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Earlier this month, I sat among twenty women in a beautiful garden on the banks of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, a volcano in the distance. The beauty of the scenery didn’t distract us from the task at hand—five days learning from writer Joyce Maynard how to become better writers. While the workshop, Write on Lake Atitlan, focused on memoir, the sessions provided valuable information no matter the type of writing. Over those days, Joyce worked through the essays we’d submitted in individual sessions. After a couple of days, she depended more and more on workshop participants to identify some of the common mistakes we made in our lessons on writing.

Here are some of the lessons I learned:

• Short sentences are powerful. We often rely too much on strings of word to convey a thought or move a narrative forward. Joyce shared the advice of Verlyn Klinkenborg, who wrote an entire book on short sentences. His advice: remove connectors like ‘if,’ ‘and,’ and ‘but.’ Pare down words instead of adding them. Rely more on direct language. Avoid being evasive. Construct sentences that focus on simple words choices. I found this advice particularly helpful, as one of my weaknesses has been overwriting.

• Avoid clichés. Clichés are well-worn words and phrases—like ‘apple of my eye.’ Creating shorter sentences requires more attention to the words we use. A cliché, a form of lazy writing, takes the punch out of those short sentences we aspire to write. Our work improves as we search for unique words to substitute for those clichés.

• Pluck out those ‘to be’ verbs. In revision, I try to weed out every ‘was’ or ‘were’ unless there is absolutely no other alternative. Often, the process is simple—as simple as ‘flipping’ the sentence. “The only sound in the room was the beating heart,” flips to “The heart beat the only sound in the room.”

• Find a ‘container’ for your story. Don’t try to make it about everything. Choose the elements that fit into that container that you can name—e.g., “my mother’s decision to remarry”—and leave out everything that doesn’t fit.

• Be mindful of story arcs. Most writers who study the craft understand this. A story isn’t that this happens and this happens and this happens. Instead, the arc begins with a situation, followed by an event that results in a change or has an impact, and ending with the changed situation. An essay contains the entire arc. Larger works are made up of individual chapters that add the pieces to the arc with a tease at the end of each chapter to keep the reader reading.

• Put yourself in the story. As a fiction writer, I had resisted the idea of writing a memoir. After a few days in the workshop, I started to rethink my resistance. Even though I don’t deny that I include parts of myself in what is largely a fictional protagonist, I often prefer to act as observer in personal essay, telling what I know of the stories of others. I’m working on adding my own story to the larger story of an essay.

I may never take that step of writing a memoir, but there’s no doubt that my writing following the workshop will change for the better. As with my other experiences on that beautiful volcanic lake, the learning comes with a dose of mystical inspiration.

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Every day, the small lobby of the dilapidated building filled with displaced people, men and women suffering dislocation, survivors of violence in the place they fled and inhabitants of uncertainty in the place they’d fled to. They brought with them stories of harrowing journeys, lost friends and family, threats of forced conscription and fears of knocks on the door at night. All had come from countries experiencing conflict. Some carried literal and horrific scars, physical manifestations of the cruelty some people wield against others.

One woman who came had been kidnapped, held in a garage and tortured, until her name was mentioned by an archbishop whose homily was broadcast over the radio. She was eventually released. The archbishop Romero was later assassinated while preparing the Eucharist during mass. One man was missing part of a finger, cut away little by little by an interrogator seeking information or absolute obedience.

For three years, I worked for an agency providing legal services to refugees from Central America. The experience informed my first novel, Water from the Moon, the novel that taught me to write. I set the themes—of cruelty, oppression, lack of human rights—in the United States to make them more familiar and not distant. I didn’t write from direct experience, but through the stories of others. Because of that, I don’t know when I will consider the novel finished.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.” Elie Wiesel wrote this in his acclaimed memoir, Night. The tremendous suffering and loss he experienced came during the Holocaust. His parents and one of his three sisters did not survive. He spoke with the authority of that experience to regularly remind us of those living in oppressive circumstances and the importance of speaking out and taking sides.

Elie Wiesel told us, “Words are gestures. Words are offerings.” In Night, he used his words to remind us, “In the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.”

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Forests are called the lungs of the world. The trees and plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale the oxygen that sustains human and animal life. They put to good use the gases that heat up our planet earth.

Forests sustain in other ways, not only by harboring creatures massive and small, but also by birthing serenity and new ways of thinking. When I reached a notable birthday years ago, I spent that day in the Muir woods near San Francisco. In Chile, I walked through a national park in the country’s lake region on the first day of one new year. That trek through the trees eventually revealed twin cloistered water falls that required a long pause before moving on. In another place in Chile on another trip, trees sheltered a stream brilliant with luminescent colors, a beacon on a foggy and rainy day. I wrote about the significance of that experience in another post.

When I wrote a story influenced by Celtic folklore, The Mists of Na Crainn, in it a forest holds secrets as well as a connection to family for the main character, Lyric Doherty. In my children’s book, The Island of Lost Children, the forest is a gathering place for the children who want to work together to keep their home a safe place. Stick horses that become stallions of wind and foam carry them there.

I am always drawn to forests, whether majestic blankets of green that go on forever or enclaves in surprising locations. On so many levels, they are essential elements of our survival. We take in their gifts with every breath we take.

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Every dog comes with his or her own story, but the stories of most rescue dogs are often mysteries to us. I’ll never know how my dog Farley and his canine buddy ended up running along a highway before they were picked up by animal control and ultimately transferred into rescue. I can only speculate about what initially caused him to attack doors when someone was on the other side of it. And I’ll never know if he always thought he was the center of the universe, or if that only happened after he got great care after becoming part of a rescue group. (Who wouldn’t luxuriate in the care and attention they provide?)

Or there’s my other dog—once a Princess, now a Daisy—who likes to stay close to us. Her previous owner surrendered her to a high risk shelter due to “allergies.” My initial inclination is to be angry—how could someone keep her unsprayed and then just abandon her to certain death? I try to remind myself that I don’t know the story of her former owners and how complicated their lives might be. I just hold her close every chance I get.

From “chow hound” Sasha, the Labrador Retriever who loved to “counter surf” right up to the end of her 16 years, to grumpy red tabby Guthrie who was brought back to the shelter twice, our brood has brought with them more than their share of untold stories. All we know is that with us they started a new chapter of their life, and that we try our best to give that chapter a happy ending.

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On an early evening in April, 1968, the news media broke into programming to announce that Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” the twelve-year-old me asked my mother, ironing behind me. She mumbled something about how people shouldn’t be killed and didn’t say anything more. I now understand how uncomfortable she was with how she had shared her own prejudices with me.

The movie, Selma, is powerful storytelling of those times and the images embedded in the film serve as a reminder of how much families like mine tragically missed that connection to those who suffered. In one of the most powerful scenes I’ve witnessed in any movie, four little African American girls descend the stairs just before church talking about what little girls often talk about. Seconds later an explosion that ends their life. The attack by police on marchers over the Edmund Pettus Bridge is portrayed in a haze of white and slow motion and surrealistic horror as marchers are brutally beaten. And toward the end an African American woman pauses from cleaning a food tray for an elderly white patient in a nursing home. She watches a black and white broadcast of President Lyndon Johnson describing the Voting Rights Act he’s about to send before the Congress.

There has been some controversy about the film that I consider minor quibbles, possibly unfair depictions of Lyndon Johnson whose domestic programs I admire but whose agenda was made possible by the organizing of the civil rights movement. I would have liked to have known more about the women who were the heart of the voting rights struggle in Selma. I’d suggest a film with these women at the center. None of these should keep anyone from seeing this powerful film.

The nursing home worker, played in a small role by Oprah Winfrey, reminded me of the nursing home where my mother ended up, a place where most of the patients were whites tended to by black healthcare workers. One of my mother’s last acts before her death in 2009—to vote for an African American president who told stories, stories that connected with her. When people say that no one can change so you shouldn’t try, I have to disagree.

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