What I mean to say is, I am most happy when I am alone. My imagination and I get along very well, as do I with my loud music. I am happiest when I can dance when no one is watching. I am free-est when I can sing at the top of my lungs, knowing no one is judging my ability. I am most content when I can write without distraction.
So, am I alone in this? Is it a artist thing, or is it just that I grew up as an only child and got used to it at an early age?
I wonder if it has anything to do with the ability or the need to create. I’ve always had my imagination to keep me company. I remember (and it was a memory just jogged this morning) trying to write a book at my mother’s friends’ dining room table – when I was five or six years old. As I grew up I would imagine for myself a different life, in which I had friends and enemies alike. I would write pages of conversations.
Of the people in my real life: an artist friend of mine, with whom I was discussing this topic the other day, told me that she also is happiest and most content when she’s by herself. My mother and my other friend (yes, I only really have two) dislike being alone. Both are creative in their own ways – my mother knits and sews, and my friend is an inventor – but they are not artists as such.
Neither of them understand this need I have to be alone, and so it makes me wonder if I’m strange. I can only ask my artistically inclined acquaintances…
You never know what you’ve got until you lose it. It’s a saying we hear all the time; sometimes in moments of profound loss, sometimes it’s trivial. In my case, in many ways it’s the latter.
There’s no summer camp for my youngest son this week. I used to think it was a luxury to have the time to write. Now, however, my luxuries include sitting for more than two minutes at the table to eat a meal without being interrupted, showering, and going to the washroom.
The latter of these I believe, falls into the profound category.
So if you see a woman walking around the grocery store buying finger foods, with stringy hair and smudges of dirt on her face and with eyes bulging out of her sockets and her legs crossed, try not to point and laugh. It’s probably just a woman who’s missing summer camp.
It all started with my romance writing course. The course was a requisite to acquiring the college certificate I’m after and I thought it would be fun to do anyway. Just to get a feel for the genre I went in search of novels to read that would cost me little or no money. Enter the freebies on my e-reader. Out of the ten or so I downloaded, two were well written – the rest, not so much. But I read them anyway. It was the general feeling I was going after, not the quality of writing.
At the same time I was finishing up the rough draft of my novel. That done, I started the editing process. In the meantime, the romance course finished and I went back to reading what I normally read. Well. I tell you.
After reading Stephen King (who, no matter whether you enjoy his stories or not, you must admit is a master of the craft of writing) I realised that my novel was right on par with the free romance crap I had been reading! Granted, I’m taking a grammar course now, so I’m finding mistakes I didn’t know were mistakes. But I still want to rewrite my entire manuscript.
I was amazed at how much influence what I read had on what I wrote. The time I spent describing things in minute detail instead of simply relating how my characters were reacting to things; the extra word count that came from blathering on about things that don’t matter is astounding.
I still have to cut down my word count by about 40,000 words in order for it to fit into even the most generous publisher’s limits, but I’m hoping with Stephen King’s influence I’ll be able to accomplish that. And from now on I must remember to keep away from authors I’m not interested in emulating whilst I write.
So I’m taking this grammar course. It’s necessary for the college certificate I’m aiming to get, in order to put something ‘professional’ on my resume, for me to take this course. I always thought my grammar was pretty good. Yes, I’ve learned a few things, such as the fact that if you’re quoting even the name of something at the end of a sentence, you should put the period inside the quotation marks. The same goes for a comma. That’s fine – I was bound to learn something new.
My problem is this: for my final assignment in this course, I have to write two grammatically correct paragraphs. No problem, right?
Wrong! In fact, SO wrong!
This course is making me question everything I learned in grade 7 English. Who knew there were eleven types of verbs? Now that I’m learning about all these different parts and tenses and exceptions and everything else on top, I’m almost afraid to speak, let alone write! And I have to construct something that’s going to be marked?
Being someone who gets most of their inspiration from watching people and trying to imagine why they do the things they do (see photo), I’m finding it difficult to write anything new these days. What with summer vacation and the fact that I’m trying to save money for the trips I want to take, it’s hard to get out of the house, even for a little while. You might say, ‘Just take your kids out with you!’ but that doesn’t work when you’ve got an autistic teenager who’s bigger than you and has definite opinions on what he wants to do with his day, none of which involve leaving the house.
I suppose I could watch TV. *gasp* But whatever I see there has already been done, hasn’t it?
I should probably count my blessings. As long as I’m not finding inspiration to write something new it means I can work on editing my novel. The going is frustrating on that front as well. The re-write I’m currently working on (a section that I’m not pleased with) requires me to fully get into character. That’s difficult when you’ve either got someone looking over your shoulder asking, ‘What are you doing?’ or simply being interrupted every ten minutes.
Oh, shut up whining, Linda!
Needless to say I’m looking forward to my weekend trip next week. I plan to view the house in which I’m staying through the eyes of the girl my main character brings home with him. Her fascination will be my path to detail.
As for finding inspiration, who knows? On top of a fresh perspective on my major work, I may have time to find inspiration for a number of other things as well. I certainly won’t be sitting in my room the whole time I’m gone. Such freedom is a rarity for a single mom, especially during summer vacation.
So I’m in the grocery store today. You can probably figure out from the title where this is going.
For my international friends I’ll share some background to the story. Recently in Canada we did away with the physical penny, which means if you’re paying with cash they now round it off to the closest 5 cents. Not so with debit and credit cards. So my bill came to $4.07. I asked for a plastic bag and the cashier added another $.06 onto the bill to make it $4.13, which is what I paid with my debit card.
I commented to the cashier, since there was no one else in line, that the government and/or the stores are really making money on this penny thing, because if I was paying cash she would have asked me for $4.05 but the plastic bag would have cost me $.10 because $4.13 would have rounded up to $4.15. She looked confused. So I went on to explain that the difference between $4.05 and $4.15 was more than the $.06 that the bag cost but by that time I’d lost her. She was staring in the other direction looking for customers (that weren’t there) and ignoring me.
More and more I’m seeing this. As the kids come out of school and start working in stores with cash registers that tell them how much change to give (when they deal with cash at all) they’re at a complete loss if they ever have to figure it out for themselves. I should probably add that the cashier I had today was in her early twenties.
Between this and text shorthand, I’m all but ready to give up on the future of mankind.
According to a blog post I read here at Brainsnorts the most important part about opening a novel is the first four sentences. So I decided to go to my bookshelf and pick up four novels at random and check it out, to see if there’s anything the first few sentences have in common in each book. These were my selections:
Standing Stones – The Best stories of John Metcalf
“Single Gents Only” (a short story)
After David had again wrested the heavy suitcase from his father’s obstinately polite grip and after he’d bought the ticket and assured his mother he wouldn’t lose it, the three of them stood in the echoing booking hall of the railway station. His mother was wearing a hat that looked like a pink felt Christmas pudding.
David knew that they appeared to others as obvious characters from a church-basement play. His father was trying to project affability or benevolence by moving his head in an almost imperceptible nodding motion while gazing with seeming approval at a Bovril advertisement.
This seems to me like a promising story. There is movement in it in the form of the fact that these people are going somewhere. The fact that the son takes the suitcase from his father tells me that he’s an adult. I want to know where they’re going. The description is good enough that I can imagine the scene easily.
The Marks of Cain by Tom Knox
Simon Quinn was listening to a young man describe how he’d sliced off his own thumb.
“And that,” said the man, “was the beginning of the end. I mean, cutting off your thumb, with a knife, that’s not nothing, is it? That’s serious shit. Cutting your own thumb off. Fucked my bowling.”
Okay, that was more than four sentences, but they were short ones. Shoot me. This opening is interesting. It doesn’t have much in the area of description, but how much description do we need? We can easily imagine the blood involved. Who is the man to Simon and why is he listening to such a horrific story? I want to know more.
It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance. Mrs. Baird’s was like a thousand other Highland bed-and-breakfast establishments in 1945; clean and quiet, with fading floral wallpaper, gleaming floors, and a coin-operated hot-water geyser in the lavatory. Mrs. Baird herself was squat and easygoing, and made no objection to Frank lining her tiny rose-sprigged parlor with the dozens of books and paper with which he always traveled.
I met Mrs. Baird in the front hall on my way out.
This opens very nicely indeed. The description is lush and from it we gather that Mrs. Baird is not going to be a central character, as we don’t get her first name from the narrator. Best of all, the very first sentence tells us that something mysterious will happen! Again, I want to read more!
I stare up through gaps in the sea-grass parasol at the bluest of skies, summer blue, Mediterranean blue, with a contented sigh. Christian is beside me, stretched out on a sun lounge. My husband – my hot, beautiful husband, shirtless and in cut-off jeans – is reading a book predicting the collapse of the Western banking system. By all accounts, it’s a page-turner.
Here we have two shades of blue and a good-looking man reading a boring book.
So. What do three of these openings have in common? Amazing descriptiveness, movement, action and/or gore and some element which makes us want to know more. What’s going to happen? Who are these people? Why are they; 1. in a train station; 2. cutting off their own thumbs; 3. staying in a place where someone is going to disappear?
And number 4? It tells us what not to do. By all accounts, it’s a page-turner. 😉
Thank you again to Brainsnorts for the idea for this post!
This probably won’t be a very popular post but here I go with it anyway. With the invention of e-publishing new writers are coming out of the woodwork. These days anyone can publish their own work without having to pay money to do so. ANYONE. Who can be held accountable for what goes out there? It used to be that when you bought a book there was at least someone out there who believed in it. Sure, there was still a lot of crappy writing, but at least if you didn’t like a book you could sell it at a garage sale and get some of your money back.
I may not be in a position myself to say what I write is good, or that I won’t eventually go the route of self-publishing, but I’ve been reading long enough to distinguish what’s good and what is crap and I am appalled at how unbalanced it has become in the wrong direction. Up until last year I had never failed to finish reading a novel, no matter how bad it was. This year alone I have thrown up my hands in disgust at no less than three novels on my e-reader. Nowadays everyone thinks they can write. Many of the people self-publishing have long forgotten what they learned in Grade 3 grammar, and I hate to think what novels would look like without spellcheck.
For me it came to the forefront with ’50 Shades of Grey’. The author, E.L. James, actually said in an interview she understands that people who read her books are people who don’t normally read. I can easily believe it. When I read it I thought to myself, great! If this can get published anything can. By God was I right. Everybody and their sister said the same thing! I’m sure editorial slush piles have never been bigger, making it that much harder for talented writers to get noticed.
Will we get to the point eventually where there are more writers than there are readers? The way it’s going now I wouldn’t be surprised. I copied and pasted the following from Kindle’s website. I think I can keep my tongue firmly planted in cheek and let this speak for itself:
Do I need any special skills to publish with Kindle Direct Publishing?
Kindle Direct Publishing does the basic work for you, but if your content contains a lot of special formatting, a bit of knowledge in HTML may come in handy.
In closing, if you’re serious about writing a novel and you want to publish it, take a class or two. Brush up on your skills first. Make more than the effort to learn HTML and learn how to write! Hold yourself accountable for putting out a good product. Perhaps we can keep future of publishing out of the crapper after all.
You are unique. I know you wish you weren’t. I know you don’t want to be thought of as different, but the fact is that you are.
There are not thousands of you, or even hundreds. There is you.
No one else thinks the way you do. No one looks like you or sees the things you see in exactly the way you see them.
No one even smells like you; you are sweeter than the rest.
When you go, the people who have known you will grieve, but they will also learn to smile. They will remember the joy with which you illuminated everyone around you.
Be proud to be unique. And know that the way you touch the earth is precious.
lindaghill.com 