Tag Archives: writing

Kill the Main Character

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I like stories where important characters die. Sometimes violently. Often suddenly. Always by surprise.

I am reading George Martin’s Game of Thrones series. I am deep into Book 4 and have lost count of the number of seemingly major characters who have died over the previous four books.

My favorite TV show of the moment is The Walking Dead. I just caught up with the first half of season 3. ***Spoiler alert: from the beginning of the show to the most recent episode, people die. Lots of them.

I grew up reading both horror and fantasy novels. I read both genres for years and then just stopped. My complaint with both genres was lack of surprise. No matter how unique the adventure, how bold the quest, how vicious the monster, you could rest assured that the hero would survive and overcome. Dull, dull, dull.

When you know the hero is going to survive, there’s really nothing at stake. I love the moment of frisson when a major character fails. The whole narrative spins. Every assumption about the rules of the story get reexamined. Everything is fresh and uncertain and the characters who remain get a lot more interesting because there are no guarantees. Everything is suddenly at stake.

This works best in stories of epic scale, tales with plenty of major characters to spare. But you can’t just stock the shelves with disposable bodies. You must first make me care about them. I need to relate to their motivation and root for them to succeed. Don’t let the death be entirely meaningless. The death should be quick and merciless. It should happen suddenly from an unseen direction, but it cannot be random and it must advance the story and increase the dramatic tension. The death must diminish the hopes of those who remain and then, inexorably,  force them to grow and inhabit their potential in unexpected ways.

Don’t write the same story over and over again. Invent new rules. Twist the old rules. Be brave. Force your characters to be brave. Kill your major characters. Don’t let the reader get too comfortable. I don’t read to be comfortable. I read to destroy my beliefs and unmake my assumptions. Surprise me. Don’t let me relax. Disturb me. I will thank you. I will read your books.

Nothing Special: A Meditation on Writing

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451 words tonight. Not sure if they are good or bad, but they are out there now and the story has a new twist. To write about the mother, I need to write about the father. Both are such vile, loathsome creatures.

Writing is meditation and meditation is writing. Hold the seat with no gaining idea. Let the thoughts arise as they will. Observe them. Notice how the ideas dress themselves in words. Observe the words. Place them on the page. Let the words accumulate. Let them pile up in a gorgeous heap. Let them rise first to the knees, then the shoulder. Let them rise to the ceiling until you are buried in words. Let them rise until you are drowning, and you are unable to breathe. Then, stand back. Shake off the words. Remind yourself, no gaining idea.

Keep doing this. Not because the words are sacred. The words are not sacred. The words are mundane. Nothing special. Do this because words are nothing special. Keep doing this because the words are mundane.

You Fall Down. You Get Back Up.

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This has not been a good writing week for me, which is a shame after my major proclamation last week (Inspiration is a habit). I started back to work after 3 weeks off. Naturally, the days before returning to work were suddenly filled by constellations of ideas and epiphanies. I made a commitment to myself to wake up half an hour earlier (6 rather than 6:30) so I could develop the habit of writing first thing in the morning. That did not happen.

Twice my daughter woke up at 4:30 and wanted me to hangout in her room while she fell back asleep. I crept back to bed at 5:30 feeling dazed and bedraggled. Twice I stayed up later than I intended the night before and ignored my alarm. Once I didn’t even bother.

So there it is. My first week back to work and already my resolve was derailed. I know I am not alone. Creating an intentional habit is a hard thing.

I’m not giving up. I will keep working with it until I have made space to do this thing that I love. That is pretty much the entire recipe for success in life. You fall down. You get back up.

Inspiration is a habit

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I used to think that blogging was a self-indulgent, narcissistic pastime for people who couldn’t write Serious Things. Serious writers, I thought, struggled in private to set down their most important thoughts on pages that would be read only when a publisher recognized their native brilliance and invested in getting those thoughts out to an expectant public starved for brilliant ideas. I was wrong.

I didn’t write much while laboring under this belief. Writing was painful — a burdensome chore that must be suffered to encounter those rare moments of flow, where idea, intention and action all align.

This blog is rescuing me from that stultifying belief.

I started blogging seriously in September 2011. Before then, I had posted sporadically to LiveJournal and a few other random places. This blog at present is 109 posts strong. I feel like I am just now getting started. I now have personal goals for my blog. I keep an Evernote folder with ideas for future posts. I have met some dedicated writers and have discovered connections with friends I didn’t recognize before blogging. All to the good.

I write this blog for two reasons:

  1. To develop and sustain a daily writing habit.
  2. To overcome my crippling aversion to sharing what I write.

I read a bit about the craft of writing and have noticed a somewhat obvious correlation. Strong, successful writers write every day. Obvious, perhaps, but it struck me as a bit profound. Most successful writers, when asked to share their secret weapon, say write every day without fail. Write if it is easy. Write if it is hard. Write if it is good, bad or indifferent. Write every day. Constantly move forward. I think of this as “holding my seat”.

Holding your seat is about cultivating a practice of writing when you don’t particularly feel like writing. This is necessary to escape the belief that we must wait until we feel inspired before writing. Inspiration feels good and the best writing is often accompanied by that feeling. I cannot wait for inspiration. Inspiration comes at awkward, inconvenient moments — in the shower, laying in bed, driving my chair, sitting in a meeting. I can’t always capture the words in these moments and, when I have the time and tools to write, I can’t always be showering, lying in bed, driving or sitting in a meeting.

Writing everyday is a way of bottling that feeling of inspiration and using it when you can actually sit with it and visit for a while. This blog gives me a focus for writing every day. I am learning not to depend on inspiration, which is fickle and capricious. I believe inspiration can become a habit. Blogging cultivates the habit of drawing inspiration when I need it and can use it most effectively.

I used to write in private, guarding what I wrote from discovery until polished to perfection. The irony was that I rarely finished anything I wrote. I never stopped polishing. Writing was a secret fetish, a lonely compulsion I practiced in complete isolation. Sometimes I wrote things I thought were pretty good. Sometimes I wrote things I thought were pretty bad. It became hard to tell the difference. I found myself endlessly polishing both the good and the mediocre until it all pretty much looked the same. Blah.

I was crippled by an unwillingness to share. The act of writing is solitary but the results of writing should be shared. This isn’t because most writing deserves reading. Most of what I write probably does not need to be read. Most of what I write is not brilliant. Blogging is my way of surrendering the idea of brilliance as a worthwhile goal. Blogging allows me to shortcut that old, anguished practice of hording my words until they merit attention. It has become a creative lifeline and a source of focus around disparate ideas and inspirations. I am grateful to the people who follow what I write here and post comments. I appreciate every visit, every like.

When people read my writing, it affirms my path. It keeps me focused and protects me from feeling overwhelmed by inadequacy. I don’t share everything I write. I don’t incomplete drafts of stories or poems or notes for longer works. Those things can stay private until they feel ready.

Blogging takes the pressure off. Blogging makes writing feel more natural and relaxed. Blogging reminds me that there are lots of other people doing the same kind of work that I do, feeling the same kind of pressure or inadequacy or stress. Those feelings may be a natural part of the process but I don’t have to be captured by them. I certainly don’t have to be imprisoned by the need to wait for inspiration. Inspiration is a habit and, like all habits, can be cultivated, prepared and grown.

Cory Doctorow: Copying is the source of creativity

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Cory Doctorow is a great writer with a fascinating mind. He writes around the edges of the science fiction genre about themes like intellectual property,  information economies, informatics, censorship, and internet connectivity. If you think he sounds like a nerd, you’d be right. He’s a nerd’s nerd. I say that with great admiration.

Doctorow spent several years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation working on information policy issues related to copyright and intellectual property. Doctorow has become a powerful voice in the movement against Digital Rights Management software. DRM is the stuff that makes eBooks impossible to share or use the way you use paper-based books. DRM is the stuff that makes “owning” eBooks a fundamentally different experience than owning a paper-based book. He writes a lot about the concept of ownership and how we try to manage ideas as property.

You should read his books and essays to learn more about that.

Doctorow generally opposes the idea that piracy is an author’s worst enemy. In fact, Doctorow gives electronic copies of his books away for free in the belief that free copies increases his reading audience which, in turn, drives more sales. It seems to be working for him.

I admire Doctorow for his ability to reduce complex, abstract ideas to their essential core. He makes big ideas small enough for me to carry around with me and share with other people.

This recent interview in the Bizarre Assemblage is a great example. This is how he describes the role of copying in creative works:

 I knew even before I went to work for EFF that there really wasn’t any way that you could prevent people from copying things that they wanted to copy. And I also understood that copying was not in and of itself evil. In fact, copying is kind of the basis of humanity. You know, four billion years ago some molecules used some process that we don’t understand to figure out how to copy themselves and we are their descendants  We have a name for things that don’t copy themselves: we call them dead. So it’s pretty hard to condemn copying as wrong when everybody biologically copies all the time. And I felt like, as an artist, there was something profoundly intellectually dishonest in proclaiming what I did to be original. Obviously I do a lot of verbatim copying as an artist and my life is filled with mixed tapes and with things that I copied as part of my journey, as it were, to becoming the person I am today. But also every time I write a novel, I copy Cervantes who invented the Western novel. And every time anyone writes a detective novel, you copy Edgar Allen Poe who invented the detective novel. And it’s very tempting to say well, what I’m doing is a creative input of what those people did. But I think that’s intellectually dishonest. And I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that everything we do is creative and everything we do becomes plumbing for the next creative act.

He goes on to offer great advice to young writers: Write a lot. Write everyday. Great advice from a writer who has made a creative career that matters. Read his stuff. Study it. Copy it and make it your own. By making it your own, I mean add value. If you can add value to someone else’s ideas, you are making the world better for all of us. You are making “plumbing for the next creative act”.

Ideas Need Action

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A few years ago, I had a great idea for a book I wanted to write. I never wrote it.

A few days ago, I watched a movie featuring the two lead characters from the book I never wrote. Turns out, someone else wrote it. And they did a good job.

Now I will probably never write that book because I have seen the characters I had imagined brought to life by somebody else.

I’m not angry or bitter or really even all that surprised. A brilliant idea is only brilliant when brought to life. Ideas need action. There is nothing I can dream that someone else can’t dream. Worse yet, there is probably nothing I have ever dreamed that someone else hasn’t already dreamed as well. Probably better.

And so the trick is to start working and keep working and not stop working until the dream is brought to life. It is a story or a play or a poem or a painting or an invention or whatever. Your idea needs action. Do it now. Someone else is doing it. You need to do it first or you will be watching someone else who has done it better.

Does the iPhone kill creativity?

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It feels good to be writing again. Earlier today, I was wondering why I ever stopped. The iPhone and iPad crossed my mind but I wasn’t quite sure how they related to my decreased creative impulse. I haven’t been lazy. Quite the opposite, I’ve been productivity obsessed. In the two years since I got my first iPhone and iPad, I’ve been busier, more productive and better informed that ever before.

In my small amount of free-time I have been Facebooking, tweeting, following RSS news feeds, setting up search builder alerts in library databases, blogging, and sharing links of interest to colleagues across the state. I have become ridiculously well-informed through the miracles of Twitter, Google Reader, Flipboard, Zite, Vodio and Instapaper. I’ve been gathering weblinks like a manic squirrel and stashing them in Evernote, Google Bookmarks, and various other digital hidey holes.

The trouble is, I haven’t been taking the time to process all of this information or wonder exactly what it is for.

The universe is often kind. I was pondering all of these things earlier today, wondering how they fit together and then I read Jay Fields’ LifeHacker post “Is Productivity Killing Your Creativity?”

Creativity requires downtime. Insights are created in the space between activities where seemingly unrelated events are casually examined and relationships are found. Fields, like me, loves his iPhone. The trouble is, the iPhone destroys downtime. The mind is hungry for information and the hand so easily reaches for the iPhone when standing in line, waiting for the bus, waiting for the kid to get dressed, whatever. The idea is that these moments between things used to be filled with free-ranging thoughts, which created the building blocks required to make new ideas. When the mind is always engaged in taking in new information, there is no time left to make anything happen with this information.

Fields writes:

I’m convinced that my iPhone was the root of my creativity issues. Life is full of ‘waiting time’ – waiting for the subway, waiting to see your doctor, waiting in the elevator, waiting in line at airport/grocery store/coffee shop, and waiting at the bar to meet your friends. Pre-iPhone I would spend this waiting time pondering anything that was troubling me. Now, I open Safari on my iPhone to see who is the latest injury on the FSU, or who’s tweeting about what (seems like it’s mostly sponsorship requests these days). I don’t spend that time thinking about anything, I spend that time reading – reading about things that have very little impact on my life, but seem to always more than fill my waiting time.

I’m not planning to surrender my iPhone, but I like Fields’ rather modest solution. He moved the attention-suckers to the second screen of his iPhone so that when he instinctively reached for the device, he had time to remind himself that he needs time to think. Fields also schedules “stare out the window time” into his day. Both of these are doable solutions.

I want to sustain habits that foster greater creativity. I still want to be ridiculously well-informed, but I need time to figure out how this information involves my life. I need time to do things with the stuff I learn.

Funny how the answers we need often arrive just when we need them. Or maybe, I’ve just slowed my mind down enough to create a relationship between two entirely unrelated events. Either way, I am feeling grateful.

Flash Fiction: “Our Autumn Town”

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For a long time, my writing has suffered from an expectation that the things I write need to be finished, polished and complete before they are read. Finished, polished and complete are all important. The unspoken corollary is that writing must be perfect before it is read.  That belief has made my writing a lonely, sometimes painful, act.

I am trying to kill that mental habit by writing in public. Posting these unfinished, unpolished snatches of “flash fiction” helps me subvert the belief that the point of writing is to make perfect things. I am practicing with the idea that the point of writing is to be read.

So here’s another piece I wrote last night. I was listening to “Autumn in Our Town” by Dave Brubeck and Ranny Sinclair.

*****

He hadn’t meant to pick up the phone. Dialing her number was sheer mutiny, and yet, here he was, pressing the numbers, his fingers finding the buttons from long lost habit deeper than memory. They hadn’t spoken in years. He couldn’t quite remember why. There had been a reason. A good reason.

The phone was ringing. He closed his eyes, trying to remember the color of her eyes. They had been green. Her eyes were slightly misaligned, though he couldn’t well remember if they had moved more to the left or the right. It was a thing he noticed when she stared at him. She had stared at him a lot, a bit like an idiot perhaps but the remembered impression of that stare was powerfully erotic.

How had they met? Was it in physics class? Had they been lab partners? Or had they met, perhaps, in the library? Maybe it was on the bus? Had he ever ridden a bus? Where would he have ridden a bus?

These questions crowded as the phone rang — once, twice, three times. He was about to hang up feeling foolish for indulging this fantastic whim when the line opened and a voice spoke.

“Hello?” A man’s voice with a British accent. She had always loved men with British accents. She had made him hate his own Southern Georgia drawl, he remembered suddenly. So many things she had helped him hate about himself, he realized with sudden panic.

“Hello?” the Englishman said again with that tone of patient annoyance that must have driven her wild. “Is anyone there?” he asked.

A choking croak rose in his throat when he tried to answer.

“Hello?” the Englishman said again, this time less patient, more annoyed. “Is there someone on the line? Can I help you?”

He swallowed a second croak, which went down his throat like a thing with a hundred legs. The taste of bile. He was dizzy and sweating a little.

“May I speak to Celine?”

The man on the other end grew silent except for suddenly labored breath. There was a moment when the latent sound of telephone wire was the only sound shared between them. And then, the British man spoke, “May I ask who’s calling?”

“I’m an old friend of Celine’s,” he said quickly. Even as he spoke the words, they sounded wrong to him. Even to his own ears, they sounded very much a lie. “Norbert,” he added, realizing he needed to add more information.  “My name is Norbert.”

The British man was being careful now. “Norbert,” he said, as if practicing the name for the first time.

“Yes. Is Celine there?”

The British man sighed. “No. Celine isn’t available. She can’t speak on the phone.”

Norbert pondered the odd turn of phrase. “May I leave her a message? Like I said, I’m an old friend. This is terribly important.”

The man sighed again. “Terribly important.” He said it as if taking dictation. “How long has it been since you last spoke to Celine?”

Norbert sensed a trap. Besides, his mind couldn’t capture how long it had been. Surely twenty years or more. Maybe thirty. Yet standing there, having dialed Celine’s number on his phone, he felt as if he had spoken with her as recently as yesterday. Time was a tricky thing. It folded in on you and doubled over while you were not looking. Things that happened yesterday seemed years ago and things from years ago were as close to hand as yesterday.

“Not sure. Years, I’m sure,” Norbert said.

“Years,” the British man confirmed. “I see.” Now it was a clinical pronouncement, the way a doctor might deliver hard medicine. “Bad news, I’m afraid, Norbert. Celine isn’t well. She hasn’t been herself. For years, I’m afraid.”

“Not herself?” Norbert asked. “Then who has she been?”

“I’m sorry. I really must be going now.”

“Please.” The edge of panic in his voice surprised Norbert. Her eyes had been green. They had tracked slightly to the left when staring at him. She had a spray of pale freckles across the bridge of her nose and her eyebrows were thinner at the centers than at either side. “I need to speak with Celine. It’s very important.”

Another sigh. “Celine isn’t here. She can’t be here. She is in hospital for people who aren’t themselves.”

He waited for the words to sink in.

“A hospital for people who aren’t themselves?” Norbert asked, feeling dense.

“Psychiatric,” the man said, his tone deadly dull.

“I see.” It was the only thing Norbert could think to say. And then, “Still, it is very important I reach her. Is there a number I can try?”

“You aren’t getting this,” the man said again. “My wife isn’t able to take your call. She isn’t able to speak with you. She isn’t able to speak with anyone. She isn’t Celine. There is no Celine. You should forget about Celine. Give up on her. Move on. There isn’t any use in pursuing this line. You will not reach her. She can’t be reached.”

The man was angry. Norbert hadn’t intended to make anyone angry. Quite the opposite. It was quite simple, really. He had only wanted to make contact and explain a few unresolved things from his own perspective. He had only wanted to hear her voice, to remember those crooked eyes and the way her wicked smile had filled him with equal measure of fear and excitement.

The man on the other end of the line had stopped speaking. He had run out of things to say. Norbert tried to hear if he was fuming or crying. In the end it made no difference. Love was a madness that descended where it would, ruining the plans and expectations of everyone it touched. Whether this man, Norbert or whatever other men had crossed paths with Celine. It was no matter. There was nothing to be said. Nothing to be accomplished.

“I am sorry to have bothered you,” Norbert told the man. And he was. He hung up the phone and felt a sudden giddy rush and his incredible good fortune. Love had come upon him, had ruined him with its crushing madness. It was a beautiful thing after all, he decided. No less delicious, however unrequited

Blogging advice from Chris Brogan

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Chris Brogan recently posted “A Primer for Blogging”, which offers 21 helpful “rules” on developing a useful blog that gets read.

Number 9 caught my eye: “Realize that posts that are helpful to others get shared more than posts that are merely interesting.”

I’m trying to imagine what problems my blog might possibly solve for people. I’m drawing a blank.

I’ll keep at it, and, until I can find a way to be useful, comfort myself with sharing those moments that feel, at the least, interesting.

Of course, no list of rules is complete without Number 21: “There’s not a single rule on this list that isn’t breakable. Break all the rules you want and enjoy yourself.”

And best of all, Number 20: “You’re doing it wrong. So is everyone.”

Something better than bad

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Since 9th grade, I have thought of myself as a writer on the verge of writing Really Big Things. Important Things. Vital Things. Astounding Things.

There has only been one thing really standing in my way: I’m not writing.

It takes a constant infusion of morale boosting to be a writer. Notice I didn’t say a “great writer”. That’s no longer my goal. I have decided to settle for being a writer — someone who writes.

Just the simple act of writing takes an inordinate amount of inspiration to stave off the question, “Who cares?”

Seth Godin’s blog provides that inordinate amount of inspiration. In his post “Talker’s Block“, Seth points out that nobody ever really gets talker’s block. We talk all the time quite freely about stuff we know nothing about and never really worry about sounding dumb or inarticulate or incoherent. We don’t worry about it because we know no one’s really listening and what we say won’t last. Our words wash away moment to moment.

Not so with writing. We carry around the idea that everything set to page is indelible, permanent, an enduring testament to the quality of our inner lives. Such pressure.

How much better to simply get over it, realize that nobody is going to actually read what you are writing and then write anyway. Write in public. Write where people can see it, and don’t worry about being good enough to satisfy. Worry only about being better than bad.

Here’s what he says:

Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly–you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

If you know you have to write something every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. If you’re concerned with quality, of course, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.

The second best thing to zero is something better than bad. So if you know you have write tomorrow, your brain will start working on something better than bad. And then you’ll inevitably redefine bad and tomorrow will be better than that. And on and on.

Write like you talk. Often.

Lovely. Thanks, Seth.