Just Get On With It

This . . . from CNN:

Madonna is following her husband into filmmaking, with her directing debut, "Filth and Wisdom," due in theaters a couple of weeks after "RocknRolla." Her film centers on a Ukrainian cross-dressing punk-rocker and his roommates, a ballerina-turned-stripper and a humanitarian pharmacist.
Ritchie said Madonna did not seek any advice from him, and he did not volunteer any.
"With filmmaking, I think it's one of those things you should not read books on. You should just get on and do it. Then you have your own voice."


I loved this movie. I liked the "voice" of it.

I am pretty comfortable with my writing voice. It's mine and mine alone.

So thoughts on Guy Ritchie's advice?

Voice

Last night, I shared with two friends two different pieces of writing I am contemplating working on. The pages I gave my friends are little more than 15 pages of one, 5 or 6 of another. What struck me is that you would never know in a million years the same person wrote them. They asbolutely bear no resemblance to each other.

One, a coming-of-age late-YA set in a mob family, is my voice. It tumbles out of me. It's me. Not my exerpiences, but bits and pieces of stories and fragments, but it just spills out of me--I can write ten pages in an hour without blinking, without trying even. The voice is my own. Me. I can't explain it, but me.

The other, also a late-YA is mine--but me pretending to be her. Until I AM her, but she is not me. That's what it is. She's not separate from me, but instead I'm her writing the book. Some people call it channeling a voice. I call it the Method technique--much like inhabiting a part on the stage.

But here's the thing . . . both voices are in some way very honest, I think. It's not about inventing a world for me, but instead BEING in that world and writing about it, if that makes any sense. I am not separate from it, but in it, living the voice in my head.

So the other day, I got one of those writer newsletters in my email box. The writer was well-known and I started reading the excerpt, and then stopped. And it wasn't the hook, it wasn't the setting. It wasn't the opening line. It was the honesty or the voice. I didn't believe it.

I can describe my process here. I can explain how yes, I can write 20 books across four genres, branch into YA, and have every voice be different. And yet still mine. But I can't tell someone else how to do it. I just know that this is the best way I to describe what it's like for me. And I just know if you can't establish a unique voice, you might as well pack your toys up and get out of the sandbox.

Thoughts?

Only You

So much to post, where do I begin. Oh yeah. At the MOST important thing. THE GIANTS WON IN OVERTIME!!!!! All is right with my world today. As an aside, I think it's fairly telling that even though they usually break my heart, I have remained loyal to my Men in Blue all these many years. My heart is bursting today. And in honor of it, Baby Girl and I are going to get our nails done today . . . and she will have the wonderful salon owner, who thinks she's cute as a button, paint her nails blue and white. I will try to post a picture tomorrow. If you think I am shutting up about the Giants until Superbowl . . . well, gang, you just don't know me. I've got two glorious weeks of unadulterated joy to bask in.

Two . . . for those writers participating . . . don't forget to get your butt over to Mary's blog today. Even if you're not participating, you can send us gluttons for punishment a word of encouragement or two. And email her tonight with your page or word count. I have a dinner party tonight, so it's entirely possible my count will be pitiful for the day. We'll see.

Three, a quote about writing from Elie Wiesel:

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

In March I am giving a presentation on writing for the young adult genre at a conference. And while I happily agreed to do it . . . (and if anyone feels like driving to the Richmond, Virginia area to attend, give a yell) . . . when I start putting my presentation folders together, I am often struck by how inadequate it is to try to explain to people how to write what sells, how to write for a certain genre, etc. Because even though I have a command of the mechanics of it all, even though I have worked as an editor for years, as a writer for years, I am ever aware that the real magic happens when writing calls to you. And the thing that will elevate your writing is that story that ONLY YOU can write. It will never be about seeing what's hot in the marketplace and then writing that story. It will always be about writing YOUR story, informed by your life and experiences and passions and interests.

I once mentored a writer who wrote a phenomenal book about a detective, but we all know that's tough to sell. I believed in him, this writer, but I also knew the detective hadn't quite gelled. I couldn't really come up with anything that I, as reader, could say to someone if I was to describe the detective other than "family man, really smart." And THAT isn't going to sell. The plot was great . . . and I genuinely liked the detective, but there was a "so what" editorially.

So the writer started adding quirks. He toyed with the detective being a gambling addict. A recovering alcoholic. X or y. And in the end, I didn't think it much mattered because the writer was tacking traits on instead of somehow digging really, really deep and finding something that ONLY he could write.

When you start tweaking tics . . . start tweaking nuance, I usually feel you are dooming a book. The specialness has to come blazing out of the gate with a roar. The story only you can tell. I can't teach that.

Thoughts? Do you write from that place? The story only you can tell?

Wrong

Sometimes, when Demon Baby sleeps, I peer through the bars of his crib and hope one day I am not peering through the bars at him here. But, given his high degree of intelligence, I am thinking even IF he one day rips off the Federal Reserve, he'll be the criminal mastermind that gets away and lives in the Caymans. And in the meantime, I like watching him sleep.

And there's another thing. You see, when it's time for him to go to sleep, I take him upstairs and I read him a book. Usually, there is a tremendous amount of negotation on precisely HOW MANY books he gets. I aim for 2. He aims for 22. We meet in the middle.

Then, I put him in his crib. I have him fold his hands and I give him a prayer to recite. Something along the lines of "Angels watch over me. Help me to sleep well and grow. Amen." On bad days, something more like, "Angels, help me to be a good little boy, not a follower but a leader, but less gray hair for Mom in the meantime." Something simple. Easy. A conversation, not rote.

Then I lie down on the bed next to him, and we hold hands through the bars. (Like I said, sometimes I wonder if one day it'll be Plexiglass, but for now . . . .) And then usually in about five minutes, he falls alseep. Completely peacefully.

Now, every parenting book in the entire universe will tell you this is THE most screwed-up way to get your kids to go to sleep. But in my GUT, something tells me he will be a tiny little Demon Spawn for so short a time, it'll be over in the blink of an eye, and there is no way I would rather him fall alseep than to feel someone he loves holding his hand until slumber takes over. When morning comes, he storms into my bedroom like a Demon Baby out of Hell, and climbs into my bed for a cuddle, though lately, I am usually off walking, in which case, he picks a sibling and climbs in with them for a snuggle.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. They have whole BOOKS devoted to how wrong this is. FERBERIZE 'em! And you know what? F*ck the books.

Which applies to writing.

You see, for everything you want to try (writing your first book in first-person, starting with dialogue, whatever) . . . someone, some book, some writing teacher, hell, some BLOGGER will tell you it's wrong. I may even screw up once in a while and say something is the wrong way--but I don't think often. Usually, my response is "it's all in the execution." Because it is.

As a mother, I trust my gut. Nearly 100% of the time. I've never read a book on mothering. I don't buy self-help because nearly every self-help author I ever edited was pretty much on the upper end of the human toxicity scale. They can just talk a good game. I go with my gut, not someone else's. When Demon Baby wants his toenails painted, I paint them. I paint them black so it's more "manly" to appease certain family members, but I don't think I'm scarring the kid for life because he wears Pirate Toenail Polish (which is what Demon Baby and I call it).

As a writer, I trust my gut, too. I "know" innately when something's not working. I can edit people's work. I can "teach" writing. But I can't teach gut instinct.

The only way to learn to trust it is to write. A LOT.

When I was 16, I thought every short story I wrote was worthy of publication. Most of it was self-involved torturous drivel. As I continued writing, I learned I had raw talent, but that every story I wanted to tell wasn't necessarily worth telling. In other words, though I never saw a therapist, writing was acting as my therapy. Who wants to read that? For God's sake, I sure don't. I learned to cut through the crap and find a STORY to tell. With every passing year, my instinct grew. I learned craft, I became an editor, I began ghostwriting and writing for magazines. I edited more and more . . . and . . . the craft only helped hone the instinct.

So, like falling alseep with Demon Baby, I think sometimes you just gotta go with your gut. There isn't "wrong." Sometimes . . . there's just that still small voice. The more you trust it? The louder and more confident it becomes.

Thoughts?

Heart and Head

Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.
~From the movie Finding Forrester

I write with my heart. I don't know any other way than to sort of spill out what's jumping around in my head, begging for release, onto the paper. It's like finally letting go of a "good cry" (and sorry, fellas, if you don't know what that's like, but for a lot of women, a "good cry" is extremely cathartic--we may even rent sad movies in order to have one). Sometimes, it's as if I have this fury in me, and I have to just regurgitate it and get it out and then, and only then, can I sigh and relax. It's hard to explain, but that's my best attempt at describing my process. That's what writing my first draft from the heart is.

But then the head takes over. I spent well over a decade editing other people's manuscripts before I sold my first novel. I learned how to get rid of passive voice, how to shape and hone someone's words. My own words. I learned, from much banging of my head against my desk (thank you, Jon Van Zile) to ruthlessly delete words that didn't propel my scenes. To cut whole chapters that just sat there, doing nothing but showing off pretty words. I learned to edit with my head.

I know a writer who once bitterly resented that she could not get published. She was writing what was "hot" (at the time, it was chick lit), and she could craft a sentence. Three top editors in a row passed on her manuscript--and all three said variations on the same theme--"no heart," "paint by numbers writing," and "I didn't care about any of the characters." This writer could target market, but the heart piece was missing. I could see it--I kept saying "dig deeper"--but you can't really SHOW someone how to. It's a process in which you find your passion for the work and stop chasing publication by creating what's "hot" for instead what "speaks to you."

On the flip side, I have seen enough horrid manuscripts that come through the slush pile to know that heart's not enough. You can see the person poured their soul into their work. It feels naked and autobiographical as you read it. There's rawness there. But it's so poorly executed that the head's missing completely.

They go hand in hand. It's what I aim for in everything I write.

Thoughts?

Voice

Tonight, I went to hear my 17-year-old daughter play violin. She is the concertmistress of her orchestra, and she played a Bach fugue and then a beautiful piece called Mountain Spring. I watched her from the audience, tears streaming down my face. You see, when she was three years old, she saw a woman playing violin on PBS, and she turned to me and said, "That is what I am going to do with my life." As the mother of a gifted kid, I was kind of used to these dramatic pronouncements, even at a young age. But for a YEAR she pestered me for lessons, and eventually, she was accepted into a young strings program at a university (she was four and played a violin 1/32 of the usual size). And that was the beginning.

I cannot tell you the sacrifices a middle-class family makes to have a child study classical music in our arts-starved school system. Lessons as much as $150 an hour. A violin hovering near $10,000, plus the BOW. Driving sometimes 10 hours to special music camps. Camps that cost $1,500 a WEEK. I have probably taken ten years off my life sacrificing and working hard for her to have her dreams, and my significant other, who is not her biological father, works two jobs--weekends he sleeps two hours a day--as we get ready for the college audition season and all the money that entails flying her to auditions--as well as tuition looming.

But none of that matters because when I heard her play, I saw all those years go by in a blur. All the sacrifices vanished. The dark circles under my eyes disappeared. I saw a beautiful young woman of poise playing her violin. But even more, I heard her E-string.

Here's the thing. Over the years, I have learned a tiny bit about violins. Enough to converse with musicians. And I know an E-string when I hear it. And I know my DAUGHTER'S E-string when I hear it. In the 12 violins or so in the chamber orchestra, I could pick her notes out. Yes, she was concertmistress in the first chair, but even if she had sat further back, I knew her string. If you have never shopped for an expensive violin, you might not know that not only does every instrument sound different (hers is an 18th-century Italian), but every BOW on every violin sounds different. And then every player sounds different playing said different violins. And I knew her sound. In fact, if you lined up three players playing the same Bruch concerto (her audition piece), I KNOW I could pick hers out blindfolded. In a heartbeat.

Which brings me to writing.

To me, the whole point of writing is to have a distinctive E-string. Okay, it's not the same thing, exactly, but I would hope if you picked up one of my books you could tell it from the book next to it, never mind if you saw my name on the cover. I know a Neil Gaimain, usually by the third paragraph.

THAT is what you are trying to do. Find that voice, so distinct, the story only YOU can tell, with the VOICE that is yours alone. And then play that E-string for all it's worth.

Thoughts?

Peace,
E

P.S. To my daughter . . . I love you, and I believe in you, and will be here for you until the end of time and then some. And you have a gift. Let it shine. I love your "voice" on that violin.

Discovering Your Voice

People who know me in my real life find it rather remarkable that for the first thirty years of my life, I was petrified of confrontation, and rather quiet in a way. Once I discovered my voice, so to speak, well, I haven't shut up since. I found my courage and then I ran with it. Whether it was working as a mentor to unwed teen mothers in horrific neighborhoods where I feared drive-bys, or quitting a comfortable job so I could have my own editing business, or having four children despite the doctors telling me I shouldn't, I blossomed and found my voice and inner courage. I figured out who I was.

But what about voice in your book? I actually think it's a very similar process, in a way. To me, voice is the very character of your book. Just as in real life, my "voice" makes me uniquely me, makes my soul and essence what it is, your book's voice, or your character's voice, is the very essence of the manuscript or work. It's that which makes what you are writing completely yours.

To use the expression we've been tossing around here the last couple of days, without a strong voice, your book is just a heaping pile of plot. Voice is the color, the nuance, the thing that makes that pile of plot become something extraordinary. It's your vision.

I think of it in film terms because I am a huge movie buff and very visual. So think of your favorite movie directed by a director whose visual style is unmistakable. For me, I'll use DAYS OF HEAVEN. It was directed by Terence Malick and visually, it is one of the most famous and beautiful films ever made. It won the Academy Award that year for cinematography. Now, I could tell you the plot--a poor farmhand convinces his lover to marry their rich boss so when the boss dies, they can claim his fortune. Simple enough. But it's only when you see the sepia images of the fields and the sky and the farm, and the images of the 1916 Texas Panhandle that you can begin to grasp this monument of a movie. The stunning filmmaking is the voice of the director poured onto celluloid.

In my own work, The Roofer, the storyline is rather simple. A writer does a long, in-depth piece on the Irish mob, wanting to expose my heroine's father as a murderer. Instead, in America's mob-obsessed culture, a movie is made based on the piece . . . and the men in the book are embraced as heroes. But the entire story of the magazine piece, its fall-out, and the lives of the men portrayed are told in a first-person narrative of the daughter of the most infamous of the mobsters over the three nights and day of his wake and funeral. Simple enough. But what makes it MY story, my book, is Ava's voice. She has been brought up amongst these men, loves them all dearly, but has been through so much by her association with them, and thus she tells the story in an almost deadened voice as nothing surprises her anymore. Her voice, her longing for a normal life yet her inability to ever imagine that for herself, is what makes it "her" story, my story, my writing. I chose her to tell the story, not her brother, not the mobsters. Because I knew I could BE her and tell it.

What if you find you can't nail the voice? What if the voice isn't unique enough? I think it's a matter of choosing your POV wisely, and then knowing that person so deeply that you FEEL it. For me, and this is only me, I have to be in the pain, be in the joy, be in the angst. I guess, when all is said and done, I am a "Method" writer, much like some actors are "Method" actors who never drop character.

How about you? How do you find your voice?

Peace,
E

AND EVERYONE VISIT SARA HANTZ'S BLOG--link on the right--SHE IS LAUNCHING HER FABULOUS BOOK THIS WEEK!!!!!! PRIZES, GREAT DISCUSSIONS, AND LOTS OF FUN. CELEBRATE WITH OUR SARA!