Category Archives: The Writing Life

Creative people-for example, musicians, actors, artists, and yes, writers-are often considered a bit odd or ‘funny’ by the rest of humanity. That’s okay, because the truth is we are different. The drive to create a work that perhaps has no permanent utility yet still stands outside the creator can sometimes cause the creator to do things that are perhaps a bit daft, as our British friends might put it.

This can even be seen in the things we do to put ourselves in a space where we can create. For example, I once read of a well-known cartoonist who literally could not work if he did not have one foot in a pan of hot water and the other foot in a pan of cold water. (Unfortunately, the book in which I read that account seems to have not survived my most recent relocation, so I can’t give you a cite.)

At a slightly more mundane level, I can tell you of at least two or three pretty well-known science fiction authors who write best with metal-death music pouring from their stereo speakers at high decibel levels. I know of at least two very successful authors whose work regimen is to write from about 10 p.m. to about 6 a.m, sleep in the early part of the day, then spend the afternoon and early evening with the spouse and kids before sitting down at the keyboard again at 10 p.m. And there are always stories about someone’s writing for the day getting totally derailed because his/her coffee/tea/drink of choice was just not available and it blew his/her routine off the tracks.

So writers are often considered to be a species of odd ducks, and sometimes for valid reasons.

I never considered myself to be an odd duck, but the one thing I secretly took pride in was I could pretty much write anywhere. Airport, coffee bar, hotels, airplanes; if I could get my laptop there and open, I could put words down regardless of the distractions around me. The day job had me doing the road warrior gig several times over the years, so I had plenty of experience in working in places that were not home. In fact, my personal best getting-lots-of-words-down-in-a-short-time record happened in a hotel room in Grimsby, England-6000 + words in five hours. Truth. Cross my heart.

So for a long time, I kind of felt like I was invulnerable as a writer.

Then came March of 2009. Remember? The housing bubble had burst, all the mortgage rocks had been flipped over and we were gagging at the putrefaction we found underneath, and the economy was on a greased slide to nowhere and it was getting there fast.

Skipping a lot of the details, the bottom line is that the day job laid off about 400 people, and one of them was me. I found out in March 2009 I was going to be laid off, and at that moment my fiction writing dried up. Withered. Croaked. I wasn’t actually laid off until December 31, 2009, but I knew it was coming. And yeah, at first I was in shock, and angry, and all the typical emotions, but this wasn’t the first time I’d been out on the street, so my head straightened out pretty quickly-except for the creative voice. I could write text for work without any problems at all. I was serving as a Bible study teacher, and I could write study materials without a glitch. Words just flowed. But try to write fiction? Wasn’t happening.

Fast forward. I spent January through October 2010 in school picking up some education credits to help the job search. Writing for the classes, no problem. Fiction? Uh-uh. Oh, maybe a paragraph here and there, but nothing good, and no comfort at it. I put that down to just the uncertainty of my situation

In November 2010 I got a new job with a great company. Only problem with it was I had to move about 160 miles to take it. And selling a house in 2010 wasn’t much easier than selling a house in 2009 would have been. So it was back to the road warrior gig: leave town on Sunday afternoon with a car full of clean clothes and food, come home on Friday night with a car full of dirty laundry, spend the week in a small hole-in-the-wall apartment. (Not unlike being in college.)

I figured that with the new job, the uncertainty would be gone. I had lots of experience at living in road warrior mode, and lots of experience at really producing words while doing it. I thought, “Great! Five nights a week in the apartment with nothing else to do. I’ll get tons of writing done.”

Yeah, that’s how it should have been. But the next ten months proved to be one of the most frustrating times of my life as a writer. I was used to writing up to 2500-3000 words in an evening. A night in which I only put down 1000 words was substandard for me. Yet during those ten months, I would sit down night after night, spend two to three hours at the keyboard, and if I was very lucky I’d have 150 words. A lot of nights I only had 50. More nights than I care to think about I had 20, or 10, or none. Truth. And if I did get some words down, the next night I’d probably delete most of them as dreck. But I kept trying.

It drove me batty. I knew I could do better than that; a lot better. But no matter what I tried, nothing primed the pump; nothing got the words flowing again. You could have used me for a picture of frustration in the dictionary. I was dying of thirst in a writing desert. Still, I kept trying.

Fast forward again to August, 2011. We sold our old house in the city we moved from and bought our new house in the city we moved to. We moved in September.

After the move, I kept trying to write. And to my surprise (and joy), slowly, bit by bit, it became easier to write. The words starting to flow again-a trickle at first, but soon in a stream. The volume of words produced each day started to grow. At the beginning of December, 2011, I was consistently producing an average of 1000 words every time I sat down, which, while it’s not where I was pre-2009, was so much better than what I’d done in the last 2 ½ years I was ecstatic. And then around December 15, it was like the muse opened the flood gate. I wrote 40,000 words in a little over two weeks. Joy, relief, happiness; oh, yeah, did I feel that.

So what made the difference? What opened the door to my creative voice again? I think it’s having a home. When I was laid off, I knew that I would most likely have to move to get a good job. I think that something about not having a home even in prospect just really shriveled my creativity, and it wasn’t until I got the new home and actually settled into it that it started to revive. Makes sense to me. So perhaps I am an odd duck after all.

What’s your bedrock? What’s the one thing in your life that if it was removed, you wouldn’t be able to write?

I hope none of you ever land in that writing desert. But if you do, the best advice I can give you is keep writing. Persevere, even if you only get 30 or 50 words done in a day. From my experience, when you get out of the desert you’ll still have the patterns and habits of writing, which means you’ll get back in the flow that much quicker.

Meanwhile, enjoy paddling around with the rest of us odd ducks. Quack, quack.

What I Did (and Didn’t) Learn from Writing Fan Fiction (Part One)

February 6, 2012

mary

Fan fiction has a mixed reputation because it is amateur writing. That’s not a judgment of its quality, which can range from juvenile to truly excellent, depending on the individual writer’s skill. Merriam-Webster defines “amateur” as “one who engages in a pursuit… as a pastime rather than as a profession” (www.m-w.com) and that’s exactly what fan fiction is: writing for pleasure, rather than for hire, or with the expectation of selling the finished product.

Fan fiction will always be amateur writing because, for legal reasons, it’s usually not sellable. Fan fiction writers are borrowing other people’s characters and worlds, typically without permission, so fan fiction exists in a legal “grey area.”

One of the hardest things for me when I began to write with an eye towards publication (as opposed to for my own entertainment) was to largely give up fan fiction. I simply don’t have enough writing time to be able to make good progress on my professional projects while supporting ongoing fan fiction series. And, when I made that switch, I found there were some aspects where fan fiction hadn’t helped me develop as a writer, as opposed to other areas where I benefited greatly from what I learned while creating my reams of amateur stories.

What I did learn from fan fiction?

Voices and characterization. As I borrowed others’ characters, I began to recognize when phrases or actions seemed out-of-character for them. This skill helped me develop more individualized original characters. Different people have different manners of speaking, different standards of behaviour, different motivations; once you know these things about a character, you can extrapolate what the character will do in any given situation.

Change comes gradually. If you want to take a character in a new direction, or portray a relationship that’s not explicit in canon, you need to show the changes evolving in a manner that seems natural and logical. Similarly, in my own writing, changes of heart needed to take place gradually and believably.

Tone, mood and theme. When I made up original characters, I discovered that some fit the already-established tone, mood, and theme of the universe, and others really didn’t-even though they were great characters on paper. Some of them even found homes in other stories, where they fit much better.

The value of a writing community. In my early days when I was writing drek, I benefited from having a community of fans willing to take the time to read the drek and offer feedback. I also shared tips with other fan fiction writers. I saw how much more difficult it was to get an audience for original fiction by a beginner author. Having a shared interest in a TV show, manga, movie, or other fictional universe gave me something in common with my earliest readers. The feedback gave me motivation to keep writing until what I produced wasn’t exactly drek any more-at least, not all the time.

What I didn’t learn from fan fiction – coming next post.

The Art of Writing Medicine – Introduction

February 3, 2012

Dylan Blacquiere

Craft & Skills The Writing Life 5 Comments

I think everyone gets a strange mixture of feelings when reading characters who do the same things we do. When a character in a piece of writing has the same hometown, or the same hobbies, I always get excited to see how true the details ring – never wanting the story to get bogged down with the shout-outs, mind, but interested enough to see if the writer knows what they’re talking about. It’s always the most fun, though, when someone has the same job as me.

You see, I’m a physician. And people love to write about physicians, about medicine; in fact, we’re one of the great tropes of genre fiction. Sci-fi, thrillers, even romance novels love to have physicians in them. It’s a perfect setup! If you’re writing a noble protagonist, who better to be selfless and caring, dedicated to healing the sick and doing good works for all? If you want a slick, smarmy villain, who better than the thoughtless physician who cares nothing for patients, deep in the pockets of the pharmaceutical agency or some other sinister cabal? We do half-crazed pretty well, with all kinds of pretensions to playing God; mad doctors have been a staple of science-fiction and fantasy since Frankenstein and Moreau. A dashing love interest for the romantic hero or heroine – who wouldn’t want to snag a rich doctor, probably good with kids and not too bad on the eyes? The physician is one of those great tropes in fiction that can go any way you please, hero to villain to anything in between.

Even when we aren’t the focal point, doctors make great Fifth Business, as Robertson Davies might have said. Physicians can be great plot propellers, even if they aren’t main characters – who better to provide exposition to a sudden health crisis, or be forced to reveal some terrible secret, or be a focal point that the heroes must find to heal an injured comrade. Really, a physician can be almost anything in the story, and done well, there’s almost no role that we can’t fill.

Done well, though – there’s the problematic thing.

As with any field, medicine can be a hard thing to write. There is a lot of detail involved, and getting something wrong can turn a knowledgeable reader into a ruthless editor. This is no different from computer science, or history, and it can depend on the scale of the error; getting the name of the surgical instrument wrong is a far cry from an unrealistic portrayal of childbirth or a head injury. As well, getting the details right doesn’t help if the scale of detail swamps the reader. I once wrote a story where a crucial plot point depended on the reader knowing how chromosomes divided during reproduction, and while I think I did a good job explaining the process, it still was nearly half a page of a cytogenetics lecture. It can take a lot of skill to do this properly – or to realize if there’s a better way to explain it altogether.

My next few posts will be dedicated to the art of writing medicine. Sooner or later most writers have some medical plot point or physician character, even if minor. In my next post we’ll talk about some of the common pitfalls that writers experience beyond just getting the medical science wrong. After that, we’ll take a look at how to write a good physician character, how to write believable medicine in your fiction, and we’ll even look at how to use it in “realistically unrealistic” ways for those of you who like your medical science mad. I’ll talk about other health professions in fiction beyond the physician – after all, multidisciplinary teams are the norm these days – and finally, we’ll look at some interesting ways that medicine could be used beyond the routine tropes of fiction.

I’m looking forward to this Grand Rounds of Fictional Medicine, and I hope you are too.

What I Learned from The Stand…a Blog in Two Parts, but Really One Big One.

January 29, 2012

KDAlex

The Writing Life 2 Comments

I find it hard to believe that I haven’t talked to you guys since November. It feels like just yesterday we were strolling down Pumpkin-Head Lane counting all the piked up zombie heads.

My, but the year has flown. I haven’t made any New Year’s Resolutions to write more, or even write less. I haven’t made any false promises to myself. Truth be told, I never was any good at that sort of stuff.

Every promise I’ve ever made to myself I’ve broken. So, I’ve found it hard to write an advice column on writing when in all honesty, this is the first time I’ve put pen to paper or word to screen since my last blog.

But, I’ve found some minor successes inside of these past few months of barren word counts. It’s something I wish I did more of.

Not dishes, not chores, not even going outside to sing and dance and play in the rain…although, if we were to get some rain right now I’d probably do a cartwheel. Dry season sucks. Especially when you get the humidity of a mid-afternoon thunderstorm without the relief in the release of the pouring rain.

This is a little something that I’ve forgotten to do in the age of fancy whiz-bang toys and video games, in a world where entertainment value is measured by how much product we can place in a thirty second television spot.

That’s right. I picked up a book.

And then I picked up another book.

And another.

It all started with 11/22/63, I’d always much rather preferred my Koontz to King. For reasons I can’t even begin to explain. But, I picked it up on a promise to a friend. Stephen King was in town out in Hillsborough County where he’d been snowbirding since probably before I was born. Since he had a winter house on a private island out there, he decided to do a book signing at the local Barnes and Noble. It was my first book signing event for a big time author with a big time lead in.

I agreed to go with my friend, who was a much more devout fan than I. So, we piled into his trusty old Civic and drove the three plus hours over to the west coast of Florida. We got there reasonably early, considering we got up at like the butt-crack of dawn. I called the book store halfway there to make sure it wasn’t a waste of time, only to be told by a friendly book seller that people had been camping out all night.

All. Night. Long.

And that just blew my mind, especially considering we were there in the early days of November and there was holiday shopping and stuff still to come. I’d seen the crazy campers for concert tickets or Black Friday deals, but a book store? For a book signing? You’ve got to be kidding me. There won’t be a line.

I mean, don’t people just watch TV or play video games now? We saw all the video footage from the riots in London where electronic stores were smashed out and ransacked by looters. In that very same footage we saw the nearby Waterstones unscathed by the civil unrest.

Wow.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. And it was one of those little moments where the light bulb goes off and the heavenly choir sings. I felt good.

I felt home, even though I was three hundred plus miles away and standing in line for hours on end.

Truth be told, I had thought that humanity was lost and truly for a moment believed that arts were a dying life form.

When I got there though, it was amazing.

For those that have never gone to a book signing, don’t be afraid. This was my first too.

In the Superstars Seminar where I met my fellow Fictorians, I remember hearing a topic of discussion on the anatomy of a book signing from the author’s perspective. To see it from a reader’s perspective was a whole different game. I think I was able to appreciate it more for the event it was because I had not been one of those die hard fans.

But, the line was through the building and wrapped around the store twice. There were literally hundreds of people there.

And like three cops to keep the peace.

But, it was the most peaceful setting I think I had ever been in for a major shopping frenzy. I mean, people were jovial and on their best behavior. Neighbors in line were striking up conversations like old friends. And living here in South Florida, it was a rarity to see people actually get along.

In the midst of all the chaos and violence, hundreds of people had found their peace in a common interest. And it was like kumbaya campfire tales.

Seriously. For being herded like cattle through all the hot new best sellers and teenage vampire and angst lit, it was the best experience of my life. The two to three hour line really didn’t seem so long. People were reading on their kindles and nooks, sonys and hardbacks. And it was just this great…almost comic-con like atmosphere.

B&N get my respect for having it down to such a controlled science. Early people get one color, other people get another, line up here, stand there. Go this way, now go that way. Hand your book to a bookseller who runs the assembly line down to Mr. King to another bookseller then to you.

And Stephen King wasn’t doing a Q&A or interview or speech or anything. It was just a strict book signing. And halfway through, we found out the poor guy had the flu. And was there to keep his prior engagement to his fans. He didn’t cut the line short or end it at like 100 people. He swore he would stay until the last fan got their book signed.

And he sure did.

For that, I respected the man that much more. I gave him another look.

It was a truly inspiring event that I probably wouldn’t have even considered if my friend didn’t twist my arm and make me go.

But I read 11/22/63. And I enjoyed the hell out of it. As I was reading, characters and events from other books popped up randomly like King had woven this one giant tapestry of a world. And it made me curious for more. So I went back in and re-read The Dark Tower. And saw more references pop up.

The Dark Tower was a book I really hadn’t read in….wow. Close to fifteen years. All I remembered was it was a “weird, gothic western”….and when I envisioned Golden Hills, the memories of my childhood under an old sycamore came flooding back. And the first thing I thought of was The Dark Tower brand of weird western. And even though I hadn’t read the book in close to fifteen years and probably forgot more than I even knew in the first place, the atmosphere just kept creeping back to me.

And I wanted it. Bad.

So, when I finished The Dark Tower (No, I didn’t read the whole series. Come on! I still have to finish the Wheel of Time), I turned my attention to a book I had never read before, but had always been told to look into.

That book was a little novel called The Stand. You may have heard of it? Seriously. It’s little. Like, maybe only 100 pages. Go ahead, you can get through it in an hour.

And I did this weird stutter-stop when I read it. I’ve been slowly paging through, I think I made it to like 33% of the book and now I’m definitely hooked again.

The one thing that kept sticking out as I read it was how familiar it all SOUNDED.

That’s a key word, folks.

I’ve written the way I’ve written for close to six years. And every time I’d write something, I’d be told all sorts of nasty things about POV and how you SHOULD DO THINGS!

And if it’s not proper english with proper sentence structure and proper thoughts and proper this that and whatever…

Truth is, the only thing proper is what’s proper for your story.

Cormac McCarthy, one of the literary darlings of the 21st century absolutely despises punctuation and quotes.

But everyone loves his stream-of-conscious style writing.

And as I was reading The Stand I kept coming back to my own books.

I noticed a simple stylistic similarity that I never would have picked up if I didn’t read my own books fifteen times.

Me and Stephen, you see, we’re a lot alike.

When he writes a POV, he writes a POV. That’s all there is to it. You can’t get any farther into that character’s skull without worrying about how you’re going to get your head out of his nose.

And I loved it. Every moment.

I’ve always said that the reason I write is because these are the types of stories I want to read.

Had I known there was a multi-million dollar author out there doing the exact same thing.

Well then.

Maybe I wouldn’t have started writing!

It’s really amazing to look at the different styles of writing out there. Patrick Rothfuss has a very literary style. His words are like honeyed words on a lover’s lips. R.A. Salvatore has a nose for a good adventure yarn. Stephanie Meyer, vilified in the “circle” has a great knack for being able to connect to a teenage voice.

My advice to you this month is to read more. Stress less.

If you get lost in your own story, go pick up someone else’s. There’s plenty out there that just might light the fire in your pants. I can’t read books to study them. I hate that word, study. It’s nasty. Like eating mud pies. And not the good chocolate kind. I read to enjoy myself.

I write for the same reason.

You never know what you’re going to learn on the road less traveled.

And be careful about that guy sitting next to you hocking up a lung at work. He just might have Captain Tripps.

Seriously, for the first three weeks after reading the first part of The Stand, I was jumping at every sneeze and cough.

*Sneezes* Oh…er… Excuse me. It’s just allergies. 😉

Happy Reading!