Happy Anniversary: Looking Back and Looking Forward

As I was perusing the blog today, I noticed that it's been a year since we got this craziness going!  Our official anniversary was the 13th of this month, but we'll celebrate it a few days later because I definitely feel it's worth celebrating.  Firstly I want to congratulate everyone who has been a part of this blog, the admin, the writers, the editor, and the readers.  I know that for me, Detangled Writers has been a source of pride, enjoyment, and education.  Taking a look at our contributor profiles, I see a group of people who I hold in high esteem.  These women have taken time out of their lives to share their thoughts and knowledge with the writing community.  Some of the goals we wrote in our profiles might be a bit outdated by now - some things might be all done and checked off, some things may have been set aside, while others may be in progress.  I invite the contributors to create fresh goals lists and provide an update.  Tell us about your writing; what projects do you have going on, is writer's block bugging you, are you having trouble finding time for your craft?   Also, let's talk about what goals we have for the blog in general and how we can become an even better support network for each other.  

 

Old Goals for Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora)! 

1. Time Management 
2. Keeping the Creative Juices Flowing
3. Finishing what I start...
4. Grad School and everything to do with it!
5. Characters - working on characterizations

I accomplished part of number four by applying to and being accepted to an MFA program.  I am currently working toward completing my masters in creative writing at Pine Manor College.  Number five can be removed because, for me, the writing itself is what generates character and plot and trying to work on those independently is possible but not really a goal.  As far as the first three goals, I would keep one and three on my list!  Number two is less of a goal for me and more a goal for the blog.  My new list, a much more specific list, would look like this:

New Goals!

1. Time Management
2. Finish Death Man (my current novel in progress)
3. Work on short stories for Workshops
4. Read craft books and fiction novels
5. Attend an AWP conference (Seattle 2014)

Some goals for the blog would be to see some more blogs on hot topics such as fanfiction writing, romance versus erotica, elements of craft, literary definitions and analyses, and even book reviews and discussions.  I would love to see more vocab words!  Everyone is encouraged to post vocab builders and word exercises.  If people have personal blogs where they share writing pieces, I would like to see entries detailing the process, successes, and failures they had with the project and then a link so we can read your work.

I hope that everyone who is part of this blog is as proud of it as I am.  This post brings our total to 148 published blogs for Detangled Writers.  Here's hoping that by this time next year we have upwards of 300!  Thank you to our contributors and readers.

A Word is Only the Beginning of the End

This is a topic I might have already touched upon, however I wanted to revisit it. If I have not mentioned it on Detangled Writers, or if I have and you just don't want to scroll a dozen pages back, I will start by asking you all a question: What does it take to make a story? Not a good story, not an amazing story, or even a bad story. Just a story, the rest can come after; and why am I asking you this? Because this is a topic that is both intriguing to me, while being irksome at once.

We have many expectations for a story, some of them very shallow. I'll name a few, a story must have plot, and it must be reasonable, that's one expectation - or often considered requirement. A story must have characters, and those characters need to serve a purpose. A story must have meaning, not necessarily a lesson, but meaning that relays to the reader. And that leads to the most shallow of expectations (in my opinion), a story must be written - or oral, but it must be made of words.

This expectation has often baffled me, as a person who can sit and stare at a piece of artwork, or listen to a classical work of art, and wonder and imagine and build from them. Yet many people are very adamant that such things as music or artwork are not stories. Do you believe this is true? In one of my writing courses we had a very heated debate on what a story was, and most people attested that no, a story had to be a full manuscript, but it could not be a picture or any form of artwork.

I believe this to be a very narrow view, and as a writer, as an artist, as someone who loves listening to music, I wanted to share this idea with you all. I was one of three people that contested this view of storytelling, and here is why. All of my stories, start with pictures, start with a feeling that I'm having inside, because that's my outlet, and so when I was told that art was not a form of storytelling I was quite offended, because this is what I believe a story is.

Anything that can get your imagination invested. As simple as that. I believe that if you look at a picture, and you ask 'why?' there is a story there, because as soon as you ask why, your mind starts building that story for itself. The artist who painted the picture, there was an investment in the presentation, there was a thought, and as an artist myself, there is a story, at least for me, even if it's missed by everyone else.

Now I know that's a very broad view, and can be equally as dangerous as the narrow view of story, so I'll condense it into a smaller frame of idea. Native Americans and Ancient Egyptians often used pictures to depict their legends where words and language were not enough. Would we deny that these are stories?

Finally the definition of story that really bothered me was that a story must have length:

"For sale, baby shoes. Never worn."
- Ernest Hemingway

This is the story that Hemingway considered his very finest in it's power to invoke a reaction. He believed this to be his greatest work of all time, and many people say that this is not a story at all. They say it's a piece of prose, but that it lacks the length and meaning of a story. It lacks the meaning? Do you believe this is true? "For sale, baby shoes. Never worn." This lacks meaning? ...Never worn; why? Why were these shoes never worn. Considering Hemingway's time, it leads to the assumption that the child died, if the child didn't die, there was something amiss with the shoes, but either way, there is a distinct feeling of loss - at least to me.

Because of the contention against this piece, a form of writing known as flash-fiction was created, and in fact my limited research on the topic genuinely suggests that this is the very reason flash-fiction was created at all. However flash-fiction doesn't necessarily make it a story. I admit I don't believe this is probably Hemingway's best work, but the fact that it resounded so strongly with him, and that he believed it to be his best, doesn't that investment in and of itself make it a story? Of course Hemingway knows much more than any of us behind the true meaning of the story, because perhaps the shoes were just too small for the baby, we don't know, it leaves us to wonder though.

So I want to ask all of you, what do you think qualifies as a story? Do you think it's an underlying meaning, or does it have to have words and length? Do pictures and songs count? Or is it what comes after that counts?

Guided Prompts

So I have a fun idea to get away from the blank page syndrome (a.k.a. writer's block, a.k.a. I-dunno-how-to-start-this-really-cool-idea).  Looking back at my writing history I realize that I write better (or at least more profusely) when working off a prompt.  This is why Role Play story writing is so successful.  Each time you interchange with a partner, it is essentially them giving you a prompt.  For any of you out there that might not know what Role Play (RP) writing is, it is just as the name suggests.  You write (in third person) the experiences and thoughts of a single character performing an act or a series of acts and then you have a writing partner have their character react to what you wrote.  It's a fun back and forth that is not only great writing practice but wonderful at helping you build and develop characters.  One of the reason's it's so fun and so successful is because you are kept wondering what your partner will write because that is your next prompt.

Back when Yahoo!360 was an active site (may it rest in peace), I used to write a few short segments based on prompts I found on sites like Writer's Digest.  One such story was about a person receiving a text from an unknown number.  I pumped out a generous amount for such a tiny prompt and had thoughts to even take it further.  Now, when I say 'prompt' it doesn't necessarily have to be 'It was a dark and stormy night when Mrs. Winters went outside to look for Pooky and found...' like that.  I mean even a self prompt like 'what would I do if I won the lottery.'  Things like that to get the juices going.  And this brings me to the point of this blog post: guided prompts.  If you have an idea and you want to write about it but aren't sure how to get started, try prompting yourself into scenes.

I have an android piece that I am itching to work on and so far I have about five different beginnings, all of which I despise and I know that it's because I'm putting too much pressure on myself to make it 'perfect' and I'm not letting myself just relax and write (which is kind of the point of writing, right?).  So what I'm going to do is give myself specific prompts.

Idea: Dystopian Android Tribe

Prompt: Leader of Android Tribe comes across a dead human.  What does he do?

Prompt: Androids find a baby and attempt to raise it.

Prompt: Androids think of themselves as 'living,' how do they react when someone tells them they have no value and are just pieces of machinery?

Prompt: Show the androids breaking or following the three laws of Robotics.

Prompt: Do androids really dream of electric sheep?

Prompt: It was a dark and stormy night... wait... no, I meant: one of the androids falls into disrepair, how do the androids react to the 'death' of one of their own?

These are all scenes that could potentially work themselves into the book, but the real purpose of these prompts is to get me somewhere in character and plot development and, ultimately, to get words on the page.  I will most likely be answering some of these tomorrow and posting them on my Gurgle Burp blog.   I know that the idea as I've written it is very vague (trust me I do have a bit more of a plan in mind than just that), but if you have any prompts for that idea, please post them and I will attempt to answer them as well!  Prompts are fun, dang it.  They shouldn't just be used to generate ideas, they can also be employed to fuel ideas that are already hatched and eager for development.

Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) © April 2013

Progress Report for Skoora

I'm over the halfway mark on my first semester in the Solstice MFA program.  I have about ten books left to read (I'm behind, unfortunately) and I have five craft analyses under my belt, one pedagogical response finished, three cover letters, one artists statement, and somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty pages toward my novel.  There are more pages than that, but those are incomplete scenes and chunks of notes.  On the whole I have to say that distance learning with a mentor has really worked well for me.  It was new and I was unsure at the beginning but I enjoy the back and forth of the cover letter and have found Steve Huff's comments to be incredibly helpful.  His critiques are honest but not rude.  He doesn't skirt around issues and, when necessary, he offers reasons behind his assessments.  It's been a wonderful journey so far and I'm a little sad that I only have two more packets to exchange with him.  That being said, I need to get my rear in gear because I want to share brand new writing with him on this next packet as well as really start putting into practice the things that he's touched upon in his responses to my packets.

One thing that we discussed is narrative authority.  I tend to write 'somehow' and 'perhaps' when writing in observant third person and not writing directly from the characters experience.  This makes it sound as if I, the god-like narrator, does not know how or why something happens.  The character does not know these things, but the narrator definitely does.  This is something I definitely want to work on because a vast majority of the stories I want to write will depend greatly upon the credibility of the observer narrator.

This month is a Camp NaNoWriMo month and I am signed up with a 20,000 word goal.  Usually I try and crank out the 50K but since the majority of what I am writing right now is coming to me slowly and with much revision and polishing, I figured a smaller goal would be less stressful and much more feasible.  I'm curious about my fellow contributors: are any of you participating in NaNoWriMo this month and if so what kind of projects are you undertaking?  I am working on my dystopian novel as well as a few short stories that may be lead ins to future novel projects.  

© Amanda LaFantasie (Skoora) 2013

Online, long distance workshop idea.

One of my goals is to set up a workshop for writing. For myself as well as my writing friends, I hope to create and build a strong support group where we can bring our stories and ideas to the table. A place where we can relax, be at ease, set aside our egos and help each other with constructive feedback, creative brainstorming, and that pesky thing called grammar. 

  

My proposal is to start small and simple. Each of us picks a short story we want to work the kinks out of or need some help with. We send it to all members of the group by a certain date and we look over each story over the course of a month or four weeks. After the four weeks/month has passed e-mail our edits back to the story owners and we agree to a date and time to join each other on a Google Hangout, one I will set up, where we can discuss each story. After the session we can add new stories to be looked at while we make edits on the discussed stories and so forth you get the idea and I am really flexible so long as we keep some structure. 

Reason for Goggle Hangout. Not all of us are in the geographical location and using this service will allow us to get together without having to shell out money to meet. Also, I've used it before to chat with family and I've seen where you can add multiple people. 

The reason for meeting once a month: We all have other things in our lives that demand our attention aside from writing. I feel a month gives us enough time, without rushing us, to really looks at each other's work without scrambling to get it done along with everything else we have to do. With this I am also flexible. If someone needs to turn in a story or submit a story, we can bring it up with each other or we can also postpone the monthly meetings to give us more time. 

If this idea is something any of you are interested in, please comment below and we'll get something set up A.S.A.P.