Ok, new rules. I had been focusing this blog on topics related to writing…but no more. That was too limiting and I was having trouble coming up with something at least halfway interesting to write about each week. So, instead, we are moving on. Now I get to write about whatever I want. Screw the rules that say to have a successful blog you have to focus on a subject and make it useful for other people. I’d rather use this blog to showcase some writing about things that I’m interested in. I’m not planning on monetizing it or anything. It’s just a place to share some thoughts. So, new rules. Well, really, no rules.
So today I want to write about owls. Specifically about the owls that seem to have taken up residence in our yard. I guess it was about a month ago, my husband told me that there had been an owl looking in the window at him during the afternoon, although they were gone by the time I got home with the kids. We have a lot of trees in our yard, and apparently a lot of owl food because the next morning they were back. My husband called us into the living room to see one perched in one of the trees in our front yard. We watched him for a minute or so before my son started crying and backing up. We looked up and realized that there was a second owl sitting on a branch right next to the window and staring in at us.
My husband looked them up and it turns out that they are Barred Owls. Pretty common owls, it turns out, and they like to live in suburban neighborhoods.
If you’ve never had an owl stare out you, it’s one of those things that is simultaneously cool and unnerving. It’s cool because, really, how often are you close enough to an owl to have it notice you? It’s unnerving because they don’t blink and they don’t move. The sit there as still as can be and look you right in the eye. The look doesn’t feel malicious or like they think you might be dinner or anything. They’re just checking you out. They’re curious.
Since that day we’ve seen them a few times. Just this morning the two of them were in our backyard, sitting on the fence our neighbors built a couple of years ago to keep the dogs apart (it didn’t work, they still bark at each other constantly). I let my dog out (I didn’t want to, but she really had to pee) and expected to see the two of them take off, but they didn’t. She didn’t notice them and ran around the yard like a nut for a few minutes without ever coming near to where they were perched. They both just watched her, but they didn’t move. They were still there when I left for work ten minutes later.
I love having these owls nearby. I don’t really know why, but it makes me happy to know that they’re there and that they’ve decided that our yard is a suitable place for a home.
I just today posted an update to my About page. It was long overdue, I hated what I had originally written, but those things are the worst to write. I never have been very good at writing descriptions of myself, at least not professional descriptions. I came across a couple of sites last week, though, that inspired me to update the page. The first was this page from workawesome.com. It’s a general description of what you should include and why, written in an approachable way. The second, which was incredibly helpful, was this page from copylicious.com. It lists 16 questions to ask yourself. They’re more for inspiration, to see if you come up with anything interesting to write about yourself, and, at least for me, it helped a lot.
So now, instead of limiting my About page to a description of my professional activities, I give more of a sense of who I am as a person and what I value. With the professional activities thrown in for good measure. I decided, that since I like to write stories, I should start off with a story. I had to come up with a story that was not only somewhat interesting/entertaining, but really said something about who I am as well. Thankfully, I have a good one.
I was standing there dripping rainwater on my professor’s office floor, dressed in my mother’s old Woolrich raincoat (well-worn by both of us) and my father’s old red plaid Woolrich shirt and Filson ballcap. I pulled the last assignment of my freshman year out from under the raincoat and handed it to him. He smiled. “Katy, you’re an original.” I smiled. I know he was probably laughing at me, but it was one of the best compliments I’ve ever received. Original is all I’ve ever wanted to be.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of stories I want to write. I wanted to have a definition, something written down where I had thought through what makes me love the books that I love. So I sat down and made a list of books that I love, books that I come back to, books that are more than just friends, books that I am known to push on people because I loved them so much.
I came up with a longer list than I thought I would, and I won’t list them here, but my top five would be:
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery (yes, I know, technically seven books, but whatever)
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- Island by Aldous Huxley
- Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
All of them are just good stories. They carry you along; reading them is compulsive and effortless.
They all engaged me either intellectually or emotionally. With books like Cloud Atlas and Island, the engagement was mostly intellectual. Especially with Island. I don’t remember, with Island, caring particularly about any of the characters. They existed to serve a purpose in that story, to tell the story of Huxley’s idea of utopia. With Cloud Atlas, I did find myself caring deeply for the characters, but the ultimate pay-off for me with that book was the political statement the author was making by examining different stories of enslavement.
As for the rest of the books, the engagement was definitely emotional. The writers all told stories about characters that I cared about. In most cases, these were characters that I identified with in some way or came to deeply admire. I wanted to be Jo March. I wanted Anne’s spunk and determination. I loved the characters in Lahiri’s stories and felt my emotions pulled in all directions right along with theirs.
In all these books, though, there are a few common threads. First, they’re human. They don’t tell stories about characters, really, they tell stories about people. About places. Everything in these books (possibly Island excepted) felt real for me. I guess this is the true goal of most writers, though, to create something that, no matter how fantastical, feels real to the reader.
They all also have heart, which I guess is part of being human, but really speaks to the emotional engagement. They make you feel something, for the characters, for the places, the subject matter.
So, what kind of stories do I want to write? I want to write stories that tug at the reader’s emotional core and engage them intellectually at the same time. Easier said than done, I think. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.
I did. And it was good. But now I have to come up with something to write here.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, I’ve tended to make this blog more about my fiction writing, but I have been trying to start a freelance career as well. This is on top of having a day job, two kids, and ambitions of being a novelist. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. That and I’m just not happy unless I’m driving myself crazy.
It’s interesting to learn about. So far I haven’t been too successful, but I’ve only been at it for a few months. At this point I can see what I’ve been doing wrong and I’m learning how to fix all of my mistakes. I’m also learning how to come up with ideas for things to write about non-fiction-wise. Essay topics, article ideas, all sorts of things. And I’m having fun with it, which is always good. So, hopefully one day soon I can come on here and announce that I have my first piece of non-fiction published. I’m looking forward to it.
I just realized that I have forgotten to post for the last two weeks. Seriously. I wish I could say that it’s been crazy around here or that I’ve been really busy or something, but, really, these last couple of weeks have been kind of relaxed. I have no excuse. Oh well.
I heard back from all but one of the places where I sent my last story (I’m not expecting to hear from that last one), and they all rejected it. Boo. It’s ok, though. I’ve learned to not take it personally. In fact, I re-read the story the other day (I hadn’t looked at it in a couple of months), and I still like it. A lot. I have no doubt that I will find a home for it. I just have to keep sending it out.
So right now I’m going through the process of finding some more places to send it. The problem is that there are so many lit magazines and journals out there, how the heck do you find ones you think might accept it? Well, first, you get on Duotrope.com. I had heard about this website before, but until I started going through this process a couple of weeks ago, I had never really explored it. I am so glad that I have now, it’s great. According to their homepage, they list almost 3,000 publications, all focused on fiction and poetry. They have all sorts of information on each publication, and they have a submissions tracker which serves a couple of purposes. The first, obviously, is to help you keep track of your submissions. The second, and the piece that I was blown away by, is that they keep track of statistics for each publication. So on the page for Monkeybicycle, for instance, I can see that, over the past 12 months, 135 duotrope users have submitted and received responses. I can see what percentage of these were acceptances or rejections, and I can see, on average, how long it took to receive the response. This is fantastic information! I love it!
Unfortunately, I still have to sift through a bunch of different publications to find the right few for my story. I say unfortunately because it takes a lot of time, time I don’t feel like I have right now. But, I’m also finding a lot of new publications I hadn’t heard of that are publishing some excellent stories, and I’m getting to read a lot of said stories, so I guess that’s a plus.
I have a confession to make. I am actually working on two novels right now. I know, not a good idea. I don’t even have time to be working on one novel, let alone two. But that’s how it is. Neither one will let me go. So I’m working on two novels.
They’re two completely different novels, as well. The first is the Civil War novel I’ve been talking about. That one has been particularly tough. I was working on it today and I hit a spot where I have no idea what the actual historical experience would have been like; I’ve found no sources to describe what I was writing about, at least not yet, but I really want to get a first draft done. So made stuff up. I guess that’s my job as a fiction writer. That’s why it’s called fiction, eh? Still, I’m going to have to look this stuff up later.
The second novel is a contemporary story. I read an article one day a few months back, when the Civil War novel was idling, about novels about people at work, and how there were so few that focused on people actually doing normal, everyday jobs. Most times, the job is the background. If it’s in the foreground, chances are it’s unlike any job you’ve ever had. Anyway, there have been a few out in recent years, such as Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and Ed Park’s Personal Days (neither of which I’ve read yet, but they’re both on my list!). Anyway, I started thinking about it and I asked myself, “if I were to write a work novel, what would it look like?” So then I came up with an idea and I’ve been working on it ever since.
I will say that it is fun to have two completely different projects going. The Civil War novel is really intense and requires a lot of research. A LOT of research. The work novel is just fun. I don’t have to look a bunch of stuff up, I can just write and not worry about it. So, even though my time is already stretched incredibly thin, I’m going to keep going on both of them. It’s fun, and doing this, having a writing career, is really all about doing what I want to do, right?
I read a couple of stories yesterday that completely upped the ante for me. My writing needs to be more urgent, more alive, more propulsive. After I’d read these stories, I felt inadequate, but also challenged. Neither story was so much about telling a story as they were about inhabiting a story. There was no distance; as a reader, you were thrown into them. I want to learn how to inhabit a story like that, to lose that emotional distance that I always seem to have.
And yet, as inadequate as I felt, I was excited about learning something new. I’m still excited. That’s what I love about writing, why, even if I never am able to scrap together a career of it, I will never stop. I’m hungry when it comes to writing. I want to learn more, to do more, to push myself farther and harder. And so I know that I will and that I’ll get better and that there will always be ways to improve.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I was having trouble figuring out what my novel was really about. Well, the next day, in the car on the way home, it came to me. All of a sudden I knew exactly who my character was, and why she is going to do what she is going to do. The whole story, the plot, the subplots, the characters, all of it was completely clear. It just needed to percolate for a while, that’s all.
The whole percolation thing was really tough, to be honest. To just sit the project aside for a while, especially when I’ve put so much into it already, to trust that I would have a breakthrough and I wouldn’t end up just dropping it, was one of the most difficult things I have had to do in my writing career so far (which, admittedly, isn’t saying much. I’ve only been writing seriously for the past four years). I’ve dropped other projects, but I hadn’t devoted myself to any of them the way I’ve devoted myself to this one. So far, I’ve read 13 books (thank you Goodreads), spent countless hours doing research on the internet, and written about five false starts. The deeper I’ve gotten into this one, the more I’ve wanted to write the story.
I’m glad I didn’t give up on it. I don’t think I could have even if I’d wanted to. I think it will turn out well. In fact, I would go so far to say that I know it will. I’m about 4,000 words in right now and I don’t have any of the doubts I had about earlier versions, although I keep searching for them, expecting them. I have a lot more research to do, but I’m excited about it. Especially now.
I read an interesting article at The Chronicle of Higher Education today and it reminded me that I have not explained what I wrote on the homepage to my newly-designed and built website. The article, by Paul Bloom, is about imagination and why its use is particularly appealing to people. According to Bloom,
Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing.
This is exactly why I feel stories are so important. Stories, whether true or fiction, resonate with people. We empathize with the characters, we identify with them, and, in the best of cases, immerse ourselves in the worlds of the stories we read/watch.
However, stories aren’t only useful for fiction. I like to think of a story as a way to frame an argument or a discussion. I use the concept even in reports that I write for my day job. You can present all the facts in the world, but if you can’t make those facts compelling in some way, if you can’t organize them into some cohesive whole, no one will care. No matter how small the document, if it is meant to communicate something, then telling a story is important.
That is why I believe stories are so powerful. We identify with stories, they mean something to us as humans. Taking a historical perspective, people have always told stories. Stories are how we have made sense of our world. My undergraduate degree is in anthropology, and in my studies I was fascinated with the stories people told, with the differences and similarities between stories from different cultures all over the world. Stories are essential.
I guess it takes some sort of hubris to think that I can contribute anything to this tradition, but I like to think that what it really takes is humanity. We all tell stories, every one of us. I am no different than anyone else.
The two topics really are related. I promise. Well, at least for this post, anyway.
The first thing I want to talk about is a post from Nathan Bransford’s blog about writing a one-sentence pitch for your novel. One part of that post really hit home for me, because it truly gets to the heart of something I’ve been struggling with for a while on my Civil War novel. He gives a basic outline for what should be included in a one-sentence pitch:
When OPENING CONFLICT happens to CHARACTER(s), they have OVERCOME CONFLICT to COMPLETE QUEST.
This is exactly what I haven’t been able to figure out for my novel, and without it, I don’t have much of a story at all. I have written that sentence on a sheet of notebook paper that I’ve been carrying around for the last few days and thinking about how I would fill in those blanks for my story. But until I can figure that out, I’m going to have trouble actually writing the book. So, I need to do some more exploratory work. It’s as simple (ha!) as that.
Now for the transition to RSS feeds. I’ve been reading Nathan’s blog, along with many, many others courtesy of my Google Reader. Every time I see something interesting out on the internet, I tend to click the RSS feed button and add it to my list. However, I’ve been doing it so much lately that my reader had become bloated. It was taking all my time just to go through it and clear everything out, and because it was there I felt like I did have to clear it out. It was becoming my new solitaire, the one thing I kept coming back to and couldn’t seem to turn away from. So I’ve blocked myself from it for the rest of the week. I’ve also gone through and unsubscribed from about 3/4 of the feeds I had been reading. I kept Nathan’s, of course, but very few others. When I wanted to break my solitaire habit a few years ago, I actually went so far as to have my husband block my favorite solitaire site so that I wouldn’t be able to access it. I hope I don’t have to go that far with this. There are many things out there that are truly interesting and that I do want to keep up with. But there are many others that yes, while interesting, are not things that I need to read everyday. And, in the end, the more I read, the less I write. So I’ve decided to make sure that what I do spend my time reading is actually worthwhile.