Novelist

Futile Seeds

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

The seed stealer

My husband and I are novice gardeners. Last year, he built raised beds and put in tomato plants, peppers, squash, eggplant, and sugar snap peas, and I planted herbs and a single heirloom tomato in a smaller patch behind the arbor in the back yard. For our efforts we harvested two or three small bell peppers that we figured cost us about $40 each.

This year, we were less ambitious. We planted basil and artisanal lettuce seeds. We’d read some good gardening books, and we scattered the seeds generously, thinking we would cull the weaklings and save the stronger seedlings and transplant them. No cold frame starts for us! We waited until there was no danger of a freeze and put those seeds right into the ground. In about eight weeks, we figured, we would start to have homegrown salads, no more of that store-bought “spring mix” that’s already going bad by the time you bring it home. That was six weeks ago.

At this point we can’t tell the tiny lettuces from the clover that threatens to take over. If we were into clover salads, we would be all set. Something has been enjoying them; there are holes all over the little plot where some little critters—maybe the one at left, or one of her many offspring, or maybe the birds—have dug up the seeds and wrought havoc of my neat little rows.

Futile seeds, I call them. Poor babies . . .

My backlog of story ideas and drafts seems something like those seeds. For whatever reason, some stories don’t flourish. What seemed like a good idea falls on infertile ground. It goes nowhere, or sometimes, it goes on for pages and pages. Maybe it even gets finished. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t work.

So what to do? Consign it to the story compost heap? Move on to new ideas?

Well, new ideas are always good, but never underestimate the power of a failed story! I used to advise my writing students when they were “workshopping” each other’s pieces to look for positives before they raised any questions or negatives. That’s not a bad idea for most of us. I look for what’s working in a piece. Maybe it’s a scene; maybe it’s a paragraph or a sentence or an image. I think about other stories that have succeeded. By succeeded, I don’t necessarily mean they’ve been published, although some of them have been. They feel complete; they’re satisfying; there are no “holes.” They’re tightly woven, without excess. They move along. I still get emotionally involved with the characters when I read the story, even though it’s mine, and I’ve read it a hundred times. They surprise me. They make me cry or laugh, or they make me ashamed or angry. I can read them without getting that feeling in my gut, however vague, that something’s wrong. That gnawing feeling always, always tells me I need to go back and have another close look.

So what nurtures a “good” story into print?

Ah. Luck, you say! There’s some of that, certainly—the trick of finding just the right niche for a story. But mostly, it takes perseverance and the courage to keep trying, to keep getting better. It requires openness to doing things differently and learning the craft. It requires picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. It takes the willingness to swallow hard and turn a rejection, sometimes multiple rejections, into possibility.

When I revise, I ask myself two very simple but crucial questions:

1)   What doesn’t belong? I prune unmercifully; after all, nothing, absolutely nothing, belongs in a short story that doesn’t advance it in some way.

2)   What’s missing? I try to read like a stranger to the work. Will it make sense, will it resonate for another reader? A story can be much clearer in my head than it is on the page.

I also get somebody else to read it–two or three people, if I’m lucky. It’s always interesting what someone else sees, or doesn’t see, in a story. That’s crucial, too.

And I read. I read short fiction by writers I admire. I analyze what they do and how they do it.

So, poor seeds of stories, poor wilted ones—maybe you have a chance after all. I’m writing this post mainly to me, of course, to remind me to get back in there and get my hands dirty. That’s what it takes.

What are your favorite revision strategies? How do you bounce back from rejection? Please share; I’d love to know!

“If I could write the beauty of your eyes” —William Shakespeare

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

A few days ago, I launched my Writer Page on Facebook.

Novel note card, April 2011

Over the last six weeks or so, I have gone places I’ve never gone before—on the Internet, that is. No, I have not been visiting naughty websites. I’ve been doing something the publishing industry calls “Building a Platform.” Note the caps, a signifier of importance. It seems a platform is important for writers. Even those of us without a published book are encouraged to go ahead and start putting ourselves “out there.” So that’s what I’ve been doing under the fabulous leadership of one Not-Bob, or Robert Lee Brewer, who led the My Name Is Not Bob April Platform Challenge.

April, you say? Yes, the challenge ended when April did, but the momentum continues.

I was already a Facebook person, and I “did” LinkedIn. I had signed up for Twitter, added Google+ and Red Room, and I’ve been visiting my fellow platformers’ blogs like crazy, with great admiration for their ability to write posts (daily, some of them; wow), juggle jobs and kids and lives and still write their novels or poetry or memoirs or whatever is dearest to their hearts.

My final goal was to create the Facebook Writer Page. Did I dare call myself a writer and make it a public declaration? When I finally held my nose and dived in, it wasn’t all that bad. In fact, it was fun, and many friends and fellow writers dropped by quickly and “liked” the page, so it’s gotten off to a good start.

Something interesting surfaced in the midst of all that. When I started to create the page, I had to choose a category from among businesses, organizations, nonprofits, brands, and such. I considered all the options and decided on Artist, Band, or Public Figure. I’m not an Artist (well, that one’s close; I like to think I am, with words); I’m not a Band; and I’m certainly not a Public Figure. (Notice those caps again.) The ah-ha moment came when I held my breath and clicked on Artist and saw I had choices there, too.

What kind of person am I? What’s my identity?

Two of the options were “author” and “writer.” Hmmm. Author sounds a little stilted, I thought, so instinctively, I went with writer. After all, that’s what I call myself these days.

It started me thinking. I’m a former English teacher. I should know the distinction between those two words. Writer is more generic? An author is someone . . . more established? I finally gave in and looked them up. Here’s some of what I found.

(If you hate it when people quote the dictionary, you should maybe stop here.)

According to Merriam Webster: an author is “one that originates or creates; the writer of a literary work (as a book). Author originates from the Middle English auctour, from Anglo-French auctor, autor, from Latin auctor promoter, originator, author, from augēre to increase.” The word dates from the 14th century.

A writer is “one that writes [refers to the definition of write] as a: author [one and the same? Really?] and b: one who writes stock options.”  The word traces to the 12th century.

So the word writer pre-dates author, but it doesn’t have the fancy pedigree.

My Dashboard dictionary on the Mac defines author as “someone who writes books as a profession” and writer as “a person who writes books, stories, or articles as a job or regular occupation.”

Are we splitting hairs here?

Let’s look at the word write. Merriam Webster begins with the simplest definition—to “form characters or symbols on a surface with an instrument (as a pen)”—and progresses  to “to set down in writing; to be the author of; to express in literary form.” Ah, getting closer. The example that follows is a line from Shakespeare: “if I could write the beauty of your eyes . . .”

So which am I? I think I’ll stick with writer.

A writer puts marks on a page, yes. She makes words, yes, and symbols, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters. Stories, memoirs, novels, poetry. She records the world as she sees it. She creates people and places and worlds that didn’t exist before.

A writer makes her mark on the world. That’s what I’d like to do. So call me writer, please. That’s the word for me.

Here’s a question for you: how do you see yourself? Do you call yourself a writer or an author? Is there a distinction in your mind? I expect there’ll be different opinions. I’d love to hear yours.

The King’s English Is Dead: Long Live the King’s English!

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

I think if I hear one more highly educated, highly paid news anchor say “him and I,” I’m going to throw something big at the TV. The same is true for celebrities and print and online media. Misuse of the English language as I learned it is rampant, and the media spreads it like a plague. I’m being overly dramatic, you say? Maybe, but what’s a little hyperbole (a great word!) in order to make a point?

It’s inevitable that language evolves over time. We only have to look at the works of Shakespeare to see what’s happened to the English language over the past 400 years:

My liege, and madam, to expostulate

What majesty should be, what duty is,

What day is day, night night, and time is time,

Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time;

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. . . .

—Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 86–92

Or we can go back farther to the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour; . . .

—from the Prologue

And there’s Beowulf. The words of that epic poem look foreign to us:

Hwæt! We Gardena        in geardagum,

þeodcyninga,        þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon.

Oft Scyld Scefing         sceaþena þreatum, . . .

A hundred years from now, will students of language—if any still exist—look back on the turn of this century and marvel at our archaic English language? Will the pronoun be erased from common usage? Will all spelling be reduced to text-speak? Will books become chips slipped into a tiny pocket embedded in the skin? I hope not.

I’m keenly aware at the moment of the history of language because the novel I’m working on is set around the time of World War I. It’s essential that I capture the vocabulary and the cadences of spoken English at that time. The book is also set in the deep South, which raises the problem of dialect: how much variation is enough to suggest speech patterns of that time and place and also variations of class and race? I want to be true to the language of the time without the language itself becoming a distraction, like that news anchor on TV whose point I miss because I’m fuming over his usage error.

A long time ago, I had a teaching colleague (English) who came to be known locally as the Grammar Police. She wrote scathing letters to the newspaper and called out columnists and editors alike on their errors. The newspaper was our primary source back then. I wonder if she’s now trying to keep up with Twitter. I doubt it. I wonder if she shuts off her TV in dismay.

I’ve noticed that several of my MNIMB platform challenge colleagues are teachers. Not all of you are English teachers, I’m sure, but some of you are; I’ve noticed your paper-grading comments. What problems do you encounter with your students? Do you find that the casual language of the spoken word spills over into their writing? What standards do you apply to their writing? To your own? If you’d like to weigh in, please comment!