A reason for everything
This is realistic, right?
One of the critiques I’ve had of previous work is that I’ve fallen into another trap laid by Robert B. Parker. Many of the women in my work are impossibly beautiful. Not Barbie-like, but they’re usually attractive. And while in God’s eyes, we’re all attractive–it’s what gives me hope–the human eye isn’t quite so kind.
So, when I decided to make the secondary protagonist of my work in progress tall and blonde and physically fit, I ran the risk of falling down that same hole. Not all women are tall and blonde and physically fit. Most of the physically fit women I know aren’t tall and blonde. And the few tall blondes I know aren’t physically fit.
So making her tall, blonde, and buff was done with a purpose. First of all, she works in radio. Even though people don’t see you in the air in radio, they see you at the appearances and on the monster-sized billboards and, increasingly, on the show’s Facebook page. When you’re tall and blonde and articulate, people will listen to you who might not otherwise do so.
Tall, blonde, articulate, physically active and fit. Holy crap, Chris. You didn’t fall down that hole, you dove in without a parachute. You built a freaking amazon goddess. Moron. (Show me pictures.)
Actually, yes I did, to a degree. With a purpose. My character is also sarcastic and witty and tends not to back down from confrontation. As my protagonist withdraws to deal with some of the garbage occurring in his life, she has to be formidable. They are a professional and personal team–though not in a sexual way. She is the more aggressive one.
But she also has fibromyalgia. I know a handful of women who suffer periodically from it. And it’s a tough thing to deal with, especially if you’re a freaking amazon goddess. Your self-assurance and physical command of your body vanishes and your strengths, the things a flare-up don’t allow you to do, are essentially turned against you. If you’re supposed to be strong and self-reliant and you have to crawl across the floor to get to the bathroom because your feet hurt too much to walk on, there’s a bit of internal stress there.
In short, ideally, nothing in your story should occur by random chance. If your lead female is attractive, buff, and articulate, there should be a reason for that. Put another way, you should make that work for you somehow. If you don’t, you’re missing an opportunity.
How do you make seemingly random things work for you?
Like this:
Wrong kind of Dead, but you get the idea.
No matter who you are and what you do, you’ll have two things in common with every single person who ever existed. You were born and you will die.
People often wonder what it will be like after they die. Will there be throngs of people at their wake or funeral? Will anyone really notice or give a damn? Will it rain on the funeral and get everyone’s nice clothes wet and muddy? And will the minister honor your request that the last song at your memorial service be Take This Job and Shove It?
But what if you don’t die, but everyone thinks you do? What happens if there’s a mix-up or–depending on your circumstances–a conspiracy to make it look like you’re dead when you aren’t dead after all? It would probably cut down on annoying spam e-mail. And no one would call to say they absolutely need your help with <insert activity here>.
But what else would it be like? What would it be like to get an e-mail announcing your death and asking people to pray for your family? What would it be like to see your name in the paper in the obituaries, or to hear on the radio news that you had passed away? What would happen? How would it affect the people around you?
If you guessed that was this week’s writing exercise–for a character to have that happen to them–then you win the big prize. (Unfortunately, our big-prize budget is exhausted for this fiscal year. Sorry.)
Write a scene in which one of your characters isn’t dead, but everyone thinks they are. The possibilities are endless, from humor to poignancy, to heart-breaking sadness.
Time Limit: 20 minutes
I have a friend who’s a pretty decent writer. There are spots where her writing could improve–which makes her like pretty much every writer who’s drawing breath. But she’s got a lot of promise.
What she doesn’t have is guts. She’s terrified of people seeing her work and judging her harshly because of it. It’s a reasonable fear.
About fifteen years ago, I read a book that angered me enough to throw it out when I was done with it, so no one would ever be subjected to such torture again. There’s a well-known author I refuse to read any more because one of her more recent efforts was a waste of time and money.
It’s a reasonable fear. In this case, not having guts isn’t an indictment, it’s something all writers face from time to time.
The first time I took my work to my first critique group, I was a mess. I’d been critiquing there for several meetings, so as to gain some credibility before thrusting my work in front of peoples’ faces. I knew my sample was pretty good. But as I made the copies and stapled them together, I started to fret.
The critique group was on a Monday night, so off to work I went, mostly paying attention to my job, but not entirely dismissing the voices in my head.
What if it sucks? What if they read it and hate it? What if they read it and hate you for peddling such crap? What if they look at you funny and say “What kind of mind produces this kind of sick crap?”
Mostly, though, the voice said What if it sucks?
If you’re looking to get your work critiqued for the first time, you probably have a similar voice asking similar questions, so here are the answers.
It probably doesn’t suck. But even if it does, understanding your flaws is the first step toward correcting them. One of the habits I picked up from my literary inspiration, Robert B. Parker, is the overuse of dialog tags. Try listening to a Spenser or Jesse Stone on CD sometime. Said said said said said said said, with each piece of dialog. That part of my writing sucked. I fixed it. Next.
They aren’t going to hate you for what you put on the page. If they’re a decent group, they’ll go easy on you–it being your first time–but still give you the feedback to help you improve. If they’re hostile or they ridicule you, that’s not an indication that you’re lacking. Groups that do that give newbies aren’t worth your effort to be part of.
Unless you’re writing stuff we don’t typically talk about on this blog, they won’t think you’re a wacko. Think about it. 50 Shades of Grey is about people getting tied up and having sex. And it’s the biggest, bestest new thing to come along since the last biggest, bestest new thing. And if you are writing stuff like that, feel them out before you submit. If the participants are embarrassed by erotica, you probaby won’t get decent feedback anyway.
It’s all about taking that one step and taking the chance that someone might not love your work, so they can help you make your work more solid.
Like this:
Putting your money where your writing future is
This blog, as much fun and wonder as it is, is a marketing tool for the Florida Writers Association and its Conference, to be held this October 19-21 at the Orlando Marriott Lake Mary in sunny Florida (it’s a great conference; you should definitely go). We believe there’s great value in the conference–but we need to pay for it all, so we charge admission to attend.
There are a lot of free, valuable tools you can find to help you as a writer–from various critique groups to this high-quality blog. But at some point, you’re gonna have to stick a crowbar in your wallet and part with a little cash now and again if you want to succeed.
And that’s the place I find myself now. I have to primary personal goals in life right now. I want to reach a specific level of fitness and I want to become a published author.
I can work out without spending any additional money. I have the DVDs and the weights and I can do the routines as many times as I want without any additional cash outlay. But without something to aim for, it gets stale after a while. There’s a five-mile mud run in early June (a little more than a month away as I write this…far less by the time you read it).
And there’s a writing marathon with the lovely and talented Jamie Morris coming up. The writing part gets stale from time to time, too. A day with others, practicing our craft, comparing notes and making friends is a great form of positive re-enforcement.
Unfortunately, neither of these things are free. Jamie’s sessions have varying prices and the mud run is $75. Fortunately, right now I have enough play money to do both. But my pockets will probably be empty from now until then. I pick both, but with those picks, I forego any other mud runs, writing marathons, or pretty much anything else for a few months.
Being a successful writer is about talent and drive, but it’s also about choices. How do you spend your time? Do you screw around on Facebook (guilty) or do you write and revise? Do you go out to eat a couple times a week or do you use that money for a writing marathon?
There’s no right answer to this question, but it’s something you have to ask. How you spend your money, like how you spend your time, will tell about priorities. And at the end of the day, you have to balance them, just like you balance your time, for the greatest ultimate payoff.
Get feedback and support at the FREE SWISH fiction-writing seminar in St. Pete this summer
By John Rehg
The FWA St. Petersburg Writers Group is proud to announce a workshop spanning seven weeks this summer, called SWISH: Story Workshop In Summer’s Heat. We look forward to building on the Novel in a Day workshop, with several added benefits.
In addition to covering the essentials of story, participants will be able to read aloud from their work, they will get feedback and critique on their story idea, their story structure, and individual scenes.
The workshop is set on an easy to remember 3-2-1 schedule; that is, the third Saturday in June (6/16), the second Saturday in July (7/14), and the first Saturday in August (8/04). It will be held at the Pinellas Park Public Library, centrally located between Clearwater and St. Petersburg.
Each workshop day is three hours long, from 1:30pm to 4:30pm.
We’re excited to offer this opportunity to writers to take the time to write a complete short story with an end in mind: to get it published. A listing of upcoming anthologies looking for short stories will be sent out so that those who have not already invested time in a story can start something new. For those who want to continue working on their novel, the workshop is useful as well, as a scene is a scene, a plot is a plot, no matter what story it is in.
We ran the Mystery In a Month workshop several years ago, and it was well received. My only disappointment was that four weeks, for me, anyway, was not enough to finish a story. Granted, I had just started it, and I was out of town for a week, but the pace seemed rushed to me. The hope here is that the time frame (seven weeks) can accommodate unexpected interruptions and still allow someone to either finish a short story or make significant progress on their novel, in at least one area.
Bring your writing instruments – this is a working workshop!
For details, please visit the SWISH Workshop website, or contact John Rehg at fwastpete@gmail.com.
What would you like to accomplish at the workshop? What genre is your WIP?
Industry News: NOLA newspaper drops to thrice a week, author publishes Twitter novel, Amazon bans spam
New Orleans Times-Picayune To Publish Three Times a Week
The New Orleans Times-Picayune has published a daily newspaper for 175 years. That will end this fall when it shifts its attention to online news and cuts its staff, on its way to publishing a physical newspaper just three times a week. The paper has formed the NOLA Media Group, which will oversee publishing of the paper, as well as content for its website NOLA.com. The move will result in unspecified staffing cuts and leave New Orleans as the largest city in the country without a daily newspaper. Advance Publications, which owns the Times-Picayune is also taking the same approach with newspapers in Huntsville, Mobile, and Birmingham, Alabama. Although the Times-Picayune is considered a successful newspaper, its readership is down 49% since 2005.
Writer to publish entire novel in Twitter
Science fiction writer Jennifer Egan has announced she will publish an entire novel on Twitter. The experiment started Thursday night and continues for three nights. Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, which makes publishing and reading an entire novel a bit challenging. Egan has also published a short story in list format and a novel called A Visit from a Goon Squad as a PowerPoint presentation. The latter won a Pulitzer Prize. The novel is called Black Box and is a series of dispatches from spy in the future. Hey, could this be the next FWA collection?
Amazon bans spam books from Kindle Store
It’s not a new idea–getting free content, or content you buy a license to duplicate and sell as your own. The technical term is spam and it litters the Kindle Store and other online locations. And Amazon has finally put a stop to the practice. Content that is freely available on the Internet and for which the “author” is not the copyright holder is no longer acceptable in the Kindle Store. Kindle has made this move before, but may be more serious about it this time, as the content is finding its way into its Kindle Lending Library service, available as part of the Kindle Select program, which is not free.
How do you kick your own butt?
I have to admit, working out has been work lately. I’ve been going at it hard for about five weeks, after recovering from a stupidity-related injury. My body seems like it’s perpetually sore and honestly, in spite my emerging Adonis-like stature, my weight is pretty stationary. It’s a chore working out these days. I do it, but only because I don’t someone to stop me on the street, compliment my Jabba the Hutt costume (which I wasn’t wearing), and ask where the Star Wars convention was.
There’s a great parallel between writing and exercise. If you want to get in shape and drop weight, you have to exercise and eat write. Every day–with a periodic exception here or there. Thinking about exercise while you chow down on fudge marble cake with a six-pack of mud slides for a chaser doesn’t help.
Neither does thinking about writing while you’re watching the latest of 2,618 NCIS marathons on USA Network. (How about the Gibbs wants you to be doing something else marathon?)
Hey. Get to work.
In short, the only way to be a writer is to…you know…write stuff. Ass in chair and all that.
But, as with exercise, there will be times when you’re thrilled for your ass to hit the chair. And there’ll be times when the chair might as well be wrapped in barbed wire and surrounded by a field of broken glass and booby traps. At some point, for every writer, putting fingers to keyboard and pen to paper ranks someplace between root canals and a colonoscopy–and you don’t get the good drugs when you write that you get with the colonoscopy.
The key to success is to do the writing even when you don’t want to do the writing. Force yourself. Get past the part where you accomplish nothing because you don’t want to be there and all that’s coming out of your brain is freeze-dried poop.
The question is, how do you do that?
So…how do you do that? What works for you?
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