Ten Rules to Embrace or to Break

The final NaBloPoMo post! I’ve decided to particpate in The Next Great Writing Project, but with my own angle. So, instead of ten rules to live by(which is way too hard!), I’m doing ten rules to write by. None of these are original, but that hasn’t made them any less useful. In fact, I’m sure it makes them a bit more true.

1. Don’t wait for permission. No writing god or loved one is going to appear before and say, “Yes, now you may go forth and write.” You want to write? Say no to an invitation or refuse a request and go write. You are the permission god.

2. Don’t think stress about opinions. Whatever the people in your life think, they think. It’s got nothing to do with what you need to put on the page.

3. Don’t write for fame. The reasons for this should be obvious, but write for the love of it or just go watch television.

4. That said, turn off the television. I used to not write because I wanted to watch Law & Order. When I had cable I watched Jon Stewart (I miss him so). Now I write everyday. And I’ve got nothing against TV. I don’t believe TV is evil or good. It just is. It’s up to you how much you let it control your life and steal your writing time.

5. If you can’t write everyday, write everyday anyway. Well, lots of writers say write everyday, and this is great advice, but if you can’t, if you really can’t (and be honest about that), don’t throw up your hands and say, “That’s it then. I can’t do it.” Make a schedule–write every other day, write Monday nights, write during the full moon–and stick with it.

6. Send perfectionism and righteousness packing or lock them in a closet or send them out to bully somebody else. Whatever. They are not your friends. They are certainly not your characters friends. Nothing is perfect and writing to show how moral or smart you are is dull. Write a story.

7. Hang write-what-you-know unless it’s what you want to write. Write what you love, what you want to know, what moves you.

8. Accept rejection. You put your work out there and not everyone will like it. That’s okay. Something everyone likes is bound to be boring.

9. Don’t wait for the muse. The muse may show up sitting pretty on your desk one day–and you might be out at the mall. Be at your desk (or sofa or table or wherever).

10. Love your story. I’ve met people who say they don’t like the story they’re writing. Then change it. Blow it up. Cast it out. I love all my stories. I don’t know why. They are not perfect. They are not great. But they’re mine and I made them and I love them no matter their failings and quirks. If you don’t love them, what hope do they have out in the world?

11. Bonus Rule (because we need more rules in the world). Don’t believe that other writers have it easier than you or are born more talented. They don’t, they aren’t and who cares? That’s got nothing to do with you once you face a blank page.

Now, I’ll try to remember my own rules. Go make your own and break them when you need to.

I love a Bookbeast, and his name is Franz…

Well, National Blog Yourself Delerious Month is nearly over…I’m glad I gave it a shot (am, in fact, delerious right now!), but I’ll be glad to be done.

But thanks to the blogosphere, fate, and Lydia, a bookbeast is coming to live with me. His name is Franz, and he’s so surreal that I may set him to work editing my novel as soon as he unpacks. Actually, I’ll probably take him out for coffee first. A bookbeast must be greeted properly after all–and I need him to be surreal, not snarky. Not to mention I’d like him to share in my caffeine addiction–how else are we going to live together and make great books?

I’m also going to ask him to explain how to recognize surrealism, plain ordinary weirdness, and bad writing. A bookbeasts knowledge, I suspect, is vast. And he looks good too.

Seven Random Things

Over at Matt’s blog I said I’d do this meme thing–seven random things about me for what they’re worth.

1. My great-aunt accused me of being sexist when I was eight for writing a poem about the sun and making the sun male. 2. With a tape recorder I taped The Wizard of Oz from the TV and for weeks I fell asleep while playing the recording under my covers. 3. I wrote my first “book” in the 7th grade. It was about cute little space blobs. 4. I skipped school twice my senior year. One day to go to the Sidewalk Art Show in Winter Park, Florida. Another day to stay at my mom’s apartment and write a short story for English class. The story was supposed to be ten pages–I wrote 24 pages and still it wasn’t finished. 5. At 14 two other girls and I published a newletter about horses. We had subscribers from different states, but eventually homework and chores got in the way. 6. When I read my work in public I go temporarily blind. 7. In the 9th grade a man in a pale blue suit followed me to library one day after school and though that was the end of it, I stopped going to the library after that–even though I used to go once a week or more. I’ve never gotten back in the habit.

Whew. Seven. Now you do it.

I knew I was a writer when…

After reading a post by a friend, I thought about the question of when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I realized I don’t know the answer.

I remember writing a short story in the fifth grade. I remember writing poems for my grandmother when I was eight. I remember reading everything interesting in the kids section of the public library by the time I was ten and asking my grandmother to check books out for me from the adult section. She would check out anything I wanted. I was allowed to read anything. I remember ignoring teachers and classwork to read books hidden under my desk and navigating the school hallways without looking up from my book. I remember books I would finish and immediately go back to the beginning to read again because I couldn’t stand for the story to end.

When I was little there were no Barnes & Noble Bookstores with cafes. My hometown had a Waldenbooks in the mall where my father would leave me while he looked at tools at Sears. The only other place to go to buys books was a gift shop a block and a busy thoroughfare away from my grandmother’s house. The shop appeared to make its money from the cards and gifts–candles, picture frames, figurines of little boys with fishing poles and little girls perched on flowers and holding butterflies, that sort of thing. Against the back wall were the fantasy and science fiction books. A huge selection I thought at the time. And I would sit on the floor and stare up at the books and spend at least an hour deciding which book to buy whenever some adult had given me money. I remember loving the colors of the books (all paperbacks) and reading the backs of them over and over again. I very much did judge a book by its cover.

I don’t remember thinking, “Oh I can do this too!” But neither do I remember thinking I couldn’t.

I remember sitting on a Saturday afternoon with my mother and my grandmother each of us with a book. They had coffee and I had milk and we all had a cookie and we read until grandmother decided it was time to cook dinner.

I remember my dad reading me fairy tales, but I don’t remember ever noticing that he couldn’t actually read very well. I remember my dad teaching himself to read and write and asking me for help with his self-imposed homework. So I believed EVERYBODY in the world had homework and everybody read.

But lots of people love to read and yet don’t become writers. Perhaps writers are not made simply from a love of books. Perhaps they are made from the way they learn to use their imaginations. I don’t mean they have imaginations and others don’t. Everyone has an imagination. I mean the way imagination plays out in their daily lives.

My father encouraged me to believe that a witch lived in an abandon shack near our house, that a mailbox painted with butterflies could fly away, that Santa’s elves were in the hot air balloons that sailed over our house in the summer. My father did not explain why I had to hide in the closet one night while he was on the floor with a shot gun (a real life police shoot out on our property I found out years later), why my mother was in the hospital for several weeks (depression), or why our dog was dead (shot by a drug-addled fool on a motorcyle). Everything was left to my imagination. If I wanted an explanation for something (the first divorce, the second divorce, the change of anything at all in our lives), I had to make it up. I think such events as these (among many, many others) have as much to do with why I’m a writer as my love of books.

But I no more decided I wanted to be a writer than I decided I was a girl or that I liked boys or that watermelon tastes good on a hot day or that the alligators in the lake were dangerous. It feels like I’ve known these things forever.

The Next Thrill

The thrill of hitting 50k has not worn off. To be honest, the thrill of 50k from previous years has not worn off. I cherish my little successes and I love every story. Maybe this is wildly egomaniacal, but I really do love every novel I’ve written no matter what shape it’s in. My love has nothing to do with how good they are.

But my head spins with ideas and lunacy for what comes next. I’ve challenged a friend to have a NaNo novel finished (as in rewritten and polished) by Halloween 2008. But I’ve got more than one novel to work on and I’m going to see each of them through to their endings.

And there are the blogs. Blogging has been unexpectedly rewarding and fun, but I’m not sure what I want from them exactly or what they should be doing. The fiction blog of lake belle needs a change, I think. What to do? Keeping characters alive in real time is a great challenge and exhausting. These characters don’t have story lines, climaxes, and resolutions. No. They have sprawling lives that go on and on. How sustainable is it? Having characters from my novel blogging about their lives and experiences in the NaNoWriMo novel just gets complicated.

I’ve toyed with the idea of short stories…maybe novel chapters changed a bit or old stories brought out, reworked, and posted. But why? And where? A more truly story-type blog? One thing I’d like to do is have someone illustrate the lake belle blog in a comic book/graphic novel sort of way. But that seems a bit on the mad dream side of things.

Before I forget, of course, I’ve got to work out the end of this novel…

…too many ideas–not enough caffeine.

I won, I won, I won!

Well, the story isn’t over, but I reached my 50K for NaNoWriMo, and I am way too please with myself. Excuse me, where is the fanfare? Where’s the confetti? Where is the champagne?

But now comes the hard part–putting the thing together in a coherent form. Ha! But I don’t do NaNo to say I’ve done and wait til next year to do it again. For better or for worse, I write these things to become a published author. I realize that publication is emphemeral, that it won’t solve my problems or wash away my insecurities or get me into the cool kids club or stave off death or have wishes delievered to my mailbox every morning. I know. But just because something isn’t everything, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pursuing. And I don’t care how long it takes, how many phone calls I don’t return, how many papers I forget to grade, how much sleep I lose, I am going to finish the book and search, again, for an agent. So there.

I’ve got 50,454 words and a story I love. It won’t change my life, but it will make me happy (and when I say happy–I mean exactly that kind of happiness that is fleeting but all the same it is so grand to feel when you briefly catch hold of it). Sweet dreams to me. la-la-la-di-da-la…

Stuff in Space

Inspired by RadioLab, here is a question–if you were to gather things together for a space capsule, those “perfect” things to represent us, this human race, to send to the social scientists, artists, politicians, gossip columnists, et al of another planet, what would those things be? (And come on now, at least one of them has got to be a book…but which one?)

Perhaps (as I think about it more I may change my mind), I’d send the music of Mozart and Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Shakespeare is predictable but obligatory, don’t you think? A Thousand and One Arabian Nights? The Phantom Tollbooth or Peanuts comics? Guernica by Picasso? Every episode of RadioLab? Something to represent every culture in the world? Or just my own perspective? My mother’s art?

Or perhaps a recording of a child’s laugh, the taste of a tomato, the smell of coffee, the glare of sunlight off glass? Seeds or DNA? A woman’s pair of red dancing shoes and a veil? A box of crayons or a box of tools? Language CDs? A good internet connection?

I don’t know. What about you?

It’s the Sacrifice, Stupid.

Thoughts of virtue, sacrifice, and vows of poverty have been hanging about lately, and while I read about them in a context that is not about writing, I am certainly capable of making that leap. For the moment I’m interested in sacrifice…

and I’ll get to the point in a roundabout way.

One of my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers (from many moons ago) was so long good-looking that I couldn’t even say hello to him when we first met. I don’t think anyone that handsome had ever said hello to me first unless the conversation involved questions such as, “Can I take your order now?” or “Did you find everything okay.” Anyway, a few days and this out-of-my-league panic disappeared on the winds, because he soon became the weird guy who would be first in line to buy a bed of nails if one were on offer. As volunteers in Eastern Europe he believed we all had it too easy and that the only remedy for this was to search for ways to be miserable.

Now, there are people who forsake all their worldly goods for a cause or a belief. I admire and am intimidated by these people. There are people who have no worldly to give up because they have no opportunity to get them–hey, poverty is not a spiritual lifestyle. There are those people who play at being poor because they want to show how virtuous, righteous, or something-uous they are. Then there are the rest of us.

My solidly-middle-class-from-a-stable-family fellow PCV wanted to live a monastic-type life and there were several ways he went about it. I went to visit our growing-less-gorgeous-by-the-sacrifice PCV (let’s call him G), and two things about that visit I’ve never forgotten. Most doors between rooms in Bulgarian apartments (in my experience anyway) have a sheet of glass in them so that you have a doorframe with a big window. G had a door with a broken sheet of glass. Imagine a jagged sheet of glass as door. See the glittering edges that could go all the way through your body? Good. He hadd tossed a shirt over the mess instead of getting it repaired. This glass could have impaled a person. But he thought maybe he wouldnt’ get it fixed for a while because it didn’t seem right to spend the money on his door when he could give that money away. Well, yeah, but I suggested the door was dangerous (unless you like broken glass on a hinge), but he just shrugged and said something about the locals having much more dangerous lives. Yeah, maybe, but not on purpose!

The second thing–G decided to offer his guests grape juice. Fresh grape juice hand-squeezed by him. He stood at his sink and pushed grapes through a strainer, picked out the seeds and the skins, and after about 20 minutes of this had a few spoonfuls of juice. I actually tried to help, and let me say that fresh squeezed orange juice is a wonderful thing. Fresh squeezed grape juice is bound to have bits of skin from your knuckles thrown in. But he insisted this was more authentic. Nevermind that any Bulgarian would go to the corner shop and buy a box of grape juice–real, tasty, natural grape juice.

After standing next to a guy working up a sweat over getting the grape skins from the strainer (they clog it up!) and the only way out is through a door of broken glass–he’s not good-looking anymore. But is he a better person? Is he? Am I mired in my material-comforts lifestyle? Okay, I probably am, but making grape juice won’t solve that problem.

So…when is sacrifice worth it? My mother warned to be careful what you chose to sacrifice and for whom or it would lead to resentment (damn grapes). And how does this connect to writing? Maybe it doesn’t, except that I’m going to make it connect and pursuing a writer’s life (and not just for the month of November) does find sacrifices along the way.

There are friendships I haven’t pursued, sleep (and probably health) I have lost, focus in the present that has gone a tad askew. But I want to write so much that I don’t really care–maybe then they aren’t sacrifices. My family sacrifices–they lose a certain amount of attention and suffer my bad moods (My writing is terrible and why are you driving me crazy?). I tell lies. (What did you do last night? Nothing.) I fish for compliments. (I can’t write! I shouldn’t be doing this! No, dear, of course you can write. You’re a good writer.) I obsess. (My word cound 43,204. My word count is 43,982. My word count is 44,306.)

And the great conclusion that will wrap this up all pretty-like is where? I’ve no idea anymore. I lost that ribbon a few paragraphs ago. But I will at least ask, what do you sacrifice for the writing life?

When is prolific prolific?

I heard an interview with Joyce Carol Oates and she said something along the lines of how she didn’t see herself as prolific. She really didn’t think she wrote that much. I wanted to reach through my headphones and shake her. She must think the rest of us are lazy bums. Just goes to show you that know matter what you do, it is never enough.

Avoiding Reality

This NaNo novel (currently at 43k!) is taking something of a fairy tale turn. I blame the websites Endicott Studio and In the Labyrinth. Well, I can never write a story straight–meaning that I can’t keep everything in the real world. Odd things wind their way into my stories and I can’t take them out without unraveling the whole thing. But in this story, the otherworldy elements fight to be stronger than they ever have before.

The other day I got into a conversation with a coworker, M, about fantasy and science-fiction (so often lumped together, which is another conversation). We are both fans (though I am only recently allowing myself to enjoy the genres again), and I was telling M how I’d read an article about how adults who read Harry Potter are avoiding reality and can’t grow up. M and I thought that was ridiculous, but another coworker, J, overheard and jumped in to the conversation. She thougth that was true and she had an excellent example of someone using fantasy to regress to an idealized childhood.

Can’t a person use anything to avoid growing up? But then, perhaps we have to define what a grown up is. Well, fantasy probably is easy to use to label a person who has certain issues. It stands out more, perhaps, than some other interests that are more common or acceptable. But plenty of fantasy is more realistic about life and death than many so-called realistic novels. I’m talking about the books by writers, not by hacks or committees who think a quick knock off will make a buck (another conversation there).

Another argument in defense of fantasy–ever notice that what you feel passionate for is meaningful? But what another person feels passion for is shallow or misguided or unrewarding? If it doesn’t speak to you, there is often a tendency to that anyone who likes it is ignorant or strange or wrong. My passion is giving meaning to my life–your passion is making you look like a fool. Right?

We didn’t finish the conversation. J will always think fantasy readers are avoiding the real world. M and I will always think people who don’t read fantasy are missing out.

This current novel isn’t a fantasy though. I think the label is–magical realism. My only problem with that label is that some people think that if you are white and writing magical realism, then you are trying to write like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende (both of whom I do like to read) and that if you are a white American, you are an idiot and bad writer to do so (I’ve read this sentiment in book reviews although if my life depended on it I couldn’t tell you which ones anymore). As if only South Americans can write magical realism and get away with it. I’m not sure who that should annoy more. I don’t write like either of them. Couldn’t if I tried. I’m a white girl who grew up Catholic working class in the boondocks of central Florida. And I write like that.

So, back to the story at hand…my main character has been given a task and she must complete the task to get what she thinks she wants–in this case, a particular man. The task is more difficult than she imagined, filled with dangers and distractions, and the coveted object is not what it seems. Oh, I guess I better go write and figure out where she is right now and where she is going next. And can I help it if the house she’s in is bigger on the inside than on the outside (damn you, Doctor Who and Russell T Davies!)?