Tuesday, the beautiful people at The Literary Lab will be posting up something I wrote. How cool is that?!

UPDATE: This is the link!

Please head over to check it out. I had notes for more, but wanted to keep it as succinct and straightforward.

Interested in seeing more? Lemme know.
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Inspired by the hooplah over Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Domey held an exhibition of critiquing extremes: Tiger Mother vs. Nice. The preference of those who commented leaned heavily toward the Tiger Mother style.

The opening of my "William the Goat" short got the Nice treatment. And I learned things about my piece that I didn't know before. Things that I might not have learned if I had gotten the Tiger Mother. Because Nice accentuates the positives and Tiger the negatives. Achievements versus failures.

From the comments section, most advocated a balanced approach. Call me William Blake, but I think that the tension of the extremes is necessary.

We can discuss that later.

I'm writing about how a writer should react to the critique. What do you do when you get a response you didn't expect or want? Hint: You do not throw a chair.

Be on the lookout for my guest post tomorrow morning.
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Here's a preview. Of course, the X's will be removed on LitLab's post.

Hamfisted, heavyhanded, pussyfooting, tiptoeing, beating around the bush.

We all know what these look like. Maybe it's just my background, but most of them conjure up memories of sermons. I'm sure you have some specific images from your own past. If you don't, watch a televangelist or local newscast.

The problem isn't (necessarily) the subject matter nor the presenter. The issue is preparation and approach. This is where I try and tie the idea I put in your head to the writing process. <- Hamfisted

The stories we write are manipulations. We work to induce attachment, love, hatred, ire, disdain and so on. We work to bring out the hard parts, where the soul rends, where beards are torn out and where ashes mat the hair. We work to elevate the joys of relationship and solitude, both; the elation of creation and destruction, both. We work to manipulate our reader into experience.

This can be a shared experience with a main character. This can be the experience of cognitive dissonance, where the story runs counter to the reader's expectation. This can be an experience of catharsis, or an increase in pent-up emotion that demands exploration.

Now, don't read this to be saying that all fiction must have its head up its hind-end and the writer believe that all the world's ills will be solved if only this one story were broadcast by flying speakers. I'm not saying that. And I fear I may have lost my thread, but I will do my best to find it again.

Some fiction can get away with flat characters, overwrought sentimentalism and hackneyed tripe for plots. Several types of fiction depend on stock characters and familiar tropes and glosses, but writers in these fields also do their best work while riffing on an old standard.

Readers read books to be manipulated. I know I do. But I don't want to feel manipulated. Does that make sense?

In which a boat is abandoned and the Captain is saved

Ekharson stood mid-watch that night, 12 bells until 4. He always went light on his feet and quick with a line. The boy never cried out. When I rose with the third watch, the jolly boat shroud lay halved and wrinkled. The launch from starboard stood on the beach. Through the glass, I saw one set of footprints. He must have bound and carried the boy. Ekharson was born Norse and raised heathen, with curses and spells and magics of the sea. A good seaman with terrible strength, but the boy and the launch were lost to us.

In the jolly boat, something yellow caught the sun. A gold bangle cruelly twisted and parted. Weird gravings marching around the inner edge. When I held it, I felt maggots writhe.

I cast the bangle into the waves.

Five miles landward, a ship spilled her sails. The scarlet compass wavered without the homing band.
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And that's the end of the beginning.

Lifted from Old Man Nevets. The mission: List approximately 10 books with known influence on your writing life. Aye-aye, mon capitaine.

William Faulkner - Sanctuary

So much of the action is understated, understood in this journey into darkness, racism, classism and sexual violence. At its most dense, the voice excludes the reader. And despite being shoved aside repeatedly, the reader keeps chasing the story.

C.S. Lewis, fiction - Perelandra.

Nevets already mentioned the first book of the Science Fiction Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet. I claim Perelandra for the descriptions, the Romance (quest) and the symbolism. This book taught me to play with old stories, tweak them, move the setting, insert extra characters. In the same vein, I should mention Lewis's Till We Have Faces. It stands alone much better than Perelandra, and teaches many of the same lessons.

Marilynne Robinson - Gilead

This book blew my mind parts away. Thick with nostalgia, religion, regionalisms and parental affection, my interest never flagged. Like Faulkner, this book taught me about voice, but not obfuscating the story, unfolding.

Bill Watterson - Calvin and Hobbes

A llesson in youth, love, friendship and (authorial) irony. This comic showed me joy and storybuilding and memorable characters. Also, how much I wish I had the skills of an artist.

James Joyce - Dubliners

It's all about connection and progression.

J.D. Salinger - Nine Stories (Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes)

I didn't care for Salinger's Catcher. But this particular story, in spare economy and limited perspective, is beautiful as only minimalism can be beautiful. Which is a lot different from Southern Gothic.

Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

Another narrative that thrives on economy, Godot taught me how much your characters can say without actually speaking volumes.

--
listening to Emery - The Cheval Glass

In which the Captain investigates

The group of us what ran fell apart and night fell on the Maid riding at anchor, lee of Round Island. Half the crew needed the night to sleep off their shore-drunk. The rest need be checking cargo and provision.

Before we began our duties, I called every man to the foremast. "Hear this. You'll know we departed before time and half-legged in a mass of ships. You'll know a scarlet woman stood screaming on the dock for a boy what escaped. The boy is onboard.” Every man nodded. “Make the ship tight. No lights on deck. With luck, one guest will join us for breakfast and another will miss us in the night."

I turned and walked toward my cabin. Behind me, aye, aye, aye.

Ropes creaked. Boards moaned. No sound came from the boy. "Hello the boy. We left her at the dock. Will you come out? There is an extra hammock below-decks."

The sailcloth lifted. As the ship rolled, the cast of a lantern revealed an eye rimmed in red peering out at me. An eye unblinking and unable, without tears, without lids. A head wrapped in wide leather and nary a hole for nose nor mouth. I called out. The light swayed away.

Surely not. A mummied boy, living and dying in my jolly boat. I’d not sleep that night and yet I missed the theft.
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The Skirtling Boy will be posted on Mondays and Thursdays for the next two weeks.

In which the Woman is deceived and the Sotern Maid runs to the Gulf

The silence held the port taut and brittle, stretching endless and foreboding as the Horse Belt with the wind lost. That scarlet malevolence sent her thugs closer down the dock. We held the last berth, so we had the most time, but no one else was moving.

Harrison stepped to the rail beside me. "Cap'n. We may have to take the risk. The she-devil's men are only 2 boats away."

A racket broke out up the dock, opposite. The four-man fisher Jamaica Favor had lain ready before the quiet, lines slipped, sails unfurled. A crosswind caught her open sails with one of the thugs stepping aboard and the boat drifted a yard out. The woman jerked away from us, toward the unfortunate fishermen.

"This is our chance." I gave Harrison a push toward the deck. "Move, but quiet about it."

The other ships were also making to head out. Sails were trimmed, lines were cast off or cut and men scuttled over the boards, all in a dumb show. The woman stalked toward the Favor, screeching things I couldn't make out other than the occasional "boy." Thugs lined the dock.

I don't blame her captain for choosing the open sea with that howling woman as his option. But I stand it looked a mite suspicious for him running full toward the Western Gulf.

We slid out the bay in a pack, slinking dogs all, shamed and running while the ill-chanced Favor bore the brunt. The boy lay safe above the wilding wet, rocked in the skiff of the Sotern Maid. None knew what lay ahead. Perhaps, no one but him.
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The Skirtling Boy will be posted on Mondays and Thursdays for the next two weeks.

For a stocking stuffer this Christmas past, I received a copy of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, the book about writing that everyone knows from the oft-cited section about excremental first drafts.

I write those. But what I'd never heard before is the chapter on plot treatments. What is a plot treatment? Well, it's not when you visit the graveyard and freshen up the greenery. Rather, it's something to do with the process of writing. Lamott entwines her definition with a story about revision, where the plot she wrote did not match the story in her head that she loved. So she revised and failed, and revised and failed.

In an impassioned harangue to her editor, she got her mind out of the way and poured out the story, the characters and the plot. He loved it. So she ran away and wrote a plot treatment. It's not an outline, which is how you tell a story to a computer. It's not a stack of note cards. A plot treatment has more in common with Cliff Notes than anything else.

You write down the action, the relationships, the things that make you love the character, the salient details of setting, the phrases that you can't shake.

AND KEEP MOVING.

I believe Lamott's figures were close to a 40 page plot treatment for a 300 page novel. So, thicker than those yellow books you clung to in HS and college (and grad school, yes, I've seen you get them through the library's interlibrary loan program).

Why do I like this better than I, II, III, a, b, c? That linear stuff has never made sense to the writing part of my brain. Maybe it's because I'm from a family that is horrible at telling joke, that cracks up before the punchline or leaves out the fact that Mr. Jones didn't own a dog. But this, this is a narrative process.

And I'm much less likely to walk away from a story than I am to abandon an outline regardless of whether the dog is in the right place or not.