I haven’t given you an excerpt for a while

I hadn’t given you an excerpt for a while; this is from what I’m currently writing.

Background: Grace Silverstein, an eighteen-year-old viola prodigy, and Ichirou Shimizu, a seventeen-year-old graphic design prodigy, have just escaped gunfire from the place they had been invited to participate in an international assembly for prodigies in Krakow. Through a combination of luck and craftiness, they have holed up in an all-night pierogi place in the Stare Misto. They eat dinner, given that they barely picked at their food at the earlier banquet, and discuss their predicament:

Ichirou interrogated me after the waiter had left. “How come you have money?” He studied me through his steel-framed glasses.

“I’m 18. I’ve been handling my own finances since I was 15. I have a credit card.”

“As a high school student?” Ichirou peered over his nerd glasses at me.

“As a trust fund baby.” I peered back at the youngster.

Ichirou pulled out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Trust fund baby?”

“My parents died in a plane crash when I was fifteen.”

“I’m sorry,” Ichirou murmured.

“It’s complicated. I spent most of my life at boarding schools — music schools — I never really knew my parents as Mom and Dad.”

“That’s strange,” Ichirou replied. He paused, as if he would say more.

At that moment, the waiter came back with our drinks. Ichirou scrutinized his cup of hot water with a teabag beside it. My water came in a bottle and appeared to be bubbly.

“I would recommend looking at the Krakow Misalliance,” the waiter smiled, reaching toward an invisible lock of hair and then stopping. “It takes a while to cook, though. Your pierogis will be out in a minute.” He wandered off, and I noted that he glanced over his shoulder at the door.

I glanced at the door again, and thankfully I didn’t see any beefy men striding through. “Do you think they’re going to find us here?” I fretted.

“Hard to tell.” Ichirou took a sip of the tea he had brewed in his cup. “This is tea?”

“This is the way the rest of the world drinks tea, Ichirou,” I smirked, then sobered.

Ichirou took a deep breath. “What happened back there? At the Palace?”

“I think they want people with talents. Not talents like ours, but talents like yours. Like what you knew would happen when I watched your screen saver.”

“I didn’t know for sure,” Ichirou responded. “I thought it might.”

“You tested that on me without knowing what it would do?” I hissed just as the waiter came by with our plates. Ichirou gave me a warning look.

“Venison pierogis for you,” the waiter handed me my plate with a dancer’s grace, “and cabbage pierogis for the vegetarian. Let me know if you need anything.” The waiter walked off, glancing over his shoulder again.

“So you think they’re after me because of my animation,” Ichirou conjectured between bites. “What about the others, then? What about you?”

Good question, and not one I’d been able to answer. “Nastka — Anastasja — I overheard her talking to Matusiak about practicing something — and did you notice that her talent was not mentioned in the introductions? And the twins — they’d had contact with this bunch before, and they were terrified.” I remembered the white faces of the children and their mother, and I remembered the gunshots as we fled the building, and wondered what their resistance had cost them. “As for me, my only talent is music — honestly.”

“We’ll see,” Ichirou responded, rubbing his chin. “You’re here.”

“Whatever,” I responded.

I have a month and a half to wait on my manuscript that’s with HarperLegend — if I hear nothing by August 1, I have to regroup again.

AAAAAAAAGH! Writer’s Block!

In the last couple days, I have written six lines of my story. Normally, I write up to 2000 words/day, as when I participate in NaNoWriMo (http://nanowimo.com) or Camp Nano (campnanowrimo.org). I’ve only not won NaNoWriMo once (50,000 words) and that’s when Trump had just gotten elected. (I didn’t have the heart to write.)

I’m not sure why I struggle to write right now. The current book (working title: The Ones who Toppled the World) isn’t much more difficult than most of what I’ve written. I have a relatively good outline to plantz from. I have more time to write than I do during the school year.

This leaves me with several possibilities:

I need a kick to the imagination.
I need a vacation from writing 😕
I’m letting my discouragement get to me.
I find the current story more challenging than I’m letting on.
I’m writing in my blog too much 😜
I need a more atmospheric place to write than my couch.
I need a soundtrack to write with.
I haven’t fallen in love with my characters yet. These characters — the sardonic Grace and the analytical Ichirou; the calm and prepared Ayana and her partner, the chameleonic Greg — I’ve barely scratched their surfaces. Maybe I need to have a chat with them to get to know them better?
I’m not seeing myself as a writer lately.

Ok, I have ideas to play with now. Let’s chat sometime!

Flow, happiness, and writing

Caution: My day job is a Human Services professor, and I teach a positive psychology course. Classroom lectures come out of my mouth (figuratively and literally) at the most unusual times.

According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990),

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing
times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is
stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something
difficult and worthwhile.” (Csikszentmihalyi, M., 1990)

The quote above refers to a concept called flow. In flow, sense of time is lost and all that remains is oneself and one’s skill and the challenge. Flow becomes a source of well-being.

If you have a creative life, you have probably experienced flow. The night on the stage where you become the character; the dance where you merge with the music, the rhythm of your feet on the floor, the movement of your partner; the writing session where time passes without your notice and you’ve captured the moment you’re writing about.

(I do not mean to imply that flow only comes from creative endeavor — people with noncreative talent experience flow as well — repairing a car engine, cross-stitching a sampler, or teaching a class.)

I think creatives, having experienced flow in our creative lives, crave it over and over — and do not always find it. Dancers have days where they miss their landings, where every movement is effort without reward. Actors have days where they’re handed a new script and they can’t encompass the character even if they’re Method and have literally put themselves in the character’s shoes.

Writers have those days when they can’t motivate to write, because we look at what we’ve written and the characters don’t shine or threaten, because we’ve lost the thread in the side plots, because the plot that looked iron-clad has a hole the size of a small house, because we had to go back to doing research (that pierogi place in Krakow haunts me in my dreams). Trust me, I know, because I’ve dealt with all these lately.

These will pass. Because we’ve paid our dues and found a level of proficiency that allows us flow, we will find it again when we hone our abilities, regain our focus, and pursue excellence.

Oh gosh — I discovered a new wrinkle for the world I’m writing in, and it’s about flow:

So I have prodigies with “normal” talents who also have talents in less normal categories, talents that can be “weaponized” — emotional manipulation, perfect recall, fire-starting, etc. These shadow talents are not always available — could it be because the shadow-talents are fueled by flow?

Trauma, experience, and characterization

“I tell my story over and over in my head, over and over to my readers, struggling to make sense of it …”I wrote this line almost thirty years ago in a short story — if you’re interested, the story was called “The Repentance of Nicholas”, was about surviving sexual assault, and about a glimpse of the possibility of amends. It just appeared to be written about an incubus, because people find it easier to believe in the redemption of monsters than of human males, because it’s harder to get angry at creatures that are not real.

I will not share this story, because an older and wiser me sees the redeemed monster as self-serving, manipulative — not truly redeemed, perhaps a more subtle and self-justified version of who he’d originally been. The world doesn’t need a false epiphany.

I mention it here, however, because of the line I featured above — The main character, obviously, wrote; she wrote to make sense of a traumatic memory. I used to write for that reason — to make sense of traumatic memories, and maybe to change the ending of the stories to get closure.

Thirty years later, I’ve told the stories over and over for long enough, and the trauma has faded to understanding of my situations in 360 degrees, as modern business jargon has it. My understanding informs the creation of characters not like me and situations not like mine — the architectural genius whose career crumbles to ruin after a period of reckless brilliance; the ancient Archetype who realizes his need for control has led to the Apocalypse; the cop who has too little faith in himself that he has not noticed the rottenness of the town he serves.

My characters are not me, but they are of me. My life experiences, traumatic and merely annoying and transcendental and mundane, splinter into purified essence of situation and reaction, and I find my characters, even the villains, enriched for it.

I hope it makes me a better writer.

Real and Facade

In the lobby of the Waters of Minoqua, I notice log ornamentation on the lobby, the furniture, the walls. Mounted deer heads line up on the walls like a gallery. Birch log accents with peeling bark display cheeky plastic birds.

At the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Ojibwa museum, I study canoes of birch bark and of hollowed logs, dresses of beaded flannel, leather moccasins adorned with dyed porcupine quills, instructions for spear fishing — and a history of how the whites banned spear fishing on reservation land, then poisoned the fish.

I have a vested interest in the reservation. I am one of the many descendents of Ikweseke and Michel Cadotte. My ancestors walked away from their family and heritage, and thus became white. My family called me the “papoose” because I had some of the look of my Ojibwa ancestors. Even though I’m too pale, I know what they’re talking about now as I walk by the social services building on the reservation.

I can tell real from facade when I look at the spaces — the real functions as tools, as baskets, as clothing, as sacred objects. Functional objects can be ornamented, not just function as ornaments; I learned this from the Ojibwa museum.

If I choose to accept my Ojibwa ancestry without having lived on the reservation, having had my livelihood destroyed, or having lived in poverty, would that be facade or a reflection of the complicated history of my heritage?

If I ignore it, do I ignore the comments from my childhood about my face, the story about the white deer, the ancestry?

Can both be real? Facade?

Even when not writing, I write…

I’m on the road, visiting my father in Wisconsin, and I haven’t taken out my computer since I set out on this trip. This is not to say that I haven’t been writing.

Writing happens all the time. I listen to the news and wonder what implications the EC’ s step away from Trump will have on Europe — Poland, Germany, Russia.

While I sit and the coffeehouse in Watertown, three bespectacled teens set up easels with art projects against the wall of the coffeehouse, debating whether to take the protective plastic with the glowering clouds. A sliver of sun peeks out, further muddling the questions. Two plump yoga moms walk in for a coffee date. One carries her daughter, who wears hot pink rubber boots with her rompers.

Some people take photographs; I tell stories like my dad and his family and my mom and her family. I listen to my dad’s stories and realize that they will show up in a future story.

The stories — all stories — are important. May I learn yours?

Why you are not in my book.

Writing characters can be tricky. What do they look like? What is their backstory? What is their function in this story? How would they react to rejection? Danger? Challenge?

I have written characters that remind me of people I knew almost thirty years ago (I met many interesting people when I was in college). I have written characters that remind me of people I’ve known more recently. But when I say “remind me of”, this means “their appearance reminds me of this person” or “their voice reminds me of this person” or their personality or maybe even just one cherished belief of theirs reminds me of that person. My characters develop as a combination of looking like someone I know (because I have trouble constructing a visual appearance in my head), sounding like another person (because that’s how I hear that character in my mind), the interests/vocation of yet another person (because that’s an interesting hobby), the emotional intelligence of yet another person …

This is why you’re not in your book. Someone with a characteristic or two of yours may be in the book. But the character is not you, reacts differently than you, makes different choices than you.

So when I write the standard writer’s disclaimer — the “Any resemblance to people living or dead is truly unintentional” that’s what it means.

******
Also, tomorrow I’m going to the wilds of Wisconsin for a couple days to see my dad and eat in Mad City (Momos! I get to have Momos!). I might manage to get online then; I might not. I’m hoping to write, however; but you’re not one of my characters.

Not at all Glamorous

I’m still writing on the new book (trust me, you’ll read that sentence over and over for a while yet) and just finished the scene where a group of prodigies of grade school through high school age experience a delicious dinner menu, poor behavior among the adult dignitaries, and a subtle menacing pitch that they can’t quite piece together. I wanted to write a whole chapter on the menu alone, but there’s no time for that.

Writing in the “plantsing” mode (with general ideas but not a complete outline) means that this next section, like all sections, will require the research I didn’t do earlier, which slows me down despite my amazing Google-fu. For example, I look forward to looking up: “all-night restaurants in Krakow Old Town”, “trains from Krakow Glowny to airport”, “planes to Stockholm; Interlochen Center for the Arts; how to say “Do you mind? I’m going to the bathroom” in Polish, preferably more politely than that.

And that’s in addition to plotting a grand escape of sorts that includes waiting in a pierogi shop waiting to not be captured.

This is writing. It’s not at all glamorous, but turning the mess above into a novel is worth it.

Retreat — second and final day

I hope to get to 2000 words today, which is rather slow for me. One thing I have to take into account, however — hours spent in online research.

When writing about a place, visiting the place helps. I feel really good about writing about Chicago, even if I have to revisit now and again to check out the non-tourist Chicago that I knew about 20 years ago. When I write about my home town — nothing to see there, move along.

However, the person who penned “Write about what you know” gave excellent advice and I should have heeded it. I set the first part of the current novel in a foreign country. I do not speak the language. Google’s page translation brings such delights as “Puget’s outbuildings provide new home for dying swans”, with a photo of a bird which is most definitely not a swan. Apparently, looking at a photo on Instagram of a dark, moody coffeehouse is not the way to pick the setting for the next novel.

Does anyone have a floor plan to the Donimirski Palac Pugetow Business Center? In English?

From my retreat —

As I look out, I see the wooden-railed back porch, and, from there, the lake. The sun on the choppy water makes the waves appear like shards of glass. I have been writing on my new novel for a while after making last-last-last minute edits on a previous novel while waiting for Richard to do a lookover at two more.

I had hoped to get more done today — my usual daily goal is 2000 words; today is a 1000-word day unless I get a second or third wind. I’ve done good work though, on editing as well as starting a novel. I admit I had a head start though in terms of laying out the plot.

According to some writers I’ve run into at NaNoWriMo, there are three ways to go about writing a novel:

Planning, or making a detailed outline;
Pantsing, or writing almost stream of consciousness;
or Plantsing, which is somewhere between the first two.

I’m a Plantser. I don’t want to use an outline so detailed that my novel has been written for me, nor do I just want to coast by the seat of my pants. (I did that for my first novel, which grew from a handful of short stories and a suggestion that I finally write the novel already. I’ve also edited and rewritten it N times, where N>5.)

So I had already plantsed this novel right before finals week. The titles of sections, chapters, and subchapters serving as my outline, and synopses of each piece serving as my plot reminder. This leaves me room to play with language and character — I need to be surprised when I write.