Tag Archives: writing process

My Brain is a Border Collie

27 Sunday Oct 2019

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I have this freakish thing going on: Although I can be miserably incompetent at many things (like housework and math), I’m wicked good at decoding my native language–I can read really hard stuff (and really bad stuff), think about it, and then spit it back out in writing. I also write at least tolerably well myself, and I write a lot. (No, not here; I’m sorry, followers! I just don’t want to have a whineblog, so I try to post only when I have something to say.) But I’ve written a doctoral dissertation and ten novels, seven of which are finished. (My first book, which needed to be split into a trilogy, is currently up on a mechanic’s lift being taken apart. In my copious spare time.)

I can also write non-fiction, and I’m an excellent editor. If I didn’t enjoy my day job, I could probably manage as a free-lancer. (I’m on disability, thank God and my fellow taxpayers, which limits my income. So I’m not fantasizing about limitless wealth here.)

Putting it a different way, my brain is one of those amazing little Welsh border collies who can herd sheep into marching-band patterns: Neither of us is close to the unified field theory, but man, are we good at what we do! It took skilled training and the sort of hyperfocused attention that only dogs and ADHDers have. (All dogs have ADH–squirrel!)

I’ve spent twenty hours this month working on a huge grant which is vitally important to a bunch of people I love dearly. They have a spectrum of writing skills, and the first draft was sorting out their various snapshots of the same subject, so we wouldn’t make the nice folks at DHCD tear their hair out. It was sort of like the Hebrew Bible, where important stories in different versions are all just plopped in next to each other, leading bored children to try to figure out just how many animals Noah took with him anyway. Only I don’t just have the J and P authors, I have three social workers, an accountant, a grantwriter, an IT guy, and the entrepreneur heading the organization. Kind of crazy–and I love it!

Taking paragraphs apart, fixing sentences, and moving things around is fun for me. I am more than happy spending my prime creative time (3 a.m. to 8 a.m.) doing this. I would probably do this for free, but I crave an iPhone. (Hey, only a 6, and I found a good deal. I’m not that crazy.)

My border collie gets bored a lot. NaNoWriMo is sort of me buying a flock of sheep to keep it occupied. But that’s only once a year. Major grants like this one only happen once every decade or so. What to do?

So the answer occurred to me this morning at about 5 a.m.: Maybe I should try writing poetry. Truth impels me to say that I can change things up most by attempting to write good poetry. It will be interesting to see if the mutt can make the sheep tap dance. (I promise not to overwhelm you with the results of this cockamamie idea.)

Confession: I loathe most modern poetry (the sort you wrote in high school with lots of emotion on each line) so will probably pick some random classic format for structure. An extra lap or two around the flock, and a nice huddle of well-behaved words as a result. Sounds like–squirrel!

If You Wanna Write, You Need to Read

19 Sunday Feb 2017

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I found this out empirically when teaching a remedial composition class at a small college. The school took composition skills seriously, and thus the remedial class met for 5 hours a week, instead of the usual 3. The kids had been assigned to it because they’d bombed a test, and as I was soon to discover, this test had some flaws.

Out of a class of about 30, I found that 10% of them had just been having a bad day on the test–they were already writing at an acceptable college level. Having been the bright kid in a group of um, less stellar talents for much of my life, my heart went out to them, and they were my inspiration to keep the class from becoming as horribly boring as it might have been. (Not hard. My glory as a teacher is that I’m not boring. This is also my bete noir, as it stems from my not being as consistent as I should be.)

Anyway, I did some digging (small schools mean you get to know the students) and found that the big difference between my good writers and my awful writers was that the people with skills read. And the more they read, the better their writing was.

So for the last couple of months of class, I broke it down by letter grades. The A’s only had to attend class Monday and Tuesday. B’s got to add Wednesday, and C’s came through Thursday. This left me five or six D’s for Friday, and that was boot camp. Every day, they had to read something, and then write about it. I wasn’t too fussy about the source, as long as it wasn’t some hiphop-esque piece of trash not written in standard English.

The results were impressive: My boot campers pulled themselves up by at least a letter grade, with one guy going from a low D to a satisfactory B. Yeah, extra teacher time. But I’m telling you, it was the reading. These kids might not have been good students, but that didn’t mean they were stupid, and when exposed to the different language that is written English, they soaked it up through their pores. I was so proud, I mighta been their mama.

Now, twenty years later, I review book manuscripts, and I suspect the same pattern exists. Some of these adults–all successful and wealthy enough to afford our firm–need boot camp. And it’s not just the mechanical flaws, it’s basic structural stuff like repeating themselves (occasionally endlessly), failure to shore up their characters beyond two dimensions, and (oh ye gods) saying stuff that shouldn’t need to be said: About 75% of people who have the stirrings of a book within plop out a self-help book, and because (I suspect) all they read are self-help books, and they all take the same classes in juicing and yoga, they all sound the same.

I don’t read self-help books in my personal life, but I’m beginning to suspect that they’re not very well written. What my current boot camp candidates need is structured non-fiction, like popular science books written by scientists who have gotten their degrees from schools we’ve heard from. They also need classic novels written by people who knew how to punctuate. (Start with Angela’s Ashes–it was written by a whip-cracking English teacher.) Until there’s a matrix of written English in the brain, I believe it’s impossible to spit it back out. And I’m not being a snob: We’re talking about basic meaning. If you’re pulling down 70k in your own consulting business, writing a simple sentence that turns out to be gibberish should be a flogging offense.

Not that I’m cranky, heh. I just sweat over everything I write, grateful to my ex-husband for having cured me of comma splices in grad school. Is it wrong to expect the newbies clustering in the doorway to have a little respect for my art and profession?

And Da Winnah Is . . .

26 Thursday Nov 2015

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I just finished my NaNoWriMo submission, which has kept me busy for the past couple of days, hence no blog. Sorry!

This year I also chose cat narrators (see Eureka, under the “Fiction” tab) and maybe that’s gonna be my claim to fame when I die. I dunno. I’ve always enjoyed animal narrators myself–the genre is called “beast tales,” apparently.

Please note that I finished early–not as wicked early as some, true–so now I have all this mojo circulating in my bloodstream and you’re the only place to go with it. Unfortunately, my brain still isn’t awake (I found that I do my best and most prolific writing when I roll out of bed) and this may be randomness.

What’s bugging me in the back of my mind is a convo I had last year or so with the writing guru I sometimes do evaluations for. I brought up NaNoWriMo, and he said, dismissively to the point of mild contempt, “Oh, I have people do 50,000 words in a weekend.” Now, this is theoretically quite, quite possible. When typing, I’ve clocked myself at a rough 1K per hour, maybe a little more, and if you check in Friday, check out Sunday or possibly Monday, and don’t sleep–it’s doable. Thinking a moment on this brings out a feeling of sadness, of compassion: How pressured these folks must be! How hard these novels have been trying to claw their way out! But it’s so easy to let the world discourage you from being a writer, God knows. And that’s what the writing guru’s thing is–he midwifes those poor unborn novels into the world.

Now, we’re not necessarily talking about literary merit (whatever that is; when 50 Shades made it big, I officially Gave Up) or even readability. I see these texts at what is most often an early stage of their being–these writers have not yet been scared by the prospect of needing to EDIT, bless their pointy little heads and unscathed souls; let alone having shown them around and asked for critique. I suspect I am often the first beta reader (defined later) and most of them are . . . surprisingly OK, all things considering. True, some of them are awful, and a few of them are wonderful–so wonderful I wish it were professional to ask for a comp copy. But the difference between them and what they were before is that they have been born.

NaNo does a similar midwifery. Most WriMos in my area are college-age women, and in a culture that still silences women, especially brainy women, isn’t it great that they’re gonna pump out that fan novel they’ve been thinking about? Maybe it’s crappy, but as my late friend Barry Walden once said to me, years ago, “That’s one less piece of crap I have to write.”

(A moment of silence here for all writers lost to depression.)

A word on and for beta readers: If you don’t have them, join a writer’s group through Meetup and show them your stuff. They will (or should) understand that your work is still in beta (the software testing mode) and they will look for bugs in your code.

There will be (to your mind, anyway) many, many, many bugs in your code. You will learn the phrase “murder your darlings;” some of you might learn how to punctuate. And that’s a good thing. Trust me.

 

 

What Does It Feel Like?

21 Saturday Nov 2015

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As recent readers know, I finally just caved in and accepted the tattered hand-me-down mantle of Writing Person For Reals. I had the epiphany that it didn’t matter whether or not I’d found an agent for my current novel; what mattered is that real flesh and blood people had beaten it into me that I Had It–that my writing was what one beloved beta reader called “absorptive.” And that was all I ever wanted for the Reader’s experience–that for a little while, in even a little way, they could be Somewhere Else. That’s the first step, isn’t it?

So what does making something like that feel like? Well, to be honest, very rarely does the Inspiration Fairy drag you out of bed and make you write, and when she does (a friend in an APA once remarked that the Inspiration Fairy smokes cigars and wears hob-nailed boots) it’s often a tad on the self-indulgent side, screaming “Oh my GOD I’m NAKED over here editor PLEASE.” Instead, most of the world’s writing is done the old-fashioned way, which looks suspiciously like work.

As many have remarked, the first step is putting your butt in the chair. Then you open the file or the notebook. This is accompanied by a whiny sort of vagueness: You’d sort of rather be doing something else, and you may or may not know what it is, but right now there’s this blankness looking at you, tapping its foot.

For me, it is processed like mild pain: My fingers are clumsy and sluggish. I scrawl or tap out something inspired like, “Miranda rang the doorbell.” At that point, I don’t know why Miranda is dropping by, I just know that it’s at least remotely plausible that she might. And then I stare at it. Slog, slog, oh god I’m no sheeping good at this, another sentence. I stare at them and heave a sigh. Maybe two, remembering that I should practice good diaphragm breathing for choir anyway. My brain feels dull and far away, and the idea that this will ever be a novel is a possible symptom of incipient mania.

And that’s where the scariness starts to happen. Miranda, the wench, opens her mouth and says something–and Darjeeling says something snarky–and then they’re having a conversation, and the conversation is bringing new ideas into the piece of writing just like you thread a new piece of yarn into knitting–really; that’s the point of that metaphor: You watch your fingers as if they’re possessed of a sudden ability to type or make the pen work, and new colors appear before your eyes like magic.

Something way back in the distance snaps, and your hands start making words as fast as they can. You’re no longer at your desk or at Bucky’s, you’re in that crowded Victorian living room with Miranda, Darjeeling, and the intruder they turned into a garden gnome. Your deeply beloved child of your actual loins, who will care for you in your old age, stops by to say “Good morning,” and you grouse something curt at them, because dammit Darjeeling is saying something exciting, and you can’t wait to know what it is.

You feel sort of stoned. This is only aggravated by your caffeine intake. I exhort you to drink actual water for each cup of speed.

You take a break to obey Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice (“Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, and scratch where it itches”) and hate your body for being so interrupty. Then you get back to it.

It is addictive.

For me, after about two-ish hours I can stop for at least a while; at that point, I admire my word count (especially for NaNoWriMo). Then I do at least a little of the other things in my life, knowing that again and again I’ll have that almost nauseating start-up, maybe in the same day.

Worth it–for me. Then after it’s DONE and I scream and do a bit of the hokey pokey, it’s time to edit. And that’s for you.