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When You're Lost in the Weeds You Need Rand McNally

19/11/2014

Back in the olden days (ok, the late 90s and early 2000s), I wrote a book with one of my closest friends and favorite people on the planet. No, it was never published. Yes, I may very well return to fixing it one day (seriously, I still think it's freaking AWESOME). It's this crazy story that takes place in three countries, with several POV characters, across, well, a few thousand years. It was a right bitch to organize and keep track of.

Enter the Book Map.

We had a file that was every scene, in order, described by POV character and highlighted in yellow if it was FULL OF PERIL. Every time we changed something in the novel, we had to change the Book Map. That thing was our BIBLE. I still have a copy of it on my hard drive somewhere. (Hell, Jimmy Hoffa is probably buried on my hard drive somewhere...)

AnyHOO. As I revise the PhD novel (ahem, Threading the Labyrinth is the title), I keep getting a bit stuck because I've not worked on it in so long. It's been cooking, yanno? I've forgotten things. And parts of it just feel so meh. MEH!

So tonight I sat with the 1941 section and hand wrote an outline of everything that happens in this section. And LO & BEHOLD but if it didn't work. I can totally see now where I have dropped tiny threads or missed out on clear character motivations.

I will be doing this for the other four sections of the novel. It will save time and, more important, my sanity.

ALL HAIL THE BOOK MAP!

And here are some peonies the size of my face. Just because.

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But What Do I Write About? You Ask...

18/11/2014

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I teach first year university students an introduction to creative writing. The majority are literature students, so they study other writers and often don't do much writing themselves. The most difficult roadblock to overcome is the FEAR of writing. We work on it, but every writer knows that it never truly goes away. Finding inspiration, though, is another matter.

As Lit students, we study writers to learn better the mechanics of writing. To learn how it all works and, hopefully, that learning translates to better writing. But we can't study other writers to figure out WHAT to write.

If I tell my students: Write a story. The first response is 'Uhhhh....'

We need lives--outside of the classroom, outside of our own heads, even outside of our immediate surroundings (because it's by going away that we can come back and see our homes in a new light...)--to have the materials to turn into a story. And the most vital ingredient?

Two words: Intellectual Curiosity.

Art. Architecture. Legends and Myths. History. Science. Archaeology. Anthropology. Woodworking. Sewing. Dancing. Music. Travel. Hell, even underwater basketweaving will spark ideas in our heads and lead to new stories and poems. Go outside. Go for a walk. Look up (physically--there are some amazing things to see on the tops of buildings that you pass every day). Look up the back story on your favourite painting or building or lake or historic person (take advantage of that most amazing search engine on the planet to find out why that artist painted that scene, and what was going on in her life when she did it).

My inspirations? An old blue BALL jar. The story of Thomas Fairchild's creation of his 'mule'. Shiny laminated coffee shop menus. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen. An old biscuit tin from the 1930s. The life of the elder John Tradescant. Julia Margaret Cameron's photography. The sinuous lines of William Morris's fabric. The fact that green wallpaper in the late Victorian era was highly poisonous.

The list goes on. It has to. Or you end up losing interest in your own writing, the story never gets started, and you're left sitting saying 'Uhhhh....'

News: Kickstarter for Athena's Daughters Vol. 2 gets underway on 16 December.

Reading Now:
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Irregularity (An anthology I'm in), ed. Jared Shurin
The Enclosed Garden: History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus and its Reintroduction into the Present-day Urban Landscape by Rob Aben and Saskia de Wit

Recently Finished:
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke (damn I wish I'd written several of those stories!)

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When You're Lost in the Weeds You Need Rand McNally

But What Do I Write About? You Ask...

Tiffani Angus

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