Archive for March, 2010

Writers Read: A Twitter Book Club

You voted to pick the first book we’ll read for the inaugural Writers Read Twitter Book Club meeting. And the winner is…Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater!

Here’s how it works:

• Buy or borrow Shiver.
• Read Shiver.
• Show up on Twitter on Thursday, April 22 at 6:30 PM PST.
• Use the hashtag #writersread to join the conversation.

Some tips for reading:

Look for the techniques the author is using, and if they were put to good use or not. Think about what you admire or what you would do differently.

• Plot
• Characterization
• Dialogue
• Novel Structure
• Tone
• Setting

Writers Read: A Twitter Book Club

When I started my MFA program at Spalding in 2008, I complained bitterly about having to write MORE papers. Having just completed my Master’s in English, I did not want to write another paper about a book from a feminist perspective or discuss the homosocial bonds in Chaucer as compared to Shakespeare. I wanted to WRITE my own novel. Still, Spalding asks us to read 8-10 books per semester, and write papers on what we discover about those works as writers.

Therein lies the difference. When you read as a writer, you are using a different skill set. You look for the techniques the author incorporated, and you notice if they were put to good use or not. You may also discover what is lacking, or rather what you would do differently. I’ve found those papers to be invaluable to my growth as a writer, as I discovered what matters to me as an author.*

To that end, I am going to offer up a book club that meets once per month via a Twitter discussion, plus ongoing discussion on my blog. The only thing I ask of participants? Try reading the book as a writer (even if you’ve read it before).

Want to help me decide on the first book? Take the poll below.

*Note: the intent is to find value in the books we read to take something away into our own works, not bash works you don’t like.

How Writers Do It: A Writing Process Series – Part Four

The idea: A 4-week blog series in which eight (8) writers give their views on eight (8) different writing process guides. For more details, visit here.

This week’s topic: Where Stories Come From: From the time you get the idea for a novel to the day you first put your fingers to the keyboard, how does the story come to you? (ie. an also explore prepping to write your novel)

The contest: Join in the fun by blogging about the week’s topic on your own site. Be sure to post the link in this thread for a chance to win a free book! More details here.

The writers and their guides: Click on any of the writer’s names below to view their blog.

Cory Jackson: Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream

Kate Hart: Stephen King’s On Writing

Jamie Blair: Thomas Monteleone’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Writing A Novel

Laura McMeeking: Natalie Naimark-Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Debra Driza: James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure

Leila Austin: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

Sarah Harian: Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey

Jennifer Wood: Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing

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In From Where You Dream Robert Olen Butler offered some tips I found very useful for getting into that space where the ideas will come to you.  His greatest tip for keeping the ideas flowing? Write every day because when you take a day off there will be hell to pay. He describes that space between novels when he’s yet to write anything new.

I feel that I am utterly wasting my life. I do trivial, ghastly, quotidian stuff; I hate myself; I complain about myself to my wife, and that hatred daily increases. Finally she says to me, “Honey, it’s OK, you’ve reached total self-loathing; you’re about to start writing.” She’s always right.  Soon thereafter, the door opens up to my unconscious, to my new work, and I leap in. And then I write every day and I am scared every day and I am happy every day.

If you’re not a writer, this sounds a lot like schizophrenia. If you are a writer, it sounds achingly familiar. In fact, in the margins of my copy of his book, I wrote “Christmas 2009” next to the above quote. The backbone of any novel is a gnarled web of the author’s self-doubt, fear, and love of stories. Before you have a novel, though, you must have an idea. Butler recommends dreamstorming.

You’re going to go into your writing space, you’re going to go into your dreamspace, you’re going to float around, and you’re going to dreamstorm potential scenes in such a novel as this with such characters as these, with such yearnings as these.

Funny enough, it all boils down to finding that character with that massive yearning. Then put that character in a position to have their yearning thwarted by the universe. This sounds so simple stated like this, but as many of you know, the difficulty comes in taking a character with a universal yearning and finding a unique way to thwart them or an entirely new way for that character to overcome the obstacles in their way.

You know what? I think I may be ready to write. Because all of that sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.

Two for Tuesday

What is it? A game started by Kate.

The Rules? Post two of anything: book reviews, pictures, quotes, poems, songs, videos, rants, shout outs, whatever floats your boat. Just connect them somehow. That’s it.

One: Who doesn’t need a little magic in their day? Besides, you remind me of the babe…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WEdcxiHRxM]

Which brings me to another 80s favorite that I watched repeatedly. And I mean repeatedly until my brother’s eyes bled…

Two: My name is Inigo Montoya.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6m7NR6iYjg]

Blog Award Extravaganza

I know, I know. I’m a total loser. I’ve received blog awards and not returned the favor. So – in answer to a challenge from Kate – here is a mega acknowledgment for the awards I’ve received from Kate and Kaitlin. I’m sorry if I missed acknowledging you!

Groovy Blog Award:

I received this one for “rocking the helpful posts.” I’m passing this one on to:

1. The ladies at YA Highway for their ever enlightening posts.
2. Kate for her Friday Twitter recaps of everything I missed during the week.
3. The gang over at OPWFT for their great book reviews and tips on the writing process.

Humane Blog Award:

A very cool award to receive! This one goes to:

1. The ladies at YA Highway for their support of the people affected by the earthquake in Haiti.
2. Kate for her Twilight bathroom graffiti which teaches us all some kind of lesson. Not sure what, but it must be important.

Awesomesauce Award:

The rules for re-awarding are as follows:

“Rules if You Get Sauced: Basically: define awesome, and then name 8 people you think fit that definition. You don’t have to pass the award on if you don’t want to. This is really just for my own amusement.

Awesomesauce: the quality of being awesome with ease, ie: just as spaghetti sauce flows easily from the jar, so does the awesome flow easily from them.

Awesome: Awesome, in this case, means one of two things (or both):
A. They make me choke on whatever I’m eating on a regular basis because they’re so freaking funny.
B. They generally exude an air of cleverness, wackiness, or badassry.”

And the recipients are the amazing writers participating in my blog series. Every week they’ve delivered thoughtful, awesome posts:

1. Kate
2. Laura
3. Sarah
4. Deb
5. Jennifer
6. Jamie
7. Leila

Honest Scrap Award:

The Rule:
Share seven honest things about yourself and pass this lovely gift on to seven other Honest, Upstanding and “Scraptastic” bloggers.

1. I can’t eat meat on the bone. It makes me want to hurl. My sister and I refer to this as our “Meat Phobia.”
2. I am a sci fi/action movie geek. While I love a romantic comedy, I also love a good blow ‘em up or aliens taking over the world flick.
3. I hate airports and airplanes. I’m not afraid to fly, but I travel frequently for work. All the waiting makes my skin want to crawl. Luckily, I am a plane-narcoleptic. If flying alone, I’m out before the plane takes off.
4. I love romance novels. Sappy, angst-ridden ones. Especially ones with lots of fast-paced dialogue.
5. I have a Master’s in English, and I’ve never read Moby Dick. I swear I started, but it was so brutally painful that I couldn’t make myself read on. *hangs head in shame*
6. I’ve gone out with more than one guy named Corey. Cory and Corey. Can you taste the saccharine? I will always have a soft spot for one of those Coreys, though. J
7. My mom would never let me cut my waist length hair, so I cut ten inches off in my bathroom with a pair of scissors when I was seventeen. It was my one teenage rebellion. I like to hold it up as a banner to show that I rebelled at some point in my life in a truly fantastic way.

And the recipients are…

1. Stephanie
2. Rachel
3. Kaitlin
4. Amanda (Hannah)
5. Michelle
6. Kristen (Miller)
7. Kirsten

All of these ladies are big time AW supporters! I’ve eavesdropped on many a conversation to learn from them.

Happy 101 Award:

The Rule:
Share ten things that make you happy and pass on to other bloggers.

1. My family
2. My best friend, who is also my sister
3. Driving anywhere in my convertible with the top down
4. Writing
5. Good news, esp. good news about my writing
6. Reading
7. Cooking a great meal for a friend
8. My cute apartment in the city
9. Any day that is asthma free
10. Vacation days

And the recipients are…

1. Emilia
2. Amanda (Plavich)
3. Veronique

Each of these ladies has brought a smile to my face on more than one occasion.

How Writers Do It: A Writing Process Series – Part Three

The idea: A 4-week blog series in which eight (8) writers give their views on eight (8) different writing process guides. For more details, visit here.

This week’s topic: Deepening Your Characters: What is at the heart of a complex character?

The contest: Join in the fun by blogging about the week’s topic on your own site. Be sure to post the link in this thread for a chance to win a free book! More details here. Last week’s winner is Karla Ellenbach! Email me at corrinelj@gmail.com to get your free book!

The writers and their guides: Click on any of the writer’s names below to view their blog.

Cory Jackson: Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream

Kate Hart: Stephen King’s On Writing

Jamie Blair: Thomas Monteleone’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Writing A Novel

Laura McMeeking: Natalie Naimark-Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Debra Driza: James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure

Leila Austin: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

Sarah Harian: Gotham Writers’ Workshop’s Writing Fiction

Jennifer Wood: Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing

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Deepening Your Characters: What is at the heart of a complex character?

A couple of weeks ago, I described Robert Olen Butler’s take on fiction in his writing process novel, From Where You Dream.

Fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.

He tells us that there are “two epiphanies in any good work of fiction.” The second, as described by James Joyce, is the “moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence.” In other words the climax of the story.

The first epiphany comes very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth.

Butler believes a good work of fiction is born out of this first epiphany. It comes from dreaming up a character with a profound yearning. Characters without this yearning can leave a reader cold. This was a huge A-ha! moment for me. A while back I wrote this post about how a lot of fiction out there now is leaving me unmoved and dissatisfied, while YA fiction is grabbing at me. I think this is exactly for the reason Butler describes.

Yearning is something we can understand – an inescapable condition of being human. Whether it is a yearning for a family or a yearning to understand your place in the world, we can relate as readers to a character’s desires. My own characters usually come to me with their yearning in place.

In addition to yearning, I believe you deepen a character with a web of sensual details that describe the character’s world and their outlook on the world. Sometimes it’s easy to veer to too much telling. Much more difficult is to allow the way the character interacts with the world to tell the story of their particular yearning. Another way to deepen your characters is to allow them a complex range of emotions.

How do you deepen your characters?

Writing from Dark Places

I know divorce. My parents had eight of them, all but one by the time I was thirteen. I have called four men “Dad,” as if the label was interchangeable. To me, divorce is a very personal story of abandonment, lies, and broken hopes. Simply put, I learned that people walk away from each other with far too much ease. The men who passed through my life taught me that children were disposable, and regret is a poor Band-Aid for wounds that have carved deep under the skin.

These kinds of scars don’t go away. You learn to move on despite them, and become the person you are meant to be both because of and despite them. And still, sometimes a moment, a look, a stupid commercial can pick at the wound, exposing it to a bloody mass you have to heal all over again.

The kind of pain I’m talking about goes soul deep. It lives in a dark, airless place, suffocating between the things we are afraid of and the things we are ashamed of. Like most writers, this pain ends up in my writing. There are scenes I read, and go, “Yep. Doesn’t take an analyst to figure out where that came from.” Too often, the first emotion I turn to in my characters is anger. It’s the easiest to understand and to feel. Anger is camouflage for the walking wounded.

Anger is too simple, though. It hides the complex snare of emotions we feel, blending the hurt and sorrow with the rage. Sometimes I wonder if I am too guarded, if my armor expands to protect my characters from feeling too much. How do you pull off the armor to expose those dark places to the light? Worse, how do you show those dark places to others, knowing they will casually discuss and mayhap dismiss them? This is something I am challenging myself to do in my writing every time I sit at my laptop. Some days I fail. And other days, I write a scene that leaves me crying and upset and proud. As writers, we pick at our own wounds, exposing them and, if we are lucky, we experience a moment of catharsis. If we are very lucky, we help our readers to experience a catharsis of their own. That bit of gold may make living the hurt over and over again worth it.

This monstrosity is my family tree. You will note that this does not include aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, or the many step-siblings I’ve had. I don’t have a website big enough to encompass my family’s particular brand of craziness. Have a question? I’m glad to answer.

How Writers Do It: A Writing Process Series – Part Two

The idea: A 4-week blog series in which eight (8) writers give their views on eight (8) different writing process guides. For more details, visit here.

This week’s topic: Getting Into the Zone: What goes into the creative process of writing a novel? (i.e. Author’s mindset, the writer’s environment, etc.)

The contest: Join in the fun by blogging about the week’s topic on your own site. Be sure to post the link in this thread for a chance to win a free book! More details here. Last week’s winner is Karla Ellenbach! Email me at corrinelj@gmail.com to get your free book!

The writers and their guides: Click on any of the writer’s names below to view their blog.

Cory Jackson: Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream

Kate Hart: Stephen King’s On Writing

Jamie Blair: Thomas Monteleone’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Writing A Novel

Laura McMeeking: Natalie Naimark-Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Debra Driza: James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure

Leila Austin: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

Sarah Harian: Gotham Writers’ Workshop’s Writing Fiction

Jennifer Wood: Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing

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Getting Into the Zone: What goes into the creative process of writing a novel? (i.e. Author’s mindset, the writer’s environment, etc.)

Last week’s post was full of how I disagreed with Robert Olen Butler’s definition of an artist in his novel, From Where You Dream. This week’s post is the opposite. It’s a lovefest because Butler knows me. He knows my best and worst habits better than I do. I’m pretty sure he’s my writing therapist or a parent calling me on the carpet. Here’s what Butler told clueless me about me.

On functional fixedness:

…you have a certain place and certain objects that you associate only with a certain task, eventually the associational values build up in such a way that when you go to that place and engage those objects, you are instantly completely focused on that task.

Apparently, this is why I can only plant myself in front of the television when I’m at home (as I write this an infomercial for a 70s music collection is on. That’s just sick. Not the 70s music, but that I’m watching an infomercial.). It’s the task I associate with the place. And that’s why I’ve herded myself to Starbucks to write for the last couple of years. I knew it was my habit to write there, and now I have a name to put to my habit. Functional fixedness is the reason a remote is attached to my hand at home and my fingers burn up the keyboard with an extra-hot, no whip Toffee Nut Latte at hand in the land of my neighborhood 24-hour Starbucks.

Butler gives this advice:

Find a place and some objects that you go to and engage only when you’re writing.

He also advises you to write every day. When I’m “in the zone” the words come out of nowhere at light speed. And then there are the days in between where every word feels worthy of the Delete key. Butler says:

You may find – this is dangerous – that you can take a day off every six or seven days. When you do, you’ll be grumpy and out of sorts and things will be uncomfortable…If you let three or four days go by it’s as if you’ve never written a word in your entire life.

And I thought, “Damn, it’s like he’s in my head, except for that crazy bit about discounting genre writers.” This is exactly what happens to me, though I’ve never been able to vocalize it. When the writing is flowing, my manuscript is like a lover, and I mourn every minute we are apart. And when I stop writing, it’s like a lover has broken my heart, and I just can’t find my way back into the dating game. I’m pinning this quote somewhere I can see it as a reminder that I need to write something every day.

One of Butler’s most intriguing ideas (and my favorite) he refers to as dreamstorming. This is part and parcel of being in the zone.

It’s very much like an intensive daydream, but a daydream that you are and are not controlling.

I’ve lost whole days writing. Quite happily. Beginning the day with one crew at Starbucks, I’ve looked up to find myself surrounded by an entirely different crowd. And I never even noticed the change. Ten hours can feel like ten minutes when the story is coming. Thank goodness Butler gives practical tips for getting back to that place. Starbucks, my headphones, an iTunes playlist, a Toffee Nut Latte, and my laptop. These are the keys to getting into my zone.

What about you?

How Writers Do It: A Writing Process Series – Part One

The idea: A 4-week blog series in which nine (9) writers give their views on nine (9) different writing process guides. For more details, visit here.

This week’s topic: Writers as Artists: How do you define yourself as a writer? Are genre writers artists?

The contest: Join in the fun by blogging about the week’s topic on your own site. Be sure to post the link in this thread for a chance to win a free book! More details here.

The writers and their guides: Click on any of the writer’s names below to view their blog.

Cory Jackson: Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream

Kate Hart: Stephen King’s On Writing

Jamie Blair: Thomas Monteleone’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Writing A Novel

Laura McMeeking: Natalie Naimark-Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within*

Debra Driza: James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure

Stephanie Jenkins: Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel

Leila Austin: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

Sarah Harian: Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey*

Jennifer Wood: Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing*

*A few of our bloggers couldn’t get their books in time, but they are offering their insights on this week’s topic. Next week they’ll pick up the discussion on their guides.

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Writers as Artists: How do you define yourself as a writer? Are genre writers artists?

“Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you.”

There are few gray areas in Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream. He has definitive ideas on writers and the writing process. Love it or hate it, this book forces you to define your personal writing process.  Every page shouts for you to get off the fence and decide who you will be as a writer. I highly recommend this book and believe writers can gain insight into their work by reading it. Over the next few weeks, I will share what I loved about. Having said that, I have to admit the first chapter provoked me, starting with this comment:

“You must…have the highest aspirations for yourselves as writers—the desire to create works of fiction that will endure, that reflect and articulate the deepest truth about the human condition.”

My comment in my book’s margins: Huh.

This idea is so enormous and abstract – the idea of the human condition – that I wonder at anyone’s ability to define it, let alone set out to tell the truth about it. My aspiration has always been to touch someone with my writing.  You know that moment when someone tells you that your book reached inside of them and played over their guts like fingertips thrumming guitar strings? That’s what I want. A moment of connection. A thrum of understanding. As a reader, the books I hold in highest regard are those that sparked a moment of kinship that I can return to again and again – that is the standard I will hold myself to as a writer. Charles Dickens, Nora Roberts, and JK Rowling all rank within this category for me.

Butler does not consider genre writers to be artists. There are writers who are artists – who aspire to that lofty human condition truth-telling – and then there is everybody else. The main distinction is that artists access the world through their senses, and intellectuals understand the world through thought. Also, while a genre piece inspires you to “fill in the blanks” with yourself, a work of art inspires you to “leave yourself.” Butler believes:

“Fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.”

When I read this, a light bulb went off. I suddenly understood why my novel had come so easily when I struggled to write a work that meant something to me. The idea for my story was born the minute I dreamed up my MC – a girl who yearns to belong to someone. To share a thrum of understanding with someone, if you will. Butler admits that genre writers “have never forgotten this necessity of the character’s yearning.”

Now, my book is a young adult urban fantasy, which would fall into genre fiction. My negative reaction to Butler’s ideas stems from this idea that by his definition I am not an artist. Oh, I beg to differ!

I was lost in that “white-hot center” of me during the time I wrote my novel. I don’t know that I’ve written something that will endure, and I don’t believe every genre book is a work of art. But are they nonexclusive? I wonder if Butler’s ideas don’t conflict somewhat. After all, if I were to begin to describe the human condition, I would begin with human yearning.

What do you think?

How Writers Do It: A Writing Process Series

It’s a contest AND educational. See how we roll? Welcome to a 4-week blog series in which nine (9) writers give their views on nine (9) different writing process guides. We will discuss a different topic every Thursday, exploring advice offered by writers from Stephen King to Donald Maass, in addition to giving insights into our individual writing processes. Plus, each week I will give away a book to one lucky winner.

Here’s how it works:

1.       Each Thursday in March, visit my home page to find links to the nine (9) amazing writers below. Join them as they react to their author’s take on a particular aspect of the writing process, while sharing their own views.

2.       Join in the fun by blogging about the week’s topic on your own site. Have fun. React to a guide of your own, or share your own methods.

3.       Link your blog post in the comments section of each Thursday’s post on this site by the following Monday at the latest. NOTE: The comments must appear on this site for you to be eligible to win. Winners will be chosen at random.

4.       Each Wednesday I will announce the winner of the previous week. The prize will be the writing guide of your choice from the list below.

The Writers and their Guides:

Cory Jackson: Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream

Kate Hart: Stephen King’s On Writing

Jamie Blair: Janet Evanovich’s How I Write

Laura McMeeking: Natalie Naimark-Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Debra Driza: James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure

Stephanie Jenkins: Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel

Leila Austin: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

Sarah Harian: Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey

Jennifer Wood: Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing

Don’t forget to check back on Thursday for the official kick-off! If you have a guide and you want to play along, please email me at corrinelj@gmail.com.