Saturday, January 26, 2013

Confidence and the Writer

One of my writing groups has a number of truly prolific and successful folks in it.  I was talking about this in my other writing group and someone asked, "Why do you think they're able to finish so much in such a  short time?"  It was a great question.  I had to think about it for a minute or two.  There was one person in particular I was thinking of.  When I thought about her, the word that came to mind was "confidence."  An enviable, and not inappropriate, healthy and powerful confidence in herself and in her writing that allows her to barrel ahead with fully realized worlds and adventures.

Now I'm hitting a snarled nest of a mess in the middle (of course!) of the magical realism nightmare I'm working on.  And it occurred to me that part of my problem is a lack of that confidence.  I second guess and second guess about where certain scenes should go and whether certain elements work or make sense or should it go here instead and before I know it, I've psyched myself out.  I lack confidence.

As writers, we should have a healthy capacity to reflect on our work, to look for ways to improve it.  We should be open to criticism.  We must be willing to revise, again and again.  And yet, that very willingness to revise can turn on us and render us and our work mediocre, wishy-washy, hesitant, unfocused, lacking in voice or style or originality.    

There is a fine line, of course, between confidence and arrogance.  Some writers believe their work is inherently the greatest literary achievement since Shakespeare, whether it's any good or not.  You hear agents talk about this all the time, the queries that declare how great they are in such hyperbolic terms that it's an insult by implication to every other writer.  

What gives some writers the kind of brash confidence that allows them to pitch flawlessly, to query with ferocity, to complete one draft after another without falling prey to the demons of self-doubt?  Maybe all writers are plagued by those demons, and some have a greater capacity and strength to withstand them.  Perhaps it is simply the personality we're given.  Maybe those of us who find confidence elusive manage to bring a vulnerability to our style instead.

So what does it mean to have confidence as a writer?  It means plowing ahead with a story wherever it may lead.  It means having faith in your own vision.  It means not only having the strength to hear, and accept criticism, but also to question it, interpret it and even refuse it.  It means decisiveness, forward momentum, stamina, completion.  

How does such confidence coexist with the capacity for honest, unflinching, realistic self-assessment?  Can it?

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Pacing and Sentence Rhythm

Which feels more urgent and gives a more rapid pace to a scene - longer sentences, with their rush and deluge of words, or short abrupt, staccato ones?  I've gone back and forth, and had writing partners take me back and forth.  On the one hand, those longer sentences can pull you forward, barely giving you a chance to catch your breath, while shorter ones, by the mere presence of the period, allow you to stop, think, breathe, ponder.  On the other hand, there's a kind of punch-slap-kick rhythm to shorter sentences that can be tremendously effective.

Let's put it to the test:

Short sentences:
The door opened.  The bird flew in.  It crashed into the vase.  It bumped against the ceiling.  It came at me.  It aimed its talons straight for my eyes.

Longer sentences:
A bird flew in the open door, crashing into the vase, bumping against the ceiling and coming right at me with its talons aimed for my eyes.
Admittedly not the most elegant example.  (Work with me here.  I'm too lazy for research today.)  It seems its not as simple as one over the other.  So much depends on the content of the sentences themselves, especially with the longer ones.  A longer sentence could feel much more languid than the one above:
Flying through the open door, the bird first ran headlong into a mahogany vase, which fell crashing to the ground, then veered in the other direction, wobbling unstably, and bumping off the ceiling, before finally aiming its talons at my eyes and coming straight in my direction.
In this last example, I've added details that slow it down, not because there are more words but because the process of noticing such details implies a slower experience.  When everything is coming at us pellmell, details such as "the mahogany vase" shouldn't register.  I also think the list of participles (crashing ..., bumping ..., coming) in the first example has more of a runaway train feel than the more convoluted structures of the second example.

Thoughts, anyone?  Thriller writers, how do you approach those exciting chase scenes for maximum rhythmic effect?

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Twitter is the Work of the Devil

Little Red Devil Head Cartoon by palomaironique - Little Red Devil Head Cartoon - Petit visage de diablotin rouge - Teufelchen Gesicht rot - Faccina di diavoletto rosso (partially remixed from All right, my title is a bit harsh.  It's a reaction to my first real attempts to get my head around twitter, and it seems to me that twitter is the Tower of Babel reborn.  It is the definition of narcissism.  It has created a nonexistent need.  Let's all blab into cyberspace and see who's paying attention.  If I blab more often than you, I get more attention.  My blabs don't have to have meaning.  They just have to trend.  Here.  Check to see how many people are blabbing about you.  Participate by disconnecting yourself from real life and entering a world of 150 characters or less, summarized in short taglines, where you amass followers and you choose who to follow, where we endlessly search for the pigeonhole that is us, the quilted blankets of labels that will define us and, in some magic world, make us stand out and exist.

With cyberspace, we have created alternate realities.  Worlds outside the physical realm, worlds where we build relationships and destroy relationships, where we hold converse, attend events, make declarations, go shopping, and play games, interacting with other cyber entities and creating other versions of ourselves.  My brain actually feels different after spending time online.

The thing is, it now appears that, to be taken seriously as a writer, you need a digital platform, a digital presence, that includes, among other things, twitter.  So, I signed up.  I followed people.  I tweeted a few things.  I'm drawing the line at setting it up so the tweets pop up on my phone.  I just don't want to sacrifice too many more moments of precious real-world time to this time-hungry digital world that demands I stand on the hilltop making announcements and waving my flag and gathering minions.  It feels like a manufactured necessity.  I don't want to join this transition from the physical realm to the digital world, but I often feel I have no choice.

Even writing this blog seems to me to be a concession.  I started it as a means to include out-of-town participants in the Writers On-the-air Workshop many years ago.  But I continued it because it was one way to build my required digital platform.  A blog and a website.  Small concessions to this new, demanding digital reality.

Then I learned that, for my blog to gather followers, I should be posting on a regular schedule.  So, I made myself a goal of posting once a week.  Even that, I was told, wasn't frequent enough.  I learned about metatags and labels and other ways to make the search engine gods  of the digital world pay more attention to me.  I started checking my stats more often, the way you check your hair in the mirror too often in the physical realm.  I learned I should be reading other people's blogs.  Lots of other people's blogs.  Reading them and commenting on them.  So I did.  Soon, I discovered blog contests, blog hopsblog giveaways and other strategies for driving traffic to my blog.  And I participated in a couple of those.  I joined twitter, and, hoping to save myself some time, I set it up to tweet onto my facebook.  Then I read that twitter etiquette frowned upon that, that I should, instead, post separately on these two digital realms.

Then I came up for air.  I didn't like the way this digital world was feeding my innate human narcissism.  How many people like me?  How many people follow me?  How often does my name come up when I Google myself?  I'm finding it's much harder to cure myself of that narcissism than it was to get involved.  It is truly a slippery slope.  My entry into twitter just seems to be the final step on my descent into a narcissistic hell of my own making, with the help of the human community, the marketing realm and the commercial world in general.

Thus endeth what may well qualify as my most hypocritical post yet.  I wonder how many hits I'll get?

Friday, January 04, 2013

The Worst That Could Happen

Sad Skull by mairor - I did this on a challenge, I didn't mean it to be sad, but I liked it and kept it that way."What's the worst that could happen?"  That's the question I ask myself when that icy cold, gut churning fear grips me just before I send off a submission of my writing. "That's easy," you say.  "The worst that could happen is a rejection.  They say 'no.'"  Ha!  Shows how little you know of the dark and fearful recesses of the writer's soul.  What's the worst that could happen?  They could say "no" and ...

They could laugh at me behind my back AND

They could pass my story around their office from one editor to another, laughing more hysterically with each moment AND

They could send me a scathing letter demanding to know how I could possibly ever have deluded myself into thinking that I could write or might be worthy of publication AND

They could post my story and query on their blogs as an example of what not to do, accompanied by their brutal point by point decimation of my work, AND

They could tweet throughout the twitterverse about my appallingly embarrassing lack of talent AND

They could read excerpts of my work at conferences to demonstrate the level of depraved crap that gets submitted to them on a daily basis AND

They could publish my name and contact information online as a warning to fellow members of the publishing industry that the mere possibility of contact with my writing might taint them and all connected with them as horrifically bad writers AND

They might launch a global campaign to have my name blacklisted from publication for all time AND

They  might issue a ban on my work throughout the publishing industry as punishment for the effrontery of my presumption that my work deserved consideration.

In my dangerously creative brain, that is, in fact, the worst that could happen.  Welcome to the curse of imagination.  Thankfully, some sane part of my brain says, "Yes.  That's the worst that could happen.  And it probably won't.  They'll probably just say 'no.'"  And so I take a deep breath and I put that envelope in the mail or click "submit" or "send" on the computer screen.  Because, hey, what's the worst that could happen?  They might say "yes."

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