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Lost and Found in Writing

LOST

It’s always on the weekend when the panic strikes. A few self-induced deadlines I set in the days before loom over my shoulder, half-done or not done at all. I start eying up the clock, wondering how I can stretch out the day so that I can write something. Anything.

It happened as such last Saturday, but it wasn’t until after 10pm when I finally sat down with an open document. For almost an hour, my fingers clipped across the keyboard. I wrote with one eye open so as not to force it, cranked out “garbage” and then “decent” and – “finally!” – the good stuff. I was going to call it at 11:00. Then, seconds before I saved my work, I blinked. Maybe I shifted my weight.

Whatever, my hand hit a rogue key and the document vanished. All those words, all the good stuff, disappeared somewhere in cyberspace.

When it’s that late at night and an hour’s worth of writing flitters off into the vapors, all you can do is laugh. “Okay,” I said, to my muse or to the ghost who roams our house late at night or to whomever might have been listening. “I get the hint.” Maybe the words read well, but the timing was wrong. Could be, that I was writing too much drama (I’ve been known to be quite dramatic in first drafts). Either way, the message was clear: got to bed, sleep on it.

FOUND

I won’t lie, I half hoped I’d wake up the next morning with full memory of the prose I lost. While that didn’t happen, I did uncover a gold mine of ideas later in the day.

Digging into research for a historical novel I aim to write, I zipped through microfilms of a newspaper dated in the late 19th century. This was my first foray into the research (and my first microfilm experience since, say, 1989), so I read through the sheets aimlessly, not sure of what I needed. A few things jumped out at me, though, and soon enough, I discovered more than just details about a particular time and place.

  • Personals: The personals in 1885 read a lot different than they do now, with news like Edward Gaynor, Esq. is down again with his old dyspepsia. There’s no fear of his passing — he’s too ugly to die. While entertaining, what’s even more great about the personals is that they’re full of names. Great names for characters that are in line with the times. My pencil went crazy making lists.
  • News Summary: This section reads much like an early form of gossip magazines, and hints at domestic life and odd characters. A woman named Hattie Thorton sets fire to a hotel, “so she might have the chance to use the firescape.” And, a doctor, accused of attempting to poison his wife, “skipped out. The evidence was too direct and conclusive.” How’s that for prompting ideas that could add spice to your story?
  • Weather: The microfilms I searched were full of simple charts about temperatures an wind gales and brief accounts of unusual meteorological events during that time. I could probably find information on climate in other resources, but, because weather will likely play an important role in the story I want to write, reading about those events from the perspective of the people who lived through them is even more exciting.

Writing is often a give and take, depending on your perspective. What I’m reminded of, again and again, is that all I have to do is show up. Bad days turn to good days soon enough.

What do you think? Tell me about your week of great finds.

 

 

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Welcome Dave Thome, author of the romance novel, Fast Lane

“Don’t let anybody write your story for you. Say what needs to be said. Write your own story.” ~ Taequanda, in Fast Lane

Often in life, we approach a situation or a goal (or a relationship), letting outside assumptions and expectations fuel our vision, only to discover that the truth of the matter is not at all what we anticipate. The same can be said for Lara Dixon, the protagonist in Dave Thome’s debut novel, Fast Lane. In the quote above, Taequanda is talking to Lara, who is on a hunt for the inside story of Clay Creighton and his man-centered, womanizing business, Fast Lane Enterprises. What Lara discovers once inside Fast Lane’s inner circle, more so when she gets to know Taequanda, is that everyone harbors a secret and no one fits their facade. Lara is torn between writing truth or fiction.

In a post on Babbles from Scott Eagan ( of Greyhause Literary Agency), Eagan empasizes a few “musts” in category romance novels: not “to see [characters] in bed and having a full on romance after the first meeting” but “to really get to know who these people are AS people. Emotion, motivation, depth.” Dave Thome’s novel gives readers exactly that, a satisfying romance with well-developed characters. I’m honored to host Dave today, where he talks about his writing journey and the discoveries he made along the way.

CC: When you started out writing, did you imagine you’d embark on the journey of a romance novel? I’d love to hear more about your background and how you came to be a Man Writing a Romance.

DT: Way back. Way, way back, I always assumed I’d write novels. But I also liked writing articles and columns for my high school paper, so I became a newspaper reporter. I loved being a newspaper reporter. Every day I got to meet new people and write about different things. Literally. When you’re just out of college and work for a small-town paper, you’re writing about a new math program at the high school in the morning, the last local survivor of World War I in the afternoon, and a stampede of dairy cows circling a house near downtown the next morning. (Seriously, I once wrote an article about how cows got spooked on a dairy farm in the middle of the night, broke down a fence, ran along the highway into Watertown, Wis., turned onto a side street, randomly circled one house, left—and returned a few minutes later to circle the house again. In the opposite direction.)

Anyway, newspaper stories are kind of like mini novels. Really mini novels. Like 400 words instead of 55,400 words. But you have to hook people right away. The story has to flow. You work in dialog (quotes) and narration and use description to help readers visualize things. You don’t really build to a climax, but there’s usually some element of tension in a newspaper story. Lots of news involves tension. A good reporter also has to know something about human nature. You have to get to know people quickly and assess their veracity and character. That translates into writing fiction, too.

I started a couple of novels over the years but never got anywhere. They seemed too big and complex. Then I discovered screenplays, and they seemed like a good idea because not only are they a lot shorter than novels (18,000 words), they also have a structure you have to follow. Certain things have to happen by the end of page 1, 3, 10, 28 and so on. And you have to finish by page 120—max. For comedy, finishing by page 90 or 95 is even better. Having those goals in mind helped me focus on elements of story and character that had to be developed. My mindset is exactly the same when I write novels, only now it’s a matter of rhythm instead of a matter of having an absolute page number to hit.

I ended up writing twenty screenplays in about twenty years. I wrote comedies and thrillers and sweeping science fiction action stories. The first four weren’t very good, but something clicked on the fifth. I was in a writing group and I brought in the first seven pages of what I was working on and one guy tore me a new one, making big red circles on my pages to make sure to dramatize how much he hated my dialog. He did this in front of the whole group, eight guys, I think. And then he said the lines his way—and he was absolutely right. I went home and started at the beginning and rewrote all the dialog to sound more natural—shorter sentences, dropped words, things like that—and the script just came together. When the dialog became more organic, so did the characters and the story.

That script, TERMINAL SEX, is about a woman in her late thirties who was recently divorced, hated her job and was having problems with her snotty sixteen-year-old daughter, so she follows a friend’s advice and logs into an Internet cybersex website. I made up everything that happened online because it was 1994, and I had never seen the Internet, but I made the cyberspace sequences into scenes with the characters in fantastical settings. Sex and murder ensue, and TERMINAL SEX won a writing award and got me an agent at a fairly high-profile agency in Hollywood. The script got read by some cool people—actors, producers and directors—but no one opened their wallet. Then some writer friends who were hot after having a big TV movie success tried to sell it to a network. Everyone there loved it except the last guy. The guy who had all the power.

After that, METAL MOM, a comedy about a woman who continues her heavy metal singing career when her kids are in high school almost got made twice. Another comedy, THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS, was next up on a company’s docket until they had a movie tank so badly they lost their financing. And yet another script, FRANKIE BIG LEAGUES, about a gangster who coaches his thirteen-year-old daughter’s softball team, got optioned for money but went nowhere.

At that point, I’d had enough of screenplays, so I wrote a novel, CHICK FLICK, during Nano in 2006 and worked on it for the next two years. It’s the opposite of a screenplay, with lots of the action going on inside the main character’s head. People in my writing group liked it very much, but it’s a really dark romantic comedy with a male lead. In some ways it’s “literary,” in others it’s like a romance novel, so it’s hard to imagine a traditional publishing market for it. I will eventually self-publish it.

Fast Lane came about because the writing business my wife, Mary Jo, and I have run since 1999 had its worst quarter ever at the end of 2009. She knew a woman who published erotic romances online, so she thought that might be something to do while business was down. I thought that if she was willing to do that, I should, too. But neither of us ended up writing an erotic romance. Fast Lane began as an idea for a screenplay that I started but never finished twenty-five years ago. I tried to write it in the erotic romance style, but I couldn’t stop myself from cracking up like a sixth-grader. Not a good thing. But the story was much better after having steeped in my subconscious for a quarter of a century, so I decided to make it a contemporary romance instead.

CC: In FAST LANE, your minor characters add such depth to the story — from Taequanda, one of the women in the rotation, to Morgan Hopkins, Clay’s security guard (one of my favorites, by the way). Did you spend a lot of time initially on character development? Or, did the characters fully come to life during rewrites?

DT: I don’t develop anything initially. I’m the epitome of a pantser. The side characters, believe it or not, always come to me when I need them.

Continue reading “Welcome Dave Thome, author of the romance novel, Fast Lane“

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3 Pieces of Writing Advice that I Almost Missed

One of my favorite industry magazines, The Writer, never fails me, though I sometimes fall short of recognizing all that it has to offer. Sure, I dog-ear several articles in each issue, but, more often than not, I breeze through the last few pages, skipping over the Market listings and the Classifieds, barely glancing at the final column, “How I Write.” Sometimes I’m in a hurry to finish the magazine; sometimes I’m being aloof. If it’s at the end, I think, it can’t be that important. Either way, when I blow past that very last page, I risk the chance, as I realized with this month’s issue, of missing out on key advice.

In the March issue of The Writer, “How I Write” features an interview with Jacqueline Winspear, author of the successful series about Detective Maisie Dobbs. I don’t read mystery much, so I almost – almost – closed the cover of the magazine. But, something pulled at me to read her interview, and I’m glad I did. I grabbed on to three key pieces of advice that I desperately needed.

1. On Research

“If you let [research] dictate a story…you might as well be writing nonfiction. . . . If you are completely directed by research, you lost the story’s rhythm. If there’s no rhythm, there’s no dance.”

Every bit of writing, I’m learning, requires research. Even now, I’m working on a short story about a piano tuner. I’ve been bookmarking sites on the internet for the past several days on things like piano terms and anatomy, tidbits of information that are crucial in making the character believeable. But where Winspears words really hit home is in respect to a different project: I have an itch to write a historical fiction. I admit, I’m frightened, of the research involved, that I might not gather enough and get details wrong, that I won’t be able to make the story work. I could walk away from the project, easy (though the idea of it keeps resurfacing and refuses to be ignored). So, it helps to keep in mind that, while research is critical, it doesn’t necessarily drive the story.

2. On Fear

“Don’t make excuses. . . . Don’t be afraid . . . . After all, [what’s] the worst that could happen?”

For me, fear can be infectious and lethal if left unattended for too long (see new project angst above). I have a few mantras that I repeat, under my breath, in moments of heavy self-doubt. One hints at my secret affinity towards a certain four-letter word. The other runs cleaner and is parallel to what Winspear says: what have I got to lose?

3. On the Job that Pays the Bills

“…[D]on’t underestimate the power of your day job; that structure and finite time for writing could be the best motivation you have.”

Boy, isn’t that the truth? The more time I have to kill, the less writing I get accomplished. But give me a crunch time of two hours (or less), and I can whip a whole draft of a story up onto the screen.

How about you? Catch any pearls of wisdom lately?