The Tough Question

"So, how's your writing going?"

Every time I get asked that, I think, "Oh, kill me now." Not that I have a death wish, but open-ended questions like that hit me in two places at once. First and foremost, it reminds me that for the very moment I am being asked that question, I am not writing. I'm talking with people, at a party, or usually doing something social and the subject comes up. At that point, I've pretty much checkmated myself because I invite that very question to occur as a part of the ongoing small-talk - yet another reason I hate that question. However, I still feel this passive sense of guilt because I had a choice to either write or socialize, and I chose the latter. Now I would pay for it. However, that's not the worst part.

The real irksome part of getting hit with that question is it usually gets me to ask myself how my writing is going. I start a self-inventory process of the things I have written lately, anything I have running around my brain that I really want to write, what I am avoiding writing, and all these other writing questions. (Yes, I clearly overthink certain things.) But while I overthink everything, the question invariably comes up - how am I progressing as a writer? Am I progressing as a writer? What can I do to make more progress as a writer? (Wow, do I overthink things.)

The questions I end up asking myself may sound borne out of insecurity, but they do serve a purpose. Whenever we question ourselves as writers, the best thing to do is have a handy go-to move to put us back on track. One of my favorites is to look at old writing, just to see how far I actually have progressed. I can open up a ten-year-old document and do a quick word check on how many times I used, "that," "was," or "were," just to see where I wrote in a sloppy, passive manner. While I can't do that during whatever social event I attended that  led to getting asked that question, but it's still a good way to remedy doubts.

Of course, one of the sure-fire ways is always to just talk about the last thing you wrote, and let yourself get pulled back into your writing process. If your recent work was something as simple as a story of the last moments of a ham sandwich, remind yourself about whatever flared up in your mind and inspired you to write that story, to commit it to words instead of it just taking up a few neurons. Recreate whatever drove you to write, and express it in full. After all, you are a writer, so talk about writing.

However, the one thing that you should always keep in your back pocket is a little reminder. Even if you don't feel like much of a writer because you are going through writer's block, or caught in a plot contradiction, or getting those Act Two Blues, these are what writers go through. These happen, and will happen again as long as you continue to write. They are the unspoken moments writers go through, just like the war stories that never get told because they don't carry the drama of the exciting stories. So as long as you are writing, as long as you are living the life and working the processes you have developed and are developing, it's a pretty simple question to answer.

"It's going great, thank you."     

"When You Get Lost, You Learn"

The title of today's piece comes from an African proverb that basically says the same thing but with a few extra words. The reason I decided to lead with this is that for the past couple of weeks, I have been quite lost as a writer. It is difficult to explain, but my creative guide has been very much asleep, and I have been adrift in the sense that I haven't been able to find the route to creating anything. You know how I say it's important to have a bunch of routines to foster a creative environment? Well, those haven't been working. I have been very much in the midst of a strange land, and I didn't know the route to get me back to that place.

I have seen this with plenty of other writers, and indeed it is different than writer's block. When we are blocked, we know what we want to create but we can't grasp whatever it might take to get us from where we stand to where we want to be. This kind of lost feeling is like waking up and not having access to all those tools that allow us to create the bizarre monsters known as out writing. Nothing seems possible at that point, not as if we are back at square one, but as if we were in a maze where we no longer knew our objective. This can hit in the middle of writing an epic novel, or a poem, or anything really. But when we are stuck in this space, what do we do? How do we escape the maze when we don't even know how we got there?

This is where the proverb comes in. We learn the most when we are not surrounded by the familiar, by the known. When we are in unfamiliar territory, everything might be scary and different, but it is in fact, new. It can be taken as a terrifying situation, or it can be taken as a chance to discover a new world full of strange, fascinating things. Indeed, when we are lost, we are away from the familiar, but if we let it, that can be a liberating experience. Without presumptions and rules set for us to follow, we are free to do whatever we want. We can learn all about how this new world of the lost works, and see what it has to offer.

I read somewhere that one of the secrets to keeping an active mind was trying new things periodically, and doing this in many different ways. Break routines now and then, even if it's as simple as trying a new restaurant on occasion, taking a different route home once a month, seeing a movie that you would normally have no interest in. Do these things with no guarantee that they will be new and fascinating experiences - just accept that they will be different, and opportunities for fresh, new experiences. That's all they have to be, so try them out for size.

And when it comes to writing, I learned that once I got past the feeling that I was stuck in a new, weird, maze and changed that to the opportunity to explore an entirely new, different kind of world that happened to be maze-shaped, my writing issues crumbled. I adventured, I explored, and I didn't get lost because I didn't think I had to be anywhere but in that space in that moment. Once I appreciated that space, I started writing again. And I am glad to be back.    

What's In An Albatross?

A few disclaimers about this post: First, this is not an anatomy lesson, and no harm has or will come to any birds whatsoever in the making of this piece. Secondly, this is not intended to be used in any way that would harm an albatross or any other of our fine avian friends. Lastly, just go with the whole albatross discussion, and see what it's actually about.

Sometimes, when a fellow writer feels bogged down in their writing and can't get themselves into a good space to be creative, I offer them the albatross challenge. In short, start writing about an albatross. Start describing it through the senses, but really don't be afraid to investigate and go deep into its particular smell or the feeling of its coarse, thick feathers. (Describing how it tastes is up to your imagination - please do not eat an albatross just to help your descriptive process). 

Now, this might seem like a simple task, but the challenge is to take it further. What does the voice of the albatross sound like? Not its call across the waters, but if it could talk, what would it sound like? Would it have a British accent? Would it use a lot of slang? What would it think about how people sounded with their smaller throats and beaks? Start challenging yourself to think of it as a unique entity, and how that might stand apart from what we typically think about these birds. Since there's no right or wrong to this exercise, you have the right to play around with it. Have fun with the exercise. Give your albatross a name - it should probably be Steve but that's your call. Then get to know Steve.

At this point, your mind should be travelling away from what we think about the typical albatross, which in fairness, is probably not very well known anyway. At this point, you can write down the secret world of these birds, their culture and habits, the immense efforts they take to make sure nobody ever finds out how they can speak English (and probably many other languages), and the heavy burden they carry in concealing everything about their special ways. God forbid if any human accidentally stumbled upon the secret kingdom of the albatross homeland. Would the birds rise up? Finally let the truth be told? Come out and demand a place amongst civilized society?

As you can tell, this exercise has very little to do with the fine albatross. This is merely a deep dive into committing yourself to writing about whatever circulates through your brain, and exploring it without the confines of annoying things like reality. Whenever we are hung up with our writing, it's usually because we have hit some kind of perceived boundary and do not have a good way to get through it. Usually the boundary is nothing more than some annoying obstacle that has no power over us, but we focus on it rather than the project of writing. So when these obstacles appear, your only responsibility is to find a way to break yourself from known concepts and explore the unknown spaces. And a good way to do that is with an albatross.

BTW - I chose an albatross for this example because it was alphabetically the first one I could think of. Your bird may vary.    

Screwing Up vs. Failing Up

Writing is a parade of mistakes and rewrites, and even that doesn't cover all the things that can go wrong. A three-hundred-page manuscript can fall apart with just a few bad pages at the end. Many well-intended essays can go completely sideways with a few poorly-placed words. And yes, even when all the words are the right ones, sometimes a piece can completely miss its target. This is a terrible fate for a piece of writing, but it's not a judgment of our work as much as it is an opportunity for us to do better.

Some of the more famous screw-ups have been very well-intentioned and purposeful, but they just ended up going in the wrong direction because the weight of the words were taken the wrong way. There was a very famous book written at the turn of the last century (yes, over 100 years ago) that was a scathing indictment of all the failings of capitalism while also backing the virtues of socialism. Surprisingly, this book is still standard reading in many schools, and was responsible for a lot of legislation getting passed that would change our way of living forever. Can you name it?

Well, chances are, you can't name the book by the way I described it - a pro-socialism book - but that's what the author intended it to be. It showed through a narrative tale about how a family was destroyed by an industry that exploited both its workers and customers, and our main character eventually supports a socialist cause that sympathizes with his cause. However, its writing about commercial exploitation was quite vivid and disturbingly drawn out, while the political side was actually quite boring. See the problem? The boring part was supposed to be the big hit of the book, but it didn't get the readers' attention. What drew all the views was the graphic descriptions of the meat-processing industry in the early 1900s. Yes, the book I refer to is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It inspired the famous Meat Safety Act of 1906, and did very little to rally the socialist cause. As Sinclair said later on, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Oops.

Sinclair's folly, however, should not be a sign that he screwed up. As a staunch socialists, his motives were obvious, but his writing persuaded a different demographic to take action. The laws that followed did put controls on wildly out-of-control exploitation by businesses in the industry, but it was a far cry from what he hoped. In this regard he didn't screw up - he failed up. He didn't achieve his goal but he still wrote something that changed the world a little bit.

When we write, we need to give ourselves the liberty to fail up - to miss our target but still produce something impressive and thought-provoking. Not everyone who reads your work - be it a book like The Jungle or an essay or poem - is going to walk away with the same impression. Hopefully, you will get your message to the intended audience, but even if you miss, you still reach people. As long as you write with conviction, your words will be persuasive. Just give yourself a gut-check now and then to make sure the words you write match the statement you want to make. Be honest and observant of how you convey your message, and you won't screw up.       

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...    

Talking to the Reader

On August 30th, I will be speaking at the Park Forest Library at the Local Authors' Fair. I love getting a chance to talk with people who have read my works, but I really love getting a chance to talk with potential writers. My talk, "So You Want To Be A Writer...," will be all about the journey to being a writer, but deep inside, I will be quietly thrilled that I am also talking to my readers. And that got me thinking - what are the best ways for a writer to talk to the reader in their stories?

I am sure that more than a few of you are familiar with the Marvel character Deadpool of comic and movie fame. With no offense intended to Ryan Reynolds, for this particular piece I will mostly focus on the Deadpool of the comics, even though the movie version has the same mannerisms. The point is, Deadpool has this habit of talking directly to the reader, either with comments about our world, some reminder that he exists within a graphic novel, etc. This is called, "breaking the fourth wall," and it is what the character is known for - along with abundant gratuitous violence. Deadpool's habit of breaking the fourth wall was pretty unique when he was first introduced, but this quirk is far from new.

While I don't know the origin, breaking the fourth wall goes way back before my time - even Shakespeare used it with a device known as an aside. This is when a character on the stage would turn to the audience and make a deliberate, informative quip about the scene that was unspoken but brought something new for the audience to appreciate. Sometimes it was the character's insight, sometimes a statement about the hidden implications of an action. In any case, this device gives additional detail to the audience, be they reading the play or watching it performed on stage.

Now, for us writers, how can we talk directly to the reader? Well, we can write a story in the second-person, which is written like the main character is telling the story to the reader - a one-sided discussion of a series of events, perhaps even with the reader assumed to be part of the story. The Edgar Allen Poe classic, The Tell-Tale Heart, is also a way to do this, where the narrator is telling the story directly to the reader, trying to convince the reader of his own sanity. These stories speak directly to the reader, but are difficult to fit into a longer-form story.

Probably the most common, and the simplest way to talk to the reader is to get the reader involved with a character, then explore the character's thoughts, motivations, and most importantly, their doubts. This can create a form of engagement that lets a story remain in the first- or third-person, but quietly prompt the reader to think about a particular situation and consider their feelings about it.

Consider this piece of writing about a person trying to consider someone else's motives:

"I thought about the way Steve acted at the bar last night and different thoughts went through my mind. Perhaps Steve had too much to drink last night and let things get carried away. Maybe Steve just needed to blow off some steam and took it too far. I thought Steve had his act together, but now I  more to consider."

This gives us the inside view of our character's thought process, and informs us about the issues at hand, but does it really talk to the reader? It discusses issues but the reader remains emotionally at arm's-length. Now consider this rewrite:

"I thought about the way Steve acted at the bar last night and different thoughts went through my mind. Did Steve let things get carried away because he was drunk? Was Steve blowing off some steam and let it go too far? I thought Steve was cool - have I been wrong about Steve all this time?"

When these observations and considerations get turned into questions, the reader gets challenged as well. The reader now feels prompted to find an answer for themselves, even as the story goes on. In the reader's mind, they are thinking about just how they feel about Steve, and they allow this to affect their feelings as they read on.

Setting Steve aside, this is how we can talk to the reader without actually breaking the fourth wall. Questions that interrogate the character from inside also target the reader, and bring them closer to the story. The reader and the character might not even come up with the same answers, but now the reader has an opinion about the whole Steve situation, and they are further invested in the story. At that point, the writer has accomplished a big part of their mission - engaging the reader on another level. So, if there's a need to get the audience closer, tricks like that are subtle ways of deepening the engagement.

And so you know, Steve was clearly being a dick that night. No doubt about it.  

   

What A Writer Does

 I have said it on several occasions, and I will say it again: The main thing you need to do to be a writer is simply write. Write down things and stuff. Write down poems, describe people and items around the house. Write up a bunch of things that you want to do, see, touch, and why these are important. The Being a writer is about communicating through use of words the world around you. It's not that difficult, and once you get into the habit of doing it, you can call yourself a writer.

Now, I usually know the next statement. "Yes, technically, that makes me a writer - a person who writes. But how do I move up from being a writer to being... you know... a writer-writer. When is it more than just the act of writing? That's the real question - people want to know when they will be a person who takes words and creates something meaningful and moving with them. When can a person be the one who can give someone the gift of a story, and when the recipient receives it, they will treasure it? When does the magic start?

To find that, let's start with the different tiers of write. The first levels involve being basically a reporter. No, I am not implying or suggesting that news reporters and their ilk are low-level writers. I am merely saying that when we first start writing about things, we start writing about its basics: What is it? Where is it? We go through the basic who-what-where-when-why-how of identifying whatever we are writing about. This gives the reader a good feel for the subject at hand, but it is sterile, distant and unfeeling. Even a wild thing like a vivid, surrealistic dream will seem less-than-fantastic at this level. That kind of reporting identifies the subject or topic, but little else.

The next steps for the writer-in-the-making are about having an opinion or specific feeling about whatever they are writing about. In this regard, they install an emotion into the subject. For someone writing about an old car, the next step is to attach something to it that is beyond form and function. Is the car ugly or clunky? Does it chug annoyingly down the road or does the rasping of the tailpipe against the road grate on every nerve? Is it painted in a tired, lifeless gray or a loud, offensive orange? What makes that car stand out from the rest of the world? What makes it worth writing about versus every and any other item you see?

The biggest step is now engagement. This is where the writer finds the tone in themselves they want to use to communicate their feelings about the object. The first tier is writing about the item, the next tier is feeling something for the item, and finally the big step involves finding a voice that expressed those feelings. A voice is a broad brush, and can express both love and anger in the same tone. Finding one's voice requires bringing all of that writing through your emotional mind like an dirty, old Chevy going through a car wash. Voice turns writing into expression, not just about the subject but about the author as well. At this point, it's beyond communication because it appeals to the audience on more than one level. At this point, you are a writer-writer.

How long does it take? Well, how long you got? Or, more to the point, how much can you write? There are a lot of voices to discover, ways to express your interests and passions, and different kinds of cars to wash - so to speak. The main part is that it's an ongoing journey where you only stop progressing when you stop moving forward. So start writing, and really throw yourself into it if you want to get there faster.

Oh - and feedback helps. Get into workshops, have friends read your stuff, get critiques from outside sources. They can be harsh, but they provide you with growth and they help you be vulnerable, which is a priceless strategy in opening yourself toward the higher tiers. But most importantly, keep on writing.     

Radical Writing Still Needs a Few Rules

Rules. They're everywhere. Governments make them, parents make them, societies and cultures make them, and we make our own rules as well. And, as I have endlessly mentioned on this blog, there are rules for writing. Of course, just like all those other categories of rules, there also comes a time and place to break them (Disclaimer: I do not recommend breaking government rules). Sometimes we step out of those social and cultural norms, we go against our own best beliefs, and so on. We do the same thing in writing - we learn the rules, then figure out how to break them for full effect. This is the radical writing that can make reading interesting. However, it's not just breaking the law for entertainment's sake, and - believe it or not - you still need to follow other rules.

Proper adjective order

I've edited five manuscripts this year, each one a different length, style, and genre, and I guarantee you that none of them followed the same rules of style (Ultimately, they all answered to my editing rules, but the author has control after that). Depending on which editing conventions you prefer, you can choose the style pallet of MLA, AP, or any other that you stumble upon. They have different rules for the Oxford Comma, how to punctuate, and what gets capitalized or hyphenated. This is good to know and follow for consistency's sake.

(At my previous job, the company had its customized, time-honored gospel of style, which still, oddly, contradicted itself in various things such as the proper spelling of the word, "Euro-zone" - the hyphen was not always there, and sometimes it was two words, sometimes one.)

I bring up the company example to showcase the primary rule about breaking rules: If you go against convention, go against it consistently. If you capitalize titles, do it consistently and not just when you remember that's how you want to do things. when you list your adjectives, give them a marching order and follow it. And so help me, if you decide to go against colloquial references and be brutally detailed in your editing, then do it proudly, without shame. Example: Most people who love The Beatles would say, "The Beatles are my favorite group!" Grammatically, this is wrong. The Beatles is one group - singular - and it should be, "The Beatles is my favorite group!" Say that aloud a few times and it sounds just wrong. However, it is very much grammatically correct. Local convention, however, would use the plural incorrectly and everyone (present company excepted) would be cool with it. This is where you have to be consistent - either resort to what sounds right or go with grammatical purity (either is fine), but stick to it afterward.

Other opportunities to break the rules will come up, and you will have a choice to make. All I ask, from the desk of a humble editor, is to please be consistent with it. I am prepping for another manuscript review soon, and another set of rules to follow or break, and I hope they take this wisdom to heart.

    

A Few Comments About the Old Days

One of the many things I enjoy about the writing workshops I attend is the wide and varied observations I receive about whatever I bring for review. Whether it's a poem, an excerpt from a novel, an essay, short story, whatever - I get the advantage of a bunch of readers seeing it as something new and (hopefully) fresh, and providing insights I might otherwise overlook. This is even more helpful when I write stories from the deep, dark past that I call my life.

Now, you might ask yourself, "How can someone else help you write stories about yourself? You know the story far better than them, right? Maybe they should just take a seat and listen." Well, that first part is true, but while I know the story better than them, they need to be able to understand the story just from what I write. This is a difficult trick, and even more so when my job is not just to tell a story but to recall a particular era in my life and communicate it to them as vividly as possible.

Case in point: My current work in progress (WIP) involves a character going through life's challenges back in the 1990s, with flashbacks to the 1980s. Well, the storytelling is its own task. However, along with telling the story, I also need to give the reader the feeling of the 1990s in whatever way is best communicated. Do I need to talk about the Clinton presidency? Act out the Macarena? Have the characters argue about the movie, Pulp Fiction? Well, these things wouldn't hurt as long as they are properly incorporated into my WIP and don't stand out awkwardly as little timestamps for the reader. However, that's not the only complication.

With any dated reference, there also has to be a context explaining them in a way where people unfamiliar with the reference would still get the gist of what I was talking about. If, say, I made reference to the Macarena, I would have to do it in a way that tells any and every reader that this was a dance-craze in the US in the late 1990s that was a common reference even if not everyone knew how to do it. Readers who weren't even born in the 20th century would be able to understand this point well enough to incorporate the information into their understanding of the story, even if they still can't do the elaborate series of moves the dance requires.

I received this advice at a writing workshop when someone suggested I make reference in my WIP to a minor celebrity of the 1990s that everyone my age would know about (I'll leave the name out for reasons that would be obvious if I included it). Other people agreed, but some people pointed out that they had no idea who we were referring to. This was the teachable moment: If I were to include this celebrity's name, it would have to be in a way that included their claim to fame, thus informing younger readers about the salience of that reference. At that point, it gets a little tricky, and risks diverging from the story.

The reason I bring this up is as a reminder that stories in a particular era are far more rewarding when that era comes with all the trimmings and all the references of the time. When the reader not only reads about events in the late 1990s but feels the presence of that time, they engage with the writing on another level, and appreciate learning about minor celebrities who they might never have heard about in their regular life. And as I've said before, when a writer engages the reader on an additional level, they've done their job and they've won over the reader.

Okay, it was Lorena Bobbitt. The reference was about Lorena Bobbitt. Happy now? 

  

What Kind of Story Is It?

"How do I know if my story is just a short story, or if it might be a novel?" I get that question every now and then at my writing workshop, and it's valid to a point. Sometimes, we all get ideas about some project we want to take on, but a part of us wonders just what the final product will be like. Will a drawing be just a sketch, or a full painting? Will a poem just be a limerick or ten pages of beautiful prose? All creatives might go through a stage where they prepare to create something, but are not sure what the finished product will ultimately be. This uncertainty is common, and often can get in our way of actually taking on the task. Therefore, there is only one way to find out.

Start writing.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am, amongst other things, an avid bicyclist. I cycle mostly for distance and pleasure, rarely for speed. When I head out on a ride, I usually have a destination picked out, I know how much time it will take for a round trip, and how much water and rest I might need along the way. However, sometimes I just feel like getting outside. I don't necessarily know where I want to go or what I want to see, I just need to ride. This is similar to the hang-up of the writer wondering about the size of their story. The more they wonder, they less they actually create. So when I feel the urge to get out and ride, I don't concern myself with the destination. I just grab a water bottle and go.

Along that same vein, if my creative nerve gets tickled, I don't always know what that is going to become. Will it be a poem, a painting, a story, a song? What I do know, however, is that some idea has gotten under my skin and planted itself firmly in my awareness, and I need to act upon it to feel like I am doing it justice. It doesn't have to be a full concept or an outlined frame for a story. It can be boiled down to something very simple: "A monkey's favorite color," "happy lampposts," or "full-contact checkers." Do any of those have potential to be a full-fledged novel? Who knows? I don't know, but if I start writing about one of those, I might just discover some creative thread that turns the idea into something big.

Now, it's always worth noting that creations that emerge from wild ideas such as those can often grow into big piles of nothing. We write about a monkey and its favorite color, and nothing really catches fire in our minds. This is fine. This answers the question of, "What is this?" It's nothing - move on. Keep the writing in a file to perhaps revisit later, and go back to being a creative type. There's nothing wrong with this. The big mistake is not doing anything with it. Letting an idea wither on the vine does not do justice to the idea, and definitely does not do justice to the creative process.

And, as a side note, you should also know when to stop. If some little idea triggers you to write 300-400,000 words, you might actually have a few books on your hands. Or, perhaps, you have a real good idea to work with. In either case, keep on writing.      

The Secret Lives of Characters

While digging through a few boxes of family heirlooms and miscellany, I came across a few secret artifacts that surprised me. The first was a Little Black Book. Not just a little black book, but my father's Little Black Book containing the names, numbers, and pertinent information of various friends and contacts from his days right after leaving the Army. And, indeed, there were the names of at least a few girlfriends - including a listing under my mother's name (her maiden name). And amongst my mother's stuff, I found the class picture of her and her friends from second grade, including a friend she remained close to for the rest of her 86 years. I also discovered that my mother's nickname was "Giggles." Alas, why didn't I find this out sooner so I could hold that one over her head for a while?

All this is the introduction to a very simple point: in my life, my mother and father each held a very important role in my life: Parent. I knew them primarily through that lens - they were the couple that bore and raised me, taught me the things and stuff in life, and readied me to look down both barrels of being a grown-up. Most traits and aspects I attached to them were channeled through that conduit - something relating to being my parent. Therefore, sometimes it can feel a little odd to come to the cold, hard realization that my father dated women before even meeting my mother, and my mother was once a little girl that answered to Giggles. 

At the point when I made these discoveries, a strange thing happened. My parents transformed from these beings whose sole purpose in life was to raise me, and they became actual people. They became deep and real, Not just Mom and Dad but Carolyn and Jerry. I saw them outside of that pipeline of parents, and even conceived of how they lived lives very much like my own at one point. They horsed around, they had friends and got into trouble, they did odd jobs and had funny stories from them. They were full-fledged people.

When we write, we often know our characters through the filter of how they relate to the story. For our mystery, we might know our main lead is a detective who is a two-fisted drinker, good with a gun, great with the ladies, and short on temper. Or maybe for our horror story, the lead is a first-grade teacher with a dark secret that now threatens every child in the class. This is a great start, but out of respect for the story, we should ask more from our characters. We should explore who they are when they are not the protagonist. Do they have their own Little Black Books? Nicknames from second grade? 

Everyone who I have ever met has a favorite color, food, book, and song, and they can tell you exactly what it is and why they chose that one. If your characters are to be that real, at the very least you should know and understand their inner workings, their details, before you go too far with them. Play around with their thoughts, ideas, and motivations, and discover them as real people. Real people are so much more fun to write about.

But hopefully you will never see your mother's name in your father's Little Black Book.     

How Important is Genre?

We all have our preferences when it comes to reading, and we can all be picky at times. Even the more open-minded readers might hesitate if there's a story before them that is in a style they just don't click with. I will read most anything Stephen King writes, and I will hesitate at the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It's nothing about them personally, it's just that I prefer reading certain a genre more than others. (Though I literally could not finish The House of the Seven Gables. Sorry, Nate.) However, genre often comes with bias, and sometimes, as writers, we need to consider whether we want to steer our writing to fit into that genre.

To broaden this idea out, let's look at action movies. This category is fairly well-known, and comes with a lot of packaged assumptions. We know that character depth will be limited, fights will be extended to inhuman lengths, the first option will be to swing, shoot, or destroy, and when we get to an elaborate set-piece, there's a very good chance it will blow up by the end of the scene. Now, going into an action movie, these assumptions are kind of baked in and we adjust our expectations accordingly when we buy our ticket. Things will happen a certain way, if the main character seems a little transparent and one-dimensional, well, you really came to see things blow up, and the bad guy gets bumped off in a big showcase way at the end. Anything more is really above the bar.

As readers, we act the same way with our stories. If we are reading a paranormal thriller, we find ourselves believing that there's some kind of spirit world seeping into our lives and everyone just kind of goes with it (except for the naysayer who gets bumped off early in the book to reinforce the point). A mystery novel brings us a Rogue's Gallery of mischievous characters with marginal scruples amidst the stand-out character who figures everything out while everyone else either watches or dies. And when reading the horror genre, well, we let our darker angels judge humanity harshly, allowing for the worst of the worst to be played out before us. And if we are not ready to do those things, we don't read that piece.

But how would we approach a piece if we didn't know the genre?

Putting a book into a genre draws it to a particular audience, giving it the best shot of finding people who will connect with the style. Any book cover should immediately tell you if it's romance, fantasy, horror, etc., despite what they say about judging a book. However, most stories at their core are about people, conflict, and hopefully growth. When you write, does it matter whether that personal struggle to grow is done on a Kansas farm or on an Arcturan battle cruiser? The story can be any genre you want, mostly because at its root, there is no genre to the main story. It's like a nice, lean, chicken breast - you can't say if it's Jamaican or stir-fry or baked because it's just the core ingredient. The rest is prepping it how you want.

If you specialize in a particular genre, that's great - write everything you can in that way and really hone your craft. However, if you come across the idea for a story, find out what it is at its roots before you try and put it into the "appropriate" genre. Let the story inform you what serves it best, then write it that way. That's the genre of writing that's called "good writing," and everyone enjoys that.          

Old Habits Are Hard to Start

"Welcome back!" is what I hear the most now that I have officially returned from my vacation away from everything. And yes, it was time away from everything. Aside from listening to some local (Chicago) news and keeping up on my sports scores, I mostly tuned out all my creature habits. No television, no consulting work, and surprisingly, no writing. The environment was indeed inspiring and quite peaceful, but this was about disconnecting from things for a while, and I did exactly that. And I needed to.

Now that everyone has said, "Welcome back!" they have followed it quickly with, "Are you ready to get back to everything?" The answer is no. I have actually needed to rediscover my habits, reset my little priorities, and try and figure out just how I functioned prior to my vacation. Having been away from regular doses of friends, news, writing, complaining about the world, and so on, getting back into the routine has been difficult. However, this is also an opportunity.

I readily admit that not all my habits have been good ones. Back in my misspent youth, one of my habits was cigarettes - a blatantly bad habit but one that I insisted upon because it took the edge off a very jagged world at the time (and later because I was simply addicted). It started off with purpose and reason, but gradually interfered with my existence rather than contributed to it. Do you know how uncomfortable it is to go cross-country cycling with a cigarette in your mouth? Not easy at all. The habit had served its purpose and it was time to change.

Along a similar vein, my writing habits had taken different shapes, and this little time-out has given me time to re-assess. As I often recommend, a writer should have dedicated routines and places for writing, for editing, or for just being creative. These defined zones contribute to being in the right frame of mind for doing these processes, and the more familiar they become, the more conducive they are to those processes. Over the past few years, my boundaries have kind of drifted, and it was time to rewrite the rules. So, when I got home from this recent vacation, I formally established my literary zones - for serious writing, for creative writing, for editing, and for reading. This does require a mental reset, and there will be adjustment, but in the end it will all be worth it.

Another thing writers should drift toward is regular writing. This I am having some difficulty with given the chaotic nature of my schedule, but it is very important. Keeping the creative juices percolating is essential to being creative in general, so I am re-establishing my creative time (along with my intellectual time, my thought-free time, and other important times). Unless the world interferes, I give myself a half hour to think about things in a creative manner - ponder the "what if" of the world, or think about a story and ask myself how I would've written it. 

When you get the chance, look at the structure of your creative world, and see if it still fits. More importantly, see where it can be changed for the better, then go through the arduous process of actually doing it. And then, of course, make the changes and stick to them.

But maybe go on vacation first. I recommend SW Colorado - it's beautiful this time of year.      

On Vacation

All writers need it. All people need it. I need it. I am taking a vacation where I hang up my official writing duties until my next post, which will be July 11th. Until then. enjoy your holidays.

But don't be alarmed - I will still be creating stuff and thinking writing thoughts - just not on an official capacity. (And no, I won't actually be fishing.)

 

Piling On

Wow! I can honestly say without doubt that this is the worst Friday I have had all year, and possibly for several years. I mean, yesterday was kind of sketchy - my health was doing some stuff that it shouldn't have, but I made it past that and actually ended up feeling a sense of gratitude. Well, that was probably my first mistake because Friday must've got wind of it and decided to put me square in my place. I got to drive from place to place where I would then walk a total of five miles in the really humid air this morning, only to have my car break down just before the end of this trip. Of course, this means I had to walk home, finish my route on my bicycle, get a jump for the car (failed), get it towed (expensive), get it diagnosed (another nightmare), get a rental, and all in the equatorial heat. Add to this, I actually had things to do today - so much for that. Yep, this Friday is the worst. Or as the joke goes, it's only the worst Friday so far.

Now, did I choose to make my Friday post a piece demonstrating how to rant about a bad day? There's a hint of that, but it's more elaborate than that. When we write about a character and their adventure (at least in fiction), we have to remember that elements such as drama, suspense, tension, etc. are more than just things we need to include because they're required. We do our readers a horrible injustice if we don't really make the readers feel what the character is going through. And we do this by the simple route of making things worse.

I offer this simple, though somewhat gross, example of a character faced with a terrible choice. For whatever reason, the character accidentally drops a quarter in the toilet. Immediately this creates a dilemma - pursue the quarter and deal with the uncomfortable repercussions, or let it go and be one quarter poorer? Interesting discussion, but most of us would've walked away, high and dry. So let's pile on the costs of the lost money. What if it wasn't a quarter, but a dollar bill? A five-dollar bill? A twenty? The character's last bit of pocket money - the twenty he kept in his wallet for emergencies? Now it isn't as easy. What if the toilet is really dirty? I mean, post-apocalyptic bus-stop restroom dirty. Now what? Recover that twenty, wash your hands vigorously afterward, and try to put that nasty twenty back in your wallet and pretend you never knew where it had been? Dropping a quarter in the toilet is nothing now. Your last twenty bucks... and let's say you're twenty miles from home without a cell phone. Now what?

Piling on the problems is definitely a mean thing to do to a person, but fortunately, a written character can handle it so go ahead. And of course, it doesn't have to be the obviously gross outcome that's the challenge - just something the character does not want to face. Maybe it's a starving person living in Chicago who is given a hot dog WITH KETCHUP ON IT! People will have their opinions about that, but the conflict the writer gets to play with is the individual character's dilemma. 

The long and short of it is simple: when you give a character a challenge, make it worth something. Make it hurt. Pile on the grief. Maybe that ketchup thing was an out-of-bounds move, but you get the idea. Piling on quandaries and consequences wakes the reader to the character's challenge, and invests them in the result. So go ahead and pile on when you want - the character can take it.

And check your car battery in the summer - they can burn out just as easily.        

The Truth About Consequences

I can't even begin to thing about how many books I've read. I've gone through fiendish binges where I would read a book or two a week along with going to school, but there would be other stretches where I would go book-free for a while. I know that one year I read at least 75, but probably less than 100 books, but I also know a few years that were free of recreational book-reading (research books don't count in this case). The point is, I've read a whole bunch of books in my many years.

Now, I can't tell you how many of those books were bad. I can list some of the great ones - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Humboldt's Gift, The Stand, Foucault's Pendulum, The Great Santini, Liar's Poker and so on - but the bad ones, boring ones just kind of fade away. Some were just poorly written, or too formulaic, some had a writing style I didn't care for, others just never really paid off. However, I can tell you the most common factor in the long list of books that never really stuck with me, and it's surprisingly simple: at certain points, I just thought, "Who cares?" More importantly, I asked myself why the main character cared about what they were doing. Ultimately, it boiled down to a sense of there being no consequences. 

Here's a question I ask about the main character: What happens if they throw their hands up and say, "Nope. No more. I'm done with this." Or what if they never take the hero's journey in the first place. The answer, in any situation, should be the consequence of giving up, and in a good story, the consequences should be severe. Look at Frodo in The Lord of the Rings - a little hobbit with an overwhelming task that he often felt was far too much for him to handle. We are told, in no uncertain terms, if he fails in his mission, or gives up, or just lets someone else do it, all the people of Middle-Earth are doomed. Those are some pretty big consequences, and it takes a while for our hero to realize just how important he is and how critical he is to the story.

Now I will offer up a story (a movie, but still), that while it's full of action and fun characters, it really lacks the satisfaction that one might get from thinking about the consequences. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones goes on the quest to claim the legendary Ark of the Covenant, leaving a trail of dead soldiers and a poisoned Nazi monkey in his wake. His mission is to keep this holy artifact from falling into Nazi hands and becoming their weapon, so we know the consequences of his failure. Or do we? As we find out, not so much. The Ark falls into Nazi hands and, upon its usage, the Ark promptly wipes out an island-full of bad guys. Now we ask what would've happened if Indiana Jones just stayed at the university? What would the real consequences be? Well, nothing different. The Ark is found, goes into Nazi hands, wipes out every bad guy in sight. No unstoppable weapon, no undefeatable army. Life goes on, Indy teaches his classes and gets hit on by students. The end.

In the end, our story needs consequences, we need the characters to be motivated not just to do something but be driven by the possible dark result of their failure, and we need meaning to their mission. And I assure you that if your story isn't driven by a clear set of consequences that legitimately drive the character, your book will probably end up on that list of bad stories that nobody remembers. (And full confession: I only remember Raiders for the action sequences and Karen Allen. The story is incidental in the long and short of it).          

The Other Side of Writing

A lot of space on this blog has been dedicated to writing the Great American Novel, to perfecting your poetry, or to making your writing as appealing as possible for your reading audience. I do this because, in my experience, a lot of people want to take their writing up a few notches, preferably to a level where they can get it published or at least read by a larger audience. They want to know all the tricks of the trade for bringing something out to the public; writing a story that plenty of people will want to read and will enjoy reading. This is an admirable goal and one worth pursuing. However, now and then I recognize that a lot of people want to develop their writing for more personal reasons. They are not as interested in the New York Times Bestseller List as they are in making their story real. This requires some special tools indeed.

Now, what actually is, "making their story real"? Well, I have seen plenty of people get into writing as a form of self-help. They write their stories as a therapeutic process, putting their stories onto the page as a way of interpreting past events, relationships, traumas, and any point in between. I have known more than a few recovering addicts who turned to writing as a way of identifying and dissecting the pathology of their own compulsions and internal drives to better understand themselves and what they must confront. And indeed, there are a number of prison programs that get inmates to write about their past to better understand why they ended up on the wrong side of the bars. This requires a different kind of writing than all the talk about narrative and subtext. While in these cases, grammar and such aren't very important, in some ways it is much more difficult.

To "make a story real" requires a willingness to to write things down that you might not dare say out loud because hearing such things makes them real. Putting terrible experiences onto paper is a very effective way of purging pain from the system, but it's only the first step. Real creation requires more than just listing the events that occurred - that's the reporting side of writing. A story becomes real when we write about our feelings of the event. If we did something terrible, what drove us down that road? If we fell victim to someone else, what feelings swirled through us in that moment? After that moment? The next day? Events happen all the time, but they become real when we discuss how we, as humans, participated in them. Even if we existed in a state of shock, understanding that moment is just as important as any other.

Of late, I've done some writing about an accident I was in as a teenager. I've written about it before, but looking back on those earlier works, I defused the feelings by stepping around the trauma of it all. Just the fact that I wrote about it at all was a great first step, but the more I felt secure enough to let my mind swim deeper into the trauma of that moment, the more I discovered about my unresolved feelings from that moment nearly 40 years ago. 

Now I write about it, and I can feel the numbness, the shock going through my mind as I tried to figure out whether I was alive. It's easier now to express what it felt like to go stumbling into the foggy night, bloody and sore, trying to find another person, a house, a phone. How my eyes transfixed on a porchlight and I staggered toward it like a beacon of sanctuary, all my pain subsiding as I placed my energy toward reaching that one porchlight. I buried all my feelings in the name of survival and forced myself to reach that porch and get help - there was no other way to do things. And having written that, I now recognize how I often bury my feelings during stressful times in order to survive, and all that trauma is something I can identify now.

Will it be a novel? A bestseller? An epic poem? Not a chance. But I dug into those feelings, piece by piece, writing about each one until I understood it. It required patience, a little bit of pain, and a good amount of faith, but writing about my feelings and asking myself constantly, "How did I feel about this?" got me somewhere special. Maybe someone will read the final product, maybe not. But It is, by far, the most important writing I ever did - so who cares if anyone reads it?     

Character versus caricature

In most stories, we know enough about the main character to portray them in a way the reader can understand. We should know what they basically look like, their basic height and weight, and any stand-out features they might have - a limp, freakishly large hands, eyes of different colors, etc. Once I lay out these details, I have the basic character - the 5'11", 220-pound, brown-haired, blue-eyed, balding guy with a shuffle to his step and evidence of a history of broken noses. He is drawn-out. He exists. He is real.

And frankly, he is boring.

Boring? Not the best way to describe a main character (and since this is also a bang-on description of me, it's definitely an unusual choice). I mean, there's nothing wrong with that description, and it is something the reader can immediately understand. However, the description is little more than a report about the character's appearance. None of that description really does anything, and in this regard, it's boring - not the best main character to have.

Now, am I suggesting that a main character, therefore, has to be 6'9", a svelte 310 pounds, freakishly blond hair with black streaks, red eyes and a brutal scar across his cheeks? Well, you would remember that visual, but that character might not fit the story very well, especially if the story was about a middle-aged writer contending with his mortality. Rather, you need to take the elements of the character and make them stand out in a memorable way, so that the 5'10" person has a more engaging description. One way to do this is to think of the old art of the caricature.

We think of the usual caricature as something we get from some guy with an easel out on Navy Pier. For $10 he draws a real exaggerated sketch of you, making a few features stand out dramatically. The portrait of you usually includes having your head's proportion to your body similar to Charlie Brown, your expression expanded to utter joy, merriment, or something else incredibly positive, and usually posed with some dramatic gesture or with a prop as oversized as your now-humongous head. It works; it makes a statement and you get a chuckle out of it. However, the important part is that you remember those key exaggerated points.

A character should be no different in their description, even if they retain normal human body proportions. Look at our writer example. Describing him as 5'11" is accurate but clinical; making him "a boringly average height" loses the detail but adds to the dimension of the character. Instead of citing his weight, suggest he "could afford to miss a few meals" and now the reader starts painting his own picture. Is he balding, or are the last few proud follicles of a once-proud head of thick brown hair stuck on his broadening scalp in a desperate comb-over? Do we need to state he has a limp, or is it better to mention this as a part of his actions? "He walked to the deli, his left leg slow to keep up" gives description as an action, keeping the story moving while offering the reader details along the way. 

These tricks take a boring -looking character and make them interesting in the sense that they have depth and dimension. If you want to make your character stand out with freakish height or other aspects, well, that's your call. However, even with a stand-out character, they become recognizable when their description is emphasized and engaged with, even exaggerated, to make the point stand out. They don't need to be fully-misshapen caricatures, but emphasizing their key points will connect the reader to even the most boring middle-aged writer.