The Horror! The Horror!: Write Your Fears Away

June 7, 2012 By 4 Comments

I am not a horror fan. Even in the absence of gore and blood (which will cause nausea in no time), I have never been able to deal with the horror genre. In a discussion in a workshop last month, I finally realized why I don’t like horror – and it isn’t because I’m scared.

As long-time readers know, I have an anxiety disorder. Aha! you say. So you are scared!

Not really. It’s not the fright that gets to me, it is the disturbing images/thoughts that horror deals in so deeply. Disturbing images stay with me far longer than with the average person—sometimes to the point of obsession. I can get trapped in a downward spiral of darkness that takes me to places I really shouldn’t go. It’s not healthy for me, and it’s very hard to break out once the spiral begins. Not only can it lead to disabling physical panic attacks, but it affects my mental state to the point where my daily activities are disrupted.

So that’s why I don’t read horror.

That said, I actually wrote a horror story last week.

Jonathan Maberry, head of our Advanced Novel workshop, had our class brainstorming outside our usual genres in the last class. One of the things he asked was, “What scares you the most?”

My answer was, of course, something happening to my child.

And that opened the floodgates in my head.

Terrifying visions of things that could happen to my toddler are nothing new for me. I shove them away quite often. They pop unbidden into my head, and I must use my coping mechanisms to turn them off and keep them at bay. Even though I know most of them are extreme and unlikely to happen, the terror is there in my brain. So I have no need to go there intentionally.

Opening that box in my brain even a little bit, one scenario leapt fully-formed into my imagination. I tried to put it back in the box but it evaded me, growing stronger during the long ride home from class. By the time I pulled into my driveway, I was on the verge of an all-out panic attack.

Over the next few days, I wrestled with that scenario, but whenever I closed my eyes it would jump up and laugh at me. My brain could not let it go. So I did the only thing I could do.

I wrote the thing down.

In an hour and a half, I knocked out a 2,000 word rough draft. I poured that horrendous vision out of my head and onto the page, and sent it off to a friend of mine (who was so scared by it, I am surprised she is still speaking to me.)

And, finally, the feedback loop in my head stopped, and the images went away.

I’ll go back and polish it up, and maybe see if I can get it out to the public anywhere, but I can tell you right now any horror stories that comes out of my pen will be few and far between. I can’t live in that place in my head—not if I want to have a healthy life.

So, do you love horror or hate it?

Brainstorming: Inspiring odd connections

May 31, 2012 By 7 Comments

I have never been one for brainstorming—just sitting down and pouring out ideas and random thoughts and then looking back to see what interesting connections my brain made. I don’t know why I haven’t done more of this in my writing life. I guess it doesn’t feel natural to me. It was never part of my writing process.

Not to say I have not done unconscious brainstorming. All writers do, because our brains never stop chewing over the details of the story we are working on. Once, while working on a novel, I struggled to explain why a character was acting the way she was. Suddenly, I said, “Well, of course, it’s because she’s his daughter.” Of course, she hadn’t been his daughter until that very second—or had she? Had my brain always known that, and it had only just then come to the surface? Looking back at the WIP, certainly all the hints and details were there to support her “new” parentage.

So I do appreciate the value of brainstorming, even though it is not something I find I can do well on my own. While I do not brainstorm alone, I love to brainstorm in a group or with another writer. My own ideas usually come at a slower pace, but when I have someone else to toss ideas at me willy-nilly my mind leaps to connect all the ideas. New ideas spring to my brain much faster than when I try to brainstorm on my own, and the conflation of two seemingly unconnectable ideas is a challenge I love to conquer.

The way the brain works is absolutely amazing. It fits seemingly random ideas and data together and forms flashes of brilliance, ideas that never seemed possible. I am currently reading Isaac Asimov’s short story Sucker Bait, where they have people called Mnemonics who are trained from childhood to remember everything, to gather any and all data they come across, with the idea that the human brain can and will make connections between data when computers will not–because no sane person would ever ask the computer to pair those particular pieces of data. This is what brainstorming does.

We did a brainstorming exercise in Jonathan Maberry’s Advanced Novel class last week, and my brain hurt afterward. Stretching my mind, breaking out of my comfort zones by thinking up ideas for genres I don’t usually write, and integrating numerous ideas from my fellow workshoppers exhilarated and exhausted me.

Of course, turning on the creativity spigot in class inevitably means my brain will be in overdrive my whole way home. I can’t just turn it off, and my 50-minute drive lends itself to a lot of thinking. This is why I continue to take this Advanced Novel class after all these years – the people stir my creativity, push me to go farther, higher, to be better than I was when I walked in the door.

It’s useful to know that brainstorming works for me in a collaborative setting. I get a thrill, a physical high, from bandying ideas about with people. It can be a tool I use when I need to break writer’s block.

And even better, fellow Author Chronicler Nancy Keim Comley and I are toying with the idea of writing a novel based on one of the ideas we brainstormed in class. We’re at the very start of the idea, and it may come to nothing, or may need to wait until other projects we’re working on are completed, but the energy generated by the brainstorming session will carry me through many hours of work—whether collaborative or alone.

Some people swear by brainstorming – how does it fit into your writing process?

Detours on the Writing Road

May 24, 2012 By 4 Comments

I have to admit that for a creative type, I am pretty type-A about some things. In many ways I am highly routinized, and in some ways I’m just a touch obsessive-compulsive. I like to set goals and reach them in an orderly fashion. I like things to progress steadily, to be able to count on a schedule, to be able to move forward at a predictable pace.

Then I had a baby, and all that went out the window.

Now my toddler is two, and I have learned a lot about rolling with the flow in the past 2+ years. My daughter does not nap predictably. She usually sleeps well at night, but some nights (like last night) she was up from 3-5 AM. I don’t know why. So my “free time” and my state of exhaustion varies quite a bit.

Therefore, I can’t count on moving forward steadily on my writing. This has been an incredibly hard thing for me to deal with. Before my daughter, I could churn out words like nobody’s business. Now I struggle to get a few hundred a day. It is frustrating, and at times I am impatient and irritated as my type-A facet conflicts with my Mommy facet.

But on the whole, I have learned to be a little more laid back. Being more flexible does not mean I am not as driven as I’ve always been—it just means I’ve realized the drive will be longer than I planned. I also have learned to be more forgiving of myself when I don’t hit my goals. Partly because I have realized I often set unrealistic goals, and partly because sometimes there are simply things out of my control.

For instance, two weeks ago my daughter had vomitus eruptus. For a week. Then I got it. For a week. I did manage to get some work done, but I was nowhere near as productive as I normally am. Things like this happen when you’ve got a kid. You can’t plan for it, and you can only get through it as best you can. So instead of beating myself up for not getting as much done as I had hoped in the past two weeks, I can choose to look at how much I DID accomplish and be proud of that. (Thanks to writer pal Jerry Waxler for teaching me the value of perspective!)

Perhaps at this time in my writing career, a weekly goal would be more productive than a daily goal. With toddlers, the doctors say not to worry about how much they eat in a single day—because that can vary widely—but to look at the weekly consumption to make sure they are eating enough. So with my writing. My daily writing can vary widely in productivity, so making a weekly goal may suit me better. Certainly looking back over an entire week will leave me feeling more positive about my progress than some single days do!

As I try to plan how to reach my goals from my current position, I do so knowing that there will be detours along the way. I hope to face such detours with calm and with an open mind.

After all, the same thing that makes a detour scary is the thing that makes it exciting—you never know where you will end up or what you will find along the way.

Old Fashioned: Writing with Pen & Paper

May 17, 2012 By 15 Comments

I used to write everything longhand. I still have copybooks filled with my young scribbling. But once I got to grad school, I found that between school and working full time, I had no time for the luxury of writing longhand and then typing it in. So I’ve switched to writing everything on the computer.

This year, I attended some writing sessions with Kathryn Craft. These sessions involved writing exercises. Because I don’t like lugging my laptop around, I elected to do this writing on paper. The funny thing was, I loved the experience of returning to paper.

There is something visceral in writing with pen and paper. I feel the words more intensely through my fingers. The smoothness of the paper is soothing. The pen pressing into the pulp lends the words a tangibility that the computer screen lacks. A permanence exists, too—no computer glitch will randomly erase your work!

The visual aspect of writing creates creative energy, too. Not only do the letters themselves have shapes that I am creating, I can deviate from the linear plane by writing in the margins, adding arrows, or writing sideways. This is akin to using another creative outlet such as painting or music to release writing creativity. I find that simple starting to write, even if I don’t have a clear idea where I’m headed, acts like doodling for me—and sometimes I will doodle as well, while I’m thinking.

I have found that writing on paper meshes better with the speed of my brain while doing writing exercises. Certainly, when in the writing flow state, typing is faster than writing. But when I am trying to come up with an idea, trying to create a scene or character on the spot, writing on paper is a good speed. I don’t get frustrated because my writing outpaces my ideas and leaves me staring at a blinking cursor on a blank line.

To my great surprise, I found the writing from these sessions to have a different tone from my usual writing. In many cases it was infused with a humor I struggle to find in my writing. I often felt that the writing was more powerful, even in its unedited state, than what I normally wrote. Perhaps this is a fallacy, perhaps it was because the writing was meant to be experimental and I felt less constrained, or perhaps there was a raw emotional connection facilitated by the physical connection of pen and brain.

I hope I can import this new depth, feel, and humor into my computer writing, but if I cannot, I know I can revert to the pen and paper. And whenever I am stuck, or struggling with a particular scene, I will try this simple change of medium and see what sparks in me.

Writing on pen and paper may seem old-fashioned, and certainly is no longer the norm, but it still has power and uses that should not be overlooked in our pixel-dominated lives. I look forward to incorporating it into my writing process and letting the ink flow!

Using the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’m currently about 2 revisions into one of my middle grade books. It’s about this time, when I know my characters and have worked out the kinks in my plot, that I turn to Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. This is only the second time I have used it, and I am having a heck of a lot of fun with it!

The workbook forces me to look at my novel from different perspectives. It can help pinpoint problems I didn’t know you had, and point out my strengths as well. I thought I knew my characters well? Think again. Thought my plot was as strong as could be? Think again. Using the workbook is humbling, frustrating—and exciting!

It’s humbling because I find out how much about my novel I didn’t know. Because it shows me how much I have to learn about the craft of writing. I will admit that there are a few chapters where I simply do not know how to do what he is asking. I understand what he wants—I can clearly see it in the examples he uses. But I have no idea how to find appropriate moments in my own work, and even if I could locate them, I wouldn’t know how to do what he suggests. But I will learn.

Mostly, I find using the book exciting! It stirs the creative pot and sets it boiling. I start seeing the book with different eyes, and my brain begins making all sorts of new connections. I know immediately that most of the new ideas bubbling up are better than what I have, will strengthen what I have, and will elevate the end product.

So where’s the frustrating, you ask? I end up with SO MANY new ideas! Volume of ideas is not bad, mind you. It is precisely these new ideas that make using the book so exciting. The problem comes when I look at all the new ideas and contemplate putting them into practice. It’s not the doing that I find daunting—it’s finding the TIME for doing this major revision.

Like many writers, Time is a four-letter word for me. When I look at the amount of revising I will need to do on this book, I don’t see how I’m going to get it all done before my toddler graduates high school. I despair sometimes that I will be the first 90-year-old debut middle grade author in history.

But then I gather myself. I remind myself that even though I have 6 pages of typed notes and a copybook with even more hand written, all I need to do is focus on one change at a time. Do one thing at a time and eventually I will see the end of the road. I have done it before, I can do it now.

By cutting that daunting revision down to size, the despair lifts, and I am left with the excitement I started with. New ideas, new connections, new depth…

I can’t wait to dive in!

Do you use the Breakout Novel Workbook–or a similar book? Has it helped you?

Curtain Call: Storybook Musical Theatre

May 3, 2012 By 3 Comments

Everyone has spent at least part of their lives searching for a place to belong—figuring out where they “fit.” Writers especially seem to have struggles with this. Most writers I know have had periods of great loneliness or confusion trying to find their place in the world. To this day I often feel like the proverbial square peg in the round hole. Perhaps this is why most writers make good observers of human nature—we spend a lot of time watching other people.

But there was a time, as my college career drew to a close, where I was a part of something bigger than myself, and found a place to belong. That time was my time with Storybook Musical Theatre.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Storybook Musical Theatre, it is a professional Equity children’s musical theatre. At the time of its founding, it was the only one outside the Philadelphia city limits. They produce 1-hour children’s musicals adapted from fairy tales and other children’s classics. (If you have kids and are in the Philadelphia area, go see a show—they’re fun and fabulous!) But starting any theater from scratch is a huge gamble, and a children’s theater even more so.

Twenty years ago, in spite of all the risks, Patricia and Marc Goldberg broke their children’s theater away from the Cheltenham Center for the Arts and struck out on a grand adventure.

I was lucky enough to go with them, and be a small part of building a wonderful, innovative, and warm theater company.

For those of you who have never been part of a live theater company, it is difficult to explain the level of camaraderie that builds between members—especially when the same people carry over working from show to show. It does become like a family—a place where you can be bold, be confident, be yourself…and be safe.

The people of Storybook (cast and crew alike), were always friendly and open. Other theater companies may experience backstabbing and the like, but in my time with Storybook nothing ugly like that reared its head. I could be my awkward self and be accepted. They valued intelligence and hard work, which built my confidence enormously. We sweated together, laughed together, and created entire worlds together.

I had finally found a place where “fitting in” didn’t mean pretending to be something I wasn’t.

I eventually parted ways with Storybook, seeking more financial stability than the theater life could offer me. My path led through video production, administrative positions, writer, wife, mother. I do not regret the road I traveled.

Yet, when I attended Storybook’s 20 year anniversary, I could not help but want to jump back into the theater. The dinner and revue was held at the Cheltenham Center for the Arts, where Storybook had been born all those years ago.

Walking in those doors was like coming home. Normally, an affair like that would bring on a panic attack, but this time I was confident. I explored the backstage area, slipping through the stage door I had entered so often—the stage door that always had made me feel special, because I was a part of the show and those on the other side of the door were not.

I stood for a few moments hidden in the dusty black curtains of stage right. Breathing the familiar air. Wrapped in the comforting darkness.

Remembering.

Once upon a time, there was a place where I belonged…

Reading Your Work Cold

April 26, 2012 By 3 Comments

The Philadelphia Writer’s Conference is coming up in June. I’ve already registered to go, and am in the process of gathering the submissions for the critiques and contests. What’s been interesting is my reaction to reading the excerpts I am preparing to send.

Before I get to that, let me dump a little backstory in here.

I have a toddler. She takes up most of my time. For a while I tried to cycle my writing projects, trying to work on all of them at once. But that just made me feel like I wasn’t accomplishing anything, because I never got to the end of anything. So I decided for the sake of my sanity to focus on one project at a time.

The project I have been working on is a middle grade dystopian steampunk mashup. It will come as no surprise that this is one of the works I am sending in to the conference. I have gathered notes from beta readers and crit partners, and reworked the first 2500 words thoroughly. Then I got more feedback from my crit partners and reworked it again. The opening is significantly better than it was, and I can’t wait to get to work on the rest of the book to bring it up to the same level.

The second excerpt I am sending in is a YA novel—I’m not sure if it would be called a fantasy or a paranormal for genre purposes. The girl’s got supernatural abilities (paranormal) but they come via her father, who is a Greek god (fantasy). So take your pick.

I haven’t worked on this story for many months, so I came to it with very fresh eyes. And I was pleasantly surprised—mostly because I had made changes to the story that I had forgotten I had made. The edits I had made definitely improved the story, and I found myself excited by it in a way I hadn’t been last time I worked on it.

We always hear the advice to put a work aside for a time and come back to it fresh. Usually, this advice is intended to allow you to see the errors and mistakes you’ve made. We rarely hear about the flip side of that coin: Coming to it fresh also allows you to see the strengths of what you have written.

My YA wasn’t perfect, by any means—my crit partners still had some suggestions. But it was so much stronger than what I had remembered having, that I found myself thinking, “This is good—almost like a professional wrote it.”

When I find myself thinking that, I know I’m on the right track.

So if you have the luxury of time, put your work aside before doing a final edit. And when you do come back to it fresh, don’t just focus on what’s wrong. Allow yourself to see and revel in what you’ve done well.

Enjoying those gems in your writing will energize you to bring your A-game to the final edit, and that passion will make your words shine.

The Fear of Writing Badly

April 19, 2012 By 11 Comments

I have heard many writers say that part of writer’s block may be the subconscious fear of writing poorly. Of turning out dreck. And this is also the reason some people never start writing in the first place—if it’s not going to come out perfectly the first time, it’s too much work.

I can honestly say I have never been plagued by this particular writing demon (which is rather shocking given the plethora of anxieties I DO have). My key to freedom is twofold:

1) I cannot help but write poorly.
2) Anything I write can be fixed.

Number one is important because nothing we write will ever be perfect. There are some days the writing flows, but then there are the days when every word is a struggle and what comes out is utter blech. It is unavoidable that you will write poorly sometimes. Worrying about it is rather like worrying that the sun might come up in the morning. It’s going to happen no matter what you do.

And that’s okay.

Did you hear me? It’s okay to write crap. We all do it. And why is it okay? Because of statement number two: Anything I write can be fixed.

I am learning and growing as a writer all the time, but there are still things I need to work on. There are still facets of the writing craft I don’t fully understand. And much of my poor writing comes from these gaps in my continuing education. I make mistakes I don’t know I’m making, or even mistakes I know I am making but do not know how to fix.

Sometimes I learn what I need to know and can fix the poor writing myself. More often I need crit partners or editors to point out to me just what went wrong with the writing. By the time I have finished taking all of the feedback from my readers, crit partners, and editors and put it into practice, a wonderful thing occurs: My poor writing improves! And the more I work—the more I learn—the more it improves!

So don’t let fear of writing poorly hold you back. Write. Write well, write poorly, but just write. Because once the words are on the page, even the worst writing can be fixed. But if the words stay in your head, you can’t improve them. You can’t learn from them. You can’t transcend them.

Don’t fear bad writing—embrace it as a necessary step toward excellence.

Bad writing is never a failure—unless you don’t learn from it.

Family Bible Bonanza, Part 2

April 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

I’m still completely jazzed by getting the Family Bible! It’s given me great info, and it’s just incredible to hold and touch something over 150 years old. Some of the pages inside (obviously torn from other Bibles) are even older – perhaps as much as 250 years old!

Just to give you some idea of the beauty and size of this behemoth of a Bible, here are a couple of pictures of it with a standard trade paperback book.














And the 1857 marriage certificate from the owners of the Bible, Mary Sellers Hobson Warren Leinau and Daniel Leinau, her second husband.

The death entry for my mysterious ancestor James William Warren, who we think came from Halifax, Nova Scotia, but cannot confirm it.

The oldest record in the book: the 1754 birth of Isaac Kite.

And a sad reminder of how fragile children’s lives were back then—one of several death records for children in the Bible.

This family treasure leaves me in awe. Now I just have to figure out where and how to store it safely!

 

Family Bible Bonanza

April 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Regular readers will know I am deep into genealogy. I love digging into the past to find the stories of my ancestors. This week, a tragedy led to a genealogical goldmine for me.

My uncle by marriage died suddenly last week. My parents went to my aunt’s house to help her start to sort things out and make her plans for the future. While there, my aunt told my mother, “I’ve been wanting to give this to Kerry for about 10 years. It’s the Warren Family Bible.”

Well, when I heard that, I was hyper-excited! Every genealogist reaches brick walls, and James W. Warren, born 1815, is one of mine. He married Mary Hobson, and he was killed in a train accident in 1852. Dying so young, there is not much information on him. His death certificate indicates he was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but I have been unable to locate him or his family there.

So a Warren Family Bible could be a huge breakthrough! HUGE is a good word – the Bible itself is a foot long, 9 ½ inches wide, and a whopping 3 ¾ inches in page depth! And it’s heavy! I swear it weighs more than my toddler.

Unfortunately, the gold-inlaid inscription on the front made it immediately clear that this was not the Warren Family Bible, but instead belonged to Mary Hobson Warren and her second husband, Daniel Leinau. So there was no breakthrough for James W. Warren.

However, there was a great deal of information on Mary Hobson’s family! I confirmed some research I had done, and got new information pushing the Hobson line back 2 more generations. It is often very hard to find information on the wives’ lines, so that is valuable and exciting data. The earliest date in the book was 1754—before the USA even existed. Fantastic!

I also have information on what happened to James Warren’s children, so I may be able to find more about their father through their census forms. You never know what little piece of data will open the floodgates!

A new mystery was raised, however. Barbara Boss, died April 19, 1836 at age 72, which means a birth date c. 1764. Who the heck is she, and why is she in my family Bible?

So although I did not get more information on my brick wall, I am immensely happy with the find. Just holding those pages from the book, seeing the handwriting change through the generations is evocative and connects me to the past in a concrete way that few other things can.

My ancestors’ stories, written in their own hands. What more can a writer ask for?

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