Seascape

This weekend I went to my first overnight writer's workshop /retreat since the Wesleyan Writer's Conference hundreds of moons ago.  About twenty-one of us, wannabe novelists and three writing gurus, all good writers themselves, met at a retreat center in Chester, CT.  Rural, nice hotel-type lodge without TV or room phones but with good WiFi, delicious home-cooked food, no booze but wine permitted in rooms and "bar."

Beautiful fall weekend, but we didn't mind being indoors, because what writers love at least as much as writing, which some of us have a love/hate relationship with, is talking about writing, and learning more about writing.

We read 20-page  novel beginnings in our group of nine and came prepared to comment on them.  Lots of beginning writers with much to learn, and it is gratifying to one who has been a "student" for a long time to realize how much of the craft has been absorbed if not always applied.

So, in spite of the fact that I had an old/new laptop that needed some upgrades, and a phone where I had to stand in the middle of the tennis court or parking lot to make a call, things went well.  

Did you know writing is a craft?  At least 80% of what you need to know can be learned, even where to find ideas.  The germ of your story is up to you, but hey, stories are everywhere in personal life, anecdotes, observations, the news, history--stories are everything.  Sometimes it's hard to know if you idea is for a short story, novella, or full-length novel, but you'll find out in the writing.  Maybe your personal story lends itself to memoir, like Significant Other's. 

Need I mention we had one man in the group?  He didn't seem to be fazed or intimidated.  Mystery writers, esp. writers of "traditional mysteries" and "cozies" tend to be women. Our man was not writing a cozy.  Do you know what a "cozy" mystery is?  Where more tea is spilled than blood, no sex, no on page violence (at least not much) and little if any bad language.  Usually set in a small town, but not always.  The suspects know each other.  Justice is served.  Lots of older females read cozies and they don't like the f-bomb, adulteresses, gore and mistreatment of pets.  The romance genre has multiple rules and so do so-called "traditional" (think Agatha Christie) books.  Of course you are free to stand any genre on its head but you're taking a huge risk.

Anyway, we didn't have any thriller writers, but we did have (including moi) two historical novelists, no mystery involved, at least not whodunnit.

I have some new ideas about how to make "Such Stuff As Dreams" more compelling and now at 70,000 words into the story, I'll finish up and save my notes for the revision.  Did you know that "Writing Is Rewriting?"  Did you know there are three rules for writing but no one knows what they are?  Did you know there's almost as many books about writing as there are writers.  Well, maybe I exaggerate, but not much.

Last thing gleaned from weekend which I probably knew already.  If you eat dessert after each meal you will gain weight, "regular" sausage is much tastier than turkey sausage and bonding with fellow writers gives one a real "high."  I haven't slept well since.  Mind is churning.

Now, off to tweak what I'm reading to my writing group today.  Yowza! 

 

The Inciting Incident

Beginning a novel is the pits. Where to start? Start too early and the story bogs down. Start too late and you end up with a skid load of flash backs. The current wisdom is to start at the "inciting incident." At least for us mystery-writing folks.

You can describe the incident, but you have to get in a little (not too much) about the main character, and whet the reader's appetite, and appeal to the senses, and have a nice little hook. And don't start with the weather. And prologues are passe. Cripes the rules start to get a little intimidating, and then every other book one picks up breaks them, and rather elegantly, too.

This writing business is hard, I tell you. But you knew that.

In 14 minutes I'm going to watch Glen Close and company in Damages. It's the one thing I've been watching consistently since the Sopranos, but I think Big Love is pretty good, too. And yeah, I watch the Red Sox. And the food channel when I'm ironing or want to chill or maybe even take a nap.

Now it's 10 minutes. Up the stairs I go.

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Ladies Who Read

The wonderful sentence I mentioned in yesterday's blog is from a review of Summer Reading in Sunday's (6/3/07) New York Times Book Review. Anne Mendelson wrote the review. She is a freelance writer and editor.

"The clank of narrative machinery being hauled into place is rather too audible at the outset, before the three dovetailing plots take on a graceful momentum of their own."

It's really hard to begin a book. There are a gazillion rules - no backstory too early; no flashbacks too early; ditch the prologue; don't intoduce too many characters at once; make sure the reader knows what the book is "about" in the first few pages; stick in lots of reasonance, with appeals to all five senses; start with actions, not driving or on an airplane; don't begin with a cliched phone call. These are rules for genre fiction, at least mystery-suspense genre, and if you're fabulous, you can break the rules, but a beginning writer better not. So the"clank of narrative machinery," aka the setup, being hauled into place is often heard. I definitely see it in Promiscuous Mode and also in World of Mirrors. As long as it's not too 'pat,' one hopes the reader is enthused, because that is what tells her what the book will be about. Can't win for losing.

Apropos of seeing the name "Wolizer," I thought of a high school teacher of Spanish and English, Miss Walters. A spinster, as they were then called, she taught English and Spanish in a tiny town out west. She cared for an aging mother, which must have been why she got stuck there. No men suitable for a phi beta kappa English major within 90 miles. I remembered her as homely, but when I looked at the yearbook photo, she wasn't. I owe her an apology for thinking her dorky, for thinking of her as a loser, for thinking she was old and ugly. God, did she teach us to diagram the hell out of sentences, to do a bang-up job on a research paper. We laughed at her Castillian accent, which sounded so phoney among all the Latino Spanish. I can still hear her voice asking, "Quien falta?" Who's absent? So, sorry Miss Walters, wherever you are. You were a cool lady.

Today I print all 500+ pages (Courier 12) of World of Mirrors to send to the agent. It's not a question of will be like it, but will he think he can sell it? Maybe he has contacts in Germany. I wouldn't care where it was sold. It would be fun to do a signing in the cute bookstore on the island of Hiddensee, where there are a couple scenes in the book.

Now I will hie myself into the kichen to make the food processor bread. When we were newly weds, I used the word "hie" in a scrabble game and S.O. had never heard of it. Ha ha . Do YOU know it? I think my grandma used it.

With flour up to her elbows,

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