The downside of drafting longhand

The sky was peeling... pearling...pearing? What the hell is this word? Oh, paleing.

Wait, I like pearling better. Now, is the next bit a coffee smudge or an actual word?

More Metaphysical Bullshit

Honesty is funny. Bluntness is funny. Specifics are funny. Don’t try to be funny, but if you happen to be, don’t fight it.

Pour your physicality into your stories until you run out of life. Think on the prism of isms: don’t let the isms drive you, but take advantage of the tension they give. Don’t use stereotypes as a free ride, use them to add depth. Don’t write a character that is racist because he’s a redneck, explore the connection between the redneck’s social identity and his beliefs. Keep things surprising. If you feel too strongly about something, or want to use your story to further some pet ism, stop. Don’t corrupt your writing in that way.

Facts are not truth. But sometimes you can present both fact and truth, in a single statement. “Leaning on another person for the first time in her entire life –” is this a fact or a truth? Though in context it is a physical action, it also has metaphorical ramifications; it is both fact and truth. Poetry is known more for its double and treble and quadruple meanings, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get that out of fiction. We write every line, we want our readers to read every line, so we should revise every line to have the most weight for its word count, to have clout.

Don’t be restricted by the forward flow of time. You can riff off of what’s already happened in the middle of showing what’s going on, or you can look forward to what your characters have yet to experience. You control the timeline, work it. You don’t have to say everything, and you don’t have to reveal everything, and neither do your characters. Let them say something, and then continue the line of thought internally. Let them say one thing and think another. Let them say one thing and do another. Keep something back.

Learn to use your whole language, not just the words you use every day. You will have an ear for the language that you speak, the language that your parents speak, the language you grew up with. You will also have an ear for the language that you read, the language in which you think you should be writing. Use them both, balance them and play them off each other. You don’t have to write like an Englishwoman, in a café, or on handmade paper. Write like you speak. Write like other people speak. Write the stories that you feel pressured to write, pressured from the inside rather than the outside. Take an idea, repeat it, expand it, like ripples in a puddle, seeing how far you can stretch it. Don’t let your fear get in the way.

There is an inverse relationship between the cleanliness of your house and your word count. 

Suddenly I need an accountant

On Friday my agent and I finished revisions of my book and she sent it out - I adore her for that alone, I hate writing pitch letters. The expectation was to sit tight for a few weeks, let everyone read and get back to us, and have a leisurely discussion about offers with anyone that wanted to make an offer. So I was sitting at my desk last night, drinking rum and trying to figure out PhD course requirements when my agent got a phone call. And then called me. And Business happened. And now my book has a publisher.

It's probably a good thing that I was drinking rum; I'm so uptight normally that if I hadn't been we would still be weighing the pros and cons.

I'm not sure how to react, other than be suddenly nervous that the IRS will come swooping in before I figure out the tax regulations that apply to students living abroad. And I'm not sure how to tell people without it sounding like bragging. Though I do have to be smug, just a little, about one thing - the undergrad professor that I asked about publication at the end of senior year told me that I'd never get this specific book published, and there was no way I'd manage to get any book published within five years of graduating, so I shouldn't try before I turned 30. Well, someone just offered a pre-empt for this book, I graduated 16 months ago, and I'm just a month shy of 25.

"There really is no joy in life greater than doing those things that people say you cannot do." At this point, almost everything I've done in the past two years I've been told beforehand that I'd never do it, so sit down, hush up, and stop being a nuisance. I don't need them to know they were wrong, I can pretty much guarantee that none of the people that told me not to try remember those conversations now. But it feels good to know that my faith in myself wasn't completely misplaced.

Metaphysical bullshit

Recently I got word that one of my Writing professors from undergrad had retired. Actually, I was poking around on Facebook and saw that my honors advisor found a copy of her own honors project while cleaning out his office, and had gotten all misty-eyed about the time he was her advisor (our English department was a mite academically incestuous; they kept it in the family) and I at first guessed that he'd kicked it. I only used 'kicked it' there because he didn't; he'd finally retired and, I assume, taken off to revisit the peyote fields of his misspent youth. Yes, he was that kind of professor.

He cultivated the reputation of an 'asshole;' with the ' 's because that's what he called himself in relation to his students, rather than what we called him. We loved him, and we hated him, and we loved to hate him and hated that we loved him. His main line of intellectual inquiry was what we called 'metaphysical bullshit,' which included the subtexts that never worked when they were consciously included but always seemed to pop up when we least expected them. It was the kind of thing that lead to trippy notes - his were the classes I always brought vodka to, and not only because they were three hours long.

So, statute of limitations be blown, here's some of the stuff I got from him. In installments. If I couldn't take three hours of it sober, I have no business inflicting great chunks on anyone.

“The imagination is a force of nature.” Trust in what comes to you, take a line of thought and run with it. Don’t cripple a narrative by imposing on it the limits you think it should have or that other writers would give it. Follow the narrative to the very end; let it go where it wants to go rather than where you want it to go. Allow the story to have its own integrity. It doesn’t matter if the story you write doesn’t turn out to be the story you thought you were going to write, the story you have written should have its own integrity, and you are free to return to the initial idea, the trigger, and write again. Observe. Remember. Steal other peoples’ gossip. Gather in the details that surround you and pack them into your narrative. The way a person walks, the flavor of sunlight or the smell of purple. Look at the world sideways. Give your readers descriptions that make them say “I’ve never seen it that way” and “that’s exactly how it is” all at once.

           Voice can take you far, no matter what person you write in. It lets you get deep down, put on the skin of the character, sink inside her head and take on her motivation. It needs to be authentic, it needs to ring true. Every line should be examined with the question, “is this what this character would say, the way this character would say it?” It’s too easy to have all our characters sound the same, or sound like us, or sound like our best friend. They don’t need to be completely at odds, just distinct. Work the voice, use it to convey something about the character, use it as a tool for character development, plot exposition, a means of adding complexity.