Michelle Wittle On Hating Being a Writer

I hate being a writer. I know I am not the first person to admit to this, but I think I should explain where this hate comes from.

I have already explained that writing is like a bloodbath. One minute, I am just sitting there looking at a blank word document. The next minute that I can say I am conscious of, there are two hundred pages in a document written. There are about twenty-fours empty cans of coke Zero scattered at my feet. Yoda has that smug look on his face. On my left are about a dozen or so wrappers of various things I must have consumed, yet I have no recollection of eating them or even buying them. Did I leave the house? I can’t say that I know for sure. It is three days later and I haven’t showered. My cat is even put off by me.

Does this sound like fun? Is this something anyone in his or her right mind would want to sign up for? I know that all writers aren’t like this. Some writers hold down jobs and commit only a few hours a day to their latest creative endeavors.

I am not like that.

I wish I could be someone who goes to work and when I come home, my job is just waiting back at the office. I want to clock in and out. I want to have a time sheet and only work a certain amount of hours a week.

But writing for me isn’t like that. I get woken up at 2am (it is always 2am and I have a theory on why…but not for this blog) and I can’t go back to sleep. My characters are dancing around telling me what comes next. Sometimes I don’t even get to sleep at all.

This isn’t fun or pretty. I hate being a writer because sometimes I can’t get it to stop. I can’t turn off my mind. I am not sitting at my beachfront house, looking at my computer and writing my “little stories” as the tide ebbs and flows.

I hate being a writer because sometimes I don’t want to write. How long has it been since I have updated this blog on a regular basis? So, because of all of that procrastination, I get to suffer the wrath of my creative self. I don’t get to sleep anymore. My stories have piled up and like that full cup of water, they are all running out.

I hate being a writer because I have no choice. Everyone else gets to choose his or her career, yet why can’t I? No, I can’t go out and play today because I have to sit down and write. If I don’t write, I will just have to pay for it later.

I hate being a writer because no one but another writer can fully understand what this is like. There is no glamour in this job. It isn’t all book signing and wine parties. We writers don’t all sit around discussing latest trends in the book business. Most of our time is spent with our characters and if we are lucky maybe a pet. The time we spend with people verses the time we spend writing is never equal. It is lonely being a writer.

That’s why I hate being a writer.

Michelle Wittle On a Writer’s Portfolio

I remember as a little girl, I would watch my dad run to the mailbox. I just assumed he was waiting for a check because why else would a grown man run to the mailbox every day? He would come back into the house, ripping open another envelope and his face would be filled with anticipation. With shaking hands, he would drag the letter out of its holder and then his face would just drop. His head would even fall a bit onto his chest. Becoming aware of his little girl looking up at him, he would shake off whatever news he read in that letter. Looking down at me, he would tap me on the head and say, “not this time.”

I would run off and play with my Barbie dolls (there was always some kind of big drama going on in my land of Barbie and this time one of my Barbie’s got into a car accident and she died. However, she was still haunting Ken because Ken couldn’t get over her death. Even though Ken already had a new girlfriend, he still loved the dead Barbie and she wanted him to move on. This explains a lot…doesn’t it?) and my dad would take this red scrapbook out and begin gluing the recent letter in the book. As it was drying, he would continue to stare at it and shake his head.

Years after my father’s death, I found that red scrapbook. I had to look in it! Sure, I felt like I was reaching into my dad’s diary and at any moment he would turn the corner and whack me in the head, but the curiosity was too strong. I needed to read what was so important in those letters that my father had to not only keep them, but also put them in a scrapbook.

“Dear L.L. Wittle:

Thank you for you recent submission to “We Aren’t Publishing You” magazine.  Although your story was very well written and your characters were brilliantly crafted, at this time we cannot publish your work.

Best of luck to you in your future writings.

Sincerely,

Mr. Mean Editor”

It went on like that for pages. On each page were at least four cut up letters resembling the one I crafted above. Oh and p.s., that magazine…I just made that up.

On one hand I understand the need to want to keep these rejection letters around. It can help you want to fight harder for a spot in some publication. When you get that acceptance letter, maybe you want to copy it and send it to all of the people who rejected you. Even in the movie, “Running With Scissors” Augusten Burroughs’ mom was cutting up all her rejection letters to put them in a collage on her writing table.

At one time, I would have suggested that writers should hold on to these rejection letters. But now, I think you should make a spreadsheet on excel. Import all the places you sent your story to and when the rejection letter comes, just mark a little “n” in the column for “published” and then shred that letter. There is no need to carry those letters with us and I really think they do us no good.

If you keep holding on to these rejection letters, you are going to start believing no one will ever publish you. This will then stop you from sending your work out. Now really, how does THAT help you become a published author?

When I was in creative writing class in high school, we had this picture we had to respond to in some way. The quote under the picture was, “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” I am in no way saying what you have written is trash. I am saying that just because one magazine didn’t like it, doesn’t mean all magazines will hate it as well.

Instead of making a rejection letter portfolio like my father did, I highly suggest you make a published portfolio. So what if you only have on thing in it? At least you have one thing in it. Holding onto all that negative energy…those negative and cold rejection letters will only hurt you and you might even start to believe them. On the other hand, if you have a place to put all your published work this will only encourage you to send more of your work out. You will want to fill up that book.

At the end of the day, positive reinforcement is more powerful then negative. I know at times it doesn’t seem that way, but train your mind to see it that way. Then watch your writing portfolio fill up.

Wacko Wednesdays: Positive Psychology

As a continuation of my previous post on Happiness, I’ll talk a little bit about Positive Psychology (PP) and the lessons we can learn, as writers, from this emerging field (perhaps in a way you might not predict, though.)

In 1998, the American Psychological Association’s then-president, Martin Seligman, used the term “Positive Psychology” to describe a new trend in Psychology research: the study of how humans become and stay happy. Dr. Seligman was tired of mental illness being the sole purpose of Psychology research and practice; He wanted Psychology to study more of what makes and keeps people happy instead of only mending the sick. PP has been the trending topic in Psych since then. Graduate students are clamoring to study topics like resiliency, decision-making, sense of control, character strength and uplifting traits. Journals publish more and more studies about the effects of “learned optimism.” Books like Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert are topping New York Times’ bestseller lists.

Like with all emerging fields, PP has its critics. The biggest and strongest critique of PP is that the field isn’t regulated. Any person can stick the term “Positive Psychologist” on the end of their name and claim to know how to apply the concepts that certified scientists and counselors developed. This means that every “life coach” kook is all over the Web promoting themselves as a “PP Counselor,” and no law or national certification program is barring them from doing so.

Another critique that is of lesser strength but more relevant to us as writers is the type of personality PP seems to attract. Those kooks on the internet and late-night infomercials are the most slimy of the bunch, but from an outsider’s view it does seem that the PP people have drunk the kool-aid. PP people are very gung-ho and tend to be exuberant evangelists for the field. The majority of them are do-gooders at heart; they want people to be happy and they think they’ve found science that can help.

Do you know a person like that? A person who stresses the positive so adamantly that it becomes unbelievable or in the very least, annoying? Your answer to this question will probably have more to do with your own place on the cynical scale than with the PP-type you’re remembering, but nonetheless let’s take a look at that character more closely. This person isn’t a snake-oil salesman; they are what I call a Believer. For reasons they usually aren’t too familiar with themselves, Believers truly feel that their solution is the answer to many people’s problems. How does a first encounter with a person like this go? What are you thinking? What would by-standers think as they listened to your conversation?

One thing about people who are enthusiastic about life is that they are usually magnetic. They light up a room, they are always surrounded by a crowd. People naturally gravitate toward other people who are happy and seem in control. But what happens when you get close enough to see that they are just trying a tiny bit too hard to be legitimate? What if the consistency or substance isn’t there? How does that character keep up the charade? How do you see it? How, if there is truly no substance, do you as a reader discover it? Will it be in the Believer’s frayed pant leg or missing button? Will it be in the quick glance down she makes after every human encounter? Just like the emerging field of PP, every character must have cracks in the armor. Even the Truest-Happiest-Believer-of-All-Things-Positive has a ding in the shield. What is it? Does the critique of that person’s belief-system hold water? Could the character make a journey over time to mend the damage?

You need both positive and negative forces in opposing characters for your novel or work of fiction to be memorable. Chart which side, positive or negative, your character will fall on. No middle ground. You can make a sliding scale (using a common measurement tactic from Psychology), but you still must divide the scale into two halves. The scale can have two of any extremes (e.g. Grape Jelly Fan vs Strawberry Jelly Fan), but you need to put each of your characters on that spectrum.

If PP had its way with your characters, they would test them on a variety of scales to diagnose current states and predict future behaviors. PP would look at self-efficacy (which is like “agency” – the ability and belief that one can accomplish tasks and goals on their own), resiliency (the ability to bounce back from trauma) and perhaps even sense of humor and daily laughter rates. The science behind PP is the same as a lot of Personality, Developmental, and Behavioral Psychology, they are just choosing to measure different traits. As writers, we tend to go into the dark sides of characters; It’s almost easier to write drama than it is to write pleasantries. But having no happy characters, or people who are optimists that promote achievement and satisfaction in others, isn’t giving your novel the opportunity for some significant conflicts.

Wacko Wednesdays: Fathers

***Wacko Wednesdays: Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology, or perhaps talk about a specific type of research into personality. I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***

Writers don’t write about mothers much. I was at a writing conference where the speaker asked the audience to call out something they’d read that examined the mother-child relationship. No-one spoke up. The speaker had made her point. The mother/child relationship is very complex and close to the heart. Even Disney likes to kill off moms so they don’t have to deal with trying to navigate those murky-mommy-issues waters. Fathers, on the other hand, abound in fiction. Father’s Day is this Sunday. Because we know all psychosis comes from our parents (not!), for today’s Wacko Wednesdays, let’s talk about at writing about the father/child relationship, or writing a character as a father.

For decades, psych research focused on the mother’s parenting as pathology for mental illness in children. More and more, researchers are looking at the father’s influence (especially with the area of girls and eating disorders). The father’s attitudes and behaviors toward parenting would influence your main character (MC). The father’s raising of your MC will probably all be backstory that happens offstage (i.e. not in the novel), but it is perhaps the most important character detail that fuels your MC’s current motivations. Let’s take a look at how some psych research examines how a father’s behaviors influence his children.

In the book, “The Role of the Father in Child Development” (.pdf of intro here), Editor Michael E. Lamb outlines the 3 areas that many researchers concentrate on when researching the father/child relationship: Engagement, Accessibility, and Responsibility.

“Whether and how much time fathers spend with their children are questions at the heart of much research conducted over the past three decades. In the mid-1970s a number of investigators sought to describe—often by detailed observation and sometimes also through detailed maternal and paternal reports—the extent of paternal interactions with children (Pleck & Masciadrelli, this volume; Lamb & Lewis, this volume). Many of these researchers have framed their research around the three types of paternal involvement (engagement, accessibility, responsibility) described by Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, and Levine (1987). As Pleck and Masciadrelli note, researchers have consistently shown that fathers spend much less time with their children than do mothers. In two-parent families in which mothers are unemployed, fathers spend about one-fourth as much time as mothers in direct interaction or engagement with their children, and about a third as much time being accessible to their children. Many fathers assume essentially no responsibility (as defined by participation in key decisions, availability at short notice, involvement in the care of sick children, management and selection of alternative child care, etc.) for their children’s care or rearing, however, and the small subgroup of fathers who assume high degrees of responsibility has not been studied extensively. Average levels of paternal responsibility have increased over time, albeit slowly, and there appear to be small but continuing increases over time in average levels of all types of paternal involvement.”

Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility are the three things you can think about when forming your character.

Engagement: How “hands-on” was your MC’s father when she was small? Was he a good guy but had a job that took him away often? Did he just seem like he was yelling everytime he spoke to his kids, but he was just trying to encourage them?

Accessibility: Could your MC bring any question under the sun to her dad or was she relegated to communicating with him through his secretary? Did he send the MC off to boarding school and say “See ya at Christmas?” Was there always a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door, but he was very attentive at dinner time?

Responsibility: Did your MC’s father support his family well? Was he a good earner but a fierce disciplinarian? Was he a drinker but loved his family with all his heart? Was he a drifter that constantly told his kids to reach for the stars?

Look for ways you can build in contradictions in each of these areas, then think about how a kid would reconcile those inconsistencies. How we judge people is a lot of our character. A father’s personality greatly influences our sense of judgment. In flat characterizations, fathers are either no-good bums or unsung heroes, drinking louses or quiet loyalists. Usually a main character (MC) comes to acknowledge the father’s cheating ways or learns to appreciate the constant wisdom that they couldn’t recognize before. It’s all so cheesy and cheap. Try to go for some more depth. What kind of roles does the father character in your book play? What kind of parent is he? Is he a stand-offish, everyone-has-to-learn-for-themselves kind of guy or is he a soccer dad that is with his kids every step of the way? How can he be both? What generation is he in? Is he a 70-year-old but a modern diaper-changing/sling-wearing dad? Was he raised to think he’d let the kids grow up before he had any kind of relationship with them, even though he’s just 20 years old?

Take those three aspects of measuring fatherhood, Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility, and mix and match good and bad characteristics of each. Make the father character a conflicted, true-hearted, complicated being that marked your MC with distinctive world views. Happy Father’s Day, to all of those dads out there!

Wacko Wednesdays: Happiness

Wacko Wednesdays: Happiness

***After a long hiatus, Wacko Wednesdays are back! Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology. I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” -United States Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 4th 1776.

Happy Muffin!

Happiness research has taken the Psychology world by storm. If you search any book site for the word “Happiness,” you will see a plethora of books written on the subject. Lately I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It’s academic research and theory about attaining happiness and how our judgment about what will make us happy in the future is ridiculously skewed by our present thinking.

This book and the advent of other titles in the positive psychology area have inspired me to think about how we, as writers, paint the picture of our characters’ states of happiness. By looking at your MC and her goals in terms of her motivations and methods of attaining happiness, you can paint a deeper picture of what drives us all.

I’m sure you are familiar with the basic story arc: Main character (MC) starts out with a status quo, then challenges galore are thrown at the MC, lots of roadblocks stand in the way of achieving the new happiness goal, MC overcomes, is a changed person. The end. Today for Wacko Wednesdays I’ll run down two phenomena that researchers, namely David Myers, have identified as influencing a person’s happiness, namely Relative Deprivation and Adaptation.

Phenomenon #1: Relative Deprivation

“when we compare ourselves with those less fortunate, we can, however, increase our satisfaction. As comparing ourselves with those better-off creates envy, so comparing ourselves with those less well-off boosts contentment.” -David Myers

Lately I’ve been reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a classic piece of American literature that portrays a devastatingly poor family and their survival struggles in 1900’s New York. It’s actually making me feel quite good.

Yes I know that sounds bad. But here it is: My husband, my two kids and I live in the smallest house in our neighborhood. We live on my husband’s salary as I’m a full-time mom, but we truly have more than enough. Still, this suburban life and the American consumerism gets to everybody. We are inundated with ads to buy more stuff, we read stories of neighbors’ huge home improvements, we hear kids describing their African safari vacations. It’s an affluent area and it seems, at times, that we aren’t keeping up with the Joneses.

The unfortunate Nolan family portrayed in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, truly has nothing. When they mention clothes, they mean one pair of pants and one shirt for a man and one dress for a woman. Can you imagine? I look at my closet full of plain, solid-colored Old Navy t-shirts and feel loaded (wealthy, not drunk). When the Nolan family mentions meals, they mean oatmeal with no milk or fruit. I open the freezer each morning and lazily wonder which hunk of meat I have to make that night. While they want for decent immune systems, we struggle to fight our ever-expanding waistlines. This book makes me feel so fortunate that I may start it all over again once I’m finished! This is Relative Deprivation at work. How rich you feel is totally dependent on who you are comparing yourself to. Compared to the Nolans (or many real people in this economy), my husband and I are doing great! Compared to our friends the doctors, with their big house and insanely lavish vacations, we’re struggling.

photo by Drawsome on Flickr

What do most good ol’ Amurrricanz do when they feel like they are poorer than everyone else? Apparently they buy lottery tickets. Recent research has shown the Relative Deprivation phenomenon in full-swing in lottery ticket buyers. If people are feeling deprived, they make the trip to the local bodega to pick up their Pick 6’s. If they feel better off than their neighbors, they don’t buy lottery tickets.

Here are the questions you can ask yourself about your MC’s Relative Deprivation feelings: Is she better or worse off than her neighbors, peers, family members? When does she feel better off and when does she feel worse? What makes her feel superior? What kinds of behaviors result from those feelings? How does she make herself feel better in the short term? Does she eat? Does she steal their watches? Does she retreat into her packed charity-ball schedule? How does her current state of feeling deprived influence her dreams for the future? Does she coast when she feels affluent or better off in some other way? Coasting is what most of us do once we achieve a certain goal or milestone. That brings us to Adaptation.

Phenomenon #2. Adaptation

“I’ll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead.” ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly

Adaptation is what happens when a person has hit a windfall, achieved a goal, or just plain got lucky when that Good Samaritan pulled him out of the path of that oncoming bus.

Little Lamb – Review by Marc Schuster

Running through June 28 at the InterAct Theatre Company (2030 Sansom Street in Philadelphia,PA), Michael Whistler’s Little Lamb examines the issues that many adoptive couples face when both members happen to be of the same sex. At the same time, however, it does so much more. In addition to examining issues related to sexual orientation, the play also investigates the ways in which race and religion factor into our notions of justice, ethics, and morality. In other words, Little Lamb offers a thoughtful, complex look at many of the so-called “family values” that are too often over-simplified by the mainstream media.

The play centers on Denny and Jose, a gay couple intent on adopting a child. While at first glance the couple may appear to be somewhat stereotypical — Denny tends to get emotional over rare Ethel Merman recordings while Jose is a former lounge singer with the chiseled physique of a dancer — Whistler’s use of these types is quite intelligent, particularly given the challenge of portraying what might be termed a “gay issue” for a “straight” audience. By beginning with figures that a mainstream audience already knows, Whistler opens a door for further investigation. Yes, Denny likes Ethel Merman, but that’s not the full extent of who Denny is, nor does Jose’s former life as a cabaret singer define him in his entirety. As the play progresses, both characters emerge as complicated, flawed, struggling, hopeful, and (above all) human. The result is that Little Lamb is not only a play that speaks to issues relevant to the gay community but a play that speaks to the human condition.

Bringing Denny and Jose to life in this production are actors Ames Adamson and Frank X, who are more than believeable in their roles. Throughout the play, Adamson imbues Denny with a fitting mix of righteous certainty and insecure bravado while X’s Jose balances out his partner with kindness, compassion, dry humor, and quiet dignity. Rounding out the cast, Cathy Simpson, Kaci M. Fannin, and Katrina Yvette Cooper provide a strong counterpoint to Adamson and X.

As the fulcrum upon which the play’s dramatic tension rests, Fannin deftly navigates the choppy waters between her character’s advocacy for her clients and her own religious leanings. Indeed, if anything in this play came as a surprise to me, it was the even-handed way in which Whistler depicts religion. It would be easy (perhaps too easy) to vilify religion in a play like this — to depict those with a religious inclination as crazy or ignorant — but Whistler never gives into that temptation. Rather, the zeal that moves his more religious characters manifests itself in a way that genuinely seeks to do good. Thus there are no heroes or villains in Little Lamb, only people trying their best to do the right thing — even if “the right thing” is at odds with someone else’s right thing and therefore must inevitably result in sorrow and heartbreak.

Overall, Little Lamb is a moving, engaging production that gets at the heart of what we mean when we discuss things like love and family, as well as right and wrong. For information on ordering tickets, you can visit the InterAct Theatre Company at their website: InterActTheatre.org.

Review: Love Park

reviewed by Marc Schuster

At a recent reading, Jim Zervanos explained that his debut novel, Love Park, was written in part as a response to John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which itself had been written as a response to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In short, Updike loved the premise of a novel written from the point of view of a young drifter, but he wanted the story to include a wife, child, and mortgage. The result: not as much drifting, but plenty of angst. Continuing on this path, Zervanos envisioned Peter Pappas, Love Park’s beleaguered protagonist, as a spiritual cousin to Sal Paradise and Rabbit Angstrom. Like Angstrom, Pappas is 26 years old and dealing with all the issues inherent in that fragile age. Yet the issues that Pappas must deal with are a lot different from those of his predecessors. Unlike Angstrom (and even On the Road’s Dean Moriarty), Pappas has never been with a woman in the Biblical sense–let alone been married. Instead he lives in his parents’ basement where he laments that life is passing him by. Hence the update to which Zervanos referred: as with previous generations, “kids today” face the age-old problem of watching the promise of youth vanish, but in increasing numbers, they’re seeing it happen from the sheltered vantage point of their parents’ basements. For Peter Pappas, the journey from basement to real life takes on epic proportions.

As the novel opens, Peter is pining away for his college girlfriend, with whom he always intended to write a book on Philadelphia’s public works of art. The only problem is that he hasn’t seen her since college–a good four years earlier. Now he’s living in his parents’ basement and painting other people’s apartments for a living. (That he’s invariably painting them white only underscores the void that his life has become.) Adrift in a relatively pointless existence, he meets a middle-aged widow named Daisy Diamond, whose mysterious relationship with Peter’s father pierces the bubble the protagonist has been living in for so long and thus forces him to take his first tentative steps into the world at large. That Peter is completely smitten with Daisy only complicates matters, but complication is exactly what Peter’s life needs. After all, he’s been avoiding entangling relationships for all of his life, sidestepping various forms of commitment, and, in general, refusing to take risks–refusing, that is, to live. And while living may be painful, it ultimately, Peter begins to realize, beats the hell out of the subterranean existence he’s been calling a life for so long.

In addition to the influences that Zervanos has cited, Love Park boasts a number of other literary forebears as well. The forbidden relationship with Daisy Diamond (and the ugly truth it obscures) clearly echoes Oedipus Rex. The same relationship is also reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby–only it isn’t Daisy who carries the tattered love letter through her life this time around; it’s Peter. Likewise, a passage near the end of the novel in which Peter observes that “we keep crawling, clawing our way back into the current, back toward our place of origin” offers a poignant twist on the final line of Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Yet if there’s a single touchstone for Love Park, it has to be Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, as both works read with a high degree of confessional zeal, particularly when it comes to their protagonists’ issues with family and sex.

Overall, Love Park represents an excellent debut. Throughout the novel, Zervanos demonstrates that he is steeped in literary, artistic, and cultural traditions, yet that he is also in touch with the real world. A sensitive, intelligent novel, Love Park provides a compelling, excellent read.

Marc Schuster’s novel, The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl, is now available from PS Books.

Review: The Yoke of the Horde

When David Prior’s The Yoke of the Horde came across my desk, I thought, “Great. Yet another novel about a man who believes he’s the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and who returns home from his efforts at freeing Tibet only to find that his wife has shacked up with a man who probably believes that pro-wrestling is real and which (the novel, I mean) features a cast of characters including a disgruntled weather man, a CEO obsessed with building the perfect putting green in his office, and a chef living in exile due to the economic and gustatory perversions of Jacques Chirac.” Talk about obvious! Talk about cliche! Talk about retreading ground that’s been trodden upon dozens and dozens of times already. But I’m a bit of a softy, so I gave the book a shot, and… I was pleasantly surprised. The Yoke of the Horde, it turns out, is not just another in a long line of books featuring the reincarnation of the founder of the Mongol empire. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it is the definitive book on the subject!

Throughout the novel, Prior introduces us to a host of memorable (if somewhat bizarre) characters. Chief among these is Rosco Rochlitz, the aforementioned reincarnation of Genghis Kahn. After a failed attempt at freeing Tibet, Rosco returns home to find his wife in love with another man. With nowhere else to go, Rosco moves back into the one-room apartment he used to share with his wife, who enlists the aid of a largely silent neighbor known only as Tom to settle the dispute over who gets to sleep where in the apartment (among other things). Complicating matters is the fact that Tom has just been promoted from a number-cruncher to a greens keeper of an indoor golf course in his boss’s office, and the local weatherman is predicting the storm of the millennium. And when a wayward boyscout troop and a lost cache of illicit pornography get thrown into the mix, things really start to get interesting.

Overall, Prior’s novel is very funny, even if the prose is somewhat dense at times. Throughout the proceedings, the author takes aim at everything from Kantian philosophy to reality television (and everything in between). His writing style is somewhat of an amalgam of Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders, though his heavy reliance on chunks of dialogue to move the narrative forward also suggests William Gaddis. Ultimately, The Yoke of the Horde is a diamond in the rough. Complete with typos and minor inconsistencies, the novel reads like a true underground masterpiece–written on the fly, off the cuff, and in close proximity to any other parts of his trousers the author could find. Worth a read if you’re into any of the writers I mention above, The Yoke of the Horde is a wild, funny novel.

Michelle Wittle On Sharing Our Work

Now, as writers we must be prepared to put our work at there and get our work rejected many times. I read somewhere (I think it was in an article by Aimee LaBrie actually) that a piece of work takes twenty places until it finds a home.

 

However, the jury is still out on rewrites.

 

Well, that is because you can’t have a formula for rewrites. Every story is different and each story will need different things. I always look at it like this, if you are mostly happy with your work and you can read it without making too many notes on the page, then it is most likely ready for the next round. Some would say that the next round would be the “hunt for publishers” phase. I am here to tell you that it isn’t.

 

Your story is now ready to be shopped. You take that piece of writing and start showing it around and getting feedback on it.

 

Once you have your feedback, then you can start looking for its home.

 

I always thought that part of the process of writing was taking your work and having people look at it before you finish the final editing. I used to think how would you know if it was good or not if people didn’t read it?

 

But that thinking is only setting your piece up for failure.

 

Think about it this way. You are writing this awesome piece of work. You take it to your friends and they all love it. Then you go back into it and you think it’s awesome, so you start sending it out. The rejection letters come in quickly and you are bummed. Your friends thought it was awesome, you thought it was awesome, so why was it getting rejected so many times?

 

You let your friends’ opinion of your work blind you. If you aren’t one hundred percent sure your piece is good enough, then you shouldn’t let anyone else see it.

 

I send out my stuff completely immature all the time and then I whine because it keeps being rejected. I start looking at it again, with the blinders off, and I see why it got rejected. Of course that character was flat! The setting was completely wrong for the plot! I see it now because I let my friends tell me my story was great when in reality, it still needed a lot of work.

 

So now I urge all of you to take a good look at your work. Reread it until your eyes get crossed. Wait until that story is the best you know you can do. Then and only then can you start letting others see it.

 

Trust me, this will save you a lot of time and will help increase your rejection to acceptance ratio.

Michelle Wittle On Sh*ting or Getting Off the Pot

My mother, I have mentioned on more then one occasion was an odd woman. She would always tell me to either “sh*t or get off the pot”. So I guess it can be noted that from a very small age, I have always been a very reluctant person. It takes a boulder the size of a small farming community to get me to go after something. Which is odd because some see me as the eternal “go getter”.

The truth is I am both. When I see the whole outcome of something and it looks positive, I will charge right ahead and run down whatever obstacles try to stand in my way. However, if I am unsure of something and the outcome is hazy, I drag my feet and do that fall to the ground thing that little kids do when they don’t want to leave the toy store (you know, when they fall down in a clump of themselves).

However, I keep hearing my mother’s deep man voice (true story there, my mother’s voice was deep and most people in my neighborhood were afraid of my mother) saying, “Michelle, you want to be a writer? Well, sh*t or get off the pot”.

So mom, I think I may be sh*ting because I am not ready to get off the pot.

I am going back into my failed novel “Nothing Fits”. I know what is wrong with it. I made lots of stupid mistakes and one fatal error. I didn’t let the main character tell her story. I wrote it in third person and allowed everyone else to speak for her. My character is very strong and does not want anyone else putting words and explainations in her mouth. In a way, I was afraid to let her speak. In doing that, I didn’t write the novel I was born to write. I wrote about two hundred pages of garbage.

It’s time to take out the garbage.

I am diving back into my character’s world and I am finally allowing her to tell her story. I toyed with the idea of making her tell my story, but I have recently learned that won’t work either. My character must stay true to her and I must do the same.

I have my Yoda all ready to go. He is dancing with his stick in his Dagobah world. My diet coke is replaced with Coke zero. I am ready to let my character speak.