Blog Archives
Discipline
This month tapped me on the shoulder a bit ago. “Halloo,” it said. “Would you perhaps care to join me?”
I picture him looking a wee bit like the genie enumerating the rules of wishes in Aladdin – rather like the first picture here:
I wish I knew a big blue guy to grant some wishes.
I decided to go with him. He seemed to know what he was doing in a stuffy sort of way, and he informed me in no uncertain terms that the month would require a certain amount of hard work. Little did he know, I had ulterior motives.
Is writing a fancy or a feeling? (Or a Ferrars…) I suspect for most of us, it begins as a little of both. Whether it’s a fit of inspiration as a young child or some burgeoning need as an adult, writers start out because of some nebulous drive to create.
A Fit of Inspiration Recorded
My fancy began as a way to get the stories out. I felt them in my head, squirming around in there. Kind of squiggly things, stories. Like a worm behind your eye if you’re aware of them. If you’ve read my About Me page, you probably know that 9-year-old Emmie took a run at the world of science fiction. My idea was based on something I’d heard — that if you were to travel through space fast enough, you could go somewhere and return to Earth the same age, though everyone else would have aged and died. So I boarded a ship with my best friends from school (leaving all their names intact, but changing mine in a fit of narcissism to go with the inspiration) and we took off to explore foreign planets. I remember thinking quite clearly that they would return to Earth to find everyone they knew dead. Sadly, the work never got finished and though I kept hold of it in a miraculous feat of preservation through the 5-8 moves after we left Portland, I haven’t seen it since early high school. I stopped writing because of some unknown little feel for the admonition to write what you know — and I knew nothing about astrophysics or quantum mechanics.
Through middle school and high school, I wrote for class, and those were the most rewarding times I had with schoolwork. Somewhere around junior year, I began my first major attempt at a novel. This time it was fantasy, because I could write what I knew and share it with people who might know the same world even if they didn’t know they knew. That’s how I feel when I read my favorite fantasy — I knew that world was out there. It feels like home, familiar. The best authors connect with the subconscious worlds of us all.
Through all that fanciful feeling that spanned about a decade and a third, the thing I lacked was discipline. Even after I consciously admitted to myself that I wanted to write, it took a long time to admit to anyone else. I grew up poorer than poor, and I didn’t want to keep living like that. That meant college and a Real Job, and when I graduated from high school, Clinton had only been gone a couple years, and that was when university still worked that way. So I went to university and studied biology for a semester before switching to history. I often wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had Dr. Bill Watson as my first college history professor. I had adored biology in high school and thought about being a research microbiologist, studying genes and DNA. My first bio professor at university was okay, but I already knew everything in the intro course, and I slept through it. Literally. That was my nap time. (Very, very rude in hindsight — but I couldn’t not go to class because I would fail, and I had learned all of the information two years earlier. Thanks, Mr. K.)
I began to write seriously, if tinged with a lot of naivete. Dunked in naivete, you might say. I kept my writing to myself and didn’t share it with anyone, afraid that someone would accuse me of a worthless fancy. Why I was afraid of that, I don’t know. And if you read what I wrote yesterday morning, you’ll know what came next.
The point of all this re-hashing of the past is this: all the fancy and feeling in the world won’t help achieve goals. Somewhere along that line of development and secretive writing between massive history papers, I created my very first Writing Goal. It was a simple one, and I didn’t think of how lofty or involved it was until much later.
I wanted to see my book in a cover on shelves. I wanted my name on the spine. I wanted to take the worlds and stories that squirm inside my head and get them out, in hopes that they existed in the minds of others as well. For all creative types, I think there comes a moment when we realize that all the creativity in the world is wasted if we lack one ten letter word.
Discipline.
That’s what NaNoWriMo is for me right now. It’s an exercise in cultivating discipline, to post here every day even if the time to hit my word count flits away on the breeze. It’s making a conscious effort to consistently devote my energies to that little goal of Book On Shelf. NaNo is the kick in the pants, but I know as the sun sets on each new day who is responsible for what comes next. It’s not you, gentle viewers. It’s me.
So this is how it’s going to work.
Step One: Ass in chair.
Step Two: Fingers on keys.
Step Three: Stories on paper.
Step Four: Make stories better.
Repeat until Book On Shelf.
Book On Shelf For Yogis
Like this:
Watch Your Mouth
It’s going to do a trick!
Sorry. I’m just chock-full of the bad puns lately. You can smack my wrist if you must.
Well, gentle viewers, we are back to The 25 for the penultimate day! Aren’t you excited?! I sure am. Though I’m going to have to start nosing around for little tidbits to chuck my two cents at day after day. Hm.
Here’s today!
24. Language
Think of your writing as a windshield. Ill-suited words can streak and cloud your reader’s view, and just-right language can be as clarifying as a high-powered carwash. Once you have a solid draft, it’s time to consider:
- Could a different word bring even more energy or resonance to a poignant moment through sound, subtleties of meaning, or syllabic rhythm?
- Could the setting be conveyed more vividly? Is the natural world palpable?
- Is the emotional tone consistently resonant? Are there neutral words or passages that could be more charged?
- Does the language powerfully enact the action?
As you polish and prune, each piece of writing will teach you something new about what is possible. Let yourself be surprised.
—Cohen
Ah, language. Such a fickle critter. Sometimes it’s in our corner, flowing off our tongues and out of our fingertips like some kind of magical chi. Other times, it’s a monkey flinging poo at our heads. And that’s all that drips off of us. Poo.
There are times when what’s important is to simply vomit the words onto the page, like this month, where hundreds of thousands of writers feverishly slave at their notebooks (electronic or otherwise) to just get the damn things out of us. Words.
And then comes December. It’ll roll over on you like a sleeping grizzly, flinging a furry arm over your face in its hibernation, then cough bear breath — which I imagine smells something like stale sushi and digested berries — in your face to remind you that what you just vomited on the page is stinking up its den. And you’ll want to clean it up, because you’re not stupid enough to piss off a hibernating grizzly, no matter how sleepy he looks.
This one looks friendly enough.
The best way I know when my language is flinging poo instead of sparkling like magic is when my attention wanders away from the page I’m revising. Come December, I’ll be going back over my first draft with a red pen text color to mark any points in the manuscript where I see something shiny in another direction, or start pouncing light beams on my wall.
Reading aloud can also show you sticky spots. If your tongue falls out on the floor or ends up in a knot tied around your uvula, some re-wording is probably in order.
The questions posed by The 25 are very good starting points. Some others to ask yourself are:
1. Are your action scenes dragging?
2. Does your exposition drop you like a weighted body at the bottom of the sea?
3. Do your characters make themselves distinct? Pick a random (but meaningful) chunk of dialogue and stick another character’s name in the attribution. Have one of your readers read it. If they shrug at you, look over that character’s dialogue. People have verbal tics. Listen to your characters until you find theirs, then pepper their speech with them. Liberally.
4. Does your story flow from beginning to end or does it cough and mutter in fits and starts?
Language is both the poo-flinging culprit and the glorious wand-waving solution to all of those issues. So when you revise, make sure you keep that grizzly happy. Or at least bring him some honey.
Like this:
Do You Feel What I Feel?
The last few bits and bobs from The 25 have dealt with creating an experience beyond the words of a story. It’s the difference between standing in line at the DMV and standing in line for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Universal Studios — they both get you from Point A to Point B, but the latter immerses you in an experience while you get there. (Granted, going to the DMV can be an experience as well, but not one that makes you want to go back and do it again. I think that’s why in Maryland our registration is good for two years.)
The next in line is this:
20. Evoking Emotion
Hemingway spoke of a story’s “sequence of motion and fact.” James M. Cain discussed “the algebra of storytelling: a + b + c + d = x.” What they meant was a sequence of incidents in a story that, if arranged correctly and dramatized vividly, will create a stimulus that compels the reader to feel the emotion the author is trying to create. Talking about emotions won’t compel a reader to feel them. “He felt sad” won’t make a reader feel sad. Instead, the reader must be made to feel the situations in the story, to experience what the characters experience; as a result, just as a sequence creates emotion in the characters, it will do the same in the reader. This is a case of stimulus-response.Writers can achieve this effect if they take the sense of sight for granted and emphasize the other senses, thus crafting multidimensional descriptions and scenes. Details of sight alone almost always create a flat effect, so when revising, take a few minutes to make sure that each scene has at least one other sense detail. In this way, the reader becomes immersed in the story, feeling it rather than being told about it.
—Morrell
This is exactly what I was talking about in my post earlier this week – in good writing, the words disappear. The way to get your readers to care about your characters is to layer flesh on their bones and sinews, to fill them with thoughts and feelings that readers connect to. Writing is the ultimate 4-D experience because it allows you to do literally anything. You can take your readers anywhere in the universe, create new worlds, or show them another side of this one. The trick to that, as Morrell says, is to take the sense of sight for granted and focus on the other ones.
Close your eyes for a moment. What do you hear? I hear the whir of cars on the main road outside of my apartment building. I hear an insistent tapping inside one of the living room walls that never seems to go away. I hear the buzz of our air purifier and the click of the button on my husbands jeans in the dryer. All these little noises add texture to the scene, even a mundane scene. The tapping in my wall is most likely not a ghost or a gremlin or some other supernatural critter (if it is, it’s a friendly one saying hello). These are just noises. Silence is extinct in this world, or at the very least on the endangered species list alongside my beloved tigers.
If two of your characters are having an awkward conversation, show that with the little noises of the world around them between dialogue points. Talk about awkward — you can build the tension of an uncomfortable conversation if you use their other senses.
What do you feel with your eyes closed? I feel a light stirring of air from the ceiling fan in the dining room, which my husband always leaves on. Say your characters are fighting, and he storms out of the house. She sits in the quiet, empty room with only the breeze from that fan as a reminder he was ever there.
What do you smell? I smell a whiff of fabric softener, a touch of sugar cookie from my tea, a little cinnamon from our air freshener, and the earthy, sheepy scent of wool from my blanket. Maybe your character catches a tiny whiff of stale sweat, or the scent of perfume so soft it’s almost a memory. Scent is powerful — it can evoke as much in writing as it can in life.
Taste also doesn’t have to be neglected. The chalky, dry mouth that accompanies terror, the herbal, almost tingling taste of horehound lozenges that remind you of grandma — taste can bring your story to life as well.
Anyone can tell you that the sky is blue, but if you lull your readers into your story with the singing of the crickets, the cool grass beneath your back as the horizon darkens into twilight and the thermos of hot cider that warms your insides with a sweet tang — do that and you’ll keep them coming back for more.
Like this:
Fuel Up
Most writing advice will tell you to just write every day, no matter what. I don’t always work that way. I go through cycles of immense productivity. There was a night last year where I wrote 12,000 words. That is a lot of words. I’ll plow through whole chapters in a sitting. I finished my novel and got halfway through the second one that way.
Then I burnt out.
Dead.
Not completely, and not in the sense of never wanting to write again, but it happened. I noticed in the three years that followed that when that would happen, I would go through a period where I wouldn’t even look at my book. I wouldn’t touch other books. I would just slog along. That wasn’t very magical, nor was it productive at all. I then realized that when I started craving words and ingesting them at the rate of two 1,000 page books a week, I was coming up on another spurt. Last year, I had an idea. No matter how I feel, I make myself read.
Reading, you see, fills my tank. It renews my love for writing and wordcraft. It comforts me in the presence of old friends or introduces me to new ones. Lately, I’ve had the itchy fingers all the time. Even when I had a two week hiatus for my wedding and honeymoon, I wanted to write. I thought about writing. I read whenever I had a spare second. The tank was full, but I had no outlet.
Since I’ve been back, I’ve been reading constantly. I bring a book with me wherever I go, in case I have to wait for something. Reading fuels me for writing. This harkens back to Stephen King’s advice to writers: Read a lot, write a lot.
Last night I decided to do a short 20 minute writing sprint before bed. It turned into 40. I took that last bit of my novel that has been bothering me so much, highlighted it, and hit delete. It disappeared, and I sighed a sigh of relief. I started over. I made the story more succinct and a bit darker. I cut through all the useless preamble and got to the meat of things. It’s one part resolution, one part introduction, and another part foreboding — and all parts propel the story to the end much more effectively than they did before I deleted those ten pages. It was a freeing thing.
As novelists, we have to try to produce hundreds of pages of manuscripts. That sentence alone looks rather daunting. It might even make you say eek. The point is not to burn out. The point is to create new stories and characters that contain bits and pieces of your Self and Soul without scraping those two things out of your core and leaving you empty and listless. The point is to not look like this at the end:
You don't want your brain to look like this.
Find whatever it is that makes you itch to write. If it’s reading, surround yourself with good books. If you’re like me and a big fantasy/urban fantasy nerd, the Science Fiction Book Club should be your new best friend. Joining gets you a gaggle of books for a dollar, and their membership terms only make you (make, pfffffffffffffft) buy four more books in a year. Even if you’re broke like me, you can handle it. Go you.
If it’s hiking or yodeling, go do those things. If you’re a writer, it’s because something in you says you must write. Don’t fail to listen to that. Fuel up your tank and gear up for the next month, whether you’re going to dive into NaNoWriMo or not.
How about this: a challenge for you, my lovely gentle viewers. My turn to be the gorse bush in your bum. Let’s all of us take the month of November by storm. It can be your birthday present to me that also benefits you! The perfect gift! The challenge is for you to write 1,500 words a day for the month of November. Snap a pic of your word count to show me. Once a week, whichever day you choose, spend an hour or more doing something you love that refills your tank and tell me about it — and send or post a picture (as long as it’s not that kind of picture). I’ll do the same.
We’ve got a week for me to work out the details of this challenge, but I’ll figure out some sort of little prize for winners if you decide to participate. (It will probably have to be little…but who says little can’t also be awesome?)
What do you say? You have a week to mull it over and get your oogly booglies out for the upcoming holiday. You know where to find me.
Like this:
Writing A Picture A Day
That’s the challenge I’ve set for myself. Regardless of whether I’m working a double shift or working out or overworked, the challenge I’m setting is for me to write a thousand words a day. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a good thousand words has every bit as much power as a picture and sometimes more. It just depends on what those words are. It also depends on what order you put them in. Funny little thing about writing.
An amusing story about writer James Joyce opens with him, dejected in his writing space. I picture him sitting, forehead on his desk, looking like he passed out in his pasta bowl. A friend comes in and asks him how many words he got done that day.
“Seven,” Joyce says.
“That’s good!”
“But I don’t know what order they go in!”
Whether or not that story is true is moot — I think many of us can relate to that. The words aren’t always the problem, it’s just that sometimes writing is like a two-year-old walking a Great Dane. You can have all that power on a leash, but if it decides it wants to smell that tree, you are helpless as the toddler as it drags you with it.
I usually surpass that thousand words in my blog alone, and lately I’ve been revising and rewriting prolifically as well. What I’m trying to do is exercise the writing muscle. Get it used to lifting weight around on a consistent basis so that stuff gets done. Sometimes it’s not easy — outside of work, I have a fiance who likes it if I notice his presence and a wedding to plan. One could say there’s a lot on my plate. In spite of that, it’s time to write. It’s time to let that Great Dane drag me wherever it wants to go, because he’s the muse.
My muse is a shapeshifter. I think that’s fairly appropriate, considering it’s me he’s hanging out with. I would never burden a human being with the title, so I’m stuck with what I’ve got. Sometimes he’s the Great Dane on the trail of some exciting new smell, and I’m just along for the ride. Other times he’s a telephone operator, connecting me with the characters when they ring in.
“Emmie. Jason wants to talk to you, and he’s really pissed. Something about overactive clams.”
Okay, the overactive clams bit is an exaggeration, but seeing as how that particular character is bat-shit insane, it’s not too far off the mark of something he would actually say.
Other times, my muse is an old granny who wears glasses with lenses the size of baseballs and as thick as Mason jars. The frames are a virulent crimson, and they sit askew on her leathery, wrinkled face. She still has all her teeth, but her mouth has the look of someone who’s lost them, and her smiles are often beatific, though glowing. She feeds me her tidbits in the form of butter cookies about to go stale and sweetened tea with lots of milk, served in glasses with no handles. Sometimes she wears a baseball cap that’s far too big for her head, the brim wide and flat. She often has cookie crumbs on her denim jacket.
My muse takes many shapes. I like the idea of having a muse rather than there just being one out there floating around in the ether. My muse fits me — yours might be an Aslan-like lion who roams about your apartment and roars when he thinks you’re not paying attention. Stephen King describes his muse as a man who lurks around his basement, gnawing and smoking fat cigars and poking through all his stuff until he feels like piping up.
My shapeshifting muse is the reason that picture a day happens. At its core, my muse is trying to reach you, gentle viewers. My muse has stories to tell, connections with other worlds that she wants to share with you. (Yes, her gender changes. Why wouldn’t it?) Your muse has different stories. Our muses might get together and have coffee sometimes, and because of that, our stories might have similar themes.
A lot of writers say that if you just write — every damn day, no matter what apocalypse threatens on the horizon — your muse will start knowing where you hang out. Your muse will come find you and start dragging or talking. It’s only a matter of time when you make the effort to open that conduit and hear what your muse has to say. A thousand words go by pretty quickly when your muse is chattering at you in your ear.
Mine knows that I live in the spare room of our little two bedroom apartment. He knows that my fingers are connected with the keyboard of my constipated dinosaur of an iBook, and that if he says something to me while I’m in here, I’ll hear it. Assuming one of the many trains that travel within a hundred yards of me isn’t blaring its horn at that moment, I’ll hear it. She also knows that she can find me between shifts, sipping the cheapest venti Starbucks drink I can muster and walled in by my emotional blinders to concentrate. She’ll sit down across from me and hand me some hot tea instead with some butter cookies, and she’ll start talking. That’s what she does. My muse knows where to find me. Sometimes he sniffs me out when I’m at work, wanting to drag me across the street by the leash while I’m trying to remember which guy wanted the IPA and if the table wanted sour cream on their nachos. It’s been raining a lot, and that Great Dane doesn’t smell better than your average soggy puppy.
There’s a lot of pictures buried in this post, which returns me to the idea of writing a picture a day. This is a thousand words — how many pictures? You tell me.
Like this:
MIA
Not the princess of Genovia. (Why on earth would you make up a country, anyway? Much as I love Anne Hathaway, The Princess Diaries would have been so much better if they threw in a badass swordfight or had Princess Mia saving the world from an invasion of bodysnatching robots. But then again, what wouldn’t be improved by those things?)
I have been doing that thing where I get sucked into life junque. Memorial Day was lovely. I participated in the annual ritual sacrifice of gnawing on pig rib cages, driving long stakes through the hearts of various vegetables, and indulging in large amounts of salads that contain neither vegetables nor anything resembling health. It was lovely. However, upon my return to reality (and thus, work — ugh), I had an encounter with my scale which left me rather scarred and frightened, although it did give me an explanation for those size 13 shorts I had to buy.
I’m not one to fuss too much about weight. As long as I feel good, I’m fine. But that’s the thing — lately I’m sluggish, lazy, and sleep-deprived. So I’ve decided to do something about it, which has left me a bit behind in the writing world.
Fear not, gentle viewers. More writing is afoot. I’ve spent a whopping 266 minutes this week on the elliptical exercising and shaking my booty (why treadmill those pounds when you can dance them off? I mean, really) just to ensure that my booty doesn’t end up causing shaking when it passes. That would be bad. And not nearly as cool as a boobquake. Although according to my boyfriend, his coworkers regularly comment on my bootyliciosity. I’m a bit perplexed by that and ever-so-slightly unnerved. I don’t know if I want to be known for my rear endy parts. At least it’s a term of approval.
Okay, my bum aside. I really will get back to writing and away from these meandering digressions. Do you see what the imminent onset of summer break does to me? Look at me, I’m molting. (Not really.)
Working Out
Turns out, it’s actually a bit of a workout. Go figure.
After literally six weeks of laying around on my arse, I decided it was about time to get off it and try to lose some of the weight that made itself known to me as I attempted to pour it into a pair of shorts yesterday. This pair of shorts was a size bigger than what I wore last summer. Needless to say, the swells of flesh that so stubbornly prohibited my arse from fitting into the denim made their point. They’ve made themselves at home, and I think I need to evict them.
Hence the workout.
I have been a bit scarce for the last few days. At least I think I have. Time has gone all wonky. I really think there is some sort of rift in the space-time continuum, but that’s neither here nor there. It is Memorial Day weekend, I suppose, which may excuse any of my scarcity (but would not excuse a rift in the space-time continuum).
I’ma go to the beach! It’s for a whole two days, but still. Beach. Me. Go. Picture me, the whitest white girl in white-onia, slathered in SPF 100 so as to look even whiter, lounging in an olive green bikini, feeling self-conscious whilst squishing my toes in very hot sand and trying to think of ways to get my boyfriend to make out with me under the boardwalk. Yep. That’ll be me tomorrow. And I’m serious about that boardwalk thing. I’ve wanted to do that ever since I heard Bette Midler pound out that song in Beaches. My boyfriend’s plans consist of eating lots of pizza and…sandwiches. (If you are a How I Met Your Mother fan, you will know precisely to what I am referring by the latter.) I have only a few things on my agenda:
1. Play a round of mini-golf.
2. Eat some Dippin’ Dots and see if they are as good as I always hoped they would be as a child — I was never allowed to get them.
3. Make out under the boardwalk.
4. Walk. A lot. Preferably on the beach. This is part of my whole fat eviction scheme.
As you can see, Item 1 has suffered a setback. The setback is that I am broke, and mini-golf is seldom cheap, particularly in a high-frequency, high-tourist area such as Bethany Beach. (Why, yes, gentle viewers! You now know where I will be this weekend.)
I don’t think I will have the money to eat, which is okay because of that whole fat eviction thing. It’s only two days, anyway.
On that note, I am off to be a nerd and play Fable 2 whilst pondering my story and waiting for the boyo to get off work.
