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)

Don't Let The Little Ones Slip Away

When I first started critiquing, I used to look for things that were wrong: inconsistent character actions, awkward language, bad similes--you name it. I'd also tend to make notes (and happy faces) around what I thought was great: beautiful imagery, lively dialog, perfect endings. The trouble was, there was a lot of writing that didn't fall into either category. I couldn't find anything wrong with it, but I also didn't love it. It was simply "good enough".

But, is good enough good enough?

I've since changed my critiquing style. Nowadays when I review, I try not to let any sentence slip by me, no matter how inconspicuous it tries to be. Lines that are not wrong and not great could probably still be revised. Why? Because no one wants to read a book that's just good enough. We want to be consistently impressed. We want every sentence to be a gem that plays an interesting role in your story.

So, check it out the next time you're reviewing your work or someone else's. See how many sentences fall into the "not bad, not great" category. At some point, everyone here is going to be able to write a competent story. It's not the major elements that will separate the greats from the less-thans. It's the little differences, the seemingly trivial decisions.

~DM

Note: I really wasn't planning to do any self-promotion today, but I just found out that Opium Magazine is doing something incredibly cool. They've printed a nine word short story on the cover of their next issue that will be revealed one word at a time every hundred years over the next millenium! Check it out.

My Writing Progress

This has been a good week for writing. After feeling stuck and unfocused for about three weeks as I settled into my new home, I am finally making progress on my novel again. I'm trying to flesh out four scenes that a reader in Paris suggested could be emotionally deeper, and this week I've made progress on two of them. One of those is my incredibly troublesome first chapter. This time around, it was youtube that helped me out. I set part of the chapter in a cockfighting arena (my novel's called Rooster), and there was some very illuminating (and very sad) footage on youtube about this subject. I set some videos to play and just wrote while I watched them as if I were simply documenting what I saw. The 500 words or so will probably reduce down to a few sentences, maybe less, but the most important thing is that it helped me move forward again, and I think I have some authentic details.

I also had an exciting lunch on Wednesday. Mary Yukari Waters, the writer I've raved about on multiple occasions here, met with me in a great little restaurant called Hurry Curry. I'm going to interview her for this blog and for, The Los Angeles Review, Upstairs at Duroc SmokeLong Quarterly, and this first conversation was very illuminating. Plus, she offered to give me a blurb on my book if I never need it!

The Los Angeles Review officially accepted "Red Man, Blue Man" and a small literary magazine in Paris called Upstairs at Duroc accepted a piece of flash fiction I wrote called "Enchantment." They actually asked me to do a public reading at the publication party, but alas, I'm here and they're there.

My Writing Progress

This week I've been taking a lesson from Scott G. F. Bailey's hand-written notebook. A dear friend of mine got me a fountain pen, and I've been working on my book without the use of my computer. It was a little rocky at first. I wrote things like "test, test, test" and my own name. Then, because I still wasn't ready to write, I decided to draw pictures of the shanty where my characters live and the soccer field where they play ball. I drew a little sketch of my protagonist's gambling father watching a cock-fighting match. The feathers. The spray of blood. His squinting eyes hungry for money--Did I mention I studied studio art in college?

Slowly, my brain constructed more details of this opening scene that I have had so much trouble writing. Some things that I thought I would write no longer seemed all that logical. New, exciting, emotionally-juicy details spat out. I realized my protagonist was being too passive in the scene and suddenly he was active. Suddenly, he was guilty of making the situation worse...maybe even starting this entire mess that is the rest of his life!

The pen came from Little Tokyo here in Los Angeles. I'm not sure how much it cost, but it's no Sheaffer Agio Signature Pen. Still, it did its job very* nicely.

I also got some more nice publishing news. Last week I told you I was a finalist in Opium8's publishing contest. A couple of days ago, editor Todd Zuniga e-mailed me and told me I was a "finalist-finalist." I'm in the top 9 and Opium Magazine is publishing my story in their print magazine. I also got a story acceptance from Noo Journal (which I had mentioned liking before) for a story I wrote a couple of years ago based on my trip to the iron mines in Brazil. It's called "God In Frogs" and will be coming out at the end of the year.

*That's for you, Scott.

My Update On Publishing

At last after a few bland weeks of "I'm not exactly sure what to do with my novel," I have some news to share on a couple of other publishing fronts.

First, my story "Red Man, Blue Man," is currently being discussed at The Los Angeles Review. I submitted it to them a few days ago, and the fiction editor reported back and said "I really dig this story." She suggested a few small revisions and is now asking the other editors if they are willing to accept it. I'm hoping they will, but even if they don't, it's really nice to get approval from the editor.

Second, I found out that my short short story "Sacred Bodies" is a finalist in Opium8's 500-Word Memoir Contest, judged by Tom Perrotta, the author of Election and Little Children. This feels nice for me because Opium Magazine markets itself as a humorous literary publication, and I've always been intimidated by the thought of writing something funny. Thanks to Proust I'm trying to be more funny--mostly by just being honest--and it's actually paying off. They are going to announce a winner of the contest at the end of May, but I'm quite content with knowing that I'm a finalist.

These two bits of news feel especially good because I wrote both of these stories very recently, after I felt like I found my voice. So, hopefully, I'm not just deluding myself, and other people can see my improvement as well.

Sign Me Up For The Decathlon -- with a brief digression on short story submissions

Last week a few of you stressed the importance of action and plot in stories. Agreed! The longer I write, the more I see how essential a great plot is and how entertaining and gripping some good action can be. I've spent almost all of the last few years submerged in classic literature, and while some of it is drenched with action (e.g. The Iliad), some of it is not (e.g. To The Lighthouse).

I want to kick off Action Week with a rant about the distinction between a plot-driven story and a character-driven story.

In all of my writing classes, in all of my readings of great writers giving out their opinions, people almost always say, "Start with character." But, when I read some of the stories that are really popular these days, many of them don't have characters that blow me away. I recently read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and After Dark by Haruki Murakami, and I'm currently in the middle of Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. All of those books were compelling and have exciting plots with twists and turns -- I could see why people liked them and I'm enjoying them myself. The characters in those books were perfectly fine, but none of them were as fascinating as, say, Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. So, are they somehow worse books for being so? My answer is, not necessarily, and one can't necessarily judge the talent of a writer based on this criteria.

So, while the rule of starting with character is a good one, I've decided to abandon it. I still want to craft the best characters I possibly can. But, I'm deciding that I will let my inspiration come from different areas, whether it be character or plot or setting or the small crocheted finger-puppet that caught my eye in a store window. The fact is, your inspiration can start from anywhere and your job, as a writer, is to flesh out that idea until the other components of the story are equally developed.

Along with that, I'm also deciding to leave the camp of people who defend themselves by saying that they write character-driven work. That's a hard group for me to leave because the members sort of held themselves above the other "Plotters", those vagabonds that only cared about entertaining people. (Who wants to entertain? We're making art!!!)

So, instead of identifying myself as preferring character-driven work versus plot-driven work, I'm going to strive to bring them both up to the same level, so that these elements marry and propel each other. Maybe we're being too easy on ourselves when we are choosing one element over another. Maybe, as writers, our event should be the decathlon instead of any of the individual events alone.

It's great to write an entertaining story. It's great to write one with depth. What if we as writers strove to do it all? And, with people out there like Lady Glamis, I know I'm not alone in this opinion. So, while I have eschewed action in the past, I'm embracing it now. Bring on the war paint and the army of dogs, I'm ready to make something happen!

***

Ahem.

A Short Story Submission Digression.

On Friday Justus asked for some tips to submitting short stories to literary magazines. I didn't want to put that off, so I'll mention a few tips here.

Literary magazines are great because they are often run by people who make no money who just enjoy showcasing the hard work of writers. I'm a staff editor for one, and trust me, I'm making no money and expending a lot of energy. You can find a database of them at Duotrope and other places. Specify your genre before searching to narrow down the field. If you're using literary magazines to help you get your novel published, then you will want to try and get into more popular places, such as the New Yorker or Ploughshares or Glimmer Train or Zoetrope: All Story or Manoa. These are not easy to get into, but once you do, you'll often have agents coming after you instead of vice versa.

Once you have picked some journals to submit to, go to their website and find their "Submission Guidelines." Sometimes this will be in a "Submit" link, but the more popular magazines will hide it a bit because they get so overwhelmed, so check out "Contact Us" or other tabs. In the guidelines, you want to find out how they want to receive your work (hard copy or email or whatever) and the approximate word count of the stories they publish and what times of the year they receive submissions. Basically, just follow the directions. You also want to find out the name of the Fiction Editor of the journal. Don't address stories to "Editor" if you can avoid it. Be personal so that they know you care about their journal.

Once you know all there is to know about the journal you are interested in, you want to write a cover letter. This is not a query letter. This is a very brief letter that accompanies your short story, along with an SASE if they ask for it.

The letter should say something like:

Dear (Name of Editor),

Enclosed is my short story, "(Name of story)" for your consideration. My work has previously been published in (list other fiction publication bylines you have, if any. If you don't have any, leave this out).

Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Sincerely,

Davin Malasarn



It seems too simple, but this is the generally accepted format, so use it if you want to blend in. The goal of the letter is to have it be ignored so that the editor pays attention to your story.

So, then you are ready to submit the story. If it's electronic, find out whether they want the story as an attachment or whether they want it in the body of the email. If they want a hard copy, mail the story in a large envelope. Don't fold it. Don't staple your pages together unless they ask you to. Include the SASE with proper postage.

Once you have submitted a story, wait. Don't bother the same journal again until they get back to you. Some of them can take months. I often send the same story to multiple journals since they usually get rejected and I don't want to wait eight years to publish a story. Journals will specify if they allow this "simultaneous submission." Some don't. I tend to ignore the ones that don't because I think that's inconsiderate.

Once they have reviewed the story, you are going to get one of three results. One, you will get a form rejection. Fine, don't worry about it. Don't let it get to you. Two, you will get a personal rejection, which means that you got REALLY close to getting in. My journal gets hundreds of submissions a month and we write, perhaps ten personal rejections a year. Three, you'll be accepted. Congratulations!

My Publishing Journey

This weekly update on my own publishing attempt is seeming a little too quiet, so I'll start with someone else's GREAT news. One of our fellow blogging buddies just got a great agent yesterday! I don't want to give away anyone's name in case she or he prefers to keep it private, but keep your eyes open for an official announcement of the good news!

In my own world, I've been back to concentrating on the writing. Writing. One of my goals is to try and get into some better-known literary journals like McSweeney's or Zoetrope: All Story or Glimmer Train or that one magazine whose name I'm almost too scared to mention for fear that people will think I'm an idiot for even trying...The New Yorker. The fact is, yes, maybe I'm an idiot, but I'll never know unless I try and I shouldn't be ashamed of trying.

So, this last week I worked hard to finish the first draft of a personal short story I've had hanging around for two or three years. It's just an early draft, but I decided to let two of my friends read it. The results were lukewarm. But, I'm planning to revise it and flesh out one of the characters, and then I'll have to see if it stirs up some more excitement. I also finished the first draft of another short story based on a Mormon father who abandons his family but still wants to have a relationship with only his youngest son. I'm excited about this one because it feels new, it feels quirky, and I love the exploration of this strange behavior -- it's based on a true story.

Regarding my novel, I'm revising the first two chapters. I've been told that they are the weakest in the book, and I realize in my own mind that I'm not completely in love with them either. I kind of took a break in February, thinking that the novel was done. But, I have some renewed energy, so I saved the old draft and am playing around to see if I like the new one.

I'm writing and I'm blogging and critiquing and reading. Nothing on the query front for me so far. I'm realizing how much time everything is taking. After getting home from my job, I only have a few hours to critique or read or write or get out on cyberspace and find other writers. How does everyone handle it? What component of writing do you spend the most time on? What component of writing do you think you SHOULD spend the most time on?

I loved our discussion this week on description. Next week, I'm going to start a few talks on the action of stories to see what ideas we can come up with!

Three Ways To Get A Literary Agent

Every Friday I'm trying to post an update of my trying to find an agent.

As I see it, there are three "standard" ways to get an agent in the literary world.

First, there's the traditional way of going through the slush pile. Based on agent information we can find online, we submit a query letter and maybe a few pages if the agent asks for it and see what happens. Several weeks ago, I did my first round of querying. Out of three agents, one wasn't interested based on the query and 5 pages, one asked for a partial and then said no, and one told me that she was no longer accepting new clients at this time.

Upon discussing this with some other writers, I was basically told that 2 of the 3 agents that I had tried -- even though they said they represent literary fiction -- don't actually represent that much literary fiction. I had been going by their guidelines, but I've been convinced now that it's better to actually look at the books they currently represent. The one agent that does represent quite a bit of lit. fic. was the one that told me she no longer accepts new clients. So, on this front, I'm actually holding back and doing more research so that I can be more systematic in my approach. I also may revise my first chapter since multiple reviewers have said it's the weakest chapter in the book. I hate beginnings!

A second way to get an agent's attention is to publish short stories in prominent literary magazines. I've had a few short stories that I was working on, but I neglected them as I was finishing my book. So, this week, I focused my energy on wrapping up some stories. I had one that was a finalist for a contest held by Glimmer Train. Glimmer Train is one of the biggest journals you can get into as a literary writer. They usually have several of their stories longlisted in Best American Short Stories. So, I have faith in this story and I finished getting it polished so that I can send it out again. I've also been working on a second short story that I'm hoping will be publishable.

The third way to get an agent is, of course, through connections. I don't have many connections right now, but I realize that I do have a few distant ones. In other words, I'm about three degrees removed from two of my favorite agents. Whether or not that will open any doors, is up in the air. But, I do think this is something to keep in mind as we all try to publish. The world is smaller than you think.

Does anyone have other ideas or tips for publishing? What are you all trying to do besides submitting queries? (Let's assume that you have already focused on the WRITING part of the journey, which admittedly, is a never ending process.)