Lucky 7 Excerpt From Sword of Mordrey

Chilham Castle

Many thanks to Audrey Kalman and Melissa Crytzer Fry, both of whom nominated me to play Lucky 7 with my WIP. These women are wonderful bloggers and I suggest you take a moment and check out their blogs. You won’t be disappointed. Audrey’s posts about the craft of writing are helpful and often make me think of aspects of writing from a new angle. And Melissa pays tribute to Arizona’s natural world as she asks questions that apply to writing in particular, and life in general.

Thank you, ladies.

Almost everyone knows the rules by now, but in case you don’t, here they are.

The tagged writer must:

1. Go to page 77 of the current WIP.
2. Go to line 7.
3. Post the next 7 sentences as they appear in the manuscript.
4. Tag 7 blogging writers. (I’m going to skip this part. While I have enjoyed reading all the posts and getting glimpses into so many enticing WIPs, I feel this game is winding down.)

Sword of Mordrey is set during the first crusade, and the year just after it. This bit of exposition that came up in my WIP is from the view point of Tristan, a bard who travels medieval England. He’s on his way to Chilham Castle, but has become disoriented in a storm and seeks refuge in a castle perched upon a high cliff above the ocean, its stone walls black and running with rain. He enters the great hall and begs leave of the lord to remain until the storm abates, offering to entertain them with song in exchange for food and shelter. Permission is granted, but Tristan soon has feelings of foreboding about the place.

        Tristan set down his pack and rested his precious lute on the bench the gatekeeper hauled near. He looked around himself as he removed his sodden cloak and spread it over the bench to dry. The hall was a strange mixture of opulence and squalor. Rich tapestries hung from the walls, but they were dark with years of soot from the smoking hearth. Elaborately carved wooden pillars, thick as the trunks of ancient trees, held up the high, smoke-blackened, heavy-beamed roof far above him. Where most halls were draped and decked with yuletide greenery this time of year: mistletoe, ivy and holly, this hall lacked any sign of the coming celebration of Christ’s birth. Torches blazed along the soot-stained walls.

Thank you for stopping by. Be sure and check out Audrey and Melissa’s blogs, and have a wonderful writing and reading week!

An illustration of the first crusade.

Eating the Elephant

And other good, hopefully inspiring stuff.

Have you ever felt completely hopeless about writing an entire novel?

Does completing a novel seem so daunting a task that you simply cannot see yourself ever getting one written?

That feeling, coupled with having to support a family, made me swear off writing a novel for almost a decade. I just could not imagine finishing a project that seemed so big, while also having a job, or any kind of life. Short stories were one thing, but:

How could I write an entire novel?

“How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.”  ~ Anonymous

The way to write a novel is simply to sit down every day, and write some of it. It’s so simple. It seems like it should be obvious this is how they get done, and yet, for years I struggled with the overwhelming bigness of getting a novel written.

In The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron recommends writing what she dubbed Morning Pages. This, by any other name, is simply writing every day. Whatever you want to call it, writing every day is key to getting the flow of ideas and words going.

“If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.”  ~ Louis L’Amour

Here’s another issue that haunted me during those unproductive, frozen years: Didn’t I have to have an outline? A brilliant concept with the plot twists and subplots, all thought out in advance and laid down like a road map? Surely writing a novel required some higher form of genius that I wasn’t capable of manifesting. I had to have the whole thing thought out before I started, right?

I’d never previously had a plot thought out for any of the novellas or short stories I’d written. They’d always occurred to me as I wrote the first draft—which, by the way, was part of my excitement and delight in writing them.

But a novel was a much bigger, more complicated thing, and all The Experts were shouting that I had to have an outline. (Well…not all of them. Just the really loud ones.)

It wasn’t enough that I had some characters that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

It wasn’t enough that I wanted to see what they would do, what choices they would make, in the world I imagined them in.

I had to have a high premise and plot points. Simply wanting to discover the repercussions of my characters choices, for good or evil, wouldn’t cut it.

Completely erroneous thinking, as it turns out.

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”  ~ E.L. Doctorow

Here’s what I discovered: Plot is what happens when you sit down and write. The plot to your novel will show up if you do. It has to be excavated in pretty much the same way an archeologist digs up long buried bones. And once found, in the act of writing the first draft, the writer’s next job is to simply scrape and brush away everything that is NOT THAT.

It would have saved me so many wasted years if someone had just told me this. Okay, someone was saying it. Julia Cameron certainly was. And Diana Gabaldon’s always been open and honest about her process.  But I didn’t hear them over those other people shouting and waving their arms.

So, now I’m telling you: If you aren’t a genius—and most of us aren’t—just bring your excitement to your special writing place and sit down and write about those characters you love so much, and that fascinating world that they live in. Every day. It’ll be okay.

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.  ~ Anne Lamott  (AKA, Blessed Patron Saint of the Shitty First Draft)

If those two obstacles weren’t enough, there was this other damn thing. (Isn’t there always?) Every time I sat down to write I could only squeeze out 2000 or so words, and as often as not they were just so so; not polished and filled with awe inspiring metaphor like the novels I loved. I mistook this as proof that I wasn’t a writer. I mean, I didn’t have what it takes, obviously. Otherwise what I wrote would be brilliant, light-filled, like all those published novels, wouldn’t it?

“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.”  ~ James Michener

“The first draft of anything is shit.”  ~  Ernest Hemingway

I believe I will end my post here, rather than attempt to add anything to Hemingway’s wisdom.

I hope this helps. XO

Now, what are you doing sitting here reading my blog? Haven’t you got something better to do?

Showing Up

When I got up to write this morning I really wanted to go back to bed. The house felt cold, the floor felt hard and cold beneath my bare feet, and outside as I stood waiting for Zeus to have his morning pee the night felt dark and damp and like any sensible person would be tucked up warm in bed.

Inside the house my husband sat in the big green over-stuffed chair in the kitchen, having his morning cup of coffee. He looked grumpy; he tweaked his back playing golf a few days ago, and hasn’t felt well since. After giving him a hug I made my cup of tea, measuring sugar and milk, then sat down at my computer.

My first feeling was that I was too tired to sit here and write…wouldn’t it be much nicer—not to mention easier—to just give in to the feeling and go back to bed? Did I really need to be up at this hour? I could always write later. (Not true, later there would be clients to deal with, emails and text messages, phone calls, and the muse silencing intrusion of bright sunlight.)

I opened the piece of Sword that I am currently working on and read through yesterday’s rewrites. It all bored me. The writing is fine, it’s just that I have read through this piece umpteen times and I’m sick of these rewrites. As I downed my first cup of tea these thoughts ran like a low murmur in the background. It took energy to ignore them, let me tell you.

Tired of working on the same piece of writing I have been for days, I opened a piece I had earlier in the week culled from the novel and saved into my rewrites folder. I had had some idea of deepening one of the main character’s flaws, of actually giving him a previous alcohol problem. (Bear in mind this is during Medieval times, so there wasn’t a lot of knowledge about this sort of thing back then, and certainly no A.A.) But I couldn’t think of how to work this in to the story line, and yet still have the reader feel sympathetic toward him, and believe in (or even understand) the transformation that occurs in him.

An hour passed. I poked around and played with this little segment of writing, mulling. Soon I was absorbed in the work.

As I sat there, my second cup of caffeine before me (this time coffee), I had one of those startling, sparkling moments of clarity, the kind we writers live for. I could see the thing in its entirety, its perfectness, and the little pieces I’d been mentally worrying, sorting and juggling for days fell into place like the colored pieces in a kaleidoscope.

It horrifies me to contemplate that I might have gone back to bed and missed this moment. That I might have stood up my muse and not shown up for our date. Really, it would have been so easy to be self-indulgent. And if I had, I would have missed this 6am epiphany. And who knows if it would have come to me another time? These moments are so transient, so ethereal. We run after them like children with butterfly nets, and if we are lucky enough to capture them they must be pinned down or they flutter off, and are forgotten.

Guest Post featuring Erika Marks

I’m happy to have debut author Erika Marks as my guest here this week. Her post is a timely one; whether you’re a published author, or an aspiring one, fitting writing in during the holidays can be a challenge!

All I Want for Christmas is 200 More Words: Making Progress On One’s WIP During the Holidays, And Other Urban Legends.

by Erika Marks

For those of us who are accustomed to having chunks of our work day (and nights) to write, the holiday season can mean a bit of a schedule shake-up. With out of town guests arriving, priorities change (as well they should!) and with that change means having less time to write—or maybe putting the WIP away completely.

Now we all know that stepping away from a manuscript can be a good thing–but most of us will go kicking-and-screaming, especially when we are in deep in a WIP. There’s no question that shutting off our writer’s brain is about as easy as shutting off the I-want-another-glass-of-egg-nog switch. But writing during the busy holidays need not be feast or famine. There are a few ways in which a writer can maintain their cheer and their word count.

Here are a few things I try to remember when the muse doesn’t want to take a holiday.

Carve out a temporary workspace. Part of what can be hard during the holidays is that lack of routine and structure. Now don’t get me wrong: normally, I LOVE to mix things up. But when it comes to writing, it’s a tough adjustment to make—even temporarily. If you have guests staying in a space you might usually use to write (my office is our dining table so that’s definitely out), try making a temporary workspace in another room with a door you can close (Yes, that includes closets. I’m not kidding. I’ve lived in NYC—I require very little space). Just knowing you can still have access to your work in a private setting does wonders to quell those stress bubbles that can boil up.

Leave things on a good note. As Rita Coolidge sang, “I’d rather leave while I’m in love,” and nowhere does this apply than when it comes to having to leave my manuscript for a while. I don’t know about you all, but I can’t stand to walk away from a WIP if it’s going badly. Which is why if I know things will be getting busy and writing time will be scarce, I try my best to leave my manuscript in a good place. And by good place, I mean in the middle of a scene that’s really rolling—like-mac-truck-without-breaks rolling. You’re thinking, No! How can I do that? I have to finish it! But let me ask you something: Would you rather step away with excitement knowing you are going back to a scene that is working—or finish it off in the heat of the moment only to hate where that runaway truck has gone off the road and know you have to let it sit there in flames for days? Yeah, me neither.

Keep scrap paper nearby. You never know when inspiration will strike and free moments in the thick of a busy holiday are few and far between, which means seizing them when you can. Waiting to pick up a relative, standing in line at the store, washing dishes! Keep something to write on and with nearby so you can take advantage of those fleeting moments of writing/plotting time. (I speak from experience—my purse is filled with note-covered receipts that I sift through weekly).

Make your goal for broad strokes, not polished scenes. See this “break” as an opportunity to look at the larger issues within your novel. Don’t focus on trying to work through certain scenes (you won’t be able to dedicate the time to it most likely and will just end up frustrated) but rather use the time to flesh out bigger themes in your novel. Have fifteen minutes of quiet? Thumbnail-sketch several chapters. Or take a character and consider their motivation, their emotional impact—do you need to raise the stakes for them? Think outline, not fine line.

Give yourself permission to bow out of the festivities for a few minutes here and there. The holiday season won’t come to a roaring halt if you excuse yourself from your guests for a few minutes. It doesn’t make you a lousy host/parent/spouse/friend/child if you tune out and tune in to your writing in that private space we discussed earlier.

But along those same lines, give yourself permission to take a break. As important as it is to feel that you have the freedom to pursue ideas when they strike (and rest assured, there’s a very good chance that elusive solution to your problematic ninth chapter will arrive to you the instant you sit down for your holiday feast!), it’s also important to let yourself let go for a few days. In my experience, absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder—except when it comes to putting away a manuscript for a break.

Now go have yourselves a wonderful holiday, everyone!

BIO: Erika Marks is a native New Englander who was raised in Maine and has worked as an illustrator, cake decorator, and carpenter. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, a native New Orleanian, their two daughters, and their dog. LITTLE GALE GUMBO is her first novel.

Erika’s website

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Why Do You Write?

A woman in my writers workshop shared this joke with all the rest of us via email. I don’t know where she got it, so I can’t attribute it, but here it is:

A writer died and was given the option of going to heaven or hell.

She decided to check out each place first. As the writer descended into the fiery pits, she saw row upon row of writers chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they were repeatedly whipped with thorny lashes.

“Oh my,” said the writer. “Let me see heaven now.”

A few moments later, as she ascended into heaven, she saw rows of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they, too, were whipped with thorny lashes.

“Wait a minute,” said the writer. “This is just as bad as hell!”

“Oh no, it’s not,” replied an unseen voice. “Here, your work gets published.”

A flurry of emails followed with one writer wondering:

Do you suppose purgatory is any better?

To which the wit that had sent the joke quipped:

Probably in purgatory you’re waiting for an agent to respond.

Writers all have different attitudes and ideas about why they write. Some claim to actually dislike it. Others, and I’m among them, say we aren’t happy unless we are living a writing life.

But pretty much every writer asks themselves at some point: Why write?

I write because I have these stories inside me. And I know that I am their only way out into the world; their conduit. I dream about my characters, and they pester me, until I write them down. If I don’t sit down and write them, they just keep swirling in my head. (I get an image here, of my head as a toilet bowl…shrieking, struggling characters swirling and swirling around in torrents of water…but I am reluctant to write it. I don’t like the idea of my head as a toilet. But there it is…and now I have written it.)

As much as I desire to obtain an agent and get traditionally published, it’s not the reason I write, really. I’d say it’s the reason I polish, and sweat, and work at perfecting some of what I write. (Check out my friend Natalia’s blog post about showing first drafts to others…it’s excellent. She’s so brave!) But initially I write to get the story out and into the physical, tangible world, where I can see it, and begin to grasp what it is. (To flush my toilet bowl head perhaps? Okay…enough with the toilet bowl thing…I don’t like where this is going!)

I write because I love language. More specifically, I love the English language. I love reading beautiful language, which can be about ugly things sometimes, but if it is written in such a way that it moves us, then regardless of the topic it can be beautiful. And I want to do that.

I write for the thrill of crafting beautiful passages. If you’re an avid reader, then you know what I mean. You come across some passages in books that make your pulse speed up and that you have to read again, and again, because they are so evocative and lovely, and just…well…sublime. (You read them to your writer pals, because you know another writer will understand.) I was at breakfast with a couple of writer friends the other day and one of them spoke of how these passages can come out during a moment when we are tapped in to the source of the story. The perfect words can flow onto the page during these magical, connected moments.

And then we look at what we’ve written and think…did I write that?

Is there any greater thrill? Any greater satisfaction?

The other reason I write is because I am a miserable, crotchety wench if I don’t write. (My family will verify this, if anyone doubts it.) I gave up writing once, for about 10 years, telling myself I needed to make money and focus on my family. But that experiment is a post for another day.

Writers: Why do you write?

Drafting vs. Outlining

The debate can get quite heated on this topic. We’ve all read the various posts, articles and books touting one method above the other.  Some folks say they must have everything down on cards or a ‘beat sheet’ before starting their novels. Others just seem to write their first draft without doing any of that.

I recently got to thinking about these two, seemingly opposing views, because a writer in my workshop was having trouble with her first novel. This woman is a talented writer, and a quick study. So I wondered what was going on when she missed a few meetings. An email exchange revealed the problem:

A “writing teacher” had told her she couldn’t write anything further until she had a complete outline to work from. That she had to have her plot twists and characters—all figured out ahead of time. And she shouldn’t write another word forward until then.

This proclamation had gotten the writer all jammed up and critical of herself—because she couldn’t ‘think’ of an outline, and had therefore deemed herself a failure. She despaired she could ever write anything to completion, and was now experiencing a mental block to her own creativity.

I have to say here…my first reaction, once my hair laid back down on my scalp, was extreme annoyance with said “writing teacher”. I had an almost irresistible urge to paddle the teacher and send her down to the principle. So the first thing I did was wait for that to pass. (Nothing good ever comes from violence!)

Then I wrote to the writer, and this is what I told her:

What some people call outlines are what other people call first drafts.

It’s as simple as that. You can write your first draft on cards, or in notebooks, or on your computer in files labeled as chapters. Whatever you choose to label it, if it’s words, written in a sequence, using the letters of the alphabet, naming characters and what they are doing, it’s a first draft. And you can’t get to it without sitting down and filling white space with words.

What we choose to call it is just semantics.

The method we choose is just preference.

It really all boils down to how different people create, well…differently. Some are sprawling, like me. I write big, loose, wild first drafts without any outline. I have some scenes, some of the characters, and I kinda know what the story is about—a premise. The entire first draft is where I find out exactly what the novel or short story is about, who all the characters are, what they sound like, and what parts they will all play. I cannot create any other way. I sit and write. Wildly. Fast. 1500 or more words in two or three hours, every morning. During the rest of the day, when I am doing my day job, or washing my hair, or the dishes, or reading…that’s when I am thinking about what I wrote that morning, and what it means, and what I might write next. (I keep notebooks handy and jot down ideas and cryptic words, sentences and images to help guide me the next day.)

A more ‘traditional’ outline simply doesn’t work for me. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and I think I know why. It’s because writing that type of outline requires the use of my left brain. And all the really good stuff, the creative stuff, comes from my right brain. That’s where my muse lives, and she doesn’t come out to play when I am being too analytical.

The rational side of me likes the idea of file cards and beat sheets. It seems so deliciously orderly. It’s like folding laundry or plotting the fastest route for a road trip. So very organized and rational. Unfortunately it’s also completely stifling, creatively…for me. Everything I’ve ever written from this kind of left brain activity was utterly boring. If I resisted the urge to deviate from the outline as I wrote, (to pop out of my left brain and into my right) what I ended up with had none of the power, inventiveness or surprise of the work written ‘by the seat of my pants’.

Do you remember ever doing a paint by number painting when you were little? They’re fun. You get to fill in numbered spaces with numbered colors, until gradually a picture emerges. Unfortunately it’s not a picture you want to look at for very long. You definitely don’t want to frame it and hang it on your wall. They usually end up in the trash…which is where they belong. That’s what ‘writing from an outline’ does for me. I end up with a finished story, that I don’t want to read.

If you listen to folks who study the brain and how it works, you quickly pick up that all the most creative stuff we do: inventions and works of art—even Einstein’s flights of mathematical insight—comes from the right brain. So it stands to reason that however we choose to create anything must be the way which stimulates this side of the brain for the individual. If postlets or file cards do it for you, so be it. Call yourself an outliner and go for it, my friend.

But please don’t insist this is the only legitimate way to do it. That it is superior in any way (it’s not). This is just one way. It’s the thing that stimulates you creatively. And we are all wired different.

An outline is a first draft is an outline.

 Oh, and the writer from the workshop? She’s back to doing some writing. She’s still dealing with her inner critic…which grew bloated and strong on what she’d been ‘taught’. She is working on getting over the idea that the published novels she reads were somehow shat out by people, complete and polished. But knowing she doesn’t have to show her work to anybody else has helped, and I know if she sticks with it…if she just fills white space with uncensored thought, she will get there.

“It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.   

E.L. Doctorow

 “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force.”  

 Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

Patricia Highsmith is one of my favorite authors. She wrote her tightly plotted suspense novels using notebooks and a typewriter, and writing many drafts. I suspect she fell somewhere between a plotter and an organic writer.

Writers, how do you create best? Are you an ‘organic’ type of writer? Or are you a ‘plotter’? Do you fall somewhere in between?