High School Bands and Marching Bands, Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love (Part 3)

This post concludes my essay on writing what I believe and writing what I love. In the first part I explained that it includes reading what I love, and that includes long novels. In the second part I wrote of hope and of young people who restore my hope. This concluding part touches on my reasons for choosing to write what I write, with thoughts about my audience and what it is that I am writing.

Writing My First Novel

Something else happened in those months of filmmaking, which has directly influenced my aspirations as a writer. May I hazard another metaphor? (I can hear you saying, “Not if you’re asking permission first.” Forsooth.)

I used to prefer watching high school marching band performances from high in the stadium, where patterns and formations are clear. In making that film, I learned to prefer a closer view. Now I want to be in the front row, if they won’t let me on the sideline. I like to watch individual performers, and I think I’ve figured out why.

Hidden in Plain View

In helping to make that film, I peered behind the scenes for months, firsthand and by watching many hours of raw video footage. I discussed the marching band experience at length with dozens of students, parents, and staff, mostly one at a time. I asked ninth graders and seniors alike why they joined the band and why they stayed in it when the marching got rough. I recalled my own band experience (though darkly, through the glass of decades). And I spent hours and hours with a couple of talented filmmakers, as we tried to do justice to it all in 80-plus minutes of sights and sound and words.

You can watch our film if you wish; I still enjoy it. But the hours of interviews we left on the cutting room floor affected me as much as the fragments we could include.

In that process I learned to see beauties beneath and behind (if they are not actually not beside or before) the visual and musical beauty of the show. True, each person’s performance is part of the whole, and great effort goes into uniformity of appearance, movement, and sound. But these youth are more than cogs in a machine, if you approach closely enough and watch them long enough and strive to have eyes to see.

High School Bands and Marching Bands, Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love (Part 2)

This post continues my thoughts on writing what I believe and writing what I love. In the first part I explained that it includes reading what I love, and that includes long novels. This is partly an artist’s manifesto – that term is still too grand – and partly a look behind the curtain or under the hood. It is the back story of stories I have written, am writing, and live.

This is the second of three parts.

What I Believe

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that what I want to write is born of and sustained by what I believe, not just what I love. Among the many things I believe, here are the ones I most want to write about.

I believe there is good in virtually everyone. Likewise, there is a measure of evil in virtually everyone. “God and the devil are fighting,” said Dmitri Karamazov, “and the battlefield is the [human heart].”

I believe that good can and often does triumph in an individual heart and in the world at large, and it will continue to do so in the future, more often than not.

Based on long and varied experience with people I didn’t think were interesting at first, I believe there is something interesting in everyone – something worthy of our notice and reflection, and often enough our admiration.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Writing What I Believe, Writing What I Love

A few years ago, I had some thoughts I wanted to test and refine about the fiction I’m writing. So I wrote them out. I didn’t share them beyond my critique group. Lately I returned to that writing and updated it into this essay. It’s partly an artist’s manifesto – that term seems too grand – and partly a look behind the curtain or under the hood. It is the back story of stories I have written, am writing, and live.

I’m posting it here in three parts. This is the first.

Am I?

Whatever you write, from fiction to commercial website copy – insert your content marketing joke here – someone has probably told you, “Write what you believe.” If not, allow me to be the first.

Write what you believe.

I don’t mean that we writers should focus all our time and energy on nonfiction which expounds and promotes our personal belief systems in political, religious, or philosophical terms. There’s a place for that. I do some of it. But today we’re talking about fiction.

I certainly don’t mean that our fiction should be tendentious and moralizing. Fiction is a well-traveled road to truth, but it loses traction when it slips from inviting us to think into telling us what to think, when the author keeps intruding to preach to us.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Thanksgiving

Radiant Moments: A Thanksgiving Reflection

I began this Thanksgiving morning by setting myself a task: to describe my gratitude for specific things which are not controversial. (I have little taste for controversy today.) I thought first of the largest things, such as God, family, and country, but the very ideas of these are currently controversial. You may safely assume my profound gratitude for them, but after a few moments I turned my thoughts toward smaller things. Granted, all things are smaller than the largest things.

So I made a list of specific things for which I have felt grateful in recent weeks, and nothing is too small. A hamburger is not too small. But soon it was clear that I had sent myself on a fool’s errand, because even a hamburger is controversial these days. And I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, in a time when many consider everything to be political, that a hamburger is easily politicized too. (I am not grateful for this.)

So the following are only relatively uncontroversial. Some are only relatively small. They involve people, you see, and people are not a small thing – but we are smaller than God.

Now that I have made the list, I see that every item, in some sense and degree, is a moment. Today, as on many days, I am grateful for moments. Here are ten and a spare. They necessarily reflect my own tastes, opportunities, and associations, but perhaps they will call to mind some of your own moments.

In neither ascending nor descending order …

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Where We Do Difficult Things:
Good AF Writers

Writing is often a solitary activity, well suited to introverts. We thrive in a sort of solitude where we rarely feel alone, thanks to the people or creatures, historical or imagined, who fill our stories and books. But several essential writerly activities require us to interact with contemporary, fellow humans in challenging ways. Three of these happen over and over again at the twice-monthly meetings of a local critique group, Good AF Writers. (AF is for American Fork, Utah. What were you thinking?)

Different critique groups operate in different ways, but most have three nerve-wracking activities in common:

  • reading an excerpt of your writing aloud
  • hearing others’ feedback on your writing
  • giving others your feedback on their writing
Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

On Writing: “I can’t teach you how to have something to say.”

Here are a few more gems — I know it’s been a while — from Ann Padgett’s “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life.” You’ll find it in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (New York: Harper, 2013, pp. 19-60), which you should buy — or borrow from the library — and read.

If you write.

Writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say. (pp. 31-32)

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

About that American Fork Critique Group

It’s a Critique Group

Last time, I told you about Good AF Writers, the critique group held twice a month by the American Fork chapter of the League of Utah Writers. (I’m assuming the AF is for American Fork.) It’s every second and fourth Tuesday Thursday at 6:00 p.m. at the American Fork Library, and you can read more of the basics in that previous post. There’s also a Facebook group to watch for new, updates, and more.

Here I’ll give you a better taste of how it works, in case you’re on the fence about whether it will work for you.

Our meetings consist mostly of three activities: reading (aloud), giving critiques, and receiving critiques. Each of these could make someone squirm, I know, but it’s the price of improving as writers. We try to be kind, helpful, and candid.

How It Works: Reading

Some or all of the writers in the meeting will read excerpts from something they’re writing, or the whole thing, if it’s very short. They may or may not preface their reading with a brief explanation of the work, of what has happened previously, or what sorts of help they especially want. It’s all on a clock; unless the meeting is especially crowded or we’re running late, each reader gets up to seven minutes for the reading itself and any introductory explanations.

man in bow tie reading

In the meetings I’ve attended, I’ve read from three short stories (one written that day on the train, because an idea struck), the first and second chapters of a novel I’m polishing, and an essay I drafted a couple of years ago and have revisited a couple of times, but which really isn’t working yet.

After each reading, the author circulates a signup sheet. Anyone who wants to read more and provide a critique at the next meeting will sign up. Sometimes two people sign up; sometimes it’s six or seven.

After the meeting the author sends out the piece – up to 2,500 words – by e-mail, at least a week in advance of the next meeting, so everyone who signed up has time to read, reread, and critique it.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Writing in American Fork (If You’re Serious)

The Elevator Speech

American Fork’s chapter of the League of Utah Writers (LUW) meets twice monthly, on the second and fourth Tuesdays Thursday of the month, at 6:00 p.m. We usually meet in the American Fork Library, in the smaller of the two conference rooms near the east entrance, but check the Good AF Writers Facebook group for current information. The chapter itself is just a few months old, and new members are always welcome.

There’s a Facebook group, Good AF Writers. Take the name as a fact or an aspiration, as you choose.

I’m told that different LUW chapters run their meetings differently. In our meetings, those who bring writing for critique read from it aloud for several minutes, then circulate a sign-up sheet. Anyone who wants to read more and provide an oral and written critique at the next meeting supplies a name and an e-mail address. The author sends out the piece, usually in a Word doc, at least a week before the next meeting. We limit the length of that to about 2,500 words – lately down from 5,000 words – to reduce the workload for critics. (You can always bring in the next chunk next time.)

We who signed up as critics then read and reread your piece, offer a brief oral critique (generally not more than several minutes) at the next meeting – assuming you’re there – then send the Word doc back to you with any markup and comments we may have added. Sometimes you get a lot, sometimes you get a little.

It works.