Let me say first off, forgive the rant. But I am tired of hearing people say this writer or that writer sold out. I heard someone say it about Stephanie Meyer of Twilight fame the other day. Look, in order to sell out you have to be writing something far below what you could write and doing it for fame and fortune. Isn’t that what “selling out” means? But many writers who people say are selling-out aren’t selling-out at all. They’re writing what they can write. A lot of them feel passionate about what they write. How is that selling out?
You and I might not think what they write is very good. Or it might not appeal to you or me for other reasons. Of course, all of that is subjective. You might love something that I don’t and I might love something that you don’t, but the only writers that I consider sell-outs are those who are only writing what they write for money, career etc… That’s it. They have no real love for their writing, or the craft and art, no desire to write the best they can, and so on. Those are sell-outs. Someone who sells a lot of books writing in a popular genre usually isn’t a sell-out. They’re just writing what they can write--like the rest of us.
Or so I think today.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
be there out there
One big advancement for me as a writer was being able to BE THERE (wherever that might be) with my characters, so that my reader could be THERE with my characters experiencing the story in what Robert Olen Butler calls a "moment-to-moment" way. But there was something else I had to do to get to this place. I had to let go and allow myself to make my stories as weird as they could be. I had to go with the WEIRD TALES. That’s just who I am as a writer. I write strange comic stories about ridiculous and serious things. Every time I tried to tell my stories in a conventional way or pull back from the absurdist path my story was taking,it died or became the walking dead. And not in any interesting zombie way either. What I had to do was to go “out there” and just let my stories be what they had to be. So, in my case, I had to BE THERE OUT THERE to BE THERE.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Details
Nothing wrong with the general. We spend a lot of time living in a general world. But it’s the specific that makes writing come alive. There will be summary in novels of course, telling that will often be general in nature. We need it. It moves the reader from one place to another in the novel, keeping the focus on what’s important instead of loading the reader down with pointless detail. We need the general, but what makes a novel come alive is specifics. If you have details, the right ones, the work will seem real.
From the writers POV, I think you arrive at the right choices in fiction, at the right details, by getting in the zone. That is, you get yourself to that subconscious place where you are living the world of your characters. Then in revision you look for those places where you’ve given way to the general—used the wrong word or failed to make a scene seem specific. It’s a constant battle to make every sentence and scene significant. I think this struggle is where a lot of our success or failure as writers occur. Genuine writing comes out of the specific.
From the writers POV, I think you arrive at the right choices in fiction, at the right details, by getting in the zone. That is, you get yourself to that subconscious place where you are living the world of your characters. Then in revision you look for those places where you’ve given way to the general—used the wrong word or failed to make a scene seem specific. It’s a constant battle to make every sentence and scene significant. I think this struggle is where a lot of our success or failure as writers occur. Genuine writing comes out of the specific.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Ideas 2
This is a continuation of my earlier post about ideas. It's also posted over at my agent's, Sara Crowe's, blog.
Where do your ideas come from?
When asked this question, I sometimes like to appropriate and regionalize a line from Kurt Vonnegut and say I get them in a little store out in West Texas near Marfa.
I wish.
So where do they come from?
Don’t have a clue, but I do know every writer has many, many ideas. They come when you’re in the shower, walking the dog, on the drive to work. They fall out of the sky when you least expect them. Sometimes you see a hint of one disappear around a corner and you have to chase it down. Regardless of whether they come easy or hard, the little buggers are everywhere. So when someone says they have A GREAT IDEA FOR ME, A SURE MILLION SELLER IDEA FOR ME, and all they want for their brilliant idea is 50% of the profits when I write the book, I get a little dismissive. Ideas are the easy part.
Easy. Getting them, that is. Actually making them work? Not so easy. Most ideas aren’t enough to carry a novel. The novelist Patrick Ness says he waits to write a novel until he has an idea that is strong enough to attract other ideas. I like this notion that you start with one idea and others are attracted to it. Another way to think of it is you begin with an idea and other ideas grow out of that one. If they don’t, then the novel will wither and die. Usually this happens around page thirty-three for me.
There are lots of different kinds of ideas. There are the big ideas behind a novel that create theme and there are the more focused ideas that drive scenes and characters. Sometimes the ideas will change as the writer moves through his story. For example, you think you want to write a novel about loss. Your main character’s girlfriend dies and it’s a novel about how he copes with this terrible and difficult situation, but halfway through the novel, he meets another girl and he starts to fall for her (Where did she come from? One day she just appeared on the page, but that’s another post) and his grief begins to fade and he feels amazement and gratitude and guilt, so then the novel becomes about this experience. Maybe the novel then becomes about this whole journey to a new life.
I read this article in a writer’s magazine not long ago about the subject of ideas. One writer said that he started his novel based on a single word. I don’t remember the word but I remember it wasn’t one of the big ones. Not one like freedom or liberty or sex or greed. It could have been kumquat for all I remember. I could never write a novel starting with one word. How could anyone start a novel with the word kumquat?
“One morning Henry woke to find he was a kumquat.”
“One morning a kumquat in a fruit salad began to talk to Henry.”
It’s obvious I can’t write a novel starting with the word kumquat. I’m not responsible enough.
All I can think is that the word, whatever it was, had an association with something important in the author’s life. I imagine that it happened like the evolution of most ideas in a novel. The word made him think of something else, and something else, and something else. Maybe he thought of his father one afternoon when he came home from the store carrying a bag of kumquats and the news that the family had to move and the boy would have to leave all his friends, his high school, his everything. Obviously not going to be a lover of kumquats. Or maybe he is and that’s the story. Why does he love kumquats?
I do think it’s helpful to consider that this gathering or growing of ideas, whether it begins with character or setting or theme or some point of action, is a process that can be worked through. It makes the whole act of starting a new novel a little less daunting to me if I think of it as a process of attracting and growing ideas. Of course once I get going I’m mostly thinking about characters and the moment-to-moment experience of those characters, but the ideas are woven into this if I’ve begun with one that’s strong enough to grow others.
The truth is even if there was an Idea store out in Marfa and even if they had a 70% off sale, I wouldn’t be buying. It’s too much fun coming up with my own.
Where do your ideas come from?
When asked this question, I sometimes like to appropriate and regionalize a line from Kurt Vonnegut and say I get them in a little store out in West Texas near Marfa.
I wish.
So where do they come from?
Don’t have a clue, but I do know every writer has many, many ideas. They come when you’re in the shower, walking the dog, on the drive to work. They fall out of the sky when you least expect them. Sometimes you see a hint of one disappear around a corner and you have to chase it down. Regardless of whether they come easy or hard, the little buggers are everywhere. So when someone says they have A GREAT IDEA FOR ME, A SURE MILLION SELLER IDEA FOR ME, and all they want for their brilliant idea is 50% of the profits when I write the book, I get a little dismissive. Ideas are the easy part.
Easy. Getting them, that is. Actually making them work? Not so easy. Most ideas aren’t enough to carry a novel. The novelist Patrick Ness says he waits to write a novel until he has an idea that is strong enough to attract other ideas. I like this notion that you start with one idea and others are attracted to it. Another way to think of it is you begin with an idea and other ideas grow out of that one. If they don’t, then the novel will wither and die. Usually this happens around page thirty-three for me.
There are lots of different kinds of ideas. There are the big ideas behind a novel that create theme and there are the more focused ideas that drive scenes and characters. Sometimes the ideas will change as the writer moves through his story. For example, you think you want to write a novel about loss. Your main character’s girlfriend dies and it’s a novel about how he copes with this terrible and difficult situation, but halfway through the novel, he meets another girl and he starts to fall for her (Where did she come from? One day she just appeared on the page, but that’s another post) and his grief begins to fade and he feels amazement and gratitude and guilt, so then the novel becomes about this experience. Maybe the novel then becomes about this whole journey to a new life.
I read this article in a writer’s magazine not long ago about the subject of ideas. One writer said that he started his novel based on a single word. I don’t remember the word but I remember it wasn’t one of the big ones. Not one like freedom or liberty or sex or greed. It could have been kumquat for all I remember. I could never write a novel starting with one word. How could anyone start a novel with the word kumquat?
“One morning Henry woke to find he was a kumquat.”
“One morning a kumquat in a fruit salad began to talk to Henry.”
It’s obvious I can’t write a novel starting with the word kumquat. I’m not responsible enough.
All I can think is that the word, whatever it was, had an association with something important in the author’s life. I imagine that it happened like the evolution of most ideas in a novel. The word made him think of something else, and something else, and something else. Maybe he thought of his father one afternoon when he came home from the store carrying a bag of kumquats and the news that the family had to move and the boy would have to leave all his friends, his high school, his everything. Obviously not going to be a lover of kumquats. Or maybe he is and that’s the story. Why does he love kumquats?
I do think it’s helpful to consider that this gathering or growing of ideas, whether it begins with character or setting or theme or some point of action, is a process that can be worked through. It makes the whole act of starting a new novel a little less daunting to me if I think of it as a process of attracting and growing ideas. Of course once I get going I’m mostly thinking about characters and the moment-to-moment experience of those characters, but the ideas are woven into this if I’ve begun with one that’s strong enough to grow others.
The truth is even if there was an Idea store out in Marfa and even if they had a 70% off sale, I wouldn’t be buying. It’s too much fun coming up with my own.
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