Category Archives: Writing

Writing–like archery–requires a target, constant adjustments to your aim, and lots of practice

Antics, Writing, ,

As I type, my back, shoulders, and arms are very sore from archery practice.  The bow in the picture is a compound bow with a 30 lb draw, which means it takes 30 lbs of force to pull the string past the point of highest resistance.  After that, it is relatively easy to hold, allowing the archer time to aim with care.  It’s a very different technique than with a long bow, which is generally a fast draw and shoot affair.  In either case, however, it takes a lot of practice to become a consistent shot.  And if I switch bows or arrows or move back or if there’s wind, I have to make many adjustments in order to continue to hit the target.

A writing career is very similar.  We have to constantly adjust to changing conditions and always re-focus on the target.  In January of every year, my critique group, Viva Scriva, has a goal-setting meeting.  We review the preceding year and set our sites anew for the coming one.

Here’s what my 2011 goal list looked like:

  1. Spend Jan-May finishing the first draft of my new YA novel.
  2. Focus on building my relationship with my agent.
  3. Build the VivaScriva website.
  4. Spend June-August researching new nonfiction book.
  5. Spend Sept-Dec drafting aforementioned nonfiction book.
  6. Rebuild my website.
  7. Write those two magazine articles I didn’t get to in 2010.
  8. Keep up with my newsletters.
  9. Book 4-6 school visits or conference talks.
  10. Build a solid marketing resource book for myself and the Scrivas.

So how did I do?

Pretty darn well on 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9.  (I’m especially proud of both my website and the Scriva site).  The “new YA” novel (1) is at about 50K words (2/3 done probably).  I had to set it aside in July when I signed on to write a YA novel for Angel Punk (I know there are worse problems to have!), but it’s far enough along that I’m confident that I can finish it up when I have some time.  Plus I’m about 55K words into Angel Punk so I do deserve a self-congratulatory pat on the back for writing well over 100K words in 2011. 4, 5 and 7  were scuttled, and 10 is a jumbled pile of papers in a corner of my office.

Looking over the last year, I see that the target I was aiming at changed dramatically with the contract for Angel Punk.  All my goals had to be readjusted, but my core direction remained and remains the same: to write for kids and teens about heros, adventurers, and scientists.

I’ll leave you with a great TED video in which Richard St. John answers the question: “What Leads to Success?”  In it, he talks about the eight secrets of successful people include focus and hard work – keys to archery as well as writing.

What were your goals for 2011?  How was your aim?

When writing inflicts collateral damage on real life

Writing, ,

Garth Nix gave a fabulous speech a few years back about how writers take kernels of reality — images, emotions, events, people — and spin them into fiction.  No longer recognizable (usually) because they are  both more vivid and raw than reality was and also deeply interwoven into the narrative, these kernels take on a life of their own.  But they retain the smells and sounds of truth and that is what enables a skilled writer to evoke an emotional response in a reader.

An example:  Last week I worked on a fight scene that is built around a fight I narrowly avoided when I tried to intervene in a domestic dispute between two strangers.  There were lots of reasons I should have walked away from that situation, but I didn’t partly because I wanted to help and partly because I was an angry young woman with something to prove. I drew on those feelings to write the scene, and I hope that it makes the reader believe in my character’s reasons for getting involved.  I want them to feel like her choices were inevitable and if they had been in her shoes, they would have done the same things.

Cool, right?

What’s not so cool is when there is blow-back.

Sometimes the fiction bleeds back into real life.  Last year, I was working on a young adult novel that centers around the unlikely friendship of a fifteen-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old girl brought together by shared tragedy.  Their tragedy is one I’ve lived.  When I showed the first chapters to my critique group, Nicole asked me if I was really ready to write that book.  Was I ready, she pushed, to feel what I would have to feel?  Could I take going back to that place of broken-ness day after day after day?  What about critique on something so dear and so raw?  Would I be able to handle it?  Ultimately I decided that I was ready for it, but I definitely spent much of the year draped in a touch of depression.

Now I’m writing an impulsive, reckless, limit-pushing heroine.  To get Mara right, I’m drawing on what good, responsible kids would call their “gap” year between high school and college.  For me, it was twelve transgression-filled months, which I’m damn lucky to have survived at all.  (Not getting my ass-kicked in the aforementioned fight being one example of many dangerous situations I landed myself in.)

Now I’ve grown up and made good and am generally a respectable citizen, but writing Mara means digging up the dirt and drawing on it.  I’ve abandoned the indie folk rock I usually listen to and have switched to much more hard-charging, punk inspired music.  I’m reading edgier fiction and watching edgier movies.  It’s all supposed to make my writing better and more real, but Mara’s impulsiveness is rubbing off on me.  I’m pushing more limits than I usually would.  I’m taking more risks.

So far, there’s been no serious collateral damage…  except the blue hair.  Thanks, Mara!

Exposed by Narrative

Writing

When we meet someone new, the storytelling begins.  We deliver the cleaned-up, well-practiced narrative of our lives with the smooth proficiency of a pitchman.  We spin it to impress, to entertain, to woo.  If—after time—that someone seems a likely lover or a potential friend, we flesh out the plot with all its nuances of regret and loss, its pains and unfulfilled desires.  We are revealed.

As a novelist, I traffic in these blemished, yearning narratives that show the beating hearts of made-up people.  My characters suffer at my hand.  Unless I let them triumph.  And I watch, at the ready to strike them down again, or maybe to extend a peace-offering.

It has been a long time since I’ve told my own tale like that.  I am surrounded day-by-day with those dear ones who know my story in all its wrenching detail.  Or with those who do not need or want to know it.

Upon breaking that long quiet over lunch in a deserted restaurant, I feel flayed, exposed, and slightly dangerous.  It’s like my story could wrest itself away from the restraints I’ve placed upon it.  Perhaps it could swell into something unexpected, something worse.

And I shake my fist at the Novelist, who knows a story without trouble is no story at all.

Never doubt that your story matters. It maintains the past AND creates the future.

My Reads, Writing, ,

This morning I stumbled from my bed to the coffee maker, turning on NPR along the way.

The first story to penetrate my brain was about President Obama’s upcoming trip to Asia.  The reporter began, “The narrative President Obama is going tell…”  He went on to describe how the future of the US economy lies in Asia rather than Europe.  So our president is going to tell a story that he hopes will create the future for the US that he desires.  You understand me?  Stories can create the future.

The second piece was from Story Corp, a project beloved by me because it collects and values the stories of everyday Americans.  In this segment, Frank Curre, a Pearl Harbor survivor, tells the story of that attack.  He describes helping with the rescue efforts and concludes by saying,

I still have the nightmares, never got over the nightmares. And with God as my witness, I read my paper this morning — and right now, I can’t tell you what I read. I can’t remember.But what happened on that day is tattooed on your soul. There’s no way I can forget that. I wish to God I could.

Frank Curre may wish that he could forget, but I, for one, am glad he can’t because his story maintains the past.

Finally, let me share with you a bit of science.

In THE ART OF IMMERSION (an amazing read), Frank Rose describes the research of Demis Hassabis, a game designer and PhD neuroscientist.  He studied the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory.  If memory works by assembling the bits and pieces of the experience during recall (rather like a puzzle than vs. a video tape), then he supposed the processes of memory and imagination should be linked.  He found subjects with damage to the hippocampus and put them through a series of visual suggestions (e.g. imagine yourself on a beach).

The results were amazing.  People who had damage in the memory center of their brain could not dredge up complex imaginings. In other words, the same part of Frank Curre’s brain that remembers the bombing of Pearl Harbor is also capable of creating the future.

We are hard-wired for story.  And it MATTERS!

Today on my run I saw an old car with a bleeding eye, skunk-sprayed dogs, a smashed snake and…

Antics, Writing, , ,

 

… a talking mud puddle, sunlight shining on moss, and barges on the river below.   Running is good for my writing, my monkey mind, and my butt.  I am lucky that I get to run in the forest on a ridgeline high above my city.  There is lots to distract me from the burn in my legs and the feeling of near-suffocation as I run.

I was inspired to starting running by my writer friend and fellow Scriva, Liz Rusch.  She described her ideal writing day as one in which she went for a run, ate a big breakfast with eggs, and then went to the Sterling Writer’s Room at the Central Library in Multnomah County to work for a solid 4-6 hour stretch.

After I got the right gear for running in our wet, cold winters, I too embraced this start to my day.  I fell off the wagon for awhile because I was busy with the horses and sheep at the barn (that was good for writing too), but I’m back to my running.  And except for the squashed snake, it was a damn good way to start the day.  I’m off to write.  Maybe you should go run!

Are you an order person or a chaos person?

Antics, Writing

I read somewhere (or more likely, heard on NPR) the idea that all people can be divided into order people and chaos people.  And while I tend to throw gross generalizations under the bus, I have to say there are very few people who inhabit the middle ground between order and chaos.  That’s not to say there isn’t a gradient.  Of course, there is.  But we tend to approach the world in one of these two ways.

In case it isn’t abundantly obvious, I am so totally an order person that sometimes I disappoint  myself.  I am a creative type too, but when I describe my creative process, you’ll never hear me saying things like, “I was swept away by inspiration” or “the muse took me behind the chicken coop and ravished me.”  Nope.  To do my best work, I like a clean desk and a clear goal.

(Which in case you were wondering is to write at least 1000 words a day or revise for a 2 hours a day).

But I am envious of chaos people.  Especially on days like today when the goal seems to invite drudgery.

At KidLitCon this last weekend, Richard Jesse Watson spoke about how he used his blog as a way to “play” creatively. He posts poetry, abstract paintings that he does for warm-up, and pictures of play activity.  If you look at his published works next to his blog, you’ll see how different they are.

I woke up this morning dragging and totally bummed out that KidLitCon is over.  I miss my friends, old and new, who are all so jazzed about children’s literature and art.  I miss fondling the piles of ARCs.  I miss the tweets buzzing around the room like so many hummingbirds.

I realize that I don’t doodle or collage or journal or free write.  My form of creative play is noodling around in the stories that are the very bone, marrow, and substance of the people around me.  I guess that’s how an order person plays with other people’s chaos!

I write like Cory Doctorow & James Joyce… A fun distraction for you writers! @iwritelike

Antics, Writing

Fun party game for you writers out there.  Cut and paste a section of your manuscript into the analyzer at I Write Like and out pops the name of a writer doppelganger.  I popped in the Angel Punk prologue (well, one of the many I have written) and got ol’ Cory.  The first page of the first chapter yielded James Joyce.  Does that mean my writing is incomprehensibly dense?  Try it.  It’s a hoot!  Post your result in the comments section so we can all feel good about ourselves.

Transmedia, Talk Back, and the Power of Story

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So my new project, Angel Punk, is a transmedia project, and I’m going to be on a panel at KidLitCon in a few weeks discussing transmedia.

“What the heck is that?” you ask.

Transmedia means storytelling through multiple forms of media: film, text, images, audio, blogs, tweets… you name it.

“How is that different from Star Trek?” you ask.

Good question.  Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and other astronomically popular franchises started in one form of media,  a TV show, a movie, or a book.  It became popular and the story spread to other media forms.  Transmedia starts out in multiple places.  We recognize that there are multiple points of entry into a story both because some consumers prefer books or gaming or movies and because some facets of the story are more interesting to some readers than others.

One key component  to transmedia projects, however, is consumer (I hate that word but reader/viewer don’t cut it) participation.  More than ever we want to be a part of our favorite stories.  I have a quidditch t-shirt.  I geek out following Neil Gaiman on twitter.  I get sucked into online explorations of the Game of Thrones universe.  Most transmedia projects want talk back.  We want to know what people like and don’t like.  We want to include consumers in the process.  We want some collective consciousness on board for story telling.  If you think about it, it’s like that game where everyone takes turns making up a few lines of a story.  I love it!

See you around the social media fire pit for the next story session!

More on writing the unexpected…

My Reads, Writing

In Angel Burn by L.A. Weatherly, readers get smacked in the face by the unexpected premise: angels are bad.  We think they are good, but they invade our world and suck the life force out of humans, who are, as they are decimated by angel burn, beg for more.

This promo photo for Witches in Bikinis is another great example. Witches?  In Bikinis? Who wouldn’nt want to see that show.

My point is the same as last post: write the unexpected.  It works.

 

 

Writing Incongruities (or Mucking Out Stalls in Full Make-Up & Heels)

Antics, Writing, , ,

Recently, I spent the morning dolled up for the Angel Punk team photo shoot.  (Thank you, Levy Moroshan, for the gorgeous new picture on my home page.)  Wait until you see the mid-air jumping shots!  Hilarious to shoot even if I was a tad terrified about breaking an ankle in my heels.

Then I proceed to go home and muck out Sir William’s stall.  The photo to the left is his high fashion shot.  A neighbor was hanging around while I worked, and every time she got a glimpse of me, she laughed at the incongruity of my heavy make-up and less-than-glamourous activity.  (I did change my shoes!)

But the process of writing is like that: sometimes exciting and sometimes pedestrian; sometimes a red carpet walk and sometimes a work-out at the gym.  And the writing itself should be like that.  Forget the predictable.  Go with the incongruous.  It builds better story!