Friday Filler!

Today is the birthday of Annie Dillard! Happy birthday, Annie! It's also the birthday of Larry Niven, whose books I read as a teenager. Also that of Luise Rinser, Cyriel Verschaeve, Rosalie Amstein, Jannetje Fisherman-Roosendaal, Watze Cuperus, Trijntje "Nine" van de Schaaf, William Lilly and Edmund Cooper.

Every day is the birthday of a writer. And that's a good thing.

In other news, last night Mighty Reader and I watched an episode of Agatha Christie's "Poirot" (with David Suchet) on PBS. Why is that important? Because it finally convinced me that the Literary Lab should in fact do another writing contest. And this time it should be...a serially-written murder mystery! What fun it will be! Details to follow, but first: is there any actual interest in this? I envision something where I'll write the first chapter of the mystery, introducing the setting, the corpse, and the investigator. Subsequent chapters will be written by you fine folks in a competition and you'll get to introduce/investigate suspects and clues, and someone (that'd be another of you lot, in a competitive round of writing) will have to tie it all up in a final chapter, reveal the murderer, and explain all the clues that will have been scattered about during the telling. Sounds impossible! Sounds like a mess! Anyone interested?

In other, other news, I have a bit of a headcold, but it's still Friday and that's reason to celebrate. Happy weekend, all!

mere air these words, but delicious to hear

It didn't surprise me how many of you don't like poetry. What did surprise me were some comments that led me to believe many of you don't understand exactly what poetry entails. It's okay, though - you can continue to dislike and even hate poetry. Poems like this often made me shudder before I learned how to read them (sometimes they still do).

A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns

O my Luve 's like a red, red rose
That 's newly sprung in June:
O my Luve 's like the melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune!

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry:

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve,
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile.

Great, I'll bet about 98% of you skipped the poem and now you're reading this. That's okay. You can skip most of the poems in here. Poetry is almost always skipped, it seems. Of course, unless, it's in the shape of something we all know and love. Like a song lyric. Yes, song lyrics are a form of poetry. Every time you hear or sing a song playing on the radio, your iPod, you're "getting into poetry." Gasp.

The Long and Winding Road

The long and winding road that leads to your door,
Will never disappear, I've seen that road before
It always leads me here, lead me to your door.

The wild and windy night that the rain washed away,
Has left a pool of tears crying for the day.
Why leave me standing here, let me know the way.

Many times I've been alone and many times I've cried,
Anyway you've always known the many ways I've tried, but
Still they lead me back to the long, winding road,

You left me waiting here a long, long time ago.
Don't leave me standing here, lead me to your door.

If you know what song that is and who wrote it, extra points to you! With my next example, some poetry reads just like prose. Heaney is one of my favorite poets.

Death Of A Naturalist
Seamus Heaney

(line breaks removed)

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart of the townland; green and heavy headed flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies, but best of all was the warm thick slobber of frogspawn that grew like clotted water in the shade of the banks. Here, every spring I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied specks to range on window-sills at home, on shelves at school, and wait and watch until the fattening dots burst into nimble-swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how the daddy frog was called a bullfrog and how he croaked and how the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs and this was frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too for they were yellow in the sun and brown in rain. Then one hot day when fields were rank with cowdung in the grass thea angry frogs invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges to a coarse croaking that I had not heard before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked on sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: the slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance and I knew that if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

An interesting exercise is to try and put the line breaks back in yourself without looking at the original. The paragraph above reads beautifully as prose, but as a poem, it's about 10 times more powerful. Why? Line breaks emphasize timing, the weight of specific words, rhythm, etc. That's half the magic.

In fact, I could write a very interesting short story about what happens in Heaney's poem above. He gives enough detail and personality that my imagination runs wild.

Definition: Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define. (thank you, about.com)

Well, we won't attempt to define poetry today. Let's just enjoy it. Who wouldn't like this poem by my professor in college? He first instilled in me what magic a poem can really create - and that poetry does not have to be boring and dry.

More Than Ashes to Ashes, Not Just Dust to Dust
Rob Carney

In the Old Songs about Washington, if a fisherman drowned
and his body wasn’t found, it brought bad luck;
the salmon vanished too, and all the seals.

Even the deer smelled the badness
and scattered past the ends of the wind.
Even the wind would be creeping, flat-bellied, afraid.

‘Til they’d send for the Sculptor—a woman as beautiful,
secret as the mountains. She’d come from the mountains
to dig in the creekside clay,

to restore with Her fingers,
shaping the fisherman’s figure, the man’s lost face.
And in the Old Songs, this was good:

the people had something to bury now
in the hole She’d opened by the stream;
his spirit could live there, spearing the spirits of fish.

And there would be living fish too . . .
and the rocks alive with barking seals . . .
and they’d thank the Sculptor by shaping Her into a song.

The thing about poetry is this: it is fluid, and it can change and shape to whatever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be boring or stiff or rhyme or whatever. In fact, if you read and study and write poetry, it will most likely improve your prose. I know it has improved mine.

I went to a conference this past Saturday. One of the classes was about description and how to write it better. One of the last things the presenter talked about was poetry and how reading it will help you focus on the right details in your prose. Poetry forces you to narrow your focus. Poetry hones your ability to grab an audience.

I think one of the best examples I have found of poetry in prose is Marilynne Robinson. She spectacularly weaves her language, her prose, her stories, into what feels like one long, beautiful poem. But, it is still entertaining, still engaging, still cohesive enough to be called a novel. Here's an example of a paragraph I've taken from her novel, Housekeeping. I've put in line breaks because, well, I want to show you how prose can contain poetic elements.

In a month she would not mourn,
because in that season it had never seemed
to her that they were married,
she and the silent Methodist Edmund
who wore a necktie and suspenders even to hunt
wildflowers, and who remembered
just where they grew from year to year, and
who dipped his handkerchief in a puddle
to wrap the stems, and who put out his elbow
to help her over the steep and stony places
with a wordless and impersonal courtesy she did
not resent because had never really
wished to marry anyone.

She sometimes imagined a rather dark man
with crude stripes painted on his face
and a sunken belly,
and a hide fastened around his loins, and bones
dangling from his ears, and clay
and claws
and fangs and bones
and feathers and sinews
and hide ornamenting his arms
and waist and throat,
his whole body a boast that he was more alarming
than all the death whose trophies he wore.

Now, I don't know about you, but if you can create a character description that reads like poetry, you know what you're doing. Scott left a good comment on Tuesday about poetry:

I am a bad reader of poetry and I don't have much of an understanding of it. That said, it's still important to me because there are a lot of good lessons to be learned from reading good poetry: the weight of words, the flow of vowel sounds and the rhythms of consonants, the difference between starting or ending a sentence with a vowel or a consonant, the uses and misuses of internal rhyme and assonance and the way some words are the right words purely because of the way they sound between two other words in the middle of a sentence. Shakespeare has also obviously had a big influence on me.

I think that even though Scott thinks he's a bad reader of poetry, he understands it more than he's giving credit for. The technical details of poetry are splendid and complex and often scare writers away from the form, but poetry is not all about the technical. In How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Edward Hirsch quotes Paul Celan:

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the - not always greatly hopeful - belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something.

The problem is that I can't make anyone pick up the message in the bottle, let alone love or read poetry or incorporate it into their writing. Still, I can guarantee that you are surrounded by poetry whether you're willing to see it or not. I'll leave you with a great comment by Marissa Graff and Martina Boone from the Adventures in Children's Publishing blog (I have no idea which one of you wrote this...)

For what it's worth, I think there's poetry in any great piece of literature. Good writers have a a natural sense of rhythm and listen to the sound of their words, but beyond that they also weave in imagery and sensory details that are poetic in their ability to speak directly to the reader. We improve as writers by reading great literature, and I do think reading great poetry makes us even stronger.

Here are some fellow bloggers (the list is by no means comprehensive, and I know I've missed a bunch of you), bless their hearts, who love and/or write poetry as I do. If you do, too, and you haven't spoken up, please do. I'm just waiting to discover you.

Judith Mercado
Sandra Ulbrich Almazan
Rick Daley
L.T. Host
Taryn Tyler
Adventures in Children's Publishing
Simon C. Larter
K. Hinny
Jamie D.
L.T. Elliot
Tess Hilmo
Gabi
Anne R. Allen
Stephanie McGee



credits: a red, red rose by robert burns on wikipedia, the long and winding road by the beatles found on the beatles lyrics archive, definition of poetry found on about.com, more than ashes to ashes, not dust to dust by rob carney found on verse daily, death of a naturalist by seamus heaney found on famous poets and poems.com, housekeeping by marilynne robinson published by farrar, straus, and giroux, new york, 1980

Technique versus Subject Matter

I've been stuck. Lately, everything I write seems pointless. This is a strange time for me, because in many ways, I feel like I'm at the top of my game. My writing technique has never been better. I'm feeling in control of the basic story building tools, and I'm even starting to pick up more subtle tricks. But, I don't have anything to say. And, it's frustrating.

Whether I'm in the research lab or writing fiction I feel put on the spot to come up with a "good idea." Right now, none of my ideas feel good enough. Not only that, but I haven't been too impressed by the ideas that other people are calling good either.

I'm writing, but not very much. My latest endeavor is the sequel to the little novella I wrote for my nephew for Christmas. You know, the one that bombed. This sequel is geared more for his mother and his aunt (my sister-in-law and her sister). Both of them are big readers, and both of them liked the story I wrote. So, I figure why not play around with writing a story just for them? I'm having a good time with it. It's a more mature story, and I'm making it scarier and more complex than the first. But it also feels like filler while I wait for my muse to come around. Where are you, muse? Did something suddenly come up?*

*Ten points for anyone who can tell me where that reference comes from. And, by points I mean, really, nothing.

The Dreaded...

As I've traversed the blogosphere for a few years now, I've noticed something quite tragic, something that I saw in myself a long, long time ago, but a loving professor helped cure: I hated poetry. I hated Shakespeare, too, because his writing was as confusing as poetry. Simply put, I didn't understand poetry. Several college courses later, and an amazing professor, Laura Hamblin, author of "Eyes of a Flounder", helped me understand poetry.

Learning to love, write, and read poetry has touched my soul and permanently changed my writing for the better. I don't think poetry will have the same impact on every writer, but I think any writer who doesn't give it a chance is losing something valuable.

On Thursday I will be doing a post more in-depth about how poetry has changed my writing. For now I will leave you with a poem of mine published in the New Mexico journal, Scribendi. I'm sharing this particular poem because it is a good example of mixing prose with poetry, and shows how poetry does not have to rhyme nor contain a predictable rhythm, nor follow a specific pre-determined pattern.

The Sky Was Bluer Then, and Smoke More White

When my grandfather burned the leaves each late October, he made it a ritual, standing near the pyramid of brittle reds and browns, pitchfork in one hand, cold air in another, wool sweater bunched in creases around arms and waist like the wrinkles on his forehead, like smoke folding to sky. He didn’t like to stand alone.

Wear these gloves when you
go help your grandfather
I used to help him when I was your age.

Standing near his giant frame,
myself only four feet tall—
tall as the burning pyramid,
except it is shrinking.

Grandpa’s hand on my back,
no longer filled with cold,
but my hair as he smooths
it around my shoulders, his voice
deep and warm, his words
constant like fire making smoke.

My grandfather drank coffee in the mornings and sang me songs afterward, his breath rich with hazelnut and cream. When he burned the leaves, he told me stories of shirtless Indians, red under their globe of sun, dancing around their own fires in prayer. The sky was bluer then, and smoke more white. When it rose to the sky in spiraling columns, it carried words of prayers on wings so small they only looked like smoke. If the leaves or wood or corn stalks were ripe, their white wings would lift to gods in praise.

Watching smoke lift
to gods, like steam rising
to Grandpa’s face when he drinks coffee,
surrounded by prayers
and praise, his forehead
a cloud, his eyes stars.

Listening to flames lick
red, devouring the paper
of trees, holding this
image of burning season
with images of Grandpa
commanding fire with a pitchfork.

Come in, get warm
I used to stand out there in the snow,
those leaves burning charcoal-hot and hissing.

When the apples grew ripe on the tree near my bedroom window, my grandfather hoisted me onto his shoulders so I could reach the highest ones. If some were rotten, we threw them in the pyramid of leaves for burning. They were bright points of green in the fire, and their waxy skin spit madly when it grew hot with flame. My grandfather laughed at the spitting and told me it was their song; if they could, they would dance.

Thank you for reading! I'd like to know from all of you, if you have a few moments, if you (a) like poetry or dislike it like I used to, (b) if you currently write poetry/have any published and where, and (c) if you're interested in learning more about poetry and how it can possibly help your writing

How Do They Cry?

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Boo

Boo who?

Why are you crying?

The awkwardness of a crying character came up for me this weekend when I was reading one of my favorite writers and a tear trailed down his character's cheek to the pillow.

I hate it when I describe a tear running down a cheek to a pillow. I hate it when my character's tears well up. Or when my character's choke back a sob. For me, having a character cry is one of the most awkward things I have to write.

So, how do you do it if you do it? Do your characters cry?

Note added later: Check out VR Barkowski's and Michelle's comments on this too.

Filler Friday

Looks like I'm going to beat Davin and Scott to Filler Friday.

First, I have a post up at The Secret Archives of the Alliterati today. About boring blogs. Thanks, Scott, for the inspiration on that.

Second, Donna, one of our faithful readers, did an interesting response post to Scott's blog thoughts yesterday. Check it out here: Specific Intent

Third, I love spring. It has been raining here for two days, and it's lovely. This is my favorite part. I may sneak outside with my camera and take some pictures of flowers sprinkled with all that rainwater. Of course, when the rain turns to snow, that's not so fun. Still, great pictures. Funny how that works!

Fourth, I just reached 16,000 words on my fantasy novella, and I'm excited about that! My guess is it will land about 30,000 words total, so I'm over halfway there.

What's your favorite breakfast?

Who Cares if You Blog?

Today I ran across the blog of an aspiring novelist. This writer doesn't have a lot of "followers" and mentioned some worry about how a lack of internet presence might hurt chances of getting attention from agents or publishers. I have some thoughts about this. Now, I don't have a publisher but I do have an agent and I know some published authors and the thing is, if you write fiction, having a blog or not has no influence on your chances of getting an agent or getting published. As my agent says, your blogging will only impress people if you have like 25,000 readers (that's not a typo; I mean twenty-five thousand), otherwise you're just another person with a blog, and we all have blogs and it's nothing special. What is special is writing a good book. So focus on that, because the average reader doesn't read blogs by writers and real agents and editors aren't cruising the internets looking at writing blogs hoping to find something dazzling (they have day jobs and that's what they do all day).

Just write a good book and don't worry about the blogging. Unless, of course, you are an ass on the internets. Because if an agent or editor is interested in the dazzling book you've written, they'll likely Google you and if you look like a difficult person with whom to work, the odds are that they'll pass on your book because, you know, there are 100 people right behind you with books just as dazzling (in their eyes) as yours is, so why wouldn't they rather work with those nice folks than you?

So write a good, dazzling book and be nice on the internets but otherwise remember that blogging--at least according to my best-selling author friends--doesn't sell books and you shouldn't expect it to and it's not, you know, a big deal. Blogging is not the Real World. Look away from your computer screen. See all of that stuff? That's the Real World. Keep blogging and have fun with it and meet lots of cool people on the internets and play nicely together, but remember that it's just the internets and if you want to be a writer, concentrate on writing a cool book, not on writing a cool blog. Because the cool book is what matters.

Also: Apologies to Lady Glamis, because this is her day to post and I've totally hijacked the Lab even though I am still officially on blogcation and I wasn't here and you didn't see me.

Ye Be Banned

A fellow blogger, Karen Amanda Hooper, has a good post up about books having warning labels. That got me thinking about banned books. I like what the American Library Association says about this in their latest list of banned and challenged books for 2009:

"The challenged documents in this list are not brought by people merely expressing a point view; rather, they represent requests to remove materials from schools or libraries, thus restricting access to them by others. Even when the eventual outcome allows the book to stay on the library shelves and even when the person is a lone protester, the censorship attempt is real. Someone has tried to restrict another person's ability to choose. . . . Attempts to censor can lead to voluntary restriction of expression by those who seek to avoid controversy; in these cases, material may not be published at all or may not be purchased by a bookstore, library, or school district."

I can see the points for each side: those who see the need to censor a given work and protect children in schools, and those who are standing up for the freedom to choose. One of the points made in Karen's post was that what we should really be doing is sitting down with our children to discuss with them the issues addressed in books, and let them decide if they should be reading a particular work. That would solve things, but then again, the child may not know a particular work has certain material in it if it were never challenged or banned in the first place.

I suppose the question is, how far do we go to protect our children and what they read? There are websites out there that review books and rate them. That's a good start, but when do you let your child decide on their own? A book I recently read, The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian has been banned and challenged all over the place. Let me tell you, I enjoyed this book a lot, and although I think it's definitely meant for a more mature audience, I don't see that it should be removed from library shelves. It deals with things that every young adult audience is going through, and made me think deeply about friendship, racism, and what it means to be human and honest to yourself and others.

How do you feel about banning? Does it solve anything or create more problems? And, more importantly, how would you feel if your work was banned, if that meant you lost sales because libraries and bookstores weren't purchasing your book? Or, maybe it would mean more publicity.

The Little Pulitzer Prize Winner

Thanks for the great discussion yesterday! Today, I just wanted to bring up the cool news that this year's fiction Pulitzer Prize winner was a novella published by a small press! It's great that that Pulitzer committee is open-minded enough to look at everything out there. I'm pretty sure they also consider self-published works...although there may be some additional rules on that. But, congratulations to Paul Harding and his work "Tinkers"!

Update: Right now my roommate is home sitting for the cutest French bulldog puppy, Eloise. I want to be there so badly I'd gladly trade my Pulitzer winnings for the afternoon off. Okay, okay, so you don't get THAT much money for winning the Pulitzer.

EDITed by Scott TO ADD:

I was wondering how many of us have read Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. It's one of my goals to read all of them eventually. Anyway, here's a list of all the winners as far back as 1978. How many of these have you read?

2010 Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)
2009 Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
2008 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books)
2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf)
2006 March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar)
2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones (Amistad/ HarperCollins)
2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar)
2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Alfred A. Knopf)
2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (Random House)
2000 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin)
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
1997 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (Crown)
1996 Independence Day by Richard Ford (Alfred A. Knopf)
1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (Viking)
1994 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (Charles Scribner's Sons)
1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (Henry Holt)
1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (Alfred A. Knopf)
1991 Rabbit At Rest by John Updike (Alfred A. Knopf)
1990 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (Farrar)
1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf)
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison (Alfred A. Knopf)
1987 A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (Alfred A. Knopf)
1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster)
1985 Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (Random House)
1984 Ironweed by William Kennedy (Viking)
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker (Harcourt Brace)
1982 Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (Knopf)
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by the late John Kennedy Toole (a posthumous publication) (Louisiana State U. Press)
1980 The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (Little)
1979 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (Knopf)
1978 Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (Atlantic Monthly Press)

I have read the winners by Cheever, Shields, Lahiri, Brooks, McCarthy, Diaz and Strout. I've read some of the older winners, but I don't feel like putting up the whole list because a) I'm lazy, and b) I'm on a blogging vacation in case you haven't noticed. Anyway. Everyone has to play now. What've you read from this list? Plans to read more of them? Do you care about the Pulitzer? I want one, you know.

Is it entirely uncool that I have come in and hijacked Davin's post?

Winner

Thanks to all of you who participated in my "memory" game on Friday. I still haven't been able to rewrite that scene because now I'm all tainted with some of the rewrites you posted and it's all muddy and, well, I'm just being lazy, too.

My three-year-old, Darcy, picked Simon as the winner from a little yellow bowl she calls her IKEA bowl because the one time we've gone there, that's what we got her and she loves them. So, congrats, Simon! Send me your first page of whatever you like for an in-depth critique. If that floats your boat.

By the way, everyone, be sure to read Davin's excellent post today, and read Scott's comment, too. We're wondering why you keep coming back here because we're planning on making some changes, but we're not sure which direction to take it yet.

New Directions

Hey everyone,

Happy Monday!

This is sort of a difficult topic to post about. First, I want to acknowledge Anne Gallagher and her post "How Do I Say This?" and another post by Scott Mitchell called "Differently." Although their posts don't exactly say the same thing, I think they touch on a similar matter.

The more I learn, the better I get at writing, the less advice I feel the need to give to other writers. Sure, I have a bunch of writing techniques that I've learned over the nine or ten years of writing I've done. But, often, they are techniques that probably only I consider all that valuable. The techniques I've learned have come from my need to solve the unique problems that my own writing creates. Or, the techniques are probably only helpful to beginning writers, and for the most part I feel like the people who poke around this part of the woods--i.e. YOU--have already developed a level of competency equal to where I am on this writing journey. So, in a way, I feel more and more like it's pointless to talk about writing to other writers.

But, then we have a problem don't we? I could NOT talk about my writing, but then I end up with really boring subject matter about how I bought Empress dates at the farmer's market today. Exciting, huh? I know, this is my life!

And, so, I end up talking about writing again, knowing full well that most of you probably don't need to hear what I have to say. And, really, I'm starting to hope that most of you ignore what I have to say for fear that everyone will start sounding the same in their writing.

So, I guess all this is to say that I'm feeling a bit speechless these days. I don't want to waste your time, and so I don't exactly know what to write about. Scott brought it back to individuality. I think that's a great approach. I'll probably do that more, and I'd also like to add that I would LOVE it if the comments sections on these posts become much more freeform. F. P. Adriani has suggested this on her blog a few times (here's one) and I think it's a great idea. So, from here on out, at least for my posts, feel free to ramble, rant, and lose focus in your comments. Write about whatever you want--you don't even have to finish the entire post!

Something else I'd also love to start doing is to "turn the camera around" and start showcasing a bunch of the wonderful writers and wonderful people out in the writing world. And, to start that off, I'd like to bring up F. P. again. Some of you might not recognize that name, but F. P. used to go by Reason Reanimator, a writer who stirred the pot quite a bit around the blogosphere. I know she gets angry a lot, and honestly, sometimes she scares me. But, if any of you out there are willing, I'd love for you to check out more of her work, both in terms of her fiction and in terms of her blog. She may rant, but she's often siding with us writers and defending us in big ways. And her novels, from what I've read, are quite exquisite. In her book After Ann, F. P. really brings back the character-driven book for me. At a time when I think character-driven stories hardly ever exist anymore, F. P. has created a protagonist who seems to pop off the page. She's discouraged enough that her fiction might be hard to acquire these days, but I hope it's still around if anyone is interested.

Free Shipping for Genre Wars

I suppose this could count as filler. I just received in my inbox today a coupon to pass along for free shipping on any books I have for sale. Well, there's always Genre Wars!

If you haven't had the chance to purchase Genre Wars yet, now's your chance to get it a little bit cheaper. The cost is $13 without shipping. Remember, all proceeds still go to the non-profit writing group, Write Girl. Here's the coupon.



This is only good through May 1st.

ALSO! ADDENDUM FROM SCOTT!

The Friends of the Seattle Public Library Annual Book Sale is this weekend! In Seattle!

The Friends holds two major book sales every year, in Spring and Fall. At each sale, over 200,000 books and other items are offered to the general public. Proceeds go to benefit The Seattle Public Library.

Friday, April 16, 6:30 – 9:30 p.m
Member Preview -- members may buy up to 25 items each.

Saturday, April 17, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Sunday, April 18, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Location: Magnuson Park, Hangar in Building #30, 7400 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, 98115. The park may be reached by Metro bus routes 30, 74, and 75. Free parking is available.

Go! The weather is supposed to be nice this weekend! Go! Buy books and stuff!

Experiments and Loss

I would have some sort of brilliant post up and going this morning except that last night I lost part of my file for my current novella, and I can blame it all on my netbook crashing and dying, and now I have to take it in to be repaired. I hate that feeling - of having spent about 5 hours on something and then it's completely gone.

So what will I be doing today? Reconstructing my work. I only lost 1,300 words, but I remember being quite pleased with some of those passages!

Please don't leave comments about backing up my work. I already know all about it (I have about 6 different forms of backing up my work!), how to do it, and why I should. This was simply the one time I forgot, and I'll be looking into one of those online programs that backs up your documents automatically.

Anyway, this all makes me think of memory.

If you had to rewrite your entire novel, would you? Could you? I've actually done this when I decided to rewrite my entire novel, Monarch, earlier in the year. It took me 3 months. And although I began by opening up a fresh document, I still had my old document to refer to for all the great lines I had before. I'm going to conduct an experiment for us today! Let's test that writerly memory of yours...

Spring had melted into summer by the time she made it back to the meadow. The grass was thick and green, cool on her neck when she lay down. She stared up at the sky, the branches with their crisp new leaves, the birds chattering around her.

When he appeared, his clothes were new, lighter, his suede boots making no sound as he walked. Small white flowers were still in his hair, like the stars echoed in his eyes.

"Did you remember me?" he asked.

She nodded as he helped her to his feet, his fingers long and slender. He led her to a path she had never seen before, and told her to remove her shoes. The dirt was soft between her toes. The world began to sing.

This is a small passage of what I remember writing and losing. I've quickly typed it out of my head, but I don't think it's anywhere near what it was before. Still, I suppose, the basic idea is there. The problem is that I fall in love with my writing not only for what happens, but how I say things, and when I lose all of that, it's a bit disheartening.

My challenge to you is: Without re-reading it, retype the first paragraph into the comments section strictly from memory. See how well you do. Maybe you'll come up with something better. Please try! Addendum: Okay, you can re-read it and then go try and type it in the comments.

I will choose a random winner from the entries for a first-page critique by me of either a short story or novel or poem or whatever you're working on. I will choose the winner Monday morning, the 19th.

Also, I'm published today! This helps alleviate my pain. Go to the Rose & Thorn journal to check out my flash-fiction piece, This.

Both Nostrils Engage!

Stop for a minute and take a few breaths.

Which nostril was more dominant, the right or the left?

Research has shown that our breathing is deeply connected with our brain function. When we are engaging the left or analytical side of the brain, we tend to breathe more through our right nostril. When we're engaging with more creative activities, like listening to music, our left nostril dominates.

When you write, are you using your left or right nostril? Are you being more analytical or more creative? Are you able to do both?

Do You Need A Writing Mentor?

Back in college I had several professors who took me under their wing, so to speak. One of those professors loved Flannery O'Connor with all of her heart. She could quote passages, and I spent a lot of time in her cubicle talking about literature and staring at a jar of Adam's 100% Natural Peanut Butter she had on her shelf next to O'Connor's complete collection. I liked looking at that jar of peanut butter - the golden oil floating atop the creamy butter. I had another professor who loved Washington and wrote about volcanoes and birds and rain. He was the best poet I have ever met, and he always will be. Why? Because he taught me how to listen to my inner rhythm. When he read poetry, dressed in his grunge outfits and large combat-looking boots, he would sweep me away to somewhere new and exciting every time.

He made me consider words as single entities, each one magical.

I had other professors who would put their arm around me and tell me to keep writing. Sometimes I would hand over a poem or a short story and watch them read it during their lunch break, crumbs still collected at the corners of their mouths. Some of the most rewarding moments of my life were when those professors looked up and said, "Wow," and then proceeded to give me suggestions, guidance, more praise.

Do we need mentors?

Do we need them through our entire writing career?

I'm going to say no. When I was learning to listen to myself in college, I would sit under an oak tree and look out across the lake, wondering what to write next. I wanted to impress my professors. They were who I wrote for because they took a genuine, keen interest in my work, and I often think I still need that sort of direction, but it's more of a want than a need.

Many of us graduate to different levels of writing, and I believe there is a level where we learn to trust ourselves, know ourselves, enough to write without wires to hold us up. Validation is for those who haven't cut the wires yet. I'm still hanging on to a few. Are you? What point have you reached in your writing career?

How Wise Can Our Characters Be?

Today in my writer's group, I was very impressed by something my friend Sue wrote. It was an excerpt about two young people, a girl in high school and a slightly older boy. What astounded me was that these two characters seemed to have two completely different life experiences, and thus two completely different wisdoms. As I was reading about their interaction, I couldn't believe that both of these characters came from a single writer.

This has been something I've tried to do lately in my own writing. I love the idea of having a wise character, or a really intelligent one, but since I'm not all that wise or intelligent myself, I sometimes feel like it's impossible to write about anyone better than I am in a convincing way. Could I, for example, write about a math genius? Probably not. Yet, I hate the idea that all of my characters must by default be less than or equal to myself in those departments.

Is it possible to write about a character wiser or more intelligent than yourself? If you've done it, how did you manage it?

Note added later: As so often happens, one of the comments made my point far better than I did. I think along with the question of the wisdom of a character being greater than the writer's, I wonder if a writer can write about two different wise people and have them actually be different. Take a look at Judith Mercado's comment.

Pizza Structure

My new book doesn't have chapters. It is divided, instead, into sections. Four of them, that I've planned so far. It has been an interesting thing, too, to work this way. I feel like I've suddenly been freed from a prison I didn't know existed around me.

Chapters - Blah!

Sections - Getting better

Scenes - YES

I believe structure plays a huge part in the way our creative brain churns out a story. With the three complete novels I have written so far, all have been split into chapters. I wrote within the confines of these chapters, and I allowed those confines to control how I treated POV, plot structure, scene structure, even how I ultimately shaped my characters. It feels like my books are split up into these little boxes, and that can be a good and a bad thing.

You can stack boxes into different shapes. After all, pixels are just little squares.

I know several writers who don't write within chapters at all. They just write and write and write until they have their 80 or 100,000 words, and then maybe they'll split the book up into chapters. Or leave it.

With this new work of mine, I feel freer. I'm writing the book by scenes, and each one can dramatically vary in length and it doesn't feel like an issue at all. When I write in chapters, I tend to slice the book up like a pizza, trying to get each slice the same size. It's my organized nature that does this, and so freeing myself of the pizza cutter altogether, I'm just picking off the toppings and piling them up on my plate, or maybe I'll just cut the pizza in two, or just eat it all with a fork.

I think sometimes we let the structure of our writing get in the way of our writing. We think of pizza and one image comes to mind - a perfect circle cut into triangles. I've enjoyed experimenting lately, finding new ways to compose a narrative. It is thrilling to see what this does for my characters, how it shapes them different from if I was writing in a stricter structure. I'm literally trying to think outside the box, and even if in the end, the book still feels structured in the traditional manner, I'll know that it didn't begin that way.

How do you structure your WIPs as you begin them? Do you always stick with chapters? Do you think this restricts elements of your characters and narrative?

Now I want a cheeseburger

My husband and I have recently been watching Star Trek: the Next Generation series, starting with season one and moving on through. I think my favorite character of Star Trek is Data. He's an android, and he's pretty much clueless to human behavior at the beginning of the seasons, and then slowly begins to learn what it is to be human. He's a great device for building emotion and sympathy from the audience.

One of the best questions Data asks: What is funny?

And even when Data attempt to figure out a joke, what ends up being funny is his attempt - not the joke.



Davin did a post yesterday about putting humor in our work. That got me thinking about whether or not it's possible to learn how to be funny. Like Data, I often feel like an android who has no clue how to go about telling a joke or understanding why something is funny. It's timing. It's intuition. It's skill.

Roni over at Fiction Groupie totally stole my idea yesterday to ask if it's possible to learn how to be funny. (I still love you, Roni) Go check out her post if you would like some greater insight there.

Today, I guess, I just wanted to say that I think it's possible to learn how to be funny - there are tricks of the trade, I suppose, but perhaps a deeper question might be should you learn how to be funny? It is certainly tempting - everyone loves the funny man.

Do you think we are better off sticking to what we naturally do best? Or do you think venturing into the unknown and trying on new hats is a good idea? I'm currently trying to write fantasy, and it keeps delving back into major drama/literary/suspense writing - just like everything I write. Go figure. Of course, there is no humor in it that I can see. Yet.

An ice skater walks into a bar...

I started listening to classical music at a very young age. Like, 10. Not because I liked classical music, but because I liked the idea that I was the type of person who liked classical music. I was serious. A serious artist. Deep and dramatic and full of meaning.

Enter Tonya Harding. Remember her? Just before the 1994 Olympics, she conspired to injure her fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan so that she could win the gold. Suddenly, the nation actually cared about figure skating, and I found myself sitting with my family in front of the television as people performed these ultra-smooth routines on the ice.

Me, being the serious artist, focused on the serious skaters, the ones who had their heartbreaks choreographed. I was baffled when the rest of my family preferred the likes of Scott Hamilton. Scott Hamilton? The funny one? Really?

It would take me years to finally realize that the reason Scott Hamilton (aka, the other Scott) was so special was because he actually brought joy to people's lives. I was so focused on being serious that I didn't realize how wonderful it felt to actually laugh once in awhile. I learned my lesson, though. I now appreciate the value of humor and joy. But, after ignoring it for the majority of my life, I still feel pretty scared to actually write anything funny.

So, I ask you. Do you write funny moments in your stories? And, if so, how do you do it?

Lawrence Wrote Confusedly and Hotly

Writers are constantly being told to avoid using adverbs in our prose, and to delete any adverbs we find while editing/revising. We're told that adverbs are "weak writing" and the mark of an amateur and I'm sure that a lot of us follow this advice and use as few adverbs as we can, but I'm not so sure that a lot of us understand why using adverbs is weak writing, and what adverbs actually do to our prose to weaken it.

Although I am officially on a sabbatical from the Literary Lab, I have been reading D. H. Lawrence's novel "Women In Love" and I saw within Lawrence's pages what the problem with adverbs is and I wanted to talk about it so here I am, posting.

I could say any number of things about Lawrence's book (both good and bad), but the thing that struck me most last night when I was reading is that he larded his sentences with adverbs. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that every line of dialogue has a tag containing an adverb. Gudrun replies angrily to Gerald who responds haughtily while Ursula speaks tenuously to Rupert who declines to say anything, walking determinedly by her but at some distance, carefully and thoughtfully. Et cetera. And it goes on like that, honestly, for hundreds of pages. (There are also moments of sheer brilliance and beauty, which mostly balance Lawrence's clunky sentences.)

Anyway, all of this use of the adverb does two things which I think weaken the prose. First, it burdens the reader not only to decide what is meant by "haughtily" or "tenuously" or "determinedly" but also to keep track of these shifting emotional states that fly by and change often. Like most writers who lean heavily on adverbs, Lawrence uses a lot of them and after a while they begin to blur and lose all of their meaning. What is anyone feeling in the example I used above? I have no idea. Which leads to the second way in which adverbs can weaken prose: they are claims, not events.

What I mean by that is the same old "show, don't tell" you've been hearing since you first put pen to paper and wrote your first story. "Gudrun replies angrily" has no emotional weight for either the character or the reader. It doesn't move us and you might as well have not written it for all the good it does you as a story-teller. "I spent the day unhappily" is vague, formless and neutral. It ups your wordcount and does little else.

What adverbs too often do is replace action in stories. Anything that reduces the amount of meaningful dramatized action in a story is bad. Anything that reduces the amount of meaningful dramatized action in a story is bad. Yes, that bore repeating. Do not, therefore, tell us that Gudrun replies angrily. Show us her anger, with her words or her actions. Gudrun can let us know she's angry the same way she lets Gerald know she's angry. She probably does not say "I am speaking to you angrily." So don't you say that either, unless you intend some comic effect.

Sometimes we want to summarize, and adverbs do that for action. "He walked quickly" is shorthand for a description of someone walking in a rapid manner and if you're just hurrying the story along, that's fine. But the quick walking will not have any impact on the reader, so if this is an important moment and you want it to have impact, don't use weak writing. Use your strongest writing, and your strongest writing will be clear and direct and have distinct form and meaning. Strong writing is concrete and tactile, visual and immediate. Even a writer like Proust, who is characterized (mostly by people who've never read him, I think) as having written a lot of dreamy and pointless stuff, used very memorable and concrete images whenever people were acting, and he showed character emotions in a direct way (a man doesn't just lecture his friend "angrily," for example, but instead beats a tophat to bits in a fit).

So anyway, that's why adverbs are weak writing and why you should avoid them most of the time. The fact that D.H. Lawrence wrote some classics of the English language and his prose was clunky and choked with adverbs is not an excuse for your prose to be equally clunky unless you also have Lawrence's particular gifts to balance that clunkiness. I am looking for a closing joke that uses an adverb, but I've got nothing, sadly.

And I am still on sabbatical (because life is very busy right now) and may not have time at all to read/respond to comments. Have a lovely day anyway.

Can A First Draft Be A Bad Thing?

Okay, the title of this post sounds a bit stupid--I'll admit that. But, I spent several hours this weekend reviewing and editing about 70 pages of technical writing by multiple authors. In my first round of edits, I thought I was doing a decent job of taking what the original writers had come up with, making my suggestions, and offering some changes. I later realized from my advisor that the help I had provided was not sufficient to make the work publishable.

To be able to improve the work enough to bring it to completion, I ended up having to ignore what had been written before--those early drafts--and rewrite the documents as if I were writing them on my own for the first time.

I won't get into the educational aspects of what I did now. (I do plan on going over these documents with the original writers in-person to try and turn this into a learning experience.) But, something I realized was that, in my original revisions, I had been led astray by some bad early drafts. Even though these drafts carried misinformation and exaggerations, I could not see the problems as clearly as I did when I started from scratch.

So, how does this impact my fiction writing? If you've been following our blog for awhile, you probably know I'm not a fan of the outline. I think that freewriting in the beginning is important for tapping into the subconscious, and I tend to write my early drafts without a clue as to where I'm going and what I'm trying to say. But, as I revise my own stories and the work of others, I'm realizing more and more that a bad first draft often serves as a trap that I can't get out of. Sometimes, the badness of my own writing feels permanent, and I can't free my mind enough to be able to re-imagine a better story.

Maybe this is a good thing. Capturing that original spark might bring some vitality to a piece. If I'm trying to tap into my subconscious, maybe I shouldn't then let myself re-imagine a story entirely. Still, I feel like there must be some compromise that can be made to allow both freewriting without finding myself stuck with only bad material.

In comes quantity and quality. If I'm going to approach a story using the freewriting approach, I am realizing that I need to ensure that I have enough of that fresh starting material to revise later. So, if I'm exploring an early idea, I shouldn't stop freewriting once I have just enough material to hold the story together. I should explore all of the different avenues of the topic, write about it to exhaustion, so that if I end up cutting one avenue completely, I still have others I can keep. Quality in a first draft is something I wouldn't have worried about at all even just a couple of months ago. But, I'm starting to realize that even if I'm a pantster, I need to slow myself down and at least make sure that I'm in the right mental state before I start pantsting--or whatever that verb is. I don't think I can just start writing about the stapler sitting beside my computer anymore. The source of that freewriting inspiration seems to matter.

Am I deluding myself here? Am I just feeling wounded from my weekend experience? For us pantsters, do we still need to at least plan a little before we start writing, or can we really free ourselves to drastically revise a story at any stage of the game?

Friday Filler - Davin Edition

Scott is on sabbatical for the month of April, and by sabbatical, I mean a blog vacation, and by blog vacation, I mean that he's still lurking around on the "internets", as he likes to put it, but won't be doing any official blog posts of his own, unless he's in the mood to--with Scott one never really knows where the mood will take him, whether it be the screechy heights of the violin or the lowly, horse head-enveloped underworld of eel ecosystems, that wriggly, slimy environment that is his brain.

So! My latest dilemma: I'm looking for a new job in the science field, possibly as a teacher at a community college, and I can't decide if I should put my creative writing teaching experience onto my resume. Thoughts?

Value

I've recently noted the responses of people around me who don't write. If they haven't seen me for awhile, they casually ask, "So, how's that novel of yours going?" and I have to fight the urge to dive into a conversation all about my book - far more in depth than these people want to hear, I am sure.

The truth of the matter is, I don't think most people, even most writers, don't care much about all the technical details of your writing, how you arrive at specific plot points, how you outline or fly by the seat of your pants, what you're currently researching. They may act like they really care, but I don't think they do all that much. What most of us want, plain and simple, is to be told a story. And nobody can write your novel as well as you.

As I work on my current work, a novella, I keep wondering why I'm doing this. Publication isn't something I'm really craving at the moment. I just want to write and learn and expand my skills. I think that's why I'm writing, more than anything right now.

And if I stopped?

I often wonder, how would that affect those around me? If people just want stories, there's bookstores and libraries and five million other writers out there cranking them out. My husband and daughter would appreciate more time with me, my family and friends would think it nice that I come to more parties and things they plan.

My question to you today is: How does your writing affect those around you? Does your family take a genuine interest in what you're doing? And do you feel that if you stopped writing they would care much? Does how they feel about your work affect the value you place on it?

__________

Also, please check out my short story contest over on The Innocent Flower. I'm hoping I get more than just a few entries!