"I get up every day and work in the morning. I have my coffee and get to work. On good days I look up and it's dark outside and the whole day has gone by and I don't know where it's gone. But there's bad days, too. Where I struggle and sweat and a half hour creeps by and I've written three words. And half a day creeps by and I've written a sentence and a half and then I quit for the day and play computer games. You know, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you." George R.R. Martin

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth."  ~ George R.R. Martin

It rained last night so the air feels new and the sky is still overcast. A week ago I was awakened at 6:45 by what sounded like German Panzers rumbling into the neighborhood. Since then it has been nonstop chaos as the house that was situated about 12 feet from my back door has been wiped out. As have the pines and grape vines, and a back yard studio. My charming patio and flower beds have been coated with dust and such no matter how often I wash them clean and I feel invaded by all the thunder and bedlam and constant crunching of machinery. It reminds me of a scene from Jurassic Park when the dinosaurs are battling to the death. And I hate needing to close my windows in the summer time, don't you?

But this morning I woke at 7 and the neighborhood was quiet. I'm going to take advantage of the lull to nap all afternoon and putter around here. And it's supposed to rain today which is just fine with me.  

Summer in Words was a big success--the speakers were so knowledgeable and deep and passionate and fun  I felt honored to be in the same room with them. And the attendees were great too. Thanks, thanks, thanks to everyone, especially my instructors (Cheryl Strayed, Deborah Reed, Bill Johnson, Randall Platt, Emily Whitman)  Mary Drew and Jay Collins. As they say, couldn't have done it without you.

The dates for Summer in Words 2012: June 15-17 and it will be located at the Hallmark Inn that overlooks Haystack Rock. People are already signing up for next year, so please don't wait too long to register since the space is limited. Registrations will be open on March 1, 2012


Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

"There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes." ~ Marcel Proust

“It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understands that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially when you are not sure of what you are doing, where you’re going? Yes. It’s impossible. Who can do it? The writer.”

     A writer is a person who stays in the room. So you do your work, and when you’re tempted to leave, you don’t. You push on, even if it’s for just a few minutes. On one level, it’s about you, the person, being along with your writing, away from all the temptations of the marketplace, away from all of the fun you’ll have with your friends, and away from all of the terrible noise on e-mail….The world is addictive. It wants us away from the desk, and a writer is a person who likes her work so much, wants her work so much, that she’s going to go get it. You’ve got to go upstream. It’s against the tide to get this kind of work done.
      The second level is, as you’re writing the story, don’t hurry. When you come to a scene, stay there. Stay there long enough to find out what might happen. I’m just pleading for patience, because people do not sit still in a place anymore. There’s almost no here and now in our country, because of the computer, because of cell phones, and because of iPods. We’re all someplace else.” ~Ron Carlson

photo by Jonathon Strong

Subtlety
I've been mulling this over awhile and have concluded that subtlety is the hardest aspect of writing to teach. After all, it's subjective and it's difficult to explain. So I want to write a series of musings on the topic here and at my (recently neglected) site.{You'll find a post on Subtlety here.}

As a starting point, here are a few suggestions:
Be able to justify every word on every page. Especially modifiers.
Be able to justify every time you slip into a character's thoughts. Can the reader already imagine what he or she is thinking?
Generally don't state a character's motivations. They should be organic to the story, not spelled out as in the huge SURRENDER DOROTHY letters.
Generally don't state your story's themes. You often don't need to state them in a synopsis either. Themes whisper beneath a story, they are like invisible threads that bind it together.
Avoid "on the nose" dialogue--characters or people always saying exactly what they mean. Sometimes when you write dialogue it might be helpful to imagine wresting words from the mouth of a teen--when he or she is at the age when he mostly mumbles and won't answer questions directly.
How was school today?
Fine.
What did you study?
The usual stuff.

TIP: Present a story as mystery unfolding, not a yellow brick road from point A to point B.

I feel that you take from your life experiences, but to make it fiction, you take it to a deeper level. You transform the mundane disappointments or the joys to make it true storytelling. You have to go much farther. You have to be a kind of spy and listen carefully. ~ Elizabeth Brundage

Quick Take:
For those of you who are writing historical fiction, try writing while playing music from the era you're writing about. (Good luck to those of you who are writing about the 16th century)

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing. Guy de Moupassant

First day of summer and sky is finally blue, full of promise. I've been working on my conference these past few days while thinking about this change of season. About how I'm longing for time outdoors, to spend days in nearby forests and wandering along mountain-fed streams.  I especially love being outdoors on soft summer nights and early mornings. I’ve learned that life is best when dawn  and nightfall are witnessed in all their etchings and fadings, and birdsong is the backdrop to it all. That falling asleep near a burbling stream is one of life’s simplest pleasures.

Writing Prompt
Write about a summer memory, making certain that you weave in all the senses.

Summer

The new season feels like it's a long time arriving here since the La Nina weather system seems determined to stick around. Of course, it's the farmers who have more to worry about, not urban flower growers such as myself. Tonight I was meeting with a friend, helping her to unmuddle a rewrite of her manuscript. She sold it to a major publishing house awhile back and the whole thing has turned into a morass of rewrites and dare I say, heartbreak. She's digging herself out of a version that went awry and trying to rescue her  novel, which might I add, is quirky in the best sense of the word, beautiful and meaningful.

When we emerged from the coffee house where we'd convened for hours the sun was blasting down, the air so softened and refined and changed since yesterday that it scarcely seemed like the same place. I arrived home, longing for a night on my patio but knowing I needed to work, so I'm playing Townes Van Zandt songs on YouTube. Remembering the time years ago when I sat in a small club and heard him perform only feet away,  his heart pouring into the room, after meeting him in the hallway before he went on and he flirted with me and I flirted back, but then stopped myself. And the YouTube songs just don't do him justice. What a writer.

I know how these summer days and nights  are in the Northern Hemisphere---you'll be busy gleaning sunshine and stealing every moment of green and sky. But you can still write, you can still write. While the flowers bloom and tomatoes ripen and fireworks explode. Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart 

What makes a story? Well, you have to have movement, right? Some people call it plot. Plot is movement that is extremely deliberate. So I would say that I'm for movement, but I'm not for terribly deliberate movement. And at some point, you come to the end of what you have to say. There's pleasure, also, and play. Something different makes every story. Sometimes you like tying up the knot. Sometimes you like to leave it wide open, for people to imagine and to do what they want with it. ~ Grace Paley

From an Editor's Desk: 
If you're struggling while plotting, keep asking yourself about cause and effect. How does the inciting incident unbalance the story world? Does the first plot point create a point of no return for the protagonist? Is it the threshold through which he or she must move forward to confront the main conflict in the story?  When a scene ends does it cause a natural push toward the next scene because it has introduced a complication, a dilemma, or problem? 

When I think of plotting I tend to think of rivers and how rivers keep moving south (or north in the case of the nearby Willamette River) the current pushing along objects and swimmers and boats. How rivers are a source of moving energy. Lapping against the shores on which trees and vegetation grow from its nourishment. The mysterious life that floats and swims beneath the surface, the secret depths. How when you stand near a river you always wonder what lies downriver. How many rivers join larger bodies of water. How they contain rocks and boulders and hidden dangers as well as forks and waterfalls. I can remember canoeing the Wisconsin River where it joined the wide Mississippi and how  difficult it was to fight the current there. How the Mississippi wanted to pull us along, send us far from home. And I've stood near the mouth of the Columbia River dumping into the Pacific in a dangerous, roiling roar, amazed at the power of all that water and movement.


So keep planning for downstream, keep looking ahead.

If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people. ~ Dean Koontz

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.~ Jeanette Winterson

Writing Prompt:

What did your father teach you?

The 'Don Knotts Golden Donut Short Story Contest' Seeks Entries

This week, the Writers' Police Academy (WPA) announced that the Don Knotts Golden Donut Short Story Contest is open for entries.

The contest is seeking short stories of exactly 200 words (including the title) about the photograph published here and on the WPA website. The photo was taken by Sunday Kaminski, a Maryland-based photographer whose work has appeared in shows, exhibits and publications including Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

The entry guidelines:
-Use exactly 200 words, including the title.
-The image in the photograph must be the main subject of the story.
-The story must be polished and complete (with a beginning, middle and a twist of an ending).
-All stories must be submitted electronically.
-The submission deadline is midnight, August 19, 2011.
-A $20 entry fee must accompany each entry. The proceeds go to the Writers' Police Academy fund to benefit the Guilford Technical Community College criminal justice foundation.
For detailed submission guidelines, go to the WPA website and click on Short Story Contest in the blue menu ribbon at the top of the screen.

The contest winner will receive the Don Knotts Golden Donut Award sponsored by the High Point (North Carolina) Public Library and Krispy Kreme. The award will be presented at the Writers' Police Academy banquet on Saturday, Sept. 24.

The contest is open to everyone. Registration and attendance at the Writers' Police Academy is not required to participate.

Advice from Jennifer Eagan: Read
A writer after my own heart.

"My advice is so basic. Number one: Read. I feel like it’s amazing how many people I know who want to be writers who don’t really read. I’m not convinced someone wants to be a writer if they don’t read. I don’t think the problem is that they need to read more; I think they might need to readjust their life goals. Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work. To be reading good things. I feel that you should be reading what you want to write. Nothing less.

The second thing is, I feel like getting in the habit of it is huge. I guess that was my one accomplishment of those two years [with the first failed novel]— making it a routine is a gigantic part of it.
One corollary of that— and this is probably the most important thing for me— is being willing to write really badly. It won’t hurt you to do that. I think there is this fear of writing badly, something primal about it, like: “This bad stuff is coming out of me…” Forget it! Let it float away and the good stuff follows. For me, the bad beginning is just something to build on. It’s no big deal. You have to give yourself permission to do that because you can’t expect to write regularly and always write well. That’s when people get into the habit of waiting for the good moments, and that is where I think writer’s block comes from. Like: It’s not happening. 

Well, maybe good writing isn’t happening, but let some bad writing happen. Let it happen!
I mean, when I was writing The Keep, my writing was so terrible. It was God-awful. My working title for that first draft was, A Short Bad Novel. I thought: “How can I disappoint?”

So, just write and be happy that you did it. You stuck to the routine. You’re kind of holding the place so that you’re present for when something good is ready to come.

And then it’s all about rewriting. Re-visiting, re-visiting and re-writing. I think it’s a mistake to be too precious about one’s words. I feel the same way about the criticism. You’re not going to break! It’s pretty tough to stick it out, to do this. So, get used to it! People are going to not like it. Okay! You’ll live. So, it’s bad. Okay. You’ll live! They said ‘no.’ You know what? Everyone gets said ‘no’ to a thousand times. If that is really something that you can’t tolerate, this may not work."

You can find the whole (really long) interview at this link
Keep writing, keep reading, keep dreaming

Contest Rosetta Books will host The Galaxy Project writing contest for science fiction novellas or novelettes. Entries must be received before September 2nd.

The digital publisher is running this contest to launch The Galaxy Project, a collection eBook reprints from the classic science fiction magazine Galaxy.

Here’s more from the release: “The winning writer will be guaranteed e-book publication as part of The Galaxy Project collection, a set of the top novellas that appeared originally in Galaxy, and will also receive a $1,000 advance against royalties of 50% of net receipts to 2,500 copies and 60% of net receipts thereafter for world English digital rights. The contest is open now and the submission deadline is Friday, September 2, 2011.”

Writers need to limit their novellas or novelettes in the range of 15,000 to 20,000 words. The judges for this contest include Nebula Award-winner Robert Silverberg, Locus Award-winner Barry N. Malzberg, and author David Drake. Follow this link for more details.

File Under: Great News
As I've mentioned before, I always like to keep up on the careers of my students and clients. So I was thrilled to learn that Deborah Reed will be featured on NPR's On the Media program. I'll let you know the date. You can read her interview here and find updates at her at her site. Her upcoming book, Carry Yourself Back To Me can now be pre-ordered at amazon.com. I'll let you all know the date of the broadcast. And again, Deborah will be explaining live at Summer in Words  (Friday night, June 24) how she landed her three-book publishing contract.