What are the highs & lows of a writer's life? (This wk: Michigan-Style!)

[#1]

As usual, Dearman manages to acknowledge the difficulties inherent in being a dedicated writer without making them sound overwhelming.  I always enjoy her unique combination of humor, insight, and pragmatic advice.

[#2]

Dearman is so fantastic in intuiting exactly what I feel as a writer--the highs and lows of my emotional state have indeed been some of the most challenging aspects of pursuing a writer's life (in some cases, harder than the actual writing itself).  When I sit alone before my computer I always feel like I'm the only one struggling with the mental journey of long-term isolation and find it hard to believe that anyone else has written in the face of such feelings of 'i think i suck-ness', but each time I tap into Deaman's writings/blogs I almost believe that there are others, successful even, who have feared that their choice to write was bound to the pipe dream of almost anything else worth pursuing.  Thanks Jill Dearman for your soothing reminders; they truly help me remain sanely dedicated to my writing!

[#3]

Jill, I'm laughing right now, only because after I first read your excerse, I thought:  I can't do this.  How do I create something from my imagination, painting a picture of a place I've never been, and turn it into an actual place with people? 

Then I thought, heck!  I've already done it, here on B&NBC, in the Com. Rm.!  I created a whole kingdom, a realm of fantasy, as people come on this board thread, as players in these scenarios.  There was a purpose for this creation, but at the time it wasn't fully realized by me.  It was just intended to be a place for people to play with their own imaginations, and have fun doing it.

Stories within stories kept popping into my head, and sometimes we've put these 'character actors' [each of us] into them.  I'm not alone in this creative venture.

This was easy for me, if I saw a plot..... but then my imagination started putting my own imagined people to work into the scenarios, as well;  creating a place in the story 'away' from actual reality, and that was even easier.  Imagined place, and imagined characters....I visualized it all before and during these interactions.  I could manipulate them on a whim, around in the story they'd fly, to fit into, and for, my own desires.  The plot thickens.

Anyway, it works for me, to a point.  Off the board stories are usually created with a base of knowledge about places and people I've come in contact with over the years.  It is funny, though, the dialogue does change according to the place they find themselves in, then changing the actual character's personalities and dialogue from my original thought, as they deal with each situation, and other characters.  hm...they end up manipulating me and my thoughts!  Yikes!  Just kidding, of course...I'm still the boss!  I think.

Kathy

[#4]

Are characters the bosses of writers? this may be a future post! thx, Kathy, and RHC and OOC too...

[#5]

Jill Dearman is one of those remarkably wise humans who's both a wild-eyed dreamer and a no B.S. pragmatist.  And since William James and John Dewey were also proud to call themselves pragmatists, that's no mean accomplishment.  The exercises work to open up my sometimes worried imagination, and writing becomes fun again, despite all the stuff my fellow-commenters have said (today's personal favorite:  writing in the face of "I think I suck-ness".  Oh boy do I know that one.)

As for Jill's question about whether my birthplace has affected my writing, it's been inescapable for me.  I love the country, yet almost everything I've ever written takes place in the city -- and not just any city, but New York City, and not just any part of New York City but Queens and Brooklyn (born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, now living again in Brooklyn).  I love evoking place, but indirectly -- my guide is something Chekov wrote in a letter, where he said that he tried to paint his scenes using indirect images; I think his example was that if a story was set at night, rather than use the word "night" he'd load up an atmospheric phrase like "moonlight glinted off a broken bottle" and just sort of drop it in.  I completely agree with Jill's comment that place often becomes another character.  I think that's true of most of the fiction I love most, from Melville, Twain, Dickens, early Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Katharine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor, James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Alice Munro, Stuart Dybek, John Cheever, Deborah Eisenberg, Denis Johnson, Charles Baxter, Richard Bausch, Raymond Carver, Alistair MacLeod, Andrea Barrett, Harper Lee, Robert Boswell, Isaac Babel, William Maxwell, J.D. Salinger, Garcia Marquez, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky.  Even Beckett, for all his claustrophobia, is intensely focused on his evocation of place -- however barren and other-worldly, he's amazingly precise about his settings.  And think of the Big Guy, Shakespeare, and how vividly he paints a picture of Elsinore, and Macbeth's haunted castle, Lear's moor and Prospero's island.  Of all the work I love most, I think probably Borges depends the least on place -- though in his case, lots of times it's his narrators' minds that are his settings, and he evokes them so well.  Sorry about the list of names -- I love talking about the writers whose work I love.

Anyway, Jill, you're a treasure.  Thanks again.

[#6]

Oh, I know my characters boss me around plenty! There is something to be said for allowing a character to dictate it's own fate.

As for birthplace effecting writing, I'm a military brat, so I grew up every where, and it reflects in my writing. As a kid I always whinned about all the moving and new people, but it's given me the ability to write about different regions and cultures and write them well.

[#7]

Ah, but is there any one region or culture that you most connect with, that seeps into your writing, SD?

[#8]

My place of birth, Seattle, has had a major impact on my writing: the vivid green, evergreen, landscape is still the default landscape in my mind, even though I've traveled a lot. I still think of the sky as something usually hazy gray with occasional breaks of brilliant blue, but the main influence has been on my vocabulary. There are so many words we use in this region, like salal (a common plant), that came into English through Chinook Jargon.

[#9]

I grew up in a crummy, industrial town on the Naugatuck river in central Connecticut. I like setting stories there, I know the lay of the land, can see it all in my mind, and can easily navigate characters through. I travel a lot for work, another advantage, and I always try to record locations in my mind so I can call them up for future use.

[#10]

As a "New York provincial" native new yorker who has never lived outside the city, I can't tell you how refreshing it is to hear from writers from other places on how their home towns and cities affect their writing. Do folks still remember the way people in your home towns talked, when you were kids?

[#11]

The way they talked?  Ah, they talked like I did.   However that was/is.  I was born and raised in So. Calif., but while living here, I've moved around, living in a variety of different cities and towns.  Although, the more rural I'd get, the differences in word usage became slightly different...from city to faming communites.

One of my grandmothers was French Canadian from Mass....hard, clipped, French accent.  She lived with us for a while.  My other grandmother, who lived close by,  was from the Boston area...a very distinct Mass accent.  Although, I've heard there are about 60 something dialects in the area of Boston, alone.

My one grandfather was from Scotland...very, very hard Scotch/broken English accent.  The other grandfather I met only once, he lived in Mass., northern section, spoke mostly French, very little English. 

California is said to have an absence of an accent, but I could hear the differences between city, and farming communities.  One of my friend's dad asked me, when I was a kid, where I was from...I said, here, Calif., He laughed, and he said, no, I mean, where were you born...  I said Long Beach Calif.  He seemed to think, by the way I spoke, I was from someplace other than here in Calif.  I'd never thought about it before...until he made that comment. Maybe Californians are a hodgepodge of nationalities, and accents, to the point of forming our own...I don't know.  I lived in Utah for about 4 years, as an adult,  and listened to the variety of voices.  Not just different accents, but word usages are different. 

Of course, every generation has their slang, their colloquailisms.  I gew up with all of them... Real cool! Ha!

I'm torn right now...after thinking about this subject, all sides of it....if it really is easier to write about what you're familiar with.  I'm familiar with a lot of different terrains and landscapes, and voices.  Or do we mash them all up together, throwing  them into the air to see what lands in your mind?  What's easier on the brain cells?:  Is it hard edge realism of specific terrain and language, or mashed up soft edges fantasy worlds?!

Kathy

[#12]

Jill,

You talk about a place becoming characters in writing... This was more than a topic of discussion for me, with Anita Diamant, on her book, Last Days of Dogtown!  Every character echoed that town, or was it the other way around?   They were one. 

Digging for every aspect of goodness from each of these characters, it was a hard struggle, but worth taking on!  The characters were pitted against so many adversities, I found myself howling a lament, along with the dogs!  It was funny, because when I finished reading that book, I wanted to write a score...music to place every one of her characters in.  She said she'd thought about writing screen plays, but at that time was "too close" to the book to think about it.

I wondered about that, and told her the feeling I got from each of those characters, and how the music would, or could, adapt to them.... It was beautiful, the feeling I had after reading that novel.  I connected to the characters, the landscape, and the author...all at the same time.

[#13]

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis and recommendation of LDoD!

[#14]

There are very few authors that I can link their characters to terrain.   My first was  Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley. 

Lyrical voice is a tugging choice.  Hearing what surrounds.... feeling the connection to the characters...these are the sounds .  You cannnot deny the feel.  It is my appeal.

[#15]

I suppose the place I write about most is Washington state. It's so beautiful and sureal there, it's a perfect setting for my Fantasy stuff. I write southern pretty well too. So much culture in the south!