He couldn’t have been more of a jerk, this handsome young man who worked at the ticket counter of the funiculare. (A train on a cable that runs up and down the very steep hill to the medieval town in Italy where I moved last fall.)
Of course, it was our fault. Local residents can buy a pass that is good for multiple tickets. I have one and my mom has a handicapped one that let’s her go through the special handicapped gate, since she can’t get the walker through the turnstile on the regular gate. You swipe your pass and the gate opens.
With her walker, my mom is like a greyhound. I can’t keep up with her. So I was shocked to discover, after I had swiped her pass for the handicapped gate, she had paused to dither and was not right behind me. The gate opened and closed without her. When I tried to reopen it with the pass, it wouldn’t.
Thereafter ensued a comedy of errors in which we wound up with both of us inside the gate and the walker still outside. Finally, I was able to get the handicapped gate to open, I dashed through backwards, grabbed the walker and shot back in. We got on the funiculare, having only spent four tickets for two people.
But then, here comes the ticket guy, who tells me I have to swipe my ticket yet again. I tried to explain what happened and that I had already spent four tickets because my mother didn’t get through the first time. He informed me that I must obey the rules. And, by the way, I must muzzle my dog. (At this, Prose looked at him to reveal her black muzzle the size of a thimble.) “Ok,” he said, “but you must swipe your ticket again.”
Even without a nasty ticket agent, it’s a little terrifying.
So I did, and we made it home. But my mother was livid. “These people are rude. And they don’t like Americans.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“No they don’t. It goes back the War.” She can’t get it through her head that by the time Mussolini fell, no one was happier that most of the Italians.
She flounced into her recliner. “I hate this place. I want to go home.”
One man. One incident out of literally hundreds of interactions with Italians who have been beyond helpful, kind and generous, including the city worker who got dog bit rescuing Prose from a pit bull. When I finally found him a week later to thank him, he was unable to tell me the feeling he had when he saw Prose being carried off and me in hysterics. So he laid his hand over his heart.
But I do understand something of what my mother feels. There’s a vulnerability in being in a new country, and the tiniest things can have a huge impact on our moods. If the woman checking my groceries is hateful, I feel belittled. I, too, might think, maybe we should go home. If then, on the way back to our apartment, ten people I don’t know smile and say buongiorno, I think, what a warm, friendly place. I want to stay forever. But most of this is my own overreaction, my own inner weather.
I think we do the exact same thing with our writing. We are so sensitive to the opinions of others. If we let a friend or family member read something we’ve written (which I don’t recommend), unless they write an oath in blood that it should win the National Book Award, we are plunged into self-doubt. Maybe we should just quit.
If we have trouble finding the information we need, if our timeline won’t work out, if we read what we wrote yesterday and conclude it’s worse than awful, we are so despondent, we have to eat a large bag of Funyons (ok, maybe that’s just me.) And when we reach that stage of sending it out to agents, we have to buy our Funyons by the case.
None of this is connected to reality. Our friends are not likely to be literary authorities, and all writers suffer from timeline snafus or swing wildly from thinking their own work is great to using it for toilet paper. That is the nature of the beast called a writer.
To lay aside our writing because of some negative moment is as silly as my mom and I leaving Italy because one man was a jerk.
And the rest of that story? I went back to him. I told him I wanted his name so that when I told my friends how rude he had been, I could use his name. I told him that my mother thought he hated Americans.
“No Madame, I love Americans! It is my dream to visit New York. And Chicago!” And, of course, that led to a real conversation toward the end of which he said, “It’s this guy over here.” He pointed to the empty desk where his supervisor usually sat. “Twenty years I’ve had this job and I love to come to work. But then this guy comes and now I hate my job. He’s always onto me. Obey the rules! He calls me back from home if I fail to do one little thing on the reports.”
Was he playing me? Maybe. But I felt better. I think we’ll stay.
–Alison
Last week, I was reminded of some truths about research.
- What you need is not always in the most obvious place.
- Going back to a place/person can turn up more.
- Your intuition may be right.
- Nothing is as inspirational as feet on the ground.
I have fallen in love with the plot in which my main character is inspired to tell his story when he finds an Etruscan coffin (actually they were called funerary urns and held ashes) on which were carved images from the deceased Etruscan man’s life. I want my character to say:
This unknown man who preserved the events of his life through carvings of himself and a woman, children, a horse, a ship, continues to call to me, and even in the night I sometimes come out and study it. It raises more questions than it gives answers: who was the man, why did the child die, what is the meaning of the horse, the ship?
I know that I will never know the answers to these questions. And yet, at some place deep within me, I know the man. He is no longer just one of that mysterious race we call Etruscan. He is saved from oblivion by his story, vague and incomplete as it is.
But, unfortunately, when I visited all the great Etruscan sites near Rome, I learned that these funerary pieces depicted religious symbols—gods and sacrifices, etc.
Well, bummer. I decided maybe I would just invent a funerary urn with a personal story—there might have been one, right?
But then, in San Gimignano, the town that I can see in the distance when I look out my bedroom window, I found funerary urns that were much smaller and cruder than the ones in Rome. With family events carved around the base. Apparently the Tuscan Etruscans valued their personal stories.
Sometimes, what you need is not in the Library of Congress but in your own little corner—in your local library or in the mind of your elderly neighbor. Sometimes it’s better not to settle for the “best,” but to keep looking.
This family’s story included a horse.
My other ah-ha moment of last week occurred when I revisited the underground rooms beneath the hotel in my little village of Certaldo, where this novel is set. I only went back to take an American friend. The owner had shown it all to me before, relating how the ceiling collapsed sometime in the past, but no one knows when, effectively sealing off a whole area of rooms. He basically gave us the same tour, but this time, he happened to mention the bats.
“I don’t know where they get in,” he said. “They don’t come through the hotel, so obviously, somehow there is an opening from the sealed rooms to the outside.” Then he shone his light into the small opening above the mound of debris that blocked a flight of stairs going down to somewhere and, sure enough, there was a bat.
One of the hotel’s underground rooms with a mysterious double wall.
These stairs once led down to a lower level, but a cave-in has sealed those rooms. What’s in them? No one knows, and the architect says it’s too dangerous to find out. But the bats know.
Why this matters is that my characters, who are trapped down there, can now see a bat and realize that the legends about a tunnel leading out could be true. And that will be a big moment in my plot.
If you went back to a site in your story—perhaps at a different time of year, perhaps accompanied by someone with fresh eyes, perhaps understanding better now what you are looking for, would you find something that you hadn’t seen before? Maybe. If you revisited someone you interviewed previously, might they say something new? Probably.
Research is like peeling back the layers of an onion. You can go deeper by looking at smaller, less well-known sources. You can go deeper by revisiting sources that you think you’ve already mined.
And if you have a feeling, such as my instinct that some people would have wanted their own stories on their funerary urns, don’t ignore it. That research intuition comes from the same place inspiration comes from–that mysterious source of our story in the first place.
– Alison
Last week I announced the wrong date for my webinar titled “Make 2018 the Year of Your Story.” The correct date is this Wednesday, December 13, at noon Central Time.
On the call, I’ll be talking about the THREE essential things for making long-term progress with your writing—actually, with anything. If you want, you can write a book in 2018. No, really, you can.
This will be set up as a webinar, so you will just call in and listen and text in the chat room. Register HERE. We are asking for a $5 donation to the Village Writing School.
This week, my mom went through a crabby few days. No, she said, she didn’t want to walk around and look at Christmas lights. No, she didn’t want to get dressed. No, she didn’t want to eat the meal I fixed that she requested thirty minutes earlier.
Finally my halo slipped, and I said, “What the heck is wrong with you?”
“I’m old and deaf and blind. Sometimes I realize it and it’s depressing.”
Well, yeah. And I can’t fix any of that.
“There’s only one solution,” she said. “I just have to think about what I have. It could be worse.”
While I think “It could be worse” is a little back-handed way of celebrating, I know what she means.
2017 has been a year of disappointment for some of us. A year of pain and confusion and massive adjustment, which we may not yet be through. In addition to the most ridiculous divorce in history, in addition to giving up the house I build and lovingly living in for decades, I had a major disappointment in my writing. The New York editor whom I thought was going to trim a little history came back with the decree that “this needs to be written as a thriller.” Thrillerizing it was going to require a massive rewrite that I opted not to do.
But that in no way lessened the pain of feeling rejected and misunderstood. I truly thought that manuscript would be my debut novel. Someone should write a country song for writers and make sure there is lots of whining and wailing.
But . . . following my mom’s philosophy, it could be worse.
We’re in Italy, which is fascinating, and the people are wonderful to us, and every day is an adventure of one kind or another. But honestly, I’d rather have had my book published. Or gotten the right agent.
So, we have these dialogues with ourselves. I lost this, but there’s still this. My mom would say, “I can’t see or hear, but at least I’m not alone. I’m never bored because my daughter is unpredictable and my dog just went by carrying the fly swatter.”
We try to muster up some excitement for the new year even though some of us may find 2018 just a little hard to get excited about. Our country is reeling from a string of disasters of unprecedented severity. Floods and fires, storms and shooters. And politics has never looked so… political. We’re worried and sad. We’re growing tired and jaded.
Maybe, we’re growing tired and jaded about our writing. Maybe we are worn out with thinking about this story that we want to write but still haven’t started after all these years. Maybe we have multiple manuscripts in boxes in our closet and we wonder: what’s it all for? Maybe we are burned out with trying to figure out how to sell these books or build a platform that truly connects with readers in a meaningful way. Maybe we’ve edited and edited and we don’t know how to know if we’re done. Maybe we’re beginning to wonder if it’s worth it.
My friend calls this “inner weather.” I love that. Because what’s the one thing we know about the weather? It will change. If it’s stormy, or dark and dismal, we just hunker down and get through it.
2018 stands before us bright and shining and full of potential. If last year was not our year, that in no way means that this year won’t be. 2018 may surprise us. In fact, it will, if we surprise ourselves. If we do something different that we haven’t done before. Something to get us thinking creatively, something to keep us motivated, something that gives us enough satisfaction as we go along to keep us in it for the long haul.
It’s not 2018’s fault that we have failed in past years to be true to our dreams. It’s not 2018’s fault if 2017 has left us disappointed and exhausted.
2018 is standing here in his diaper saying, “Let’s GO! I’ll go down in history as your year. The year you made real progress, the year you finished, the year you published, the year YOUR writing dream (or whatever dream) came true.”
I think we should give 2018 the benefit of the doubt. I think, as you bake your cookies or hang your ornaments, you should think about what you really want to accomplish with your writing in the coming year. I think we should talk about it on Wednesday, and you can find out more about that call HERE.
Let’s stand together to make 2018 our year.
– Alison
P.S. You can share this post on social media via my blog. Also, please connect with me on Twitter and Facebook!
The winter holidays are both about giving thanks and making plans for the new year, about looking back in gratitude and ahead with resolve. Here’s a partial list of what we writers can be grateful for as we look ahead to making the new year our most creative ever.
I am thankful for the power of story to heal us and connect us and empower us.
I am thankful to stand on the shoulders of giants. That Boccaccio discovered “ordinary” people were complex and conflicted and quirky. That Shakespeare taught us to turn a word. That Chekov showed us the short story. That Atwood and Le Guin, O’Connor and Steinbeck, and all the rest in their varying greatness lead us into the labyrinths within us and sometimes show us a little light on the other side.
I am thankful that writing is a cheap endeavor. That we don’t need equipment or supplies. That a story can be written on a paper bag or a prison wall. That I’ll never fail to convey my vision simply because I’ve run out of burnt umber.
On the other hand, I am thankful for computers and the internet that serve up the whole world and all the ages of history right to my desk so that I can write books I could never have written without them.
I am thankful that so many people realize the importance of story and are so willing to give their time to us writers to show us places, tell us stories, discuss their research. I am thankful for scientists of all fields and scholars of all fields and experts of all fields who probe and publish their findings, for all information is fodder for a story.
I am thankful for other writers around the world who are willing to write about their ideas of craft or their sources of inspiration or the mystical, magical process of creation to help me understand what the heck I’m doing. I am thankful for the writers I know who think two hours discussing our plots is just the best way to spend an afternoon and who pray for me and ask me hard questions about my characters and hold my feet to the fire when I don’t produce.
I am thankful for the vast numbers of readers who buy books because they long to experience life through other lens and who appreciate a well-written story and who make us feel that what we do is important.
I am thankful that at this stage of my life I have let go of some the perfectionism in other areas that was consuming my time and energy and holding back my writing.
We are carried on the shoulders of a vast crowd: the writers who have gone before, the people who daily contribute to the total collection of world knowledge, the people who share with us in interviews and otherwise support our research, and especially, the readers who believe that stories matter. Writers are a winning team, lifted to the skies by fans of a good story, buoyed up by support and appreciation of our efforts.
We are the storytellers, honored since the first ones told around the fire what they saw across the far mountain or how they escaped that sabertooth tiger or how that star is a god and that one is a dog.
We are the storytellers, and I am thankful to be one.
— Alison
For years, I lived in a “holler” in the Ozark mountains, rarely saw anyone except at Wal-Mart, and had no social life beyond my Sunday appearance at church. I come from generations of women whose default setting is suspicion. I was insecure myself and never knew what to say/do in social situations. Every party gave me a migraine. I also had a disdain for chatty women who seized innocent bystanders—often me—and drove us to the point of murder by twittering about whatever topic seemed to pop at random into their heads.
With all that in play, there was no way I would ever strike up a conversation with a stranger.
However, through the years I have discovered that when I tell people I am writing a book, their eyes light up. Maybe they love to read. Maybe they would love to write themselves. Maybe they can’t imagine how anyone does it.
I have learned that you can begin to find readers even if you are not yet published, don’t have a “platform,” are not on every social media channel, have a blog/newsletter, or any of the other things we are constantly told are essential. You don’t have to be a world traveler, a marketing expert, or a media maven.
There are people around us all the time, and we are all waiting. Waiting for the line to move, waiting for the game to begin, waiting for our name to be called at the dentist. Just before I left Rogers, I was in a restaurant with a writer friend who struck up a conversation with the lady whose booth backed up to hers. They both were waiting for their food and had turned sideways to stretch out their legs. Then they began chatting about the peanuts on the floor. Next thing I knew, the writer was talking about her book and the woman was sharing her own related experiences.
I am not suggesting that you “sell.” I am giving you permission to talk about something that is very close to your heart. How real is that?
You need three things:
#1 A Filtered Opening Conversation
Open with a friendly comment. If the whole thing falls flat, no worries. You haven’t lost a thing. If the person responds and you kick off a conversation, don’t launch into a long story. Lob the conversation ball back rather than grabbing it and running full speed away like Prose does. Use some judgment to talk about what might be of interest. Gauge how much time you have. A line at the post office won’t take as long as a flight to Chicago—hopefully.
Say you are a writer. If you haven’t started your book yet, own the dream. “I’m beginning a novel about ___.” “I’m about to start my memoir about ____.”
Figure out a way to describe your project in one or two sentences. DON’T TELL THE WHOLE STORY. You have to learn to be succinct. But let your passion show. Why do you want to write this story?
Listen. Maybe they have some thoughts on your topic. Maybe they used to live in your setting. Maybe they had a cousin who had a similar experience as yours or your character’s. Maybe they also dream of writing a story. BUT LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE. Even if you have all night on a plane to London, don’t go on and on. Leave a little mystery.
#2 A Vehicle to Keep the Dialogue Going
No, you don’t have to be on every social media channel. But you should have at least one online location out of which to connect.
This should be a curated channel. By that I mean a social medium, such as Facebook, or a blog or something online in which you speak to the themes of your book or your writing life. On this channel, you are the same interesting person speaking about your passion as the person they just met waiting for a table at Olive Garden. You do not suddenly become Ms. Political Rant or Mr. Off-Color Jokester unless that’s your book.
Ask directly. “Are you on Facebook? I post about my [research, story, journey].”
#3 Have Amazing Contact Cards.
I resisted having my picture on my cards until it was pointed out to me how this helps people remember who the heck you are. It doesn’t have to be a head shot. It can be you doing something related to your book or its setting. On the back, have your email and all your online links. You don’t have to have your phone number if that makes you uneasy, though I do. Don’t have your address or agree to meet a stranger in a dark alley. Do have a little byline if you can think of one that sums up your writing.
Finally, don’t work like a politician. It’s not about passing out your cards to everyone. It’s about finding those people—and they will be the minority—who are interested in your book and providing them a way to stay connected.
This is not only about selling a book. It’s about relating to people who are drawn to your story. You will know them when you meet them, but you have to open the door to your writing and invite them in. If you do, they will bring you assistance, connections, knowledge, insights, encouragement, and a sense that you are not alone on this very isolated journey. They will enrich your life in ways that you can’t imagine as you, and your ongoing story, enrich theirs.
Have you had an interaction with a stranger who impacted your writing? I’d love to hear about it. Reply and let me know.
– Alison
If you’re tired of hearing about my Italian adventure, you’re not alone. I’m tired of writing about it. At first, it was so difficult, it was funny. Now, it’s not so difficult and not so funny. Now, it feels like the long haul. Day after day of figuring stuff out, making mistakes, taking baby steps forward while sometimes losing ground.
A lot like writing a novel.
My biggest challenge right now is learning Italian. La lingua italiana has me thrown to the ground and is kicking me in the stomach. I have committed to myself to spend three hours a day on learning this language. Holy clocks, Batman, that’s a lot of time.
Certain wise friends mention gently that it’s really hard to learn a language when you’re older than—say—five. Or at least older than—say—twenty-five. But, I’m not listening to them. Why?
Because I’ve written a novel. A whole 100,000+-word novel all the way to the end. No, it’s not published, and yes, it probably needs some more polishing, but it is written to the end.
And that, gentle readers, changes you forever.
I am serious. If you’ve written a complete novel, then you have super powers. You are unafraid of the challenges that other people don’t even consider trying because they’ve heard that it can’t be done or it takes too much time or whatever. You scoff because you know the secret. A huge project, whether learning a language or writing a novel, happens day after day after day. And if you take a bite every day, you can eat a dinosaur. With sides and dessert.
My second novel went faster because I knew more about what I was doing. It got closer to finding a publisher. This Boccaccio novel is on track to be finished by spring. This could be the one. Or not.
But if I never get published, I am so much better for having written these books. They have taught me the power of process. They have taught me that success comes from a plan, a routine, and dogged perseverance.
Every day, I read Italian for an hour out loud, I spend an hour reviewing my text book, thirty minutes working with my tiny flash card app, thirty minutes working with a deck of 150 Italian verbs printed on 3 x 5 cards. I do this every day.
Yeah, I’d rather go to Florence and buy a purse. Or see wax models of plague victims—darn, that’s fun. But here I sit, conjugating verbs. Why? Because I had good reasons to learn Italian:
- my research will benefit;
- I’ll gain the ability to see better into another culture;
- my brain will benefit from the exercise;
- I won’t accidentally buy a can of octopus.
All seriously good reasons. And those reasons didn’t go away because the going got tough. Don’t ever forget your “why,” someone told me. If you keep your “why” in front of you, you’ll find your “how.”
So just keep plodding forward and finish your book or something equally huge. And for you, what is that huge thing? Name it! What have you wanted to do/learn that you thought was too big? Or maybe there is a big thing that you can name that would benefit your writing.
Once you finish one giant thing like a novel—once you see the (super)power of the process—nothing can stop you.
Piano, piano si va lontano.
Slowly, slowly, one goes far.
Alison
