10 posts tagged “writing”

I heard this story on All Things Considered during my drive home yesterday and pulled it up my browser while I banged out a page of my latest manuscript this morning.

"As part of NPR's occasional "First Books" series, first-time author Charles Bock explains that it took a decade to "unpack his head" and write the novel." 

Bock has a line in the piece explaining how the book was bigger than his meager skills were when beginning the book. In order to write it he had to first understand the structure of a "big book" and the depths of character it takes to achieve such a book. There's not a lot of insight in the story about how he did that, but the ideas certainly gave me food for thought.

I'm writing my newest book in a different manner than I did my first. I did a little bit of advance outlining, and what I called story boarding the stake points of the story before I began the act of writing the story. It helped me realize the structure of the book as a whole. There will still be quite a bit of creative improv as I move the characters between the stakes (and whose to say those stakes will be there when they reach the places I put them), but I'm hoping this will help in the revision process. There were so many words on the cutting floor after I revised my first book.

I'm not supposed to be on Vox right now. Instead I should be in my other space working on a short story, or a novel, or really just some piece of creative writing. But I can't.

The Expired-Tired-Wired graph from the October 2007 issue of Wired sums up my current state nicely.

Wired -- Staying Creative

Tired --  Becoming Happier

Expired -- Getting Smarter.

Lately it's been a battle to stay creative. I'm not fortunate enough that all of my time and energy can be put into my writing life. I have a 40+ hour daytime job as an assistant branch manager for a super-regional bank.

I once read an article about Jim Lehrer. Known primarily for his news work on PBS, Lehrer is also an author with 21 works of fiction and non-fiction under his belt. In the article he said he goes into work early each morning and writes a little bit before preparations for that day's newscast begins. I've tried a similar approach, waking early in the morning to write before getting ready for work. My mind just isn't ready to write that early. I try to put aside the time to write in the evenings, but often that clashes with time spent with my wife, exercising, and the daily chore of maintaining a clean household.

The result of not writing seriously for several months is my creative juices have dried up. I'm on vacation this week and decided to take advantage of the extra time to write something, anything, but nothing will come. I can't even remember the last time I had an idea for a story.

All of this leads me to two things: making the time to write, and staying creative. 

Surely there are those of you out there who manage to write within the same lifestyle confines as mine. So, how do you do it?

Stephen King edited this year's edition of The Best American Short Stories, and came away with an interesting take on writers of short fiction and their audience.

What’s not so good is that writers write for whateveraudience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.

I've tried my hand a short fiction, with some success at publication, and I think King is on to something here. The short fiction found in the smattering of lit-mags at my local bookstore feel weird. They feel as though the story isn't being told for the sake of the story, but only to impress the editor. Pick up any lit-mag and you'll soon notice that the stories all exhibit a sameness, the editor(s) like a certain style. The writer's pick up on it and format themselves into that style. I know I've been guilty of that. It's not because I'm a lesser writer than others, it's that no matter what I say about writing for writing's sake, publication feels damn good. Getting published today nearly almost involves some trickery on the writer's part, and the work suffers, which means readers suffer.

So — American short story alive? Check. American short story well? Sorry, no, can’t say so. Current condition stable, but apt to deteriorate in the years ahead. Measures to be taken? I would suggest you start by reading this year’s “Best American Short Stories.” They show how vital short stories can be when they are done with heart, mind and soul by people who care about them and think they still matter. They do still matter, and here they are, liberated from the bottom shelf.

Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.

“When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool?” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.”-- New York Times, May 22, 2007 [link]

As a person who has been sharing his life story on the web for a few years now, and a journalist and writer telling other people's stories, I enjoyed the perspective in this article.

On Monday night Chuck Palahniuk, whose books include Fight Club, Choke, and Lullaby made a tour stop in Lexington in support of his latest book, Rant. The sheer spectacle of the event made me glad I went. The inspiration I came away from it with was even better.

A Palahniuk read and sign is like no other. Not content to merely sign a few copies of his books and read aloud from his works, he encourages audience participation. There were two ongoing contests during the reading. One was a trivia challenge where he would ask questions pertaining to his books. Anyone answering correctly received an inflatable deer head which was tossed into the audience and bounced back beach ball-style to the person with the correct answer. Periodically Palahniuk would also pause to take questions from the audience. Anyone asking a question was awarded a bridal bouquet ( a reference to the events in Rant) and two books that Palahniuk had recently read and loved. Most of the questions were met with several anecdotes and biographical tidbits instead of simple yeses and nos, or  standard author replies.

Instead of reading allowed from his works alone, Palahniuk also read from letters he received. The letters were very personal reader stories, and became the emphasis of Palahniuk's talk. People like the letter writers, he said, were the reason he writes. No fiction he could ever create would compare to the reality he sees in the letters and the world around him. Even if he was never paid a cent for writing, he said, he would still do it to document the lives of the people he meets. Everyone will die, he said. The sweetest, smartest, funniest people we know will still die, and most of the world will never know them. He records it in his writing so that someone will know them.

Before the reading I had not thought about writing that much, I had in the sense of "If I'm calling myself a writer, why aren't I writing anything?" but that is as far as my thoughts were taking me. I carry around a little notebook to trap the fragments of stories that come to me throughout the day. Lately I've just been carrying it around, not doing so much trapping. There's been nothing to trap. I've got stories lying around unfinished, undeveloped, and I haven't thought about those either. The most writing I've done has been here.

But hearing Palahniuk has revived my creative juices. He even joked that the reason there is so much non-fiction in his fiction is because he feels like he has to use his 4-year Journalism degree for something. It's the same degree that I have and I'm not currently using it.

I went for a walk this morning, and as the world woke up around me so did the stories in my head.

The great Ira Glass, of This American Life fame, has a series of videos on the art of storytelling floating around these here internets. The videos themselves focus on storytelling through video, obviously related to the televison pemiere of TAL on Showtime, but a lot of what he has to say applies to all storytellers.

I enjoyed the insight provided in each clip, but one spoke to me more than the others. Here it is:

I've realized for awhile now that my first manuscript isn't very good. Furthermore it's not the kind of book I ever thought I would write. It's too real world, not supernatural, or metaphysical enough. I want to tell the kinds of stories that Jonathan Carroll, Jonathan Lethem, and Stephen King are telling. Stories about real people reacting to unreal situations be they horrific or ultra-surreal.

People have read my manuscript and have said good things, and I even think from a pure technical stand point it's a well-written, well told (for the most part) story. But it doesn't feel like me. The question is if I could get it published do I want it published? I already know my future works will differ vastly from this first. Do I keep sending the thing off to publishers and editors, or do I stick it in the desk drawer where it belongs and send them my current work-in-progress, which is more in line with the stories i want to tell?

According to Glass, and I think I'm in agreement, I need to move past the crap I know I've written, thankful it's out of my system and just keep working on the next one.

If you could write like one fiction author, who would it be?
Submitted by Marilyn.

Underworld

Oh wow! What a question. There are authors who I like because their stories are good and others because their writing is good. I'm answering this QOTD from a pure prose-style point-of-view. And I'm going to cheat a little bit by doing a combo.

I'd like to write like a combination of Jonathan Lethem and Don DeLillo. Yes, they both also tell amazing story, but the way they do, the way the build sentences is often as amazing as the stories they tell with them.

I had just started writing my own fiction when I first read DeLillo's Underworld. I finished the book thinking I would never be able to write that well and nearly gave up writing completely.

1.Our marriage got better

Not that our marriage was bad by any means. I just feel like last year--our seventh--we really grew into our marriage. Somehow it feels more adult, more real. We're having fun together, just the two of us and I like that. I like that we're becoming closer and better friends as time goes on.

My wife is becoming a woman, and I a man. We still play and have our childish tendencies, but we're growing, ripening if you will. I've begun to see the mother she will be, and the father in me.

I wish I could pinpoint when the change occurred or even what it was, but I can't. I just know it happened, continues to happen.

2. I finished my first novel

Early last year I completed the manuscript for my first novel. I'm not a full-time writer so I had been working on the book for at least two years. The final draft is the third revision of the manuscript. At about 80,000 words it is a short work in terms of a novel, but it's the longest work I've ever finished. l'm proud of it most days. Even if it never gets published I'm happy to have accomplished the task of completing it. I learned a lot about the writing process, about what works for me and what doesn't.

The sheer amount of time a writer has to sit in a room alone with his words is often daunting and something, I think, most people don't consider when they decide they have an idea or story they'd like to put down in black and white. The truth is, having an idea for a story and actually writing said story are two very different beasts. The fact that I battled the writing beast and won last year thrills me to no end.

3.We got out of debt

When Sadie and I moved to Kentucky three years ago we had a lot of debt. A car loan, and credit card bills were eating up the vast majority of our income. We were miserable. That began to change when on one of 12 hour drives back home to Louisiana we heard Dave Ramsey's radio show. He was talking that day about a Total Money Makeover and Financial Peace and he was making sense.

When we got back home I immediately picked up a copy of his book. As I read I grew excited. He advocated a method of getting out of debt that was hard and slow, but the payoff was huge. I quickly bought into the gameplan, and after Sadie heard it out, so did she. That was a little over two years ago. Last year we paid off the last of our debt and are currently debt free. Knowing that the money we spend 40-plus hours a week earning is completely hours, with the exception of the necessary(ish) bills, is an amazing feeling. We're now on to the saving portion of Ramsey's plan, and I hope soon to reach the investment portion.

(I do have one caveat: Ramsey's plan, if followed to a T can result in wrecking your credit. He doesn't care about credit, because once out of debt he never wants you to use credit of any sort ever again. This includes the purchasing of a home. I don't see it entirely that way, so Sadie and I worked to maintain a good credit rating, and I can attest that we did so.)

My story "Terminal" is included in the Literary Cash anthology from the Smart Pop series of BenBella Books.

I really like this story, and the others included along side mine.

If you're a fan of the Man in Black consider picking up the book.