You Can Take the Writer Out of the Story...

One of the most frequent questions I get is: Where do you come up with story ideas?

It's a difficult question to answer because I don't find the ideas - they find me. I've never had the experience of thinking "what should I write about" - ideas sneak up on me and once they grab hold, they don't let go. My life as writer reflects the way I move through the world, which is that I'm never quite fully here. Part of me is always looking around, watching, waiting, knowing the next idea will soon strike.

While this way of being is fantastic for my writerly self, it makes life difficult for those closest to me.You know how some people are really charismatic? Great listeners, the people that make you feel like you're the only other person in the world?

I will never be one of those people because I'm never fully present in a moment. It's both a strength and a flaw. The good of this is that I see the world in layers of possibility, the bad is that I can be distant and spacey with friends and family.

Case in point: about a month ago I was at a wedding of close family friends. The wedding took place at the Minnesota Arboretum. It was wonderful and beautiful.And I was totally fixated by this:
To run-of-the-mill Arboretum guests this structure was what it was toted as. A living sculpture.

For me? Pagan sacrificial hut. (Wicker Man, anyone?)I couldn't stop talking about it. I went from being totally freaked out by it, to fascinated, to demanding pictures.
This is a typical example of what life with Andrea is like. I can't have a conversation, or go on a trip without the world of story bleeding into the life I'm leading. In a way I'm always living with a foot in this world and a foot in the writing world.

So if I seem distracted, just keep this in mind: it's not you, it's me.

Top Ten Things To Do Whilst Your Manuscript is On Submission

10. Leave the country (I recommend London, it was very nice). Charming accents, great theatre, and fabulous people watching are all wonderful distractions.

9. Scour favorite writers' blogs, web sites, and tweets to figure out what they did while their manuscripts were on submission
8. Read (for distraction, inspiration, and to remind yourself of what you love about books and why you wrote yours in the first place). So far I've read/am reading:











7. Watch movies and play video games. Maybe my favorite forms of escapism (reading is never a complete escape for me as I always am looking for craft while I read)

6. Have long conversations with your pets about how much publishing is a waiting game. My dogs are great listeners, though obviously tired of my thoughts on publishing...
5. Think about cleaning/doing dishes/folding laundry.

4. Actually clean, do dishes, fold laundry.

3. Check email obsessively for updates on submissions; look at phone, will it to ring and be agent calling with the best news of all time - 'are you sitting down?' news.

2. Put phone in drawer so you will no longer stare at it.

1. Write next book (of course!)

From Toxic to Bliss?

There have been some interesting posts recently that discuss expectations, jealousy, and ideas about navigating the emotional rollercoaster that is the writing world.

Here's my two cents:

The ups and down of writing, revising, attempting to get an agent, get published, get reviewed, and the list goes on, inevitably produces the full range of human emotions from euphoria to rage to despondence. More often than not, this mental yuck will be directed at those of whom we're jealous or who we blame for our current dire-seeming circumstance.

Rather than hiding from these volatile feelings or pretending that we don't experience them, I think it's best to find productive ways to move through the toxic mire of envy and self-doubt to the Elysian fields of hope and confidence. To achieve this end requires conscientious, thoughtful traversing through one's own psyche.

When it comes to human relations I still don't think you can get much better than the golden rule: Do unto others as you'd have done unto you.

There's a reason this saying has been enshrined at the United Nations.

But even with the best of intentions, it's important to acknowledge and experience the emotions that come with the darker sides of writing life, namely rejection. So how can we rage without doing permanent damage?

I think I found the answer in the All-American Rejects song "Gives You Hell."

With this wickedly catchy song and what is perhaps the funniest video I've ever watched, the message is clear:
Yes you'll get angry, yes you'll be frustrated, yes you'll feel crazy, but at the end of the day it's all about walking a mile in the other person's shoes, knowing we're all in this together and that we're all human.

Sister Christian

I'm going to branch out from a lovely blog tree-trunk that's been growing today; that is, what is writing to you?

Fantastic topic, so to push it a bit further I want to know what moves you into a writing mindset?

For me, it's a challenge to ever turn off the writing mindset. One of my favorite tales of the writer's life is from James Thurber:

I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Damnit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, "Is he sick?" "No," my wife says, "he's writing something."
(Interview with George Plimpton and Max Steele. Paris Review, Fall 1955)

The first time I came across this story I blinked and reread it, all the while thinking "Hey, that's me!" (And my husband rolls his eyes and nods).

I am always writing, it takes very little to push me into story-crafting, imagined dialogues, and scene painting. Tearing myself out of the writing world is much, much harder and quite painful.

This process (lifestyle?) came to mind when I arrived at Target yesterday. I passed through the sliding doors at precisely the same moment as an elderly nun.

Now, as the daughter of a Protestant minister I haven't had a lot of quality nun time in my life.



(Looks like I might have missed out on all the fun)

These days most nuns have eschewed the traditional habit, so they move through the world garbed like the rest of us civilians. Invisible saints.

But this nun was fully bedecked in meditative black and long wimple. I'd guess she was in her eighties. I immediately began to muse about her life and the reason for her visit to Target.

After gathering my Target goods and heading to the check out. I was rather startled when the nun turned up in line right behind me. Her shopping cart contained just a few items...three or four packages. All clothing for an infant.

Moments like these bulldoze me into a writing mindset, as if the universe is channeling a story my way. I've never believed in coincidences.

Questions ballooned in my mind. Why would a nun buy baby clothes and only baby clothes? Orphanage? Relief work? Grand nieces or nephews? Her own grandchildren from a life prior to getting to a nunnery?

The entire scenario struck me as incredibly bizarre.

Stories manifest all around me; from snippets of conversation I overhear, to the way shadows wrap around a tree, to nuns at Target.

Where do your stories come from? How do they evolve?

Word Friction

I spend much of my day mulling over words. For the most part I adore words, but a few bother me to the point of distraction. The reason: the sound of the word negates its meaning.

Two key culprits - bucolic and sanguine.

Bucolic. This word purports to evoke benign, pastoral, even soothing settings. For me it's much too close to bubonic. When I picture a bucolic meadow, an image of undulating grasses kissed by a summer wind manifests...but the field is littered with bodies in various states of decay. Like this:













Sanguine. The problem with this word is its relation to sanguinary - one of my FAVORITE words. For any of you who don't know sanguine = enthusiastic, cheerful, optimistic, whereas a sanguinary event involves lots and lots of blood. Or better yet, if you've been exsanguinated you had a date with a vampire that went badly for you, but had a happily-sated nosferatu at evening's end.

Though sanguine has come to dominate the lexicon, sanguinary is the older word, from which sanguine derived. In the past the two words had a more direct affiliation, sanguine also meant a ruddy, flushed complexion (get it? from blood rushing to one's face....aha!) but as language is always evolving and words grow distant from their own origins, at some point the relation of these two drifted apart and now the two meanings have become oppositional.

I stand firmly in sanguinary's camp.

So for me a sanguine pastime equates to turning lazing laps in the pool at your Beverly Hills Estate...but the pool is filled with AB negative instead of water.

(Hmmm, I'm really not sure what to make of the fact that I actually had a successful hit upon Googling "pool filled with blood"...I guess their "Don't be evil" motto went out the window (or was defenestrated for any fellow word freaks out there).





If anyone else has a word they can't stomach, let me know. I'd love to hear your own word sound/meaning divergence quirks.