Trans/plant/portation

It’s a common statement about stories—the conflict is the story. Sure, conflict is the center of a story’s universe, in that it pulls all of the elements together and is the thing around which those elements revolve. And yet it’s what the characters do in response to that conflict that keeps us reading. After all, the audience can’t identify with the conflict itself—they identify with how one or more of the actors reacts to the conflict. If those characters aren’t fully envisioned on the page, there isn’t enough for the reader to latch onto, and writers run the risk of breaking a cardinal rule: The story must be believable.

And not just the story, but the people in the story itself. Rookies build two-dimensional characters. Good writers get readers to buy the people in their novels (or short stories, which is harder because of the smaller scope). Read More…

I understand the appeal of putting up the best of the worst queries that land in an agent’s inbox, of letting off a little steam of frustration and giving everyone a laugh in the process, I really do. There is no end, after all, to the pipeline of awful query letters. After reading through agent blogs, Twitter links, fan pages and the occasional Writer’s Digest article, I can even scratch out some categories of Terrible Queries:

1. The Delusional Query Letter—This is the best book evar!!! Nobody has my lyrical, lyrical, lyrical prose, and you, dear agent, whoever you are, will love it and love it and die happy for the reading of it. Pay no attention to the fact that it gives the same tired storyline, be it Eat, Pray, Love, or boy meets girl, or a hero’s journey. At least this writer is no stranger to fiction. Read More…

Most things worth doing have their moments of frustration—it’s as if a whole world of negativity opens up, abounding with endless possibility, and all of it unpleasant. Maybe I should just give up. I knew I sucked at this. I’ll never get out from under the thumb of so-and-so. This was a stupid project to take on in the first place. Failures too, come in a variety of shapes and sizes: our own motivation may seize up, we run into grown-up versions of bullies, markets shift, opportunities close. Whatever the situation that led to this moment, we’re growling.

In this context, let’s consider the rejection letter. Read More…

The tracks stretched so far toward the horizon that the individual rails merged into one point, and then they devolved into something indistinct. If men had laid down a railroad here, at some point it became lost to the wilderness. I followed the tracks, using a scrap of paper I’d received a couple of hours earlier. Edgar camped out where the tracks took on a look of modern sculpture, the result of a terrible derailing several years ago. Not that modern art was anything anyone had heard of yet. The old conductor told me I couldn’t miss it.

I’d been tracking him for a week, and I was running out of time. I crunched through a stream of broken glass and pottery. Moonshine bottles, brown beer glass, growler jugs, or so I guessed. Hopefully I was getting close. If the story was right then he hadn’t started to spiral down yet, but this was the last night for his sobriety. Read More…

Eve’s feet stung in response to the cold tile floor. It was the downside of taking such boiling hot showers, but nothing else eased the tension between her shoulders. She tiptoed into her tidy bedroom, marred only by the messy sheets and her cat Oliver, who seemed asleep save for one sliver on an open eye.

She rubbed Oliver behind his ears, who gave a pinched half-meow in response. He lifted his head and sniffed at the room. In the next second he looked at Eve, then hissed, and jumped off the bed, running into the darkness of the closet.

“Oliver! What’s wrong?” Eve went over to the front of the closet and craned her head in, looking for him in the back, in the dark. Oliver continued to hiss.

“Oliver, it’s me! What’s the matter with you?” He’d never acted like this in his life. The hissing continued. The cat was scared out of his mind. Read More…

Folks who know me will recall that I wrote a memoir a couple of years ago and have been shopping it around, to occasional interest from agents and publishing professionals. It’s a process that gets frustrating, but I tell myself that the whole thing is worth it. I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve met loads of great people who care deeply about writers, the craft of good writing, and the need to build strong networks. That Snooki got published isn’t anything I care to rant over; who will have any clue about her book in ten years? I want publishers to put books out there that will make them enough money to find interest in mine, even as I think my memoir is a sure-fire best seller. Read More…

I have excised a word from my vocabulary today, because I know I rely on it too often and in too many kinds of circumstances. Perhaps it’s part of my voice, but I think I’ll survive without it. It’s the word “just.” I tend to use it in one of two ways: Read More…

We drove until we reached the other side of three towns, and then pulled up to a general store. I cut the engine and Jackson and I inspected each other.

“Well, you’ve looked better,” he said, lifting my chin.

“You’ve looked worse,” I said. That made him smile for a moment. “So who was that back there?”

“I don’t know,” he said, taking the opportunity to look back behind us, where the dust we’d kicked up was settling back on the wide lane. “You were kind of in a hurry when you talked to me the last time.”

“Last time? How many times have I come by?” Where did I get the time for all this, I wondered, and then paused. If I could jump at will then I kind of had all the time in the world. On this side, anyway. Read More…

I should begin with a clarification; I’m thinking of inner critics here. Whether an individual literary critic who says something about a single piece or section of literature should be considered is a whole nother question, and I’m unwilling to jump into the lava pit of that debate. But when it comes to the voices in our heads, the nasty ones, I will relate a refreshingly brief tale and feel fine about it. Read More…

…and at a writer’s open mic near you. I’m risking my own karma for writing this post, I’m sure, but there are some things that need to be said, first and foremost out loud to myself, but secondly communicated to other writers and authors who would venture to an open mic, and lastly, to the innocent public.

The poet Michelle Tea got started by attending with great intensity and frequency the open mics of San Francisco, which, to be sure, are aplenty in that market. So she has become, for me at least, the exception that proves the rule—if you read in public often enough, you will become super famous. So don’t pipe up right now and tell me you’ve never heard of Michelle Tea. Read More…