Writing

Christmas Stories

2011-11-29T06:44:00.001-08:00

I've spent the better part of 2011 immersed in this little town I created in north Texas and now, with the holidays, I find that my interest in further editing and polishing is virtually non-existent. I'm going to have to declare the thing finished and submit it to a publisher. That will be a whole other set of posts.

In the meantime, I've been playing with the idea of a short story set in Cambridge, Texas, with all the same characters, involving Christmas. The whole short-story medium has never appealed to me as a writer. Why use 5,000 words when you can use 50,000 to tell the same tale? On the other hand, it might be fun to try.

It will be easy to set the story well outside the timeline of my first Cambridge novel, which takes place in the springtime, but I've also started thinking about a second novel with the same characters and place, which means I want to be sure I don't limit myself or create confusion in my own head by having these characters do something at Christmas that will interfere with my plans for them next year.

The thing about Christmas stories is that you can be as soppy and sentimental as you want. You can include angels and talking animals and precocious orphans and get away with it. You can do things at the elementary school's Christmas pageant that you just can't do at the 4th of July Parade through the middle of town, even if the same people are involved and you're going for the same sniffly poignancy.

I'm finding this vast array of options a little intimidating. I think I can either have a talking sheep in the manger or an orphan child looking for parents, but probably not both. Unless the sheep talks to the orphan...?

Character Names

2011-10-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

You learn a lot about a character from his name and the wrong name makes it harder to get comfortable with a character. There are some stereotypes in literature and life that help a lot when you're writing, especially with secondary characters. Leonard is unlikely to be the star quarterback on the football team. Tiffany is probably not a research chemist in her 50's.

Names follow trends and even a character's age is indicated, subtly, by their name. I've been using this site => http://www.momswhothink.com/baby-girl-names/baby-girl-names-a-to-z-listing.html <= to find names that are age-appropriate for my characters. It tells you what the top 100 baby names were for girls and boys in any given decade. A baby born in the 60's like my main character wouldn't be named Madison or Tiffany. She would be named Karen or Lisa.

I was astonished to find both my name (Christine) and my sister's name (Kathleen) on the list for the 60's. We've both spent our whole lives thinking we had very unusual names and I've never actually met another Kathleen. It's a good resource.

In my first draft, I named my main character Bonnie and have been doubting the selection ever since I started. It's not a common name in my life either. In fact, the only Bonnie I have ever known was a fantastic little Cairn Terrier who lit up my world for nearly twenty years. But it's on the 1960's list, too, so I'm going to quit worrying about it.

Changing a character's name partway through the first draft is messy and requires diligent proof-reading, which isn't something I'm particularly good at, so I strongly recommend sticking with the names you start with at least until you've finished getting the story down. I learned this by doing it wrong. The first few friends who read my finished first draft noticed that Dave became Ted for a few pages in Chapter 7 and that I either had too many pilots on The Shark's small commuter plane or Dustin became Roger and then switched back to Dustin mid-flight. It was the second one. Very embarrassing for me and distracting for them. And probably confusing for poor Dustin.

Another bit of good advice I learned by doing it wrong is to be careful with giving names to very minor characters. In Chapter 3, I have the warehouse manager drop in for a very short conversation with Dave, and I went to the trouble to give him a name and a personality. He never showed up again, so it was confusing for my first readers who thought he was more important than he was. I could have achieved the same goal by simply referring to him as the warehouse manager and having Dave call him by his first name in conversation.

That's the main reason you want names for people. If they're going to talk, it's easier to identify them by name than with generic terms. On the other hand, you get tired of writing even their names in long spans of dialog. I have found that the easiest conversations to write are those between one man and one woman. You can do a lot with "he said" and "she said", which doesn't work when you have two women talking.

Maybe that's why so many authors write romance novels. Because the dialog is easier to write. Huh. I'll have to think about that.

The Main Character

2011-10-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, I just wanted to write the sort of book that I want to read and sometimes have trouble finding. I knew I wanted to write about a single woman who cared more about her job than about finding Mr. Right, so it's not a romance novel for sure. I knew that this woman would have to be in her 40's for this to make any sense at all to me, as that's about when I realized I couldn't seriously commit to a relationship because I was already married to my job.

Side Note: In the nearly 20 years I was married to my job, it took me to all the great vacation spots...Fort Lauderdale, Boulder, Niagara Falls, Charlotte, Waikiki, London, Penang...but like any marriage, there was some drudgery, too. Buffalo, Birmingham, Houston, Denver, Iowa City, Raleigh, Baltimore...to name a few. Even those were wonderful experiences filled with great people, so it's not really surprising that I forgot to get married and have a family.

I set about changing my priorities in my own life around age 40, which will make a great book someday, but first I think it will be interesting to explore some of those changes through the eyes of a fictional character -- mostly because that sounds less like work. This is my hobby, after all, and no one is paying me to do it. If it's not fun, why bother?

So I knew my main character would be a 40-ish woman with a high-powered career who wants to get a little balance in her life. I didn't want this character to be me, however, so I gave her two sons that she adopted later in life, which is based on my sister's life, and a job involving accounting. I don't much like numbers and, frankly, they don't like me, but I think I can write about someone who speaks Finance with a little help from my friends. The same friends who help me with the money decisions and balance sheets in real life. You know who you are.

By giving her two college-age sons, I've automatically given her a sense of humor. I don't know anyone who has successfully raised children who didn't learn how to laugh at themselves and the world around them. I like her already.

I think she needs a supportive, not to say interfering, family that she's close to. An overbearing big sister will be easy to write. I am one. And she'll definitely have an amazing mom, who is graceful and elegant and smart and a little wry, like my own mom. I feel sorry for people who weren't raised by my mom, and I want that same fun childhood for my main character.

The story starts with Bonnie (that's her name) running away from home. Fortunately, stuff happens almost immediately that causes her sons, sister and mom to follow her. Reinventing your life is all very well, but it's better if you get to keep the parts you like.

Values in Conflict

2011-10-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

In this month's e-zine, which is always worth reading and usually filled with valuable insight that affects my writing, Randy Ingermanson writes about creating tension and conflict in fiction by identifying each character's core values and putting those values into conflict -- either within the person or between multiple people.

The people in my novel-in-progress, Town Hall, are so real to me that it seems like I should be able to identify their core values from the words that have already been written, rather than going back and putting values into the characters that didn't exist in the first draft. Then, once I've identified those core values, my story will be better if I can highlight the conflict between values in each of the climactic scenes. I think.

The main character, Bonnie, should be the one I know the best, but I'm finding it difficult to complete the sentence "Nothing is more important than_____" for Bonnie. I started to say her children, but that's a trite and over-simplified answer. I think Bonnie cares most about predictability and transparency. She hates not knowing what is going to happen or feeling that something is going on behind the scenes. She thinks she is a champion of Truth for its own sake but, in reality, she is more comfortable when she is in control and it's impossible to feel you are in control when you are constantly beset by surprises and unexpected events.

I'm not sure this counts as a core value in the sense that Randy Ingermanson means it, but it is certainly a source of tension that runs throughout the story. At first, Bonnie is excited about starting her new life because she knows exactly what it will be like and what will happen. As soon as the first unexpected conversation takes place, long before she realizes there are deeper secrets and hidden agendas, she starts to get nervous.

Since her whole mission in life, or at least in this phase of her life, has been to find and embrace her own happily-ever-after, it's worthwhile to consider that she doesn't seem to be (really) looking for an easy or comfortable life -- as long as it is predictably hard or uncomfortable.

Now that I've identified that particular bit of tension and conflict, I think I'll be able to highlight it in the second draft and make the whole story more powerful.

10 Tips for Aspiring Writers

2011-10-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

1. Keep writing. Write all the time.

2. When you’re not writing, read the sorts of books or stories that you want to write. Every genre has a different tone and pace. Every writer organizes chapters and writes dialog a little differently. As you’re reading, pay attention to these details and it’ll be easy to find your style.

3. Despite what they taught you in school, it is okay to start a sentence with “and” or “but” when writing fiction, and it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition. Write the way you talk, not the way they taught you to write in school.

4. Write down great ideas for stories or characters or essays, or even just great combinations of words, whenever you think of them. I carry a small notebook in my purse that is filled with random thoughts, alongside grocery lists and the model number of my printer because I can never remember it when I’m at Office Depot and need ink. In my extra bedroom, I have a huge cedar chest that is full of these notebooks. (I’ve been doing this for a long time.) When I get stuck and need some inspiration, I pull out a notebook at random and begin to read. There is always something cool there that will help me. For example, yesterday I was writing a 1000-word essay for my writing group and I needed a few words of advice for an old person to give the bride at a wedding reception. I was completely blank. Could not think of any slightly negative, completely random words to start this conversation. I dove into the trunk, pulled out an old notebook, and the fourth or fifth page said, “Bad luck follows bad choices,” which was absolutely perfect for the conversation I had in mind, since my goal was for the bride to then burst into tears and run out of the room.

5. Get into a writing group. My group is actually just a few friends who all aspire to write fiction but make our livings with other things. Every week, one of us sends out a “prompt” which is just three random words or concepts. The exercise is to write 1000 words that uses all of those key words. Then we compare essays, and we are always astonished at how we used the different ideas. You can do this by yourself, but it’s more fun with writerly friends. (Our prompt last week was "camera, tears, yellow", so naturally I wrote about a wedding.) There are some great discussion groups for writers on Facebook, if you need a place to start.

6. If you have something written that you want to have published, send it to a publisher. Start collecting rejection notices now so you can learn from them and become a better writer. And, you just might get published.

7. Don’t close yourself off from writing opportunities that are not your “dream job”. I have always wanted to write fiction, and I’ve written a lot of it, but I’ve never been paid for a single word. (Might partially be because I’m afraid to risk rejection, so no one has ever read my stories.) I started out in my career as a technical writer designing training manuals for software. Then, I switched to consulting documentation and proposals. Now, I have one book on Amazon and two more coming out in the next two months – all of which are business how-to books. I have been paid for my writing, and for talking about writing, for nearly 20 years, but when I started, I thought the technical writing gig was temporary. I was sure that I’d be a famous novelist before I turned thirty.

8. Ask questions. Don’t hesitate to talk to every writer you meet about your goals and dreams. Writers are extremely generous with their time and advice.

9. Read books about writing. You'll be amazed how reading a book about how to write dialog, for instance, makes you want to write dialog. Maybe it's the temptation to try what you've just learned, maybe it's the sense that now you'll write better...I don't know. I just know it works for me.

10. Set goals for yourself. If you don’t know exactly where you want to end up, it’ll take a lot longer to get there.

Ever wish you had a time machine when you're trying to do research?

2011-09-25T19:25:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to decide what to do with my novel and that has caused me to pay even more attention to the writers I admire in particular genres, especially romance and mystery. This morning, as I was eating my balanced breakfast of oatmeal and protein powder, I stumbled across a sentence in a book by Emma Lathen that sent me to the computer for research.

Let me back up a minute and give you some background. Emma Lathen wrote sophisticated workplace mysteries in the 50's and 60's featuring John Putnam Thatcher, Senior Vice President of the Sloan Guaranty Trust (third largest bank in the world), who became embroiled in murder mysteries through his business dealings with customers and companies in whom the bank invested. It's a fantastic premise because the detective/executive is never out of place -- he is always the visiting VIP who arrives in a Rolls Royce, can ask questions of anyone on any topic without obstruction, and has nearly unlimited resources when he needs to get someone on the phone or to arrange an elaborate charade to trick the killer into revealing himself.

The mysteries, and it's a long series, take place in companies that <bear or bare?...neither looks right> striking resemblance to real companies. In 1959, she wrote about National Calculating Inc.(NCI) which was a cash register company that had recently gotten into the brand-new computer business when the murder of their chief Purchasing Agent revealed corruption around its defense contracts. In 1964, she wrote about Michigan Motors, a Detroit automobile manufacturer who had been convicted of price-fixing in an anti-trust case and, apparently, shoots the ringleader in the warehouse when he gets out of prison. The banker, John Putnam Thatcher, does not necessarily object to this means of dealing with misbehaving executives, but his bank has a great deal of money invested in Michigan Motors, so he ends up in Detroit to solve the crime. There are many more. Thatcher visits an oil company in Houston, the winter Olympics in Lake Placid, a candy bar maker in Pennsylvania that is exactly like Hershey's, a chain of fast food restaurants called Chicken Tonight! and an importer of Persian rugs.

As much as I enjoy her writing, which is amazing, and her plots, it's the casual business commentary that runs through her books that keeps me reading them over and over. Between investigative interviews with suspects, Thatcher will drop in on a meeting of the Investment Committee and listen to their deliberations about new investments or spend three hours with his ever-suffering secretary, Miss Corsa, catching up on his dictation. The contents of those meetings and letters are single-line irrelevancies to the story, but fascinating to me.

So the part I was reading this morning included a few paragraphs of dictation to Miss Corsa and one of the letters was summarized as, "Thatcher dictated a very polite reminder to Waymark-Sims that essentially told them if they insisted on investing in US Steel, they must take Roger Blough as they find him." And then it went on to other things. Presumably the reader, me, was expected to know who Roger Blough was and why he might have offended the management at a company that was heavily invested in US Steel, but I had never heard of him and never seen that sentence before, despite having read this particular book at least 25 times in the last 30 years. (I discovered Emma Lathen in college.)

So when I came in to work today and realized that I have nothing to do till noon, I googled "Roger Blough US Steel" and found that he was the president of US Steel from 1955 to 1969, that he frequently appeared in the news for one thing or another including a famous disagreement with President Kennedy in 1962. I find this reassuring because it means that I can casually mention Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates in passing without explaining who they are -- and the readers who don't know will easily ignore it. I ignored Roger Blough for years.

But the much cooler thing I discovered in my googling was that Time Magazine and the New York Times and many, many other publications have put their back issues online. If you go here, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/10/us/roger-m-blough-81-dies-led-us-steel-for-13-years.html you can read the announcement in the New York Times on Oct 10, 1985, that Roger Blough died. More interesting, to me, is the Time profile here http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,892625,00.html that first appeared on June 8, 1959, where a steelworker describes the head of Big Steel, Roger Blough as "a real warm, likeable IBM machine." It's an in-depth profile about someone who was important in American business five decades ago, but there's no real reason for Time to have gone out of their way to put this story up on the internet, unless it's to sell ads. By pulling all of their past publications into the web, they can sell advertising space, via Google, on millions of pages as people read them.

Isn't that amazing? Instead of wondering what magazine articles and newspaper editorials were like before we were born, now we can just go and see. The internet, powered by Google's instant advertising, is a time machine!

A Treadmill Desk? Seriously?

2011-09-23T19:18:00.000-07:00

One of the most common complaints I hear from other writers, freelance programmers and work-from-home consultants is that it's hard to draw the line between work time and personal time. Many of us spend more than a typical workday at the computer when we're writing or coding, but we also spend a lot of our personal time at the computer, too. How else could I keep up with all my friends on Facebook?

Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of talk about treadmill desks. Research says we've got to get up and move to maintain good health, and these contraptions appeal to us, but the cost seems prohibitive.

I already have a treadmill, though I haven't used it as much as I hoped when I bought it. (Shocking, I know.) I thought maybe I could make my own treadmill desk, so I did a little googling and found some ideas. If I were an engineer or if I cared how it looked, I might have invented an elaborate solution like these guys.

Instead, I decided to try this guy's idea for myself.

I went to Lowe's and bought a 6'x18"x1/2" precut, raw pine shelf and a package of styrofoam sheets intended for insulation. Total cost was less than $25.

I simply laid the styrofoam across the handlebars and then placed the shelf on top of the styrofoam. Nothing is attached to anything else, so it can all be disassembled instantly if I decide to take up running (ha ha ha ha ha ha) or sell the treadmill. After a few adjustments and the addition of one more layer of laminated shelves (that were stored in my garage) to protect me from splinters and raise the work surface, my treadmill desk was ready for work.

I did this a year ago and have been delighted with the result. I can read, write, and talk on the phone easily at 1.2 mph. If I'm shopping on Amazon or loitering on Facebook, I can push it up to 2.0 mph without noticeable effect.

I walked more than 40 miles last week, all while writing more than 100 pages of the new book, 4 blogs, too many tweets and Facebook comments to count, and playing Angry Birds on my iPad2. (What? I saved nearly $5,000 not buying the Steelcase Walkstation. Yet. The iPad was my reward.)

I've always known that my brain works better when I'm moving. In the past, I'd write a few paragraphs, get stuck, go for a walk, get an idea, rush back to the computer, and write a few more paragraphs. This week, I didn't get stuck. I got tired after a few miles each day and moved back to the sofa, but overall, I'm thrilled. I think this is going to be a permanent addition to my working routine. Maybe it's time to move the treadmill out of the "extra room" and into the office...

Manuscript Analyzer

2011-09-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

Manuscript Analyzer online:

http://www.christophermpark.com/manalyzer.php

Why Write?

2011-09-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

I read when I want to escape from something. I write when I can't find anything to read that suits my mood. In nearly every case, the books I've written have been to fulfill a need I feel. If they could fill that need for other people, too, that'd be great. If not, each one is still valuable to me. It accomplished what I needed to accomplish.

Right now, I'm looking for a light, fun novel about people I like in a situation that I find exciting. For other readers and writers, the idea of overcoming great sadness or danger is thrilling. For me, it's just scary. If I don't like to read those stories, why would I think I would want to write them? I like cosy-genre mysteries, but not because of the thrill. I like the puzzle. I like trying to solve the problem -- which is exactly what the team is doing in Town Hall, which is the working title for my novel-in-progress. They are trying to solve a problem.

If the reader comes up with a different solution, that's okay. Unlike a mystery, there isn't only one right answer with this sort of story. In fact, I've come up with several possible solutions to my fictional predicament and I'm still not sure which is the right one.

I also love my plot, my location and my characters. All of them. I even like the villain, Simon, though it has taken some effort for me to get to that point. I am Simon, which is part of the problem. If I were in his situation, I would try to fix things and then I would start planning how to turn it to my advantage. I would solicit allies and play on their ambition and desire for an easier life. Knowing that, I hope I can make him a much more interesting character.

I am everyone in this story, really. I can put myself in all their shoes and feel comfortable. Does this mean they are too similar? I don't think so. I think it means they are as diverse as I can make them and still have realistic people. Okay -- time to stop blogging and go back to writing!

Motivation

2011-09-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the sites I visit when I want to be reminded that writing is hard work and only the really cool people do it.

www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

www.christianwriters.com

www.absolutewrite.com

I'm a novelist!

2011-09-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

I've always thought of myself as a writer and I've written a lot of book outlines, story snippets and partial novels. Once in my early 20's, I really buckled down and wrote a whole novel with a beginning, middle and end. It's okay and I now plan to revisit it and see if I can talk myself into publishing it somewhere, but I never did anything with it at the time. Like all writers, I spent a lot of time reading and I just didn't think it was as good as the books I loved. I now realize that I was comparing myself to Dorothy L. Sayers, P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie -- masters! -- and the fact that my story wasn't as good as theirs does not mean it wouldn't have been published if I'd tried. I guess that's the wisdom that comes with age.

In any case, what I did was give up for a while. I decided that I wasn't really a novelist and went to work as a technical writer. Still a writer, but not quite the dream job I had envisioned. About ten years later, I tried again. Thinking I might have more luck if I wrote about something I knew instead of the murder mysteries I loved, I wrote a romance novel. Again, I got all the way to the end and have a complete manuscript that is pretty good. But not as good as Nora Roberts or Jennifer Crusie, so I put it away and went back to consulting. I'm going to publish that one now, too. Hopefully.

In 2008, having reached my 40's, I decided it was time to buckle down and write a real book. By then, I'd been working as a consultant for about twenty years, so I lassoed my business partner, Casey Conner, into co-writing a book about how to be a consultant. It's not fiction, but it's filled with stories and I had a ball writing it. I also love seeing my name on Amazon.com and being interviewed as a "writer", but I still wasn't a novelist.

This past summer, temperatures in Texas soared over 100 degrees nearly every day. Going outside because a chore and everyone was looking for ways to escape reality. I chose to start writing again. I've written the first draft of a novel and have decided that having completed three novels, published or not, entitles me to say "I'm a novelist!" This blog, and in fact this whole website, is a result of my decision to really pursue it this time. What am I waiting for? Maybe in my 50's, other people will say I'm a novelist, too.