Quote, Interrupted

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard

This quote cropped up in my random reading this evening, and it struck me negatively for some reason.  I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but quickly realized that, beyond simply reducing an entire universe of communication to a selfish world of useless indulgence, it's fundamentally in error.

Writing is almost never formed in a single, glutting, go.  It is by nature almost nothing BUT interruption.  Few authors, scriptwriters, essayists, working in ficiton or non, in short form, long form, poetry, or even graphic work - nor any other writer - creates an entire piece in one sitting, without revision.  Ever.  For the sake of the reader, writing almost *must* be interrupted, and for the sake of the author's message, story, issue, interest - likewise.  For clarity - interruption.  For entertainment - interruption (who can build tension, perfectly, with nary an edit?).  For every possible purpose - staying on point, getting the story told well, evoking a setting (fiction or non, we're always *somewhere* when we read) - interruption.

Writing is the art of perfecting your OWN interruptions.  Of learning to use them - the down times between having the actual moment to write.  Of winnowing inspiration by the process of editing - learning how to use the interruptions in time, the interruption of revision, the interruption of feedback, refining, polishing.  Writing is the *cultivation* of interruption, in order to write well, to engage.

Talking without being interrupted is just self indulgence.  It isn't writing.  Not good writing.

Time-pirism

Some time sucks on the internet are better than others!

It's the Total Perspective Vortex.

Getting Limber as A 'Nartist

It was gratifying for me, in the workshop yesterday, when they began by asking a few questions of us - who has completed a work - who has *submitted* it - etc.  I've accomplished a good deal, even if I'm not yet published, and it's nice to sort of be given permission to be proud of that.

The assignments we had started with this:  write down a word.  Where it came from, who the heck knows or cares, but I put down Anglophilia.

When it was time to use that in a six-word story, I went to "My Anglophilia is unsatisfied, staying home."  I'd written "at" home at first - so there was that minor edit.  But I got the thing done well within our brief time limit.

Next it was time to round-robin our six-worders to the next person over, and we changed one word of each other's works.

I tended to stay within the rules pretty rigidly, and it was nice to see the way the rest of the class worked within the limits.  They seemed to suit me, which is an instructive realization.  Naturally, such structure wasn't comfortable for everybody - but everybody produced, and I was so impressed.

The 55-worder was our "big" assignment, and with five minutes, fifty seconds to do it, I finished in probably three or four minutes.  Faced with the job of inspiration on speedy demand, I found the sentence "I must, and am paralyzed" - and refused to take that to The Writerly Place (I really need to get my "Writerly" post written some time soon), so when perhaps the ultimate tale of conflicted "must" occurred to me, it was just a matter of placing Isaac before Abraham and bringing the ram onstage at the last, conflicted moment.  Angel ex machina, sure, but in fact, the story got a good response in the room at least.  I hated the overwrought dialogue, but it met my central criterion, which was not to write about sitting in a room where I was forced to come up with a short story.  Hitting the word count well within time limits was good enough for me to stay my editorial hand, so the work came out and remained essentially un-edited.



The weekend was good, but like last weekend, I've been so occupied I feel ready for a weekend.  Boy is the 20th looking good already.

I did actually complete my taxes, got a lot of bills done - RC was not my sole focus for the past three days.

But it will be a pleasure, next go round, to get back to my ordinary round of housecleaning, getting all the sleep I need, and ordinary amusements once another work week is under my belt.

RavenCon

This weekend was not good for me in the direct, applied way JRW's conference is, but even if only for the Wordsmith's workshop, I got a lot out of it for my writing.  I'm histfic, of course - not fantasy nor sci-fi - but the disparity in genres can be thin enough to become irrelevant.

I don't tend to do a lot of writing exercises, but the 55-word story was one of a bunch we did yesterday, which limbered up the muscles.  Equally as stimulating was the fact that I was lucky enough to attend with Leila.  It was she who gave me the 60-page cut late last year, and it was in a brainstorming session she and I were having I found at least two characters to cut entirely.  The 'smithing workshop also inspired me to tighten the opening scene right to a key event which should not be delayed by any intervening scenes.

So great stuff, and more inspiration than domestic sanitation or much of anything else this weekend.  Heh.  The house is a sty, but I did get some hand laundering done, and there are still socks and underwear enough to get me through the week.  Maybe even a few bits of actual clothing too, of course.

Inevitably, I kept comparing RC to JRW, and of course JRW is my nearest and dearest authorial event.  BUT, though RC needs to build in small improvements in timing/transition, and I'm dying to see attendance improve over the next couple of years, there are actually some things JRW could pick up from RavenCon.  Such as:  the workshops.  JRW doesn't offer the short bursts of creativity like that, and it was invigorating to actually *write* at an event which, for me, centered so much on that aspect.  It doesn't have to be innovative stuff; we worked on The Six Word Story before taking five for the 55-er, and it's not like The Six Word Story or flash fiction is widely unknown, but writing exercises survive because, even for contrarians like me, tools are worth picking up sometimes.

Plus, as a break from fairly static Q&A panels, they provide a great deal of relief.  I was entertained by everyone's work, surprised by the pieces we read, inspired, pleased.  The laser focus on *language* was incredibly appealing.  More than anything, having an active role in a session, which we tend not to do apart fro Q&A at JRW, was hugely engaging.

For me - for my writing - engagement is so deeply important.

... Then I Will Shut Up

A second/final acknowledgement, and I will stop.  For tonight.

This blog is intended to be my pubic, authorial presence online.  I'm aware when it gets tangential, and believe it or not, this is not entirely unplanned.

Of late, between the anger I encountered, stopping me in my tracks recently, and the experiences with my past sexual harasser (his last day is tomorrow; today I was able to say exactly no goodbye, and will never lay eyes on him again), it may be obvious to some why the tangents have become increasingly focused on feminism.

I'm aware this alienates a certain audience, and perhaps someday I'll have an agent, publisher, or even a PR drone to tell me this must not be allowed in my public persona.

Today is not that day.  And I am no more a processed, telegenic Evil Sexbot than I am a published author right now.  When I feel a responsibility to something beyond The Ax and the Vase or my other products and work, it is still my freedom to use my voice.

I don't look forward to ever stifling myself again - though, to be sure, I may prove willing to provide a professional public face sans certain polemic.

But even with this awareness, the woman I am serves the work I have produced and will continue to put out.  (Yeah.  I caught the entendre there.  "Feminism" also doesn't mean I have no sense of humor - so it stands.)

I consider myself an essential storyteller in that I refuse to enslave myself to didactic themes - but the woman I am, and the beliefs I maintain, are the source of the things I write.

As a feminist, my female characters aren't allowed to be feminists.  Still, they aren't stifled.  They are remarkable to me, they teach me how to maneuver without denying the realities they faced.  They seem to love men, though the one central to the work in progress does so with all the complexity and even twisted impulses and motivations we as human beings seem to heap onto the process of loving.

I don't want to alienate anybody.

But damned, right now, if any of you will ever see me stifled again.

This is More Than a Comment

I started to respond to Mojourner in the comments, but - no - this goes right up in a post.

**


Wasn't on.  I've actually been contemplating the precipitous backslide of feminism for a while now, and I'm not the only one who sees it.

Sure, Free to Be You & Me is a weak example - but the point is, when I was coming up, even way back in the dark ages of the 1970s, in a Southern Baptist home, in the morass of beautiful downtown White Flight suburbia, the stone-age exposures I had to pop culture were FAR more enlightened than "The Bachelorette" and rather terrifying swaths of the YA urban fantasy lit now utterly saturating the populace.  As an agent I really like said a year and a half ago, "the boobs are getting smaller" ... but female characters in the vast majority of entertainment today are NOT what they used to be.

Even as recently as the 1990s, women - actual, human women (and not even all of them milky white) - were allowed to make money making music.  Now even the supposedly "edgy" ones (Gaga) conform to the blond, radically thin, porcelain-skinned model pioneered by Britney when she was a pedophile's delight.

Look at a movie made in the 1970s and just the physical appearance of the women alone is a revelation - but the characters written back then are almost alien today.  Sex was something they participated in - it wasn't imposed upon them - and it wasn't something they imposed upon those around them, either.  These days, there isn't a female character in television, movies, or "reality" TV who isn't using sex in one way or another - to that exhausting, inevitable end:  proving that women are either evil sexbots - or useless, decaying flesh.  The evil sexbot might well be appealingly drawn.  But it's a detestable and seriously tiresome cliche' I frankly didn't have to grow up with.

Yes, female characters have been "drawn that way" for millenia now.  Even the early Church's hysteria about feminine sexuality and its resultant He Man Women Hater's (and rather drawn out; it took centuries) decision to refuse priests the right to wives was a reactionary stance strictly by gender.  BUT.  When I was growing up, that was not the ONLY available model of femininity.  Love her or hate her, even "Maude" was an option once upon a time.

Now, though, there's Sullen Teenage Girl, the character whose life is utterly empty but for the empty veins of her chilly and much-aged vampire/boyfriend.  There are the "boobs getting a bit smaller" heroines of games, none of whom presents as a human woman ever really could.  There's "The Bachelorette" and every pneumatic, "perfect" girl hawking her body (erm, music) and a culture glorifying adolescent cat-fighting and vanity the likes of which even I can't hold a candle to.

I have never cared for Madonna - and she's become the very icon of everything I'm complaining about, as well as a hilarious travesty to boot - but in 1983, that girl had a gap in her teeth, armpit hair, and a belly on her.  At least she looked like a *person* - and still approximated that financial bonanza people equate with success.  Belinda Carlisle got a lot of flack 25 years ago for not being a stick - but she had a career (and, I doubt, ever got a boob job either).  Beautiful, talented women who weren't peroxided nor stamped with makeup straight out of Playboy magazine, standardized, sanitized, all vestige of talent rendered irrelevant before the almighty corporate trends of "sexy" and "perfect".  Melissa Etheridge could not get a break today, period.  And those years I was talking about, in the 90s? - when PJ Harvey and all those alterna-GRRLS who had something to say beyond "please observe my appearance" - are over.  I don't know when I've caught sight of an American performer whose own raw gifts could really overcome anything so important as the package she's served in.  (Yeah, yeah, Adele is doing well - and she has a curve, yes.  But Adele is already pissing people off due to oversaturation, and those curves of hers still come packaged in highly calculated vintage style, perfect false eyelashes, and a creamy envelope of beautiful skin so luminous a camera still adores her.  Holler at me when a woman comes on the scene who is homely by current telegenic standards, but whose assets and training are more luminous than that skin.  Particularly if she is not extremely pale, no matter her race.)

Holler at me, for that matter, when you see a female police officer, attorney, or actual romantic lead who has a waistline above 24 inches ... or an ID indicating she was born before the 80s.  Who has something more to say than platitudes or pining admiration for some man, or (worst of all) self sacrificing paeans of martyrdom which mouth a writer's cause, not a character's.  I have grown pretty sick of the self-martyring female character.

Gaaaahhhh.

I need to go mow the grass, so I"m posting this while my thoughts are still roiling.  But still.  Keep on thinking for me.  And I'm not stopping either.

"Does This Battle Scene Make My Butt Look Big?" ...

... or "The Perils of Taking Advice TOO Seriously"

The key revision work I am doing right now includes:  making Clovis more immediate, intimate - bringing that much-discussed charisma to a much more prominent position in the character.  Tightening the plot - though I have been cogitating some ideas on how and where to do this, it is my readers I shall trust for advice on this - this is perhaps the point on which I need the most objective, and savvy, advice.  Finally, working on my first battle scene.

The very very very first draft of that scene was of course extremely different.  I *hate* writing battle scenes, of course - as, I believe, I have mentioned.  Heh.  So the first go at this one consisted of little more than the comment that "this battle happened" with my personal stance of "ew. ick." unstated, but probably pretty obvious.

The essential critiqe of this first mention was, "Um.  Battle scene, please?" - and that was as correct as the current requirement.  Ya can't really have a SCENE without, say, verbs.  Maybe even a noun or two.

So I set to work in creating a setpiece, and the battle scene which had been offstage, came on.  It got big.

Taking advice is great, but one *can* still take even good advice too far.  "You want battle scene?  WE GOT BATTLE SCENE, MAN."  Pow.  Boom.  Crash.

The thing is, I'm not sure the scene as it stands is all *bad* per se - but there is just rather a lot of it.  I've already deleted a good bit, but am aware it still needs to come down.

Ahh, there's nothing like showing your enthusiasm for critique by overdosing on the point at hand.  I said it myself, basically, in that post I linked above:  I held my nose and plunged in.

Bit too deep.  We're working on that.  Working on, actually, quite a number of small things.  Details are coming to me - inspirations - intimations, immediacies.  Good things.  A glint of light on steel, a blur of anticipation in passion, the work of remembering a boy is not a man.  Power, and closeness.

It's been a good week and a half or so.  I love it so much when, being a writer:  I find myself actually writing.

Excuses? Excuses!!

I've been thinking, since the Conference, about what should get my focus right now. My instinct is to put the most effort into revisions, to put out a couple more key queries I feel are time sensitive (incuding to meet with Jason Allen Ashlock, when his generosity is matched by his availability) - but to largely curtail the querying process. It's an easy cop-out, of course - but there are a couple of logical points almost demanding the shift in effort.

For one thing, the fact that the manuscript will be in a state of flux for some time means: I no longer have a "finished product" I want to present. Because the revisions I want to do, I don't want to do "only" for this one agent. The feedback is too good to start versioning now. In any case, if I'm committed to The Ax and the Vase, I need to be committed to it as a whole object - not as one thing to one agent and another to another. Versioning is an unnecessary pain in the behind, in any case; who'd want to get involved in that?

As much to the practical point as that: querying right now, while advertising all over my blog and the SBC's, only tells agents - 'hey there, hi there; I'm moist about somebody else right now, but if you're interested, maybe I'll throw you a draft of what I'm shilling ...'

Um. Yeah, no.

As much as anything, and still valid I feel, is the simple fact of life that thre's only so much you can do and expect to manage any of it well. For that matter, there's only so much you WANT to do, barring a martyr complex, really. And I have no martyr complex - so ... not so much.

I spend a minimum of 40 hours a week working on administrative projects, and writing - at least, selling one's writing - is another one. It's not minor, and after the 80% of my working life spent on days dawning at six a.m. and working until almost six, the importance anything must obtain after hours like this to demand and compel further effort out of me is fundamental. Sure, I have half-day Fridays, and there are the weekends: but if you restrict authorial effort to two and a half days a week (or less, if you actually use those days for anything OTHER than the work of writing), you're shortchanging your work, most likely.

So here we are: I will have to backburner querying for some finite period. The revisions offer both the opportunity to shift focus temporarily - AND, for goondess sakes, to get back to *creative* work, which hasn't been extensive with everything going on. What a pleasure - and what a concept, for a writer!

So. The focus shifts - and the work suspends, so other work can be done. Dissenting opinion is welcome; I sort of seek perspectives here, if anyone has one. But this is my instinct. We'll see how it works!