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Stepping Back

Sometimes, when my plot has become snarled in a traffic jam, I think of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men with its straight-forward, train-wreck focus, where we start steadily down a track and accelerate fast toward a visible and unavoidable disaster.  Lennie kills a mouse, then kills a puppy, then crushes a man’s hand, then kills a woman, and each time we try to forgive him and search for someone else to blame because we believe he is an innocent at heart.

FerrisWheelI look at this plot, this driving plot… Continue reading

Silliness

Smurf

Smurf

Oh, my gosh.  Do you remember how much of life used to be devoted to combating silliness?  I can still hear the multitude of grownups minding us to sit still, quit that giggling, mind yer manners, or cut that out, and in every case I nearly keeled over from laughing inside.  School, church, the dinner table, grocery store aisles, and the back of the car were all prime for silliness and the squelching of it.

Then I had kids of my own, and silliness abounded again.… Continue reading

The Secret Club

KeyHoleI venture to say that for writers, a mystique persists around publishing, as if all the published writers and people in the business were part of a secret club where they shared special handshakes and insider knowledge.  I suspect it has something to do with rejections, and the polite but impersonal way editors and agents say no to projects they must decline.  Writers outside the circle might well wonder why they can’t get in when the rules of admittance seem so capricious.  To make it worse, there’s… Continue reading

Both of Us, Night and Day

NightParisI can spend an hour at night laboring over the composition an email or a blog post only to wake up the next morning and find it’s weirdly uppity or just plain pointless.  Because of this, I have a hard and fast rule about never sending any emails that might actually matter at night.  What’s strange is that I can’t uncoil myself from the snare of writing the insidious late night drafts, even knowing I’m needlessly embroiled.  It’s like I’m processing, letting my illogical, instinctual side out… Continue reading

Q. Should I Keep Writing?

A.  Yes.  You should. I know the first draft is awful, and even as you’re writing it, you can see you’ll have to cut most of it, but go forward anyway.  Get to the end.

Q.  But why, why?  It’s so bad!  It doesn’t even make sense.

A.  That’s just what first drafts are.  They’re painful and ugly.  They wander down dead ends and come out smelling like old fish.

Q.  I thought I liked my main character, but now,… Continue reading

Still more on bad first drafts because, yeah, they take a while.

So, I was writing along today, minding my own business, when an atrocious scene came spilling out of my fingertips.  I kept thinking, No, this is too gross! And Ouch! And I can’t put this in a book for kids! And then I kept writing it anyway.

Who knows if this painful, cruel scene will make it into the second draft, let alone the final?  Not me.  But it’s there now, where I can squirm at it, and it certainly led to some interesting choices for my… Continue reading