Reading to feed your Mechanic & Muse

In the magazine rack of my college library, I discovered two sources of inspiration. The New Yorker and The Writer continue to feed me to this day.

The New Yorker sets the bar for excellence in reporting and criticism. I have to crane my neck to see the bar for fiction; I have the rejection slips to prove it. I get the print edition every week, but like to beat our mailman by checking in Sunday night for the few pieces they share online.

Today, The Writer is a far different magazine than the issues I first read in my youth and collected for years. Under Sylvia Burack, who edited it for 40 years until her 80s, the magazine was visually drab but lit up with advice from real writers.

One of my biggest thrills came in 1998 when Mrs. Burack accepted a piece of mine, but not before it went through several rewrites. After one revision, she wrote me a letter, pecked out on a typewriter,  that said I was close. But, she added, as St. Augustine said when he prayed for a celibate life, "not quite yet." I got the message and went back to the computer. Aware of her high standards, a  second piece made it through fewer revisions, I recall.

Mrs. Burack died in 2003. In her obituary, The New York Times listed the rich and famous writers who appeared in the magazine, including Stephen King, Sue Grafton, and Sidney Sheldon. But what resonated with me was the comment from Wendy Dager, a newspaper columnist: "She and The Writer treated us lesser-known writers as if we were just as important as those with household names."

"We're not going to make anyone a Pulitzer Prize winner," Ms. Burack told The Boston Globe in 1987. "But we can tell writers about the basics — the dos and don'ts."

The Writer changed hands in 2000. Its new editor, Elfrieda Abbe, has kept alive Ms. Burack's spirit, but has brought the magazine into the 21st century with a more visually appealing design that features "before and after boxes" that demonstrate how implementing the lessons of an article can improve a story, resource boxes that include online as well as print sources, along with a web site (magazine subscription required).

Like its predecessor, its value continues to reside in the stories that writers tell about their successes and failures, their rituals and rejections, and most of all, the lessons they have learned about the writing craft. (A disclaimer: I was fortunate enough to place a story, about the value of old newspapers as research tools, in the new Writer in 2003.

For example, in The Writer's January 2006 issues, I found an article on fixed-form writing stories that appeals to my Mechanic and the Muse.

Just as poets rely on the sonnet and the villanelle and other fixed forms, so can prose writers. Bruce Holland Rogers describes several, among them the "69er"-- stories that are exactly 69 words long--and the "369" which consists of "three 69-word stories that share a common theme or subtheme."  I've got an oft-rejected story that might do well fixed by those formats. I'll let you know how it works out.

What are the lessons here about my relationship with these two magazines? Several, I'd say.

• The importance of libraries
• The value of community
• The power of lessons learned
• The challenges of craft
• Most of all, the way excellence corresponds with longevity.

So, what magazines or web sites feed your writer's Mechanic?

Comments

[AF]

I'll have to check out The Writer. The before-and-afters sound pretty useful.