Sorry, but I’m a firm believer in not only the Oxford Comma, as well as all forms of grammar rigidity, especially since living among the absence of such is hastening my eventual decline into ridiculousness. Call me petty, but that’s the way it is for someone who spends their days dealing with the open defiance of all rules of written language usage. Then again, who cares as long as we’re communicatin’? I mean, honestly, DILLIGAS?
Master of One
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (Little, Brown & Co. ) is not a new book. In fact it’s over eight years old, but it is one that I’ve read lately. As in the other Gladwell books (The Tipping Point, Blink), the author picks a subject and expands on it, or as he explains in his website, I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. Said theme for Outliers was, and I liberally interpret: Why do some people become successful and others, who are just as educated and innately intelligent, don’t? This is a question I have posited myself, as I have seen some people rocket to the top of their chosen profession while many of their peers struggle and remain perennially in the backfield. So I picked up Gladwell’s book hoping to find not so much answers as explanations, and I certainly received what I was searching for. Not that it made me feel any better. In fact, there’s a simple word to explain exactly how I felt.
Screwed.
As Gladwell theorizes, it’s not how hard you work, but how advantageous you were in where and when you were born, and how the culture in which you developed shaped you. In essence, as hard as some people work to succeed, the vast majority of those who do find success do so aided by circumstances beyond their efforts. Or as the author puts it: …we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Now, who hasn’t heard the stories? The accountant who just happens to send his resumé in on the day another accountant gets fired, and gets hired, purely out of necessity. The actor who gets to star in a blockbuster film after the first pick for the role turns it down. Or as in Bill Gate’s case, growing up in Seattle the son of a wealthy lawyer whose private middle school, in 1968, was able to afford a unique computer for him, and a few other select geeks, to use on their own. A computer, tied to a main-frame up town, which Bill and his cohorts got to use day and night and weekends and all summer until all they did was program and program and program, until this coding-jones replicated exponentially into Microsoft. My God, how could you compete with those innate set of circumstances? Because part of what Gladwell expounds on, what ultimately leads to Bill’s success, lay not so much in the advantages, as the time he spent perfecting his craft. His 10,000 hours.
Gladwell postulates that in order to be considered a Master in any given field, one must spend a minimum of ten years, or ten thousand hours, grinding away at it. Bill started out by obsessively programming for almost 1,600 hours in one seven month period. Likewise, the Beatles launched their career by performing in Hamburg, Germany, for 270 nights in a little over eighteen months, for almost 1200 hours. Reading that, I began to feel a little better about myself, as I’ve had my own set slave-driving circumstance. To wit:
You may as well know, I’m an academic. I have a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing and at the time my thesis, a novel, was in progress, I was working on a three-book contact. So, in one ten-month period, I wrote one 80,000 and three 50,000 word novels, as well as several papers, four grant proposals (I minored in grant writing), and two short stories. This is addition to all the ancillary writing that goes along with the business of submission and course requirements, so I spent many a weekend from sun-up to -set still in my dressing gown, gaining my sustenance by anything I could eat with one hand. At times, it wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was always exhilarating and ultimately very rewarding.
The end result is I can drop prose like others drop trou, and now I get to teach people how to do it. I’m not perfect, I’m still a work-in-progress, but I can honestly say I love what I do. And if you can say that, well then, your working days are done.
Liberty States Fiction Writers Annual Conference is coming! March 19-20, 2016
Hey writers! Looking for something to do on these cold winter days? How about looking into the 7th Annual Create Something Magical Conference Saturday, March 19 thru Sunday, March 20, 2016 at the Renaissance Woodbridge Hotel in Iselin, NJ.
- Two days of workshop offerings for both Writers and Readers
- Editor/Agent Appointments
- An open to the public book signing
- Dessert and dancing at our Saturday night party
- Tons of opportunities to meet and connect with readers and authors
| Keynote Speakers | ||
| New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author Catherine Bybee |
AND | Mary Higgins Clark Award Winning Author Hank Phillippi Ryan |
For more info follow this link to LSFW! |
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Boo Effing Hoo – get your ass in the chair
One New Year’s resolution I’m sure plenty of writers made was finally attempting that full-length novel. For some, NaNoWriMo in November gave them their first taste of what long form writing’s like, as a national novel-writing month forces derriere-in-chair and excuses out the window. But what if no amount of incentive will work? What if you just can’t get in the mood to write?
If you consider yourself a writer, then no one has to tell you about black moods. To a writer, they’re as welcoming as a rejection and as familiar as the backspace. Our black moods spawn as much from those brick walls we face as from the months we spend waiting for an answer, and when we do it’s often nothing we want to hear. Our dismal days are frequently filled with endless rewrites, verbal vomit and dead ends, and the inevitable recalcitrant character who insists on upending the plot. Sometimes when it gets really bad we end the day dispirited and frustrated, cursing our near obsession as we cry into our goblets of pinot noir, gorging on double-chocolate brownies and tater tots. ANYWAY, this writing life can sure enough get you down now and then, no fooling. So what’s a sullen scribe to do?
Milk it, I say. Milk it for all it’s worth, right down to the quick until it’s pink and screaming. Believe it or not, your darkest days can bring out some of your most illuminated writing, as you dig into the depths of your rawest emotions. You need to write a scene where your protagonist loses the love of his life? His job? His home? His space in line for the newest iPhone? Drag yourself to your keyboard and lose your troubles in his, as pouring all that angst into your prose will make it so much richer and realistic, not to mention the cathartic bonus you’ll get out of unloading it all into some unwitting character. The same thing can work in reverse, too. Write your heroine falling in love on the day you finally nail that job, fit into those skinny jeans, eat a perfect peach. Works really well when you’re angry, too, letting that poor, downtrodden patsy finally give the bully his due as he lands a left dead-on his fictional jaw. Hey, it’s better than shoving your own fist into the sheet rock. It’ll save you a ton of dough in repairs, leaving more money to spend on pinot noir, tater tots and–oh, we’ll just leave that up to our very fertile imaginations, now won’t we?
My Post-Holiday Sugar Crash
It’s a sunny morning in my neck of New Jersey, and unlike the photo to the left, snow-free. The wind is relatively calm, and from my window I can see all kinds of birds pecking at the feeder and except for the barren vegetation, it could almost be anytime of the year. But it isn’t, and I don’t need to step outside into the mid-twenties chill to feel the hollowness of the season in my bones, especially when the Weather Bleaters are predicting a Snowmageddon for the weekend. Sorry if I’m being a bit of a Debbie Downer, but seriously, after the choreographed optimism of the New Year fades back into the mundane, what are we actually left with? Only the anti-climatic yawn of the Dead of Winter and the mind-numbing ennui that follows.
Maybe it’s just a sugar crash after all those Christmas cookies, but last fall’s good intentions and best laid plans now seem as sensible as earmuffs in August. What happened to that get-up-and-go, those ideas that seemed so workable, those plans set to be implemented as soon as the everything got back to normal, post-holiday? Instead, you’re quickly finding out that things don’t really change, that everything goes comfortably back to the way it was, or more often than not, gets just a little bit worse. (Like waiting for that first paycheck of 2016? Times like these make you wish you’d majored in creative accounting and not creative writing.) You’re finding yourself just a little more broke, a touch fatter, a tad less cheerful and a whole lot lazier. A stretch on the sofa feels more natural that an extended stretch at laptop, and when you do find yourself in front of a screen, it’s more likely for Netflix than for fixing that severely flawed manuscript.
Not that you haven’t tried. To fix that manuscript, I mean. But everything you seem to write is crap. As it was the last time you looked at it just before Christmas. When you told yourself you’d make it better next month. When you had more time. When everything calmed down. After the New Year. When all that holiday hoo-hah is behind you and you can finally think again. In January. Because in January the Universe presses the big RESET button and all wrongs get righted, everything gone down goes up, all promises are kept. When the Muse of Inspiration suddenly infuses us with glorious plot threads, miraculous turns-of-phrase and endings so sock-blowing that ever-elusive editor you queried back in the fall suddenly jumps from your proposal and screeches “MY GOD! THIS IS GONNA MAKE US MILLIONS!”
As if. So what to do?
Beats me. I’m depressed, remember? Deads of Winter tend to breed brain-deadness. Or at least that’s how it feels from here. All I can offer is this isn’t my first Dead of Winter, that I’ve made it through several, and there’s just something about January that breeds contempt. And invariably, things do pick up by February. Maybe it is all that holiday crap we ingested and like a six-year-old on Halloween night, we just need to sleep it off.
Okay, whine over. Back to work.
RIP Thin White Duke 1947-2016
The only time I saw David Bowie was in his Station to Station Tour in the late ’70s. I was very young and impressionable, and wanting to fit in only the most glam-rock way, I wore a sky blue satin vest to his concert at the long-gone Spectrum in Philadelphia. As I sat there dead-center back in the first tier, passing joints and sipping Schmidts as an enormous train chuffed in the background to Bowie singing “TVC 15,” I thought back to the first time I heard him. My cousin had just gotten his Ziggy Stardust album, and was completely blown away by it. “Just listen to this,” she said, playing “Suffragette City.” And we did, maybe ten times over, slam-dancing across her room and screaming “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am!” I never heard anything like Bowie in my young life and for one reason or the other, being into him as much as I was made me feel part of something unique, like an elite corp of insiders. I can’t explain it, but his music just made you feel that way, and rather than fade I kept being amazed by him well into the new millennium.
You will be missed, Mr. Bowie, but thank you for such an astounding ride. RIP.
Writers’ little helpers when the caffeine ain’t enuf
By Grant Snider via GalleyCat and James Boog. This speaks to me, especially left-center, though I’m sure you writers out there can draw from it what you need. The New Yorker cuts worse of all. But still, I’m addicted. Heaven help me!
Happy Holidays, New Year, and all that
I’m optimistic, I always have been. So it’s with enormous hope in my heart that I wish everyone the most fabulous of holidays and the absolute best in the New Year. And in case you’re wondering just what the hell this picture means then obviously, you haven’t experienced New Year’s in the greater Philadelphia area. Nothing will bring you back to the land of the living like twelve hours of struttin’ and string bands. If that doesn’t get you off the couch I don’t know what.
Happy Holidays everyone. See you in 2016!
Rejection, you old bastard
The other day I received in my inbox one of the most eagerly unanticipated of emails – the dreaded rejection. It wasn’t my first, and it most certainly will not be my last. In fact, it was another in a long, and happily broken line of such letters, which at this point in my career, totals well over one hundred. Through the years I’ve received all kinds, reaching back to the pre-electronic era: my own typed query with a rubber-stamped REJECTED across it, thrifty pre-printed postcards tucked into my SASE, crookedly off-centered-Xeroxed form letters, flyers inviting me to partake in the purchase of 1) editorial services, 2) how-to books, 3) seminars, even one with a large NO scribbled across the body of the letter. Of the electronic variety, I’ve received mainly cut-and-paste form emails, some three months after I submitted, to one within the hour. Several of these, especially of late, have been what is popularly known as good rejections, dismissals of a more personal nature, where the sender comments on what they liked and disliked about the work, more often than not praising the writing, but not “falling in love” with the story. Often the sender will point out the subjective nature intrinsic to all rejections, and wish you “the best of luck in finding a home/editor/agent for your novel/project/work.” Although rejections of this ilk are often sent with the kindest of cuts, because of the higher level of expertise the writer has demonstrated by the point, they’re usually the toughest rejections of all to take.
I’ve seen many a writer crumple in despair over such rejections, burn their manuscripts, erase their hard drives, lose themselves in a blurry of cheap liquor and even cheaper chocolate (yours truly suggests burrowing into a Himalaya-size pile of Tater Tots). Many vow to give up writing for good, and sometimes many do, at least temporarily, and often that’s a good thing. Because once the hurt and the anger and the self-deprecation subside, the writer can take a step back and look at the work objectively. Subjectivity aside, editors and agents, more than anything else, are professional readers, and if the work comes back over and over with similar commentary, maybe it’s time to take a look at that particular aspect of the story. In the same vein, the writer also has to consider where the work was sent and the editors’/agents’ preferred genres. Are you submitting mystery when the agent’s preference is sci-fi? Have you sent a novel query to an editor who usually publishes self-help? Have you taken a look at the agent’s clients? The editor’s list? Have you read the acknowledgement pages of works similar to yours to see who the author is thanking? You have? Then good, but let me ask you this: do you have multiple queries out there, or are you placing all of your literary eggs into the basket of one editor/agent?
If you are, you are most certainly setting yourself up for disappointment. Submission should be a very fluid process, and sending to one editor/agent at a time is akin to hitting a stop sign on every corner, causing your writing to lose momentum. For the most part, your writing life should have two very distinct entities – the creative and the practical, and as hard as it is to separate one from the other, the two should never align. Plus if you have multiple queries out there at once, the random rejection tends to lose its sting, and the dismissing editor/agent diminishes in importance. But most of all, you should never, ever let a rejection sink you so low that you lose faith in your abilities, a point where I’ll admit I have found myself. Instead of wallowing in dejection, ask yourself this: Who are these people who wield such power that I allow their judgment to supercede mine? Confidence in your talent will show through in your work, and you should always be exercising your writing muscle. As I tell my students, writers write, and no one was more surprised than me by my reaction to that latest rejection. Sure, it rattled me, but all I could think about was finishing the chapter I had been working on, which I did before I went to bed that night. To me, that meant I had lived through one more rejection, and had come out the other end, still a writer.
A while ago, when I was less confident, I had poured my heart out to my sister over one particularly brutal rejection. She told me of an article she had read in the New York Times about author James Lee Burke, and his fourth novel, The Lost Get-Back Boogie. By his own accounting, the manuscript was rejected by 111 editors over a nine-year period. When it was finally accepted and published, it went on to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s now translated all over the world, and has gone into numerous printings. I never forgot that story, and many times it has kept me going. It made me think that one day, if I’m lucky enough, my own tales of desperation and abject failure will rally someone on to success. Only if!
Sex Scenes for Chicks 101
Sex scenes are as integral to spicy romance as whipped cream is to sundaes (or to use-your-imagination), but quantity hardly speaks for quality. A proliferation of ins and outs and seductive banter are only the more apparent components of saucy scene-writing. Truth be told, there should be much more going on before the point of contact than during. A romance writer should never forget to keep an eye on the romance if she’s ever going to make the scene truly sensuous. So how to accomplish it?
Romance is mostly written by and for women, and because of that the prose has to be approached with their sensibilities in mind. Women take their cues from the images they form in their mind as their senses are acted upon, rather than visuals observed as men are more apt to do. This is the greatest difference I’ve noted between sex scenes written by male and female authors, and the biggest flaw when male authors get it wrong. (Not that it’s universal in male authors, as many get it exceedingly right. Ken Follett still writes the best sex scenes of any male author I’ve ever read. To see what I’m talking about, read Night Over Water.) Let me give you an example.
I once read a sex scene written by a man which included the male character receiving stimulation to a very male part of his anatomy. While the prose was quite good and very descriptive, the writer’s observations were not only in the male character’s point of view, but within the confines of a man’s sensibilities. He described the woman’s breasts and her voluptuous figure, as well as her lipsticked mouth gliding up and down him. He also described rather graphically how it looked when his climax reached its er…finish, using some very active verbs and sticky adjectives. I don’t know about you, but I was a tad put off by the scene’s ickiness, and I feel quite safe in saying there would be more than a few women who’d share my opinion. Now, while this would be considered just fine if it were written primarily for a male market, it doesn’t work for women, and I’ll tell you why.
Part of the explanation is obvious, as most heterosexual men would consider a description of a woman’s feminine pulchritude essential, while most heterosexual women would not. But it’s more subtle than that. When writing for a female audience (and I’ve found this point valid with lesbian romance as well), it’s more important to show not what the woman observes but what the character’s lover reacts to. Although she may be just as interested in the male’s anatomy and what he does with it, her senses are more roused by the male’s sexual reaction to her. The more arousing he finds the heroine, the more arousing it is for the female reader. Take male-centric scene mentioned above. Written for a female audience it could be just as sexually charged and graphic, but the focus would be more on how excited she felt doing it, as well as how passionate her partner reacted because of it.
Simply put, as far as the males are concerned in female-centric sex scenes, they should always be more aroused by their woman’s reaction to them, than by how they feel by the act alone. Every woman, no matter the shape or looks or age, wants to feel that she alone can cause her lover to lose it, her own uniqueness being the most potent aphrodisiac of them all.
Gwen Jones Writes 