Category Archives: fiction

editorial, fiction, lifestyle

Find A New Dream

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

dream bigYour dream is about writing.  I already know that.  But what I want to know is if you’re living your big writing dream today? 

Because I’m not.

And, in a way, I’m farther away than ever.

(How in the world 20 years of hard work can lead you farther away, I have no idea!  But reality is like that.  It’s illogical and ill-behaved and apt to squash your hopes and dreams.)

Now, some of you are getting close to your dreams, so this article won’t help much.  But if you have worked hard every waking moment and still aren’t “there,” then this article might help you ask The Big Questions.

Should I let go of my dream?

Should I stop giving it CPR?

Should I find a new dream to dream?

The more you fear these questions, the more important it is to ask them.

And yes, your new dream can be a new writing dream. Or not.  I’m not imposing rules on your dreaming.  Not my job.  But basically you have all of reality to play with, so don’t panic.

The Importance of Today

In all my years of hard work and dreaming, what have I been doing?  I’ve been clawing my way toward a future goal.  The Dream.

I thought that was how it was done.  Everyone said so.  You set your sights on a big dream and then you don’t give up.  You use your fingernails if you have to, as you dig in and keep going. 

But now, I’m not so sure.

  • What about all the todays on the way to your dream? 
  • What if you don’t reach your big dream, ever? 
  • What if your fingernails break before you get there? 
  • Does that mean you have no dream to live, because you never made it to your dream location?

What if the future is today?  How would that change things?

The folks over at The One Question put it this way:

“…to find your life purpose you have to live your life purpose. You can start living your life purpose immediately.”

If you don’t live your purpose (or your dream), then you’ll never find it.  And if not today, then when?

Just For Today

Instead of a big dream, I wonder if the key isn’t found in what you dream just for today?

What you live for today

Maybe all you have to do is find your dream for today.  Or as John December says:

Find a way to gain some aspects of your dream today.

The pieces of the dream ARE the dream, just smaller.  To ignore these small pieces is to miss the whole point of having a dream.

Gain your dream, piece by piece.

Own your dream, today by today.

By owning a piece of your dream today, you are eliminating the space between you and your dream.  In fact, you and your dream are one.

Dreamer and dream.

Now Back To The Big Questions

Is it time for a new dream?

It really comes down to today, doesn’t it?

Do the small pieces of your dream create a wonderful today?

That’s the one question this whole article comes down to.

Until you can answer this question, you can’t ask any of the others. 

How can you know if you should let go of your dream–if you should stop giving it CPR–unless you ask yourself about the reality of how you live your dream.  Or how you don’t.

After all, if your dream doesn’t even exist until some dim future, then what are you planning on letting go of?  Something that never existed?

And what about if you decide to let go?

There are so many, many changes you can make to your dream and how you experience it.  And beyond that there are a multitude of dreams you can call your own.

You’re the dreamer.  It’s your call.

It’s okay to make a change.  It really, really is.  And it’s okay to keep your dream exactly the same.

I just wish we talked about the small pieces more.  The day-to-day tasks.  the way we tried to move forward.  About how we see these small pieces as “living the writing dream.” 

I think we might be a lot happier with a dream we live just for today.  A dream we can touch.  A dream that makes us… US.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

editorial, fiction

Top 10 Ways To Tell If You’re Creative

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

Creative Child Hands

10. See a problem, brainstorm solutions.

You can’t help yourself.  It give you happy feet.

9. See the box, play outside of it.

Color the box.  Take an object from inside the box on a little trip outside the box.  Remove the box altogether. Cut box up into little pieces to see if they make something better.

They do.

8. Every word has a certain feeling to it.

You want to explain how valuable this is.  Sometimes you even try.  But ultimately it takes a Jedi to feel the Force.

7.  Mental leaps.  Take them you will.

Yet each looks totally logical, practical, and the speed of all worthwhile thought.  Everything else is slow and painful.

6. Stories are essential to mankind.

Good news:  everything is a story.  (Or would be if you ran the world.)

5. Real life can always be made more meaningful.

Especially when seen through the lens of fiction.  Also non-fiction and limericks.

4. Creative people can be fearless and full of fear at the very same time.

Certainty and uncertainty.  High gear and the emergency brake.  When people say you should create a balanced life, you think this is exactly what they mean.

3. The moments when we’re brilliant make everything else worthwhile.

You don’t even need very many of them. You can go for months on the fumes of one moment of creative genius.  Imagine what you could do with two?

2. Compliments are currency.

A fan letter is like an Oscar.  They like us!  They really like us!

Sob.

1. Epic idea = writing crack.

It’s your biggest superpower.  The thing from which everything else flows.  And this feels normal to you.  Totally, 100% normal.

Ordinary, really.  Like a wheat bran muffin, ordinary.  Except it’s made of sparkles and travels mach10 around 25 billion brain cells, in a world made of only your favorite colors. (Except the bran muffin is really chocolate.  But you knew that.)

After all, in an ordinary day, there’s always enough time for your mind to be blown.

And THAT’S how you can tell if you’re creative.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

fiction

How To Screw Up an Action Scene

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

As a thriller writer, I love me a good action scene.

CartoonBomb

In fact, there are no thrills without something actually happening.  Color me obvious, but a lot of writers don’t link these two concepts together.

Thrills without something happening?  How would that work?

So, this is the first part of an occasional series about how writers screw up their action scenes and what to do to fix them.

Today I want to focus on the order of your action.  This is something more than story, plot, or scenes.  It’s how you break story information up into little pieces to give the reader an adrenaline rush.

And how you can screw this up.

It’s all about “Visual Grammar”

OpenCulture’s recent post The Dark Knight: Anatomy of a Flawed Action Scene, features a brilliant breakdown of action-scene failure by film critic Jim Emerson.

Read it.  Watch it.  Master it.

Even novelists must master how to create a movie in the reader’s head.

The danger of “The Storyteller Cut”

One of my favorite fiction experts is Terry Rossio.  And of all his brilliant articles (on his site and available free), I find myself recommending The Storyteller Cut over and over, even to advanced writers.

Okay, especially to advanced writers.  Sometimes this is the only thing holding an advanced writer back.

I truly believe that understanding the pitfalls of this type of storytelling can save your novel, script, or stageplay.

—

Okay, that’s it this time!

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

fiction

Where Should I Start My Story? (the truth)

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

FEARS

Where to begin: Isn’t this the worst question ever? 

questions It’s so important (readers won’t read on unless you nail the opening), so frustrating (why isn’t it right yet?), and so "unprovable" (this one is 93% right, woohoo!). 

And heck, even if you do happen to stumble upon the right place to start, you’ll never know it. 

It’ll still look like lame words on a page.  You’ll rewrite it into something worse. (Oh, the agony.  The shame.  The total irony of being a writer and finding out that Words. Are. The. Enemy.)

SANITY

The idea that there’s a perfect place to start at story is wrong.  There are many perfect places to start a story.

We writers get confused, because we study stories that are already written, and we talk about how opening X is the perfect opening for a specific book.  As if it’s the only opening that could ever exist.

But in truth, what we’re really noticing is that a particular opening did work very well, and the writer avoided a sucky opening.

So, if there are many perfect openings and many sucky openings, how do you find at least ONE perfect opening?  How do you know where to start your story?

And this, my friend, is where all the advice fails us.

ADVICE THAT DOESN’T HELP THAT MUCH

Pretty much all the advice out there falls into this category for me.

Example 1:  Open "in medias res." 

You mean “anywhere” anywhere, as long as it’s in the middle of things will do? Boring things, violent things, things that don’t matter? 

Of course it is Latin, so it sounds smart. 

Example 2: When things change!  (Or at the Inciting Incident or In The Ordinary World of the protagonist, etc.)

There’re lots of changes, so which one?  But more importantly, doing this doesn’t make it a "right" opening.  You’re not guaranteed an opening that works for the reader.  There’s nothing here about quality, nothing about the needs of your story or the hopes of the reader.

Example 3: Open with the character and setting, and make sure to get across everything we need to know, plus a really good hook!"

Thanks for the laundry list.

But isn’t this advice sort of like telling a chef to make sure to use food, probably a protein and a carb?  Oh, and vegetables are nice, too?

THE TRUTH

Open any place where you can…

(a) enter with a JUICY piece of story information (character, plot, setting, anything!)…

(b) that captures the reader’s IMAGINATION and…

(c) ultimately PULLS her into a story JOURNEY…

(d) that SPANS the book or script or whatever.

A NICE EXAMPLE:

‘Gone Girl‘ By Gillian Flynn

When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very ?rst time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a ?nely shaped head.You could imagine the skull quite easily.

I’d know her head anywhere.

DOES IT WORK?

(a) Whoa, a husband who obsesses about his wife’s head and can imagine the skull quite easily.  Now that’s a creepy-interesting character.

(b) This isn’t going to turn out well, is it?  I’m already imagining stuff that could happen.  Bad stuff.  Oh, noes.  Maybe it’s already happened….

(c) I’ve got to find out where this goes, because I know this links directly to the story I was hoping for (when I read the back blurb):

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

(d) I’m being pulled into the story question that matters, the one that will be resolved by the time the book is over:  What happened to the wife?

Plus there’s all that mighty fine prose.  That’s a bonus for sure.

Put it all together and bam!  The reader and the story are well served.  And they’re joined together for all the pages to come.

And that’s how you start a story.

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

advice, Business, fiction, resources

WRITERS: 8 Amazing University Classes You Can Take For Free

by Diane Holmes, (a) Chief Alchemist of Pitch University, (b) lover of learning, and (c) writer of fiction, non-fiction, and the occasional manifesto.

As our very own Joe Wallace begins his Recording Arts For Film program at Tribeca Flashpoint Media Academy in Chicago,

  • I celebrate his multi-tasking insanity and
  • I seize the opportunity to take Free, WORLD-CLASS, (online) University classes, through the innovative site Coursera.

Take a look at these 8 classes to power-up your BUSINESS and WRITING.

Set Your Words On Fire

#1 Modern & Contemporary American Poetry

Al Filreis, University of Pennsylvania

This course is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly “difficult.”

Next session: 10 September 2012 (10 weeks long)
Workload: 5-8 hours/ week

About the Instructor:

Al Filreis is Kelly Professor; founder, and faculty director of the Kelly Writers House; director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing; co-director (with Charles Bernstein) of PennSound; and publisher of Jacket2 — all at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching since 1985.

Among his books: Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60; Wallace Stevens and the Actual World; and Modernism from Right to Left.

He has also (with Beverly Coyle) edited the letters of José Rodríguez-Feo and Wallace Stevens (Secretaries of the Moon), and has edited and introduced a new edition of Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People. He hosts an ongoing podcast series,PoemTalk, a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation. He is currently working on a book about poetry and poetics in 1960.

He has won every major teaching award given to faculty at Penn, and in 1999-2000 he was chosen as the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.

Write With the Power of Myth

#2 Greek and Roman Mythology

Peter Struck, University of Pennsylvania Continue reading WRITERS: 8 Amazing University Classes You Can Take For Free →
editorial, fiction

Revealed: The Secret Ingredient That Practically Forces Your Reader To Share Your Writing

3 Comments

Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery by Diane Holmes, Chief Alchemist of Pitch University

Do you wonder why some writing is shared in email, talked about among friends, passed around person to person?

I read a lovely little “shared memory” by Dr. Robert M. Todd that begins…

Indiana Dunes

When I married my wife in 1952, I was taken into her immigrant family in Whiting, Indiana.

Dr. Todd quickly pulls the reader in with elegant, simple, details.

He writes about being accepted into his wife’s family and by his wife’s Uncle Al, who isn’t an uncle at all.  Uncle Al is a boarder, a concept we’ve lost in our current culture and now find foreign.

And Dr. Todd describes him like this:

He was born in Lithuania, which was taken over by the Russians in its conquest of the Baltic States.

As a young man before World War II, he decided to escape from the communist occupation.  He snuck out of Lithuania, often crawling through fields and swimming underwater in rivers to avoid detection.

He worked on a freighter, shoveling coal into the furnaces to create steam. That was how he got to the United States.

Uncle Al ends up living with Dr. Todd’s in-laws, becoming family in a way that captures the immigrant experience of America, and also becoming the best of us, the most generous, the most loving.

It’s a good story.  You can read it here. It will only take a moment, then scroll down below Dr. Todd’s watchful gaze.

Dr ToddThe Secret Ingredient.

So what is the secret ingredient of writing that must be shared?

It’s the unexpected hurdle of not speaking English.  It’s the surprising information that adds depth and meaning to our understanding of what happened.

How did he do it?  we ask ourselves.

How did Uncle Al befriend so many while unable to communicate with much of the world around him.  How did he speak the language of caring for his fellow man and make the world around him his dearest family and friends?

How do any of us, when we’re alone in the world, make our way?

The simple gestures of a new suit, a paid insurance bill… these are nice, but it’s the moment we realize the effort that went into being Uncle Al, that he’s alive to us.

He amazes us.

He makes us look within to see if we have what he had.  Do we have what it takes…

  • to hold our breath underwater long enough to escape war,
  • to search for a missing brother in a country as big as the United States, and
  • to care that deeply about the new people you meet even if the language is foreign and we never master it?

Now that’s writing worth sharing.

(Thank you, Dr. Todd.)

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clip_image004Diane writes two alternating columns for Freelance-Zone:Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.