The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Process

  • Editing: Just saying ‘no’

    Kerouac scroll
    Even Jack Kerouac — who purportedly wrote On the Road in three weeks on a scroll of taped-together paper — still took time to edit his work.

    It’s never easy to tell yourself “no.”

    We live in a world where we we are programmed to eat large portions, fill our wish lists with the latest gadgets and toys, and give in to every impulse buy imaginable. So it’s difficult to show restraint and say no. Especially in one’s own writing.

    As a writer, it’s necessary to explore ideas. Every character, every line of dialogue, every situation has the potential to be something great. Many writers (I’m looking at you, poets!) think every word is essential and each description is pure gold. In the end, some are good, others… well, not so much.

    But I’m not only a writer. I’m also an editor. I have to edit my work, and the editor in me is much less likely to put up with the falderal that the writer in me indulges.

    As much as it pains me, sometimes things in my writing don’t work. When that happens, I have to decide if it’s worthwhile to fix it, or whether I should just cut it and move on. The key to avoiding wasted time is to develop the story before I even begin to write.

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  • Persistent Stalkers: A Love Story

    Dear Idea:

    If you are shiny and new and interest me in any way, I am yours.  I know I pretend to play hard to get.  I act like I’m choosy about what thoughts I let into my head, and that I have, for lack of a better term, some kind of “standards.”

    Truth is: I’m kind of an idea slut.  And I’m down for almost anything.  So make your pitch, tell me why you’re worth my time, and we’ll see what happens.  If you pique my curiosity, I’m like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “a sure thing.”

    But let’s be honest here for a moment.  Ideas like you come and go.  We can flirt and maybe mess around a little, but if you’re looking for more, I need to know you have staying power.  So here’s what you’ve got to do.

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  • Eating Your Dead

    “The difficulty lies not so much in the developing of new ideas as in escaping old ones.”
    ~ John Maynard Keyes

    If writing is my addiction, developing ideas is my obsession.  Once I have a premise, especially a good one, I will mill it over for days.  The strange thing is that more often than character traits and plot lines, I get flashes of language and dialogue.

    Even when I am not actively working, I am writing in my head, constructing quotes.  Anyone who has read my writing knows I enjoy linguistically lining up sounds and syllables.  I wiggle words against each other, hoping the verbs vibrate and the tone trembles.

    My journalistic training singles out sound bites, excavating bits of dialogue from syllabic slabs.  I attempt to craft art, and in the process develop character and plot.

    This may sound odd, but it has always worked for me.  It’s how my writing brain functions.  I don’t seek out the sound bites.  They show up while I obsess about my premise.  I write them down for later use while ideas take shape.

    My one rule is that I will never force a favorite phrase into a story.  If I have a beautiful metaphor, but it doesn’t seem natural in context, I won’t use it.  I’ll save it for later.

    Cannibalism is allowed in art.  If it doesn’t work on its own, if the idea doesn’t have enough heft for a full story, that doesn’t mean it is bad.  What may not drive a novel may be perfect for a short story or a sub-plot.  A protagonist who can’t carry the conflict may be a great supporting character, a sequin sewn in to the fabric of another story.  It is decorative, but still helps the new piece shine.

    I don’t believe in broken premises.  If I can’t make it is work, it isn’t necessarily a bad idea.  I’m just not the artist needed to pull it off.  I won’t waste a ton of time chasing an idea that isn’t working for me.  I’ll lay it aside, but never get rid of it entirely.

    In writing, you eat your dead.  Someday, the abandoned premise, approached from a fresh perspective, may speak to me.  Twice now, I have re-written stories several years later and found them to work in ways they never could have when I originally wrote them.

    An artist changes over time, and characters I could only pretend to understand as a college kid are brutal reflections as a 32 year-old divorced father.

    Never throw away an old idea.  Maybe it isn’t a bad idea; it is just ahead of its time, waiting for you to catch up.

  • How do you go about developing ideas? (Week of 23 January 2012)

    The Cafe is a busy place. There are only a few tables in the small space and all of them have at least one writer at them, working in different ways on different things. Literary Dr. Frankensteins assembling their creatures out of surreptitiously collected parts and amalgamated into something new, hopefully something better. Occasionally you’ll hear one of us shout “IT’S ALIVE” and you’ll see the others look up from their work and smile. We’ve all been there.

    This week the Confabulators offer another behind the scenes look into how their brains work on developing ideas, including when they need to be abandoned. This a rare glimpse into the deeper processes of how a writer goes about writing. Each of us is different and thinks so differently you might be hard-pressed to say that any of us is really talking about the same thing. Take a closer look though. A close read will reward you with deep insights.

    As always, let us know what you think in the comments. Come on in, have a latte, grab a scone.

  • What If?

    A few years ago, I stood barefoot in the middle of my back yard on an early June afternoon, curling the freshly cut grass between my toes. And I thought to myself while I cleaned up my lawn mower, “What if my entire property was just grass? No landscaping, no driveway or sidewalk, no house. Just pristine, green grass.”

    Then I asked The “What If” Question: “What if I lived on a property like that?”

    Six months later I wrote The Emancipation of Bartholomew Benson, the story of a possibly delusional, possible savior-of-humanity farmer, who is torn between raising dairy cattle and annihilating quantum artificial intelligences that threaten to take over the world right beneath our noses. Oh, and he lives in an underground bunker, covered by beautiful, luscious green grass. Of course.

    As writers, we all know that crafting fiction is hard. I think it comes down to the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”  When writing a novel, the logic in our stories has to make perfect sense during every single moment and every single scene. The logic has to be even more believable than the real world. People around you act irrationally all the time in the real world,  but if a character in a story acts irrationally the reader often loses the story thread because they fail to comprehend or empathize with the actions of the character. Your characters can perform extreme acts (i.e. hunt AIs masquerading as utility boxes in people’s basements), but their actions have to follow a logical pattern that the reader can comprehend and accept.

    My solution to the uber-logical storyline constraint has been to keep my stories very simple, at least at conception. The simpler the premise, the simpler the maintenance of that thread of logic that the audience requires while reading my story. Reflecting back on my inspiration for my manuscripts, I see that the start of every story I’ve written has begun with one or two basic questions which I attempt to answer throughout the novel. These “What If” questions have typically fallen into three major categories.

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  • Paying Attention or Paying Money?

    Harlan Ellison tells people who ask him where he gets his ideas from that there’s a company in Schenectady, NY, that sends him a six-pack of the things for $25 a week. I’ve always loved that answer because it reveals the ignorance of the questioner and allows the answerer the opportunity to pontificate.

    And, being honest, a lot of writers like to talk. It’s part of why we’re writers: we have something to say.

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  • Over-rated Origins

    Big ideas and plotting have always been a struggle in my writing. I envision worlds and characters and interactions with ease; sentences and paragraphs come naturally from my fingertips. But climax and plot and sequence? These emerge slowly if at all.

    For years, alas, I thought that I was condemned to writing only of my own limited experiences, using my quotidian existence as source material.  But rarely are happy lives the stuff of good novels (see:  Tolstoy), and I am blessed with a happy life.

    Eventually I figured out that if source materials are good enough for Shakespeare, they’re good enough for me!  So now I mine ideas from the wealth of the texts around me.  I love newspapers, especially the tiny columns of human interest stories that run down the margins, giving two or three sentences of a story–a kernel big enough to build around, but small enough to prevent imprisoning the story in reality.  A few years ago, I read about a young man taking the bibles out of a church before burning it to the ground, as a form of protest against who knows what.  Despite numerous google searches, that story has never resurfaced, but it lives on at the core of two of my three NaNoWriMo novels.

    I also find ideas in the biblical, Old Testament book of Judges.  Now, my dad is a pastor and my origins are deeply religious, even fundamentalist.  In response to this, I strive to embrace the good parts of my heritage of piety and reverence for holy texts, and bring that into my writing.  And the book of Judges is as good as it gets for source tales–sex, lies, and videotape (metaphorical, anyway).  It portrays an anarchic society, or very nearly anarchic, a society making up the rules as it goes along. A society dependent on deeply flawed leaders with limited authority to help them discern justice from injustice.  The most interesting society possible, in other words.  I find ideas in those lives of sinning saints and saintly sinners.  Eventually, once the stories of the judges are exhausted, perhaps I’ll find another holy text to mine–but for now, I draw storied guidance from their faith and follies.

  • There is always a Story.

    Sometimes it’s not a very interesting story. Sometimes it hides itself from you, and sometimes it’s so buried in the weeds of poorly conceived presupposition that you have to get out a metaphorical brush hog to make any sense of it all. But you can take it on faith that there is always a Story.

    I’m a technical writer by trade. You would think the craft of technical writing is all about— well— technique. Marching one word in front of the other from the start to the finish, and making sure they all line up in the correct order. Choosing vocabulary and policing acronyms. Herding commas, nurturing semicolons, recapturing run-on sentences. Describing things. Mundane, boring, everyday things that require procedures and user manuals and progress reports. It’s not literature, or even journalism. I have built a career out of writing the kinds of books that nobody in their right mind will ever want to read [0].

    But there is always a Story.

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  • I Got 99 Ideas but My Hair Ain’t One

    Not what I had in mind

    I always thought the idea thing was a silly question. Worse, I thought it was a cliché, and that nobody ever really asked it. Then a hair stylist (not my regular lady, mind you, somebody new who, apparently, wasn’t sure what to talk about with me while she screwed up my hair) came right out and asked me where I get my ideas.

    I have to admit, I was surprised. In all the dream scenarios where I imagined I was a successful writer, this never came up. I was unprepared. I stammered for a second, then I spit out the first thing that came to my mind.

    “Well, you know,” I said in a conspiratorial whisper, “we’re all insane.”

    It wasn’t at all surprising this answer didn’t satisfy her a bit.

    “I’m just so fascinated with you creative types,” she said. “I guess I don’t have that much imagination.”

    This was made clear once I saw her finished product in the mirror. Somehow my telling her that my hair should look “like I just had sex” translated in her mind to “like I’m on my way to an ‘80s reunion and want to look like a French poodle.”

    I think my problem is I didn’t quite understand the question. I always assumed everyone was picking out pieces of conversation at the next table in a restaurant. I thought everybody was making up a story in their head about the guy walking his dog in the middle of a downpour. I figured everyone remembered snippets of their dreams in the morning and used the pieces to create other worlds.

    Apparently, not everyone is. And that’s okay. If everybody’s brain functioned the same way, it would be a boring world. So, to all the people genuinely curious about where a weirdo like me gets her ideas, I will answer as honestly as I can.

    Ideas come from everywhere.  They come from childhood fears nurtured far into adulthood. They come from broken bits of dialogue overheard in the grocery store. They come from dreams, television shows, movies, games, and books.

    But most of all, they come from you. When you talk to me, there’s always at least a tiny part of my brain listening to how you breathe, watching how your fingers twitch when you talk, and examining that splotch of gravy on your collar.

    Collecting ideas is easy. The tricky part is figuring out which one out of 1000 is worth closer examination.

  • Positively Steaming with Ideas

    If I ever get stumped in a story, or need to come with an idea, I head straight for the shower. It’s about the only place I can go in my apartment where I won’t be interrupted by my adorable cat demanding to be petted and cuddled. It’s a retreat.  But that isn’t the only thing that makes it so ideal for writing. Something about the hot steam and water beating down on my scalp helps clear my head and chase away all the stress of the real world, giving me time to figure out where I need to go in my story from there. Maybe it’s because showering is such a necessary part of the real world that I don’t feel guilty for sitting around and doing nothing. Maybe steam is magical. I’m tempted to believe it is a mixture of the two.

    Once I’ve stepped into the shower, there are usually two ways I gather ideas. In the first way, I draw from situations that happened in my life and left such an impact on me that I still remember them with startling clarity years later. These usually have a tendency to be moments of grief or embarrassment. These ideas tend to come to me unplanned and then float around in my head for months until I finally come up with a way to manipulate them into something interesting and find characters who want to tell that story and make it their own. This is how my latest NaNo novel got started back in May.

    Sometimes as writers, we don’t have the luxury of thinking about an idea for months on end, nor any sudden bursts of inspiration at precisely the right moment. As a Creative Writing major with writing classes every semester, I developed a second way of gathering ideas. I learned how to force myself to come up with stories. Once again, I returned to what I knew. Rather than taking from personal experiences, I turned to my other classes for inspiration. When I took a course on Cleopatra, I wrote poetry about her life. When I was completely uninspired in one of my fiction writing classes, I turned to a play I had written years earlier and found a way to convert it into another format. The story took on new dimensions and allowed me to explore the characters in ways the play formatting had not allowed me to do. (more…)