N is for narrator

The word narrator always makes me think of the closing scene from "Walton's Mountain", an OLD family friendly prime time TV show from back in the day of three letter networks. MTV wasn't even around yet. Archie Bunker may have been though.

Anyway, it's dark and the camera is outside John-boy's window looking in on him as he sits at his desk writing in his journal. Slowly the camera pans out. the view is wider and the voice (Earl Hamner I think) is talking, in the character of John-boy I think. Maybe the voice is simply reading what John-boy is writing. I don't remember. As an aside I do remember John-boy had a really hot sister. Mary Ellen if memory serves. She might have been my first crush. I wonder where she is now?

Anyway, I am using the narrator's voice to describe setting, feelings, and thoughts. Things that have no way of coming out in dialogue. Time will tell how it turns out.

M is for Meander

All the writing advisors out there exhort everyone to keep the thrills coming. One per page. Keep the reader at the edge of their seat. Everything needs to be a page turner. I say bull~!@#. I'm starting to think that writing advice blogs are starting to copy news journalists and they're writing for attention rather than truth.

As I get further into my fiction and the world gets more solid and my characters acquire more personality, I'm seeing there is room to breathe. There is room to describe something. There is room for dialogue to solidify the plot and there is also room for main character monologue to describe a setting.

As in so many other things in life, I am realizing that not everything is true if you read it in the blog of an expert. Styles are individual. The story you know needs to be written according to you, not what some author architect asserts you need to be doing. Be your own writer. Read what others write, but stay in control of your own POV, when it comes to style and taste. Blogs are looking for readers and fans just like journalists. Their words are not written in stone nor are they absolute. Go your own way and seek to add to your perspective from what others write. Blind obedience is not needed.

L is for local flavor

"Keepin' it real" is a bit of a phrase I've heard some place, maybe multiple places. My suspicion leans toward it being a greeting by Randy Jackson on American Idol. Don't tell anybody I confessed that though. Actually, my wife watches it and I was in the same room at the time. That's the excuse...

It does serve as a nice segue into today's phrase "local flavor" brought to you by the letter "L". Two of my favorite authors, Roger Crais and CJ Box, write about what they know and a big chunk of that includes the urban and rural landscapes in which their characters live and the plots happen.

For me, RC does a phenomenal job writing about the canyon that Elvis lives in. He does just as well writing about the L.A. and southern CA countryside in which his plots involving Elvis and Pike all take place. Geographic descriptions, maps and freeway descriptions, traffic conditions, and shortcuts are all part of a Roger Crais book taking place in the fictional world of Elvis and Pike, which is an unknown (to me anyway) portion of the real world where I think RC actually lives now. Love his writing.

Writing this entry today, brings me to realize that not only is there a strong local flavor in RC's writing, but he also lavishes time and words on the meals and the food preparation that his characters on occasion indulge in. Further, Elvis has a cat that appears frequently in the Elvis and Pike series. I love these aspects of what RC does with his local flavor and the reality with which he surrounds his characters.

CJ Box writes about a Wyoming game warden, Joe Pickett, and a frequently included friend, Nate Romanowski. The Joe Pickett series is housed in the fictional setting of Saddlestring, Wyoming, even though Saddlestring could well be a real (if uninhabited) place. CJB's writing gets even better, at least for me, in that Joe has a wife and three daughters. The local settings in his books are all the more real because he's dropping his kids off at school in the morning or stopping in at a bar or restaurant or the library where his wife works part-time. Fiction based on reality, or at least bits and pieces of reality.

If you haven't read CJ Box or Roger Crais, give them a try. I think their fictional worlds are all the better to immerse in because they seem so real. You can live vicariously through the characters as they climb mountains, or drive old Forest Service roads, or sneak across back yards because the line between real and fiction that the authors write about so well is so blurry.

K is for Milan Kovacovic

Back in the day, when I was virtually carefree, I was prone to squandering my opportunities. Milan Kovacovic was one of the few individuals who knew me enough or had the right approach for someone living like I was. He looked me in the eye and told me I had to "try harder". As I recall it went over my head at the time. But here I am almost thirty years later and while I remember beaucoup de francais, or however it should be written, what I remember more is him saying that to me.

He was right. I wish I had a "do over", as my kids say. All these wise older folks may be right when they say that "youth is wasted on the young...". No doubt he has no memory of me. I was a "nothing" student by my own admission, intent on enjoying freedom and girls and living on my own. I should have taken a year off and learned the hard way about the importance of education. I did do that a few years later and it did teach me and I did actually come back to UMD and achieved the best grades of my time at UMD, but then I left again never to return. So.....Professor Kovacovic, I hope you have a Google alert set for your name. Thank you for those well intended words somewhere between fall of 84 and spring of 88. I still remember them. You were right. The more you put in, the more you get out.

He wrote his memoirs. While I am not prone to reading this type of work, I do look at this and read what there was in this article and marvel at the lives others have lived in the places and times they were in. Here I am in this plain old culture of the U.S. at its peak. Safe, stable, ongoing times of plenty, no war in my lifetime that affected me (although I did dutifully go to the USPS and register like I was supposed to as an 18 year old). What he remembers from his youth in WWII-era Europe is far different from mine.

J is for Judaism

Judaism. A big word in history, replete with success and tragedy and much in between.

While most might be expecting something religious to comes next, I'm going to talk about swear words. Yes, Judaism in the context of its cultural picture I guess, is very expressive.

Also, if I am to believe what I read in doing research there are three languages close together. The one I think I am looking at most often as a source of rich cultural expression is Yiddish. This led me to wonder about the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish. In reading about that I came across Aramaic. I won't belabor this entry with details. Yahoo has an awesome Q&A answer board that provides some great background and explanation. I usually take Yahoo with a grain of salt. I at least try and confirm what I read there with another entry elsewhere. In any case, here is the Yahoo entry describing the differences. A good answer that makes sense to me.

As a mere lad, back in my young and dumb years, I was a French major. I also took a few credits of Russian. I wish I had applied myself more back then. Now I realize what an opportunity I had then with the time to learn those languages. But I was young and dumb and not much of a student. I was also quickly realizing that the application of foreign languages was going to be problematic. As a student at a Midwest university, I was thousands of miles from anywhere that conducted business in anything besides English.

Fast forward 30 years +/- and I find myself still fascinated with languages and still faced with the same lack of pragmatic utility. However, my characters can speak in French and Russian and Yiddish, or at least use foreign words throughout their daily life as I write about it. Throw in some Mandarin and some Spanish and you have my cast of characters all schooled in foreign languages from one source or another, all using bits and pieces of these languages in dialog with each other, especially those swear words. Nothing better than a good foreign language swear word. Especially Yiddish.

I is for Indie Author

It's a business and you have control. That's an indie author in a nutshell.

Some contrast helps further define it. A traditional author may never get published. Most do not. But if they do then most, if not all, of the big decisions are made by others on your behalf. The publisher does most of the work and in exchange they keep most of the money too.

The odds of success are against you as an indie, but then the same is true as a trad author, only at a different stage of the game.

Success does happen, likely with the same odds as traditional publishing. Hugh Howey and Joe Konrath are a couple of big names in the indie world, well worth reading.

Now go write your book, and then start the business of selling your book. The world is your oyster.

H is for Habits

Sometimes, rarely, success is a gift to the person receiving it. Call it luck. Like lightning though, the odds of being hit are highly unlikely and almost never in the same place twice. Better to develop a work ethic and rely on that for success instead. While it does not guarantee success, at least it is more consistent.

The "H" word was almost Harlan Coben. He's one of my favorite writers. Reading an interview of him got me thinking about "H" word habit. When asked about his success, he talked mostly about "hard work" involving his back side in a chair every day, with some sort of typing device in front of him. It seems he is also in the habit of writing about things he knows. Like basketball, life in New Jersey, kids, and the suburbs. He does an exceedingly good job. I do wonder though where he knows the sociopath that he based his character "Win" upon. That guy is a load. A load of strange attributes, but paired with Myron they make one of my favorite all-time set of partners.

Nothing fancy today. Habits are simple. I think writers need them, but more important they need to stick with them until the book is done. They then need to be resumed when the next book is started.