Be a Writer

I’ve been published a handful of times, five times in professional, critically acclaimed collections, once through self publication on the Kindle. I have submitted my work to literary magazines and journals and amassed a tidy pile of rejection letters.
I remember, after my first publication, being told that I was now a “real writer”, and being told the same after I took on the task of self publication, and again by my creative writing professor after I received my first rejection.
All in good fun, but I’ve felt like a real writer all along. When I was ten years old, I got an idea in my head for a movie that simply would not leave me alone. I finally realized that no one would make said film because it was an idea unique to me. It was my story. Soon I began obsessing over the characters and their relationships to one another, and whenever I found myself struggling (I moved cross country twice following year, leaving behind my childhood home and friends), I would return to the world of that story. I had written a novella when I was 6, but never seriously considered, until this idea leapt into my brain and would not release me, that I might be a writer. Once I began penning it in notebooks and on the backs of envelopes, I found myself thinking of myself as a writer. My head would scream with images and dialogue and characters and not let up until the pen had let them out. By the time I was in middle school I found myself, more and more, seeing myself as little else. I wrote constantly, on math notes, during lunch. I could not dampen my resolve in any way, and few things could pull me away when I was writing something that excited me in some way.
These days, over a decade later, I have trained myself to write more responsibly. Sometimes the ideas in my head need tweaking, or brewing before they reach the page. Sometimes I put aside the story so it can mature, and sometimes, with little thought except a vague image, I throw myself into the words, full-force, and do not stop until it is written.
There is no sure-fire way to write, I think. I can write on a schedule, but I do my best work when I wait for true inspiration. Some people need to force themselves or they will never do it. I tend to take a more passionate approach to my writing and get it all out in one burst, but not always. This summer, for example, I forced myself to write 3-5 pages on a story every night and the end result was a murder mystery novella that went in directions I was not expecting.
But all of that is discipline. You do not become a writer when you set a schedule, nor even when you become published. All of these are good things, and writers aspire for these things so that they may share their work with the world. But becoming a writer starts with passion. I do not mean you are constantly scrawling your story on everything you get your hands on- part of any good story are the bits that slow you down and cause you to reflect, and sometimes these moments can make the writing long and laborious. But if you love your story, then it will all be worth it.
And that is the size and shape of a writer: someone who has found something in themselves they feel is so worth saying, they need to share it with the world.

I don’t always enjoy classes or homework or tests but I can tell you one thing, I love being in school. I love learning new things. I love being exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking. One of what I consider to be my most creative- not to be confused with one of my best overall- short stories was spawned in one of my spanish classes where we were taught the literal of “putting on make up” from spanish to english was “to make yourself up.” Which isn’t terribly different from the english phrase, just words scrambled around differently but I started thinking what if someone could wake up every morning and make up exactly how they wanted to be that day.

Learning new ideas enhances creativity. Learning new ideas gets the brain running. Learning new ideas helps prevent us from developing an “inside the box” method of thinking that time, cultural influence and a lack of stimulation will foster.

I will be graduating in a year and my greatest concern is not what job will I get or if I will end up just living in a  cardboard box with no internet, though both of those are up there. It is whether or not I will maintain enough of an interest in the world around me to continue exploring and exposing myself to new ideas. 

I have begun making a point to use sites like Tumblr, TED talks, Dark Roasted Blend and the “sparks”  section of Google+ to help me find stories and articles that were new and interesting to me. I treat these feeds of information that I’ve set up for myself like a morning paper of sorts. A dose of new ideas with my morning coffee.

The Changing Frontier

The world is changing. The way people read is changing, the future of the publishing industry and other artistic markets, if you will, have all shifted dramatically just in the last few years. But is this something to be afraid of, or to embrace?
In the new artistic frontier, we are given even more opportunities. Publication is easier than ever! Even I have released a Kindle book of short stories that would simply never see the light of day otherwise.
But the new frontier also means that other mediums have arisen for real and earnest artistic expression.
When you think of video games you likely think of say, Pac-Man or Super Mario Brothers. You likely think of video games, as well, games; challenges to be completed. But just recently the court ruled that video games were a valid art form. It may be hard to tell if you are slogged down in a world of MMOs, but artistic expression has taken off in the video game world dramatically in the last few years. Last spring I played a game that shook me and caused me to question what I really regarded as art. It was a game called The Path developed by Tale of Tales, a forerunner of what is commonly called the “artgames” genre and what they prefer to think of as the “notgames” initiative. The idea is to use the video game technology to cause a real emotional and psychological experience. The Path is just that. There are no goals, no rules, no ticking clock. The game recasts “Little Red Riding Hood” with seven sisters who are given the same instructions, “Go to Grandmother’s House. Stay on the Path.” You can follow these instructions, and the game ends, calling you a failure, despite seemingly achieving your goals. If you do not follow these instructions, and you stray from the titular path, you run the risk of being lost in the woods forever, stumbling across objects that unlock different aspects of each sister’s personality. And then of course, you may run into a wolf, which will end the game as a success. There are no goals, simply exploration into the psyche of each sister as you try and understand her view of the world, what brings her to the woods, and what the wolf means to her. It is a chilling, haunting piece, and certainly, while it is a video game, not like any game I have played before. It is a thought-provoking art piece.

While they have existed since newspapers themselves began, comics have taken a great leap in the digital frontier, with Dark Horse, the largest indie publisher in existence, being a forerunner in the digital world. As any glance at the world of webcomics will show you, comics have done nothing but thrive in the new frontier. While there still exists a cultural stigma that shrugs off this artistic medium as capes and nothing but, they are missing the big picture. Since the 80s, comics have developed into a medium as profound as any. Works like Maus, a dramatic retelling of the Holocaust experience through the comic book medium, won a Pulitzer Prize for literature. And the genre has only expanded. Writers like Neil Gaiman known for his work in genre-bending literature like American Gods have contributed mightily to comic books, working with a number of titles and applying the same genre bending to this medium as he does in literature. His work with The Sandman graphic novels was heavily acclaimed, winning a number of awards, and widely considered a “masterpiece” of the new wave of comic books. And let’s not discredit capes either. Over the years, as 2008 film The Dark Knight should have been an indication, superhero stories themselves have become a valid artistic medium, as in Batman pieces such as Year One, The Long Halloween or the anthology collections, Black and White which has featured some of the most thought-provoking story telling and provocative art I have seen. Any writer in the field should be honored to work in the comic book medium, which is only soaring as the digital world levels the playing field further and makes it easier for more fresh voices to filter into the art field.

The bottom line is, the world is changing for artists and writers and the things we once considered childish can be works of exquisite beauty. Are your talents up to the task?

Has anyone written about writing habits yet? I don’t think they have yet and it’s something I really believe in so I’ll do that today. If it’s slipped my mind and it has been done and I’m being redundant, then I apologize in advance.

A huge pet peeve of mine however is when writers complain that they haven’t written because of writer’s block or that they just haven’t had time. Or when some of my friends who once aspired to be writers give me gloomy prophecies about how in the “real world”  it’s almost impossible to make a living and still write.Writing is a job and a habit. You have to decide to write for a portion of time, or up to a certain amount of words, and do that ever single day. Because life, whether it’s school, a family, a job or whatever your responsibilities are, it gets in the way. It hovers around and demands a lot of your time.

I make myself sit down and write every day. I typically allow myself to have weekends off, just as if it were a proper job for me. Though if I feel like writing on weekends I won’t not do it because I’m “off.” In the spirit of full disclosure I’ll admit I haven’t written anything in months. I’ve been editing the last novel I wrote though, which means not creating anything new but it is an important step in the writing process.

It’s challenging to write every day. It’s easier to write with inspiration which you probably won’t have every day, but writing won’t always be easy. Write anyway. If it’s rubbish, that’s what editing is for. It is easier to just write when you have time, but unless you’re making a living as a writer and you have a publisher waiting on your manuscript, odds are there are going to be many things that are tempting to prioritize over writing. Make yourself do it though. After a little while writing every day does become a habit and your day will feel empty if skip that part of it.

Write What You Know

“Spend some time living before you start writing. What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, ‘Write what you know.’ It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.”-Annie Proulx

I recently stumbled across this quote by Annie Proulx, and I find it to be very apt. Many aspiring writers are, as she says, coiled tightly into themselves to the point that they cannot relate to the world in their writing. However I think there is something to be said for writing what you know, though I don’t mean it in the way Proulx is taking it . I give “write what you know” as the first piece of writing advice to anyone setting a pen to the page, in fact. Writing is a journey, a journey of self that takes you to that tightly coiled center of your boring little self, but the journey has a point, writing, as much as it goes inward, should bring what is inside out. If you are only going in, that is only half the journey. Writing is expressing those deepest thoughts in a way that others can relate to, a way that can bring your experience to others, rather than drag them into it. If you do not write what you know, then you bring nothing to the table. It is your thoughts and experiences that color your writing, otherwise you are simply another voice screaming in the void. Who cares for your thoughts? Nothing is new under the sun, and heaven help us if you ever find your thoughts to be unique. They are not. But only you come from your set of experiences, and that is what makes the need for you to “write what you know” so important. Have new experiences, learn new things, explore new ideas and locations. But write them from your soul, the thing you know better than anyone else. You can write magnificently on foreign lands, but if you have no experiences or emotions to attach to them, we’d just as well read an encyclopedia..

The cliché of an author is that they’re recluse people, practically hermits, with strange habits and several cats and a strong dislike for people. Here are two cliché defying writers that I admire and want to be like should I ever become an author.

Neil Gaiman

He was an obvious choice. He’s probably one of the biggest fantasy writers today. I mean is there anything he doesn’t write? He’s done novels, graphic novels, short stories, poems and guest writer episodes of several television shows. He’s also on Twitter and has a blog. In fact, I became a fan of Neil Gaiman as a person, through his blog and Twitter account, before I became a fan of Neil Gaiman as a writer. He puts himself in the public eye through his social networking but also seems to be involved in tons of other things working side by side various artists in different arts. He’s done numerous cons, oversees plenty of his movies turning into television shows and movies and generally seems to be always on the move to somewhere doing something, while simultaneously causing websites (known as Neil web fails) to crash by linking them from his twitter. 

John Green

I’ve mentioned John Green before in one or two of these articles that I’ve written. He and his brother, Hank Green, have a video blog that they update regularly. They also created Nerdfighters to “fight against suck,” and anyone can be one by just being awesome. He and Hank organized Vidcon, are involved in other cons, co-founded DFTBA (Don’t Forget to Be Awesome) Records and he does regular tours with his brother around the country. Aside from the youtube video channel, he also has a Twitter and a Tumblr account. Like Neil Gaiman he’s got numerous causes that he supports and encourages others to support as well. Recently his unreleased book made number one best seller on Amazon. He’s also personally signing all the presold books often during live video streams. 

I respect these writers and others like them who are very involved with their fans rather than locking themselves up in their studies and only writing. I use them as role models for the kind of person I want to be if I ever rise to a position of influence, however slight, through my own writing prowess. I think it’s important for writers to be in the public sphere. Imagine if writers were considered celebrities, on par with rock stars and movie stars. Writers are often intellectuals and thinkers. If we put them in the spot light and their opinions carried as much weight with the public as some of the other celebrities do I honestly believe our society would be greatly enriched.

Creativity in the Midst of Difficulty

I blame my creative outbursts on many things, but all of them are rooted in my childhood. I was always a sickly little girl. I got pneumonia, severe dehydration, and a number of infections when I was six years old, and nearly died. Since then I was in a delicate state for the rest of my childhood, my immune system thrashed beyond repair, I was susceptible to nearly everything that went around, and was hospitalized several more times. Looking back, I see I must have been fairly isolated, but I never felt it at the time. While I had a very loving older brother who was always down to play anything from musketeers to Barbies with me, I learned, early on, the value of entertaining myself, especially when sickness took hold so much that I could not hold a plastic sword or tilt a doll’s head.
I will never forget one day, under a severe fever that left me listless, I was lying on my mother’s bed, staring at a wall, sponge-painted in mauve and green. Soon there formed patterns in it, a monkey, a trio of monkeys on a bicycle, a whole temple that the monkeys must have lived in, then cruel baboons who were invading the monkey temple, then...

Well, you get the idea. I stared at the wall, wracked by fever, for nearly an hour, inventing new and exciting twists in the great monkey-baboon war. I was pulled out of epic struggle only by pure exhaustion.

So what makes this delicate stage of my life so important? Well, like any of the other events in my childhood, it formed the way I think and the way I form ideas. Not everyone comes into their creativity in the same way, and I certainly hope no one else had to go through isolating illness and hallucinatory adventures on a sponge-painted wall to come into theirs.
But this is one example of many of the things that went into forming my imaginative state. There are others, more delightful and more tragic, that I could cite. The point is, and what I want to encourage creative individuals to realize is that all darkness has a light. I could have been a miserable child during my repeated hospitalizations and intense fevers, but I instead explored imaginative worlds, and somewhere in the midst of this period was the first time I took up a pen and wrote a story. It wasn’t simply escapism for me, it was how I made life bearable when I was at death’s door, and how I coped with realizing I was, in a sense, alone in what I was going through.
Everyone won’t go through what I did, and thank goodness, but everyone goes through something. If you explore your creativity, you will never go through those things alone.

Writing Advice: Showing off

I’ve spent a good amount of time this summer editing my most recent novel. While doing this I noticed that I was deleting a lot of long phrases that weren’t necessary. Most of the time they were overly verbose or somewhat redundant descriptions. Basically, I was showing off.

Showing off is usually a rookie and/or a first draft sort of mistake. Think of one of those people who talk just to hear themselves talk. Often they don’t even say anything, not really. A writer who is showing off is using words for the sake of using words. Getting carried away by the words or by our own clever ability to spin them into pretty phrases can happen to the best of us.

Try to avoid it and resist the temptation to keep them. Don’t think that no one will notice. I really liked some of the phrases I had to get rid of but they had to go. No matter how much I liked them they made me sound pretentious or, even worse, boring. 

Hemingway once wrote a six word story. Six words. Of course he was a minimalist writer and we can’t all write like Hemingway. The world would be very dull without a variety of styles. Even the more wordy styles though choose their words carefully and avoid saying the same thing over and over again in different ways.

Be careful, be choosy and make sure every word pushes the story forward in some way.

Expectations.

When I sit down every Tuesday night to write my weekly post, I write of whatever is relevant to me in hope that it will strike a cord with the readers. Tonight, is no different, and I write of expectations.

You know? Expectations? The shit that will break you down, and make you cry if they are too high, and for some reason do the same exact thing, if they are too low? And to make matter worse everyone has them. Your parents, siblings, grandparents, relatives, friends, teachers, mentors, and even strangers, but what we forget as humans is to ask ourselves what WE are expecting of OURSELVES. But listen to yourself. You know what you want deep inside. You know what you preach, love, hate, and shun. Don't let someone else do it for you.

Ask yourself. Answer it in a post, or submit it into our ask (anonymously or not.)

Soul Books

Exploring your universe

Today is my birthday so I find myself thinking of some of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. As a writer, I am always hungry for words. You can’t really be a writer if you are not.
Some of my favorite gifts have been books given to me by other people, especially that which is their favorite book.
One of the most treasured books I own was given me by my writing mentor, a liberal Jewish lesbian who I had very little in common with except a shared love of words. Upon my 18th birthday, she presented me with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I had already read it, but she told me that, in college she carried it with her until it was beaten up and abused, and she had written in the cover, encouraging me to do the same. I have not fulfilled this, but I have admirably beaten it up through multiple readings, each time growing a bit more and understanding the book more fully from not only the protagonist’s and the author’s points of view, but from my writing mentor’s. She presented the book to me, not just as a piece of required reading, but as a piece of herself, something that she could let me in on, like a small gem of her soul.
Soon after she presented me with that book, I began to understand the power of giving books, not that you necessarily think your friend or family member will love, but that you love. To this day, one of the most common gifts I have given anyone is Till We Have Faces, a novel by C.S. Lewis. It is a beautiful retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth with a strong historical flavor and a brilliantly crafted female protagonist. But I very rarely give it to a person with any description beyond, “this is my favorite book”.
You see, when you give your favorite book to someone, you are, in a way, letting them in on the big secret of your soul, unveiling yourself, so to speak. They will read you into the book and try to work out the appeal. If they are a good reader, they will understand, even if the book doesn’t speak to them in the same way, why it does speak so strongly to you.
So I encourage you, writers and artists alike, to let yourself love a book so much it becomes a part of your soul. Then I encourage you not to hoard it all to yourself, but to share that most beautiful aspect of yourself with others, so in that way, you can make them a bit more beautiful too.