I’m starting to think writing is a bit like running a séance parlour for a living. Some days you’ve got a whole troop of spooks moving the furniture. Other days you’ve got the Duchess of Popularity and all her friends around the table without even an unexplained smell to entertain them. Your job is to make sure you are the only one who knows the difference. You wake up every day hoping the ghosts clock in and do all the hard work, but prepare to use every ounce of your intellect and abilities in case they don’t. You can’t sit back and trust the same old tricks every time because the majority of your clientele are repeats and will stop coming if you cease to astound and amaze them.
Author: Minerva Zimmerman
To The End!
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“First things first, to the death.”
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“No. To the pain.”
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“I don’t think I’m quite familiar with that phrase.”
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-The Princess Bride
I’m in the midst of “End of Book Pain” right now. Because of sekrit things, I absolutely must finish the first draft of the WIP by as close to the end of the month as possible. I wish I had a method of talking to my younger self so I could tell her to always “write to the end” (also that the phrase “When in Rome” should not be applied to situations involving punk musicians and malt liquor).
I wrote a lot, but I did not finish very many things. I wrote and rewrote the beginnings of a great many things. I can write beginnings LIKE A BOSS. However, I never got around to practicing middles and ends to the same degree. I’ve been playing catchup with those for awhile now and sometimes I have a bit of a teenage-style pout about them being “TOO HARD”. They aren’t, I just haven’t had the same kind of practice at them.
See, at about the 1/2 or 2/3rd point in a long work it becomes horribly obvious where I made terrible mistakes. These errors start to haunt my thoughts and make it very difficult to move forward. They groan, bleeding on the word battlefield behind me. I want to stop and tend to their injuries, but I must grit my teeth, reload, and push forward. There will be time to tend to my wounded once the battle is over. Finishing can be hell, but I’ll do a better job of triaging my mistakes once the bullets stop flying. If I stop, I might save one but lose the battle and forfeit the field.
Thou shalt not edit in the writing trenches. I can’t fix words I don’t write. Write to the end, regroup, triage based on the whole, then edit.
Advancement Through Weakness
“If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.”― Fay Weldon
I learned to sculpt making kiln-fired ceramics. After I no longer had access to a kiln I switched to using sculpey clay and was constantly frustrated by what I saw as the limitations of sculpey. Some time passed and I happened upon instructions for a project that called for making an armature out of tin foil and then covering it in sculpey. I knew what an armature was, but I thought of it as being something you only used on very large sculptures. Discovering that simple tin foil could not only help me do what I wanted to, but could help me create things I hadn’t previously thought possible blew my mind. It opened up a whole new world of things I could create. It turned what I had seen as a limitation into a strength and opened up possibilities that weren’t possible with traditional clay techniques.
Recently I had to provide a full outline for a story and I discovered… I didn’t know how to construct a plot from the ground up without actually writing the whole story. Holy crap. Plot is the bones the story hangs on– and I don’t really think about it? Clearly I can’t be HORRIBLE at plot as my stories aren’t falling over due to lack of support– but how much better could they be?
It’s hard work doing plot autopsies of books and movies I enjoy. It’s even harder constructing my own outlines. I’d much rather rely on my strengths. Whenever I decide that learning to plot is too difficult my internal editor turns into my editor friend Lily standing over my prone form, her pink hair flying as she punctuates each word with a ruler smack, “You. Will. Learn. To. Plot.”
Yes’m.
Dangers of Omission
There’s a tendency in urban genre writing to use an “Anywhere City, USA” setting but call it a specific real world city and throw in a specific location every so often. In naming a city I believe you enter a pact with the reader to use unique attributes of the city– or at least not to contradict them without explanation. A story set in our world or a very near version to our world causes the reader to weigh certain details based on the world we live in. So if you set a story in Seattle, but then make the city feel like San Francisco with more rain without a story reason, you’ve broken that pact with the reader.
A setting generally becomes “Anywhere City, USA” through omission. I think most writers do this (either on their own or in editing) to let readers overlay their own cities on the setting or because they don’t have the personal reference. If the former I’d personally prefer a fictional city with overtones of real ones, if the latter, there are ways to fix that. Everyone has used the internet to check up on a friend or former partner they’d rather not actually talk to– take those same skills and use them to stalk a city. Pretend you’ve just found out that you’re moving to that city in less than a month. What do you need to know? What sort of sources are you going to to use to get the information you need? Are you going to use the same guides that tourists use? No. You’re going to ask friends and look at blogs and maybe Yelp for your favorite kinds of food. You want anecdotal information, not tourist destinations.
“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.” -Stephen King
You don’t need gobs of place detail– you just need the right kinds of detail. Readers will nitpick but forgive getting a street name wrong (though with Google maps and Street View you can usually avoid this if you’re not writing a different time period). But getting the little details wrong is a little like dressing your setting in a floral print sheet and sending it to the first day of middle school. It WILL be teased and WILL require years of therapy.
If I have a character enter a gas station mini-mart and have them pay for gas and a soda– that’s just a generic setting. If I mention the sign on the back of the door reads “Cerrado”, the character picks up a tamarind flavored soda and a display of De la Rosa Peanut Marzapan candy at the front counter– and you know the character is in Los Angeles, the details work to reinforce the setting. You want to pick out the small things unique to the setting to highlight. Every detail should have a reason for being there, either to reinforce setting, character, or plot. If you remove the setting, just like if you remove a character, a good story should collapse. A lot of times in a short story the setting operates as an extension of the main character because there isn’t room to do world building.
If you notice in my mini-mart example above, I chose to highlight things from outside the dominant culture. While it is technically possible for a white middle-class male protagonist to only interact with white middle-class males over the course of a day in Los Angeles– it is not the norm. You would need to have a good explanation as to why that happened if you did that in a story. Omitting all mention of cultures outside of the dominant one effectively white-washes a story. When you do that in a city setting with a strong non-dominant cultural presence in our world, it doesn’t matter if you intended to or not, it will always look like it is done on purpose.
Be careful to not fall into the Firefly trap either. I really like the show and it has a lot of lovely details that show the influence of Asian cultures including a Mandarin Chinese derived jargon. However– there are no Asian characters. Which is REALLY CREEPY if you stop to think about it. Showing the influence but omitting the people seems like everyone belonging to that culture was killed off prior to the start of the story and never mentioned.
Cultural awareness is not only in what details you use, it is in what details you consciously or unconsciously omit.
Off on an Adventure…
If by chance you haven’t seen the new Symphony of Science you should check it out
The Pen is Mightier (or at least works better for me)
I took a math class where the professor required students to write the equation in one ink color, do work in a different color, write the answer in a third, and then circle it in a fourth. It took a long time to do assignments this way and was generally irritating. The prof’s reasoning was based on a study that said forcing students to switch writing implements helped us learn better. I wouldn’t take a class from that professor again because of the aggravation, but I did best in that class of any math class I ever took. The act of switching pens allowed me to shift my brain over to a more mechanical step-by-step process. I could imagine myself as a computer taking the instructions from the equation and applying processes to get the answer.
When I write fiction, I write notes and first drafts longhand on paper with a fountain pen. I don’t use four colors to write with, but I do write in non-standard colors and write different stories or different POV (point of view) characters in different colored inks to help my brain switch gears. In my current project I label one POV character’s scenes in red and one in yellow in Scrivener so I’ve split the difference and draft in a pretty orange color. Picking a color I don’t see when I’m doing other kinds of work really helps put my brain into the right mode and allows me to focus.
I don’t revise as I write in pen. On the computer I can backspace 10 times faster than I can type. Writing in pen is the only way I can give myself permission to write badly. I cross stuff out, sometimes write the same few lines 3-5 ways, but every word I write is still there on the paper at the end of the day. Seeing my true word output goes a long way toward a sense of accomplishment. I measure my first drafts in an estimated word count based on 100 words per pocket notebook page. My actual word count is 110-120 per page, so I purposefully under-estimate because that 10-20% is what I lose in the first typing. I am a terrible over-writer. My edits cut words overall even if I add sections. A recent short story drafted in at around 10k. The first typed version was around 8k and the second pass dropped it under the target of 6k.
I have a tendency to stare off into space when I’m writing. If I do that on the computer, my ingrained tendency from data entry work is to tab over to something else to regain my focus, which I do, but not on the thing I was working on. Working on paper removes that possibility. Sometimes even when I’m typing up work I have to put Freedom on so I can’t get too distracted. If I need to look something up, I write myself a note to do it when I type it up. If I can’t continue without looking something up I’ve probably done something terribly wrong in the story.
My equipment for writing is totally analog. I can work anywhere, anytime. I don’t need a power outlet, wifi, or even a table or desk. I often drive to a pretty ocean vista and write for an hour or two.
There’s a distinctly tactile feel to writing on paper (especially with a nice pen). I can literally feel the words take shape. I am a very spacial and tactile person. I love sculpting with clay, but can’t get my brain to grok the same techniques in a digital sculpting program. I utterly fail at any sort of flying game that gives me an x, y, and z axis to control… cause I can’t feel the movement and get turned upside down and backwards within seconds. I need that tactile feel of ink flowing onto paper. It’s just how I’m wired.
This is what works for me. I’ve experimented and flailed around with lots of different things.
Sure, some of this is just because I love buying pens and different colored ink– but it works for me. Every so often I’ll get it in my head that I’m going to start drafting on the computer because I type 80-120 words per minute. I type MUCH faster than I can write. Every time I try it… I’m ten days into things, struggling with every word, and have little to show for my efforts.
My battle cry when writing is: “We’ll fix it in post!” I used work in video production, and it’s something you say when there’s a snafu but for whatever reason you’re not going to re-shoot it. It’s a more professional way to urge people forward to the next task. If you want to finish a project, you have to move forward to then end– then you can fix it. It is A LOT easier to cut the path you want in a mess of words that aren’t quite right than it is to lay them like tile. Unlike four hours of footage no one had a mic plugged into the camera, you really CAN fix everything in post in writing. For me, writing in pen is the way I keep kicking my own ass forward.
Close Encounters of the Otter Kind
One morning I was taking the dog out for his constitutional in the yard when a large brown creature started charging right for us from the neighboring field. It was long and thin and immediately I thought, “Wolverine! Imma gonna die!” before enough synapses fired to bring up the fact that wolverines don’t actually live anywhere near me. My poor pre-caffeine mind haltingly managed, “That looks a lot like a river otter” which it was.
Mr. Otter was doing the otter-equivalent of walking and texting. I mean this otter was charging straight for me and my 96lb dog thinking about what he was going to tell the Mrs. about why he was out so late, cause he was totally oblivious to everything around him. My dog gave a low, warning “woof” and the otter looked up and I totally saw the thought, “Whoa… Crap! ABORT ABORT!” flicker across the otter’s brain as it realized where it is and what it was heading toward. It abruptly made a 90 degree turn and hurried along the outside of our fence rather than cut through our yard on the way to the creek.
Links: Characters
So much about writing good characters comes from allowing them to be complicated individuals. This article about writing characters with mental illness points out that most depictions of mental illness are stereotypes and often factually incorrect. Don’t do that. Complex individuals
Why Smart Characters Make Dumb Mistakes
Why writers as “gods” of their stories have to cause bad things to happen to good characters and how to do it.
How to Craft Compelling Characters
A good overview of the things you should think about in creating characters and some of the questions to ask yourself and your characters.
Using Theory of Mind – Controlled Multiple Personalities of Writers
Theory of Mind = “the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own.”
Kat Howard writes a haunting piece on how she is not her characters but that her knowledge of other creators has changed how she is able to view their work. The last paragraph has really stuck with me.
Character Knowledge
To write believable characters you need to know them the way you know real people. They MUST be products of their own past experiences and environments. This means you need to know a bunch of people and as much of their own past experiences as they’ll share. This will give you a framework for how events and environments shape people. This is something you can never master, but you’ll get better at the more people you meet and talk to. You also need to understand how what you know about people shapes your (or your character’s) interaction with them.
Let me show an example:
Setting and interaction: Main Character (MC) is standing in line at the grocery store. There are two people ahead in line. One of the customers is pleasant to the grocery clerk, the other is surly and overly hostile. Now think of how the scene changes each time as we change the knowledge/relationship the MC has about/with the grocery clerk. Think of the different things you can relay about the MC through this interaction.
Observable Knowledge: Only the details the MC can observe. The clerk’s appearance: name tag, hairstyle, non-uniform clothing items, jewelry. The clerk’s general demeanor and responses as they deal with the two customers and the MC.
[This is still a decent amount of information and allows you to show how the MC sees the world and other people. Any character that warrants mentioning their name should get at LEAST this level of information and preferably a decent in-depth thought from the MC if in 1st or 3rd limited. If you aren’t putting at least this much information about the character over the course of the story (might not be all at once) you probably shouldn’t give them a name. Personally, I’d hesitate to give them a name unless they show up in more than one scene or the MC spends a lot of time observing/internalizing about them. Giving everyone a name is how you end up with 42 named characters in 10,000 words. (*Cough*What me? Never. *Cough*) ]
Habitual Knowledge: Details gleaned over habitual interactions. The clerk is a clerk that the MC interacts with on a semi-regular basis. Nothing too personal, the clerk and MC don’t use each other’s names outside of the prescribed interaction. The MC and clerk know each other by sight and have had at least 10-20 previous interactions to this one. The MC can probably tell (and vice-versa) if the clerk is having a good or bad day even if they are being professionally polite.
Sustained Knowledge: The clerk is one that the MC has had clerk/customer interactions with for years, possibly their entire life. The MC remembers their Mom buying things from this clerk over a period of years. They still do not have a social relationship outside the customer/clerk interaction, but the relationship is as deep as it can possibly be within those confines. The clerk knows the MC’s family, job, habits.
Past Knowledge: The clerk is someone the MC went to High School with. This layers Observable Knowledge with unrelated past events. The MC and clerk may know extensively about each other’s past but have almost no knowledge of the present.
Life Knowledge: The clerk is the MC’s best friend. They have a shared past, shared present, shared secrets far beyond any clerk/costumer interaction.
Every one of those scenes would have the exact same framework but the details and interactions would all be different. It is important to not only think about the character’s past and present but how the past and present of others around them touch upon their lives both before and during the story.
MINERVA ZIMMERMAN 