Peter Prasad's Blog: Expletives Deleted - Posts Tagged "writing"

Some say writing is best done alone in a crowded room, by weak light at the wooden table of a tavern or coffee shop. It’s where imagination lurks in an empty chair. Here stories grow loud and bleed techno-colors on a starched white sheet.

To bolster my pen, and having taken to shaking when I lost my compass on manuscript day #66, I found a Sonoma writers group. The rules were rigid. I had to hand in my pages, a copy for each reader. Then I read aloud and watched my babies be red-penciled to less. It was modern torture and I confessed all.

My babies amazed me. Cling not, they cried to the writer in me. Just go with the flow to new 26-letter combinations. My words raced ahead and spun the locks in my head. In a chapter critique, my flat characters popped out round, richer with detail and motive.

Authors and editors squint for extra eyes. Once we literary had them in ivory publishing towers as wards of civility. They’re gone now, off-budget in the global call for ‘more raw.’

Readers want bold strokes and less tip-toe. More gut-wrench and less sit-on-the-fence. It's voodoo to ward off work-a-day and leap to imagination transported, escaped from rows of toil.

In birth and war, no battle lasts forever. In critique I soaked up all the learning I could blot: a litany from confessional to animal sacrifice; a review of place, voice, verbs, action dialog and a hero's march past decision-points of storyline. My tribe survived.

More blood on the cover was the final request. What I showed looked like a sheep-breeding manual. I took a deep breath, perforated by zingers. A phrase or two rang my bell.

I plowed on; we launched and have landed a few 5-star lauds. Yes, I shall return to my critique group as a shorter writer but never short of words.

So began my public journey to address readership. Damn the semi-colons; I leaped with a new crew of characters. If you write, I hope you’ve paid dues at the portal of proof-reading. It helps to know how to bail on open ocean.

Place Is Character: I write of Sonoma to refresh my spirit. Sonoma, is just over the bar to country cream-top dairy -- where sun and rain outweigh us all – and green meadows roll onward in celebration of sun, moon and soil. With a moo-moo here and a bah-bah there. On'Ya readers all.

So let’s assume you have a voice yodeling inside that compels story telling. Agreed? Then you want to be a writer, a dancer with verbs, or maybe one who checks into a beltway motel with a dictionary, a yellow pad and a bottle of name-your-poison.

The voice wants out and will plumb your thoughts and springboard through your emotions as it burrows a hole straight up.

Now don’t go gopher on me. Instead, work your imagination into a fertile field and aerate the soil of your soul. Get it right and we all breathe better.

Last century, I’d read The Paris Review of interviews with authors. I wanted to know how they worked, the tools, the body position, how they tuned in and found the channel. It was all short wave to me. Recently I found more threads of this weave in a 1986 column by William F. Buckley, once editor of the National Review. Trust me, he used to be famous. Here’s what I learned. Yes, I’m plagiarizing.

Anthony Trollope rose at 5 every morning, drank his tea, performed his toilette and looked at the work done the preceding day. He would then begin to write at 6. He set himself the task of writing 250 words every 15 minutes for three and one-half hours. Indeed it is somewhere recorded that if he had not, at the end of 15 minutes, written the required 250 words he would simply ''speed up'' the next quarter-hour, because he was most emphatic in his insistence on his personally imposed daily quota: 3,500 words.

Erle Stanley Gardner dictated his detective novels nonstop to a series of secretaries, having previously pasted about in his studio 3-by-5 cards reminding him at exactly what hour the dog barked, the telephone rang, the murderer coughed. He knew where he was going, the plot was framed in his mind, and it became now only an act of extrusion.

Margaret Coit wrote in her biography of John C. Calhoun that his memorable speeches were composed not in his study but while he was outdoors, plowing the fields on his plantation. He would return to his study and write out what he had framed in his mind. His writing was an act of transcription.

Albert Jay Nock's book on Thomas Jefferson proved that he made fewer corrections on an average page than Buckley would write into a typical 600-word column. Clearly Nock knew exactly what he wished to say and how to say it; prodigious rewriting was, accordingly, unnecessary.

Buckley Jewels:
1) It is not necessary to know how your protagonist will get out of a jam into which you put him. It requires only that you have confidence that you will be able to get him out of that jam.
2) You are, while writing, drawing on huge reserves: of opinion, prejudice, priorities, presumptions, data, ironies, drama, and histrionics. And these reserves you enhance during practically the entire course of the day, and it doesn't matter all that much if a particular hour is not devoted to considering problems of your work-in-progress.
3) You can spend an hour playing the piano and develop your capacity to think, even to create; and certainly you can grasp more keenly, while doing so, your feel for the priorities of your storytelling.

So, there you have it. So, have at it.

You might want to follow along behind you beast with a bucket of soil, some seeds and a strip of typing white-out in your pocket. Life is worth living, and now that summer is here, worth living with bare feet.

My Kindle is open and begging to see how your voice sails through my imagination, spinnaker billowing like the America’s Cup races on San Francisco Bay, the carbon fiber pontoons groaning, sail lines slapping the mast. I want to be up on a rail with you, going flat-fast with contrails of ocean spray in our wake. Happy summer.

On’Ya, dear readers & writers.

And now a word from our sponsor: Celebrate for me. My climate fiction thriller and next in the Sonoma PI Jake Knight series, GUT-CHECK GREEN, launches June 20th Amazon willing. There will be contrails, figuratively speaking.