The Confabulator Cafe

Blog

  • A splash of reality

    In L.M. Montgomery’s semi-autobiographical Emily Climbs, the title Emily publishes a novel after years of pursuing a career in writing.  She recounts to a friend that half her family is offended because they are sure they appear in the novel, and the other half is equally offended that they do not appear!

    Emily’s experience has been instructive to me; while I would not ban my daily reality from my writing, I don’t seek to adapt experiences or characters directly from it, either.  Part of this is an ethical decision.  Most of my daily experiences now are in the classroom, and I believe it’s unethical and a little exploitative for me to write too directly about specific students or classroom situations.  Of course, my own experiences there and the understandings that I’ve developed from them influence my writing a lot, but all specifics from my school world must be invented, composite, or otherwise disguised.

    I am a little more comfortable mining my family history for skeletons.  My father is an inveterate story-teller, and stories of his grandparents, my grandparents, and generations of uncles and cousins undergird my entire storytelling vocabulary.  I still try to avoid adapting characters directly from the family, although some of the larger-than-life figures became myths so long ago that I figure they wouldn’t even recognize themselves and are fair game.

    But mostly, my life isn’t that exciting.  Were I to write it down, it would make for very boring books. Indeed, when I was in college I did try to write down stories from my student life, but as it turns out the angst filled coming-of-age of mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly Midwestern college students does not make for riveting prose.  Now I know people from many more diverse walks of life, and their stories are probably pretty interesting–but they are not my stories, and I try not to steal others’ stories.

    One place that I see reality splashing in is when I learn new skills or knowledge sets; my last novel had a lot more specifics of plant life than my first two, since I started gardening between those novels!  Now I’ve started sewing and trying to make more of my own garments–and lo and behold, my characters suddenly have a lot more ideas about the specifics of clothing manufacture.  Certainly, living informs writing, but for me it doesn’t take it over. Reality is overrated, anyway–if the text doesn’t splash me into a reality more vivid, or more gritty, or more refined, or more something than my own reality, then why would I read it?  Why would I write it?

  • Worry Wart

    I write about things that worry me.

    When I think about the stories I’ve written over the years, the common theme is:

    • Flawed characters
    • Struggling to overcome a societal issue
      • usually caused by overreliance or abuse of technology
      • sometimes caused by scientific hubris
      • often compounded by environmental collapse
      • often a result of overcrowding and/or overuse of natural resources

    Why do I write stories that deal with these types of issues? Because these questions and concerns are the ones that plague me every day. How can humankind sustain itself given the rapid depletion of natural resources we’re currently experiencing? Can technology provide solutions? If so, can it do so quickly enough to halt or reverse the damage we’ve done already? And will there be unintended consequences to our corrective actions? As a teacher of technology, I’m constantly bombarded by the wonderful advancements we’re making in science and industry. I’m also constantly struck by how much harm many of those advancements can cause, either directly or tangentially. And it worries me.

    I love science fiction, and one of the major reasons why is that, as an author, I can choose to answer the questions above any way I see fit. I can (and usually do) choose to provide salvation for my characters and the planet on which they reside – a light at the end of the tunnel. Usually that light is much too faint for my characters to see at the beginning of their journey, hidden in the far distance behind many twists and turns. And more often than not when they return from their subterranean adventures, blinking and confused, they’re nowhere near where they expected to be. But sometimes, just making it back to the surface and breathing fresh air again is enough.

    Because, frankly, sometimes I feel like the real world’s not going to be so lucky.

    As for whether or not any particular people I know make it into my stories, the short answer is: sure. Not exact copies, but caricatures of friends, family, and coworkers sneak into my stories all the time. More telling is that my protagonists are almost always some shade of myself. Given that my main characters are often trying to save the world from imminent destruction, who wouldn’t want to be cast in that role, at least in some small part? I’m guessing that’s true of most authors, and authors that deny it aren’t being completely truthful.

    So, returning to a common writing mantra: I write what I know. What I know is what worries me, how I feel about it, and what I wish I could do about it. That’s what (and why) I write.

  • Freudian slip

    As far as I know, there is no one from my real life making appearances in my fiction. I do not deliberately make characters out of people I have known. I have sometimes made characters who have similar demographic information to me, or similar age-related issues. But these characters have been no easier to write than the characters who have nothing in common with me.

    For example, one of my screenplays is about a post-college female job seeker. I myself have been a post-college female job seeker, but that character was just as difficult to write convincingly as the retired military man, child prodigy, or engineer centaur. I have written about people looking for jobs or finding happiness in making art. These are experiences I have had. But I also write about things that are not possible in the real world like man-eating shrubbery, which is definitely not based on anything I have experienced in my own life.

    Having ruled out that I am deliberately putting myself or people from my real life into the characters in my writing, I still have to examine the possibility that it is happening unconsciously. I have certainly had the experience of reading a novel and thinking to myself “Gee Bob, your Freudian slip is showing.”  What if I am revealing more of myself through my characters than I intended to?

     

    Like I explained in my post “The Creativity Hopper,” writing for me involves taking in everything around me, letting it bounce around inside my mind, then spitting it back out. This means that the filter that I look at the world through colors my perception of things. It also means that my own personal feelings about issues influence how ideas bounce around and stick to one another. What I think about those topics will also affect how I present them in my writing. That’s a lot of bias. I consider myself a postmodern writer and try to be honest about my bias. That doesn’t mean I’m in the business of writing autobiographical stuff. So the idea that my work would be transparent enough that others could glean information about me by reading my fiction is, in a word, terrifying.

    I need to have faith that I am not subconsciously basing characters on real life people in order to preserve my calm and continue creating without being hampered by self-consciousness.

    The truth is characters aren’t the most important part of my writing anyway. I don’t get too attached to them, and I don’t try to mold them into anything specific because my philosophy is to just make characters do whatever needs to happen next in the story. In that way I gravitate toward plot-based stories as opposed to what I’ve heard people describe as “character-driven” stories. When I’m reading a book I am more likely to ask “Then what happened?” rather than “What’s she like?” If the story I’ve written is good, characters won’t need to be described because they will show what they are like through the decisions they make. In that way, I hope to be more like the characters in my stories rather than making the characters more like me.

  • 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.”

  • Saravision

    One of my dearest writing friends, Jack Campbell, Jr., told me once that there is nothing fictional about fiction. “Fiction is just a distortion of our dreams and nightmares.” Every plot, every character, every snippet of dialog contains a part of me. If you were to dissect everything I had ever written and put it all together, you would know me better than my closest friends and family who haven’t ever read any of my work. Especially if you were a writer.

    Writers understand what goes into writing. We understand each other on a level our normal friends and family never could. They see us in our day to day lives, in a real life setting, making the most out of the lives we are given, while other writers can see the world how we envision it by looking at what we’ve created. They can interpret what is hidden deep within our subconscious mind. Zero drafts in particular are the most telling – they are almost flow of consciousness style writing, seen before the author has a chance to edit or censor their thoughts.

    There really aren’t new ideas as far as stories. Everything has been done. The difference is every single one of us has a different view of the world. Our backgrounds shape who we are which in turn shapes how we write or even what we write about. Only I can tell a story a certain way. It is my point of view that makes it unique. A cliché might be cliché, but my particular spin on it makes it somewhat new and different.

    Everything in my life has crept into my writing. My hopes and dreams, as Jack said. My bitterness, my pain, my happiness, my sense of humor. The people I know, the conversations I’ve had. My writing is an amalgamation of everything I’ve read or watched or listened to chewed up and spat back out. It’s the world seen through my particular rose-colored glasses. When you read something I’ve written, you put on my glasses and see the world in the particular tint that I see it.

    Saravision.

    It may not always be obvious, but what I write is me. Distorted, translucent, inverted or twisted, substituted or hyperbolic. Everything I write is a seed taken from something of myself and cultivated into something somewhat recognizable, if you know what to look for.

  • You wouldn’t know me from my writing

    Palm trees and an ocean view
    I prefer to write about places I know well. Someday, all of my stories will be set here.

    For years, I heard my writing teachers telling me to put more of my own experiences into my writing. I’ll be honest with you, though. My life was pretty boring. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to read about me.

    I don’t like writing about real life. I prefer the odd, the strange, and the fantastic. I’m more at home talking about people with superpowers than work, relationships, or my efforts to catalog my DVD library.

    But here and there, my real life has started slipping into my writing. A woman in my short story reminds me of my wife. And the banter she shares with the protagonist is reminiscent of the way my wife and I finish one another’s thoughts.

    Other characters, too, reflect certain aspects of people I know: an old friend, a mentor, or an obnoxious guy at work. Of course, I have to do something to make them interesting. So sometimes that guy in my office turns out to be a tasty snack for a demon or an early casualty in an alien invasion.

    Mostly, though, it’s settings that I steal from real life.

    I’m no good at imagining cities I have never lived in. I couldn’t write a hard-boiled detective noir set in 1950s L.A. I can’t write about New York City. I’ve tried writing about Florida, but it’s been 20 years since I lived there. I’m sure it’s changed a bit.

    The only reason I set my current novel in Chicago is because I’ve actually visited there recently. Well, that and the fact that I destroyed half the city before the story began. The streets of “New Chicago” don’t have to bear a strong resemblance to what exists there now. I have kept a few of the neighborhood names, and some landmarks. But I had to spend hours pouring over Google Maps and  Wikipedia pages to make sure I managed to get those details right.

    For now, I’ll stick with people and places I know, even if I have to change them up a bit to make them more interesting.

    As Jimmy Buffett once sang:

    “Don’t try to describe the ocean if you’ve never seen it.
    Don’t ever forget that you just may wind up being wrong.”

  • The Upside to Hearing Voices

    I had a plan once.  It was all about writing hard-boiled detective fiction with gritty characters and heart-rending drama.  I was an acolyte of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and I wanted to communicate to people that the life we lived was a gritty and brutal existence.

    Here’s the problem with that scenario: I didn’t know what the hell I was talking/writing about.  I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and the threat of crime was not a significant part of my life.  I also went to small, public schools where being a smart-ass know-it-all translated to very few significant ass kickings, if any.  I was by no means a kid of privilege, but I didn’t fear going out after dark either, unless I’d watched a little too much creature feature the night before.

    As much as I loved the works of Hammett and Chandler and would later come to respect some of the novels by Dennis Lehane, particularly Gone, Baby, Gone, when it came to writing my own stories, I had very little to add to this particular vein of fiction.  I had no common experience, or even knowledge of someone who did, so my work lacked authenticity.

    A kind and honest professor in grad school once told me, “Maybe you’re too nice of a guy to write this kind of stuff.”  I completely ignored him at the time because what did he know.  He was only a kick-ass writer who’d been published many times over (I mean, seriously, the balls on that guy!) and I was nearly finished writing yet another novel of the type for which he felt I was ill-suited.  This guy’s truth and I did not see eye to eye.

    Fast forward several years later, and I finally wised up a little.  I stopped ignoring the voices in my head.  They talked like the people I’d grown up with, and the ridiculous things they wanted to do made me laugh.  The characters still take themselves seriously, but the reader doesn’t have to.  I don’t think you can help but put yourself in your stories, either through events you’ve experienced or attitudes you’ve held.  But when you flip through one of my stories, I want you to have a little fun, enjoy a little escape.

    Life has enough serious drama of its own.  I see no reason to add to it.  I’d get schooled if I even tried to step onto that court.  I just want to make you chuckle.  (It’s honestly more of a need at this point).

  • The Exotic Mundane

    “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” – George Santayana

    The writer’s mind is like a sponge, absorbing all moisture from around it, only to spill everything when squeezed. Your life is going to creep in to your writing, even if you don’t subscribe to the “write what you know” belief. Instinct drives the expression of the human mind through art. Writers are artists.

    What’s more, you shouldn’t fight it. Artists are illusionists of reality. We take the real and twist it, deforming fact into fiction. We get our readers to believe our stories by weaving the truth and fantasy into a tight, indistinguishable mesh.

    You absolutely should take aspects of those around you, their quirks, habits, vices, and hobbies. You should use those aspects to create three-dimensional characters. But you should also remember that fiction is fiction, and you must change enough about those people that they can’t sue you for libel or defamation of character. Change their names, appearances, speech patterns, everything.

    Writing is like a puzzle that can be put together many different ways. Unless you are writing non-fiction, you must make sure it is actually a fictional character, no matter how real it seems. Or you can take the advice of Anne Lamott if it is a man. Write that the character has a small penis.  No one will ever claim you were writing about him.

    In recent years, I’ve seen a lot of real life creep in to writing, mostly because I realized it was pointless to write about people living in cities. I’ve never been to a large city, much less lived in one. How could I possibly know what it is like to live in New York City or Los Angeles? Besides, there are more than enough writers writing about those settings. I am familiar with the rural, the suburban, and the dynamics of living in a place where everyone knows about you.

    Very few writers can duplicate that knowledge. I know what it is like to be known by everyone in your area. I know what is like to live in a place where secrets are hard to keep and the difference between friends and enemies is defined by days, rather than names. I know what it is like to have to worry about reputation, not in the media or your career, with your neighbors.

    As such, I dove into reading Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and others who wrote about similar places. These environments are a part of my life, their people a part of my history, and my fiction is richer for using them.

    Don’t be afraid to use the parts of your life that seem mundane. What is mundane for one may be exotic for another. Spice your writing with the ingredients of your life, and make it a truly special concoction.

  • Real Life and Writing (Week of 16 April 2012)

    It’s rare that a writer’s only job is to write stories for our entertainment. Certainly the big names do, and several mid-list authors are able to make that leap into being a full-time writer. We baristas here at the Cafe are writers, but we have other occupations, too. One of the benefits to working out in the ‘real’ world is being able to populate our stories with things that we observe out there.

    That can scare our friends. No one wants their foibles put on display for strangers to see. Unless of course they’re on a cell phone and telling their BFF all about what they did last night. You wouldn’t believe some of the conversations we overhear when the customers think no one’s listening. Or maybe you would.

    This week, our bloggers are answering the question “How has your ‘real’ life crept into your writing? Is there anyone you know in them there words?” No really, that’s how the question was asked. Anyway, tune in every day to see what we have to say about it. Maybe you’ll come to understand that not everyone we meet is a good character though bits of you might get in there. We promise it’ll be enlightening and you could possibly see some of yourself in there.

    If you look hard enough.

    Have a cup of coffee, or tea. Read up on how we writers change things to suit ourselves.

  • What is your goal as a writer?

    Goals are tricky things, like New Year’s Resolutions in a way. They are things that everyone has in their minds. Sights that are set, whether realistic or not, as plateaus to be attained. Writers are dreamers – in general – and sometimes those goals are lofty indeed. This week, the Confabulators are challenged to tell us what their goals are. Setting things like this down in stone (really pixels but who’s quibbling?) are tough for us to do, too.

    So check out what we have to say on the subject of what we want to do or what we want our writing to be. This’ll be interesting for sure.

    Ted Boone

    Tangible goal: receive a publishing offer from a legitimate publishing house. Ephemeral goal: write stories that entertain my audience.

    Larry Jenkins

    Is it shallow if I say I’m really looking forward to groupies?  Oh, wait . . . do we have literary groupies?  Are they hot?  Shit!  That does sound shallow.  Just say peace.  Yeah, peace.  I’m looking forward to my writing bringing about world peace.  Suck on that, haters!

    R. L. Naquin

    I’m very fortunate right now that I have two novels contracted. Realistically, I know that’s not going to be enough to bring in a living wage. My goal is to write and sell enough books to build up a backlist and have a steady income from it. I figure, oh, I don’t know, a gazillion should do it. Maybe two gazillion. The economy is a little rough.

    Kevin Wohler

    I have three goals for my writing. I want to have someone publish my 1) novel, 2) short story collection, and 3) book of poetry. If I can accomplish these things before I die, I will consider myself a successful writer — even if they don’t sell a single copy.

    Jack Campbell, Jr.

    My goal would be to make a living writing full-time, but I am a bit of a realist. I would be happy with making enough of an income out of writing that I could actually say it contributed to my yearly income in a meaningful way. I would like to publish a novel, a short story collection, and have a screenplay produced. I would also like to write academic papers and teach literature or writing. I’ve also thought about starting a small press in retirement, editing a literary journal and publishing small regional titles. My goals are pretty vast, but sometimes those are the best ones to have.

    Jason Arnett

    Consulting my crystal ball (the oracle is on vacation, stoned on a beach somewhere) I can honestly say that I’ve got some pretty high-falutin’ goals: getting a novel published by a Name House and parlaying that opportunity into a full-time writing career. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. I can see just the barest pinpoint of light on the horizon. Maybe that’s a star. Or torches and pitchforks. I don’t know, but I have to go now. Time to start walking that direction and see what I can see.