Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 57

What Makes Us Better Writers

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When I first started writing, there was already a writer in the family.  Where other people had House Beautiful as coffee table magazines, he had The Writer.  With those digest style covers that The Writer had for many years, and finally had to change because it was too old-fashioned.

Things have changed so much since those days.  We can find writing advice really, pretty much, everywhere.  But should we follow it?  Will it make us better writers?

Not Everyone is an Expert—But They Think They Are

The more I write, the more I realize how little I actually know.  I’ve been taking a workshop called Plotting with Depth and learning about tags (which is not what you think they are) and am astounded at what I’m learning.  All I need to do is pick up a book like the latest Jack Reacher one and I can start finding examples.  I’ve been trying to incorporate what I’m learning in my current project, and it’s challenging.  But it’s a fun challenge.

Meanwhile, there’s a writer who I know from a blogging class way back at least seven years ago.  She’s teaching online classes on how to write fiction.  So I wandered onto Amazon to check out how many novels she had written.

None.  Zero.  Zip.

But she had written a whole lot of non-fiction books on how to write fiction.

Hmm.

For a while I made the circuits of the various cheapie writing classes that are all over the place.  They were $30 and about 4-6 weeks.  Usually had 20-30 people in the class.

I tried to screen them.  I checked the writer background to see if they wrote fiction.  Yes.  As a pantser, I also asked if they taught to pantsers.  I was always told “Sure!  I teach pantsers and outliners.”

That turned out to be code for, “I have no idea what to do with a pantser.  I was expecting you to outline.”  There was one horrifying class that I almost quit four times (and should have.  The Army soldier kicked in and said, “Accomplish the mission” when I should have just blown up the bridge and been done with it.).  I did not understand at all what was being taught.  The instructor kept telling me I was doing it wrong and explaining the same thing, really, like I was stupid for not getting it.  The problem was that it required outlining to understand, and I was never going to understand it that way.

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Being Vigilant With Learning

But those classes taught me to be vigilant and selective with what I was learning:

To make sure that what I did do was a good use my time.  Way too many writers don’t think that their is valuable, or perhaps a better phrase is they’re not even aware it is valuable.
To always ask questions about what’s being taught, and if I don’t like the answers I’m coming up with, then to walk away.

And probably the most important thing of all: Push the skills.  Always push the skills.  It’s hard and can be painful. I spent almost three years trying to get setting into my books, and now I don’t have to think as much about it.  But part of being a better writer is wanting it.

And earning it.

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Remembering Warriors Available

Read more about it here!

Perfectionism and Reading Fiction

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I’ve taken a few writing workshops lately that teach craft by having me read books to figure out how the writer did something cool.  It’s been a fun and interesting experience.  Writers always get told to read fiction to learn from other writers.  Normally, no one ever explains this, other than treating it like we were in a college class getting graded, then complain when a writer tries to imitated a best selling writer.

I was in a monthly writing call and was reminded of this because the topic was on studying books.  One of the questions was “What writer weaknesses do you identify and how do you use it to improve?”

One of the writers said that she didn’t read for pleasure any more—only for study.  That’s a terrible!

The reason I became a writer is because I had all these wonderful books I was reading and I wanted to do books like that.  I wanted to go on adventures even if I really couldn’t go on adventures and besides, fictional adventures are fun.  Real adventures are quite a bit more dangerous.  Ahem.

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But I got stuck into the critical analysis, too.  By 2003, I thought that the new releases I was reading were terrible!

I thought books had gone downhill from what I remembered reading when I was growing up.  So one day at work, someone had left out a bunch of freebies on the break tables: Mack Bolan, the Executioner.  That was a men’s adventure series, written by many different writers.  I’d read that during the those years, along with Nick Carter, so I snatched those bad boys up.

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And…

They weren’t as good as I remembered.

Could it be me?

I thought about how much I looked for what was wrong in books.  Sure, I did run into ones that had geniune problems, like the one that ended on a cliffhanger.  Man!  That was an annoying book.

But I also went into a book as I was reading and looked for flaws.

And, as I thought about it, I really wasn’t learning anything from doing it.  At least other than hating books.  I was expecting perfection as a writer and lost my pleasure as a reader.

So I went cold turkey.  I decided that I was going to stop critiquing published books and work on enjoying them.  That next book was I read was The Da Vinci Code.

I did  enjoy reading it. I also thought, after I read it, about why it might have been such a runaway best seller.  I think the answer was timing, because it came out about the time we had all the scandals and cover-ups in the Catholic church.  The book provided escapism, and yet, played right into the headlines.

Writers on the message boards I was on nitpicked the words and the sentences as not being “perfect,” whatever that means.

No one asked what this runaway best selling writer did right.

This is what negativity does.  It holds people back.

Respecting the Writing, Respecting Yourself

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It’s hard to believe that about 2010, I was thinking I was never going to be able to write a novel.  My process of writing because a source of great frustration.

The more I revised something, the more broken it got.  It went from a two car accident to a spaceship crashes and destroys an entire city.

I remember one writer offering to look at what I’d written to see if she could see what was wrong and I was embarrassed to let her see it.  I knew I was a better writer than what I was producing.

So I attended a lot of classes, searching for answers.  One was with Bob Meyer, one of the earlier indie successes.  I was so frustrated that I described my writing as a “screwy way of writing.”

He said “Never put down your writing.  There will be someone else who will be happy to do that for you.”

A lot of the starts with respecting the writing, not treating it like a weird thing from outer space.

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There’s a hella out there that does the opposite. (That’s California slang, by the way).

The writing community, craft books, and even writing magazines are rife with put downs.  Some of it is quite subtle.  Some of it is blatant.  Some of it you may be saying yourself.

“My writing is crap.”
“My first drafts are shitty.”
“All first drafts are terrible.”

So you’ve just said you can’t write.  What the heck does that do to the little kid in you who is doing the writing?!!

What does that do in how you write that story?!!

Some people think their first draft is so crappy that they race through it so they can get to the revision.  Contrary to popular believe, revision isn’t where the real writing happens–it’s the first draft.

And that first draft is being labeled as crap.  That’s a lonely place for the muse to be.

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We’re constantly bombarded by advice that we’re not “good enough.” The writing magazines have what amounts to diet advice, that there’s something we’re not doing right, something that we should be checking the box on that is keeping from getting us published (rather than another skill level of writing).

I used to be on a message board where anyone experimenting was told, “Most writers screw it up anyway, so don’t even bother.”

This stuff is TOXIC.

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Our words have power.  Just read a book that makes you want to re-read it all over again once you’ve finished it.

If we say put downs to ourselves and repeat them, how can they NOT have that power?

 

 

 

 

First job (and no, it wasn’t the Army)

I’m starting the New Year with what my first job was.  And no, it wasn’t the military.  I enlisted at 25, so I already had some jobs behind me.

But my first job was stuffing the Sunday newspapers for the Los Angeles Times, which is called a newspaper inserter.  I helped out a woman named Mrs. Fisher to prepare the Sunday papers.

Mrs. Fisher was probably in her late fifties or sixties (hard to tell now; people looked older then).  She was a victim of the Flying Tiger disaster in 1962.  A plane crashed on a street (and was depicted in an episode of Emergency, with a plane crashing into an apartment complex).  She had just grounded her son and sent him to his room, but he sneaked out.  Turned out to be good timing because the plane’s engine came down his room!

Mrs. Fisher picked me up at school every Friday and took me to a building a building on Ventura Boulevard that went for $1,000 a month (in the 1970s!).  It was a grungy building, always caked with paper dust and smelling of ink.  The bathroom was grubby from all the dust, too.

One wall had a bench that ran along the length of it, and that was where we stuffed the newspapers.  The Sunday came disassembled, the print run of each part in a bundle.  So it was the front page, entertainment, sports, and the ad package.

We’d go down that line and pick up each section and then stuff inside the front page. The constant contact with the newspaper left my hands nearly black with the ink, and we’d sometimes find pinch bugs crawling around the papers.

The completed newspaper was stacked up against the wall on the benches, to the ceiling, where it would be picked up Saturday morning.

The problem came with that ad section.  We dreaded spaghetti day.  There was a company that periodically included a sample of instant spaghetti mix.  That made the newspapers lopsided.  Remember, we were stacking to the ceiling, and during spaghetti day, the stacks would sometimes tip over.

It made getting the newspapers done twice as hard, and those were often the late nights when I got out at 11:00!

Mrs. Fisher usually took me home, but 11:00 was the cut-off.  If we were running late, my father came to pick me up.  He was astounded one night to find a traffic jam at that time nearby…johns picking up hookers.

I don’t actually remember the job formally ending like others.  This seemed to be one that just evolved away.  Now the want ads advertise for inserters.  A very different time.

What was your first job?

Filed under: Personal Tagged: California Air Disaster, Emergency! TV Series, Flying Tiger Crash 1962, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times History, Los Angeles Times Newspaper, newspaper inserter, Pinch Bug, Ventura Boulevard California, Ventura Boulevard Los Angeles

2018 Writing Goals

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I wish I were like this snowman.  But it’s unseasonably cold in Washington, DC.  We got snow yesterday, the second of the year, and the temperature outside right now is 20 degrees.  Tomorrow, with windchill will go into -10.  There is something seriously wrong with that number for this Southern California woman.

I’ve been in reflection of what I want to do in the New Year, writing-wise.  There was long-standing event that occurred almost a year ago at work that started out as a snowball, moving very slowly.

So slowly, I didn’t quite see what was coming, and it crept up on me.  Especially while I was following a habit from the Army: Accomplish the mission.

In the Army, we got orders to do something, and we would have to do it, because, well, we had our orders.  If you didn’t have the tools, you found them (or “acquired” them).  Or you built it, or whatever was needed.  There was no, “I can’t do this” or “I don’t want to do this.”

And I was running into a whole lot of “I can’t do this,” this year.  I came home tired and frustrated, and that was impacting not only my writing, but getting new releases out.  The releases take about the same mental energy that some tasks at work take, and I just didn’t want to do things that felt like work at home.

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And then it turned into an avalanche around Thanksgiving.  Things normally wind down at that time because everyone’s on leave.

It didn’t.

I was running into so many deadlines I couldn’t get anything done.

I also realized I hadn’t really done much fun for myself in my off time.  I’d gotten out of it when I broke my foot and really couldn’t go and do anything.  When I started back up, it felt more like “mandatory fun.” That comes from the Army where they set up an organizational day on Saturday, when you were off, and you were ordered to attend to have fun.

Then I took the Carving Out Time For Your Writing Lecture (free until January 18).  I’d taken it three years ago, but hadn’t looked at it since.  I realized that work had shifted around me and I needed a reset to keep myself from burning out.

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So for 2018:

Write Longer Fiction.

2,000 words a week, in 15 minute sessions.  That works out to 8 sessions a week.  The number comes out of the lecture itself, but it’s a much slower pace.  I’m in the process of doing a redraft of 49er Planet because it had some structure problems.  Redraft is an easy fix.
Workshops that will help this along.




Have more fun.  I’ve been looking at a book called The Power of Having Fun: How Meaningful Breaks Help You Get More Done.  It has some interesting ideas (the goal in the book is to have fun for free or low cost).  I’m looking at:

Go for a massage once a month.  I did that last week and got my feet pampered.  It felt so good that I want to do it again.
Visit a museum I haven’t been to. I’m thinking of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.  This has to be planned because they are only open weekdays, so I have to take a day of leave.
Tai Chai class.  This is a four week class at the library.  I took a one hour special session at work.  Be a nice way to vary the exercise routine for a few weeks.

For the moment, I’m trying to keep things simple to keep everything in balance.

 

 

 

Filed under: Military, Writing Tagged: 2018 writing goals, long form writing, new year's goals, smart book army, tai chi, writing novels for amazon, writing novels for fun

2017 Writing Year in Review

I started out the year saying that it was going to be a year of craft.

Then I broke my foot in February and was pretty much offline until May.  I didn’t realize how exhausting a broken bone could be.  So most of the Year of Craft came after May.  I started out the thing year saying there would be four workshops.

There were six.  It’s like the more I learned, the more it snowballed, and the more I needed to learn.  The workshops can be found over here if anyone is interested.

Speed

This was an interesting workshop.  It’s not what the title implies, though.  Everyone always thinks speed writing is somehow racing through the story at a break-neck speed.  This helps figure out what your range is through actual writing.  Plus writing fears get discussed.  The fears themselves can be insidious because they don’t always look like fears.

How to Edit Your Own Work

Writers tend to use edit and revise interchangeably, though they are two different techniques.  I thought this would fit into the Edit category, but it didn’t quite do that.  It was the one workshop of the year that didn’t give me as much benefit as I thought (I wished I used my money for a different one).  If it had popped up three years ago, it might have been a different thing because I was in a different place.

Writing Science Fiction

This was a pretty cool workshop.  It talked about how to do the world building for science fiction in some very simple ways.  I honestly wish I’d had something like this long ago.  Everyone always seems to talk about world building by saying you need a three ring binder and an extensive list of question.  Huge, huge turn off for me, so much so that I didn’t touch speculative fiction for years.

Depth 3 Research Workshop

This was an important workshop for me, because I hated research.  My only exposure outside of school were writers who loved research and would happily do it instead of writing.  Other writers approached it from a position of fear, like someone was going to catch them out because they got the size of a grate in Rome wrong.  Until this workshop, I’d given up any chance of writing fiction in a historical setting because I thought I could never aspire to what I was hearing from other writers.  Now I’m thinking of some mystery stories set in Hollywood in the 1940s.  How cool is that?

Novel Structure Workshop

Also a very important workshop for me.  One of my indie goals is to write longer fiction.  But for years, I struggled to get my novels to, well, novel-length. I hit the problem the way I usually do (and need to break this habit), with a battering ram.  And could not figure out what I was doing wrong!

Common writing advice just said use an outline or a three act structure, like it was a magic fix.  Well, I’m a pantser, and trying those two things left me with a story so badly broken that I thought I would have to stick with only writing short stories.  No one discussed in this way, in a way that made it easy to understand.  I’m probably going to spend the next year digesting what I learned because it was an enormous, high-level topic.

Carving Out Time for Your Writing

This was a temporarily free lecture that popped up in December.  I’d already had seen it, but it had been three years at least.  Time for a relook.  I realized after watching it that work had shifted around so much that what I was doing for my writing needed a reset.  It sort of crept up on me and I didn’t realize it.

The lecture is still also free until January 18, I believe, so grab it now.

I’m going into the new year with Teams in Fiction and then Secondary Plots  I also have Plotting in Depth, Writing a Series, and Character Voice and Setting.  Whew!

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: novel writing research, novel writing structure, time management tips for writers, world building science fiction, year in review 2017

Sue Grafton, RIP

I was shocked to hear Sue Grafton passed away.  Somehow, after seeing the march of books on the shelf, writers seem immortal until they aren’t.

I read Sue Grafton’s first book A is for Alibi after three books gave her visibility.  It was the 1980s and one of several writers emerging who wrote about women characters in non-traditional roles.

I grew up reading Nancy Drew, Trixie Beldon, and Kim Aldrich.  And then I got to the adult books and there wasn’t much of anything similar with women.  It was really frustrating!  I wanted to read about women having adventures, too!

Sue Grafton’s detective, Kinsey Milhone, was kind of a misfit private investigator, and a loner. She also lived in California (yay! Where I lived!), in the fictional city of Santa Teresa.  My father never understood that.  He’s always said, “Why doesn’t she just call it Santa Barbara?”.

I liked the character and the way she saw the world.  Sometimes that’s all it takes to grab a reader.

I’ll miss Kinsey’s adventures.

Filed under: Books Tagged: kim aldrich books, Nancy Drew, sue grafton a is for alibi, trixie belden books

Time Traveling to the Past

The Desert Storm Memorial was looking for photos from in theater (which means in Saudi Arabia in my case) for a pair of videos they’re doing.  I was digging around and found some from after the war.

In January 1991, the mail clerk passed me a flyer she’d received advertising a Desert Storm Writing Contest.  If I won first prize, I’d go to Washingon, DC to receive the award from Barba[image error]ra Bush.  The contest was for fiction and poetry.

I instantly knew what story I wanted to write, though I expected it to get rejected.  It was on a friendship that had just self-destructed because of the war.  It was a very dark story, born out of the stress of war.

I also wrote several others, and a bunch of poems.  The poems hold up pretty well, so they’re in my book Women at War: Stories and Poems.

And then I forgot about it.

We all came back and started back to normal things again.

One day, I found a transmittal stuffed in the training box and it was an announcement that the story had picked up an honorable mention.  Cool.

Maybe about a week later, I was on CQ (Charge of Quarters; two soldiers man the desk overnight).  It was a 24 hour duty, so my brain was always fried in the morning because I needed to bed.

And suddenly everybody was freaking out.  They didn’t tell me why, but kept telling me I had to be in formation this morning.  I was pretty sure it had something to do with the contest.  But I let everyone think it was a surprise.

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An officer came to present a plaque and a savings bond.  I was chuffed.  I was the only lower enlisted who had placed.  Everyone else had been officers or more senior non-commissioned officers.

I was told at the time DOD would be publishing all of them in a book, but as far as I know that didn’t happen.

The story was called “A Loss of Innocence,” and it was the start of my writing veering into some pretty dark fiction.  And I couldn’t see it myself until my writing group pointed it out.  I also reviewed a book by Phil Clay that was getting a lot of press.  He was five years out of Afghanistan and had written a series of short stories.  They were so dark that I looked at them and didn’t want to be writing like that.

So I had to do a conscious shift to not go dark.  It was hard in the beginning because I would get these ideas and as I thought about them, I knew they would go dark very easily.  So I passed on a lot of story ideas.

Eventually, I was able to shift myself out of it, and then I was able to write my book, Soldier, Storyteller, which is available in the Rabbit Bundle Remembering Warriors.  Check out the list of writers.  I’m chuffed again to be published next to these big name writers!

The proceeds go to charity.  The book is available for preorder, but will be available January 1.  Start the new year donating to charity and getting books!

 

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Filed under: History, Photos, Writing Tagged: Desert Storm, Desert Storm Desert Shield, Desert Storm Era Veteran, Desert Storm Gulf War, Desert Storm Images, Desert Storm Memorial, Desert Storm Writing Contest

The city or the country? Which would you pick?

Between the city and the country, I’ll always pick…

A beach, with the city mixed in.

This was a question from Facebook, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to put it here.  I grew up in big cities, and visited small towns.  I’ve never really been in the country.  Not even sure how it would be defined.

Maybe farmland?  If so, I have been to Kingston, Indiana, where I saw corn growing taller than me at the side of the road, waving in the wind.  But it was so far to go anywhere, and not much when I got there.

I grew up in Southern California, right on the doorstep of Hollywood.  Friendly palm trees stretching into the blue (or sometimes yellow-gray) sky…lots of sunshine.

And the beaches.  We didn’t go much to the local beaches.  Malibu was always packed with people out sunbathing.  But we would drive North, along the 101 and later the 5 to Central California.  The area has a lot of mountains that bump right down to the beaches.  The freeways cut through the mountains, so on the right was the rocky hills covered by scrubby grass and chaparral.  Always brown and dried out.

On the left was the ocean stretching out as far as I could see, deep blue against the line of the sky and darkening where it got deep.  The water was both foreboding and inviting.

The waves curled up high, then crashed down on the beach, spreading out across the sand, foaming and bubbling.  High tide would leave a line of kelp on the sand, smelling of sea and decay.  I’d go out to the kelp and stomp on the air bladders that kept it afloat, then hunt for the shells embedded in the sand.

I could always find broken shells, especially mussels, which weren’t very pretty shells.  Other common ones were Chinese hats–limpets; butterflies, which were two shells connected together; and sand dollars, flat disks that were nearly always broken.

Then it was off to check out the rocks.  The beaches always had black, jagged rocks poking up out of the sand.  Inside were pockets containing tide pools.  I always found sea “enemies” with their flower-like tentacles twitching in the water as they fed.  Clusters of barnacles clung to the rocks, sticking their tongues out at me.

At Morro Bay, which was always our destination, the sounds of the sea lions having a big party carried across the water.  Sea otters popped up to the surface and rolled over to float.  The sea gulls barely designed to look at the humans approaching.  Get out of the way?  Not important to them.

The wind was always a bit brisk and cold, but I could spend all day looking at everything and never seeing the same thing.

Beach.  Definitely.

Filed under: Personal, Travel Tagged: California beaches, California cities, California Los Angeles, morro bay beach california, Morro Bay CA, morro bay in california, Morro Bay otters, Morro Bay Sea Lions, Tide pools morro bay