WILL TALK WRITING FOR MARTINIS

Aspiring authors sometimes ask me whether they should go to a writing conference.

The short answer is yes, if it's one I'm going to be speaking at.

Your remaining options in 2013 are:

·         Writer's Digest West, in Los Angeles September 27-29. All information here: http://tinyurl.com/c76lmtu.  I'll be doing two presentations, one on Saturday afternoon ('How to Write a Dynamite Mystery or Thriller that Sells'), the other Sunday morning ('Quit Your Day Job—Seriously!).

·         Florida Writer's Association, in Lake Mary, Florida (Orlando) October 18-20. All information here: http://floridawriters.net/2013_FWA_Conferences.html For this one I'll be doing 'How to Write a Dynamite Mystery or Thriller that Sells.'

At both of these conferences you'll meet and learn from other experienced professionals, be able to buy books and get them signed, and not least, you'll meet other aspiring writers.

The longer answer to "Should I go to a conference?" is this: Conferences cost time and money, and you need to be reasonably sure the conference you pick will be worth it.

 

The best way to pick a conference is read the schedule and see who the faculty is. If your writerly heart beats faster while reading a session description, pay attention. If this happens three or more times, seriously consider going to that conference.

Star appeal is a funny question. Most conferences feature one or two brand-name authors, and if a particular author is an idol of yours, it would be cool to meet that person. You'd naturally want to thank them for writing the books they do, and hey, maybe it would be possible to pick their brain on the art and business of writing, if only for a few minutes.

Trouble is, the bigger the name, the more they'll be overrun by fans (or cornered by overt opportunists), and the less chance you'll have of making contact. I remember being at a huge conference that featured a marquee author I really wanted to meet. I went to his session, and that was neat, but afterward he was so totally swarmed that I never got a chance to talk with him one on one.

So if you do meet up with that big-name author, great! But the more rewarding approach is to focus on learning new things and making friends. There is absolutely no way Facebook or Twitter can give you the sort of connection that just hanging out with somebody can. I should probably stand in the hotel bar holding a sign that says, "WILL TALK WRITING FOR MARTINIS." (I will absolutely talk writing for martinis.)

 

Moreover, most presenters try to be as available as possible during conferences, not just at the official meet-n-greets. I like to hang out after my presentation and answer questions I couldn't get to in the time allotted. If I have to vacate the room for the next speaker, I pull over somewhere nearby (ideally a corridor with a comfy chair or two!) and listen to aspiring writers and try to help them.

Apart from the presenters, there are your fellow participants. If, when you look in the mirror, you see a nice, interesting, caring person there (and I know you do), you will be amazed at how many nice, interesting, caring people you will find at a writing conference!

It's true. Writers tend to be terrific people. Smile, schmooze, and make friends. Some friendships will last a lifetime. It's happened to me.

Have you attended a writing conference? How did you approach the experience? Tell us! To post a comment, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

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How to Write Scared

In my undergraduate days I hung out with other students who questioned the value of book-learning over direct experience. There's a lot to be said for direct experience, and one of the direct experiences I had was getting stoned.

This happened several times.

One night I was visiting a friend at her apartment off campus, where we enjoyed some of the latest imports, and it was time for me to get back to my dorm, some ten miles away. We went out to her car. I headed toward the passenger door but she stopped me, pushed her keys into my hand, and said, "You drive."

"Oh, I'm too stoned."

"Elizabeth. You've got to learn to drive stoned."

Although these days I'm known for prudent judgment and a strong sense of social responsibility, in those days I was not.

"Well, how do I learn to drive stoned?" I inquired.

"By driving stoned."

"Oh."

"You just have to believe you can do it."

At the moment, the logic was pure and powerful. So I got behind the wheel, believing I could drive perfectly well stoned, including the part of the route that went past the state police post. In fact I drove back to campus perfectly well.

I took from that experience an important lesson, and it was this: An impairment need not be an impediment.

Needless to say, I don't advocate driving under the influence of anything but caffeine. But this lesson relates to much in life, especially writing.

Fear comes to all writers sometimes: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of mediocrity. Fear makes you tighten up. Tightness is no good. Therefore, it's a fact that the state of fear is an impairment. But it need not be an impediment.

The cool, fantastic reality is that we don't have to vanquish fear in order to write with zest and freedom. If you're too scared to write, just write a little bit and see how you feel.

Understand that the way to consistent output in writing is to be able to write under any emotional load. And there is no trick or technique to doing it.

Every day, simply act on your writing goals, no matter how good you've gotten at inventing obstacles for yourself, like anxiety. Welcome cold fear, let it rush to you, fangs foaming.

Then go about your writing.

Surprisingly, your fear will snuggle up close to you while you write. It will get warm.

What's fear but another friend, anyway?

Breaking news p.s.:
I'll be presenting two sessions at Writer's Digest Conference West,
Sept 27 - 29 in Los Angeles.  Early registration before July 19 is $50
off the full price.
http://www.writersdigestconference.com/ehome/61986/speaker/
Sessions by me:
"How to Write a Dynamite Mystery or Thriller That SELLS"
and "Quit Your Day Job - Seriously!"
More on this soon. 

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[Photo info: This is a picture of my left hand.] [Taken by my right.]

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A Quill on the Fourth

Given that I'm writing this on Independence Day for the United States, wouldn't you think my theme should be independence? Wrong! I'm a writing nerd, and there's an opportunity here, but it's not idealism.

Here's the Declaration of Independence, this image stolen directly from the National Archives web site. Have you ever seen such a beautiful job of penmanship? (The reproduction doesn't do it justice.)

There's tons of history about the draft and the revisions and then the finished Declaration, which was famously engraved on broadsheets and distributed to the American people as soon as it was ratified by the Congress.

When I was a small child, I was given a modern reproduction, nicely printed on aged-looking heavy paper. I looked at it a lot, wondering how anybody could write that beautifully, and I decided it was because they used a beautiful pen, the feather quill.

Being a little word nerd, I developed a fascination with writing instruments, papers, and so forth, but my handwriting never looked good, and I never tried writing with a quill pen until today.

For a long time I thought that John Hancock actually wrote out the document, given that his signature was so big and bold and centered, as if he had the right to sign it so. But today I learned that a guy named Timothy Matlack, who assisted the secretary of the Congress (Charles Thomson) is probably the one wrote it out all nice and neat. Hancock simply jumped right in there, front and center, with that signature. There's a lesson somewhere in there.

I've since lost my copy of the document, but I did see that signature many times afterward: I dated a boy in school who happened to be named John Hancock. Early in life he learned to write his name exactly like the famous one—quite a feat using the ballpoint pens we all used then. I remember us checking books out of the library together once—this in the days when you had to write your name on the card that resided in a pocket inside every book's cover—and the librarian getting angry about John's signature, thinking he was fooling around. This was also in the days before student I.D.s, so John had no way of proving that was his real name. Together we convinced her, as I remember.

Upon getting up this morning, I got out a vulture feather I'd found on the golf course last year, figuring I'd make a quill pen out of it someday. I had washed it when I found it, so it was theoretically disease-free.

I looked up how to cut a quill on line, and realized if I were to do it right, I couldn't do it today, because you're supposed to let the feather soak in water overnight, then let it dry, then heat the quill end in sand that you've warmed in your oven or on your stovetop, and this will temper the quill (which I guess means make it harder), then you must get the right sort of blade to cut it with, then do your very fine cutting which cannot be achieved just right by any idiot on the first try, and gosh it all seemed totally hopeless.

So I just took my feather and my miniature Swiss Army knife and hacked a point, split it, and dipped it in some brown Pelikan ink. During coffee delivery by my loving muse, I opened a sketchbook and gave it a shot. I didn't make it through the first sentence of the Declaration, and my result looks like hell, but here it is:

Happy Fourth, happy writing, and God bless America.

I welcome your comments! Specifically, have you ever written with a quill? Ever wanted to? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

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Bad Writer, Good Writer, Great Writer

 What's the difference between a bad writer, a good writer, and a great writer?

When I was a college freshman, my English professor said, "Lots of young people want to write. But before you write, you must first have something to say."

The message was: The yearning to write is not sufficient to produce something worthwhile to read.

At the time, I thought that was an extremely wise insight.

Later, having written a book or two, I realized that great writers do not write because they have something to say. They write in order to find out something, or to get at something. Writing like that can be as thrilling for the reader as for the writer. You can get fire and ice that way.

Moreover, even if you begin a piece of writing knowing quite exactly what you want to say, if you’re relaxed about it you’ll find your heartbrain going off in interesting, unexpected directions. And if you begin with nothing but your pencil and a sense of vague desperation, you’ll eventually find yourself focusing and sharpening on something worthwhile, and smiling as you go.

I've learned that way too many writers get confused and think they're preachers.

Bad writers preach badly: "Mean people suck and should be hated."

Good writers preach well: "Mean people suck and should be pitied."

Great writers draw on their deepest courage and humility: "Mean people are the likes of you and me."

Nobody needs a preacher. Just shed light. Great writing is a journey of discovery, and it can be undertaken by anybody.

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[Photo info: I took this shot of the sky over Sarasota, Florida.]

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Don't Feed the Lunkheads

Every artist strives to produce amazing, fabulous, original work.

No authentic artist, however, strives to produce perfect work.

Why not? Two reasons:

One, the very act of striving for perfection hampers free expression. I mean, that's true by definition: since perfection is impossible on this earth—given how molecules sort of squish around all over the place and all, even those of precise instruments such as laser beams and Stradivarius violins—it follows that striving for the impossible is futile. And futile effort cannot result in free, fullhearted creativity, no way.

On some level our heartbrain knows this. If we consciously try for perfection—that is, the impossible—our heartbrain will quietly but forcefully go to war against that. Result: anxiety, doubt, fear, and crappy work.

Two, an audience who can tell junk from real art will intuitively reject any product of a perfectionistic artist. Another term for perfectionist is control freak. The product of such a person will be brightly polished and free from cosmetic mistakes. As such, it will be pretty and it will fool lunkheads who will probably buy it. And it will have no soul.

Do not feed the lunkheads.

Go after the audience you want—that is, an audience who will appreciate you and will stick with you—by forgetting perfection and going at it headlong, reckless, and grinning like a maniac.

End note:

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Good Writing Doesn't Flinch

Recently I was at a party and spent some time talking with and getting to know a firefighter. Given my early experience as a reporter, I'm comfortable asking probing questions of strangers.

Since this firefighter was female, I indulged my curiosity about the aspects of the job that require physical strength. She gave her height and weight: a couple of inches shorter than me, and only five pounds heavier, definitely not a thick chick. Yet she said she could deadlift 225 pounds, which just astounded me. (By contrast, I can probably deadlift forty pounds max, unless I have to lift a car off of a baby, in which case I would run like hell to find somebody with muscles.) (A deadlift is where the barbell starts on the ground, and you bend down and lift it with straight arms until your back is straight, which makes the bar end up around your knees. Lower it and you've completed one rep.)

The firefighter said that her strength strategy, to keep up with the guys, was to acknowledge that she couldn't lift as much as most male firefighters at one time, but she had trained so that she could repeat lifting heavy weights more times than most of the male firefighters. "So I can't lift as much, but I can repeat and endure as long or longer than they can, and a lot of the job is endurance, rather than explosive strength."

(OK, I didn't have a picture of a female firefighter. These guys work putting out flames in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Don't you love the Spanish word for them?: Bomberos!)

Then I asked the firefighter how she copes with the emotional vicissitudes of the job, thinking of the broken bodies she deals with, being that firefighters do a lot of EMT work as well.

Here is what she said: "We get there after it's over. We don't see the trauma occur, so we don't get that shock. We don't see the leg breaking, we don't see the stroke happening."

And I realized that that's a huge difference, one I never thought about. Certainly the job can be traumatizing, but it's not like I thought.

She went on, "And if somebody's dead, they're dead, and it's all over for them. Nothing's going on."

What about the survivors? I wondered how she deals with their grief and shock.

"We get in, we do our job, and we get out."

In other words, they don't stick around.

Because, really, the only way they can survive is to not become emotionally involved in the dramatic, often defining moments, of other people's lives.

What does this have to do with writing?

As writers, we must be like firefighters and we must not be like them.

We must be like them in that when the shit goes down, we have to jump in our truck and rush to it. But of course we must create the shit that goes down, and we must be different from firefighters. We must stick around.

We must be there for the tough stuff, we must be deeply involved in it, we must not gloss over trouble, agony, difficulty. We must be there deeply because we want our readers to be there deeply. So we have to show the leg breaking. The heart breaking. The bullet piercing the flesh, the fire licking the Picasso, the floodwater inching toward the nostrils. And we must show these things as vividly as possible, discomfort bedammed.

Of course, we as writers also get to indulge in the flip side: We get to be there for the ecstasy, and we must not only let our readers know it's happening, we must portray it as deeply as we portray the pain.

Sometimes this is even more a challenge than portraying suffering! Why is that? I think it's because suffering is drama, while joy is…well, joy is nice.

Which is why novels go like this: "Once upon a time, a dreadful thing happened. But they lived happily ever after." instead of like this: "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after."

Gotta have that drama, gotta have that suffering!

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The Curse of Vocabulary

A friend of mine once found himself in civil court, defending himself against a lawsuit in front of a jury. Before he took the witness stand, his lawyer told him, "Whatever you do, talk plainly. Jurors don't like witnesses who use fancy words."

"OK," he said.

On the stand, the lawyer's first question was, "And how did you feel when you found out you were being sued?"

My friend exclaimed, "I was flummoxed!"

He prevailed against the suit in spite of that, but he said the look on his lawyer's face still haunts him.

I remembered that story when I went into a hardware store in a rural area not long ago. I wanted a particular tool that I'd noticed for sale elsewhere. I couldn't find one on the shelves so I asked for help. Two clerks, good ole boys both, came to my aid, and we scanned a large display of tools, trying to find what I wanted.

I said, "I kind of can't believe you guys don't have these; they're so….so…" and I paused, because the word I wanted to use was 'ubiquitous,' but I looked at these country guys and I thought, "OK, do not say 'ubiquitous.' Think of any word but 'ubiquitous.'"

The seconds passed like centuries.

The guys waited politely for me to finish my sentence, until finally I accepted my fate and came out with it: "ubiquitous!"

They looked at me in silence, then after a moment we all decided I probably didn't need that tool anyway.

For a writer, a large vocabulary is almost always a blessing. But at times it does feel like the opposite. I knew that for sure as I got into my car in that hardware store parking lot, cursing like a gynecomorphous canis lupus familiarus.