Breathing Room

I've noticed an annoying thing about my writing in the last few weeks. I guess that how we write--especially in our rough drafts--is related to who we are, and this is sometimes more evident than we wish. I'll tell you what I'm talking about, but first we're going to talk about movie rules.

We all know one of those people who have movie rules. Sometimes they're unspoken, and sometimes they're the focus of passionate arguments about what that person will NOT go to see with you. The rule may be religious (at least one person I know says they won't go to see Rated-R movies on that basis). It may be based on rabid dislike (I don't care how good Inception is, I can not sit in a theater staring at Leonardo di Caprio and be expected to enjoy it or to take him at all seriously. I just keep thinking about how much he looks like a human weasel.). It may be based on lack of desensitization (I didn't watch a lot of TV as a kid, and still don't, and I'm not desensitized to high levels of graphic violence, so I don't enjoy it in movies).

Yes, I am one of Those People With Movie Rules. Most of the above don't even have a chance to seep into my writing. I don't have a problem with graphic violence when it's on the page, just when it's up on a 22-foot-tall sheet of vinyl in front of my face. I guess I could write Leonardo into something, but about the only way it'd fit is if I was writing a Redwall novel rip-off, and I love Brian Jacques' books too much for that.

But the one movie rule that has proved the most insidious is this: I can't stand too much suspense.

I guess that has to do with a mixture of my desensitization problem and my empathy problem. I can't watch movies where people are being humiliated or tortured; they get me honestly upset, and I don't enjoy the sensation. I guess if I found it easier to distance myself, this wouldn't be a problem.

So how does it seep into my writing? I give my characters too much breathing room.

This was brought up by my first reader when I handed him a new story last week, and he noted that I backed off of the rising tension right before the climax. Then I looked at my older story--the one I just got a rejection for--and I do the same damn thing! It's like characters I empathize with being put in tense situations makes me uncomfortable, so I give them a breather. Crazy talk. Who would have thought such a thing could come out, unconsciously, in my writing?

And, of course, it's very harmful to any story to take a big breather unless you're building a stairway of tension--a little tension, then a short break. More tension, short break. Lots of tension, calm-before-storm. Incredible tension, climax! I wasn't doing that, though. I was interrupting the smooth rise of tension in the story just when it should have been at its most intense. To quote the awesome Blake Snyder in his fantastic script-writing book Save the Cat, I was breaking the tension just when "the bad guys close in".

Well, the good news is that now I'm going to get a lot more conscious of this in re-writes and revisions. Maybe someone else will read this and get more conscious about rising tension in their stories. And maybe my own stories will start to drive a little more and meander a little less.

At least, my beta readers sure hope so...

It's the Only Way to Be Sure.

People who've read my earlier posts know that in my other life (dare I call it the "real world"), I paint miniature figures. Yes, I'm one of those. I also teach other people to paint them, and since I took up my writing again I've begun to notice all sorts of parallels between writing and painting. Of course, I'm not the only one to notice them--I just finished The Sun, the Moon and the Stars by Steven Brust, and most of that book is about writing except it's disguised as being about painting. Or maybe it's that painting is similar to writing. Or maybe that all creative vibes use the same energy. Or maybe we're just all desperate to draw parallels...but I digress.

There's such a thing in painting called "over-working" your figure (or canvas). In canvas painting it's the tendency to take your fresh image and destroy it by pushing too far--not stopping when the painting is at an optimal point. It can be the same in miniature painting, people seeking a perfection that they can't achieve. But I'll also use it to describe people who paint the same figure over and over (and over!). They don't learn much because there's only so much that any given model can teach you, no matter how many different ways you paint it.

It's something I often see in beginners, because they're improving so quickly. They'll paint the body and then they'll work on the hair and they'll think "Wow! I learned something on this hair, and the body looks so messy now!" Or it'll be someone who has an image in their head of what the model should be, and they'll sit there, stubborn, and work it over and over and over. Or worse yet, they'll strip the paint off of the model and start over, or buy another copy of that one model and start over. The infamous example was a friend who, every year, brought me a different version of the same dang mermaid sculpt to critique. He'd painted them in slightly different colors, but his technique hadn't improved a bit. He was trapped in that one sculpt. I think I might have looked at him when he brought me the third one and said, "Seriously...if I see one more version of this mermaid from you, I am going to puke. Paint. Something. Else."

So now...go back up and read everything I just wrote about miniature painting and substitute writing. :)

When it comes down to it, we always want things to be as good as possible before we expose them to the world. But when all we do is re-work the same thing, we're trapped. So that brings me to my story.

I recently got a rejection from a top magazine on a story I'd workshopped at Viable Paradise and spent countless hours on revising and re-writing and tweaking. Being me (perfectionistic little git) I immediately hyper-analyzed this rejection note. It seemed, in fact, to expose all of the dire weaknesses of the story to me (add "neurotic" to my list of sins). My first thought was "I could re-write the beginning", but it wasn't like I hadn't done that before. I was at the point where, in painting, we advise, "Step awaaaaay from the mini"--that point where we see the crazy in someone's eye and know that if we don't get them to stand up and walk away they're going to hurl the thing at someone across the table, or at the annoying kid in the game store, or run back into the casting room in search of the closest melting pot. I knew I was casting longing gazes at the gas stove for the hard copy, and wondering if "/nuke" might work on my laptop. It was, of course, that I had just stared at the damn thing too long. I couldn't tell a hole in the plot from a hole in the wall at this point.

Which is when I remembered the brilliant advice. I think I read it first on Uncle Jim's thread on the Absolute Write novel board. Someone had been howling about losing their writing with their hard drive, and he replied (paraphrasing), "Re-write it from memory. You'll find it will be even better than the original."

Well, I was a neurotic perfectionistic rejected writer, and I was suddenly into writing dangerously. Hell, I thought, I could completely delete and re-write the whole first section! Maybe the second section too! I know...maybe it will be a completely different story when I finish!!

Wait...wasn't this what I told my mini-painting students too?

Anyhow, the point is, at the end I realized that I was trapped. I had over-worked the heck out of that first section and I was still trying to beat it into shape, even though I could sense that it was weak and I'd never been completely happy with it. The solution was to highlight it all, hit "delete" and start absolutely fresh, writing from memory, without obligation to use any of the prior writing. And, weirdly, once I made that decision, my head filled with new ideas and great ways I could trim and re-shape the rest of the story to go with that fresh new beginning section.

So what I learned this week is that Steven Brust was right, and that Uncle Jim was right, and that I should not cling to already over-worked writing just because I'd previously done everything but sacrifice a chicken over it. Sometimes you just need to nuke it from orbit.

AFB

(p.s. What I didn't learn this week that I was hopelessly perfectionistic and neurotic. Sorry. Knew that already.)

Days of Ice and Fire

Last week I was fortunate to be up in Minnesota--in November? No, that does not sound fortunate at all, you say. But it was! Because I got to attend Fantasy Flight Games' Days of Ice and Fire convention, and the Guest of Honor was George R.R. Martin.

Now, I'm a writer whose first love is classic heroic fantasy, high fantasy. The kind of writing where half of the awesome is in immersing yourself in the author's unique world. Almost no one's as good at this as Mr. Martin. I've been fortunate enough to do some artwork for George in my other life as an itinerant miniatures painter, and this was an opportunity to meet him in person at last. So to say that I was terribly excited about all this would be rank understatement. (Below you'll see a photo of one of the models I painted for George; the 54mm Daenerys by Dark Sword Miniatures.)


Also attending were Wild Cards shared universe authors Melinda Snodgrass and Ian Tregillis, who did a panel on Wild Cards and its history with George. Ian is a newer writer who was just hilarious on the panel; I thought George might swat him when he described him a leering privateer captain kidnapping young authors into slaving away on the Wild Cards series. Melinda shared some awesome stories about how the long-running shared universe first began!

In their free time, Ian and Melinda were both terribly gracious and allowed me to bore them with questions on writing and discussions of my own painting hobby. Melinda also had some fantastic anecdotes about working on scripts for Star Trek: TNG. All in all, both were wonderfully approachable and enjoyable company!

George Martin himself was generous with his time, doing dinner with myself and fellow miniatures painter Jennifer Haley (you can see Jen's work here, on her website...she's much better than I am!) and hanging out after-hours with us and our host for the Con, Dark Sword Miniatures owner Jim Ludwig (you can see the Ice and Fire miniatures that Jim is producing for George here, on the Dark Sword site).

Finally, as they say, "pics or it didn't happen". Take a gander down below: from left to right, during the Wild Cards panel, we have Ian Tregillis, Melinda Snodgrass, and George R.R. Martin. Following that is a shot of me, Melinda, and Ian. Finally, in the last one the painter/miniatures crowd mugs for the camera up in George's hotel suite. From left to right we are Jennifer Haley, her sig. other Eric Kelley (who some of you from Viable Paradise may recognize, as he graduated from VP 13), George R.R. Martin, Dark Sword Miniatures owner Jim Ludwig, and myself, Anne Becker. :)

And now that I'm all inspired by remembering all that great discussion with awesome writers...time to run off and work on the NaNo novel!

Viable Paradise Retrospective

Like today's Mood Kyrie, I feel like I've been twisting every which way trying to catch up and get ahead with life after I came back from Viable Paradise 2010--was it only three weeks ago? Wow. It seems like months! Anyhow, I figure I should get my memories down before they get pushed out by worries, puppies, and to-do lists.

First off, I can't possibly recommend this workshop enough to any aspiring fantasy or science fiction writer. Heck, you could probably write chick lit or horror or mysteries and you would STILL get a ton of useful information out of a week with these brilliant people. I'm one of those writers with a large library of writing resource books, and some of the topics I was familiar with from those, or blogs, or forums. But in all cases, having an interactive discussion with a published author about them jogged my memory and caused me to internalize the techniques and subjects faster than I would have otherwise. I came out of this a lot more solid on my basics and with a greater overall conceptualization of how fiction hangs together and what being a writer means in today's world.

For me probably the most useful event was the one-on-one sessions, where pro authors and editors go over your work and point out the stupid stuff you somehow put in there and the things that didn't quite suck so much. You're assigned two instructors and can make appointments with as many others as you would like during the course of the workshop. You also get critiqued by five of your fellow students (and of course you're free to nab a bunch of the rest of them to get more if you would like!).

One of my instructor critiques was with goddess-editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden (click here for the lovely blog she and her husband Patrick write). I would honestly probably have paid an additional $500 just to have a couple more hours with Teresa one-on-one. In our hour-long session she took up her editorial pen and went over my manuscript line by line, explaining what she was doing as she went.

I swear, it was like someone just handed me the Holy Grail. All the little weaknesses in my writing sat up waving little neon signs saying "fix this here!" After that session, everyone else in the workshop could have hated my story, but it wouldn't have mattered one bit to me. It wasn't that Teresa said she loved my story. I didn't go in there looking for affirmation; this isn't a workshop you would ever take if that's what you wanted. She did say it was a weird little thing and that if I was going to write like this, she was at least going to show me how to do it right! But the real point is that the lightbulb went on in my head. She showed me exactly where my writing was, and the potential it had for improvement, in a clear, concise way that really hit me.

Of course, to other people, it probably just looks like scribbles on a page of type. But honestly, trust me here. It was abso-frikkin-amazing. I'm going to frame this thing.

So that was my favorite part of the workshop. Other highlights included John Scalzi's talk on managing money as a writer (don't quit your day job, folks), Laura Mixon's lecture on how to keep inspiration coming, and the three days of lovely warm rain we started off with, which made it so much easier to kick back with a hot espresso indoors and work on writing assignments.

I'd like to thank all the VP instructors and staff, and my classmates, for such a wonderful experience. I hope that I'll get an opportunity to run into many of you in the future. Though hopefully not in jail. Or in a cage on an alien ship. Or in a post-WWIII concentration camp for writers. Let's think positively: I'd much, much rather run into you at the World Fantasy Awards, when some of us are on the ballot. ;)

Good luck...and now it's time to crash back into the 2010 NaNoWriMo novel effort! Ciao!

Dammit, iBooks!

I came to the conclusion a little while ago that my blog entries needed some color. Maybe it's the artist in me (though that sentiment stops short of wanting to write picture books for kids). I considered being boring and writerly and using applicable shots of book covers or other literary references. Lucky for you, gentle reader (yes, I assume there's only one; and perhaps that one might be me...do you hear an echo in here?), inspiration visited me earlier this morning. What I really needed was a Mood Kyrie.

So this is Mood Kyrie's inaugural post, and as you can see, Kyr's got a bone to pick with someone today. And that someone would be iBooks.

When the iPad was due to come out I was very excited. I begged for one--this may, in fact, be the only technological device in our house that I owned before my husband. But I digress. Here's a little history.

I use my iPhone for mostly surfing the web, email, and some note-taking. All of this, I figured, would be a lot easier, handier, and better-looking on a larger screen with a bigger keypad. In addition to that, I am the type of girl who, when she goes on vacation, goes burdened with no less than six books, and often eight. I read fast. I go out of town several times a year, so I'd been scoping out digital book readers like Kindle already. The presence of an awesome reader on the iPad sealed my fate. I got mine the day they came out.

I just went on my first vacation since getting my iPad, and I've got to say that, other than having to turn it off on takeoffs and landings, it is very comfortable to read on. No eyestrain. No having to insert a bookmark or (heaven forbid!) dog-ear a page corner. But, and this is a very big BUT...

Where the hell are the books???????

I mean, okay, I downloaded my favorite classics right off, my Kipling and my Austen and my Arthur Conan Doyle and my Mark Twain. I downloaded some lovely short stories by some authors who I'm going to be learning from at the Viable Paradise Workshop in October: Scalzi, Bear, Gould. I downloaded a new Patricia C. Wrede novel (haven't read her for years) and some Agatha Christie (a favorite when I was a kid, and I still love reading her from time to time).

But...WHERE are all the modern genre fiction books? I mean, Peter Straub, you'd think he'd be enough of a big name to at least have his new one in the store, right? How about C.J. Cherryh, my favorite sci-fi writer, with her new book? How about P.D. James, the top mystery writer of our time, for godssakes?!?

But no. "Not found" returned my iBooks store. "How about some modern fiction?" asked my iBooks store. No doubt it was within its power to give me every book in the Twilight series or a bunch of Jodi Picault novels.

But I'm not INTERESTED in that. I don't want to read nothing but the New York Times Bestseller list (and you know, out of the two books on there that I was interested in, they only had one). I'm a genre writer. I like genre fiction from the top names in the fields of fantasy, mystery, sci-fi. I like good, thought-provoking non-fiction about sociology/archaeology/history--things I can use. I do not like James Patterson. I do not need to read every vampire novel out there right now.

In the end, I stopped at the local B&N before I got dropped off at the airport. I bought four books. I didn't have to close my P.D. James mystery on take-off or landing. iBooks, you've failed.

Catalyst

I was thinking over the last few days about the catalyst, about how I got my writing back.

I've written more in the last year than I have in my entire previous life. I'd estimate that I clocked in a good hundred thousand words. For other writers, that's nothing--certainly, for the pros, it's less than nothing--but for me, trying to fight my way back to the dream, it's a lot. It is, in fact, around 275 words a day, and if it had been all on one project, I'd have a novel.

But come on, I'm 38 years old (37 when I started this, last year). After all this time, and more commitments in my life now than ever before, what made this effort work? So many times I've started the process and ended up failing, abandoning my writing again. I may fail yet, this time, but I've gotten a lot farther than I ever have before. What happened to make this time be THE time that things started coming together? In going back over it in my head I realized that it was a snowball of experiences, serendipity, and small decisions that I made. I'm going to write them down here, just in case it might help someone else, someday, uncover the hope in their own creative situation.

First off, I made a commitment to my journaling. When I was in high school, for godssakes, I remember reading articles that said that every writer should keep a journal. And I tried. For years and years, for decades I tried! But something always made it taper off, got in the way, I got busy or distracted or it wasn't as important as it should have been, and then I got down on myself and the writing would fade for a bit again. Sometimes for months. Other times for a year or two.

But this time, I started my journaling in the middle of personal turmoil: an opportunity that I thought I had, the next direction I'd been driving toward in my life, had just closed up right in front of me after over a year of work and obsession. When I'm on a track to learn something, I'm ultra-focused; I devour everything I can find, internalize it like crazy, live and breathe it until I can feel the foundation of it in me like an instinct. Having done all this and then having that foundation shatter like it had been hit by an earthquake--that's something I'll never recommend, but it was sure a wake-up call. For an evening I wandered around our house, utterly vacant in my mind, adrift. Even thinking about my old direction made me feel ill. I came over to my bookshelf, finally, to take my mind off of things. And the first book I reached out and picked up was Ray Bradbury's Zen and the Art of Writing.

At that moment, in late July of 2009, I made a conscious decision to re-direct all my energies into the writing. Here I'd been distracting myself with this other direction; I'd put years previous into becoming a professional freelance artist, after figuring out that the corporate life just wasn't for me. What could it hurt, to take all this energy and make a serious run at the dream again? With the writing, the only person who could disappoint or stop my progress would be me.

After Bradbury I read Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, and re-started my journal. Every time I felt the urge to log onto the discussion boards I'd been frequenting, I consciously forced myself to go to a writing discussion board instead. That slowly switched my focus onto the writing instead of the other stuff. From there, I went away from discussion boards, and now the choice when I walked up to my laptop was to close the browser and open my Writing folder instead, or my journal.

In a note on the bottom of a journal page around that time, I wrote: "When I first started truly writing again I thought, "How odd, I'm not rusty." then I realized that of course I wasn't rusty; I had been writing volumes every day, spending the time on discussion boards [and emails] instead of stories."

Up until that point I would have pegged myself as a novelist. I write long. I've never been good at shorts; I live for the long-term character development and story. I read novels; I never read short stories. But there's been a particular story in my mind for about twenty years, the first real short story idea I got, back in college. And one night in early August I sat down and, after twenty years, I started to write it.

It was rough. It was bumpy. It was full of little segues where I just chatted on the paper about stuff I was thinking about. But once it started to come out, it was like all these stories I'd forgotten or given up on or that were stuck up in the rafters in my head, all moldy and gathering dust, came tumbling down in a cacophony of sneezes.

And I started writing them down. And started working on the old novel again, and then embraced National Novel Writing Month (something I had failed at for the previous two years) and made a success of it with a brand-new urban fantasy novel. I found Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a book that has been slowly changing my outlook on my art over the last several months.

For a while I'd been meeting my friends, Jarrad and Eric, once a week at a pub to write--the only bone I'd tossed my writing for a couple years. In 2009 Eric got accepted to the Viable Paradise Writer's Workshop out in Martha's Vineyard. When he came back, he generously shared his notes with us, and I began to think: this would be more valuable if I went myself. And then the thought: COULD I go myself? Could I make it in? And I started really working, then, on finishing that story, the twenty-year-old story that started the avalanche.

In March of this year I finished it. I submitted it on Saint Patrick's Day, three and a half months before deadline (this is notable, as I'd been a horrible procrastinator for most of my life). And?

I received my acceptance letter earlier this month. I'm in. I'm going, this October. Someone out there--several someones, apparently--thought I was worth teaching. And on the "about me" survey, they asked "Do you have a blog?" and I thought, "Well, why not?"

So now you're stuck with me, and with my observations and ramblings; and maybe these will do someone some good, someday. Or maybe they're just a way for me to be accountable for my progress, or lack thereof. Either way, I'm here.

The First Momentous Post

Julia Cameron says something to the effect that all creative types are insecure about the value of their work. They are ready to doubt, to tear themselves down, to be the crazy grounds keeper blowing up the gopher holes from whence their ideas crawl. Given this, those of you in this same boat, sharing this oar with me, and staring at the looming iceberg-infested waters ahead may understand why I am spinning in circles and second-guessing this endeavor: starting a blog about my writing.

Why have I done it? What could I possibly add to the vast numbers of writer-blogger-aspirants who have gone before? Why am I not going to just delete this dang thing?

Well, maybe I will. But after a few brain cells sacrificed themselves to chase down internal truths, I realized that if I don't have a specific place to make notes about my writing thoughts, they drain out through the cracks along the scoodgy (take that, proper English!) bottom of my brain pan along with all the other muddy gunk and fine-ground debris. Most of them aren't big enough flakes to catch and hold on through the chaos-laden confusion of my workday. And if they do manage to remain, coming home to three dogs and a whiny cat who all need attention means a shift of gears (my brain's gear shifts are pretty rocky; I'm expecting the transmission to fall out any day now) that dislodges them.

I'd like to think that maybe my experiences and babblings about this process--of learning, of writing--might have some value to others who are tempted to give it a try, so I'd like to see them saved, even if only for my own reflections down the road. Maybe they're not flakes of gold; maybe people who read this (if ANYONE does) will come back complaining that they're only gold-plated, or, worse, tarnished brass. Or plastic with that shiny gold coating on them like the fake ring you bought for your mom at the grade school holiday gift sale because you were too young to think of anything else, only you realized in time that it really sucked and you squirreled it away at the bottom of a drawer because you were ashamed of it.

Well, I guess blogging means that you're not squirreling it away, unless hiding it in plain sight in a sea of other blogs just like it counts. Some glutton for punishment can always come along with a backhoe and unearth your dusty collection of nuts. Maybe they'll even find a gold ring in there, hidden away, and realize that it's not fake or crappy after all. So we all hope.

Why Second World Writings? Because my mom told me when I was about eight (and ten...and twelve...and fifteen...and twenty-eight, most likely, she said it a lot) that I was living more in my own little world than the real one. It's true. I'm pretty comfy here. So if I'm going to write a fantasy blog about me being a real live writer, I may as well write it from the seat of my make-believe world. It feels just about right.