I’m not generally in the habit of rummaging through my neighbors’ trash, although there have been temptations. Lawn chairs. Desks. TVs that look like they work. However, this morning I passed a great temptation: a thing, covered in a floral sheet, with a sign pinned to it that read, “Please Do Not Take.”

Why not? I immediately asked myself. I don’t know what’s under the sheet, though I thought I glimpsed a bit of wood. I’d like to say I snuck a peak, but I didn’t. I’m a coward and something about the sign made me think its writer had anger management issues. Also, it’s just way more fun to think about.

What could possibly make you want to put up a sign like that? What could it be? A broken piece of furniture and you’re afraid someone will sue you about it. But there must be a legal assumption that trash is broken. Perhaps you have a phobia about other people using your things. Perhaps you think the item is possessed, but then why let the garbage people pick it up. Perhaps you are a nut. Perhaps you loved that item so much that you can’t bear to think of anyone else using it. Perhaps a broken mirror. Perhaps a computer with nuclear launch codes.

Whatever it is, I feel confident there’s a story behind it. And isn’t this how stories begin, so often—with something that’s just not quite right. Have you ever started a story that way?

For a period of time, my oldest son raced dirt bikes. As a result I spent a lot of time at race tracks an hour north of Manhattan, which isn’t upstate, but is so different it might as well be. At that time I was working on a novel, COURTING DISASTER, which didn’t sell, but from which I took the character, Chuck Jones, who went into THE FICTION CLASS. I felt Chuck would have an evangelical background and so while my son and his friends lumbered about with chains and tires and so forth, I sat in a chair and read Billy Graham’s autobiography, which was very long, but interesting. I can safely say I was the only person at the track reading, (except for a man who was always reading books on conspiracy theories), but people were friendly and, to a person, when they came up to me, seeing the length of the book, they would say, WAR AND PEACE? That always struck me funny. As though there was only one long book in this world.

A lot of Will’s racing took place right after 9/11. You could watch soldiers parachuting off into the fields while the dirt bike races were going on. This was Republican country. The boys who raced, and they were all boys, were the sorts of kids who would join the army. Many of them did. They all loved guns and hunting, but although my liberal sensibilities were ruffled, I always felt in good hands when I was with them. I suspected they would do a better job of defending the country than I would. They were so physically strong it astounded me. (My son used to take great pleasure in handing me the dirt bike and then walking away, laughing uproariously as I struggled to keep it upright.) These guys were also idealistic and poetic. The track smelled strongly of motor oil and one of the guys looked at me once and said, “It smells better than candy.” When they said the Pledge of Allegiance before the races began, you felt every single word.

I was thinking what a blessing it was to be forced out of my comfort zone. My natural habitat consists of libraries, book stores, Starbucks, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum. I love those places. But for a period of time, it was a race track, and I think I’m a better writer for it. How about you? Have you ever wound up anywhere unexpected?

Someone asked me the other day if I’d be interested in writing a memoir and I said, “No. Because I can’t remember a thing.”

Minutes later I received an e-mail from an editor, giving me information about an article of mine his magazine is publishing. He said the word count was good, but they had to add a word to one of the sentences because they have a “strict anti-widow policy.” Oh dear, I thought, and then remembered that a widow refers to a stray word at the bottom of a column. Old newspaper lingo.

Which reminded me of when I started out as a reporter for FORTUNE Magazine. My first job was to work on the FORTUNE 500. This was in the early 1980s, before the internet was used, so the job involved reading through tons of annual reports, looking for those companies that had the largest revenues. The twist was that more than fifty per cent of the revenues had to be from manufacturing. So if you were General Motors, that wasn’t a problem. But some companies teetered, if, for example, they did a lot of financial services. One year you might be on the FORTUNE 500, the next year off. You can only imagine the glee a young reporter would feel at telling an older gentleman (because they were all older gentlemen in those days) that his company had been booted off the list. By me.

That in turn made me think of the first time I had a martini, which was at a party in Memphis at which I met Glenn Campbell and Danny Thomas, who were famous at that time. On that occasion, I was reporting an article. They were serving martinis on trays. I have a very hard time not taking something off a tray if someone holds it up to me, and it was not my most professional moment. Thirty years later I had a martini with my husband (who proposed to me after the Memphis trip) and I passed out yet again. Not a drink I should have more than twice a century.

All of which made me think how much memory is inside me, and all of us, just waiting for someone to prod us and make it come out. Unfortunately, and this is embarrassing, I can’t remember who asked me about writing the memoir in the first place. But it will come, if I think about it. How about you? Memories inspire any stories?

Sometimes it’s fun to think about the beginnings of stories, without figuring out where they’ll end. Of course, if I can figure out where it will end and who the characters will be, that’s all the better. But a lot of times I just have a start, and I chew over that for a while, and then it disappears. So I’m passing along this start to you and maybe you can make something better of it than I can.

I was on the train. It was late and I purposely chose a seat behind a man who looked quiet. He wore a shabby suit, he was hunched over, he looked like he was going home after a long day’s work. Just as the door began to close, two very loud drunk people burst into the train and sat right next to my quiet guy. One was a very, very tall man and the other a very tall woman. They asked the quiet guy what stop he was getting off, and lo and behold, we were getting off at the same place. I figured he would do what I would do, which was close my eyes and hope they went away. But the quiet guy began talking to them. They were all involved in divorce and custody battles, they loved their children, they were frustrated by various things. I was touched as I listened at what a surprising turn the whole thing had taken. These were three people who never in the world would have connected, and here they were.

A week later, I’m sitting on the train and three big bruiser types get on, or, as Woody Allen would put it “hairy knuckle types.” They were talking about some guy who was getting out from jail and I wasn’t sure if they were felons or police officers. All of a sudden a voice pipes up, from deep within the 5-seater and I’m darned if it isn’t my quiet man. He begins talking to them about Mike Tyson and various other boxers. They start to talk.

There’s a John Cheever story about a woman who keeps showing up to visit people who are dying, and I began to get a spooky feeling about this man. What if he was a figment of my imagination? What if he was a killer looking for drunk people? What if he was just a really lonely guy who could only connect with people on a train? (What if I should just read a book and stop listening to other people?)

What do you think?

We writers are a twitchy lot, and this is the time of year when we’re forced away from our computers and into the society of people who are bemused, intrigued and largely ignorant about we do. I’ve spent many a holiday party grabbing onto the nearest drink, dog, or baby–trying to still my nerves. So in the interest of holiday harmony, I’d offer up some suggestions of statements to avoid when speaking to a writer.

1. What are you working on?

I don’t want to talk about it. I think my new manuscript is good, but I’m not sure and it might be bad, and if I gather up my courage to give you a brief summary, you’re likely to say what you said last year: “That’s interesting. “ I then spent the month of January wondering why you said “interesting” instead of “great.” Should I scrap it? Should I start over?

2. When is your book coming out?

I don’t know. If I knew, I’d say so. Right up front. I’d walk right into this party and hand you bookmarks and buttons and talk all about it. I wouldn’t be trying to keep it a secret. So if I don’t say anything, it means there’s nothing to say.

3. I was just reading this really bad book and thought of you. You don’t write any worse than she does. Why don’t you have a series?

Just no.

4. Would you read my manuscript?

Aside from the fact that that would take me about ten hours, which I don’t have, if I read your manuscript I would feel like I should come up with constructive advice, in order to be helpful. But every time I give someone constructive advice, they wind up getting insulted and never talk to me again. This doesn’t happen in the classes I teach, so all I can figure is that people who expect you to do something for free have different expectations than people who are serious about studying the craft of writing.

5. Have you considered self-publishing?

Everyone considers self-publishing because the ads are all over the place. People who self-publish pay a large chunk of money in order to produce a book that very few people will read. I would rather be paid for that honor.

So what should you say to a writer at a holiday party? I would stick with the tried and true: politics and religion.

Happy season, Bloomer friends. Anyone have any statements they would rather not hear?

Recently I’ve become convinced that a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt would be perfect as an epigraph for my new novel (an epigraph being a little quote on the opening page right before a novel starts). With the right epigraph I’d immediately establish a warm, sympathetic, intelligent tone. I hope. Unfortunately, although I know what I want Eleanor Roosevelt to have said, and although I think she probably did say it, I can’t find the exact right words. I’ve been reading her letters, confident that somewhere, tucked away, I’ll find my epigraph. But meanwhile, I’ve been accumulating epigraphs perfect for books I’m not writing. So I’ll pass them along and feel free to take them.

Eleanor Roosevelt: “Perhaps we have to learn that life was not meant to be lived in security but with adventurous courage.”

Eleanor Roosevelt: “It is often said that friendship and loyalty are the petty illusions and dreams of youth and that as one grows older, one gives them up and forgets them, but this seems wrong, for the greatest men and women are those who have been loyal and honest and have believed in friendship to the end.”

Bernard Selling: “Sometimes the only real truth is each person’s perception of it.”

Peter Ackroyd: “If there is one aspect of a writer’s life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood.”

Antigone: “The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with might blows of fate, and at long last these blows will teach us wisdom.”

Oedipus: “The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.”

Margaret Robison: “The soul has to have a place to come home to.”

Bill Roorbach: “If memory is what people are made of, then people are made of loss.”

Lucille Clifton: “I write the way I write because I am the kind of person I am.”

Katherine Russell Rich: “There are three things you can’t hide—happiness, a cough and love.”

Anyone have an epigraph they like?

One of my favorite writing exercises relates to obsessions. (Faithful readers may remember I mentioned this in The Fiction Class. Just saying.) The exercise is to make a list of your five obsessions.

Recently, I was discussing this with my Intro to Fiction class, and I made a list of my own.

1. Dogs. I am obsessed with dogs and will read anything relating to dogs, unless I know for a fact the dog dies at the end. My first novel had a Golden Retriever in it; the one I’m working on now involves a cockapoo. There’s something about the very name cockapoo that sets me off.

2. Illness. I am obsessed with illness and will read anything related to illness, unless I know for a fact that the person dies at the end. (That last part isn’t true. What is true is that I will develop symptoms of any illness I read about.)

3. Family. I love stories about the way family members interact with each other, whether it be mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, and so forth.

4. Writing. I’m fascinated by writers and how they work. For that reason, and others, I love reading memoirs.

5. That’s personal. There’s got to be one thing I won’t write about.

How about you? What are your obsessions?

This month I’ve decided to jump into the fray and take part in the Dueling Authors: Austen vs. Dickens Tour (http://classics.rebeccareid.com/).  With no disrespect intended to Jane Austen, I had to cast my vote with Charles Dickens. He had such passion. He wrote to change the world. His writing makes me laugh and cry, often on the same page.

For this particular contest, I was assigned to write in support of THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, which is a tricky novel to write about because it’s very sentimental. Little Nell, the main character, is a female version of Tiny Tim. She suffers, suffers, then dies. Oscar Wilde famously said one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears…of laughter.

Bah! Humbug! say I.

For me, the power of this novel is that Dickens’ passions shine through so ferociously. I feel closer to him with The Old Curiosity Shop than any other of his writing. He wrote this novel fast. The pages came out in monthly and sometimes weekly installments over the course of 1840 and early 1841. He didn’t have time to separate himself from the writing. There’s an unfiltered, raw, vitality to these pages that speaks to the joy Dickens must have felt writing them. You sense his mind at work. You also must be touched by the passions that animated him.

“I am breaking my heart over this story,” he said to a friend during his writing of The Old Curiosity Shop. The novel forced him to explore feelings of grief that were already raw. Only a few years earlier, just as he was becoming famous, Dickens’ beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, died suddenly at the age of 17. Mary influenced the way he wrote about women; there’s a reason so many of his women are gentle and pure. His feelings of loss helped him write about grief more beautifully than any other writer. Anyone who has mourned will recognize what Dickens is writing about when he describes the “weary void” that comes with grief, “the sense of desolation that will come upon the strongest minds, when something familiar and beloved is missed at every turn—the connection between inanimate and senseless things, and the object of recollection when every household god becomes a monument and every room a grave.”

But perhaps you are not looking to be depressed.

That’s all right, because THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP is also a very funny book, with much more laughter in it than tears. For one thing, there’s an evil dwarf who pursues Little Nell and wants to make her his wife. Daniel Quilp is one of Dickens’ most vivid characters. Some of my favorite exchanges are between Quilp and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Jiniwin, who lives with him “and waged perpetual war with Daniel; of whom, notwithstanding, she stood in no slight dread.”

 The novel’s plot is fairly simple. Nell and her grandfather, a gambler, are evicted from their home and forced to leave London and seek shelter.  They are pursued by Quilp, who enlists a host of vivid characters, among them a villainous attorney, Sampson Brass, and his masculine sister Sally. On the road, Little Nell and her grandfather have a series of adventures, many of them moving testimonies to what life was like in England in the 1820s. (The novel is set some years before Dickens wrote it.) One of the most poignant scenes comes when Nell and her grandfather find shelter with a man who lives and works at a furnace, and spends all his time watching the fire. “It’s like a book to me,” he said, “the only book I ever learned to read; and many an old story it tells me. It’s music, for I should know its roar among a thousand, and there are other voices in its roar. It has its pictures too. You don’t know how many strange faces and different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It’s my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life.”

Similar words could be used for Dickens. He shows us all the passions that make up all our lives.

Yesterday my son told me he had just renewed a library book on line. Had he told me he discovered the cure to migraines, I couldn’t have been more dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe such a thing was possible. Immediately I went on line to my account, called up my name, which, of course, had the word Delinquent stamped next to it. I renewed my book, and the delinquent sign went away. I was incredulous.

Since I was a child I’ve been in possession of an overdue book. When you have an overdue book, there comes a point at which you have to troop down to the librarian and pay the fee. Yes, you can stick the book in the return slot, but still comes the day, when you want to take out your next book, that you have to make amends. You have to go to the librarian, she takes out the calendar and totes up the days late you are. She’s always perfectly pleasant, but she looks disappointed. Then you take out the change and she takes out the metal box, which, when she opens it, reverberates throughout the library. Patrons lift their heads and they know.

The last book I’ve been reading has been causing me a particular level of agita. It’s Joseph Lash’s biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and it’s easily 1,000 pages long. I love it, I read it every day, but no matter what I do, I can’t speed up my pace. I’m halfway through and the book is a month overdue and I’ve been in a quandary. I figured if I went to renew it, they’d take it away from me. So I decided I’d soldier on, finish the book, and pay the fees when I was done. But knowing I’m paying five cents a day is taking pleasure away from reading. Plus, I assumed I couldn’t take out any other books until I resolved this one, which was cutting back on research for my novel. (This is why I don’t write blogs more frequently. Because I’m preoccupied with things like this.)

What a miracle then that I could renew Franklin and Eleanor on line. Turns out, it didn’t matter that it was overdue, so long as it wasn’t $25 overdue. I was so thrilled I immediately put five other books on hold. This is going to end unhappily. I feel sure of it. In two months time I’ll be sitting around with six overdue books and I’ll only be halfway through World War II. But thank you Westchester Library System. You’ve brought me great joy!

Normally I start the semester with a discussion of opening paragraphs, which seems a sensible place. However, in an exciting break from my own routine, I decided to begin this semester with a class on revision, a topic I don’t usually get to until week 9. By then everyone’s usually thrashed their way through a number of critiques. The last class is always about publishing and I know people want me to finish nattering on about revision so we can get to the good stuff. So I’m usually rushing through revision myself.

For this semester I decided to take a different tack. I decided to separate revision out from publication and put it at the start of the class. My hope is that not only can my classes discuss it, but we can also embrace it. Specifically I want to move past the notion of the idea of revision as being “fixing errors.” I want a more holistic approach to revision. I want students to view it not as a necessary evil but as an opportunity to explore their manuscripts and bring out deeper meanings that may have been dormant in early drafts. I want to get past the fear!

Of course, the only problem is that it’s hard to teach. I can tell you what a good opening paragraph looks like, but a good revision is much harder to quantify. A good sign is if The New Yorker agrees to buy it, but even an unpublished story can be successfully revised. There are some things, however, that can help.

1. Have a title that works. Almost always, if the title’s good, the story’s good. The reason is that an author with a title knows what the story’s about. So challenge yourself to come up with a good title.

2. Retype the story. From the beginning. Novels too. Don’t try to squeeze every little correction into the draft. Take a bold approach and start from scratch.

3. Cut out a quarter of the words. You don’t need them. Trust me.

How about you? Do you have any tips for revision?