Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded #13: Learn from the Masters

After several months of arm-twisting, I convinced my 14-year-old daughter to watch Gone with the Wind with me.  She is generally very tolerant of Mommy's ancient movies and overwrought 1970s progressive rock, but she was balking on this one.  Finally, I said, "Remember that I was right about When Harry Met Sally?  Do Kansas and Aerosmith not rock?  Sit down and look at the TV.  We're watching the movie."

At some point during the second half, she posted a Facebook status that said merely, "Rhett Butler!"  Styles and tastes change, but the virile appeal of Clark Gable and Rhett Butler will never fade.

As we watched, she periodically bleated, "She's so awful!" as Scarlett plunged through a dying civilization, trailing her swaying hoopskirts and the disapproval of every unreconstructed rebel in Atlanta.  Scarlett did some absolutely awful things, but she shouldered the responsbility of caring for her destitute friends and relatives and former slaves who didn't have her brass and determination.  And she found room in that flinty heart to completely love her father and her mother and her daughter and Ashley and her Mammy and, though it took her way too long to figure it out, to love Melanie and Rhett, too.  This, my cherished readers, is what one calls a memorable character.  And so is her husband Rhett, the rogue who is burdened with just a little too much romanticism to be a convincing scalawag.

I've seen the movie and read the book many times, though not lately, so this was the first time I'd paid attention to the story from the perspective of a novelist.  The first half of the movie is the epic war tragedy that we all remember, but not so the second half...the two hours that pass after Scarlett vows that she'll never be hungry again.  I invite you to watch it, and pay close attention to the second half.  The world is changing to something unrecognizable outside the walls of Scarlett's and Rhett's mansion, but it is their domestic tragedy that rivets our attention.  The second half of Gone with the Wind is an unflinching portrayal of the disintegration of a marriage between two people who love each other.

Watch Scarlett's face when she welcomes Rhett home from a long trip, only to be rebuffed by a man who thinks she doesn't want to see him.  Watch her strike back at him with hateful words, instead of running into his arms.  And listen to Mammy tell Melanie about the brutal and wounding things they say to each other in their grief over their daughter Bonnie's death. 

Then read the book, so you can enjoy the character details that couldn't be crammed into the four-hour movie.  Did you know that Margaret Mitchell said plainly that Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but that she had the ability to make people believe she was?  If you wanted to write about a character who was that strong and that dominating, how would you go about it?

It never hurts a writer to go back re-read something wonderful and familiar, if only to see how its author accomplished such a feat.  Now I must resume my campaign to bully my daughter into reading Anne of Green Gables...

Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded #12: Wandering in the Wilderness with J.K. Rowling

I love starting a new project.  When the project is short and manageable, like a short story, I usually just toss the idea around for a while, then plunge in.  When the project is book-sized, I prepare.  I spend a month or so reading for a living, searching out books and websites that tell me more about my setting or about my subject.  Then I make an outline.  And then I plunge in.

The first 75 pages or so of a new project seem to write themselves.  In fact, if writing an exciting beginning didn't flow easily, I'd question whether I'd done my job during the preparation stage, and I'd go back to reading for a living for little while longer.

Similarly, the last 75 pages of a book seem to write themselves, with the words tumbling onto the computer screen as fast as my fumbling fingers can type.  If they didn't come easily, I'd worry.  The previous 250 pages were written expressly to set up those last exciting chapters.  Difficulty writing a book's climax is almost certainly a sign that it's just not time to finish it.

But what about those middle 200 pages or so?  For me, some of those pages are just back-breaking to write.  (Mind-breaking?  Finger-breaking?  Whatever...you know what I mean.)

I was writing Findings when the last Harry Potter book came out.  My son called to chat, and he mentioned that he was reading it.  Then he asked how my book was going.  I was bogged down in the middle of the action, and I said, "Awful.  I feel like I'm wandering in the wilderness."  He laughed and said, "So's J.K. Rowling.  Wait till you read this one."

Within 24 hours of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, my younger daughter had finished devouring it, so I got a crack at reading it.  After I raced through the slam-bang beginning, I found that my son was right.  A goodly chunk of the middle of the book involved Harry and Hermione and Ron fleeing from one remote campsite to another, and not a whole lot was happening.  In other words, they were wandering in the wilderness.  I laughed out loud. 

Now, maybe this wilderness wandering was completely calculated by Rowling.  The woman is a storytelling genius, and I admire her work immensely.  I find it amusing that her books have stirred religious controversy, when the entire series spins on the power of self-sacrificial love, even its ability to conquer death.  (Do these concepts not sound just a little bit familiar to those of us who grew up in homes steeped in Christian concepts?)  It is entirely possible that she intended those middle chapters to hark back to the 40 days and nights that Christ spent wandering in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, as a fellow writer, I cannot help but wonder whether Harry Potter's creator was slogging through her own wilderness, agonizing over how to get Harry and his friends from that slap-bang beginning to the eventual mythic ending.  She pulled it off very nicely, and my hat's off to her.

So what's a writer to do when she finds herself in her own wilderness?  I do two things:  I rely on my outline, and I keep slogging. 

The beauty of an outline is that you know where you're going.  If you find yourself in a mushy spot, point yourself toward the next big scene in your outline, and do whatever it takes to get there.  Push your characters toward the location of that scene.  Write the dialogue that will get them ready for the action in that scene.  Give them the knowledge that they're going to need when they get there. 

Do these things, even if you feel like you're just pushing chess pawns into place.  Do them even if the action feels clunky or limp.  Write the transitional scenes that will get you where you need to go, even if you know in your heart that they are awful...because you can always edit them later.

When I come back to those awful transitional scenes later, a couple of things happen very frequently.  First, I usually find that a lot of the narrative is unnecessary.  I can just surgically remove ninety percent of the ugly and troublesome text, and the narrative still works.  Still, I needed to write that ugly and troublesome text in order to generate the all-important ten percent.  And second, I often find that the scenes that seemed so ugly and troublesome aren't really that bad.  With some honing and polishing, they turn out to be good enough to stay in the book, after all.

Don't be afraid to write bad stuff.  You can always fix it later.  Sometimes writing the bad stuff takes you straight to the good stuff.  J.K. Rowling knows that.  And now you do, too.

See you at the Anhinga--
Mary Anna

Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded #11: Editing at the Scene of the Crime

What do you do when you finish a book or a story or an article?

If I'm not smack up against a deadline, I turn my attention to another project, even if only for an afternoon.  (And sometimes that project is laundry and vacuuming, because these things tend to get neglected when I'm deep in the flow with my writing.)

When I come back to my project, I usually just read it, front to back.  I'm a compulsive editor, so I do a little twiddling as I go, but I try to keep it to correcting typos and grammatical errors.  Wholesale slicing and dicing can wait till later.  At this point, I need to see my story as a coherent whole for the very first time...and this read-through is a very good way to spot the ways in which the story is not yet coherent, because it is essential that my early editing strategies are directed toward writing a story that makes sense.

Once I feel that the story is near its final form, I begin looking at the way I've told my story.  Today's writing tip is focused on this stage. 

Most modern fiction is constructed as a sequence of scenes, each told from a single point-of-view.  A story of a day in the life of a ten-year-old, for example, might consist of a scene at the breakfast table told from the student's point-of-view, then a scene from his mother's point-of-view as she waves good-bye to her son getting on the school bus, then a scene from his morning spelling class and another set in the school cafeteria, both told from his point-of-view.  And so on.

When I'm editing at the scene level, I read the piece with a single goal in mind:  making sure every scene really needs to be there.  I ask myself whether a scene advances the plot or deepens characterization or injects an important sense of realism by improving the reader's perception of the setting.  If a scene that shows our hero eating Rice Krispies does none of those things, then it has to go, no matter how well I described that nutritious breakfast's snap, crackle, and pop.  I'm not really happy unless a scene accomplishes more than one of my goals as a storyteller.

Remember...if a scene serves no function other than to highlight the beauty of your prose, then it doesn't get to stay.  Make your lovely prose work for you.  Make it tell your story!

Happy writing!
Mary Anna

Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded #10: We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Edited...

I read a tidbit in my friend Bev Browning's blog, onemoretimebev.blogspot.com/, that could not be more perfect for a writer's blog on Independence Day:  Modern technology has revealed to us that Thomas Jefferson edited the Declaration of Independence down to the last individual word, even as the ink was drying. 
 
Who among us is really surprised to hear that?  Still, seeing a photo of the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, complete with Jefferson's edits and the comments of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, is enough to give this history buff cold chills.  Check out this quote and link:  "In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote the word "subjects," when he referred to the American public. He then erased that word and replaced it with "citizens," a term he used frequently throughout the final draft." (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38068227/ns/us_news-life/)
 
If Thomas Jefferson didn't get it right the first time, why should we be hard on ourselves when our first drafts aren't everything we'd hoped they'd be?  Editing is an important part of our art form.  In fact, it could even be viewed as an entirely separate art form, requiring the use of an entirely separate set of skills.  To edit one's own work requires clarity of thought and the ability to take an unbiased look at a piece of work that was created directly from the heart and soul.  Editing requires an unwavering belief that a story can made better, and it requires the judgment to recognize when a story has reached in its final form.

When Jefferson asked John Adams why Jefferson should be chosen, between the two of them, for the job of writing the Declaration of Independence, Adams said, "'Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can."
(http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/jefferson.htm The italics are mine.)

When you doubt the importance of typing letters onto your computer screen, day in and day out, remember what words can do.  They can influence.  They can convince.  They can deceive.  They can flatter.  They can wound.  They can heal.  They can foment war.  They can wage peace.  And when an uncommonly brilliant writer finds himself standing at a turning point in history, pen in hand, words can change the world.

Let's revisit Jefferson's genius on this, the 234th anniversary of America's birth:

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America
(http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/doi/text.html)

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Happy Independence Day!
Mary Anna

Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded #9: Writer's Block, Revisited

I talked about writer's block on Thursday, but it's difficult to exhaust the subject.  Maybe this is telling.  I can write all week about not feeling able to write.  Perhaps the difficulty when a writer is blocked is that he or she simply needs to find the right subject, something that invokes passion or excitement, or in the case of writer's block, outright terror?

I was once on a panel with two other writers who had published many dozens of books between them, and another writer who was about as far along in his career as me and who was just as serious about it.  During the question-and-answer period, the conversation kept veering toward the question of writer's block.  People genuinely wanted to know what we did when inspiration didn't come.

We tried serious answers.

"Trust the process."

"Write whether you feel like it or not.  The act of sitting down and beginning a project will trigger that mysterious part of the brain that sends you your stories.

"Write through the tough parts.  Yeah, maybe you'll get a book that has a slam-bang beginning and a can't-miss ending, with a bunch of saggy parts in between, but you can always edit.  That's what revisions are for."

These answers did not mollify the crowd, so we went for humor...black humor, which is usually quite truthful underneath the sarcasm:

"I have a contract.  My contract has a due date on it.  Every day, that due date gets closer; thus, I write whether I feel like it or not."

"When I need inspiration, I just look at my credit card bill."

Or, if your goal is to be a professional writer someday, perhaps your inspiration should be pretending you have a contract with a due date on it, or imagining that your royalties might someday make a dent in that credit card bill.

I don't think I'm done with this subject, so we may be talking about the quest for inspiration again before this month of Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded is finished.  But I think I'll leave you with this thought today--

"Don't let your mind get in the way of your art.  When the nattering voices in your head tell you things you don't want to hear, drown those voices out with the clattering of your computer keys."

For four straight days of inspiration, join me at the Anhinga Writers' Studio Summer Workshops!
Mary Anna

Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded #8: Because even I can't be practical-minded all the time...

I have confessed to you people that I write in a recliner.  And I had described the first month of writing a new book in these terms:  reading for a living.  And there's truthfully a good dollop of thinking for a living thrown into the mix, so when I saw this photo, I had to share it with you.  I wish I had taken it, but no.  I got it from icanhascheezburger.com.  Enjoy!

TGIF!

Mary Anna

Writing Tips for the Practical-Minded #7: Trust the process

When I teach, I am invariably asked questions about writer's block.  Do I get it?  How does one cure it?  Is it inevitable?

I never know whether I should reach out and hug the terrified questioner, murmuring, "It'll be okay, really..", or whether I should just reach out and shake the person and say, "Get a grip!"

Sometimes I think that worrying about writer's block is a symptom of a bigger problem.  I think that some people think of WRITING as something that is so deeply important and larger-than-life that it must be written in bold, italicized capital letters.  Well, it is important.  It's my chosen art, and maybe it's yours.  But if I write something stupid today, or even if I don't write today at all, nobody will die.  No civilizations will fall.  The sun will not fail to rise or set.

Writing should be fun.  It should be the thing that helps you shake the world's pettiness aside.  It should be something you anticipate fondly while you're taking care of the boring, odious tasks of daily life.  If you're like me, the stories pile up in your head while you're doing those boring and odious tasks.  They're waiting to burst out when you finally...finally...get a chance to sit down and write. 

When I was writing Artifacts, I was convinced that I was wasting my time.  If, on the off-chance, I actually managed to write an entire book, I knew that it was not possible that I would ever have another idea big enough to support a book.  Never, never, ever.  There would be no career, because I had no other book in me.
 

As I was finishing the last chapters of Artifacts, the idea for Relics suddenly came to me, so I wrote that book.  But as I wrote it, I was utterly convinced that I had no potential for a career as a writer, because I would never have a third idea big enough to support an entire book.  Never ever.  Ever.  Yet as I wrote the final chapters of Relics, the idea for Effigies came to me. 

This, ladies and gentlemen, is when I began to trust the process.  All the things I've learned and all the life I've lived are bottled up in my head.  I can trust that when I reach into the well for stories, something will be there.  My late father always said, "No education is ever wasted," and my father was always right.

Feeling blocked as a writer doesn't mean that you have nothing to say.  I think it means that you have let your anxieties tell you that you have nothing to say that is good enough. 

The cure?  Write anyway.