If my answers frighten you
then you should cease asking scary questions.
- Jules Winnfield: Pulp Fiction

I sincerely appreciate all the e-mailed I get. Writing is all about communicating. I’d much rather converse than lecture, but some of the questions I receive are repeated so often that I thought this was a relatively painless way to share with you a little more about myself and my words.

You will be, when I manage to get them published. Autographed copies of Chaos and Other Love Stories, slated for mid 2004 and The Window, in early 2005, will be available for purchase through this web site. Unsigned copies will be available on Amazon.com and other sites yet to be listed.

My first answer is that I have many things to say and the commensurate talent to do so. The real answer comes from my sister, Susan, who once told me that when I’m not writing – I’m not quite sane.

I get that question the most often. My standard answer is that I like the supernatural and the fantastic, but mostly, I like subtlety and against a black background a candle flame is bright.

Now, let me tell you why I think you don’t like that answer. I think you are asking a different question. And here is why…

I was once in a writing class with my daughter and husband, where as an exercise, we all took a relational psychology test. It began with, “You are walking in the woods…” and continued with discoveries like: “you find a key, what does it look like, and what do you do with it?” Then, “you find a cup, a body of water, an animal, a house, etc. Without being told their symbolism, we were asked to write the answers in a descriptive paragraph and read the paragraph to the class. The trees represent one’s friends, the key one’s education; the cup, one’s marriage; the body of water, one’s sex life; the house, one’s ambition, etc.

A fellow student began to read what appeared at first blush to be a humorous version, but ended with greater gravity. His was a forest of dead trees spiking into the blackened sky. He lost the key, he smashed the cup, he stepped in a cold mud puddle and the house he found was burning to the ground as evidenced by the smoke filled sky. Filling the prolonged silence that followed his piece - my daughter involuntarily asked, “Dude, are you okay?” We all feared that he might be suicidal. He said that was fine. He‘d just had a bad day and this was his way of venting it.

The answer to the second most often question I get, the one you didn’t ask, is… yes, I’m okay.

What people really want to hear is what is wrong with me to like writing “that” stuff? A received an e-mail with this series of questions: Do you have monsters hidden in your head? What pain do you have that makes you write about darkness? Are you afraid of dark? Can you be alone at night? Do you ever feel that people do not understand your brand of intelligence?

Do I have monsters in my head? Yes, but they are all my friends; misunderstood, ugly oafs who are judged harshly because the don't walk and talk and look like everyone else. I have never been afraid of the dark. I love the dark; it is the time when anything is possible. As for being alone, day or night, I have a gift for entertaining myself. It also might surprise you that I am probably the most well balanced person you know.

It is perhaps a better question to ask why I don’t write mainstream fiction or science fiction or high fantasy or romance novels. I'm not a technophile, so science fiction requires far too much research on the nuts and bolts for me to properly represent that genre. (Although, I love reading the Sci-fi nuts and bolts of other writer's brilliant imagination.) Romance novels more often make me laugh than breath heavily. Maybe it's because the child in me thinks "penis" is still a silly word. (Yet, I love the rare, intellectual love story, where mind, body, and spirit all meet in the right places.) Fantasy is often too surrealistic for me. (And I love grappling with the names!) The staple of a variety of beings caught in a world of superlatives with ultimate good fighting ultimate evil for supremacy is about as far from subtle as one can get. (But I have many favorites of this genre in my book collection, too.)

Mainstream fiction can tell the truth so close to the bone that it can read like nonfiction. It tells stories about real people with real joys, sorrows, pains and pleasures, in a universal way that everyone can identify with. They are often autobiographical in nature. Why can't I write about those things, in that way? I'm not very good at standing naked in a spotlight. The real joys and sorrows of my life are often too deeply felt for either objectivity or eloquence. Once in a while, I find that voice in my poetry. Sometimes, I find that voice in an essay. Most often that voice is silent. Then there is the fact that I love crafting fiction.

Dark fiction clothes me. I can hide in it. I can tell stories that are autobiographical or be a reporter telling the stories of a good observer, and you can't tell which is which. I don't write extreme, gothic or noir horror - the beasties and body fluids type. I write some psychological horror, but rarely about man's inhumanity to man, the terrors that give us headlines and bigger bolts on the doors. I love the supernatural. I love dealing with fears that don’t get you through doors no matter how many bolts they have. I love putting ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

All my stories have something to do with one kind of fear or another; or stupidity or ignorance dressed up as fear. They have everything to do with either conquering that fear or what will happen if that fear conquers you. Other themes include, the obvious, be careful what you ask for - you may get it. Another is that nothing lasts forever, (sadly, not joy - but also - not sorrow!). And there is the theme that everything has a price...but to not participate in life for fear of paying that price - is a kind of waking death. My characters demonstrate that if grief is the inevitable price of knowing joy, it is a price worth paying. I hope, ultimately that the body of my work will add up to the conclusion, that life is often scary and ugly and unfair, but that sewn within these times that break us, there is joy and kindness and infinite beauty.

As to my brand of intelligence, I don't feel that I am not understood, because I am a pretty good communicator. What I know is that I sometimes frighten people. I often exhaust people. I am usually either loved or hated, and find that one is rarely indifferent to me. I'm great in small doses and best on paper. It seems that my destiny was always ink.

My favorite stories are the ones that happen in your kitchen or at the grocery store or while driving in your car. Real or imagined, I love experiencing the familiar and benign that suddenly turns on you. I love watching the character sliding ever so softly off the cliff’s edge of reality, the free fall panic of the imminent landing, the brief relief of survival only to find oneself in a place where the rules of physics no longer apply. If the character survives, I am also curious at the inevitable attempt to return home as if one had not seen the things one saw and did not do the things one did.

I began keeping a journal when I was 13. When I got to college the head of the English department and my English 101 professor, Dr. Barbara Agonia, wrote two sentences at the bottom of my first essay. “Teachers wait their whole career for a student like you. If you do not get from me what you need in class, seek me outside of class.” I had no idea what she was talking about. So after class I asked her what she meant. She complimented my talent and asked if she could read my other works. I told her that there were no other works. When she pried it out of me that I kept journals, she asked if I would bring her some of my entries.

My instinct was to say no because I am a lousy liar and there was that standing naked in the spotlight thing. But she was a rare thing, a born teacher. Her first words to the class were that she did not have the proper purity to be an English teacher. I loved her instantly. Her education included a year at Oxford, an intimate understanding with John Donne and she spoke Chaucer. I once told her that as long as I lived, I would never have her education. She answered, “As long as I live, I will never have your talent.” She said these words after I had entrusted her with several of my entries, from which we pulled forty-two poems, changing nothing but their format.

My goddess mother was a novelist and a journalist. It never occurred to me that I could follow in her footsteps without freezing to death in her shadow. So, I was a late bloomer, starting college when my youngest child was well into school. I published in the small press immediately and became a journalist three years later. That was nearly 20 years ago. Since then, I've been paid for my words in one capacity or another.

I continued writing through my years in broad cast news and public relations, becoming a speech writer, while still working on my personal projects. Still everything on the planet seems to be more important than writing to those you can’t write and it’s a fight every day for the right to put my butt in the chair.

People at my day jobs used to ask why I was there, if I was a writer. I used to say – research. And it was true. I look forward to the debate of who is who in which stories. My guess is that the villains will never recognize themselves.

Recently, a windfall allowed me to focus solely on writing/publishing.

And so it begins…

I pay attention. I always have. And I seem to have this great little organizer in my head that files things and cross references them and ties things together, adds and subtracts things, lists examples and the degree of interest these things might generate. Then, when I finish the sentence…”I want to tell a story about a…,” or “I wonder what would happen if…,” all this stuff starts rising to the surface. When I am “in deep” on a subject, alarms go off every time I find a connection or illustration or piece of the puzzle that can best tell the story.

And some days – words and ideas float down from the gods, full blown and on a silver platter. But not as often as you would think or I would wish.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who uses an outline. It is taught in every creative writing class and it is a good organizing skill to learn for the new writer who doesn’t trust his/her talent yet. I have never used an outline. Before I start a story I know how it begins and how it ends. I know some of the high points along the way. How I get to the end is a loose roadmap, subject to epiphany, the caprice of my characters or what I might have eaten the night before. I never drift far from the goal except to add a little color.

However, I due use a chronology. My stories tend to be well populated. I love ensemble casts. So, drawing up a chart of who is who, what they do, what their relationships are to each other and approximately when they should be where. This gives them a place to be until I have provided a proper environment where they can live. Once let loose, they may rewrite themselves but they rarely betray the essence of the original chronology.

Although I once had a character who refused to die. I created him for the sole purpose of allowing him to insinuate himself into your affections, then to kill him. He kept padding his part in the story. He'd wake me up in the middle of the night with script changes, that I'd veto in the morning. (Agreeing to what ever he wanted so I could get back to sleep!) I'm not crazy, I know I'm crazy. But every fiction writer will tell you that characters that come alive in a story can come alive in your head. As for him not dying. It wasn't for lack of trying. The little sucker kept dodging the bullets.

With no phone, no electricity and seven miles from our nearest neighbor, my favorite place to write is at our summer home in Idaho. Winter demands my staying in civilization, however, and with a husband I adore and children who are all my best friends, it is sometimes difficult to get anything seriously done in my home office, with phones ringing off the hook and someone always at the door. At home, the deadly hours are my favorite writing time. My entire world sleeps and no one needs me. That or early in the morning before the world wakes, out on my balcony or back patio.

I think it was Steven King who coined the words for a new kind of looking glass, “falling through a hole in the monitor.” Some days I forget to eat. I write predominately on a computer but every once in a while I grab a pen to scribble a memory trip-line for a character or story idea in one of my dozen strategically placed reporters notebooks; to record some small inspiration and the next thing I know, its two hours later.
Magic.

Most often, I listen to movie scores. The music lends itself to the drama or romance or mystery of a scene and doesn’t get in my way of falling down the rabbit hole. When I research, I listen to 90’s alternative, metal or metal rap. My favorite contemporary groups, in order of importance, Disturbed, Staind, Fuel, Perfect Circle, Tool, and Linkin Park. I’m flirting with Audio Slave, too. I’m not crazy about the high pitched, treble of most female voices, but India Irie, Nora Jones, Alicia Keys and my major guilty pleasure, Pink, are my current favorite girl-power voices.

Yes and no. I wouldn’t write a screenplay, unless I could direct it - because anyone who knows the alphabet feels qualified to change the script. Film is a collaborative art form and although I am a good collaborator, I like veto power. As much as I love film, my gift is putting the words on paper. After it is published, whatever Hollywood might want to do with it is fine with me. Just pay me. My art is intact if it should all go horribly wrong.

I did once. The considering part, not the actual writing part. My collaborator and I spent three months working together but couldn’t get past the brainstorming. His concepts - all good ones - kept changing so rapidly it was like me trying to catch a particular Monarch butterfly – in Mexico – during the height of the migration. So, neither of us used the original idea, which however good it was, was not solely our own. And I never got paid. Does it count that many of my professors and several of my bosses have asked to keep my writing for use in a speech or book they are doing? I ask for nothing more than a byline is given and since that rarely happened, I’ve had the experience of ghosting and didn’t like it much.

I can’t tell you how many times I have been approached by someone with an enthusiastic idea but not the corresponding effort to get it down on paper. These well-meaning people think the writing is the easy part. Writing isn’t easy for me, just because I love doing it. Among the several hundred of my challenges to get it right, I am dyslexic.

I try to let the words flow. I try not to think about length. I don’t over edit in my head. I try not to be overly critical about style. I try to give myself permission to just get the story on the page… for the first draft. Even then, I can’t help editing almost immediately after writing. Usually the beginning of each day starts with an editing session of the previous day’s writing. At any point in the story, an editing epiphany can strike and send me backwards to fine tune a sentence written chapters previously.

After I get to The End, I consider the first draft ended. Then editing begins in earnest. The Window began with 600 pages, cut down twice, to 450 – still a rather good size novel.

If you hate editing, you probably will not be happy as a writer. It is the single most critical step in the process to getting a manuscript in shape for publication. The way I look at it, the first draft is just clay, the raw material. The succeeding drafts, turn it into a work of art.

For the record, I love editing.

You can read books on writing all day and all night and the only thing that will make you a good writer is writing. But everyone has to start somewhere. So, here are some suggestions.

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk Jr.
On Writing by Steven King
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

My first novel was written after lots of research and no experience as to how to write a novel, but I knew how to write a sentence, a paragraph, and a page full of interesting, expressive words. As I did not have supreme confidence in my plotting ability, I decided that if you didn’t like the story, I was going to at least give you a wonderful ride. To do that, I conjured the characters to life and paid critical attention to the craftsmanship. My goal was to write one sentence on every page that captured your attention, either making you smile, cry, shudder, sigh, grit your teeth or otherwise turn the page. I wrote every day and figured sooner or later, I’d get to – The End. And I did.

* The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.- Ray Bradbury
* Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
* Learn your craft. Learn how to spell and how to punctuate.
* Words have meaning, learn them.
* Learn the rules. (Especially those that start with either “Always” or “Never”.) Know the black and white of how writing should be done.
* You can break any rule, as long as you DO IT WELL.
* Show, don’t tell.
* The central character pushes that action…rattles the cages.
* The stock characters are one dimensional.
* First draft – let the characters have free reign. Second draft – prune the characters back to focus on the protagonist.
* The shorter the story, the closer it begins to the climax.
* If you quit when you are stumped…it’s hard to face the keyboard the next day. Push through the problem until you get to a place that is free flowing again…and then save the thought to the next day.
* Put your butt in the chair everyday.
* Plato said that writers are dangerous people. They dare to expand the universe.
* Think boldly. Gene Roddenberry.
* I write. Let others learn to read. Earnest Hemmingway.
* But if I do not communicate, I have failed. Leigh McCormick.
* Don’t be afraid of doing it wrong. Most people can’t do it at all.

* Thinking is not Writing
* Researching is not Writing
* Brainstorming is not Writing.
* Putting words on paper…is Writing.

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