Category Archives: Creative Process/Craft

A Pair of Metaphors

10 Wednesday May 2017

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Some days the writing really works – it just pops and flows – but other days it feels like you’re in the center ring, in the cage with it, your chair in one sweaty-palmed hand and your whip in the other. Across from you the writing is crouched, staring you down, showing off its roar and its razor sharp teeth.

To pile on another metaphor, I have come to see the writer’s life like being invested in the stock market, in the blue chips. You’re in it for the long haul, the return that will come months if not years hence. You’re a fool if you let any single day cause you to stall and falter or to shout and celebrate. You’re best to quietly enjoy it when it’s good and just keep going when it’s not, trusting the investment you’re making as you build your writing portfolio.

[Don’t] Write What You Know

19 Wednesday Apr 2017

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“Write what you know.”
This is a very old bit of advice for fiction writers. The idea is that your life is far more interesting than you realize. You needn’t look toward the exotic or far-fetched to find material. You are an expert at many things. Your experience has gained you an edge. So, simply write what you know.
If this works for you, ride the wave. Quit reading this blog post here and get back to work.
Go on. We’ll wait while you leave.
OK, now that they’re gone…
If you find this advice leaves you flat, maybe even bored, try this bit instead.
“Write what you want to read.”
You were a reader before you were a writer. You have likely started writing because you want to create more literature like the writing you enjoy. Your reading has probably given you ideas. Ideas you want to explore. So, do it! Write the sort of book that you’d want to read.
Isn’t that refreshing? This approach will keep you engaged in your project, fuel your writing routine, and will take the focus off of you – putting it back on the work…which is always where your focus should be.

My Supporting Character

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

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I haven’t always been like this. For 18 years I was a fully functioning member of my family. I was always present, always a part of what was going on. Wherever my family was – in the living room, on the back patio, downstairs playing ping-pong – there was I. I went with my wife to the grocery store. I cleaned out the garage. I once washed the car in the driveway. I stood in the cul-de-sac and chatted with the neighbors. Time was easily spent, my attention was never split, and my mind was always on the task at hand.
On February 25th, 2010 this changed. I began writing every day.
Now some part of my brain is always working on the writing. I’ve fallen out of touch with my neighbors and my garage is a shameful mess.
I spend a lot of time alone. Every day I spend some significant part of my prime time alone, off in my study in a carefully procured silence. Because of this, my wife spends a lot of time alone as well. She gives me up to my craft. She does this willingly, and when people do things for us willingly it is easy to take such acts for granted.
Each of us has a Supporting Character*. We have someone who pays the price with us. Someone – likely the person you share a bed with – that deals with the often distant and distracted person that is you, the writer.
So as you spend another mid-winter pulling text from your core, pause and recognize that while it may look to the casual observer to be the case, you don’t work alone.

*Supporting Character is a word which here means that one who supports us who writes.

Working and Waiting

25 Wednesday Jan 2017

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Here they are, the two central tasks of the craftsman – working and waiting.
These actions, one active and the other passive, are inseparable.
No one tells you as you learn your craft that, if you go to the marketplace, you’re in for some brutally long waiting, that most of the time it will appear that you’re working only for yourself.

I spent the afternoon and evening of November 5th at Tomandy Gallery in Frederick, Maryland. My friend Alan Clingan designs and builds custom furniture – gorgeous, artful stuff, often from reclaimed materials. He has four major pieces for sale in this tastefully stocked gallery. For several hours I hung out and watched him present his work to people.
The rejection was staggering.
Over and over he talked about what went into each piece and how he conceived each design. Over and over people told him how wonderful his work is, in gushing terms of awe. They pointed and caressed and huddled close around it – – and then left. They simply walked away.
The next morning Alan and I talked about this. The conclusion we drew is that in the end, the work must sell itself. It is up to the work – the object.

As producers of craft we can overwhelm ourselves with the calculus of placement and presentation (selling) but in the end there will be one buyer in a million. Buyers (publishers and thoughtful readers in my case) are staggeringly rare. Whether it is a vintage oak cabinet or a literary short story, the great masses will walk past, pointing in wonder and delight. But our work cares not for them, it awaits the Buyer – that person who will not only observe and fall helplessly in love, but consume the work. Who will make it their own.
This transaction is between the work and the consumer. We must remove ourselves from it. We must step away and let it happen. For we control only one thing. Producing. We do the work. And this is not easy. We must develop the ability to know well our work and determine truthfully its quality, even to recognize when it is done. This is very, very difficult work. But we must tend solely and diligently to the doing of the work because no one else can.

Progressive Elaboration

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

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There are two kinds of writers.
One kind thinks about the story they are going to write. They think and think and think about the story, then one day when they are done thinking, done imagining the story, they go and they write it all down in one feverish rush. This kind of writer is very, very rare. They may even be the stuff of myth and movies. They are the mad scientists of literature.
The other kind of writer has an idea about a story – a character, a plot point or two, a place, a situation – and gets a draft of the idea down as soon as they can. They write a reckless and awful first exploratory draft to see if the story has legs, if the idea is going to sprout. This is almost always clear to the writer in this first draft and is always clear by the second. There is either life in the idea or there isn’t. It is either on or it is off. If there is life then the writer reworks that draft over and over until they are convinced the story is fully wrought.
I am this second kind of writer. I learn what the story is going to be as I write it. That original seed of an idea is only a place to start. The story is created in the writing of it. This revealing of the story as it is written is called progressive elaboration*. As drafts of the story are written, the story unfolds and the facets of it develop. I believe that all novels are like this. It is certainly my experience that all short stories are. With each draft you find there are aspects of the story to be fleshed out, other aspects to be left less explicit, for the reader to imagine.
It is in the progress of making the story that we learn what it will be and how it will be told.

*This is a term that is used in project management – discovery of the work to be done as it is planned. I am repurposing the term here, as it applies perfectly to the making of fiction as well.

That Last Page Melancholy

07 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Reading as a Writer

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For the better part of four years I have offered you a post on writing, Dear Reader, every two weeks on Wednesday. I have not, in all that time, written a post with more than a passing comment on reading for readers*. Ultimately every post I write is for writers of fiction. This one will be too, but there is just as much here for the readers that may have happened by.
I’d like to think that this is a balanced blog post.
I recently finished the novel “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel. As I closed the back cover I had that old familiar feeling that we’ve all had since childhood. That last page melancholy, that realization that the dream is over and you’ll never get to read that novel for the first time again. I know many of us re-read novels. We ache to get that rush again, that page-turning frenzy that gripped us the first time through. And often we’re rewarded the second and third time through with a deeper understanding, a missed detail, or a clarified character.
But, there is only one solution to that last page melancholy, Dear Reader. Start reading the next novel on your list.
Writers suffer similar phenomena when they finish writing a story or a novel. There is a melancholy that sets in almost immediately. And the wisdom is the same. Start writing the next story. The day after you finish the one you are working on, start another^.
So whether you’re a reader or a writer, as soon as you finish the book you’re working on, start the next one.
And we’ll keep this relationship going!

*I have mentioned, haven’t I, that there is no such thing as “writer’s block” – that writers who “suffer” this malady are simply not reading? This is true. Writers often go for long stretches without reading. This drains the writer’s creative fuel tank. Someone named the results of this empty tank “writer’s block”.
^The assumption here is that you write every day.

There Are Parts of It That Are Weak

23 Wednesday Sep 2015

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I’ve seen it dozens of times, in my own work and that of my peers. After finishing three drafts of a story there are parts of it that are weak, sections that aren’t carrying their weight. They are easily identified by how they interrupt the narrative pace of the piece, how they pull the reader out of the story.
I tend to fixate on them. They are like splinters in the bottoms of my feet until I get past the following decision:

1. Cut the weak sections and flesh out what is left in order to fill the gap(s) they’ve left behind (if necessary^).
2. Go on to create draft number four and focus on those sections, trying to bring them up to snuff.

Option one is difficult. I like this harder path because that is where the risk and reward are greatest*, however, it is good to pause and give option two some serious thought. I’ve taken option two more often lately and it has worked out well. Why? At this point (draft three complete) those sections that are weak are not far enough developed to make the call that they should be cut** .
What I’ve seen over and over again is the weak sections (after another several drafts) become strong, even rivaling the strong sections. The result is a multifaceted story, one that has depth thanks to those passages that were “weak” and that I nearly laid out on the chopping block. I look back now and see that I was once willing to give up on what would become a significant layer of the story.

*See my post from June 6, 2012 or March 12, 2014. You need to be comfortable cutting material. Very comfortable.
^You would be surprised at how little deleting material from a piece hurts what is left.
**I heard recently on a NYT Book Review podcast that Jennifer Egan drafted parts of “A Visit from the Goon Squad” eighty times! That is mind boggling; however, it is much closer to the reality of crafting fiction than most writers can imagine. In any case, three drafts is only a start.

A Mystical Consideration

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

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It is uncommon for me to do this – forgive and bear with me as I wax mystical.

It is critical to your creative work to be attuned to ideas* that come into your mind, to be aware enough to notice them when they arrive and snag them when they do.
Such ideas slide in from the wings and are on stage very briefly. They appear during meetings at work or while you’re standing in line at Meijer. They show up while you’re brushing your teeth or sweeping your garage.
You don’t summons these ideas. You don’t conjure them. They come when they please. They come to you with the mundane, in the daily routine. You may not be sure you detected anything at all, but when you go to capture them, to write, it turns out that there was a wonder that shimmered in your periphery.
Your brain has energy to spare. It is always working, all of it. The skill a writer needs to learn is to notice what it offers and to harness it. This is the creative dance between the conscious and the subconscious. This awareness is another of the creative muscles you must build.

*I’m talking only about creative ideas here. They could be ideas on characters or ideas on how to structure a piece (“maybe that poem should really be a flash fiction”).
Ideas about your next career move or what to get your spouse for his/her birthday do not require this sort of awareness. The practical matters flop down right in front of our faces. That calculus is all done in the logical, conscious part of our minds. The brain’s creative processes are factors more subtle than this.

750-Word Flash Fiction

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on several flash fiction* pieces. These pieces which are all related and will be in a collection at some point are 750- words in length – about a page and a half. I have concluded that this word count is my perfect flash fiction length.

The flash fiction form brings many craft demands which are helpful for the developing fiction writer. Limiting yourself like this forces an economy of words that results in precise descriptions and transitions that must come from a character’s point of view.

Without this limitation you might allow a description to run on for three or four lines (50 or 75 words). You might even invite the reader to get lost in it. But here you must choose carefully what the reader will see, giving them the precise visual that will allow them to build the world you’ve left off-screen.

I have found that writing an omniscient third-person narrative overwhelms the form. These pieces are most successful when written from a character’s point of view, where the observations are by nature limited and intimate. Intimacy is a key to the form. It is not the place for grand, sweeping epics. I have in the past referred to flash fiction as prose photography (where the novel might be thought of as a feature film).

Each word is chosen for the weight it will carry, for its sensory value. Indeed, as I am putting the final touches on a piece I must look and see if I’ve hit the word count. And then I must go line by line through the piece strategically adding or removing words in the right places, careful not to over-write or weaken the delicate lattice of the story. It is a type of construction that reminds me of the work of poetry.

Investigate this form. Give it a shot. It has a great deal to offer you.

*Flash Fiction is a short, short-story form, a complete story that with a count of 2,000 words or less. Often much less. Perhaps the most famous flash fiction ever written is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/short-and-sweet-reading-and-writing-flash-fiction/?_r=0

A Round-up…of Facts about the Daily Effort of Writing Fiction

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Qualities of Good Fiction, Writing Discipline

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If after a few attempts a particular sentence or section is not working, delete it. Following this maxim has never let me down. The remaining text has never suffered in the absence of the troubling material.

Good writing only comes of bad writing. There is no shortcut to successful prose. Thinking, outlining, discussing, researching, scheduling, obtaining instruction – these are all necessary, but they don’t result in functional paragraphs on a page. Only through writing do we arrive at a draft manuscript. Bad writing is not something to be avoided. It is something to be accomplished with the knowledge that it is the gateway to good writing.

Try writing from a challenging POV*. I recently wrote a short short story (flash fiction) from the perspective of a character that dies half-way through the narrative. And then I maintained that POV for the rest of the story. No POV should be considered off-limits. Such decisions often lead to more imaginative story because they cause the writer to think differently.
Especially try this if a story is coming off flat.

Action is the result of character A trying to get something from character B that character B doesn’t want to give up. It doesn’t have to be a big thing; it just has to be some thing. In order for there to be action there must be reaction. Agreement between characters is not action and won’t result in story – no matter how interesting the agreement might be.

*Point of View – the perspective from which the story is being revealed. Might be a character or a narrator. Might be 1st or 3rd person, close or omniscient, etc.