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.
Who invented fruit flies? What are they good for except invading our kitchens and eating our fruit? Would they fill up the belly of a bird? No. And I refuse to let a bird into my kitchen to test the theory. How many tiny fruit fly bodies do I have to pick out of my wine? I get enough protein, thanks.
Every year it’s the same thing. You go into the grocery store and see them swarming around the onions and you think to yourself, the strawberries are far enough away from the onions that they shouldn’t have got into them, right?
Ha!
And so every year my kitchen is either on the wing, or littered with fruit fly traps. The home made ones are the best. A jar with a small piece of banana peel inside and cling wrap over top with a tiny hole. They can get in, but they can’t find their way out.
They are still and always will be a bloody nuisance though!
I wrote a flash fiction a little while ago called Puppet Master, and it got me to thinking about the characters I write. In a sense, I imagine them into being, but as they grow I can’t help but wonder if they were all my imagination. Perhaps they were always there, and I simply uncovered them.
When I ‘create’ a character, I take a single aspect of their personality. I then add a few details of their past, mix in a number of ‘what ifs’, and shove them into a cooker to see how they’ll handle it, suddenly I’m left with a complete person who evokes feelings of empathy, love, hatred, or what have you. The point is, they become real to me, and, I hope, my readers. After all, what we care about becomes real to us, does it not? Attachment to characters in a well written story can cause us to mourn when the story is over.
Going back to the Puppet Master story, I don’t feel that this is what I am. I may have the ultimate control over where my characters end up, but it is their own strengths and limitations which determines whether they will succeed or fail, live or die, as long as I remain true to them. Not to stay truthful when I write is, for me, a sin. That again is another argument in favour of the fact that they exist.
I have read many times about authors who feel that they are ‘God’ over their characters. Personally, if I felt that way I don’t think I’d be doing it right. My role is to simply make my characters known to as many people as I’m able. And if they came out of the oven delicious enough, people might even keep them alive through fan fiction. 😉
Being polite in this town I call home runs rampant. So much in fact that it normally takes twice as long to get through a four-way stop because everyone is insisting everyone else go first, regardless of who gets there first. Today takes the cake though.
I was sitting in a long line of cars at a red light waiting for it to go green. Finally we get to go (it was a long light); I was behind a Cavalier. We were almost at the light when the Cavalier almost rear-ended the pickup truck in front of him. Why did the pickup stop at the green light we’d been waiting so long for, almost causing an accident? To let a pedestrian cross in front of him on the red.
Fuuuuu…
As the population in this town ages – I believe it will be half empty in the next fifteen years – it seems that many of the drivers lack more and more the concept that the rules of the road are more important than being nice. And it’s scary! I’m trying to teach my son to drive around town, but it’s unrealistic. The first time he leaves town and goes to a big city he’ll be run into and over top of. There is no such thing as aggressive driving here. I actually had a ball when I went to Montreal last month, getting to experience that again after so long. At least when everyone is only looking out for themselves you know what to expect.
This little town with all its nice people is, I think, the most dangerous place I’ve ever gone out in public. Unless I’m walking of course.
As a writer I need time to myself. I need the opportunity to be able to think and imagine without distraction. I have to say it’s even more difficult now that I’m working on the second draft of my novel; the writing, when I was fully into it, could sometimes be done even amidst the chaos that is my children.
Every other weekend, typically, I have this time alone when the children are with their father. What I think annoys me the most is that it takes me a day to simply wind down from the twelve previous days I’ve had to take care of them. They leave on Friday night, but it’s usually not until sometime late Saturday afternoon that I am in a state of mind where I can sit and concentrate.
So why am I not working on it now? I’m coming up to a major edit and this post has been bothering me, niggling in my brain to be written. This is me, getting it over and done with. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
I also wanted to say that, writing a novel makes me feel a bit like this guy:
The Eye, by David Altmejd
Disturbing, isn’t he? I found him at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal two weekends ago. The hands are my characters, wrapping themselves around my brain and wanting to get out; the hole is the feeling I have as I pour forth my entire being into my writing, onto the pages.
I hope my writing talent is worthy of such sentiment. If it is, I’m sure to be successful.
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.
Just a quick update today for those of you who are following my sad little story. I was standing with my back to Nosehair when I took these pictures today so he wouldn’t see the final moments of his neighbour standing tall (though I think he could still see over my head).
You can see the large parts of the trunk falling. While compared to the news of the world this is really nothing, I find it sad when these old trees come down. We’ve lost a few in the last year. Hopefully Nosehair won’t be next.
Kira suggested yesterday that Charles might send over some of his Windemere characters to help out with Nosehair’s cause, to avoid becoming one of my newspapers. Charles?
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!
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