Here There Be Dragons...

I'm currently at loose ends and as I look through my "seedlings" file for what I want to work on next, I've uncovered a trove of some fun stuff I did awhile ago.  

For instance...

Way back in 2006 someone foolishly left me alone with a little stuffed dragon, a camera and some miscellaneous props.

The result was a strange little picture book. 
The Adventures of Snap the Dragon.

I thought you might enjoy it.

Feeding Our Pet Peeves

This NPR op/ed is fantastic! 
But for the record, it's a different Scott.  Honest.

Bibliomane

Referenced

I can pick a lock or repair a watch.  I can conduct surgeries, examine corpses for forensic evidence, bind a book, dress a deer, identify or concoct poisons, and reproduce Lord Nelson's flagship down to the last knot and nail.  If necessary, I can also conduct a Latin Mass, reproduce the scripts of Carolingian scribes, shoe a horse, summon Cthulhu, or swear like a WWII soldier.  I can walk the streets of forgotten cities in lost kingdoms and navigate the alleys of Calcutta in the year 2010.  And I can do it all from the safety and convenience of my writing chair.

Some of these things I can do because I'm weird that way.  For the rest of it, I have reference books.

If there are any writers who don't have a personal library of research materials, I haven't met them yet.  If you want to be a writer, I swear that the first order of business is to nail down a handy and reliable source of research material.  Whether it's a colonnaded building built with a Carnegie grant or an impressive list of websites and online journals or a room in your house (apartment, condo, whatever) an eccentric collection of research materials grows as a result of the curiosity that made you become a writer in the first place

I never studied medicine but one of my main characters in the last novel I wrote was an MD.  I could go online, of course, and get a lot of information and some of it would even be accurate.  But far better for me to be able to reach over and pulling my Manual of Surgery or PDR, or Mosby's Manual of Diagnostic Tests off the shelf and getting on with the writing.

For most writers I know, research is our drug of choice.  Putting a slumgullion of random yet curiously interrelated websites and blogs at my fingertips just ups the danger of losing my workday down the rabbit hole.  I can spend hours hopping from topic to topic, following a chain of links down a questionable path of lies and truth spun together into a strange blend that even William Gibson's Neuromancer failed to adequately predict.  How easy it is to get lost on the information superhighway, tumbling in the slipstream of bits and bytes as I bounce from website to website, digging up one quirky fact after another like a hyperactive two year old shoveling candy into his mouth.

Far better to bind my search between boards.  Paper is safer and there are no pop-up ads or viruses.

Your public library is a good start and will always and forever supplement your home library.  In fact, the aspiring writer needs to first and foremost make friends with the reference librarians at their local branch library.  A first name basis is best, and you might even want to learn how to bake their favorite cookie because odds are good that you're going to put their library sciences degree to work.  You're going to be the story they tell around the supper table that night when they get home; embrace the fact. 

"So that writer guy Scott came in again today and asked me to help him calculate the amount of whalebone harvested by Basque whaling fleets before 1610."   The answer is approximately 24 million pieces.  Academic libraries are the best and if it wasn't for the able assistance of Becky, Kendall and Rachel, I would never have discovered the various academic journals that allowed me to piece that together.

Which reminds me.  I need to bake some snickerdoodles.

Even straight literature requires at least a modicum of research.  One story idea I'm developing would feature nary a single mysterious element or unexplained death.  But it still required me to pick up an old pocket watch repair manual and another on the history of the American athletic shoe industry.  In any story, for any market, it is the job of the writer to create the verisimilitude of background and character that allows you to accept the setting and concentrate on the story.  Unless you are an acknowledged expert in every field your writing will touch on or uncommonly skilled at lying... you're going to need some help at some point.

I'm not suggesting that you have to become a Crichton or Clancy, but it's important to get stuff right or know how to lie convincingly.  I swear that half of fiction writing is getting a feel for when you have to know what you're talking about and when I can make stuff up.  (Yes, we lie to you all the time; the sign overhead in the bookstore says 'fiction' for a reason.)

My dad taught me that a personal library largely exists to supplement the public libraries I frequent.  Duplicate books you want to collect, but save your money if you're not filling the gaps.  It has since grown to encompass books that I reference often enough that I don't want need to get in the car to go consult them.  My dad wasn't a writer, but it's worth noting that at his funeral, the local librarians were among the mourners.

"I like books. I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get in their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Buy the books you need to touch more than once a  week.  The collection will grow of its own accord, so devote some space to the books you love and the books you need.  Cicero said that to add a library to your home was to give it a soul.   Your relationships with your books and those who purvey them will extend that feeling to your words, imbuing them with soul as well.

Bibliogenesis

I find myself in the unusual position of being without pages to type before I sleep. Well, it's unusual for me anyway.  At any given moment, I have several novel ideas in various stages of completion.  There's two mostly-complete first drafts sitting on the footstool next to my slippers as I type this, in fact.  Either or neither of which could be my next project depending on whether I feel up to writing about the Library of Congress or Shakespeare next... or starting something completely new.

I tend to both savor and fear these moments.  The blank page is a terrible void to fill, casting word after word into the white nothingness in hopes that it will return with a story in tow.  So I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on how I get from that idea jotted on a napkin to something that I feel strong enough to devote a hundred thousand words to and eventually like enough that I feel it's ready to hand to an agent.

Bibliogenesis: n. 1. The act or process of creating books or literature. From Greek: βιβλίον, 'a book', + γένεσις, generation. (via Wordnik)

Every time I have an idea or a random thought that might make a good story, I jot it down.  In a notebook, on a napkin, on my hand, in the margins of a book, whatever happens to be handy becomes the keeper of that idea until I can get it home and type them into my computer.

Somewhere on the hard drive of every computer I own is a file folder titled "Seedlings".  It's into this folder that I toss all the random nonsense that appears in my head.  In these surroundings, those half-formed notions are given time to germinate and cross-pollinate with other ideas and eventually mature into stories.  Regardless of content or craziness, into the folder they go so that I don't forget them (even if I may want to).  Bizarre names like "Yenta Bill" stand cheek-by-jowl with "WWII Spy Story - Possible Novel". 

There is another file that all of my computers share titled "Character Cocktail Party".  This is the holding cell where I keep all of the characters that spring to life when I'm not looking.  It's quite literally a digital cocktail party where these fragments of my imagination can swap lies, tell stories, form alliances, and sometimes hook up.  A metaphorical melting pot from which only the strongest characters emerge.

As each character develops, they get his or her (or its in some cases) own file folder for the research notes specific to that character.  A folder currently on this hard drive is labeled "AJ MacLeod", a character from the novel I just put in the mail.  Inside can be found files related to gardening, education and Washington State history, all topics immediately relevant to that character.  Another file is more nebulously labeled "WWII Spy", an idea without a name, but full of random information ranging from snippets of stories my grandfather told me to details of OSS operations, along with any random tidbits about the period that I stumble across in books I've read.

As you can imagine, at some point the seedling file "WWII Spy Story" and the character "WWII Spy" will meet.  But my spy isn't ready to leave the cocktail party yet.  He has to mingle and make connections and decide what his name is going to be and who he will bring with him... or if it's even a him for that matter.

In the fullness of time, stories and characters meld and merge and get combined with other ideas and characters in sometimes unexpected ways.  The best of them reach a point where they deserve to get leave the party for a bit -- get out and stretch their legs.  (No character is ever completely freed from the cocktail party, of course.  When I'm done with them, back to the party they go to help the next generation along.)

When I feel that they're ready to break into the real world, the key tidbits of information are culled and printed and organized into a binder.  There are shelves of them in my studio, filled with notes and maps and ideas that are still ripening, waiting for a day like today when I'm at the end of one project and looking for the next one.

On days like today when I'm trying to find my fictional bearings, I get to take one of the binders down and read through it.  Poke it, read it, gnaw on the covers, see if it's ripe yet, ready to bear the scrutiny of a hard year's writing, strong enough to support 100,000 carefully-chosen words.  In short, decide if it's ready to be the genesis of my next novel.

Unfinishing

The line between being an artist and being mentally unbalanced is sometimes blurry.  I'm told that if you hear voices and talk back to them, you are schizophrenic; but if you hear voices and write down what they tell you, you are a writer.  

Likewise, if you fret and obsess over every detail and cannot move on if even one small thing is wrong... well, then you're still a writer. 

I only mention this because yesterday I tore my hands away from the keyboard and decided that my book was 'finished'.  Ever since, I've been fighting the urge to break it open and fix Just One More Thing.  Because who am I kidding?  It's not finished!  I can change this, and tweak that and...

and...

and...

And I feel a deep and abiding kinship with George Lucas right now.  His deep need to go back and futz with a film that was considered 'finished' thirty years ago is perfectly understandable... and just as bad an idea as me re-opening that document file to add the scene I just thought of.

"Finished" is a myth.  In the mind of a creator, it's never finished.  Stories, once they enter our minds, evolve and transform and grow.  An idea joins another idea and they become a book.  But those ideas don't stop mutating and growing just because I've started pinning them to a page.  At some point in their evolution we just have to close the file and call it good.  Because if you don't cut it off at some point, it will never be done and before you know it, you're Grady Tripp, wandering the streets of your own private Pittsburgh with a novel that runs to several cases of paper.

You can always revisit a theme or a character or an idea at another point.  Jot it down and let it start evolving its own story on a nice blank page where it has plenty of room to romp and play with all the other ideas I didn't use this tiime.

So my novel is gloriously and definitively unfinished.  At least until some editor gets hold of it.  Such is the life of a novel.  

To commemorate the occasion I'm going to seal it in a box and ship it off to an interested agent and get on with the next project.  Because if you are forever rehashing the old, you'll never really do anything new.  Even if you are George Lucas (are you listening to me George?) you have to let go.

Maybe I just need therapy but for now, I'll settle for another cup of coffee.

3-Minute Fiction - NPR

The ultimate challenge of brevity and wit.  NPR announced this past weekend that they are breathing new life into their "Three Minute Fiction" contest...

Writing Advice from My Wife

"You cannot live on words and coffee alone."

Lessons from Lists

Last year I posted a "permanent" link to the fantastic New York Times op-ed by Elmore Leonard "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle" which was the basis of his book 10 Rules.  It's one of those articles that's worth printing out to read and re-read over and over again.  (Incidentally, if you're going to and haven't, you might want to do it soon because the NYT paywall is going up soon... unless - like me - you're planning to subscribe.)

This morning, the folks at The Guardian put up a sort of über-version of Leonard's ten rules with additional rules by other writers, including this gem from Margaret Atwood...

"...there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."  - Margaret Atwood

That's an incredibly good piece of advice for anyone in the creative arts to keep in the forefront of their minds.  There's no pension plan for this and no one forced you to do it.  If you wanted to write, you could have finished Journalism school and had a nice secure job at a newspaper or magazine.  (ahem)

This is the sort of advice I try to give my younger friends and friends of the family who come to me in starry-eyed innocence asking me what to major in at college because they want to be writers.

Business.  I say.  Or law.  Or business law.  Or maybe engineering.  Or business engineering law... For God's sake don't major in English or literature or you're going to end up getting a degree just to teach other people who probably shouldn't be majoring in literature who will go on to teach other people who shouldn't be majoring in... Sigh.

They never really listen anyway, God bless 'em.  I've said it one and I'll say it again and again: The only real education a writer gets is the one they give to themselves by reading.

I like this bit of advice from Roddy Doyle especially:

"Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said"."  -Roddy Doyle

The piece of advice I dispense most often is "Write with the vocabulary you have" not the vocabulary Mr. Roget had.  He was kind of a nut anyway.  Every once in awhile at the writing center, I catch someone revising their paper with a Roget's in one hand and a red pen in the other.  Looking over their shoulder, I see perfectly innocent nouns and verbs lying dead in a sea of red ink to be supplanted by their polysyllabic cousins.

Don't do this.

Your vocabulary is an organic thing, it has to grow naturally or become unwieldy.  You may be  able to graft another type of tree onto it and get kumquats and apples off the same tree, but the unnatural feel of picking a kumquat off an apple tree will never fade.  Grafting Mssr. Roget's lists of high falutin' words onto your personal list will never quite fit either.

Which brings us to my favorite advice from Geoff Dyer:

"If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great auto­correct files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes  ­"photography" and so on. ­Genius!"  -Geoff Dyer

He's right, it's genius.  I periodically ask other writers why they're willing to give up their native understanding of grammar and spelling to a programmer from Microsoft.  I lived in Redmond, WA for awhile and though I love my many friends who have worked for Mr. Gates, I'm not sure I'd ask any of them how best to spell a word.

I am certain that some liberal arts majors were plucked out of the fast food joints surrounding Redmond and given a decent salary for at least a summer to compile MS Word's spellcheck functions and compile their thesaurus.  But some of the quirkier things they did convince me that they weren't happy working there because how else do you explain the furious abandon with which the program inserts semicolons into every sentence?  Subtle vengeance indeed...

Be that as it may, take the time to upgrade your word processor's dictionary and auto-correct features.  My first foray into novelwriting was a fantasy novel that contained so many Gaelic words that about fifty thousand words into the novel, I got a message from Word that there were so many 'errors' that it was going on strike.  No more errors would be tabulated until I got rid of the ones I'd already made.

(In the interest of not having little paperclip people picketing my prose, I went back and started adding Gaelic words to the onboard dictionary.)

There are many many more, but this post is getting rather longer than the article that inspired it.  Go read the article and take it to heart.

Just remember that there are no humble opinions, especially among writers.  We tend to open our yaps because we think we're right. (Accepting that you might be wrong isn't humility, it's reality)  And like all advice, take what works for you and discard what does not.

And remember Anne Enhright's advice which has the benefit of being true no matter who you are or what you plan to write:. 

"The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page."