A Rant Unrelated to Writing… Or Maybe It Is

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I love social media.

Usually.

It’s fast, it’s easy. I can keep track of my friends and relatives without calling them. I can laugh at jokes and eCards, view photos and videos from all over the world, and shop for bargains. I can monitor world events, see what’s hot and what’s not, and find large bits of useful and useless information, both meaningful and dumb. I gave up my newspaper subscription, because 1. the Detroit News is a shadow of its former self, 2. news is readily available online, and 3. my bird died.

I especially love social media because I write. Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads (social media for writers), and Instagram – writers tend to use these forums to dispense information. I can check out my favorite authors’ new releases; I can research people and places; I can stalk agents (discreetly) and find out what they really think about us poor, helpless writer-schlubs. I can learn about upcoming contests quickly, thus freeing me from blog hopping all over the information superhighway. Saves both time and aspirin.

But social media isn’t all about ONE THING. It’s…well, social, meaning that what happens in the world spills over with some of these personalities. Believe me, I have narrowed my follows to people I really know or like, or authors, writers, agents, and/or others in the business. While I tend to shy away from the troll types, I engage with people who, quite frankly, I don’t agree with on many issues.

I’m not a pithy Tweeter, and I try to stay away from Facebook as much as possible. I love to be sociable, but these Internet water cooler-coffee klatch-parties are a time suck, my friends. My plate overfloweth. I run a business, a household, and I’m trying to write in between many crushing Real Life commitments.

That being said, while I like a nicely executed verbal exchange of ideas, there are things I do not like. One, I don’t care for a constant battering of positions which inevitably winds up some hapless soul being virtually lynched. I (and others) can have our opinions without being called stupid or worse.

Recently, I’ve noticed the online tone changing from an exchange of ideas to a pity party, where people tend to play the victim card with every revelation or change in government. I don’t care if you’re white, black, red or purple, I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, straight or gay, born here or (like me) not, if you had perfect loving parents or were abused, I don’t even care if you’re a Donkey or an Elephant. Honest to God, when I look at people, I see none of this.

What irks me more than any or all of these distinctions is that people tend to claim victimhood as a valid argument for any position.

I suppose it’s because I’ve had my craw full this week. Not only do I see this online, I see this in offline relationships. If your mother was a child abuser, if your skin is a certain color, if your spouse cheated, if your boss is a bitch – all these are reasons to justify bad behavior. WHAT? (That sound you heard was my head hitting a brick wall.) First of all, why give the other side that much power? Secondly, if you’re over 18, why not own your situation and carry on? If you have brains and strength and chutzpah, figure out your problems and devise a workable solution.

I am a woman, I am of mixed race, I am old, I have issues. I’m flawed BIG TIME. A physically and emotionally abusive mother raised me. Never once in the last 57 years have I blamed any of my shortcomings on my external environment, that the “man” was keeping me down as a woman or anything else. That’s because I control my life and my destiny, and the parts I can’t control I deal with the best I can.

After ruminating on this revelation and my subsequent annoyance for a few hours (after shutting down Twitter, because I couldn’t stand it anymore), I realized that the victim card is played by aspiring authors too. I’ve been to plenty of writers conferences where there are a few disgruntled and unhappy attendees. They see other writers as enemies or rivals, and agents as tyrants. Perhaps their manuscripts aren‘t the next Harry Potter and need more work. Instead of taking control of their work and their destiny, they choose to play the blame game.

It’s so much easier, right?

Grow and let go.

Rant over.

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Writing Like You Speak – Good, Bad, or Ugly

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I’m pretty sure I sound like a blonde on the phone. In fact, I know I sound blonde, because I’ve had people (employees) who know me by phone only, meet me later and tell me so. (They also think I’m a lot taller than I am.) It’s likely disconcerting to discover that your boss is a short Asian woman, especially after your imagination has convinced you that I’m fair-skinned and statuesque.

(I’m only bringing this up because my daughter decided to dye her hair blonde this weekend. This has nothing to do with anything…)

When analyzing the “why” of this phenomenon, I can only come to one conclusion: It’s my voice. I laugh too loud, my humor is left of center, and I am overly emotional. (I have no theories about the 5′ 8″ supposition.)

I’ve often said that I write like I speak. Which isn’t completely true, because my mouth is not as fast on the draw as my brain. (That’s why I started writing, because speaking was difficult.) It is true in the sense that I pepper my speech with words and phrases I’m in the habit of saying – we all do this, it’s human nature. My own father was fond of “evidently” and “Suzie Q.” But when writing and/or reading, we don’t need those extra filler words.

Take the first sentence of this blog post:

I’m pretty sure I sound like a blonde on the phone.

This is how I sound in real life – full of adverbs, when all I wanted to say was this:

I sound blonde on the phone.

Now that I’ve been writing seriously, as I edit, these filler words stare back at me with the illumination of a thousand suns. It’s amazing how worthless they are. I’d been told many times before that the mind skips over these words as they’re read. Since I had originally written the words, I didn’t believe it – until the edit. Heck, if I can see I don’t need them, I probably don’t.

However, writing how you speak does have an upside. Let’s say you’re working on a novel in first person. If your main character is middle aged and high class, or a teenager with attitude, or a sassy thirty-something in search of love, you can imbue some of these characteristics in speech. Or, in period pieces like Monte Schulz’s This Side of Jordan, where the rag-tag cast of characters from the Depression era says things like “My cousin Frenchy eats crawdads cold,” a hint of uneducated dialect goes a long way in portraying the look and feel of the character. (Just so you know, the book also features also a dwarf who is extremely well-educated; you know this through his dialogue.)

Writing how you speak has a bad and ugly side, however. Too much can be too distracting. The reader can get the gist of a heavy accent with a light touch. The author does not have to misspell words in order to get the point across. The reader will tire of a character who (perhaps like you) has trouble conversing.

Personally, I have to be in the mood to write in first person as a character. For Amberly Cooper, I have to listen to a lot of teenagers beforehand, the more self-absorbed the better. For Cadence Reed, I have to either read deep, depressing novels or watch movies that make me cry. I had the worst time when I wrote Virtually Yours, a book with seven distinctive characters from different parts of the country. My first draft found all of the characters sounding the same – like me. Slowly, I had to separate the “me” in my characters and give each of them believable voices of their own. I accomplished this by talking to people in various parts of the country and listening to their speech patterns.

If you’re like me and write like you speak, make sure your edit is thorough. Your writing must convey character, but it must also make sense.

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Writing: Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Posted by Joanne Huspek

It’s true: sometimes you must step away from your work long enough to gain a different perspective.

This is why writers seek feedback. (Perhaps not all writers, but this one does!) We use our family members and friends, look for critique groups, employ the use of editors and book doctors – basically run our manuscripts through the wringer and then some. Some use feedback to gloat and marinate in praise. I need it because I see the value in being slapped silly every now and again.

Take my good friend, The Little Fluffy Cat. She’s not really a cat, but a great writer, and on top of that, a kick-ass editor. I’ve emailed her passages and she red-lines and returns them in minutes. “No, this won’t work.” “Adverbs?” “Purple here.” (These aren’t quotes, but it’s along those lines. Plus there’s many strike throughs. I can almost hear her sighing from Texas.) I don’t ask her often, because she’s a busy woman. I ask her when I need an unvarnished review. I’m not sure what she really thinks of me, but I must be somewhat amusing because we’re still friends after all these years.

It smarts a little to read a LFC edit, but she’s 100% right.

And while I have an Editor for Life, I like the idea of another pair of eyes. I’ve signed up for classes to work on my manuscript, one that’s already been through the editorial process. MANY times. I am thinking that my ED may be too close to me to give me an unabashed review. (He likes me. I like him. As a person, not just an editor.) I suspect my ED is like me, the writer. We are too close to the trees to see the forest. (Or too close to the forest to see the trees.)

Recently, I signed up for a Savvy Author mentoree class for my manuscript, Finding Cadence. The current edit is better, much better, but I’m going for making this manuscript the best I can. While waiting for my Book Doctor-Mentor to read the manuscript, I hurried to finish the current edit.

Then I put the book away.

She called me a week or so later and we had a nice chat about what she liked, what she didn’t like, what was unclear, and what could be improved. New Eyes Hillary pointed out a few things that were true, basically the sapling trees I’d forgotten were in my forest. She had me send her an outline. This took a while, because the outline saved on my computer was a few incarnations of this book ago and the middle and end was nowhere close to what it is now.

Again I put the book away.

Lately I’ve been working on a different edit. My brain has been full of Cadence for the last six months. It’s time to give it a temporary rest, while I pursue some other work.

If your work is starting to look like a blur of green, step away from the forest. When you return, it will be that much clearer.

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Change: Not Bad, But Scary – So USE It!

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Celebrating the fact that I’ve been writing every day this week!

As I alluded to in this post, a writer can make use of the rigors of daily life as a tool.

Thinking about rigors, I realize most emotion springs from one thing: CHANGE.

Some people don’t like change. They think change is bad. If you’re old, you want life to stay as it was “in the good old days.” If you’re young, you don’t want to leave your mommy and go to school all day. No matter what the scenario, if you like a situation and it changes, the immediate reaction is of repulsion.

Let’s face it; change is damned scary. You’re enjoying your life, comfortable in the status quo, when suddenly a gust of wind (change) knocks you off your moorings and into the unknown.

How dare there be change! Right?

Writers should take advantage of the gust of wind and note their emotional response.

Example: Your marriage of many years threatens to disintegrate. You get news that a close family member has a life threatening medical condition. You make one small mistake and end up totaling your car.

It would be SO EASY to wallow in the emotion of your change. For example: damn it, but I’ve given him two decades of my life! or how will I live without my mom? or I hate walking, and that guy (uninsured, of course) in the other lane is a jerk for hitting me! Instead of marinating in emotion, write down the emotion of your change; the hurt you felt when you learned of the infidelity, the vulnerability of abandonment, the loss of your family member, the rage you feel knowing the insurance won’t cover it and you have no money. Your characters will need to express these things, once you, Author-Person, gets down to the business of weaving the bits of your ideas into a viable story.

It doesn’t have to make sense; it doesn’t even have to be sentences or paragraphs. It doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t have to be pretty. On the off occasion when I don’t have a notebook, I’ll jot down my winds of change in my iPhone notes.

There is only so much time in a day. Make use of it.

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With Real Life to Contend With, How Can You NOT Write?

Posted by Joanne Huspek

Once, two, maybe three years ago, I suffered from a case of Lack of Writing. I refuse to call the inability to string a series coherent sentences outlining character and plot ‘writer’s block’ – I wasn’t blocked as much as I was overwhelmed/tired/bored/busy/juggling/severely ADD. After several weeks (or maybe months) of N-O-T-H-I-N-G – not a chapter, not a paragraph, not a word, I emailed my ED, throwing him an SOS. I couldn’t believe I was without WORDS. Nice guy, he offered an online intervention, but since I haven’t been able to sign into my Yahoo! account since 2009, getting to the messenger for my wake up call was daunting.

He probably could have called me to jump start my flat-lined ambition, but he didn’t have to. While in the middle of figuring a way around Yahoo! (lowly step-brother of that demon-child Google), something happened. Something epic.

I began to write.

There was no “ah-ha” moment, no light bulb over my head. No dynamiting the log jam, or self-abuse. Somehow, some way, without prompts or nudging,  somewhere in the puzzle of getting hooked up, I wrote.

I must admit that I do love a good writing prompt. I have a whole book of them I can turn to in case of brain freeze. A writing competition is a great tool for getting the juices flowing, especially if you get a friend or two involved. But sometimes LIFE is more than enough impetus to write. Even if it threatens to bury you. (Especially if it threatens to bury you.)

The past few months have found me in that lazy/overwhelmed/tired/bored mode. Sometimes it’s  hard to get excited. Sometimes your creative energy is sucked out of you. Many times there’s no TIME. Writing, as all my  creative pursuits, is an indulgent luxury. (I hope it always is.) Many pressing tasks stand between me and my computer and three hours of peace and quiet. I’ve taken to notebooks and writing quickies when I have a minute to spare.

This is my life the last few months: business, people quitting, friends and family contending with illness or other challenges, drama and more drama, money (or lack of), a crumbling house, the police and jail (don’t ask) – with all this Real Life to contend with, how can I NOT write? The only things I haven’t experienced in the last few months would be dragons, murder (although someone did threaten my husband’s life), and vampires, but there’s always tomorrow.

Today my temporary Lack of Writing has officially ended. I’ve been writing like a fool ever since.

Look out, world.

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An Omen: When Your Dog Soils Your Query

Posted by Joanne Huspek

It’s a beautiful Sunday in the neighborhood, and while the sun shines and the temperatures are mild, I figured I would get up early and finish weeding and planting my vegetable garden. I made significant progress yesterday and want to finish NOW, so I can enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Gardening used to be a lot easier when I was young(er). I bounced out of bed today with an aching shoulder and a bum knee. Still, I’m on a mission – to eradicate weeds and plant more tomatoes. (Sorry. It’s my Army brat upbringing. Plus, you can never have too many tomatoes!)

On my way to locating my tennis shoes, which were next to my laptop and a six inch pile of printed manuscripts waiting for me to edit, I noticed that my dog had a gastronomical accident. On two pieces of paper that had escaped the tower of editing. Those two pieces of paper happened to be my query. On the query I sent to and received back and edit from a Big Name Agent as part of the Writers Digest class I took on querying back a couple of months ago.

Nothing says “YOU SUCK” better than runny diarrhea on my corrected query.

This, my writing friends, is an omen. First of all, I should have never left my query on the floor. Secondly, I should have spiffed it up and produced a better query from Helpful Agent’s notes a long time ago. Thirdly, I should really impress upon my husband that feeding the dog steak bones and whipped cream is not good for a Boston terrier.

Of course this disaster could be a more serious omen. Like God telling me I should ditch that particular manuscript (FINDING CADENCE) and perhaps channel my time more wisely into something that has more than a snowball’s chance in hell of making it past an agent’s assistant. Or maybe that I should give up writing altogether.

Yeah. Giving up. That would be the easy way out.

After I finish my urban farming, I’m going to work on my edits, dammit. And I’m going to make serious headway.

Because somewhere in my email, I have a copy of that edit from Helpful Agent.

Take that, Powers That Be. Your nasty little omen is powerless against this writer.

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Real Life Bulldozer

Posted by Joanne Huspek

I have to admit this, but as a writer, I’ve been really bad.

No, really, really bad. (Note the use of that adverb. It’s doubled, italicized, and bolded for a reason.) In fact, I’m almost a non-writer.

I won’t go into the grim specifics, but let’s just say that Real Life is kicking my ass.

The older I get, the more I realize there aren’t enough minutes in a day. Honest to God, it was just February and my return from the San Francisco Writers Conference last week! Wasn’t it?

I have three edits printed and waiting for me to slice and dice. Okay. So I did get to one of them about a month ago and made some significant progress, but then… yes. I ended up nowhere near my computer as I raced from one end of the world to the other.

So what do you do when life bitch-slaps you and leaves you with no time?

This is what I’ve been doing.

1. Write in my little notebook. The one I carry in my purse, religiously. I jot down ideas, lists, emotions, character traits I want to use later. Names. Places. Smells. Sights and sounds. It takes just a second. Sure it’s not a novel, probably it’s not serious, but every little bit helps.

2. Read. Here, I’m not doing so well, even with Kindle on my iPhone. BUT… I have discovered Audible.com. I am listening to THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand. I’m up to Chapter Three. I mostly listen in the car or…

3. While exercising. Because if you’re not going to exercise your brain, you might as well work out. Not that working out has made this aging hipster a babe. In fact, while losing a pants size, I have gained two pounds. Go figure.

4. Channeling my creativity to other endeavors. You don’t know how beautifully I can scrub soap scum off my shower tile. Of course, I have to break the chore up into four days. I can’t hack away in one sitting. Cooking is another way to expand on creativity, and it doesn’t take much time. Cooking, however, is fraught with pitfalls. According to my husband, who rails against my creme brulee or cherry duck, I should stop cooking altogether. But when I do, he gets mad.

5. Gardening. It is somewhat time consuming, but at least there are edibles at the end of the season.

6. As a writer, you should give yourself a simple, stupid-easy to accomplish task to achieve daily. Mine is THIS. I know. It’s frivolous, it’s silly, it’s dumb even, but it only takes me five minutes.

7. Buy a tool to help you in your quest to write. My current is 642 Things to Write About. I picked this book up at the airport in San Francisco on the way back from the writers conference (like I needed extra books? my bag was stuffed full of books -and wine), for a couple of reasons: 1., I am a HUGE Chronicle Books groupie, and 2., I often find myself without writing prompts. In fact, I just filled out a page yesterday.

Writing during real life can be done, although, the road isn’t exactly a scenic drive on new asphalt.  When the bulldozer threatens to mow you down, push back, even if the only tool you have is a child’s beach shovel.

It’s the only way to write.

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