The Solitary Pursuit

Writing is an alone experience.

I don't say lonely because, I suppose, some people might be built best for time alone and might never feel a moment of loneliness.

That said, there's no denying that it's a solitary, isolating pursuit.

Novel writing, particularly, tends to isolate. So long between inception and any kind of feedback.

The novel has always been the holy grail to me. Being a writer meant being a novelist.

But in the last couple years, thanks to a friend's influence, I've occasionally written short stories targeted at contests.

The discipline of trying to tell a compelling story in a confined space, and to do it on a deadline, has been very good for me.

I have, for a long time, thought I could write, that I had a decent facility with words on paper. What I lacked was the ability to tell a compelling story (a far more important skill). Chasing the short story contests has helped with that.

The contests have also helped with the isolation. In a relatively short span, you can conceive a story--often based on a promt--complete it, and get some kind of feedback . . . even if it's only that you didn't place.

And, occasionally, you just might perform well enough to get happy feedback. This, too, is a cure for the isolation. And it is wonderful fuel for the long, silent road to a finished novel.

Try it and see if it doesn't make your writing better and make you a happier writer.

In service of this little tid-bit of advice, I'll be posting links to contests now and again.

Writing Contests

I've made attempts at four different flash fiction writing contests* in the last couple months. The process has been fun and extremely challenging.

Two of the contests had a word limit of 500, which seems a comfortable fit, but one, The Pearl, had a 250 word limit. I made two attempts at the problem (writing two completely different stories) and failed miserably, even after re-writing one of them multiple times. 250 words is a painfully constricting barrier. Despite the fact that I've read published stories of that length that worked (and a writer friend of mine wrote a very fine horror story for the same contest), I'm going to make an official announcement here... It's impossible to tell a good story in 250 words. It has to be impossible, 'cause I can't effing do it.

More about the mechanics of the flash fiction contest world in the next entry...




*Writer's Weekly, Reading Writers, Tattoo Highway, The Pearl

Character Naming Tip

Actually, this blog entry should be called a character naming anti-tip, because it starts with the pain I'm having renaming my characters after I've lived with quickly-chosen names far too long.

During an in-class critique of my last submission from my novel, several people agreed that they were having problems with two of the character names, Aidan and Devlin. Apparently, the shape of these two words is too similar and causes confusion, however subtle, for readers.

The trouble, from my side, is that I've come to know these characters with the names they carry. Forcing new ones on them turns them into impostors. I'm sure, once I've lived with some newly-chosen names for a while, I'll get comfortable, but for now, it makes me feel like a liar.

Don't do a careless job of naming the characters in your novel. You'll only pay for it later.

Writing Tip: Put Your Body Where Your Mouth Is

Writing offers us the opportunity to explore locations, emotions, and behaviors we will never experience in life. We get to climb mountains whose continents we won't ever actually touch, turn the tables--in very public ways, if we choose--on lovers who've hurt us, and conduct racy, skillful affairs with near-perfect (but not too-perfect) paramours.

But that's not all the opportunity that writing offers us.

A few years back, I was a member of a small writing group that met weekly for reading/critique. Somewhere along the way, the group of us decided that there were a handful of experiences that might work to our benefit as writers.

Sad to say, torrid illicit affairs didn't make the cut.

One of the things that did make the cut, however, was to witness an autopsy.

One of our members at the time was friends with a recently published mystery novelist and managed, through her, to get us an appointment at the coroner's office, where they agreed to put us through the same scared-straight process that drunk drivers face.

The day of our appointment, we were ushered us into a small meeting room, where we watched a video documentary detailing the adventures of various unfortunate drunk drivers.

In the worst case, a woman at a bar had accepted the offer of a ride from a would-be one-night-stand. Soon after they left the bar on his rocket-like Kawasaki, with her hugging him close from behind, the driver took the wrong half of a fork in the road.

On the good side was a freeway onramp, on the bad, a cul-de-sac. Fifty yards and ninety-plus-miles-per-hour later, he slammed into a brick wall, turning himself into a stew and cutting the top half of his passenger’s head off.

The officer on the tape described the pain of explaining to the dead woman’s husband how she had come to her end.

After the sobering film, we were given white scrubs and masks, which we put on over our street clothes, and then ushered through a cooled room filled with occupied body bags.

For a minute or so, we stood by a steel door leading to the ‘operating’ room. The group of us was nervous, and some of us were actually willing to admit it.

When we entered the large white autopsy room, we came on three stainless tables aligned perpendicular to the wall. Atop them lay three corpses in varying stages of their final physical exam. One was a Vietnam Vet who’d overdosed in his apartment and gone unmissed for several long, hot days. Another was a Santa Ana gang member who’d been shot multiple times and left to die on the beach. The third was an 80-plus-year-old woman who’d fallen in the tub, broken her hip and later died of an embolism.

You might believe that watching CSI or reading bleak horror novels would tell you enough to understand this experience—and perhaps to write about it—but you’d be wrong. If you’ve got even the slightest bit of humanity to you, there is a somber gravity to a room like this and its activities. Nothing about that feeling is effectively conveyed by the carnival act that is CSI and every novel I’ve read that touches on the subject. Even when the basic mechanical details come out right—the behavior and the tools and the smells are described correctly—the feeling doesn’t.

The point of all this rambling, I guess, is to encourage you to use every excuse you can to extend your experience. Let the fact that you call yourself a writer drive you to embrace adventures you might otherwise avoid (or maybe just ignore).

I’m not one who believes you have to have experienced something to write about it sensibly. But there is no doubt that the living of a thing will flavor your writing. And, almost inevitably, that will improve your stories.

Writing Tip: Look It Up. Write It Down

When I was a freshman in college, taking a 200-level English composition class, my professor was a curmudgeonly hard-ass*. Yes, he was a good-hearted curmudgeon, but we didn't get that 'til much later.

After we students had delivered our first essay--written under the gun as a 45-minute in-class assignment--he returned our graded papers with the dramatic assessment, "I see there's one person in this class who wants to pass."

Having gotten a strong 'A' and some nice praise from my previous writing professor, I assumed I was that one.

Wrong.

My essay earned me a 'D.'

The one person who wanted to pass proudly accepted her 'C.'


If this had been the first response to my writing in the world of high academia, I would have been badly shaken. As it was, the 'D' unnerved me and forced me to rethink where I stood.

Anyway, this is all just a long-ish preamble to set the stage and the tone for the real tip.

In addition to the writing assignments, this class required us to read many broad-ranging essays from prominent writers (John Updike, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and many, many more). Early in the semester, as we were discussing one of these essays, our professor stopped, pointed to one of the students--let's call her Gena--and said, "What does the word cleigenmeiser** mean?"

After doing an uncomfortable cheek-shift in her chair, Gina said meekly, "I don't know."

From the look on the professor's face, she might as well have relieved herself on the aged tile floor. With a resigned sigh, he pointed to someone else and repeated the question. The response, predictably, was similar.

One more time, he glanced around the room for a victim. My only thought was, how the hell can I make myself invisible?

After a third student embarrassed himself, the professor said, "The word is here in the essay. Right here on the page. If you don't know what it means, how can you possibly understand what you're reading?"

It's all very obvious, I know, but there wasn't one of us who had done the obvious thing.

The professor continued. "If you see a word you don't understand, Look. It. Up. Write the definition in the margins if you have to. And keep going back to that definition until you've got it down."

The notion of avoiding embarrassment at his hands was strong motivation to follow that advice, and I have defaced many books in the wake of that lecture.

Anyway, this memory came charging back last night when someone in our writing class mentioned that she had no idea what a word in one of the stories meant. I wanted to shout out, "Look it up. Write it down." But God gave me just enough manners to hold off 'til I could write this blog post.

*Sadly, I can neither remember nor find his name.

** I have no idea what word he pointed out. But the point is that it was as foreign to everyone in that room as I'd expect cleigenmeiser to be to you now.