It should not come as a surprise for you to learn that many novelists are or were also great poets.  John Updike, Robert Penn Warren, e.e.cummings, and James Dickey come readily to mind, and there are many others.  Can learning how to write a poem help the prospective novelist learn how to tell a story or write a novel? What does poetry have to offer the novelist? 

      If you’ve ever read a Readers’ Digest condensed book, you know the answer to these questions.  The good poet masters the economy of words, learns to choose the right ones and make them count. This may not be strictly correct, but I view the narrative poem as part of a continuum of distillation that begins with the novel, runs to the short story, and then to the poem, each step a more concentrated version of what preceded it, like an upside down triangle or the reduction of a good sauce. Thus, in a novel the writer uses so many words that the relative importance of any one word or group of words is fairly low.  A novel, then, has a great many throw-away words, and the Readers’ Digest can condense the novel by 1/3 and some folks won’t even notice the difference.

      Training as a poet, acquiring a poetic ear, might help the novelist learn to reduce the number of throw-away words, to recognize the importance of each individual word, and thus make the novel richer and deeper in meaning and sensory image. As Voltaire put it, “it (poetry) says more and in fewer words than prose.” Each word has to carry not only its own weight, but like an ant or a beetle, many times its own weight.  The poet, Billy Collins, describes poetry as a place “where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.” Billy Collins also gives us the best possible example of a narrative poem distilling a story to its bare essence.  In his poem “No Time,” using just eight lines, fifty-eight words,  he manages to tell us about an event, introduce three characters along the way, show something about their individual personalities and relationship, and then reflect back on the event and do it all with unforgettable pathos and humor.  

No Time 

In a rush this weekday morning,

I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery

where my parents are buried

side by side under a smooth slab of granite. 

Then, all day long, I think about him rising up

to give me that look

of knowing disapproval

while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down. 
 

      Do you know any novelist who could get as much out of eight lines, fifty-eight words?  Maybe you ought to sign up for a poetry class at the conference. It just might make you a better novelist.

You pick up tips and techniques but the main thing you take away from writer’s conferences is a recharged battery.

Writing is a lonely profession. It’s just you and a keyboard. Feedback doesn’t come easily. Rewards are few. There’s no one across the room to bounce ideas off and no one to encourage you.

Conferences being together people with common interests and common challenges. Writers discover they’re not alone, that out there somewhere are people who also feel lonely.

I hope we’ll recharge some batteries at the Chattahoochee Writers Conference next month. Just bring your battery and plug it in.

The benefit of any writers’ conference is the opportunity not only to listen to successful writers hold forth on topics of interest to anyone aspiring to put together memorable fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, but also to sit down and talk one on one with these generally approachable figures and also with other aspiring storytellers, poets, memoirists, etc. The Chattahoochee Valley Writers Conference (CVWC) facilitates all of these processes, and you will take away from the experience both inspiration and motivation. Writing ultimately comes down to the individual writer, yes, but in community — in conference — the individual writer finds support, new ideas, and validation. What more could you ask for? 

"No Enemy but Time" won the 1982 Nebula Award for best science fiction novel for Michael Bishop. He won the 1981 Nebula for his novelette "The Quickening" (Cover art by Vincent Di Fate)

Award winning author Michael Bishop, of Pine Mountain, Georgia,  has written 30 books,  numerous articles for national magazines,  and a  collection of poetry.  He is writer-in-residence at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. He and his wife Jeri have a daughter and two grandchildren.  His son, Christopher James Bishop, was one of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.

By John Frandsen   

For years I have tried to persuade a writer friend of mine to attend her first conference. ”Margie,” as I’ll call her here, is a journalism graduate who wrote her first mystery nearly thirty years ago and got an agent to read it. The agent told her it showed promise, and he would help her polish it to the point where it was marketable. She’s yet to get it to that point. In the intervening years she has written many more mysteries, but none that the still-encouraging agent considers quite marketable.

“Why should I go to a conference?” Margie asks me. “I learned everything I need to know about writing when I was in journalism school. Conferences cost money and take time. I write six to eight hours every day, and would lose those hours at a conference. I already have an agent, so I’m not looking for one. And the agent I have is also my tutor.”

I’m giving up on Margie, for she’ll never change her mind. Though extreme, I think she exemplifies the kind of writer who would benefit most from conference attendance.

So how would Margie benefit if she were to go?

She’d meet other writers, and at lunch or around the nearest bar, one of them might convince her that her agent is just stringing her along. Another might encourage to attend next year she should submit a manuscript to one of the agents critiquing for the conference.

She might meet an agent or editor who is attending the conference. This person might persuade her to let him take a look at one of her manuscripts.

At one of the workshops, she might well learn that though the instruction she received in journalism school was impeccable, stories that were marketable then simply don’t appeal to today’s readers. That’s why it’s generally acknowledged that few of the great novels and short stories of past centuries, including the early to middle twentieth century, would ever find a publisher today.

From  writers like Margie who never attend conferences, let’s proceed to the other end of the spectrum—those writers who regularly attend conferences, year after year. What brings them back?

Workshops sometimes do, provided they deal with new aspects of the craft of writing, with new genres such as graphic novels or graphic nonfiction (yes, there really are successful book-length graphic manuscripts in the market), or are presented by faculty members with renowned credentials. As a general rule, however, over the years most workshops simply re-plow old furrows, and few return again and again just to attend them.

But responses to questionnaires distributed at many conferences conclusively show that those who attend regularly do so mainly to schmooze, to build and maintain networks of acquaintances among other writers, agents and editors. These acquaintances provide the support they need to deal with piles of rejection slips. They provide the ideas that may open new pathways to publication. They provide leads as to how that old story can finally get published. And most importantly, it is whom you know that determines success in publication just as it determines success in so many other human endeavors. Lamentably often, an outstanding manuscript remains unpublished because its unknown author cannot get it past the first sorting desk at a literary agency. At long last, the author attends a conference where she meets a successful author who personally knows just the right agent. The agent likes it, and the author is immeasurably glad that she attended all those conferences.

By Dick McMichael   

When I started announcing on radio at age 17, I didn’t do much writing.  I mainly read commercials and newscasts that other people wrote, and I did a lot of ad-libbing on disc jockey shows.  That changed in 1957 when, at age 26, I went to work for WSB Radio in Atlanta.  When I was assigned the morning news shift, I had to write all of my local newscasts. That meant to survive I had to learn to write news stories very fast.  

The shift was a killer.  Daily, I aired five minute newscasts on the half hour and two 15-minute newscasts at 7:00 and 7:45 a.m. My immediate superior, the legendary Elmo Ellis, who was credited in the mid-1950’s with “taking the rust out of radio,” who offered me the morning news shift, said, “It’s not easy. You have to select and write the stories, and include tape actualities. You are expected to rewrite every story from the paper and wire services.  Do you want the shift?” I did.

Dick McMichael, about 1958, Atlanta, GA (Courtesy: WSB Radio)

Elmo also gave me some advice about writing for broadcast, mainly, “keep it simple. Use short, declarative sentences.  You are writing for the ear.” 

I already had some idea about that.  The late Ed Snyder, an announcer at WDAK in Columbus, my mentor, told me in 1948, “Remember, when you are ad-libbing or writing for broadcasting, you have to do it so that a 12-year-old will understand you.  The trick is to do that without insulting the intelligence of adults.” 

I followed their advice, and it served me quite well for my more than 50-year broadcasting career. However, as I matured, I would slip in a sophisticated word every occasionally just to show that I could. When a fellow TV broadcaster would kid me about that, I would rejoin with, “Hell, I don’t want anyone too dumb to understand that word to watch me.”   

 My late older brother Elbert got me interested in vocabulary when I was still a teenager. He told me to read Thirty Days to a Powerful Vocabulary.  You were supposed to do the exercises in one chapter a day for thirty days. I still think it’s a great book. 

I guess I had better use some big words to show you that I know a few.    

 Perhaps I have been too prefatory in making my points in this article.  Maybe I have been too eliding, and synoptic in my approach, though perhaps it is necessary when one is being polymathic..  All of the italicized words were in a letter published in Harper’s Magazine. 

A one point during my WSB days, Elmo decided he wanted me to do a few “think pieces” that would be taped and played at different times during the day.  After I did a few, he called me into his office for a critique.  “They are good, but you may be talking over the heads of a lot of the audience.  They sound like something you would read in ‘Atlantic Monthly.’ For radio, you need for them to be more like ‘Reader’s Digest.’” Interestingly, I got the lead article, “Unforgettable Bob Barr,” published in Reader’s Digest in 1991. “When people ask me about writing for radio,” Elmo continued, “I always tell them, ‘Just write a story the same way you would tell your neighbor over the backyard fence.’ After all,” Elmo smiled as he said it, because he was Jew, “Jesus taught in parables.”  Maybe Elmo’s advice is good for almost any writing, but sometimes there is just no other word that accurately gets across the exact meaning as one that is arcane.  It doesn’t bother me to have to look up a word occasionally, which I do when I read “Harper’s” and George Wills’ columns. In fact, I like it because it does expand my vocabulary and can even make me think more clearly.

Welcome to the blogsite of the Chattahoochee Valley Writers, sponsors of the Chattahoochee Valley Writers’ Conference. We encourage you to use this site to post news of interest to fellow writers, seek solutions to the problems and challenges you face in creating and refining your manuscripts, provide support and understanding to those suffering the pangs of rejection letters, and engage in lively discussion of all things of interest to writers. Remember always that this is a site dedicated to subjects related to the craft of writing. It is not a place to air your political or religious convictions, nor is it one where you can feel free to advertise your vast knowledge of epithets and expletives.

May this site make a mighty contribution to increasing the creativity and vibrancy of the communities of Chattahoochee Valley writers.