Intrepid Dreamers

Most of the freelance writers I know are talented dreamers, who took to the field through a variety of unusual paths–many giving up jobs that sucked the life out of their souls, many taking huge leaps of faith to launch themselves.

Recently, one of these intrepid dreamers, Brandi-Ann Uyemura, looked me up after reading some of my work. It turns out she lives less than a half hour from me, so we decided to get together for coffee, to talk about the writing life. For freelancers, who no longer have offices, it’s a good thing to get together in person, step out of the isolation of our desks, put on something other than pajamas (you know who you are!), and talk shop.

The visit was such a pleasant reminder that not everyone in the freelance world is in competition with each other, that some of us work better together, in fact.

She has since interviewed me for her blog 2inspired.com.

She’s a talented and inspiring writer who deserves to thrive!

The Left Brained Writer Learns to Show, Not Tell

Guest post by Mike Fine

I suspect I may be one of the most “left-brained” writers out there. After 20+ years as a software engineer and managing technical teams and technical projects, I discovered—lo and behold—I love writing! How strange is that? Well, probably not very strange to you if you’re reading this post, but it was certainly strange to me when I first realized it about 10 years ago.

There’s a great deal about being educated and trained as an engineer that works against me as a writer. First, while all of you were probably reading the great works—Austen, Bronte, Melville, Tolstoy—you know the list better than I do—I was taking the easiest Language Arts classes I could find. I had all of these advanced math and science classes, you see…

Second, and more seriously, engineers are trained to distill an issue to its core. The essence of a thing is what matters to engineers; we like to simplify and abstract, to get right to the point. The good news is that because of this, I rarely struggle finding a theme or central idea for my writing. I rarely fear that I’m going to write some long-winding run of flowery prose with no point. I am rarely without a solid outline. The problem is, readers don’t want to be hit over the head and be told the morale or theme, they want to feel it, to experience it. Stories are supposed to immerse the reader in a detailed world with believable characters so that they—the reader—infer the message(s) from the story. And, of course, sometimes, readers will infer things we never intend as writers. I have to force myself to remember this—something I think comes more naturally to most other writers with their predominately right-brained brains.

 Third, because I’m focused more on the essence of the primary arc of the story and the critical characterizations of the main characters, my writing often feels rushed, too much like a treatment than a story. The structures of my stories are usually sound; I struggle with adding enough detail. My wife often says that I’ve painted the trunk of the tree and the larger branches, but none of the smaller twigs or the leaves. Again, I suspect others with different educational backgrounds and personalities have an easier time with this sort of “inside out” nature of writing. I have to constantly remind myself: show the leaves in all their splendor, and let the reader infer that there’s a tree holding them up.

 Like many writers, I struggle to ensure that my writing follows the old maxim, “show, don’t tell.” For years, I couldn’t get my weak engineer brain around this concept. Then, finally, I came up with a way to think about this. I think even you non-engineers out there might benefit from thinking about things this way.

 When we’re guilty of “telling” instead of “showing,” what’s really the problem? It’s that we’ve summarized too much. If I tell you that “Abe and Ben fought,” your experience is much different than if I describe the right crosses, the chipped teeth, and the broken tables. I get that. You get that. Most everyone gets that. But how do we ensure that we don’t fall into the summarization trap? Simple: engage your left brain a little bit.

 Here’s the idea: allocate a certain amount of space—words, paragraphs, or pages—for a scene. Say to yourself, this scene has to take X pages. Let’s take our fight scene. Imagine it’s important to our story. We want to slow time down and stretch this conflict out for all the drama we can milk out of it. So, how many pages should the fight take up on paper? Three pages? Five? Ten?

 Once you decide how many pages (or paragraphs) you want the fight to last, you simply cannot summarize “too much.” If you do, your writing will stop short of your allotted space! If I write that “Abe and Ben fought,” I have to stare at the remaining 9 ½ blank pages for the scene. I have to fill them up. How can I do it? I can start to describe what happens in more detail and by slowing down time. I cannot stop editing and improving my scene until it fills up the space I’ve allocated for the scene. Is it possible I can introduce other kinds of problems into my writing—dialogue that drags, character descriptions that are too lengthy, etc.? Sure. But one thing that’s almost certain: my writing is much more likely to slow time down so that I provide enough details. And that’s something my readers will hopefully enjoy.

 ***

Mike is the co-creator of the Young Writers’ Story Deck Writing Program. He writes technical, marketing, and educational pieces for high tech companies and school districts. He has written novels, short stories, screen plays and stage plays. His stage play “Building a Bridge” was produced in the 2008-09 school year in Sebastopol and received rave reviews. See www.buildingabridgeplay.com  for more information about the play. His short screenplay “Time Capsule” is slated for production for some time in 2009 or 2010. In February 2008, Kansas student and forensics competitor Taylor Montgomery performed Mike’s piece “Pushed”, placing 2nd out of 40 competitors and qualifying for State Champs. Mike’s creative writing can be found at www.blackfoxbooks.com. Mike is an active volunteer in the Mount Diablo Unified School District, and has been an active volunteer in the Morgan Hill Unified School District and at Rocketship Education in San Jose, California.

Fiction Writers Need Platform Too

Day Five of my interview with Christina Katz, author of Get Known Before the Book Deal and Writer Mama.

 

 

Q: Is it as necessary for a fiction writer to build platform as a non-fiction writer?

 CK: Why in the world wouldn’t a fiction writer want to build a nonfiction platform alongside her fiction platform? Fact of the matter is: published fiction writers produce a ton of nonfiction. Why not own it? Why not own it starting now? Any traditionally published author (or self-published author, for that matter) is going to be producing a ton of nonfiction material to support her platform. I have a whole chapter in Get Known about how fiction writers can spin off nonfiction topics from their book.

 

Don’t get hung up on being one kind of writer and not another. Fiction is one form. Nonfiction is another. If you write strong fiction, there is a pretty good chance you can write strong nonfiction too. Everyone is a writer today. A huge number of people write fiction. A huge number of people write nonfiction. Be one of the writers who write both and save yourself a lot of headaches. Once you become traditionally published, a huge gush of nonfiction writing comes pouring in at you. I’d suggest embracing the opportunity to write nonfiction and even using it to make some money.

 

 

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s question:

 

There has been all kinds of press lately about how the publishing industry is changing, how it’s becoming smaller and more competitive than ever. How do you think platform plays into this new world of publishing? Do writers need to be more online savvy then every before?

 

Overcome Your Platform Roadblocks

Day Four of my weeklong interview with Christina Katz, author of Get Known Before the Book Deal and Writer Mama.

Q: Most writers I work with express overwhelm or fear or utter ignorance about platform—what advice can you give to help them get past these roadblocks?

 

CK: This kind of response is understandable because there is a lot of pressure out there right now to come at publication via social networking or self-publishing. I believe that there is a much simpler, easier way — not that there is anything wrong with social networking or self-publishing per se. But in my opinion, they should come last, not first.

 

My advice to anyone interested in traditional publication (or self-publication, for that matter) is to first educate yourself about what platform is and isn’t. Determine your specific expertise, choose a topic and a target audience, then pick and choose from the various ways you can flex your expertise and start working it. You will gain confidence by doing, and I mean in the world too, not just online. Finally, build your online presence around all of these keys. That’s what I call establishing and building your identity, not “branding,” because I am so weary of that word.

 

I work with folks aiming for traditional publication and I work with them all the way from beginner to book deal. And there is only one way to get from point “A” to point “B” and that is step-by-step. I find that this kind of grounded progress tends to alleviate much of the anxiety around platform building.

 

 

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s question: Is it as necessary for a fiction writer to build platform as a non-fiction writer?

 

Wanting to be Jackie Kennedy

My talented friend Elizabeth Kern has made it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel quarter-finals for her novel Wanting to be Jackie Kennedy. I have had the good fortune to read this lovely novel and I can plainly say that it is a winner. If you’d like to help out a talented author and read a wonderful excerpt, you can review her book favorably!

Download the excerpt here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG39M4

Fertile Attraction

If you haven’t read all you possibly can about people’s opinions on the octuplets’ situation, then check out my article on fertility ethics in the Pacific Sun.

 

by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

In this age of reproductive wizardry, where babies can be created in test tubes and implanted in women who would not otherwise be able to get pregnant, it sometimes seems that anything goes. Yet the recent media storm and public outrage over Nadya Suleman—the Los Angeles mother of octuplets born in January that were conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF) and are still in critical care—has led many to think of fertility treatments as Frankenstein manipulations and Suleman as a selfish monster. Other medical professionals are calling her case a “failure of medicine” and defending their profession.

Yet Suleman’s is not the first set of octuplets born in the past decade, and multiples ranging from four to six still turn up every couple of years, most famously the sextuplets that made the Discovery Health show Jon & Kate Plus Eight a ratings hit. The outrage over Suleman’s case is inspired by revelations that the 33-year-old single mother has six other children ranging from ages 2 to 7, also conceived using IVF, and that she is unemployed and collecting money from state disability insurance.

In light of her case and the furor it has sparked, some Marin fertility doctors are expressing dismay at what they feel are ethical lapses on Suleman’s doctor’s part, and fear that this high-profile case may dissuade people from seeking fertility treatments, and attract unnecessary regulations to their field.
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Cuss Time

Jill McCorkle was my first mentor teacher at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I  earned my MFA in creative writing. She’s a much beloved teacher there for many reasons, from her big, flirty, Southern personality, to her incisive  ability to tell you what works and what doesn’t in your fiction. She was a fabulous entry point for me because she could criticize me and still make me feel like she’d kissed me on the cheek.

She’s written a fantastic article about, in essence, freedom of speech, called “Cuss Time” at The American Scholar. Her article also confirms for me why I hate it when people teach their children to use goofy sounding euphemisms for their body parts. I like to call reality as it is!

Here’s just a taste. Please read the rest for yourself.

From Cuss Time, by Jill McCorkle.

Potential is a powerful word. I remember feeling so sad when my children turned a year old and I knew, from reading about human development, that they had forever lost the potential they were born with to emulate the languages of other cultures, clicks and hums and throat sounds foreign to me. For that short period of time, a mere 12 months, they could have been dropped anywhere in the world and fully adapted accordingly. But beyond this linguistic loss, we are at risk of losing something far greater each and every time we’re confronted with censorship and denial. Perfectly good words are taken from our vocabulary, limiting the expression of a thought or an opinion. I recently read about high schoolers who are not allowed to use the word vagina. And what should they say instead? When you read about something like this (just one recent example of many), you really have to stop and wonder. Is this restriction because someone in charge thinks vaginas are bad? I once had a story editor ask me not to use the word placenta. I wanted to say: “Now tell me again how you got here?” Oh, right, an angel of God placed you into the bill of the stork.

Sneak Preview: Interview with Litpark’s Susan Henderson

Today Rebecca Lawton, my co-editor of the Write Free e-newsletter, and I are doing something we’ve never done before–offering a sneak preview of the November/December 2008 issue’s Creative Interview with Susan Henderson. Though the newsletter is free, you do have to SUBSCRIBE to read its contents. But since Susan rarely toots her own horn, we wanted to make sure that fans of Susan’s and of Litpark could read her interview here.

From the Write Free e-newsletter:

SUSAN HENDERSON is a contributor to National Public Radio’s newest literary venture, DimeStories, produced by Jay Allison of This I Believe, and is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Publications include Zoetrope, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, South Dakota Review, The MacGuffin, Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, North Atlantic Review, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Opium, Other Voices, Amazon Shorts, The World Trade Center Memorial, The Future Dictionary of America (McSweeney’s Books, 2004), The Best American Non-Required Reading (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), Not Quite What I Was Planning (HarperPerennial, 2008), and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press, 2009). She blogs at LitPark.com, occasionally at Huffington Post, and Brad Listi’s The Nervous Breakdown. She lives in New York with her husband and their two sons.

WF: What ways does creativity manifest in your life?

This question is funny to me because I’ve never once thought of myself as a creative person. I think of myself as a workhorse and a pragmatist. My writing comes from a need to write, and then I go about getting it done the way I might shovel the walkway so the mailman can get to my mailbox or swim out in cold rough water to save a drowning child. I just have to do it.

WF: What kind of time do you give to your writing? To other creative endeavors?

I write a minimum of two hours a day, and sometimes as much as 16 hours a day.

WF: What other responsibilities do you have that you have had to carve out a creative life from?

I’m married, with two boys, two dogs, two cats, and a squirrel, so I have to be emotionally available, and I have to make time for various extra-curriculars and field trips and so on.

I’m in the very fortunate but strangely shameful position of writing full-time. This is a career choice that involves very little income, if any, and sometimes it is two years or more before I have anything I consider suitable enough to submit. The most visible product: probably mood swings and balled up pieces of the manuscript. It’s not an ideal career to lay on the people I love.

Because my family is so affected by my writing, I feel I owe them two things: I need to learn to be more productive during the hours I devote to writing, and I need to learn to put my work away at the end of the day. I’m not great at either of these things, but I’m getting better.

For example, there are certain routines I won’t disrupt for anything: after school, I walk with my kids and we talk about the day; we have dinner together at the table; I read to them every night, even though they’re plenty old enough to read on their own; and I tuck them in at night, and try not to hurry that time. But I’ve dropped the PTA and the Board of Elections. And I regularly neglect my friends and neighbors. And sometimes, my husband and I are in bed at night with our laptops, and we find ourselves emailing each other.

WF: How do you define the idea of success?

Ha. Well, now I guess you’ll get a dose of my ego, because I consider success to mean changing the world for the better. I want the things I do and the things I write to save people’s lives or make them more forgiving or less prejudice. I want to gain enough stature to be able to pull people up the ladder with me. I want to lead more people to a passion about books and writers and artists. So, you know, I still have a ways to go.

WF: What did your path to “success” look like? We’d especially like to hear about the creation of your wonderful site www.Litpark.com.

My path to success looks very much like that of other writers: we are like Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a big mountain, but never reaching the top. Sometimes, though, you hear of a set of stairs or an elevator lift on the other side of the mountain and that combo of struggle and opportunity is why I created LitPark. Because much of what we all do is just hard work and requires as much stamina as it requires talent. I just wanted to create a community where we could keep each other going. When I hear of another path that makes life a whole lot easier, I’m quick to share it.

As far as how LitPark came to be, I took what I had been doing for years via email or private rooms at Zoetrope, which is talking to people about the business of writing– from the process of creating a story to overcoming writer’s block to exploring where to submit a piece. Also, for years, I gave my writer friends pop quizzes, partially to give us new ideas for stories, but also because I have always had an insatiable need to play. LitPark was just about making these private interactions public.

Originally, I ran a version of LitPark on Publishers Marketplace, and I used to run interviews several times a week. But on PM, there was limited space, so I had to erase earlier interviews in order to post new ones. It wasn’t until I interviewed Peter de Seve, the cover artist for The New Yorker, that I thought, I can’t bear to throw away that interview or his artwork. So, LitPark was born. I gave it a predictable structure (quiz, interview related to the quiz, wrap up related to the quiz and the interview), and the active community brings the best kind of unpredictability to it. So far, it’s worked.

WF: Can you remember the first time you “claimed” yourself as an artist/writer?

When I was in third grade, I decided I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. In seventh grade, I officially declared it in a paper. That was also the year we got to choose our own theme for a poetry unit, and I chose Death. I kept to poems by James Agee, Dylan Thomas, James Dickey, and John Donne. After that, I was so utterly distracted by the power of writing that I never fully set my feet back in the real world. I was always observing and jotting down phrases I liked on little slips of paper, and I’ve never really stopped.

Still, it was a long time before I committed to it as a career. I applied to Carnegie Mellon’s biomedical engineering program, and bounced through Biology, Psychology, and eventually landed in the Creative Writing program. But when it came time for grad school, I went for Special Ed, eventually sliding back into the Psychology program. The whole time, my heart was in storytelling. Even when I graduated and became a counselor, I think my real interest was in the story, in searching for a theme and a resolution.

WF: Do you set goals or intentions for your writing life? If so, describe what this looks like (daily, monthly, in a notebook, with a group). Does the process of setting these intentions help you to achieve them?

Oh, now this is something I can really speak to because—well, you don’t need to know all the sad details about writing and rewriting my novel—but let’s just say I had hit a wall again and again, many walls, and I was thoroughly spent. Both my agent and a friend called me out on the fact that I was trying to finish this book robotically. When they’d ask me how the book was going, I’d answer, “I don’t know. I don’t care anymore. I’m just going to finish it.” And both of them, in their own ways, told me, “Don’t write it, then, because who wants to read anything you don’t care about?”

I decided to take some time away from my agent, my writer friends, my email, my deadlines, and ask myself some bottom-line questions: What the hell was I doing? Is this a book worth writing? Do I need to write it? And if so, where is the urgency? And if not, if I had embarked on a long and pointless experiment of trying to write a book, can I give myself permission to stop?

I gave myself forty days to figure this out—forty days in the desert, so to speak. No contact with any writers. No pep talks or running ideas past anyone. This had to all come from me.

It was absolute murder at first. For the first three days or so, I got nothing done at all. I felt absolutely numb and unproductive. By days four and five I decided I was for sure going to give up, and I thought of all the ways I hated my characters and my writing and myself. And then the anger kicked in. Because the moment I let myself imagine quitting, something struck at the heart of the child narrator of my book. Stopping felt like betrayal. Suicide. A severe loss of purpose in my life.

A fire was lit. I felt desperate, remembered what was at stake for me personally if I closed up shop. I began to write the way I blog, meaning I just used my voice and typed fast and didn’t worry about grammar or tangents. I told the story with absolute urgency. I sliced out chapters and characters and only committed to the parts that would devastate me if I gave up on them. And at the end of forty days, I had my book. It would take three more revisions before I had a final version, but I knew I had the book I needed to write and the one that would have killed me if I’d given up on it.

WF: Whose success inspires you? Is there a higher level of creative success you would like to achieve?

I’ve always been inspired by Harper Lee. Not just because she wrote one of my all-time favorite books, but because she wrote one, incredible, terribly important book.

I don’t have a particular idea of what success would look like–it can take any number of forms and sizes–but, for me, it must mean that my work is read. I know a lot of people who journal and who find some private satisfaction out of getting something out of their system and exploring it on paper. My drive, my compulsion, is to communicate. So for me to write something and then for it to sit on my computer or in a remainders bin does nothing for me. I’m not a journal writer. I am writing in order to say something and to start a dialogue.

WF: From your own experiences, what suggestions would you give to others who hope to achieve a satisfying, meaningful, and self-supporting creative life?

I learned so much from finishing what felt like a long and unfinishable project. The first was clearing my plate and making this novel my commitment. One of the best writing moves I ever made came from a very high-up literary professional who told me to stop writing and submitting short stories. She assured me that they did not help my career and were keeping me from focusing all my talent on the novel. Immediately, my novel progressed and deepened.

So how do you keep at a novel every day and see progress each week? You have to remember to enjoy the process. Remember back, however far you have to go, to what you loved about writing—controlling a universe, having a say, finding the right word, realizing a character was no longer some two-dimensional figment of your imagination but had become a living thing. Whatever it is about writing that you once loved, find that again.

Find a reason to be psyched to go to work every day. I once interviewed the writer Danielle Trussoni for LitPark. She wrote a wonderful memoir about life with her rogue father after he came back pretty damaged from Vietnam, where he was a tunnel rat. And Danielle told me that she would actually dress up to go to work, and I mean pearls and dark lipstick, making a real date of it. I’m not someone who likes to dress up, but this made a real impact on me, this idea of treating writing not as this never-ending process of failure but an event to look forward to. So I decorated this little space where I work to be completely inviting—pretty colors, throw pillows, scented candles. And in the morning, I light a candle and crank up the heat and get a cup of coffee and treat going to work like an escape, like the thing I’ve been waiting for.

But how do I stay creative and productive week after week? Well, I trick myself into it. I steep myself in the mood of the scene I’m trying to write. My iTunes is loaded with really emotional music: Public Enemy, Edith Piaf, Mika, Puccini, The Fairfield Four, Queen, Gogol Bordello, ELO, DMX, and old spirituals. There are movies that get me thoroughly emotional, that shock my heart and get it beating hard and fast: Finding Neverland, The Deer Hunter, anything starring Sean Penn. These are all ways to tap into sources of energy and emotion.

And my favorite technique is to take the one transition I’m stuck on, the one page of dialogue that sounds truly fake, and go walking with only that and a pen. I don’t come back until I’m unstuck. Have I walked into parked cars using this method? Sure. But it helps me find ways to move forward.

WF: This month our theme is “courage.” You strike us as a courageous creative soul—the kind who persists on behalf of her art. How has courage played into your creative life. Does your creative life lend itself to your courage?

Writing is all about courage. It takes courage to search the darkest corners of your heart and mind for the struggles that nag at you. Just to go there with your eyes open, to write things bolder than you would dare say in your real life, to look hard to find the flaws in your heroines and the heart in your villains.

It takes courage to show your writing to anyone, knowing what it feels like to get a form letter rejection or that quiet concern from friends who had no idea your head went to such places. And it takes still more courage to then send it to your toughest writer friends, knowing there will be things wrong with what you’ve written that you hadn’t noticed, that there will be things that were clear to you but not to them.

It takes courage to listen to your critics and cut those passages you worked so hard on, and to change the shape of your story, knowing that when you unstring it, you risk not being able to put it back together again. And it takes courage to know, despite the continued criticism and well-meaning advice, when your work is good and done.