Monthly Archives: April 2016

Daily Writing Tip 52 of 100, You Will Never Fool Anyone Else If You Can’t Fool Yourself

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – You Will Never Fool Anyone Else If You Can’t Fool Yourself

Source – Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell

Ultimately you have to believe. If it is not real for you, you cannot talk about it persuasively. Because the writing of fiction is all about producing an illusion, it’s all-important that you believe in the illusion absolutely. You will never fool anyone else if you can’t fool yourself.

All the rest is craftsmanship.

Narrative Design is an interesting book. First of all it is a Textbook – a more formal tome designed to be used in a classroom setting to teach people how to write fiction.

I have bad memories of trying to learn to write in school. Bad enough to make me a chemist rather than a writer and bad enough that it took me twenty five years to write anything fictional after I graduated.

It also talks a lot about fiction workshops and about the Iowa Model of fiction workshops.

I’m not convinced that does any good at all.

Daily Writing Tip 51 of 100, Misfits Don’t Fall in Love

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Misfits Don’t Fall in Love

Source – Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter

The distrust that many Americans harbor for any community except the family has helped to make us a nation of politically misallied misfits. Misfits don’t want to join political parties or fall in love. They want to light out for the territories, proclaim their belief in purity, acquire some firepower, and stay clean. They think of themselves as heroic. The quest is secondary and often incoherent and unintelligible. It is undertaken in the condition of cheerfulness – think of the recent crazy-rictus candidacies of Ross Perot or Steve Forbes. Cheerfulness, as Robert Bly has argued, is a deeply Puritan emotion, frozen and static, as opposed to joy, which is transfigurative. America, as visitors never tire of pointing out, is full of vaguely sinister cheerfulness. Your murderer smiles at you when they shoot you. Robert DeNiro caught this quality in his performance in Taxi Driver. The crazier Travis Bickle gets the more he grins.

I don’t think this is a writing tip as much as it is an example of how a writer can look at characters in a complex, unique, and multi-dimensional way. I think there should be at least one Misfit in every story – actually, I think every character should be a Misfit in their own idiosyncratic way.

Oh, and this is interesting in how it illuminates our present political predicament. Today, Ross Perot or Steve Forbes would be considered the sane candidate. I think I would be less afraid of Travis Bickle than I am of Donald Trump.

What Machine Is It That Bears Us Along So Relentlessly?

Posted on by Bill Chance

“What Machine is it that bears us along so relentlessly? We go rattling thro’ another Day,- another Year,- as thro’ an empty Town without a Name, in the Midnight…we have but Memories of some Pause at the Pleasure-Spas of our younger Day, the Maidens, the Cards, the Claret,- we seek to extend our stay, but now a silent Functionary in dark Livery indicates it is time to re-board the Coach, and resume the Journey. Long before the Destination, moreover, shall this Machine come abruptly to a Stop…gather’d dense with Fear, shall we open the Door to confer with the Driver, to discover that there is no Driver…no Horses,…only the Machine, fading as we stand, and a Prairie of desperate Immensity…”

― Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

tractor

Daily Writing Tip 50 of 100, When Time Stops

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – When Time Stops

Source – Writing in Flow by Susan K Perry

You may find that time becomes essentially irrelevant. When the writing session is over, you may find yourself astonished at how much time has actually gone by. Numerous writers said this is exactly what happens to them.
…
Flow’s timelessness, for some of us, is the best part of the experience, highly valued for its own sake. It feels incredible.

That feeling of timelessness is why we do… anything, really. I’ve never had a feeling of timelessness in the hours spent making sure my TPS reports have proper cover sheets.

The opposite side of this timelessness is how exhausted you can feel when it is over. But it is a kind of good exhaustion – earned exhaustion – spent.

Daily Writing Tip 49 of 100, Stay In Touch With That Hunger

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Stay In Touch With That Hunger

Source – Writing the Novel by Lawrence Block

There is a hunger at the root of all our creative work, whether it is for wealth or recognition or a sense of accomplishment or some tangible proof that we are not worthless human beings after all. To return to an earlier metaphor, we might call that hunger the yeast that starts that dark ferment working down in the unconscious.

If we can stay in touch with that hunger, the pot will keep bubbling-and ideas that engage us will continue rising to the surface.

That all sounds well and good – but I guarantee you that a few days of staring at a blank page in a typewriter (or those white LEDs on the screen) will often seem to prove that the writer is indeed a worthless human being.

The Only Acceptable Currency Is Pain

Posted on by Bill Chance

Gravity, velocity, and the ground; stopping is going to cost a fortune and the only acceptable currency is pain.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

The Goat Ranch Dallas, Texas

The Goat Ranch
Dallas, Texas

I Just Wanted To Be Sure Of You

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

petting zoo at Rodeo Ranch Dallas, Texas

petting zoo at
Rodeo Ranch
Dallas, Texas

Daily Writing Tip 48 of 100, First Aid for Plots

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – First Aid for Plots

Source – How Fiction Works by Oakley Hall

  1. Remember that plot is character in predicament.
  2. The protagonist should be the initiator of the action rather than the victim of it, active rather than passive.
  3. Is there a use for a Ticking Clock?
  4. Give the protagonist a compulsion. Consider the compulsions in The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy wants to get home to Kansas, the Tin Woodsman wants a heart, the Scarecrow a brain, the Wicked Witch the ruby slipper.
  5. Consider unities and contractual obligations. If the novel begins in Santa Ana, California, maybe it should end in Santa Ana. If Ralph appears on page 10, maybe he should reappear before the end of the novel. If there is a bear trap hung on the wall in the first chapter, maybe it should be actuated in the last.
  6. What is at stake?
  7. Is the ending inevitable yet surprising?

Inevitable yet surprising? – I think that only a writer can fully understand how this is possible… not only possible, but common and maybe even necessary. Comprehending subtle realities like that makes all the work and frustration worthwhile.

I Think I’m Ready Now

Posted on by Bill Chance

With a taste of your lips
I’m on a ride
You’re toxic I’m slipping under
With a taste of a poison paradise
I’m addicted to you
Don’t you know that you’re toxic

Intoxicate me now
With your lovin’ now
I think I’m ready now

I think I’m ready now
—-Toxic, Britney Spears

Last Saturday I went on a fun bike ride – a fundraiser for the Santa Fe Trail that runs from White Rock Lake to Deep Ellum and Fair Park (my favorite Dallas trail). We ended up at a new place, The Goat Ranch which was fun.

At the end of the festivities, instead of riding straight back to White Rock, I rode into the thick crowd at the Deep Ellum Arts Festival. I had been there the evening before to buy a little monster head in a box (this was my seventh – will have to write about that soon), but thought I’d check it out for a few minutes and see what was going on in the crowded melee of a Saturday Afternoon.

I locked up my bike and hobbled in on my SPD cleated cycling shoes along Murray Street until I saw a woman setting up with a guitar and a small Fender amp on a little busking stage at Murray and Commerce. There was a table with a chair available so I decided to sit and listen.

Alexandra Tayara and her Fender amp

Alexandra Tayara and her Fender amp

Her name was Alexandra Tayara and she was very good. Surprisingly good.

Her first song was the chestnut “House of the Rising Sun.” I’m not sure if she knew the significance of singing that song in that spot. This was the heart of Deep Ellum, of course, and I could almost feel the ghost of Leadbelly wandering those very streets with Blind Lemon Jefferson and singing “House of the Rising Sun.”

She went on to sing some original tunes (really liked “Hurt Boy” – you can get a copy from her website) along with some covers.

My favorite was an emotional bluesy version from that master of emotional bluesy songs – Britney Spears. I had heard people say that “Toxic” was a very good song, but until that Saturday, I didn’t understand it.

I wasn’t the only one that was affected. The crowd grew on the sidestreet as members of the thick throng parading by on Commerce were pulled in by the sound. A guy sitting next to me kept shouting out – his girl would walk over and admonish him but he would reply, “I can’t help it.”

Alexandra Tayara

Alexandra Tayara

She did a few more songs and then finished up. She was going to perform on a larger stage at seven that eveing. I would have enjoyed hearing her again, but I had a lot of work to finish, so I unlocked my bike and began the pedal home.

Daily Writing Tip 47 of 100, Thoughts to Help You Press On

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Thoughts to Help You Press On

Source –Writing the Short Story, by Jack M Bickham

I’ve said it before, but it should be remembered always: Good stories aren’t written; they’re rewritten. No matter how bad you may feel about the pages you produce today, they’re better than no pages at all. You can always fix them later. Your job at the moment is to produce something concrete, which you can revise later.

False starts, messy transitions, recalcitrant characters, and all manner of other disasters befall every writer during first draft. Pros don’t let this discourage or frighten them.

Most excuses for not writing are not good enough.

I wish I could take this to heart better than I do. I know I’ve written (in my useless head) more excuses for not writing than I have produced actual pages.