Category Archives: Writing

Summary: 100 Day Project

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In the 100 Day Project, one creates an art project over 100 days. In my case, I declared that I would write a mosaic novel and prove out my work by posting on my blog. My posts were to be lessons I had absorbed from the media I consumed – usually writing related – focused around lessons that enabled me to turn a book shaped object into a novel I was happy to have created.

So that didn’t quite happen. For one thing, “Hey, maybe cannibals” is not a plot. For another, 100 posts in 100 days is tremendously hopeful. I’m calling a close to the project so I can focus on more art creation and a little less churn posting.

I love what I have learned about myself and my consumption tendencies, and I love how much I have to learn.

In summary:

Planned: 100 topics, 1 novel

At one point I made a throwaway reference to a 300 sonnets problem. Somewhere on tumblr, the-humdrum-gatsby references an English professor who said, “if he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. if he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets”. It was easier for me to write posts about writing lessons than to create my stated work. While I’m glad to have this reference repository now, I will admit that it’s easier to create new art when I’m not worrying about writing blog posts.

Actually: 49 topics, 3 essays, 1 novel revision, 1 new novel (started)

I’m amazed at my level of productivity. I have a full time job that is unrelated to writing, there is currently a worldwide pandemic, and as much as this introvert has reverted to the Mona Lisa during quarantine, I will be the first to admit that I have gone a little more than slightly mad. Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to interact with actual humans. But look at that productivity.

Favorite: Practice: Read More

I have long interacted with things and people and stuff as though I were analyzing them for English class (sorry people), but writing it down and analyzing my love of museum exhibits reinforced a drive to slow down and take in this new world of pandemic. The streets shut down and so the village went road-construction crazy, so that the whole world outside my window looked like an apocalypse. And I got used to it. If I were to read the street and the construction and my sense of trapped, I would find comfort that I cannot go anywhere while I cannot go anywhere (due to quarantine). A happy ending after all.

Least Favorite: Conversation: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

This had to be my quickest and dirtiest post. There is a single revelation, but I feel it was done better with Conversation: Cabin In the Woods.

Biggest Oops: Confusing Anne Lamont and Annie Proulx (fixed!)

Ahahah. Whoops!

Biggest Revelation: Space: The Joy Luck Club

It wasn’t until I was considering the length of actual mental space that the Joy Luck Club takes up in my memory (a second handshake, years apart from the first) that I realized the power of time within a written work. It has changed how I consider plotting and structuring my work going forward.

First: Structure: Skin Game

I didn’t know what I was doing, and the difference in tone and feeling of work I perceive when I read the post really shows it.

Last: Space: Richard Peck

This was nearly the easiest post to write. At this point I had written 48 posts and gotten very comfortable with joining a wide range of media in leaps and bounds. There are no rules. And so, between the point I wanted to record and the stories in my memories of the media I had consumed, the post spilled out in a lyrical, comma filled mess that needed very little shaping. Probably could have used a little more. Eh.

I’m Glad: Community: Critique Partner

This is one of my most embarrassing and favorite stories of my childhood. At a certain point, my parents decided I should learn to handle my problems myself, and as the story in this post illustrates, there’s a reason kid logic will only get you so far.

I Wish: Space: Virgil Abloh

I wish I had written this post. I will write it someday. I will write about how much I looked forward to the show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and how disappointed I was after I went – right up to the last exhibit. It completely changed how I understood the theme of the show and sat in my mind for months, changing my behaviors and the way I interacted with things and stuff. It was wonderful. I’m still mad. I’ll write this someday.

Mistake #1: Someone Will Read This

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My first drafts of the novel that nearly wasn’t had the same slapdash sense of panic I felt while trying to get it on the page. The first complete draft took nearly 10 years to get on paper. That’s a lot of anxiety.

One of the common, basic, slap your forehead writing lessons is that every emotion you feel when writing the work will be magnified when a reader reads that work. That’s a LOT of anxiety.

At the same time I was working on turning a book shaped object into a novel, I got fed up with my pretentious self and – there’s no real and. I just got fed up with it. Instead of writing works I wanted to read, I thought I had to be more clever than clever, tricky and suave and intellectual. There’s a place for that kind of work, but when I re-read those drafts I could only feel the same work that went into them, pulling me downward into a slog.

All works are devoured differently.

If I sit down with Terry Pratchett’s anything, I’m not leaving until I hit the back cover. Same with Jim Butcher and Kage Baker. I love Italo Calvino, but I can put his works down in the middle of an essay and come back days or months later. I consumed the Three Body Problem in an evening. If I pick up anything Marie Liu, I make sure I have a seat, snacks, and a drink, because I’m not moving until that final sentence closes. Mo Haydr, for all the wonderful grotesque villains and not-quite-heroes, is very easy for me to put down at chapter two for months. Then I find the book again, open to the bookmark, and devour the rest of it. There are parts of Mary Doria Russell’s Sparrow that I had to put down after each paragraph to collect myself. That’s fine.

Before I wrote Draft 24, the magic draft, the one that just came together, I asked myself what kind of experience I was trying to have. Not create, but to have in creating. Usually I was an anxious mess, clawing figures out of mud with my fingernails. I wanted to have the same fun writing that I had reading my favorite books.

So I peeled the pretentious out of my plot and characters. I analyzed past drafts for payoff moments, humor, fear, grief, anger. I didn’t find many. Most of the wordcount was burned on explaining things, which is great for a textbook, but not for a book I actually wanted to read.

When I wrote out the plot on sticky notes that last time, I included a space for the emotions of the characters, and a space for the emotions I wanted the reader to feel. This helped me get a bird’s eye view on pacing, as well as confronting whether my villains were villainous enough or my allies were too helpful, etc. It helped me space out my payoff scenes and information reveals so that I was no longer lecturing made up history to an uncaring audience of 1 (myself, annoyed and ready to go re-read an actual favorite story).

I took a week off work* and committed to going away from home so that I was trapped with only my story and ideally, a lack of wifi and people who cared if they talked to me. I used a Deskpass trial (highly recommend a co-working space if you need to get out of your head), packed a bag each day like I was going to work, left at 7:30 am and returned after 6 pm. I had two conversations, both with bus drivers. It was glorious.

Every day I sat down, opened my scrivener document, and wrote. The concentrated writing time meant my personal emotions didn’t have time to regenerate and drift away from my story. I careened from mystery to mystery, leaned into plot twists, and by the time I got to the big reveal, I was genuinely surprised as these characters I lovingly, determinedly created spoke to each other without my strict direction. They came alive as I came alive.

If I got to talk to the me who sat down to painstakingly type out draft 3, I would give me the kind of advice I did not have the life experience to appreciate at the time. Be sad. Be happy. Be angry, revel in unrighteousness, be sharply curious, be surprised, be scared, and only after you have earned it, take a deep breath and let it all out. Be at peace.

That’s basically the same writing lesson I got from every teacher, many how-to books, seminars, conferences, friends and mentors. What I didn’t understand all those times before (23 drafts and a few other book shaped objects prior) was that emotions are both complimentary and cumulative. The protagonist is scared, I am worried. The love interest is scared, I am angry. The bully is scared, I am evilly joyful. Those emotions don’t turn off when you hit the enter button for new paragraph or a new chapter. They don’t turn off for your reader, either. Every mystery should make you, the writer, more curious. But if your sense of justice and fairplay has already been elevated through an act of comeuppance, the next comeuppance won’t have the same impact.

Writing the kind of work I want to read was never the first goal, and that was why it took me so long to even finish a work. I was bored while I was writing. I was writing boring things. Or exciting things in a boring way. Even if, by the outline, it should have been an exciting story, I was too wrapped up in being new and special to appreciate the kinds of things I liked to read. And in turn, that meant my reader would feel that sense of boredom in a magnified manner.

Don’t be entertaining. Be entertained.

*Not everyone is lucky enough to have time off from work, but I found myself working for a company that offered three whole weeks vacation annually. Yes, I am in the USA, whataboutit.

Space: Richard Peck

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Richard Peck, the man, the legend, gave a wonderful deep dive into writing for a younger audience. It’s an SCBWI DVD and if you can find a copy, I highly recommend picking it up. And investing in a DVD player.

One line jumped out at me; I even wrote it down in my commonplace book*. He said that for a younger person to go on a journey of growth, they need to leave the world of the familiar behind.

Ever wondered why so many protagonists were “friendless” or “orphans”? Once divorced from the familiar, all the comforting coping mechanisms evaporate. The ability to tap out from the struggle is gone. The only way to the end is through, and in going through all the story troubles, the character emerges as a changed person.

You don’t need to use friendless or orphan as a crutch.

Take Disney’s Princess and the Frog. Tiana has a mother, and a best friend, who has a very rich father. She even interacts with her best friend while going through her story problem. However, the bulk of her journey takes place with a stranger, and as she meets helper strangers, allowing her the space from her comfort zone to stretch and grow.

In Jumanji (the remake), once best friends, and two also-detention serving kids get transported to the world of Jumanji. Even though the boys are best friends, they have grown apart which gives them the space to reconnect and understand each other at the end of their character growth arcs.

There are plenty of options to artificially separate a protagonist from their comfort zone: send them to their estranged grandparents, move in with divorced parent who has remarried, move to new town, new school, summer camp, lost in the woods, lost in the desert, lost in general, lost with estranged friends, lost with new potential friends, amnesia (be prepared to show your work), kill a parent, kill a sibling, kill a best friend, hospitalization, long lost best friend, long lost parent, deep dark family secret that makes the familiar world newly strange.

These are a small smattering of ways to remove comfort prior to the opening of the story. There’s probably, at rough estimation, a billion more ways. Torment your character with wild abandon.

*A commonplace book is a notebook where you write down your impressions of things you’ve read or interacted with, to spark your memory later. I use mine for reflecting on business books, writing books, seminars, story ideas, travel impressions, whatever I want. There are no rules.

Conversation: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is not necessarily an allusion, though without that literary device, the form itself would not exist. Technically, it’s satire. Sort of. It’s really fan fiction.

The best part about a zombie story is the zombies and the survival or lack thereof. The best part about an eighteenth century novel about manners is the exquisite agony of the nuance of every breath, every bat of a eyelid.

If you choose to launch yourself down the rabbit hole of novel genre mash-up, I would caution you to be an absolute expert on each genre expectation first. For example, in Pride and Prejudice times, there is a mannerly way to press the big red nuclear button: the cut direct. If the cut direct is activated, the person to whom the maneuver has been deployed against no longer exists. This person will not be acknowledged in any way, shape, or form. It’s like a one-person ostracization in a public room and believe me, if anyone has mean-girl shunned you in public, everybody and their second cousin knows it.

So if you were to attempt a genre mash-up involving a comedy of manners and oh, zombies, for example, the understanding of those manners should probably be on par with the fan who buys grocery sacks of romance novels weekly or people Just Might Talk. For more about Pride and Prejudice and its intertwining themes with zombies, check out this amazing haiku review at Dear Author.

Conversation: Girl With All The Gifts

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Below are three levels of conversation around Girl With All the Gifts. The first layer is the one I usually interact with – the subject matter/details of the work itself. That’s not a bad thing, just something I’ve noticed about myself and my consumption of media.

I’ve loved Mike Carey since my brief satanic stint in college. Not to say I went on one, I just got really fascinated by the media that came out of the devil worshiping scare in the eighties. From John Constantine to the Felix Castor novels to Lucifer, I consumed whatever that guy put out. And then he sort of fell off the radar. Or maybe I did.

Girl With All the Gifts was completely different from that whole comic book and gore aesthetic and I nearly passed it right by. Then I looked at the author name and thought, oh, what if… So I gave it a shot. It was good. It was the kind of book you read and then you go on to the next book you’ll read. So a movie came out with the same name and like any good nerd, I reread the book and went to watch the film.

Sometimes we understand a work immediately. The high notes are easy to grasp. Here we have a special child with a special destiny but – oooh, twist! – her special destiny is not what you think. Seriously, go read it.

Most of the PR I can remember about the film talked about how they made the main protagonist black, which was a great example of when changing the race of the protagonist adds to a work and makes it richer. Go read this review on Black Girl Nerd for a nuanced look at how changing the race of the protagonist added depth and a discussion of agency as the work translated between book and film.

When the movie came out, I was doubly excited to see that pivotal end scene, the one that took me two readings to understand. The one that, on the second reading, changed the way I saw the world and the shape of it.

When I saw the movie, I saw they also changed the race of a side character.

MASSIVE SPOILER

But you already read the book, so you know what I’m going to say next. Right?

In the book, we have a special child with a special destiny and a special teacher who, from the child’s perspective, is the best teacher in the whole world. She’s the most amazing adult the child has ever met, which is a very understandable perspective given the cruelty the kid faces every day of her life from absolutely everybody else. She protects her favorite teacher above all else, so that when the whole world ends, her favorite teacher is still right by her side. Because you read the book, you know the students are all zombies, the special child finds a way to turn all the remaining human survivors into zombies, and now the special students will be the leaders of the new world. And the basis of their new world is what they are taught by the best teacher from the old world.

In the book, the most pivotal scene to me, was of the students sitting at the feet of a black woman, ready for their first lesson in the world from the their favorite teacher. Through the film she watches the last vestiges of the world she knows be destroyed by her beloved special student and finally she stands before the children, the only grown-up found worthy. The last of humanity in her known world – and while it is a delightful horror movie ending, there was another layer. She prepares to shape the new world from her perspective, breaking a long history of white perspective for the first time in English speaking countries at least. Remember, the author was British, this writer is American, and most of my formally taught history was written by, or at the very least, filtered through the white, male perspective. That was never more apparent than when Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The last scene of the book, the promise of reverberation, was the kind of scene that nestled down into my brain and crept over me weeks and months later, a quiet what if –

In the movie the teacher was a white woman.

That’s the first layer of the conversation.

Here’s another layer. There is only one black character with a major speaking role (or major narrative role) in either the movie or the book*. Why do we need to accept only one? Why couldn’t we have had both in the movie? Or the book? Why, when the “major POC character” role was filled, were we trapped in a world where we still have to count non-white ethnicities? Why are there so few I can count them?

And there is yet another layer. The book was authored by a white English man. In the chain of creation, there will also be his agent, editor, and publisher. The director of the movie was a white Scottish man. In the chain of creation, there will also be the casting team, producers, etc.

Representation matters, at all levels.

*There are a couple of minor roles played by black actors who exist to get eaten, basically. To be really fair, everyone who isn’t the special teacher or the students are there to die. It is a zombie flick after all.

Voice: Hannibal S02E08

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Like many foodies, I gravitated to Hannibal the series both for the beautiful dinner parties and the people eating*. As a lifelong horror fan, it had everything I craved at the time, from the quiet, gorgeous framing, delightful costuming, and little things like growing mushrooms on people or a man who is turned into a beehive.

Every time we rewatch and reread a work, it becomes new in that we have space to notice new details, or to notice old details in a new way. During the intervening days and years between consumption we have taken in new works that create new spaces for these old works to slot newly into our minds, thus changing our worldview oh-so-slightly, wonderfully, in a way that creates a cascade effect to change the works we have taken in and will taken in – and on and on.

In season 2, episode 8, Jack and Will go ice fishing. At this point –

SPOILERS

Will has dealt with his encephalitis and subsequent minor jail sequence as the suspected copycat killer. Jack, in the surety of his leadership style, has not yet accepted Hannibal as a suspect, but is working to reintegrate a newly freed Will.

The entirety of their two personalities and the tug of interaction – Jack’s overconfidence, Will’s quick thinking, poorly executed communication style – is on full display in a single frame. Look at the footprints in the snow leading to the ice fishing hole.

Jack’s footprints are in a straight line with a brutally even stride. Will’s footprints are turned in and out, as though the character has carefully and quickly picked his way over the ice, even though of the two, he is the more experienced fisherman.

It’s a single instance of care for the characters, the setting, and the audience, that draws me back to the show again and again.

*Eating people? I feel like this is one of those accidental in-jokes, if you haven’t seen the show and don’t realize Hannibal doesn’t just rhyme with cannibal.

Structure: Outer Limits

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If one good thing has come from a time of mass-binging old TV shows, it’s learning how to watch shows to catch their quirks and appreciate what those quirks add to the art form of the show. I’ve been working my way through the Outer Limits for a couple of reasons. First, it’s been a while. Second, there’s only so many times a human can reasonably watch Murder, She Wrote.

The Outer Limits, for the uninitiated, was a science fiction anthology show similar to the Twilight Zone, or, because I’m watching the nineties Outer Limits, like the Outer Limits from the sixties. There are roughly twenty episodes per season, and plenty of seasons to lose my time to. After a couple of seasons, I noticed (and plenty of first run viewers noticed) that each season was ended by an episode made up of flashbacks to other episodes, cut from context, and twisted to support the character viewpoints made in the current episode.

These clip shows make wonderful use of the copious amounts of material that have come before. They run like the popular montage technique – usually when a bad guy is talking about how his evil plan came to be, or the hero talks about how he thwarted the evil plan at each step.

In writing, we aren’t supposed to delete. I was told to open a new file and just dump my lesser babies there until I could use them again. Well.

The Outer Limits clip episodes ably demonstrate how to manipulate those lost bits and pieces into new works, separated from their original destiny. They also demonstrate the recycling of old work without quite plagiarizing themselves. By giving the clips new meaning, they are adding rather than taking up space with what we’ve already seen.

There are certain themes I fall back to – community, power, corrupted bureaucracy, among others. I have written about memory in my nonfiction works, over and over. I write about food as a mode of communication. I believe that we are never finished with an idea, and there is nothing stopping us from turning it on its head to look at it from another angle.

Sunday Check-in 6

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How it’s going: I’m about 3 weeks behind in posts and have run out of the backlog to post. It’s fine. It’s fine! I have 4 chapters on a middle grade. It’s fine.

Count: 1,156/80,000

Check List:

Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
Edit prep – o
Revision – o
Query – o
Pitch – o
Agent list – o

Mistake 6: Three Spaces of Story

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One of my favorite comic book series was called Planetary. It’s still called Planetary, I’m just having issues with tenses.

Warren Ellis took a world that started with century babies, people born in 1900 with extraordinary abilities, and riffed on the Fantastic Four, martial arts movies, Godzilla, and a dozen other artifacts from my childhood. How could I not love it?

Illustrated by the incredible John Cassaday (just pick up a copy and you will understand), one sequence changed the way I looked at space availability.

In this sequence, a character has to convey a chunk of information via monologue. Usually, as in a Shakespearean (or any kind of) play, the actor will talk a bit and maybe move around onstage. In a movie, maybe they are waving a gun. In real life, you get told “sit down!” as you try to move around while your parental unit monologues about that thing you totally swore you were going to do. And didn’t. Anyway, in this scene, the character finds a camera on the table, takes a selfie, sticks the photo to his forehead and turns around to face the audience and his in-panel listeners.

Boom.

Every time someone had attempted to tell little-me about art, they went on about background and mid-ground and foreground. Every time it went in one ear and out the other. Here, finally, I got it. In comic books, there were three spaces available to tell parts of the story. Background for small characters or something the characters were reacting to, mid-ground for main characters to be speaking, and foreground for small, immediate actions.

These spaces were not interchangeable, but shifting the focus of the space or rotating the camera, would change the meanings of what was happening. The background side story becomes foreshadowing becomes main focus. The foreground small throwaway action is a character trait illustration, or perhaps a hidden action for the audience of the comic but not the other participants on the page.

In terms of dialogue, there were three spaces as well. The character monologues to us in the midground. He performs a small movement in the foreground that illustrates his character. And his audience stares gobsmacked outside of the panel until the very last cell where the view changes and we see them having watched him the entire time. The third space is off the page – what we call breaking the fourth wall – but without the character slyly acknowledging us the audience, that third space is simply the space left for the reader.

Most of the drafts of my first novel type project had all things happening on the foreground. Background information, secret histories, side conversations; everybody knew everything. There was no sense of mystery or in-jokes, or the sense that anyone existed outside of a capital letter at one end and a period at the other.

When I applied forcible separation via spacing, I got something different entirely. I didn’t have the visual space of a comic book. I couldn’t show someone meeting with a suspicious looking character while another oblivious character went about their day. I needed to allude to a shared past, foreshadow danger, and stop making characters so darn helpful. I needed most dialog to be understood in different ways by all characters present in the conversation. Finally, my villains got creepier, my protagonist faced great consternation, and my allies took time and effort to win over. You know, conflict.

Conversation: Cabin In the Woods

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As previously surmised on this very site, there are probably tens of thousands of alphabet-type books in existence. There are probably a double dozen published each year in the USA. Some past favorites of mine include a Where’s Waldo type hunt in the illustrations, a jazz rhythm primer, and teaching about the natural history of Hawaii.

When a market is saturated with what has been said, eventually you can say something about what has been said before and add to the conversation of what exactly the market has tolerated, what it means, what it says about us as a culture, a society, and the human experience as it is understood in this moment.

Cabin In the Woods put both of these concepts together and gave audiences a commentary on killing teenagers in a movie, stereotype roles, rituals both arcane and corporate, and the most hilarious exchange (”Am I on speakerphone?”) that illuminated the humanity behind the people who typically hold NPC signifier positions. It was not the final word.

Time marches on, seasons change, tastes change, social mores change, more derivative works are added to the total library of human creation; there is always more to be said.

Cabin In the Woods is a horror movie, first and last. Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom (referenced elsewhere on this blog) is an alphabet book. Both take the structure of expectation of their genre, tick the required boxes, and then hang something new on the skeleton of what is needed to succeed.

Horror movies need horror, and they need to say something horrible or reveal a horribleness about us or at least say something in a horrifying way. Alphabet books need to be about the alphabet or at least include the letters in the currently accepted order or acknowledge that there is an order they will proceed to ignore for the good reasons they go on to state in the work itself.

Alphabet book? Needs alphabet.

Horror movie? Needs horror.