Lines Blur Between Adult and Teen Novels!

After a busy fall semester teaching creative writing, I'm once again back at my desk as a full-time writer. Whew. The hat feels a bit loose like I've lost some weight.

I'm revising my novel which my agent tells me reads like a young adult novel. I'm embracing her expertise and the idea that my novel will appeal to sixteen-year olds and others who are young at heart.

So You Think You Can Write Dialogue -- Round #4

It's the final week of the Times Colonist contest and this week’s writing is full of fairy godmothers, goddesses, and happy endings. Everyone resisted the Highway of Tears. If we could rewrite the sadness and loss of missing women, we would, I suppose. These stories expressed a longing to protect, to rewrite the story, to surprise the reader with the unexpected.

For this writing prompt, I gave my own story. I was twenty-two and routinely worked the closing shift as a bartender at a golf and country club. One night, when I missed the last bus home, I hitched a ride with a tow-truck driver who lectured me about the dangers of hitching a ride with strangers. He then delivered me safely to my door. He was my fairy god mother.

I want to thank all the writers who took part in the contest. I can’t imagine what they went through to produce a new piece of writing every week, all the things in their busy lives they set aside. It was such an honour to be a judge and to have an opportunity to encourage and critique these assignments. Sometimes my first choice didn’t coincide with “the judge’s first choice.” Overall, however, I could see agreement on what we considered to be “good writing.” I believe the disagreement was over what we considered “a good story.”

That’s just my take on things. It’s been a wonderful ride and I enjoyed every minute of it. Next year, I look forward to kicking back and reading what the new judges have to say, and popping my vote in along with all the other readers.

So You Think You Can Write -- Round #3

Anybody can write fiction, right? It’s a story. We tell stories since the time we are old enough to talk. “He took my bike.” That’s a story.

Not true.

Fiction is different. Show don’t tell.

It’s dialogue.

It’s action unfolding in front of our eyes.

It’s the banana seat or as Raymond Carver taught us, “the telling detail.”

It’s a spell cast over the reader so the present moment becomes something else.

Who cast the best spell this week? I asked of each entry. Which one made me feel I’d stepped into the story at just the right moment? Whose story could I not put down? These were the questions I asked until I came to the clear winner, for me. That’s it, I thought when I’d finished Norris-Jones’ story. That’s the one.

To read Everybody Hurts simply go to this link.

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/writing-contest/index.html

So You Think You Can Write a Poem -- Round #2

When creating the assignment for Round #2, Carla Funk suggested we provide the writers with an image, but what image?

I had been watching Dateline and they were showing all these houses in Detroit that were abandoned and burned, but left standing. The image stuck with me. "Burned out house in Detroit," I suggested.

Carla and Rob both agreed it had something to offer. "Take out Detroit," advised Rob, "make it more open."

Although it was a dark image, and Carla feared that poetry already had a reputation for being morose, we went ahead with it.

Little did we know that one of our finalists would be an insurance adjuster who had seen his share of house fires. Trevor Presley's poem impressed me with its details, things that I thought only someone who had seen the effect of fire firsthand would know.

His poem cautions us to recognize the power of fire. He writes, "It started with Grandma’s soup simmering. An open window, a paper towel, a breeze. Combustion."

Yes, I thought. Fire starts that easily, slips in a window when no one is watching.

How do we learn about the world? Through the experiences of others and their generosity in writing about those experiences. The contestants reponded to the assignment with a range of forms from the winner's pared down lyric poem, to the expansiveness of Presley's prose poem to Dean Norris-Jones' traditional villanelle.
It was a pleasure to read them all.

So You Think You Can Write -- Round #1

I know it’s not funny to laugh at a dog’s misfortune but when Lee Moss wrote, “I remember the day my dog accidentally lost his testicles” I laughed out loud because I never imagined anyone taking the phrase, "I remember the day" and ending it that way. The five finalists submitted their creative nonfiction pieces to the Times Colonist on Monday and I got down to work reading them.

I appreciated every single entry, I did. I took something away from each one whether it was an image of a single-room home darkened by smoke, or an effective line of dialogue: “You’re a useless carpenter, mate,” he said. “Useless.” I learned things. I learned about the radiation bullet, iodine 131, and what it takes to swallow it, and about how the world looks through a colonoscopy. And yes, even for that last one, I was grateful. These writers took risks.

Now, having said that, when I read over the submissions I thought there were a couple of people who might have to step up their game. There are some writers here who are setting the bar high and taking this opportunity seriously. The contest is a chance for the writers to publish their work and to reach a large audience.

There are many competitions out there, but few of them publish the work involved. Publication credits are enormously valuable to a writer. They open doors to grants, to other writing schools, and agents and publishers. As any writer will tell you, it’s hard to get your work published, and so my advice to these writers is to grab this chance. I mean, really take it and run... and dream big. You never know what’s going to come out of it. Much more than the prize, I suspect.

"So You Think You Can Write?"

Sometimes in the solitary world of a writer, a window opens and a neighbour from across the street calls over, “Saw your picture in the TC!” and gives you a thumbs up. Since Sunday’s newspaper hit the streets introducing the judges for the “So You Think You Can Write?” contest, I’ve become a little more visible.

This morning, my favourite birder, who walks Dallas Road with his walker in hand and a pair of binoculars around his neck, stopped me. “I didn’t know you were a writer,” he said. “I wish I could write.” I wish I knew a tiny fraction of what he knows about waxwings, but all I could do was smile and nod.

I’m not used to the attention. Not used to having a man call down from his ladder, “Didn’t know we had a celebrity judge on our street!” I didn’t know there were so many people who read the Times Colonist. Would they follow the contest? I wondered. Would they vote for their favourite writer? Would they boo the judges’ decisions?

I’ve already been tagged as the “emotional judge.” In an interview for the Camosun website, I confessed to liking stories that moved me to laughter and tears. Isn’t that what all good literature does? But I guess people are looking for different kinds of experiences when they read. So, I’ll take the title and try not to get too emotional about it.

I’m looking forward to the contest, to learning the names of the finalists. We don't know yet who the writers are because it was a blind judging. I'm looking forward to the actual part where the writers perform before the reading public and the judges get to talk about writing. It’s a conversation I’ve been having for a long time with students and other writers. But this is a chance to have it right out in the open, like cleaning one’s gutters or weeding the garden.

In closing, I wanted to thank TC's Tanya Chasse whose idea it was to run this contest. Without her, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. “So You Think You Can Write?” contestants will be announced this Sunday in the TC and I, for one, will be running next door to steal my neighbour’s newspaper to learn the names.

Blocking the Movement of Characters

A word of advice as you move your characters around the page. It's not necessary to block each movement because the details can overwhelm the reader. An example to address this is changing: "Ellen comes around to the armchair and sits down. Her whole body is shaking." To: "Ellen's whole body is shaking as she lowers herself into the armchair."

In the first quote you have a sentence that is pure blocking followed by a sentence with the interesting detail. Merging the two lends authenticity to the interesting detail, eliminates a less dynamic sentence and allows the reader the freedom to imagine the layout of the room to suit them.

In first person it can be especially intrusive to block the characters' movements and you end up with something I call the "cooking show" effect whereby it sounds like this: "I'm adding two eggs and then I'm folding them in." Characters shouldn't be narrating their lives as they go, just living them.

Example,

I opened the door and found my wallet lying open on the seat. (cooking show)

Inside the car, my wallet lay open on the seat. (not the cooking show)