Every writer has to have an "elevator speech." Shoot, probably every artist does. Anybody who's selling something, in fact. But distilling 87,000 words into one or two sentences is hard. In an effort to hone my pitch, I'm going to ask you to come on an elevator ride with me while you are juggling coffee and a file folder and your backpack and lunch.
Here's my first effort:
Two children with secrets die in vastly different ways two decades apart. In Scarred but Smarter, reporter Eden Tremay carries the emotional scars of the first while she is drawn into the vortex created by the second.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
More on Bond, my alter ego....
For some reason, I can't create a clickable link to this website: http://iwl.me/. You can paste a portion of your writing there and see what famous writer the program says you "write like."
This is the piece of writing from Chapter 4 of my novel, Scarred But Smarter, that got me compared to Ian Fleming as noted in my previous post:
(Not sure what I think of the comparison, but it sounds marketable!)
"When I feel guilty and sense trouble, like now, I do chores. I grabbed my basket of dirty clothes and went downstairs to do laundry. The machines are in the back room of the gallery I live above. My apartment occupies the middle floor of old rowhouse which is gorgeous but definitely not made for tall people; I hit my head at least once a week. I have the second floor apartment; the third floor is vacant and had been since I moved in three years ago. It is wonderful not to have to listen to anyone banging around up there. My landlord Kathleen owns the gallery and the building, as well as the one next door where Leo lives. She is a fantastic landlord - quick to call a repairman if something needs fixing, she hasn’t raised the rent in three years, she loves Stella, and I like the art in her gallery. All in all, it is a pretty good living situation. The icing on the cake is that I get to park my 1966 Corvette snug and dry and safe in her garage. Kathleen doesn’t have a car and the garage is too small for any of her artists to use; they usually lugged work around in vans or trucks. The lemon yellow baby is my prized possession, a gift from my mother for my move to D.C. She heard I loved old cars, especially Corvettes. It was a bribe, but I didn’t care. The price she extracted in return was my weekly visit to Dr. Wilma Harper, my therapist. I was willing to pay because I loved that car, and Wilma turned out to be pretty okay too."
This is the piece of writing from Chapter 4 of my novel, Scarred But Smarter, that got me compared to Ian Fleming as noted in my previous post:
(Not sure what I think of the comparison, but it sounds marketable!)
"When I feel guilty and sense trouble, like now, I do chores. I grabbed my basket of dirty clothes and went downstairs to do laundry. The machines are in the back room of the gallery I live above. My apartment occupies the middle floor of old rowhouse which is gorgeous but definitely not made for tall people; I hit my head at least once a week. I have the second floor apartment; the third floor is vacant and had been since I moved in three years ago. It is wonderful not to have to listen to anyone banging around up there. My landlord Kathleen owns the gallery and the building, as well as the one next door where Leo lives. She is a fantastic landlord - quick to call a repairman if something needs fixing, she hasn’t raised the rent in three years, she loves Stella, and I like the art in her gallery. All in all, it is a pretty good living situation. The icing on the cake is that I get to park my 1966 Corvette snug and dry and safe in her garage. Kathleen doesn’t have a car and the garage is too small for any of her artists to use; they usually lugged work around in vans or trucks. The lemon yellow baby is my prized possession, a gift from my mother for my move to D.C. She heard I loved old cars, especially Corvettes. It was a bribe, but I didn’t care. The price she extracted in return was my weekly visit to Dr. Wilma Harper, my therapist. I was willing to pay because I loved that car, and Wilma turned out to be pretty okay too."
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Habits
Apparently, I like to very much split infinitives. Not usually that badly, though. I discovered this habit in the third revision of my novel. I wondered how it became a part of my writing, which led me to wonder how anything becomes a habit. So I Googled. Most of what I found in the 15 minutes I allotted myself for this round of procrastination was about adopting healthy lifestyle habits or becoming a winning corporate pawn. (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, anyone?)
I think habits form because there are too many decisions to make in life each day. We can't focus on the important ones if we don't make the majority of our choices by habit or routine. But since choosing what words to put on the page is one of my more important activities, I have to be more mindful. In other words, not lazy.
I think habits form because there are too many decisions to make in life each day. We can't focus on the important ones if we don't make the majority of our choices by habit or routine. But since choosing what words to put on the page is one of my more important activities, I have to be more mindful. In other words, not lazy.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Swimming in Santa Cruz
This time of year, I am desperate for cooler weather. The heat makes me feel like a trapped wild animal, one that could chew off its foot to get out of the trap's jaws. Well, instead of chewing off a limb, I pester my husband about moving to Santa Cruz, California. To his credit, he is also intrigued by the idea, but he thinks we should stay put until I finish my book. He sees this moving fantasy as what it is: procrastination. Well, only partially procrastination. I truly love it on the California Central Coast for a lot of reasons. The following essay may be a little purple in its prose, but it conveys the truth of what I was feeling six years ago on a windy Pacific beach:
The fear tears at my gut. I tell myself that it is irrational. That there is nothing to be afraid of, that I am ready. These thoughts temporarily tame the beast while I walk down the stairs, but I cannot keep my concentration. The sharp jaws pounce at my lapse and resume their tearing as my feet hit the sand.
Because there is plenty to fear. Mankind has survived by obeying such fears. It doesn’t help that the lifeguards are on surfboards and look about twelve.
The fear, rational or not, eventually makes me angry, and I welcome the anger. It distracts me. I’m angry that I’m afraid, because I want to do this. And I’m also angry that I want to do this.
The irony makes me chuckle. If I oscillate between being amused and angry, I think I can get to the water’s edge. My mind, so busy with self-loathing and silent laughter, will have no room for fear. My body, freed of guidance, will simply follow all the other lemming bodies. I want to start soon; I cannot maintain this delicate emotional equilibrium for long.
I know other people are having more fun. They come to California to visit wineries and hunt for movie stars. At home, they go antiquing on Saturdays, maybe take an occasional family hike. I come to California to wait on a rainy, cold beach for my turn to swim in the shark and jellyfish filled ocean.
They call it the Red Triangle, the area from Santa Cruz north. Great white sharks live, breed, play and eat here. The line of my race pierces that triangle.
The gun goes off.
It’s funny how the fear that grips you on shore is different than the fear you swim with. Once I’m in the water, shark thoughts are washed away. I am panicked by the real, not the imagined. I’m hyperventilating because of the cold, I’m tossed by the violent waves as if I have no will of my own, and I’m being swum over by a human wave of faster racers.
The turbulent start becomes a more measured struggle, and I am afraid only that the cold will get worse, that I’m not making forward progress and that I’ll be last. That I want something I can’t have. That it’s not true you can do anything if you just try hard enough. That I’m fooling myself and that I am a fool. That a teenaged lifeguard will have to save me and won’t even think I’m cute. That my husband will be embarrassed. That people will look at me and feel sorry for me. Isn’t that scarier than swimming with sharks?
Something pulls a switch in my brain. I figure out how to breathe to the left so the army of waves coming from the right won’t beat me. Fortified with air, I find a rhythm and pull myself over the waves with arms that have found their power. I am moving through the water, to the horizon. The sea lions are watching with approval from their rock, and the cold water is dense and deliciously easy to grab. It feels like dancing with the best partner in the world.
My anger and fear are long gone, replaced with bursting pride. I feel gloriously alive and privileged to swim in the ocean far off shore with whatever else is below me, to have a body that can work like a fish. The world has shrunk and I have grown to fill it all. I never want it to end; I’m not even cold. I exist just to move forward, faster and farther. My mind is silent, my heart is singing, and my body leads.
I swim until my hand touches the sand as my husband taught me. I push myself up and run like a drunk through the finish chute. Rob is there with a towel and a look so full of love and pride, I know I’ll swim through anything to see that again. I won no award, but I won everything.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Elmore Leonard's Rules for Good Writing
I found this wonderful advice in an article in the Guardian (read the whole piece here:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one). I found the article via a link from my favorite time-wasting website, www.aldaily.com. Favorite next to Facebook, that is.
Here are Elmore Leonard's ten rules of writing. They are great rules, I think, and the rules, like all of Mr. Leonard's fiction, are so well written. Of course, I was raised to break rules, but it's good to know them before you do!
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac?ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look?ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be ?annoying, especially a prologue ?following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points ?under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos?trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri?can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ?Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
(Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing will be published this month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Here are Elmore Leonard's ten rules of writing. They are great rules, I think, and the rules, like all of Mr. Leonard's fiction, are so well written. Of course, I was raised to break rules, but it's good to know them before you do!
1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac?ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look?ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be ?annoying, especially a prologue ?following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points ?under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos?trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri?can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ?Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
(Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing will be published this month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Friday, June 25, 2010
Super Short Fiction
I wrote this piece a few months ago for an NPR contest. The piece had to be short enough to be read in three minutes or less, and it had to start with the first sentence you see below. I think my longer fiction is more plot driven, but my short stories - super short or regular short - tend to be more atmospheric and quiet. Or maybe my characters are more messed up. I think I need to learn how to jazz them up without losing the feeling of negative space I like to create.
Thanks for reading. I hope it goes without saying, but comments and criticisms are very welcome!
Instead
The nurse left work at five o’clock. As he had every day for the last five, Henry Middleton watched her walk down the school steps and across the parking lot to her car, an old, banana yellow Toyota Celica. Henry was the new principal at Red Rock Middle School. Celine had been the nurse at Red Rock for the past ten years. On his tour the first day, his assistant principal, Veronica White, told him Celine was trouble and that the parents didn’t like her. She didn’t mind her own business and she overstepped her boundaries, they said. But Henry liked what he saw of Celine as they passed the nurse’s office that first day:
“There, there, Jesse,” she cooed as she mopped the blood running down his shin.
“I want my mommy,” the boy wailed.
“Your mommy’s working sweetie. She’ll be there when you get home, but now, you have to be a little man and take one for the team.”
“What team?” Jesse was still crying, so his words came out in a wet, breathy stutter.
“The team you and your mother and your little sister make. A family is like a team. One little skinned knee isn’t enough to make your mother take time off work. You’ll be fine. I’ll be your temporary mommy until you feel better.”
Jesse sniffed and let Celine tend to his cut.
Every school Henry had ever worked at was divided between those who sided with the principal and those who didn’t. Henry hoped he could make an ally of Celine, without causing trouble with Veronica, who he was realizing he didn’t like very much. He actually hoped for a lot more, but he didn’t dare focus on that. Not now anyway, he had to get home. Friday night bridge was sacred, and Henry’s role as chauffer and general chap in waiting to his aging mother was the main reason he moved to Phoenix.
So Henry slipped the file he was reading into his briefcase and snapped it shut. Then he put his forehead briefly on the smooth black leather to gather strength from its coolness. The air conditioning hadn’t worked right since he got here. He lifted his head and then his body out of the chair with what felt like the biggest effort of his life. He wanted to stay there until Monday morning when Celine came to work at 8 o’clock. Instead, and it seemed lately that every thing he did felt like it was instead of something he really wanted to do, he grabbed his jacket from the back of the door and headed to his car.
Stepping into the bleaching sunlight, Henry could see that Celine was squatting next to her front passenger tire. He walked over.
“It’s flat,” she said as he approached.
“I see that. May I call someone for you?”
“Who, a magic fairy?”
“No, um well, AAA or a towtruck?”
“Mr. Principal, I can manage just fine. I have a jack and a spare tire and a strong back. Thank you for stopping, though.”
Celine went to her truck and popped it open. Henry stood there, irritated, embarrassed and excited all at once. He’d been dismissed, but he was actually talking to her and he was not going to give up.
“Mind if I watch, then? I could use a refresher course on changing a tire.” He smiled and sat on his briefcase.
“Celine lowered the trunk and looked at Henry. “Mr. Principal..”
“Call me Henry.”
“Henry,” she paused, “I think this year will be fun.”
Thanks for reading. I hope it goes without saying, but comments and criticisms are very welcome!
Instead
The nurse left work at five o’clock. As he had every day for the last five, Henry Middleton watched her walk down the school steps and across the parking lot to her car, an old, banana yellow Toyota Celica. Henry was the new principal at Red Rock Middle School. Celine had been the nurse at Red Rock for the past ten years. On his tour the first day, his assistant principal, Veronica White, told him Celine was trouble and that the parents didn’t like her. She didn’t mind her own business and she overstepped her boundaries, they said. But Henry liked what he saw of Celine as they passed the nurse’s office that first day:
“There, there, Jesse,” she cooed as she mopped the blood running down his shin.
“I want my mommy,” the boy wailed.
“Your mommy’s working sweetie. She’ll be there when you get home, but now, you have to be a little man and take one for the team.”
“What team?” Jesse was still crying, so his words came out in a wet, breathy stutter.
“The team you and your mother and your little sister make. A family is like a team. One little skinned knee isn’t enough to make your mother take time off work. You’ll be fine. I’ll be your temporary mommy until you feel better.”
Jesse sniffed and let Celine tend to his cut.
Every school Henry had ever worked at was divided between those who sided with the principal and those who didn’t. Henry hoped he could make an ally of Celine, without causing trouble with Veronica, who he was realizing he didn’t like very much. He actually hoped for a lot more, but he didn’t dare focus on that. Not now anyway, he had to get home. Friday night bridge was sacred, and Henry’s role as chauffer and general chap in waiting to his aging mother was the main reason he moved to Phoenix.
So Henry slipped the file he was reading into his briefcase and snapped it shut. Then he put his forehead briefly on the smooth black leather to gather strength from its coolness. The air conditioning hadn’t worked right since he got here. He lifted his head and then his body out of the chair with what felt like the biggest effort of his life. He wanted to stay there until Monday morning when Celine came to work at 8 o’clock. Instead, and it seemed lately that every thing he did felt like it was instead of something he really wanted to do, he grabbed his jacket from the back of the door and headed to his car.
Stepping into the bleaching sunlight, Henry could see that Celine was squatting next to her front passenger tire. He walked over.
“It’s flat,” she said as he approached.
“I see that. May I call someone for you?”
“Who, a magic fairy?”
“No, um well, AAA or a towtruck?”
“Mr. Principal, I can manage just fine. I have a jack and a spare tire and a strong back. Thank you for stopping, though.”
Celine went to her truck and popped it open. Henry stood there, irritated, embarrassed and excited all at once. He’d been dismissed, but he was actually talking to her and he was not going to give up.
“Mind if I watch, then? I could use a refresher course on changing a tire.” He smiled and sat on his briefcase.
“Celine lowered the trunk and looked at Henry. “Mr. Principal..”
“Call me Henry.”
“Henry,” she paused, “I think this year will be fun.”
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