The Confabulator Cafe

Author: rlnaquin

  • Fisticuffs at Dawn! The Writer’s Block Duel

    One of these girls believes in writer’s block. The other does not.

    I think it’s hilarious that the existence or non-existence of writer’s block gets people’s panties in such a tight little bunch.

    Unlike a lot of people, my feelings about it are lukewarm, maybe tinged with amusement.

    Is there a magical curse that blocks the flow of a writer’s creative source, sucking him dry and preventing him from writing anything but total and utter crap? No. Of course not. But writers are a superstitious lot. We have to be. Making stuff up is what we do.

    But.

    There are always going to be days when we pull out every single word onto the page like a fishhook that’s been embedded deep in the skin. It’s not always manic rivers of prose flowing from lightning-charged fingertips. (more…)

  • Bobo’s Haunted Circus (Flash Fiction)

    Photo credit: Wee Willy Wicked http://stayingscared.blogspot.com

    Okay, guys. Chill. It’s getting dark. I need you all around the fire so I can keep track. Nobody wander off. Two steps into the trees and it’s pitch black. You’ll get turned around and lost. I don’t want to explain to your parents why their kid didn’t make it back home.

    Jimmy, come on. Why didn’t you pee when it was still light? Fine. Just to that tree there, no farther. Hurry. You don’t want Bobo to find you out there alone.

    What? You guys haven’t heard about Bobo? Hurry up, Jimmy! You don’t want to miss this. Finish up over there and hurry back to the fire.

    They say years ago, in this very spot, a circus pitched their big top once a year. Right where we’re sitting. They had elephants and dancing dogs, a high-wire act. They had everything. The Macelli Brothers owned it.  Giovanni and Enzo. They did everything together, and the circus was their dream. (more…)

  • Submission Secrets of a Rookie Pro

    We’re told never to start a story with the main character looking into a mirror, but we’re going to do that anyway, here. But it’s only a metaphorical mirror, so maybe that gives me some leeway.

    Shortly before my 42nd birthday, I took a long, hard look at myself. Ever since I was a little girl, my plan was that, someday, I would grow up to be a published author. I would write books and stories, and they would be available for other people to buy and read.

    The funny thing is, dreams like that don’t actually happen unless you do something to make them happen. And time was getting away.

    (more…)

  • Eavesdropping for Fun and Profit

    Not the real Stonehenge, but the photo got my attention. It looks a lot like a gorilla jumping off the stones. I feel a story coming on.

    I am not a very physically adventurous person. You won’t see me running any marathons, climbing Mount Everest, or parachuting out of a plane. The truth is, I’ve had serious back problems since I was about twelve. That was when a drunken Boob Fairy visited me in the night and couldn’t remember how many times she’d hit me with her wand. I fear there are a lot of flat-chested girls out there who never got their turns that night.

    After I had kids, the Ass and Belly Fairies came by in a well-meaning, but poorly conceived attempt to even out my proportions. Thanks guys. I appreciate your help. Didn’t help my back any, but at least I don’t need to buy dresses that are four sizes bigger on the top than on the bottom.

    All this is to explain that I do not try a lot of daring or adventurous things for the sake of my writing. No martial arts classes, no standing in a field learning to aim and fire a gun, and no jarring car chases in the name of research.

    But none of those things show up in what I write (so far), so it doesn’t matter.

    (more…)

  • It’s All a Matter of Perspective

    Let me assure you that, despite being stuffed and mounted, this buffalo is very much alive and performing at Walt Disney World. Photo from http://disneyatdisleelandiablog.blogspot.com/2011/04/country-bear-jumble.html

    When it comes to point of view in a story, you don’t have a lot of choices.

    You can go first person — “I ran naked through poison ivy and got a rash on my butt.”

    Second person, engaging the reader directly — “You opened the door, shrieked when you saw the dead buffalo bleeding on the carpet, and dialed 911.”

    Or third person — “He wept when he discovered there was no more cheese in the house, for cheese was now illegal in the state of Alabama.”

    There are variations, of course, mostly a little weird. I once wrote a short story in first person plural.  I did it because I had an assignment in a writing class to write in a PoV I’d never tried before. It was sort of a hive-mind kind of thing, effective in this one instance, but not something that should be done often. Really, first, second, and third person are your big choices.

    So, what’s my favorite? That’s today’s question, right?

    I don’t play favorites. When I start writing a story, I choose what I think is going to be best for it.

    Sometimes, mistakes are made. (more…)

  • The Best Part of Writing

    I learned to type on an old typewriter just like this one. Still have it up in a closet. Image credit: Benjamin Chan at Flickr

    When the voices chatter in my head, and the words come so fast I can barely capture them with the keyboard — that’s when I feel good about writing. That’s the “ah” moment when I remember why I do this.

    But that’s not the only time.

    When I’m writing index cards like a woman obsessed, piling them on top of each other and moving to the next fresh card as each new idea or previously unknown fact emerges into consciousness — that’s when I feel good about writing.

    Then later, hovering over my big white board with cards spread out and held in place with brightly colored magnets, I can see a hole in a plot, an unanswered question, or a character missing from a scene. My hands blur as I shift and slide the cards, remove dead ones, add new ones. That moment when the plot lays straight and true, and the seemingly unrelated scenes and snippets of dialogue on the cards melt together into one coherent story — yeah. That’s when I feel good about writing.

    When I reach the end of the story, knowing the end is exactly how I imagined it, yet so much more, and my fingers tap out the last word, something it took me so many years of my life to do—that’s when I feel good about it. I beat the fear again. The deep, debilitating fear of sucking. Knowing that I will never again fall prey to that little voice in my head, so prevalent for over three decades, the one that whispered in my ear that if I didn’t finish, I couldn’t fail.

    But most of all, more than any other time, is the moment when someone else reads what I have written, and my words make them happy. Or sad. Or frightened. Or simply entertained.

    When someone else enjoys this thing I’ve made, that’s when I feel best about writing.

  • Writer’s Obstacle Course

    Chapter 1…

    *blinking cursor*

    First sentence, first sentence. Let’s see. Hmm. It’s got to be grabby. My main character has to be in the middle of something, something crazy and chaotic. Well, I can clearly see her in my head, rushing around with pillows and blankets, her house overrun by needy supernatural creatures of all sorts.

    All sorts? That’s kind of vague. Let’s take a minute and figure out all the different creatures and why they’re there.

    I need to organize this. Where are my index cards?

    *stares at pile of blank index cards.*

    It’s too soon to write anything down in permanent ink. Where’s my white board?

    Is it really ten already? I haven’t eaten anything yet. I should eat. I can’t think when I’m starving.

    Holy hell, that’s a lot of dishes. Well, I can’t do them until I empty the dishwasher.

    God, I’m so hungry. What’s in the fridge?

    Gross. I have to clean this out. There’s no real food, just a bunch of leftovers that need to be thrown out. I should clean out the fridge so I can go to the grocery store and buy real food.

    The trash can is full. Have to take out the garbage before I can empty out the fridge. Also, with all the dishes in the sink, I hate to add to it with the gunky containers after I throw out the leftovers.

    I’ll eat later. First, I should pee.

    While I’m in here, I should take a shower. The bathtub really needs to be cleaned. I could do that while I’m in it.

    If I shower, I have to get dressed afterwards. Do I have any clean clothes? Technically, yes. But they’re still in the washing machine from two days ago. Probably should run the washer again to freshen them up.

    No reason to shower, I guess, if I don’t have anything to put on.

    Crap. Is it Friday? I thought it was Thursday. I have to write a blog post. I’ll do that real quick. It’s already late. Then I have to post the link on Twitter and Facebook.

    Oooh, I just thought of a perfect first sentence!

    Chapter 1…

    *blinking cursor*

    I am so hungry.

  • Writers Are Thieves

    I'm in yur lifes, stealin' yur wurdz.

    Nothing anyone says is safe in my house. Not only do we have two writers, we also have a teenage daughter who will take the most offhand remark, laugh maniacally, then immediately post it without explanation or context on her Facebook page. (The Boy is pretty safe. He’s a musician and deals more with musical notes and philosophical truths. He rarely updates his FB status.) The Girl, however, has a flair for sharing the ridiculous.

    She gets that from me, unfortunately.

    I like a good challenge. Some are self-inflicted, and some come directly from others. Sometimes a piece of real-life dialogue is so silly, it begs for a new context. In Monster in My Closet, there were two separate lines I had to find a use for: “My bread fell asleep in the toaster” and “The problem is, you’ve got to have movie-time attitude.” They made little sense in real-life when they were spoken, but inserting them into a story? Challenge accepted.

    I also like to drop inside jokes into the manuscript, just to make my husband laugh. I never expect them to make it through edits, but so far, I’ve managed a Ghostbusters and a Raiders of the Lost Ark reference that made it all the way to the galley stage, so they’re permanent.

    In Pooka in My Pantry, in honor of my best friend from childhood (who’s also my hardest critiquer), and also in honor of our fourth-grade teacher, I dropped in a little scene about a mess in a girls bathroom—one which I recreated from something she and another girl actually did. It was epic and included yogurt and a peanut butter sandwich. I felt it needed to be immortalized, even if it was only a few sentences in a short conversation in the book.

    As someone who’s known me longer than any other non-family member, she also picked out my dislike of goats from a zoo scene. Zoey’s flashback was a real childhood event wherein a goat in a petting zoo tried to eat my dress and scared the hell out of me.

    And while we’re talking about it, Zoey herself is more like me than I’d like to admit. Everybody who reads the books tells me she’s me. Well, no, she’s not. Not intentionally. But when people at a checkout counter stop her and tell her their life stories with no prompting whatsoever—yeah. That’s me. It happens every time I leave the damn house. Hell, it happens when I don’t leave the house. My son laughed when the pizza guy (with no prompting from me, I swear) started rambling on about his problems. Hand to God, I even had a shrink do it once while I was sitting in his office.

    So, yeah. Real life goes into what I write.

    I guess that’s what they mean by “Write what you know.”

  • I Smell a Learning Opportunity

    This is the most bullshit you'll probably ever see in one place. Impressive, no?

    This week’s question was tough to tackle. My first response was kind of a bullshit answer. I’m going to share it with you anyway.

    Bad writers teach me so much about what not to do. I’ve learned about awful dialogue, poor story arcs, ugly sentence structure, and shoddy character development. On the other hand, good writing disappears, and I’m so invested in the story that I don’t even notice the writing itself.

    But like I said, that’s the bullshit answer. I’ve learned plenty from some of my favorite authors.

    From Maggie Stiefvater, I learned that I will never be able to write prose that’s so beautiful the sentences dance across the page like a…well, like a beautiful dancing something that I don’t have the ability to write.

    (more…)

  • How to Self-Edit: For Non-Pantsters

    The timing for this week’s topic is perfect. I just finished edits on last November’s novel and considered writing this same post for my own blog. So, we’ll do it here, instead.

    I failed to note that I also bought an awesome box so my index card collection has a permanent home.

    First of all, I should warn you that I’m a little spastic in the planning department. My brain needs something tactile to work with to get things moving, and let’s be honest here, I have a serious addiction to office supplies. In order to really understand my self-editing process, you might want to first see how absolutely ridiculous I am with the writing process. You can check it out on my blog here: How to Write a Novel: For Non-Pantsters.

    Got it? Terrifying, isn’t it? I fully accept that there’s something more than a little off in my head.

    Like the planning I do before I write, there are several steps I take for editing. They’re probably just as time-wasteful and self-indulgent.

    1. Do absolutely nothing with the novel for at least a couple of weeks to a month. This is important. Let it breathe. During this time, I let a few critiquers have at it, with the understanding that it was a raw first draft.
    2. Read through the critiques and set them aside to marinate. (You’ll KNOW when the advice is right. If you’re not sure about something someone says, let it go for now.)
    3. Once out of the post-novel-writing coma, open the document back up. Puke if necessary, but come right back. This needs to get done.
    4. Time to get out my beloved index cards! Yay! While I have a stack of events and chapters from when I was writing, they aren’t accurate anymore. Things changed, scenes happened I hadn’t expected. It’s okay. Start a new pile, one card for every chapter as it’s currently written.
    5. To celebrate the sale of my first novel, I bought a bigger whiteboard, as well as a big container of magnets. I put all the cards up on this big whiteboard, pinned them with magnets, then leaned the whole thing against the wall to examine it. With it all laid out in rows, I clearly saw a few plot holes, as well as a lack of tension in the middle.
    6. Rearrange the cards, write new cards to fill holes and put them where they need to go in the lineup. Leave it for awhile while you pace back and forth mumbling.
    7. Take the cards down and put them in a stack. Starting from the beginning of the manuscript, work through all the cards, in order, making the changes according to the new plan. Don’t skip any passages, even if you think no structural changes need to be made. Every change you make causes air bubbles in the future which must be smoothed as you go.
    8. Send it to your most brutal critiquer.
    9. While you wait, go back over all the critiques you had in the beginning to make sure you didn’t miss anything. I was shocked at how many typos and inconsistencies they caught that I STILL hadn’t fixed. Fix All the Things. Keep going over everything until your eyes bleed.
    Here's the inside, complete with all the cards from two books. Notice how book two has nearly twice as many cards. My addiction is growing.

    By this time, I’ve actually gone through the entire manuscript four or five times, at least.

    So, I go through it again.

    And you know what? It’s still not perfect. There are still typos I missed.

    The point to the entire thing, no matter how you go about doing it, is not to make it perfect. The point is to make it the best novel you possibly can. Sloppiness isn’t cool. But the need to be perfect will freeze you up.

    I know this post doesn’t give you any handy tips about what words to weed out, how to build better tension, or even what mistakes to look for in an early draft. There are plenty of books and websites teaching craft. My weird methods aren’t necessarily the most efficient, but they do one thing all the how-to books in the world might not help with: they give you a place to start.

    And sometimes, that’s all you need to go off and find your own way to do it.