Rear, meet seat; fingers, meet keyboard.

One of my favorite pithy sayings about writing is “ass in chair, fingers on keyboard.” It’s short and to the point. Unless you write standing up, or perhaps sitting on a rubber doughnut, it’s pretty standard for a writer to sit in a chair and write. You can’t write while roaming the streets or hurtling off a diving board or driving, or rather you shouldn’t because that could lead to injury.

Side note: If you think texting while driving is bad, I knew someone who used to write while driving. He kept a little notebook on his leg and when he was stuck in traffic, he would scribble down humorous verse.

Back on topic. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? “Ass in chair. Fingers on keyboard.” For me, the hard thing about accomplishing that task is not sitting, but eliminating the things that prevent me from sitting. If I’m trying to sit near a basket of dirty laundry or similar, that visible sign of Things To Do That Are Not Writing can be very distracting. I have to either leave the house, perhaps for a coffee shop where cleanup is not my responsbility, or perhaps mentally schedule that load of laundry for later: after I’ve written for two hours, after I’ve written a thousand words, at 7:00 pm, tomorrow afternoon.

Then comes moving my fingers on the keyboard. I move on to another pithy quote to tell how to accomplish this:

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon." --Raymond Chandler

Another version of this quote, which has numerous sources, is "Don't be afraid to let yourself write shit." Just because the story isn’t yet perfect doesn’t mean you get out of working until it's as perfect as it can be. There aren't any shortcuts to accomplishing this task.

Except, perhaps, ass in chair. Because the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be done.

"I hate writing. I love having written." --Dorothy Parker

Related posts:
Writing Elsewhere.

Finish it.

How To Write a Novel (in 72 Easy Steps!)

Love & Mysteries

“Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.”

--Raymond Chandler, "Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel" (essay, 1949), first published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

Turn Your Writing Topsy-Turvy

In Jane Yolen's Take Joy: A Writer's Guide to Loving the Craft, she writes, "When we force ourselves to go topsy-turvy, we can see anew what is on the page," (p. 49).

She suggests taking a single chapter and re-reading the whole thing while changing the gender of the characters, or the point of view, or leaving out all the modifiers, or counting how many times you've used each sense for events you've related. All this is to help you see where you've repeated yourself, among other things.

This path had no colored lanterns, and the pristine white gravel gave way to hard-packed earth. Abruptly, their steps were silenced, and the evergreen hedges seemed to lean in on them, concealing them from view and softening the sounds of distant voices. (c. Victoria Janssen 2010): sight - 4; touch - 1; hearing - 2. Of course, I chose that selection because it had a lot of sense impressions. Hmmm.

Checking a few other places in my current manuscript, in a very unscientific way, my pattern continues of sight being the sense I refer to most often, followed by hearing, followed by smell or touch, so perhaps sampling is just as effective a way to do the exercise. I seem to use scent a lot when I need a quick, vivid impression, which makes sense to me, as I find some smells very evocative. Some examples: "opulent smell of roasting beans and honeyed pastries" versus the later "bread fried in lard and sour wine," along with a number of instances of distinctive scents associated with a particular character, either physical things (something they'd eaten or drunk) or associational (the person has a familiar personal scent which the pov character finds delicious).

I tried the gender switch exercise, and...in my writing, there's not much difference between how males and females speak and behave (aside from physical differences). Which doesn't surprise me much.

Yolen notes also that turning a prose paragraph into lines of poetry (just breaking the lines, not rhyming or anything) can help you identify where you've overwritten. Turning poetry into prose can help you see if you've been too cryptic.

Gulls swooped and
dove and
screamed.
Wading birds scampered
along the tide line,
stopping only to
stab their long beaks
into the wet sand
in search of food.
Behind the blindingly bright sand,
tall grasses waved
in the breeze, gradually merging into
low, darker green scrub and finally into
towering, densely leaved trees.
As she watched, a scarlet bird winged
from the trees to a rocky outcropping
that was white with guano.
(c. Victoria Janssen 2010)

(It's harder than it looks! I think this is a little flowery, but it's only one paragraph; I think it's okay to leave alone.)

I read Take Joy shortly after it came out, and had forgotten these very useful pieces of advice until I was browsing through my notes.

Art has a shape.

"One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape; they have beginnings, middles, and endings. Whereas in life, things just drift along. In life, somebody has a cold, and you treat it as insignificant, and suddenly they die. Or they have a heart attack, and you are sodden with grief until they recover to live for thirty petulant years, demanding you wait on them. You think a love affair is ending, and you are gripped with Anna Karenina-ish drama, but two weeks later the guy is standing in your doorway, arms stretched up on the molding, jacket hanging open, a sheepish look on his face, saying, "Hey, take me back, will ya?" Or you think a love affair is high and thriving, and you don't notice that over the past months it has dwindled, dwindled, dwindled. In other words, in life one almost never has an emotion appropriate to an event. Either you don't know the event is occurring, or you don't know its significance. We celebrate births and weddings; we mourn deaths and divorces; yet what are we celebrating, what mourning? Rituals mark feelings, but feelings and events do not coincide. Feelings are large and spread over a lifetime. I will dance the polka with you and stamp my feet with vigor, celebrating every energy I have ever felt. But those energies were moments, not codifiable, not certifiable, not able to be fixed: you may be seduced into thinking my celebration is for you. Anyway, that is a thing art does for us: it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear. Whereas in life, from moment to moment, one can't tell an onion from a piece of dry toast."

--Marilyn French, The Women's Room

What Happens in the Reader's Mind

"A writer's talking about what he or she is capable of, like a writer's talking about the worth of his or her own work, is a pretty good way for that writer to start sounding like a pompous poseur.

Above all things, the story, the poem, the text is -- and is only -- what its words make happen in the reader's mind. And all readers are not the same.

Any reader has the right to say of any text: "But I didn't think it was that good."

Samuel R. Delany, SF Site interview with Jayme Lynn Blaschke, April 2001

Proposing and Disposing

"I shall now defuse this highly explosive bomb while simultaneously, and at the same time, reciting from the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley." --Gonzo the Great

While I'm writing my Crimean War time travel story, I'm also thinking about the second book on my current contract.

I am planning to propose another World War One paranormal, this one heavier on the paranormal elements. It would be a sequel to The Moonlight Mistress.

I haven't fully developed a plot arc in my mind, but I have the character conflicts in my mind, which for me usually come first. The main couple will have internal conflicts that will generate external conflicts, complicating how they negotiate the big external conflict of the war. Their conflicts were set up in The Moonlight Mistress, and can proceed logically from there. I have a tentative plan for introducing a third major character, a new one, who will be a foil and sometimes a mirror. I also have a subplot in mind, involving other characters from The Moonlight Mistress, but that one is already getting complicated in my mind, possibly too complicated for a single subplot, even though it would work in beautifully in many ways. I'm not sure yet. So I'm letting my backbrain work on it.

That almost always works well for me. Think hard, then let it go. Later, think again. Probably once I'm done with the short story, and can devote all of my attention to it. Switching back and forth, I should get the best of both methods.

Good versus Talented

"Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully..."

— Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

Purposeful, Habitual, and Gratuitous

"As early as 1959 or '60, I'd noticed that there was something terribly wrong with the female characters in most novels I was reading. Most of the writers (men and women) tended to conceive of their male characters as combinations of purposeful actions, habitual actions, and gratuitous actions. A female character, in contrast, would be all gratuitous action if it was a "good woman," with no purposes and no habits; if it was a "bad woman," she would be all purpose, with no gratuitous actions and no habits. This seemed silly. Very early on I tried to think about women characters in terms of all three -- actions purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous."

--Samuel Delany, interviewed in Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s,by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 99-100.

Black Wine opening

I really love the opening to Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine (1997).

#

There's a scarred, twisted old madwoman in a cage in the courtyard. The nurse throws a crust at her as he passes, therefore so does the girl. Others bring a can of water, or a trencher of meat cut up small, to stuff through the bars. The woman shoves the food into her mouth, dribbling and drooling and muttering.

"Why do they keep her?" says the girl. "She is useless. She is crazy. She eats too much."

"So do you," says the nurse offhandedly.

"But I work," says the girl. "I am a slave."

"She is not a slave."

"She is in a cage."

"It doesn't matter."

The old woman babbles in a language the waif understands but the others don't. She calls names, she recites recipes, she counts things. Sometimes she talks of hanging, and carrion crows. The girl thinks she calls like a crow herself, and the voice makes her shiver with an atavistic fear she hardly notices, so like the rest of her life it is.

#

Black Wine

Did You Know Bach Had a Father?

I post this section from Patrick O'Brian's The Ionian Mission because I love it for what is says about Bach (Johann Sebastian) as well as about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

O'Brian was an incredible writer, and I think this passage shows it.

#

'[London Bach] wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library. We searched through the papers - such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees - we searched for hours, and no uncle's pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.'

'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.'

'And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.'

'A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?'

'I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great Passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, 'cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well - to hear Viotti dashing away.'

Stephen studied the 'cello suite in his hand, booming and humming sotto voce. 'Tweedly-tweedly, tweedly tweedly, deedly deedly pom pompom. Oh, this would call for the delicate hand of the world,' he said. 'Otherwise it would sound like boors dancing. Oh, the double-stopping . . . and how to bow it?'

'Shall we make an attempt upon the D minor double sonata?' said Jack, 'and knit up the ravelled sleeve of care with sore labour's bath?'

'By all means,' said Stephen. 'A better way of dealing with a sleeve cannot be imagined.'

...

Now when the fiddle sang at all it sang alone: but since Stephen's departure he had rarely been in a mood for music and in any case the partita that he was now engaged upon, one of the manuscript works that he had bought in London, grew more and more strange the deeper he went into it. The opening movements were full of technical difficulties and he doubted he would ever be able to do them anything like justice, but it was the great chaconne which followed that really disturbed him. On the face of it the statements made in the beginning were clear enough: their closely-argued variations, though complex, could certainly be followed with full acceptation, and they were not particularly hard to play; yet at one point, after a curiously insistent repetition of the second theme, the rhythm changed and with it the whole logic of the discourse. There was something dangerous about what followed, something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare; and although Jack recognized that the whole sonata and particularly the chaconne was a most impressive composition he felt that if he were to go on playing it with all his heart it might lead him to very strange regions indeed.

During a pause in his evening letter Jack thought of telling Sophie of a notion that had come to him, a figure that might make the nature of the chaconne more understandable: it was as though he were fox-hunting, mounted on a powerful, spirited horse, and as though on leaping a bank, perfectly in hand, the animal changed foot. And with the change of foot came a change in its being so that it was no longer a horse he was sitting on but a great rough beast, far more powerful, that was swarming along at great speed over an unknown countryside in pursuit of a quarry - what quarry he could not tell, but it was no longer the simple fox. But it would be a difficult notion to express, he decided; and in any case Sophie did not really care much for music, while she positively disliked horses. On the other hand she dearly loved a play, so he told her about....

[from pp.47-48, 154-155 of The Ionian Mission, Patrick O'Brian].

Be Like a Bug

"All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what's keeping things running right. We're bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like to make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they're not needed, hon. Just take in the buggy pleasures. Be kind to the others, grab the fleck of riverweed, notice how beautifully your bug legs scull."

--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

How to Make Money in Publishing (and other writing jokes)

How to Make Money in Publishing and other writing jokes



Question: How do you make a small fortune in publishing?

Answer: Start with a large fortune.


Question: How many screenwriters does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Ten.
1st draft. Hero changes light bulb.
2nd draft. Villain changes light bulb.
3rd draft. Hero stops villain from changing light bulb. Villain falls to death.
4th draft. Lose the light bulb.
5th draft. Light bulb back in. Fluorescent instead of tungsten.
6th draft. Villain breaks bulb, uses it to kill hero's mentor.
7th draft. Fluorescent not working. Back to tungsten.
8th draft. Hero forces villain to eat light bulb.
9th draft. Hero laments loss of light bulb. Doesn't change it.
10th draft. Hero changes light bulb.

Question: If you were lost in the woods, who would you trust for directions: the publisher who prints everything you write, an agent, or Santa Claus?

Answer: The agent. The other two indicate you are hallucinating.

Jane Austen Didn't Let Other People Tell Her What To Write

"My Dear Sir,

I am honoured by the Prince's thanks and very much obliged to yourself for the kind manner in which you mention the work. ...

You are very kind in your hints as to the sort of composition which might recommend me at present, and I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe-Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

I remain, my dear Sir,
Your very much obliged, and sincere friend,
J. AUSTEN.

Chawton, near Alton, April 1, 1816."

-- Jane Austen, letter to J. S. Clarke

More letters from the Brabourne edition of Jane Austen's letters.

Happy Birthday, Ursula!

"We turn not older with years but newer every day." --Emily Dickinson


Today is Ursula Kroeber LeGuin's 80th Birthday.


[Photo copyright Eileen Gunn]

"Socrates said, "The misuse of language induces evil in the soul." He wasn’t talking about grammar. To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper."

--"A Few Words to a Young Writer"

"...when women speak truly they speak subversively--they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That's what I want--to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don't know the power in you--I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman's tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don't let us sink back into silence. If we don't tell our truth, who will? Who'll speak for my children, and yours?"

--"The Mother Tongue," Bryn Mawr Commencement Address, 1986

Now go read and admire A Pillow-Book For Cats.

Many Happy Returns, Ursula!!!

Raymond Chandler, on time to write

Today I'm a guest at fellow Spice author Amanda McIntyre's House of Muse Blog, for "Coffee Talk." Please stop by and chat if you have a chance!

For a LiveJournal charity auction, I am offering your name as a character in The Duke and the Pirate Queen. You do not need a LiveJournal account to bid. How To Bid. Information about the auction itself and its purpose. Bidding closes October 10, 2009, Saturday, 11:59 p.m. Pacific time.

(This picture is not of Amanda.)

"I write when I can and I don't write when I can't...I wait for inspiration...The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day, when a professional writer doesn't do anything but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it he shouldn't try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules. A) You don't have to write. B) You can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself."

-- Raymond Chandler to Alex Barris, 1949

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

I've been thinking about this book lately, and considering a re-read.

Excerpt from How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ:

If certain people are not supposed to have the ability to produce "great" literature, and if this supposition is one of the means used to keep such people in their place, the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which such people are prevented from producing any literature at all. But a formal prohibition tends to give the game away--that is, if the peasants are kept illiterate, it will occur to somebody sooner or later that illiteracy absolutely precludes written literature, whether such literature be good or bad; and if significant literature can by definition be produced only in Latin, the custom of not teaching Latin to girls will again, sooner or later, cause somebody to wonder what would happen if the situation were changed. The arguments for this sort of status quo are too circular for comfort. (In fact such questions were asked over and over again in Europe in recent centuries, and eventually reforms were made.)

In a nominally egalitarian society the ideal situation (socially speaking) is one in which the members of the "wrong" groups have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can't. But, alas, give them the least real freedom and they will do it. The trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so's will do it anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning, or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done, these strategies result in a social situation in which the "wrong" people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or whatever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so we can all go home to lunch.

The methods indicated above are varied but tend to occur in certain key areas: informal prohibitions (including discouragement and the inaccessibility of materials and training), denying the authorship of the work in question (this ploy ranges from simple misattribution to psychological subtleties that make the head spin), belittlement of the work itself in various ways, isolation of the work from the tradition to which it belongs and its consequent presentation as anomalous, assertions that the work indicates the author's bad character and hence is of primarily scandalous interest or ought not to have been done at all (this did not end with the nineteenth century), and simply ignoring the works, the workers, and the whole tradition, the most commonly employed technique and the hardest to combat.

Buy from University of Texas Press.

Reviews, the Sweetest Pain

"Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good." --Samuel Johnson

I think writers often worry too much about how their work will be perceived, or rather, how they imagine their work will be perceived, before it's even finished. They worry about how other writers will see their work: hackwork, work of genius, cutting-edge, supreme prose-stylist, unputdownable.



And how will readers see it? Bland, nothing new, boring, not bad, entertaining, good fluff, best book ever. "I will never read this author again!" "This author is now an autobuy!" If you're lucky, you'll get both opinions in the same review. I can't even remember how many times I've been pointed to wildly conflicting reviews of the same book. They might even both be right. A lot depends on the perspective from which the book is being viewed.

Worrying about it can stop you-the-writer in your tracks. It's good to try and be a better writer, I would never argue that. But I think it isn't generally a good thing to be too self-conscious about how one's own prose is perceived by others, to the extent that one is paying more attention to what one imagines others will think than to what one is actually doing. Easier said than done, of course.



This is one reason why it's probably a good thing to ignore reviews of your work. For the most part, I haven't done this, but I keep thinking I ought to. Once the reviews arrive, I'm already done with the book, and have been done with it for almost a year, and have moved on. In fact, I might be done with the book after it, as well. By the time those reviews start showing up, good, bad, or indifferent, there's nothing much I can do about the book.

"Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen." --Stephen King

We'll see if I can take my own advice in the future. I fear I'm not strong enough to resist for long--even though any critique in reviews comes too late, there's the draw of reading commentary on your work by someone who's read it, and cared enough to write down their thoughts on it. This draw is very tempting when you've spent months with little or no feedback about the thing, the novel, that is consuming your life.

"If all critics agreed, only one of us would have a job." --Mary Kalin-Casey

Related Post: Striving for Perfection.

Doing What Interests You

"If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased."

--Katherine Hepburn

Tune in tomorrow for Jeannie Lin's guest post "Feminism in the Tang Dynasty: The Footbinding Dilemma."

Jerome K. Jerome on Work

It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.

And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn't a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.

But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.

But I get it without asking for it - at least, so it appears to me - and this worries me.

George says he does not think I need trouble myself on the subject. He thinks it is only my over-scrupulous nature that makes me fear I am having more than my due; and that, as a matter of fact, I don't have half as much as I ought. But I expect he only says this to comfort me.

--Jerome K. Jerome, from Three Men in a Boat

Woolf quote

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

--Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)