Oh, come on, you fantasized about the glamour, didn't you? When you first harbored those secret desires to be a writer, you pictured yourself in a little villa in the south of France, maybe? A woodsy cabin by a New England lake? At least an oh-so-romantically seedy flat in a major metropolitan area?
And there were the afternoons in Paris cafes. Jetting off to tropical climes to do a little deep sea fishing or big game hunting. Or maybe you'd get to solve crimes like TV's Jessica Fletcher or Richard Castle.
Thing is—have you ever seen those TV and film novelists actually writing books? Of course not. For the same reason they don't have TV shows about watching paint dry.
As Ruth Harris shows us this week, a lot of real writers' lives are pretty boring. And living with us can be kind of a pain. But she's found a few who have some exciting tales to tell...
DANGER: Writer at Work
by Ruth Harris
Anyone who has ever lived with a writer knows it ain’t easy.
Moody? Check.
Preoccupied? Check.
Cranky, quirky, obsessive, prone to long silences and short bursts of typing? Ditto.
And those are only the subclinical descriptions.
We kill people, make them miserable, give them impossible challenges, break their hearts, subject them to rainy days and stormy nights, vicious enemies, terrible wardrobe choices and soul-shriveling bad hair days not to mention fires, floods, avalanches and tornadoes. We do nothing but cause trouble and then pile on more. We’re dangerous for sure.
But what goes on behind the scenes? Are our own lives as dramatic and crisis-ridden as our characters? Do we live on the wild side? Do we battle zombies and assassins? Are our love lives as passionate as the characters we write about? I asked a few writers to confess their quirks, their routines, their oddball habits.
Some of us (Michael and me definitely included) are—there’s no other way to put it—b-for-boring. We stick to a regular routine, sit at our computers and beaver away. We’re soooo boring we’re not even competitive about it although Vanessa Kelly, bestselling author of Regency romance, claims she and her DH, Randy—they write romantic suspense as VKSykes—are THE most boring writers on the planet.
“We both write in our offices on our computers, and I sometimes write on my Alpha Smart. The only thing I’ll sometimes do is take notes or write when we’re driving in the car somewhere – Randy is doing the driving! We will brainstorm together when we go for a walk, but that’s about it. All the quirkiness seems to go on in our heads!”
Anne R Allen says: “I’m at the keyboard at 8:30 every morning, seven days a week, with a big cup of English Breakfast tea with almond milk and Stevia. If I'm writing something with an urgent deadline, I ignore the Internet entirely. Sometimes I ignore the entire world. For long periods. I remember one time going outside after a long intense writing session and wondering what weird weather pattern was going on now--all the trees were blossoming, and here it was November. Then I realized no: my book was set in November. In the real world, it was April.”
Mark Chisnell, thriller writer extraordinaire, is much more adventuresome. He races yachts and climbed halfway up Mount Everest in sneakers(!). “I work normal hours and I have a grown-up office with a desk, book shelves, filing cabinets but I wasn't always so organized. I wrote and rewrote my first novel,THE DEFECTOR, in a multitude of strange places, but the early draft was done in the South of France. It sounds idyllic and very Graham Greene, but I had gone down there to work for a magazine that went bust. So I was trapped in a rental agreement I couldn't escape, with no job and very little money in the bank.
"I wrote the novel to make the best use of a very bad situation, but circumstances had a lot in common with the freezing garret of legend. There was no desk in the room, so I improvised by using a chest of drawers—awkward as there was no gap for the knees. It was winter and the building was designed for summer residence, with thick brickwork to keep it cool, and no heating; every hour or so I would have to go outside to warm up enough to keep my fingers mobile and typing. I remember that the only time I was truly warm in that place was in the bath. I finished the novel just as I escaped the lease and fled back to England.”
DDScott, bestselling rom-com author and founder of WG2E, doesn’t fool around with English Breakfast tea: “I do luuuvvv to write in cocktail lounges while I'm enjoying Happy Hour. I actually fill my cocktail napkins with tons of ideas then take 'em home and slip 'em into a special box just for that very thing. Then, when I need an off-the-wall, over-the-top idea, I know just where to look. :-) Martinis and other such fabulous glasses full of liquid courage make for killer muse therapy!!!”
Some, like Claude Nougat, founder of a Goodreads group devoted to Baby Boomer fiction, even break the law. “I had a light bulb placed over the bath tub, thus going against every law in Italy (apparently it's unsafe to place a bulb there!!) because I used to love to read in the tub! I did try to take notes while I was in my bathtub but I had no pen and had to get out, dripping wet and cold, to get it. I slipped on the mat coming back into the tub. I slid into the (by now tepid) water but managed to splash some water drops on the paper, making half of it unusable. I tried to write but having forgotten to take along a slate or something hard, I couldn't do it. Just a couple of miserable squiggles. So I had to hold it up against the wall to try and write. More water seeped into the paper, leaving me no place to write anything beyond three or four words.
“By then, exasperated, I got out having thoroughly forgotten what I wanted to write. Yes, I hate bathtubs!”
In addition to Claude, the law-breaker, DD, the lounge lizard, and Mark, the broke and freezing writer who had better experiences in the bathtub than Claude, Roy Street, who writes Daphne du Maurier-award winning romance, mystery/suspense and paranormal genres with his wife Alicia, also lives—and writes—dangerously.
“Alicia and I like to keep physically active while we write, taking frequent breaks for things like push-ups or jogging in place. Having been a pro dancer, Alicia keeps a portable barre in the study where she works.
“I prefer shadow boxing. When we were working on a novel that featured a boxer I decided to up the ante to deepen the ‘show-don’t-tell’ aspects. I asked my friend Aubrey, who was an ex-pro boxer, to come over and spar with me. Not only did he graciously oblige, but he knocked me out. Fortunately, it took only a handful of minutes for me to revive and, yes, return to my keyboard. Loaded with inspiration . . . and a sore jaw.”
So, Scriveners it's YOU TELL US time: What are your writing quirks? Have you ever broken the law, gotten knocked out, or frozen in the South of France? Or are you just…sorry, but I don’t know how else to say this…the b word like Vanessa, Randy, Anne and Ruth?
We have 5 Opportunity Alerts this week:
#1 Tech-Savvy Author Workshop: If you live on the Central Coast of California and you’re interested in learning about blogging, building platform and everything a 21st Century author needs to know, Anne will be teaching at a seminar called THE TECH SAVVY AUTHOR with Catherine Ryan Hyde, screenwriter and radio personality Dave Congalton and a whole crew of smart techie folks on March 2nd.
#2 Interested in having your short fiction recorded for a weekly podcast?There’s no pay, but it’s fantastic publicity if your story is accepted by SMOKE AND MIRRORS. They broadcast about three stories a week. Spooky, dark tales preferred. No previous publication necessary. They judge on the story alone.
#3 Cash prizes for flash fiction. The San Luis Obispo NIGHTWRITERSare holding their annual 500-word story contest. Anybody from anywhere in the world is welcome to enter. Prizes are $200, $150 and $75. This is a fantastic organization that boasts a number of bestselling authors among their members, including Jay Asher, Jeff Carlson, and moi. (Well, some sell better than others :-) ) Deadline is March 31st.
#4 $3500 Grand Prize for literary short fiction. NO entry fee. The deadline for the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Contest for short fiction is February 1st.
#5 $2000 Grand Prize. NO entry fee. Call for Entries—The Flying Elephants Short Story Prize, sponsored by "Ashes & Snow" artist Gregory Colbert. ::: AndWeWereHungry, a new online literary magazine, seeks literary short stories for its debut issue fiction contest. THEME: "And We Were Hungry....," or "Hunger." For isn't it, to quote Ray Bradbury, hunger or "lack that gives us inspiration?" Prize: One grand prize ($2000) + three finalists (each $1,000) + eight runner-ups. Deadline: March 31, 2013.
Showing posts with label Michael Harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Harris. Show all posts
I think it gets worse at this time of year. The holiday frenzy adds its own brand of crazy to our already pressured lives. I talked about that pressure a couple of weeks ago in my post on White (or Red) Queen Days: Why Are We Running as Fast As We Can to Stay in the Same Place?
It seemed to resonate with other writers, because the post got thousands of hits, and Porter Anderson mentioned it in his Writing on the Ether post last week, agreeing that it's increasingly hard to survive on "the accelerating authorial treadmill."
Now here's some advice from Ruth Harris, who's been surviving in this crazy business for a lot of years now and has figured out how to keep the frazzles at bay.
You’ve got a book to write, a cover to create, tweets to tweet and pins to Pin. There’s metadata, pricing decisions, giveaways, keywords, tagging, liking, formatting and facing FB. Your lists have lists, your back is killing you and your eyes are crossed from so many hours in front of the computer.
There are 1000 things to do and, sometimes, it feels like 999 of them are driving you batshit crazy.
You feel overwhelmed and out of control.
We’ve all been there, done that. Anne and me included. We decided it was time to take a step back and figure out how to be a writer in the Twenty-first Century without going bonkers.
1) Know your trigger points. What is it that absolutely, positively guarantees a meltdown? One more email that must be dealt with? A blurb that resists your creativity? A looming & leering deadline?
For me, it’s dinner when I’ve been working hard all day and am running on fumes. I don’t even always know how I feel when I’m in that state but Michael has learned to recognize the warning sighs (You think a crabby, cranky wife might be a tip-off?) Even though I love to cook, he knows when I’ve had enough and should stay the %#%!! out of the kitchen lest the pots & pans feel my wrath.
Born and bred in Manhattan, he’s a true New Yorker who reaches for the phone. There’s Afghan, pizza, Turkish, Chinese, A+ hamburgers, deli sandwiches and the long-running pasta palace nearby so when dinner is the tipping-point, we (he) knows the warning signs, has learned how to deal & keeps me out of trouble.
Whatever your own trigger points, it’s essential to recognize them (or have a spouse/kid/best friend who does) and can come up with a strategy to fend them off before you have a meltdown.
2) Recognize your limits. You’ve uploaded your new book to Amazon, Nook, Kobo and Apple, approached 10 book bloggers requesting a review, edited the first half of your next book, tweeted and posted to your blog. You took your oldest to the dentist and your youngest to ballet class. You hit the supermarket, the dry cleaner and the drugstore.
Uh. Really?
Don’t you think you might be pushing it? Don’t you think you should learn to prioritize? Don’t you think allowing a little space in your schedule might be a good move? Haven’t you heard of delegating? Does the laundry really have to be done tonight? And addressing those Christmas/Hannukah/ Kwanza cards? Can’t one of the kids help? Wouldn’t one of the neighbors, recently retired and sort of bored, enjoy lending a hand in exchange for a free book or a tray of your fabulous brownies?
You don’t need me to tell you’re not superman or superwoman. You need to tell yourself and keep reminding yourself. Take the pedal off the metal, back off, slow down, pace yourself.
3) Dump the OCD tendencies. IOW, don’t torture yourself with perfection because perfection is a fantasy. When I was preparing my backlist books for epub, I was sort of shocked to find a few typos and other minor mistakes. Not many, to be sure, but a few. Books published back in the day went through an editor, a copyeditor, and a proof reader. Not to mention the fact that the author (me) had two more go-rounds: galleys and page proofs.
You’d think that with that many eyes, no mistake would survive but you would be wrong. You should aim for an excellent book but not a perfect book because perfection simply doesn’t exist and the big advantage of cyber-pub is that if a reader spots an error you missed, you can fix it. Not possible in TradPub.
Mr. Monk solves crimes, but you aren’t going to solve the riddle of the perfect book. Hire an editor if you need to. Get your best friend, your crit partner, your neighbor who loves to read to do a careful proofing, then let it go.
4) Don't become a tech wreck: get help. Does uploading a cover image to specified measurements in KBs and MBs and pixels have you tearing your hair out? You mean you don’t even know what KBs and MBs are? And pixels? What’s pixels? Drunken elves? Does creating a text link cause you angst? Is Photoshop your Rubicon? And don’t even mention HTML, JPG & PNG.
Kids grew up with tech & if tech is turning you into a wreck, look for a kid—maybe even your own kid or the neighbor’s kid—to bail you out. Make a deal and pay them because what they do in saving your sanity is well worth it. Or, as the ad says, priceless.
5) Recognize burnout and deal with it. If you’re running on empty, give yourself a break (literally). Meditate, take a yoga class, have a 10-minute massage (most manicure places offer them). Read a good book. Watch a season’s worth of Homeland. Go to the movies, a concert, the ballet. Make a lunch date even if it’s only with yourself. Take the time to catch up with an old friend—gossip is a superb refueling technique & a great source of new ideas.
Here ares some suggestions for dealing with burnout ideas from other writers at the top of their game—
Mark Chisnell: Ace thriller author of the Kindle chart-toppers, The Defector, The Wrecking Crew and The Fulcrum Files—as well as contributor to leading magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and Esquire.
His advice: balance mental with physical:
“I've always felt that because writing is such a sedentary job, it's really important to balance the mental stresses with some physical ones—usually with some sport. So I try very hard to do a mix of yoga and aerobic exercise, and do some sort of physical activity every week. Football, surfing or mountain biking are my preferred forms of torture, but I'll take whatever the weather and geography will allow, even if it's just a run round the block. If I keep to this routine I find that I can keep everything else in perspective, and don't get to the frazzled and overwhelmed stage.”
Donna Fasano, superstar author of bestselling sweet romances—her latest is Her Fake Romance which earned a "Top Pick" 5-star rating from HarlequinJunkie.com.
She deals with the frazzle like this:
“There are always those two great and well-known standby remedies in my house: chocolate (for daytime frazzles) and wine (the perfect solution to evening frazzles). However, several other coping strategies have served me well. I find solace in nature, so I take a lot of walks. I visit friends. I take in a movie, usually a comedy because I love to laugh. I often will find myself up to my elbows in flour (I love to bake), or stirring up some new recipe in a pot (I love to cook). One of my favorite coping mechanisms is to switch gears, literally. I love my manual 6-speed convertible Miata. When I return from a glorious top-down drive, I don't seem to mind picking up my much-lighter Ms Overwhelmed, slinging her over my shoulder, and getting back to the endless tasks that come with the job of being an Indie Author.”
6) Go Noir. Scream it out and laugh about it. Considering all the things that go wrong, that get screwed up, that have you in fits, a sense of humor is your Number One offense & defense. When all else fails, when you look in the mirror and see Quasimodo, don’t scream: laugh. Be bitter, be outraged. You have the right, damn it!
Now that reviews are disappearing, your buy buttons have mysteriously evaporated and ancient covers from a long-forgotten Transylvanian edition have replaced the elegant & expensive covers on your author page, noir does the job.
You can even write a blistering email to the guilty cyber vendor invoking every known noun, verb, adverb & adjective deriving from the ubiquitous and much-loved f-word--as long as you don't hit "send."
On second thought, make that a capital F!
How about you, scriveners? Are you feeling the burnout? Is your family begging you to take a vacation...preferably alone? Is it all getting to be too much? How do you cope with the frazzles?
Blog News: Anne will be visiting Romance University on Friday, November 30th, where she'll be talking about Slow Blogging--another way to combat the creeping enfrazzelation.
Six Ways to Beat the Breakdown
by Ruth Harris
There are 1000 things to do and, sometimes, it feels like 999 of them are driving you batshit crazy.
You feel overwhelmed and out of control.
We’ve all been there, done that. Anne and me included. We decided it was time to take a step back and figure out how to be a writer in the Twenty-first Century without going bonkers.
1) Know your trigger points. What is it that absolutely, positively guarantees a meltdown? One more email that must be dealt with? A blurb that resists your creativity? A looming & leering deadline?
For me, it’s dinner when I’ve been working hard all day and am running on fumes. I don’t even always know how I feel when I’m in that state but Michael has learned to recognize the warning sighs (You think a crabby, cranky wife might be a tip-off?) Even though I love to cook, he knows when I’ve had enough and should stay the %#%!! out of the kitchen lest the pots & pans feel my wrath.
Born and bred in Manhattan, he’s a true New Yorker who reaches for the phone. There’s Afghan, pizza, Turkish, Chinese, A+ hamburgers, deli sandwiches and the long-running pasta palace nearby so when dinner is the tipping-point, we (he) knows the warning signs, has learned how to deal & keeps me out of trouble.
Whatever your own trigger points, it’s essential to recognize them (or have a spouse/kid/best friend who does) and can come up with a strategy to fend them off before you have a meltdown.
2) Recognize your limits. You’ve uploaded your new book to Amazon, Nook, Kobo and Apple, approached 10 book bloggers requesting a review, edited the first half of your next book, tweeted and posted to your blog. You took your oldest to the dentist and your youngest to ballet class. You hit the supermarket, the dry cleaner and the drugstore.
Uh. Really?
Don’t you think you might be pushing it? Don’t you think you should learn to prioritize? Don’t you think allowing a little space in your schedule might be a good move? Haven’t you heard of delegating? Does the laundry really have to be done tonight? And addressing those Christmas/Hannukah/ Kwanza cards? Can’t one of the kids help? Wouldn’t one of the neighbors, recently retired and sort of bored, enjoy lending a hand in exchange for a free book or a tray of your fabulous brownies?
You don’t need me to tell you’re not superman or superwoman. You need to tell yourself and keep reminding yourself. Take the pedal off the metal, back off, slow down, pace yourself.
3) Dump the OCD tendencies. IOW, don’t torture yourself with perfection because perfection is a fantasy. When I was preparing my backlist books for epub, I was sort of shocked to find a few typos and other minor mistakes. Not many, to be sure, but a few. Books published back in the day went through an editor, a copyeditor, and a proof reader. Not to mention the fact that the author (me) had two more go-rounds: galleys and page proofs.
You’d think that with that many eyes, no mistake would survive but you would be wrong. You should aim for an excellent book but not a perfect book because perfection simply doesn’t exist and the big advantage of cyber-pub is that if a reader spots an error you missed, you can fix it. Not possible in TradPub.
Mr. Monk solves crimes, but you aren’t going to solve the riddle of the perfect book. Hire an editor if you need to. Get your best friend, your crit partner, your neighbor who loves to read to do a careful proofing, then let it go.
4) Don't become a tech wreck: get help. Does uploading a cover image to specified measurements in KBs and MBs and pixels have you tearing your hair out? You mean you don’t even know what KBs and MBs are? And pixels? What’s pixels? Drunken elves? Does creating a text link cause you angst? Is Photoshop your Rubicon? And don’t even mention HTML, JPG & PNG.
Kids grew up with tech & if tech is turning you into a wreck, look for a kid—maybe even your own kid or the neighbor’s kid—to bail you out. Make a deal and pay them because what they do in saving your sanity is well worth it. Or, as the ad says, priceless.
5) Recognize burnout and deal with it. If you’re running on empty, give yourself a break (literally). Meditate, take a yoga class, have a 10-minute massage (most manicure places offer them). Read a good book. Watch a season’s worth of Homeland. Go to the movies, a concert, the ballet. Make a lunch date even if it’s only with yourself. Take the time to catch up with an old friend—gossip is a superb refueling technique & a great source of new ideas.
Here ares some suggestions for dealing with burnout ideas from other writers at the top of their game—
Mark Chisnell: Ace thriller author of the Kindle chart-toppers, The Defector, The Wrecking Crew and The Fulcrum Files—as well as contributor to leading magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and Esquire.
His advice: balance mental with physical:
“I've always felt that because writing is such a sedentary job, it's really important to balance the mental stresses with some physical ones—usually with some sport. So I try very hard to do a mix of yoga and aerobic exercise, and do some sort of physical activity every week. Football, surfing or mountain biking are my preferred forms of torture, but I'll take whatever the weather and geography will allow, even if it's just a run round the block. If I keep to this routine I find that I can keep everything else in perspective, and don't get to the frazzled and overwhelmed stage.”
Donna Fasano, superstar author of bestselling sweet romances—her latest is Her Fake Romance which earned a "Top Pick" 5-star rating from HarlequinJunkie.com.
She deals with the frazzle like this:
“There are always those two great and well-known standby remedies in my house: chocolate (for daytime frazzles) and wine (the perfect solution to evening frazzles). However, several other coping strategies have served me well. I find solace in nature, so I take a lot of walks. I visit friends. I take in a movie, usually a comedy because I love to laugh. I often will find myself up to my elbows in flour (I love to bake), or stirring up some new recipe in a pot (I love to cook). One of my favorite coping mechanisms is to switch gears, literally. I love my manual 6-speed convertible Miata. When I return from a glorious top-down drive, I don't seem to mind picking up my much-lighter Ms Overwhelmed, slinging her over my shoulder, and getting back to the endless tasks that come with the job of being an Indie Author.”
6) Go Noir. Scream it out and laugh about it. Considering all the things that go wrong, that get screwed up, that have you in fits, a sense of humor is your Number One offense & defense. When all else fails, when you look in the mirror and see Quasimodo, don’t scream: laugh. Be bitter, be outraged. You have the right, damn it!
Now that reviews are disappearing, your buy buttons have mysteriously evaporated and ancient covers from a long-forgotten Transylvanian edition have replaced the elegant & expensive covers on your author page, noir does the job.
You can even write a blistering email to the guilty cyber vendor invoking every known noun, verb, adverb & adjective deriving from the ubiquitous and much-loved f-word--as long as you don't hit "send."
On second thought, make that a capital F!
How about you, scriveners? Are you feeling the burnout? Is your family begging you to take a vacation...preferably alone? Is it all getting to be too much? How do you cope with the frazzles?
Blog News: Anne will be visiting Romance University on Friday, November 30th, where she'll be talking about Slow Blogging--another way to combat the creeping enfrazzelation.
Ruth and I are totally jazzed to announce that this blog has been named one of the Top 50 Blogs for Writers by Tribal Messenger Daily. To be up there with Konrath, Kristen Lamb, and Jane Friedman is an amazing honor. Here's what they said:
One stimulating blog, two of the most prolific digital and print authors of today– that’s the Anne R. Allen Blog with Ruth Harris. Together, they make time to impart their successful writing and publishing techniques with other budding writers. This blog is replete with industry updates and other information that will make writing in the digital age easier– although not without hard work– and more successful than most. Anne Allen is the author of five comic mysteries while Ruth Harris is a New York Times bestselling author and former editor. In this blog they take turns in sharing what helpful tips and updates they have to fellow writers.
So: A great big THANK YOU to the folks at Tribal Messenger Daily!!
When I spoke at the Central Coast Writers' Conference last weekend, somebody asked me why this blog has taken off when most don't. I didn't have an answer for her. Why does one blog or book take off when other great ones don't?
Nobody knows.
Q. As a young Army draftee you were sent to the island of Eniwetok in the South Pacific during the U.S. H-bomb tests in 1956. What made you want to write about an experience that you’ve told me was very difficult?
M.H. I knew at the time that I was witnessing an important slice of American history at the Pacific Proving Ground during Operation Redwing. I wrote about the experience while I was still there, and a friend who left the island before I did "smuggled" the manuscript back to the States for me.
Q. Why did your friend have to smuggle out your manuscript?
M.H. Eniwetok was a security post. There were signs everywhere impressing on us that the work going on (I mopped floors, typed and filed requisitions and wrote movie reviews for the island newspaper: All The News That Fits We Print) was Top Secret. “What you do here, what you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here, leave it here.”
I was afraid they would confiscate the manuscript if they found it. My friend concealed the pages in the clothing in his luggage and luckily they weren’t discovered. When he got back to the States, he mailed it to my father.
Q. What happened when you got home?
M.H. When I read it, I was dissatisfied. In order to avoid disclosing classified information, I had written about my year as a novel — and left out too much. I wanted to rewrite the book, but I also wanted to forget what I had seen and experienced, a common response among veterans. I was happy to be home and I was determined to get on with my life.
Ten years later, I wrote a new version of my H-bomb year, once again as a novel. This too was a failure. I was using "fiction" not just to follow security regulations but to avoid the truth — I was also leaving out unclassified material.
1. I blocked out the anger and frustration I felt about the life-threatening incompetence I observed in the officers in charge.
2. I buried the fears that my health had been damaged and that my life was going to be cut short by my exposure to radiation.
3. I shrank from the lies I had been told about our safety (“There will never be any fallout on this island!”) and tried to forget the deadly mistakes, some of which led to radiation sickness and worse. I tried to forget the three-eyed fish swimming in the lagoon. And the men whose toenails glowed in the dark.
4. I was reluctant to confront a deeply disturbing personal incident — the only doctor on the all-male island (the man most responsible for our well-being) tried to force me into a sexual relationship and took vengeance when I refused.
Q. How did you come to terms with your experience?
M.H. My perspective gradually changed in the years after I married Ruth. An editor and best-selling novelist, she read what I had written and, in conversations with her, I began to remember what I had tried to forget:
1. We were told we had to wear high density goggles during the tests to avoid losing our sight but the shipment of goggles never arrived — the requisition was cancelled to make room for new furniture for the colonel's house.
2. We were told we had to stand with our backs to the blast — again to prevent blindness. But the first H-bomb ever dropped from a plane missed its target, and the detonation took place in front of us and our unprotected eyes.
3. Servicemen were sent to Ground Zero soon after Zero Hour wearing only shorts and sneakers and worked side by side with scientists dressed in RadSafe suits. The exposed military men developed severe radiation burns — and many died.
Using these memories, I wrote a new version — one that a number of editors admired — but wanted me to recast as a memoir. Once again I started over, but by now decades had passed. I had changed and certain important external realities had changed.
1. Top Secret documents about Operation Redwing were now declassified. I learned new details about the test known as Tewa: the fallout lasted for three days and the radiation levels exceeded 3.9 Roentgens, the MPE (maximum permissible exposure). Three ships were rushed to Eniwetok to evacuate personnel but were ordered back after the military raised the MPE to 7. That, they reasoned, made everyone safe.
2. I was finally able to confront my memory of the Eniwetok doctor and relate the incident to a long-repressed episode of sexual abuse in my childhood.
3. I made contact with other atomic veterans, some of whom I had known on Eniwetok. They told me about their own experiences and in some cases sent me copies of letters written to their families during the tests. As we talked, we also laughed: about officers who claimed Eniwetok was a one year paid vacation; about the officer who guarded the daily island newspaper by deleting "pinko propaganda," including a speech by President Eisenhower.
4. Finally Ruth, who by now knew the material almost as well as I did, was at my side and on my side, providing crucial input and detailed editing expertise.
I was finally able to pull all the strands together. I had overcome the anger, the self-pity and the knowledge that I and the men who served with me had been used as guinea pigs. At last I could understand my nuclear year in its many dimensions and capture the tragedy and the black humor that came along with 17 H-bomb explosions. After 50 years, I was able write the book I had wanted to in the beginning.
Q. Do you have any advice for someone who’s thinking of writing a memoir?
M.H. 1. Make sure you have enough distance from the experience so you have perspective on what happened. Sometimes it’s obvious right away as in my once-in-a-life moment of meeting the Beatles at the airport. The facts themselves tell the story and being objective is a matter of reporting. Exposure to radiation—anger, terror, incredulity—are powerful emotions that take time to process.
2. Figure out how to use (or keep away) from your own intense feelings. In the case of the H-Bomb tests, anger and self-pity were emotions to stay away from. So was the hope of somehow getting “revenge.”
3. Voice/Point of view. Sometimes the unexpected works:
4. Figure out (by trial and error) how much or how little of yourself you want to reveal.
How about you, scriveners? Have you had to confront personal trauma in order to write a story you know needs to be told. Did you fictionalize it, or try to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Do you think you're at the point where you can laugh at it the way Michael has? Ruth Harris will respond to your comments below. And don't forget, now Ruth has her own blog with daily links to fascinating articles.
SHOCKING, FUNNY, SAD, RAUNCHY! Catch-22 with radiation! Area 51 meets Dr. Strangelove!
Attention Email Subscribers! Feedburner is apparently no longer sending emails to many people subscribed to this blog. (Does anybody out there know what really happened to Feedburner? I hear so many conflicting stories.) Until I can figure out how to get a new email service to work on a Blogger blog, I'm making a list manually. So if you'd like to get notifications of new blogposts, and Feedburner has let you down, just send me an email at annerallen at yahoo dot com. I will put you on my list of personal blogfriends and send you a notice when the Sunday blogpost is up. (I promise not to spam you with anything else.)
Also Short Story Writers! I don't usually plug magazines here, but since I keep telling you how you should be writing short fiction, I thought I should tell you about a no-entry-fee contest that sounds like a great opportunity:
When I spoke at the Central Coast Writers' Conference last weekend, somebody asked me why this blog has taken off when most don't. I didn't have an answer for her. Why does one blog or book take off when other great ones don't?
Nobody knows.
All we can tell you is that making money from writing—whether it's for a book or a blog—is tough, so don't do it if it's not fun. Writing has to be done for the love of the process.
My post last week produced some thoughtful comments on the Kindleboards about whether authors should blog at all. Blogging certainly doesn't generate direct sales. But it does raise your overall profile if you do it regularly.
This week in a great post asking "Would Hemingway Blog?" Social media guru Kristen Lamb said "blogging is probably the ONLY form of social media that 1) draws from a writer’s strengths and 2) doesn’t try to fundamentally change our personality."
That change in personality thing is what happens to me on Facebook and Twitter, where I feel I have to pretend to be an adolescent. Here Ruth and I get to be grown-ups. Maybe that's why this blog works.
That and the fact that we have such awesome readers. Thank you all!!
Speaking of grown-ups, we have a fascinating piece for you today on writing memoir. Michael Harris put off writing his story for longer than most of you have been alive. But it was a story he knew had to be told—about nuclear testing in the 1950s—and the horrors those tests created. He wrote about the experience at the time—smuggling manuscript pages from the secret test site at great risk (and this was in the days when there weren't even Xerox machines to back up your work.) But the book didn't come together for half a century. He'll tell you why.
Agents tell us memoir is the toughest genre to sell. It's also the toughest genre to write. It involves revisiting the most difficult scenes of your own past. Today we interview Mr. Harris and ask him about that process.
I find his last tip especially interesting: a third person omniscient voice can give you control over a shocking story. I usually advise against using omniscient voice, but in nonfiction, it can give you distance and authority.
Reliving Trauma in Memoir: Offering the Real Truth Vs. Fictionalizing Your Own History
...an interview with Michael Harris
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| Ruth Harris and Michael Harris |
M.H. I knew at the time that I was witnessing an important slice of American history at the Pacific Proving Ground during Operation Redwing. I wrote about the experience while I was still there, and a friend who left the island before I did "smuggled" the manuscript back to the States for me.
Q. Why did your friend have to smuggle out your manuscript?
M.H. Eniwetok was a security post. There were signs everywhere impressing on us that the work going on (I mopped floors, typed and filed requisitions and wrote movie reviews for the island newspaper: All The News That Fits We Print) was Top Secret. “What you do here, what you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here, leave it here.”
I was afraid they would confiscate the manuscript if they found it. My friend concealed the pages in the clothing in his luggage and luckily they weren’t discovered. When he got back to the States, he mailed it to my father.
Q. What happened when you got home?
M.H. When I read it, I was dissatisfied. In order to avoid disclosing classified information, I had written about my year as a novel — and left out too much. I wanted to rewrite the book, but I also wanted to forget what I had seen and experienced, a common response among veterans. I was happy to be home and I was determined to get on with my life.
Ten years later, I wrote a new version of my H-bomb year, once again as a novel. This too was a failure. I was using "fiction" not just to follow security regulations but to avoid the truth — I was also leaving out unclassified material.
1. I blocked out the anger and frustration I felt about the life-threatening incompetence I observed in the officers in charge.
2. I buried the fears that my health had been damaged and that my life was going to be cut short by my exposure to radiation.
3. I shrank from the lies I had been told about our safety (“There will never be any fallout on this island!”) and tried to forget the deadly mistakes, some of which led to radiation sickness and worse. I tried to forget the three-eyed fish swimming in the lagoon. And the men whose toenails glowed in the dark.
4. I was reluctant to confront a deeply disturbing personal incident — the only doctor on the all-male island (the man most responsible for our well-being) tried to force me into a sexual relationship and took vengeance when I refused.
Q. How did you come to terms with your experience?
M.H. My perspective gradually changed in the years after I married Ruth. An editor and best-selling novelist, she read what I had written and, in conversations with her, I began to remember what I had tried to forget:
1. We were told we had to wear high density goggles during the tests to avoid losing our sight but the shipment of goggles never arrived — the requisition was cancelled to make room for new furniture for the colonel's house.
2. We were told we had to stand with our backs to the blast — again to prevent blindness. But the first H-bomb ever dropped from a plane missed its target, and the detonation took place in front of us and our unprotected eyes.
3. Servicemen were sent to Ground Zero soon after Zero Hour wearing only shorts and sneakers and worked side by side with scientists dressed in RadSafe suits. The exposed military men developed severe radiation burns — and many died.
Using these memories, I wrote a new version — one that a number of editors admired — but wanted me to recast as a memoir. Once again I started over, but by now decades had passed. I had changed and certain important external realities had changed.
1. Top Secret documents about Operation Redwing were now declassified. I learned new details about the test known as Tewa: the fallout lasted for three days and the radiation levels exceeded 3.9 Roentgens, the MPE (maximum permissible exposure). Three ships were rushed to Eniwetok to evacuate personnel but were ordered back after the military raised the MPE to 7. That, they reasoned, made everyone safe.
2. I was finally able to confront my memory of the Eniwetok doctor and relate the incident to a long-repressed episode of sexual abuse in my childhood.
3. I made contact with other atomic veterans, some of whom I had known on Eniwetok. They told me about their own experiences and in some cases sent me copies of letters written to their families during the tests. As we talked, we also laughed: about officers who claimed Eniwetok was a one year paid vacation; about the officer who guarded the daily island newspaper by deleting "pinko propaganda," including a speech by President Eisenhower.
4. Finally Ruth, who by now knew the material almost as well as I did, was at my side and on my side, providing crucial input and detailed editing expertise.
I was finally able to pull all the strands together. I had overcome the anger, the self-pity and the knowledge that I and the men who served with me had been used as guinea pigs. At last I could understand my nuclear year in its many dimensions and capture the tragedy and the black humor that came along with 17 H-bomb explosions. After 50 years, I was able write the book I had wanted to in the beginning.
Q. Do you have any advice for someone who’s thinking of writing a memoir?
M.H. 1. Make sure you have enough distance from the experience so you have perspective on what happened. Sometimes it’s obvious right away as in my once-in-a-life moment of meeting the Beatles at the airport. The facts themselves tell the story and being objective is a matter of reporting. Exposure to radiation—anger, terror, incredulity—are powerful emotions that take time to process.
2. Figure out how to use (or keep away) from your own intense feelings. In the case of the H-Bomb tests, anger and self-pity were emotions to stay away from. So was the hope of somehow getting “revenge.”
3. Voice/Point of view. Sometimes the unexpected works:
- Finding humor in a tragic situation: military incompetence in planning the H-Bomb tests.
- A third person omniscient narrative can be surprisingly effective if shocking facts are related in an understated way.
4. Figure out (by trial and error) how much or how little of yourself you want to reveal.
How about you, scriveners? Have you had to confront personal trauma in order to write a story you know needs to be told. Did you fictionalize it, or try to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Do you think you're at the point where you can laugh at it the way Michael has? Ruth Harris will respond to your comments below. And don't forget, now Ruth has her own blog with daily links to fascinating articles.
Michael's memoir The Atomic Times is available on Amazon .
SHOCKING, FUNNY, SAD, RAUNCHY! Catch-22 with radiation! Area 51 meets Dr. Strangelove!
"A gripping memoir leavened by humor, loyalty and pride of accomplishment. A tribute to the resilience, courage and patriotism of the American soldier." Henry Kissinger
An entertaining read in the bloodline of Catch-22, Harris achieves the oddest of victories: a funny, optimistic story about the H-bomb."
Publisher's Weekly
Publisher's Weekly
"Brilliantly conceived, elegantly rendered and persuasively authentic."
Robert B. Parker, bestselling author of the Spenser and Jesse Stone series
Robert B. Parker, bestselling author of the Spenser and Jesse Stone series
Attention Email Subscribers! Feedburner is apparently no longer sending emails to many people subscribed to this blog. (Does anybody out there know what really happened to Feedburner? I hear so many conflicting stories.) Until I can figure out how to get a new email service to work on a Blogger blog, I'm making a list manually. So if you'd like to get notifications of new blogposts, and Feedburner has let you down, just send me an email at annerallen at yahoo dot com. I will put you on my list of personal blogfriends and send you a notice when the Sunday blogpost is up. (I promise not to spam you with anything else.)
Also Short Story Writers! I don't usually plug magazines here, but since I keep telling you how you should be writing short fiction, I thought I should tell you about a no-entry-fee contest that sounds like a great opportunity:
And We Were Hungry, a New Literary and Arts Online Magazine, Announces Inaugural Short Story Contest.
Four winning writers will share prize fund of $5,000 and publication in the inaugural Winter 2013 issue. Contest writing theme is “And We Were Hungry.” Top prize reserved for the short story that connects the theme with nature, in honor of the short story contest's sponsor, "Ashes and Snow" artist Gregory Colbert. No entry fee, deadline November 30, 2012. The Magazine publishes original creative writing in the form of fiction (more than 1000 words), flash fiction (1000 words or less), creative nonfiction, and poetry; as well as essays, photography and visual arts.
Writers: Are You Taking Care of Your Emotional Health? 8 Tips to Keep From Going Batty as You Launch Your Career
First, a couple of announcements: This blog is up for a Goodreads “Independent Book Blogger” Award and we'd love your vote. If you’re a Goodreads member, you can vote through the vote button on the sidebar. Unfortunately the Goodreads icon seems to have been eaten by the Blogger elves, but the button works. You can vote once in each of four categories, Publishing Industry (that's us) Young Adult, Adult Fiction, and Adult Nonfiction.
AND: Ruth Harris has a brand new book out! It’s OVERRIDE—another hold onto-your-hat, fast-paced thriller written with her husband, Michael Harris. More about it on Ruth’s Book Page.
This week we have a returning guest, literary author and college professor Samuel Park. Last year when he visited us, Samuel had just published his first novel, THIS BURNS MY HEART with Simon and Schuster. (And he told us NOT to kill our darlings.) His spectacular reviews are the kind most of us just fantasize about.)
Yes, there still are hardbacks and paperbacks coming out from the big publishers! And yes, there still are success stories like Samuel’s. People magazine and the Today show do still pay attention to debut authors. Congratulations, Samuel!
And how did he do it? Turns out he didn’t torture himself with overwork and 20-hour days filled with endless publicity gigs.
He took care of himself. He thinks you should, too.
Take Care of Yourself: (Emotionally) Healthy Living for Writers
by Samuel Park
Being a writer is full of highs and lows, with lots of opportunities for anxiety. For instance, I can’t think of anything more frustrating than waiting to hear from an agent after a query. Or the emotional yo-yo of being in a relationship with your book—one prone to fits of joy, followed by bouts of self-doubt. Being a tortured used to be part of the persona of the artist, but these days, everybody wants happiness. Even writers.
Here are 8 Tips for (Emotionally) Healthy Living:
1. Delegate Anxiety
If there’s a particular part of the process that sets your teeth on edge, see if you can get a spouse or friend to do it—somebody who is less emotionally invested than you are. If querying agents is getting you down, see if you can get someone to take care of that for you. That way you can avoid the emotional rollercoaster of waiting to hear back.
I’m not suggesting you hire someone—I don't believe in paying for that kind of service. And you absolutely have to write your own query. But if you can get a writer friend or spouse to manage the submission of the queries and the follow-up (maybe trade query duties with a fellow writer?), that'll remove you from the daily stress of the waiting game.
2. Be Delusional
According to what I’ve read, delusional people tend to be happier, richer, and more successful. For a writer, being deluded can be an effective antidote for writers’ natural propensity to be pessimists. It may, in fact, be the only way to have a more clear, truthful perspective on your situation.
I have a friend who published book a few years ago and it didn’t do as well as she’d hoped. Recently, her former editor got in touch with her to find out what she was working on.
Because I was an impartial observer, I knew that the editor was checking in in the hopes of possibly snapping up my friend’s second book. My friend, however, read it as the editor simply being nice and feeling sorry for her.
In this case, my friend thought she was being realistic. My advice for her was to be more delusional, and tell herself that she was brilliant, talented, and that editors were desperate for her next book.
In her case, “being delusional” actually provided a more accurate reflection of reality.
When writers act “delusional” and tell themselves that they’re fabulous, there’s a good chance the “delusion” is a necessary corrective for writers’ natural tendency to doubt themselves.
3. Use Up Your Brain Cells
Sometimes worry and frustration come from your writerly brain not having being used enough that day.
When I first started writing, my mentor Don Roos stressed to me that I should write for an hour a day every day (except weekends).
I thought it was for the sake of discipline and productivity, but he said it was actually to stave off the self-loathing that every writer feels when she hasn’t produced that day.
When you don’t write, the guilt starts inching forward, and makes you feel bad. When you do write, the world feels terrific. And the brain post-writing (and post-FLOW and post-high of creating) is too tired and spent to indulge in negative, self-sabotaging thoughts—its capabilities have been used up by the plotting and scheming for the day.
4. Let Out the Anger…But Don’t Become a Rage-a-holic
One of the easiest ways to escape the writer’s blues is to indulge in anger. If you’re feeling bad, you can probably start feeling good almost right away just by letting out your repressed anger.
The problem with that, though, is that you become an angry person. If a rejection from an agent stings, go right ahead and let out some expletives. It’ll make you feel better.
But for the sake of your friends and family, get out of that mode as soon as you can! Nobody wants to be around someone who is mad all the time.
5. Take Care of Yourself
Evolutionarily speaking, we weren’t born to work indoors all day, or to be writers in the modern sense of the profession.
Being sedentary and solitary may be conducive to producing work, but it’s not conducive to producing happiness.
Exercise; get vitamin D either by going outside, getting a sun lamp, or by taking multi-vitamins; be social, ideally in a “tribal” scenario—that is, with two or more other people; watch your favorite TV show; or better yet, do all of the above.
6. Avoid Avalanche Thinking
Being turned down by an agent is not bad if you maintain things in perspective.
But we’re writers, we have big imaginations, and it’s hard to resist avalanche thinking: “Agent X doesn’t want my manuscript, which probably means that Agent Y won’t either, and no agent will ever want me, and that’s because I have no talent, and if I have no talent, then I’ll never sell a book, and if I never sell a book no one will ever love me, and no one will ever love me then daddy was right when he called me a loser, and so on and so on.”
If an agent turned you down, all it meant was that he wasn’t right for your manuscript.
The right writer-agent combo is something worthy of a matchmaker, and dependent on personality, work styles, and temperament. It takes a while to find the right one.
Don’t read too much into things.
Avoid negative chains of thought; chop them off from the very beginning. If you’re prone to avalanche thinking, try reversing it by replacing it with a positive thought, or by feeling gratitude for something.
Think about something good that happened to you and focus on that in your mind, and focus on how you feel about the person who helped you or made that possible.
7. Take the Lesson Contained in the Conflict
I hate to sound like Polyanna, but every time we feel bad about ourselves or others, there’s a lesson there waiting for us.
The lesson may be to be more patient, or to write a better query letter, or to improve one’s writing by attending a conference.
Instead of dwelling on the rejection, rewrite it as a teaching moment, and try to squeeze a lesson out of it. And then focus on that lesson.
Instead of dwelling on what went wrong, focus on what will go right next time.
This will help you get over the negative emotions surrounding the event (disappointment, anger, frustration) and focus on the positive emotions that come from focusing on the future (hopefulness, more inner strength, satisfaction from self-improvement).
8. Think About Being Down When You’re Happy
When you’re happy, the last thing you want to do is think about the worries and frustrations of being a writer, but I’d argue that when you’re happy is the exact time to set these behaviors and habits into practice.
When you start feeling beat down is actually too late, because by then you’re in a funk, and it’s much harder to get out of a funk than to prevent one in the first place.
If you’re feeling bad, you won’t be able to gather the motivation to do any of these things. When you’re feeling good, you can’t imagine that you’re ever not going to feel good, but that’s a mistake.
Anticipate the inevitable lows of the writer’s life, and prevent them rather than ignore them.
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Originally born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Korean-American author Samuel Park graduated from Stanford University and USC, where he earned his doctorate in English. He is the author of THIS BURNS MY HEART, which was chosen as one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011, a People magazine “Great Reads in Fiction,” and one of the Today Show’s “Favorite Things.” THIS BURNS MY HEART was also a Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction of 2011, a BookPage Best Book of 2011, an Indie Next List Notable Book, and a Starbucks Bookish Reading Club Selection. Translations of the book are forthcoming in Norway, Germany, China, and South Korea. He lives in Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Columbia College.
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What do you think, scriveners? Do you feel better about yourself if you write every day? Do you think being delusional is helpful to writers? (I wonder if I’d have gone down this road if I hadn’t been a little delusional myself.) How about trading query duties with another writer? I never thought of that, but it sure would have made it easier. (Misery loves company.) Do you have any other tips for keeping your sanity in this crazy business?
INDIE CHICKS FANS: The final installment of the Indie Chicks anthology is from Michelle Muto. Read her inspiring story on the Indie Chicks page.
First, the winner of last week’s contest is PHYLLIS HUMPHREY and she chose GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY. Congratulations, Phyllis!
For this week’s contest (there will be TWO WINNERS this week!) just put the title of Ruth’s bestselling thriller HOOKED in the comment thread.
Other news: my box set of all THE CAMILLA RANDALL MYSTERIES is now available on Amazon. Hope to have it on Nook soon (as well as FOOD OF LOVE.) Any of you who have reviewed one of the mysteries, if you had time to post your review on the box set page as well, I would be forever grateful.
Ruth has some awfully useful tips for us today. They really hit home for me, because I’m just at that stage where I’m seriously falling out of love with my WIP. So while Ruth takes the helm this week, I’m going to get out my tablet and chisel, change the love interest’s name to Bon Jovi, give the villain a tragic childhood, and maybe think about a sex change for Camilla…? These are fun ideas, and they work.
7 “BLOCK” BUSTERS FOR WRITERS IN DEEP DOO-DOO
By Ruth Harris
You’re stuck. You don’t know what you’re doing. You hate your book. You hate your characters. The plot sucks. The whole *&%^ idea sucks. And don’t even mention the title. Oh, you mean, you’ve tried a kajillion titles and they all stink, too?
You have no talent and don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. On REALLY bad days, you even hate your computer which just sits there like a bilious toad and never, not once in living history, came up with a single idea. You’re mad at your cat, your dog and whichever politician is yapping away on the TV—none of THEM ever came up with an idea, either!
We’ve all been-there-done-that, including me who’s been writing stories, novels, articles, blurbs, flap copy, and blog posts for almost four decades and still, now and then, wonder WTF I’m doing. Lost, I tell you. Beyond clueless. Out of gas, out of inspiration, out of ideas. Hopeless. Blocked.
So what do I do to keep on keeping on? What have I learned about how to bust the block?
1) The Writer’s Tool Box
Really simple but sometimes all it takes: If, as usual, I’ve been composing on a computer, I pick up a pad and pencil. Working by hand slows me down and forces me to think more carefully. Often writing a few paragraphs by hand will get me going again.
I haven’t had to resort to a quill yet. Or even a stone table and chisel. But I don’t rule them out because you never know.
2) Geography
If a tool switch doesn’t work, try changing the venue. Leave your desk and go to the kitchen table, a coffee shop, a park.
Sometimes just moving around can make a difference. A short walk, once around the block: the street and sidewalk remain but the block might be gone. A run, a Pilates session, even getting up from your desk and making the bed or emptying the dishwasher can get you out of your funk. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a great idea pops up.
3) The Meh Character
We’re talking about the character who just lies there like a blob, does nothing interesting, says nothing provocative, and drains the energy out of every scene in which s/he appears. Even you, the creator, are bored to death by this loser.
The first thing I think about when confronting the meh character is his/her name. Maybe I’ve given this character a boring name. Sue, John, Jim, and Jen might be examples; names so common, they evoke no images or associations, give me no idea of who they are or were they came from.
Another possibility is that I’ve given the character the same name as someone I’d cross town to avoid because I don’t want to hear one more version of their latest drama with their rotten boyfriend/girlfriend or yet another installment of their decades-long battle with crabgrass.
Obvious solution: change the name. Look at baby-names sites. Plug “random name generator” into a search box and you’ll find a galaxy of suggestions. Pick a name you’ve never heard of so you can start fresh. Try something ethnic that will evoke a whole background and set of experiences.
Or else: Choose a name that has a strong association: Angelina, Brad or Madonna, for example, to get you going again. You can always change the name again later with a search and replace.
4) Escalation Strategy: The Sex Change
When the name change doesn’t help, go for the nuclear option: change the character’s sex. Leave the character exactly as you’ve written him/her but try a sex change. IME, the literary sex change, although it will probably feel traumatic at first, can work magic and the character who once seemed flat & boring suddenly isn’t. Putting a female character into what was once a male POV can really shake things up. Vice versa works, too.
You can also play with gender orientation: boring straight character/clichéd gay character? Do a switch: Different person, different motives, different experiences, different goals may well be the transformation that turns the meh character into someone you and the reader will care about.
As always, if the trick works, you can always change the character back again.
5) Sympathy For The Devil
Seems easy to write the villain, doesn’t it? They’re bad. Bad, bad, bad. Not to mention horrible, awful, and absolutely vile. They evoke terror, horror, revulsion and you have plenty of ideas for scene after scene of unrelenting evil. So what could go wrong?
The answer? Plenty.
Rotten, miserable human—or supernatural—being. Blood dripping from fangs. Evil oozing from every pore. Dictator, serial murderer, assassin, malicious neighbor, vicious ex—problem is, even evil can get boring after a while. Unrelenting vengeance, torture, and/or destruction give the writer nowhere to go after a while and, sooner or later, the writer is stuck and just can’t come up with another can-you-top-this? twist.
What’s needed is nuance—and nuance can come in the form of traumatic experiences ranging from neglectful and/or over-indulgent parents to war, famine, global financial upheaval. Give the reader a glimpse of why the devil is doing whatever s/he’s doing. Let the devil speak for him/herself in terms of motivation, goals, and longings. The point is to create a character, not a check list of horrific flaws.
Hannibal Lecter, one of the most famous of all villains, was intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful. It was juxtaposition of those qualities with his lurid crimes that made him such a fascinating character. Without them, he’d be just another cannibal. Yawn.
6) Plot Problems
I’m a pantser and my best stuff comes out of character but when I face the oh-god-what-happens-next block, I try an outline. Because I’m severely outline-challenged, my outlines usually emerge in the form of a list: scenes that need to happen, plot points, character details and future cliffhangers.
The truth is, even in the form of a list, most of the time the outline just doesn’t work for me. What does help is going back to the beginning and reading slowly. Very slowly. Several times. I will frequently find that I’ve left out something crucial and I’m rewarded with the aha! moment.
You may find the opposite: that you’ve revealed too much and must take something out—a particularly juicy morsel—and save for later.
7) Code Red: The Last Resort
When all my fixes have failed, I talk out the problem—usually with my DH. What we’ve found is that often it isn’t what he says—he doesn’t know the ms. nearly as well as I do—but what I say. Turns out I’ve known the solution all along but needed to give it breath and the receptive ears of an interested listener.
Michael and I have faced and fixed each of these problems (some of them more than once) in the course of writing our thriller, HOOKED.
To celebrate, we’re giving away two copies this week. To enter, just include the title HOOKED in your comment. The winner will be chosen at random and announced next Sunday.
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How about you, scriveners? What do you do when you and your WIP are having a spat? Have you ever tried any of these “fixes”? Do you have any suggestions to add?
INDIE CHICKS NEWS!! The ebook is now FREE for both Kindle and Nook! This week’s inspiring story is from Carol Davis Luce.
INDIE CHICKS NEWS!! The ebook is now FREE for both Kindle and Nook! This week’s inspiring story is from Carol Davis Luce.
First, we have a few announcements:
#1 Our blog has been nominated for the Top Writing Blog Award by ECollegeFinder. UPDATE: Votes are open again through February 3rd.
#2 Ruth’s thriller HOOKED which she wrote with her husband Michael Harris, has been zooming up the charts this month. It’s in the Kindle top 100, and made it to #3 on Movers and Shakers!
#3 Treeware lovers: Anne’s first Camilla Randall mystery THE BEST REVENGE is now available in paper ($9.95.) You can buy it at Popcorn Press or Amazon .
#4 NOOK Owners: Anne’s other two Camilla mysteries GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY ($.99) AND SHERWOOD, LTD ($2.99) are now available at B & N. And Ruth's romantic saga DECADES ($.99) is featured this week on the Nook Lovers blog.
#5 SLO folks: Judy Salamacha interviews me for her column in the Tribune on Monday, January 30th.
#5 SLO folks: Judy Salamacha interviews me for her column in the Tribune on Monday, January 30th.
And now I’m going to get out of Ruth’s way and let her give you some very sound advice—a lot of which I could have used a few years back. I hate to admit it, but I spent almost a decade trying to “perfect” a book that wasn’t that bad to begin with—but got worse with every “please all of the people all of the time” revision. My perfectionism killed my own book. So listen to the lady. She knows what she’s talking about:
The secret to becoming a successful writer is not learning writing one perfect book. It’s learning to write as many good books as you can. So once you’ve got the nuts and bolts down, stop obsessing and write another book.
HOW TO GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY: TOUGH LOVE, RULE BREAKERS & A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE GUY IN THE DELI
You know what I’m talking about. I know you do. Most of us recognize it as The Enemy Within, the devil with a thousand faces, the ugly, waxy build up of negative forces that stand between you and Writing The Book/Finishing The Book/Editing & Polishing The Book.
Science still hasn’t come up with a cure for the common cold but, as an editor, I’ve worked with lots of writers over the years and I’ve learned that writers, crafty creatures that we are, struggle with the lit version of the common cold.
I’m going to list a few of the symptoms and propose cures, but be warned: If you like to play it safe, don’t pay any attention to me.
Are you a perfectionist?
Do you suffer the misery of unfinished drafts, half completed novels, computer files so ancient only Methuselah remembers the program that created them? Have you settled into an endless rut of rewriting, revising and second guessing yourself? You’re working hard but getting nowhere—and not fast?
Then, please, stop! Ask yourself what are you afraid of: failure? Or is it success? And what’s the worse thing that can happen if you upload a less-than-”perfect” book? Heavens gonna fall? Earth stop in its orbit?
So you think it’s a POS? Maybe you’re right—but maybe you’re wrong. Writers are notoriously lousy judges of their own work. So get over yourself. No one except you is going to give a bleep.
Who knows, maybe readers aren’t as picky as you are. Maybe no one will notice whatever it is that’s worrying you and maybe whatever’s bothering you is only the monster under the bed anyway. If people like your book and buy it, what’s the problem? Close your eyes, think of the money, and smile.
If they don’t like it, if they actually hate it, and your reviews absolutely, positively stink, take the book down. That’s what the “unpublish” button is for.
Give yourself a day to lick your wounds and shore up your ego, then look at the book with a fresh eye. Maybe you ought to hire an editor to offer some objective perspective, then fix what’s realistically wrong.
Give that sucker a new title, a new cover, maybe use a pseudonym (although I don’t think people remember writers’ names unless they’re Stephen King or William Shakespeare), write a brand-new, more come-hither blurb and re-upload.
Think: “Why, Miss Brown, you’re beautiful without your glasses!” Same deal, the magic of the makeover.
Like shampoo, a book can be rinsed and repeated. Big 6 editors hate this but these days you’re not writing for an editor. You’re trying to reach thousands and maybe millions of readers. Huge, huge difference.
Heed Voltaire: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Accentuate the positive.
In a tizzy about your alleged weaknesses? Your critique group sez your characters are stereotypes? That means readers will recognize them immediately. They’ll fill in the blanks themselves.
Your bff sez your plots are creaky? There are only 6 plots anyway….starting with the Bible and going up to Harry Potter. It’s what you do with the plot that counts. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl? What if the boy is Clark Kent and the girl is Lois Lane Park Avenue poodle?
Do more of what comes easily and work on your strengths.
Snappy dialogue? Scorching sex? Elegant descriptions?
Whatever you like to write will likely be a key to developing a style that is uniquely yours.
Whether your style is Tilda Swinton or Lady Gaga, George Clooney or Judd Apatow, work it. Robert M. Parker did. Elmore Leonard did. Style counts, style matters, style lasts.
Raymond Chandler nailed it: “Style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”
Bottom line: Style is you being you on purpose so embrace it.
Make friends with your subconscious.
If you respect your subconscious and treat it right, your subconscious will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
That guy who works at the deli on page 3? You had to stick him in when your heroine stopped for coffee and needed change? You put him in, didn’t spend two seconds thinking about him. You needed him so you typed something.
Maybe on page 106, he reappears. Maybe he’s the murderer. Maybe he’s an undercover cop. Maybe he’s a billionaire who wants to find out how the 99% live. Maybe he’s the long-lost sister who’s had a sex change op. Maybe that guy at the deli will turn out to be the key to a great plot twist.
That guy—the one you didn’t spend two seconds thinking about—was a creation of your subconscious. He appeared out of nowhere because you needed him while you were concentrating on your heroine.
But later?
Later, that character turns out to be gold.
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Scriveners, have you ever had an experience like that with the deli guy--has a minor character reappeared to become a major player? Are you tired of the writing gurus who tell you rejections will stop if you do yet another edit of your Work-that-has-been-in-Progress for a decade? Are you working as hard to be YOU as you are at following directions and coloring inside the lines?
Indie Chick News: This is my week to post my essay from the Indie Chick Anthology: A KINKY ADVENTURE IN ANGLOPHILIA. Click here. Or click through the Indie Chicks link in the sidebar. You can read an interview with me on Cheryl Shireman’s blog later this week, and see the clothes I chose for Camilla to wear when she arrives at Sherwood Ltd. on Christine DeMaio-Rice’s blog , Fashion is Murder And there will be a giveaway of THE BEST REVENGE on Lizzy Ford's blog on February 1st.
BOOK LUVIN' BABES Valentine Blog hop: Starting February 1, we are participating in an exciting contest. Sign up for our mailing list and you'll be entered to win a $75 gift certificate, a diamond neckalace and wonderful free books click here for our contest page, and for more on the whole blog hop, click the (very) pink Valentine blog hop button in the sidebar.