Category Archives: writing
Write About What You Are Afraid Of
Advice for writers: write about what you are afraid of. I’ve never been very good at that. In fact, when things have happened to me that nightmares are made of (hitting a pedestrian with my company car, getting adrenal cancer, to name a few) I can’t write. I won’t write. I avoid recording my thoughts and emotions, even just the facts. Maybe that’s why I took two memoir writing classes, to find a way to break through that wall. Yet I still have no desire to write about what I fear. Possibly that will develop as I grow as a writer.
This week I read Laura Moriarty’s book, “The Rest of Her Life,” about a teenage girl who hits and kills a pedestrian in a crosswalk. I was interested in how another author would approach this topic, especially from the driver’s perspective. Moriarty focused more on the relationships among the family members and how they all dealt differently with the accident. I didn’t get what I wanted from the novel. But that’s what happens when you read a book, especially fiction. You get what the author wants to give you.
Cancer. If I wanted to write about my experience with adrenal cancer I’d be competing with a multitude of other cancer books. I doubt if I have anything new to contribute. Even if I did, I still have no desire to write about it.
I want to write about people who don’t exist. Whose lives I have made up and control. Whose lives do not resemble mine. In other words, books and stories I would want to read, characters I could engage with, who entertain me but don’t mimic me. I can’t engage with myself. Do other writers?
Woman in Gold
Yet there is one story that I play a minor role in that both piques my interest and frightens me, the story of my German heritage through my mother. We have both Nazis and Jews for relatives; anyone who knew about the Jews is long gone. My mother, though Christian, lost two brothers during World War II. They got on a train and my mother’s family never saw them again. Watching the movie “Woman in Gold” this morning not only brought me to tears, it also resurrected my need to know more about the German history of my family. I must hurry—my mother is 87. This is a story I want to write although it has been written before. But this one would be for me.
The Joys of Research
Martha, a ferret with attitude
I mean, of course, the early research for your writing, when you don’t know what you need except bright new ideas, and everything is fair game. We’re not talking last-minute research, when you suddenly find out that every ambulance now carries a perfect antidote for the poison that killed your murder victim.
For some reason known only to my unconscious, the protagonist of my mystery novel emerged carrying two ferrets, George and Martha. (If you can think of any reason why this would happen, please do not tell me.) That’s Martha, above. My ferrets cannot talk; readers are not privy to their thoughts, if any; they do not solve the mystery. They just make messes, reveal human character and generally provide uproar when uproar is needed by the author.
My first source of ferret information was a friend. She owns seven ferrets. They live on the upper level of her house, separated from the kitchen and her other pets downstairs. I held her ferrets: furry and squirmy. I smelled them. Not close up, there’s no need for that. Ferrets broadcast an aroma that ferret lovers do not find offensive. I played with them: irresistible. They bounce, pounce and slither nonstop. They run with their hind half elevated in a kind of Spy-vs.-Spy hunch. The ferret philosophy of life is WHEE-EE-EE-EEEEEE!
Narnia
Like mink, ferrets are water creatures. This is Narnia, who runs for the shower whenever she hears it running. Another of my friend’s fuzzies would park herself under the nozzle and stare at it until someone turned it on for her.
After the cute-ferret session, my friend sat me down for a serious talk about potty habits. Theirs, not mine. If you are squeamish, ferrets are not for you. If you want to know more, you’ll have to find out for yourself.
Next stop: books, books, books. If nothing else, research is a license to buy books. Ask Amazon about ferrets, and it first produces what you’d expect: The Ferret Handbook, Ferrets for Dummies and the alarming How to Stop Ferret Biting in 3 Days. But wait! There’s more! Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull has written a series of fables about two ferrets, both of whom are writers. I sampled one volume, but my insulin level rose so alarmingly that I had to stop. There is also a 30-page mystery for children, featuring Fiona and Farley Ferret. Here we see one of the reverse benefits of research. Warning: you are entering the Sentimentality Zone. Watch your feet or you will step in something squishy.
Red Ferret Hoodie
From Amazon, you can buy tiny red ferret hoodies, a high-sided plastic litter pan in a delicate shade of mauve, “The Ultimate Crunchy Advanced Nutrition Diet for Ferrets,” and a ferret decal for your car window. You can also give your ferret a “leopard-design” hammock. Surely this is like offering a shark-design hammock to a herring? Another repressed-hostility product: a wholly edible image of a ferret for the top of a sheet cake. It’s Kosher! Gluten Free! Soy Free! Trans-Fat Free! Buy yours now from Amazon!
Next, the wonderful web. You could spend the rest of your life watching cute ferret videos. Fun fact: ferrets are one of very few pets that have a smooth reverse gear. Just try to get your dog to back up. A ferret will do it so easily that he looks as if someone pressed the ‘rewind’ button. Check out the YouTube video, around minute 4:00.
Ferret owners are not necessarily mad. But they are very … specific. They are very focused on ferrets. Case in point: a YouTube performance by a proud ferret mommy of the song she composed, “Ferret, Oh, Ferret.” The tune’s her own invention, but it’s kind of like “O, Canada,” sung at a cricket match by a real non-professional.
Once you’ve done your research, you come to the hard part. You have to decide what belongs in the book. Ferrets are a lot messier than I want to deal with, in life or in fiction. I can leave the messy parts out of the story. But even when ferrets are misbehaving, they are every bit as adorable as ferret fanciers think they are. I don’t want readers rushing out to buy pets they’re going to get rid of at best and neglect at worst. So I’m planning a disclaimer, with web links, at the end of the book. I will not buy my own ferrets. I won’t. Really.
Desire Isn’t Enough
Arizona hummingbird-my muse?
I’ve moved from the bed of the dim, cozy casita to the patio adorned with blue sky and sunshine. Little birds chatter in the palo verde trees. The water fountain bubbling in the background competes with the wind chimes in the tree. Helicopters and Canada geese fly overhead while the thrum of a hummingbird draws my attention to the feeder. A ruby glitter signals this is a male. My muse, perhaps?
I have decided to read outside rather than write inside—the comfort of the bed was about to lure me to sleep at eleven in the morning. Or was it the pressure to write that caused my eyes to glaze over, my lids to droop? Yet here I am, outside, surprised to find pen and paper, rather than my Kindle, in hand. How is it that the distractions of a glorious winter morning in Arizona are allowing me to focus on my writing when I was convinced that I needed quiet and seclusion, and especially darkness, to get words, action, characters, plot, onto paper?
Excuses. I have plenty of them. The environment isn’t conducive to writing (see above), I have too many other things to do (aren’t I retired?), I don’t have the energy (it’s the medicine), my Words with Friends and Trivia Crack opponents are waiting for my next move (life or death situation to some).….you get the drift.
I can’t write on demand–the forces of the universe must be perfectly aligned before I can put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard,
I’m a winner!
with words leading to paragraphs to chapters to a book. A completed book. Yet I have won NaNoWriMo two times—a “complete” novel, 50,000 words written in the month of November! How do I reconcile this?
NaNoWriMo frees me. No inner critic sits on my shoulder or on the page. No time for self-doubt, perfection, or the fear of failure that normally trigger my procrastination. No concern over what my writing group will think. And then there’s that deadline. All I need for the other eleven months of the year is to find a way to replicate NaNoWriMo, to accept that my first draft will be a shitty first draft, and my creative juices will flow. Miraculously, I will become a published author. Though I have heard that it also takes hard work, writing every day, perseverance. Oh, and I can’t forget a dash of talent. Desire isn’t enough. And desire is all that I seem to be able to muster.
A few nights ago I was up until one in the morning reading a novel, anxious, as usual, to find out how it would end. Although it was my own 2014 NaNoWriMo submission, I had already forgotten. Now I remember how as midnight on November 30 approached those last few sentences seemingly leapt from the keyboard onto the page, surprising even me. Funny how that happens.
Of the Making of Many Blogs There Is No End
WordPress has my number. No sooner had I obeyed its command to “Create Your Web Site,” than it was tempting me to explore everybody else’s blog instead of writing my own. It waved a dozen links to blogs on writing under my nose, even more to book lovers’ blogs, and one called (truth in advertising) Longreads that can mess you up for days.
Then there’s Freshly Pressed, WordPress’s links to individual posts that “you might like.” How does it know? Yeah, Google tells it. The trouble is, Google is so often right. I told myself I was looking for good writing, for ideas on using WordPress well, for designing the page, blah, blah. And I did find ideas I could use.
But if I read all this stuff, when do I write?
All the wonderful How to Write books pose this same problem. Ideas about writing exist in a different universe from writing itself. Books show you nice clear roads to success: if you are writing X kind of book, and arrange your chapter in Y way, the result for your book will be Z. Those are the basic books. The tone of the more advanced comes closer to celebrity cooking shows: “you’ll be amazed how just a touch of coriander (humor/specifics/pornography) will transform your recipe!”
The actual experience of writing is more like forcing yourself to jump off a cliff, having been told by, say, an angel that you will not in fact be smashed to jam, because you can fly – as long as you think you can. Some days, just the icon for your writing program is enough to send you to Longreads.
When you do make the jump, you can fly or you can’t. You start where you left off or somewhere else in the text where you need to be. Your characters need to limber up over a few (dozen) pages. Then they stop making the kind of remark you make at dinner parties to people you don’t know why you’re talking to. And then, from somewhere behind your left ear, an earlier prop or an embedded quarrel or a potential love affair hooks around and snatches your plot. Suddenly, the conversation is making sense, but only if we assume that… and the story is writing itself. If you can keep the scene pulled up around you, and refrain from insisting that it “work out right,” you’re golden. For the time being.
And some days, you’re smashed to jam.
There is no way to avoid either the jump or the jam. I read a bit, here and there, in my pile of how-to books, and like the blogs, they add to my little store of technique. I may even recall their tips to my great profit, if I ever get to the third draft. As soon as your nose emerges from the book, you are going to have to walk back to that cliff face. So get over it, close the book, close the writing blog and jump.
That’s all for today. I gotta go write my post.
Answers to Life’s Unending Questions
So, who asked an unending question and who should be so bold as to want to find out the answer to one of THOSE?
We do. Writers do. It’s an indelible, incontrovertible, inalienable fact that writers need to know. How else could we plot a mystery, a thriller, a fantasy, anything that will stand up to the scrutiny of our readers, or the even more critical judgment of our very own group, a company of fellow writers whom we look upon as dear friends? Dear friends that is, until the evening of our critique rolls around.
But this is why we need to know all about everything; about wormholes in spacetime, and how people hit the ground after they’ve been shot, or how it feels to walk through a tree. Not to mention how different poisons work on the individual systems of our bodies, and how to introduce them into said bodies. How, and why, marshmallows can have a deleterious effect on those from the afterlife who deign to pay a visit. And, of course, how a derelict can hide in a spinster’s attic until the time is right to…. You name it, we need to know.
We love trivia. The more arcane the better. Did you know that wormholes have names? That having too much protoplasm invites trouble? That best friends, step-mothers, and old sweethearts are just asking for it constantly?
Writing is fun, entertaining, and hard work. We groan and moan as though we’ve been dealt a rotten hand in Mah Jongg each and every time we force ourselves to sit down to write. But we do it, by hook or by crook, by cracky.
Oh, another question? Who are we? We are five writers united every Thursday evening for one single purpose: encouragement. Though we might be separated by space and time occasionally, we collectively hold our banner high:
‘Five writers in search of a reason not to work on the book just now.’
Eleanor Ingbretson
Karen Whalen
llandrigan
Heidi Wilson
Mike M
Thursday Night Writes 