View Jill's webpage

If you would like to see samples of my work, go to my webpage. This is only available on the Alverno Intranet, so you must be logged onto a campus computer to view it.

The Manuscript in the Drawer

There's an old joke that if you walk down the street in Los Angeles, you can stop people randomly and ask how their screenplay is going, and 9 out of 10 will tell you. Everyone in LA, it seems, has dreams of being the next Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) or Diablo Cody (Juno.) For most, that dream never lives beyond the desire, imagination, and computer files of the writer.

There's a similar scenario that gets played out in films, novels, and on stage. That's the college English professor who has a novel in the drawer of his or her desk--a novel the writer worked hard on but never saw in book form. It's the same dynamic: I want to do it; I'm doing it; I did it. But that only applies to the writing.

What happens after you've written your screenplay or your novel or your collection of short stories? Do they live their entire life in your drawer like that favorite blue sock that lost its mate in the dryer or an old fortune cookie no one ever opened?

Perhaps you print a few copies of your manuscript for friends you can depend on to give the work high praise. "I LOVED it, they exclaim. I wish I could write like you do. Hey, just between us, Marla was based on me, right?" (Marla of course was your heroine who faced challenges with determination and wisdom and humor and eventually learned to love her whole self, untamed hair, Buddha belly and all. You love Marla, and it's amazing how many of our own stories made it into her life. Not that it was a memoir or anything.) You reward your readers' enthusiasm by putting their names on your acknowledgments page. It will look wonderful in print if the book ever gets published.

And for many of us, that's as far as it goes.

So here is my question: Is there value to the manuscript in the drawer? Was it worth the time and energy to produce those pages? If the work will never be produced in Hollywood or find space on a shelf in Barnes and Noble or be offered up on Amazon.com, was the time you spent simply wasted time, like all those exercise sessions at the gym that were negated by a plate of cheese enchiladas before the week was out? Are they related to the goldfish you got that seemed so cool at the time--a little friend!--and became a neutral element in your house, then a nuisance as you noticed the water turning green then brown and finally decided to give the little guy away to your nephew or flush Goldie to his final resting place.

I really don't know. I have three books in drawers. The first, a murder mystery, is a good book. The second, a sequel, never got the attention it needed to be revised into something solid. The third is a strong book. It has a soul. An agent agreed to read it--wanted to read it in fact--and I told her it needed a little more tweaking. I had an editor friend go through it line by line, and she returned it decorated with an abundance of marginal comments and bandaged with a colorful array of post-its.

And now it is in my sock drawer, the one that has not just one blue sock, but dozens of unmatched socks. It is the Drawer for Lost and Lonely Things.

It's a good book. But for some reason, I can't take it out of the drawer, read all of the comments, and send it off to the agent who has probably forgotten all about it. I don't know why, but that book refuses to move. It may have grown roots.

Was it worth it?

For the love of words

Homage and The Singing Line

I teach writing because at a very young age, I fell in love with words. My family aside, this has been the truest love of my life, and I have remained faithful while richer and perhaps just a teensy bit arrogant about it, and oh so much poorer than I am now; through better and far, far worse times although right now pretty much has me whipped; through sickness of the body, mind, and soul, and in fair, good, and gleefully robust health.

No matter where I am in life or who is sharing my heart and home, some of my most satisfying moments are when I read truly good writing. Michael Chabon describing the evening light reflecting golden off of an empty window in "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. " Anne LaMott describing the perfect selfishness of a smart and angry adolescent girl in "Crooked Little Heart." Charlotte Bronte--exquisite Charlotte Bronte--giving life to plain Jane Eyre, the elphin orphan who became my role model for all that a strong woman can be.

Writers have shaped my soul; there is no other way to put it. They have taught me how to see beyond the transient to the enduring. They have given me great wanderlust. They have made me grateful for the smell of night, the cold light of winter, and the season of life "where late the sweet birds sang" (WS's Sonnet 73.)

So I have tried, as a teacher and as a writer, to honor those gifts, those Faberge boxes of words, images, and ideas.

Paying homage is not always easy. While writing and revising (and revising, and revising, and revising) three books, a drawerful of short stories, essays, articles, and poems, I've spent hours staring at the paper or screen, my brain running through dozens of possibilities for a single word or phrase. I've written the same line nine different ways until my central nervous system said that it was note-perfect. When I hit that perfect note in a piece of writing, I can feel it throughout my body. It takes mindfullness, time, and hard work to hit it. And it is always worth the effort.

Edwin Markham, poet, scholar, and bibliophile of the late 1800's, once described another poet as having "the gift of the singing line." The singing line. Isn't that a singing line in itself? What a delicious way to phrase it.

So, my PCM 300 weekday college students, I am going to push you hard to have the patience and rigor to take apart your writing, sentence by sentence, word by word, until you know that you have done your very best. I am going to do my very best to make you acutely aware of concepts like parallel structure, active voice, and economy of line. And oh, those conventions--you know I am going to be merciless. In the process, I hope that you will learn to love your own words. This is a love affair worth persuing.

Jill

I began teaching writing 30 years ago. Back then, the most sophisticated writing tool was a typewriter with a daisy wheel, and I had one. [Note to the under 40 crowd: A daisy wheel was a small, flat plastic wheel about the size of a mini dvd. It had spokes coming out from the center--hence the "daisy"--and a letter, number, or symbol at the end of each spoke. If you wanted to italicize a word, you took off the regular daisy wheel and snapped on the italic wheel. You typed your one word, then removed that wheel and put the regular one back on. Ditto for bold text.]

What did we teach? Organization. Support. Language clarity. Sentence structure. Punctuation and mechanics. And more important, the ideas behind the words. Someone whose name I've forgotten said "Good writing is clear thinking made visible." I love that line, and I think it applies to professional writing . But there is something else. Good writing helps the writer (is it okay if I switch point of view and use "you" instead of "the writer?" I think I heard a yes.) Redo: Good writing helps you get to places in your head you didn't know you were going. It helps you uncover levels below levels below levels. I know it was William Faulkner who said, "I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it." Now that says it perfectly. When you get into the zone of really writing deep and hard and focused to the point where those little electric minnows are racing through your blood and you lose track of time and the only thing that matters is getting those words out, then you begin, begin to discover what it is you want to say. It is exhilarating and scary, and it is better than almost any feeling I know.

That is writing. It doesn't matter if you do it on a pad of purple paper, a daisy wheel typrewriter, or on a $3,000 Mac Pro with Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Harpertown” processors, 2GB memory (800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered DIMM ECC), ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics with 256MB memory. It doesn't matter if you have your own writing studio on the third floor with a skylight, mini-fridge, futon, and radiant heating (my old studio) or if you write in a crowded Starbucks or on your dorm room floor. None of that has a single thing to do with real writing and what happens when you get to it.

But what does all that have to do with professional writing today--daisy wheels and skylights and electric minnows? Organization, support, language clarity? Professional writing used to mean typing on good bond paper, using whiteout, and running your stuff off on a mimeograph machine. (Oh don't even ask. If you've never smelled mimeo fluid, you'll never get it.) Now it means writing for websites that use flash and knowing that your words can go from your keypad to every computer on earth with Internet access in less time than it takes to sip your latte. And none of that matters the least little bit. The best professional writers still pay careful attention to the basic elements of good writing. Dig for good ideas, then dig further. Uncover the mysteries. Use examples that will help your reader understand just what you are trying to say. Choose each word carefully by comparing it against other possible words and listening for the rhythm and tone and rightness of it. Put those great words and ideas and examples into clean sentences, and put those sentences into a clear structure that flows effortlessly. While you're sipping your latte, refrain from hitting "send" until you have read what you've written a few dozen times to see how and where you could make it better. Check the commas and colons and quotation marks. Do the work. Take the time. Believe that it matters.

If you do that, the past 30 years are just a blip on the screen--here and gone with the speed of a blinking cursor. What is timeless is what lasts, and good writing lasts.

Welcome Students!

Welcome to PCM 300, Advanced Writing: Professional Applications