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?

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?

Feel the Burn

Taking Our Novels From Second Rate, To Great!

For those of you who have frequented workout classes and gyms over the years, you have undoubtedly heard the expression feel the burn. You know what it means: feel the pain of a weak muscle growing more efficient through use, of your body becoming more honed and tight. Wouldn’t you like to do that for your WIP?

Allowing someone, especially another writer, to read your WIP can feel like exposing a newborn to the elements on a dark hillside. Yet it must be done.

We submit our chapters to beta-readers, writers groups, workshops, and writer friends. We take our beloved characters and plots and lay them at the feet of others. If we are very fortunate we know some good folks; some fellow writers who are willing and wise enough to help us.

If we’ve been doing this writing thing for a while we can by now distinguish the help that is truly needed, from the help that is just another writer’s opinion or prejudice. And that’s important. I don’t recommend taking everyone’s comments and using them. It’s your novel. You are the artist. Monet did not have somebody looking over his shoulder telling him not to use those greens and blues. (Or if he did, he knew enough not to listen.) We all have our own way we prefer a sentence to be structured, or punctuated, or a scene set. Those are suggestions to consider. They can sometimes be helpful, but…

There are the deeper, more weighty suggestions. Those that ask us to think about how a character is perceived by a reader. Those that question a plot twist, scene development, or pace. Those that highlight a sag in tension. These are the suggestions that set us to thinking and working on a weak slice of our novel, and if we stick with it, if we put in the effort, the result will be a leaner, more honed novel. One that will keep the reader licking her finger and turning the page.

I discovered a trick recently that I am going to share with you. It’s deceptively simple. But it helped me feel less overwhelmed by the whole rewriting process, because, like a weight machine in a gym helps us isolate a specific muscle, this little trick helps me isolate and focus in on one area, or solution, at a time. Here’s what I do:

1. I copy and paste a section of the novel— where I’ve identified a weakness— into a blank document.  (Usually between 4000 – 6000 words.)
2. I give the piece a name and save it.
3. Then I give myself a question that addresses the weakness that has become apparent, or been pointed out to me, like, what would my MC be feeling here? Or, how can I describe this scene so it draws the reader in? Or, how can I get across the information the reader needs, without giving away the twist?
4. I keep this flabby piece of the novel open on my computer for however long it takes to write it the best it can be. It can take hours, or days, but it doesn’t get put back into the novel until I know, with certainty, that it does what it is supposed to do, and does it well.
5. Then I copy and paste it back into the main body of the novel, and move on to the next Area To Be Improved. (I don’t allow myself to think of these as ‘problem areas’, because problem areas tend to become problems. Just a little Jedi-mind-trick I play on myself.)

I think the reason this method works so well for me is that it makes each issue seem smaller and more manageable. Instead of feeling the psychological weight of every place that needs work in the novel, I focus in on only the one I’ve isolated. I usually write anything new in red. But using track changes will work too. I like to work new parts in red because when I’m done I can see at a glance how much, or little, had to be changed. Sometimes there’s just a smattering of red in a section I’ve finished. Other times there are entire paragraphs of red.

I know there are many ways to handle whipping a novel in shape. I’d love to hear about yours.

Do you have any tricks for getting through the last rewrites? How do you go about the big process of honing your novel?

The Cult of the Short Sentence

Over the course of having my work critiqued in local writers groups I have gotten back this remark numerous times: This sentence is too long. It takes up two and a half lines, and should be made into two or more sentences.

Where does this belief that all sentences should be short stem from? Is it the result of the shrinking American attention span? Of over-exposure to ‘sound bites’ and commercials and texting and tweeting? Is it instilled by the pallid preaching’s of exhausted high school English teachers, struggling to cram some semblance of education into the hormonally preoccupied, marginally literate minds of teens hopped up on Red Bull and Monster?

I have listened while writers tell other writers that their flawlessly crafted sentence should be chopped into shorter lengths – “because it is too long, you see.” (And these were not sentences dealing with action…just to clarify.)

At a recent writers’ group meeting a lovely young woman who might someday – if she diligently studies craft and reads a lot – become a writer, told the group, with unblinking sincerity and conviction (for her JC English teacher had said so), that any sentence over 10 or 12 words was suspect of being a ‘run-on’ sentence. After a stunned pause while those around the table absorbed this proclamation a discussion followed, with some writers claiming that most readers don’t have the patience or intelligence to read a novel containing long sentences.

With the exception of age appropriate genres like children’s and YA, (and perhaps pulp fiction and detective novels), I disagree.

And so today, my darlings, to both rebuke and refute this erroneous thinking, I am going to regal you with very long, very beautiful sentences—written by literary masters.

If you belong to the Cult of Short Sentences, gird yourself:

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.

And another:

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them as silently as eyes.

From The Road, by Pulitzer prize winning author, Cormac McCarthy.

It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has just finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration.

And another:

I ate roast duck stuffed with oysters and yams and that wonderful curry they make in Savannah, which tastes good even to a man like me who loathes food, and drank rye whisky, and walked down those beautiful streets General Oglethorpe laid out, and stared at the beautiful houses, which were more severe than ever now, for the last leaves were off the arching trees of the streets and it was the season when the wind blows great chunks of gray sky in off the Atlantic which come dragging so low their bellies brush the masts and chimney pots, like gravid sows crossing a stubble field.

From All the King’s Men, by Pulitzer winning poet/author, Robert Penn Warren

“The Emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning ‘the Great,’ and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate, but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—The Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage—this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural—had begun to meditate, during his long tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular—the ‘I.’”

From The Enchantress of Florence  by Salman Rushdie  (contributed by writer, David Waid). In 2008, The Times ranked Rushdie thirteenth on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945″

It was a city in which the very old and the very new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names – Crouch End, Chalk Farms, Earl’s Court, Marble Arch – and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or more recently, motorized, and the needs of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every manner and color and kind.

From Neverwhere by award winning author Neil Gaiman

“That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing—the stream.”

From The Green Hills of Africa by Pulitzer prize winning author, Ernest Hemingway  (Yes, this is all one sentence…all 424 words of it.)

Do you have a favorite long sentence? Do you know someone who fears them—for whom we might perform an intervention?

Style…Have You Got It?

A recent link to a fun website prompted a discussion on Facebook. And it raised some interesting questions. Mainly this: do we ever adjust our style when we write a different genre, or do we write every genre in exactly the same style?

Here’s the link.  It ‘analyses’ your writing ‘style’ and then tells you what famous author you write like most. When I tried it I got one response for my historical novel, Sword of Mordrey, and another for a short dark metaphysical piece. So, this made me wonder: Do some authors write in the same voice and style, no matter what the subject matter or genre? And do others adjust their style to somehow better ‘fit’ the writing they are taking on?

Some people feel that changing sentence length or word choice is not changing one’s style. That using long flowing sentences would not constitute using a different style, for instance. But I think it does. Imagine if you read something by Hemingway that had long compound sentences and many esoteric four-syllable words. Would you recognize it as Hemingway? What if it was also written in present tense and utilized many semi-colons? What if it used parenthesis for asides? Starting to sound more like Neil Gaiman now, aren’t we?

Most published authors write within only one genre. It’s very common. And so perhaps their ‘style’ is one they’ve found works best for that genre? Imagine your favorite author. What does that author write? Probably s/he writes your favorite genre: horror, political thrillers, mystery, fantasy, whatever. Now, try to imagine that same author writing in a genre that is the extreme opposite. Would their exact same style work? I really want to know what you think, here. So please consider this carefully and leave a comment.

I recently had an interesting experience. For the past couple of years I have been working on Sword of Mordrey. It’s an historical novel set in 1100. So, it’s medieval. When I set out to write a medieval novel I had a certain voice in my head as to how the characters of this time period would speak, and also the voice I would use to describe events to the reader. Many of the folks in the writers groups I attended during the past two years know my writing only as this voice, having never read any of my horror, or literary writing. So, when I submitted a dark, literary, metaphysical humor piece, it was met with resistance and shock by a some. Which both interested me, and made me smile.

It interested me because it got me thinking about how easy it would be to get pigeon-holed into only one genre as a published author. Readers expect something familiar from authors they like. We want to know ahead of time just what we are getting. And this reaction made me smile because it reminded me there is not just one writer inside me, but many. My bag of tricks is so big even I can’t see the bottom. Which I find reassuring.

Still, I like to think that even if I changed my genre, changed my word choice and sentence length—someone who really knows my writing would still recognize it. And perhaps that is the illusive thing we call style.

Writers: do you write in more than one genre? Do you use exactly the same word choices, sentence syntax and length, etc, for each genre? Or do you adjust your style? How do you define style?

Readers: Are you ‘upset’ when a favorite author writes different than you are used to? Do you prefer reading authors who stick to one genre and don’t deviate from it? If so, why?

Here’s an interesting link to an article on writing style.

Girl From Down Under

This week’s guest post comes to us from Australian writer, Ashlee Scheuerman. 

Writer Ashlee Scheuerman

Ashlee Scheuerman writes from her home in Western Australia, surrounded by her troop of cats. A fantasy, horror and romance author, when she’s not busy capturing dreams and putting them to paper, she also dishes out a fair share of artistry in jewelry. Ashlee loves reading, watching anime, travelling, things of a spiritual nature, and playing video games with her husband, while still finding time to knit/crochet/sew! Come visit and hear her current ramblings over at Something to Say . If she’s not there, Ashlee’s probably working on her custom-made jewelry at http://theDragonsHoard.bigcartel.com

 

Momentum (the best kind)

by Ashlee Scheuerman

You’re finished! The final draft is complete! You can call your Work In Progress just Work now! And damn, you’re excited. Maybe not excited enough to get over the crippling terror of sending the manuscript off to agents and editors, but you’re still hyped and that’s all that matters.

What do you do with that energy?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got other projects waiting. Old stories that need a rewrite, new stories brewing in your mind, crazy ideas that you (normally a 200,000 word epic fantasy writer) will go on to write the next best-selling military action novel like all your favourite authors do! Okay, so maybe not that far, but there are definitely places to turn.

One of the greatest reasons to finish a project is the high you get from being able to stop and realise, it doesn’t need more work right now. You’re done. That story can be put aside, with no feelings of guilt, no nagging conscience threatening to destroy your self-esteem (“you never finish anything, blah blah blah”). It’s a crazy feeling. You’ve dedicated however much time to this piece, slaved over it and questioned every single word. You’ve killed your darlings (now 25% less words than when we started!). And honestly, at the end, you kind of got sick of it. All of it.

Hallelujah, praise the almighty pen, you can put it out of your mind.

Of course, that’s not to say you shouldn’t ship it off immediately. Now is the time to do it, when you’re invigorated and passionate about completing it. Wait too long, and you will start to find errors in your work. You always do, months or years later. Pretty much any author will tell you they don’t care much for their earlier stories. So rock it while it’s fresh, but embrace your new-found freedom.

It’s time to start that eight book novella set you’ve been musing over. It’s time to branch out into a new genre. It’s time to blog all over the blogospace, because you’re not tied down to finishing that one piece. Take that excitement, turn it on to something you haven’t been able to write while you were diligent and responsible and finished your other work. Use your momentum! Get out there and write!