I’ve been teaching several classes this month that concentrate on moving writing forward by using details–specific images that come in through the senses–and by receiving first reader response to drafts. That made me think of posting Chapter Eight from Writing In a New Convertible with the Top Down, a book I co-authored years ago with Christi Killien, a book in which as writers raising children, Christi and I applied our observations of family life to our observations of the writing process.

Chapter Eight: Raspberry Picking

How can writers use readers’ responses to refine their perceptions of their own writing?

August 11

Dear Sheila,

We went raspberry picking. Annie Rose, my 2½-year-old, was tired of it all after about twenty minutes of picking. “Home” she kept saying, whining, crying. What made it worse for her is that she dislikes raspberries. When we picked strawberries later, guess who led the way? In any case, after more imploring to her unhearing, totally absorbed raspberry-loving parents and sister, she planted her foot squarely into the flat of berries. JOLT! I was upset at first, then incredulous, then I laughed with my husband as we sorted the squished little rubies from the flat and left. Annie Rose jolted us out of our picking frenzy, our concentrated tornado of task.

Jolts are precious things. They enable me to think about something differently, and that’s hard to do when a person’s as stubborn as I can be some times.

Replanted, looking at
a clear blue sky,

Christi

****

August 15

Dear Christi,

I’m in Vancouver, B.C., on the 28th floor of the Blue Horizon Hotel on Robson Street. The sun is shining and I look out over English Bay: a tugboat in the water is like a hat; from this height, a marina filled with sailboats is like Chinese characters on a page; the mountains in the distance are like a hippopotamus; seaplanes are like dragonflies; rooftops are like empty streets; fir trees are like thimbles; my balcony is like a postage stamp; clouds in the sky are like the inside of a quilt; cars on a highway are like parts on a conveyer belt; a child’s foot in a flat of raspberries is like a mushroom sprouting in the garden!

What a story about Annie Rose! How direct we all once were as children. The jolt you were open to reminds me of what happens to me every time I revise a piece of writing. I write in a task of getting the words on paper and then I look at them and they are not as beautiful, as streamlined, as rich and full and lyrical as I hoped, as I know is possible for me.

We must come to know the size, shape, taste, sound, smell, and texture of the real work buried inside the task, the pleasure of the berries apart from the interminable picking.

I am enclosing a poem of mine, recently accepted for publication and an earlier “task” version. I am grateful for them both — grateful for the early version because while doing it, I sat with my notebook getting images, details and surroundings recorded. I am grateful for the later version because it is smoother, more informed by the emotional truth of the moment, more elegantly constructed.

How did I move from the first to the last? Readers in my writing workshop read the first one and their responses were the “little Annie Rose with her foot in the raspberry flat” for me. I was “jolted” into realizing their emotions were not engaged. I felt each word until I was able to choose the ones

that best described the other person in the poem at the time I was evoking. Then I could discover what my emotion was at the time I was inspired to write. The revision from then on stayed more focused, coming from emotion and observation of the time and place. That kind of writing engages readers. Here is my “task” version first and then my rewrite.

Fire Head and Two Orange Wings over the Horizon

South of Monterey we pull off the road
onto a lay by over the blue Pacific,
watch the sun burn a hole
in the sky and the sky like flesh
turn grey around such fire.

 When you nap, I pick up my notebook,
notice your shorts, wet from the river,
show through the jeans you drive in.
The sun burns more discriminate over a thin
haze of purple, my eyes fastening the glow
in spots on the pages. As I write, a constant
wind moves the dune grass into flames
like the sunlight I saw reflected
on the canyon walls today as we swam.
Now orange spreads from the sun
and I stare longer. The wings drop
behind clouds leaving only the furry
golden head of a butterfly. You wake,
kiss me, see the monarch spread its color

in thin salt air and for a few moments
we barely have to look harder at all
to see the eternal flames, the grass,
the canyon walls on fire.

The Coastal Route, After Arguing

As we drive, I see wind
moving the dune grass
like flames on the hillsides.

This is how river light
looked as I watched canyon walls
today, you diving upstream.

I’d hollered that great noise
between us again, mountain tops
of stone pulverized in air,
you like an unaware camper
caught in dark, descending ash.

Now before dusk, the sun burns
a hole in the sky and the sky
turns grey around that wound.

For a moment, we look at the sunset,
open wings of a monarch
spread behind clouds.

Yours in writing the strong stuff
that comes after the jolt,

Sheila

****

A Key: Unhunch and Look at What You’re Doing 

Have you ever noticed how your ears hear differently with somebody else listening? Unhunch and look at what you’re doing means getting out of the insular world of your own mind and feelings and seeing how and where you are making contact with an audience.

Take It For a Spin

Ask someone to read your work to you. Read it to them. Tape record the work and listen to it with someone. The feeling in the writing becomes clearer when you listen with extra ears. Even if you are going to have verbal response from your listener or peer editor, do this exercise first. You will get a body experience, a registering with yourself of where your writing works and where it hasn’t fully evoked your experience yet.

When you go back to your work, you will remember the sound of the jarring sentences and the inspired ones. You will know better how to guide yourself.

To document the moment, write about how it felt and what you noticed when you listened to your work. Be detailed. What in your writing was jarring, what was smooth, what was touching, what perked interest, what was flat, what was obtuse?
Where did you feel the sensations about this in your own body? How were those sensations like other times in your life? For instance, if you read the words and felt a kind of hollowness was that like when you say the “wrong thing” to a friend or a partner? When you felt the sound of your words sounding just right, did it seem like the air around you was suddenly cleansed like after a thunderstorm?

****

You can read the book in its entirety at Booktrope.com (formerly Libertary.com).