Listening and Learning

 Q: Do you have favorite craft sessions, or articles/books on craft that you return to for inspiration or help?

-from Susan

 

At Left Coast Crime last week, a talented writer told me that something I said set her on a new and exciting fictional path. When she told me what resonated so much, it was something quite simple, nothing that I had polished or that I felt was original. It made me think, and it’s relevant to this week’s question.

 

You can hear the same message a hundred times and it runs right past you. At a specific moment in time, however, the gates to your mind open and in that piece of advice sinks in – not because it’s new or brilliant but because it comes in a form you “catch” or at the moment when your subconscious is ready for it.

 

I have a shelf with about a dozen craft books on it, the very first given to me by my biggest supporter and cheerleader, my late partner. BIRD BY BIRD, by his friend Annie Lamott, was just what I needed several years before I had crystallized my desire to write as an alternative career. Lamott’s basic advice is to just do it, no excuses, no rationalizations for being lazy or fearful, just “butt in chair” and get on with it. Her style made her advice not just acceptable but inspiring, a Big Thing broken down into small bites that were achievable. 

 There are bits and pieces of the other books that helped, but for me something said in a particular way becomes the catalyst. Right now on my whiteboard, held up by a magnet, is a list of Billy Wilder’s “Top Ten Screenwriting Rules.” Am I going to write a screenplay? Nope, but the entire list speaks to me about how to structure a novel that will grab and hold the reader. I’m still learning, but “If you have a problem in the third act, the real problem is in the first act” has helped me more than once. 

 I scribbled another piece of advice, maybe from David Corbett, who is whip smart on all writing techniques. It says to ramp up tension, “Put your protagonist in a bad situation and then make it worse!” I sometimes have to apologize to my protagonist as another villain bounds down the stairs while the first is holding her hostage! 

 What I’m trying to say is that there are aha moments, no matter how often and in various ways I have already heard something, when the bell rings and it becomes a forever tool I can draw on in my writing. I haven’t mastered any of this, of course, but when I’m stuck, my eyes drift up to the whiteboard and I’m comforted by the knowledge that so many writers and teachers are ready to help me dig my way out. 

 NOTE: Claire Booth and I are speaking Thursday, May 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the wonderful Avid Reader Bookstore in Davis. And, Terry Shames and I are interviewing each other Saturday, May 11 at 4 p.m. at the equally wonderful Book Passage Bookstore in Marin County.