The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Listening to the sound of my voice

    PaperbacksWhen I first started writing, I never intentionally tried to mirror a favorite writer. The problem was that I hadn’t found my own voice yet. So when I started creating stories, it surprised me when I discovered the stories were not my own.

    One of my early attempts was to write a science fiction epic that would have a galactic scale to it. I stopped after a few thousand words when I realized I was retelling Issac Asimov’s Foundation series. As time went on, I discovered an interest in writing stories about a populated Mars, not unlike Ray Bradbury. When I graduated college, it was Stephen King and his epic The Stand that I was mimicking in style — if not in apocalyptic subject matter.

    Through all these phases in my writing, I was equally concerned and confounded by the advice I received to “find your own voice.”

    I don’t have a voice, I wanted to argue. I only know how to write like the books I have read.

    After a decade or so of writing, I’ve discovered my voice has been with me all along. It was my own voice I was drowning out by listening to my favorite authors whispering in my ear.

    What I didn’t understand, what many new writers fail to grasp, is that our favorite writers aren’t doing anything special in their writing. They aren’t adopting a “writer’s voice” when they put pen to page. Do you want to know their secret? Lean in close and I’ll whisper it to you: They talk to you.

    Writing can still be difficult. I get off track, I overwrite scenes, and I have a habit of putting on my editor hat when I should be writing. But when I get things right, it’s because I have stopped trying to write. Instead, I talk and let my fingers transcribe what I’m saying in my head.

    That’s the voice I needed to find, and it was inside me all along.

  • You’re Derivative. Get Over It.

    How similar is my own writing to that of the authors I like?

    Right off the bat, I was not a fan of this question.  It really turned me off.  Maybe even pissed me off a little.

    I was all like, “[BLEEP] you, voice on high” (otherwise known as the Café’s editors).  “I don’t write like anybody.  My style is my own.  Maybe you’re the ones who are a bunch of derivative mother-[BLEEP]ers.”

    I’m not going to lie.  It wasn’t pretty.  I went on like that for a good, solid five . . . days, but really who’s counting?  The point is I had this immediate protective reaction for not only the stories I create but the way I create them.  The thought that this voice I’m trying to cultivate might have its origins with someone else was upsetting and disheartening, and it sent my brain spiraling into what I can only describe as a mental hissy fit.

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  • I, Apprentice

    “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

    I’ve often read about writers, especially young writers, who write like the writers they are reading.  I don’t have that issue.  In fact, I wish I did.  How easy would it be if I could instantly write like a successful writer.

    However, I have learned some great things from some amazing writers.  From Bradbury and Gardner, I learned you don’t have to write poetry to write lyrically.  From Hemingway, I learned that the simplest sentence can be powerful.  From Faulkner and Twain, I learned you don’t have to stray far from home to find intriguing settings.  From Steinbeck and Joyce, I learned a fulfilling story isn’t about living happily ever after.

    We can learn so much from the supposed masters of our craft.  But, I believe you can learn something from any writer or any reader.  Look at the contributors to the Confabulator Café.  We all have our own styles, strengths, and weaknesses.

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  • How Much Is Your Writing Like Your Favorite Author’s? (Week of 30 January 2012)

    Don’t try to deny it: everyone who does anything creative is influenced by another who has done something similar before. Sometimes the impetus to pursue a career is as simple as “I can do better than her” or even more basic, like “I wish I could do that like him”. What it takes is the courage to make the attempt. Jedi Master Yoda is famously and often quoted: “Do or do not. There is no try.” We are exhorted to “Just Do It” by Nike ads. But whose lead do we follow?

    For writers, we have to learn at the feet of the masters. Just who those masters are is up for grabs, though. Each person views their own hero as a master, whether or not the rest of the world does. That said, most of the names dropped this week in the Cafe are universally acknowledged as masters of the craft of writing. Many have won awards that are ultimately meaningless. Or are they?

    The Confabulators walk the borderlands between what’s real (coffee, for instance) and what’s not (imagination, as an example). Meshing the two is a lot of work. Creating believable settings for readers to get lost in takes practice, too. And each of us has aped a style made famous by someone else. It’s all part of the process. That said, we don’t take standing on the shoulders of giants lightly. Come in, pull up a seat and see what we mean by that.

  • The First Thing You Wrote

    Creative tendencies often show up in youngsters. If they’re encouraged, they can find a way to blossom soon and the world is graced with prodigies that we don’t need to name as we don’t want to compare ourselves to them. If creative tendencies are left to flower or flounder on their own, it may take years or decades for the person who has such tendencies to realize that’s what they need to do. Creativity must find a way out. 

    Every week we ask the Confabulators a question that may further illuminate the blog question or give you some further insight into our working minds. This week we wanted to know about the first attempts our writers made. You’ll find as wide a variety of answers as there are Confabulators answering the question but a common thread was school. Let’s not underestimate what schools can do for creative people. Perhaps our answers will help you understand why…

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  • Complicated + Ugly = Wrong.

    I’m a technical writer. I get assignments, with requirements and (horrors!) deadlines. The content and general format are usually specified. But the way I present the information is up to me.

    There’s a rule of thumb in computer programming. If an algorithm is complicated and ugly, it’s wrong. The same rule applies to technical writing. If what you are writing makes no sense, then you need to simplify. Hard concepts require short choppy sentences. Don’t worry about style. Worry about communicating.

    Recently I was asked to help update a program manual. The previous version was, in a word, awful. The original author wrote it ten years ago, and he was good at writing regulations— which showed in spades. This book could be prescribed as a cure for insomnia, except we were worried about side effects. The whole project got dumped on my desk with the terse order, “Make it better.”
    That manual was complicated. It was ugly. It was oh, so wrong, on so, so many levels.

    So I simplified it. I reorganized it into three sections; one for program participants, one for their technical experts, and one for their lawyers. I translated the language from Government-ese to English, added color, “chunked” the information by employing sidebars and call-outs, and modernized the typography and layout. I alternated blocks of technical information with narrative case studies and success stories and added so many graphics the darned thing almost reads like a comic book. I excised the former subtext of regulatory doom and gloom and replaced it with a pep talk. I prepared to defend to the death my decision to use the second person, “you,” when referring to the reader rather than the bureaucratic and distant word “party.”

    Then I printed it out, lovingly swaddled it in my best binder clip, and sent it out to the higher-ups for their review and criticism. Sometimes you just have to let your babies go out into the world and face the slings and arrows.

    My bosses loved it. (Except for that one typo I missed.) It has all the required program and regulatory information, but unlike the previous version it is readable. Helpful. Simple. Elegant. And right.

    (By the way, this is the fourth draft of this blog entry. I started the first three with what I thought was a perfect beginning, after which things got very complicated and very ugly very fast. My “perfect beginning” turned out to be perfectly wrong.)

  • Panning for Gold in the Dark

    A couple of weeks back the fabulous Confabulators weighed in on where their writing ideas come from.  I may backtrack a bit over some of that territory, because where they come from seems to be connected to the ideas I end up pursuing past the ‘idea’ stage.

    Looking back on the thousands of words I’ve written, I sort of see this pattern: for a novel or short story, what usually what gets me going, and keeps me engaged, is something I’m struggling to understand in my own life.

    For example:

    ~The aftermath of the unexplained death of my father became a short story about the changing relationship of two brothers, as one pulls away from what’s left of his family.

    ~Trying to understand marriage became a novel exploring the lives of a girl traded into white slavery and a man raised in the 1960’s “who did everything right and failed.”

    ~The idea of refuge and the families we make became a novel about the friendships between gay theater kids in college and their circle of friends (‘Fame meets Boogie Nights’.)

    ~Addiction, the allure of escapism, and personal betrayals (both perpetrated and experienced) became a book about a young girl’s search for her birth parents in an alternate reality. (more…)

  • Storyteller’s Vagary

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: In the dark with another idea rubbing up against it.

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: One thought plus one notion equals One Idea. Take three or four Ideas, apply Heat and alchemically a story appears in the mist.

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: Ideas + Heat = Story.

    Not very helpful answers to an odd question. These are the sort of answers that I’ve read from several authors, the sort of thing that’s been frustrating as I have tried to grow as a storyteller. It doesn’t really mean any one thing and can be interpreted so many different ways that it’s ultimately meaningless. I’ve tried to relate what I do to percolating coffee, sauteeing vegetables, aging whiskey or fermenting wine. None of them have been good analogies and all have been even worse metaphors.

    Dreams are part of the mix, to be sure. Anything that recycles or goes over an idea until it coheres is helpful. They’re not the most important thing because they’re irregular and for some reason I don’t always remember them. I can do the self-hypnotizing thing and try to remember them, and that works, but it’s not the most reliable thing I can do.

    For me – and I’ve been struggling with how to tell you this – developing a notion into an Idea is kind of mystical. I know, it’s not all that helpful. Being truthful, going back to the Idea Still, it really is a mystery to me how an Idea gets turned into a story. It’s one part Interest, one part Need and who knows what else. What I can and will share with you below (and this is my fourth attempt at quantifying all this) are two things that I do to facilitate the mystical process.

    WRITE IT DOWN

    Easiest thing in the world to do, just put pen to paper and throw down whatever’s coming to me. I’ve got notebooks and scraps of paper everywhere. The best one is a spiral notebook divided into three sections of about sixty pages each and it’s half full of scribblings about this and that. When I use one of the ideas or notions there, I cross it off.

    Writing things down solidifies them in my mind. I’ve got so many things vying for my attention in my head that if I tried to hold on to things in there alone I wouldn’t be able to access them. I know some writers can do that, I can’t. I have to write things down.

    WALK IT OUT

    The best thing I can do for my writing is to exercise on a regular basis. My favorite thing to do is take a three-mile powerwalk first thing in the morning before the chickens are up. That part of the day where the city is just waking up and the possibilities of the day are endless is where I get a good chunk of thinking done. I often come home from that walk with an insight into the story I’m working on. I’ve solved plot problems, work problems and any number of other things on that walk.

    I can’t emphasize enough how important exercise is to a writer. You have to move your body to stimulate your mind. It’s science, look it up. The data is there.

    It’s difficult to synthesize what I do into five or six hundred words. I hope that the more I think about it, the more I walk it out, I’ll be able to give a more concise and satisfying answer. Maybe not though. Perhaps it’s best that some things are more mysterious than others, yeah?

  • But does it lead down the primrose path?

    Every writer has the moments of doubt and indecision, asking herself, “Is there a story there?  Would anyone ever want to read this, anyway?” Usually the answer to both those questions is no, if you consider it too rationally, and she must learn to ignore the nagging voice that insists all ideas are bad, and no one would ever want to read anything she wrote, and instead persevere with the hope that all the ideas are good at heart, that the muse will triumph if you just start writing.  It’s not about the story, it’s about how you tell the story.  Any story can be made interesting, right?  Remember The Social Network?  The concept behind the movie sounded so dull, but the movie was so entertaining, even suspenseful!

    Alas, this is not always the case.  After watching the Social Network, I had to conclude not that it was a good movie about something boring, but that I was wrong about the original concept, which the movie revealed as an important and interesting topic.

    I believe that most ideas will eventually produce some good writing, if one explores the topic enough and allows it to branch and lead to new topics, twining itself into a world of interest.  But every once in a while, a true stinker of an idea does come up.

    Generally, if I have to work too hard to develop an idea, if it doesn’t help me at all by suggesting its own new directions, I eventually abandon it and return to a better-traveled path.  Good concepts do branch and twine and scaffold, and help bulk themselves up into a novel.  Bad concepts can be just carbohydrates–that quick burst of energy that fails right around 10:30, too early for lunch but too late for second breakfast.

    If I can’t stop thinking about an idea, I figure there is something to it; if I follow, it will lead me to some good thinking and writing.  But sometimes, if I forget a project, my potential audience probably would too.  The worst ideas will be naturally abandoned, and that is as it should be.

  • Pants are optional. Plans are not.

    I’ve tried lots and lots of different things in the pursuit of cultivating story ideas. As an avid NaNoWriMo participant, many of my manuscripts have been an exercise in pantsing, where the story develops while my fingers are typing it. However, I’ve found over the years that a pure pantsing technique doesn’t work that well for me. For one thing, my characters tend to lead me off in strange and unpredictable directions (a phenomenon many NaNo novelists experience in November), but those directions are often dead-ends, and boring ones at that. For another, when I approach a novel with absolutely no planning at all, the ending tends to be…not. No wrap-up, no conclusion, no sense of fulfillment. That’s less than ideal for both me and my prospective readers.

    The alternative to pantsing is careful, meticulous planning. Outlining every scene, detailing every setpiece, crafting thorough background stories for characters and extensive histories for your world. I know many authors absolutely love this process of world-building, and I’ve certainly dabbled in it and enjoyed it as well. I’ve taken online classes that explore theme, and the hero’s adventure, and story arcs, and all kinds of other very important things.I’ve filled a white board with color-coded index cards, and used Scrivener to map out every scene, character, and setting in meticulous detail. I’ve even gone so far as to try rigid plotting techniques like the Snowflake approach.The problem I’ve had with these methods is that by the time I get to the actual novel-writing, I’m bored. All the excitement of creativity is leeched out of me during the outline process, leaving me uninspired and disinterested. Clearly not the right mindset for tackling a novel-length writing exercise.

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