Irene Smith

I have finally had to come to the conclusion that I can’t do everything. I was trying to update this blog weekly, write a book, participate on Brigit’s Flame by writing a short story every week, study for Microsoft Certification, and also do my real job, the one that pays the bills. This left very little time for everyday things like, oh, sleep and spending time with my family.

I just couldn’t do it. Trying to do too many things at once caused a system crash (my system, not the computer) and I just haven’t felt like doing anything for several months. My health has been suffering and so has my psyche. The whole experience just made me feel sorry for myself and left me incapable of accomplishing much of anything. The few stories I did manage to write got me nothing more than a bunch of rejections.

Is it time for me to give up on writing? Maybe I’m just fooling myself. I thought that I write well. Most of the people who read my stories like them (except for the magazine editors, apparently) so if I haven’t figured out what I’m doing wrong by now, maybe I should just quit.

Why can’t I do that? No matter how many rejections I get, I find myself writing again. It builds up, like water pressure behind a clog in a pipe and after a while, I start getting story ideas that swoop and dive around my head like crazed birds until I sit down at the keyboard and get them out there. I can’t help myself.

I am a procrastinator by nature. I tend to do things at the last moment. Most of the time it works pretty well for me but sometimes…

Last weekend I was busy. We had a party for my son’s birthday and by the time I thought of the blog post, it was Friday night. I vowed that this week would be different. Yet here it is quarter to midnight and I haven’t written anything yet. Maybe this is why I haven’t had a major publishing success?

Even so, I’m too persistent (too stupid?) to quit. I keep trying.

It’s time to go back to the drawing board. I am going to throw out everything I’ve already done and begin at the beginning with a new idea, a new story, and maybe, finally, a success.

They say that one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Maybe that is what I’ve been doing. I have about half a dozen different story ideas and I keep trying to redo them and get a bestseller out of it. Maybe I’m just getting bored with my own stories. And, if I’m bored, my readers will be as well. Time to start fresh.

So…

Tonight’s post is going to be short and sweet. I’ve got a book to write.

See you next week…

Take a look at the following short exchange and see if you can tell me what’s wrong with it:

“Good morning.”

“Good morning to you,” I replied.

“What is new?” said my boss, George Newbinging.

“Nothing. How was your weekend?”

“Great,” he replied. “How are the kids?”

“Oh, same old, same old,” I said.

So, what do you think? Besides being boring as hell, this little dialog does none of the jobs that dialog is supposed to do within a story. Dialogue can do any or all of the following:

• advance the plot
• tell us about the characters
• heighten the conflict
• provide information the viewpoint character might not otherwise know

I suppose I could make a case for increased tension if the employee had done something terrible, say screwed up some paperwork or lost an important order. Then the very fact that the boss doesn’t say anything about the incident could be a means to heighten the tension. Otherwise? Not so much.

While people exchange comments like the above every day in real life, they can’t afford to do the same in fiction. Dialogue in fiction must perform at least one of the functions I listed above.

Advance the Plot

Take a look at this short exchange:

“You must be my new master.” The man looked around and sighed. “What year is it?”

“Two thousand and nine,” Ken replied. He tried to get up but he couldn’t move.

“Only eight years this time,” said the man shaking his head. Then he bowed low. “I am a jinni and you are my master. What is thy first wish?”

Now Ken was glad he hadn’t run away. “How many do I get?”

“Three wishes are standard. Everybody knows that. ”

“Finally something is going my way,” said Ken.

In just a few lines we’ve managed to convey the information that Ken has found a jinni and that he is entitled to three wishes in a more entertaining way that “Ken found a jinni and it told him that he was entitled to three wishes.” The narrative version might use less words but the version with dialogue is more interesting.

Tell us About the Characters

If you are doing your job right, the characters in your stories each have their own mannerisms in speech and action. For example:

“Yo, man, how’s it hangin’?”

“Good morning, my dear fellow, how is the world treating you on this fine day?”

Obviously there are differences between these two characters’ speech patterns. The informality of the first speech (yeah, I know it sounds corny) might indicate a lower level of education or it might indicate someone who is putting on a personality that isn’t really his own. Which it is depends on the context of the story of course.

Heighten the Conflict

Dialogue is the perfect way to heighten conflict. Don’t tell us that two characters are angry at each other. Show it in the way that they speak. Instead of:

Mom was angry.

Have Mom show us herself like this:

“Matthew Denis Smith, what in the wide world do you think you are doing?”

No question that Mom is a little bit annoyed now, is there?

Provide Information

Dialogue can give us information that we might not be able to get any other way. For instance, if a story is told from the point of view of a character that was not a witness to something that needs to be presented, a character that did see the incident can tell the viewpoint character about it in a much more interesting way than, “Later I found out, blah, blah, blah.”

I find dialogue is more fun to write than narrative too. But that’s just icing on the cake, so to speak.

I went to a free course at the Gotham Writers Workshop on Wednesday night. It was worth the extra effort that I had to make to attend. It really was a bit of a hardship because the class ended at 8pm so I had to take the 9:58pm train home. That meant that I didn’t get home until 12:30am. How easy is it to get home and go to sleep right away? I can’t do it. By the time I was in bed and falling asleep, it was nearly 2am. Needless to say I was a bit tired the next day, although it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe the high I got from going to the class is what kept me going the next day.

It was a high. The funny thing is that I didn’t really hear anything I didn’t already know, but hearing it made me anxious to apply the information myself. What we talked about was character. We talked about how you go about creating characters that have depth. Really? Everybody knows that.

Then we were given ten minutes to describe a character. It could be someone you know or someone with whom you are barely acquainted. I thought I had this one down pat. I started off and (I thought) was going along great.

After a second little exercise where we were to show the character eating breakfast, the teacher asked some of us to volunteer to read what we had written. That was when I realized what a poor job I was doing. The two students who ready their breakfast scenes had basically written what could have been the beginning of excellent stories. I almost had the feeling that they were ringers, professional writers invited to the class to make the rest of us realize how much we needed to take the full, paid-for 10-week course.

I tried to put my failure down to the fact that I don’t think quickly, that if I had more time I would have done a better job. I even blamed the fact that I was writing with a pen instead of a keyboard.The truth is that most of my characters are about as three-dimensional as paper dolls. I have known for some time that my fiction was missing something and i think this is it. I don’t think I really understood what it meant to create three-dimensional characters.

My characters often have desires, quirks, I try to make their speech patterns enough different so that you can recognize them from their words. But, when it comes right down to it, they’re still boring, often nothing more than a collection of quirks.

Since I was eliminated early (for the second month in a row!) from the monthly writing competition at Bridget’s Flame so I’ve got time to work on my characterization skills before the next competition begins. So this is what I am going to do:

1. I am going to create a character by giving a physical description.
2. Then I will write about the person’s past.
3. I will look at his or her hopes and desires.
4. Finally I will describe the person’s deepest, darkest secrets.
5. Once all of that has been done, I will place the character in a situation and see if all that preparation will give me a better story and a more interesting protagonist.

It’s worth a try. If you want to try it too, go ahead. If you end up with something you want to share, put a snippet or two in your comments to this entry. I’d be interested to see what you come up with. My results? See you next Saturday.

My husband took me and our son to Olive Garden tonight for dinner. The place was beginning to fill up with Saturday night customers so we had to add our name to the list for a table. I went up to the hostess and said to her,”I’d like a table for three.” I paused and said, “Smith.”

“Thank you. What is your first name?”

How is that relevant? I looked at the hostess as she stood, pen poised over paper, waiting for my answer. Reluctantly I said, “Irene.”

This raised a question that I’ve pondered more than once. That is:

When did we become so informal?

Once upon a time young people didn’t address those who were obviously older by their first name. I might enjoy the thought that maybe I look younger than I am, but the truth is that, when I was a little girl, people didn’t address others that they didn’t know by their first name. When you added yourself to a list at a restaurant, you gave the hostess or maitre ‘d your last name and then when it was your turn they would say, “Smith, party of three.”

This change does not just apply to restaurants. When you go to the doctor’s office these days you never hear a nurse say, “Mrs. Smith, could you come with me, please?” It’s always, “Irene,” and then they turn and walk away without saying any more. Now you’ve got to scurry after them as quickly as possible, hoping that they don’t get too far ahead for you to find them again because almost every doctor’s office is a maze of examining rooms but that’s another blog entry.

When I go to the bank, not a common occurrance since my husband usually takes care of our finances, the teller calls me Irene, when I used my credit card at WalMart, the 15-year old at the register says, “Here you go Irene,” when she hands my card back to me. I have been married to my husband for 15 years now and I can count the number of times I have been addressed as “Mrs. Smith” on the fingers of one hand.

Even in the work place, formality has gone by the wayside. I am as guilty as any of calling the CEO of the company I work for by his first name but, now that I think of it, I’m wondering if that’s the best thing for us all? Would we respect each other more if I called him Mr. Sherif and he called me Mrs. Smith?

Some people seem to feel that this informality is a good thing. “Why be so formal?” they say. “It’s so much more friendly the other way.”

At first thought, that seems to be true. However, consider your childhood. To whom were you more respectful, the teacher you had to call “Mrs. Smith” or the kid on the other side of the aisle that you called “Bobby?” I’m betting that Mrs. Smith would have won out.

This is going to be a short post tonight. I’ve been fighting with a ‘flu for the past two weeks, it’s late, and I’m tired.

I had my 50th birthday this week. I find it hard to believe (somehow I don’t remember when I became this old) but there it is. I imagine that a lot of the complaining that I’ve been doing lately has something to do with adjusting to–what? middle age? early old age? I’ve reached a point in my life where most people are satisfied with who they have beomce or they are busy bemoaning their fate and trying to understand what went wrong. Me? I’m thinking about going back to school. I’m thinking about trying to start a whole new career, and I’m looking forward to the birth of my fifth grandchild.

Then again, while I was far advanced with intellectual things like reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, I’ve always been behind the curve when it comes to social and career milestones. For example, I didn’t buy my first car until I was nearly 30 years old and didn’t marry until I was 35. And yet in usual fashion for me, it all worked out well because when I did marry, I married a man with two grown-up children. I became a grandmother before I gave birth for the first time.

Lately it seems as though a lot of things have been going badly wrong. My father died, I had a credit card taken away from me (not that the loss of a credit card compares to my father’s death) and I can’t seem to get any reaction to my writing but “thanks, but no thanks.” I’ve been tired and sick and just feeling sorry for myself. Then this weekend came along and I had to admit that things aren’t so bad after all.

In fact, so far this weekend has been absolutely perfect. Two of my granddaughters came to spend Thursday and Friday night with us. We played computer games together, we talked, we made pizza and we watched movies. Then tonight my step-son and daughter-in-law came with my grandson and we all went out to dinner. I looked around that the table for eight at the restaurant tonight and thought, “How can anybody be luckier than this?”

It got me thinking about how very lucky I really am in so many ways. For example (and this is in no particular order):

• True, my father died. On the other hand, he was 85 years old and I was nearly 50. I have some close friends whose parents died before they graduated high school. My son has been lucky enough to know his grandfather and my father was around long enough to see that he did a good job raising me. I know he was proud of me.
• I was lucky enough to have my paternal grandmother in my life until I was in my 40s. She died at the age of 99 in 2003 when I was 44 years old.
• I have a husband who loves me so much that he was willing to move from New York State to Washington State (and greater love hath no man for woman, than to drive across country with a nearly 3-year old child) and then to pick up and move back again 4 years later when my father had a stroke.
• I dearly love both of my step-children and their spouses. When my husband and I were married, my step-daughter was Maid of Honor and my step-son Best Man.
• I adore all four (soon to be five) of my grandchildren.
• I have a good job at a time when many people have lost theirs through no fault of their own.
• We managed to get a mortgage for a brand new house right before everything fell apart. I love my home and so did my father when he visited us. Our home is a place where friends feel welcome and I love entertaining.
• I have good friends who care about me.
• My husband is still addicted to me even though we’ve been together for nearly 25 years.

Who could ask for anything more? It would just be greedy.

When learning to paint, beginners often learn by copying the work of the great masters. Go to any art museum and you are bound to see at least one student sitting in front of a great canvas, sketching different portions of the work and, therefore, learning how to make a few lines and dots appear to have substance.

The technique I am about to describe is similar. I have used it several times more or less successfully and I have always learned something useful in the process. The results you achieve will vary and you may end up with something that you can’t sell because it is too close to the original. On the other hand, you may end up with something totally new. Therefore, this technique is probably more useful for short stories than for longer pieces because only a masochist would write fifty thousand or more words knowing that there is a good chance the final product can’t be sold.

Pick a story you like. Read it casually. Then read it again. Study it. Keep reading until you can state the plot in a single sentence. Identify the protagonist, the antagonist, and any other important characters. Then make a list of the scenes. There may be anywhere from one or two to a dozen or so scenes in a short story. Make a list. Record everything on paper or in a computer file and then go away and do something else for a few days.

Now it is time to write your own story. Don’t try to remember the exact wording of the original; just read over your notes and write the story step by step according to the blueprint you have created. You may want to use a similar voice or style just for fun, but the important thing here is to write the story.

The last step is to compare your story to the original. Did your version progress at the same speed? Did you alter the pace, the voice, or the ending? If you did make changes, does your story please you as much as the original? If so, you have won big time. If not, write it off as a learning experience.

What now? Pick another story and do the same thing or, and this is even more valuable, wait a few days and write another story from the same notes. Whatever you do, make this exercise your own and let me know how it worked for you.

By the way, I came up with this idea several years ago when I was reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. He describes having learned to write newspaper stories by reading existing stories, reducing them to a single sentence, and after giving himself enough time to forget the original, writing his own version. At that point, although I had started a lot of stories, I hadn’t ever finished one. This exercise was, for me, the way to a complete story. I hope it does something as good for you.

Is it Saturday already? No?

Actually, today is Sunday and I messed up. Hence the title of this week’s post. If you are shaking your head in confusion at this point I don’t blame you. Let me explain…

Normally I work at home on Friday. My boss is away on vacation this week. She is out of reach by phone or email. I had to be in the office on Friday in case something happened that couldn’t be managed long distance. That little change in my routine threw off everything. To make matters worse, I took two days off earlier in the week to visit with friends from Seattle. I have absolutely no sense of what day it really is.

At least half a dozen times yesterday I thought, “It’s Saturday, I have to write my post.” Then I promptly became involved in programming, writing, or any number of less productive things (like farming on the Facebook app Farmville) and forgot all about it. Don’t worry, it’s just a minor setback. We’ll be back on track next week.

This little error made me think, however, about how much of our lives we spend doing things without thinking about them. Sometimes this is good. For example, the fact that you drive to work the same way every day (if you are unlucky enough to have to drive) means that you don’t have to concentrate to hard on the how of getting to work. You know where to turn, where the traffic lights are and you automatically slow down for the spot where the policeman always hides behind the billboard to catch speeders.

On the other hand, when there is construction along the way, it is extremely difficult to change the route, even if by going a different way you could avoid the delay. We all face this trade-off between habit and thought. And, unfortunately, advertisers are counting on habit winning the battle. This isn’t new. As long as there has been advertising, advertisers have counted on the fact that, once they have won you over, they’ve got you for life. Once they have convinced you to buy, they want you to continue to buy automatically. They don’t want you to think about it.

This type of message is usually reasonably subtle but some aren’t. Lately WalMart has been running an ad on television lately where a woman says (as well as I can remember it), “Luckily WalMart checks the prices of all its competitors so I don’t have to.”

They’re counting on you to do the same. They want you to assume that the WalMart price is the best price, turn on the automatic pilot and shop at WalMart for everything. With our economy in the shape it is, we can’t afford to do that anymore. We have to check out the prices, even when it takes longer. Don’t assume that anybody is the best. Check it out.

By the way, I am not advocating that you not shop at WalMart, I am just saying that you need to compare before you buy.

Case in point I recently bought a new computer. Before I did, I went on the Internet and looked at Best Buy, WalMart, Tiger Direct, and Sam’s Club. I found what I thought would be a good deal at Best Buy. Then I hit the stores.

My husband said, “You should look at Staples too, while we’re out.” I walked in and found that they were having a sale. For less than the price Best Buy wanted, I was able to get a computer with everything the Best Buy computer had plus it had a larger hard drive and for just $20 more than the 2-year warranty, I was able to get a four-year waranty that covered parts, labor, and surge damage.

I nearly bought it on the spot. Then I looked at my husband and I realized that he was going to hold me to my promise to look at Sam’s Club, WalMart, and Best Buy as well. So we did.

Then we went back to Staples and purchased the computer I wanted, confident in the knowledge that we had gotten the best possible deal. We compared features, prices, and service and settled on the best computer for the least money. I ended up saving over $100 and got a more powerful computer than I would have if I had assumed that Best Buy (or WaloMart or Sam’s Club) had the best quality and price.

Will I buy my next computer from Staples? Maybe. If they still have the best computer for the best price, of course. But I am not going to do it out of habit.

Our parents taught us and we teach our children that if you are nice to others and fair in your dealings, others will be nice and fair to you. If you want to find a place where this is clearly not true, all you need to do is ride mass transit. Take a look at the PATH or the New Yorki City Subway. When those doors whoosh open, there is a general stampede for a seat such that anyone who is polite (doesn’t push and shove) is guaranteed to be standing.

There are signs that say, “Please give this seat to the elderly or infirm.” How old is elderly? If you are 17 and you see someone who looks as though they must be in their 60s, is that “old” enough? Apparently not. I have seen men and women in their twenties and thirties watch an octogenarian stand holding on to the pole for dear life. Have I given up my seat? I hardly ever have one but I have given my seat up more than once to people who seemed more needy than I.

There are other things too…

Most cars have a sign that says, no eating, drinking, smoking or open food containers. More than once I’ve seen people sit directly across from one of those signs while eating a McDonald’s value meal or drinking a Dunkin Donuts iced coffee. Of course, what doesn’t occur to these people who feel they “have the right” to eat and drink whenever and wherever they wish is that it doesn’t take much of a jolt to make them drop food and/or beverages.

I mean, if you spill your coffee down my back in the morning, are you prepared to pay to have my clothing cleaned or to replace a completely destroyed garment? In my case, a disaster like that would mean either buying new clothes or sitting around in wet, smelly clothes all day long.

And there are even smaller things. If you are carrying a huge suitcase, backpack, or briefcase is it that difficult to figure out that the people around you are likely to be hit by it if you don’t pay attention when you move around? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been hit in the face by a tall person’s backpack.

Then there’s my pet peeve. I’m short–barely five feet tall–and that means danger in a crowded car. Does it really take a genius to figure out that the small person in front of you might not want to have their nose jammed into your armpit? Or that if the paper you are holding at reading distance might be unpleasantly close to someone who doesn’t have room to back up? Would it really be so terrible if you couldn’t read the paper for one day?

So much of what I’m complaining about can be prevented with a little bit of consideration for the world around you but so many people are so self-absorbed that they seem completely unaware of anyone else.

We need not spend all of our time saying, “After you…”

“No, after you…”

All we need to do is take five seconds to look around and think, just a little bit, about how much more smoothly and pleasantly the world would work with just a touch of consideration. Just that little change would put us on the path to a much nicer world.

I have been writing for–oh hell, nearly forty years. I wrote my first book, a horrible mish-mash of The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Doctor Doolittle when I was 11 years old. It was really bad, but the way, in case you are curious. Not only did I steal every plot twist and turn from my favorite books, I included every one of my friends as characters.

For most of those forty years, I believed that writing fiction was something that had to be inspired. By what? Who knows. I guess I imagined some schizophrenic muse residing somewhere in my brain. Once in a whle she would throw me a bone and I would write a story. Mostly I wrote parts of stories that had beginnings and no ends but that’s beside the point.

When I write non-fiction, articles or documentation, I have no problems. No blocks have ever existed for me with non-fiction. There are times, in fact, when it seems like cheating. I don’t need to be inspired. The words just appear on the page. Sometimes it feels as though someone else is dong the work and I’m just getting it all down.

Fiction is hard. I write, I re-write, and I question every word. At least, I always did. I worry about writing clichéd stories. I want every story to be perfect and wonderful and–you get the idea. Usually about halfway through I begin to hate the story and, more times than not, I end up throwing it away. For every story I have completed, there are at least five more that will never see the light of day.

Today I decided to stop trying to write perfect, unique, absolutely fascinating stories. From now on, I’m going to write stories that are fun to write whether they are “wonderful” and “perfect” or not.

That’s not as easy as it sounds but I wrote a story–a complete story–today in about three hours. It’s not long (only 1,970 words) but it is complete. It’s not perfect. It’s not totally original, but it’s done.

If you want to read it, go here… Of Smoke and Mirrors

Does this mean I’m going to become the prolific, successful story teller that I’ve been trying to become for the past forty years? Probably not. Yet I feel as though I’ve taken a huge step forward today. I’ve stopped believing in writer’s block. I’ve stopped believing that I need to be inspired to write, and–this is the best part–I wrote a complete story because I decided that was what I was going to do. **Pats self on back.** That’s a good start.