Importance of Words, a Reminder

(If you had trouble opening the Scribblings scene, it's because I forgot to add the link. Ooops.)

After months of letting my hair grow, until it was long enough to rub against my shoulders, a location it hasn't touched since I graduated from high school and left Indiana, I was sick of it. It took too long to style, and if I didn't blow it dry, I felt ugly. I called and made an appointment with whoever was available at 7:30 in the evening. Turned out to be Jennifer, an Asian woman whose long hair looked like Anne Hathaway's after she Finds Fashion in The Devil Wears Prada. I tried to describe what my haircut had been for years: short on the sides, a little height on top, fringe-y bangs.

I let her do her thing. I care a lot about how my hair looks, but I figure: if she messes up, it'll always grow out.

And when she was done, it didn't look like my old style at all. She'd given me a short bob. Cute, but not what I was expecting. That's when I realized, when you start with longish hair, "short" means "up." Starting with short hair, "short" means "in" or "close to the sides." I'll see what it looks like tomorrow, when I style it myself. In the meantime, it's an object lesson that communication is hard, even on the simplest subjects.

Think of the misunderstandings you've had when talking to someone. Different background, different gender, different education; everything can interfere. And all the trouble people get into when they go to e-mail, where the back-and-forth can cause hurt feelings faster than you can say "r u crazy."

Conventional publishing gives you no chance to say to the reader, "You following me here? Get what I mean?" That's why a standard piece of advice is to show drafts to family and friends. They often can see what we know but haven't actually gotten down on the page. Make sure you pick the right people as readers--ones that are not too nice ("Oh, this is fabulous just the way you have it") and not too critical ("Hey, you're crazy for thinking anyone would pay good money to publish this crap").

Sometimes, you come up short on all sides. When that happens, give your story some time. When you pull out the manuscript again, you'll have grown better at seeing how to shape it.

category: craft

Scribblings, Re-send

Unrequited love.

Sorry. Forgot the link. But I'm posting the piece here, just so you don't have to try again. Remember, this is a first draft, only a first draft.

Cat-22

The neighbors' cat, Snickers, is 16 and looks it. Her mottled orange and black fur stands away from her thinning flanks, dull and dirty. "I think she has stopped grooming herself," says Kristine, who is explaining to Nora how to tend the cat while Kristine and David are away for a long weekend.

"Does she like to be combed?" Nora asks. She is 11, five years younger than Snickers, and seeks cats the way streams seek oceans.

"Not so much, but we can try," Kristine says. She fetches a steel-tooth cat comb and demonstrates where Snickers prefers to be combed, when she tolerates combing at all.

The big cat weaves around Kristine's ankles then escapes to a worn blacket in a corner of the master bathroom.

Kristine leads Nora out into the hall. "I'm afraid she might not be that interested in playing," she cautions. "I can't believe she's so old already."

The first evening Nora comes to feed the cat and scoop out the clumps out of the litterbox, Snickers eases into the bedroom, an expanse of cream-colored carpet and glistening blond wood furniture. The cat ignores the fishing oole that dangles a finged bit of cloth in front of her nose, rubs her fur along the catnip mouse Nora tosses on the floor, and stares at Nora.

Snickers hisses, flattening her ears and switching her tail.

"She doesn't like me, Mom," Nora says, staring at the cat.

"Give her time," her mother answers. "She needs to get used to you."

[more about how Snickers acts worse and worse]

xx
Several years ago, when visiting an aunt with two cats in Chicago, Nora wanted desperately to play with the felines. Both cats were standoffish, but one took a particular malevolent attitude and began stalking her down the hall one morning, looking as if she might pounce at the first good chance. Nora's mother took to standing between the cat and her daughter, as a defensive mechanism.

Nora loves cats. Cats flee from Nora. She tries to cozy up to them; they hiss; she flees from them.

"She tried to attack me five times!" Nora tells her father later.

"Just twice," interjects her mother.

"I'm rounding up," Nora says.

"She tried to attack me," Nora says. "Can we go over in the morning?"

Inspiration

I finished Steve Olson's Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World's Toughest Math Competition this week. Gotta give the guy snaps for going for a narrative on a competition where the kids just go in and work on math questions. Olson takes the opportunity while the kids are sitting at their tables to go off on explorations of what it is to be creative, the meaning of "genious," whether Asians are inherently better at mathematics and science, etc.

This book falls into what I think of as the "Wall Street Journal page 1 narrative," which is more "story segment, exposition/tangent, story segment, exposition/tangent, story conclusion." See Follow the Story, by former WSJ editor James B. Stewart for a lengthier explanation.

I note that Olson tagged along for the 2001 Olympiad and the book was published in 2004. It takes so long to do a book from beginning to end! How does anyone have the patience?

For stories of competitions, reviewers on Amazon of Count Down recommend the documentary Spellbound (and I wholeheartedly concur) and Cookoff (I haven't read it, but it's now on my list).

By the way, I've put the links here to Amazon so that the info on the books is easily available, but I always try first to get my books at the public library.

Essential Reading

My dear friend Cheryl, who is a lovely writer, sent me a link to this article by Chip Scanlan, one of my favorite writers on writing. This terrific piece called "What Is Narrative, Anyway?" and a couple of follow-up pieces ran in Poynter Online in 2003. I never get tired of hearing people define narrative. (Short answer: Storytelling.) But the explanations he elicits from people in the field are great.

category: reading

Reading List

Narrative Digest has added to its archives. Check out these:

• "The Wrong Man" by Tamara Jones is part of the Washington Post's ongoing project called "Being a Black Man." It's an unnerving account of a man mistaken for a fugitive.
• "Of Meth and Motherhood" by Nicole Stricker chronicles the life of a woman in a sandwich generation of meth users: Her mother and daughter are addicts, too.
• In "Chasing Shadows" Howard Altman tells a good yarn about exploring the community near D.C.'s "shadow government" -- and finding himself part of an espionage investigation.
• In "Good Intentions" Lane DeGregory engages us once again with story and character while showing the challenges and shortcomings of foster care.
• Xan Rice gives an eyewitness account of the murder of photojournalist Martin Adler in Somalia.

Writers Write

In my last post I mentioned people can stumble as they begin a story on the fact that their families don't consider writing a reasonable career. Family dynamics can be tough. I recommend Julie Cameron's book The Artist's Way; she has suggestions and exercises to overcome less-than-supportive home life.

In a similar vein, I know people who do not consider themselves writers yet; they're waiting for some magic moment that will confirm that they're "real" writers. It's now, people: if you write, you're a writer. It's that simple.

(I confess to being completely arrogant on this point. I've always known I was a writer--although I did toy with the idea nursing school when the fourth-grade boy I had a crush on said he wanted to be a doctor.) I've heard one Pulitzer winner say that, as she struggles with each story, she keeps expecting someone to come up and expose her as a fraud, not really worthy of a Pulitzer.

Consistency Is What Counts

Take some comfort in the stuff you don't have to stress about.

Editors don't care whether you use commas before the conjunction in a list (the comma before "and" in the phrase "meat, potatoes, and gravy"). They don't care if you capitalize "President" even when it's not in front of someone's name. It doesn't matter if you put spaces on each side of a dash. These are style details that someone at the publication is paid to change if need be.

Many magazines follow the Chicago Manual of Style (currently in its 15th edition). Most newspapers follow the lead set by the Associated Press. Online publications are a mixed bag. Publications also have "house style," where they follow their own wild child and do stuff they happen to like it--I knew a managing editor who chose to use an apostrophe in plurals of numbers (e.g., the 1980's).

Instead of worrying about what style a publication uses--

• Spell everything correctly (pick a dictionary and stick with it).
• Be consistent in how you punctuate and capitalize--this makes using "search and replace" on the computer so much easier.

Write through the Fear

Getting the idea onto the page isn't hard. Getting the story down in the fabulous, stellar, outstanding, Pulitzer-Prize-winning way you pictured in your brain is a whole 'nother ballgame.

I don't believe in writer's block. I think it's my background as a newspaper writer: I write whether I feel like it or not. But I'll admit there can be a . . . um . . . pause when tackling a narrative. It's like staring up from the pier at an aircraft carrier knowing you're expected to drive that thing. You're responsible for taking people on a journey; you know the kind of ship (story) it is; but the thing feels so bloody big.

A story can be scary to write because 1) it's capital-eye-Important in a policy kind of way (e.g., turning the spotlight on the county's ineptitude in running group homes); 2) it's full of people you have to work in and keep track of for the reader somehow; 3) it's tragic; 4) the protagonist is interesting but not likeable; 5) you don't have an ending yet; 6) you're drowning in research; 7) it's so long! 8) it's so short! 9) you don't have an editor to help you structure and streamline; 10) it has to hook people and draw them through the story and that requires beginnings and middles and ends and tension and who the heck knows how to do that? 11) your dad/mom/guidance counselor never thought writing was a real job anyway.

These concerns are valid, and I'll talk about them in future posts. It's OK to worry, but ya gotta get started anyway.

So. Calm down. Go get a drink of water. Take some deep breaths. Then write down on a piece of paper why you want to write this story and one or two words that say what this story is really about(e.g., "disillusionment," "rebirth," "betrayal," "motherhood"). Tape the paper to the corner of your computer and get started.

Start anywhere. A scene, the lead, an outline, a list of people who are the characters in your story. Anything. No one will make you use it, but you have to get something down on paper to be able to fix it. I haven't come across anyone yet who can write and edit an entire story in his or her head.