Identity Management

No, I’m not going to talk about single sign-on, LDAP, or strong passwords, so disappointed techies will be advised to keep moving.

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Okay, are we writers alone now? Good. Because I want to take a minute to discuss who we really are.

In the years I’ve been writing and meeting writers online, I’ve seen a wide range of attitudes toward the end result of our efforts. For some, just getting their work into the hands of a few friends is enough, while for others, print publication and financial success are the only markers that their long hours at the computer have not been in vain.

Why such a disparity in what a writer considers “success?”

Clearly, some of it is innate. Some people are naturally oriented toward the external trappings of success (such as a positive review in the New York Times) while others see success as something internal. (Who cares if anyone else likes it? I had fun!)

But there’s another element to all this that had eluded me until recently: Identity.

When you define yourself first and foremost as a writer, that means something to others, and you’d have to be made of stone to not be swayed by the cultural assumption that if you’re a writer, you therefore must be published. For those of us who see writing as our primary identity, a sense of true accomplishment can only come from commercial success.

Even if we hit the brass ring of traditional publication, that doesn’t mean the book will sell or that we'll ever be published again. Therefore it seems to me that we writers would be wise to better appreciate our other identities.

Most writers are fully capable of developing other artistic skills, so why not paint, learn a musical instrument, or sing? If you already do these things privately, maybe there’s a retirement home that would enjoy some new paintings or a piano concerto. Maybe there’s a church or civic choir that would appreciate your lovely voice.

Get some new certifications and develop new career goals. If you don’t have a non-writing career, why not do a little volunteer work?

Want to do something non-creative for a change? You could take up a sport. Go back to school. Learn to fix cars or re-upholster furniture. Plan a garden for spring. The possibilities are almost limitless.

Then when the query-go-round has got you down, your writing is only one piece of your identity that’s not going as well as you would like. People love your great ideas at the office. Your brownies/quilts/therapy pets were a hit at the retirement home. You finally mastered that tricky heel work in your flamenco dance or hit a shot on the golf course that made your buddies jealous.

No matter how much our writing lives mean to us, we’re more than our stories. When we stop narrowly defining our success, we become open to many more ways to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Let’s not succumb to the temptation to box ourselves into narrow ways of interpreting our lives.

Character Study: The Amazing Madame Violet

This is the fourth in a series of character introductions associated with my book, My New-Found Land.

Viona Haddler had all the answers from a very early age. That no one at the orphanage paid her any mind was a mere detail. Not only did she know what she wanted, but she had something none of the other orphanage kids had-- a silver trumpet in a leather case lined with purple velvet. It had belonged to her father, and although her teachers told her she had a tin ear, Viona knew better and would learn to play the darn thing if it took her a lifetime to do it!

At eighteen she was turned out into the world with nothing but the clothes on her back and the trumpet. Viona renamed herself Violet (which surely was the name she should've had-- the orphange must've read the papers wrong) and set out to earn her living as a musician.

Sadly, what little she could squeak out of the silver horn didn't appeal to paying audiences and Violet found herself playing on street corners for handouts from passersby. But her cute figure and bright red hair garnered attention and soon she had a boyfriend. The boyfriend had a band that played the local dives for food and tips. Violet wasn't allowed to play with them, but the food was nice and the sex was nicer.

Violet tried her best to manage the band's gigs, but for some reason they weren't interested in her suggestions. And when the baby came along, her boyfriend not only refused to marry her but wouldn't follow her advice about guarding his own safety and was picked up off the street by "recruiters" and sent to fight in the resource wars. If only he had listened to her!

Alone with her boy Aaron and her trumpet, Violet sought some means of support, finally happening upon a traveling carnival that thought her music was just fine. It wasn't a very good carnival-- even with her limited experience in such things, Violet could see that. But she would whip them into shape, oh yes she would!

She billed herself as The Amazing Madame Violet, and over the years she improved her act, adding a parrot and eventually a bicycle. She watched with pride as Aaron grew up and became an expert in running sideshow games. She suspected he might be cheating the customers, but their steadily growing nest egg quieted any concerns she might otherwise have had. Aaron wanted to buy her a house!

Someday soon, she would have the last laugh on all those people who dismissed her trumpet-playing and thought badly of her for having a son and no husband. She would sit on her front porch in a home of her very own and smile as she thought of all those smug people who once thought she would amount to nothing.

But in the meantime the show must go on. Now if only she could keep up with that damn parrot!

REMINDER: My New-Found Land is available in print or download at my Lulu Storefront. If you buy in September, let me know so I can enter you in a drawing for promotional giveaways!

The Wisdom of Mark Twain

I followed this link from someone’s blog today, and found it both amusing and thought-provoking.

Literary fashions come and go. Creative dialogue tags, long descriptive passages sans action, and phonetically-rendered dialogue are just a few fashions from an earlier era that are about as popular today as whalebone corsets and celluloid collars. But even though he wrote for different audience tastes, ol’ Sam Clemens had a good grasp of the basics:

From Twain’s critique of James Fenimore Cooper:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art. . .

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

Some things about writing are truly universal!

I would venture to say that as writers and critters, we should be careful to distinguish between critique of style vs critique of the “bones” of the story. If someone has read your entire story (as opposed to an outtake) and says, “I have trouble believing s/he would do that,” you might have a serious problem on your hands. But a comment about “too many adverbs” is stylistic. It's a recommendation that you read up on current literary fashions in your genre, and does not necessarily mean your work is fundamentally flawed.

The full text of Twain’s comments is here, and worth a read.

Gotta love that man!