Tag Archives: Writing steps

Writing Process: Anything But “Friends”

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I had this bizarre idea – which did seem great at the time – of using an extended reference to Friends in my previous draft of Anori. The reasoning for this fails me now. Neither is it compelling nor does it develop character, and I don’t even like the show. Anyway, it’s all out now and here for you.

“I’ve figured you out, Dee.” Dennis, his t-shirt sleeve rolled up over his left bicep, revealing his phylogenetic tattoo. “You think you’re a Monica when you’re actually a Phoebe.”

“What are you talking about?” Dee asked.

“You think you’re a Monica, but you’re not. You’re a Phoebe.”

“Friends!” Saarva explained. “I love that show.”

“Seriously? That is what I’ve been reduced to?” Dee glowered. “A sitcom archetype?”

“You’re a Phoebe,” Dennis reiterated.

“What does that even mean?”

“Phoebe is a dreamer,” Saarva explained. “She sees the world from a different place. Seemingly not all there, but then surprisingly she is.”

“You watch Friends?” Dee demanded. “Why do you watch Friends?”

“Study the white American ways,” he replied.

“What?”

“I’m joking. I’m a Joey, right?”

“The point is,” Dennis continued, “is that you think you’re a Monica, controlling. You think that, but you’re not. You’re a Phoebe, head in the clouds.”

“I’m not a Phoebe!” She snapped back. “If anything, I’m a fucking Rachel.”

“Rachel,” Em laughed. “No.”

“You’re supposed to be Rachel then?”

“I’m nothing like her. I’m a Ross, the science nerd.”

“You can cross gender?” Dee asked.

“Why can’t you cross genders?” Saarva asked.

“I’ll get some wine,” Dee announced.

“That’s such a Phoebe thing to say,” Pax replied.

“They all drink wine,” Em replied. “They all say that.”

Words to Know: Askance, Askew, Asunder

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I am still in recovery mode from reading bad sci-fi and think on ‘as’-prefix words today, ‘as’ meaning ‘with regard to’. Askance (a look of suspicion), Askew (not in a level position) & Asunder (apart).

Looking askance, askew on the heath, the lamb bleated not to be torn asunder.

Writing Process: Editing “The Cx Trilogy”

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Two more scenes have been aborted – still legal in the writing world – from my speculative novel, Anori. My aim for both scenes was to give context, both historical and geographical, for the narrative, but seemed redundant in the end.

Scene One: Dee looked out at the Temple of Poseidon across the bay and thought about how it had been built, the exhaustive excavation of the site, mining the stone and carving of so many columns, dragging them through the brush, and imagined all the people who died to build it.

All of that labor and pain for that, something that was supposed to be permanent. That was the idea, that they just had to level out the ground and pile up stones to prove that their existence mattered. It was odd how important all of this once had been, this civilization with its government, rights and citizenship. And now all of that was gone, the temple now a tourist attraction atop a barren, thorny place.

Scene Two: The ship carried on to Karachi and then Sri Lanka, Dee cataloguing everything all of the shrews, jerboas, sun bears and dholes. The deliveries were at night, trucks waiting, the tailgates toward the edge of the docks, militiamen always there, black SUVs, cranes towering above in a metallic sky.

It was a routine, sleeping much of the day, watching the shore. The Repaks were the hardest, at the end of each month-long segment. What should have been satisfying, an accomplishment, was wrong, the animals taken back to Greenland. The feeling wouldn’t leave her, nor in Aden or Marka, not anywhere on her seven months at sea.

Id Bits to Something Else: Writing Process

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Half thoughts come to me as I waver between sleep and playing word games. I have been left alone. No one is coming to find me. I will stay like this.

These tiny bits percolate from my subconscious – or so I decide – unbaked nonsense. My foot twitches, a muscle in my left shoulder. I am still on the dock, the paint can hot in the sun. I am watching Maude and then a Japanese superhero show. The color goes in and out.

I am asleep for the briefest of moments and trying to remember. You’re jealous. You hate it. Phrases like that by an odd voice in my head. Who is that? It isn’t me. My thumb gets tired. I text badly like this. I am falling asleep again. I almost drop my phone and type that. I should do something. I really should.

What Replacing My Knees Taught Me About Writing

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I had both knees replaced two years ago. I walked three steps the day after surgery and down the hall the day after that. I went to physical therapy twice a week for the following year during which my flexion and power was repeatedly pushed.

A few days after surgery

I went on my annual Alzheimer’s Research fundraising hike one full year after surgery and was exhausted within an hour. My knees were not working like I expected. I was disappointed and angry, realizing that my knees were never going to be what I wanted them to be.

I continued with my workouts over the next year – stationary bike and exercise ball – and headed out, a little anxious, for another fundraising hike this past month. It was remarkable how much my knees had improved – flexion, power, stability, the works.

Pyramid Mountain, Adirondacks

Incremental change is impossible to detect from one day to the next. But then, seemingly out of the blue, mountains are climbed. It just took some pain and patience.

Ghost Fish Dreams: Writing Process

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I dive in, immediately nervous, thinking of doing a hard turn back, but I force myself to drift, my nose just out of the water, and look down at my feet dangling into the murk. It is thick with sediment, shafts of light trying to break through and failing in the deep, deep brown.

White smudged lines appear, a birch tree that fell into the water last year, a nightmare place made worse by the fish that drift past. I pull my feet up and clamber onto the raft, and I am on it and then I’m not. It sinks and then shoots out to the side, breaking the surface like a shark, leaving me to sink back into that awful abyss.

Writing Process: Lingering in the Moment

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As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t engage well with fiction that verges on therapy, where the voice is exhaustingly self-centered. Even if the work conveys immediacy or suggests raw documentation, this too often comes across as tedious, much like the bastardized fictions that are sprouting on TikTok and Insta, the faux confessional of the “look-at-me” generation.

I’m much more intrigued in the crafting of narrative, where the story moves forward and characters express. “You must remember to paint the walls”, my workshop leader reminded me. “Linger in the moment. Allow your reader to look around.”

Ausable Canyon, New York

I was actually stunned by her comments. How wasn’t I doing that? As my work tends toward the cinematic – dialogue and visuals – I thought I was already doing this. However my perspective does tend to race from start to finish. Linger? No, I didn’t really do that. Explore the interiority of Dee Sinclair. That was the thing. Picture and paint, so that I can draw the reader in to believe in going to another planet.

Writing as Therapy

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Writing is a personal thing, no doubt about that. Write who you are. Write what you know. The willingness to explore yourself is the essence of the process. Writers commune to learn – and steal – from others, to develop in their ability to communicate. Work is developed at writing workshops, feedback offered on anything from how the text could be restructured to phrasings reconsidered as well as lines and ideas that are to be praised. Does the piece work? That’s the thing. The craft of writing is what writers help each other with. That’s it.

But then, given that writing is personal, therapy tends to bleed into the scene, which is highly problematic given that writers are not therapists. The only qualification to attend a writing conference is the ability to write. Nothing else. Truth be known, writers tend toward the asshole end of the spectrum and are often the last people to look to for empathy. And yet when a writer shares intensely personal pieces, the conversation focuses almost exclusively on the psychological aspects, the therapy of it.

When I think about real trauma and terror – those who have been victimized by hate crimes or survived war and famine – the issue is not the prose but the process of getting better. They are just surviving. And writing is clearly an effective tool for that. But that is not the work to be shared in a workshop because there is nothing that anyone can do except offer a sympathetic nod and talk about bravery. And what good is that? (Speaking as a writer who tends to the asshole end of the spectrum.)

Writing Prompt: My Worst Decision

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I arrived at Kenyon College for a week-long writing conference. As I blogged yesterday, my thoughts going in were not very positive. When I arrived, it just got worse.

Kenyon College, Ohio

The writing prompt on our first day was “My worst decision…” It seemed easy to write about but the thought process led me down angsty alleys. It wasn’t so much that I was nervous about exposing my dumb-ass life, more so that it didn’t seem interesting writing to me. I wanted to do process writing for my book, Anori. That was the thing.

Icebergs at Ilulissat, Greenland

I was in a bad place when I listened to the readings by our workshop leaders that night. I thought about leaving the conference. I had nothing in me. It seemed utterly futile. I did write something eventually, but it was bad, a transcription of bland dialogue. I had someone read it who admitted that it was empty. My fears were confirmed. I would leave.

Piper at roadside in Pennsylvania

Then she made a suggestion for a framing device, which got me thinking. I thought about it as I watched a series of tornadoes blow that night and wrote in the morning, adding details like The Starfish Room, Fun Lovin’ Criminals and the bent peel coming a mini bottle of champagne bottle. It wasn’t that great, but it was something. And I wasn’t dead. Not yet.

Oozing egg at St. George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island