For me, inspiration is much the same thing as realization. Thinking about a factory setting in my novel in progress, Wash Away, I suddenly realized that the building had been a brewery before it became a chemical plant. “Realized” is the only appropriate word I could use here; it simply struck me. Even though this place is completely an artifact of my own imagination, I discovered a piece of its history.
This year for NaNoWriMo – and wish me luck with this approach, because I have no idea if it will work – I decided to write thirty scenes for my novel, one a day during November. I have a lot of threads in play, and they all need to go in certain directions, but a linear/sequential approach seems more difficult than necessary, since they’re all jumbled up in my mind. So I wrote thirty scene cards, which I will attack one at a time starting on Sunday.
Writing thirty scene cards required thirty small acts of inspiration. Inspiration is elusive, and everybody knows that. The best you can do is increase your odds. I believe in trying to cultivate a state of active waiting. The active part is attention and preparedness. If there is a place in my story and it needs a certain part, I can at least try to define the shape of that part, and be ready to recognize it when it happens to roll by me.
It’s such a presumptuous idea, to write a blog post about inspiration, as if I had it by the tail. I don’t, and I’m deeply aware that this is an area subject to what Dr. Laurie Santos calls “The G.I. Joe Fallacy.” The G.I. Joe Fallacy is mistakenly thinking that because you understand something, that understanding will change your behavior. (It comes from the phrase “Knowing is half the battle!” which I remember well from cartoon PSAs when I grew up.) I may be aware that active waiting is the best way to cultivate moments of inspiration. That doesn’t make the waiting any easier for me.
Franz Kafka wrote, in a notebook intended only for himself: “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Robert Pirsig, in his unparalleled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, equated waiting for inspiration with the Zen state of nothingness in consciousness. If you’re trying to remove a motorcycle’s cover plate but you accidentally tear the head off the screw, you’re stuck. But wait, and “no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. … The solutions all are simple after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.”
Impede, implode, implant your data
Interpose apocalyptic fear
The dead are whispering wise advice
Somehow you cannot hear
The watchers know your search behavior
All your favorite sites for girls and guns
Computer eye, unblinking at you
Compiling all your deeds undone
So God led you down into the shadows
Trapped in hidden mechanism gears
Step on the gas, pedestrians scatter
Trade your life and dreams for a career
Secure your bunker, disguise your weapons
Nervous laughter edged with helpless rage
The drooling gibberish, senseless babble
Push the bird back in the cage
Feeling way too fine, that's the sign
You're about to crash
Your stardust wand, that Disney crap
Match it with your sleek stiletto blade
Spiced up, spaced out, packing heat
Jittered, jagged, and all frayed
That swirling flock of blackbirds
Flat and dreadful as a falling pane of glass
Heartbeat and breath, warmth and sleep
For what, you cannot ask
Feeling way too fine, that's the sign
You're about to crash
October is prep time for National Novel Writing Month in November. I’ll be racing for 50,000 words next month, just like thousands of others around the world. One of the best books I’ve read about writing is No Plot? No Problem!, by Chris Baty, who is the founder of NaNoWriMo. At the risk of taking all the fun out of it (it’s a really enjoyable read), here are the notes I took from this book last October while I was prepping for NaNo 2019. Think of this as a matted tangle of good advice that probably makes very little sense out of context. I highly recommend you read the book instead.
“Writing for its own sake has surprising rewards.” Seek to achieve the zone where the writer becomes a passive conduit for the story.
The deadline is the essential motivator. Low expectations, high yield, exuberant imperfection.
Find time by analyzing your own daily schedule. Set aside the internet, non-writing friends, and television. Approach scheduling with light heart and open mind.
In writing at home, isolate yourself, use uninterrupted blocks of time, limit your writing to those times, don’t write in view of a bed, be comfortable, keep the writing area neat.
Listen to the voice of the universe giving you material; use a notebook to write it down.
Benefits of limited planning: you might stumble across something brilliant; planning becomes an excuse to put off writing; prewriting takes the fun out of writing.
What, to you, makes a good novel? What is the novel you want to read?
What are the things that bore or depress you in novels? Make these two lists. If you won’t enjoy reading it, you won’t enjoy writing it.
Pitch the plot to yourself, from start to finish, repeatedly.
What would happen if we added an orangutan to the mix?
The story suggests its own setting. Model your settings on real-life locations you know.
During week one: Confiscate the inner editor.
Take the challenge seriously. But do not take the work too seriously. Ride the momentum. Don’t delete, but mark sections to be deleted.
Keep a novel notes file. Don’t tell anybody your story.
Write about something that scares you. Ask somebody to tell you about their strange uncle.
Watch a good TV show with analysis in mind.
Don’t feel like each chapter has to be right before moving on to the next one.
Split up writing sessions, two a day, and write every day during week one. Wake up 30 minutes early.
Week two: Still having no plot is not uncommon. Characters may rise and fall in importance. “Don’t get it right, get it written.”
When you’re not writing, be open to “plot flashes.”
Create notes within the story to indicate idea changes, don’t go back and change earlier chapters.
Push yourself to exhaustion because you know you’ve got the potential.
Switch to writing on paper sometimes.
End your writing sessions in mid-sentence.
Week three: Catch up on any word debt. Feel gravity taking effect as the trail turns downhill. Let the momentum fly. Break things, break a character’s arc. Add more conflict.
Week four: Finish. Write the ending, regardless of how far away you think you are. Come-from behind victories are a time-honored part of NaNoWriMo.
Good luck to anybody who is participating this November. God bless NaNoWriMo and Chris Baty.
I’m tremendously pleased this week to interview an author I really admire: Susan Balogh. Susan is a holistic healing and happiness coach – and writer! – whose 2019 book, 100 Days of Actions and Intentions To Create the Life You Wish For, is something like a detailed treasure map to living a happier, more fulfilled life. Every page sparkles with insights and guidance, with practices each day to bring the experiences to life. Here is a beautiful quote from the book:
“When you’ve brought your mind and body into harmony with the natural free spirit within you, you allow the wellbeing to flow, and when it flows, all good things come your way with effortless ease.”
Susan, how would you describe your book, 100 Days of Actions and Intentions To Create the Life You Wish For?
The overall goal of the book is to help you feel better on a daily basis so that you begin to attract healthier, happier experiences and relationships. It’s also meant to help readers believe in themselves and believe in their desires, as well as their ability to achieve them. I really wanted them to feel as though the words they were hearing were specifically meant for them, so I tried to make it very relatable. Since it’s meant to help you practice feeling how you want to feel, it’s written from the reader’s point of view. I did my best to design it in a way that would gradually build up their positive momentum. The idea was to keep leveling up to a higher level of wellbeing throughout the book.
Your book is structured with readings, guidance, and actions daily over a 100-day period. How did you choose this structure, and did you find it easy to work with while you were writing your book?
For the reader’s best possible results for a personal transformation, I felt it was important to encourage a daily practice. It also needed to be long enough to practice the actions and intentions until they became a routine thought or habit, if so desired.
Each chapter has its own topic with a beginning and ending. That made it quite easy to write the book. However, I made it all-inclusive of anything I felt was important to include about life. I wanted it to feel a bit like a handbook for life that could help someone feel better from morning to night. That was the goal, and it became a lengthy project that was well worth my time!
Your book is also structured with three major 30-day sections. Can you give us an overview of each of the three sections?
Each step is meant to help you practice a feeling until it becomes a part of who you are. The first thirty days are meant to help you practice the feeling of total wellbeing.
The second step is practicing more love and appreciation for yourself and all that life brings you. It’s focused on improving your relationship with yourself and others, and feeling more deeply satisfied with your life.
Step three is meant to help you achieve an abundance mindset and gain clarity on your wishes and dreams.
Who are some of the authors who have influenced you? What books would you like to recommend?
Deepak Chopra was one of my favorites when I started becoming more purposeful in my thinking. I loved The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and kept it close for a lot of years.
Another somewhat unusual writer and a favorite of mine is Wallace D. Wattles, who wrote his books in the early 1900’s, three of the most popular being The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Well, and the Science of Being Great.
Is there a time of day you like to write? A certain place you like to write?
I have found myself writing morning, noon, and night, and haven’t found a favorite time yet. However, some of my favorite moments are those I’ve spent writing on my laptop and sipping on wine, while seated at a restaurant patio that overlooked the water. I also tend to wake up in the morning with an idea for a new book or the book I’m writing and speak it right into my phone to get the idea in there before it’s forgotten.
Do you write every day? Do you outline before you write?
I am in the habit of writing every day, yes. I’m usually eager to get to it and I find it so exciting that it never feels like work. Generally I get a whole bunch of ideas that keep coming again and again, and then I finally stop to look at all of it and try to put it in some kind of order. I think I feel better putting down the ideas when I think of them. But oddly, I often end up starting over and ignoring everything I wrote down. Ha! But I find it all comes back to me.
When I am caught up in a writing project, I know I sometimes dream about the characters or dream I am writing. Have you had an experience like that? Are you an intuitive writer?
I often imagine I have a client or potential reader sitting in front of me and that helps me think of what they may need or want to hear. Much of what I write is based on what I’ve learned in my own personal experiences, as well as the research I did over a period of many years when I needed it for my own self-healing purposes. Since I never refer to anything as I write, I consider myself a very intuitive writer. I feel that it’s the best way to write; from the heart. And I often feel guided as I’m writing.
How have you promoted your book? Has the pandemic interfered with your plans for promotion? Do you think the marketing of your book has gone according to plan?
When the book first came out on 2019 I had it on a few discounted book promotion sites that were very helpful. I have also enjoyed doing several book signings and presentations at various book stores and libraries. I did some advertising through Amazon that seemed to go well. Since the pandemic began I’ve been so focused on writing new books that I haven’t thought of any upcoming plans for promotion. I do things rather spontaneously, rather than by following a plan.
What new writing projects do you have coming up that you’re excited to tell us about?
I’m finishing up now on a self-discovery workbook that is based on step 1 of the first book and should be available in a couple weeks. I plan to do step two and three as well. And I have written outlines for several books that will become my new journal series. I intend to have a couple of those out before Christmas as well.
Honestly, my favorite part of having my books written is that I can keep them on hand and give them to someone I meet that might enjoy it. It’s a thrill for me every time.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
I believe there’s a book in each and every one of us. If you know something of value to someone else, such as a life lesson you learned or a great story to tell, there’s someone out there who wants to read it. And it can be so exhilarating to see your book out there and to know there are people around the world who are reading it. It’s much easier than you think it is. Do it well. Do it with heart. And let it be fun. You can even make a career out of it if you want to.
Thank you for a great interview, and best of luck, Susan!
A friend suggested I write a blog post about my “process of developing characters.” Caution: questionable advice ahead!
Fiction can’t exist without characters, but the extent to which characters are developed can vary a great deal from novel to novel. I’ll point to Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite novels, as an example of a book where the characters are never developed any further than the absolute minimum. We’re not told anything about anybody, beyond the details that propel the story forward.
The NaNo Prep 101 workbook, a resource offered for participants in NaNoWriMo, suggests 46 questions for a writer to answer about the fictional characters they are creating. I waver in my opinion, whether that’s admirable or ridiculous. I don’t think much about my characters before I start writing. The story will create them; the narrative as it spins out tells me about them.
In a graphic novel, the reader knows what every character looks like from the very first panel. In a traditional novel, you never know what the characters look like in the reader’s mind. A writer can set some boundaries by spelling out a tedious physical description, but unless certain features are critical to the plot, what’s the point? Let the reader’s imagination run wild! In my completed YA manuscript Silver Sparks, I didn’t keep a vision of central character Kaneia Stellivar’s face in my mind as I wrote. When Hollywood comes calling for that book, they can cast any actress of the right age, as far as I am concerned.
Characters in novels come to life in what they say and what they do. In particular, they reveal themselves by interacting with each other in dialogue. In my writing, I want characters’ voices to be distinguishable from each other. But the road to a distinct character voice is strewn with hazards. Bad accents, drawls, overactive vocabulary, verbal tics, signature words or phrases – these can easily become a point of scorn if used poorly.
One of the reasons I usually write in first person is because I want to have one character who observes and filters everybody else. A central character narrates in her own voice, and she serves to create all the other characters by virtue of their relationship to her. I like the mechanics of a storyline where all the judgments and assessments are made by one character.
Someday, maybe, I’ll rewrite this blog post after I’ve recently read Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, and I’ll reach 100% opposite conclusions. There is a beautiful example of a character-driven story.
Imagine a character grid, six rows by six columns. There are 36 positions. In the first 26 positions are the letters of the alphabet. The numbers 0 through 9 are in the final positions. Now you have a perfectly simple encoding device: identify a row and a column in order to specify any character.
This coding mechanism has the advantage of being simple to use, either to encode or decode a message. (Its disadvantages are many, including the lack of any punctuation.) Every character requires two symbols, from a set of (at least) six symbols. The better you can conceal the meaning of the six symbols, the more difficult it will be for someone who doesn’t understand the code to break it.
In the novel I’m currently writing, the characters use the numbers on a digital clock to create a key for the six symbols. When you look at a digital clock, the time is shown using the numbers 0-9 in four positions. For each digit, there are seven small LED bars used to make up the shape of the number. Four of the bars are vertical: two on the left and two on the right. The other three bars are horizontal: top, middle, and bottom.
The number 8 uses all seven bars. In this code key, 8 is used to represent the first row or first column.
Six bars are used to form three different numbers on a clock: 0, 6, and 9. In our code key, it’s a dealer’s choice which to use to represent the second row or second column. Use a 0, 6, or 9 randomly.
Similarly, the digital clock has three numbers that use five bars apiece: 2, 3, and 5. Use 2, 3, or 5 to represent the third row or column. This “shuffle” element in the second and third positions contributes to the opaque nature of the code. Ten characters are used to represent only six positions.
Using four bars, the number 4 represents the fourth row or fourth column. The number 7 uses three bars; it signifies the fifth row or column. Finally, all that remains is the character that only uses two of the digital clock’s LED bars: the number 1, therefore used to denote the sixth row or sixth column.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the first time I used the Internet. (This statement is accurate within an estimated range of eight months in either direction.) Thirty years ago today, plus or minus, I learned how to use email on the George Washington University VM server, and I joined a mailing list for writers.
As far as I’m concerned, the first killer app of the Internet was not Gopher or Usenet or FTP, but a mail-list management platform called Listserv. You sent a “subscribe” command via email to the Listserv host, and it plugged you in to the discussion list you requested. Soon your inbox was bursting with on-topic and off-topic messages from people you didn’t know who shared your interest.
In 1990, a lot of the available discussion lists were technical, since IT people made up the majority of users of email. (We spelled it “e-mail” back then.) There were also fan groups for your favorite bands, as long as those bands were the Grateful Dead, Indigo Girls, or Blue Oyster Cult. There must have been others, but those are the three I can verify.
The WRITERS list became an important community for me. I’ve come to realize that there were times in my life where I thought of myself as a writer, and other times when that wasn’t really part of my identity. Being a member of a group of writers has always been part of what keeps me engaged and working. This electronic forum was my support group in the early 1990s, and I am grateful to all the people who were a part of it. I got to know a lot of interesting people, and I never met most of them.
An online group enables collaboration in a way that in-person groups don’t. You’re exchanging words anyway, so why not do a writing project together? Somebody on the WRITERS list, and I’m very sorry I can’t credit this person but I don’t remember who it was, invented a fictional newspaper called the PARSONS MESSENGER & INTELLIGENCER. Parsons was a mythical small town in Iowa served by a weekly rag with a cranky and quirky staff of writers. I had the privilege to edit one of the last issues of the PM&I, with more than a dozen contributors.
As far as I can determine, there is no archive of the WRITERS listserv, and all the issues of the PARSONS MESSENGER & INTELLIGENCER are lost to time, except for this one.
While I was in high school in the early 1970s, the University of Iowa was building a new Music Building along the Iowa River. This was the name I knew it by: New Music Building. My friends and I were actively interested in the construction. I followed a group one time into the catwalk area of Hancher Auditorium. It must have been a Sunday because no work crews were around. My friends walked across a plank that had been laid across two very high lighting points. I refused to cross it, and I still think of that today as one of the moments I cheated death.
If you looked at the New Music Building from the opposite side of the river, it was not too far-fetched to see it as a giant machine enclosure. One of my friends called it the “Thing of Great Power.” This became our alternate name for the New Music Building, the “TOGP.”
On the grounds of the TOGP were four huge limestone blocks in a group: three standing upright and one on its side. I didn’t have any idea why they were there until I attended the University of Iowa myself and spent one brief semester in my sophomore year as an art major. The artist, Luther Utterback, came to talk with our class. I don’t remember much about what he said, but it was an evolutionary experience for me. I learned that there was such a thing as public art, environmental art. I discovered that these weren’t just four rocks dumped onto the lawn, but that they had been quarried and placed according to a design, and that a competition had selected that design to be awarded the public art contract. The art work had an intended time scale of centuries, as the blocks would settle into the landscape, adjusting and adapting to the geologic forces of nature.
I have a vague and questionable memory that the sculptor told us, in that class meeting, that there were actually five blocks of stone in this installation, but that one was completely buried. I can’t find any confirmation today and it’s possible I made up that memory, or that it came from a different art project.
I became interested in public art and I recall that I wrote a class essay assignment about an abstract metal sculpture by Richard Field that was in front of the Iowa City Civic Center. My casual impression of this work is that it looked like a giant insect with antennae and legs. I learned that its title was “Triaxal Hemicylindrical.” Standing in front of this work, contemplating its title, I saw with a flash of insight that it did have three axes and it was entirely made up of split cylinders in two different sizes. It was geometrically exactly what the artist called it.
In 2008 the Iowa River flooded to historic levels and the Music Building and Hancher Auditorium were destroyed. It didn’t occur to me until today to wonder what happened to Luther Utterback’s stone blocks. Apparently they weren’t washed down the river in an adaptation to the geologic forces of nature. According to a University of Iowa web site, in 2013 the sculpture was “relocated on the grounds for a new Hancher Auditorium.”
My current novel-in-progress (Wash Away, but that’s a working title, depending on how much I can work the river into the storyline) includes a corporation that has developed an artificial intelligence in order to automate its factory. The AI has begun to build robots so that it can take over customer-service jobs. It has named itself.
Honestly, I don’t know why every fiction writer doesn’t find AI to be irresistible. Imagine the strange characters that will result from non-human intelligences trying to reprogram themselves to thrive in a human world. AI will take character-building into unmapped territory.
I’m trying not to write a science-fiction novel – that’s my #1 author guideline on this project. Some early draft chapters got tossed when my writing group friends said they sounded “futuristic.” But don’t you know: personal robotics, automated manufacturing, self-driving delivery vehicles, and AI chatbots are already here? It’s a present-day novel! As William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”
These technologies are worth knowing about, if you want to be informed, or justifiably scared. The librarian in me wants to provide a bibliography, but I’ll restrict myself to saying that The New Yorker’s coverage in this area has been excellent. Look up “How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?” by Tad Friend, or “What Happens When Machines Learn to Write Poetry” by Dan Rockmore, or “Learning to Love Robots” by Patricia Marx. These are mainstream business technologies now. There’s nothing futuristic, I hope, about a humble handmade factory AI that wants to pull itself up by its bootstraps into a white-collar job.
An outstanding research resource for me has been a book called Possible Minds, edited by John Brockman. I don’t know much about Mr. Brockman, but he seems to be a prolific thinker and writer, and if you want to be impressed by the length of an Amazon.com author page, go see about him. This book contains essays on AI by 25 top modern intellectuals and scientists. The consensus seems to be that the development of self-programming, machine-learning artificial intelligence is likely to be a major turning point in human history. Where it turns us, there wasn’t much agreement about that.
An endearing oddity of this book is that all the essays have been structured so that they refer back to the research and ideas of Norbert Wiener, who coined the word “cybernetics” in 1950. That was decades before the personal computer, before silicon processors, before the Internet. All the same, some of Wiener’s insights have held up.
An important topic for consideration about AI is what is euphemistically called “value alignment”: making certain that that any future AI systems pursue goals that are beneficial to humans, even though these systems will not be human themselves. Intelligence on earth has come to exist only through the thorny and tortuous process of natural evolution, and so human intelligence may be bound by constraints that are not even knowable to us. Now, soon, for the first time, we will have an intelligence that has not evolved. How will it think differently? How will we guide it and how will we know if it’s taking a destructive path? And will we be able to stop it if it does? One of the essayists points out that if humans create a superintelligent machine that has an off switch, the first thing the machine will do will be to disable the switch.
My grateful thanks to Kayla King, who interviewed me this week for a guest post on her blog series, “Pages Penned in Pandemic.” Kayla is a terrific writer, and a great friend, and I am lucky enough to be avidly reading the draft chapters of her next novel. She’s got an unlimited future.
The “Pages Penned in Pandemic” series of blog posts is about the writing life in 2020 and how writers have adjusted as unprecedented changes erupt around them. I am somebody who needs contact with other writers to motivate me to get work done. A scheduled meeting on the calendar is a prime motivator for me. My groups used to meet in person, but now we meet online. I’m an ex-IT administrator, so the software of choice is of interest to me: Google Hangouts for one group, GoToMeeting for the other. But everybody uses “zoom” as the generic verb for this type of meeting now.
The virus keeps me apart from the other writers in my groups, but in a broader sense, a virus brought us together in the first place. William S. Burroughs was the writer who first said “Language is a virus.” (I’ve got a minor bias against science fiction, so I’ll record the rest of his quote in parentheses: “from outer space.”) For me, the human imagination is something like a receptor field that responds instantly to everything it’s fed. It’s a wide-open immune system.
Writers hope their ideas will catch on and fire the readers’ imaginations. Songwriters hope their every chorus and hook is a potential earworm. YA/fantasy writers can only wish that their imaginary worlds would spread as infectiously as J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts did.
On social media, with our attention tuned to the minimum, we get exposed to graphic memes. A meme triggers, first, an evaluation about whether we agree with its viewpoint. If yes: share. That’s the flow chart for a lot of Facebook users I know. There’s no pause for fact-checking or for making a judgment about the reliability of a meme’s source. We spread it virally, without thought.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s recent report made public that the Russian military GRU unit continues to interfere in American politics. One of their methods is disseminating memes that are designed to mislead and confuse. Both left-wing and right-wing users are targeted. Senator Mark Warner, vice-chair of the committee, commented that he’s afraid Americans “unwittingly” share the disinformation and propaganda. I admire the restraint in that word “unwittingly.” For me, most of the time, I want to shout “You’re a Russian dupe!” every time I see one of these in my feed.
The word “meme” in its broader sense means any idea that can be shared, imitated, replicated, mirrored. A meme is an intellectual virus, and language arose in the human race because it was a meme whose time had come. Susan Blackmore in her remarkable book The Meme Machine made the case for the idea that memes were responsible for the evolution of the human brain. Our brains became big because we wanted to share our thoughts with each other. We’re super-spreaders.
