I struggled with the last post written a couple of days ago.  It didn’t flow, didn’t feel right, felt like I was trying too hard, all those normal things when the universe is trying to tell you that maybe it’s not the right time to write.  And then today I was walking in rare sunshine along the river with a friend, actually doing something work related, and we came across a woman painting.  Her easel was set up in a bit of shade from an old maple tree, there was a lovely breeze in the leaves above her, the river was rushing along singing, and she was painting an oil of the mountain.

As my friend and I went about our work, I mentioned that I had always wanted to draw.  Some of you know that my brother is a very talented artist.  I said the same thing to him once and he said, ‘but you draw with words’, which is still one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.  Today however, my friend said that it’s all about letting go.  I had to walk in silence a few seconds to think about what she said.

Letting go of the sense of failure before you even begin to try.

Letting go of embarrassment at the results of those beginning baby steps.

And then she said it was true of writing, too.  Of course she’s right because those simple words can be true of so many things.

Where would you be right now if you had never let go, never started writing, never faced that awful beginner prose that we all still save and pull out for comic relief, and to reassure ourselves that we really are growing as writers?

I think I’d be pretty miserable and without a clue why.  I somehow let go without even realizing that was what I was doing, and jumped joyfully onto that blank page, pen in hand, and wrote in spite of everything that said I shouldn’t.  I look back on that now and think, well it was easy to let go because writing gave me joy.

That’s hindsight.  That’s me ignoring the more accurate memories of really awful writing.  Honestly though, the writing might have been awful, but at the time I loved those words, saw beauty in them, and found happiness.  Okay, truly honest, I still love that early writing, and find good things buried in there, and now, find lots to laugh over so it still gives me joy, just for different reasons.  I have to admit, that first story written in pencil on lined paper in 1969 that involved me and Huckleberry Finn going on some really corny adventures, reminds me of how it felt to be in the middle of my first crush.  Guaranteed to bring a smile of reminiscence at those oh-so-young daydreams.

Anyway, letting go.  What a simple, deep concept to ponder for a while.

I love Yahoo Answers, in particular, the ‘Books and Authors’ section.  It’s a great way to avoid writing while justifying playing on the internet.  Seriously though, I learn a lot by answering other’s questions on writing.  I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.  If I’m going to answer someone I have to be sure I know what I’m talking about so that I don’t give out false help.

Which brings me to the question I ran across today.  ‘How do I write a great novel?’

My question is, ‘how do I answer that?’

First, what defines a ‘great’ novel?  What publisher picks it up?  How big the advance is?  How many people read it?  If it’s still on bookshelves forty years from now?  How much sex is in the pages?  How lurid the cover is?

Or, how easily the story world transports you away from your daily grind, how the dialog makes you laugh or cry, how loudly you cheer for the protagonist, how strongly you desire a just reward for the antagonist…

Probably, for those of us who are readers, and those of us who aspire to improve our craft, it’s the second set of questions.  But when I was on the Answers forum, here are the two answers the person received.  ‘Read a lot’ and, believe it or not, ‘Put in lots of description, paragraphs of it, with no dialog’.  Personally, I think the second was a person simply being rude, or thinking they were being funny.  That irritates me because no matter how we might judge the intelligence level of a person asking a question, they still deserve dignity and respect.  But anyway, telling the person to read a lot is good advice as we all know.  Yet so much more is needed.

So for me, I paraphrase this question to be, ‘How can I make my story better?’

I would answer myself, read a lot.

And then I’d start down the list of self-editing tools, like reading out loud, asking trusted friends for feedback, revising, cutting, and so forth.  All the things that anyone who has been working at this for any length of time most likely knows.

I have to admit though, in the end, I still cannot take a finished piece and judge it to be a ‘great’ novel.  I might be happy with it, faults and all, but that’s about it.  I guess that means there’s no way for me to answer the question.  I’d love to hear what others judge as great, and how others judge their finished work.  Are you ever happy enough with your finished piece to put it down on the table and say, ‘wow, that was a great story’?

The news today carries a story about an American man supposedly caught posing as a gay Damascus girl.  Her blog caught attention because of persecution.  Now the man says that all facts in the blog posts are true ‘on the ground’ and that he doesn’t believe he’s hurt anyone.  We’ve seen this sort of thing before, where people tell a story and pass it off as true.  In this case the man has done nothing in my opinion, but hurt a cause.  How much more impact would his words have had if he’d been up front with who he was, what his job was, and shared true stories? 

One of my stories has a character I based loosely on my mother.  I killed the character off early in the story, and the writer’s group had a collective fit because they said, rightly so, that she was a huge source of conflict for the protagonist.  I rewrote her back to life, and she ended up having a major role in the story, and a huge influence on the protagonist’s growth.  If any of my siblings ever read this story, they will see mom in the words.  But will they see that fact is woven through fiction, or will they think that the protagonist’s problems with her mother were mine?  Either way, I’m not making changes out of fear of what the family will say.  My siblings and I have strong relationships and I trust them to be know where the boundaries blur.  But it reminds me of a friend who won’t try to publish a story until her parents have passed away.  Or the interview I read with an author who ended up being estranged from his father because of a memoir. 

Authors know they are writing fiction, even if bits and pieces are pulled from life, and they trust their readers to understand that.  We aren’t labeling our work as fact, as this author of the blog did.  We build a bridge of trust to our readers, and that bridge must stay stable.  This man will now have a hard time getting anyone to believe what he says.  For instance, when he said in the article that the ‘facts’ underlying the deception were true, my first thought was, ‘sure they are, buddy’. 

If there is a gay girl in Damascus somewhere who is struggling with life, how will she now tell her story to the world?  Who will believe her?  How many people will say, ‘oh, here’s that guy from Georgia again’?  His fiction has potentially caused outflowing ripples of harm that he cannot fathom.  He has broken that contract of trust between a writer and a reader.

Recently I received a creepy email at my work, that ended up forwarded to Homeland Security.  My son, who is much more computer literate than I, said ‘oh mom, it’s probably a troll’.  Can you picture the rolling of a teenager’s eyes as he said that?  He explained a troll is someone who goes into the internet world creating falsehoods to stir things up and get people upset.  I said, ‘the guy has a Facebook page!’ and my son’s response was to show me how easy it is to fake a Facebook page.  My internet innocence was lost. 

But it points back to fiction posing as fact and how the internet world has dramatically changed the relationship of trust between a writer and a reader.  I believe we writers now have an even stronger obligation to make sure the words we lay down on our blankets of writing have the story threads colored honestly.  To carry the analogy further, a blanket of fiction will have threads of fact and fiction interwoven.  A blanket of non-fiction should be woven very differently, and labeled very clearly.