Getting back to writing

Writing the first paragraph of anything is always difficult, because there’s so much pressure. That first paragraph, even more so, the first sentence, has to do so much: set the scene, get the story moving and grab the reader’s attention.

But I took a lot of pleasure from that pressure last week and wrote an opening for my next book, after a long period of spending my writing time doing other things. Things that are rewarding and worthwhile, but aren’t writing.

What have I been doing?

• editing three excellent and very different books for colleagues, including David C. Cassidy, author of Velvet Rain and the upcoming The Dark
• traveling with my lovely and very tolerant wife to France (well, that was just a week, but still)
• finalizing the print version of my latest book, Army of Worn Soles—print is much less tolerant of mistakes than e-books are
• working on revamping my website, which sad to say, still isn’t done.

In fact, my attempts to improve my website have so far had the opposite effect: they’ve rendered it unviewable by any browser. Oh, I still have the files, but I’ve done something in the coding that creates a looping redirect. So for the past couple of weeks, my spare home-office time has been taken up with researching cheap or free, yet easy-to-use HTML editors for the Mac.

Now, there are some excellent inexpensive programs, but I found one that’s free, and that does (or purports to do) all the things I want to have in my website. There’s something in me that just won’t let me shell out 80 buck US for something when I can almost the same thing for free. The downside is that I had to start all over again to rebuild the site.

Anyway, the revamped site is close to being done, and when it is, this blog will look very different.

This is a blog about writing, not about being a cheapskate

Clio by Pierre Mignard.
Source: Wikipedia 

Thank you, muse of writing. 

The writing. Well, last week, I pushed the website and the book formatting aside for a while to return to writing. I know that I said in June that I would have the sequel to Army of Worn Soles out by December, and we all know that’s not going to happen.

I have had this nagging feeling that comes from knowing that I have been putting off finishing the story of Maurice Bury, my late father-in-law, and his experiences in the Second World War. Now, I feel so much better that I have started to make progress again.

This is a very early draft, but here’s an opening:

Ukraine, January 1942Wind blew the snow smooth, polishing surface of the lake to a dull sheen under the full moon, and pushing drifts higher than a man along a rough fence that shielded the railway. Beyond the rails, more snow weighed down the boughs of close-growing fir trees and covered their trunks more than six feet high. 

The moonlight made steam sparkle as a train emerged from the forest to puff and groan slowly along the edge of the frozen lake. The engineer squinted through the small forward window, which gave only an obstructed view. Periodically, he would lean out the side window to peer at the track ahead, but he could only bear the frigid air, the wind from the train’s forward motion, and the smoke and cinders from the engine, for less than a minute before he had to come back inside. 

He kept the train’s speed low and one hand on the brake lever, despite the commands of the Wehrmacht officers in the cars behind him. He knew the risks of going too fast in this country. Besides snowdrifts over the tracks that could derail the train despite the plows welded onto the front of the engine, the men he knew hid under the dark boughs posed worse threats.

Army of Worn Soles chronicled Maurice’s drafting into the Red Army, his service as an officer as the army retreated across Ukraine and his capture along with half a million other men, his imprisonment and his escape along with the men in his command from the POW camp. The second story is about his experiences after that:

• fighting in the underground resistance against Nazi Germany
• being re-drafted by the Red Army
• fighting across the Baltic states and then eastern Germany, up to Berlin in May, 1945
• and finally, his narrow escape from the Red Army and Stalin’s NKVD to return home to Canada, where he was born.

I think I’ve got it all mapped out now, and about 80 percent of it is written. But I am having one problem, dear readers: the title. So I’m turning to you. In the Comments section below, tell me which of the following possible titles you think is the most grabbing:

• Walking Out of War
• Walking Away from War
• Slipping Through Stalin’s Net
• The Four-Sided War
• Worn Soles Home

I’m looking forward to your comments!

Inspiration from the natural world

The Canadian Shield. Trees down to the water's edge.

I've made it back from the wilderness!

A typical "Canadian sunset" picture. 

Actually, I've been back for three days now, and it wasn't that wild. While the Mattawa is significant as part of the original "river highway" of Canada, used by the fur traders as part of the route from Montreal to the Great Lakes, today it's paralleled by a highway, dammed and is home to many summer cottages.

A rapids on a small stream as it enters the Mattawa.

Still, it's an inspiring landscape, evoking thoughts not only of the early days of European exploration of North America and the founding of Canada, but also of far older civilizations (Algonquin, Ojibwa, etc.), and of the deep power of the Earth itself. 

The Stepping Stones reach about halfway across the river as it leaves Trout Lake. 

I find these pictures spark ideas for stories and essays. What about you? Can you attach a story, or at least the beginning of a story to any of these pictures? Share in the Comments section if you can.

Into the near(ly) wild

As this post goes live, I'm on the highway toward North Bay, Ontario, to begin a canoe trip down the Mattawa River. It's going to include some white water, a few short portages and more white water, all in the great Canadian wilderness.

Actually, it's not all that wild. There are provincial campsites all along the stretch of river, the route is marked and mapped, the portages are long established and marked, and there is human habitation, even towns, along the way. We'll even be within cell phone range for most, if not all of the trip.

The pictures here are from that trip with Super Nicolas and the Rovers. They'll give you an idea of the kind of territory I'll be going through, and maybe inspire you, too.

Talk to you next week.

What do great writers like to read? Terry Tyler and David Vinjamuri stop by

Creative Commons/Flickr

In the sporadic series where I ask bestselling authors about their reading habits and inspiration, I again turn to two very different authors.

David Vinjamuri is the author of bestselling military thrillers Binder and Operator, as well as two books of non-fiction.

It’s hard to categorize Terry Tyler’s writing other than as “contemporary literary fiction” — or maybe, “really good contemporary fiction that you can’t put down until the last page, even if you’re not the type of reader who normally reads contemporary literature about believable characters.” She has published six novels since 2011, including her latest, Full Circle, plus a collection of short stories, Nine Lives. 

Their books are very different, but both David and Terry are talented, professional authors who know how to spin a smooth, gripping tale. I asked them about what they look for when they open a book. 

Name three characteristics of books that you like. What makes you keep reading a book? What are some books that you weren't able to put down until you finished them?

David Vinjamuri: Three characteristics of books I like:

• a great “hook” in the first sentence that surprises or intrigues me
• deep and realistic characters and relationships that don’t smack of wish fulfillment by the author
• brisk pacing — a sense that every scene in the book is integral to the overall plot.

Terry Tyler: I like back-story that’s another story in itself; Jackie Collins does this particularly well. I love to read lots of different characters’ points of view, and novels that keep moving from one dimension of the story to another, like GRR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire series (Game of Thrones).

What keeps me reading I find impossible to put my finger upon; it just depends if it has a particular spark that appeals to me.

Books I can’t put down: Something In Disguise by Elizabeth Jane Howard — even on its umpteenth reading!  A perfect book.  Anything by John Boyne or Phillipa Gregory.  Recently, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.  I remember reading Jeffrey Archer’s A Matter of Honour in six hours all in one go, about 30 years ago, when I was meant to be going out somewhere and didn’t — many people criticize him, but that book’s plot was outstanding.

Do you consciously try to emulate these books? If so, what form does that take: plot, structure, characters, settings, author's voice or word choice?

Terry Tyler: I would never (not even subconsciously, I hope!) try to emulate someone else’s work. However, one thing I did nick from Susan Howatch was telling a story in the first person by several characters, having one pick up where the last one left off. There are five of her books that take this form — Cashelmara is my favourite. What I like about writing a novel this way is that you can show not only two (or more) sides of a story, but also the different aspects of a personality: how people see someone, and how they really are, inside. Not all my books have this structure, but in the ones that have I enjoy working out the best character to tell each part of the story.

David Vinjamuri: My Michael Herne books are partly an homage to the Matt Helm series written by Donald Hamilton from 1960 to 1993. So there’s some intentional similarity in tone and structure. One of the things I loved about the Helm series was the noir-ish realism. The Herne series is reviewed by a U.S. Army Special Warfare trainer at Fort Bragg for technical accuracy.

Do you try to avoid any of the techniques or conventions followed by your favourite writers?

David Vinjamuri: Herne is not betrayed by his love interest in each of my books as Helm tends to be in Donald Hamilton’s series.

Terry Tyler: No, I don’t think so.  Most writers I read these days don’t write in my genre — I read mostly historical fiction, or thriller-ish books with a male protagonist, or non-fiction.  One thing I do try to avoid, though, which appears in many books, is too much description.  I skip-read it, as it doesn’t make me visualise the place or the people any more than if those words weren’t there.  This is why I rarely describe rooms, for instance.  I think readers conjure up their own pictures.  

What rules of writing do you intentionally break?

David Vinjamuri: I don’t break rules, but I do always think of John Steinbeck when I write.  I ask myself whether there's a way to write something more concisely, economically, efficiently?  Though many well-regarded literary novels spend pages and pages on description, internal dialogue and characterization, I’ve never felt like I have that kind of time in the thriller genre.

Terry Tyler: I haven’t read any “how to write” books, nor indeed an article of that type for ages.  Someone told me a while back that “you can’t have a big chunk of backstory”; if that’s a rule, it’s one of which I take no notice; I write as much as is necessary.  If it seems right to start a sentence with “And” or “But,”  I do it — not too often, though.  I use metaphors and similes if they fit, and the odd cliché if it really serves a purpose, too.  I don’t think I know any of the other “rules,” but I expect I break loads of them. 

With such “how to” articles and books, I know more experienced writers can get a bit sniffy about them, but they’ve served to remind me about many bad habits it would be easy to fall back into: using too many variations on “he said,” for instance, or writing sentences like “bad habits it would be easy to fall back into”!  I don’t know the grammatical term, but I think “it” used like that is very sloppy – when the “it” refers not to an item, but something like “it was raining outside.” Can anyone tell me the name for that?  I hope I’ll always be open to advice and learning more. 

Thank you very much for appearing on my blog, David and Terry.

Terry Tyler has published six contemporary drama novels on Amazon, and a collection of short stories.  She has a writers’ blog on the UK Arts Directory, about books and self-publishing, and a personal one on which she writes about everything else.  She has just finished a longer family saga (publication date to be announced), and hopes to spend the rest of this year on its sequel, and a Christmas novella.  Terry lives in the northeast of England with her husband.

Read a review of her novel, You Wish, published on this blog in June 2012.

The bestselling author of the thrillers, Operator and Binder, David Vinjamuri also writes the “Brand Truth” column online for Forbes, where he covers brands, advertising and publishing. In addition to the thrillers, he is author of Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands and Understanding Self-Publishing: 2013. David has appeared on television as a brand expert on the BBC, Fox Business News, Bloomberg TV and MSNBC and has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and Investor’s Business Daily. David is Adjunct Instructor of Marketing at New York University and the founder of ThirdWay Brand Trainers, a leading brand marketing training company. 

How a friend's comment solved a major writing problem

Image source: writeshop.com

I have been wrestling for years over how to organize my work-in-progress, Walking from the USSR. An almost casual comment from a friend over dinner presented a solution.

Now I feel I can wrap this baby up!

The book is the story of my father-in-law, Maurice, who served in the Red Army during the Second World War. It’s a complex story, because his life, like all of ours, I suppose, had several distinct phases. Understanding this story requires an explanation of the shifting borders of Poland, Germany, Ukraine and other countries, and some little-known facts about the war itself and who was on whose side.

I have written separate chapters and have enough raw material written down now to fill several books. All I need is to organize it and write a few connecting passages.

The trouble is, I’ve been at this same stage for well over a year now. I have made almost no progress in all that time. I have to admit, in that year I also wrote and published my second novel, One Shade of Red, and wrote a few other short stories and poems (and kept up with the rest of my life, but all writers do that). But the bottom line is that I didn’t get anywhere with the book.

Until last week, when a group of old friends got together at a local steakhouse for our quasi-annual bull session. One friend, Michel, asked how the writer was going. I summed up: “I’ve written most of the book, but I’m stuck on how to organize it.”

“What’s the book about?” Michel asked and sipped his beer.

“My father-in-law. He was drafted into the Red Army, was captured by the Germans, escaped from their POW camp, made his way with his 12 men back home, joined the resistance, was re-drafted when the Soviets came back, and fought through to Berlin before he could come back home to Montreal.”

I had to explain a little more — how a Canadian-born man ended up in the Red Army in the first place — and then Michel said “Why don’t you just tell it like that? He was drafted into the army, was captured and then escaped?”

I couldn’t say another word. Of course. It’s so simple — why hadn’t I worked that out long ago?

Sometimes, you’re too close to the subject to see it. It took someone who knew nothing about the project to make sense of it.

But that's the point of beta-readers, editors and literary friends. They can tell you about the obvious things that you, the obsessed writer, just cannot see.

That's another reason that we writers have to stick together. And have to get out of our homes or writing studios or wherever we write and talk to human beings occasionally. It just makes everything better. And far from being another distraction from writing, human contact is the stuff of which writing is spun.

Okay, now I have to get down to finishing the book. But at least now I can see the path clearly.

Thanks, Michel!

Cleaning off winter’s dust

Spring is coming to Ottawa — I can tell because the snow is getting dirty and the birds are starting to chirp (“Hey! We’re freezing out here!”)

Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson, licensed under Wikipedia Creative Commons.

A change of season always inspires me to take on new projects, and to resolve to complete those half-done tasks like organizing the basement and cleaning the garage. Time to take the skis and skates, shovels and snowblower, and stack them away neatly until next November (if we’re lucky; January if we’re not); time to pull out garden hoses, rakes, gardening tools and rubber boots. Time to take out the bikes, re-inflate the tires, tighten the seat, oil the chain and adjust the brakes. Time to gather up all those little things that I just put down wherever was handy through the winter and put them in their proper places.

Whenever I do things like this, I find so many things that I had thought were lost or that I had forgotten completely. The same is true of my writing: whenever I straighten up the papers scattered around my study (“Not often enough,” my long-suffering, lovely wife adds from offstage.” I’m doing it now!) I find little notes, longer notes, outlines and partial drafts from months or years ago — ideas for stories or novels that I wrote down and forgot about since.

The messy office. Photo by allysa/Creative Commons.

Now that spring is here and my second novel is (mostly) wrapped — at least, the creative part —I feel energized again to move forward and finish my third novel, tentatively titled Walking from the Soviet Union. And the next one, where I’ll be completing Dark Clouds, the first book in an imagined series about the Witch Queen’s Son.

The advantage of finding notes after I’ve forgotten about them is that they lose their baggage in the process. My notes are short forms for my ideas, a few words or phrases to trigger the thoughts I had. But after a number of months, a lot of those ideas are forgotten, lost under the dark waves of what passes for my mind.

But that frees me. Unlike my bicycle or the kids’ basketball net, the passage of time does not leave a thick layer of dust and grime and god-knows-what-its-source-is goo on ideas. They’re more like driftwood, cleansed of clinging assumptions, associations, emotions, stripped down to the true essence of an idea.

I'm expanding Dark Clouds
from a short story to
a novel — eventually.

Like this one for Dark Clouds, the novel I seem to be writing in installments timed with special events. I had almost forgotten this little nuance to the back-story: “Matt is immune to magic; he can break or absorb the Witch Queen’s spells, but every time he does so, he must give her a piece of his life-string.”

See? I had thought of a deeper dimension to the story, the idea of a price that the hero has to pay for every favour; every victory he earns furthers his ultimate defeat.

Wow. That sounds great, and looks better on the page. Now, it’s time to buckle down and write!

Your turn: does springtime inspire you to start something new? Or to finish an incomplete project, artistic or otherwise? Tell us all in the comments block below.

I miss winter

My house in winter: a source of inspiration.

Ever since I read Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, I’ve wanted to write about the power and majesty of winter. Helprin wrote about images of frozen lakes, mountains of snow, impassable drifts and sharp, bright stars in a sky frozen to crystalline clarity.

I remember similar images from my childhood in Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario: snowbanks high than my head along residential streets; fighting for dominion over hills of snow in the schoolyard until the teachers yelled at us to come down; snow-spray kicked up by my boots as I walked to the bus stop, glowing golden in the light of an approaching car.

I’ve written before about how I find a lot of inspiration from the world around me. I don’t have to create a new world to write fantasy — the world out my window is filled with wonder.

But with global warming, I am losing one of my favourite and most evocative sources of inspiration.

When I was a child, riding in the family car across the prairies in January, the snow covering the prairies would be polished by the wind and shining golden in the slanting winter sunlight.

Today, as I rode along the Ottawa River, the world was gray: lead-coloured sky, soft gray ice on the river, soggy gray slush on the fields, dark gray slush along the sides of the gray roads, gray, leafless trees ...

Winter has no majesty anymore. It’s warm, only minus 4 degree Celsius. (That’s 25 degrees Fahrenheit for US readers.) A couple of days ago, the temperature in Ottawa reached plus 10 degrees (50 Fahrenheit)!

I remember snow squeaking and crunching as I walked outdoors. Now, it slushes and splashes.

Ottawa has a reputation as a winter city; in the American imagination, Canada is home to winter, source of cold winds that freeze the US from December to March.

It’s just not true anymore.

We have lost winter

I know there are some people who think that would be great. The people who moan about every snowfall, who pray for early spring, who prefer January rain to February snow.

But I love winter, and I know I’m not alone. I love the feeling of cold air on my face, the blue that only comes to a cold winter sky. I love winter sports, too: skiing downhill or cross-country, skating on an outdoor rink or frozen river or canal, tobogganing under a starry sky.

There is no blue like a clear winter sky.

I love walking through a snowy forest under the moonlight. Just looking at a snowy yard through my window sparks an urge to write, brings forth images and stories and even sentences. Now, I fear that’s all going away.

My problems may not seem important compared to those of polar bears, which depend on the shrinking Arctic sea ice for their lives, or for countless other species whose habitats are being destroyed by the increasing temperature of the planet.

But the loss of winter as a source of inspiration is indicative. There has been no denying that the world is warming for decades, and now the fact that it has been caused by humans and our industry is just as undeniable.

Except by the humans who perceive that their wealth and short-term livelihood derive from those world-warming industries.

There are solutions, dear readers. If you want to conserve something that shapes the world we know, there are steps we can all take. We can use less energy. And no, it won’t cause an economic collapse.

Let’s face it: we let the people who put economic growth ahead of every other possible consideration, including health, the non-human part of the world and even fiscal responsibility, run the economy and every industry, and they managed to bring about an intractable economic calamity with every tool and freedom they asked for.

Can we let them to the same thing to the world we need to live?

Creativity can kill

The best and worst of Valerie Strawmier

Valerie Strawmier blogs and tweets as Miss Wordy (MissWordy.com and @Miss_Wordy), and she has submitted to my nefarious campaign I mean, graciously agreed to participate in my “best and worst” blog tour.

What’s the best that Valerie Strawmier does, as a writer? She says they’re the same thing.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—sounds like a story I once read….oh wait, that’s my life!

Everyone has their skills, things they really excel at, as well as weaknesses. My strength and weakness are kind of the same characteristic—the one thing that really hurts me is also the one thing that makes me crazy happy!

Enough stalling…I admit it, my creativity kills me.

You know those times when your brain gives you this awesome story line while you’re lying in bed? This is the part where I grab a notepad and a pen and turn on the lamp (dimly, so as not to disturb the hubby) and start writing as quickly as possible to get it on paper.

Another great example is being right in the middle of a writing project when another inspiration springs out of nowhere and shines so brightly you can’t focus on what you’re doing. Out comes the pen….you get the picture.

These brilliant flashes of inspiration are wonderful and they keep me going. They give me a new twist on old ideas and help me share things in a way that’s unique to me.

Then again, the brain can only take so much. All that enthusiasm going in several different directions results in several bunny trails that never get fully explored.

When you have all those unfinished projects lying around, it can have the opposite effect and make you think you’ll never get any of them done—talk about a downer.

So my cure for this has become the very tool that helps to cause it in the first place—my pen and paper.

This doesn’t mean that I neglect to write down my ideas or creative inspirations. On the contrary, I have all of them written somewhere depending on where I was when lightning struck.

It does mean that I now have a priority system in place. Somewhere in the brain there’s a drug that’s released every time you get to check something off a list—at least there is in mine. Every completed task now gets a check—but only when it’s done in the right order!

Now, each day, I take a look at everything on this list. I put numbers by each one based on how important it is and whether it affects any current projects I’m working on.

If so, and it’s going to improve what I already need to finish, then I mark act on it immediately.

However, if it’s going to slow me down and only apply to the next project, it receives a lower rating.

This is how I have learned to organize my brain, channel my enthusiasm and take the cure for the creativity-killer.

All that lightning is surely going to fry more than a few brain cells if I don’t direct it into productive channels. That’s why the pen and paper were invented and that’s why they are now my best friends.

I am a very happily married (17 years!), mother of two beautiful kids, and I love to write! This site lets me connect with others who enjoy the same thing and may be looking for help. Thank you for reading!

Valerie Strawmier blogs at http://www.misswordy.com/. Follow her on Twitter @Miss_Wordy.

My guest post on her blog is about my greatest challenge as a writer. Now that you’ve read her post, read mine.