Author Spotlight: Barbara Shoup

Yesterday, I had the good fortune of listening to Barbara Shoup give a reading. She's a YA author promoting her latest book, Looking for Jack Kerouac.

She said she loved novel writing because it uses both sides of the brain. One side is the "What if?" or right side, and the other side is the "What do we do with it?" or left side brain. It's a constant balance between being in control and letting go of control. As a writer, you have to be open to new things. You have to let the story take its course instead of trying to force it to be something that it's not.

Shoup also spoke at length about something we talk about often in my writing workshops: what makes the reader keep reading? What is the yearning, the heartbreak, the crucial unanswerable question at the heart of this story? Without it, you cannot have a compelling story.

She said that the main way to incorporate this yearning into your story is to access it from deep within yourself. A writer must be willing to mine their own personal history and connect with a yearning they themselves know intimately. Even if the story has nothing to do with the writer's life, there must be something personally at stake for the writer.

Also, she reminded us that "nothing is lost."  As writers, it is our jobs to turn pain into something beautiful. We wrestle with words until we make the pain more bearable. I can speak from personal experience that it is those moments of intense emotion that have the longest legacy on the page.


Luckily for me, her talk focused on her process in writing this book, and in writing novels in general. She prefers to stay away from writing software and uses old-school methods like drawing charts and making calendars. She also explained how she builds a visual map of her story line using colors to track where there are flashbacks and when characters are in scene.  She even passed around her "Process Book," a log she keeps while writing full of factual information, character development, backstory, problems, revisions, and tasks. In order to write Looking for Jack Kerouac, she herself had to take a road trip down to St. Peter to collect "research." Another great reason to be a writer!

Listening to her talk about the process of writing a book was exciting and also daunting. "You can hold a short story in your hand," she said. "But you can't hold a novel in the same way. Sometimes, you get lost. And, to make matters worse, you're never the same person at the end as you were when you started writing the book." She says it takes her years to write a novel, and many - many - drafts. Each time you rewrite the story, you learn something new about the characters, about the yearning, about the possibilities for depth in this story. You start with the bones and you keep on layering.

Every writer has to figure out what works for them, and that takes time. It is my hope to use my summer to find out what my artist's way is... Check back for more updates as I blog about my writer's journey!

And thank you to Barbara Shoup for introducing me to this beautiful quote:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. –Ernest Hemingway

Embrace the Remix, Cultivate Creativity

I love being in a place of learning! Yesterday, we had the good fortune of meeting with Dr. Henry Jenkins, a media scholar from the University of Southern California. He sat in on our Teaching First Year Composition Practicum and spoke with us about the ever-changing role of media and technology in our lives. He writes about participatory culture and digital media.

As educators, it is our task to keep up with the times while maintaining academic standards. We need to make our information relevant in order for it to matter to our students.

Dr. Jenkins explained to us that a lot of educators and academics he meets find it difficult to incorporate new technologies into the classroom, and they are baffled by his willingness to embrace them.

“Yes, it's true,” he told us. “I learned how to think in graduate school. But I have also kept on thinking since then.” I thought that was a profound statement that speaks to many people’s reluctance to flow with the changing times. Rather than hold back the tide, Dr. Jenkins leans into digital culture. After all, it's here to stay.

Dr. Jenkins reminded us that everything is a remix.  Even Melville was a master re-mixer of his time, shifting genres from chapter to chapter in Moby Dick. We may not see it this way now, but it was revolutionary for the time. So what did Dr. Jenkins do to get people reading this classic book? He asked them to re-write it. 

He calls this participatory learning: getting students engaged in a text by asking them to apply it to their world. What would the whale trade look like today? Who would Captain Ahab be? But what Dr. Jenkins is really promoting with this project is giving students the chance to pursue their own interests and passions. This is where we find the key to learning.

Unfortunately, our education system does not make writing accessible to the youth. As Dr. Jenkins remarked, “If we taught sex education like we do writing, we’d die out in a generation!”

But actually, according to Dr. Jenkins, this generation writes a lot. They just don’t think of it as such because it’s not writing in the traditional sense. Maybe it’s a blog post about the Jonas Brothers or a response on a World of Warcraft forum; the internet houses hundreds of different ways for people to connect and communicate with one another. Because this writing is not happening with pen and paper or in a classroom, does that make it any less valuable? And how can we bring the kinds of communications that happen naturally over the internet into the classroom?

I was intrigued by Dr. Jenkins' stance towards social networks and digital media as a learning tool, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom behind it (speaking of social networks, you can now follow The Restless Writer on Facebook!). Why not use a blog post or a Youtube video to explore the rhetorical situation? Instead of banning Wikipedia, how about analyzing how it works by tracing the history of a Wikipedia page? Digital culture can be a friendly point of entry for students to embrace learning and writing.  

According to Dr. Jenkins, and I agree with him, we should be moving towards a creative society, and anything that we can do to get people thinking and acting creatively is valuable.

As someone who has apprehensions about the internet and social media on the whole, I found his point of view fascinating. But what will happen to reading books? I asked him. The novel isn’t going anywhere, he reassured me. We need to keep in mind that communication is the key, without getting caught up on the particular mode of communication. There are multiple literacies, and each mode of communication serves a different purpose. How-to books, for example, are probably not as effective as how-to videos. On the other hand, novels as a self-reflexive form are valuable for conveying the "inter-states" of being. Novels ask a reader to imagine what a world looks like, while film asks their audience to figure out what the characters are thinking. They both require imagination, the key to creativity.

And so, fellow writers and friends, I’ll leave you with this last question: 

What does writing do that other technologies don’t?

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll check out this short video with Dr. Jenkins!

Let's All Be a Little More Like Jane Goodall

It helps, when starting a big endeavor like an MFA, to be clear about the goals you wish to achieve by the end. I'm taking a class called "Graduate Studies in the 21st Century" which has been very helpful in helping us map our way.

In the name of accountability, these are the goals I have come up with:

1. Improve my writing skills. This is why I'm here. I think I'm a pretty good writer. I want to be better.
2. Engage in a community of writers by developing relationships with professors, peers, and off-campus events and groups. Before coming to the MFA program, I was part of a few writing groups but again, I wanted more. Now I have 10 pairs of eyes looking over my work and giving me feedback! And one of those people is the talented and impressive Heather Sellers! Yes, I am a lucky girl. Also, I have already attended a writing workshop by the Spoken Word poets of Tampa and I hope to get more involved in this beautiful and vibrant community.
3. Further my development as a teacher, by actually teaching classes but also by learning from my fabulous teachers, many of whom practice contemplative pedagogy which I love! Learning lots from brilliant people...
4. Explore my career opportunities as a writer. Whether that means transcription work, marketing, editing... I'm excited to learn about all of it! And hopefully I can even do an awesome internship in the field.
5. Develop a STRONG WRITING ROUTINE. No, I don't need an MFA to do this, but I'm hoping it will help.

It's a hard life being a hyperactive person and a writer at the same time. But then again, when I see people like the incredibly inspiring Jane Goodall (who came to campus this week!), I realize that you can lead a highly productive and active life, and also.. write books! She's done amazing things with her life: she's changed the way we view primates and ourselves, released countless chimps back into the wild, and written 15 books along the way! 

That's one badass lady.