Bright Lights, Big City Pt. 3

Sunday morning was bittersweet. I had a couple more sessions to attend before hopping on my flight back to Charlotte, but was just getting the hang of things in NYC. The one hangup I'd had with the whole weekend was the fact that I felt like I was missing out on some of the sessions in order to do mundane things, like find lunch or check out, and so if I had the chance to do it again, I would schedule a buffer day in on each side of the trip. That way, I'd have had more time to get out and explore. Basically, once the conference started, I was locked in unless I wanted to skip.

That morning, I attended a session from DIY MFA about writing MG and YA. I started out initially as a YA author. I began writing as a young adult, and as a result, most of my characters are close to my age. I find it hard to stretch. While I had been pitching Momentum as New Adult, NA is very new (no pun intended) and has a murky, nebulous definition. I knew this session would be beneficial to me. One of the main takeaways of the lecture, aside from some fabulous ideas about working yourself out of plotting issues, was that writing MG and YA is super fun (which it is) and also that it is not lesser than other forms of literature. Yes, we want to write about teenagers, but teenagers are also very good at pointing out bullshit or when you're pandering to them. Writing like a teenager and about teenagers is hard. You have less room for error since your audience will dip out pretty quickly if they smell a rat.

I did skip a couple sessions to beat the aforementioned rush to check out at 11 and to have some time to wander the area surrounding the hotel for food. I was looking for a sandwich shop which ended up being across the street (I have a terrible sense of direction), but stumbled upon a street fair instead. I bought some costume jewelry and got a crepe!

It was supposed to be strawberry and Nutella, but whatever, banana works, too.

The closing keynote speaker was Kimberla Lawson Roby, creator of the Reverend Curtis Black series. She's about to publish her twenty-first novel! She began as a self-published author before selling 10,000 copies and being picked up by an agent. Her husband took out money from his 401K so they could print the first 3,000 copies of her debut novel, which she sold from her home.

She's an incredibly personable, intelligent, and funny woman. As Harlan Coben advised, "Don't be a douchebag." All these successful writers who had spoken to us, the unpublished authors scrambling our way to the top, had been the kindest, most engaging, and interesting people. They fielded our questions with grace and patience and made us laugh, almost moved us to tears.

That's how I'd felt the entire conference. I'd been surrounded by these veritable writing juggernauts, where I should have been intimidated and completely awestruck by their success, but instead, I found myself emphasizing with them, nodding my head as each of them spoke. For the first time, I was beginning to feel as if I belonged, as if I were a writer.

Once the conference ended, I had the hotel hold my bags since my flight wasn't until seven. I took the subway ALL BY MYSELF (thankyouverymuch) to Bri's lovely apartment, kicking myself that I hadn't remembered that she lived in NYC so I didn't have to waste money on a hotel. But whatever, I'm not bitter about it. There, she and her girlfriend Rebecca made me their classic breakfast sandwich, complete with a latte, watermelon, and fresh orange juice. Like, shut up. I should have stayed here and saved myself the cash. Anyway, check out the views:

Just look at that sautéed kale goodness. 

Broadway Street

These little tufts of green are Central Park. 

Panorama! 

Couldn't resist a mirror selfie. 

They had to run off, but the apartment was close to Central Park. I had to do ONE touristy thing, so I trekked over and took some pics/selfies. Does anyone else get that gut omg-do-I-really-look-like-that reaction whenever they hit the camera reverse button on their phone? Nope? Just me?

It's tourist season in the city! 

This made me think of a million movies. 

When I can't seem to take a good picture, I just ruin it by making a face. We all win. 

I finished Eleanor & Park while sitting on the runway at LaGuardia, somewhat sad that this journey had ended. However, I planned the trip strategically. I quit my job the day before, jetted off to NYC where I made some fabulous contacts to follow up with about Momentum, and now I was flying back to begin the journey to Wilmington for graduate school.

The fan art inside the cover of Eleanor & Park is just fantastic. 

It's a strange life, full of twists and turns, but as my dad has informed me, I tend to thrive on the chaos.

Gaining Perspective Through Setting

Recently, I spent a couple days in good old LA, which is my dad's tongue-in-cheek name for Lower Altavista, Virginia. He grew up in Altavista, a small little town about twenty minutes south of Lynchburg on highway 29. My grandmother still lives in the house my dad grew up in. They moved in the year Kennedy was shot.

I spent a lot of my childhood there discovering the same places my dad had frequented as a child. Often, when I write, those memories come back to me. I think finding something true to write about helps yield your work an authenticity that can be otherwise hard to find. I began a new Work In Progress (WIP) this summer, and the setting of the story is based on Altavista. I needed a small town, one that almost seems lost in time. You drive into town and step into a world where the world moves a little more slowly, where folks wave when you drive by, and everyone knows your last name.

My grandmother, Dodie, was a wonderful resource, acting as my official tour guide and Altavista's historian. I learned about Altavista's beginnings and how it has grown into the town it is today.

I hit a roadblock in my writing earlier, so I decided to take the trip to inspire myself with the setting. I was able to sit out on my grandmother's back porch and listen to the train whistle through town, a sound I will forever associate with Altavista. Without music or internet or anything to distract me, I watched the fireflies come out at dusk. I heard the soft crunching of something moving through the woods which begin at the end of the back yard and trail down into a ravine where the old football practice field is slowly being overgrown by vegetation. Sometimes as a writer, I feel you have to take the time to immerse yourself in your setting. You have to live it, breathe it, feel it.

A Watchful Summer (my working title) is going to be a personal novel, hopefully one where I can capture that feeling of magic and curiosity that so pervaded my childhood. In a way, this novel is for me to come full circle. When I was thirteen, I discovered a manual Royal typewriter in my grandmother's closet. We dusted it off, had the ink bands replaced, and I took it home with me where I was able for the first time to truly shut the door and write on my own time (this was before laptops - I didn't get a personal computer until I moved to college.) In fact, it's that typewriter that I found in Altavista that inspired the name of this blog.

Here's a couple of pictures to get you in the mood: 

The Avoca House (technically the back)

The front of the Avoca House  

Lovely Victorian staircase

Bedford Avenue 

 

Woods near the house  

Staunton River 

Railroad tracks 

Cemetery where my grandfather is buried. 

-E

The Weekly Wrap 1/7/13

Monday 1/7/13 - Spent my work time today on Momentum. Chapter Five has needed some serious work, but I've found that I'm extending chapters as I rewrite. Looks like the second draft is going to be longer than the first.

"The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent but no money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

 - Chuck Palahniuk 

Tuesday 1/8/13 - Kicked ass today. Not gonna lie. I got a lot of revising done, adding about 2,000 words. That's a big writing day for me. Tonight I had my first class for this advanced Fiction Writing workshop I'm taking. It seems like it will be fun, but we've got a seriously limited word count. Under 4,000. Yikes! I know one of my first drafts of the stories I wrote last semester was almost double that and nearly all the revised drafts ended up being over 5K. I wanted to be challenged though and one of those challenges is learning to be brief. The short story is a much different game from novel writing. I have to adjust my brain to thinking in smaller, more sizable pieces. 

Wednesday 1/9/13 - I was doing double duty today, squeezing in some time for revision this morning before jetting off to work, leaving there to go to another job thing, and finally spending some time unwinding with friends.

It was a pretty day, if I do say so myself: 

Thursday 1/10/13 - Double duty again! Spent all morning working on a post at You Should, only to have it deleted right before I had to leave for work. Blogger can be good and it can be bad. It was definitely acting up today. Deleted an hour and a half of work. Bleh.

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."

 -Ray Bradbury 

Ray helped me through it though. I went right back to it after I got off work and got the post figured out. You can check it out here, if you like. 

Friday - 1/11/13 - It is a perfectly awful day outside - raining and about forty degrees. This is what I like to call writing weather. 

Saturday 1/12/13 - Today was a lovely foggy morning. I finished two of the books I've been reading (We Have Always Lived in the Castle and On Writing) and did a lot of blog tinkering. I've gone blue! This is because my MC in the Work In Progress has synesthesia and loves the color blue. I wanted something bright and amorphous, therefore jellyfish. 

Sunday 1/13/13 - Another morning squeezed in before work all afternoon and night. Here's how I keep my routine. I nearly hit the halfway point in Momentum's revision today! Feeling good about it. This quote felt appropriate: 

 

"Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true." 

-John Green 

This works in a lot of ways. The past really is subjective to your memory and how your mind twists it. My MC spends A LOT of time wrestling with his past, trying to decide how it informs his present and the future. 

Muse Food for the Week: 

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson 

This book is decidedly creepy. Mary Katherine Blackwood is part of the infamous Blackwood family. Her sister, Constance, was accused and acquitted of poisoning her family with arsenic, but the town isn't ready to forgive her yet. The family lives in seclusion and Constance cares for Uncle Julian, though his mind is somewhat addled by the poisoning. Mary Katherine spends her time burying precious things across their land and running with Jonas, her cat. Everything changes, however, when Cousin Charles appears on their front door. (You can check out a mini review of it on my 2013 Books page, which is sadly pretty empty right now)

And that's all for this week, folks! See ya on the flip side.

-E

Chapter 12 - Updates

I promise, I am trying to get on a better blogging schedule.  I know I've been pretty sporadic here, but now that I'm actively working on improving my craft, I'll hopefully have more to say.  Some little words of wisdom here and there.  I want to aim for a post a week here.

Here's my most recent Barnes and Noble haul:

From top to bottom:
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein - I started reading this last week.  My schedule's been pretty full, but I've been sucked into this thing.  Everyone on the blogosphere has raved about it and I see why.  So glad I started it.
Different Seasons by Stephen King - Confession time: I haven't read everything King's written.  Shocker, I know!  Until now I've had a strange aversion to short stories and novellas, but my writing classes have opened my eyes.  I'm also writing some short stuff now so I need to do my homework.  This one includes the inspiration for the Shawshank Redemption.  Can't be half bad.
The Iron King by Julie Kagawa - It's my first fey book!  I've heard about this series over and over so I thought I'd give it a try.  From what I read last night, I like.  The faeries so far aren't your typical winged creatures flinging glitter everywhere.  They have teeth, literally.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor - Finally!  It came out in paper back and I bought it yesterday.  As much as I love a good hardback, they're expensive.  And I'm back in school paying for supplies.  Gotta be thrifty.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - I'll admit, I bought it because of the hype.  Everyone has been raving about it and it's at the top of the best sellers lists, so how bad could it be?  Plus Barnes and Noble had it for 40% off.

So what have I been doing all this time, you ask?

Well I went back to school!  That's what I did.  After much pushing and shoving and calling the registrar's office (because NC State has the most asinine advising system on the planet), I forced myself into two writing classes.

First I have Fiction Writing, which I love.  My professor (I don't know if it's appropriate to call him that because he's a MFA student at State and he's also probably only a couple years my senior and I feel weird calling someone who could be considered a peer Mr. So and So) is great.  He reminds me of one of my long time friends, if she were a dude.  He's a science fiction writer (yeah, I googled him and found his blog, whatevs) so I'll probably try to hunt down the stories he's had published.  The class is great.  Granted, I'm the oldest person there, but everyone is excited and ready to go.  They start talking about our readings and discuss them before class even starts.

Last week we finished our first drafts of our stories to workshop.  We have two due during the semester consisting of 2,000 to 10,000 words.  I've never written short stories before (aside from that pretentious allegory I tried to write in high school), so this is new territory for me to squeeze my ideas into that word range.  I think I did well on my first go around.  I wrote about two kids spying on their strange new neighbor.  My own neighbor was the inspiration.  Life imitates art, right?  My workshop group receives its critiques next Wednesday so I'm excited to see what the class's response is.

Second I have Creative Writing.  This class focuses on more forms: drama, poetry, and short stories.  Right now, we're smack in the middle of our poetry third.  My professor is another MFA student who specializes in poetry.  She's exactly what I would picture: soft spoken, well dressed but without make up, often wears only one earring, and she must have art class before she teaches us because she never wears her shoes and her toes are covered in either plaster or white paint.  This class has a different feel to it.  The students are quieter, less prone to blurting out their opinions, but now that we've begun critiquing each other's work, they are starting to become more animated.

It's a funny thing being back in school but not working toward a degree. For one, I feel old.  Most of my classmates are five years younger than me.  They can't buy alcohol and have really only just graduated high school.  They're concerned about Rush and football games and intro Biology exams.  They don't know what their majors are, but they have ideas.  I feel like a fish out of water sometimes.  I say things like, when I was in college, or my old college roommate, or when I was a senior.  I don't have an answer when they ask me what year I am or what my major is.  I don't have either.

But I see that bright-eyed ambition that I've been missing.  Out in the real world, it's an easy thing to lose.  Young minds like these are always clicking and turning, looking for new ways to make better grades, how they can update their resumes, what they can do over the summer to show they didn't waste their time.  They're busy and tired.  Each semester, their lives change with their classes.  They are surrounded by their friends, free from the watchful eyes of their parents for the first time.  They have the world at their fingertips.  It is refreshing to see that again.  It makes me want to move, to do more.  These are people who will stay up the night before, toiling until the task is done.  I've become lazy.  If I don't finish something by bedtime, I push it off until morning.  Not these people.

So in a way, I am different, but I am the same.  They are different, but they are the same.  We're all a little bit mad but we are all determined.

Chapter 11 - Write Without Fear

Again, I apologize for the long lapses between posts.  August has been filled with weddings and trips and classes and work.

Last time, I wrote about having writer's block.  And I am first to say: I was wrong (Hear that, Mom?).  Writer's block is another one of the convenient excuses I can hide behind like lack of time or inspiration.

It is fear.  Plain and simple.

Fear of ending.  Fear of not living up to the grandiose expectations that I have built up in my head for how I want my writing to be.  Fear of actually having to put this thing out into the world one day.  This is Step One.  Write it.  If I finish, it's been written, and if I have a first draft, soon I'll have a second and then people will be putting it in front of them and the judgments will come.

It is an old notion: if I don't try, I won't fail.  It is a cowardly move, for sure.  I am slowly learning to let my writing stand on its own two feet.  I can't cripple it from the get-go by never finishing.  Let me let you in on a little secret:

Everyone writes crappy first drafts.  Professionals and amateurs.  Everybody.  (And if there is someone who writes a perfect first draft, we don't talk to her anyway.)

The beauty of a first draft is no one else has to see it.  A first draft is a diary; a first draft is your dirty little secret.  You take your first draft and you mark the hell out of it.  You massacre it and the final product looks nothing like that awful piece of prose you put down.  If you're lucky, in the end, what you have is something that comes close to what you imagined in your mind.

Every writer wants to do a story justice.  But what about the characters? we moan and cry.  We aren't painting them in just the right light.  

So what?

Keep writing and it will come.  The important thing with a story is 1. starting and 2. having the courage to finish it.  I can pretty much guarantee that perfect little snippet you've written a thousand times in your head will not match up to what ends up on the paper.  The beauty is that with time and careful inspection of your work, the final product is exactly what it needs to be.

My advice?

Write.  Just write.  Don't comb over the details looking for out of place commas or even plot holes.  Put a bandaid on it and let that little bit of magic come.  Writing is something like channeling for me.  It's a groove, often like running.  You have to warm up and stretch.  You have to give yourself time to let your strides lengthen until you reach a sustainable pace.  Sure, it's painful.  You have moments where you feel like you are constantly running uphill.  You are battling to get the next word down, to find the right detail.  You have to remember no one else is watching.  If it's shit, toss it.  However, you may find that upon revision there are some good kernels in there you can tease out.

I am still guilty of these things, but I am learning to write without fear.  I had a moment the other morning while reading some of my Fiction Writing class's assigned essays and I thought, Good Lord, I am not this good.  I will never be this good.  I pulled up the manuscript and started looking at it, hating all the parts I'd once loved.

Then I made myself stop.  I'll never finish anything if I let myself be paralyzed by fear.  I may have to humble myself a little bit (I am not Hemingway and I am not Steinbeck; I don't aim to be), but that doesn't mean that what I'm doing doesn't have value.

Honor it.  Block out the negativity and let the words come.  Free write.  Associate.  Observe.  Ask questions of your characters.  Challenge them.  Make them grow.

As a young writer, it can be a lot to take in.  There are so many rules, but if you write a lot and you read a lot (the two most basic rules for becoming a successful writer), you will find that you already know a lot of them.  You see examples of what to do and what not to do every day in what you read.

Writing can be a lonely road.  You lay bare parts of yourself normally kept hidden and you offer them up to the world on a platter, asking for acceptance.  Many times, you won't get it.  But I believe with talent and perseverance, one day, it will come.

-E

And if you can't write, like they say at NaNoWriMo, just add ninjas! 

Chapter 8 - The Devil's in the Details

Details, details, details. 

For me as a writer, it's a blessing.  Something can catch my eye and instantly, words start flowing in my head.  Inspiration sometimes strikes as a dinky trickle or a ragging river.  For me as a person and particularly as a girl, it can be frustrasting.  I'd like to use a personal story to illustrate this. 

I remember a lot about my (only) ex-boyfriend.  And yes, I believe first loves always stick with you, occupying a place in your heart you can never truly erase them from.  It doesn't have to be a bad thing.  Years later, I'm sure I could pass him on the street, we would acknowledge each other, and I would walk away knowing we are now strangers.  That's what happens when a broken heart heals; it bounces back strong and resilient, ready to throw itself headfirst into the next promising relationship. 

But when it's still mending, every single detail of a relationship can be agonizing.  As someone very concerned with details, I romanticized him.  Instead of remembering how he made me feel, I knew the small things and I cherished the stolen moments.  Even now, I could paint him like a picture.

He had sandy hair which grew long and curled right behind his ears and eyes the color of the ocean.  He had brown freckles in them too, more on one side than the other, always slightly off-balance, his symmetry just to the left.  When he was drunk, which was often, his slight lisp became more pronounced.  A childhood spent growing up at the beach and surfing made him tan and lean, almost like he'd been hardened by the waves.  On his chest where his ribs came together in the center, he had a little divet like an upside-down V and I remember sitting on my bed when we were breaking up, pressing my crying face into him and feeling my nose butt up against that spot I'd traced lovingly so many times before. 

Over the summer when he went home to his parents' and to work at the beach, I would visit on the weekends.  We'd drive around without shoes on with the windows down in his beat up green car, listening to songs with eight minute guitar solos and trying not to knock over the buckets of cleaning solution and chlorine tablets in the backseat.  When he was working his pool cleaning job, I'd tag along.  We'd visit beach houses and mansions and pretend we were as rich, jumping into hot tubs and pools of all shapes and sizes when no one was home.  I remember popcorn shrimp and french fries from a little shack on the beach road and the 4th of July where I sat cross-legged drawing circles in the sand with my back molded against him, watching fireworks explode over the water and shower the breaking waves in fantastic colors.  Red and blue and gold and green.    

When his father, the commercial pilot, suggested we take their four seater for a ride, he gave me his crooked smile and slipped into the front seat.  We'd been together for months and I never knew he had his pilot's license until then, but that was how he was.  Humble and surprising.  We flew low over the coastline all the way to Cape Hatteras, watching the cars and people scurry about their lives below us like ants.    

See?  It's very easy to look at the past and see it in shades of black and white.  After the ashes settle in the wake of a break up and the heart mends, you only remember the good times.  It's hard to gain perspective on what it was really like because all I can remember are the details. 

For relationships, it may not be the best habit I have.  For writing, this hypersensitivity can be a blessing.  The details and little moments are the vehicles I use to create an emotion, tell a story, or construct a scene.  In the editting process, I go back to what I've created and parse out the pieces that count, that really say something, but for the writing process as a whole, it helps give shape to what I'm trying to do.  It makes my story concrete and full. 

This may be a very roundabout way of saying "show, don't tell", but it's how my brain works when I'm writing.  Typically in a story, I know the beginning and the end.  I know the characters and maybe some of what happens in the middle, but fleshing out the rest of it is all about the details.