What If You Could Not Fail

Hanging Out in Writer's Limbo

I might have written before that I am in writer’s limbo right now. Although I have finished Rules for Giving, I’m still doing some revisions based on the input of some readers that have been so kind to offer input. As for my next novel, I am doing  research and outlining ideas. Not quite ready to start writing it.

So I thought I’d take a stab at some short stories. Yeah, right.

I took a writing class this past May and June and wrote a few shorts for that class. I should have resurrected them. Instead I wrote a new piece, based on Leo the Knuckle, a character from my novel. She’s a great character—a six-foot-two-inch lipstick lesbian, former U.S. Army Special Forces and now a private investigator. Sort of a cross between Demi Moore in G.I. Jane and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill (I’ve seen the first movie, but not the second).

Then just to juice it up, I threw in a story line based on a favor I did for a friend—serving his wife divorce papers.

It was much too complicated a story for twelve pages. There were two story lines and sort of a third one. My critique group tore it up, as well they should have.

Although I think the story has potential, I’ve decided to set it aside for right now. Instead I have pulled up a story based on an experience I had more than twenty years ago, that I used for my writing class.

My mother lost a brother in WWII.  He was killed in France, a couple of weeks after the D-Day invasion. Back in the mid-80’s, I took my kids into downtown Los Angeles, where my parents grew up. We were at the Los Angeles Children’s Museum.  My kids were playing in one of those rooms filled with hands-on exhibits, and I was watching an older couple with their grandchildren. The husband bore a striking resemblance to the men in my mother’s family. He could have easily fit at a family reunion or a holiday dinner. I began to have this fantasy that he was my uncle.  He could have been. He was originally buried at Normandy and the body was not brought home until a few years after the war. There easily could have been a mix-up.

I turned the experience into a short story, but I had a hard time keeping a sub-story out of it.  I’ve pulled the story out of the files and reworked it a little. We’ll see how the group likes it. If they do, or if it survives with revisions, I’ll publish it on this blog. 

 

Recording What I Read

One of the things I like about writing is that it's a good excuse to so something else I treally enjoy--reading books.

I found this blog called Terrible Minds by a writer named Chuck Wendig—a cool site that I have to look at more. In a recent post, 25 Things a Writer Should Start Doing, #14 is Start reading more. Goes in line with my New Year’s resolution, which is to write down every book I read in 2012.

I’ve already started. The first book of the year was The Spiral Staircase by religion writer and scholar Karen Armstrong, detailing the development of her life after she left the convent and her gradual transition into a career as one of the leading scholars on religion. Armstrong’s books are filled with information and insights (this coming from an ex-Catholic), but her style is very dense.  This is at least the third book of hers I have read, and the first one I finished. It was part of the research for my next novel.

I find that keeping a list of books I have read makes me more mindful of what I read. At the end of the year I want a great list.  I find I have to pace the variety of books, though.  After The Spiral Staircase, I read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. That’s two dense books in a row. I wanted to go to something a little lighter, but the next book I picked up was not light enough.

Every once in a while I like to read the formula books, the franchises that are popular and sell well. Janet Evanovich’s series (One for the Money, Two for the Show, etc.) is a good example. I have read some nose-in-the-air scathing reviews of Evanovich, but, hey, she’s writing a lot of books and they’re selling. I call them mind candy.  They’re not about the meaning of life, but there has to be something to them, because they sell very well. Besides, Stephanie Plum, the protagonist in Evanovich’s novels, has this grandmother—Grandma Mazur—who cracks me up.  

Reading a lot of different writers exposes us to different styles—Hemingway’s spare passion, Raymond Chandler’s characters who make social statements, and Cormac McCarthy’s great dialog. I read a book by one of these and I can see it in my own writing.

By the way, if you want to read a great piece of writing, take a look at Hills Like White Elephants, a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Great dialog.  Check it out. It’s a very quick read—all of ten minutes.

And don’t forget to check out Terrible Minds. 

 

Learning How to Thump Our Chest ... and How Will it Change Things?

I'm traveling out of town for a few days, so here is a posting from earlier in the year. I read over it and it still makes sense. I will be back to you in a few days with some fresh material. 

In the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, getting published was mostly an issue of finding an agent who would find a publisher who liked your work. Between the two of them, the book got published, and the writer would get booked for some readings, radio interviews, magazine articles and reviews other such things. But mostly the writer had to write.

This is what they tell me, because I have yet to be published.

Now, with publishing turned upside down by the economy and self-publishing and the Kindle, writing has become more of an entrepreneurial vocation.  We have got get out there and hustle—Facebook, websites, Twitter, social media up the wazoo. You name it. Even if you get published by the larger hoses, they are still expecting you to do a large part of it.

My question is: since writing has required writers to become hustlers and chest thumpers, how is this going to effect the literature of the future. We’re starting to see it—writers and readers are becoming more and more genre loyal. There are the price wars on Kindle and the other e-readers, and there is a lot of experimentation with podcasting, and delivering books to all sorts of electronic devices.  Now if I have forgotten my Nook, I can read a novel on my cell phone. We’re seeing more graphic novels, too. What else is on the horizon? I have not read it yet—it’s on my stack—by I understand A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan incorporates PowerPoint to tell the story.

I ran across this quote last week that I thought was interesting.  Nigel Fenwick, a VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research, was recently quoted in QSR Magazine (QSR is a magazine serving a sector of the restaurant industry. My job that pays the bills is in marketing and one of my clients is in the technology side of the food service business, so I stumble across this stuff all the time).

“I actually believe we are at the tipping point of creating a new societal paradigm …. Social media is going to transform the way we work. Today's millennial generation is the first to grow up with access to this ubiquitous technology. It's what they've grown up with.  As this generation continues to go into business, they are bringing with them a new social paradigm: one where the social network and the ability to collaborate across it is going to be the key to driving growth and differentiation.”

The bad news is, dead tree publishing is dying, but it’s going to be such a slow death that we will hardly notice when they pass. The good news is, the market is wide open for new ideas.

In the meantime we are going to be stuck with this old ethos of “the bigger the publishing house the better.” There are going to be some predictable turning points. When the Pulitzer and the National Book Award and the other prestigious awards start recognizing self-published and indie published books, that’s going to be a big deal. When a self-published book gets made into a major blockbuster movie,  that will be a major breakthrough.  There are others.

The writing process is going to change, but what’s going to drive that change is the kinds of folks who manage to get published in the new paradigm. They are going to be more techy, more entrepreneurial, more innovative. They’re going to be risk-takers.

You know us writers—quiet, unassuming, we don’t like to talk about what we do. In order to survive in the new publishing paradigm, we’re going to have to talk about ourselves, promote ourselves, thump our chests. How is this going to change what we write? 

 

When the words Don't Flow, or They Flow the Wrong Way

I find myself in a strange position in my pursuit of writing. After three years, I ‘ve finished my novel and it is in the hands of a few alpha readers—people I have asked to read it for one reason or another.  Two or three readers are writing colleagues, and I am looking for overall feedback on things like pacing, conflict, characters and whether all the loose ends are tied up.

Another reader was a person who I borrowed heavily from in developing a character in the novel. As I suspected, she loved the novel, but she did confirm my suspicion that a villain in one of the plot lines needed more of a comeuppance. I was concerned about that one and I am giving it some thought.

But I still have a few other readers that have yet to get back to me, so I in a limbo of sorts. I am developing a concept for a second novel, but I’m still very much in the research stages. In the meantime, I’ve been working on a few short stories, and finding them to be a different animal.  

The best writing is the most direct and clear, but in a novel you have time and room for back stories, sub-plots and deeper character studies.  Not as much in short stories. I have written a few shorts as of late where this is not a problem, but in the most recent one, things got complicated. In a thirteen-page story, I had three different plot lines. As one writer friend said, “Whose story is this?” My critique group pretty much skewered the piece, too.

This, along with some other realizations and passing thoughts, have spun me into a low-level depression about my writing. This happens regularly to a good friend of mine.  He has written and published hundreds of poems, and he has published short stories.  But he confesses that after every piece he pens, he fears that he has nothing else to say, that he’s exhausted his supply of things to write about.

But then is comes back to me: Writing is rewriting. There is not anything here that can’t be fixed. Some of what I consider to be the best chapters in Rules for Giving started out in a pitiful state. They needed to be worked on.

As for running out of ideas. That’s not going to happen, either. As long as we’re alive and experiencing the world and our place in it, there will be plenty to write about.