To the gay community, in Maine and in all of America:
I apologize for my state. I apologize for the groundless fear that apparently still lives in so many of us: fear of what isn’t like us, fear of what we don’t understand or were taught is wrong, or never gave enough thought to. I’m sorry that there are still people living here who believe that those who are different are a threat to be put down and hidden away. I am sorry that the ignorance of the majority and the deliberate and very loud malice of a certain few has resulted in a terrible mistake: that somehow, a mere 52% of 50% of the registered voters in Maine have chosen to not only believe in their hearts that you are less than they are, but to deny you the same rights as they enjoy.
Most of all, I apologize for our federal government.
I am sorry that it doesn’t slough off the criticisms of the prejudiced and stand up for you– because this should never have been an issue brought to a popular vote. We don’t get to apply majority rules to civil rights, and somehow, through the bigotry of some people and the cowardice of others, we have allowed that to happen. The days when the word marriage had nothing but a religious connotation are long gone, if, in fact, they ever existed at all. Now marriage means the ability to raise a child together without fear of challenge to your parenthood; it means you can sit by the bed of your partner in a hospital without worrying that someone will tell you you’re not allowed to. It’s taxes, and health benefits, retirement, social security. At its heart, it’s a social recognition of your commitment to one another, and it is your right, as citizens of this country, a right as inalienable as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I am sorry that the blindness and the ignorance we saw win in my state this Tuesday are so obviously echoed –and encouraged– by some of the people we elected to protect the very rights that they’ve chosen to deny you, and to uphold the very principles they’ve violated by that denial. And I am sorry, so sorry, that those in power who do not believe that there are different classes of citizenship based on personal attributes did not have the courage to stand up for you. I voted some of these people into power myself.
I also voted on Tuesday. I could tell myself that’s enough, that I did my part– but it’s clearly not enough. There’s more to do. All I can say is that the fight isn’t over, sorry is not enough, and one day we shall overcome.
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever put anything flagrantly political on this blog. And I’m probably going to regret this later, because I think that was a deliberate choice on my part: but I just read an article saying that the voter turnout for today’s referendum election is predicted to be a whopping 35%, slightly more than usual for a non-election vote.
What the hell?
That’s the best we can do, Maine? 35% of our 1,316,456 people give enough of a damn about participating in the political process to stand in line for 20 minutes and color in some lines with a pen? A little under 461,000 people are going to decide the fate of excise tax, school consolidation, voter approval of government spending limits, bond matching, medical marijuana, same-sex marriage and a constitutional amendment? Are you kidding me?
Please vote, people. I’d love it if you’d also vote No on 1, because I’d like to think that we’ve crawled far enough away from the uglier parts of our history to finally stop denying our fellow humans the same rights as we enjoy for no other reason than because they act and believe differently than we do –but really, whatever you’re going to vote, just go vote. Take the time. Find a babysitter or bring your kid with you: you can. Lose a few bucks for a long lunch. Stand in line with your fellow Mainers, quietly or arguing the whole way, give your name to the tired-looking person at the desk, hunch over in that flimsy plastic booth and pick up your felt pen and take part in the process. Don’t give me that crap about how it doesn’t make a difference: the difference between 35% and 100% is pretty fucking important.
Here’s what you’re voting on. There are links in there to the actual legislation, and they’re not that long or that confusing: you should read them. Frankly, I think many of the campaigns on both sides of the issues are probably counting on the fact that you won’t.
Here’s how you can figure out where to go. Enter your address and hit GO. It will tell you where the polling place for your area is. It’ll even give you a map of it.
Here’s how you register, if you haven’t. In Maine you can register and vote all at once, so no excuses!
And, because I do have an opinion on 1 –a very strong one– here’s an article I think you should read.
So go. Participate. If it turns out the way you hoped, you can say you were part of it; if it doesn’t, you know you tried, and you were heard.
There’s a pretentious title for you, eh? Sorry, I’m feeling slightly ugh today, and this is all I got.
I was catching up on Nathan Bransford’s blog this morning and read this piece on writers and sensitivity. It was such good subject for a post that I felt like doing my own about it. Nathan’s post was interesting for the same reason many agents’ twitter feeds and blogs are interesting to me: it gives me a glimpse of what a day in the life of an agent is like, and the more of those I read, the more it sounds to me like agents take a lot of abuse from querying writers. Or, at minimum, some abuse that’s fairly memorable.
And this isn’t a surprise, is it? Anyone who was watching the fascinating mass-hissyfit that was #queryfail and then #agentfail got a pretty good look at what frustrated, rejected writers + public feedback + internet anonymity can add up to.
(In some cases, I should say. Not in all cases, or even most cases. I think the majority of We Who Query know how to take it on the chin without flinching: but the few who do have something angry to say often say it so loudly that the rest of us are kind of invisible by comparison.)
So here’s where I’ll just come out and say it: I get it. I’m sensitive about my writing.
That’s a no-brainer for me. I care about these characters. I spend endless hours thinking about word choice, theme, plot, you-name-it– I come up with a plot I like and an MC I love, and I jump in heart-first and I don’t look back till I hit THE END. I take it personally. I can’t not: if I didn’t care this much, I just don’t see how I could expect anybody else to. Now, I don’t think that’s a requirement to be dubbed a writer, and I know some very good writers who don’t feel this way… but it does seem to be a pretty common stage in the process, one that maybe some of us don’t ever leave.
And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Frankly, I think I work best this way.
~And now for the but!~
But... I do think there’s something wrong with letting that get in the way of 1) your learning curve, and 2) your career. If you can’t take a critique because to you it feels like a personal attack, then not only have you just wasted both your time and somebody else’s, but you don’t have much hope of getting better. If getting a rejection from an agent or editor is as painful to you as getting dumped… well, then maybe you should think about another way to pass the time, say stamp collecting. Because once other human beings are allowed into the weird little world(s) you built, you’re going to get kicked in the teeth at least a couple times. It’s inevitable. Get used to the idea. Pitch a fit about it and you can expect people will remember that about you first, and your talent second.
Care. By all means care: care till your eyes pop out and you bleed ink. You may get over that after a while (well okay, if your eyes actually pop out you may not), or it may stay with you forever. Just remember that when you move out of the messing-around-with-it realm into the I’d-like-to-get-paid-for-this realm, you’ve got to check your ego at the door. Out here very few people have time to make you feel better: out here honesty and bluntness are virtues, and if you listen long enough you will come to see them that way too. Because there’s always room for improvement, and for every fifty people who say no, if you’re lucky and patient and serious about your work, there may be that one who says yes. And that one is all it takes.
The lovely Lisa and Laura posted a challenge on their often hilarious blog (which if you haven’t yet visited, you definitely should) — post something online about a book you’ve read and loved. That seemed like the sort of throwdown I could get into, since I do it every now and then anyway, so I decided to take it a step up and list two I loved. These won’t be recent reads, because I’ve been saving my money for Christmas presents and whatnot: I’m going for books I’ve read in the last decade or so that really stayed with me.
Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey. And pretty much every other book in that series. Serious, detailed world-building, serious, detailed historical research, and serious, detailed sex. Carey’s heroine, Phedre no Dealaunay, is a servant of Naamah, otherwise known as a prostitute anywhere else in the world but in her beloved Terre de Ange, where the profession is sacred. She is also about the only person in the country in a position to save it when treason and ambition threaten to overthrow the new queen. Carey’s lyrical prose and intelligent, complex plot are only outshone by her amazing characterization –and yes, the detailed sex scenes. I learned a lot about writing those from reading this book.
Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh. It’s hard to know where to start describing this: not least because any summary invariably involves a major spoiler; so much of the book hinges on it that there’s no way around mentioning it. So I’m going to be ridiculously vague and say that this book is set around 200 years in the future, when humans have ventured out into space and come up with, invariably, a system of trade and a few wars. Cyteen takes place in a sector opposing Earth, where growing humans in labs and building them to be whatever you need is considered acceptable. There’s so much experimental psych and sociology in here I felt like I’d taken a college course by the time I finished the book, which wouldn’t necessarily sound like much fun — but believe me, it is. Cherryh weaves politics, psychology, betrayal, love and morality together flawlessly, her characters are all utterly believable, and her world-building is second to none. Combine that with a muscular, fast-moving plot and well, you get many happy hours of reading.
So there’s that. If you haven’t read them, do so: and spread some book lurve around today!
…Which is to say Yours Truly is hacking her grumbly, angsty way through the perils of BookMiddleLand, that long dark night of the novel, that valley of the shadow of the plot hole, that—
Yes, I really am trying to earn this blog title tonight, aren’t I?
It’s not my fault, I swear. I’m listening to Muse, and no music was better suited to purple in all purple’s adverby, emotive glory, than songs like Uprising and Butterflies and Hurricanes. Which is actually the roundabout way of getting to my point of the evening: I am slow, but not stuck, and I think I can thank Muse for this. Because I was stuck before I got this album. I was dreadfully, most thoroughly stuck, as I get oh, every two weeks or so. Not a big deal, except in my neurotic writer head, where every hour spent dithering over one idiotic word I’m going to delete in revisions anyway signifies The End Of The Whole Mess, and now I guess I’d better take up stamp collecting, because the well done gone dry.
God, I could have been a soap actress.
Anyway: back to Muse. Or music, I should say, specifically writing music. The Soundtrack. From what I’ve read on various forums, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and every other electronic medium we writer-types have and use, the folks who write in total silence seem to be in the minority these days. I can’t even claim I’m drowning out the noise of the world; that used to be the case, back when I thought 10,000 words was a real accomplishment –hell, these days I can’t clear my throat in under 10K– but now it’s mood-setter, and oh man, does it make a difference. I couldn’t tell you when that started to be the case for me. Once upon a time I found it impossible to write while music was playing. Then I only found it impossible to write while certain types of music were playing. (And, truth be told, I still find it hard to rub two brain cells together while country is playing. I think polka might actually give me an aneurysm.) Now –well, I can write in silence, and perhaps I ought to do so more often, so I don’t forget how, but gods, it’s almost Pavlovian how well it works. I may not write that much faster, but I feel more certain of my scenes and my character motivations, and far more confident about word choice. It’s a little astonishing, how quickly a change of song can result in a change of tone in a scene. I’ve had to choose my background music carefully, and what I’ve ended up with is a solid blend of electronica and a very (for me, anyway) fast paced story.
There’s a psychology paper in this somewhere, if I had any talent (or wit) for such things.
Artists for this WIP so far: the aforementioned Muse, Hybrid, Mythos, Crystal Method, and Moby.
So let’s hear it: have you got a preferred type of music for different WsIP?
Don’t tell it, show it. One of the first pieces of advice I got when I started on this crazy road –and that would be 8th grade, and a short story I wrote that just didn’t have an ending. An unthinkable seventeen pages in I brought it to my English teacher, who was cool that way, and she told me two things: 1) it looked like the start of a book (pause so 13 year old moi can faint from shock), and 2) I was summarizing a lot of things that deserved to be shown.
Eh? said I. But I did that. It’s right there. Look.
No, said she. You gave me the highlights. I don’t want Cliffs Notes, I want the play-by-play.
Oh, said I, trying to sound intelligent. And went home to sulk with great adolescent industry while I tried to figure out what the hell she meant.
Bless you, Miss Rough. It took me a decade or so, but I got it.
Summarize means to tell in or reduce to a summary (thank you, Merriam-Webster). Reduce is the key word here. It’s the bulleted list version of your scene. And it’s so damn easy to do: you know the scene, you know what your characters are thinking and/or learning, so you tell your reader, forgetting that 1) you reader hasn’t been in your head before, and deserves the grand tour, and 2) nobody actually liked listening to those book reports we had to give back in junior high.
Telling is the book report. Showing is Pictionary. (If you haven’t played this, for the love of dog go out and get it.) You have a thing, a concept like hitting a home run, and you have to get your teammates to say said thing without you actually telling them what it is. So you draw a bat, which due to your lackluster sketching skills looks extremely phallic, and suddenly everybody’s shouting dildo! You erase, and draw a ball. More adolescent giggling, Beavis and Butthead style. Then a cap. Eureka, we’ve got baseball now. People are hollering out things like Babe Ruth and Red Sox; some moron invariably 
bellows steroids! Shake your head frantically and keep scribbling: four bases, stick figure swinging the giant dildo, other stick figures with caps looking up, tiny ball flying over the packed bleachers. Bingo.
Okay, now just do the novel-writing version of that.
Easier said than done, right? Showing isn’t any one thing: it’s dialogue, and internal monologue, and setting, and action. It’s easier to just say what it’s not, which is narrative summary. Telling is just the recap of a scene that exists, at this point, only in your head; showing is getting the scene itself on paper in all its dialogue-tagged, adverb-spackled glory. I know this post is ridiculously long even for me, but I decided to go nuts and give examples, because I’ve spent a long time messing around with it, so I have some.
Version the first:
Our road trip started out badly and progressed, with speed more or less equal to what Aaron’s lead foot was forcing our little car to achieve, to much worse. We bickered like a pair of cranky old ladies over a really close bridge game, only with less dignity, prettier shoes, and far better background music. I’d come to the conclusion that going back home to Vermont was quite possibly the worst idea my roommate had ever come up with, and Aaron, in typical Aaron style, just dug in and threw stupid little clichés at me every time I questioned our mutual sanity. He even had the temerity to suggest I play tour guide.
That sounded only slightly less fun than gouging my own eyeballs out with a pair of tweezers ought to be.
Truth was, I was terrified, not only of what was happening to me, but of going home, and I was pretty sure Aaron knew it. Which didn’t help my mood, or his. So we snarked at each other until I started to think throwing myself out the door while we were going ninety on the beltway might be a viable alternative to another two days of this.
Version the second:
“I still don’t understand how you think this is going to help.”
“Maybe I’m just curious about where you grew up.”
That was a new one.
I looked over at Aaron. We’d been driving for over three hours and I’d already asked this question so many times I was sick of hearing it. I couldn’t imagine how sick of it Aaron must be. I’d gotten answers ranging from ‘you dreamed of it, it must mean something’ to ‘when in doubt go back to the beginning’, and finally ‘shut up, Dari’ –that last one with a rare edge that reminded me even my saint of a roommate had limits to his patience.
This answer, finally, sounded like the truth.
“Great,” I grumbled, and folded myself into one of the limited configurations possible in Aaron’s shiny two-year-old VW Golf. They’re pretty little cars, and they go like hell, but you can’t exactly sprawl in one. My beaten up old Camaro would have been a far worse choice, but at least I wouldn’t be scrunched up in the passenger seat like somebody’s used newspaper.
“You asked,” Aaron said peaceably. “What do you expect? I’ve known you for five years and you never talk about where you grew up, Dar. You know how many cousins I have, where I went to high school, hell, you’ve met my parents –and for all I know you were found wrapped in a blanket on a ski lift in Stowe.”
“I didn’t live anywhere near Stowe! Everyone thinks Stowe when they think Vermont. It’s a tiny little town, goddammit. There’s a lot more in Vermont that Stowe.”
“Well, you can play tour guide then. I’ve never been to New England.”
“You’re going to be cold, you bastard.”
Both are voice-y (or, well, I’d like to think so, anyway). Both tell you something about the MC, and her relationship to Sidekick A. Both kinda-sorta move the plot forward. And the 2nd version still has some summary in it, of course, because telling does have a place in your novel! However only one of these is a scene. The other one is a disembodied voice in a dark room.
There’s risks to showing, of course, that you avoid in narrative summary. Showing is, by its nature, less accurate than telling: it leaves room for interpretation. For example I don’t know for sure that you got how scared my MC is in the 2nd version. There’s space between a character’s actions and their words that a reader will fill in with whatever fits best to their way of thinking. It means you can’t guarantee that your point is understood precisely as you wanted. It means that you need to have confidence in a) your ability to make your point without spelling it out, and b) your reader’s ability to see home run in the phallic-looking baseball bat and the stick figures standing on the diamonds. It requires a certain amount of trust.
It also, of course, means that you need to practice drawing your baseball bats. Figuratively speaking.
To see more fun posts about show vs. tell today, particularly some great examples of when telling is a good thing and how to use it, check out these ladies!
Bryn Greenwood (Redzilla) Gretchen McNeill (Blond) Tracy Martin (Ink) K.A. Stewart (Tas) Wendy Cebula (Wendy) Dee Garretson (Melia)Autumn in Maine is usually worth seeing, when it’s not so rainy-windy you have to walk with your eyes closed, that is. I took this pic with my cell phone last week, driving from work to pick up the laundry (yes, I know: bad girl for messing with my phone while driving, but it was worth it). We didn’t get any rain, but somebody somewhere must have, because this rainbow just popped up out of nowhere and hung around for a good 15 minutes.
Is a pretty.
Anyway, it totally made up for what was otherwise quite a bitch of a day, so I thought I’d share. Happy Friday, folks.
