Tag: adventures in the writing life

Neophilia

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Writers have always tended to have a complicated relationship with the tools they use to write.  Some of them praise the fluid ease of writing in a fresh bound notebook with a high-quality fountain pen; others insist that only #2 pencils and a legal pad will do.  (Lord Dunsany allegedly wrote his stories with a peacock-feather quill pen, but he was the 18th Baron Dunsany and could get away with such things.)

Other writers love new tech.  Mark Twain was an early adopter of the typewriter, for example.  For a while in the mid-twentieth century, composing directly on the typewriter, instead of just using it to make a fair copy for submission, nevertheless had a faintly non-literary smell – an aroma of hackwork, as it were — in the noses of sensitive readers and critics.

Then along came dedicated word processors, followed shortly by word processing programs running on personal computers, and the people who had been looking down on typewriters switched to looking down on word processors and waxing nostalgic about their old muscle-powered Remingtons and Underwoods.

And so it goes, and keeps on going.  Even among the computerati, there are writers who eagerly embrace each new development (Google Docs!  Scrivener!) and others who lovingly maintain a vintage PC for the express purpose of running their copy of WordStar or Leading Edge.

Which is all taking the long way around to saying that I’m composing this blog post using Microsoft Live Writer for the first time, and if anything about it looks strange or funky or unexpected . . . well, you’ll know why.

Back Again

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Returning from the land of holiday distraction….

I have a new pair of L. L. Bean fleece-lined slippers.  My feet are warm.

The various and assorted Christmas gifts for the various and assorted family members were all properly appreciated (which is always a relief — all it takes is having a gift-choice turn out wrong once to make you twitchy forever afterward.)†

The Christmas dinner crown roast of pork turned out well, as did the five different pies, of which we still have about two slices each of apple and cherry left, and maybe four slices of blueberry.  The maple cream and the pumpkin are both gone, gone, gone.

And I need to get back to work.

†A word to the wise: If you’ve got a pair of young twins, and they both, separately, tell you that they want a particular thing for Christmas . . . do not decide that it would be a good idea to get one of it for them to share. Just don’t.

Weather, We’ve Got Weather

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And I might even have had a blog post last night about short stories, and how long it takes to write one, if we hadn’t been in the part of northern New England that had freezing cold and high winds all day yesterday, and had the power go out for nearly five hours yesterday night.

Which wouldn’t have been bad — only annoying, and boring, and putting a serious delay in all the work I had in hand for the evening — if we didn’t also heat the house with electricity.  We toughed it out by candlelight for the first couple of hours, until our laptops ran out of juice; then we gave up and huddled under the down comforter and all the blankets until the power came back.

Then we spent today playing catch-up, and putting the finishing touches on the short story we were working on when the power went out.  This is a short story that either took us a couple of weeks to write, or took us about nine years.  We would periodically pull it out, and work on it some, and throw out bits and put in more bits, and come up against a brick wall and put it away again . . . and this went on, as I’ve said, for years.†

Then about a week ago, revelation hit and the wall broke and we had a finished draft.  The rest of the work was revision, seven drafts of it.  (I figure I’m in good company; the humorist James Thurber once claimed that most of his seemingly effortless casual pieces for The New Yorker went through at least six drafts before submission.)  Next comes sending the story out on a blind date with an editor somewhere, with all the concomitant angst and uncertainty.

Persistence.  Persistence is key.

†We didn’t have the external spur of an anthology we’d promised the story to, and we’re not primarily short story writers anyhow; otherwise, the process might not have taken so long. A good part of the final, successful effort involved throwing out all of the short story’s misguided attempts to turn into a novel.

A Few Things a Writer Should Probably Do at Least Once

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At least if he or she is working in the fields of the historical or fantastic:

  • Fire a rifle or handgun.   If you don’t have the sort of friends who own firearms and back pastures where they can set up tin cans on fence posts, visit a shooting range.  (But the effect of a bullet on a full tin can of dubious green beans or corned beef hash is a lot more impressive than holes in a paper target.)  If you’re working on stuff set in the black-powder era, see if you can find a black-powder enthusiast for a demonstration.
  • Build a fire starting with tinder and matches.  Starting with flint and steel, or with even more basic gear, is rather more hard core than necessary, though if you happen to know a Boy Scout or a historical recreationist who’s into that sort of thing, you should take the opportunity to observe the process if you can.  It explains, among other things, why so many fictional wizards keep a handy firestarting spell in their back pockets, and why the ancient Romans were so big on keeping a fire burning in the Temple of Vesta.
  • Try on some armor and a helmet.  Cultivating the acquaintance of some historical recreationists, again, is good for this.  You’ll most likely end up in chain mail, because plate armor is a lot more size-specific.  But the narrowed field of view and dampened sound inside a closed helm are certainly instructive.
  • Wear the clothing of another era, for insight into how movement and demeanor are affected by it.  What can and can’t you do in hoop skirt and corset, for example; or in high heels, a powdered wig, and a sword?
  • Cook and eat a meal from the same era.  Bonus points for doing it over the fire you started with tinder and matches.
  • Get far enough away from major urban areas to see the night sky unaffected by the glow of city lights, and hear the world without the background rumble of machinery and hum of electricity, and smell the world without the overlay of internal combustion engines and industrial processes.  You don’t have to stay there; just visit it for a few hours, or a day or so.

And that’s just for starters.  Not all research is done in books.

The Transience of Things

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Today’s pop-up target was my LCD monitor’s sudden affliction with creeping screen rot.  It was bound to happen eventually, I suppose; I got this monitor back in 2008 or so, and nothing lasts forever.  Especially nothing involving computers — though they do get cheaper; our very first computer, the Atari 800 of blessed memory (48 screamin’ K of RAM!  Upper and lower case letters!), cost nearly ten times as much as my most recent computer purchase.

Of course, that was back when personal computers were still mostly the domain of electronics enthusiasts, and Gates and Jobs and Wozniak and their fellows were still regarded as (admittedly, fairly well-off) nerds, rather than as giants in the earth.  These days, computers are appliances, like televisions or toaster ovens; they’ve gone from being a luxury good to something we assume most people have — at any rate, we tend to regard lack of computer access as a sign of economic misfortune, if not outright poverty.

What these changes mean for me is that I was able to order a new monitor of somewhat higher quality than the old one for less money than the old one cost, even figuring in the extra expense of speedy delivery.  And I console myself with the thought that at least the monitor died this month, when the tidal nature of freelance income meant that I could replace it, rather than last month, when I would have been left with nothing to work on but my little netbook.

Shakespeare was a Glovemaker’s Son

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This post here says it all, really.

You don’t need an M.F.A. to write.  You don’t need a B.A. in English to write.  In fact, you don’t need any sort of specialized education whatsoever to write.  (Jane Austen was tutored at home by her father and brothers; Charlotte Bronte had maybe half a dozen years of formal schooling, at least a couple of them at a boarding school so hellish she turned it into that ghastly boarding school in Jane Eyre.) You don’t even need to be a native speaker of the language you decide you’re going to write in.  (Joseph Conrad’s first language was Polish; Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first novels in Russian.)

You just need to write.

So go do it.

The Seasons Change

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Up here in the north country of New Hampshire, we’re well out of the glorious fall colors and moving into the grey-and-brown of late autumn and early winter — fitting weather for enduring the tail end of a particularly debilitating cold, and for contemplating revisions and similar work.

None of it is made any easier by having a large, plushy cat draped across my forearms as I’m trying to type.  Having me gone for over a week in mid-month appears to have made her inconveniently affectionate.  On the other hand, she’s warm, which will be a decided plus if her new behavior hasn’t moderated itself come January.

Cats, by and large, make good writer’s pets.  They’re emotionally self-sufficient, which means that they aren’t going to go into a decline if the human of the household spends a week or so in a deadline-induced fugue (but they’re perfectly capable of demanding attention for necessary things like food — quite ruthlessly, if need be.)  They don’t regard the human of the household as a minor god, or even the alpha of the pack; at best they appear to regard humans as mentally challenged, peculiarly-shaped kittens who can, with patience, be taught to understand simple commands.  This is good for keeping the writer’s ego in check.  And they can catch mice, which — considering the sorts of places writers often have to live — is  a positive contribution to household morale.

Road Trip Rerun

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Having made it through the Peterborough book signing, we’re now holed up for the night in our favorite inexpensive motel in Manchester NH, and I am pondering the question that always gets asked on occasions like this, which is:  Do readings and book signings actually do a working writer any good?

And the answer comes back, as it so often does in this business:  Who the hell knows?

My own theory, for whatever it’s worth, is that readings and similar activities may not do much to sell the particular book you’re pushing at the time, but they probably do contribute to increasing your “hey, I saw this person once and he was a nice guy, so  why not buy his new book” factor, at least a little bit.

(Don’t be a jerk to the booksellers, though.  Like the folks in Production, they have the means in their hand to exact a  subtle but devastating revenge.)

Back from Martha’s Vineyard…

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…and we’re already contemplating another road trip.  This one, thankfully, is briefer:  a jaunt down to Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough NH for an Impossible Futures booksigning, this Saturday the 26th.

More regular posting about life, literature, and the things that peeve or fascinate me will resume shortly.