Looks like there might be lots of good stuff for writers on this site — including creative nonfiction writers.

A very helpful new post takes a close look at writer Jeanne Marie Laskas’ work — why it reads so well. Check it out for some great tips for making your nonfiction writing more lucid and reader-friendly.

See you there.

Jasmin Darznik was at the Book Passage bookstore in Marin county, California, Monday night for the monthly meeting of the Left Coast Writers. She had some tips for wannabe writers, particularly memoir writers.

Tip # 1: Jasmin’s New York Times bestselling memoir, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life tells the story of her mother’s marriage in Iran at the age of 13. Jasmin spent months interviewing her mother in Farsi, taking notes about her mother’s life in Iran.

The book is clearly a winner, but just as Jasmin was finishing it up, many industry folks were discouraging . “Iran is dead,” they told her. “Nobody wants to read about Iran anymore.”

If someone tells you your topic is dead, Jasmin advised her listeners, don’t listen. She said Mark Childress is a Southern writer who often hears the lament “Southern writers are dead.”

There’s only one way to respond to the gloom-sayers, she heard him say one summer at the Squaw Valley writers conference. “You have to write your story so well that you can’t be ignored.”

Tip # 2: Memoirs are stressful. It’s tricky navigating the pressures of family and friends who don’t want – or do want – to be included. But writing about your mother while she is still alive, is about as tortuous as memoir writing can get. Think twice before doing it.

Jasmin is working on a right novel now (it’s set in mid-twentieth-century Iran) and she’s finding the fiction process soothing in comparison.

On the other hand, Jasmin notes, the memoir, because it tells a true story, has an authority that fiction lacks. Choose your poison.

Tip # 3: In terms of time, for Jasmin less is more.

While writing The Good Daughter, Jasmin had a scant three hours per day to write between the time she dropped her son off at school and picked him up.

The time constraint worked for Jasmin. She got a lot done – but might not have if she’d had more time. “Give me twelve hours and I will hang myself with it.”

Tip # 4: Enjoy the process. Enjoy your book. Of The Good Daughter, Jasmin said with a tender smile, “I love the whole thing.”

Tip # 5: And finally: “The big lie of a memoir is that the story ends. I’m still alive. My mother is still alive. I’m still trying to make sense of her life. And I’m still trying to make sense of our relationship.”

FYI: Jasmin is a professor of English and creative writing at Washington and Lee University and teaches Iranian literature at the University of Virginia.

© 2011 BF Newhall

The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life

By Jasmin Darznik

Grand Central/Hachett, $14.99 paper

My computer monitor the day before my mother broke her hip and brought progress on my book to a halt for a year.

My book is close to done. I’ve been working on it for nigh on to 13 years now. Can’t imagine how it will feel to have it  done-ish.

As some of you know, it’s called “Finding Holy: True Stories of Religion and Spirituality in America.” I’m within spitting distance of finishing the last three chapters.

There will be quite a few holes to fill in, but the hard part — finding that #$%^&* story arc — is done.

How I find Holy, of course, is quite another matter. You’ll have to read the book to find out about that.

When it’s done will I feel really, really good — or really, really bad? Dunno. Watch this space.

c 2011 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Well, I missed my Friday night 11:59 p.m. deadline last week. The reason: My 92-year-old mom is still in a skilled nursing facility recovering from a broken hip. My brothers and I are stressing ourselves out trying to figure out what her next residence will be. Assisted living, great though it has been for the past couple of years, no longer suffices. She needs a memory support unit.

Peter and Emily put together a vegetarian meal for the family. But that was before my mother broke her hip. Photo c 2010 B.F. Newhall

Driving home the other day from just one of  countless visits to my mother at the hospital, I had to ask myself, why aren’t I writing about her? Naturally, I prefer to think about happier things – the elegant dinner Peter and his girlfriend Emily put together when they visited here in January.

But why, really, do I resist the topic of my mom and me? I’ve got plenty of time for self-examination on those drives back and forth to the hospital.

I’ll see if I can persuade myself to give the subject some thought and get back to you. 

Maybe.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I don’t like daffodils. I feel about daffodils the way I feel about some of my writing – too damned cheerful. Too nicey-nice. Too tidy. Too certain that in the end everything’s going to come out just fine, that all shall be well.

I prefer irises. I especially like the bearded irises that are volunteering up and down the hills of our neighborhood right now.  Their swooping, swooning petals are downright lascivious. So are the fuzzy, yellow-brown genitalia cascading from their centers. These are not nice flowers.

Daffodils, by comparison, are starchy, unequivocal. They are trumpets of optimism playing to the sun. Last month, there were daffodils blooming all over the neighborhood, as if there had not just been a winter. And if by chance there had been a winter, as if there would never be another.

The trouble with daffodils is they have no subtext. They are all cheer and sparkle and optimism. They are avatars of perky. They get on my nerves, no doubt, because of that daffodil place in my psyche, which from time to time locates itself in my writing.

In my daffodil brain, everything happens for the good. Problems can be solved. Human beings are redeemable. God is in God’s sweet heaven. And my 92-year-old mother, who’s been lying in a hospital bed with a broken hip for the past five weeks, is not going to die. Ever. In just a few weeks, my mother and I will head over to Nordstrom again for lunch. As usual, she’ll order the chicken salad with berries. I’ll get the one with artichokes. After lunch we’ll hijack Nordstrom’s loaner wheelchair and scoot over to Macy’s where things are more affordable. She’ll sit in the wheelchair with her purse in her lap, credit card at the ready, and I’ll roll her around the petites department. She’ll ask me to back up to take a second look at the crisp brown and white linen jacket. She’ll offer to buy it for me, I’ll decline.

My mother will come through this hip thing just fine. She always has. She always will.

My daffodil brain does not write about my mother’s spine, which is as curved and uncertain as question mark. It averts its eyes from the sun-damaged splotches darkening and growing across her cheeks. It makes excuses for the strings of nonsensical sentences coming from her mouth. (It’s the painkillers talking.) My daffodil brain is too polite to type words like constipation, commode, diaper, droopy buttocks, crepey skin, thinning hair, boney knuckles.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

No, my mother’s days are not numbered and, therefore, neither are mine. My mother will not spend her last days in pain and uncertainty, wondering how God, or death for that matter, could possibly be real. And neither will I.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Sharon Olds gives a craft talk at Squaw. Photo c by Tracy Hall.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Want to meet a poet? Like say, Kazim Ali, Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Evie Shockley or Dean Young?

Or maybe your more into prose, and you’d like to get a close-up look at people like Mark Childress (Crazy in Alabama), Glen David Gould (Carter Beats the Devil), Sands Hall (Catching Heaven), Teresa Jordan (Riding the White Horse Home), ZZ Packer (Drinking Coffee Elsewhere) Luis Albert Urrea (The Hummingbird’s Daughter), Diane Johnson (Le Divorce), Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones), Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club), and former California Poet Laureate Al Young.

Then think about applying to attend one of the conferences held every summer in the Sierra mountains by the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.

I’ve attended the Squaw writers workshops three different summers and loved every moment. Mornings are devoted to workshops, afternoons and evenings to readings and very useful panels on craft, choosing an agent, publishing in literary magazines, and the like.

Squaw is a great place to work on your writing skills, pitch your book project to agents and editors and, best of all, talk writing all the day long with other writers. Two of those three summers I came away with wonderful new friends who formed two different writing groups that have given me terrific feedback on my own projects over the years.

The really good thing about Squaw is how darned friendly everybody is, including the writers and presenters. I can remember a workshop with Alice Sebold’s agent, Henry Dunow; waiting in line for coffee with Anne Lamott; pelting a panel of agents with questions, and watching scenes from “I Walk the Line” with live commentary from the screenwriter Gil Denis.

The dates this year:

Poetry Workshop: July 17 to 24, 2010
Writers Workshops: August 7 to 14, 2010 (Fiction and Nonfiction)
Screenwriting Workshop: August 7 to 14, 2010

You have to submit a manuscript and be accepted to attend Squaw. The application deadlines are May 1 and May 10. Get busy.

George Leonard at Esalen. c 2009 Esalen Institute.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I’ve thought of George Leonard often over the years. And when I read in the New York Times last month that he had died on January 6 at the age of 86, I thought of him yet again.

George and I knew each other in New York at Look magazine , where we both worked during the 1960s.

That is to say, we were aware of each other at Look – I more aware of George than he of me.

I was a very young editorial secretary – and not a very good one. (My bosses were people like Betty Rollin, Jack Shepherd and Pat Carbine.) He was a Look writer and a star. He was documenting – no, inspiring – the youth and human potential movements that were fermenting in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time.

George went on to write a number of books, including Education and Ecstasy, The Way of Aikido, Mastery and The Ultimate Athlete. He was a long-time influence at the Esalen Institute. And he was as formidable physically as he was intellectually; he took up aikido at mid-life and earned a fifth-degree black belt.

Though he barely knew me, George was kind enough to meet with me when I first moved from New York to San Francisco in 1969. During that conversation, he gave me some advice I’ve kept pasted to the inside of my forehead ever since.

We were talking about story ideas, and I told him I had one I thought was pretty hot, but I didn’t want to reveal it to him. At Look, story ideas were gold, we treated them like state secrets. If we didn’t keep them under wraps, our competition – Life magazine – might get wind of them and scoop us. We hoarded our ideas.

George’s response took me by surprise. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Ideas are not in finite supply. The more you give away, the more you generate. That’s the way the universe works.”

Those aren’t George’s exact words. But they are the way I’ve remembered, interpreted and reinterpreted them over the years.

Following George’s advice has been a useful practice. I’ve learned over time that the more willing I am to help out other writers and share my ideas and (hard-won) expertise with them – the more thoughts, ideas, inspirations and writing tricks (hot ones all!) pop into my mind.

I think of it as the Tao of writing.

Thanks, George. I’m going to keep on thinking about you.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Carol’s letter is in response to Lauren Kunze, a recent college graduate who says she wants to write but doesn’t know where to start. Narrative is the on-line literary magazine out of San Francisco that Carol edits with husband Tom Jenks.

Carol’s advice in a nutshell? “Tell me a story!”

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Thumbing through a book on feng shui at the now defunct Gaia bookstore in Berkeley a few years ago, I ran across a chapter on decorating the bedroom. The author wanted her readers to know that bringing pictures of family and friends into a bedroom is a sure way to wreck its romantic feng shui.

Who, after all, wants to have sex with mothers, mothers-in-law, small children – or even one’s college roommates – watching from all over the walls and dresser tops? For that matter, who can sleep with crowds of people rattling around the room, posing, smiling, hugging, and crying out for attention?

My mother's desk -- tucked away between a recliner and the fax machine.

I’ve decided that this feng shui principle for bedrooms applies nicely to my writing room. There are no big photos in my study. No kids, no parents, no family, no one I know.

Pictures of my children send me into worry mode. If a photo of Christina as a 12-year-old catches my eye, four-figure orthodontia bills spring to mind. If it’s a picture of Peter as a 2-year-old, I see the red bite marks he once left on a babysitter’s arm.

Pictures of my parents are even worse. “When are you going to get a real job, Barb?” they shout from their frames as I enter the workroom. Peering over my shoulder as I write, they pass judgment on me and my thoughts, “You’re writing about that? Shame on you.”

Which brings me to a decision I faced earlier this week – where to put my mother’s old, carved desk with its matching chair? It was a wedding gift from a rich aunt. And, like my mother, that desk with its graceful curves and sworls has never left me.

When I was a girl, it stood in the living room window at the front of our  red brick colonial house in a new, post-war Detroit neighborhood. Ditto in our more ample cape cod house in the suburb, also new, where I spent my teens. Space was short in my parents’ tiny retirement ranch house on the outskirts of Phoenix, however, and the desk was left forgotten in the guest room.

A few years ago, when my mother got ready to move from Phoenix to an assisted living apartment here in the Bay Area, I rescued the old thing from the Goodwill giveaways and had it delivered to my house.

Photos c 2009 B.F. Newhall

It’s a beautiful desk. A curved top, delicate swooping legs, solid wood drawers. It was probably expensive. My mother tells me that the rich aunt had had a few drinks over lunch with my grandmother before the two of them set off to shop for my mother’s wedding present in downtown Chicago.

Beautiful as it is, that desk is so saturated with memories of my mother and my childhood that being in the same room with it is like being in the same room with my mother. Sometimes, it’s just a lovely, graceful desk, complete unto itself. At other times, I am cooped up indoors beside it on a dark winter’s day in Detroit with no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to read, nobody and nothing to play with, no thoughts to call my own.

Jon and I have tried putting the desk in different rooms around our house here in California. It looked very pretty in our living room – in its rightful place at the front window. But its petite lines were overwhelmed by the other furniture in the room, especially the heavy Victorian tables from Jon’s side of the family. Finally, we moved the desk into the den, where it’s now tucked away – wasted really – in a dark corner, anachronized by our big screen TV, the fax machine, and our sprawling black leather recliners.

Some people would insist that the logical place for this lovely example of prewar workmanship is a corner of my writing room. There’s plenty of space down here. The colors and the proportions of the desk are right. And a writing desk for a writer’s room – what could be more fitting?

But those would be people who don’t understand a writer’s work and how much it has in common with sex. Which is – you can’t do it with your mother in the room.

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall

A Dash of Style

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Wow! A book on punctuation. By Noah Lukeman. The bookstore had an entire book  on punctuation by this master of the dot and the dash. My heart lept.

It was called A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. I bought it.

Ever since I read Lukeman’s treatise on the comma — the comma! — in the March/April 2006 issue of  The Writer’s Chronicle, I have been a fan.  A devotee. No, let’s face it, a groupie. This man Lukeman knows  what to do with a comma. Not to mention a period. Or a semicolon. Or my default favorite – the dash.

Take the colon, for example. Maybe you write the colon off as that unassuming pair of dots found on formal business letters, or signalling an upcoming list. And that would be too bad. Because, according to Lukeman, the colon is majestic, dramatic, a writer’s most powerful punctuation tool.

“When it comes to dramatic revelation,” Lukeman writes, “the colon has no second. In this function, the colon acts as a mark point, with the text preceding it building to a revelation, and the text that follows living up to the promise.”

Lukeman suggests comparing this (colonless) sentence:

I grabbed my bag, put on my coat, and stepped out the door, as I wasn’t coming back.

With this one:

I grabbed my bag, put on my coat, and stepped out the door: I wasn’t coming back.

Noah Lukeman

See what I mean?

It’s late. I’m tired. I’m going to bed, and I’m taking Noah Lukeman with me: I want to know what he thinks of the dash.

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall

A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, by Noah Lukeman, W.W. Norton, 2006, paper, $13.95.

Snapdragon "Sonnet Mix" flourishing in our yard. These two colors are a little heavy-handed for my taste. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Writing teachers have been warning us against using the passive voice since high school. And rightly so. Passive sentences can be wordy and vague. But they can also come in handy.

What’s a passive sentence? One way to think of it is a sentence that omits or obscures the doer of the action — the agent

For starters, a sentence is passive if it has a passive voice verb:

“The camellias were pruned last month.”

Yawn. Give that sentence a living, breathing subject — a doer — and it comes alive:

“Jillian, our dynamo gardener, pruned the camellias last month.”

Some sentences just feel passive. For example, any sentence that starts out “There is” risks passivity. Compare:

Boring: “There are snapdragons thriving in my front yard.”

Snappier: “Snapdragons thrive in my front yard.”

Last year's pansies came up again this spring. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

Turning a verb into a noun and making it into the subject is another good way to squeeze the life out of a sentence:

Boring: “Planting pansies is how I spent the day.”

Engaging: “I spent the day planting pansies.”

Still, the passive voice has its uses. Sometimes it helps the reader out by keeping the subject of a sentence short and sweet:

Murky: Surpressing seed germination with a layer of newspaper, then covering it with dirt, horse manure and pea-sized redwood bark solved our weed problem.

Clearer: Our weed problem was solved by putting down a layer of newspaper to supress seed germination, then covering it with dirt, horse manure and pea-sized redwood bark.

Redwood bark keeps the weeds down around our "Gerbera Sunburst Coral Pink." c 2009 B.F. Newhall

You can also enlist the passive voice to avoid placing blame:

 ”Dad served our dinner late.”

That’s a perfectly good sentence with nice narrative tension. But if you’re trying to stay on Dad’s good side and don’t mind a little obscurantism, you could say:

“We were served our dinner late.”

President Obama is a master of the well crafted passive sentence. More on him next time.

Meanwhile, pls send along any funny, pithy, lame or obscurantist passive sentences you come across in your reading – or writing!

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall

Writer’s block? Not my problem. At least, that’s what I thought until I read Jane Anne Staw’s book, Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block.

During my many years as a newspaper reporter, it was sit down, write, meet the deadline or find some other line of work. End of story.

So, when I bought Jane Anne Staw’s book a couple years ago, I did so, not because I thought I needed it, but as a favor to Jane Anne. I’ve bought dozens of books by friends and acquaintances over the years on the theory that when I get a book published it will be pay back time. (Right, Jane Anne?)

In other words, I bought, but did not read, Jane Anne’s book.

Then, last December, crashing around the house, looking for something to take with me on our family road trip, I spotted Jane Anne’s unread book, reproaching me from its bookshelf. I grabbed it up, headed for the car and took my assigned place (as the shortest in the family) in the back seat behind Peter (the tallest in the family), who was riding shotgun with the seat pushed back.

Things got boring somewhere along the 10 between West Hollywood and Joshua Tree National Park. So I pulled Unstuck out from under a pile of wet umbrellas and began to read.

To my surprise, writer’s block as Jane Anne describes it, is not always simple primal terror at the sight of a blank page. Writer’s block can be subtle.

It can be the nagging sense that I don’t have the right to write, that my thoughts are not as important as Marilynne Robinson’s , say, or Richard Ford’s.

It can be the belief that successful writers never procrastinate, never blush with embarrassment at what they’ve just written, never rewrite the same sentence eighteen times before throwing up their hands and going into the kitchen to do something useful, like empty the dishwasher.

It can be assuming that someone like Anne Lamott sits calmly at the keyboard while the limpid prose flows from her fingertips – when actually the real Anne Lamott probably rewrites sentences seventeen times, maybe eighteen until she finally gets it right on the nineteenth, and then the next day gets out of bed, has a cup of coffee, and ditches number nineteen for number twelve.

These are good tips from Jane Anne. But the most important lesson I learned between West Hollywood and Joshua Tree, was how important it is be aware of what kind of reader we are writing to. We need to make sure it’s a friendly reader. In my case, not the English department professor at the University of Michigan, but someone nice – one of my sisters-in-law, my college roommate, the friendly woman sitting next to me in the shoe department at Nordstrom.

Somebody who likes and appreciates me – like you, right? (You’ve gotten this far. I’m putting you down for a yes.)

Bottom line, Jane Anne Staw’s book is a godsend for writers who are stuck and know it. It’s also a great read – okay, a godsend – for people like me who need a deeper understanding of themselves as writers. And maybe don’t know it.

How about you? Any tips for curing writer’s block you’d like to share?

Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block, by Jane Anne Staw, Ph.D.,  2003, St. Martin’s Press, $23.95.

©  2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall