WRITING BY HAND

By Sandra Schmid

There’s a current trend to get rid of stuff. We walk through our house, picking up each thing, asking if we love it. If not, Goodwill gets it. 

I’m trying the same technique on my manuscript. Chapters are dropped that don’t move the story. Excess words, slashed. Till eventually, I can hold something I love. 

The question arises, how do I know when I love my writing?

I’ve been writing the same story for twenty years. Drafts have accumulated. I’m a hoarder of words.

  

To rediscover my love, my hand and eyes becomes the gauge for whether the words stay or get thrown away. If copying a paragraph by hand feels torturous to my arthritic fingers, it’s probably ready for Goodwill. On the other hand, if the pen floats effortlessly across the page, I’m reconnecting with the heart and soul of my story. Those are the words worth keeping. 

When my eyes speed across the page, skimming to get through, I’m bored. My reader will be too. But when my eyes slow down to take a long, sensuous look, I start copying. 

Unlike the current trend to throw everything away, I advise keeping copies of our waste. Sometimes, old words trigger the best parts of our book. 

Reconnect with an old manuscript stashed away in a suitcase. Romance it. Feel it with your hand, your eyes, your heart and soul. Write until you love it.

FICTIONS for WEIRD PRIMATES

By Caleb Pennington

I’m a weird primate, half hairy, named Caleb. I have the mystery of my existence to solve. I’m scared that there isn’t a purpose.

One day I picked up a fruit of sorts. It was the letter A. I asked: “The hell is this?” I said: “It’s the letter A.” I then knew that it was real. Like bedrock to a mountain. Hardly ever changing. It made me feel good. Comforted. The world has real things in it. Things I could piece together.

So I wrote: The letter A is a standalone fact. It is objective. There is not one literate half hairy primate on this big life ball planet that won’t get it. It is a tool. It can create something. I couldn’t argue with it. I told myself: I think I just learned something real.

Promising, the realization was. I started typing. I wanted words in sequence to be real like math. But a math of the spirit. My spirit doesn’t seem to be half primate. Sometimes, maybe it’s a human and thinks about all the problems of not having a purpose. My human side wanted to read a book. It did. It then said: These fictions and myths have a reason for living. The letters that makes them is as objective and durable as the bedrock on this planet.

So, I started introducing myself to fictions and myths.

After a while, I said to myself: I made a friend, today. Fictions meet myth, myth meet fiction. My name is Caleb.

Fiction said: Nice meeting you. I don’t get to meet many people, these days.

Myth said: Yes, likewise.

I asked was: Why are you here?

They both said: To answer.

I asked: What? ‘Cause I have some questions.

Myth said: Hypotheticals pertaining to your survival, the reasons for the natural world, the reasons humans must adhere to a natural order. They die when they don’t. They suffer.

Fiction said: Hypotheticals pertaining to your spirit in the context of your experience.

I said: Damn, that’s pretty deep fellers.

They said: No shit. You must not be too educated if you didn’t already know that we’re deep.

I said: I’ve read Nietzsche.

Myth said: He made me feel relevant, again.

Fiction said: He breathed life into my lungs.  

I thought that was pretty cool. Fiction did too, so he made me a recommendation. He gave me Richard Bachman, or Stephen King in disguise. His writing is crisp, but it felt like someone was just trying to put me in a demonic world that scared me as a half primate. I wasn’t feeling too human. I still wanted a purpose for being here. So fiction handed me 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I realized I was going to die at the end of it. That I couldn’t escape time. My family couldn’t, either.  

After I read that, I had to go over to my mom’s house because she is my mom. She was on the couch, watching T.V. Gabriel Garcia Marquez made me realize she was going to die. I told her I love her. It felt good. For thirty minutes, I wanted my purpose in life to be loving my mom. It felt good.  

So I said to fiction: “You know, that book made me want to spend time with my mom.”

Fiction said: “Understandable. All loved ones pass away in that fiction you read. As they do in life.”

I decided to pose some questions to him. Because he gave me some answers when I was with my mom. I asked: Could we come to the weakest’s rescue? Would we if they were a dog? A cow? A fetus? Are you too good to save a fetus?

Fiction and me are trying to answer them. I think that’s the reason I try to know him. He helps me figure things out.

  

  

HEAD-HOPPING VS FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE

By Bonnie Stanard

I’m back with point of view (POV). Bear with me. I’m trying to turn my head-hopping into the professionally respected Free and Indirect Discourse (FID) ) . (If you read this nomenclature as wordy, I find it even wordier to write.) Head-hopping, after all, is a signpost of an amateurish writer. I’ve been there, and when workshop critics suggest confusion about POV in my work, I cringe.

Online information about FID does little to distinguish it from head-hopping (or from omniscient POV, for that matter). Some descriptions apply to both, and you’re left in more fog than when you began. What is the difference? I’m not going to clear the fog, but I’ll tell you the conclusions I’ve reached.

Narrators in both approaches presume to third person, but in both, Third Limited POV is scattershot throughout the fabric of the story. Neither can be considered Third Limited because we’re not confined to one character’s viewpoint. Both approaches get into the heads of various characters and put forth individual thoughts, feelings, and motivation.

One way to differentiate the bad from the good: head-hopping gives you whiplash with its herky-jerky POV whereas FID doesn’t.

The difference, as I see it, is whether or not the narrator holds on to her voice and keeps it consistent. So? Put another way, the FID narrator maintains a pivotal voice even as she flits about describing the inner life of characters. It deteriorates to head-hopping when the voices of the characters overcome the narrator’s control. That is to say, the characters bounce their thoughts around in a power struggle with nobody minding the plot.

As I aspire to FID, I am reminded to protect my singular narrator, or teller of the story, from being usurped by the characters. For instance, I may write “John thought his mother ignored him.” There—it sounds like I’m in John’s head. That’s fine as long as the narrator doesn’t capitulate to John in a way that elevates John to the level of narrator. Since John doesn’t know the plot nor where anything is going, his thoughts are merely pieces of a puzzle.

You keep the narrator from being overtaken by John by pulling back (it’s about distance between narrator and story/characters) and asserting control; make it clear that the story teller is describing John, not John telling us about John. Add a sentence such as “John would have denied it, but he always thought he was being ignored.” John wouldn’t talk about himself in this way. This is the FID narrator saying, “John, you’re not telling this story. Those are your thoughts, but I’m going to tell them.”

The FID narrator makes objective observations that serve to distance the teller of the story from the characters in the story. The idea is to talk about the characters instead of talking for them.

In head-hopping, readers know the insecurity of having no anchor, even if they don’t consciously realize it. The bottom line is that your narrator is the boss, regardless of how many characters try to tell you otherwise.

You may realize by now that the FID narrator has much in common with an omniscient narrator. But let’s stick to one fog at a time.

THE BOOK HANGOVER

By Kasie Whitener

What must the teen-aged clerk have thought of me at 9:57 on a Tuesday night, the hum of a vacuum in the back of the store, jammy pants tucked into my Ugg boots, hair snarled into a messy bun, wild-eyed and profusely thanking him?

Weeks before, I tore through The Bronze Horseman, secretly scheduling meetings into my work day so I could sneak into conference rooms and read. I had purchased the book in Fremont, California, on Monday afternoon. By Friday at 1 p.m. when I boarded the plane home, all 810 pages of it were over. I hadn’t read that fast or that much since graduate school. I was reawakened to the power of an intoxicating story. And I was hungover for weeks afterward.

Sometimes you only recognize the book hangover when you start the next book in your stack and feel an overall “meh” as you turn the pages. The book hangover makes you bitter about the writer’s inability to produce more work. I once considered burning effigies of Cassandra Clare when I learned the next book of hers would not be released for 18 months. The book hangover makes you jealous wondering just what that author was able to do that twisted you so desperately into knots.

Like getting intoxicated, you know while you’re doing it that this will end badly. As you near the end of the book, your spirit sags. The pages in your right hand feel too light to meet a satisfying end. How many things will go unsolved?

It’s not just good books that cause a hangover; any book that connects with you at the right time, in the right way can do it. You feel euphoric and invincible until it’s over. Then, parched, lethargic, grumpy, and suffering in a way only cheeseburgers and milkshakes can solve, you lie on the couch and binge watch Netflix swearing to never read again.

I want to write the book that does that. The one that gets the reader so deeply invested, s/he will ignore family, work, and the Super Bowl to keep reading. I want to write characters like tequila shots and turning points like toasts, climaxes like bar anthems sung at the top of our lungs and denouements like fervent whispers that lead to one-night-stands.

I want my readers drunk on my novel. And afterward, when they’ve finished, I want them spent, heartbroken, and lonely. Like I was after The Bronze Horseman.

In desperation one night in Cincinnati, I trolled the Amazon listing, a jilted lover internet-stalking the book that had meant so much to me.

And learned there was a sequel.

Wild with desire, I called Barnes & Noble to check availability. Told them I’d come right over.

“Don’t close yet!” I begged.

Their last copy of Tatiana and Alexander sold, opened, and reading before I even made it back to my car. And like the hair of the dog bartenders prescribe, I was drunk again within minutes.

THE ART OF REJECTION

By El Ochiis

Can rejection be an art?  Can it ever be acceptable? 

The first time I was rejected for a piece of writing, I curled into a fetal position and subsisted on a diet of kale and oatmeal for, well, five days.  I love kale but, at three meals a day, that’s just gross.

When I look back, I don’t feel so much like I had failed as much as I had submitted something that was not ready to be published. I had dated this guy whose sibling was a famous New York agent.  He was impressed by a piece of writing I had published in a publication.  In hindsight, he was trying to impress me with a connection to a world that I had dreamed and I, for some unexpected reason, wanted to impress him with my writing talent, which was silly because I really wasn’t crazy about him.  But, I figured if his connection to the tough world of New York agency could get me a fast road to acclaim, maybe I’d come to love him. 

Of course, I heard my grandma mah’s voice in an ethical chamber of my head: “Never use people for your own gain.” 

Firstly, grandma mah was not living in an empty loft on Varick Street in NYC with a view of an entrance to the Holland Tunnel, to New Jersey, no heat and an empty refrigerator.  To be fair, I couldn’t afford electricity so there was little need to put food into an unplugged apparatus that was supposed to keep stuff cold. The point was, rejection still sucked.

Recently, I’ve read about a movement, in NYC, whose members have come to embrace rejections like they were awards. Some writers were aiming for their one hundredth rejection slip.  Who has skin that thick? One writer even parlayed her rejections into a teaching gig at a workshop and college.

Then, I heard that voice of grandma mah again: “Turn your lemons into lemonade, my child.” 

I am not even that fond of some yellow, bitter fruit in a glass of water with sugar. However, I must admit, they might have been right, both granny and the writer with a centennial of rejections.  Still, I’ve always found it difficult to grow titanium skin. So, with my second rejection, I took to a more pronounced fetal position and played blues songs for twenty-one days straight.  This rejection took my guts from behind my rib cage and played bongo drums with them.  I had turned down an offer for a piece, I deemed a literary masterpiece, because the producer’s creative vision was for a cable show in some foreign market. How dare he use my literary musing, that rivaled Tolstoy, in my opinion, as fodder for a commercial endeavor – oh the horror. 

It was my “awakening” when an editor reminded me that Tolstoy was dead. Um, now was that a metaphor for my writing? I checked and she was right, figuratively, literally and metaphorically.  Damn you Russian men who shaped my view of how to pen stories. Was I blaming someone else for my own failure?

Never mind, I heard your agreement there granny.

But, undoubtedly, we have to learn to accept failure – well that was what I would told my offspring to make them feel better.  Without failure, there is no success – Michael Jordan said he missed hundreds of the shots that he threw – look at his career. Writing is not basketball; writing is sitting down and ripping out your intestines, putting them back in again and describing it so that a reader would, not only understand the process, but believe it.

Couple that with solitude, poverty and anxiety. 

Who would apply for such a job?  A writer would, that’s who.  That’s why rejections, though they suck, have to be tolerable. 

How many times did I use the word “Suck”?  Crap, this is so going to be rejected – I’ve assumed the fetal position.