Two More Weeks To Enter

Hi Everyone,

Here's a reminder that there are about two weeks left to enter our Notes From Underground contest. It looks like we're going to be donating the proceeds from this anthology (our second!) to charity based on our poll, and we'll probably pick the Writers Emergency Assistance Fund, who was our second place charity last year.

Casting A Wide Net: Scott Begs for Help

My writing project for this fall is a detective novella. I have no idea how it happened, but an eccentric detective character appeared almost full-blown in my imagination, and a few days later I had a setting, some characters including the victim and the murderer, and some other bits and bobs and now I've got a mystery sort of banging around in my head demanding to be written. But here's the thing: I've never written a mystery, and while I have read all the Holmes stories (when I was a kid) and I have also read a few (a very few) other mysteries, I really don't have much of a clue (sorry) about how to put one of these stories together.

In the last couple of months I've read four Agatha Christie "Poirot" books. I've read all of Iain Pears' "Jonathan Argyll" mysteries. And I'm sure I've read one or two other detective stories over the years, but I mostly don't remember who or what or when. Poe's "Rue Morgue" and "Purloined Letter," of course. "The Gold Bug," and that sort of thing.

The Christies are enjoyable enough, but I don't think I want to use her as my model for the story structure. I like her beginnings and I like her characters and some of her digressions are really very nice (the four or so pages about gardens in "Halloween Party" are gorgeous prose that any writer would be proud to have written), but the middles of her books are an inchoate hash of evidence and interviews and they bore me because there's no real story and no movement until Poirot is ready to confront the murderer. Also, you know, I'm not pleased as punch with the way Christie gets her detective to the solution to the mystery.

The Pears books are interesting and a bit more linear in their construction, but even though they have a good set of main characters (who doesn't love Flavia?), they seem a bit fluff. And I really hated the final book in the series, Mr. Pears. Hate is a strong word best used infrequently, and I use it here about your last art mystery book. Yes, I do.

Anyway, dear reader, I am a bit stuck. I don't know my genre well enough to go a-trolling for new ideas elsewhere, so I turn to you who are smarter and more widely-read than I am and ask for some recommendations. I'm looking at cosies, if I understand the term correctly, and not action-packed spy stories or serial killers or paranormal mysteries. More like modern classic detective novels, if you know what I mean. Maybe historical stuff (Dorothy Dunnett has been waved about in front of me while I dithered pointlessly) is it's a real detective-looks-at-evidence-and-human-nature stuff, new or old but probably I'm interested in what's going on now in the genre. I just don't know. Point me in a direction, I beg you.

Dying? I don't agree.

Loren Eaton wrote a good post yesterday about serious, weighty books dying. That, and the poem is dead. And I stopped in my tracks and thought, really? Really? Poetry's dead? Does everybody really think poetry has died? Loren seems to, and that's okay. Maybe we're talking traditional poetry, here? THE POEM, not poetry in general. You know, sonnets and sestinas and haiku. But I still don't think those have died, nor are they dying.

My boss at my old job had a twelve-year-old who was obsessed with song lyrics. She would write them down in books and read them over and over and then she'd write her own poetry and lyrics in response. She's part of this "rising generation" that has a short attention span. I'm sure she uses Twitter now, and Facebook, and has a hard time reading classic novels in English class. But come on - poetry seems to be at the root of many writers I know, whether they admit it or not. We're stringing otherwise lonely words together to create a cohesive story - something that breathes and flows.


My Favorite 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)


I wrote a post about poetry not too long ago. It got a bit of attention, and I think it was a great post. You should go read it. I suppose my focus here today is a bit different in the fact that I just want to shout out that I don't think poetry is dead or that it is going to die. I think it has evolved, yes, and in good and interesting ways. It has always evolved. Perhaps that means poetry is turning into something even more beautiful and versatile than it has been in the past.

To me, when I use imagery and focus on the sounds of words, I'm using poetry. When I listen to a song, it's a form of poetry. I guess it's like film vs. digital - film will never die. It remains an art form, although used by less artists, and film is superior to digital in several ways. For that reason, I believe it will always be around. I suppose Loren's post may be referring to the fact that the masses don't love poetry anymore, or that they don't love the weightier literary novels that only weighty literary circles pass around and actually read. Still, in my opinion, unless something goes completely extinct, it's not dead. People still write poems (there's a list of them in my other post), even traditional poems. Gasp. And there's journals that print them and classes that teach about them at universities. To me, that's not DYING. I like to think that if poetry sticks around, then THE POEM won't die, either. I like to hold onto that glimmer of hope that one of the most beautiful, original things about language will never disappear.

The Power Of Pity and Fear

As I mentioned before, I started studying Aristotle's Poetics this weekend. The first half of this work discusses the art of writing tragedy, and one of the things Aristotle stresses is that all tragedy should evoke both pity and fear.

The concept of having both of these emotions at play in a story was eye-opening for me. Aristotle argued that pity was important because it resulted from readers sympathizing with the character. Fear, on the other hand, results from readers putting themselves in the character's place and worrying about themselves.

For me, what's powerful about this idea is that a writer who evokes both pity and fear has engaged their reader on two levels. And these two levels work on two different planes, one "inside" the story, relating to the character, and another "outside."

I imagine the two emotions don't have to be only pity and fear. For those writers who aren't working on Tragedy, the concept of getting readers to feel emotions for both the character and for themselves still applies. It seems like sympathy for the character applies to every genre. But, the pairing with that sympathy might be desire in the case of romance, or joy in the case of comedy. I'm honestly not sure. But, either way, this allows us to transcend the world of our book into real life.

So, has anyone been able to create these two levels of emotions in their writing? If so, do you have tips on how you did it?

Goals and Time Tables

I am very much a deadline-driven sort of person. Whenever I set out to write something, I always have a definite date by which I must be finished with it. I don't know why that is, except that open-ended projects--for me--always seem permitted to go unfinished forever. Which is very likely a more healthy way of looking at artistic pursuits, but my Virgo nature won't let me be healthy like that. Damn you, Virgo nature.

A year and a half ago I finished draft five (or maybe it was draft six) of a novel and set about finding an agent. I didn't have a timeline for that search but I assumed it would take a couple of months at least. Luckily for me it was a very short search and at that point, I figured I'd have the novel sold by the end of the year. That's last year--2009--I'm talking about. During those happy initial days of my relationship with my agent, I assumed that I'd be a published novelist before I was 50, and that somehow became my goal. I'm just shy of 48 as I type this.

What became clear in 2009 during the two rounds of rewrites to the novel that I did at my agent's request was that I had a good premise and good characters and a good fictional voice for the novel, but I had also written the book wrong. There is a structural problem with the last third of the book that I couldn't fix by revising what I had written, and in January of this year I told my agent that I couldn't rewrite the book anymore. I was done with it. It was a failed novel. I declared my intention of writing a different book and if, after that, I had any bright ideas about the book my agent and I had been working on, I'd see about fixing it. My agent said he'd be happy to read the new book when I was ready to show it to him, but gosh he wished I knew how to fix the first book. Yeah, I said, that would be cool, but whatevs.

This dramatic scene blew my hopes of being a published author by the age of 50. I don't have a MS in my agent's hands now, the different book I wrote has a lot of potential but needs some rewriting, and it looks pretty grim for me meeting my self-imposed deadline. Yes, I did in fact have a bright idea about how to fix the first book and I had that idea half an hour after telling my agent that the book was impossible to write and yes, I am now rewriting that book entirely from scratch and I'm a bit over halfway through a new draft of it and it So Totally Rocks, but it will be October at the earliest before I have a rough draft and then there'll be a couple revisions and it will likely be next year before my agent sees the damned thing. Which leaves 20 months, if my agent reads the MS in January and thinks he can submit it to publishers as-is, to go from unknown unsigned debut author to publication. That's a very short timetable. So I am coming to grips with the idea that I will not, alas, be a published novelist by the time I'm 50.

Yet still I write. I think about the WIP and give over most of my lunch breaks and evening commutes to the new draft, and I work on it in the evenings and I think about it when I go running and I make copious conflicting notes about it and I plow forward because that's what we do. I have a first draft of the next novel already written, and I know what the two books after that will be (plus, maybe, a cosy detective mystery novella this winter if I'm not still working on the current MS) and there is plenty of good writing ahead of me. My goal is to write those five books I've just mentioned, and hopefully I'll have ideas for other books to write after I've done those, and I'll keep writing novels and the occasional short story until the day I die. I want to be in the middle of a groundbreaking and amazing literary novel of baffling and mysterious beauty when I drop over dead. That's my goal, anyway.

When I was a kid (by which the old man means "when I was in my 20s") I was in rock bands. It's cool to be in a rock band, and I think everyone should do it. Too much of my time was wasted as I sat reading SPIN or Rolling Stone and imagining the interviews I'd give when my band became famous. I was not writing then, at least not fiction. Anyway, one day I realized that not only was I not a very good songwriter, I was also not really passionate about being a rock musician or playing electric guitar (though it's still supercool to play electric guitar and scream into a microphone, kids). What I am passionate about, as you likely know by now, is writing.

My point, if I have one, is that even though I began pretty late in life (first novel begun when I was about 30, second novel written when I was 45, third and fourth started when I am 47), being a published novelist is still an attainable goal. I love writing. I adore fiction. I read books about the theory and history of novels, and interviews with authors, and I am a total book geek. I write because I am fascinated to read what I've written, and I am a big fan of my own writing and I also have certain evolving but strong opinions about what should go on in a piece of literary fiction. So to be a novelist is a worthy and workable goal.

My timetables, on the other hand, are absurd and not under my control. I think I'm giving up on the idea of deadlines (until an editor at Knopf gives me one, that is) and learning to sit back and see how things go. The pressure of my 50th birthday, which looms threateningly out there on the horizon, is still something I feel constantly while I work on this MS, but I am trying mightily to ignore it.

What I'd like to know today is this: How many of you have come to writing as a serious business later in life? Do you have goals, and are they related more to the writing or to the calender?

What else do you read?

Happy Monday, everyone. I've spent the weekend reading Aristotle, and it has given me a bunch of topics to talk about with you all. But, what I also started wondering was what everyone out there reads aside from fiction.

I used to be strictly a fiction reader (and a scientific reader for work). But, lately, I've been feeling the limitations of most fiction, and I've instead been looking at poetry, memoir, and philosophy. I honestly never thought I'd be craving these other forms of writing, but I find that I've naturally drifted away from fiction, perhaps because I've been feeling good about my own work and don't feel like I have as much to learn from other fiction at the moment*.

What about you? What else do you read? Something that always stayed with me was critic Harold Bloom saying he read the backs of cereal boxes whenever he ran out of books at home.

*Although, I should say that I recently discovered writer Kazuo Ishiguro and have been learning a lot of new techniques from him.

Mowing Grass and Other Random Things

I've been reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and before I started I finished a Young Adult book. Talk about a difference in writing styles! If anyone ever asks me what "literary" means I tell them I have no idea. I've been in the debate one too many times to even care any more. McCarthy is spoken of everywhere as a literary genius. Maybe he is. I've enjoyed his book on so many different (not better, just different) levels than I enjoyed the Young Adult book. The Young Adult book I couldn't put down. I read it in a day. It was fun and fast and had depth, but The Road...it's like a rich dessert and it's getting hard to swallow at some points. That's not a bad thing. It just means I have to read it slowly.

For me, any writing that makes me feel this way is great (not better than other writing, just greater for me) writing. I don't run across it too often, but when I do it's a treat. If I feel like I want to read the book again to catch more of that dessert I missed the first time around, that's great writing. If it makes me jealous, that's great writing. If it makes me want to stop reading and go write something, that's great writing.

That's all for me, though. You may be different. So there's a thought for Friday. And now for some random.

Don't miss the writing contest going on over at The Clarity of Night!

Don't forget to vote about where the proceeds for our Notes from Underground anthology should go. It's down below on Thursday's post.

Don't forget to check out the fun giveaway on my author site for the release of my novella, Cinders. (Yes, that's a shameless plug)

I'm house/dog sitting for my parents while they're gone for two weeks, and I just mowed the lawn. I haven't mowed grass for years. Oh, the smell. It's the essence of summer. That, and some watermelon. I'm savoring it before the months of snow return. What's your favorite summer thing?

So You Think You're Talented

If you were writing with the belief that you truly sucked and you'd never improve, would you keep writing? I didn't think so. One of the hardest things I've ever done was to keep working on a novel that I loathed, but there was one small seed of hope inside my heart that the book would improve. And it did.

It's that small seed that drives me. I'll bet you've got it, too.

That seed drives me to share my work. Here's a commonly asked question that I'd like to address:

Do you write to sell or do you write only for yourself?

What a stupid question, huh? Yeah, of course you're writing to sell, or at least to share. Unless you're locking up all your manuscripts in a drawer with no intent of showing them to anyone, ever, you're writing to sell and share. And since you're writing to sell or share, you're considering an audience. And if you're considering an audience, you're shaping stories that you believe that audience might like. No? You're writing exactly what you want and how you want it and you don't care what anybody else thinks? Good for you! Write what you want and an audience will follow. You talented writer, you. Either way, you've got drive!

You know what got me to really let go and just write what I wanted to write? I made a secret blog with a separate gmail account and fake name and started posting my work just to get it out there. I thought, heck, I’m going to write what I want to write, even if it is clichéd or boring or overdone. I don’t care! So I wrote. And I wrote one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve created so far. It taught me how to let go.

True creativity comes only when you forget the world you’re living in exists. It is only you and the art. At least that’s how it is for me.

Get to that place.

And then enter our contest! Show us your talent! We want more entries! If I was going to enter a contest like this, my mind might explode with the possibilities of what I could do.

Maybe there’s

P
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Up on my roof and there’s

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Growing to

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Oh, and guess what? You can get 15% off the first Genre Wars Anthology over on Lulu. If you haven’t purchased your copy yet, now is the time to do it! Click here and enter code: BEACHREAD305

The code is good until August 15th.

Oh, AND, speaking of anthologies, we have a POLL! Please vote! We want to know where you think the money should go for our new anthology this year, Notes from Underground. If you haven't heard of this anthology, go check out the contest and rules here.

Show So You Don't Have To Tell

Is this cheating? Lately, I've been realizing that a lot of literary fiction uses the show-don't-tell rule to be lazy. What I mean by that is that a character in a fictional story will face some complicated conflict, and as a consequence she, he, or it will do something strange that is somehow supposed to provide insight to the reader.

Example:

Eloise nodded to the coroner to confirm the identity of the body lying in front of her. She hadn't said good bye to her mother, and now she would never have the opportunity. As the coroner zipped the body bag back up, Eloise noticed that she hadn't spit out her gum yet. The flavor was all gone. It felt like a ball of hard rubber in her mouth. She pushed out through the building doors and stepped into the empty parking lot. Dark clouds were starting to move in, and she was sure it would rain soon. She walked to her car. She noticed a paper cup rolling around on the asphalt, caught up in some gust of wind. She picked it up, fingered the soft edges, and then tossed it into the air where it took flight.

I think lately it has become a trend to have a character "reveal" emotion by doing something like throwing a paper cup up into the air. Somehow, it feels satisfying, but I'm not sure it makes any relevant point.

What do you think? Is this technique B.S.?

Silence is not criticism

Scott GF Bailey is off vacationing in Oregon this week. As a result, I get to fill in for him, and I do declare open random, even nonsensical comments for today's (and any day's) post.

I went to see the great movie The Kids Are All Right this weekend. (Director Lisa Cholodenko is a resident of the great San Fernando Valley in which I live.) Among the many great insights throughout the movie was the realization that silence is not criticism.

How often have I completely rewritten a story or even scrapped something simply because a reader didn't say anything about it? Too many times. And, I do apologize to those readers for forcing such negative feedback into their intentions.

Let's say it again: Silence is not criticism.

Ahhhh, doesn't that make us all feel just a little bit better?

Less Than One Month Left

Happy Monday everyone!

Just a reminder that there is less than a month left before our Notes From Underground contest closes. The deadline is August 15th. I really think this project is a great opportunity for writers to challenge themselves and see what they write when they are allowed to write anything. It's probably a daunting task, but I've always liked a little bit of pain in my life, so that's another reason to give it a shot!

I also wanted to remind you that our first Genre Wars Anthology is still up for sale. We've already been able to donate $200 to WriteGirl after the first quarter of the year. You can buy the hard copy or the pdf, and all the proceeds will continue to be donated to charity.

The Right Boots

Writing is a funny thing, isn't it?

Actually, CREATING is a funny thing. I've managed to create some amazing things in my brief 30 years of life, but none of them come close to my family. Keeping my daughter and my husband happy is an accomplishment requiring endless effort from all three of us. But when I think of that effort in any great detail, writing is the same way. Any creative effort or career is the same way.

As I climb the trail to the top of a mountain, I look into the eyes of the hikers who pass me on their way back down. They always look exhausted, but fulfilled. When I get to the top, I look down at all the steps I had to take to get to the summit, and it always amazes me. The view is always worth it. I don't need validation from someone on the top telling me I wore the right boots to get there.

Some of us take large steps. Some of us take short steps. I've even seen some people hike barefoot or with a cane or a child strapped on their back. We all do things differently, and I'm certain there will always be people out there criticizing how we do them, and there will also be people out there telling us we need validation to feel satisfied, or we need a lot of sales, or an agent, or a huge book deal, or a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list.

I started seriously writing when I was 16 years old. I looked like this on top of the mountain near where I live:

I look a bit heavier now, and older, and I lost the bangs, but other than that I look the same. I'm still writing about the same things, too, essentially. I still have that same drive and ambition. I wrote books because I loved to write and there weren't any books in the small-town library that I liked. I'd read all the ones worth reading, so I decided it was time to bring more books into the world. I'm still doing that.

My decision to self-publish one of my books has been a difficult one. Self-publishing seems to be a hot topic right now, and I've seen a thousand different opinions about it (many very negative), but in the end, I'm happy with my decision. Davin and I were talking yesterday about how we'll both feel satisfied when people we don't know send us emails about how much they enjoy our work. Amazing that it doesn't matter how you publish if your goal is something along those lines. I think there comes a point in our lives where we have to ask ourselves why we chase after the creative process, and it's essential that we answer honestly. For me, the answer was this: in the long run, some things simply don't matter, like how I share my work. It simply matters that I share it with as many as I can by the means I currently have available. Bigger plans will come later, and they may or may not include what others consider success. Success is what you make it, not what others dictate.
____________________________

It looks like there's an interesting contest going on over at The Clarity of Night. You should hop on board! All you have to do is write a 250-word flash fiction piece prompted by this image:

The prizes are very generous! $100 for the first place winner alone! And even more dough for other winners. Yay! I'm definitely entering. I always end up writing some good fiction because of a contest or prompt.

I Can Feel It In My Bones

I've been meaning to say something about this for some time, but I never had an idea about it that felt complete enough. I wanted to say something about how good isn't always good enough.

What I mean is that I think sometimes when we look at our writing (or when others look at our writing), we content ourselves in thinking that we're done when we can't find anything wrong with our work. And yet, sometimes we might not admit to ourselves that even though there's nothing necessarily WRONG with the work, it's also doesn't exactly feel RIGHT.

Some people might call the missing ingredient in a piece like this the "X-factor." What I realized tonight is that it's more of a physiological or emotional response to the work. Intellectually, we might not be able to find a problem to fix, but it's good to be aware of how we react to a piece beyond the intellectual level. Does the work give you goose bumps? Does it make your ears itch? Does it make you look over your shoulder? Does it make you want to walk to the edge of a mountain and throw little things off like car-parts, bottles, and cutlery, or whatever you find lying around?

So, can you pick out a piece of your writing that works beyond the intellectual level?

For me, there's a scene in my novel Rooster where one of the main characters, a teenager named Jaroen, is learning to meditate in a Buddhist temple for the first time. The monk is telling Jaroen to clear his mind, but instead he's flooded by thoughts. Suddenly, he remembers a day from his childhood when his dad is teaching him how to ride a bicycle. That scene always invokes and emotional response for me.

Tone-Deaf Writing

One of the terms you might hear thrown around regarding writing is "tone." This is not the same as "voice," though it's certainly a big part of voice. Tone in fiction refers to the author's attitude toward the subject: how seriously (or casually) the author seems to take his subject.

There is a complete spectrum of tone, from indifference to over-the-top histrionics, but most writers avoid the extremes, and we'll consider tone as having essentially three shades: understatement, hyperbole and a middle ground. Hey, let's examine each shade in turn.

Understatement is a casual or light treatment of the subject. The reader is given to believe that the author does not take a subject seriously. This is common in first-person narratives, but not so common in third-person except in comedy.

Often understatement is used to call upon the moral indignation of the reader because the reader knows it's a serious subject and thinks the narrator should think so, too. This form of irony was common in 19th-century writing (Lermontov, Gogol, et cetera). Some of Nabokov's unreliable villain narrators pretend to be indifferent in order to anger the reader. Voltaire's Candide and a lot of Vonnegut seem to be understated treatments of their subjects.

Hyperbole is the opposite of understatement. In hyperbole, some elements are exaggerated for rhetorical effect. A lot of genre fiction employes hyperbole because it's a way of heightening the drama. A lot of mythological writing is hyperbole. Ain't that a surprise? Hyperbole is also commonly used nowadays for comic effect.

Much horror/suspense writing is hyperbolic. Think of Poe, Lovecraft, Ludlum and friends. Hyperbole can be similar to melodrama, but it's not necessarily the same thing. Purple prose is often hyperbole, but not all hyperbole is purple prose.

The middle ground is the style used by most authors, who present an accurate picture of things as they are. Or as they could be (we are after all talking about fiction here, which includes fantasy, sf and vampiric werewolf romance and zombie comedies). Examples are too numerous to list. Tolstoy, though, is often held up as a realistic tonal stylist whose prose stays out of the way of the story.

Bear in mind that the tonal spectrum isn't absolute, either. One man's middle ground is another man's hyperbole, and some folks' idea of "subtle" involves a sledge hammer. The important thing is to match the tone of the piece to the intention behind it. Unless you write about the same topics from the same emotional perspective, you probably use a variety of tones in your prose, whether you know it or not.

Sometimes, the tone is wrong for the piece. When this happens, I call it "tone-deaf writing."

Failures in tone (tone-deafness)

The spectrum of possible tones in a narrative is not a scale of "good-to-bad" writing, and hyperbolic prose is no better or worse than middle ground prose or understatement. It's a matter of taste and the needs of the writer to manipulate her story/characters/plot/et cetera. But there are a couple of ways in which the tone of a piece can be bad writing, by which I mean here unsuccessful writing (or lazy or thoughtless or cliche writing).

Sentimentality is a danger especially in hyperbole, and it is when the author attempts to impose upon the material a greater emotional burden than it can comfortably bear. Which means that simply mentioning a baby doesn't get you a sympatheic character. All young children are not instantly adorable. All pregnant mothers do not deserve our tears. All ghosts are not immediately frightening. "Sentiment" is emotion that is not supported by the actual text.

Inhibition is usually a by-product of going too far with understatement, and is an author's failure to give due emotional weight to his material. Which is to say, if something tragic (or joyous et cetera) happens and there is no reaction to it by the narrator or any character in the story, or if there's an epiphany reached by a character but the character or narrator doesn't reflect at all on it and the writer is essentially backing away from strong emotion in his writing, we have an inhibited narrative.

Inhibition is my particular bete noir. My agent and I have had some 'lively exchanges' where he tells me I'm not giving enough to my reader and I accuse him (sometimes behind his back, poor man) of trying to get me to dumb down the book. What's actually going on is that I sometimes balk when I bring up a subject that makes me uncomfortable and I don't pursue it in the narrative the way I really should. Which is, you know, incredibly lazy writing and I'm working on it. My opinion is that when a writer stumbles against something that makes him uncomfortable, he should poke around, see what nasty thing is bothering him and then drag it into the story. You'll have to ask Davin how I'm doing with that.

Anyway, that's a too-long discussion of narrative tone. Is this something you're aware of in your own writing? Do you tend to lean one way or another on the tonal scale, and does that create problems for you? Am I forgetting to mention something important about tone?

Also, just because, here's a photo of our back yard, taken on Sunday afternoon by Mighty Reader:



Also Also: If you are in Seattle on Wednesday, July 14th, you should go to the new Elliot Bay Books on Capital Hill to hear Jon Clinch read from his new book Kings of the Earth! And if you haven't already read his first book, Finn, you should buy it and read it.

Two Characters. Two Reactions.

First, I have to toot my own horn today. I found out this weekend that a short story I published in the Los Angeles Review ("Red Man, Blue Man") was selected by the editor to be used as an example of narrative tension in her fiction writing class. I'm honored!

This has put me into a great mood, so I just thought I would talk about something that always excites me when I'm writing.

One writing situation I love finding myself in is when two of my characters are forced to react to the same issue. I've been working on a story called "Satellites", and a father and daughter are both dealing with the return of a long lost family member. They go to have lunch with this family member together, but afterwards, I plan to have them react to his return in different ways..ways I have yet to figure out.

For me, this is when characters come to life. And, come to think of it, the situation arises in "Red Man, Blue Man" when each of the men decide that it's time to fall in love. What better way to emphasize individual personalities than to have them react differently to a shared situation? It was actually this very type of thing that made me start writing in the omniscient point of view, where I could get into the heads of both characters at once.

In the movie High Noon, there is a scene near the end--spoiler alert--when the main protagonist's wife (played by Grace Kelly) and his ex-lover (Katy Jurado) find themselves sitting next to each other on a train headed out of town.

Both of them have reasons for staying and reasons for leaving, but their personalities determine what each of them does in the end.

A similar situation is set up in the movie Princess Mononoke --spoiler--when two of the animal gods find themselves waiting for death.

One of the gods decides to face death calmly while the other is full of rage. Just thinking about this type of set up makes my mouth water!

Have you found yourself in this type of writing situation? Did you use it as an opportunity to contrast your characters and bring them to life?

Nobody Likes You or Your Writing

That's right.

Take it personally.

Have you seen this movie trailer?

Vampires Suck

No matter what you create, no matter how many people like it, probably even more people are not going to like it. They might make fun of it like this movie does (although I believe the entire thing is more of a marketing ploy and cash-creator than anything else). But even if people don't like what you create, that doesn't mean they don't like you. Or maybe they really don't like you, who knows.

Does it matter?

What will it take for you to feel successful?

Is publishing a prize to you? (It shouldn't be a prize. Please don't think of it as a prize. Ack!)

If you can't answer these questions, and if the title of my post offends you, you probably shouldn't be writing.

Where Are You Creative?

I think lately I've been stuck on finding creative premises for stories. Or, sometimes I'll try to come up with a creative character. But, I'm feeling like I'm neglecting all the other ways we writers can be creative in our writing. It can be in language. It can be in structure. It can be in metaphors. Really, anything.

I've been rereading Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and stumbled upon this glorious passage about a man, Mr. Ramsay, thinking about his own intellect:

It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q....But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation*. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q-R- Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. "Then R..." He braced himself. He clenched himself.

Isn't that a creative way to express the idea of one's intellectual limit? It just inspires me to work harder in my own writing.

So, tell me, where are you creative? What parts of writing give you the free room to play? I need ideas, people.

Who Are We Writing For?

Excuse the ungrammatical post title. "For Whom Do We Write?" just sounds too formal on my first day back after a glorious 3-day weekend.

One of the events Mighty Reader and I attended during the American Independence Day Festivities was a traditional barbeque, featuring grilled meats and malted beverages and potato salad and non-traditional karaoke. All of this is by the way. The part of the 4th of July barbeque that interests me right now is the argument about politics.

The substance of the argument is unimportant (I don't think we actually even got there, truth to tell). What happened is that one person spent about half an hour carefully building up his position as self-appointed expert on politics and spinning flawed syllogisms to establish himself as the only informed person in the room so that the rest of us had--by his reasoning--no other role than to sit back and listen to his lecture and if we disagreed, we were admitting--by his reasoning--that we were idiots. You know the type, I'm sure. Next time, I'm going to hit him with something heavy.

Anyway, this was pretty much no fun if you were not the "expert" in the room and it was nothing like a conversation and the only point of the exercise was to let one person massage his self esteem. It was all about the speaker, and there was nothing, really, there for the listener.

I worry sometimes that a lot of our writing is serving that same basic purpose: we write for/about ourselves, wondering how much of us is getting on the page, how much of our secrets we inadvertantly give away to readers, how well our writing reflects our personal voice and points of view and how well our personal ethos comes across and if we'll be viewed as immoral and really, ultimately, we suffer along under the burdensome question of What Our Art Means To Us.

I just don't get it.

Admittedly, every once in a while I wonder what my writing says about me that I'm not seeing. But I don't wonder that often. I don't wonder if I have found my personal voice. I don't wonder if the real me is getting over on the page. I don't. Because I don't care.

I care about good stories. I care about good writing. I care, dear writers, about the reader's experience much more than I care about my own experience. I am alarmed when I see people blogging about the writer's experience as if that's the most important part of it. Because it's not. If I go see a movie, I want to not be aware of the director at all. I don't want to know about his experience making the film. I want the film itself. I want Steven Spielberg or whomever to care about my experience as a moviegoer.

This is not meant to sound all crankypants and it is still true that the writing life is quirky and interesting and unlike the reading life and should be discussed because, you know, the writing life is hard and often discouraging. But I think it's too easy to forget that we are supposed to be writing stories that will be read by others, hopefully lots of others who don't know us personally and never will and we'll be read long after our deaths and the important thing is supposed to be the text--the novel or the story--that we leave behind for these readers.

Speaking as a reader, I love you and the work you do, but when I read your book I want to forget about you. Which is to say, stop worrying about your Personal Expression. Stop worrying about your Voice. Stop worrying about being Individual or Unique or True to Yourself or whatever. Just stop. Stop worrying about it, stop blogging about it, stop talking about it. Just write well, for a reader you will never know. That's the job.

Should Your Readers Know You?

Self-portrait, July 4th 2010

I love it when someone reads one of my stories and initially assumes that I'm female. Or a Brazilian miner. Or a grocery store owner. That indicates to me that I've managed to create a convincing fictional narrator based on someone other than myself.

On the other hand, a lot of my most emotional writing is personal and autobiographical. I think my writing is stronger when I write from personal experience, and it is more emotionally satisfying for me to put something out into the world that does reveal something personal about my own life. (My first experience of publishing a short memoir was completely thrilling and terrifying.)

So, I often go back and forth about how much I want to reveal about myself in my stories. Sometimes I want readers to know who I am, and sometimes I like being invisible.

How do you feel? Are YOU important to your stories? Is it important for you to share your own views and thoughts through your fiction?

Tension on Every Page (and all that crap...)

As you probably already know, I dislike rules. I don't like people telling me what to do, and I especially don't like people building a box around my creativity. It's stifling. I can't work that way. I've also read one too many posts lately about rules and how the new trend is barreling toward everyone ignoring them.

Yet, I don't think we really are ignoring them. I think we like to pretend we are, but secretly, we're looking over our shoulder at the rule makers (hmmm, agents, publishers, the marketplace, our fellow bloggers...) who keep yelling "If you do that your story is going to suck!"

And we quickly turn back around and pretend we're ignoring them, but we delete that adverb anyway or cut the flashback or prologue or extra 10,000 words.

After judging all the entries for my short story contest, I realize there is always a need for discipline. Rules, maybe not so much, but discipline, yes. Stories can get sloppy around the edges and especially the middles. They can feel like jello, and I don't like that feeling. I think one of the biggest problems I found with stories that didn't make it into my final cut of "I think this is a winner" pile, was lack of discipline - attention to details, cutting unnecessary story, etc.

The difference, to me, between rules and discipline is this:

(RULE) - Hmm, it's like a plug-this-here-and-it-will-fix-the-problem product. In fact, it IS a product. How many WRITING BOOKS have you read? Yeah, I thought so.


(DISCIPLINE) - It's more like FIGURING IT OUT ON YOUR OWN and sticking with it, isn't it?

See, I happen to believe that every story needs tension. It falls flat without it. I'll read along in a story and about the time I realize I'm bored out of my mind I see that the story lacks one main element - tension. That's a big RULE for me. But that's for me. Your idea of tension is different than my idea of tension. We all like different things.

So I think you need tension, whatever that is. (And by the way, I don't think tension means suspense. Suspense means you don't know something. Tension is more like stretching. It's uncomfortable. It means conflict and worry and your reader's heart beating faster because they see that the character is going to lose something or never gain what they lost in the first place. The fact that your reader cares about your character and will keep turning the pages to get past that uncomfortable "stretching" probably means there's some good tension going on. And that's my lame attempt at 11:00 at night to explain tension).

So you think you've put tension in your story, but I'm still bored. Your other readers are bored, too, or at least you suspect they are. No one is publishing your story. There's obviously a problem. Maybe not for you because you like what you've written, but for everyone else there's a problem, and if you want to sell your story and have more than 5 people read it and enjoy it, you should probably change some things.

Please don't go out and buy a writing book and think it's going to solve everything for you. Sure, read it. Absorb it. Consider what it says. But understand that every word in there is what worked for THAT writer and what they think is good writing. The book isn't going to make you a good writer. Your discipline is.

If your story lacks tension, go read a story packed with tension. Then read another one and another one and another one. Then go back to your story and you might see what it's missing. Reading a book about tension and how to put it into your story will help you learn the rules, but on many levels it won't get you far - unless you want to sound like a machine spitting out a mechanical story. Studying what works will get you somewhere. It will give you intuition where rules never could.