The craft-based approach to writing

Recently, I started knitting.  I began for a few reasons, the most obvious being that I wanted to extend my wardrobe with lovely, handmade garments.  Also, it was around Christmas and I was annoyed at all the over-spending that goes on around that holiday, and on gifts that have arguably less meaning that something handmade.  As a writer, you always have the option of writing your loved ones a story, poem, or memoir (hopefully keeping it as cheese-free as possible).  But, let’s be honest, how difficult would it be to write something creative and uniquely styled for each family member while also working on your own projects?  And with the same 25th deadline for each present?  I don’t think so.  Now, with knitting, I’ve got next Christmas in the bag.

One of the driving reasons for my learning to knit, though, was as a way to connect with my grandmother.  Although she is healthy and active now, I know that she won’t always be around.  I feel a great push lately to spend as much time as possible with my grandparents and to accept their gifts of knowledge and skills, which will otherwise be lost.

So those were my reasons, and the time spent with my grandmother in pursuit of this craft produced lasting and precious memory.  However, as I’ve now completed two projects and am working on a third, I’ve discovered another benefit of learning a craft.  Knitting to me is like praying the rosary.  Sometimes I do pray; knit by knit, perl by perl, a prayer for every action, every loop, ever tug, every person in my life, for the stranger I’ve never met.  But even when I am not actively praying, I am meditating.

Knitting preoccupies the hands in a creative way, allowing the mind to mull over other creative pursuits.

For me it’s a great time to think — sometimes without being aware of it — of my writing projects and to work out issues which, if I stared at a computer screen and forced myself to work them out in an attitude of frustration would, A, be unproductive, and B, possibly, and hopefully only temporarily, snuff out the positive creative  vibrations associated with that project.  There is so much to be said for taking breaks from writing.  There’s even more wisdom, I think, in taking craft-based breaks which keep your creative muscles engaged in a way that might seemingly have nothing to do with your writing, but is actually keeping you in tune to those voices.

I’m officially a knitter, but I realize that as long as I’ve been a writer I’ve always been a crafts person.  In these next few days, I’d like to discuss the philosophy of “craft” and how it pertains to the writing life.  What crafts do y’all enjoy in partnership with your writing?

Pictures of my latest project, a basic hat using Araucania yarns from Chile.

I love how my camera picked up the lovely glints of green and blue of this yarn.  Safe to say it will be a photogenic hat even if the wearer is not. 

Book Request

Hi folks!

I’m writing a novel that’s set partly in present day small-town North Carolina and partly in the Pacific during WWII.  It’s not a war story, per se, though there are several combat scenes based on Okinawa.  However, the heart of the story lies with my female protagonist, an 85-year-old southern bell who receives a long lost letter from her husband, dated 1945, and begins an investigation into her husband’s past military career.

My question is, can y’all recommend any novels (war novels even) where the narrative shifts between two settings, one in present day and one in past?  And perhaps any which deal with similar subject mater, i.e., war, the unearthing of secrets, old folks (older romance),  memory and memory loss (male protagonist has Alzheimer’s), shame, forgiveness, etc.  WWII Pacific Theatre would be helpful too.

Seems like so many war novels either  center around the combat, or else they harp on about bravery and/ or the futility of war… themes which might come into my story but are not the focus.

I would appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks

Planning, a necessary evil

I just read the Forbes study rating the healthiest states in the US and was pleased to find my home state solidly in 37th place.  Go Tarheels!  Incidentally, if I were to rate my productivity from the past 50 weeks (roughly) since I began working on my novel, this past week would figure in at about 37th place.  That’s 37 with 1 being the most productive and 50 being the week I vegged out on the couch and watched back-to-back BBC Life and Ray Mears episodes.  This week wasn’t  as bad as that, but what did I actually do?

I planned.  There comes a time in every writing project when you have to back off from creating and do a little tidying.  For me that meant going back to my chapter outline and cleaning it up a bit.  I’d written a rough and unfinished outline several weeks back, but had abandoned it because I feared (and rightly so, as it turned out) that it would stopper the flow of ideas and words that were pouring out of me.  At the time the story was coming easily too me then and, knowing how quickly the winds of inspiration change, I prefered to let down my sails, cut off my planning engine, and let those winds push me along.  Sure enough, the winds did change and this week my engine seems to be out of gas.

It’s not that making a chapter outline isn’t important.  It is.  Some people say they can write a story, script or novel without a clear plan and maybe they can.  But in my experience, even if I think I have an idea of where my story is going but I don’t actually sit down and plan it all out in detail, I will write myself into a dead-end.   Discouraged and full of self-doubt, I don’t have the confidence to retrace my steps and begin again, this time with a plan.  That’s how so many projects never get finished.

Planning my chapter outline this week was hard going, and not entirely owing to the frustration of improving the logistics of my plot.  There were some details which I had to mull over and rework until I felt like they advanced the overall plot.   But the most frustrating part about planning is, without a doubt, having to take time off from actual writing, which can and does disrupt the flow of ideas.

How to get back into writing the story once you’ve taken off a week to plan it?  That’s my task this weekend and one that hasn’t produced much fruit yet.  Instead I’m left looking at my plan and listening to the familiar voice of my inner critic who’s whispering, “Do you really think you can do all that?”

On Finishing

I’m celebrating a milestone in my young writing life.  After three years of writing fiction, I did something today I’ve never done before.  I finished a short story.

I don’t know much about the psychology of persevering through a project — I only know it stinks when you’re working at it, but feels oh so good once it’s completed.  Kind of like exercise.  And I don’t have a ton of advice for motivating writers to finish their projects.  I’m learning myself!  Though, I will say, I’m sure there’s a healthy amount of hard work involved with just the tiniest bit of luck.

I guess what I did this time that was different from others was that I wrote, kept writing and didn’t go back and scuba-edit everything I wrote as I wrote it.  Which means, my next task is rewriting.  But there’s something to separating out the writing stage from the rewriting… if only a psychological something.  You feel accomplished when you finish; you feel discouraged when you murder every sentence baby before it’s even born.

So  I’m  properly chuffed.

I began working at 9:45 am and finished at 4:05 and celebrated with a brain-exploding run.  It was a long haul of self-doubt, with my inner editor telling me to take a break after every sentence.  But I didn’t!  How many great stories have been lost because their authors took a break and never had the courage to come back?

It’s a rough story and will need a ton of rewriting, but today I persevered and I finished it.  Hurray!

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
E.L. Doctorow

Daily writing habits

Every considered stopping your day’s writing just when it’s getting good?  If you’re like me, stingy for each rare day of free-flowing writing and wanting to squeeze the most out of them when they come, the thought has probably never crossed your mind.

Starting the day’s writing can sometimes be the most rigorous part of a writer’s day.  Every writer has his own way of coping.  For all you NaNoWriMo folks out there, as well as the less-daring writers like myself, here’s a tip from a fairly successful writer.

Hemingway reportedly wrote 500-1000 words each day and stopped when he was going good.  That way he could pick up where he left off the next day.  Sometimes, he’d stop mid-sentence so that he’d have at least one-half of a sentence to write the next day.

How’s that for forethought?  How often do we just rush through an inspired days work until we’ve depleated the well of ideas?  Then what’s left for the next day’s writing?

I’m working on a short story today — I’m starting it, rather — and I’ve decided to  try out Hemingway’s method.  If nothing else, I’ll have half a sentence written day and the assurance that I’ll at least write half a sentence tomorrow.

Finding Story Ideas #2 Tips

How do you practice coming up with ideas for fiction?  Here are two tips I’ve learned over the years, which have helped me in my practice.

1)      Be Aware:  Imagine you’re brain’s a Brita-filter.  Every second of every day, our brains process stimuli which we receive from our environment:  the natural world, the people we meet, the media, all of that is part of our environment.  As writers and storytellers, we have all the information we need for coming up with great stories.  It’s just a matter of seeing them.

That squished snail you just stepped on, for example.  The way the grass looked this morning with fog laced through its blades.  The person you just walked past that was in hysterics for having stepped on the snail.  Who among us is completely aware of every little thing that happens to or around us on any given day?  No one.   But maybe we should.

By paying a bit more attention to the world around us,  not only will we feel more alert and tuned-in to this beautiful world, we’ll see something worth writing down.

2)      Ask Questions:  Go through life asking the question “What if?”  “What if there were creatures from another planet?” H.G. Wells might have asked.  “How would they react to humans?  What would they look like?”  See how one question leads to another? And this trick doesn’t just work for fantasy or sci-fi.  Consider Jane Austen:  “What if a snobbish land-owning gentleman fell for a feisty, dowerless girl?” In fiction, anything can happen.  Prod your imagination awake by asking it questions.  Begin by asking, “What if?” and see where it takes you.

As an exercise, think about one thing that happened to you during your day.  It can be anything:  a scene from your day, like a meeting or a coffee break, something someone said, that car that nearly ran you over as you were trying to cross the street, anything.  What “What-if” scenario can you imagine coming from that event?

Here’s an example:  you overhear a snippet of an argument between a man and a woman.  All you catch is the man saying, “What do you mean you forgot to get the dried blood?!”  You know he was probably referring to compost fertilizer, but what if he wasn’t?

But the scenarios don’t have to be that ripe for the pickin’.  With a little bit of prodding, you can turn anything into a story.

Just start asking the questions and let the story unravel from there.

Eileen Hughes goes into more detail about finding story ideas using these two simple ideas.  http://hubpages.com/hub/Tips-for-finding-ideas-to-write-a-story

How do writers come up with ideas?

This year I’m taking a creative writing class titled “Researching and Writing a Novel.”  Sounded like exactly the good kick-in-the-pants I needed.

Our class spent first two weeks coming up with ideas for our novels.  Some people had already written the first couple chapters of their novels.  Other’s had a fairly well formed idea that just needed a little deep tissue massage to work out the kinks, and still other hadn’t a clue. I was nervous enough about my own abilities to come up with good story ideas back in the spring when I signed up for the class, so I spent most of my summer researching and working on one.  In the end, one session of in-class work-shopping was enough to tell me that my brilliant idea was not as brilliant as I’d thought.

Scrapping an entire summer’s worth of work, I went back to the drawing boards and spent the next two weeks coming up with a better idea.

In six years of writing, what I’ve found about this tormenting stage of the writing process–coming up with ideas –is that it doesn’t have to be… tormenting, that is.  With a little practice, it can become second nature.

Let me explain. Although I ended up rejecting that idea (putting it away in a drawer, actually – good ideas are still good even if they don’t suit at the time of their conception), I found that that summer had put me in planning mode.  Like a young basketball player who practices dribbling every day until it becomes as natural as walking (and from there he can add tricks and speed and what have you), actively practicing coming up with ideas, even ones that end up in drawers, trains the brain to recognize good ideas even you’re not aware that you’re searching for them.

So lesson #1:  Practice.  And practice a lot.  Get in the habit of looking at the world through a story-teller’s lenses.  Consider news stories, personal experiences, and observations of the world and prod them like a biologist would an amoeba.  Look at them from every angle and ask what-if questions until you have a story.  And if you can think of no story worth telling about that particular amoeba, move on to the next one.

In my next entry, I’ll be going into a bit more detail about ways we practice coming up with ideas.