Viable Paradise: A Travelogue (Part 5)

(The time between Travelogue parts is increasing, and the amount of detail is decreasing, the farther away I get from VP. It's been a bit over 2 weeks now and already the vividness--and the "dammitall" urge to steal sleep time away to write about it--is leaking away from me. Things are getting harder to remember, so I’m now entering the somewhat looser-with-the-truth realm of "memoir" rather than "journal". Argh. Must…finish….)

Thursday and its early morning group critique dawned far, far too soon for writers having gone to bed at nearly 3am the night before. Luckily, there was precedent (so my body didn't expect anything remotely resembling a full night's sleep). And there was coffee. I'd brought my own beloved Kauai Peaberry from home, and despite the absurdly tiny cups provided in the townhouse's kitchen that I was forced to drink it in, it made me oh so happy in the mornings.

Thursday's group critique was led by Cory Doctorow and Laura Mixon (this was the first time I'd really interacted much with Laura, and I was impressed by her quiet insight). Coffee plus the general boost of being a morning person got me through the critique, but either due to the sleep deprivation or to the fact that Thursday's writer in the hot seat was really quite talented, I didn't write down any particular notes from that critique.

After the group critique there was no rest for the wicked (or at least, the procrastinatory) and we all trooped over to the main room for the next set of lectures. Up today were Cory Doctorow and Steven Gould. I didn't write down the titles of either of their lectures. (Anyone else? Help!) Despite my layer of cottony exhaustion, both lectures were compelling and interesting and forced me to pay attention. Unfortunately, I didn't take nearly as many notes, so I refer you (and my future self) to Yeff's summary on his LJ for additional details. Below are some of the bits I did write down though.

Cory lectured on writing attitude/habits, composition and plotting, and being a 21st century writer. He's a high-energy (and highly interesting) person when he talks anyway, but he pours an extra jolt of voltage on when he's presenting to a group, so his lecture was not only incredibly helpful (like all the rest of the instructor lectures), but also incredibly entertaining. Some gems (those not reading these posts for the writing advice might want to skip this part, it gets kind of long):

Writing Attitude:
-Write with as little ceremony as possible. "Heroic" writing (pushing out work in giant chunks) makes everything harder--like climbing Mount Everest as opposed to going on your morning walk
-Rituals before writing (e.g. cleaning the desk, choosing the right music) accrete over time and make it harder to just get going and write
-Heroic, ceremonial writing makes for an unhappy writer
-Writing 20 minutes/1 page a day with no fuss and no drama is enough to get you roughly a novel a year
-Watch out for the "centipede's dilemma" ("How do you walk with all those legs?" "Gee, I never thought about it….CLUNK")--once you start closely examining your process, you might get stuck
-cheap writer tricks:
*add one sensory detail per page
*write on your books (the ones you read)--don't treat the pages as sacred, be an active reader, have a conversation with yourself while you read
*end your page a day with an unfinished sentence, so you can jump right in the next day (take advantage of built in momentum)
*blogging is a way to assemble pieces of the puzzle that you are trying to put together--keep assembling things that seem interesting or "backlit" to you, and put them in quick blog-bit form. Someday they will all start to click together in ways you never anticipated and may even self-assemble into the story
*initial pages are often "throat clearing" and can be cut (boy am I guilty of this)
*sometimes writers "overshoot" their endings--take the last sentence (or page!) off your story and see if it still works

Composition and plotting:
-Cory talked about his experience at Clarion (where he's now an instructor also), and how they were taught Algis Budrys' 7-point plot outline:
*person
*place
*problem (in an appropriate scale to start the story)
*characters try to solve the problem intelligently
*and fail
*and things get worse
*repeat until climax, then wrap it all up in the denouement (the shiny red bow on the package)
-This type of 7 point plot is an engine on a freight train, pulling the readers through the story--you can put whatever you want in the freight cars, but the engine drives the story and the readers want to go along.
-The 7-point plot is so ingrained in storytelling, it's "like a hack on our neurology"
-"We don't empathize with settings"
-When in doubt, figure out what you can do to make things worse for your characters
-When you're flailing around for the ending, go back to what you've already written and look to see if you've already given yourself some clues early on
-Nancy Kress says "a story is a transformation machine"--ask yourself, who changes the most in this story?
-Some great books for writers looking for info on how people work (or don't) how people can screw up social situations and how people can misinterpret each other: "Getting Things Done", "How To Win Friends and Influence People" and "The Feeling Good Handbook"
-"If you are going to use a cliché, use it with confidence and verve and move on quickly"
-Resist internet research--write "TK" and move on
-Download the US Census of names to use as a reference

Being a 21st Century Writer:
-With Creative Commons licenses you can pick the levels/options you want (e.g. commercial vs. non-commercial, remix OK or not OK, etc)
-Tim O'Reilly says in "Pirates Use Progressive Taxation" that most authors'/artists' problem is not piracy, it's obscurity
-A writer's concern should NOT be "how do we ensure that everyone who reads it pays for it" but "how do we make more money for it?"
-Screen time is really distracting for us as humans, which is why sometimes a simple interface (like a book) is better
-"It's not ever going to get any harder to copy stuff than it is right now"
-"Copyright protection" just winds up screwing up the social contract--it makes us all into criminals and makes us care less for the rule of law
-Telling stories and sharing information is an inherently anti-authoritarian act
-"The reason why authors are poorly compensated is because we lack leverage"
-Podcasting is an incredible way to get people to feel like you (the author/reader) are their buddy--it gives a certain level of intimacy

Steve Gould's lecture on "The Writer's Life" was so generally commonsensical and reasonable that I wound up mostly nodding along instead of writing down notes (and no, I don't think the sleep deprivation had anything to do with it). Here are the few little bits I *did* write down:
-"Control what you can control and don't worry about the rest" (words to live by)
-"Ubiquitous capture"--make sure you always have a way to capture an idea, because ideas come everywhere at every time
-Try an "idea jar" or "ideal drawer"--jot down ideas on slips of paper, put them in a jar or drawer and pull one (or several) out when you need it (this is similar to Cory's blog of interesting bits idea)
-"Rejectomancy"--the obsessive scholarship around rejection letters which tries to imbue meaning into things that have no meaning
-NEVER respond to bad reviews (and don't send thank you notes for good reviews)
-Don't drive yourself crazy with comparisons to other authors
-"Don't Be A Jerk"--not to anyone. The relationship between creators and fans is very close in the F/SF community, and it's a small community to begin with.

After lectures it was time for lunch, and instead of listening to Steve Gould's optional lecture "Adventures in Hollyweird" (where he talked about his experience with his book Jumper that's been turned into a big Hollywood movie only faintly similar to the original) I tried to squeeze out a little more homework writing before it was time to go share what we'd written. Unfortunately I was so generally muddled and befuddled by then that after a few minutes of trying, I just gave up and went over to the staff room to print what I'd managed to get done. Then it was back to the common room, where we broke down into small groups and shared what we'd written, and eventually came back together as a big group where each instructor gave an elevator pitch for what had been written by the students in their group. We taped our stories up to the walls, where they remained for perusal for the next couple days.

As for what I wrote--well, I'm not going to share the story online (because it does contain some pretty foul language), but if anyone truly is dying to read it, I'm happy to email it to you. Let me just say this about what I was trying to work with though: My story was supposed to be a fantasy with no magic or elves, "action with a noir feel" set in the 1950's somewhere other than the USA. My "person", "place" and "problem" were "bastard professor", "flying convenience store" and "hole in head", respectively. My toys that I had to work in were a pterodactyl foam glider and a "puny plane". My character that was someone whom I did not like/agree with, but had to paint as a sympathetic character turned out to be the main character, and he was a racist, sexist, foul-mouthed military pilot who loved flying with fierce intensity and eventually wound up Doing The Right Thing. I had a lot of fun writing it (not least because of the chance to do some really creative cursing and then read it out loud to people), and it certainly felt good to stretch and play a little with something that was just so out of my usual writing style and setting. I don't know as I'll ever finish it (well, at least not any time soon), but I'm glad I did it.

After the presentation of homework assignments, it was time for a well-deserved celebration, which took the form of some truly delicious pizza for dinner and the infamous "Beer With Billy" (reading a Shakespeare play while drinking). The play this year was Richard III, which is one I've never read or seen. I got the part of Queen Elizabeth (mostly because I wasn't paying attention to how big or small the parts were and just went for one that made the ex-Ren Faire geek in me go "oooo"). Unfortunately it was kind of a small and boring part overall, though it's always fun to read Shakespeare out loud. And by the time we got to the ending of the play, we were all tipsy and/or punchy enough to find unintentional double entendres hilarious (like stage directions that said "Enter [character name]" or "coming into tent"). There was a point where Cory started saying "ow" every time Jim read a stage direction that said "Enter [character name]" and then the rest of the group picked it up and ran with it for the rest of the play, getting sillier and sillier. I took a quick break during the fun to go call home for kid bedtime, so apparently I missed the most hilarious bits, but you can get Yeff's much better description of the whole thing here.
Eventually the tent and the word "ow" became VPXI's unofficial logo and tagline. (Pam even made a nifty LJ icon for VPXI based on this--and I'm hoping for t-shirts at some point. Viva the obscure in-joke!)

We were all pretty exhausted after all that hilarity (and I was only operating on 3ish hours of sleep anyway) so it was off to bed at that point.

With only one more official day to go in the workshop, will our Heroine ever get a chance to actually see anything on the island besides jellyfish, a seafood shack and a lovely pebbly beach? Will she have any final amazing experiences with overwhelmingly brilliant instructors? Why yes, she will…details next time.