KEPLER'S WRITING GROUP APRIL 26, 2009 MEETING

Dear Writers,


To thank our wonderful guest bloggers we have put up a new Well-Read Donkey bookshelf display at Kepler's, featuring our guest bloggers books and their favorite book recommendations. Stop by and check out Victoria Zackheim, Meg Waite Clayton, Caroline Leavitt, Kate Maloy, Michele Zackheim, Lucy Silag, Joyce Maynard, Lynn Freed, Barbara Graham, Gayle Brandeis, Sandra Gulland and many more.






Kepler's April Writing Group meeting is on Sunday, April 26th from 3-5:30 p.m. at Paul's house in Palo Alto. E-mail to aggie@keplers.com to confirm your attendance and get directions.


A few thoughts about our March meeting:

What I have found most appealing about the Kepler’s writing group is their fairly consistent focus on the technique of creative writing. In our last session, for example, the group first focused on their responses to Jeanie’s “flash stories.” Some members suggested that her stories needed more development, whereas others found their condensed and fragmentary structures intriguing. These varied responses—like those that would follow throughout the workshop—were, for the most part, relevant and constructive for the writers. For instance, in response to the piece by Mary Jean Price, the participants generally suggested that more details were needed to better invoke the mysterious nature of her short narrative. In response to this suggestion, another participant implied that establishing a clearer point-of-view would help generate more details and material for this story. The focus on details took on a new turn when participants discussed the story by Mary Stahl. Several participants, for example, claimed that the story’s main character appealed to them for the details that were used to describe his complex, disturbing and yet likable temperament. This focus, in turn, generated an interesting discussion on creating characters that readers can empathize with. These varied and interesting responses made me feel quite good after I left the workshop—I felt as if I had revisited a literary seminar from college.

Story Origins

Here's a question for my fellow writers.

How do you get your ideas for your stories?

Post a comment with your answer to my writing question. I'm curious to know what other writers use as the seeds for coming up with a story idea.

I went to an author event with Meg Waite Clayton last night. She talked about writing her book The Wednesday Sisters, sitting outside Tressider on the Stanford campus, having a "pity party" for herself, feeling like she'd never be able to write another word. A woman in a red baseball cap with a blonde braid sticking out the back walked by. And suddenly Meg started writing about a character in a red cap and blonde braid. And an hour or two later, by the time she was ready to leave, she already had a story outline and set of characters for what became her novel. Bam. Just like that.

The muse has never graced me so profoundly as it did Meg, though one of my short stories started with just a title: Imagining the Moon. I was in a writing class; we were told to come up with a story title, write it on a small piece of paper folded up and put in the center of the table. We each drew out someone else's story title, and had to develop a synopsis to fit that title. Imagining the Moon was the title I wrote on my piece of paper. The classmate who drew it had it all wrong; something about aliens and goofy stuff like that. I took my prize title home with me and wrote a story that I still love to this day. (There are no aliens in my story, just a single mother and her 4-year-old daughter who wants to go to the moon.)

Another story started with a friend's photograph of red rock country. You can read an excerpt from that story in my previous post. The story I'm currently working on came from yet another writing class exercise: a 1-sentence plot description. The plot description I drew: a man lives in Montana, 150 miles from the nearest body of water, and is building a sailboat in his backyard. I'll let you know how it turns out. If you're in the Kepler's writing group, you might get to read the draft this summer. We'll see.

Don't forget to post a comment with an answer to my question. I could always use some more great ideas!

Molly McCall: One Baby, One Bookcase, and a Whole Lot of Books

My daughter is six months old. She tugs at her toes, slurps on her toys, and, occasionally, positions herself in such a way that she suddenly and majestically flips from her tummy to her back. She’s rarely patient enough to sit through the reading of a book. But I’m ready nonetheless.

Over the years, I’ve acquired children’s picture books that amuse or inspire me. None were purchased with any thought of a child of my own. I just loved them. Books like Maira Kalman’s sly and exuberant “Ooh-la-la Max in Love,” Istvan Banyai’s wordless “Zoom,” William Steig’s squiggly and true “Grownups Get to Do All the Driving,” or the pitch-perfect “Owen” by Kevin Henkes have long nestled alongside my other books. They are well written, beautifully illustrated, full-hearted, and funny. Something in each of them got me.

Once I found out I was pregnant, however, everything changed. This was a collection -- and it was missing so many of the books I loved as a child: “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish,” “Make Way for Ducklings,” “Pat the Bunny.”

These books formed the foundation of my love of reading. Returning to them in my burgeoning state, I felt that same flush of pleasure over the familiar curve of the images, the playful slap of the words. Soon, I found myself pawing through new and used bookshops, happily rediscovering long forgotten friends like “Babies” by Gyo Fujikawa and “Katy and the Big Snow” by Virginia Lee Burton. My shelf of children’s books began to grow as fast as my tummy.

In the meantime, friends and family, many of them ex-booksellers, pitched in. Korje, a buyer at Books Inc. (and a former Keplerite), gave me a huge, luscious stack of children’s books. Andrea (also a Kepler’s alum) turned me on to the delightful, smudgy stories of a little French doggie named Lisa.

In a magnificent surprise move, members of the Kepler’s fiction book group put together a basket of children’s books for me. Many of them picked books they loved as kids or volumes they encountered and adored as adults. Through them, I met such new titles as "Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale" and “Little Pea.” Children’s authors Kevin and SuAnn Kiser gave me a copy of one of their own books, “The Birthday Thing.”

So here we are, at six months and already the three-shelf case in my daughter’s room is crammed. Maybe it’s early for all this, but what better way for a book-loving mother to welcome her little reader into the world? When my daughter’s ready to look up from her toes and focus on the page, I’ll be there, book in hand.

Bookshelf After Bookshelf Part Six