Sometimes I start with a title, other times I write the entire post first and choose my title based on what I wrote. Tonight I start with the title. Immediately upon writing it, I realize that the title is misleading, because it implies that the Night is the subject and that Writes is the thing that it’s doing. Which is nonsense. I do the writing around here. No, in my head it was the Night (adjective) Writes (noun), like the DTs or the heebie-jeebies. In other words, the title is a problem. I could change it BUT I WON’T because problems are what make the world turn. Just ask that guy who sang about the problems and the b-words. I feel like things worked out for him pretty well.Read More »
Tag: Writing
Why are my peripheral characters so much easier to write?
My writing over the last couple of weeks could not be more schizophrenic. One day I’m on fire, the next day I’m frozen in ice. First I’m barely able to type the words as quickly as they are coming to me, then you could sail ships through the gaps in between the words that come to me.
So, am I up or down? Manic or Depressed? Today, I’m up. I’ve just written a scene which flowed from the reservoir of my brain like a rain-fed stream, full of (what I imagine must be) crackling dialogue, crisp, direct prose, and even the delicate flourish of metaphor coloring the pages. Difficult to write good metaphors on the fly while I’m drafting, I’ve found. Some days it just doesn’t happen, and I certainly don’t like to force it. It bogs me down. Those days I leave lots of notes to Future Me: FIND SOME BETTER COMPARISONS or THIS IS LIKE SOMETHING BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT YET, FIX IT. None of those notes today or yesterday, though.
A good writing session, then. But still one that leaves me a little flummoxed, because it’s a scene taking place entirely between secondary characters. Not leading roles. Not even supporting actors, really. These are characters that only appear a couple of times in the book, and writing them is as easy as swinging a cat in my house and hitting a toddler toy (which is to say, it basically happens on its own without interference from me multiple times on the daily). And it makes me fargoing ANGRY. These guys are bit parts. Icing on the cake. Curlicues on the calligraphy. They’re not, by any stretch of the imagination, the main players. Sure, they have bearing on the main action of the story, but they are by their nature peripheral. They’re not who I have spent my time with. They’re not who my audience will spend their time with. So why are they so goldfingered easy to write?
Maybe it’s because the stakes are low for these characters. Well, not for the characters themselves — obviously they have their own concerns in the storyline as it pertains to them — but rather for myself as storyteller, my particular stakes in regard to these characters are low. Low stakes means low pressure. Low pressure means I can just let it happen, like an old guy squeezing out a few drops after a prostate exam. I don’t have to worry about what repercussions their interaction will have on the plot, because I’ve already decided that, and they can’t affect the plot very much in their own right anyway… kind of like a fridge magnet stuck to the side of the space shuttle wouldn’t alter its trajectory too much (yeah, I know the space shuttles are defunct now, I’m just… jeez, okay? Leave me alone.). I can just set these guys alone in a room, wind them up like clockwork toys, and let them do what they do.
What’s frustrating is not that these peripheral characters have been so easy to write, these last few days. The frustrating part is how much I’ve been struggling with my main cast lately. It feels like, even on my good days, the strings of authorial intent are clearly visible tugging on their puppet-like hands and mouths. On my bad days, it’s more like I’m shoving cardboard standees around a stage and taking still photographs, trying to make it look like it all fits together when it looks like a bad diorama from the third grade. Hackneyed. Forced. Boring. Awful! You would think that my main characters would be the ones I’m in love with, the ones that spring fully-formed from my head like Venus and go out into the world creating wild plot devices and surprise twists. And to be fair, they’ve done their share of that. But I think I’m growing just a little bit weary of them. I guess it’s not terribly surprising that I should do that; after all, I’ve been spending the better part of one thousand words a day, five days a week, with them for oh, going on four months now. Still, my main characters should be the ones I love, right? The ones I can’t wait to write for, the ones that just boil over when I put them on the page?
I’m just pontificating, here, but maybe I need to think of my main characters a little bit more in the way that I think about these bit parts; just step back off of them a little, loosen the reins, and allow them to do a bit of story-building on their own. It feels like, as I get close to the end, I feel myself steering them more and more toward the ending I have in mind, which takes away their agency and, as a result, ends up being just really crappy storytelling. Problem is, here at the end, there is very little story-building left to do, which means I’m going to have to go back and tear the engine out of this thing and let them do their story-building back in the middle where things started to go all squidgy, which is going to mean more rewriting and…
Hey, Future Me, are you reading this? I’M SORRY. I’M SO SORRY. But your job is getting bigger every day. Good news is, the draft is almost finished, which means you get to start your job soon. We’ve got your office all ready, and a case of bourbon to help you deal with it. You’re going to need it. Wait, where are you running off to? Come back! WE CAN’T HIRE SOMEBODY ELSE TO okay he’s gone. Sharknado. Anybody else feel like editing this first draft for me? I just totally flaked on myself. Or rather, my future self flaked on me. Or rather rather, my future self will be flaking on me by the time I…
God, make it stop. I’m at 95% now. I can make it. I might burst into flames as I cross the finish line, but I can make it.
On YA Lit: Should Adults Be Embarrassed to Read It?
There’s apparently been a bit of a stir lately over this article on Slate condemning adult consumers of Young Adult Literature. To condense, the author over there, one Ruth Graham, feels (rather strongly) that YA lit is strictly for YAs and if you’re not a YA then you shouldn’t be reading YA lit.
Okay, that’s perhaps an intentional oversimplification, but the argument is simple. As an author, you must know your audience. (An interesting comment for me to make given my schizophrenia lately over exactly who my audience for AI might be.) And an author writing for young adults presumably makes different choices in their stories than an author writing for adults, whether it’s simplifying plots and making characters’ choices more transparent, using saucier or more elevated language, or even the entire subject matter of the story. So the author is writing for a specific group of people (though that group might itself be incredibly diverse).
Let’s just take that on its face. Say you’re an accomplished author, and you write your book about robot-fighting tree-farmers in post-carbon-emissions formerly-known-as-America. (Don’t steal that, it’s MINE.) But you write it specifically from the point of view of, and full of the lingo of, and bulging with references to, let’s say, south Floridian retirees. Why would you make such a choice? This is the strange and wonderful land of Hypothetica, just keep your hands and feet inside the chopper.Read More »
Why I Like “Like”
This post is part of SoCS:http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-2114/
Trying something a bit different here, a non-fiction based prompt from another blog. The topic? Write about the word “like”.
Well, there’s a lot to like about “like”. The straightforwardest (yep) and simplest is the fact that “like” is used to build similes, which are like the connective tissue holding the loose clunky bits of your prose to the solid, enduring ideas that everybody’s familiar with. Similes are just those little bits of language where you say “this thing over here is like that other thing over there.” They can be as simple or as complex as the situation demands, but they are infinitely adaptable and always appropriate. In fact, I’m going to step out on a ledge here and say that the simile is perhaps the most important literary technique out there.
Why? Because it creates inroads. Pointing out that two essentially unlike things actually ARE alike, that they do share characteristics — whether their similarities are immediately apparent to the casual observer or not — is one of, if not the, most effective way to make the most opaque of subject matter clear to your reader.
Example? Let’s say I took creative writing instead of calculus in college. (This is true.) Therefore I’m not particularly familiar with arcs and curves and the best method for calculating trajectories or … okay, I’m probably making my point perfectly about not knowing anything about calculus. Let me try again. Physics. As the saying goes, I know a little about physics, enough to get me into trouble. Say I’m trying to explain a concept in physics to somebody who knows nothing about physics. Somebody who, for example, might prefer to watch Titanic again rather than branch out and watch something new and exciting, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos. Just hypothetically speaking. This is not a real person. But this person’s perception of gravity, let’s say, might be that it makes objects fall down. In a highly specific way, that’s accurate: here on Earth, gravity makes things fall down. As far as capital “G” Gravity goes, however, that’s a horrifically simplified view.
Sharknado, I’m meandering off-point. Let me return to the simile. Right. A simile allows me to explain to this person whose thinking is a bit myopic that gravity, capital “G” Gravity as it exists in the Universe, not just on Earth, is a bit like the attraction between Jack and Rose in Titanic. Once they affect each other, they forever feel one another’s pull. When they are close, they are nearly inseparable, but even when they are apart, each one is aware of the other’s presence, and is always trying to find a way to get back together. Now, it’s not a perfect description of gravity by any imaginable stretch, but it’s allowed me to (hopefully) shift the way that this particular person thinks about gravity by tapping into what they know about something else.
So, similes are awesome. They allow me to paint pictures in your head by saying for example that “the blood pooling around the dead man smelled like so many old, grimy copper pennies” or that “the colors of her eyes were blue like the bluest blue sky; endless, perfect, infinite” or, in a favorite quote of mine from Douglas Adams, that the alien ships “hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don’t.” Each one lets you see one thing in another way, lets you consider my experience and my retelling of a thing, which then colors your interpretation of that thing in a way that’s perhaps different than the way you already thought about it.
Damn, that feels circular. What I’m trying to say is that “like” is like a vicegrip — a simple tool with a thousand different applications. “Like” is like water — you find it everywhere, always adapting, always flowing, always enriching. “Like” is like salt: sure, you could eat without it, but would you really want to?
This has been an exercise in language analysis. Those don’t tend to read well here on the blarg. That’s okay, I’ve got a humdinger of a flash fiction coming in my next post.
My Writing is Awful and I’m Awful
Seriously, what the hell made me think this is something I could do in the first place?
What started as an exciting adventure, a fun foray into a sunlight- and flower-filled valley where things are hunky and dory and smell like candy and everything feels like soft velvet for some reason is turning to ash. The beautiful butterflies are turning into bloodsucking bats. The fragrant flowers are a thicket of thorny thistles. The brilliant, redeeming sun is covered over with clouds the color of sick and despair.
This, on the day after I had a really quite lovely session of writing. Words came easy, metaphors bloomed like so many daisies, the story was clear, and now the path is filled with bear traps. And bears. Who are surprisingly good at avoiding traps.
Do all writers suffer these vicious mood swings? These vertigo-inducing changes in perspective and confidence and certainty? I am trying hard to remember that it’s okay if the first draft sucks, that anything and everything can be changed in the edit — lead can be turned to gold, nonsensical plot turns into natural progressions, sharknado into sandwiches — but damned if the howler monkey of doubt isn’t getting the better of me today.
I’m trying to find ways to downplay this sense of dread and inadequacy. Trying to find parallels so that I can convince myself that it’s not so bad, that tomorrow is another day and that Future Me is a capable chap who can right all the wrongs I’m putting on the page. Like…
This might be like stage fright, where I’ve spent weeks learning lines and blocking and running scenes with my fellow actors and now on the eve of performance I look out past the footlights into the sea of waiting faces like so many piranhas with their gleaming teeth and I freeze up and forget my lines. Except this is not stage fright. There is no pivotal performance, no impending moment at which I must either demonstrate everything I’ve worked for or be revealed as a fraud and a charlatan (bonus points, self, for using the word “charlatan”). No, I have as much time as it takes to get this story right before I put it out there into the world. Hmm. That feels better.
No, rather this is like I’m a chef who’s studied for years and years and souffle’d lots of things that get baked into souffles and fricasee’d lots of things that get fricasee’d, whatever the hell a fricasee is. So then I make this monstrously big fricasee souffle except it’s actually made of dogsharknado because I ran out of other ingredients and this big food critic is coming into the restaurant tonight and he’s going to review my dogsharknado fricasee souffle and it’s going to be awful, really the worst thing ever, but I had to serve him SOMETHING, didn’t I? Except, no, there is no food critic except myself, and I have time to go to the grocery store and get more ingredients instead of serving up hot fricaseed dogsharknado on a plate. Okay, yeah, that’s better, too.
Even here, on the blarg, where there are virtually — no, scratch that — LITERALLY no requirements or standards except that I remain more or less honest and attempt to amuse myself, I am feeling overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and self-deprecation. That last post was boring, I didn’t use enough colorful descriptions, I’m just describing things as they are, nobody’s going to care to read it, I’m even boring myself to tears. I didn’t even post 1000 words — THIS POST ISN’T EVEN 1000 WORDS — WHERE HAVE ALL MY WORDS GONE? Except, wait a minute, the blarg is for me and me alone, to help me deal with these roadblocks: if people who are not me read it and enjoy it, that’s just a bonus. If I’m being truthful and letting the writer-flag fly, as it were, then the blarg is serving its purpose. Okay, yeah, I’m actually feeling much better.
All this will be better in the morning. It will. The draft will be finished in two weeks. I can do anything for two weeks. Even, perhaps, steer this storm-shattered ship to safety (alliteration x5, bonus points whee!)
Yeah, it’s feeling much better now.
Accidentally Inspired 