Writing a blog post here to tell you what I’m going to write in blog posts next week. Why do something so asinine? Because I’m shorter on time than I’d like to be today, and after my previous lapse in blogging, I really wanted to get a post in this week to represent, yo.
What I was going to write about this week (and will now have to next week) was the beginning of my editing process on someone else’s manuscript now that I’ve received my first assignment as freelance developmental editor. I respectfully will refrain from discussing this author’s specific plot and leave it purely to the general suggestions I’ve noted that are likewise duly filed away in me noggin for my own manuscript (and may be useful for yours).
Which brings me to another topic I was going to write about…my manuscript status. Not super interesting at this stage, other than I’ve had it printed and bound as-is to whisk away to the English countryside for another workshop with the Room to Write organization I met in March. This is the first time I’ve seen those words in print, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t catch a typo and sentences begging to be cut on first cracking it open. It’ll never end will it…Ah well, the focus of the workshop is manuscript revision and submission, so it’s just as well that mine is still a work-in-progress.
Which brings me to what I was going to write about next week anyway: the workshop. I promise to share what insights I take away from it (and I can cram an extra scone in my pocket for ya if you’d like).
Ah, and in catching up on some of your blogs, I see that I’m going to fulfill the reqs of receiving the “Honest Scrap” award from Milo James Fowler over at the always-enjoyable In Media Res blog. Thank you, Milo! So now next week in addition to the usual fur balls, I’ll be coughing up 10 random things about myself.
Hiya! I’m back from where I left off yesterday. Hopefully I didn’t leave anyone in a great deal of suspense, as this post will only reek of anticlimax .
What I was about to continue yammering on about last night, at any rate, was that sentimentality is not the only way my past informs my writing. To start, yes, I’ve had a lovely life—I’d be an ungrateful twit not to acknowledge that and count my blessings every day (I know, la-dee-frickin’-da, right?)—yet to be honest it concerned me this would hurt my writing, make it too naive, idealized, and anything otherwise be too two-dimensional and cliché. And that’s a very valid concern…
I couldn’t help but peek ahead in my very-neglected Room to Write book, where on page 90 Bonni Goldberg says:
“Where we come from influences both what we write and how we write. [...] This is why six people can describe the same tree differently. Each person sees it through a unique set of experiences.”
And then she warns that:
“Cliché seeps into writing when writers forget or neglect to bring who they are into the piece.”
This reinforces what eventually got me over the above concern. Everyone’s life brings something to the writing desk, and maybe some of things I don’t understand first-hand consequently don’t have a place in my writing. Maybe this, then, helps me narrow down my focus, find my creative niche where what I do know can be optimized. OR maybe what I don’t know presents that extra intellectual-emotional challenge that could be enriching to explore further through research and imagination, as when a method actor immerses into a new role. In that way, I don’t have to be so pigeon-holed after all.
Then there is the simple fact that, despite general trend, my life of course hasn’t been entirely rosy! I know pain, heartache, depression, and have sharpened my teeth around anger and resentment pretty well in my day…I may idealize the past out of sentimentality, but I’ve also brought in the darker emotions from the tougher experiences I’ve had—case in point being the “writing-as-therapy” I mentioned yesterday. As a result, my protagonist shared in my own downturn, and in a way we worked through it together. Then, when I succeeded in pulling out of mine, I could outstretch my hand to lift her out of hers.
I’m not going to do the writing prompt today, but the exercise on that above-mentioned page from Room to Write asks us to write about our origins, beginning with, “I come from.” In doing so, we’re to also consider the sensory details coinciding with our memories that, by virtue of experiencing them, have impacted who we are.
Now, to put my teacher-cap back on briefly, I can’t help but recall from this a poem I had to teach my sophomores during a unit on discovering our cultural identities and identifying how they shape our individual frames of reference:
I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.
I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from Perk up! and Pipe down!
I’m from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.
I’m from Artemus and Billie’s Branch,
fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger,
the eye my father shut to keep his sight.
Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments–
snapped before I budded –
leaf-fall from the family tree.
“If I weren’t from Appalachia (or from my family and my genetic expression and my experience — I don’t know how to separate these), my writing — and I – might be bolder. I might live in New York or L.A. and push it more. As it is, I’ve chosen to stay close to home and to be somewhat restricted in what I’ve written and/or published. I anguish a lot about hurting or betraying family members…On the other hand, if I weren’t from Appalachia, my work might not have the same support of noncompetitive colleagues, of a community of memory, and of strong voices from my childhood that still speak in my head. Certainly it wouldn’t have its roots in the rocky creeks and high horizons, the enfolding spirit of trees that I call home.”
Though kids inevitably groaned over reading and writing poetry, I always loved this activity because they’d surprise themselves—by recalling and isolating the simplest of images, smells, sounds, tastes, and textures, they’d craft their own “Where I’m From” poems that offered profound insight into who they were, and I think in the end they were proud, learning that if they seized the power to really know themselves, they could harness the power to write.
Such a simple exercise here, yet so dense as we draw out the good along with all the bad to build the organs and flesh around the skeletons of our characters and infuse them with blood and soul.
And YOU, my dears? How does your sense of self inform your writing?
I’ve demonstrated before to what extent I can cling onto the past in my guest post for Real Bloggers United, “CSI: Chronically Sentimental Individual.” Now, in the spirit of the recently passed Halloween, let’s just say my memories continue to “haunt” me…
But in good ways (hence, a “blessing”), though sometimes they hurt so good (hence, a “curse”). I first conceived this topic last week when my parents’ visit came to an end and they returned Stateside. Though the effect has had a few days to wear off, I remember how I walked home from the tube and almost couldn’t bear how everything I saw reminded me of them because of our recent walks around the neighborhood together. Forget that I’ve traversed that same route for over two years now and between their two visits they haven’t even been in London a total of two months…the memories with them seemed to replace my collective everyday experience. Same went for when I returned to the flat and sobbed over little things like the coffee remaining in the French press that we’d shared earlier that morning. I know, I know…it’s passed now, though tonight I’m jolted with another stroke of sweet sentimentality from home, as I just checked my Facebook messages and saw one from a former student I taught my last year in the States. She was a freshman at the time and is now a grown-up senior about to graduate…simply cannot believe it! My babies! Anyways, she had the sweetest things to say, which made me really pine for those happy teaching years.
In view of such “ghosts” from my past, I find that they appear in some incarnation or another in my writing, perhaps in special homage of these special people and moments. ”Write what you know,” they always say, and I do, knowing full well I am clearly not alone. I’m constantly reading intros to novels that state how they’re the “most autobiographical” of the author’s works, and, really, isn’t every work of fiction arguably so? Just ways of telling our truths “slant”?
At the time I started my current manuscript, I was in need of emotional healing to follow leaving home and career, so the tale I began to spin was much more so a “therapy” than an ambition. I didn’t care if it was unoriginal; I let my first chapters draw very much from my own background, which resurrected the spirit of my earlier happiness and allowed it drift and swirl around me in my new atmosphere. The words brought it alive, brought the people and the values back to me and reminded me who I was in an otherwise unfamiliar context that sapped me of purpose. The story certainly evolved from there into a terrain highly unlike anything on which I myself have embarked, but those early chapters gave my protagonist her core, and in doing so assured me of mine.
Among the sentimental inspirations from real life, there are very direct ones that creep up in sentences reflecting the comforting closeness of my family like:
“They weren’t the stuff best-sellers and blockbusters were made of, and prayed they never would emulate what society spent its money on or turned its channel to.”
“Her mom multi-tasked concern for her child with rescuing bacon strips from their spitting inferno. She wore her short, hairsprayed curls like a helmet ready to combat any threats to her family head-on.”
I’ve also incorporated actual snippets from childhood diaries and adulthood travel journals. Plucked entirely out of their original contexts, though, it’s crazy the way they fit in and communicate something entirely new and different and had inspired new offshoots of sheerly imaginative thought, not that from experience. It’s been like dismantling a clock and using some of its gears to operate, ooh, maybe something like the Happiness Machine in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine(which, in keeping with our theme here, is a valentine to Bradbury’s own childhood).
It’s all about our frames of reference. No one could possibly perceive the world in exactly the same way that we do individually because we occupy separate space and move differently through it. This gives us our own private reality, then, and this is what writers constantly tap into to construct their fictional realities. And there’s more I’d like to say on this, but am realizing this is getting long, so I’ll break it into two parts. Fair enough? Cool. See you tomorrow.
Just dropping the MIA FYI…I’m presently back in the U.S. of A. visiting with dear family and friends to celebrate birthdays, meet newborn babies, attend weddings, sort out my condo’s new tenancy, and all that good schtuff that always makes these visits brim over with joyful obligation.
As a result, the Monkey screeches (i.e., my blog-posting and reciprocal blog-reading/commenting) may be quieted for the bulk of the week—not assisted by the fact that the Internet speed of my parents’ computer is presumably generated by two hamsters running in a wheel. If I want to spare them the expense of a shattered window and broken PC (when thrown out of said window), it is best that this dial-up connection and I keep our distance from each other. “It’s not you, AOL, it’s me. Well…maybe it is you, but I hope we can still be friends.”
I shall miss you, fine writers of the blogosphere! But I look forward to reuniting on my return from holiday and catching up on your pearls of wisdom
So, folks, this week we’ve found ourselves the victims of an Internet hoax that claimed yesterday, 6 July 2010, was the very day that Marty McFly and Doc flew into the future from 1985 in Back to the Future‘s sequel. The evidence of this was compelling: a photograph of the time-traveling DeLorean’s dashboard (above). Uh, well…see here’s the thing about living in the “futuristic” society that we do today: computer technology has brought us a little something called “Photoshop.” The actual date? 21 October 2015.
Do you realize what this means???!!! We still have five more years to invent the hoverboard. Wicked.
In any case, I found this “news” of transcending time and space to be quite timely with regard to the next writing prompt…
The Prompt:
On page 36, Room to Write asks us to choose a fantasy of what our lives will be like in 20 years. We’re supposed to “develop a reasonable plot that would make the fantasy work out.” Otherwise, we can try the same exercise using a beloved character from either our own writing or a treasured story.
Response:
Well, I don’t know how “reasonable” this is, but in my fantasy future life, I’ll have published a few novels, earning not enough for a sustainable living on my own, but enough to supplement our travel budget—or, wait a minute, if this is my fantasy, I’ll up it and say that it’s also making the mortgage payments on that stone cottage in the English countryside that we’ll maintain so we can still get our UK fix after having returned to the States (eighteen years earlier) to start a family.
[okay, I'm grabbing the DeLorean's stick and shifting this into present tense---it'll be cooler, like I'm speaking to you from the future]
For we do have a family—Fate decided it for us before we managed to overcome selfishness and laziness on our own Three children, two in high school, one in middle school. Ever since the offspring have been old enough to poop and wipe by themselves, we’ve been travelling with them abroad as well as domestically (so they know how to appreciate their own country as well), taking them to London to show them where Maw-n-Paw started their married life together, pointing up to the very window out which Mumsy would stare and formulate her fictional storylines in penning her first novel.
Not much has changed with the old neighborhood, essentially as little as had changed in the century-and-a-half prior to then. Well, the doors are painted different colors, and the streets need some paving—we have those hoverboards as well as hovercars by then, so they are no longer a priority!
“Roads? Where we’re going, we won’t need roads.” – Dr. Emmett Brown, Back to the Future
[...oh, c'mon, I'm spotting the envisioners of Back to the Future an extra fifteen years here]
Wellll…no, okay, even twenty years out, I think we’ll be lucky if we’ve even converted to 100% alternative fuel automobiles, so I really don’t see the hover-anything happening. Rather, every petrol station has outlets where we can plug in our electric cars, or hoses for those autos that run solely on baby shampoo.
I still sit at a desk tap-tappin’ my stories, even though computer keyboards are now archaic—replaced with laser light sensors that project from a paper-thin pad. I decide to still play it old-school, vowing to use my last-generation Mac keyboard until it goes kaput, just as I had with my Jetta, dearly departed about thirteen years ago…(resto en paz, my little German car manufactured in Mexico). I listen to my same old alternative rock 80s tunes, but not on the computer—I now upload my iTunes (just like the rest of my apps) by scanning the chip embedded in my wrist against my monitor whenever I order new music; the music then pipes into my inner ears through my veins, so no headphones necessary. If there’s a video, it projects inside my eyes. There is now an app for dreams.
My parents are still alive, and they are defying science with their amazing health and sharp minds. There is no question they will be able to see our children off to university (not the one where I teach literature and film studies, though, having earned my PhD a decade ago), just as they did for my nieces and nephews. Our Illinois home is a warm and velvety, pristinely preserved 19th-century house with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelved library with REAL BOOKS (they’re not obsolete yet) and a hidden door, an attic bedroom with a dusty sock monkey resting in a box, and an echoey phonograph reproduction playing my Artie Shaw—and, okay, my John Hughes movie soundtracks thanks to the vinyl records a friend gave me for my birthday way back in 2008. My siblings still live near us and make me laugh as hard as they did twenty years ago, and the twenty years before that. Some things never do change.
Otherwise, when it’s life at the English cottage with its durable thatched roof, it’s Wellies and soil beneath fingernails, raking the earth to make a garden bloom and feed us. It is quiet. The few cars along the narrow roads no longer make noise. The iTune chip in my arm is muted. It is only the insect-leg violins and fluting birds that orchestrate the score of a life of expectation now fulfilled.
Reflection:
Well, I had to stop it somewhere. I look back on this and notice all the aspects of my life I inevitably left out—What job will my husband have? What about friends? In-laws? Relatives? What about the negatives? The illness? The loss? What’s going on in the world? Politics? Other technologies? Pop culture? And on and on and on…it makes me ponder why I did describe what I did, what I chose to idealize and stretch as far as fantasy would allow me…and still feeling that I didn’t play with it quite enough or feel comfortable with what extent I could. There was the temptation to write science fiction, yet the reality is that 20 years isn’t really that far out. Though technology has made tremendous strides in the last couple decades (ah, to recall a time before email and mobiles), I don’t believe the same goes for people and lifestyles in general—so this is more a study in how an individual might evolve over time, the outcomes of choosing certain paths over others.
But if I did want to tinker with creative futuristic imaginings, I’d definitely have to leap waaaay farther out than 20 years…further than Back to the Future II‘s 30 years…something more like…the Year 3000:
So consult the crystal ball and do tell—what does the future hold for YOU or your characters?
My previous post addressed beginnings of stories/novels, yet before I get to endings, it is worthwhile to comment on the dialogue that might not only span all the in-between but, in fact, could very well be our means of beginning and ending if utilized effectively. Yet again, I am drawing from the specific advice proffered at the writing conference I attended last weekend (sponsored by the organization Room to Write), lessons we may have learned time and again through various sources, but that I found particularly insightful when distilled during this focused workshop.
To begin with, dialogue is essential to a successful novel because it:
- teaches us about characters and what they might be feeling the second they open their mouths through tone, accent, dialect, and word choice.
- conveys information
- moves the story forward and quickens its pace
- gives immediacy/brings readers in by appealing to senses of sight and sound
- creates white space, which gives us a chance to visually “breathe”
To maintain this significant impact of dialogue, we must therefore keep the following in mind:
- When using dialogue to convey information that we do not through narration, keep the information provided brief. Otherwise, it may come across as more than would be natural in a conversation.
- Voices engaged in dialogue need to be distinguished from one another—
* Test this distinction by reading dialogue out loud.
* Consider overdoing sense of voice (e.g., through dialect or word choice), as you can always go back and take it away. Spelling phonetically or using curse words to add color to a character’s voice can be effective in distinguishing him/her, yet it can also be distracting from what they’re actually saying.
* With this previous point in mind, be aware that while dialogue more closely resembles natural speech, even in the best of books it is not exactly the same as we would really talk…and that’s okay. Again, it may be due to avoiding distractions in exact pronunciation or errors in grammatical syntax (we don’t obey convention 100% when we talk vs. write). Yet I also feel it may relate to the artistry of language that we might infuse through our characters’ speech—think of the TV series Mad Men…those characters certainly do not speak like ordinary people, but there is something clean and lyrical in everything they say that is a joy to listen to and truly raises the program to a higher plane of thought and reflection.
* Not every line of dialogue needs to be tagged. This is more easily done, though, when only 2 characters are involved and it’s easier for the reader to track who is speaking the alternating lines.
* Regarding tags, you are better off using plain and simple “said.” Also, avoid adverbs—whatever description you could provide of how a character says something should already come across through the dialogue itself.
- Incorporate the “business” that goes with the dialogue. (In the excerpt we read from Ian Rankin’s Let it Bleed, for example, one character prepared a cup of coffee for the other as they conversed.) In doing so, you will:
* help the reader “see” the scene by bringing in movement and showing versus telling through the characters’ actions
* reinforce the reality of the situation, make it more authentic to real life
So, talking of talking, I’ll stop my yammering on this topic. It is a critical one, though, to writing an effective, engaging, and believable piece, so bear these pointers in mind while also just having fun with bringing your characters to life when you grant them the gift of individual voice.
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