Awooga! Awooga! Stepping into the Landmine of Fan Fiction

Way back before the last ice age, when Cranky Rah's husband, the Poet-Accountant, was still an accountant, he got to audit a nuclear power plant to make sure they had all the uranium they thought they had. (If you're a nuclear power plant and you don't have all the uranium you think you have, that is Bad.)

As you can imagine, there's a lot of security and pretty intense safety procedures at a nuclear facility. The Poet-Accountant didn't have to wear one of those radiation suits, but he did have a special badge that tracked the amount of radiation he was exposed to. Still, I thought the best piece of advice he got was this:

When you hear the awooga! awooga! alarm, drop everything you're doing and run. Upwind. Fast.

This next topic makes me want to do that a little, but I'm going to brave it anyway.

Over the summer, I had a great back and forth with one of The Three. S was struggling with developing one of her characters, and we talked about how she should think about her main character's background and experiences and the character's relationship with other characters and even other characters' relationships with each other and how that might reflect on the main character.

Then one day, I ran into S (okay, actually, I was trying to chase her down at the rock climbing gym but totally failed because I was anchored to another climber), and she announced that she hated her story. That's okay, I told her. When you're stuck, it's all right to set it aside for a little while; you can always go back to it later. "No," she said, "I just hate it."

Yikes. Of course there are times when there's just nothing to write about. Maybe you're really busy or your creativity is totally drained. Maybe you're just not feeling it. Maybe you're thinking it would be better to start an origami boat business with all that paper you bought for writing on. A lot of people who talk about writing will tell you that you have to suck it up and keep writing anyway. Whatever. Unless you're trying to make a living off writing, I honestly don't see the point in forcing it. (Landmine #1!) My advice: Take a break. Chill out. Life's too short to write something you're not passionate about.

Luckily, that wasn't what was going on with S. She wanted to write; she just couldn't. She was having the Dread Writer's Block and didn't know what to do about it.

Here's my controversial advice to S: Trying writing some fan fiction. (Landmine #2!)

Before you freak out and start throwing paper airlines full of rude messages into my cave, hear me out.

A lot of authors complain about fan fiction—and I get it. I don't want people writing about my characters and then posting it all over the Internet, either. (So don't do that.)  

But you're juggling a lot when you write stories: plot, setting, character development (and characters that can't just be interesting but have to change, too), tension, narrative voice, dialogue. It's a lot to bite off, especially for young writers. Borrowing an idea (don't say stealing; we're just absconding with it temporarily) can be a fun and easy way to break through that Wall.

Just find a character or a world you like, one you feel like you already know. Pick a book or story or song you love. Does one of the characters do something you wish they hadn't—or don't do something you wish they had? Did the plot go in a direction you didn't want it to? Use that as a jumping off point and rewrite. Change it. Add new scenes. Introduce new characters.

There's a bad 80s movie (and I mean bad) called Solarbabies. (I told you it was bad.) It was a bad movie (did I mention that?), but I thought some aspects of the premise were kind of interesting. So I played around with rewriting the story. I kept some of the characters and changed others. Some of those others became characters with their own stories. Eventually, an idea for a desert dystopia of my own came out of it. (And perhaps eventually it will make its way out of my brain and into an origami boat.)

Even if nothing ever comes of it, I was writing and practicing and having fun, and that's really the point, especially when you're learning to write.

Here are a few other ideas for destroying the Block:

• Go to a random name generator, and generate until you find a name that makes you go Hmmmm... I also love the site Serendipity, which will generate random descriptions of cities, strongholds and interesting sites, as well as names.
• Do the old Flip the Fairy Tale trick. Think about your favorite fairy tale or nursery rhyme and find a way to rewrite it fresh, a la Cinder. Or write from a secondary character's point of view, a la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
• Play around with Google Images. Search until you find a person, a locale, an object that fascinates you, then go write about it. 
• Go to the bookstore (or to Amazon.com) and browse book titles. Find one you dig, and write your own story for it.
• Listen to music. The Three love to write from music.
• Take a page from Ray Bradbury. That man loved lists, and he used them to brainstorm. Here's a list he made, starting with the word lake and letting his brain take him wherever it would:

The lake. The night. The crickets. The ravine. The attic. The basement. The trapdoor. The baby. The crowd. The night train. The fog horn. The scythe. The carnival. The carousel. The dwarf. The mirror maze. The skeleton.

Or just wait for it. Ray Bradbury said, "If you have writer's block, you can cure it right now by stopping what you're writing and doing something else."

Oh! My Eyes! (Or: The Perils of Critiquing)

Maybe you've figured out by now that Cranky Rah is fond of her cave. It's quiet. Solitary. Adorned with paintings of earthy colored dun horses and aurochs and what may be a cave hyena. Those weird angular petroglyphs on the walls? They translate into the Kafka: Even night is not night enough.

That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

Did I mention it's quiet?

And, yet, Cranky Rah does come out on occasion. On Fridays, for tacos. On the last Thursday of each month for the James River Writers Writing Show. And of course to hang with The Three every month or so and find out what they've been working on and to throw some crazy freewrites their way.

You know what they say about the road being paved with good intentions, right? I'm pretty sure it's The road to summer is paved with good intentions. Because The Three and I had every intention of getting together every month this summer to talk and share writing.

Then life got in the way.

But even though we never got together, everyone kept writing. And we all used this miraculous technology called e-mail to share with each other. This is way better than how we did it in the Stone Age.

One of the advantages of e-mail sharing to a reader is that you can read, ponder and then reply with feedback at your leisure. One of the advantages of e-mail sharing to a writer is that is you can cry in private when you read the feedback.

I'm just kidding. We never cry. Really.

The truth, though, shockingly, is that giving other writers feedback on their work can be intimidating. Ditto on receiving feedback yourself. And honestly, sometimes you'll whiff it. Sometimes your feedback will hurt someone's feelings or be totally off-base. (With continued apologies to my dear friend Neurotic K.)

Sometimes, you won't take the feedback well yourself. You'll take it personally. You'll feel like you were just stabbed. You'll be sure the world is ending, and you'll be tempted to crawl, whimpering, back into the darkness of your own cave.


But don't. I promise that feedback can be your friend.

Here's the mantra when you're giving feedback: Be specific, but be kind.

Under the Be specific portion: "It was really neat" isn't particularly helpful. Calling out words and phrases gives the writer an idea of what she's doing right and what resonates with you, the reader. Like this:

I liked the way you described the sounds and smells of the attack, especially snarling and when Margot says, "It's true that blood really does taste like iron!"

Under Be kind: It doesn't matter if the person you're reading for is your best friend. Hearing critique can be really hard—even and especially from best friends. So be kind but truthful. If something doesn't work for you, think about why. Don't write Dude, that Mephistopheles is like such a nosy, goody-two-shoes. Try I wonder what experience Mephistopheles had that makes him think that deal with the Devil is a good idea?

For a good starter set of the types of topics you can think about when crafting your feedback, check out the critique tips from Short Story Group. Dinna fash (that's Scots for don't worry): Your feedback doesn't have to cover all the topics discussed in the article or even be excruciatingly detailed. For just general feedback, you can stick with this rule of thumb:

1. Tell the writer something you liked in the piece.
2. Tell the writer something you'd like to see expanded, explained or worked on.
3. End with a compliment.

And before you hit send on that e-mail, shooting it off into the great Netherworld where it cannot be retrieved and changed, reread it one last time and ask yourself how you would feel if you were the one about to read it.

What about when you're the writer who's just split blood all over the page and now has to read that maybe, just maybe, something didn't quite work or could be improved?

First, take a deep breath and remember that the human body has between three and five liters of blood, so you really aren't going to die. Then, be open-minded. You might be amazed at what great ideas can come out of other people's feedback. I once threw a six-year-old girl out of a tree because of some feedback. (Thank you, Neurotic K!) It was such a little thing (well, not for the girl), and yet it totally opened up the story I was writing, tied into a crippled bird motif running through the book and got that little girl injured (she needed to be) in just the right way.

Remember that in the end, you're the one writing this world. Take what works for you; discard what doesn't. But really think about each comment, and if you reject it, have a good reason.

(No little girls were injured in the writing of this blog.)

Words Rah Loves: Widdershins

In the novel I'm reading, one of the characters walks widdershins three times around a burned house, and he does this to keep the ghost who presumably inhabits the remains from following him.

Ah, widdershins! I love this word.

It comes from one of my favorite languages, German, and is used chiefly by my favorite people, the Scots. The Middle Low German weddersinnes comes from wider, meaning against or back, and sinnen, meaning to travel or go (or "in the direction of," depending on which etymological source you're looking at). So widdershins means to go in a direction contrary to the journey of the sun, or anticlockwise.

According to Wikipedia (who supposedly got it straight from the Oxford English Dictionary, the horse's mouth of dictionaries), the first use of the word comes from the early 1500s: Widdersyns start my hair. Which is a lovely way of saying your hair is standing on end.

It's almost onomatopoetic, isn't it? Widdershins sounds a little off kilter, like not only are you walking the absolutely wrong direction (because everyone walks clockwise), but you're probably a little tipsy while you're doing it.

This is a word clearly underused. I'm going to walk widdershins around my cave right now, just so I can tell someone I did it.

Unfortunately, I might come to a bad end if I do this. Walking widdershins around something, especially a church, is supposed to be very unlucky. Which makes me wonder why the guy in the novel I'm reading did that, especially because he is a Scot and should know better. Then again, he's left-handed, like me, and many of us take a...contrary view of this idea that right is somehow right.

Widdershiners of the world, unite! You never know the Good we might do, simply by being contrary. After all, Superman flew widdershins around the world to rewind time and save Lois Lane. That was pretty lucky.

Group Hug: Pick a Name, Any Name

Generally Cranky Rah likes to write alone in her cave, but when The Three come for a visit, we all hang and do freewrites and writing exercises together. Let's call this one Pick a Name, Any Name.

1. Find a random name generator online (there are a bunch of them out there), and generate a name—or five or six. When we did this, we kept going until we found one we all liked (relatively speaking). If I remember correctly (and, honestly, the likelihood of that is pretty slim), we wrote from the name Paxton.

2. Spend about 10 minutes with everyone writing on her own, spinning a character based on the name. Everyone writes from the same name.

3. Squabble over who gets to read first, then share.

All of the characters we created were vastly different from each other. We were split 50-50 on gender, and we even each ended up with multiple spellings of the name: Paxton, Packston and Joe. (That would be L with the eclectic spelling.)

This is a fun exercise anytime, really, but it's also good for when you're in the doldrums of writer's block or if a character's not really working for you anymore. Not sure who someone in your story is or where he's going? Maybe he's not a Butch, he's a Kristof. Or maybe he's not a Kristof, he's just plain Chris. Even within one name, you often have a lot of options. Christopher, Kristof, Chrissy and Topher are all very different characters.

In fact, you could have fun doing a freewrite in which all of the characters' names are just variations of the same name. Hey, that sounds good. Take 10 minutes. Ready? Go.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: Quirks and Tells

Cranky Rah's been in the cave writing a lot lately, so let's delve into the stalactite-y landscape of her mind and see what's there (besides tacos).

Ah, quirks and tells. Those little things that make a character real, both to the writer and the reader.

Quirks are a person's weird, unusual habits (don't tell me you don't have any). One of my characters likes to invent and build; he uses his bedroom walls like a whiteboard, drawing schematics and equations on them with a Sharpie (don't try this at home). When he's done with a set of diagrams, he whitewashes over them with paint. When he doesn't have a notebook to hand, he takes notes on his jeans.

Giving a character a quirk or two makes them memorable to a reader; it can also create tension or inspire scenes. When my character starts writing chemical formulas instead of mechanical schematics on the wall, is it just because he's trying out a new science or a sign he's starting to experiment with his crazy uncle's voodoo medicine even though it's nearly killed him before?

Tells are like quirks that give something away. We talk about tells in poker: Maybe a player always sneezes when she has a good hand. My father-in-law whistles thematically (and unconsciously), so when someone tells a story about a house that burned down, about 10 minutes later you'll hear him whistling that song Eternal Flame by the Bangles. This could be pretty inconvenient for an arsonist.

You don't want to overdo it; quirks and tells are a spice. Like cumin in taco meat. Ooo, tacos... Gotta go.