Mamalicious!

So Tami tagged me for the Three Pieces of Writing Advice meme. I’m honored; I haven’t been tagged since elementary school! Here goes…

I really do believe there’s nothing new under the sun, and writing advice is no exception. Any advice I have for other writers is advice that has been given to me, either directly from treasured mentors and workshop leaders, or indirectly from books about writing. So I suppose I’m recycling here with three pieces of advice that have served me well:

Make peace with your shitty first drafts. Even though I had been writing (and continue to write) shitty first drafts, I never heard the concept phrased quite so eloquently as it was by the incomparable Anne Lamott (who is coming to town next month, and yes, I have tickets!) in her writing bible, Bird by Bird. The perfectionist in me wants everything I write to be stellar, and if I don’t reign her in, I’d be so caught up agonizing over every sentence, that I would never finish a page much less an entire essay or story. Over the years, I’ve learned to get the story down first, and then go back and fix stuff. More than one writer has observed that the real heart/work/crux of writing is rewriting–that what we tend to think of as the “art” of writing is really rewriting.

If memory serves, Anne Lamott uses the metaphor of the coal mine when encouraging writers to embrace the shitty first draft. You have to sort through a ton of coal just to maybe find one small diamond. In the revision/rewriting phase, you may rewrite the whole thing into a diamond, or you may decide that everything, save one line of dialogue, or one character, or one idea, is irreparably shitty. So you salvage that one line or character or idea, and run with it. The time spent writing the shitty first draft is not time wasted; it was what you needed to do to get at that diamond.

Murder your darlings. Something bad or challenging or unexpected has to happen to the characters in your stories. You have to make life difficult or uncomfortable on some level for a character the reader cares about. And chances are, if you’ve created a character that readers care about (congratulations!), you probably care about that character too. But you can’t let your caring get in the way of letting life happen to that character, letting her take some hard knocks and come out on the other side of them. Some kind of problem or obstacle must be faced, and if the character comes out on top easily or too quickly, then where’s your story? I once started a novel where the main character resigned herself to her big problem at the end of chapter one. No wonder writing the rest of the story felt impossible–there was nothing left to say!

In the same vein, you also can’t love your characters so much that you don’t let them behave badly or in ways that you would never dream of behaving. Maybe you don’t share your character’s moral code; you can still write about their lives, with or without judgment about their choices. If the character has no shortcomings or problems, what’s there to write about?

We read stories of good things happening to good people, and we smile and are happy for them; maybe we are encouraged or inspired by their example. But as evidenced by our culture’s ever-growing fascination with reality TV and celebrity meltdowns, we are riveted by trainwrecks and injustice and people who do things we dare not do. In short, we love reading about other people’s problems. Such writing allows us to live vicariously.

I’m not suggesting that all writers pen National Enquirer/TMZ-esque stories; but there’s a reason there’s a huge market for those stories. In seeking to publish, I believe we can capitalize on that very human interest in conflict and turmoil (and the happily ever after–or not–which follows), without become parasitic.

Related, don’t censor your writing or your characters out of fear of What People Might Think. Some (most?) people assume that an author’s characters are at least some degree autobiographical. More than once I have had someone comment to me about something a character of mine did or said, and they talk to me as if I was the woman who neglects her aging parents and abandons her kids. Just because I tell the story without ham-fisted condemnation of the woman doesn’t mean I agree with her choices.
The way I’ve made peace with it is this: If a particular reader isn’t savvy enough to separate me from my characters, or savvy enough to be able to read about characters who are flawed without getting their panties in a bunch, then why should I put any stock in such an unsophisticated reader’s feedback?

When I first started writing, I thought that, as a Christian, all of my stories had to deal with Christianity on some level, and that if any characters weren’t saved at the outset of the story, then they had to be by the end. Talk about trite, flat stories. The stories weren’t about the characters; they were about me and my fears of What Other (Christian) People Might Think. So I had to ask myself, if I was going to censor myself on this basis, then what was the point of writing? I had to decide if I was writing for approval, or if I was writing because I loved it and had stories about real, imperfect people (present company included) to tell.

Bring some objectivity to writing that is “therapy on the page.” Writing sure can be therapeutic. But one of my writing mentors and dear friends, Laura, gave me some sage advice when I showed her a piece of writing that was so raw it made her, and the one other person I let read it, wince. I had asked her if she thought it was “too much” for publication. She replied: “Deeshaleh, not all emotional expression is artistic expression fit for public consumption.”

Anne Lamott (I think, and at least one other writer before her) describes writing as opening up a vein on the page. True enough, but at least for the purposes of publication, that bloodshed will need to be corraled into following some basic fiction or nonfiction writing rules (show, don’t tell; use active verbs; be clear; create 3-dimensional characters, etc.)

I went through a phase when I first started writing, a phase that a writer I love and respect called my “horny little fiction” phase. There is nothing wrong with writing horny little fiction, but it had better still be good fiction–sometimes mine was, sometimes it wasn’t. It felt great to write those stories because of things happening in my life at the time…but they weren’t necessarily good stories that other people wanted to read, and to the extent that publication was my goal, this mattered. Generally, the stories came across as me trying to be clever. “Deesh,” said my astute writer friend, “I can see you smirking between every line.”

That’s not to say that only those with zero baggage should pursue writing–if that were the case, there would be no writers. That is to say that it’s a good idea to have an objective reader(s) read your really emotional stuff–to make sure it’s artistically fit for public consumption.

Now…I’m going to tag:

Christina

Caroline

….and Elrena.

Alright, ladies, tell us how you do your wonderful writing thang!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Blogging, Books and Writers, Cool Stuff, Fun Times, This and that, Wordsmithin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.