Karinwritesdangerously

« There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. » W. Somerset Maugham

Quick questions: Did James Joyce like to write at night or in the morning? How about Hemingway? Did Marcel Proust prefer tea or coffee? What about Stephen King? 

Not to keep you in suspense: James Joyce was a night owl like me, while Hemingway preferred to pick up his 20 sharpened pencils in the morning. Proust was a coffee enthusiast, but Stephen King sips “a cuppa tea” while he creates his creepy thrillers.

This little exercise shows there’s no one-size-fits all way of getting work done. The same is true for getting published and the backgrounds authors bring to their writing. Debut authors bring different life histories to their writing ventures— which I think is very inspiring because it proves there’s no one path to success. Whatever works!

Here’s what I mean: One author, Eyre Price who wrote Blues Highway Blues is a former lawyer with a passion for music. Lissa Price, the author of Starters, had an unsold manuscript that had been shopped by an agent to a handful of publishers and rejected. After she wrote Starters, she had three agents offering representation in 24 hours and the one she chose sold her novel in six days after a preemptive bid.

Melinda Leigh was a former banker and stay-at-home mom. She had two young kids in school, a longing to write, and a total lack of desire to return to banking. She ended up penning a romance, She Can Run, and then snagged an agent and wrote a series. Carter Wilson was the director of a global hospitality consulting firm. He wrote four unpublished novels as a moonlighter and sold his fifth one, a thriller called Final Crossing, with the help of an agent who stayed with him through all the rejection.

These writers didn’t start out being writers — they turned themselves into writers and published authors, by writing, rewriting, surviving rejection, reaching out for agents, and following their dreams.

There are no absolutes in writing — and that’s absolutely great news, isn’t it? Anything is possible! Once we’re out of the starting gate, the race is ours to run any which way we can. Write on!

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When J.K. Rowling was writing her now-legendary Harry Potter series, one of the tools she used at some point was a version of storyboarding: She mapped out her chapter outlines and plot points using vertical columns on a sheet of paper. This gave her an at-a-glance visual road map to follow as she was writing.

Storyboarding is a technique that’s always been widely used by script writers. It’s a great tool if you’re a visual person, as a friend of mine noted. She’s started using index cards to map out the plot of her story and pinning them up where she can see them easily.

I’ve done this myself with chapters of my novel. Index cards or large PostIt notes are perfect for this because you can write plot points and/or scene descriptions on them and then add additional notes as ideas crop up. You can also move them around easily, which allows you to play with the order of scenes in a chapter, for example.

One writer who uses storyboarding all the time is Janet Evanovich. Since the characters and relationships in her series are well established, she uses storyboarding instead of outlining as a tool to manage action and plot. As she observed in an article, “When I’m plotting out a book I use a storyboard — I’ll have maybe three lines across the storyboard and just start working through the plot line. I always know where the relationships will go, and how the story is going to end. When I storyboard, they’re just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard. Another board I keep is an action timeline. It’s a way of quickly referring to what happened a couple of scenes ago. The boards cover my office walls.”

Storyboarding is more scene-oriented than an outline: it allows you to create a blow-by-blow map of your action points. It can be a great tool if you are wrestling with a plot and if you need to see how the arc of your story is progressing. Whether you find outlining to be helpful or not, creating a storyboard can be a fun way to get your story out of your head and onto your wall and the page. Write on!

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The first day of February is the day Langston Hughes was born in 1902. In honor of this legendary poet and the launch of Black History Month, here’s a wonderful poem of his a poetry lover passed on to me:

Dream Variation

Langston Hughes

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me —
That is my dream!
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at the pale evening…
A tall, slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

What a “joyful noise” these words make, strung together like pearls. May they inspire and uplift you as we all write on!

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Customize

Winter Time
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,
A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;
Blinks but an hour or two; and then,
A blood-red orange, sets again.

Before the stars have left the skies,
At morning in the dark I rise;
And shivering in my nakedness,
By the cold candle, bathe and dress.

Close by the jolly fire I sit
To warm my frozen bones a bit;
Or with a reindeer-sled, explore
The colder countries round the door.

When to go out, my nurse doth wrap
Me in my comforter and cap;
The cold wind burns my face, and blows
Its frosty pepper up my nose.

Black are my steps on silver sod;
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;
And tree and house, and hill and lake,
Are frosted like a wedding cake.

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Words of wisdom on words to inspire and light our way today:

“Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence. It is no fun to write lumpishly, dully, in prose the reader must plod through like wet sand. But it is a pleasure to achieve, if one can, a clear running prose that is simple yet full of surprises. This does not just happen. It requires skill, hard work, a good ear, and continued practice.” Barbara Tuchman

“In private correspondence, the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated. I understand the purpose behind his doing this. This is the way Chandler gave himself the physical stamina a professional writer needs, quietly strengthening his willpower. This sort of daily training was indispensable to him.” Haruki Murakami 

“A writer is a person who cared what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom,and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well, they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” Ursula Le Guin

“When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened on a person, is as hard to get ride of as any other vice.” Mark Twain

“The best rule for writing — as well as for speaking — is to always use the simplest words that will accurately convey your thought.” David Lambeth.

“A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved through his knowledge and memory … dictionaries, thesaurus’s, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.” Ruler Godden

“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in the, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.” Hart Crane

“Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.” Unknown

And now, inspirited and emboldened, let’s all write on!

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It all began in a bookstore.I knew almost nothing about Sojourner Truth when I picked up a Young Adult biography of her not far from where she group up in the Hudson River Valley as a slave on a small Dutch farm. I didn’t even know there were Northern slaves! In a way I never cold have predicted, she and I began building a future together.

When I learned that she had completely reinvented herself reinventing herself after being a Northern slave for 30 years, I was hooked. Sojourner Truth! What an amazing name to give yourself! What an incredible woman! I remember thinking. Wouldn’t it be amazing to bring her to life on the stage? In that moment, Our adventure began.

My play, Dust of Egypt, is about a true, little known event in her life: her heroic fight to rescue her little 5-years old son Peter after he was sold and illegally taken down South. She became the first Black woman to sue a slave owner in court. Against all odds, she won!

It’s taken me more than 20 years to get the play from the page to the stage. Now, I am thrilled to share with you something wonderful! This March, Dust of Egypt will have a full-production, 4-week, 16-show run at Sheen Center for Thought and Culture’s beautiful Frank Shiner Theater in NYC! Our incredible cast will be able to get reviews and, perhaps even awards, for their stirring performances. But fundraising is challenging! My amazing KWD reader, Dr. Terrie Wurzbacher, gave an incredibly generous donation to help us stage the play, for which I will be forever grateful! I’m hoping my other cherished KWD readers will also give us a hand by contributing to my play budget and sharing this with their friends. Here is the link: Support Sojourner Truth for Women’s History Month. 

One of my beloved readers, Lise Fattel generously donated to my play fund and actually came to an earlier short run of the play—I was so excited to see her! I hope some of you will join her. Here is the ticket link (please hit the More Showings button to see all the dates in March): https://www.sheencenter.org/events/detail/dust_of_egypt If you do make it to a show, please let me know!

Many thanks! And now, let’s all write on!

A story: You’re a little girl growing up in a small farming community in New York State in the late 1930s. For your ninth birthday, your grandmother gives you a magical gift: A beautifully bound, slightly oversized book. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, it’s a volume of Lewis Carroll’s two classics, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with gorgeous illustrations by John Tenniel. And this gift turns you into a writer. 

This is exactly what happened to the prolific and ever-inventive novelist, Joyce Carol Oates. When she was asked to write about “the book that changed My life,” she wrote about the birthday book she received more than 60 years before. It was a treasured, life-changing gift with a place of honor on her bookshelf. 

Since yesterday, January 27, was the amazing Lewis Carroll’s birthday, I thought it might be fun to ponder the power of this gift of a book.

Why was the book so transformative? Quite simply, it made Joyce “yearn to be a writer” — a spinner of tales like Lewis. How did the book weave such a spell?

It carried her to a different world: Like any kid with a beloved book, Joyce wanted to be Alice. And yet reading about her plunged Joyce into a foreign world — one of teatime, crumpets, queens and kings. 

It changed her: As Joyce put it, “I think I learned from Alice to be just slightly bolder than I might have been, to question authority — that is, adults — and to look upon life as an adventure.”

It gave her a role model for confronting life: Having Alice as a model, “I was prepared to recognize fear, even terror, without succumbing to it. There are scenes of nightmare illogic in the Alice books — dramatizations of the anxiety of being eaten, for instance, yet Alice never becomes panicked or loses her common sense and dignity.”

It showed her the joy of writing: The name Lewis Carroll in gilt letters on the spine of her book inspired Joyce to begin drawing and creating her own “novels” on lined paper for hours on end. As she describes its life-changing influence: “Out of Alice in Wonderlandand Through the Looking Glass have sprung not only much of my enthusiasm for writing but my sense of the world as an indecipherable, essentially absurd but fascinating spectacle.”

What a treasure a book given to a child can be! And what magical worlds they can transport us to. Let’s all think about the books that changed our worlds as we all write on!

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“I think I could pick out the best writers in a strange city room by those who write with their lips moving.” Don Murray

Here’s a simple technique I’m playing with: Reading your words aloud or mouthing them as you are actually writing them down. I first came across this “tool” when I read Edna Ferber’s autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure. According to Edna, “You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken.” 

Edna was a prolific and genre-jumping writer: She wrote short stories, novels, and several hit plays still widely performed today. One of her best-known works, Showboat, inspired the groundbreaking musical by the same name. But before she became a popular writer and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for So Big, Edna was a journalist. She started out on a small paper, The Appleton Crescent, as a teenager. 

In describing her reporting days, Edna said that she and another reporter shared an unusual writing habit: They would “talk” their stories as they were typing them. (See Writing Aloud).This really caught my attention, because we hear a lot about reading our drafts aloud once they’re finished, but I’d never really thought of reading my words aloud in the moment, as I was writing them. 

This approach makes words and sentences flow more naturally and rhythmically. It also instantly highlights awkward phrasings, allowing me to eliminate them by rewriting them right away. I’ve also found that it alerts me to repetitive sentence constructions. The big payoff: Adopting this approach leads to a more polished draft.

I’m going to pay attention to this with the goal of turning it into a habit. If I practice consistently, I believe it will become second nature and sharpen my writing style. Why not try it yourself and see if it works for you? It’s simple, but powerful. Write on!

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“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
‘Pooh!’ he whispered.
‘Yes, Piglet?’
‘Nothing,’ said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw.
‘I just wanted to be sure of you.’”

The birthday card with this little story sits in a spot where I see it every day. On it, an adorable little Pooh and Piglet walk hand in hand toward the sun. I cherish this card because it was from my beloved little sister Judy. January 26 is her birthday. Judy passed away very suddenly in 2009 of pancreatic cancer and I miss her and long to speak with her every day.

There were four kids in our family and Judy was the youngest. As a little girl, she just loved A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books; I have two of her dog-eared volumes sitting on a shelf near me as I write this. Judy had a theory that our family mirrored the characters in Milne’s stories. I was Piglet, philosophical and reflective. Our sister, Stephanie, was Tigger, filled with energy and enthusiasm.Our brother Peter was Eeyore, loyal and reliable. And Judy? Judy was Pooh: that lovable, ever hopeful bear, who was forever chasing the sweet honeypot of life.

Judy was a gifted writer with a wonderful imagination — and a fountain of creativity. Whenever I needed help with my work or with a fresh new idea or angle on something, Judy was my go-to girl. Not only was she gifted, she was generous. And smart. And witty. And everything wonderful.

Soon after she passed away, I had an experience that really lifted my spirits. I wrote a story about it called, “Tell Me You’re OK.” In honor of Judy’s birthday, I’ve been inspired to share it here. Please feel free to pass it on to anyone you know who might find it hopeful or consoling. To read the story,
just email me at karin.abarbanel@gmail.com and I’ll send you a pdf.

Many thanks to Kelly Weatherby (Rdesignonline.com), who created my wonderful blog banner, for helping me put this unpublished story up on my site.

One of the inspirations for launching Karin Writes Dangerously was my desire to cherish and fan the flame of Judy’s faith in me. So, inspired and encouraged by those who believe in us and our work, let’s all write on!

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This seems to me the perfect poem to savor and enjoy as we experience our own snow days:

Snow Day
by Billy Collins

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows

the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while, I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch
sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I will make a pot of tea
and listen to the plastic radio on the counter,
as glad as anyone to hear the news

that the Kiddie Corner School is closed,
the Ding-Dong School, closed.
the All Aboard Children’s School, closed,
the Hi-Ho Nursery School, closed,
along with—some will be delighted to hear—

the Toadstool School, the Little School,
Little Sparrows Nursery School,
Little Stars Pre-School, Peas-and-Carrots Day School
the Tom Thumb Child Center, all closed,
and—clap your hands—the Peanuts Play School.

So this is where the children hide all day,
These are the nests where they letter and draw,
where they put on their bright miniature jackets,
all darting and climbing and sliding,
all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

And now I am listening hard
in the grandiose silence of the snow,
trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,
what riot is afoot,
which small queen is about to be brought down.