You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'writing' tag.
Become a Manuscript Whisperer
You’ve seen those strange shows. Reality tv aimed at getting your pet/horse/strange Japanese youtube character to follow some unspoken direction. Creating a cohesive whole – otherwise known as story design – is a lot like getting some animal to animate in convincingly human terms.
‘Writing’ is ‘what I did on my summer vacation/personal fantasy on the train’ – but ‘Story Design’ is laying the bricks of a very rugged and methodical oven. It’s so unlike initial creative instincts to ‘just write’ – because it’s practically antimatter by comparison. It’s supposed to invisibly hold everything together, creating a speed and direction that seems like magic to the outside observer.
Writer’s Myth # 1:
Writers come up with a what-if and that becomes the premise of the story, right?
You’d think, but not from what I’ve seen. New writers get zapped with what-ifs meant to drive the dialog, but they usually end up being the arc of a specific scene, which will echo by and then be recorded. The larger story design has yet to materialize.
Which brings us to the tools of Manuscript Whispering…
Manuscript Whispering Step 1: The Notebook that Never Was
Keep the smallest moleskin possible on your body at all times. You are diabetic, and that notebook is the antidote. Be subtle if you need to, make it an address book, etc. but you need that notebook more than your laptop, keys or the litany of other usual suspects in distracting devices.
When some what-if story idea appears, one you really feel strongly would be a good story, write it down. You’ll know when it’s the right kind of thought bubble. It will demand your pen immediately. But before you set your pen down afterwards, write down whatever the characters would do or say in that situation in order to…
A. PHYSICALLY and EMOTIONALLY *GET* to that scene…
B. REACT after it happens… (and with who?)
You will naturally come to the end of the scene using these before/after prompts, and what’s more, you’re creating cohesive, self-contained units of story building blocks that don’t depend on you knowing the end of the entire story arc to constructively develop on their own.
Other uses for your Whisperings:
a. character names
b. ironically juxtaposed character profiles
c. titles and unusual little symbolisms
b. your theme/pitch/unique gimmick.
This is your primordial goo of evolving ideas. No one should see it but you. Moleskins come with convenient elastic straps for this purpose. You’ll be surprised how many people feel better once their loved ones have their votes reneged.
Manuscript Whispering Step 2: The Gimmick that’s Not
Give up on the idea that you would never use a ‘gimmick’ and understand your ideas will need to be looked at with a critical marketing perspective. Something unique or starkly differentiating your story from all the others like it – that is a gimmick. That’s all it is. You can have a pure art. Finding a playful way to make it worth reading to someone other than you is unavoidable. Also, it’s easier to agree with yourself on that gimmick from the beginning. Back-peddling on this is a bear.
Writer’s Myth #2
Pitch-writing is hard and takes a certain extroversion writers don’t have.
I will challenge you to a duel on this one. Writers are excellent communicators. Most writers who find they can’t pitch will discover the problem is with their ‘gimmick’ or uniquely differentiating idea. It’s not there. Ideas which are cliche are going to sound lame because they are. A little secret? Your gimmick is your story arc. They’re like mirror twins. Don’t look!
Manuscript Whispering Step 3: The Character in the Negative
A lot of a writer’s time is spent on defining what a character IS. This isn’t bad. But what if you read the blocks of story dialog you’ve collected over, say, a six month period, realize what kinds of characteristics are being projected in these discrete expressions of your growing story DNA, and then reversed them?
Balance in a story is what conflict is made – and resolved – from. If you have a lot of blocks that are red (heated dialog) – what is their common subject? If not a subject, a motivation. Once you’ve defined the similarities, next come up with characters to defy the one’s you’ve already created on these common themes. If you already have too many characters, as many detail-oriented writers tend to create, begin to consciously ’shadow’ the negative characteristic in another character. Likewise, a villain can only be so ‘bad’ before he or she is totally inaccessible, and therefore unrealistic, un-scary, and even worse, un-problematic. People cause us problems because we care about them. Dabbing similar shades of kindness and cruelty from your villains to your catalyst gatekeeper-types and vice-versa will give you the bridge conversations to ultimately net your story blocks together.
Even with the extraordinary adventures of every-day life, I’ve slowly built up an armory of these personal blocks. Writing software brags about them, but to DIY makes you a writer and gives you a chance to come up with the illusive, so-called “unique” idea that every writer is after.
You’ll dog-ear and number those blocks – it even helps to keep different color pens to separate them, or quickly color-code the mood or character of your off-hand writing in your notes. And in a about a week of on-the-side typing, you’ll have something you’ll actually like. It will stand on its own legs and look finished, even without the sheen of buffing and editing that will finally send it out of the plant.
Now does it sell? That’s a post for another weekend. But if you’re tired of manuscripts taking forever, and shouting the story out as a one-block continual narrative doesn’t work, try a little whispering.
Proof positive that inspiration can strike anywhere.
And not to be missed by any self-respecting literary mind, The Economist has a debate on the curiosity for culture overpowering the tendency for the dumbing down of individual knowledge. The best debate so far. Sushi for the writer’s soul.
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.
