Giving & Telling?

Zestful Blog Post #138

Social media, including blogs, especially blogs, can be a challenge for those of us who were brought up not to boast. Is that a humblebrag right there? It is, it is! I’m sorry. Hopeless situation. Here’s my issue today: Charities and those who give or serve have the dilemma of telling about the giving vs. not telling. If you tell, it seems boastful, yet perhaps by telling one can prompt others to give. If you don’t tell, you’re safe from any boast accusations, yet by keeping it secret you relinquish the possibility of suggesting the idea to others.

What the hell. After I post this, I’m off to donate blood. I do this regularly; I got the email a few days ago notifying me that I’m eligible again; I decided to schedule my donation on Christmas Eve day. My reasons, actually, are selfish: The donation center is unlikely to be crowded, and I can eat large portions of Christmas fest food for a couple of days with the perfect excuse of having to build my life juices up again. Plus, OK, yes, it feels more special to do it today.

Donating blood, if your health permits, is such an easy way to give a gift no one can buy. That’s message #1 of 2 from me today.

[This is the most elaborate Christmas display on a private residence I’ve ever seen. It’s our neighbors’ house a few doors down, and it's only a partial view. I mean, that's a life-sized Angel Gabriel on top of the garage. The people are new, and I’ve got to catch them and tell them of the awesomeness of their work. Wish I'd had a tripod for crisp focus, but you get the idea.]

Message #2 is this. Thank you, my friends, for giving ME gifts throughout the year, gifts that can’t be bought: your attention and your esteem. Your sharing of your ideas. Thank you for being with me.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Direct Experience

Zestful Blog Post #137

Here’s a blog post by new friend Alan Spector, who got inspired by one of my recent Writer’s Digest articles (on making a new commitment to your writing). He believes getting out of your comfort zone and going for something special is important for retirees too. Yeah! Here’s also a link to a historical novel he’s written and published.

What’s stepping out of your comfort zone really about? Two things: One, it’s about keeping your comfort zone comfortable. Think about easing into your nice soft sleeping bag after a hard day of mountain hiking. Ah, bliss. Now think about lying in your sleeping bag for days on end. Comfort evaporates. Muscles atrophy. Only by periodically leaving that comfort can you maintain that comfort. Paradox, yeah. Zen, yeah.

The other thing: leaving your comfort zone is the only way you can gain new direct experience. Who has a stake in this? I remember arguing with one of my grad school professors about sleeping out under the stars. The question was, do you need to experience something in order to fully appreciate it? She, who had never spent a night in the open, contended that you can read a book about being outdoors in the woods and have as much feeling for the natural world as if you’d actually experienced it firsthand. I, who had slept on mountainsides without shelter, contended the opposite. And you can only know the difference if you’ve gone out and done the experience, whatever it is, dammit. It’s great to love books, and books can bring the outer world alive, but only to a point.

It’s essential for the writers of books to go out and gain direct experience, so they can write about it convincingly—so the experience can inform their work. This is true even for writers of sci-fi and fantasy. I think I’d like to explain and dig deeper into that soon.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Three Buds

Zestful Blog Post #136

The most recent two issues of Writer’s Digest magazine include articles by me. November/December contains “Make a New Commitment to Your Writing,” which has moved more readers to get in touch with me, either via email or social media, than any other piece I’ve written for the magazine in the ten years I’ve been doing it. The article is a bouquet of encouragement, drawn from my insights, woes, and successes. From the response, I realize that while writers can always use help with technique, they thirst as much or more for help with heart and guts. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the article:

Rekindle the spark by simply moving full-on into the unknown. Whatever you doubt you can do on the page, choose that thing. In our increasingly cautious world, “For the hell of it,” has too often been replaced by “Better not.” It’s up to artists—that is, you—to throw away caution and leap. You might attain remarkable new heights.

I want to keep helping writers this way.

[For the hell of it: trying to fit into a mockup of the Mercury capsule at NASA. Real dimensions. The Mercury 7 astronauts all were shorter than me. The thing is terrifyingly tiny. This is the best I could do for an illustration for this post.]

The January issue features a more workmanlike piece: “Power Tools,” which shows how to use arc and pace to fix just about any problem in fiction writing. And here’s an excerpt:

Often dialogue doesn’t work because the author was afraid to move too fast. But fiction, almost as much as stage drama, relies on dialogue for vigor and movement.

Arc and pace together, when injected into dialogue, can transform it from weak to strong. In fact, a small dialogue exchange can have a microarc all its own:

“No, because I don’t think you can keep a secret.”

“Oh, yes I can! Try me.”

I just turned in a chapter for a new Writer’s Digest book on dialogue, set to come out in 2016. My assignment was to write something on internal dialogue, or the inner voices of characters. It’s funny, I’ve always represented my characters’ thoughts intuitively, but researching and writing the chapter made me realize how complex the whole thing can get, when you try to nail down absolutes. For instance, is this passage in present tense or past?:

I should hold up that liquor store tonight, he thought.

Truly, you can argue that one both ways. And truly, it doesn’t matter! If you have a basic grasp of how it works, you can’t go far wrong. All you really need to attend to is consistency. For instance, if you use the above construction in a story, you should not later use something like this:

I’ve got it made now, he thinks.

Once you see it explained, you’ve got it.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Shutting Up Most of the Time

Zestful Blog Post #135

My blog is about zestful writing and the things I learn about and love. When one is a blogger and something big just happened and is all over the news and social media, one sometimes wonders whether to comment. I think many bloggers, no matter what their specialty, figure if they don’t comment on whatever the big news is, readers will think they’re out of touch or don’t care. I’m in touch, I care, and I have opinions, but I choose not to comment.

The very best one can do is choose peace for one’s own heart at whatever the cost. And there is a cost to choosing peace. The price is relinquishing the grievance narrative, dropping the need to grasp and struggle, and embracing humility. Which also means not trying to fix other people. And it means shutting up most of the time.

Out of all that, simply that, comes real power.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Retail Heck, Free Book, and Coloring Opportunity

Zestful Blog Post #134

My first retail job was in a produce market that was only open during the summer. Great for kids needing summer jobs, which we all were, except for the head cashier, who was a hardbitten, chain-smoking redhead who had a crush on the owner, who, she regularly and mournfully informed us, didn’t even know she existed.

Which was bullshit, because without her the place would have collapsed. But we knew what she meant.

I have many fascinating stories about unloading watermelons (human chain; if you drop one you have to cram the pieces down the sewer as fast as possible before Ronnie sees); grading peaches (a job to be foisted off to a rookie employee after the peaches are four days old, because yuck); and more.

Later I spent ten years selling books, a year-round job where I learned all about Black Friday and the Christmas rush (as it used to be called). A butt-busting time of year, but fun too, because everybody on staff got into the spirit of the season while being able to justifiably whine about how hard it all was. Boy, did we sell books.

Every year around this time I think of retail, and give thanks that I don’t work it anymore. I give thanks to you, my friends, my readers, and to and all three of my family groups (birth, law, and chosen).

In the spirit of giving, thought I should give away some e-books in honor of Black Friday, just for the hell of it, you know. Somehow Holy Hell presented itself in my mind, dunno why. So yeah, the first in the Lillian Byrd series is free on Amazon through the weekend. Tell your friends, because the more downloads, the happier I am. As I write this, twelve hours after zeroing out the price, it's already #2 in Amazon's GLBT Mystery & Detective category. Happy.

Also, here is a fun page you can print out and color to make look like a turkey, just as we all did once in the past, at least those of us who attended kindergarten in the United States in the 1960s. Do children still do this?

You can enjoy coloring it and maybe even upload and share your work here. (You can email it to me and I'll post it next time, because I don't think you can attach anything to a comment.) Remember, there is no such thing as a poorly colored Thanksgiving turkey hand.

With warm wishes and love,

Elizabeth

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Breaking the Rules of POV

Zestful Blog Post #133

Recently I got three inquiries in a row from aspiring writers wanting advice on point of view in fiction, specifically shifting POV from one character to another, and even more specifically, mixing first-person POV with other styles—third person limited and omniscient: can we do it? should we do it? how do we do it? (Thank you to D, J, and E for giving me the idea for this post.)

The novels of my first series (Lillian Byrd crime) are all in first person, which has its joys. The reader gets to know the main character intimately—if you’ve done your job well—and the limitations of the form can help shape your plot. One character can’t know everything, which automatically introduces an element of suspense. I chose first person for my first books because I was told by some magazine article (probably & ironically in Writer’s Digest magazine) that all first novelists should use it, because at least then you can’t screw up POV.

LOL.

Alternatively, writing gurus often tell new authors to stick with one style of POV: pick either first, third-limited, or omniscient, and stay there. Yet messing around with POV is interesting, and it can be just the thing for your story. Yet it’s fraught.

In many novels old and new, an omniscient narrator tells the story, shifting frequently from one character’s viewpoint to the next. If done well, we get not only a literal unfolding of the story, but also the characters’ inner worldview—their thoughts and judgments as to what’s going on. But the narrator becomes a bit of a character as well, which can be helpful or annoying, depending on the skill of the author.

For The Actress (Rita Farmer mysteries) I wanted more flexibility than simple first person, because my story was more ambitious, wider ranging, with more characters. Yet I liked the intimacy of first person. So I looked around to see if any novels mixed first with third limited and/or omniscient and found a few that worked (don’t ask me; I forget), so I figured I could do it too.

Yet I hated reading novels where the POV sticks with one character for almost the whole book, but shifts quickly and inexplicably to another character’s POV as a way out of plot jams, which is cheap. Suddenly—gosh!—we learn what the bad guy’s thinking, just at the exact moment we need an explanation of what the hell his motivation is. Then we’re back to the hero for the duration. In such cases, shifting POV is a way to avoid telling the story with discipline and fluidity. And it’s pure plain jangling to readers. It’s especially bad when readers constantly have to re-orient themselves to rapidly shifting limited POVs. Note I say limited: This is worse than just choosing omniscient, which imposes its own demands of reason and plausibility.

So I structured The Actress to begin from the perspective of Rita, my protagonist, and to shift POV only at major breaks. Sometimes it’s a chapter break, other times it’s a mid-chapter shift from one scene and set of characters to another. I carried the same pattern into the other two Rita books. By On Location I was pretty comfortable with it.

Currently I’m writing a final draft of a novel told in a mix of third limited and omniscient; no first person. It happens in Los Angeles, it involves a retired schoolteacher, her illiterate (and undocumented) cleaning woman, and a gang of corporate saboteurs. It digs into why people help one another, why they betray one another, and how far into the abyss they will go for money—and sometimes love. The title is Crimes in a Second Language.

Bottom line answer to the questions on mixing POVs: Yes, we can do it. We should do it IF the story demands, or at least prompts it. Keep your artistic integrity handy and never shift POV to get yourself out of a tight place you’ve gotten yourself into. When mixing first with third limited / omniscient, do it sparingly.

Moreover, don’t be cowed by the process. Relax, jump in, and give it a try.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

How to Turn Darkness Into Light

Zestful Blog Post #132

This post is to honor two friends recently lost to cancer, Jeanne Bates Smith and Sandra Moran Pletcher. It’s also in honor of you, my reader, and yes, my friend.

Here’s the whole of it. When a marvelous human being too soon leaves the building for good, we grieve hard. Then we have to figure out what to do next. If we lose our joy, that’s letting cancer—or whatever disease or disaster—win. If we focus on disbelief, if we keep insisting things ought to be the way they were before, that’s making that person as gone as can be. It’s giving death everything.

To change darkness into light:

When you do your best work, smile, because she’s right there with you, because she did her best work.

When you speak and behave honestly and kindly, feel happy, because she did so.

When you make an effort to understand—to really extend yourself—be joyful, because she did so.

When you do anything your beloved person did, with integrity and a true heart, laugh, because she or he is there with you.

When you

act like a goof;

taste/smell/touch/hear/see something that person liked;

get out for a walk or a jog or a swim;

create something for the hell of it;

make a mistake (yes, of course);

try to fix something;

be joyful, because.

I said to Marcia the other night as we grieved our friends, “I guess the pie of life is like this: half work, half love, and half chocolate.” Don’t start with me about math.

Time gets us all. But it can’t steal our joy. So do the work now. Give more love now. And don’t forget the chocolate.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.