Tag: writing

May 17, 2016

May 17, 2016 / / 8 Comments

You know, I started out writing something much longer and more complicated, but the truth is that those of you reading here, by and large, have been here for the long haul. You were around to read about the start of Blue Riley, and about what happened when her story sold. You may very well have been one of folks who responded to my request for help with details around Wyoming in winter or the wonders of I-90. You’re the people who know about Wren, and about how I vanish into my head every spring, and how much I like turtles.

So I don’t need to tell you all those things again. It’s simpler to say this: once upon a time there was a girl who loved words more than anything, and she made a deal with sadness once and gave up all her words to try to stave off change and loss, and then she realized that didn’t work, and she took her words back again. If there is a piece of me in Blue, it is that piece that puzzles over how the words fit together, and what it means to write something, and to say it out loud, in front of people.

But the thing about books is that once they are out in the world, they become about the readers far more than the writers. If the world of a book being read could be seen from afar, I suspect it would look much like a jigsaw puzzle being fit together. Every individual reader a piece; their own lives, their own stories, shaping the part they create. It becomes so much more than a book, so much more than words on a page made by one person alone somewhere. In reading we are alone, but we are also together in a truly incredible way.

All of which is a long way to get to the point: DEVIL AND THE BLUEBIRD is out in the world today. Thank you for being part of the journey.

Final cover

A sea of scenes

December 7, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Blustery!

That is the word for the day. The light coming in the window flashes here and there as the pines wave in the wind. I went for a walk earlier and skittered along on the ice, watching chickadees chatter in the trees.

Inside, the Great Rewrite Adventure has hit an expected snag. Namely, the difficulty of explaining things, again, while maintaining the requisite level of freshness. I need to knock back the “my toys, figure it out yourself” urge that comes up when I look for new ways of describing the Aware.

That’s not the sole issue, though. When I wrote The Lost, I structured it the way that made sense to me: sequentially. There are three acts, and the first takes place over a period of time six to eight years prior to the last two. I love the first act (have I mentioned that I love the whole novel), but the continuity is challenging.

Trying to coax readers through that change in time taught me more about writing for others than practically any other experience I’ve had. It was the first point at which I really thought about all the pieces and how I needed to lay them out. It was the transition between writing totally for my own entertainment and writing for the entertainment of others. Blue Riley exists only because of what I learned writing The Lost.

But the truth is that the time change remains a hard leap. It’s more than just the time. By sticking to a linear shape that begins with teens, I set up the expectation of young adult fiction. It could go that way. I could force everything into a different time span. In fact, I’ve already done it. Wren is the first act, written from a different POV and with a YA focus.

In thinking about which pieces are most important to save, though, because much of the work of this rewrite is triage, I’ve realized I’m more drawn to the later acts. To focus on the first act, no matter how I love it, is to change so much of everything that follows. To be clear, what follows are two more books, so the change is not insignificant. (A note on the trilogy: most people will tell you never to write a trilogy without selling the first book. This is logical, if you write the first book with the goal of publication. If you do not, and if part of your goal in writing all three books is to learn about writing novels, then plowing ahead works really well.)

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as lopping off the beginning. The new version has become a nonlinear story, told from the POV of a character whose damaged mind wavers between present and memory. For now, I’m sifting through that first third, searching for the pivotal scenes and thinking about where they need to be woven into the rest. It’s complicated work, something like a jigsaw puzzle lacking an image to refer to. Which details stay, which details go, how much needs to be retained to maintain the essence of the original story? If I move this, how much do the characters shift, and in a direction I want?

Okay, time to go warm my hands and get to work. Stay cozy.

Saturday afternoon, November 22, 2014

November 22, 2014 / / 6 Comments

First, a gripe.

This is how writing a blog post works in my house:

1. Turn on the computer.
2. Wait five to ten minutes for it to rouse from its unearthly slumber.
3. Connect to internet. (Note: this used to be fun to listen to, up until the speakers died. Now it’s simply a lot of waiting.)
4. Load blog.
5. Load page to make new post.
6. Reload page after it loads as a blank page.
7. Reload page, after it times out while loading.
8. Reload page, after it loads as a mostly blank page.
9. Page loaded after only fifteen minutes of trying!
10. Take deep breath and remind self that there are still many hours left to Saturday afternoon.

Massachusetts, right? I mean, it’s not like we’re not known for our industry, our technology, our education. If I say I’m from Massachusetts, first thing anyone thinks is “poor thing, bet she’s still years and years away from having high speed internet access.” At this point, it’s pretty clear that we’ll be getting rid of dial-up right around the time that other folks are jacking directly into their computers through their artfully designed arm ports.

Anyway, while it is still cold enough to make me cry, there’s blue sky outside. I’ve made a giant box of papers to be sorted into half a giant box and a bag of paper recycling, which deserves a cheer or two. I convinced the cat not to eat a large feather, I convinced the dog to go back to sleep, and I’ll be making cauliflower cheese soup for dinner later. It’s really not a bad day.

And writing? I think I mentioned that I was resculpting The Lost, did I not? I am, and it’s kind of a terrifying, glorious project. It’s not just the how and why aspects of it. It’s examining who I was as a writer in 2008, when I finished the first copy, and who I am now. Crazy stuff, trust me.

People don’t tend to admit that writing is partly about falling totally and inappropriately in love with something that works for no one but yourself. It just is, like loving pumpkin cheesecake so much that some part of you would happily hide it away and pretend you didn’t have it, just so you didn’t have to share. The trick is understanding at what point it becomes unhealthy, as a person, as a writer. Yes, it hurts to peel things apart and rewrite them sometimes, but if your goal is to communicate with at least some of the world, it can be a necessary thing.

It makes my heart ache a bit, though, when I hear writers talk about how their first works were terrible. The Lost was written in multiple tenses, in first person and third, had maybe the worst death scene ever written, and it was perfect for what it was–me learning to tell a story. The second version was better, and the third, and the sequel had some awesome and some not-awesome, and I love them all, and am happy to say that they were exactly what they needed to be, even though they were not what they needed to be to be published.

This is the thing I always tell the kids I work with (and anyone else that will listen): What you are doing when you sit down to draft a story is weaving a bolt of cloth. Not a suit, not a dress, not a tent. Just the cloth. Once you have that cloth, then you can figure out what to do with it. In the meantime, love what you’re doing.

Two final notes. One, my last story for the year, There’s Always A Nuclear Bomb At The End, will be in Daily Science Fiction this Friday. More about it then.

And two, if you haven’t already read Ursula Le Guin’s speech from the National Book Awards, please do. Better yet, watch it. I would, but, you know, dial-up.

In which I ramble about things that can vanish in a fire

January 16, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I’ve been rereading Little Women with the kids. I still enjoy it, though not as thoroughly as I did when I was young. I find myself wanting to tell Jo not to learn to tuck all her anger away. Especially when Amy burns Jo’s only copy of a manuscript she’s been working on for years, just to be spiteful. I’m not sure how forgivable an offense that is.

As we were taking part of the Great Chimney Fire Escape of 2012, I realized, much too late, that while I’d managed to grab the kids and the cats and the dog, I’d left my netbook on the couch. The couch right under the area which would soon be filled with water if the firemen discovered the fire had made it out of the chimney and into the attic crawlspace. How much of the work on the netbook was backed up elsewhere? Not enough, and some of that not enough was on the dinosaur of a computer sitting on the other side of the chimney.

I don’t remember saying anything out loud about it, but I must have. My son took a breath and said, in his calmest voice (calm was a scarce commodity at the moment), “Not to be rude or anything, but the pets are more important than the writing.”

An interesting question. The answer, of course, is that the pets cannot be backed up anywhere, while the writing can and should be, in lots of places, at least some of which should not be fire or water accessible. If you haven’t recently backed up your files, take a minute to go and do so.

It’s always possible to write more words. It would have been possible for me to take older versions of stories I’d been working on and continue on from there. Given the exact same choice, I’d have stopped to catch the cats and call the dog rather than grab the computer every time.

But…writing is not just words. Writing is the hours you put into a story, not just the hours of words, but the hours of thought. It’s the finally figuring out a sentence that’s been puzzling you for days. The personal part, not the publishing part, not the working with readers or editors part, but the piece that begins with an idea that will not leave you alone, that piece is bound up in those words that can be lost to water, to fire, to carelessness, and may never come again in the same way.

There’s more as well. That netbook was a Christmas present from my parents and my siblings one year. The same year my children gave me a pair of fingerless wool gloves and a little USB stick thingy (yes, that is EXACTLY what it’s called). Tools for a writer. A writer with cold hands and a ancient noisy computer. A writer who was only just beginning to admit she was a writer. I’m not really one for things, aside from books, but those three objects serve as reminders of the faith my family has in me.

Yes–kids, spouse, pets–they all come before anything else when a fire calls. But the humble little netbook would have been a hard loss to bear.

The state of things

January 8, 2013 / / 4 Comments

I’m eating bunny crackers for breakfast. Yes, some might question that choice, but today they are the breakfast of champions.

This getting back into ordinary life after a few weeks off is kind of for the birds. Which is an odd expression. For the birds implies something like tasty seeds, or trees that cats and snakes can’t get up, and that doesn’t really seem to fit, does it?

So, let’s try again. It’s tough to jump back into the daily grind. Grind is at least suggestive of the overall sense of settling back in among gears and cogs and insistent forces. But really, that’s not fair either. Life is so much more than a grind.

Over the weekend I saw two bluebirds in the snow. There may be more cheerful sights in the world, but I’m not sure what they are. The Eastern Bluebird is blue and rust and white, and in the winter they look like little balls of joy in the snow.

I’ve been wishing I had two lives lately. One to spend with my children, who are in periods of exponential growth, and one to spend in a lonely writer’s garret somewhere. Preferably not a cold one, though I suppose I would survive. Wool hats and wool socks go a long way in the winter.

Oh, a third life too, please. One for reading all the books I haven’t had time to, the ones I’ve fallen asleep in bed with, and stolen five minutes with every other day, and still can’t make the time to finish. It really doesn’t seem fair to have writing and reading have to battle it out for my time. Either way I end up with a head full of unanswered questions, and an itch to do something more.

The voice you hear

December 20, 2012 / / 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about birth lately. There is a point at which a labor outgrows everything you know, everything you read and hear and plan for. It is a frightening space for the woman involved. It is a space of surrender. It is also the place at which everything about you as a person shines through.

It is a place where having someone there who can look you in the eye and say I believe in you and I know you can do this can be the difference between continuing on in fear, or continuing on in faith.

I’ve accepted that support, gratefully, from other people during my own births. I’ve provided that support to other women. It is what we need in birth, and it is what we need in life.

Writers need it too. As I sit here, waiting at the darkest point of the year, when the pines see more of the sun than I do, I’m thinking about what that means, that voice that says I believe in you. I’m thinking about all the times when it feels like the writing is going nowhere, or the story feels too hard to tell, or the novel wants to be written but you know that you may be writing it for yourself alone.

Sometimes it just feels too big to do. Sometimes you want to walk away from it, but everything inside you insists you continue. You skitter around it like a horse crossing water, eyes rolling, convinced it is too deep.

If you’re lucky, there will be a voice coming from across the water. I believe in you, it will say. You can do this.

Listen to it.

Introducing my audience

November 29, 2012 / / 0 Comments

This is Big Eyes.

She hangs on the wall next to my head when I sit at the computer. I can see her out of the corner of my eye most of the time, because I’ve been getting ready to move my desk and I have boxes and piles of papers taking up the space where my chair should be, so I have to sit at an angle.

She was painted by my daughter several years ago. She’s joined on the wall by Guitar Dude.

Guitar Dude was put together by my son. The two of them are my audience as I write.

Why do I need an audience? Because writers do. Because I can’t help but write toward an audience of some sort, even when I pretend I don’t. And once people start reading what you write, well, that audience becomes all sorts of things. Good things, bad things, labels, challenges…it’s a long list.

Sometimes that’s a great thing. Sometimes it’s a confusing one. I think part of learning to be a writer is learning to control the volume as you listen to the audience collected in your head, to figure out who you invite to sit in the front row, and who there really isn’t any room for at all.

I need some tangible reminders of that lesson. So I have Big Eyes and Guitar Dude. They’re my audience when it’s hard to write. Just a few more chords, Guitar Dude says, and I smile and nod. Big Eyes says nothing, just watches.

Me? I write.

Starting from scratch

November 26, 2012 /

This morning we have the kind of snow that happens when the sky feels too lazy to really snow: occasional giant flakes that can’t decide whether they’re going up or down. I know the feeling.

When I came back from vacation in September, I mentioned having an idea for a new project. I started it this weekend. It’s a novelish collection of stories, or a short storyish novel, with two threads of narration to tie it together. The sort of thing I can work on in shorter stretches, if necessary.

It’s an experiment in another way for me as well. I’ve been thinking a lot about a comment in a John McPhee essay in the New Yorker that I read a few weeks ago. I don’t have the issue, or even the date of the issue, so I can’t give the quote. Basically, it said that new writers need to spend a lot of time trying things out before they know what they should be writing.

In terms of writing years, I count as a young writer. I don’t know what I should be writing yet. I’m kind of like a mechanic with a great big pile of shiny tools in my toolbox, and not enough practical experience to know which ones should be on top, and which ones I should put in storage.

It feels like time to start from scratch. It’ll be all messy pages and dead ends and trying to find the place where the words come true. Hopefully, I’ll learn something from it.

How I write (part two)

April 26, 2012 /

Picking up where I left off, I’m clean, exercised, and I have an unedited draft of a novel. By novel, I mean a document somewhere between 100,000 to 124,000 words (yes, one was that long), made of mostly connected story. Next comes the the process called either revision or unbearable suffering, depending on how I’m feeling about my writing.

That piece right there, the bit about how I’m feeling, that is the crux of things for me. The truth is that I enjoying revising, or drafting, or most any other part of writing, as long as I’ve got my head in the right place. There other truths too, though, things like the fact that it’s easier to keep the Infernal Editor at bay when I’m in the flow of drafting, and that when I start to think critically the head games begin.

Who is the Infernal Editor? She’s the one that tells you that you’ve failed in some catastrophic way, the bit of your mind that tries to shred your writing to bits. I suspect that most writers have vulnerable points, places that despair can seep in all too easily. For me, it’s while revising.

What do I do? I hang on to my support people with both hands. When it starts to feel like it’s just me and a giant pile of words that looks suspiciously like…debris, I go looking for help. Have you ever watched a horse race? More specifically, have you ever watched the horses going out to the starting gate? They’re ponied along by a rider on another horse, a calm horse that doesn’t freak out at the antics of their highstrung companion. Support people can be that for a writer, the steady presence that gets them to the starting gate to do their thing.

Okay, I prepare my support, and I sit down and read. I read the whole story, often in hard copy, though I have no printer currently, so Wren is stuck in pixels. I cross out lots of things, and I write little questions, and I make lots of faces at really bad prose. I get a sense of the overall shape, and how things move along. Sometimes I discover things I like more than I thought I would. Other times I feel like it’s all a irredeemable mess, and I cry on people’s shoulders.

Then, I go through chapter by chapter. I cut and reword and buff things up. I take out really boring bits of action that are more or less stage directions inserted to remind me what’s happening, and I replace them with somewhat less boring bits. Sometimes it goes quickly. Sometimes I spend a day or so stuck on one line. I try to think of it as working on a puzzle, and that helps. When I finish a chapter, I read it aloud to myself. If it seems to work, I pass it on to my first reader.

And so it goes. At some point I reach the end, and I read it again, and I have other people read it, and then I read it one more time, also aloud. With each pass, I change less and less. Sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes I make huge changes, but as I’ve gotten more adept at figuring out what I’m doing, those huge changes tend to come earlier in the process.

The most important piece to these final passes is to not overdo things. I find it far too easy to edit the voice out of a piece if I spend too much time on it. That’s been one of the best lessons writing short stories has taught me, and I’m working on carrying it over to the novels. At some point I’ll write more about short stories, but this is long enough for now.