REAL WORLD

The Writer’s Dog

May 8, 2019 By Juliet Marillier 24 Comments

The writer’s dog is a multi-talented individual. He or she carries out a support role essential to the creative process. The writer’s dog is companion, confidante, inspiration, distraction, time keeper, and monitor of all matters health-related: nutrition, exercise, stress, sleep. His or her job includes keeping the writer mostly sane, reasonably fit, and for the most part on task.

I speak from personal experience here. For a long while I’ve worn two hats: writer and crazy dog lady. I spent some years as a foster carer for a canine rescue group, specialising in old and frail dogs, and I have seen quite a few little ones come and go from the household. These days I am down to three permanent dogs, two of whom were ‘foster fails’, that is, animals with whom the foster carer falls in love and cannot bear to part. It is perhaps no surprise that I’ve written so many dog characters into my novels, or that I love reading stories with great dog characters in them, including a few by WU’s own Barbara O’Neal.

I write full time from a home office. My dogs have my working day well under control, with suitable breaks for walks, snacks, and administration of their various medications, of which there are many. If I sit at my desk for longer than an hour and a half at a stretch, they have several techniques for drawing my attention. One, come and sit by my feet, gazing up piteously until I respond. Two, run to the front door barking wildly. Sometimes this means a real person is at the door, sometimes it’s only someone walking up the road (person with dog or dogs gets an extra loud bark), and sometimes it is solely an attention-grabbing ploy. It always works. Fergal may be very small but he has a mighty voice. Three involves tipping over the kitchen bin and scattering the contents on the floor. Four is to sit alone in a distant part of the house and wail as if the end of the world is coming.

The correct response to all of these is to get my eyes off the screen, stand up and take a break. Such breaks must include cuddles. They should involve moving out of the office to an area where at least one dog can get on my knee, and the dispensing of snacks for all.

Dogs love naps. They especially enjoy taking naps with their writers. I take a break from work in order to do this most days, and stay up later to compensate. The dogs give me the sign when it’s time, more or less herding me into the appropriate area and settling around me.

Dogs don’t like deadlines. When a deadline is looming, writers don’t stick to the sensible program the dog expects of them. They sit at the desk far longer than they should, they forget the established protocols and they miss the very clear signs that it’s time to take a break. At such times the writer can be tense and cranky. They may even shout and throw random objects. Basically, they are not a lot of fun to be around. Dogs will make their displeasure clear. We should try to take notice. A quick walk reduces tension. Dogs know this.

However long a writer has dogs, there’s always something new to be learned from them. Today I learned that the most unlikely canine can be an emotional support animal.

[Read more…]

11+

The Morning After

April 30, 2019 By Brunonia Barry 20 Comments

Whether you’ve been working on your WIP for one year or ten, there comes a day when you know it’s ready to submit. Whether it’s fifty pages and an outline or the full manuscript, today’s the day. You’ve done your work. It’s time to let go.

You go over your cover letter again and again, reviewing each sentence, obsessing and rewriting until you can’t put it off any longer. You take a deep breath. You hit send.

After the initial feeling of euphoria fades, you glance up at the wall, at the framed sign you pinned there months ago with some of the best writing advice you’ve received: Stay in the chair. You stand up, noticing the stiffness in your legs, the lower back ache you’ve been ignoring for the last few months. Step by step, you slowly move away from your writing nook, forcing yourself not to look back.

And then you celebrate the best way you know how. Maybe with a glass of champagne or a nice lunch at that restaurant you’ve been longing to try. A stroll through the park, a massage, perhaps a visit with an old friend, one who’ll forgive your long absence.

For the first time in months, you sleep through the night: no characters whispering in your ears, no jolting awake with that great idea that just can’t wait.

And then, inevitably, it arrives: The Morning After.

You wake up early and happily realize that you have nothing on your agenda, nothing but the life you guiltily put aside for far too long. It’s time to get back to it. You climb out of bed with a bit more vigor than you’ve had in these final days of rewriting. You stand there wondering what to do first.

You’ve faced The Morning After at least once before. You know enough to avoid the piles of laundry that have collected on the bedroom floor, the sweats or yoga pants or pajamas you’ve been living in for the last few weeks. You’ve learned to avoid mirrors.

At this point, if you’re smart, you’ve already considered that short vacation, ignoring housework, bills, yard-work, the half-painted den. You can’t wait to reward your hard work with a change of venue, but it doesn’t work out that way. Since you couldn’t gauge exactly when you’d be finished, and your preferred travel companions have real world schedules, they can’t just drop everything the day you’re finally ready. Even your writer friends, the ones who would gladly celebrate with you, are busy wrestling with their own WIPs. The vacation will have to wait.

With nothing pressing, and against your better judgement, you wander into your writing nook, sit down at the computer, and check your emails. Maybe someone is already reading. Maybe your manuscript was so compelling that the minute they received it, they put everything aside and stayed up all night, unable to stop turning pages until they finished that final brilliant chapter.

Instead, there’s not even an acknowledgement of receipt. [Read more…]

Hurray for Independent Bookstore Day!

April 23, 2019 By Sarah McCoy 19 Comments

In case you weren’t aware, April 27 is a national holiday: it’s Independent Bookstore Day. Only five years old, you might not have heard of it and that’s okay… because you have now! What could be more exciting than discovering we have a new holiday to bedazzle on our calendars?

In my humble opinion, we don’t have enough true holidays. I.e. Unadorned celebrations without the stress of gift giving, event planning, cooking complicated meals, decorating, and contending with the in-laws. Too often, holidays don’t feel like the definition of the word and more like its antithesis. So here I present one day that is entirely, wholeheartedly, unequivocally designed for a communal book lovers’ jamboree. And that, my friends, is not to be missed, particularly by our kind—writers and readers.

Don’t be fooled by the facades of social media, we are living in an age of community. The big and little main streets of America are being reinvigorated by their citizens’ commitment to supporting one another and thriving despite all obstacles against our diverse democracy. No place is this more apparent than with booksellers. I travel from coast to coast doing book events, and it never fails that at the heart of each city is an independent bookstore.

For nearly a decade, I lived in El Paso, a beautiful city with wonderful readers but no independent bookstore. I watched as friends from across the country shared their photos, events, interviews, and most significantly, their memories with independent bookstore staffs, patrons, and fellow authors. The dynamic relationship between these people was more than professionalism. They were a book family committed to strengthening the bonds of their literary village. You know the saying, It takes a village to raise a child? Well, I argue it’s even truer written, It takes a book village to raise a person.

The minute I planted roots in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I went in search of that village. For me, it’s a beautiful, bustling indie called Bookmarks in the epicenter of the city. It’s my privilege to support their growth and impassioned work connecting community members through reading. Bookmarks is not merely a brick-and-mortar business; it’s a place that encourage young and old to seek out stories and find magic. It’s a safe haven with caring booksellers who help us believe again in the goodness of our neighbors—who help enrich minds, bodies, and spirits every day. They are my friends, some of the best I’ve made in my adult life. Independent bookstores are where we come together to share, celebrate, learn, and connect. They are places that endeavor to fill us with reliable head knowledge, and more importantly, reliable heart knowledge.

I didn’t grow up with an independent bookstore. [Read more…]

The Positive Side of Envy

April 22, 2019 By Kim Bullock 30 Comments

Trashing a little book called The Bridges of Madison County was a popular sport in the English department when I was in graduate school. Professors and creative writing students alike could not find a single thing to praise about the plot, the writing, the characters, or even the setting. My school was located less than an hour away from those famed bridges and most Iowans I knew revered anything associated with their beloved home state, so this extreme loathing seemed strange.

As fifty million copies of this “pretentious fluff” (as one professor repeatedly called it) sold, the nastiness escalated.

I had picked up the novel the previous summer because it looked like an entertaining love story – something I was certain not to have time to read once I became both a grad student and a composition teacher. I got exactly what I paid for – three hours of entertainment. Would I read it again? Probably not. Had I enjoyed it the first time? Sure. Clearly there was something wrong with me. Maybe I didn’t recognize good writing. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to make it in academia. I sunk lower into my seat each time “that book” was mentioned in class and kept my mouth shut, not wanting to announce my ignorance to the brilliant masses.

And then one day, while meeting with the most vocal of my professors, I happened to glance at the bookshelf in her office. Her name appeared on the spine of a book I’d never heard of, a book I later sought out and could only find tucked away on a forgotten shelf in a local bookstore. (This was in the pre-Amazon days.) I could not have named a single character or plot point a week after reading it.

Those students who bashed Waller the most violently were the same ones who had nothing good to say about anyone else’s work in critique sessions. They read their own work aloud with a smirk, laughed at their own jokes, and paused at key areas to make sure everyone listening had time to appreciate a clever turn of phrase. They ignored all feedback.

At twenty-two I lacked the courage to suggest that the bashing stemmed from jealousy or insecurity, but I certainly thought it. I also made up my mind not to fall victim to that poison. I still don’t bash. Not publicly. Not among other writer friends. Rarely even in my own mind. [Read more…]

16+

The Flip Side

April 17, 2019 By Kathleen McCleary 9 Comments

Recently I was talking to a friend about her mother’s death. Losing a parent—especially the only parent you had left—sends the world spinning off its axis. It can feel like a free-fall into grief. “But it’s also liberating,” my friend said. “Is that an awful thing to say?” The answer is no, because it’s true. While parent/child relationships are often complicated (my God, what would we all write about if human relationships were straightforward and easy?), the death of a parent brings enormous loss. We lose the buffer between ourselves and our own mortality; we lose a generation and the values and events and memory that shaped them; we lose the individual who shaped us, for better or for worse.

But it’s also liberating. Suddenly we are free to be and do things completely apart from our parents’ expectations or rules or hopes or disappointments. We are different people without our parents, no matter how young or old we are when we lose them. We can serve tapas on Christmas eve instead of roast beef, move to a different house or different town or different job or different relationship, take up the hobby Dad thought was a waste of time and money, go on the trip Mom worried was too risky. Those are just the obvious, external examples. How a parent’s death frees us to BE someone different is yet another piece of the story.

And this proverbial two-edged sword—we lose, we gain—is at the heart of writing fiction. It’s the key to character, because every character is both good and bad. It’s the key to plot, because every obstacle offers an opportunity to conquer that obstacle, to face down a challenge or a fear. And it’s the key to story, because every compelling story involves a win and a loss.

As you write, think about the flip side of your character and your story. Maybe your character is a young woman who’s calm and emotionally balanced and poised under pressure, the rock of her family. But there’s a flip side to all that stability, too. Maybe she can’t empathize with her husband or brother or the child who feel things more intensely than she does, so her relationships are distant, a step removed from real intimacy. You can find this duality in Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Less, featuring a mild-mannered, polite, not very successful middle-aged protagonist who seems to let life sweep him up in its currents and carry him along. He’s soft-spoken, innocuous, not memorable. Yet he has an innocence, a kindness, and a sweetness that make him unforgettable, and that lead those around him to act in remarkable ways.

The flip side is critical for antagonists, too. I play a game called “Monster Confessions” in the creative writing workshops I teach to kids, in which I ask kids to write a monologue from a bad guy’s point of view. I’ve had students write “confessions” by the big bad wolf, by Harry Potter’s Professor Quirrell, by Jugo, the bad guy in a Japanese Manga series. What I love about all of their essays is the way the students manage to find the common thread of humanity in every villain, the vulnerability or wound that is the flip side to all that evil. [Read more…]

13+