Tuesdays with Story

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ~ Toni Morrison

Tuesdays With Story Writers Mail, June 3, 2010
by Jen Wilcher

Tuesday Night at the Bookstore

Clayton read from Chapter twelve of his story, Fishing Derby. He tells us he’s not wild about the beginning, and Pat suggests cutting the first paragraph. Jerry notes that the chapter starts with a dependent clause, which is a weak beginning anyway. Pat got bored with the other boat. It was like a really slow car chase. Millie thought it was exciting. Jerry thinks if a character has severe PTSD, it has to be set up earlier, so we understand it. John thought the character was shot. All Miker did in this chapter was drive the boat, which might be a problem – readers might want to scream, “My hero isn’t doing anything!” John was confused, but he loved the action.

Kim read from her Chapter thirty-two of her recently renamed novel; City of Summer. Millie thought it had a lot of action. Pat wanted to know if someone from Summer would know what a snowflake was. Jerry didn’t think Hell would be in one character’s frame of reference. Clayton liked a word Kim created, could she come up with another for Hell? Elijah (new guy), notes that nowhere with ‘deepest pits’ is a nice place. Greg was wondering about what the main journey was.

Greg introduced us to his story Goodbye, Mars. Jen liked the general story overall, but didn’t get that the people he helps were human colonists. Pat wondered if the story should start later and the back-story could get sprinkled in. Jerry had a question about the viral toxin not being communicable. Pat thought the description of the gangster was a little, well, trite – could he make them good-lookin’? Cooties survive! Cathy was relieved to read the first page because she’s usually lost when she begins reading something sci-fi. John thought the computer could be used to account for the time change that concerned Amber.

Amber…is taking notes and can’t keep up with the wonderful comments. I read from chapter fourteen of my as yet untitled piece of work. How does Moira recognize the circle of stones? – Jerry. Do we see Bucktown coming? Merlin? The Once and Future King? Absentminded professor-ish – Clayton. Lighting in the distance at the game. Leave out some she saw, etc. – John. And other great comments I’m not fast enough to type.

Cathy shared her story, since changing the main character to the lifeguard who finds the dead body. Pat didn’t know why she was so upset after having seen a dead body. Maybe a line about, “never had a floater, huh?” John wasn’t sure why the lifeguard was so scared about being sued, because there didn’t seem to be reason for her anxiety. Overall, it felt accurate to Pat.

Jerry shared the tenth chapter from his novel. Greg thought the chapter by itself read like a short story. Jerry reminded us that the main character, Quinn, lost a hand and a leg in Iraq. John Wondered what the odds were of people taking pictures with their cell-phones at that exact moment in time. Most others found it likely. Pat hopes this is relevant to the story somewhere down the road in Quinn’s own murder trial. So does Jerry. So do we.

Who’s Up Next

June 8: Jack Frieburger (chapter, Path to Bray’s Head), Kim Simmons (chapters, City of Summer), Terry Hoffman (chapter, The Journal), Jen Wilcher (chapter), and Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon).

June 15: Kim Simmons (chapters 37-38, James Hyde), Jen Wilcher (chapter 1 rewrite, Memories Awakened), Judith McNeil (radio play, “South to Sunday”), Nicole Rosario (???), Millie Mader (chapter 18, Life on Hold), and Patrick Tomlinson (???).

June 29: Fifth Tuesday at Terry and Jan Hoffman’s home in Oregon.

July 6: Kim Simmons (chapters 39-40, James Hyde), Jerry Peterson (chapter 11, For Want of a Hand), and Greg Spry (novella/part 2, Goodbye, Mars), Pat Edwards (poems), Elijah Meeker (???), and Clayton Gill (chapter 13, Fishing Derby).

July 20: Kim Simmons (chapters 41-42, James Hyde), Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon)

Fifth Tuesday

Second-and-fourth group will host our next Fifth Tuesday social event on June 29. We will be at Terry and Jan Hoffman’s place in Oregon, the city south of Madison, not the state out in the Great Northwest.
Usual format for the evening. Potluck dinner followed by reading our writing challenge stories. So here’s what you need to do:

#1 . . . Block out June 29 on your calendar for Fifth Tuesday. Do that right now.

#2 . . . Email Shel Ellestad, and tell him you are coming and who you’re bringing as a guest. Yes, guests are welcome. We need to know you’re coming so we have a chair for you. Also decide what you are bringing for the food table. Shel wants to know that, too.

#3 . . . Write your challenge story now. The challenge: Write a commencement speech to a targeted audience – ghouls, kindergarteners, Divas, trolls, whatever group you wish. It’s your choice. 500 words or less.

#4 . . . Email your story to Jerry Peterson, no later than June 25. We have to have a little time to print the stories.

Special event

You read last week that TWS alumnae Leslie Huber will be in Madison on July 7 to promote her book, The Journey Takers. It’s a family history unlike any other you’ve ever read before . . . and it’s darn good. We old hands know because we critiqued a lot of the chapters when Leslie was a member of our group.

A couple handfuls of us will have dinner with Leslie before her 7 p.m. event at the Sequoyah branch library. We haven’t set the restaurant yet, but we’ve set the time – 5 p.m. Come and be with us . . . and to be sure we pull enough tables and chairs together, email Jerry Peterson, that you will be with us. Come even if you don’t know Leslie. She’s done what you want to do – write a book and get it published. We can learn from her.

Sophie Littlefield: Five Things My First Book Taught Me (From BookTrib.com)
I’m not your average author. It took me longer than average to get published (16 years). I received more rejections than average before landing an agent (over 200), and wrote more books before one was accepted for publication (9).
All this striving had an upside – it taught me a great deal about the publishing process. Now, with my second book coming out in five days, I’m looking back over my first year as a published author and realizing how much I’ve learned since then.
Here are some of the biggest revelations:

1. It’s different when it’s real.
By the time a novel comes out, the author has read it about a thousand times. The only person who could be anywhere near as sick of it is the editor. After two rounds of copy edits and galleys, I never wanted to see my words again as long as I lived.
Then the book arrived one sunny summer day. I ripped the package open, practically hyperventilating. My book. I caressed it. I smelled it. I kissed it. I opened it with shaking hands.
Right up to that moment, I think I half expected everyone to change their minds – but there they were – my words, in actual ink on a for-real page. Suddenly those were the most beautiful words written by any author since the dawn of time.

2. You can’t please everyone.
In my book’s early days, I was blessed with many positive reviews, and I got a little complacent. Don’t get me wrong – I doubt that glowing reviews ever get old – but I allowed myself to start believing I’d dodged the haters.
Not so! One day I popped over to a book club web site and was gobsmacked by a handful of 0- and 1-star reviews. “This book is terrible,” one read, “and the writing just makes it worse.”
I was flattened, but only briefly, because sixteen years of rejections tend to give a person a tough skin. The bigger lesson was this: writing from the heart leads to provocative fiction, and provocative fiction – well, it provokes. And that’s not a bad thing.

3. Marketing decisions are not personal.
Last year saw several high-profile dustups between publishers and authors, publishers and retailers, authors and retailers, authors and reviewers. As our industry rolled with the punches (the economy, reader trends, and new formats chief among them), finger pointing and accusations of greed and calcification were rife.
The more I know, however, the more I realize that publishing is a business – not the business of screwing authors, as some would have you think, but the business of creating the right product mix to sell lots and lots of books. Each step of my first novel’s journey – determining print runs, committing promotion attention and dollars, scheduling, even the wording of the flap copy – all of it was predicated on the information available at that time about my book’s viability in the market.

4. Helping others is more than its own reward.
This may be the ex-girl-scout-leader in me, but I never really doubted that Nice Matters, even in publishing.
But I’ve lost count of the number of times in the last year that some small act of kindness has come back to reward me. My most oft-repeated story was chatting up the nice lady in the bar at the end of a long day…and later discovering she was an important reviewer. But there were dozens of moments like that.
I’m certain that much of my book’s success is owed to the countless little and big favors people have done for me. So many people have helped me that I’ll probably never manage to pay it all forward, but I’m going to try.

5. Dreams take up as much room as you give them.
I used to dream I’d finish a book one day. Then, for a very long time, I dreamed that I would find an agent and get it published. Some days it seemed hopeless, but the dream never faded.
Lately I’ve begun dreaming of bigger things. An Edgar nomination was, quite literally, a dream come true, one that I promised myself I’d attain one day, but never imagined would come so early in my career. On good days, my dreams seem possible. On my best days, they seem inevitable

On the business of plotting

Nelson Algren wrote the 1949 novel, The Man with a Golden Arm, and he received the very first National Book Award for it.

Algren, in a 1955 Paris Review interview, was asked how much he writes before he begins to rewrite. His answer dealt more with plotting, something he didn’t do in The Man with a Golden Arm.

Algren: “I dunno, maybe five pages. I always figured the way I could finish a book and get a plot was to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can’t outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it’s a slow way of working.”

He said the plot in The Man with a Golden Arm is pretty creaky, that it kind of props things up. Algren outlined his next book, Walk on the Wild Side, and he says it’s a better book for him having done so.

Newsletter duty roster:
July – Greg
August – Clayton
We will need someone in September and beyond – let us know if you’d like to volunteer!

The Last Word… An Excerpt from This Year You Write Your Novel by crime fiction author Walter Mosley (thanks Clayton)

“If you skip a day or more between your writing sessions, your mind will drift away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you’ll have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only you wrote every day.”