Giving back
Writers, on the whole, seem to be generous in terms of giving time and energy and support to other writers, particularly young ones learning their craft. I've known writers who have taken in other writers who need a place to stay, writers who teach workshops and classes, writers who read manuscripts and evaluate them, working for free in a de facto editorial capacity, writers who write books and articles intended to help other writers. Some of it is certainly a way to supplement income, which is always tricky when you're a freelancer with only occasional checks but constant expenses. More, though, I believe it's because most writers are also readers and we want to be assured of a continuing supply of good stuff to read even when we and our generation of peers have put down our keyboards and are lounging in retired bliss next to our Olympic-sized pools (no, wait, that's just a fantasy moment).
Not all of us can or will do all those things, so this isn't a suggestion for readers of the blog to start sending in their manuscripts--I don't have time for that sort of thing, and although I've blurbed the books of a few friends I'm not sure my name is "big" enough to have a lot of significance to the casual book browser.
One thing I have done, and am doing again, is mentoring a student who is doing a comic book script as a senior project. I don't know these students personally, although they're from San Jose, CA, where I went to college--as far as I know the first one picked me out of a hat, and the current one is friends with the first one. But it's interesting for me to see what high school students find compelling enough to write about, and to follow and help shepherd the project along.
The current student had some concerns about finding the motivation that would propel her protagonist through the story, and I responded, in part, by telling her of a technique that David Morrell suggests in his terrific book Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing. I think it might be of interest to readers here, so I'll excerpt part of what I wrote to her:
" One idea
for clarifying the character's motivations, interests, and ideas to yourself
is to "interview" yourself. It sounds a little weird but it can be really
helpful, and after a few minutes really starts to feel like a dialogue.
It's a trick I swiped from writer David Morrell. Basically, you sit down
at the keyboard and ask yourself about your story, character, or whatever.
Use the question "why?" a lot. As an example, say you wanted to do a story
about a circus clown who learns that the town the circus has just come to
is where his parents, who put him up for adoption as a newborn, live. (Bear
with me, I'm just making this up on the spot).
To begin my self-interview, I might ask: Why a clown?
And answer something like: clowns are creepy. Who puts on all that
make-up and tries to act goofy for hours at a time, as a career? Why would
they do that? Are they hiding from something? Is the make-up really a
kind of mask? And this particular clown, who has never known his real parents--I
think he has been hiding his true face for his whole life because he doesn't
know who he really is, what he "should" look like based on his heritage,
and I want to dig around with that.
Does he have something to be ashamed of?
He might. Maybe his parents were very poor when he was born, and that's
why they put him up for adoption--they didn't think they could afford a kid.
Now they're wealthy, but only because they did something immoral or illegal
shortly after the clown's birth. So it isn't really his own past he's ashamed
of, but theirs (even though he didn't know about it until recently learning,
accidentally, who they were). It's just always been in the back of his
mind, unformed, making him uncomfortable facing the world as himself.
So after he confronts them, will he be able to drop the mask?
And so on, like that. Each question and answer will lead to another
question, or many questions. It can take a while, but by the time you're
done with it, you'll have clarified for yourself who the character is, what
he's all about, what he wants, etc., and maybe some other story/plot elements
at the same time. Once you've got the character settled on you can quiz
yourself about other story points you're still vague on the next time.
The other good point about this method is that you do it while writing--you're
not worried about deathless prose, or even proper grammar and punctuation,
but you are sitting at the keyboard putting down words, and the more of that
you do the more it flexes the mental muscles that govern that process.
Doing enough of this kind of self-interview helps the thoughts and ideas
flow more freely when you do sit down to do the actual work."
As I indicated to her, I have used this technique from time to time to help me through some sticky points, and find it a really fascinating and useful exercise.
I just finished another book, Samuel R. Delany's About Writing. Delany's writing is more "experimental" and literary than my own, his concerns less about plot and story than language, technique, and aesthetic. But he has written some amazing books. And far from being the kind of "literary snob" that many of us working in genre fiction expect when someone writes that sort of thing and can throw around the sorts of literary heavyweight names and concepts that he does, Delany is proud that most of his fiction has been in what he calls the "paraliterary" genres of science fiction, sword & sorcery, and pornography. In his book, along with Eco and Rimbaud and Auden, he discusses Robert E. Howard and Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore and the Beatles.
He also helped point to some areas where my work could use improvement, and I'm working on it. So thanks, Chip--and anyone interested in writing could do a lot worse than to pick this one up, and the Morrell too.
