When Does It End?

By Sharon May

Since I have been losing weight this past month, I have been asked, “What’s your goal?” I answer by stating weights I’d be happy with, but add there is no goal because I don’t yet know how much I can lose. Not having a goal in mind reminds me of writing fiction or poetry. Unlike life, a literary work captures only a moment in time, starting and ending in medias res. The question is, “How do I know when I’ve reached the end?”

I have known how I wanted to end a story twice in my life, but had no idea where to start. So I wrote backwards, asking “What has to happen to make this the ending?”

Usually I have a first line, image, or character I want to explore and begin writing, discovering the ending when I get there. This organic method is my preference for the writing experience as it allows me to be as entertained and as surprised as the reader. But it does make me question whether the ending works. A friend says that he can tell when I discover the ending because I have a tendency to slap it on too early instead of letting the ending come at the end. I understand what he means and am trying to break that habit.

An ending should answer all the questions or themes introduced, resolve the conflicts, and satisfy the reader, according to how-to articles. But that doesn’t even come close to explaining how to know if you have the end that is meant to be.

A case in point is a poem I wrote recently in memory of my cousin who died last fall. In the first draft, I ended on a note that emphasizes his role in his death, and the resulting tone is bitter. I wanted to share the poem with my family, but knew their wounds were too fresh to deal with such an ending. I consulted a poet friend, and he wrote an alternative family-friendly ending. He used the same words for the majority of the poem, but changed the last three lines to create an ending meant to console.

It is hard to imagine that the exact same words could be used in two poems with dramatically different endings, themes, and tones, but they both work equally well and are satisfying to the reader. They are just different.

So there are no finite or definite endings. An ending can be swapped out for another, depending on the author’s intentions. Some post-modern works emphasize this by offering multiple endings, and the individual reader can choose the one he or she finds most satisfying.     

This can be unsettling for a writer who expects THE END. But in reality it never is that; it’s just an ending, a place to stop. 

I could conclude by offering advice on writing endings.  But as Bartleby the Scrivener says, “I prefer not to.”     

Writing a Non-Fiction Proposal

By Laura P. Valtorta

www.gattafilms.com

Laurapv.wordpress.com

Next week I have a meeting with a publisher. My goal is to pitch a non-fiction project about filmmaking. The publisher does not know me. I need him to sit up and take notice.

Aside from eccentric clothing and hair, my best bid for attention will be a non-fiction proposal that makes sense. In the publishing world, making sense means making money.

Everybody is a filmmaker these days. The ease of digital filmmaking means that there’s a lot of junk out there. On the bright side, artists are freer to express themselves. What makes my filmmaking different is that I have a message rooted in reality: change your community by praising it. When I see a modicum of strength, I pick it out of the surrounding pile of poop and blow it up into a film.

As an attorney with an exciting clientele (tough survivors), I have access to a smorgasbord of material. Illness, injury, psychosis, and reliance on family. Society can’t stop this train by throwing the passengers in jail. Brilliance and beauty are the results.

Sarcoidosis: a chronic illness will be the subject of next week’s proposal: how to make a film about it. Which doctors and researchers to bug. How to crack the organization of survivors in Orangeburg. Describing prejudicial assumptions about the disease that the folks in Orangeburg say are false. Interview subject, camera, sound check, action.

A synopsis, an outline, a sample chapter. These are the basic tools I plan to bring with me to the meeting next week.  The synopsis will state my premise, even though I seek interview subjects who may belie that premise. The outline will be detailed, even though I plan to veer away from it whenever necessary.

Only the sample chapter will describe my uncertainty. Can this project work? Can we raise production money? My cinematographer, Lynn Cornfoot, and I will get some raw video to send along with grant proposals. Can we get butts in the seat to view this film? That’s the ultimate question.

Illness can create strength: look at Dallas Buyers’ Club. This is the message I must convey to the publisher next week. Every human has an interest in that.

Getting Ideas for the Story

By Rex Hurst

Joseph Conrad as a seventeen-year-old sailor once heard the story of a man who had stolen, single-handedly, "a whole lighter-full of silver.” This story bounced around in his head for twenty-five years before emerging as one of his greatest novels, Nostromo. It is about a man who, while involved in a fictional South American revolution, stashes away a shipment of silver, only to be unable to reach it again.

One little story blossoms into a novel that has never gone out of print.

That’s why when I’m preparing to start on a new book, I never read fiction. For months I delve into non-fiction, watch documentaries, listen to old people. Then little by little the full story emerges. An idea here, some dialog there, a new character, bits of flesh and bone- all of it comes together.

If I don’t do this, what sparks my ideas? Other people’s work. And then I’m not producing my own, but copying another’s style.

Decades ago, when I was first starting to write seriously, I listened to a lecture by an author who told us, “If you’re going to go into writing, don’t be an English major, because then all you’ll have to write about is other people’s work. Do something that will give you ideas or things that other people will actually want to read about.”

That always stuck with me. And when I delve into the non-fiction world of material, I am always asking myself, “Can this be a good story? Have I heard it before? And if so, is it a story that has been played out? Done too many times?”

It’s incredible how a minor germ of an idea from an obscure place, can spark an entire novel.

My last book, The Foot Doctor Letters, came into being because I was reading about the life of Carl Panzram and I realized that most fictionalized books and films of serial killers never got them right. Thus, I set out to create a fictional serial killer that could have been authentic. Maybe I was too successful because a lot of people seemed turned off by it, but c’est la vie. What I had initially intended to be a two-page short story blossomed into a 267-page novel.

You never know where these ideas will take you. There is a wealth of ideas and new stories just waiting to be unearthed.

Go forth and find them.

New Year, New Writing You – 2018 Installment

By Kasie Whitener

Last year, I had the first blog of 2017 and I used it to inspire myself to set some writing goals. This is the link to that post if you’d like to review it.

Here’s how I did on my writing goals:

• Find an agent for the vampire novel. Nyet. The thing was a hot mess most of the year and I only just figured out what’s wrong with it. Not agent-ready.     
• Find a publisher for the GenX novel. Nyet. I did get some valuable feedback and a semi-yes from a small press before the press closed its doors to new submissions. I also learned it stayed in consideration for a long time with a different small press before being rejected. Thanks for sending it to us and please submit again. 
• Write ten new stories. Nyet. I wrote about half that and submitted even fewer.

I said at the time that these were “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals,” and they were absolutely career-changing, had they come about. How’s that for building in an escape clause?

What I did accomplish in 2017 was to present at a prestigious literary festival on the topic of funerals – a much-needed examination of a critical scene in the GenX novel. I also applied for and won a scholarship to the Big Dream Conference held by our parent organization, the South Carolina Writers’ Association. In my application, I said the conference could really move the needle on my writing life. And it did.

What I learned is that I’m at a new level in my writing career. Gone are the novice-writer needs like learning the publishing industry and learning to take feedback. I’m now in a middle plane of writer’s career where I know how to do the work and just have to do it.

My bestie, Jodie Cain Smith, offered advice on one of my stories this year that summed up my entire writing career right now. She said, “Be willing to dig deeper.”

It’s not enough to play at writing. If you want this, you have to dig deeper.

Here’s the 2018 strategy:

• ·       Write every day. Something. Anything. Whether it’s for work, a blog, or fiction. Don’t let yourself go to bed without writing something. The more I write, the better I get. So, write more.
• ·      Submit every week. Query an agent, send off to a publisher, enter a contest, submit a story to journal. Every week you have to put yourself out there. That’s 52 submissions this year. Something will get published.
• ·         Revise one work per month. Focus revision on a single piece and work that piece until the month is over. At month end, done or not, move on to something else. You don’t have to finish revising all in one go. But you do have to focus.

In my writing life, it’s time to dig deeper and do the work. What will you do in your writing life in 2018?