Month: July 2023

Got to hang out virtually with a friend I hadn’t talked to in awhile.

I came across a cool, somewhat obscure historical figure who would make a great protagonist and plotted out a short story. That’s not usually how inspiration strikes, so that was an interesting experience. I read a lot of advice about brainstorming story ideas, which mostly suggest finding a core concept and running through what-if scenarios until you have an interesting plot. That never works for me. I have a good imagination but it runs towards the “…and then they all suffered and died alone in a cardboard box” rather than “that key in granddad’s lock box opens a door to a magical fairy land!” The cardboard box ending works only so many times. Most times, I’m struck by a theme or scene and work through it to explore the idea or emotional experience I want to create. I have questions in my head and try to figure out what drives people to act a certain way or make their choices. But this time I went through the what-if exercise with different scenarios until I came up with something that caught my imagination. Helpful. I gave up on being that kind of writer a long time ago – I’m an explorer not a storyteller – but maybe there’s some hope after all.

Through my daily blogging, I’m learning and adapting to a number of concepts this year. One of them is that we create our own obstacles when we don’t accept the reality of our problems, choices, and opportunities. There are a couple of ways to look at this.

• If you can’t acknowledge a problem, you’ll never fix it.
• Truth is always better than fiction, delusion, or lies.
• You can like yourself just as you are, even if you aren’t what or who you thought you’d be.

I’m going to practice accepting the unacceptable. That doesn’t mean I like the situation and it  doesn’t mean I can’t change it, only that I will no longer avoid it. I’m going to stare down the unacceptable until I see its origin, its power, what about it scares or protects me, and how to dissipate it.

Sticking to the creative:

• I’m not going to have a “career” as a novelist and I accept that.
• I won’t ever be well-known and I accept that.
• I can’t work on – and won’t ever be able to work on – all the different creative projects I have in my head, and I accept that.
• I won’t ever be able to write a book as perfect as the one I see in my head and I accept that.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about being defensive, about life in general and about my writing, and about how the defensive postures I learned from bad experience may not be serving me well today, when those ghosts are long buried.

To connect this to our writing, our characters are also likely to have defensive postures learned in childhood. Most often, these bad habits and negative ways of thinking are exactly the obstacles our protagonist needs to overcome to achieve their goal. Of course, these old ways create more problems before they get better.

If it’s relevant to your story, consider your protagonist’s backstory and how the evidence of their wounds linger, not merely in how they think or in the ways in which they are flawed, but how they crouch in defense. Are they defending themselves against someone or something that’s no longer there? How do these defenses hurt them in the present and prevent them from fulfilling their destiny?

It’s common in romantic relationships for someone to “punish” a new partner for something their ex had done or to have an extreme reaction when someone behaves in a way that recalls an abuser. I think this is also common in relationships in general. People remind us of our parents, teachers, or bullies, and we respond to them in the same way, usually without realizing it.

As you encounter people, listen to what they say and how. Notice whether someone is speaking from a sense of discovery or defensiveness.

If you’re not sure where to start, consider past encounters with customer service reps at any business. Intuitively, you know when someone genuinely wants to assist you with a problem and when someone is ready for a disagreement. Look for those kinds of signals when you’re out and about. Is the person behind the counter responding to you with a sense of discovery or are they defensive, like they expect a Karen-type encounter?

Another angle is considering whether someone sounds accusatory or questioning. This is often a trouble area between romantic partners. Consider the difference between saying “You never listen to me!” and “I notice you’re not looking at me.” The former is accusatory and likely to prompt the other person to feel defensive. The latter is a fact-based observation that could open a line of communication.

How do your characters talk and how do they change over the course of your novel?

In order to maintain integrity – our sense of completion – it’s important that we accept and tell the truth. Lies, secrets, and truth avoidance push us away from our baseline morality and into misalignment.

I believe this is nowhere more true that with our creativity. Writers and artists must have the freedom and willingness to reveal their personal stories and to document what they observe and experience in the world.

That doesn’t mean that you have to tell the world your deep dark secrets or confess every trauma. It also doesn’t mean that “your truth” is a universal truth or even factual. I do mean that you are free to say what you need to say, in the manner of your choosing.

This applies to personal essays and memoir, but also to your fiction. You can create unlikeable characters and make them the hero of your novel. You can portray them with empathy or sympathy. You can write about people with complicated messy lives and problems that aren’t easily resolved, if at all. You can skewer sacred cows. You can write about your family. You can be difficult. You can ask people to think.

You can tell the truth about what you see and experience in the world, even if it’s ugly, even if other people might not like it. In fact, I’d say it’s imperative that you do so. The world needs more of its underbelly revealed. The world needs more of what only you have seen.

In this world of influencers and media whores, be a Sinead O’Connor.

Two days ago, I made a personal commitment to stop feeling defensive about my creative work.

That’s a tough one, to be honest. My writing is a part of me I consider sacred, for want of a better, non-secular word. To the extent I believe little humans come into the world with some aspects of their personality already formed, I arrived into this life as a writer. There is no part of me that doesn’t love it. I’ve learned painful lessons about how badly I need it for my mental and emotional health. Opening myself to listen to what others have to say about it is…difficult.

But I can separate my commitment to creativity from the results, and of course I want the results to be as good as I can make them. I’ve already written about being receptive to criticism and treating feedback as a learning opportunity, but today, I’ll take an additional step.

I won’t merely wait to receive meaningful feedback. Instead, I commit to going out in search of it.

Are you aware how your facial expressions or body language signal what you’re feeling? My face often says what I’m thinking, to my detriment.

Consider how your characters can convey their inner thoughts, without you having to state them expressly. Do their eyes crinkle when they’re trying not to show anger? Do they frown or shuffle their feet when they are afraid of disappointing someone? Does their weight shift from one leg to the other when they are uncomfortable? Do they tug at their collar when they lie?

This also works in reverse. Other characters will send your protagonist signals, whether they realize it or not. You don’t have to turn your hero into a human lie detector to work with body language, though that could be fun, too.

As you go about your day, pay attention to the signals other people send you during your encounters.

In this week’s forecast for Aquarians, Rob Brezsny offers two quotes from Gertrude Stein and advises us to put them into action.

“Silent gratitude isn’t very much use to anyone.”

“Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.”

Brezsny says we water bearers should prepare for a season of deeply expressive interpersonal action.

If he’s talking about romance, I’m lost. However, creatively, this makes sense. I’ve been shedding some of my anxiety about getting more connected with the writing community and am determined to start assembling an adequate feedback circle.

I’ve never ceased having an active inner life, but it’s been a long time since I let someone else tap into it. It might feel good to share those kinds of thoughts, even if only those about the story I’m working on next.

Without realizing, we can go through life in a defensive posture. We learn these behaviors at home and school, from bullies and bosses and anyone who tries to steamroll over us on the way to their goal or merely because they can.

I can be defensive about, quite literally, anything. I can still hear my dad complaining that I wore too many black clothes. I can hear my ex telling me I stacked the dishwasher incorrectly. I still hear religious sex shaming and the kids at school teasing about just about everything. I was a bookish, non-athletic, socially awkward, late to puberty but soon-to-be gay nerd on the autism spectrum, with stimming behaviors that in retrospect look a lot like mild Tourette’s, who was being raised by reclusive parents in a fringe religious sect.

Let’s say I gave the world a lot of material to work with.

I’m an adult now. All those people are long gone from my life. I drummed out the weird fidgety behavior before I went to college, thank goodness, decades before I got a diagnosis. Like Popeye, I accept that I am what I am.

But the voices don’t truly vanish, do they? They still pop up from time to time. Fortunately they are now mere nagging memories, not some ghost that can make me feel shame or alter my conduct. But they linger.

Of course, a lot of that shame and defensiveness spilled over into my creative life, staining my thoughts on how much I write and how often, the genres I like, my problematic characters, if self-publishing will make me look like a hobbyist, if my themes are sufficiently weighty and topical. If there’s an element of writing to consider, there’s a nag in my head telling me that the way I do it isn’t serious enough.

But really, who cares? Other than my own bad thoughts, who out there is waiting to pounce on my creative work? Everyone self-publishes these days. I can write family drama or superhero stories. Everyone is problematic if you scratch far enough beneath the surface. It’s ok to create and have fun in the way I like.

My defensive postures served me in my youth, when I hadn’t any other options. There are only so many ways a kid can avoid family, church, and school, and these methods are painfully temporary. But I can see these patterns no longer serve me well, especially as I get older and the windows start to close. I don’t have to go through life in a crouch.

Starting now, I’m going to practice dropping my defensiveness about my creativity. I won’t assume I’m surrounded by barbarians.

I’ve written before about how disappointing it is to hear writers talk about how much they hate writing or what a horrible slog it is. It weighs me down. No one ever talks about their dislike of the act of writing in a way that is inspiring to other writers or benefits the community in some way. To hear some writers talk, they’ve had better times at a crucifixion.

Yes, writing is not always easy. Our creativity demands our time and attention and our work rarely comes out the way we envision it in our head. Sometimes the gap between what we want to create and what we can create is discouragingly wide. We see other creative people create magic and marvel at the trick.

And yes, sometimes things we love doing are “not fun.” Writing is almost always a solitary act. You have to be comfortable being alone with your thoughts. Unless writing is your day job, you have to say no to some social occasions. We write and re-write and ask for criticism and attend classes and fret over choosing the right word. Sometimes your writing can come easily and sometimes it’s an effort.

But to hate it? The idea is foreign to me. When someone says they hate writing (even when quoting the cutesy Dorothy Parker line “I hate writing but I love having written”), I have to wonder why they do it? No one is required to love writing – I know lots of people who don’t – but if you don’t enjoy it, why on earth would you do it? Isn’t life too short?

For most of us, writing is an avocation. It’s how we express our creativity, exercise our minds, exorcise our demons. We will not make much money from our writing. For many, writing novels and short stories is an avenue to other forms of income, such as teaching, editing, or leading workshops. If your readers number more than a reasonably-sized Facebook group, you’re doing something right.

Let’s face it – the majority of writers have almost nothing to gain from their writing, at least financially. What we gain is internal – the joy of creation, pride at achieving our goals, the fulfillment of our need to communicate or entertain, perhaps the satisfaction of our curiosity. Maybe you’re simply having fun, engaged in a hobby you love.

The love/hate relationship of writers and writing is on my mind a lot, partly because the attitude is so prevalent it’s become cliché. Maybe I notice it only because I hate it, but it seems to be everywhere. It’s on my mind today because of a recent post on CrimeReads, an otherwise enjoyable blog about crime and mystery writing and books.

In a post presumably intended to help promote her new book, writer Liz Nugent says she’d rather clean toilets than work on her next book. She repeats the quote attributed to Dorothy Parker about loving writing only in the past tense, and lists the various methods she employs to avoid the work.

Tragically for Liz, writing is the only thing she’s good at. Her first novel won the Irish Book Award for Crime Novel of the Year in 2014, and apparently her novels are best sellers. As someone who hates writing, she’s suffered for most of her adult life working in film, theater, and television, writing radio and television drama, as well as short stories. Gosh, she’s simply helpless at every task, except finding jobs in collaborative creative environments, winning awards, and writing best-sellers. Poor thing. How does she manage?

If it sounds like I’m picking on her…yeah, I am, a little bit. Nugent has had jobs many writers would love to have and success most will only envy. She humble-brags about her awards and best-sellers, the months of time-off she gives herself between new projects, which she needs because she hates this writing stuff so much. I’ve read chatty Christmas newsletters that felt more authentic.

As she’s promoting her new book, she could have shared insights on her writing process or passed on something she’s learned in her research, and instead she wrote a few hundred words about how she’d rather clean toilets, and did so for a blog that appeals to writers, an audience very likely comprised of people who would love the chance to do what she does and will instead have to make their living cleaning those toilets, or the equivalent. If she really hates writing as much as she claims, I can only assume she dashed off this article under duress, at the behest of her publicist or editor. Maybe she was trying to be humorous, but the writing came off insipid and glib. I feel bad for her that she missed this opportunity to talk to her audience in a meaningful way.

You may have any or a number of reasons for why you write. You might hope to earn an income. You might like the validation. Maybe you enjoy entertaining people or appreciate the camaraderie of the writing community. Maybe you have something to communicate about your life and what you’ve learned. You want to help people, make them feel good, and possibly less alone in the world. Or else you’re looking for people like you, your tribe, and your stories are the signal fire in the night leading them to you.

Whatever your reason, whyever you write, my fervent wish for you is that you don’t hate it.

A common theme for developing characters and creating conflict and obstacles for your protagonist is miscommunication. Sometimes purposeful, sometimes inadvertent, our human inability to express ourselves with precision gets us into trouble.

This is especially true with our feelings. There are a few ways to communicate feelings honestly and effectively – generally, you simply say it aloud with or without some diplomacy – but there are lots of ways to screw it up. Our characters lie, obfuscate, keep secrets, withhold information, and shade the truth. Complex characters may not realize what they’re feeling, understand how to communicate their emotions, or interpret them correctly. Under whichever circumstance, communication breaks down, creating conflict, self-inflicted wounds, and barriers to success.

But there comes a time when your character will speak the full and honest truth. Once your protagonist – or any character – has learned the lesson you’ve set before them, you will probably want them to vocalize it in some way. You shouldn’t beat the reader over the head with your message, but your hero should convey that they have absorbed their experiences, have interpreted them correctly, and have learned something important about themselves and about life. Dialogue is the easiest way to manage this, but your protagonist’s growth can also be communicated through action and narrative.

In the movie Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman’s male chauvinist character Michael spends a good portion of the movie masquerading as a woman who supports other women, while also continuing to disrespect the women who know him only as a man.

Near the end of the film, Michael realizes that he has to change his attitude if he’s going to have any chance of winning over the woman he loves. First, he communicates the lesson he learned with action, when he sheds his masquerade on live television, to the surprise of his fellow actors. He extricates himself from his deception, risking his career and friendships, but his exposition explain why he acted this way or why he’s changed. The audience knows what’s happening, but no one else does. Michael puts it all on the line again later, when he finally bares his soul to Julie, the woman he loves. At the denouement, Michael communicates his lesson in dialogue.

“I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man. I just gotta learn to do it without the dress”

In one sentence, Michael sums up the theme of the movie and the lesson he had to learn before he could achieve emotional growth, complete his story arc, and get nearer to his goal. We don’t know if Julie will fall in love with him, but he has a chance to gain her friendship.

Most writers aren’t so heavy-handed with their protagonist’s final revelation, but Tootsie was a farce, so a big dramatic pronouncement at the end served as an appropriate counterbalance to the humor. Michael’s blunt confession also underscored that he’s abandoned his illusions – physical and emotional – and is ready to live an authentic life as a man who treats women with respect. His truthfulness drives home the point of the story in a humorous way and gives the audience its closure. Despite Michael’s statement being so on-the-nose, it’s doubtful the audience minded too much.

Most writers won’t get away with being similarly straightforward with their theme, but in the right circumstances, a brief statement of truth from your protagonist can show that they’ve satisfied the moral need for growth you established at the beginning of your novel.

*h/t to John Truby for the quote and the character breakdown. His book The Anatomy of Story is a must-read.