Priscilla Long - The Writers Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life

The Writers Portable Mentor

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HE WRITERS PORTABLE MENTOR

A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life

SECOND EDITION

Priscilla Long

2010 by Priscilla Long

All rights reserved. University of New Mexico Press edition published 2018 by arrangement with the author.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Long, Priscilla, author.

Title: The writers portable mentor: a guide to art, craft, and the writing life / Priscilla Long.

Description: Second edition. | Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018006286 (print) | LCCN 2018007812 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826360069 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826360052 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: AuthorshipHandbooks, manuals, etc.

Classification: LCC PN147 (e-book) | LCC PN147.L66 2018 (print) | DDC 808.02dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006286

Cover illustration: Donna Huntriss

Designed by Lisa C. Tremaine

Writing is a labor, shot through with delight.

Scott Russell Sanders

I am a reader and following from that, a writer. So to be able to contribute this work to other writers and to those who want to write is a privilege for which I am profoundly grateful.

I shaped the original pages of The Writers Portable Mentor for fifteen years, using the evolving manuscript in my writing classes. I did (and still do) the exercises many times over in relation to my own works in progress. Lets say I am on intimate terms with its alchemical effects. And Ive had the gratification of witnessing other writers blossom under its aegis.

So why a second edition? Im in excellent health and not so very old, but I want The Writers Portable Mentor to live on beyond me. The venerable University of New Mexico Press, with its stunningly competent staff (as I learned when the press published my book of poems) makes a perfect home for the second edition of The Writers Portable Mentor.

For the second edition I wanted to switch most of the model sentences, paragraphs, and pieces, to replace them with new ones. Why, since I adore the models in the first edition? Partly for selfish reasons. I felt greedy for a fresh palette, a novel cuisine, a new wardrobe. And I fancy that devotees of the first edition will relish these new goodies as well. Its my hope that old and new readers alike will find these models as revelatory as I have.

The replacement process required an intense year of reading, for my practice is to read all of any work from which I pick out a sentence or paragraph. Reading is what I do, but this years marathon has been a benison. How could I possibly thank all the authors, past and present, who havethrough their literary worksgiven such richness to our culture and to our lives? And by literary I am not referring to some genre but to artists ranging from crime writer James Ellroy to poets Mary Oliver and Gwendolyn Brooks to novelists Annie Proulx and Viet Thanh Nguyen to classic giants like James Baldwin. The novels, stories, essays, and poems by these and other writers have been my mentors, my teachers, my tutors, my taskmasters. I am forever in their debt.

Other changes in The Writers Portable Mentor reflect changes in the world of reading, writing, and publishing that have occurred since the first edition appeared in 2010. This includes everything from the number of words in an average-length short story to reflections on the decision on whether or not to self-publish to the findings of neuro-science on what our brain does while we write by hand versus what it does while we tap keys.

To those I thanked in the first edition: I must thank you againall of you. My workshop, including writers and visual artists, began some twenty-seven years ago and is still going strong. I am grateful to Jack Remick, M. Anne Sweet, Geri Gale, Gordon Wood, Sadato Hosoda, and Anna Blint. The folks at HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history, have kept on keeping the faith that comprehending the past will help us to shape a future we will want to live in.

I am grateful to Sharon Oard Warner, novelist and longtime founder/director of the Taos Summer Writers Conference, for providing me with the opportunity to teach prose style in Taos and Santa Fe every summer for close to a decade. I am grateful to Hugo HouseSeattles center for writersfor creating such a warm and stimulating community in which we writers can write and teach and learn and perform and listen.

I must thank the team that coalesced around creating the first edition of The Writers Portable Mentor. We have remained a team, evolving into one whose purpose is mutual aid and support for the endeavor of getting our works out into the world. Thank you to Andrea Lewis, Susan Knox, and Waverly Fitzgerald. I am grateful to Ms. James Kessler whose hard work and competence as editorial assistant has been invaluable to this book. I am grateful to Scott Driscoll, Kate True-blood, Laura Kalpakian, and Maya Sonenberg for good advice and kind support. I could not do without my loyal but critical first readers including my dear friend Bethany Reid, my sister Pamela O. Long, and brother-in-law Bob Korn. Great thanks to Liz Long, David Messerschmidt, and Jay Schlechter, without whom I would be a mess.

Lastly I am grateful to Elise McHugh and the staff at University of New Mexico Press, for taking on The Writers Portable Mentor with love and enthusiasm and for making it their own. Thank you.

For writers dedicated to their craft, learning the craft never ends. Yet the pleasure in it deepens as we achieve, upon occasion, a virtuoso sentence, a virtuoso page of writing. This book is for writers who strive for virtuosity. It is designed to mentor you, first, in practices that catalyze productivityfor basic productivity underlies everything else. And second, in craft moves that will aid you in your quest to deepen the work and carry it forward.

I wrote and rewrote The Writers Portable Mentor during years of teaching both apprentice writers and writers who are seasoned and quite well-published but who want to deepen their skills and extend their range. It is for you if your goal as a writer is to develop faster, become more skilled, or go in new directions. My goal is to help you realize beautiful and accomplished works on a regular basis and to get them out into the world. The Writers Portable Mentor is particularly oriented toward writers of creative nonfiction (or, as some prefer, literary nonfiction) and short stories. But poets, novelists, and magazine writers may profitably thumb it for the reason that a well-stocked toolbox of craft strategies and creative approaches can be taken into any genre or form.