FORGET THE MUSE

Today I wanted to talk about the process and act of writing. What I mean by that is the simple craft of regularly putting pen to paper. As Stephen King famously said, “Amateurs wait for the muse to come. The rest of us get working.” That is so incredibly true. When I was a creative writing undergrad at San Francisco State University, like many young [writing] students, I thought that, when the ‘muse’ came, I could then write the Great American Novel.

The truth is—any professional can affirm this—and I hate to break your heart here: There is no muse. The muse is like Santa Clause; it’s a hoax that we tell beginners to try and inspire them. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But at some point, if you take yourself seriously as a writer, you will have to let go of the Santa Clause Effect, and sit down every day to write. No matter what.

The trick is to treat it like a job, which it is. For those of us who have actually made money from our writing (even if it’s just a little bit), you know. Editors, whether at magazines, lit journals, or in-house, demand speed. You need to get those edits done fast. And you need to put the proverbial pen to the page every day or close to it. It’s the regular practice of writing that makes you better. That and regular reading of other authors’ work.

I like authors like Harlan Coben and Stephen King, not because they’re famous, but because they criticize creative writing classes (including MFAs), writing critique groups, and the idea of The Muse. King states that he writes 4-6 hours every day. Now, I know, I know: He made a quarter of a million bucks off Carrie, his debut novel. That’s not fair: He has been able to write daily from the “beginning” because he wrote good, salable prose that had an audience. He was lucky enough to have had an agent and an in-house editor that recognized his talent and the potential audience. So he’s been able to live in luxury since that time, in terms of carving out time to write.

Of course, he’s also had a wife and kids. And some could argue that the starving artist thing is actually helpful in terms of writing motivation: It keeps you hungry.

But I digress. I saw Harlan Coben speak at the Writers’ Digest conference in New York City back in early August, 2014. He knocked me sideways by suggesting, like King, that creative writing classes and critique groups actually often prevent you from doing the one thing you really need to do: lay down lots of prose. Whether the prose is of substance or not is really irrelevant. The point is to nail down that first draft. THEN, later, go back in and look at what you’ve got; edit, revise, rewrite, hand to beta readers, etc. King talks about reading first with your heart and then with your head.

In both cases, the authors’ say write a lot and read a lot; that is the key to success. Any professional will tell you this. Agents always say it doesn’t matter if you have an MFA or not. Check out the book MFA VS NYC edited by Chad Harbach.

In my own personal case, I write on average about five days a week. Sometimes more like six. Rarely every single day. But close. I allow myself to GO when working on a new piece of fiction. For example, the other morning I woke up, showered, made tea, and sat down to write. In less than two hours, I had 4,600 words on the page. I think this is a pretty good story! Sure, it’s not going to pop out at the end perfect, finished, ready to publish. It’s going to need work, as all writing does. But the point is that I allowed myself time to just let it out. Tell your inner critic, your inner-editor to take a hike when you write. Later, when you’re in the editing process, then you can bring that inner critic out. But not before.

As a freelance book editor, one of the most common things I see is writers who can’t allow themselves to finish a book. They might have been chopping away at a novel for a year, two years, three. But they keep going back to chapter one, revising, changing, altering. They keep moving the characters around. They keep getting conflicting feedback from their group. King says it should never take you longer than three months to write a first draft.

Ok, again, accepting that he’s an extreme, I do think there’s still value in that idea. Just let it go. Find that two hour or three hour period everyday when you can allow yourself to write. Use that only to work on whatever piece you’re working on. Have a basic plot-outline done before you begin. You can veer off the grid anytime, but at least you have an idea of where you’re going. Then just type. Allow yourself to get into the groove. Before you know it, you’ll have a very unready, imperfect first draft. Then wait a while and go back to it in a few months, seeing all the plot-holes and character issues.

From there you’re on your way. It’s a process. Allowing yourself the right to write is a big part of the early stages of this career.

Order Stephen King’s “On Writing,” his memoir on the craft.

Good luck!

Michael Mohr

I do developmental book editing. Right now I am—happily—booked solid until June, 2016. If you want a free test edit now I can do that, but I’ll have to throw you in line for June/July. Cool with that? Have an adult novel (no sci-fi please) or memoir? Email me: michaelmohreditor@gmail.com.

Also, check out my client Christian Picciolini’s book: “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.” True tale of a neo-Nazi who got out and became an activist for love and positive change. Great read. Buy it on Amazon (click here).

Buy my short fiction at Alfie Dog Press online (CLICK HERE).

MEMOIR VS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I’ve posted about this before and I do it again now. I’ve had clients—phenomenal writers—who have dealt with this. Here’s a quote from Writer’s Digest on the subject:

“An autobiography focuses on the chronology of the writer’s entire life while a memoir covers one specific aspect of the writer’s life. So, if I chose to write about my complete life up to this point—including growing up in Cincinnati, my time in New York, the few years I spent in Chicago and eventually landing at Writer’s Digest—I’d write an autobiography. If wrote a book about the winter of my sophomore year in high school where I got my tongue stuck to an icy pole, I’d write a memoir.”

The above points out something that is very simple and very key and yet what many new writers seem to somehow forget again and again, and again: A memoir is about ONE specific event. Now, let’s be clear; let’s clarify. That certainly and absolutely does not mean that we talk about that singular event and ONLY that event. We use back story and refer, of course, to prior life events that are directly or indirectly related to the said memoir.

But the point is, we focus on that one event. If the memoir is about your story of growing up poor in Idaho and deciding to live alone in the mountains for five years, then later becoming one of the top CEOs of Google, you have to mainly focus on those specific years. Yes, you’re going to comment on what mom and dad were like growing up. Yes, you’re going to mention your upbringing. But that’s NOT going to be your focus. Your focus is going to be the story you’re specifically discussing. If you find yourself talking about everything that happened in your life—from day one until now—you’re actually writing an autobiography. Unless you’re Wolf Blitzer or Bill Maher, most readers, sadly to say, won’t care enough about you to read. Sorry. Sad but true.

But lucky enough for the rest of us, there is a medium between a novel and an autobiography: It’s called memoir. But the unfortunate thing is, most of us don’t know how to write them.

Memoir should be written very much like a novel. Think story arc, plot, character arc, setting, driving desire, stakes, conflict, the whole deal. Everything that takes place in a novel should essentially be in your memoir, too. So, skip the intro, skip the boring “I was born in 1967…” and go directly to the actually STORY. Hook us on page one and don’t let go. Start with an inciting incident. You all know the drill. And yet so often this is ignored in order to tell a tale from birth until current times.

Here’s another quote: “Good memoir borrows from fiction, following the rule that the story is not as important as the way it’s told. In fiction, all the characters are literally nobodies, because none of them actually exist. Fiction writers use dialogue, description, scenes, and metaphors to make these nobodies feel like the most important people in the world to the reader. Similarly, memoirists adopt fictional techniques to elevate their own nobody status, and make their stories, whether about a trip around the world or a hike through the woods, feel as important as global affairs.” (From ‘Autobiography vs Memoir: The Changing Landscape of Recollective Writing,’ by Jennie Yabroff [‘Biographile,’ Random House, 2014])

The point above—again—is that memoir is written LIKE fiction, using similar techniques. Furthermore, memoir is an odd beast. It is considered nonfiction, it’s true. And in a way, it is. Anyone will tell you right off the bat: Of course memoir is nonfiction; it’s a ‘true’ account of the facts of your life. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find other notions of memoir.

As Stephen King famously said, “When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.” There is a large element of truth to that quote. NO one, I don’t care who you are, can remember things exactly as they happened in their past 100 percent. Just simply isn’t possible. As I’ve brought up before, memoir is about ‘emotional truth.’ Sure, you try your best to get the facts right. A memoir MUST center around the planet that is ‘true’ life event/fact. But other than that—and doing your best to stay the course in terms of ‘what actually occurred’—you’re going to focus on that emotional truth. The main difference between autobiography, memoir and fiction is: Autobiography tells the WHOLE story of your life, using much information and fact; memoir tells a specific story of your life that’s true but you’re using fictive techniques to tell emotional truth; and fiction is completely, for the most part, made up out of your imagination (obviously there are elements of truth in fiction).

Pretty simple. But again, it seems to be commonly misunderstood. For example: The Kiss, by Kathryn Harrison; Jarhead by Anthony Swofford; The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. In all three of these memoirs (all great by the way if you haven’t read them) the author focuses on ONE SPECIFIC time in their lives. With Harrison it’s her twenties having a secret love affair with her estranged father. With Swofford it’s the Gulf War. With Walls it’s her crazy and alcoholic father, leading her family around the country like poor lunatics. In Walls’s book she does go deeply into her early childhood to explain the present, and she flips back to current times at the beginning and at the end, but those times are only used to demonstrate the story therein being told.

So, the moral of the story, so to speak is, when writing memoir, be honest and tell the truth (we don’t need another James Frey, author of ‘A Million Little Pieces,’ which by the way, regardless of the truth, was a great book!) but also be aware of the fact that you’re only telling about one key moment or time in your life—not the whole thing—and that really, memoir rests on fictive techniques and emotional truth. Then come hire me to edit your memoir J

Write on!

“You said it. Let’s edit.”

Michael Mohr

***

I do developmental book editing. If you want a free test edit I can do that, but I’ll have to throw you in line for June or July, 2016 for the actual edit because I’ll be out of the country from mid March to mid May. Cool with that? Have an adult novel (no sci-fi please) or memoir? Email me: michaelmohreditor@gmail.com.

Also, check out my client Christian Picciolini’s book: “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.” True tale of a neo-Nazi who got out and became an activist for love and positive change. Great read. Buy it on Amazon (click here).

Lastly, read my mother’s (Lori Windsor Mohr’s) debut novel, “The Road at my Door,” published by Alfie Dog Press last month.

Here’s the synopsis: “The Road at my Door follows protagonist Reese Cavanaugh on a dark journey to save her family without destroying herself. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the sexual revolution, Mohr examines cultural forces shaping family life in a decade of upheaval. Road is a perfect storm of conflicting needs and beliefs about love of self, love of another, fast-changing attitudes about sex, and the toxicity of family secrets. Through Reese Cavanaugh, Lori Mohr delves into the deep tension between appearance and reality, portraying a family in turmoil.”

Buy Lori’s novel: http://www.amazon.com/Road-at-My-Door/dp/190989429X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454106501&sr=1-1&keywords=lori+mohr

Want to read my short fiction? Click here: http://alfiedog.com/fiction/stories/michael-mohr/

WHAT ANNE PERRY DOES: SUCCESSFUL WRITING TECHNIQUES

Anne Perry. Author of the William Monk and Thomas Pitt series –The face of a Stranger; The Cater Street Hangman—Perry is an authorial behemoth. She published her first book in 1979 (The Cater Street Hangman), introducing her series character, Thomas Pitt. Since then, she’s published dozens of novels, and is an international bestseller. At seventy-seven, she still writes regularly, publishes often, and tours the world attending writers’ conferences and panels.

In short, she’s a badass.

I wanted to use this post to talk a bit about some things I noticed that Perry did in The Face of a Stranger (1990), the first book to introduce William Monk. There is much to be gleaned here, both as a writer and as a book editor (in my case).

Perry writes primarily historical fiction, crime-detective novels set in Victorian late nineteenth-century England to be specific. The Face of a Stranger is set in 1856 London. Monk wakes up on page one, barely conscious, in pain at a hospital with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As it turns out, he works as a detective for the police and got into some trouble the night before. So, in essence, we discover his reality as he does. Great plot.

“He opened his eyes and saw nothing but a pale grayness above him, uniform, like a winter sky, threatening and heavy.”

That’s the first sentence of the novel.

Two things I notice about this right away: One, she starts the story with ACTION. Notice how she’s not solely describing something (there is description, though); she’s not TELLING the reader anything. Instead, we have a character who is actually performing an ACTION. (I keep highlighting the word ‘action’ because, as a book editor, I notice that this is often lacking.) The character is doing something, involving movement (opening his eyes). That’s key. She allows the reader to experience this action through the character’s movement, versus using summary or ‘telling’ to report something to us.

Also, she uses the active voice. Meaning that the character (‘he’ at this point) does the action, the action isn’t being done TO the character, which is passive. Passive would be if she said: “His eyes WERE open when Sally walked in.” When passive, the action is done TO the character, versus the character performing the action themselves. Readers empathize and identify more when a character DOES the action, because we can relate. We’ve probably done it, or seen it done.

“Did this man know him, or merely of him? Was he a public figure Monk ought to recognize? Or did he pursue him for some dutiful and anonymous purpose? Might he only be looking for information, or could he tell Monk something about himself more than a bare name, put flesh and memory to the bleak fact of his presence?”

The above is from page 5, and is regarding Monk thinking, wondering to himself, trying to pick up the memory pieces of his now-confusing life. What is obvious is that the narrator asks a lot of questions. I noticed that the use of internal questions were all over chapter one. Now, part of this might be due, clearly, to the plot-line: He’s woken up in a hospital without a clue who he is. Naturally, he’ll have lots of questions.

But I think also, in general, a character having internal questions re the narrator is a good device. Why? Because isn’t that how the human mind operates? We constantly ask ourselves questions, do we not? Of course we do. And that often leads to more questions, some of which eventually get answered—accurately or not—and some of which do not. But the point is: Readers can RELATE. We can empathize. And when readers can relate and empathize…readers care. And if they care…they’ll read the whole 300 pages, as long as it’s well-written and the plot and characters stay strong and engaging.

“Were they his? Surely not; the emotions jarred on him and he found himself pulling a face at the mawkishness of the subjects, even feeling a touch of contempt.”

The above is from page 12 of the novel. My observation here is EMOTION. So we have direct, active-voice action. We have a character that has internal questions which makes him relatable. And now we have emotion, which furthers our connection to the character and continues even more our likelihood of caring and following this protagonist. Since this became a long-standing series, obviously it worked.

I noticed that Perry used this emotion-technique all throughout the first chapter. And what’s interesting is that she very clearly STATES the emotion. She literally uses the word ‘emotion’ perhaps half a dozen times in chapter one. Then she will describe the emotion being referred to: terror, fright, fear, anger, jealousy, sadness, shame, regret, etc. Some novelists like to be more subtle and ‘literary’ about this touch/device—Perry is very commercial—but depending on your feelings around that, and genre books, you might take a lesson from Perry: It’s alright to concisely name the emotions your protag is dealing with.

Again, we identify. IDENTIFICATION of the reader with the main character is key. She does this strikingly. I noticed that Suzanne Collins did this same thing in The Hunger Games. Again, maybe not the best written book, but it has sold like nobody’s business. I’m not saying you should ‘copy’ Collins or Perry. I’m only suggesting you could, like myself, learn from successful authors whose books are already on the market.

Write on!

I am a developmental book editor. This means I read your manuscript and critique things like plot, pace, structure, dialog, character-development, logic issues, etc. I zoom out the camera and focus on what’s working and what’s not. I assist you in making your book shine.

Interested in a free test edit? Send your first chapter and a query to: michaelmohreditor@gmail.com. I work with fiction and memoir only. No sci-fi/fantasy, children’s, or picture books. Not sure? Email me. I charge 2 cents/word. Check my site for more info, under ‘Editing Services.’

***I am also currently interested in pursuing my first ghostwriting project. I would like to charge a flat fee of $20K for this, considering a 1-2 year total project length including research, planning, writing and editing. Additional $3K for an accompanying book proposal. Email me at the above address for more info.

I am out of the country from 3/13-5/15.

Please buy my short stories for 66 cents here at ALFIE DOG PRESS.

Also, please check out my client Christian Picciolini’s book (released April, 2015): ‘Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.’ From racist white-power skinhead to reformed anti-racist hero starting his own non-profit organization to fight hate (Life After Hate), follow Christian on his journey to becoming a decent, moral man. He has showcased his book and philosophy on such programs as CNN with Anderson Cooper, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” The Glen Beck TV Program, the Adam Carolla Show, and has appeared on NBC, CBS and other major network programs. The foreword is written by the famous rock musician, Joan Jett.

“You said it. Let’s edit.”

Michael Mohr