The Dark Night of The Soul

Otherwise known as the All Hope is Lost moment.

This is not about the Dark Night of The Soul that may or may not precede your second plot point. This blog post is about that terrifying moment that you (if you’re anything like me) will have at least once before your novel is finished.

You’ve poured your heart and soul into your concept. You’ve painstakingly mapped out your scenes, and then deviated from that path eleventy billion times. You’ve written until your fingers were too numb to write another word, or until you were too emotionally exhausted to form a coherent sentence. Sometimes you laughed, sometimes you cried. You felt that excited jolt of electricity when you wrote something you thought was brilliant, AND you’ve torn your hair out in frustration when you just couldn’t convey the right emotion or get a piece of dialog just right.

You’ve probably also had days where you adored your work in progress, and felt it was the best piece of fiction you have ever written. Days where you had hope. Hope, much like Destiny, is a fickle bitch.

Then your inner editor and your inner critic take up arms together. Their target? Your inner writer; that wide-eyed hopeful part of you that you somehow manages to cling to long after childhood. Your inner writer is your imagination, your optimism… he or she is the part of you that still wants to change the world, one word at a time.

But the twin demons on your shoulders don’t want to let that happen. All of a sudden your palms are sweaty and your heart is jack-rabbiting in your chest. Your mouth is dry. Your fingers are trembling.

You’re too wordy. You’re not wordy enough. Is that really an adverb? Oh my God, there’s more than one. That sentence is a run on, and what in the hell is your deal with parenthesis? And seriously, just how many times do you think you can slip into passive voice in one chapter? Your main character is whiney. Or worse, boring. Or even worse, a super mega bad-ass with more superpowers than all of the Justice League put together and all of your plot points and beautiful complications are falling flat because he or she can just bat them away. Your plot, your brilliantly wonderful complex plot, is trite. And the story that you fell so deeply in love with is so ridiculous that no one in their right mind would want to read it. This scene makes no sense. And there are five more adverbs. Why did you write that character in the first place? Trope much?

ENOUGH.

This is only your first draft. Or second. Or tenth. Maybe this is the first novel you’ve ever written. Maybe this is your seventy-fifth. Regardless, you have two options. Yes, only two (that my panic-seized brain can think of, at least).

1) Stop Writing.
2) Keep writing.

Which is it going to be?
How do you decide?
Why did you start writing this novel/script/story?

For me it was simple. It was keeping me up at night.
And that is why PAWN has been the hardest story I’ve ever written. And the most exciting. I love the world my novel is set in, the mythology that surrounds it and the real life legends that inspired it. I’m in love with my main character, Elle. She’s so broken, and so flawed but she’s still so determined. I laugh when she laughs, and I cry when she cries. I want to tell her story, and I want to tell to the very best of my ability. Why? Because I want just one person to see her as I do. Maybe it’s a selfish thing. Maybe it’s an artist thing. This story, this world, these characters touch my heart in a way no other characters I’ve written ever have.

I want it on the page. I want to say I finished it. I want to curl up in bed with a latte and my finished manuscript, and read Elle’s story (because it is hers, not mine).

So I’ll keep writing. And you should too. Because even if you trunk it, even if this story never sees the light of day, you did something that so many people never accomplish.

You finished it.
And no one can ever take that away from you.

My advice for when All Hope is Lost?
Lost. Seriously. No, not the adjective. The TV Series.

Screen capped by Lost-Media.com.
Lost is owned by ABC-Disney.

Namely, Jack’s advice to Kate on how to manage fear: Count to five.

 “…and the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I’d let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for five seconds, that’s all I was going to give it. So I started to count: one, two, three, four, five. Then it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up and she was fine.”

-Lost, S01E01 “Pilot.”

If that’s all he had to do to finish performing spinal surgery, surely it’s good enough to get our fingers moving on the keyboard.

Now go write. Let your inner Tyler Durden stab your inner critic in her beady little eye with a fountain pen.
You are not Jack’s Unfinished Manuscript.

Yes, I did just mix Lost with Fight Club. It’s my blog, and I can do that here.

Research Wednesday: The Strange Medicinal History of Onions

This year, in late summer and early fall, I devoted nearly every second of my free time to one thing: Research. Britain, specifically the post-Roman/Early Medieval (dark age) period. This included a huge spreadsheet on the available vegetation: fruits, vegetables, and herbs. I ended up listing growing season, soil necessities, and length/yield of harvest.

Image Credit | Mira Produtora

Since witchcraft plays a key role in PAWN, I also needed to research the historical medicinal uses of these plants. Nothing compared to what I found on the many diverse species of vegetables in the Allium Genus Or, in non-scientific English – ONIONS (yes, leeks, chives and garlic are also under the Allium umbrella. I’m ignoring those for now). Most of them were amusing (in the Olympic games of first century AD Greece, athletes would not only consume large quantities of onions prior to the games, but also drink and cover their bodies with onion juice). Some were downright frightening (placing onions near the bed of someone with a highly infectious disease to prevent family members from also being infected).

Scientists seem to agree that our ancestors have been eating onions in one form or another since pretty much forever (traces of onion proteins found in a Bronze Age settlement dating back to 5000BC), but they’ve also been used in medicine and religion. Images of onions can be found in ancient Egyptian art, and scientists found small onions in the eye sockets of King Ramses IV’s mummy.

Ancient Egyptians believed consuming an excess of onions would grant them increased endurance (for asthma, your treatment was the onion’s bastard cousin, garlic). But it didn’t stop there. Egyptians cited onions as a treatment for over 8000 different illnesses and ailments. It was used for everything, from an antiseptic to increasing sperm count. Does it really matter if your sperm count is increased if your wife won’t go near you? Those poor women.

Hippocrates (that guy that is supposed to have written The Hippocratic Oath) was also apparently a pro-onion advocate. According to his texts, onions were a diuretic and a treatment for pneumonia. They were also named as a ‘wound healer,’ which makes me think of an ancient Greek (very painful) substitute for Neosporin.

Onions also pop up in folk traditions from pretty much everywhere. Europe, North America, Africa. As late as the mid 1900s.

Think we’ve evolved past the onion fetish?
There was also apparently a chain email being circulated in late 2009 citing that placing baskets of onions around your house would ‘absorb the flu virus and prevent your family from getting sick.’

If you’re a writer (or if you’re not), what’s something interesting you’ve found during your research?

I Write Like…

I’ve used the I Write Like analyzer so many times. I always get one of two authors: Chuck Palahniuk or Anne Rice. Always. Never once have I got another author.

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

And to me, that makes sense.
No, I’m not as good as either of them. I probably never will be. But those are the two biggest influences on my ‘early writing life.’

When I first started writing, I was young. So young that I had just moved out of the ‘read absolutely every single book that came out of this enormous crate of books I got at a yard sale for $10’ stage of my life.

My mom gave birth to me exactly one week before she turned eighteen. She made it her mission in life to make sure that when the snotty parents and teachers at the private school she enrolled me in looked down on her for being a broke twenty-three year old in shorts and cheap shoes, they could say nothing about her parenting. It was important to her that I learned, that I was ahead, that I had what I needed. And what she believed I needed more than anything was an education. Sometimes it worked (I could read before kindergarten). Sometimes it didn’t (despite her attempts to teach me long division – before kindergarten – my eyes still cross when I stare down a math problem).

My mother still to this day brags that I was talking long before any baby she’s ever known (and firmly maintains that she’d never have taught me to speak if she’d realized she’d never be able to teach me to shut up). By the time I was three, I could recite my thin, condensed copy of The Beauty and The Beast verbatim. By four, I’d been doing Hooked on Phonics for (if I remember correctly) two years. By the time she enrolled me in kindergarten, I could read. Not sound out words. I could read.

If it sounds like I’m bragging, it’s because I am. But not on myself.
I’m bragging on my mother. She deserves it.

But once I started reading, there was no going back. It didn’t matter the genre, it didn’t matter the subject. If you put a book in front of me, I was going to read it. Until I turned about twelve. Then I started figuring out what I liked best. And over the next few years, Anne Rice was at the top of the list. So was Chuck Palahniuk. Those were the years I started writing.

Are we all subconsciously influenced by the writers we love, or more specifically, the writers we loved when we discovered we loved writing?

One Honest Word (or A Dream Of Zihuatanejo)

“Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”
― Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption

I made a realization the other night, and this is probably going to garner a few eye rolls if anyone ever reads it. “You mean, you just now figured this out?”

It was just before Thanksgiving. I was with my mother, and a great night of white wine and family tree research ended up devolving into a heated argument (read: shouting match). I left, furious. She cursed me all the way out the door (don’t worry, everything is fine; that’s just how we show affection). But I got home, and it was time to write. I was sitting there scowling at Scrivener – teeth gritted, eyes narrowed. I wasn’t typing. I wasn’t gently clicking keys. I was punching them, and the words just kept coming.

While I was still seething and seeing red, I sat down and wrote a scene I had previously drafted. It was a fight scene and the first look at my character’s dark side. Pre-argument, I’d gotten so frustrated with the scene I’d almost scrapped it. But once I was as pissed off as my main character, the words (and insults and punches) started flying.
When I was done, I was no longer angry. I had channeled it. I had a scene that needed polishing, sure. But the emotion was there. All it cost me was a spacebar.

But the knowledge I gained was invaluable:
In my first draft, yeah sure, I should be focusing on ‘good’ words.
But I should be more focused on honest words.
The kind of words that come from the soul instead of the fingertips. The kind that speak across nations and ages and boundaries. Words that make me feel something. I should be striving to put love on my pages. And hate. And fear, and grief, and sorrow and heartbreak. I’ve felt them all. Who hasn’t? I just need to get them on paper.

I can revise the language. I can cut paragraphs, erase erroneous expletives, add in a concise sentence or two… But I’ve realized something in my many years of devouring books. A beautifully written sentence cannot and will not trump an emotionally powerful one.

My goal is to make my sentences, paragraphs, chapters both beautifully written and emotionally powerful… one honest word at a time.

Who doesn’t have those memorized lines from books you never grow tired of? I do. Fight Club is filled to the brim with them. Knock it all you want, but its a book I will never tire of reading, and the only movie that I’ve watched so many times I can recite it. Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption is another brilliant book turned movie that I can never pass up.

What is your favorite line?

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