Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors: March 2008

“You come upon the person the author put there. ...
beside the small running river where a boy is weeping and no one comes...
and you have to watch without saying anything he can hear. …”

—Marie Howe

Every author is the god of his own little world. No story is the same; each is a cosmos of its own: its own land masses, its own oxygen, its own life forms. No two authors can present the same world, no matter the similarities of setting and theme. The Chicago I write about is the not the Chicago that springs to life beneath the pens of Audrey Niffenegger or Dee Henderson. The Battle of Britain exploding on my pages is not the same as Milena McGraw’s Battle of Britain. Indeed, my Chicago, my Battle of Britain are not the same as the city we find on the shores of Lake Michigan or the battle immortalized in the history books.

What I write, no matter how heavily based in reality, is not reality. It is my world, ordered according to my whims and my paradigms. This is one of the most fantastic paradoxes of the writing life: we strive to present reality, but really we are controlling reality. It’s pretty heady stuff, when you stop and think about it. Historical novelist Stephanie Grace Whitson once commented that one of the reasons she enjoys writing is her “god complex”; she’s in control of the story, the characters, and their destinies.

Last month, we talked about “Catharsis and the Written Word.” The flip side of that catharsis is the control we have over our story worlds. It’s in our power to decide which characters die and which characters live. Will justice be done? Will good triumph over evil? Will truth be martyred to greed and sadism? Will it end happily ever after or in a vale of tears and frustration?

Knowing that “conflict is story,” we shove our characters into the deepest, darkest pits of hell our hyperactive imaginations can dredge up. In my own writing, I’ve forced my main characters to endure explosions, comas, familial rejection, horrific car accidents, slaughtered loved ones, life-threatening diseases, kidnapping, wars, wounds, and rape. And that’s the characters I like.

But it’s also in my power to drag my characters through these tragedies, to make sure they struggle and fight their way to freedom and triumph. I force them into sorrow and pain and unrelenting anguish to make them grow, to force them to become the men and women I need them to be. To defeat the despicable bad guys, to overcome personal problems, to bring even a modicum of justice to their worlds, they have to endure these trials. I know the ending. I know what they have to do fulfill that ending.

Of course, as any author will be more than eager to explain, characters aren’t the docile creatures most readers take them for. Characters have minds of their own and ideas of their own on the best way to achieve their goals. And they don’t often appreciate the crucibles I put them through. Case in point, Chris Redston, hero of my current project Dreamers Come, has proven himself a refractory character practically since the beginning, when I first slapped his name onto the page in bold black print.

He didn’t appreciate my interrupting his ordered, if aimless, life to shove him into an unheard of parallel world, mirrored to ours only in dreams. He didn’t like the idea of having his life snatched away from him, his destiny arranged for him by some outside force. But what he can’t see is the faraway ending. For him, too many battles, too many split-second decisions, too many mistakes fog the path to that ending. He doesn’t know what I have in mind for him. He doesn't know that I created him for a special purpose, that I shoved him into unthinkable trials to mold him for a special end. He can’t see that; but I can. He keeps fighting me, insisting he has better plans for his life. And I keep poking and prodding him, urging him in the right direction, knowing if he can just follow my lead, he will reach the other side of that fog having learned and grown beyond anything he could have imagined.

I can’t help seeing the parallels between a writer mapping out the destinies of his little world and God organizing the much grander cosmos. If we think bringing order to one little story is tough, if we think spanking a handful of frustrating characters into shape is agonizing, we are experiencing only a taste of the Divine patience that organizes the universe. It’s an interesting exercise to look at our stories and recognize that God wants to direct our lives in the same way we want to direct our characters. Like our characters, we can’t see that He created us for a special purpose, that He shoved us into unthinkable trials to mold us for a special end. We can’t see that; but He can.
Marie Howe sums up her thought-provoking poem “Why the Novel is Necessary but Sometimes Hard to Read” with the following challenge:

“This is the life you have written, the novel tells us. What happens next?”

March 30, 2008
4 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Characters , Writing Life

March 23, 2008
9 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Characters , CUC

I’ve always been intrigued by the left-brain/right-brain theory—the idea that creative thought stems from the right hemisphere of the brain, while logical thought flows from the left hemisphere. Most people are noticeably stronger in one hemisphere or the other, mostly due to their tendency to exercise one side more often.

Growing up, I always considered myself a right-brainer, due to my imaginative ramblings. But, the older I get, the more my left-brain (logical, sequential, rational, analytical, objective) tendencies seem to be taking over and, as a result, the more my creative processes become subjective to the “thinking” side of my brain versus the “instinctual” side.

I’m a rabid organizer: I outline my stories in such depth that the outline could almost be considered my first draft; I run my characters through an intricate “interview process”; and I edit methodically, piece by piece, sentence by sentence. I feel very strongly that this method is the best I could possibly utilize for myself. I am not someone who can sit down at the computer with a half-formed idea, type the first sentence, and then wing my way to the closing chapter. I have to know where I’m going and how I’m getting there. And I feel that my stories are much the better for my following this method.

A few Christmases ago, someone gave me Robert Olen Butler’s book From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, and last month I finally got around to reading it. I squirmed a little through the introduction and the first chapter. When Butler wrote things like “Please get out of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you” I rolled my eyes and though Oh boy, here comes the useless touchy-feely stuff. But as I read further, some of Butler’s ideas intrigued me.

In Chapter 5: “A Writer Prepares,” Butler talked about “dreamstorming” your story, about letting images and characters well up from your unconscious. He recommended that writers collect hundreds of these little idea snippets before sitting down to write. As I read this, I found myself leaning forward in my seat, a lopsided grin curving my face, and thinking: I do this!

To a certain point, anyway.

After their initial conception, most of my stories sit around in the back of my mind for years. I don’t often deliberately “dreamstorm” them as Butler suggests, but ideas will well up out of nowhere and add themselves to the mental panorama I am forming for a given story. When, finally, I am ready to write, I’ll sit down and organize all these random scenes into a brief and sketchy outline.

Now, here’s the interesting part: the best parts of my stories are almost always the unconscious parts—the scenes I’ve dreamt up out of nowhere.

Butler’s theory does allow for “thinking” in the second draft, in the rewriting. It’s just the original concepts that must be unconscious. He even allows for outlining to the extent that he organizes his collection of scenes and images into a cohesive and linear whole. He’s not a stream-of-conscious proponent, which was one of things I feared when I started the book. He just demands that the idea (although he wouldn’t use that term) flow from the unconscious without initially being checked or directed by the writer’s conscious, thinking mind. Taken in small part and non-exclusively, it’s a brilliant approach.

In Koine Greek, it is impossible to say “I think,” because no active form of the verb exists. Instead, one is forced to say, “The thought occurred to me.” As Sharlee Foster, one of my earliest writing mentors, put it: “We ourselves do not think, but rather thoughts are given to us.” Although all stories need the eventual guidance of an objective and analytical design plan, I think authors find that their greatest and most original ideas must be filtered through the labyrinth of the unconscious.

I don’t agree with all of Butler’s opinions (especially his adamant claim that anything created “consciously” is hackneyed dreck), but his book presented an enormously vital and valid point. The best of writing—indeed, the best of all art—is a gift. Most artists would be the first to admit that their genius is beyond even them. It comes from someplace outside the conscious realm... it comes from where we dream. Once we recognize and accept that fact, we are then able to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity of harnessing our unconscious minds. The two sides of our creativity—the conscious and the unconscious—working in harmony, the one pulsing and pounding ahead, the other slowing and refining, are capable of producing great things.

March 16, 2008
1 Comment
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Conscious , Creativity , Left Brain , Right Brain , Subconscious , Unconscious

Writing is treacherous business, fraught with fear and doubt on every side. Am I any good? Will I get published? Will I get good reviews? Will I sell any books? But, perhaps, the most inherent danger of the writing life is the necessary baring of our souls to the world. Writing, at its most basic level, will always be the story of the author himself. No matter how far removed the subject matter, no matter how diverse the cast of characters, the story is always, always, always about the author. And, to all but the most narcissistic, that’s a dad-blamed scary thought.

Janet Fitch, author of the best-selling novel White Oleander said it perhaps as well as anyone: “Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don’t want people to know. ... You have to work as deeply as you can to give the reader something worth reading, but you’re also showing things about yourself that you’re not pleased with. It’s your flaws, not your strengths that go down in the depths of your books. You’re exposed, like dreaming you’re naked in a public building.” (quoted in “Into the Light” by Mary Curran-Hackett, Writer’s Digest April 2007)

The best novelists are those that can tap into their characters’ psyches at a primal level. They can reveal a character’s innermost fears, his secret fantasies, his darkest sins. To reveal these things, to bring them to life in a way that will resonate with readers on a deeply human level, means the author must understand and even identify with these feelings to at least some extent.

A writer is an actor. A one-man show. For two hours every afternoon, when I sit down to write, I become my characters. I am the megalomaniac bad guy, I am the damsel in distress, I am the knight in shining armor. To make these characters live and breath in three dimensions, I must become them, I must understand them and the issues they are facing. When my hero limps in front of a firing squad, I am standing with him. When my bad guy orders his army into battle, I am shouting alongside him.

But the rabbit hole goes even deeper than that. Actions, on the page or in the theater, are just actions. I can go through the motions of trauma and chaos right alongside my characters, but that hardly means I am actually fulfilling them. My hero may be running through No Man’s Land on a German battlefield, while I am safely perched on my chair, feet propped against my printer, typing away in my warm house. It’s in the emotions, not the actions, that a writer truly gives himself away.

When I write of a character’s deep fear of failure, when I tell of her fear churning and churning in her gut until all that’s left is anger, and when I show her lashing out in her anger and in her fear, I am telling something of myself. I am not this character. I am not consumed in this fear-cum-anger. But, somewhere in my own self, I have found the latent potential for this emotion, and, in printing it on the page, I have revealed that potential to the world.

Anyone who has ever written more than two paragraphs in a row has experienced the blast of fear that comes when someone else reads his work. He waits, sitting on his hands to keep from chewing his nails, cold sweat touching his scalp, fidgeting and squirming (mentally, if not physically) as he waits for the scales of opinion to tip in favor of either commendation or criticism. We, of course, fear that our work, our words, our craft will not measure up. But, I think, an even more inherent fear is that of rejection on a deeper level. When someone rejects our writing, he is, in a sense, rejecting us. When someone tells us he doesn’t like a character, he’s telling us he doesn’t like a part of us. And, very naturally, that hurts like heck.

Writing is not for sissies. I suppose you could get by without ever really pouring yourself onto the page, without really sharing your own personal slice of the human experience. Perhaps you might even be able to get yourself published. Certainly, I’ve read plenty of novels that don’t seem to share much of their authors’ souls. But the good books, the really good books, the ones I lay in bed at night thinking about, the ones I can quote even years after I’ve read them, the ones that have impacted my thinking and challenged my soul—those are the books that can only be written by an author who is willing to spill his guts onto the page.

Is it still risky? You bet your birthday it is. Are there going to be people who misunderstand your message? People who disapprove? People who slap you in the face with rejection? Absolutely. But, if you’re called as a writer, you cannot let that stand your way. Don’t short-change yourself—or your readers. If you have a gift, don’t prune it, don’t censor it. You cannot fill someone else without emptying yourself. Write yourself ragged, don’t hold back, and you’ll find that honesty, in writing as in all else, is the best policy—and the surest path to success.

March 9, 2008
12 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Writing Life

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