by Leisha Maw
Today's to-do list:
1. Wake up: check.
2. Actually get up: check--and yes, I do have to have a separate line for this. Getting up is hard.
3. Get kids up: check, check, check, and check.
4. Get kids up again because they fell back to sleep: check.
5. Repeat steps 3 and four several times: check.
6. Beg/bribe/force some of them to get dressed: check.
7. Remember it's Kid D's birthday: check.
8. Pat self on back for remembering, because yes, I've forgotten a kid's birthday before: check.
9. Start laundry: check.
10. Make beds: check.
11. Make birthday breakfast of blueberry pancakes from scratch: check. I even ground the wheat. Extra check.
12. Get kids to school: check, check, check, and almost check.
13. Write blog: checking as we speak.
14. Write 2000 words in WIP: ummmmmm
Do you ever have those moments when it seems you've run out of words? When the flow just stops? What do you do?
I used to try to force the story and make my characters do what came next in the outline. It never worked well. Ever. (Kind of like number three on my to-do list.) So now I take a step back and consult my writing checklist before I start yelling at my characters to behave.
1. Setting: is it developed? Check.
2. Plot: do I have one? Check.
3. Characters: what would they do? Oh flub.
There's my problem. I'm reacting to the scene, instead of letting them react and act for themselves. What's the difference? It's kind of like my morning checklist. If I had my way, I'd never need numbers four, five, and six. Umm, okay, and eight. Oh heck, I'd never need number two. And someone else would make me pancakes. In bed.
But there's a reason I have those numbers in my checklist. Because my children drive the list. They drive my morning story. It's the same with a book. The characters, if they are fleshed out enough, have strong personalities and develop a life of their own. They won't do certain things. You can make them try, but no one will believe it. They won't. The reader won't. Even the writer won't.
Most of the time when I get stumped in my writing I just need to take a step back and ask myself, what would this character do in this situation? Then I smack myself in the forehead and let the character tell his own story while I write it all down.
What do you do when you hit a writing wall?
Leisha Maw
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Bottom of the Ninth
Within a few days I will write the last words of a first draft.
Nothing else seems to matter. There's laundry and dishes everywhere. I hope the kids did their homework. I wish I could lock myself in my room with my computer and have someone bring me my meals. Not that I'm sure I would eat them.
When I have to stop, it feels like my mind is coming back from a long ways away. And it doesn't want to stay for long.
I'd love to come up with some snappy concluding sentence for this post, but I really must get back to work.
"THE END" OR BUST!
Nothing else seems to matter. There's laundry and dishes everywhere. I hope the kids did their homework. I wish I could lock myself in my room with my computer and have someone bring me my meals. Not that I'm sure I would eat them.
When I have to stop, it feels like my mind is coming back from a long ways away. And it doesn't want to stay for long.
I'd love to come up with some snappy concluding sentence for this post, but I really must get back to work.
"THE END" OR BUST!
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thank You Grandpa Tolkien!
by Rebecca J. Carlson
My son's third-grade reading teacher called to tell me he's dropping behind. He can't keep up with the other readers in his group, and he may need to be put back a level. This surprised me. I have a family of voracious readers. I'd say over half of our dinner table conversations are about books.
But as I thought about it, I realized I don't see my third-grader reading much.
Time to convert him to the family pastime. I went to the shelf and pulled down some chapter books that his older brothers had loved--The Time Warp Trio, Marvin Redpost. I spotted A Cricket in Times Square and added it to the pile. And then I stopped a moment to think about what I had loved as a third-grader.
The Hobbit.
I remember finding it on the shelf at the school library, an enticingly illustrated spine with a smoking volcano and some paths trailing around mountainsides that rose from a deep forest. I had pulled the book down, opened it up, got sucked in and never came back.
So I grabbed our paperback copy and took it along to my son's room, even though I doubted he would want to read it. The reading level would be too high for a boy who may need to drop down to an easier reading group. I gave him the stack of books, starting with The Hobbit, telling him, "This book is the best."
Thirty minutes later I came back. What book did he have? The Hobbit. "I like this one the most," he told me. Smiling, I kissed him goodnight and turned out the light.
When I went to get him up this morning, I found him already sitting on the couch in the family room, reading The Hobbit!
This is another reason why I do what I do. Why I work and wish and hope and fight. Because some child, some reluctant boy reader, some day, may get up at five in the morning to read the next chapter of one of my books.
Thank you, Grandpa Tolkien!
My son's third-grade reading teacher called to tell me he's dropping behind. He can't keep up with the other readers in his group, and he may need to be put back a level. This surprised me. I have a family of voracious readers. I'd say over half of our dinner table conversations are about books.
But as I thought about it, I realized I don't see my third-grader reading much.
Time to convert him to the family pastime. I went to the shelf and pulled down some chapter books that his older brothers had loved--The Time Warp Trio, Marvin Redpost. I spotted A Cricket in Times Square and added it to the pile. And then I stopped a moment to think about what I had loved as a third-grader.
The Hobbit.
I remember finding it on the shelf at the school library, an enticingly illustrated spine with a smoking volcano and some paths trailing around mountainsides that rose from a deep forest. I had pulled the book down, opened it up, got sucked in and never came back.
So I grabbed our paperback copy and took it along to my son's room, even though I doubted he would want to read it. The reading level would be too high for a boy who may need to drop down to an easier reading group. I gave him the stack of books, starting with The Hobbit, telling him, "This book is the best."
Thirty minutes later I came back. What book did he have? The Hobbit. "I like this one the most," he told me. Smiling, I kissed him goodnight and turned out the light.
When I went to get him up this morning, I found him already sitting on the couch in the family room, reading The Hobbit!
This is another reason why I do what I do. Why I work and wish and hope and fight. Because some child, some reluctant boy reader, some day, may get up at five in the morning to read the next chapter of one of my books.
Thank you, Grandpa Tolkien!
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Advice to Writers from a Tax Man
All right. I can already hear you groaning. Tax time is fast approaching - and you're a writer. You have expenses. You can claim them on your taxes, right?
Yes, IF you do it the right way. Well, most of the time.
In a recent meeting of our chapter, Walt Eddy, an appeals officer for the IRS (and fellow writer) spoke to us on this very subject.
Here are the highlights.
Treat your writing as a business:
Make a dynamic business plan.
Open a separate checking account to be used only for writing expenses and income.
Keep all your receipts.
Keep a record/journal of all the events you attended and your expenses. Mileage to and from these events is usually allowed.
Do some research and KNOW which expenses are allowed and which are not.
(And sorry, for the most part, all your movie purchases probably won't make it through an audit - even if you only used them for story-line research - which of course we know you did.)
To legally use your expenses for your taxes, you MUST be submitting and promoting your work, and be able to prove it. If you haven't made any profit after three years, you might want to think twice about claiming them if you're showing a loss.
I have three more pages of notes, but I'll torture you no longer. Most of us have limits to how long taxes fascinate us, even if it is about writing.
If you'd like to know all the legal exemptions for writers and how to claim them, Walt Eddy has a website and a book, Making Expression Less Taxing: A Freelancer's Tax Resource. You can access them here:
http://www.death-and-taxes4writers.blogspot.com/
Best of luck and may you all survive another April 15th!
Yes, IF you do it the right way. Well, most of the time.
In a recent meeting of our chapter, Walt Eddy, an appeals officer for the IRS (and fellow writer) spoke to us on this very subject.
Here are the highlights.
Treat your writing as a business:
Make a dynamic business plan.
Open a separate checking account to be used only for writing expenses and income.
Keep all your receipts.
Keep a record/journal of all the events you attended and your expenses. Mileage to and from these events is usually allowed.
Do some research and KNOW which expenses are allowed and which are not.
(And sorry, for the most part, all your movie purchases probably won't make it through an audit - even if you only used them for story-line research - which of course we know you did.)
To legally use your expenses for your taxes, you MUST be submitting and promoting your work, and be able to prove it. If you haven't made any profit after three years, you might want to think twice about claiming them if you're showing a loss.
I have three more pages of notes, but I'll torture you no longer. Most of us have limits to how long taxes fascinate us, even if it is about writing.
If you'd like to know all the legal exemptions for writers and how to claim them, Walt Eddy has a website and a book, Making Expression Less Taxing: A Freelancer's Tax Resource. You can access them here:
http://www.death-and-taxes4writers.blogspot.com/
Best of luck and may you all survive another April 15th!
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
What's the big idea?
People always ask writers where they get their ideas, and I think there's a simple and a not so simple answer to this one. The simple one is: practice. Anyone who makes themselves write every day is going to get good at coming up with and cultivating ideas. Most of us always have an eye out for a funny story, or an odd image, or a theme suggested by an anthology. Over the years, we all train ourselves to strip an idea down to its most essential components, and then fit it into the structure of a story. We learn tricks like taking two seemingly unrelated ideas and playing them off each other. We learn to spot what kinds of ideas would make a great A plot versus a B plot, and then switch them around for the challenge.
But there's a difficult answer too, and it's probably what most people who ask the question are digging for. How do you find the ideas that you're excited about? That you must write? Before I share my answer, I have a funny story. My friend and writer's group-mate Walter Jon Williams used to wake up in the middle of the night having dreamt the most amazing dream ever, but he'd invariably drift off to sleep again and by morning he couldn't remember it. The feeling that he'd had this incredible idea that just set his creativity on fire was all that was left. So, he put a pen and paper on his nightstand and one night, woke up with one of his world shattering ideas and managed to remember the pen and paper. He jotted down his dream, fell back to sleep, and in the morning woke up excited. He grabbed the piece of paper and looked at what he'd written and it was, (not making this up, you can ask Walter):
UFOs are actually made out of bread.
The point of that story, aside from making you laugh, is that even a writer as experienced and accomplished as Walter, with his many awards and decades long career, will go out of his way to get the idea. He's surely got enough story ideas to fill several careers, given he's practiced coming up with them for most of his life. Yet there are ideas and ideas. The former can make perfectly good, even great stories. The latter won't leave you alone until you pour out your soul onto the page - which sometimes results in a great story, but without enough training in how to write will result in a mediocre, incomprehensible mess. Hence one purpose of practicing your writing skills is to be primed and ready to make those rare ideas shine.
Mine sneak in through the back door. I lay bait for them by thinking of something that I want. A certain feeling that a book gave me, for example, and then I ruminate about it and get frustrated and write a bunch of random scenes and make up characters that don't really click for me, and then, after several days to a few weeks, one of those ideas usually comes together, and it often has nothing to do with what I was originally looking for. Most of my sales, though, come from these ideas, and this in part explains why I didn't start selling stories until relatively recently, even though I graduated from Clarion West a decade ago. I used to work hard on ideas, honing my craft and execution and I got a lot of positive feedback and rejection letters that told me I was close. It was when I started laying bait for ideas that the sales started. I used to provide my most polished, overworked piece to my writer's group in New Mexico. More recently, I dashed off a rough draft of a story with an idea for my writers group, heard them chew it over and worry it to shreds, and came away with an idea, which might or might not have anything to do with what they'd said.
So the question I ask is, how to you find your ideas, as opposed to the regular run of the mill ideas that you've got a million of?
Monday, January 17, 2011
Piecing Together a Story
posted by Rebecca J. Carlson
Strip away the page, the stage, and the screen, and what beats at the heart of any work of fiction? Story. What do we crave as readers? Story. What do we strive for as authors? Story.
But how do you make a good one?
This past week I came across some new ideas from a professional storyteller. His name is Donald Davis, and every summer on a little island off the coast of North Carolina he runs a storytelling workshop. No, I didn't get to go, but I caught the documentary film about it:
What's Your Story?
Even though Mr. Davis teaches people how to find true stories in their own lives, I discovered a lot of things I could relate to writing fiction. He said our first step shouldn't be to ask, "what's the plot?" Our first step is to gather scraps, like a quilter getting ready to make a quilt. I realized that I like to do this for years before I begin a novel, dreaming up little dialogs between the characters, thinking about what their world would be like, what their histories are. I've also tried writing a book without gathering scraps first, and I ran into snags at every turn.
One of my favorite things that Mr. Davis said is that we need to establish what normal life is like in our stories. That's what people want to know about. What was your life like? What's it like to be a potato farmer's daughter, or to grow up in the Projects? Or maybe if you're writing science fiction, what's it like to live in an alternate world? But that's not all people want to know. They want to know what problems we faced, and then most of all, what progress we made. What did we learn? How did we grow? How did we survive and overcome? A story is a quilt made up of these three kinds of scraps - daily life, problems, and progress - put together in a unique and beautiful pattern of meaning.
I also enjoyed Mr Davis' wisdom on how to take care of "newborn" stories, on tapping into our memories, and on why humans need story. Take some time to enjoy this film and get a refreshing, inspiring view of the heart of our craft.
Strip away the page, the stage, and the screen, and what beats at the heart of any work of fiction? Story. What do we crave as readers? Story. What do we strive for as authors? Story.
But how do you make a good one?
This past week I came across some new ideas from a professional storyteller. His name is Donald Davis, and every summer on a little island off the coast of North Carolina he runs a storytelling workshop. No, I didn't get to go, but I caught the documentary film about it:
What's Your Story?
Even though Mr. Davis teaches people how to find true stories in their own lives, I discovered a lot of things I could relate to writing fiction. He said our first step shouldn't be to ask, "what's the plot?" Our first step is to gather scraps, like a quilter getting ready to make a quilt. I realized that I like to do this for years before I begin a novel, dreaming up little dialogs between the characters, thinking about what their world would be like, what their histories are. I've also tried writing a book without gathering scraps first, and I ran into snags at every turn.
One of my favorite things that Mr. Davis said is that we need to establish what normal life is like in our stories. That's what people want to know about. What was your life like? What's it like to be a potato farmer's daughter, or to grow up in the Projects? Or maybe if you're writing science fiction, what's it like to live in an alternate world? But that's not all people want to know. They want to know what problems we faced, and then most of all, what progress we made. What did we learn? How did we grow? How did we survive and overcome? A story is a quilt made up of these three kinds of scraps - daily life, problems, and progress - put together in a unique and beautiful pattern of meaning.
I also enjoyed Mr Davis' wisdom on how to take care of "newborn" stories, on tapping into our memories, and on why humans need story. Take some time to enjoy this film and get a refreshing, inspiring view of the heart of our craft.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Rushing Slows Me Down
by Rebecca J. Carlson
The cabin girl sneaked a look at the latest print-out of my unfinished manuscript.
Okay, I let her. I didn't take it away from her when I saw her bringing it out to the car. All the long one-hour drive into town for our monthly Costco trip I listened eagerly for the gratifying giggles that came now and then from the back seat.
After she'd read the last page I waited, breathless, for the verdict. My daughter has no problem telling me when my writing is boring, or lame, or just doesn't work.
"This is good, Mom, but after the first few chapters it feels like you're rushing."
She was right. I had been rushing. Desperately rushing to catch up from the sixth months I'd spent moving my family to Hawaii. Rushing to catch up with my dreams. Rushing to write the book I'd been waiting all my life to write. But day after day, the words only trickled out. I stopped counting words to keep from getting depressed. I pushed harder, tried to put in more hours. Still, I felt bogged down in the endless morass of the middle. Have to get out, must get to climax, must press on...
Wait a minute! Sure, I'm excited to finish this book and get on with my writing career, but what's the rush? The real fun is in the writing.
So yesterday I decided to relax and have fun. Enjoy each and every beat. Stop trying to plow through my outline and get to "the good stuff." It's all good stuff, or it isn't worth writing.
When I stopped driving myself so hard, the words came. At the end of my daily writing session I had ten pages to print out, whereas in these past weeks my daily page count had been five or six.
I'm through rushing. It slows me down.
The cabin girl sneaked a look at the latest print-out of my unfinished manuscript.
Okay, I let her. I didn't take it away from her when I saw her bringing it out to the car. All the long one-hour drive into town for our monthly Costco trip I listened eagerly for the gratifying giggles that came now and then from the back seat.
After she'd read the last page I waited, breathless, for the verdict. My daughter has no problem telling me when my writing is boring, or lame, or just doesn't work.
"This is good, Mom, but after the first few chapters it feels like you're rushing."
She was right. I had been rushing. Desperately rushing to catch up from the sixth months I'd spent moving my family to Hawaii. Rushing to catch up with my dreams. Rushing to write the book I'd been waiting all my life to write. But day after day, the words only trickled out. I stopped counting words to keep from getting depressed. I pushed harder, tried to put in more hours. Still, I felt bogged down in the endless morass of the middle. Have to get out, must get to climax, must press on...
Wait a minute! Sure, I'm excited to finish this book and get on with my writing career, but what's the rush? The real fun is in the writing.
So yesterday I decided to relax and have fun. Enjoy each and every beat. Stop trying to plow through my outline and get to "the good stuff." It's all good stuff, or it isn't worth writing.
When I stopped driving myself so hard, the words came. At the end of my daily writing session I had ten pages to print out, whereas in these past weeks my daily page count had been five or six.
I'm through rushing. It slows me down.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)