Eric Witchey's Blog: Shared ShadowSpinners Blog , page 6

The Enlightened Assassin’s Agenda

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The Enlightened Assassin’s Agenda

Eric Witchey

My agenda today is to move my readers toward more specific articulation of their character agendas. If there’s any overlap between handling dramatic characters in text and managing our own lives, it is purely coincidental and has little or nothing to do with me or my agenda.

In a recent conversation with a writer, I said something that she then sent back to me as an important quote. At the time I said it, the words meant little to me. Having them sent back to me as important to someone else made me look at them again. Here’s what I apparently said,

“The more specific you are on agendas, the more proactive the agendas become and the stronger the scene becomes.”

Hm, says I. Isn’t that like setting identifiable, quantifiable, achievable goals? In moments of hubris, haven’t most writers entertained fantasies of accolades, awards, and glory? Even the humblest of us have at one moment or another had J.K. Rowling’s name evoke at least a little wish to be richer than the Queen.

Of course, those visions of grandeur are generally beyond our control. Even if we follow the advice of every well-established writing productivity and personal self-help guru alive, we have to acknowledge that a number of things have to happen at the right times and in the right order. We can control how hard we work. We can control how focused on the craft we are. We can control how much we risk and how often we put ourselves out there for consideration. To an extent, we can control how we use our financial, physical, and emotional resources to pursue our paths to publication.

However, we can’t control where we started in life, our beginning cultural currency, the attitudes we were trained to and had to overcome, the beliefs we had to recognize were not useful, the dynamics of family and language that both support and limit us. We can’t control the coronavirus, the economic swings of the nation, the consolidation of publishers, changes in marketing attitudes toward various demographics groups, or the wind on the wings of the Peking butterfly.

Still, as one writing friend once told me, “Lightning can strike anyone, but it helps to put up a lightning rod.”

So, when writers meet to set our goals, we look for the things we can measure, execute within our limited awareness of the world, and pat ourselves on the back for achieving. We whittle away at the greater obstacles, and we hope the moment comes when the lightning rod of hard work and focused effort over time pays off by attracting a strike that powers us for our next sustained effort.

So why is it that as writers we create characters with agendas like, “She wants to feel respected by her culture?” Don’t get me wrong. I think that is an important theme, but it is pretty useless as a scene agenda.

When I talk about character agendas, I often parrot one of my teachers, James N. Frey, who said, “EVERY character on stage has an agenda they are trying to execute. Conflict is the execution of mutually exclusive agendas.”

My favorite scenario for describing this, which I may have gotten and modified from Jim, is the pizza delivery man at the door. In the scene, there are three characters. An assassin, the person who lives in the house, and the pizza delivery guy. The agendas are all working against one another:

Assassin wants to kill homeowner and slip away.
Homeowner wants the pizza guy to call for help.
Pizza guy wants to be paid for the pizza.

The stakes are life and death for the homeowner. The stakes are professional success/failure and maybe honor or several other intangibles for the assassin—perhaps even incarceration or death. The stakes for the pizza delivery person are minimum wages, tips, and maybe some distracting fantasy they have going on about someone else on their delivery list.

Which brings up another point.

If Pizza has some adolescent male otaku Japanese anime-driven fantasy about the hot schoolgirl he’ll be delivering too next, then he has another agenda that his current scene agenda contributes to. He wants to get paid so he can deliver the next to pizza to the object of his creepy obsession.

If Homeowner wants Pizza to call the police and live through the afternoon and, perhaps, get information about why someone is trying to kill them because their daughter will be devastated to lose another parent, they also have another agenda that their current agenda contributes to.

Assassin might also have an overarching agenda. Assassin wants to get finished, get paid, and move on to the next job so they can build a strong enough reputation to be able to pick and choose jobs that will let them influence the world order and eventually retire to a personal island in the Caribbean from which they believe they will pull world-wide political strings and usher in an age of greater peace and prosperity for all.

However, right now in this moment in this scene, knife to the skin over the homeowner’s kidneys, Assassin wants the pizza guy to go away. Right now, Assassin only wants privacy.

Right now, in this moment with the knife in their back and Pizza outside the door, Homeowner only wants Pizza to get a clue and call for help.

Right now, large veggie pie in hand, door open so they can only see Homeowner and not Assassin, Pizza wants to be paid and, if possible, tipped well—quickly.

The agendas are, to take a line from the gurus of goal setting, specific, measurable, and reasonably achievable. If achieved or not achieved, each agenda for each character has an immediate impact on the character’s wellbeing and life in the moment.

In the larger dramatic sense, each agenda also has an impact beyond the moment for all the characters on stage.

If Pizza gets what he wants, he’s off to the next delivery and his inevitable disappointment. Homeowner will not get what they want. Assassin will quite likely get what they want, but maybe not. The fight in the foyer is another conflict to play out.

If Homeowner gets what they want, they might survive and get information, but Pizza will not get what he wants. Assassin will not get what they want—at least not all of it. They may end up killing two people and losing the ability to slip away.

If Assassin gets what they want, Homeowner is dead. Pizza may or may not get what they want. Who knows? Perhaps Pizza will become an apprentice to Assassin.

The point for writers developing dramatic scenes is that:

“The more specific you are on agendas, the more proactive the agendas become and the stronger the scene becomes.”

If the scene opens with the setup described earlier and the writer sees each character agenda as something less specific, the potential of the dramatic moment changes radically. Starting with a vaguer agenda than discussed so far and moving toward the global, vague, more like a theme statements we get things like this:

Assassin wants to be the best assassin.
Homeowner wants to be a good parent.
Pizza wants to get a raise or something.

In this scenario, the Homeowner could be anyone. Pizza guy might be motivated to move quickly, so he could just drop the pie off and go. No reason not to if the ticket was paid over the phone or online. Homeowner might beg because they want to see their daughter, but the agenda statement doesn’t focus their choices to allow selection of a specific set of tactics beyond that. Assassin might see killing Homeowner and Pizza as becoming the “best assassin.” They might see killing one and getting away while people chase them as becoming the best assassin. There are a million “best assassin” possibilities here.

Let’s create broader, vaguer agendas further outside the dramatic moment.

Assassin wants to go on vacation.
Homeowner wants to be a good parent and chairperson of the HOA.
Pizza wants to go home and boost his buzz.

These agendas might be true, but they are not specific in the moment. The types of motivations this filter encourages don’t lend themselves immediately to tactic development.

If I’m Homeowner and chief among my concerns is that I want to be a good parent and head of the HOA, connecting parenting and HOA to evading assassin behavior is a stretch. It works for comedic effect, but in that case, it is actually quite specific and reveals the mental problems of Homeowner. Homeowner might be engaged with the assassin on the manager’s worst nightmare level of, “Do you know who I am? I’m the next manager of the HOA. Did Karen VanSitling put you up to this? She’s been after the chair for…”

Now, Assassin can kill them, and Reader will applaud. It’s all good.

However, Pizza might as well be an unused chair in this scenario.

Let’s get vaguer:

Assassin wants satori.
Homeowner wants the respect never received from their parents.
Pizza wants to rise to CEO of the franchise system.

Now, the agendas are bordering on themes that might be stated more like this:

Becoming a perfect killer is a type of enlightenment.
Adherence to early life rules and values never heals the wounded child within.
Ambition and diligence are the path to wealth and power.

These might be true in the story. Certainly, I’m not stating them as true in any context other than the context of a story. However, at the best they only provide nuance in the dramatic moment in a specific scene. These vague agendas/themes do not allow a writer to discover or design possible tactics for achieving an immediate result in-scene.

That said, a set of nested agendas such that each specific agenda is a contributor to a larger agenda might allow for development of details that would enhance the scene. This set of agendas might provide insight into exactly what each character would do in the moment. Assassin’s agenda might look like this:

Assassin wants to kill homeowner and slip away.

in order to build skills to become the best assassin.

in order to go on vacation.

in order to create spiritual balance.

in order to one day achieve satori through their art.

Suddenly, the blade at the kidneys will be held a specific way. The words whispered in the ear of Homeowner must be considered carefully in both context of the moment and in terms of how Assassin sees the moment in relationship to their higher-level aspirations. Consider how this cascade of agenda elements can affect a line like this one:

…pressed her back against the wall, using the door as a blind to cover her presence and the blade she held to Homeowner’s back…

If each layer influences the moment, the physical reality of the blade, the door, and the wall remain the same, but the language might change to something more like this:

Smooth, black silk slid between the skin of her back and the coolness of Homeowner’s stucco wall, and she brought her thoughts back from that distraction, returning her focus to the transience of breath, the inevitability of mortality at the point of her blade, and the rhythm of the pulsing jugular of Homeowner’s neck. A skilled assassin might see the vein’s rise and fall as a tell, but a Pizza delivery boy distracted by material gain, hormone-laden blood, and cold night air would not perceive the interconnections of life and death and knowing and unknowing in the words that would arrive on the wave of Homeowner’s next breath. Assassin found within the silence that gave a shape to the perception she would spend on those final, important words. Later, perhaps on the beach while meditating, she would savor the moment and seek the meaning within the words.

Homeowner said, “. . .”

Of course, I have made the leap to Assassin being the POV character. I’ll leave building the nested agendas of the other characters and writing the moment from their POV as a game to play later. The point here is that the agendas are nested. The outcome of the moment will have an impact on all the layers of each character’s beliefs and desires. To get the best result, the most immediate agenda—the desire of each character at this moment, in this breath, in this heartbeat—should be as specific as possible.

-End-

A Writer Finds Hope Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

by Cheryl Owen-Wilson

I’m receiving varying messages through my artistic virtual channels.  Some of my friends are sheltered in place writing, and painting for hours on end.  Their creations, I am certain, will reflect the circumstances surrounding their current reality.  Those feelings, those never before felt nuggets, will flow through them onto a blank page, or canvas.  For some the message will be easily understood, in full display for all to see, while for others it will be hidden, like the Easter eggs I wish my grandchildren could be searching in my back yard on Sunday.

Then there are those who say they can’t seem to create a thing.  I hope for them to have clarity soon, because I find being able to immerse myself in any creative endeavor the best way to soothe my frantic nerves.

Unfortunately, I have not been sheltered in place.  But luckily, there are only a few of us working in the now closed facility, and we can easily manage the six-foot distances, and then some.  As a small business manager, I have been going to my quiet office and attempting to make sense of with the mountains of paperwork necessary to keep said business viable and able to reopen when allowed.  I hope to have dug myself out of this important task by next week. And like many of my creative tribe, I hope to be able to allow myself the grace to not force creativity, permitting it to instead flow easily, and at its own pace.

It seemed fitting since it’s National Poetry Month, and also because this poem begged to be written, that I carve out time to place it’s somewhat chaotic voice upon the page.  Is it the poem’s voice, or my own?  I leave you with these thoughts to ponder as you read on…

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C is for the many closets and cupboards which will be sorted and left spotlessly clean.

Who can sit to write when those cluttered spaces whisper and beg for a bit of much needed hygiene?

But rest assured, when all is put to order, your creativity will kick in.

The laptop, pen and paper,  will come out, and your writing will begin.

 

O is for the oath you took, once self-quarantined,

Yes, we all had this eloquent, if not, foolish dream.

To sit, and not get up until you’ve written at least a thousand words a day,

please for our own sanity, and those with whom you live, let that vow slip away.

I promise it will all be, okay.

 

R is for the mounds of reading you will undoubtedly get done.

Please don’t forget, when your massive pile is down to one, or none,

remember to support your local bookstores, in any way you can.

After all, when your books were published were they not your biggest fan?

 

This O is for those organizational skills not so readily seen, but who have now magically been awoken.

Those stories tucked in desk drawers and saved in computer files are calling to you. Send them forth, for they have spoken.

Now that it’s done, don’t you feel better?

No don’t begin to obsess over some phantom rejection letter.

 

N is for a different type of novel.  The one you’ve labored over for years, the one you know needs just one more revision.

Let’s let this one go.  Why, you can even call it your pandemic decision.

Think of the mighty fire it will create outdoors.

While you keep a six-foot distance as you roast yummy, melting, smores.

 

A is for all the other artistic skills you may possess.  Rip up that shirt or dress,

and make masks so those in need can stress, less.

Or what about planting something green, be it a flower or a vegetable.

Think of the accomplishment when you’ve grown something deliciously edible.

 

V is for the victory and validation you will feel,

when one of those stories comes back with a contract deal.

By then I’m certain you will be able to socially celebrate.

But if not, Zoom with willingly hook you up with at least one writing mate.

 

I is for the insecurities you will have as you sit quietly with all this time to think.

When it gets too much to bare, please call someone before you succumb to that 3rd or 4th  drink.

I is also for the abundance of imaginative stories and illuminating art that will be birthed from this pandemic.

I have been assured of this phenomenon by friends both alchemic, as well as academic.

 

R is for the formidable resilience each and every one of us will possess.

After we’ve come through this arduous cosmic test.

And what about all the budding new relationships that will be born,

as they visited virtual movie rooms, while eating popcorn?

 

U is for the Universal Unity which will ultimately defeat this foe.

Through our joint socially distancing efforts, we can, and will, stop its flow.

Then think of all the varying stories, from every corner of the world, we will write,

Of the time when human beings around the entire earth stood still, to fight.

 

S is for the symmetry this virus has allowed us to glimpse.

Dolphins swimming in Venice’s canals is not mere happenstance.

Where once there was death,

Mother Nature has been allowed to take a long, overdue breath.

Now it is up to we the human race to follow suite.

How do you feel about a socially sensible reboot?

 

What creative projects have you taken up, or completed as you shelter in place?

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TRANSFORMATION

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Cynthia Ray

This the perfect card for the times we find ourselves in.  The message hidden here is one of transformation and ongoing change. Dickens describes what it feels like to be in the midst of deep and profound change, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Some decks title this card Death, but here it is called Transition.  Contrary to what some may think, it is a positive and joyful card. Transition is change, the act or state of passing from one place, condition or action to another, a transformation from one state to another.

All change has two faces, a face of life and a face of death.  The end of one thing is always the beginning of another.  Our own body replaces itself with a new set of cells every seven years to ten years, and some of our cells are revamped even more rapidly.

There is a seed in the upper corner, denoting the promise of life and rebirth.  Every seed is destroyed and broken open, for new life to emerge. My heart is like this seed, breaking for those who are ill, or dying, for those that have lost their jobs, for the homeless, the poor and for those who are afraid.

Life as we know it is crumbling around us, revealing fault lines in our systems and structures.  But even as those thing crumble, they are giving way to embryonic and hopeful signs of change.  The heads of a man and woman on this card represent the growth of Wisdom and Understanding, and the wheel shows possible progress in new activities.

I hope and look towards a new beginning to be born out of this shared global experience. The pandemic will change how we approach healthcare in this country, for example moving to more telehealth, and community health. It is moving us to novel ways of working, communication, and global cooperation to solve problems.  It will affect how we make a living and how wealth is distributed.

We are now living and experiencing a common story together, holding hands as we move into the unknown future together.   There are many trajectories we could choose, but in this card the sun is rising (not setting as some suppose), and the river of life is flowing into it.

Nothing in this blog is about writing fiction but all good fiction is about transformation, showing how characters, how worlds, how ideas change, and the best fiction changes us, too.  I am finding that writing during this time is different, and deeper, affected by the state of my mind and my heart.  What about you?

When the Show Can’t Go On

by Christina Lay

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© Daniil Peshkov | Dreamstime.com

Our regularly scheduled blog post has been interrupted to bring you this public service announcement: Keep Calm and Support Your Local Artists.

Yesterday, with one fell swoop, the seasons of two local performing arts companies ended prematurely and many others were disrupted when the governor of Oregon announced a ban on all events with audiences of 250 or more people, and our local performing arts center cancelled all performances for the next thirty days.

The Eugene Opera was set to perform Puccini’s great opera, Tosca, today and Sunday.  This was the big event of the season, the opera’s Reason d’etre. The cancellation is potentially devastating to the small company. Tens of thousands of dollars have already been spent and the loss of ticket revenue is a crushing blow.

For this blog, though, I’m thinking about the cost to the artistic soul and the soul of the community. Countless hours of planning, preparation, practice and rehearsal led up to this point. The opera had gathered not only several fantastic principal singers to perform, but a twenty-two member chorus, a children’s chorus of fifteen, an orchestra of fifty-eight, a technical crew of about twenty, and dozens of peripheral people who contribute to the production in some way.  Thursday night was the final dress rehearsal (I’ll kick myself forever for missing it). The music, the songs, the concentrated effort of artists challenging themselves to the utmost, all pulled together to a pitch-perfect level, all the confluences of design, staging, costuming, directing, conducting, all arranged, organized, ready, to culminate in…silence. An empty stage. An empty theatre.

Ironically, the blog I’d been working on before this took over my attention concerned my grim determination to complete a novel that is a year past deadline and about a thousand hours of mental anguish over budget.  I wrote briefly about how I considered abandoning the project, walking away from all that work: 86,000 words and two years’ worth of practicing my craft.  I couldn’t do it of course, couldn’t stop striving for that final “performance” that is publication.

I’ve always believed that the main driving force behind art of any sort is communication, the burning need to express the inexpressible, to span the vast gap between one distinct person and another, to escape the shell of our body and let our souls fly free. To not publish, to not perform, to not share, to slip the novel into the drawer and quietly turn your back on all that you’ve created, is an especially exquisite sort of despair. This, alas, is what the opera, the grandest of art forms, is experiencing, only they don’t have the choice to forge ahead. Toscawill remain unsung; in this instance, in this remote corner of the globe, the show will not go on.

I’m certainly not blaming the governor or anyone else for this outcome, but that doesn’t mean I can’t mourn the loss and in my own small way, make a plea.

Eugene Opera isn’t the only arts organization being affected. The State of Washington has taken similar measures, and oh my god, Broadway Theatres are closed.  Italy, Puccini’s home, is shut. As we circle the wagons and go into crisis mode, I’d urge you, if you’re a ticket holder to a cancelled event, to donate that amount to the organization or artist in question. Even if you’re not, consider a donation to any group that’s hard hit. Beyond that, buy a book, a piece of art, a song.  Do not abandon the arts in these dark times.  This is when we need our artists the most, to give us hope and remind us of our common humanity, especially in times when isolation is recommended and communication is breaking down across all spectrums of society.

Yes, Toscawill be sung and sung again, but not our Tosca. And not today.

 

 

Getting Started Guide for a Lost Writer

[image error]By Lisa Alber

Two weeks ago I got laid off from my day job as a technical writer. After the initial shock and anger and slumpiness, I’m now in the process of adjusting … The job was stressful and getting worse by the month because the company had gotten bought by a ginormous multinational.

So, now I’m in this scary position of creating a new life. Could I re-fashion myself as a contractor with enough time to write fiction? Given my recent medical history, is this possible? It’s a scary proposition, this thing called the “gig economy” — and paying for my own health benefits too?

As a technical writer, I sometimes write getting-started guides. In fact, I recently wrote one related to creating data strategies for analytics efforts. (I’m here to confirm that it’s all about data, folks. No joke. All the companies are doing it now.) What’s my getting-started guide for myself right now?

Please join me in a thought experiment.

1. Context and Vision

Why do I need a strategy — what will be my return? — and what’s my high-level aspirational vision?

I need a strategy because I’m a lost puppy right now. My return will be that I will have a higher quality life working from home, having a flexible work schedule, and, most importantly, have time for my passion: fiction. I envision myself completing works of fiction and feeling immersed in a creative lifestyle while earning a flexible day-job living at the same time. (Notice that my vision doesn’t include things I can’t control, like landing that ultimate publishing contract.)

2. Core Information Model and Principles

A core information model in the world of data analytics is a definition of how a company will treat its data. Principles are like the guiding practices for doing so. For my purposes, this model is how I will treat my time and principles around that.

In my model, time is a raw material. Time is useful to the extent that you actually use it well, transforming those minutes and hours into productive output. What are my principles around this?

When I’m working, I’m really working. When I’m not, I’m really not.
Not all time has to be used productively; quality of life is a factor too.
For fiction, the time allotted each day will be sacrosanct, and this schedule will be fairly rigid and for those hours, fiction trumps the day job.
The day-job hours will be worked flexibly and for as long as needed to get tasks done.
Use a consistent Monday through Friday routine. Allow weekends to feel like weekends; even if I’m still getting work in, do so in a looser manner.

3. Current State Assessment

This is a scored assessment of various dimensions that make sense for you. Score 1 (worst) through 5 (best–wish list level).

Organization: 3

Fiction output: 1

My health: 3

WIP status: 2 (solid start on first draft, but needs a re-think)

Contracting status: 2 (have some stuff lined up)

Infrastructure: 3 (I don’t own a proper desk!)

Technology: 4

4. End State Characterization

Same dimensions, but what they need to be to say that I’m achieving my vision. For example, my infrastructure will never be a five, because my house isn’t optimal. My office is small and kind of dark, rather than large and airy and bright.

Organization: 4

Fiction output: 4

My health: 4

WIP status: 5

Contracting status: 5

Infrastructure: 4

Technology: 5

You may ask, why not set the end state to all fives? Well, you’ve got to be realistic and think about what the original goal is: completing works of fiction, feeling immersed in a creative lifestyle while earning a flexible day-job living at the same time. I don’t need to be all fives to achieve this.

5. Architecture

For my purposes, the architecture is the architecture of my life such that I can close the score gap and move to my desired end state.

Organization: 3 to 4. I’m pretty organized, but I could improve. This means actually using my planner — create goals for the week and write things down. I don’t need to be 5 because I don’t need to be a project management guru about it.

Fiction output: 1 to 4. Heavy lift here. This is bum glue, and getting back into the habit. No five here because in my world a five output can only occur if I didn’t have to have a day job. Not that this couldn’t be a goal, but I’m where I am now. That goal can come with some future, updated strategy.

My health: 2 to 4. I’m still getting over the medical stuff, so I’m aiming for a solid four. That seems realistic right now. Lots to do with this one: lose weight, get good sleep, gain strength, do PT exercises, etc.

WIP status: 2 to 5. Five is the completed state. If I use my time wisely and consistently I can get to five.

Contracting status: 2 to 5. This is getting enough contracting clients so that my income is consistent and livable. At a five, I’m even earning enough to save a little back. So this is a long-term goal, for sure.

Infrastructure: 3 to 4. Get a new desk and optimize my office given its restrictions, and I’ll be good.

Technology: 4 to 5. This is the easy one. I’ve already got all the equipment: big screen monitor, good all-in-one printer, laptops (yes, a Mac AND a PC). I just need to think about ergonomics–ergo keypad, wireless mouse, etc. No big.

6. Roadmap

The sequence of tasks to perform over time. This is fairly high level. The timeline isn’t some set thing. Some aspects may take longer (like feeling like I’m a healthy four) than we’d expect. For me, this is a chunking exercise. I’m going to set the roadmap for 2020. Break down the above things into various tasks. Some things are short term and easy: buy a danged desk. That’s a next-week task.

Some things will require further breakdown. Like what do I mean by “livable”? So then there needs to be a budgeting exercise too, which will include trimming the fat.

The WIP status is another thing altogether. Since I’m not trying to kill myself, I’ve decided that I’ll aim for WIP being completed by the end of the year. But, what do I mean by “completed”? Let’s imagine completed is first draft, revisions until I’m ready for beta readers, beta readers, then more revision, and then my final detailed self-editing process. You can imagine — working backwards, come up with a schedule.

7. Execution Plan

The nitty gritty. This is the kind of thing were you breakdown the roadmap into even more granular chunks, maybe on a monthly or weekly schedule. So for WIP status, let’s say March’s tasks will be: print out manuscript, read what I have so far, brainstorm the plot line that I already know is a problem, re-write that plot line up to where I am in the first draft overall, get an early trusted reader to give me story development feedback.

This is where I’m at. Writing up this blog post as a thought experiment has proven quite inspirational! Wish me luck!

 

Be Writing

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Don’t Be a Writer. Be Writing.

With thanks to WordCrafters in Eugene, where I teach Fiction Fluency.

by Eric Witchey

A little late. A lot busy. The life of a writer who has the privilege of working.

Freelance for thirty years in October has allowed me certain perspectives. I’ve seen creative clusters rise, spawn careers, and fall to petty differences and self-righteous ideological splits. I’ve seen creative clusters rise, spawn careers, and… Spawn careers. That was the important bit. The rest was just human beings being monkeys who think they have to hurt other monkeys to have enough bananas. It’s the bit before they start fighting over the tiny, useless, insignificant bananas that’s important—the part where they are banding together and writing.

I’ve seen poor writers rise out of poverty and return to it again. I’ve ridden that ride myself, though things are pretty good right now. I may be on the rise. I may be on the fall. Who can say?

A few people who have called me friend have decided I’m a lesser human because they achieved their vision of success. A few people who have called me enemy began to call me friend when I achieved their vision of success. I have looked down on other writers for not being whatever it was that I thought they should be that day, and I have railed against people who looked down on me for not being whatever they thought I should be that day.

Writers and readers have ridiculed my work because it is “only genre” and, equally, because it is “literary and not imaginative enough.” Just this morning, I received a rejection letter in which the editor said, “I loved reading the story and the sense of the innocent imagination of the child character, but I wanted more depth.” Another editor rejected the same story a couple months ago because, and I quote, “Children aren’t that deep.” In college, a professor attacked me for being a technocrat. In high-tech, engineers attacked me for being “just an English Major.” I’ve been shamed for working from home and raising children. I’ve been envied for working at home and raising children. If we are honest with ourselves, envy or condescension, it’s all the same. It’s fear. Fear that what I am is not enough and I should be like you; fear that I might become like you; fear that if I see you as legitimate I can’t get the bananas I want because my path is not like yours. Fear.

People have stolen my work. I have received email copies of my own articles, sans my name, from friends who said, “This guy thinks like you do.” Once, I managed to get paid for one of my stories that had been pirated. More often, pirates have taken my work and turned it into money for themselves without a thought to my life and my effort. In a seminar, many years ago, I heard a teacher say to a student who was carefully picking up copies of the story we had just analyzed, “Why are you picking them up?”

“I don’t want anyone to steal my story,” the student said.

The teacher laughed then said, “You should be so lucky that people want to steal your work.”

Thanks, M.K. Wren, wherever you are. I’ve never forgotten. I am that lucky.

I’ve known honest, helpful agents. I’ve know agents who were liars and thieves. My name has been on black lists and white lists. Companies have tried to ruin me. I’ve witnessed, and even uncovered, some very shady doings within government agencies and corporations. I even worked as a consultant for ENRON on the project that blew up in their faces. I discovered that a company I worked for was a coke ring. Another was a front for actual spies. Another . . . And another. . . And another. . . I learned that an editor who won’t sign their own contract is not worth the argument, and I learned that when someone says, “It’s nothing personal. It’s just business,” that they have never been hungry or lived under a bridge. They think there’s nothing personal about food, shelter, and feeding self and others.

Freelance for thirty years. A lot of stuff has happened. Awards. Money. Friends. Lovers. Fans. Detractors. As Vonnegut says, “So it goes.”

I get paid. I write. Sometimes, I’m asked to give advice to agencies, entities, executives, and even other writers. Generally, the advice is ignored until the issues hurt enough. That’s very human. I know I often can’t see or hear things I should until I’m desperate enough to seek change. If only I had listened. If only they had listened. If only I hadn’t listened. It’s not my fault you listened to me.

Through all the years, I write. Today, I finished reading a novel. I revised a document that will help bring clean water to a village. I also wrote a few pages of fiction that are, well, meh. A rejection came in. This essay happened. I wrote. I got paid. I did my job.

The rest is just noise in a wind that howls in the back of the mind.

My friends at the WordCrafters in Eugene, an organization I often support by teaching, have a motto, “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” They have stickers that say that. I have one on the door to my office. It faces outward so I see it every day when I walk in.

Today, I was not a writer. I was writing. It was a good day.

It was good because the whole time I was writing, I felt no pain from my life. I even smiled and laughed. If someone stole my work, I didn’t know. If someone bought my work, I didn’t know. No rejections got read. No sick children or dying family broke into that magical space where vision and feeling merge to become words on the page. Food and shelter were worries to imaginary people who only live in my heart and mind and, with luck, in the hearts and minds of others someday. Political turmoil only existed as a theme. Liars and fools and all the various types of lesser people my righteous stupidity lets me believe exist in various moments all existed only as shadows and echoes far beyond the walls of my office and the light of my screen.

I was writing. I was, for a few blissful hours, what I was meant to be and what I have trained to be, and in the being of that writer, there was no striving or regret or fear or hope. Only the dream made word existed.

Writing cures everything if you are writing instead of being a writer.

Luck and skill to all who write and send.

Crawling Hearts

 

By Cheryl Owen-Wilson

It’s February, a month where we are inundated with the all too consuming concept of romantic love.  I’ve shared previously in this blog that when I’ve attempted to write straight Hallmark movie stories I fail miserably.  Inevitably, someone dies!  Please don’t misunderstand. I do believe in love and all it entails, but I also understand how much pain an unrealistic Hollywood colored love creates. So I thought I’d share my idea of a love poem.  I chose this poem in particular, because it was the first poem to create a vision in my mind for its very own painting.  Happy Valentine’s Day Y’all!

Crawling hearts skitter across my floor.

Their breath beats like thunder, as they shout—”Forevermore”

Their tendrils reach out, seeking to find,

a love that does not bind,

yet, is intricately intertwined.

A love, that knows its own soul,

without taking a heavy, breaking toll.

A love, that will last beyond this world,

taking into each day, a hope, easily unfurled.

Crawling hearts skitter across my floor.

Through their long search, they came knocking at — My door.

“Tell us, does it exist?”

Their pleading whisper, brushes my face, with a warm mist.

“Tell us, will we find that one to connect to?

That one who will forevermore, be true?”

“That one, who will bring us happiness,

as we revel in loves undying, sweet bliss?”

“That one, who will make us complete,

as we dance to the rhythm of our own heart’s beat?”

“That one, who when the long day is done,

will wrap us in their arms, as we watch the setting sun?”

Crawling hearts skitter across my floor,

disconnected bodies, searching forevermore.

They search for answers to questions as old as the Universe.

Questions, that for centuries they have rehearsed.

“Where do our answers hide?”

“Has true love really died?”

I reach deep within—my own heart,

for words of wisdom to impart.

My reply is simple but true.

“To find the love you seek, you must first love, YOU.”

“For how can we offer this great gift to another?

When our very own heart, has yet to be our lover?”

Crawling hearts skitter across my floor,

seeking to escape my simple metaphor.

 

What are your favorite love poems?

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“Crawling Hearts” an original painting by Cheryl Owen-Wilson

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?

by Cynthia Ray

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Writing short stories, poetry and flash fiction is fun, interesting and doable for me.  Undertaking a longer work scares the pen off my pages, because the skills and commitment required for writing a novel are very different from those needed for the short story.  I didn’t realize exactly how different until I ambitiously started a novella over two years ago.  I spent a few months on the task, became bogged down in the middle, frustrated with myself and the process and a self-induced state of embarrassment, shame and regret I quit writing.  I gave up on myself and the book.

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Recently, inspired by a friend’s publication, I dug out my draft and read it again.  I was surprised to find that it wasn’t  as atrocious and stinky as I remembered.  In fact, I liked it enough to finish it after all.  Now that I am re-engaged with the project, and recovering from my feelings about my wobbly process,  I wondered how long it takes for someone, who is not me, to write a book. Is there an average?  Is there a right answer?  Do people start and stop, and then start again?  Is the process consistent among authors?  As you would imagine, the answer varies wildly among authors.  That, too, gave me hope and inspiration to write on to the end of my project, no longer alone in my leaky canoe.

In the writers who “git r’ done” category:

Jane Austen, according to family tradition, began writing First Impressions, the novel we know today as Pride and Prejudice, in October 1796 at the age of 20. She completed it in August 1797, just 10 months later. (Has it really been 300 years and they are still making movies of this story?!!)
Victor Frankl wrote his amazing and inspirational book, Mans Search for Meaning, over the course of nine consecutive days, but he had thought about it for years during his time in the camps, and written it in his head.
It only took Charles Dickens six weeks to write a Christmas Carol- Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit helped speed up the process. When Dickens wrote he “saw” his characters much like the way that young Ebenezer Scrooge saw the characters from the books he had read.
Stephen King says that “”The first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months, the length of a season,” he says. If you spend too long on your piece, King believes the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel.

But take heart, my slow writing friends. Look how long these famous books took to produce:

Melville’s tome, Moby Dick, took 18 months (but that was a year longer than he had planned).
Margaret Atwood took over a year, with starts and stops, to write the Handmaids tale.
JK Rowling worked on her first novel for more than six years.
George Martin also took six years to write Game of Thrones.
It took Tolkien more than 12 years to write Lord of the Rings, and he kept on tweaking his books even after that.

Finally, here is a short list of novels that took from 10 to 20 years to write.  Mine won’t take that long to finish.  I promise.  By the way, what are you doing here?  Shouldn’t you be writing?!

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Resuscitation by Fiction

The current covers for the Jack the Ripper Victims Series

I set out to revive the victims of the Whitechapel Murderer in fiction, to write dramatic novels about their lives and create a Jack the Ripper Victims Series. 

There is something of Doctor Frankenstein in what I did. These photos give a sense of where I started—with the police reports and evidence. They are mortuary images of four of the five victims taken shortly after they were murdered. The fifth victim was left unrecognizable, and the crime scene photo is so extreme, it’s not fit for viewing on this blog. Part of my goal was to give voices back to the five women who were lost 131 years ago, so they might tell us what life was like in their time. In the midst of the work on the writing, I used Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the mortuary photos and bring life to the faces. Being rather visually oriented, repairing the damaged features, opening their eyes, and giving them a hint of color gave me the most vivid sense that I was reviving them. I strove to change the faces as little as possible. Even so, I have no idea if anyone who had known the women would have recognized them from the images I came up with.

Motuary photographs of four of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. From left to right, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes.

Of course, the same would be true for the novels. When writing a fictional drama about the life of a person who is long-deceased, one has to make up much of the story. I had to invent, to flesh out around what was merely a skeleton of information. There are points in the historical record in which we have some confidence that certain things happened. But we do not know what motivated the women from moment to moment. We don’t know what they said or did in most cases.Just as Victor Frankenstein did, I had to borrow parts to make my creations’ lives seem whole. Not body parts as the fictional doctor did, but parts from other lives. I borrowed from my knowledge of the people I’ve known, from history, from the dramas I’ve read and watched. I asked my female friends and family members a lot of questions. Some were surprised by what I asked about the female experience of love, sex, pregnancy, and child birth. Filling in the gaps, I had to bring my own emotional experience in life to the telling of the tales. As an example, my experience as an alcoholic was invaluable to the telling of tales about alcoholics, which several of the women seemed to have been. Yes, the stories are inevitably inaccurate. Yet establishing fact is not my purpose. A different sort of truth emerges from the tales. The object was to give readers some experience of the world the victims knew, to provide a sense of walking in their shoes, of knowing a different time and place through senses that, although fictionally portrayed, gave a persuasive representation of a bygone environment and social situation. That took a lot of research, something that, though plenty frustrating at times, I thoroughly enjoyed.

Covers for an earlier release of the Jack the Ripper Victims Series.

As I developed the book covers for the series, I chose at first to take advantage of the high profile Jack the Ripper has in pop culture. On each of the original covers there was at least an intimation of the killer. Although that may have attracted attention to the books, it wasn’t the best idea perhaps, since the novels are not about JTR. Instead, they are about the struggles of women in a society with a class system that kept the poor down, one in which women had few rights and were treated as having little value if they had lost their male partner and were past their prime years. These are novels about women for women. Men who love women will also find much to like in these tales. Female readers appealed to me to depict the women on the covers in a manner that spoke of life. I took the advice to heart. Working from the images I had derived from the mortuary photos, I created a whole new set of covers for the books. I regressed in age the faces I had done to depict the women in happier, healthier times.

For the interior illustrations for the novels, I often opted for the expressiveness of hands to convey emotions for the characters. As my good friend, Jill Bauman once said to me, “Hands are the voices of figures in artwork.”

“Reaching into the Past,” interior illustration for OF THIMBLE AND THREAT, the novel about the life of Catherine Eddowes.



“The Old Woman’s Crooked Hand,” interior illustration for SAY ANYTHING BUT YOUR PRAYERS, the novel about the life of Elizabeth Stride.

Not all the illustrations are of hands. Here’s one of a phantom of alcoholism that haunts Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols. All the illustrations appear in black and white in the paperbacks. The ebooks have some full color while others illustration are sepia, blue or green monochromes.

“The Bonehill Ghost,” interior illustration for A BRUTAL CHILL IN AUGUST, the novel about the life of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols.

While writing the first novel in the series, I feared my effort would be greeted with the same horror people had toward the lumbering monstrosity that first awoke to Doctor Frankenstein. An American male, what qualified me to write about British women of the 19th century? I worried that women, my British friends, and those who consider themselves Ripperologist would ridicule my depictions. Yet that did not happen—far from it. The reviews for the books in Ripperology magazine have been glowing ones, women have praised the stories as sensitive and pro-woman, and the UK market is where the books sell the best. I gained knowledge of my subject and confidence with each novel. The Whitechapel Murderer is not a dashing figure who got away with something daring. The killer did not deserve my time and creative energies. The tales in the Jack the Ripper Victims Series are of common women who would have been forgotten but for the outrageous manner of their deaths. As with all of our stories, simple or complex, rich or poor, it’s the emotional content and context that counts. I found I had a lot to work with.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

The novels are available in paperback, ebooks in ePub and Kindle format, and audio books from Audible.com

Click here to purchase the novels from THE RIVER’S EDGE

Below are links to purchase the novels on Amazon.com (The listing on Amazon may sell you one of the earlier releases that had a different cover and possibly fewer interior illustrations):

A Brutal Chill in August 

Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man

Say Anything but Your Prayers

Of Thimble and Threat

The Prostitute’s Price

The Definition of Insanity

By Christina Lay

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© Adrian Ionut Virgil Pop | Dreamstime.com

I once again found myself on the periphery of one of those conversations between mothers. You know the one, where they coo over newborn baby photos and then quickly descend into recounting the horrors of a 48 hour birth procedure that included suction cups, multiple doctors and gravity. Then, as always, one of the mothers leans back smiling and says “But then you forget about all that, and have another one!”

I nod sagely. Yup. Writing novels is just like that.

Now I know there are mothers out their gritting their teeth and composing terse missives to me about how writing is NOTHING like giving birth and are lining up many terrifying and explicit examples for me to ponder. But I will blithely continue in my ignorance, because poetic license.

As you might know if you read my posts, I’ve been consumed in a two-year birthing process of a novella that turned into a novel that turned into a many tentacled monster that has no intention of every leaving the cozy confines of my computer to enter the harsh fluorescence of a published reality. And you know what my go-to solution is? Well, I’ll just write another one. That one will go smoothly and will require no suction cups.

Haven’t we all been there? After a tortuous year or two or ten, we deliver onto the world a misshapen squalling mess of a thing. It is beautiful in our eyes only, and requires more attention than ever, which we give it in the hopes that it will someday move out and stay in touch via the form of royalty checks. So what do we do once the thing no longer requires 24-hour care? We immediately start another, sure this one will be much less painful, and more easily pushed out of our brains into the light of day.

And the really sad thing for us writers, and why we deserve more sympathy than actual mothers, is that nowhere in this process is sex involved. In many ways, writing is anti-sex, because it’s a lone endeavor, and one that doesn’t promote social skills or bathing. If there’s any comparison to be made, it is that those first moments of inspiration, those early pages of infinite possibility and gleeful spewing of words, is a tiny bit orgasmic. But there’s no climax. No, the flirtatious tease that is our muse develops a sudden headache, and we are left to bring up baby on our own.

If we’re lucky, we belong to a coffee klatch of writers who gather occasionally to recount tales of horror and express sympathy, and maybe one of them is even lucky enough to have pictures to coo over in the form of cover art. Oh, blessed day!

If writing a novel is like giving birth, than composing a blog post is like passing a kidney stone. No, I’ve never done that either, but a kidney stone is smaller, so I’m assuming the process is proportionally shorter and less painful. But no tickle fest either. If there’s one thing I deeply regret as I look back over this past year, it’s allowing my post to be scheduled for New Year’s Day. This is the day when any writer worth their salt summons up all the Facebook meme wisdom they’ve absorbed over the past year and distills it into an inspirational post that will lift their fellows from the mire of despair and bring relief to the hearts of those pummeled into whimpering piles of sleep-deprived misery by the unrelenting joy of growing a novel in their brains.

I could probably come up with something inspirational if I dug deep, altered my perceptions, took on an attitude of gratitude, had more coffee and attended a 12-Step meeting or two, but I’m not feeling it. My baby refuses to move out. It’s a surly teen now and lurks in the basement wearing all black and not speaking to me (yeah, I’m gonna milk this metaphor for all it’s worth).

So as I am locked in this battle yet again, I reflect upon a piece of wisdom I’ve heard many times in many Al-Anon meetings: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I have to ask myself, has my compulsion to craft stories become an addiction? Is it insane to think that I will ever “get the hang of” the noveling thing? Is it self-deluding to hope for an easy birth? The answer to all of those things is Yes. Does that mean I should stop? Hell, no.

The problem isn’t the writing, No, never the writing. The problem is that word “expect”. Here’s another bit of annoying 12-Step wisdom: An expectation is a resentment waiting to happen. In this case, a writer who expects an easy go of it, who expects their next novel to be perfect, wonderful, Harvard-educated, with great posture and clear skin, is doomed to fall into resentment. Resentment of the very story they’ve conceived and nurtured, resentment of themselves for not living up to their goals and dreams. Insanity is expecting that we’ll be able to do this thing, write these novels, and look good doing it. That we will one day become that person in the memes who wallows in joy, wildness, creativity and spirituality all while looking great in a flowing frock on a beach or a mountain top, backlit by a sunrise.

No, there will be drool. Blood maybe. Tears definitely. All days will be bad hair days. Mysterious stains will appear on all our favorite things. We will trudge, fall down, ugly cry, and doubt. Oh, there will be so much doubt.

Inspired yet?

Okay, let’s try that again. The thing to remember is that we will forget. Forget the pain. Remember those exciting moments of foreplay, and the wonder of creating something new. Insanity is believing the resentments and doubts and drool and letting them stop us from doing our thing. Sanity is doing what we love no matter how much it hurts. For someday we’ll look back on those stories and novels and oh-so-many pages, and be able to say, “I did that” and be proud. Maybe we’ll even have pictures to show.