Tag: writing

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Don’t Let Your Muse be a Prima Donna

Granted, there’s nothing particularly sexy about the image here, but that’s exactly the point I hope to make today. I have plenty of writing mistakes behind me, and, no doubt, I’ll probably have more ahead of me, but my biggest mistake, by far, has to have been my slow recognition of how to live with a flighty muse.

I fell in love with words and books as a little kid, and the magic holds as much of a spell on me as it ever did. Even now, watching the letters group up into words and the words into sentences on this page pleases my eyes and settles my soul; only now I know there is nothing mysterious about the magic! I once thought of my muse as this elusive creature who must be cajoled into making an appearance. I had to attend to her every need with just the right coffee/surroundings/writing pad, etc.  Otherwise, like some spoiled prima donna, she might get offended and disappear as quickly as she arrived. There’s a good country word for that sort of thing: bologna!

If I might digress a moment to a much more important subject, I’ll use my last breath on this green earth helping my fellow believers understand that this same principle is applicable to our life in Christ Jesus. I believe it’s vain to wait on some supernatural hunger for God’s word and His fellowship in prayer to bonk us all on the head and propel us to our quiet places. And yet, I know that when we bend our will to His and seek Him diligently, He meets us and begins forming those very desires within us. Now, THAT is good news, any which way you slice it. And now, back to your regularly scheduled writing post.

My muse wears work clothes. She has to, y’all. Deadlines call from every corner. Oh, yes, I love words and writing as much as ever, the process will always feed my soul. But if I were waiting on a flighty muse to show up and perform, I’d be dead in the water.

Like so much else in this life, I’ve found that success comes when one foot, or word in our case, is placed in front of the other, time and time again. I can’t get the hours back that I’ve wasted in the past, waiting on my muse to show up and perform, but that’s okay. Experience is, after all, a mighty fine teacher. I may have stumbled towards the understanding, but I’ve learned that my muse, she is me. I’ve taken the power back, and it feels good. Who knows, if she’s good, I may even treat her to a caramel macchiato!

Do you wait for inspiration, or do you start without it?

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Top 5 Self-Editing Tips: Structure

Writing is rewriting, and rewriting is self-editing. “But isn’t that the job of the editor after I’ve made the sale?” No. Some writers think running spell-checker is self-editing. Not so much.

“But won’t rewriting my work edit the life out of it?” No, but it will catch the eye of an agent or editor as a well-written manuscript and may lead to a sale.

Obsessive editing during the writing process will destroy your work. However, after you’ve written the first draft, gain some distance and perspective on your manuscript by setting it aside for a few weeks or a couple of months. Now it’s time to rewrite.

Here are my top 5 self-editing tips in their order of importance for polishing your work to a high sheen.

  1. Structure: Think of the structure of your work as an arched bridge spanning a great river. If the contractor takes short cuts (such as using less cement, steel, or fewer bolts) because she’s bored with the process and rushes to the end, the bridge is weakened and will collapse.  The same holds true for both ends of the bridge. If too much cement is used at either end of the bridge, it will collapse from the added weight.

For the purposes of this post, I’ll concentrate on the structure of novels. If the structure of your story is solid, the reader will continue to turn the pages until the ending scene.

The material of the structure is comprised of the elements of the story arc (the basic story thread) held in place by a beginning, middle, and end. Pretty simplistic, huh? Yet the three-act structure has worked since Aristotle’s days whether you write plays, scripts, short stories, or novels.

Sydney Harbor Bridge

Some authors maintain they have a four-, five-, six-, or even eight-act structure. I maintain if you break down the parts of their story arcs, you will discover classic Aristotelian structure.

Using the bridge analogy, a car drives onto the bridge. This is the point in the novel when you can lose a reader in the first page or two. I’ve thrown many a book (or manuscript) on the pile beside my bed if nothing happens right away. The author might as well have written “blah, blah, blah-blah, blah.”

A novel that piques the reader’s interest starts as far into the story as possible. I don’t want to know that the protagonist’s parents left him stranded in a snowstorm when he was a toddler and that’s why he’s terrified of snow (or abandonment). That’s back story. The story should begin with stasis (a state of equilibrium) and then the main character, pressed with conflict, reveals her goal.

One of my favorite movies is Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. The story throws you into the action, and the back story―Indy’s character, profession, the setting, and the antagonist―are revealed as Act 1 plays out.

As the story progresses into the middle (Act 2) and the bulk of the novel, you should have rising and falling tension as your protagonist encounters numerous obstacles or crises.

The main turning point, or big surprise, comes in the middle of the novel. By this time the reader believes he has the story figured out. You need to turn his assumptions on their head. The major turning point should be such a shock that no one sees it coming. It should keep your reader up at night turning pages.

The crises continue. Will he? Won’t she? Oh, no! What will happen to this character your reader has invested her time in? Will everything turn out all right? How will the story ever end on a happy, satisfying note now?

Tension mounts and we reach another major turning point before we head into the final third act. Every turning point should be a surprise to the reader.

The crises are unrelenting until we reach the climax halfway through the third act. The protagonist faces off against the antagonist. The clash of the titans ensues. A woman faces her attacker or her paralyzing fear. The antagonist is not always a person. A man pushes his wife out of the path of a stampeding herd of cattle. Will he live? You get the picture.

Tie up all the loose ends of your storyline in the denouement―the final resolution of the plot or story arc. Is your ending satisfying? Does the main character live happily ever after? If you live and write in America, trust me, she better if you want to succeed as a professional author. Americans are eternal optimists.

To be continued…

How will you self-edit your novel to make sure your structure is strong enough to carry your storyline through to the end?

Photo credit: Sydney Harbour Bridge with the Opera House in the background by Ian.

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On Becoming an Artist

“Red boathouse at sunset” by Karen L. Macek

Last year, I realized something that changed the way I look at myself and my writing.

I am an artist.

Over the course of my writing career, I’ve called myself many things: journalist, essayist, columnist, editor, reporter, researcher.  (I’ve also called myself other names at times, like stubborn, stupid, crazy, and masochist – especially when I’ve struggled to meet writing deadlines.) When I began writing fiction a few years ago, I added the descriptors of novelist, author, plot architect, and starry-eyed dreamer.

But artist?

Not in a million years.

For me, ‘art’ always referred to visual or performance genres. Art is the domain of my sister when she paints beautiful marsh landscapes in oils on canvas. Art is my daughter bringing a character to life on the stage, or playing haunting melodies on a flute or piano, or throwing clay on a wheel to transform it into a smoothly shaped bowl. Art is the creation of something new and tangible, and though I produced countless pages of words, I just never felt it rated as ‘art.’ I didn’t use paints, or clay, or costumes or musical instruments; my tool was a word processor, and my product was all in my head. And, with any luck, the heads of my readers.

Galley material, yes, but gallery worthy?

Not even close.

As far as I was concerned, writing was simple information management – collecting information, fitting it together (coherently, hopefully), and passing it on to readers. Whether it was just reporting the facts or organizing disparate information into a mystery novel, it was all about language skills and communication. Not Art with a capital “A.”

But then one day I was helping my daughter fill out a personality inventory, and I came across a section that listed occupations. I looked for the usual category of ‘Writer,’ but couldn’t find it in any of the traditional places I expected to see it. Instead, it was lumped under the category of “Art.”

The longer I thought about that label, the more I realized that what I do when I write truly is Art. Like any painter or musician or sculptor or actor, I look at the world around me and then translate my own experience of it into a new form, a personal, one-of-a-kind articulation of what is, or might be. I have a vision of life that ‘colors’ my representation and allows me to penetrate the surface of what I see to get at the heart of what lies beneath. Maybe my lens of choice is humor, or inspiration, or romance, or fantasy, but whatever it is, it helps me bring a freshness to my subject that is the essence of artistic endeavor.

I create with words, and not only is it my calling, but my sacred trust.

And now that I understand it that way, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m an artist. After all, my Father is too, you know.

Do you consider yourself an artist?

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How to Plot by the Numbers

Plotting By the NumbersShow, don’t tell. Watch your participial phrases. Don’t head hop. Whatever you do, stay within manuscript length recommendations. For a writer scrambling to keep up with all the dos and don’ts, the writing profession can seem full of arbitrary rules. And when someone breaks said rules and goes on to win awards, it’s tempting to follow suit. One standard you shouldn’t buck, however, is a publishing house’s word-length requirements.
Why? Shouldn’t you let your story tell itself without regard for its length?

If you will be the one footing the bill, you’re free to make your manuscript whatever length you prefer.  But if you hope a publisher will pay to produce your book, it’s important to understand that additional pages cost extra money, and not just in terms of paper and ink. It takes several editors (who are on the payroll) to review and guide you in polishing a manuscript. Proofreaders don’t work for free either. If your last name is Tolstoy or Michener you might get away with submitting a beefy manuscript. The rest of us need to keep the bottom line in mind.

Book stores base the number of copies of a particular title to order on standard widths. If a publisher fails to adhere to these widths, it throws off a bookstore’s shelving efforts. Besides this, writing your novel shorter or longer than genre readers expect can negatively influence their buying decisions.

Aren’t these considerations crass? What about your inner artist?

Your inner artist will recover, and you’ll even grow as a writer from keeping to practical guidelines.

But how on earth can you tell how long a novel will be until you’ve written it?

You can’t know entirely, but I’ve developed a method that helps me write to a specific length. Even if you’re a seat-of-the-pants writer and allergic to plotting, my technique may help you. Here’s a screen shot of one of my working calendars. CS stands for my current novel, and the number represents the scene I’ll write that day. (I number them in my plot outline.) I find it helps to include upcoming deadlines and events as well. The DS represents DawnSinger, the first novel in my epic fantasy series, Tales of Faeraven. The Renewal mentioned was a conference I attended.

Sample Scene Calendar

1. Estimate your desired word count. If you don’t know what that might be, read publishers’ submission guidelines at their sites. As a starting point, here’s an agent-maintained list of word count guidelines. Find the happy middle ground in a given range. That way you can guard against running too-short or too-long.

EXAMPLE: A publisher gives the range of 80,000-100,000 words for a historical romance. The middle ground to aim for is 90,000 words.

2. If you already know the average number of words you write per scene, use that figure. If you don’t know this number, write the first 50 pages of your book, then estimate the average number of words per scene. You can also base your figures on 1,500 words per scene, but eventually, you’ll want to check your own average against this figure and make adjustments as needed. It’s okay to round your numbers.

EXAMPLE: Approximately 12,500 / about 8 scenes = 1,500 words per scene

3. Divide your average words per scene into your desired total word count. The answer is the number of scenes to brainstorm.

EXAMPLE: 90,000 / 1,500 = 60 SCENES

4. Develop your plot to include the number of scenes you should write for your desired total word count. Write just a few sentences to describe each scene. This keeps you from bogging down while plotting and gives you a flexible guideline you can easily adjust as you write.

What’s next?

To learn more about my system of plotting, read How to Plot a Novel in Three Acts at my Live Write Breathe site.

Are you more of a plotter or a seat-of-the pants writer?

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How Input Affects Output

I felt it sneak around the edges of my concentrated efforts. My lashes blinked faster. My lids now fought when I struggled to lift them off my eyes. A light sheet of brain-fog settled over my mind.

Afternoon fatigue had arrived. And it threatened to keep me from writing the scene on the screen before me. How would I finish without falling asleep?

Too often, I fight a common battle when I finally get a few snippets of time to write. But instead of grabbing a caffeine loaded, sugared up, fattened calf kind of snack, I’ve found a few quick solutions that allow me to treat my body with the respect it needs to function at optimal efficiency.

1) Eat nutritious vegetables or fruit. In particular, I’ve found the following have fabulous energy boosting properties for my body chemistry. Literally within seconds, I can feel a renewed focus and am able to write well. My faves include, red, orange, or yellow peppers, V-8 juice, grapefruit, oranges, watermelon, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, cucumbers in vinegar, cantaloupe, and celery.

Fruits & Veggies Energize Writers
Fresh Veggies and Fruit Energize

2) Get out in the sun. A few minutes of vitamin D rich sunlight is just the ticket to get my blood pumping and my thoughts racing.

Vitamin D Wakes Writers Up
Sunlight – Natural Inspiration

3) Drink water. When writing, we often don’t want to interrupt our thoughts, so dehydration is a big problem for many writers. Most people assume they need caffeine when exhaustion strikes — in reality, dehydration is often the culprit behind your fatigue. Science shows that water wakes us up.

Hydration Hydrates our Brain Cells
Water Wakes Writers Up

4) Take a nap. Though I fight it, sometimes a ten minute nap works miracles. A few moments of shut-eye gets me going again. (I find I need to set the alarm on my phone, so I can actually nod off. Otherwise, my fear of over-sleeping keeps me from getting the rejuvenating rest I need).

Naps Help Writers
Nap Time for Writers

5) Go for a walk. I plan this powerful method of staying alert into my writing schedule. It’s part of the formula I follow to get words on the page. Having an intended break gives me something to look forward to and pushes me past the humps. A good walk gets my blood flowing, my muscles heated, my cells active, and my thoughts fired up.

Walking Wakes Writers Up
Walking Stirs Creativity

6) Take prayer and Bible reading breaks. A few minutes spent with the Master Author infuses me with energy and inspiration. Nothing like purpose to light me into action.

Prayer and the Bible Inspires Writing
Pure Inspiration

Before fatigue wraps itself around me like a constricting serpent around its prey, I need a plan to fight back. I find the list above gives me exactly the input I need to affect my output in positive ways.

Here are some other great tips to help you battle afternoon fatigue.

What ways do you battle exhaustion when it threatens to hinder your writing?

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With Us Here Tonight

Shortly after my first book was published, I gave a book talk at our local library.

Then I gave another talk at another library. And then a third library.

Then a Rotary Club called me. A few months later, I found myself the featured speaker at a Shriners dinner. Last month I presented a talk at the National Eagle Center. Birding festivals, book conferences, annual meetings, schools, service organizations–I’ve addressed them all.

Wait a minute. I thought I was a writer, not a speaker.

Guess what? Book authors get to do both!

The fact is, you NEED to do both if you’re going to successfully build your readership and market your writing. That means you should work on your public speaking skills, and the best way to do that is to take every opportunity you find for a speaking engagement. Develop the following five types of speeches, and you’ll be ready for anyone!

The Sound Bite is the one you will use a bazillion times. It’s the one-liner you’ll utter every time someone asks you what your book is about. It’s also one of the hardest to compose because you need to distill your book and its value down to one sentence. My sound bite for my series is “The Birder Murders is a humorous series about a really nice guy who happens to find bodies when he’s out birding.”

The Book Talk is the speech that focuses on your book’s content. If it’s nonfiction, you can give a general review of the topic itself, or focus on just one chapter’s point and why it’s important. If it’s fiction, you discuss characters, their relationships, the plot, how you came up with all of it, what you want to accomplish with it. This works best with audiences who have already read your book because they will have questions about what they’ve learned and/or enjoyed from reading it.

The Business Talk is about your experience with the publishing business of being an author. The changes we’ve seen in publishing, including the growth of e-books and marketing paradigms, is a topic that appeals to audiences composed of business people or future authors.

The Writing Talk is about your own process of writing a book. Do you do research? Conduct interviews? Journal or set word goals? The beauty of a Writing Talk is that it is appropriate for a variety of groups, and depending on the slant you give it for the group you’re addressing, it works equally well as a classroom talk, a keynote address for a gathering of library supporters, an awards speech, a writers conference, a book club… you name it.

The Topic Talk is the newest talk in my own arsenal of speeches. Because my books are about nature, I’ve started giving talks about nature education and conservation issues. If it is mentioned in my books, it’s fair game for a talk and a great way to use extra research.

Here is a great resource to help you to continue to develop your public speaking skills.

What talks could you present for your book? Do you have any ideas for talks that I have not mentioned?

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The Art of Bloodletting:Translating Suffering to the Shared Page

“The only books worth reading are books written in blood.” –Frederick Buechner When suffering strikes, we are often silenced by pain. In such times, the act of writing may feel frivolous, exploitative, or irrelevant. Yet it is these dark, raw places of our lives that most demand our full attention, our most artful labors. We must steward the afflictions God has granted us. We may remain silent in the midst of it, but at some point we must write. Patricia Hampl reminds us of the responsibility that comes with our experiences: “We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something—make something—with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.”

Dan Allender, in “Forgetting to Remember: How We Run From Our Stories,” tells us what happens when we ignore the hard events in our lives: “Forgetting is a wager we all make on a daily basis and it exacts a terrible price. The price of forgetting is a life of repetition, an insincere way of relating, a loss of self.” How then do we begin to write from within our afflictions? And how might the practice and the disciplines of writing offer a means of shaping our suffering into meaning for both writer and reader? Forgive the brevity and oversimplification, but here’s what NOT to do and why:

1. Don’t write to heal. Our therapeutic culture urges us to write into our pain as a means of self-healing. Newsweek’s article, “Our Era of Dirty Laundry: Do Tell-All Memoirs Really Heal?” rightly questions this cultural assumption. I have mucked through some hours and days of writing that were hellish. Re-living an experience with language and full consciousness is sometimes worse than the original event. Recognize that writing into affliction brings its own affliction. And even more importantly, recognize that when we are predisposed to heal ourselves, we will not be fully honest in the writing. Healing will likely and eventually come, but only as we engage with the hardest truths.

2. Don’t write to redeem, to turn inexplicable pain into sense and salvation. We want to bring beauty from ashes. We want to make suffering redemptive to prove its worth. But this is God’s work, not ours. Our first responsibility is to be true to what was, to witness honestly to what happened. Our job is not to bring beauty out of suffering but to bring understanding out of suffering. Poet Alan Shapiro argues that “…the job of art is to generate beauty out of suffering, but in such a way that doesn’t prettify or falsify the suffering.”

3. Don’t write for yourself alone. This is not just about you. You are working to translate suffering to the shared page. Buechner reminds us of the universality we should be striving for: “…all our stories are in the end one story, one vast story about being human, being together, being here. Does the story point beyond itself? Does it mean something? What is the truth of this interminable, sprawling story we all of us share? Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

Writing can begin here, in the self, but should consciously move us beyond ourselves, to place our story into the larger stories around us, and ultimately, into the grand story that God is writing. The most powerful work comes from a “self that renders the world,” as Hampl has said—not just the self that renders the self.

Life is holy with meaning. Pain is holy with meaning. Don’t miss it. I pray for you the strength and faith and wisdom to begin to enter those hard places and to translate your suffering onto the pages we share—for the good of all, and for His glory.

How have you been able to translate your suffering into your writing?

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Writing Giants

Surf the web and you will see that the subject of writing is well-charted territory. No matter what your goal, a how-to manual is there to support it. Need to write grant proposals, company newsletters, technical manuals, instructional design or academic materials? Industry experts abound to provide a sea of knowledge about any aspect of writing imaginable. For advice on how to create fiction, it seems logical to consult some of the successful authors and writing giants among us.

As I began researching books on writing by authors, Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft kept appearing on the horizon. I extrapolated all that I could from that book and have started recommending it to other writers. Some of his tips include writing the first draft of a manuscript with door closed, consulting an ‘ideal reader’ that represents the audience, writing consistently each day (1,000 words or more), and writing about what the writer really knows, because that is what makes a writer unique. I’ve been applying King’s techniques into my writing regimen whenever possible. With over fifty worldwide bestsellers in his wake, clearly he knows what he’s doing.

Another writing giant willing to share his techniques is Ray Bradbury, who still cuts quite a swath. The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine and his other stories will forever swim in the waters of literature.  Bradbury’s book for aspiring writers Zen in the Art of Writing is full of sage advice. He suggests that people write about what they love or what they hate because that conviction and passion is crucial to the story. He advises authors to run after life with fervent gusto, to pursue their interests, and write about the things that make them happy.

Starting out, even surfing small literary waves can feel like riding giants. I’m getting more comfortable with what lies beneath (although it’s harder than it looks).  King and Bradbury cared enough to show the rest of us that it’s possible to conquer the sea, and when you do, an ocean of opportunity awaits. Besides, what one person can do, another can do.

Are you ready to paddle out?

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Keep Doggedly at It – Writing That Is!

 

 Isaac Asimov at work                                         

                 

Samuel Johnson, the 18th Century Englishman who penned the first dictionary of the English language said this of writing.

“A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.”

There is a lot of wisdom in this statement. I believe the main thing which separates successful writers from would-be is that most people who think they can write don’t have the stomach for it. Just like any other enterprise of worth it involves hours and hours of hard work.

On the radio this week I heard the story of two 12-year-olds, swimming hopefuls both of them outstanding athletes. The young boy said it was his dream to swim for Great Britain in the Olympics in 2012. The young girl said she had the same dream. The boy talked a lot about winning a gold medal. The girl got stuck into training. Five years later the young girl, now 17, has been picked for the GB team and she has a good chance of getting a medal. What about the boy? Well he’s still talking about winning, but he hasn’t even got a spectator ticket for the event. He dropped out of training long ago.

Here’s a quote from the Novelist Doris Lessing, “I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.”

“The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline” Ayelet Waldman.

Bah humbug! Discipline, the bane of all who want to be a success overnight, can’t I just have it all without the discipline, the work, and the misery?

We all know the answer to that question. Lee Iaccoca said “The discipline of writing something down is the first step towards making it happen.”

Ernest Hemingway used to get up at dawn and write until lunch time then enjoyed his afternoons not writing. CS Lewis had a daily schedule which he kept to and that meant writing 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the afternoon. Jean Plaidy wrote 5000 words before lunch. Graham Greene did only 500 words a day, but look at the output. Isaac Asimov awoke each morning at 6 AM and worked well into the night, sometimes churning out entire books in a matter of days, amazing, but not for me.

Whatever your plan is just keep to it, doggedly, and then one day you’ll walk past a book shop with your own creation smiling proudly in the window.

I love this from Harlan Ellison “People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing. That you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones about and come down in the morning with a story. But it isn’t like that. You sit in the back with a typewriter and you work. That’s all there is to it.”

I leave you with this quote from your own John Adams, which is good advice to any writer.

“Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.”

How do you maintain discipline in your writing life?

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Fame and Fortune

Twenty-three years ago, when I first began writing a humor column for our local newspaper, my editor told me that I could expect local fame, but no fortune.

Today, I know he was right.

And wrong.

He was right because within a few months of my byline’s first appearance, I had a stranger come up to me at the local ice skating rink and tell me how much he enjoyed my column. Even bundled up in my parka and stumbling around on the ice with my children, he recognized me, thanks to the photo that accompanied my column. I thanked him for reading and promised myself to never leave the house again until I’d at least applied some mascara.

Fame makes so many demands on a writer.

My editor was wrong, however, when it came to the fortune part. True, I received a mere $5 a week for the short column I labored over for days, and no New York book agent or Hollywood scriptwriter came knocking at my door offering me any contracts. My net income from writing is abysmal, I’m still clipping coupons for groceries, and my husband politely refrains from laughing each year when he prepares to file my taxes.

But my fortune has steadily grown over the years and sometimes even surprises me with dividends I didn’t know I’d earned.

My fortune lies in every reader I have reached and in every life I have touched, whether I know about it or not.

This realization came to me especially powerfully a few months ago. I had an email on my author website from a woman I’d never met, asking me if I would give her permission to use my poem in an online anthology she was preparing for young mothers. When she told me the name of the poem – “A Mother’s Midnight Prayer” – I was stunned, since I’d written it 17 years ago, and it had appeared in a monthly magazine to which I occasionally contributed. The woman told me someone had given her my poem to read, and that it had inspired her in the course of many long nights with her own children. She also told me that my poem appeared on several websites for moms, and lo and behold, when I searched  for my own poem, I did, indeed, find it on the web, always with my name attached, and often accompanied by reader comments noting how meaningful they found my poem. One reader even reported that she’d had my poem on her refrigerator door for years, reminding her to cherish the fleeting days of her children’s early years.

To connect with others in our humanity and love – this is why I write, and it’s worth more than any material fortune could hold.

What unexpected dividends have you experienced in your writing life?