Back to Basics

I got together with a friend of mine this morning for our weekly summertime writing, support, marketing, critique group meeting. We met at the SF Conservancy of Flowers and talked for a bit and then wrote for a bit and then talked some more, and I've been feeling great ever since then. It's amazing how much of a difference being able to jot down a few words makes to my sense of balance and well-being. But more than that, I made some connections today that I want to share with you.

Traci came up with our writing prompt. It was a really simple one: Choose an object in this room and have your character interact with it in some meaningful way. 

Both of us are working on fantasy projects right now, like I wrote about in my last post about Decoding the Muse. I decided to use a traditional quest/hero's journey pattern for my project and was outlining it while I was at Lake Tahoe last week. I know where it's going, and I know most things about the plot, but where I kind of got bogged down in my outline was in Chapter 3 -the small tests, trials and obstacles that my characters encounter on their trip. I couldn't figure out what those would look like and finally had to tell myself that I'd figure it out when I got to those middle chapters. The small obstacles portion of the plot is important - it keeps the action going while the characters are learning the rules, getting to know each other, and discovering the skills they will need to be successful on their quest. If you think about Lord of the Rings, these are the small trials the Hobbits have to survive before they meet up with Strider at the Prancing Pony. In the book, it's things like the Barrowdowns (where they get the swords that will ultimately allow Merry to defeat the Witch King of Angmar) and they meet Tom Bombadil (an alley who helps them safely on to the next phase of their journey). When the Fellowship is formed, there's a similar phase as each member of the Fellowship slowly learns to trust each other. In the movie, it's the scenes where Boromir is teaching the Hobbits to fight and when they're trying to climb the mountains, but Frodo is allowed to say they will turn back when the Sauroman brings a blizzard on them.

Anyway...I was having trouble figuring out what obstacles my characters would face, what skills they would need to acquire, and basically just over-thinking the whole thing (how strange for me). Today's prompt gave me a road map.

The object I chose was a strange plant (see right) that, as I wrote, turned into an animal and then became a cub that drove a spike through the toe of one of the character's shoes when he nudged it. One of the other characters recognizes that what looks like a plant is actually an animal and that it has a MOTHER that is much larger and they must get out of there now. And suddenly, there it was, one of the first tests this group of characters has to face. 

What also happened was that I realized I had a road map for the rest of the tests, a way to figure out how to write them. I'm going to do them as a series of prompts based on locations in Golden Gate Park. I realized this after I stepped outside the greenhouse and came across this tunnel. After turning a plant into an animal, seeing this tunnel as dark and dangerous, almost like a mouth, was no problem. 

Writing prompts are one of those "tricks" all writers keep in their tool boxes. Prompts are a way of narrowing down choices which, in a perverse bit of psychology, actually helps us make decisions. Too many choices = no ideas. Put limits on those choices and suddenly the world is just bursting with the EXACT THING YOU NEED FOR YOUR STORY.

A little bit after this, I picked up my younger son from chess camp where he's a junior counselor after having been an attendee since he was in first grade. He's teaching the younger kids the skills that he's learned and discovering that it's a good refresher in the basics for him as well. Which is when I realized why teaching creative writing to the kids in elementary and middle school has been such an important part of my creative process for the past eight years. It's about remembering the basics and continually reminding myself that the fundamentals are important. Keep writing. There are no wrong answers. When you can't think of something to write, make something up. Those are the things I tell my students all the time. All the fancy bells and whistles and terminology with which writers want to dress up the writing process come down to basics. Traci's simple writing prompt was enough to open up the world of my novel in a way that all the convolutions of my outlining and knowledge of the hero's journey didn't.

And don't get me wrong. Having those technical skills and depth of knowledge about craft is important - they'll save me when the novel bogs down and I can't figure out why. I'll be able to go back and figure out what went wrong because of those skills. But the basics...that's what's going to keep the project moving forward and get me working on the next one and the one after that...and it's what's going to have me back in the classroom in the fall telling the kids to keep writing. When they tell me they can't think of anything to write about, I'll tell them to look around. The world is full of possibilities.

Decoding the Muse

The lake was spectacular yesterday.

I spent yesterday in Lake Tahoe with a friend who needed to make a couple of sales calls for her company and didn't want to make the round trip from the Bay Area by herself. While she took care of her appointments (which resulted in two new clients for her business Asta Glass), I spent the time outlining a new writing project (I don't know yet whether it's going to be a novella, novel or even (gasp) a series because I'm not sure how big it's going to get on me, so for now it's "the writing project" - though my instincts tell me it's at least a novel).

To be honest, I've been resisting this project for awhile mainly because it's fantasy. My intention when I finished Altar was to begin work on the novel I originally applied to grad school to write, but I've found that, as much as I would like to be, I'm not really "finished" with Altar. As I've conducted my agent search, writing and rewriting and revising the query letter, writing multiple versions of my synopsis depending on the requested length, maintaining the novel's Facebook page, etc, etc, etc - it has kept my brain very much preoccupied with that novel and its characters and the new project is too similar in intention (ie; contemporary/literary fiction) to receive much bandwidth. Plus, as much as I hate to say it, it spooked me. I started working on it, wrote one page, felt it start to go very, very deep and begin to acquire depth of layers in the images and, to put it bluntly, FREAKED OUT. I haven't been able to go near it for months.

Earlier this week, I had coffee with a friend of mine who was going through a similar problem with a novel of her own. It got too big too fast and scared her. So she started working on a children's book. It made me think about this fantasy project. The one that's been niggling at me lately. The one that's been patiently waiting its turn and always getting shunted to the back of the line. The one that has invaded my working notes lately, the one the muse has been sending me plot points and character details for lately.

So I went home and wrote the prologue for the project. And it went terrifically well, even adding a heretofore unknown plot point that was positively genius for the final reveal of the main character's identity - the thing on which the entire story rests. And I spent yesterday, while my friend was at her appointments putting together an outline of the project.

I don't usually do outlines - so this was new territory for me. Since this is a plot-driven work, I wanted to get my ducks in a row and figure out where my motley crew of characters is going to go and what they're going to do when they get there. It's proving to be a great exercise, giving me lots of new things in incorporate in the work. But above all: IT'S FUN. It's just what I needed. Something fun. Something that is designed to be entertaining for myself (and any readers, if I'm so lucky) and something in which I am not so terribly invested that if it doesn't work out, I will be devastated (at least not yet). And, above all, something which is writing very fast.

My "desk" at Tahoe.

Which brings me to the main point of this post. Sometimes it's really difficult to understand what the muse is trying to say simply because IT DOESN'T MATCH WHAT I THINK I SHOULD DO. In this case, my conscious brain was telling me the smart thing to do, the right thing to do, the serious thing to do would be to start the next literary novel since I consider myself to be a literary writer. But the writer part of my brain (the one where the muse resides) was telling me to go have fun. The harder I tried to make myself work on the serious thing, the less I wanted to write and the more time I spent inventing reasons to stay away from my writing desk. So...here I am, working on a fantasy novel (okay, I said it) about a character named Mouse who is a LOT more than she seems, and having a blast. And, most importantly, my muse is curled up like a fat and happy cat in a patch of sunshine, quietly purring to herself. Onward...

Neil Gaiman's Commencement Address

If you haven't seen this yet, you should. Especially if you are a writer, artist, freelancer, creative person trying to figure out how the hell to have a career in this crazy world where no one seems to be paying attention. It will be the best 20 minutes of your life this week. Trust me.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/trust-me-im-doctor-honorary-of-fine.html

The Glamorous Life of A Writer

This "job opportunity" came through the email the other day from my alma mater (I've changed the identifying information):


"Client" would be interested to give a promising graduate student an editorial opportunity, reading and commenting on the readability of a fiction narrative novel. Total pages are 585 and in a pdf format that can be easily e-mailed to you. You would to read the text [sic] and comment as to readability.  He would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for the project. "Client" believes it would take about 8 to 16 hours to do a professional read through and is eager to begin this editorial project.

Believe me, "job opportunities" like this appear all the time when you're a writer. Before I went to grad school and got my fancy creative writing degree, I worked for many years as a freelance writer (I've got the clips to prove it and you can still Google my name and see some of them online) and then a friend of mine and I ran a copywriting company for a couple of years where we wrote marketing copy for companies, ghosted articles and books for executives (you didn't think they write those themselves, did you?), and picked up the odd job like the one above. I stopped when got into grad school, but she's still at it. Most days, I think she deserves a medal for keeping her sanity in the face of "job opportunities" from people who believe they've got the book everyone has been waiting for.

Seriously, there's a category of people out there who believe that writers are just waiting around for people who want help to bring their amazing projects to fruition. For free or as close to free as they can get because you, as the writer, should be grateful for the opportunity to work on something like this, and, hey, let's get real, if you were any good, you'd have a book contract already and be living the jet setting life. Am I right or am I right?

Take, for instance, the above opportunity. The client believes it will take about sixteen hours to read and critique this 585-page manuscript. That works out to 36 pages an hour. Even reading through my own novel (which I know intimately), editing and proofreading along the way, I read about 20 pages an hour max. So that puts us up to about 30 hours at a minimum to do this guy's manuscript justice (the reality, based on my experience, is that it's going to take closer to 50). If I were still in the biz, I'd bid this project at $1,500 ($50 an hour), but I can almost guarantee you that he's thinking "reasonable compensation" means $100 max.

Which is where the disconnect between "what I do" and "what people think I do" lies.

When people hire a writer, they're not thinking about how they're actually hiring a professional to do something they can't do. Just like hiring a plumber or an electrician, when you hire a writer, you're hiring someone who has spent years honing his or her craft, taking the time to learn and practice all those niggling rules of grammar everyone forgot as soon as they were out of school, and who has a skill set you don't possess. How do I know you don't possess them? You wouldn't be hiring a writer if you did. 

In addition, when you hire a professional writer to help you hone something that you hope to have published, you're also hiring a professional who understands the marketplace (or at least should) and what your manuscript has to do to compete out there in the big wide world with a thousand other manuscripts that say essentially the same thing. 

A lot of times, clients don't want to listen to that. I can't tell you how often my friend tells me stories about clients who have "improved" the copy she's written by filling it with grammatical errors, random digressions, etc, that she then has to clean up. I once had a client, for whom I was writing web copy, tell the creative director of the project to have me go through the copy because he'd found a LOT of grammatical errors. The creative director and I rolled our eyes, but I did comb through the copy and even had a grammar checking program go through it, too. The result? One grammatical issue that was more a question of style than grammar. 

What I find funny about all this (and I do find it funny despite the somewhat snarky tone of this piece), is how clients expect the writer to be more invested in the project than they are. Writing a book, even editing a book, takes a great deal of time and effort and expertise to accomplish well. Think of it as turning over your child to be raised and educated by someone else. Wouldn't you want someone who knows more than you do? And wouldn't you want to pay them in a way that reflects the true value of what they're doing for you? And wouldn't...oh, well, yeah...and that's a discussion for another time. I'm off to work on my next masterpiece.

When I'm Procrastinating...

Some of the things I read and look at when I'm trying really hard not to write or just need a laugh:

Texts between a man and his dog. This Tumblr is kind of like an ongoing soap opera, and it's really, really, really super funny.

The Bloggess. If you haven't discovered her, you are missing out. 

Cake Wrecks. Need I say more?

The Odyssey - Literature or Hack Writing?

My alter ego, Lady Felicity St. John-Smythe, is guest blogging for a friend on his blog, Writing About Writing. I reviewed that hack piece of genre fiction, The Odyssey, with tongue firmly placed in cheek. Check it out.

Vacation

Word Slut will be on vacation this coming week.