Mary Ellen Lives

Recently,

a writer friend of mine mentioned she avoided writing in first person for fear of over-using the pronoun “I.” Another writing buddy doesn’t like to write anything that is sad or uncomfortable. One gets hung up on perfect grammar and finds it difficult to write at all, so concerned about correctness that she stifles her own imagination.

These are all examples of writers afraid of leaving their comfort zone. They set their imaginative thermostat at 68 or 72 and never deviate. All of the friends I mentioned are wonderful writers, but each limits themselves with their own fears of venturing too far from home. This is where writing prompts can help. I am subscribed to one of the free daily writing prompt websites available, but  admit to skipping some. They seem too silly, or uninteresting, or too far-fetched. However, after thinking about the conversations I’ve had I am determined to try them all from now on. If I don’t go beyond what I am accustomed to, I won’t ever grow.

Fear is a big monster that hides under every writer’s bed. We all need to run him off by turning the light on. Or the thermostat up! Sweat the sucker out or freeze him—it’s your choice. The important thing is to get out of that safe zone and venture into the wilderness. Don’t worry. You can always come back. It will be nice and warm when you do.

SOME OF YOU
may have noticed the Steinbeck quote to the right of this blog. Those who know me may think it is a reference to the book manuscript I’m still rewriting, always rewriting. In fact, I have several pieces that I return to over and over. They never seem to be finished.

This month I participated in a seminar at the Hub City Writer’s Workshop. Writer-in-Residence Akwaeke Emezi did a wonderful job talking to us about revision. She confessed that she was mortified when rereading her early work. Fiction workshop leader Marlin Barton remarked that he never read his published novels or short stories. He would want to rewrite them all! These writers had gone far beyond were they were. They are much better writers now than then.

That’s what the Steinbeck quote means to me. As a writer I am always learning my craft, always developing voice, always practicing the art. As I learn I become a better writer; as I become a better writer, I become more aware of how much I have to learn. It’s a never ending circle, like a wedding ring. Another quote that stuck in my head when I was a teen is from the Agony and the Ecstasy: “Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.” A little melodramatic maybe but it is from Irving Stone, after all. And it makes the same point for me as Steinbeck. No matter how much natural talent you may have, dedication to craft is required. Forever.

Participating in writer’s conferences, finding the right critique group, reading writing blogs and books on writing all contribute to my continuing education and invigorate me as a writer. And so, happily, I will never be finished.

Though, hopefully, someday my manuscript will be.
Write on!

A while back

I read a book that had the annoying habit of veering off on tangents, topics that were out of place. It seemed to me the author was putting in their own favorite foods or an opinion the author felt strongly about. But it didn’t fit the character espousing these views and it interrupted the flow. It took away from the story and is, unfortunately, what I remember most about the book.

I didn’t know until recently that this bug-a-boo has a name: Author intrusion. A more fitting name could not be had. That’s exactly what I felt reading dialog about a certain grocery store. Dialog that even told me its location. Reading an author’s opinion or preferences in the middle of a novel makes me scratch my head in wonder. Didn’t the author see how misplaced this is? Didn’t the editor?

I’m not sure what impulse compels us humans to dispense our unsolicited opinions but it happens all the time. Haven’t you been in conversations where someone is always telling you what they think even though you haven’t asked? Annoying, isn’t it? It’s even more of an irritant in a novel. It puts someone else in the room, namely the author. I pick up a book to read the story, not to be lectured on which political stance I should take. This unwanted advice is, indeed, intrusive.

But not all author intrusion is bad. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles inserts himself to marvel at his male protagonist. He puts himself in the same train and ruminates on what this character is doing and what may come next. It’s wonderful stuff! In this case author intrusion is a literary device used consciously by the writer. As a literary device the writer steps out from behind the curtain to speak directly to the reader. The intrusion helps the story along, it doesn’t detract.

So, like everything else in life, the difference is in intent. If you want me to ride the train with you and your character invite me along in the pages of the book. But if you want to tell me about your favorite grocery store call me, don’t put that information in your character’s mouth.

Point of View (POV)

Are you scared yet? A lot of writers, dare I say most writers, break out in a rash when they hear the term. In my critique group we are constantly struggling with POV. The first hurdle is which POV you need to use. I say need rather than want because I firmly believe the material, not the writer, dictates the POV. But that’s for another day. In fact, any POV you use will present its own challenges.

Many writers believe that first person is the easiest to write in. I beg to differ. Staying in one character’s head is harder than it seems. How to get the reader the back-story? The physical description? It’s common to see the main character’s back story in another character’s mouth. “I remember when you were born on that April day in 1975. Your mother was blind and your father a drunk and you left home at sixteen to roam the streets of New York.” A whole paragraph of that is not only boring but unnatural.

As for physical description there is the overused mirror technique. “I gazed in the bathroom mirror at the heavy black eyeliner around my light blue eyes and tucked a strand of bleached blond hair behind my ear, glistening with three studs.” I have attended numerous workshops and conferences and have been told umpteen times not to use the mirror technique for first person POV descriptions. But come on—who hasn’t resorted to it?

Then there is omniscient or God’s POV. It solves some problems but creates others. God is all knowing, all seeing, and much better at organizing that information than mere mortal writers. How do you decide what to tell and what to leave out when presenting the past, present, and future of each character in your story? I wrote a whole novel in third person only to rewrite it in first. It needed more intimacy than the God view allowed. Or so it seemed. I am currently reading Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World and am astonished at his use of the third person. His story is intimate and dramatic without being overloaded with information. He surprises me with details of what the character will experience in the future, without distracting me from the present plot. I am learning a lot from this book on POV while enjoying it. Critique groups help to pointing out where POV diverges; reading a writer who uses POV masterly shows you how it should, and can, be done. It is inspirational.

As for second person—you don’t want to get me started.

flow chart from https://booksbytrista.wordpress.com/category/point-of-view/

Though I have been accused of being a member

I protest that I am not. I don’t hate adverbs. I just think they are like a part-time Walmart employee—over worked. There are so many wonderful, strong words out there that can do the job for you, why hire a skinny little thing that has to bring along his big brother to do the lifting? Let’s take a simple sentence as an example: John walked slowly toward Mary’s bedroom.

What image does this sentence bring to mind? Why is John “walking slowly?” Who the hell are these people anyway? Let’s go further and pretend that this is the first sentence of your novel/short story. What have you told the reader? How have you enticed the reader with this sentence? What will happen next? If the answers to these questions are- nothing, don’t know, don’t care- you see the problem with weak verbs propped up by adverbs.

What if the sentence read, John slouched toward Mary’s bedroom? Or, John snaked toward Mary’s bedroom. In the first sentence the reader may wonder why John is reluctant to go to Mary’s bedroom. We don’t know the answer yet but at least it poses the question. In the second sentence John is more sinister. Is John there for no good? It adds to the character development of John.

Yes, you could add to the sentence in an effort to define “walked slowly.” John walked slowly toward Mary’s bedroom, unzipping his pants, intent on no good. Ok, now we know John is the villain. But with a stronger verb in the sentence we can give the reader the info in a much more succinct and interesting way. John snaked toward Mary’s bedroom, unzipping his pants. The reader knows from the verb that John is intent on no good.

The Adverb Police can be uncompromising. Their leader, Stephen King, puts it plainly in his book On Writing: Adverbs are “…like dandelions. If you have one in your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day… fifty the day after that… and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions.”

I’ve have been known to harbor weeds in my lawn, so I can’t claim to belong to the Adverb Police. At best I’m in the neighborhood watch.

and write it down.

I am in awe of them. When I read The Year of Magical Thinking, I was blown away by Joan Didion’s honesty and courage in relating the intensely personal loss of her husband. It’s unfathomably hard to face one’s own grief and put it on paper. A friend of mine is dealing with this issue. Having lost a child some years ago, she is struggling with the need to put it in writing and the inability to do so. It’s just too hard to face. Yet something compels her to want to write it down.

As writers, we feel the import of emotional events. As writers, we need to get these experiences and the accompanying emotions out for understanding, for healing. As writers, we see the universality of events and the emotions they elicit. And we want to share them to help others, to find community, and empathy. Yet as humans we shrink from the glare of our pain.

Every spring I think of my brother Tom. He died the day after Christmas, 1984, in an awful car accident. He was a “motorhead” and had ten cars. Ten! He wasn’t rich. He found good deals. Some of the cars didn’t run or ran sporadically. For a while he had a Jaguar XKE that wouldn’t shift out of first gear. The ’57 Buicks, the Porche 911, the Corvette convertible: these cars would winter in various barns and garages around eastern Wisconsin until the weather turned and the snow melted. Then they would appear with Tom behind the wheel.

“Want to take a ride,” he’d ask. I always dropped whatever I was doing. Once, he let me ride in the Porche as he tested a slalom track before a competition. Just writing about it now puts the sound of the engine in my ears, the smile on my face, and the tears in my eyes. Even after all these years. In fact, this is the first time I have written anything about him. My chest is tight and my stomach aches. I am a coward.

Yet I know now that I will return to him. Maybe not as memoir, perhaps I need the distance of fiction. Yet I feel the need…as a writer.

Be careful what you share.

A few blogs ago I mentioned writer sharing sites, such as Wattpad, and wondered if sharing work online would preclude it from submission in contests or publications that ask for “unpublished” work. The answer is yes. Anytime you put a piece of writing onto a public forum it constitutes publishing. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, Pinterest, and all the others.

The confusion for me came from Wattpad itself. On the writers’ page it states, “Anything you post on Wattpad can be published in as many other places as you like.” It’s true but a bit misleading. It can be published in “as many places as you like,” as long as those places will consider already published work. The next sentence makes it sound as if the difference is in copyrights: “We don’t demand any rights to your work, or any control over where you share it.” Most short story and poetry venues ask for one time rights, but not asking for rights has nothing to do with whether a piece is considered published.

Several publications and writers answered my query on this topic and all were in agreement. If you post something on an open site—anything—it is published. So why would you want to do that at all? It would be a good marketing tool for self-published, soon to be published, or already published work. The piece Margaret Atwood had on Wattpad was a short story from her new collection Stone Mattress. She ran a contest based on the story’s characters. What a great idea! And a perfect use of sharing sites.

So if you have something to promote, by all means share it. But be smart. Offer free rides but don’t give away the horse.

The recent death

of a good friend led me to ponder the nature of obituaries. In Ann Hood’s novel The Obituary Writer, the main character has the ability to bring the deceased to life through her writing. People travel long distances with the stories of their loved ones because they know the writer will deliver an obituary that reveals the true nature of the person who has passed. Her obituaries bring readers to tears.

These days obituaries are a listing of birth and death dates; of accomplishments, awards and organizations; of family who have passed before and those that remain. None of these facts alone give the reader insight into the character of the deceased. Few papers, in print or online, offer an “old-style” obituary. One that I know of is the Delta Independent of Delta, Colorado. They give a fuller picture of the deceased by publishing often lengthy obits that mention small, insightful, facts.

“…he dreamed of owning his own ranch.”

“She was drawn to the nursing field due to her illness.”

“She moved to San Diego where she built airplanes.”

These seemingly innocuous details lend humanity to the stark facts of life and death. They each could be the basis of a story, perhaps even a novel. Many writers do biographies of their characters. I have heard this suggested at writers conferences and read it as advice in writer’s magazines. But if your bio is only a string of facts, your character will never have a full life. I’m thinking of writing not bios of my characters, but obituaries that reflect the most important details of their lives—the enduring dreams and life changing moments. It seems to me that it is the little things that individualize and surprise us.

As for my friend— he was an avid historian who rode horses until his knees gave out.

And we will all miss him.

It’s a question that arises often, at least for me.

I bet you could name an author who gives a lot of detail in their story telling — Clive Cussler comes to mind — a well as one who doesn’t. I brought a story to my writing group and received the suggestion that I be more detailed in the character’s movements. The scene is one where the main character is picking up broken glass from the kitchen floor and cuts her foot. The group member who made the aforementioned suggestion wanted to see the character take a step before mentioning she had cut her foot.

It’s tough to walk the ditch between too much detail and not enough. As with most things in art, it’s subjective. I remember a scene in Wylie Cash’s first book, A Land More kind Than Home, where the young boy at the center of the novel makes a peanut butter sandwich. The boy is grieving, traumatized, and caught in a confusing position. Cash goes into great detail on the boy making the sandwich: spreading the peanut butter, the jelly, etc. I thought it was a wonderful way to show the boy’s angst. The intense detail on the action gave poignancy to the small act. My good friend, a prolific reader, thought it was too much.

And so it goes.

A writer’s style is made up of small decisions. I think one of them is this question of detail. I tend toward the sparse, believing the reader will be able to fill in the gaps. Writing the sentence “She got into the car and drove off,” is not very evocative, but “she opened the car door, sat down in the driver’s seat, closed the car door and inserted the key, turning it to the right to start the engine then depressed the accelerator while shifting into reverse” and on and on would be way too much. However, if I were to write, “She got into the car, closing the door on her skirt” would that be enough for the reader to know she was in a hurry? Would I have to add, “in her haste”?

If my character is picking glass off the floor and cuts her foot, do I need to say where exactly she stepped on the shard? I don’t know. Maybe. I am rewriting the story and will look carefully at my absence of detail.

In the meantime, what do you think? What writers do you love to read that do one or the other. I’ll sit here and pick my nose while you think.

I recently joined the writers/readers sharing site Wattpad

on the recommendation in Joan Curtis’ article 7 Tips to Help Writers Gain Attention in the World of Fiction posted on the writer’s blog Live Write Thrive. I had never even heard of Wattpad before. Turns out it is Google’s version of Amazon’s Write On, a readers/writers sharing site for Kindle. Since every one says I need to raise my web profile, I figured I would give Wattpad a whirl. The first thing I noticed was that the site seems to cater to younger readers and writers of YA or NA lit. Then I found out that Margaret Atwood is a member. She posted a wonderful, adult, short story from her new collection and ran a contest related to it. Hummmmm.

This started me wondering how sharing sites fit in with literary magazine sites. Anyone can put everything, good or bad, up on a sharing site. Lit mags have editors to reject pieces that don’t fit their standards and criteria. This gives a story published on a site such as Atticus Review more cache, even though there is no payment involved. One of the purposes of sharing sites is to expose new writers to publishers and agents that, supposedly, cruise the sites looking for new talent. This, of course, is one of the perks associated with lit mags. The advice given at conferences and on agent blogs is to get your work in these lit mags to build your credentials – otherwise known as platforms. Sharing sites do not count when building platforms.

So is it worth ‘publishing’ your story or novel, or pieces of your story or novel, on a sharing site? I question whether putting a piece up on Wattpad would disqualify it from being published later in a lit mag or contest. The Wattpad site says that it can be; I wonder what a lit mag such as Atticus would say.

I suppose that Wattpad would tell me that none of this is the point of their site. Their business model is to bring readers and writers together – period. They have had remarkable success so far with 30 million readers world-wide. And you don’t have to have an e-reader!

I’m interested enough to be considering which piece to put up on Wattpad.

What do you think about Wattpad and sharing sites like it? Are you on one?

Let me know.