Back in college I took a creative writing class. I expected it to be a novel writing class that would allow me to really start to hone my craft. I found out on the first day class that the course catalogue was a bit misleading. Yes, it was a creative writing class but we would be writing poetry. All freaking term.
I hate writing poetry.
I really do. Not because I’m bad at it. I’m actually pretty good — and no, I’m not exaggerating my skills. I won a poetry contest in 2013 with a haiku. I simply hate writing poetry. I also hate being forced to listen to poetry that a Vogon would be proud of. One of my classmates, a 40-year-old woman with no grasp for prose, only wrote about one thing the entire term:
It was like being imprisoned in a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.
Now what does this have to do with the dark side of my brain? Well, other than the murderous rage that rose every time this woman read her work aloud in class, if I didn’t I want to inflict the same torture on my readers I needed to make sure that everything wasn’t rainbows and kittens.
There’s nothing wrong with rainbows, or kittens, or unicorns, or even Trapper Keepers, and by themselves none of them are torturous. But when a tale is nothing but fluffy Trapper Keeper unicorns frolicking in a rainbow then there’s a problem. Once the LSD wears off it’s easy to see that this is why the “torture your characters” rule exists. Not only is a story more believable when there’s a major conflict, it’s more palatable too.
However, becoming comfortable doing all sorts of horrible nasty things to your characters can make you feel like a sociopath. That’s normal. And for heaven’s sake don’t shy away from it. Embrace your dark side, your inner Emperor Palpatine. Not only will it help you take your stories to the next level (by amping up the danger in new and interesting ways) but you can also get a better understanding of yourself. It can be a therapy of sorts. And after unicorn poetry we could all use some therapy.
I had a nice conversation with occasional Fictorians guest poster Petra Klarbrunn about how she ended up becoming a writer. Here’s a mini-interview that gives a good explanation as to why some folks write.
Guy Anthony De Marco
When I walk into Everyday Joe’s Coffee House in Fort Collins, Colorado, it takes all of ten seconds to locate Petra Klarbrunn. A prolific author who writes under at least ten pseudonyms, she built a temporary wall of research books around her clunky pre-Lenovo IBM laptop to keep the world at bay. Her face remains focused on her computer, fingers pounding away on keys polished blank and smooth from years of hard use.
I place my order for an espresso and a cup of Earl Gray for Petra. While the volunteer baristas expertly craft the brews, I realize that my author friend looks more like a librarian than a writer of bizarro stories and niche erotica novellas. Her round Harry Potter-esque glasses are oversized for her small features, and tattoos of Marvel comic book heroes peek out from around her well-worn Batman t-shirt. Everything about her is a clash between multiple worlds. Marvel versus DC. Demure librarian versus hardcore literary dominatrix.
She remains in her own bubble universe until I pierce her event horizon by sliding the ceramic mug of steaming tea into the only open spot within her reach. Her clear blue eyes lock onto mine and she flickers the corners of her mouth upwards.
“Gimme a minute to finish this scene, would you?”
Nodding, I take the opposite chair at her table and locate a few spare inches of table space to set my cup. The coffee house is half-full of students from Colorado State University, and Petra blends in seamlessly. I’m easily the oldest person in the place. Most of the students are working on homework or socializing. Several kept glancing at the attractive brunette with the loud keyboard. Once I had settled in, even more eyes wandered towards our table. Was I her father, her friend, or something more? The enigma baffled the college crowd.
Petra finally pushes the screen down on her laptop, the old hinges squealing in protest, and she looks up with a lopsided grin. “I had to get that scene down before I forgot it.”
“What are you writing about today?” I asked while adding a little brown packet of raw sugar to my espresso.
“Chick porn.” She laughs with a clear soprano voice when a barista stops in his tracks at her words and then continues on as his face turns red. “Gotta pay the bills. This one is set in Ireland.” She waves at the books piled on the table with the grace of a ballerina. All of them pertain to some aspect of the Emerald Isle, ranging from travel books to historical castles. “I love to travel. One day I’ll make it out to Europe. I’m keen on visiting Wales, Ireland, and especially Scotland.”
When pressed why she wanted to go to Scotland, it was her turn to redden her complexion. “It’s the kilts. I can’t resist someone manly enough to basically wear a skirt and drink Scotch.”
Sex, a travel bug, and a sad childhood are what started Petra’s foray into writing erotica novellas for women and, to a lesser extent, for QUILTBAG readers. “It allowed me to travel virtually for a while, burying my head in travel books and online forums so I could forget my problems. Eventually, I had to get off of my butt and go see things without having to peer through a window made by IBM. By the time I was ready to get on a plane, I had 33 erotic novellas published under a couple of different pseudonyms. I made enough to cover my living expenses and to travel to my first exotic location – Los Angeles.” Her laugh is contagious, and eventually everyone in the coffee house is smiling.
When asked about her family, Petra admits she barely remembers her father. She does remember the tears and the sobbing that gripped her mother. “I was, what, five or six years old. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with my mom. She was Wonder Woman to me…indestructible, yet loving and warm. To see her so broken up, it broke my heart.”
Those feelings haunted Petra. In grade school, she fought so often that the principal joked he was going to adopt her because they saw each other more than he saw his own kids. “I was a terrible hellion. The girls start growing faster than the boys, and they were all afraid of me. I never had to wear make-up because I had a bruise or a black eye. Maybelline Fist, I used to call it.”
Unfortunately, when the boys started their growth spurts, she remembered the principal saying that she had better start to use her brain instead of her fists if she wanted to survive. “That made sense to me. Someone talking to me like I was an adult, telling me things that made logical sense…that was the game changer for me.”
Several bleak Christmas holidays in a row, one of them requiring a midnight jaunt to a park to locate a suitable shrub so she and her mother could have a tree to decorate, convinced Petra to settle on a career choice. She heard about the lofty advances that authors like Stephen King were pulling down, so that seemed like an easy method to get rich. “My god, what an idiot I was. Still am, now that I think of it.” She laughs and snorts, which causes her to laugh uncontrollably for several minutes.
“I was the proverbial broke, struggling writer until I wrote my first erotica—based in Scotland, of course. My roommate read it straight through and convinced me it was fantastic. I uploaded it to Amazon’s Kindle Digital Publishing platform, and it began to sell. I made more money the first month than I did waiting tables. I wrote another one in a week, and that one did even better. I kept writing, and the books got better and better as I learned my craft. I now make enough to pay my bills, my mom’s bills, and I’m taking her on a two-week vacation to Scotland next month.” That lopsided grin lights up her features again. “We’re going to drink real scotch and find out what’s hidden under those kilts. It’s my mission in life now.”
About the Author:
Guy Anthony De Marco is a speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award® nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.
A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.
When I was approached to write a guest post about how my life experiences have shaped my writing, I almost said no. Not because I’ve never written a post before (I write fiction, not blog about real stuff—especially not about myself), nor because I don’t have a life…or experiences. It’s because some things are too painful and raw to think about, let alone display for the world. But if I’m going to move people with my writing, I have to be willing to go there.
My current work in progress is about a genetically engineered, genderless sixteen-year-old known only as 31 who struggles to choose a gender and find love. But when 31 breaks the selection process, 31 is forced to decide which of them will be recycled into genetic waste and which will live to become the future leaders of society.
I’ve heard dozens of times that it’s best to write what you know. I’ve never been genderless, but some of my most painful memories relate to my own gender identity struggles. I’ve learned to use those memories and experiences to fuel my writing.
Looking back, I still cannot pinpoint the exact reason I decided to play football–the most male dominated sport there is. It wasn’t because I had a passion for football exactly (though I’ve always had a soft spot for contact sports) or wanted to make a point. Looking back, I think I was trying to understand myself. Understand a side of me I had never explored, something inside me that playing football opened up.
In the late 90s, girls playing football were unheard of—especially in high school, on the varsity team, in a southern town like Norman, OK where football is sacred. My team hated me. Even those that I hung out with and were my “friends” harassed me on the field. In fact, sometimes they were the most verbally abusive. I was even dating one of my teammates for nearly a year before he would outwardly admit it to anyone (months after the season had ended). He was too embarrassed to even hold my hand. Looking back, he was a straight up idiot. They all were.
I wish it stopped there. The team was also physically abusive and NOT ONCE did any of them stand up for me, and tell the others to back off. They had such a problem with a female doing something that in their minds was purely for males that not one of them stood up to be a man. Any chance they had, they would take cheap shots. I don’t mean a punch to the arm. They would get in my blind spot and full out tackle me while I was standing in line or walking to the next station. Slamming me onto the concrete or against the fence must have scored them double points. Recently in the news, there has been a lot of discussion regarding helmet collisions. For me, that was a daily thing. The guys would go out of their way to hit my head. And it’s not like they would do this behind the coaches’ backs. The coaches encouraged it.
It started as headaches. Sometimes the pain was so intense that I thought my head would explode. My neck and back were messed up, too. One time, when one of the guys was going for what I can only guess was a curb stomp, I tried to get out of the way and his cleat scraped everything off my shin down to the bone. Instead of helping, the coaches yelled at me, the trainers refused to help. I couldn’t even stand. Finally, my body recovered from the shock and I wrapped it up myself and finished practice. Not long after, one of the guys cheap-tackled me, aiming his helmet at my face. He caught my chin and split it open. The coaches and trainers wouldn’t help but couldn’t ignore the fact that my white uniform was now a sheet of red. I went to the emergency room. The doctor pressed and I finally divulged my symptoms. After some scans, he told me that I’d had multiple concussions and if I continued playing, I could get paralyzed. I’m not a quitter and getting run off was the last thing I ever wanted. It felt like they won. It still feels that way, sometimes.
It wasn’t like I was a total butch or anything. The same year I played football, I won Miss Teenage Oklahoma, was a national finalist and won Miss National Congeniality—very accepted by the girls. You’d think that having Miss Oklahoma in the school would turn some heads but I’d already been labeled as an outcast. I won national dance and cheer titles and went on to be a cheerleader in college. Nothing mattered. To them, I was forever the freak who played football.
In college, I was still drawn to understand myself. I took honor’s gender studies and discovered that while I was female on the outside, I was more like a male on the inside. It made sense and I was relieved, but I didn’t know what to do with the information, didn’t know there was anything I could do. Gender fluidity wasn’t openly discussed back then.
Today, going against the norm is more acceptable. Being “different” can sometimes be “in.” Though being different for different sake is about as bad as people who conform to match everyone else’s desires until they’re unrecognizable even to themselves. With empathy comes truth that isn’t always what we want or like and it may not be what’s accepted. It’s about you being true to you.
If I help even one person to not be afraid, to be stronger, to see who they truly are, to not have to go through even a fraction of what I did, everything I’ve been through would be worth it. I’m not telling my personal story in my young adult Sci-fi novel, Smooth. Smooth is about it being okay to be different. It’s about acceptance and being open, even when you don’t understand, because you never know when you might need someone to be there for you. But most of all, it’s about being true to yourself.
It’s hard digging down to the very core of who we are, to get close enough to painful memories to use them in our writing. Find the courage to connect with the emotion of those experiences and tell your story, in your own way. I hold onto knowing that the more I can tap into that scared, determined girl and let her tell her tale, the more it makes everything worth it.
Joy Johnson bio:
Shortly after receiving her BFA and MBA, Joy Dawn Johnson worked as a project manager for more than ten years, including a stint in Baghdad, Iraq, as a government contractor. She is a member if the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and was the 2015 recipient of the Superstars Writing scholarship. Joy typically writes middle grade and young adult Sci-fi and fantasy. She will begin to query agents later this year with her current work in progress, Smooth.
Your inner muse is the voice of your experiences – both real and desired.
I think my muse went this way….
That inner muse can be elusive. It is who we blame for our writer’s block.
But there is a secret to keeping that muse away from the straight jacket of silence. That secret is understanding the two truths of the inner muse which no one talks about.
Those two truths, once realized, will forever unfetter your inner muse. This month’s theme is about how life’s experiences shape what we write. We know that our experiences shape our perception and hence what we write. Experience also shapes what our inner muse reveals. But, did you know that there is a way to tap into those experiences while letting the muse do its sorting and compiling to create those aha! moments?
Tapping into our experiences happens when we’re aware of the two truths about the inner muse that no one talks about:
1) Inspiration isn’t always obvious; and
2) You may not realize what you know.
It seems that I’m stating the obvious. But without conscious awareness of these two truths, your inner muse doesn’t have permission to stay away from the straight jacket of silence.
What these two truths mean is that what inspires you to create a world and to write the story can be hidden somewhere deep inside and you don’t even know it.
Can you dig it out? Find it? Use it? Of course you can. The best way to do that is to not go looking for it. Sometimes, you’ve just got to let it happen. Sometimes you just have to be literal about being inspired. Here’s what I mean:
To be inspired means to be in spirit. That means giving your muse permission to access all that information in your head, all those observations and the situations you’ve experienced. It means letting your muse make the associations it needs to and to draw from the library of your inner knowing.
All you have to do to succeed is to trust it. Yes, trust your muse, trust what you know even if you’re not aware of it. Why? Because:
1) Inspiration isn’t always obvious
Sometimes we have an aha! moment which inspires a scene, a story even or a moment in the book. More often it comes from somewhere deep within. How often have you read what you’ve written and wondered how you knew to write that, or to word it that way, or your character has surprised you? Those are the moments when inspiration isn’t obvious and you may never figure out what inspired you to write what you did, but aren’t you glad your inner muse was working for you?
Our brain likes to make associations, find familiar in the unfamiliar, and find patterns. It sees shapes in clouds, a face in a whorl of wood, that phone number is all primes and if I add the first two numbers together…
The trick is to trust the inner muse and to trust that it’s working for you. Forcing the writing, forcing a scene, rarely works. It has to come from the characters and the situations we created and from the inner muse which understands those creations at a much more profound level than what we are sometimes aware of.
2) You may not realize what you know I’m a kid from the farm. It took a little while for me to realize that most of my stories happen in rural settings in whichever genre I’m writing. I have detail which I take for granted and other people have to research. I understand the relationship people have with the land and animals. I have planted, harvested and marketed, I have prepared and stored food for the winter and have experienced limited access to store bought foods,.
It’s the same thing with the characters we create. We tend toward the familiar, especially when it comes to relationships. That’s when patterns in our writing occur. Strong female, weak male characters or vice versa. Female characters who hate their fathers. Male characters who are emotionally deprived heroes. There are countless patterns and stereotypes we fall into because it’s subconsciously familiar in some way. It’s the material the muse has to work with.
Whether it’s settings or characters, relationships or values and ethics, our inner muse has the information of who and what we are and uses it, even if we don’t realize that’s what is happening.
So we don’t always realize what we know and even what we don’t know. But when we consciously let the muse do its work, when we become consciously aware of the work it is doing, then we can form a relationship with it that changes what we write. We can give the muse permission to explore new situations, characters and relationships. This awareness allows us to ask for help to change the pool of information the muse has to work with. In a critique group I’m in, a well published author informed us that she had become aware that she always wrote a specific father-daughter relationship into her stories and she understood why. Now she wanted to change it up.
The two truths contradict each other:
“Trust inspiration” versus “Don’t trust what it’s telling you”.
Or, so it seems at first glance. But the real axiom is:
Trust Inspiration. Understand what it’s telling you so that you can change it up – if you wish.
We found our muse!
We, and our inner muse, are the sum total of our experiences. As writers, we’re not always aware of what we know and what we don’t know. The more we write, the more opportunity we have to understand what informs our writing and to change and expand upon that.
You know that the writing myth that says you’ve got to write a million words before you’ve got a chance to be successful? It’s not about the word count, it’s about understanding your inner muse and developing a comfortable, trustworthy relationship with it. Sometimes, it takes a million words before you realize you’re basically writing the same story, the same themes albeit in different settings and milieus. Once you realize that, you’ve hear your inner muse. Now, you can give it new fodder, inform it with new information and experiences. You can give it permission to shake it up a bit.
Will you need a million words to do this? Maybe yes. Maybe no. And remember, I used the word ‘myth’ for a reason.
Inspiration isn’t always obvious and you may not realize what you know – once these two unspoken truths are understood, your life experiences will shape your writing in ways you never imagined it could! So, trust Inspiration and understand what it’s telling you so that you can change it up – if you wish.
