Karinwritesdangerously

I have always been a good editor of my own work. I’ve tried to teach my writing friends that there are two arts: number one, getting a thing  done; and then, the second great art is learning how to cut it so you don’t kill it or hurt it in any way. When you start out life as a writer, you hate that job, but now that I’m older it’s turned into a
wonderful game, and I love the challenge just as much as writing the original… It’s an intellectual challenge to get a scalpel and cut the patient without killing.”
Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

One of the things I love most about Ray Bradbury is the absolute joy he takes in writing — he loves it — and it shows. You’ve got to love a guy who started out hating editing but came to see it as  a “wonderful game.”

In Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray tells a story about writing the screenplay for his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (wow, what a great title!). When director Jack Clayton was working with him on the movie script, Ray, ever enthusiastic and prolific, produced a 260-page screenplay. That would translate into a six-hour movie.

Here’s how Ray described what happened next: “Jack said, ‘Well, now you’ve got to cut out forty pages. I said, ‘God, I can’t.’ He said, ‘Go ahead, I know you can do it. I’ll be behind you.’ So I cut forty pages out. He said, ‘OK, now you’ve got to cut another forty pages out.’ I got it down to 180 pages, and then Jack said, ‘Thirty more.’ I said, ‘Impossible, impossible!’ Okay, I got it down to 150 pages. And Jack said, ‘Thirty more.’ Well, he kept telling me I could do it, and by God, I went through a final time and got it down to 120 pages. It was better.”

“It was better” — what a punch line! And how often that’s true of skillful editing: It reveals the true story inside a story. How did Jack help Ray get there with his film script. It all came down to what Ray called “compression” — tightening dialogue, and coming up with
“compact images” to show what he wanted to more succinctly. One of the things that Ray said helped him most in this massive cutting project was his knowledge of poetry, because poetry is all about  metaphor and imagery. As Ray put it, “If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.”

So often, we think of editing as a chore — a self-inflicted hatchet job. But if we can approach it as our boy Ray came to — as “an intellectual challenge” and a “wonderful game” in which we get to play with metaphor, imagery, and compression, we can transform it from a difficult task to a delightful triumph. Write on!

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Character — it’s one of the cornerstones of spinning a good yarn. In Since character is key, whether you’re writing a novel, short story, film script, some reflections by seasoned writers:

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying — only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
Willa Cather

“I feel as though I know all there is to know about them, even things I don’t write — like how they part their hair.”
Toni Morrison

“What about a chocolate factory that makes fantastic and marvelous things — with a crazy man running it?”
Roald Dahl, from notes that led to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“Major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.”
Graham Greene

“I don’t want to make a photographic copy of somebody I know. I want to make someone who never existed, and who at the same time is a plausible person.”
Iris Murdoch

“If you have a skeleton in your closet, take it out and dance with it.”
Carolyn MacKenzie

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”
William Faulkner

May these words of wisdom inspire and enliven your characters — write on!

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“Writers are people for whom writing is more difficult than it
is for other people.”
Thomas Mann

I was sitting in a café at a book event when one of the authors who was reading shared this quote. What a great statement about writing this is!

How strange this statement is at first glance — and yet how true it feels! Why should writing be more difficult for us as writers than it is for everyone else? Why shouldn’t it be easier for us?

My handy Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines “difficulty” as “needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.” 

Like any other creative discipline “much effort or skill” is needed to accomplish the work we do — the novels we write, the short stories we craft, the plays we pen. Words matter to us and we care about craft more than most people, so we have to work harder at it.

But there’s a hidden joy here: As my friend and mentor Rob Gilbert says on his fabulous Success Hotline (973.743.4690), there’s nothing more satisfying than tackling something difficult that you really care about. Isn’t that one of the true pleasure in writing? 

Moments of inspiration when words just flow out of us are always a source of joy. But equally fulfilling, in my experience, are moments when you face a thorny plot point or flabby transition or lackluster ending and you fight through the problem until you solve it.

Like Jacob, when he wrestled with an angel until it blessed him, sometimes we need to wrestle with our words until they bless us. And when we find the strength and persistence to do this, what a joy! Now that’s writing dangerously. Write on! 

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“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
Jack London

As an author, you may not have the opportunity right now to devote your days to writing and courting your muse. Well, you’re not alone. On the road to fame and hopefully, fortune, many writers held day jobs that were strange, even weird, in order to support their writing:

James Joyce, author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young man and Ulysses: Composed melodies, played guitar and piano, and was a theatrical performer.

William Faulkner, Author of The Sound and The Fury: Served as postmaster at the University of Mississippi.

Ken Kesey, Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Did a stint as a janitor in a mental hospital and volunteered for a CIA study.

Kurt Vonnegut, Author of Cat’s Cradle: Worked as a car dealer for Saab, the Swedish car manufacturer.

Stephen King, Author of The Stand and Misery: Mopped the floor as a janitor in a high school.

J.D. Salinger, Author of The Catcher in the Rye: Kept them laughing as entertainment director on a Swedish cruise liner.

Harper Lee, Author of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman: Booked plane tickets as a reservation clerk for Eastern Air Lines.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author of Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby: Worked in an ad agency dreaming up slogans for trolley placards. 

Charles Dickens, Author of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist: Labeled jars in a shoe polish factory.

Jack London, Author of White Fang and The Call of the Wild: Labored in a cannery and then struck out on his own as an oyster pirate. 

Oyster pirate — sounds exotic and exciting, doesn’t it? Know any other writers with odd jobs? If so, I’d love to hear about them. Write on!

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Indian Summer

From gold to gray
Our mild sweet day
Of Indian summer fades too soon;
But tenderly
Above the sea
Hangs, white and calm, the hunter’s
moon.

In its pale fire
The village spire
Show’s like the zodiac’s spectral lance;
The painted walls
Whereon it falls,
Transfigured stand in marble trance!

John Greenleaf Whittier

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rossetti

“We’ve all been aware of the five senses since childhood, but so often they’re not used to their full potential in fiction. We all tend to include the easy and obvious ones — what your character sees and touches. But what about what your characters hear? Or more importantly, how does what they hear make them feel, react, or take action?”
Joelle Anthony

Adding sound to create emotion — an intriguing idea, isn’t it? Joelle Anthony is the author of several young adult novels and teaches writng. Helpful advice on tapping the potential of sound in storytelling:

Listen to the sounds of your world: As a first step, sit quietly for a few minutes and take in the sounds around you. If you do this attentively, you’re likely to hear layers of sound ebbing and flowing: A refrigerator whirring nearby, a plane engine rumbling, birds singing, cars passing.

Consider the emotional effect of sound: Use sound to enrich your characters’ world.” Consider a lawnmower: Its rumbling sound might conjure up lazy summer days and family barbecues — all happy memories — for one person, but for someone else, hearing one rev up might be irritating and intrusive.

Practice adding auditory elements to your stories: In order to propel your story forward,” here’s a quick exercise to jump start your ability to add emotion-enhancing sound elements to your writing: 

1) Start by choosing an emotion: joy, sorrow, anger, etc. 

2) Once you’ve selected one, close your eyes and conjure up all the sounds that make you feel that emotion. When you’ve done this, jot them down. Joy, for example, might call to mind birds singing in the morning, a crackling fire, a baby’s laughter.

3) Choose one sound and write a paragraph describing what it sounds like, and how it makes you feel emotionally and physically. Joelle gave the example of the beep, beep of an alarm clock. Here’s part of what she wrote: “Oh, my God! That stupid alarm! AGAIN! Not mine, but my brother’s. Every friggin’ morning his alarm goes off, usually until I scream through my bedroom wall at him…” And she added, “Just writing this has caused my stomach to tense up and my breath to quicken, and it’s been thirty years since the last time this happened!” The message? Sounds can invoke intense, even violent, reactions.

4) Now, do this exercise for each of your characters. “Find a sound they love, hate, makes them happy, etc. and work those sounds into your stories, using emotions to show your readers more about your characters and to make them dimensional people everyone cares about.” Great advice — write on!

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The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what
we are unable to say.”
Anais Nin

Finding our voice is all about finding the courage to write dangerously, to speak out from our hearts onto the page. Some quotes about voice to inspire you:

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise it. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”
Stephen Hawking

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing wings on the
way down.”
Kurt Vonnegut

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak out about. Be willing to split open.”
Natalie Goldberg

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
Virginia Woolf

“If you hid your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”
Ray Bradbury

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what
I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
Joan Didion

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”
Margaret Atwood

“Nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say.”
Mitch Albom

“Before you learn to write well, to trust yourself as a writer, you have to learn to be patient in the presence of your own thoughts.
Verilyn Klinkenborg

“If it’s still in your mind, it is worth taking the risk.”
Paulo Coelho

I hope some of these words of wisdom give your own words wings today. Write on!

We’ve all been there: Hit those moments in our writing when we feel confused and upended, agitated and frustrated. When moments like this happen, we can plunge into them with both feet and find ourselves in hot water creatively — unable to find our way out of the darkness into the light because we’re feeling too stressed and negative. 

Or, we can choose the other path — the one that sets us on the road back to where we want to be: the path of peace. How can we shift from agitation and confusion to being at peace with where we are in the moment? Here are a few approaches I’ve found helpful:

Note where you are: Name the feelings you’re experiencing — confusion, agitation, frustration — whatever they are. But instead of identifying with them, create a little distance by saying to yourself, “Agitation is being known,” or “Ah, agitation is like this.”

Allow yourself to be there: What you resist persists. Instead of resisting where you are, bring a spirit of relaxed awareness to your feelings of confusion or frustration. See them as clouds, not bricks: Don’t let them weigh you down, let them float through you.

Trust yourself: Have faith in your process and your efforts. Take a few deep breaths, relax, and just rest in the awareness that the answer you need is waiting for you. Gently say to yourself, “It will come to me” — and then just wait and listen. See what silence brings you.

Play around: Sometimes the best way to loosen things up is to play. Instead of feeling angsty, have some fun! Doodle or fill in the page of one of those intricate coloring books. Or free write—just sit and let words pour out of you without worrying about whether they have any connection to the project you’re working on. Keep going for fifteen minutes without stopping and see what you’ve come up with. Chances are there will be a kernel of something you can use. 

Getting stuck happens to all of us. Being at peace with that reality can be one of the least stressful ways to get unstuck. How about you? any techniques you use to calm and refocus yourself? I’d love to hear about them. Write on!

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Kahlil Gibran said that “work is love made visible,” surely a beautiful thought to take with us as we enjoy this Labor Day weekend. And to help us make the most of each day’s labor, let’s keep in mind Kahlil’s powerful poem “On Work,” which I quote in part here:

On Work
Kahlil Gibran

“You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons,
and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and
proud submission towards the infinite.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours
turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?

Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life,
And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret…”

Wishing you and yours a peaceful, fruitful Labor Day.

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