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All right, peeps, here’s the first draft of my story. As before, not much editing has been done, so please be forgiving. As you’re reading, please keep the following questions in mind:

• Does any part of it look or sound unnatural to you? Speech, action, whatever?
• Are the characters sufficiently developed? Do they feel “fuzzy” to you?
• Does it make sense? Is there a cohesive narrative, and did you feel you understood what was happening throughout the story?
• Is it predictable? I know this isn’t the most original plot out there, but is it too trite? Did you feel you knew what was going to happen the whole time?
• I have taken some care to add description of the main character’s behavior into the story, in an attempt to make you as the reader feel more a part of him; in his skin, so to speak. Is it too much? Am I drowning the story in banality? Are there too many unnecessary details?
• And finally, did it pass the entertainment test? Were you interested to find out what happened? Did you get bored at any point in the story? Was the pacing too fast? Too slow? Did you, in fact, like it?

When you’re done, if you’re so inclined, please do shoot me an e-mail with your impressions. I’d greatly appreciate it.

So without further ado: A Little Knowledge.

After a week spent living, breathing, eating and sleeping my story, I’ve finally completed a draft. I feel pretty happy right now, but that’s because I haven’t gotten any comments back on it yet. I sent it off to my three editors extraordinaire about an hour and a half ago, and am now waiting on pins and needles for them to get back to me.

This is the first serious prose I’ve ever really written, so I am a bit anxious. I have always known—not to be immodest—that I have the inclination and some small talent for writing. Now is when I find out if I can back up that big talk, if I can tread water with the rest of them. Wish me luck!

PS – No, I’m not going to post the draft. I did, to some extent, write about the draft now just to be mean to you non-editor people. Neener.

will be spent in workshops. That is, we’ll be spending that time reading and discussing our fellow students’ stories. Kind of a scary—but exhilarating—prospect. All other things being equal, I expect that fully half of the student stories we read will stink; and which, moreover, will be irretrievably stinky. And yes, I concede that mine could be one of them. Anyway, for the class, every time we read a story, we’re to compose a letter to the author describing our impressions of the story, and containing our suggestions for improvements—which, the instructor admonished us, are to be specific and helpful, and which, moreover, will have to be copied to the instructor, who will use them to help decide the author’s grade (if they’re taking the class for one). One student suggested that we do it like a sandwich; that is, begin and end with some praise for the story, and leave the bad stuff for the middle. The instructor quite liked that idea, and so that’s how we’re doing it.

But here’s my problem. When you’ve got a terrible story—and we’ve got one this week—how do you find something good to sandwich the bad? I’ve spent all weekend agonizing about this, and am no closer to a solution. When I talked to a friend about my predicament this past weekend, he said I should say something like “You have a very unique voice,” and leave it at that. Ha! He also suggested that I should, in my letter, draw a piece of bread at the top, put in my criticisms, and then draw another piece of bread at the bottom. An amusing idea, to be sure, but not one, alas, that will be any good to me.

Sigh. The things I have to deal with.

my writing class, but this one is my favorite: Steven Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop. It takes a very back-to-basics approach that seems both very intuitive and completely revelatory. I’m finding reading it to be a very inspirational experience. And here’s my first revelation:

“But”—you may say—”I don’t even know my story yet.” My answer is: “Of course you don’t know your story yet.” You are the very first person to tell this story ever, anywhere in the whole world, and you cannot know a story until it has been told. First you tell it; then you know it. It is not the other way around. That may sound illogical, but to the narrating mind, it is logic itself. Stories make themselves known, they reveal themselves—even to their tellers—only by being told. You may ask how on earth you can tell a story before you know it. You do that by letting the emerging story tell itself through you. As you tell it, you let the story give you your cues about where it is going to go next. At first, you must feel your way, letting it be your guide. You may eventually be able to plan the whole scope of the work down to its smallest details, as J.K. Rowling is staid to have done with all her Harry Potter books. But in the very first phrase of its creation, any story must be teased out from the shadows of your imagination and unconscious.

<Ted “Theodore” Logan>Whooaaa</Ted “Theodore” Logan>. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you could start with just a glimmer of an idea. I thought you had to have the whole thing outlined out before you even started. You mean I can just…start writing? Excellent.

And that’s exactly what I ended up doing. The first week of class, the instructor assigned us the opening scenes of our stories. I was, to say the least, alarmed. I thought I’d get the chance to ease into it, not be required to jump into the freezing ocean all at once. I had no ideas, no stories I wanted to tell, and I started to panic a little. So I decided to get my mind off it, because, even untrained as I am, I know that panic would bring me no closer to a solution.

I was reading Charlie Huston’s Already Dead at the time, and so I picked it up; I had, in fact, just begun it. Now, Huston, along with Lee Child, is just the sort of writer I’d like to emulate. Clean, immersive writing, great dialogue, addictive plots. And maybe I was unconsciously keeping that in mind when I read that night, because I read a scene near the beginning of that book where the main character is sleeping and gets woken up by a phone call. And boom, I had my idea.

And it was enough to get me through the opening scenes. I had a couple of vague ideas about what would happen after the first two scenes—but not, you understand, the whole story—and I started writing. But then I hit a wall. I wrote myself into a sort of corner. If I went with my original vague idea, the beginning of the story wouldn’t work anymore. It wouldn’t make sense. I had to start seriously thinking about the story, the plot, the structure (the meanings and differences of which terms, by the way, I had not known until I read further in the Koch book):

The way—the only way—to “find” your story is to tell it. Nobody in the whole world has ever before told the story you are about to tell. You yourself have never told it to anyone, not even to yourself. You may have lots of intuitions about what the story is going to be, and you may even have a sort of summary overview of it. These are good and useful things to have; they are fine places to start. They are not enough. Until you actually tell the story, the whole story, it will be nothing but smoke. Moreover, you probably will not tell the story exactly right the first time you try. You’ll make wrong turns, use the wrong key, or use the right key in the wrong door. After all, you have nobody to guide you. If you are like most people, you will have to tell this story more than once—maybe even several times—before you really get it down.

Okay. So I kept writing, tweaking here and there—at that stage I was pretty happy with what I’d actually written; it was just the backstory I had to figure out, to assign motivation to one of the characters—and thinking hard. Then I found it, the thing that would fix my problem, and I had another crutch. Something to get me through the next couple of scenes and into my other vague idea. For a little while, I had clear sailing.

And somewhere in the middle of that writing, the stuff that I had sort of a plan for, everything clicked. I saw the shape of the whole thing, maybe the major turning points, and—this is very important—the final scene. And now I know where I’m going, and, pretty much, how I’m going to get there. The details are still a little sketchy, but that’s okay. The sort of exploratory writing I’ve been doing so far, letting the story do the work, has been working pretty well up till now. May as well stick with it.

read my blog will know that I recently signed up for a creative writing class, and that the first meeting was last Tuesday. That night, the instructor asked us to write the opening scenes of the short story we’ll be working on throughout the class. As promised, I’m going to be blogging my progress on the story, and this is the first post. I’ve completed a draft of the first couple of scenes, and it is posted below. Please note that it is still raw and has only undergone the barest minimum of revision, so read accordingly. Also note that this is the last time I’ll be posting an extensive sample of the actual story until it’s finished; giving away the game in the middle sort of ruins the drama of the final unveiling, don’t you think? Enough yakking already. Here it is (click the “more” link):

(more…)

I’ve been thinking lately about the mechanics of inspiration. More specifically, the mechanics of my inspiration, since it is, of course, a highly individualized experience. I’ll focus on poetry here, although I think this should apply to prose as well; I tend to write more poetry because, well, I’m better at it than prose, and because poetry is like instant gratification to the writer. It’s quickly done and edited, quicker for the reality to match the vision, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, back in the day, I used to think of a topic I was inspired by and write on it—pretty straightforward, sure—but more often than not that came out as rambling, melodramatic drivel (you have noticed my tendency toward melodrama?). Of course sometimes I came up with something I really liked, but my yield was pretty low. And, engineer that I am, I am constantly dissecting and studying the anatomy of my ideas to see if I can more efficiently harness my creativity (is that even possible?).

Looking back over what I’ve written, I’ve noticed that the stuff I like best is more or less the stuff that was produced under pressure. Something written with a specific goal or parameters in mind. Let me explain: as an example, let’s look at one of the exercises I did in a creative writing class I took in high school. I was to use the following words in a poem: finger, voice, mother, needle, cloud. Moreover, I was to take a proverb and paraphrase it somewhere in the poem. Here’s what I came up with:

The Ghost Ship

Black cliffs rise, stern and forbidding,
through the reaching fingers of the mist
Echoes of voices
voices of the disappeared
lost in the clouds of memory
Their mothers sit quietly in the howling wind,
mending with needle and thread the tatters of lost souls
The ghost ship passes by in dead silence,
its passengers screaming soundlessly
The sea is the death of a thousand loves.

Now, call me arrogant, but I was very happy with that result. The same is true of the love poems I mentioned earlier. In fact, the last 5 or 6 poems I’ve written have been done with that sort of under-pressure writing style, and I’ve been happy with all of them (and if you’d seen some of my earlier stuff, you’d know that is pretty rare). What I’ve been doing is this, and it sort of came about naturally. I’d find myself somewhere, maybe driving down the highway late at night, listening to music, and suddenly a word, or a phrase, or a stanza would pop fully-formed into my head, and I’d rush home (or wherever) and write it down. More often than not it’d be a line or a collection of words I thought sounded particularly, for lack of a better word, poetic. But, and this is the most important part, it had no context. It would just be something evocative of an emotion I wanted to capture, or a pleasing combination of sounds. Also more often than not, I had no larger purpose for this phrase.

And so I started amassing this collection of rootless words. Eventually, I compiled a file of them, and occasionally I’ll come back and look it over. Then, like scrabble tiles, I’ll pick some of them, rearrange them this way and that, maybe add some connective tissue, and presto! I’ll have a poem. Here’s one like that:

suddenly incomplete

awoken by
the temporary grace
of a breath of your skin
as you passed by on the street

I didn’t know you
but you were all that I dream of
in the dreams that
come morning
I can only remember
as impressions of color and emotion

you were not real
in the way that children
are seeds of people
who do not exist, yet
you were the promise of meaning
and the suggestion of joy

you moved too fast
for my mortal eyes to see
leaving only brilliant,
fading afterimages
photo-flashes of vivid life
in a monochrome existence

I was left blinking,
confused
my eyes trying to readjust
to the dimness
of my everyday world

made slack-jawed and slow-witted
by the blinding vision
of unfulfilled possibility
I stood still, there
making small ripples
in the river of people
that flowed around me

I was stunned by
whispers of what-ifs
given a glimpse of the realization
of a wish I didn’t know I had

and all of a sudden
I was unfinished
made somehow less
than I had been
a moment before

I had not missed
what I had not known
what you had just shown me

and I didn’t know which was worse
the loss
or the never-having

and now
when it is all
nothing but a memory
that has not faded
I am still amazed
that something so little
isn’t.

It was built around the phrases “temporary grace” and “children are the seeds of people…”. Pretty cool, huh? I find it unbelievable that I could do something that…random, and have the result be something I like. Here’s a snippet of an unfinished poem, another one of those collections of rootless words:

light splatters across my room
like a paint spill
an accidental luminosity
a fortuitous geometry
of moon and star and window-pane

That’s the beginning of a poem that’s been almost-finished for months now. I’m just missing the connective tissue between a couple of the stanzas. Maybe one of these days I’ll get another phrase and boom, it’ll be done.

What inspires you? More importantly, how does it inspire you? How do the mechanics of your inspiration work? Comment; let me know.

So as some of you may know, my sister is getting married in a few weeks. For the ceremony, she and her fiancé wanted to do a couple of readings, and she asked me to help her find one. So we searched around and found some good candidates, but then she thought, knowing that I dabble in writing, that it might be cool to have me try and write something, and we’d keep her final 3rd party provider (Touched by an Angel by Maya Angelou) as an understudy if I wasn’t able to come up with something satisfactory; creativity on demand does not always work well, you understand.

Now, I hadn’t ever written a love poem before, and hadn’t, to be frank, historically been a big fan of the genre; the subject is pretty trite, and I have read very few love poems that I actually like. But where there’s a need…Anyway, I came up with a couple of poems that, after some editing, I am pretty happy with, and she ended up picking one of them. For your reading pleasure (?), I’ve posted them here. First, the runner-up:

Two together: a song of devotion

We came up out of the dark
and found the world free of shadow
found joy where we had not imagined a lack

We exorcized the ghosts of memory
shed the legacy of our past sorrow
and armed ourselves with conviction

Travelers both, we two
now unburdened, now prepared
for the terrain of our lives together

Our ideas of ourselves,
half-formed and shapeless,
only together are made whole
made sharp
made strong

Disbelieving the good fortune
of this chance-met circumstance,
this coincidence of moon and stars,
we come to the truth,
that we are better together than apart.

Though it demands a heavy price
love is the sweetest sacrifice we can make.
This is my pledge:
This is the ink of my love and my loyalty,
tattooed here across my heart,
indelible.

Credit where it’s due: one of the lines in the poem is a paraphrase of a snippet of a poem I saw on TV. I’d like to credit it more fully, but it was a poem written by a fictional character on a TV show, so I guess I have to thank whoever was the poem writer on the “Best Friends” episode of Cold Case:

I came up out of the dark without you
and every day since has been in shadow

Another line, my favorite, is a paraphrase of some song lyrics (really, it’s a poem)—from Walking Through the Empty Age by Chris Mosdell:

I dip my hands into this darkness
This is the ink of all our lifetimes
Here in this world of utter silence
Let the stones speak to me

Tattooed here across my skin, “I will live”
Like a rose that grows from the wreckage
Blood red, beautiful
As the storms all around me are now breathless

Beautiful, ain’t it? Brings a tear to my eye. No, really. Anyway, moving on. Here is the winner:

Influence

It is tempting to consign love
to the banality of daily existence
another of the petty magics of our lifetimes
just, or mere, or only
another meaningless, overused word

But let it come to us
and even the air is sweeter
every instant touched by fate
every breath invested with meaning

Flushed with the happy circumstances of our meetings
the serendipitous confluence of our paths
we dare to believe
that we should be so fortunate
to have found our complements in each other,
that the burgeoning excesses of others
could fill the lack in ourselves
that we could deserve these wondrous gifts
love gives us:
connection where there was a void
hope where there was despair
courage where there was fear
self-sacrifice where there was conceit

Love makes angels of us all,
and only in its arms are we free to fly.