Writing News

September 5, 2013–Best writer’s inspiration this month comes from a video.  Poet Neil Hilborn offered “OCD” as a finalist in the 2013 Rustbelt Poetry Slam, delivering a punch-to-the-gut love story that is also a wrenching portrait of human psychological illness. Do that in 1000 words or less, and you have created living art.

Congratulations to local author Max Ellendale for Glyph’s appearance on Amazon’s Erotic Horror bestseller list!

Last but not least, Team Cuppa Pulp is looking for some bada** writers and generous souls to support us in the 8th Annual NY Writers Coalition Write-a-Thon, benefitting writing programs for the underprivileged. You can read Donna’s plea here. Join us by registering or donating at our FirstGiving page for the Writers Coalition. Writers reach out to sponsors and show up to write from 10-6 on September 21! If we have enough team members, we will have two groups, one at Cuppa Pulp and one in NYC at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen Library,  20 West 44th St., NYC, NY. Thank you in advance for supporting the NYWC through Team Cuppa Pulp!

Writing Advice: First Drafts, Part 4

Be Unstoppable

Donna Lee Miele

Max Ellendale is no stranger to finishing difficult projects. She holds a graduate degree in mental health counseling, completed her MFA in 2013, and has written short stories since the age of 12. The second book in the Glyph series was recently published, and the third is well-underway. But she almost abandoned Glyph in the first year of her MFA program.

“At the time, most people were not clued in to the booming sci-fi/fantasy genre. I felt like an outcast. What I was writing wasn’t good enough, because it wasn’t memoir or literary fiction. It dampened my spirit. ‘What are you writing that for? That has no value.’ I butchered Glyph and changed it to attempt to meet the needs of others, breaking Kurt Vonnegut’s rule of writing fiction: ‘Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.’”

The turning point came when, against all her own expectations, Max mastered a “worthwhile” writing assignment: a literary memoir. “I struggled the entire semester because of my ‘sci-fi/fantasy handicap,’” she says. “[And] I tore a nonfiction piece from somewhere inside me. During our final reading, I made people laugh, and sad at the same time. The look on my teacher’s face, and the pat on the back she gave me when I finished, said to me, ‘You can do this, you can write.’”

With the confidence gained from this small success, Max went back to writing what she really enjoyed. She learned to listen critically to critics. A literary critique of genre fiction “is like going to a podiatrist for a dental consult,” she says, “though the flipside is also true. You might learn about metaphor and symbolism from a poet, or you might get some political insight from a blogger. Take what feels right and leave the rest.”

Max also found an audience through online networking. Industry wisdom counsels against putting your drafts on your own website or blog, if your goal is publication in a literary journal or press. Many publishers want work that has never been published before, in any format. But Max had already submitted to numerous agents without success, and felt that it was time to try communicating with readers another way.

“I posted a few tidbits on my blog that started to get some attention. My now-editor read chapters 1 and 2 and contacted me via Facebook. She urged me to submit to the small press that she works for, which publishes in my genre. I was able to find value in my work.”

The Authors’ Extra Mojo:

So does Max celebrate upon finishing a first draft? “I celebrate by moving on to the next project,” she says.

For most writers, the “next project” is revision.

James King does not celebrate either. “I get started as quickly as possible on the second draft,” he says.

Emmy Laybourne takes a time out—sort of. “When I get to the end of a first draft, I type ‘The End,’ and then I lie down on the floor and go to sleep! That’s happened twice, now. I get to take a nap, in the middle of the day.”

Stephen King recommends stepping away from a piece completely, for longer than one afternoon. “My advice to you is that you take a couple of days off—go fishing, go kayaking, do a jigsaw puzzle—and then work on something else. Something shorter, preferably… you’re not ready to go back to the old project until you’ve gotten so involved in a new one (or re-involved in your day-to-day life) that you’ve almost forgotten the unreal estate that took up three hours of every morning or afternoon for a period of three or five or seven months.”

If you’re not a strict outliner, you’ll know you’re done with a first draft when “you feel you’ve done what you set out to do, or you’ve come as close as you are capable,” says Joanna Clapps Herman. “By the time I’ve gone down my initial ‘grocery list’ and said what I have to say about each item I have a rough first draft, and I know more or less what work is ahead of me to write this piece fully.”

Joanna, who has experienced the full spectrum of the writing process many times, understands that when you finish your first draft, you are really just beginning. Now is the time to call on craft—“All the stuff that everyone works so hard to learn, and that is so well outlined in so many how-to books,” Joanna says. Your work has found its voice, but that is intermediary, at best, to a complete book. You must enflesh your story’s bones. You’re about to start all over again.

Coming Next Time: Part 5, Begin Again

References: 

Except where noted below, quoted material from James King (Bill Warrington’s Last Chance, New York: Viking, 2010), Emmy Laybourne (Monument 14: Sky on Fire, New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2013), Max Ellendale (Glyph, Breathless Press, 2012), and Joanna Clapps Herman (The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011) are from personal interviews and emails with the author, March-June, 2012.

Quoted material from Lauren Groff (Arcadia, New York: Voice, 2012) is from the author’s transcript of Ms. Groff’s seminar at the New York Writer’s Institute, State University of New York at Albany, March 27, 2012. “Lauren Groff on Writing and Arcadia”

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010, pages 211-212.

  Writing News

August 15, 2013–Check out local filmmaker Deborah Kampmeier’s crowdfunding drive for her upcoming film, SPLiT, here. It looks AMAZING.  Deborah’s past projects include Hounddog and Virgin, portrayals of women’s experience that are true jewels in the astonishingly small contemporary treasure-chest.  In other news: writing is, apparently, communication!  The age-old rumor that many writers fail to connect with readers because of simple breakdowns in language and syntax–well, author Karl Taro Greenfeld says, it’s TRUE. Check out this interview with Karl in The Review Review, in which he confirms the rumor: writing IS communication.

Writing Advice: First Drafts, Part 3

Vanquish “Writersbane:” Staying Out Of Your Own Way

Donna Lee Miele

Emmy Laybourne says that her editors’ initial rejection of Monument 14 “was very hard to hear,” but the usual banes of self-doubt and writer’s block never bogged down her process. She revised to produce the very different, very polished manuscript for her first novel, which went on to receive a Publisher’s Weekly starred review before release. To date, Monument 14 and its sequel, Monument 14: Sky on Fire, have earned her great reviews, thousands of young fans, and a hot demand for another sequel, due out in 2014.

“I’m really quite out of my own way,” she says. “I’m not critical at all as I’m writing. I just write. I let the stream pour and pour. When you’re writing a first draft, you shouldn’t sit down with that bully writing partner who looks over your shoulder going, ‘No… that’s not good. Start over. That sentence sucks. You know what, it’s not gonna happen today.’ I don’t sit down with that person! She’s not allowed. Not in a first draft.”

A highly trained improviser, comedienne, and actress, Emmy finds that her performance work gives her writing an edge. “Improvisation is just about training your mind never to judge yourself in the moment. That is what I think is crippling to writers. When you’re improvising, you cannot stay in the past for a second. Improv teaches you to stay in the present moment, to never judge yourself.”

Common writersbanes are self-doubt, writer’s block, or garden-variety procrastination, that succubus that likes to sit on your chest, blocking your focus. Emmy dispatches them all without flinching.

“I have a few tricks,” she says. “Number one is attaining a certain velocity. You have get up to speed. In a week where I’ve written for four hours Monday, four hours Tuesday, I sit down to write on Wednesday, and I literally just start to write. It’s right there. The next thing is, if I’m really in the zone, before I go to bed, I think about the next day’s writing. It works like a charm. Then, if I’m blocked, or can’t get started, I walk. It’s better if it’s the same walk every time. I’ll walk as many loops as it takes for me to see the scene in my mind. Then I’ll go back, I won’t check emails, I’ll just sit down and write what I came up with.”

Learn to talk to yourself. You engage your banes via a healthy internal dialogue, instead of one in which they easily sabotage you. When you commit to regular writing hours on consecutive writing days, your storytelling voice strengthens. Walking, or any form of meditative movement that doesn’t wear you out, keeps your focus active.

Your infant creative work is only beginning to find its voice. Your anxieties and fears, by contrast, are well-versed in sending you off-track. Acknowledge them, instead of pretending they don’t exist. Then quiet them. Your task is to nourish this new fantastical being, your story. Recognize your limits, be patient with your process, and the power of your story will eventually guide you past the blocks.

Max Ellendale encountered another common interloper while writing her first novel: too much advice.

Wanting more than anything to make a living as a novelist, Max brought Glyph, a paranormal romance, to the first year of her graduate writing program. But neither she nor her novel were prepared for the literary fire-breathers at the gate.

“At the time, most people were not clued in to the booming sci-fi/fantasy genre. I felt like an outcast. What I was writing wasn’t good enough, because it wasn’t memoir or literary fiction. It dampened my spirit. ‘What are you writing that for? That has no value.’ I butchered Glyph and changed it to attempt to meet the needs of others, breaking Kurt Vonnegut’s rule of writing fiction: ‘Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.’”

How did Max vanquish her banes? By hard, often introspective work, she improved her skills and her story, and gained new confidence. A little help from the magic of online networking did the rest.

**And for a little extra mojo**

Along with Emmy, James King recommends “Sh**ty First Drafts,” a chapter from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. “The first draft is a child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page,” Anne writes.

“Use the first draft to be as creative as possible,” James says. “This is tough to do if that little voice inside your head is constantly piping up… ‘You think anyone’s going to publish that?’”

Lauren Groff’s pet interloper during the first draft is getting into “fetishizing the individual sentences,” she says. “I write the first draft longhand, without really caring what I’m writing about, because the first draft is where the characters come alive, and they start to tell me who they are… And I don’t even look at it again… I go and do another longhand, and then possibly one more…

“If the sentences are good, they’ll stay… And if they’re not good, why not throw them out, and start over again with something else?”

To tune back into her subconscious when she’s stuck, Lauren also observes the ancient practice of… napping. “Napping is a huge part of the writing process!

“The dreamscape is really important… Sometimes [a problem] solves itself in your head, if you just close your eyes and relax.”

Day-to-day anxieties clamor for her attention, but Joanna Clapps Herman has the discipline to let them wait. “I’ve gotten past them so many times,” she says. “Now they are like annoying old relatives. Oh, you’re here again? I know how to deal with you. Sit down and have a cup of coffee, because I have some work to do! If I’m really having trouble, I force myself to sit down for just ten minutes a day. I start a log, where I literally log myself in and out. Even if I am only at work for very short periods of time, especially then, to keep myself honest. By the end of two weeks of this, something always emerges.”

Coming Next Time: Part 4, Be Unstoppable

References: 

Except where noted below, quoted material from James King (Bill Warrington’s Last Chance, New York: Viking, 2010), Emmy Laybourne (Monument 14: Sky on Fire, New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2013), Max Ellendale (Glyph, Breathless Press, 2012), and Joanna Clapps Herman (The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011) are from personal interviews and emails with the author, March-June, 2012.

Quoted material from Lauren Groff (Arcadia, New York: Voice, 2012) is from the author’s transcript of Ms. Groff’s seminar at the New York Writer’s Institute, State University of New York at Albany, March 27, 2012. “Lauren Groff on Writing and Arcadia”

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 22-23.