Last night, for entirely professional reasons, I was fact-checking quotations from people on the red carpet at the Grammys. Just for you, writers, I am repeating two of them here because I think you need to read them.
You have to make sure that you have a reason for why you do things. You can’t just do things just because you want people to know your name.
—Zendaya
Don’t know who Zendaya is? Me neither. Go look her up; it’ll help her hit count. The point is a solid one — if your sole goal in pursuing a writing career is to become famous, you have missed a turn somewhere. And if you are approaching any writing project with that intent and no other, it will fail.
Believe in yourself, and don’t let nobody throw you off your game.
—Timbaland
Yes. Listen to Timbaland. He knows. And he wrote a book, so he can stay the course in multiple genres. Also, the group of people you need to prevent from throwing you off your game, I’d like to add, includes yourself. So believe in yourself, but don’t listen when that self is telling you that you suck at this and should probably have just gone to law school like your mom and your college advisor suggested.
So why are you writing that thing that you’re writing (or thinking about writing, or taking just the teeniest little dance break from writing)? Figure it out. It will help. And then get it done, believing that it needs to exist as a completed work, and nothing can replace it, and no one can create it but you.
Editing a good dissertation is like auditing a class, and as a person who was deported from the land of academia for taking four years to obtain a two-year master’s degree, I love that. Last Thanksgiving I expressed my gratitude for the grad students who hire me to polish their dissertations. Not only do they provide an income stream, but they bring me new ideas, lofty academic stuff that I don’t run across in my day-to-day. Bonus: I get the best of the class without having to leave my house or listen to That Guy who monopolizes every discussion. You remember That Guy.
Anyway, this year’s student introduced me to Félix Guattari, Marxist poststructuralist psychoanalyst, and his three ecologies: those of mind, society, and environment. He’s involved with the deep ecology movement, but that’s not what I’m interested in right now. Reading this student’s research made me think about the importance of setting in any narrative.
Let’s break it down freshman style: ecology derives from the Greek roots oîkos, meaning “house,” and logía, “the study of.” It is the science of where we are now and how that affects us. Biology and environmentalism are generally where people go with that, but we can transfer the concept to storytelling.
Ecology is more than just this.
Creator of Worlds
For me, the hallmark of a good story, fiction or nonfiction, told with print or film or stage, is that it creates a world that lingers in memory long after the story has come to an end. A key element of this world building is setting. One could argue, and I do, that setting is as important if not more so than characters. In a sense, it has to be a character in whatever narrative you are telling. The audience needs to understand its backstory, its traits, and why it reacts in predictable or unpredictable ways as events unfold.
To use a negative example, have you ever watched episodes from original Star Trek or early Doctor Who in which the characters are trapped in some featureless landscape or a tiny room? This may have been edgy in the 60s, but now it qualifies as blunt force trauma. It’s claustrophobic, tedious, and more or less unwatchable unless you’re a hardcore fan. This is what happens when you subtract a sense of place that is connected to an individual (mind), a group (society), and a physical location (environment).
How do I make my setting (and story) unforgettable?
So glad you asked! Setting needs to have a connection to character and events. You can’t just toss your characters into a primeval forest or an overgrown building in Chernobyl or an underground factory in a dystopian future or a ratty apartment in the Lower East Side in the 30s—not without knowing why they are there and why this is either the best or the worst possible place for these characters to be at this time. Note that last word, time. When is part of where. It gives dimension to setting.
Frequently characters arrive in a writer’s brain with their time and place fully intact. If not, you may need to chat with them for a while, observe them as you would strangers in a train station. What are they wearing, how do they speak? What do they carry? Urban, rural, wealthy, poor, from the past, from the future? Sheltered, worldly, street smart? Are they comfortable wherever they find themselves? Are they fish out of water no matter where they go? Do the distinct places from which two characters come create a conflict between them, a disconnect?
If you are working in the genre of fantasy, you have both immense freedom to invent ecologies and immense responsibility to create the perfect place for your story because the limits of our space and time don’t exist. Use your powers wisely, and don’t trap your characters in a box when you have the universe at your disposal.
A Little Bit of Not-Here
A final note on setting: no matter how bleak their current surroundings, characters must all carry some piece of sanctuary, some memory or talisman or dream of a better future to represent the hope they have of getting out of there. That idea or item signifying a better place creates contrast with the present; without it, the setting is flat and offers no connection to the audience or the characters. Just as you need ebb and flow in the steady rise of emotional engagement, there needs to be variety in setting. When you build your house, give your characters light and shadow to play in.
It’s been busy around here, which is why I have neglected the blog. And then there was the annual vacation in early July, back from which I traditionally come inspired to break out of the money-driven confines and do some creative work. I do want to get to that, and also I have some things to say about some of the more esoteric, Talmudesque entries in the Chicago Manual of Style, but that is for another day.
Today, I want to consider the tardigrades, microscopic animals also known as water bears or moss piglets. These tiny critters have survived the five major extinction events in our planet’s history; they can withstand temperatures from close to freezing to higher than the boiling point of water. Atmospheric pressure six times greater than that at the bottom of deep ocean trenches, the vacuum of space, radiation lethal to humans—no problem; they can handle it. They can survive for ten years with no food or water and then get right back to the business of eating and reproducing as soon as they are rehydrated.
A testament to perseverance, yes, but when I heard about water bears, the first thing I thought of was not the gorgeous flexibility and tenacity of terrestrial life, but the poor grad students whose job it was to go into the lab every day and try to kill these little buggers. Science is a bitch, sometimes.
a water bear: evolutionary superstar
What would I know about it, you are no doubt asking. I sit around with a laptop all day reading books. Either the books are good, and I am entertained, or they are abysmal, and I enjoy a deep, satisfying schadenfreude over that. Well, no. (OK, there is a dark sort of joy in exposing and expunging ignorant usage, like “per say”—dude, I know.)
The task that has been wearing on me lately is the repeated exposure to mediocre manuscripts. They are of poor quality not simply because the writers lack vision or talent, but because they have got hold of some idea that all it takes to be an author are several thousand words strung together in a file and a few thousand dollars to PayPal off to a self-pub factory.
This is not a new idea, and people all over several industries have been decrying the self-pub revolution for ages. I don’t care about the dilution of literature so much; no one is reading this deluge of poor fiction, so it doesn’t matter. What concerns me is the attitude, the hubris, that makes fact-checking, revision, the numinous, and honest hard work seem irrelevant. It’s sweatshop work versus craftsmanship.
I recently watched a documentary about this guy, which was well done, but I was most impressed with his use of the phrase “chasing the music.” In music, as in writing, it’s not just daily practice that’s important, or even amassing a body of work, it’s the chasing—the relentless seeking after solutions, hunting the elusive, trying to take down the seemingly unkillable.
I look nothing like that thing.
Want to write a book? Do it, I implore you. Put the sum of your experience and intelligence into it. Never stop chasing the images and characters in your head. Never give up, and by that I don’t mean the trite advice to push on past naysayers and doubt. When I say never give up, I mean your work isn’t done until it’s polished and awe-inspiring. Write it, fix it, fix it some more. Ask kind souls to read it, and then fix it again after they tell you what’s wrong. If they say nothing’s wrong, get some more truthful readers.
Care about your work. Bring a thoroughness to the job that would make a water-bear-murdering microzoologist proud. No one is going to care about your project the way you do, so put all your passion into it before you unleash it on the world. If you prefer the self-pub route to the agonizing pilgrimage of traditional publishing, that’s fine. Just don’t sign off on something that reads like self-pub, like you wrote it on your phone over your lunch break.
Give your dreams the respect they deserve. Follow your bliss, pursue your excellence, and never stop chasing the words.
So it’s that time of year again—the one filled with stress and panic and copious amounts of alcohol. Not for me, you understand, for the doctoral candidates knocking up my inbox to have their dissertations edited in time. I want to take this opportunity to say, “Thanks, grad students!” Not just for the PayPal infusions, although I like those too, but because every thesis or dissertation I read teaches me something new. There’s a reason I give you guys a discount, and it’s not entirely due to my commitment to higher education.
Here’s what I learned about this week: critical discourse analysis and its sassy younger sister, feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (go on, read it—it’s a short paper, and it explains both terms). I waded in Foucault and Derrida in grad school, but that wasn’t the main course of my study, so this was all new to me. The sparkly bit that caught my eye?
FPDA believes in complexity rather than polarization of subjects of study.
What’s that mean? Basically, it means that this method of analyzing discourse (any kind, the weirder the better, apparently) prefers not to divide speakers into powerful vs. powerless, voiced vs. voiceless, oppressor vs. oppressed. The official reason is because power tends to shift, elevating the formerly oppressed into a role of authority. The unofficial but obvious reason? Because complexity is much more interesting, especially for writers, who, presumably, are writing about people and what they have to say. Polarity can be very limiting.
Enough about scholarly analysis of discourse. Earlier this evening I attended a book launch and listened to this woman talk about a character she created for a fictional habitat who ultimately never made it into the book. Most writers do this, but it isn’t discussed often: so much informs a story that the end readers never even know about. There are marginal or interstitial voices surrounding every narrative, fictional or not, and reacting to it, shaping it. We only hear half of the conversation.
Anyway, if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving next week, enjoy it and any related days off. While you’re sitting around the table, imagine what scholars would do with your family conversation. How would they quantify it? What roles would they assign? Whose voice is absent yet still profoundly shaping the discourse?
Or, yet another way writers earn money besides writing
So, it’s been a while. In addition to the usual hail of deadlines, I’ve been occupied with maintaining websites and blogs and handling related social media activities for other organizations. This has taken up most of the energy I ordinarily siphon from my editing and writing work to pontificate here. Yes, dear friends, I am now officially a web monkey. I’d put that on my business cards (if I had any): writer/editor/monkey.
It’s not a bad gig: it encompasses ghostwriting, a small degree of scheduling expertise (think of it as pacing a narrative), and troubleshooting code (not unlike filling plot holes). In my case, troubleshooting usually means typing questions into a search box or emailing someone more proficient. If you know people like that, proficient coders who haven’t blocked your address yet, be extra nice to them. Bring them cookies.
The hardest part of the monkey gig so far has been extracting information from the owners of the blogs so I can then translate it into welcoming copy and upload it. I have no advice for that. Cookies again?
The best part? That would be surveying my creations and starting each day nerding out about stats. Oh, the other best part? It takes very little time and makes for a nice break between or during book-length editing projects. Let me rephrase: it’s a more lucrative form of avoidance behavior than Buzzfeed.
If you have tolerable WordPress skills, give it a try. Extra income is always good. What’s that you’re thinking? You don’t have tolerable WordPress skills; in fact, WordPress gives you fits? And you were just wishing that some magical fairy monkey with outstanding grammar would appear to help you keep your professional blog or site up to date? Hey, you know where to find me.
Today, the sun rises on a glorious time here in the Bay Area, a holiday I like to call the first day of school. Today, I lose my unpaid interns to third and fourth grade and gain five hours a day of quiet work time. Gaudeamus igitur and laborare est orare.*
So here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately (and yes, the Latin does enter in). In addition to editing manuscripts and articles, I’ve been picking up odd jobs maintaining website content for others. The most recent of those jobs involves a social media management component, including Twitter.
How can Twitter be an effective social media marketing tool and a source of entertaining and thoughtful content? Well, as one example there’s this guy, who is promoting his book using Twitter, not in the usual way but by releasing a short story one tweet at a time: a free sample in serial form.
I’ve written before about how formal constraints can help a writer focus, so I’m approaching this Twitter thing the way I would take on the task of writing a sonnet: use the rules as scaffolding, not obstacles. A single Twitter resembles haiku, whereas an ongoing feed would be more like an epic poem, or like this (if you like Victorians—seriously, every stanza would fit), or this (for those who prefer the moderns). I may be approaching the task sort of like this.
Digress? Me? Anyway, that’s the challenge that will occupy my quiet hours this fall. Content generation is easy, but how to make it both promotion and poetry? Not obviously either, of course, but delayed reaction poetry, an afterimage that blossoms in the reader’s memory.
* “Let us rejoice” and “to work is to pray.” The organization that has hired me for the tweeting is spiritual in nature—told you there was a reason for the Latin.
I try to get out from under the laptop occasionally to do things that have nothing to do with books, words, or getting money in exchange for books or words. Try it sometime, seriously.
Anyway, the following suggestions may be helpful in your writing process or your general pursuit of happiness.
1. Go see these guys at your earliest convenience. They spread joy wherever they go like brilliant, tub-bass-playing, dirty-minded bees.
2. Lost your smart phone? Borrow a friend’s phone, and text your own phone asking the finder of your phone to please call or text the number of your friend’s phone. It shows up on the lock screen. Most people genuinely do not want your lost items and would prefer to see you reunited with them.
Writing process? Totally getting to that.
3. Step outside of your own field. Having a community of writers is invaluable; in fact, I’d have to say it was one of the highlights of my graduate writing program, and I’ve made efforts ever since to keep in contact with such a community. However, and I’ve said it before, you need to get out and talk to people who view books as entertainment commodities at best and don’t give a rat’s ass about semi-colon abuse, plot structure, character development, or synecdoche. Your daily page count? They don’t care about that, and neither should you, ultimately. This is a transitory success.
4. There are people out there making gin from wild-harvested roots and berries, and if you don’t see a connection between that and writing it is possible that you are in the wrong field (or don’t drink enough, which amounts to the same thing). Whether it’s hillbilly moonshine or gourmet spirits, make something out of the abundance available to you.
5. Excellent advice I heard from a musician: when learning something new, be prepared to suck for awhile. Beginning musicians require a room of their own for entirely different reasons than writers do, but the impetus to study a new instrument or take on a new writing project is the same. Relax and let the process develop at a natural pace, like small-batch, handcrafted mountain gin.
Enjoy your summer break in whatever form it takes. Don’t have one scheduled? You might want to revisit your priorities.
