Writing
now browsing by category
A Day in the Life of a Writer: Wisdom from McKee
I’m reading McKee’s Story along with one of my writing partners, and we’re both finding gems. Sure, screenwriters are the intended audience, but story structure is story structure. My favorite lines so far:
“But fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small “t.” Big “T” Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed” (24).
Reminds me of quantum physics. Y’know how an electron seems to know when it’s watched? And it won’t move if you’re looking at it? At least, that used to be the case, but now they’ve found a way to trap an atom in a vacuum so they can watch it jump. Kind of sad, really. No more mystery. But Truth–now that is not something you can trap in a vacuum.
Sometimes little “t’ truth can magnify big “T” Truth, but the writer must lay those words down lightly, respectfully. For example, please don’t write an overwrought scene between a victim and her abuser and expect the reader to take away anything but a grimace. Seriously. Knock that shit off.
If you want to portray abuse, and you want to use “accurate reportage,” as McKee puts it, show everything but the victim, and refrain from telling your reader what those facts mean.
For example, a living room snapshot:
A clear glass ashtray sits neatly upside down on the rug, empty, but Shelly smells cigarette smoke. No, it smells more like a barbecue, she thinks. It’s a distant scent, like it’s coming from the patio down the street, wafting through the window. The front door slams and she ducks in reflex, and suddenly the scent is up close. She hears a car peel away from the house at the same time she realizes she is sitting, naked, on a small pile of burning cigarettes.
That needs tweaking, but it should give you an idea of how you can give small details without hitting your reader over the head with angst. I think the angst is inevitable in a rough draft. Just eradicate it in your rewrites so your reader doesn’t want to stab his eyes out.
A Day in the Life of a Writer: Back to GMC
I’ll be writing about how I’m using GMC, which I got from GMC: Goal, Motivation and Conflict: The Building Blocks of Good Fiction by Debra Dixon (Clean link)
I’ve begun working on my novel again, and recently had a breakthrough because of an app I found online that utilizes Dixon’s GMC. I dumped what I knew about my heroine into it, and came out with something I can work with. (I am waiting for this writer to get back to me with feedback. *ahem* ps: You did ask what character issues I’m having, Ms. Tammy.)
The GMC wizard was created by author Shawntelle Madison, and it’s on her site:
GMC Wizard
(http://www.shawntellemadison.com/writer-tools/gmc-wizard/)
Plug your info in and go. Here’s what I got for my heroine. This is a work-in-progress, particularly the internal goal part. For some reason I wrestle with understanding that.
GOAL, MOTIVATION, AND CONFLICT GRID
Name: Diana
Age: 35
Occupation: homeless. Previous occupation: ?
Basic Information: Sober b/c of dog Bart. Son died a few years ago & she is beset by guilt.
Eventually she will save Pax, hero’s nephew, which will release her from her self-imposed guilt-shackles.
| INTERNAL | EXTERNAL | |
| GOAL | forgive herself for the death of her son. | own her own house where Bart will have a yard to play in. |
| MOTIVATION | she will die on the streets if she doesn’t. | He’s been beaten before and shot after she claimed him. She wants him to be safe so she doesn’t have HIS death on her conscience, too. |
| CONFLICT | she keeps falling back on alcohol to drown out the pain. | She has no job. She’s been out of work for years. She struggles with sobriety. She has no place to shower, even, and has no idea if she even HAS any skill sets. No confidence. |
Another link I found useful has a blank GMC chart found here: http://www.midmichiganrwa.org/gmc-charts.pdf — 6 pages of character-building here. RWA stands for Romance Writers of America, and it is one of the best investments I’ve ever made in my writing.
The key is to know your characters, which means you have to sit down with each one and listen to them. If you don’t, you risk writing your character into an unbelievable situation, or you risk pushing your character into unbelievable action. For example, I know that my heroine, Diana, loves books, so while it is believable that she would be found digging in a dumpster to rescue a book, there is no way she would burn one to keep herself warm on the streets. She would burn a building first.
What would your character do/not do?
Best Year Ever. Still.
Nothing like committing to do something in public to make you see your own flaws.
My best year isn’t done, and it’s still the best I’ve ever lived, and I’ve been busy living it. Eh, but I’ve been busy procrastinating about all sorts of things. Like posting here. Seems as soon as I give myself a rule it makes me want to break it. Makes me wonder if there’s an app that’ll impose deadlines that make you unable to post after a certain time. (I do this for my students on Blackboard, and as a fellow procrastinator, I understand the value of having a deadline with consequences.)
So.
Some of the best things right now:
- I’m rediscovering Jesus. And praying every day that it doesn’t turn me into an annoying conservative twat. I’d annoy myself. Gag me.
- I am learning a lot about my absentminded habits. Thank God my husband is so laid-back. Couple days ago he said, smiling, “Honey, do you not like bending over?” I gave him a wtf look and he said, “When you lay something down, it stays there.” I–ah–well. That explains a lot. What amuses me is that now, because of that tiny, indulgent smile of his, I catch myself when I lay something down, and I remember that my actions affect someone else. And I don’t lay it down.
- I am writing! I am noodling about scenes, I am plotting, I am creating characters I love, and I am regularly in my writing corner.
- I am actively growing as a teacher. This semester I’m implementing a couple of tools I developed last semester and the feedback I’m getting from students is helping me to make them more user-friendly. (A worksheet on thesis statements and topic sentences, and an online workshop on developing a solid thesis.) Geeky, yes, but fun for me.
From Notes from the Universe:
“The absolute, most sure-fire way
of physically moving in the direction of
your dreams, on a day-to-day basis,
without messing with the “cursed hows,”
is living them, now, to any degree that you can.
And you can.“
My dream is not only to write, but to create a space for others to explore writing, so I’m committing to starting a group for writers here where I live. Instead of waiting to move to somewhere green and cool (O! Vermont!) I’m going to do something now.
Funny. No one really cares what you can do, only what you do.
A Day in the Life of a Writer: Excavation via fresh hurts
Sometimes I only have a scent. Ivory Soap. Pine sap. Old Spice. It’s faint, like an afterimage, as Atwood writes in The Handmaid’s Tale.
Other times, I catch a memory when I noodle about something peripheral, like the weather of my childhood.
And other times, I am knocked into a pit by something that happens, like my son telling me he will not be seeing me again. As of this writing, I am 18 hours and 40 minutes from that revelation, and all I can think is, ‘if I’d known it was the last time I’d see him, I’d’ve lingered over dinner. I’d’ve drawn out the conversation, which would have been easy because our conversations have always been interesting. I’d’ve found some way not to be the mother who drives him crazy.’ Okay, nix that last one. I actually don’t know how to do that.
(He is not suicidal.) (And he doesn’t read my blog.)
There’s more to it. There always is. But that is not what this post is about. This post is about how present events harken back to old wounds.
I often identify old hurts by rooting around in the new ones (when I have the clarity to do so.) Today, in this fresh hell, I can identify the pain of many old things, but I will name only two:
1) giving my son up for adoption almost three decades ago, and
2) my mother washing her hands of me when I was 11, and again when I was 19.
So my next question for myself is, which pain am I feeling?
Here’s the thing: I have seen enough of life to understand its cycles. The grownup in me knows that nothing stays the same. So the enormous pain I feel is not just about my son walking away.
So what does this mean? How does the current issue illuminate the past hurt?
I see that by linking them I am telling myself the old story of abandonment, and that’s a story I’m done with. Being abandoned means I have no power. I’m not an abandoned waif, I’m a grownup, and I will not be undone by grief. I do leave my arms open for him should he return. But I also accept that it could be years, even decades, before that happens, if at all. My mother was dead ten years before I understood some things in our relationship, things about her.
I’m writing this because I am devastated and I have to work through this or go crazy. I have to be back at work on Monday and I can’t be dissolving every time something reminds me of my son. I have to see some meaning.
Still working on that.
What I do know is that I can model the grace I now recognize for myself. I can be thankful that he has new-found faith and that he is seeking his own right path. And I can trust that everything will be okay. Mostly. Still working on that, too.
Shadow work
“According to Jungian Jolande Jacobi, in psychic inner reality the archetypal Shadow is a symbol for an aspect of the self (1959). When we cannot find a way to work with our shadow through our dreams or in other ways, it becomes a symptom in our outer world. ” From http://www.eupsychia.com/perspectives/defs/shadow.html
In the compilation of shadow essays called Meeting the Shadow, M. Scott Peck writes,
“If evil people cannot be defined by the illegality of their deeds or the magnitude of their sins, then how are we to define them? The answer is by the consistency of their sins. While usually subtle, their destructiveness is remarkably consistent….
A predominant characteristic, however, of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection….
Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection…. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad….
Strangely enough, [they] are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil…” (178-79). (see here for more info on the book)
I think that when we cannot accept a certain aspect of our selves, we are then on hyper-alert for that aspect in others. This is why politicians and other public figures should shut up. I’ve lost count of how many prominent figures have loudly decried sexual misconduct and then have been found guilty of that same “sin.”
We are loudest about what we hate in ourselves.
And the only way to combat this effectively is to accept those parts in our selves which cause us to be ashamed.
But we can’t if we don’t have a safe space to be vulnerable.
So not only is the accusing person hiding secret shame, he is in an environment which fosters such deceptiveness.
Where is grace?
Why is grace so difficult to give?
I’m noodling on grace because my mother was unable to receive it.
And because of that, she couldn’t give it.
I wonder if that is true across the board. If you haven’t ever received unconditional acceptance of who you are, right to your marrow, can you give that to anyone? If so, how?
I am also still formulating what my definition of grace is.
I experience it on a daily basis from my husband. I make mistakes. I get psycho/neurotic/depressed–and there he is, accepting that I am in a particular space, but I am still the beautiful girl he adores. This means, usually, that he walks with me through that valley all the way through to the other side.
Humility. That’s the key to grace.
And you can’t be truly humble if you don’t accept all parts of yourself, and you can’t accept them if you can’t see them, blinded by pride as you are.
So.
This week I’m reflecting on all the ways I experience grace, and I’m looking for it in Mama’s life, too.
Exploring grace
My assignment this week with my writing partners is to articulate my definition of grace because I’m finally narrowing my focus on the theme for my WIP, Out of the Woods. I thought I knew this definition, but when my partner asked me, I fumbled for what I meant.
After our meeting, I stumbled across this:
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self–to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. (Barbara Brown Taylor/An Altar in the World) –reference found here.
Her quote reminds me of people who point fingers at others in condemnation, not realizing that what they condemn is what is inside them. You are my mirror. If I hate what I see in you, chances are I loathe it in myself. I recognize my shadow in someone else far more easily than I do in myself.
Grace forbids condemnation because there isn’t room for both.
And by accepting the other, we are sprung from our prisons.
By other, I mean that which is different from us.
I’m riveted by the notion of .grace because it was absent in my family. Actually, it pretty much still is. We are awkward in giving it, and we don’t recognize it when it is extended to us. I am convinced that my mother’s grief and sorrow over her choices made her sick. She never knew how much I loved her perhaps because she couldn’t accept it. If you don’t believe in something, can you recognize it? Ever?
Another assignment I have is to identify points of grace in my life, and in my mother’s life. I’m surprised by how difficult it’s been to identify such moments of grace for her. In my own life, yes, but not Mama’s. Not sure what that means.
What is grace to you?
Shenpa revisited
I wrote a little about Shenpa in 2012, but I didn’t have a lot to say because, while I recognized it, I didn’t really understand it. I’m not sure I do now, but I’m going to write about it anyway. I’ll share the same quotes:
Shenpa is what Pema Chodron calls the hook. We each have different hooks but we all get hooked by attachment to outcomes, expectations, or regrets. It is emotionally painful and we suffer. Whatever the hook is, I have to let it go. I must remember that 100 years from now when I am dead and gone, it truly won’t matter. It won’t be important because all my actions will be in the past. Just as they are now while I am living, from moment to moment. Why hold on to the negativity? What matters now is being kind, forgiving and loving towards myself and others. ~ Loran Hills ♥
I was just telling myself this yesterday: next year, it will not matter, these hurt feelings. I will be over them because my perspective will have changed. So why not fast-forward through the struggle and forgive NOW? Trust that my perspective will eventually have more understanding, that even if I don’t have it now, it will come, and I will not have caused more damage with resentment and hurt? Why hold on to it? Why am I attached to the hurt?
I don’t know why I’m attached to hurt feelings. I’m less so now than ever, but still. I recognize that staying in that space is a choice, and all I have to do to get out of it is to ask myself how much I want to be happy.
Chodron writes,
Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens— that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place— that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you—they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child— and, shenpa: almost co-arising.
Trying to root out shenpa is like trying to force a paradigm shift. You know you’re in a box, but you can’t find a seam to force your hand through.
It’s an irresistible itch. You get that your partner didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, and you get that in the grand scheme of things it’s insignificant, but those hurt feelings…they’re more comfortable than happiness and peace because they’re familiar. You know what to expect, and the hurt fits the paradigm of abandonment and neglect and disillusionment.
Never mind that it’s been YEARS since you were abandoned.
I think shenpa is like the old rusted bike that got leaned against a sapling and was left there for the tree to grow around.
The only way to dislodge that bike is with an axe and chainsaw, and then you destroy the tree.
In dislodging that hooking point, it’s necessary that some part of ourselves is destroyed, but it’s only the part that doesn’t serve for the good.
I became aware of the tightening during my various attempts to quit smoking. I was trying to figure out why I smoked, and I discovered that I did it to shut my mouth. Better to inhale poison than to say what I thought. I was afraid that if I quit smoking, I would offend everyone around me when I said what I thought.
I quit smoking over a year ago, and I’ve offended people and I frequently wish I was more skilled in diplomacy, but I’ve also learned that not speaking is my choice,not something I have to force myself to do.
I’ve given myself the same permission to speak that I gave my children.
You know how in movies when a mother is hiding from the enemy and she has her child tucked tightly against her, and her hand is on his mouth to keep him from crying out? I think that when Mama silenced me when I was little, in some ways it was for my protection. This is how we do things in this family. We do not say what we think because it endangers us because the adults react. The tightening is both taught and embedded in us at an early age.
I will have to come back to this again.
I’m very interested in your thoughts about this shenpa….
love letter
I confronted my mother, once. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.
15+ years later, my scalp goes clammy again at the memory of telling Mama she was a chicken for running away. Always running away.
Mama taught me to run, even as I hated it, protested against it. It’s cliche to say that I’ve become my mother, but I do see her in me.
“You’re not as smart as you think you are, Stacy,” she’d say. Snarky–but also a little frightened. What she meant, perhaps, was that I didn’t understand her or the world as well as I thought I did. This is still true.
Around 1995 or so, in a straight run, Mama drove all the way from Hopland, California, to El Centro. 13 hours on the road. She was exhausted, and, unbeknownst to me, extremely ill with the cancer that would eventually eat its way through her body. My sons were 5 and 7, and she was visiting them for the first time in years. I had visited her briefly a couple of months earlier, and that probably made me brave.
Jake, my 7-year-old, offended her by wrinkling his nose and telling her she had smoky breath. She viewed it as rejection, and I saw it as him speaking truth. She felt he should apologize, and I refused to force him to do it. He was not rejecting her at all, and he hadn’t been rude, only spontaneous. So I made a choice then not to re-create the rules I had grown up with. Part of it was a fumble. I didn’t know how to address the situation in a healthy manner, but I did know I was not going to silence my sons to protect any adults’ feelings. This would mean consequences socially, of course, but it would also mean that they would not be cowed.
So Mama jumped in her Jeep Wrangler and lit another cigarette. I jumped in with her and told her that she was being a chicken by running away, and that she was abandoning me again. Which was a worse offense? Jake’s comment, or mine? I could’ve handled that better– fifteen years later. :/
But again–Mama taught me how to run.
I think I understand that flight instinct. Perhaps the pain was too much in the space together with me…but if she had just taken some of it with her and not shut me out entirely after that, I think we could have worked through our stuff. Sure, it means juggling that pain like a puffer fish, but the understanding and peace that results from fighting through something is matchless.
I have run, but I have learned to go back, and the more I do that, the more I see the importance of not leaving in the first place. I think the running instinct is tied to shame, somehow. Am I running for cover? Or perhaps I just want to put distance between me and air that feels like broken glass in my lungs. That kind of pain is from hurting someone you love and knowing you were wrong and you can’t fix it. Ever.
But you have to face it and acknowledge your part, and you cannot say, “I did my best,” because on some shadowy level you knew the choices you were making. I remember being in therapy and thinking that it didn’t matter if Mama “did her best” because her “best” didn’t protect me. I remember thinking that it was horseshit, and now I am forced to see the truth in that for myself. I could have done better.
Mama said I was her blackest pain. She wrote that in one of her journals, then she went on to describe me as a baby, and how sweetly it all began for us. I wish I didn’t understand this so well.
At the same time, I recognize grace.
Mama did not, and so could not receive it from me.
I loved her even though she failed me. And why is that?
Why do we love our mothers no matter what? We are irrevocably stuck in a love/hate relationship….
I drive my youngest son crazy. I know this, and all I can do is give the grace that I need, and to always have a place for him.
I’m reminded of a saying: Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it’s not the end.
Uncertainty and Inspiration
From Notes from the Universe:
At any point in one’s life, the greater the uncertainties they face, the greater their chances of hitting a major, life-changing “home run.”
I am learning how to embrace uncertainty, but I’ve had to approach this concept in baby steps. I tend to prefer the known, but not for a solid rational reason. I just feel like I have more control if I know what’s coming.
I am leaving everything I know to embark on a beautiful amazing life with the man I love this summer, and I am not doing well in the uncertainty department. I haven’t changed residence since 1997, and I’ve lived in the same town since 1985. I’m moving across the country to a fascinating city full of tons of things to do, I’ll be surrounded by his big, loving family, I’ll make new friends, and the only thing I can focus on is the fact that I don’t have a job yet.
This note from the Universe reminded me that I’m doing something enormous. So shut up and jump, sister. The water’s fine.
I’ve been feeling anxious, so I looked up ways to pull myself out of it, and I started here: 50 things you can control right now
And that leads me to the other part of today’s post: Inspiration.
Yesterday, out of the blue in the most perfect way, I received a blogger award from fellow blogger, Mandy Eve-Barnett.
I’m going to pay it forward by introducing you to bloggers who inspire me.
The award requests the following rules are kept:
- Display the award logo on your blog.
- Link back to the person who nominated you.
- State 7 things about yourself.
- Nominate 15 bloggers for this award.
- Notify those bloggers of the nomination by linking to one of their specific posts so that they get notified by ping back.
7 things about myself:
- I’ve been in a long-distance relationship for 9.5 years, and our relationship is stronger than most others I’ve seen.
- I’m marrying him this summer. 😀
- I’m a member of Romance Writers of America.
- I teach firearms classes.
- I’m genealogy geek and am working on several friends’ family trees in addition to my own.
- I’m a member of Bookcrossing.com and I’ve given away over 8,000 books since 2004.
- I’m a perfume pig. I love them all. Current fave: Angel. And Opium. And Jessica McClintock. And… right. Never mind. lol
15 bloggers whose blogs I nominate for the Very Inspiring Blog Award:
- Amanda Fox : The Fur Files
- Devin Berglund
- Sarah La Rosa: Her Strange Angels
- The Squeaky Robot
- Life in the Boomer Lane
- Helen Klebesadel: A Muse and Her Artist
- Fred Allen’s Old Time Radio
- Marc and Angel
- The Connectome
- 1000 Awesome Things
- The First 10 Pages
- People Triggers
- The Soulful Contrarian
- Clotilda Jamcracker
- The Tovarysh Connection
D5 Creation