Bad Writing, Good Writing, and Great Writing

Posted by Joanne Huspek

This will be an ever so brief blog post. I had planned on a meatier offering, until yesterday’s ice storm, which left us without electricity, thereby throwing a major monkey wrench into my planned activity. (Cleaning, decluttering, painting, and creating.) Say what you will, electricity is not just a modern convenience, it’s a modern necessity. After taking several long trips to charge my iPhone in the car, I thought, “Wait a minute! I have a house for sale!” Which has electricity! So I am sitting in this nearly vacant, “for sale” house charging up my devices. (This also makes for a great warming hut!)

Lately I’ve been playing with the idea of bad writing, good writing, and GREAT writing as a writing exercise. I know, I know. I always (usually) try to do my best at my writing. Sometimes the muse is unwilling, or likely on a trip to Cancun, which is where I wish I were today. (Spring? What’s that?)

Bad Writing

This week I thought I would mix it up a little and PURPOSEFULLY engage in bad writing. No story line, terrible grammar, very little arc, and throw in every broken rule I could think of. I limited myself to one handwritten page. (I didn’t want to make this a habit.)

I don’t know if it was successful (I’m not showing any of this to anyone), but it felt oddly freeing. Like I would imagine it would feel to shoplift a lipstick from Walgreen’s. (Believe me, I have no previous experience. These lips and lipstick are not a combination.) I immediately went from my intentionally bad writing to editing a few pages of my manuscript. Wow. What a feeling.

Good Writing

My next exercise was to take awful writing and turn it into good writing.

To do this, take a known quantity, like a New York Times bestselling author (with questionable skills but a massive following). Take a random paragraph or page and rework the words from terrible (or even mediocre) and turn it into something better. Tighten up the sentences. Remove the adverbs. Take out the dangly participles. Think of better adjectives.

I won’t reveal here which writer and which paragraph I chose, but you may be able to squeeze it out of me at a cocktail party. 🙂

Great Writing

If you cannot produce great writing, at least concentrate on someone else’s great writing.

This weekend (before power outage), I decided to deep clean my kitchen. Don’t laugh, I’ve been chipping away at this for weeks. There’s mystery food, and then there’s MY mystery food, some of which are school age now, but let’s not get into that.

As I clean, I turn on YouTube and listen to the hits of the 1970’s. GREAT music, and the lyrics are poetic. I’d almost forgotten how poetic until I loaded up early Emmylou Harris.

“Pancho and Lefty” (written by Townes Van Zandt) was not one of my favorite tunes on this album, but damned if this guy couldn’t turn a phrase.

Take the first four lines:

Living on the road my friend,
Was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron,
And your breath as hard as kerosene

How evocative are those words? Listen to the rest of the song. He takes very few words and paints a picture so vivid, you are there.

Of course, then I fell into the black hole of great lyrics. Think early Neil Young (Like a Hurricane), Gram Parsons (Grievous Angel), and anything Bob Dylan. And that’s just a fingernail scrape across the surface. Listening to great oldies is motivational for me.

And then the neighborhood transformer blew up – or a tree fell on it…oh well.

OK, time’s up. Back to the frozen house. Stay warm, peeps, and keep writing.

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Finds in the Library

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Here I am again, minimally writing and editing because I am majorly cleaning and decluttering. It’s still winter in the tundra (as far as I can tell, BRR…) but as soon as the temps warm up enough, the plants are going outside and we are once again listing this house. Hopefully it will sell this spring, because as of late summer, I’m on my way to my retirement home in Colorado.

The longer I live, the more I realize I don’t need half the stuff I have. That also pertains to my accumulation of books. There are some books that are near and dear to my heart: ALL the Khalil Gibran, my T. Greenwood, Michelle Richmond, and Laura Kasischke collections, my art books, the Bible, and of course, the writing books. I’ve so far lugged six boxes of books to the Goodwill. Some are books from my To-Read mountain (I’ve got one of those on Kindle too). If I haven’t read it in two or three years, I’ll probably never read it. Others I’ve read but will probably never read again. Someone else should enjoy beachy romances, political discourse, and textbooks. I even gave away my entire collection of cookbooks, which was a massive one for sure. Now with the Internet, people pull up recipes online. You don’t need pretty books to take up space, and perhaps become covered in oil and flour dusting as you make something crazy like a duck in cherry sauce. Besides, I’m a competent cook these days and can’t remember the last time I cracked open a cookbook.

My latest modus operandi is to leave books in my wake after I’ve read them, especially when traveling. I leave them in motel rooms, airplanes, restaurants, and in my father’s house. One: books are heavy and I’m old. My suitcases start out heavy and end up infinitely lighter. (Except after the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I usually bulk up.) Two: read it, don’t need to read it again (unless you are one of my favs listed above). Let someone else enjoy the power and entertainment of words.

Decluttering a house means you’ll always find something you thought didn’t exist anymore, like the handmade cards my kids gave me for my birthday or the letter my grandma Della wrote to me in 1975. (Amazing. Her handwriting and my dad’s are almost identical.) I’ve also found many printed edits from my own work. Interesting to read what the editor(s) had to say, what words of encouragement they offered, or the oft wielded cattle prod to poke me out of my mistakes. I wrote so badly back then, it’s embarrassing! (I’m keeping Grandma’s letter, but the edits have been shredded and recycled.)

I opened a Donald Maass workbook and was immediately taken back to the first self-edit of my first book. I was sitting in his workshop at the San Francisco Writers Conference, where we did an exercise making our main character suffer, and suffer some more. And more. I was so enraptured with the process that I made her suffer to the point of intolerability. (Is that a word? Spell check says no.) The second draft was so painful to read my editors hated it, even my beta readers couldn’t stomach it. Even now as a finished product with many of the hardships removed, some people find the first part of the book trying, depending on what the reader’s own psyche can handle.

These days I understand what the intent of this exercise was. I’m still keeping the book. 🙂

When we moved into this house fourteen years ago, I probably had twelve boxes of books. Each of my kids probably had a half dozen boxes of their own. (We also had massive bookshelves, long since garage saled-away.) When I leave here, I’ll probably have four or five boxes of books, just enough to fit into to built-ins in my new house.

I love books, I really do, but what you’ll find in my library after the purge will be the true gems, the jewels I will never give away.

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The Laws of Distraction

Posted by Joanne Huspek

So, I’ve officially retired from my Day Job as of the end of January. You would think that this would leave me with scads of opportunities and hu-mongo blocks of time with which to edit my ever growing files of first drafts I have floating in my external hard drive, right?

Wrong.

The longer I live, the more I see that things are still difficult. Time still gets sucked out of the days (and weeks and years). Life doesn’t ease up once the kids are grown (in many ways, dealing with adult children is so much more difficult than managing the Terrible Twos or Threes). It takes a thousand times more effort to disengage from the working life than it does beginning the working life. Add to that the fact you are now in your 60s (gasp!) and your brain and body doesn’t want to cooperate the way it used to forty years ago, and well…you see where I’m going.

Oh, to be a teenager again…

I know what the problem is, and that is D-I-S-T-R-A-C-T-I-O-N. Not that I think distraction is age related (as in my age in years – after all, children are VERY distract-able) but is AGE related, as in the times we are living in. Here are a few things that cause me to be distracted, and how I deal with it.

1. The Internet is a HUGE distraction. It always is, it always will be. It’s difficult to limit when you’re a writer, because most writers use electronic devices to create (as opposed to manual typewriters, pen and paper, and Fred Flintstone’s chisel and hammer) and those devices are more often than not connected to the Internet. I’m weaning away from Facebook and Twitter, but I must admit that I’ve got a world-class addiction to Words with Friends and my play list is at maximum peeps.

My solution? Obviously. Cut. It. Out. Buy a timer or use the one on your phone. Set a limit, and when the alarm sounds, close out the browser and step away for a moment before resuming your place in the scene.

A second solution would be to use a computer not tied to the Internet for writing only. (I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.) I have an old laptop that I’m not using specifically for that purpose. It’s so old, it’s not wireless! My wifi is so new, it doesn’t have cables! Can we say perfect match?

2. Your life is a distraction. Carve out writing time and stick to it. I don’t care if it’s a page a day. (In my case, I have pledged to at least write one page in my Hobonichi, which sometimes proves to be 250 words depending on how large my handwriting is that day. Anything more is gravy.) It can be as little as 100 words. I’m not the task master, YOU are. Set a reasonable goal. Lofty goals are for angels.

My solution for external noise (dogs, cats, loud children, the rest of your family, TV noises, etc.) is to MOVE. Move away from the distraction, to somewhere you know there won’t be any. I’m lucky/unlucky in that I’m living in a large 4-bedroom house, of which we use one bedroom and the kitchen/family room. I sometimes don’t walk into a spare bedroom for months. No one has sat on my formal living room furniture in like…forever. (Christmas 2007?) I’ve got a nice futon in my son’s old room which is comfortable and with south-facing windows – just perfect. Plus it’s at the far end of wherever the action is in the house.

If your house is small or the family is large, go somewhere else. I’m not a fan of coffee houses though many writers are – it’s too easy for me to get distracted by people watching. I’ve grabbed my laptop/notebook and headed to a parking lot, at the beach, a park, etc. (Upside is that there will likely be NO WIFI at the beach.)

3. Your health may be a distraction. This is why it is so important to take care of your physical self. Case in point: I spent six weeks in January/February sick as a dog. Truly incapacitated by some sort of germ that eventually caused me to have an ear infection. (I know, right? How old am I? Four?) I normally carry on despite illness and will drag my sorry butt around to do whatever needs to be done, but in this case I spent two full days in bed, unable to move. No writing, no jewelry making (missed jewelry classes!), no housework, nothing, nada, nyet. I made myself five pots of chicken soup in six weeks.

Do yourself a favor. Eat right. Take care of yourself. Exercise. Repeat.

4. People are a distraction. Don’t let them be. Give yourself permission to say no.  (You ask them to do you a favor, they’ll probably say no to you.) Don’t let yourself be sucked down a vortex of drama and angst. Save that for your pages. You have committed yourself to writing, a real job, a real artistic effort. Complete your minimum allowance (perhaps more) and then turn your attention to that person who seems to be draining you of energy. Be friendly but firm.

Distractions are daunting, and even if you give in to them, keep telling yourself, “Writing coming up next” or “I could sure use this in my backstory” or “YOU ARE A WRITER! This distraction is only temporary!”

Believe it, do it, make it so.

So excuse me now, I must practice what I preach.

🙂

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Writing is Like… A Walk on the Beach

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Ah,I’ve been reveling in my week in San Francisco spent on the beach (mostly) before the San Francisco Writers Conference which starts later today (Thursday). Oh, and I’ve been editing, but as we know editing is not my favorite activity so it’s been a long sloggy slog. Still, I find inspiration from the beach and the ocean, so I’ve been jotting things down furiously. (Thank you, iPhone, for your note app.) Hopefully, I will have lost a few Midwestern pounds by the end of my trip.

As a beach walker and someone who dabbles in other arts such as drawing and jewelry and metal work, I’m always on the lookout for found objects that I can use in my work. Interesting shells, very small sand dollars, unusual and small pieces of driftwood, and now sea glass – I pick all this up for a later installation. Or maybe I’ll get it home and decide it wasn’t worth the five calories to bend over and pick it up, I don’t know. I won’t know until I begin to build whatever it is in my head.

It’s always a wonder: where did this piece of glass come from? Where did this limb originate? How far did it travel? Across the Bay, or somewhere thousands of miles from here?

It’s not always a successful day of scavenging at the beach. Sometimes you can walk for miles and not find a thing of interest. Just sand, just waves, just seagulls. Wild wind, sunshine, maybe dense fog. (Although some of those things are interesting, you just can’t take them home with you.) Sometimes the debris looks toxic or dangerous and um, no… I won’t touch that.

Other times you arrive and start walking and all of a sudden things twinkle, and you bend down to find THE MOTHER LODE of sea glass. Or you may happen upon an area that is littered with sand dollars, all perfectly formed from the size of a quarter to bigger than your hand. Or you’ll be the only one on the beach to find a starfish curled up and dying.

Walking the beach is like writing a novel. First, you clear your head. Then you look around you. You pick up what you think might be compelling and start your story. There may be days when you go back to the beach for inspiration and you might not find any you can take home, but you just might find something intangible that will fit the story somehow. Some beach days are miserable, cold, wet, windy. Others are glorious, warm, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. Yet all points are needed. Some finds might be garbage, but you remove the unwanted once it’s apparent.

I don’t really believe in “muses” but I need the beach, just as I need the mountains. Both seem to stir the creative deep inside.

The first step is to get there; the second is to submit.

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The Unraveling

Posted by Joanne Huspek

One thing I learned in the last few months: Starting something new is infinitely easier than taking something apart.

Why did I think it would be different with a business? One we’ve spent three decades and more working in. There’s a bubble above you thinking “This will be a cakewalk. This will be so easy.” Add, subtract, multiply, divide – it’s all numbers, right?

No. Unraveling anything takes more work. Look at marriage. Anyone with a pulse can get married with very little hassle. But once you start talking divorce, you’re thinking about alimony, child support, visitation, the house, dividing the possessions, who’ll get the dog, etc. You don’t think these things walking down the aisle; if you had, you might not have made the trip all the way to the minister in the first place.

I realized that I love beginnings. I love writing new stories; I love spinning the tales and seeing where my words will take me. Once the story is out, however, it sits in my hard drive (now my external hard drive, my stories had clogged up my laptop) where I might think about editing. Then again, I might not. The pressures of everyday life take over and I might not open a manuscript for months. A year once.

This is not acceptable! I should finish a few things I’ve started. (I should finish them all, but let’s start in baby steps.)

Well, the hassle and strain of the last few months are behind us now. I am officially retired from my Day Job (YAY!), and will only return sporadically in the next week to tie up loose ends. My next step is to unravel some of those stories that have been taking up space in my hard drive.

It’ll be tough, tougher than writing a first draft, but I think now I can can give writing ALL of my attention.

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I Made It! Hello 2018!

Posted by Joanne Huspek

the page after the last day 2017

The calendar rolled over to another year while I was sleeping soundly and peacefully. (I don’t like to say “Happy New Year” in advance. What if I die before midnight? The person I said it to might have a happy one, but if I’m dead I’m likely not a happy camper.) I’m too old to stay up all night. If I make it past nine, that’s a late night. The last time I saw the ball drop was in 2000 – Y2K. I had to stay up to see if the world was going to end or not. (It didn’t.)

I spent the entire month of December doing nothing but scribbling furious notes on my NaNoWriMo effort of November. I thought I might want to open the file and start working, but I know from experience that most writing has to marinate in silence for a time. You can’t hurry it, you have to let the words age like a fine wine. A couple of weeks doesn’t do it. A month is long, but sometimes not long enough. A year is probably a good number. 🙂 Actually, twenty or thirty or forty years is a fairly good expanse of time. When a writer looks at aged work, it’s with a more objective eye that when the writing is fresh and new. Kind of like the difference between looking at your brand new baby and looking at the same person as a teenager.

So! I survived!

Resolutions: I don’t like to call them that, because to resolve to do something doesn’t seem quite strong enough. Self-cattle-prodding is more like it. Or cross my heart and hope to not die. I only want to accomplish one thing (clearly I will not lose weight or eat sensibly – life is too short!), and that is to make an entry EVERYDAY in my Hobonichi. (I thought about daily blogging, but that’s a huge commitment. I did it for my experience, My Life in Instagram 2013, but that was all Instagram photos.) I nearly filled my Hobonichi Techo last year, missing only a handful of days. This year the journal WILL BE completely covered from the first to the last page.

I will try to do more on this blog and others I maintain, but I can’t promise. Who knew that life would be more complex after the kids are gone? With any luck, the current hurricane of events will settle down by the end of the month and then I can resume the rest of my life.

The other big project I’ll be working on is the Great Purge (continued). Got to get ready to move out of the massive house into something more sensible for two people, a dog, a cat, and a Steinway. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

And I promise to release Virtually Yours Forever. Because that one has marinated way too long.

Other than that, I’ll be living clean and light. The best way to go.

Happy New Year, y’all. (Now that we are firmly into 2018.)

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2017 NaNoWriMo Update and a Few Other Things

Posted by Joanne Huspek

November 20, and I’m so happy to announce that I have hit over 38K words in NaNoWriMo thus far. (That’s not counting what I’ve written in notebooks. If push comes to shove, I’ll type directly from my written notes. That will account for a few thousand words I’m sure.) It’s a good thing I’m ahead, because Thanksgiving is in 2.5 days and I’m going to be busy. Not only that, but I’m doing an artist market Sunday. My hope is to get so far ahead of the game where a couple of days off won’t be devastating.

While not revealing the story,  I’ve been writing like a fool because I’m really enjoying myself! Sometimes, when I sit down to write, I’m so overcome with nothingness that it’s painful to write anything including a grocery list. I’m here to say that with interesting characters, plot twists I’m surprised I thought of,  and secrets galore, the writing job-gig can actually be fun! Without pre-planning too! Woo-eee!

It’s not a finished product, but I’m happy of where I’m letting the words take me.  It will be enough to work on to perhaps make it a worthy novel – you never know.

I’ve not been this inspired since Virtually Yours.

As for the rest of my life, smashed my hand, put out my back, and have a terrible abscess in my tooth. The weather went from summer in early October to winter by the end of the month. It snowed yesterday! Not looking forward to winter, for sure.

And now…I will continue to write. Might as well while I’m hot.

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