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  • To Catch a Wild Idea

    An idea is like a wild animal. At first, I hear it scratching and chittering in the attic. I can poke my head up there to see what it is, but if it’s not ready to be seen, it’ll scurry away into the shadows. The best I can do is let it nest up there and wait for it to come out of hiding.

    If I don’t poke at the wild idea, it’ll get comfortable. It might grow. Maybe I’ll leave some food out for it, coax it out into the light. If it’s a healthy idea, and I don’t force the issue, it’ll come out into the garden in its own time.

    Assuming I haven’t startled it by shouting or trying to trap it in a cage, the wild idea will step out into the sun blinking, as curious about me as I am about it. I can see what it is at last. I can estimate its weight, the sharpness of its teeth, the velvet of its fur.

    This is the tricky part. I have to figure out the approach.

    I circle, examining it from every side. I step forward, change my mind, and step back.

    Maybe I’ll come in from the left, say, going with a third person approach. I croon to the wild idea in a soft voice, let it eat from my hand, then slip a leash over its head. Sometimes this works well and it walks by my side, docile, yet still exotic.

    That doesn’t always work, though. Maybe the left was a poor choice. The wild idea is blind in that eye and startles when I appear out of nowhere. It might dash off, but more likely, I’ll grab it by the scruff of the neck and wrestle the leash over its head.

    You can’t force a wild idea into submission. It’ll get sluggish. It’ll choke on its tether. It’ll wander around in circles making pathetic wheezing noises. The only thing to do is release it, start over, and come at it from another angle until I get it right.

    From the right this time as an omniscient narrator? Maybe straight on, first person? I must go softly. The idea is skittish.

    Sometimes an idea is too wild, too prickly, or even too domesticated. No angle feels right. The idea flops over on its back, sides heaving. I try to drag it where I want it to go. It snuffles and goes silent.

    It’s not dead, but it might as well be. I can do nothing with it.

    Let it go, Rach. Just let it go.

    There’s always some new creature skittering in the attic, waiting for me to offer it table scraps. If I can find the right approach, it’ll follow me to the end of the story.

  • You’d Know Better than I Would

    Hahahahaha. You’re joking, right? You assume that I know when an idea is good or needs to be abandoned.

    That’s what I count on my readers for.

    I’ve thought certain ideas were the most brilliant things since Harry Potter and been informed that they’re more ridiculous than Twilight.

    And I’ve also thought some ideas were absolute garbage that my writing group has told me are worth trying to get published.

    I think writers are too close to their ideas to be able to accurately judge. It’s what we need each other for. We have love/hate relationships with all of our writing and we can’t be trusted to make the decision whether an idea is good or needs to be abandoned.

    I also tend to be a bit like a pit bull when it comes to ideas. Good or bad, I can’t let go. Never give up, never surrender type mentality. Even when I’ve been told an idea sucks, or even if I know it myself, I still tinker with it in the back corner of my mind, trying to figure out how I can fix it up, rearrange it, give it a different coat of paint so that it is useable after all.

    And that is how I develop ideas. I take bits and pieces and try to fit them together, or take them apart and use different pieces in different places. Save some pieces for later if I can’t find a spot for them. Maybe I’m an idea hoarder. Ideas stacked in my mind like leaning piles of decades-old newspapers in an old lady’s house.

    Mostly, I develop my ideas by writing them out. Sometimes it’ll be an outline of events or character arcs, but sometimes it’ll just be a scene, and the story grows up around it. The more I write the better feel I get for whether an idea is solid enough to see through to the end.

    Ok, I might have lied a little bit. I do sometimes know when I’ve got a good idea. It’ll just hit me. Like lightning. An idea. And I think “Yeah, that would make a good story.” There’s usually bouncing up and down on my toes, pacing, and sometimes even hysterical laughter, and that’s when I know I’ve got something good. How could I abandon something like that?

  • 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’s Your Dream Writing Assignment?

    Every week we’ll ask the Confabulators a question that may further illuminate the blog question or give you some further insight into our working minds. This week’s question is one that a lot of writers have stuck somewhere in the back of his or her mind. Not everyone wants to work for someone else, or even write a character that’s not theirs, but certainly there’s something that fires our imaginations. Writers that dream are the best kind.

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  • On Writing First Drafts

    Call me a traditionalist, but for a difficult first draft, it has to be paper. A pencil, perhaps a nice fountain pen. The creative part of writing, pinning down that first draft, is a tactile, sensory experience. There’s the resistance of graphite across the page, the sound of paper rustling, the concreteness of pages stacking up one on top of another. The wrong sensations can easily derail the process; paper that is too smooth, or doesn’t soak up ink well, or a pen that skips, or an eraser that is old and hard and smudges rather than wipes clean.

    A first draft is when I don’t know what I’m going to write, haven’t yet pinned down the thoughts that have been skipping across my mind, given them body and gravitas and forced them to pose on the page. First drafts are about exploring the topic, organizing ideas, trying things out. It’s harder to delete something written down. It exists, even if I decide it no longer is needed. Pages in the recycling bin are a testament that my time has not been wholly wasted.

    Paper breaks through writer’s block. With paper, if the hand is moving, then progress is being made. Writing in longhand slows down my thinking, allows me to craft sentences, put in more meaning than just the bare bones of the facts. Paper is where the poetry begins to dance. Paper is where my subconscious mind, which is way smarter than I am, finds its own voice.

  • Writing routine and devices

    In spite of being old enough to be a registered Luddite, I use a Mac computer (either MacBook Pro or G4-hotrodded-to-G5-speed desktop) exclusively to write. I don’t think I’ll ever have to worry about Alzheimer’s, and my mind works way too fast for me to trust a typewriter or pen (although I keep my Olympia Standard and Parker 51 around for nostalgia’s sake).

    I follow no special writing routine, except during Nanowrimo, when I start after breakfast and write until my wrists hurt – literally (which is how I passed 50K words this year in 6 days). But otherwise, I write when I’ve finished up other daily tasks, as if I don’t, they may never be completed – I write like I read, quickly and voraciously.

  • My Squishy Red Couch

    When I entered college, I was suddenly required to write—and to take notes in class. My days in high school writing fanfiction in a spiral notebook while Coach “Drone-On” was discussing the civil war were over. I was completely unprepared. I needed to find a way to squeeze in hours of homework along with a suddenly active social life (they didn’t have those back in the small rural Texas town where I went to high school). Something in my life had to give and I decided, rather foolishly in retrospect, that of everything, sleep was the least necessary. At this point I discovered a tendency to binge on Mt. Dew and chocolate, pulling all-nighter after all-nighter to spew words onto a page. Sometimes I wrote for pleasure, but more often it was for an assignment. I’m not sure which part of my new lifestyle was the least healthy, but combined it was a terrible force to be reckoned with that my system still has yet to recover from.

    I came to a few realizations about what helped me to write during those exhausting years, so the self-induced torture sessions actually had some lasting worth. I couldn’t listen to music with vocals in it without trying to pay attention the lyrics and not my writing. So I would queue up my Final Fantasy soundtracks on my Zune—I was too cool (cheap) for an iPod—and delve into my writing. It was the perfect amount of background noise to drown out the sound of other people typing.

    Out of extreme laziness, I discovered another writing assist. I didn’t want to haul a backpack full of reference books up three steep flights of stairs only to find out halfway through my paper that the books weren’t what I needed after all, so I took to writing in the bowels of Watson library. If I was lucky, I could find a desk where the overhead lights only flickered occasionally. I nearly gave up when I turned on my computer and couldn’t access any wi-fi networks, but then I looked at the mountain of books, remembered how much I’d struggled just getting them all the ten feet to the desk, and decided I could tough it out, just that once. When I finished the assignment, it felt like I’d been down there for hours, possibly days. I was suffering extreme Facebook withdrawals. But after looking at the time, I realized that I’d written the paper in about a quarter of the time it took when I had access to the internet.

    Over the final two years of my college career, I perfected the technique. It quickly descended into a quantity over quality approach to writing as I rushed through assignments so that I could go check the latest staff updates.  Thi method is one I heartily recommend for college students trying to squeeze short stories in between lengthy research papers that all coincidentally happen to be due the same week, but not for people who with aspirations to publish.

    Then I went and graduated college. I was too busy job hunting to devote any time to writing something that wasn’t a resume and for a while I despaired of ever having time to write again.

    The inevitable happened: inspiration struck me and I suddenly couldn’t write enough. I spent two weeks typing furiously, turning out words faster than I thought humanly possible. I wrote from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep… with the occasional pit stop for food. And after two weeks, I was burnt out. I then attempted to bribe myself into writing which was great for the word count but not so much on the bank account. A new pair of heels every few weeks adds up pretty quickly. I attempted to set goals and deadlines for myself. That didn’t work with the same successful results as bribery. (more…)