Posts by Barbara O'Neal
Many meditation disciplines are meant to help the practitioner develop awareness by cultivating The Observer. The observer is a part of the self, but stands a little apart, noticing everything, judging nothing, only seeing, paying attention. It is the observer self that notices you are unhappy with a person and eventually helps you to see that’s why you’re a grouch when you come home. The observer stands apart from family arguments and traffic accidents and weddings and swimming, noticing noticing noticing.
Everything. In the traditional practices, one hopes to achieve peace or spiritual enlightenment.
For writers, cultivating The Observer serves a different purpose, that of enriching and enlivening and deepening our work in a thousand different ways. The Observer collects everything and tucks it away for us, making sure there is plenty of material for our work at every moment.
This works in large and small ways.
In January, we traveled to New Zealand to see family and explore the country. It was a long trip and it’s hard to stay completely awake to everything that’s happening when you’re on the road for a while, but I tried to let The Observer gather everything all the time. Not just the beauties, but everything. That unpleasantly blustery day on a beach in Nelson, when sand peppered my neck and face and arms, driving us back inside. The grim reality of shattered Christchurch. The astonishment of a school of dolphins swimming and dancing and leaping in the sea. The color of the sea, for that matter. Water, water, water, everywhere. So right for me.
One afternoon was quite ordinary. We were resting, just CR and I, in Rotorua, a town of mud vents and sulphur springs. He needed to get a swim in because he was in training for an open ocean race a few days down the road. There was an old touristy pool a couple of blocks away, and we headed over there in spite of the rain that kept showing up. I didn’t see how we’d manage to swim in all that rain, but the girl at the desk waved us in—and I realized that the lightning that closes pools in Colorado was nowhere in sight.
So we swam. In the hard-falling rain, in a turquoise pool with only two local women also doing laps. I felt like a dolphin myself, swirling and lapping, opening my arms up to the rain, diving down back under the water. It was utterly magical, and while I was immersed in pleasure, The Observer was taking notes. Tiles, bricks, hot springs, rusted leaking shower, very shallow shallow end. Girl in red suit looks like an actor. Friend is fit and lean and gray haired, swimming with purpose. The sound of the rain pounding like a thousand drums on the roof and the water and the concrete. The color of the sky. The color of the water.
A trip to a far away land is bound to net a few magical moments. But here is an ordinary one.
Read MoreLately, I’ve been concerned with an angle of the digital market that needs discussing: Editors. It concerns me that so few digital-only/digital-first writers are hiring this all-important help before the books go live.
Look, I’m a professional writer and have been for better than 20 years. I was trained to edit, and I’m pretty clean, clear, concise. And I would never send work out without the fine, clear eye and particular talents of an editor, and a copy editor.
Here’s a story of why:
I’ve just turned in the revisions for my next book for Bantam (currently titled The Flavor of a Blue Moon) and all the way through the process, answering the questions my editor posed, considering her suggestions, tightening here, expanding there; as I plumped up two characters, rewove an third, and adored a fourth all over again, I kept thinking—would I be able to see these things on my own?
The answer is—I’d probably see some of it. I’d let the work rest (just as it did in this professional process) and come back and see about 40% of the fixes I made. I am not at all sure I’d see the other 60%, not because I am a bad writer or because I think I’m so brilliant, but simply because I’m standing in the midst of my creation, walking around in the fully colored, fully realized landscape of my imagination, and it all looks real and strong and sturdy to me. As it should.
But maybe…just maybe….
Read MoreOne of the most elevating aspects of writing is the use of detail. It marks voice, it shows attention and care, and it can be quite elegant. The main reason to cultivate the powerful use of telling detail in your own work, however, is that it is transportive for the reader. Our goal as fiction writers is to remove all barriers to the reader experiencing the story in the purest, truest way possible. Detail is one of the most important ways we do that.
All fiction is created from detail, of course. Scenes, characters and plots are created out of single molecules of detail that create solid experiences. Unfortunately, a great many stories are crafted from overused, exhausted, bland details, placeholders that do nothing to set the work apart.
A couple of months ago, I participated as faculty in a Writing Away Retreat in Breckenridge, where a collection of very talented writers showed their work to a panel of people working in the field—writer, agent, editor, poet. We all read the works and met with the writers individually. Afterward, Jeff Kleinman, agent at Folio Literary, suggested that we offer some exercises on how to build character, because in nearly every case, the thing missing from the work of these writers was a sense of depth. Our exercises ended up being nearly entirely about character, and focused almost entirely on detail.
I read a lot of material on a regular basis. I can’t say I remember a lot of material from that weekend (with a couple of exceptions), but I clearly and strongly remember a piece Jeff wrote about being happy in Italy, riding a horse at sunset through long grass. It was thick with detail—details of light and the Italian setting and a sense of time. It lingers with me, several months later.
The purpose of good detail work is to create that sense of compelling recognition in the readers, to anchor and make memorable whatever it is that you are writing about.
How do you do that? In general, the telling part of telling detail means it is unique, or at least unusual. It’s fresh and new. It stands up and captures a moment, a character, a setting in a way that cements it for the reader.
Most of all, it is specific, related to exactly the time, place, character and emotion of this very second in your book. It will create recognition, sometimes visceral emotion. It will elevate your work as nothing else possibly can.
To find those remarkable details, you must begin by opening your eyes to your world every day, every moment.
Read MoreWhat are your natural rhythms–in life and in writing? How well does the reality of your life support those rhythms?
I am writing this from Breckenridge, a very small Colorado village in the Rockies. It’s known for skiing, but I don’t ski and dislike the heavy crowds in the wintertime, so I come now, in mud season. The trails are closed because everything is so muddy. There is no on one here except the odd day-trippers. A lot of restaurants are closed, too, but I don’t mind because I have an apartment with a kitchen.
I’m here alone, after an insanely busy two months of promotion and publicity for my new book, The Garden of Happy Endings, complicated by two months of pinch-hitting with the new baby until full-time day care came through. My last gig for Garden was on May 15, the same day I had to mail progress materials on the new book to my agent and editor.
Stick with me. This is not about me, although I am using my particular life and work rhythms to help you think about yours.
Here’s the thing: right now, it’s not even 7 am. I’m looking out on the most serenely quiet vista of half-melted snowy peaks and baby green aspen leaves. A raccoon trundled by, then a molting fox who was pretty sure I might toss him scraps. I was eating my breakfast out on the balcony, contemplating the day, what I will write, when I might get in a long walk along the river. There’s no hiking because of the mud, which suits me just now–I don’t, actually, want to work that hard.
I was awake and working by 7 am yesterday, too, because I woke up naturally and cheerfully at 5:30 after falling asleep at 8. Now I’m at the computer, working happily, and at home, I’d still be getting breakfast for myself and my beloved, then taking the dog for a walk. Do I need to change my routines? Maybe.
The other thing about this retreat is that it IS a retreat. All of us want to do more now than we can possibly get done, a model heavily endorsed by American/Western culture. You can never be successful enough to feed the yawning mouth of American expectation. You can never get far enough ahead to rest easy.
The demands of the machine on writers are higher than ever.
Read MoreMy new book, The Garden of Happy Endings, has just hit the shelves. It began with a single question: how can a benevolent being/Universe/Higher Power/etc allow young teenage girls to get kidnapped and murdered?
It’s the thing that bugs us the most, right? If there is a God, what the heck is s/he doing when a little girl is kidnapped out of her bedroom? When a boy is snatched from the bus stop? When a jogging teenager is snatched and then tortured and murdered?
I didn’t exactly set out to try answering this question. You’d have to be insane, right? If all the sages and mages and masters have been wrestling with such a question over the centuries, what chance do I, a commercial novelist, have of creating meaningful material out of it?
But I didn’t know the question at first. No, no, as always, the girls in the basement hid it from me. I thought I was writing about a woman who was furious at the anti-woman bias of the Catholic church. A devout Catholic woman, actually, who had to leave the church to find a way to serve her calling. I’m very interested in vocations—not just the churchy kind, but all of them. I feel very lucky to have known from a very young age that I wanted to be a writer. My sister was called to be a nurse and she’s doing that work. I strongly believe every single one of us has some work we are meant to do, and if we can find it and carry it out, the world heals. We heal. We are happy.
But what happens when things get in the way of a vocation? Like a woman who wants to be a priest?
That’s what I thought I was writing about. But really, I was back to my same old subject: why do bad things happen and how can we get through them. The extra layer on that question this time was, “What if the thing that usually gets you through, like your faith or your husband or your work, lets you down at the exact moment you need it the most?”
All of us have those central questions in our work.
Read MoreLately, I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea of the endless number of stories there are in the world, right this very second. Every window in
every house has a story. Every car driving beside me on the highway, every person I glimpse walking in the parkway or standing in line at the grocery store. Every year of history, in every town, in every graveyard.
I’ve always thought about the details that make lives unique, but lately, it’s taken on an obsessive quality that sometimes disconcerts my beloved, especially when he is trapped with me in a long drive at dusk, when I can see into cars and windows. What if you were God, I say to him, and could slip into any of those lives, any time you wanted, see what was going on? And if you were as big as God, wouldn’t that be something you might invent, just to keep yourself entertained? Christopher Robin dubbed this God’s Cable Network, and offered the idea that each of us is a channel.
As writers, we have the opportunity to switch channels a lot, and most of us are so curious we watch as many channels as we possibly can. We’re constantly surfing for new material, stowing away details, opening our eyes wider to find out what else we might discover.
This not only makes for an interesting career, it makes for an interesting life. This weekend, I had a chance to visit Fort Carson which is an enormous Army base at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain. The base has been a background fixture of my life, always present and influencing the world around me, but somehow in 50 years, I’d never actually been on base. My daughter-in-law is active military, however, and she had a baby Saturday (more on that in a minute), so I had to learn how to navigate the gates and find my way to the hospital on my own, even if it was in the middle of the night.
It was intimidating.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago, I was crashing and my beloved knew it. He suggested we take Martin Luther King day off and go to Denver–wander through the new Ikea store to see if we might find some storage for our basement, maybe.
More importantly, we would go hang out at The Tattered Cover bookstore. As Christopher Robin wisely understood, I needed a good long amble through the slightly dusty-smelling aisles of a bookstore with chairs and obscure texts on things like the 1918 flu (one of my current obsessions) and ordinary ones like how to garden year round.
I am a writer. I am a reader. These places are to me like blood to a vampire.
I felt better just walking in. All those silent, noisy books, all the way to the ceiling. All those magazines about every geeky interest in the universe. All those tags telling me why I might like this book and that one. I wanted to savor the upcoming pleasures, so we ate bowls of soup and drank some tea, sitting in the corner just looking at all the possibilities. I felt overcome with pleasure that I am a writer, and took a picture to remember that I am, that this is great stuff, that books are more than commerce, way way way more, and it really was the only life I wanted and I have it.
That was even before going to actually look at books.
These are the sections I checked out: the magazines, including the juicy European fashion rags. Food Essays. The “new and recommended” section. Science fiction and fantasy, where I lingered with the second volume of Connie Willis’s award winning World War II duet, but I haven’t read the first one even though I have it, so I put it back. I wandered through history: medieval, European, World War II and World War I and African American soldiers in WWII. Flu. Fiction, gardens, Indian writing. Memoirs.
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