Take Aways

Oct30

Just finished up online workshop — new one, and that’s always interesting. Take-aways from this workshop, which had a focus on storytelling….

Folks don’t seem to know how to do writing exercises–or does no one teach that not all writing is meant for the final product? 

We had some issues of grasping what is an “exercise”–as in, you do need to practice your craft.  That means technical practices, the same way someone does scales before you play music.

This seems basic to me.  But, then, I’ve just hit a place in the new book where I need to write some “off camera” scenes.  I need them since I need the blocking and info hard in my head (not floaty and fuzzy).  Folks this class didn’t seem to understand that sometimes you write to STRETCH — as in push a particular technique, then let it relax to normal.  I’ve often doen work just to try out a new technique.

This is something I learned from dance, and riding–you’d often have to exaggerate a technique to get it to stick in your muscles.  Once you overdid, then you could relax back and have it work to fix a technical problem you were having before.

Very common mistake for writers in their first couple of years of writing–most of ’em bite off more than they have skills to execute.

This makes me wonder if more folks need to go back to school and take some creative writing classes just so they can figure out where they are with their skills.

IMPORTANT: Just because you can put a sentence (or a paragraph together) does not mean that you know boo about telling a story.

VERY IMPORTANT:  There may not be much of a short story market around, but start off with short stories if you’re just learning to write.  Write them as fan fiction, or just because, or publish them yourself on your blog with a Creative Commons license.  Writing short will teach you craft, help you avoid getting bogged down in complexities you may not be ready to handle, and keeps the basics manageable while you’re still getting them down.

Of course, I may be prejudiced about this since I learned so damn much from writing short before I tackled the long stuff. And the long stuff still daunted me and tangled me up for way too long.

(And then there’s always the other extreme of not going far enough with anything–playing it safe and doing too much of the ‘me too’ book.)

There’s never such a thing as too much of the basics.

Just when I think that I’m repeating myself (way too much) I find out that, oh, whole bunch of newbies here.  And they need to hear this.  This is why I think writing books are as much a perennial as cook books–basics never go out of style, and we all need to get back to them every now and then.

The words matter.

How you put words on a page matters–that’s your style, your voice, and what someone’s going to buy (or not buy).  Never think you can get away with being a little sloppy about the words because ‘it’s a great idea’.  I do see folks get carried away sometimes with their style, or a style, and forget to think about things like, “does this work, is the emotion and scene clear, am I tripping up the reader here with fancy footwork that’s much too much?”

And the one thing I still wonder about–can you teach someone to have a self-editor?  Is that just a matter of some folks can learn to have an objective eye to their work and can see ways to make it better, and some can’t?  It’s sort of like if you have someone who is tone-deaf–that person’s never going to make for a great musician, but you could give them some level of technical proficiency.

So can you have someone who is word-deaf?  Or is that edit-blind?

New Online Workshop

Oct1

Monday the “Storytelling Techniques” for writers online workshop starts for NEORWA — that’s North East Ohio Romance Writers of America for the acryonym challenged (and boy is that a mouthfull).

New workshops are always interesting–there’s always a moment of ‘what the hell was I thinking.’ Coupled with the certainty that I will not have enough material to fill a day, let alone several (that never happens, but it always seems all too possible). Add in a dash of wondering why I though I had something to say, and it’s the usual insecurities showing up. I’m convinced these are not just writer neuroses, but writers just happen to write about them (being writers and all). And its just that edge of fear–of performance–that makes it interesting.

I also happen to like teaching. But online classes are odd.

Face-to-face instruction leans heavily on an exchange of the excitment of ideas–on contact. Online that doesn’t exist–and wry humor can bite you on the ass in text form. But the storytelling technique has me excited–it’s something that I’m not sure all that many folks really think about, or study, or take apart. And it’s vital to a good story. Which leads me to my favorite part of workshops–I know I’m going to learn things.

It’s going to be a challenge to figure out what I think–and do. Plus I get the good excuse to look at some other storytellers to pull apart their stuff to see if I can find the ticking heart. Comes of too much of my youth doing jigsaw puzzles, I suspect, which is a useless but soothing hobby. I would have been happy in this life digging up shards of things and fitting them together–puzzles are great training for that. But its not bad to pull apart craft and fit it back together again. It keeps me interested.

Form or Content?

Sep21
Interesting article by Paul Graham on “Post-Medium Publishing, and it comes with the idea that we pay for form, not content.

This actually brings up the idea of buying first editions, or special edition books.  And how books were once purchased separate from the binding — you’d then have your books bound as you wished, paying for more expensive leather covering if you could afford such a thing.  It could be that we’re moving back to that.

I’ve often thought that authors now need to offer various editions.  The free download, the printed paperback, the signed special edition, the complete collectable version which includes audio, and then of course the edition for a few thousand dollars which includes dinner out with the author.  This could be a much better way for authors to actually make money and still deal with the world of downloads and free.  And, frankly, there are books that I’ve read where afterwards I almost wish I had a more special edition — I loved them that much.

And perhaps we’ll get back to more speaking tours–Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, they made their money more from their tours, and not so much from the printed page.  But, of course, the tours will be virtual ones, held online at the computer, streaming video and mixing in questions.

And, of course, this means a stronger after-market for an author’s work. Collectables will go up in value.  Or perhaps an author can actually regulate that by releasing more forms of the work–a newer edition, the illustrated edition, or even revised editions with additional scenes (heck, TV shows and movies do that, so why shouldn’t books?).

But writers are generally more interested in the content.  And I suspect readers are as well (I am–it’s why I’ll read cereal boxes…I want the story, and the form takes second place).

On the other hand, there are forms that make the story more accessible.  Form does matter.  Now the question is — just what forms am I willing to pay for?

Discouragement

Sep12

Joel Olson posted at The Village Voice on why, I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script, an amusing, and pained, observance on both dealing with getting and getting feedback on writing. Which got me thinking.

He notes, “…not only is it cruel to encourage the hopeless, but you cannot discourage a writer.”

There is much truth in this. Speaking just from personal experience, I think I ‘quit’ writing about a dozen times–yeah, it’s like smoking, or drugs, only worse. Finally, I gave up on the whole giving up idea–if it’s not taking, it’s not taking. But it still took a couple of years after that of still writing the stories to get something to the point where it could sell. (And, no, you cannot see the ms. under the bed. They’re staying there–for now, at least.) From my side of the street, writers write.

On the other hand, there’s John Kennedy Toole (and isn’t that a name to work with), who offed himself, and eleven years later A Confederacy of Dunces came out, went on to do very well. So was it discouragement, or booze that dun him in, or another set of demons? And did the folks who rejected his work wonder about that later? (Don’t we all hate to be the one with the straight pin at the end of the birthday party that really does need to end now?)

Now, I’m not advocating for the tormented writer stereotype who needs comfy care. On the other hand, writers can be touchy bastards…oops, I mean sensitive types. As in thin-skinned, egocentric, arrogant…well, you get the idea. You cut us, we not only bleed, but we whine about it the whole time–words are habit forming. And, yes, every critical word sent at our precious goes in like a cut–or seems to, but that’s that ego thing.

And on the third hand, this sort of thing always leaves me heading for the truth behind the word. To ‘discourage’ is to dishearten–love that word, taking the heart out of you. According to M-W it’s to “deprive of confidence” to “hinder by disfavoring” or to try and talk someone out of doing something.

Seems to me that saying something needs work, or that it doesn’t work, or even that it sucks does not come tied to saying, “give it up.” But even that opinion is subjective–art’s supposed to appeal to the individual on a core level. So I like this book, but hate that other one, and a third is a big ho-hum–and the next person down the line feels entirely different. (God, please always have folks feel something about my work–love it or hate it, but spare me indifference.) And if you’re going to get really artsy, you’d better know your audience is not going to be mainstream.

Which leads me to the fourth hand of this bridge set, and the idea that really, it’s damn hard to be discouraged unless you do it to yourself. As in confidence is an inside job (or if it’s not, my friend, you are in serious, serious trouble, probably not too unlike Toole).

So I’m left thinking that what anyone says to you about your work is an opinion. How you take this is your responsibility. Even if you ask for it, your reaction to it is yours to own. To my mind, a writer is responsible for her own work. And for her own opinion of it. Meaning, we all need the ability to evaluate any critical comment and see it as either useful or irrelevant. That includes the comment, “Ever considered knitting, dear.”

Hemmingway (not a writer I adore, but he has good things to say, and you cannot fault the man’s craft) is credited with the quote, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.” A good thing to apply not only to the world, but to your work, so you see what’s good, and what’s crap. And then learn how to fix the crap (or just cut it out).

But Jeffrey Carver’s the one who said, “Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong.”

And, yes, we all lose perspective at times. We ask for advice which we are not ready to hear. Shit-detectors can fail on us. (Oh, yes, those purple pants were indeed a mistake, and yes, so was that very bad, bad idea of that cowboy amnesia story.) Which means, a writer needs friends who will point out the mistakes, say what’s wrong, and do so in a way that is not an abuse of friendship. And I do mean friends (not friends of friends, or acquaintances, or cyber-stalked folks, which just seems to me to be a path that is begging for a smack down or neglect).

If you do not have such friends, reference Toole’s story again. Or, frankly, Hemmingway’s. Which just goes to show, it’s not always about the rejection. Sometimes it’s about having friends who tell will you the truth. And the ability to hear them.

Storytelling Workshop

Sep6

The storytelling thoughts have turned into an October workshop for Northeast Ohio RWA — wonderful how the Internet makes this possible.

We’re going to cover more than writing craft, and actually take a look at what makes a good story because you can have poor or just okay writing, but still have a great story that grabs readers and sells its way into published book and movie deals. So how does a storyteller spin a good yarn on the page?

This workshop covers storytelling techniques writers can use, including:

Words/Voice Mechanics
1.Voice: choice of language
2.Clarity, clarity, clarity
3.Making it non-monotonous

Your Characters
1.Stage presence
2.Believability
3.Letting the reader play too: non-verbal communication

Basic Structure
1.Pulling the reader in: clear and engaging openings
2.Pacing — sequence of events
3.Ending has a sense of closure

Innovation
1.Unique or creative use of language
2.Presenting the sequence of events
3.The meaning of the story artfully expressed or suggested

It should be a fun time, and it’s all new to me, too, so I expect to discover a few thing–the joy of a good class is that the teacher can learn as much as she teaches.

But is it Literature?

Sep1

Boing Boing, one of my favorite sites to visit, had a link to this Wall St. Journal Article, Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard, an amusing article. Lev Grossman, the article’s author, is the book critic at Time, and urges literary types to discover that, gee, folks like to have a plot in a story. Now he sites the decline of adult trade fic (down 2.3% last year), and the upswing in YA novels (hardcover up 30.7% this year). And he writes, “The novel is getting entertaining again.”

I’m not sure what he’s been reading, since I’ve had a steady supply of excellent novels all my live. I will agree that some of the best stories around are to be found in YA — I’ve found myself reading a lot of YA. But I’m not sure about this, “…revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks.”

What’s wrong with a supermarket rack? What…literature is not only supposed to be hard to read, but hard to get? Didn’t Amazon kill that idea?

And in a bit of reverse snobbery, maybe it’s time for readers of genre fiction to start looking down on those who read “literature” and slip them a nice paperpack that’ll keep them up all night.

Ageless Prose ?

Aug21

Over at Wyrdsmiths, author Kelly McCullough picked up on the post from John Scalzi on why new authors are kinda old. That started me thinking not just about how long it takes to learn how to write (Scalzi and McCullogh note about twenty some years, each, which seems about right to me, since it took ten years of dabbling for me, and about another five or so to get serious and figure out what the hell I was doing). And I wonder if the real danger to the novel is not that folks will stop reading, but that potential writers may not have the patience to learn to tell a good story.

Note the phrase “tell a good story” — I’m wondering if that’s the key here?

Recently, it’s been contest entry time, so I’ve been judging. Give back when you can, that’s the idea, only I worry sometimes that I’m being so very tough. But then I think what if some kind souls hadn’t sat down with my early scribblings and written up comments (hard to take at the time, but oh so useful once you get past being ticked off at anyone not loving every word). Learning takes sweat, and patience. Learning writing technique is one thing, but I so many entries these days from good writers — really good ones, sometimes — but the story is not….(sorry to say)…not good.

So…good writing, bad storytelling. What–are these writers just not reading enough to absorb what storytelling takes? Or are they reading a lot of badly structured crap, and therefore producing the same? Or is it really that hard to get a creative writing class these days in which characterization and story and pacing are taught? Come to think of it, most of what I learned wasn’t from a class, but from taking apart the stories I liked. And from imitating.

My first story came out a Ray Bradbury wannabe. There was the inevitable Poe poetry–ghastly stuff on my side, but Poe will teach you a lot about the rhythm in words. And then the Georgette Heyer imitation, which seems mandatory for any writer who has aspirations to write a Regency romance. Oh, and a couple of mysteries that leaned heavily towards Dick Francis. Once I got all of that out of the way, I finally found my own stuff. Thank god. And, just in case you’re thinking it, copying does not mean taking their words. It means writing in the style of. I think I even slipped in a bit of Lovecraft there for a bit.

So…what does it take to learn storytelling? Maybe this just goes back to writing — a lot. And reading even more. And maybe it also goes to having a small circle of friends who can read those early stories before they have to go out into that big, tough world.

Buying and Selling Words

Jul31

The Green Apple Core (bookish tidbits as noted in the blog subhead from the folks at Green Apple Bookstore) has a somewhat amusing vid on the buying and selling of used books as compared with digital books. As in, with a physical book, you have something with inherent resale value–I’ve got a few at home that are worth a bit. They’ve a point I hadn’t thought about–mostly, I suspect because while I’ll go hunting for some out of print books, I don’t do a lot of used book selling or buying. But it got me thinking about is it better or worse for an author to have that second, after market sale?

Used bookstores can help an author reach readers who might come across those said out of print books–and hopefully the readers then go looking for newer, in print books. But there’s also the school of thought that says used books eat into an author’s income, as in, that’s a sale stolen away. Either argument also applies to libraries who loan books.

Now, I’m not really sure that used book stores (or libraries) really hurt an author all that much. I’m a library user (not as much as I used to be, but still trained that way as a reader). And I’m a book store junkie. I do pass around authors I like–and I’ll try out new authors from the library, and if I like, I go shopping for my own copy. I like having books around. It would be harder to keep these habits if/when books go digital (much harder to pass around a copy, and digital can make things very hard to find, and very easy to lose). Would the loss of a second/used market work to an author’s advantage?

As in you have to buy a copy? And what about sharing your copy then? When I think of how often I do share, pass along a book (usually with a stern warning that it must be returned), then digital seems to have a big disadvantage — unless you’re talking open source and not DRM. And maybe that’s the key.

Books need to be free to move around as they will. Words often need the same thing.

Online Workshops — too much ?

Jul20

I’m due to give an online workshop with Colorado Romance Writers — in past years this has been very well attended (it’s the Show & Tell Workshop), but this year isn’t looking too full. And might well be canceled. They show other workshops they’ve held in the past couple of months as also canceled. Which makes me think folks are really tightening belts and budgets, and this falls under extras.

I’ve cut back on a few things–less trips, fewer lattes out, and really thinking twice before I buy a book (but I’m still buying and have hit a new streak of great reading).

But I’ve also seen writer contests struggling, pushing back close dates, entries dropping. So now I’m wondering if it’s a time crunch as well as cash–as in the second job take, or the extra work undertaken, or the stress of job shopping (can be hard on the muse, I know).

Maybe it’s due to just too many contests, too many workshops online, too much info floating about. There’s certainly nothing wrong with putting your head down and writing–much more can be learned from the doing instead of the learning. But I do wonder how this will shape the market, and future writers.

Storytelling for Writers?

Jul2

So I’ve been thinking about story and writing, and how one of those is being taught these days, but maybe not the other. Which got me thinking about ‘story telling’, that most ancient of arts if you go by the cave drawings of Lascaux, which has to be the first picture book around.

This led me to Story Arts a most useful site. Now they break it down to the telling bits, but the info seems just as good for the writing of a story if you look at the parts that apply to the concept of conveying a story:

They start with Voice Mechanics — and that’s a great place for a writer to start. It’s the mechanics of actually putting the story on the page.

…clear…non-monotonous…expression to clarify the meaning of the text.

All good stuff for a writer to do–clear, not boring, and making sure its very clear to the reader. Without meaning there is no story.

And then Face/Body/Gesture which a teller of story needs, but a writer needs to remember to use this for the characters: …uses non-verbal communication…

Ah, yes, the sub-text, SHOWING more than TELLING. More stories could use that.

And then, Focus as in: …engaging….charismatic…

This is noted as “stage presence” for a teller, but characters need all of this, too. Do writers check back and ask, “Is this a likeable character? Someone who is engaging, charismatic?”

And speaking of characters, they note: Characterization….characters are believable…

That’s one where I’ve read manuscripts where the ‘anything goes’ rule has been applied, except that doesn’t work if the reader isn’t playing along with you and also believing. Are you sure everyone’s drinking the Kool-aid you’re peddling?

And another essential: Pacing:….The story is presented efficiently and keeps listeners’ interest…

That’s a big flop area for a lot of stories–the pacing is too fast, and the reader has no time to settle into any scene, or it’s too slow and I’m flipping ahead looking for where this story actually starts.

They add in Effective Storytelling Composition but I’m only quoting the parts that a story teller needs for the written word:

Basic Story Structure
…clear and engaging opening.
…sequence of events is easy…to follow.
…ending has a sense of closure.

Okay, if I read one more synopsis in a contest that talks about how this it the start of a series, I’m going to quote the above to that person. Engaging opening, easy events to follow, and closure. It’s simple stuff, but simple takes more work than complicated. And I think most folks want to over-complicate.

Words
….choice of language is descriptive and articulate.
….character text is clearly differentiated…so the listener understands who is talking.

How many folks read their own dialog aloud? Without tags? Can you tell which of your own characters is talking? This one caught me the other day, so that I knew I had to rewrite that passage so that character’s voice stood out better.

Innovation
…a unique or creative use of language….
…creatively presents the sequence of events.
…the meaning of the story is artfully expressed or suggested….

And, yes, this is another place where the language has not been used in fresh ways, where the sequence of events is just too much like other already published books, or the writer may really not have anything to say. There’s no theme–meaning no there there.

This is about as good as it gets for a clear map to better story telling. I’m going to have to think about this myself, but I think there’s a workshop here, too.