"You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space." Johnny Cash from yesterday's The Writers Alamanac

Write What You Can Handle

A number of manuscripts I’ve read or worked on over that years have always haunted me. These were written by beginning writers although I’m not certain that they’d classify themselves as beginning writers.  I don’t have a clear definition for beginning writer, just like I cannot classify certain colors of the sky. As I look out my window now the sky is smoke colored. But how to name it?

Some beginning writers plug away at their first story for 3 or 4 years. Some more. Some dabble; some earnestly apply themselves to the task and keep improving.

The ones that I’ve read and wish I hadn’t often feature similar problems. Most are constructed from a grandiose plot, a bloated cast of characters, and innumerable subplots, and they’re usually written in a genre the writer doesn’t actually read much. Often these stories take place in far-away lands the writer has never visited and feature heroes that are as unlike the writer as raisins are unlike jalapeno peppers. These stories are usually doomed.

Here’s the thing: Forget about the advice about writing what you know. Write what you can handle. Start with a comprehensible tale with a handful or so of characters. This  story should unfold in your imagination, as if you’re watching a 3-D movie. It needs a simple, clearly-drawn dramatic question (Who murdered John?) as its basis and sharply-etched conflict. (John was murdered because Alex, the murderer, wanted his wife).

Resist being all fancy and elevated and don’t wander hither and yon. Don’t preach; don’t include stream of consciousness musings about the nature of creativity. Don’t put yourself in the story, especially as a talented and overlooked writer unless you’re writing a memoir or essay. Don’t write a story based on a knotty topic you know nothing about and will take years of research. Most which you accomplish on the internet.  

Write the simplest possible plot based on a timeless theme: forgiveness, justice, freedom, love. Write about emotions you understand, although they might be pitched higher than what has happened to you.

Keep it simple. And yes, high concept and simple can co-exist in your story. Craft beautiful sentences and breathe life into characters. Don’t keep adding until you’ve got a Gaudi-style behemoth.   

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Continuing my bits or Bitter Truths series here.
Whereby I espouse cautionary tidbits about the writing life.

Balance might not be possible all the time.
For years now I’ve heard much talk about balance, as in work-life balance. For years I also pursued it and actually still do. Each person has his or her own definition of this oft-elusive quality. For some it might mean exercising more and fretting less. Or spending that elusive quality time with their kids. For me it means that whatever I’m doing, I’m not fretting that I should be doing something else. So that I can be present with the moment.

Quick Take:

Don't dangle threads without dealing with them. When you raise a question or a problem in a story, do so intending to eventually deal with it/solve it/resolve before the  story ends Dealing with it can be as simple as acknowledging the problem isn't going to be solved within the space of the story, but the acknowledgment needs to be there or the reader will believe the writer simply forgot about it. 

Now, not all subplots need to be wrapped up in a complicated story. But if a subplot is not resolved (and it too has a beginning, middle and end) then the reader still needs a sense of the eventual resolution or that this is an ongoing situation. Meaning a subplot cannot just disappear as the story goes along. 

Quick Take:

Every work of fiction should have an emotional feel, an overall tone you want readers to experience. The feel may be romantic as in a Nicholas Sparks novel. Or creepy, as in a Dean Koontz horror story. You may want lyrical, or dark, or adventurous. These are all emotional tones.Sometimes the tone will lighten or change over the course of a novel, but usually one prevails. 

Thought for the day:

"I have enormous gratitude for no reason at all. I experience joy just for being alive. I love because I have no choice. If you are wondering why I write and talk so much about awakening, this is it." ~ Scott Kiloby

Just saying...
Before you send an email to anyone in this business, make sure you don't sound like a crazy person. When you sound like a crazy person people remember.

 "All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again." ~ Catherynne M. Valente

 

Get it Done!

Writing, that is. Listen to my talk on the Susan Rich show here.

On the air in half an hour (9 PT, noon ET) with Susan Rich on All Women's Radio.
Talking writing. Talking how to get it done.
www.w4wn.com
Join us!
 

First, I'm going to appear on Susan Rich Talks radio show tomorrow (1/8). 9 A.M. PT noon ET. We'll be talking about your writerly aspirations for 2013, keeping on track, staying out of the muck,  and how to make your writing more alive.
Solid writerly advice. Also, we're going to laugh a lot and probably talk fast. You can find us here: All Women's Radio www.w4wn.com

Second, My newsletter The Writing Life will be emailed this week. If you want to be on my mailing list or you are not receiving it, please contact me at jessicapage(at)spiritone(dot)com.

Third, Since I've received some emails on the topic, I am not leading a critique group this semester. I've got a backlog of editing projects to catch up on. Some are written by my favorite authors, so looking forward to diving into their pages. 

Fourth, There is still time to sign up for Making it in Changing Times conference. 

January 26th, Portland, Oregon

Keynote speaker: Lidia Yuknavitch

Not to be missed. The schedule is here. 

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Thought for Today:

"I do believe in an everyday sort of magic - the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone."
  ~ Charles de Lint

What's Next?

A column on another approach to writing the new year is here at jessicamorrell.com
Here's how it starts:

In long-ago times, as seems fitting, March was the beginning of the year and interestingly marked the resumption of war. In about 700 BC January and February were added to the calendar by a Roman king. January is named after the god Janus and he is the god of gates and doorways, openings and closings. Janus has two faces, back to back, which allow him to look both backward into the old year and forward into the new one at the same time. He is the spirit of the opening. Native Americans called January the wolf moon, the Anglo-Saxons called it Wolf-monath because wolves came into the villages in winter in search of food. Wolves howled loudest and searched furthest in January. With wolves about they hunkered down, kept the livestock close.

Thought for the Day:

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
~ Mary Oliver

Pick a Number

Amazingly, the sky is blue again this morning. Last night we spent the final hours of the old year and greeted the  new year at a Storm Large concert. It was just the thing to inspire --electrifying, sassy, soulful, uplifting. In her final song of the evening she sang about how we are the light, we are the change. After the bruising, saddening events of 2012 I've never been more aware of the need for light-giving people. Writers and artists are needed and needed now to tell truths and stories and create poems and songs. To spread the best parts of humankind, to bring the sky into view. Every chance you get, spend time with people who are vibrant, in sync, and deeply alive because their art has transformed them.

This morning I've been pondering my intentions for 2013.
It's a year that's going to include numbers because numbers don't lie.
I'm focusing on the number of words I'm going to write each day to be accountable and present. A word count leads to a writing practice.  A writing practice brings results and changes you. Sure, sprints are terrific for proving you've got the words stacked within you, such as when you crank out pages during a NaNoWriMo challenge or write like a mad person to meet a deadline.

But the way to write is with the grace and potency of daily obligation.
Before you know it, you'll have created a writing practice. A writing practice sustains and holds you through the spindly times, the storms that toss you aside. A writing practice takes you deeper within.  It's simple: you keep reaching toward or returning to the number of words you're going to achieve. Day after day.

Some numbers that work for many people: 250, 500, 1000, 1500.

Pick one.
Start writing.
And keep dreaming, keep writing, have heart
 

January 

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~ Sylvia Plath

Quick Take: 

Story equals problem.

Every story is about a problem that needs to be solved, and the protagonist is the only one who can do it. In short stories the problem is often the inciting incident. In longer fiction, the inciting incident typically leads to the problem. The inciting incident upsets the order of the fictional world and leads the protagonist toward the problem. No matter when the problem begins in the story (and it’s always in Act One) the problem needs to be weighty and vexing. It should also be personal, often creating a bond between the protagonist and antagonist.  So a handy definition of plot is the constant struggle of the protagonist to solve an intolerable problem and reestablish order.

Thought for the Day:

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” ~ Ishmael Reed

In Case You Missed It

A few items to get you thinking.
I'm still cleaning up after the holiday and alas, eating Christmas cookies for breakfast. Looking forward to a winter of productivity and quiet. I've missed blogging, but the previous weeks involved a flurry of gift buying and wrapping, baking,cooking, and decorating. One more dinner party to host on Sunday for my book club, then on to the new. I love the week between Christmas and New Years because I can enjoy the Christmas trees (we put up two this year and now that I'm not baking when I walk downstairs in the morning the house smells like the trees) and slow down and think ahead to what I want to accomplish next year.

Here are a few posts to nudge us all to ponder our writing goals and publishing plans. And then more to help us look back at the successes, trends, and good things of 2012.

From the all-around smart guy  Nathan Bradsford, go to this link for knock-out advice on doubts and pain that come with the writing life. He calls it Living on Edge of Confidence and Self-Doubt. He writes: "Terror and joy. Confidence and self-doubt. The best artists live right in that uncomfortable middle."
Doubt and terror are indeed normal--it's all about how you handle those bedeviling emotions.

Agent Rachel Gardner is a font of sound advice. Here she answers the question about querying an agent twice. 

The digital world is hard to keep up with.  For those of you who plan to self publish, it's not only about good writing, but also discoverability. Here's some helpful information on the state of ebooks and self publishing: Discovery Landscape Becomes More Complicated as Reader Behavior Fractures

As for looking back: There was, of course, The New Times list of 100 Notable Books for 2012. Find the list here in case you haven't seen it.


From The Virginia Quarterly The Media Consumption List for 2012 Edition. Not a "best of" list, but this one is comprehensive and original.

Time Magazine has a lollapalooza of compilation of top ten lists here called The Top Ten of Everything. You will not be disappointed.


Keep writing, keep dreaming, step forward

A lovely Solstice to All

And if like me, you've been heavy hearted in the past week from the terrible violence and carnage in this country, please remember that writers are the lights in the world. Never before has this planet so needed our songs, stories, poems, and truths and what it means to me human and alive and compassionate and real.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

"If you don't torture your characters with hardship and suffering, you're torturing your reader with boredom." ~  ThinkBannedThoughts

Making it in Changing Times Conference

January 26th

Portland, Oregon

the complete schedule is here

A Simple Way to Create Suspense

Lee Child has the answer here. And I agree with every word.
He writes: Readers are human, and humans seem programmed to wait for answers to questions they witness being asked. I learned that fact in my first job. I worked in television production from 1977 until 1995, and the business changed radically during that time, mainly because of one particular invention. It was something that almost no one had in 1980, and that almost everyone had in 1990, and it changed the game forever. We had to cope with it. We had to invent a solution to the serious problem it posed.
 

For more on creating suspense and tension you can find chapters on both subjects in my book Between the Lines, Mastering the Subtle Elements of Fiction. Which is on sale here and here. And from me.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

Quick Take: plot points

When writing  fiction , it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a plot point and an event. Events or actions stand alone; they build scenes and flesh out the story. The best actions have consequences. If your action doesn't have consequences, then you need to ask yourself why it's part of your story.

A plot point, on the other hand, couldn’t exist without everything that came before it, and if you remove that plot point from the story, everything that happens afterwards would fall apart. Plot points are game changers. Once the plot point happens, there is no returning to the way things were before.  Each point is a link in a chain. Break one, and the whole shebang collapses. Fiction is causal.

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

"To this day you can take me to a room with my eyes closed and my ears plugged, and I can tell at once, without the slightest doubt, if it is a room full of books.  I take in the smells of an old library not with my nostrils but through my skin, a kind of grave, pensive laden with book dust finer than any other dust, blended with the savor that emanates from old paper, mingled with the smell of glues ancient and modern, pungent thick almond scents,

sourish sweat, intoxicating weed and iodine, and undertones of the lead smell of thick printer’s ink, and a smell of rotting paper, eaten away by damp and mildew, and of cheap paper that is crumbling to dust, contrasting with the rich, exotic, dizzying aromas emanating from fine imported paper that excite the palate."

~ Amos Oz

Short Story Contest news

Great News. The deadline for entries has been extended to December 17th.

Do you have a winning short story of 1,500 words or fewer? Would you like a shot at national recognition for your work? Imagine the effect winning or ranking in a highly respected story competition could have on your résumé and publishing career. The 13th Annual Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition is on now.

Enter your short short story today and you could:

• Win up to $3,000 cash-Plus, more cash and prizes awarded to the top 25 entries
• Get national exposure for your work-The winner will be featured in Writer's Digest magazine, and the top 25 entries will be published in the 2013 Writer's Digest Short Story Competition Collection
• Win a paid trip to New York City-The first-place winner will be sent to the Writer's Digest Conference in New York City!

 Polish up your manuscript of 1,500 words or fewer and enter the Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition today.

According to the Writer's Almanac, today is the birthday of Rainer Maria Rilke. He wrote: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue [...] Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers."

In Case You Missed It

a small compilation of writerly news.
From Media Bistro: 5 Ways to Find an Agent is here
I especially like their suggestion to follow agents on Twitter.

Simon and Schuster has now joined the self publishing industry with Archway Publishing.  The FAQ page is here.  But writers beware: this is essentially vanity publishing. The writing world is in a hubbub about this for good reason. And vanity presses have been around  a long time.

And here is Porter Anderson at Writing on the Ether weighing in on the whole controversy of Vanity Presses, back lists, social media and a slew of other topics.

Stuck? Dial 911 at webook You can find tips on setting,endings, characters....and it's fun.

"We are so in love with our words and ideas that we forget the direct experience from which they arise. We build concept upon concept. In the end we have abstracted our contact with life into the rote regurgitation of thought-bound ideology.
We have fallen victim to the great curse of human existence of the tendency to misconstrue language (words, thoughts, ideas) for actuality. We are entombed in our brains.
We are thinking our lives, not living them.

Think about the problems all this thought is creating. We pick up a self-help book, a book of spiritual advice, a religious book, thinking it might help with our thought-bound world. We read. We think it quite interesting. We think we will read more. We are not sure where all of this is going, but we think we will read more and find out.
It is not going anywhere.

Thought has nowhere to go but its own isolated, endless fragmented repetition.

Without the obsession of thought we are the recognition and the expression of the energy of consciousness and space in which we and others coexist in such profound contact that there is nothing that definitively divides us.
We search for this relationship of profound openness, without guile or armor, vulnerable, trusting, and at the same time, intimate, intertwined, boundaryless - but this transcendental relationship constantly slips from us as we experience it and then try to institutionalize it.

When our minds are absolutely quiet, when thought is still, this relationship is the natural state of our being. Then thought, the ego-center, enters immediately to catalog, analyze, and capture the beauty of the vision.
We seek the rare butterfly. Upon glimpsing its beauty we stalk it, catch it, drive a pin through its head to mount it, and put it on our wall with its Latin name. We trade the moment of beauty for the endless stultification of a dead symbol, an artifact, a word, a concept.

We can use language to approach that which is beyond language. We can use language to amuse ourselves. We can use language as poetry, as music. But we forget that these words, any words, bring us nowhere in actuality, only somewhere in the mind, in thought. We are in a bubble. We are staring in the pond admiring the reflection of our own thoughts." ~ Steven Harrison