Work Habits (Writing nests redux)

As I said, I tend to spend most of my writing time in public places such as cafes and libraries. But when I'm home on the weekends, the reading and especially the research end of this operation continues apace... and that means a but of a writing nest. At some point, I fell out of the habit of writing at a desk. The large horizontal surfaces leant themselves to stacking. And stacking is the enemy of organization (I think I read that somewhere.) My preferred spot is a well-lit chair with a bookshelf nearby loaded with the books I need to be able to reference on a whim. Since we turned one room into a properhome library, I've plunked my chair into that room and arranged my most frequently used reference books and style manuals nearby. With NaNoWriMo starting tomorrow, I felt it was imperative that I have everything arranged and ready to go so that I can sit down and start to really generate some pages without the necessity of stopping to hunt down a reference book. Speed-noveling aside, this is generally a good writing habit to be encouraged anyway. (Incidentally, the only reason there are empty shelves in the photo is because the rest of my father's library has not yet arrived. I recently doubled my shelfspace to accomodate them.)

Brain Food

My Friend Elspeth (you may remember her as the inspiration for this post) wondered aloud recently about why writing her dissertation makes her tired all out of proportion with the physical exertion of the seemingly simple task of sitting down and putting words on a screen. I looked into this a long time ago and discovered that the brain is apparently the body's prime consumer of glucose. According to Popular Science, over 75% of the glucose that gets used gets used by the brain to create neurotransmitters. These levels fluctuate, but the harder you think, the more glucose you need to fuel the thinking. Write that book! Feel the burn! My fellow NaNoWriMo participants should take note and lay in a stock of healthy snacks or we're all going to go up a size during the month of November.

How to Find Your "Writing Nest" - wikiHow

Of course, as you know, I write in a public place most of the time. Nevertheless, at home I have a writing nook. The Engineer calls it my "nest" which is why I found it inordinately funny when my friend Denny pointed me to this article. In all, there's some good advice here and it bears the hallmarks of an article written by a writer who was procrastinating something else they were supposed to be writing. (When I do that, I call it blogging... ahem.) It all seems so obvious, but it's the sort of thing that people ask me about sometimes, so... here ya go! Enjoy! How to Find Your "Writing Nest" - wikiHow

Kerouac is a verb?

Note: I had to write a new bio for the NaNoWriMo site and decided that playing it straight wasn't any fun...

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Two years of journalism school taught me primarily that it wasn't the kind of writing I wanted to do. I ended up in art school for awhile before dropping out to climb mountains and Kerouac my way across the country.

I wrote some poetry until I had my poetic license pulled for trying to smuggle bootleg limericks across the border. After I got out of the Writers Bloc, I dabbled in political blogging and techwriting. The love of a good woman rescued me and now I help run a local writing center while I sell my first novel.

I placed 18th overall (out of over 10,000 entrants) in the 6th Annual Writer's Digest Short-Short Story Contest (published by Trafford Press) with the story "Armageddon Interruptus". This is a humorous romp through the difficulties of staging a proper apocalypse, the difficulty in finding a properly pale horse, practical accountancy and daylight savings time.

(An appalling amount of that is actually true.)

We're all mad here...

Call the guys with the butterfly nets, because I think I lost my mind. In the euphoria of polishing off the last niggly editing details on The Palimpsest, I made a decision of the sort that one simply would not make under normal circumstances. Yes, I woke up to find my hat in the ring of that internet writing phenomenon uttered with fear former novelists wearing the latest in straightjacket fashion as National Novel Writing Month, aka "NaNoWriMo". National Novel Writing Month sounds innocuous enough until you realize it's not just a month when we celebrate those of us benighted enough to ignore Lewis Black's sage advice -- it's also a sort of marathon. The funny funny pranksters at NaNoWriMo have challenged the citizens of the world to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days or less. Write one novel in one month and you "Win". . . a Jim-dandy .PDF certificate and a badge to put on your website.

Really? All that work for that? It's an awfully nice certificate. And there's also satisfaction in a job well done. "Well" done, Scottie? Okay, a job quickly done, but done nonetheless. Did they specify if this includes post-contest psychological counseling, and/or rehab for caffeine addiction? No, but I would certainly hope some sort of group discount can be negotiated by participants. You're already talking to yourself.

As I am a man of my word as well as my madness, I will finally be putting words to the page on the project I refer to as "42 Lines" starting bright and early Sunday morning. No outline, just my ego, my laptop and a pile of accumulated research that's waiting for me to boil it down into novel form.

"Tell everyone you know that you're writing a novel in November. This will pay big dividends in Week Two, when the only thing keeping you from quitting is the fear of looking pathetic in front of all the people who've... had to hear about your novel for the past month. Seriously. Email them now about your awesome new book. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse" -NaNoWriMo welcome email.

Good advice. Masochism is a writer's best friend, after all. To keep myself from changing my mind, I'm posting it here for all to see. Maybe some good will come out of this. I plan to average 1,800 words per day, which is a decent output and actually a little low for me when I'm under a full head of steam. I only need 1,667 to hit the mark, but I want to create a bit of a cushion to cover the contingencies. Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise (as my dad would say) at the end of the month I should have a credible rough draft of my next novel. Assuming I still remember how to read by that point. If you've a mind to do so, you can find me at the NaNoWriMo site under the name Pages2Type.

The Week From Hell

Is now the winter of our discontent? Is it the best of times and the worst of times? Is the end nigh? Don't listen to the literary alarmists, it's not the end of days, just time to watch text go from page to screen. Time catch up on the state of technology after the Week From Hell Literary agent and blogger Nathan Bransford summed it all up for us as the week everything in publishing changed and stayed the same. He also unfortunately called dibs on all future puns on the Plastic Logic "Que" eReader, so I'll have to throw away that limerick I wrote. Ah well. NPR's "All Tech Considered" considered the eBook today. Robert Seigel described them (quite accurately, I think) as something that looks like "an etch-a-sketch for adults". The story is a thoughtful and thorough State of the Tech piece that I admired enough to repost in case you missed it. Unfortunately, the NPR media player cuts the story and the interview afterward with tech journalist Omar Gallaga. It's interesting to note Gallaga's summary that most eReader buyers are older "voracious" readers, which tips the "It will take a generational change" argument on it's ear. I'll see if I can track down those statistics.

Movie Adaptation

The other morning, the Engineer threw a magazine at me. It was the September edition of Writer's Digest, and it had apparently been languishing far too long on the dining room table for her taste.

We were on our way out the door, so I stuffed it in the backpack (which is very similar in many respects to "putting it away") and headed off to the cafe to do my morning writing. After I finished writing my five pages, edited a couple dozen and wrote a blog entry likening my character to Bugs Bunny, I opened the magazine. In the back of my mind, I was noodling with my ongoing series of posts on "Cultural Cross-Pollination". I've already done Commedia del Arte, Playwriting, Role Playing Games, Kinetic Text and Cartoons. I either needed a good hook for talking about movies or I needed to just let it lie fallow for a little while.

How movies can, should or should not affect our fiction writing is a bit of a poser, I don't mind saying. It's a big topic for one thing, and for another, I've already touched on it a little bit. Then it hit me... exactly like a rolled-up magazine left too long on the dining room table. In WD and just about everywhere else that writing is discussed, the ability to write "visually" is discussed, dissected and otherwise touted as one of the hallmarks of marketable writing. In the "MFA Insider" column, author Joshua Henkin posited that movies and television and the onslaught of "Write more visually" advice from writing books and magazines have cumulatively eroded our willingness to create introspection in our stories. To prove his point, he gave a writing exercise that entails going through your story or manuscript and highlighting everything that can be filmed in one color (action) and everything that cannot be filmed in a contrasting color (internal dialogue).  In "too many" stories, there would be an imbalance -- the external story would outweigh the internal struggle of the characters, the parts that cannot be adapted for film.

I'm not sure he's right. For one thing, recent and upcoming movies are challenging what's "Filmable". Where the Wild Things Are takes us into the lengthy interior monologue of a young boy at war with himself. Assuming they don't screw it up The Road will be a challenging movie of silences and bleakness where the characters never refer to one another by name.

Has visual media cracked the whip of visual writing? More to the point, have novels been overtaken by authors who would be better suited writing screenplays?

I undertook his experiment with my own manuscript and without compiling exact statistics (there's a limit to how much free time I have) I think my writing is about even. Between the "filmable" sequences and the internal dialogues, I was looking at a pretty decent balance of colors. While there are extended action sequences, I temper that with the fact that my characters are pretty brainy and have a tendency to live inward.

Speaking of "filmable" writing, Paul Levine is an entertainment attorney and agent who represents a lot of screenwriters as well as authors. At PNWA, he told a full room that aspiring screenwriters should write the book first. Movie rights were easier to sell with a publishing contract to back them up and getting a screenplay over the transom at the moment was almost impossible without that. The other editors and agents on the panels all agreed. Hollywood wants a sure thing now more than ever. This is why we're seeing sequels and adaptaions packed cheek by jowl on the marquee right now. Hollywood wants someone else to play taste-maker, to vet the stories for them, to see them succeed in another venue before they plunk millions of dollars into a film project.

To bring it back to novel writing, I used to wholeheartedly agree with Henkin on the impact that visual media has had on writing... for better and worse. And I still do to some extent. But talking to Levine, I got the feeling that there was a bit of the tail wagging the dog -- that movies are following print as much or more than it goes the other way around. Films are delving into territory that was long thought impossible to bring to the screen. Introspective movies are elbowing for room alongside the usual action and adventure. Rather like you will see in my screenpla... um... novel.

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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The Rabbit Problem

I have a rabbit problem. Not in the garden, in my books. And if your characters are as capable as Jack Reacher or as smart as Sherlock Holmes or as beautiful as a fashion model... or in anyway presenting themselves to you as nearly super-human, then you have a rabbit problem too.

Legendary Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones also had a rabbit problem. He was possessed of a set of characters with the ability to bend reality to their whim in order to triumph over what seemed to be overwhelming odds. And at the head of the pack was a rabbit named Bugs.

"Golden Rule. Bugs must always be provoked. In every film, someone must have designs on his person: gastronomic, as a trophy, as a good-luck piece (rabbit's foot, which makes as much sense as a rabbit carrying a human foot on a key chain), as an unwilling participant in a scientific experiment [...] Without such threats, bugs is far too capable a rabbit to evoke the necessary sympathy." -Chuck Jones "Chuck Amuck"

Take the above quote and insert "Sherlock Holmes" or "Jack Reacher" or "Calvin" from Calvin & Hobbes in the place of Bugs and you'll see the problem that Conan Doyle and Lee Child and Bill Watterson have faced every time they sat down to write.

If you can take your lead character(s) and insert their name and gender into the above quote, then you're in the Radio Flyer wagon with Arthur, Lee, Chuck and me, staring around at the sea of rabbits. Welcome aboard!   The blonde kid with the tiger is in charge, so don't smart off.

If a drama is derived from ordinary people in extraordinary situations, is it worthwhile to examine the extraordinary person in the extraordinary situation? Of course it is. It's just a matter of how you go about it.

The first thing to remember is Chuck's admonition that the supremely-capable character acting unprovoked will elicit very little sympathy from the audience. The corollary to this is that watching someone who is smarter than the subject matter waltz through the story is boring to boot. The Rabbit has to meet a challenge worthy of his efforts and attention or I'm not going to read your story and most of the editors I've met won't either.

Incidentally, if your character is so talented and capable in every realm and situation, I humbly submit that you need to rethink the decisions that led to your writing a novel about Superman. (Unless you really are writing a novel about Superman, in which case good luck and Godspeed because I'm as big a geek as as the next guy.)

There's a trap that catches just about every writer early in their writing career: It's insanely easy to create a fantasy alter ego that is everything we ever dreamt of being. And because as a breed, writers tend toward the bespectacled introvert more than the opposite (there's a fine line between being stereotypical and merely archetypal) when granted godlike powers, we can make manikins of words that are smarter, faster, and better than any human being could ever hope to be.

There are degrees of extraordinariness and I should take a moment to poke some holes in...

Contrary to what detective novelists and television have taught us, a genius IQ does not automatically come with a detective's badge, Oriental lineage doesn't come with a black belt in the local martial art and very few CIA employees ever get issued a Glock and a license to kill. Those things are all cliche's. That's not to say that there aren't any genius PI's, Japanese kids trained in Ninjitsu or CIA hitmen in the world, just that there's a fine line between stereotype and archetype and in a fictional setting the scales are too often tipped toward the wrong side of that equation. (mixed metaphor alert!)

The cliche has a place in writing and life and we should treat them in the manner that they so richly deserve: subversion. Playing against audience expectations is part of the fun of writing the extraordinary character.

Drag your Rabbits out of their element. Give them a reason to get involved and then challenge them by forcing them to act in a realm beyond their expertise. Play them against themselves and keep doing it or you're going to end up running afoul of Chuck's Golden Rule. At which point, you might as well lobotomize your rabbit and let the hunter catch him.

Here There Be Wild Things

One more Wild Things post and then I'll move on to other topics, I promise.

Something I forgot to mention (I was reminded by a friend on Facebook) is that the source material for the movie included more than just the Caldecott Award winning picture book. It also included the story Max at Sea by the masterful Dave Eggers, which he has since turned into a novel (which I cannot recommend because I haven't read it... yet). Eggers is credited as cowriter for the screenplay.

Of course, Mssr. Eggers is almost absurdly talented: not only has he contributed to The Onion, he co-founded McSweeney's and has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer.  

You can read Max at Sea here at the New Yorker (click).

As is his habit, Eggers is astoundingly brilliant in the guise of a pre-adolescent boy. If you haven't read Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius you don't know what I'm talking about, but you should and then you would. It's no wonder previous attempts at the movie failed, they didn't have Eggers on staff. Every movie should be so lucky.

Also also... yesterday, I mentioned that Lasseter took a stab at a cartoon of Where the Wild Things Are. It's on YouTube (linked below). Lasseter, of course, went on to Pixar where he probably produced or directed every movie the company ever made that you actually liked.