Pep Talks for Writers Read online

  Perhaps that’s why it’s so important for me to preserve at least a corner for my writing sanctuary and carve out a space where I can put the statue of the dog, the toy antique cannon, and the mug of pens I still have. Those talismans have the power to transport me elsewhere, to invite me to leap into my imagination. I bet you can create a space with your own lucky charms of creativity.

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  DECORATE FOR CREATIVITY

  What spaces inspire you? What items are charged with creativity? Decorate your desk for the characters you’d like to invite onto the page, the memories you’d like to kindle.

  27

  ARTISTIC THIEVERY, OR THE ART OF REMIXING

  Be original.

  Those two little words have loomed in my mind since I first decided to be a writer. Originality is a mantra, a revered artistic commandment, but such a daunting charge has shut down many an author. Writers so often tell me they have an idea for a novel, but they haven’t written it because it’s too similar to the Hunger Games, or it’s a vampire novel, and the market is glutted with vampire stories. I sympathize. I also sometimes get an idea I like, but then question if it’s truly new and fresh, and often decide it really isn’t. (It’s difficult to be original after thousands of years of storytelling.) I’ll wonder if I’m writing a story in a singular way, with a singular voice, with singular characters, with more and more singularity, or if my stories are simply boring retreads.

  I’ve begun to wonder what originality truly is. Is it like a newfangled creature that bursts from your head—a creature never witnessed or imagined in any form by someone else? Does it have to be entirely unique, or does its originality reside in the pulse of truth, the authentic personal feeling the author imparts in the work? We have this idea that an author’s imagination flows with a sparkling, pure stream of ideas. We hear how art should be new, revolutionary, without precedent. A novel is supposed to be . . . novel, after all—new!

  Here’s my view: The idea of originality is not only over-rated, but originality is never all that original. What appears to be original is actually a selection of elements from other sources that are remixed, repainted, and retold. Originality has always been done before, in other words, or the originality came about as an inadvertent accident of the artist’s pursuit through all the materials. The first story that was ever told in the world was original, but then the second story was certainly a remix, a new interpretation of the first.

  Before the written word, oral storytellers retold the stories that were handed down to them. Homer’s The Odyssey was the end result of thousands of varied retellings as one person recounted the story to another who then recounted it again. Like a game of telephone, the story changed in each telling. Storytellers had to rely on their imperfect memories. Or their vibrant imaginations just took over and transformed the tale for a new audience, all the while echoing the structures, topics, and characters that came before it.

  The scholar Joseph Campbell identified a universal pattern in storytelling that he found across cultures and throughout history, which he called the “hero’s journey.” It’s simple: a hero leaves his or her home, encounters other worlds, faces down opposing forces, and returns “with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Think of the stories of Jesus, Buddha, Moses—or Harry Potter or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Their journeys all follow the same basic structure.

  Originality didn’t used to be such a strict criteria of artistic merit. In the Elizabethan era, for example, it was common to esteem a work’s similarity with an admired classical work. Shakespeare himself tended to work with other source material to create his great plays. He lifted the biographies of Greek and Roman rulers in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives to create Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. He “borrowed” the plot, characters, and setting of a short story called Un Capitano Moro and turned it into Othello. Romeo and Juliet was lifted from a 1562 narrative poem called The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.

  Was Shakespeare an original writer or a plagiarist?

  There’s a famous quote, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” What I love about this quote is that I’ve seen variations of it attributed to Pablo Picasso, T. S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Aaron Sorkin, and perhaps most appropriately, the artist Banksy. It’s poetically perfect that the quote has been lifted time and time again and recontextualized by the person saying it.

  To dig back to one source of the quote, though, here’s what T. S. Eliot actually said: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

  Taking from others and building it into something of your own is the way creativity works.

  Eliot gets at the heart of a crucial part of creativity: the challenge isn’t to create something entirely original from scratch, but to take from others’ works and create a new concoction—to transform varied elements into something different, startling, and hopefully better. It’s not plagiarism, but more akin to playing in a jazz band, picking up others’ melodies, motifs, aesthetics, and then breaking out into your own solo. You find the communal joy of working with another’s ideas, as if your favorite author is in the room with you. The originality that occurs in the art of remixing might not be intentional; the artist might not even recognize it. It comes unselfconsciously, through the simple and pure pursuit of the story.

  So, if you take from another artist, don’t think of it as stealing. Don’t think of yourself as a fraud. Taking from others and building it into something of your own is the way creativity works. We learn to talk by mirroring the words of the people around us. We learn to be ourselves by mirroring those around us and remixing it all into our ever-changing selves. Our brains are a mass of connections and if you add something new into the mix, you will spark new connections. My credo? Steal. Borrow. Remix. Blend. Meld. Layer. Stitch. Assimilate. Appropriate. But make it yours. Always make it yours.

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  REMIX

  Take a favorite line, phrase, or motif from a story, poem, or song and use it in whatever you’re working on. Feel free to edit it as appropriate, and build on its rhythms and themes. After you’re done, ask this question: How did the introduction of this outside element affect your piece? Does it represent your expression? Did it become part of your story?

  28

  TAKE A STORY FIELD TRIP

  One of the mistaken perceptions of writers is that all of their writing gets done at their desks, that plots, characters, and the telling details that make a story blossom into life just flow out of a writer’s mind and onto the page. As much as I hesitate to lure you away from maximal word production (because most of my pep talks encourage you to just keep writing in one way or another), one of the wonderful side benefits of being a writer is not just the places you get to go in your imagination, but the real places you get to go to explore your story in all of its nuances.

  It’s time to go on a story field trip—an imaginative scavenger hunt to gather details, sensory information, and character insights. It’s just like the kind of field trip you went on in elementary school, except you don’t have your parents sign a permission form and you don’t have to travel on a bus with a lot of screaming kids (unless your story takes place on a school bus, that is). There’s nothing like venturing out to an actual place to experience it so you can write about it with the ring of authenticity. The location of your story can function almost as a character in your story, so know it well.

  One of the wonderful side benefits of being a writer is not just the places you get to go in your imagination, but the real places you get to go to explore your story.

  Is your main character a doctor? Go to a hospital one day and sit in an emergency room and observe all that is going on—the people waiting in pain, discomfort, or boredom; the nurses bustling about; the out-of-date magazines in the waiting room; and, yes, the doctors. How does your doctor character relate to the pain in a patient’s eyes? How
does your doctor view an impatient nurse? How does he or she wear a stethoscope?

  Spend some time walking the hospital’s halls and attune your senses to all of the little things you might not think about when you’re there as a patient. What does the hospital smell like? How is it decorated? Where would your doctor eat lunch? See if you can even do a brief interview with a doctor. How many patients does he or she see each day? What thoughts does he or she carry home from the day?

  I once went to a cemetery at night to see the moon’s chilly glow on the tombstones. Another time I drove from San Francisco to Reno, tracing the road my main character was fleeing on. I ate tacos in Chowchilla and drank a Coke by an irrigation ditch for one story, and dressed in my suit and went to a Pentecostal church on a Sunday morning for another.

  A story field trip can take many forms, and sometimes we have to make do with our limitations. I once wrote a novel that took place in Thailand, but I didn’t have the time or money to go to Thailand. I knew I couldn’t go deep into my descriptions of it by looking at it on a map. What did I do? I ate in Thai restaurants. I watched Thai movies and soap operas (even if I couldn’t understand them). I listened to Thai music and read Thai books. I discovered that the clerk at my dry cleaning shop grew up in Thailand, so I asked her questions about her childhood. It was one big virtual Thai field trip that helped me shape my novel.

  Sometimes I take story field trips without any research purpose, just to get the creative juices flowing in a different way. One of my favorite field trips is to sit in a train station and simply observe the people. People reveal themselves in different ways when in transit. They’re in that odd state of suspension, between places, carrying high expectations of the pleasures ahead or the dread of what’s to come. They’re fleeing a place or running home. Some travel in packs, and some travel in what seems like a perpetual solitude. I watch to see how they reveal themselves; I eavesdrop on their conversations; I try to surmise their stories. They carry questions that stir my imagination, and in observing them, I bring a deeper sense of humanity to my characters.

  There are some downsides of a story field trip. It can be tempting to twist your characters and plot into illustrating your research instead of letting your observations serve the characters’ stories. It’s easy to fall so much in love with all that you’ve gleaned that you force details where they don’t belong. Focus on imparting the telling details rather than a random inventory of your notes.

  In the end, perhaps the biggest purpose of the story field trip isn’t just for information, but for confidence. By spending a few hours inhabiting the world in your story, you’ll write much more confidently about that place. You’ll trust your words because you’ve grounded them with a foundation of experience.

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  INHABIT YOUR STORY WORLD

  How can you inhabit the world of your story? Is there a key setting, occupation, or encounter that you can tap into in real life? Go there. Smell, touch, listen.

  29

  LOOKING THROUGH YOUR CHARACTER KALEIDOSCOPE

  Our differences make life a rich and nuanced affair. They create the frissons (and frustrations) of drama we wake up to each day, the mysteries we wend through.

  Some people like to talk a lot. When they walk into a room, any room, they start rattling off all kinds of opinions, jokes, stories. They laugh, they smile, they bellow, they snort. They’d start singing old Elvis songs if asked, and they might even do so unbidden.

  And then there are those who practically have magic powers of invisibility. They live in a realm of quietude, seeking it out and creating it. They know the corners of rooms well. They enter and exit parties with scarcely anyone noticing. If you gave them a convertible sports car, they’d donate it to a charity before taking it for a test drive.

  The wonderful thing is that as author you get to be an omniscient God, a psychologist, a friend, and a judge. You get to be the priest who hears your characters’ confessions and the devil who whispers in your characters’ ears to do the wrong thing. You get to immerse yourself in what I think of as a character kaleidoscope: turn the tube of your story, and the colored shapes of your characters tumble into different colors and patterns.

  That’s our job as writers—to explore behavior in the shaky and shifting terrain of the world. Even though everyone looks somewhat similar—two ears, two eyes, a head, a belly button, and so on—everyone behaves differently. We’re animated by conflicting impulses, striving for noble purposes, yet often acting in ignoble ways.

  When I conceive of a character, I think of the fundamental questions that are the catalysts for any story: What does my character yearn for? What does my character lack? What obstacles lie in my character’s path? But I also try to move beyond those core motivators to build a more rounded, lifelike character. My characters might start with an impulse (a teenage girl wants to leave the small-mindedness of her small town); a telling detail (she’s hidden a black leather jacket that her very religious parents forbid her to wear in the trunk of her car); a passion (she wants to join her secret punk boyfriend to form a band in Chicago); and a fear (her boyfriend has started using drugs). Then I like to build on these stray details by viewing them through the big five personality traits that psychologists use to describe one’s identity: OCEAN.

  O = openness to experience (curious vs. cautious)

  C = conscientiousness (careful vs. careless)

  E = extroversion (outgoing vs. solitary)

  A = agreeableness (friendly vs. detached)

  N = neuroticism (nervous vs. secure)

  We all fall into different places on the spectrum of each category, so I ask questions for each trait to understand where to best situate my character. Does my character prefer to live according to the familiarity of a strict routine, or does he or she constantly seek out new experiences? Does my character trust people and open up to new people, or does my character view them warily and assume the worst of others?

  And then what happens when life heats up in intensity or fractures with unpredictability. If my character, who is introverted, disagreeable, and doesn’t trust others is trapped in a sunken ocean liner with an odd cast of travelers, as in The Poseidon Adventure, will he or she work with the group to survive or go off alone? Will my character’s natural distrust contribute to survival or lead to demise?

  Drama occurs when a person is not quite themselves, when they’re seeking something new, or when a situation pressures their defining traits.

  Drama also occurs through simple perception—or misperception. One of the rich paradoxes of life is that we strive to know the world with certainty, and we think we perceive it clearly through our senses, but we actually live through unsettled perspectives, changing stories, a veritable phantasmagoria of perception, no matter how sure we are of what we’ve experienced.

  Consider this: two people at the scene of a crime, watching the exact same sequence of events, often see things differently. We think of our sight as an infallible record of the world—a video recorder, in effect. But when we recall scenes in our mind, they become re-recorded—retold, in effect—so the story changes. We don’t see what we see; we see what we think we see. Our memory takes in the gist of a scene, not its totality, and then the gaps are filled in during the retelling through the preexisting schemas, scripts, emotions, and hypotheses in our minds. We take reality to be true, but we form it through our beliefs, which form our perceptions, which then form our beliefs, and so on.

  That’s why questioning by a lawyer can alter the witness’s testimony—the questions force a retelling, and the witness’s memory changes because of the new frame provided by the questioner.

  We’ve all had these moments, when we remember something from the past completely differently from the people we experienced it with. We think we’re objective, but humans aren’t really wired to be objective. We make many errors in perception because of something called confirmation bias—our tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall informa
tion in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs or hypotheses rather than investigating our worlds in a neutral, objective way. Everyone has experienced this at a holiday dinner when a clash of opinions arises. The tendency to privilege even the most minuscule fact that proves we’re right gets magnified as a disagreement gets more extreme and attitudes get polarized.

  So why am I telling you all this? What does it have to do with writing? It’s because every character in your novel—every character in your life—passes through this mental juggernaut, seeking evidence of why their beliefs are right, weighing positive and negative perceptions. The shorthand for characterization is character = desire, but if you’re going to write complicated characters with nuance and depth, you need to go beyond their desire.

  Therein lies the drama—the gap between expectations and reality, when two characters have a wholly different perception of the action. You get to look through others’ eyes, understand their thoughts, explore their perceptions and misperceptions, as if you’re looking through a kaleidoscopic mishmash.

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  PERSONALITY PROFILING

  Write a short narrative based on the next stranger you see. Consider the OCEAN list of traits, and then explore how your character is experiencing the moment. What might trigger a dramatic reaction? How will he or she react?