Give Me Purpose!

Why do you write? What drives you to put words to paper or screen?

I write because I have something to say, and I want to world to learn about my vision of the world. There is much to make commentary on in society and the world at large, and I use my writing to do just that. I have a purpose in writing. I believe that that is the difference between "literary" fiction and non-.

Too many people get hung up on writing what they deem to be literary fiction, when inevitably someone else makes that decision for them. I intend each time I write to produce something that will one day be literary, because I write fiction that has a definitive purpose. To me, that purpose makes my fiction literary as opposed to commercial (using the definition of literary not to mean "good, scholarly, 'important' fiction").

This was a topic of discussion between me and another writer colleague of mine. To both of us, there was a significant difference between writing that sought only to entertain - that is, to provide titillating fiction with no drive for the reader to have to work at it - and writing that is meant to enlighten. The difference between the two is something of a personal definition in my opinion, and I think it's pretentious to try and impose your own definition on someone else's fiction. However, to understand the literary community and the editors who (unfortunate though it is sometimes) hold reign over it.

The term 'literary' has been used too often to be the definition of "good" fiction. Fiction that doesn't adhere to the formula of the classics tends to be looked down upon as "commercial" or "mainstream" well before it gets the appropriate reading that it deserves. Editors love to think that they're in the powerful position of helping to continually redefine what is literary, when it can only be proven that future generations will be the one to determine what sticks around and what does not. Despite the academic community's refusal to recognize genre fiction as "literary," books like The Lord of the Rings, War of the Worlds, and Brave New World continue to be wildly popular and in the case of LOTR the second most purchased book in the 20th Century. How, then, does this make them less literary when all of them teach us a variety of things and enlighten us to the widely different ways of human nature?

In the end, find your own purpose. This is just my definition. But you should have one, because to write is to put your very passion out to the world and if you're doing it "just cuz" then you're opening yourself up to a world of painful rejection, which is never a good thing.

Time Is of the Essense

The last month has been dedicated, very heavily, to the polishing of a novella that I've had completed for nearly three years (perhaps four, though my memory eludes me). I've had it critiqued, rewritten it, critiqued again, and sat on a shelf for six months. What I've found through the process of this polish is that time in stories is a uniquely difficult thing to master. So here are some of my thoughts on timelines of stories.

Originally the story I'm working on had a host of flashbacks that I felt illuminated particular parts of my main character's past. However, those flashbacks were all within the 10-year timeline that the entire story took place in. While I felt like the flashbacks were beneficial to the story, I began to realize the timeline itself was disjointed. So I've combined a number of them into longer flashbacks that elaborate a bit better than the previous ones did.

Flashbacks, in my opinion, are useful in giving perspective to a story. We see what the main character is like in the "present" time of the story; flashbacks give us a picture of what they were like before the story.

The trouble with flashbacks, I've found, is learning where to place them and how to distinguish them. Transitions are one of the toughest things, and I have never been a big fan of the old trope of putting in dates. While I understand that dates are easy time markers, they don't have a place in certain stories, and there has to be a new way to identify such things. I decided to mention my main characters age as close to the beginning of the chapter as possible in order to give the reader an indication of when in time they are.

My suggestion, having used a lot of different methods for playing with time in a story, is to write it linearly first. Then, determine where the story really starts and see if there is an opportunity to put in flashbacks. Otherwise, don't do it until you've got a story that really requires them.

A Burst of Inspiration

For a long time, I've been working on notes and details and maps (nearly everything but writing) in my world of Dalurin. It's an expansive world, and I have a lot of faith in it - and not just because I'm the one creating it. I've written two legends of some length that are based in the world, and those are good material for future writing, but they're not really the kind of thing to try and publish first. And while I believe that my first novel, Shadows of Mati, has some legs, it needs considerable work, and I don't know that I want it to be the first publication based in my world.

Last night, however, I came across a great idea. This next bit is mine (just as a declaration of sorts) so no snatching.

In the world of Dalurin, there is - at present - a great deal of magic. It is present in much of the world, save for the monotheistic kingdoms, where it is used only for specific purposes and almost exclusively under the direction of the ruler of a particular kingdom. There are powerful mages, certainly, and many come and go; however, the catalyst of this particular story is a specific magic ritual that has been contemplated for centuries but never attained and certainly not perfected. So when rumors of the successful accomplishment of this ritual reaches our MC, he is afraid of many things that will happen, and he takes it upon himself to get a commission from the king to go and investigate - and potentially stop the mage responsible.

Unlike a great deal of the great fantasy works, my underlying mission with this and all of my fantasy novels is to extend beyond tropes (not cliches). There are a lot of things that work in fantasy, and there are a lot of things that are just "standard." I want to try and do something new with certain things; one of them is magic. The other is the races in my world. For anyone who's ever role-played with me, I've never been a fan of tradition, even as a student of speculative fiction. I enjoy it; it has it's place; but I like to step outside the box. So I'm hoping to produce something that will make people feel refreshed and yet satisfied at the same time.

In other news, I applied to two editorial positions yesterday, so we'll see how that goes.

My Thoughts on WriteCamp

WriteCamp was here in Milwaukee this past Saturday, June 6th - for those of you who haven't heard me gabbing about it for the last two months. I believe that it was a huge success, and I am eager for the next iteration of it.

Over the course of the day, I learned a few things:

1. Writers are not nearly as isolated and introverted as people think. Not only did we have nearly 80 people, but all of those people were on-board with the whole notion of participant-driven sessions and interacting with as many people as they could while they were there.

2. Writers are savvy networkers. I saw more people interacting with complete strangers at this conference than I ever saw at UWM's Spring Writing Festival. That's not to knock that conference, because it's great, but the atmosphere at WriteCamp was so much more relaxed and open, that people felt comfortable stepping out of their bubble.

3. Milwaukee's community is big. Outside of the members of The Milwaukee Writers Workshop who showed up to the event, there were a large number of people who I've never met. We did, however, have people come all the way up from Chicago-land.

4. Community - or the notion of community - is changing dramatically. I had more than one person come up to me during the conference and say that they enjoyed the approachable nature of the conference and how they felt more apt to share and listen than they do at their regular group or with their colleagues. This made me happy.

WriteCamp is an evolution in the way we think about how people in the writing/editing/publishing world think about disseminating knowledge to the world at large. Traditional means are working anymore, and no one likes the idea of the acedemic world thinking that they have the keys to the publishing world by determining what's "good" and "bad." WriteCamp proved that there are more experts in the world than people know about, and they're willing to share, to mentor, and to support the community that they're becoming a part of.

Let's hope that word spreads about WriteCamp and that we can hope to begin fostering a new generation of writers who believe in our mission. Thank you to everyone who attended, participated, volunteered, and came up to me and said nice things.

Distractions 5/26/09

With WriteCamp coming up in two weeks, things have been a bit hectic. However, I managed to polish off an old short story, titled "Terminal." I think that it's a bit stronger now, and I will begin to do my bit of research to figure out where would be best to send it.

My next goal will be to finish off a story that I started at an MWW workshop about a month ago. I've been listening to a lot of Snow Patrol lately, and I keep getting better and better ideas for how this story will go. Essentially it's a tale about a reporter who visits a town that's been hit by a meteor (which I might possibly change) only to discover that it's the town where an old flame from college - some 30 years previous - is living and dying of cancer. It's to be a story with a bit of nostalgia for the two, some obvious undertones of romance, and perhaps a bit of reconciliation after years of regretting a break up in college. I know, it's romantic :-)

Anyway, I'm very excited for WriteCamp, and I keep getting a lot of good compliments and comments about it, so I'm very hopeful about it. I sent out for some new JB Dryden Co business cards, which should be good, and I'll be getting some MWW cards, too. Yay!

Until next time. Cheers.

Fresh Ideas

I've been very pleased lately with my writing.  Or, rather, the fact that I've been writing.  I polished a story I had not even looked at in quite some time and began a new story that I'd had in my head for a while.  I suppose distractions were my biggest reason for not writing but more importantly I think it was a mental block.

I get that way sometimes - as I'm sure plenty of other folks do, too.  I find it hard to break the cycle of "oh, well, I'll get to it tomorrow" when I'm so busy dealing with other things.  I have been bad about practicing what I preach (regarding writing on a regular basis), and I feel badly about it.  I feel like I've been abandoning my own craft for other things.  But I'm glad to be back on track.

I think that we, as writers, get pulled aside so often to do other things that we forget our passion at times.  Or maybe it's just me.

In other news, WriteCamp is just two weeks away, and I'm getting a little annoyingly excited about it.  Already we have a good collection of sessions, our keynotes, and a fair amount of registered folks.  I think it's going to be a wonderful event, and it will be a great establishing of the community for future events.  As with everything else I'm doing this year, I'm being very positive and considering this part of me "Year of Boone."  If nothing else, I will have learned a great deal about event planning by the end of things.

That is all.

Make It Mean Something

I was speaking with one of my students the other day, and she asked, "What is it about short stories that make them stand out?" I asked her if she meant stand out from other stories or stand out as a medium for fiction. She wanted both answers.

So . . . what makes certain short stories stand out from other short stories?

For me, it's stories that mean something. Not in the truly metaphorical way but more in the metaphysical one. They have to speak to me in some way - make me connect with the story, the characters, the concept, something. I want to walk away from a short story with having gained some sense of the author's truth about the world.

Perhaps it's the literary mind in me. Perhaps it's the theorist as well. For a long time, I thought that there was a slight sense of arrogance to my preference (and I'll admit that might be part of it) - a hold-over from my academic days where criticism meant the world. Honestly, though, I think that it comes from a continually-growing love of short fiction. I try and read as much as I can when I can afford it and go to the library when I can't. So I've digested a lot of fiction in the last three years. To me, the stories that resonate the most are the ones that I respond to in some way. Whether it's "Wow, that was great" or "What the hell did I just read?"

And . . . what makes short stories stand out from other fiction media?

I will give you my thoughts, and then I will give you the thoughts of two individuals that I highly agree with.

First, I think that it takes a distinct desire to create something concise when one is writing a short story. And with that in mind the author gives himself a challenge to put together one grand thought into a short amount of space. I think it's a challenge because we have want to say what others have said before, but we want to say it our way, and we want it to resonate with someone in a way that it hasn't done before.

Second, I think that short stories are wonderful and diverse and offer a way to be creative, artistic, experimental, and out of the ordinary. Novels are hard to sell and harder still to make "out of the box." Poetry is, by its nature, out of the ordinary. It speaks to the soul in a way that the short story speaks to the mind. And fiction on stage and screen is dramatic and visual; it's hard to compare that to fiction most times.

I think it's best summed up by these two quotes:

Martha Foley, one of the first editors of the Best American series said, "A good short story is a story which is not too long and which gives the reader the feeling she has undergone a memorable experience." I think that Barbara Kingslover - the author - expands upon that nicely: "A good short story cannot simply be Lit Lite; it is the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces."