We writers can be a vain bunch. We write because we think what we have to say is magnificently important, and we think that we articulate these magnificently important thoughts in magnificently impressive ways. Often this is true. Sometimes it is not. Even when it isn’t true, we’ll never admit it. Such is the nature of the writer. So why, for fuck’s sake, would anybody ever want to write under a name other than his or her own?
Well, a lot of the best writers in history wrote under pen names, so there’s gotta be some sort of legitimate reason, right? Mark Twain, O. Henry, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre under the male name, Currer Bell. Now, luckily we live in a world where female writers don’t need to write under male pen names, but there are still some definite upsides to writing under a name other than your own. One of the main things is that you can deal with topics unabashedly and without inhibitions. Maybe you’re writing a pretty intense and intimate love scene, and you’re a little hesitant to send it out and risk friends or family reading it. There is also a certain allure to operating in secret. It helps the mind go to a different, more writerly place. By day, you are yourself and you go by your given name—but at night, when writing, you are somebody else entirely. A new name, a new person, an anonymous writer who writes unapologetically and is daring and bold. A Jekyll and Hyde of sorts, except rather than turning into a frightful monster, you just turn into a frightfully good writer. You hole yourself up in your atelier in the wee morning hours, a different self, tapping away at your keyboard, channeling a new personality, creating a work of genius. Sounds fun, right? But here are some drawbacks. First off, it’s hard to choose a pen name. You think it’d be easy, right? Wrong. This is your alternate identity. This is your writer name. This is a huge deal. Make it right. Think about good writer names—Flaubert. Twain. Kipling. Orwell. Pynchon. Hemingway. Salinger. Fitzgerald. The list goes on and on. But these are just last names, even. First names are even harder. Personally, I find that emulating J.K. Rowling in this respect is a good option. E.E. Cummings. E.M. Forster. All great writers, all great names. Don’t even get me started on three part names—David Foster Wallace, Garth Risk Halberg, etc.—if you want to go the three-part pseudonym route, more power to you. Another drawback is that you may feel like you forfeit some ownership of your work. Let’s say you publish your novel, your baby that you’ve been working on for years, and you do it under a pseudonym. Let’s say it becomes a massive success, because of course it does. What then? All the recognition belongs to your pseudonym. But then again, sounds kind of fun, right? Going to a reading or a book signing, having an entirely different signature for your author-self, and then going home and answering to a different name. Many of us already feel like we’re somebody else when we write. We silence our phones, lock our doors, and shut out the world so we can focus on what we love doing—writing. Why not adopt an entirely new identity for this side of ourselves? Why not create a new name. Some readers, much like seasoned smokers and their tobacco, or heavy drinkers and their liquor, settle in time to favoring their own particular brand and flavor over any other. It’s not that we can’t read another kind of book, bum a cigarette from a stranger, or order a new drink every now and then, and even enjoy it, but given the choice, we will return to our familiar and beloved territory, to the themes and authors we prefer, to the aftertaste and the smell we are used to.
I am a hard-core science-fiction and fantasy literature lover. I have grown-up in Narnia and in outer space in equal parts. I read many other fiction and non-fiction books, stories and poems, and love many of them, but my hometown is in a deep dark magical forest aboard a flying spaceship. In the last years, with the ease of reaching and acquiring new and old literature online and having to settle less and less for what the library simply has to offer that day, I have mostly chosen to read well within my genre, regardless of publishing date. Recently, I have been reading outside of my comfort zone, cast away by choice from my usual haunting grounds into new lands, to places with new rules and different textures. Contemporary (non sci-fi/fantasy) Fiction! This experience has heightened a duality I find about reading: 1. A good story is a good story for any reader Just like a good beer, a well-written book telling a compelling story can go down as smoothly as the one made by your favorite brewery, if not better than some of the local brews, even if it’s made from ingredients you are not used to. It does not matter that you haven’t read anything related, perhaps it’s even better, since it allows you to enjoy the act of consuming the book, the smoke, the drink, without the constant comparison to others you’ve had like it. The act of telling a good story is supra-genre. 2. Past works in the genre is a major part of the ability to properly appreciate a book In the years I have been reading sci-fi and fantasy I have amassed an extensive knowledge regarding the history of the genre, the major works and evolutions, the significant authors and influencers. Any piece I read can easily be compared to dozens of others similar or related to it, and put into context. I felt that knowledge gave me a better understanding of where a work stands within its own field compared to while reading outside of my normal genre. I could tell better if a subject, a plot-line, a scene, has been already beaten to death by other writers to the point where you are now pounding the ground above the grave of the flogged horse, and where creation harnessed originality to become unique, or sophistication paid homage to other works in the past in a satisfying manner. Disarmed of most of this insight, I have a harder time discerning between the two. In the same allegory we started with, we need to have a few cocktails, several cigars, before we can enjoy a perfectly crafted Martini or an exquisite Cuban. Once I stopped being disappointed none of the stories were set in the far future, and stopped waiting for a dragon to appear or somebody to do some magic, I actually had a great and very interesting time. There are pieces of the shattered truth we are all looking for in any creation. Still, somewhere in the middle I snuck away to take a break in the arms of a proper science fiction book to recharge my batteries. Print vs. Digital. The debate has been ongoing, though some might say it slowly becomes more and more obsolete as the digital world becomes more and more pervasive.
The rhetoric of this debate seems to revolve around losses and gains, particularly when it comes to books. From EBooks and Kindles we gain ease of access and portability, but we lose a level of focus and attention and apparently the ability to sleep. Book lovers everywhere defend the physicality of books—their touch, their smell, and their feel. I always seem to land somewhere in the middle, using whichever format, print or digital, is presented to me, usually based on the length of hold lists at the library. However, a recent article in the New York Times, “Our (Bare) Shelves, Our Selves” by Teddy Wayne, adds a new facet to the argument for the physicality of print culture—that of history. Wayne begins the article lamenting the switch from records and CDs to digital MP3s, remembering his own childhood spent rifling through his parent’s old vinyl records only to discover the enchantment of The Beatles. There’s an intellectual benefit to having print culture in the house he argues, with the support of several scientific studies, but, more concerning to me, is his suggestion that something is lost in terms of sentimentality: “And what of sentiment? Jeff Bezos himself would have a hard time defending the nostalgic capacity of a Kindle .azw file over that of a tattered paperback. Data files can’t replicate the lived-in feel of a piece of beloved art. To a child, a parent’s dog-eared book is a sign of a mind at work and of the personal significance of that volume.” There’s something to be said for the act of “perusing,” of looking through a person’s shelves, at their books or magazines or CDs, and trying to discern something about them. I remember reading Siddhartha in high school, awed and impressed by the impact of such a slender book, rearing to tell my mom (the one bookish ally in my family) all about it, but at the same time, afraid of her conservative southern baptist reaction. I raved about it to her anyways, only to be led to a whole shelf in my dad’s office dedicated to Hermann Hesse novels. Magister Ludi was her recommendation for what to read next and then, I knew: my mom was way cooler than I thought and was quite possibly, at one time in her life, a total hippie. In the library world, we refer to it as “reading history,” and it comes with important qualifications about privacy because, as the recent debate over Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s teenage library check-outs shows, you can glean a lot about someone’s past and future plans from their reading history. For some of us, books are a large part of who we are; certain books have shaped us in complete and inexplicable ways. So I have a little challenge for you. Can you tell I like challenges? Don’t worry, I did the challenge too: Embrace the physical. Delve into your inner shelf. Think about the books that have shaped you as a human being. Not necessarily your favorite books or even the books you’ve read the most, but the books that have changed you. Find a copy of them in print. Got them? Okay, now line them up and take a picture of your shelfie. Now embrace the digital, give up a little bit of your privacy, and post the picture for all of us to see and peruse and feel a little more connected. If you are feeling extra brave, you can even explain why you chose the books you did. See below for my shelfie, explained: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: It’s not so much that it’s Little Women more that it’s this particular copy of Little Women; my grandmother’s copy, which she read aloud when my mother had the mumps; the same copy my mom then gave to me. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly: I read this book at the exact right time. It’s about the struggle between selfishly chasing your dreams and remaining loyal to those you love. I read it in high school at a time when leaving my hometown, let alone the whole state, was exactly what I wanted, but also the scariest, most selfish thing I could do. The main character leaves her family to go to school and so did I. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: This book made me fall in love with language--how it can be fun and playful and twisted and heartbreaking all at the same time. That love of language, and especially language at its best, made me want to be an English major. Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor: This is a placeholder for the St. Louis University City Public Library copy of Wise Blood, which I so devilishly defamed with pencil markings and the deepest hopes of my soul. Never before or since have I ever been so haunted by a book. I felt that I was Hazel Motes, and in identifying with him I was both inspired and terrified. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: This book taught me that novels--and people--could be oh so many things at once. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell: I was reading this book when I finally admitted to myself that I wanted to be a writer. It was something I always wanted, but a want I had never made explicit. And then there was Karen Russell, weird and dark and from Florida and I thought, I could do this too. Most of us, unfortunately, work in jobs that we find boring or useless to our own personal lives. As I have ventured into the corporate world, I find that my days can become long and drawn out without much excitement. Since I spend most of my days like this, it seems that I am falling into a routine where most of my nights are spent also doing things that require little or no real imaginative thought, because why would I want to come home from a monotonous day at work just to have to jump start my brain into any critical or deep thinking?
If this does not describe you or your work environment, never let go of your job! Recently, during down time at work, I have been doing some creative story writing. Granted, these stories could never get published, and might not even be worth reading, but they provide some creative entertainment and it forces my brain to think in a different way than I normally do for my job. Ever since starting this creative venture, my days at work are more enjoyable and it seems to help my brain clear itself of fog and helps me focus on my work again. This is my own example, but I believe that people need some sort of way to break out of the same thought patterns that we inhabit for 40 hours a week. Whether it’s taking a book to work and reading it at lunch or taking a few minutes to write out your thoughts or plan a dream vacation during some down time, we as people need a spark to jolt us out of the rut that we tend to fall into day in and day out. Of course, I’m not saying that we need to work less, but there are ways that we can engage the other half of our brain during the day, and I think it will actually help productivity. It’s the same thing as leaving your desk to get some coffee and coming back again to find that the problem you were working on doesn’t seem as big or as bad. We need a refresh button. This doesn’t even have to be in the context of a job either. It can apply to any situation where we have to continually think or do something the same way. Obviously, as people who write and read, these are our go to ways to refresh our minds. It is worth the improvement to your professional (or otherwise) productivity to allow your mind to think of other things, especially creative ones. By thinking outside the box, outside the average, we can not only allow our mind to catch its breath, but we can begin to combine our creative and logical brains to tackle problems at work or in life in general. Taking time to give our minds the ability to make a creative spark can be a benefit that everyone, and especially yourself, can enjoy. Most of us, unfortunately, work in jobs that we find boring or useless to our own personal lives. As I have ventured into the corporate world, I find that my days can become long and drawn out without much excitement. Since I spend most of my days like this, it seems that I am falling into a routine where most of my nights are spent also doing things that require little or no real imaginative thought, because why would I want to come home from a monotonous day at work just to have to jump start my brain into any critical or deep thinking? If this does not describe you or your work environment, never let go of your job! People often mistake me for being a grammar queen. They assume, because I read so much, because I was an English major, because I am a writer, that I am also an expert on grammar.
This is not quite the case. The reading and writing and English majoring did force me to be more aware of grammar, to see the ways in which punctuation adds to meaning, to garner an innate sense of how to write correctly, but I am no stickler for the rules and am often scared to admit that I don’t even know the rule in the first place. Friends always seem so surprised when I have to Google their grammar questions, same as them. I always felt a little bit like a fraud. My passion was for books and language and stories, so I should also know the ins and outs of grammar. I was like a surgeon who knew nothing of basic anatomy, dangerously faking my way through, sewing sentences and cutting commas as I saw fit. The thing I am learning now, as I take jobs and internships related to writing and communications, is that all those people, all those assumptions they made: they weren’t wrong. I need to know my grammar. So I’m daring to ask and find answers to the grammar questions I’ve always been afraid to ask. And I’m asking you to join me. Please leave your own grammar queries and quandaries in the comments section. Do it. Do it right now. I’m hoping to have a recurring Grammar Q&A post so please, please send in your grammar questions and keep a lookout for the first Q&A. After several excruciating months working on the second edition of Francis Daulerio's poetry collection If & When We Wake, we are happy to say that we are green lighting the release. The book is set to release in all major retailers on 12/22/2015, just in time for Christmas and New Years. Yes, if you order this book via Amazon, you should be able to apply two-day shipping to it (Free for Prime members) and get it before Christmas. If you aren't in a Christmas-like frenzy to purchase it, then we would love for you to buy the book from us directly. We are launching a preorder on 12/17/2015 through 12/22/2015. Books ordered between those dates will receive a complimentary ecopy of the book and potentially something else. We are randomizing who receives extra goodies, so they are not guaranteed. If you preorder a book with us, we will ship them out starting 12/26-1/4, as our editors return from vacation. Books are shipped via First Class USPS mail. Estimated shipping time is 2-5 business days, but you should allow more time due to the holiday season. After December 22, 2015, all orders made through our site will be considered regular purchases and may not receive extra items. Random readers will receive something free....others may receive an invitation to a Skype author Q&A that we are working to set up in January. It’s been a little over a week since 2015 closed its doors on another (hopefully) successful NaNoWriMo. Everyone hopes to hit 50,000 words, but if you fell a bit short this year, try not to be too disappointed. Remember that NaNoWriMo is our way of banishing the perfection, doubt, and anxiety that causes some of us to rewrite sentences ten times before we’re even marginally satisfied. I had the opportunity to speak with two of my scribbling friends in the middle of NaNoWriMo this year about their adventures and how the event is about so much more than word count. So even if you’re already planning and plotting next year’s project, take some time to read through Storm’s and Whitney’s experiences as you reflect on the ups and downs of your own NaNoWriMo adventure in 2015.
What type of novel are you working on this year and how does it compare to the novels you’ve written in previous years? Storm Nevel: I don’t really know what the genre would be called that my work would usually fall under. I guess modern YA fantasy? A lot of it is really dark as well. This book is more of a dark comedy/supernatural tale. Don’t get me wrong, I like vampires and werewolves as much as the next person, but I’ve always been really intrigued by ghosts. So it’s about ghosts falling in love. Whitney Klahom Thompson: I’m actually doing something completely different this year, which is both exciting and terrifying. For the past four (yes, four!) NaNos, all the stories I’ve written have been set in the same universe and involve some of the same characters. This year, though, the story that wouldn’t let me go was a Victorian Gothic remix of sorts. Basically, I’m smashing together a bunch of underappreciated/underdeveloped/misinterpreted female characters from Victorian Gothic fiction (e.g. Alicia Audley from Lady Audley’s Secret, Laura from Carmilla, Christine Daae from The Phantom of the Opera) and making them team up to fight supernatural evil. It’s been fun. Why do you participate in NaNoWriMo? SN: I like the challenge of setting a goal and reaching it. I come from a long line of people with a lot of ambition and very little motivation. I’m constantly being thrown off track by another new idea that I just have to run with so it’s very easy for me to lose focus. Giving myself that narrow 30-day window makes it more real. “This is the goal. Here’s the time I have. What am I really capable of?” WKT: It’s probably the best way I’ve found to actually get a first draft down on paper. Between the lofty word count goals and my own hypercompetitive streak, I find it really easy to hold myself accountable during NaNo. Can you tell us about one of your most memorable NaNoWriMo experiences? SN: This is actually only my second time actively participating in NaNoWriMo. The first time was about three years ago and I learned about it a week into November and I thought I should try to go easy on myself. So instead of writing a novel, I wrote a collection of short stories. I do not recommend this course of action. I drove myself crazy trying to keep track of everything and since I was horribly organized when it came to my writing at that point and hadn’t even considered making a chart (or anything remotely helpful) I ended up missing my word count by about 10k and feeling utterly drained. I burned myself out basically, a surprisingly easy thing to do, and needed almost three years to recover. WKT: My third year, I managed to make it to 62,000 words before the end of the month, so that was pretty cool. We all have so many different responsibilities to manage in our daily lives. How and when do you find the time to write while managing those responsibilities? SN: I’ve been very fortunate these last few years to have a job that has a decent amount of downtime and a lot of scrap paper lying around. I come home at the end of a day with roughly a dozen or more little notes to myself or bits of dialogue that I’ve written throughout the day to organize. I also always try to give myself at least 30 minutes of just quiet to try and organize my thoughts. WKT: If I knew, I’d be a lot more productive the rest of the year! I suppose for me, the fact that I’m not just thinking about my stories while I’m writing does a lot. I’ll be at work, filing and alphabetizing away, and the whole time I’m also thinking, “How is Flo going to find out Helen’s big secret? What if I have Caitlin do x instead of y – how would she and Kris react to that?” I guess I’m always writing, in a sense, and that makes me more motivated to put it all down on paper. How do you keep yourself on task? SN: I remind myself that writing is what I love. No matter how crazy and frustrating it can be, it makes me happy just to put words on paper. Plus, I like that tired feeling I get after real productivity has occurred. WKT: Usually it’s easy for me to stay on task because I just really like what I’m writing. I like my plots and I like my characters, especially when they get to snark at each other. This year it’s a little more complicated because I’m effectively writing historical fiction, and I still find myself having to fact-check, which can lead to going down a Google rabbit hole if I’m not careful. Some people are really particular about their writing atmosphere. Do you have a particular routine, regimen, or requirement that might seem odd to other people? SN: I write almost everything in longhand before I type it up. I like how my handwriting looks and I like the feel of a writing utensil in my hand. I never start a new idea on my computer, though I have started writing something and then when I type it I’ll continue the thread from there. But writing longhand is definitely one of the things I have to do. I know a lot of writers prefer music when they’re working, and most of the time I do too, but there are times where there’s so much going on in my head/the story that I need total quiet to focus. I also read my work aloud, under my breath, to make sure what I’m saying and how I’m describing things is actually what I want to say and describe. WKT: I’m really weird about my laptop battery. I’m the kind of person who gets freaked out if it dips below 70 percent or something, so if I can be plugged into an outlet, you can bet I will be. That’s the only thing I’m particular about, though. What’s your favorite caffeine source? SN: Green tea and/or blue raspberry Frooties candies. WKT: Coffee with plenty of half-and-half, mochas, black tea (Earl Grey or Irish breakfast), and chocolate-covered espresso beans. If it has chocolate in it, I’m all for it. Why do you write? Or why do you think you write? SN: I know I’m supposed to say something about writing for the sake of wanting to write, but honestly I’ve wanted to be a professional fiction writer since I was 11 years old. I want to provide for my family with my writing. I feel that I have important and relevant things to say and I think my writing can help me say those things. I want my work to make a difference, no matter how small it may be. I have stories to tell and I plan on telling them to a lot of people. WKT: I write because writing makes me push myself. I continually have to step into new shoes and see the world through fresh eyes. As a writer, I can pretend I’m an actress, a superhero, a pirate, or an artist – sometimes all at the same time. Any encouragement or advice for your fellow NaNoWriMo participants? SN: “Never give up, never surrender.” Sincerely. What you have to say matters. WKT: Don’t be afraid to let your characters steer the story, even if you’re an obsessive planner like me. Sometimes they have great ideas. Let them speak.
After reading Emily Kiernan’s novel Great Divide, one would naturally be interested to hear how about how this unique story came to be. Fortunately for us, Emily was gracious enough to spend some time chatting about her novel and what went into its creation. If it is not already apparent by her writing, Emily makes it obvious to the reader, through her answers here, that crafting a story with deep and meaningful language is a true passion of hers. Kiernan gives us the rare ability to hear about her writing process, the journey that this novel took her on, and why Great Divide is so close to her heart. I invite you to hear from Emily as she answers questions from an interested reader, and learn more about how Great Divide took shape and why she thinks you should read it!
Rituals help keep us sane, they help keep us on track, and they make us who we are. Many of these rituals are shared across the masses—we can’t start the day without a cup of coffee, we eat the same breakfast and read the same newspaper every day. There’s comfort there. Regularity. The hand of expectedness resting on our shoulder.
The true test of routine is when you feel inconsolably off without doing something. When you feel guilty about it, even. If you’ve been jogging every morning for three weeks and then one day you don’t jog, it messes with you a bit. Everything else that day feels off. And then the next day, when you go out for your morning jog, the sweet relief hits you like that first sip of morning coffee. Again, that reassuring hand of expectedness and routine. So when you create a routine of productivity, there’s great power in that. It’s almost more powerful than discipline—its dependency. We depend on our routines to keep us in the right frame of mind, so if a component of your routine is to, say, write for an hour every morning, and you become dependent on that hour of writing to feel at ease and yourself for the rest of the day. I’m not saying that routine is entirely unrelated to discipline—it takes discipline to formulate a routine, certain aspects of a routine, at least. A morning jog, a healthier breakfast, getting to work fifteen minutes early, writing for an hour at a specific time each day—all these things aren’t as easy as just having a cup of coffee or reading through the New York Times. But what I’m trying to get at here is that once you get past the point of discipline and to the point of dependency--when you’re dependent on productivity—that is a very good place to be. Particularly for writers. Writing is fun. Anybody who wants to be a writer definitely enjoys sitting and writing. But writing is also work. Hard work. Thankless work, a lot of the time. Work that people sort of cock their heads at when you tell them “I’m a writer.” It’s easy to skip a day, and then three, and then a week, and then months. And when you’re skipping all that time, you're forming a counter-productive routine. One where part of your ritual is “not writing.” And it’s a comfortable place to be. There’s a whole bunch of shit to do in this world that beats sitting at a desk by yourself and writing something that has a higher chance of failing than succeeding. Why sit and edit a draft of something for four hours when you could just plop down on a couch and watch a football game? What starts as a chore becomes a habit. Habit then becomes routine. And once something is a routine, you become dependent on it. In a nutshell, what I’m saying is that it is important to write every day until you feel like you’ve let yourself down when you don’t. Grow dependent on the habit for your own peace of mind, and good work will come out of it. It’s bound to. Laundry lists of book-titles—either in our heads or jotted down in notebooks, we all have them somewhere. Books to read, books to re-read, favorite books: all of these lists are ever-evolving, ever-growing, but there are always a handful of titles that keep their spots, particularly on the favorite books list.
This list is especially meaningful to those of us who aspire to write, as the books we read are usually the motivators behind our decision to write. In the post-Thanksgiving spirit, here are three books I’m thankful to have read, because these are the three books that made me decide that I wanted to write. The Call of the Wild - Jack London Jack London’s most renowned work was the first book I read that made me consider writing. I was in elementary school and chose the book for a book report. It was the first time I’d ventured out of my own head while reading, if that makes sense. The Yukon became so real to me, and the book ignited a childhood obsession in me. Frontier life yielded such fantastic stories and such unique characters. The Yukon was “where” I started—I began writing my own stories based on the gold rush, Yukon life, and The Iditarod. Also, The Call of the Wild made me see that it’s possible to write about a nonhuman protagonist and still level with the human brain. The story follows Buck through his journey from California to the wild, and along the way he evolves into a toughened animal from the house-pet he once was. To me, a young boy at the time, this was an amazing concept—to jump inside the mind of a dog and hear a story told about his journey through the world (Dave Eggers’ short story “After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned” is a marvelous example of writing from a dog’s perspective, also). London’s The Call of the Wild, in a nutshell, provided me with an example of the adventure that can be had through reading, and it made me long to find the same adventure through writing my own stories. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse This book became somewhat of my bible after I first read it in high school. I took it on every plane-ride and read as much of it as I could. What London taught me about looking out in the world for stories to write, Hesse taught me about looking into the individual. Sometimes the changes that occur within oneself are just as riveting as Buck and Spitz fighting to the death. Having read Siddhartha at around seventeen years of age, I’d become more aware of my own interiority, and it was encouraging to see that writing about one’s interior life can be interesting enough for somebody else to read. Dozens of times, even. Animal Farm - George Orwell We read this in my English class when I was a freshman in high school, and it was my first exposure to a political satire. Learning about history through fiction was something I’d never even considered before, but I also realized that I could write stories by taking things from my world, contemporary events, and inserting them into a narrative under a name like “Squealer” or “Snowball.” I also learned to appreciate the meticulous work that goes into writing—the research, the knowledge, the refining from draft to draft. So many of the small details in this book had significance in regard to the allegory, every bit represents something else, something real. To take the time to do that made me want to try it myself (I’ve yet to succeed in any attempts), and opened my eyes to the fact that there’s more to fiction writing than just writing fiction. Readers and publishers have long since embraced the young adult fiction genre. More advanced than juvenile fiction, but not as mature as adult fiction, young adult is an in-between genre that has the ability to entice readers of all ages. Sometimes the lines between young adult and adult content are so blurred that literary agents aren’t sure which titles should belong in which genre. I became a fan of the genre before my tenth birthday and will probably remain a fan forever. As much as we may complain about their immaturity, irresponsibility, or short-sightedness, teenagers have an amazing ability to see the world as it is: hopelessly blemished, yet full of hope. There are endless opportunities for authors in exploring that kind of perspective, but my hope for the next decade is that we will see some sort of resurgence of the 20-something narrator. We may not be the young, free-spirited souls we were at 16, but our stories are far from over, and I would enjoy reading more of them.
Although I am a more educated, capable, competent, and, at least in my opinion, interesting person at 24 than I was at 16, I still don’t have it together, whatever that elusive “it” might be. And here’s a secret: none of my friends have it together either. Neither do their friends. I’m not sure who decided to spread the idea that your twenties will be the best decade of your life, but that person was lying. I think, for most of us, our twenties are a frustrating decade of transition. Unless you’re some sort of child prodigy or are fortunate enough to not be suffocating under the weight of your student loans, there’s a good chance your twenties will be the worst decade of your life. Adulting is hard. Student loans are awful. Your dreams will seem impractical. You won’t be able to binge-watch Netflix without feeling guilty about the complete lack of productivity you’re exhibiting. You’ll drink too much wine and cry about your life. Most of your friends will move away. You might move away. What you think you want out of life will change more than you’d like to admit. It’s awful and awesome at the same time, and it will be an amazing story. You should write about it. Reading books and listening to music are two of my favorite things to do. And yet, the combination of books and music has always been puzzling to me. Do they fit together? And I don’t mean listening to music while studying for school; I mean sitting down with a good novel with your headphones in. Some people prefer to read in complete silence. Others listen to music while reading, either to enhance the experience or block out outside distractions. Authors even look to music for inspiration. But, for those who listen to music, how do you figure out the right kind? It’s hard to listen to music with lyrics because you can start focusing on the song instead of the words of the story. And when you choose instrumental music you are then setting a tone for your reading experience so you have to be careful. Do you go with classic Bach or a rock album’s karaoke version? Is there a place for soundtracks to novels?
I usually don’t read with music because I can never create the right atmosphere. But it got me thinking nonetheless so I did the first thing I could think of, which was to turn to Google. And that’s where I discovered BookTrack. Www.Booktrack.com is a very intriguing new way to read a book. It was created in 2011 and its main goal is, “syncing music, effects, and ambient sound to text, helping your inner imagination come alive.” The website has made thousands of eBooks available, some free but most for purchase, each with a custom audio track that plays as you read. The audio tracks are crafted specifically for each book to create a whole new experience and the music automatically paces to your reading speed. So the soundtrack changes as the settings and the mood of the book change. Imagine reading the beginning of The Wizard of Oz with the sounds of the whirring winds of a tornado and racing music as Dorothy grabs Toto and runs for shelter. Well now you can actually do it. Plus, you can use the BookTrack Studio and create your own soundtrack whether you’re an author or a reader. It’s an interesting idea. When the company started out, a lot of people had things to say about it. Some people think it’s insulting to books. Books create wonderful worlds that you can be captivated by already, without the help of music. Other people say why not make the experience more multimedia? Especially in today’s world where we are constantly obsessing over the newest technologies and everywhere you go, people have headphones in. Because this has been around for a few years now and I am just learning about it now doesn’t bode well for book soundtracks as the “future of reading,” but I wouldn’t write it off just yet. I think there is a place for it. I think it can succeed the most in children’s novels like The Wizard of Oz or Sherlock Holmes. It can be a great way to get younger children to pay attention and immerse themselves in the world of the story. And then hopefully, they can begin to understand the magic of reading. Go check out the website and tell us what you think! You are walking alone in a dark forest, hiding the stolen papers under your sweater, taking delicate steps in order to avoid making any noise so that they will not hear you as you sneak between the river and their base camp, a mere 50 feet away. In the darkness, your movement is achingly slow, but you know that going slowly will be the best form of protection that you can give yourself and the important papers you are carrying. As you start to head away from their camp…CRASH!
Your cat just knocked your water glass off the table in the next room. Wait, I’m not in the dark forest on a top secret and urgent mission..? No. I’m just sitting here in my sweats on the couch, reading about it. It’s not me. Darn it. After you get over the shock of being forcibly thrown back into reality by your pesky cat, you begin to reflect on how amazing it is that you actually felt like the character in your book. Your heart was racing, your breathing was hushed, and you weren’t even conscious of the fact that all you were actually doing was moving your eyes back and forth on a page really fast. Our minds are absolutely incredible for giving us the ability to completely forget our real lives and to become so absorbed into a story that we think that we are a real part of it. You know that you have found a gem of a book when this happens to you. If we, as readers, are not careful, this could also be dangerous. It is a treat to be able to be transported, but if this happens to us often, then we risk being too caught up in the story that we forget that we are the main character in our own stories, and that we need to live out our own lives. This can happen especially when reading a series, because you are constantly involved with the same characters, and you get to know them over an extended period of time. You get pulled in deeper and deeper into the world of the book, and once you put it down, your life does not seem that great. You’d much rather live in the book, right? I definitely went through a brief phase where I really wanted to go to Hogwarts. I loved that the Harry Potter series had the ability to carry me away, but it is also that same ability that can really cause problems for those of us who whole heartedly invest in stories. When reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I walked around angry for a week, because everyone at Hogwarts was mad at Harry for no real reason. It wasn’t because anything in my life had caused this, but because fictional characters were being mean to another fictional character. That is a problem. Allowing yourself to carry your story over into your real life can cause ‘reader’s depression’ as I like to call it. Your reality is skewed, and it will never live up to the perfectly crafted, more romantic, exciting, or fun world that an author has created. Usually, novels are not supposed to reflect day-to-day life, so it is ridiculous to expect them to. If you find yourself falling into this frame of mind, close the book and take a deep breath. Look around you and realize how awesome your life is; stop and appreciate what you do have and everything you have done, and be thankful for that. Then, after this refreshing dose of reality, go on to read to your hearts content. Breaking from reality to become enveloped into a great story is often an excellent way to learn, relax, and be entertained, but to not break from the story when you eventually step back into reality can be a challenge. You should treasure the times that books can pull you so far into their pages that it seems real, but when it’s time to put the book down, pull yourself back out into the world. That is, until next time. One of the stressors that comes with writing is the fear of being unoriginal—that every story or poem we could ever aspire to write has, more or less, been written already. These are often the best ideas we have too, the ones that we know have already been recorded and developed; usually by the writers we idolize, ipso facto writers we already believe to be better than ourselves.
So the question arises: where can a writer derive inspiration for a story that is, for the most part, uniquely theirs. Entirely original. I’ve found, quite simply, that if you want to write a story that a writer hasn’t already written, then you must look to other sources than writers. So where does this leave us? Here are a few places I’ve found inspiration outside of the pages of my favorite books. Art: I know little about art. Very little. I painted when I was younger, but between all the different extracurricular activities we juggle as youths, I no longer found the time to accommodate it. But, art yields close to infinite inspirational potential, and a lot of writers were amateur artists themselves. Kafka’s drawings, for example—Vonnegut’s as well. You can read the trial, you can read Slaughterhouse Five, but the drawings open new doors into the minds of these men. But again, we’re trying to find inspiration outside of the writerly world. Look at any painting, by any artist, renowned or unknown. Each brushstroke is like a sentence in a story, and the whole piece is a snapshot from a narrative—a narrative that remains untold. As a writer, you can take these snapshots—you can tell their stories. Look at the piece: what are the people in the piece thinking? How did they get to where they are in the painting? Do the people in the painting know each other? What are their individual stories? Extract characters, plot, a whole story from the canvas. It is easier than you might think. Music: Songs with lyrics are often stories. Even a stripped-down pop song tells a story. Some artists (to give a little insight into my own personal music tastes), like Iron & Wine, Cocorosie, The National, and others—their lyrics alone can stand by themselves as works of literature. However, they’re songs at the end of the day. Give the subjects of the song names. Give the story a setting. Expand on the details presented by the vocalist. Verbalize the mood set by the instruments. One minute of an instrumental can lead to hundreds of expressive words, if you give it the chance. Some people find that listening to music while they write is distracting, and I agree, to write well, you need to be strictly focused on writing. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t consider listening to music while you write as a sort of creative exercise. Songs without lyrics can be just as inspiring. Listen to some Stravinsky, some Bach, or some Haydn. What do you see? What scene unravels in your mind, let your mind un-spin like a spool of narrative thread, close your eyes and follow it to the end. Does it remind you of a character? Does the song itself create a character? Let yourself create a movie, almost, in your mind—let the song be the soundtrack and you fill in the rest. Listen to world music—let it introduce you to a setting you’d never envisioned before. Listen to the lyrics in languages you don’t know and extract the feeling from the voices. Focus only on inflection, on the long, drawn out wails, the gentle whispers. Sometimes the unsaid is more revelatory than words. Travel in your own mind, listen to the stories that you imagine being told. Then retell them. Too often we are limited to reading from a literary canon, we find ourselves simply reiterating novels that everybody’s already read. Escape the canon and find new inspiration. It’s safe to say that being alive today is pretty damn easy. We can order pizza on Twitter without writing out a single word. Just tweet a pizza emoji and a pizza is on its way to your door. We can answer any question within seconds, thanks to our good friend Google. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there was a time before emojis, before Twitter, and before either of these things could be used to put food on the table.
As writers, we are both blessed and cursed by our laptops. Pros: We can type anywhere and we can type quickly. We can send the stuff we type to basically anybody without thinking anything of it. We have tools like spell-check, automated word count, and the list goes on. But, sometimes we overlook the negatives of writing on laptops. For starters, it’s incredibly easy to get distracted when you have the vast entirety of the cyber-world at your fingertips. at 7:33 you might be on a roll, forging ahead in your novel, your story, your poem, what-have-you—but by 7:41 you could be watching cat videos on Facebook or taking “Which Disney princess are you?” quizzes on BuzzFeed. It’s also incredibly easy to over-edit when you’re writing on a laptop. You write a sentence, you re-read, you don’t like it, you re-write it, you re-read the revision, you still don’t like it, and the cycle goes on and on. Forty five minutes go by and you’ve re-written and erased the same sentence two dozen times without even being able to look back at each draft. All you have to show for your time and effort is blank white space with nothing to learn from. Sometimes, if only for a little while, it’s important to step back from the blue-light of your Macbook screen and write how writers wrote before computers, before typewriters even: paper and pen. Recently, I’ve experimented with writing by hand. I’ve found some interesting things.
Basically, especially during National Novel Writing Month, it is important to try new things and new ways of writing. As far as practicality and convenience go, the laptop can’t be beat. But sometimes a little shake-up is the push you need to allow your best work to be produced. Last weekend my family came for a visit. I have five nieces and nephews—all under the age of seven—so family visits incite as much joy as they do utter exhaustion and chaos. They also provide me with a lot of subjects for study: family interactions, child development, and the basic tenets of humanity (or how babies, technically, are different from dogs). This weekend, as the happily unmarried and blissfully childless aunt, naturally I spent the whole time observing and internally critiquing my siblings’ parenting skills.
While the intricacies of those critiques can be petty, one thing I noticed was the way in which parents shape the stories of their children’s lives. My twin nieces just reached the one-year mark on wobbly, bowed out legs, and already they have their own stories. MJ is the quiet observer, she likes to sit and watch, take the world in with her big, round eyes; Ceci is a little gymnast, crawling and climbing and terrorizing whatever she can find (including the cat’s litter box—blech!). MJ is calm and careful; she likes music and dancing. Ceci is rough and strong, a tomboy all the way. I struggled with this deterministic characterization all weekend. It’s so easy, and as a writer it’s rather fun, to categorize and characterize and compare, to imagine what all these little beings will be when they become complex and experienced adults. At the same time, I recognized how tenuous the role of parent can be. Parents are the keepers of their children’s stories until they are old enough to take control themselves, but at the same time there is a danger in being the story keeper, in forcing the character, in placing too many expectations and in so doing inviting the equivalent limitations. When you consistently compliment only a child’s skills in math or running, you are also, in a way, telling them they are not good at other things like music or dance; your ideas and personal preferences get transferred to your child and their story becomes narrowed. In her wonderful treatise on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott has a chapter on character in which she discusses the importance of knowing your characters: “…each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or don’t tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in?” (Lamott 45). She stresses the importance of a fully fleshed out character, even if not all of that information, not all of the things growing in the character’s emotional acre, make it into the book or the story or the poem. By having a complete physical and emotional picture of your character in your mind, you are one step closer to having a more realistic and compelling character on the page. However, just as I, the completely unqualified crazy aunt, am concerned about the effects of over characterization, so too is Lamott. She ends her chapter on character with a complete and cautionary reversal: “Just don’t pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them. It’s teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It’s that simple” (Lamott 53). Characters, like children, are meant to surprise; they are meant to disappoint, to astonish. Sometimes I look back on the writing I’ve done and wonder: Are all of my characters the same? Where is my diversity in personality? It’s so easy, in attempting to know are characters, in trying so hard to make them come alive and feel real, to become an overbearing parent of a writer. But as writers, we are not creating miniature versions of ourselves, we are raising our own fictitious children, and like parents, we must find the perfect balance between guiding, shaping, directing and stepping back, watching, and listening. We can imagine and cultivate our character’s emotional acres, but at some point we must be willing to let them grow and see what happens. |
Popular Topics
All
We Support Indie Bookshops |