Your Resident Fool

Are you still afraid to act like a fool? Are you wary that someone will take you for a fool if you do foolish things? Aha! If you answer "Yes!" then you're stifling one of the greatest assets a writer can possess. I like to think that people, and especially writers, are fortunate if they have a resident fool. What's the role of a fool, really? Think about it.

In ancient days, every noble ruler and many lessers ones, too, has a resident fool. The fool's role was manifold. The fool made satiric remarks, often echoing what the king or queen might have wanted to say, but couldn't. The fool also served to keep the nobles from getting too haughty and egoistic. They fool acted the part of Nemesis, sometimes, to keep hubris at bay when pride became too strong. Another of the fool's duties was that of social critic and jokester. Add all of that up and you've got a pretty powerful force, don't you?

Too, a fool had to be very quick witted or they might lose their job or even their head. So a fool had to think sharply and to weigh his words carefully, yet get the job done in a way that seemed casual and easily understood. Doesn't that sound like a writer to you?

What's the status of your resident fool? Does he or she make puns, word plays, turn a clever phrase or even coin a new cliche saying? Or do you immediately put your fool down in the mental dungeon and think you have to be "serious" all the time. Good writers play with words all the time, but they don't think of it as being 'too foolish." They think of it as being creative.

I say, free up your resident fool and let him or her help your writing sparkle with wit.

September Stuff

Hello again,
Always interesting developments for the working writer, aren't there? I don't know if you're familiar with articlestop.com, but it's a place writers can post articles and writings that can be used freely by bloggers, online magazines, etc. My article "It's My Hometown: Making the Reader Feel Like a Local," for example, is making the rounds, posted in the Worldwide Freelance newsletter, on the Written Road (www.writtenroad.com) and Writers Dock UK (www.writersdock.co.uk) blogs and is also now listed in the Writing 101 (www.worldwidefreelance.com/articles/101-writing-craft.htm) website. I also finally got my copies of Skirmish magazine (UK) carrying my article and photos of the Bydand Forever-Gordon Highlanders reenactment group with a nice two-page spread and the magazine's opted for my article on a recent Civil War reenactment in Huntington Beach, CA (w/photos).

Which brings me to think about, how do writers get known these days. It seems facetious to say "they write," yet that's the very crux of it. Through my stories, articles, reviews and interviews at the Erotica Readers & Writers Association (www.erotica-readers.com) and Clean Sheets online magazine (www.cleansheets.com), I can now find various bits of my writing all over everywhere by running a google search. My writings appear mentioned in blogs and also reprinted in full by numerous sites around the WWW. Authors I've interviewed usually also post a ref. or link to the interviews on the originating sites as well. Because I once mentioned Grace Metalious' novel Peyton Place in an article, there's a link and reference to me on a Grace Metalious website. See how it works?

The more you write and get your name and works spread around, the more of a "presence" you have as a writer and that works to your advantage when editors ask "What have you done before?" And they will ask.

Credentials help, especially if you want to lay down a few journalism credits in your favor. I went to a Renaissance Faire some months ago, digital camera in hand, and later thought, well I could write this up and submit it to Renaissance magazine (which I did), but I also ran across Skirmish magazine which is touted as Europe's *premiere* magazine for historical reenactors. I'd gone to a Scottish Festival and the Gordon Highlanders reenactment group was there, so more photos and a write up. I submitted the article and pics to Skirmish. They went for it. And wanted more, since they have hardly any (if any!) writers from the US sending them material. So, after two articles and photos, I am now pleased (witht he Editor's permission) to call myself the West Coast Correspondent to Skirmish magazine. That opens doors to historical reenactment folk all over. It's also a great credential to use when writing similar or even different articles for other magazines.

So how do you get known? You write, you submit, and keep up the work. It's easy!

Immersion (or is it Exposure?) Therapy for Writers

One of the things that continues to startle me is how rarely many writers seem to "get out." While a few appear to hit the clubs, read other writers, attend (non-writerly-related) events, the vast majority, so it seems, are too content to be stay-at-homes and scribble, scribble, scribble. Unfortunately, this stuck in the muck 'tude shows in their writings as a terrifying parochialism.

Wide, vast, deep, and varietous is the world, you see. Writers, unless they're reproducing Kafkaesque or Proustian "documents" really DO need to get out of their tiny selves, to be immersed or exposed to the bigger picture (for inspiration's sake, if nothing else).

Now, everywhere you go there are countless (and oftenfree!) events going on that force writers to view the rich panoply of human living going on under one's very nose. Myself, I frequently take in the Living History sort of thing or ethnic festivals that abound in the greater "outdoors." You really do see all kinds of folk at such events and who can say that this tasty stew of humanity carries not the spark that burns your midnight oil over a hot computer.

Green-haired nouveaus and tidy three-piece family groups, punk fetishers and rowdy, raunchy wench and stud combos, picaresque and dowdy throngs circulate and stir your creative pot with decidedly intriguing spoons of one-somes, two-somes, threesomes, and more when you're aiming for the seductive or salacious. The prim yet brutal recent evocation of a Civil War reenactment combined the following weekend for me into a roaring, tawdry pirate camp and corporate Tall Ships "thingy" is still in mental process.

Get out, you writerly people! Get immersed in another time zone or exposed to the milling panorama of human endeavor (or sloth as the case may be). If you sit all day and night in your lonely authorial garret, eventually you become aware only of the weariness of your own seated posterior, not of the sparkling depths and shallows of "the stuff on which dreams are made."

Disasters

Well, of course, everyone is emotionally and mentally devastated by Katrina & New Orleans (as well as much of the Mississippi Delta area). I include myself, as time and again, I return to check the latest news and blog reports, gaze at the photographs of desperate people. The worst of it is that this was a relatively preventable disaster. Had budgets not been cut, had planning gone forward, had intelligence and foresight prevailed -- well, crying over spilt milk does no one any good, except perhaps the cow.

What, you may imagine, does this have to do with writing? Actually, a great deal. And on many levels. When you have a problematic story, examine not just the words on the paper or their order and proper grammatical sequence. No. You must think beyond that.
Have you really budgeted enough time on the writing or are you simply rushing through it to meet a deadline? If you've been penny-wise and pound foolish, you may face a writing disaster. Have you planned out what's going to happen, why, how, where, when? Do you know where you're going to turn if suddenly there's a "blockage" or a seeming deadend? Or are you aimless drifting or rowing and hoping that speed alone will save the story? And lastly, are your characters "desperate" for a solution? Is the plotline so predictable that readers are ho-humming their way along or have you caught them up in the passions and emotional turmoil of the characters? Desperate people take chances, they risk dangers, they're excited and exciting.

While writing may not seem on the scale of a hurricane ravaged city, it should reflect storm-tossed characters seeking survival...somehow. And remember that YOU, the writer, are the only rescue team to save them.

Being "Adult"

Having now over a decade of perspective about writing erotica and sexuality topics, it still amazes me sometimes how un-adult many writers are. Often the more "pornographic" a writer tries to be, the more adolescent their perspective on sex seems. Erotica and sexuality are more than just writing "dirty words." Sometimes, I think I can almost hear the childish giggles and snorts behind the writing. Adolescents, of course, like to shock their peers and even more so, their older fellow Earth inhabitants.

I think, despite the free-wheeling vocabulary of the 1960s, too many people (and it shows up when they're writers) still feel the frisson of the "outlaw" when they use four letter words in print. Some of our "brightest" writers in the genre remind me of Howard Stern's shock-jock persona or the comedians trotting out their "filthiest" language for the dubious film "The Aristocrats." In other words, they're not being very "adult" about the adult world of erotica.

Society's priggishness and a general trend to Puritanism (still rampant, sadly, after centuries) may explain this tendency, but so, too, does an individual's attitude. If you feel you're "getting away with something naughty," by slipping four letter words (or their equivalent) into your writing, I think you're always going to sound a bit childish.

On the other hand, we also have writers, and many of them outside the basic vanilla lifestyles, who use the same vocabularies casually and yet with a sense of meaning and appropriateness. Perhaps, part of the explanation of adult vs non-adult usage, can be traced to the limitations of genre publishing.

Romance novels, for decades, have sought to hide sexual acts and feelings behind a pseudo-vocabulary associated with the Victorians. Here, we find "manhood" substituted for penis and "bodice" for breasts. While romance novels, at least those now called erotica romances, have begun using more common terms for genitalia and acts with same, writers may still find themselves locked behind the "dirty words" doors.

Why do we still think of them as dirty, though? And why do we still find writers with the underlying concept that the very normal sexual acts themselves are dirty?
Erotica, at least the best kind, isn't bathroom graffiti, though we do still it treated that way, especially in bad pornography.

There's a great bit I heard recently on archived material from BBC radio, in which an interviewer-reporter snickers and giggles uncontrollably when he mentions "knickers."
Imagine that! A grown man, a professional media person, who can't say the euphemism for "panties" without losing control like a little child saying a naughty word. It's both hilarious and sad.

Everybody's Talking At Me...

The voice. Interesting discussions come about when writers congregate to express their opinions on just what the writer's voice is. Some feel the writer has an obligation to "speak" with one voice their entire career; that unique expressive recitation of the tales with which we associate all works from their pen. Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe, et. al., for example, all write in a voice which we can easily identify.

Other writers eschew this device and tailor each story by using the voice they most feel is suitable to tell the story, often from a character's viewpoint or from a pseudo-ominiscient overview.

Neither is "best" per se, each having strengths and weaknesses which contribute to the effectiveness of telling the story. It is perhaps the most important thing to tell the story. From a writer's standpoint, anyone inside or out of it can tell the story, the trick may be to discover whose "voice" is most moving, most eloquent, most relavent, most effective.

Beginning writers and even veterans can find this a daunting challenge. When we sometimes don't know how the story will end, how are we to know who is best to tell it? The truth is sometimes, we don't and sometimes writers will experiment, telling the same story through different voices. Classic examples of this include Rashomon, and more modern examples would be A Maggot by John Fowles and Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost.

Chaucer and Boccaccio used the various voices of their characters to tell a series of different stories. Each story in the Decameron and Canterbury Tales is a triple example in that the author tells us (in his words) who the storyteller is (Nun, Miller, Noblewoman, Friar, etc.) and then they tell their story in yet another voice, that of the charcters within that story. Surprisingly this works!

Many writers ask the question "But how do I get out of the story?" They want to remove the author's voice entirely and simply let the tale tell itself. This can have odd consequences, such as the development of "new schools" of literature. Alain Robbe-Grillet, for example, wrote several novels from a curiously "removed" point of view, describing characters, objects, events, and settings in minute detail. The existentialist authors, such as Camus and Sartre, attempted to write in this "removed" manner as well, and even Kafka -- while describing social horrors -- seems to objectify everything in a cold, removed observor POV.

Personally, I don't believe the writer can remove themself entirely as they are the ones doing the writing and their attitudes, experiments, etc. will always come through in the telling of the story.

But what a writer can achieve, sometimes successfully, is to adopt a kind of surrogate "voice." The "voice" of the storyteller might be one that is completely opposal to the attitudes and interests of the author and the effective see-saw of these rival POVs have created some fascinating works.

Writing, at best, however, is always an exploration of events, people, and settings and the writer's reactions about them. That's why the admonition to writers is usually left at "Just get on with it and write!"

The Grammar Hammer

It's a clever old saying that to those who only have a hammer, every problem is a nail. The same can be said of those who absolutely, positively, and without question strictly apply the rigid rules of English teachers and grammarians to every example of writing.

Much like those who sneer at small breaches of "high society" etiquette or the tiniest infractions of any sort of rules regardless of the circumstance or situation, grammarians often try to ruin perfectly sensible, understandable, and creative writing by substituting "rules" for other important considerations, including pace, variety, common usage, vernacular, dramatic dynamics, and user friendliness.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't *know* the proper grammar constructs and usage, but that they *do* sometimes take a backseat to what the intent or content of the particular writing is all about.

For example, grammarians *still* bristle and wince when they see sentence fragments, despite the fact that practically every good writer uses them on occassion. Whether used in narrative description or dialogue, fragments used "properly" carry weight in pacing and style. They can convey emotional impact which a fully parsed out sentence simply makes heavy and unrealistic.

Fiction particularly is often made more effective by borrowing the fragment from poetry. Curiously, I've noticed that the same reader who lauds a work for engaging them emotionally, pulling them into the story's action and dynamic, will also -- when dissecting the work -- point out the "grammatically incorrect" bits, advise changing them, and then wonder, after their changes, why the work suddenly seems flat and predictable. Well, duh. They've "ruled" the life out of the piece and made it grammatically correct, but utterly boring by doing so.

Writing in the Imperfect Tense

Firstly, it's good to know all the rules of writing, grammar included, so that you do know when you're breaking any and why. But language is a morphing, living, organic thing, not a solid as rock prison to the expression of creative urges. Writing can be many things: an experiment, an exploration, conveying information, the attempt to replicate emotions and sensual impressions. To those ends, each writer tries their best to use the tools they have, words, to work out what they have to say. The sequence of those words may or may not perfectly follow the "rules" established by grammarians, but that doesn't necessarily make the writing "bad." Sometimes, it's the rules which are bad and which ought to be changed to better reflect the language use.

Know what I mean?