BEDA, Day 3

I'm all distracted and busy and can't focus on making a coherent blog entry. I just want to laugh and cry and shake and sing. Hey look, I'm doing all four at once!

Wow, look how everyone's running away. Bye!

But today is day 3 of Blog Every Day in April (BEDA) so I had to put something down, right?

For the first time in a forever I fee like maybe, just maybe, I know what I'm doing. This is rare phenomenon in writers and thus deserves thorough documentation.

THINGS ARE WORKING, PEOPLE!

Like, my plot is flowing, my ideas make sense, I feel like I understand my character. I've done this before, and I can do it again. AND, I'm not the only one who thinks so.

(And I don't mean that my parents think I'm great. They do, God love them, but that's not what I'm talking about here. People unrelated to me in any way think I know what I'm doing. So it just might be true. On a side note, parents who think you are great are the best thing in life and if you have/had that, then you WIN.)

Off now to crank out a few more pages before my class deadline, then whooshing off to a big party tonight on a flower-decked patio overlooking the lights of Hollywood. (Ooh, how glamorous! There will even be fudgie oatmeal bars at this party, thanks to my friend Brian, so you know it's gonna be great. Oh, and cupcakes. And well, maybe some alcohol.)

Have a good Friday night!

Writing is Hard

It's day number two of Blog Every Day April! Once this blog is done I'll be two for two! Go, me!

So they tell you that writing is hard, that life as a writer is a hard life, blah blah blah. And you go, yeah, sure. I get it. What's the big deal? I write something out of my genius brain, people love it, it gets published and makes a lot of money. You'll see this attitude in folks everywhere. You know, the ones who don't write.

I can't tell you how often people have said something like, "Hey! I've got a great idea for a book/TV show/movie! I'll tell it to you and you can write it and we'll make lots of money!"

Uh, no.

"No really! It's the most fantastic-est idea ever! All you have to do is write it!"

Um, no. Thanks. But no.

"Okay, well, who in the industry can I sell this idea to? Just point the way and I'll go sell it and be rich, rich I tell you!"

It doesn't work like that. Get a clue.

Ideas are easy, people. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If writing them down is so damn easy, then go take your brilliant idea and write it and make your own million dollars. Leave me out of it.

Truth is - it's the writing that's hard. People can look at your book/script/poem/whatever and say - why don't you make your main character do X instead of Y? Add a lesbian scene. Add texture, add depth, add puppies and kittens and rainbows. They say this gaily, as if they know how amazing their ideas are and how grateful you are to hear them. Then they sail away, dusting off their hands in satisfaction. Problem solved!

Well, no. There's still this pesky thing called writing that has to happen. Writing is more than just jotting down ideas. It's more than characters, plot, texture, scenary, puppies, and kittens. It involves staring at a blank page, knowing that out of all the words in the English language, you have to pick the exact right words to convey all this depth, all this tension, all these rainbows and unicorns and dancing elves. You not only have to have the idea, you have to have the bricks, the mortar, and the know how to use them. You are architect, contractor, and home owner all in one. You have to entertain, enlighten, amuse. There's pacing, plotting, syntax, vocabulary, metaphor, theme and which breed of puppy to consider. The possibilities are infinite, and you have to pinpoint the perfect needle in the midst of that Milky Way sized haystack.

So writing is hard. After you're done writing, you then have to find someone who likes it enough to pay you for it. And that's just as hard as the writing. It's not for the faint-hearted. It's not for the egotistical. You will get beat down and discouraged. You will work long hours alone with no one to tell you how brilliant you are. You will be rejected, over and over again. You will scramble to find hours in the day to write, then when you do sit down, your mind will be blank. The muse will not come.

If you have to write anyway, do it. The world needs people of determination and character who can face these problems down and keep moving forward. But remember, it's no picnic. It's not even a dinner party. It's hard. Now get to work.

Favorite Poem

In honor of Poetry month, I post here what is probably my favorite poem. There are many others that come close, but I always come back to Fern Hill by the late great Dylan Thomas.

FERN HILL

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Blog Every Day April

YA author Maureen Johnson has declared this month to be Blog Every Day April (BEDA - on Twitter search #BEDA). So in addition to it being Poetry Month, it's apparently blogging month.

Any other writing demands you got, folks???

I'm in the last week of my class, trying to churn out pages, and now I'm supposed to blog every day and write a poem every day too? Can you, ya know, spread this shit out a little for me?

Yet lo, see how I have blogged today, April 1? Perhaps I shall be able to do this BEDA thing.

Perhaps not. No promises.

In the spirit of all this, here's a stab at a poem for today.

Running down Hollywood Boulevard at sunset

Plane contrail a white arrow in dusty blue sky
backlit palms
Elvis and Marilyn arm in arm
three musicians, pierced, blue hair, use the crosswalk
carrying a guitar, a trumpet, and a bass.
A woman tends white roses in the Wattles gardens
while rats rustle in drifts of leaves
beneath the avocado trees.

Breath comes hard, I limp
past an open case of beer on the sidewalk
and stop. Inside, bottles beer.
A few feet away a dog owner
has neglected to pick up after an elephant dog.

No one but me
and the old Russian ladies
leaning on each other down the block.

Sweat trickles down my back. A sign
on the telephone pole reads only:
Young Man in need of Living Situation.
All the phone numbers have been torn off.

I feel the beer.
It's cold.
But I run on.

April - a Poem a Day

Robert Lee Brewer at the Writer's Digest blog Poetic Asides in once again having is Poem a Day in April challenge.

For those that are poetically inclined, it's a great way to get those creative bats fluttering. Robert posts a prompt every day, you write a poem and put it in the comments section of his blog, and he picks his favorites.

I tried this last April and it was a complete mixed bag. My chocolate chip cookie poem got picked as a favorite, but some of my efforts were so awful that I ended up deleting them from this blog. Never to be read again!

I won't have the time to do it again this April, (too much else to do!) but I do think I'll check out the prompts and try my hand once or twice along the way. If anything I churn out is slightly palatable, I'll post it here.

If you take the challenge, let me know! And good luck!

Outlining

Thanks to a member of my writing class, I found a very useful post on Deadline Dames about outlining here.

If you've never tried outlining, I can't recommend it highly enough. The post on Deadline Dames shows a couple of fairly simple, straightforward ways to do it. One uses a fave of mine The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler to get things going.

Whenever my writing bogs down and I feel like I'm trudging through sludge to get something on paper, it's almost always because I have no idea where I'm going or why this scene exists. The answer is - outline! Every scene in the outline has a purpose, and knowing that purpose makes it ten times easier to write the scene.

Things will change as you write. You'll come up with ideas that never occured to you before, or see that things should go together differently. That's fine. The outline is not set in stone. I often reoutline, or jot notes in my old outline to indicate changes. It won't squash your inspiration - it'll foster it.

Busy Week!

Went out a lot this week, date-y things, friend-y things, civic duty things. And then there's all that working out and washing my hair and giving medicine to my ancient cat. I thought about bringing my laptop to jury duty but have a horror of schlepping things around. Plus it gave me an excuse to keep reading YA book WAKE by Lisa McMann, which is excellent, by the way!

All of which means I only have four new pages of writing so far. My class deadline (only two more to go!) to submit up to 15 pages is Saturday at 9am (realistically, that means by the end of the evening on Friday because I sleep in on the weekends, babe). I can submit less, but my teacher, Jill Santopolo (children's author and editor at Balzer & Bray), is fabulous, and I want to maximize my use of her talents by getting as much feedback as possible.

So let's be real: no way am I going to churn out 11 pages by the end of the day today. I might be able to generate 5 or 6 - if today is a good day So I'll have maybe 10 or 11 pages for Jill and the other class members to rip into. Sigh. Then just one more week of feedback before I'm on my own again.

Well, not quite. I have good friends who are talented writers who give me their feedback if I do the same for them. Halleluyah! But it's weird how I have this compulsion to squeeze every last drop of feedback out of Jill before she slips away. I guess it's just a sign of how valuable her comments are!

Busy weeks happen. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't write more, but at least I wrote something!

Think Big, Write it Down

Writing is useful in so many ways. I just read a post on The Art of Nonconformity about writing a Big Life List.

I've done variations of this and found it to be very useful. I wrote a list of writing goals here in this blog at the beginning of the year, and am on my way to achieving them - I hope!

The other day I found a list of life goals I'd written many years ago. I'd put it away in an obscure place and came upon it. And guess what? I'd achieved the majority of the goals I'd written there! And that happened without looking at the list after I'd written it. I think writing it down makes it more concrete, lays it down in your synapses somehow, so that you take in the goal unconsciously and start moving toward it.

It may be time for me to form another list of Big Life goals. Maybe it's time for you as well? Check out the links above to see ways to help yourself. Take your time, be concrete, think beyond adventure goals (climb Mt. Everest), and consider publishing the list somewhere. All these things can help you have a life that's more fulfilling as you go through it.

Anyone But Tom Bombadil

Author Neil Gaiman sat down with Stephen Colbert on his show last night to discuss his lovely Newberry Medal-winning novel The Graveyard Book. (Read it now! I loved it.) The interview below reveals the theme of the book and that Neil loves Tolkein but hates Tom Bombadil.

Because I follow Neil on Twitter, I've learned that they cut out 40 second of the interview, where Neil said his favorite Tolkein character was Gandalf, and Colbert said his favorite was Faramir. Enjoy!

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Neil Gaiman

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Mark Sanford
NASA Name Contest

Indulging my Inner Archaeologist...

They are opening up the chambers in the Bent Pyramid in Saqqara! Check out the announcement here.

I did make it into the pyramid of Menkaure when I went to Egypt in 2003. You had to crouch and walk, maintaining that crouch, down a steep incline, clinging to the right hand wall, while people coming out climbed up past you on the left. As you descended, it got dark and sticky and hot. The stone above your head bulged downward. You became accutely aware of the tons of stone piled on top of you. Many people turned around and got the hell out of there after a few moments. Those tomb robbers could not have suffered from claustrophobia at all.

Now I have to go back to Egypt. And maybe write something about exploring underground tunnels beneath a bent pyramid, the tons of stone weighing down from above...

Writing with a Cold

I've been under the weather for about three days now. Hopefully today is the big finish and I'll start getting better. But it did make me (blearily) wonder - how do people write to deadline if they get sick?

I had a brief burst of energy last night and did manage to write two pages. Now I'm afraid to go back and see what I wrote. But I do figure it's better to get something down, almost anything, rather than leave the page blank. Rewriting is a certainty as it is, and you might as well give yourself more to rewrite, right?

We'll see if I have enough energy to crank out two more pages tonight. So far, no. Just typing out this blog entry is making me want to go lie down. So I'm going to lie down.

But all you writers out there, who write sick, on deadline or not - hang in there. Keep writing.

The Grace of Surprise

Okay, this really has nothing to do with writing, but I found the video clip below and am just in awe. In it, a basketball player Chris Paul dribbles the ball through rival team member Jason Perry's legs at lightning speed. It's so fast you can barely see it.



Never thought you'd see a sports clip on this blog, did you? Thank goodness for slo mo and replays. The pass to his teammate who makes the dunk afterwards is almost as spectacular. I could watch this kind of graceful athleticism for hours. It shows the benefits of hours of practice, natural talent, and determination. Writers take note!

(As a tall chick, I also like seeing really tall people show the world that just because we're tall doesn't mean we're clumsy.)

Ten Commandments for Happy Writers

Check out agent Nathan Bransford's post today about the Ten Commandments for Happy Writing.

He's pretty much nailed it.

The Impossible Dream

I haven't seen the Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire yet, but I saw a montage from the film that just floored me, and inspired me.

Getting published. Making a living writing. Impossible dreams, right? Well, take a look at the clip below of Philip Petit, the man who walked on a wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It's a lesson in how to make your impossible dreams come true.

At one point, Petit says, "I thought, okay, this is impossible. Now let's get to work."

Social Networking Etiquette - Agents

So you want to friend an agent on Facebook, or follow your dream agent on Twitter? There are some rules, baby.

Check in out here, on the Literary Agents blog.

I'm now on Twitter. Please forgive me.

At the urging of my evil friend Elisa, I joined Twitter today, and you can follow me @ Ninaberry if for some god-forsaken reason you're on Twitter too.

My excuse? I'm trying to see it as a writing exercise.

Okay, so... yeah. It's a narcissitic writing exercise. For those of you not up on the latest web insanity, Twitter is a site where people just post updates on themselves all day. Unless they block you, you can follow the updates of folks like John Cleese and Neil Gaiman (two of my faves!) and even send them messages. Along the way, you can post your own updates and get your own followers. There's a central feed where every single one of the kajillions of updates is listed as they are added.

Even just this one day of experience has shown me how valuable writing talent is when it comes to Twitter. Would you rather read witticisms from Stephen Colbert or learn that your Aunt just bought some Cortaid? Exactly. That's why Colbert has thousands of followers and your Aunt just has your obligated ass following her.

So I'm going to TRY not to bore all four (!) of my followers with dull updates. This is a challenge since my life is not all that exciting. So I must find ways to make my plodding life and dull observations sparkle and shine. This is a writer's lot, to find the universal, the funny, the beautiful, the truthful in the things and people around them.

It's not easy! But that's my excuse for joining Twitter. Later on no doubt I'll descend into narcissitic madness. Stay tuned!

Oscar Nominated Screeplay Podcast

Deceptive title for this post, ey? My friends Brian Pope and Mike Musa star this week in Pilar Allessandra's latest ON THE PAGE's podcast #76 - "Oscar Talk." You can check it out here or on ITunes - just search for On The Page.

Brian and Mike are funny and smart, and sometimes they're even right! The podcast is a lighthearted and informative. As a writer, I often try to figure out what makes a movie great, and how much the screenplay has to do with it. Of course, if the screenplay is awful, the movie won't be much good. But can a movie be great when the script is just okay? Can a truly great script lift an otherwise adequate movie to greatness? Which of the nominated films has the best screenplay and why?

I live and work in Hollywood, so the Oscars are a big deal around here. They arouse much passionate discussion. Personally, I enjoy the hullabaloo and the excuse to talk about movies, but rarely do I agree with the choices the Academy members make.

You have to remember that the Oscars are first and foremost a marketing tool for Hollywood. On Oscar is not like the hand of God reaching down to pick the best movie. It's a bunch of industry folks with their own weird takes on the people and movies involved.

Fortunately, Pilar, Brian, and Mike know movies, but they also know the truth about the Oscars. If you care about writing or movies, they are definitely worth a listen.

Exposition Central

Conveying vast quantities of exposition is fricking hard in a novel! I have a ton of info to convey on the world, the organizations in it, the people within them, their titles, names, hierarchies, conflicts - oy! I managed to hint at a lot of this in the early, action oriented scenes, but there's only so much of this stuff you can show.

And we all know showing is infinitely better than telling.

So what am I doing now?

Telling.

One character is telling stuff to another. It's logical that he would do this. But I just know that I'll need to change some of it later. This is where I have to force myself to just power onward, rather than stopping to make it perfect now. I can lose a lot of momentum worrying about things like this, and right now I need to just crank out pages, imperfect though they may be.

But exposition's a bitch, baby. Hopefully later I'll make it MY bitch.

busy busy busy

Write write, read read, edit, comment, read, write write.

Blog.

Write write write. Read, edit, comment. Write write write...

A Writer's Credo

Agent Michael Stearns has an effing brilliant quote from Raymond Carver on his blog As the World Stearns, which clearly gives a writer's credo. Check it out here, and be reminded of what it is to be a writer.