I went rooting through the basement yesterday, sorting through boxes of junk, most of which needs to be thrown out. But rooting occasionally turns up a truffle, and I found a paper I'd written for a class in college in 1993, "Gender Studies". The assignment was to interview someone, and I chose my grandmother, who my mom had nicknamed "Charlie" (for no explicable reason); a nickname I later picked up. It's my intent to use this essay as a foundation element for a book about my grandparents. I've captured it in Scrivener verbatim from the original (it's poorly organized, partially because of the format for the class, but partially because I was a lesser writer then than I am now), and present it here partially as a declaration of my intent to expand on it and partially as a way to put it somewhere in the digital cloud where it will be preserved. With that, I give you "Charlie". Born in 1918 near Great Falls, Montana, Dorothy Louise Thompson, dubbed “Charlie” by her daughter Elizabeth, has led quite a life. Her second marriage, forty years now and still going strong, has been one of sharing and companionship that doesn’t cling to definite ideas of gender roles. In her interview, she told of growing up in Montana and Saskatchewan as part of a big family, and how what she learned there came to use when she married the second time and suddenly found herself mother to not only her own two, but three more children. “I was born in Aznoe, Montana. It was just a grain elevator, a store, and a post office. And the post office was in the store like in most places out in the country where you had to go miles and miles to pick up your mail… and it’s no longer there. It’s now an extinct town. Improvements in transportation make the whole town obsolete, I suppose. That was back in the horse and buggy days when… well, that’s all that we had to get around in: a horse and buggy. Or a horse and what we they called a buckboard. That’s just a wagon seat and a bed like a pickup. Quite a rough ride, I tell you. “I was born at home. Since I was born in March, 1918 (we had a very severe winter that year), my father had to ride the horse through the snow to where the doctor lived. It was below zero even then. It was a very severe winter. The doctor came to the house. My mother, being a nurse, gave very good directions to the people that were there to help. My grandmother was already in the house, so she had done all the preparations for the delivery before the doctor got there. “We lived out on the farm, the homestead that my parents had gotten. My father was a painter, and he did painting around in Great Falls and the small towns and in the countryside. That’s the way he made his living, paper hanging and painting, all facets of the painting he knew. But he had problems with what they called ‘the painter’s colic’. He was very allergic to some of the paints in enclosed rooms. So he’d get very ill sometimes, with this painter’s colic, and later on they found out that it was from the white lead in the paints back then. They didn’t know about it back then, they just knew that a lot of people got it. So he wanted to get out of the painting business. “Though he didn’t know anything about farming, when they threw open the areas of Montana to homesteading, he and Mom each applied for a homestead. I don’t remember the number of acres that each person could get as a homestead, but it was a small amount. [What do you consider a small amount?] “Well, I don’t really know. I’ve forgotten. Anyway, they had to ‘prove up’ on the ground. That was to build some sort of a building and to live in on the ground and with… oh, it must’ve been eighty acres to a homestead, because one father pieces of ground that they’d ‘proved up’ on was called ‘the eighty’, and mother called her piece of ground “the sun kissed”, because she felt that it’d been kissed by the sun. And she loved it out there. “I was one of five children. We moved to Great Falls when my brother, who was just older than I, was old enough to go to school in the first grade. So we moved off of the homestead when I was between four and five years old. George was really a year older than he should have been [to start school]. He was seven before they moved to town. They were thinking about having him go to a country school, but then thought that it would be best if we moved into Great Falls, which was 32 miles from where I was born. I started into kindergarten when I was five, because that’s how old you were when you first started into kindergarten back in those days. At six, you went into the first grade. “Out on the homestead, even through it was really small, it was difficult. A really difficult time. In order to help the family, to support the family of then four children and my mother and dad, and my grandmother on my father’s side, mother went out to nurse for the little country doctor who had his office and practice in Fort Benton. She graduated from the University of Michigan (she was in the first graduating class of women there).” With her mother working out and about in the rural area, much of the housework had to be tended to by the children. Dorothy, being the second oldest child, had much of the responsibility for the housework loaded onto her, because the oldest, George, was helping tend the farm. “I went to school in Great Falls clear through high school, and graduated in 1936. Also in 1936, my mother’s mother fell and broke her hip. She was in her seventies then, and no other member of the family was able to go and stay with her. So I was sent from Great Falls to Orrville, California to live, to be with my grandmother, and to care for her until the hip healed. There I worked in a cannery, part time. That’s what I did there, along with aiding my grandmother. “After she was better, I went back to Great Falls. When the war broke out in 1941, my brothers had already gone into the service and Boeing was advertising all over the country for workers to work in the war plants. And so my sister [Amelia] and I decided that we’d like to go. That’s how we ended up in Seattle until 1945.” Every little while, Dorothy pauses to thin about what she’s said and try to think of what to say next. Often she apologizes for “this being so dull and boring”. Just when she thinks she’s said everything, though, she remembers something else she left out. “I’d forgotten about the years in Canada. We didn’t live all those years in Great Falls. In 1929, right before the depression hit, because of drought and crop failures and grasshopper infestation (it seemed like it was one thing after another on a farm), [my parents] gave up the homestead entirely and went north. Out in Great Falls, seeing that things were going poorly, my father had laid aside a little nest egg of money because he still had hopes of becoming a farmer and having some land of his own. [The Canadian government] opened up the Matanuska Valley in British Columbia, for homesteading again, and he was going to use the money that he’s saved to go [up there]. When they were in preparation for going, it just happened that some other people moved into [our] neighborhood from Saskatchewan, and they gave such glowing reports of land and crops and so forth up there that Dad and Mom went up to investigate. When they saw the lush wheat fields and oat fields and so forth, they bought 360 acres of ground at the end of the Corduroy Roads. Corduroy Roads went over very soft, swampy ground. [Road builders] laid logs across these swampy areas, and those made it really bumpy. “So we were in Canada for two years, and that was a real experience for us, because we had to go to a different school. That was the first and only place that I went to a one-room schoolhouse. Eight grades, all in one room. And the country people had many activities that were different than what we were used to in Great Falls. We had always gone to city schools. [There were] country dances and get-togethers at the schoolhouse. In the winter, you had to travel by horse drawn sleigh to go there. And they had box socials, where the women would fix up a box and put a meal in it. Then you should share the meal with whichever man bid the highest on the box. That was an activity that the younger people participated in more than the older, married women who had children already. They had potluck where they brought cakes and pies for them and their children.” Skipping ahead now, Dorothy tells about the war years and what she did while she was in Seattle. “I took time out during the war to enlist in the cadet nurse corps. I had worked at Boeing for a year and a half. Then I found the nurse corps for a year, and then went back to Boeing. When I was in the nurse corps, I had to tend to one patient (all of the patients had just one nurse). I was a really small person. Still am. He was bedridden, and weighed well over two hundred pounds. In taking care of him, I hurt my back. And so I decided that it was going to be too strenuous and difficult for me to go on with. I wrote to the shop foreman in my shop at Boeing, and asked for my position back. He said that I should come on out, and of course I could have my job back.” She met a sailor, her first love, during the war. Right after thew war was over, they got married and started a family. It was short-lived, though. “I got married the first time in 1944, I think. Let me see… Jimmy [their son] was born in 1946, and Liz [their daughter] in 1948, so I was married in 1945. Yes, that’s it. It wasn’t much of a marriage, though, except for the two kids. My husband was drowned in 1950.” After getting out of the service, her husband had taken up commercial fishing as an occupation, along with her oldest brother George. A boating accident in 1950 left her with one less brother, no husband, and two small children on her hands. With the help of...
Some recent feedback on my WIP said that my descriptions of new places didn't sufficiently immerse the reader in that place, so the work seemed a little flat. I asked for examples of what the reader thought were good scene descriptions, and am waiting for a response. In the meantime, I looked to the work of Rosamunde Pilcher, a famously descriptive writer. I'd never read her work, and given the opening paragraph of her famous and popular novel "The Shell Seekers", I'm not sure I'll continue: My editor's eye sees several problems with this passage (SPAG, even), but frankly the worst part is that by the time I got to the end of page two of this work, I was worn out. Do people really like this stuff? Am I missing something by not pressing on?
I desperately want to write a witty, pithy, somewhat trite essay about all the nonsense happening in the U.S. with respect to the virus response. Or mourn for the elderly in Italy, a country with a declining population that skews unnaturally toward the aged. Or cheer for the sensibility of the governments of China and South Korea for their rapid and decent response to the situation. Instead, here I sit without a creative thought in my head. Writers block. Do you recommend coffee or whisky?
I'm a somewhat regular member of StackExchange's "WorldBuilding" site, a place for writers, game developers, and imaginers of all sorts to bounce ideas off of really smart people, and get answers to seemingly intractable questions. A couple days ago, I asked a question related to my WIP; whether famine death of a billion people in a world with ten billion was reasonable. Someone reading an early fragment of the work called me out about that, saying that it was a preposterously large number; that society would collapse. I doubted his statement, but thought I should take it to the aforementioned smart people (no offense to the WF community) and see what they had to say. Maybe he was right. So I asked, with the hookish title of "A billion dead?" I set up the situation (ten billion people), and asked if a global famine could kill off ten percent. What would the impacts be? Was I overreaching? I got good answers from a lot of people, but what I really learned was the value of a good hook. A heady, short question that leaves so much unexplained has, in two days' time, drawn ten thousand views of the question. For comparison, most questions asked in the same time period have garnered between one and two hundred views, with a couple that have pegged view counts in the low thousands (2-4K). There is little about this statistic, these ten thousand views, that has anything to do with the question I asked. Only a fraction of the setup and question are visible in the preview lines; just enough to lead the reader on. But other questions are presented similarly, and are just as interesting in the long form. I'm fully convinced that the hook is what has drawn people in. This is something to remember when writing a bit of ad copy for our self-published works. Sure, a blurb is what will sell the work, but the hook is what gets them to read the blurb. Write the hook, sell the book.
You know how you get so used to something that you only see it one way? I've been working on my WIP, Lives in Time for so long that it didn't strike me that "Lives" is either the plural of the noun "life" (the way I intended it) or the third-person present tense of the verb "live". I was showing my draft cover art to someone today and they asked, "How is that pronounced?" It was like I had cold water tossed in my face. The last thing I want to do is bring a shopper to a complete halt on the first word of the title. If they're confused by something that simple, they're not going to want to read the book. It was always kind of a working title anyway. Now I need to cogitate on a replacement. "Two people live through a series of adventures across centuries" is too damn long. Now what?
Now that I've completed Lives in Time: Part One, I need to package it. One element, of course, will be the blurb. I'll take a stab at it here, and feedback is welcome, particularly from people who haven't read any of the work. Marko and Celeste are young and in love, with a long, privileged future before them. But when they find themselves thrown back in time with no resources and no idea how to return, they must use their wits while hiding who they are to survive a medieval world and escape to their own time.
Those of you who have listened to me blather for the last sixteen months about my WIP, Lives in Time, might be interested to know that Part One is finished. That is to say that it has the brightest sheen I can put on it with my writing skill. It wrapped up at 49,560 words on 156 pages exported from Scrivener using the default PDF settings. Scrivener estimates three hours and eighteen minutes to read, which is a pleasant snack; an evening of reading. I'm leaning toward publishing now, and setting a goal for myself of getting Part Two out in another year. I've got a good head of steam, and if I can maintain it, I think I can get there. From there, maybe Part Three within six to nine months after that, which will be the balance of the story. Thanks to you all, my writing skill has improved greatly in the time I've been here. You can't know how much your support means to me. I don't know where this is going to go. My efforts to self-publish may flop completely. Or they may succeed beyond my wildest dreams (which really aren't that wild, to be honest). At any rate, I'm going to continue to plug away, continue to work on smaller projects on the side, and continue to support this forum in what way I can with whatever small advice I can pass on to those further down the hill than I. If I do end up publishing, I'll post a link here. If I can figure out how to offer a discount to WF members, I'll do that too. Cheers. JD
I have a bad case of the hads. I recently performed a self-diagnosis and discovered the illness. I hope it's not terminal. Seriously, though, as far as I can tell, about eighty percent of the time the word "had" appears in text, it can be deleted. Sometimes you have to modify the following verb, but often it's just double-click-and-delete. Example: A heart symbol into which someone had carved “M+C” held a place of prominence. A heart symbol into which someone carved “M+C” held a place of prominence. Modify the verb: It didn’t take long to cover the entire site, and soon they had seen as much as they could. It didn’t take long to cover the entire site, and soon they saw as much as they could. Replace with a more useful verb: His smile had little in the way of warmth, though it did not seem ingenuine. His smile carried little in the way of warmth, though it did not seem ingenuine. It can be a useful word, but should be used judiciously. To wit: It seemed like a natural cave that had been worked so the walls were smooth. That's all I had wanted to say.
Several people on this forum criticized (rightly) my posted fragments of "Lives in Time" with the common refrain of "show, don't tell!" Like many, I struggle with this. It's something I probably need to revise in my interpersonal manner as well; I'm wordy, and people get bored listening to me. In an effort to resolve the situation, I took @Stormburn's advice and purchased and read a copy of "Understanding Show, Don't Tell: (And Really Getting It) (Skill Builders Series Book 1)" by Janice Hardy. It's a practical and pragmatic guide to finding and resolving instances of telling instead of showing in your fictional works. Lucky for me, Scrivener has a feature where you can put a list of words into the search box and it finds all instances of those words in your work, highlights them, and makes a list of the documents that is easy to navigate through. In the appendix of the book, Hardy provides lists of words in categories. I used those lists to seek out opportunities for revision. I did not, however, take her advice wholesale (and she doesn't expect her readers to do so). Sure, words like thought or realized are red flag words for places that can be revised, so this: After the man had gone, Marko thought they ought to get to the safety of Pula's crowded streets. Becomes this: After the man had gone, Marko wanted to get to the safety of Pula's crowded streets. And this: Marko realized that, like him, she had come to accept that they, or at least one of them, was not dreaming. Becomes this: Marko could see that, like him, she had come to accept that they, or at least one of them, was not dreaming. Small changes, but effective. I find that leaving words like this in dialogue makes it seem more real. People don't speak formally, and wrenching streams of dialogue around so it always has that show, don't tell panache can strip it of a sense of realism. Additionally, uses like, "Marko thought about the things that made a man civilized, and couldn’t find it in himself to set them aside" and "Now, at the docks of Rovinj, they realized that the sight of a man and a woman carrying a clearly heavy load on a pole through the streets would draw unwanted attention. appear, to me at least, valid. In all, I found Hardy's recommendations very helpful, and look forward to reading the next book in her series. By title, at least, it appears I have need of every Skill Builders book she has written.
I use Scrivener to write, and occasionally compile to Kindle format to see how the final product might look. Recently I did a compile to send to a beta reader, and, having used a more critical eye than in the previous compiles, noticed that the work didn't have a cover image. Feeling sparky, I fired up GIMP, did a search for an appropriate photo, applied some filters, added some text, and came up with this. It's a first draft. Thoughts? View attachment 23027
Most of a year ago, I wrapped Part One of Lives in Time, my WIP. My friend Steve, an author of some renown, offered to read it and give feedback, which I readily accepted. His review is posted in my blog below, titled Feedback if you're interested. It's good material. Today, after letting the work languish for quite a while, I started the long, arduous process of editing. I'm relying on Steve's feedback, as well as that of another author friend, to guide me. It's difficult, though. One thing I did notice, after letting the work settle, is that I had (probably still have) a habit of making lengthy paragraphs that were really several paragraphs chained together. I broke them into two (sometimes three) pieces, and now the work reads better. The simple addition of a few carriage returns helped the flow of the work dramatically. Now just to go back and fix the "show versus tell" business, which will be harder. :|
I took about a six month break from writing. You're welcome, by the way. But now I'm back to it, harrowing you with questions and requests for suggestions. I hit you with one short story (which is getting published! yay!), but watch out, more of my novel is headed your way. Part One of "Lives in Time" wrapped last summer, waiting for an appropriate length of time for me to forget what I wrote and look over the work with a fresh editor's eye. In the meantime, my hindbrain has been cooking up something, and last week it got shoved to my forebrain. I've got ideas, and I'm not afraid to use them. Your only salvation is that work is ridiculously busy for me, and I don't see myself sitting for hours on end cranking out paragraphs for you to tear up. Thank me now, because sooner or later this stuff needs to get put down, and then you're in for it. All of this is my way of saying thank you to everyone who has gotten me this far. I look forward to your support going forward.
I recently finished reading Lonesome Dove, that staple of American Literature that was made famous by the all-star TV miniseries from 1989. In the first few pages, I laughed regularly at McMurtry's phraseology and regular witticisms. I fell into the genre enough that, ten pages into the book, I stopped to write a ~1300 word story with the same flavor (though perhaps not the same quality of writing). A hundred chapters later, the tragedy ended with a whimper, having wrung everything possible out of the characters and then some. Something that struck me about the novel, though not so much the story, was that almost everything I've been taught about how not to write showed up in McMurtry's style. Head hopping is rampant throughout, to the point of becoming a feature of the novel. The beginning of Part Three is page after page of infodump. One passage, like the Tom Bombadil encounter in Lord of the Rings, had nothing to do with the story at large, and the minor character that had the encounter barely reflected on it and it had nothing to do with his ultimate disposition. Speaking of characters, there were so many who were superfluous to the core story that they began to feel like sagebrush that had to be waded through to get to the watering hole. And finally, at one point, one of the main characters specifically chose to let his favorite horse go graze while he took a lesser horse out on watch with him, but then McMurtry closes the scene by mentioning the favorite horse being out there with him. Given all this, I'm not encouraged to read more McMurtry. The funny thing is that I know people, authors I respect, who love that novel. I will say that I learned quite a bit about character development from reading the introspections of not only Call and McRae, but Lorie, July, and the rest. It was certainly worth my time to read. I just wish it had been written better.
I got asked yesterday who I wanted to "be like" as a writer. A non-introspective person might answer that they don't want to be like anyone; that they think their writing is unique among the billions of words written by tens of thousands of writers and authors plying their trade in the world today, let alone the countless writers who have gone before them. I'm a little more open minded in my approach, and seriously consider who my influences are. However, I can't put my finger on the name of a particular author that I would like to use as a template for myself as a writer. Perhaps therein lies one of my failings. Perhaps I need to pick an author and study their work more closely than others to find patterns I like, turns of phrase, stylistic cues... Perhaps I need to establish a style and refine it. Luckily for me, I'm a long way from needing to be so declarative. I'm slowly plugging away at writing a novel, and I'm getting good feedback on ways to improve it from some people who know the craft; people I respect, and who have influenced me with their writing. I'll slog away at the framework of my personal Monster in a Box, then go back and refine it based on what I learned along the way. With luck, it will be readable. With great luck, it will be salable. For now, I am pleased with the idea of finishing it in a form that I'm proud of. After all, we need to set our goals as things we can achieve.