The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Influence

  • Sad Days = Good Art

    Five years ago on Halloween, one of my dogs (who, for people who know me, we treat as our surrogate children) was playing in our backyard when she suddenly started to get sick. If you own dogs, you know that stomach issues are not that uncommon, so we weren’t that worried. I took her to our local vet and asked for them to keep her overnight and give her lots of fluids.

    An hour later they called and told us she’d suffered heart failure. Luckily, they were able to revive her, and we rushed her to Kansas City so the emergency unit could watch her overnight. Unfortunately, the next morning she passed away from unknown causes. We have no idea what happened. She was three years old, and perfectly healthy.

    National Novel Writer’s Month didn’t start for me on November 1st that year. I think I actually started writing on…the fourth? Maybe the fifth. And for the remainder of the month, every word I typed was infused with the emotions of my traumatic event. Anger. Frustration. Hopelessness. My main character was wracked by guilt and the need to lash out at…something. Anything. Just like me.

    It made for great writing. Channeling that energy led to one of the strongest manuscripts I’ve ever written. I wouldn’t wish that kind of tragedy on anyone, but it informed my writing that year in a very powerful way. I’ve always felt that sad writers are better writers than happy ones. Unfortunate truth to that, I think. When life is good, it’s much harder for me to write the tough scenes: I always tell people to push their characters down the stairs, but boy, that’s a dark place that’s difficult for me to visit sometimes.

    Would I like to write like that all the time? Yup! Am I seeking out misery and despair around every corner? Uh…no. What am I, stupid?

    Life’s good to me. I’ve got a great job, great wife, great dogs, great house. In the past year I visited France, Peru, and Ecuador. I got to visit Machu Picchu and the Galapagos Islands, and hike Quandary Peak with one of my dogs. I have nothing to complain about.

    But happy life does not equal a happy writing career.

    When life’s good, I really struggle to take my own advice: “When in doubt, throw your protagonist down the stairs.” Uh…nah. Things are good! I’ll take the elevator! Thanks, though!

    Without personal tragedy, I struggle to provide adequate conflict and heartache in my stories. I’m aware of the issue, but it’s not something easily remedied. I’m not willing to torture myself in order to inform my writing. Ain’t gonna happen.

    However, this year promises another sad note. Yay! (?) My spouse will be living in Washington D.C. for almost eleven months working for the Securities & Exchange Commission. We’ll both travel back and forth often, but it’s still going to be a long, lonely year. And already, my outline for this year’s story deals with long distance relationships, communicating and connecting across vast gulfs of space and time. I didn’t plan on that type of story, but clearly my subconscious mind has an agenda, and I know better than to argue.

    So, embrace life’s tough moments and allow them to inform my writing. Silver lining and all that rot. We’ll see if it pans out. I’ll let you know in December.

  • An Absolutely True Story

    Although he looks rather similar, this isn’t actually Ralph. My camera was lost overboard when the ship got caught in a bad storm.

    There was a time, many years ago, when I struck out on my own and went backpacking in the rainforests of South America. The heat was sweltering, and the humidity stuck in my lungs, making every breath an effort of will. The group I was with consisted of a bunch of tree-hugger college kids, a missionary, and our guide. We called him Ralph, because, since he was a native, there was no way our American mouths could recreate the sounds of his actual name.

    One week into the trip, a python strangled Ralph in his sleep. We were on our own. We tried to find our way back to civilization, but with Ralph gone, we walked in circles for three days. Our rations ran out by then. There was plenty of water, but we didn’t have the training to feed ourselves. The missionary girl, I think her name was Grace, volunteered to try some berries we found, hoping they weren’t toxic. Turns out they weren’t. But one got stuck in her throat and she choked to death. The Heimlich maneuver doesn’t always work. (more…)

  • Writers are Clay, Life is the Mold

    I believe that every experience a writer has shapes his or her writing. Everything we do informs and influences who we are, and therefore what we write. Some of the things are minor. If I read a really good book, maybe my writing sounds like that style for awhile. If I find something incredibly unjust, I get up on my soapbox and include that theme in a story. Writers are like sponges, soaking up what is all around them, and then wringing it out onto a page. We mimic real life so that it feels real when it’s being read, and the best way to do that is take what happens in our lives and re-purpose it for our writing (although this isn’t always a conscious process).

    Then there are profound life events that can forever change the way we think and feel, which can drastically alter our writing. Marriage. Children. Divorce. Death. These experiences dig deep trenches within us which fill with pools of emotion. From these pools we have an even greater depth to pull from when we write.

    When my Mom died after struggling with breast cancer on and off for almost a decade, I was profoundly changed as a person. My mom was the most important person in my life. There really are no words to describe what it was like to watch her die for years, and then lose her before I was even 30 years old. I wrote an entire novel for National Novel Writing Month in November trying to find the words, and they still seem inadequate.

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  • A Writing Partner

    Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday
    This is how I like to imagine my wife and I when we write.

    Seven years ago, I married my best friend.

    I could tell you the story of how we met. I’ve told it a million times. I could tell you of our mutual love of all things Disney. I could tell you of our honeymoon at Disneyland, during the 50th anniversary of the park opening.

    But I’d like to talk about a different aspect of our life together, and how she saved me.

    You see, when Rachel came back into my life about eight years ago, we hadn’t seen each other in years. Despite being great friends, our lives had taken different paths. She was married, had kids, and traveled. I stayed here, working and trying to be a writer. And we both went through some rough times. She got divorced. I lost my parents. We both struggled for a while. But we each came through it stronger.

    After a short engagement, we were married. And a few months later, when I told her I wanted to leave the information technology support position I had held for five years, she understood. She encouraged me to pursue my dream, whatever that may be.

    The following years were rough. I tried teaching for short time, but that wasn’t for me. So I put our savings and my trust in a plan to build a home business on the Internet. I failed fast, and started looking for work. This was around 2006, just as the U.S. economy was starting to turn south. Finally, as the last of our savings was spent and we were paying for groceries with credit cards, she noticed an ad for a copywriting position.

    I applied and was offered the job, which started my second life in the corporate world. For the past several years, I’ve been happy working as a copywriter for a digital marketing agency.

    Once we had some solid ground under our feet, I started writing again. As I mentioned last week, it wasn’t really until 2010 that I began writing short stories and novels again. After more than a decade, the stories started to come back to me. Little by little, I started to remember how to use those tools in my writer’s toolbox. She dragged me to a local write-in for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Though I didn’t finish that first year, I finished the next one. And I haven’t looked back since.

    The Confabulator Cafe has given me a great base of operations, forcing me to write something every week. It’s a nice departure from the marketing work I do all week at my job. Most importantly, it allows me to work alongside some wonderful local writers who amaze and inspire me.

    I don’t know if I could pick the moment in my life when I decided to be a writer. I was likely still very young, pecking away at my mom’s typewriter and dreaming of stories to be told.

    But I can tell you when I became a copywriter. And when I entered NaNoWriMo for the first time. And I can tell you that neither would have been possible without my writing partner.

  • Truth Hurts, but It’s Worth It

    Stories like this are tricky. Ultimately, they’re subjective. All I can do is lay out the events as I see them, and you have to understand that I’m giving you a single point of view. This is my own admittedly biased experience, and others in this tale could take exception to my interpretation. Be that as it may, this is the event that I feel has done the most to shape me into the writer I am today.

    Growing up, my brothers and I hit the daily double of childhood. We were both rural and poor, and from an early age we were taught to distrust authority. Most of our conversations with non-related adults consisted of the following phrases: “I don’t know,” and “they’re not here right now.” The tenants of our family were simple and observed like dogma: support it, defend it, and keep everything in house.

    If you weren’t blood, our affairs were none of your damned business, and marrying in didn’t necessarily afford you with a right to know.

    As a child, this sort of fierce loyalty appealed to me, and I saw something noble and good in its application. My brothers and I belonged to something greater than ourselves, and we thought it was something worth defending. I no longer feel that way.

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  • Rise Above the Tears

    Grandpa Joe

    Sometimes, tears can be our greatest inspiration. They force us to react, and rise above ourselves.

    Almost a year ago, I really kicked up my writing output. I wrote a lot. I read a lot. I started to find myself as an artist. Then, in December, my Grandpa Joe lay in hospice, dying of cancer.

    This affected me in many ways. Perhaps the most direct is the blog I wrote while struggling with my feelings about his impending death: A Train Ride to an Unknown Stop

    I wrote it in the middle of the night, right after finding out. I bought a domain name so that my blog would be easier to find, and then I posted it. My post had nearly six hundred views in December.

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  • Life, the Universe, and Writing (Week Ending August 18)

    Few of us can separate our writing from our personal lives. The stress of life’s tragedies and the joys of life’s celebrations can affect the ability to write. Whether dealing with family problems or issues at work, it doesn’t take a lot to hurt creativity.

    This week, we asked the writers in the Cafe which life events have affected their writing. What did they do to work past it? And how can creativity bloom in the garden of misery? We hope you learn something from their answers.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Don’t Get It “Right,” Get It Written!

    Remember the scene in “Throw Momma From the Train” where Billy Crystal has terrible writer’s block because he can’t decide whether “the evening was hot,” or “the evening was moist?” And later, when Momma suggested “The evening was sultry,” it gave Billy Crystal incentive to actually kill her?

    You can spend hours futzing around like that because you can’t decide on a particular word choice. Or what to name a character. Or whether a particular factoid should be mentioned in Section 2.1 or 3.4. I have wasted hours clicking through photo libraries looking for the perfect illustration.

    Scruit, because time and deadlines wait for no man.

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  • Sweat the Bad Reviews. Sometimes.

    It took me a while to work out where I was going with this topic, because I can’t think of a lot of advice I’ve gotten from other writers, and none of it personal. After covering two bits of good not-quite-advice, I finally found the advice that I couldn’t step away from: “Don’t sweat the bad reviews.”

    It’s not bad advice. I agree in principle, but it’s over-simplified. I think over-simplified is bad. I think over-simplified leads to professional writers who don’t read their own reviews at all and can’t see the difference between “The quality of this series has decreased,” and “Bad reviewers are just sexually frustrated haters.”

    You can’t please everyone, but there’s a big difference between someone leaving a review because they weren’t your target audience1, someone leaving bad reviews because they sort of hate you personally, and someone leaving a review because they’re pointing out what they feel to be genuine problems in the work.

    I don’t believe, at any spectrum of success, that an author should agonize and dwell on bad reviews. That said, I do believe in taking the bad with the good — and sometimes the bad is a reviewer calling you a hack. So, generally, I feel like this advice would be better stated as, “Consider what the bad review is saying, and make your own judgement.”

    In my favorite form lately: personal anecdote time!

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  • Advising the Truthteller

    Director Carol Reed and star Orson Welles in the sewers under Vienna during the filming of The Third Man.

    It used to be that the hero would have to climb a mountain to find the sage old man in a lotus position waiting for him, apparently immune to the cold and wind and not needing any sustenance like food and water. The hero would then ask a really – I mean REALLY – silly question that would inevitably be answered with a cryptic “Because it is there” line or some such. Or the hero scales the cliffside in order to visit the teenaged oracle who’s higher than a kite and the sexual plaything of a suspect religious order. The oracle then mutters some barely intelligible riddle that the hero takes back to the horny old goats of the order and they ‘interpret’ it to mean what they want it to mean. Usually this involved the hero taking a powder away from the village so that they can do what they want without any interference from the do-gooder hero.

    Seeking advice is as old as people are. We go to those we trust in order to gain validation for what we want to do or are already doing. That we trust anyone enough to seek their advice is amazing in this day and age. At least to me it is. There’s so much free ‘advice’ laying around waiting to be picked up that it’s hard to understand why there aren’t more success stories. (more…)