Tag Archives: fiction

Reading Many Books at Once–Dilemma or Delight? (Well, It Depends, If One of the Books is Magic for Beginners.)

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When I was in grad school working on my comprehensive exams, one of the things I had to learn to do pretty quickly was read many different books at once.

Now, if you think about it, when you’re in any kind of school situation, you naturally read many different books at once, all the time, to keep up with your different classes.  Somehow, though, that seemed different.  Maybe because of the “compartmentalization” that going to school requires—i.e., when I am in my Whitman seminar, I am only reading Whitman; when I’m in my Women’s History class, I’m only reading Women’s History books.  But of course, you’re still taking multiple classes in a single semester, so you’re actually reading multiple books, and you might not finish one on one day because you need to prepare for a different class the next day.

Logically that makes sense, and yet when it came down to my comps, I suddenly felt like, OMG, I have to read 100 books (or whatever it was) all at the same time??? How will I keep them all straight?

And of course, the reality is, you’re not reading 100 books at once.  You’re maybe reading five or six at once—and taking notes, to keep them all straight.  And many of them were books of poetry, so of course, it’s easy to finish off reading one at a stretch.  But you add in books about practice, about writing, about theory, and you just can’t read 400 pages at a sitting.  (Well, I can’t.)  So you learn to negotiate, and you work your way through the list.

All of this is by way of saying that I used to be particularly rigid about not starting a new book until I had finished the previous one.  When you’re reading for personal enjoyment (i.e., not studying for a comprehensive exam), you can be restrictive like that.  My thought was:  be disciplined, finish the book!  And then of course comps happened and then I let that goal go.  You have to, to manage all that information without losing your mind.

These days, I do mostly just read one book at a time—you can inhabit the world and connect on a really deep level, concentrating on the characters in front of you, and only have them to think about for the duration of the novel.  But occasionally I read multiple books at the same time.  Sometimes, it’s because my attention is wandering in the book I’m trying to focus on.  Sometimes people tell me I need to read X, Y, and Z, so I think, ok, I’ll add them into the rotation.

As I mentioned last week, I was reading Aimee Bender and Kelly Link, in between reading chapters from Kerry Greenwood’s Queen of the Flowers.  But then I got on this Kelly Link kick, because multiple people were saying how she awesome she was, so I focused entirely on Kelly Link.

And got really pissed off.

There are stories in Magic for Beginners that I like.  I liked the first one, “The Faery Handbag,” quite a bit, and both of the zombie stories (“The Hortlak” and “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”) though I didn’t love their endings, were enjoyable in their way.  What pissed me off though was the story, “Stone Animals,” a story which my little writing workshop held up to the highest esteem, and so I had great expectations for it.

It is not rational, when we have a visceral repugnance against something like a fiction story.  But I repugn “Stone Animals.”  I despise it.  I hate it so much, in fact, that I wasn’t even sure that I was going to finish Magic for Beginners at all because it took me so long to get through, and I was annoyed that Kelly Link forced me to read it since she wrote it.  Every page was like pouring acid in my eyes and gulping down deodorant.  Catherine’s obsessive painting, Henry’s inability to quit his job, the rabbits, the rabbits, the rabbits—really?  About the only thing I liked about the story was how they’d stop using some household object because it was suddenly “haunted.”  But after multiple pages of this, I was like, come on.

Perhaps what really pissed me off was that there was no payoff for the story. Like, after I felt I’d given my life’s blood to read it, to discover the rabbits were waiting for Henry to get on their back and be prepared for an attack against Catherine’s party inside the house?  WTF?

Actually, I don’t need an acronym, I need to write that out:  WHAT THE FUCK?

Now, considering the kind of writer that Kelly Link is, I know better, after having read several of her stories, than to expect a conventional, satisfying ending.  She’s kind of out there—she writes horror and fantasy, and they have their own genre-imposed behaviors and audience expectations.  But the horror of “Stone Animals” is its obsession and obsessiveness, and its obsessive repetition, and at some point, I just really wanted to fling the book across the room.  I mean, Goddammit, Kelly Link.

So you’re saying, Why not just stop reading?

Because I was looking for a payoff.  I was looking for THE BIG REASON she wrote that story—I wanted to believe that somehow after reading 53 pages, investing that kind of time into unlikeable characters and a story that just seemed to go nowhere, that everything would be clear—albeit clear in Kelly Link’s kind of fucked up way.  But no.  I got to the end, and couldn’t even feel the relief that it was over.  I just felt angry and betrayed.  (I know, not rational.)

I had to put to put the book aside after that—even though the next story was called “Catskin,” and I’m drawn to anything cat related—because I was too mad.  I was just too mad at her and didn’t want my brain to feel defiled any more.

So I started reading the first book of Chobits (manga) by Clamp (a collective)—I’d long since seen the anime, but found the first book buried on a high shelf in my office (from the previous occupant, I suppose), and thought it would be good to read, then I picked up Kerry Greenwood again, and Aimee Bender… then went back to Kelly Link.

I’m in the middle of “The Great Divorce,” which is interesting from an idea standpoint (that a person can marry a dead person and have dead children), but I find my passion (good, bad, or otherwise) for Link is spent.  I’m wondering why everyone loves her, in other words.  Yes, she’s inventive, but at what cost?  My sanity—what little there is of it—is precious, and I don’t like getting angry at books.  That seems like a waste of time.  Still, I’m determined to finish the book so I can say I finished it.  But it’s happening about six pages at a stretch.  I find that’s all I am emotionally prepared to give her.

(Sadly, when I bought Magic for Beginners [after all the Kelly Link love I was hearing about], I also bought her Pretty Monsters.  I feel depressed just thinking of it sitting on my nightstand and taunting me to read it, knowing as I do that it will probably be more of the same.)

I’m also currently reading the manga for the Ouran High School Host Club. (I’ve watched and loved the anime multiple times, and thought I should finally read the manga—and it’s just as funny as the anime, and I like how the author, Bisco Hatori, periodically makes herself known and comments on her own work, which amuses me—although I know lots of people don’t like when an author breaks into the world of the story.  Generally I don’t either, but maybe it’s ok in a comedy full of highjinks and farce—you learn to accept that anything’s possible, including authorial intrusion.)  And I’m reading a couple of books of poetry, one of which is Daniel Khalastchi’s Tradition, the other, The Octopus Game, by Nicky Beer.

Speaking of the “payoff,” in case you’re wondering what it is for this post:  I guess it’s this—that my reading process is kind of like my writing process—all over the place.  And that’s ok.  If a book annoys you, put it down and come back later to it.  Or don’t.  There’s no Book Police out there who will hunt you down if you don’t finish a book—especially if you’re not reading for educational requirements.

I don’t know why I feel like I HAVE to finish a book though–like I will finish Magic for Beginners, even if it kills me—which it very well might.  I certainly don’t feel that way about my writing.  If something’s not working in my poetry (and especially my abortive attempts at fiction), I set it aside, and come back later. Or I don’t.  I guess with books that are already written (in comparison to my writing which is in various stages of completion anyway), if you don’t finish them, you’re denied that little perk of feeling a sense of accomplishment.

And if you think about it, that’s really ok too.

Oh, Fiction, How You Torment & Tantalize Me…

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I’ve been doing this little online fiction class—it’s only for three weeks, and it is just about over.  The group is small—seven writers and a leader/ moderator and his friend/ assistant.  I don’t know much about the person leading the workshop (I know he has an MFA and a TT job and he’s published a great deal). But all of the things he’s shared about writing and about the individual stories that the group have submitted seem pretty on target to me, and (once I finally understood the interface—it took me several days) I’ve been enjoying it… but more from a teacherly perspective, than a writerly one.

Were I a fiction writer by vocation, I would probably find the prompts and writing discussions more applicable to my own writing process—I want to try them out, of course, I just haven’t… yet.  I’ve said before that I’m interested in writing fiction—I just really can’t seem to do it.  But perhaps like anything, it just takes practice.  And, a few of his prompts could very well apply to creative nonfiction, and I know that I’ll definitely try his “life through artifacts” prompt.

Anyway, as I said, the class interests me from a teacherly perspective.  I like to see good teachers in action.  He draws from a lot of different backgrounds in fiction, and, since the theme of the class is about genre bending/ blending, and being experimental (two things I’m especially poor at), he has a vast knowledge of texts that he uses as examples to illustrate his suggestions about individual pieces and in his discussion about writing in general.  Since I’m not that educated about fiction (from a writing it kind of standpoint), his commentary is especially useful and interesting.

While he seems to have a particular affinity for SFF (as do the rest of the students in the workshop), he doesn’t look down his nose at other genres of fiction, and I admire that, because many academics in general dismiss genre fiction as being aliterary at best and no damn good at worst.  This tension seems to pervade the aesthetics of many writing programs; I’ve seen a few genre-writing MFA programs advertised in Poets & Writers, but that’s in no way typical.  (I never took a fiction writing class at Nebraska, but my sense of the fiction writers they had on faculty back then was that they were literary fiction writers exclusively.)

I suppose writing programs still want to turn out John Steinbecks and Margaret Atwoods (though she’s a bit of a fence sitter) rather than Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowlings and Kerry Greenwoods… The argument always comes back to high art vs. popular culture, particularly in the hallowed grounds of the Ivory Tower, doesn’t it?  (I also suspect, though I can’t be sure, that academics have a deep-seated fear of debasing themselves to write for money.  Like writing popular fiction is the dark side or something.  I have no such fear.  If I had the talent to do it, you better believe I’d be turning out romance novels or mysteries or Game of Thrones clones or horror stories, or hell, even porn.  I’m not proud.  I’m just not talented that way–I have no attention span to write anything longer than six pages, tops.)

As a reader and lover of genre fiction (although my interest tends to run toward mysteries… and Christmas romance novels, when it’s Christmastime), I’m glad the  workshop leader doesn’t have an arbitrary bias against genre fiction.  Anyway, all this is by way of saying, I ordered three books from Amazon on his suggestion—two were by Kelly Link, a writer I didn’t know about at all, but whom I’m liking. (I’m reading stories from her Magic for Beginners in between more chapters of Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novels and in between stories from Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (which was a suggestion from BFWF**).  It’s important to have good material to aspire too… or to be motivated by.

Imitation being the highest form of flattery, I try putting absurdity like Bender’s or Link’s into my stories, but generally it just comes out wrong. Or pretentious.  Or just like I’m trying too hard to be too cool and winding up being that doofus in the corner.  So then I try writing a conventional story, which I gravitate towards naturally anyhow.  (I know, I know, they tell you to write the thing you’re frightened off… but mainly I’m frightened of writing things that suck, so that advice doesn’t work too well for me.) I worked on a story the other day—it was based on an upcoming theme from Duotrope’s upcoming theme list—a Christmas-ish story, to be submitted by Sept. 25th.  (So, not a lot of time to dick around with it.)  I don’t know if I will finish it, though.  It’s lacking something… maybe, more words.  It’s supposed to be flash though—ideally, the journal wants 700 words.  I’ve written 1000, and it’s not finished.

A real experience prompted the story, and so as I’ve written it, it lies somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. (Liminal spaces suck, by the way.) The problem is, it doesn’t work as fiction OR nonfiction.  I like the idea of it—it focuses on an interaction with a neighbor I had one time when I made a snowman in the front yard.  I could make it totally creative nonfiction, but then it will be considerably longer—and it already lacks that CNF aesthetic—that real attention to beautiful language that CNF is known for, that expectation of a transformative moment that we rely on in creative nonfiction to drive the story forward.  And yet, it is there, a flash of a moment where the woman building the snowman relents, at least a little bit, in her annoyance at her neighbor’s intervention.  So the draft has that going for it.

Still, the journal wants fiction.  If I make it shorter, and more fiction-y, I don’t know that its point will be clear.  Honestly, I’m not sure anyone would care either way.  If I made it more fiction-oriented, I wonder what I could do to “fix” the story?  I can’t make it about a snowman that comes to life because I believe we ALL have heard that one before.  What I’m really interested in is the relationship between the two neighbors.  But I just don’t know if it’s compelling enough.  Maybe the story just needs to be a little anecdote I share with friends—maybe it’s really not meant to be shared in a large sense (with a public audience, I mean).

But maybe I’ve just persuaded myself that I could try harder and make this story work.  It doesn’t hurt to try and a hundred other motivational platitudes, blah, blah, blah.  I can see what happens if I try.  At the very least, it will be practice, and all writing practice is good, even the failures.  I know it will wind up longer, so I guess I’ll go the CNF route and forget about sending it to that particular journal.  That’s ok.

But I’ve digressed…  Back to the writing workshop:  I have a story to read and respond to for the online group.  I printed it out and left it on the table and now it has cat vomit on it.  But the first page seems pretty good, despite the stain, so I think I’ll go read the rest now.  And then maybe another Kelly Link story.

**Brilliant Fiction Writer Friend™

Headus Injurius, Or, Why Can’t I Write Fiction Too?

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I was having one of my “tired days” yesterday, and when I came home from work, I went directly to bed. I did get up later, but never with the kind of focus I needed to be able to write a blog post (well, not one that would have been coherent, anyway), so here is my Wednesday post on Thursday.

I’ve mentioned my interest in nonfiction before, but I’ve also become interested in writing fiction too. It doesn’t come easily, writing fiction, so I am a great admirer of those who can write it “easily.” I put “easily” in quotes because I know that writing well doesn’t come easily to anyone—an author has to work at it. But of course some people have a knack for writing fiction, and some, like me, have some really great ideas that, because they have the attention span and stamina of a gnat, rarely get explored in a long form like fiction. Oh sure, there’s always flash, and I do have some ability to write flash because it’s short, and it has a kind of poetic aesthetic which I can get behind. But I want to write “real” short stories.

I have a number of partially completed stories that I’ve written in the last few weeks. The problem is, I can’t get past the “partially.” This is my fiction writing process:

  1. I have a great idea.
  2. I begin to write the great idea.
  3. I write myself into a hole (or into boredom).
  4. I wish, fervently, for a tornado, or earthquake, or angel or other Act of God to happen to get my characters out of the hole I’ve dug.
  5. I know deus ex machinas are cheesy and horrible, and reject any Act of God that occurs to me as being the last desperate attempt of a failed fiction writer.
  6. I give up on the story.

You see? It’s hopeless. And what I really don’t understand is that conventional wisdom says, “Read voraciously in the genre you want to write and you will be able to write it.” I do this! I read mysteries, literary fiction, romance fiction, YA, monster/ fantasy stories. I read a lot of fiction (as well as nonfiction and poetry, of course—and drama). I don’t understand how come I can’t translate all this great modeling being done by the fiction authors I read into fiction of my own.

Conventional wisdom also says “Go with your strengths.” But maybe whoever came up with that bit of conventional wisdom was some bozo who wants us to stay with what we know so we won’t encroach on their areas of expertise! It’s possible.

Or it’s possible that the idea of going with our strengths (writing what we know?) is to keep us from banging our heads against the wall. Believe me, I’ve felt like doing some head-banging lately—and not of the metal concert variety. I have written these partial stories, and I just know that if I could finish them, they’d be cool. But where do I get that impetus to finish? Or perhaps a better question is, “Is there anything beyond the initial cool idea rattling around in my brain?” (Sometimes, I doubt it.)

Certainly it’s a matter of training—my creative writing background consists entirely of poetry and poetry classes. (I wonder if there’s a Remedial Story Writing 101 class I could take?) But I want to write beyond that—and to write in a sustained way. I just don’t know how to do it, and it’s so frustrating to come up against limitations that I don’t even know why I have them. How hard can it be to write a story? Why does it have to feel excruciating? Why does my brain have to come up with these ideas that I clearly can’t develop beyond a few pages? It seems so unfair. And pointless.

And so I suppose I’m going to continue banging my head against the wall, writing these partial stories until SOME DAY I get the message from outer space or wherever that lets me actually finish one. Or maybe I’m just destined to be a failed fiction writer. But somehow, I can’t accept that.

Well, not yet, anyway.

(Fiction writers:  how do you do it????)

Hey, Baby, What’s Your Writing Process?

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Yes, yes, I know I said I would write every Wednesday—and here it is Thursday, the very first week, and I have failed.  In my defense, yesterday was a long day made longer because it was a freshmyn orientation day, and I was so exhausted that I came home and went almost straight to bed, good intentions be damned.  Alright, I’ll try harder next week to maintain the schedule.

Moving on.

The last few days, I’ve had a character floating in my head—or I should say, the mother of a minor character (Rodessa) I already wrote about in another piece.  I had intended to write about Rodessa’s early life, because in the other work, she was mostly a wizened old crone, but somehow, her mother’s story suddenly seemed compelling to me.  Perhaps I will get around to writing about Rodessa, but right now, Azucena wants to speak—through, ironically, it is Rodessa telling her mother’s story.

I’m not really sure what is happening yet.  I feel like I’m writing a lot of exposition. I tell my students that sometimes you have to “write for discovery.”  In other words—you’re writing, perhaps not with a very clear plan, but just to see what might happen.  Right now, I’m writing to find out about Azucena as a character—and since I’m doing character building, it makes sense that there is a lot of exposition—which I will probably trim later on—because exposition tells us who characters are and what the situation is in which they find themselves.  That is the purpose of discovery.  Using Rodessa as the narrator helps focus the discovery though, because, being her daughter, Rodessa should have a good sense of what her mother is like.  In other words, I’m trusting the narrator to reveal to me what needs to be revealed.  The plot can be worked out later.

What is surprising to me about the story is its form.  It seems to be emerging as something halfway between a memoir and an oral history or testimony one might find in a historical society journal.  I don’t know if the form is part of the discovery phase, or if, like a lot of the writing I do lately, it’s experimenting with form—or, more likely, it’s defying form altogether.  (Like poems I write are actually memoirs or stories that haven’t found their right form yet.)  I do know that if I complete this project, it will be yet another piece I don’t know what to do with in terms of submission—publishers don’t generally like writing that flounces conventional forms (or genres).  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I need to write the thing first!

What I really want to talk about today is process.  Read any book on creative writing, and it will probably tell you a version of the following.  But this is my approach—these are my writing process phases, if you will (and I use them when I teach):

  • Unintentional writing:  This is an assignment I often give to my students.  I tell them, “Write for 15 minutes without stopping and see if anything emerges.”  Journaling, blogging, freewriting, brainstorming, all of that falls under this category.  I personally should do more unintentional writing.  I have found that when I practice it more frequently, interesting images and bits of ideas appear like mushrooms—and there’s so much you can do with mushrooms!  Once, an “unintentional writing” wound up being a prose poem (with revision, of course).  But if I hadn’t let my mind just wander where it will, that poem would never have appeared.
  • Invention exercises:  This is generative material, for when I know I want to flex my brain muscles—I’ll come up with some parameter that I have to meet in 10 unique ways.  Ideas come with a little more rapidity than they can do when I’m not writing with a purpose.  So, I might say, “Write 10 reasons someone might find a stray dog  in their  kitchen” or “List 10 things you might do in a bathtub besides bathe.”  Give yourself a weird little list, and be amazed with how quickly you can come up with the ideas.  I usually have my students choose one or more items from the list and then have them do some “guided” unintentional writing… that is, they freewrite with a topic.
  • Writing for Discovery:  Here, the writing is much more intentional in its direction (as I was mentioning previously)—there may be characters, image patterns, story ideas, metaphors, etc., etc., that are swarming around in my head and I have a direction in mind with a way to use them—it’s just not fully formed yet.  (To be fair, I think most writing falls into this category—I mean, who really plots in minute detail what is going to happen in a piece of writing?  Talk about zapping the creativity to slag when you overthink things, right?)
  • Writing with Purpose:  You’ve figured everything out more or less, and are cracking the whip on yourself and writing it all down, come hell or high water.  I think at some point I may choose to revisit the definition of this phase, to make it more elegant.  I will say that sometimes in tandem with Writing with a Purpose is its near and dear relation, Slogging Through the Muck (also known as Powering Through).  Writing with a Purpose is all about getting that shit done—even if it makes you so annoyed you’d rather clean your house than write, even if you’re so bored with every single word you’re writing, you’re only writing to meet a word count or a line count or a page number–some arbitrary stopping point that you’re not sure you’ll reach, but you’re going to die trying.  You’re doing it, and that’s what matters. Because after all, after you get it of your brain and onto your computer or paper, then you can work on the best part of all, which is Revision.
  • Revision, as anyone will tell you, is where the magic happens. There are a number of steps I could illuminate—and maybe I’ll save that for a future post.  But right now I’m just going to list the quick and dirty version. Revision is certainly often the most difficult part of the writing process, but it’s the most rewarding because here’s where you can do all the fancy work—where you look at all your verbs, and notice how you rely too frequently on “to be” (I notice I do this and I hate that about myself), and you get the chance to replace it with a more precise action verb instead.  Here is where you merciless attack all flabby nouns and replace them with more robust ones.  Here is where you can strengthen your image patterns, where you can work on the music and lyricism of your poetry, whether it’s increasing all the o-vowel sounds or repeating certain words to add resonance.  Revision is all about finding a piece’s most perfect form, most perfect voice.  All the “heavy lifting” is done—it’s just a matter of approaching perfection.  (Not attaining it of course, because perfection is a myth, but you get my drift.)
  • Editing:  This is the cosmetic job after the fact–last minute once-overs for spelling and grammar and any other little formatting things that somehow got overlooked before.  I’m not even sure it is its own category.  But it is an important part of the writing process, so I don’t want to leave it out, even if the topic bores me because I generally have perfect grammar. 😉

Anyway, I’m sure I haven’t written anything you haven’t thought about your own process.  But on that rare case I have, you’re welcome.  Use it for good or ill, but write something awesome tonight.  Or save the awesome for tomorrow, and just write anything at all tonight.

The Dilemma of a Personalized Rejection

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Recently, I got a rejection on a flash story I had written, but it was personalized.  In fact, the editors explained that the reason they rejected it was that they thought the story missed a comic opportunity to explore the absurdity of the situation as presented in the story—that one of the main characters had much more life in her than just 500 words could show.

I really appreciate that they offered this bit of critique, because I wouldn’t have considered that maybe her life does need to be a short story.  In my mind, I was mainly thinking that the story was about her mother, and how she had to deal with a magical pregnancy.  But I could see that maybe the story is about the daughter—or maybe it should be.

I haven’t written a revision of the story yet.  I don’t know many fiction writers, and so I find I’m not sure what would be a good way to expand.   When I teach creative writing (like I am right now), it’s so easy to see the directions and possibilities that my student’s stories offer.  Easy? It’s generally obvious.

But of course we’re all blind when it comes to our own writing.  I find that, thinking about the daughter, I’m not sure what she should do.  Does she have dialogue?  What is her life like, when she’s abandoned her mother practically right after her birth, and she becomes a reality TV star?  What happens to her mother, who has to join a support group for mothers whose children have abandoned them?

There’s one person on campus whom I can ask what he thinks—he’s a fiction writer, and once, when I brought him a creative nonfiction story I had written, he gave it the most amazing reading and response I’ve ever received—like he lived with the story, and saw so many places for revision and connection that frankly I was embarrassed by the riches of his generosity and spirit and writerly insight.

I don’t know that anyone has looked at my writing the way he did.  I had the thought, that he must be an unbelievably fantastic teacher.  If he gives all student work the same attention that he gave my story, students must just be in awe of him.  Like I am.  (I would give a shout out to him here, but I don’t want him to be inundated with requests by hungry writers looking for critique gold.)

I am thinking of asking him for some suggestions on my flash piece… though I can’t help feeling a little greedy doing it… like I am taking something precious from him.  Which he freely offered, I know.  But still.  Perhaps, I can repay him in coffee and muffins…

Writing with a Weak Will

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I needed to write a poem today for the APPF, but I didn’t.  I had a migraine for most of the day, and when I didn’t have a migraine, I didn’t feel like writing a poem.  And now it’s 20 after 11 and I don’t feel remotely like doing anything poetic.  Not that it matters, because the little book of postcards and the stamps for them are sitting in my office.  I’ll have to write a couple of poems to make up for it tomorrow, and then get them all in the mail on Monday.

It’s kind of bad that it’s only the first of August and I’m already behind with the postcard poems though.  The postcard that was for today I put in the mail yesterday or Thursday.  It’s going to Ottawa, but of course it won’t arrive there till probably sometime next week.  It costs 79 cents to mail a postcard to Canada.  That seems awfully pricey, when it’s only about $1 to send a card-card to England.  Oh well.  I hope the person I sent it to likes it.  The poem I sent was “Garden Variety,” the same one that Karen read yesterday on the Plinth.  Which, while I’m thinking of it, I need to send to Christine Swint, because she wanted to read it.

I’m really amazed at people who can write in multiple genres.  Right now I’m thinking of Collin Kelley, whose novel Conquering Venus, is coming out a little later in August, I think.  He writes in all kinds of genres–poetry, fiction, news.  Probably other genres I don’t know about.  How do people do that?  How do they have so much to say that they can say it in multiple genres?

I can’t write fiction.  I’ve tried.  It comes out dreadful.  And it’s too bad too, because clearly I have a narrative strain in my poetry, and I have the desire to write fiction (and memoir, for that matter), and flesh out characters who do interesting things.  Oh, maybe I don’t have The Great American Novel in me, but I might have an Entertaining Bit of Fluff in me.  Or I would if I had an attention span longer than a gnat’s.  

I suppose, like any writing, you have to work at it.  But poetry is hard enough for me as it is, and I’m not nearly as dedicated to it as I ought to be.  Can you imagine me trying to write a novel?  I’d probably write 20 pages, get bored, and tack on a “The End” before my main character even finished her Cheerios.