An Introduction

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Robert Olen Butler, the process of writing is not intellectual, but emotional, and it is necessary to enter our dreamspace in order to write honest, inspired fiction.  That works for me.  At least for the first draft.

Then there is the process of turning that first draft into the finished story or novel.  As Stephen King says, for that you need lots of tools, the tools of the writing craft.

In this blog, I hope to discuss both the emotional and the intellectual – the tools.  There are lots of web sites and blogs that do the same, but maybe you have not found them or they do not speak in your personal language.  Maybe I will, for some of you, anyway.  Or perhaps I can make it more fun, with your help and comments.

I will add to the Categories and Resources lists as we go along, and try to keep them organized for easy access.  If there is anything you would like to see here that you do not, let me know.  This blog is for you, beginning, intermediate and maybe even published writers.

The idea is to improve your writing and mine, whether you want to publish or not.  In case you do hope to publish, I will include information on agents and publishing.

Good luck and happy, excellent writing to us all.

Show and Tell

Remember Show and Tell from Elementary School?  It wasn’t Show versus Tell, or Show instead of Tell, it was Show and Tell.

Show, don’t Tell, is what the writer is continually told, and this is good advice . . . usually.  Do not tell us your character is afraid; show us his fear.

As P. Bradley Robb says, every rule has an exception.   Knowing when to show and when to tell is the sign of a writer who has learned her craft, of a writer who has found his voice.

One instance telling makes sense is when showing will slow down the pace when it is appropriate to speed it along.  It always takes more time, more words to show a thing than to tell it.  Sometimes showing can get wrapped up in unnecessary detail, relating a writer’s knowledge, knowledge that is not necessary to the plot, the scene or the character.

Another would be filling in background information, description or events that are not as important as scenes that you want to stand out, those which you will show.

It is always a case of:  Is this scene, description, character trait important enough that it must be shown? How will showing affect the tension and pace of the story?  If important showing slows down the pace too much, perhaps it is misplaced.

Back to my own novel now — hope I have shown everything at the right time and place.

The Need for Constructive “Critters”

Best intentions.  Good bloggers blog at least once a week, twice is even better.

Yes, I realize I am not one of those.  I will try harder, but guarantee nothing.

I keep discovering interesting new sites and getting sidetracked by them, and am often too lazy to get back to my blog.  One of those sites is so good I had to join it – Critique Circle.  Let’s back up a little.

I started writing fanfiction on LiveJournal years ago, and it was nice to have a “built-in” fan base, even nicer when those fans commented on how much they loved my little stories.  It can be difficult to write in a vacuum, which has always been what writers do, as writing is best done all by one’s lonesome.  On the other hand, once you decide you are serious about what you write and want to improve, “I love this story,” doesn’t give you much useful information.

Add the fact that many of us do not know how to give a constructive, helpful critique.

Enter Critique Circle.  The membership is free.  The site gives examples and templates on how to critique.  You have to give a certain number of critiques before you can submit up to 5,000 words and get critiques from other members.  Critiques are graded on how helpful they were by the writer who receives them.  This is only the beginning of all the helpful goodies that are on this site.  No, I do not own stock or make any money from Critique Circle.

I have submitted two chapters of my novel so far, and benefited enormously from the critiques already received.  Check it out.

More Joy of Writing Sex

Here is more from The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict, and whatever else comes to mind.

• Narrate from with the characters’ bodies and minds and connect them with their physical surroundings.  A buttock in warm sand (or cold), the bite of a mosquito – something or anything that contributes to the mood you want to create.
• They may not speak, but they might.  Dialogue can reveal your characters, create conflict, resolve conflict, reveal attitudes toward sex.  Perhaps a little humor?  Talk leading up to sex can be more fun and interesting than the sex, itself.
• Be specific and add a little detail, but not necessarily explicit.  Use details that reveal emotion or distinguish one character from another, time, place, status.
• Surprise!  Something about the scene the reader remembers, which is not necessarily a great orgasm.  What happened that was unexpected?

In writing about sex, remember the realities of the world in which you are writing.  Today we must consider AIDS, how the characters feel about it, safe sex – are they reckless, restrained, what controls their decisions?  There is a great deal of exploration to be done here when writing about the gay community, in particular.  As the author states, “Gay characters, and the primarily gay writers who create them, live in an environment in many ways defined by the ravages and repercussions of AIDS.  Illness and death have an inescapable immediacy and weight for the infected and uninfected alike; fictional characters, like their real-life counterparts, often exist in extremis, forced at every turn to explore the fusion of love, sex, mortality, and grief.”

Because of AIDS, the year and location in which you set your characters is crucial and will vary between gay and straight couples.

• In our current time, most gays take practicing safe sex for granted.
• You can use the preparation for safe sex between straight couples for further revelations about your characters.  Embarrassment about the condom?  Use it.

Here are titles of following chapters:  “Losing Your Cherry and Other First times to Remember; Great Expectations: The Wedding Night and the Honeymoon; Life Sentences: Husbands and Wives; Three Cheers for Adultery; Your Place or Mine: Recreational Sex; The Illicit: Sex Forbidden by Law, History, and Politics; Solo Sex: Alone, on the Phone, and on the Internet.”

You get the picture.

We love to talk about it, don’t we?  Now write and have fun.  This can be the most fun writing of all.  Truly.

That Vexing Sex Scene

Many writers have commented on various sites about their difficulties with writing a good sex scene.  I have found the best book on this subject to be The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict.  She has authored four novels, one of which was a finalist for the American Book Award.  She knows from where she writes, and I highly recommend this guide for your writing book shelf.

She states that there is a difference between porn, or erotic writing, and literary sex writing.  “In pornography, consumers will demand their money back if the sex is lousy . . . or the girl cries when it’s over.  This other kind of sex writing thrives on all the things that nourish good fiction:  tension, dramatic conflict, character development, insights, metaphors, and surprises.”  The best fiction writing is not a sex manual of what happens, but who it happens to, the characters’ inner lives, and must engage the reader on all levels, not just the physical.

• The orgasm is not what is important.  What is important is the connection or lack of connection.
• Sex is in the realm of the mind.  What are your characters thinking during their encounter?  Robert Owen Butler’s recent book, Intercourse, is full of excellent examples of couples’ thoughts.
• For many, “suggestion, suppression, and sublimation are more potent aphrodisiacs than the real thing.”
• Set a tone of heightened erotic tension by using sensual description of your location and/or items within it.  Anne Rice is an expert at sensual and lush description.
• Sex can be scary.  One person never truly knows what the other is thinking.
• Do both want the same thing out of this encounter?  Always remember that a good character must yearn and yearn intensely.  Here is another opportunity for dramatic conflict.
• I love this, from the book:  “Sex can be an expression of affection, love, fear, vulnerability, anger, power, rage, submission–or nearly all of these at once.  Sex strips us of our defenses, leaving us vulnerable to feelings that are often repressed.”
• A good sex scene is not necessarily about good sex.  Consider what this means for your characters, how it might send your story off into an exciting new direction, how it might show something about each of them.  It might express your theme, be a symbol or a metaphor for something within your story.

There is more for next time.

I want to leave you with one of my favorite sex scenes from Barbara Kinsolver’s novel, Prodigal Summer:

“Carefully she took both his hands off of her, raised them above his shoulders, and rolled over him and pinned him like a wrestler.  Straddling his thighs this way, looking down on his face, she felt stunned to her core by this human presence so close to her.  He smiled, that odd parenthetic grin she already knew to look for.  It’s that simple, then, she thought.  It’s that possible.  She best down to him, tasting the salt skin of his chest with the sensitive tip of her tongue, and then exploring the tight drum of his abdomen.  He shuddered at the touch of her warm breath on his skin, giving her to know that she could take and own Eddie Bondo.  It was the body’s decision, a body with no more choice of its natural history than an orchid has, or the bee it needs, and so they would both get lost here, she would let him in, anywhere he wanted to go.  In the last full hour of daylight, while lacewings sought solace for their brief lives in the forest’s bright upper air, and the husk of her empty nylon parka lay tangled with his in the mud, their two soft-skinned bodies completed their introductions on the floor of her porch.  A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.”

The Good Old Days, No more

What happened to the good old days when all you had to do was write a novel?  As if that weren’t enough.  These days, if you want your story to reach the public, you need be a web expert, a marketing expert and a publishing expert.

I have been trying to complete the second draft of my Civil War novel, but I keep getting sidetracked by all these articles about how I have to have a web presence, network hither and yon, be prepared to promote myself on Facebook, Twitter, various writers’ communities, etc., etc.  Then I must decide whether to go for a paper publisher, ebook publisher, or self-publish.  Then there are three different ways I might self-publish, depending.

“The Writer” magazine’s January issue contains an article about whether publishers should pay authors for promoting their own books.  We are expected to do our own promoting, you see.  Instead of them.  Only the cost comes out of our own pockets.

Then there is this blog.  It was originally going to be about writing.  Perhaps I should get back to that and worry about publishing when the writing is done.  First things first.

For those of you ready to publish, the newsy sites are on the sidebar.  Right now, I have to clear my head for writing.

Writing and Bowling

First, my sincere apologies for not having updated this blog for so long.  Last week we found out my husband has melanoma, and it knocked us both sideways a bit.  Today is exploratory surgery, and we will learn more.  Enough of that.

I have begun editing my Civil War novel, after letting in hide away for a couple months.  How interesting.  I word-searched the phrase “There is” for starters and received over two hundred hits.  Good grief Charlie Brown!  If there is anyone out there who does not know, this phrase, or any other form of the verb “to be” is not a good way to begin a sentence.  “There is a lot of rain blowing against the window” is so flat compared to “Rain blows against the window in torrents.”

Writing reminds me of learning to bowl when I was in high school.  My father taught me.  From the moment you hold the ball and look down the lane at the pins, you must remember to relax, let your arm fall straight down in an arc, release your held breath, left foot first, bend a little at the knees, lift behind exactly straight, look right at where you want the ball to go, keep your hand straight, thumb next to you, fingers on the side, the ball must just kiss the board, point it where you want it to go, etc. etc.  I am sure I forgot something.  Do it and do it and do it until those little synapses in your brains and arms and fingers are built and do everything automatically.  Lots of time and lots of practice.  Same with tennis, soccer, horseback riding, football.  Writing.

The Author – An Anachronism?

A web friend of mine recently published her first book – an eBook.  She is thrilled.  I would be, too.  She also has a very fun blog that interviews her characters.  This is not only clever, but shows she is aware of one of the most current methods of marketing her book.

One of the recent articles on Digital Book World is by Don Linn, former owner/CEO of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, entitled, “Caught in the Middle, Publishing’s Other Customers.”

The cost of hardcover books is going down.  Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it.  It is for the reader, which I suspect applies to most of us.  He notes that authors like Stephen King will not suffer.  They and those like them can self-publish and will still sell the same number of books they always have.  Even us newbies may do all right, as long as we do not seek to make a living from our writing.  I add, as long as we are willing and able to do all of our own marketing, delivery, follow-up etc., etc.

What about “those who fall between these two groups. They are the people who write for a living and who bring us the workhorse books in their categories (from literary fiction to genre fiction to all manner of non-fiction). Their advances have historically been relatively low and their sales relatively modest. They write for major publishers and independents. They write books that backlist and, in a small but very important number, they write really important books that either break out commercially, or say something significant that might not otherwise get said.”

Yet another consideration in this age of transitions.  Will the future look back on us and declare we produced nothing new, nothing of worth?  For the lack of funds, art suffered?  No more authors, only people who “write on the side.”

You may want to check out his article.  More food for thought.

Scary Things and EBooks

I was not sure, but NanoWriMo is a good thing.  Once again, I have found that the things that scare me are the things from which I learn.  Things.  Such an all-encompassing word, one most of us cannot do without.  My things, your things, whatever you wish to put in that mammoth open bag, or box.  Imagine what you will.  That is why we write, isn’t it.

I am writing better.  Each day.  Pushing for those 1,677 words.  I knew it was true.  I declared so earlier on this blog, and I have proved myself correct, at least for me.  It gets easier, too.  After the sixth day I noticed a difference.  Write every day.

I was writing before, sporadically.  Trying to “get out” short stories for those magazines and epublishers.  “They” said, those who supposedly know, that a writer should include a list of all previously-published stories when submitting a query along with all the other information that agents and/or editors generally require with a sample of your novel.  They want to see that you are successful, that you have previously been published.   So I am trying.  Only I am not a short story writer.

Some are.  So many wonderful short stories out there, anthologies and all that.  All those literary magazines.  All those popular erotica sites on the web from which you can buy something to turn you on from one to five dollars.  How do I know about those?  No comment.

I love novels.  I love to get deep into a character and which him or her grow.  I love to go somewhere else and live there for days or weeks.  I love to learn about other times, other places.  I practically never read short stories, never buy an anthology, even at the used book store.  I appreciate a well-written short story.  A few have amazed me; others have made me chuckle.  Only they are not my “thing.”

I am so much happier writing my NanoNovel.  I live it.  I think about the characters.  My writing is more fun and it is improving.

It remains to be seen whether a publisher will take a novel on its own merits.  Maybe this is another place where ebooks offer more possilities for us all, particularly yet unpublished writers.

Bloggers, Are You at Risk?

Fellow Nanos, we have begun.  Not every writer does well with this sort of pressure, and it remains to be seen whether I will . . . or not.

I came across an article by Kay Day at The Writer magazine, who always has something interesting to say about writing on the web and how the web affects the rest of us.  This time she posts on the government’s new interest on blogs and advertising.  If you have advertisers on yours, give book reviews or even post comments to someone’s monetary advantage, beware.

“It was only a matter of time before watchdog organizations and the government took an interest in blogs. And if you’re doing paid reviews for products or services, you should adopt a low-risk position. Disclose what you’re doing. The Federal Trade Commission is expanding the agency’s interest in blogs and other advertising media on the Web with a sharp eye on endorsements and testimonials. The National Advertising Review Council (NARC) is doing the same. But the issues go beyond the mommy blogger who praises a toy brand after she received a free sample.

“If you blog, even if you don’t write paid reviews, regulations will affect you. So it’s important to protect yourself from a liability standpoint. For starters, if you have third party advertising on your Web site, place a notice telling your visitors they leave your site for another if they click on the ad. Make the reader aware the destination may have a different standard for recording private information.

“If you are writing paid reviews, disclose your arrangement to the reader. Otherwise you are in violation of the FTC’s guides on Endorsements and Testimonials.”

This was to be expected, as someone takes advantage of every new thing, and there is always that bad apple that makes it difficult for the rest of us.  The larger the community, the more opportunity for those rotten apples and the more of them.  So we give our collective sighs, follow the new rules and move on.

Thoughts on NaNoWriMo

I have been going back through my files (mostly from Writer’s Magazine) and rereading Robert Owen Butler, From Where You Dream in preparation for NaNoWriMo.  Here is what I have found:

• I will write first thing in the morning for two hours, before I am bombarded with all the words, other’s words, life’s everyday stuff, while I am still partially in the dream state, so I can more easily get to that intuitive place of true emotion and imagination.
• Write every day.
• Be fearless.
• Some beginnings:  a line (poems, billboards, conversation you hear), a list (Who is making it?  Why?), a title (Does it suggest a theme?  Character?  Place?), a character, a situation (Is it troubling?  Does it make you wonder?), an event, an image, a subject (a drought, a flood, grade school), an oddity.
• Get unstuck:  Write a scene where the character enters a new place.  Bring in a minor character.  Write a monologue for a character you would like to know more about.  You don’t have to write in order of your story.  Write a group of crucial scenes.
• More getting unstuck:  Free-write on an emotion, a character, a place.  Free associate on a word, a character’s name, a place.  Write a list of possible character choices in a particular situation.  Why that choice?  Have another character make a declarative statement about your main character – does it surprise you? There is less chance of getting stuck if you write every day.
• Trust in the writing process. The first draft is exploration and discovery.  It is an adventurous journey you begin not knowing where you will end up.  I read this by John Dufresne, and got even more excited:
• “You have nothing to prove in the first draft, nothing to defend, everything to imagine.  . . .  You write the draft in order to read what you have written and to determine what you still have to say. . . . You may have a destination in mind, and you may well set off in that direction, but what you encounter along the way will likely alter your course.  This uncertainty, though daunting, is crucial to the writing process.  It allows for, even encourages, revelation and surprise, while it prevents the manipulation of character or plot to suit a preconceived, and usually ill-conceived, notion of what the story must be.  In writing the first draft, you begin to work through all the uncertainty and advance toward meaning.”
• You may remove words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters in the second draft, but nothing is ever wasted.

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written. John Dufresne wrote that, and he has completed two story collections, three novels and a book on fiction writing.  www.johndufresne.com.

Have fun on your journey, everyone.  I plan to have fun on mine.