Setting the setting: Water colors

Hi friends of reading and writing,

Do you enjoy the setting details in reading or do you skip over them?  I've heard both from friends who read a lot.  I enjoy setting details myself, so I can go over the top in writing about them.  I have to remind myself about music, films, other good time markers, but when it comes to water, I can write a book on that alone.

Watching water is one of my favorite mind-regenerating activities.  It looks remarkably like doing nothing, I admit that.  But the colors change, reflect the sky's moods, show more or less reflection of the shore depending on the wind and current and the sun's position.  And the water can be its own color.  I posted a photo of a great blue heron at Newport Back Bay on FB.  People liked it, commented on their experiences with this bird.  Since I'm writing about North Carolina's lowland rivers and swamps, I said that for my setting in current writing, the water should be tes-brown or black.  Shiny like coal, great at reflecting egrets but great at hiding herons.  I just hope that the color of water means something to my readers someday.  It means a lot to my protagonist, Holly McLain, growing up into an environmental activist in North Carolina, then California.

What do you feel about settings in your writing and in your reading?

cheers,
Laura

Something That Makes You Uncomfortable to Write

Hi friends of reading and writing,

Maria Popova, in her online magazine BrainPickings, has written about F. Scott Fitzgerald's correspondence with aspiring young writers this month.  He advises them that writing well is hard and may require you to invent a new form to fit the exigencies of your urgent message.  He also says that the stronger your technique is, after years of practice, you can write about anything.  But early on, while you're a writer-in-progress, you need the power of pain and bewilderment, anguish, misery to propel a story and make the reader sit on the edge of her chair.  So you have to use those things you'd rather not bring up, rather not delve into, definitely don't want to write about for public consumption.  Only those things carry the emotional weight you need.

My friend Gayle Brandeis suffered though a time of excruciating emotional turmoil in her life when her mother committed suicide soon after the birth of her child.  She wrote about it in ways that gave readers some sense of her feelings.  Why should something so specific, that almost certainly does not match what each reader is going through, have such power to attract and hold the reader?  I think it's the authenticity.  When the emotions are raw and powerful, the writer does not pretend or posture, but just tries her best to capture them. They come through and resonate with times each of us has experienced those types of emotions, whether or not they were elicited by the same events.

So don't hide away the secret events of your life.  Get them out of your brain's deep freeze, remember and re-experience the emotions, and write them into your work, whether it is fiction or non-fiction.

cheers,
Laura

Interview with Kathryn Wilkens

LH: Kathryn, how did you get interested in writing?

KW: I didn’t get interested in writing until my late 20s when I felt the urge to start a personal journal. I didn’t want to write for anyone else, only for my future self. A few times when I came to the end of a book I would consider abandoning the enterprise, but I always wound up buying a new book and filling it up. No one had ever encouraged me to write, so I had to encourage myself. My writing was a form of rebellion against my traditional, Midwestern, male-dominated upbringing. My journals taught me how to write and helped me become the kind of adult I wanted to be.

LH: What was your first success?

KW: My first paid acceptance was an essay in Walking magazine, followed closely by a personal essay in the Los Angeles Times and a travel article, also in the Times. For me the stumbling block was in mustering the audacity to send out queries and manuscripts. Once I got over that, publication came easily (not that I didn’t have rejections and rewrites). Of course, by this time I was in my 50s!

LH: What kind of books or articles do you most enjoy writing?

KW: I write short nonfiction—700 to 900-word personal essays or 1,000 to 1,200-word articles. I write about anything that interests me at the moment. In addition to travel articles, I’ve written about the English language, writing techniques and photography. I wrote several articles for the now-defunct Personal Journaling on topics such as nature writing and how to title your journals. I’ve had three essays published in anthologies, with another one coming out in 2010.

LH: What are your thoughts about marketing? Do you have any great tips on how to do it well?

KW: Only what everyone has heard a million times: Never give up. A story or article is only a failure if you quit sending it out. Of course, you may have to update, revise or re-purpose a piece of writing (by changing the angle or writing it for a different audience than you first envisioned). Also, I like to use the word “decline” rather than “reject” because it’s less emotionally loaded, as in “The editor declined my article, but I’m sending it out again.”

LH: If you could go back in time and start over, tell us one thing you have learned that would help you to succeed better/faster/with less struggle.

KW: I took an article-writing class at UC Riverside Extension with Mike Foley and he explained the marketing process (queries, cover letters, submission formats). I wish I had taken his class (or a similar one) at a younger age. I struggled with my own attitude for years and couldn’t accept that I was a real writer. Then I looked at all my journals and realized of course I’m a writer! Who but a writer would maintain a journal for so many years without a reason other than the desire to do it? Anyway, I think a certain amount of self-doubt is good if it motivates you to take writing classes, read writing magazines, learn how to research, revise and market.

LH: Any other thoughts to share?

KW: Join or start a critique group. Set up ground rules that everyone agrees to. Read your story aloud, then be still and listen to what others say, without jumping in to justify what you wrote. Accept both praise and criticism with equanimity. You don’t have to take everyone’s suggestions, but you should pay attention to what is working and what isn’t. And right before you send a manuscript, it’s a good idea to have someone proofread it. They will find little mistakes that you may have read right over several times!

Here is the link to my travel article about Egypt:

http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-trw-egypt7-2009jun07

Interview with Linley Erin Hall

LH: Can you tell us how you got interested in writing? I know you were into science back at Harvey Mudd College.

LEH: I started writing stories in the fourth grade, and although I wrote for the school newspapers in junior high and high school, I mostly wrote fiction. When I went to HMC, I thought I’d become a chemistry professor. I found biochemistry fascinating. But I didn’t enjoy lab work. Putting my science interest together with my writing skills was a great combination for me.

LH: What was your first success with writing?

LEH: I was a graduate student in the science writing program at UC Santa Cruz, and one of my internships was at The Californian, a small newspaper in Salinas. I was assigned to cover the visit of the Olympic Torch to the area, and my article ended up on the front page! That my article was important enough and good enough for the front page gave me a lot of confidence.

LH: What kind of things do you most enjoy writing?

LEH: The in-depth ones. I’ve written a lot of different kinds of nonfiction, but it’s more fun to dig deep into a subject, to tell a real story, than to write a 300-500 word article skimming the surface, although those are important too. I also still enjoy writing fiction, although I haven't had any published yet.

LH: Any experience with agents?

LEH: Not yet. I sold Who’s Afraid of Marie Curie without one. I wrote an essay about the hairs we leave behind, not science at all, for the magazine section of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. In the blurb about me at the bottom, I said I write about science and engineering. About two and a half months later, an editor at Seal Books emailed me, said she liked my writing style, and asked if I’d like to write a book for Seal about women in science. That contact grew into Who’s Afraid of Marie Curie. So I basically skipped one of the hardest parts of getting a book published. It’s almost like I cheated.

LH: What are your thoughts about marketing?

LEH: It’s the part of freelancing that I enjoy least. It’s hard to put yourself out there. There are so many people trying to reach your audience, you need to stand out from that background. Target your audience and be creative.

LH: If you could go back in time to when you started writing and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

LEH: If you want to be a freelance writer, make a specific, detailed business plan. I sort of made one when I first made the leap into freelancing, but I could have avoided rough places if I’d done more research and planned more carefully up front. As for the writing itself, outline, outline, outline. Having a plan, even if it changes, makes writing both fiction and nonfiction easier.

LH: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on writing with us, Linley.