The Quote on Your Desk

Ariel’s lyrical, compelling post on Monday set a high standard for our week here on NovelMatters. And then Patti vaulted over that bar with the announcement that her new book, Goodness and Mercy, is free on Kindle through today.

You want a hint about what those two have in common?  They are both terrific, unusual, unforgettable writing.

I come to you as the street sweeper after the big parade. After a considerable time not writing on a full-length fiction project, I’m back working on an unusual (aren’t all of our NovelMatters projects unusual? That’s why you come here, right?) co-written project. Something I’m not yet ready to talk about.

But I come to the writing of it changed. The period in which I did not write altered me.

During a recent move I misplaced a little framed saying that always sat on my desk.  When I found it this week, it explained something to me.

Here is what it says:

“Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil us. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grown strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become.”

This quote by Brooke Foss Westcott served as a warning to me for years. It serves now as an explanation.

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that the quote on this writer’s desk has nothing to do with writing.

Or does it?

What written words do you keep on your desk? If it is a quote you have had for a long time, has your perception of, or reaction to, it changed over time?

Sending Your Baby (Book) Out into the World: Put Your Feelings in Words

Ta-dah! We have winners of the signed copies of Goodness & Mercy: Josey Bozzo, Karen K., Karen Schravemade, Cherry Odelberg, and Lori Benton. I'll try to contact you but let you know if I need to hear from you. Thanks for all of your great comments.

Before I start my post, I must thank the readers of Novel Matters for stepping up and doing a brilliant job of writing Amazon reviews of Goodness & Mercy. You're the best!

Dearest Goodness & Mercy,

Today is your big day. Yes, I've been horribly clingy. It’s terrifying to let you go. You've been in my brain since you were but a wee seed of an idea. And there you are, all 322 pages of you, ready to launch into the great big world. You will try to understand my protectiveness, won’t you? It’s not that I don’t trust you. I only fear I didn't prepare you well enough.

It’s not you; it's me.

And yet, I can’t help myself. I flip through your pages, only to find a cumbersome word or an awkward phrase. As with any parent author, I've had to accept that you’re not perfect. How could you be? I created you. We’re two flawed peas in a pod that way. But please know, while in my hands, I served you heart and soul.

Darling, not everyone will love you like I do. They’ll say cruel things--some deserved, some not. These people believe it’s easy to be a story. We both know that’s not true. You've paid your dues—you've been red-lined, cut and pasted, and deleted. People who call themselves critique partners have pointed out your weaknesses and written letters when they saw that you’d faltered.

I know that stung.

I must also warn you that people will use you as a coaster for sweaty glasses or to level a wobbly table. Others will read you—and this is difficult to say—in the bathroom, where you will be subjected to all sorts of insults to your senses. These kinds of people are out there. I would be lax in my authorial duties, if I didn't warn you.

You go with my blessing, my darling. I’m already proud of you. Just be yourself. Readers will love that about you. Don’t hang out with anything in shades of gray or blood-sucking, and you’ll be fine.

It doesn't hurt that you’re free on Amazon today. You’ll make lots of friends. 

Should I have read through you one more time?

No, you’re going to be fine. Go. Go.

Don’t look back, okay?

Signed,

Your loving author

xoxoxo

P.S. Don’t tell the others, but of all my stories, I love you best.

Goodness & Mercy is indeed FREE as a Kindle book on Amazon today through Friday. Feel free to spread the word by copying the image above and pasting it on your FaceBook timeline or visiting my FaceBook page to simply click and share. 

To WIN one of FIVE SIGNED COPIES of Goodness & Mercy, tell me your favorite flavor of pie in the comment section. I'll draw winners randomly on Thursday, 5:00 pm MT.

Writers in the Marketplace, a She Reads Guest Post

“I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, I will tell you a story, and then he passes the hat.”
– Robertson Davies

The above quote is scratched on a Post-It and pressed to the top of a notebook that I drag around the house. I am a writer in transit, my office moves depending on the needs of my family. One moment I’m banished to the bedroom, the next the dining room table. But the notebook moves with me, as does the reminder that as a writer I’m nothing more than a busker in the marketplace, hawking my wares to the passerby. Sort of like this fellow:

“I am a liar, see, and you’re not to believe a word of what I tells you.” The old man flicks a piece of straw from the edge of his rug. Grins. “Even if it is true.”

Off to the side, a crone plucks at the strings of a lyre. Her knuckles bulge with arthritis, but still the melody is hypnotic. The small crowd leans in to hear her music and his story.

“Most don’t believe me anyhow, sez my tale can’t be true what with the mermaid and all. But I knows what happened that day, just before the storm.” He pushes a tattered hat closer to the onlookers with one toe and continues in a sing-song voice, “Billy Gray took her by the milk-white hand, and he threw her in the main; since then a full-five-and-twenty-hundred ships have sunk along the coast of Spain.”

“Rubbish!” The voice rises from the back, a young man, not old enough for a proper beard. “That’s a fleet, old timer. Such a thing never happened in my lifetime. Or yours.”

“Get on with you, then. You’ve no knowledge of the times of my life. And no stomach to hear of Poseidon’s wrath upon losing his daughter. Run along home, little boy. These fine folk want to hear a story.”

A few scattered nods bob through the crowd and the old woman laughs, melodic, fingers never leaving her lyre. She sways to the rhythm of her own making, cords of silver hair dangling at her waist.

“See, this Billy was a shrewd one. The sea ran through his veins eight generations deep. Saltwater for blood. And he paid attention as a lad when the old men whispered over fires and too many pints, knew that when a white squall bears down on a ship, the only way to gain safe passage is with a mermaid on board. She’s duty bound to protect the ones in her care. If you can catch her.”

A tiny sprite of a girl inches from her mother’s side toward the rug where the old man sits cross-legged. Her voice little more than a whisper, “How do you catch a mermaid?”

“Ah, now, that’s a trade secret. Alls I can tell you is that to catch a mermaid you has the have the one thing she wants. And then she comes to you.”

“Surely no one believes this old codger? He’ll take your money and drink it at the pub. Mark my words.” The heckler pushes his way to the front and waves a finger in the storyteller’s face. “The merrow-folk are nothing more than legend.”

The old couple laughs, their voices blending like sea and sand. “Such are the words of the young and foolish. Isn’t that right, Maran?”

In answer she plucks a lonesome tune from the lyre while she sings:

I am the star that rises from the sea, the twilight sea.
I bring men dreams that rule their destiny.
I bring the dream-tides to the souls of men;
The tides that ebb and flow and ebb again –
These are my secrets, these belong to me. *

Even before her song has faded, hands are thrust deep in pockets, searching for stray coins. They clink like tiny bells as they fall into the hat.

“Thank you kindly, but remember, I am a liar, and you’re not to believe a word of what I say.”

The child steps onto his rug and drops a single coin into the hat. “Even if it’s true?”

The old man retrieves it from the dark fold, winks, and presses it into her palm. He folds her little fingers around the coin. “Especially then.”

“And your name, sir? You never said.”

“I was born a William. But my friends call me Gray.”

Writing is All Fun and Games Until Somebody Gets Hurt

Nobody said writing would be easy, but I wish there had been a disclaimer early on somewhere. Sure, 'Writing is easy...open a vein and bleed' is all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. (Boy, that just didn't come out right, but there it is.)

When my daughter was in elementary school, she experienced her first loss of a pet.  Her beloved cat, Snipper, was hit by a car one day.  She cried like her tender little heart was broken.  I held her and we both cried. Then, in the midst of her sobs, she pulled away and ran for a pad of paper and a pencil.  To my amazement, she began to journal her feelings as she cried.  I later remembered that her teacher had given them journals at school and encouraged them to record their feelings.  Something in the experience must have been cathartic for her.  She filled pages with abandon until she was spent, with all her love for Snipper boldly scribbled on the pad.

I wish I could write like that.  The first draft raw and searing with emotion.  The trouble is that I clean up the bad things before they get onto the paper.  I don't really want to remember them.  I want to move past them to the place where I'm recovered and can look back with compassion, comfortably removed a safe distance away, to dust my hands and experience the relief.  Once there, I sure don't want to go back. 

When I was doing research for Tuesday Night at the Blue Moon I was fortunate to find a mother who was willing to share her story of losing three young children to Niemann-Pick disease.  She taught me a thing or two about courage.  She willingly revisited that dark place in the hope that people would be drawn to God. Our phone interviews were sometimes cut short when she became overwhelmed with memories, and it often took her days to recover, but she was willing to open her heart and private pain.  My story wasn't her story, but much of her experience became my protagonist's experience.  I am grateful to her and amazed by her courage.  I wasn't sure if she would be able to read the book when it was done, but she did (finally) and was pleased with it.

I have a theory that fiction writers are particularly sensitive and this is the reason we shy away from 'getting real'.  It's doubly hard for us to take a step back from the pain and maintain perspective.   But the best writers are brave. They walk right up to it and poke it with a stick.  That doesn't mean they won't get hurt.

Have you connected with a character's pain in a way that was healing to you?

Digging Deep Without Hitting the Gas Line

Sharon encouraged us to dig deep as writers. It amazes me how frequently my “fight or flight” instinct kicks in on behalf of my characters.

Over the years, I’ve gotten better (I hope) at recognizing those moments and steering into traffic instead of swerving to the curb. Here are three reasons and three techniques for digging deep in your writing.

1)   Speak to your reader. Reason one for digging deep as a writer is so that you can reach out to your reader and say what they need to hear. You can’t do that if you skim the surface, write tip-of-the-brain plots and scenes. It’s the difference between a chat around the water cooler, and a conversation that runs deep into the night.

       2) Stop lying to yourself. Last year, I wrote a blog post about how reading fiction brings us closer to our true experience as human beings. “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.’”

A writer will never truly become a writer until she can face her humanity full on and tell the truth without trying to justify it.

3) The more personal the pain, the more universal it is. That stuff you’re ashamed of? So are we. We all have those charred marbles rolling around in our souls, those broken off pieces, long dead yet still so powerfully able to bend us low. Those questions you have—more like doubts, really—yeah, we’ve all got them. The skilled writer takes the reader by the hand, walks her into the pain, and teaches how to stare it down. And don’t you want to be that kind of writer?

Here are three techniques for digging deep.

1)   Listen to the scene. You’re writing and things are flowing, then BANG, you hit a wall. The words dry up and you’re scrambling to push through to the end of the scene. Most often the reason your creative tap turned off is because you fudged a deep truth, a difficult reality in order to preserve your emotional distance from the scene. Go back and pin point where you hedged or skimmed when you knew the right thing to do was tell a stark truth. Likely, it will take the scene in a different direction (maybe even the story) then you intended, but your intentions don’t matter. The story matters.

2)   Read your work aloud. There are a million good reasons for doing this frequently: you spot typos, missing words, misspellings. You also will hear places where you’re lying to yourself. Say the words aloud and if they are true, you’ll hear that truth ringing clear. Fudged, shallow words? You’ll hear that too.

3)   Kill off the bad nouns. “Terror”, “horror”, “hysteria”—kill them all. I’ve read sentences like, “Her heart filled with dread.” Um. Gee. That’s too bad. Maybe she should look at getting that fixed. Now, before you jump on the “here’s how to show and not tell” bandwagon, let me stop you there. People’s hearts filling with dread is never the point. It’s too late by then. What’s important are the few seconds just before her heart filled with dread. What was going on then? What clues were in the room that let her in on the fact that dread was knocking on the door? Write that. No pat phrases, no emotional shorthand.

Here’s your Novel Matters Assignment, should you choose to accept it: Write/read through your WIP—as much as you dare—and follow these three techniques. I follow them and its made a huge difference in my storytelling. Share your additional ideas/experiences in the comments section!

Dig Deep

It's June 3, and before we get to my post, how about a trivia game? There's a song from the 60s that makes reference to today's date. (It also happens to be my nephew's birthday, so happy birthday, Johnny!). If you can think of which song it is, well, you're probably not a Gen-Xer. But if you know the answer and are the first to post it, we'll send you a copy of our fun and whimsical Novel Tips on Rice recipe book. If someone does come up with the answer, I'd like to have further conversation about the song ...

I recently answered some interview questions for a blog I'll be a guest on in July, highlighting Unraveled. One of the questions was what my top three pieces of advice to writers would be. One of my points is for writers to dig deep to make their writing as authentic as they can, so that it might have the biggest impact possible for the reader.I know I've said it several times on this blog so forgive my redundance, but it's my opinion that the first job of fiction is to entertain. That said, I don't have the time or the desire to read what I term "fluff" fiction, or fiction that doesn't deliver something of substance. By fluff, I mean cotton candy, which has absolutely no substance. It's sickly sweet, dissolves with hardly any satisfaction, and typically upsets the stomach. If I'm going to give up precious hours of sleep time, because that's when I read for pleasure, and invest time in a novel, I want it to strike a chord in me, to cause me to reflect on something relative in my own life.

My next novel, The Color of Sorrow Isn't Blue, due out July 1, is the story of a woman's emotional response to losing a child. In writing this story I drew from my own experience in losing my son seven years ago, and believe me, the well of emotion continues to be deep and raw. But that doesn't mean I believe our novels should be thinly veiled autobiographies. I don't. At all. There's no rule against it, it's just my preference as a writer and a reader. (There are those who write memoirs in novel form, and that's a whole different subject.) To that end, this woman's story is not my story. She responds in a way completely different to how I responded. She doesn't lose her daughter in the same sense that I lost my son -- but loss is loss, gone is gone. And I drew on my experience and emotions like never before. Trust me when I say this was a painful story to write, and there were many days I didn't want to go anywhere near it. That was often hard to overcome. But was it worth it? I certainly hope so. One thing I can say unequivocally is that this is my best writing yet.

When it comes to your own emotional well, do you draw freely or would you rather stay as far away as you can from it? How does that decision affect your writing and the stories you tell?

Schizoid Beginnings

Like Latayne, I'm preparing to start a new novel. But unlike Latayne, I'm going solo with Patti-specific ideas. Beauty or beast, the ideas are all mine. Let me explain how I feel about that.

Rather schizoid, actually.

Party Patti wants to believe her ideas are effervescent in their beauty. They are the perfectly dressed woman who walks into a party, and everyone there wants to talk to her--men and women. She has a wide-eyed intelligence and a sense of welcoming that makes her approachable and endlessly entertaining. 

Party-Pooper Patti knows her ideas are old chestnuts that should have been taken out with the trash. So she lurks in the kitchen, hoping no one will notice she arrived in the blouse she has worn all day or the spots of spaghetti sauce on one breast. She trembles over being asked what she's working on. Her elevator pitch is three pages long! Her plot is convoluted. The premise...well...what is the premise?

I hope I'm not the only one.

Am I?

You will admit that you're a bit schizoid, too, right?

This is the truth of it. We all want to be heard, but the part of us that is looking for a campfire where we can tell our fabulous stories (publishing contract?) is at odds with the part of us that fears rejection, exposure, and humiliation. 

This is the tension we must face to start a novel, or if you prefer a more dramatic metaphor: These are the demons we wrestle to get to the computer to muss that first page on the screen. This may be the very phenomenon we're calling procrastination. 

What are we to do?

I would tell you to put your butt in your chair and start writing, but they're telling us that all this sitting is killing us. We should be writing as we walk on a treadmill. Now, we have a fear of falling to overcome. (Picture included, so you'll know I'm not lying.)

Do you feel this tension when starting a novel? (Please say you do even if you don't. My dentist already called me neurotic this week. Honestly, I could use a pack of co-ninnies around me just now.) How do you work past the tension (demons!) to start your novel? Is anyone out there walking and writing at the same time? Is that wise?