Location Location Location

I collect locations. Whenever I travel, I take photographs and catalog streets and businesses. On a recent trip to Manhattan I spent an afternoon walking the streets within a ten block radius of my hotel with my Easyshare snapping the streets, architecture, and geography to be (possibly) used in future stories. I snapped clandestine shots of people on sidewalks and in crosswalks, and overheard their conversations (“So, what you’re telling me is you've done dick all day…”).

In the spring of 1999 I took a road trip across the country. One of the reasons I took the trip was because I knew I was going to use the experience in a novel. I wasn’t sure what would happen or how the locations would come into play. But I took about ten rolls of film, which, as I predicted, became the general route of my main character in “A Little Disappeared."

But, one of the best locations I’ve found was one I didn’t seek. It came to me.

A few years ago I had a temporary job where I worked in the inventory department of a computer network company. Part of my job was counting computer parts that, for one reason or another, had been sent back to the company. Call them gently used. All these parts, from large routers and backplanes, to reels and spools of various sized microchips, were boxed up and stored in a warehouse.

The warehouse was a temporary one, housed in a five-story building that had originally been home to another networking company. But aside from pallets of computer bits and pieces on two of the five floors (microchips sure can take up lots of space) it was vacant. It had not been designed to be a warehouse, so much of the space was made up of vast areas of cubicles. On the third floor was a dormant cafeteria. Next to that was a corporate gym. Always darkened. Always musty. Always a little creepy.

What struck me about the building was that all the chairs and desks were still in place, waiting in the cubicles for the next occupants which, due to the financial downturn of 2001, were nowhere to be found. Everything was gathering a gritty, grimy dust. Not only that, but some of the desks still contained files and paperwork and office supplies.

It was a fun place to work, because I was often alone in the building. Sometimes when I had to drive over from the main inventory department—in another corporate park a couple miles away where I did most of my work—I would spend an extra ten or fifteen minutes poking around the building.

It was like a movie set. I could pretend that the world’s population had been wiped out and I was the last man alive, lamenting humankind’s fate while working out in the gym. I walked the stairs alone. I used the still-functioning restrooms. I took the elevator alone. I stood at a fifth floor window and looked out over the empty parking lot. I looked through every desk in the building, and procured fistfuls of paperclips, file folders, and binder clips. I found a drawer full of Wall Street Journals all from a couple years earlier. I found a Beatles CD and birthday cards. I was fascinated about how a building that had obviously been full of workers could become, and remain, a shell.

I never took any pictures of the place, but I still remember it. I started writing a story that grew from this location, the idea of such an empty building, and how it got that way through corporate downsizing. So, details like how the lobby was three stories high and contained leather chairs, are still logged and ready. I haven’t finished the story, but it’s still there, like the memory of the location, ready to be used when I’m ready.

A great location helps make a great book. Stephen King uses locations to add menace to his horror, often using locations like characters. Think of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. In A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole used all of New Orleans as a tapestry on which he imprinted his own brand of literary insanity.

As a writer, what are some of your favorite locations? As a reader, what stories made an impression through use of location?

How to Balance an Unbalanced Writing Life

Lately it feels like I've been putting more effort into my posts over at Beyond the Margins. And I admit, I've been saving some of my ideas for that blog. While some of my posts on Unreliable Narrator are less personal or less about the craft of writing. Mainly, that's a result of having a deadline at BTM. I can see on our Google calendar that once every 11 business days (or so) a sparkling new post is expected of me. I know what I signed up for and if I get overwhelmed I can opt out at any time.

But I'm not going to. Having my own blog and being a writer in great company on a co-op blog is just too good an experience to let flag. So I plan to continue participating in both. It's really a matter of keeping my writing life balanced. Because not only am I blogging, I'm also working on a novel-in-progress, querying agents and smaller publishers regarding my finished novel A Little Disappeared, putting finishing touches on a handful of stories and sending those out to literary magazine, and enjoy contributing literary magazine reviews to The Review Review. 

As a writer who works to pay a mortgage, I need to find that balance of work and writing. My balance is a little unbalanced. I try to use the weekends as much as I can. Weeknights after using my technical writing brain I'm pretty frazzled. But I try to do a little reading, emailing, or social networking. I also try to keep up with the many excellent blogs and websites that help inform writers who are querying, synopsizing, and otherwise seeking publication. Publishing is a business and as such I need to work at it. I know this, I just have to work harder at it.

In general, I'm happy with my writing life. I am able to get up about an hour early each weekday and work on my novel-in-progress. It's slow going, a slog if you will (if it were a song, it would be a dirge or My Bloody Valentine stretching their 4 minute pop ditty You Made Me Realise into a 20-plus minute live sonic assault), but one that moves forward. And soon, I'd like to add to my unbalanced writing life by taking another writing class or reinstating an existing writing group currently on hiatus or joining/starting a new one. But that's a writing life decision for another day.

How do you keep your unbalanced writing life balanced? What goes, what stays, and what kind of schedule do you have just to get through the week?

In the meantime, here's You Made Me Realise for your listening pleasure (or pain, depending):

Technical Writing Vs. Narrative Fiction, Part 2

Telling a Story

Chapter 3 – Configuring Disaster Recovery for Zombies

Disaster recovery is a system configuration that helps ensure your network environment remains secure and online in the case of a physical catastrophe; for example:

• Earthquakes
• Hurricanes
• Zombies

How Disaster Recovery Works
When the primary system on which the software is installed goes offline (when zombies chew through the wires or set the building on fire), failover is initiated, and the secondary system is automatically brought online at another location (Alaska, where there are no zombies…yet!) and continues to function with a minimum of downtime.

This chapter describes the procedures necessary to configure disaster recovery in your infrastructure and fend for your life from flesh-eating zombies, including:

• Installing the software
• Killing zombies: guidelines and best practices
• Configuring disaster recovery

To install the software
1. Log on to the server system as the administrator.
2. Navigate to the closest exit.
3. Double-click……Zombies!

A software user's guide tells a story (sans zombies). A novel tells a story (about anything, including zombies). It could be argued (I double dare you) that any book, technical or otherwise, has to tell a story. What kind of story does a software user guide tell? Well, in the planning phase of my disaster recovery user guide (my example from Part 1 all the way through here) I have to determine who my audience is so I have a better understanding of what they need to know about disaster recovery. Is the user very technical? If not, I will need to include more introductory and concept material. Is the user a network administrator? If so, my user won’t need a lot of setup, she will just need the procedures to configure her software for disaster recovery.

Where’s the story in that? Well, look at the outline. Chapter 1: Introduction. Chapter 2: Install and Configure software. That’s for the new user. The experienced user does not need as much intro material, so that will not be part of the story. What is the motivation? Why tell this story? My audience, new or experienced, needs to install and configure the software correctly. I have to tell the story of this install and configuration.

During my planning phase, I’ll determine how I will tell the story. There are two ways I can go:

• Start with the easiest information and then, continuing through each chapter, get more and more detailed, more technical. This might be the way I write one user guide for both those audiences (new and experienced). The new user will get all she needs in the first few chapters and then can stop reading. The experienced user might skip the early chapters, and get to the nitty gritty of the story: the procedures she needs to configure the software for every disaster recovery scenario (there is more than one type of failover—but I digress).

• Tell a story from start to finish, logically, like documenting each point of a flowchart. Maybe every user needs all the information, so chapter 1 begins my story from where any user needs to start the process. Chapter 2 continues it, and so on, through to the last chapter. You can look at the table of contents of my user guide and consider each chapter as one process in a complete series of necessary processes (Chapter 1=Process 1, Chapter 2=Process 2), with each chapter/process broken into all the procedures needed to complete the process.

No one, and I mean absolutely no one, reads a technical document for fun. (Unless you’re a technical writer studying bad tech writing to figure out what not to do.) But many people, whether they’re an engineer (learning a new product or reviewing technical documentation because they’re the only person in the world who knows how a piece of the software puzzle works because they wrote the code) or a soccer mom (installing the latest version of iTunes) will at some point have to read a user guide or some online help topics. The more concisely you present and tell the story, the better experience any user will have with her product. Often a user clicks that Help button because she can’t do something. She needs information fast; she’s pissed off, and she’d rather not call tech support. This is when telling that story about the installation and configuration saves the day.

It should go without saying that narrative fiction also tells a story. I mean, that’s why it’s narrative; it tells a story, somehow, from start to finish. But how are these two types of storytelling similar? Okay, you’re in a book store and you pick up a copy of the new hardcover by that hot young author who looks good in heels and has a haircut you envy. You’ve heard good things, read decent to excellent reviews, and you need to find out for yourself. You read the first paragraph. It doesn’t grab you. You read two pages; you’re still not sold. One more page, and the hot young author has lost you. You put the book down, walk away, and buy a new book by a writer whose ten other books sit happily read on your bedroom bookshelf (yes, I have a bookshelf in my bedroom).

What the hell just happened? This reader clicked Help and tried to determine what the story was. And she either had no idea what the author was trying to say, or it wasn’t for her. She may or may not know why. I’ll argue that a reader of a user guide can get the same feeling—this book sucks, but why? In both cases, the story failed. For the fiction reader (reader A) the author failed at storytelling. But, we can assume that if it didn’t work for reader A, there’s a reader B and C for whom it didn’t work equally well. She is not alone.

Novels and user’s guides must tell a story clearly, concisely, and with a minimum of bullshit, or readers will give up out of frustration. Which brings us to the most important part of this comparison: Editing.

Tune in next time when I’ll discuss the following parts of editing:
• Structure
• Pacing
• Consistency
• Standards

At Least I Don’t Have a Book Deal…

This morning I attempted the fifth beginning of the total revision (new characters, new situations, twice the fun!) of my novel "American Standard" (I’m changing that title, so feel free to take it). Five times I’ve put my main character through different versions of similar actions and introductions. Tomorrow morning I plan on starting a sixth. It’s like creating six alternate realities for my character; each version would spin my character off in a new direction. Which bizarro world can I create today? It doesn’t matter if none of them is the right one.

What’s disturbing is that I’ve never had a problem starting a novel. It was always the other stuff that gave me trouble. It was the middle and end that slowed me down. Stopped me dead. Put me away for years of head scratching. But without a beginning, I don’t get the chance to revise an ending.

The stupid part is I know where the novel’s story really begins, when my main character meets the supporting character who will change his life forever. And I just can’t let myself jump ahead a few scenes and get down to it. I’m stuck introducing my main character over and over again, my own little Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, and it’s not working. I can hear you now: drop it like it’s hot, and just write the damn scene where these two characters meet.

I can’t. I mean, I can’t yet. I have yet to exhaust all my ideas at an opening. I’m linear, is my problem. I write front to back, beginning to end. It’s just the way I’m wired. And it makes thing woefully structured sometimes.

My sister, romantic suspense writer Cynthia Sherrick, told me once that she will skip ahead and write the end of the novel (or at least one of the final scenes) then go back and fill in the rest of the story, using that last scene as a guide. I like that idea. I’m not sure how my story will end, so I probably won’t go that far. But I should trust the story I want to tell, and allow myself to break this construct I’ve surrounded myself with and jump ahead a few scenes. Who knows, maybe this scene I have in mind is the real beginning of the novel and I won’t need to go in and back fill? Only one way to tell.

I know this is the beginning of at least a year’s worth of work, just to get another draft. If I can get the thing out of first gear, that is. There is another novel I’d like to write, and if I wait too long spinning around the track with "American Standard," that other story might take over. I want to finish one project before starting the next. So that’s why I say I’m glad I don’t have a book deal, where I’m supposed to get a book written by a certain date, with an agent, editor, and publisher breathing down my neck. That’s pressure I’m not sure I could stand. That’s my spin at not having an agent or a book deal right now. At least I have the luxury of time to write what I want to write.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

How’s your writing going? Tell me all. I want details. Are beginnings the most difficult part for you? Or do endings slow you down?

My So-Called Writing Life

Work’s busy, evenings I’m beat, and there’s always a lot to do on the weekends. I write for about an hour each morning before work on weekdays, and for a few hours on weekend mornings. So it’s easy to let slide an aspect of writing life that’s imperative to moving forward: getting published.

It takes an entirely different writing muscle to send out material for publication or agency placement. It doesn’t matter if you’ve attended the most prestigious MFA in creative writing program ever, all that learnin’ won’t help you place your brilliant writing. (Okay, an MFA can get agents’ and publishers’ attention more easily, but that’s another story for another blog post.) It’s after you finish your poem, story, or novel that a new sort of dogged creativity gets tested. Now it’s time to write the perfect query letter, research the agents and/or publishers that seem the best fit for your manuscript, and target the literary mags that best suit your stories. This is a full-time job. It can get immediately disheartening and even the small stuff can throw you off your game.

Recently I looked at my Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of my query activity on the novel front, and submissions on the story front. For "A Little Disappeared," the novel I worked-shopped at Grub with Ms. X, I have about five or six queries still out to agents and publishers. I have about eight or ten instances of stories or novel excerpts out to literary journals. Some of these have been out for over a year.

I realize, looking at the sent dates, that there’s a new publishing biz practice. No longer will an agent, publisher, or lit mag guarantee a response. If the answer is no, you may never get a response. I suppose I understand this behavior, as they are getting more and more queries and manuscripts, and have fewer and fewer employees to handle the slush piles. Still, that great big NO meant closure, allowed me to move on to try again somewhere else. Now, with no real NO to work with, I need to remind myself to move on myself after, say, three months.

I always try to stick to a self-imposed schedule: send out a story or query once a week. But, after a few weeks I always fall off the wagon, either because my writing isn’t going well or the rejections become overwhelming. I recently showed a new story to Liz. She had some good ideas, and I rewrote the story. Then had my writing group critique the story. I got a good response and also some great ideas on how to make it better.

So, for the first time in a few months, I’m excited about sending out writing again, and this is bleeding over into trying to again place "A Little Disappeared", and getting back to my so-called writing life.

Muse and the Marketplace Update

I was alerted this week to the workshops I will be attending next week, and I’m happy with the choices:

- Marketplace Panel: The State of the Industry
- Eternal Rocks Beneath: the Relevance of Setting, with Lewis Robinson
- Building Character, with Stephen McCauley

Here Goes Something

This week I’m writing a review for The Review Review website. I finished reading a book I plan to review for this blog. For the last couple weeks I’ve been working on five or six stories, trying to narrow them to three, and getting those three into shape to hand out to my writing group. And I’ve been working on this here blog. Not that the blog takes a ton of time, but everything adds up and so I wonder when I’ll get back to what I need to be doing: writing a novel.

Saturday night Liz and I attended a movie night at Rex Art’s crib. Rex was one of my gracious and honest and encouraging readers of "A Little Disappeared". When we were leaving (after a heady cocktail of Cadillac Records and The 40 Year Old Virgin) he asked me when I’d have something else for him to read. It took me years to finish "A Little Disappeared" (and if you’re one Ms. X, would argue there’s more work to do). So the chance of another novel popping out any time soon is nil. I shrugged off the question, grateful that a past reader wants to be a future reader.

It also means it’s time to get off of my ass. Since the first of the year I’ve done some outlining and planning on a proposed new novel, although that’s currently stalled. I also came up with some good revision ideas for the last novel I workshopped with Mr. X, called "American Standard". The plan for the next six months or so is to start working in earnest on a novel to 1) hand out to the writing group and 2) eventually workshop in Ms. X’s upcoming summer session. That means I only have a few months to kick it up a notch, to go from 0 to 60 in under six months. Here goes something.

Writing Outlines

I’m working on two outlines. Not the kind of outlines you write while the manuscript is in progress or after it’s complete and you want to send to agents and publishers. These are for me to wrap my mind around novels yet to be written. One is for a new novel that I’ve been making notes about since 2005 and just haven’t pulled the trigger on yet. The other is a proposed rewrite of “American Standard,” the last novel I workshopped with Ms. X
at Grub Street.

So why do this? Doesn’t this tamp the creative magic at time of inception? Meaning, don’t us writers just sit down to a blank monitor and just go to town? Maybe. Sometimes. But usually not. I’ll jump into a short story without a plan, but at this stage in the novel game, I won’t start a novel without a pretty clear idea of the story I want to tell and the characters I need to populate it with. I find that at this outline/pre-writing stage, I can get as creative as I want, coming up with any and all scenarios to try them on like shoes looking for the best fit or perfect Steve Madden knockoff. I won’t end up using all the ideas, scenes, or even the characters I plan ahead for. I also don’t let myself stay confined to the numbered steps of the outline after the novel-writing starts. If it turns out that Andrew was really abducted by little green men from Uranus, then maybe it’s best for the integrity of the story.

For the new novel, I’m creating characters and their backgrounds, figuring out where they are in life right now, where they want to go, and what’s holding them back. How they fit in to the story, or rather how the story evolves around them (I suppose that happens concurrently). One technique I picked up from my film school screenwriting teacher for getting to know your characters is to write a scene from each character’s perspective about the day before your story starts. What do your characters do when they’re at work? How do they treat their co-workers, and how are they treated back? Are they chronically late for work or compulsively early? Do they take two hour lunches on the clock or work through lunch? What do they do on Sunday mornings? Go to church or sleep in? Wake in a Dumpster or head out for brunch with high school buddies? These details you unearth are telling and prophetic. If they never make the final cut of your novel, they still inform it and help you to know your characters. When I’m done with the outlines, I will write these character portraits.

The second outline is for American Standard. Why an outline for a novel that I’ve already got in first draft form? Based on feedback from the workshop and from other readers, I’ve decided to scrap the characters as they currently stand, and approach them and the story from another angle. The main character is now younger, he’s not going through what could be considered a mid-life crisis. He’s no longer in love with his cousin (oy!), and he also makes more boneheaded moves which, this time around, he has to find his way out of for redemption’s sake, and hopefully the love of a good woman. This version has more of an arc. The main character starts off a decent guy, gets sucked down into a quagmire of moral ambiguity and questionable behavior. Hopefully by the end he’s made some strong decisions and comes around to fix what he done broke. Figure out what he really wants in life. It sounds mundane, but would it help if I mentioned that he’s a pornographer? Moral grey areas and ambiguity abound. See, rise and fall and rise. Hopefully.

Two outlines. Two nascent novels. Let the games begin.

Rudderless

Since putting away the first draft of my novel, I’ve been working on revising short stories. Not a bad way to pass the time. But whenever I sit to write it takes a few moments to remember what I worked on the day before. The narrative thread that tied together my novel is on a hiatus. So, I have to create temporary narrative threads for each story I write.

It doesn’t always work. I miss living with the same characters for months at a time. The characters from my stories live in bursts, sometimes brilliant, but often foggy and unformed. Especially if I’m still figuring out what the story’s about and what the characters are supposed to do. But characters from a novel stay with me. I know what they eat, what they do on an average Wednesday, what music they listened to in college, whether they know how to spell communiqué.

My novel characters hibernate as I consider them during their long winter, until I'm ready to sit back down and exhume them for another go-round. And when I do, they'll come alive and show me what their favorite colors are and how they quit their first job by skywriting a note to their boss and why they broke up with their pregnant girlfriend on Valentine's day then asked her out the day after.

Until then, I’m rudderless; dealing with cranky protagonists who bother me to understand why I brought them into my world, confused about what to do next. They’re not my first loves, but they’ll have to do for a while.

Friday my iPod Slept Late

Black Lipstick—Grandma Airplane
Weezer—Troublemaker
The Cure—Catch (live bootleg)
Echo and the Bunnymen—It’s all over now, Baby Blue (Live)
Orange Juice—Poor Old Soul (Part One)
Bill Nelson—Another Day, Another Ray of Hope
Pavement—Summer Babe (Winter Version)
The Jesus and Mary Chain—Hole
The Field Mice—The Last Letter
Gnarls Barkley—Last Time
Underworld—Boy Boy Boy
Thievery Corporation—Lebanese Blonde
Figurine—New Mate
New Order—The Him
Belle & Sebastian—I Don’t Love Anyone

First Draft Theater

First draft theater presents the first in a series of posts featuring a page or two of a first draft. The following is the first draft of what could be the beginning of a story, novel, or nothing depending on whether I continue with this idea. Give it a read. Let me know what you think. Is it worth continuing? What do you think's going to happen next?

And now...First Draft Theater

Reggie grabbed the snow shovel and pushed the handle into a mound of slushy, heavy snow. It was his job, one of many at the restaurant, to keep the front entrance clear. It was a slow night. Four parties since six. He wanted to make the task last.
He walked along the front of the building, out of the lights, scrapping the snow before him. He had smoked a joint a half hour ago. It was wrapping loosely around his limbs, dislocating his arms and legs. Giving him that dulling sensation that calmed him, softened his mind, allowed his thoughts to run along wire dangling in darkness between points of light.
The yellow t-shirt he wore said Fuller Liquors, faded. From a few years ago when his sister rang up customers and bagged there. Then she married her high school boyfriend and moved to Mashpee. Might as well have moved to Uranus for all the times he saw her anymore. If Mashpee was Uranus, Orleans was—whatever planet was beyond Uranus. Was there a planet farther out? Or was it further?
The reason he smoked tonight was Amber’s phone call. Jonathan had contacted her and wanted to meet with both of them tonight. Jonathan would pick up Amber at their apartment and then drive over and pick him up after his shift ended. When you called Jonathan, you left a voicemail that was never returned. When Jonathan called you, that meant something was starting up.
Reggie was halfway to the road before he realized he had left the restaurant’s portico behind him. He was shoveling the parking lot and he was almost positive his boss, Mr. Daniels, had told him not to do this. Plus he was getting wet. Wet snow. Snow always turned to rain on the Cape. And he was cold, freezing. When he was in high school—
“Reggie.” It was Mr. Daniels standing at the back door. “Reggie. Over here. Forget about the parking lot. Mike plows that. Just do back here.”
Reggie watched Mr. Daniels lift his arm. Like a zombie. The walking dead. Mr. Daniels—
“Reggie! Come over here.”
He trotted to the back door. Frozen snow caked the bottoms of his pant legs, clinging like loose teeth.
“Hi,” Reggie thought to say.
“Just make a path to the dumpster,” Mr. Daniels said, pointing across snow-covered pavement to the green dumpster back along the fence. In the summer that thing smelled horrible. One July night maggots formed all over and inside it. In minutes. Reggie couldn’t stop watching those things wriggle. An hour later they were gone. The mass of them living and dying in unison.
“And put a jacket on, it’s freezing out here. Did you hear me?”
“Sure. To the Dumpster.” Reggie had trouble paying attention sometimes.

First Post -- Here we go

Just finished another great writing class with Ms. X, an instructor at Grub Street in Boston. It’s the fourth ‘session’ I’ve taken with her and her revolving stable of novelists, all of whom are at a similar level with their writing. Well, I only hope I’m at their level. Regardless, we are all working on novels in various stages of done-ness.

For the first three sessions, I workshopped my second novel, A Little Disappeared. It was 80%-85% finished when I bucked up and showed it to Ms. X and her class. (Now it's finished and I'm trying to land an agent.)

For the latest session, I brought in the first 120 pages of a new novel I started earlier this year. This new thing, well, it’s still damp. It was harrowing to show it to a roomful of great writers, baring myself writing-wise, letting it all flap in those chilly, atmospheric Grub Street hallways. After I finally let go my ego and squelched my stage fright and fear of rejection, the class critiqued it.

They gave it a decent scrubbing; unfolding it for structure problems, refolding to show character development flaws, mulling over the controversial subject matter, then spinning out idea after idea for the second draft. For a story that I was struggling to find (its way and footing long lost) it was an invaluable undertaking.

Now, post-class, I’m still writing the first draft. A test really, because most of this initial draft will be pruned or pulled up, then replanted and cultivated. But my characters, the current version of them, want to keep breathing, moving, fucking up, changing, and etc.'ing for a little longer.

After I'm done, do I put it in a drawer and let it smolder for a few months, douse it, read over the class’s comments, and start the next draft? Do I let it simmer longer and start a new novel? Do I focus on short stories and novel excerpts in an attempt to get short pieces published and my name out there more?

Stick around. I'll let you know how it all goes down.


Define the Phrase

Hog Grubber.

I’ll give the answer in my next post.

(From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.)


Current Listening

Bethany Curve, Biff Bang Pow, Big Black, Big Country (one after the next in my iTunes).