Magic in the morning

Yesterday I made Richard stop at the Farmers’ Market while on our way to move my office things back into place for the school year. Little did I know it was to be a magic morning.

First, I should point out that I was wearing my writers’ shirt as I so often do — a t-shirt that says “I’m getting dangerously close to killing you off in my next novel”. That got attention from one woman in her thirties who self-publishes romance novels, a woman my age who dabbled in writing, and a young woman who writes for herself. So we stood around and talked about our experiences in writing, in what it means to be a writer, in dreams and realities.

Not the sort of conversation I expected in Maryville. Which is why it never happened before.

Later, as I walked around the ring of merchants, a little girl on her mother’s lap looked straight at me and said, “That bird over there is singing to you.”

I need no greater magic than this.

Truth be told…

A couple years ago, I put together a map using Sketchup, a three-d sketching program which architects and other designers use to lay out inside and outside scapes. At the time, I was convinced it was a great two-dimensional map-making program, until I accidentally discovered that my two-dimensional map with borrowed buildings from the Sketchup Warehouse had become a three-dimensional map. And my expectations went up, and once I had a computer upgrade, I made sure all the buildings and plants were above ground and properly organized, and it was a pretty nice map.

My current mapping experience (for Hearts are Mountains) makes me think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. (International readers, do you have that idiom?) First of all, I have to create the basement dwellings from a tracing of a picture, and then make them three-dimensional (which I am nowhere near ready for, having barely created in two dimensions. I tried to trace the picture once, and the geodesic dome “roof” (aboveground part) looked like a spider on LSD traced it. Nobody in the 3-D warehouse crew has made a rendering of this underground building, so I’m on my own.

It’s not top priority — first of all because I’m intimidated as heck by the challenge. Second of all, because I have other priorities of things I have to get done like two novels (although I’m struggling with those as well). Third — see #2.

Face it — I need some inspiration, because it seems to be somewhat drained from the class I’m taking. I don’t have a good flow of ideas right now. I’m angling for a change in scenery today and a day devoted to creativity, a day where I can make magic.

Editing, as much as I dislike it, may be where the magic happens.

Writing is delightful, full of beginnings — meeting the characters, exploring their world, setting them on an adventure. Writing feels like the first of May — trees in bloom, journeys started.

Editing feels like carving into a knotty tree with a chainsaw. Every spare subplot, every awkward sentence, every cliche causes the saw to buck. And then, when all the negative space is trimmed out, the question becomes whether or not what’s left is the true seeming of the story.

I had a revelation about where a couple of my stories (novella? novel?) should go, and I’ve been wielding the chainsaw lately. I think they’re getting better. I think. It’s sometimes hard for the one with the chainsaw to judge.

Serious setback

I’m struggling today — struggling in a “I don’t know if I want to keep doing this” way. I don’t know what I need from you, dear readers. Bear with me.

I did not reach my goal today. I only made it half-way there. I will struggle to get there tomorrow, if I get there at all.

Today, a friend of a friend who was supposed to edit the first three chapters of my book said something in the guise of advice that has made me feel, more than anything, like giving up:

“A reader is a simple organism. We expect A, will be happy with B, will grudgingly accept C, and all the other letters are crap. Stereotypes and tropes exist for a reason. No matter what someone says about wanting pure original stories, they will get pissed off if the wizard doesn’t carry a staff.”

I know I can get a bit sensitive about criticism. But usually, I can step aside and say, “Yeah, that needs work,” and I can get to work. I’ll be the first to admit that my words are too big and I need help in pacing the plot. I read advice to writers and implement it the best I can.

But the above comment basically tells me that my viewpoint is not valued, my voice is just wrong, and I have to write at the level of The Flintstones to get published.

I could live with “write at the level of The Flintstones to get published” if that were all that was said. I would keep writing my stuff and not publish it. End of problem.

But the rest of it tears into my very soul. I do not want to be known for writing Islamic terrorists, white saviors, and Fu Manchu. I also don’t expect to write stereotypes in terms of “the repressed but sexy librarian”, “the rugged action hero”, and “the desperate sexless nerd.” I expect my characters to be three-dimensional. I in fact try to write outside these stereotypes.

As for tropes, it’s impossible to write without them — Every story I’ve ever written touches on self-discovery, which is a trope called The Hero’s Journey. (Some argue that everything written is the Hero’s Journey, but I’m skeptical.) I’ve written in “boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back after 150 years” trope. Obviously I subvert tropes.

I firmly believe that words are so important that writers have to choose them carefully. Words have the magic to change perceptions or to freeze them into cages. I believe that roles are held by well-formed characters and stereotypes hold characters hostage.

The worst part, though, is that I can’t even conceive of what this man was talking about. He might have been talking in a different language about a world I didn’t live in.

When I write a book, I don’t say, “Hey, let’s put the clever and debonair robber and the stupid cop and the clueless but hot woman in and first the robber breaks into the bank in a tension-filled scene, and then he sneaks the money out right under the nose of the cop, who chases him, and he carjacks this fast car and the clueless woman falls in love with him.” I don’t shop at “Tropes r Us” to find a plot.

When I write a story, it’s like I have these characters, and yes, I deliberately pick them so that they don’t fall into stereotypes, because people who aren’t white, beautiful, and upper class deserve to have adventures and fall in love (this is why I can’t write romance novels). I write a plot, and the chapters take me traveling through the plot.

I travel with the characters in my mind when I’m writing, seeing the same things and experiencing the same events they do. It’s an intense immersion process (and the only time I can actually visualize). This is how I write. It’s like I’m creating the world I want to live in in the remains of the world I live in, right before my eyes.

In fact, I have trouble editing my books because I don’t get the same intensity I got when I wrote them. Honestly, I don’t know if what I’m doing is readable. That’s the problem — I honestly don’t, because when I get to the editing stage I see that it all makes sense, everything follows logically — but I can’t tell if the pacing is right and I really can’t tell if anyone besides me would find it interesting.

Notes: I have trouble finding beta-readers. Am saving up for an editor who has more experience, but I’m so afraid that I’m going to keep getting critiques of what I am and not what I need to improve.

Thank you for listening.

A Different Magic

Never have I had a harder time picking an adjective in my life. There are moments I’ve had in my life that were — amazing? Overused. Magical? Cliche. Wonderful? — It seems we’ve taken the magic out of these adjectives. And in the moment I’m about to describe, I experienced magic, and I allowed it to change me. (Note: I know “Woodchuck” below to be a derogatory term, and I know that I’m showing classism, but I have to write this about the me I WAS rather than the me that I AM NOW. And I’m still learning about how I’m classist.)

******

This incident happened in upstate New York, a place full of thick woods, looming hills, shimmering lakes, and secrets. Washington Irving wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, distinctly American fairytales, about those secrets. I lived in the Upper Catskill region, and the thunder in the hills did sound like giants bowling in hidden places. But at any rate, this was my brush with magic, and it wasn’t what you might think.

I had made friends with the manager of a beer and wine supply shop. I would visit him in the summer when I got bored because I lived alone and I couldn’t hang out at the coffee shop forever. Besides, I thought Scott was cute. I would never have dated Scott because our worlds were too dissimilar: I was a professor seeking tenure and wearing suits; he was what locals called a “Woodchuck” — an impoverished resident of the Catskills who typically lives off tourism in the summer, and welfare in the winter.

I walked into the store that day, greeted by the now-familiar setting — rough-hewn, dark wood; big squared barn windows; two-by-twelve shelves with boxes of rubber stoppers, gaskets, plastic airlocks, bottle caps and corks; a back room with the bigger merchandise like carboys and corkers and spargers. I wondered, not for the first time, if the space had been a stable or a work shed in an earlier life.

My friend Scott stood at the counter, ridiculously tall and skinny. His straight black hair fell past his shoulders in keeping with his Blackfoot heritage and set off pale skin befitting his German and Scottish heritage. He squinted at me through his thick steel-frame glasses and grinned. “My friend’s coming over in a bit. He’s bringing some hopped sparkling mead over to taste. Should be good.”

I made wine and mead, which was how I’d found Scott’s shop in the first place. I knew that mead could be divided into “wine-like” and “beer-like”. I made the wine-type, of course — slightly sweet, not bubbly, sometimes herbal. I’d never had beer-like mead — bubbly, slightly bitter from hops. I decided to stay around, having nothing better to do.

Scott and I indulged ourselves in storytelling while waiting. Both sides of my family treated storytelling as a major ritual in getting to know people, and I honored the oral tradition by exchanging stories whenever I got the chance —

“… I woke up that morning, and my mother was gone. No, completely gone. All her belongings were gone, all the furniture was gone, and she had left me a note that said, ‘You’re responsible for the apartment now. I’ve moved in with my boyfriend.'”

Just as I had recovered from the ending, a stocky, sun-browned man with shoulder-length golden hair and goatee arrived with a bag, from which he pulled out two big brown bottles.

“Hey, Scott, do you have a bottle opener?” he growled, and I noted his leather biker’s cap, wondering how it would look on me. I was not going to ask.

“Ha ha,” Scott snorted and pulled out his bottle opener and three glass tumblers from behind the rough counter.

“Would you like some?” Greg asked, more gallantly than I had expected for a biker.

“Sure,” I replied, and he poured me a tumbler full.

I took a deep drink, and then another. Smoother than beer, scented with honey and fragrant hops, I knew I tasted something rare and rich. I felt a tingle, almost like a shimmer of gold, slide from my toes to my head —

I sat down abruptly, feeling tipsy yet not tipsy. I felt — not vague, but as if a golden mist had surrounded me, surrounded everything. Greg examined his mead against the light from the window, and it seemed that Arthur Pendragon, dressed in jeans and boots, drank of the Holy Grail. Scott limped across the room to look out a window, and I spied the Fisher King who had held the Grail before Arthur.

I excused myself, feeling small against such august personages, and stumbled into the sun, where I discovered that ordinary people had become mighty, and I, in turn, had become ordinary.