Humanity Matters

“[. . .] craziness and brokenness are so vital to a story,” Katy said on Monday’s post.

We’re just so human. Try as we might to be otherwise, what with our Christmas newsletters and greener than green front yard lawns, we can’t escape our messy, confusing human state.

Hide, yes.

Escape, no.

Enter fiction where, for once in our ever-loving life, we’re allowed to pull back the thin veneer of straight teeth and gold stars at kindergarten, and look straight into the bubbling pot of messy humanity. Really have a good look. Poke around in there, sniff the dirty socks, and cry a little when the way the character breaks apart looks so much like the way we’ve broken apart.

You are broken.

There’s no way around this fact (even when, as parents we fool ourselves into thinking it won’t be that way for our children, that if we keep them whole long enough they will stay that way for life). Somewhere along the way life tossed you like a toy, and something about you broke.

Enter fiction where for once there is someone who is broken and lost and confused and getting it all wrong. Just like us—but just enough not like us that we can bear to look deeply and brush up against our ache. Really feel it, and accept it as part of our experience, part of what makes us who we are. Part of our personal crazy.

You are home to personal craziness.

There is a part of you no one understands—not even you. The fear that wakes you in the middle of the night and pushes you out of bed, down the hall, to check the child sleeping in the other room even though that child is grown and hasn’t slept in that bed for twenty years. The way rain makes you laugh, and how mowing the lawn reminds you of the six weeks you spent with your leg in a cast, and how you can’t remember your Grandmother’s maiden name and that makes you cry. And how you can’t explain any of it to anyone because it doesn’t make sense.

Enter fiction where we find characters that speak the language of our silence. Who ask the same questions our hearts have been wordlessly asking for years we just didn’t know it until we found the story that asked the questions.

Fiction is the story of you living a different life in order to be able to see yourself in a new way and make sense out of the life you are living.

You’re broken.
You’re hiding it.
And it’s making you crazy.
Fiction says, “Welcome home.”

Literary Fingerprints

On Monday, Debbie spoke about anonymous writing. A feeling most of us are familiar with, if for all the wrong reasons. In her post, she mentioned Don Foster’s idea of the literary fingerprint; the DNA from our pen that would convict any one of us of authoring a piece of writing. He was likely referring to habitual wording and phrasing, moldy metaphors we lean on. But, as I read Debbie’s post, I wondered if Foster was referring to voice – that ill defined, yet sought after attribute of writing no one understands but can only point to when it is present. If something of the writer sticks to everything he pens, certainly voice would be the glue. I’ve written and taught about voice in fiction. After several years of writing, I thought I might know something about the subject. Turns out I don’t. I’m not unhappy about the revelation. Writers are never bothered by being wrong. We know how to rewrite. And we know being absolutely right is the death of art.

Still, it surprised me when Roger Rosenblatt, in Unless it Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing, dismissed the subject of voice with a metaphorical wave of his hand. “Voice is merely the latest cliché to signify good writing. Its predecessor was ‘authority’.”
One man’s opinion. So what? Except that it sat right with me. I understood what he meant and why there was no need to talk about it any further. Voice is simply a way of saying that writer believed in herself.
In theater we call it stage presence. In film it’s scene stealer. That actor who chews the scenery, and makes us believe he is the character.

Voice is writing with an assurance that translates by osmosis to the reader. It has nothing to do with POV or which tense you tell the story in. It’s not about diphthongs or Irish accents. It’s plunging into story without timidity or throat clearing. By sheer perfection of word choice and sentence structure the author conveys her absolute confidence to the reader. An elbow nudge and wink from the captain of the ship. Authorial authority. Rosenblatt says, “Voice is the knowledge of what you want to say. After that, it becomes any voice that serves your purpose.”

Maybe that’s why he swatted the topic aside. It’s simply an outcome of years of perfecting the craft and art of writing enough to allow yourself to write like you mean it. And there’s no talking about that. There is only doing.I like the thought that my literary fingerprint may one day be confidence, not that my story is perfect, or even right, but that I deserve the opportunity to tell it my way.

I recommend Rosenblatt’s book for reasons I can’t articulate. Not because it will teach you about writing a novel, but it presses the writer's consciousness into your grey matter and you come away with a heightened ability to express what you’ve always known.

Creating Character - A different perspective

The following post is by the protagonist in my novel-in-progress titled, A Girl Named Fish. It is the creation of character from the character’s point of view.

~
I am Joan, though I’ve had other names. Some names I was called only for a moment, an identity that burst through the soil of my creator’s mind, only to shrivel under the heat of scrutiny. Those were difficult days. I was mute. Unfounded.

I’m not like you. I can recall my primordial. Can construct my world’s genesis with intact steps. Mine is a creation of misunderstanding. Of being known as much by what I am not as by what I am – have turned out to be.

My world shakes with violent change that sometimes swallows people whole. Sometimes spits other people up from the ground. I gather the ones I love most near me, as near as possible, trying to keep them safe from a wrath that seems intentional and arbitrary. I try, but my creator spreads us over the landscape of story, which rises up, and then caverns down, forming a strange topography only she understands – if she truly does understand. There is evidence she does not. I can only hold on and trust there is a plan.

Not only my surroundings change, but also the world that exists when I close my eyes. My inner world morphs, my own mind changes. My memory roughens. My demons grow teeth.

All of this takes too much time. It is too slow an upheaval to be bore. I am alone too much. When my creator isn’t looking, I flag in stillness. A glance from her, and I spurt like a summer vine. But she looks away too often. I know why. It’s because of where I come from. She had to travel to the aching place to find me. She had to journey to the cry in the spine in order to unearth me from under my cloak of strange grace.

I am glad she has persisted. I have my own skin now, and I like having form and substance. Spirit moves freely, but it is my bones that make me real. That give me voice. Ah voice. I speak to my creator now. She listens closely. Drops my words on a scale, measuring them is if they were her own idea. But I am naming the world now. I do this from a memory I carry with me from the aching place.

I speak to my creator in somatic impressions, which I press into the cells of her body. The smell, taste, and sound of all that I am, all that exists in the story in which I dwell. I bring these impressions to life in my creator’s organs and limbs, her bones as well as her brain. I crawl around inside her skin until she’s forced to scratch me out with her words.

Yes, I leave the words to her –the nouns, the verbs they are of no concern. What matters to me is that I am understood. That my story transfers into the mind of my creator. My real story is the one my creator did not create, but discovered within the aching place. I have become an invasion of terrible clarity.

She is responsible for the words. I am the one who brings the knife of whole truth and uses it to tear the temple veil, and reveal the holy of holies inside her mind. And Bonnie discovers I exist, not to change the world, but to change her.

Unhooked. Writing an Inviting Novel Opening.

Marian! You are the winner of a signed, and personalized copy of Talking to the Dead! Please contact me at our email (click the "contact us" button above) with your mailing address - and who you would like me to make it out to, and I'll get your book to you right away!

It’s simple semantics. But it’s not just semantics. I’m referring to my reluctance to use the term ‘hook’ when discussion the opening lines of a novel. I’ve no quibble with the concept of the need to offer the reader something grand off the top that keeps them reading. But ‘hook’? If I recall, it ends badly for the fish.

I prefer ‘invite’.

Semantics, right? Perhaps. But may I suggest there’s more at work here? Come read over my shoulder, and I’ll try to explain what I mean.

Scattered on my desk you’ll notice heaps of papers. Some from my computer printer, others bound in a book and given a nice cover with the author’s name on it. Let’s start with the computer paper. Contest entries, writers asking for my thoughts on their work, novels I’ve read for various reasons that have not found their way to publication. They represent hours of work and a great deal of soul searching. I approach them with respect. They weigh as much as a human heart. Still, look here how the writers try to ‘hook’ me with their opening lines.

One has decided to drop the reader into the middle of an ongoing argument between two characters. Yelling, tears, accusations – throwing of various objects. Dramatic stuff, to be sure. But does it belong at the beginning of a novel? 99% of the time, no (there are always exceptions to prove the rule). The problem with starting with an argument is the reader has no idea who the characters are. Even if every other logistical aspect of the scene can be dealt with, explained, and presented with a red ribbon – the heart of the problem with this hook beginning is the reader has no emotional connection with the characters. What would you do if you walked into someone’s house and found the couple that lives there arguing? Yay. Me too.

Here’s another manuscript that attempts to hook the reader. This time the author chooses to drop the reader into a character’s dream (or nightmare). Some interesting things happen and then an alarm clock rings and the reader needs to start all over again getting the feel of the REAL story, and the REAL character, and the REAL story world. Annoying. But the biggest problem with starting with a dream or nightmare is that it is very difficult to ground the reader in the setting, plot, and characters of the story. Vague. Symbolic. Perhaps interesting. But not at the front of the novel.

Here’s a novel that begins with a terrible car accident. Lots of twisted metal and shattering glass. Messy. This opening works fine if this novel falls into the mystery genre – a well-written car crash could be just the thing to get mystery readers off and running. But this isn’t a mystery novel (and this isn’t a blog about mystery novels), and that makes the choice to open with an accident risky. I’d say an 85% chance of not being able to make this work. If I pick up a novel and read of glass cutting into people’s skulls, and blood everywhere, I’m going to recheck the back cover to see if I’m reading the literary effort I thought I was reading. There IS a chance you could make this work if you back up the story to the hours, or even minutes before the accident happens and give us a fantastic intro to character and storyworld.

These are three examples of writing that attempts the letter of the law of ‘hook’, but misses the spirit. There are other examples we could look at, but lets move over to some of these books I have here and peek into a few of these.

As we read these, keep in mind those two words mentioned above: character and storyworld.

Here’s some favorites of mine:

“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.” (Opening lines of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.)

The exquisite beginning is a wonder of character (an old man and a young child), their relationship (isn’t it interesting that Marilynne Robinson choose to reveal the emotional relationship between the characters before she revealed their biological relationship?), and the story world – the pages of the old man’s journal which comprise the entire novel. Simple, deep. Perfect.

“Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Other’s figured it might be the perfect city joke – stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like wating for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag.” (Opening lines to Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin)

McCann’s opening is the textbook of creating storyworld in the first words. There’s no doubt where we are – Where but New York? And even though we don’t know exactly what is happening, we find ourselves on West Street looking upward into the New York sky and thinking, Yeah, I see it too. He doesn’t just hook us – he places us in the middle of what is happening. He turns us all into New Yorkers. Spot on.

“Afterward I lived in Paris, in the same apartment where I had painted the Brooklyn Crucifixion. I married Devorah, and we moved to the Rue des Rosiers. Some years later, Devorah gave birth to a girl, and we named her Rochel, after Devorah’s mother, of blessed memory, who was taken away in the July 1942 roundup of French Jews. We called her Rocheleh, beloved little Rochel.” (Opening lines of Chaim Potok’s The Gift of Asher Lev)

Chaim Potok has a way of wringing every drop of significance out of ordinary words. Here he simply speaks to the reader (in a manner of fashion), saying, “Look there’s a book before this one – you might know it. If not, we can simply catch up a bit now. We’re all in this together. We’re friends. Or we will be.” Straightforward, yes. But when he tells us of Devorah’s mother and the name Rocheleh we are pulled into a family of love and terrible loss – even if the author doesn’t say so.

“The mark burns upon him all the time now. Its hurt is open and shameful like a scab picked until it bleeds. In years past he could find ways to forget it or at least misplace his awareness for a while; it was never easy but he managed. These days he cannot. There is nothing to fill Cain’s time so the mark does this for him.” (Opening lines to David Maine’s Fallen)

Tell me you’re not sitting there picturing the mark. I am. What shape? An image? He’s old, something very few people on earth had experienced at that time. What does one do when one ages, anyway? Anyone familiar with the biblical story of creation (hello Western Hemisphere), is drawn into the myth, the theology, the story of Cain. But not the expected. Here he's not the passionate youth who took his brother’s life. Old. Useless. At ends. A whole new way of looking at Cain – and a wholly effective way of inviting the reader into character and storyworld.

In the end, there’s nothing wrong with using the work hook to describe the author’s intent for the opening of a novel. But I’ll continue to use the word ‘invite’ when thinking about how to open my novels. My hope is to invite the reader into the storyworld and into the community of character.

How about you? Do you hook ‘em? Invite them? Set the scene? How do you talk about the opening of a novel? Any favs you’d like to share?

Consume vs. Create

This post comes to us from Ariel Allison - the wordsmith behind our sister blog, "She Reads." The message in red at the end comes from us.

On Friday Katy Popa wrote a genius post for She Reads that at first had me choking on my coffee and then left me paranoid that she’d hi-jacked my webcam and had a ring-side seat to my creative process - sans the cat, she lives outside. If you’ve not read it yet, do so immediately. I’ll wait.

Ah, welcome back.

Told you it was good. South American catnip. El Capitan. I’m still chuckling.

Here’s the thing about Katy’s post that resonated with me, and what I’d like to pull from today: creating anything, be it a novel or crème brulee or a song, is hard work.

And I suspect it’s the reason why so many of us spend the majority of our time talking about writing instead of tapping out prose during the embryonic moments of our day. So in an effort at full disclosure, I have a "really ugly truth" of my own to share:



That's me writing at 5:00 a.m. It ain't pretty, folks.

The cover charge for my participation in this mystery called Art is paid in the commodity of sleep. It costs me every day. It's hard to get up, as my husband says, at the "butt-crack of dawn." But the alternative is no easier. Not for me during this season of life:
["The Many Faces of Distraction"][/caption]
A friend recently wrote that “it is easier to consume than create.” And he's right. It's easier to soak in a well-crafted story than persist through a first, second, or twenty-third draft in effort to spin that perfect yarn. It's easier to lick crème brulee from a spoon than to stand over the ramekin with a pastry torch, browning the sugar just so. Far easier to hear a song than spend hours in the studio recording, mixing, and mastering a single. This is true of any art form. Drinking in is easier than pouring out. (I would add that it’s also far easier to critique than create, but that's another post.) It is easier to sleep in.

For Katy it meant a night of lost sleep in order to fulfill her blogging commitment. For me it means getting up far earlier than I consider healthy or decent. It means peeling myself from between the sheets when my alarm blasts out its shrill reminder: create, create, create.

It is so much harder to create than to merely consume. But the rewards. Oh those rewards, like cracking that thin layer of caramelized sugar, they are sweet.

Tell me friends - so I know I'm not alone - how you pick up the tab for the grueling honor of creating?

Since this is February, we authors at Novel Matters must jump in here for a teensy Valentines message for you, dear reader:

Mwah!

And because we are so glad you've all stopped by, we want to send one of you a bar of Green & Black's fair trade Chocolate. (Of course it's fair trade. We love you too much to support injustice in your name.)

Here's what you must do to win: In the comments, when you answer the question Ariel asked at the end of her post, if you phrase your answer in the form of a haiku, we will enter your name in the hat.

You know what a haiku is, right?

Three short rhymeless lines
The writer mustn't stress out
This game should be fun

And once again,

Mwah!

Salty Stories

I hear it all the time – it’s the big debate in Christian fiction, the one that writers and readers buzz about, the one that makes us stop typing and ask, “Is this passage preachy?”

I think it’s a good discussion, one we should continue to have because it helps us shape the industry of Christian books. However, it is a mistake to think that Christians are the only ones who need to ask if our literature is “preachy” and packed with messages that hammer rather than whisper.

General fiction has just as much reason to worry as Christian fiction does that it’s preachy.
I read broadly, as I suspect the vast majority of us do. In my fictional travels I’ve come across general market fiction that was so preachy it made me put the book aside. The adage that “no one likes to be preached to” is one mainstream writers need to heed every bit as much as religious minded writers do.

I’ve been reading The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, a book I wanted very much to like for many reasons. First, the author is Canadian (from Winnipeg). I read vast amounts of Canadian fiction (and I recommend you do too – there is a delectable “otherness” about Canadian fiction that is at once familiar and foreign), and I was happy to add Davidson’s name to the list, especially after I heard about the large advance he secured for this, his debut novel. The premise is so strong and compelling, it’s no wonder publishers snapped him up. So, I bought the book.

Remember – I wanted to believe. I wanted to love this book.

There are two things that keep me from falling in love with The Gargoyle. First, the writing – with a wobbly voice that never finds its track, to Davidson’s habit of writing in a way that minimizes emotional impact, to his lack of knowledge of the psychological, the writing left me feeling – well…cheated. Still, there are moments in the book that shine, and I would have overlooked (on tip-toe, mind you) the writing if only he would have refrained from his preaching.

But the real reason I couldn’t love the book was because several times I had to check the front cover to ensure I had not, by accident picked up a book titled “I am atheist, hear me roar” or something of that nature. He spoke his beliefs loudly and from the soapbox on the corner street Christians are so often accused of standing on. He didn’t let the story just tell the story of a man who didn’t believe in God yet couldn’t explain the things that were happening to him.

I don’t mean to pick on Davidson and his book. But, for the sake of blog post brevity, I wanted to highlight a concrete example of what I am talking about. All of us, regardless of the religious/political/ethical messages we wish to incorporate into our fiction, need to remember to respect the reader, and respect the story.

For the Christian, that means creating salty stories – fiction that is flavored throughout with the truth of God and His character. You would never sit down to a meal and drown it with salt, covering your plate until all you saw was white. We use salt in measure and allow it to bump up against the rest of the ingredients, soak in, and change the flavor of the entire meal for the better.

Jesus said we were to be salt and light to the world. These two things are perfect examples of how God wants us to write as well as live. Salt and light both are, in and of themselves, overpowering elements when taken in large quantity. Salt burns the tongue, light burns the eyes. But used wisely and in measure they are indispensable. Keep in mind though, it isn’t the salt or light that matter most, but the effect the salt has on the food, and the effect that light has on a darkened room that make them transformative elements.

What have you been reading or writing lately that uses salt in proper measure? How did the writer accomplish this?

Roundtable: Spirit and Muse

Someone once advised me to find a picture of my muse and put it near my desk. I actually did this. In my office there hangs a carved wooden figure that somehow seems right. When I read William P. Young's novel, The Shack, I imagined that Sarayu looked a bit like this. Later I read George MacDonald's The Back of the North Wind, and thought this being looked like the North Wind.

The thing about this figure that really struck a chord was that little bit of wavy stuff beneath her. To me it looks like water,

and water has for some time represented, in my mind, the mysterious depths of the human soul. The Bible says it was the Spirit who moved over the face of the waters. So there you have it. My "muse" is the Holy Spirit.

I love Vinita Hampton Wright's take on this, in her book on writing, The Soul Tells a Story:

The spirit will require tougher things than the Muse ever will. The spirit will not be satisfied when you merely embrace your personal darkness and write an astounding poem about it; the spirit will push you beyond that to whatever healing or understanding is necessary in your life.

This spirit will stare at you until you make your art honest... The spirit will require that you push through the despair and get to the hope, that you push past the comfort and embrace the confession.

~
A muse I have not. Or, if I do, it is a shifting thing that doesn't move with me from project to project. I don't look to or at any one thing to find inspiration. Mostly because my brain doesn't work that way. I'm a self-proclaimed "projects person". Once I have turned the last page on a project, I'm finished with it and look ahead to the next. The trappings, ideas, even the magic of the last project is gone. (Don't get me wrong, Talking to the Dead stays with me - but not as a project to be worked on. Rather it stays with me, I think, in the same way it lingers with readers, as ideas to be explored).

I've started a new novel I'm very excited about. I can't give details at this point because of some still unanswered questions. But I can share this picture of the journal I am using for my handwritten notes for this book. It feels "muse-ish" to me. It makes me smile when I reach for it and when I write in it, I feel as though I'm recording something very important - even if it does look like plain old chicken scratch- including spelling mistakes and words crossed out. It is the place that holds my ideas for this book and it is very much a place I meet with God to talk things over.

~
By definition a muse is "the spirit that is thought to inspire a writer; the source of genius or inspiration." As a Christian, I simply capitalize the "S" in Spirit, and there's my Muse, backed up with my favorite Scripture regarding the call of writing in my life: "For it is the Lord who works in you both to will and to do his good pleasure" (Phil. 2:13). As the Source of inspiration, He gives the desire and the ability to accomplish the thing He's called me to do. That doesn't just apply to one thing in my life. For He's called me to do many things; writing just happens to be one of them.

~

There are times when I feel His leading in a very particular way as I write, and there's no doubt where the inspiration comes from. I love those little surprises -- serendipity or happy accidents as Jim Scott Bell shared recently: http://killzoneauthors.blogspot.com/. Other times, the inspiration is more subtle, but it's just as important.

~

I don't have a physical or mental image of my "Muse." I just know that I need His presence in my life for all that I hope to accomplish in the name of the Lord, which includes writing the stories He plants in my heart.

"By living well and observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read...by training yourself in writing, in repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the Muse. You have given her...room to move around. And through training, you have relaxed yourself enough not to stare discourteously when inspiration comes into the room."

This is from Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, a book he freely admits has nothing to do with Zen but a title that has everything to do with marketing. This quote is from the chapter "How to Keep and Feed a Muse" which discusses how inspiration comes from being fully engaged in life.

As Christian writers, we know that inspiration comes from the Lord. Each one of us has a fertile history that God draws from for our unique stories. We are the only ones who can tell these stories from the perspective He gave us and He expects us to keep the soil tilled and prepared to help those new ideas to sprout.

Until I began posting on this blog, I never acknowledged to myself or anyone else how great a role dreams have in my spiritual life.

Once I had a colleague who was very discouraged and thinking of leaving his ministry. At that time, I had a very vivid dream of a vast field of mud that stretched out as far as I could see. One at a time, people began emerging from the viscous mud and struggled to get free. My friend stood at the edge and began pulling people from the mud.

Imagine my surprise when I attended the estate sale for a late neighbor/artist. There was a chalk portrait of someone leaning over a wall and reaching for the hand of another. It so precisely portrayed the spirit of the dream I had. I keep it in front me as I write.

Though the deceased artist was African-American and thus most of her portraits were those of people with dark skin, I prefer to see these two people as both covered in the mud I saw in my dream. It reminds me that anyone who thinks to help draw people from the mud of this world must remember that each of us in ministry was also once in that very mud.

(Please excuse the largeness of the image. I was afraid the details of the painting might not be visible in a smaller size. )

Is it me?

I'm nearly ill.

Honestly.

How could this happen?

She's been my favorite author for nearly 20 years. I buy her hardcover releases without flinching. Something delicious lies within, and I'm willing to see sparks fly from my credit card to partake.

I once drove 600 miles to attend a conference--dragging 2 friends along--where the author read from her latest book. I mouthed the words as she read.

I wrangled a picture with her. It stands with my collection of her complete works, even though I am smiling like an idiot in an incredibly ugly sweater I had no business wearing.

I aspire to be as authentic, as poetic, as tender with my reader as she is.

Was?

This is too sad.

I'm reading her latest. And no, I'm not telling who she is. She's earned the right to slip just this once. At least, I hope it's just this once.

What am I grousing about? Well, she's using italics like they ran a sale at the dollar store. And they don't make sense. She writes in present tense, which I find appealing, immediate, surprising. BUT she takes one small step forward in her story only to take five steps back in a flashback. Aack! I'm getting motion sickness with all the back and forth. Every chapter, several times each. And so much introspection. Pleeease. And get this, her main character is a writer who can't write after the death of her husband.

Hey howdy!

Or is it me? Am I so obsessive about the craft of writing that I can't enjoy a story that is structured differently or strays from the sacred cows of writing craft? Has being a writer ruined me as a reader?

Is that a price I'm willing to pay?

Am I alone? Do you find yourself editing published works as you read? Are we too hard on the writers out there? Do we criticize the speck in someone else's writing to ignore the plank in our own?

Help.