Category: Craft

Transitions: Make Them Powerful, Not Harsh

152537949Here in the Pacific Northwest, it feels like we’ve gone from summer to winter in the space of a week. One day we were sitting by the pond enjoying 16 degree sunshine and two days later we were inside by the fire as a fierce windstorm brought plummeting temperatures, hail and a power outage. The transition was harsh.

Though the weather has stabilized to more fall-like norms, I’ve been thinking about transitions lately. I’m in the middle of revising a YA novel due out next year. As part of the process, I’m making sure the transitions from scene to scene, location to location, and from one point in time to another, are seamless.  But it occurred to me as I worked that if you want to get technical, novels themselves are one big transition. At least most of them are.

Transition, by definition, is the process or period of changing from one state or condition to another. In my novel, The Art of Getting Stared At, the teen protagonist must come to terms with a disease called alopecia areata and the subsequent loss of all her hair.  In the process, Sloane learns about judgement – the way she judges herself and others – and she changes significantly.  She literally transitions from one state of being (both externally and internally) to another.  While the editor was pleased with the way the story flowed, she felt Sloane’s journey from discovering the disease to accepting it – and accepting a particular truth about her own character – should have one big exclamation point somewhere. In other words, she wanted a recognizable point in the story where the character makes that leap, that transition, to realizing she isn’t who she thought she was.

I do have that. It’s a big, black moment kind of scene, and I quite like it. But since I’m more of a gradual girl myself (I don’t like going from summer to winter in a week) I built up to it. And in the process something was lost. So now I’m back in the story, refining and revising so the transition is seamless but the point of no return is clearly recognizable. I don’t want a harsh transition. I don’t like power outages, plummeting temperatures or hail and my character doesn’t either. I’m trying for powerful instead.

Wish me luck. And please pass the cocoa. It’s cold in here.

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Holding Hope in Your Hands

mindfulwriterIn a bookstore last week, I stumbled across a book I didn’t know I needed: The Mindful Writer ~ Noble Truths of the Writing Life by Dinty W. Moore.

I was away from home, trying to maintain some semblance of a writing life while helping family. It was a precarious juggling act and one with mixed results. There were glimmers of joy (my mother-in-law was improving; I scored some amazing dim sum at an Asian grocery store one afternoon) but there were challenges I couldn’t escape: a concrete hard bed, relentless rain, and – worst of all – a new manuscript that wouldn’t behave.

Never mind behave – the story was only embryonic but it was already on life support. The harder I worked, the less satisfied I became. Pinning this particular story down was like trying to catch a minnow by hand. Slippery, elusive and frustrating.

Before I left for home, I decided to stop at a bookstore and spend some time browsing. I’d probably miss a ferry because of this, and possibly even dinner, but I needed to be surrounded by books. I needed the physical reminder that stories do get started and finished, they do find readers, they do bring pleasure. Surfing an online bookstore wouldn’t cut it. I needed to smell the ink and flip the pages. I needed to hold hope in my hands.

Funny thing, after looking at the first few shelves of fiction – and reminding myself that some of these authors surely struggled at one point in their manuscripts too – I meandered into non-fiction. I checked out metaphysics, biographies, cookbooks, travel. And, as a matter of routine, I glanced at the section on writing. I didn’t expect to find anything (my library of writing books is vast; I don’t need more). But when I saw the title Mindful Writer I pulled it off the shelf.

A friend has been talking to me lately about mindfulness. About breathing. About staying present. About loving detachment. Her advice has concerned life circumstances rather than writing but I don’t believe in coincidences.

I opened the book to the quote on page 33: What crazies we writers are, our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock. Hayden Carruth.

In his discourse under the quote, Dinty Moore says that the exact thought we have, the precise phrase or adjective we want, can be just as elusive as that minnow, just as frustrating to catch. We know what we want to say – all we have to do is say it. How hard can it be? Of course, he says, it’s often harder than we’d like it to be, and certainly harder than most non-writers would believe.

In case I needed more, in the intro Moore talks about the power of releasing control of a story, of letting the words and the characters take us in unexpected directions. “The less I grasped at my writing, the more it seemed to expand into areas that surprised and pleased not just me but the reader as well,” Moore says.

Needless to say, I bought the book. The Mindful Writer ~ Noble Truths of the Writing Life by Dinty W. Moore. A collection of thoughts and inspiration for the writer. Or as I like to think of it: hope in my hand.

The Steps We Take

step by stepI just finished reading Step by Step, A Pedestrian Memoir, by Lawrence Block. It’s a combination memoir, travel piece and journal of his years as a race walker. I’ve read Block forever (I loved his column in Writer’s Digest). He’s funny and insightful. I expected a great read and I got one. I especially enjoyed his recollection of his unlikely pilgrimage along the Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

As I read the book I was reminded again of that link between creativity and movement, especially walking. Author Brenda Ueland regularly walked up to 9 miles a day (she was a prolific writer and she lived to be a healthy 93). Thoreau would ramble for miles through the forest every day too. Author Barbara Samuel titled her blog after her love of walking (A Writer Afoot:http://www.barbarasamuel.com/barbarasblog  and she has spoken often of how important a regular walking habit is to her writing practice.

I walk several times a day with Team Sheltie, often with my partner or my son. It’s never a race walk. Depending on the friskiness of the dogs, it’s sometimes more of an amble. But it becomes a time for sharing confidences, or working through a story problem or hatching plans for the future. Or maybe simply a time to enjoy the changing seasons: the smell of lilacs in spring, wood smoke infused air in fall.

Author Julia Cameron calls walking a potent form of prayer. She says it leads us, a step at a time, and gives us a gentle path. Walking leads me, a step at a time, into my own creativity. Not every day perhaps, but often enough to keep me going back for more.
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Pink Confetti and Revisions

imageproxy.jpgcherrytreesNature often inspires me and it’s not unusual for me to find parallels between the natural world and the world of publishing.

I thought about this last week. I was in Vancouver and the ornamental cherry trees were at their best – froths of brilliant pink against the blue sky (yes, it was sunny and that’s a rarity in Vancouver in spring). Those blooms don’t last long, even with sunshine. In fact, some had already dropped, carpeting the streets in swaths of pink confetti. But before they drop, they put on a dizzying, pull-out-all-the-stops dance that takes your breath away. And then Mother Nature, aided by wind and time, comes along and encourages those blooms to drop so the trees can leaf out for another summer. And those trees will provide places for bird’s nests, and shade for picnics, and branches for kids to climb.

Those cherry blossoms are a lot like the ideal first draft – over exuberant, wild and a little uncontrollable. And beautiful. Stunningly so. But then we need to come along and let the pink confetti fall. We need to let go of words, sometimes entire passages, possibly even characters. It’s hard. We’re usually a little in love with those words and those characters. We see their beauty. Almost always. But in order for our manuscript to leaf out and become a reasonably good book that actually holds someone’s attention, we need to play Mother Nature. And sometimes Mother Nature can be brutal. We need to remember that too. But she is inevitably wise . . . inevitably in tune with the natural order of things.

So when it comes time to edit my next first draft, I’ll try hard to let the pink confetti fall. After all, spring rolls around every year without fail. And without fail, there is always another book to write. 2553927251_b113bbf06d.jpgcherrycarpet

A Sifting We Will Go . . .

Later this week I’ll be retreating with a few writers to ponder all things story and publishing. We do this four times a year, usually over a weekend. We laugh . . . we eat . . . we drink. And we work. We work hard. So hard that by the end of the weekend my head is crammed with information and ideas and inspiration, and it takes me a few days to sift through it all.

156523419This time, though, my head is also full going in. Actually, it’s more than full; it’s a mess. I need help brainstorming a new novel. I have an idea – an inciting incident really – and I have a character. But the rest is a tangled mess of threads, mostly because I could take this story in a number of different directions.

Needing to send something ahead for the agenda, I wrote out a rough book blurb as a starting point for a brainstorming session. Except – the second idea had merit so I wrote that one out too. And then I wrote out the third one because it was different again, and also full of possibility. I tossed in a few character notes. A thought or two about the setting. A vague suggestion (okay, mostly a whine) about where I might find the love interest in all of this.

And I emailed the whole tangled mess to my fellow pen warriors. No doubt I’ll come away from the weekend with a head full of information, ideas and inspiration. But with some luck – and a little hard work – I’m also hoping that those tangled threads will be nicely sorted into one tight, cohesive and colorful story idea.

Wish me luck.   1954248-red-ball-of-yarn-on-green-background

 

The Kindle Has Brought Out My Dark Side . . .

kindleI wasn’t desperate for an ebook reader. I wanted the perfect tablet instead. A tablet featuring E Ink and color, one that was easy to hold and reasonably priced. There’s no such thing. At least not yet. But there are plenty of books coming out in electronic form only, and I couldn’t read them easily. So I bought a Kindle Paperwhite.

It does the job. The lighting is terrific; it’s easy to hold. I never run out of reading material, and I don’t have to remember to take a book when I know I’ll be waiting somewhere. It’ll be great the next time I travel.

Friends said owning an e reader would change my reading habits, that I’d never buy physical books again. I don’t think so. A hardcover sits perfectly on the elliptical at the gym and I prefer a paperback in the tub. Plus, what would a cookbook be without those luscious, glossy pictures?

But the Kindle has done something. It’s brought out my dark side (And I’m not talking about how much I’ve spent in the Amazon store, though that certainly has its dark side). No, the Kindle has made me an impatient, stingy reader.

When it comes to physical books, I’m generous about giving a writer time to draw me in. I’ll read quite a long way before giving up on a story. I figure even a poorly crafted book teaches me something. With rare exceptions – that exception being a book that sucks so totally my eyes cross as I read – I pretty much finish everything I start.

Not on the Kindle.  That screen is small. I read fast. If I’m not drawn in with a few swipes of my finger, I get cranky. My mind starts to wander. And if I’m not completely hooked in those first five or six pages (probably the equivalent of one or two pages in a physical book), then I’m hitting delete.

At first I felt guilty. Then I got worried. Maybe I had an arrested case of ADD. Or something worse. Maybe I needed to see my doctor  (I don’t; the Kindle Paperwhite lets you google Web MD).

What I have instead is a new relationship. My Kindle and I need to get used to each other. Maybe my dark side will recede. Maybe I’ll become more generous and patient and revert to my old reading patterns. Maybe. Maybe not.

Either way, this dark, guilty business has reminded me of the importance of craft. The critical need for smooth, clear, and irresistible story openings. Openings so compelling the reader can’t stop reading. I’m not the only Kindle user out there. And I may not be the only impatient one.

What I’m reading this month:

On the Kindle – Angelfall by Susan Ee

At the Gym – Stay by Allie Larkin

Beside the Tub – Help, Thanks, Wow by Anne Lamott

Truth Lies in Fiction . . .

TV reporter1I started my professional life as a journalist, and I loved it. It was challenging and stimulating. I met some cool (and not so cool) people. But from the very beginning, fiction had my heart. I was never content with the ‘who, what and where’ of the reporting world though I never deviated from its rules. I used to think that facts didn’t always tell the real story. I still believe that.

Fiction is capable of telling hidden truths, loving truths, painful truths – the truths that make up our lives. The truths that haunt us or inform us, the ones that make us who we are and sometimes make us who we wish we weren’t.

Recently a plane crashed at the South Pole. Three Canadian men were on board. A helicopter was able to land near the crash site and a search team retrieved the cockpit voice recorder from the back of the plane. Sadly, the front of the plane was buried in snow, ice and rock. That means the bodies of the three men will stay there for months until weather allows for an easier retrieval. The news has provided details about the plane (a de Havilland), the company that owned it (Calgary based) and conditions and life at the South Pole (fascinating). The names of the three men have been mentioned too; there was a shot on the news of a ceremony held in their honor near the crash site.

Those are the facts. But the story – a multi-layered story of larger-than-life characters, of love and loss and horrendous grief that will shadow people for years – was missing.

The news can’t tell the story of the conversation between veteran polar pilot Bob Heath and his wife, Lucy, where he promised her that, after nearly a dozen trips to the Antarctic, this would be his last. Or the sweet details of 25-year-old Mike Denton’s wedding to Carlyn this past September. Or how Perry Anderson was a Rush fan and how he’d crack friends up with his play-by-play of Aussie dart matches.

The news isn’t about personalities, or emotions, or relationships. It doesn’t trade in small details. Not really. But fiction does. Fiction is about the stuff of life  . . . stuff that rarely makes the news. It portrays real life in a way that news can’t. And that’s why I write it. I remain a news junkie; I follow it closely – too closely sometimes. But fiction still has my heart.

For those who want to read about the details and personal lives of the three men lost in the Antarctic crash:http://www.borekair.com/memorial/

Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. Would Tweet

 

I don’t remember Martin Luther King Jr. very well. I vaguely recall him speaking on TV and I clearly remember the collective sadness when he was assassinated, though some of that was download.jpgMLKundoubtedly influenced by the assassination of Robert Kennedy two months later. (In my child mind the spring of 1968 was all about public weeping).

While the man wasn’t part of my little girl world, his beliefs and words were. And since January 21st was Martin Luther King Jr. day, I thought I’d share a few MLK quotes that resonate with me as a writer.

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” It applies to so much in life but it sure applies to a life in the arts. Writing that first line, dabbing that first swirl of paint, picking up that lump of clay requires a tremendous leap of faith.

“Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.” This quote reminds me of my neighbor who passed away unexpectedly last year. Ron was a mechanic, one of the best in the city. Retirement didn’t stop him either. On days when my words wouldn’t flow, I’d look out my window and see Ron in his driveway tinkering with a wrench and being the best he could be under the hood of a car. Humbled and inspired, I’d go back to the keyboard to do whatever best I could muster in that particular moment.

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” Much of what I do for others is private and not something I care to share (I don’t get why some are public about their good deeds). But one thing I do for others publicly is write. I write so people will be moved or informed or entertained. (And sometimes I write so Teen Freud will remember to empty the dishwasher or companies like Dearfoams will replace the two-month-old slippers that are already falling apart). I also write to get paid; it’s how I make my living. I like to believe there’s honor in that (see middle quote). But sometimes I spend too much time in the ‘how am I doing?’ loop and forget that this whole thing isn’t about me at all – it’s about the readers.

Which brings me to the last MLK quote: “We must use time
creatively.” I’ll bet you money that if Martin Luther King were alive today he’d be on Twitter. And probably Facebook. For sure he’d have a website. He was a smart guy; he’d recognize the power of social media. But I doubt he’d spend hours tracking his progress or checking his likes or counting his retweets. He’d be too busy doing for others, doing it well, and having faith.

Don’t you think?