First of all, if this needs to be said, no piece of software will ever write your story for you. And no program will ever be able to replace a human editor either. A machine cannot tell you if your story works or not. It has no idea. That said, there are some programs available that will make your life a lot easier.

The point of this is not to replace a human editor. Really. But what a machine can do for you is to catch all that lazy writing, the things that slip by your eyes after several thousand passes through the same sentence. The things that might even slip by your critique partners after they’ve read several thousand words of your work and have become similarly accustomed to your lazy mistakes.

But a machine won’t – not the first time, and not after the thousandth time. That’s where machines work best. (more…)

My friend Nina was the one to introduce me to Liquid Story Binder. I’ve been meaning to write something about this program ever since I got it, but I keep coming up blank. It’s very hard for me to put into words exactly how much LOVE I have for this program. (I know, that’s lame, but seriously people!) And it’s also hard for me to explain everything it can do… which is pretty much anything you need it to do!

I will never write anything in a Word document again. Never. Not a blog entry, not a poem, not even a freewrite-background-note. Nothing. It all goes into LSB, somewhere. And what I love about LSB is that there’s a place for everything in it. It’s more than just a word processor – it’s… well, a binder! If a binder could have just the perfect amount of pockets you wanted it to have, in the perfect order and shape, and in all your favorite colors. It can be whatever you want it to be. (more…)

#1: read your old college writing, you know that writing you were sure was so good, that you were sure would be published some day? And oh, is it bad! Rest assured that you are a better writer now.

#2: try some other hobby as a novice. Join a community where there are lots of professionals doing amazing work. Fail badly and stand in awe. Then realize that you are not this novice at writing. At least there’s that.

Sorry, I haven’t written in this thing in FOREVER. I do have some stuff in the works. I have SO much stuff in the works! (Too much stuff in the works?)

Stuff #1: I’m beginning a 52-week photography project. It’s partly a New Year’s resolution kind of thing, but it’s also practice for a writing idea I’m putting together. My project will be photos inspired by pieces of my own writing – you’ll get to see the first one soon enough, and I’ll post them here, as well as on my Flickr page, each week.

Stuff #2: the writing idea I’m putting together. I’m sure nobody remembers, but a couple/few years back, I was working on a novel of linked short stories. It didn’t work – not really. I abandoned it, and began writing other things instead, one of them being my current silly little web series. But after nearly three years of work on that, I now know where I failed that first time, and how to do things differently this time. And I want to try again. It’s a ridiculously crazy idea, because I’m not sure I’ve even seen this format done before except in my own web series.

The idea is that it’ll be a novel series in linked stories – with photography! It’s still in such a tender and fragile idea stage, but I’m all kinds of excited about it. It’ll also be indie-e-published, because I won’t even begin to try to convince a publisher to get on board with this crazy business! I’m beginning to think I wouldn’t even want a traditional publisher if it was a possibility, because this is something I want to do exactly my own stubborn way. Readers can read the series by the chapter each week (e-format only), or in book form at the end of the “season”, which I hope to do in both e-format and print. The series won’t begin until fall of 2012 to give me some time to wrap up some of my other current projects.

This probably makes no sense to a lot of people, but if you follow my upcoming photo project, you’ll get a small taste of what I mean by it.

Stuff #3: the novel continues to be written. Part of the reason the series isn’t starting until next fall, besides just my photography practice, is that I want to get this novel good and finished and out the door. I’m currently about 40% through the second draft.

So that’s that then. I have a lot of (self-imposed) work to do! And Stuff #4: I also want to do a better job at keeping this blog updated (for anybody who still follows this old thing).

My book is about a lot of things. On the very first page of my notebook, I have a list of all the things my novel is about. Some of them are vague and abstract (fragility and unexpected strength?), and some are less vague (a young marriage rooted in friendship?). It’s also a story about some birds. Really, it is. But nowhere on my list is the [big topical subject, or two] that happens to also come up in the book. It isn’t a story about “that” at all.

Or at least I hope it isn’t.

For a while, I was worried it would end up being “one of those kind of books” about [insert your favorite big topical subject matter here]. Not that there’s anything wrong with “those kind of books”. People love them. They sell well. They make people think and they make people talk, and the author gets invited to morning shows and Oprah to talk about [big topical subjects]. Jodi Picoult writes “those kind of books”, and I’ve read some of them before, and they’re interesting. You can tell when she talks about them that they’re “those kind of books”, because when she talks about them, she talks about the [big topical subject] they’re about. But I don’t think I’ll ever want to talk on a morning show, and that’s not the kind of book I want to write either.

The Cider House Rules is a good example (one of my favorite books ever!). If any book could be tagged as being “about abortion” I think that would be it. But in truth, it’s not about abortion at all. It’s about people, and what a person is entitled to do with his life, and what’s right or not right, what’s fair or not fair. It’s about love, and family, and sacrifice, and standing up for what you believe in. But no, it’s not really about abortion. Or I’d say, if you think it’s just about abortion, then you’re clearly not reading it deeply enough.

What is the difference then, and how do you make that difference stand out? I think one difference I see is in the characters. I imagine that when you sit down to write “one of those kind of books”, you start with an idea, a story about [big topical subject], and then you insert some characters.

Then the stories I like to write, and love to read, are ones where the story is so organic to these particular characters that no other characters could possibly take their place, because the story just wouldn’t work anymore. The story is the characters. Maybe that’s the difference? I love stories about people, not stories about [big topical subjects]. Though often people will run into these big topical subjects in their lives. It’s kind of unavoidable sometimes.

So I know what I want my book to be, and what I don’t want it to be. And I think I have one point to start with. Does anyone else see other differences, between “those kind of books” and the other kind, which somehow manage to be about much more than you’ll find at the surface level?

So after having a bout of cold feet on my 1st person alternating POV narrators, 35% into the second-ish draft of my novel, I decided to look through a few of my all-time favorite books and see how they were done. I was very surprised to find about 90% of the novels I own (as many of my favorites as I can afford, of course) were written in first-person, and a good handful of those used alternating 1st person narrators too.

Kind of telling then why I’m trying to do the same for my own novel – whether I can or can’t has yet to be decided

The list, favorite novels in 1st person:

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter (4-5 different narrators)
Kiss Me Judas, by Will Christopher Baer
Lolita, by Vladimir Nobokov
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, by Lorrie Moore
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides (1st person plural)
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (1st person plural, and one chapter in 3rd person)
My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult (4 different narrators)
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz (2 different narrators)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

***

Not counting short stories, and not counting books I loved but don’t own.

I’m a sucker for a good love story, whether that be romantic or platonic love. I don’t consider myself a romance writer, but I do write a heck of a lot of stories about love, whatever form it might manifest itself in. (And I have a theory, that on a very basic level, all stories come back to love in some form.) They’re hard to write though, without dissolving into a syrupy mess.

It seems in the past weeks the world has been thinking and reflecting on the topic of love in writing, and I’ve been collecting a few of the links I’ve found.

First, an interview @ Maud Newton w/ Marlon James: about his novel, the Book of Night Women (which sounds fascinating, by the way!), and writing about love.

I remember calling friends shouting, “I just wrote a love scene! All they do is kiss!” to which they would respond, “. . . and are they then dismembered?” and I’d go, “No, after that they dance!” It was hard. I resisted it for as long as I could because I didn’t believe in it at first, and even when I did, I couldn’t figure out how to write it. Not until Irish novelist Colum McCann gave me permission by giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten from a writer: Risk Sentimentality.

There’s a belief that sex is the hardest thing for a literary novelist but I disagree: love is. We’re so scared of descending into mush that I think we end up with a just-as-bad opposite, love stories devoid of any emotional quality. But love can work in so many ways without having to resort to that word. Someone once scared me by saying that love isn’t saying “I love you” but calling to say “did you eat?” (And then proceeded to ask me this for the next 6 months). My point being that, in this novel at least, relationships come not through words, but gestures like the overseer wanting to cuddle. Or rubbing his belly and hollering about her cooking, or teaching her how to dance or ride a horse — things reserved for white women…

…I think, as a writer, the important thing was to layer the relationship with complexity and contradiction. There were situations where I could have left certain storylines one-dimensional and gotten away with it. I think the relationship is gripping not because they love each other, or think they do (or not) but because even with such a horribly skewed dynamic, hearts do what they want. And people don’t always fit in the roles that have been assigned to them. But of course the relationship is doomed; any slavery love writes its end in its very beginning.

On a similar tangent, I certainly don’t consider myself an erotica writer either, but I can’t seem to write a story that doesn’t involve or at least elude to sex in some form.

Here, an article on how writing about sex in fiction is almost never really about the sex.

More on writing sex here, from Storytellers Unplugged.

And finally, a must-see movie – film, I guess, we call them films when they’re artsy and thoughtful Good Dick: I suck at writing reviews, and there are plenty of good ones on IMDB, but really, it’s a hilarious, twisted love-story, but at the same time surprisingly sweet. Emotionally taxing, but so worth it! Movie trailer here. (Oh, rated R and not for the kiddies though!) Enjoy!

“You need a bridge,” he said. “To get you from one place to another.”

My husband says he’s only here on earth to think up ideas for other people to use, since he claims his own ideas never go anywhere. That was all he said, pretty much, “You need a bridge.” And that bridges are useful. Musicians use them. Builders use them. I used one, symbolically, I suppose. And it worked.

It was just the word, “bridge,” that triggered the memory of this bridge we used to play on when we were little. It was a covered bridge over a creek, and we used to climb up onto the side of it, play small pranks on the cars passing by, like wouldn’t it be so funny if you hung over the side with your butt up in the air?

We were ten

But what bridged me from chapter one to chapter two, where I was hopelessly stuck in the fog, was not the bridge at all, but the childhood memory that was sparked from the word “bridge.” A childhood memory, and the scene I ended up writing had absolutely nothing to do with a bridge of the literal or figurative variety. But just the word got me from one place to another.

I wonder what other words might be useful sparks to use when we’re stuck in the fog? It would be nice to build up an arsenal of these useful triggers. Bridges, to get us from one place to another.

Thanks, hubby! Brilliant!