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If I Get Lost, the Story Falls Flat

There’s been a lot of talk online* recently about craft and voice and when to know if your work is publishable or best kept in a drawer.

Linda Cassidy Lewis posted about the fact that everyone can write a story, but a writer hopes to craft one.

Jennifer Stanley and Donald Maass posted separately on voice. If you stay true to your voice, the work, according to Maass, will read “authentic and passionate.” The story, Stanley believes, will “outshine” all the others.

Rachelle Gardner said that rejection after rejection may imply a writer needs more than just good grammar skills. That writer should sign up for a class on the craft of writing with a good teacher who isn’t afraid to say, “This doesn’t work. At all.”

I wrote a story a while back that was a good story. I remember sitting in a diner watching a scene unfold across the restaurant in a way that I thought, “somebody should write about that. That’s crazy!” So I did. I made up a story that paralleled the scene I witnessed, but I didn’t tell the story well. I wrote it with a particular literary magazine in mind. And, I wrote it in a way I imagined a particular famous author would write it. My voice was lost, along with the passion. The story read flat, no matter how hard I infused it with vivid details or realistic dialogue.

I know better now, but I still have much to learn. I do recognize when a story is becoming my own – when it’s a story that I enjoy reading myself. That sounds narcissistic, but when I read my own story and think, well, I might pick it up, but I hope they will pick it up, then I need to go back, rework it, and find the place where I got lost.

There’s still no guarantee my well-crafted story will get published. But, I can lean on the belief that if it’s authentic to me, it will at least stand out next to another writer’s tale.

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* If you’re on Twitter, consider following Debbie Ridpath Ohi @inkyelbows. She rolls out tweet after tweet of great links, resources, and retweets.

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What’s in a Name, Really?

Kate Harding’s compelling article, “Write Like a Man,” on Salon.com reveals how gender affects a writer’s success and psyche.

She writes about James Chartrand’s first hand experience that proves a male writer succeeds faster than a female writer, even in the 21st century (you can read James’s account here). For James Chartrand, changing the she to he, on paper, skyrocketed her writing career. The same writer – sitting at the same laptop, crafting articles with the same style – became a quick success under the guise of male anatomy.

Kate Harding also mentions Kathy Sierra’s story about a barrage of death threats, via internet, aimed at her simply because she’s a female blogger. Kathy Sierra put her gender on the table and still managed success. However, she also attracted a hostile reader who threatened her with physical and sexual violence. Not because she wrote provoking blog entries, but because she was a woman who dared to write about “cognition and computers,” which apparently is man’s domain.

There are days when equality seems accessible, tangible. Then, I read about the experience of these writers, and I wonder, what’s a woman supposed to do to get ahead, or just plain even? In ten days, we will enter another new decade, one that seems lightyears away from the Seneca Falls Convention and the  birth of a seventy year struggle to ensure a woman has a voice. Still, women stand two rungs down on the ladder to success. Not only that, but we are susceptible to bodily harm when we dare to succeed in a man’s world.

Sure, there are plenty of women writers at the top of their game, selling books left and right, sporting a fat, healthy readership. Yet, Kate Harding’s article cannot be ignored. She says it well when she expresses the same sentiment I feel when faced with these odds:

“I get furious when people insist that western women have achieved full equality, feminism is no longer necessary, the wage gap is imaginary or the lack of women in positions of power is unrelated to sexism.”

Check out Kate Harding’s article for yourself. Though your perspective may differ from mine, we’ll at least be on the same footing about the facts.

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Back Online and Dreaming

I’ve had little time to write lately, and that disconnect is beginning to wear on me.

Today, I stared at a blank screen.
The blink
Of the cursor,
A taunt.

“Write something. Anything.” I told myself.

I searched through my files for an old writing prompt to stir me into new material, and I found this one from an online course I took with Ariel Gore:

Allow a beautiful vision of your life to come to mind.

As cliché as it sounds, this is a great time of year for me to reflect on the past and envision the future — especially when I sit in front of a screen and wonder, what do I, little writer that I am, have to offer?

Reflecting on the past year, I see that I passed more benchmarks in writing this year than in the past:

  • I saw my work in print on the pages of a few different publications.
  • I “met” several writers online who offer encouragement, support, and excellent feedback on my work.
  • I wrote almost every single day, in the form of a post or a rewrite or morning pages.
  • I signed on to Twitter and found an even greater pool of resources and authors online.

Small successes, I tell myself, are as important as signing with an agent for a three book deal (though maybe not quite as exciting).

This year, I dream:

  • I find time to write every day — not just minutes pieced together here and there but good, solid, time.
  • I see myself opening my email to a message from a literary magazine, saying “yes.”
  • I watch my hand reach into an envelope and pull out a check for a story published.
  • I envision holding a finished manuscript, passed through the virtual hands of beta readers, reworked, and queried.

Then, I imagine I put down my manuscript and turn away. Let the story go, I tell myself, and let it land where it may.

I step outside into the brisk air of early summer. The wind raises goosebumps on my arms, but the sun warms my back. With bare hands and a spade, I dig in the ground for a while. I turn the soil. I wake the earthworms. I plan a plot of fresh herbs, tomatoes, maybe some wildflowers.

What do you envision this year?