LEARNING to BE the “OTHER” PERSON

By Raegan Teller

At a recent signing event, another author said to me, “Selling books is hard.” When he walked away, I felt a bit overwhelmed. Would I ever master the marketing skills I need? And then I remembered saying to myself about five years ago, “Will I ever master the skills I need to write a book?”

If you are writer, you know there’s a long list of skills you must have, whether you’re producing a book, short story, or poem. Even if you know how to write a decent sentence, you must learn structure, pacing, and storytelling, to name a few. The list of required writing skills is long, but that isn’t all.

Sometime after my first book was published, I realized that I’m expected to be two, totally different people: an accomplished writer and a marketing genius. On top of that, the skills and behaviors needed to master each role are opposites in many ways. Yen and Yang. How could I become proficient at both?

To confront my being-two-people dilemma, I recalled Martin Broadwell’s four stages of learning I had used often in my consulting practice. When I began writing my first novel, I was at the level of “unconscious incompetence”: I didn’t know what I didn’t know. After writing that book for the next three years, I reached the next level of learning: “conscious incompetence.” I was beginning to realize what I didn’t know—and it was scary. As they say, “Ignorance is bliss.”

While writing the next two books, I honed my writing skills through continuous studying and feedback. Now, I’m able to write at the level of “conscious competence.” But while I have the skills, writing is still hard work and requires a lot of mental energy.

But what about becoming the “other” person I mentioned earlier? Could I also become a marketing genius? Even now, I’m still at the lowest level of learning for those skills: unconscious incompetence. Every day, I learn something I didn’t even realize I was supposed to know. Things like learning how to navigate through the behemoth Amazon maze seems like learning to fly a fighter jet. Slowly, I’m beginning to figure out what I don’t know when it comes to marketing books. While I might be approaching conscious incompetence, I’m nowhere near the final level: unconscious competence. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to achieve that level of mastery. I may not live long enough to see that day, but one can hope . . . and keep learning.

All of this is to say, yes, you can be two different people with different skills and behaviors. One role may be easier and more natural than the other. You’ll learn those skills quicker. But on a parallel learning track, it may take you a bit longer to acquire the skills and assume the behaviors you need to become the “other” person. That’s okay. Just remember, the learning process is the same: one level at a time.

WRITING A MEMOIR

By Laura P. Valtorta

www.gattafilms.com

www.thearthousemovie.webs.com

laurapv.wordpress.com

                                               

Three women presented memoirs at the November meeting of Dinah’s Writers’ Group: two were children’s books, and one was an outline of the writer’s life that could be turned into a complete autobiography.

Memoirs can take many forms. I appreciated hearing about the warmth of Dinah’s father and grandfather in a picture book designed for two-year-olds. The story had a surprising amount of depth.

Likewise, the autobiography was extremely poignant because it highlighted a lifetime of pain and the insight that came from overcoming mistreatment. Serious abuse can land a person in jail, or it can propel them to the top. The outcome depends on the stuff that person is made of.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to weave the peaks and valleys of my life into a manual for indie filmmakers. I think this is appropriate. Dinah’s group suggested I rename it Autobiography of a Filmmaker.

As writers, we don’t create stories out of nothing. Art stems from experiences, like a lunch in Newberry followed by an evening Durga Puja ceremony. A trip to Cuba.

I create art, both films and stories, in order to communicate a message that could be the color of a conversation or an outright lesson on decency. These messages come from my family life, my friends, and my work as an attorney.

Judges and courtrooms don’t matter. The day I quit enjoying my clients will be the day I quit practicing law. Their lives are art; their faces are beautiful. My sisters, parents, husband and children are what make life meaningful. Or extremely frustrating. I hope my autobiography will do them all justice.

What I Learned at the 2018 SCWA Pawley’s Island Conference

By Kasie Whitener

I co-hosted the Open Mic on Saturday night at the Pawley’s Island Conference with my friend Mary Sturgill. What I learned was that people are skeptical of Peter Pan and ready for a new interpretation of him. Also that most writers don’t perform their work, they simply read it. And that an open mic should be fun and treated as such if you want people to stay.

For me, the open mic was the highlight of the conference: a chance for writers to come together and read and perform and listen and appreciate the work others put into the craft.

I’m a fiction writer, so I attended the sessions on character development and point of view. These were led by Dr. John Kessel and Therese Anne Fowler respectively. I enjoyed Kessel’s session although it was more lecture style and instructive than interactive and discussion-based. I like instructive because the session leaders are why I’m there. While amateur attendees’ opinions might be interesting, the session leader has the knowledge to apply to the discussion while many attendees’ have only experience or opinion.

What’s the difference?

 Leader (Kessel for example): lose the driver’s license descriptions – hair, eyes, weight
 Attendee (justifying his/her own work): you need to help the reader picture the character.
 Leader: you mean picture what you think the character looks like.
 Attendee: I created the character.
 Leader: then what role does the reader play in creating the character?

When the attendee doesn’t know how to answer, because the attendee (writer) hasn’t considered the reader’s position in the existence of the work, then I know we’re seeing a gulf between the literary folks (Kessel) and the storytellers-who-want-to-be-writers (attendee).

So I learned I’m still in between those. I’m trained as a literary person, meant to understand the nuance of giving vital stats of character (trust the reader to infer necessary character traits from the details I give) and the reader who enjoys a good tall, dark, and handsome protagonist.

Therese Anne Fowler talked about choosing a point of view as a matter of distance. How close does the reader need to be to understand and appreciate the story? How close is too close?

So I learned that the focus on the reader is a big deal. What is the reader’s experience? Is it the kind of experience people buy?

As a voracious reader, I can separate the experiences I’m willing to pay for from the ones I’d rather borrow from the library. And THAT is how you know you have the kind of book agents and publishers want.

Is this an experience the reader will pay for? Gladly?

In the open mic when I detailed Peter Pan getting aggressive with a mermaid, when I made it clear that he was entitled, selfish, and probably psychotic, I learned some people would pay to read that version of the boy who refused to grow up. So, yeah, let’s pitch that.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

By Bonnie Stanard

When I was in college I wrote a story in which a girl talked to the reader about her life in a vague and unexceptional manner. In the end, she saw a rat and scurried after it, intending to eat it, at which point the reader realizes the narrator is insane—my attempt at an unreliable narrator.

To get a better idea about the unreliable narrator, I looked it up in dictionaries.

1. A character whose story cannot be taken at face value.

2. A narrator who holds a distorted view which leads to an inaccurate telling of events.

3. A character who cannot be trusted, either from ignorance or self-interest.

First of all, a reminder that the narrator is the character who tells the story. An unreliable narrator, then, tells lies. (I was going to add partial lies, but I don’t believe in partial lies.) Oh, you say, that sounds simple enough. But wait. Who reads a paragraph in a novel, stops, and wonders: “this says it is raining, but I wonder if it really is raining”? Our assumption is that the character telling the story is laying it on the line, giving us the facts (and only the facts, even if it’s fiction) and usually they are.

Since it is the narrator experiencing the action who gives us a false interpretation of the events, the obvious choice of point of view (POV) is either first person or third person limited.

GIRL ON THE TRAIN

I always become suspicious of a story (or movie) that features a character who has lapses of consciousness for reasons such as fainting spells, memory loss, drug or alcohol abuse. These are easy tropes for establishing an unreliable narrator.

SHUTTER ISLAND

The narrator that is insane, deluded or impaired may give you a distorted picture. If you figure that out on the first page, the author is an amateur. A good writer will string you along for pages until you figure out that you’re reading a story told by a deluded or crazy person (the most extreme of unreliable).

ATONEMENT

In more subtle instances, a rational narrator puts forward a view that is corrupted by bias, hatred, or naïveté. You, as the reader, will only be able to pick up on this by comparing the given narration with other verifiable evidence, whether it be from other characters or reality itself.

The purpose of an unreliable narrator is to deceive the reader about a story’s actual facts. Given that our stories are fiction to begin with, this makes for a fiction within a fiction. The more shrewd the deception and the more mystifying the story, the more gratifying for us when we figure it out.

If that isn’t confusing enough, here’s a conundrum for you. One www source lists as an unreliable narrator Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye). Because, says the source, Holden calls himself “the most terrific liar you ever saw.” When events prove he is honest in telling us he is untrustworthy, is he reliable or unreliable?