Lamentations
Please welcome guest author Emilie-Noelle Provost to Writer Unboxed today! Emilie-Noelle is an accomplished editor and writer, having held editorial positions with four magazines and written hundreds of articles over the years. She has a published book of middle-grade fiction, The Blue Bottle, and her first novel of adult fiction, The River is Everywhere–about a 16-year-old who must overcome doubt after his best friend’s shattering death–will release on March 14th.
“Provost’s writing is vivid, and her pace is swift. Readers of all ages will be drawn to this moving coming-of-age tale.”
– Paul Marion, editor of Atop an Underwood, the early work of Jack Kerouac
“Ernest Benoit’s odyssey begins as a search for some meaning that can help him better understand his best friend’s tragic death. But his, at times, dangerous journey quickly becomes a search for his own roots and soul. Provost is a gifted storyteller. The River Is Everywhere is well worth your time.”
– Stephen P. O’Connor, author of The Witch at Rivermouth
Though The River is Everywhere has not yet released, Emilie-Noelle has unfortunately already experienced online harassment over it. Today, she shares that encounter and some advice on how to cope with it.
You can follow Emilie-Noelle on Twitter and Facebook, and learn more about The River is Everywhere on her website: emilienoelleprovost.com. Welcome, Emilie-Noelle!
The day I signed the publishing contract for my second novel, I wrote a post about it on LinkedIn. I tagged the book’s soon-to-be publisher in the text, and included an image of their logo. The small press publishes just ten books a year. The fact that my book would be one of them was tremendously validating. I was delighted to share my good news.
Within minutes of the post going live I received a comment from a writer I was connected with on the platform but didn’t know very well. “That’s a vanity press!” he wrote. “Don’t publish your book with them. You’ll ruin your credibility. Everything you’ve worked for will go down the drain!”
Thinking this person was simply misinformed, I replied. “You must be confusing them with another publisher,” I wrote. “These guys are the real deal.” As proof, I added the link to my new publisher’s website. Believing I had settled the matter, I logged off.
When I looked at the post again later, I was horrified to discover that the same person had gone on an all-out digital tirade, posting multiple comments about how the publisher I had signed with wasn’t legitimate, and that as an author, neither was I. I realized then that, for some reason I still don’t understand, this complete stranger was trying to publicly discredit me and my work. I reported his comments to the site’s admin, removed him from my connections, and deleted the post.
The feeling of accomplishment I’d had that morning evaporated. I was sad and confused. I’d worked on that book for years. Why would a person who knew nothing about me or my work put so much effort into casting doubt on my achievement? Why would anyone be so mean to someone they don’t even know?
Some people get their sustenance from tearing apart others’ creative work. […]
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Please welcome guest author Henriette Lazaridis to Writer Unboxed today! Henriette’s new novel, TERRA NOVA, will be published by Pegasus Books in December 2022. Her debut novel, The Clover House, was a Boston Globe bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors pick. Her work has been published in such outlets as Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, WBUR’s Cognoscenti and Pangyrus, and she is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. Visit her website at https://www.henriettelazaridis.com/.
Linger, Tinker, Savor: Taking the Time to Get it Right
I came to novel-writing later in life, after a career in academia. Though I’d decided as a teenager that I wanted more than anything to be a novelist, one thing led to another, and I detoured into scholarship and teaching at the university level, and then I was almost forty when I realized I’d strayed from my once-held dream. Starting “late”—or so I thought—I became a Woman in a Hurry. It’s not that I wrote massive amounts right away. Quite the contrary, in fact. I didn’t take myself seriously for a few years and kept undermining myself by engaging in all manner of other pursuits on top of (and often in place of) writing. But even then, I was in a hurry mentally. When I did finally get serious about writing novels, I wanted everything to happen fast.
My first novel, The Clover House, set me up for some false expectations of speed to come. The novel went on sub on a Thursday and, by the Monday, I had phone interviews with three publishers. About three weeks later, I had a sale. This gave me the impression it would always go like this. You write the draft, you revise a little, you go on sub, and bingo, you sell. I imagined doing this on a sort of two-year timetable and queued up my ideas accordingly.
Insert a pause for sad-maniacal laughter.
No, the next manuscript I wrote did not go off into publication at lightning speed. Nor did the next one. But though the publishing world’s operations were slowing me down, I continued to write if not quickly then briskly. I began a third manuscript, and then set it aside to revise one of the two novels I’d already completed, reworking it under the skillful and attentive scrutiny of my then agent. Before the ink was barely dry on a finished draft of Terra Nova, I began and finished another manuscript, during the pandemic (didn’t everyone?), in a matter of months.
The take-away from all these manuscripts bouncing around in my writerly existence isn’t the speed of their creation. That’s, in fact, the cautionary tale. The real lesson is that the ones that really succeeded were the product of time and slowness. Notice that while we have a nifty word for when things are fast—speed!—the word for when things are slow is awkward. Slowness? And yet, there it is: a word that takes as much drawn-out time to say as is fitting for its meaning. What worked best for me as a […]
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Photo by author
Recently, in his writer’s newsletter, Story Club, George Saunders wrote about packing for a move and completing what he called a “death cleaning”, which is not his concept, but a Swedish one, he explained, where a person edits their belongings before death, in order to simplify things for their survivors.
I’ve been doing some of my own death cleaning lately (I’m just fine, BTW, nothing dire to see here), and I admit that just maybe, there is a little teensy smidge of avoidance behavior going on. I tell myself it’s a good time to set my novel-in progress aside for a bit and then go back to it with fresh eyes after the holidays. Anyway, I started the Big Clean in my studio (see above), which was originally built in the 1920s as a bunkhouse on our farmhouse property. It might have held two sets of bunk beds in its prime, and originally had a wood stove. It has no central heat, air conditioning, or plumbing, but it is MINE—my she-shed, or whatever. Honestly, I hate that term. But I digress. For the twenty-two years I’ve lived here, it has been my place. I began by sorting a bin of tangled needlepoint yarn in a mélange of harshly bright 1970s shades. There were four unfinished needlework projects—two by me and two I inherited from a friend of my mother’s when she died, comprising one knotty, half-finished, floral pillow cover and a just-started monogrammed tennis racket cover. I’ve no idea whose monogram it is (was?), and the cover is small enough to fit a 1970s-era wooden racquet. Toss!
Next, I found the accoutrement required to make a smocked infant garment, given to me by a friend who taught me this craft twenty-some years ago, before the birth of my daughter. Back then, I completed one dress and thought I’d rather go through first-stage labor again than start another smocking project.
And so it went.
Bin by bin, I had to decide which things I might use again someday. I still knit obsessively, so my yarn stash and pattern books remain. My newest hobby, originated during lockdown, is knitting little 7” forest animals with clothes, and making rooms for them and telling their stories @tinyfoxstory on Instagram. So there are myriad minuscule fiddly bits to misplace and step on. My three sewing machines stay in use these days mainly for repairing chewed dog beds. I’ll also save craft supplies I hope to use with my toddler granddaughter someday. Pneumatic upholstery stapler? Nah.
From a post on Instagram by the brilliant cartoonist Roz Chast @rozchast, I found an organization in New York called Materials for the Arts, a government-sponsored “creative reuse center.” They are happy to accept donations of beads, buttons, fabrics, art supplies, etc. So boxing up things to mail off kept me busy for a good few days and produced a flattering glow of accomplishment. I tossed! I culled! I donated!
My Marie-Kondo-inspired self (have not read, BTW) was feeling pretty pumped by now—warmed up and ruthless. It was time to double down and tackle the alternate function […]
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Spooky season is here — and what could be more horrifying or haunting to a writer than the projects that have met tragic ends?
Whether big or small, we all have a graveyard of failed work. The novels we got 10K words into, and then just lost steam on. The essay that never quite came together. The manuscript that garnered a decent number of requests from agents, yet couldn’t land an offer. The seeds of ideas that simply never managed to grow into anything more.
Some of these deaths hurt more than others. My personal cemetery includes all of them and more.
Because I am a slow writer, the most common cause of death for my writing projects is running out of momentum, interest, or relevance. Similar to tombstones marked with the years of birth and death, my hard drive is littered with files labeled “Road Trip Novel (2016 version),” then “Road Trip Novel (2018 version),” then “Road Trip Novel (2021 version),” and such, until finally I realize it is futile. No matter how many times I try to revive it, the window for this story has already closed. Maybe the headline that inspired it has become old news. Or the internal struggle I was having, and that I built a whole story around, has resolved itself. (More likely, it has been replaced by some new and more pressing anxiety, haha.) Whatever the reason, the fuel for this work has been exhausted, and my energy would be better spent moving on to the next thing. To be fair, this seems like a relatively natural and peaceful way for a story to die.
On the other hand, I’ve had to “murder” a project once or twice, after realizing that I simply wasn’t the best writer to tell it. (Jeanne Kisacky recently opened a good discussion about this right here at Writer Unboxed: “Who Are You Reading Now?”) For example, many years ago, I started a story about a bisexual Black teenager who was being bullied by a former best friend, so her mother sent her to live temporarily with a friend in Barcelona. Certain elements were drawn from my own experiences, and the heart of the story — about a girl who heals herself with the help of found family in a foreign place — still calls to me. But other aspects felt like too much of a stretch for me to write well, and were simply too important to risk getting wrong. For a while, I resisted what had to be done, but eventually I came to see it as a mercy killing, on several levels.
By far the most painful addition to my graveyard came from the manuscript that snagged me two offers of representation from top-notch agents, only to die a drawn-out, back-and-forth death on submission. I spent 3 years writing and revising that book, 3 months querying, 6 months on submission, and finally, at least 9 months in mourning for the future that it (and I) would not get to have. Does it haunt me? Absolutely. In the time since then, I have racked my brain with doubts and second guessing. Was it bad luck, bad timing, bad writing? Should I have just […]
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Stephen of England, 1153 from WIkipedia.
In my last post about revising a novel draft, I offered up some primo advice from four successful and wise author friends. I’m still revising my own draft, so, being totally self-serving, I thought I’d stay with this theme and tell you about a fabulous program I found for self-editing. Then, I’ll fangirl for a bit over two gifted authors who don’t follow the rules, and finally, I’ll wrap up with a short rant about style. If you’re up for it, read on.
I’ve just joined up with two talented writers in a novel critique group and I look forward to having fresh eyes on my work. My number hasn’t come up yet, so being the insecure impostor that I am, I wanted to buff up my pages as much as I’m able to on my own before handing them over to my critique partners. I’m deep into the hairpulling stage of revising my third novel manuscript and I have some character arc issues to and some sequencing to work out, so it’s a great time for feedback. In the meantime, I’m exploring techniques for polishing pages on one’s own.
Here are the resources I used so far:
MS Word. I wrote my first two novels in Word. 350-page documents, and I used up hours of my life scrolling, searching for a keyword to find where I wanted to be in the manuscript. I kept separate desktop files for research, photos, and drafts. I like Word for finding overused words. A word search through the manuscript produces a tidy list in the left margin, and slap, slap, slap, like a teacher’s ruler across one’s palm, those pesky overused words go away and you can enjoy the smug self-satisfaction that only a lowered word count can bring. Also, Word’s basic spelling and grammar checker is easy to use to find glaring typos.
Scrivener. As a pandemic pastime, I converted. Like the camera on my iPhone, I know Scrivener has a lot of cool features I haven’t mastered yet, but to utilize them, I’d have to remember 1. what they are, and 2. how they work. So there’s that. Once I learned the basics, there was no going back. And I haven’t gotten much past the basics. I love the corkboard feature for sequencing, and I can add a mood photo to accompany each scene. It’s also handy to have research right there at hand, as well as character sketches. I’m not a Save The Cat devotee, but I did recently see a Scrivener template for that construction format offered from writer/blogger Jen Terpstra. (Save the Cat was originally a book about screenwriting, by Blake Snyder, recently adapted as a novel-writing format by Jessica Brody).
Grammarly. I’ve written about this program before, with mixed reviews. I don’t trust it. I’ve fed it my novel manuscripts, chapter by bloody chapter. Sometimes I get a proper hand slap: [really, Liza, how many times are you putting in “its” where “it’s” belongs, and vice versa?] As writer’s grammar goes, Grammarly is often just plain wrong. It […]
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As I sit at my desk, my wireless keyboard waiting expectantly, my fingers hover ever so lightly on its keys. My extra wide gaming screen shines brightly in my eyes, with the minutes ticking away as the TV in the background emits white noise. I wait for the words to come. And wait. And wait.
They don’t come.
I swivel in my chair facing the TV, thinking, “Oh, General Hospital’s on,” and realize that it’s 2 pm and the day has slid past me. I have to pick up my kid in an hour, talk about the school day, and maybe make dinner. Hopefully, I’ll be able to write before I get sleepy.
I should have started writing at 8 am, typing my way to literary heaven. I should have banged out at least 1600 words to keep up with my Scrivener target count and deadline.
I didn’t.
Instead, I whiled the day away, sitting at this desk. I daydreamed. I lamented. I checked social. I texted. I even paid some bills — and who the hell wants to do that? I begged for words to drop into my head so I could write They Come At Knight. It didn’t happen the next day, or the next, or the next…for months.
The words abandoned me. Creativity that once flowed, betrayed me, leaving me insecure and confused. Second-guessing myself and angry that words seemed so effortless for everyone, I struggled to get down ten. I developed a debilitating fear that I was going to disappoint everyone: my publisher, my agent, my family and friends, the readers.
I don’t include myself in that list of people who I was going to disappoint because writing, to me, was no longer for me. It was for everyone else. That’s why I became too paralyzed to write.
When I wrote Her Name Is Knight, I wrote for me. I wrote to get out this story that had been building within me for years. I wrote while holding down a demanding full-time job and commuting daily, raising kids, and other family duties. When the house was finally quiet because my kids are great like that, I sat on my bed and wrote the night away. Effortlessly. Because I was writing for me. With no expectations. No limitations. No deadline looming over my head. No promoting one book while attempting to write the other. No one was waiting for my first book but me. And that feeling was glorious!
I had to write the second book before the first one was even released. I didn’t know how HNIK would be received. How could I write a sequel when I didn’t know what worked, or not, with the first? I guessed. I wrote the story and prayed everyone would love it too. I know how people can be when the sequel isn’t like the first. I didn’t want to disappoint before I even knew what would be disappointing.
Then the reviews started rolling in. Everyone seemed to love Nena Knight and her story. They said such marvelous things, calling the voice haunting, telling me they cried when they read the end. Good, because so did I! I received emails where readers told me just how much my book meant to them. Stuff I would say […]
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Note: This post does not contain a happy ending.
In Seattle, June is the cruelest month. Terrifying. Violent, too. A month where people rarely leave their homes, and if they must, they hurry from house to car, exhaling only once safely inside, windows rolled up, doors locked. In June, schools forgive truancy. Non-urgent appointments–dental check-ups, meetings with financial planners, eyebrow shaping–pretty much anything other than trips to the ER–are put off until mid-July.
Have you seen Hitchcock’s film, The Birds? Hitchcock himself claimed, “It could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made.”
I bet Hitchcock was inspired by Seattle in June.
Because of Poe’s quothing ravens, I’ve always found crows a bit sinister, but in general, I had no beef with any corvids, not really, until June 2013. While walking to get my daughter at school, a crow–out of nowhere–slapped me across the back of the head with a rolled-up magazine. At least, that’s what it felt like.
The June 2015 NPR story, “They Will Strafe You,” taught me these attacks are common. I was simply in the wrong place (near the crow’s fledglings) at the wrong time (June, fledgling season). This particular crow, undoubtedly sleep deprived and struggling with postpartum depression, deemed me a threat. Thus, she grabbed her June 2013 issue of The New Yorker, or perhaps The Economist, or maybe it was The New Republic, and whacked my head.
I began to fear another strafing.
“No eye contact, people!” I’d yell at my children, my husband, my dog, whenever I saw a crow. “You make eye contact, and THEY WILL STRAFE YOU!”
The whole world was starting to feel unsafe, and not just in June. Year-round, I felt the beady eyes of crows upon me.
Fast forward nine (terror-filled) years, and we arrive at Spring 2022.
At the end of May, bunion surgery left me horizontal with my sad, swollen foot in the air. For weeks, I crutched only between the TV room sofa and my Room of Convalescence. Back and forth, forth and back.
Bedridden and homebound, I could not escape their terrible cawing, could not ignore the murderous shadows that darkened my windows. Twenty-three days post-op, loopy with a weird mix of boredom and fatigue, tired of my POW status, I raised my fist at the crow-laden spruce in my yard.
“Nevermore!” I shouted. “NEVERMORE!”
After Googling “what do crows eat,” (the answer: “pretty much anything”) I crutched to the kitchen and found a box of stale, generic-brand Wheat Thins. […]
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We’re thrilled to have returning guest Danielle Davis on Writer Unboxed today! Danielle has had dark fantasy and horror published in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, The Astounding Outpost, and multiple anthologies. You can find her on most social media under the handle “LiteraryEllyMay” and at her website, literaryellymay.com
It’s Not Me, It’s the Story
Have you ever reached a point where you couldn’t see the path forward while writing your story, and found yourself saying, “What is wrong with me?” It’s an easy trap to fall into, to see our stories as a projection of ourselves and to equate our story’s perceived value with an internal sense of worth. We put so much of ourselves into our writing that it’s a natural tendency to create an inflated sense of connection between the two and to take it personally when the story doesn’t want to work the way we want it to. This, in turn, drains motivation and makes it hard to move past those negative feelings.
In her TED Talk, “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection,” Reshma Saujani provides the anecdote of a friend who is an instructor at the University of Columbia. During office hours with his computer science students, he noted that men struggling with an assignment would say, “Professor, there’s something wrong with my code.” But when the women came in, they said, “Professor, there’s something wrong with me.”
This resonated with me. I, too, struggle with the culture that Saujani coins “perfection or bust” when I’m working on a story. I often beat myself up about not being further along as an author or tell myself that it’s a personal failing on my part. I tell myself that mine are pipe dreams and I’m just not cut out for this work. It’s a pervasive thought, that you aren’t enough, and if you’re not careful, it can fester and grow into a writer’s block that sticks.
Not too long ago, after wrestling with a sudden dead-end in my WIP, I went to my husband and lamented, “It’s not working out. I think I’m just not the writer for this story.” He very quickly (and correctly) called me out about it. Talking with him made me realize that it wasn’t ME. I wasn’t the failure. Elements in my story needed to be improved. A few tears and several days later, I realized what wasn’t working and made the necessary corrections. And it began to move again.
In the process, I began to identify several ways to fight that sense of personal failure and inadequacy:
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(Yes, this actually IS a photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
In my previous post, I focused on the importance of the written word in the time of Covid, and on how I was embracing a newfound reliance on written correspondence to stay connected with people – in particular, people I care deeply about. Among the books I mentioned in that post was this collection of letters written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I recommend to anyone who’s a fan of the author.
Since posting that, I stumbled onto a powerful quote from F. Scott. (By the way, how cool is his name? I actually went through a phase in college where I insisted on being listed in musical programs as “K. Daniel Cronin.” Good thing I wasn’t pretentious or anything, right? But I digress…)
The particular quote attributed to F (er, can I call him F? Okay, probably not) was: “Nothing any good isn’t hard.”
Or at least that’s what Facebook (or Instagram or some other social media site) wanted me to believe. Ever the skeptic, I researched the quote to see whether F (okay, his real first name was Francis, which helps me understand why he chose the initial) actually ever said that. Turns out, he did.
But far more interesting to me was the context in which Mr. F expressed that thought: It was in a 1936 letter to his then 15-year-old daughter “Scottie,” to whom he was providing a combination of coaching and tough love re her aspirations to become a writer like her dear old man. The letter skips around a bit, some of it addressing Scottie’s complaints about life at the new boarding school she was attending, but then her father turns his attention to a story she’d written. To quote from the book I mentioned above:
“Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it […]
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Please welcome author and community member Tom Pope back to WU today! Tom was a singer/songerwriter in Hollywood for twenty years before turning to novels. His second novel The Trouble with Wisdom is a cross-genre tale, being compared to a union of McCarthy’s The Road and Mattiessen’s The Snow Leopard, a dystopian story that gives rise to hope. It launches this Tuesday, 2/22/22. A prolific guy, Tom has four more novels in the pipe line.
We’re thrilled that he’s here today to bring us a provocation about hope, fear, and creation.
Learn more about Tom and his novels on his website, and by following him on Facebook and Twitter.
Joan Didion’s passing reminded me that after no one pronounced my first book brilliant, trendsetting, and sure to meet with fabled destiny, I realized I was slouching toward Neverland and quit writing for good.
It may surprise you that the next books I wrote in spite of my commitment to join the circus to avoid writing also sucked. My secret is: angst and self-contempt make for wonderful inspiration to get to the writing nook, so in my spare time I hone them to a sharp edge. In addition, ruinous doubt has proved to be a powerful enhancement for doing my best work. . .
. . . Said no author ever.
The Place of Dopamine
According to endocrinology and other scientific disciplines I can’t pronounce, success—such as landing a publishing deal—triggers dopamine response, which fuels happiness. But before you run too far with that, consider that eating food, sleeping well, and taking a bath produce the same result.
In the interest of personal and community care, as authors, let’s lay the cards on the table. 1) Writing involves nearly endless intricacies of the highest form of human cognition along with the mastery of many particular skills. Only the initial aspects of these capacities can be taught. Sharpening them is up to us. 2) The fabrication is time consuming. 3) Underlying each stage of writing lies a barely understood ability of mind—the creative process. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the challenging landscape we work in.
The publishing industry, on the other hand, is not particularly interested in these things, including our dopamine response. So why would we—except under threat of death—surrender our symbiotic relationship with it in favor of taking a fused subordinate position if doing so weakens our passion to write, the quality of the work, and most importantly our ability to live happy and fulfilling lives . . . which can enhance our writing?
Earth, Sky, and Sales
Regarding creativity, consider each of us is bound by the parameters of the soil from which our creative process springs; things like our culture, country and history, our education and dwelling situation, and our health, backstory and gender. These conditions shape the stories which arise in the blue sky of our creativity. We cannot create what we cannot conceive.
What universal law, though, says that what we conceive will lie neatly on today’s idiosyncratic commercial path to fame and wealth? AND what axiom states that if our work doesn’t lie neatly there, it is bad? (That some authors solve this problem […]
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As we come up on the two-year anniversary of our lives being changed forever by the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s easy to think about everything we have lost. And I know I am not alone in being sorely disappointed in the failures of our governments, our health agencies, and society at large in not adopting any sort of consistent or universal approach to combating this deadly scourge. But even though I’m admittedly a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I can’t help but notice one ongoing behavioral shift that I attribute primarily to the pandemic, which I believe is both relevant and even beneficial to us as writers:
The increased power of the written word.
I really do believe that writing has become more important than ever. And this is particularly interesting to me, since for more than 20 years I’ve been earning my living as a writer in the corporate world.
The biggest surprise I encountered when I first entered white-collar life was that most people apparently do NOT like to write. Many of them find it hard, unpleasant or flat-out frustrating. And to me an even bigger surprise was to find smart, educated people who were extremely articulate and effective speakers, yet could barely write an intelligible sentence.
Having been raised by a pair of journalists, I grew up thinking that writing and speaking were essentially two sides of the same coin, since in my household we were expected to be able to express ourselves in writing just as well as via the spoken word. I had no idea that this was not the case for most families. In working with my new colleagues and clients in the corporate world, I soon learned that just because somebody was an eloquent speaker, it did not necessarily mean they were able to capture that same eloquence when they wrote.
The good thing was: Because so many people hated to write, I could earn a nice living, because – wait for it – they would pay ME to write for them! Who knew? Seriously – this was a major revelation to me, and has been the secret to my staying gainfully employed for the past couple of decades. But that revelation is why I also find this new Covid-era trend so surprising. I mean, if people don’t like to write, why are they doing it so much? I have some thoughts on this.
But before I go on to defend my hypothesis, I want to acknowledge that I’ve seen numerous posts on this site over the past couple of years about how some of us are NOT writing. Posters and commenters alike have expressed how they’ve felt blocked, disinclined to write, unable to concentrate on artistic endeavors in light of all that’s going on around us, and so on. But while some of us may have found our creative writing efforts hampered or even shut down by the sheer emotional and psychological weight of these turbulent times, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of us have actually been doing more writing than ever. Think about it:
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The writing shed of my dreams, not my actual office
I saw a photo of Alix E. Harrow on twitter recently. In it, she’s wearing a baby in a front pack and has a toddler tucked under one armpit, her eyes are glazed — probably from sleep deprivation — and she’s typing madly away. In the caption, she reveals that the manuscript she’s working on will eventually become THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES.
The photo made me nostalgic — I wrote my first book in much the same manner — and it also made me laugh, because–although I cannot fit my almost-adult children on my lap or under my arm anymore, nor would they be caught dead in either position–the search for a private place to write twenty years later is still ongoing.
I had an office in my first house — a loft with a tiny balcony overlooking our yard. The view was so lovely I set my desk against the wall so I wouldn’t be distracted, and I motivated myself with timed breaks on the balcony. The house had an open floor plan, which was perfect for two adults. But babies are much more distracting than views and after our first arrived, my productivity took a dive. Thankfully, we moved to another house soon after. This one had no balcony but did have the benefit of an office for me on the second floor, complete with a door that closed.
The room was large enough to hold a small couch, and often when I was working at night the door would creak open and my toddler would tiptoe in, board book and sippy cup in hand, secure in the knowledge that so long as she was quiet I wouldn’t rat her out to her dad, who had bedtime duty. I stocked the bookshelves, not just with craft tomes, but also with stuffed animals and quiet toys, and I painted the walls kid-friendly pastels. I wrote for newspapers and magazines in that room, and finished and sold my first novel from there.
But as time passed, the kids grew up and went to school. I no longer needed to barricade myself in to finish an article or chapter, no longer had to work only during nights and nap times. Oddly, now that I had what I’d longed for — a few uninterrupted hours of writing time — the office felt far too quiet. I took to wandering the house with my laptop, writing some days at the kitchen table, other times on the living room couch. When I truly felt like I was going crazy in the silence, I packed up and headed to a local library or coffee shop.
And then Covid struck. Like most everyone else, all my chickies came home to roost at once, filling the house. The two teenagers stayed mostly in their bedrooms, which left my husband. Who needed a place to work with a door that closed. A place like … my office.
On paper it made sense. He has a job that often involves discussing confidential information, whereas most of my conversations take place with people I’ve made up in my head. Even so, he was reluctant to […]
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What do I, as an author, owe to myself? What do I owe to my publisher? To my readers?
I think about this often as I promote my debut novel, Waiting for the Night Song, while simultaneously revising my forthcoming novel, The Last Beekeeper, and drafting what will hopefully become my third novel.
To whom do I owe what?
I wrote Waiting for the Night Song with no expectations. I created a story I needed to tell, not knowing if I would ever sell it. I wrote the book for myself. After landing the elusive book contract, I incorporated changes based on suggestions from my editor. At this point, I was still writing for myself — sort of.
New expectations started lining up.
I wanted to please my editor and my agent, both of whom took a gamble when they signed me. I wanted to make them proud. I wanted my book to succeed commercially. But mostly, I need this book of my heart to be mine, to be the book I had envisioned for so many years.
It was still my book, right?
Ideas, many of them bad, started sneaking into my head. Should I add more surprise twists? Books with twisty plots were topping the charts, so I added a poorly-conceived plot contortion, for no reason other than I thought readers wanted it.
I quickly deleted the ridiculous subplot because it didn’t serve the theme of my book, and this book was, after all, for me.
To be clear, my editor and agent have never pressured me to change my writing in ways that didn’t feel right for my story. They make suggestions, not demands. But after years of writing just for myself, I now feel the burden of writing for other people, as well.
I started to wonder: Was Waiting for the Night Song still mine?
Every time I contemplated a change, I checked in with the little voice inside my head that shouted: Is this really what you want?
Waiting for the Night Song launched in January 2021. As soon I got the first copy in my hands, I took a long, hard look at my beautiful book, and I can honestly say, yes, it is the book I wanted to write.
But as soon as it hit the shelves, a new player came into the picture: readers. Early readers, reviewers, influencers, book clubs, and they all had opinions.
When I Zoomed in to virtual book clubs to chat about my book, I occasionally faced tough questions. Did that character really need to die? Are you pushing a political agenda?
At first, I assumed a defensive position when anyone challenged my authorial choices. Didn’t they understand I wrote this book for myself? Of course, my writing includes my worldview. But I soon realized that the day I released my book into the world, it no longer belonged to me, at least not completely.
My book did not belong to my agent or my publisher.
It belonged to my readers.
Every reader who invests time and money in reading my book owns a piece of the story. They read my words through the filter of their own lived experiences. I believe the scenes I wrote play out differently in the minds of each reader.
Some readers appreciate the choices I make for my characters. Other readers […]
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I often turn to Disney and Pixar for easily identifiable examples of craft elements for my classes, as well as their approaches to plot in general. Their writing is dependably clean, clear, and effective in their most popular movies.
So when I heard there was a documentary Disney had banned about an unfinished movie, I was immediately intrigued. It appeared the documentary filmmakers had been granted unparalleled access behind Disney’s closed doors, gleaning a rumored 150 hours of footage. When the documentary debuted, Disney responded by buying up the rights and shoving the film into their infamous vault.
But the internet being what it is, a fine cut of the documentary exists in fairly frequent rounds. Its contents, however, are less about dirty Disney secrets and more about a universal truth that resonated a little too hard for me as a writer.
The documentary, called The Sweatbox, was directed by Trudie Styler (musician Sting’s wife) and John Paul Davidson, and premiered at festivals in 2002. Named after what the original Walt Disney crew called their screening room—at the time, a wooden shack with no air conditioning—this documentary depicted the wild ride that was the production of The Kingdom of the Sun, which would eventually turn into The Emperor’s New Groove. Why Disney apparently banned the documentary from further distribution, however, was less due to it being about an unfinished movie and more about the grueling process of writing itself–particularly, how often the final project becomes something nearly unrecognizable from its bright-eyed beginnings. The sweatbox, in so many words, is the unhappiest place on earth.
Released in 2000 and loosely set in ancient Peru, The Emperor’s New Groove is the story of Emperor Kuzco, a spoiled young man and unintentional queer icon who decides to build a Kuzco-only water park on the generations-old land of Pacha, a gentle llama herder. When Kuzco simultaneously fires his queer-goals royal adviser, Yzma, she decides to exact revenge by poisoning him and taking over. The plan is predictably botched when put into the hands of her himbo henchman, Kronk, and Kuzco is turned into a llama. Making a false deal with Pacha to spare his land, Kuzco and Pacha must return to the palace to change Kuzco back to human while avoiding Yzma and Kronk, who have since realized their blunder and are hunting Kuzco down.
The film is as silly as you can imagine such a plot to be, bordering on a near Looney Tunes quality of wacky mayhem. So far off the beaten path as it is, the film is frequently forgotten as a movie within the Disney canon. So how did it become what it became?
In late 1994/early 1995, Roger Allers, fresh off his successful co-direction of The Lion King, decided he wanted to make a film set in Peru.[1] After two years of research, planning, and production work with his team, he approached Sting in 1997 to write the music for The Kingdom of the Sun, at which point Sting had put the documentary into his Disney contract as a stipulation. Mark Dindal was also brought on as co-director of the feature film. The entire team then went full tilt into the work.
(A sidenote on representation: This is a movie inspired by Peru and […]
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