May17

All in the Details

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Yesterday I wanted nothing to do with my novel, because it was gloriously sunny outside and the ice cream truck kept on tinkling past my house.  Ice cream is not usually seductive, but on a day when the writing is tough, the siren call of that truck creeping by is entrancing.  So I found myself outside on my front stoop, waiting for it to stop.  While I was waiting, I pulled out my phone, idly checking all of my apps when I happened upon an interesting image.

Here is what it was:

J.K. Rowling’s Outline?

Apparently, it is an outline for J.K. Rowling’s “Order of the Phoenix.” Is it real? I’d like to believe it is.  I wanted to share it with you, because it reminded me that all of the worthwhile stuff takes a lot of focus and determination.  It’s in the little moments of thought, considering the details that makes the best things really good.

So what did I do?  I went back to my desk and wrote.

What do you think about J.K. Rowling’s outline? Would you ever try outlining a book like this?

May13

Writerly Wisdom Inspired by Fleetwood Mac Songs

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Graffiti from Sumner Beach, New Zealand

Nostalgia is in the air this morning, trickling into my ears as I listen to old Fleetwood Mac songs.  There’s nothing better than dancing around your office with the window open, that fresh, dewy rain smell wafting in through the open window.  Yes, Mr. Grumpy from across the street is staring at me again as he shouts into his phone… the postman is likely afraid to go anywhere near the house too and that pigeon which I once named Lester is ogling me in that cross-eyed way that only winged rats can manage….  But hey, sometimes you’ve just got to let loose.

In case you don’t want to jump around in your boxers while being ogled by pigeons and mailmen, here is something that might inspire you to feel awesome today:

  1. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow—be in the moment when you write, but don’t be afraid to keep moving forward too.
  2. Dreams  are what inspire, so listen to them. And then keep on writing, because the Skies the Limit.
  3. If you find yourself trapped under a Landslide, trust that you can pull yourself out of any literary pickle with a little faith and a lot of hard work.
  4. Draft giving you trouble?  Don’t be afraid to Go Your Own Way (at least for a little while until you gain more perspective).
  5. If Monday Morning is really getting to you, give yourself some peace and take a break.
  6. Feeling a little Over [Your] Head?  Don’t worry about what you can’t control.  You’ll get there, because deep down you know you are GOOD.  So believe it.
  7. Love your story and you will find that there will be more Love In Store for you too.
  8. Every time you decide you’re Never Going Back Again, decide instead that you won’t give up and get back to it.
  9. The World [is always] Turning, so make sure you step out of the writing bubble and find ways to interact with books and other writers.  Perspective is everything.
  10.   If the phrase I’m So Afraid won’t get out of your head, let it be there, because when you are out of your comfort zone that’s where the magic happens.
May10

Distraction, Or the Fort of Doom

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I could tell you about the time that I snuck into the real Fangorn Forest, or that time that I accidentally sat on a Maori sacred statue…the time I got lost in Paris…but here’s the thing.  I’m kind of stuck.

Truth time: I’m sitting in the middle of a book fort as I write this.  The walls are so tall that every time I move, it leans ominously inwards.  I admit, it’s quite a strange predicament to be in on a Friday morning that was meant to be a productive writing session!  It started out as a small tower—a place to put books as I organized the bookshelf—a good, productive journey on the road to cleanliness and order.  The more the tower grew, the more curious I became about how tall it could get.  I expanded it to make a wall…a few turrets…you know the story.  By the time I was putting the roof on the last tower it was too late—I was swept up into a wind tunnel of distraction.

The Fort of Doom

Distraction: it’s a serious problem even if you don’t wind up mired in book fort madness. A symphony of chirps and cell-phone buzzes drags me back into the real world far too often and the siren call of the full inbox never seems to get any less enticing.

So how do you avoid distraction?

I read once that there are two types of procrastination—the good kind that lets your story percolate until it is ready…and the bad kind that I suspect might involve building book forts, watching reruns of Friends, painting the dog’s toenails…just to avoid the fear that comes with not writing perfectly.

Just in case you are in the same place I am, here are some ways to extricate yourself from the fort of doom:

1. Selective focus-give all your attention to what you are working on right now…then move on to the next task.

2. Build in breaks so you don’t snap.

3. Nix the phone, shut the door, put the headphones on

4. Ignore the perilous email ding—remember that like all sirens, it wants to lure you out into the waters of distraction and pull you under.

5. Relax.  The ideas are in there somewhere.  Trust that they will come with or without a snazzy book fort.

A funny thing happened when I began typing furiously, determined to warn others about the fort of doom–it started to wobble wildly, tilting this way and that. I was too distracted to care, though–the good kind of distraction! Before I knew it…

on the floor...

The fort of doom was just another pile of books on the floor. Take what you will from my temporary insanity, but I’ve decided that sometimes you just have to put distraction in its place and see where your imagination can take you.

How do you thwart distraction?

May3

The Land of Opportunity: Ebooks

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Ebooks

It’s been long known that exciting things are happening in the e-publishing industry.  Self-publishing and the boom of ebooks over the last few years has changed the way that we (or at least I) think of writing (and reading) books.  So when I heard that HarperCollins’ William Morrow Division had announced that they were going to launch their own “digital-first imprint” for mysteries, thrillers, romance, sic-fi/fantasy and YA novels, my interest was piqued.

While the promise of monthly royalties to authors who sign with Impulse is tempting, it is the fact that digital-first lines are one more opportunity for new authors to be discovered by publishers.  According to Morrow, “the HarperCollins sales group is always seeking out opportunities in print.” Considering that this will provide more opportunity for publishers to take a chance on previously unsigned authors, it feels like a step in the right direction.

Do you see ebooks as the new frontier of publishing?  Or do you prefer print books and the traditional publishing route?

Apr27

Why Should You Re-Invent the Wheel?

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The wheel.

Did you ever hear of Max and the Cats by Moacyr Scliar?  It’s a story about a teenage boy who is stranded in a boat with a panther following a terrible shipwreck.  If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is.  “I saw a premise that I liked and I told my own story with it,” claimed Yann Martel, when asked about the obvious similarity between his book and Scliar’s (The Guardian).  In many ways, against the ideological underpinnings of modern art standards, this makes Martel look like a plagiarist.  But when compared, the two novels are actually quite different: Max and the Cats is all about Nazis, while Life of Pi deals mostly with religion.  To complicate matters, Martel says he didn’t even read Scliar’s book.  Considering all facts, can we still call Life of Pi an original?

For that matter, the fact that J.K. Rowling used many elements from Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13 in the Harry Potter books blurs the line between theft and imitation.  After all, Ibbotson also wrote about an orphaned boy with magical abilities who lives with his terrible relatives—long before Rowling did.  H.G. Wells’ Outline of History is largely borrowed from Florence Deeks’ The Web of the Worlds’ Romance.  Shakespeare, Plato and countless others are all said to have done a little literary pilfering too.

Originality as a concept hasn’t been around for as long as you might think.  Prior to the 18th century, imitation was a crucial part of successful art.  Writers lifted whole lines and stanzas from poems and shamelessly used the same ideas.  It was only later that people started getting touchy about it—right around the time that artistic “genius” became important.  I could be alarmed at these shocking revelations, but instead, I offer to you a case for imitation as part of the artistic process.

The truth is this: we are not writing in a vacuum.  So why pretend that great stories, voices and characters haven’t happened before? Writing in the voice of an author that you love or writing a story based on a scenario that inspires you is another way to inform your own literary voice.  In part, I think that the honesty of writing real, original works comes from a deep understanding of captivating elements of literature and writing them the way you want them to be.  They say that art imitates life, but I would argue that in many ways, great art—great literature especially—imitates other great literature that has come before it.

To return to the question: why reinvent the wheel?  Because the wheel works.

What does originality mean to you?  As artists, can we imitate honestly, or does it come too close to theft?

Apr22

Back to the Mailroom

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Alec Baldwin at his finest.

Confession: when I was in high school, I failed my drivers’ test six times.  There was the damned horse and buggy, plodding down the middle of the road that first time.  I sat there in the drivers’ seat, hands clenched to the wheel like bird claws.  There was a line of traffic all the way around the block, punching a Morse code of car-horn curses out into the air and the instructor, hidden behind enormous aviators, smiled and shook his head.  There was the time of the hypothetical pedestrian…the time of the wrong lanes…the time I ran over the curb or the time I was so nervous that I forgot to look in the mirrors for the whole trip.  I’ve been thinking a lot about those slow, defeated trips home from the drivers’ test.  Each time I knew that if I didn’t pass soon, I would have to start over again.

The other day, after a particularly frustrating experience of rejection, I started to think.  (Actually, if I’m being honest, I ate some cheesecake and watched some 30 Rock re-runs, because this is the all-time best remedy for disappointment. But saying “I started to think” just sounds way more avant-garde artiste…or something.)  And you know what?  It was totally productive, because I had an epiphany and it’s all because of Jack Donaghy and his awesomeness.  No, really, I mean it.  And not just because I have a crush on Alec Baldwin.  It just so happens that in this episode, Jack loses his position as CEO, but he climbs his way back to the top by getting a job in the mailroom.

Okay, bear with me.  This all makes sense, I swear.

For some reason, it got me thinking about my novel.  No, really, this time I actually was thinking and not ogling Alec Baldwin.  I’m rewriting this novel for the third time.  Why?  Because it just didn’t feel quite right the last time.  Maybe I’m a tad insane (aren’t we all?), but when I write another draft, I don’t like to cut and paste or edit what I already have.  I read each chapter and then type it out in a new document or write it again in a notebook without looking at it.  For some reason, the act of starting fresh makes all the important pieces stand out in my mind.  Aspects of the novel that I forget just fall away, because they weren’t really that important to the story anyway.

I guess you could say the blank page is my mailroom.  Sure, it’s not quite where I want to be.  Most of the time, it’s dark and filled with grumbling and a lot of papers everywhere.  But the thing is, I know that this is where I need to be.  After all, I did eventually pass my driving test.  (If this terrifies you more than comforts you, this is totally understandable). But it stands to reason that if someone who had to start over so many times can still succeed, we are all capable of our aspirations.  So make peace with the mailroom, because it’s only the first stop on the way to the top.

Have you ever gone back to the mailroom?

Apr17

Small Moments of Heroism at the Boston Marathon

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Helping Hands at the Boston Marathon

Call me crazy, but when I was a kid, I aspired to greatness.  Visions of literary superheroes danced in my head as I hung from the monkey bars, planning out the precise way that I would be the next J.K. Rowling, become the discoverer of a cure for diseases or whatever the most exciting “hero” was that week.  The thing about greatness is that its’ definition, as I have learned over the years, is vague.  Heroes (especially in literature) aren’t limited to being Superman, because I think being a hero is more complex than that.  Simply put, heroism no longer fits into the binary out of which it was born.

Monday evening found me camped out in front of my computer screen, scanning the news after getting a call that the Boston Marathon had been bombed.  My father in law was running the race and nobody had heard from him.  After calling the Canadian Consulate and hearing no news, frantically calling everyone who might have heard from him all there was left to do was wait.  That tension, heavy and thick like the air has left the room is the worst feeling; it’s the mixture of uncertainty and possibility that makes waiting for news painfully hard.  But it was while I was waiting that I had a realization of sorts.  It was while I was skimming the headlines that I started to see a pattern; amidst the chaos were a series of small acts of kindness.

In horrific events like these there are those stories that trickle down the lines of communication. Stories about the runners who lost their legs when they ran to help a mother and sister who had been injured, the people who ran towards the explosion to help out and the Boston residents that signed up on Google Docs to open up their homes to survivors are a reminder of the small moments of heroism.  On CBS news, they identified a “man in a red T-shirt and baseball hat, leaning over a visibly injured woman” as well as the countless fire fighters and EMTs who showed up to help.  The voices on twitter and Mashable were raving about The Man with Orange Juice, who offered his bathroom and some orange juice that he had or “the woman who opened her doors.”  Among the wreckage of this horrific event are a myriad of heroic acts.

We tell these stories for a reason; we tell these stories because they are the true stories of heroes. Everyone has the potential to be great not because they were born with great talent or goodness, but that there is the possibility to act in a heroic way when the opportunity arises.  Greatness does not mean grand gestures.  Sometimes, greatness means small acts of kindness.