Learn to Write for Yourself...And Everyone Else

In honor of paradox, I’d like to consider another bit of possibly contradictory writing advice:

1.       Know what’s going on in the market

2.       Write for yourself

Unlike this paradox, which is OMG

This is essentially saying that we should simultaneously write for ourselves, and for everyone else. Be completely selfish/be completely selfless. Write with your eyes closed/never close your eyes. Read every published work you can find/find your own voice. 

And people talking about absolutes. Anyone who deals
in absolutes is stupid. 

I can kind of make sense of this conundrum when I remember my first exposure to band. My brother was in middle school band, a trombone player. I was a fifth grader, coming with my mother to pick him up after school, and she brought me inside to see the band room and see an experience I might be able to share in, in a few years. After school, the band room was noisy. Students were practicing at random, in small clusters or solo, somehow able to concentrate on their own sheet of music while amongst the tumult bouncing between the sound-cushioned walls.

“How do they do that?” I asked my brother. “How do they hear themselves?”

“They don’t,” he answered. “Well…they do. It’s complicated. While everyone is playing, you have to ignore everyone else and completely concentrate on what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll get distracted and lose your place. But you also have to listen in to be sure you’re matching what the others are playing around you—not too loud, not too fast."

I feel that it's a good illustration of listening--but not too much. If you concentrate too hard on what other people are doing, you'll only succeed in copying them. But if we write in a vacuum, we're sure to produce works that are only appealing to us, that lack an appeal to the other human beings that are sure to make up your audience. 

Unless you have successfully cornered the "reading puppy" market. 

I feel that the "write for yourself" bit of advice most often comes from well-meaning mentors trying to keep their manatees from freaking out too much. 

Reference

For a beginning writer, trying to figure out "what the industry is doing" can be terrifying. And it makes "the industry" sound like an Orwellian force set on blocking our every move towards a successful publishing career. Thus, "write for yourself" is really a way of saying, "Chill out. Stop spending all your time trying to chart the themes in the current best-sellers list, and just write." For we learn by doing, instead of thinking about learning by doing. 

Yes...I see...

Try A New Perspective

I've never been comfortable writing in the 1st person. Whenever I have a story idea, I see it in my head as happening to someone else. The film in my head plays out like...a film, with discernable 3rd person characters, because Hollywood hasn't come up with a good equivalent of a "Write Your Own Adventure" novel.

This and "Blair Witch" are the closest we've come.
Plus, Jason Bourne's shaky cam. 

I'm not sure why I envision my storylines this way. I think part of it is because I was trained as a Medievalist, always envisioning a glorious past. People have been writing about the Trojan War since long after Troy even had the possibility of existing. And it is hard to write about something that happened so long ago as if I was a part of it. Other people were. I'm trying to tell their story.

Perhaps it's because I think less of where I am, and more of where other people are.* That I've always imagined that characters are doing something more exciting than I've ever done.

When really, I should accept that few ever will. 

This flips me into an interesting conundrum. I've never felt hampered by the 3rd person before. In fact, I believe that most of my favorite stories were written in the 3rd person. 

        Here are the first three stories to come to my mind:

1. Harry Potter- J.K. Rowling's epic explanation of why people can be terrible while they're young, and can still turn into great people. Give them a chance. (Seriously though, every adult in his life was a terrible kid. But the important ones got over it).
2. The Once and Future King- a guys finds a sword, another finds a cup. There's a lot of excitement in-between, though. You should really give it a look. 
3. Back in Action- a children's book by Elvira Woodruff which was a favorite of mine, concerning the adventures of 10 year old Noah and a magic powder which shrunk him and his friend to the size of his action figures, who also happened to come to life. This was an important tale to young me, who, with no shortage of real friends, always imagined having more.   

But let there not be equal representation here. After all, if there were not a conundrum, I would not be writing a blog post about this. 

Star Wars is the answer. I miss when Video Games allowed you to choose between the two pov's.

It makes a difference. 

Because sometimes you need to feel the stormtroopers burn as you swing. And sometimes you don't. 

Here's the flipside, that "outsider's pov."

      Books which are fantastic in the 1st person:

1. Gulliver's Travels- the story of a man learning what it is like to have ultimate power, ultimate weakness, and terrible ignorance. There are also horses, if you like that kind of thing.
2. The Historian- a book that will make you think vampires are really, historically real, and will also anger you because of the unbelievable, unmimicable effort that Elizabeth Kostova put into her world building. 
3. The Hunger Games- about the kids from children's television shows like Clarissa Explains it All and Clifford, all pitted against each other in a ring of death. [Seriously though- Suzanne Collins is a super genius, fantastic writer, and someone I'd be uneasy asking to babysit).  

So, here's my own experience. I've been writing on this book off-and-on for a few years (yes, my projects always run in the years because I have trouble commiting and I have always had to have 'real person jobs.' Annoying). I had it in 3rd person until just recently, when I decided to try shifting, and I've really enjoyed the result. 

Original 3rd person perspective:

Highway 280 was a lonely road from Sylacauga. It was only an hour and a half drive, past Alex City, past Dadeville…and then nothing but trees, which can make an hour pass in minutes with the right company, and minutes pass in hours with the wrong. Although they drove at a steady pace, there was the illusion of being motionless. Not even the leaves waved as they passed, the wind giving way to an August heat. They called it Fall Semester, but true fall, seasonal fall, wouldn’t come till late October, and two months of rising heat and scarce rain had scorched the Alabama landscape. The endless asphalt grey road radiated heat waves, only disturbed by the occasional pothole and the more than occasional patch of roadkill brown. 

New, first-person perspective, which I believe is an improvement:

"My name is Ryan Aleman. This all started in August, when we drove down to Auburn for the beginning of the semester. Highway 280 is a lonely road from Sylacauga. In the hour and a half drive, past Alex City, past Dadeville…there’s nothing but trees, which can make an hour pass in minutes with the right company, and minutes pass in hours with the wrong. We drove at a steady pace, but there was the illusion of being motionless. Not even the leaves waved as we passed, the wind giving way to an August heat. Yeah, they called it Fall Semester, but true fall, seasonal fall, wouldn’t come till late October, and two months of rising heat and scarce rain had scorched the Alabama landscape. The endless asphalt grey radiated heat waves, only disturbed by the occasional pothole and the more than occasional patch of roadkill brown."

It's a subtle change, but one I'm growing more and more confident with. I think it provides more imediacy, more insight into the character. I don't feel so bad dwelling on Ryan's thoughts, or describing what he sees. I guess, for some reason, this is just a story that I needed to tell from behind a set of eyes, instead of from the sky.

I just had to open myself up to the possibility. 

*(Although, I do believe that this often happens when authors try writing in the opposite gender, when it feels most natural to say, "she's doing this," or "he's throwing this," or "that person over there who feels different from me is having experiences." All I'm saying, in the relative safety of these parentheses, is that authors who are afraid of showing gender bias are probably more likely to write in 3rd person.)

Draw from Other Genres

My heart lies in the fantastic—fantasy and science fiction. There is often, as well, a certain ridiculous element that shows itself. 

Just imagine--in a few more years those horns will curl around enough to reach his mouth,
so he can blow great trumpet blasts right into his own head. 

I do enjoy, every now and then, writing a memoir, or a short-story with reasonably adult characters with jobs and mortgages, where the tensions lie in secrets or sexual tension, etc. And that’s all well and fine, but I always feel this pull towards something else. I never seem to last long in a “normal” world, perhaps because I use reading and writing as such an escape from my “normal world.”

After all, I too have a normal 8-5 job, bills to pay, a future to fret about. If I’m going to write a hero, that hero’s going to have a big flaming sword and a pet dragon and the issue he's dealing with has a lot less to do with the ennui of a life in suburbia and a lot more to do with the mystical viking martians who have crashlanded in the ancient mountains of his forefathers. 

AND TRUMPET GOAT WILL BE HIS STEED

As such, I tend to read works somewhere within the range of fantasy fiction (which is a wide range. A traditional definition would have Twilight and The Historian in the same category—a criminal offense). This does make sense: read what you write, know the genre, the trends. Know what storylines and tropes have been used and overused so you can avoid them. But there is another way to be original, I think.

My fiancé recently introduced me to the works of L.M. Montgomery, and such delightful characters as Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon. I am thankful for this, because these are not books that I would ever think to pick up on my own, and as a boy without sisters, they were not on my childhood reading list.

Montgomery is, first and foremost, a fantastic writer. I approached her books as a skeptic. The covers didn’t appeal to me, and neither did the titles, the settings, or the blurbs on the backs.

Everything about this is designed to repel me. In book stores,
 I would literally see blank space on a shelf in place of this

It was literally a labor of love for me to even crack one open. But I have changed my tune, now. It is most amazing that Montgomery can make the daily dramas in the life of a nine year old girl seem to be the most important things in the world for those three pages. Her characterization is absolute, her world building on-par with the most successful fantasy or sci-fi authors.  

And there is freshness there, new subjects and phrases that I have never seen in a modern books of fantasy fiction. Something I drew away, for instance, was how she describes the Canadian scenery:

“It was November--the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines. Anne roamed through the pineland alleys in the park and, as she said, let that great sweeping wind blow the fogs out of her soul.”

                -Anne of Green Gables

I especially recall the way she wrote about the flowers, because I’ve never cared a bit for flowers and would never think I could enjoy a book so much that spent so much time on them. That’s the joy of a good book. You enjoy it even when you can’t believe that you’re enjoying it.

And those kinds of words can make it into any genre, any setting. There’s no reason words like these have to stay in late 19^th century Prince Edward Island. They can stretch to any world or time I could possibly invent. This is a real lesson I learned from reading L.M. Montgomery. Good writing is not limited to any particular genre. And so, learning to write should include reading all the best works, learning from the best authors of every age, style, and subject. 

Learn How to Create

For anyone who hasn’t read my last two blog entries ("Goodbye my Darlings" and "Learn How to Copy"), it may seem obvious to encourage a writer to create, rather than copy. But in a world so saturated by stories, and a culture so obsessed by the best and worst of them, it is often difficult to separate ourselves both consciously and subconsciously from what we’ve already known. 

A friend of mine wrote a poem in 8th grade that he was incredibly proud of. It had everything a poem should - beautiful imagery, clever wording, a passionate outpouring of emotion. Then his teacher pointed out to him that he had inadvertantly copied much of the content, and sometimes almost the exact wording, from a poem by Wordsworth. 

Feeling discouraged with the fickleness of poetry, my friend grew up and became a doctor. 

But can't you see the poetry still yearning to crawl forth from his hollow smile?

I know I've fallen victim to this myself. I've cursed Orsen Scott Card several times for "stealing" several of my ideas--by writing them decades before I thought of them. 

To create something original, something both in-tune with the stories that a culture is currently consuming, while pressing forward towards something new, is difficult. It means getting uncomfortable. It means taking chances. And that may also mean turning your work into something completely different.

This is hard.

Or at least it's hard for me. You might be brilliant at it. I don't know your life.

The reason it is hard to really create, in my opinion, is because we learn through mimicry. As humans, we learn to speak by listening to others speak. We learn speech patterns and mannerisms by watching our parents communicate. 

Be open to eating warthogs and meerkats, unless they offer a greater supply of food and songs

For this reason, it is hard for us to do things we have never seen, i.e. difficult for men to act as fathers if they had no father figure in their own lives. We live, we learn, by copying.

And then, so that we do not repeat their mistakes or becomes clones of our parents, we adapt what we’ve seen. In a way, we learn history for the same reason. We learn what other people have done, both good and bad, so we can apply those lessons to our own lives. Teaching Monet in art class and Mozart in music class is the exact same as teaching Marx in economics and Stalin in government. We take those lessons and use them.  

Yes, I'm talking about painters again

I had an English teacher tell me that Shakespeare knew all of the rules, so he could break them. There is an extra step, forward movement past successful mimicry and into creation. I think few of us would be satisfied with being able to make “really, really good copies.” We want something original.  

I thought I had done it, with my decade-long novel project. I thought I had created something in a grand tradition, another piece in the puzzle that is the fantasy novel. I had mimicked and drawn something that seems so familiar and yet so very much my own.

But, no—I had very carefully and wonderfully crafted something that the world does not need—a copy.

I see now that though the world didn’t need it, I did. I needed it. To learn. I was just one step behind where I thought I was.   

Degas said—“You have to copy and recopy the masters, and it’s only after having proved oneself as a good copyist that you can reasonably try to do a still life of a radish.”

(Seriously, these painters have all the quotes)

Of course, the HOW is much more difficult. How do we press forward? How do I move past the tropes, the stereotypes?

I start by asking myself this—“Have I seen it before? Is it a character, or a theme, or a setting, or an entire universe ripped from another’s story? Am I rewriting known stories with such minor changes the differences are only superficial?

If I have seen it, if it feels too familiar…then it probably is. Try again.  

Learn How to Copy

In my last post, I wrote about my attempt over the last decade to create a new work of fantasy fiction, while accidentally recreating a list of fantasy tropes in an unoriginal, relatively immemorable fashion.  

The basic idea, however, is not a bad one. 

We should copy. 

I learned the following concept in an elementary school art class:

"Students Copy, Masters Create"

This was my interpretation of Van Gogh's White House at Night,
during the daytime, with pretty birds 

While learning, and, in fact, to learn, students copy those who came before them.

And even though I understood this concept at age seven, somehow I neglected to apply the full concept to one of the most important aspects of my life—writing—for the next twenty years. Go figure.

I assert that it is a mistake to avoid the “copy” phase of artistic instruction. I have seen this phase particularly in poetry exercises:

Write a Sonnet. Now write in Terza Rima.

Now a Shakespearean. Now take the same poem and change it to a Petrarchan,

to learn how your words must adapt.

We play with form, to see how it affects function.

While I have found this to be a staple of my poetry instruction, this same technique was not present in my ‘Creative Writing- Fiction’ classes. I say this not as a critique of those classes or my teachers, because God knows I was taught more than I could possible learn, but simply to say that it is more difficult, and, perhaps, even disagreeable to copy the masters of fiction.

I enjoy using painting as an analogy for writing instruction, simply because I feel there is a very real and immediate grasp of a visual medium. If I come upon a student copying Monet’s Water Lilies, It is obvious that student is simultaneously practicing their own art, honing their own skills, and copying the work of an artist who came before them, to see how it was done.

So...beautiful...

In the writing world, this method of practice is often lost. Are we to open Shakespeare and copy his lines word by word? Perhaps. Surely, after spending so much time writing in a Sixteenth Century voice, one can at least be sure to retain a sense of time and place. If an author were working on a period piece, this may well be a useful technique.

I shall call thee squishy, and thou shalt be my squishy

But for others, this would seem a waste of time, almost more of a punishment than an exercise, like Bart Simpson writing lines on a chalkboard. No, for true instruction, a writing student cannot simply copy a master’s words, but must recreate the same aspects of the master’s work that are copied in poetry classes. Copy form, copy function. Learn how they did it.

For instance, what if a writer were to take the content of Thoreau’s Walden, which I have often and loudly condemned as mind-numbingly dull, and write it as Edgar Allen Poe. This is a dual act, copying the content of one writer and the style of another (though, I am sure some of Poe’s content is sure to slip in. After all, there’s nothing to spice up a lonely few years at the lake like a nice murder and a spiteful ghost).

Can you imagine how many hearts would fit under those floorboards?

I have seen a writing exercise that ‘updates’ old fables—

“Retell ‘The 3 Little Pigs’ in modern day,”

or “from a feminist point of view,”

or “in space, with space-pigs.”

This is right on the threshold of the kind of exercise I am searching for. This fable has a moral and a structure simple enough to be applied to multiple settings (in fact, most of the fables do, which is why we see them redone again and again). As long as the moral and the three-turn structures is maintained (failure, failure, success; brother 1, brother 2, brother 3) the fable is still a success.

I believe it is a young writer’s fear that they won’t be true to “their voice” which keeps them from learning through copying. But why, of all the arts, should writing be so different from painting, or music, for that matter? How ridiculous would it be to have a beginning piano player refuse to play Mozart because he fears that “his own style will not be allowed to grow?”

After all, it is mastering the different voices of our characters, our settings, and our genres that creates incredible literature.