Indie Author Fringe is a three-times a year, online conference for self-publishing authors, brought to you by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), fringe to the major global publishing fairs.
All online, all free.
Organized by authors for authors.
Antoni Gaudí’s mosaics at Park Güell—stories within stories
In the world of words, creativity is not restricted to writers: reading is creative, too. Even if neither is aware of the process, readers complete a story by understanding, interpreting and meshing it with their own inner narratives. A reader brings his or her own ‘voice’ to the task. It’s a collaborative process. And sometimes, the meaning readers make from a tale is not what the author intended: writers must release their stories to make their own relationships with their audience. Without readers would there be writers?
Continue reading . . .
My sincere thanks go out to Thomas Drinkard (@ThomasDrinkard) for nominating Creative Flux for the “One Lovely Blog Award”!
Tom is a writer, editor and teacher with a strong military background whose specialty is writing about characters who command attention in suspense, mystery and action-packed novels. Recently, he was a guest on Blog Talk Radio in a dynamic and entertaining interview by Donna Cavanagh that reveals the man behind the pen.
I met Tom a few years ago on social media and and it was an honor to interview him in June, 2011 (includes audio clips). He has also contributed an excellent piece on writing—”Planner or Panster?”—on CF, and you can find his writing blog here. Thanks again, Tom!
You can view some of my favorite words and other blog nominations in the updated “Inspiring Blog Award” post.
As for nominees for the “One Lovely Blog,” each of you is special to me in a unique way:
As the guidelines go, if you so choose, you are requested to:
I look forward to learning more about you:) Have fun!
Me and “The Green Vase” that won Best in Show at Artel Gallery, Pensacola, FL.
Friends, I’ve missed you all! And back in April/May, when I mentioned on Twitter that I would be taking a break from curating Creative Flux, I hadn’t expected to be away so long. But events of the last six months redefined my time and priorities. A long story short: within four months of that time we moved twice, and this last time, in July, it was across the state. I apologize to all of you reading this, you members of the Creative Flux community, for I know I’ve been negligent and it makes me feel awful. And, because of new opportunities, the future of Creative Flux is still undecided.
On the other side of things, Life has finally given me an opportunity to reunite my deepest artistic love with action! In under two months of living in our new Pensacolian digs, I’ve met a number of amazing artists, entered my first juried art competition at the Artel Gallery (@artelPensacola) and was awarded Best of Show!
And there’s more news; please come read about it and share in my excitement–Terre Britton: Best of Show at Artel Gallery–because each of you in the Creative Flux community has been instrumental at helping me arrive at where I am today, through your stories, conversations, kindness, laughter, wisdom and insights. I’ve just loved being immersed in your generosity; so thank you!
I do hope you’ll swing by my art blog (which still needs a name), when you get a chance, to catch a glimpse of works to come or to sit and chat.
Again, friends, thank you.
“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
― Vincent van Gogh
Incredible scenery on the road in Banff National Park | Photo by Alaskan Dude on Flickr
I’m convinced that the creative process for fiction writers is a messy mixture of imagination, insecurity, and wee bit of insanity. Combine ingredients, shake well, then get the synapses to start firing, and wait for sheer genius to flow from every pore in your body.
I can only speak for myself, but I don’t frequently stare at a blank screen, my fingers poised at the keyboard, waiting for ideas or inspiration. No, more likely, I’ll be pounding away on the keys, creating something clever or profound . . . before I realize that it has nothing to do with the manuscript I’m working on, or the blog I’m writing. Some of my best writing, unfortunately, has been zapped into the great digital void by the delete key, because it didn’t fit. OK, I have to be honest. Some of my worst writing has suffered the same fate.
I’ve read in a number of books and blogs that writers should never edit while they write, because the muse is fickle, and you don’t want to interrupt her when she’s on a roll. But it sure seems that you can waste a lot of time and creative juices in the process. I’ve tried to go the other route and write the perfect paragraph before moving on and then spent an entire day on twelve sentences. If that kind of discipline is required to be a successful writer, I’ll pass. I’m just not wired that way.
I started out with a writing process that was a little schizophrenic, a little neurotic and definitely not productive. It involved writing a blog or a story in a vacuum and then posting it and waiting for the world to react. I’d wait all of two minutes before the internal voices would begin.
“Sometimes you need to have the confidence that when you write you can draw on an ancient and mystical force…”
“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?“
“Yeah, I think so, but what if they don’t get it?”
“They won’t.”
“What???”
“Yeah, I blew it. I should have looked at it one more time.”
“No, they’ll get it once they read it. “
“What if they already read it and hated it?”
“That could explain why I haven’t heard anything.”
“Settle down, maybe they just haven’t seen it yet.”
“You’re kidding yourself. You can’t send out drivel like that any more.”
“Drivel? It wasn’t that bad, was it?”
So then I go back and re-read it. “It was pretty good, wasn’t it?” . . . and I repeat the process all over again. Within a half hour, I’m a basket case. That was the routine with the weekly blog. But the hundred thousand word manuscript? I was in a near-catatonic state waiting two weeks for feedback from a freelance editor.
Over a period of time I realized two things: I couldn’t wait until I had finished product to get some kind of feedback and a conversation with myself was not productive – or healthy. So I discovered the answer by involving some other people in the conversation . . . and going for a drive.
Now when I write, I picture myself driving in a car to an outstanding destination. You can come up with your own version of this, but here is what works for me, and why:
Destination: Currently I’m on the road to Banff, to take in the beauty of Lake Louise. Your destination (the book, article, blog, etc.) has to be appealing enough to be worth the journey. When you finally arrive (and complete your book / project, etc.) it will be beautiful – and rewarding.
Pontiac Firebird | Photo by Stokpic on Flickr
Vehicle: I’m driving a 1969 Pontiac Firebird. It’s a convertible. And it will fly. The engine rumbles. Heads turn. As you write, enjoy the ride! It will get monotonous and challenge you along the way, so make sure that you still get a thrill when you sit behind the wheel.
My role: I’m driving. Ultimately, I’m responsible for getting us there. So I have to control when we go, how fast we drive, when we stop, and what route we take to get there. As a writer, I can’t delegate these responsibilities. I want to be in charge. I need to be in charge.
The passengers – and each one plays a critical role:
Hunter S. Thompson | Photo by billypalooza on Flickr
Hunter S. Thompson – he sits in the back seat, as far away from me as possible. When he’s coherent, he’s the agitator, and always looking for excitement. He occasionally screams, “This is boring! Let’s get this baby up to 140 miles an hour!” Sometimes he smacks me in the back of the head and cracks up if it causes me to swerve off the road. He breaks out the hallucinogens every once in a while, but he always goes to excess, and then passes out. Thankfully. As a writer, you need to push the limits. Stretch us. Stretch yourself. Make Hunter proud.
Eeyore – he sits right behind me, so that he’s within reach if I need to punch him while I’m driving. He constantly says things like “We’ll never get there;” “I’ll bet you’re lost;” and “Who’s going to read this garbage?” Eeyore serves a dual purpose. You don’t need everyone telling you how great your writing is. Occasionally you need a pessimist voice, just to keep you honest, so long as it doesn’t overwhelm the conversation. But even more importantly, there are times when it just feels good to punch the pessimist in the nose and shut him up.
Gandalf – he sits in the middle, in between Hunter and Eeyore. He helps me navigate and sometimes points out things that I’d never see when it’s raining or dark outside. He’s also helpful to have around, in case I’ve driven into a ditch or I’m completely lost. He keeps the forces of evil at bay. Sometimes you need to have the confidence that when you write you can draw on an ancient and mystical force – and know that all your hard work can lead to something magical.
Grace Kelly | Photo by targophoto.com on Flickr
Grace Kelly – she rides shotgun in the passenger seat. She lets me know that this is a noble pursuit, and there’s a certain amount of grace required in the writing process (sorry for the Grace / grace, but trust me, the reminder works). Now that she has returned to the US after her royalty gig in Monaco, she constantly asks, “What did I miss?” I want to be the one to show her this world – my world. Confidentially, I want to impress her. Your writing should not appeal to the least common denominator. Help us discover a new way to look at the world through your eyes . . . and your words. Make us glad we took the journey with you.
The writing journey can be therapeutic, and sometimes it is liberating. But it can also be lonely. You may be visited by demons, which can wreak havoc with your creativity and confidence. So don’t go alone. Pick an awesome destination. Assemble your crew carefully. Then enjoy the ride. We can’t wait to read about it.
~~*~~
Karl Sprague
Karl Sprague is a writer and executive coach. His blog, The Short Distance, can be found at www.karlsprague.com. He has completed a manuscript for a thriller entitled Castro’s Shadow.
You can follow him on Twitter @karlsprague.
Please join the discussion below
My biggest fear as a writer is that the Grammar Police will hunt me down, confiscate my Ink Slinger’s Permit, and sentence me to Life Without Paper Or Ink.
You see, I’m not officially Licensed to Write. I don’t have an MFA degree, creative writing workshop certificate or good high school English scores.
I do have a poet’s ear for language, a musician’s sense of rhythm, and a child’s irrepressible imagination.
I don’t write by the book. I write by ear, like a musician. I’m an outlining junkie but when it gets down to the writing, the words tell me where they want to go.
They clamor to go right there, so they can roll across a reader’s tongue sweet and slippery as a butterscotch disc, or over there, so they can shimmy down your ear like a lilting little melody.
They beg to go there, where the fields are ripe, and there, where the sky is swollen, and oh yes, there – there – there, where the stars collide and the air is thick and the river runs wide.
My heart and mind and ear collectively intuit where the words should go according to beat and rhythm and whimsy in much the same way Predictive Text makes an educated guess at the typist’s desired words and phrases.
“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is . . . the inner music the words make.”
~Truman Capote
I sweat and starve and go sleepless practicing the craft while the words cavort with metaphors under the bramble bush, lob spitballs at syntax from behind the library stacks and play pick-up-stix with a pocketful of rhymes.
They refuse to be contained or coerced or captured in my butterfly net of productivity. They wake me at midnight with the promise of pixie dust and vanish like fireflies in the sunlight.
They flirt with the poetry books on the desk, hiss at the grammar manuals on the shelf and shamelessly consort with the colored pens spilling out of the top drawer.
But the moment I give them up as lost causes, they come rushing in, letter by letter, word by word, and sentence by sentence, and fill my page with their rolling vowels and clashing consonants.
“I’m not officially Licensed to Write . . . but I do have a child’s irrepressible imagination.”
They come rum-tum tumbling out of my fingertips, splashing onto the page in a jumble of ink, pausing briefly enough to panic me before gliding across the wide open white places and building word palaces and paragraph thoroughfares and the loveliest of letter landscapes, as in this playful passage of a husband and wife reading together in my short story “Tahitian Sunset”:
“Why do you always race to the end of a story?” he asks, his fingers swimming through my hair like clownfish through anemone.
I shift in the sand, burying my toes beneath his. “That’s where they live happily ever after.”
His chuckle glides up my spine, cool as the evening tide. “No, my butterfly loach, they live happily all along the way. Don’t you want to hear the whole story?”
One word never took so long to utter, a lifetime of want in three little letters. “Yes.”
He rises like a dolphin breaching the surface, gazing at me through eyes wide as tidal pools and just as full of surprises. “Then we can’t afford to skip one page, one paragraph, one sentence. Every syllable is rife with meaning, my lovely little angelfish.”
Well, hmmm. A funny thing happened on the way to the confessional booth. Now that I’ve acknowledged my Big Fear, it in no way resembles the frothing beastie I’ve been dodging all these years.
Therefore, we will not go gently into that good night, the words and I.
Sure, an Ink Slinger’s life can be a strange and wild ride, peppered with self-doubt, pockmarked by friendly fire and riddled with rejection.
But it’s also filled with curious companions and creative conundrums and puzzling phraseology. It’s riding on the coattails of quirky, hanging by the toes on a rippling row of rolly-polly o’s, and canoodling with consonance, assonance and their tow-headed cousin alliteration.
Watch me now. This is where I make my stand, folks.
From here on out, I’m adopting Elmore Leonard’s 11th Rule of Writing as my own: If proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.
Hear us well, all you over-eager grammarians, for this is the Rebel Yell of the words and I:
Give us cadence or give us silence!
Until they strip me of my pen and paper – I remain ardently yours
Lady Bullish, Rogue Ink Slinger
~~*~~
Ruth Long is a forty-something administrative professional who enjoys fast-paced stories, vintage cars and southern rock. A reader by birth, paper-pusher by trade and novelist by design, storytelling is her passion.
You can read more of her take on the writing life at www.bullishink.com or by following her twitter feed @bullishink.
Please join the discussion below
I don’t like horror movies—even squashed bugs gross me out—but I love the movie Flatliners. I love that concept of what’s beyond the beyond.
You know how it is whenever we start a story, how we’re flames alight, burning up everything around us, the very atoms of the air fuel for our creation? Our characters walk among mortals like creatures from a visionary universe. They live and breathe, crack wise, laugh, put a tender hand on our arm. They learn bad news, and our eyes fill. When their hearts break, we’re sobbing as we type. Just sitting around the kitchen table with them all morning talking gossip as the sun crosses the window is as fulfilling as human contact can ever be. Everything we never get from real life is here, in these manuscript pages, waiting for us to wake up every day and join them again.
Fiction is our way of creating a tribe for ourselves.
Then we’ve gotten it all down, and we’re transforming it from our own personal tribe into, well, literature. The first part is about our needs. The rest is about everyone else’s. Now we’re creating a plot, an adventure for these characters, and we’re using what we know about them to tell how they would act in any given situation, to show how they get themselves from one pickle into another, what facility they have for disaster.
We don’t want to do dreadful things to them. But there is that reader out there. And the reader wants our characters to help them understand the turmoil of real life.
So we do that part, too. Then we go into revision. Because we’ve had to combine these agendas—ours, our characters’, and the reader’s—and naturally there are some glitches. This takes innumerable passes. At first we’re drunk on the reality. Then we’re drunk on the power of fiction to speak. Then we’re drunk on the sheer potential for transforming this world that has meant so much to us into something that could mean so much to a complete stranger, simply through the artifice of language and fictional tools. It happens. It really does! We’ve all read books of a beauty to take the breath away. And we too can be among those who walk with our feet in the stars.
“Fiction is our way of creating a tribe for ourselves.”
Finally we wake up one morning and go to our desk and pick up the pages . . . and something snaps inside. And we realize we’re never going to get those words to transform.
Never.
Our reach has exceeded our grasp.
By about five light-years.
So here we sit with our faces lying sideways on the desk, feeling the tears trickle ever-so-slowly down to the bridge of our nose, across it, and drop with the most delicate little irritating mosquito-touch from our nose to the desk under our cheek. Our neck hurts, but it doesn’t matter.
Nothing will ever matter again.
This is the point, in Flatliners, in which we have medically anesthetized ourselves to the point of death and just beyond, and we discover—much to our surprise—that the beyond is Hell.
And yet it seemed like such a good idea at the time!
Now, I am not here to act as our medical-student cohorts pulling us back from the anesthesia. I am not our pals reeling us in, waking us from the nightmare, patting everyone jovially on the back, and helping us off the table. “You’re not really dead. That didn’t really happen. Psyche!” Those are not the words coming out of my mouth.
Because I know something about that. I know when someone does that, Hell follows us home.
“And when we are done, we will know something about life we didn’t know before . . . We will have gone beyond the beyond into the ephemeral . . . alternate reality of endless potential we knew was there . . .”
And then we are well and truly haunted. The glaring errors remain and get worse. The stumbling blocks trip us up more and more, throwing us headfirst into the muck and mire faster and more heartlessly every time we attempt that impossible task of transformation. Peer critiques, if we get them, become more random and less predictable. No one can agree on what’s going wrong!
We might stick with it because the hype about Becoming a Writer is so powerful and omnipresent out there, and besides now all our friends are Becoming Writers too. Or because we’re stubborn cusses and don’t know when we’re beat. Or because we have a story we desperately want to tell. Or simply because we’ve always looked up to our favorite authors, all our life, and dreamed with our heart in our throat of the day we would join their ranks.
But the secret pain is crippling. And it is countered only by the numbness of turning ourselves into donkeys plodding in joyless drudgery after that coveted carrot.
No.
I am here to do the opposite: to push us through—because on the other side of Hell is craft.
And we can’t get there by backing out. We must dive forward into the agony—sitting there with our face lying sideways on the desk—and discover within it every reason writing is an inanely bad idea.
Tackle a task we only know vaguely through the second-hand results of someone else’s lifelong efforts? Tackle it with the wild-eyed hope that, although it takes professional writers their entire lives to polish their skills, years to produce a single novel, and the nearly-unlimited assistance of publishing professionals they pretty much lucked into, it will take us a matter of months because, after all, didn’t Faulkner write As I Lay Dying in six weeks? Tackle it with the idea of supporting ourselves, even though the greats almost universally died penniless and unknown? Tackle it with minimal training and experience, barely a smidgen of comprehension, a whole lot of optimism, and the encouragement of people who stand to gain financially by our ambitions? Tackle it with nothing but our bare hands?
We will lie there and sob. Gnash our teeth. This is how we learn to be us.
And when we are done, we will know something about life we didn’t know before. We will know how to survive. We will have gone beyond the beyond into the ephemeral, multi-faceted, tactile alternate reality of endless potential we knew was there—we wanted so badly to believe in—all along.
And then we’ll have something to write about.
~~*~~
A. Victoria Mixon
Victoria Mixon has been a writer and editor for thirty years and is the creator A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, voted one of Write to Done’s Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2010. She is the author of The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual and the recently-released The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, as well as co-author of Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, published by Prentice Hall, for which she is listed in the Who’s Who of America. She spends a lot of time connecting with writers on Google+ and Twitter.
Victoria is now writing a column for the Writer Unboxed newsletter: Ask Victoria.
The Art and Craft of Story
The Art and Craft of Fiction
Please join the discussion below.
In the Digital Age, promotion is a daily part of most authors’ lives, whether they like it or not. Considered by many as two separate processes, writing is seen as creative and purposeful; promotion, a drudgery. Well, what if authors started thinking about promotion as part of their creative lives? What would a writer’s life look like if creativity and promotion were blended? As someone who studies book promotion all day long, I can tell you that authors who incorporate promotion into their creative lives are having a lot more fun, becoming better writers, building longer-term relationships with their readers, and selling more books than those who keep these two responsibilities separate.
What exactly am I proposing here? I’m suggesting that when we put the “art” back in book promotion, both authors and readers benefit. Let’s start by taking a look at a few examples of this “blending” done well.
I became aware of Colin Falconer (@colin_falconer) through a tweet that said his blog was “seriously addictive.” The link took me to “Looking for Mr. Goodstory…an author’s search for James Clavell’s ghost, a good bourbon, and the perfect role for Russell Crowe.” Before even exploring his posts, I knew I liked this guy. Why? Because he was clever and having fun. The first post I read was about famous last words. It was oozing with creativity, historical knowledge and whimsy.
I explored the site more fully, and found posts about Falconer’s fear of flying, “a phobia about the kind of people who end up sitting next to me on planes.” These were humorous, short character sketches with which anyone who’d ever flown could identify: The Ear Popper, The Talker, The Sweaty Virgin, and so on.
Though I am sure Falconer mentions his books sometimes, none of the posts I read did. He simply let his writing speak for itself. He drew readers in with his craft, and he appeared to be having a great time doing this. Subtly stationed nearby was a bio, which explained that he was the author of more than twenty historical novels. Also found on the sidelines were book covers, which linked readers to more information about his books. Though historical fiction is not a genre I typically read, I wanted to learn more so I bought a digital version of Falconer’s book Seraglio.
Roz Morris is another author who came on my radar as a result of social media. I had already purchased her latest book, when I saw her January 10 guest post for Creative Flux called “The Black Dress.” Here, Morris shared a scene she’d cut reluctantly during final revisions of My Memories of a Future Life, a novel about an injured musician who must contemplate life without her passion.
Morris explains about the scene,
“I like its simplicity, the tiny slice it showed of a musician’s life and the totemic responsibility Carol put into one garment….Even though it didn’t make it to the page, I like to think that she still did it, off screen in the moments we didn’t see.”
Then, Morris commits another act of creativity and shares an elegant photograph she herself took of the dress, a family heirloom that inspired the scene. The response from readers revealed a high level of emotional engagement. Not only did they empathize with her struggle as a writer to cut a scene that she loved, but the story of the black dress took on a literary life of its own.
I especially identified with one reader’s comment.
“This is a touching scene. After having read this book, I do agree that it reiterates what Carol [the musician] is feeling….It brings back all of those pangs that I felt for her….Thanks for sharing this melancholy reminder of a great read!”
Do you think the next time Morris publishes a book, this reader will be there ready to devour it? Do you suppose Morris enjoyed creating the photo that breathed new life into a cherished but abandoned scene? I’m confident the answer to both questions is yes.
As a final example, I introduce the work of Harrison Solow, author of Felicity & Barbara Pym, a book I have now read twice. Like the other authors mentioned here, I discovered Solow’s work through social media. I dare you to tell me that you could resist clicking through tweets like these:
Solow’s brilliant literary teasers make your neurons twitch until you click through and fall into a rich trove of stories, poems and reflections. Each tweet is an intimate invitation to explore the life and work of an artist. The more of her work you encounter, the more you want to read. And with each new post, her body of work as an artist grows. In this approach, writing and promotion are symbiotic…simply a writer sharing his or her unfolding body of work with the world. Herein, we discover the true “art” of promotion. Instead of drudgery, book promotion becomes an encounter with creativity that is a joy for both reader and writer.
~~*~~
Kathy Meis
Kathy Meis is a writer, ghostwriter, former award-winning journalist and passionate reader as well as founder and CEO of Serendipite Studios, a publishing technology startup located in Charleston, South Carolina. Stop by http://www.serendipitestudios.com, and check out Pappus, the revolutionary eTool that lets authors blog directly from their books.
Pappus
Please join the discussion below
Patrick Ross
If it’s Friday, it’s time for my latest collection of links on creativity and writing I tweeted this week. There’s a lot to be said for reliability. Tourists will be coming here to D.C. through April 27th to take in our beautiful cherry trees in the 100th anniversary of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, but with this early spring, the trees are almost done blooming. I would suggest those tourists instead visit Traverse City, Michigan, and take in tiara-wearing beauty queens competing in a cherry-pit spitting contest.
Read more on “The Artist’s Road” . . .
Thanks, Patrick, for including Creative Flux in your Creativity Tweets!
One of the questions I pose to writers when they’re interviewed on my blog is whether they write from an outline or by the “seat of their pants.”
Some are strict outliners. These are people whose minds are so orderly that they can create a detailed outline and work a novel from it. Following is an example of one extreme of the method.
I attended a writer’s conference in Nashville, Killer Nashville, in August of 2010. The Guest of Honor was the internationally acclaimed author, Jeffery Deaver.
In his address, Mr. Deaver said that he was an outliner. As a matter of fact, he stated that his outline for The Bone Collector was 184 pages. The book has (on Amazon) 423 pages. My calculator shows that his outline was a little more than 43% as long as the published book.
That’s a detailed outline.
Most of the writers I interview say they work from a skeletal framework and allow the story to fill in the missing pieces. One person said that it was like using a map (yes, those paper things still exist!) to plot out a long journey. The traveler knows starting and ending points and notes the major cities along the way. Noting the distance between the principal towns accommodates planning for overnight stays and stops for meals.
A writer using that method is employing a fusion of the planner and pantser methods.
The most memorable example of writing by the seat of the author’s pants came when my dear, departed friend, Anne Carroll George who passed away in 2001 told me her stories. We were sitting at her kitchen table with her husband, Earl, enjoying her marvelous Fifteen-Bean soup with cornbread.
She told me the tale of how the title of her first book, the Agatha Award winning, Murder on a Girl’s Night Out came to be.
“I’d sent it to my agent with the title, “Line Dancing at The Boot and Scoot. The publisher said that, for a cozy mystery, I had to have ‘murder’ in the title, so we settled on the final title as it was printed,” she said.
“So what are you using as a working title for the second one,” I said.
“Well, I thought that, since they want ‘murder’ in the title, I’d see what they said if I proposed, Murder on A Bad Hair day,”
Her eyes sparkled as she flashed her wonderful mischievous smile.
And, of course, that’s how the book was published.
Anne was a “pantser.” When I was working on Piety and Murder she helped in innumerable ways. I asked her if I should be working from an outline. She said she’d tried it, but it didn’t work well. I remember her story as something like this:
“When I was writing Murder on A Girl’ s Night Out, I thought I knew who the murderer was, then he was driving along in Shelby County and somebody shot him. Now, I wondered, just who is the killer?”
Anne created such vivid, memorable characters that she let the people in her story drive the narrative. She asked her characters to solve the mystery.
She once said that she knew what the major points in each book were before she started writing. She called the process of filling in the voids between major story markers, “trudging.” Obviously, she loved the process and could barely wait until her people and keyboard took her to the next tale-telling juncture.
What do the two polar extreme examples tell the writer?
When writing a novel, the author should have a pattern, at least a simple outline in mind before activating the word processor. This may be a simple framework (maybe not even written) delineating major points in the book. From there, the novelist should create characters; people he/she knows well, and let them propel the story between highlights.
Writer’s Block shouldn’t, ideally, happen during the writing of a story. The term is well named. It is a block from the writer. If the person clicking keys, knows the people he/she has created, then the author should ask them the telling question, “What happens now?”
~~*~~
Thomas Drinkard
Thomas Rowe Drinkard was born and reared in Alabama. He graduated from the University of North Alabama with a degree in English. At graduation, he was commissioned an Army second lieutenant. Within two years he completed parachute school and was selected for the U.S. Army Special Forces (the Green Berets).
After his active duty, he found his way into teaching and writing in the securities exam preparation business. Many of his articles and texts are currently in use.
Tom is now a full-time writer/ part-time editor. He is the author of Piety and Murder, Where There Were No Innocents and the novella, V Trooper – First Mission. He is also the author of a chapbook of Vietnam poetry, Finding the Way Home.
A sequel novella, V Trooper – Second Mission – The Demon and a new novel, Overload will be published by the end of April, 2012. Two additional novels are works in progress.
For an earlier interview with Drinkard by Sirius Press, click here.
Audio clip of Drinkard and his wife, Marjorie Hatfield Drinkard, on Piety and Murder.
Piety and Murder
Where There Were No Innocents
Please join the discussion below