Inspiration, and Staying the Course

Seasonal Affective Disorder, a winter affliction, has a summertime counterpart. I call it SDD: Seasonal Distraction Disorder. The outdoors beckons. Flocks of visitors descend. We want to play, and we want to get things done – active, physical chores - before winter sets in.

What’s a writer to do?

When he’s working on a book, author David Vann maintains his momentum with a disciplined schedule. He guards a few quiet hours of solitude every morning so he doesn’t lose touch with his project.

I do my best to follow his example. But though writing weaves close to the soul, though we need it deeply, there are times when we simply have to focus on other priorities. Within the past month, both my children got married. I considering pressing forward with my projects, writing daily, preserving momentum. But I realized I’d simply be too distracted. I set my writing aside and focused on flowers, brunches, and ceremonies.

Still I feared losing momentum. What if I couldn’t recapture the initial excitement that spurred me to the page? What if I lost touch with my inspiration? Maybe I should have plodded forward, writing a little each day, regardless of how distracted I felt or how crazy-tired I was.

Not necessarily, says Joyce Carol Oates. Applying yourself too doggedly to your work can be “like striking a damp match again, again, again: hoping a small flame will break out before the match breaks.”

No matter how busy or distracted we get, inspiration is always at hand. If you believe with Oates in the Surrealist notion that life is a “forest of signs” for us to interpret, there’s nothing seasonal about inspiration, and there’s no need to drop out of live to pursue it. Henry James dined out two hundred times in a single season, eavesdropping on conversations that inspired The Turn of the Screw. Eudora Welty claimed she heard the most amazing things at the beauty shop, inspiring her story “Petrified Man.”

Traveling? While driving in the Adirondacks ,E.L. Doctorow saw a sign for Loon Lake. He was struck with the sudden conviction that everything he felt about the mountains was contained there. The novel Loon Lake resulted, a story of “a palpably mysterious wilderness, a place full of dark secrets, history rotting in the forests.”

When you find yourself distracted, consider all the ways you might get inspired again. Joseph Heller begins simply with an intriguing first sentence. Joan Didion explores an image that fixes itself in her mind. James Joyce believed in epiphany, “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or of a memorable place in the mind” (Stephen Dedalus). Joyce collected seventy of these epiphanies in notebooks, using them as raw material for virtually all of his important writing.

When SDD strikes – or any distraction, for that matter – don’t despair. Your momentum may stall. But it will return. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll find or recover inspiration, even when it seems you’re doing everything but writing.

Keep It Simple

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

~Ernest Hemingway

My only daughter gets married today, on a bluff overlooking Kachemak Bay. If we pull it off as intended, it will be beautiful, simple affair.

Make that deceptively simple. A year ago, my daughter traveled 1500 miles from Portland to deposit in my closet the first set of dishes lovingly scavenged for the reception, the perfect shade of green, more yellow than blue. That was only the beginning. What followed: dress, rings, music, officiant, photos, catering, cake, lodging, vows, seating, tents, heaters, rehearsal, plates, flatware, tables, coffee urns, welcome bags. One hundred twenty-five things to buy, rent, or borrow; 162 items to scratch off the to-do list. Not that anyone’s counting.

In writing it also takes effort to pull off the simple. A little exposure to the classics, a lot of textbook drivel, and we leave school with writing that’s pompous and overbearing. Re-training can take years. 

Overwriting is the caste mark of the emerging writer, worn unaware. “Diction problems are symptomatic of defects in the character or education of the writer,” John Gardner says. “Both diction shifts and the steady use of inappropriate diction suggest either deep-down bad taste or the awkwardness that comes of inexperience and timidity.” Ouch.

In Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us, agent Jessica Page Morrell calls it purple bling: writing that’s euphemistic, clichéd, and extravagant. “The problem with purple prose is that it calls attention to itself instead of performing its job – telling a story – and it tries too hard to manipulate the reader’s emotions.”

In The First Five Pages, agent Noah Lukeman echoes this concern. He identifies these warning signs of overwritten prose: writing that feels forced or exaggerated, not fitting the subject; books that come off as arenas for showing off the writer’s talent; and writing so noticeable it drives the reader away from the story.

Gardner identifies these signs of badly elevated diction: cliched personification (“greeted by the sound”), abstract language (“unique sound”), and Latinate where Anglo-Saxon will suffice (“surveyed the sound situation”).

Maybe once, long ago, you let a purple phrase or two slip. Examples, courtesy of Morrell:

• In love scenes, quivering and throbbing; breasts as mounds or globes, couples locked in a primal dance
• Storms featuring distant thunder and menacing clouds that crouch on the horizon, generating violent gusts of wind that frighten the shutters
• Characters known to the core of their being or to every fiber of their being; characters who experience the slow burn of anger or who are touched to their innermost souls

Fortunately, there’s a cure. “By reading carefully and extensively,” Gardner says, “by writing constantly and getting the best criticism available to him, the writer who begins with no feeling for diction can eventually overcome his problems.”

Try This: As an antidote for purple prose, Lukeman recommends rewriting a passage in a style exactly the opposite of its original. “If your style is straightforward,” he says, “try one that is convoluted; if it is baroque, try one that is minimalist.”

Check This Out: For no-holds-barred advice from a master, read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. “A necessary handbook, a stern judge, an encouraging friend,” is how John L’Heureux describes this classic.

Outlining: How Good Ideas Get Undone

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

~E.M. Forster

I rarely outline, not at first anyhow. But like most writers, I do a lot of thinking about structure, and especially about what I call the reveal.

Admittedly, outlines are great for seeing what you’ve got to work with and for playing around with organization. But they also wheel us back to the artifices of academia that work against fresh, lively prose.

The outline’s partner in crime is the five-paragraph essay. Both set up habits that please teachers but stifle interest. Find a topic, chop it up in the most obvious way, knit it back together with a thesis statement and a bunch of handy transitions, reiterate, reiterate, reiterate, and then wrap it all up. You may thank Artistotle for the snores of your readers.

This training is all wrong. We’re not building a case in a courtroom. We’re aiming for art, insight, and enjoyment. But if logic’s not the best way to arrive at surprise and delight, a hodgepodge doesn’t satisfy either.

Rewind to Aristotle, more helpful with his three acts. Beginning, middle, end; set-up, complication, climax/resolution. Screenwriters can tell you how long each should be, and how the action shifts. The more we read, the more good movies we watch, the more we develop an intuitive sense these three acts, so as we’re playing around with ideas for a story or a narrative essay or a book, we start to envision scenes in which the action builds from the set-up and complications toward a climax and resolution.

Though we’d like to think the process is entirely organic, at some level order does get imposed. The question turns to when and what kind of order. First thoughts aren’t always best thoughts, and that’s the problem with a lot of traditional outlining, which carves a topic into logical parts and arranges them in the most logical and expected manner.

Pulitzer-prize winning author Jon Franklin says there are three levels of story: the academic, polished level; the outline level that deals with conceptual relationships between characters; and the structural level, made up of major focuses that zoom in on emotional turning points. Transitions aren’t used to connect dots, but to move the reader from scene to scene.

The first focus Franklin calls the complicating focus. It’s where your reader is hooked, where character begins to unfold, where the nature of the dilemma is made clear. The second focus, in three or more parts, is the developmental focus, where complications are explored. Each of these has its own beginning, middle, and end. The first can carry a flashback. At the end of the third comes a moment of insight, a plot point in screenwriter lingo. A resolving focus comes at the end.

S.C. Gwynne’s bestseller Empireof the Summer Moon, a finalist for the Pulitzer, is a great example of Franklin’s principles on the page. The subtitle reveals the scope of this nonfiction book: Quanah Parker and the Rice and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. Outlined in the traditional way, it would follow the life of Quanah Parker, starting with his birth, tracking the rise of his influence, and ending with his death. Yawn.

Gwynne begins instead with a complicating focus, hooking the reader with on-the-ground accounts of fierce Comanche battles. Hints of Quanah’s character through the captivating (literally) story of his mother, a white woman taken by the Comanches. The over-arching dilemma is clear: the Comanches rise up as warriors among the Plains Indian tribes, and they won’t go down without a fight. Every complication has its own beginning, middle, and end: the introduction of the horse onto the American plains, the botched Indian policies of the U.S. government, the in-fighting among tribes. Each focus weaves into the others, and the very, very end of the book satisfies the reader’s anticipation of how they’ll ultimately come together.

Even at the paragraph level, Gwynne is a master of rocking the traditional order. Look at where he puts the traditional topic sentence in this excerpt, which comes at the end of a long paragraph about the blunders of Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, deemed the “Anti-Custer” by Gwynne:

Large concentrations of soldiers with long supply trains were a signal to simply disappear, which was usually easy enough. It was the reason so many U.S. troops spent so much time marching and riding about, looking for and not finding Indians. Not finding Indians had been the principal activity of the U.S. cavalry for years in the West. Mackenzie’s force was enormous by plains standards: It was the largest that had ever been sent to pursue Indians.

“Not finding Indians had been the principal activity of the U.S. cavalry for years in the West.” A less writer would have killed the reveal by moving this great one-liner to the top of the paragraph where we expect the topic sentence, and thereby deflating its effect by half.

Withholding is a huge part of good writing. So is shaking up the traditional order.

Try This: Shake up the order of your work in progress. Think like a camera, zooming and in and out of complications. Work the stories within your story. Strategize your reveals. As Seth Kantner says, you need to always carry your reader, but don’t overuse transitions to impose logic; instead, use them sparingly, to move the reader from scene to scene.

Check This Out: Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story promises – and delivers on – craft secrets of dramatic non-fiction by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. It opens new ways to think about structure for writers of fiction, too.

Channeling Your Inner Guerilla

Once upon a time there was an easy order to the business of writing: create, pitch, publish, promote. A writer’s creative energy went mostly into her work, and the rest followed from there.

That everything’s different is old news. Your work no longer stands only on its own two feet. It requires a platform, or so goes the twenty-first century wisdom. Agents and editors urge writers to promote early and often, even if they’re still working on their first viable project.

To get your work noticed in the topsy-turvy world of modern publishing requires fortitude, courage, and a broad-minded approach. “Schmoozing, pitching, that’s your job,” says screenwriter Scott Silver. Though he admits some people are good only at schmoozing, he also points out that it’s juvenile to think that if your work is good enough, you’ll never have to promote.  Nevertheless, he reiterates, the work matters most.  

“I’ve been a Luddite most of my life,” says author Lynn Schooler. “Then they overthrew the government in Twitter, and I realized I’d better start paying attention.” These days, Schooler notes, writers have to schmooze the world, not just a person.

Though he self-describes as a bit of a recluse and until recently had only dial-up internet service, Schooler has managed to amass over 3000 Facebook friends in less than two years by applying an old principle of marketing – offering a value-added service by regularly posting scenic Alaska photos from his professional portfolio.

Author Heather Lende contends that self-promotion boils down to doing the work and showing genuine interest in the people around you. In the beginning, you might find yourself working for free, the way Lende did. Though she initially volunteered to do radio shows in Haines, she looked up a few people at NPR and mailed tapes of her shows to them.

She got her first paying gig as a writer on Monitor Radio, thanks to her husband’s Aunt Dottie, who passed on a tape of one of her radio pieces to the executive producer of Monitor Radio, who went to her church. Once she started writing a column for the Anchorage Daily News, NPR picked up Lende’s work. Whenever she called back East, Lende says, “I always asked who I was speaking to.” Editors come and go, but receptionists stay.

Author Kim Heacox echoes Lende’s advice, recalling an early meeting with an editor at Discover magazine. When he asked how she’d gotten her job, he said, “she was like a flower I’d just watered.” The interview turned into a conversation. A few months later, assignments started flowing in. In the world of what Heacox calls “You Twit Face,” he reminds writers to promote the work of others in the writing community. His cautionary note: “Be careful you don’t turn into a cardboard version of your original self.”

Should you blog? Post about your project on Facebook? Make book trailers? Schedule tours? Talk up yourself and your project every chance you get? The answers boil down to time, energy, and balance in your writing life. You need a viable project, finely crafted, though as Andromeda Romano-Lax demonstrates, it can be promoted in its development stage. Pay attention to opportunities to connect, in person and electronically, with people who might have an interest in your work. Be genuine and sincere in working your connections. Be courteous but not shy. Avoid arrogance. Get used to rejection. Support and promote the work of others, not just your own.

Thanks to North WordsWriters Symposium for providing a forum for discussion of this topic, from which many of the quotes here were drawn.

Likable Characters

No doubt you’ve met some despicable lunks, in literature as in life. So what’s all the fuss about likable characters?

Let’s assume you love your characters deeply and passionately, even the evil and naughty ones (maybe you love those the most). But what if your readers aren’t as taken by them? While characters must of course be themselves, it’s worth noting the traits that readers seem drawn to. Likable characters tend to be proactive and driven, though we also appreciate passive characters who are given a chance to show their mettle. We like characters that are vulnerable and redeemable. Charm doesn’t hurt.

Our interest in characters builds from the set up. “I remember reading once that if you want readers to bond with your main character, put him in love or in trouble on the first page,” says author Elise Broach. “The reason isn’t hard to fathom: it makes the character vulnerable, and readers are instinctively drawn to, interested in, and protective of vulnerable characters. A difficult situation with a high emotional investment for the character sows the seeds of compassion and affection in the reader.” Broach notes that this one trick of circumstance can compensate for a bunch of off-putting personality traits.

Spunk, courage, persistence, ingenuity, kindness, loyalty – these are among the traits that make a character likable, she points out. Humor can offset a number of vices. We’re also endeared to characters with weaknesses like poor judgment (in moderation), as that helps build suspense.

What don’t readers like in a character? Predictability, self-pity, preachiness, whining – we have a low tolerance for characters that suffer from these flaws. The passive character can be also be tricky, although author Robin Romm points out that some of the best stories have passive protagonists, characters who have not yet acted on their latent desires. A fierce protagonist can alarm or exhaust the reader, Romm notes, and he may not be capable of the same revelations as a passive character.  “The trick is that the passive character doesn’t stay passive,” Romm says. The passive character should be pushed toward moments of complicated crisis that make readers rethink who she is.

Is a likable female character different from a likable male character? Though it’s not especially literary, Shana Mlawski conducted ananalysis of Entertainment Weekly’s 100 Fav Fictional Characters list. Her conclusions: “Most great female characters, the EW list seems to say, are doers—not thinkers or losers or comedians or lovable ogres or what have you.  Great male characters, meanwhile, range across the entirety of human experience.” Perhaps, Mlawski posits, the problem lies with writers who don’t know how to write nuanced female characters, and in particular with male writers who are afraid they’ll be accused of misogyny if they push beyond the safe strong female character mold. “Or is it that Hollywood’s female characters have been focus-grouped to death, as A.O. Scott suggested in his (hilarious) review of Knight and Day?” Mlawski asks. “Are writers shackled by the market research that says that likable female characters must be ‘tough but not aggressive,’ ‘sexy but not actually having sex,’ and ‘willing to fall for a certain kind of guy without entirely losing their heads’?” 

“The perfect hero is the one who offers the most conflict in the situation, has the longest emotional journey, and has a primal goal we can all root for,” notes author Blake Snyder. Though he’s speaking of screenwriting, it doesn’t hurt the literary writer to consider the questions he poses on character:

• Is your hero’s goal clearly stated in the set-up?
• Do clues of what to do next just come to your hero or does she seek them out?
• Is your hero active or passive?
• Do other characters tell your character what to do, or does she tell them?

In the end, all we want is to create characters that readers care about, characters they’ll stick with to the end and continue to think about after they’ve finished reading.

Life into Story

When a certain politician released her autobiography a few years ago, a mock cover circulated: All About Me, by Me, Me, Me. The Seusslike rendering generated laughs because it captured the narcissism of this particular individual - and perhaps of politicians in general.

Laugh as we may, the truth is that nearly everything a writer creates is at some level All About Me. The first rule of writing is to write what you know, and unless we suffer from narcissism or other delusional disorders, what we know best is ourselves. So how does something so personal and seemingly egocentric get spun into writing that’s meaningful, true, and of interest to readers?

Start with your motivation. If you’re bent on showing the world all the ways you’ve been wronged, shut down your laptop and a join a support group. As author Steve Almond points out, writers should at all times love their characters, and that’s tough to do when you’re bent on revenge

Then push beyond what you know. Discover what only you can write, the experiences and perspectives that not everyone has. Go beyond stuff that happened to you and probe the things you got yourself into. So you were raised by a pack of wolves. Readers want to know what happened when you challenged the alpha or failed to howl like the rest. “Good stories show how people survive,” Almond says, adding that a "character in a hole" is only of interest when you probe her unbearable feelings and the thwarted desires.

Should you tell your truth straight or slant? Both, if you’re honest. In nonfiction, there’s always a slant, and that slant will be all about you, the truth that you’ve lived and the truth you’re discovering – and that’s without even venturing onto the slippery slope of remembered or emotional truth. If you write fiction, go ahead and tell yourself you’re making everything up, but the truth that you’ve lived and the truth you’re discovering will creep in regardless.

Still, there’s the question of form. In Turning Life into Fiction, Robin Hemley advises writers to consider how wedded they are to the facts. If you’ve chosen fiction as your form, you mustn't cling to what “really happened.” Memoir, on the other hand, frees you – somewhat – from the expectations of narrative; in memoir, writer David Shields notes, issues of identity take center stage, and revelations can be more episodic than in a novel or short story. At the same time, if allowing artifice or recreated memory into your memoir feels wrong, you’re better off sticking with fiction.  The material is basically immaterial, Hemley says. The most fascinating life events handled badly by the author make for dull reading, while a strong rendering draws interest in what might otherwise seem a dull life.

In both fiction and memoir, strong narrative structure transforms your life, or parts of it, into story. “All of our lives are narrative,” says author Jon Franklin. “Story is something else: taking select parts of a narrative, separating them from everything else, and arranging them so they have meaning.” Follow Chekhov’s advice, Franklin suggests, and look for points of character complication, where characters are forced into action and transformation. You should be able to identify the points of insight, the moments that lead to these transformations. Building on the theories of neuroanatomist Paul MacLean, Franklin contends that every narrative should also work on three levels: what happens on the surface, what happens in the emotional landscape, and the universal, evoked by the narrative rhythms.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that since it’s your story, either you or a character like you must tell it. Decisions on point of view are more complicated than that. Consider both perspective and psychic distance. “What matters is the emotional posture you’ve taken toward your characters and what short of narrative latitude you desire,” Almond says. “The trick to finding the right POV is striking the right balance between intimacy and perspective.”

Yes, it’s all about you. But the world only cares if you invest yourself in the details of form, and if you’re unwavering in your commitment to truth. As Almond says, “A big part of writing is about developing the capacity to expose yourself on the page, if not your life story, at the very least your prevailing anxieties and the people who caused them.”

Ready, Set...Market: How a Writer Knows If It's Ready

Scan advice from agents and editors, and you’ll find a common thread: too many writers send off their work before it’s ready. But how do you know when a piece is as good as it’s going to get?

This is trickier than it sounds. Part of the fun and frustration of writing is that a piece can always get better. Most published writers will tell you they’ve wished for changes even after their work came out in print. And while much writing goes off half-baked, it’s also possible to overcook a piece, to fiddle with it till it falls apart on the page, or to play with it more or less forever, thus staving off any chance of rejection.

Let’s assume you’ve engaged in that recursive process of discovery, prewriting and drafting and revising until you have what feels like a decent draft. You’ve let it set awhile, and in the most objective of ways you’ve approached it again. You’ve gotten critiques from a few trusted readers. Is it ready for market?

Even when your instinct tells you a project is ready, it’s good to go one more round, taking time to move through the project chapter by chapter, doing the same sort of writer-as-reader analysis you’d do on a good published book by another author. If your piece is an essay or short story, so much the better – there’s a lot to evaluate.

Handwrite your notes, both in the text itself – marking lyric moments, best parts, surprise and delight – and also in a free-standing list. Handwriting keeps your right brain involved in what’s essentially a left-brained pursuit.

Here’s what I look for. I’m not a big fan of checklists, so beware. This sort of analysis too early in the project tends to stifle creative energy. And this is my own personal list,  keyed to what I find engaging in narrative (fiction and non) and slanted toward my own shortcomings. Your ready-for-market survey might look quite a lot different. 

• The basics: notes on time, point of view, narrative distance, voice, and length.
• Beginning and end: Copy down the first and last sentences in order to study the frame for the piece.
• Scene and summary: List these, in order. For the scenes, note ways in which characters change from beginning to end. Note how backstory, if any, works in.
• Characters: What do the characters know about themselves? What are they blind to? Which feelings are articulated? Which feelings need to be articulated? In what ways are they larger than life?
• Arc: Where’s the set-up, the climax, the denouement?
• Surprise and delight: What feels most fresh and alive in the piece? Consider word choice, metaphor, humor, voice, plot, character.
• Suspense: Foreshadowing, not overdone. Consider what’s not said, what’s withheld, and conversely, what’s revealed and where.
• Language and details: Where’s the sharp, smart language? The humor, if any? Make sure nothing’s overwritten or over-explained. Even after a few rounds of revision, I find myself lopping off ends of sentences, where I’ve said too much.
• Lyric moments: Identify the ones you’ve got, and look for places where they should be.
• What it’s about: If you thought you knew and now you’re seeing something more, less, or different, that can be good, as long as you make the most of what you discover. Pay attention to how the focus is revealed to the reader. Sometimes it’s too obvious, sometimes it’s too subtle. Every story is two stories: identify both.
• Where you copped out: Consider the ways in which your project could be more than it is – more emotional depth, more distinctive voice, richer language, more layers.