Alli Marshall's Blog, page 17

So you want to be an artist.

From a 2009 interview of Asheville-based painter Barbara Fisher by Constance Humphries:

What advice would you give to an artist just starting out?

• Experiment a lot, follow your instincts.

• Let go of thinking you know what you’re doing.

• Start over again (if you’re just out of school).

• Set regular studio hours and show up.

• Work hard and listen to your inner voice.

• Don’t compare yourself to other artists.

• Talk to artists you admire.

• Don’t whine, it’s not an easy career path.

Filed under: inspiration

Watching YouTube videos while eating lunch

There’s a thing about a singing voice, the way it tells a different story that the speaking voice. Different from actions, different from looks. You can hear a song from another room, you can hear a song that you wouldn’t normally like, you can hear a song that doesn’t necessarily work. But if the singer is reeling the gold light in through his lungs and casting it out again, a fleet thread invisible in the air, then little else matters.

The vocal is the thing that shapes a lyric. Words are wet clay, you can carve them with a pen or with a voice. You can belt them out of your guts or whisper them from the narrows between your eyes. There is no space that the sound doesn’t fill.

Every song is an incantation, chanting some magic into being, somewhere. Even the bad songs access the power of words and tones, vowels rolled like sea-tumbled stones; consents cutting quick and painless. The hurt doesn’t comes from the slicing, the blade laid to tender skin. The best songs crack the hardest hearts with the softest current. It’s the fissure that lets the light in — the swirl of saltwater stinging a fresh wound, the sudden squinting brightness of day in a place kept dark forever.

Filed under: essay, inspiration, Music

Women who write

Authors at their desks. From top left: Amy Tan, Anne Sexton, and Daphne du Maurier. Middle row: Agatha Christie, Ursula Le Guin, and Pearl S. Buck. Bottom row: Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag, and Margaret Drabble.

Filed under: history, inspiration

Flash fiction: Structural soul

Photo from The Blaze

It took a long time to understand the men who creaked around particular edifices. One drank coffee outside the Flat Iron building, one cleaned the windows of the former Bon Marché, one cuddled a bottle on the curb under the bridge leading out of town.

None of them were young, but they didn’t age. The white of their beards dulled a bit from time and the elements, but they continued with their tasks. One window at a time, one cup of coffee after another. The man with the coffee sat at a café table in his tweed jacket and trilby, looking ready for a chess match or a heated discussion on European politics. No one engaged him, but he kept sitting, kept waiting.

And the man under the bridge. How long could he sit, in and out of seasons and through the years, nursing a malt liquor tall boy and a black eye? It seemed, on alternating days, sad and angering that he sat there, battered and drunk for all to see. But he was resolute in his duty, a troll at the underpass demanding a toll of spare change to buy the next bottle. Even in his soiled jacket, long since stripped of its royal blue color, there was something honorable in his charge. Who among us never takes a sick day or a vacation, or at the very least leaves our post for a long lunch?

From Flickr Hivemind

The window washer kept at it, too, though he grumbled while he worked. He also took smoke breaks, further yellowing his stubby fingers and his long white beard with nicotine. He might have looked like Santa Clause once. Though he’d gone bald on top, the rest of his hair was snowy white and fell to his shoulders in soft ripples. His cheeks were round, his nose like a cherry, but summer or winter, rain or shine, he faced the day in a white t-shirt and faded jeans. There was no known Santa iteration who washed windows or wore an undershirt from a plastic-wrapped three-pack.

None of the men were what they appeared. Nor did they even necessarily appear at all — not to most people. They blended in or were completely invisible, bottle and dirty jacket just two more pieces of trash left under the bridge. Tweed trilby the perfect camouflage for Autumn’s decent on an outdoor café. White beard just another puff of smoke, a wisp of low-hanging cloud moving through rain-soaked city streets.

The buildings groaned and settled, more than a hundred years already weighed on their foundations. Old bones sang with ache and quieted again, roots of steel and brick sunk deeper below asphalt and concrete to drink from the mineral-rich middle earth. Rooftops were watered and sun-baked and blanketed by snow to sleep another month or six.

The edifices call their souls back from the sidewalks, back into the depths of boiler rooms and basements, back into the dark places where buildings dream the visions collected by their human spirits. Their consciousnesses and pulses embodied in the forms of men who look, upon closer inspection, like the structures they inhabit.

Even the bridge, open on three sides to the wind, has a deep heart where deck meets truss and shadow is never dimmed by daylight. There, the troll waits out the storm, bottle clutched tight to chest, already home while the outside traffic rushes on forever to get there.

Filed under: architecture, fiction, flash fiction, short story

And the winner is…

Mama Muse Me! You’re the winner of the second giveaway. A package will soon be on its way to you. (Please email your mailing address to allimarshall AT bellsouth DOT net.)

And for everyone else, a new giveaway will be announced next Friday. Stay tuned!

Filed under: Uncategorized

Lisa Wingate on writing

Author Lisa Wingate, currently based in Arkansas, has published 25 books in 14 years — a staggering number. Her series include the Texas Hill Country books, the Moses Lake books, the Daily Texas books, the Blue Sky Hill books, the Tending Roses books and the Carolina Heirloom novels and novellas. It’s from the last group that Wingate’s most recent novel comes: The Sea Keeper’s Daughters is part history and part mystery. It follows the stories of three characters: present day restaurant owner Whitney; her grandmother Ruby, who lived in the Excelsior hotel on the Outer Banks; and Ruby’s twin sister Alice, a member of the Depression-era Federal Writer’s Project, stationed in Western North Carolina.

For readers living in or near Asheville, Wingate presents The Sea Keeper’s Daughters at Malaprop’s on Tuesday, Sept. 22. For everyone else, here is some writing wisdom that Wingate shared during a recent interview (read the full story at mountainx.com):

I pretty much write linear, from first to last. There are parts that are harder to write, parts where I really have to stop and think, “If this does happen here, what will it create in the future of the book?”

There are days when I quit for the day thinking I know what will happen the next day, in the story. [Then] I may see something, hear something, overhear some conversation in a restaurant and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s the perfect thing. That’s what needs to happen next.” [The writing] may end up the next day being completely different than I thought it would be. Ideas come from everywhere.

So much of it comes from just living life with those characters in the story. That’s what makes it an adventure — really not knowing. What makes it magical, too, is when life intercepts with it. You think, “This real life experience or this person’s story will be perfect for this character.”

I’m very regimented. I set a word count every day and I write seven double-spaced, Times Roman 12 pages per day, and I pretty much don’t shirk on that unless I’m traveling or whatever. There are days when I think, “This is junk. This is going to have to be completely rewritten.” And there are days when it just flows right out. Sometimes I go back to the stuff I thought was junk and it’s not so bad. Sometimes it’s even good. Sometimes those things end up on the cutting room floor. But I know that when I stick to that schedule, I’ll have the rough draft of a novel done in three months, and then the real writing begins.

The rough draft is the hard part because you’re discovering the story — you’re telling the story to yourself. You’ve never heard that story before that point. The first edit is when you begin telling the story to other people, so you look for the threads that didn’t get wrapped up or didn’t go anywhere. Then you do a little more fine-tuning to make it a story that makes sense to the rest of the world.

Filed under: Books, fiction, inspiration, writer quotes

Fiction and songwriting

It’s my theory (and probably not mine alone) that whatever you search for, that’s what you’ll find. Teachers are everywhere. Since I’m interested in the craft of fiction, and my day job involves many interviews with musicians, I learn a lot about writing fiction from songwriters.

Creativity is transmutable. (Technique is another issue, but there are probably YouTube videos for that.)

Still, I was surprised by a recent interview between Lord Huron front man Ben Schneider and NPR reporter Melissa Block. Schneider, who got his start as a visual artist and now lives in L.A., approaches his musical project from a very literary point of view. The first Lord Huron album, Lonesome Dreams, is a collection of songs inspired by Schneider’s youth spent near Lake Huron. The characters are all fabled and mist-enshrouded and could have been be culled from folklore.

The new album, Strange Trails — which the singer-songwriter discusses with Block — is a series of post-apocalyptic shorts and ghost stories, each sung from the perspective of the song’s central character. It’s flash fiction at its finest: poignant and palpable, brief yet complete.

http://www.npr.org/player/embed/397364256/397891235

I love this for a couple of reasons. First, many musicians say they don’t want to share their song inspirations for fear of altering the listener’s perception of the song. And that’s valid. I understand the sentiment from the perspective that songs hit on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one (and often the former more than the later). But as a person who loves words and listens to lyrics first, I want to dig into the songwriting process. That Schneider’s is so closely linked to the process of writing fiction is intriguing.

Second, I’ve felt disappointed, in the past, by songwriters who get too invested in creating a fictional world for their songs. Telling a good story: yes. Creating a persona and a fictional voice and a world for those to inhabit: no.

Case in point: Father John Misty. Now, I have friends, whose opinions I respect, who like Father John Misty. I get that the songs, albums and stage shows are the fiction created by Joshua Tillman. But I don’t think the fiction works because the character is pretty much a jerk. And, while he crafts a world of his own, it’s ultimately not one that anyone else can inhabit. It’s a world of flash and catchy hooks, of smug insider jokes and brash dismissals.

But there’s no mystery, no room for the listener to live within the idea, no secret doors left to open or curtains to peer behind.

Lord Huron, on the other hand, is all mystery and doors and curtains.

That’s what I want in the books I read and, apparently, in the songs I listen to.

Filed under: essay, fiction, inspiration, Music

Author Talk: Fantasy writer Elizabeth Tyree

Oklahoma-based author Elizabeth Tyree is a fantasy writer who pens short stories, picture books and chapter books for children of a wide range of ages. Her characters range from fantastical dragons to real-life lemurs and from Spanish pirates to human kids seeking adventure. Here she talks about developing ideas, getting inspiration from her real-life students, and publishing as a family affair.

What inspired your interest in writing fantasy novels?

I think it was probably a combination of many things from my childhood. I loved to watch those wonderful ’80s cartoons (OK, I still do!) and read fantasy and fairy tales. According to my mother, I first mentioned my “dragon friends” around the age of 2 or 3. I was playing with my toys and when she told me to clean up, I tried to tell her that it was Al and his brothers and sister that had messed up my room so she needed to get on to the dragons. (Didn’t work, she told me they were my guests and a good hostess cleans up after her guests.)

In third grade I read Anne of Avonlea and The Hobbit, both for the first time, and they had a huge impact as well. Happily, my family encouraged my creativity and allowed me to be the nerdy weird kid in the corner!

How much time do you spend on research for each of your books, and what are some of your favorite resources for research?

Does the time I spend in the classroom count as research? Haha, but no, seriously? You see, as an author of mainly picture books to upper YA books, the time I spent in my own classroom teaching writing and science, the time I spent tutoring, and the time I spend substituting adds up to about eight years of research for me now! Research that I absolutely love! Students enjoy talking about themselves, their hobbies, their classes — it all adds up to great backstory and understanding for the audience, as well as for some of my new characters. Some of [the students] even enjoy bantering back and forth about histories or alternate sciences, searching for answers on the internet or in books, and helping me by listening to things I’ve written and telling me if it sounds authentic to the generation.

Outside of that, I’ve really been researching mythologies and fantasy my entire life. However, one of my current works in progress relies heavily on the use of a salvage ship and equipment, a mini-yacht, and an ancient Spanish galleon. I did read a few articles on those items, but the most helpful research was done on the internet and the telephone. I was able to contact colleges who have marine archaeology sections, read their articles and descriptions of the ships, equipment, and personnel online, and get a few first-hand details from their wonderful pictures and emails. That was almost two years ago, and I still return to their sites or send minor questions to their emails as I try to finish the novel.

You’ve written a number of books — are there characters and/or themes that return from one project to the next?

Of the six books currently available, three are part of a continuing series that follows a band of dragons and fairies who have managed to get stuck in our world. The dragon family consists of the only known dragon fairy in either of our worlds, his normal-sized dragon sibling, and Grandmother (still searching for his parents), the kind of the fairies, some fairy guard members, and a few lucky humans who discovered them. Their fight is against the formerly beloved (and now straight mad) Fairy Queen, King Ferdinand’s wife, and Franme the Sorcerer.

As for themes, my children’s books all have a theme (however subverted it may be) of getting out and away from the television/computer (ironic, isn’t it?), helping, learning, and being a good friend. Which also tracks for my older books.

You write both short story collections and full-length novels. Do you know from the beginning if an idea will be one or the other? What’s that process like?

My first novel began as a short story contest entry. I just didn’t want to stop, I had to know more about what happened because it was like rediscovering an old friend! Some of the ideas, like another of my works in progress (Paulonious Punk) are definitely going to be chapter books or novels. On the other hand, some are definitely short stories and some could go either way. So the short answer here is, no I haven’t got a clue!

The process is always the same for me, whether it be short story or full-length I always get a notebook or pad of paper and start jotting down notes and ideas. Typically I get a few lines out about the back story or overall idea, and then it morphs itself into the actual beginning of the story and I write from there. I tend to outline in reverse, writing character and setting outlines after they’ve arrived in my story. This helps me to discover things about my novels and sometimes even helps push me along if I’ve gotten stuck.

How do you know an idea is a good one and that it can be sustained for the length of a book?

You write it out. Sometimes you may have an idea you love but no one else thinks will work. You still need to write it out or it will haunt you. You may have an idea everyone loves and you aren’t that sure about — write it anyway! It can be changed, morphed, and tweaked until it works. If you abandon the idea then it will poke at you. Sometimes you have ideas you don’t even tell anyone about — write those out, too. WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE … am I obnoxious yet? The truth is, there are some amazing novels out there that I would never have believed could be written into a full-length book out of the idea they center around.

How do you publish your work (mainstream press, small press, independently), and what has your experience been with that format?

My father and I both publish with CreateSpace. I enjoy being able to maintain control over my “babies,” but am still struggling to learn the ins and outs of everything else that goes into publishing a book. The advertising, however, kicks my rear! I am still new enough that I’m not making the money to spend the money to make the money — But I’m going to get there someday! We created TyreeTomes as a family-run editing and publishing company for our own works (so still very much an Indie!) and have helped a few others, including my fifth graders last year, edit, format, and publish through CreateSpace and Amazon. That part, I’m pretty good at.

Do you grow attached to your characters? Tell us about one that really sticks with you.

I am very attached to most of my novel characters. Of course, I have “friends” with my dragons for my entire life so I won’t expound on them anymore. One non-dragon character that really sticks with me is Sylvester, a main character from a novel I have set aside at the moment. I dreamed of him before beginning to write the story, and I still do every once in a while. The story itself, a fantasy of magical mirror world proportions, is a new adult adventure: danger-romance-type. Sly is the dark, handsome, and deeply sarcastic hero you would hope appeared. Don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned his story completely! I hope to use what I have as an outline for betterment in the NaNoWriMo events for this year — though it will probably have to wait until NaNo 2016 the way my other works in progress are progressing.

Are you working on anything right now that you can tell us a little bit about?

I am actually working on five things right now, but I’ll just give you the bare bones of a couple:

First, I’m working on book No. 4 in The Stone Dragon Saga. As I mentioned earlier, this one involves a lot of hijinks on the the high seas, including a Spanish pirate ship and a kraken (named Sergio — he has a short story in one of my compilations as well, incidentally).

Then there’s Paulonious Punk and the Search for An Adventure — a children’s chapter book following two 9-year-old boys who, with a lot of help from their families (especially Pauly’s grandpa), attempt to search out an adventure before it’s too late.

The other book I’m really excited about right now is a picture book that my talented mother is illustrating for me (she will illustrate all of my books as well as do the new covers for The Stone Dragon Saga). This will be the first in a series focusing on animals. A picture book meant for K-2: The pictures and stories will appeal to all ages as we follow Leonard the Lemur’s adventures and learn about the animals he meets along the way. Leonard is living at Tanganyika Wildlife Park (in Goddard, KS) a real park, with a real lemur named Leonard, and we are excited that the park has allowed us the honor of including them in our work. Since they are a privately owned and funded institute whose goal is to educate people about animals, this book will not only help children learn interesting facts about animals and habitats, but will help spread the word about an amazing place that needs our help to survive.

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, and Amazon.

Filed under: Author Talk, inspiration, Q+A, Writing

HAPPY FRIDAY … SECOND GIVEAWAY!

Just what every book-lover needs:

A lucky brass locket, shaped like a book. Wear it close to your heart and keep a tiny photo of your favorite novel inside.

The contest runs through Friday, Sept 18, with a winner selected at random and announced at noon, EST.

To enter, comment on any post on my website or Facebook author page between 11 a.m. EST Friday, Sept. 11, and 11 a.m. EST Friday, Sept. 18.

Filed under: contest, giveaway, inspiration

And the winner is…

Vickie Burick! You’re the winner of the first giveaway. A package will soon be on its way to you.

And for everyone else, a new giveaway will be announced next Friday. Stay tuned!

Filed under: Uncategorized