all in all you’ve hit the wall

What are some of the reasons for stopping? In his book (which I recommend) on writing, IMMEDIATE FICTION, Jerry Cleaver makes the case for conflict and continually raising the stakes: ”Happy lives make lousy novels…. If the characters are having a good time, the reader is not.” What if, on the other hand, it’s about you and not the page?

There are some problems that can cause you to hit the wall, creatively speaking. Things like myopia when it comes to the work, being totally rule-bound (though please know the rules before you begin breaking them), forgetting to play, concentrating too hard on the outcome you want, fear, difficulty taking risks, lack of perspective, not listening to other opinions, worrying too much what others will think, and writing for the entire world. Newsflash, you can’t please everyone. Open up your process and let it breath. Have a good time. Get to your point. Have a reader in mind and write to them. Go out and play once in awhile.

The solutions for you as a writer are remembering your playfulness, striking that balance between what you want to say and getting helpful input from others, clarity, resourcefulness, research, persistence, flexibility and a willingness to go with your strengths while developing your weaknesses. If story isn’t your strong suit, do some writing exercises that focus only on the story. Honing your pitch would be one of them. The National Storytellers Network has lots of resources. There are more here. Visit Toastmasters. Yes, Toastmasters – tell a story to a room full of people. Write a play. Take an acting class. Get out of your comfort zone and improve your writing.

Can you play through pain? Are you stuck because it’s just too difficult? Marathoners (and for the record, that in no way describes me – blew out my knee playing soccer when I was a teen) talk about hitting the wall around mile 22 (26.2 miles in a marathon). There are plenty of sites and books to tell you how to prepare for the wall, but if you’re going to compete physically at a certain level – if you are serious about it – you learn to play (or run) through pain. In a sense, the same is true for writing. You have to learn to write no matter how you’re feeling (within reason – time off for major life events). In other words, it does not matter if the subject matter is uncomfortable psychologically or if you think the first three chapters stink or (whine, whine) you just don’t feeell like writing today, keep at it. When I talk to other novelists about it, our mile 22 is usually in act 2 (what is it with the number 2?) The fun and agony of it is that no one can save you, the writer, in Act 2. You have to find your own way out. Steven Pressfield and the always-opinionated David Mamet have been there and written about it. More on getting unstuck by Michael Bungay Stanier. Now that you are, go write!

 

wallflowers

Writers are not known for their social skills. Here’s an article on the 20th century’s most reclusive authors. However, most authors who last have engaged in a fair amount of self-promotion. Mark Twain comes to mind. And his autobiography is out. He would have loved all the social media available now. You can be reclusive – maybe people will find your books. You want the odds to tip in your favor, find a way to get the word out and either be or get comfortable doing it. Unless of course you only write for yourself.

What does this have to do with Mad Men? Not drinking, tempting as that may be when a writer must face the public. No, it’s about what your characters wear. Faran Krentcil takes a look at the women’s fashion in Mad Men. In one episode, many of the choices are designed to blend in with the sets (wallflowers, nudge, nudge). The Fashion File is a great resource for dressing your characters, to discover how to reinforce character and themes. Example, you ask?

In “Blowing Smoke,” cigarette campaigns and ruinous addictions both stoke the plot and influence the costumes. When Don Draper wrote an anti-tobacco manifesto for the New YorkTimes, he didn’t just have an ironic cancer stick in his hand. He also had an ash-colored suit and tie that referenced his nicotine clouds, Roger’s “black spot on the X-ray” comment, and the boardroom suggestion that the agency was “decaying.” In fact, a quick survey of the SCDP senior partners in their first meeting in this episode shows them all in various shades of gray, black, and white — skeleton colors, if we’re being honest. Add Faye Miller at the end of the table with a jagged black-and-white blouse, and the bleak at-death’s-door vibe is palpable. They look like a pile of bones.

What your people wear can reinforce themes and motifs. Something to think about. Keep writing.

 

not so odds & ends

Great post on how different writers write – routine or lack of it, setting deadlines, using page count vs. word count. I use word count, setting a rough goal (for the next novel, it will likely be in the 90,000 range) and then daily and weekly targets. It helps.

What do Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor have in common? Read all of The Brutality of Grace:

Throughout much of her life, Flannery O’Connor struggled against what she perceived as dangerous and excessive sentimentality among her readers, defending her stories against accusations of violence, brutality, and “gothic grotesqueness.” For her, violence was an essential part of her message, for “to expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.” Responding to her critics, O’Connor made an important point: “Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”

Yuvi Zalkow discusses using the computer as a creative tool for writing. I’m fine with MS Word, but if you want something simpler along with other suggestions, check out what he has to say.

30-Word Story Contest: SmokeLong Quarterly if you’re feeling overwhelmed, confine yourself to a 30 word story and enter

The rules:

•Thirty words exactly—no less, no more.
•You MUST have a title for your story, though the title does not count toward the word count.
•You can submit up to three stories, but please submit each story SEPARATELY.
•No entry fee.
•Submissions open from November 1 to November 30.

Enjoy your writing.

 

feedback

I am a lucky writer. I am fortunate to have a great network of talented writers. Some of us check in weekly, I have coffee or lunch with others now and then and we compare notes, cheer each other on or offer consolation. It helps tremendously. Forget the lonely garret. No one is successful by themselves; while you have to put in the hours writing and develop the skill and craft of it, you need other people to help you keep going, to finish, to cheer your successes, to pick you up after the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth rejection, and to provide feedback on what you’ve written. This last can be a bit tricky. One of my mentors (and brilliant writer), Rob Roberge, said no story has been made worse by (good) editing, but a few of my compadres take issue with that. One writer recounted killing the soul of a story through editing and another mentioned the experience that I have also heard from painters – that sometimes going back to a painting to fix something just made it different, not necessarily better. So I quote a classmate, “sometimes the first draft is the only draft.”  I would add that you need either a tremendous amount of innate talent or years of work before you know whether a first draft is that good. And so we return to feedback. You need trustworthy people with some experience and it doesn’t hurt to have a paid professional editor who won’t spare your feelings. It can also be of help to have someone who is in a different field altogether look it over. If you are fortunate, they will be able to identify problem areas, but will leave it to you to figure out how to fix them. All that said, I recently received feedback on my prologue that was in direct opposition to what I heard from the editor who works with a prospective agent. At the end of the day, you have to go with your gut to strike that balance between being open and knowing what’s best for the work. Don’t forget, it’s your story, your book and your name will be on it. The editor read the entire book and advised me not to touch a word of the prologue. She wasn’t hesitant to tell me what needed to be cut or altered in other parts of the novel, I was willing and the book’s better for it. My gut says she’s right about the prologue. There will likely be other changes on the road to publication, but for now, it’s done.

For luck, I leave you with an Irish blessing:

May your blessings outnumber
The shamrocks that grow.
And may trouble avoid you
Wherever you go.

Now go write!

 

chance favors the connected mind

Mingle, people, mingle! Go write with others. That’s where I’m headed – a cafe to meet a couple of fellow writers…

 

file under less is more

A hand, a foot, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
(Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, ll. 1427-8)

What if you write a scene of sex, violence, or intense emotion and focus only on one of the character’s body parts? Oh stop, not the obvious ones either. And yeah, I’m being silly with the crab legs. Have some fun, for goodness sake.

What would happen if you select just one of the senses and focused an entire scene through it?

 

Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

 

As far as sensory detail goes, the sense of smell is often overlooked. Writing can gain power not only with focus, but with the specific. Simple words can pack the most punch. Try zeroing in on only what your character smells in a paragraph and see where it takes you. It needn’t be as dark as Apocalypse Now, but it can be just as memorable.

Aaron Gansky discusses deeply imagining over at his blog. Check it out, then spend some time daydreaming (purposeful daydreaming, that is). Then of course, you have to write it down.

If you get tripped up by rules, take a look at what it perhaps the best copy editing blog out there, The Subversive Copy Editor. Now then, no more excuses. Go write.

 

booker prize

Congratulations to Howard Jacobson who won the Man Booker prize for THE FINKLER QUESTION. Haven’t read it yet, but since I just finished writing a comic novel, I’m looking forward to it.

 

 

work habits

Last week I finished revisions on my latest novel and sent it off to a reader I trust. Note: always have a couple of people who will tell you the truth look at something before you send it out. Agents and publishing houses don’t have the time and money to edit you the way they used to. (Remake of Shane for the literary set – Come back, Max Perkins, Max, come back!) It’s also a good idea to hire an editor as well. However, not my point. My point is about the writing life and work habits. Writers who are prolific, successful or both, put in long hours with their story. They write because they cannot not write. So what did I do after finishing? Let a couple of the people closest to me know, posted it on social media and started researching the next novel. I can’t say much about the next novel, but I am going to give myself some time for background reading because at the moment, it looks like a much bigger book than I’ve written before.

My preferred schedule is to go to the gym or for a hike in the hills, work till lunch, errands, then more writing, then if I’m on a roll, more writing in the evening. When I was wrestling with the revisions, it took a lot of staring into space while I struggled to solve the problems of replacing and moving scenes. One of the instructors at Antioch pointed out the value of writing immediately after sleep and sometimes I try to do that, just to see if more creative solutions come first thing out of dream time. I’m not sure it makes a difference for me. Basically, all you can do is what works.

 

you are what you do

Dovetailing continues. Or perhaps it’s serendipity. In any case, I rediscovered the Harvard Business Review. It contains a surprising number of articles that are helpful to novelists. If you haven’t thought about your purpose, read this. It is the key to discovering your personal fuel that will keep you going when things get rough on any level. This morning I read Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything. That would include writing! And the article includes what I’ve been discussing in recent posts. If you are a writer, you write. If you want to be an excellent writer, you write a lot. I need to write more. My discipline writing ritual has faltered in the last year or so and I need to write more hours a day. That said, hours daydreaming are not wasted for the fiction writer provided those hours are directed to a purpose: imagining yourself as someone else or in another time or place, in detail (or as I discovered with this round of revisions, spend the time imagining solutions/allow time for insight). This is not you playacting, but really being someone  or somewhere different while building up empathy, compassion, attention to detail, especially sensory detail, and so on. Want to know how to handle your agent, career or how to evaluate an agent’s style? Take a look at The Delicate Balance of Being Perfectly Assertive. Yes, most of the articles are “business-y,” but if you get past that, there’s a wealth of information on the site to apply to both your writing and career.

I fell back into thinking it’s about will and discipline, but as I was reminded via one of the links above, it’s not. Writing a novel is about establishing a writing ritual that works for you. Same with exercise and so on. I do much better when I exercise first thing in the morning. Too many excuses build up during the day. Same with writing. My only problem is choosing which one to do first!

More on the intersection of business, work habits and writing: if you are a Harry Potter fan, take a look at Oprah’s interview with JK Rowling. 6 parts, no commercials.

 

trust your reader

Read ROOM by Emma Donoghue a few days ago. The characters and story lingered after I finished the book, but now I find it’s fading fast. I believe the reason is that the way the book is constructed – from the viewpoint of a five year old boy – there’s no space for the narrative to comment on the larger issues of freedom, abuse, or evil. There is the implicit comment, of course, but for a book to really stay with me, it needs to be able to rise and fall further than the confines this narrative allows. It is, however, a good study of conveying more by showing less. The author also does a great job of building tension, especially in buildup before the “After” section. The ending is also well done and a natural place to stop – a place when we can easily imagine continuing, yet satisfied with what’s been told. There are some lapses – the five year old is sometimes too precious, and I didn’t always buy that I was in the mind of a little boy. There are points where the use of language feels gimmicky and the narrative manipulative, but there are many more positives than negatives here. It is an excellent illustration of one way to accomplish what I discussed in the last post of leaving room (pun intended). The reader gets to participate in the story. Instead of having the boy witness the sex or have a narrator show it or shift POV, we have the boy, Jack, in a wardrobe in a dark room counting bed squeaks. Eww. Makes it so much creepier by leaving it in our imagination rather than detailing everything on the page. Donoghue trusts her reader… and has a book on the short list for the Man Booker Prize.