Category Archives: A Room Of Your Own

Nano Update

I’m managing to stay just a little ahead of the game at 25,000 words. I’m half way there and I’ve got all the symptoms. What if I run out of story before I hit 50,000? What if I fall out of love with my characters or something unforseen happens to them that I didn’t expect or want and I end up having to write about it? Don’t I have other projects I should be paying attention to? However, I will keep pushing to 50. I’m fresh out of prompts until next month, so scroll back through my blog and use one you missed from a prior week. Instead of prompts, I’ll keep updating you on my nano progress. A friend of mine is whizzing through this like it’s cake and I’m starting to get both jealous and competitive. 🙂

From Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of A Writer: Life, Craft, Art:
“The practicing writer, the writer-at-work, the writer immersed in his or her project, is not an entitity at all, let alone a person, but a curious melange of wildly varying states of mind, clustered toward what might be called the darker end of the spectrum: indecision, frustration, pain, dismay, dispair, remorse, impatience, outright failure. To be honored in midstream for one’s albor would be ideal, but impossible; to be honored after the fact is too late, for by then another project has been begun, another concatenation of indefinable states. Perhaps one must contend with vaguely warring personalities, in some sort of sequential arrangement?–perhaps premonitions of faliure are but the sould’s wise economy, in not risking hubris?–it cannot matter, for, in any case, the writer, however battered a veteran, can’t have any real faith, any absolute faith, in his stamina (let alone his theoretical “gift”) to get him through the ordeal of creating, to the plateau of creation. One is frequently asked whether the process becomes easier, with the passage of time, and the reply is obvious: Nothing gets easier with the passage of time, not even the passing of time.

Buy my books here.

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

One blue, one black.

Today is the seventh day of NaNoWriMo, and I am going strong. I’m keeping about one day ahead at 11, 612 words last night. My spirits are high, but I cannot say I am unphased. I noticed this morning on my way to work that I was wearing mismatched socks: one blue, one black. What could I do but shake my head and chuckle? The dishes have piled up. There are muddy dog prints on the kitchen tile and front door that have been there for a few days now. I notice them, wonder if Alex or Winston care, then call Emy for our nightly word war. I almost fell asleep last night in the final relaxation phase of my yoga class. I wonder what my students would have done if I’d started snoring? Would they have shuffled quietly out and let the hip-hop teacher wake me or woke me up? You don’t hear of teachers falling asleep in class often. In fact, I’ve only heard of that once. One day my son came home (he was in fifth grade at the time) and told me that his teacher had fallen asleep in her rocking chair during silent ready. At the time, I kind of envied her. So, I guess that’s what it’s really coming down to for me. NaNo has forced me to a point where I’m releasing my kung fu grip on certain things, like cleanliness, matching socks and the need to sit down and eat an actual meal.

Buy my books here.

Must be a sign.

I woke up this morning, put the coffee on, and made Winston’s lunch at an unusually slow pace. You see, I could afford to go just a little slower this morning, because I’ve taken the day off to write as a sort of celebration of the start of another (third, for me) National Novel Writing Month. While I waited for the water to boil, I checked my email. What did I find? A letter from Tom Robbins to all NaNo participants meant to inspire us. It must be a sign. He’s one of my literary heros. I adore him from his silly jar of mayonnaise to his stubborn yellow legal pad. I’m posting the letter here:

Dear NaNoWriMo participant,

When you sit down to begin that novel of yours, the first thing you might want to do is toss a handful of powdered napalm over both shoulders—so as to dispense with any and all of your old writing teachers, the ones whose ghosts surely will be hovering there, saying such things as, “Adverbs should never be…”, or “A novel is supposed to convey…”, et cetera. Enough! Ye literary bureaucrats, vamoose!

Rules such as “Write what you know,” and “Show, don’t tell,” while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

Ah, but how can you know if it’s working? The truth is, you can’t always know (I nearly burned my first novel a dozen times, and it’s still in print after 35 years), you just have to sense it, feel it, trust it. It’s intu itive, and that peculiar brand of intuition is a gift from the gods. Obviously, most people have received a different package altogether, but until you undo the ribbons you can never be sure.

As the great Nelson Algren once said, “Any writer who knows what he’s doing isn’t doing very much.” Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what’s going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

A topic is necessary, of course; a theme, a general sense of the nexus of effects you’d like your narrative to ultimately produce. Beyond that, you simply pack your imagination, your sense of humor, a character or two, and your personal world view into a little canoe, push it out onto the vast dark river, and see where the currents take you. And should you ever think you hear the sound of dangerous rapids around the next bend, hey, hang on, tighten your focus, and keep paddling—because now you’re really writing, baby! This is the best part.

It’s a bit like being out of control and totally in charge, simultaneously. If that seems tricky, well, it’s a tricky business. Try it. It’ll drive you crazy. And you’ll love it.

Tom Robbins

—
Tom Robbins is the author of eight novels, including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume, and his latest, Villa Incognito.

Buy my books here.

My Nano Idea

Winston Freeman is thirteen years old. His story is told from his point of view, through narration and online diary entries. There is not excessive foreshadowing, and the foreshadowing he provides is not reliable because he is inherently pessimistic about his own abilities and future.
The story begins with Winston’s diary entry about he and his mother unpacking the moving truck. They bought a house in Vancouver, WA. This is his first move. He was born in Los Angeles, in a gated community in the Tarzana neighborhood. He lived in that same house until now. However, this is not the first time the rug has been pulled out from under him. His father died unexpectedly and mysteriously when he was seven years old.
His mother says that he died of heart failure, which has always bothered him because his father was an extremely healthy eater and a weekend cyclist. He taught poetry and Theatre Arts at Los Angeles City College. Will
Since his father’s death, his mother, who develops software for restaurants has telecommuted. Though her company is based in LA, she was able to move to an area closer to her family and long-time friends because she works from home. She was born and raised in Vancouver. She met Winston’s father when she enrolled in his theatre arts class at the age of nineteen. He was twenty nine years old at the time.
Winston Freeman’s hero’s journey from a boy who is painfully shy and lives boldly in his own imagination to a young man of confidence and principle begins when the summer ends and he begins the year at Discovery Middle School. There he meets Jewel, a confident, but secretive girl who is misunderstood by boys her age. She is; however, unconcerned by this and seeks adventure after adventure. It is her urging that calls Winston to an adventure of his own. The adventure of his life, that begins with his attempt to seek the answers that he doesn’t feel he has about his father’s death and life.
Winston plays an online game called FantasyScape. However, she is extremely protective of him and keeps roping him into all these other activities to make him a “well-balanced” child.
Winston is and only child and has a beagle named Romeo, who his mother bought for him three months after his father’s death. He named him Romeo after a character in a play he’d seen with his mother recently. He’d wanted to be Romeo, because Romeo acted. He may have acted stupidly in the end, but he acted.
His story contains a few other characters. A male teacher, who becomes a mentor for him and Jewel and Joe, the old man who lives next door, who grunts and glares. He keeps the online diary because his mother makes him. She is protective and upbeat, though he “catches” her sadness when he sneaks up on her. He hates chocolate, but loves gummi candies. He misses Alison from L.A., who he’s sure he’ll marry.

Still working out the rest. Four days until kick-off!

Buy my books here.

"Up At A Villa" Helen Simpson

“Up at a Villa” by Helen Simpson (in Zoetrope)

The writing is good. The cynical tone is consistent and reinforced by the author’s masterful use of description. In the opening lines, for example, sh writes,

“They were woken by the deep-chested bawling of an angry baby. Wrenched from wine dark slumber, four of them sat up, flustered, hair stuck with pine needles, gulping awake with little light breaths of concentration. They weren’t supposed to be here, they remembered that. They could see the baby by the side of the pool, not twenty yards away, a furious geranium in its parasol shaded buggy, the large pale woman sagging above it in her bikini.”

I didn’t care for the story. The parents are passed out drunk by the side of a pool and their baby is just sitting there by the side of the pool in a buggy? These seem like sophisticated people. Baby’s dad is too busy reading the “Times” to take any notice of the child and in fact is irritated by the baby’s presence. He tells his wife that he’s not attracted to her post-pregnancy body. The young couple with them are even shallower than the young parents. I’m left thinking that these two must have made the decision to have a child, there are other options after all. They must have gone through nine months of development and anticipation. They must have, filling their own roles, experienced childbirth. Where are the signs of that? I cannot like or sympathize with these characters. The story ends with a flight—an adrenaline rush as the two couples flee from detection (they’d snuck in to a hotel pool) and ends with a “photographic instant” of the “little family frozen together”. The ending predicts a continuation of the dead relationship this couple has with each other and with their child. A relationship that doesn’t even hint at any intention, any complexity, any love, not even to show how small it is in comparison to the selfishness and insecurity. The description was dreamy and affecting, but the story didn’t seem real and the characters were all pathetic.

This makes me think of what I was reading last night by Gogol on realism, “But the author who dares to bring all that he sees out into the open is otherwise. All those things that indifferent eye fails to notice—all the slimy marsh of petty occurrences into which we sink, all the multitude of splintered everyday characters who swarm along the drab, often painful road of life—he shows them clearly in relief, thanks to the power of his merciless chisel, so that the whole world may view them.” Perhaps this is what Simpson is doing in “At the Villa”, but still, I can’t help but think that her characters are too shallow to be real.

Buy my books here.

What are you reading now?

Tell me about it.

The Yellow Wallpaper by C.P. Gilman

What a fabulous story! I don’t care that it may be a bit contrived, a bit heavy-handed, the symbol of the woman in the wallpaper too obvious for our modern times. It’s just so perfect, right down to the final image of the woman (no name?) crawling over her painted control-freak husband (John–common name) again and again and again. The language is perfect. The words all right and wonderfully suggestive and full of wit. And…in its time a broad social critique.

Buy my books here.

The Countdown and Blog Editing

TGIF!
And…only three more weeks ’til summer vacation. I spent hours yesterday getting writing projects organized for summer, when I’ll have more time to write. I also worked on this blog a bit, adding a new page on what I’m reading now. I used to chronicle this on myspace, but I’m done with that now. I prepared some poetry to send out in the mail. It was a productive day.
Okay, I’m getting better, I now spell check my blog entries, but I still find that I have to go back and edit them the next day, when my mind in no longer sunk in the content of the post. This is how I edit work that is not being instantly broadcast. It’s a bit like busy eating. It’s habitual. Slowing down takes conscious effort. Huge effort for me, since I’m often “busy” and accustomed to writing it all out and then editing later. Anyway, just a thought on that.

Buy my books here.

"A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

The second sentence, “The world had been sad since Tuesday”, is just excellent. It introduces the central idea of this story, the self-centered nature of human beings which leads to complicity in wrong, even downright cruelty, and definitely neglect. Things are not going well for Pelayo, Elisenda and their sick child, hence, the world is sad. A pathetic fallacy. This is again demonstrated in the couple’s exploitation of the “angel” man to gain wealth and security and in how Elisenda regards the man’s appearance around the house as annoying and like living in a “hell full of angels”. All the characters in the story can only think of how the winged man can help or hinder them. It’s only when Pelayo cares for the man for the first time–giving him a blanket and a shelter to sleep under that the angel becomes well enough to fly away. Elisenda is happy that the angel is gone “because he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the sea. ” This couple’s reluctance to be compassionate and complete lack of curiosity or desire to cultivate their own sense of the fantastical shows their self-centered, mundane existence keeping crabs out of their home. I think there is also a message here about how people are willing to entertain ideas as long as they are convenient to them, such as the existence of angels.

Buy my books here.

"A Simple Heart" by Gustave Flaubert

Felicite, ironically named, is never happy. Her life is full of devotion, submission and servitude. She is uneducated. She does not think for herself or have any hobbies or ambitions of her own. Her love is excessive and largely unappreciated and unreturned. There are some occasions where she receives objects of affection from her mistress and her nephew, but never any substantial gestures of love. She clings to these objects in an excessive, pathetic way. In truth, I don’t feel sympathy for her because she has no self, no identity to connect with. She clings to trinkets and remnants of lives she lived through. She is, as the title suggests, simply heart, without inspiration or direction or any of the complexity that is being human. It’s appropriate that she eventually goes blind–she’s blind all along, blindly devoted, which even for someone as simple hearted and “single-minded” as she is, does not lead to happiness or contentment. It’s a dead life she lives, full of relics of the dead, waiting for her own death.

Buy my books here.

Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: A Room Of Your Own

Nano Update

One blue, one black.

Must be a sign.

My Nano Idea

"Up At A Villa" Helen Simpson

What are you reading now?

The Yellow Wallpaper by C.P. Gilman

The Countdown and Blog Editing

"A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

"A Simple Heart" by Gustave Flaubert