WRITblog

Good morning.  I do not receive a regular paycheck.  My vocation is writing, with a little editing thrown in there.  I have yet to make a thin dime from any of it.

I’m terrified.

Starting today, I absolutely have to treat this as a job: to take it seriously so that others might take me seriously.  I am giving myself a five-day workweek with (hopefully) a fairly regular set of hours, with only myself to be accountable.

I plan to write, to re-write, to research publications and contests and to send stories out to them, to edit, to get in the workshop, occasionally to job-hunt for a juicy publishing gig, and to read voraciously, with a writer’s eye.  I will have a lunch break.  I won’t have a dress code, although I might wear a tie if I decide it helps me write (which it might). 

At some point, if and when I acquire a laptop, I will start bringing the entire operation to the café so as not to become distracted by television, cats, roommates, junk food, or the Internet. (Ok, I might bring my wi-fi card along now and then, but only for submitting things online and working on the Writ.  No lolcats, YouTube, hockey scores, or MySpace.  Srsly.)

Cafés will also have gratuitous amounts of coffee, which I may start needing.  I’m setting my alarm.  I’m getting up early.  I have, at a generous estimate, six months of living expenses saved up, probably more like four or five realistically.  This is not a good plan, this is not enough money.  Vonnegut saved up the equivalent of a year’s salary – from just his story sales, not his regular income – before he quit his day job.  I haven’t made any money on my stories.  And I’m certainly not Vonnegut.  But I can’t keep working crap jobs.  I have to think I can do this, and now seems as good a time as any.

I’m a sucker for reality TV.

 I’d like to say I’m intellectually amazing all of the time, but the truth is that sometimes I grab a bag of chips and plop down in front of Rock of Love, or Top Chef, or MTV’s True Life. I draw the line at American Idol because that’s just way too much commitment for me. Top Chef has been one show that I continually tune into lately. These people have to be insane to cook gourmet food in a matter of minutes with all the restrictions the show puts on them. If someone gave me 10 minutes in a grocery store and $10 to put together a meal for a family of four I’m pretty sure I’d have a panic attack. The part of the show that I’m always really interested in is when the time is up and everyone mentions various things they would have done differently or tweaked in various ways. Writing is a lot like cooking in that it could always use a dash of salt or a minute more in the oven. There is always something in your writing that can be reexamined and made better with a little more time and effort. Fortunately for most of us, our creative writing is not on a timer and we have the opportunity (if we so choose) to edit our work and edit again and again and again. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve found a crumpled piece of paper or an old notebook with some poetry and thought, “Whoa! I could totally make this piece better!” So the next time you’re thinking about throwing that bit of poem/fiction/manuscript out the window, take a deep breath, pull out the salt, and season that writing!

Writing isn’t just about conjuring words and ideas and everything out of thin air. It’s extremely important to have a good imagination, to be sure, but it’s also important to know what to focus on, and often, the result is that you, the writer, may know more than what actually makes it on to the page – in fact, it’s virtually unheard-of to keep absolutely everything in by the time a story is done (“done” being relative, but a debate for another time…).

This is true for all forms of writing – the best definition of a poem I ever heard was “something where no word is unnecessary,” – but especially so for prose. A memoir can’t really encompass an entire lifetime, or it would take that long to read. Journalism and creative nonfiction both require research and investigation to even find a story to tell, and often the research is just as much to discover what the story isn’t, as well as what it is. In fiction, however, you need to create that “research” yourself.

The best writers out there know their characters better than they know themselves. It might never come up in the story that so-and-so’s favorite color is mauve, or that she’s allergic to feathers, or that she’s never been in a car accident. But if you, the writer, know these little things, then, regardless of whether or not it makes it onto the page, your character will be livelier and more realistic in subtle, but important, ways. By imagining details of a fictional life, what you’re doing is tricking yourself into thinking that your character is a real person, and in doing so, their dialogue, motivations, actions, and decisions are more informed and more realistic, even if you’re not aware of doing so as you write. Some writers will make lists of things about their characters, some will even write biographies for all of them. Other writers are less deliberate, and let the characters slowly evolve, “getting to know them” as they write them. Either way, they know more than the reader will get to in the story. But then, what observer really knows everything about someone they know in life? And we don’t suspect our friends of being fictitious simply because we don’t know what they had for breakfast that morning.

Fiction comes in many forms, and it’s a good idea to keep an open mind with all media when it comes to thinking about craft. Fiction doesn’t just mean novels and short stories – it’s any story that someone, somewhere must have sat down at one point and written. Television shows and comic books are both essentially serialized stories, with recurring central characters and minor characters that come in and out, and in these media one can start to dig deeper and see things in characters, the little moments that might not come out in a single, self-contained work like a novel (or a graphic novel, or a film, or a play, or a musical, or…). And even then, there are plenty of things that exist within these fictional worlds, without the observer being told directly.

One benefit of modern technology is the ease and accessibility of the average person into the processes of things formerly known only to the people in those fields. And a benefit that helps fiction writers especially is the DVD Extra. For about twenty bucks, anyone can see deleted scenes, often with introduction or commentary from writers and directors about why a particular scene was worthy of being filmed, and indeed, almost makes it into the final version, but even though it’s really funny or really poignant or whatever, its own aesthetic value has to be sacrificed for the benefit of the bigger picture. Listen to commentary tracks, too – very often writers will discuss the ways in which they approach central themes, how they balance plot and character development – all things very important to writing prose fiction.  Even listen to the directors – in films, their decisions are the equivalent of the narrative voice in prose – the plot and dialogue and action can all be the same, but it’s the function of that voice to create the way it’s perceived.

Which brings me to Peter Jackson.

As both the screenwriter and director for the massively-expensive Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was responsible for virtually every aspect of recreating a world already masterfully imagined in prose by J.R.R. Tolkien. The challenge was no small one, but he is for certain a master storyteller. He made believable a world that should inherently be unbelievable, and he did it by attention to detail in ways that wouldn’t be seen by the viewer on the big screen, but would nonetheless be felt. It wasn’t a movie of cardboard cut-outs and papier-mâché; rather, every prop, costume, and set was designed as though made with a functioning purpose by an inhabitant of that fictional world. There were design flourishes on the insides of costumes, silverware inside cabinets that didn’t need to be opened in the script, extensions of buildings that would be cut off by the framing of the shot. And there were lots and lots of scenes with Hobbits, many of them just shot from the neck up, but for every single take, the actors had to endure hours of makeup time to put on hairy, giant Hobbit feet.

What this did, according to the actors, was to make them feel not like they were being paid as actors to work on a movie shooting in New Zealand, but rather that they were in Middle friggin’ Earth, and to watch out for Orcs. And the more they believed it, the less they needed to act. Acting is a sort of lying, in the same way that good fiction tells a sort of truth, and to that end, a writer shouldn’t be concerned with trying to convince his or her audience that this or that happened, but rather, convince themselves that it happened. When it’s then conveyed to the reader, the reader will believe it, because the writer believed it.

Writing prose fiction is challenging, make no mistake. You are the director and the actor, you are the prop master, costume designer, and set builder, you are the sound engineer and cinematographer, and, let us not forget, you are the screenwriter. Use all these elements to tell a story, but build it bigger than we can know – when you create the whole world, the snapshot that the reader gets will be all the more textured.

So put on your Hobbit feet before you sit down to write, figure out what your antagonist did over his long weekend, and then forget that he only exists as far as you say he does. Then, your reader will, too.

Here’s a website I found today:

http://spellcheckplus.com/

It’s an online spell-checker.  Common sense would lead me to hope that most people on here, being proficient enough with a computer to set up an account here, would probably have a good word processing program with an automatic spell-checker - heck, even Firefox spell-checks these days and is correcting me as I type this.

But in reality, people can, from time to time, post things in the workshop full of errors.  No, spell-checkers aren’t foolproof.  No, they don’t account for intentional straying from rules for artistic purposes.  No, they can’t do dialect.  But, those have been the case a minority of the time, from what I can tell.  Spell-checkers aren’t able to help you if you’re not willing to use them.

No one’s a perfect speller or grammar guru.  But technology is good these days, and resources are at our fingertips, and it’s easy to get pretty close.  The workshop is here as a resource for everybody, but that doesn’t mean it should be used as a proofreading.  If you can fix up the spelling and grammar and punctuation before posting something on the workshop, you will get better feedback, period.  You will have more readers, and more readers will read all the way to the end.  If a reader happens to notice an honest mistaken use of a homonym, they usually point it out, but generally it’s along with a substantial comment on the meat of the piece.

The other benefit from an online spell-checker, and this particular site, I should mention, is its utility to non-native English speakers.  Having tried, with varying degrees of success, to learn three other languages, I can appreciate the level of difficulty in making oneself understood at all, much less to write creatively in another language.  This site, (again, http://spellcheckplus.com/ ) is aimed specifically at ESL writers, although it can easily be toggled to give advice geared more to native English speakers.  With our humble little site becoming more global all the time, we’re going to have increasingly more writers with other first languages.  And while we don’t now have the same infrastructure set up outside of English language writing, we can do our best to help non-native speakers become better writers in English.  Be kind with your comments, but don’t be shy about addressing common mistakes.  English is a complicated language with complicated rules and terrible exceptions to all of them.  It’s a nightmare to learn, even as a first language.  Anyone remember spelling tests as a kid?  You don’t need ‘em in Spanish, because Spanish spelling makes sense!

Anyway…

It helps everyone to spell-check your writing before posting it.  So spend the extra minute and make it pretty.  Thanks.

One thing I really want to do on the new site (and, in the meantime, on this blog) is to collect and/or produce helpful resources for other writers.  I certainly don’t know everything there is to know about writing (nor will I presume to), and therefore will be looking in plenty of dark corners for new insight.  I use this site as a primary resource for improving my writing, and I would hope to be able to offer some of my own experience back as a resource for others. As one evolving writer to a community of evolving writers, I thought I could share some of what I’ve been through so far, and new things as they reveal themselves.  I’m interested in trying to help writers who sincerely want to improve and become better writers, because that’s what I want for myself.  (What that means is, although I often will write “you,” I really mean, “me.”   If my advice is “You need to finish that short story you started weeks ago,” it means I started a short story MONTHS ago and my roommate got us cable, so I’m gaining weight and not word count.)

Today I got some notes from Sarah, in what was a bit of serendipitous timing, to zap my ass into gear.  One of the pledges I made was to post on this blog once a week – something I’ve failed to do for these two weeks since making that promise.  This coincided with me reading a bit of stirring writing advice which prompted me to make a schedule for myself.  Hence, this post.

Something that I almost always forget, and I’d wager many others forget as well, is that writing is WORK.

Writing can be fun, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be, but to be even a little bit serious about it requires discipline.  And I’m sure it’s the most common, clichéd bit of writing advice out there and there’s no way to say it that hasn’t been said before, but that doesn’t make it any less true or less useful.  It’s something that I’ve known for years, and preached all along, but it’s much easier said than done.

If you want to write anything that’s any sort of good, if you want to write more than once and write more than one thing, if you want to write something that’s longer, or, worse, shorter, and above all, if you want to be READ by other people, then be prepared to spend a lot more time writing than you thought it would take.  You can’t just sit down for five minutes every few months and expect Shakespeare to pour out.

It’s hard to do when the only thing motivating you to write is you.  Most of us on this site aren’t professional writers.  Some of you are in college, though, and you have the external motivation of writing for classes.  And this is fantastic – take advantage of it while you can.  I was my most prolific (to date) in college – magazine deadlines, due dates for fiction classes, submission deadlines for lit journals.  The difference between writing in college and writing for public consumption is that in college, you get to PAY people to give you deadlines.    After college, you have to get good enough to deserve an editor or publisher pushing you around with a deadline.  Then, maybe, maybe, maybe, you get paid. 

And if you don’t ever make a dime at writing, that’s fine.  Not everyone expects to, or maybe even cares to.  Most of the people here (myself included) are traveling on the writing road, not quite sure where it goes.  Some of us have gone farther than others.  Some are going faster, some slower, some might have stopped at a state liquor store.  Maybe a few will take the first exit they see, maybe a few won’t even notice anything but what’s directly in front of them. 

But if you’re on this workshop, then chances are, you identify yourself with that slippery notion of being a Writer.  (Heaven’s sakes!) 

You might say to yourself, “Well, I write things, but I wouldn’t call myself a writer…”

 Well, why the heck not?  That’s pretty much the definition! 

“But I don’t do it for a living…”

Neither did any professional writer, at first, but publishable material doesn’t just come out of thin air.  Every single professional writer was once an unpaid, unpublished, amateur writer, but a writer nonetheless. 

Thinking of yourself as a writer, and thinking of writing as work, are fundamental.  Everything else comes from there.  It’s work that won’t make you any money at first, or maybe ever – in fact, it’ll cost you money: pens and paper, computers and printers, schools, workshops, stamps and submission fees, coffee, booze, anxiety medication, corrective eyewear, and of course books to read, because you can’t write in a vacuum.  But you do what you have to to write.  I also cook in a restaurant and substitute teach, but I don’t identify myself chiefly as either of those things.  Maybe some of you identify first as a parent or a student or a firefighter or a wizard, and that’s awesome, but none of those mean you can’t say, “…and I’m a writer, too.”

So now that we’re all telling the world we’re writers, well, we have to back it up by writing. 

Which means working at writing.

It means setting regular times to write, and thinking about it like going to a job or a class, and you can’t just skip because no one will slap your wrist.  It means setting concrete goals for how much you get done before you stop, and not checking to see what’s on TV.  It means revising, regularly and ideally with a bit of distance, because nothing’s too good to get tossed out, and nothing’s too bad to get a second look.

I’ve set aside my writing time (on paper it looks like a college class schedule), I’ve set my goals for output (weighted and complex as a tax plan) and I’ve got a support network writing community (mad as hatters, every last one of ‘em, and for some reason perpetually olive-green). 

I know what I need to be doing.

Now I need to sit down and do it.

(And if I don’t write another one of these on time next week, someone yell at me!)

some of us writoricians met up a few weekends ago to discuss the future of the writoracle as well as many other exciting thoughts we have in the works.

one item that was discussed was the idea to have members of thewrit.org community submit articles for publication in the same way that poetry/prose/fiction is submitted. this way we will be able to craft a very different publication every time. this is also another way that everyone in the community can participate to put together a really well rounded and diverse publication. if you don’t think we have enough articles about music-go ahead and write us an article! if that new poetry anthology that just came out isn’t your favorite-write a review! we are very open to all types of articles. if you’re worried about the possible content of your article please do not hesitate to send me an email (juliek@thewrit.org).

we will not be publishing an issue of thewritoracle until the new website is up and running and we do not have a definite time frame for the new website as of yet, but i encourage anyone who has written an article and would like it considered for our first publication on the new site to email me (juliek@thewrit.org) with your articles.

Charles Simic on Writing Poetry from the Library of Congress

**The internet is full of wonderful pieces of information. The Library of Congress website, kind of a square one of American Poetry, contains some interesting links, from Poetry Webcasts to the following petite list of suggestions from current Poet Laureate Charles Simic. I enjoy these not only for their simplicity, but for outlining the mentalities that surround crafting poems. Not quite as epic feeling as Letters to a Young Poet, but a good piece of perspective. Hope you like it — Jeremiah**

A few things to keep in mind while sitting down to write a poem:

1. Don’t tell the readers what they already know about life.
2. Don’t assume you’re the only one in the world who suffers.
3. Some of the greatest poems in the language are sonnets and poems not many lines longer than that, so don’t overwrite.
4. The use of images, similes and metaphors make poems concise. Close your eyes, and let your imagination tell you what to do.
5. Say the words you are writing aloud and let your ear decide what word comes next.
6. What you are writing down is a draft that will need additional tinkering, perhaps many months, and even years of tinkering.
7. Remember, a poem is a time machine you are constructing, a vehicle that will allow someone to travel in their own mind, so don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get all its engine parts properly working.

I wanted this message/thread to list those online publications whose site you frequent. With each entry please include the following:
1. Name of publication

2. Link to publication

3. Type of work most featured (poetry, fiction, essays, mix)

4. What do you feel is the publications strength, possibly including, but certainly not limited to, the following:

a. strength of writing – include examples
b. strength of visual layout – specifics (color, column width, etc)
c. strength of readership – who reads these? what are their comments as readers?
d. mission statement
e. freshness of authors – is these just the same old faces?

Some ideas to get the ball rolling. I know this might take a bit of effort for each publication, but it really will help shape what we should be striving toward and patting ourselves on the back for. It will also help define our “niche” a bit more concretely.

NOTE: I did a quick search and there are more to look at here. Check out some and add your thoughts!

The writ is refocusing its collective energy to become a more complete go-to for new writers. To do this we need every one’s help!

If you have been on the writ for a while you’ll have noticed the “challenges” section on your homepage. Throughout the years challenges have been varied, from “help name the writ” to “write a piece about change.” The responses always vary from poignant to hilarious. All in all it’s a way to be more involved in the shaping and community of the Writ as a whole!

Currently we have some CRUCIAL challenges for young and old, new and seasoned.

First is the Resource Library Project. I want to call special attention to this because I have found that to be part of the greater online writing community you need to be involved in the discussions, news, and writing of more than just the Writ.  This is the chance to let the writers on the Writ who is putting out great online journals, which print journals you enjoy, your sources for writing news and even great articles that you feel everyone should read.  We want to hear your voice!

Secondly, to get a better feel for what may have been missed by those were gone and/or to get some more acclaim for some of the “golden oldies” you can submit Writ pieces to the “That which needs to be read” challenge.  It’s always good to show your successes and this is a great way to show the best of the Writ.

Your input is so important to making this a better community and resource for new AND established writers, so get on out there and challenge yourself!

Hi Everyone,

If you  tried to access The Writ this morning, you may have been surprised to learn that we destroyed the workshop in favor of becoming a PayPal phishing site.  Unforunately, this strategic business move (that I’m proud to say I had absolutely nothing to do with) failed to produce revenue for The Writ staff, and we have shut the operation down.  You’ll have to take your paypal payments over to PayPal.com from now on.

No, but seriously… some evil fingers slithered into our site through an unsecured script (my money is on that old forum, and all traces of it have now been removed from the system), and wreaked some havoc on us.  We’ve 80% recovered, but I could use your help tracking down that last 20%.

If anything is still broken, please comment and tell me about it so I can try to track down the unbroken files.

Thanks!

Sarah