You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Inspiration' tag.
Last night I was talking with a writer who was in the same boat as a lot of other writers judging from the other writer blogs I read, meaning he had the manuscript done, or as done as it would be before an editor got to it, and he was waiting for a publisher to take interest. After an undisclosed time of no luck, he turned to self-publishing, and with a little marketing effort managed to get a small press to pick it up. Now he has a second title out, seems pretty happy with the deal, soon to have yet another in the works.
I’ve been a big proponent of find the right editor first – the one you won’t hate for being obtuse (you or them) and will marvel at for offering you insight into your characters you didn’t know was there. Such people exist. Mostly though, they are already swamped with thousands of manuscripts silently waiting for them. You could build a house with all the manuscripts. A skyscraper, even.
The problem with writing the good stuff for most people is that it’s deeply personal and therefore very much a thing all on its own. I’ve never had much of a problem displaying the works I haven’t liked. I hold them up and say “yah, I know, this sucks. Watch it bounce the rim of the waste basket.”
It’s a very liberating feeling. You know what you want, and that’s not it.
But when you write something, and you love it, suddenly it becomes a part of you. That’s scary as heck. It’s like it blinks back. That’s when you know you’ve done something really useful, but also, how will it interact with the rest of the world? Suddenly there are all these questions.
What will people think about you the writer? How will people misconstrue? Will it completely end any chance you have at earning money from a day job ever again? What about your family? Will it reflect badly on them? Even if you don’t think it does, will someone feel it does anyway on some level you don’t intend?
And so it goes back in the drawer, and I think that’s the truth of most really good writing. It’s all sitting in drawers or tied up in little yellow folders, or worse yet in the trash used as nesting material for sea gulls on a barge somewhere.
I’d like to think that some day all those non-biodegradable trash bags are out there harboring the next Shakespeare, which someone will find years and years from now under the right conditions, and suddenly all of humanity will be in awe of how profound and ahead of our time we must have been to be so right that just the stuff we threw away was gorgeous and masterful. What must the stuff we saved have been like if this was what we threw away?!
It will make us look very good, despite the real truth of being in the here and now. They will be wrong, but it will be in our favor to smile and nod in our histories now so that we’ll look like we meant for it to work out that way all along.
Writers who started out self-published:
Anne Rice – said in an interview she sold her first novel from plastic bags in a shopping cart in San Francisco.
Margaret Atwood – self-published her first volume of poetry straight out of college.
Even in 1838, John James Audubon had to self-publish “The Birds of America” via installments.
The point is not that self publishing is a silver bullet to get through to the more experienced and helpful editors and publishers of the industry, it’s that many people have wanted very badly to communicate via writing to their fellow individuals. Eventually it got done.
For me, it’s about writing as an art, and the enjoyment it creates. Sure, everyone wants to get published. But there are a lot of us who are too scared to roll our manuscripts around in shopping bags because we think if no one has picked it up from our desk yet and gone “My god, it’s a masterpiece!” then it must not be ready yet.
I’m slowly prying my fingers off the cover of the story I’m writing right now, though I think I can still make it a little better, and people will still like it a little more if I can finish that one last edit or rewrite of chapter 26.
In the end it’s really not about them, but about me. If it’s not as good as I can make it, I won’t be satisfied, and if I don’t have the confidence in it, no one else will either.
So the balance is this: Don’t be afraid to put things out there. Write all the time. Essays, responses, scraps of phrases, whatever. But don’t let getting it out there make you lose sight of why you do this in the first place. It’s for yourself. There’s something you’ve got to say to the world. Make it something people will like to read. Starting with yourself.
After that, if it needs to go in a plastic bag on the side of the road for people to see it, you’ll know and that’s what you’ll do.
Having tea with a friend of mine today was a nice reprieve to trotting home to research and write. That’s not exactly accurate in that it paints the research as a toil, which it isn’t. It’s engrossing. I look up and hours have gone by and I don’t know where. But the word is a little fuller and more defined. Both of them, actually – on paper and walking down the street soaking up the sunshine.
There’s something very right about it. Even if a piano falls tomorrow, just doing what I do is enough. Even if not another soul ever reads it. It’s like looking out from a mountain. Sure, there’s more to be polished and refined.
In fact, better work on that now.
But first here is a word of advice based on some otherwise very meaningful writing I read. Because you know anyone with a blog is entitled to some sort of baseless, high horse opinion. Anyway.
Don’t forget to count the ly words in the above before you take anything I say with much weight.
Don’t use adverbs. Not any and all, but the ones that most easily slide off your fingertips. The ones that end in -ly. THOSE adverbs.
If you find yourself repeating an ly word more than once a paragraph, stop using them. Entirely. Begin by finding a way to fit them at the end of your sentence. Then put the period in on the word before. Sit there and think on it. Do you really NEED that ly word to say what you’ve got to say? Writers like Stephen King would say no. Writers like Ursula Leguin would write amazing rebuttles for, and you will have tea and milk snorting through your nose while you read her. But then again, she knows what she’s doing. You don’t.
Every time you step down to -ly level in your writing, you’re trying to modify the meaning of an action to suit some other definition you haven’t bothered to explain though your plot. Did you ever notice the best poets don’t use -ly words but maybe once a stanza? Look at Stan Rice some time. The spark of good poetic writing is all in the connection between the words, jangling new ideas and connections. It is not the Jinga approach to stacking modifications on the base structural meaning of the language.
You would think poetry would be more about adding detail to the actions that occur, and perhaps bad poetry came about because of all those people hanging out at Walden after it was fashionable, trying to flint together the same magic of an internal soul, but failing, instead taking to the pattern of dramatizing the snowflake-like pattern of bird poop dripping from leaves. It wasn’t that exciting for the bird the first time around, and it’s not exciting now to hear how it sporadically, iridescently spools off the delicately (read: horrified) leaves.
Imagine a cat in snow. No matter what, that cat is your reader, shaking you off with every shuddering step through your flowery prose, unable to grasp what is modifying who, and what relevance it will have to the plot of your increasingly murky writing. Your reader feels out of breath and you’re writing about purposefully meddled-with crap. Don’t make them hold their breath with anything but suspense. Crap with a stick through it is still crap. Aerated, but crap. Crap that apparently doesn’t do anything meaningful but follow a gravitational swirl so predictable you have to add things that make it sound deeper than the doo you will find yourself in if you ever wake up from your trance and try to sell that dehydrated, shriveled pile to anyone who sits there through the whole recitation going “But wait. The bird missed you. Is that a metaphor for feminism? It had a traditionally feminine pose when it landed on the gravel, no?” Do you really want that on your conscience? No. Trust me, you don’t.
Your garden variety ly words are like garnish. If anything use them in the high-brow hoity toity device of misdirection to slap down those unhealthy misconceptions your reader holds dear. Use the twisting of the meaning for effect.
Don’t cling to your poetry with the somberness of an emu tweenster. If you’re going to be funny, do it on purpose. If you do it by accident, don’t do it again until you figure out why. Unless they pay you. And even if they pay you, is it enough? Eventually it won’t be. Figure out what the heck you’re doing, and don’t take the lazy approach of dressing up bored activities with bits of dramatic literary airbrushing.
Whenever possible try not to take a word that could stand on its own just to throw it on its knees to some other word you don’t actually want. You’re modifying the meaning of the unwanted action, and so your character is outwardly doing something that has no bearing on the turning of your story. You have them in a situation so unimportant that you have to focus on dolling up the minutia. The secret is that you should never have to work so hard to bring about any insight to who and why this character exists. Proper plot turning is all the fertilizer you need.
Worse, a lazy use of the -ly fosters stereotypes which if used unexpectedly-on-purpose can be quite funny as a contrast, but if used simply because this ly word goes poetically with the handle of a shovel, will only have your reader enjoying the mental equivalent of ditch digging with no backdrop.
When you use an adjective, you’re not plying the words, you’re defining characterization. “Tall man” is both clear and to the point, yet vague enough to let your reader fill in all sorts of personal preconceptions, allowing them to add real-life resemblances to your imagined characters in the events you create, just before you bash them all on the rocks and say “didn’t expect that, did you?” With such simple language, you create a very strong characterization. If you say “The man with the lengthy stride” you’re not doing anything bad, and in fact it’s a bit more toward the scale of poetic. You’re reader is not choking on rose petals. Yet. But keep that up and soon you have to work hard not to say “the gloweringly disputatious sneer of mendacity from the gangly man impatiently fleeing with extremely lengthy stride” is about ten words of nothing but time from my life that I want back. The tall man glowered. With sly mendacity he fled with an easy stride.
Note that I have the character doing something frictional (misdirecting) yet set in contrast to his relaxed outward behavior. I’ve established the question of “why?” before revealing the answer of “how,” which is how suspense and drama are allowed to begin instead of being cut out before the reader ever gets a chance to wonder. Lengthy would describe his stride, but I want to describe him. He’s not low on insulin now, an animal without a choice or psychological tension, instead he is complicated, easy, all in the same passage.
If you were bored on a desert island, which would you date? Periphrastic comparison is euphemistic poo dripping in the forest. It doesn’t get invited back to parties. Even deserted island parties.
Coincidentally, you and the deserted island? Guess who will be visiting you while you write?
Do make them interesting.
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
– Albert Camus
“There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.”
– Mark Twain
Dutifully lifted from this afternoon’s CS Weekly newsletter which I got on some how or another and can probably be subscribed to here.
Now back to writing.
That goes for you, too.
