Recently in The Process of Writing Category

Last year I signed up for Red Room, an online community for writers launched in January of 2008 from the San Francisco Bay Area. That's about the time I signed up, hoping for a fun, writerly community online to augment my writing habit. Unfortunately, January 2008 turned out to be a bit soon for the Red Room folks on the technical side, and after much frustration and inability to post even the simplest items to my member profile, I gave up.

Well, it's been a year and a half, so I thought I'd try again. Red Room is a great idea, after all, and they've had some time to work these things out.  Still called a "beta" effort (a cheat in my view - a site that is open to the public for over a year should never be called beta) My hope was that beta or not, the site had become more functional.

The basic organization of Red Room is two-tiered. "Authors" are defined as people who have published via traditional means, which is still a very difficult and selective process (unless you're a right-wing pundit). "Members" are people who haven't yet published a traditional book.  At first I forgave this obvious caste system as a necessary filter mechanism, but after some consideration, I've changed my mind. It's insulting, and because self-published authors and established bloggers and performance poets who have no chapbook are not considered "authors", it perpetuates some of the walls of the print publishing world that may not be truly useful for an online audience. It all smells a bit dusty for an online community.

Red Room looked at first like a place where writers could gather and form community, sharing literary interests, and providing as a secondary feature a directory of writers and their works.  Instead I found a very fragmented online community which reminded me of early blog groups in which you'd have a simple directory and then hop from isolated blog to isolated blog.  There are a few index pages where you can find author's works listed under specific genres, the pages are oddly laid out (if you don't scroll down, you don't know you've found your list of results) and as far as I can tell these pages do not include "member" works.

My own attempt to set up a member page has been an exercise in futility. Though I have been able to put up a blog post, the rest has been a struggle. Menu items are not intuitive, the purpose of some pages isn't clear, and Red Room requires a human to approve all content - something that I never received any notification about. This caused me to think my work had gone into a black hole. With some help from one of their staff (or volunteer? Hard to know) some of it got published, but after several tries I was unable to post photographs in a gallery, one of the features of the site. Despite relatively responsive technical support, I eventually had to give up.

Another problem is that the approval stage is not properly disclosed to content submitters. I never received a message informing me of this step, though I was told I should have, and it is not part of the faq. The support staff member explained it in very general terms in an email, which is not sufficient. The lack of transparency for this step was odd, and combined with the very traditional publishing bent of the entire site left a bad feeling about the place. It's fine to edit - but in a community site, it's important that some guidelines be made known, and that the activity of editing is disclosed clearly. Is it just pornography they object to? Or criticisms of authors the staff likes? We don't know.  

The best way to use Red Room at this time is to simply use the blog feature, which is the most technically competent at this time. If you do this regularly, you may be able to slowly join the community and attract some readers, and it does appear that some folks are having a good time in there. It's also the only place I found that one can actually upload a picture. Ignore most of the rest of the advanced features of the site until they are improved. "Conversations" looks promising, but does not function for me. Creating prominent, front-page linked discussion areas seems like the most important piece of community that is missing. If you are a traditionally published author, apply for the author status. But if you're not - frankly, you're better off doing what I have, and creating and hosting your own blog. 

I hope Red Room improves, and I'll check back in another year and see what's happened - that is, if I don't find that someone else has done this better by then.

I think I've seen this before, but this time I got a picture, and I am still not really sure that such a thing can exist. But there it is, at a local carnival (the Taste of Minnesota fair in St. Paul, which was surprisingly light on food): an inflatable Titanic that kids can enjoy by climbing to the top and sliding down, presumably to their early demise.  In this case, the children can throw themselves into the sea and then allow themselves to be eaten by a large reptile.

As part of a nonfiction project, I've scoured the used booksellers of the internet and collected about 10 books about the history, ecology, and culture of the coastal redwood regions of California.  As someone who split her childhood between the two great coastal redwood regions of the state - the Santa Cruz Mountains and the North Coast - I find it interesting how small the populations are that actually live there. It's a good thing, of course. Too many people spoil the trees, I think. But going through these books, many of the names are familiar to my mother or I, and every single photograph is a place I've been. 

So while the rest of us were reading, or something, a controversy erupted about the online social networking site Facebook.  Facebook issued a new set of terms and conditions to its users, which, when read by a layperson (and apparently some lawyers), gives the impression that when you sign up with Facebook, the company owns all of your content in perpetuity, including your mother's love letters to her Italian lover, you diary you kept for a year when you were sixteen, your liver, your kidneys, and, in certain circumstances, belly button and all lint therein.  After enormous outcry, Facebook relented and switched back its terms, and so at least for now, your kidneys are safe.

One of the things about my fiction writing that is fairly obvious after a page or two is that I pay a lot of attention to setting.  I like my characters to be fully immersed in a place, swimming in its details and colors and smells.   I usually use settings in which I myself have lived, enhance them a bit, twist them a little.  Characters don't exist outside of their setting, they are part of it, they interact with it, and they react to and are influenced by their place.

Now that I've mapped the heck out of my novel-in-progress, I'm settling back to the writing itself. And I'm considering my darkest character, and how to flesh her out.

I've been spending quite a bit of time expanding the middle portion of my novel-in-progress, and this week I'm taking a break to re-map the thing.

I've mapped this novel, which takes place in a fictional version of my hometown on the Northern California Redwood Coast, twice already. Once after writing the first 50 pages, and then again after the first 150.  I like to write stories that connect and interconnect in many ways, and as I write more, the novel becomes more complex. In addition, as the story changes over time, I find a map helps me go back to earlier portions that now need to be revised due to revelations later on.

Mapping a long work is different for every writer; it is my belief that most writers of long works do this in some way. I did attend a lecture by Carol Muske-Dukes once in which she claimed, to the surprise of others in the room, to do no such organizing - in fact, she didn't seem to know what that was even about - but then again, she's a poet, and writing novels is not her strong suit.

Some writers use a box of index cards to organize. Others draw elaborate maps on large sheets of paper. I prefer to create a written outline that reads like a detailed synopsis, mapping out, outline style, the entire book. The first time I did it for this book, which I'll nickname HH,  the latter half of the outline was thin and speculative.

Now I know very much how this book is going to go up until the last couple of chapters. So, with a lot more work done, it's time to take the old outline and rewrite. I'll  take two Word documents and put them side by side, the old outline on the left, and retype the whole thing. I find that exercise forces me to examine every element in the pre-existing outline. I then save the outline with a new name, and that way I have a copy of my old versions of the map.

Enough procrastinating...a-mapping I will go...

Random pic: view from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Every year there are thousands of writers retreats available, ranging from a couple of hundred bucks to thousands of dollars for more elaborate surroundings. On a drive up to Bemidji, Minnesota, this weekend, I saw these fishhouses on Lake Mille Lacs, and I thought, now there's a writer's retreat. Nothing but a box on the ice with a hole for catching your dinner. Put yerself out there, and don't let yerself back in 'till the novel's done.

This may be how Stephen King pumps out so much material...or not. Anyhow, perhaps there is something for the writer to learn from the frosty contemplation of ice fisherman, and the icy villages they create on northern lakes each winter.

I took a drive in the sunshine today, a little alone time before the family dinner.  Stopped at Coon Lake County Park, in northern Anoka County, Minnesota, and found a few lonely ice huts already out on the ice, a symptom of our cold winter (in the last few years, December has generally not been cold enough for ice fishing by Christmas). It was cold and quiet, very little wind, bright sunshine. After I stood by the lake's edge for a while, taking pictures, a fellow drove up in his old pickup. He rolled down the window and said, "beautiful, isn't it?" I answered yes, and he smiled, and then rolled up his window and slowly drove away.  Days like this bring out the nature lovers, even for a small lake like this one.





My semester in Fiction is over, thankfully, so I'm going to start posting more regularly again. I have to say, the class was a disappointment. I feel like I'm getting into a situation where the MFA program may be interfering with the writing I actually want to be doing right now.  Anybody out there have a similar experience? Feel free to leave a comment.

I'm leaning back in my sofa, watching and listening to an episode of Austin City Limits on our local PBS HD channel here in Minneapolis, and the band--if you can define them as such, or at all--is Polyphonic Spree.  They must have fifty people on stage, all in various brightly colored smocks. They have a horn section, a large chorus, wind instruments scattered throughout, a harpist, and a handsome lead singer.  Their music has a distinct 60's flavor with a large-scale optimism hard to find in popular music these days. They don't have "dancers", but every musician on the stage is constantly moving around, some to loose choreography. At one point a French Horn player desperately dodges the lead singer and several others in an attempt to just find a spot to play his part--which he does, beautifully.  The music is inspirational in feel, and you can see the entiire Spree getting onboard that feeling. With some bands, such intensity feels contrived, but these guys do it right.

Just watching this performance makes me feel like writing, makes my mind wander off into the last place I left a certain character, staring across a river from the bare lot of her former home.  The music contains strong emotional hooks, and those hooks awakened the experience of the character, Rachael, in my head. I scribble down some notes and get into the "mood" that will take me through Rachaels next trial and certain rebellion against the forces that have taken her home. 

A couple of years ago I watched Hiyao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away"--one of my favorite movies that inspires me to write--and on the DVD they had a special feature of The Making Of, as DVDs often do. Miyazaki talked about how he and his animators at Studio Ghibli had spent the ENTIRE production--years--listening, over and over, to only one song, by a Japanese singer and included in the credits on the film. It's a haunting, sad song,  and the film has a very similar tone.  As to me that film is Miyazki's greatest so far, the role played by that song intrigues me.  Music can certainly elicit emotion, but it seems that this song, repeated endlessly, was able to contain the emotional spectrum of the art being created around it.