a translator's best friend

Okay, this translator's best friend, at least - I've been revising some poetry translations this morning and I need to stop long enough to sing the praises of J. I. Rodale's The Synonym Finder. (Totally unsolicited. I was compelled by its synonyms for the word "permanence," including "perpetuity, everlastingness, immortality, deathlessness, athanasia; imperishability, indestructibility," and a whole host of other words that certain uptight word processors and blogging softwares don't even think exist, phtbtbtbbbt. I love diction that eludes Microsoft Word.)

While I use it most often during translation, it lives on my desk and often comes in handy when I'm revising my own poetry, as well. If you've figured out the music you're going for in a poem or translation, this is the world's greatest resource.

After years of feverishly hunting through online dictionaries and thesauri, I recently dug out my reference books and I could not be happier. It's hard to articulate why I like them so much more as actual books - I'm not anti-e-reader. But for some reason, I'm finding physical reference books noticeably more enjoyable to work with.

So. Rodale's Synonym Finder. If you need more awesome words in your life, get it. In the meantime, I'm getting back to my translation. Peace.

(Hey, if you have a favorite dictionary or thesaurus, please tell me - I'm always on the lookout for kickass writing resources. Cheers.)

whoosh

*blows dust off*

*there is a lot of it*

Why does restarting this blog scare the crap out of me?

I've almost pulled this thing back into the light a hundred times in the past year. And then the little chattery self-editor starts up. My inner critic likes tea and conversation. She sips with self-assurance and says, "I'm sorry, wait, does this mean you started being able to do things on a regular schedule?" And, "So who do you think actually wants to hear what you have to say?"

I'm over it. Well, I'm not over it, but I'm OVER it.

In recent months I've spent a fair few sleepless nights uselessly wringing my hands over the civil rights' atrocities in Ferguson and elsewhere in the U.S. and the world; ISIS or ISIL or whatever the hell the beheading bastards are calling themselves; Ebola; Syria; the Ukraine; climate change; rape culture; the politicized & misogynist SCOTUS; and all the other tragedies & catastrophes taking place on small and large scales that call themselves to my notice. I have perhaps an excess of empathy (apparently making up for more than one Republican congressperson).

I lived in fear of the future. Then I realized that the future will remain scary and out-of-control regardless. The only thing I can control is my response to it.

So I've started doing things that are, for me, brave. Going back to grad school to push evolution in my writing skills for a career in the only work I've ever really cared about. Submitting poems and manuscripts for publication, and continuing to do so even as the rejection letters soar into my inbox. Tweeting without rewriting it 18 dozen times. Expressing my opinions adamantly instead of pacifically. Facing my parenting flaws as problems that can be solved instead of horrible deficiencies I can't help but enact.

None of this is going to change the world, perhaps. It's certainly not the kind of bravery that warrants medals or rescues someone from an oncoming train or keeps jellyfish from taking over the oceans.

But it's changing my world. So whether or not I post on a regular schedule (hint: not), and whether or not anyone remotely gives a shit, I'm coming back to blogging. Good news: for the most part, I'll be thinking about the craft of writing - especially poetry - and offering brief critiques on what I'm reading. And seriously, y'all, I have been reading some amazing books lately, so it should be fun.

Why is it the more I care about something, the more it scares the living shit out of me? How do you deal with fears of failing at things that are desperately important to you? 'Cause I'll tell you honestly, I could use some help here.

Twitzilla: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog.

In recent weeks, I've found myself somewhat paralyzed by a crushing attack of what I call "Twitzilla". Twitzilla is, in my corner of the universe, a monstrous behemoth formed by an aggregate of writers across the world who are blogging their fingers off on every single topic known to writing man, and doing a much better job of it than I possibly could (or so Twitzilla whispers terrifyingly, lovingly, in my ears). 

Don't get me wrong: I adore Twitter and all the resources it provides. In fact, it ranks right up there with chocolate on the list of kickass things that make me happy. It's possibly the greatest thing that ever happened to writers, from the blog posts to the book promotions to the endless cups of tea and pictures of people's cats and seven-hundred-eleventy-three gabillion other ways we all get to know that, by god, we are not alone. Best of all, we don't have to actually see each other or talk to anyone face to face; we can hunch over our laptops in the wee hours of the night and read and write to our solitary hearts' content. 

But there's a whole lot of must-haves that can be a little soul-crushing intimidating as well. You must have a blog! You must have a platform! You must write interestingly and usefully and other-such-adverb-ly so that you can have many, many followers, or no one will ever want to publish you! 

To quote that immortal hero, Bill the Cat: ACK. 

I'm a writer, for crying out loud. I just want to write. (And edit, and read, and occasionally nap on the sofa curled up with a blanket and a book... but I digress.) And while I'll spare you the litany of other responsibilities all  screaming for attention throughout the day, believe me: there are a lot of them. It takes a concerted effort to make time to write every day. 

So the thought of coming up with blog posts on writing and editing techniques that are witty and useful and informative and all those other brilliant things is a little scary. I've spent many a happy hour reading other people's witty, useful, informative, brilliant blog posts on these topics, and you know what?

It's all pretty much covered. Yep. That's it, guys, time to call it a day and go read each other poetry over a tasty microbrew! (Hey, a girl can dream.) 

Coming up with new twists on blog posts on writing and editing techniques now seems to take ingenious acts of creativity that I always assumed I should put towards, y'know, story ideas and incredible poetic images and razor-sharp dialogue that advances the plot. Silly things like that. It seemed like any time I did come up with an idea, I would immediately see the link to someone else's blog post in which they ran with it and, yep, did a fantastic job.

You can imagine my relief when it recently occurred to me that I don't need to be intimidated after all. Something finally sunk in, which is that everyone is just sharing their own experiences (insert platitude about snowflakes here).  I can leash up Twitzilla and take that bad boy for a walk. If I just do my thing, somewhere out there in the magical interwebs it'll mean something to someone else. 

So, to make a short story long (and I do apologize - you might have noticed by now that I have a slight tendency to ramble), I intend to post on a regular basis now. I'm starting with once a week. I can't promise anything earth-shattering, but I can promise you - and myself - that I'll be posting about my experiences with writing and editing, in the sincere hope that some of it will prove useful to you. And by the way, thank you, in advance, for reading.

Also, I'm curious: what writing blog topics do you find endlessly fascinating? Let me know - I'd love some food for Twitzilla thought.

Creak, creak

If this blog were a box, it would be made of smooth-sanded hardwood and inlaid gold, and I'd be lovingly wiping away a thick layer of dust right now, having rediscovered it among a jumbled pile of loved but forgotten possessions.

Last posted on November 30th, 2009, upon finishing the second draft of my WIP. What's happened during the 16-month ellipsis? Well, most significantly, my 14-month-old daughter happened, who is now snoozing next to me. Almost no actual writing has happened on the WIP; it was reviewed and comment on in detail by an absolutely incredible crit reader, but the only work I've done in response to her comments has taken place in my head. I've read a lot of blog posts lately about moms who started (or went back to) working on a novel the same day their child was born. Kudos to them - it did not happen for me. I think I did write a poem for her the next day, and have written sporadic poems since her birth, but in no way did my writing life possess anything resembling discipline until a week or two ago.

In all honesty, that was due as much to a dormant period in my writing as it was to arrival of The Teensy One. Let me be clear: I'm not making excuses. It's been more than a few years since I realized my creativity goes through periods of dormancy. It used to freak me out, but once I figured out that the times of silence are always followed by outpourings of creative energy, I stopped worrying about it. Nowadays when the muse goes silent, I let her rest for a while, although I listen with a keen ear for her to speak again.

Although this latest cycle of creativity started a couple of weeks ago, the arrival of National Poetry Month helped me get back into a disciplined routine, which feels oh, so good - like a bird on wing. There are a couple of sites I've been using for daily prompts, both of which I found thanks to that perennial friend-of-writers, Twitter.

The first is @robertleebrewer's Poetic Asides blog, which he writes for Writer's Digest: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/. Some good prompts here - some reliable and familiar stand-bys, and some creative prompts that provide good nudges to the brain to approach a poem with a fresh perspective.

The second, Instapoem, is a collaboration between @inkyelbows (Debbie Ridpath Ohi) and Rand Bellavia: http://instapoem.blogspot.com/. This blog features a series of one-word prompts, one for each day of the month, and the rule is to write it within five minutes of seeing the prompt. It's a great concept, although there are days when the word of the day just doesn't strike me; on those days, I just use a word from a different day.

Oddly, a lot of the poetry I've written since I got back into the swing of things has rhymed. I have nothing against rhyming or free verse, but I tend more towards free verse, generally. Not lately, though - it's a little disconcerting to have all these rhymes popping up, but I'm rolling with it and focusing on using them to challenge myself rather than as crutches for simplicity.

Today's prompt from Poetic Asides is to write a "what if" poem. Here's mine:

Songs for Abigail XV

The freight train howls its lonesome song
Cloud upon cloud piles white upon grey
The heron tucks its head under wing
What if you were alive today?


Well, now that the dust is cleaned away, I'm hoping to post semi-regularly on here. No promises, though; some days I'm lucky to get five minutes to myself for a quick writing exercise. Hey, a girl's gotta have her priorities. Cheers.

Reaching the Goal

I'm thrilled to announce that I met my November writing goal today, completing the second draft of my current work-in-progress. I must say, the experience taught me a lot, since I've never revised a novel before. In case it proves helpful to others struggling with revising an unwieldy first draft, here are the key lessons I learned:

Know thyself. I am a terrible procrastinator, I'll admit it right now. (Or maybe later.) I set myself a deadline to complete this revision during the month of November. I got through a little more than half the novel and hit a big fat brick wall. The wall didn't move for a good two weeks or more. On Black Friday, after stuffing myself with leftover pumpkin pie, it occurred to me that I had three days left in the month and few other demands on my time. I figured out that if I averaged seven chapters a day, I could still meet the goal; this seemed entirely feasible. I got re-energized (why else do we procrastinate, except that we love the mad dash towards the finish line?) and made it happen.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses as writers. If you're honest with yourself about what they are, you can leverage the former against the latter to avoid your own pitfalls.

Don't give up. Churchill said it best - doesn't he always? "If you are going through hell, keep going." I think he was probably referring to WWII, or possibly the Boer War, but regardless, the adage works here too. While it's not quite as traumatic as war, revising your writing tends to be hellish more often than not. Difficult choices present themselves. I want the work to be phenomenal, but am I going the right way to get there? This is the question.

That big fat brick wall I hit? In the first draft, I'd written some chapters in first person and some in third person. I had to make a narrative choice and stick with it. Guess who deeply questioned that choice just over halfway through the second draft? I agonized for a good two weeks before deciding, "What the hell," and telling myself to just get on with it. If the end result sucked, well, I'd just proved to myself I could take massive amounts of writing and make titchy subject & verb tense changes throughout it. I could always do it again, but I wanted to finish this draft first, maybe to see how it went, maybe just because I'm stubborn, maybe a little of both. By the end of the revision, I felt like I'd made the right choice after all, and even developed cogent-sounding arguments as to why my narrative choice better supported the story. (At least, I'd like to think they sound cogent.)

It's rough, no doubt. When you care this much about something, a bad roadblock can make you question the entire project, and it's tempting to walk away and start anew. I think the key is to not give up midway through your decision; carry it through to the end before you determine if it's unworthy. It's dangerous to try and judge only part of the picture.

Identify the issues before you start fixing things. Granted, things will pop up along the way, and you should address some of those too. But you already know what huge, glaring plot holes you blithely skipped over on that first go-round, or that you were going to have to do some serious web-surfing to write accurately about raising goats in Greece, or what have you. Hopefully, you had at least two or three readers provide you with feedback, and you've read it through yourself (resisting the urge to launch into revision right then, which is so hard, isn't it?). I actually made a list of the issues I wanted to fix and the questions I had to face, so I could approach them more effectively. I'm definitely more of a pantser when it comes to the first draft, but I think the more structured & organized approach to the second draft is what got me through it.

Plan on a next draft. We tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves when we write. (Go ahead, call me Captain Obvious.) You don't have to make it perfect right now, just better. Knowing this helped me a lot. I confess I took refuge in focusing on the technicalities for much of this draft, except for changing and dropping a couple parts of the plot that just didn't feel right - and that I felt capable of fixing there and then. If I ran into something that was still too overwhelming to tackle, I left it for the third draft without even a twinge of guilt. I stayed plenty busy fixing other massive problems, the ones I'd planned on dealing with. Like my mom says, "Eat the elephant one bite at a time."

somewhere between a sigh and a growl

I'm not sure what that noise would sound like, but it's what I'm making right now. Or rather, I keep alternating between sighing and growling, because like I said, I don't quite know how to combine the two. Suggestions?

There are several reasons for my frustration and crankiness, most of which I won't go into here, but one thing that's been bugging the hell out of me is my internal struggle over 1st vs. 3rd person POV in my current WIP.

When I wrote the first draft, I was just focused on getting the words on paper (or the computer screen, whatever) and I wrote some chapters in first person, some in third, as the mood struck me. There was not a lot of thought involved; I just wrote instinctively.

So one of the questions that's preoccupied me for the last year, since I wrote the first draft, is which POV to use. I felt like the story needed a consistent narrative approach. I ended up going with first person, largely because the protagonist undergoes such an emotional/mental journey as she goes through the plot conflicts. She transitions from anti-hero to hero, and during her journey, she makes some choices that most people would probably respond to with a well-deserved "WTF?" So I felt like the first person would heighten the reader's sympathy with her while supporting the tension between her (at times admittedly unreliable) perspective and the rest of the world.

Then, yesterday, I reached the halfway point in my first round of revision. I finished 25 of the 50 chapters (yay!), and felt great about how the story was going. I decided to take a little break, do some stuff around the house, and then read a bunch of articles about writing/revising/character/plot/POV.

That last bit was, I realize now, perhaps a mistake. Okay, definitely a mistake. I read some articles discussing 1st & 3rd-person narration, and the debate I thought I'd settled for myself just raged right up again. Except at this point, I'm halfway through making the novel a consistent POV, and nearly 30,000 words in is really not when one wants to be questioning one's narrative choice.

So, y'know. Little irritated. Part of my frustration is that it seems a lot of writers consider first person to be an "immature" choice of narration, which made me question myself and get all insecure about my writing abilities. But as Nathan Bransford says (not in the linked post, but often), if it works, it works, and I think as long as I'm aware of the possible pitfalls of 1st-person narration - and, even better, avoiding them - it may still be the right choice for this story.

So I'm going to press on with the 1st-person narration, finish the revision, and then go back and reread it carefully and critically. Hell, if I really feel the need, I can always go back and revise the entire book with 3rd-person instead (and won't that be a treat). It could be a useful exercise, and really, it's not like I'm on a particular deadline. I just hoped to get the novel in query-worthy shape sooner rather than later.

But ultimately, the important thing is that the story's told right, and told as well as possible. So if it takes an extra draft, I'm sure the extra work would only improve it. (Sigh. Do I sound constructive? I feel... tired. But I'm trying to convince myself to think positive anyway.) I was already planning to put it through at least two more rounds of revision, so an extra, massively long exercise in POV might not be too much of a detour. We shall see.

In the meantime, once more unto the breach, dear friends. Time to tackle the second half. If you have any thoughts on the pros & cons of 1st or 3rd person, I'd love to hear them!

Revision's still, deep waters

In the last two days, I've revised eleven chapters of the novel I wrote during last year's NaNoWriMo. Technically speaking, that puts me more than 20 percent of the way through Round 2, which is a lot better than, say, zero percent of the way, or even ten percent. It's important to celebrate these milestones.

I'm starting to get a little nervous, though, because I know the real work is up ahead. It sort of feels like digging around in the yard and not quite knowing where the water line is, just that it's there. One of these days soon, I'm going to reach a certain point in the story and all this force is going to be unleashed.

So far, the revisions mostly involve making all the verb tenses consistent, tightening up sloppy or redundant writing, and smacking the occasional passive voice into action. A lot of it has centered around changing the chapters I wrote from a third-person POV into first-person. (I'm sort of glad I have no idea whether I wrote more chapters in first or third person in Round 1.)

But I worry that I'm taking refuge in technicalities. When I revise my poetry, I tend to get in there with both hands and tear it apart, move words and lines around, pull lines out and write 10-line exercises based on them to get at what I really meant, reassemble the lines and stanzas in different orders - in short, I rip my heart out, play hacky-sack with it for a while, and then put it back in place better-than-new.

Since I've spent a lot more of my life on writing and revising poetry than I have on fiction, I feel a lot safer during the poetry process than I do right now. Don't get me wrong; I go through plenty dark nights of the soul when I'm revising my poems, but y'know, they're just so much shorter than a novel. There's that stage of revision, right before it all comes together, when the entire thing turns into a royal, absolute mess. Then, like pulling the right thread in a cats-cradle, somehow it all magically ties together in a neat, ordered, beautiful way.

When we're talking about a 62,000-word rough draft, though, that absolute mess starts sounding a whole lot messier. In my imagination, it takes on downright scary, Titanic proportions. I know there are plot holes lurking like icebergs, just waiting for me to run into them. I also know I'm going to have to add some word count at some point, for this to be the length of a proper novel, and so far all I'm doing is tightening up the words.

Of course, one of the keys to good writing is for every word to matter, so I don't stress as much about adding to the story. If it's there, it'll come out; if not, it'll just be a short book. Better to be short than to have a lot of useless blather. My hope is that filling in those gaping plot holes will add to the length, too.

I keep telling myself I can make this entire first round of revision about the technicalities, if I want to, and then go through and read it more for the storyline. I can just keep segmenting down the necessary aspects of revision until they're in more manageable pieces - poem-sized, if you will.

But I've never labored for too long under the delusion that I really have control over my writing. Isn't that why we write? The words demand we write them, and we serve as their channel as best we can. Here's hoping I lose some of this control soon, and the story takes over.

of miscellaneous mind

I've got an amalgam of thoughts jostling each other for space right now.

First, as I delve further into the writing Twitterverse, I keep coming across articles on common topics. One is what-you-should-be-Tweeting or how-to-be-a-successful-Twitter-writer or whatever. Here's my opinion:

Just be yourself.

It's a lot like writing; it's important to speak with your authentic voice. There seems to be a lot of advice to advance your personal brand and be professional and useful and whatever else people want you to be. Apparently people don't want to know what I'm making for dinner or that I'm entertained by my cat snoring. Those people would be well advised not to follow me.

Granted, I do think you should learn from the things that annoy you in others, and not do them yourself. Learn from the things you admire in others, and adapt them to your own strengths.
 I like to know both the professional and personal side of people I follow on Twitter; it's much like enjoying a well-developed character in a book. If you're only showing your professional side, you come across as pretty flat. Be a real person. There's only one of you. Tell me who you are.

Granted, I think a key to this is to try and have a sense of humor about it. Whether on Twitter or in real life, genuinely self-absorbed people are just boring. But random glimpses of others' quirks remind me of the notes struck by a really good poem, when I'm grateful to realize just how universal my individual perspective really is.

So, that's my little rant about "how to act on Twitter". In other news, while the rest of the writing world is launching into NaNoWriMo with all the frenzy that writing a novel in a month deserves, I'm throwing myself into NaNoEdMo rather like a dive into an icy pond. In other words, I'm editing the novel I wrote during last year's NaNo. I attempted the same project in May, and got through five chapters in two weeks. This morning, I got through those five chapters again, and yes, through chapter 6 as well. (Hooray! Progress!) Here's hoping that being unemployed will keep me swimming through the murky waters of revision.

Since I'm working on this project, a lot of the links posted by my tweeps are serving as helpful reminders on the craft of writing. I hope they help you too. The agent/publishing/marketing-related links will come later.

My sincere thanks for links and/or writing the actual articles: @inkyelbows, @megancrewe, @motjustes, @ElizabethSCraig, @Quotes4Writers, @AdviceToWriters, @benwhiting, @mystorywriter, @david_hewson, @WritersDigest, @brianklems, @jessicastrawser, @MFAConfidential, Jon Morrow and Stephanie Perkins.

Tips from a master of writing. From @MFAConfidential: Flannery O'Connor's take on the tenets of craft. http://ow.ly/15YolZ

From psych major and YA author @megancrewe: What makes a good story? http://j.mp/3gOhzY

From Elizabeth S. Craig's excellent blog: Different characters have different perceptions. http://short.to/v7hu

From crime writer Andrew Taylor: Getting the Plot Right. http://bit.ly/10vwGX

From Jon Morrow: No one but you is an authority on your writing. http://bit.ly/r3nK3

To become a better writer: Intense, focused practice. http://bit.ly/1NpapO

He's absolutely right about the Facebook/Twitter trap. From @david_hewson: Keeping your writing alive - even when you're not writing. http://ow.ly/x71i

From @brianklems: 4 Tips for Choosing the Right Word. http://ow.ly/xmw7

I'm not quite sure how I ended up on the following blog, but I enjoy the irony of her digressions as she talks about how important it is to stay focused on your plot. Irony aside, good tips on self-editing: 
  http://naturalartificial.blogspot.com/2009/10/scarf-weather-answers-part-eleven.html

learning.

This whole large-amounts-of-free-time thing is a new and strange experience for me. The good news is that I'm learning a hell of a lot.

One thing I'm learning is that posting writing links gleaned on Twitter "once or twice a week", as I so naively posted yesterday, would either be totally insufficient or completely overwhelming. There are just too many good articles out there. I must've read at least 35 or 40 yesterday, and since waking less than two hours ago, I've read 5 or 10 more. Um... wow.

I feel a bit silly for not cluing in to this wealth of information before. I take some comfort in the fact that I was working more than 40 hours a week, and any time I made for writing took the form of cocooning myself in my own creative efforts. But what a remarkable new world to enter; it's almost like a DIY grad degree.

Still, however inspiring and useful the articles are, a too-long list of links could turn into a death-by-chocolate scenario, in which one's attempting to finish an ecstatically yummy cake, but can't quite manage the last couple bites for fear of brain explosion.

Really, it's a lot to keep up with, and a lot to take in. Frankly, my brain's kinda tired. So I'm going to tell the perfectionist side of me to feck off, keep up with the articles as best I can, and post a round-up on here when I have 10-15 links or so. Which, dear reader, would be now, among other times.

A few current trends are apparent: NaNoWriMo fever, for one; for another, massive changes are afoot in the publishing world, but the traditional process is by no means obsolete (yet); and an interesting number of articles calling writer's block is a sissy's excuse neglecting your craft. I didn't post any of that last category here, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that a quick google search on it will give you plenty of reading.

A couple other things are also obvious: if you're a writer on Twitter, and you're not following @inkyelbows, @motjustes, and @thecreativepenn, you're seriously missing out. These folks have led me to at least 85 percent of the articles I'm posting here, and they are invaluable resources. Rock on, y'all, and thanks.

Other literary tweeps providing links or writing these excellent articles: @bhurley, @FictionMatters, @Nathan Bransford, @BookEndsJessica, @joannayoung, @Kid_Lit, @JonMorrow, @FictionCity, @ftoolan, @fastcompany, @jessicastrawser and @WritersDigest. My heartfelt thanks.

If I've left anyone out, I apologize - let me know in the comments and I'll update with appropriate credit.

On writers and the craft of writing:

@bhurley: The craft vs. the art of writing http://bit.ly/Geck2

Why good writers make bad conversationalists http://short.to/v4u5

@NathanBransford: Mainstream literary fiction is increasingly found at the intersection of quality and accessibility. http://bit.ly/4uzPbW

@BookendsJessica: Present vs past tense: which is best? http://bit.ly/1SSaRP

I really liked this article. Character and landscape http://bit.ly/1iaKwY

Another great article. @joannayoung: Confident writing tips (stop apologizing!) http://bit.ly/2r8VgO

"Good writing is rewriting." The Secret of Pixar Storytelling http://bit.ly/30PjLJ

Great roundtable discussion. Starting a new novel: http://short.to/v4uz

10 top social networks for artists & writers http://tinyurl.com/yzl5ree

On publishing:

@Kid_Lit: If you’re getting intimidated by a query letter, you’re probably overthinking it. http://j.mp/cU50V

20 Tips for Query Letters http://bit.ly/1IY0T5

@FictionCity: Finding Consistency in Query Letter Advice http://bit.ly/1bMSQ1

Mind-boggling. @ftoolan: The Day Publishing All Changed http://short.to/uwyd

@fastcompany: Forget Everything You've Heard About Book Publishing http://is.gd/4zXUt

tweedle-dee

I'm a big fan of Twitter. I know some people aren't into it; to each their own, and all that. But if you're a writer, I cannot recommend Twitter strongly enough. It's an excellent forum for connecting with other writers & bibliophiles, getting leads on potential agents, and above all, finding an almost ridiculous amount of useful articles & essays on all aspects of craft, publishing, self-marketing, etc.

So, being newly unemployed and having ample time on my hands to pursue and peruse said articles & essays, I've decided to these are just too good to not share with the rest of the non-tweeting world. Once or twice a week, I'm going to post a round-up of links to awesome writing articles or resources I've found on Twitter.

And so it begins. If you're on Twitter, check out my feed @annthewriter. Many thanks for the links (or writing the pieces themselves) to @ElizabethSCraig, @inkyelbows, @motjustes, @ColleenLindsay, @VictoriaMixon, @AlexanderChee, @justinemusk, @thecreativepenn, @rileymagnus and @ByLeavesWeLive.

On writers & the craft of writing:

LOVED this: @alexanderchee on Annie Dillard's writing class: http://bit.ly/24rvRa

Nice interview with Seamus Heaney by Alan Taylor in the Herald: http://ow.ly/wNjb

"Reading is the inhale. Writing is the exhale." @justinemusk's reader's manifesto http://bit.ly/qORT4

Booker winner Hilary Mantel on historical fiction http://j.mp/2QapdS

10 ways to write every day: http://short.to/uqnx

On publishing & marketing your work:

Making sure your cover letters don't have sleazy pick-up lines in them: http://tinyurl.com/yzblrmk

Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer - A different kind of guide http://bit.ly/28IC9c

Market Research for Authors http://short.to/uw23

(Incidentally, Twitter's a great resource for any craft or hobby you pursue - my feeds are largely comprised of those similarly obsessed with writing, reading, and/or craft beer. If you're into good beer, there are a hell of a lot of good breweries & cool homebrewers just tweeting away out there...)

a little more

Warning! The following post is of an unusually maudlin & navel-gazing sort, rather outside my normal MO. I'm not apologizing for it, I'm just giving fair warning. My life has taken some twists and turns lately that have left me speculating on the human condition, the vagaries of fate, and other such nebulous topics.

"So may we leave in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, a little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not, but still could be." - Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., from P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, by Studs Terkel

I fall into the trap, sometimes, of thinking the question of the human condition is the province of writers, musicians, artists alone. Leave it to Studs to awaken me to the infinite possibility of the question, and its relevance to every human in humanity's history. What is it in us that makes us yearn for beauty, for justice, for immortal truth? And do we really care as much about immortal truth as we do about its immediate experience in our lives, right now?

I have to wonder at the struggles we go through every day. We deplore injustice, we sorrow at ugliness, we outrage over a lie. But as long as they stay out of our immediate lives, we don't often do much about them. Maybe we find ourselves ignoring them so often because they're just too big to cope with while driving on the morning commute or lunching on a PB&J; maybe we ignore them because they'd keep us up at night. And yet when they touch our lives, when someone is unjust or ugly to us, how massive the question then, how we lose our appetite, how restless we lie in our beds.

But surely it's not only writers - or artists of any type - who hear this question whispered day in & day out by our stirring souls. My life has taken place entirely in the nuclear age; there's always been an underlying sense that the world's going to end somehow, someday, maybe in ten years, maybe in a thousand or ten thousand years. It's either going to end entirely, or humans will, and all our art, all our beauty and truth and justice will be - not meaningless, because they have intrinsic meaning - but without an audience.

And really, what use are truth and justice and beauty without someone to appreciate them? Is it enough for them to exist for their own sake? I'm not sure it is. And I confuse myself, honestly, somewhere between the intrinsic meaning of these crucial elements of life, and the fullness of existence that an audience gives them.

For example: let's say there's a ridiculously scrumptious organic strawberry dipped in dark chocolate. (Just for example. Not that I could totally scarf about a dozen of those right now.) This is going to have an inherent element of deliciousness to it (just pretend no one's allergic to strawberries, for the sake of argument). But if nobody eats it, does it matter? What value would it have? The truth and beauty of its deliciousness is wasted, unappreciable, without consumption.

But I don't think this is what Studs and Rev. Coffin, Jr were discussing on this occasion. (I get sidetracked easily by chocolate-covered strawberries.) I think their point bears more on the perhaps ultimately futile and yet necessary struggle to heighten the human condition, despite the fact that the world will end someday.

The question is not so much about art but about justice. Whether the world will end one day or not is almost irrelevant to the human condition (almost, but not quite). What matters is here and now, how we treat each other this moment, how we treat the world today, how much beauty we see, how much truth we speak, how just we are to one another. The fate of the future matters, but we're living right now, and all we can do is make now worth living.

silent night

New poem. At least insomnia's good for something. Will need revision, of course, but at least at 6:22 a.m. I've already done some creative writing for the day... I wish I could control the column width so the lines wouldn't wrap like they are, dropping the last word down. But then, there are a lot of things I wish.

silent night

the world lies silent and still, watchful with winter insomnia,
except the dog snoring at the foot of the bed, content in dreams.
silent watches of the night are never true, something always intrudes:
drip of faucet, wind stirring late autumn’s crisp husks of leaves
and the sound of my thoughts, trampling over and again through
my all-too-busy brain. what if, what if, what if, what if.
the world waits full of cruel possibilities, watchful of my careless steps,
waiting to drop the other shoe. the silent night
does not let me rest, the faucet echoes my relentless worry
over things I cannot control. keep the wind from rustling the leaves,
call the plumber I cannot afford, silence the mind from its fret and fears,
tell the people who think ill of me they are wrong. stop the sun, it rises soon.

Can't talk. Reading.

I got 18 books for my birthday. Talk about happy happy, joy joy! It's hog heaven for a bibliophile like me. I got several Studs Terkel books, several P.G. Wodehouse collections, Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' (I know, I can't believe I didn't have it yet either), Ben Franklin's autobiography, three awesome vegetarian cookbooks, some Martha Grimes mysteries, and a really interesting-sounding book called 'The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary' by Simon Winchester... as well as a few other titles I'm sure I'm forgetting.

So it's really been quite a delightful few weeks. I started off with the P.G. Wodehouse, because I was stressed out with work and volunteer duties, and if there's any better literary stress relief than Wodehouse, I'd love to know what it is. If you've never heard of him, he's an absolutely hilarious writer of short stories and novels generally set among the English upper class during the early 1900s or so. His work is laugh-out-loud funny, like to the point that my husband would get annoyed with me for laughing so much while he was trying to watch TV or do work. Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) was truly a brilliant comedic writer, and if you haven't yet fallen in love with him, you're in luck because the man was also quite prolific.

Studs Terkel, who I've raved about before (a couple of times, actually), is another of my favorite writers, although decidedly of a different tone than dear old Wodehouse. Where Wodehouse lets you take refuge in a totally foreign world of butlers and valets and earls and such, Studs brings you to the city and opens your eyes to the perspective of people from all walks of life. If you've never heard of him, he's an oral historian (he died last year, and I still can't think of him in past tense, it just hurts too much) who interviewed thousands of people on every subject imaginable over his lengthy career - but mostly just had them talk about themselves. To me, Studs brings to light the commonalities of humanity, breaking down social, racial and cultural divides. While he frequently interviews the common man (and woman), he's also done a lot of amazing interviews with writers, musicians, etc; in fact, one of my favorites of his books is called 'And They All Sang'. It's a compilation of his interviews with musicians from opera singers to Bob Dylan to Earl 'Fatha' Hines over 40 or so years, and it is incredible. You might also call Studs a folk historian, as he's collected the memories of so many people on topics such as the Great Depression (see his book "Hard Times") and WWII ("'The Good War'").

Then, of course, if you're like me and need to change up your intense sociological reading with some brain candy, we turn to Martha Grimes. The one thing that bugs me about Martha Grimes is her apparently lackadaisical copy editor, or whoever's responsible for the relatively frequent typos in her books. I mean, really. Come on. The publishing house has to be making a pretty penny off sales of her Richard Jury series, and they can't catch these? Spell check is not an acceptable substitute. In fact, why not hire ME to read all the books and fix the typos for you? I'd be just fine with that. Anyway, I think Grimes does a great job developing her characters and plots, and her mysteries are always an enjoyable read, typos aside.

I actually haven't started in on the rest of the books yet, but I'm getting there. Wading through a huge stack of books is definitely one of my favorite "chores". Cheers!

what is left to us

what is left to us
in memoriam, September 11, 2001 - from wire reports

I wish you could hear me from underneath that rubble,
as I stand atop a broken heap
to proclaim your death
valid, my words falling thin across this jagged gash of landscape
barely ruffling the thick quilt of dust.
I wish you could.

I wish you could hear me
when I tell you I love you,
I miss you, your eyes, your lips, how they’d curl
over breakfast at a sly joke.
that I never knew you
but how I sobbed, how I fell
to my knees for you, your eyes
your lips gaping in fear
and that is why I am angry.
because you died afraid
innocent
as I would have died.

and what would you say,
what if you were on vacation
or thought your day ruined
because you missed your plane?
only to drop your glass later
choke out "there but for the grace of god – "
would you wait till you were alone to cry?

The Taliban’s last stronghold
was once a school for girls,
you’d say, eyes calm and clear, laughing a little.
on the grounds of fecund learning
walled in, they gripped the last
few feet of Kabul
from its womb.
its sterile, beaten, exhausted womb.

when the Persian New Year came
Khatol Mohammad Zai
a female air force colonel
jumped from an airplane
floated to the earth of Kabul
Zai said
“as a representative of women
I have shown we can jump from helicopters
women can do something as good as men
even something that is so difficult”

the floating down is easy
it’s ramming an airplane
into a skyscraper
at 500 miles an hour
that’ll make you grit your teeth.
floating
from the 88th floor
did you ask yourself,
who said they could play god,
they have no right,
did you say,
it’s not their choice
whether I live or die
or were you too busy
with your own
final prayer?

the girls’ school reopened
girls peeking out of tents
on packed earth soldier-trod
the girls wait
for their gutted school
to be rebuilt.
they will have to go year-round
but just for the first few years.
just till they’re caught up.

would you say, I didn’t want to die.
yes. would you say
I’m sorry I left angry
or I wish for one last kiss –
do you watch me cry
alone in our apartment
the kitchen counter choked with memories
of cutting boards seeped with garlic
and tomatoes staining, waiting for the pan?

and I am supposed to let you go for this?
I haven’t even gotten to bury you yet.
they still can’t find you.
I got to sort through
a few hundred men’s wristwatches.
I couldn’t decide between two of them.
I just left them both there.

and how I wish you could hear me

what dreams may come (and how to stop procrastinating on your daily writing exercise)

Do I get a prize for the longest post title ever? The satisfaction of it, huh? Man, that's lame.

So thanks to a Twitter tip from @motjustes, I came across this fabulous tool for procrastinating writers. It's called Write Everyday, and alls you have to do is click this link and enter the minimum time you want to write. It gives you a prompt and a timer. Away you go! Amazing.

I realize that someone who's considered herself a writer for a quarter-century should possibly be a little more self-disciplined. But there is not a whole lot of self-discipline about me, and it's better to know yourself (and find ways to successfully trick yourself into being a better person) than to hold yourself to impossible standards and berate yourself for falling short thereof. And so on. So that's my take on that.

Anyway, using this tool (which I learned of yesterday) I have actually written for two whole days in a row. How 'bout it?! And no, it's not great literature, but it is writing with ye olde creative bente, and just now I turned out more than 500 words before even starting this blog post. Ooh, ouch, I think I just pulled a muscle patting myself on the back. Still, it's a decent accomplishment, and one that far outstrips not freewriting 500-plus words today.

Sooo, in case you haven't gotten enough of my brain ramblings for today, you can read what I wrote from the prompt below. The prompt was, "When I wake up in the morning, the first thing to cross my mind is..." It's not the world's greatest prompt, but it still did the trick. The prompt I used yesterday was better, but being a bear of very little brain, I can no longer remember it. I may, however, go eat some honey now. Enjoy the further ramblings.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing to cross my mind is usually the fleeting footfalls of my dream hieing itself back into my subconscious. Sometimes it takes me a minute or two to realize that I'm actually awake, so engrossed is my mind in continuing the train of thought in the dream.

In pregnancy I dream vividly. As someone who loves to interpret dreams, and has what you might call a well thumbed dream dictionary (if you wanted to be unkind, you might call it a tattered, falling apart dream dictionary), the pregnancy dreams are none too difficult to interpret. Occasionally a more obscure symbol will surface (what does my fat orange tabby cat mean to me, really, and why was I taking her to the amusement park with my husband and apparently already-born baby?) but for the most part, it's pretty straightforward.

There's no question that my brain considers dreaming heavy therapy, and discusses a lot of my issues with itself on the flickering screen of my mind. I suspect most of my dreams are about my fears, at least, of the dreams that I can remember. Some are about my joys, and a few are about my hopes. Perhaps my subconscious considers my waking brain to spend more than its fair share of time on my joys and hopes, and wants to even the score. Occasionally I'll have a dream that's more like living in an alternate reality than a dream, or one that predicts the future, if only I could realize that when I wake up instead of when the shit actually goes down in the future and I think, "Oh, right, I dreamed about this."

Perhaps two of my favorite dreams involved me beating the shit out of someone I hated - both times featured the same girl, who as you can imagine, I really, really, really did not like. (Bear in mind that I have never in my waking life beat anybody up. I do kill spiders, though.) It was disturbing, naturally, but what was perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that it was oh, so satisfying. I'd like to think that much of the satisfaction came from the fact that I would never really beat someone up, but it also could have come from the fact that I was beating the shit out of this godawful, horrible, evil person. In fact, I even hated her less after the dreams, perhaps because I'd worked out my anger so very thoroughly in my mind. Who knows?

Anyway, it's been lo, these many years since I had a violent dream like that (nine or ten, to be precise, and oh, dear god, I just realized my ten-year college reunion is coming up next summer - talk about nightmares). Nowadays they're much more realistic, except for the cat at the amusement park thing. Oh, and the recent journey through a cave and up the magical holy mountain with a good friend. Okay, maybe they're not really that realistic nowadays either. But really, what are dreams for?

songs for abigail

Today is the year anniversary of my daughter's stillbirth.

I don't have a lot to say about it, at least right now. I've written about it a lot in past weeks, and talked about it with very close friends, but right now I just find myself sort of wordless and grieving.

Still, I would like to share these poems I wrote in the days after her stillbirth. I wrote many, many poems in those days, but these are my two favorites, in order of favoritism.

Songs for Abigail

VI

Still the bells and muffle the drums;
with solemn step the parents come.
With weeping hearts and lowered eyes
they curse the day that Abigail died.

Let the trees shed their leaves in the summer field
Let the autumn harvest refuse to yield
Let the birds fold their wings and forsake the sky
The world must be broken, that Abigail could die.

Tell the mourners in a somber throng
To quiet their cries and swallow their song
Let the silence beg the question why,
of all that is possible, Abigail should die.

Stop the waves on the ocean’s shore
Stop the seasons’ changes evermore
Stop the sun in its eternal sky
Let the world mourn that Abigail has died.


III

It’s rained every day since you died.
As if the world weeps with us
and the clouds could swaddle our grief.

A hollow place in the world
echoes with your absence
the space where you should be, and aren’t.

I can almost feel on my pinky finger
where your grip should curl, and surprise me
with its strength. But your hand lies motionless.

It is hard to believe our hearts can keep beating
when yours is silent forever.
That was not the miracle I expected from your birth.

Like pulling taffy from my brain...

One of my tweeps caught me at just the right time with a 500-word challenge, so here we go.

I've been trying to figure out why I haven't blogged for a month and a half. I was doing so well for so long! It felt great to write with something resembling self-discipline and make my craft a part of my daily life. And yet, suddenly, I just dropped it.

Ultimately, it's my own damn fault. I made the mistake of telling my dad and stepmom that I was writing every day and posting much of my work on my blog. For whatever reason - entirely not their fault, for they are as supportive as one could ever hope - whenever I tell my parents about my writing endeavors, I completely lose all motivation to complete said endeavors. Weird, huh? It's one of those things I've always thought might be worth a good hypnosis session to root out, if I ever had the money to blow on a hypnosis session. (Not at the top of my priority list.)

Anyway, I should probably learn either to stop telling them about my writing projects, or to get over this weird self-defeating behavior, sans hypnosis.

Really, there's so much to write. I've got this novel that's still a work-in-progress, I've got poems rattling around my subconscious, I've got random topics to rant and rave about.

I did start going to an improv writing group recently, which pretty much kicks ass. It was fun to flex my creative muscles again. The exercises we did in that group, and my willing response to my friend's word challenge just now, make me realize that I need to rely more on formal exercises during these periods of dormancy. Maybe instead of the more intimidating and nebulous 'work on novel revisions every day', I need to set myself less ambitious goals, like 'write 500 words every day'. Now there's a novel concept (pun only slightly intended).

Because, really, I always go through these dormant periods. I don't stress about them too much, since I always come out the other side and write regularly again, but I'm starting to get to the point in my life where I feel like I need to pursue writing seriously if I want to take myself seriously as a writer. And I definitely believe in myself as a writer. But instead of treating it like a hobby, if I ever want it to be my full-time career, I should probably start adopting a more professional approach. ...Not to suck all the fun and passion out of it. But there comes a point when 'letting it flow naturally' turns into 'letting oneself be lazy'.

Maybe I'm finally starting to learn how to make passion and self-discipline co-exist. Stranger things have happened. Hell, I even finished a novel during NaNoWriMo last year, in what seems a lot like the merging of passion and self-discipline, in retrospect. Granted, there was a lot more passion than self-discipline involved, but there's no reason I can't make it work with the proportions reversed.

It's times like this that I just need to make my good old instinctive Irish stubborness work for me. Reverse psychology can be such a pain in the ass sometimes, I swear - if someone would try to argue me out of writing, I'll bet you dollars to donuts I'd have another novel written in another month. O foolish mind!

Whew! Made it. That was tough, but I definitely needed it.

Another take on Vonnegut's Seventh Rule

I was thrilled to be asked to guest post on www.fictionmatters.com:

I'm intrigued by the concept of Vonnegut’s Seventh Rule, which essentially is to write for one person rather than the whole world. I’ve never really considered writing for the whole world; instead, I find myself writing for my main character. After all, if I don’t tell his story, no one else will. And if I can tell the story to his satisfaction, I’m certain to end up happy with it as well.

(Side note: I’m rather enjoying the fact that Vonnegut would’ve hated that semicolon in the preceding paragraph.)

I think one’s instinctive audience is deeply intertwined with one’s creative process. Every (good) story I’ve written has started because a protagonist popped into my mind, in a sort of reverse-Athena-birthing, whispering urgently that they must tell me about this thing. Or I’ll get a sudden image of this person - who’s never occurred to me before - in the middle of an intriguing action, and realize I must know what happened next. Or maybe I do know what happened next, and before too, and realize that for his sake and mine, I must tell his story, now now now.

There are some great advantages to this approach, in my opinion. My protagonists become close friends of mine, because I take their stories seriously, and they know I’m listening. Writing for them helps me with characterization quite a lot, because they’re driving the story so much that all I have to do is pay attention, and a thousand tiny details come forth with relatively little effort.

It also helps me with developing other characters. Since the secondary characters are all there because they’re a part of the protagonist’s life, I tend to see them from the protag’s point of view. How they respond to the main character, and how he responds to them, helps me understand both people better. The drawback, not surprisingly, is that this can make my secondary characters a bit flat at times. But hey, that’s why we have revision, right? I’m a big believer in getting the first draft down on paper and worrying about making it great on the next go-round or twenty.

Another thing I love about this approach is that the inspiration is all wrapped up with it. Whatever inner emotion makes this character so urgent, so insistent that I tell their story, tends to be one of the main themes. Even better, since that passion is innately contained within their personality, I typically don’t have to put a lot of conscious thought into the character’s motivation. It seems natural that the protagonist’s motivation and the story’s overall themes are linked in a necessary - indeed, inextricable - way. Granted, I may not fully understand that motivation or the themes until I’m knee-deep in the story, but I just keep trusting my main character and in time, all is revealed.

Focusing on telling this specific character’s story to his satisfaction helps me to hone in on the plot, too, even if I can’t see all the way to the end when I first start jotting down the scenes and images that occur to me. If I start to get lost, or bogged down, I can turn to the protagonist and say, “Sorry, what were we talking about? I got a little distracted.” In a very real sense, the protagonist is like a guide leading me along an unfamiliar trail through the forest. It doesn’t feel like I’m making up his story; I’m listening to it, asking questions, and writing as fast as I can.

the marvelous world

(we now interrupt the story revision in progress to bring you the following poem...)

the marvelous world

stay beside me, love, for all my days and nights
hold my hands in yours, sing to me adventures
of heroes and true love and the marvelous world;
look in my eyes and tell me in wordless joy.

hold my hands in yours, sing to me adventures;
walk by my side and make me laugh to tears.
look in my eyes and tell me in wordless joy
of the infinite sky, the vast ocean dreaming.

walk by my side and make me laugh to tears;
when the storms come, I shelter in your arms.
the infinite sky, the vast ocean dreaming -
how they roil and rage, shine and sing.

when the storms come, I shelter in your arms.
we are safe in each other, fire and air in sacred flame;
how they roil and rage, shine and sing -
how the ancient earth envies our life together.

we are safe in each other, fire and air, sacred flame;
we are constant and changing, we are beauty and art.
how the ancient earth envies our life together;
the old stories are true, but never so true as now.

we are constant and changing, we are beauty and art,
heroes and true love and the marvelous world:
the old stories are true, but never so true as now.
stay beside me, love, for all my days and nights.


...And now, a little context.

There is an absolutely amazing and wonderful woman named Kate - well, I am sure there are a lot of amazing and wonderful Kates, but this one is superlatively so and has been one of my dearest friends for lo, these many years.

Three years ago, Kate read a poem I wrote at my wedding - called, perhaps unsurprisingly, true love. And now, at the end of June, Kate will marry an excellent guy named Andrew (I don't know him as well, but he seems fully worthy to be her life partner, and I can give no man higher praise than that).

To my great honor, Kate has asked me to read a poem at her wedding, preferably one that I wrote. She did give me the option to read something someone else wrote, but I love her very much and wanted to do something original as a gift to them.

So there I was, faced with the task of writing a non-cheesy poem about love, something that would deserve to be read at the wedding of one of my best friends. After about 83,000 attempts, I finally drafted the poem above. I've put it through a few revisions by now, but I have until June 27th to make it perfect, or as close to perfect as I can get it.

You can therefore see, dear reader, why your feedback is much needed and appreciated.

A word on the form - this type of poem is called a pantoum. As you may already know, pantoums are a type of poetry that originated in Malaysia. There is little structure besides the pattern of repetition of the lines - no set number of syllables or stanzas, no rhyme scheme, no scansion. It's one of my favorite forms of poetry; the repeating pattern creates this great tension, then the pattern of the last stanza provides a fantastic catharsis.

A word to the wise - should you wish to attempt your first pantoum, may I suggest you drive it with verbs. At least, that's the only way I can ever figure out how to make 'em work.

Anyway, please let me know what you think. Much obliged!

Okay, mad props to @FictionMatters...

We now interrupt this story for random homage to tweeps & Vonnegut...

So I joined Twitter not too long ago. I'm loving the interaction with other writers, getting to read other folks' blogs, discussing craft & technique etc etc. It's wonderful - a lot like real-life writing workshops, except that you actually get to choose whose writing you read. :)

Anyway, one of my Twitter feeds is @FictionMatters, who deserves some mad props for two things. First, he used Star Wars to analyze successful development of a villain's character, and anyone who can use Star Wars to explain, well, anything is pretty much awesome in my book.

Second, he recently blogged a separate post on each of Vonnegut's 6 rules of writing. Let it be known that I am a HUGE Vonnegut fan. I adore the man. In fact, I started this entire blog because I was so upset when he died, and I needed a place to vent. And in addition to a wonderfully creative and unique perspective, Vonnegut was a damn good writer. So his rules - which I had seen before, sometime in my halcyon days of youth, and then promptly forgotten - are quite useful.

So, not to steal from Fiction Matters, but for my writing friends that aren't on Twitter (join! now!), here is the list. Talk about perfect timing - I plan to use these, especially #4, to help me with my revisions to 'Mississippi'. You can read a discussion of each rule at http://www.fictionmatters.com/.

Kurt Vonnegut's Rules of Writing:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.