Fiction Scribe

In the comments of this post, Richard remarked he thought he was the only one who didn’t like talking the phone.

Oh, no.

I hate the telephone. I hate it with a passion. I truly do, and Mr. Scribe can confirm it. There are a whole two people I am reasonably comfortable enough on the phone with to call myself. Other people I know? Tough cookies. You have to call me, not the other way around.

So why? Why hate the phone? I’d like to pass on a little something I was told a few years ago because it bothered me that I disliked the phone so much and didn’t know why.

My mother was talking to a friend of hers, an English professor at the local university. She mentioned how much I hate the phone and how I fought against using it.

The professor laughed and said she’d heard of that so many times from her students who loved English, and especially those who loved creative writing. It’s not about laziness or simply a strange tick.

When one is serious about writing and has been writing for a long time, it’s likely one is used to people watching. When you’re so used to watching people for body language and facial expressions, picking and choosing what personality characteristics might be of use in your stories, and just plain observing people, having voice alone can be unnerving.

The people-watching writers out there have grown so used to having “all of the above” - body language, facial expression, etc - that only having voice makes the ground a little less sturdy, so to say. Voice tone doesn’t always give away everything, like subtler emotions or lying, whereas body cues can.

This may not ring true for you, but it did for me. I don’t like phones because I can’t watch people as they are talking. I don’t like talking to people I don’t know, but even with people I know on the phone, it makes me uncomfortable to be unable to make eye contact and see how they are acting when on the phone.

So maybe you’re not quite as weird as you think you are…

“There are no original stories anymore, only original ways to portray them.”

Gasp. Horror. Shock.

Whether you’ve heard these words or not, I no longer find it shocking when a writer sees or hears about something and says, “Hey! That’s my idea!” They sputter and run to their drawers or computers, bringing out their carefully dated work to prove it’s theirs! All theirs! How dare someone try to do something as foul as pouncing on an idea and actually doing something with it before you did.

Tough luck. So it goes.

When someone says the statement above, they are talking about the basic plots like the tragic lovers, young person of questionable birth suddenly finds out s/he is part of a massive prophecy, etc. Your job as a writer is to take your basic plot and move beyond it. Shape it into something the reader won’t see anything familiar with.

Take the second “young person of questionable birth” example. Two examples come to mind: The Belgariad by David Eddings and The Immortals by Tamora Pierce. Both feature a young person of questionable birth, but each make it their own right away.

Tamora Pierce makes her heroine Daine with a mother she grew up with and a father she never knew and her mother never spoke of. Eddings, if you read Polgara the Sorceress, doesn’t keep any secrets about Garion’s parentage except from Garion himself.

The same base plot applies if you take away everything else, but both were successful books with successful authors. A true writer can take a base plot and weave it into something great - a story no reader would think to whittle down to something so small as the base plot.

This is not to say you need to go in with a base plot in line, but you will use one, be it damsel in distress or hero fighting against all odds to save his platoon/family/land/etc. The importance, the difference in what will get you slush-piled and what might earn you and extra five-seconds in looking (if you get him/her to look beyond the cover letter) is making that base plot your own.

Remember, when you are writing, you are a god. You are in control of this universe that lies within the white space on your computer screen or on your page. The base plot gives you earth, air, water, space, and life. It’s your job to form it into a world and people I never want to leave.

It’s simple. It truly, truly is. I’ve mentioned it before, albeit briefly.

So, again, I’ll make it simple for anyone having trouble.

“Can” is about ability. “May” is about permission.

Can you fly? No. May you fly? Well, you certainly can feel free to try. You don’t need my permission.

“Can I have a piece of cake?” If you have a mouth and a digestive system, I reckon you can!

“Can” is a question or whether or not you have the ability to do something. Asking if you can have a piece of cake is pretty ridiculous unless you’re unsure of your food allergies, and you’re asking your doctor if it’s okay. Even then, s/he’s likely to say, “You can have a piece of cake, but it’ll go straight to your bum and make your tongue swell up.”

(Allergic to cake? My nephew has an egg allergy - no traditional cakes for him, so it does happen.)

“May” is all about permission. You have the ability, but the action is not yours to take without the permission of someone. May you go to the bathroom is a perfectly acceptable question. Asking can you go to the bathroom could very well mean you’re asking the person of authority to check whether or not you have a bladder.

Can = ability.

May = permission.

All clear now?

Hello and welcome to another lovely Monday. Are you one of the many people who don’t like Mondays? Admittedly, I don’t feel this way or that about Mondays. It’s another day.

This Monday is a bit special for me in that I’ve finally started my novel. Why now? I told my husband I would write ten pages if he would make a phone call I didn’t want to make. (Are there any other writers who don’t like using the phone out there?) Needless to say I didn’t sit down and write ten pages, but I did sit down, look at my notes, and start writing.

Things have been a bit crazy lately, and I have been forgetful as my to-do list gets bigger. Today’s list of reminders are for those of you like me who need reminding every now and then to remember everything that’s going on.

First off, the Spread the Love comment contest is still going! There are three $15 (US) Amazon.com gift certificates to be given away. All you have to do is refer your friends to this site and make sure they put your name as the person who referred them. A simple way to get your next book fix. (Or whatever else you’d like to get on Amazon. I’ve found some fantastically odd things.)

Send me your 200 words! Send me any 200 words out of your current work in progress, and I’ll tell you what I think. Check out 200 Words rounds of the past to see what I do and what I say.

You can also send me pictures of your creative spaces. Email me pictures and descriptions of your space(s) and I will feature it in a post.

The next edition of Fiction Scribe’s very own blog carnival, the Scribes carnival, is about to close. Be sure to submit your blog post about writing to the link provided and be a part of the link love all focused on writing.

Also, the next edition of Fiction Scribe’s monthly newsletter will be sent out to email boxes soon. If you haven’t signed up and would like to, click the “Contact Me” button on the right and send me your email address. I’ll put you on the list.

And finally, Script Frenzy is starting this week. Let me know if you are participating, hiding in terror from the event, or eagerly cheering someone on from the sidelines. I’m thinking I won’t be participating this round, but I’m still waiting to see if someone challenges me.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It’s the birthday of the novelist who created the detective Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett, born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland (1894).

It’s the birthday of novelist John Barth, born in Cambridge, Maryland (1930). He’s the author of novels such as The Floating Opera (1956) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991).

It’s the birthday of ecologist and nature writer Rachel Carson, born in Springdale, Pennsylvania (1907). Her best-selling book about the dangers of pesticides, Silent Spring (1962), became one of the most influential books in the modern environmental movement.

It’s the birthday of the poet Linda Pastan, born in New York City (1932). She started writing poetry when she was a kid, and had some early success. But after she got married, she didn’t write again for 10 years. She only started again after her husband told her he was tired of hearing her talk about what a great poet she might have been if she hadn’t gotten married. She has gone on to publish many collections, including Waiting for My Life (1981) and Carnival Evening (1998).

It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer John Cheever, born in Quincy, Massachusetts (1912). As a child, his grade-school teacher let him tell stories to the class if the children had been good. Sometimes he stretched a single story over the course of several class periods, ending each installment with a cliffhanger.

In the spring of his junior year, Cheever was expelled from prep school for poor grades. He wrote a story about it called “Expelled” (1930), and it was published in The New Republic magazine. He got married and began struggling to support his family by publishing short stories, and he developed a style that blended realism and fantasy.

In his story “The Swimmer,” he wrote about a man at a cocktail party who decides on a whim to swim home to his house by way of all the swimming pools in the neighborhood. Cheever wrote, “He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. … Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along the way; friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River.”

Cheever went on to publish several novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Stories of John Cheever (1978). But all the while that he was writing fiction, Cheever was also keeping a series of journals, which contained his most private and explicit thoughts about his struggles with alcoholism, bisexuality, adultery, and depression. As he approached the end of his life, he began to think the journals were his best work, so he arranged with his son to have the journals published after his death. He died in 1982, and The Journals of John Cheever came out in 1991.

Cheever once described his work as coming from “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat … [a world full of] chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing … who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.”

Courtesy of American Public Media

I say … and you think … ?

1. Dancer ::
2. Intellectual ::
3. Direct ::
4. Tolerate ::
5. Post ::
6. Instinctive ::
7. Brink ::
8. Regain ::
9. Repulsed ::
10. Distressed ::

Courtesy of LunaNina

Remembering the love.

This time around, write five things you love about writing your type/genre/etc or just about writing in general.

Every night over the past few weeks when I started my bath, lit the candles, and poured in the bubble bath, there was an important thing I never forgot to take with me on my special relaxation trips away from the outside world:

A Piece of Normal, by Sandi Kahn Shelton.

This novel was out of my normal reading sphere, but I loved every minute of it. Sandi will tell you a little about her novel in the interview I had with her.

Sandi has done me the honor of stopping at Fiction Scribe on her internet book tour of A Piece of Normal, and I’m pleased to have her as my guest.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Also, please keep Sandi and her mother in your thoughts as Sandi spends time with her mother, who was recently diagnosed with colon cancer.

Hello Sandi and welcome back to Fiction Scribe. Tell the readers a little about yourself.

Hi, Jaime! I’m delighted to be here on your wonderful site. Honestly, I don’t go a day without reading all the tidbits of information you’ve gathered from all over the web. And congratulations on your wedding, by the way!

Let’s see…about me…well, I’ve always wanted to be a fiction writer from the time I was a little girl and would make up stories. In fact, I “sold�? my first book when I was six years old and my mother wouldn’t give me money for the ice cream man, so I went in the house, wrote a story about a king who slept three hours and forty-five seconds, and sold it to the neighbors for the price of a banana popsicle. My mother was mortified and had to go and buy the story back!
(more…)

Be sure to stop by Elisa’s The Book Stacks and check out (one of) my favorite reading space(s).

Also, send in pictures of your favorite reading spaces.

Last week I did a call out for people to email me pictures (and a paragraph or two) of their creative spaces.

Now, it wouldn’t be fair for me to not post my creative space, now would it?

Here is my wonderful writing space, complete with mug full of smoothie and telephone (to the left of the big monitor). Yes, working with two screens (the monitor, keyboard, and mouse hook into the laptop docking station) definitely has its advantages when you have a bunch of things going at once. (Being married to a computer guy has its advantages, too. ;))

To the left. Nothing very exciting. The cord is to hook up the camera.

To the right. Also nothing very exciting. This is where I stack most of the books I have for researching weight loss, nutrition, etc. The PDA (next to the mug o’ smoothie goodness) is not actually mine. Mr. Scribe lets me borrow it.

Ah, my lovely top shelf. If you don’t recognize her, the statue in the middle is the lovely Egyptian goddess Isis. She has a Chinese fan with dragons behind her, and her very own book light to shine on her at night. There is also the small beanie polar bear Mr. Scribe gave me, a few of the snow globes I collect, the measuring tape I use to keep track of my personal measurements as I lose weight, a little token from a friend… Yeah, the picture frame needs a picture. I just have yet to print it off.

And so you have it.

Please keep emailing me pictures of your spaces. I’d love to see them and post them up.

I want to thank Mr. Scribe for stepping in with his practical and useful writing advice while I was sick. Hopefully he won’t have to again, but the action was and is much appreciated.

Mr. Scribe here… Fiction Scribe is down & ill today, so I thought I’d contribute my 2c’s worth.

To me writing is about getting the idea in your head across to the reader. To do that, you first need to get their attention.

I’ve seen it quoted a number of times that an author has the title, the blurb on the rear cover (or inside the front cover for a hardback - either way it isn’t usually written by the author) and at most 3 paragraphs to grab the reader. If they haven’t been caught by then they put the book back on the shelf.

You may have the best thoughts of your generation, but if nobody reads them you go down into obscurity just like 99% of the rest of humanity - no-one will ever know who you were.

So there is the 1st point: good writing has to grab a reader and hold him from the start.

Good writing has to convey the ideas in understandable form. It could be sheer genius but if you require your readers to perform convolutions worthy of an eel on the end of a line to get to the meat of the idea, your thoughts are not going to transmit to a very wide audience.

Good writing needs to entertain. Yes, your work might be serious and needed to save humankind from destruction, but it also needs to keep the readers interested enough for them to spend the time reading it. Ideally it should entertain so well they stay out of bed to finish it.

To write well means to take a reader by the scruff, make her/him sit down & read your words, understand them well enough to assimilate them, & to engage them so well that even if they disagree with you, your words will inspire emotion in them and maybe cause a change in their lives.

Without that kind of response, your words fade rapidly and your book will not be the topic of conversation around the water cooler when they go to work. Money and fame may not be your personal goad for writing, but getting your words out there and having them talked about is something that an author needs to care about.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On a personal note, FS is being looked after & hopefully will be back for you for the next post.

This is actually something I didn’t learn/didn’t pay attention to until my Women’s Studies course in college, but the lesson made enough of an impression to truly stick with me.

In my opinion, if you talk/type like a goon elsewhere, I’m not at all likely to read your work. That’s why I stray into mentioning pet peeves in what I hear and/or see in debates, speeches, etc instead of what I only see people doing in their writing.

I’ll forgive you if you say something wrong occasionally because we have our own weird accents. (If you type like you speak and type “gonna” instead of “going to” then we have something to talk about.) But it grinds my nerves when people use words when they don’t know the meanings and other things like that.

For the Princess Bride fans out there, remember this?

“Inconceivable!”

“I do not think that means what you think that means.”

So in comes sex versus gender. People tend to interchange these two words as if they mean the exact same things. I’ve even seen it done (repeatedly) in sex and/versus gender debates. So here it is in simple terms, and it’s easy to remember. At least, the sex bit is.

Sex is biological. His sex is male because he has balls, a penis, and a good lot of testosterone.

Gender is society’s way of fitting you in a box. She cooks and cleans because those are her stereotypical gender roles.

Your sex is decided by your parts and your chromosomes.

Gender is a social construct.

He can cook and clean just as well as she can because gender roles aren’t rules. She, however, can’t magically grow a penis and change her sex.

Have I made it clear now?

So the next time you tell your partner they do this or that because s/he is the wo/man, you’d better be talking about menstruation or getting a hard-on, not the dishes.

by Chris Miller

Apocrypha – Writings or statements of questionable authorship or authenticity.

About a month after we’d started dating, I took her over to my parents’ condo for “heads up�? introductions. On the coffee table was a copy of my dad’s latest book, “Biblical Faith and Fathering: Why We Call God Father.�? Excitedly she picked it up. “Did you write this!?�?

“Why yes,�? said my dad, inflating just a little. “Yes, I am the author.�? He pointed to his name on the jacket. “Are you familiar with it?�? You could tell he was pleased, that she’d already scored points. Because mostly the only people who read my dad’s books are his editor over at Paulist Press, Theology students and students who accidentally take Religious Studies as an elective, my mom and professional colleagues, among whom he is very well respected.

“Yes, I most certainly am,�? she said. “I recognized it immediately.�?

“Really?�? said my dad, beaming. “So few laypeople know my work.�?

“I just found two dollars in it!�? she said, fanning the pages.

See, this was before Canada’s peso-like toonie—back when we still had a two-dollar bill. And I’d been using one of those old orange bills as a bookmark in the copy of “Biblical Faith and Fathering: Why We Call God Father�? that lay beneath a pile of paperbacks beside my bed on an antique trundle sewing machine. And she, who has a sharp eye for currency, had spotted it peeking out from between the pages just that morning, and replaced it with a Kleenex.

Writing is fraught with disillusionment. But my dad recovered from her provincial review and continued to refine and publish his understandings of the Bible as a canon depicting the evolution of monotheism and Christianity, attempting to diffuse the nutsiness that the Literal Word of God approach has bestowed upon humanity, which is to say, breathe some historical context, social relevance and sanity into the whole Fundamentalist mess. So that a decade later, at eighty, he’s still honing his legacy.

But to me, history is just bad fiction—fiction that claims to be based on a true story or some real event in order to garner credibility and interest. The kind of fiction ghostwriters write for dumb celebrities. And to me, religion is just bad poetry—poetry that takes itself way too seriously. The kind of poetry people write upon failing to get laid.

So I find the Bible and my father’s scholarly tomes on it eyelid-flutteringly to almost tongue-swallowingly dull. But I have learned one important thing from them that can help us as writers: the Bible is the most apocryphal and successful anthology ever compiled. (Although it cannot compete with the Koran, in which a single author managed to pass off his entire manuscript as God’s.)

We’ve all read where someone’s plagiarized and submitted some famous dead author’s literary masterpiece in order to laugh at the pea-brained editorial comments returned with publishing’s gatekeepers’ inevitable rejections. But why not take a lesson from the Bible and try the opposite approach? I mean, which would you rather people read—your name or your words? If you are like me and many of the Bible’s authors, you will choose your words.

So next time you submit something to “The New Yorker�? or “Pedestal�? or some other prestigious snooty venue, try using Dean Kuntz or Dan Brown or Steven King, or, if you are a good writer, Alice Munro or David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen as your pen name. Be modest. Say in your cover letter that you wish to remain anonymous, that your real name is a nom de plume, but then “accidentally�? leave something like “© 2007 Neil Gaiman – all rights reserved�? along with some canned agent waiver/security type garbage atop your document. Perhaps create for yourself a gmail or hotmail account under your adopted name for submitting to editors who don’t open attached documents.

If you can’t write, maybe choose a political figure like George Bush or a pop icon like Britney Spears. Use your imagination: “discover�? the work of someone recently, or even long, deceased. You can streamline bio writing and enhance your credibility by cutting and pasting excerpts from whomever’s you choose’s Wikepedia page. But keep it simple, almost banal. Let your reputation speak for you. And if you’re really serious about getting published, but are uncomfortable with apocryphal submitting, you can always change your name, the way my mother did.

I say … and you think … ?

1. Coastguard ::
2. Buddies ::
3. Nap ::
4. Groan ::
5. Sitcom ::
6. Reader ::
7. Heroes ::
8. Amazing ::
9. Woman ::
10. Don’t! ::

Courtesy of LunaNina