And A Time to Scribble...

Maybe some people are picking this up as a trend, so I will just go with it. I have been talking about a lot of things in my past few posts that diverge from an actual writing process. They've been more like advice on how the written world is different than the real world, and how handwriting some things can affect the creative centers of the brain. So, in keeping with the spirit of things, here's another thing for you as a writer to try, just to see what it does for your process: scribbling.

Now, scribbling has many definitions, including but not limited to just wildly marking up a page with ink or with whatever you choose to write with. When a writer scribbles, it should be very similar but with words. What kind of words? Any words - anything remotely like words. Just applying ink to page, and letting the flow happen. It sounds weird, but I will explain its purpose.

First, it helps to know the rules, which are: no rules. If you get out a legal pad and just start jotting down things that pop into your head, you do not need to start at the top of the page. You do not need to obey the margins, write things left to right, top to bottom, or even in order. the blue-ruled lines across the page are irrelevant and should be ignored. Write words large, small, in cursive or print, whatever comes to mind. The magic of this is that it pushes you to see what is possible outside of all the grammatical, stylistic rules you've taught yourself. Instead of driving within the lines, you are free-wheeling across the Nevada Salt Plains, no boundaries, no restrictions, finding out what you want to do. It's actually exciting once you open yourself up to possibilities.

What should be the final outcome of this? Well, nothing amazing, and likely nothing worth keeping - that's fine. The idea is try to do this freestyle form of writing/play for ten minutes, or fifteen if you are enjoying it. Nobody has to see it, no other eyes but yours ever need explore what you write. It's strictly open season on words for words' sake and nothing else. But after that ten-to-fifteen minute period, end the session with one sentence, written at the bottom of the page, describing in whatever way you wish the experience of free-wheeling across the page and writing things without restriction. This sentence will be the takeaway from all this - the moment that you can look back upon and realize how after you broke all the rules, scribbled random nonsense all over the page or pages, and just poured things onto the page, everything afterward was fine. You created nonsense, broke the rules, and nothing bad happened. You escaped your boundaries, did something weird, wild, and new, and it all worked out. It's a feeling that's hard to describe until you try it and feel the results.

So often we do confine our creativity because something can't/shouldn't/won't be possible in our mind. This is usually because we create our own little boundaries that, if reinforced too much, trap in our creative urges. We lose the urge to explore because practicality overwhelms us. So, now and then we offer ourselves the chance to live free from the rules, throw around our words, and let the creativity flex its muscles. This is what being a creative is all about, and sometimes, it takes a little practice.

Incidentally, this is entirely different from free-verse poetry, although not at much as one might think. However, that's an article for another time.   

And So It Is Written...

Maybe it's a quick tell about my age, but I can read and write in cursive. I have been able to read cursive since I was about four, thanks to my mother diligently teaching me to understand her very elegant handwriting, and at about eight I could write it, although with far less elegance. I eventually developed my own style of semi-legible handwriting, and so started my practice of writing my homework, my journal entries, my everything. Then, one fateful day, my father picked up a used Smith-Corona typewriter to inspire me to do more homework, and that changed everything. Out with the script, in with the 12-point Courier Elite (that's the font old typewriters use). From there, I evolved to keyboards, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now, why did I give everyone this useless history lesson on how I learned cursive? Well, as it turns out, in my various readings I have noticed more and more discussion about the benefits of... not cursive, but writing things by hand instead of typing them. Now, what kind of heresy is this, you might ask. Are these studies done by Luddites? Is it all research funded by Big Pencil and its many industries? How can there be benefits? Computers are far faster, they have built-in spellcheckers and grammar-proofing, they know the margins and even typeset the letters. It does not go unnoticed, btw, that I am in fact creating this post on a computer. So what's the benefit?

Tell me this - have you ever had an idea for writing that just can't wait to pour right out of you? When you start writing, you just can't type fast enough because the creativity is just overpowering? If so, good for you. The pro-handwriting argument, however, suggests that unless we are just overflowing with words, it serves us better to exist within our writing, appreciating and savoring the process of creating as much as the creativity itself. Typing is a blur of activity, often working in fits and starts. Writing something by hand, however, takes an entirely different route through the brain, and that's worth exploring.

When we type, we hit a variety of keys and the corresponding letters appear as designated. At least in word processing, no matter how hard or soft I press the key, the letter is basically the same. Each key feels the same, each letter just a square on the keyboard. The process works, but it uses a part of our operational brain that reproduces activities such as pulling a lever to get a treat. The lever isn't the treat itself, it's a cause-effect process. When we write, however, different parts of the brain kick in because there is a direct connection between our pen or pencil and whatever we are writing on. If we write fast, slow, with anger, intensely, whatever, it shows in our handwriting. Activating different brain functions brings different results, and some of them actually feed into our creativity.

Lastly, and this may sound like a weird thing to boast about, but writing by hand - either cursive or print - slows down our mind and we focus more on the words than the paragraphs. The experience becomes more intimate, our thoughts more concentrated on the details rather than the broad brush of filling the page. And as we create things through this deliberate process, we think about what we are doing and we have the opportunity to consider whether it should be a little better. Our mind is still very fertile and creative, but it is now paying attention to the little things, and those make up the real grit and substance of most works.

Try writing a descriptive paragraph by hand, just to feel the experience. Describe some motionless, unimportant thing in the house - a refrigerator, a couch, a cat - and write seven sentences about it by hand (I apologize in advance for the hand cramps). Feel yourself in that moment, creating something on a simple sheet of paper with a basic pen, and see how it feels to engage in this process in a different way. You don't have to change, you don't have to delete Microsoft Word, just give a try and see how it feels. Try it a few times and you will realize it can be an excellent tool for writing first drafts, or sketching out things when you just need to formulate ideas. Then go ahead and type away if you wish. Just enjoy the process for what it offers.

And don't let my cat see that thing about being unimportant. 

Reading is a Different World

I performed a quiet little experiment during one writing workshop (that none of the participants were ever aware of as far as I know). I set my phone to record the meeting - just the voices - then let it get transcribed, word-for-word, to a document. Now - keeping in mind that I was there and speaking as well - when I read the discussions in written form, they were barely decipherable. I mean, I knew the content and context, but reading it off the page was absolutely brutal. Why? Well, they were talking, not writing, but their spoken voice was on the page.

You might be asking yourself whether it really makes that much of a difference between something someone said and writing something that was said. The difference is amazing, though probably not all that surprising. The difference, surprisingly, has very little to do with what they say as much as how they say it. More to the point, it has to do with the fact that "natural" speaking might sound fine but it reads very unnaturally. 

Think of it this way. I am a fan of the Law & Order franchise and its billion spin-offs. Every week, I get to see a nice legal procedural, watch the prosecution and defense have their back and forth, and usually a dramatic twist is thrown in as well. It's entertaining television. However, if you have ever seen a real trial, or compromised and seen a real crime documentary, you realize nothing is really that clean-cut. The legal counsels is full of average people, as are the defendant, the prosecution witnesses, the judge, the jury - every single person is just... a person. They do not have polished appearances, well-scripted dialogue, or magnetic presences. Basically, they are just like you and me - real people - and not the well-lit, properly made-up people on television.

Now, I am not downplaying real people or saying that television performances are better than reality television or documentaries - they just have their place. In my little workshop experiment, I noted how about one-half of everyone's sentences were run-ons, fragmented, used bad grammar, and/or were stuffed with "uh," "well," and "like" (including my own sentences). I understood every one of these lines as spoken at the time because they were filled with facial gestures, tonal inflections, and so on that filled in the cracks and made it a complete experience. In the written world, we lose that advantage and have to depend on clean dialogue so people don't get lost by reading all the "...well, um, it's like, y'know..." and trying to parse out the meaning.

This doesn't mean we can't give speeches a little variability - throw in some "ain't" or "y'all" to mix it up a little - but we should recognize that the written conversation should not sound similar to how we really speak. In a perfect piece of writing, a conversation should sound like how we think we heard everything afterward, with our brain editing out the stuttering, stammering, excessive words, and so on. Let it be clean in that regard, and save "real dialogue" for the documentaries.

And yes, it's okay to use the passive voice within dialogue. Just keep it inside the quotes.   

Rough Drafts and Tough Drafts

Writing can be many things for creatives, and is often more than one thing at any given time. Writing, for me, can be an exercise, a challenge, a puzzle to be solved, and often provides some form of catharsis. If I accomplish more than one of these feats during a writing session, I feel like I've won the game of writing. However, to win, I also need to know what my goal is - sometimes it's a victory just to put words on a page, other times it's all about finishing a particular piece. My current project has a goal in mind - finishing a first draft. However, this rough draft isn't the win, because it's also a tough draft.

Allow me to explain. Today, September 5th, is my mother's birthday. She was born 87 years ago today. However, this is the first birthday since her death, so instead of it being a time to celebrate with some cake and stuff, it's a much more somber day, and I don't like somber. Therefore, my goal was to try to seek some form of catharsis by writing about her and our complex relationship in one form or another as a way of remembering her. This is a case where one can claim victory merely by creating something. However, writing about my mother after her passing is not easy - therefore, this becomes a tough draft to write.

The tough drafts are far more difficult to create than just a rough draft, because the real challenge is digging deep enough within yourself to find that something worth pouring out your heart for. For first-time writers, sometimes it's a win just to write a simple confession of some thing never before spoken, or acknowledge something that is difficult to say out loud. "Growing up in a broken home really sucked," would make for a great reveal for first-time writers, especially if they had never admitted such a thing in the first place. However, future projects would require deeper revelations, more intense feelings, and an increasing reluctance to face up to the difficult truths (the drafts aren't called "tough" for now reason). 

The first tough draft I wrote about my mother's passing was simply saying that she died. Not "passed away" or "drew her last breath" but died, D-I-E-D. Using such a cold, absolute term was difficult to commit to words, and even more so to read to myself afterward, but it forced me to confront, head-on, a truth I did not want to face. The simple phrase, "My mother died last week" became my own tough draft, and that was all that needed to be said. It was, in that regard, a final draft as well.

Now, the one last thing about writing the tough draft - it's yours to do with as you wish. Nobody has to edit it, read it, see it, or even know it exists. Its purpose is merely the challenge of you writing it, then seeing this cold-hearted truth for what it is. Anything after that is up to you, because once you create the tough draft, you've already won.

Happy birthday, Mom!     

It Doesn't Mean A License to Rhyme

I made a promise to my loyal readers (and all the other ones) that I would cool down on the posts about the virtues of writing poetry as a way of enhancing your overall writing skills. And, even though I still firmly believe that the art of conveying your thoughts and feelings through specific structure, meter, and rhyming patterns is a great way to sharpen your literary skills, I am keeping to my word and not writing a poetry piece this time. Mostly. I am, however, going to discuss a subject that hits close to the target: poetic license.

Now, here we have an odd contradiction. The classical forms of poetry had a meter you needed to follow, rules that had to be obeyed, and a structure that turned a particular poem into a sonnet, a limerick, or what have you. Conversely, poetic license is one of the ways we, as writers, are allowed to deviate from our pre-defined structure in order to make an artistic point. Since the "poetic" part of license can also be replaced with "dramatic," "artistic," "creative," and a series of other expressive words, it doesn't have to push all the responsibility into poetry. However, since poetry has so many rules, breaking them for effect is a good way to show how this function works.

An example of using this license in a non-poetry form would be, for example, to write a particular character's perspective in the passive voice to emphasize how truly boring this character is. No editor would recommend this, but if an author found a way to sneak it into the narrative, it could be effective and therefore, violate the rules against passive voice for dramatic effect. I have read a work (that unfortunately I cannot remember) which involved a very superficial salesman, and every description from his view was a hackneyed cliché. Everything came off as a bad sales pitch - but only in his narrative voice. He spoke like any other character, but the use of tired, worn-out descriptions spoke volumes about who the character was and how he thought. Would an editor like that in a first novel? Doubtful. Would it be ingenious? Definitely.

Over the past few decades since the advent of desktop publishing becoming so mainstream, another form of poetic license has been with choices of fonts and even point sizes as forms of expression. Depending on how these things are done, they can be clever, like using a strikethrough to represent someone's self-editing, or they can be silly, like someone's quotes always being in Comic Sans. Try it if you dare, but make sure it has purpose and meaning, and isn't just something you do just because you have a bunch of fonts.

Poetic license is an opportunity to make a statement by breaking the rules. This has been done across the spectrum, from Robert Frost to Lenny Bruce, and when it's done with purpose and intention, it gets noticed. When done improperly... well, it just looks like you don't know what you are doing. 

I will be taking Monday off to do Labor Day things. My next post will be on September 5th.    

Writing and Common Excuses Not To

If you qualify the term, "writer," as someone who has written and published some literature, then I can proudly say I know dozens of writers. If, however, you open up the definition of writer to include those people who have a great idea for a book, play, poem, etc., but just haven't gotten around to actually creating it, that tally rockets into the thousands. Now, I actually consider a writer someone who writes as a preferred form of communication for thoughts and ideas, which is an entirely different discussion. So, for now, let's look at the difference between those first two categories, and why people don't graduate from the big group to the narrower one.

"I really don't have the skills to say what I want to say." That's a fair assessment for an initial diagnosis, but it doesn't hold water in the long run. I played Little League baseball in my youth, and maybe two kids who I saw play really had what it took to go pro. (One went pro, but in basketball, the other died before graduating high school). The rest of those kids - myself included - had minimal talent but played in an attempt to get better. They found their strengths, worked on their weaknesses, and built up their game. Even I did, until I realized the weakness in my game was all the kids started hitting puberty and growing above five feet tall while I stayed a little pipsqueak. However, the point is, nobody has the skills straight out of the chute, which is why we write plenty of other things, working our way to where we can tell the tale we want to.

"I just don't have the time." I wrote my first novel, The Book of Cain, in 40-minute intervals on the train to and from work, assuming my joker friends didn't join me for the trip. I wanted to tell the story, so I made a little regular time to create. It took a while but it was worth it. And in case my case doesn't quite tip the scales, New York Times Bestseller Mary Kubica wrote her first book shortly after having her first child. Imagine having a child - knowing full well that those little darlings feed on your spare time - and still arranging a little time in the morning to write before the morning crying starts. Mary Kubica did that because she wanted to tell that story. She's told many more since that.

"I'll get around to it at some point." This one I hear a lot, and it really grates my nerves, today in particular. One of my longstanding friends - a journalist by trade and very deep into news and industry writing - always had a penchant for the theater. He performed in at least five different Shakespeare plays, and probably more stuff as well. However, he wanted to create something. He wanted to be the playwright, not the performer, if only once. Plenty of times over drinks, I would tell him to get started on it - it wasn't going to write itself. With gin-induced confidence I would get on his case to get started, to write an outline, a character sketch, a something that would get him moving. "I'll get around to it," he would answer.

My friend died this week, entirely unexpectedly. He never got around to writing his play, though I am sure he thought he had the time. But none of us have a guarantee on that.

"Everyone has a reason to not do something" as the saying goes. However, it just takes that first step forward to change the entire trajectory toward being productive and heading toward making that thing in your head come to life. At that point, you have done something that few have accomplished, many have wanted to do, and some never had the chance to complete.     

Details vs. Uncertainty

I don't think I've ever mentioned in this space how I know a famous actress. It's a funny story (not funny-haha but funny-unusual). We met back in 2008 on a commuter plane flight to a regional airport. The plane was a 19-seat Beech 1900, and we sat across the aisle from each other. As the plane flew over the Rockies, we both discovered that this would be a very turbulent flight, as was often the case in smaller planes, though this one was particularly bad. We made small-talk across the narrow aisle just to take our mind off of the bumping and bouncing, and discovered we were both flying into town for the same reason - a wedding (I was with the groom's family, she was a friend of them both). That was a great ice-breaker, and made for an easier flight. During the days running up to the wedding we talked quite a bit, and stayed in touch after everyone got married and flew back to civilization.

Now, the real question is, did you believe me, and what tipped the scales? After all, you as the reader have to draw a line somewhere, but what determines that? After all, I didn't give the actress's name, nor the name of where we flew from or to, other than us flying over the Rockies. However, the tiny little plane we were on can be verified, and anyone who has flown in smaller planes knows those flights can get rough. The scenario is plausible, and nothing happened that was over-the-top. What makes us choose truth versus fiction?

Often, that's what a good story toys with, regardless of whether it was actually truth or fiction. If the reader knows for certain that a story either happened or didn't, they settle into one camp or the other - acceptance or just enjoying a good yarn. However, if the reader does not know for certain whether this story is factual, they pay more attention. Maybe they want to look for plot points that would discredit the story or things that validate other facts they are aware of. In short, they are engaged with the story.

The secret (or at least one of them) regarding keeping the reader suspended over the chasm between truth and fiction lies in the details. For whatever relevance they might carry, details lean the needle toward truth, but they don't confirm anything. Yes, the Beech 1900 is an actual plane that was in service in 2008, but that doesn't prove anything. Turbulent flights over the Rockies are also a thing, and anyone who knows my family history knows my brother got married in Telluride, Colorado, in 2008. These details start taking the story into the solid story camp, and make up for the big question of whether or not I really met and talked with a famous actress.

The other thing that makes stories convincing are believable interactions. Striking up a conversation to get through a rough plane ride is a simple, unpresuming event that, when mentioned, gives the story a tinge of relatability. People often talk in planes - trust me, those conversations can get loud when I'm trying to sleep. The familiar anecdote is always important because the reader can associate with it.

Now, for those people who are still not convinced about this story being true, I offer you this: It's kind of true, kind of false. Yes, I did fly into Telluride in a Beech 1900, and it was a bumpy flight. I did meet a famous actress while there that week, and yes, we talked. We did take the same flight back to Denver, but I have not talked to her since. The point is, I extracted details of the factual part of the story, mixed them with just enough comfortable, familiar interactions, and came up with a story that kept the reader guessing until the end (or perhaps afterward). Most good suspense stories incorporate this blend of facts and subtle omissions to make an interesting tale because the reader becomes a participant in determining the story's believability. Whether it actually happened becomes academic.

Incidentally, did I mention that my stepmother is actually still in touch with that actress? Funny story...