Trans/plant/portation

There’s an entertaining show about cancer on Showtime, The Big C. This is out of alphabetical order with The L Word, an entirely different, and now completed, series about lesbian life in LA—and which shock of shocks, looks nothing like any actual lesbian’s life I’ve ever known. HBO has its pluralist wives show, Big Love, which hasn’t worked so well for a reality series, Sister Wives, over on TLC. Apparently The Learning Channel wants to learn us some polygamy? I’m not sure. But in this television is a window into our culture thang, there are some obvious disconnects, and not just having to do with the preponderance of overly made up, coiffed women near Rodeo Drive.

Four boys made headlines in the news in these last three weeks, four boys—one of whom was 18 but for all intents and purposes still had the thinking processes and responses of an adolescent—who took their own lives because of bullying, more specifically, anti-gay bullying. You’d think this sort of situation had never happened before. But that’s just because we’ve turned away from admitting we have a long-standing problem with youth suicide. Read More…

I’m a regular reader of the various “How I found my agent” stories that pop up all over the Web at a slow simmering rate. Part of it is because I enjoy a good pick me up tale in the midst of all the mass-murder, spree-killing, pandemic-virus, certain-doom narratives that flood the information superhighway every day. But I’ll come to Jesus and add that I’m also looking for patterns, as anecdotal as the occasional agent article is. Is there something successful authors are doing that I should adopt as a practice? Is there any kind of aspect to their attitudes, their community base, their writing environment that I can leverage? Read More…

A good friend asked me this morning where I find my ideas, and the first image that popped into my head was an Easter egg hunt. On the heels of this sweet memory appeared a roundhouse punch, something delivered in a grimy tavern. And so I had my answer. Sometimes I find my ideas, and sometimes they find me. Read More…

If the ocean signifies the breathing apparatus of Planet Earth, then the mountains are the memory of its earlier incarnations, seemingly frozen in time even as they move secretly in some new direction. I have an affection for sea water, since childhood play dates with sand, shovel, and pail. Growing up east of the Mississippi I thought that the Appalachians were as powerful as mountains ever aspired. They counted as wilderness, filled with things not commonly found in our suburban parcel. Read More…

A joke I’ve told over the years is that I have a 1950s education because I went to Catholic school in the 70s and they were twenty years behind. But it remains true that I learned penmanship using the Palmer method and I was forced to diagram my sentences as a means of mastering grammar and syntax. I’m sure I would have learned the difference between a complex and a compound sentence without diagramming, but hey, I had the additional instruction in seeing how words make patterns, and looking back, I appreciate the sisters’ determination even if it meant a lot of embarrassment in front of a chalkboard.

Before everyone rolls their eyes and runs off lest I carry on about sentence diagramming, know that it isn’t the focus of this post. Yippee! Actually, I want to talk about flow diagrams for novel writing. Read More…

I haven’t spent quality time in a writing workshop in years, and I was disappointed to find that the LGBT writing group in Seattle doesn’t really have a workshop per se. After college and graduate school studying American literature I don’t really have any more pep for talking about books, especially if I have to pay $100 a month to do it.

I went online to find some critique groups and I came up with three: two for speculative fiction and one for long format work. After underestimating Emerald City traffic congestion, I turned around and came back home from my first foray, now much better educated about where exactly Bellingham is, and which is the best on ramp to I-5 from my house. I will always marvel at how places so close together can take so long to reach in something as technologically advanced as a car. Read More…

I went back to Whidbey Island yesterday to hear Corbin Lewars give a presentation: How to Persevere with Your Writing. One could argue that driving four hours round-trip was in and of itself “perseverance,” so why even drive out there? But then if one didn’t go, then they wouldn’t exactly be persevering and well, I think I just found a paradox. Or an alignment of truth. Whatever. I only passed that logic class in college because the TA took a shine to me, I’m sure, because there is no way that 50 points on each exam equals a C. Read More…

Over on Twitter last Monday, folks were conversing about the concept of confession—in 140 characters or less, which is more demanding that it might seem at first glance. It got me thinking, as good conversations do, about confession. According to Merriam-Webster, confession means:

1: an act of confessing; especially : a disclosure of one’s sins in the sacrament of reconciliation b : a session for the confessing of sins <go to confession>

2: a statement of what is confessed: as a : a written or oral acknowledgment of guilt by a party accused of an offense b : a formal statement of religious beliefs : creed

3: an organized religious body having a common creed

Confession can sure be hokey. Or absurd and unbelievable. It seems to me that confession is a pretty good barometer of how well one’s plot is holding together; if the confession seems funny when it’s serious, or causes eyerolls for the reader, it’s a bridge to far, and that means the plot has gone too far on its own out of solid story territory.

I’ve written before about having the wearwithal for taking up writing as a career, or if not a career, an ambition. There’s writing for one’s vertical filing cabinet, and then there’s writing with the intention of getting the thing published. When one isn’t a writer, it looks like a cakewalk. There’s the throngs of fans, the languid lounging at the hotel pool while on a book tour, the eating of many bon bons, and the excitement of the book signing or reading session.

I don’t think that world ever really existed, much as Truman Capote’s legend would have us believe. Writing is a thing people do because they feel a compulsion to do it. At the writer’s conference I attended this summer, I heard the same narrative repeated by many of the participants there—they have always felt an urge to tell stories, to write things down, to play with language. I have my story about my beloved Royal typewriter. It made me a pugilist just to use it, whaling on the keys and throwing the carriage back to pound another line of ink onto the page. And damned if I didn’t introduce a typo on the second to last line of a sheet. Nothing taught me typing accuracy like not having any correction fluid.

And yet, as soon as I came to the act of writing things down, I learned about rejection. Well, almost as soon. Rejection was nailed to the heels of excitement. This is great! We can’t use it. Welcome to our summer program! Sorry, you didn’t make it to our elite finalists group! You’re a finalist! Sorry, you didn’t win this year. We loved your piece but it doesn’t fit with our line right now.

Often, encouragement mixed with regret. Push, pull. Wait for another day. As Johanna Harness said in her blog last week, those rejections are still progress. It can be challenging to see that when one is bogged down in nos from agents and journal editors, and therein lies the way out of hopelessness.

1. Not everyone makes their career their identity. We writers often do. Just the word writer implies a connection between the act of writing and the human being performing that action. But it helps me, at least, to remember that this is a thing I love to do. There is more to me than writing stories and memoir and commentary about crazy politicians.
2. Rejections are never about the writer, they’re about the writing. I saw firsthand when speed pitching to four agents in 8 minutes that even face-to-face, they have no idea who I am or what I’m about. They can’t deduce anything in 2 minutes beyond the language I give them. The looks of disappointment and sincere apology that they’re not into my project are great reminders that I’m seeking a business relationship, and so are they. I’m sure I could have had a great conversation with any of them over coffee or a beer, but that’s a whole nother level of connection we weren’t seeking.
3. Because rejections aren’t personal, my ego need not get involved. This is tough on a daily basis, or more accurately, just after a nice rejection arrives at my in box. My tendency is to cringe that my writing, what I produced, truly sucks at awful nadirs of suckage, which makes me a bad writer and thus a bad person—see where this train is headed?—but then I recover. It’s my ego that does the heavy lifting here, telling me that actually, it’s just a bad fit for that agent.

To take the Freudian sense of the word, “ego,” in which I understand who I am in the world, and thus my relationship to others, I need to be ego-minded enough to take criticism and rejection and move on. My ego tells me that I still like writing and I still think I’m good at it and publishing is a goal I still seek.

This is different from being an egotistical ass, the vernacular of which means I’m immune to criticism because I think I haven’t earned any of it. This is not a writer with whom anyone cares to work. This is the guy who emails a certain science fiction-inclined agent every day for the last two years with the same bloody query, even though she’s rejected him a couple of times and gone silent to his repetition. This is the writer, peddling her unpublished first book of 160,000 words who just can’t understand why she would ever even consider cutting 60,000 of them, or turn it into two books. Never mind that agents and publishing houses love the multi-book deal.

I try to keep myself honest. I don’t declare that I’m the next David Sedaris, even when others have said that to me. I think I’m a good writer, and sometimes I’m funny as hell, which I hear has quite the comedy club going, somewhere on the third circle. But I do need a tough enough skin, enough confidence, enough ego to keep pushing even after getting rejected. Because it is, in fact, forward momentum.

I’ve heard from a few people recently—in the last few months, for sure—that they’re “against” adverbs. As if adverbs occupy a political position which one could oppose.

The point that each of them made was that adverbs get used way too often by lazy writers. Take the following example that I composed off the top of my head for illustrative purposes:

“Stop it,” said Lucinda angrily. “You know I hate popsicles.”

Do we really need the “angrily” here? No. We can tell Lucinda is angry. Or rather, we ought to be able to tell Lucinda is angry.

In yesterday’s Friday Flash fiction that I posted, I think I wrote “He was livid.” No adverbs present. It was a tell, for sure, but I had other reasons for putting it in the story. Letting an adverb expound on the action in the sentence, however, can take away from the rest of the line. Or, title, as in (already noted by Stephen King) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

“Rowling  has never met [an adverb] she didn’t like.” Harry, he noted, “speaks quietly, automatically, nervously, slowly, and often—given his current case of raving adolescence—ANGRILY.”

So Stephen King is not behind adverbial use, either. As a long-time King reader, I have to say I’m not surprised to learn this, given his writing style. That’s like saying Ernest Hemingway didn’t much care for compound sentences or long predicates.

Of course adverbs can be used poorly, but so too, do other parts of speech make themselves rather unbecoming. Superlative, excessive, overburdening adjectives can destroy the simple peacefulness of a noun. Nouns themselves become pretentious when authors reach for “practicable” over “practical,” or “sublime” instead of the more accessible “awe-inspiring.” There may be reasons for their usage, certainly, or they could just be a writer pushing too hard or too dedicated to her thesaurus.

Conjunctions and articles, to their credit, are too utilitarian as to be go-to tools for the lazy writer. And verbs, well, verbs can get writers into trouble in one of two ways—the eternal passive voice problem, or its evil twin, the over-active verb. Again, let’s go to fake dialogue to emphasize the point:

“Katrina,” he screamed, “Why did you rub mud all over the sofa?”

“Because you love the sofa more than you love me,” she hissed menacingly.

I couldn’t resist the adverb there, sorry. There is no reason in the world, the whole entire, land mass and oceanic experience of Planet Earth, why we can’t just use “said.” Said is not pretty, not lyrical, not powerful, but whatever. It’s a great worker for what it does—letting the reader cognate that there is speech happening, and by whom, and then getting them to move on to the next bit. What’s important are the words around the verb. Sometimes the verb is important, sure. I would never tell writers to go for the most banal verb possible—”said” being a special exception, in a class of its own—but writers don’t need to hit every verb out of the park. Readers get stopped by highfalutin verbs. Yet, if the verb is right for the sentence, there’s little need for lots of adverbs to shore it up.

For me, as a writer, I don’t want to single out any part of speech and write its death certificate. Language isn’t about trends, and writers who attempt to write only for fashion are writers who will always be behind the times. Adverbs are great, all on their own. There’s no way to answer the question, “How are you” without an adverb. To focus just on adverbs is to frame the subject of poor writing incorrectly. Poor writing leaves a lot of hot mess in its wake beyond just adverbs. There are usually, in my experience, a whole host of similes and other metaphors floating in the water of bad writing. Nay, the cesspool.

Good writing lets us know it’s good writing because we don’t remember most of the pieces, save the exquisite sentences that we mull over long after we’ve closed the book. It’s not the adverb which is the problem.

It’s the author.