Author of Great Books

Writing Tip

2012-01-31T10:18:00.000-08:00

I can't count the number of books, newsletters, and articles I've read in which the author has made one simple mistake: repeating a word, or a word so similiar to another in sound that my teeth grind together.

Avoid writing anything like -- Twelve senior boys were the boyfriends of the most popular cheerleaders in a high school populated by wealthy kids.

Every Day New

2012-01-17T13:05:00.000-08:00

     Today, for Book Four, I dreamed up the most absurd, logic-defying love-hate relationship between two of my characters. And fell in love with the idea instantly. How could two characters be connected this way, I ask myself.
     As a day dreamer and author and to-the-bone creator, I answer: because I say they are.
     I love this! I've now given myself another story puzzle to solve. The building of those feelings, all those years ago, the complete raveling of the relationship now -- or will it? This is the dream job.

Cold February Writing Day

2012-01-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

So cold today that I can't warm my hands. Fingers on the keys are stiff. What a great writing day, nevertheless. Two whole scenes rolled out of my head -- Easter and her boy Dubby, who has Down Syndrome and is "sweet and ornery and fragile and tough." Easter has lost two boys to the war in Vietnam. Writing her leaves me both filled and drained.

Yesterday I was privileged to hear the mothers of Kevin Durant (Thunder) and Blake and Taylor Griffin (OU basketball) speak. They talked of their faith and their memories of, and hopes for, their boys. I took copious notes and plan to write them up for my own sons, and for daughters who are both mothers of one son each. We are all so similar, we mothers of these young man who still scrape their knees and come home to us. What a precious time I had, listening to them.

Tomorrow I'll go back over today's new scenes in this Big Book (#4) and flesh them out, let the characters fatten up. All writers do that -- breathe life into the bodies, give them fingers and toes and noses and bone joints, then command them to bloom. What a fantastic job.

Playing With Matches, etc.

2011-12-07T12:28:00.000-08:00

My new book Playing With Matches is now scheduled to be out July 24 of 2012. Has been in the hands of Random House for a long time. Much internal stuff there, I understand. Now we are actually going in to a countdown.

My Write to Free Speech

2011-12-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

As a writer, I have, many times, struggled to make ends meet. I've been writing for publications -- and teaching the same -- since 1980. I held an additional job until 1995, when I began to write full time. Every weekday and usually on Saturdays I show up at my desk and pound out something, or I research parts or the topic of a story. Sunday afternoons, I work on my students' manuscripts. I send my stories, features and novel manuscripts out, and I log them when they come back. If they don't come back, I deposit the check and keep a close eye on the eight or ten stories I have out in the mail -- and I write more. I research the markets and editorial wants, too. In all this time, I've sold so many hundreds of stories, I can no longer count. In all that time, two lonely features did not fly.
I am a business, a small corporation. I daily practice the right to free speech. So I'm adding this, below, as an exercise in that very thing.

I heartily suggest and approve of a proposed Congressional Reform Act of 2011-2012 as follows:

1. Regarding Congress: Salary is to be paid for the days in that office. Not there? No pay.
2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.
Congressmen/women made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

It's way past time -- CDW

The Power of Words

2011-11-29T17:04:00.000-08:00

It's a powerful thing, writing. Words, you see, are the least accurate means of expression. In joy, we lift our arms to meet the sun. In desperation, we clutch and reel and execute dance moves that define the very depths. In painting, we express with strokes and let the eye tell the brain tell the arm: dab the brush in this color.
But writing is complex. That first gut feeling, that sudden so-powerful-it's-painful spine-buckling awareness of something must first be changed into words. Words we know -- the exact ones that say what we mean. Then those words, now rattling in the head, must be turned into other words that are acceptable to our audience, to our editors, judges, readers. If you go there, structure of story must be adhered to. You can, of course, journal with abandon, but if you want to be a selling writer -- and why shouldn't you? -- so many story things must first line up. And be edited and edited and edited again.
The job is private and arduous, brain-wracking, back-breaking and time consuming. But there's nothing else I would rather do. And I've decided to talk about that -- those kinds of thrills -- on these pages. Reader, beware. There's an agony connected with this job, a disconnect from the real world while I make several of my own. There are worries and tears and mental hair-tearing. But there's also the thrill of creating man. Giving him woman. Letting her deflect bullets with her fingertips. Tuck fifty-one clowns into a Volkswagon and send it to Mars where candy bars cost a dime a dozen. Ice cream, there, doesn't melt.
See? Crazyness helps. On with the new book and its secrets, oh so deep and dark. The world will never guess....

2011-11-29T17:02:00.000-08:00

Been so long since I entered anything, here, I've almost forgotten how. I'd like to talk about my new book, the one I'm working on now, but we're keeping it under wraps. So I'll tell you a bit about the life of an author....

Update

2010-09-19T11:28:00.001-07:00

My third book is done! I have come up for air.
Playing With Matches is currently scheduled by Random House to appear next summer, 2011. It's a story of chicken circuses and burning beds on the False River, a century-old Mississippi prison farm, and a five-year-old who won't talk. Playing With Matches tells us this: sometimes it's enough to say "I'm sorry."
A million thank yous to all the readers who claim they are waiting, trembling in anticipation, and holding their breathe. All 353 pages have been printed and are going out to my last reader, then, with any last changes, it goes in the mail to my precious agent in New York.
I'd like to think I'm taking a break, but I turn ugly when I don't write. My hair frizzes, nails break, and I chew holes in the people around me.
I'd like to revamp The Coffin Maker, see what it's future might be. And I have IDEAS for the next book -- a couple dozen sticky notes on and around my computer, new characters vying for space in my head. Yum.

Movies, oh boy

2010-08-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

At the suggestion of a friend, I went to see the movie Winter's Bone, an independent film showing at a nearby mall. Over lunch, my friend's comment had been, "It was hard to watch, but it reminded me of your book."
--A certainly, then, that I must see it.
And so I did.
Wow.
Do not go, do not rent it, unless you are ready for a simple plot set in the deep woods of the Missouri-Arkansas line, a story peopled with characters so real they hurt. In the dark of the theater, I lifted a finger and pointed and said out loud, "I know her. And her. And I've seen him."
Sure wish I'd been the writer for that film.
Last night I finished reading The Girl Who Stopped Swimming. I stayed with it to the end, and it was only in the end that we saw that same true poverty and fabulous folks -- it was as if the movie and the end of Joshilyn Jackson's book had merged.
So, poverty, I think, may be the literary byword.
We've talked only about how these last years' economy has affected jobs and salaries and lay-offs and down-sizing.
Poor us.
And I mean that. But we've missed a lot. Back in the woods, in the hills, on the roads whose signs have been gone so long, nobody knows what they're called anymore, up popped the meth labs and home was the single-wide. Family clinging to family in need and secrets, for defense and protection, in a way most of us will never know.
Poor us.
They're surely the folks who live in my head, the ones I want to write about.

Here we go....

2010-08-04T11:14:00.000-07:00

I think of all the readers who email me, who are waiting for my next book to come out, and of all the writers who ask for help, and I think: Wow, I should begin planting bits of advice here, drop hints on how to turn out essays and novels and better letters to Grandma.
And then I wonder why I would want to create competition. But here's the thing: I've been helping new writers for nearly thirty years. Just because I've stopped ripping around, finding, writing and selling feature articles and short stories, just because I've settled down to (gasp) write my own novels -- why change who I am?
So we begin.
You'll need to read. And read and read and read and read. I myself love to read mystery-suspense novels. Although my own books (Sweeping Up Glass, available in all bookstores now, and Playing With Matches which will be out next year) are shelved under literary fiction (think Opray-style books), they all needed and have, huge elements of mystery.
But wait -- I crave a cup of coffee. I'll be back....