Opportunity. Skill. Motivation. Habit.

Opportunity.

When I moved out here to the farm a month ago today, I thought, “I won’t  be working. I’ll have the time to devote to our novel EVERY DAY.” Turns out, boxes that are stacked three high and covering 90 percent of the spare-bedroom floor scream for attention like toddlers for Happy Meals. You just have to give in, so I unpacked until I ran out of room to put things, at which time I changed gears to making space, and my husband and I emptied another bedroom, which I’m now painting (including the floor) so we can move some stuff in there.

Skill.

I think Larry and I have that as writers, if not in spades, at least in Old Maid. Our male beta reader turned in his critique and compared our novel to the movie "Snatch" which is VERY cool, because it’s one of my favorite movies.

Motivation.

I’m highly motivated to get our boxes unpacked and organized, but there just isn’t space for it until we create some. Creating space means emptying attics and outbuildings that are still full of stuff from when my husband’s mom and dad lived here. That’s all extremely time consuming and exhausting, so motivation for working on our book has taken not the backseat, but the trunk.

Habit.

That’s what I need to develop. At the other house, I had a dedicated spot for my laptop and plenty of workspace to spread our manuscript out for revision, so it was always ready for attention, and I was driven by habit to attend to it. Here, my poor laptop has lived in a bag and the manuscript waits patiently in a binder on the kitchen table, stacked precariously atop a filing box surrounded by the KitchenAid mixer, Cuisinart food processor, and miscellaneous bags of carbohydrates: sliced bread, an Italian loaf, and English muffins.

Apparently, if I needed a laptop to prepare a meal, it’d have a dedicated spot. So by next blog, I promise myself I’ll create a space for my laptop, and it can behave as badly as the stacks of unpacked boxes do, screaming until it gets attention.

One Transformers Happy Meal to go, please!

Methods to Madness

My writing methods are changing, and it’s been a bit of a challenge. The primary challenge is research. Our book is entirely fiction, but we are trying to get the details right, which requires occasional Googling.

I was working on our book the other night, and there are questions that could easily be answered in about 30 seconds with Google and a cable modem.

Now that I’ve moved to the farm, we have dialup, as I’m sure I’ve said before. To look something up, I have to set my laptop aside, go to the computer with a modem, dial up, log on, type in what I want, then wait five minutes for it to load. And that’s only for the text. Heaven forbid if I want to look at pictures.

Yes, I could just work on that computer, and that would eliminate the trip across the house. Buy it doesn’t speed up the dial-up connection. Could I look it up in a dictionary or encyclopedia? Probably, but only if they were current, and only if I owned them. Why purchase those dinosaurs when you’ve got Google?

Well, now I know.

So our novel--which has been produced steady by jerks anyway--is going to get even jerkier on my end. Larry is already accustomed to the limitations and unreliability of dial-up, and I’m learning, but it’s a really painful curve.

My plan right now is to make a note of all of my research questions as I have them and when I drive to town for groceries, I’ll stop at McDonald’s, log on, and do my research there. It’s a pain, and I do that only about once a week, but considering how long research takes on dial-up, it’s gentler on my patience.

And regardless what you may have heard about my charming personality from Larry, I am not a patient person.

Make it stop!

Noise.

Bad country music. Kids fighting over the pop dispenser. Women discussing burying a man in the right pair of socks.

People come here to eat and visit, not to concentrate and not to use their computers. Even though the place is wired, in all the times I’ve been here, I’ve seen only one other person with a laptop.

Frustrated.

Glare on my screen keeps me continually fiddling with the angle, and the BIG kick in the pants is that I either 1) can’t open my thumb drive to retrieve my prewritten blog to post because of computer problems, 2) can’t open my blog because of brain problems, or 3) I am a doofus and only thought I’d saved it on my thumb drive.

Now which seems more likely?

Adjustments.

I knew there’d be a period of warming up to my new process of computing – posting blogs, doing research and paying bills. The trick is to be properly prepared when I leave home with my laptop bag.

I can’t do anything about the French fry alarms, clinking ice, or nonstop chatter. What I can do on go-to-town-computer-day is make sure my blog post is on my laptop, not an external drive, make sure that I choose a seat with the least glare, and most importantly

pack ear plugs.

Character Fracture

As you all probably know by now, Larry and I have very different methods for writing, and in this case, VASTLY different methods in creating characters.
           All of my characters are based on me. And from the reactions we’re receiving from readers, I’m pretty sure they’re not boring.

I don’t pattern characters after people anymore. I did that once with dreadful results. What I considered interesting and quirky personality traits turned out be highly insulting to the aforementioned quirky individual. So, to save hurt feelings if people identify themselves, I make my characters up from scratch, creating people I could have been under different circumstances.

I ask myself—what if I didn’t care about repercussions? How might I act? That was how I created Vic. What would I do if I were a really hot woman, full of confidence and highly intelligent? That was how I created Bella.

For this book, it also depended greatly upon my mood which character I choose to work on when it was my turn. If I had a bad day at work and wanted to take somebody out, I could work on Vic. If I had a good hair day and felt dangerously feminine, I went with Bella. This gives me an opportunity to live many lives, however vulgar or charming or dastardly. I can do all sorts of things I’d never consider in real life.

I like creating brand new personalities. It’s fun. And even though Larry might think he would create boring characters using his own personality, I disagree. It’s because of his creativity that he can pick up my characters without knowing people like them, and they remain consistent.

Either that or Larry’s personality is as fractured as mine, and he just doesn’t want to admit it.

"Real" Characters

Years ago, an Emmy-winning sitcom writer tried to encourage me to get an agent and write for sitcoms. Which sounded great at first. I thought I could just send the scripts in, but I soon learned it doesn’t work that way. There are constant readings with the actors, rewrites, more meetings, more read-throughs, and rehearsals that you have to attend.

That’s not for me. I couldn’t leave my family. I’d rather bend nails for a living.

I’m not too bad at dialogue because I listen to others. We each have different personalities, so if a writer instills his own personality in every character they would all be the same and boring. It wouldn’t work.

The sitcom writer gave me some advice on dialogue for TV. He said to record the show you want to write for and sit with your back to the screen and listen to the dialogue: what was said, how each character verbally reacted to the circumstances, how the character react differently, what their emotions should be, and if their words effectively relaying that.

I don’t know how Becky does it but I try to pattern characters after people and personalities I know, usually with a little exaggeration. I have characters I write, and she has characters she writes. What’s interesting is that I can write her characters when they’re in my scene and somehow they all stay pretty consistent.

That’s how I do it. So Becky? How do you create your characters?

How do I look?

While watching an episode of Undatable, Speedos were up for discussion, and I agree that they’re not a good idea unless you’re David Hasselhoff on Baywatch.

This made me wonder how much a character’s appearance affects their likability. One of our readers was particularly irked because we didn’t spend much time describing our protagonist, and she felt she would feel more sympathetic toward him if she knew what he looked like.

What makes us sympathetic to characters? Would I be sympathetic to a man in Speedos with a big belly and vast amounts of chest hair? Not so much. On the other hand, Tom Selleck as Magnum PI can run around in all the tiny clothes he wants, and I’m painfully sympathetic.

Which brings me back to description and sympathy—should our protagonist be unfortunate looking to bring out reader sympathy? Or should it depend on his brutal life experiences, which are well documented in the story?

I’m thinking again it must depend. And I do agree that more description couldn’t hurt, but how much, where to slip it in, and how to do it without it feeling deliberately inserted after the fact will be the trick.

Obviously, (if we’re using the David Hasselhoff/Tom Selleck measuring stick) looks matter, and I don’t have any solid answers for the questions right now. All I have are gut feelings influenced by Americanized stereotypes. For now the need for additional description of our protagonist is in the discussion stage. Larry and I will hash it out and let you know.

But in the mean time I feel the need for some 1980s drama and poofy mounds of chest hair.

Hearing Voices

           People often ask me, “Larry, where do you get your ideas?” and I addressed that topic in a previous blog. But I recently discovered a brand new resource. Drugs.

Legal, of course, administered at the hospital.

Hospital, you ask? Why yes. 

I don’t know where a gall bladder is, what it does or what it’s supposed to do, but I do know that when one goes bad, you just want the damn thing out. I was scheduled for surgery the morning after I saw the doctor.

Once admitted and once the nurses were done collecting blood and hooking me up to hoses, it was time to sleep—or so I thought, but the bed creaked and groaned, and the IV pump made its annoying racket, and then I moved my arm and set off the alarm for the IV pump. The nurses came back, always cheerful, poked, prodded, fluffed. They made me wear booties that fit around my calves and pumped up and down like a blood pressure cup to keep me from getting blood clots.

Oh, I felt emasculated in those booties. At least my gown wasn’t breezy. I’d fought valiantly to keep my underwear until surgery.

Again alone, which is all I’d been wanting, I began to doze. At one point in my sleepy haze I clearly heard the word “God.” Suddenly wide awake and listening intently, I heard the growling voice speak again. “God.”

Was I nuts? The strange voice came from the IV pump! After throwing up all night and facing surgery the next day, it’s a little alarming when your IV pump wants to talk to you about God. So I listened. And listened. And listened. The pump whirred, clicked and growled in a rhythm, in which the growl sounded like words.

I recalled a Ghost Hunter show in which the ghost used a box to somehow speak through.  The hospital is said to be haunted—this would make a great story, I thought. I listened and plotted and created characters. I tested scenarios from horror to romance, to comedy. There were so many interesting ways to create the story that I was a little surprised to see my doctor pop his head through the door. I’d been so busy with characters and story that I had missed another opportunity to sleep. Oh well, I’d sleep during the operation.

That evening I had company. I’m not complaining—it’s nice they care. But by the time they left and the nurses got done assaulting me and fitted me in those damn booties, it was after 11:00. I slept like a log until 2:30 when I was awakened by another growling voice. This time it was a three word phrase, “Don’t wait under.”

What the hell?

“Don’t wait under,” the IV pump repeated. I was awake and not likely to go back to sleep until I figured out what not to wait under.

It was a different night and a different drug induced haze. This time the pump relayed messages from ET wanting to come back to earth. I had to decipher the code and help him return safely. ET was more talkative than last night’s ghost. He said “Five” “All try” “Forego,” and many more words my now sober mind can’t recall.

Great stories floated through my mind, filled with adventure and suspense. FBI, CIA, men in black all trampled across my bed searching for information only I had. All too soon it was morning and my regular nurse’s visits interrupted my stories and my brain became occupied by other matters.

Now, we all know that to be a writer you have to be at least a little loopy but combine that loopiness with prescription drugs and you have a treasure trove of ideas, plots and characters.

Hmmm. Where to begin…