Better Writing, a blog by Thomas McAuley,
San Antonio writer and member
of the San Antonio Writers Guild

Writers Digest has been a  constant source of good information at every stage of my writing career. I subscribe to the magazine, rss and I buy the special issues that come out throughout the year, most recently the How to Find an Agent issue. This prompt came from a Writers Digest's Tip of the Day, a great email to subscribe to.

When Things Aren't Going Well
Source: Page After Page by Heather Sellers

It's easy to be calm and strong when things are going well. When you are resting and exercising, your writing life is easy. It's when things are hard that we forget all our tools. I want you to rewrite a scene. Literally. I want you to take a conflict, one that you obsessed on, blew out of proportion, talked about a lot. Something at work, or in your family or friendships—not life or death—but an irritation you spent too much time on. (It should be easy to think of one because we all do this too many times each week, giving minor irritations—at the grocery store, in traffic, waiting in line longer than we deemed appropriate—way too much power over our imaginations).

I want you to rewrite the scene, actually putting pen to paper. Write yourself, your character, with your head in the clouds, the art space, the spiritual center. In the writing, react as your best possible self. Write the scene. Take all the drama out.

I'd love to read what you come up with. Email me a shortish work and I'll take a look at it for you and provide feedback.

This was an intriguing article I found at Suite101.com from May 5, 2008 by Anita Riggio. 
Click here for the full article.

Keep in mind when you read this that you're not limited to this list. That may sound obvious to any but the most novice writer, but some folks take things WAY too literally. Take the time Riggio says to take with the questions below, but if another question arises, don't hesitate to answer other questions. I'm sure the author didn't intend this to be the definitive list of questions for learning more about backstories. So don't limit yourself. Outside of not getting anything written, you really can't delve into your backstory too much. The more you get into the skin of each of your characters, the more you can walk around in the places they walk around in, the more you can talk just like them, the more convincing your story is. More about this in an upcoming post I've been considering having to do with the crossover between acting and writing.

Now for the article:

How much about your characters do you really know? Small details might seem superfluous even irrelevant to the story you intend to write, but the smallest detail informs the bigger picture. The more you know about your characters, the better you’ll create believable characters who live and breathe on the page and in their own fictional world.

Take time to answer each of these questions candidly and deeply. Expand your responses to include other questions that may arise.

1. What do you know about this character now that s/he doesn’t yet know?
2. What is this character’s greatest flaw?
3. What do you know about this character that s/he would never admit?
4. What is this character’s greatest asset?
5. If this character could choose a different identity, who would s/he be?
6. What music does this character sing to when no one else is around?
7. In what or whom does this character have the greatest faith?
8. What is this character’s favorite movie?
9. Does this character have a favorite article of clothing? Favorite shoes?
10. Does this character have a vice? Name it.
11. Name this character’s favorite person (living or dead).
12. What is this character’s secret wish?
13. What is this character’s proudest achievement?
14. Describe this character’s most embarrassing moment.
15. What is this character’s deepest regret?
16. What is this character’s greatest fear?
17. Describe this character’s most devastating moment.
18. What is this character’s greatest achievement?
19. What is this character’s greatest hope?
20. Does this character have an obsession? Name it.
21. What is this character’s greatest disappointment?
22. What is this character’s worst nightmare?
23. Whom does this character most wish to please? Why?
24. Describe this character’s mother.
25. Describe this character’s father.
26. If s/he had to choose, with whom would this character prefer to live?
27. Where does this character fall in birth order? What effect does this have?
28. Describe this character’s siblings or other close relatives.
29. Describe this character’s bedroom. Include three cherished items.
30. What is this character’s birth date? How does this character manifest traits of his/her astrological sign?
31. If this character had to live in seclusion for six months, what six items would s/he bring?
32. Why is this character angry?
33. What calms this character?
34. Describe a recurring dream or nightmare this character might have.
35. List the choices (not circumstances) that led this character to his/her current predicament.
36. List the circumstances over which this character has no control.
37. What wakes this character in the middle of the night?
38. How would a stranger describe this character?
39. What does this character resolve to do differently every morning?
40. Who depends on this character? Why?
41. If this character knew s/he had exactly one month to live, what would s/he do?
42. How would a dear friend or relative describe this character?
43. What is this character’s most noticeable physical attribute?
44. What is this character hiding from him/herself?
45. Write one additional thing about your character.

Photo is of Degas' Nude Scratching Her Back

It's hard to believe it's already the 8th month of 2010. Staying busy really keeps the time sprinting by. Below are a couple updates, the titles for which can be applied to writing or underwear. Please enjoy them and the giant underwear rug I found a picture of.

Guilty of Stuffing.

The stuffy my regular work hours into Monday through Thursday so I can have a (mostly) full day of writing on Friday in addition to a typical writing block Saturday morning is working out wonderfully. It's not easy getting all 40 hours in a 4-day window, but it's definitely been worth it. Now, I find I am way more focused at work. And, therefore, my work -- web design, for those of you who didn't know it -- was tighter overall. Distractions seem less powerful since their effect is magnified. If I give in to one, it could mean the difference between making and not making my goal for the day. Before, a distraction would only make it to where I had some hours to recoup on the weekend or elsewhere. Also, there's the obvious benefit of having a whole (mostly) uninterrupted day to write. Without looking, I want to say I started this experiment about this time last month. Last Tuesday's critique of Forever By His Side's third chapter showed that the extra time really paid off. For the first time in a long time, most of the critiques reinforced that I was finally heading in the right direction. The flow of action was smoother. There were fewer dumb proofreading errors -- probably my greatest flaw as a writer. And the voice worked for the first time since I started writing the actual story. This success has heartened me to continue pushing myself to get those hours in.

Change is Good.

Next, I've been working on my site. I was introduced to an app -- new to me at the time -- on Facebook called NetworkedBlogs. I registered my blog and immediately got networked to others' blogs. Also immediately, I discovered that my blog is different than many other blogs. And, I fear, mostliy in a bad way. Where my blog is very much like a journal -- which is how is started out -- other blogs tend to have more interesting content outside of the lives and goings on of the writer him/herself. I also realized I didn't know what my blog was about. I started out assuming that my blog would be about me, but I found when I really looked at it, my blog is about better writing. My journey toward it and my desire to bring others along for the ride. Therefore, over the weekend, I changed the header. Not exactly big news but after having the same look for quite a while, any change seemed pretty drastic to me. The other benefit of changing the header to the larger "Better Writing" was that on NetworkedBlogs, the blogs are listed with tiny thumbnails and I needed something that could effectively be ready from a distance.

So welcome to August. This month, I'm going to begin to share more writing-related findings that come from other authors or other sources on the Internet and elsewhere. I'll keep posting my writing-related ramblings but I think adding in the other will add overall interest.

Below is reposted the article, 50 Iconic Writers Who Were Repeatedly Rejected , from OnlineCollege.org (credit given, though I've seen the list or a list very similar to it elsewhere.)

Enjoy and submit. Then submit. Then submit. Believe me, there's someone out there who likes what you write. It may not be the best market at first, but it's a market. That aspect of your career WILL improve with time.

50 Iconic Writers Who Were Repeatedly Rejected

This is a short time of transition for The Better Writing Blog by Thomas McAuley. My wife recently passed along that Facebook has -- and apparently has had for a while now -- an app or whatever it's called...called NetworkeBlogs. It allows bloggers to post their blog in a Facebook directory. It makes it easier to advertise your blog to others who might not have found it otherwise. It allows me to find similar or otherwise interesting blogs to follow. It gives me the option to post to my Facebook and Twitter profiles my newest blog entries. And it presents my RSS feed in an attractive, easy-too-use list. Basically, on first study, it strikes me as interesting, potentially helpful but also a bit of an unknown quantity.

I've posted my blog there and will wait to see what happens. As of this writing, only my wife and I follow my entries, so help me move past the pathetic and follow my blog on Facebook. If I have more than 20 followers, The Better Writing Blog moves to another level in the keyword search listings. That's a whole other order of visibility, if the listings run in the same way as other keyword search engines.

Anyway...with or without followers, The Better Writing Blog will continue. I post it, hoping that others will benefit from the things I have to say about writing and the rewards and difficulties of living a life dedicated to writing, but I'm also satisfied to simply be journaling my path to becoming a better writer.

Join if you can.

Andrew Bosley's Brainstormer, which can be found at http://andrewbosley.com/the-brainstormer.html or obtained as an iPhone app (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-brainstormer/id374496865) is the most fun story prompt generator I've ever used.

Andrew Bosley is a self-described concept artist working -- as of the publishing of the bio on his site -- out of Raleigh. I'm assuming the North Carolina, not the English variety of Raleigh. Wherever he's working, his site is way worth a visit. Not only is his Brainstormer tool a dandy find on its own, he also has a couple terrific galleries of his concept art full of odd, believable cartoonish characters and what not.

But it's the Brainstormer that really caught me. Typically, when searching for fresh story prompts online, one will find anything from the disappointing -- a simple tired bulleted list of ideas -- to the tech-dull -- a simple script-driven, randomly-generated prompt.

Whereas the Brainstormer also must be driven by a script, the design and action fools the eye and mind into thinking we're looking at an old-timey contraption, hand painted, crafted of thick, yellowed cardboard held together with a brass pin. Something you might find in the drawer of  an abandoned 1920s office building.

Usually a three-part prompt, which Brainstormer is, goes Genre-Setting-Object. The Brainstormer doesn't follow this standard practice. Each of the Brainstormer's three wheels has a different purpose, each of which tends to be a little hard to define simply. They are organized like this:

• An inner wheel includes themes or settings: Disaster, Healing Journey, Genius
• The middle wheel has what I have to describe as modifiers: scientific, family-owned, Chinese
• The outmost wheel, the easiest to define: objects or subjects like subway, church, oil freighter

It's not standard, but somehow the combinations work every time. I must have clicked the damned thing 100 times in an attempt to throw it off. Nada. So different isn't bad. I think of it like Mac's approach to things: design your whatever-you-need with the mindset you've never seen an existing product that serves (or often does its best to serve) the niche you're designing for. Many times, you'll end up with a product that no one has seen before.

::Brainstormer stands, waves and bows::

In the center is a RANDOM button. Click it and its three concentric gold-green wheels start spinning. Quickly, the wheels come to separate stops a la a slot machine. And stopping quickly is key because too long a spin could get old fast. A white line highlights a single item on each of the wheels.

I'll click it a few times and list the results. Fun times.

Ok. 10 seconds. Go!

Um...an Rocky mountain family during the mid 1900s. The son is showing signs of rejecting the fire and brimstone religion he's been taught to believe is all there is to life. Sort of already writing an Appalachian-based story. Pass.

K...duh....how about a huge multi-national conglomerate spills a shit pot of oil in the Gulf. Pass.

Alright...oooh. Good....Let's turn the third one on its head. Normally the gods would abduct some poor bastard, making the ones left behind suffer and bestowing some awesome advantage -- like awesomeness -- onto the abducted person. But, under what circumstances would a god itself be abducted. Maybe by humans. Given the typical scenario I described, maybe they figure something out that allows them to abduct one of the gods' own. Classic standoff that the gods never saw coming.

Bingo! I'll have to write that down. Oh. I just did. k.

Now, honestly, this is not a story idea I probably would have thought of without The Brainstormer. The cool thing is that when you're forced to think about the first two and come to a dead or dull end, by the time you get to the third story, your story-creating ideas are already flowing. The tool lulls you into the right mindset. And it's quick. Three clicks and thirtyish seconds?

The down side is when you're ready to sit down to write prompt-inspired story and you check out The Brainstomer, you'll sneak a peek at the options just above or below the prompt it gave you. It'll invariably be one so tasty and tempting you feel like using it instead. I suppose that's okay, but it feels like cheating to me.

Or you end up clicking over and over until the writing window has passed. Maybe that's just me. Tread lightly.

Regardless of the risks involved, check The Brainstormer out. Bookmark the page on www.andrewbosley.com or download the app. Tell a writing friend. But, most importantly, give it a spin and see what wonderful, fun, off-beat ideas come to you.

What is Luxurious Writing?

I think we all strive for some that I call luxurious writing. There is a certain polish to professional (or merely experienced) writers' work. This polish comes across to a reader as a clear sense of being unhurried in the telling of their story. The author's state of mind during his writing is communicated in smooth sentence structure; natural, unforced sentence variance within a paragraph; and an easy flow from one paragraph to the next. A skilled writer spends necessary time on key details and shows the discipline to give only brief mention to needed but minor details.

None of this is new or complex. But how one achieves luxurious verse in his own writing is no simple thing. What can be done to assist one toward reaching this goal?

It has been said "I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand." For learning writing, I would suggest a little bit of each approach. One method may prove more effective than another but all done together is certain to help the most.

Hear Good Writing

Public radio and C-SPAN often features authors reading aloud their own works. You can visit authors on their book tours. I would suggest attending authors' tours regardless of the benefit to one's writing. If you don't now or have never toured with your own book, chances are if you're serious about this whole business of writing you will. You can buy audio books. Regardless how you get to hear writing read, listen for the songlike quality of the verse. Even plays and movies can both inspire and instruct if the listener is active.

Read Good Writing

Read in conscious detail writing you enjoy and find easy and enjoyable to read. Study it. Dissect it. What about works for you? Not all writing hits you the same way. What are the differences between writing that you connect with and writing that you don't.

Then Go Do Good Writing

Not only will you want to start on your own work after hearing and reading good writing. You may want to take some of that good writing and simply copy it. Many who have written about writing have made this suggestion. Coming from a background of painting, I can tell you there's no better way to truly understand a painting than to copy it. In so doing, you're not trying to rip off the author: what you're trying to accomplish is, in essence, ride in the passenger seat next to the author. By simply typing out good writing, you experience it to a degree. You get inside and feel the flow. You experience first hand the point at which the author decided, "That's just right. That's how I wanted to say so and so." Writing, in this regard, is one of the few types of art where you can go this deep, so take advantage of that fact and dive in.

Happy July 2010, everyone. These are hot days around my house and it's been hard to find good solid blocks of writing time.

Unless you're a hermit, you'll know that the World Cup has been dominating the sports world for the last month and continues through the 11th, another week. You'll also probably know that the Tour (of de France and Lance fame) begins today even though its publicity has been diminished due to more American interest than usual in the Cup.

With a personal history of being a soccer fanatic and with a son engaged in high-level cycling, these two events smeared over both of these summer months presents a very difficult quandry for me. My work and writing have always fought for my time. Now that the Tour and the Cup are here, I have a lot of juggling to do.

The obvious answer to finding writing time should be -- to an outsider -- have a simple simple solution: Miss the Cup. Skip the Tour. To that I say Fuck the You. Missing either one is not an option. My addiction has progressed too far to turn back.

Here's what I've done to help get everything done -- and allow me to include watching these infrequent sports events as "getting something done:"

• Balanced diet and little simple sugar. Sugar crashes don't work.
• Go into the day knowing that you're looking at a 12- to 16-hour days.
• Perfect the short nap. Halftimes are about 30 minutes.
• Treadmill and other workouts during games.
• Say good bye to all other TV. Since television is the devil anyway, use this busy time to refuse to watch it. I limit myself to the Cup, the Tour and BBC morning news.

There's more, but I'll cut this short since Argentina plays Germany in about 5 hours. Yes, it's just after 4am and I'm up writing.

Wish me luck.

My last couple attempts at getting the voice right in Forever By His Side, my current novella-length work, met with more mixed reviews at our last critique session. With another tweak I should have the right balance of Appalachian twang and real-world readability. This process has been a hard-fought one, taking place in the story's first four chapters. My first attempt was promising but difficult to read. My second attempt was flawed in that I attempted to tackle the voice and unplanned-for backstory at the same time. This last -- my third -- attempt revisited the first chapter the critique group read. It was largely a retelling with more approachable language. Whereas the language worked well enough, some suggested that I keep my sentences shorter. Readers, the felt, could lose the meaning of longer sentences if even a little odd syntax and terminology was thrown in. The main problem, though, with this last submission was the story itself. Too much meaningless fluff. I think I may have gotten lost in the testing of the voice. I kept too much in that should have been excised.

This has all lead to my having taken since the last  critique session on Tuesday -- 5 days -- to not write much. What has happened in the past when my work has received luke-warm reviews is that I tackle the changes before I've had a little breather, a little time to stand back from the story to see what all the critiques meant. I'm a huge advocate of writing every day, but I could tell clearly and without guilt that my attachment to this self-imposed dogma was standing in the way of good logic. It was also proving lethal to my love of the story. Over and over in the past, I've lost steam due to overworking the mechanics. I end up forgetting why I wanted to write the story in the first place.

I still like the idea of a detailed outline. For someone like me, it's a proven necessity; however, I need to do some thinking/meditation on how to keep up the fire when I hit a bump. In this time of short attention spans and instant gratification, I need to find a way to maintain my momentum. Right now, I believe I'm burning too hot at certain points of the work when I should work toward an overall even heat. Hrmm. I may be onto something.

This is probably a good time to think. Keep writing. 

I'm heading out the door shortly with my younger boy to:

1] Visit the San Antonio College's drama building to check the place out prior to his upcoming drama camp. I participated in a few camps and programs that took place on college campuses and would have appreciated a bit of familiarity about where I would be going.

2] Finding free wifi locations in the area of SAC because I'll be driving him there and back each day and it will make more sense for me to work in the vicinity of the college -- at least for some of the days.

3] Heading to the downtown branch of the San Antonio Library. We are looking for monologues for his rehearsal on the first day of camp. When I originally looked into "Free Monologue Adolescent Male," I came up with nearly nothing. I don't think he's ready to spit out even a quick minute of Shakespeare and everything else seems to be locked away in books or must be purchased per performace. New territory for me.

Even if I find a great one tonight, this brings me to a cool solution. I decided yesterday that I'd write him a 1-minute monologue myself.

I'd never done it before, so I wasn't sure where to start. That never being much of a problem for me -- at least in the sense of writers block -- I plunged in, figuring I could read the dos and don'ts later. I'd love to show what I came up with, but I'm adverse to showing first drafts of anything I do lest it be founds via a search and mistaken for my finished work. Not a great association.

Anyway, the first run was successful to a point, as much as can be expected of a first draft, maybe better. I showed it to my critique group and they offered great advice, though none of them has much (or any?) first-hand experience with screenplays or monologues. 

I'm looking forward to tweaking this in time for my boy to practice it for the camp audition. Doing so will also provide me a welcome break from my Wady/Appalachian story. I haven't lost steam or passion but a tiny bit of distance usually pays good dividends.

Argh.

Could I have been more frustrated a couple days ago when, despite having written a 40-ish page synopsis, I still managed to create a plot hole. I've had a couple of days to sort it out. It's not so great a problem that I have to walk away from the story, it's just that I went to such lengths to avoid stumbling into plot holes that having done so again has almost driven me mad.

Here's the deal. I had all the details of my current work, Forever By His Side, nailed down tight. There is a relationship that runs into difficulty. There's a complex magical element. There is a spooky backstory vignette. And there is a mystical meeting that leads to final closure. I needed to have all my ducks in a row to pull this off. Thus the 40-something page synopsis. I took a month to work through it. I read and reread. I gave it a couple of days off so I could triple-check it with somewhat fresh eyes. I was confident everything worked, that there weren't plot holes. All I had to do was follow the synopsis and I was home free.

It sounded great. In theory.

I wrote my first two chapters. They're told from the POV of the main character, a 14-ish-year-old Apalachian girl named Wady. I figured I'd go out on a limb and mimic the Appalachian dialect. So when my critique group got hold of it, I would have expected the critique would be limited to that, the thick dialect. While they did hammer the depth of the dialect, they all agreed that I needed more backstory prior to where I had chosen to start the story. I agreed. During that initial critique, the group had also mentioned that the magical element also needed a bit more clarification. This is where the problem came in.

I was so excited to get started. Even before I got home from the critique, I had what I thought was the solution to all my problems. I would switch up how the magic worked. It would solve all the critique group's concerns.  That night and over the next two weeks, I crafted two chapters that would precede the action of the original two chapters. Never once did I feel concerned that making this little tweak would affect the later action.

Well, I was wrong.

The two new chapters finished and well-received, I looked forward to moving on with the rest of the story. That's when I realized that the "tweak" I had made to the magic element rendered the most important part of the story, the very culmination of the action near the end, impossible.

How could I have missed this? I KNEW the synopsis. I KNEW what had to and what could not happen. I had the synopsis open behind my manuscript document. Still, it didn't occur to me. I simply didn't think it through. 

And I've been taking this as a personal shortcoming. It's simple laziness or denial. And it's not like this is the first time I've done this. The whole reason I wrote out a synopsis of this detail was because I had failed to think my plots through adequately, leaving me in the middle of an impossible situation, where only a mediocre ending could be reached. Huge time wasted unless I took away something that would better my writing in the future.

Fortunately it's fixable, but, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, I was so frustrated I could have scrapped the whole thing. The chapters, the story, writing, everything. And argh.

Folks, the synopsis is there not only to craft the story into something that works; it's there to maintain direction. It's a reference, so if you don't refer to it, you get what you deserve.

A quick note about backing up your writing...

it just occurred to me after a recent speaker at the San Antonio Writers Guild related a story about his having lost literally all of his digital files that there's really no need for this ever to happen if one joins a critique group.

Every two weeks, my small critique group meets. There are between 4 and six of us depending upon the state of the world -- we have a military officer and a police sergeant among our ranks -- and we send our work to one another digitally a few days before each meeting. 

While filing two of the members' work into tidy folders, i mis-clicked a folder that turned out to be from August of '08. In this folder was a now-published story in a near complete state. Seeing that file made me realize how lucky we all were to have one another as yet another layer of protection in the event of calamity such as fire or  theft, crash or clumsiness.

A quick email to these friends and, voila, I'm back in business. Maybe I'll lose a day or a month, but I won't ever lose it all. I might lose all of a few of the more obscure works, those that I didn't complete, but I wouldn't jump off a bridge to lose them.

So, if you don't want to lose your files, don't lose your friends!

This morning, early enough that it could have still been night time, I stood behind my house as I do multiple times daily to watch my two small dogs drag their paws in a seemingly needless search for the perfect spot to relieve themselves -- a constantly rubbing aspect of working from home. With as much time as they give me and with so few details available in the low light, I often watch the clouds cruise by, usually on their way north. I live on a hill, so the clouds often appear on a course that should smash them into houses further up, only dozens of feet overhead.

The scene is often dramatic. On quiet days, the clouds hang impossibly heavy overhead, drifting like an iceberg. On wilder days they scream by, broken into racecar-sized clumps behind which the Texas stars blink in and out of view. It was on one of these more dramatic days I felt the call to write in the serious fashion I have dedicated myself to in the last four years. The call came in the form of a puzzle. I put a challenge to myself to describe in satisfying and concise terms what all I saw and experienced in that unique sky.

Begin with the speed of flight? Begin with the impossible mass? The poetic feelings the scene inspired? Begin with the shapes or colors? Perhaps begin with the stars behind or the houses on my side of the bank? Over and over and for days, I tried unsatisfactorily to sum this one thing, the clouds moving behind my house. Like too much water through a pipe, I could not describe one thing without leaving all the rest behind. But those details were equally important and individually addressed I could make them so. Taken as a whole, though, I was not up to the task. How is it done, I asked myself.

At the time, I had a strand of a story idea. I've heard many of us do, writers and non-writers alike. Instead of sitting down and writing what I possibly should have, my best attempt at describing that elusive cloud bank, I wrote the first peculiar version of my head-on-a-stump story. It was only a chapter, and a poorly-writen one even if at the time I was inspired, but it was a beginning.

As with any art, the path from initiate to master is one of years leaned solely toward a single goal. Some have said in writing that journey is no less than a million careful words. Lazy words don't move one toward the goal. And as with any art, that goal is achieved in steps, not as a gradation or a gently-rising hill. Along the way are apparent setbacks -- many or perhaps all of which reveal themselves to be steps forward when viewed from a future, wiser standpoint -- lapses in faith and dreadful mountains of rewriting. Accepting that those negative aspects are as necessary as weather along the way is probably the most important lesson to learn early on.

The fact that I was taking on  the various aspects writing one step at a time only recently became clear to me. With my first real story, a novella called Southern Sun, I focused almost entirely on character and emotion, neglecting every other important aspect of writing. The reader was left with a fantastic character dropped in a white featureless place and left to perform vague tasks in awkward order. In my next real story, a children's work called Hilmer Gibb and the Honkin' Huge Bib, I brought in pacing. The reader enjoyed couple of fun characters doing things in a fun, reasonable order but the things they were doing didn't end up leading much of anywhere. With my current piece, what appears will be a short novel or more likely a novella, Forever By His Side, I'm closer than I've yet been to including everything one needs to successfully tell a story: Character, plot, pacing, emotion. Ironically, seeing as how my path toward becoming a skilled writer began with a challenge to describe my real life setting, I still haven't been able to integrate setting into the story in a satisfying way.

I never set out with a specific goal to incorporate these writing elements one at a time and I believe there is a certain organic correctness in not going so. I believe that writing should be discovered in order to find ones personal style. That is not to say critique is not important. On the contrary. It is the most important tool -- the fuel -- that drives one's career forward. I only mean that one can't know prior to setting out on the journey in what order the aspects of writing should be addressed. In fact, at the time of writing, one can only write the best as one knows how and from that perspective look back and notice how those aspects integrated themselves.

Once I have satisfactorily incorporated setting into my writing, I may then be in that golden position any artists strive for, that of beginning the long process of forgetting all the crap I've just described: the unlearning. It is a sought after place because -- again, I only believe because I haven't myself been there -- not until a writer can NOT think about his writing can he truly call what he's doing writing. Only when one can concentrate on his subject without awareness of his craft can he produce without a screen dimming his view. Knowing that I am not even to the top of the climb could be daunting, especially since I am 42 years old, but I find it inspiring. I imagine the real fear will be well after the learning, after the unlearning, when I have reached something that resembles mastery. At that point, I will only have me and the subject and there will be no excuses. I'll finally be naked, faced with describing that speeding wall of clouds.

The reality is, sometimes things get in the way of writing. Family in from Pennsylvania, my regular family and full-time job obligations and a convergence of two sites that I work on for friends and friends of friends needing a huge amount of attention all hit at the same time. All this went on for nearly two weeks. Could I write during that? Honestly no. I needed to sleep in order to focus on the next day. To be technically correct, I did write some -- I even edited three semi-long pieces while all this was going on -- but we're talking a trickle. Just enough to say I wrote, really.

But when I woke up yesterday [Saturday, May 29] there was no visiting family. I was caught up on work. I had knocked out the non-work sites. There was no critiquing waiting in the wings. I was even well-rested. To add to the day's perfection, my wife had plans to take my younger son and his best friend bowling until mid-to-late afternoon.

I split before everyone rose and was out the door just after seven. Nothing but time and writing ahead of me. I could feel the pressure of writing long waiting to be done behind the dam as I drove.

A writer never really stops writing. During all the madness of the previous two weeks, I still ate and showered and drove and walked. To a writer, that's basically planning time. Perfect for contemplation of details and jotting notes. So when I finally sat down with my Local Coffee press pot, the next six hours -- 6 HOURS -- were writing bliss. It was as if the rubber band had released.

The piece I'm working on requires a huge amount of attention to word choice and fluidity to pull off a very thick and unique dialect, so the hours didn't directly translate into a high word count, but writers know that word count and page count are not the be all and end all of a successful day. Sometimes simply solving problems is enough. Sometimes getting right the order of detail revelation is enough. Sometimes smoothing the language or doing good research is enough. I pulled off a little of all of these plus put down a few good new pages.

I'm sitting in bed writing this and only wishing today offered a fraction of the time I enjoyed yesterday. Times like these, I know I'm a writer, no matter the stage of my career. This feeling and this yearning for more. This looking forward is what the art and life is all about for me.

Disclaimer: I've heard that some authors do this, so I'm not pretending I'm the original inventor of using a unique marker in any written works in progress.

Rarely will you sit at the computer and finish a piece in one sitting unless it's a flash piece or a short article or blog entry. For everything else, one needs a way of finding where you left off at the end of the previous writing session. Sometimes there are even multiple stopping points.

For instance, you write along and realizes new turn would be cool. But it requires you add a certain something higher up in the manuscript. You want to go back and add the detail. No problem. That is, there's no problem if you've stopped at the end of the manuscript. In that case, fine. Add the detail and skip to the end of the document. No trick needed.

But when is that the case? That you write a piece from beginning to end. If you're like me -- ever like me -- where you write as much as you can and later have the need to start writing from the middle of the manuscript. You insert a chapter or scene. You're right in the middle of everything. Now, when you have to add detail elsewhere or if you need to leave the document entirely for quick research, you need to find your place quickly when you return.

Remember: As in reading where anything that takes you out of the story should be avoided, anything that takes you out of the writing should also be avoided. Sidetracks like research and tweaking the details are necessary, but they need to progress with as much speed and fluidity as possible to keep in the zone.

So how do you get back to where you started? My answer?

swh which stand for Start Writing Here

I have not discovered those three letters next to each other in any writing. There may be a company or program out there with those letters, but how often will that really come up?

So all I do is type swh and I'm off to my edit. If I forget to go back to that marker, no harm done. If I have a number of them, I can search for them and close all the holes I left. And since I've come back to an swh and have forgotten exactly what I was working toward at that point, I've recently begun added a quick stream of consciousness note that is sure to jog my memory when I do eventually find it again.

swh:Wady concentrate faint shadows appear slowly mesmerizing OR swh:research bicycle-chain tool

If I do that, I make sure to add a return at the end of the line so I don't risk confusing the note with the text that may exist close by.

Try this or find your own marker. swh is surely not copyrighted. Just make sure you don't forget what tag you've chosen or you risk missing it in the manuscript.

The first chapter of Forever By His Side, my latest novelette-to-novel-length work, was critiqued Tuesday evening (May 11, 2010). The reviews were largely positive. And since first chapters pose the greatest challenge for most writers, I was heartened.

Forever By His Side follows Wady, a 14-year-old girl living far from normal society in a place that is (or may as well be) Appalachia. The boy Wady loves doesn't return her feelings. She finds out from her mother a secret, an ability the women in her family has passed down for more than a century. The gift turns out to be a curse and the passing of the ability a cruel trick played on Wady's great grandmother Ruthie Mayo when she was 14, also in a love that was not returned.

With this work, I'm biting off quite a bit. Wady and all those she interacts with have a deep-woods manner of speaking. The beginning paragraphs give you a good idea of the voice. (Disclaimer: These paragraphs are modified slightly; I had originally gone out on a flimsy limb, hackin' the "g"s off all the ing endings. I had read not to do so a dozen times, but something in me said I could pull it off. I couldn't ;)

    I was becoming more like Ma every day, filling out my dresses similar to her and giving myself recently to conversing more than horseplay. And it was during some late Summer sitting, me in Pa’s rocker and Ma in her own, I struck up an old topic between us.

    Ma? How’d you and Pa come to be together?” If I done asked her oncet, I done asked twenty times, never yet hearing a plain-spoke answer from her.

As expected, the challenge was to keep up the dialect at a consistent level. My upbringing largely in Tennessee helped a great deal as did my exposure to my rural family in Ohio. Those factors and a natural gravitation to country folk I've met helped a great deal. 

Word choice was crucial. Paraphrasing one member of my critique group: "Reading this sort of thing aloud is vital for catching when the voice falls away." I couldn't agree more. I read aloud and still managed a couple misses in the 11 pages. Still, no worries. Nothing that can't be corrected.

Next, the nature of the magic needed to be better defined. Until fresh eyes read through a piece like this story, you can't get a good idea of how certain elements are going to be received. Being too close to the story, knowing what everything was supposed to mean and how everything was intended to work, I was blind to alternate ways processes could be understood.

There were other critiques, but they were smaller fixes not worth going into. The bottom line is, neither of these problems could have been caught by me. So, if you're not already in one, join a critique group. If you're disinclined to join in a group, find a critique partner. I can't stress enough how important it is to have others -- not family or non-writing friends -- look over your work for you.

What I'm talking about is doing what one needs to do to make time to write.

If you didn't already know, I'm a web designer with ICG Link, Inc. in Brentwood, TN. I've been with them since '99. I worked in the office for about 4 years before my wife, Nadine, started moving around the country following better positions, first within, then without the company she worked for. Since then, I've been tele-commuting.  It's a great gig. If there's any drawback to the job, it's that it's not a magic position that allows me to do virtually nothing and still collect a fat-ass paycheck. Wouldn't that be great.

Kidding.

The real drawback of working from home is that, knowing I have all the time in the world to get my hours in, it's tempting to take a 20-minute nap in the middle of the day or pick up the guitar. This often makes my days long when they could, if I disciplined myself, go pretty quickly, especially considering I don't have a morning or afternoon commute. What I'm accomplishing is not a freer day or week, but less writing time. 

Self-defeating.

And that leads me to a new phase of experimentation. I'm trying out working four 10-hour days. No naps. No distractions. Just plug away. I've always been able to stack a lot of hours over the weekend, but this gives me a whole weekday day in which to exclusively write. I'm not sure yet if Friday or Wednesday will work out better. Friday strikes me as the better day since it would feel more like a reward for a week of hard work, but Wednesday would be nice too since it would break up the long days.

I've always written some in the evenings through the week, but I find that unless I can dedicate a good three hours, I'm not really writing my best. Typically, I get about an hour each night if I'm not distracted by rare TV or family obligations. So even on the best of days I feel like I'm wasting the time whether I'm writing or not.

I'm on my last long day this week, so tomorrow (Friday) will be my first test all-writing day. I'll let you know how it goes.

This last Wednesday, I attended Rebecca Stockton's final independent study presentation. Rebecca had been my mentee throughout her Senior year and had written an astounding 18 chapters, the first third of an ambitious teen novel based on Beauty and the Beast. Watching her presentation, I was filled with pride. She really knows her stuff when it comes to folklore. She's especially knowledgeable about the world surround King Arthur.

The bulk of her presentation guided the audience through the path the Beauty and the Beast story traveled through time to get to us in its most recent Disney form. Turns out it began as Cupid and Psyche in Greece. It showed up later in German in a modified form. Then it was off to France in the form most of us were familiar with. Finally, it has ended up in the United States in the form of popular Disney animated movies and musicals of the last couple decades. Actually very interesting stuff.

I was glad to meet all of Rebecca's family and many of her friends. Such a smart and funny group. Having edited Rebecca's work over the last year, I could see many of her characters and much of the energy that must of has inspired the action she added. Seeing it made me wonder how transparent my own life is in my work.

Even though driving to the Bandera area of San Antonio from where I live and work in Stone Oak was a long and sometimes annoying weekly chore and even though editing a Beauty and the Beast inspired novel meant for teen girls was not always my first choice of fun things to do, I have no regrets. What I learned from the experience cannot be measured and it did feel like that "giving" Oprah keeps yapping about. Of course, to know Rebecca and her family, giving in the charitable sense is the last thing she'll ever need. But I really felt like I was making a difference. I could see it in her writing and in the way she communicated about story, character and plot. A truly quick study.

Rebecca humorously mentioned her book's acknowledgement that she had a feeling her story would never be my favorite, nothing could be further from the truth. It will remain a treasured possession and a reminder that I had a hand in what is certain to be a very successful person's life.

Thank you, Rebecca and Godspeed Ahead.

If I've learned one thing about myself and my writing, it's that I cannot move forward if I can't solve a plotting problem or if I can't figure out what a character would do, say or see given a strange set of circumstances. I am overtaken by a feeling of dread until I've passed whatever obstacle I'm facing. I'll hash, rehash and re-rehash scenarios until doing so dominates my workday, intrudes upon my family time and derails my writing progress for sometimes weeks at a time. I'll write during these problem times, but the writing will, more often than not, consist of crap that I know while I'm writing it will never see completion. I have little doubt this is my single most problematic writing behavior.

Given a problem that requires an idea, like most creatives, I can come up with something for just about any set of circumstances. The difficulty comes in when I need to juggle many different ideas or when one idea affects the behavior, setting, rules, etc. of multiple other elements in a story. I envy those who can do such juggling solely in their heads. No. I don't envy them; I question their honestly. Come on. Really. Who can do that?

So, do I accept it. Hells no. I solves it. Here's how I've found works for me.

But some background first.

Whenever I come up with an idea for a story, I'll judge whether it's worth pursuing. Maybe the idea too similar to something else. Maybe it's smaller or larger an idea than I want to pursue at the time. Maybe I find a conflict that I recognize right away as unworkable. I've gotten pretty good at filtering for those things. But when I have found that workable idea of the right length, I start right into a story synopsis. Here's a piece of a synopsis to give you the idea of what sort of writing I do at this stage:

An Appalachian grandmother speaks to her granddaughter on the front porch on a warm Fall day. “You’ll have to pick daisies for me at the Greening Festival next Spring, Wady.” “We can pick ‘em together, Mammaw?” “No, Cherry Blossom. I won’t be goin’.” “Why not, Mammaw?” “I’ll have seen my fiftieth year come . I’ll be headin’ up the mountain to sit next to the King.” Confused look. “What do you mean, Mammaw.” A beautiful woman in her late twenties “Don’t scare Wady with that talk, Mama. She’s only eleven.” Mammaw puts her hand on Wady’s and gives her a wink.

No real structure. Just writing without breaks between staging. Nailing down the dialogue styles if it and disregarding characterization when it doesn't. All I'm doing is going from important moment to important moment. Each paragraph tends to be a beat, but even that is not key to stick to if it's slowing you down.

I wrote this way for a while until something wasn't hitting me quite right. I had originally wanted Wady to follow Mammaw to a mountain where she finds a disturbing secret. But I couldn't get her there without being told to go and the person I needed to tell her to go would be dead. And there was the issue of a "gift," a talent that needed its rules defined. In a moment I went from full-bore synopsizing to a two-headed problem. I could feel the brakes apply.

Story problems are usually a matter of choices. The story could go this way which would mean this and this would happen. Or it could go this way, in which case this and this and this would have to happen. Just thinking about it, as I've mentioned above, tends not to get my anywhere. At this point, I skipped past to the bottom of the synopsis document and, on a new page, started talking to myself. I start by asking questions. 

What is the gift, if not sight
If sight, how does this sight manifest itself

What was the pact and how does it relate to the gift AND the pennance?

What does any girl want? Love. But she must only bargain for it if that love cannot be attained. Love cannot be attained if the object of her love is taken or finds her unattractive. For this story, the more disturbing the better. Moonshine. Underaged sex. Mistaken love. A terrible wife. A wish for her death. A special death that relates to the pennance. “I will give you what you can’t have, but your blood will sign the name of each of the first-born women you who come after.” “I accept...who wouldn’t want to have what they can’t?”

During this synopsizing, I always arrive at a point where something doesn't work or I need to really nail down the rules that are going to be followed. Sometimes, a better idea will come from what I've written. In the case of the story start above, I realized pretty quickly that the backstory was going to be the real thing to read about.

So I left the part of the initial synopsis for the time, the one set in the present, and started a separate synopsis six generations in the past. I knew not all of the story in this section would be used, but I believed it would be necessary to know the history well:

While she’s out on a walk, Ruthie, a 14-year-old Appalachian girl (6 generations ago) finds a girl her own age standing by the edge of a pond. She asks Ruthie where she came from and what she’s doing and doesn’t her family worry about her out so far and blind. I’m Lurlene. What’s your name? Ruthie. Ruthie asks why she ain’t never seen Lurlene before. Lurlene says she’s blind, that she ain’t never seen no one before. Lurlene asks Ruthie if she wants to play an Appalachian game where they hold hands and spin. While spinning, Lurlene asks if she ever loved someone. Ruthie lets go, shocked that Lurlene can see inside her soul. Lurlene asks again. Yes, she loves a man right now. Thought so Lurlene says. Lurlene asks her about him. Ruthie waxes poetic about him. Lurlene tells her she used to love a man so badly that it ached like a sore tooth. Again Ruthie is amazed that they have so much in common. Lurlene asks if the other girl wants to see something. Ruthie says yes. Lurlene leads Ruthie to the edge of the pond where there’s a paw-paw tree. She looks long at the tree and eventually says...

Tasty. Better.

I ended up bringing this backstory to a natural end. By the time I was finished with it, I realized that none -- or little -- of the original synopsis was going to work. So it was back to the bottom for more brainstorming that could tie this clearly stronger backstory to a new setting in the present time. Mammaw's role had changed. What Wady had to accomplish was better defined. I needed the revelation of the secret to occur in the specific place I had worked out in the second synopsis.

Right now, I'm probably 90% done with the entire synopsis -- both past and present. I'll be going into the writing with a clear sense of where the story is going and what turns I need to take at what points and where and how I need to add important physical details. I expect the writing to flow well once I get started. Without these plot distractions, I'll be able to better concentrate on style, the stuff I believe really sells the story.

I will have been committed to writing seriously for four years at the end of this month, May 2006 being the earliest version of the head-on-a-stump story I can find and that story being the one that started the ball rolling. So four years on, how would I assess my progress?

SKILL

It's no surprise that answering that question requires more than a short answer. Even dividing that question into logical subquestions, if there are such things, requires a lengthy response. There is skill, motivation and publishing and other types of "success" to address. Let's take them in order.

When I found that earliest version of my head-on-a-stump story a few months ago, I read as much of it as I could stand. I could not stand much of it. All manner of simplest errors freckled the eight or so pages. That in itself is forgivable but I was proud enough of it that I showed it to my wife and boys. That, again, is not a bad thing, but doing so breaks at least a couple very basic rules of serious writing:

1. I showed someone a first draft before poring over it, making sure it was ready to show. For the record, never show someone a first draft unless you very much like criticism or you very much don't like the person to whom you've shown it.
2. I showed people I live with and love my work. What can one really expect besides courteous smiles and half-hearted, well-intentioned compliments and support. I recall the uncertainty and embarrassment on each of their faces. None of them sure what to say and none of them sure whether they should tell me I'm not cut out to be a writer.

The good part, the happy ending to all of this is that as I read that early story, it was like reading a child's work in many regards. I read it like an experienced writer. All the critiques, all the words written, all the books read, all the editing and blogging. I've emerged at the very least someone who can see suck a mile away and can advise -- though not perfectly -- how and whether to try to improve a piece.

But I sell myself short. Though there's no perfect way to rank one's skill as a writer, one can see the signs and get a decent idea. A pretty girl, even if she hasn't seen her reflection her whole life, can gather from the frequency and nature of reactions, compliments and inquiries a good idea of the level of her attraction. In this way, being so close to my own writing, I can say with confidence what I excel at and where I fall short. In a too-brief nutshell:

• I have a a tasteful and fairly established style
• I do character better than plot
• I am confident there is something special and yet undefined and unrefined about my writing, thus making continuing the endeavor worth while. 

MOTIVATION

Since becoming a serious writer, I'd say my motivation to continue has never waned. I've wondered a few times in the last four years whether I was good enough to write alongside the big boys but each time that doubt has come up, I've denied that goal is valid. I'm not writing to compete; I'm writing to write. There is a certain amount of unavoidable, even fun competition to it but competition is far from my central motivation. I know the type who are driven by competition. They're often successful, but theirs is the type of success I would not enjoy in most cases. No, staying motivated to write has not been an issue for me. I write and enjoy it every time. 

My motivation to blog, to mentor and to edit, however, could use some work from time to time. I tend not to blog short. Each entry takes me no less than an hour. The fact that few actually read my blog can make blogging difficult to begin, too. I just plough ahead and pretend someday people will care. ::sigh:: Regardless, there's a crap-load of stuff for a beginning writer to read, so tell a friend.

"SUCCESS"

"Success" gets italicized since my liberal leanings remind me that success can come in many forms.

In the conservative sense, my success has been limited. I've been runner-up in one contest. I've won another. And I've had a short story -- flash fiction -- published in an online magazine. On the surface, it doesn't sound like much. Okay...even well below the surface, it doesn't sound like much for having worked my ass off, threatened my marriage and gotten myself kicked out of the Awesome Dad club.

Back to the liberal leanings now. My progress to becoming the kind of writer I want to be is my success. I started writing seriously late in life. I haven't read as much as one might think one need to in order to write well. I am fighting against a fit, convincing, overly-critical mind chatter. Despite all of this, I have come leaps and bounds toward writing in the way I demand I need to before I'm comfortable to show too much to the world.

A few writers have told me to write short stories. Get recognition there then move to longer works once your name is somewhat known. Some advise me to submit anything to anywhere that'll accept the piece. Some say follow the rules when it comes to writing, submitting and marketing. There are others who say more still. The bottom line for me is that if I don't have a sense I'm doing things in the way that's right for me, that if I don't see the reason behind something, that if I don't feel comfortable doing or saying something, I'll live to regret it. More and more each day, I find something new that identifies me as a writer. My process is slow but I'm getting somewhere certain.

To me...for now...that's success.

SO, FOUR YEARS ON

So where would I put myself after four years of writing? Imperfect and patient. What I do wrong or too slowly, I'm addressing. What I do well, I'm trying to strengthen. I've come to learn better which types of stories I like and which types I write well. Sometimes they are the same and sometimes they are different. That distinction is one of the important things I'm learning.

Four years on, I know at least one thing with total confidence. I can do this and I like it enough that I expect to be writing while or not long before I eventually croak. If I haven't had some traditional form of success by then, I'll be shocked, but in no way disappointed as long as I'm enjoying the process and the life as much as I do now.