Category Archives: Writing

Community: Critique Partner

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, ,

I used to be terrified of showing my work to people. Sometimes, I still am. I know it’s not perfect, I know what I need to change, I know it’s crap. I wrote it just for me, for that piece of me that needed to see it existing in the world, and now I’ll put it in a drawer and never see it again.


My time is worth more than that.


And the me I wrote that story for is worth more than an imperfect, not-quite-what-I-meant-to-say work.


When I was in middle school, I had hair below my shoulders. You should know, as an adult, I have curly-wavy hair and a tight regiment of moisturizing haircare products. As a kid, I lived in the desert. And as a kid in the desert, we used Suave. We used whatever was cheapest and on sale, and that was Suave. So I spent many years with very dry hair that didn’t like a hairbrush and eventually, I just gave up when I ran into a mouse-sized tangle.


Around Christmas that year, as we were waiting at the ice cream shop after the middle school winter concert, my mother got a good look at the now-guinea pig sized tangle on my shoulder. “WHAT’S THIS?” she asked.


“That was a tangle I couldn’t work out,” I told her. “In September.”


Sometimes we know we have a problem. Sometimes we even kind of know what that problem is, and we even know how to fix it before it becomes a huge issue. Sometimes we still need another person to say that they can see the problem, too.


Anyway, that’s how you get a free chin-length bob in middle school.

Practice: Word War

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, ,

Word wars can be played by yourself or with another person, or against up to forty or so people. Probably more. Here’s how it works:

  1. Set a timer.
  2. Write.

Here’s how it actually works:

  1. Procrastinate.
  2. If in a group: chat a bit. Chat a bit more.
  3. Realize your writing time is going away like that last few minutes between the alarm going off in the morning and the time you actually HAVE TO BE UP AND MOVING NOW NOW NOW.
  4. Decide on a time. Fifteen minutes is good. Five minutes is good. Sixty minutes is a marathon but if you’ve never scooped your brain out with a teaspoon, you can give it a try.
  5. Procrastinate.
  6. Realize the timer is going.
  7. Write.

Realistic tips:

  1. Set a timer for 5-25 minutes.
  2. If you are working by yourself, allow for 5 minute breaks between wars.
  3. Before the timer starts, write down your beginning word count.
  4. Double check your inner editor. This is no time to talk to yourself, so put a gag on it. You are here to get ink on the page or pixels on the screen.
  5. Press start.
  6. Write.
  7. Do not look back.
  8. If you get stuck or are trying to think of that one minor character’s name or if a gun really weighs this much, write an easily locatable symbol and move on. I use [xx].
    A. Later, I will find every [xx] and replace or remove it as necessary.
    B. If you ever read a work I have written and you stumble upon [xx], I meant to put it there. Don’t worry about it.
  9. Stop when the timer goes ding!
  10. Write down your ending word count. Subtract your beginning word count from your ending word count.
  11. Set the timer. Your goal is to beat whatever was calculated in step 9.


Voice: Charlie Huston – The Joe Pitt Books

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , ,

I have a thing for detectives with a supernatural bent. If you like the Dresden Files, you’ll enjoy the Joe Pitt books by Charlie Huston. Huston’s characters speak in monologues even if they only have quick vocal bits here and there. It’s apparent from their clothes, to the entrance, to the accoutrements that create the sound of their voices in our minds.


A spoiled rich kid is at home in a limo and on the street with her bleach blonde arrogance. The, uh, kindly vampire peacenik is a beatnik without the finger snaps. And the main character is a hardboiled vampire detective who breathes life in to the story even if his body doesn’t.


So how did Huston get here? I honestly have no idea. I have one supposition – his background includes playwright. The novel gives one the freedom to move about the universe and more importantly, to settle in a particular set of molecules for a length of time. It is the only form that allows for that solid rumination. Because of the peculiarities of this style, Huston has the opportunity to create the perfect actor to inhabit the space of the character he is attempting to portray.


Read a few plays. We’ve all suffered high school Shakespeare. Now watch some video portrayals if you can’t watch a play in person. Sure, we can call them movies. But plays exist in a different sphere.


You can also try this: who is the actor currently portraying your character?
Now what if someone else inhabited that skin?

Talking to Yourself: MFK Fisher

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

I have an abridged version of MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. The original version was written as a cookbook to stave the wolf of starvation from the door during World War II. It included such ideas as cooking a quiche with sawdust to stretch the recipe.


When she revisited the book sometime later, she included editorial comments in brackets suchly []. So that when I read How to Cook a Wolf, it included that recipe for stretching a recipe with sawdust to feed four and in brackets she included the line “if three are not your friends”.


The line struck me in the haven of my own mind. It was wryly funny, and darkly realistic, and yet. Her re-visitation of the work was something few artists are able to do, we believe, and yet the avenue is open to us all. Think of the painter who reuses a canvas to paint a portrait of a sunrise where once he had painted yet another portrait of his grieving wife. Letters were once written vertically and then horizontally to conserve paper.


A commentary to our past selves is a conversation with a now stranger. Be kind. Don’t light that draft on fire. It says something important, even if you are not the person now that it was speaking to when you wrote it.

Conversation: Allusion

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , ,

Allusion is a vocabulary word that we learn somewhere around high school or secondary school, and that is where it stays – for most of us. The allusion is a callback to a previous work of literature such as the nursery rhymes in WH Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” or any reference to Greek mythologies in modern works, or a shoutout to Beyonce in that bingeable TV series you’ve been mainlining on Netflix. It’s a brief mention that operates a little like an in-joke, to the educated folk who know what’s going on, and a little like shorthand to illuminate a point to the reader without going into detail or grave expense of the story.


All works exist within the greater conversation of concepts that we are constantly having with one another even if we are speaking different languages or living in different millenia. Think of the conversation of zombies. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies exists in part because we are already familiar with two pieces: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and zombies.


Your allusion choice may anchor a piece in time or attitude, or may say something about the understanding of the characters and thus say something about their class, education, means of understanding the world and events happening around them.


Consider your allusions carefully. They will always say more about you, and the time in which you exist, the media you consume, and your understanding of the world and the events going on around you, than you think you are saying about your characters.


Consider also that a work without allusions risks feeling anchorless, unmoored from the conversation taking place in that space today.

Mistake 7: Three Levels of “About”

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

Every story that sticks with you has the same three layers. The first layer is the story the character is living. This action layer has the plot problem, the real world, face-to-face, the antagonist and protagonist locked in struggle. This layer is the action and reaction.


The second layer is the inner journey of the character as influenced by the antagonist (or any cast member, really), subplot, secondary theme. It’s the one taking place inside the character’s head, the layer where we watch this person become someone new by the last page.


The third layer is the one where you say something about the world or the reader or the way the reader sees the world. This is the theme layer, the crawls-under-your-skin layer, the connection to the conversation happening in books and media and world events outside of the world in the story.


Without that third layer, you can still have a story. I had a story. I had things that happened and a character that realized he needed to change and the change that he made. And when you finished reading, it all went away.
One of the genres that does the third layer best is horror. Really good, crawl into your skull, and whisper hello, weeks after the fact, horror. Take Hereditary, which is about witchcraft, but also saying something about families, and well trod paths and those unavoidable destinies. Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark (movie version) had a horror story around each character such that the ending of each story was truly delightfully frightening.


I didn’t understand the third layer of story until I read Lisa Cron’s works, Wired for Story and Story Genius. Though the example story she develops is a little Hallmark (in Story Genius), there’s a reason Hallmark sells. And the concepts are easily illustrated so that you can apply them to your own work, big or small.


So about 22 drafts in, I had a character. I had a supporting cast. I had a villain and a couple antagonists and a wider world. And it didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t truly nailed down the why of the story and how that why fit into the world I live in.


You ever see Buffy? I am devastated to declare that it’s a classic, because I am now old enough to call things I saw as a teenager “classics”. Sure, she’s the chosen one. In the world of Buffy, it means she protects humanity from evil monsters. But what if your hunting territory is much smaller? And no one can leave? Then we would call your territory a prison. And the chosen ones serve an entirely different purpose. That wasn’t the third layer. The third layer went a little something like: if you are going to play a game, forced or not, and you play against the gamemakers, can you ever truly win? Can you dismantle the system once you’re inside of it? Once you win enough to make real change, you’re a part of the system. And that makes you part of the problem.

Voice: Covers

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

I thought Dr. Dog did “Heart It Races” and then some other band covered it. That band was Helsinki Architecture, which earned mad points for the name alone. It turns out, Helsinki Architecture came up with this eerie beat laden ballad and later, a folk type band covered it.


Covers are the greatest way to completely change the meaning of a song without altering a single word. When Hozier does Beyonce, it’s very much Hozier. I’m still wrapped in flannel, my toes digging into the soil of the forest as I wait for dawn, even though I know this should be an anthem as Beyonce presented it.


Sometimes covers can be controversial. Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” is an anthem of the domestic abuse victim as survivor and don’t you damn well forget it. But when Cake took a stab, their signature spoken word and sort of singing took a triumphant victory and turned it into something else. I have a theory that these songs can be sung by the same person, just at different times in their fight. At some point, you are victorious over your abuser, apart and whole and changed and alive. But at some point before that, you are trying to get up the courage to walk out that door. To change the locks. To get up off the floor. Both viewpoints are necessary. Neither one is better. Just different.


You have at some point written a story. You have perhaps not realized that you were the only person in the whole entire universe who could have written this story at this time as this person that you are. Were. Point being, sometimes people do things differently. You weren’t telling the same story. You were talking about the same thing from different angles. Neither one is better. Both are necessary.

Community: Nanowrimo

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , ,

One of the craziest ways to get a novel on the page and existing in the real world is to participate in Nanowrimo. I would not have survived all the way through grad school without it.


Just before the bottom dropped out of the economy, I was quietly flitting through grad school in a foreign country, talking to no one I didn’t live with and quietly fading into my own shadow. I had attempted National Novel Writing Month before – and failed horribly. This time, I had no social obligations, I had a lot of studying to do, but I also had nothing left to keep me going outside of textbooks and tests. Deep in my soul, I was bored.


Part of Nanowrimo is attending write-ins, getting together with your local writing community, and meeting people who are just as strange as you. After all, you’ve all promised to write 50,000 words in only 30 days.


We met in Leeds, in York, on the train and in the rain and in cafes and in tiny little alleyways that had existed since before running water came to that part of England. It was magical. It was wild. I created utter crap. It was great.


I have done Nanowrimo nearly every year since and while I created several book-shaped objects, it was also what prompted me to dust off my very first failed project and to try again. That was draft 2, and a few other drafts. More importantly, the writing community in Nanowrimo has consistently been the same type of wild, creative, welcoming energy that promises yes, you can do this. Whatever this is.


They will help you gag your inner editor, they will help you work out that one detail, they will pick you up and kick you in the butt when you’ve spent the last ten minutes starting at a blinking cursor. We’ve all read those essays and articles about how writing is solitary. It exists just passed the door of your mind, a door through which only you can enter. They can’t turn the knob or help you push it open; but they can help kick you through it. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend looking up the Nanowrimo website.

www.nanowrimo.org

Titles: How I Live Now

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , ,

Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now sounds not a whole lot like her. When she’s onstage, she has a presence and voice that fills up the room and all the little spaces in your skull. But the protagonist of How I Live Now is a fifteen-year-old bad-attitude madly-in-love girl who fills up only her own space. Much of the work –

Massive spoilers

Is filled with the feeling of dirt and death and decay, even before the invasion. There is a sense of a dissolution of a life as she falls in love and the sense of a family unit breaking down when the siblings begin to fracture over whether they should go with the army, bunker down, or strike out on their own.


When I think of this book I think of scenes from war films, largely WWI, of brown and green and hot, bloody red, and blackened corpses. Then, all the way at the end of the novel, there is a single sentence where the color changes to white. White, cold light. It is a scene where the girl reunites with her lover and they come together, not clinging to the past they have lost, but coming together in the now.


From a reader perspective, that sentence is an immense payoff – especially if you read the book in one sitting. If you haven’t already, I’d put it on your to read list, somewhere near the top. It’s good.


I’m a fan of titles that add to the work and aren’t necessarily spoken within the work. Something that adds a whole new dimension, over and over again every time you read it with new eyes.