Every day I conquer the world...

Stories to tell...

Everything is a story. Given sufficient supplies of coffee and time, I will prove it to you.

A psychologist I used to know told me that making stories is a defense mechanism, a game our psyches play to help us make sense of trauma. A story is a box to put things in, a safe place to keep things until we unpack them carefully in front of our loved ones and let them be amused or thrilled.

Then they go back into the box and get put away for a time.

I have a lot of those boxes stored away, my own and some I’m holding for others. The only difference being that I view them all as spare parts boxes, to be opened and plundered as the need presents.

For writers, all boxes are spare parts boxes. We riffle through them for the bits and pieces from which we invent new stories or retell old ones. Thus, we allow of stories out into the breathing world, as Frankenstein's monsters, with bits of this and bits of that, and an aspect which -- if we are good enough -- will inspire our readers to the churchyard to dig up their boxes, to check that everything is still there. And to ponder how the writer knew these things, these secrets we never tell anyone, and to ponder anew a world where stories live in the open air even when we are certain they are nailed into a crate and buried as deep as ever we could dig.

The best stories, of course, are usually made from the parts of our lives that we actively tried to avoid. That's just the nature of the thing.

All stories are reflections of one another because they are all part of the same larger picture, the same overarching story that we call our 'culture' or our 'society' but really mean 'our shared story'.

Stories are going on all around us all the time, and though we may fancy ourselves the hero of our own tale, in reality we are bit players in someone else's story. It's the strange and awesome truth that we are not always in the story we think we are. We are not always playing the role we thing we are playing. And we are not always fully aware of the endings, the beginnings, or who the heroes and villains around us truly are.

When a story is happening, it's just life.  

It's the writer's role to understand that, to recognize it, and to choose the arbitrary points of initiation and conclusion so that the stories we tell reflect the ones that you don't tell. Because when we walk through the world, we're the ones whose eyes are up and looking around, filling their boxes with spare parts.

Ask a writer where they get their ideas and you will get a panoply of answers, most of which are untrue. Because the simple fact is that while appear to be trying to come up with an answer, for the most part we are really trying to imagine how anyone could walk through this world of stories and not trip over at least a few.

Up in the digital tree house: Forming Online Writing Groups

I'll be honest: I've never been a big fan of writing groups. I'm sure they're great for some people, but I've brushed up against too many that are snake pits of negativity and unnecessary competitiveness.

Illustrated by Joel Reid, copyright 2012

The trouble, as they say, is people.  It seems a kind of magic, pulling together a group of people who are of like mind who are willing to set aside ego and meet in civil and constructive conversation about their work. It's even more difficult when you take into account the geography. Finding all those people within driving distance of a central meeting place that serves coffee and/or wine.

I found it once, briefly, and then it slipped my grasp and I haven't been able to pull it off again.  Maybe that makes me a miserable misanthrope, but I think it's just the nature of the beast.

Enter the world of social media and the advent of the online book group...

It's been said that being a successful writer in the modern sense is about 1% talent and 99% being able to ignore the internet (which is a talent of its own). There's certainly some truth to that, but the internet has its uses too, and one of the primary uses seems to be drawing together people of like mind who might otherwise never meet and lending a megaphone to the voiceless.

It's no secret that social media has played a hand to some degree in every popular uprising from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wallstreet. What it is doing to authors is no less revolutionary.  And while it's not all good, and I'm normally not the biggest fan of Facebook as a company, the idea of the thing is wondrous.

Our online group was formed around the time I was writing Howard Carter Saves the World. We supported one another through that stint of NaNoWriMoing and had so much fun that we stuck together. If Facebook has become the virtual neighborhood, we built a tree house in the vacant lot down the block and hung up a sign: Dreamers Only.

It's where I go when I'm having trouble with something I'm writing, but it's also where I go when the real world rises up and wallops me with a mallet. Real friends, digital tree house. In the zany, text-based world of the internet, across thousands of miles, we sit down and share, and kvetch, and dream together.

I hope you find a place, either online or in what we laughingly refer to as 'real life'. Build a tree house, hang up a sign, choose a secret handshake. We'll wave to you from our tree and tip our paper hats across the neighbor's fence.

Just don't touch our Otter Pops... because we've got Howard Carter in our tree house and he's been filling water balloons and cackling maniacally for about a week now. Best not to tempt him.

With enough time and coffee...

It's Story Time In America: Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

There were two people outside of my family that inspired me to become a writer: Jim Henson and Dr Seuss. But that dream would have been meaningless if there had not been two people inside my family who told me it was okay if I wanted to write a novel, as long as I got my homework done first.

The children of readers become readers; a lucky few get to be writers.

Today is Dr Suess's birthday, which coincides with the National Education Association's "Read Across America" celebration. It's an entire day about childhood literacy.

I have come to understand that I was a lucky child; growing up it was a rare day indeed that wasn't about childhood literacy. From my earliest memories there was a shelf of books in my room. There was an orange shelf in our room stuffed with Golden Books, picture books, and Storybooks telling tales from Disney and the Bible... I romped with the Pokey Little Puppy, and sailed to a far off land where the Wild Things roamed. I helped The Little Engine up the big hill and helped Grover avoid the Monster at the End of his book. 

Why my dad painted that shelf bright orange, I will never know. Maybe my memory is faulty and it was really turquoise, but whatever the color, it was where we found our books. It was at my elbow when I sat by my sister, wandering the desert with the Israelites and I enduring the Long Cold Winter with Laura Engels Wilder.  

That shelf of a peculiar color seemed so large at one point and then suddenly it wasn't big enough to hold our library. My sister and I branched out on our own, leaving behind story time for the adventures of Nancy Drew and the Brothers Hardy. More and larger shelves replaced it, a library that grew at the same rate we did.

Today is a day that celebrates childhood literacy. Today is a day when I encourage everyone to sit down with a child and read if they can and donate to an organization that does if they cannot. But it takes more than that to make a reader: You have to read too.

Most people think of the image in the photo above when they think about encouraging children to read, sitting with a kid on your lap, doing all the voices as Grover tries to keep you from turning the pages. But that's not how my parents turned me into a reader. 

If they ever did that, I don't remember it.  

Of course they read to me, but the way they turned me into a reader was by being readers themselves. They made time in their day to turn off the television and open a book. They did it consistently across the entire course of my life. And for all my rebellions -- and they were many -- that was the image of adulthood that I carried with me.

So celebrate childhood literacy today. Read to a kid. Donate to the cause. Buy books for your local libraries and schools. But understand that childhood literacy isn't a holiday. It's not something we do once a year like Thanksgiving or Halloween.

If you make one day about literacy and you have made a start.  Make every day about literacy and you've made a reader.  

Visit the NEA Foundation's website at readacrossamerica.org to learn more about how you can help improve childhood literacy in your area.

RE: "Greed is Good"

Open Letter from the desk of Mr. G. Gekko, Chairman

TO: All Employees 

RE: Setting the record straight on "Greed is Good" 

It has come to the attention of this office that a speech given some time ago has become problematic for the business practices of this firm and this nation. The Chairman has expressed regret (having nothing to do with the current slate of litigation against him) and wishes to set the record straight.

On that day in 1987, when addressing the ethos of his firm and his vision for western culture, he misspoke on rather an epic scale. 

What he meant to say was this:

Read is good. Read works. Read is right.  

Reading clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Reading, in all of its forms; reading for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and reading, you mark my words, will not only save us, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A. 

The chairman expresses his sincerest apologies for any misunderstandings.  If nothing else, unchecked READING is less likely to crash the world economy. 

Semi-sincerely,

G. Gekko, Chairman

Northwest Tutoring Center Conference

The big project at the writing center recently has been preparing to host the NWTCC. Today, that all came to fruition. And what a day it was.

Sleep now.

Watching the Clock: Keeping track of the third 'W' in your writing.

I was recently re-reading an old manuscript when I stumbled across the following passage...

    "Jordan paused before turning the corner, wondering what she was going to say to the old man that would make any difference. She toyed with her lighter, but couldn’t bring herself to light it. MacLeod had done nothing to earn her disrespect; his house, his rules.

     She could smell the old man’s cigar smoke on the late-afternoon breeze and wondered what she’d have to do to earn the latitude Pastor Kipfer seemed to enjoy. Maybe he'd share his stogie, turn it into an ersatz peace pipe. 

     The rattle of gravel echoed off the garage wall as a car pulled up out front and she hesitated. She didn’t want to do this in front of an audience. She stalled for time, stowing the lighter back in her pocket and hoping it was just a deliveryman.

     A gruff male voice yelled “You Ashleigh MacLeod?"

   “Maybe, who’s asking?” growled the voice of the pastor. 

     A sound like twin thunderclaps shattered the afternoon silence. Light flared, casting harsh shadows against the garage wall, freezing the moment like a camera's flash. The moment of inrushing horror seemed to stretch to infinity the moments before Jordan screamed..."

Did you catch it?  

The muzzle flashes of the shooting we're witnessing through the main character's eyes are bright enough that she sees them from around the corner. Moments after noting that it was mid-afternoon.  

If you've ever been around guns much, you know that's just silly -- it's a gunshot, not a lightning flash.

I know exactly what happened. The first time I wrote the scene, the two characters (Jordan and Pastor Kipfer) had just risen from the supper table and dusk had fallen.  During a rewrite, I removed a bunch of material and shifted the preceding scene from dinner to lunch.

End result: The sun was still in the sky, but the way I was describing the scene still assumed it was dark.

Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How?  Sometimes the third W seems obvious, and sometimes it bites you in the butt.


Incidentally, I checked my notes from the beta readers and one of them even mentions that this scene has timing issues. I remember going through looking for things like this and still I missed this one. More than once.


It goes to show the value of close-reading during revisions.

There are many ways to keep track of this. I've known some authors to keep an account of every scene with a minute-by-minute timestamp. I'm convinced that the trend in thriller novels to include a timestamp at the top of each chapter started with an author's attempt to keep track of what was happening when and then forgetting to erase it.

Instead of military-style timestamps, I've started using an Afterthought Outline (patent pending).

It's not a new idea. In high school and college, instructors would require me to turn in an outline for a paper. Because I didn't see the value in them then and still don't, I would write the paper and then generate a fake outline after the fact. They're fine for those they help, but an unnecessary chore for those they do not.

Good thing I'm not teaching high school English, I suppose.

These days (since long after I wrote the passage above) I've started using the afterthought outline as an editing tool.

Instead of writing from an outline, I have a short precis of the story and some notes about how the main characters will interact. Sometimes I have character sheets for the characters detailing their descriptions and mannerisms, sometimes I don't. Sometimes, I just pin all of my cocktail napkins and bits of paper to a cork board in approximately the order in which they will unfold. Then I start writing and let things happen organically. It's not until the second or third draft that I start seriously jot noting how the story finally settled down and start flagging pages with Post-it notes to indicate where certain events begin and end.  This helps me sort out the flow of events and ideally, notice discrepancies like the one I mentioned above.

To avoid the kind of mistake I detailed above, I often note the date and time at the top of each scene either in the manuscript or in the attached outline: This happens and then this happens. And it's ___ o'clock. And in that location at that time and date, the sun would be ____.

So it goes that even an organic writer (so-called) finds it necessary to outline at least a little. Because if they don't watch the clock, at the very least they're going to have lighting issues.

Write Everywhere & Everywhen: A pocketful of ideas.

Sitting at dinner among other writers, I am often struck by the number of times someone says "I'm going to write about this as soon as I get home!"

I usually hear this as I am tucking a scribble-covered napkin in my pocket and wondering why they're waiting.

I once told someone that I started a new book whenever I didn't have anymore room for my wallet or keys. And it's not far from the truth.

I would imagine that in a world where almost everyone carries a tiny computer in their pockets, we could stop waiting until we get home to write something down. The sad fact is that even with the ubiquity of smart phones and other devices, we still rely on our memories to preserve the ideas that spring fully-formed into our heads at the drop of a word.

There's magic in places where different minds meet. Conversations in real life are fertile ground for ideas.  We're told to keep our eyes open and watch for the stories all around us, but what good does it do us if we don't write it down?

We spend a lot of time on writing blogs and at conferences reminding aspiring writers to keep a notebook on their nightstands for those 3 am epiphanies. (I've moved mine down the hall to the bathroom cabinet because turning on the table lamp wakes up my wife and I got tired of using a headlamp.) But I think we don't spend enough time stressing the need to carry a notebook (or equivalent) at all times where we're out with friends.

Not that I should throw stones; I don't always have a notebook with me either. That's no excuse to let the ideas slip, though. I'll use a napkin or an envelope, or my hand, or a patient passerby if necessary... pretty much anything that will take ink will suffice.

They're not all gold, of course, but they're not all dross either. And the only chance I get to decide which is which is if I stopped for a second to jot a note and shove it in my pocket. Ideas are transitory things. They'll slip away from you if you don't get them down while they're fresh in your mind.

I've never had anyone tell me they find it rude, but I accept that some people might. It's all part and parcel to befriending an author, I'm afraid, occasionally we'll get that far off look in our eyes and start searching our pockets for a pen.

I think that it's a goal we should all have: to come home at the end of the day and find that our pockets are full of ideas.