fiction

Full of Questions Today: What’s Your Take?

Posted on by lalber

Last night I was flipping channels at around 11:00, not quite ready for bed. I landed on a talking head with big, shiny teeth and tightly coiffed hair. I stopped and listened to the Christian fella, who must be popular to have his own television broadcast. His name was Joel Osteen. Anyone ever heard of him?

I would have rolled my eyes except that he was talking about overcoming adversity (I think). Not letting the struggle get us down. Having faith that God (I don’t think in these terms but this was Osteen’s message) has everything figured out for us. That adversity and struggle are a sign that there’s all the more good coming to us at the other end. We need not worry so much.

This morning, a surprise: I heard his echo in my head when I woke up! In particular, something about not talking about our feelings all the time and instead staying quiet with contentment and certainty that all is well and will be well. To me, this message especially makes sense in a Buddhist context. Mindfulness. Living in the here and now.

But I didn’t like his follow-up: Given that our good is waiting for us, airing self-doubts about obtaining that good can delay or halt its arrival. Could this possibly be true? Are our thoughts that powerful? That possibility scares me. Do we have to already be enlightened to live our dreams?

These days, I’m most likely to feel angst-ridded, doubtful, and frustrated about my fiction career. I so want a book deal and oodles of happy readers! I’m not that mindful all the time; I often air my downer feelings as a way of letting them go. In and out. Emotions are so transient.

Does giving these emotions airtime lend them more power? Do I self-sabotage my chances at a successful fiction career by indulging in them for even a moment on this blog or to my friends?

This is all very woo-woo, I know. I don’t know the answers. What’s your take?

P.S. The eerie thing is that on Saturday I bought a book with the word “mindfulness” in its title. So maybe I was “meant” to land on Mr. Osteen last night?

 

Okay, So I’m an Addict and Other Tidbits

Posted on by lalber

No deep thoughts today, so I’ll get my schizophrenic groove on with an interview…

Mini-me: How you doing?

Me: Wow, great interviewing skills.

Mini-me: Just answer the question.

Me: It took me all day to write four pages, one tortured paragraph at a time, and I’m sick again to boot. My throat’s at it; my lungs are congested; I haven’t been sleeping well; I’m headachy and parched—

Mini-me (whispering in an aside to imagined audience): Get out the violins. (Louder:) Right then, tell me about the scene you wrote today.

Me: It was a lighter scene centered around two clerics and a parishioner who lets his dog defecate on church grounds.

Mini-me: Sounds plain silly to me; I trust you wrote this scene for a reason.

Me: Of course, what do you take me for? The dialogue hides a bigger point. In fact, in my previous posts about dialogue I could have discussed this — that dialogue is best when it functions on more than one level.

Mini-me: Enough with the dialogue blah-blah-blah already, yeesh. If I read between the lines correctly on this blog, you suffered a rough writing patch during the holiday season. The writing is flowing better now, I take it?

Me: Slower than I’d like, as usual, but steady. In fact, this week I broke 200 pages on my first draft. Woohoo! (Momentary break to get coughing under control.) For me, that’s a significant milestone — the halfway mark, the light at the end of the tunnel — you get the picture. I’m already looking forward to revisions. Now, THAT’s fun stuff.

Mini-me (sighing): You don’t get out much, do you?

Me: I’ll walk out right now if you don’t quit with the attitude.

Mini-me: Will not.

Me: Yeah, you’re right. Next question?

Mini-me: In a post earlier this month you mentioned your moratorium on reading novels until your first draft is complete. How’s that going?

Me: Okay, so I’m an addict. I fell off the wagon for about a week because I’d forgotten about my book group, the Sassy Lassies. We convened last Saturday to discuss Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (don’t ask). Long story short, while in the library to fetch the book, I had to peruse the Latest Arrivals shelves…and, well, you know. But I’m back to nonfiction again. However, I’ve decided that I was a little extreme; I’ll now be a weekend fiction warrior until the first draft is complete. 

Mini-me: Good luck on that. Next up, I heard through the grapevine that you spoke to a writer buddy this week—

Me: Wow, news travels fast. J– said something interesting about her current project. Namely, that she realized that she was writing her novel with her agent in mind. Basically, J–‘s creativity went haywire because of thoughts such as: Will her agent like this novel? Will she still want to represent J–? And so on. Luckily, J– found a way to disentangle herself from these external considerations. She’s since restarted the novel and likes this version much better. Our conversation stuck in my head — as you well know — because it was a vicarious learning lesson for me.

Mini-me: And, last but not least, do you have a favorite quote these days?

Me: Funny you should ask, because I do.

       “The secret of happiness is freedom;
           the secret of freedom, courage.”
                                         —  Thucydides     

I’m Still Thinking About Dialogue…

Posted on by lalber

In 2002 I participated in my first writers retreat. A fancy one on Maui. I was nervous about going public with myself — scary! — especially because I suspected I’d gotten in over my head with my chosen retreat course — called “Writing from an Idea” — which was all about the process of evolving an initial concept through many phases of story and character development to the point where you can start the first draft. Theoretically, I should have started with the beginner fiction retreat, but I wanted the instructor I wanted, period.

(Sidenote: This retreat also interested me because I’d previously written a novel willy-nilly and ended up with a 600-page first draft — talk about a learning lesson!)

End result: The instructor’s positive feedback — and as a New York Times bestseller she’s no slouch — started me on my slow path toward accepting that I might have talent and toward admitting aloud, “I’m a writer.”

But, lest you think I was riding high on a teacher’s pet wave (hardly), let me get to the point, which is the raw, painful, ego-busting lesson for all newcomers: dealing with critical feedback. As the culmination of our week, our instructor treated us each to an in-depth critical analysis of our imagined novels’ first scenes. After three paragraphs of positive feedback on mine, she hit me with my weakness. You got it: pesky, tricky dialogue!

And here’s the sad truth of it in her words:

Where you’re currently a little weak is in using dialogue well. Here, you run into several difficulties. I get the impression that you’re in a huge hurry to get to the end of the scene and, consequently, you tend to rush things a bit when the characters are speaking. You fall into the jumping conflict trap as a result of this tendency on page four, and the brief spurt of dialogue on page seven suffers from a lack of cohesion. I realize that, as Andrew is a dying man, his discourse might be wobbly and illogical. But art does not imitate life in all circumstances and in these circumstances, each line of dialogue could serve you much better if it’s causally related to the line that goes before it…Generally speaking, if you’re going to shift to another topic like that, you need to interrupt the flow of dialogue with some sort of related action.

(Another sidenote: She also mentioned that in places I went overboard with the figurative language. Oh, my injured ego!)

As you can imagine, I’ve given much thought to dialogue since then. Hopefully I’ve internalized many of her lessons: slow down, don’t jump to conflict without proper build-up, don’t write dialogue as people really talk (as described in last week’s post), strive for clarity and cohesive flow.

Funny thing about that first scene: It’s no longer in the novel! Over many revisions I ended up sprinkling its essence throughout as part of my protagonist’s backstory (Andrew being her father and not a nice guy).

Dialogue and Ye Old Authorial Intrusions

Posted on by lalber

urbangrind1.jpgA few days ago I met up with BigD at Urban Grind, a trendy coffee house with a warehouse feel and interesting art. I was glad, once again, for the excuse to leave my home office, where I had so far accomplished nothing but staring out the window and bugging my ever-patient cat.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about a comment from BigD. Gazing at me from across our laptops, he wondered aloud how to create snappy and realistic dialogue — which is to say, dialogue that achieves a state of verisimilitude; which is to say, dialogue that reads realistically without being realistic; which is to say that if we were to write dialogue as we heard it in everyday life: boring, snooze, zzzzzz. For example:

urbangrind2.jpg

“I told that guy Todd that we’re, like, so over, and, like, you should have seen his face. I was like, whatever.”

I ask you, who wants to wade through a novel written the way people really talk?

But back to BigD: He provided a sample sentence in which character x says to character y, “You are always so stubborn.” The sentence is awkward, but why exactly? I realized today that if I’d written it, I’d have to accuse myself of an authorial intrusion.

The sentence tells us that character y is a stubborn person, which I might indeed want the reader to know. However, I could convey the same fact through implication, such as having character x state “you stubborn fool,” which implies the same thing and provides information about character x (his opinion about said stubborness). Also, my simplistic example is a bit more snappy and realistic.

urbangrind3.jpgMy point is that dialogue that smacks of authorial intrusion often lacks verisimilitude. I don’t know how many novels I’ve read where dialogue was used to convey a fact that the author obviously wanted the reader to know. For example, good friends sit in a diner and one says to the other: “But you remember Todd; he’s the investment banker who married my sister Claire last year and then divorced her two months later because he fell in love with me.”

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One: If they’re such good friends, why does the nonspeaking character need an in-depth reminder? Two: Even if a reminder is apt, who really talks to a good buddy like this? Three: There are more graceful ways to weave in backstory.

I’m differentiating between using dialogue to pass on data to the reader and using dialogue to show one character passing on data to another character. Hopefully, the latter scenario forwards plot, creates intrigue, develops characters, something.

Dialogue is great fun, but in the end BigD and I agreed that writing it can be tricky. I’m still learning how to tease out my own authorial missteps.

Growing Pains

Posted on by lalber

After regrouping, analyzing, editing, and brainstorming my first 120 pages, I come to four possible conclusions:

1. My story sucks, and I don’t know what I’m doing.

2. I’ve mastered just enough fiction craft to be my own worst enemy.

3. I’m not trusting the process.

4. I’ve got it going on, no worries.

Even I know point one is too negative. At the other end of the spectrum, point four isn’t realistic either. That leaves points two and three, both of which have merit.

Point two: I’ve mastered just enough fiction craft and technique to be my own worst enemy.

I used to muscle my way through what Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft” in her book Bird by Bird: Some Instuctions on Writing and Life. Here’s what she says on page 22:

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and you can shape it later.

Somewhere along the line, however, I grew out of this 100% organic writing method. As my writing group would gladly confirm, when I let the prose flow too well I end up with 500 pages and too many plotlines and a big mess.

These days, I’d rather end up with, say, a teenager’s draft — or, a semi-mature story. I’d like to avoid revising for years. To this end, these days, I have enough craft under my belt to consider many things at once while I’m writing — things such as subplots and set-up and pacing.

The downside is that all this awareness gets me thinking TOO much. (A nasty little habit of mine as my family would gladly confirm.) Let’s label point two in terms my ex-therapist would understand: analysis paralysis.

Point three: I’m not trusting the process.

I’ve heard many writers over the years advise us younger writers to “trust the process.” I’m a big fan of trusting the process. However, how do I trust that which I’m still trying to nail down? I’ve grown out of muscling through first drafts with only my right brain (the dreamy side versus the analytical side on the left). Unfortunately, I haven’t discovered my own best process yet. I’m still experimenting.

Some writers advocate outlining the whole novel up front, which is the opposite of Lamott’s strategy. But outlining isn’t for me either. I think you need to be a naturally organized person to write outlines. I’m somewhere in the murky middle place, and since I don’t have a tried-and-true process (yet) I’m currently having trust issues.

Sigh.

So, my final conclusion? In the world of fiction, I’m not yet a mature writer; I’m more like a teenager experiencing massive growing pains. Thankfully, I survived my actual adolescence somewhat intact; I’m sure I’ll survive this first draft, too.

Meanwhile, am I too old to throw a hissy-fit, slam the bedroom door, and turn my head-banger music up too loud? 

Testing: Am I Live?

Posted on by lalber

I should be writing today’s allotment of novel pages by now, but I’ve decided to test this blog, my fledgling effort. In truth, I’m procrastinating, which is silly because I know exactly what needs to happen in the current scene.

The scene takes place in a fictional village in County Clare, Ireland. It will be a scene of conflict, but since fiction is all about conflict, that statement says nothing. I love writing about internal conflicts, characters who are wounded and flawed and trying to get by. However, the scene I’m about to write is a good old-fashioned verbal confrontation between two strong-willed men. That one of these men is dying and the other not telling the whole truth should make the scene fun to write. So why am I procrastinating?

(Because I can, I suppose. I have all day to get my five daily pages out of my head and into the computer.)

I live in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment. The master bedroom is my office because it faces south, not that that matters this morning. It’s misty outside, kind of romantic like I remember from my childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area. The quaking aspen aren’t quaking, but their branches loaded with gold leaves shiver as squirrels go about their autumnal business. The leaves are waiting for a good breeze to set them flurrying all at once. It’s quiet out there with everyone at work.

I look out the window a lot, but then I’ve been doing that since I was kid. I sometimes wonder if dreaminess is one of the prerequisites to being a writer, and a novelist in particular.

It may be quiet on my street, but it’s growing increasingly loud in my head. The confrontation wants to get written.

Welcome to my blog. I might use it as a procrastination device all too often.