I Wish I Was A Princess

Factions before Actions

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:04:15 GMT

Well, I've discovered something. It took me two outlines and one nearly 20,000 word novella to figure it out, but I did.

The problem with writing political thrillers -- political thrillers of any kind, including fantasy or historical or modern day or science fiction futuristic -- is that you have to write about the political factions. Their motivations, their goals, the obstacles to said goals, their members and how split or unified they are, you have to write about all of it. And, generally speaking, you have to make it believable. You can't just have them not able to achieve their goals because it would get in the way of writing your story. And depending on the story and how much time you have to devote to this, you may have to do this for several angles and factions.

It's a pain in the ass.

Recently, I've found myself writing a number of these stories. I may have to go back to them to remind myself why I find them such a pain in the ass. After the second try on an outline and scrambling to pull the story together in time to make the deadline I realized what I was doing wrong. I was writing the plot with no conception of the motivations of the movers and shakers behind it.

This leads to not necessarily knowing where the story is going, or having plot collisions at random points. Or having characters repeating the same scene over and over again because you don't know what the people around them are doing, even if said people never actually make it into the text itself. This leads to plot stagnation and tangled knots and a lot of frustration as you try and try to rewrite it to make sense, but it isn't.

Factions before actions. It's my new watchword whenever I realize I'm actually writing some kind of political thriller. It keeps things organized, it keeps everyone from running into each other, and it can even drive new plot you didn't realize you had until you put everything up on a white board and saw where everyone was going.

For example, in any kind of plot involving nobility there's usually the King who wants to remain in power. There's the nobles who are ossified into their ways and are rooting for the status quo. There are the ones who think they're progressive and fair and advocating for change. There are the ones who want nothing but power for themselves and will backstab anyone else to get it. That's four factions right there for you to play with; depending on where you've set your court there could be twice as many, at least. If not more so, depending on how many you want to juggle and how much time you have to work on it.

In a plot involving science fiction, the modern world, or any more capitalist based setting, there will be corporations. And with corporations comes corporate espionage, research and development, playing both sides against the middle, stealing trade secrets, insider trading if you have a stock market, etcetera. All of these generally fall under the heading of 'every man out for himself,' but you can also have factions. The pyramid scheme, everyone at the top dependant on each other to sucker the people below them to succeed. The morally upright corporate executive comes in two variations, the kind who slowly sinks to everyone else's level even as she tries to maintain her ethical position and the kind that manages somehow to rise above it all as he keeps himself and his employees to a rigorous standard. The player who's come to believe he deserves it all and the cold fish who knows nothing but the wheel and deal and who thinks she is entitled to devour anyone in her way.

Politics, well, there's endless potential factions in politics. Find a cause, and then split your assembled politicians into for or against. Repeat as necessary for as many causes as you have, and then make a nice little chart and see who overlaps where. Then divide down party lines for extra configuration confusion. In that case, you might do better to see what plots you need to have thickened where before you go adding to the soup.

The short of it is, it's a lot easier to plot out who's doing what if you have the whys and wherefores of it first. If you have the motivations, the party lines, and where who falls in with whom, if you can figure out where your people are coming from it's a hell of a lot easier to see where they're going. And this is a manifestation of that that may not be readily apparent.

But now I know. Factions before actions. And now, you know it too.

The Writing Space

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:24:43 GMT

I asked a question on the Nanowrimo LiveJournal community that got a myriad of interesting answers. It got me thinking a lot about the way we write, in some little things that maybe we don't think about very often.

Actually, as I write this, I'm not actually typing. I'm dictating. Most of you who read this journal also read my personal journal, and therefore you know that I've been having problems with my hands hurting. In order not to kill off my writing career before its time with a sudden attack of carpal tunnel, I started writing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I've actually had this program for a while, and used it from time to time, but I've never used it quite as extensively as I am now. So, there's a little something about the way I write, and something I don't think about very often.

But, that's a different essay. This one is about all the little things that are essential to our writing life, even though we might not think about them very often.

The question I posed was this: what must you have around you or with you, eat or drink, wear or listen to or cuddle while you write?

I got a lot of different answers. Some people wore specific things to make them feel creative, beautiful, innovative, God knows what. I know that when I put on my elf ears I feel particularly like a Peapod Pixie ™. That's my name for it, I've been watching too much Legend. So, it's a good thing for me to wear when I'm writing a fantasy novel.

Come to think of it, that reminds me of a comment I received when a friend of mine and I attended the Maui Writers Conference. I was dressed in black slacks and, I think, a red blouse. She was dressed in a pretty orange and tan sundress, with a matching flower in her hair. We sat down at a table for lunch, did the usual round of introductory questions: "Hi, my name is so-and-so, I'm working on this. What are you working on?" When I mentioned that I was working on a mystery novel and she was working on a fairy tale, one of the people sharing our table remarked that we were dressed like our books. Bizarrely, it was true.

So, maybe when I'm working on a detective novel, I should actually wear that pinstripe fedora I have in my basement. Or something like that.

Some people ran out and bought new notebooks. I'd do that, except I always want to buy new notebooks. It's a compulsive thing with me. But it makes sense, if it's not something you have the urge to do regularly, I mean. A new endeavor requires a blank sheet of paper. Even if nothing is more intimidating than a blank sheet of paper. And what better way to start a new novel than with a whole book of blank sheets of paper.

Some people have little figurines are avatars of their characters. I don't think I have any of mine, barring one particular action figure who represents a character that a bunch of you, dear readers, know and love to hate. (or hate to love?) But I can certainly see where it would help. Having an avatar for your character gives you something to talk to. It gives you something to scream at when the character isn't doing what you want.

There are probably half a dozen other habits or quirks or things that I'm not touching on. There are the little rituals we do, before writing or during or after. Someone mentioned that they clean, and I'm thinking about doing the same thing. Hell, who am I kidding, I usually do the same thing. Only, instead of cleaning my physical house, usually I clean my hard drive and my writing notebooks. Anything I have hard copy notes stored in, that gets a clean. Actually, looking around at my office, I could really use it...

I have another little ritual that has less to do with writing and more to do with the Dragon program. In order to warm it up, or maybe just warm myself up for the habit of dictating, I recite a little bit of poetry I read off the lyrics to a song or something before I start. Something that I know by heart, and can correct as I read it on the screen, if it gets things wrong. By the time I've gone through about two or three songs or poems, I'm warmed up and ready to start writing.

Some people meditate before writing. Maybe you organize your mental headspace, check to make sure all your tools are where they should be in your old box, clean your mental house as well as your physical. Some people might go out for a run, others might go out for coffee. Hell, as far as I can tell, morning coffee seems to be a ritual among most of my friends. I know one person who plays a few games of solitaire, because, if he's going to do it while writing he might as well do it before writing and get it over with. Apparently it helps him avoid procrastination.

There's no instructions here for you, I have no little pithy words of advice and no statement of, this is what you must have to get yourself in the proper mood. Just, these are some thoughts I had while I was getting ready for Nanowrimo, and these are some things I like to have around me when I write.

Sometimes, it's the little things that help. What helps you?

Plot/Structure Exercise #1

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 22:14:10 GMT

When readers read my novels I want them to feel transported. That's because to me, novels are a form of distraction, escape, or entertainment.

When I was a little girl I remember kicking my feet up onto the wall till I was bent in an L shape and reading about seven novels in a series (two series, actually) back to back. I had a box of wheat thins and the only time I'd get up would be to refill my water glass. And I just read. The sun rose to noon and slowly set outside my window and I don't even think I remembered to turn the light on until it got really hard to read. I was so into the book.

To me, novels are a means to get away from something in your life, or to be something you're not. There's always something in your life you want to get away from, even if it's just the deadline or paying taxes or picking your kids up from school. And there's always something you want to try to do, even if it's something ordinary like baking a cake that doesn't burn all over the bottom. Novels give you a way to be that super-spy, that homemaker who can balance funds and cooking and cleaning and taking care of kids and everything with a smile on his or her face, the seductive person, the wily person, the person with the easy retort on his or her lips. They're entertaining, and they're safe, because when you finish you can put the book down and be yourself again. You can stop doing or being what it is you're doing or being by living through the book.

Novels are also relevant to life. They have to be, or it would be so alien that we'd be left sitting there going "Huh?" and we wouldn't be able to empathize with it, wouldn't be able to get into it at all. And maybe if we read a novel that hits close to home we're able to see our lives in a different way. Or maybe we're able to see the people around us in a different way. And if that bothers us, we can go "It was just a novel. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a story."

The wonderful things about novels that way is that they mean as little or as much as you want them to. I like that.

I want people to be able to empathize with my characters, get caught up in the plot, be transported into a place or a person that they've never been before. I want to be able to weave a story around them and when I'm done, have them come up for air blinking. I want people to cry when horrible things happen, or be outraged. I want them to root for at least some main character in the book, even if it's the villain. I want them to have someone they can walk along with. I want them to come away going, wow, that was intense.

I want people to be able to do what I did, sit down and read a book and not notice the sun rising or setting outside, how hungry they are, how tired or thirsty or whether or not someone's been trying to get their attention for the last five minutes. I don't want them to do what I did and read books as they walk around in the city, because that could get you run over. ;) But I want them to want to. I want them to feel sexy, or powerful, or tragic, or witty. I want to be their ticket to whole other worlds.

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:59:21 GMT

One of the hardest parts about writing for publication has little to do with writing and more to do with selling it.

If you want to become a published writer, you have to learn to summarize your novel in a sentence. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. No protestation, just do it. Once you've gotten a couple books out there ad they know you as a seller you may have people who will do it for you, but right now, you have to be selling yourself.

Not only do you have to condense it into a sentence, you have to condense it several times over. Most publishing companies ask for 1-5 pages of summary, either a synopsis (1-3 pages) or an outline (3-5 pages, usually). In the query letter itself you have to summarize again, in two paragraphs. Two short paragraphs. If you're selling the book in person you have to summarize it in a sentence or two, because you can't stand there and talk at them for five minutes. Well, you could, but you run the serious risk that they'd get annoyed and walk off. And you have to summarize it in five or six different sentences or two, because people get tired of hearing about the same thing over and over and you'll get tired of saying this.

Why do I ramble, you ask? Someone recently asked on their journal, how do I summarize my novel and do it justice?

The brutal answer is, you don't. It's probably impossible. But the equally brutal part of that is you have to, and you have to do it justice or at the very least you have to make it sound appealing. It's one of the bitch parts of writing, that when you're starting out you also have to sell your writing. It's not something I'm looking forward to dealing with on a more regular basis. Hopefully it's something I've developed some skill in.

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 20:42:08 GMT

Someone recently pointed out to me a tirade that an LJer (who goes by the name Dr. Joseph Mengele, and what does that say about a person?) wrote about the evils of NaNoWriMo. He compared novel writing to the scientific fields, asked what would happen if we allowed this kind of amateurish behavior in biology or chemistry, and said it was a ridiculous enterprise for a bunch of self-deluded idiots and had no redeeming value. I believe he also implied that it was detrimental to society as a whole and brought down the general intelligence of society.

I’ve never quite understood that point of view. Not in the sense of understanding that is empathic and visceral. It doesn’t ring any bells with me, nor push any buttons, nor create any type of feeling whatsoever. In fact, I’m only writing this essay because I need to get off my lazy butt and start writing today.

The point of NaNoWriMo has never been to turn out 50,000 quality words in a month. The odds of that happening are right up there with the monkeys and the Bard, it’s not going to happen to me in my lifetime, and probably not to you in yours. Whether or not you turn out 50,000 good words that can be polished and shaped into something of quality, that’s another matter entirely. But that’s not what NaNo’s for, is it? It’s to write. To sit down and just write, to say what you have to say as fast as you can say it and get a beginning, middle, and end in thirty days. That’s really it.

And there’s something admirable about that kind of dedication. No matter what field it’s in, there’s something very admirable about the ability to say, I’m going to do this difficult task in this limited amount of time and I am going to finish it.

Novel writing is hard. It’s hard to reach inside your mind and pull out all those thoughts, put them into something coherent on paper that runs in sequence and makes even an iota of sense. It’s even harder to do it for 50,000 words. Which isn’t even a novel by today’s publishing standards, it’s about half a novel. And even so, it’s an impressive accomplishment to be able to tell a story that long. And to do it that quickly.

And it doesn’t cost anyone anything. Really? It doesn’t 99.9% of these novels will never be published. 90% of these novels will never even be submitted. We do it because we want to. Because we can. Because we have a story inside us that wants to get out, and this is as good a way of any as letting it. Because we want to be novelists, and we’ve chosen this way to achieve our dream, even if you won’t see our books on the shelves at the local stores. It doesn’t matter. We’re doing this in the privacy of our own homes, on the privacy of our own computers. And if you care about that, you’ve probably got way too much time on your hands.

Why do these people put down NaNoWriMo? Ultimately, although it’s an old argument, I do think they’re jealous of the people who participate and win. I think they’re jealous that we can achieve satisfaction so easily. That we have stripped the act of writing a novel to its bare bones so that we can get it done, and flesh it out later. That we have said we are going to do this thing and figured out how we can actually do it. They’re jealous, I think, and upset and cranky and sententious because their brains are fossilized, old, used. They have narrowed their world to the acceptable and everything else, and now that I think about it I do find myself pitying them. It’s a wonderful thing, to be so easily pleased. It means you will spend a much smaller portion of your life unhappy.

Post-Virginity Breakfast

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 17:56:41 GMT

I was re-reading Stephen King's On Writing the other day -- which is actually a very good book. Whether or not horror is your thing, it's worth picking up his book On Writing simply because he does tell it like it is, the way he's lived it and with some considerable success for so many years. Now, if Stephen King's writing style isn't your thing, you probably won't get much out of it.

But I digress.

I was reading the book the other day and in it he talks about losing his virginity. Not that one. The other one. The one where you're reading a book and you're struck by the revelation that, in fact, this book is crap. It's so crap that it isn't worth its weight in toilet paper. And it's so crap that you could probably better write a book, half-assed, with your eyes closed. And then it occurs to you, wait a minute. Why haven't I already done so?

I don't remember when that moment was. Not the first time, anyway. I remember the most recent time it occurred to me. I was reading [Title Deleted To Protect The Innocent] which, while a compelling story, was not written terribly well. Does that make sense? The story was nice, it was beautiful, I could picture it in my head, but something about the way it was written gave me hives. There were fragments of description that looked like they belonged in a romance novel. The paragraphs were four or five sentence long, seven at most; I'm not a big fan of the Dickens-Hugo-Fenimore Cooper endless paragraphs of doom, but a little depth might not go amiss. The characters, by and large, the ones who weren't main characters were fairly two dimensional. Even the main characters conformed to archetype without venturing far from the path. I'd swear the main character was a Mary Sue.

I was reading it and thinking, this person got published. Not only did this person got published, they got reprinted. These books are now being reprinted in omnibus edition. And she's putting more books out. Chances are she hasn't learned any sort of editing lessons; authors rarely get better so quickly, and most of the time authors in the fantasy and sci-fi genre seem to either stay at good or get worse. Much worse.

Dammit, I can do this. I am a better writer than a lot of these people I read. I do have style, even though my brain at five in the morning after my third cup of hot chocolate might not think so. I write, and even if I write several hundred thousand words of crap, even if only one word in every ten is successful, that's several tens of thousands of words that are good. And that's what editing's for, innit?

It's an almost cleansing, heady, a good feeling to realize that you can do it. It's the revelation, perhaps, not that other people are so bad you can do better, but that you're not as bad as you thought. I know I can use more of that kind of thinking.

Fear Is The Mind-Killer

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 18:47:19 GMT

There's always a point, and usually there's several points, where things have gone about as far as they could possibly go and gotten about as good as they can possibly get. It's at this point when I start manufacturing excuses not to submit works of writing to magazines, anthologies, or book publishers. It's also at this point when a bottle of whiskey starts to look pretty damn good.

I understand now, now that I'm trying to write for more than just my own gratification or release, now that I'm trying to get published, I think I understand why some people take to drinking. I've had more panic attacks over the novel I'm trying to submit than I want to think about. Certainly enough that if I were getting paid for my trouble alone, I'd be set for the rest of this year and all of the next. I've burst into tears so many times over the last week alone, and I'm only a fifth of the way into it at most. Final edits, working my way towards submission. The anxiety gets worse in direct proportion to the size/fame of the publishing company to which I intend to submit.

Considering I'm re-tailoring it for one of the big three or four, that should give you some idea of the size of the panic bubble.

I want a drink. I want a drink and/or I want some kind of mood altering drug that will leave me in a pleasant yet disconnected stupor from which there is no sight of agony or self-doubt. I want a new drug, as the man said, one that won't go away. One that won't keep me up all night. One that won't make me sleep all day. I want to have the confidence in myself that everyone seems to have in me. That'd be nice. Everyone seems to have so much confidence in me.

Which, really, is probably part of the problem. I have it built up in my mind so much that I should be a success, or that I am a good writer, or some other mountain of towering arrogance that I'm terrified to even try anymore. And when you think about my record for what I have submitted so far, I've actually enjoyed far better than usual success. I should be successful with my novels, equally successful. More so, since I have it on good authority that it's easier to sell a novel in at least the science fiction/fantasy market these days than a short story.

And that's not going to help when it comes time to submit the damn novel. Especially not when the rejection letter comes that I'm already working myself up to accept. It's going to make me feel as though I've done something so wrong that the success for which I should have been a shoe-in passed me by like a five dollar hooker.

Hence, wanting the drugs.

I'm stronger than this. But there are times when I just feel small.

8 Simple Rules For Throwing Something At Me To Edit

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 23:14:05 GMT

You can avoid these rules by being one of my special people. The special people know who they are. They are also the people I regularly edit/read over for, if you were wondering if you are special.

COMPLETE YOUR WORK. I cannot stress this enough. In fact, I refuse to read it unless it is done, or you have a draft of it done. I will accept drafts. If you’ve written half of a novel, but it has a beginning middle and end, it’s a draft. I’ll look over it. But if you’re going to come to me with two scenes out of fifty for a something, I’m going to smile and tell you that finishing is the first key to good writing. By now I may have lost track of the people who have asked me if I can look over something and they haven’t even written anything yet! So sick of this. So very, very sick of this. DIE NOW.
BUY A GRAMMAR BOOK. This is also essential. While you’re at it, buy Strunk and White. The latter is no less important for the fact that I currently don’t own one. Actually, only buy Strunk and White if you’re one of those people who habitually marks up their books with little notes. I do that sometimes, depends on the book. Strunk and White is available online, so if you have money for either an internet connection or a cheap book at a used bookstore, there’s no excuse for the Strunk and White. The title, for those of you who’ve never heard of it, is Elements of Style. The grammar book is a point on which I will not compromise. Know the rules before breaking them.
WRITE LEGIBLY. There should really be no excuse for this considering I think everyone I know who would throw something at me for editing has a computer, and most of those are online anyway. If you’re typing something up, please double space it because I tend to like to edit manually. With red pen. There’s really no explanation for that, but I do. Possibly because it allows me to shake something at the people I rant at. I accept .doc and .txt files, and Word Perfect. Don’t know what that file extension is. If you write in Photoshop I will kill you. Don’t laugh, because I know someone who did that. And proof. Please oh please. Spellcheck is still not as effective as good proofing.
WANT WHAT YOU WRITE. I’m not kidding about this either, even if it is hard to explain. Don’t come to me asking to proofread a story that doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s a waste of your time and a waste of mine, and I’ll probably be more cranky about it than you. I don’t care if you’re not going to submit it or publish it or enter it into a contest. But if your writing isn’t worth something to you, if it isn’t written because you really want to write it, go do something else. Build a computer. Clean the house. Race stock cars. I am a writer, you are asking for my expertise. If you didn’t want it, you shouldn’t have asked me.
MEAN WHAT YOU WRITE. That gets a lot of the editing done right there. Stephen King said it well: if the first word that comes to your mind is accurate, it’s probably the right one. Leave it at that, please. Fancy words and concepts are all well and good for some, and if that’s what springs to your mind then so be it. But plain words are all right too. There’s no shame in small and short, and there is no lowest common denominator. You’re writing for an audience, even if you don’t know who, yet. In fact, if you’re thinking about writing for the lowest common denominator, you’re patronizing your readers. Don’t do that. Just write what comes to mind. The rest will follow.
KNOW WHAT I WRITE. I don’t mean that you should familiarize yourself with the complete works of me. But if you’re looking for someone to proof-read your DaDaistic future-set retelling of a fairy tale, I’m not your girl. I write plain and I write simple. I write the stories that are in my head and I have never taken a creative writing class in my life. I’ve only taken one or two philosophy courses. I don’t make a habit of familiarizing myself with creative, intellectual, or philosophical theory. And if you want me to pick up each and every reference to some dialectic you learned in university, I’m going to chuck it at your head. I want to read your story, not proof your paper.
KNOW WHAT YOU WANT. If you hand me a story or a novel and then halfway through it you tell me that you’ve changed your mind, you don’t want to do anything with it and I don’t need to edit it, I will be very cross. I don’t care if you want to do anything with it beyond edit and polish it, I’ll read it over. But if you decide halfway through that you don’t want it read, then what was the point of the last half hour I just spent looking at it? Don’t waste my time. Don’t waste your time, either. Think carefully before you hand me something to read over and edit, and think twice before you do. Just to make sure.
BE PREPARED FOR BRUTALITY. When it comes to writing I do not spare your delicate sensibilities. If what you have written is crap, I will tell you so. I will, however, also tell you the best way I see to fix it. I generally don’t give praise in an edit or a critique unless I see something exceptional. Your work will likely be covered in more red marks than smiley faces, more “fix this!” than “good!” and it will be demoralizing. I don’t mean to be, but I don’t want you to turn out crap, either. If you want a yes-man, find a friend. If you want an edit, I can try to help. And don't ask me after "what makes you the expert?" Ever.

Most of this won't apply to people. These are, for the most part, only serious rules. But I have had a lot of people come to me lately asking me to read over something or another. No idea why. I can explain my qualifications for editor if you want me to, most likely if you've asked me it means you think I'm a good writer. Which is flattering. But I also take writing very seriously, so it behooves you to tell me if you're doing this as a casual thing or if you want me to take a good hard look at it.

And the special people can still disregard the tirade.

Too Much, Too Soon

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:39:01 GMT

I'm running into problems with inspiration again. Fucking hell.

It doesn't help that I have other things I need to do, and I'm not doing those either. No, that's not true. I'm not doing some of them, the ones I need to get done in two days. I am doing other things which, while equally constructive, are not geared towards getting me to finish on schedule. But at least I'm being productive.

It's not helping the inspiration problem. My laptop is hot, my face is flushed, and my emotions are driving me crazy. I'm going to wind up with a long string of stories that read like Jagged Little Pill, and that's not good. Well, it could be good if some of them turn out to be decent pieces, but it's not good for my mental state and it's not good for my sense of dependancy. I need to be able to write whenever, whereever, however, no matter who in my life is doing what. Emotions are the bane and blessing of my existance as a writer. I require my emotions to inform the flow of my writing and the intensity with which it takes the reader. I require them to be far, far away from me when I need to concentrate.

There is no happy medium for this. Not that I've found, and not that I'm likely to find in the next few months. I will consume more chocolate in the coming six weeks than I have all year. Most of it in hot, liquid form, adulterated by water and milk and the occasional spurt of whipped cream. I will go up, I will go down, I will in fact turn into a barrel of monkeys.

None of this is helping with my writer's block.

There are all sorts of tricks I've taught myself over the years for how to deal with it. Pick a scene in my mind. Pick an emotion or a person, although I'm very wary of doing that one right now and if I do it's likely that none of them will ever be shown on LiveJournal. Pick a song lyric and write about the images it conjures. Some artists are great for that. Some are a little less great but there are gems of lyrics in there.

I could take characters from novels I've worked on and write short stories about them. I might do, about some of them, because while I never developed them fully into novel-length characters, I do know a little bit about them. I could take scenes from my dreams (or, more probable, from my nightmares since I have more of those) and turn them into scenes. I may do that for one dream I meant to turn into a novel, and couldn't. I've tried twice. Come to think of it, I think I will, since it was only the one scene.

I'm tired. Not sleepy, as I was yesterday, just emotionally exhausted. I probably should even take a nap but I have too much to do today, tomorrow, and Sunday. Too much to do in general before I go to Thingie, and then even after. Although after is less of too much to do than before. I'm thinking of all the things I have to do and I cannot concern myself with such mundane matters when I have to write. I need to remember how to just sit down at the keyboard and type words, no matter what they mean or turn into, no matter what else I have to do.

Inspiration. It occurs to me that maybe all I need to do is take some drugs and watch Yellow Submarine. The problem with that idea is that I have neither drugs nor Yellow Submarine, not even a bootleg copy of The Wall. I could put on a film, a TV episode, but all that would happen would be a surge of fanfic. Which isn't productive unless it's short, and I take out all the pronouns, in which case I can use it as a masquerade. A piece of original fiction. I should cave in and add these words to my word count, but I won't. There's a difference between writing fiction and babbling in your journal.

Inspiration. I had wise words about this a few days ago, and they're gone now. Inspiration's a fucker.

In the end, all I'm really doing here is whining. And there's a certain kind of relaxation in that, a catharsis. Clearing out all the self-important, self-deprecating junk so that one can get back down to work as one should be doing. I floss my mind with a bit of whine and some cheese and then I'm done. Boom. Time to put on some music or a good background video and sit down to do what has to be done. I'm relaxed and I'm ready to get back to work and carve out a chunk of the mountain I've ordered myself to reduce to sand. What I wish doesn't matter so much as what will be.

I will be an author. I am. I will be.

I will take the world around me and spin it into new forms that no one has ever seen before or will see again. I will amaze, I will anger, I will enrapture and I will destroy with what I create. I will take the world around me and every little part of it is fair game for what I do in my life. It's all a part of itself. The small reflected in the large and all of us little folk in the whole. It is, as a wise man once said, my job to tell the truth. To see what happens and write it down so that people pay attention. To see what happens and write it down just so that it's not lost. Nothing is new, but nothing is old and used, either. Inspiration is the art of knowing how things are and changing your point of view, then seeing the pattern clearly for the first time.

Perspiration is what happens when you drop the pretension and glue your ass to the chair and force yourself to start typing it all out. Annoying, but necessary.

I.R.

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 14:44:57 GMT

In his book On Writing Stephen King talks about his Ideal Reader.

Actually in the part I'm reading now he's talking about his car accident, but never mind. I just read a graphic description of his injuries. Eew.

I knew what he was talking about but it never hit me until now that I had one of them there things. It's a romantic notion, like a soul-mate or a unicorn. Ideal Readers don't exist, except when they do. Eight months in a little under a week. I see you doing the math, you know.

Ideal Reader doesn't hold back. Ideal Reader doesn't snap or deride, either. Ideal Reader is the person who knows what you're trying to say, sometimes better than you do, just from reading a few paragraphs. Ideal Reader could pick out your writing style from a hundred anonymous posts at thirty paces.

There are other feelings here, but they're not relevant. This isn't about me.

This is about him.

Everyone should have an Ideal Reader, and I should have said, him or her. We'll call it him because for inexplicability most of my writing has been written for, by, inspired by men. I don't pretend to understand it, but it's quite entertaining considering how very female I am, and I say that to mean when I look down I can see the tips of my toes. Most of my writing has been written for men. My chief muse is very, and perhaps annoyingly male. In fact, he and Stephen King's muse, if he referred to who I think, would probably get together well as drinking buddies. I digress again, I do that often. You shouldn't let me get away with it.

Ideal Reader is the person for whom you write. Is the reason you picked one word over another. Ideal Reader sits in your head in the opposite side of the brain as your muse and waits, patiently (or sometimes not so patiently) for you to finish your story. And when you're done, Ideal Reader picks it up and you won't get word one out of him till you've finished it. Sometimes even when you've finished it. But you can take every word he tells you to the bank.

Ideal Reader believes in you. In your ability, in your stories, and in your heart. He is persistent in believing in you, even when you don't believe in yourself, so much so that it becomes obnoxious at times. You'll want to just hurl your notebook or laptop or typewriter if you're feeling athletic across the room and he'll be sitting on your chest telling you to stop that and get back to work. Telling you not to be silly. It'll be fine, just keep writing, you're a good writer. I say so, and you'd better believe me.

I hadn't noticed, or realized, or understood what an Ideal Reader was until I discovered that yes, I did have one. Now I think I understand. But I'm still not sure.

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:52:31 GMT

I have decided that these words will not count towards the end goal of achieving 1 million words by the end of the year.

Which is sad, 'cause I'm so far behind.

I hate writing in the first person. HATE. My hate for the act knows no bounds.

This is not to say that I hate everything written in the first person. Mike Hammer continues to thrill me in that secret girlish way I try not to acknowledge, Anita Blake was good until she began the Campaign of Suck (also known as the Campaign of Suck Every Cock that Comes My Way), and I can't imagine any other way to read certain Neil stories.

But I hate writing that way. Even when it seems to be the best way to do a piece or a project, I hate it. Part of me says it's the most pretentious thing in the world to do. Your main character has to be able to see everything of importance in order that your audience see it as well. Has to be able to bear up a sufficiently interesting wit and semblance of an interior monologue since it's the backbone of the background. Has to, in other words, not be dull as toast or stereotypical as an Italian mobster.

This makes it a pain in the ass.

I wrote a bit of Pen Bryton's story before I decided to scrap it and start it for NaNo. You may remember this because I complained my hard-boiled detective wasn't boiled enough. It's the first rant in this journal, too, for those of you who forgot or weren't paying attention or have no idea what I'm talking about. In retrospect, it's not that she wasn't boiled enough, it's that she was distilled down to her essential cliches. The hard-talking, tough-as-nails detective. Shyah, right.

In retrospect, too, this could be my fault. I thought I had a complete character; what I really had were a few scenes strung together by formulae and haphazardly infected by the germs of ideas. She wasn't a real character. And from what I am learning, you need to have a real character in order to be able to write in the first person. Unless, of course, you like dialogue that sounds as though it was made up from the top 500 most famous lines in [insert genre here] films.

No, I didn't think you wanted to read that. I don't want to write it. I write it, I read it over, I cringe and scream and throw my laptop across the room. Not really.

And now that I'm thinking about the previous attempt that was cut short, I'm starting to get nervous. That little demon fear is tapdancing up and down my spine worse than Michael Flatley at his most egotestical. Which is stupid. I shouldn't be getting this worked up about something I haven't even written yet, and certainly not something I'm trying to write and finish at a certain word count just to have it done. That's what editing is for. And I should remember this.

God, I hate writing in the first person. Hell. I swear.

I'm Not Bad, I'm Just Drawn That Way, Part 2

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 17:14:50 GMT

Armed with a greater knowledge of the legalities behind being a PI, I return to the interrogation room to deal with Pen Bryton.

“Who did you do your…” What’s a good word. “Internship with?”

She smiles a little, as though she knew it before I did. Which doesn’t entirely surprise me, but it’s just a bit irritating.

“I got my degree in Criminal Justice and Political Science, that counted for two of the three years. Then I spent two years working with the cops for the rest of it. They helped me figure out what I’d need to go out on my own.”

“Your father’s old precinct house.” It’s not a question. I get the feeling she was close to some people her father used to work with, the old-timers who are still there, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. Her face stills, blank. I’m not sure if it’s her pissed off face or her upset face.

“Yeah.”

I nod, and make a note on a pad of paper that doesn’t really mean anything since I’m recording this entire conversation but it seems to reassure her anyway. That I look normal. That I act like what I’m seeming to be.

“Who taught you how to shoot?”

“Mike Torres.” Her voice is still tight. “My dad’s … mentor, when he was just getting out of the academy. His first partner. He’s a good guy.” She snorts. “Gonna kill himself with a heart attack one day, the kind of shit he eats.”

I smile and pretend I know what she’s talking about. In my mind, a picture forms of a guy shoveling down eggs and bacon in a diner where they know him well. He’s a little on the heavy side. Guess it’s all the cholesterol.

“Are you two close?”

She scowls. “That’s none of your business,” she says, and her voice is calm. But she’s still reacting almost as if I suggested something improper. Or maybe she really is just that private. Probably more the latter than the former.

Which means she’s really not going to like my next question. “Do any of them still talk to Jake?”

Her expression softens, more than I expected it to. I don’t think she’s aware of it either. “No,” she says after a moment, quietly, slowly. “No, I don’t think they do. They act like he doesn’t exist.” And something in the way she says it suggests that she’s not happy with that idea, and not because she wants him to suffer for what he’s done. But I don’t point that out to her. It’s been a long time, and if she still feels she has to keep a good mad on…

… well, that is my business, isn’t it? But I don’t have to rub it in.

Tangent. “What about friends from high school, or college? Do you still keep in touch with them?”

She gives me a funny look. “Not really. No friends I’d miss, anyway.” There’s probably something there, but I don’t push it. She had a boyfriend in college. Someone she slept with. There was something there, but I can’t get at it now. I’ll let it slide.

“What do you do in your time off?”

She gives me an incredulous look this time, and laughs. “What time off? If I’m not working in what passes for an office, I’m working at home.”

“Where do you live?”

“Two-story townhouse.” I blink. It used to be two houses, but some enterprising person converted it bigger. I also whistle, and she shrugs a little. “Yeah, there’s a hefty mortgage on it. I deal. It helps that it wasn’t in that great shape to begin with, someone had let it go to pot.”

To pot. That’s an archaic phrase. From her grandmother? “Where does your grandmother live?”

“Not that far. She’s got an apartment…” she says something I can’t quite pick up, and I think it’s because I don’t know it yet. Time enough to find out. I know it’s upper-middle class, at least. Her grandmother’s well off. “Grandpa set her up good before he died, and I think my aunts and uncles help out a little.”

“How many of those?”

“Three and two.”

Six kids. It’d surprise me, but it sounds a little like my own family, so I’m not too surprised. “You don’t see much of them?”

Another little shrug. “Not really. Most of them live out of town. One of my uncles lives up in Rockford, that’s about as close as any of them are. We get together, once a year, have between Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. That’s about it.”

I realize at that point that she must be spending Christmases alone, maybe with her grandmother, maybe not. No Dad. No Mom… where’s her mom in this picture? “What happened to your mother?” Brace for impact.

It doesn’t come. She just shrugs. “She left when I was a kid. Dad never talked about why, but he never blamed her, so she must have had some kind of a reason. Maybe they just weren’t close. Maybe she couldn’t take care of me like he could. Being a cop doesn’t pay that well but it’s got great benefits. Government benefits, health care and dental and insurance, things like that. If she was just working at a fast-food joint it would make sense.”

She doesn’t blame her mother for leaving, but I can tell from the distant look in her eyes that she’s not really over the lack of a mother in her life, as a girl. She’s created a fantasy because it’s better than dealing with some of the very real possibilities. I wonder if that’s going to come back to haunt her.

Instead of asking, though, I gather my things and stand up.

“That’s it?”

Shrug. “Yep. That’s it. I’ve got enough for now.”

She looks at me, suspicious. “Now what?”

“Now? I go interview Jake.”

I can almost smell her irritation and fear as I walk out.

Kid's Logic

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 15:26:51 GMT

I have to write five (really three, but I'm going to push for five) children's stories of 300 words or less for ages eight and under in the next couple of weeks.

This is a problem.

I don't write children's stories. I just don't. Young adult at best. My mind isn't the sort of mind where I can write children's stories, it just isn't that nice. It's a sewer. It's a bloodbath. It's twisted and wild and full of hopeless dreams of romance with a man who probably doesn't know I exist, that kind of thing. It's not a world for small children.

And yet here I am trying to write children's stories. It's for a good cause, really! Prizes are gift cards to a used bookstore, and they publish all finalist's stories in an anthology. Mostly, I'm doing it for the publishing credit. I'm also doing it to try and be able to write children's stories though; the anticipation and sense of impending doom is killing me.

The good news, I suppose, is that I'm more used to writing 300 word stories. Working on the weekly prompts has sharpened my skills to a point where I can be succinct. I can actually write a short scene, a beginning middle and end, things like that in 150-300 words. I couldn’t, two years ago. If I’d been given this contest two years ago I probably would have worried more about the word count than about the fact that I was writing something warm and cuddly for eight year olds to go to sleep by. Now I’m down to one worry out of two. I suppose that’s progress.

How am I supposed to do this? I have no idea how to bring myself to write something cozy for children without being patronizing. I remember when I was a child one of the things I hated most was being patronized. Fortunately I had parents who didn’t try it, for the most part. But I don’t want to write a story that involves talking down to children. I also don’t want to confuse them by writing about a lot of things they won’t understand. It’s been far, far too long since I’ve had to deal with any children in this age bracket. I have no idea what’s too complicated and what’s stupidly simple.

At the moment the useful trick is recalling my own childhood. All the old stories and songs that my mother, my grandmother, some friend of the family used to say or sing. The old books I remember reading as a child, Rikki-Tikki-Tembo, Alexander, the Golden Conch. Harold and his Purple Crayon. The Goops.

I don’t want to steal these ideas, though. It’s a fine line between stealing and renewing. I hate walking tightropes as a matter of course. I can’t think of any other way to get this done, but I hate not having the slightest idea what I’m doing. After this, I think I’m going to give up children’s writing.

I'm Not Bad, I'm Just Drawn That Way, Part 1

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 16:45:14 GMT

Some characters pop into your head with history and mysteries complete, and they won’t shut up once they’ve started. Other characters walk in, say as few words as possible, and you can’t get a word out of them.

Right now I’ve got more of the latter than the former in my mind, and it’s driving me more insane than usual. Let’s try and organize this logically. And when I say logically, I mean in my own inimitable brand of logic. Interview the character.

Hey, lots of authors talk to the voices in their head, right?

“Your name is Penelope Bryton.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

She’s sitting across from me in an off-white blouse and tan slacks. Her shoes are sensible, black sneakers, not as formal as the rest of her outfit. She’s got her legs crossed at the knee and her arms folded across her chest, a defensive posture but she’s leaning back in her chair, which means she’s at least a little relaxed. Or wants me to think she is.

“And your father was a cop.”

“Yeah.”

She’s not giving me much. Monosyllables. Whole sentences if she’s feeling good. Not today.

“His partner killed him when he tried to expose him as corrupt.”

Her jaw tightens and I don’t even get words this time, just a jerky nod. I resist the urge to ask how she feels about that like some sort of psychiatrist. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m something else.

“And yet he still keeps trying to talk to you from prison. Your grandmother likes him. She seems to know something you don’t.”

Her eyes widen a little, which is more than I’ve gotten out of her in the whole conversation.

“What if he’s innocent?” I wanted it to be more of a statement, but when I say it her body uncoils as she forgets to protect herself.

“No,” she leans forward like she wants to pound on the table or point a finger at me. Her hand even moves half to do so, but stops in more of a warding kind of gesture. “No, he’s guilty. I saw the evidence. I looked over the evidence, a whole team of trial lawyers, the judge, they all saw it. He had his trial. He confessed…” She saves that for last, and the almost-whine in her voice tells me she knows how sketchy confessions can be. “He’s guilty. He killed my father.”

“If you say so.”

The easy admission of defeat bothers her, I can tell, but there’s nothing she can do about it. She leans back again in her chair and tries to cross her arms again, but the tension’s gone now, her momentum broken. There’s something in her relationship with her dead father’s partner that gets to her.

Partner. Some thought brings a grin to my face. “Do you think they were lovers?”

“Oh, please.” The look on her face is half disgust, half incredulity. I’m not sure if the disgust is for the homosexuality or just the two people involved. “Where would you get an idea like that?”

I shrug. “Just asking.” It’s a ridiculous question; I know it and she knows it. But it keeps the conversation going. “How do you like your job?”

She shrugs. “It’s a living.” No real passion for it. “It gets me in the day to day.” Interesting turn of phrase. I’m not sure what it means.

“What got you into it?”

She’s quiet for a long time. Either she doesn’t know or she doesn’t want to talk about it, and with her face and body as still as it is I can’t tell which one is right.

“Did you want to be a cop, like you’re father?”

She shook her head. “Cops are corrupt. Not all of them, but some of them. Government paycheck. Dealing with the people. It’s like they owe them something. I’m on my own. I don’t owe anyone anything except what’s written down in the contract, and if I decide I don’t like it I can return the money. I’ll be out some cash but I won’t owe them anything.”

I don’t show it, but that’s interesting. Also the first new information I’ve gotten out of her in a while.

“So you like the independence. Reporting to no one but yourself. Have you ever thought about hiring an assistant?”

She laughs. It’s kind of a barking sound almost, and I don’t know if that’s because she’s not actually finding it funny or if that’s her normal laugh. “I don’t make that kind of money yet. I wouldn’t do that to some poor kid.”

I nod. “You’re also a bounty hunter. Why?”

Another shrug. “It pays the bills a little better. I have to deal with two licenses, but the jobs are kind of the same. It’s all about tracking down information.” Information, not people. Interesting.

“You don’t like to deal with people?” I follow that one up quick.

She shrugs, but she doesn’t look at me. “I don’t much like people. They lie. They cheat. They beat their wives. Most of the people I meet aren’t the kind you want to be friends with, even if they’re on all the right boards and have the right kind of house, income, kids. They’re all jerks.”

I squish the impulse to comment on how cynical she is. She already knows that, and probably hears it at least once a day.

“Is there anyone you do like?” I ask. I have to ask. She has to have some friends, somewhere. More than just her grandmother and the dead man’s partner.

I know what happens there. But I won’t tell her.

“I guess.” By this time she’s relaxed, sitting up a little straighter, hands draped casually over her lap. “There’s a kid who hangs around, runs errands sometimes for change. He’s cool. Saving up for a video game. There’s a girl at the coffee shop where I do most of my thinking, she’s nice. But, no, I don’t have many friends.”

Inspiration Comes Standard

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 19:02:38 GMT

The problem with inspiration is that it doesn't come standard like the commercial says. It comes and goes and comes and goes at the most irritating moments, and often in places where one can't do a damn thing about it. Like in the shower. Or while walking the dog. The most obvious solution to this would be to carry around a tape recorder or a notepad or a CrackBerry, something. But a shorted-out CrackBerry isn't much use when you sit up with a good idea in the middle of the bath and let it fall into the water. Oops.

And then, of course, when you need it most there fails to be any inspiration at all. When you're sitting at your computer or on the couch with your laptop screen up and the word processor staring at you like the world’s nastiest creditor. You thrash your brain into submission and instead of rolling over and coughing up something interesting the best thing you can get is it was a dark and stormy night. You’ve all felt that sense of irritated frustration, haven’t you? I know you have, cough it up.

The amount of inspiration seems inversely proportionate to the length of time remaining to complete the project. As you fly down to the wire your mind ceases to occupy itself with all that you could do and instead fills to the brim with all the things you haven’t done. This would seem to be a counter-evolutionary trait. And maybe it is. It can also be a great motivator if you’ve had the foresight to write down every detail of the flash of inspiration brought you before. Again, if you have something with which to write it down. Otherwise, we all know how much of a bitch life can be.

I’ve got no solutions for you. Not a one. If I had a solution I’d be using it myself instead of typing up this ramble when I should be working on any one of three different overall writing projects. Or cleaning. Or something.

The one trick I do know is that inspiration can be everywhere if you know where to look and know where to push inside hard enough to force it. Take a fan-fiction idea, write something short about it, and put in no proper names. If you have to, put in descriptions of the people involved but no names. Usually, if you do it right, it’ll pass itself off nicely as original fiction.

Look in the paper for a news article. Write a story about the situation.

Find a photography/art picture book. Look through for a picture, then write a short scene about it. If it’s just a landscape, put in a person and an emotion.

Start stringing words together. Even if they don’t make sense, put it in your mind as dialogue, then try and figure out who would be having that conversation and why.

Write your ideas on a notecard, and keep them for a rainy day.

Quantity and Quantity

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 23:27:55 GMT

I’m gearing up for NaNoWriMo 2005 and wondering, as usual, if I can actually do this. I always wonder at the beginning of the season if I can actually do it. Usually I manage at least one success.

I may write a letter to myself, later in the week. Something to be given to myself around the middle to beginning of the end, something to the effect of I know you think this sucks but keep plugging anyway. Remember, quantity, not quality!

The first time I made a spectacle of myself on LiveJournal with the NaNoWriMo I ran into a couple of people who were fussed about that. It made sense at the time; they were very meticulous about their work and edited it numerous times before posting, and I looked at their writing and wondered how I could ever hope to achieve that kind of standard.

(Writing, you see, is an activity that’s murder on your self-esteem.)

I finished the novels for that year because I am a stubborn bitch, but I felt terrible about them. I went through all the predictable stages of self-loathing and humiliation, and even a few that were downright esoteric. I smiled while my friends made their exclamations and told me how much they loved my stories and how I should submit them as quickly as possible. I even made a token effort at editing before I slid them quietly into storage and let them gather two feet of dust.

Two years later, I realized it didn’t matter.

NaNoWriMo is about quantity, not quality, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s outlined very clearly in several places on the event’s website. It’s repeated by many a successful author. It’s the principle that any kind of success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. And when it comes down to it, you can’t edit your novel into perfection if you don’t have a novel to begin with, right?

Writing a novel is a long, laborious process. It’s made even longer and more painfully self-destructive by one’s innate need to make every word perfect. Closing down the word processor begins the implacable cry in the back of my head that somehow this damn novel could be better. Pulling it back up and reading it over increases the volume to airplane-engine levels. If I were to listen to my internal editor every time he screamed at me, I’d be deaf and curled up in a tiny ball in a corner of the back of my mind rocking back and forth and crying this isn’t happening.

But if I didn’t actually write? I would be deaf and curled up in a tiny ball in a corner of the back of my mind… you get the idea.

I write because I have to. Not because I can. I write because if I don’t write I slowly go insane. My imagined reality takes over my reality as perceived by the people around me. I become depressed, listless, and I look like a malnutriated hag.

But writing takes time, and effort, and about half of that time and effort is actually putting the words to paper. Whether or not all of it makes it into the final draft, whether or not most of it is any good. The words will not write themselves, even though there’s usually a point during the process of novel writing where you stare at the novel and think that since you know how it all turns out, the damn thing should just write itself. Sadly, it won’t, and you have to press past that point and finish it yourself otherwise it will sit in your hard drive and mock you for all eternity. I may or may not have several of these. *shifty eyes*

NaNoWriMo, and indeed all other contests of its ilk, provide a valuable service. It’s a marathon impetus to do what you may always have dreamed of doing or simply to get off your butt and finish the one project you’ve always back-burnered. Competition, for whatever reason lost in the dawn of human biology, has always been a powerful motivator. Only it isn’t a zero-sum game. If you finish, you’re a winner. You’re in competition with yourself, in a race against everyone, trying to beat that nagging little voice in your head that looks at everyone else’s word counts and goes ‘my god, I could never do that.’

You can. It’s easy.

NaNoWriMo isn’t about quantity over quality. It’s about quantity in furtherance of quality. It’s about getting down something to edit before you let your internal editor take over. True, there are people out there who can produce by editing every page until it’s perfect before they go onto the next one. Kurt Vonnegut, I believe, was one of them. But it’s been my experience that the vast majority of us can’t stand up to that kind of self-imposed scrutiny. We don’t have that kind of dedication. Or masochism, take your pick.

I know I don’t.

So start writing. Keep writing. Write until your wrists develop shooting white-hot jagged glass edge pains and your fingers turn green and fall off. Write until your brain feels like the dregs of a pot of oatmeal. Once you have an idea in your head, write it down even if you don’t have a beginning, middle, and end. Write down every picture and every scene and every scenario and every sensation that comes into your head. Put it together when you have some distance, when you believe you can work with it dispassionately. Because in order to vivisect your baby and put it back together you will need a lack of passion. You will need to be able to stand apart from what you’ve created and cut out what doesn’t contribute to the whole, and then you’ll have to patch up the results of your butchery. It’ll be worth it, eventually. But you can’t shape material if there’s nothing there to shape in the first place.

Pulp Fiction

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 21:59:46 GMT

Writing pulp fiction is not as easy as it looks. There’s an art to telling the same story over and over again and I’m not sure I have it. Feh.

I write three or four paragraphs and then discover that my hard-boiled detective fiction needs a little more boiling. Which is all well and good but by the fifth or sixth time I feel tired and useless.

I think the biggest problem I have is the language.

Hard-boiled fiction, from what I’m reading, is made up mostly of one and two syllable words. If you’re using a three or four syllable word and there’s a shorter one, or maybe a one or two word string of shorter words, then use that instead. I don’t think that’s because it’s written for a lower reading level as much as it is written for people who like the machine-gun style of writing. The words fly at you fast, hit you hard, and leave an impression before you’ve reached the next chapter. Every word is important. You have to choose them with care and precision, not spew the words out onto the blank page and hope they find their mark.

The language is troublesome because the heyday of pulp detective novels seems to have been some time ago. They’re still, of course, in high demand but the media seems to have gone largely to visual. Books are important because they have movies made out of them three years later. Books aren’t important because they entertain us, much less challenge our minds. Come to think of it, detective novels don’t challenge much of a person’s mind, but at least they’re fun. Which isn’t got anything to do with the language.

Colloquialisms change every six months on average. Sometimes more often where there’s a greater migration pattern of people, sometimes less often in the small towns what don’t see much traffic. Speech patterns are distinctive and telling. What we say and how we say it tells the people around us more than we think, even if we don’t pick it apart at the time.

A man who speaks with an English accent, calls everyone ‘darling,’ and mixes in clinical anatomical references with his vulgar words is probably someone who has grown up among highly educated folk. He is either very comfortable with a high level of intimacy amongst people he has just met or isn’t comfortable amongst people in the slightest, but prefers to make others think he is so as to make them just as discomfited as he feels. And, likely, he is from England or one of its remaining colonies. The exact sounds of the accent will determine where.

In the books I’ve read, the type of book I’m trying to write, people don’t talk with fanciful words. They don’t use clinical or technical terms, and they’re more likely to use colorful metaphors than speak terse and literal. They say things like did you a solid or cored his head like an apple or tighter than a duck’s butt. They talk like people with good imaginations who aren’t burdened with an overabundance of schooling.

Do you know how hard it is to write like that? Especially without stealing other people’s metaphors as I just did. It’s hard to try and think in images, to think in pictures that you can then translate into words that other people might read and understand. It’s even harder to do it in a style that’s distinctive. And to add to that I have to write at least two different people with their own speech pattern. One of whose will undoubtedly include a number of terms and phrases from an environment of which I know very little -- prison.

I’ll try starting another draft again later tonight, I figure. And it might help some to re-read some of the books, watch some of the movies that are considered classics in the genre. Pulp fiction means Mickey Spillane, Elmore Leonard, Dash Hammett, if the spelling’s all right on those. It means Sin City in some cases. And it means trying to update a lot of these for the twentieth century, seeing as how most of these books were written ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago. That’s the hardest part. I can go ahead and imitate what I see, I’m very good at that, a regular parrot. But trying to imitate the style and keep in the time I’m writing in is breaking my metaphorical and nonexistent balls.

This is without going into the problems I’m having with characterization. There aren’t enough tough female protagonists in fiction these days, and not from the first person point of view that I’ve read.

For the final draft I may run some scenes by a police station, or something of the like. See what they know, if the details are correct. Preferably I’ll find some sort of a pet federal agent of some kind. I wonder if anyone I know back in DC is still connected with some sort of Bureau. They talk differently, every major occupation talks differently from the other. Different tasks, items, situations they deal with every day. Different words for it all.

Some television programs help. The reality shows that aren’t actually all that much based in reality. Most of them are re-created, staged. But they deal with real police, real bounty hunters, and these people talk as they do in their day to day lives. That’ll help with the language at least. The procedure I can do the book-work on and take that into account.

This would be so much easier if it were the kind of language I know. The lyrical up and down cadence of a teacher or the colorful words of a woodsman. The kind of language folk use in the mountains or on the trail. Words for horse-folk and words for theatre type people I can understand and use. This cop-talk and detective thing? Not so much. Still, I’ll give it my best shot. No pun intended.