Category Archives: Writer

Ready, Set, Go…For the Jugular

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Tell us your Secrets

For reasons unknown, I used to teach creative writing. The don’t-think/just-let-it-rip type of teaching, and depending on how willing/able people were to try it, I was mildly successful. I taught this way because it was the only way I knew – or know – how to write. Not suited to everyone, I found out.

But once, a student came back to class and said she let it rip for a half hour straight and apparently, she’d dug deep, pulled out something painful. Her eyes were huge, her voice shaky: “It scared the hell out of me!”

I was young, and as you might have guessed, not a great teacher.  Great teachers clarify, illuminate, impart useful information.  (What made me think I could do this???) So while I felt for her, I had no words to explain it.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I have those words.  I could have told her that yeah, writing can be scary. It can be painful. Because writing is a risky business. Because it’s about letting go and going for the jugular. Because fiction writers have to be prepared to go for their own jugular and dig up their darkest secrets — over and over again.  Agatha Christie put it succinctly: “writing is torture.”

While I’ve never been scared by what I’ve written, I can say, letting the story go where it’s wanted to go, I’ve been surprised by where it’s gone and what it’s revealed.

I’ve read that writer Doris Betts – who writes both novels and short stories – once said that the novel is prose growth, and the short story is prose revelation. This explains a lot to me! It explains why, when my short stories work well, they give me the chills. (I have one particular story that still gives me the chills!)

In any case, if I were ever to go back to teaching (not!), I‘d still use the let-it-rip type of teaching. It’s what I believe in, it’s worked for me and it’s worked for thousands of other writers.

So here’s what I know: I know what works for me, and I know teaching is not for me,  But I very much like certain writing prompts. So how about this one: Write a piece of fiction that reveals something you have never told anyone before.  Don’t think, don’t judge. Just go….

If you get something that scares you – or gives you a little chill – awesome! 

🙂

 

Buck Up and Take It

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Rejection Sucks          It hurts. I admit it.

Over the years that I’ve been writing and submitting my stories for publication, I’ve received hundreds if not thousands of rejection letters and emails, and I’m still not immune to the sting of rejection.

I have enough rejections to line the walls of my dining room. Stuff like, “not for us,” “thanks for submitting, but we’ve decided….” or the worst one: “not funny and not fair.” Yikes!

It’s hard enough to put yourself and your work ‘out there.’ Still, rejection comes with the territory. And of course, one can always rewrite (or not) and re-submit someplace else, move the story to an archive file, join a writing group, or simply rationalize: They wouldn’t know a good story if it hit them in the arse.

In my heart of hearts, I’ve never quite believed that once your writing has reached a certain level of competence, it’s a matter of taste. Still, this is what other (more accomplished) writers have been telling me.

And then this happened:

My story 13 Rules recently won first prize in the short-short story writing contest run by  New Millennium Writings. At the same time that I submitted 13 Rules to NMW, I submitted it along with two other flash fictions to Fiction Attic Press. (Yes, multiple submissions are ok, particularly if a publication’s guidelines say it is.)

When 13 Rules won, I was so bowled over I forgot to notify Fiction Attic and withdraw it from their consideration. Bet you can guess what happened next….

A few weeks after I won the NMW fiction contest, Fiction Attic emailed me to say it wanted to publish two of the three flash fictions I submitted – and the one they didn’t want was – ta da! – 13 Rules.

Which just goes to show:

1)    One man’s meat is another man’s poison.

2)    After a certain level of competence, it really is just a matter of taste.

Of course all of us who have had our work rejected are in really good company. Here are 30 famous authors whose works were rejected (repeatedly, and sometimes rudely) by publishers

p.s. Coward that I am, I never did tell Fiction Attic the story they rejected just won 1st prize somewhere else.

🙂

A Stimulating, Impassioned Discourse on The Day Job

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A Stimulating, Impassioned Discourse on the Day Job

By the time you read this, it will be a couple of days past the end of my association’s Annual Conference. But today, as I write this, it’s a couple of days before the conference, and the plates are flying! Cancellations, last minute replacements, information requests in areas not in my realm of expertise…..

I’ve been doing this job for some time, but never get used to conference time. Sometimes, I go to the conference, sometimes I stay back, tend the fires and juggle the plates. And man, are there plates to juggle today!

Would I rather BE at the conference?  At conference, you arrive before the speakers, the attendees and the exhibitors. A day of unpacking, organizing, meetings and last minutes set-ups.

You’re up before the sun rises, and back at your hotel long after it sets. You sleep with one eye open, worried you won’t get up in time to meet the caterers and unlock the door so they can serve the staff breakfast. You are not hungry yet, but will be as soon as you are scheduled to be elsewhere.

You walk about a million miles in your hopefully comfortable shoes (God help you if you don’t bring any!). You check session rooms, distribute registration envelopes, take tickets, meet attendees, speakers, exhibitors and sponsors. Tired? You don’t notice. The energy that buzzes through the conference is exhilarating; everyone is having a great time, happy to meet you and like you, running on high.

Then, too soon, it’s over.

But I digress. It’s nearly five o’clock, and the fires are now out, the plates have gone back into the cupboard and the blessed weekend is almost here. On Monday, I’ll go back to editing/writing session descriptions for my association’s many upcoming conferences and help members who are, or wish to become, certified legal managers.

This is my job, which by the way, is not just the ‘day job’ I do to support my fiction writing; I actually enjoy it.

Still, I do wonder, if I didn’t work the ‘day job’ would I have more psychic energy to write fiction? Would I blog more, volunteer at a food pantry, spend hours at the library and go to lunch with my friends?

I’ve tried to imagine it. With retirement in the not so distant future, all I can say is, stay tuned….

Do You Hear Me?

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Can your inner child come out; Listen to Your Characters

Famous playwright Harold Pinter once said when he is writing his plays he doesn’t know who is behind the door until it opens.

Pinter lets his characters tell the story. Well I’m certainly no Pinter, but I can say I have experienced the same. It happens when my first draft is going really well, when it flows effortlessly and my characters are talking to me.  I just need to listen.

Will character X leave her husband? How does X talk, act, think?  If I listen to X, she will tell me.

If I listen, my writing feels unforced and carries with it a certain heat and depth of experience that hopefully resonates. When my writing is forced, it’s uninspired, unauthentic, flat.

Perhaps I’m not always in the right frame of mind when I’m writing. Frankly, I don’t always know until it’s too late. All I know is when my writing is flat, it’s as if X has shut the door and gone into hiding.

And, by God, the silence is deafening.

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Why I’m Reluctant

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Writing this blog, not to mention creating my website, has been a harrowing labor of ….. are you waiting for me to say “love…”?

Well, I confess: I hate this.

I hate this: Because I’m a fiction writer expending energy NOT writing a piece of fiction.

I hate this: Because I’m an introvert – meaning I process everything internally, I am NOT outgoing and am definitely NOT the life of the party. It also means it doesn’t come easy for me to share my life, my thoughts or my writing process.

Last but not least, because for this writer of fiction, it’s not easy to write non-fiction.

Yet here I am.

Me Being Reluctant

S.J.Powers; writer; short stories; New Millennium

Next post: My writing process

Sex & the ‘Burbs

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By Guest Blogger, Timothy State

About two years ago, I sold out and chose a life with my partner in the suburbs over the urban lifestyle I’ve been used to for most of my adult life.  It was like moving to the country: occasionally we get public safety notices pushed to our cell phones that read something like, “Possible cougar sighting in the neighborhood.”  Of course there was a cougar sighting — and she was drinking a martini!

In this suburban wilderness, my partner and I seem to have amassed a following of tweens, who show up at our house wanting to tell us all about their boy troubles and girl troubles.  One young gentleman in particular has taken a fondness to me, which I am certain is because of his yet-to-be-realized need to be comforted in life by the arms of another boy. Despite being surrounded by images of gays everywhere, he seems to be trapped. Isolated in the way that every teen seems to be isolated by their own demons.

It’s a bizarre world here in the suburbs, where all the ladies on the street are either going through a divorce, are on the verge of a divorce, or have completed a divorce.  Those that are still married seem to be married to closeted gentleman who suppress their need for male companionship.

We’ve trained these ladies to show up at the front door, wine glass in hand, when we flip on the martini light that we place in the front kitchen window. Given advanced warning of the martini illumination, they bling out, like it’s a special occasion — a tupperware party, a Mary Kay bash…. But here, in the home of two gay men, they seem compelled to trash-talk their husbands who continue to not live up to the exacting and unrealistic standards they hold them to, unwilling to admit they themselves don’t live up to their own expectations.

After pointing this out (as a simple courtesy), they stare blankly over their blush-filled wine glasses, like cougars caught in headlights, paralyzed by reality.

On the other side of the room, in the gentleman’s corner, the husband with one testicle who shoots blanks with the testicle he has, finds an occasion at The Gays as the perfect opportunity to lose himself in a bottle of RumChata.  “Boozy Milk,” we call it. Drunk on the intoxicating cream, his hand slips across the inside thigh of another street husband whose raging homophobia has banned “Glee” from his household, driving his twelve-year-old daughter down the street to watch the show with the budding gay boy on the night that he thinks she’s at piano lessons.  The irony of this over-protection is that he seems to have no cause for limiting his daughter’s exposure to the dangers of FOX News, like the father who leaves a loaded pistol on the coffee table. But I digress.

Palm of hand firmly planted on the inside homophobic thigh, the shock of pleasure reverberates through both their bodies, like an electrical charge igniting the Hindenburg, leaving behind a sticky social residue calling for delicate diplomacy.  They retreat as stunned, wounded puppies, grabbing their wives. They share what happened with their wives, quick to place blame the other party, clearly a move of offensive masculinity. Are we imagining this, you ask?

Well, a few days later, walking through the neighborhood, a glass of wine in hand and the dog exploring on his leash, we spot a cougar housewife as she races out of her home to reveal to us that she and her husband returned home to have what could only be described as, “angry sex.”

“Angry sex?” my partner, Michael, and I ask in unison.

“It was so rough,” she says.

“Oh, so you mean rough sex.”

“No.  Angry sex. It was so hard and rough, filled with so much aggression; I’m bruised. I can barely walk, let alone sit down.”

Michael and I look at each other quizzically, wondering why we’re the receptacle of this over-share.

“He was on top of me and then behind me, then on top of me, and then behind me again.”

“Wait? What?”

She then describes how he penetrated her vi-jay-jay, then went to the vi-no-no, back to the vi-jay-jay, before finally shooting up her vi-no-no.  She doesn’t seem to mind it up the vi-no-no and he seems to really enjoy plugging her from behind when she’s on all fours.

The irony is not lost on us that in this moment of hyper-masculinity, her husband went right for the hyper-homosexual; we suck down wine to keep words from escaping our mouths.

“So you used a condom, and washed up in between, right?” I ask.

“No. That’s why I had to go to the doctor,” she says.

“The doctor?”

“I’ve got a vaginal infection. I’m on an antibiotic for ten days.”

Such is the normal neighborhood conversation while walking the dog.

We turn on the martini light about every other week, which means the cougars on the street are generally on a low-level antibiotic. Always.

Better than Cymbalta or Zoloft, I suppose.  At the very least, we know they’re getting some.

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Timothy State, writer, photographer, producer, has been living in the North Shore of Chicagoland since 2011.  In that time, he’s spotted numerous wild cougars.

Three Days of Drinkin’

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BettyBras Musical InspirationCompliments of Guest Blogger The Oldest Living Middle-Aged Writer

The lyrics to some songs have helped my writing. Not copying the lyrics into a story, but using the poetry and tempo as inspiration that energized my next writing project.

For instance, I love the song from the Sopranos TV series – “Woke up this Morning” by A3. The beginning of the song features a spoken track:

And after three days of drinkin’ with Larry Love

                  I just get an inklin’ to go on home

                  So I’m walkin’ down Coldharbour Lane

                  Head hung low, three or four in the mornin’

                  The sun’s comin’ up and the birds are out singing

                  I let myself into my pad

                  Wind myself up that spiral staircase

                  An’ stretch out nice on the chesterfield

It goes on for a while before the refrain “Woke up this mornin’/Got yourself a gun.”

With the visual in my head of the man shuffling down the street just before sunrise and the moody rhythm in the background, I begin my story of this man getting shot in a drive-by on a warm summer Chicago morning. I can see the car low to the ground, the bass turned up and pulsing to the song’s refrain as it slowly and deliberately approaches. The left rear window slides down. The muzzle of a gun sparks in a bright red ring followed a millisecond later by smoke and sound. The man sitting at the bus stop, head hung low, slides off the bench. The car moves on down the street as the sun peeks over the liquor store sign. The birds stop singing.

Another song that I feel has a compelling story is “Streets of Philadelphia” sung by Bruce Springsteen:

I was bruised and battered and I couldn’t tell

                  What I felt

                  I was unrecognizable to myself

                  I saw my reflection in a window I didn’t know

                  My own face

                  Oh brother are you gonna leave me

                  Wastin’ away

                  On the streets of Philadelphia

Listening to the mournful refrain in the background, I can imagine a homeless man catching a glimpse of himself in a store window and realizing with startling clarity that he is unrecognizable to himself. And he suddenly can’t breathe, his heart filled with overwhelming regret and remorse. He falls to his knees and cries, his head bowed, his hands useless. He collapses onto the broken concrete.

What song or songs speak to you? Have you followed a song’s words and music into a place in your writing you have yet to explore? Did you allow your imagination to do the work, and maybe found a story in your head you didn’t even know was there?

As for me, I might also try three days of drinkin’….

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The Oldest Living Middle-Aged Writer (aka Pat Childers) lives in Midwestern flyover country with her dogs. There have been reported sightings of her husband. In between innings of the Cubs game she works on her novel.

This Is Your Brain On…

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Welcome to your brain

Welcome to Your Brain

Compliments of Guest Blogger K. Jean King

Texting and driving – dangerous right? It’s a national campaign: to become aware of the dangers of texting while driving and to end it. But here is the thing about that: texting while driving is actually impossible to do.

Let’s start with the brain, because, like everything else, that is where our problem lies. There are two types of functions the brain uses to complete any given task: the cognitive and the associative.

When the brain is engaging in an associative task, it is capable of doing many different things at once, such as listening, talking, singing show tunes, and driving.

Since driving is an associative function, we have gotten very used to being able to do other things at the same time.  We can listen to music, have a conversation, eat a burrito, have a thumb war, all without compromising the effectiveness of our driving. (You know, as far as our brain is concerned).

This is why it is possible to talk on your cell phone and drive at the same time. Talking is associative. Driving is associative. Your brain can do it.

Cognitive tasks, on the other hand, render your brain incapable of performing any other task while you are engaged with them. Cognitive tasks include things like long division, reading and writing.

As soon as we pick up our phone and begin to read a text message, our brains have become involved in a cognitive task; by nature, a cognitive task needs the entire brain to engage in it.

Therefore, if you are texting, your car might still be moving, but your brain has stopped driving it.

If you are reading a text message, you are sitting in the front seat of a two-ton tank, now speeding down the road at fifty miles an hour with no one operating it.

Texting while Driving

Two Ton Tank Driving Itself

If you are writing a text message, be aware – that is all you are now doing.

Additionally, your brain will not start controlling these things again until you stop reading or writing that text message, either because you’ve finished or because your attention has been diverted by the giant elm tree that is now where your front hood should be.

To call any task “texting while…” would be -and is- completely inaccurate. When texting, your brain can do nothing but text. You cannot text while talking. You cannot text while singing. You cannot text while rubbing your stomach and patting your head. And you certainly cannot text while at the same time driving, even though, in our cars, we are under the illusion that we are doing both.

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K. Jean King has been battling a writing affliction since early childhood. She lives outside of Philadelphia with yet another dog and the rest of her family. For humor and insight by K. Jean King, please visit theirrefutableopinion.com.

Ouch!

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Compliments of Guest Blogger, The Oldest Living Middle-Aged Writer

Slapped into a Nap

I didn’t see it coming. I was just minding my own business getting my paper and pen together, planning the day, and WHAM I was on the couch taking a nap. In retrospect, I should have been better prepared.

It wasn’t that long ago I was assailed by self-doubt. I re-read my current writing project (a mystery called Intimate Murder) and found it wanting. Or rather, the editor on my shoulder said very unkind things about it; he said my writing was pedantic.

Ouch.

Not pithy?

While I slept that night the parts of my brain that conspire against me whipped up a slide show of previous failings, including that time in college when I took a biology test without reading the textbook. At 2:00 a.m. it was presented to me in great detail and deliberation until in desperation I took a sleeping pill.

I remember I shrugged lethargy off when I got up. It’s not as if I hadn’t seen all the slides before many times. I keep them handy in little brain files for those anxious moments when I’m desperate to feel self-assured but need a reminder why I’m not. Like in Star Wars: “This is not the writer you’re looking for. Move along.”

Okay, inertia got the better of me and wrestled my self-esteem into an all-time low of humdrum, which is just barely above apathy.

But I cannot work under these circumstances. It is unprofessional. I demand respect. Where the hell is she? Oh there she is over there with recognition. They’re working on a new slide show with samples of my work and awards I’ve earned. It’s about time. By my age, I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that I’ll never have a bra that fits, but at least I’m sure that I am a writer.

And to the editor on my shoulder, time you moved along.

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Whether being pithy or irreverent, the Oldest Living Middle-Aged Writer (aka Pat Childers), is an award-winning writer and occasional blogger.

Questions from The Oldest Living Middle-Aged Writer

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Writer

by Guest Blogger, Pat Childers

Why do you write? I know why I write. I write for money. I write creative nonfiction for money, but I also write fiction to make myself laugh and so far nobody pays me for that. Sometimes I write to find out what I’m thinking and that can be really scary, but it does help me straighten out my medication.

I’m currently writing a science fiction thriller titled “Robot Love.” I thought of calling it “50 Shades of Robot Love,” but that would make it an entirely different book, albeit entertaining. I’m also writing a mystery that takes place in Chicago about a private investigator named Murray Antoinette. Anyway, I’ve had my picture taken for the dust jacket, written the prologue and thanked the people who helped me. It’s just that stuff in the middle (the actual text) that I’m having trouble with.

But what I want to know is: why do you write? What is it that you have to say that is so insightful, thought-provoking, or entertaining it needs to be shared with as many people as possible?  Do you have a story inside you that will cause a reader to pause and re-read a passage because it is so well said it is startling? Is it plot-driven, character-driven, or written in stream of consciousness like Virginia Woolf? I am anxious to know.

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The Oldest Living Middle-Aged Writer lives in Midwestern flyover country with her dogs. There have been reported sightings of her husband. In between innings of the Cubs game she is working on her web site and can be contacted at pat@pjchilders.com.