When Your Characters Speak to You
Posted on | August 15, 2010 | 2 Comments
This week, I’ve done very little writing. Well, that’s not exactly true, I’ve written sales pages, emails, comments, tweets, posts and the like, but not done a lot of creative writing. This is my first blog post on any of my many blogs in quite a while, and, besides notes, I’ve not move far forward with the novel. It happens sometimes. Is it writer’s block? No. Absolutely not. Besides the fact that I have said many times I don’t think there really is such a thing, my mind has been swirling with ideas the whole time. Sometimes it’s best to let them swirl (as long as you’re not using that as another excuse not to get stuff done) until they coalesce into a form that’s manageable.
So what are the ideas I’ve been riding along, Dorothy-like, in the storm of my mind? Well, let me tell you. I suspected the novel would be dark, but one of the characters just decided to have an affair with someone very inappropriate and two others are going to die quite unexpectedly, all in delightfully dark and twisted ways. I hadn’t expected a lot of death in this novel, and now there will be at least two bodies. You will grieve for at least one of them.
Writers often talk about the point where the characters start telling you what they are doing, what they want, start moving in directions seemingly completely outside your plans for them. It’s an exciting point to get to and I say 1) it is predictable and you can cause it to happen, and 2) they really aren’t outside of you moving your pen at all. Both of these things are caused by what I have been saying all along about the process of writing:
If you imagine the circumstances of the people, places and events, using all five of your senses, and dream yourself through the story, you will be feeding your subconscious mind with information and with a command to be creative. Your subconscious loves this particular command and will bubble what you’ve fed to it, churn it, cook it and feed it back to you in ways that will surprise you. It will really seem as if the characters are talking to you, telling you that what you planned won’t work, giving you suggestions or demands. Your subconscious has created these people to the point where it can’t tell they are fiction. Your subconscious doesn’t know what fiction is. To it, they really are real, perceived beings and circumstances and anything that don’t make sense, the things you planned that aren’t logical within the world you’ve created, won’t be tolerated by the reality you have allowed your inner mind to grow and experience.
So I’ve been being very productive. I just haven’t been writing. That will come again very soon. I can already hear Kyle’s mother telling me to stop judging her.
[Remember, for all the posts that deal with my new novel, click on the tag Old Magic.]
Getting Started
Posted on | August 4, 2010 | 2 Comments
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I have a habit, bad or good, I’ve no idea, where, once I’ve written something, I read over it several times, almost obsessively, trying to imagine what some other reader would think of it. I’m not sure why I do this, and I’ve always felt at least a little silly about it, but there it is.
Last night I finished the first draft of the prologue of my novel. It’s not long as prologues go, and from experience the chance that it will end up exactly the way it is in the final product are slim, but after I’d written the last moment, which I had been quite excited to get to, I immediately started reading it from the top. Each time I went through it I tweaked a bit, changing a description, adding detail, correcting a word or a spelling, but the tweaking wasn’t why I reread it.
As I said, I had been very excited to get to that last moment while writing it out and I think I wanted to assure myself that I had led up to it properly, that it was sufficiently startling. Getting to that moment was why I’d actually started writing at all. I’ve been doing a lot of background work for the novel, imagining people and places, deciding on conflicts, living through the cycles and thrusts of the story, both viscerally and philosophically, but the starting off point, the thing that propelled the story into motion had been missing. Last night I realized that I had it, that it had been there for a few days without my knowing it, so I sat down and wrote what lead up to that moment. In the process, my two main characters started breathing a bit more.
As I write, when I write like that, when the story is becoming complete somewhere in my subconscious, I know where it’s headed (of course I do) but on some odd level I experience the writing as if I were reading someone else’s story for the first time and I want to see how it turns out. That’s not completely accurate, but I’m not sure I can describe it exactly. I can say that, when I’ve done good preliminary groundwork building, writing it down is, or at least can be, a thrilling experience. Perhaps one of the reasons I reread a piece so often right after I’ve finished it is to keep that feeling alive longer before it inevitably fades.
In any case, as I reread it, I decided that I liked it. That it is a fine beginning, as far as it goes. That it nicely sets things up, but in a way that isn’t obvious. I don’t think that moment, the one I was so keen to get to, is nearly as startling as I’d thought it would be, but I also now think it needn’t be.
Now I need to complete the groundwork for the next bit, which is rapidly getting to the point in my head where it must also be put down.
(To see all the posts dealing with the novel Old Magic, click here: http://www.tipsonwriting.net/blog/tag/old-magic/ )
What I’m Reading – American Gods
Posted on | July 30, 2010 | No Comments
A video review of the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Read more books. Tell people about the books you’ve reading. Talk about them. It’s good for your heart. It’s good for your soul. It’s just good.
This is Just Terrible! – An Important Part of the Writing Process
Posted on | July 26, 2010 | 6 Comments
When Steve and I write together, at least once during every project Steve will lament, “There’s no story, there’s nothing going on, there’s no conflict, it’s not funny!” He’s only partly joking when he does it. No matter how much thought, imagination, preparation and care we’ve put into the project, there is often a point where one or both of us think it’s just not good and just not repairable. Thankfully, we’re both aware of this and one of us will remind the other that it’s all just part of the process, so just shut up and get on with it. The moment usually passes fairly quickly.
It’s easier to believe in and get caught up in that thought process when you’re writing on your own, however. I know. I went through it this morning while working on Old Magic. I have been working a lot on the characters, especially the main fellow, whose name is Samuel. I’ve been building him from the ground up, spending time with him, getting to know him. He’s a little more irascible now than I imagined he would be but in spite of that, I like him. This morning I sat down to type out some notes of things that had occurred to me in the last day or so that I hadn’t yet gotten down and started getting a little ahead of myself. (Yes, I often do what I teach my students to look out for. I know these things because I’ve experienced them.) I started worrying how a I was going to logically build to a specific plot point that was large, necessary and important to the point of the whole story. And I thought, “This story won’t work.”
I sat back, disgruntled. (Have you ever been gruntled?)
Then I remembered that I wasn’t there, yet, that it was too soon to worry about that and by the time I was there I will have done sufficient work living in the world that the thrust of the story will simply unfold before me. I got over myself and went back to the keyboard.
I wonder, though, how many writers get to that point and really think it means something other than that they’ve gotten to that point in the process, the point where they’re questioning their sanity for pursuing the project, and let it stop them. I wonder how many very worthwhile projects are simply abandoned before they’ve had the opportunity to breathe with a vibrant life of their own because the writer had never been told to simply thank those thoughts of self-doubt, declare them a crucial part of the process and get back to work.
That little moment of drama in my writing session today, that doubt that I’ll be able to connect the dots, will likely seep down into my subconscious like nitrogen-rich water and fertilize a whole garden of rich fruit for me to encounter after turning a corner one day while strolling through my modern day fictionalized Los Angeles in my mind. I won’t try to dictate now what I’ll discover there. But I’m very excited to discover it.
Make Writing a Job
Posted on | July 23, 2010 | No Comments
I’ve talked before about scheduling writing, treating it as a job, but even I forget my own advice sometimes. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been pining for the day when I had the luxury to write the book that has been forming in my head for several months. When I got the idea, I jotted down several notes, then went away, sad that I had to wait to write it.
Then I got around to setting up a time management system and just for the heck of it decided to put “Write Old Magic” on it for an hour every morning. (Okay, not quite “just of the heck of it.” Finding time to write was one of the reasons I wanted the system in the first place.) I’ve been keeping to that time commitment since then. I’m not a slave to it, of course; yesterday I had a breakfast meeting at the time of that hour, so I moved the hour down. This morning I had to cut it to around 45 minutes, but did those 45 minutes diligently.
I started writing this novel just like I recommend starting a short story, by deciding what I needed and imagining the specifics of those people, places and events.
Now I have several pages of notes and am starting to get to that wonderful point when I’m thinking about the story spontaneously during the day and night, where my subconscious is starting to have fun with me and flicking out little bits of wonderful data about my people, their culture, what they look like and how they interact. Some of it is going in the direction I had planned, I do have a very specific theme for this book, but some of it is taking some delightful (and a bit delightfully dark) turns and entering in to areas of the psyche I hadn’t realized would be involved.
Another thing I like to do is just get the ideas down, the thoughts, the imaginings, then look at them and see if they are hackneyed, cliche, un-thought-out, illogical, etc., then ask myself questions. “If this is true, how can this also be true?” or “Okay, that’s been done so many times since the invention of myth that it looks like a Xerox copy. How can I turn that on it’s ear?”
I either answer the questions as soon as they’re asked, even having a discussion with myself on paper about them, or let them ferment a bit. The answers to those questions, or the discussions I have with myself about them, are usually the very things that make the story rich for me, and, hopefully, will make it alive for a reader.
I love the delightful obsession, this passion, when it comes over me and I really love that I have the ability to engender it. And it becomes this passion simply because I treat it like a job.
Putting Off Procrastination
Posted on | July 21, 2010 | 10 Comments
Writers often find the most creative excuses not to write. We will use anything from messy desks to low biorhythms to avoid getting down to business. Creativity is fragile, we think, and we mustn’t jostle it. I am as guilty of this as anyone. And I know that creativity isn’t fragile at all, it’s hale and robust, practically indestructible if you feed it well, but thinking of it as dainty is a convenient myth when I’m looking for an excuse.
I check my email. I check to see if anyone has responded to any of my Facebook or Twitter posts. I think of something clever to post on Twitter that will also show up on Facebook, which will give me an excuse to go back and check both of them again in a few minutes. I drink the last of the coffee and must make more. I fuss with my computer settings, telling myself that, in doing so, I’m making myself more productive. I fuss with my calendar settings, telling myself the same thing. (Excuses are elastic and adaptable, it seems.)
I have had two conversations in the past week about this habit of procrastination. It wasn’t until the first one that I recalled the length of time I have been a willing slave to it. As a grade school kid, I avoided picking up my text books, avoided sitting down to do my math or history homework, until it was often simply too late.
Once I remembered this, I started looking at what the mechanism was and it seems I want to avoid anything that feels, however irrationally, like it will be too difficult or complicated. Also, I fear doing something that seems it might be what is known as mind-numbingly boring or repetitious. I also notice that when I dive into something, no matter how complicated it is (or how boring), I am very good at figuring it out and getting it done, so the thoughts that come up to trigger my procrastination have little or no basis in reality. Imagine that. What a surprise.
With this new observational viewpoint, I am now beginning to be able to put a task on my daily calendar and know I will get to it and get it done. For example, I’ve been whining for months that I have a new idea for a novel that I wanted to write, but had no time to actually write it. I went on and on about how busy I was and won’t it be nice when I finally have the luxury of time to sit down and be creative rather than spin my wheels making a living. Well, now I have it on my daily calendar: “One hour a day, work on Old Magic”. I also have on my calendar a half hour three days a week to write blog posts.
Now, when the old thoughts come up, so does an annoying green reminder that in five minutes I need to be working on my book and I open the document and start working. It’s not brilliant every morning, but there’s no possibility of brilliance showing up if I’m not doing anything at all, so I let it be ugly and mundane and pedestrian and keep writing. It seems to be working.
(A nice side benefit of this is that, now that I actually am doing what I dream of doing, I have no more excuse not to be doing the things that make money. I don’t need to avoid them in order to have an reason to put off my creative writing. It all feeds on itself.)
As you can see, this is the half hour that I’m scheduled to write a blog post. I’m about to mark “completed” on the calendar entry.
Now I have to check my email, Facebook and Twitter pages.
Fireworks
Posted on | July 3, 2010 | No Comments
Photo by http://www.epicfireworks.com/
My writing partner Steve’s favorite two holidays aren’t Christmas or Thanksgiving, they’re Hollowe’en and 4th of July. Both offer an element of mischief (good, clean, fun, American mischief, of course) and both offer some wonderful spectacle.
4th of July in the United States is a time of celebrating our independence, (it was from England, for those not keeping track) but it is also a time of community. We get together in parks, on beaches, in high school athletic yards, to sit on blankets, eat bar-b-que, drink beer and, most importantly and to the point, watch fireworks, those colorful, loud displays of concussive excitement that explode exuberantly over our heads.
There is something amazing in the wonderful, bright displays. Even a simple, less elaborate show is wonderful to behold. One with some money and brilliant creative minds behind it can be breathtaking, inspiring, quite literally earth-shaking.
So why am I writing about our annual celebration of fire on a creative writing blog? Because I truly believe that creativity in any form can be just as breathtaking, inspiring and earth-shaking, in almost as literal a way, as a 4th of July show. When you paint with all your heart and soul and a viewer stands in front of your painting, surrounded by other gallery-goers and other works of art, and is held speechless by your creation, you have created your own fireworks display.
When you write with the inspiration of your entire subconscious or “other-than-conscious” life and a reader falls into your world, only waking back up to reality when the supper burns on the stove, you have created a colorful, loud display of concussive excitement that exploded exuberantly inside their head.
Bring your 4th of July to the rest of your year. Create fireworks where ever and when ever you can. Be loud and colorful. Be excited.
And on this 4th of July weekend, enjoy the fireworks, both real and figurative.
Geoff Hoff~
Co-presenter of the creative writing course On Writing a Short Story.
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Interview with Terrie Wurzbacher about Creativity
Posted on | June 2, 2010 | 1 Comment
Last week, I was interviewed by Terrie Wurzbacker of Getting Unstuck, LLC. We had a fairly rollicking time, talking about creativity, the process of writing and writer’s myths.
We also digress into some odd and interesting subjects.
You can also listen to it over on Terrie’s blog, From the Desk of Terrie Wurzbacher
~Geoff Hoff
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Blogging – Whys and Wherefores
Posted on | May 18, 2010 | 9 Comments
I came to the Internet fairly early. I was on several of the early bulletin board services with my very slow modem back during the dark ages before the Internet was invented. Then I joined AOL. How exciting was that? (Yes, I still have my AOL account all these many years later. I have my own company email account but enough people from my life have that AOL address I just keep the service going.)
Steve is the entrepreneurial visionary of our company. When we started writing together, he saw the potential of the Internet in a way quite distinct from the simply communication and information device that I had been using it for. We wanted to tap into that power. We also wanted to take charge of our creative lives instead of relying on others to get our stuff out to the world. We created an on-line Amazon affiliate store, then created what eventually became our best-selling novel Weeping Willow, which was, initially, an on-line serial.
As proud of it as we were, the Amazon store went nowhere, but Weeping Willow took off in a delightful way. We created a forum so we could interact with and get to know our readers. They were always delighted when something that we’d discussed on the forum ended up in the story. The forum was over-run by spammers, so we shut it down, but by then we’d been bitten by the bug.
When blogging first started to become mainstream, rather than simply a way for people to make the minutia of their lives public, I set up a blog on one of the free services. Then I found out how to set my own blog up and created http://www.ThatWouldBeMe.net – a place to write (mostly) humorous essays, sort of in the vein of the stuff David Sedaris was doing live on NPR. Steve also put up a blog. When we started teaching creative writing, we put this blog up to connect with our students about the process of writing.
We put up the blogs to communicate with our current audience. Quite without our noticing it, and quite without any master plan, these blogs have absolutely increased our audience, both for the fiction stuff and our creative writing courses. We realized we had something, here.
People began to notice that I was getting my name out to the world in large part because of the blogs. Blogging is powerful. You should have one!
~Geoff Hoff
Geoff Talks about blogging live at BloggingForWriters.net/call.
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Be a Tree
Posted on | May 9, 2010 | 6 Comments
There is an exercise that is often taught in acting classes, and most actors hate it. They not only hate it, they deride it and spend countless years after their initial training parodying it and using it as an example of why it’s completely useless to study acting. That exercise is to “Be a Tree.”
It’s an exercise that I actually like, although I teach it slightly differently, I think, than some do.
- Stand or sit. Standing is probably better, but it isn’t really important.
- Shut your eyes or keep them open. Actually, keeping them open might work better for various reasons, but again, it isn’t really important.
- Feel your roots. Here’s where it gets squidgy for some actors. “I don’t have any roots,” they think. Feel them anyway. Feel them spreading out into the ground beneath you. Feel them pulling water and nutrients from the soil. Feel the moisture moving up them into your trunk.
- Feel your trunk. Same as above. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have one. Feel the rough bark on your surface, the more spongy interior that is pulling the water from your roots and sending it up to your branches and leaves, that is taking the energy from your leaves down to your roots so they can grow further out into the soil.
- Feel your branches and leaves. Feel the warm sunlight shining on your leaves and the energy you pull from it and send down your trunk to your roots.
- Feel the breeze moving your leaves, your branches. The gentle sway it causes.
- Notice the squirrel running up your trunk and down your branches. Notice the family of birds there. Hear the chicks begging the parents for food.
- Stay with this for a while.
Why do I like this exercise? Besides that I’m odd and think it’s fun (I once pretended to be a salmon swimming upstream to spawn), it also opens up your ability to imagine, to experience that which is, by definition, foreign to you. As a writer, you will often require of yourself that you develop and make real something you haven’t and couldn’t experience. Your ability to imagine it fully and viscerally is vital. The more you practice this, the easier it is when you need it.
So, be a tree.
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.
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