The Presence of Person

13 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in Character in Fiction

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A fellow writer of mine recently wrote a poem about the first year of her marriage and the challenges that arise when two people throw in their lot together.

There is a great deal of bravery in writing about those we love – those people closest to us – whether we love them or not. It is not just the bravery of putting such things on paper – of making a record of them, but the bravery due to what happens when we write. When we write we learn. And sometimes we uncover things we’d rather not know – things more difficult than those with which we initially sat down.

When we write about people – real or fictional – they become more real to us than when we started. We create them, or interpret them, and they become a thing from which we cannot look away. Our investment in them grows and they become integral to the engine of our story.

This is part of our superpower. We write and that which was elusive, only given a nod, occurred behind closed doors, is unveiled – it is illuminated and exposed.
And it is never the same again.

The Power of Place

29 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Character in Fiction, Qualities of Good Fiction, Role of the Writer

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Among the elements of fiction – conflict, character, and place – I could argue for any one of them being the more palpable, the key to quality story. Conflict is the engine. No question about that. But place…world-building…the environment in which the story happens – that is central.

I have a fellow writer who recently wrote a poem about walking through the Atlanta airport and how alone she felt among so many people. There is so much truth in that. How does that happen? How does a place illicit universal feeling and emotion? How do our psyches and souls become intertwined with physical spaces?
And it seems that the further you go back, into youth and then into childhood, the greater this phenomena becomes. Pause in those memories and place will tug, transport, and consume.

Place is unique among the elements of fiction. Practice reverence in constructing where your stories will unfold. And know that if the place you create lifts off the page it could, just maybe, transform into a character.
And that would be a gift.

The Energy of Experience

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

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It is that moment when you are emotionally moved, when you are shocked, in awe. When damage is done or redemption is realized. The epiphany, the dumbfound, the fear and delight – sometimes small, sometimes large. Sometimes public, often private.
Take note, for these are the turns in which the writerly aesthetic lives.
To observe in such moments is human. To realize that the observation is material to be creatively mined, this is writerly. This is the skill – to learn to harness, capture, and form the energy of experience into craft.
Here are a pair of examples:
I have a fellow writer who recently wrote a poem about a drunk driver hitting a tree in his front yard in the middle of the night. For most people this is a story you tell over coffee with friends. Everyone is amazed and this spurs a series of stories of drunken tragedy. But for the writer, this is an experience that can only be properly dealt with by being set down in language.
Another fellow writer recently wrote a poem about sitting on an airport bus and receiving an email that he’d just been fired. This is more private, but is it less violent? Not as he tells it. Not as revealed in short, stark lines.
In both cases we are escorted past what happened and shown the residue of truth we might otherwise miss.
We fail our craft when we are like all other mortals, when we let our experiences simply come and go. Let us do the work of shining our spotlight on such moments.
Our readers will be the richer for it.

The Problem of Journaling – Solution #2: The Travel Journal

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

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Whenever I travel – whether its a long weekend getaway or a trip outside the US – I cease my daily creative writing routine (for the most part) and instead spend my allotted time each day scribbling in my travel journal.
There is a delight in carrying a notebook as you tour a distant town or coastline, stopping occasionally to write your impressions or to sketch your surroundings. What you have with a notebook is not a camera or a map, but instead you have a tool that expects you to develop a skill. The skill of interpreter. You are not simply taking, you are leaving something behind – a record. You are interacting. You are a writer.
In my travel journals (I’m on my second volume now) I have an etching from Henry Thoreau’s grave, a page of signatures of Mexican orphans, a drawing of a southern Irish countryside, and (tucked in the back) a chart of common fish caught off the gulf coast of Florida.
Of course there is a practical value to keeping a travel journal as well. I know that it was on August 4, 2011 that we drove from Carmel down Highway1 to Big Sur. I also know that on the weekend of July 13, 2014 we discovered the quaint beauty of Westerville, Ohio, the home of Otterbein College.
Travel journaling causes you to develop new writerly muscles. And it later serves to aid the memory.
Who among us could not benefit from a bit of both?

The Problem of Journaling – Solution #1: The Commonplace Book

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Writing Discipline

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I keep a notebook next to my computer on my writing table. A simple, black, Moleskine, ruled 80 page journal – they come in sets of three.
Into this notebook goes an entry for every day. During my daily writing I sometimes start by making a note, but at some point during that day’s writing session I always turn to it and scribble.
I write my frustrations and hopes about my work, approaches I’m considering, things about life that are distracting me or making it hard to write. I often jot in the top margin what time I started writing or a reminder to revisit that page later to review important notes.
If I go to an author reading this is the notebook that goes with me so that I can capture ideas or comments that come during the evening.
The Commonplace Book is a working journal. It is a place, at my elbow or under my arm, where I can park whatever is standing between me and the work I’m trying to get done. I’m in my 17th notebook. Some days there is a page, other days a line, but it has become essential to my creative process.
Sidenote: The Wikipedia entry on Commonplace Book is surprisingly robust. The history of this tool is richer than you think.

The Problem of Journaling

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

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Every time I hear or read the praises of journaling my anxiety goes up and I feel I’ve lost out. The over-achievers that harp on journaling, the die-hards who swear by it – they say that the practice of daily journaling yields riches of life and craft that cannot be summarized.
I’m 49 years old. Am I going to start keeping a diary?
There is something attractive (albeit a little strange) about those few of you who have kept a diary since the day you learned to write and have an entry for every day since the first day of second grade. You can go back and read what your childhood mind was thinking on any day in 1976.
But what about the rest of us? We all agree that journaling is important for a writer, but the idea of beginning to write a daily entry seems self-absorbed, pointless, and above all, mind-numbingly boring.
Then several years ago I heard about the practice of specific, purposeful journaling.
Here a few very good examples.
The Reagan Diaries. Ronald Reagan began keeping a daily journal the day he entered the White House and stopped the day he left. It is said to be in simple chicken-like scratches and full of misspellings. And highly personal at times.
The Genesee Diary by Henri Nouwen. Nouwen needed some time away from the rat-race and so he entered a Trappist monastery in Genesee, New York. The book has become a classic on solitude – and marked the beginning of what became Nouwen’s legacy as a monk and a beloved teacher and writer.
Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. Here we have a journal that became a classic of American travel writing – and that provides a first-rate primer on how to write as a contemplative and transient observer.
In the next two posts I will offer a couple of solutions to this problem of journaling. There are two types of journaling that I’ve incorporated into my writing life without turning the practice into a part-time job. These are keeping a Commonplace Book and a Travel Journal.

Failure of Feelings

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

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There is a grit, a strength of will, a determination inherent in the work of writing that has NOTHING to do with art, inspiration, or the wonder of making story.
The discipline of sitting down to write must not be predicated on “feeling like it.” Our feelings can’t be trusted to guide our actions when it comes to getting work done.
Our feelings are not our ally. If left alone in the front seat, our feelings will drive us to a premature and fattened ruin.
If I did what I “felt like” doing, I would sleep till 9AM every day, get up and go out to breakfast, come home and read for a couple of hours, take a nap, go to dinner with friends, stay out late carousing, and return home to crash and do it all again. There would be no productivity. No accomplishment. No craft. No tending to the soul.
Well wrought fiction doesn’t come from inspiration or a great idea. Good fiction is the result of putting your butt in the chair to write when there is no inkling of desire and no likelihood of progress.
It doesn’t matter how you feel.

Reader’s Group

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Contract with the Reader, Reading as a Writer

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I’d never been to a reader’s group. The last Saturday evening in August – I imagined folding chairs and a clamshell of store-bought cookies. Bottles of water, maybe some coffee.
I was wrong.
There was food and drink. Really good food and drink. A wide variety of delights – homemade and homegrown, savory and sweet. (I shouldn’t have eaten dinner before I went.) And the seating was permanent, complete with throw pillows and end tables.

In writer’s groups/workshops, we approach the work we’re discussing in an effort to make it better at doing whatever it is trying to do. We strive to support the work according to the author’s intent. Our focus is on production, not consumption. We’re in design and construction. We might talk about a potential reader response, but we’re focused on the process and mechanics of creating good writing. It is a technical conversation. This is the world I know.

Then I went to the reader’s group. Immediately they began to personalize the book we were discussing. These readers were educated, successful in their careers, and sure of their perspectives. They talked about how the book related to their own experience and about the author’s effort – whether it rung true based on what they’d seen and lived. Sometimes they talked about the book and sometimes the book was simply a starting point to talk about larger issues or personal concerns. They sought to apply the book to their worldview and determine if there were any previously unseen rocks they needed to kick over due to having read it.

Hearing readers discuss writing was like being on the inside, in the back room, behind the closed door. It was imagining, for a couple of hours, what it would be like to be only a reader – the joy of consuming writing. And it was thinking about my own work and how it might fare in such a setting. It was to sit with those who might be my readers someday. And listen.
I plan to go back to the reader’s group.
Please don’t tell them that I’m a mole.

Pseudocode

23 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Starting a Novel

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Pseudocode is a term that first showed up around 1960. One source defined it as “A notation resembling a simplified programming language, used in program design.” I have decided that this term is useful for our purposes, so I am stealing it for those of us writing fiction.
Here’s the new definition.

Pseudocode (noun)
Writing that resembles or summarizes story, used in first drafts and outlines.

No one produces fully functioning software from the first line on a blank screen. And no one produces fully functioning fiction from the first sentence. There is writing that must come first. Writing that no reader should see. Writing that is in service of the writer as the story is created.

Here’s an example of the use of pseudocode from my current project:

So I said to the messenger. Tell our king this: Who am I to be your kinsman? Who is my father’s clan that I should be the son of the king by marriage?
[Saul hears this and sees David as weak and gives Merab to another (ESV). Skip the next paragraph.]
[OR]
[Per Deane, there is an attack by the Philistines on the day of the wedding. I would add that Saul sees this as a sign that David is inept in beating back the Philistines – as he has commanded him to do – thus gives Merab away and sets David up for failure.]
Wedding, rushed, too rushed. It is not at the palace. We stand in the hall by the edge of the theatre. Mid-wonder there is a crush at the door. It takes too long for my men to rush in and thus too long to gain a sword, but this close work of the battlefield, even here, is what I have done and do again. My dagger from under my cloak.

The pseudocode is mixed in with research and with bits of prose that are leaning toward fiction. There is no story yet, but it is being drafted. The craft point here is that you should cut yourself a break, take the pressure off, and simply write the pseudocode. Not only will you then have something on the blank page, but you’ll be moving toward understanding what the story or scene is trying to accomplish. In the next draft you can write to unpack what is happening in the pseudocode. But for now, you have a first draft. A start. And that is very good news.

The Rush of the First Draft

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Starting a Novel

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The first draft is about gathering all the basic materials you’ll need for the finished product and organizing them before you. Laying them out, taking inventory, making sure nothing significant is missing. If you can do this, you have a very successful first draft.

The first draft is about paragraphs and ideas. It is about laying the beams, not hanging the curtains. There will be time to tend to the sentences, to the language. The first draft is written from several yards away. Don’t look too close. There’s no point in it. Few of these words will survive. Look only close enough to ensure the bones are in place.

The first draft is ugly and unfit for a reader’s consumption. Show it to no one. It is a waste of their time. Its only purpose is to get you to the second draft. It is a fumbling start. It is full of holes. It is held together by chicken wire. And it is the only path to the “next”, and to “done.”

The first draft is horrifying and exhilarating. The rush of the first draft. It is always amazing to see what comes out. What inhabits the first draft is raw energy, hope, promise. A first draft is optimism incarnate. And it is a wonder how a thing that did not exist an hour before now is.

The first draft seeks a tone, a thing inherent in the first words that emerges. Listen for it. As you come to hear and feel it, and then see the hue or color – focus in and move toward it. Sneak up on it. Don’t rush. Creep in from behind and throw a net over its form and drag it onto the page. In a few drafts it will seem that it has always existed, that you simply heard it, honed in on it, and subdued it for all to see.