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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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It’s Midnight Somewhere

Everyone is asleep at my house, except for me. NaNoWriMo begins at the strike of midnight, and I hope to get at least half an hour of writing in before I crash. NaNoWriMo kick off parties are happening everywhere tonight, and while I’ve never been to one, I can imagine the scene.

A door opens into a surge of energy, a waft of fresh-brewed coffee mixed with the smell of cookies and the sight of candy wrappers scattered across a table, and stories of last year’s NaNoWriMo. Cords stream from laptops to extensions to outlets, creating a web of connections between writers. Minutes before midnight, conversations crescendo, and then – at 12:01 – the noise dips to a low hum of hard drives and the curt click of keystrokes. The race is on.

I wish I were sitting with my friends, Dot and Jenny, in Portland, with a pot of coffee and giddy smiles between us. Instead, I face my laptop alone. The cursor blinks at me, and my thoughts bounce from NaNoWriMo to my pillow and warm blanket and sleep. I may be in for a long 30 days.

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If NaNoWriMo isn’t your thing but you kind of like the idea of setting high goals in compact amounts of time, then check out Linda Cassidy’s recent post. She and a few other writing pals have designed their own Nano contest, one that promises sparkling clean results.

Or, if you’d rather just write – on your own terms – but need a firm deadline on the horizon, here are two writing contests to consider:

The Collagist’s 2009 Flash Fiction Contest
Women on Writing Fall 2009 Flash Fiction Contest

I work better under pressure, so I love deadlines.  That explains why I’m staying up past my bedtime, waiting for the two hands of the clock to flip to 12.

Right now, it’s 11:01 my time. Somewhere on the east coast, it’s after midnight. A host of voices just rose and fell, wooo!

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The Importance of Shades of Gray

I love this week’s theme on Wordsmith.org: eponyms.

Today’s word, as quoted from Wordsmith’s site:

manichean. adjective: Of or relating to a dualistic view of the world, dividing things into either good or evil, light or dark, black or white, involving no shades of gray.

ETYMOLOGY:
After Manes/Mani (216-276 CE), Persian founder of Manichaeism, an ancient religion espousing a doctrine of a struggle between good and evil.

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I heard it or read it somewhere: writing is a solitary act, but it cannot be done in isolation. If you’re not a writer (and of manichean tendencies), you might think that sentence contradicts itself. Writing is, or it isn’t, a solitary act.

But, I find, in writing, there are no black and white, right or wrong answers most of the time.

Two writer’s whose blogs I frequent, Linda Cassidy and Cathryn Grant, both posted this week on the subject of genre descriptions and the struggle to find the right category for your novel. Linda posted a link to AgentQuery’s genre descriptions, and, though my novel is several rewrites away from being agent-ready, I could relate to the struggle of choosing a genre. AgentQuery starts out by comparing the job of classifying a novel to the question, “Where are you from?”

I’m from Wisconsin. Well, really I was born and raised in Texas. So, I’m from Texas. Right? I’ve lived in Wisconsin long enough, but my heart is still….

You get the point. It’s a tough question that only I know the answer to, and the answer isn’t one or the other. In the world of genre categories, nothing is clear-cut either. Genre descriptions overlap and interweave and can drive an author mad.

My struggles with my work-in-progress henge on my resistance to rewrites. I’ve been sitting on the premise that a rewrite must go from beginning to end and back again. After several encouraging comments from other writers on a recent post of mine, I thought, okay, I’ll break it down, piece by piece, and address those parts that don’t work. But until I read Linda’s and Cathryn’s posts, I stared blankly at the story and wondered, which parts don’t work?

What does all this have to do with queries and categories, you ask? Let go of the linear, and hear me out.

Linda’s and Cathryn’s posts, and AgentQuery’s descriptions, gave me pause and shed a new light my novel. I asked myself, in what genre would my story fit? I came up with an answer of what I don’t want, and then my mind flashed through several scenes in need of fixing, or deleting. That may be a minute part of the writing process for some authors, but, for me, the experience was like a jump-start.

In the last several months, I’ve connected with a number of great writers online, my own mini virtual salon. In this online community of writers, our experiences overlap. One writer’s struggle highlights my own, but in a different way. Even if I read others’ posts that describe steps and struggles in the publishing process that are well beyond my reach, I learn. When they comment on my posts, I grow in the same way as a writer who might be sitting in a cafe, sipping coffee with my colleagues, reading our work face to face. As a mother of two young children with little time to write – much less, time to get out for coffee, alone – I cherish these relations and their dialogue.