5 Days of Trapping the Muse

By: Sarah

Okay, so maybe I’ve gotten out of the writing habit a little. 

I finished writing the first draft of my manuscript Final Belongings fifteen months ago in May 2019. My plan was to take a two-month break, then spend the remaining half of the year editing it. I’d have a shiny, new, agent-worthy version come the new year. 

Yet by the end of 2019, I still hadn’t even opened the document on my computer. Why not? Well, it all began with some fairly valid reasons: 

• My husband and I bought a house that also needed renovations before moving in

• I’m running my own business, which had grown extremely busy

• We traveled for two weeks during the Christmas holidays 

Then January 2020 came. Still nothing. By this time, the internal pressure and anxiety was mounting. When I thought about getting back into my novel, I felt irritated rather than excited. Like it was just one more chore I had to weave into my already insane schedule. 

Waiting for inspiration to unfold 

I’m just not feeling inspired, I thought. Yes, that’s the problem. I’ll wait until I feel inspired again. 

I Googled “how to feel inspired to write,” hoping for a magical solution. Instead, my query returned myriad variations of the answer I already knew, but resisted with every ounce of my being: The only way to be inspired and summon the muse is to form a daily writing habit. You get up and write every day, whether you want to or not. 

“Write one thousand words every day,” writes author Chuck Wendig. Easy for you to say, I thought darkly. You’re not trying to plan, prep, and cook all your meals while also working out every day to maintain a healthy mind and body. You also don’t have the stress of running your own business. 

Stephen King says he writes every day of the year without exception beginning work between 8:00 and 8:30 am. He has a daily writing quota of two thousand words and rarely allows himself to quit until he’s reached his goal. 

Well, la-di-da, I stewed. Clearly, you’re not a poor sleeper like me, so it’s easy for you to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at your computer by 8. Oh, and you’re also a bazillionaire so you have the luxury of writing on until you’ve reached your goal! 

The truth is, I was afraid to get back into the writing routine because of what it would mean for my self-identity as a writer. What if I created a writing routine, and the muse simply never came back? What if I stared at the screen and no words came? What if I re-read my manuscript and realized it was utter shit? That I’d wasted two years of my life writing some unsalvagable piece of garbage? 

As I debated what to do, the decision was soon made for me. I woke up wild-eyed one morning to the world shutting down, nations closing their borders, and thousands of people dying due to a terrifying virus running rampant around the globe. 

It goes without saying that my muse issues were pushed to the farthest corners of my mind. Cue another four months without writing. 

Playing catch-up in our new normal 

Now, finally. Fifteen months “late,” but here I am. Owning up to my fears. Like a long-lapsed Catholic dragging herself to confession. If COVID didn’t (or doesn’t) kill me, am I not lucky? Don’t I owe it to myself to finish this goddamn thing? [A tad hyperbolic, sure. But it’s what I’m going with for motivation for now.]

Last Monday I began. Five mornings in a row, I got my ass into the chair in front of my screen for ninety uninterrupted minutes of writing. And each night before, I’d prep for the following morning routine by programming the coffee to brew at 7:30 am; opening the document I’d be working on the next morning, closing out all other programs, and turning off wi-fi; and cranking my alarm volume to the level of a front-row seat at a Nascar race. 

And guess what? The muse showed up. And I trapped her, five days in a row. 

She crept in slowly at first on Monday morning, skeptical. We stared at each other yards apart like long-lost sisters, unsure of what to do. I offered a little smile, which she returned. By the end of the first day, she’d inched a little closer to me. On the fifth day, like a loyal cat, she was lounging on the armchair next to me. 

As much as I feared, dreaded, averted, eschewed, and fought the damn writing routine, here I am: putting words on a page again. Of course, I don’t want to get too excited – I still have miles to go before I sleep. But it’s not so bad to imagine that maybe 2020 will have one redeeming quality after all. 

Write What You Know—A Pitfall

By: Ruth

Write what you know. Every writer has heard this and quite possibly heeded it as good, sensible advice. Seems obvious, too, what could be easier? Course, it also seems boring. Most of us write to get away from who we are, our status quo, our situation. Who hasn’t said, I don’t particularly like what I know. Let me do something else.

But say you have heeded the advice and given it a twist, looked deeper and at a slant, and you’re about to turn up something you know but at a more exotic, more esoteric, more real level. You’re turning up something lively, charming, spicy, fascinating, wicked, or profound, and possibly not thought by you before because it is an exploration below the surface. But it is something only you could think of, because it is authentic, it is you.

So perhaps you’re in a writing class and the teacher assigns “write something you know.” You choose to write a story based on fact (a scene based on facts and characters from your childhood) but with elements of fiction in it, giving you wonderful latitude. Hm, not sure where this is coming from. Could be it doesn’t matter. Some say that memory and imagination are the same thing. Suddenly writing what you know looks like fun.

Call it what you will. Creative nonfiction or fictionalized memoir. Don’t be too concerned about genre. Just write.

So this is what I did.

When I was a child of about 9 or 10 in small town Kentucky, I would go every week down the hill to Lizzie Birch’s house to sell her a dozen eggs. We kept chickens for eggs for our own use and when they were too old to lay, we ate them fried for Sunday dinner. The extra eggs we sold to the neighbors for fifty cents a dozen.

The fascinating thing about Lizzie was she was black, at that time called “colored.” Most of the black people in town lived in the “Bottom”, an area in a valley on the edge of town. But Lizzie lived just under the hill, down a gravel side road from us. In the segregated world where I lived, I only saw the black people who came to me, like Viola, who came to our house to mop the floor and do the wash on Fridays, or Flora who came to my school to clean the floors and the bathrooms. But Lizzie was different. I got to go to her house, talk to her sitting at her kitchen table, see her sink and shelves and cupboards and kitchen curtains, smell what she was cooking, be in her world, something I thought was very exotic.

Accompanied by my brother or sister, I knocked on her back door, looked shyly through the window, heard her say, “Well, look who it is. Come on in,” went in and sat the carton of eggs on her red-checked vinyl tablecloth. Before she paid us the fifty cents, she offered us a piece of candy from a big bellied, close-mouthed jar on the table. “Help youself to a peppamin?” came the invitation, as soft and sweet as the candy itself.

Who could resist a piece of peppermint, filling the air with nose tingling scent and then sharply bitter and sweet in the mouth? So you put your hand in the jar and grabbed a chalky, striped square, pulled it out, and popped it in your mouth. Delicious.

Every one of us children had, at some time, succumbed to the temptation of wrapping our fist around more than one piece and trying to pull ourselves out a little extra. But with a fist full of more than one piece, you couldn’t get your hand out. As you struggled to wriggle an extra piece out, soft hand adjusting and slamming against unyielding glass mouth, you got more annoyed and stupid all the time. Finally you realized you had to take just one piece of candy, as you were invited to do. You let go of one and quickly retrieved the other. Into the mouth it went, not quite so sweet as you remembered. Lizzie watched you the whole time, chuckling softly.

After you had your candy, Lizzie would draw fifty cents out of a soft leather coin purse with wrinkles around the clasp like the wrinkles around her mouth and put the coins in your palm. The inside of her hand was as pink as mine while her body was mahogany brown like the antique dresser in Mama’s bedroom.

Taking eggs to Lizzie was like a fairy tale, going into a foreign world, seeking your fortune, with a test of honor, a mistake of hubris and redemption. Learning a lesson at the hands of a wise, old seer, primarily benevolent, but with a touch of dark magic.

So how to work Lizzie into a story, who to make the quester and what lesson to learn? Of course, I know, I’ll use my older sister, beautiful, haughty, superior to everyone and everything, especially something as mundane as carrying eggs down to Lizzie for a small amount of money. My sister was so sure she was special, she was like someone out of another fairy tale—the wicked sister.

So in my story I had my mother make my sister, M.A., accompany me to Lizzie’s one day, against her will, because Mama always wanted us to go down in two’s and no one else was available and M.A. had always resisted going before.

Well, long story short, M.A. grabs the fistful of peppermints, gets her hand stuck, and instead of admitting her mistake and adjusting, she throws a fit, insults Lizzie, foolishly shakes her hand in the jar until she releases all the candy and gets nothing but her hand back. Lizzie, in blank-faced shock, gives her the fifty cents and M.A. runs back up the hill to Mama, with me following at a short distance. She tells Mama that Lizzie forgot to give her the money and she evil eyes me to not dare dispute her story. She assumes Mama will take her word over Lizzie’s, because Lizzie is black. The younger sister character is horrified at this injustice but afraid of opposing her sister.

But Mama knows M.A.’s lie can’t be true. She knows Lizzie well enough to know that she would never fail to hold up her end of a deal. However, Mama is afraid of M.A., who is so haughty and spiteful that Mama won’t confront her. Instead, she forgets to give M.A. her allowance that month, and when M.A. demands her money, Mama says, “OK, but you need to do extra work to get your allowance this month. Clean the bathroom and I’ll give you your money.” She glares at her intensely when she delivers the message and M.A. knows better than to challenge her.

So the moral universe is reestablished, although without a big moral reckoning scene. A race tale of a certain time and place is told. Family is used as fodder.

I turn the story into the teacher, who likes it very much. Praises it for the features I admire about my own story—characterization, folk tale elements, convoluted moral universe. Then, with a wise look on her face, she says, “It’s always tempting to get even toward family members by using them in a story.”

I stare at her in confusion, a little embarrassed but not sure why. She can tell I don’t like my sister, can tell that I need to retaliate toward her for past pain and suffering and that I think I’m so clever by using the retaliation in my beautiful story.  She can see something I wasn’t even aware of until she points it out to me. I feel caught.

Later, I try to decide. Should I care that my sibling strife is so obvious? Should I try to hide it somehow? Should I take my sister as the evil, foolish, all-to-human antagonist out of the story? Or is it still a good plot twist even if the back story screams “look at me and be on my side”? I don’t know the answer and would love to know others’ thoughts on the question.

The Pope Method of Brainwriting

By: Carol

I so dislike how I have to start this after discovering that I am not the first person to use this term. 

My mind has been "brainwriting" how I would attack this blog post before Googling it. Now that I have Googled it, I am trying to come up with a new term to describe it.

But this word so fits what I do to begin the action of writing — fingers on the keyboard, or pen in hand, staring at a blank piece of paper. At this moment in time, as you read this post, it is THE POPE METHOD OF BRAINWRITING. Ta Da! 

This method refers to a common activity all writers do. Sometimes it's call "musing" or "brainstorming" or even "thinking".  I choose to call it, THE POPE METHOD OF BRAINWRITING.

How Brainwriting Tells Stories

Now that I have brainwashed you into only using my method, I shall begin.  Without our brains, we are just plain dead. We need them to survive on this planet we call Earth. 

Maybe somewhere out in the far reaches of the Universe there is a place where creatures can live without one. They may have another organic device that helps them survive (Just another idea for our Sci-Fi writers). But here on this planet, it is necessary for most living beings, especially for those who write or tell stories.  

Stories have been around since the beginning of modern man about 200,000 years ago. It's something our brains are wired to do. Why? I have no idea. It's just a fact of human life. The brain has been becoming increasingly complex over that time period and so have our stories.  

First there were pictures scratched on rocks and in the dirt, then oral language evolved with sound being the mode to deliver stories.

The primitive pictures became simple symbols put together to create written language. Today, writers mostly use electronic devices to convey their stories. The best part is humans can share these stories.

As a Speech and Language Pathologist (say it three times fast), I learned that language and storytelling resides in the left hemisphere of the brain, in Broca's and Werineke's areas. If those areas have lesions or damage, not much storytelling is going on. (So if you writers fall out the window head first, let the right side hit the ground. Just sayin’.)

You Brainwrite Even When You Think You Don’t

I have struggled with writing stories for many years and probably will continue so, but my new conscious method of brainwriting has helped me considerably.  I even count it as writing time. You know, when that writer friends asks you, "How much time did you put into writing today?" You may not have put one word on paper on or on the laptop screen, but you can say, "I spent two hours writing this morning and 30 minutes this afternoon."   

All along they don't know you spent it pulling weeds or taking a shower.  I heard of a screenwriter who had a shower installed in his studio office. He did his best writing scrubbing his pits in the shower. (This is my first blog post, BTW, in case you hadn't figured that out already.)

I just don't do well sitting down at my PC and set up a fresh blank Word doc and start writing my story. Forcing a story just leads to crap. That’s where brainwriting comes in.

The brainwriting process is easy and you have all done it, but have you consciously set your brain to visualizing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching your story? Seeing it all unfold on that movie screen in your head as you lie in bed putting yourself to sleep, immersed in the tub, waiting in line at the DMV, watching the ocean waves ebb and flow.

Brainwriting is the necessary and sometimes subconscious process that tells your story for you. It readies you so that when you place yourself at my storytelling machine, the words flow like molasses, honey, olive oil — you get the idea. 

All my life I have been brainwriting, be just called it daydreaming. As a kid, it was creating adventures where I come out the heroine or get all the friends. Or creating vindictive stories to get back at my brother or others who had wronged me. This behavior continued into the teen years, adulthood, and now I “senior daydream.” I can't tell you how many Oscars I've won and how many times I've hooked up with Brad Pitt.

TMI?

That Sounds Good! What I’ve Learned by Listening To My Novel

By: Valerie

Lately I’ve been listening to more books than I’ve been reading, and I’m not alone.

Audio book sales have skyrocketed in the past few years. Publisher’s Weekly reports that audio book revenue jumped nearly 23 percent last year alone.

I’ve been a fan ever since I worked in a public library in my early twenties and had my pick of “books on tape,” as they were called back then. Now smartphones and apps like Audible have made them even easier to get.

In addition, the growing popularity of other audio forms like serial podcasts has led Audible to compete by producing Audible Originals, stories that never existed as a book to begin with, blurring the lines between writing and performance.

PAY ATTENTION TO HOW YOUR NOVEL SOUNDS

But when you get right down to it, they’re all just different forms of storytelling.

Long before stories were written down, they were spoken, probably by a very hairy ancestor to an equally hairy audience around a campfire.

Later, traveling bards of medieval times knew too well that unless their story held the attention of the lords and ladies of the castle, they might go hungry and homeless for the night, or worse.

All of this leads to the conclusion that as aspiring authors, we’d be wise to consider how our novels sound when read aloud. How to capture and hold the attention of readers with seemingly endless choices of entertainment at their fingertips.

I understand the popularity of audio books. They allow a certain freedom that sitting and reading a book does not. None of us are truly fans of multi-tasking, but it’s actually pretty great to be able to listen to the latest thriller while walking the dog or during the daily commute.

However, it’s not so great when the neighbor’s pit bull charges you, or the driver in front of you slams on the brakes, and you lose your place while the narrator just keeps talking.

Even when I’m sitting quietly and listening, often my attention will drift away to whatever worries or list of to-dos are weighing on my mind that day.

Some of this is because of the fractured nature of our schedules and attention spans, but some of it has to do with the writing itself. I’ve tried to turn this into a lesson for my own writing.

I’ve gotten hooked on the Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson (admittedly a little late, since it’s now a Netflix series), about a grizzled old sheriff in a small Wyoming town. I’m a huge fan of mysteries set in lonely, majestic Western landscapes, and I tend towards long descriptive passages of landscape in my own writing.

My fellow Inkwells compliment those passages, but they also question their length and purpose — and I’m starting to realize why.

USE DESCRIPTION IN YOUR NOVEL WISELY

In the audio version of the first Walt Longmire book, when the author began waxing poetic about the colors of the clouds and the quality of light on the distant mountains, I found myself tuning out. Even George Guidall, a great grumbly-voiced theater actor perfect for narrating the series, sounded a little bored while reading those passages.

It taught me that, while I appreciate beautiful and remote settings and a literary turn of phrase, mainly I want to know the basics. Who’s doing what and why? Who’s saying what to whom? Dialogue, both external and internal, is important to moving the story along, as is action.

Settings can be integral to the mood, theme, and plot of your novel, but they’re best when simply worded and relevant to the scene at hand. Pepper in your descriptions, rather than serving them up in big chunks.

There’s a reason that “read your work aloud” is perennial writing advice. And sure, nowadays you can have your computer read your text to you — it’s a great way to catch typos and small mistakes.

But there’s a more important reason to read it aloud, and in a human voice.

Read it yourself, or better yet ask a friend to read it to you. Chances are, if they stumble over the words or get bored slogging through them, your readers will too. And if you end up self-publishing and want to reap the rewards of the booming audio market, you’ll be the one paying the narrator by the word or by the hour. Good incentive to keep your work lean.

This isn’t to say that we should all pare down to screenplay-style brevity, or dumb down our work to cater to the shortest attention spans. After all, we’re creators of the written word, and there’s plenty of room for beautiful prose.

But in writing, as in life, balance is the key.

Gleanings From The Writing Class Junkie

By: Michelle

In preparation for starting this blog project on the craft of writing, I pulled out a thick file folder chock full of yellowing conference notes and dog-eared handouts saved from workshops and writing classes dating back fifteen years.  

The basic elements of craft really haven’t changed much in that time. But I leafed through the folder with the intention of locating tidbits that have not only stood the test of time, but are simple, useful, and presented in a memorable way.

The Secret to Structuring Scenes

The building blocks of stories are scenes. While some scenes may lean towards deepening understanding of the inner life of characters; others may bring elements of theme into higher relief. But the main purpose of a scene is to move the story forward.

In order to engage the reader and keep them turning pages, a scene must be mindfully structured.

One of the first writing classes I ever took was with the late novelist Drucilla Campbell, author of thrillers and contemporary women’s fiction. She had a simple concise way of capturing that structure: The point of view character must have a desire, or goal.

Ask yourself the question, “What does the character want?” Then, put someone else in the scene who opposes the POV character or an obstacle that prevents the character from achieving their desire -- voila -- you have conflict. Then, watch the opposing forces play out.  

In order to make the scene a page turner and keep the reader engaged, it always has to end in “disaster” for the POV character. What defines “disaster”? Anything that raises the stakes, increases the tension, sets the POV character back, or complicates the situation. How is that accomplished? There are only three answers that will make the reader turn the page. Does the POV character get what he/she wants?

The choices are No, No and furthermore, or Yes -- but keep denying the “Yes” until the very end. If you give that “Yes” payoff too soon, you dilute the tension, slow the momentum, and the story stops moving forward. The reader should always be left wondering what will happen next.

How to Outline Your Novel When it Doesn't Come Naturally

By: David

I’m not a natural outliner, and must force myself to follow some semblance of order so as not to waste thousands of words on a draft destined to be rewritten from scratch. That happened on the first couple drafts of my novel, which, to be fair, weren’t so much drafts as verbose outlines.

After a couple years floundering, I’ve come up with a checklist I now use prior to creating or revising my work. As with any system, this is totally unique to my own foibles, and so it may or may not work for you. But it's worth a shot!

Step 1 – Read the previous draft (if it exists) along with prior feedback I’ve received from a writing group or other first readers. Almost always, my first response is that what I wrote was garbage, and I resolve to fix it.

Step 2 – Review the novel outline and revise big-picture stuff as needed. This is where I identify structural issues and significant consistency problems that might have crept into the story as I revised. It’s here where I decide which chapters need to be reworked, placed elsewhere, or eliminated altogether. I use the outline much like a compass – to make sure I’m headed in the right direction.

Step 3 – "Truby" the chapter. Which means deconstructing the chapter so I know what needs to get accomplished and how I get there. This step is the most important. I use John Truby’s methodology (from his book, The Anatomy of a Story), though, there are a host of systems that accomplish much the same in different ways. This just worked best for me.  Oftentimes, this also helps diagnose why a chapter isn’t working (what I call the ‘autopsy’). Here’s the Truby checklist, along with context for each question:

1. Position on the character arc: Where does this scene fit within the hero’s development, and how does it further that development?

2. Problems: What problems must be solved in the scene, or what must be accomplished? From the author’s perspective, not the characters.

3. Strategy: A short paragraph summarizing the chapter and a listing of the major action beats for each scene. For me, this is crucial.

4. Desire: Which character’s desire will drive the scene? What does he or she want? This desire provides the spine of the scene. Oh man, this question keeps me on track.

5. Endpoint: How does that character’s desire resolve? By knowing your endpoint in advance, you can focus the entire scene toward that point.

6. Opponent: Figure out who opposes the desire and what the characters fight about.

7. Plan: The character with the desire comes up with a plan to reach the goal. There are two kinds of plans that a character can use within a scene: direct and indirect. To be honest, I usually build this into the Strategy, but the question makes sure I deal with it.

8. Conflict: Make the conflict build to a breaking point or a solution. This prompts me to up the conflict, which I oftentimes keep too subtle.

9. Twist or reveal: Occasionally, the characters or the audience (or both) are surprised by what happens in the scene. Not every chapter has a twist, but it’s a great prompt to get the reader to the next chapter.

Step 4 – Write. Yea! Finally. Even when I’m revising a chapter, I pretty much start from scratch to keep the flow of words natural – which is why I’m a slow writer.

Step 5 – Listen to it. Forget what I said about Step 3 being the most important - this is. Listening to the words I’ve written uncovers embarrassingly obvious things my internal editor didn’t catch – awkward phrasing, overused prose, overused body language, unnatural dialogue, etc. I think this technique helps me objectively listen to the story, so I can more easily pick out those sections which don’t work or sound amateurish. This step oftentimes takes me a while, especially when I didn’t do a great job in the previous step.

Step 6 – Read & Critique. Hooray! This means submitting the revised (or new) chapter to my writing group, the Inkwells. Yes, I know, some writers don’t like the idea of a writing group (talking about you Stephen King), but it helps me immeasurably. Not only for the advice, but for the motivation.

That’s it. My first blog post – ever. I bet it sounds like I’m an over the top outliner, but I assure you, the opposite is true.