The Old Love/Hate Thing

September 17, 2011 / Lisa / 3 Comments

Why do we have such dysfunctional relationships with our creations? I understand the first bump in the relationship road. When you’ve just finished your piece and you are still on that emotional high from creating. And then you let it sit a few days or few weeks and go back to edit, and realize it stinks. It’s the worst thing you’ve ever written and there’s no hope for it at all. There’s the first bump of many and one that makes sense to me.

As you edit you find tiny gems that make you breathe a little easier and think maybe the piece isn’t as bad as you thought. Those gems are so important. Without them we’d probably throw away work that should be kept. And so it goes, through finishing editing and thinking it’s great again, to sending it out to a trusted first reader and retreating back to thinking it’s horrible again, until the reader comes back with honest, constructive comments and you feel hope again…every writer knows what I’m talking about.

I have made the decision, after a lot of thought and a lot of going back and forth, to e-publish a story. I’ve debated all the pros and cons, and realized one of the biggest reasons I had to not e-publish was ego. As in not feeling like a real writer until a big name publisher wants you. But I don’t want to get sidetracked by that topic here.

This week I’ve been reviewing the cover art, which is a whole blog post on its own, working on the formatting, and all those chores. I’ve been through loving this story, hating it, editing it many times, having it read by professionals as well as trusted friends, and spending way too much time studying each and every comma. I also went through radiation treatments with this story and learned a lot about writing from that process. Never, never try to edit or write when you are hunkered down in survival mode because you’ll just end up redoing everything.

What I have discovered today, is that I am way, way past the love/hate relationship with this story. This story now feels like a young adult who has lived at home too long and needs to move out and live without the parent. It’s time to let go, time for the story to move on without me. Time for it to stand on its own and succeed or fail on its own merits. I realize that if I don’t e-publish this story, it will live out the rest of its life in a file on the laptop. And I don’t think that’s why it wanted to be told, why it haunted me for so long, begging to get written. I think this story wants to be released, too.

Or maybe it’s just me looking for reasons to get rid of it once and for all. Once it has moved out, I will love it again.

The Memory Keeper cover

Warning: Probably Corny

September 12, 2011 / Lisa / 6 Comments

I have been receiving writing prompts (thank you Lisa) but have only posted the results here once as I hesitate to share my shaky attempts. With that said, one of the exercises was ‘What Runs Through My Veins Besides Blood’ and I want to post the result here. No editing again, no chance to revise, and I think it’s corny. But since it’s about writing, here goes, and feel free to skip to the end and tell me what runs through your veins.

My first gut reaction to the question was, of course, to answer ‘words’…

When I don’t write, when I choose the television, the book, the chores, I betray the gift, betray the words.

When I don’t write, when I give in to feelings of inadequacy, of limited ability, inexperience, I betray the story begging to be told.

When I don’t write, when I fear the untold story, fear not living up to its expectations, fear not being able to capture it, finish it, do it justice, I betray its soul, betray those living words.

When I don’t write, when I don’t feed words to my spirit, I betray myself, starve my being.

But when I do write, music fills that starving soul, the universe joins me, I soar, I am not alone, words bear me away into the story world, into dreams.

And when I do write, stress becomes manageable, troubles diminish, beauty comes into my world.

So then why do I not write every single second of every single minute?

Because it is too easy to forget, too easy to look away. Until I start to write, I am only caught up in the stress of life.

Until that moment when I force myself to dip back into a story.

And then it all comes rushing back and I wonder, why did I ever walk away?

Tribute on a Shelf

September 7, 2011December 22, 2014 / Lisa / 10 Comments

I unpacked some (but not nearly all) of our books recently. One whole, long shelf ended up being full of just Elizabeth Peters books. Those cracked and well-worn spines represented years of an author’s devotion to the craft. And those were just the ones she wrote under that pseudonym. To them you can add all the many books written as Barbara Michaels (any of you give yourself nightmares reading Ammie Come Home?), and her non-fiction books on archaeology written under her real name of Barbara Mertz. I notice her cover photos are starting to show her age, but she’s still writing.

Think about it. All those years of struggling with plot and character and continuity in her series, and editing. Now that’s love.

The first book I purchased of hers was back in the late 1970’s and was called Legend in Green Velvet. It was during the time period of Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt. You know, the gothic romance period. The book was set in Scotland and since I was madly in love with anything Scottish and had just started Scottish dancing, I counted out my seventy-five cents and bought it. Elizabeth Peters tricked me. It wasn’t a gothic romance. It was hilarious. It was a mystery. It had characters who weren’t perfect, and who were eccentric. Needless to say, when she followed that with the first in the Amelia Peabody series, I was hooked. All these years later I still anxiously wait for the next one, knowing that as she ages, the chances are good there won’t be more.

One of the things Elizabeth Peters has always done is insert ‘inside’ comments. If you’ve read all her books, you understand them. A character from one series wanders through another. An object important to one book shows up in another. A character says something that has to do with another story. I know there are other writers who do this, but she does it with a gentle hand and with the humor that is in all her books.

Another thing Elizabeth is very good at is showing the protagonist in stories written in first person. If you like to write in first person, I strongly urge you to read the Amelia Peabody series. The books have evolved over the years, but even in the early ones written in the 1980’s, she was very strong in this aspect of writing. Amelia has a view of herself that is at odds with the way everyone else sees her. And Elizabeth manages to show everyone’s opinions without stepping outside of Amelia’s mind. This is very strong in her later Peabody books.

I would say that Elizabeth Peters went a long way toward encouraging me to write. I was writing anyway by that time, in secret of course, but she instilled in me a desire to be able to pull a reader so fully into a story, to make them laugh out loud, and to make them want to be part of the character’s family for many years.

I can only hope that she has some more books in her because I’m not ready for her to be done writing. There’s still one more shelf to fill.