Also Known As

Here's a short experiment, no eye protection or heat-resistant gloves needed. Some of you may have seen this one before, but please bear with me anyway.

Take a sheet of paper (or a Post-it or an index card, or whatever). Write your name on the paper. Turn the paper over and, on the other side, write an alias for yourself. It has to be a brand-new pseudonym, not a childhood nickname or anything anyone else has ever called you. Take as long as you need; I'll wait right here for you to finish. But try to do it in less than a minute, just because I know that you haven't got all day. And, you know, this assignment isn't part of your grade.

Done? I chose "Asimov Eric Crane." I have no idea why, and that's not the point.

Do you remember the moment when you turned over the paper and stared off into space and there was nothing but a blank gray wall before your mind's eye and you didn't know the answer to the question yet? You were sitting in a sort of undefined space where there was only one wrong answer, and it was written on the down-facing side of your paper. That moment was a real, palpable moment of creativity and, more importantly, an example of writing what you don't know.

When I did this exercise, I felt--though just for a few seconds--disoriented and off-balance and, honestly, a bit afraid and verging on nausea. Call me a wimp; I've been called worse, trust me. One thing that was going on in my mind during that moment of off-balance creativity was a battle between conflicting forces: You are this alias. No, you are this one instead. No, over here is your real alias. There were several directions I could've gone, and in that brief moment I was aware of, if not every possibile outcome to my creative problem, at least many of them. The more complex the creative problem and the more time we allow ourselves to think about the solutions, the more possibilities we'll see. Most of those possibilities will conflict with each other, and we will attempt to choose one of them and let the others go.

Some of the most interesting and useful things we can discover about our story elements (characters, scenes, plots, themes) are the conflicting versions of them that are possible. One of the things I've tried to do in my own fiction is to present many of the conflicting versions of story elements in the same story. It has only been recently that I realized I was doing this, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that it's only been recently that I started trying to give a name to what I've been doing in stories. But as I say, if there is more than one way to think about some story element, I am pretty strongly inclined to include more than one of those ways in my stories. I'll give an easy example, using something I did in a chapter of my WIP "Cocke & Bull."

Suppose you have a group of characters who've all traveled to a city together. Suppose there is some kind of emotional turmoil or conflict within the group. Suppose you want to have your characters walk through the city from one setting to another, and you want to point out locations in the city. Suppose you also want to show the emotional turmoil, but you don't just want them to argue their way across town.

What I did was split the group in two, and the first group walks through the city and I give their impressions of the various locations within it, and I show certain interactions they have with the city's inhabitants. I use a certain type of images and descriptive language, to paint things as colorful and fun and light-hearted. Then I have the second group walk through the city, following the same path as the first group, and I show their interactions with the city's inhabitants. I use a different set of images and type of descriptive language for this trip, painting the city as dark, shabby, dangerous. It is the same city, but viewed from a different emotional angle, as it were.

This is one of my current favorite tricks, and in "Cocke & Bull" and my last book, I've played scenes twice in a row and shown how the scene can have radically different meanings depending on how you interpret the actions within the scene.

A sort of inverse to this is to figure out what the your characters' best and worst traits are, and to dramatize them behaving at their best and their worst in scenes that are as similar as you can make them. Show us your hero, and then show us his alias, as it were. Think, for example, of the protagonist's thoughtless insult during the garden party in Jane Austen's Emma. Shocking, embarrassing, and totally believable. Let the reader enter that moment of off-balance creativity you had, and let the reader be caught up in the battle between conflicting forces inside the story and the characters. You can ask youself "What are the possibilities here?" and you can use more than one answer. You can stay in that off-balance moment of creativity and write down as many aliases as you like and call them all the right answers.

My point, if I have one and possibly I really don't, is that rather than choose The One True Way for your characters and stories, you can create a multiplicity of meanings for events and people and places that are all true and all overlap and all conflict with one another and the story will be, in my opinion, much deeper and richer and satisfying. You can show, with certainty, that the world is uncertain. You can define how things are not definite. You can give your characters and your story not one alias, but many.

It's Not You, It's Me

In a sort of continuation of Davin's post about sincerity and Michelle's post about honesty, I wanted to do a poll today.

(Poll closed, results below:)

Q: In your current novel, is the protagonist:

1. Someone unlike you or anyone you know? 41.5%

2. A stand-in for you, or an idealized version of you? 36.6%

3. A stand-in for someone you know, or an idealized version of them? 19.5%

4. A version of someone else's protagonist because you could write that story better than they did? 2.4%

In my last book, my protagonist was a minor character from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" that I expanded and fleshed out a lot and he's nothing like me except, of course, that he reads a lot and is obsessed by fine food. Otherwise he's a complete stranger. In my current book (titled "Cocke & Bull"), the protagonist is a gay Irish highwayman in colonial Maryland. Again, not so much me though we share Irish Catholicism but I've never killed anyone, at least.

If your protagonist is essentially you, why is that? If not, why is that? Discuss.

Stones

photo found on photo dictionary

A long time ago people used a flint-like stone to test gold for its purity. By running the gold over the stone, they could see if the metal was real or not. They called this a touchstone, which is where I think the other definition originated - a test or criterion for determining the quality or genuineness of a thing. Not just gold.

Yesterday Davin posted about where originality comes from. Is it from our subconscious as we absorb everybody else's originality? Or is it from our own personal life experiences, from something deep inside us? What we mean when we say "write from your heart?"

In college I worked for the literary magazine, titled Touchstones. That's where I first learned about the term, and where I learned the importance of what Davin talks about in his post - copying. I know that sounds bad. We writers should never plagiarize or copy anything, right? I agree, to a point.

For several semesters, before I got onto the staff of Touchstones, I submitted my work to the magazine. It got rejected every time. I was frustrated. What was wrong with my work? It was good, I was an English major, written two novels in high school, blah blah blah. One night I took a current copy of the magazine home and read through every piece.

Oh.

Nothing in it was like what I wrote. I realized I'd have to either be happy with never being published in the magazine, or write something that would fit. I studied the work in there, practiced writing, and basically copied the style of some of the writers. And I got accepted. I was astounded. Was it really that easy? So I started paying more attention to work outside of the magazine - especially Annie Dillard. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, shocked at how beautiful her language was, and how deeply her thoughts reached into me. She was something genuine to me, something I could rub myself on to see if I could do what she had. I wanted to write like her, but put more of a fictional story to it. I wrote a short story titled, Clover, and submitted it to the magazine. The first bit of the story:

Slowly, the hills around my house burst into green. No longer virgin-white from the snow, they spread their life, their color, their vigor to neighboring hills until the entire valley breathes life. Pulsating from its filled lungs of color, I transform to spring, and watch as my four-year old daughter spreads her crayons across the table with one swipe of her hand, then sighs with approval.

Colors have a way of fascinating, whether wrapped in paper and stuffed in a box, or pushing fist fulls through topsoil, screaming, “I am here at last!”

The doctors say my daughter has two years left, perhaps three if she’s lucky. Her disease continues to spread, coiled inside her like a spring ready to burst and pierce vital organs with its fangs. I help her color. She misses the lines, but somehow creates a masterpiece. The smell of Crayola fills my head.

If you know Annie Dillard at all, you'll know nature is a huge pull for her. I copied that idea. I copied the slow, laid-back tone, her observing eye, her symbolism. Although others tell me this isn't necessarily copying, it was for me at the time.

This story changed my life. I was on the technical writing track, dead set against a creative writing major. I had always wanted to be a published novelist, but knew I'd never be good enough. So I set my major to Technical Writing instead, sure I'd end up as an editor somewhere. I was so stupid.

I submitted Clover to Touchstones, and two of my professors cornered me one afternoon, telling me how good the story was, and what the hell was I doing as a technical writing major? So I reconsidered.


What Are Your Touchstones?
I spent a lot of my time in college studying classical literature, learning from the masters. I ended up as the managing editor on the Touchstones staff, and remember reading through all the really bad submissions (not because they weren't a "match" for the magazine - they just weren't well written). I remembered my own bad submissions, and beginning at the bottom. And you know, I still feel like I'm at the bottom seven years out of college, three completed novels later. I'm not copying others anymore, and that's good. I used my touchstones - the excellent works of other writers - as stepping stones to something better for me: my own voice.

My point here today is that as writers, we must learn from something. There is nothing wrong with practicing our craft with bits and pieces of other ideas, voice, style, tone. Everything we read and study becomes a part of us, twists itself into our experience. I will always hold a special place in my heart for Annie Dillard and her style. She will forever flavor my writing, but she hasn't become my writing or my voice.

Davin explains:

We can sometimes fall into the trap of believing we are writing well simply because we sound like other writers. I myself often admit to wanting nothing more than to be a copycat of Tolstoy.

Having only developed the tools does not make one a great writer, however. I think to be truly satisfied with our own creations, we writers have to somehow make the connection between the words on the page and our own experiences, our own hearts. To be original, we have to turn to real life.

Tolstoy is one of Davin's most impressive touchstones, but I don't think he runs any danger of copying or plagiarizing Tolstoy, because he understands the importance of a writer's own voice, and what it means to to reach deep into ourselves when we write.

For me, there is a novel in every thought that runs through my mind, but it is only the thoughts and ideas that I grab hold of and make an intrinsic part of me that flower into a full-fledged, beautiful novel. And oh what work it takes, what stepping stones I proudly use to make it mine.


Question For The Day: What are some of your touchstones? Do you think it's a terrible concept to use other writings to help us along? Or do you think it's something no writer can avoid?

Oh, and it's Scott's birthday today. Drop him a note on his blog!


~MDA (aka Glam)

Holding Onto Your Idea

So you have an idea. Let's start at the beginning. I was in high school. I was a loner, bored, constantly looking for something to hide behind. I found reading the best place to go. Then I realized there was a book missing on my shelf. My book. All I could think about was a teenage girl waking up in the backseat of a car trying to remember how she got there, and wondering if it was for the best. Shiny idea!

So I wrote the book. Then I wrote it again. And again. And again. Then I left it alone for about 12 years, and wrote it again last year - twice. It still needs some major overhauling, but it's on its way to being query-able, or at least somewhere that I'm happy with it. Amazingly enough, through all of these years and drafts, the idea has stayed the same. No, the teenage girl never wakes up in the backseat of a car, but the idea that she's taken against her will, and then decides it's a great thing - that stayed.

Scott's post on Tuesday about Overwritten Prose, and then Davin's post yesterday about Story, got me thinking about initial ideas. Every book starts with one. My idea is usually a setting or an image, and I build a story around it, a huge complicated messy puzzle. I know some writers who begin with a theme or a character. Whatever comes to you, I want to urge you to hold onto it. Davin says:

When I think about what inspires me, most of the time it is a character, or a situation, or some small detail or phrase that I fall in love with. I get that bit of inspiration down on the page, and then I face the problem of shaping it into a story.

Then Scott says:

So my advice is simple: write directly, and just tell the story. Don't be fooled into thinking that you have to put onto paper something that looks like literature, or that you have to reach for grandiloquence with every sentence. You don't. Elegance is eloquence. Strive for clarity and know what you're writing about.

Great thoughts from great minds! First of all, with Davin's comment, we see that there's usually an idea that inspires us to start a story. Then we run into a problem of how to shape that story. His post asks the question of whether or not traditional plot structures and stories are really the way to go, or if we should stick to what we want to tell, no matter how it comes out. I think the problem I've run into with figuring out how to shape a story is keeping my idea interesting for the length of the novel. Easy to do with lots of devices, but oftentimes hard to keep it clear.

Scott hit a chord with me when he said to strive for clarity. I've heard this over and over, but I never thought of it in terms of my initial idea. Covering up my idea in fancy writing, no matter how beautiful or poetic, has never worked for me. I tried to do it twice with my first novel, which is why I ended up rewriting it over and over. I lost sight of my initial idea, lost in the forest of complicated plot structure, fancy time changes and flashbacks, pretty prose, secondary character plots, and on and on and on. What a mess. Where was my idea?

I firmly believe that when an idea comes to me, it generates from my subconscious, gathering bits and pieces of me one strand at a time until it emerges as something shiny and worthy of pursuit. Of course, there are ways to figure out if one should actually pursue these ideas (check out Scott's post, A Good Idea Is Hard to Find), but if I decide it's worth chasing, I write that initial idea down and tape it to my computer desk, or put it at the top of my manuscript so that I can see it every time I sit down to work on that story.

It's about clarity. Focus. This is why I map things out, as I talked about in my three-part post (Don't Dis the Map) on my personal writing blog. Mapping helps me flesh out my idea and keep it in line with everything else that's fighting to come to the stage. It's not so I can stick to a traditional plot and make my work formulaic. If anything, staying focused on my original idea keeps me creative as I strive to help it grow. Sometimes other ideas sprout off my initial idea, but I've found over and over that they are like a mirage, shimmering in the distance. It's best to stick to my compass.

I want to stress that every writer is unique, of course. We all work differently. So you tell me, do you keep track of your initial idea? Is it something you feel can add clarity to your work if you don't lose sight of it? Or is it just a springboard and nothing more?


~MDA (aka Glam)

Just then, the protagonist tripped...

I had a fascinating but lengthy prologue to this article which I've just cut because, you know, it was just me prolixing on about how cool I am. So let's just get to the goods instead.

Sometimes writers get stuck in the middle of their narratives. The story develops too quickly, for example, and your protagonist's journey from inciting incident to climax is over before you know it and your book is only 50,000 words long. Or, you simply don't know what to do with your characters on the way through Act Two (if you think in terms of a three-act structure). Anyway, there are three basic things you can do to make your plot more interesting during the middle of the story (and, incidentally, up your word count).*

The basic idea is to interrupt your protagonist's journey toward the climax. I will, alas, use examples from "Star Wars" because I doubt most of us share the same reading habits and references. Also, I get to be a geeky SW fan. Live with it.

Complications: These are things, people, or events that slow the protagonist's movement toward their goal. Luke being told by his uncle that he has to wait another year before applying to the Academy and leaving Tatooine is a complication.

Roadblocks: These are things, people, or events that stop the protagonist in his tracks. The Millenium Falcon being snagged by the Death Star is a roadblock.

Reversals: These are things, people, or events that turn the story on its head; the protagonist changes his worldview, his direction and often his goal. Luke's family being killed by the Imperial forces is a reversal.

All of these things are essentially problems the protagonist must solve. You can simply make them things that have happened to the protagonist, but that would be wrong. Why? Because a passive character to whom things happen but who does not himself act is boring. Rule Number One is that you do not bore your reader.

So, if your story is lagging, you give your protagonist problems to solve. Beginning writers tend to just throw these things at their characters in a long episodic middle stretch, and none of the problems are connected to the story as a whole. That's bad. All of your plot complications, roadblocks and reversals should grow out of things, persons or events that have appeared earlier in the story. Minor conflicts from Act One can loop back around and reappear as major conflicts in Act Two. This will give your story balance and shape and internal consistency.

Also, you might consider giving complications to your antagonist. How your villain (to sort of continue Michelle's post of yesterday about complex antagonists) deals with adversity might give us clues about his motivations and weaknesses, possibly foreshadowing the climax. Foreshadowing is teh roxor. Don't forget to use it. See above comments about events/items/people looping back around into the story.

So that's my advice today: if you find your story lagging or rambling in the middle, try to focus on the protagonist's goals. Point him at his goals and them have him trip, fall into a hole, come against a wall, or realize his basic assumptions are all wrong. Even if none of these ideas make it into your story, they could be useful brainstorming prompts that end up giving you ideas better than anything I could possibly offer.

*Does that all sound too formulaic and calculating and anti-art? I try to give pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts technical advice here. I don't know about art.

A Good Idea Is Hard To Find

How do you know when you've got a good idea? Some of my writer friends tell me that they know they're onto something good when it inspires them to write, when the words flow almost by magic, the story "writing itself." One of my friends tells me a good idea is "the weirdest thing I never imagined I could imagine" that he's never read anywhere else. Me, I think I've got a good idea when I'm excited about the story and think I'm writing a book I'd like to read.

But...in my conversations with these very same writers, it turns out that some of these ideas that look amazingly fantastically great and brilliant for a week or a month don't actually lead anywhere. Or, we don't know where they lead and spend years trying to find out. Michael Chabon, in his book Maps and Legends, talks about wasting five years on a second novel that never panned out, because the idea wasn't enough to sustain a novel and there wasn't actually a story there, just an idea about a city. My own first novel had what I thought was a compelling protagonist and series of events, but the ideas behind the plot were pretty trite and, really, just plain dumb.

I've begun short stories with a clear image in my head of a main character, and never managed to find an actual story for that character. I've also had utterly brilliant first lines that generated prose which petered out after a paragraph or two. Sometimes, what seems like an amazing idea turns out to be very slight, and I find that I've been chasing a mirage across the desert while my story dies of thirst. Or some other, better, metaphor of your choice.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, and that many of you have also begun writing and felt initially that you had a good, strong idea only to find that the muse was only mumbling to herself, not giving you anything you could really work with. So the question becomes how do we know when we've got a good idea for a novel?

There probably isn't a universally reliable test for this, but over the years I have developed a short list of questions I ask myself about ideas before I sit down and write. Admittedly, some of these questions are best answered by actually trying to write out the story, but one must begin somewhere in forming a methodology (for those of you who reject/are repulsed by any sort of methodology in your art, you can stop reading now).

1. Does this idea generate other ideas? Can I keep brainstorming off the initial vision and spin out more--and more interesting--ideas? If the idea doesn't give me additional ideas right away, I don't bother. Sometimes, you know, they grow into better ideas if left alone for a year or so.

2. Does this idea generate a lot of questions? The more questions the idea raises, the better for me, because I like to solve problems in my writing. If an idea leads to a dozen "what would happen if..." questions, then I've got something I can probably use.

3. Does this idea seem to go anywhere, like to a climax or other ending? If I can't work through from beginning to middle to end of a simple story using this idea, I let it lie until it grows into something more story-shaped. I used to just write out as many ideas as I could, but I don't do that anymore.

4. Does anything about the idea really surprise/shock/anger/frighten me? The stronger my emotional response to the idea, the better. If I'm not emotionally involved in some deep way, the story will end up being boring, even to me. I think it's a great idea to write about things that make us uncomfortable.

I also make notes, draw pictures and otherwise push ideas around before I commit myself to the splendid misery of writing prose. These days, a lot of "writing" takes place in my head before anything gets on paper. I've grown much more cautious as I've aged. So how about you? How do you know you've got a good idea? How do you know you've got an idea that will generate a whole book? How do you know when you don't?

From Inspiration to Story: Where Do You Start?

Most of the writers I admire say that a story has to be inspired by character. You can also start a story from a situation and write something more plot-driven. But what are the things that inspire you? Can you start a story from anything else?

For me, Alice Munro is one of the greatest living authors. Even though her writing isn't about three-headed polar bears, they are strange works. I read one story, "Open Secrets" where I thought to myself: How did she get away with this?

It wasn't a bad story. In fact, it is one of my favorite stories by her. But, it was so unusual that I felt like she had broken some major storytelling rule. (Without ruining the story, "Open Secrets" is a murder mystery, and the in the end, the mystery is solved in a very strange way.)

It seemed like Alice was cheating and still making it work. How did she do it?

I read an essay that she had written where she said something that revealed her technique. She talked about what inspired her to write "Open Secrets." It was something incredibly mundane, something similar to seeing soap bubbles in the kitchen sink. She had written a story inspired by soap bubbles! Then she said something that was truly helpful to me. She said that the longer she writes, the more successful she is as keeping the story focused on that thing that inspires her. And it can be anything. That's what made this story so unusual. It wasn't focused on character or conflict. Instead, somehow, this murder mystery was about soap bubbles. (They weren't actually soap bubbles, but I don't want to give away too much.)

This has really opened up new avenues of storytelling for me. I get inspired by everything. I used to discard a lot of these points of inspiration because I couldn't fathom how a story could be built around it. Now, I'm more open to experiencing the world and writing based on anything that excites me. And, in the end, isn't this the heart of making art? Don't we want to portray what inspires us instead of showing that we are good at following rules? I used to tuck the non-character driven inspirations somewhere in the background of my story. I wanted those things (such as the soap bubbles) in the piece for my own satisfaction, but I also didn't want to write something that wasn't "a story". Now I dare to place my inspiration in the foreground. I write to explore my inspiration rather than to construct a story just to contain it.

My 25 Most Influential Writers

Jennifer tagged me to list my 25 most influential authors. I really like doing this because it lets me honor wonderful writers, and it allows me to share a bit about myself. I placed the writers into categories and ordered the categories based on their personal significance to me.

Put simply, these writers helped me in every way:

1. Leo Tolstoy

2. William Shakespeare

3. The collective writers of the Old Testament

These writers taught me that I could express the darker side of my emotions:

4. William Faulkner

5. Yasunari Kawabata

6. Cormac McCarthy

These writers influenced the way I create characters:

7. Gunter Grass

8. Jonathan Safran Foer

9. Homer

These writers influenced my writing style and voice

10. Chaim Potok

11. Maya Angelou

12. Kathy Fish

13. Jhumpa Lahiri

These writers gave me permissions to access the thoughts of my characters and freed me from the "show don't tell" rule:

14. Virginia Woolf (almost in the first category)

15. Fyodor Dostoevsky

These writers taught me how to express my own experience of the world through detail and description:

16. Marcel Proust

17. F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. John Updike

These writers taught me about story construction:

19. Dante Alighieri

20. Banana Yoshimoto

21. Alice Munro

These writers remind me to be inventive:

22. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

23. Kuzhali Manickavel

24. Don Delillo

This writer taught me how to evaluate writing:

25. Harold Bloom

I've love to see anyone else's list! I find this quite fascinating.