Sep 30, 2006 | Uncategorized |
What I learned at Starbucks this week is that I can deliver the goods when absolutely forced. When all internet and possibility of internet is brutally cut off, I have no choice but to work. Oh, I stared at the screen plenty. I shifted my poor butt on the rock-hard cafe chair when it began to ache. I drank coffee. I listened to my iPod. And I wrote 6 pages in 3 hours!
What forced this crisis, you ask? I am one who doesn't like to leave home, toting the computer, to go to a cafe and work. It's a pain. I'm sure I won't actually get much done. I wonder what all the other people with laptops are doing. Does that slightly spacy guy over there think he's the next Faulkner? Are there really this many people who want to write novels, or are they surfing? Why here?
But, I had no choice except to endure the cafe experience. For some reason that is still not apparent, our power went out on Wednesday evening and stayed out for nearly 24 hours. That meant the cable went too, and it stayed out even longer.
So, Thursday morning, I was forced to get dressed (thank God the water was still hot) and head for Starbucks if I wanted coffee and food. I set up my laptop, complete with the new security cable I bought, and tried, oh yes I did, to connect to the T-Mobile HotSpot. I refuse to pay $10 for a day pass. But, lo, for T-Mobile voice customers such as moi, one can get UNLIMITED access for only $19.99 a month. Oh, sign me up!
Except that apparently the offer isn't good in Hawaii. WTF? Or at least it wasn't good for me, because no dice, I couldn't sign up. Which totally forced me to close out all IE windows and stare at my WIP.
Oh the torture! The pain! The agony! And then the first trickle of an idea began, then another, and another, and before I knew it I was certain about what was going on in this scene, this chapter. Lots of staring, deleting, and typing, but I got six good pages out of it.
So now I believe I am going to be forced to consider the Starbucks experience more frequently. I need to see if I can do it again, or if it was merely an anomaly. On the other hand, I got far less done today because guess what–I had to catch up on all those emails I'd missed yesterday, take care of the business newsletter I edit, and do some RWA business. Now the weekend is here and I'll get next to nothing done with a man around the house. Not to mention it's 33 days until he retires and we've got movers coming in about three weeks and we still need to go through stuff. Yikes.
Where do you work best? Home? Starbucks? The local microbrewery (I once watched a woman making airline reservations at the next table over during Happy Hour. I hope she really wanted to go and wasn't making a drunken decision, ha!)? What's your routine like?
Sep 26, 2006 | Uncategorized |
The good news is that my thesis has been accepted WITHOUT REVISIONS!! My mentor and both readers have signed off on it! I was SO worried about the philosopher guy, but he signed the approval page. He did, of course, enclose an article for me that he'd written on Locke's theory of personal identity since I briefly mentioned Locke in my thesis. But he stated that my thesis was engaging and interesting and he enjoyed it. Whew!
All three readers recommended an A grade. Woo-hoo! Now, I simply have to get through the graduate studies office review (they check for formatting issues) and then submit the entire thing on fancy paper to the library by Dec 1. I will graduate in December. I am so happy!!! It took me entirely too long to do this, and I procrastinated the hell out of the thesis, but wow, I'm done.
Now if I could just finish this dang novel……
Sep 20, 2006 | Writing |
Okay, raise your hand if you know a writer who believes her work will be stolen if she shares it with anyone. Someone who laboriously puts a copyright symbol on every page or, worse, registers the copyright by paying the $30 (or whatever it is now). Found this post today over at Edward Champion's blog, which made me nod and say “Amen!”
The point of all this is that if you’re a writer clinging to the stubborn notion that someone is out there to “steal” your work, and if you are letting this get in the way of writing, submitting, or pitching, then I ask you for the good of humanity to step out of the way. Take up something else. All good writers are idea machines. All good writers have distinct and original voices in which an “idea” is just one component of an equation as intricate and inexplicable as love.
Perhaps this fundamental misunderstanding of the writing process is what causes so many people to ask the question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Would these same people ask a bookkeeper, “How do you keep focus when you’re inundated with so many numbers?” It’s just the way writers are wired. For a writer, ideas flow through the noggin like a barely controllable fire and trying to manage all this is a bit like a good head rush during a run. There’s really nothing writers can do about this other than set it down on paper and do the best they can to convey this frenzy in coherent terms. If they’re lucky, they can make a living at this.
Afraid someone's going to steal my ideas? Nope. However, there IS something to be said for not talking about uncontracted work in detail on a public forum such as this blog. Suppose I outline my plot for you right here, in all its glory (snort), and you write up a proposal and sell it to your editor. Your work won't BE my work, but you may be cutting into my chances of selling a similar storyline because you already did so. If you think that's crazy, Alison Kent talked about that very thing on her blog a while back. (I linked to the post at the time, but can't find it now of course.) And Diana Peterfreund talks about the same thing in her post today.
When I said “keep that stuff off the internet,” I was talking about writers who blog at length about their uncontracted ideas. Call me superstitious, but I don't do it.
Sounds like good advice to me. And that is totally different than the person in your critique group who won't let anyone take a chapter home to read and comment on at leisure because he's afraid that you, dear writer, may take his brilliant idea and write it yourself. Gimme a break!
Yesterday, in fact, someone sent me a link to a blog that was criticizing (okay, ripping to shreds) that Left Behind series of books about the apocalypse. And I realized, as I read the post, that OHMYGOD, I once wrote a story in 8th grade English class about — gasp — the people left behind after the Rapture! Those thieves! They somehow got a hold of my story! They took my idea! They made millions! I'm going to sue!
Okay, okay, I'm not really that insane, and I realize that me writing about the people left behind (I called the story “Alpha and Omega”) came from a really warped church experience with a group of people I won't name but who are pretty common in the American South. They scared the everlovin' shit out of me, and so the second coming was on my mind quite a lot at the time. Maybe those two dudes went to the same church, or maybe writing about what happens to those who don't get sucked up to Heaven with Jesus is a pretty common idea since, oh, every New Testament contains the story about the second coming and no one who's read it or had it preached to them wants to be left standing on the Earth after Jesus picks up his friends and boogies.
Ahem.
But sometimes ideas really do run in common threads. And what you think is unique, brilliant, never before been done, may exist in many incarnations in many writers' heads. All you can do is write your story your way, and then market it to agents and editors in the hopes of seeing YOUR vision be the one on the shelves.
Steal your ideas? Puh-leeze. I've got too many of my own.
Now tell me about a time when you saw your plot or your idea or your character's name in a published book. I just told you about my left behind story, but I have another one. Once I named a horse in my WIP Sirocco. I loved it, and it's the name of that wind that blows from Africa up the Med and into Europe. Loved it. Imagine my surprise when I read, after I'd finished the book, Laura Kinsale's Prince of Midnight and she had named a horse, you guessed it, Sirocco. Damn it.
Sep 18, 2006 | Uncategorized |
If you didn't get enough of Miss Snark's Crapometer a couple of weeks ago, Rachel Vater is doing queries and first pages on her blog this week. I gotta tell you, these blogging agents and editors out there have really REALLY opened my eyes. There is nothing in this world like seeing for yourself just how boring slush can be. Doesn't mean the author can't fix it, btw, just means that it seems like Jung's collective unconscious is alive and well in the storytelling world. We all begin with beginnings: waking up in the morning, driving a car, looking in the mirror, relating the character's boring old backstory before the action begins. It's natural to begin at the beginning, though no less a personage than Aristotle himself told us to begin in media res. That was over a millenia ago, btw.
So why do we still start at the beginning? I guess it's habit. I solved the backstory issue in the current WIP by including a short newspaper article on the first page that told what had happened to the heroine. It's done well in contests, so I guess I did it right.
But, I was thinking about another story this weekend, and the opening line popped into my head. She wasn't waking up or looking in the mirror, but the action didn't happen until the third line. So, I had to rework it a bit. I know, third line should be fine, right? But I had the heroine standing there doing nothing for the first two as I told backstory. Nope, not going to work. Open with the action, then tell the (limited) backstory. Readers want to move forward in time, not backward or sideways.
Last week was pretty good for working on my WIP, actually. The hubby was home sick on Wed & Thurs, and then he decided to take Friday off, so I had a man in the house with me while I was trying to work. Never an easy thing, but he spent a lot of time reading. He took one end of the couch and I took the other, plopping my laptop beside me on the little lapdesk I have. It worked fairly well, though by Friday I was getting sick of the house.
So, Friday night, we accepted an invite to go out for happy hour with friends. OMG, did we have fun. Beer and friends is always a good combination.
Saturday, I suggested we go to Borders. I took my computer and the hubby took his book. After a round of musical tables, I finally snagged one near an outlet. I worked on my WIP and managed to write about 5 pages.
I've been thinking about openings lately, especially since I've been thinking of a new story, so I've been talking to my husband to see what interests him in a book. He's been reading a lot lately, and not much has really moved him. He read a David Eddings book that he didn't much care for (this after having read the Belgariad and Malloreon last year), read Golding's Lord of the Flies on my recommendation and thought it was okay but predictable, moved on to Stephen King's Gunslinger where he determined that SK has a weird outlook on life, enjoyed Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and then picked up Dracula. (In fact, I guess this is beyond openings and more about story, but I still want to know how he was dragged in.)
Bram Stoker has scored a direct, and somewhat surprising to my hubby, hit. He LOVES this book, and he didn't think he would. The man is glued to it. I bought it because I've never read it and always intended to, but he's beaten me to it. And he totally loves it.
I have to admit that I enjoy seeing him so wrapped up in a book. Because I love to read and I get wrapped up like that and it's one of the best feelings ever, and I want to share it with my husband. He doesn't read as much as I do ordinarily, but he's certainly been on a reading jaunt the past few weeks and he's enjoying the hell out of it.
So how did Stoker manage to hook his readers with an opening like this?
Jonathan Harker's Journal
3 May. Bistritz. __Left Munich at 8:35 P. M, on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.
Knowing the train was an hour late introduces a little bit of conflict, but not enough to propel one forward. There is the suggestion, however, that Harker is on a journey. Where is he going? Why is he passing through these places so quickly and not taking time to look around? Is something urgent awaiting him? What could it be? Even though this book is from a different era, and has a century of reputation to recommend it, would it still be so popular if it didn't manage to grip something in the modern reader's imagination? Apparently, it does, even if it's not quite the immediate opening of today's commercial fiction novel.
Commerical fiction is about more than opening lines, sure, but I just picked some books off my shelves to look at random opening lines and the promise they hold (because they ARE promising something to us, or we wouldn't keep reading):
“You're going to feed them again?” (Heather Graham, The Island)
Going to feed who? Why is this a problem?
If Annabelle hadn't found a body lying under “Sherman,” she wouldn't have been late for her appointment with the Python. (Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Match Me If You Can)
Oh wow, who's Sherman, what body, and Pythons take appointments?!
Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. (Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)
Really? Cool! What did they do?
Every one of these lines promises something. The promise might vary from reader to reader, but it's there nonetheless. And it's what keeps us reading. That's why, I think as I work my way through this, that static openings like dreams and driving don't move us. It's an overused way of delivering the promise. Sometimes, it doesn't deliver at all, though I won't say you can't open a book with someone driving and make it compelling. Nora Roberts does it, that's for sure (can't remember the book, but she had a driving scene to open). You can even open with someone being awakened from a dream by action, but it's been done to death. This is why agents and editors tell us to write something fresh, to twist the old into something new.
A recent article by Sam McCarver in The Writer stated that you should “begin with your strong, empathetic main character involved in a scene. Show your character facing a challenge, decision or course of action on page one–or better, in paragraph one, or even line one. Hit the ground running with activity–not with biography, history, or backstory.”
In fact, working through this right here, it occurs to me that it's the character involved in action, not having action happen TO him or her, that makes for a compelling opening. If someone's shooting at your character, naturally he's going to be trying to escape.
That's action, but only if he makes decisions that impact whether the bullet hits him or not. If all he does is duck behind a brick wall and sit and think about how he got here in the first place, that's not too compelling. Have that bullet be threatening, so close, and have him constantly on his toes trying to get away. That will keep me reading for sure. Promise me something good, promise me consequences for failure, promise me rewards for success–just promise me something, immediately, and then set about delivering it.
Think about your promises as a writer. What did you promise in that first line? Did you deliver? Or is the promise unclear or missing? How could you fix it?
Sep 15, 2006 | Uncategorized |
I was reminded recently of how annoying disembodied body parts can be in a novel. I read a book where lips slid, slipped, quirked, danced, twisted, and God only knows what else. Once or twice is one thing. Constantly, on every other page or so, is a bit much.
So, today's hint, watch out for those body parts with a mind of their own! It doesn't have to be lips. It can be anything. If you've got a body part twisting or quirking or dancing to convey emotion, think twice about it. There's probably a better way to say it.
It's easy to get carried away and forget to look for this stuff, but you'll be glad you did.
Tell me about the most annoying disembodied body part you've encountered recently. Leaping hearts (guilty)? Waggling eyebrows? Dancing lips?
