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The Expiration Date for Literature - Like Milk, Books Go Sour

2010-02-16T09:20:00.000-08:00

First, a terrible admission: I don't read enough. It isn't that I dislike literature on principle, it's just that it's very hard for me to find books which hold my attention. And it's grown worse over time - it might be that I'm easily distracted, or it could just be that I don't have the patience of my younger years. The Once and Future King, even, when I reread it, simply wasn't as riveting at 29 as it had been when I was 15. And it's even worse when I go to the bookstore. I might spend hours in the science fiction section (my genre of choice) and not find a single book that I really want to read, the kind of book where you're eager to invest the ten or twelve hours it might take to go through each page.

No go back a couple decades - or, tougher still, a century - to the days when books were even more wordy than they are today. Pushing my way through Henry James is like getting a buy-one-get-one-free on root canals. And Henry James is a great author - The Turn of the Screw is the classic example of a novel that literally thrives on deconstruction and "spook-factor." I've read the book twice for class, and it fully deserves the literary reputation it's built over the years, just as it's earned the reputation for terrifying boredom. I think I can safely say I'm not alone in my visceral desire to avoid reading this book. Yet I also own three copies - again, a result of studying literature. It's a testament to the quality of the work that professors are still assigning this work as required reading for many, many higher-level literature courses.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to this loyalty many hold toward the canon of classical literature. Anyone who's read a riveting novel - Harry Potter, for example, or The Silence of the Lambs - and then tried writing a story realizes that the styles of other authors will bleed over into your own. You can unwittingly find yourself trying to write like J.K. Rowling or Thomas Harris, losing your own unique voice to their mastery of the language. And this isn't entirely a bad thing - this is actually how we learn to write well. Just as children learn to speak from hearing the spoken word, we pick up the essential techniques of writing from our reading.

The problem is that many writers end up reading too much of the wrong books. For me, if I spent all my days reading trashy science fiction, I would eventually write only trashy novels. And - disturbing as this declaration may be - too much great literature has the potential to pollute your writing with an obsolete style. If you simply read The Turn of the Screw, you'll know that the book would never sell on the bestseller racks at the grocery story today - it's great literature, sure, but very few in the general public would find it worth the investment. Yet the literary writers of today - anyone in an MFA program, for example - are reading disproportionate quantities of old-fashioned literature. To me, it'd like trying to make science fiction movies if the only experience you've had comes from watching Star Trek's Captain Kirk "boldly go where no man has gone before." Yes, it's crucial viewing if you want to understand the science fiction tradition, but Captain Kirk and Buck Rogers alone wouldn't be inspiration enough if you wanted to produce something as edgy and modern as Battlestar Galactica.

By reading classic literature exclusively - by ignoring the new (and unproven) novels of the past ten-to-twenty years - writers may fail to absorb the changing face of literature. And let's face it - the novel has changed a lot over the past fifty years. Direct, clean prose has mostly triumphed over the older, wordier narratives of Dickens and Hawthorne. It's a reflection of the modern era. Today's readers, racing to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, and cell phone bills simply don't have the time to slog through fifty pages of text without a clear conflict in sight. Sure, we can argue that people should make time for "good" literature, but the great books of the past aren't competing with just the pulp racks at the supermarket - they face stiff competition from ten-dollar blockbusters and the instant gratification of YouTube. Then we have Netflix - why spend twenty-five dollars and a hundred hours of your time to slog through six or seven classical reads when you can take in maybe fifty movies for eight bucks a month?

As modern writers, we have to be careful that we don't condemn our selves to the "classics" pile before we've even published. Never mind that agents and editors are looking for modern material with an edge - if you want to make a living selling novels, then you'll need to attract an audience that keeps coming back. You need to target the individuals who are harried by the stress of modern life - you need to attract them with something new enough and entertaining enough to keep them fastened to their seats, eyes glued to Amazon waiting for your next book.

This requires that we keep abreast of not just modern books, but the new language of these books. I hate reading lines like "in my estimation" and "as a subscriber to the local magazine" in stories written by students and classmates during the past month - phrases like this may not be dead, but they're obsolete. They carry the kind of impact one gets from quoting Shakespeare over the course of a dinner date - wordy, pretentious, overdone. Trying to attract steady readers with phrases like this is like trying to build a successful car company using Henry Ford's original assembly line - unless you're selling to a crowd that really, really likes the Model T, you'll be struggling to break even.

So as you choose your reading, make sure to throw in good books of the modern era. Cormac McCarthy's The Road or even Stephenie Meyer's Twilight will reveal the turns-of-phrase and plotting which have held millions of readers in their seats for hours at a time. Neither book is perfect, I know (many sentences in Twilight read like an ivy shrub - tangled and growing). At the same time, you'll need to read authors who are not yet well known. Nascent talents will write the literature of tomorrow, and you'll want to learn from them if you want to keep up - Syne Mitchell's science fiction is a fine example, or Evie Shockley's poetry (both are great writers who are well-known in their own right, but not yet household names).

This involves taking some risks, of course. You may purchase books with incredible opening chapters which lead nowhere (I hate posting this link, but here's a book I wanted to return after reading it: Old Man's War. If you want to read the more timeless classics from which John Scalzi pulled his story, check out Starship Troopers or The Forever War.) You might end up with books you can't finish. Or you may even pollute your writing with the ills of the modern style: misplaced colloquialisms, blunt-force metaphors, and similes which cause your liver to bleed out into your spleen like a dank moldy sponge. But that's okay. Because, armed with knowledge, you'll watch out for these problems in your own writing.

And, of course, because you're a writer, you'll ignore half my article and keep reading the classics anyway - as you most very well should.

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Know Your Audience, Follow Publishing Guidelines

2010-02-08T07:46:00.000-08:00

So I found out yesterday that I have to resubmit my MFA thesis with a different set of stories. Now, before you worry, I have enough workshopped material for three more theses, so it's just a matter of picking a better set of stories. Actually, I'm glad in a way - the material I submitted before wasn't my favorite. But the fact that I need to resubmit shows the importance of paying close attention to submission guidelines.

According to common mythology, submission guidelines are more of a roadblock than anything else. There is a kind of sacred merit for artistic work. In books, movies, and conversation, we sometimes hear individuals speak of "being true to the art" as opposed to "giving in to fame" or, worse yet, "falling prey to lawyers and editors."

(At least, this is how I remember things growing up. It's actually been a while since I've heard anyone voice this opinion. It's possible that the economy has finally beaten the spine out of the writing community...)

However, regardless of artistic merit, any work you wish to sell must find a "home" in the publishing world. And this can be difficult. Or nearly impossible. So here are some tips from a barely published writer:

1. Guidelines, Guidelines, Guidelines

When you're sending in unsolicited work, read and follow the guidelines given by the agent or publisher. If they ask for a two-page synopsis, don't send a twenty-page excerpt.

Now there's a bit of psychology behind why people often ignore this one. As writers, we each like to think "I'm different. My work is special." And these facts are both true - all writers are different, and all stories are special. But no one is so special that they can earn respect by ignoring simple directions.

2. Politeness Pays

Imagine this scene: you are a thesis adviser. One of your students has just turned in sixty pages of thesis that won't make it past the department chair. You have to tell your student this and hope that new material can be found and submitted in time for the deadline. Do you really have time for an argument?

Answer? Of course not. Now I'm not saying that writers should become "yes-men" to editors and publishers, but we need to be open to the bad news as well as the good. Sometimes the truth hurts, and the reality pill seldom goes down easy. But we all like to work with people who are able to adapt to change and then respond with a smile - publishers, editors, and thesis advisers are no exception. And it's easy to forget, but our editors almost always have our best interests at heart. My thesis adviser would very much like to see me earn my MFA - an not just graduate, but to really succeed in the program. Agents and publishers want your books to do well - if they could write better books themselves, they would. Instead they look for writers they can work with.

This is why early politeness and respect is so critical to being published. Agents and editors have no idea how you'll respond to news along the lines of "fifty-seven publishers rejected your novel" or "this second half of the book? You need to rewrite it." But they do know that they will need to break such news to writers from time to time. So they'll pay attention to how you react to the little things. Something like "I'm sorry, I have to reschedule our meeting" shouldn't be met with "What? You're my agent! Without my book you'd be out of the job!" Besides showing a lack of courtesy, such a response sends the message that you aren't open to change - and people who aren't open to change tend to ignore their reading public...

3. Know Your Audience

Have you ever heard the phrase "they don't know what they should like"? Or something along the lines of "readers just don't know anything about good writing"? It's rare to find an author who shows such blatant disregard for his or her readers, but many authors ignore their audience in more subtle ways - and these subtle ways can be just as damaging to your popularity.

First, if someone criticizes your work, listen to what they're saying. For example, I turned in a story to workshop last week which had the term "EMP." Now for me, a lover of science fiction, "EMP" is short for Electromagnetic Pulse. It's the reason Tom Cruise has to steal a mini-van after the aliens show up in War of the Worlds - it's the only car on the block that's been to the shop for a new starter. But most of my classmates - lovers of more traditional literature - didn't know what EMP was. And it's good now that I know - in future stories, I'll make sure to reveal what EMP is rather than assume that everyone will already know what it does.

And this is good. It shows me an important weakness in my own writing - I tend to assume my readers already know the facts that I take for granted. And I'll take this information to go back and write a better story. Which brings us to...

4. Always Write the Best Work You Can

Personally, I hate reading novels that are poorly written. I hate it even more when a good author - a renowned author whose books I've enjoyed in the past - publishes a $24 hardcover that reads like plotless swill. And there's a reason that book ended up on the discount racks, and there's a reason I'm still upset that I wasted six bucks to own it. It weighs two pounds and I can't even finish reading it. I would send it to Haiti for firewood if it was worth the postage. (Wait, did I just promote the burning of books? It's only because that six bucks could have bought me an iced green-tea latte with change left over.)

Nothing will turn off a reader - or a publisher - like badly written prose. Never assume that prior success means your new books is "good enough." The goal should always be to write a better story, to give your audience something new and improved. And this is especially important for new writers. If you write a story that does well in workshop, try to write a better story that will get published. Once you're published, try to write one still better that will receive critical acclaim. Just because that last group of readers liked your story doesn't mean any one of them would trade in a green tea latte to buy it. And if you're going hardcover, we're talking about convincing a lot of people to give up a whole lotta lattes...

5. Never, Never, Never Give Up
There comes a point when every writer must ask the following: "Is this my life? Can I make a living doing this?" Most writers, actually, must ask this question at least once every three or four months, depending on the alignment of paychecks and rent checks.

So let me tell you a little secret: you don't need to make your living as a writer. Not today, you don't. Working at Starbucks? Take your complimentary green tea latte back to the keyboard. Working as a lawyer? Remember John Grisham. Stuck doing laundry on your lunch break from the factory? That didn't stop Stephen King.

Except for Christopher Paolini (author of Eragon), pretty much every published writer has held a full-time job that had nothing at all to do with writing. I'm working on my MFA now, but before this I've worked summer jobs in medical records, spent five years in the Army, spent another six months as a bartender, and held more campus jobs than I can count. And every time I walk into Chipotle or Starbucks, I check out their latest Help Wanted sign. (You never know when you're gonna need a job that offers a free green tea latte with your burrito.)

Never mind that there are the English majors who don't need to earn extra money for college, or that some of them go on to grad school and then go on to teaching part time. Sure, you might say their lives revolve around creative writing. But they still need to publish. They still face the same hurdles that we all face - they take those teaching jobs to pay the bills, and those jobs never pay well. There's always another MFA grad just waiting to step in whenever someone finally gives in and moves back home. And publishers won't publish a book because of an MFA degree from Iowa - they'll publish a book because it's good. They might be more likely to read a manuscript from an MFA grad, but that's little more than a foot in the door. (And no, it won't help to mail a prospective publisher a green tea latte - those things don't mail well anyway.)

So don't give up. Keep writing. Those black thoughts of tossing your computer out the window will pass. Know that publication is not the most important thing in the world. Even if you never publish a word, you can still be a very successful writer. You can encourage your children to write. You can run workshops at the local library. You can even start your own website. And always, always, always keep writing. The "overnight success" in the publishing world usually takes ten to fifteen years hunched over the keyboard without an advance. No, there are no guarantees in the publishing world, except this one: those who give up today cannot publish tomorrow.

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My Novel Just Ate My Cat

2010-01-22T09:36:00.000-08:00

Novel Writing: A Disorder of the Liver

It's a tragic fact: novel writing has been proven to be the root cause of sixty-three percent of divorces, eighteen percent of unplanned pregnancies, and a whopping ninety-eight-point-six percent of all feline suicides.

If you suffer from the symptoms of "I'm Writing a Novel That I Have to Finish This Year," know that you're not alone. Dozens of celebrity personalities such as Stephen King, Amy Tan, and Brittany Spears have also suffered from this condition. Some have overcome their disability and gone on to lead perfectly normal lives as dysfunctional pop stars. Others, though, are forced to live with their addiction by writing bestselling novels on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, doctors have been unable to isolate the gene responsible for Degenerative Autoimmune Writing Disease of the Liver (DAWDL). But there is hope. Please read on for what you can do if you or a loved one suffers from DAWDL:

Understand that frequent references to "Plot" do not indicate a paranoid disorder

Many individuals who suffer from DAWDL continually refer to this idea of "plot." This does not, however, indicate any belief in plots to overthrow the government, plots to devour grandma's cheesecake from the refrigerator, or other plots to rule the world through the use of remote-controlled house cats. Doctors believe that they have isolated the cause for this fixation on the word "plot." It is somehow related to an insatiable urge to assign pattern and correlative coherency to a fictional life. Common treatments for this symptom include green tea served in Japanese porcelain, frequent trips to Starbucks, and regular concussive lobotomy inflicted via frying pan by female spouses.

Stiffening of the wrists and fingers ARE symptoms of carpal tunnel disease

There is an extremely high correlation between DAWDL and carpal tunnel. Doctors have been unable to determine the reason. The predominant theory is that sufferers of DAWDL, due to their inability to sleep normally, often suffer from somnambulation. It is believed that, while sleepwalking, these novel writers work for long hours at a GM automotive plant. This would explain the repetitive stress injuries and the chronic lack of financial stability. The only known treatment involves a soft mattress and duct tape.

Excessive Optimism coupled with Chronic Depression DOES NOT indicate the need for season tickets to see the Cubs

Psychologists studying the common "Those Cubs Are Gonna Win the Series Next Year" disorder (see also "Chicago, et. al.") have found distinct similarities with DAWDL. Both groups suffer alcohol-induced cirrhosis, moments of excessive euphoria at the first signs of regular-season success, acute anger and depression at the first signs of a new year unaccompanied by a book contract/post-season playoff slot, and eventual resignation exacerbated by increased alcohol consumption. Current research focuses on the use of Las Vegas slot machines and Wii as potential distractions from the more serious effects of this illness.

Support Groups only seem to encourage deterioration

Psychological support groups for individuals suffering DAWDL have found that these novel writers tend to encourage one another to express increased symptoms of the disorder. Isolation from other suffers of DAWDL leads to limited improvement. However, exposure to nature trails, empty rooms without windows, and large black birds of excessive size seems to cause symptoms of a similar disorder, Poetic Libation of EAting and SErial SHunning of Unknown TUPperware disease (PLEASE SHUT UP).

If you or a loved one suffer from this disorder, please ignore the links below. They have been shown to encourage deterioration and the misplaced hope that the Chicago Cubs will win "next year." Instead, please go to the nearest search engine to type in "Brittany Spears," "Martha Stewart," or "Censorship" for additional resources.

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Research in Fiction: The Foundation of Realism, the Structural Support for the Fantastic

2010-01-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

When I was a junior in college, I took the "Intermediate Journalism Workshop" with Professor Ted Gup. As a journalist, Professor Gup was renowned at the time for the release of his recent book The Book of Honor : The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. More, he's released his second book, Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life. And he's received some pretty important awards for these books (including a nomination for the Pulitzer). Clearly, working as a journalist around secrets as closely guarded as those held by the CIA, he knows his way around research. He's probably met a roadblock or two preparing his manuscripts, making sure they have sufficient material - and evidence - for the general market.

Now, imagine a younger Ryan Edel taking Professor Gup's course. I was an English Major by then, very excited about the prospects of becoming a fiction writer, and certainly proud of my own work. And our first assignment sounded like cake - eight hundred words written about Cleveland's West Side Market. And I was accustomed to writing ten or twenty pages - I figured that 800 words would be the time to show my talent. I even wrote over and then pared it down, cutting from 1,200 words to a magical 798. And somewhere in there I also talked about my visit to the West Side Market.

I hope you see the problem in this approach. Writing these 800 words for a journalism class, I approached the story not from the facts, but rather from the words. On that trip to the market, I wasn't looking for knowledge about the market - I was looking for information for the story. I walked around, gathering my laundry list of shops and locations, the general layout of the place, maybe a bit about the history. The fact that my memories are pretty vague on this reveals something very important - I never actually experienced the West Side Market.

This of course became very clear when it came time to read our articles in class. I tend to favor encouraging, positive criticism - Professor Gup favors direct criticism which is fair but very much too-the-point. "Did you talk to anyone while you were there?" he asked. And of course I hadn't - it never occurred to me that I should. And even now, the thought of interviewing a living, breathing human being is rather scary. I don't like the idea of asking personal questions, especially the awkward moments of sitting down for the express purpose of asking such questions. But my list of shops was nothing to the history of the single stall that one of my classmates had written about. Even now, I remember his line about "the smell of ground chuck" at the butcher shop, and then how he went on to read about the woman who had worked there for many years. He didn't cover the entire West Side Market the way I had tried to - in 800 words, no one really can - but his article gave a name and a face to the place. It revealed why a person would work there, how a person would find a life and a living there. It changed the way I look at research.

Come back to the present. Consider this idea that, as fiction writers, we must "write what we know." And ask yourself - "What do we know?" Me, I know about the Army and writing workshops and running. I know a bit about books. I can tell you what it means to be an RA, and I can talk about love and relationships and other topics I won't mention here. But what about the weightless feeling of going into space? Or how it feels to work under the hood a Jiffy Lube, coming home every night with the smell of oil permanently welded to one's hands? Or how about the feeling of being ill and having no idea about treatment - maybe having tuberculosis in, say, one of those countries inhabited by two-thirds of the world's population?

Now let's say I wanted to write a story for one of these settings. Clearly, I don't have personal experience with these situations, but I can still write about them. Here are techniques for conducting the research necessary to do these situations justice.

1. Gain that Experience
This is very time consuming and potentially expensive, but it gives the most genuine result. One of the reasons I joined the Army was so I could write better stories with a military theme. Now, bear in mind that I enlisted the year after September 11th, just a few months after graduating as an English/German major with no other job prospects - there was a lot more going on than just a desire to write a better story. But those five years in the military gave me an irreplaceable wealth of knowledge. You can learn about claymores and RPG's and HMMWV's from books, sure, but can you also learn how to use a salute to insult an enlisted man? Or how to say "sir" in such a way as to carry the mandatory respect while also telling an officer he's full of it? These are aspects of the military one can only learn through direct experience, and this experience has significantly improved the realism in my stories.

(As you'll see in some of my other posts, one of my pet peeves is reading a military story that gets the basics wrong. I'm reading a military sci fi book right now that has characters flat as posterboard, a plot thin as tissue, and language so direct that its stilted. But the author gets the military part right - really right. Maybe even too right, too perfect. The book isn't that great, but it doesn't bother me as much because I buy the basic premises behind the military decisions.)

2. Interview Others - Better Still, Just Talk
I hate question-and-answer sessions unless I'm the one answering. When you're answering, you have the power - you have the knowledge that someone else wants. And for me, as a fiction writer, I already feel oppressed enough - my body simply isn't sturdy enough to support the dead weight of ego floating in my head. So direct interviews are practically out. And that's okay - tragic, but okay. I've done a couple interviews, and I remember that I didn't like them. More importantly, I understand why didn't like them.

Let's start with why interviews are important. As I mentioned above, there are certain experiences that simply cannot be learned from books. You miss the facial expressions, the tones of voice, the very subtle ways that people move their hands as they interact. And interviews on TV don't quite provide the information you need, either - they're good, but the facts you need for your stories are very specific, and you alone will know what they are. Unfortunately, you don't often know which facts you need until you hear the facts you're interested in.

This is where the interview comes in. Say you're writing a story about the socioeconomic injustice of Jiffy Lube. (Nothing against Jiffy Lube - I really like their service. I actually take my car there for every oil change. But for an example of some assertive interviews and a good reason for me to be wary of my favorite oil change, check out Channel 4 Takes on Jiffy Lube). Now there are several perspectives on this - the needs of a business to thrive and prosper, the needs of those employees to keep their jobs and get paid, and the needs of customers to get their cars serviced at an affordable price. If you really want to know what's going on, you'll want to talk with some people who work there - they are the ones who see the place day-in-and-day out. Their lives and livelihoods depend on understanding the place and succeeding there. They will understand the Jiffy Lube in ways that no customer or reporter will ever know.

But this isn't to say they'll want to share that knowledge. Chances are, they won't just answer questions, especially if they don't know who you are and what you're after. (If you look or sound like Channel 4...best of luck...) This is where we switch to what I like to think of as the "soft" interview. It's more of a conversation, really - just two friends, hanging out, talking about things. Alcohol may help with this, but not in a "I'll get this person drunk so they'll talk" kind of way. Actually, you should avoid that kind of thinking. What we're going for here is comfort. This is easy if you're having a conversation with a good friend or a relative, but it's hard if it's a stranger or a relative who's close enough that they worry about what your questions might mean for them. (it would be like asking your parents about sex - probably not the best idea).

So what do you talk about during these soft interviews? Lots of things. You'll talk about yourself, and your new friend will talk about things you'd never think to ask about. Conversations might slip to family, or they might slip to school, or they might slip to that topic you're really interested in. Whatever you do, don't rush things. Let it come naturally. Ask questions to get your interviewee interested in the subject. If you're ever lucky enough to talk with a former fighter pilot, for example, avoid starting out with "so what's the weight-to-thrust ratio of an F-18?" Instead, go with the pilot's interests: "What made you want to be a fighter pilot? How'd you like flying? Which plane was your favorite?" By focusing on the interests of your interviewee, you'll establish rapport and maintain they're comfort. You send the message that the subject is less important to you than the person. By doing this, you'll encourage your pilot to share vignettes about the pilot's locker room on the carrier, and then maybe that story about pissing off the colonel's daughter and getting a martini splashed in his face when he was actually hoping to piss off the colonel by feeding a martini to his daughter. These stories might have nothing to with airplanes, but as you listen you'll find they have everything to do with being a fighter pilot. (to any fighter pilots - I hope I haven't gotten things horribly wrong. I've never had a chance to meet a fighter pilot, though I always wanted to be one).

Now you want to know how to meet all these people for your research. The simple answer is to meet lots and lots of people - go to parties, volunteer, etc. But this doesn't always work. In fact, I do horribly at parties. They're kind of like a serial interview, interviewing one person after the next after the next. Not that I'm interviewing - it's just the stress of all the noise and people and having to "say the right things." So I try to go out in smaller groups. Whenever I see someone sitting alone at a party, I try to strike up conversation. If I have nothing interesting to say, I ask a question. It doesn't always work, but every little bit helps.

3. The Boring Part: Read. Read a Lot. Then Use Google.
I don't want to talk too much about this one. It's mostly self-explanatory - read good books, find reputable websites, and learn as much as you can. One strategy I do recommend is to do your reading before you do the writing. Get a feel for your subject first - you'll find that research offers wonderful vignettes that find their way into your story. For example, I'm working on a story right now that involves an electromagnetic pulse. Now we all know from movies that EMP's wipe out cars, cell phones, and digital watches. But would an EMP kill the brake lights in your car? I didn't know. But then I found this wonderful video of a guy driving a car under an EMP generator. And yes, it killed the engine, but some of the dash lights still worked. And, as an added bonus, I learned about why airplanes and certain kinds of research centers might (only might...still need to do more research...) be immune to the effects of EMP. And this is very handy knowledge for when you're writing a story about advanced warfare. Might change the plot a bit if the hero can find a drivable Mercedes parked on the street, or if he runs into the only nutcase in the state who has researched all this stuff so he could own said Mercedes...(trust me - if you have to ask, then your car would probably not survive EMP. I checked. If nuclear war is something you lose sleep over, then it's time to buy some beer for that interview with the local nutcase...)

So, with these tips in mind....Happy Research!
Ryan

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Vacations and Writing: Overcoming the Upheaval of Holiday Travel

2010-01-14T15:29:00.000-08:00

So here I am, on my second trip of the past two months (Christmas in January...that's what happens when you visit your girlfriend's family in Thailand over Christmas).

For some, the happy stress of travel actually helps inspire new writing. Watching a live cobra jump a moat and a low wall to fly into the bleachers of tourists - excitement like this can lead to some wonderful new takes on Edvard Munch's "The Scream." For example:

The Scream, c.1893

Poster

Munch, Edvard

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The Scream, c.1893

Art Print

Munch, Edvard

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Unidentified Woman Screaming with Maid Coming Down Stairs in Foreground

Giclee Print

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Scream

Art Print

Munch, Edvard

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You see that third one? The entire painting has changed. There's even a second person, now, and all the details are sharply defined - clearly the work of a live cobra sneaking into the room. Somebody better call G.I. Joe before it's too late...

For others, the idea of writing while traveling is simply untenable. And the reason for this is simple: most travel isn't that exciting. Bangkok, for my girlfriend, isn't exotic - it's home. With airline tickets what they are, normally she and I drive to exciting places like Illinois or Iowa to see my family. Again, we're not talking about exotic - we're talking about home. We're talking about "how the hell am I gonna write my novel when I'm surrounded by nieces and nephews and - God Forbid - my parents??"

I'm here to reassure you that writing while visiting friends and family is indeed possible. Here are some tips and techniques for Escaping the Creative Suction of Well-Meaning People Who Love You:

1. Stay at a Hotel

Expensive? Yes. Antisocial? Depends on the size of your family. But with a refuge away from the smorgasbord of turkey and cranberry, you can take some time out to work on your story when you wake up in the mornings and before going to bed. Assuming of course you aren't married. In case of marriage, you may need to request a separate hotel room from your spouse. And trust me, this is will give you lots of good material to write about - but you won't stay married for long.

2. Bring a Laptop

If you have a computer, this adds to your credibility as a writer. Tell your friends and family that you're working on the next bestseller. Some in your family will roll their eyes and leave you alone. Others will be extremely fascinated by the idea of your novel. They'll ask you all kinds of questions about the plot, the characters, maybe even which publishing house will offer you largest advance. (Be sure to smile and be polite - there isn't a publishing house on Earth that knows the name Ryan Edel, let alone would give me an advance right now. And I even have my own website.) Some of these relatives will even remind you of the importance of sharing profits with loving and lovely family members.

This latter group of relatives is the group you most need to escape. The most certain means of flight will require a fresh box of baking soda. Clutching your laptop to your chest like a Roman shield, toss a handful of the white stuff into your mouth - the foaming will be mistaken either for rabies or cyanide. If you have a strong enough grip on your computer, you can work on your novel in the ambulance on the way to the ER. Either that, or you'll have to hope that defibrillator damage to home electronics is covered by your insurance.

3. Eat Lots of Sugar

It's a known fact that the brain does not use fat or protein for energy - neurons can only metabolize sugar. And maybe caffeine. So the more Christmas cookies you devour, the better your novel will be. Assuming, of course, the sticky bits of sweetness don't jam your keyboard. Or give you diabetes.

4. Eat a Ton of Fats and Salt

Good for maintaining a healthy weight? No. But your adrenal glands require healthy amounts of cholesterol and salt in order to function properly. Symptoms of adrenal dysfunction include depression, inexplicable anger, and an inability to deal with stress. All of these symptoms are exacerbated by the loving words of people who care more about your weight/finances/occupation than you do. So toss back some hefty helpings of adrenal gland goodness. Then wash it all down with some orange juice - the sugar helps with salt absorption, and the Vitamin C is also critical for healthy adrenal function.

5. Try Coke

Skip Coca-Cola, I'm talking about the real stuff, that white powder you snort up your nose. Powdered sugar, flour, baking soda, anthrax - pretty much any white-powder substitute will do. Some families might sit you down for an intervention, but most families won't. Instead, they'll try to pretend they didn't just see you snort a line of powdered lemon-lime Kool-Aid, and you'll be able to sneak away to the garage with your laptop and a lawn chair. As an added bonus, they'll actually hope you're out there smoking that cigarette you've been craving all morning.

6. Bring a Jacket, Gloves, and Voice-Activated Word Processing Software

Let's face it - your parents' garage is cold, especially over the holidays. And it's nearly impossible to type with gloves on. Or mittens. And mittens are warmer. Though they do make it pretty hard to clutch that cigarette you've been using as a dual-purpose lamp/nose warmer.

7. Stay Home

The decreased consumption of wine, spirits, and medicinal nicotine will lower your chances of diabetes, heart disease, and lung cancer by up to 30%. And you can assure your in-laws that this statistic is supported by irrefutable scientific evidence. And you'll soon have irrefutable proof that divorce is financially taxing.

8. Fake Your Own Death

Socially irresponsible? Naturally. Tasteless? Absolutely. Especially when your own mother discovers you very much alive on her trip to 7-Eleven to buy soda for the wake. I mean, really - those potato chips could have waited until after the priest consigned your immortal soul to God.

9. Drink. Then Drive.

Vehicular Manslaughter carries a pretty stiff prison sentence, so you'll have plenty of time to write after the trial. The downside is that it'll in be longhand on toilet paper. And if you've resorted to this for the sake of your writing, I'm guessing you weren't married in the first place.

10. Forget Writing: Bask in the Dysfunctionality that is Family

You've had a rough life - first childhood, then school, now this whole trying-to-make-ends-meet thing. Enjoy the few days you get with the people who will still invite you over for Thanksgiving after that whole fiasco with rehab. Actually listen to the loving words they have to say to you. Later, you can use these words as material for your bestseller. Or, failing this, you'll have a stronger testimony to rest on as the judge considers your plea of temporary insanity...

1-2-Writing Workshops Online
About Ryan Edel

Free and Instant Publication! The Joys of Hosting Your Own Website...and then Navigating the Minefield of Online Freedom

2010-01-09T12:47:00.001-08:00

Okay, so I don't get to publish exactly for free...I pay like $6.95 a Month...but it's still my own website, and I can post whatever strikes my fancy. And this, perhaps, can be a problem.

One of the major strengths of the internet is the way we can access simply vast amounts of information at the click of a button. Yet, for all the convenience this offers, we also face the terrible specter of abuse. Information is often misrepresented online - just look at the way some businesses will fill out their own customer ratings to give themselves more "I loved this place!"-type reviews. Worse still, many individuals use the internet as their own hunting ground - I recently saw a poster at a bus stop here in Baltimore stating that one out of every five children is solicited online. Now, I don't know how they came up with the numbers (are 20% of American children online often enough to be solicited? Are 20% of our children visiting websites that would allow pedophiles access to their attention? I don't know...) However, we do know for fact that useful sites like craigslist and eBay have been used to sell nonexistent merchandise and even lure people out of their homes to be murdered. We do know that some children have been solicited online - an even just one child is one too many. And this is despite continual oversight by both the websites themselves and the authorities.

So what, then, should we think about the rest of the internet, the ones that fall in that middle ground somewhere between famous and utterly irrelevant? Places like www.12writingworkshopsonline.com? No one will punish me if I post bad writing advice. I could post outright lies, actually, and no one could do much - I don't offer services or require physical meetings which could endanger anyone's life, limb, or property. About the only thing illegal I could do would be to accept money for classes which were subsequently never taught - it's a possibility, certainly, but credit card companies do a good job of stopping that kind of behavior very quickly. (Not to mention I wouldn't be able to sleep at night - accepting someone's money is a bit more than a promise to do something, I think).

Money aside, though, how should we approach this freedom of the internet? Thomas Jefferson once wrote that "ignorance may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it" - and I believe very strongly in this. It is, perhaps, the ultimate defense of free speech. But how do we know this works online? How do we know that reason is combating ignorance? Do they have a little button on Google you can press to defend yourself? I'm thinking something along the lines of a link to "Combat Ignorance Now!" - maybe even make it a complete widget, with advanced tools like "Reference Wikipedia" and HTML code for "Fire Claymore."

Unfortunately, such automated functions will never exist. Or, if they ever do, they'll never work in the ways we require - by the time technology is advanced enough to provide such wonderful toys, we'll need something still more advanced just to keep tabs on the technology. (Terminator fans, anyone?)

As writers, we are particularly vulnerable to the lures of the internet. Although we have many websites to protect our rights (SFWA's Writer Beware is a great example), the vast majority of writing websites are assembled by individuals like myself. For the most part, we're small-time or part-time writers looking to claim a bit of online real estate, build up a following, maybe even get our names out there. No one really checks up on us - no one needs to. We aren't dangerous - we're writers (lol...)

This decentralization mixed with the very portable nature of our work (an entire novel can be attached to a single e-mail of less than one megabyte...) makes it very possible for scams to weave their way among our numbers. Although the vast majority of writers, writing coaches, editors, and agents are legitimate, it only takes one bad one to ruin your year. You might find yourself paying hundreds (or possibly thousands...) of dollars for online workshops or editing services which aren't worth either the time or the money. You might even find yourself reading a website which tells you that everything you've ever thought about writing is absolutely wrong - that you should quit now and never write another word (note: even free advice can be bad advice). Or, in the true nightmare for the unpublished author, you may actually find someone to steal your manuscript and sell it as their own. (Please note: I have never heard of a single instance of this happening. But I know it's one of my nightmares. I know that other writers share this nightmare. In my opinion, most people dumb enough to steal a manuscript wouldn't be smart enough to market it. But it remains a compelling sort of nightmare...)

So what do you do? Well, I have a few suggestions. And I think these are focused just as much on keeping your sanity as protecting yourself:

1. Go to Real Live Writing Conferences
Online, it can be hard to know who you're talking with. At a real live conference, though, you can meet people, shake hands, exchange business cards. Many of these people have legitimate websites, and they offer very helpful services. Or they have friends who do. There's no better way to come in contact with reputable help than through word-of-mouth.

2. Talk to As Many Fellow Writers As Possible
I already know of a counterexample to Number 1 above - a friend of mine once paid very large amounts of money to a reputable writer for feedback that wasn't helpful. Meeting people in person is great, but it's best to meet lots of people, if possible. And this is where the internet is even more useful. If you see a writing website that looks interesting, and you really want to check it out, then there's a good chance that others have already visited and commented on it. Go ahead and Google the site you're interested in - you'll probably find feedback about the site (whether good or bad) that you can use to decide if it's a reputable link.

3. Use Your Own Judgement
In grade school, our biology teacher told us that when you get a bad feeling about something, there's probably a reason. And I believe this is very true online. If something seems too good to be true, or if the website just doesn't look the way you think it should for the services promised, then try to figure out what's up. It might be nothing, but you never know. A big giveaway, though, is spelling. If you're visiting a website that promises writing or editing services - and yet the site itself is filled with misspellings, typos, or grammatical errors - then there's a good chance that something is wrong.

4. Beware Those Fees!
On the internet (as in life), know what it is you're paying for. Any reputable vendor will let you know up-front what your money will buy. If someone offers a workshop or editing services for a fee, feel free to ask them how much you can expect for your money. My friend mentioned in Number 2 above would have been much better off had the reputable writer provided an estimate before doing the work. And this lesson should apply to your entire writing life, especially when you seek publication - be aware of the fees a typical agent will charge versus the fees your prospective agent will charge.

5. Always Know You Can Walk Away
If a website just doesn't provide what you want, don't feel obligated to use their services. If they're genuine, they'll understand. If they start sending you lots of e-mails promising "Oh, just give us one more try" or "you should think twice about passing up our Deluxe Service," then that's all the more reason to walk away. (Honestly, anyone who abuses your e-mail should be ignored. All reputable vendors I know of will offer you the opportunity to be removed from their e-mail lists).

6. Tell Others About Your Experiences
Nothing can be more helpful - or more damning - than word of mouth. If you've had a positive experience with a website, let your friends know. If a website provides an exceptional service, post that on your own website. Likewise, if you are dissatisfied with a website (e.g. "Those F***ers totally S****ed me!), then you should post this to online forums somewhere. And it doesn't matter where - whenever most of the links to a site say "Don't go here, these F***ers will S**** you," then people tend to stop going to that site.

(You'll note that here on www.12writingworkshopsonline.com I provide links to sites like HostMonster and thesitewizard.com and Storm the Castle. This is because these websites have made my own site possible. For full disclosure, though, I do receive a commission from HostMonster if you click their link on my site and then sign up for a website through them. It's the same with all the Amazon books listed on the site. I still recommend them, of course, but you have a right to know where I'm coming from.)

Conclusion
I hope this article has been interesting and helpful. If you have comments on it, or you'd like to relate some of your internet writing experiences, please feel free to comment below. Of, if you prefer, you can visit our homepage and then follow the links to contact me directly.

Happy Writing!
Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online
About Ryan Edel

Marching Orders: Write the Beginning of a Novel

2010-01-02T23:31:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, my thesis adviser gave me "marching orders" for my novel-in-progress: "I want you to write the first fifty pages," she said. "I'd hate to have you graduate without getting that down."
What she means by "getting that down" is one of the most fundamental aspects of writing the long fiction piece: the ability to write a solid beginning. And we know from publishing practices that the very first lines of a book manuscript can determine if that first chapter gets read by an agent, and the first three chapters can play a very, very critical role in determining whether a publisher picks up your book. Learning to write the beginning, then, is not only a necessary skill for becoming a full-fledged writer, but also a strong economic move - and you know a writer needs every economic advantage he or she can find.
In this post, I'll talk about how to go about writing the beginning to your novel while also discussing why I'm having so much trouble writing the beginning to my own.

1. Find Your Character's Voice
The first step in writing any beginning is to determine the voice of the work. Many writers and writing coaches present this as a kind of tactical decision - they recommend that you decide which point of view can tell your story best, and then you use that point of view to "show what you need to show." I actually disagree with this approach - for me, the voice of the piece must be a natural extension of the work, and you won't always know that voice until you start writing.
For my own novel, I'm somewhat lucky - I have a very strong character who I've been writing about for years. His name is Jonathan Mitchell, he's soldier (and I'm a veteran, so I can relate to his mentality), and he's fighting a bunch of aliens from the future (a very original plot, I know...). For me, when I sit down, his voice just comes right out. I'm very comfortable writing him. And, unfortunately, his voice is not a storytelling voice - if he was a living, breathing person, he would never tell anyone the story that I need to turn into a novel. He's more of the taciturn type, the "I've been there and back and there's no reason you have to share the pain, too" kind of person.
So when I refer to the voice of the work, I'm not necessarily referring to the voice of your protagonist. In fact, it's quite possible that your main character will not even provide the primary point-of-view of the work - just think of Dr. Watson telling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, or the narrator who relates the stories of Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. If your story is written in third-person, you may purposely pull back from the main character at times, telling the audience what the main character is thinking (or a fact he doesn't know yet, or a perspective he's never thought of). For me, I write the Jonathan Mitchell character from a very limited third person - we only ever see what he sees. At the same time, though, the narrative voice is not his own voice:

He motioned with the gun and told her take a seat. She reminded him, somewhat, of a girl he'd known in high school - short, petite, that red hair. He had trouble thinking of her as an enemy, someone he might have to shoot or possibly even kill. But she was Martian. She wore their uniform, had that eternal stoned look to her eyes. Still, when he took the seat across from her, he forgot, for a moment, the dangers. He set the pistol on the table. He closed his eyes. He was tired. He really wanted to sleep. Only then did he jerk awake - she was already reaching for the gun.

Now, if Jonathan was going to tell us what happened, it would be a very different story:

I told her to sit down. I shouldn't have set the gun down, but I was really tired. If I'd been smarter I would have stayed on my feet - I should have known better than to take a seat.

Note that Jonathan's person voice is very focused on his own sense of "should have" and "shouldn't have." He misses - or simply doesn't care about - many of the details that a reader would need in order to fully see this story. The look of the Martians, for example - the fact that they look so human that "she reminds him of a girl he knew in high school." He'd never let on a detail that personal, but understanding him requires that the reader sees this about him.
Now I'm not saying that the first-person perspective here is necessarily the wrong approach to this story - it would simply be different. The tone of Jonathan's first-person narrative is somewhat reminiscent of a hard-boiled detective novel - "I should have known better than..." is the kind of line we here just before bad things go down, and the relative lack of information could be used to build some inherent tension. But it really depends on the writer. As a person, you'll find that you naturally gravitate to certain voices, that they resonate with you in interesting ways. Hopefully you can do with more than one character voice - this gives you more room to experiment when it comes to Step 2 below.

2. Experiment
Honestly, this shouldn't be listed as Step 2 - it should be combined with finding the right voice above. In order to find the right voice, you may well need to experiment a lot. When I write stories, I often start anywhere between three and ten drafts before I find the right combination of voice and opening scene. And sometimes these drafts are pretty long - one of my short stories (20 pages or so) was written from scratch after I cut a 33-page opening. Those 33 pages were going great until one morning I woke up and realized "no, that's not right."
I'm relating this to you as a separate step because I really want you to give a lot of attention to experimentation. Too often, I see classmates in workshop submit the same stories written in the same ways. They write a story that feels "comfortable," and then they lock in that opening as if it was gospel. I feel that this is the wrong approach. I strongly believe in writing quickly and trying to churn out drafts as quickly as possible - it really helps you keep the creative and emotional energy flowing at full-tilt (either that or it's a sign of mania - I think the verdict's still out on that one...) However, when you write, don't chain yourself to the comfortable. If you wake up one morning and something doesn't feel right, feel free to rewrite. In fact, given the choice between editing and rewriting, I believe rewriting is often a stronger way to go. Just as master painters will sketch multiple "studies" of a subject before laying brush to canvas, so too should you write studies. Try out rough drafts, experiment with different voices, feel free to rewrite. What I've found is that through rewriting, I often discover a voice that I couldn't have envisioned before, a much stronger voice than you'd find in my original openings. And when this happens, you as a writer will take a stronger interest in your own work. The story will begin to write itself.
This said, it is possible to take experimentation too far, especially with the opening of a piece. It's very likely I'm guilty of this. Currently, I'm on opening draft 30-plus with this Jonathan story - that's not 30-plus pages, but rather over thirty different first pages. Some even go up to five pages. By the time this story really gets rolling, I may have a few hundred pages of slush taking up space on my hard drive. (Can you imagine if I was writing this stuff out by hand? Or on a typewriter? I wouldn't have enough space in my apartment to store the excess pages. I'd need a burn barrel next to the shredder just to stay sane.)
At a certain point, a story does just need to be written. So if you do find yourself in the kind of position I'm describing, I recommend you don't follow my example. Instead, continue to experiment with the voice of your work as you move on past Chapter One. If your gun-toting muscle-bound marine suddenly decides to a cigar-smoking Kara Thrace in Chapter Three (see Battlestar Galactica), then just go with it - you can always rewrite Chapters One and Two later.

3. Bum to Seat - Keep Writing

My thesis advisor's marching orders for me require fifty pages. Now fifty pages is a good chunk of story, especially when you consider that a complete novel may be eighty to two hundred pages. This kind of writing requires diligence - you won't write this much in just one day (trust me, I've tried. I think I've maxed out at up to 35 pages in a single day - that's eight to eleven hours of writing in one day. By the end of a day like that, I start to lose touch with reality. It gets really hard to think about things like eating or going to class when you've immersed yourself in a story like that).
The goal here is to be reasonable - push yourself, write for long enough periods to let your inspiration get warmed up, but don't overdo it. (Or if you do overdo it, treat yourself to lunch at Chipotle or something to get out of the apartment and experience this amazing thing called real people). The main thing with writing a novel is that it requires sustained effort spread out over the course of days that stretch into months and possibly years. We're talking about a real investment of time and energy - we're talking about the kind of labor usually reserved for a Ph.D. thesis or the architectural plans for a skyscraper. And with that reassuring thought...

Step 4: Enjoy Yourself
I'm serious - cherish the moments you write. If possible, steal away from things you "should" be doing to write - it adds a sense of adventure to the undertaking (especially when your landlord is pounding on the door for rent money that you won't have until you publish the bestseller that's just waiting to be written...and no, that's never happened to me, though I did once lose a job because of National Novel Writing Month - I was writing long into the night on opening day when I "should" have been studying for employment training.)
Something here I want to emphasize is that the best stories are often written without the author really knowing where they come from. You sit at the computer or with your legal pad, and you scribble away, and sometimes a character will just jump out at you. You keep writing to find out what this character will do next. Pretty soon, this character's life becomes far more interesting than your own. Or maybe this character's life is your own, and you can feel all the pain and heartache of regret just pouring out of your soul and onto the page. These are the moments when the real writing occurs - enjoy them. Let them happen. Follow them wherever they take you. Because honestly, these moments don't last forever, and they might not come every day. So...

Step 5: Accept Disappointment, Learn from It, and Keep Writing
When I say that writing a novel may take years, this is especially true for the first one. Something to bear in mind with this process is that novels are not necessarily written in a linear fashion. I read somewhere that Margaret Mitchell, when she was writing Gone with the Wind, would keep each chapter in a little folder, and she'd just pull out a different chapter each day to work it and rework it.
The novel I'm currently working on is actually one I've written before - at least the main idea. I wrote it while deployed to Afghanistan - we had no movie theaters or restaurants and only limited internet, so it was a great time for some serious writing. So in about ten months I wrote a science fiction novel that was 190,000 words. And I felt great - for me, it was the most amazing thing I'd ever written. I felt for sure that I'd finally "done it" - written something that would get me noticed.
It didn't take long though before I realized that the "novel" I'd written was actually really bad. I mean, it's so badly written that I get a vague sense of nausea every time I open it to take a look. And I still keep a printed copy handy - it's sitting in a three-ring binder on the floor by my desk. I tried to line-edit it soon after finishing the last chapter, and that's when I saw the real flaws - the protagonist (Jonathan) made no real decisions, much of the plot was forced, and the lines themselves were so convoluted that I had to make the pages bleed red with all the run-on sentences I needed to cut.
That was December 2005, when I finished the last chapter. Now it's January 2010, and I'm rewriting the same story - those 190,000 words turned out to be a first draft. Or a very long study in characterization.
As you can imagine, I was disappointed by that manuscript. I wasn't what I had hoped for. It wasn't even close. Worse still, publishers rarely accept any novel over 100,000 words from a first-time writer - unless I wanted to self-publish, that manuscript wasn't making it to the bookstore shelves, let alone the bestseller lists.
But this isn't to say the story wasn't important. In many ways, writing that long, convoluted, deus ex machina text provided a critical turning point in my writing. It taught me a certain discipline which serves me very well now that I'm an MFA student - when I need or want a story, I can sit down and write it. If need be, I can churn out words, pumping out those long studies in characterization. Some of them even become full-fledged stories. It is much, much easier to experiment when you write enough to try more than one approach to a given story.
Just as important, though, is the fact that the long work really showed me the major flaws in my writing. In writing, the greatest disappointments often teach you the most important lessons - it's when one of your own stories really fails that you see what it takes to make the story work. And I believe that writing a novel - any novel - is one of the best ways to learn your own writing style. After writing a novel manuscript, you can't help but compare it to the books your read from other authors. It makes you appreciate what the best authors do - you see the entire process of writing in a new, more refined light.

Conclusion: Go Write Your Novel
I don't believe I've made the novel sound simple, but I do hope that I've shown the benefits and sacrifices inherent in writing the longer work.
Hopefully, many of you who read this are working on or are planning on writing a novel. Even if you aren't, though, many of the techniques described here work well for any kind of writing career. To succeed - to write stories and poems that will be published and then loved by readers - takes a great deal of dedication. You should enjoy it so you can love it - otherwise, you may find yourself staring at a blank screen and hating your life for years at a time.
Success in writing rarely comes overnight. And many times, people measure success in the wrong ways. I know that I've mentioned publishing several times in this article, but I don't want you to think that publication is the be-all and end-all of writing. The writing you do should first be for yourself - it should represent the stories that you personally need to tell. Only then will your stories and poems resonate with the kind of genuine truth necessary for your own satisfaction and, later, publication.
Bear in mind that every great writer starts somewhere. Wherever you are in your writing - whether scribbling your first story into a journal this week or punching away at the keys every day in hopes of publication - you are a writer. Whether you write for a living or simply write for your life, you are taking part in one of the most important pursuits I know - printing lives and perspectives to a more permanent record, to a literature that can be shared with readers across time and distance. Whether your stories are read by thousands or even just by the grandchildren yet to be born, they will represent your legacy in a way possible through few other means.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online
About Ryan Edel

Blogging Thoughts

2010-01-02T00:35:00.000-08:00

Websites are a funny thing. I started 1-2-Writing after a few less-than-positive experiences with writing workshops - both online and in-person. The biggest problem I ran into was price - I was paying money for workshops (some rather serious money - $500 for one of the online courses I took) and getting some really bad service. It wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback or that the instructors were people I didn't like - it just seemed like they didn't know how to teach. They were good writers, great people, but not very well organized. I wouldn't have minded if the workshops were free, but they weren't. It didn't help that I was barely employed at the time - I had just gotten out of the Army, I was paying rent for the first time in my life, and the only jobs I had were these part-time spots that barely covered rent, let alone food and health insurance and car insurance and my internet cable and...but who's counting? When you get to the point that you're buying generic dried beans from Harris Teeter so you can make a batch of chili that's even cheaper than the last batch, you get a bit irate after dropping a few hundred dollars for a writing course that doesn't pay off.

Like I said, though, it wasn't that I disagreed with the feedback. The real problem was the relative lack of feedback. The course for which I paid $500 was a 15 week novel writing course - I received no feedback from the instructor until after I submitted my third assignment some nine weeks into the course (and trust me, two months is a long time to wait for feedback worth $500). We were told the problem was instructor illness, and then the course was extended, and a new instructor brought in, but it was very hard to get back in the swing of things. The web administrator offered us all $250 refunds, but there was no reply back when I e-mailed in.

You can imagine that this experience turned me off to online workshops. Unfortunately, I think I was one of the lucky ones. After this experience, I made it into an MFA program, so I don't pay money for writing courses now. But I have friends who do. I've seen one friend pay a very, very large amount of money (thousands of dollars) for writing help with turned out to be little more than line edits. And it galls me because there isn't a lot I can do about it. I'm not exactly famous, I can't exactly say I've written enough to argue with these instructors who've published several books each. All I have out there is a short story and the fact that I'm earning in MFA. But I do have some knowledge. Maybe I haven't published much yet, but I've written a lot, especially compared to where I was when I first dropped engineering to pursue creative writing. It's not so much that I know enough to teach everything, but I can teach more than some of my teachers have. They may have known more, but they didn't have the time or - in my opinion - the knowledge of teaching necessary to convey their experience.

That, however, was two years ago - before I'd even finished applying to MFA programs. Since then, I've taught three semesters of undergraduate writing as part of our MFA program. What amazes me the most about teaching is not how much I know about writing, but how much I still have to learn about teaching. I've had to reconsider what I thought about the $500 instructor who disappeared. Sometimes, I wonder what I would really do if I became so sick that I couldn't teach - I'm not sure I would want my students to know just how sick I really was, and it's possible that she really couldn't continue with the course. And although I feel that I am a better teacher than some instructors I've met, I realize now that I am not the best teacher out there, not by far. Over the years, I've learned how to provide good feedback and good encouragement, but I've taken workshops from teachers who can literally light up a room. Two teachers I highly recommend for anyone who has a chance - Zelda Lockhart and Pat Schneider - changed the way I write. Another writer who I've only met through an online workshop - Karlyn Thayer - really kept me going when I was first learning to tighten my short stories. I wish I had space here to list all the teachers who've helped me - there's no way I would have made it even this far without the help of many, many people, most of whom I've only known for brief periods between moving. I have more than enough proof that writing workshops do work - maybe not always, and maybe not perfectly, but they do help your writing.

And something else to consider is what I've learned from the writing instructors who weren't as helpful. Sometimes, the books that best show you how to write well are the ones where you can see where the writing failed - I think the same is true for writing workshops. The great workshops gave me the experience and the desire necessary to take up writing - it was the bad ones that pushed me to take charge of my writing, to stop waiting for my writing to "improve enough" for me just just start publishing. What I've found is that it doesn't happen that way - some days you write well, some days you write through setback, and some days are so bad that you want to write but can't. Regardless of the situation, regardless of where you're at or the resources you have, you have to keep faith in your writing and push onward. If you read a book that's terrible, you sit down to write another one - if you take a workshop that's not worth the money, you start a website and do better.

With this thought, I encourage each of you to keep up the faith and know that, whatever your publications or lack of publications, you're a writer. And something I've learned over the years is very simple, but many people forget either one side of it or the other: every writer has something to learn, and every writer has something to teach us.

Happy Writing,
Ryan

1-2-Writing Workshops Online
About Ryan Edel

2010-01-01T18:08:00.001-08:00

Teaching Meter

This is the lesson I’ve been working on the past couple semesters, and I think it finally works pretty well. The main idea is just to expose them to meter and to give them the freedom and confidence to play around with it. If you find ways to improve or condense the lesson, please let me know. --Ryan

Explanation of iambic pentameter and language
•    English is a stressed-syllabic language very similar to German – we naturally speak with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables (the “Nazi Staccato” used to stereotype German in old war movies is a result of this effect being exaggerated)
•    When people converse, they generally speak in short exchanges. Ten syllables is relatively close to how much a person might say before expecting another to speak. (for chemistry or physics students, you can think of this as a “quantum” of conversation…)
•    Romantic languages also have stressed syllables, but these stresses are determined by position in a sentence and not by relation to other words.
•    In languages such as Japanese, no syllables are stressed in relation to other syllables, so iambic (or trochaic, dactylic, etc) patterns are nonexistent in poetry.
•    In German, plays from Shakespeare’s time were often written in iambic pentameter. German sonnets and other poems also relied heavily on meter.

For Reference (students don’t need to memorize, just need to know they exist):
Iamb (Iambic)        Unstressed + Stressed            Two Syllables
Trochee (Trochaic)    Stressed + Unstressed            Two Syllables
Spondee (Spondaic)    Stressed + Stressed            Two Syllables
Anapest (Anapestic)    Unstressed + Unstressed + Stressed        Three Syllables
Dactyl (Dactylic)        Stressed + Unstressed + Unstressed        Three Syllables

Demonstrations of Meter
Live demonstration is the best way to reveal the inner workings of meter. For science students, you can compare this to poetic vivisection (real-time dissection of a living, breathing poem…perhaps even a purple dinosaur…)

Demo 1 – The Barney Song:
o    I love you, you love me (Anapestic)
o    We’re a hap-py fa-mil-y (iambic/trochaic)
o    With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you, (Changing meter – note the way the anapestic portions split the line into two natural sections)
o    Won’t you say you love me too? (iambic/trochaic)

Demo 2 – Dialoge: A change in stress changes the meaning of a sentence:
    “What did he do?” (i.e. What scandal did that politician pull off this time?)
    “What did he do?” (i.e. I don’t believe the explanation you just gave me – what in God’s name that that idiot actually do?)
    “And what did she do?” (i.e. How did his wife respond?)

Demo 3 – Ask students to provide an example sentence
Any kind of natural sentence will work (don’t use a quote from literature or movies, though). Write it on the board. Ask them to identify which syllables are stressed (and encourage discussion when not everyone agrees). Point out that multiple stresses are possible, and that some changes in stress may change the meaning or impact of the sentence. Use stressed/unstressed marks above the syllables to show which ones are stressed and which ones are unstressed.

Now discuss the “shortcuts” to identifying which syllables will be stressed and unstressed in natural speech.
•    Polysyllabic words: the stress in these words is carved by God and cannot be changed. Example: Zom-bies and Were-wolves are always trochaic. zom-BEES and were-WOLVES simply don’t sound right. Sounds like some kind of timber wolves went after the beekeeper.
•    Single-syllable words: stress is determined by word type and position in the sentence.
•    Nouns and Verbs: these are the most important words in a sentence, and they are generally stressed.
•    Adjectives and adverbs: these are middling words. They will be stressed or unstressed depending on their importance in expressing meaning:
•    “My car is blue.” (i.e. “Only a sicko like you would get a forest green Hybrid” – the emphasis is on differentiating my tastes from yours.)
•    “My car is blue.” (i.e. “The reason you can’t find the green shrubbery parked in front of my house is because it’s green and not blue, you idiot” – emphasis is on differentiating the car from the shrubbery.)
•    Conjunctions and Prepositions: These are the least important words. They are almost always unstressed. Placing them beside one another can be used to provide a length of unstressed sentence.
•    Articles: These are even less important. You can bully them around, rearranging them to shift the meter within your sentence.

    Exceptions to these rules happen all the time – they are guidelines only. It’s important to remember that all words in a sentence carry a natural stress, and that you cannot force stress on words to “make” them fit the needs of your meter. A poem is considered metrical because the words are arranged to create the stress – a poem that requires stress to be forced has not been written in meter.

Return to the Barney Song Example
Note which words are stressed and unstressed and how this relates to their grammatical role in each line.

Now use these shortcuts to rearrange the example sentence into something poetic.
    Change the word order to put the sentence into iambic pentameter. Add or remove words as needed, but keep the meaning the same.
    Now rearrange the words in such a way that the stress will make the words take on a sarcastic meaning.
    Then rearrange them to convey emotions like anger, hope, sadness, and resignation. (Depending on the sentence, only one or two might be doable).

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About Ryan Edel

Your "Real-Life-Fiction" Worldview

2008-10-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

In her book Writing Alone and With Others, Pat Schneider discusses a notion that sometimes, in order to fix the writing, we have to fix the author. She presents the example of a doctor who was quietly sexist in his writing - the male characters were bold and dominant and Doctor, and the female characters were meek and willing and on First Name Basis Only (I am simplifying this example - Pat describes the situation much better).

As I write and as I grade the writing of my own students, I'm coming to realize how greatly our personal biases affect our work. Often, these biases are so deeply ingrained that, as writers, we don't realize our own writing is flawed. For me, the toughest bias to overcome is the one regarding parents. When I write stories, the parents of my protagonists never come out well. I could discuss potential reasons why over the course of pages, but I know the fundamental cause: I have unresolved issues with my own parents, areas of my life that I am unwilling to discuss with those closest to me. Oftentimes, I turn to fiction as an outlet, thinking that I can "write my way" to inner peace.

Unfortunately, life is not so simple. Stories are not born in peace (not if you want good conflict, they aren't). The stories I write to come to terms with my own personal difficulties sometimes reinforce my biases. The parents I write about turn out to be flat, and the children are little better. Rather than crafting a poignant piece about parents and children discovering common ground, I often dig trenches of ignorance between between my characters. And it's not that trenches of ignorance don't exist in real life (they do), it's that literature is meant to reveal something deeper. As writers, our goal should be to get to heart of our characters, even the ones who are not nice and pleasant or even decent.

Of course, I'm making it sound as if only the people we don't like or understand are hard to write about. All true characters are hard to write. I'd love to go on and say that we should never "write about" our characters, that we should instead "write" them, as they are. This is of course hard. This requires an acute empathy not just for other people, but for ourselves, for our own inner struggles. It requires, on the one hand, an intimate personal understanding of the characters. On the other hand, we must let go of our sympathy to reveal the deepest, darkest facts about these characters. I've heard this described as "writing with empathy but without sympathy" (and I'm afraid I don't know who to attribute this to - I think I heard it in an interview on NPR).

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About Ryan Edel

Trying Something New

2008-09-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I wrote a new story. It had no guns, no light-saber-wielding hobbits, not even a time traveler. It started with a girl in a coffee shop and went on from there. I've never written about an ordinary person in an ordinary world sitting in a coffee shop - I didn't know what to expect. But then, who is ever truly ordinary? Can any human being be considered reliably normal?

The impetus for this story came from my MFA thesis advisor. I met her for the first time yesterday during our department orientation. As we all sat around the table - eight fiction writers, two of them faculty - we talked about what it meant to be in an MFA program. And my thesis advisor recommended that as we work through the next two years, we should each try to generate new work. We should be experimenting with new ideas, developing stories which may not succeed. As she said, a spectacular failure is better than always turning in "perfect" work.

Last night, I started with a girl in a coffee shop. Then her parents appeared. Then friends of hers outside. Someone had a prosthetic arm, others were playing Scrabble. I didn't know where any of it was going, but there were no laser cannons. No solar flares, no end of the world, no entropic heat death of the universe. I left out the standard plot drivers of speculative fiction (which I'm good at) and went with writing about the kind of people you might find on the street (which I'm not so good at).

Honestly, I was surprised. I ended up writing a story about an anorexic who is oppressed by her well-intentioned parents. Did I know I would write about this? Nope. Never would have predicted it. If I had predicted it, the story would have fallen flat. It would have been a diatribe about college and repression and the injustice of living. Maybe it still is. But I didn't know I was writing about those things until they happened. I didn't try fitting the story to any of the molds I'm accustomed to, and yet I ended up touching on themes that I've always wanted to write about. It even has a modicum of racial tension, something I've never had the courage to write about directly.

So is it good? I think so. The story works. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The characted changes, somewhat, over time. We have conflict. It takes on a side of life I understand strangely well, but haven't really written about, this drive to see students perform academically at all costs. More importantly, though, the story is unique. It pushes my writing into uncharted territory. I've proven to myself that I can craft a plot without resorting to the deux ex machina of overwhelming speculation.

This, I think, is critical for good writing. The reason that many stories in speculative genres like fantasy and science fiction fall apart is the lack of character-driven plot. A story is nothing without character - as human beings, we want to read the stories of other human beings. We want to understand our fellow travelers on this blue Earth. But when that Earth is about to be devoured by hungry nanomachines from Andromeda, we all know what the protagonist will (must!) do - save the Earth. And many speculative writers, unfortunately, fail to create characters who are nuanced enough to save the Earth in a "human" manner. We humans never simply solve a problem - we try to make the problem work for us. We try to make our lives fulfilling and secure. But when that asteroid is coming in and the atmosphere is boiling away, it's easy to ignore this. Sure, astronaut dude is saving the planet, but what about his wife and his kids and his parents and that roommate he had in college who still hates him for making the astronaut corps? The Earth's about to be crushed, man. We don't have no time to think about no hateful roommates.

This is why I'm so happy with my story from last night. I want to write science fiction - good science fiction. Character-driven science fiction. But in writing stories with themes from out-there, you have to first learn how to write the people down here. And I don't mean write about them - I mean write them into your stories, write them as people, write their lives as if they could happen. And as we strip away the trappings of speculation, as we get down to the bare bones of what makes these protagonists as real as people, we discover the personal plots that make our lives and our stories truly come alive.

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About Ryan Edel

2008-09-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

I'm exhausted. It's 10:30, dinner won't be for another half-hour, and I haven't eaten since lunch. Somehow, I still have the restraint to avoid eating raw chicken.

I've been writing. Today I met my MFA thesis advisor for the first time. It was the large group meeting, everyone in fiction getting to line up names with faces, a very good but very quiet meeting. During this get-together, my thesis advisor, Alice McDermott, gave some very good advice. She recommended that we as students try out new work. She said that if we come up with an interesting idea at the coffee shop, we should go home and write it, to go ahead and give the new idea a try. The other faculty member present, Jean McGarry, seconded the importance of this. I'm not sure which one said this, but they said that it's better to turn in a spectactular failure than it is to have perfect, polished work all the time.

The note I posted a few days ago was related to this, but I was having a lot of trouble making it work for me. Part of why I decided to go the MFA route is because I wanted to learn to write better stories. Though I left it out of my MFA application, I've been writing science fiction for years. Too many years, I think. It's incredibly easy to develop ready-made plot when your protagonist has a laser pistol jabbed in her face. It might not be good plot, but at least we know what the protagonist will do - must do - in order for the story to continue. Assuming of course you don't want the ending to be medium-rare.

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About Ryan Edel

Return from the Wilderness

2008-08-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Seriously, the past four months or so feel like I've been in the wilderness. I was only out of internet and phone range for eight weeks, but my work on the website and my writing and everything else literature related has been flagging terribly. It hasn't been happening. The pen had run dry, and I was busy.

For me, it's been a dry spell for writing, but so much fun in so many other ways. I've set up a new apartment in Baltimore, I'm starting on my MFA, and I'm surrounded by people who aren't just working at writing, but are working their lives around writing. I, finally, am working my life around writing. And it's a great feeling. But all these months leading up to it have been the exact opposite. Instead of writing, I've been...doing other things. I've lead science students on hiking trips through the forests of West Virginia. I've seen the 2.3 acre radio telescope at Green Bank - the worlds largest moving object on land, the most precise radio telescope on the planet. I've said hello and goodbye to nearly two hundred of my best friends. I've attended lectures on global warming and breast cancer and maple syrup disease. I've talked with friends I hadn't seen in ten years, given writing seminars, driven a U-Haul on Pennsylvania Avenue through D.C. during rush hour, chased people with water balloons...and of course I was the one who got wet...

What, then, does this mean for my writing? Have I given up my novels? Do I have to relearn the short story? Am I stuck now with writers block?

The answer to all of the above is no. I stopped my forward progress, but I didn't stop my writing. I've been writing snippets of things all summer - morning show ditties, impromptu songs for my girlfriend, 10-minute free-writes with science students. But none of these short works have been typed, none of them are "publishable" or even really manageable. They fill up notebooks of all shapes and sizes, pretty much whatever paper I had on hand at the time. It's unlikely that any of them will ever show up here or anywhere else online. There were, in fact, no Dagny stories, not a one (and if you know who Dagny is, you understand what this means...the word "payback" comes to mind...)

Often, as writers, we fall prey to this myth that all our stories must be good. We believe that we must craft every word to be if not perfect then at the very least great. Sometimes, we'll spend days and months and years worrying over the same story, trying to get the elements just right. We rebalance the plot, reconstruct our characters, deconstruct the setting and the mood and the tone of our stories. We revise the one story until we're tired of it. And to become professional creative writers - the kind of people who get paid for stories and poems - this process is crucial to future success. Publishers and MFA faculty want to see the best we have to offer. They want to see that we're worth the time to read. But for many writers, this process of revision gets confused with the process of creation. Oftentimes, we credit ourselves with growing as writers because we have made one story better.

Don't stop with one story. Experiment. Spend ten minutes writing something that you know you'll throw away. Skip the laptop routine and scratch out a few words that you won't share with others. With writing, an essential aspect of mastery is practice. As in any field, be it sports or science or music, we become good because we experiment. Every professional violin soloist spent years if not decades scratching out notes that would torture the human ear - and it's that practice which provided them the confidence and skill to be performers today. It is the same with writing. Just as no violinist would spend an entire lifetime playing a single concerto to the exclusion of all others, as writers we cannot afford to work on a single novel or a single poem to the exclusion of all else. There are too many techniques, too many ideas, too many facets of life to chain ourselves - and our literary careers - to the quality of a single piece. We must break ourselves of the idea that every story will be good and realize that experimentation is as much a process of elimination as it is a process of creation. We create, we judge, and we sift the gems from the sand. But trust me, there are no diamonds without a lot - and I mean a lot - of rough.

This said, let me leave you with a bit of guesstimation regarding my own work. In my apartment, I have an entire file box filled with stories I wrote before and during high school - thousands of pages of original, handwritten work. On my computer, I have my stories sorted by year - from 2002 until now, we're looking at probably twenty to a hundred stories per year. Some of these stories were meant as novels, some as novellas, some as shorts, some as still-births. One of the stories weighs in at 190,000 words, and it even has an ending. Out of these hundreds of thousands of words - actually millions of words spend for several hundred story ideas - I have about fifteen short stories that I'm happy with. I have one short novel that I'm happy with. I have half of another novel that I'm happy with, but it doesn't have an ending. And out of all this? One short, short story has been published so far - I earned $100 for it back in February. And why am I starting on a master in fine arts? Because I'm not that great of a writer. I want to be better. I want to learn what it will take to be better.

So as you write, remember to break out of the house every once in a while. Try that wild, off-the-wall story idea that probably won't work. Don't worry about wasting time. Don't worry about whether it's "worth" your time. All writing is worthwhile. All writing is worth producing. It might not be worth reading when your done, but that's okay. It's part of the learning. We cannot succeed until we learn how not to fail.

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About Ryan Edel

Why We Write

2008-04-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

The other day, the devil came and whispered in my ear “anything you want, you can have. All I want is the usual.”

The usual? My soul? Okay, devil, take my soul – just gimme a few more of those juicy publishable things I call words.

And so the devil, satisfied with this renewed bargain, allowed me a few more minutes of computer time while I – ever so excited – spewed on about my life in general. I wrote about my parents and my girlfriend and myself. I chatted – to myself, because some things cannot be shared – about the state of my future and the decisions that await. I made everything seem so dark and hopeful and twisted because it felt so right, so justifiable, so true.

And then I come back to this essay. This is shot number three at “why we write,” my contribution to understanding the motivation of the working writer. And by working I don’t necessarily mean publishing – I mean a writer who is putting pen to paper regularly, dripping blood and sweat through the ends of fingertips worn raw with typing. That alone is the qualification for a working writer – the closer we come to this ideal, the more the words will match our lives, the less room there is for imagination and the more sway we give to truth.

As I write this, I feel like a fraud. I feel like a lamb with a shotgun about to hunt down his own cousin so Mary can have a little lamb with her sauerkraut. I’m not a writer by trade – I’m a struggling human being. Forget the artist part of starving – I’ve spent my entire life scrounging for money. So I tell myself the experiences will contribute to my art – does that make me a writer? If it means dropping engineering to study English? If I then enlist in the Army to get money for grad school?

Currently, I don’t have enough money to marry. Buying airline tickets to meet my girlfriend’s family isn’t in the budget. But writers aren’t collections of money – writers are people who put pen to paper. Writers are dedicated souls who search for the meaning in life and then – harder still – do their best to share what they’ve learned without spoken words, without hand gestures, without lights or camera or CGI or even a hint of sound.

Am I a writer? Some days I feel more like a sellout. I take the easy way out in the name of “literature.” When I could have toughed it out and demanded a desk job, I allowed an injury to get me out of the Army. When I could have taken on some debt for that fifth year to finish engineering, I decided to graduate and get out. I see people talking and I’m too afraid to meet them. I see politicians argue and I’m too quiet to show that I care. I’m not a writer because I love it – I’m a writer because there’s nothing else for me, there’s no other way to get my words out to be heard. I don’t talk loud enough. I’m a guy, a male American, and I’m too afraid of my own voice.

So here I am telling you, another writer, my friend the reader, what it takes to be a writer. If I charged you a dollar, it would be fraud. But since this is free, it’s ethos. It’s the mythology of writing. It’s my contribution to the lore of the professional wordsmith. And you read this because you want to know why you should keep writing, you want to know why we all keep writing.

I can tell you this – I began writing in the seventh grade. It was a journal we were assigned to keep, a page a week for an off-campus class I was lucky to take. I don’t know now how I managed to earn a slot in this class, or why anyone trusted a seventh-grader to ride the train half-way across Chicago once each week to take this class and miss half a day of school, but this class taught me to write. It taught me to put personal words on the page. The teachers taught me to staple the pages in half for the days when I didn’t want to share my words. Later, when I read about Arthur the King and Frodo the Hobbit, I thought I could write the same kinds of stories. I thought I’d be like other writers, taking my personal life and weaving it into the worlds of heroes and dragons. I didn’t know what I was doing – I was fourteen. I couldn’t tell the nominative from the jussive if you held a gun to my broadsword. But still, in the nighttime hours, when my parents went upstairs and there was no trusting a teenager to cross Chicago by himself to see friends, the pen was there. Without classroom assignments, there was no need to staple pages shut. The trick was saving these pages from the fate of spring cleaning, when every useless toy and outdated scrap of homework met the dumpster. They were my precious thoughts, those pages, my personal publication for the audience of one. And still I save these story notes and journal entries from back then. They sit in a box at the side of my desk, pages and pages of incoherent scrawl I’m afraid to read for fear of heartburn. I wrote that? Ick! Thank God I learned to write before our home had a computer – it’s harder to back-up loose leaf. And vomit goes better on paper than mousepad.

Still, the writing happened. Somewhere along the way I learned the feel and the sound of words written well. It may have been the long summer days stranded alone in the middle of Chicago – I had the choice of biking down to the end of the block and back or reading a book. Going around the block – and out of sight of the house – required special permission. My brother was autistic, my buddy from two-doors down grew up on Playboy in an attic that smelled of cat piss, and visiting my friends from school required a parent to drive. The books ate the time. I spent days on Treasure Island with the pirates. Black Beauty was a dear equine friend. King Arthur was more than my hero – he was my inspiration, my guide for how to live, how to act, how to be.

Still, I produced more tripe. Piles of tripe. Great bound piles of pages that weren’t fit for bathroom reading. Even in college, I did this. Somehow I found my way into creative writing workshops, and somehow the teachers liked me. I don’t think it was the work so much as it was the way I listened. When they said my stories needed conflict, I stared at them and waited for the punch-line. When I presented my eight-hundred-word masterpiece for Intro to Journalism, the professor cut four-hundred words and said the rest needed work. Again, I waited for the punch-line. I was barely twenty – I had no clue what I was doing.

Still, I wrote. I wrote because my girlfriend at the time wouldn’t have understood my leaving her the computer. I wrote because my parents couldn’t understand ne’er-do-well English majors. I wrote because I was too tired to study math or physics or any of those other subjects. I wrote because I wanted the bad guys to win. I wrote because I was only a phone call away from being the bad guy to someone, somewhere.

I’ve spent the past three weeks asking myself why we write. Twice I've tried writing the answer, but the words didn’t flow. They didn’t ring true. I was asking the wrong question. I wanted to explain why writers write – I should have been asking why I write. It’s pointless for me to fathom the depths of your soul – I might understand a bit, but I can’t explain why you should write. I have enough trouble understanding my own reasons. Especially this week, when I’ve written hardly a word aside from this essay. I tell myself I want to write fiction and that I want to publish novels, but then my own chapters make me nauseous. I get headaches and vision loss and a serious urge to “go outside” at the thought of editing my own work for mass consumption. And don’t get me started on the thoughts of finding an agent or, worse yet, publicity. It’s not my vibrant social life that fuels my writing – it’s the vibrant writing which fuels the little social life I have. Except with my girlfriend – she’s foreign, so her English isn’t the best. We hold entire conversations involving two syllables and a helping of curry-fried-shrimp. And where did I meet her? Online. Through e-mail. With the words we share beyond sound.

And so, when the devil returns again – when it’s morning, and the sun shines, and I’m late for work – I’ll look deep inside and ask what comes next. Is it the writing, this craft of my voice made audible through print? Or is it the daily struggle of getting out and saying hi and smiling back?

Ask yourself – before you forget – about why you write. Ask yourself the meaning of the words on the page.

I say this, now, because next semester I start a new phase in my writing. In the past, I’ve written in the dark, on hidden notebooks, majoring in the wrong subject, short on cash, in the middle of Afghanistan. But now, suddenly, I will be paid to write. A university has decided to trust this kid from Chicago. The professors see great promise in my work. They look forward to meeting me. They tell me that they are fascinated by my life experience. They believe I will be a fine addition to their MFA program.

So write. Write as much as you can. Write until it makes you sick. And then keep going. Learn from the authors you enjoy, learn from your mistakes, learn from everything you can. But remember where you came from. Fix your motivation in your mind – and in your writing – now. Because it does matter. Because it shapes who you are and what you write. Because the depths plumbed with words begin with the vast ocean we call life. And the minute you forget where you came from, you lose everything worth writing for.

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About Ryan Edel

First Law of Delete

2008-04-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

A great point brought up in one of my classes was the question of where to go next with a story. In writing, this question plagues everyone. No story is ever so complete that it can't use work, not even the million-copy bestseller. Every word we write, there's the question of which words to place next, which direction to take.

For this class, and in all your writing, I encourage you to remember the First Law of Delete - anything written can be deleted. If you don't like it, you can get rid of it later. If it's awkward, ugly, smelly, disgusting, or simply too horrifically beautiful, the delete key's always ready, always hungry.

I say this because often, as writers, we get caught up trying to make a piece "perfect." This line of thought actually hurts the creative process, especially during the rough-draft - this is one of the main causes of writer's block. For the assignments, feel free to read the prompt and then start writing. Write for fifteen minutes. If the words feel wrong, keep writing. Keep pushing forward. Oftentimes, it takes a few minutes (or even a few hours) to get in the groove - all those words that sound wrong are simply stepping stones to the right path, the slow curve of the on-ramp before you merge with the interstate.

Later, after the fifteen minutes (or twenty or thirty, if it's a good day), you can apply that First Law of Delete. And some days you will - there will be days when that whole fifteen minutes just doesn't work. But no worries. There will be other days when that awkward smelly no-good first paragraph becomes the keystone for a new plot you never saw coming. Embrace that plot. Enjoy it. And remember this irony: knowing you can delete everything helps you the stories you never forget.

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Fiction - The Unplanned Birth

2008-04-01T22:49:00.000-07:00

In my workshop today, one of my writers touched on the fundamental difference between fiction and nonfiction. She said that she normally writes nonfiction, and that she’s accustomed to outlines and roadmaps for her writing. But she hasn’t liked the results of her planned fiction. She found that she likes the results of her freewriting, but that the process is scary – there is no planning, and editing is needed at the end. But still, the she likes the results.

Part of the reason freewriting inspires the creative process is that it forces the mind to write automatically. The result is that the words you produce are words you’re intimately familiar with. You begin writing about your life, about the things you’ve seen in life, even if the story is not a true story. And it works. It has the feel of truth, because in a deep way the words written on autopilot are truth – your truth. The life you’ve been living.

This is the funny thing about good fiction - it can't be planned. It's as random as our lives, as constant as the stars. Certain aspects of the human experience are accepted as absolute - the need for food, for example, or the strain and exhaustion that come with stress - but the events and decisions of an individual defy outlines. It's a strange phenomenon - generally, most writers avoid crossing back-and-forth between fiction and nonfiction. Before freewriting, I tried to control my writing. I wanted to “make” it good. I believed in working hard to produce the “perfect” story. But results of controlled fiction aren't good, let alone perfect. The characters are stale, the decisions pre-planned, the conflict watered down.

Fiction is not nonfiction. How do I know? Try writing nonfiction without an outline and good sources. That's just not a good idea, not for a longer work. The reader has to believe in the work, and for nonfiction that means believable, reputable facts. And these facts have to fit together tight as a jigsaw puzzle. To make the truth coherent, you have to sit down and plan it out, piece it together, see how every isolated piece matches with every other.

It's not that fiction's any different in that regard - the "facts" must still be "right," and they must certainly "fit together," but the source of these facts is a different place entirely. Some call it the heart, some say it’s the unconscious mind, others believe it's the soul. Tapping it, though, is hard. Allowing the disorder and the chaos of the inner mind to creep out onto the page is a process all by itself. And then telling your conscious mind – the part of your brain that stops you from giving embarrassing revelations at work – to step aside? For some, it’s inconceivable. I've met people who don't believe in freewriting and won't try it - they hold on to the control they have, choking their own creativity. It's not a pretty sight - flat characters, organized plots without purpose, antagonists who don't care about anything except owning the world.

When editors look for good fiction, they aren't looking for someone who can string words together in the "correct" way. They're looking for someone who can reveal a protagonist's inner hate, someone who can show the antagonist's hidden love, a writer who makes us appreciate life in new ways. As you push forward in your writing, make sure that you are learning to write from within rather than simply pen beautiful sentences. Don’t plan your novel to death – write it. Feel it. Express it. And then later, after the words are on the page, after you’ve bled your soul through the keyboard, go back and edit. Assert the control you didn’t need before. Make sure the grammar isn’t too ugly. But don’t do this until you’re done. Don’t edit until after the last line is written. If you’re tempted to edit early, tempted to “tweak” the story a little bit, just keep one thing in mind: you can always edit grammar. You can insert and delete characters and subplots in a finished story. You can even go through and emphasize a theme that didn’t get enough “air time” in the rough draft. But no matter how much you edit, you can’t revive a story without heart.

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Write Relevant Dialogue

2008-03-31T17:28:00.000-07:00

Your story has just begun. The conflict is terrible, the plot superb, and the characters fascinating. It's time for the major scene, bringing together arch-nemesci in the same setting: the protagonist and antagonist. To pull off the ensuing confrontation, you'll need dialogue.

Dialogue is nothing more than words. But many of the conventionals of traditional prose are waived or modified for dialogue. If you write a story using third-person point of view, for example, the words of your characters may provide an entirely different tone from the rest of the text. For example:

The town's cathedral was an imposing monument of God and tradition. The mayors from time-before-memory had each held their inaugurations on the cathedral steps, quietly dodging questions from outside reporters about the separation of church and state. Even Holly Muhammed, the first Muslim female mayor-elect in the state, had asked the deacon's blessing for her administration. The announcement of her upcoming inauguration was posted inside the cathedral's brand-new bulletin board - a gift from Mayor Muhammed's husband.

Patrick ran his fingers over the bulletin board's rough-hewn lumber. Then he yanked back his fingers in pain. "Dag-nabbit! Another splinter."
"Dad," Sharla asked, "you want me to get the tweezers?"

"Lay off, will ya?" Patrick shot back. "Can't you see a grown man dyin'?"

Sharla looked confused. Her gaze went from the embossed invitation to all local residents before returning to her father's face. "You don't look like you're dying," she said.

Patrick jabbed his thumb against the invitation. "You see that? Do you see that? We're all dying, girl, every last one of us."
Sharla shook her head. She wondered if Mayor Muhammed would follow tradition and invite the local quartet to play a bit of Brahms for the celebration. Every mayor did it - it was tradition.

The key to good dialogue is twofold: it must convey relevant information while sounding true to natural speech. Dialogue that lacks sufficient information sounds too wordy - if it doesn't sound true-to-life, it sounds forced, as if the writer had to make the characters share information. In the example above, the dialogue conveys information on multiple levels. We see that Patrick has misgivings about the new mayor even though he never mentions her directly. The tone of his dialogue is brusque, a strong contrast to the smooth, reflective tone of the narrative. Note also the use of physical gesture and expression to heighten the emotional impact of his words - he jabs the invitation to shift the reader's attention, and then speaks. In this way, the dialogue avoids unnecessary reference to the mayor - the kind of reference that a regular person speaking would never actually say.

Another key here is that each character has his or her own way of speaking. Sharla, the POV character in this dialogue, speaks little, and her words lack the heightened emotions of her father. Instead, her words have the more measured tone of the narrative because the narrative is from her own point of view. Yet does she talk about the traditions of the town with her father? Nope. There’d be no point. It’s clear her father would argue with her, and it’s clear that she’s not the confrontational type.

There are two key ways to improve your mastery of dialogue. The first is to listen to people talking. Seek out people who are different from yourself and listen to the words they say. If you find someone who talks with the same mannerisms you use yourself, you won’t learn as much – we hear the novelty of human speech best when the words are unfamiliar. For myself, I learned the most about dialogue after I finished college and joined the Army. In the army, soldiers don’t always use no proper English, and we can’t be wasting no time with words, we gotta be out the door and in formation at oh-four-thirty.

As you can see, dialogue like this has a rhythm of its own, a rhythm that you can pick up and incorporate in your own work only by hearing it and learning to feel the meaning deep down. But in addition, you must bear in mind the second rule of human dialogue – all words are spoken with a purpose. When a character in your story speaks, he or she should be saying words to achieve a goal – and the tone and diction must match this goal. A new baby is born – the proud aunt will announce the news at the top of her lungs in the hospital waiting room. Why does she do this? Because she’s excited, because she wants to world to know she’s an aunt, because this is the happiest day in her life so far. Will she calmly take the stage beside the artificial plants and explain the baby’s birth weight? Heck no. She’ll belt it out at the top of her lungs from inside her sister’s maternity room as the doctors shove her out the door, and then she’ll turn pink at the sight of all the onlookers turning to face her. Her voice will drop to a squeak. “Um…sorry?”

Keep these points in mind as you write, but don’t slow your writing to adjust until it’s time for editing. After you’ve completed your first draft, read your work aloud. In real life, dialogue is a tool of the ear. You will hear missteps in dialogue far better than you can read them, especially in your own work. Listen for how natural the words sound. Listen for whether the characters are speaking to convince other characters. Most importantly, decide if you believe in the words you hear, if they sound “right.” If they don’t, remember the true beauty of writing – you can edit the words until they do.

This article is part of the FICTION 101 workshop sponsored by 1-2-Writing. Information regarding this free workshop and other courses may be viewed at http://www.12writingworkshopsonline.com/.

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Setting to Illustrate Conflict and Character

2008-03-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

I remember setting as the bread and butter of my days in Reading class. Setting was the most wonderful (and most analyzed) part of every fiction story we read. Were there trees? What did they look like? How do they make you feel?

As you move up in the writing world, so to speak, setting begins to take a back seat in writing classes. Not that good setting is easy to write, but it becomes neglected as a tool. Setting is usually the one part of any story that is most easily grasped and understood. If you read a book that has too much setting, you still know exactly what's going on in the story - you can see everything. If there isn't enough setting, then you don't see and understand the imagined world. Oh well. It wasn't a very interesting story to begin with.

So we have a dichotomy with the teaching of how to write setting. One the one hand, it's taught early because it is so "simple" to understand. As a child, I couldn't have told you the first thing about character development, but I could read a story and describe the setting. On the other hand, setting is somewhat ignored later because a story can survive without it. In my experience, workshop stories often have problems with the setting (most of my own stories have setting issues, as well), but readers don't give much feedback on how to fix those problems. Larger issues take precedence. Is the main character fully realized? Do we see the conflict in light of the protagonist's inner development? "Oh, by the way, I wasn't clear on where this story was taking place - was it in the hospital room? Okay, if you can just fix that for next time." Sometimes we hear "you know, the description of the flowers in the vase on the bedside table was a little too much exposition." Okay, too much setting, so what? Don't you want to know where the story takes place?

Fortunately, we have a yardstick to judge whether you have "too little" or "too much" or "just enough" setting. In any work of fiction, setting must contribute to the story. It can set the tone, it can establish the character's mood, it can be a part of the action, and sometimes it acts almost as a character itself. The task of the writer is to identify the role played by the setting and to ensure that the setting fulfills that role without going overboard. The best way to understand this is through example.

Tone and mood are relatively straightforward. Let's say you have a detective novel - a young girl is kidnapped and held for ransom. Is the kidnapper a terrible villain? Are the parents worried? Is there a strong possibility that the girl is already dead? You can hint at all these things through your choice of setting:

The parents, they lived up on a mansion at the edge of the bay. I drove up in the rain. All I could see through the storm was the road - the sky and water to my right merged into a wall of black, and the mountain on the left looked like it might fall in any time. Lightning flashed - suddenly I saw the house, white like a corpse in the rain. The back end was a box floating in space over the bay. I figured it was only a matter of time before the whole place slipped away into the ocean.

Dark and brooding, with rain for tears - it's blunt, and such a setting builds the expectation that something terrible has happened or will soon happen. But you can go for a more subtle effect. Say the kidnapping happens in a small town - you may want to give the impression of innocence lost:

One by one, the clowns gave out balloons - long puppets twisted into lions and parrots and puppy dogs. The cotton candy vendor smiled and pointed over to her treats - clouds of syrup sweet pink and blue and yellow waited. A hand-lettered sign with a smiley face advertised "Hot Dogs, Too!" I looked away. In the corner of her stall was the garbage stuffed to overflowing. A pile of cigarette butts had been left on the counter by the ketchup. Obviously, no one had told these people the news.

What do cigarettes have to do with kidnapping? Nothing. But through the eyes of the protagonist, they take on a new meaning. Just as people always remember the clouds at funerals and the sun at weddings, your protagonist will see the world through the lens of mood. Beware of clumsy techniques in writing - it's rarely good to simply tell the reader exactly what the protagonist feels. "I was frustrated because the girl had disappeared, and it was my watch" abuses the reader's intellect. Instead, by focusing on setting, your narrative accomplishes two tasks as once. In the example above, it's clear how the protagonist feels - the readers don't yet know that the girl is gone, but they don't need to. By withholding this information and establishing a dark tone to "the news," you build immediate suspense. As you continue to answer questions and build more suspense, you will gain the trust and more importantly the interest of your readers. If you tell your readers everything right away, then there's nothing left for them to read.

Naturally, once you've got your readers hooked in the opening lines, you need to keep their attention. Setting alone cannot do that (unless of course you're writing a pure landscape...though painters normally have better luck with that than writers). Reader interest requires action, and setting is crucial for establishing the context of events. In speculative fiction genres, setting is often half the story - what would the science fiction masterpiece be without starships and plasma cannons? How can one read a fantasy tale without magic? Some authors confuse the need for setting with an excuse for exposition. When you need setting to establish your story, incorporate it with action:

Deidre climbed faster. The ladder's narrow rungs pinched her skin and bruised her shins. She could hear them below - their voices echoed up the narrow shaft. They couldn't have been closer than twenty feet - they sounded practically on top of her. She pulled herself up too fast, and the spin of the ship knocked her into the wall. Dazed, she kept up her climb.

Compare that to the following exposition:

The decks of the ship were linked by a ladder shaft. The ladder had metal rungs, and the shaft's interior carried echoes across decks. Coriolis forces from the ship's spin prevented objects from falling in a straight down the shaft.

Both examples provide the same setting details, but the first offers excitement and danger while the second provides a description without reference. Why should the reader care that the shaft carries an echo? If the reader has no reason to care about a detail, that detail will be forgotten, even if that detail holds critical importance later (and you don't want your reader leafing back to figure out "what the heck?" after getting to the exciting part).

There is, of course, a drawback to incorporating all setting into action - a good action scene is often too quick to adequately explain the setting. Readers may become confused by the spin of the ship knocking Deidre into the wall, and breaking out of the narrative to explain Coriolis forces interrupts the action. You can use judicious exposition establish the setting you need for upcoming action scenes. Build the tone and mood of the story tone to make details memorable:

Deidre avoided the long shafts between decks. The cramped metal walls and the narrow ladder left her claustrophobic. The echoes of voices from the other decks made her imagine ghosts inhabiting the ship. Most of all, though, she didn't like the Coriolis forces, as the engineer called them. She understood how the spinning ship provided a sense of gravity, but she didn't understand why nothing could fall in a straight line. She had tried it with a quarter, dropping it down the center of the longest shaft. The quarter's ricochets off the walls had nauseated her with a sickening ping!

Finally, we come to perhaps the most complex use of setting - establishing a world or a place with the force of character. You can cheat with personification, but most readers distrust stories told with "the glowering eyes of the thunderclouds" and "the chatter of the power lines as they exchanged the gossip of electrons." When setting takes on the element of character, if must fill the duties of a character from the background - it must drive plot, is must react to events in the story, and it should give opinion of its own. And it must accomplish these tasks without a body or dialogue. To pull off this feat, you must successfully provide your setting with a believable voice of its own. The key is in the interaction between your characters and their surroundings - the reactions of the characters become the window for viewing setting's character traits:

Turtle stared up at the clouds gathering overhead. He pointed
the end of his walking stick at a funnel cloud beginning to come
down.

"You've angered the sky," he said.

John rolled his eyes. "What, you think global warming will go away all on its
own? We expected the mirror to leave a storm front."

Turtle lowered his stick, leaned his weight upon it. Through the ground, he
could feel the vibrations ofdistant lightening. It struck the Earth
harder, now, than before. Like a freight train, the sound of it
carried through rock and soil. It was only a matter of time before
this new lightening found a city for its hunger.

"Look at the bright side," John said. "All this lightning's a great source of
renewable energy."

Here, the raging storms are a reaction to something the characters have done, and we can see that John's last line ensures an ongoing conflict. Can the sky really be angry? No, of course not. But for the story, Turtle will perceive it as angry, and Turtle's reaction to this setting establishes both his and the storm's attitude.

Ultimately, mastery of setting in your writing will come down to obeying the one rule: everything in your writing must work in terms of the story. Too much setting will drown a story in detail just as easily as an undeveloped sense of place will leave the reader thirsting for context. Use the examples here as a guide, but push forward in your own direction. If you fear that you are writing too much setting, keep going - you can always edit later, and sometimes it is harder to write in new setting than it is to pare down the words already on the page. Conversely, if you fear that you are not writing enough, keep going in the direction you are on. In the first draft, you are looking for the core of your story, the essence, and sometimes an aspect like setting gets left for later as you sketch out your plot and characters. Whatever it is you are writing, write it - that alone is the only sure way to success.

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2008-03-21T12:54:00.000-07:00

Losing Your Voice

2008-03-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

I don't let my mom read my stories. I once made the mistake of letting her read one, and then for years afterward she used that story as part of the reason why I shouldn't write. Granted, that one story had problems - many problems. The first glaring error my mom noticed was that the medical information was completely bogus. I had made up a disease and put it in my story, and my mom - a very experienced nurse - could tell right away that the disease had no basis whatsoever in fact. Besides that, though, the story didn't speak to my mom. She wasn't enthralled, wasn't thrilled, couldn't see those words showing up on a bookstore shelf.

And my mom was right about that story - it wasn't good. But I was also in high school, had never taken a writing class, and had never seen much of the world. My experience with "high drama" up till then was getting a D on a math test during cross country season. Everything I knew about fiction I'd learned from books. So when my mom told me the story wasn't worth reading - and, in her own blunt way, that I shouldn't be wasting my life writing stories - I listened. I got angry about it, sure, but I couldn't silence the nagging voice. I couldn't deny that my mom was an avid reader - she was the one who had turned me to books as a child, and she was the one who accumulated stacks of paperbacks that she read while on breaks or on the way to work.

Fortunately (I say now, years later), I was too pigheaded to listen. I kept writing. As I burned out on college engineering and burned out on the extra credits needed to graduate in a new major and as I worked to pay tuition, I still wrote. Much of it, I'm sure, was a wretched desire to prove myself right, as if to show my mom that I could, indeed, make a living writing. And I thought I could, too - I figured I'd write my short stories and get published in science fiction magazines and make an easy $400 a pop. I was young, I was idealistic, and after all the fights I had with my mom about the relative merits of English versus Engineering, I wanted to show that I was right.

I wish I could say I took the right path, but I'm not sure I can. I invested so much energy trying to prove my point that I missed the real point of college. I gave up friends in favor of work and study, and I entirely gave up the sciences that I had always loved. Rather than explore options, I locked myself in to a goal - graduate in four years as a "writer" - and skipped the fun parts of college.

As writers, we have to avoid making the mistake I made in life. Fiction is very much a reflection of life - the stories that we write hold power over the imagination because they represent struggle and conflict at the personal level. Readers enjoy a story that plays with possibility - they want to read about characters who dart off in different directions without a map, and they want to read about

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Elin O'Hara Slavick on Creativity

2008-03-03T20:55:00.000-08:00

Today, National Public Radio's "The State of Things" featured photographer and activist Elin O'Hara Slavick. This was my first introduction to the artist, but her commentary provides very revealing insight regarding the creative process. One of her comments that sticks with me is the sentiment that if you look too hard for your memories, you won't find them. You have to rely on the memories that come to the surface, even if they're inaccurate or twisted by time.

During this interview, Professor Slavick also discusses her role in attempting to foster more peaceful - and productive - reactions to September 11th and the roles of social and financial concerns in the making of art. I highly recommend this program as a look at the artistic process. Although Slavick herself focuses on photography and social activism, many parallels can be drawn with writing.

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Writing through Distraction

2008-03-03T07:54:00.000-08:00

Freewriting's open, free-form structure is great for the office, the beach, the classroom - anywhere you go that allows only snatches of time to write your story. Since the free-write is usually not intended as a marketable story, you don't have to worry about typos or smudges or whether you can concentrate enough to make the story "good." But it still takes concentration to write, especially to "get in the groove" and write fast.

This is where your real-world setting can pose some problems. Sometimes, the air conditioner is just too loud. At the beach, you just can't take the glare of the sun in your eyes. And then, of course, there's the chatter from two cubicles down - it's nearly impossible to tune-out a conversation in-progress. For human curiosity, people talking provides too much interest. It's worse even than CNN. When you want to be writing, your mind locks-in full attention on people you don't know and don't care about simply because they're producing words.

But don't worry. You can free-write through such distractions. The key, first of all, is to relax. Writing may feel important at times, but it's rarely important enough to stress over (essays, term papers, and grad school applications excepted, of course...). It's a constant struggle for me, but I've found that placing too much importance on the words themselves hurts the work itself. When I feel pressured to perform, I begin writing words because they sound right, not because they are. Distraction then pushes me over the edge. Perfection in writing is an impossible goal - thinking about it while the AC churns is a headache waiting to happen.

The next trick - and this works really well for freewriting - is to write the distraction into your manuscript. Write about the air conditioner's grim rattle or that too-hot sun - you'll think about it less once you've written around it. I used to think this was a funny idea because I've always been good at tuning things out. My younger brother is autistic, so I grew up learning to read and study while he gave my parents and babysitters hell the next room over. But I can't tune out everything, and I can't control when and where distractions arise. One night, after a very stressful week, I set all my hopes on an hour of writing at Barnes and Noble. That was to be my "unwind time" when I could catch up with the story I hadn't worked on all week. But then there was a very large, very loud man having a one-way conversation with his wife and the entire rest of the bookstore coffee shop. I couldn't ignore him, and I already had a headache from the rest of my week - so I wrote him into a free-write. It wasn't a flattering portrayal, but the writing went on. Strangely, as I wrote more about him, I stopped hearing him talk. It was as if the mind processed his existence and then moved on to other concerns - namely writing.

But then there's the big question: what do you do when you can't write a word? When staring at the page makes you sick? When the AC and the sun and those yapping coworkers simply will not go away? Or, worse, what about when there's no physical distraction? When you're busy worrying about your taxes and your health insurance and the upcoming visit with your mother-in-law? How do you tune out your own mind?

Sometimes you don't. Instead you start writing a journal entry. You call up a friend and gripe. Or you break out the old 1040 and start filling in rows of numbers for the IRS. At some point, you have to resolve the personal distractions in your own life to allow your mind to focus on creative pursuits.

Sometimes, though, even that isn't enough. It's worse, of course, when you're working under a deadline, when you know that you have, say, one week to finish a story for a class. The days get whittled away as you sit at the keyboard contemplating the blank screen, your blank life, the blank career prospects for creative writing. You contemplate ugly notions involving your computer and the window.

That's the time to go outside. Call up some friends and hit the volleyball court. Catch a movie. Stroll on over to the local pub and start talking with random people about random things (if the people are no longer so random, then you know you're a regular). The key is to get out and live a bit. Let the brain rest. Let the ideas simmer without too much thought. Later, when you get back to your page, you'll find that the story is still in there, still ready to come out. It just flows a little better when you're relaxed. And, of course, a beer or two never hurt - never enough that I remember, of course.

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Cheeky Characters Write Themselves

2008-02-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I had the sad job of watching a story die on the page. It shouldn’t have died, I figured – it was the prologue. It had all the elements of a good prologue – a protagonist scorned, a world of injustice, the start of a very long journey. And yet the story stopped. I made it halfway to the end of prologue and found nothing more to write. This bothered me because the novel’s already half-written. After 42,000 words of novel, what’s a few hundred words of prologue? Why would it be so hard to write a stirring introduction to a story that’s already halfway done?

The problem was expectation. As I noted in “Hit Your Muse With a Rock,” expectation can kill inspiration where it counts most – on paper. As writers, we struggle with two expectations – we expect a certain quality in our words, and we expect a certain ability in ourselves. In good writers, these expectations are not necessarily in agreement, but they are in harmony. The writer expects that he or she can write, and the words produced generally meet the expectation of decent work. But most beginning writers face the problem of low self-esteem coupled with an intense desire to write something good, to write something incredible. The low self-esteem results from lack of practice, and the desire is a natural product of Barnes and Noble. Today, we are surrounded by good books. Even the second-tier authors we rarely hear of are very good writers. As human beings, we feel that we have to match their performance in order to join their ranks.

This expectation of great work kills the creative process. It turns writers into control freaks. We spent hours mulling over the meaning of a single line, lose precious minutes trying to decide between “he said” and “said he.” The momentum of the moment stalls as the process of writing gives way to the process of frustration.

Unfortunately, lesser expectation often creates the same problem. Yesterday, my prologue had little chance of greatness. I wasn’t looking for great – I was looking for an introduction, a way to explain the character who stars in my novel. When the story stalled, I shrugged and walked away. I figured inspiration would come to me, but it didn’t. The expectation that killed this work was a desire to mold the character myself, to control the outcome of this prologue to match the novel. I had turned into a control freak of limited scope, but the effect was equally devastating – the story stopped. The words ran dry. The prologue sat unfinished.

My story needs a prologue, so I’ll start it again. But on the second try, I will remember the cardinal rule of fiction – the best protagonists write themselves.

Now, you’re wondering how I can label this the “cardinal rule.” If I had a dollar for every “first rule of writing” I’ve heard, I wouldn’t need to publish to pay the rent. But the fact is, life is about conflict. Great stories are about conflict. Readers sit riveted because they want to know what happens next, because they can’t predict from page one the outcome of page two. But if you want to keep readers in their seats through page four hundred, you must maintain the same unpredictable tension on every page of the book, whether it’s page one, two, or three-seventy-three.

There are two processes you can use to accomplish this. In the first process, you can carefully plan out a riveting story and then write it. I don’t recommend this. Very few writers can pull it off. This method fails because the inner control freak gets free reign. In the outline, every plot twist seems simply stunning. But in the manuscript, as you’re trying to foreshadow and trying to build tension and trying to insert the critical plot twist – everything just like it says on the outline – the story stagnates. It sounds dry. It’s a lot of trying and not a lot of “let’s see what happens next.”

The second process is better. Start with your character, and then write. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going to write a good story – in many ways, it’s better if you don’t. Pick your favorite fictional protagonist – I’m fond of Jane Eyre, myself – and think about what you enjoyed about that character. Was it the way the character reacted to the world? The words the character said? The way they always managed to do the “right” thing, even if it was unexpected or simply outrageous?

Characters don’t achieve this kind of free-spirited winner-take-all success through outlines. They become flesh-and-blood heroines through their own quirks and their own ways of viewing the world. They become realistic because the author allows the character the freedom to pick what comes next. Stories are about conflict, yes, but they are most riveting when they are about personal conflict, the kind of struggle that rocks the protagonist to her bones.

The prologue I couldn’t finish failed in that regard. I inserted my protagonist, but then I withheld the conflict. I made it a secret. She didn’t know that she was walking into a trap, or that she was about to start her long journey. She had nothing to do but stand and wait.

Readers hate waiting. And it’s a dull theme to write. I grew bored, and the writing stopped. When I start again – from the beginning – the protagonist will know the conflict. She’ll know what she’s fighting for – or at least what she’s fighting against. And I’ll have an idea of what the protagonist will do, but I won’t know. That part’s up to her. As a full-grown character, she has to make decisions. She has to be an adult because that’s what readers want to see – an adult making grown-up decisions regarding her own life, regardless of how twisted the world she’s written into.

So as you go forth and write, remember to ease up on your protagonists. Allow them the freedom to make the choices that you yourself would not make. If the protagonist wants to try something outside your plans for the story, go with it. Try it out. Let the characters speak for themselves. You’ll have more fun, as will your readers.

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Hit Your Muse With a Rock

2008-02-26T12:01:00.000-08:00

There is a very healthy market of books on how to write and – more importantly – how to find inspiration. Every day, frustrated writers struggle with getting their characters on paper – they battle writer’s block and boredom and the conviction that the story isn’t worth writing. They rack their brains for ideas on how to liven the story, how to make it work, how to “find their muse.” And yes, many of them are sitting in the chair, hand on pencil, eyes on the page as they struggle, so it isn’t even an issue of taking the time to write. It’s an issue of making the writing fit the time.

Seriously, when your muse deserts you like this, hit her with a rock.

Blink. A rock? How can I advocate hitting an imaginary goddess of inspiration with a rock?

It’s simple. When a story stalls, that’s your invitation to write whatever comes to mind. You can begin with the most outlandish words you can think of. For example: “Muse, dear, I’m mad at you. I need a good story. Why aren’t you helping me? I’m throwing a brick your way.”

It sounds like a twisted form of on-the-couch therapy, but the key to this technique is that you write as you do it. Writer’s block is so harmful because it stops your desire to write. It halts the pen with thoughts of inadequacy. Hitting your muse with a rock is not the way to start the Great American Novel. What I’m advocating is a way to break that writer’s block. This probably won’t produce words you can use, and anyone looking over your shoulder might wonder at your sanity when the muse writes back with “Oh yeah? A rock? Is that the best you’ve got, writer-boy?” But this technique will get you writing. It will get thoughts from your mind onto the page, reopening the all-important path between eyes and pen.

This technique is actually a modified version of freewriting. Most writers use freewriting entirely off-the-manuscript. They find a fresh scrap of paper, scribble away for fifteen minutes or so to get in the head of their protagonist, and then they return to their typing. Hitting the muse with a rock requires no such interruption. As you sit before the precious manuscript with nothing to say, you duke it out with your muse right there. You type it onto your manuscript wherever it is you happen to be. Sure, the muse holds no real part in the story, but it relieves a lot of stress to throw rocks on paper. It loosens up the manuscript itself. Remember that writer’s block is the result of high expectation for the manuscript coupled with low expectations of your own abilities. Both of these impulses are wrong. A manuscript is never all-important – when you’re still at the stage for writer’s block, you’re sitting before a first or maybe a second draft. The story isn’t done yet. There’s plenty of room for change. Throw some bricks – you can always delete them later. A press of a key or a swipe of the pen restores the original work.

The secret, of course, is that you don’t need to throw bricks. You don’t need to involve your muse. As you develop this technique, you can focus it to meet the needs of your story. I discovered how much fun this can be during National Novel Writing Month, that wild month of the 50,000 word novel. For NaNoWriMo, the only requirement is word count, but getting that word count is hard. A week of writer’s block can be a deathblow to your work. To produce 1,667 words a day during the month of Thanksgiving and Christmas Shopping, every moment counts. You have to be focused and you have to be excited. The fingers must fly. So I began throwing rocks at my protagonists. Rocks, dragons, tanks, even a computer that was allergic to water. I tossed in absurd challenges, ideas that I would have never written had I taken the time to worry about the final product.

Strangely, the story I wrote worked. The protagonists fought back. Parts of the work seemed silly and ridiculous, I kept writing. The audacity of the story kept me in my seat – I never knew what would happen next, but I always knew I could find another rock.

There’s a reason why this technique works. Deep down, every story is about conflict. It’s about a protagonist facing a challenge and learning to overcome. Challenge on the page takes many forms, but you can imagine it as throwing a rock. Remember that your rock can represent any difficulty. It can be the prom dress that doesn’t fit. It can be the spooky neighbor who invites your protagonist to see the windowless basement after dinner. It can be the cute crush who’s too nice and too funny and to perfect for your protagonist to bear thinking about.

How does your protagonist respond to the rock? Does she duck aside, find her own rock, and throw it back at you? Or does she catch it in the stomach and throw up? Don’t think about it – write it. The key to this technique is to write every step of the way. Keep it fun. Pick an unusual rock, something that does not fit with the rest of your story. Has the heroic knight of the quantum order defeated the horrible space dragon? Give him the queen’s baby nephew to keep quiet for an hour. Has your heroine survived budget cuts and layoffs to become the executive vice president? Maybe her boss the vampire invites her to a round of midnight golf.

Remember, the goal here is not to write the Great American Novel. The goal is to break through writer’s block and to keep writing, to get the ideas free-flowing. Sometimes, you may discover an entertaining twist that you enjoy more than the original story. Other times, you’ll get a good laugh, reconnect with your characters, and then pick up from where you left off. The hardest part is letting go. You have to relax, ignore the expectations of greatness, and focus on your eyes and your fingers.

And, when all else fails, feel free to blame your muse. Just beware of the brick she’ll throw back.

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About Ryan Edel