Introducing A New Series

— Posted inDiscuss Writing Craft, Literature, Talk Write — 3 min read

hand tool on wall

The Tool Series

Writing Tools

I know “tools” is a hackneyed metaphor but the reason it is overused is because it is widely understood and it works.  So rather than trying to explain the concept in some new and original way I’m going to save time and use the term we all understand—tools, and in this case, writing tools.

I am, of course, not talking about actual tools—pen, paper, computer, etc.—but about the mental skills writers can develop to write effectively and, in particular, I’m talking to writers of literature—literary fiction—to novelists.  Simply put, this Tool Series will explore the skills one needs to practice in order to become a better storyteller.  Writing is not so much a profession as it is a practice; as a writer you will only learn and improve as you practice writing; there is no magic methodology, outside of practice, for improvement.

The truth is, you will have to learn to design and build your own methods and processes of writing a story because, frankly, you have a different personality and style of learning and working than any other writer.  And I know this is a scary idea but it’s actually not that difficult and is rather fun, once you realize that you are in charge of everything.

You don’t need a guru but having a writing friend can be helpful and that’s what I hope I can be for you.  A woman expecting her first child will ultimately deliver her child, with or without a mother or friend to advise her about how it’s done.  But having that mother or friend who has already “been there done that” can make a big difference in how smoothly the birth goes.

So now let’s open the metaphorical tool chest (our minds) and examine how we might use some of the things we find there.  Remember, every tool is useless until we know how we can use it and have practiced using it ourselves.

What To Expect

I will post the Tool Series articles here, as usual, on the blog as I write them.  But I also plan to archive them (as well as all of the Talk Write articles) and to make both available with a text-tab in the top menu.  The menu tab will be titled Blog Archive and will be available as soon as I can build it.  This will make finding and rereading those articles, which have helped you the most, easy to get to without having to scroll all the way down the blog.

If you have other ideas for improving this blog, please share them with me in the comments.  Your ideas are always welcome here.

Trick Or Treat!

— Posted inLiterature, Personal, Writing Sample — 7 min read

white and yellow road sign on green grass field under blue sky during daytime

Since it’s Halloween, I thought I’d give you a slice of old writing of mine just for fun.  This piece was all I wrote of this story.  I titled it—

Expect Bill On Thursday

On Saturday, Harry the mailman delivered a strange package to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes out on Route 6, Shady Loop Road.  It was a box, about as large as brick, wrapped with paper-towel paper, having a pattern of blue flowers printed on it, and the box rattled as if it contained a single nut inside.

When Mrs. Barnes opened the package, there was nothing inside except a broken fortune cookie in a cellophane wrapper which had been opened at one end and resealed with scotch tape.  Mr. Barnes ate the cookie anyway.

And inside the cookie was a fortune, of course, except instead of a normal fortune this one had a scrap of paper on which was a handwritten note in very tiny print.

“Here!  What does it say?” said Mrs. Barnes impatiently.  “It’s too small for me to read,” she added, handing the scrap of paper with the tiny printing on it to her husband.

“I’ll have to fetch my glasses,” said Mr. Barnes.

“Oh, hurry up, will you.  I don’t see why you can’t keep your glasses with you for times like these when we receive messages in fortune cookies.  You know they are bound to have tiny print.”

It took several minutes but finally Mr. Barnes found his glasses where he had left them on the kitchen table beside the peanut butter jar.

“Come on!  Come on!” insisted Mrs. Barnes.  “Hurry up.  Read it.  What does it say?”

“It’s very tiny writing,” said Mr. Barnes.  “Oh, okay.  It says:  Expect me on Thursday.  Bill.”  Mr. Barnes finished reading triumphantly.

“What does that mean?” said Mrs. Barnes.

“Well, I suppose it means that Bill is coming to visit us on Thursday.”

“I know that!  But it doesn’t make sense,” said Mrs. Barnes exasperated.

“It seems pretty clear to me,” answered Mr. Barnes.

“We don’t know any Bills, now do we, Walter?” said Mrs. Barnes.

“No, I don’t suppose we do.  Hmm.  That is a bit odd,” mused Walter.  “Well, perhaps he’s a nice fellow and we’ll enjoy his company, this Bill.  Say, Trudy, why don’t you make one of them lemon cakes of yours for when Bill drops by?” suggested Mr. Barnes.

“I’m not making a cake for some…Bill we don’t know.”

“It is odd; I’ll give you that.  Perhaps, though, he’s a relative, a cousin, we’ve never met and he’s decided he’d like to meet us.  I can’t remember the last time we’ve had family by for a visit.  It’s quite exciting, don’t you think, dear?   I wonder where Bill’s from?”

“Or maybe the package wasn’t meant for us,” said Trudy.  “Maybe Harry delivered it to the wrong address.  Have you thought of that?  And now you’ve gone and eaten someone else’s cookie and Bill—whoever the devil he is—is not coming here at all.  And someone else, who should have gotten this package, and should have eaten your cookie, is now not expecting their cousin or uncle or friend when he arrives on Thursday.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Walter.

“You never do,” said Trudy.  “You never think of the most direct, practical explanations, do you.”

“Well, we can find out easy enough,” said Walter who directly found the address label on the box that the fortune cookie came in.

“Yep, that’s our number,” Walter said, “Box 9, Route 6, Perryville.  It’s our address, Trude.”

“But who is it addressed to?  Whose name is on the package?” demanded Trudy.

“No name.  Just the address.”

“Well, see,” said Trudy, “it could belong to anyone.”

Walter shrugged.  “It is our address, Trude.”

Trudy snatched the box from Walter’s hand and studied the address herself.

“This!  This!”  She showed it to Walter.  “Now what did you say this was?”

“Route 6.”

“Aha!  I’ve found your mistake, Walter, and I can always trust you to make one.  It’s this!  You said it was a six when clearly it is a five.  I’ve caught you,” said Trudy triumphantly.

“It looks pretty plain a six to me,” said Walter.

“Oh tiddlywinks!  I will show this to Harry on Monday and I’m sure he will agree with me and will understand what happened and take the box to its rightful owner.  Bill, indeed!  We don’t know any Bills.  I knew it had to be a mistake.  So Walter, what do you say to that?”

“I say we’re going to have dinner at the Lucky Dragon tonight.”

“What an absurd notion.  You know Chinese food plays havoc on my digestion—all that MSG.”

“You can have the hamburger and salad like always.  I’m going to have the General Tso’s Chicken this time and the panfried Lo Mein.  I do love Chinese!” rejoiced Walter.

“We are not eating at that heartburn factory!  Not tonight!  Not anytime!  I’ve only endured it as a gift to you on your birthday but if it were up to me, Walter, we’d never darken the door of that greasy, vile smelling, hole in the wall again and we’re certainly not eating there tonight.”

“But how else can we get a fortune cookie to put back in the box?  Because if we’re going to return the package, don’t you think we ought to return it the way we got it?” Walter asked.

“Oh Walter, you are such a child.  All we have to do is include a note—you know, in the box—explaining how Harry delivered the package to the wrong address and how you ate the fortune cookie by mistake before realizing it was not yours.  And then we’ll apologize and that will be that.  The rightful owner will still get the message before Thursday; that’s all that matters.”

“But what if, Trude, there’s some secret significance in the message arriving in a fortune cookie?  What if Bill is telling his lover he wants to meet her on Thursday and the fortune cookie is part of the message?  What if that’s the case?”

“My Lord Walter!  How on earth do you think up such ridiculous things?  How could a fortune cookie possibly be part of the message?  That makes no sense!”  Trudy grew exasperated.  “The message is very simple: ‘I’ll be at your house on Thursday,’ that’s it.”

“Nope, nope, that’s not what it says,” countered Walter.  “It doesn’t say anything about where he will meet her.  So perhaps the fortune cookie indicates that he will meet his lover secretly at the Lucky Dragon.  It could be that.”

“Well, I say, if the Lucky Dragon is this Bill fellow’s idea of a nice place to take a girl for a romantic dinner then, by gosh, I say he deserves to have his fortune cookie eaten by a wheezer like you and his stupid message thrown away.  It would serve him right, by my book.”  Trudy folded her arms in victory.

Talk Write — On Dialogue

— Posted inDiscuss Writing Craft, Literature, Talk Write — 5 min read

woman wearing yellow and pink floral dress wahing carrots

What’s So Important About Dialogue?

Have you ever attended a staged play?  If you have you understand how limited the stage is.  I’m not talking about the huge Phantom Of The Opera type productions; I’m talking about the sorts of plays your local Civic Theatre might stage.  What is possible on stage in the way of settings, special effects, dramatic action (wars, car chases and such), even lighting, music and sound are very limited.  So what’s left?  Mostly dialogue.  And yet, the art of the stage can be very powerful.

Thinking about this, what I drew from it as a writer is that dialogue is perhaps the most important tool the novelist possesses.  It can open so much information to the audience and reveals the deep, powerful human motivations and emotions of the characters which is the basis of the story conflict itself, especially for the writer of literary fiction.

A Common Problem

Try this experiment with me.  First, quiet your brain for a minute.  Now, call to mind a person you love very much.  Think about them for just a few seconds.  Now, imagine this scenario:  You are somewhere with this person (you may choose where) and they tell you that they had a difficult night last night and did not sleep well.  How would that person relate this information to you?  Exactly how would they say it?  Write it down.  Now, imagine a professional person whom you only know as an acquaintance (a doctor, lawyer, teacher, minister, accountant, etc.) and follow the same steps.  Think about this person for a few seconds; choose a setting where you see them; and then have them tell you they had a difficult night last night and did not sleep well.  How exactly do they relate this information to you?  What do they say?  Write that down too.  Now, of course, compare the two quotes.  It is basically the same information but my guess is that the two pieces of dialogue are articulated in two very different ways.

One common problem with dialogue is that when two characters are speaking to each other it can sound like both characters are the same person because they speak in the same manner.  That gets boring for the reader and it indicates that both characters grew up in the same town, perhaps in the same family.  Maybe they both did grow up in the same town but, even then, the reader should be able to distinguish who is speaking by the manner in which they speak.  But in my mind, even brothers or sisters do not express themselves identically and neither should your characters.

What you did in the experiment above was infuse your loved one’s voice with all of the personal information you know about them.  You probably actually heard them speak in your mind’s ear, that grandmother or uncle, and heard the tonal (that slight Nordic accent, for instance) and rhythmic characteristics, unique to their voice and manner of speech.  This is something important to keep in mind when writing dialogue.

An Example

Here is a bit of dialogue I wrote for Wanderer Come Home, my ebook novel.  As you read this excerpt, listen to the two voices talking and, also, notice that I give the reader a bit of stage direction as to how to hear Bertie’s voice.  The other character in this scene is Axel Browne, my main character.

“. . . So Bertie, what were you planning to do with that big stick you were brandishing when I showed up.”

“I was going to whop you with it if I needed to,” said Bertie in a sort of loud whisper.

Bertie always spoke that way: as if telling you a secret, something he could confide in you but did not want others overhearing.

“But boy am I glad to see you.  To see anyone actually.  I’m about to go stir-crazy out here in the boondocks, alone.  I ain’t used to it, Browne.  I need people.  Conversation, you know?  I hope you can stay a while.  I see you’ve got a new dog.  What’s his name?”

“Her name is Dixie.”

“No, this dog isn’t Dixie.  Dixie was that ugly, wiry-looking mutt—rat terrier or something.  Wasn’t that Dixie?”

“Yes, that was Dixie the second.”

“Dixie the second?” said Bertie, surprised.

So in this case, there is not a huge difference between Bertie’s and Axel’s voices but there is enough of a difference for us to tell who is speaking.

When I wrote Bertie, I was working part time at a supermarket.  And there, I worked with a fellow I liked very much.  And he had this wonderful way of bringing intimacy to every conversation by speaking to me in a loud whisper when there was really no need to.  This friend at the store became my inspiration for Bertie.  And thus, it was very easy to write this dialogue.  All I had to do was think of my friend and let him talk to Axel.

There’s much more that can be said about dialogue so maybe we’ll discuss it again another time.  But until next time—

Salut!

Dale

Talk Write — Watch Movies And Improve Your Voice?

— Posted inDiscuss Writing Craft, Literature, Movies & TV, Talk Write — 4 min read

2 women sitting on blue leather chair holding white and red plastic cups

As writers, we sometimes think that time spent watching a movie is wasted time.  Maybe not.

I remember vividly that first line of Isak Dinesen’s Out Of Africa, narrated by Meryl Streep, at the beginning of the movie with the same title.  It goes:  I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills.  At the time that I first saw the movie, that one line and the way Streep read it set the tone for the entire film and, though we don’t get Streep’s interpretation of the line when reading it in the book, it accomplishes the same thing for the novel.  It sets the mood and sets the reader’s expectations of what the story will bring—a wistful recollection of a beautiful passage in the narrator’s life.  But most of all, it gives the reader a clear sense of the storyteller’s way of telling her story.  And this we call the “narrative voice*.”  (*note: This is my interpretation of this term; there may be variations put forth by others.)

The narrative voice is extremely important to the story because it’s the voice we hear in our minds as we read the book.  If the person telling the story is interesting and we can relate to her (or him), we become hooked.  We will listen to this voice for hundreds of pages just because we like being told stories and we especially like the way this person tells the story we’ve picked to read.  We might think of the narrative voice as the storyteller.

So what does watching movies have to do with my novel’s narrative voice? you might ask.  Well, the first thing is you must realize that your novel has a narrative voice, whether or not you acknowledge it.  When your readers read your novel, they, at least, hear a storyteller.  But secondly, and to answer the question, as the author, you must be aware of who the storyteller sounds like and this is where movies can help.  Ask yourself:  If a Hollywood actor was telling this story (of my novel) which actor would that be?  And in answering this question you can get very specific with it.  For example:  My storyteller is the Meryl Streep character from the movie Out Of Africa.  Or, my storyteller is the Danny DiVito character in Throw Mama From The Train.  Or, my storyteller is the Jessica Tandy character who appears in Fried Green Tomatoes.

If you are familiar with an actor or actress and the character they play in a particular movie, you can probably conjure them up in your head and listen to them speak.  And when writing text in your novel, you might easily imagine how Danny DiVito or Jessica Tandy would express that line if they were telling your story.  Actors are professionals at creating characters for parts in movies.  They are given a script and that’s all.  They have to imagine (with the help of the director) what sort of person that character is and how the character would articulate his or her lines.  In this way, the actor brings the character on paper to life, giving it personality, temperament, and emotions.  Well, as writers, it is our job to give our storytellers those same attributes.  We certainly don’t want our storyteller to sound like one of those computer reading programs, right?

But all of those hours spent watching our favorite movies and favorite actors performing their roles can help us to better define our own narrative voices.  But let me know your thoughts on this, please, by writing a comment below.  And tomorrow, I will explain how you can use this same concept to create terrific dialogue.  In the meantime, however, put in the DVD, get comfortable, and pass the popcorn.

Salut!

Dale

Talk Write — The Write Garbage Advice

— Posted inBecome A Better Writer, Discuss Writing Craft, Literature, Personal, Talk Write — 4 min read

stainless steel trash bins beside concrete brick wall

What is the “Write Garbage” advice?

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you’ve surely gone online and read content offered by the mountain of writing advice websites and blogs; I certainly have.  There seems to be hundreds of them.  (This was one reason I did not want to use this blog as an advice column for writers because there are so many of them already.)  But, I’m trying to envision this space more as a discussion room for writers rather than an advice column.  Anyway.

One seemingly popular piece of writing advice for the would-be novelist is “Write fast!  Write lots!  It will be garbage, of course, but you can always fix it later” and presumably turn the garbage you’ve written into gold.  Well, I disagree with this advice.  In my experience, whenever I’ve written garbage—especially several pages of it—it has pigheadedly resisted revision.  For me, garbage has always manifested a Titan state of inertia.  I have spent an hour or more trying to fix a page or two of garbage in the past and have ended up throwing the whole thing out and feeling like I’ve wasted a lot of precious writing time and energy.

That’s not to say I don’t understand the theory behind the write-garbage advice because I do.  It’s based on the idea that our unconscious minds are hiding precious plot lines, scene scenarios, dialogue and so forth from us which, it does, actually, and all we have to do to pry open its treasure chest is write sentences without thinking about them.  But one thing to keep in mind is that the unconscious mind does not express itself using regular language, such as English.  Instead, it prefers pictures and symbols and metaphor and is good at solving problems but not so good at creating conflict, such as is necessary in writing an interesting story.

And there are several variations and versions of this garbage-out advice but they all have in common the idea that if you just brain dump sentences onto the page that somehow, in all of that unstructured, unintended, and discombobulated text—if you look closely enough—you will find articulate prose and an engaging story.  In logical terms, this just doesn’t make sense and I believe it is dishonest to lead others to believe that it does.  Unless, that is, you want to encourage others to write garbage novels, though I’m not so sure that even that is possible using this method.

Good writing demands intentional expression of refined thought.  What does that mean?  First let me define refined thought.  When we were children, we had the worst time speaking to adults because we knew we needed to form complete sentences in our heads before blurting them.  Otherwise, we would say something  that didn’t even make sense to ourselves, then turn red in the face and vow, afterward, never to open our mouths again.  But over time, we learned that our thoughts are flighty and jumpy and too ephemeral to catch, most of the time.  So it took mental training before we were able to corral our thoughts into sentences which made sense when spoken.  That’s what I mean by refining thought.  By intentional expression I mean organizing the sequence of refined thoughts (sentences) into an order which allows your listeners to follow the development of your ideas so that they understand them—so that your ideas make sense.  So the processes of writing and speaking are closely related.

So what’s the bottom line?  The bottom line is that we do a lot of work in our heads (evaluation, revision, reformulation, etc.) before we actually express an intelligible sentence, whether verbal or written.  And if we bypass this process and just write what jumps into our brains, then we create—perhaps interesting but generally—unstructured, unintended, and discombobulated garbage which may be very difficult to make sense of.  So I’ve come to the conclusion that I needed a better approach for putting thoughts on the page.  Perhaps, we’ll discuss that in a later post.

Until then—

Salut!

Dale

Talk Write — The Axiom, Part 3

— Posted inDiscuss Writing Craft, Literature, Personal, Talk Write — 4 min read

person holding white and silver-colored pocket watch

The Axiom — Part 3

Several years ago, I read an interview given by a famous novelist (can’t remember which one, not Stephen King, however) in which the novelist said that it takes ten years to master any skill, including writing.  The wisdom behind such a statement, I would think, is to challenge us—aspiring writers—to view our careers in realistic terms.  That is, to view them, not as sports-type professions where you play a few years and then you’re done or where you emerge from nowhere as a fresh sensation and take the world by storm.  But to, instead, view the writing profession as something you grow into, giving it your sustained effort, creativity, and patience.  I believe that that was the point the novelist was trying to make:  Success as a writer requires dedication and a commitment for the long haul.  That’s how I read it, anyway.

So what happens to our view of ourselves as writers when we accept this “ten year axiom” as true?  Well, I can answer that question best, I think, by sharing what it did to my perspective when I first heard it.  But let me explain where I was in development, first.

As mentioned before, I had been writing seriously for several years prior to the axiom.  By “serious” I mean I was actively engaged in writing a literary novel.  I had written several hundred pages of manuscript, had a dozen or more unfinished manuscripts collecting dust in my laptop, and had written a dozen or more full notebooks of notes, trying to clarify the writing process and story organization for myself.

I mean, I was serious about this job.  Plus, at that time, I had the luxury of being able to work full time just writing.  But I also constantly felt like I was under the clock, like time was passing, day after day, and I was getting no closer to my goal.  Sure I could write pages and scenes and chapters and some of it was excellent material.  I would rip off thirty-thousand words worth of manuscript and then block because I had no idea what my story was about or where it was going.  Back to the drawing board once more!  Write more notes.  Start over again.  New story.  But starting a new story never solved any of my problems.

Then I was hit with this it-takes-ten-years idea.  Could it be true I wondered?  Well, with all of the other types of work I had done, I had always felt like I was climbing a steep learning curve the entire time I did them.  But only a couple of job types had I worked for ten years or more and, yes, those activities did get easier towards the end—considerably easier.  And I had already invested, maybe, eight years into writing fiction by then so, I figured, I probably didn’t have too much farther to go.

That became an important psychological turning point for me.  First, the ticking clock stopped ticking; the pressure to complete a manuscript this summer, this winter, this summer for sure, vanished.  I felt free to work on the mechanics of writing, instead of producing ten more manuscript pages to finish my book.  The other mental change was that I shifted from production orientation to problem solving orientation and that caused me to focus more on creativity and creativity is fun!  I went from working on my novel to having fun writing my novel!  Big difference.

From that point on, it still took years for me to finish my first novel.  But I’ve had a great time doing it and along the way I have learned how I build story and how I deal with blocks and what sort of stories I want to write.  I’m also confident I will have no trouble completing my next novel in a year or so.  Not to mention, all of those unfinished manuscripts are still sitting on my hard drive just begging for the chance to be next.  All in all, for me, accepting the “It-takes-ten-years” axiom was so worth it.

Hope you enjoyed this post.  Please join the conversation and add your comment below.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Salut!

Dale

Talk Write — The Axiom, Part 2

— Posted inFinish Your Book, Literature, Miscellaneous, Personal, Wisdom, Writing A Novel — 3 min read

woman in black dress playing violin

The Axiom — Part 2

So the axiom we are discussing is:  “It takes ten years to master any skill.”  Some time ago I asserted that I thought this axiom was true to a family member of mine.  He is a fairly young man (late 30s, early 40s), quite successful in his career, and very ambitious.  He strongly disagreed with me.  Had I been in my career at age 38 or 40 where he is now, I probably would have denied the veracity of this axiom myself.  When we are young or even nearing middle age, a ten year span of time is difficult to wrap our heads around, especially when we’re talking about how long it might take to achieve a single goal.  And, here in the U.S., we live in an “instant gratification” society so waiting for anything is contemptible to most of us.  Working and waiting for something for ten years would seem like a waste of eight or nine years to the typical American, and especially to the younger set.

But once you reach age 50, ten years achieves a more realistic perspective.  Because is seems that only last summer you were twenty, sexy, and had a full head of hair.  And now you are scratching your bald head and wondering where the last thirty years have gone.  Ten years, you realize, is not a long time.  If fact, it starts to feel like it isn’t enough time to achieve anything of significance—like mastering a complex skill.  If you don’t believe me consider this:  How long would it take for you (having never touched a cello before) to become a member of the cello section of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony?  The Frankfurt Radio Symphony, by the way, I think is one of the best in the world!  And also, how much work would it take?  When we think about it this way, ten years seems pretty short.

“But, Dale,” you say, “I’ve been writing English (or fill in your preferred language here) since I was six!  So it couldn’t possibly take me another ten years to learn how to write a novel!”  Yes, one would think, right?  But it turns out that writing a good novel is more like playing the lead cello part for Kol Nidrei by composer, Max Bruch, than sawing through Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for the middle school talent show.  When I said, I’ve been writing since I was six, it reminded me of a humorous story (true story) I’d like to share with you.

There was woman I knew who seemed always to have had a stormy relationship with her mother.  At age six, after one such stormy encounter with mom wherein the little girl got banished to her room for a time out, the angry little one found a piece of brown school paper on which she was supposed to practice printing her ABCs.  And in her fury, she took in hand the lined paper and a red crayon and wrote: “I HAT MOM.  I HAT MOM.  I HAT MOM.”

Well, there is still more to say about the ten-year axiom but I will save it for tomorrow.  In the meantime, please try not to HAT anyone and especially not your mother or your writing.  Until then—

Salut!

Dale

Talk Write — Good Morning Monday!

— Posted inArt of Living, Discuss Writing Craft, Literature, Personal, Talk Write, Wisdom — 3 min read

The Axiom — Part One

the nativity scene figurine

Well, today is Monday and I’d like to begin with a bit of “housekeeping” as they say.  I’ve decided to change the name of this writing discussion feature of my blog from “Writing Talk” to “Talk Write.”  In English, anyway, Talk Write has a better ring to it and it sounds the same as Talk Right, meaning, speak appropriately or respectfully.  Talk Right is a phrase you might likely hear in the “South” or southern United States where I live.

But today, I’d like to pass on an idea I encountered a few years ago and which I’ve thought about a great deal since.

He was a famous author who had written many books but, for the life of me, I cannot remember which author nor have I been able to find the article that contained the interview.  But I’m pretty certain it wasn’t Stephen King.  Anyway.  I don’t remember much about the article apart from this one axiom, asserted by the famous author.  He said:  “It takes ten years to master any skill and writing is no exception.”  At the time that I read that, I had been writing seriously for several years and had not finished anything in terms of a book.

Over those years, yes, my skill with language had improved (though I already had a bachelor degree in English to begin with).  And I had learned much about writing—such as how to write more efficient dialogue and scenery and how to use action and internal narrative to create flow in scenes and several other things of that sort.  But I still struggled with how to organize the complete story and that was primarily why I hadn’t, to that point, finished any of the many stories I’d started.

One of my manuscripts, at that time, was close to eighty-thousand words and I had a vague idea of how to end it.  But it didn’t feel right.  One thing I had sworn to myself was I would not publish a crappy first novel.  The reason for that being, I was afraid that a bad first novel would poison the water for any work that followed.  Now, I know that I could have published a crappy novel and probably no one would have ever read it.  Live and learn, right?  But still, I’m glad I waited until I had a book I felt really good about.

From here on, I’m going to try to keep these posts to a manageable reading length so I will continue this one tomorrow.  I have much more to say about the “ten year” axiom.  So until then—

Salut!

Dale

Writing Talk — A Writing Time Out

— Posted inBecome A Better Writer, Literature, Personal, Productivity, Writing A Novel — 5 min read

Related to Writing, What Do You Mean by “Time Out”?

boy in yellow shirtIf you’re a parent, you’re probably aware of the disciplinary concept of “time out.”  If your child is misbehaving, you may decide he needs a time out in which case he is sent to his room or some other quiet place and his activities for a while are suspended.  And we usually say to him something on the order of:  “You need to think about your behavior and how it should improve.”  But how does this strategy relate to writing? you may ask.  But before explaining further, let’s look at something else, first: the unconscious mind.

Have you ever gone to bed at night with a problem on your mind and then in the morning, as soon as you wake, the answer to your problem suddenly leaps into your consciousness and it’s a perfect solution?  It has happened for me many times and that’s the unconscious mind at work.  So how does it happen?  Now, I am not a scientist nor am I a psychologist so my answer to this is not based necessarily on empirical evidence though I have read about it, somewhat.  But here’s the way I think about it:  The brain has at least two states of consciousness.  Waking consciousness, of course, is when we are awake and our thoughts are like a continuous stream of internal language (one we understand, of course).  Our brains seem to talk to us all the time we are awake.  I’ve heard it referred to as “waking consciousness” or commonly known as “thinking.”

But there is a second type of “thinking” or consciousness going on in our brains and it is sometimes referred to as the “unconscious mind.”  I usually call this type of consciousness “my intuition.”  And here are some things I’ve learned about the unconscious mind, or intuition, over the years:  It never turns off.  But most of the time, it is silent so I’m not aware of its presence nor of its workings.  When it does talk to me, it mostly uses pictures and symbolism (like in dreams) or it speaks in a sudden flash of insight, like an apple falling from the sky.  And intuition loves to solve problems.  So here is where I can relate it to writing.

Writing fiction is nothing if not a huge ball of situational problems that need solving.  The question is:  Is there a way to harness my unconscious mind in order to solve some of the more difficult writing problems?  The answer is Yes!

So, how do we do it?  You can use your unconscious mind to solve writing conundrums by giving your writing a time out.  Here’s what I mean:

Some days the writing is no good.  For me, I know it’s no good when I have to rewrite a single sentence three or four times and, at the end, I’m still not satisfied.  When the writing is bad, I just can’t get into the flow: I stumble, I backtrack, I debate over whether a scene is good or not, the dialogue gets weighty—overwritten.  And when the writing is no good, I’m most afraid that, on a different day when my brain is clear, I will read the passage again and hate it and feel as if it has taken the whole narrative down the wrong path.  Has this ever happened to you?

So I have finally learned that on bad writing days I need to give my writing a time out—a break.  On those occasions, what I usually do instead of writing is cook!  I love cooking because it turns on my intuition.  I may follow a recipe but my intuition seems to jump in and throw out ideas as to how to make the recipe better or suit it to my palette on that particular day.  And cooking, for me, is fun!  I never plan when I cook; I just cook.

Obviously, cooking won’t work for everyone.  But what other activity—physical activity—do you do that does for you what cooking does for me?  Let’s call that a “complementary activity.”  Perhaps for you, the complementary activity is painting or dancing to music or mopping floors.  It doesn’t matter what the activity is so long as it’s physical and it puts you in a Zen state of mind—complete absorption in the task you are doing.

And what happens while I’m playing in the kitchen?  Well, my intuition is multitasking!  Not only is it having fun helping me come up with something good to eat but it is also working on my writing riddles and devising new ideas for me to consider.  At the same time, my waking consciousness is resetting, so that tomorrow or the day after, when I return to my writing project, my brains are clear again and I can read a sentence once and know exactly how to fix it.  And I can write fluently without fighting the language.

Maybe you have a similar trick for resetting your brain; please share it with us by writing a comment below.  Or if you have a question or some other problem with your writing you’d like to discuss, please do mention it in the comments.

Well, until tomorrow, I’ll say so long and wish you good writing.

Dale

Writing Talk — Using The Stick-pile

— Posted inDiscuss Writing Craft, Finish Your Book, Literature, Personal, Writing A Novel — 5 min read

What Do You Mean By “Using The Stick-pile”?

black metal canopy frameMany years ago, I was writing my first, first novel (which was never finished nor published).  Every free day I had, I’d visit my favorite coffee shop, find a comfortable nook, and continue working, with my laptop, on the chapter at hand.  One day some artist friends of mine stopped in at the coffee shop and we chatted and I told them about what I was doing.

As it turned out, I offered them a finished, printed chapter, which I had on hand, for them to read.  And they did, aloud, right at their table in the middle of the coffee shop.  When they had finished and returned the pages, one of my friends asked me about a particular passage in the chapter which described a dream, dreamt by the main character.  He asked:  “Are you planning to do more with that dream later in the book?”  The truth was I had not even thought about doing more with that dream; my view was that it had already served its one and only purpose.  But it got me to thinking:  Should I do more with that dream?  Have I raised a question in the mind of the reader which needs to be answered?  It felt like the answer to both those questions was yes!

What I eventually learned was that building a story can be compared to building a house or some other material structure.  When you begin your project, you have your two-by-four boards of lumber and your two-by-sixes and so on, all stacked nicely and ready to use.  Then you start cutting the boards into the right sized pieces to build your walls and gables and so on.  The odd pieces you cut and don’t use, you toss on the “stick-pile”.  But during the building process, there are many times when you return to the stick-pile for a piece of lumber that will serve whatever purpose you have at hand.

The same concept is true when building a story.  As you build your story, you will write “elements” of the story—scenes that support certain story “truths”.  For instance, let’s say that it is true that character, Bob, is character, Fred’s, brother-in-law.  And the reader knows this because you have written a scene in which Fred marries Kelly, Bob’s sister.  And maybe Bob blabs inappropriately while giving a toast at the wedding reception and causes an embarrassing moment for his sister.  At this point, you, as author, might be done with Bob; he’s had his little cameo and now you throw him on the stick-pile of your story.  Then later in the story, you find you need character, who has a tendency for “loose lips”—who discloses too much during conversations.  And you need this character to talk about Kelly’s past dating history.  Your first impulse may be to use a new character for this job, say a girlfriend of Kelly’s.  But—wait a minute—how about checking the stick-pile?  And lo and behold, there’s Bob, ready and willing, and he can do twice the job that some girlfriend of Kelly’s (whom the reader has never heard of before) could ever do.  Voila!  You’ve found exactly what you needed on the stick-pile.

What is important is that we remember every story element we’ve written in all our previous chapters, even if that element happened two-hundred pages earlier.  I’ll give you an example.

In my novel, Wanderer Come Home, I have two primary characters who are strangers to each other.  For twenty-four chapters, they do not meet.  But, of course, they must meet; it’s a very important event in the story.  And I know exactly the circumstances under which they will meet.  I could make the meeting a happenstance, a lucky accident but then that will mean they are total strangers and thus would not usually engage in any sort of deep conversation.  So how do most people meet each other?  They usually meet through a mutual friend or acquaintance, right?  And here was my problem:  Who could be that mutual acquaintance?  Well, it just so happened that a character I had thrown on the stick-pile worked perfectly.  So I ended up writing a happenstance meeting and an arranged meeting between these two characters.

But why is this sort of thing important? you may ask.  The short answer is: giving your reader plausible causes for events in your story makes the story a) more believable b) smarter and c) structurally more solid.  In real life, we know that events don’t normally happen out of the blue.  Usually, one thing leads to another which leads to another and so on and these connections have meaning for us.  Have you ever met the person who can—and does—tell you the whole history of how he and someone else came to know each other?  That person is just relating, out loud, what we all do in our heads.  Relationships have dimension; they are not flat.  If you write a story without dimensional relationships, your story will come across as flat to your reader.

Well this was a long one.  I’ll try to keep them shorter.  But please do add your comment below and join this conversation.

That’s good for now.

Dale

Writing Talk — The Moving Goalposts

— Posted inBecome A Better Writer, Discuss Writing Craft, Finish Your Book, Literature, Personal, Write A Novel — 3 min read

What Are “Moving Goalposts”?

football stadiumGood Morning!  Well, let’s get right to it, shall we?

Here in the United States we have a saying:  “They keep moving the goalposts” by which we mean that what we think are the criteria at the beginning of a task for completing it, keep getting more and more added to them until it seems we will never reach the goal of finishing the task.

Let me give you an example related to writing.  My beginning goal for completing my first novel was to write a story of about eighty-thousand words, more or less.  I calculated that my finished novel would end up being about twenty chapters in length with each chapter weighing in at around 4,000 words.  (By the way, chapters can be as long or as short as you want them; there’s no standard length they should be; you fit the size to your own needs.)  But the more I wrote, the more I realized that I could not finish my story in twenty chapters or eighty-thousand words.  It was going to take a lot more.

My novel ended up growing to 53 chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue, and 195-thousand words—more than double of what I anticipated in the beginning.  There were many days, weeks, and months when I could not see the end of this project.  But I believe that “moving goalposts” is a common problem for most writers.

Right now, I can hear my high school English teacher saying:  “But Dale, if you had properly outlined your story beforehand, you could have easily met your original goal of finishing the novel in eighty-thousand words.”  Perhaps that is true.  But what kind of novel would I have ended up with?  Would it be at all interesting and full of life or would it have been boring and lifeless?  I don’t know.  But what I can say from experience is that the act of writing inspires ideas and ideas inspire divergence from the “sacred” outline.  (We’ll discuss outlines in another post.)  So, as a writer, you are often presented with a decision:  Do I stick with the outline or do I follow this flash of creative inspiration I’ve just had and diverge from the outline to use it?  Well, I’ve always chosen to go with the creative inspiration which has, time and again, moved the goalposts farther away from me finishing my novel.  But I think I’ve ended up with a damned good book for the extra trouble.

But let me know your thoughts on this topic by posting a comment, or ask a question, or relate a difficulty you’re currently dealing with as a writer.  All right?  So until tomorrow . . .

Salut!

Dale

Writing Talk — A New Feature

— Posted inBecome A Better Writer, Discuss Writing Craft, Finish Your Book, Literature, Personal, Write A Novel — 2 min read

 

woman sitting in front of black table writing on white book near windowWriting Talk, What Is It?

Writing Talk is a new feature of this blog with the aim of encouraging fellow writers who are engaged in the daunting process of writing a full length book.  With Writing Talk, I will share some of what I have learned but would hope that WT evolves into a discussion about writing where you, as a writer, offer your insights and ideas as well.

My experience, in terms of number of books published, is not extensive.  Yet, I think what I have to offer can be useful to anyone trying to get around writer’s block or figuring out how to organize a story or develop a narrative voice or address any one of a score of other common writing hurdles.  And everyone is welcome.

If nothing else, I hope Writing Talk will give me the opportunity to speak about the craft I love — writing the novel — while at the same time, allow me to meet other serious scribblers.  If you are experiencing some general or specific difficulty with your own work, then please take a minute to describe your difficulty in a comment below.

I promise to address your comment and hope that what I can offer—and what others might add in the comments section—will help you on your writing journey.

Sometimes just knowing we are not the only person dealing with a particular type of difficulty is enough to get us recharged and moving again.  So how about it?  Will you give it a try?

My goal is to post a Writing Talk article every day.  So please do drop in and say hello from time to time.  And bring your coffee, tea, or wine and stay a while.

Dale

About Me Personally

— Posted inPersonal — 3 min read

By clicking on “The Author” tab above you can read about Dale Tucker, the author, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is a rather boring bio, suitable for the back matter of my novel.  But I have decided it is appropriate to add something to this site which gives you a bit more of a personal glimpse into the sort of person I am, or at least think myself to be.  Something which defines, a bit better, my values, if you will.

So you will notice I’ve added a new tab on the above menu which reads: “About Me”.  And tonight, I will post the contents of that page here so you may read them for yourself.  I’d like to know about you too, those of you who read this blog.  So please post a comment about yourself below; I will surely enjoy “meeting you” in a sense.

About Me

the-signatories-to-the-window-the-artist-at-the-window-19091-jpgportraitI have been told I over-think things, but at least I think about them.  I am a stubborn non-juggler which means I do one thing at a time.  I’m a tireless worker when the work interests me but an insufferable procrastinator when it doesn’t.  I ask too many questions because I love learning.  I enjoy the company of others but in small doses.  I can’t breathe without a certain amount of solitude.  I distrust authority mainly because it has never proven trustworthy.  I believe in undying loyalty but not blind loyalty.  I spring from peasant roots of which I am proud.

I love deeply, without reservation.  I love peace but will stand up for the downtrodden.  My heroes are John Ball, Robert Kett, and Gerrard Winstanley.  Henry David Thoreau is my favorite author.  My favorite work by him is “Wild Apples.”  Trees are my bards; birds are my minstrels; and Nature my guru.  The designation of “family” comes with the obligation of being good company – that which is enjoyable and not tedious.  But family, is a relationship not determined by blood; it is determined solely by how individuals accept and treat each other.

I am disgusted by smugness, entitlement, and narrow mindedness.  I accept religion where it is merciful, righteous, and loving.  I embrace both mushy love and firm responsibility.  I believe that greed is a symptom of psychological poverty and generosity is the true indicator of wealth.  I believe that children should play outside and don’t need cell phones or electronic devices. I believe everyone should dream at night and during the day whenever possible.

There’s more I can say, but I think you’ve gotten a picture of who I am.  I take it for granted you know I’m a writer.  My genre is literary fiction.  Two of my favorite jobs, aside from writing, have been managing a music store and teaching international adult students English.  Yep, now I’m certain I’ve said enough.

Art Credit: The Artist At The Window  (1909) — Paul Klee