ON WRITING, FLOW AND COFFEE

By Olga Agafonova

If I have a muse, she kicks in at the same time caffeine is absorbed into my bloodstream. On occasion, I can be completely immersed in what I am writing and I would like to imagine I am getting closer to entering the state of flow. Flow, or “being in the zone,” is when good things happen – you are focused on what you are doing, you enjoy what they are doing and your environment is conducive to keeping you in that state.

Smart employers are helping their staff reach flow to boost productivity. Smart writers should reflect on how to achieve the state for the same reason. Flow won’t happen with multi-tasking: you should be focused on doing one thing. Flow won’t happen if you are bored because that means you are already disengaged. 

Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception and Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations experiment with psychedelics to transcend self. Of course, I am not going that far: I just want a mild kick from a legal substance to help prod the muse. What I have tried includes variations on Bulletproof coffee and coffee brewed in a Clover machine.

I did not like the Bulletrpoof recipe. Per instructions, I dutifully added fatty-acid-containing organic butter to brewed coffee, poured some patented coconut oil on top and let it swirl in a mixer. The coffee, no surprise, tasted like butter and whatever cognitive-enhancing effects it had were overshadowed by the butter. Just in case I did something wrong, I also bought ready-made butter-containing coffee at Whole Foods and still, I could only taste the butter.

The Clover machine-brewed coffee, available at Starbucks, was more promising. About thirty minutes after drinking a cup, I did feel a noticeable rise in my alertness level. I have been drinking mild coffee for years and it takes a lot to have any effect on me. The alertness did not involve jitters or nervousness – it did exactly what a good coffee beverage is supposed to do.

There is also mushroom coffee: a beverage made from medicinal mushrooms like Lion’s mane and chaga. (I have heard of chaga being used as a folk remedy for the prevention and treatment of cancer in Russia. The fact that it is catching on as a nootropic substance elsewhere in the world is interesting.) High-quality mushrooms are hard to get and there are subtle details about which parts of the mushrooms matter: the fruiting body vs. the mycelium, the spindly parts that are underground.  The drink is supposed to taste like burnt toast – not an appealing description but enthusiasts say it’s flavorful and delicious.

My plan is to continue to experiment with caffeine-containing concoctions and see what happens with the writing. I promise to report back with results.

           

LEARNING WHAT NOT TO WRITE

By Raegan Teller

It took me three years to write my first mystery novel, Murder in Madden. During that time, I worked with several wonderful writing instructors. They taught me how to make the shift from business writing to fiction, which wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Much of my previous work focused on instructing readers on how to do something, so step-by-step details were important. But writing fiction was a different animal, as I quickly discovered. I found myself having to unlearn many of my coveted business writing skills. While I knew how to construct a sentence, where to put the commas, and how to apply the grammar rules, I often stumbled, especially during my first attempts. And then, over time, word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph, I learned how to write fiction.

When I began writing the second book, which only took eight months from the first word to a first draft, I realized I had to learn something else: what not to write. I’m not referring to merely avoiding ornate language or eliminating you-need-a-thesaurus words. Fortunately, my business background had taught me to write at an appropriate comprehension level and to stay within the maximum word count. But, on those occasions when I did get overly descriptive, I followed Elmore Leonard’s 10^th Rule of Writing: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My form of overwriting came from something one of my instructors called “temporal linearity.” I tended to instruct the reader on how a character got from one place to another, in a linear fashion, just as I had provided comprehensive details in business writing. Of course, fiction readers need enough information to make logical assumptions, but they don’t need to be led by the hand.

For example, if one scene ends with “Sara” telling her boyfriend she’s going to the library, you can insert a break and begin the next scene in the library. Unless it’s germane to the story, the reader doesn’t need to know how she got in the car, backed out of the driveway, and drove down the street to get to the library where she had to drive around the block three times looking for a parking space. I wasn’t quite that bad, but I did overwrite some scene transitions in my first draft.

Mostly as a reminder to myself, I developed “Raegan’s Rules to Avoid Overwriting.”

1.      Trust your readers to figure out how Sara gets to the library.

2.      Practice writing six-word stories and other forms of micro fiction where you have to tell a story within a strict word limit: writers should spend words like gold.

3.      Read your work aloud. If it sounds boring, it is.

4.      Hire a good editor—listen and learn.

5.      Keep writing and eventually you’ll overcome inexperience.

6.      Continue to overwrite, and you risk arrogance.

Perhaps all I really needed to do was re-read Leonard’s 10^th Rule of Writing.

WHERE ARE WE?

By Sharon May

Imagine starting a story and having no clue as to where or when it takes place. You would feel as if you were floating in space. To make readers feel grounded we need a setting.

Most writers develop setting early in the work and expect the reader to be satisfied. But a skillful writer keeps the setting alive throughout the piece and lets it build organically. Silas House, in works like The Coal Tattoo, masterfully uses setting throughout his work.

It would be nice if we could establish setting in a sentence or two but the physical location and time of a story only scratch the surface. Instead, an author, to create an adequate setting, should develop what I call place, which builds the look and feel of a locale and era. Some authors use long descriptions to establish place, but details, a word or phrase here and there, can also build it piece by piece.

In my most recent short story, “The Birthday Gift,” the setting is rural Kentucky in the early 1960s. I could have said that in one sentence as I did here, but that would have been rather boring. Instead, the young narrator tells what he knows to demonstrate he is ready to start school, including his address and the president’s name. Not only does this information build place, it also reveals the narrator’s character. This helps me keep the story compact and short.

For my novel, setting is much more like a character so I provide lots of descriptions of the landscape, particularly of the mountains to capture how they sculpt where and how Appalachians live. If on a winding, narrow roadway, you can bet that the road is built along a river, and the houses or trailers, can only be found on wide spaces carved into the hillside. Small farms and towns fill bottom land between the hills. The mountains dictate this layout, and they mold the characters as well.

Patty Loveless, a Pikeville, Kentucky native, in her song, “You Will Never Leave Harlan Alive,” describes the mountains’ effect on the inhabitants as she describes the brevity of a day in a hollow, saying, “Where the sun comes up about ten in the mornin’/ And the sun goes down about three in the day.” A poet friend of mine wants to leave Kentucky because he is tired of the grey winter days. That pretty much sums up why I had to escape the mountains as well. This darkness leads to the hillbilly’s attitude of hopelessness and sorrow. Of course, place helps create the mood of a story.

Place can’t be dashed off in just a paragraph or two early in a story, but should unfold as the story progresses from beginning to ending. Readers want to be enveloped by place and time, to feel, hear, taste, and smell as well as see where they are.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED BY SUBMITTING EVERY WEEK

By Kasie Whitener

In entrepreneurship, my other profession, business ventures evolve through iterations. A company tests an idea with customers, then adjusts it after feedback, and then issues another version for another test. The cycle is ongoing as the company iterates, builds, and prospers.

I decided this year to treat my writing life like entrepreneurship. The goals I set for 2018 were about creating iterative habits that would enable me to build my writing business.

Write every day.

Submit every week.

Revise one work per month.

These goals are about progress in small increments and about establishing habits. They have taught me things I didn’t know about myself and about establishing my dedication to this thing we call craft. This blog focuses on the second goal with a list of things I’ve learned:

Submissions mean rejections.

Better than writing in a cave, thinking my work is fantastic and polished and clever is submitting said work and getting the “no thanks” over and over. Why is that better? Because I know my work is not fantastic, it needs more polish, and cleverness is for bozos.

“Just tell the stories, Kasie,” these rejections tell me. “Don’t worry about us.”

Submissions are about finding the right amplifier.

I can share the story I wrote for my best friend Jessica with her via email. I have a few I’d like to send directly to the ex-boyfriends they’re about (but I won’t). I submit to journals and magazines because I want the stories to be amplified. Finding a place to share them means finding the right audience for them. So, I submit. And I get rejected. Because as much as I think by reading three or four pieces the journal has published that my work would fit there, the editors read everything they publish and they know better.

Rejections are about the work, not about me.

Editors who say, “No, thanks,” don’t know me. They don’t want to hurt my feelings, ruin my life, or keep me from writing another story about another ex-boyfriend. They just want to put together a collection of work that their readers will read, enjoy, and maybe even pay for. Editors who reject my work are rejecting the story. Not the storyteller.

Rejections shouldn’t be purchased.

I don’t pay for submissions anymore. Not even the really good journals like Missouri Review and Glimmer Train. I know the industry says getting my work in those journals would say something about how fantastic and polished and relevant it is. But, the free journals are more competitive. So, getting published by The Forge or The American Literary Review, or Apeiron Review would be better because they receive more submissions. Also, submitting every week at $3, $5, or $20 a week is crazy expensive.

So far, the iterations have taught me a lot about myself and this business. Learning is what iteration is all about and I’m definitely learning.