The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Process

  • The pleasure of writing is in the unwritten

    Every day, I write for a paycheck. Every week, I write for a variety of blogs that offer me a chance at a little recognition. Every now and then, I pen a poem or short story and send it out into the universe for publication. But none of these are a reason why I enjoy writing.

    Empty book
    Some of the best books have yet to be written.

    Twenty years ago, I was the kind of guy who could never pass a bookstore without buying something. I’d purchase a paperback, a hardcover, or a bargain book without much thought about why I was doing it. It was a compulsion, an obsession, to surround myself with books. As a writer, I wanted to read everything and become one with the words.

    Then one day — I remember I was in the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Topeka — I looked at the multitude of books in the science fiction section. Rows upon rows of titles, written by grand masters and new authors over the past sixty years. But as I passed a finger over the brightly colored spines, passing from story to story, something occurred to me: I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

    All those stories, volumes of them, didn’t resonate with me. I had read as many horrible stories as I had great ones. And although I hadn’t read every great book ever written, I knew one thing for certain. None of these books were the story I wanted to read.

    That story hadn’t been written yet.

    This is why I enjoy writing. Not because I want to get published, or make money, or become famous. (Although I wouldn’t say no to any of those things.) But because I have an overwhelming desire to read stories that no one has written.

    It’s up to me. I’ll write them. And maybe someday someone will read them and imagine their own stories.

  • Entertain Yourself. The Others Can Wait.

    I think a lot of writers hate themselves, at least a little. We desperately want to have someone look at our writing and tell us that it’s good, that they want to publish it, and that we are worthy of the career we’ve been pursuing. We want readers and respect and most of all, validation.

    But every writer I know, at least the ones who are apprenticing the hell out of their work and constantly trying to get better, also have this fear that they don’t measure up. That they probably never will. And in their quiet time, when no one’s around, they wonder if they should just stop. If they should finally let go of the writing and the dream and everything else that goes with it. Because belief is hard and the signs of failure are everywhere.

    Not being able to believe in ourselves prevents us from believing in our work, and this is why many of us never think our stories or novels or screenplays are ready to see the light of day. For all the self-naysayers among us, I have two words for you: shut up. Your head’s in a dangerous place and you’re being self-destructive.  You aren’t preventing rejection. You’re guaranteeing a lack of success.

    It’s time to stop hating on your stories. Write something you like. Write something you would want to read. Tell a story that amuses or haunts or titillates you. Work on making it the best you know how, and then let it go. Send it out into the world, and move on to the next thing. There should always be a next thing.

    When it comes to my own writing, I try to make myself smile. It’s hard to laugh at your own jokes as you’re writing them, but if I do manage to pull it off, I know there’s a good chance I’ve got something good. Sometimes it’s a story. Other times it’s a chapter. I will even admit that I spent the better part of the day chuckling at a one-liner I slipped into scene.

    I realize there’s a chance that my audience could eventually end up just being me. That thought is almost enough to make me want to walk away from the keyboard altogether, but I try not to. Most days I succeed. But when I make myself laugh, I’m having a good time, and it’s a good day. And when other people laugh along with me, well … that’s just about as sweet as it gets.

  • Artistic Endeavors in Granite and Clothespins

    What I love about writing, especially prose, is that when it is done well, it can accomplish many things at once. You can share a story, paint a precise character, address an overall issue, and create a work of verbal art, all at once.

    I am in love with the writing process, with the act of putting words on paper and seeing what happens. I love the feeling inside my brain while I am writing. I feel my brain swell comfortably, as it might feel if I were drunk, slightly disconnected from the physical world around me.

    When it is going well, there are few better feelings on Earth. I have never come away from a writing session and thought, “That was a waste of my time. I never should have sat down.”

    It isn’t that I have always been happy with what I have written. Sometimes, even though I pride myself on having a certain literary artistic quality about my writing, I write total crap. The characters don’t work, the story is contrived, my themes don’t connect, and my prose plods along like a drunken elephant.

    But the feeling of writing, the release of endorphins and miscellaneous bodily chemicals produces a sense of euphoria. If nothing quality is produced, I still get that feeling. Granted, it is much better when it is all working, when my fingers are flying and I know what they are leaving carved in their wake is made of granite, instead of clothespins and Elmer’s school glue.

    I’ve always thought that to be one of my strengths as a writer. I have a decent sense of metaphor and am extremely interested in the sound and feel of my writing. My prose is at its best when it is a work of art, rather than just a work of fiction.

    There is nothing wrong with genre writing. My favorite writers are genre-oriented. I write some genre fiction myself. In fact, I believe “literary fiction” can be written in any genre. Literary fiction hasn’t learned enough from genre fiction, and vice versa. But I have always seen writing as an artistic endeavor, rather than a storytelling process.

    My favorite lines on the page are those that leave an aftertaste. When you read them, it is as if you have tasted the delicate creation of a master chef. The syllables roll off your tongue in a way so tasty that it accents the theme and content of the work itself. When it all works together, theme, tone, and content interweave, creating a tapestry stronger for every thread that runs through it.

    This might come off as word snobbery. I don’t mean it this way. I firmly believe in what Hemingway said. We are all just apprentices in a craft with no masters. My particular interest in writing is total absorption of the theory behind the craft. I love reading about story structures, spiraling narratives, psychological profiles of classical characters, theories of theme development.

    Will any of this make me a better writer? Who knows? But it can’t hurt, and I enjoy the study and practice of it immensely.

  • The joy of writing (Week of 12 May 2012)

    As writers, we tend to split our focus between the technical aspects of the craft and the business side of things. We’re so busy thinking about what we’re writing or how we’re going to get published that we forget why we started writing in the first place.

    Some write for solace. Some to entertain. Others write to find something they can’t find anywhere else. We asked our writers this week what they get out of writing. They responded with stories about their strengths, their joys, and what makes them feel good about their writing.

    We hope their answers inspire you, as well as encourage you to think about your own writing and what you get out of it. Be sure to leave them comments and let them know why you write.

  • 46,000 Words, Give or Take

    I used to despair that I would never be a novelist, because I can’t write lengthy, epic novels. And I’m not using despair lightly — we’re talking all the gnashing of teeth and melodrama that comes with being, um, a freshman in high school. Okay, now I don’t even take this story seriously, but hear me out.

    I cap out at about 56K, maybe 58K on a good day. And I mean, 58K would be a seriously verbose novel for me. I’m more likely to complete a story in about 30K – 35K. This is just how I roll, apparently, and I don’t know why. I’m still editing my second novel, so maybe I’ll have that moment where I understand why. But in the mean time I’m okay with this limitation. I believe that I can tell a good story in under 60K. And you know why?

    Douglas Adams.
    (more…)

  • Open to the Bad Signal

    Bad Signal by Warren Ellis; cover by Jacen Burrows

    I graduated high school in the mid-1980s, went to college and dropped out because girls and booze were way more interesting and I thought I was going to be a rock star.

    The rock star thing didn’t work out but I had a helluva lotta fun making music and playing shows. I wish I’d never left college, though. Having a degree would have been helpful in a couple of situations in my day job/career. That said, I never stopped trying to improve my knowledge base. I never stopped learning.

    I read a wide variety of science texts and followed politics and though I don’t have any aptitude for math, I learned how to be pretty good at the things I need to know to run a business.

    You get that information so that when I tell you that I learn from everything I read, you understand that’s exactly what I mean. I read for enjoyment as much as for how a writer does what he or she does. Sentence structures and word choices are the obvious things. Any author that can increase my vocabulary is one that I will never forget and will likely read again. China Mieville is a current favorite; Elmore Leonard is another one who I’ve learned a great deal from; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stephen King, and Neil Gaiman all top the list of writers I’ve learned from.

    Mieville made it okay for me to use the word ‘and’ to connect ideas. (He also taught me to think about everything that can possibly be connected to what I’m writing about.)  Leonard taught me how to streamline my thoughts. Burroughs renewed my sense that it was okay to go for high adventure. King’s insights, in particular throughout his spectacular On Writing, taught me that it was just fine to reach for the heights and that it’s ultimately okay if you don’t reach them every time, but that shouldn’t stop one from trying again and this time going higher. Gaiman brought me back to fiction after spending a long time away from it and I was encouraged to take what I loved about comic books and start writing stories that encompassed all my interests.

    But the the writer who’s taught me the most is Warren Ellis. He’s only got one novel out, Crooked Little Vein, but it wasn’t from his novel that I learned so much. It was from his Bad Signal emails (which he began sending out in 2001 but that I didn’t pick up until 2003). In those emails, he talked about everything that interested him and how he could apply it to his writing or if someone else liked the idea to go with it themselves.

    I did just that. Ellis is halfway responsible for me starting up my serialized novel The Long Range. He mentioned in one email (forgive me I don’t have time to look up the date, but it was around 2004 I think) the idea of creating stories in the same way that bands create songs. (I’m probably remembering it wrong, but this is how I remember it. Sorry if it’s wrong.) I took that idea, rolled it around in my head and decided that what I wanted to do was write a series of seemingly disparate stories of at least 6000 words each that would interconnect to tell a larger work. Something that mashed up comics, music, TV and anything even vaguely episodic. There were thirteen stories there and I only missed my deadline once in the entire year I did it.

    That project led me to try my hand at writing a novel and then trying to do it in 30 days. I’m talking, of course, about NaNoWriMo and from there I’ve written more and more and even been published since then. Ellis discontinued the Bad Signal in January 2010 but I’ve got every one of them I received. I can go back and read them at my leisure. Ellis has been a huge influence on me in terms of my writing (and even my love of whiskey), but is he my favorite writer? No. He’s just my favorite teacher.

  • When does the work, work?

    When I read a book or article that really works, I try to sit down and analyze what made it effective.  Sometimes it’s a matter of style.  I discovered that my favorite writer, Richard Powers, achieves his effectiveness in descriptive passages by layering lengthening clauses, one tucked inside the next, unfolding to a final expression of expansive impact.  Another writer I admire, Jeff Sharlet, wrote a couple of terribly effective non-fiction works by correlating a lot of previously unconnected information.  Another book did not manage to make the new connections explicit, and it was not as effective.

    A couple of times, when I find a sentence that encapsulates its theme particularly well, I tear it apart to learn from it.  I don’t diagram it formally, but I do analyze its grammatical content.  I try to write another sentence using identical structure, to see where it takes me. I examine its relationship to the preceding sentence, and to the following sentence.  This practice sometimes is rewarding with my favorite writers, but it can be equally rewarding for sentences and paragraphs by hack writers, in blogs, in random acts of literacy.

  • Brady Russell

    “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
    — George Bernard Shaw

    The writer who taught me the most is a friend of mine named Brady. We go way back. I first met him in the lobby of middle school when we were both waiting for rides home. We started talking about comic books. Ever since then we occasionally have conversations about our creative projects (and also about comic books.) I guess twenty years of semi-regular conversations about how we write have added up to some useful information.

    Brady has managed to work full time and be a relentlessly productive writer for years. He just self-published an ebook titled Dream Her Back.

    He creates a twice-weekly web comic, Eat the Babies, and he also somehow finds time to blog now and then for several different websites.

    He and I have had many conversations over the years about creativity, but one sticks out as particularly memorable for me. That is when Brady told me about the idea of trying to write for one specific person. It doesn’t matter who, he explained, and they don’t need to know. This was a suggestion he picked up from reading Kurt Vonnegut’s forward to Bagombo Snuffbox. He insisted this was an idea worth trying.

    To be honest, I did not understand how this practice could be helpful until I tried it. Turns out that this is a tremendous tool for forcing a piece to have an even tone to it. Don’t judge the effectiveness by this blog post, however because it is too meta.

    Of course I had heard about the concept of a “target audience” before. All through middle and high school that term was rammed at us in every Language Arts class. Truly, I felt like a target. But until Brady suggested it, it had never occurred to me to pick one single individual as my target audience. Maybe this is common sense to other people, but since neither one of us were creative writing majors it felt like hard won wisdom.

    I use it nearly every time I write anything now in order to keep focused on what to say and how to say it. Sometimes this is easy. When I have an editor to work with I know that my editor is my intended audience and I can keep my tone consistent by crafting each sentence for them personally. Other times it is not so easy.

    If I am working on a personal project with no guidelines, due date or editor, those are the times I have to use my creativity not only for writing, but also for putting constraints on myself in order to keep from going in too many directions at once. In these cases I have to really stretch my imagination and reach for someone to keep in mind as the intended reader.

    If you want to try it yourself, here are some suggestions on how to pick an intended reader. Remember, this person never needs to read your piece in real life. This is strictly a mental exercise in order to keep your writing focused. Who should you pick? Former teachers are handy, assuming they were any good when you were in class with them. Family members are useful to keep in mind, since one often has fondness for them and they are usually willing to read the finished piece anyway. You can also pick your favorite author, or a friend who is also a writer. But watch out it can easily get meta.

  • Grammar: One Novel at a Time

    At some point in my life, I’m sure I was taught grammar. It seems like it would be one of those things teachers are required to impart as you are funneled through the scholastic system. To be honest, other than gerunds in sixth grade, I don’t remember any of it. I’m not even sure what a gerund is, but that’s because we killed him off.

    What I know of grammar, I learned from reading, so if I do it well, it’s because the authors I read had a firm grasp on it–or a really good editor. It’s why I like to believe that I can write with—fairly—decent grammar, but couldn’t begin to tell you what part of speech a word is. Other than the obvious ones like verbs and nouns. Over time, I learned to trust my natural instinct when it comes to sentence structure. So long as I don’t overthink something or make a typo, I’m likely to get it right on the first try. I’m pretty good at pointing out when something is wrong, but I’d never be able to tell you why. It just is. (more…)

  • 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.

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