Tag Archives: Writing

What MY Skateboarding Days Can Teach YOU About Writing

I used to be one of those long-haired, baggy-pants skateboarding teens, and would spend hours everyday riding my skateboard.

Oh, I’m 34 now, the hair is mostly gone and my clothes are oddly and unflatteringly tight for the most part. I was a good skateboarder, one of those kids that rode by and did a trick lightning-quick and the board seemed almost magically attached to their feet. My skating earned me the respect of the boys my mother really wished I would not hang out with and for a while I was known as Joe Skate. It got to the point that I heard a rumor that I had gone pro and was soon moving to L.A..

I’m not telling you this to brag (well, not JUST to brag) but to make a point. Two points, actually, both of which apply to life in general and writing in particular. There is a third, rather personal one, but we’ll skip that for now.

1. The Thing You Use to Write is Irrelevant

feather-pen-featured

Seriously. Some people use Scrivener, others Word, some use a plain-old typewriter and some paint with their blood on used toilet paper. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is the quality of the writing. My first skateboard was one of those silly thin ones made of plastic that I used to sit on and ride down the driveway in front of my house. My second one was a ridiculously heavy one from the supermarket, cheap as fuck and about as useful as gluing marbles to a plank of wood. But I rode that one until it was splinters, and then I got my first real skateboard, a Ron Allen Life board. It was also really heavy and sort of hard to ride and by that time most of my friends had boards that were lighter and better.

But I was better than they were, even with their fancy boards. You want to know why? I didn’t care about the type of skateboard I was using, I just wanted to skate. They would fret about their boards not being quite the latest model or that they really wish they had that other slightly better model. I just wanted to skate. Riding a heavier board meant that I had to try just a little harder then they did.

By the time I got my next board (and now it was a fancy, top-of-the-line thing) I was skating like the guys in the magazines. The board never mattered, and focusing on the quality of the board just takes the focus away from the real issue: the skating itself.

And how does this relate to writing? When I started writing for real about four years ago, I did it on the computer I’m using now, a reject from work. Focus on the story, not on the gadget you are writing on. You don’t need to postpone writing while you save up for a better computer or that new software. Write on whatever you have now. Worrying about the things you use just gets in the way of the thing you want to use them for.

And you know what… it really doesn’t matter. Only your writing matters.

Hugh MacLeod makes this point far better then I just did, in his excellent post Pillar Management.

2. Practice Makes Perfect

skateboard-street-jumpQU

This. Man oh man did skateboarding teach me this life lesson. It’s one thing to hear it and sort-of realize that it makes sense. But to know it, to have lived it is another thing entirely. I rode every one of my skateboards into splinters. I don’t know how many pairs of shoes I ruined (they grate against the sandpaper on top of skateboard). I would skate in the rain and in the cold, windy fall we have here in Iceland.

I remember spending hours rehearsing tricks in the grass by myself. Hours and hours spent by myself improving in what was on the very edge of being an obsession. I subscribed to magazines, watched skateboarding videos (on VHS) in slow motion, admiring the pros with slack-jawed amazement. I would watch every single movie that had anything to do with skateboarding (Gleaming the Cube FTW) and played every skateboarding video game.

All that practice and obsessing resulted in one thing: I became good at it. And this is a certainty that I’ve carried with me ever since; if you practice at something, and I mean really practice, you’ll become good at it.

The Takeaway Lesson

  • You don’t need a new computer so you can finally get started on that novel, whatever you have now is more than fine. Just start, and by doing so you have won half the battle already.
  • Practice. Make the mistakes, scrape your knees and go through a few pairs of shoes. And then practice some more. Write poetry, write flash fiction, submit to magazines and get rejected and then rejected some more. Each time you will learn just a tiny bit more, get slightly better at what you are doing, and your stories will start getting accepted. And soon you’ll be looking back at the others, the ones who don’t practice as much, who wonder why their stuff is getting rejected.

Do it now.

About these ads

Prompted Writing | The Night That Stayed

Twitter is a place of miracles, wonder and, let’s be honest, a lot of shameless self-promotion (you know who you are).

However, I somehow managed to get myself followed by a whole bunch of really interesting people who I am able to communicate with about all sorts of stuff (ok, mostly writing and books) without anyone trying to sell the other person anything.

This evening, for example, I asked to be prompted for a story to write. Two very nice people responded.

Beth Wodzinski with a simple image:

the-red-baron-and-his-dog-e1351186139910

And Josh Hanagarne with the following:

So here goes. I’m writing this in a single go, with only the automatic spell-check to help.

The End of the World, Seen With a Child’s Innocence

The people had always been nice to him, the ones in the white coats all the way up to the ones with the special suits and the dark glasses. He’d never been far outside the base and the surrounding desert and he didn’t want to; home was right here.

His parents explained to him once what it was everyone was doing but the words were too big and didn’t fit. Puzzle pieces that didn’t belong together. So they stopped trying to explain and slowly they stopped worrying about him too much. Or caring. Jonathan walked around freely, and was allowed, or at least tolerated in most places around the bunker, even the deep secret ones under the ground. He liked riding the big elevator down into the metal rooms, and it was in one of them he met Peter.

Peter had a blue uniform with medals on it and he greeted Jonathan with a smile. The next time Jonathan saw him was up in one of the hangers. Jonathan was watching the planes take off, planes that carried serious men with black briefcases to and from the base. Peter came in alone in a small plane, small and shiny. He set it down without the wheels twisting up any smoke like the others did and then drove it quickly into the hanger. He open the domed glass of the cockpit and climbed down a ladder. He was dressed in a leather jacked with what seemed like fur around the collar, and he took off his aviator goggles and waved to Jonathan.

“Some day I’ll take you with me, show you how it’s done. Would you like that?”

“Why, yes sir, I would.”

“Tomorrow will be your first lesson then.”

Peter did as he promised. He explained what everything in the plane did, how the controls worked and for the first time in Jonathan’s sheltered life something clicked. Puzzle pieces that fit. He understood why a plane was lifted off the ground if it went fast enough, and why dipping to the side would make it turn.

Peter had a talk with his parents, who found it odd that he was spending so much time with Jonathan, and as Jonathan tip-toed close to listen he caught something he didn’t understand about his brother being “special too in that way. I mean your son no harm, and it is not completely unselfish of me to spend time with him like this. They put my brother away, you see, in an awful house and every time I visit he remembers me less. He is like Jonathan, a serious child trapped in a man’s body, a little older, but it’s the same. I tend to think of your Jonathan as what my brother might have been, had someone cared.”

His parents had a look about them that Jonathan had learned to respond to with a hug. But he was afraid that they were going to ban him from flying with Peter again so he went to the elevator and the guards knew enough that security clearance was not something to discuss with the boy and so they let him through.

He was on his way down, alone, when the lights flickered and Jonathan felt a deep concussion in the earth. The elevator slowed, the lights went off and a dim yellow light came on instead. The elevator stopped and the doors opened. People were running about and shouting to each other. Jonathan found himself a small nook in one of the rooms and fell asleep, even with all the noise.

The world had changed when he woke up. The corridors were full of debris, as if a small storm had gone through and thrown everything about. The corridors were long and metallic and still only lit with dim yellow bulbs.

“Hello?”

He pressed the button for elevator but it didn’t come so he went to the stairs. After walking up two flights he saw the first dead person he had ever seen in his life. It was a woman, sitting in a corner with her hands by her side and a large hole in her head. He stood and looked at her for a while but felt little about her death, either way. He didn’t know what he was supposed to feel so he carried on walking up the stairs.

It was dark outside, an odd starless darkness with lightning in the distance. The air smelled strange and most of the people were gone. He saw more dead people, but still wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel about them. He just hoped nobody was watching him, wondering why he didn’t feel one way or another. He wondered where his parents were, and if he would know how to feel if he saw them dead.

He went into their apartment and into his room and closed the door. He would wait for morning, and then surely someone would find him. But morning didn’t come. He slept again and then checked his watch but it must have broken when the lights went out because it said that it should be daytime now. He went out again and saw more dead people, and more lightning in the distance. His skin itched.

He walked to Peter’s plane, which stood in an open hanger, half-full of fuel and ready to go. He looked for Peter and found him but then just went back to the plane. He want back to Peter and took his jacket and his pilot’s hat and went back and sat in the plane. No one was walking and he didn’t hear anything but distant thunder so he turned the engine on, just to have something new to listen to.

He flew off into the daylight darkness, just like Peter had taught him to, though his flying was nowhere as smooth as Peter’s. He wondered if he would miss his parents. He flew towards the lightning, because everything else was darkness, but he turned away because he was sure the lightning would be bad for the plane. After three hours of flying and thinking about the concussion he heard in the elevator he saw that the fuel was running low so he landed the plane in a field of dry grass.

It must have been windy, because the grass was all bent low along the ground, pointing in a single direction. A dog came up to him, hesitant and slow, and sniffed at Jonathan’s hand. He scratched him under his chin and hoped that they would be friends, but the dog ran off.

Jonathan walked towards the lightning, and hoped someone would be there.

I Want To Live Here | Best Writing of the Week

I’m about to finish Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. It is a fantastic book that I put off reading for far too long.

the-night-circus-jacket-e1306491176869

While reading it on the bus this afternoon I came across a passage that described the room I want to spend all my days in. Fix yourself a cup of tea, or get a glass of red wine and put a stack of books on the table next to you, just to get in the right mood. I’ll wait.

Celia Bowen sits at a desk surrounded by piles of books. She ran out of space for her library some time ago, but instead of making the room larger she has opted to let the books become the room. Piles of them function as tables, others hang suspended from the ceiling, along with large golden cages holding several live white doves.

Another round cage, sitting on a table rather than hanging from above, contains an elaborate clock. It marks both time an astrological movement as it ticks steadily through the afternoon.

A large black raven  sleeps uncaged alongside the complete works of Shakespeare.

Mismatched candles in silver candelabras, burning in sets of three, surround the desk in the center of the room. Upon the desk itself there is a slowly cooling cup of tea, a scarf that has been partially unraveled into a ball of crimson yarn, a framed photograph of a deceased clockmaker, a solitary playing card long separated from its deck, and an open book filled with signs and symbols and signatures procured from other pieces of paper.

Celia sits with a notebook and pen, attempting to decipher the system the book is written in.

The book is magical, reminding me of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but somehow more approachable. Where Strange & Norrell was slow going for a while, The Night Circus is richly detailed. Highly recommended for fans of urban fantasy (that is, fantasy in a contemporary, real-world setting) and all readers with eclectic tastes.

Also, who do I know that can make that book-room for me?

Remember This as You Write

So, I’m trying to speed-write a YA novel, which will be my debut book. I pitched the idea to my publisher and he said “Go for it”. The thing is that I have to turn in the first draft on the 25th of April so they can apply for a grant that will help me greatly with turning the first draft into a real book.

So now I’m really trying to get the core in, and will add the bells and whistles later, the stuff that makes the book a book. And so I turn to my betters for writing advice.

Harlan Ellison

The following advice is from Harlan Ellison, in his excellent collection Harlan 101, Encountering Ellison

As a final note, let me hit once again at the core fact that no matter what it is you think you’re writing about, the best and most significant thing to write about, what you’re always writing about, is people.

Emphasis on my characters then, got it.

The Best Writing of the Week | Daniel Woodrell


There are ways to describe a setting, and the mood and atmosphere of that setting. Mortal writers, like myself, might describe a poor neighborhood in a small town with words like “derelict”, “broken windows”, “dimly lit” and so forth, probably describing only the way things looked.

But we have to go deeper than that, and here is an example from one of America’s better contemporary writers:

Daniel Woodrell’s description of the Frogtown district of the town of St. Bruno in his novel The Ones You Do (one of three books in The Bayou Trilogy) is so good it almost makes me want to give up writing. Almost. It describes the town, the characters in it and their state of mind.

It was by now a neighborhood of row-houses of brick or wood, shotgun apartments, small, weary stores, robust vice franchises, and abundant dirt alleys that made for excellent escapes from the scene of the crime. Small backyards were strung with clotheslines from which flapped the work clothes of the occasionally employed, a work force that generally punched the clock on various nearby stools where they drank at the bar, toked in the alley, and gambled upstairs with their cut of the take or this month’s disability check, and when that was lost, the last smoke ashes, and the bottles only glass, they posted themselves to the street with their empty pockets held open wide, faces turned to the sky, on a red-eyed alert for that much bally-hooed trickledown of wealth.

I will now take a moment to point out a few things. First off, the passage above is two sentences. Daniel Woodrell crams a whole chapter’s worth of description into just two sentences. Also note the amount of references to crimes in the passage; “shotgun”, “vice”, “escapes from the scene of the crime”, “gambled” “their cut of the take” and references to drinking and smoking; “drank at the bar”, “toked in the alley”, “the last smoke ashes”, “the bottles only glass”.

Read it again now, and tell me that is not the work of a genius.

Finally, because by now I know you want to, you can buy the book by clicking this image (trust me, you want this one):
The Bayou Trilogy

The Best Writing of The Week | Harlan Ellison

Neil Gaiman told me to read Harlan Ellison, and if Mr. Gaiman says something, I obey. (This is also why I read Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)

blue_eyes_01

I come relatively late to Harlan Ellison but am not sorry for it; I’m glad there’s something this good out there still left for me to read for the first time.

I recently bought an Ellison short story collection called Harlan 101, Encountering Ellison. It has 22 short stories and seven essays on the art of writing, written in a way that makes you feel like Ellison is sitting on your couch, talking to you. The book is good, and totally worth the hefty price tag ($39.99 softcover). And I had to add international shipping to that.

This week’s finest writing is a description of a character from one of the stories, Pretty Maggie Moneyeys, where Ellison describes what many, lesser, writers would simply say was a “beautiful woman”. Behold a master at work:

Long legs, trim and coltish; hips a trifle large, the kind that promote that specific thought in men, about getting their hands around them; belly flat, isometrics; waist cut to the bone, a waist that works in any style from dirndl to disco slacks; no breasts – all nipple, but no breast, like an expensive whore (the way O’Hara pinned it) – and no padding…forget the cans, baby, there’s other, more important action; smooth, Michelangelo-sculpted neck, a pillar, proud; and all that face.
Outthrust chin, perhaps a tot too much belligerence, but if you’d walloped as many gropers, you too, sweetheart; narrow mouth, petulant lower lip, nice to chew on, a lower lip as though filled with honey, bursting, ready for things to happen; a nose that threw the right sort of shadow, flaring nostrils, the acceptable words – aquiline, patrician, classic, allathat; cheekbones as stark and promontory as a spit of land after ten years of open ocean; cheekbones holding darkness like narrow shadows, sooty beneath the taut-fleshed bone-structure; amazing cheekbones, the whole face, really; an ancient kingdom’s uptilted eyes, the touch of the Cherokee, eyes that looked out at you, as you looked in at them, like someone peering out of the keyhole as you peered in; actually, dirty eyes, they said you can get it.Harlan Ellison

I really very much recommend Harlan Ellison. Start with Deathbird Stories.

Of Writerly Doubts

Self-doubt is the lead weighing down the writer’s running shoes.

And the thing is, every writer has moments of self-doubt, even the great ones, the ones that have made it into the mainstream, the ones that sell millions and have tv shows made after their books.

20130313-063330.jpg

Here is a quote from George R. R. Martin, from early in his career:

Neither story sold its first time out. Or its second. Or its third. My other ‘summer stories’ were getting bounced around as well, but it was the rejections for ‘Mistfall’ and ‘Loneliness’ that hurt the most. These were strong stories, I was convinced, the best work I was capable of. If the editors did not want them, maybe I did not understand what makes a good story after all… or maybe my best work was just not good enough. It was a dark day each time one of these two came straggling home, and a dark night of doubt the followed.

As I write this I’m waiting to hear from a magazine regarding one of my stories, after having it rejected by two big markets. And I think exactly the same thing Martin thought, way back when he was starting out. Perhaps I needn’t worry.

It helps me to know that other writers have self-doubt. I remember reading Neil Gaiman say that when he was starting out he expected someone to come knocking on his door to tell him to quit writing and get a proper job (I’m glad he didn’t).

So… self doubt. Do you have it and how do you deal with it?

The Best Writing of the Week | Toni Morrison

I’m reading one of those books that I kept hearing about, again and again, but never really wanted to read. Then I bought and read the very excellent Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. He puts the book in question in his “Literature Masterclass”, with three other works of staggering genius: Great Expectations, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ulysses. The book I am reading, and where we find this week’s best writing, is Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

In this passage, Morrison describes the main character, Milkman, falling out of love and out of lust.Song of Solomon Cover

Now, after more than a dozen years, he was getting tired of her. Her eccentricities were no longer provocative and the stupefying ease with which he had gotten and stayed between her legs had changed from the great good fortune he’d considered it, to annoyance at her refusal to make him hustle for it, work for it, do something difficult for it. He didn’t even have to pay for it. It was so free, so abundant, it had lost its fervor. There was no excitement, no galloping of blood in his neck or his heart at the thought of her.

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make?

Great writing, pure and simple.

The Next Big Thing | My Work in (little) Progress

Every now and then I seethe with envy as I see bloggers tagged and awarded by other bloggers, challenged to take part in a chain-blogging what-have-you. I thought of them as blackballing bastards that didn’t give me the time of day (I may embellish somewhat).

Until recently, that is. 

NextBig

It is with great pleasure that I announce that I have been tagged by David Jón Fuller in what is called The Next Big Thing,  in which I am to tell you about my current novel-in-progress, in a friendly question-answer format.

What is your working title of your book?

Sand & Glass.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I was sitting in a car driving past a wall somewhere and all of a sudden I had an image in my head of two girls in a hot air balloon flying over a large wall to see what was on the other side. The girls and the wall made it into the story but the hot air balloon has been abandoned.

What genre does your book fall under?

It is a post-apocalyptic fantasy. I’m hoping to impart enough “style” into it for it to be elevated to the status of “literary fantasy”.  There are no dragons in it, nor wizards in odd hats but there are monsters a plenty and a girl that discovers a magical ability involving sand, which comes in handy as she lives in a desert. There is also some sword fighting. There are portions that happen just before the world of the story is torn apart that would fall under more classic fantasy.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

It is early days yet to be thinking along those lines. Lead is a young woman who must appear fragile but pack a kick. I’m thinking maybe Kate Mara, who is both those things in addition to being very pretty. There is a strong male character as well that I think Jake Gyllenhal would pull off well.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

In the last village of humans in the world, built against a giant wall in the desert from which water flows, a young girl discovers her will to survive as society falls apart.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I will make every attempt to get an agent and a publisher. I have no illusions of becoming the next E. L. James.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I am still working on the first draft, and it has taken me about half a year so far of intermittent writing. I am learning a great deal about motivation and effort along the way, as well as the need to outline outline outline.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Dune comes to mind, mostly because of the setting but also for the mix of styles (Dune is half sci-fi, half fantasy), and also because I think it is very well written.  Very little else comes to mind, perhaps The Handmaid’s Tale for the back-and-forth timeline way of telling the story. Just to be clear, I am NOT comparing my current work-in-progress to the brilliance of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m merely saying there are some similarities in form.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The writing style of Michael Ondaatje, and also the hundreds of crap books published every year. I can do better.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The world ended, and all that is left is a little village of humans trying to squeeze life from the desert. The village lies against the side of a giant wall, from which water flows out of a pipe. But what’s on the other side of the wall?
I was tagged by David Jón Fuller, who is writing a very interesting 80′s glam-rock werewolf book.

I have however been busy lately and haven’t given myself time to find people to tag next, but am doing so here. Rachel Lynn Brody, Barry Napier, Colin F Barnes, K T Davies and …. Stephen King (’cause why the fuck not?)

The First Sentence of Every Novel Should Be…

I’ve said it before: Michael Ondaatje is one of the great writers of our time. However, his novels go all over the place and are definitely not for everyone. (If you want to know more about reading Ondaatje, click here)

I am currently reading a book of his called In The Skin of a Lion.

It is there I came upon the following sentence:

The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”

I checked; none of his novels start like that, but those words should be written as a warning at the start of every Ondaatje book.