Heather Or Eels? An Experiment!

We have cooked up a little experiment for you here at the Literary Lab. It's been some time since we've done anything like this, so hopefully you're rested up and ready to participate, because you are an integral part of this experiment.

Here's the deal:

1. We will present prose excerpts from four writers, and tell you who wrote what.

2. We will present prose excerpts from the same four writers, in a different order, and not tell you who wrote what.

3. You will compare the examples and tell us who wrote which of the unidentified excerpts.

4. We'll talk about this tomorrow, based on the results. We have no idea what those results will be or what conclusions we'll draw, but we're Very Excited to find out!

Here we go!

From Michelle Davidson Argyle:

The light along the gulf’s horizon melted twice before the search for Edna was reconciled. She was found bruised and naked amidst a tangle of bright green seaweed. Along with the sand and crushed shells crusted against her salted body were creamy white feathers, twisted and broken. Two mornings before, the search began when Edna did not show for the meal she had so discourteously requested. After Edna’s clothes were found, the beach was scoured for hours on end, night and day, without the help of Mr. Pontellier who, although returned from business because of Edna’s disappearance, believed his foolish wife had simply run away for a few days. “I have no worries,” he replied. “She will return. It is only a spell she is passing through, and if this is what it takes to get it out of her system, then so be it.”

Mariequita was alone when she found Edna sprawled across the sand with her arms and legs flung in uncanny contortions. The woman who had once been a wife and mother was now broken along the shore, comparable to a small child lazing innocently in the weak sunlight— perhaps too stubborn or deaf to obey its mother’s orders to put its clothes back on. Mariequita stared only for a moment as she dug her muddy feet into the grainy sand, wondering whether Edna had really only dipped her toes into the water and been carried away by surprise, or if she had voluntarily swam out to sea in hopes of being carried away.

---

From Scott G.F. Bailey:

It was not far to the General Post Office on Sackville Street, but because he knew that Mr. O’Hagan would have left the office before his errand was done, Malone took his time walking through downtown. The weather had turned hot and humid and he had no desire to be soaked with sweat by the time he returned to work. In fact, Malone had no desire to return to work at all. Finnerty’s funeral had soured his thoughts for the day. He wandered at random through the crowded streets for some time, paused briefly to look up at the afternoon sun and then carried the package into a pub a block north of the post office.

Malone ordered a pint of stout, paying out of O’Hagan’s half-crown. The parcel lay on the table before him, addressed to Finnerty’s nephew in London. He remembered now that Finnerty had, before dying, written to this nephew but had not posted the letter and that the parcel contained something he’d left to the nephew in his will. He should have remembered the contents of both the letter and the parcel; he’d sat and listened as O’Hagan read Finnerty’s will aloud not a day earlier. But for the last several months Malone had been sleepwalking through his days, acting more out of habit than will. He frequently took breaks from copying or filing documents to scratch out short lists. In his coat pocket, in fact, was one such list he’d scribbled that very morning.

---

From Anne Gallagher:

As they drew closer to the old house, William hobbled the horses in a small clearing about twenty feet off the path. The two men moved stealthily through the remaining brush and came to rest in the back of the house.

"There’s someone in there, smoke from the chimney," Peter whispered. He pointed to a single stack.

Downstairs, the curtained windows hid any signs of life. William kept his eye on the second floor and was rewarded by a slight movement from the corner room.

"Up there," William whispered and pointed to the window. His heart almost broke when John appeared at the pane. How were they going to get his attention and where were the others?

"Now what, sir?" Peter looked to William for the answer.

"I don’t know. I'm going around front to see what that holds, then we'll come up with a plan. You stay here and if there’s any way you can get John's attention without being seen, do it." William crouched and made his way on his belly through the underbrush around to the front of the house.

Heavy curtains draped the front windows as well. An overgrown garden stood off to one side of the manison. A barely discernable drive led through another wilderness in the opposite direction. Two horses grazed in a field a short distance from the house. There was no barn, any outbuildings to use as cover, or people.

---

From Domey Malasarn:

The abductions started around the same time Trish met Scott. The first night it happened, Trish had been driving home on Interstate 7 after the couple’s second date. They had gone to a seafood restaurant, a place where Scott’s family celebrated all of their major milestones. She associated Scott with the aliens for a time, so blurry was her memory due to the lack of sleep. All of it had seemed extraterrestrial, not just the aliens, but the idea of being in love with Scott...the idea of being in love at all. On the night she lost her virginity to Scott, she knew that the aliens were watching.

There were two types of beings on the spaceship. (She hated that she now used words like "beings" and "spaceship".) One was a translucent humanoid form, the other like deshelled oysters: small, globular, mucoidal. The oysters slid around on the floor in glossy heaps, sometimes gathering in the corners as they conferred with one another. It was these oysters that seemed to be in charge of everything. The humanoids did all the work, but they were dumb. When they wanted Trish to raise her arms, they would raise their own arms. If she didn’t comply right away, more of them would raise their arms. In her most frightening moments—climbing onto the table, parting her legs for the probes—she felt as if she was surrounded by a tai chi class. She wasn’t even sure they were actually alive, these humanoids; they could have had motors inside them for all she knew. The oysters were the patient watchers. The oysters were the masterminds.

---

And now the Mystery Excerpts!

Number One:

I am homesick, Olivia thought. I miss Ali, his breath sweet with dates and almonds and his hair foolishly scented with English pomade like a cheap mobster. I miss the gap between your front teeth, she thought. What am I to do with you, Ali Ali Ali? Your name sounds like the wailing of Arab mothers at a funeral, and I hope you are being cautious. Algiers is a dangerous city, especially for men who take employment with the French oppressors.

A wind came up and Olivia made to snatch the wine glass from the window but she mistook the distance and knocked the glass off the ledge. It tumbled away out of sight to shatter on a paving stone below. Well, it had not been much of a glass.

Olivia stood and leaned out of the window, into the wind. The nights here were not as warm as she’d imagined they’d be. Her skin constricted in the cold air and she felt brittle, useless anger and the urge to scream out, to howl at the sliver of moon. She pushed her shoes from her feet and was about to pull off her dress and lean naked and foolish out into the frigid salt breeze when she heard the children laughing.

---

Number Two:

Richard stood on the fore deck of the triple-masted clipper, the spray of the water stinging his face. His heart filled with an immeasurable joy. There was nothing in the world like standing on an ocean-going vessel. The smell of the salt as it stung his nostrils, the heavy wetness encompassing him, almost womblike. The vastness of the water mesmerized him, what was on the other side, what treasure could be found there? He loved the ocean the same way he loved a woman.

As comforting as a mother’s hand with the gentle ebb and flow of the tides, the bob and sway as the vessel moved through the water, almost like sitting in a rocking chair suckling on a breast. The sea could also be as furious as a woman scorned, ranting and wild, a tempestuous fury. As beautiful as any woman he had ever seen, with her myriad of effervescent colors, shimmering or dull, the ever-changing hues of virulent blues and purples to chartreuse and moss to grey. And formed like a woman; the swell of a breast, the curve of a waist, the sway of her hips as she walked away. Yes his only true love was the ocean.

---

Number Three:

As the cookies baked, she slept and I studied her long, thin body lying limp on the couch. Her eyelashes, frail and skeletal, fluttered against her cheekbones. She was wedged between dream and sleep, unconscious of the fact that I was breathing her in. My heart beat wildly at the remembrance of her taking me into her arms years earlier. I was eleven, and she had whispered into my ear that there would be times I would feel sad, but those times would pass. She caressed my forehead, her hand smelling of lilacs. That was the year he died, my father, her husband. That was the year she began to tremble, the year she hid her red hair behind golden curls, the year she put up the fence. Change advanced gradually—in layers so slight I was only now beginning to see them, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of how thick these layers, these gradations of change had become, but another moment of reflection brought me back to the deliberate acceptance I learned years ago.

From the window behind her, bars of yellow light fell across my mother’s closed eyes. For a moment, she was so hushed with some thought wedged in her mind that I could hear the leaves fall outside. It was autumn, a season of change, but with my eyes focused on my mother, I felt as if there would only be one season, one age that would stretch further than I could ever imagine.

---

Number Four:

He woke to a strange sound. Orange light from a streetlamp below shone up through the blinds and streaked across his bare chest and legs. He panted, as if waking from a nightmare, though he had no memory of any dream. His skin was pricked with heat. The bed sheets were damp. The stench of skunk came in through the open window.

He looked at his room, inverted as it was from his position on the bed. He had knocked over the nightstand and the lamp lay disjointed beside an empty water glass. The bulb had popped when he swatted it to the floor—this he remembered. Bright light and shattered white glass and the coiled fuse dimming from orange to red to black. His alarm clock was still plugged in and he could see the first red digit unobscured by the lamp. It was after two in the morning. He heard again the sound that had woken him. It was a cry in the night, half man and half animal. It was the sound of pain. He groped for his clothes. He stood and stepped over the mess, careful not to cut his feet on the shattered glass.

Below, the rooms were bright in the moonlight and the streetlamp light. He could make out the clear path to the kitchen. He turned on the faucet and cupped his hands under the running water and drank. He reached into the cupboard, found a bottle of aspirin, and took some pills with another swallow from the tap.

---

And now you tell us who you think wrote what. Save discussion of stylistic indicators leading to your decision for tomorrow, if you will. Please make your decisions before reading the comments! You will be most helpful if you are an unbiased observer! Thanks awfully much!

The Hijacking Of Original Language

You've probably typed it yourself, or at least you've been on the receiving end of someone who typed it. Yes, I mean that long stretch of exclamation points. The excitement was so great, how could we expect anything less than the complete loss of restraint?

But, it's not always a perfect stretch, is it? Sometimes...sometimes we can't quite muster the strength to keep that shift button down the whole time. The exclamation points turn into lowly ones.

This can happen to you!!!!111!!!

The mistake is something that's fairly common. In fact, I'm pretty sure I made it Monday when I was chatting with Michelle (who is, by the way, co-editing an anthology to raise money for Japanese earthquake and tsunami victims). So, it wasn't too much of a shock when I saw this same supposed slip while reading a post from the hilarious and brilliant Kuzhali Manickavel.

Now, so you know, Kuzhali is one of the few living writers that I am truly, truly jealous of. Sometimes I read a piece of her writing and feel the need to wring out a wet cloth she's go good. I was, then, ever so slightly disappointed to see that she of all people had made that ! to 1 slip. Kuzhali, could you possibly have made a mistake?

Then, the realization struck me. The more I read, the more I noticed that she was consistently 1-ing her !s. She did it nearly every time she !!!!ed. In fact, it hadn't been an accident at all. Kuzhali had hijacked a common linguistic mistake and was using it to help her reach her own goals of taking over the world (or whatever it is she's trying to do). She was creating original language by observing the behavior of our society.

Maybe this sounds like I'm making a big deal about something trivial, but I really do think she has hit upon something.

We often criticize writers for sounding too writerly. I think that "writerly" quality that sometimes seems suspicious comes from that fact that we may be trying to mimmic the great writers before us. In Kuzhali's case, she's done the opposite. She's not stealing something great and pawning it off as her own. She's finding something in the scrap heap and turning it into something great. If art is an imitation of life, then this is how it should be done.

Think of the greats like Shakespeare, Dante, Joyce, and Faulkner to a lesser extent. We may be able to find the roots of their inspiration, but in the end they created language that was completely their own. How do they do that? Where did they get the building blocks from? I'd argue that it must come from some source other than the work of earlier artists.

To see how Kuzhali has done this is not a lesson to me to use more OMGs and LOLs in my prose. (OMG, Vincent just ate someone.) It serves as an example to me of how one can (and should) create new language by looking at life rather than looking at art.

Does Your Fiction Have A Comfort Zone?

Some years ago, I was petsitting a cat, Ricky, who had all of his teeth removed. He had been a stray and suffered from malnutrition. The pain from his rotting teeth bothered him so much that he refused to eat.

I was happy to do the favor...until the day I had to get Ricky into the pet carrier for his follow-up appointment at the vet.

A cat + a pet carrier = crazytown

I've never been a very good salesman, and the honest pitch about why Ricky should get into the cramped little carrier wasn't working. I tried to lure him in with treats. I tried to coax him in with a loving nudge. I eventually had to force him in, which resulted in a lot of hissing and plenty of scratches on my forearms.

I got Ricky to the vet and waited anxiously for the nurse to call his name. I figured I'd be facing another struggle, this time getting Ricky back into the carrier after his check up in the presence of a vet who probably expected me to be much better at the task then I actually was.

The time came. The doctor opened the carrier and lifted Ricky out by the scruff of his neck. She looked into his mouth. She weighed him. Then she put him back on the examining table, where Ricky slinked back into the carrier of his own accord.

I was a bit stunned. I looked at the doctor wide-eyed.

"He's behaving like a good, scared little kitty is supposed to behave," the doctor said.

Suddenly, what had been an instrument of torture at home became a place of comfort at the vet. It really made me understand that the idea of a safe haven was relative.

* * *

As a writer, being original is often something I try to accomplish, and I think it's something that readers appreciate to some extent. At the same time, I'm aware that the reader in me often seeks something that falls into my comfort zone. That's why I read some books over and over again. I like to re-explore familiar places and relive enjoyable times, something that seems even more desirable as the problems of the world press down on us.

For a fictional story to be successful then, it seems to require components of newness integrated with more familiar material. I think a reader is more willing to explore something new if they also feel the security of something familiar at the same time.

Originality is probably something we all think about. But, what about the familiarity?

For me as a reader, comfort zones come in many forms. Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic The Road might not seem like it should have any comforting elements in it. But, I found that the consistent beauty of the prose style created that warm blanket that wrapped around me while I looked out at the desolation of the story. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical One Hundred Years Of Solitude created comfort by describing emotions that I could relate to, even when the characters and the setting were foreign to me.

Most recently, I became aware of the creation of comfort zones while I was reading Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This book is TOTALLY bizarre. I was scratching my head for the first 500 pages of the book, and it's only about 600 pages long. The story was so fragmented, so fantastical, so quirky--for much of the time I couldn't figure out why I stuck with it for as long as I did.

But, as I went on, I realized that Murakami had created comfort zones in a really odd way. He made me comfortable by repeating the same bizarre elements over and over again. Through the repetition, the newness became familiar and comforting. I started to crave it.

I've often thought that some writers have to first "train" their readers to read them. In a way, Murakami did that in this book by returning to story elements that seemed bizarre at first but that grew more familiar each time I re-encountered it. From the beginning of the book to the middle, he had trained me how to read him.

This idea of originality mixed with newness isn't specific to writing. I'm guessing that's why covers are successful in music, and why fusion food is in, and why some production companies are so willing to remake the same movies. People want something new, but they don't want it to be too new.

Where does that leave us?

It may be a requirement to mix the old with the new in our writing, but how we choose to create that hybrid is completely up to us. I've found comfort in many books, and often that comfort is created with elements. In my own work, I try to create comfort by describing the mundane. I mix that with some dark elements and some magical elements, and as a whole I think it holds together.

However you choose to do it--and whether you choose to do it at all--will come from your own personality and your own views.

Lights, Camera, Ostriches

Yesterday I helped a friend scout out a location for a scene in his book. We went to an ostrich farm. He had originally planned for the scene to take place on a non-ostrich farm, but he thought a few of those amazing birds could spice things up a bit.

And, I think they will.

It got me to thinking about my own settings in my stories. Most of the time my scenes take place in pretty ordinary locations. A Pasadena condo, a suburban home, a bakery in Paris. Even when I set my stories in places that most people wouldn't know about...say Thailand or Brazil, I often downplay the "exotic" nature of the place because I thought it might make the story too gimmicky.

But, lately, I've been realizing how exciting it is for readers to experience a new location while they are going through the story. It helps the story work double duty, taking readers on a physical trip, along with the emotional trip I hope I've managed to create. It makes me think much harder about the settings in my stories.

I don't think a setting has to be exotic to work, but I do think the place where your scene occurs should affect the actions and emotions of your characters. A neutral setting may serve to establish your characters in space, but chances are the details about that setting will feel extraneous. If the setting has an impact on the story, it feels much more important and more well-thought out. It also feels more real.

If it's a place many people might already be familiar with, I now try to focus on unexpected details about the place. For instance I recently wrote about a scene that took place in Notre Dame Cathedral, and instead of only focusing on the beautiful stained glass windows, I had one of my characters fixate on the checkered floors.

If the scene in your story takes place somewhere I'm not familiar with, a bit of research will usually be called for. Then, it's up to me to share the facts I learned without making the details feel too forced.

Setting was something I didn't pay much attention to for a long time. But, now I see it as an exciting new element to work into my stories.

What about you? How do you come up with the settings in your stories? What sort of impact would it have on your story if you moved a scene from one setting to another?

Do You Write Big or Small?

Lately I've been looking at my work and wondering why it feels so boring when I prop it up next to other stories. I finally realized it's because I've been comparing it to other stories that aren't even in the same realm. You know, that apples to oranges thing. Here's the thing: I write small.

I was having dinner with a friend last night and we touched on the subject of ideas. She told me her latest idea and my mouth dropped open. It was so...sparkly. I was a bit dazzled and then I thought about my own ideas and they just looked seriously lame.

You see, big is not better than small. Apples are not better than oranges. Sparkly ideas are not better than matte ideas. It pretty much means we are all different and like different things. I like intimate settings, small groups of characters, stories about small changes. The sparkly ideas seem to work on grander scale settings and deal with larger groups of characters (or at least characters interacting with larger groups) who bring about big changes either in their world or themselves.

I don't mean to say every story can be categorized as big or small. Some of the best stories incorporate elements of both. On the whole, however, I do think most writers tend to lean more toward one or the other. Which one do you lean toward?

Unexpected and Inevitable

Scott's post Friday and my own revising this weekend had me thinking about story endings again. I was revising, Bread, and I had gotten to the last few pages. The two possible endings I arrived at were both fine in the sense that they were plausible and gave the story closure (and really, how hard is that when you're dealing with a cannibal?). But, neither of the two endings sat quite right with me.

I realized that the reason I didn't like either one of the endings very much was because they represented the two most obvious outcomes to my story. In my case, my main character was committing a crime, and it was either going to go well or it wasn't.

While chatting with Michelle, I was reminded of two Jhumpa Lahiri stories in her most recent collection Unaccustomed Earth: "Hell-Heaven" and "Only Goodness". What I loved about both of these stories was how they were ended. In reading these stories, I will say that I was fairly underwhelmed a good 98% of the way through. They were deftly written, and in general the characters and conflicts were engaging and emotional. But, what bothered me about them was that they felt boring.

Until the last line.

In both cases, Lahiri managed to catch me off guard with the final sentence. They are both unexpected and inevitable, meaning, they led me to a new conclusion I wouldn't have guessed at, even though all the clues were there.

I think a reader wants to be surprised without feeling cheated. An unexpected and inevitable ending accomplishes both of those goals. It gives them a journey that they can relate to, but then something catches them off guard and makes them see things in a new light (something I think all good art should do).

So, in going back to Bread I ran through my entire story and dared to avoid the two endings that came most naturally to me. Using the earlier material, I decided to come up with that I hadn't thought about before. I wanted to surprise myself. I wanted to learn something new.

I'm happy to report that I like my current ending. I like that it makes me revisit the story again and sort of go, "Huh."

What about you? How do you go about approaching your story endings?

Writers Teach Others How To Feel

I don't know if it's old age, but more and more I think about what the point to writing is. And, lately, while rereading one of my favorite books, To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, I realized yet another thing that we, as writers, are able to do. We are able to teach readers how to feel.

Writing happens through words. And, often, words help us to understand amorphous concepts. Words allow us to contain ideas by serving as symbols for these ideas. This comes in handy when we talk about emotions.

So often in an emotional situation, I feel overwhelmed. Several different sensations run through my head and heart at the same time. Often I don't stop to reflect about these sensations until later, at which time the emotion may be lost. But, sometimes when I read, a situation in a book is able to bring up my past emotions. And, with the very best writers, I am helped by the reading because I can suddenly understand my own emotions through words I may not have had before. The language helps me to frame my own emotions in a way that allows me to understand them better.

When I used to work with language in my own writing, I would try to come up with a unique way of stating something. Now, I think it's not about finding simply a unique way, but it's about finding a more accurate way of expressing ideas than other people may have done in the past. Just as the Eskimos have multiple words for snow, each one representing something different, I think writers should create different words for distinct emotions. How many types of sadnesses are there? How many happinesses and angers and melancholies?

Have you written or read an expression of emotion that you had never seen captured before?

Maybe You're Already Doing It

As I start this post, I realize that the idea of what I want to post about isn't totally clear in my mind.

Some of you may know that I've been looking for a job. I'm not currently jobless, but I do feel that I will be ready to move on from where I am in a few months.

For my future, I currently have several different jobs that I'm considering:professor in a community college where I would be mainly teaching, professor in a liberal arts college where I would also run a lab, consultant in a think tank, and something called a program officer that deals with the distribution of funds to other research scientists.

This last week, I had the opportunity to have lunch with a program officer, and the more she told me about her job, the more I realized how excited I would be to have it. It seemed to be the perfect combination of tasks that I love doing with a minimal amount of stuff that I don't like doing.

And, for some reason, that struck a chord with me when I thought about my writing.

I think so often as I'm trying to improve as a writer I force myself to do things that I see other people doing. I'll try to improve my dialog, for example. Or, I'll try to tell less and show more.

But, I wonder if maybe writing what I'm naturally resistant to isn't such a good idea after all. In other words, just as there's a job out there for me that makes use of those tasks I love without the tasks I hate. Maybe there's a readership out there that appreciates my natural tendencies in writing.

Must we develop every writing skill out there? Or, does the lack of skill in a certain area help us steer our own writing in a unique way that might also fill a niche?

Note added later: Some of the comments here say what I tried to say much better than I did here.

This. Is. So. Cliche.

One thing I try to avoid when I'm writing is the use of current figures of speech. Not only slang, but also constructions like the title of this post. I know people tend to blog the way they talk in real life (I do, and you can see now why I have so few friends), but for me at least there's a difference between the way I speak and the way I write on teh internets and the way I write prose fiction. A lot of it has to do with the fact that my fictions tend to be based in the past, but when I write short stories, most of them are about action in the current time. Even then, I try to scrupulously avoid modern cliches and slang.

For one thing, slang seems to go out of date pretty quickly. A great deal of "the new smalltalk" (as Henry Higgins calls it) is disseminated through our culture via television shows, and those come and go rapidly enough. Though I do wish "shiny" for "cool" from Firefly had caught on at large. Alas. I digress, though. Slang and au courant constructions date books, and I think that means that they don't age well. Even a fairly well respected book like Kerouac's "Subterraneans," while still kind of shiny, is also embarrassingly doofy in the use of slang, cats and kittens.

But I know that a lot of fiction is written for immediate consumption and the shelf life is not projected into the coming decades for future generations. A lot of stuff is written to be consumed and discarded and replaced by new stuff next year or next season or next fall, and so slang or neologisms that will date books don't really matter, just as 100 years from now nobody will care that the way hippies talked on "Dragnet" is ridiculous. I mean, it was foolish and inaccurate then, but it gets increasingly hysterical as the years pass, and nobody can take Joe Friday seriously either. Again, I digress. It's early, I've had no coffee and I'm getting a cold, so be kind.

In the fiction I write, I will use slang from those time periods, but it's pretty much set dressing and clearly for characterizations. I'm still not sure how I feel about that (it might just be a gimmick, in which case I know where the "delete" key is to be found on my keyboard). But I know that I won't have one of my characters say, "Just. Stop. That. Right. Now." because that's a construction I expect to go away within a few years. I also won't have my characters say "scoop" for "pick up in a car" or "roll me up" for "drop me off in your car at some destination" or "hip to" for "inform about." There's this album by David Bowie from 1975 (I think) called "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" which is a great album, but really, it's just doofy sometimes. "Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah." That's not the sort of thing I want to look back upon in my own work.

Your thoughts? Am I just too fussy about stuff like this? Does it matter? Are current cultural references actually good things, especially in YA or MG fiction or in topical thrillers where I seem to see them the most? Do you even think about this sort of thing, or do you just write the way you write and I should just go have my coffee and let you find your own authorial voice?

Inappropriate Subject Matter

As I get farther along in the first draft of my work-in-progress, I begin to suffer some sort of vague but growing doubts about the subject matter and the characters I have chosen. I'm not second-guessing my choices so much as I'm starting to feel a bit ill at ease over the reception this book will get from my agent, possible future publishers, Mighty Reader, et alia.

Mighty Reader and I were talking just last night (over dinner of chicken Provencal, if you must know) about books we won't read even if we admire the authors who've written them. There are subjects that I'll simply steer clear of: modern warfare, terrorism, pedophilia, serial killers, anything with explicit sex scenes, cyberpunk stuff, clown romances (kidding; I love clown romances), white collar crime; there are also subjects that aren't so nice that I will read: adultery, occult stuff, slavery, poverty, murder, imprisonment, death of all sorts. And the book I'm currently writing might, maybe, be one that I wouldn't necessarily pick up off the shelf and buy were I in a bookstore. Which is what I find most interesting here, that I'm writing a book about things and characters that I usually don't read about.

And, really, mosty my issue is that I'm writing about characters for whom I don't feel I necessarily have adequate standing. I am not an escaped female slave, nor am I a priest, nor am I a widow, nor am I a gay man, nor am I an American Indian. All of these characters appear in my book, as do (I attempt) all of the worst things about their lives when viewed through the above-mentioned societal identifiers. Who am I to presume to speak for any of them? Also, there is a violent act in each chapter. Is this the sort of book I normally buy? Not in the least. But it's the sort of book I am writing. Imagine my embarrassment at the library as I ask for books about how African slaves were tortured during the colonial era, or what the symptoms of syphillis are. Really, thank god for the internets sometimes.

Anyway, Davin's already written a post about "dark subjects" so I won't get into the question of avoiding possibly-inappropriate subjects, but I will wonder if any of you have awakened to the reality that you're writing a book about things you would normally never even consider reading about?

What Makes You Shine?

All right, so on Monday I shared a bit of my frustration about publishing and the art of writing. I want to liven things up today...and, admittedly, I need a little positivity!

So, I'm curious. What makes you shine as a writer?

We've talked about how there are few original stories. The originality comes from the writing, from the unique perspective of the writer. So, what's your unique perspective?

I personally think my unique talent is my ability to write stories from different points of view. I've been told that I can write convincingly from both male and female standpoints, young and old standpoints, and I even once wrote a story that includes the points of view of a goose and dog that I am quite proud of.

Now it's your turn. Help me to lift my spirits by celebrating the originality in our writing!

Where is Originality Found?

Originality is a concept I wrestle with. On one hand, artistic attempts that rely too much on originality can end up being inaccessible or self-conscious. For those reasons, I usually don't try to be original when I'm writing myself. On the other hand, art involves invention. And, as a reader, discovering original writing that affects me is a bliss. With this latter thought in mind, I wanted to say a few things about where I think originality should be found.

As writers, we all know how important it is to read. Studying great writers, experiencing their stories, copying their language word for word is essential, at least in my opinion, if we want to develop the skills we need to write beautifully. But, what can sometimes happen is that, when we try to write our own stories, we find that we have adopted someone else's voice, or, worse yet, someone else's view of the world. 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.

Because words are symbols, after all. "Chair" isn't really a chair. It's a collection of letters that are placed together to represent a chair. A real chair is that thing sitting off to my left, with its carved wood and its padded seat and its avocado green paint. Likewise, "love" isn't love, and "struggle" isn't struggle. Furthermore, my "struggle" isn't your struggle, and my "love" isn't your love.

When writing, I believe that we have to start with non-words. And, I think that's one reason why so many people have problems with cliches. (Really, I think there are far more cliches in writing than we acknowledge.) Cliches are the most obvious cases of stolen language. Vanda's hair was as golden as the sun. Whoever came up with that first made a beautiful comparison. But, chances are, everyone else who used that same line didn't make the same direct comparison. Rather, they stole language. In our perceptions, we have our own specific descriptions, our own comparisons, and our own way of relating to things before we limit those relationships with words. To be original, we have to access that source and then translate it into words. The words represent the thing rather than being the thing itself.*

The beauty of this--because make no mistake that this is HARD to do--is that as soon as we invent new language by translating our experience, we are suddenly able to distort our reader's perception of reality. Nowadays, don't we sometimes see golden hair that reminds us of the sun? Someone has made that connection for us. Someone has forever shaped the way we experience our world. That's a remarkable thing, and that, to me, is a compelling reason to try and be original.

How do you all feel about originality? Is it something that's important to you? And, what about you science fiction and fantasy writers? What is your source for originality? Do you think you must also look to life first, or does it come from a different place?

*There are probably artistic movements where the word itself is the art. Fine.