My 20th class reunion is this month.
I'm not going.
Oh, part of me wants too. Another part of me wonders why spend $$$ on airfare and whatnot to see folks I haven't seen in 20 years. Anyhoo, in honor of my upcoming reuniptals...
How much of who I am today is a result of what happened to me in junior high and high school? Eeewww. That’s just too freaky to imagine. Heck, I just don’t want to imagine it. But I should. I need to.
An Ode to the Senior Class
Like dirt in the wind
wanting...
waiting...
knowing...
knowing that one day they will be sucked in the great vacuum cleaner of life.
Like dirt in the wind
reaching...
yearning...
striving...
striving to leave the oneness of themselves and unify with others to become one large dirtball.
I knew even as a sophomore that my destiny didn’t lie in fertile poetic valley. (Gee, I was a cynic back then.) Yet I sure had fun writing pages of stinkweeds because I wasn’t writing to please my teachers, friends, or family. I jotted down what grew from my loony and not-so-loony mind. My poem may be corny, but if you dig a bit, you can find a truth because at the core of my soul abides Truth.
Are you a dirtball?
Ouch. Well, you might be. Chances are (remember that movie, now that was corny)...chances are you need to do some soul dusting. If you want your story—your writing—to reach breakout proportions, you will break out a rag, a facemask, and a can of lemon-scented Pledge.
How many times do you “leave the oneness” of yourself to become just like your friends or the celebrities on TV? How many times do you “leave the oneness” of yourself to become just like the other writers out there? How many times have you heard “if you want to right for Harlequin, familiarize yourself with Harlequin novels,” “to write romances, you must voraciously read romances,” or “know what the publishers want”?
Yeah. Please ignore my curled lip. If you haven’t heard saying like those, then I’ve heard them enough times for the both of us. I’m soooooo anti-cloning.
While I understand the merit of familiarizing yourself with a publishing line or with a genre, if that's all you read, then at some point, that's all you know.
“A true breakout is not an imitation but a break-through to a more profound individual expression. It demands that an author reach deep inside to find what is truthful, original, important and inspiring in his own world view.” ~Donald Maass, WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL
I only have a bachelor’s degree in radio/television (thin, cheap books with lots of pictures), so I needed some help understanding Mr. Maass’s impressive verbiage. So I googled to find the answer.
Knowconflict.com defines worldview as “the way s/he sees the world and his/her place in it. In includes the person's beliefs about how things are done and by whom, what is good and bad, why things happen as they do, and who holds the reins of power. It also includes the group or groups to which a person belongs or with which s/he identifies.”
The way you “view” the world and what’s in it affects how you write.
Your worldview may contradict the mainstream, follow the mainstream, agree with the majority, agree with the minority, may blame Global Warming for everything or nothing, may be liberal, conservative, narrow-minded, open-minded, no minded.
Everyone has a worldview. Everyone has a voice.
Are you struggling to define your “voice”? Has ascertaining your “voice” never even crossed your mind? When someone asks about your “voice,” do you answer, “Well, I’m a soprano, but I can sing alto if needed”?
Far far far too many writing contest scoresheets have a question similar to "Is the author's voice fresh and unique?"
What a stupid question.
How many judges even know what "voice" is? And is it the author's voice they are hearing, or the POV character's? If it's the former and not the latter, then I say we have a case of author intrusion. I don't want to hear an author's voice when I'm reading. I want to hear the POV character's.
But I'm not talking about that kind of voice.
Maass says, “what drives you to write, to some extent, are your own unresolved inner conflicts.”
Great, I guess we all could stand some shrink-wrappage. Who wants to break out the Glad first?
Give yourself freedom to say things in your own unique way. How do you do that? How do you develop your “voice”? Good question because I've been wondering that myself.
One way is to read poetry.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said, “Prose consists of words in their best order. Poetry consists of the best words in the best order.” Reading poetry will cause you to become more aware of the dynamos of the correct word choice.
Another way is to put you in your story.
Maass says, “It is from the unknowable shadows of your subconscious that your stories will find their drive and from which they will draw their meaning. No one can loan you that or teach you that.”
As I think about the lead characters in my manuscripts, I can see me in them. I can hear me in them...well, not all the time. :-) In the manuscript I'm currently working on, I'm a tad frightened by how much I see of me in the heroine. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. However, I do know it's a scary thing because I tend to view myself fairly favorably until I see my flaws in print. Ouch.
Back to my point.
Reading to familiarize yourself with a publishing line or with a genre is a good thing. However, be forewarned: birds of a feather flock together. Pick up a handful of books written by differnt authors and published by the same publisher. Rip off the cover or tear out any page that identifies who wrote the book.
Read them. Can you identify who wrote the book (if you didn't know who wrote it to begin with)? Do you notice similiarities in the books of the particular publisher or line? At any point do they all begin to sound the same? Could one author have written them all?
Since January, I've read a dozen or more novels from a best-selling inspirational line. Other than with one author, all the rest of the novels could have been written by the same person. The fact that most of the novels ended up being historical fiction with romantic elements instead of pure romances is another post.
Since January, I've read a dozen-ish novels from Steeple Hill. Of all the publishers I've read, they tend to have the most diverse sounding novels. I wonder why that is? And I ask because prior to my "since January" research, I would have theorized quite the opposite. See, researching is a good thing.
On a side note, my book researching has reinforced my belief that present tense is the stupidest tense to write a novel in.
One of Steeple Hill Cafe novels was in present tense. I made it to page two before I flipped to the last couple pages to see how the book ended.
Grand total of pages read: FOUR.
Considering all the wonderful things I've heard about the author, I really really had been looking forward to reading her novel. No matter how great of a person the author is, I couldn't get past the present tense. Someone ought to send a memo out to all published and unpublished authors: Even God knows past tense works best, which is why He used it in His best-selling novel.
So why did the author choose present tense?
My guess PT was the trend, the popular thing. My subsequent guess is the "popular" thing to have chick-lits in present tense adds to the reasons for it's so-called demise. I don't think chick-lit/hen-lit/etc are dying. I think think they're evolving into something more relevant to the average reader. Case in point: Camy Tang's Asian-American series.
Like dirt in the wind
reaching...
yearning...
striving...
striving to leave the oneness of themselves and unify with others to become one large dirtball.
Don’t strive to leave the oneness of yourself only to unify with others in one blob of sameness.
Don’t become a clone.
The world already has a Nora Roberts, a Julie Garwood, a JK Rowling, a John Grisham, a Ted Dekker, a Brandilynn Collins, a Tamera Alexander.
It’s just wanting...waiting...hoping for you and, hopefully, for me too.
Write, drink Dr. Pepper, and be you.
