Gwen Florio | Blog

Really? Another tortured writer? (In which I pick a bone with ‘Treme’)

July 8, 2013 1 Comment

I know, I know. It’s heresy to event hint at flaws in David Simon’s work. Because, he is The Greatest Television Writer of all time and, I’d argue, one of the best writers, period. Love his characters and the dilemmas they face. Happily watch his shows over and over again.

But I’ve finally gotten around to Treme and while it’s just as brilliant as everything else he does, one aspect of the first season makes me just the tiniest bit queasy. (This is probably a good place to acknowledge the show’s need to underscore the lasting effects of Hurricane Katrina.) Still. This particular plotline features John Goodman as a Tulane English professor and novelist, and Melissa Leo as his wife, who pushes him to finish his novel as a way of reclaiming a career derailed by storm.

Pause for hysterical laughter.

More to the point, Goodman spends an inordinate amount of time staring at the blank computer screen (so far, so par for the course), hitting the delete key after he does write something (I’m still with him), typing gobbledygook to look like he’s busy (Uh-oh. Verging into Jack Nicholson/ The Shining territory now) and generally falling apart from the Agony of It All. [Read more…]

‘Resolve’ Author J.J. Hensley on Why Tiny Pink Shoes and Writing Do Not Mix

July 2, 2013 Leave a Comment

Today, with the Missoula Marathon fewer than two weeks away, it seems appropriate to run this guest post from J.J. Hensley, whose debut novel Resolve takes place during the Pittsburgh Marathon (which he ran). Hensley’s topic really resonates with me as it comes during a recent spate of family visits – wonderful, but challenging in terms of writing. His post is a good reminder about priorities:

Why Tiny Pink Shoes and Writing Do Not Mix

Three months. Nobody ever believes me, but it only took me three months to complete the first draft of my novel, Resolve. If it sounds like bragging, I certainly don’t mean it that way. If anything, it’s a self-criticism of my lack of a writing process and how I tended to selfishly sit at the computer, block out the rest of the world, and type furiously as thoughts of plotlines and characters in a fictional world swirled in my head. Most of the concepts for the book were generated in my mind as I enjoyed my hobby of distance running or as I quietly sat in the car and cruised down Pennsylvania roadways commuting to and from my “real” job. Those moments were my “me” time when very little came between me and my mental writing. Words simply sped along unimpeded down various routes in my brain and came together to create a coherent story.

You may have noticed I’m using the past tense when referring how I went about things. It was a different time. It was simple. It was serene. It was madly productive. Now, all of that has been crushed like a bug… by tiny pink shoes.

[Read more…]

Dispatch from proofing hell: Hard copy vs. computer screen

June 27, 2013 1 Comment

Actually, I haven’t even gotten to the delicious point of proofing. That would mean Novel No. 2 is done but for the literal dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s. It has, however, gone through another draft, which means it’s time to print it out and take a good hard look at what’s wrong.

Halfway through that look, a lot is wrong! I make changes on a hard copy with a red pen, and it looks as though someone has committed murder on my manuscript. Although, to be more accurate, I’d have to say it looks as though someone is performing lifesaving surgery, because that’s what rewriting is.

All of which speaks to the fact that a hard copy is an invaluable tool. You catch so much more on the printed page than on a computer screen. And – this is an inviolable rule for me – you catch still more when reading it aloud. That’ll be one of the final steps, and I’m a long way from there. But it’s the best way I know to catch sentences that stumble and go clunk.

And, I found this good tip, from an old post on DailyWritingTips.com:

For proofreading (i.e. basic spell-checking in context), read backwards (i.e. from the bottom of the page upwards). Since the words come in an unfamiliar and unnatural order, you are more likely to find mistakes than if you read forwards and read what you expect to see, instead of what’s already there.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it makes eminent good sense.

Quitting the day job, two weeks in

June 21, 2013 Leave a Comment

“Don’t quit your day job” has to be the advice most often given writers (right after “Sit down, shut up and write”), and for the best of reasons. But I’ve never been good at listening to reason.

Mean boss Today I began my third week of working for myself, which basically consists of a lot of bitching about my boss (crazy woman at right), who keeps telling me to sit down, shut up and write. Seriously, it’s been a much smoother transition than I expected.

Some observations: I start work a lot earlier these days. I used to roll into the Missoulian about 20 past 9, reasoning that since I worked late every day and never took a lunch break – well, you get the picture. Now, I start as early as 8 some days, and even when I start later, I can’t wait to be at my computer.

The days have been pretty easy to structure. I try to do at least four hours of writing a day, after which my brain goes to mush. I write first thing, before the mush stage. Afternoons are for editing and figuring out all of the *&%#! promotional stuff that’s part of writing these days.

I’d looked forward to being done by 5 each day, something that never happened at the newspaper. That’s been surprisingly hard to achieve, especially on days when Scott is traveling. I think I worked until 10 one night my first week. Overall, I’ve accomplished more in the last two weeks than in the last two months. Very gratifying.

Sleepy Nell The downside? No paycheck. Let’s just say those lovely afternoon lattes at Break Espresso are largely a thing of the past. And it’s probably time for me to get re-acquainted with the library in terms of feeding my book addiction. ’Nuff said.

Mostly, I’m just grateful to have the opportunity to do this. Big shout-out to my endlessly supportive partner, Scott. And to Nell, the office dog – apparently my writing puts her to sleep.

Running down your darlings and killing ’em dead

June 11, 2013 Leave a Comment

Usually, running feeds my writing, or so I tell myself. On long run days, I’ll frequently assign myself a “thinking” task; say, involving a particularly problematic chapter, reasoning that by the time the run is done, I’ll have it all worked out. Sometimes that works. Sometimes what happens is that I spend my time thinking about how much I want a cold beer.

T Governor's Cup Marathon Start his last week though, the tables were turned, with the writing feeding the running. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. On a whim – which should have been my first clue that things would go badly – I signed up for the Governor’s Cup Marathon, in Helena, Montana. It’s a beautiful course, with a long downhill start from Marysville, a lonely spot on the road about 22 miles outside town. Maybe the downhill was more than my knees could handle. All I know is that I was in trouble by Mile 8. I hobbled along to Mile 13.1, for the psychological satisfaction of at least salvaging a half-marathon distance, and called it quits. My sweetie worried that I’d feel like a failure. “I feel great!” I responded. And I did.

If I’d kept going, I’d have ended up with an injury. The whole thing reminded me of the way that leaving something in a book that doesn’t work, no matter how much you cherish that particular passage, hurts the end product. Cutting those parts is called “killing your darlings,” and some of my best writing is most bloodthirsty, wielding my delete key with the same relish with which Jack Nicholson swung his ax in “The Shining.” (That said, I generally save them in a file in case they might work better in some future piece.)

When I got back from Helena, I switched my registration for the Missoula Marathon over to the Half-Marathon. Lesson learned. Now, if I could just get more focused on my writing during those training runs.

Of writing retreats and strippers

June 6, 2013 Leave a Comment

Got your attention, didn’t I? And truly, the reference to strippers is germane. We’ll get to it in a minute. But first the retreat – in this case, the second annual Creel (an adaptation of Choteau Retreat for Excellence in Literature) gathering outside Choteau, Montana.

It’s the brainchild of journalists Bill Oram, who covers the Utah Jazz at the Salt Lake Tribune, and Alex Sakariassen of the Missoula Independent, and this year included returnees Aaron Falk (also a Trib sportswriter), University of Utah journalism professor Matthew LaPlante, Jamie Rogers (until recently of the Independent), Camilla Mortensen of the Eugene Weekly , and – through some wonderful stroke of luck – me.

The long weekend of critiquing, hiking, and critiquing some more amid some of the best scenery on the planet underscored yet again for me why it’s so important for writers to find community. For me, few things are more inspiring and energizing than talking about writing with other people who truly care about it. My son, Sean Breslin, detailed the philosophy far better than I in a recent blog post of his own:

“… You realize how lucky you are to be sitting at a table with other people who care enough to give up their evenings so they can help you improve your writing, and how much talent and sincerity go into every comment and every critique and piece submitted to the group.”

Then there’s the practical stuff. Here’s where we get to the strippers, more particularly, pasties, and not the Butte kind (edible, and pronounced pass-ties, anyway). I’m working on a novel set in the North Dakota oil patch. You can’t write about the patch without including strip bars – at least, I sure can’t. I’d included what I thought was a pretty clever detail, a young woman applying pasties shaped like yellow hard hats to her impossibly large and very fake breasts.

Someone posed the question: “Are strippers in North Dakota required to wear pasties?”

Ummm. In my very limited experience (for newspaper stories! Really!), all strippers wear pasties. A quick check of the smartphones by the Creel crew revealed just how limited that experience was. No pasties required, at least not in North Dakota.

It seems like a little detail. But my feeling is that getting a detail like that wrong can undermine an entire book. The minute a reader stops trusting you, you’re sunk. So out with the pasties. And thanks, Creel crew, for the addition of bare breasts to my new novel.

Of first, worst drafts

April 29, 2013 Leave a Comment

McPhee

The New Yorker April 29 issue, with John McPhee’s piece “The Writing Life: Drft No. 4” (subscription required) could not have arrived at a better time.

I’m only on Draft No. 2 of my sequel to Montana, still light years away from the growing certainty that accompanies a fourth draft – but light years ahead of the absolute torture that is the first.

“There are psychological differences from phase to phase,” McPhee writes, “and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting.”

“Dread” is a perfect word to apply to first drafts. “My animal sense of being hunted,” McPhee calls it, and that’s as good a description as any. I can almost picture slavering doubts eager to devour the plodding writer of any first draft. In fact, when working on a first draft, I can spend hours conjuring pictures of such doubts rather than setting words down on the blank page.

Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, her essential book on writing, talks about the necessity of “shitty first drafts.” Boy, do I ever have that part down cold.

Thing is, for years my standard answer to the standard job-interview question about writers I most admire was “John McPhee.” Now I find out that, even at the top of his game, he’s still a damn mess during his first drafts. Which means that my own process isn’t likely to get any easier – insult on top of the injury of knowing that I’ll never approach his level of mastery.

I could natter on like this for a while longer, but it’s just a cheap trick to put off getting back to work on that second draft. And I really need to finish that because the third will be easier and the fourth easier still. Onward.

(McPhee image: Macmillan)

A week when journalism trumped fiction

April 21, 2013 Leave a Comment

It’s been tough to concentrate on fiction this past week, what with the tragic and riveting events in Boston. I lost way too many hours of sleep following the Boston Globe and its reporters on Twitter, and could not be more grateful for their thoughtful and accurate work.

Lehane

Today on NPR’s Morning Edition, Dennis Lehane – who sets many of his novels such as “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone” in his home city of Boston – reflected on the week, in words as eloquent as any he’s written: “The thing that I’ll never forget from any of this … those civilians who in the first 10 seconds of the first explosion ran toward their fellow human beings, ran into absolute danger … just one of the finest examples of human grace under pressure I’ve ever seen. Then you extend that to all the members of law enforcement and the way they handled that. And then you extend that to the way the city didn’t rush to judgment, the city didn’t have any sort of reaction against Arab-Americans, which I think was an early fear. There was none of that.”

This morning, he said, “I wrote for the first time in six days.”

I don’t know that I believe that people, or by extension an entire city, ever completely heal from something like this. But resuming the motions of normalcy – that’s a great thing. Tomorrow I’ll join hundreds of people in Missoula on a benefit run for those in Boston. And then I’ll look away from Twitter and back to the blank screen and get some writing done.

Write. Write. Write. (Got that?) Now write some more.

March 31, 2013 Leave a Comment

Here’s a great piece, short and very much to the point, on writing from Neil Gaiman that my running buddy Joni posted on Facebook yesterday.

I love the way it harkens back to that phase all of us go through, where our writing sounds like a pale and shaky version of whatever we’re reading at the moment. I’m grateful to Gaiman for pointing out the value in that. No matter how timidly you’re writing, at least you’re doing it – and of course, the more you write, the more likely it is your own insistent voice will break through. I also love the link to the Hand in Hand project by Shared Worlds, with all manner of writing advice scrawled upon writers’ hands.

Gaiman’s – “Write. Finish things. Keep Writing” – is spot on, especially the part about finishing things. And ya gotta love Patrick Rothfuss, with the best writing advice of all time, “Sit your ass down and write.”

(Photo from SharedWorlds)

Seal good writing with a KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

February 4, 2013 Leave a Comment

Writing guru Ben Yagoda used the Wall Street Journal’s WordCraft column for a reminder on the most basic rule of writing – well, along with the one about applying seat of pants to seat of chair.

His column is headlined “In Writing, First Do No Harm.” Amen to that. Yagoda, who teaches at my alma mater, the University of Delaware, shows what he means by getting right to the point.

My students can’t really handle writing “well.” At this point in their writing lives, that goal is too ambitious. I propose a more modest aim: not writing badly.

Take this sentence, adapted from a restaurant review by a student who was roughly in the middle of the pack in terms of ability: “Walking in the front door of the cafe, the vestiges of domesticity are everywhere regardless of a recent renovation.”

In just 19 words, it provides an impressive selection of current widespread writing woes: dangling modifier (“vestiges” didn’t walk in the front door), poor word choice (“vestiges,” “domesticity,” “regardless”), excessive prepositions (four in all) and an underappreciated but pervasive ill, a weak sentence-subject (“vestiges”).

One of the great things about journalism is that it demands simple, declarative sentences. I’ve been a reporter for so long I can barely remember those early days, but I’m sure I resented that rule. Now, as I write fiction, I’m profoundly grateful for that lesson. Start with a bang. Get to the point. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

As Yagoda says:

Not writing badly isn’t a snap, but it can be done. Then you can start on the road to writing well.

Blog

Really? Another tortured writer? (In which I pick a bone with ‘Treme’)

‘Resolve’ Author J.J. Hensley on Why Tiny Pink Shoes and Writing Do Not Mix

Dispatch from proofing hell: Hard copy vs. computer screen

Quitting the day job, two weeks in

Running down your darlings and killing ’em dead

Of writing retreats and strippers

Of first, worst drafts

A week when journalism trumped fiction

Write. Write. Write. (Got that?) Now write some more.

Seal good writing with a KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

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