Monthly Archives: May 2020

Rhythm: The Stop

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , ,

Gilmore Girls’ actress, Alexis Bledel, once talked about using a dialog coach to practice for the high-paced chatter style of Amy Pace’s drama. I assume everyone else did, too, but the article I read when I was in my teen fan binge period had a picture of Rory.


I really enjoyed Gilmore Girls while it ran on TV for a few reasons. My mom and I could watch something that wasn’t Murder She Wrote for the Third Time and it had enough angst to soothe my tortured teenage soul.


Years later, I caught a similar affected rhythm in Life, starring Damien Lewis, a couple other great people, and a kickass ending that turned the show from a deep think mystery into an incredible character study.


It isn’t the rapid-fire back and forth that makes you sit up and listen to the characters in either show. It’s the sudden stop. That space is the impactful moment.


Consider Barns Courtney’s “99” if you don’t feel like watching roughly 7 seasons (all-together for Gilmore Girls and Life combined, minus the new Gilmore Girls. This could have been a footnote) of television. It slaps, but the neat parts are where the sound ceases and we continue into the next rollicking phrase.


The rapidfire exchange in prose has a different sudden stop. Either the long winding sentences have a sudden short interjection, or the short staccato style sentences give way suddenly to a long, winding, run-on sentence of effervescent vowels and sibilant consonants.


Consider, also, a helpless passenger in a getaway vehicle on a hilly road. Sometimes the impact is when you hit the ground; sometimes it’s when you launch into the air.

Conversation: Bridge of Birds

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , ,

My all-time favorite trilogy took some time to obtain. The first was published in the year of my birth and went on the win the World Fantasy Award. It was the author’s first novel. Years later, it would take me three countries and four months to locate all three volumes for a complete set.


Some years after that, I found another complete set at a bookstore two blocks from my then-apartment. Go figure.


Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart has a long and storied history which I highly recommend perusing, but it is not the subject of my post today. The idea of having a conversation within a novel is not new. Normally, we call this dialog. Alternately, think of this conversation as demonstrating two versions of a topic you which to display in order to convey either the superiority of your point or to analyze many facets of the topic you are thinking about as you create.


There are a number of ways to discuss your topic in-depth. Plot and subplot are the most usual manner where the plot is the main point you wish to make and the subplot is the counterpoint played out in a smaller fashion or unsuccessfully so that your main point is the stronger contender in the reader’s mind. Think of a story where something is done twice in some scale. Odysseus is attacked by a cyclops and his men are ruthlessly murdered, after he and his men invaded the cyclops’s home. Some time later, Odysseus returns home and slaughters the strange men within. In the case of this story, the subject highlighted is perhaps when is a crime a crime, or when is an acceptable when performed by some person but not another?


In Bridge of Birds, the conversation revolves around love. Every storyline, every recurring minor character has something to say about love, though not always with words. Some are saying something about familial love, some about romantic love, some about faith which is another kind of love. What love can co-exist? What love is superior? Is any love more than another?


I would caution the writer not to assume that the conversation they put on the page is the only one the reader hears or sees. Additionally, art is accidental. Craft is purposeful. If someone sees something and you didn’t mean to put it there, a few tweaks that make it look purposeful might make you look real artistic. That someone could be a beta reader, or just your future self. Future me is one of the smartest people I know.

Space: The Joy Luck Club

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I read The Joy Luck Club for pleasure, before it was assigned for pain. I mean, technically, my English teacher assigned it as summer reading and I chose the work because I’d already read it, but there is some kind of evolution that happens to a work you have read before and now MUST read.


Amy Tan’s multi-voiced novel is similar to a mosaic novel and not much like one at all. For one thing, the framing device is much of the story, for another, I didn’t know the category existed when I was twelve. Thus, the novel exists in the same space as a favored, half-forgotten childhood memory. Condensed, dreamlike, and witnessed as a passer-by rather than a participant. That is not to say that her protagonists and supporting characters are no longer intimately familiar, just that my first reading has taken place so long ago that I can no longer tell you what exactly happens or exactly how I felt at any one point in the book. I can only look back, and, without truly understanding who I was then, think of green spaces and angry children and unrelenting parents. Somewhere in there is a great joy. I have also tangled the book I knew first with the second time I knew it, reluctantly, and the movie we also had to watch, and a couple of quizzes that I absolutely loathed.


What I meant to say was that Tan’s stories within the book occupy the same time and space as one another, though they are lived generations apart. Her flashback style feels similar to approaching someone you know but can’t remember why, and then in reaching out to shake their hand, you are struck with the memory of the first meeting and that first smile. Thus there is this smile with two layers, one buoyed with the joy of seeing someone again and one of self-congratulations of that knowing epiphany right before your hands connect.


Someone will read your story. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your future self and all your audience. When you close the book, and you exhale that story world for the final time, what space will the story inhabit in your memory? The length of a bus ride? The length of one awful revelation (Memento)? The length of a dream – within a dream – within a dream (Inception)? Or a tremendous life-changing journey to a parallel world and the universe shaking revelation that physics is actually quite fun (Diane Duane’s So You Want To Be A Wizard)*?

*I had a deep-seated, frothing hatred of science in general until this book. Just, in general. Even the word made me twitch. Full disclosure, I am now a scientist. Reading: the gateway drug.

Structure: China Mountain Zhang

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The first time I realized I was reading a mosaic novel, I had deliberately sought it out. It took a few trades in the online book networks to find it, but finally I held a battered copy of China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh in my hands. I had no idea what I was getting into but by the end I still had no idea what I had really read. It was good. If I were to recommend it today, I would say: it was very good.


The premise of the novel supposes that China is the ruling superpower on Earth and takes a wide ranging look at how this affects Chinese citizens, Chinese Americans, space colonists, naive young people, and people who think they are too old to be naive.


A mosaic novel treats each chapter as a short story in the same world. I believe I have seen the term “loosely connected” somewhere in relation to this form, though I cannot remember where. McHugh uses the form to give us a different perspective on the world so that we sample coming of age and Outer Limit-like episodes set within the same confines. However, all characters interact with each other and each others’ consequences until what we really have is a journey of self-knowledge and acceptance.

Anything more is a spoiler, so go hunt down your own copy.


Mosaic novels exist onscreen in a very popular format if one is a horror addict like myself. The horror anthologies, of the eighties and nineties, usually use the smaller films within to affect the larger framing device characters so that the true horror is one that the audience sees coming (as is true in all good horror – we call this feeling dread).


I chose to do a mosaic novel for the 100 Day Project because I thought a. It will be really fun and b. It will be challenging and c. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Sunday Check-in 3

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing

How it’s going: It isn’t. I have revised 2 previous works and written a short draft of a new work. All three went to my beta reader. The only thing I haven’t worked on is this piece.

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 8: Talk Smart

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing,

There’s the work and then there’s talking about the work. I knew an artist who dropped out of her graduate program because she hated talking about her work so much. Her love for her art became littered with think-piece-like witticisms until her passion evaporated. I know that tiredness. Most artists probably do.


If you take seminars and attend conferences to learn about marketing your work, sometimes people will say they want high concept. Or the elevator pitch, or comparables, or the brutal “but what’s it really about?”


In high school English, there were two teachers. You either got the sex fiend or the death obsessive. I got death. Once we had a poem about – well, something – and one student really nailed what the teacher wanted. She said death. We said music and autumn and rebirth and can’t it just be a walk? And she sat there and chanted death death death.


He pointed wildly and shouted, “Yes. Death!”


He did let us spin for a good three minutes first.


There’s two points I’d like to make here. Firstly, your work boils down to a single sentence just for you. Secondly, people will take away what they want to take away.


I didn’t know how to talk about my work for the longest time. If some poor soul asked me, I would launch into a plot summary, the query pitch, a rattle fast recitation of the cast list. At a party filled with not yet published writers, one told me about his coming of age story with two made up genres and a neat slotting into place in current events that was so glossy that I opened my mouth to say, “You got that out of a magazine!” Luckily, total sobriety grabbed me by the throat and I did not.


Point being, there are no rules. Mashup the genres. Tick the buzz word boxes. The only one you must know by heart is the one for you. That single sentence will be the reason you wrote this book. The real reason you turn back to it until its messy potential matches the shining promise of that neat, square, written on your heart concept.


Draft 23 approached the concept because I sat down and wrote it out first. I wanted to know what if the chosen one was trapped with the monsters. I wanted to explore prison and games and outplaying the game makers. Draft 24 was a series of tweaks to make the nearly there draft into a novel that was about something, instead of just a series of things that happened.


There’s a small chance I could have done that exercise around draft 3, but I didn’t.

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.