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Tag: writing about writing

StoryADay update No. 3 #storyaday

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Here’s my report on this week’s progress for the May StoryADay Challenge.

Overall:  not great.

  • I wrote a sizeable chunk of a short story I’ve been thinking about for a couple years, but then the story decided to become a novella (probably about 7000 words when done).  So that became a multi-night project.
  • I finished a story for a contest that ended over a year ago.  It needs some editing, and a new title, but my beta readers have been encouraging with their feedback (“there are those that need to read this and find a kindred spirit. Pls get it out there in a journal where it can be read.”  Yay!)
  • I added another 500 words or so to the horror story I wrote last week.  The main character isn’t quite who I want him to be, so that’ll require some additional tweaking before I let the critiquers at it.  Fortunately I have a potential home for it in mind – an incentive to finish it soon.
  • I wrote a chunk of another story I’ve been working on for the last couple years.  I know where I want it to go, but I haven’t felt like writing it.  Today the mood struck. 

I think I might have to downgrade my goals.  Rather than write a story a day, I’d like to finish the month with 15 finished stories.  So far, I have 3.  But school is out for the summer in another week, so maybe I’ll still be able to pull this off?

If you’re doing the StoryADay challenge, how’s it going?

Z is for Zamyatin #atozchallenge

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Day 26 of the Blogging from A to Z April challenge. Today’s topic:  Yevgeny Zamyatin and creativity.

Last day!

Once upon a time, there was this guy who wrote a book about a dystopian society where the government controls every aspect of life.  The main character falls for a woman, which is against state law, and they sneak off to a place they think they won’t be watched.  Outside the city are people thought to be beneath the citizens of the police state.  The main character is eventually caught, lobotimized, confesses everything so that his girlfriend takes the blame, and falls in line with what the government teaches.

I know what you’re thinking.  “That’s 1984.  Big Brother.  Doublespeak.  Where we get the term Orwellian.  Everyone knows that.”

Well, kinda.  The book I described is We, written in Russia in 1923.  The book you’re thinking of was written in 1949, about a year after Orwell wrote a review of We and said he’d use it as a model for his next novel.

My whole point with this, I guess, is that maybe there aren’t any new ideas out there.  No matter what you write, someone will have covered it prior. 

So find those ideas.  Read, and read widely.  Experience life as much as you can, vicariously and armchair-ily to fill in the gaps, and discover those ideas.

Then take a new angle with them.  Add a twist, a different POV, a different theme.  Write it in your voice, colored by your own experiences.  Make it your own.

And maybe, someday, yours will be the one that’s remembered.

(Note: I really wanted to work in how Godsmack completely ripped off Metallica, but unfortunately it didn’t quite fit.  So I’ll just add it here at the end instead.)

W is for Writing Goals #atozchallenge

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Day 23 of the Blogging from A to Z April challenge. Today’s topic: writing goals (topic kindly stolen from Jessica Loftus).

At the beginning of the year, I set myself some resolutional goals (making up words was not one of them).

One-third of the way through the year, and with summer break fast approaching, it’s time to reevaluate and revise.

  • Get an agent (which means stop picking at my novel and just send it out already).

I’ve sent out queries, and this weekend I’ll send out more.

Ain’t happened.  I’m on chapter 10 and got sidetracked.  But I’m focusing on this novel with a writing group on Scribophile, so hopefully that’ll be the impetus I need to get going.

  • Have at least fifteen stories out on submission at any given time – currently I’m at nine. 

I was lucky enough to have a string of publications recently, so right now I’m at five out.  I have six half-written stories I’d like to finish, as well as several that need some tweaking.  If I can get them out soon, I’ll be able to meet this goal as well.

If you’re a writer, what are your goals for the next few months?

V is for Veracity #atozchallenge

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Day 22 of the Blogging from A to Z April challenge. Today’s topic: veracity.

In his book The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes,

“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” 

This has stuck with me as a writer, because often I’m writing about things that I haven’t personally  experienced.  And obviously I want these things – events, characters, themes – to resonate with the reader.  A big chunk of why I write is so that someone who doesn’t write will read something of mine and think, “That’s exactly what I would say.  She gets it. She gets me.”

O’Brien’s book is written as a memoir of his experiences in Vietnam.  Only the characters never existed, and their actions never happened.  But does that make them less real?

Our perceptions color so much of our lives.  What if we remember something differently than how it happened: different motivations, different reactions?  It was real, but it happened completely different than we thought.  What if I as a writer portray something that never happened, but could have?  But should have? 

What if I can discern your motivations and thoughts and express them in writing, even if you don’t even know why you’re doing something?  What if I can make something real for you?

I think that’s what we look for when we read, or watch a movie, or look at a painting – can the creator articulate what we can’t?  Can they make it real for us?

K is for Kill Your Darlings (figuratively, of course) #atozchallenge

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Day 11 of the Blogging from A to Z April challenge. Today’s topic: Kill your darlings.

The general consensus in writing seems to be, “Kill your darlings.”  It’s meant as being able to chop out big parts of the story that aren’t working, even though you may love the prose.

I’m a bit more literal than that.

I’ve had nine flash fiction stories published, and in four of them, someone dies.  In one, “Bardo Bureaucracy,” everyone obviously is dead. In the novel I’m shining right now, a major character dies.  In the novel I’m still writing, three characters die in the first section.

And it’s rarely a bad guy who’s offed (although I don’t really have bad guys; I try to nuance my characters so that everyone is both good and bad).

Macabre, depressing, or maybe just downright sadistic – call me what you will, but the deaths fit the stories.  They’re not pointless; they help the other characters grow.

If you write, do you frequently kill off characters?  If you read, how do you feel about authors killing off major characters?

Unreasonable constraints – lipograms

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It’s a well-known fact that writers are crazy masochists.  So crazy and masochistic, in fact, that they often put silly limitations on the words they use when writing.

Dr. Seuss did it with Green Eggs and Ham, written using just 50 words.  Ernest V. Wright wrote his novel Gadsby without the letter e, in a style known as a lipogram.  But as Robert Cass Keller pointed out, that’s easy, and it’s been done. Why not really challenge yourself?

So he suggests removing a few more letters.  Eleven, to be exact: BGJKPQVWXYZ.

My writing group’s assignment for the week:   write a 500-word piece of flash which uses the constraint suggested by Keller as equivalent to an axed e: a total lack of the letters ZQJXKVBYGWP.

I of course waited until the last minute and then got suckered into teaching another class (because really, who needs planning periods?), so I only wrote about 200 words.  It was tough; characters can’t laugh or cry or punch people or shrug or even just think to ask why. 

I’m not sure where exactly my story is even going, but I’ll post what I have here for your reading enjoyment (or not).  Maybe I’ll finish it someday – with or without the entire alphabet.

At Sea (Lipogram)

Hermione sat on a small raft, no smile on her face. The sides of the craft rose from the sea to surround her, some canteens, a container of rations, and Dan, the other one left.

Hermione hated their situation.

She hated Dan more.

Not that he noticed. He sat and smiled. Hummed and trailed his hand off the side. Didn’t care he and she could die.

“It’s so calm out here,” he said to her. “I could remain here for months.”

Hermione clenched her hands at her side. One thrust and he’d irritate her no more. She didn’t need much force at all. Instead she said, “Is that so?”

He motioned his hand at the stuff around them. “I’m content. If I die….” He smiled at her. “It has to occur sometime.”

“I can’t die,” she said. “Not me.”

“All creatures die.”

“Not me,” she said a second time.

Dan nodded, then turned to the sea.

“I tell the truth.”

“Sure.”

“I am!”

“It doesn’t matter, does it? Us out here – either die or not. I can’t alter that.” He fell silent, his hand in the sea.

Hermione seethed. Such consent to their situation infuriated her.

Why I write

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A recent blog post on a writing site to which I belong asked, why do we bother to write? What’s the point of it all?

Sometimes I look at my novel and at what beta readers have said about it, and I just want to chuck it and move on.

Then I see this – “Based on a survey we conducted of veterans who have returned from Afghanistan or Iraq, we estimate that more than 300,000 veterans — or 18.5 percent of those deployed since 2001 — now have PTSD or major depression….Only about half of veterans who currently need treatment for these conditions seek it, and just 30 percent of those in need of treatment receive minimally adequate care.” – and this – “armed Iraq War veteran suspected of killing a Mount Rainier National Park ranger” – and read this – Aftershock: The Blast That Shook Psycho Platoon.

And this pops up on Twitter:

And I get a comment like this one – “The PTSD of the [Lone Wolf] MC lead is poigniant [sic] and it’s disturbing that so many vets go through this.”

And I think, dang it, I gotta at least try to get this sucker published.

Why I Write (pt 2)

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Tonight was parent-teacher conferences night.  The sad thing about these at the high school level is that the parents who need to attend the most, don’t.  I had my typical turnout of one parent, and then I put on my surrogate-parent hat and went around to a bunch of my students’ teachers to see how they’re doing (I’ll be giving up my planning periods to tutor someone in geography, two other kids in Earth Materials, and a third in Guided Writing). I still had an hour left, so I turned to my homework.

My online writing group is making a conscious effort to expand our understanding of the craft.  This week’s assignment:  Read (and discuss!) the linked essay by George Orwell and write a 500-word piece of flash which responds to it, or which features some of Orwell’s four reasons for writing in mixed amounts.

I’ve already written about why I write, but this time around I’ll focus on Orwell’s essay.

Why I Write

In his essay, Orwell gives four reasons for writing:  sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.  I can maybe buy that.

First is egoism.  There’s a definite thrill when I receive an acceptance for a submission and then again when I see my name in print, knowing that the message I’ve thrown into my work may reach its intended audience.  Knowing that my work will have an impact on someone, somewhere.  However, I hide behind a pen name and most people don’t know that I write, or if they do know they don’t bother to read any of it, so obviously egoism isn’t a main reason for why I do this.

Next on the list is aesthetic enthusiasm.  My language tends towards simplistic words and phrases, usually devoid of the dreaded purple prose, of elaborate descriptions and miles of narrative just because I can.  But aesthetics, Orwell tells us, isn’t just minute details; equally important is the general flow, the overall impact my words create with pacing, dialogue, character development, and plot. And it’s those that fuel my “desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.”

And that leads to his next reason, historical impulse.  In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien wrote, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”I couldn’t agree more.  For myself and I think many writers as well, how things are and how we see them overlap equally with the truth.  We interpret what happened; whether it happened or not is irrelevant.

This shouldn’t be confused with political purpose. If I can understand your reality and articulate it when you can’t, does it matter whether it happened as I wrote it or as you experienced it, if both versions arrive at the same truth?

That’s not to say I don’t put a spin on what I write – Orwell’s political purpose.  I color my stories with how I see the world or want to see it, and, more importantly, how I want the reader to see it.

All these reasons for writing blur together.  I write because I enjoy when other people (egotism) react to my words (aesthetics) and see the world (historical impulse) as I see it (political).

But more importantly, I write because I want to.  Because I need to. As Orwell says in his essay, “One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

It’s not egotism; I’d write even without an audience, and I have tons of stories I’ve written that I don’t plan to share with anyone.  It’s more than how well a series of paragraphs come together, or an agenda I push on people.

I write, quite simply, because I have ideas in my head that I want to express.

Everything else is just excuses.

Reflections on NaNoWriMo 2011

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Another NaNo is wrapping up.  My official stats:

  • My final word count was 13,767.
  • I averaged 458 words per day.
  • I wrote something 14 out of 30 days.
  • Not one day did I manage to write the 1667 needed to keep on track.

Overall, it was a pretty pathetic showing on my part. I had a strong (relatively speaking) start, but then pretty much crapped out as the month progressed.

But what’s important is that I’m now almost 14,000 words further along in my WIP novel, A Handful of Wishes.  And I learned several important things:

  • My muse is a jerkwad.  There were days when I sat in front of the computer but couldn’t think what to write.  I know the whole point of NaNo is to just get it out there, but I couldn’t even do that.
  • I have a hard time forcing myself to do something I don’t want to do.  Sure, there are days when I don’t want to go to work and I do that, but hobbies are different.  It’s not that I’m fickle, necessarily, just that I go in spurts.  I’ll throw myself into something for a couple weeks or months, then move onto something else.  It’s not that I’ve lost interest; it’s just something else is now more important to me.
  • I won NaNo in 2009, and that novel is crap.  Pure, will-never-see-the-light-of-day, let’s-pretend-it-never-happened crap.  I wrote it in 30 days, and it shows.  Granted, it was my first attempt at a novel, but it was still pretty bad.  My first real novel, The Lone Wolf, took nine months to write, as well as a year to edit.  I do much better writing when I’m not under a word count deadline.

That being said, I’m still glad I did NaNo this year.  And I’ll probably do it again next year, with the same results.

Did you NaNo this year?  How’d you do?  Any thoughts to share on the whole process?

Writing encouragement

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As I get closer to querying my novel, I’m of course getting cold feet, which I voiced to a writing group.  This was a response:

In her most recent message, ED wrote about being hesitant to send out a novel because “it’s not as good as it could be.” She quotes a character in a story of L M [Montgomery]’s as saying to a would-be writer, “‘You’ll never write anything that really satisfies you though it may satisfy other people.'”

This reminds me of comments made to me by David Foster, then head of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Oregon. He said that when an artist works, the work is for the artist first, and for anyone else second. He said that Art is a process of discovery conducted by the artist, and that any discoveries made in the course of producing one piece only lead to the need for further exploration in the next. No artist is ever satisfied with his or her work, because that work is only one step on a road that will never end — the road to understanding. So artists churn out works, and as each one is produced it teaches the artist something; as the lesson is absorbed, the work that provided it loses value — it has been exhausted. If these works can help others — readers, viewers, listeners — to improve their understanding, then the works have continued value for them, but the artist is on to new explorations.

Foster went on to say that trying to make any work of art “perfect” is a mistake, because it simply distracts the artist from the true course of his or her explorations. It’s like Crick and Watson refusing to divulge their findings on DNA until they’d figured out how to do gene splicing and cloning. An art work is not a final product. It is an experiment, and it may be more or less successful in the artist’s estimation. Whether the artist regards it as a success or as a failure, it may or may not be of value to others. Everybody’s exploratory path is different. For the artist to try to make something perfect is simply to expend further effort on an experiment that has already served its primary purpose….

So, ED, don’t worry about getting it absolutely right. Don’t go after those diminishing returns. Don’t be overly concerned with which piece of parsley to use as the garnish. You’ve cooked the meal, it smells wonderful, the flavors complement each other deliciously, and your guests will agree with you that it is wonderfully nourishing. Your guests that aren’t lactose intolerant, that is. Or gluten-aversive. Or vegan. But there are other cooks cooking for them.

I know it’s time to throw the baby from the nest.  I know changing a couple words here and there won’t change anything overall.  But damn is it still daunting.

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