Terry Gross: No, she didn’t call me.

I had another interview with Terry Gross this morning.

No, it wasn’t for real. It was just me in the car talking to myself again. This happens more than I ought to admit, but I doubt I’m alone in the world of fantasy author interviews.

Actually, I’m pretty good at calling up Terry’s voice in my head. I bet I could even get her to read an extract from on of my stories. Let’s give it a shot:

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.

“So tell me what did you mean by that?”

“Um… Well, Terry, I guess I really haven’t much of a clue what I meant because I didn’t even write that. You’re reading from Moby Dick.”

Ok, so maybe I don’t have total control of my personal Terry Gross just yet. Still, it’s fun sometimes to pretend that I’m actually going to end up on Fresh Air someday if I keep working hard at my writing.

Chilling Out

In any case, this morning’s interview focused on the story I’m getting read to work on for NaNoWriMo. After all, we’re coming in for final approach to NaNoWriMo. What else would I be thinking about?

Are you getting nervous? I am. Obviously, I’m getting nervous, right? I mean, I’m driving down the road at 6:20AM talking to Terry Gross, who isn’t even there, about a book I haven’t written yet!

I really like the story I have in mind, and this probably the source of my nervousness. I’ve written before about taking notes, making character sheets, writing backstory, etc. Certainly I’ve done a little of that, but my hands keep wanting to find the keys that tell the real story. They’re itching to get rolling and see what lies around the first bend.

This tends to happen whenever I’m close to writing something that I know I’m going to enjoy working on. So, when I get a little frenetic about a story (and having fake interviews in my head is a good sign I’ve reached the tipping point), I like to take a bit of a breather so I don’t burn myself out or fret so much about the story that I just seize up on it. Part of my relaxation routine this week involves reading. I’m also looking to get as much sleep as I can since I’ll be getting up early to work in my extra writing time.

Now that I think about it, I may try to get out for a walk in the woods too. We’re just feeling the first brush of winter here. The air is especially invigorating.

If I told my friends that I was going to give away halos, they’d probably would wonder just who is in charge of hiring at the Pearly Gates, but those aren’t the kind of halos I’m talking about. I’m talking about NaNoWriMo halos.

Something so wrong with this picture.

When you donate to NaNoWriMo, the good folks at the Office of Letters and Light attach a little halo to your profile on the NaNoWriMo site. The money from your donation goes to fund the servers and the staff and the offices that make NaNoWriMo possible. It also goes to helping schools participate in NaNoWriMo through the Young Writer’s Program.

Well, after I made my donation, I was feeling pretty good about getting my halo and I decided to tweet about it and encourage other Wrimos to donate if they could. Not long after that message went into the Twitterverse, I received a reply that reminded me that not everyone was in a position to contribute.

It only took a second for me to realize that there was something that I could do to help: I could sponsor halos.

At first it was going to be a handful, and then the number grew to ten. Then I decided that with 30 days in November I’d donate a single halo for each day of the event. Not only that, I’d give writers a chance to tell their writing stories here on How Not To Write. After all, this website is devoted to helping people get over their own fear of writing by watching me diagram my failures. Why not take it to the next level and help people get out there and write?

How the How Not To Write NaNoWriMo Halo Giveaway Works

So here’s how the NaNoWriMo Halo Giveway works:

To enter, just fill out the form below. Yes, that’s about it. However, please only fill out the form if you do not believe that you can donate to NaNoWriMo this year. If you can afford to donate, please save a halo for others. [Donate to NaNoWriMo]

On October 31st (at noon EST), I’ll pick 30 random people from the list of entries and submit an order for their halos to the good folks at the Office of Light and Letters.

If for some crazy reason I do not get 30 entries, I will extend the contest till the slots are filled. Oh, and please only submit one entry. Seriously.

If you are selected, I will also give you the opportunity to write a guest post on my blog. The theme of your post should be “Why I’m Entering NaNoWriMo” or something to that effect. Actually, you could write about most anything you like as long as the post concerns your personal experience with writing. Could be something fun and zany, might be something sad. Note: The guest post is entirely optional.

Help Me Help Other Writers

Please help me spread the word on this little giveaway. Feel free to forward this post on to any Wrimo you know who may need a halo boost! Thanks!!! 🙂

Doing NaNoWriMo? Buddy up with me!

Yes, this is the “true topic” post…

I’ve been running away from this post for a week and I suppose that’s appropriate as I’ve been running away from the subject for most of my adult life. When I was a kid, I used to dream of stories and then I would write them. Not much has changed in the years since except that the stories have gotten further away from the dreams.

And so, if I had to nail it down, and I guess I do, my true topic is the journey of discovery. I’m a dreamer after all and this is basically what dreamers do.

Two years ago, I started working on a book called “Beastly John Skelton.” Beastly John started like many of my stories – I saw a little scene and then I started describing it. There was a girl playing in her backyard. She was new to the neighborhood and something of an outcast. A boy…

Have you ever stopped mid-sentence like that and realized just how ridiculous you sound trying to describe something you were supposed to write? Describing a story you tried/wanted to tell is a lot like trying to explain a joke after you’ve already told it.

How about I just put a little bit of the story in here for you to read…

I was out in the yard walking in circles, when I noticed a boy staring at me through the gap between the slats in the tall wooden fence. He had hair so blond it was white and his eyes were so dark they looked black. He was dressed all in black too, but not like other boys I had known. He was wearing a suit and his skin was very pale.
“You haven’t seen my cat,” the boy said.
“No, I haven’t,” I replied.
“That wasn’t a question,” he said. “It was an observation. You haven’t seen my cat, I can tell.”
I looked up into the crossing branches above, expecting to see some monstrous tiger lurking up there, but I only saw a pair of squirrels huddling together on a branch. It seemed rather odd for them to be just sitting there. They were obviously terrified.
John Skelton was watching the pattern of the leaves sway and move as the wind rustled the branches.
“I want you to stand right here,” he said and pointed to a spot of sunlight just at the edge of the shade.
“What do I do?”
“You just stand there. Kitty-Kitty is in there somewhere and we just need a reason for her to come out.”
“What sort of reason?”
“Bait.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the way he said bait, but I didn’t get the chance to think about it for long. The wind shifted overhead and instead of standing in the sun, I was now standing inside the flickering shade. All at once I felt something move behind me, something very large. I turned and saw a huge black shape looming up over me with pointed ears and holes where there should have been eyes that went clear through the black and out to the other side.

This is a slightly edited version, two separate bits joined up together, but I think it serves to convey a sense of what I was working on.

I worked on this book diligently for a few weeks, producing just under 20K words of semi-polished prose. The story was going along well, or at least I was discovering what the story was about. Every time I finished a chapter I let my son read what I’d written. His feedback was incredibly valuable not just because it served as an inspiration to write the next chapter but because he asked questions or pointed out things I hadn’t thought about…

“I can’t wait to find out what happened to Trevor Watson.”

Whoops. I hadn’t planned on answering that question. Trevor and his nice little family just disappeared. I’d barely even mentioned them… Had I just stumbled into a plot?

In November of that year, I went to a conference in rural New Jersey. I took the book along with me. I spent evenings and mornings in my room working on new chapters, but something sort of happened to the story. It got away from me a bit, became a little too dreamy, diffuse.

And then I started wondering if this was a proper subject for me to write about in the first place…

This is when I stopped writing the story altogether. For two years, my son has been needling me to write more about Beastly John Skelton and Lillian and Trevor Watson and, of course, Kitty-Kitty. I keep saying that I’m going to get back to it, but I haven’t. I go on to the next thing and the next thing. I flit here and there always dodging the subject, always trying on some new writerly cloak.

“I can’t wait to find out who Silas really is.”

My son said this just the other night after I finished reading the first chapter of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, and it reminded me of our conversations about Beastly John. It reminded me of how I felt about books I’ve loved, books like Cannery Row and The Hobbit, books which are in essence about the journey of discovery.

I was thinking about this today when a section of Wallace Stegner’s Letter to a Young Writer came to mind:

The moment you begin writing for an audience, you begin wondering if you are saying what the audience wants or expects. Nevertheless, except for vaguely imagining the audience and hoping they are there, I urge you to ignore them. Do not write what you think they would like. Write what you like. Literature speaks to temperment, Conrad says. Your books will find the temperaments they can speak to and the particular virtue of your audience is that they shall leave it up to you what should be said.

Now if you go looking for this passage, you will find that I have taken some three or four separate paragraphs and plucked the sentences I liked best to form the little ditty above. This is not what Wallace Stegner wrote but rather what I felt in reading that particular section of his letter.

The point is that I’ve come to love what it is that I write. I write about the journey of discovery, a journey which often though not always has some measure of the fantastic. In fact, that’s basically what this entire website is devoted to – the journey of discovering myself as a writer.

If you’re wondering, I’m not taking up Beastly John Skelton for NaNoWriMo, but I do have another idea and it is also a book for kids. This isn’t the story I originally thought of writing for NaNoWriMo but something totally new. I can’t wait to get started!

Also, I left in the bit above about Conrad because The Heart of Darkness is also one of my favorite books. Again, the journey of discovery… 🙂

Doing NaNoWriMo? Buddy up with me!

I’ve written a truckload on this site about what I like to write about besides writing about not writing. I love mysteries. I love science fiction. I love fantasy. I swoon for literary fiction that serves little purpose but to make people swoon.

I have the same problem picking books to read.

It’s almost as if I’m fussing over my literary future when I’m standing in front of the stacks at the library. This internal struggle is made a little more ridiculous by the fact that I have a five year old tugging on one arm and a moody ten year old huffing about the fact that he can’t check out Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the fifteenth time this month. If you saw this in a movie (complete with interior monologue running in subtitles), you’d probably laugh. If you saw it in real life, well, you’d probably laugh too. I should laugh myself, and often I do.

Sometimes though the laughter doesn’t come so easy. I feel incredibly anxious. I feel like I wasting my time with story X or author Y. I feel like I should be writing the books I’m staring at instead of trying to find the right book to read.

With the starting gun of National Novel Writing Month fast approaching (11/1 if you didn’t know), you may be fretting about what you’re going to write about. I know I am.

You may recall that I had an idea for a book and that I was making progress on my notes and outline. This is true. I am making progress. The problem is that the progress is leading to new questions, questions most likely posed by my inner critic (aka The Jerk Who Keeps Me From Writing) under the guise of some rather harmless point about what sort of writer I happen to be.

Obviously, none of this is terribly surprising to me. I also know that I’m not the only writer in the world that sways between ideas and projects. This is something that happens to, um, well… everyone. It’s the nature of the creative mind.

“You may say to yourself that you can’t stand such a narrow, gray life, that you will modify your temperament and your taste, and work into your books some of the sensationalism, violence, shock, sentiment, sex, or Great Issues that you think may make them attractive to a large audience. I doubt you could do it if you wanted to, and I am certain that you shouldn’t try, for you cannot write with a whole heart things that are contrary to your nature. The fine things in your first novel are there because you wrote them with a whole heart, from an intense conviction. Trying to write like those who manage a large popular success, you may succeed, because you have brains and skill; but however proper success may be for others, in you, and on these terms, it will not be legitimate, for you will have stopped being the writer that you respected.” ~ Wallace Stegner To a Young Writer

Mr. Stegner here is trying to convince a young writer to keep at their literary art in the way their heart intended. I’ll admit that it’s more than a bit snobbish in its dismissal of “popular” works, though he does not explicitly rule out success. He’s just trying to be a realist with respect to this particular writer’s talents.

In thinking about my plan for NaNoWriMo, I wonder if I am still playing about with old themes. Themes that I’ve already resolved for myself and whether it isn’t time to just move on to the things I am meant to write.

Finding the thing you are meant to write is a difficult process. I have worked for 20 years to “discover” my true topic and to accept it. I put the word discover in quotes because I’ve always known what I wanted to write. It is the thing I that I have always responded to in fiction.

I’m going to write about this “true topic” in a later post, but I think I’ll stop here and let you have your say. What is your true topic? Do you know? If so, how did you come to understand it? If not, how will you get there?

Doing NaNoWriMo? Buddy up with me!