The War Of Art

I don't read how-to-write books very much.

Well, I take that back. I've read more lately than I did before I was published. Not because I wanted the writing tips, but because I was looking for concise, cogent ways to talk to groups about writing. Usually, I don't find anything that I couldn't have thought up myself from my own experience, but occasionally I come across something that strikes me as particularly insightful.

I (Donis) did a program on the importance of setting for our local Sisters In Crime annual writing conference earlier this month, and I found some useful information for the panel discussion in Walter Mosely's book, This Is the Year You Write Your Novel. This is a short little step-by-step manual for someone who has never actually written a novel from beginning to end, but Mosely is a very good writer, of course, and I found the whole thing rather interesting, especially when I compared his advice to my actual real-world experience.

I've been having a lot of real-world experience in the past year or so, and have been finding it increasingly hard to carve out writing time. 

The very best book on writing, in my humble opinion, is a small book called The War Of Art, by one of my favorite authors, Steven Pressfield. It's not a how-to book. It's a why-to book. Pressfield maintains that the greatest barrier to becoming a writer is the demon inside you that keeps you from actually sitting down to do it.

This quote is an excerpt from the introduction of Steven Pressfield's The War Of Art.

"Are you a born writer? ... In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don't do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet...

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got."

In the end, it doesn't really matter how many people read your contribution. I enjoy the thought that the thing I love so much to do is still a gift to the world and every being in it.

Why Do You Want to Read This Book?

 Last night I was reading an older Barbara Kingsolver book, High Tide In Tucson. a collection of essays. In one of the essays, “Jaberwocky”, Kingsolver notes that “a novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life ... The power of fiction is to create empathy.” As an example, she says that a newspaper will give you the facts of a situation, say a plane crash, but a novel will show you just how it felt to be one of those hundreds of people who were killed in the crash.

One of my basic beliefs about fiction is that you as the author have to figure out how to make your reader care about the people in your book. It seems to me that truly empathetic characters can even cover sins in the plotting and construction of your book. Think of how many bad plots or unbelievable situations you’ve read in really popular books, and yet, even as you were aware of the novel’s weakness, you still enjoyed it. How does an author manage that?

Jean Auel’s books are a great example. Her Earth’s Children series is spectacularly fascinating. Talk about being able to create a world! She manages to make a character in Ayla that millions of readers wanted to follow all across Ice Age Europe though five encyclopedia-sized tomes. And yet in Auel’s world, one woman is responsible for every technological innovation known to Stone Age man. Do we care?

Here’s an egregious example: ever see the movie Troy? I love The Iliad. When I was an English teacher, I taught The Iliad. I know it well. And yet - in the movie, the Trojan War lasted three days instead of ten years. Paris and Helen lived happily ever after. Menelaus got killed. Agamemnon met his fate somewhere other than his bathtub. However, when Brad Pitt stripped down and sluiced himself off after a battle, did I care?

It all depends on how successfully the author (or filmmaker) is able to pull you into her world and how willing you are to go along with her. In his book on writing, This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosely said, “a novel is a collusion between the author and the reader.” The reader wants to walk in your character’s shoes, to believe in the world you’ve created, and you don’t want to let him down.

Thoughts on a Reading Life

Like all writers, I’m a reader first. But my day job has me thinking about books, maybe, differently than some other writers might. Given that I'm a writer and a teacher, when I choose a book to read, I always have an eye toward my syllabus and a possible spot in my curriculum. I'm fortunate to get to teach a crime literature course twice a year, because many books I read for fun end up on that list.

But I read more than crime books. As a writer — and a human being, for that matter — I strive to have an eclectic stack beside my bed. And I read multiple books at once. Right now, I'm loving Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, a collection of intertwined stories, by Walter Mosley. This will make it onto my syllabus for the spring. I'm listening to the audio version of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote for maybe the tenth time. And I'm reading White Like Me,by Tim Wise, a memoir about white privilege.

I prefer the term "well-loved" over messy

It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by what's on his or her reading list. I've always found it interesting to read interviews with writers to see what’s on his or her nightstand at the moment. Stephen King, for instance, says he reads about 80 books a year. He says he's a slow reader. By my math, that's about a book and a half a week, much faster than my pace, for sure.

Many writers read for inspiration. I certainly do. Not ideas so much as inspiration. Those are two different things, and the difference probably lies mostly in honoring intellectual property boundaries. When I get in a rut, I read. I remember working on the opening of Out of Bounds, a Jack Austen novel, and thinking the opening chapter was flat. I picked up Ian Rankin's wonderful book Let It Bleed, read the first chapter, and thought, I simply need to do better. I went back to the drawing board then rewrote the opening scene several more times, finally punching it up.

One never knows where he or she will find inspiration. I have always loved reading poetry, Philip Levine being at the top of my list. Poetry often offers a view of life through a sequence of images that teach us all a great deal about tone. Conflict is often present in poetry, but it isn't always obvious, and that's a good thing for fiction writers to remember.

These are some thoughts on my reading life. I'd love to hear others’ views.

Summertime. And the Living Ain't Easy.

109.2 °F

My latest manuscript is in the hands of my editor. It will more than likely be after the Independence Day holiday before I hear the verdict. I expect a great deal of rewriting is in my future.

In the meantime, I, Donis, am working on a couple of short stories, doing some book reviewing. Trying to accomplish something. Anything. But it is summer in southern Arizona and trying to get anything done is problematic to say the least. A friend of mine pointed out that Arizona summers are the price we pay for our gorgeous winters. The winters are fantastic and it is nice to rub it in when it's seventy degrees and sunny here and ten below with fifteen feet of snow and ice everywhere else. However, summer is a steep price to pay.

The past week or so hasn't been too bad. Daily highs of 108ºF to 111ºF. One can tell a long-time Arizonan by the fact that she thinks as long as it's below 110ºF, that's "not too bad". Early in June we had several days between 115º and 118º. They were predicting 120º, so we dodged the bullet there.

There are Arizonans who brag about surviving or even loving the heat, just as native North Dakotans brag about the cold. But I'm not one of them. Three months of super heat is exhausting. I get cabin fever. I try to get any errands done in the morning, but banks and stores often don't open before nine or ten a.m., and it's already hot enough for sunstroke by then.

My writing life is not helped by my heat-induced ennui. I have to gear myself up for the task of writing. A few years ago I read an interview with Walter Mosely in which he said it was no problem for him to sit down day after endless day and write, since to him writing was like having to have sex every morning. It may be his job, but he still enjoys it very much.

I wish I were the same. I don’t love it, as a rule, especially when I’m just beginning a new work. I love the ideas, I love working out the details of the story. I love the imagining. But for me writing the first draft is like writing a term paper. What I really love - the endorphin rush for me - comes when I am finished, or nearly so. Then I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment, and amazement that I created something that I like so much. Because I always write what I like to read.

How Much Research is Enough?

As I, Donis, mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve just begun a new novel, and I must say that though I have been working my little tail off lately, I haven’t written very much on the actual story. I’ve been doing research.

The series that I’m writing now is historical, so there is always a certain amount of research that must be done, but every single time I start a new book I end up wrestling with the question of how much research is too dang much. I mean, eventually you have to write the book.

I keep telling myself that it isn’t necessary to do so much research that I become the world’s foremost expert on my subject. Right now I’m researching realistic and historically accurate ways to kill people. This is always problematic for me. Sadly, I have reached such a state of paranoia that I am a little bit afraid to do murderous research on my home computer, lest the NSA bust down my door in the middle of the night. Once I I spent many hours doing anonymous research on library computers because wanted to discover exactly how oil field workers used nitroglycerin to clear obstructions from a well. I am writing murder mystery, after all, and I thought that blowing someone to hell with nitro seemed like a colorful way to commit murder.

I really want to give my reader a true experience of the time and place I write about. I want you to know what it was like to live in southeastern Oklahoma during the flu epidemic of 1918. I want to be accurate, but in the end, I’m writing fiction, not history. Less is almost always more. It’s way too easy to overwrite. You don’t need to explain everything (which I have been guilty of doing.) Even so, that doesn’t mean I can play fast and loose with the facts. One thing I absolutely do not want to do is take the reader out of the story by writing something so obviously anachronistic that she stops and says, “What the …?”

Many years ago a woman told me about a movie she had seen in which an aspiring author walks into a publishing house with a manuscript in hand and asks to see an editor. He gets right in. The editor says, “sure, leave your manuscript with me and come back tomorrow.” The very next morning, the author returns to find that the editor has read the book overnight and loved it. He gives the author a check and tells him that his book will be on the shelves in two weeks.

What? What is this? The Nicholas Tesla Time Warp Publishing House? Their motto is Publishing Faster Than the Speed of Light. I want this publisher.

A lot of people who saw that movie didn’t know or care that that scenario is wrong, but we writers know it’s not only wrong, it’s ridiculous. I remember that story when I’m tempted to think that most of my readers know nothing about Oklahoma in 1918, so I can fudge a little. Somebody knows the truth, and believe me, they’ll let you know when you’ve got it wrong.

Usually history is not front and center in a historical novel. In novels of any ilk, I think it’s the characters that make the story. Walter Mosely said, “Fiction is a collusion between the reader and the novel. Your readers will go along with you, creating a much larger world as they do. It won’t be exactly the world you intended them to see, but it will be close enough—sometimes it will be better”.