We’re in our final week of the Southbank Writer’s program in Surrey and what a great time it has been. This weekend our writers will take to the podium to read some of their best work before being let loose with their words.

Heidi Greco, who gave us a great class on poetry, has these final words of advice:

Send it out!

No matter how exciting your writing might be, it won’t find publication unless you send it out. And it won’t be accepted once it gets there unless it has the special something that appeals to an editorial board. They’ll be looking for those qualities that make it a match for their particular print or online publication.

Start compiling a list of places that might provide a home for your work. SFU’s library still subscribes to many periodicals. Often, just a look at what’s inside a magazine can help you determine whether it’s for you.

Visit magazine websites, as that’s where you’ll find more examples and – most importantly – specific guidelines for submission. Do they want 3-5 poems? Stories no longer than 2,000 words? Your name on the work – at the top, bottom, only mentioned in a cover letter?

Although many print magazines now accept electronic submissions, not all of them do. And some that do accept e-submissions want the work embedded in a message, not sent as an attachment. Others prefer an attachment. Some even specify a particular subject header. Online magazines are every bit as specific in their guidelines as print ones.

Whatever the process – electronic submission or paper – do it the way they ask you to. If you don’t, your work probably won’t even be considered.

Don’t bug the editorial staff about your work. Many publications take several months to reply.

If your work isn’t accepted (face it, this is the case with most submissions – or magazines would be bigger than phone books), take it as a sign that you should look at the piece again.

Then, when you’re sure the work is the best that you can make it, find another place where it might make a better fit and send it out again.

If you set yourself a goal – and keep it – of always having something (say, three different submissions) ‘out there’ you’ll not only find that the sending out gets easier, it’s likely that your work will be making it into print.

This great tip comes from Caroline Adderson who teaches the self-editing course in the Southbank Writers program:

To most effectively edit your own writing you have to change the way you read and respond to it. You have to take off the Writer Hat. When you’re wearing the Writer Hat your experience of writing, positive or negative, imbues your perception of the text. On a good day, when the words pour forth and the characters are obedient to you, you feel that the writing itself is good. On bad days, when each word you put down seems to fly back off the screen and smack you between the eyes, when your characters ignore you and open doors you didn’t even know were there or lean over and kiss a stranger on the bus, creating implications that you suspect are merely useless tangents, you feel the writing is terrible. A mess. You’re the worst writer ever.

The truth is that the process of writing is completely separate from the finished text. To actually see that text for what it really is, you have to take off the Writer Hat and put on the Reader Hat. You have to engage with the text as it is without the emotional baggage that belongs to the wearer of the Writer Hat, not the story. You have to read it as though you didn’t write it.

Not so easy. The best way to do this is to put the darn thing away. File it. For how long? Six months is a start, but some people don’t have six months to wait. You can speed up the hat-switch by immediately writing something else. This way, you begin to attach to the new text and gradually forget about the other one. When you finally come back to the other after a month or two, the hat-switch is as natural as pulling off the toque at the end of winter and putting on the ball cap.

Image: Flickr.com (creative commons license)

Here’s a great tip from Ellen Schwartz, Instructor of SFU’s Southbank Writer’s Program on Writing and Illustrating a Children’s Picture Book:

The great children’s writer Christie Harris once said: “Plot is character in action.”

This sums up what we, as writers, strive to do every time we set out to write a story. What readers – not just children, but especially children – want is an engaging story about characters they care about. What happens to those characters has to spring from who they are – their insecurities, their strengths, their sense of humour, their fears, and, most of all, what they want. Some stories focus more on character development and some focus more on plot, but the best ones intertwine the two in an inseparable marriage.

Image credit: Flickr.com By Foto_di_Signorina

We’ve been learning a lot about poetry lately south of the Fraser River. This week Poet Heidi Greco has been offering her insights on process and form. Here is just one of her many tips on reading a poem. If you’re anything like me and sometimes have no clue what it’s all about, this might help…

My friend Bernie is the person who taught me the best way to eat a mango: sitting in a stream, naked. While we don’t always have access to a warm, tropical stream – or the opportunity to get naked in one – his lesson applies to more than justmangoes.

Reading a poem can be as juicy and delicious (and sometimes as messy) as eating a mango.

First reading sees you peeling back the skin, admiring the flesh, taking in the scent of the fruit. Then, it’s bite after scrumptious bite, each one providing a new rush of flavour. The further you poke your face into it, the messier it gets, all those juices dribbling down your chin and between your fingers. And there at the middle, that nugget of almond-shaped pit, worth scraping clean between your teeth.

But, look out. It won’t be long before you find your tongue worrying some thread of mango string, caught between your teeth– a little something to take you back to the experience of enjoying the fruit.

Eating a mango is a whole lot like reading a poem. Both can leave you with something to think about later on. But the bits left behind by a poem are so much less annoying than strings caught between your teeth. Besides, with a poem, you don’t need a stream to wash up in afterwards.

During Jami Macarty’s Sounds Like, Looks Like, and Feels Like Poetry, a core course of Southbank Writers’ Program, Claire DeBoer, a program mentor, and this blog’s coordinator, asked the following excellent, multi-part, and compelling question:

“On the few occasions when I have felt moved to write a poem (and have been afraid to do so because I had no clue about process) I have worked from the emotions I felt at the time and built words and images around that. What I am left with is lines on a page that don’t seem to reflect any particular type of poem or process. So – do I continue with this method and then try to shape my first draft into a processed poem (sestina, free verse, whatever format I choose)? Or do I leave the poem as is instead of trying to force it into a particular format?”

Here’s Jami’s response:

As I got half way through my response to Claire’s questions, it occurred to me that other writers may be interested in this topic. In fact, Toni Levi, another Southbank mentor, had a similar question a few days after Claire’s. With that in mind, though I am addressing Claire and her question directly, I offer all of you my response:

The way you describe the beginning of your process “when I have felt moved to write a poem” is, as far as I’m concerned, the perfect first step. That is, to allow for an arising movement within you to lead you to words and then paper/screen. And, yes, it’s often par for this course for fear to debilitate that movement.

Fear is one of the many manifestations performing the Inner Critic’s biding. When you “feel moved” to write a poem in the future, I invite you to focus as fully as you can on the energy within that feels “moved.” Write from there. If fear crops up, respectfully ask it to come back later for tea, because right now you’re busy writing a poem. Say it as loudly and as proudly as needed to get the critic to back off for a bit. I’m serious!

Now, it seems to me, dear writer, that “being afraid” to write a poem because you “had no clue about process” is in the category of putting the cart before the horse. It’s pretty common for writers to worry about process and form before they have material to process or form. From my point of view, as a creative writer, your number one and most important focus is to get the material out on the page/screen as authentically felt as possible. That’s first and foremost. So, your “worked from the emotions… felt at the time and built words and images around that” is exactly right.

Then, right! What you will be “left with is lines on a page.” That’s just the first movement. The process continues as revision occurs. Again, worrying about what’s there—”that doesn’t seem to reflect any particular type of poem”— sounds a lot like you’re putting high expectations on yourself to know what’s there before you know what’s there. This takes time. You cannot write a Shakespearean Sonnet (14 lines in iambic pentameter) before knowing what you feel compelled to say. Put the horse in front and let it run.

So, yes, I vote for continuing with the method you’ve been following. I urge you to go as far as you can with the content—getting it to be as true to heart as absolutely possible before the focus shifts to form. I believe content shapes form. In Black Mountain poet Robert Creeley’s words, “form is never more than an extension of content.”

In a way, the writer doesn’t have to concern herself with form. Content takes care of it. I don’t think there’s a “trying” to shape. I think that happens organically from within and out of the poem. I don’t believe the writer chooses a form for a poem.

What if the writer takes as her first task to listen, patiently, for the poem to assert its form and shape? Now, that’s not to say that you can’t create a formal constraint for yourself, and say, choose to write a sestina, as an exercise—to get to know the form experientially. This is an excellent practice. Much is learned about the form, and in the process, the left brain (the Inner Critic’s territory) is highly occupied, which frees the right brain to run and skip and jump and cartwheel as it so desires.

It’s probably clear by now that I am not a proponent of “trying to force it [the poem] into a particular format.” A poem is like a butterfly caught in the house and cupped in the hands to set free outdoors. If you close your hands or hold too tightly, you’ll crush it.

Lastly, reading broadly, exposing yourself to as many different styles and types of poetry will offer you examples of and possibilities for form. Through reading, you’ll gain a sense of how form and content work with and for each other.

To your world of words,

Jami Macarty

Faculty, SFU’s Southbank Writers’ Program

Image credit: AJU_photography flickr.com

The Southbank Writer’s Program in Surrey has been underway for 3 weeks now and we’ve been picking up some writing germs along the way.

Instructor Nancy Lee taught us that great writers are born, for the most part, of thousands of hours of writing practice rather than a God-given talent. She helped us to see that by worrying less about perfection and getting it right the first time, that our best writing comes from exploring our imaginations freely on the page.

Lois Peterson introduced the concept of ‘germs’ to us. Germs are those ideas for a writing piece that come to us when we’re driving down the highway, sleeping in our beds, reading the newspaper, or when we overhear a conversation. The trick is to make a note of these germs as soon as we think of them and then to spend some time watering and feeding them until they are ready to grow. “Don’t judge a germ”, Lois says, “just record it and start asking questions about it.” Don’t write until you are ready. You should feel so pregnant with the story that you will burst; that’s the time to begin writing.

Poet Jami Macarty showed us to look for the germ of a poem through a writing exercise than began with a most unlikely seed: cataloging the start of our day in reverse order. Simple sentences came out of the exercise, such as,”grab keys from counter,” “get up and feed the cats.” But once we focused on those words, sounds, images and letters that meant something to us, we began to find the germ to a poem and the unexplored seeds that lay dormant inside us.

We’re looking forward to some great insights from Jami this week before we journey into the world of non-fiction with Bryan Payton this weekend.

Post by Claire De Boer —Mentor, Southbank Writer’s Program

Claire De Boer is a fiction writer and graduate of both The Writer’s Studio and the London School of Journalism. She is the Wellness Editor and regular contributor for SheLoves Magazine and also provides professional writing services.

Creative commons image courtesy of flickr.com.

In addition to our usual Writers’ Tips, we are also now featuring posts by guest editor Claire De Boer. Claire will talk about a new creative writing course called Southbank Writers’ Program. This SFU summer course will begin at the end of May and continue throughout the summer in Surrey, BC. We look forward to hearing all about it from Claire, who is a 2011 TWS alumni.

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By Claire De Boer

I’m excited about this summer. Firstly because the sun will come out at some point—I hope—and secondly because I will take my first steps into the world of mentoring through a new SFU creative writing course called Southbank Writers’ Program.

One of my long-term goals on my writing journey is to teach others how to find and develop their unique voice. I have been blessed with several mentors so far and I know the value of having someone help you to grow your writing.

As a mentor for Southbank I’ll be providing feedback to students with suggestions for how they might further develop particular pieces of work. And as someone who loves to talk about writing, that’s pretty exciting.

Writing for me is about growing together in community and I know that SFU has this core value at the heart of its creative writing programs. I was therefore only too willing to help the Director of the Writing and Publishing Program devise the kind of course that I would have wanted to take when I started out as a writer.

The Southbank Writers’ Program is unique in that it was built by writers for writers. How often does that happen? Something I felt was really important to writers still developing their style was to define their genre. Do they want to write fiction, non-fiction, blogs, poetry…all of the above? I think if writers aren’t exposed to the various ways of expressing themselves through writing, it’s harder to find their niche.

It’s all about Conversation

I’m not one for sitting back and being lectured to. I learn through conversation and expressing ideas. The teaching format for Southbank is all about conversation and helping writers have more confidence in their work through sharing their thoughts and reading their prose aloud.

We’ll also hear from recently published authors about how they navigated their way through the ever-changing world of self and print publishing, something I definitely want to hear more about.

Yes, it’s going to be a great summer of writing, with or without the sun.

Find out more about the Southbank Writers’ Program.

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Claire De Boer is a fiction writer and graduate of both The Writer’s Studio and the London School of Journalism. She is the Wellness Editor and regular contributor for SheLoves Magazine and also provides professional writing services. Visit Claire J De Boer to learn more.