S.A.D. (not) Update

So I spent most of last winter analyzing data about the shortening of the days, the inception of Daylight Savings Time, the lag between less light and colder temperatures, etc, and writing about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). That was fun and interesting. 

It was fun and interesting in large part because thirty years ago I found a good therapist, and twelve years ago, after three decades of suffering with anxiety and depression, always made worse by Northwest winter gray skies and rain, I finally acquiesced to the reality of needing pharmaceutical support. 

With that groundwork in place, this winter I've discovered that a passion, learning the craft of writing a novel, one that can be pursued under a down comforter next to a wood stove, can make northern latitude winter and it's associated blues practically disappear for hours at a time. Things are indeed better then they have ever been.

The experiment of The Winter of the Novel is going very well. Time is speeding by as I work on my assignments for the Author-Mentor Workshop at the end of February, the time winter usually seems like it will never end. I don't know if there will be a finished novel by then, but that goal fades into the background as I enjoy doing the pre-workshop homework. Partially because the homework is it's own reward.

One assignment has us delving into five or six recently published Literary Fiction novels of our choice. Books I would not have probably picked up without homework on how to develop a sympathetic protagonist. Literary fiction, I remember now, has the most creative use of language, a delicious feast for the eyes and, when read aloud, for the ears as well. Musical, magical, lyrical phrases that beg to be repeated before moving on.

Here's my list. Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult, The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje, Room by Emma Donoghue, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker, City of Veils by Zoe Ferraris, and A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

So nice to have a life partner who appreciates a good book and always has one on the night stand.

More later.

Publishing

Writing is not publishing and publishing is not writing. Lately, I've been studying how to get published. Have become rather obsessed with it really. As I tend to do. It's fascinating and an energizing challenge. It puts me in contact with people who feed my mind and spirit.

What I learned this week however, is that when you look at all the things you can do to up your chances of getting published, and there are many, it's possible to lose track of the fire in the belly for the writing that started the whole ball rolling in the first place.

Unless you're the one in a million who gets discovered while typing away at the proverbial soda fountain, a balance must be struck between the artist who channels the words, phrases, sentences etc. that delight the reader, and the practical, feet on the ground, go getter one must be in order to be published.

That's all.

More later.

Genre

So I went to the library in search of books in my genre. Light women’s fiction. Sophie Kinsella is funny. I loved The Undomestic Goddess. Oh, here’s a book called Shopaholic and Sister. I have characters who are sisters, I’ll get that.

At home I sit down for a good read. The first two pages are confusing and too much work. Are these telegrams? Why does the book start this way? I’m reading LWF so I don’t have to figure this kind of stuff out.

The reader rules when it comes to publishing. I’m the reader here. Note to self. Must have great first line, first page. Yes, must have first page that makes the reader want to keep reading.

Next! Good thing I picked up Diary of a Mad Fat Girl by Stephanie McAfee. Oh, this is really good. Funny right out of the gate. I like this voice. Cheeky, but endearing. I can use this for voice practice.

So glad I got pointed away from Romance. Why did I ever think that was my genre? When you tell the publishing coach you are writing Ro-mance, and your voice drops on the second syllable, you should know you’re in trouble.

Yes, cheeky, funny, smart Women’s Light Fiction, that’s the ticket. Beach read. Ahhhh. I love the beach.

More later.

Discipline

When it's been a few days with not much time for writing, it's easy to toy with giving up. Then I think of my dad. He worked hard, supporting us, as a dedicated minister, and finally got the chance to write full time when he retired at sixty-five. He and my mom lived incredibly frugally in rented apartments so he could live his dream.

The thing I have in common with my dad is the love of the craft. That's why he did it. He was far too humble to try and get published. His short stories are our family legacy. Carrying on the legacy for me means pushing myself toward publication.

I'd like to say it's self discipline that takes me back to the keyboard instead of giving up. But I am not that self disciplined. It's the simple love of words that takes me back. Playing around with words never gets old for me. Like for my dad.

I saw a quote from Fran Lebowitz yesterday. She said, "I am probably the worst speller in the world, so I am constantly looking things up. Every time I sit at my desk, I look at my dictionary, a Webster’s Second Unabridged with nine million words in it and think, All the words I need are in there; they’re just in the wrong order."

I aspire to her wit.

More later.

Platform

So it turns out the homework is actually a lot of fun. Copying by hand, my favorite writers best work. It reminds me of tracing Renaissance floor plans and photographs onto sketch paper in architecture school.

Although not every aspect of writing is fun, it should at least be what you want to be doing.  I have to want to be doing this, or I won't prevail in the long haul.

Having a platform is equally important as being a good writer and having stamina.  This blog is my platform.  But I do have one other claim to fame.

A while back I decided to get more serious about promoting myself as a writer.  I subscribed to the Writers' Market online listing of publications to which one can submit.

I thought about it, what has the best chance of getting in somewhere?  Well, people seem to like the pieces about having cancer.  What was that magazine in all the doctors' offices?  Oh yes, Coping With Cancer.  I liked that magazine.

So I looked it up and sent in my own favorite piece, one about losing and getting back my hair. Then I went about the rest of my life and looking for work.

After a while, I found a job.  I'd been out of the job market for a while and it was a steep learning curve getting back in.  All mail that wasn't a bill went into a pile to look at later.

About six months later, it seemed a good idea to check to see what was in that pile.  I came upon a 9x12 envelope I vaguely remembered said Coping With Cancer in the return address.

Opening it, I found a copy of Coping With Cancer and a letter, thanking me for my survivor story.  I didn't get it at first.  Then I remembered at work, if there was an article about my employer, they sent us a complimentary copy.

I thumbed through the magazine and there was my story, and even the picture of me post cancer with lots of hair. They'd printed my little story, six months earlier, my first article in a national magazine, and I didn't even know!

Pretty funny, I think.  Something I wanted so long, was in an envelope in my cabinet for six months without my realizing it.  Makes one think about keeping the faith.

More later.

Getting Real

Well, the synopsis writing didn't go so great.  The good news is it's obvious why not.  The bad news is it means I have to backtrack a little.

After watching Syd Field while web surfing yesterday, I realize the plot of my story is weak and ill defined.  Damn, I hate when that happens.

I had some very good advice given to me about ten months ago.  It involved homework that would prepare me to write the novel.  The homework was to be done over the next few months.  Life happened and I didn't do my homework.  Now there's no one to tell the dog ate my homework to except myself, and well, really, I'm not going to buy that excuse.

So, time to go back to school and actually do the assignments.  Ouch.  I have my eye on the Algonkian Author-Mentor workshop the end of February.  This is a serious workshop with people who can really help me finish a publishable novel.

Counting on my fingers, that's one, two, three and a half months away.  Can I do it?  It means devoting a minimum of two hours a day to the process.  That might mean saying no to a lot of other stuff.

Why do I even ask the question, of course I'm going to do it.

While I'm working on that, here is a little musical interlude I found from February 2009.

More later.

Side Tracked by Possibilities

Years ago, I heard on the radio, a cancer doctor talking about his patients.  He said something I've never forgotten.  He said optimal performers are not side tracked by possibilities.  What does that have to do with cancer?  I think he was saying people who accept they have cancer, find out what is the best treatment for them, then pursue it doggedly, have the best chance of survival.

That advice and a lot of luck, helped me survive cancer six years ago.  Wow, six years ago at this time, I was in the middle of chemo, the cute little name we give to putting powerful poison into our bodies.  "Chemo".  Sounds like the name of an animated character in a Pixar movie.

I thought she was blogging about writing a novel, you might say.  Well, yes, I am.  I am in the middle of one of the hardest "other things" (see yesterday) and I thought of optimal performers.  The task at hand is writing a synopsis of the whole novel in one page.  Not just blathering on for a page, I can do blathering no problem at all.

No, this synopsis has to be tight, crisp, believable, something that grabs the agents and publishers.  Something that makes millions of people want to read this novel.  Whoa, now I'm scaring myself.  But really, the competition is fierce.  It is kind of scary.  But it's also very exciting.

As I make my way through the last 150 pages of Fifty Shades, the climax of all three books is finally here.  What I've been waiting for.  I said I feared my own writing being contaminated by reading Fifty Shades.  But I have to say the reading is the easiest I've done since I discovered Little House on the Prairie almost fifty years ago.

Reading Fifty Shades has been like eating candy.  But now, finally, the climax has arrived, after fourteen hundred eighty two pages.  A tease equal to one concocted by Christian Grey himself.  You really do have to read all three books to find out what happens.  E. L. James is brilliant.  Although I wish she knew that eye rolling is the universal sign of contempt and bodes very badly for the relationships of those who practice it.

Well, talk about being sidetracked, I don't want to spend too much time blogging about Fifty Shades.  My point is the synopsis of the trilogy can be written in only a few words. Something like, Millionaire playboy with kinky sex life finally finds love of his life and has to face his demons if he is to have the love he deep down desires and so desperately needs to heal himself.

So that is a point in E. L. James' favor.  Especially in the world of marketing fiction.  In that way, E. L. James is brilliant, or has a brilliant agent, or publisher, or possibly all three are true.  Also, sex sells, but we all knew that, didn't we?

Hmmm that gives me an idea.

More later.

Other Things

Okay, so I went to see what other things needed doing besides the voice blocks (see a couple days ago).  One of them is vitally important.  Vitally, from "vital", meaning concerned with or necessary to the maintenance of life.

If I want my story to be alive, my characters to be alive, and I do, then it is vitally important my main character's conflict become very clear in the first fifty pages of the novel.

Now, I'm not going to tell you who my main character is or what their conflict is, partially because I want you to read it when the novel is finished.  But also because I learned at Write on the River it is possible to "talk out your story".

What does that mean?  It means saying so much about your story before or during the writing that it evaporates in the telling, gone like the breath you can see when it's freezing out.  I know this is true because I've done it.

And because the guy who told us about it at the conference was a really cool writer of Western novels who I never would have picked had there been another better option. Westerns? I thought.  Yeah, me too.

But now I think about it, Larry McMurtry writes Westerns, so I shouldn't have judged so harshly.  Also, this guy had some of the best advice I've ever received about novel writing.

Revealing in the first fifty pages the main character's conflict is easier said than done.  In order to do that, I've got to call on some other "other things".

More later.

On Being Concise

Good writing often involves using as few words as possible to paint a picture or tell a story.  I don't know if it's just me or if other writers have this problem, but concise ain't that easy.

Here's where a day job comes in handy.  When writing a letter or an email, I've found it's best to let the thing sit for a bit, a minute or a day, depending on the urgency. Coming back, I find I can eliminate about half the words, making the same point.

These blogs are the same.  I'll publish a post, then read it, seeing many words can be left out.  So I'll go back and remove them.  It's a dynamic process.  Very exciting we live in the modern world of lightning speed re-editing.

It reminds me what I learned in architecture school.  To make something look like it was created with ease, one must work many painstaking hours massaging the thing, working out the kinks.  That is how you get a building that looks like it was designed without effort.  It's a paradox.

These days, in architecture, ease of editing through computer aided drafting makes it possible to try out many more ideas in much less time.  It's nice to find good and exciting things about the new age in which we live.  Keeps the skepticism in check.

More later.

Tense Moments

The first thing I noticed while hand writing the voice blocks (see yesterday) is that it requires reading and repeating every word very carefully.  You want the repetition to be accurate or it won't work as well.

Then I noticed my first voice block is written in past tense.  Janet Evanovich.  She writes in first person, but in past tense.  I like to write in first person present tense.  I didn't notice that before.

I thought the point of the exercise is to write them fast and get the style into your blood.  But now I see it's better to write them at a normal speed.  You notice more that way.

I think I'm mixing this up with morning pages from The Artist's Way.  There you want to pour it all out.  At least I think it is.  Maybe I need to go read about morning pages more carefully.

I still think voice blocks are a kind of magical absorption process.  But I can see they definitely are a way of analyzing and using the experience of other writers to improve one's own writing.

More later.

Voice

Coming back to the writing after a day of work, household duties, and election day, I now know what's wrong.  I've lost my voice.  I could tell the writing had gone flat again.

A wise man told me to copy down by hand, daily, for three weeks, voice blocks copied from favorite novels written in a voice I like in my genre.  First task was to find the best passages from the favorite books.

Once I found the voice blocks, I thought I could by-pass the hand writing since I and a lot of other people like the voice with which I write.  But nooooooo.  It seems voice is not the same in novel as it is in memoir and essay.

Damn.  But I remember what Stephen Covey said about working with people. Paraphrasing what Covey said, the idea is, with people, fast is slow and slow is fast. Writing is like that too.

Take the time to lay the ground work and the writing will go faster.  Eager to get on with it, it just might be possible there are some other groundwork tasks left hanging out there, dangling, waiting to be done.  In fact I know there are.

More later.

Real Life

Real life sometimes disturbs the creative flow.  Long hours at work this week, meals to be made, laundry to do.  Railing against it just makes it worse.  Go with the flow.  What if focussing on other things provides a break from the novel writing so when one returns to it, the dry creek bed of ideas will be a flowing stream again?  

More later.

Anywho...

Life is full of surprises and today did not turn out to be the long drive in the car, fruitful, ideas bobbing to the surface kind of day I'd expected.  Quite the opposite.  A mind zone out was more like it.  Well, whatever it takes.

Every day of sitting down without any ideas and just writing is in fact proving to be fruitful in itself though.  That means hours at the keyboard.  For the past week, there's been a knot in the muscle just to the left of my right shoulder blade.  I keep begging massages from whoever is willing.  Typing all day at the office followed by typing on the novel on work days, and typing all day on the novel on non-work days is hard on the body it turns out.

The single idea I got today was for one of the characters to say, "So, I got this tiny computer, I’ve been hunching over it , and now I’ve got another friggin’ computer injury!" Actually, I think that's kind of funny.  My last computer injury was when I switched to a track ball mouse and ended up with a wrist so painful it took months of physical therapy to cure it.

Is this why Hemingway drank so much?  To either loosen up, or deaden the pain of typing injuries?  Oh wait, didn't he write by hand?  Yes, I think he did.  Not that I'm comparing myself to Hemingway or anything.

Well anywho, every day of this novel writing adventure is a surprise.

More later.