GENREALITY

Persistence is what makes the impossible possible, the possible likely, and the likely definite. – Robert Half

I’ve had several conversations in the last week with other writers that surrounded the subject of doubt demons, dealing with stress, and career paths. I’m sure part of it is that January was fast coming to a close, and if they’re anything like me they’re thinking… “Damn, time is just whipping by…again.” and if others are like me they’re thinking maybe they need to revise their goals for the year. But I think the other part of it, the bigger part, is that we’re writers, and no matter how much you write, how many sales you have, or how well your last book did, we still have doubts.

It’s funny because I know me and my friends fight these demons off to somewhat regular intervals, and I often hope that someday I’ll get to that point where I don’t doubt my skill/talent/or drive anymore, but I doubt it. Yes, there’s another doubt.

Because it seemed to be such a prominent topic of conversation I figured I’d share some thoughts of my own, as well as some that I’ve seen elsewhere that have stuck with me.

Carrie Vaughn’s post a while back called A NYT Bestseller has a meltdown really hit home with me, not just because of what she said, but because of who she is. I’ve been a fan of Carrie’s for years, and think she does a fabulous job on every Kitty novel, as well as her other stand alone’s.

The truth of it is, we all have doubts, and it’s not always a bad thing. Doubts are very bad, when you let them cripple you, or worse yet, stall you altogether. Doubts are bad when you give in to them and let them take over. But I believe if you acknowledge them, and consciously work to run right over them on your way to the finish line (whatever that is in your case) that they can be a both of a good thing because doubts mean we care about what we’re doing. That we’re not just churning out the same thing again and again in some sort of formula that once worked and we think will work again.

Like most things in this often crazy business, doubts are all about how you use them.

If you want more reinforcement that you’re not alone in having self doubt…check out this articles, that quote’s some pretty well-known authors voicing their doubts, and gives some great advice for dealing with doubts.

I’m going to leave you today with a couple of steps from a post I found on romance writer Kelly Wolf’s blog
1. Keep writing. You won’t want to, but you can. It’s all in your head. Really. Just do it.
2. Read a book on your craft.
3. Write some more.
4. Check out blogs by your favorite author or other writers with information on your craft.
5. Write again.
6. Read. And then read some more. Remember why you love books.

Want to read more… click here 12 Step Program for Writers Doubts by Kelly Wolf.

If you’re an artist, one of the key things you do is observe life around you.  It’s second nature.  With your eyes wide open, there should always be plenty of ideas and characters for your work.  As a writer, I observe some of the wackiest shit you can imagine.  People are illogical and inconsistent to the point of madness.  Just look at the folks running for president this year.  They pander to the moment, to the funders, to the specific crowd they are standing in front of at any particular moment.   Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see the fallacies and the out-right personality shifts.

Oh, you’ll find individuals who have a fairly strong narrative in their real lives, those who try to live by consistent values and appear logical from one moment to the next.  But I promise you, there are going to be moments when you see people do something so illogical that it will make your brain hurt.

As a writer, this is the stuff of dreams.  If you are writing comedy, then the election season is  your goldmine.  Or was that tragedy, I forget some days.  Regardless, you should never be short on characters, motivations or reactions when you write.  If you don’t believe me, take your favorite writing device and casually stroll through a department store or better yet, grab a beverage and sit in the food court of your local mall.  Within ten minutes you’ll see enough to fill a novel with secondary and perhaps, main characters.  It’s better than television most days.

Now, here’s the trick.

You can’t use that stuff as it happens.  No one will believe it.  We humans are just too whimsical and capricious to be used as is in a story.  See, unlike your day job, your dating life, or even a trip to the grocery; fiction has to make sense.

I can hear some of you out there gasping and examples of fairies and dragons are just popping to mind faster than you can write them down in the comments section of this post.  Yes, we write about stuff that doesn’t exist.  Sometimes we take things that exist and twist them around to be different than what they really are.  But the one thing we also do is proceed with internal consistency.   I don’t care what logic you use, but if you tell me the Bobby turns green on Tuesdays in the first paragraph.  When I see a green skin tone next, it damned well be Tuesday.

See, the characters in your books and stories can be wild men but no matter what their motivations, no  matter what their appetites or fears, they must behave with a level of logic that your readers can follow.

Every action must be aligned with the behavior this character has portrayed before, or ample justification must be shown as to why this individual would suddenly start behaving in a way that is different from what you as the author has shown.

It’s a balancing act.  I’ve critiqued a lot of stories over the years, shorts all the way to novels.  I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve had an author tell me, “but that’s the way it happened.  I wrote that based on real events.”

To which, I have to inform them that real life is too crazy for fiction.  Fiction must follow a logical thread if you want to keep your readers engaged and if you want them to finish reading the piece.

Don’t get me wrong.  Be gonzo, write some avant-garde story that would make your high school English teacher cringe in his cardigan.   But if you do not have the characters act with an internal logic that the reader can follow, you will lose them.

So, be a people watcher.  Eaves drop on conversations and experience the drama of real people from time to time.  It’s where we get our juice.  But when you put that down on paper or pixels, make sure your darlings can follow the bread crumbs back to their first introduction and your readers will gladly follow you into the apocalypse, or the next general election, depends on your threshold of pain.

As a writer I make it my business to pay attention to details.  I’ve always done it.  Even as a little kid I would notice things the adults around me would miss.  I also have a crazy scary memory for minutia.  Like the time a friend of my mom’s, Lynn mentioned that she worked with a certain Gail who had a crooked nose.  Weeks later at the bowling alley, Carol and Kim, two women who bowled with my mom, were once again oblivious to my presence.  I was so much a regular to the Tuesday and Thursday bowling leagues that they forgot I was listening.

They were gossiping about how Gail was such a whore and how she probably did things with men, for money.  Kim commented that anyone who worked in “that kind of place” was probably a whore as well.  I had no idea what “that kind of place” was.  Those kinds of details are not important to the story yet.  I’ve learned that.  Those details will present themselves with time.  Even at eleven I knew they were being catty, but I filed the information away and went back to reading A Wrinkle in Time.

Four months later, I was sitting at my grandparents house flipping through the paper after my grandpa had finished reading it.  Deep into the entertainment section I saw series of head shots of young women.  They were strippers and advertising a specific club.  The first picture was a young woman with a crooked nose named Gail and my mother’s friend Lynn was the next picture over.

I looked up at my grandma and asked,  “So, is Lynn a whore as well as a stripper?”

Grandma walked over, took the paper away from me and said I’d have to discuss it with my mother.  I didn’t even know Gail.  I’d never met her.  But the way Carol and Kim had described her and Lynn’s picture next to hers, I was able to put things together.

Events like this have occurred all throughout my life.  It’s amazing to me how many connections you can make if you just pay attention to what’s going on around you.  Writers are voyeurs.  It is our business to collect things and string them together into stories that entertain, enlighten and possibly, earn a bit of coin.

Don’t think as a writer you need to give the reader every detail of a scene, an argument, or a moment of passion.  What the reader needs is a few specific details, the overall feel of the scene, and enough runway to get off the ground.  They can fill in a significant amount from their own imagination.  It’s a balancing act.  How many pieces of furniture do I need to describe to give you the idea the characters are sitting in a diner?  How many specific sensory inputs ground you in the tacky booth with the overflowing ashtray and half empty coffee cups?  Do you need to see the one lonely slice of lemon meringue pie in the class container on the counter?  How about the way the waitress has a stain on her uniform, or perhaps the pungent aroma that greets you as you first walk in the door — that grease and despair, old cigarette smoke and overcooked bacon.

You could describe every barstool and every patron, but how long do you really have before you lose the audience?  The last thing you ever want is for the reader to look away from the page.  Rolling their eyes at the overload of details is one cause for folks walking away from a story.  Flipping ahead to see if anything interesting happens is another fatal point.

So you need to come up with those important details that are critical for the story to connect.  A young woman named Gail with a crooked nose who is a stripper and possibly a whore.  Then later, when you see a picture of a Gail who is a stripper and she also has a crooked nose, your audience will start to put two and two together.  Seed clues along the way, little details and points of interest that will make your reader’s story brain start to click.  They are looking for road signs that will point them to a satisfying connection and a plausible conclusion.

It’s a tough skill to hone.  I know I struggle with it all the time.  Fortunately writing allows you to go back and weave in details as they unfurl in your writing brain.  Unlike the real world, where you may not have the luxury to go back and look for all the right clues; in fiction you not only have the ultimate control over space and time,  you also have the ability to rewrite history so it fits the story’s needs.

We are builders, we artists.  We create something from nothing.  It is a gift and a curse that will haunt us for our entire lives.  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t listen to half a conversation in the elevator at work and I fill in the blanks.  I saw two squirrels chasing each other round and round a tree one morning and I store that scene away for another time.  Someday I’ll have a story where the characters are walking through the woods and they’ll happen upon the strangest scene with two squirrels.

But you must keep your head up, your ears open and your mind engaged.  That’s the life of a writer.  We observe and report.   Just because the next story you see from me deals with aliens or elves don’t be surprised to find some mundane details that enrich the story and make it believable enough for you to follow along.

If you do the job well enough, you can turn something simple into something magical.  It’s all in how you put the puzzle pieces together.

I love Christmas/Hannukah/Yule, whatever you call it, however you celebrate it, it’s time to let the kid inside out to play. And guess what? If you’re a writer, that’s a vital part of taking care of your creative self. But grownup responsibilities can overwhelm the fun, so here are 10 ways to help make the holiday season happy even for a writer on a deadline.

1. Eat the Christmas cookies. If you love them, eat them, enjoy them, have them on pretty plates with tea or coffee or eggnog. They come once a year.
2. Read your favorite holiday stories. I love Connie Willis’ Christmas tales especially, but there’s a world of choices out there. I read The Grinch to my kids yesterday and that never gets old.
3. Watch your favorite Christmas movies. Make time.
4. Call somebody.
5. Write somebody.
6. Play with your own kids or some in your extended family or friend circle. Busy parents will appreciate the gift of time to shop, bake or wrap unencumbered and the kid in you may enjoy playing with Playdoh, making snowmen, building with Legos, etc. more than you realize. I mean really, when was the last time you played?
7. Schedule time when you can sneak off into your own world of words. When it’s on the schedule you don’t have to feel guilty about all the holiday/family things you are NOT doing. When work time is up, go be present for everybody else. But make time to be present for you and your writing world and don’t try to do both at the same time.
8. You don’t actually have to spend all day in the kitchen to celebrate. Go out. Buy premade dishes from Costco. Holidays do not really have to mean a ton of extra work.
9. Start getting ready early. If it’s too late for that this year, do it next year. Just like you figure out how many words/pages you need each day or week to not be pressured at the end, you figure out how early you need to shop to not end up overnighting everything at the last minute in a panicked rush at the postal annex. If you can’t face the stores on Black Friday, guess what; Saturday will bring the same deals and hardly any crowds.
10. Remember that it isn’t merry for everybody. Kids in hospitals need books and toys and blankies, families in shelters need gifts and supplies, food banks need food. Check around your community to see how you can help out. Generosity and kindness make us better human beings and better writers.

Happy holidays!  I’ve had a good writing week, getting started on a new novel that I wasn’t expecting to work on right now, but inspiration struck, and since I don’t have any serious deadlines looming, I’ve grabbed the opportunity.  Being in the groove like this feels so wonderful!

And when I fall out of the groove. . .  I have another trick for getting unstuck:  talk it out.  Having trouble with the plot, or some other aspect of your manuscript?  Try explaining it out loud.  If you have writer friends, you can bring out the coffee or beer or other drink of choice, and have a big brainstorming session.  Explaining your work out loud can help you articulate the problem in a way you hadn’t been able to before.  By coming at the problem from a new direction, you may discover some excellent solutions.  What you say doesn’t have to end up in the story, but it may help you clarify things in your own mind.

Don’t have an audience?  You can still talk through your story, to yourself.  I’ve done it.  Imagine yourself in the future, when the book is all written, published, out in the world, and you’re doing a publicity tour for it.  You’re being interviewed on radio or on TV, or you’re on a panel discussion, and someone asks a question about the plot (maybe that section you’re having trouble with), or wants you to discuss the themes of the book, or why you wrote the book.  What do you say?  How do you explain it, as articulately and briefly as you can?  This isn’t meant to be a stressful exercise (it helps not to think about an audience hanging on your every word).  Think of it as a different form of brainstorming.  Switching to the verbal part of your brain might spark the idea you need to move forward on your draft.