I’ve been a full-time freelance writer, teacher, and communication consultant for over three decades. I have trouble believing it, but the numbers don’t lie. Even after all the study and practice of those years, certain aspects of writing, especially fiction writing, remain a mystery. Chief among the mysteries is the concept of characterization. I’m not talking about the cognitive concept of character or about the many elements of crafting characters that can be listed and categorized. I’m not even talking about the deep psychology connected to character’s heart-driven agendas. I’m talking about the mystery of that tiny moment after drafts are finished and all the conscious work is done when the writer’s subconscious, the magical intersection of mind and heart, rises to the occasion of translating all of the above into a few perfect words that allow the illusion of humanity to form whole and believably in the mind/heart of the reader.
That mystery.
Last year, one of my best friends from high school died. Dave Lay got up, had breakfast, went to work, and dropped dead on the work site—a sudden and fatal heart attack. Everyone who knew him, and especially his family, will miss him and the joy he brought into so many hearts. Good peedinking to you, old friend.
During our teen years, Dave Lay and I spent endless summer hours peedinking, which to us meant aimlessly wandering fields, forests, and streams to see what we could see. We lifted rocks, flipped corrugated tin, rummaged through dumps, and dug in river muck just to see. From time to time, our rock and tin flipping took on a more serious focus. We hunted venomous snakes. That was never called peedinking. That was called snake hunting and was a focused, consciously practiced and skilled activity. In the photo, that’s Dave casually holding a pillowcase full of Timber Rattlesnakes and a few Copperheads at the Morris, PA. Rattlesnake Roundup.
After my own heart attack and subsequent quadruple bypass surgery in January of this year, I found myself dancing around a little survivor’s guilt over Dave’s death. He was so deeply loved by so many, and he was taken away young and strong and without warning. On the other hand, I told myself in my more maudlin moments, I would leave exactly the same gap in people’s lives as a finger being pulled out of a glass of water.
Then, family and old friends from my hometown sent me cards, letters, text messages, and notes on social media. I was surprised by how many and by some of the more unexpected ones. Notes came from old flames, from old friends, and from a few people I barely remember who had, over the years, found some of my stories and received joy from them.
Now, don’t get me wrong on this. I got a lot of outpouring of support and love from many friends I’ve made over the years. People I knew when I sold waterbeds and furniture reached out. People from college touched base. Folks I knew from full-time tech jobs in the late 80s wished me well. Friends made in the dozens of companies and government organizations I consulted for sent cards. Students and fellow fiction writers sent notes and cards and even financial support for delivered meals to get me through the period of time when I couldn’t feed myself. I could keep going, but the point here is that I was forced to accept that I have had an impact on the lives of others. The very worst I can justify for my maudlin moments is that my impact has been odd and sometimes twisted. Luckily, and with thanks to all these people, I do better than that most of the time.
Which takes me back to Dave Lay. Maybe I can’t justify my feelings of guilt that I’m alive when he is not, but that doesn’t mean I should feel the loss of my old friend any less. He was a very important part of my formation as a human being. He was family, and the last experience we shared, though we were far apart when we experienced it, was the chill of disorientation and sudden constriction in the chest.
As the spring wore on and I put hours and hours into peedinking as part of my outdoor cardiac therapy, all the above experiences collided in memory and heart to create a maelstrom of thought and feeling from which ideas were occasionally ejected whole into my consciousness. Somewhere in that mess, the mystery of characterization ran into the memories of aimless peedinking and the focus of hunting copperheads to become an insight into characterization.
I have rarely, in fact with a couple exceptions never, based my characters on actual individuals I have known. However, I suspect that all my characters are born from my own subjective experiences of all the people I have known. The conscious work with all the fiddly bits of character development to create an imaginary person who not only fits into a story but must be the manifestation of the story because their personal history, their ideologies, and their attitudes and aspirations are precisely what is needed to let the reader believe in the tale only sets parameters for the subconscious to mine my memories of my relationships with thousands of people.
The magical, mystical translation of experienced memory into just the right words at the right moment for the reader to believe in the reality of the character for a little while comes from all the people I have known—all of them at once. The best, most complete and emotionally powerful attributes come from the people I knew when I was youngest. Our oldest friends know our youngest hearts is true in life. In fiction, the truth is that the best hearts of our characters come from our oldest friends.
I have never, and will never, be able to create a character who captures the essence of family, music, and wonder that lived in Dave Lay’s heart. I’ll never capture the wisdom and kindness of Fr. David Foxen, Ph.D., a man who selflessly cared for a damaged young man who needed help. I’ll never encapsulate the love of children that drove Sister Francis Xavier into fits of rage born of her need to keep us safe from the world. I’ll never capture the cruelties, betrayals, and dangerous camaraderie of children playing unsupervised in barns, woods, and fields or of back-alley tribes of paperboys waiting for presses to finish a run so they could head out to their routes.
And on and on and on…
However, all those people, their words, their behavior, the truths, the lies, the wisdom, and the foolishness, were imprinted on a young heart and mind. They became, if not actual then much like, Jungian archetypes. Especially the innocent beliefs and awkward hypocrisies of our behavior as children learning to become adults became deeply impressed foundations for capturing and mixing together all the nuances of sociology and psychology of character that would come later.
The subconscious has no choice but to work with fragments of memory to build patterns of meaning around whatever scaffold of criteria we create. No character, no matter who purely we think it might match some individual from our lives, is ever built of one set of memories. Rather, character is what we remember of thousands of people, and all characters are built on the archetypal foundations of those purest hearts we knew so well when we were young.
We all make mistakes. We all chase illusions. We all try to learn from our mistakes so we can reorient and rebuild our visions and dreams. This is life, and I do hope I keep learning until my eyes close and my heart gives its last buhthumpa.
Teaching is one of the tools of my learning. At the very least, it forces me to recognize perceptual frames of reference in my students and reconsider concepts for presentation in new frames of reference that will help the students grow. That’s the worst case.
The best case is that questions will force me out of my own frame of reference so that I have new insights. Sometimes, that takes a while and new insight only comes when a contrasting experience allows a new connection.
That’s what happened recently. I taught a Zoom class on Character Arc, Dramatic Tension, and Suspense. The concepts might be interesting, but they aren’t the point in this little stream of words. What matters is that a few days later while talking to another writer, I heard them say something that connected to and contrasted against a moment from that class.
In the class, a student asked a very specific question about a moment in a scene they had written. The question showed that they had worked at their craft long and hard and come to a moment where they could articulate a difficulty that would lead to an answer that would move them forward. Questions like that always make me happy because answering them leaves me feeling like I actually helped. Certainly, our ability to isolate concepts and articulate questions helps define the trajectory of our progress.
The student had made a mistake in their writing. The mistake generated frustration. They turned the frustration into focus and the focus into a question designed to acquire skills that would help them change their outcomes.
To me, the nature of the mistake considered then articulated as a question demonstrated that they were engaged and learning.
A few days later during the conversation with the writer, we ended up discussing a behavioral pattern in students where they make certain types of mistakes in spite of available opportunities to change their outcomes.
The insight that struck me was that mistakes can be grouped into two types: Mistakes of Progress and Mistakes of Avoidance.
I’m fond of saying flippant things like, “If you want to learn faster, make mistakes faster” or “Screw it up until it starts to make sense,” or “Dare to be bad,” or the perennial answer to how to get to Carnegie Hall, “Practice, practice, practice.” The insight that hit me was that those kinds of statements imply my underlying assumption that the developing writers are moving through layers of discomfort in the pursuit of new craft skills. The underlying implication is false. Sometimes, writers move through their discomfort in pursuit of craft. Sometimes, we become comfortable in our discomfort and engage in behaviors that preserve the discomfort with which we have become comfortable.
Mistakes of Progress
Some mistakes demonstrate the writer is practicing craft. They are leaning into the knowledge and working to change themselves into someone with new understanding. Early development writers might ask questions like the following:
How much do character names matter?
Do I have to have conflict?
Are short stories worth writing?
How do you come up with ideas?
What is manuscript format and why does it matter?
Some writers roll their eyes at questions like these because they feel the writer is showing that they are beginners—as if that’s a sin of some kind. However, all these questions imply that the writer has encountered some level of discomfort in their pursuit of craft. Perhaps the questions are not as sophisticated as they will be later on, but they are born of engagement and pursuit of progress. Thus, they deserve respectful answers. We were all there once.
Later development versions of those same questions might look more like this:
Does the reader internalize the cultural mythic significance of a carefully chosen name that represents a thematic role in the story?
When working with combined Person vs. Self and Person vs. Person conflict sets, how does arrangement of tactic group climaxes influence reader internalization of emotional-psychological change?
How do you use your short story practice as part of your development of longer works, and do you use the shorts as marketing material?
When working with creativity brainstorming, how do you select results that become the seed values for the stories you choose to turn into projects?
When working with manuscript format as the input to workflow for an intermediate press, what kinds of XML artifacts can I control to make the conversion to the publisher’s electronic format easier for the book designer?
Still later questions look something like this:
Why is that student struggling with the syntactic relationship between character history and diction?
How can I better explain the nested elements of emotional change so it is a less abstract concept related to already printed stories and more concrete as a usable tool for writers approaching a broken page or new concept?
Why am I making the mistake of writing an essay on mistakes instead of working on the current novel I want to finish?
Which brings us to a pause.
All the questions above, except for the very last one, are questions that demonstrate the willingness to engage in discomfort in pursuit of change. They are questions born from mistakes of progress.
The last question represents. . .
Mistakes of Avoidance
Mistakes are. That’s all. Sure, I could say they are unavoidable. That would be true, but it’s sort of obvious. I could say mistakes are how we learn. I could say that people who want to learn must make mistakes. In the history of people writing about mistakes, thousands of cliches, aphorisms, and similes have been catalogued to remind us that we will all, every one of us, make lots and lots of mistakes.
Some of these cliches, aphorisms, and similes become habitual ways we think about mistakes beginning very early in life. Our relationship with mistakes can be a source of shame or guilt. It can be a comfort when faced with inevitable setbacks. It can be both.
And that’s where I find myself when I engage in mistakes of avoidance. These types of mistakes are mistakes I make then justify in some corner of my mind and heart as an indication that I’m making progress. Simultaneously, I can feel like I’m failing and moving forward even though I know I’m doing neither because of the type of mistake I’m making.
WTF, Eric? That makes no sense at all.
Except it does if I step back and really find the patience to let myself unravel my own convoluted behavior. A mistake of progress comes from engaging at the edges of my skill and discovering some element of craft that I could not have experienced otherwise and that will require me to engage in focused practice to develop.
Mistakes of avoidance happen when I avoid engaging at the edges of my skill then justify my actions as progress even though I’m resting on some imagined laurel or set of status quo skills. Mistakes of Avoidance are only actually mistakes if they are overused. We do, after all, have to do things like research elements of a story, engage in characterization studies, play with voice, research markets, and engage in revision to existing works. We have to compose new material, and we have to get some kind of feedback from peers or beta readers.
However, all of these can become mistakes of avoidance when we engage in them without also, sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously, working at the edges of knowledge, understanding, and skill in craft.
My personal favorite mistake of avoidance is procrastination by production. When faced with a problem in a longer work, one that would require me to focus, isolate, analyze, and discover new skills in order to move the project forward, I step back and justify spending hours and hours composing new short stories. Mind you, I’m not saying finishing short stories. I’m saying composing.
I’m quite comfortable pounding out page after page after page of material I’ll never look at again. In fact, I convince myself that I’ll rewrite all those new magical pages—that they will be the best short stories I’ve ever written. I avoid the harder work by engaging in comfortable work, and the days go by. And the days go by…
This essay is another perfect example. I’m writing it instead of working on the characterization issues that are blocking progress on the current novel. I composed the first half of this essay over the course of a couple days, then I had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery, then as part of my recovery I finished composing this essay, and now I’m revising it after spending three days telling myself I’ll work on the novel today. Except for the whole medical emergency bit, this essay is self-referential. I am procrastinating, and I know I’m procrastinating, and I’m telling myself this is just fine because I need to do this essay “at some point.”
As with this essay, mistakes of avoidance often include an illusion of progress. While it is not one of my personal favorites, the mistake of endless unconsidered revision is one I see in writers quite often. Having drafted a novel-length manuscript or a short story-length manuscript, writers will set about revising the manuscript over and over and over again. Often, they will treat revision as if it is some subset of reading. That is, they start on page one, paragraph one, line one, word one and make changes as they move along from word to word to word.
The activity feels like progress, so it is quite easy to justify continuing the process. However, page-by-page, line-by-line revision is rarely useful in terms of craft development or even project development until the overall dramatic content of the story has been considered in terms that allow reorganization based on character changes, oppositional elements, thematic intents, and climactic convergences.
Changing a line of dialog outside of an understanding of character psychology manifesting in immediate agenda and/or personal social history as a modifier to the immediate agenda does not improve the story. It only changes the lines and provides the illusion of progress—a mistake of avoidance.
Years can pass without significant improvement for a writer if they persist in revision that “feels good” without developing a deeper understanding of why the feel good changes will improve the experience of the reader. A writer can engage in constant activity that feels like progress without ever risking improvement via mistakes of progress.
Perhaps the most common mistake of avoidance is research. “The rapture of research” is a mistake of avoidance writers often have to face. I certainly have to admit to this one. Give me a good rabbit hole to run down, and I’m happier than a door mouse at a tea party. So many of us can easily get caught up in chasing after the next interesting detail we think we “might” need to understand in order to tell a particular story. Days, weeks, and years of highly focused, organized collection of details that lead us to new details that, in turn, lead us to new details can easily be justified as progress while never pushing us up against the edges of our craft. After all, anyone who has taken a degree in any discipline, and especially anyone who has worked with formal content research in any form, has the necessary skills to chase down the underlying research on C02 scrubbers in a submarine, the consequence of designs, failures, redesigns, successes, applications in WW1 vs. WW2, and current use in modern nuclear and diesel-electric submarines.
Fun, but useless unless the story has a POV character who is an environmental engineer on such a submarine. Even then, it is only useful if that character is faced with some psychological/moral/ethical pressure that requires them to engage with that detail in a way that demonstrates personal change.
I currently get advertising emails about ETSY whalebone corsets because I spent time searching for details about hiking footwear for English women between 1780 and 1820. How much time did I spend on that research? I don’t know. I have a whole Pinterest file full of shoes and riding clothes, but I don’t actually have a character who needs them yet. I do have a character from that period who might, maybe, need to hike across a highland landscape, but I don’t yet.
A mistake of avoidance.
The illusion of progress that comes from feeling like I’m engaged while sitting firmly in the center of a comfortable set of skills I already have.
The real issue in the project has nothing to do with hiking shoes. It has to do with my having failed to face the definition of the underlying psychological scars of a rift between family members and the main character’s need to take personal responsibility for personal choices in new relationships. What a difficult, messy, emotionally triggering space for my heart and mind. Researching shoes is a lot easier than applying mindfulness skills to separate my own emotional reaction from the emotional damage of the character and the impact of that character’s personal history on their decisions in the dramatic moment.
Another personal favorite mistake of avoidance for me is to teach the same material repeatedly. First, I’m teaching rather than producing, so it’s easy to believe I’m engaged in valuable activity. I am, but it is only valuable if I don’t allow it to become more important than my own production and growth as a writer. In fact, the teaching only has value if I continue to grow, experiment, and explore my own boundaries. Teaching the same material over and over is comfortable, but it is not progress for me. It might help others, which only serves to make it more seductive as a mistake of avoidance.
Don’t get me wrong. I still have to teach old material to new students who need it. However…
Teaching can be a way of pressing against the edges of my own skills, but teaching the same material in the same way over and over is a pretty good indication that I’m falling back on complacence. Even teaching something as simple as emotion-driven fiction, a concept I’ve been teaching for over 25 years, can be seductive because it is universally useful to writers and the apparent simplicity of the concept creates a bias in the direction of repeating the form of presentation. It’s so easy to feel justified in presenting the same concept in the same way over and over. However, the result is neither production nor new engagement with the concept.
A mistake of avoidance.
By stepping back, examining the concept, seeking new layers and understanding, testing them in story development, and testing them against students, new questions will arise, new nuances of understanding will appear, and new skills will improve stories under development. The mistake of avoidance becomes a mistake of engagement because of awareness, conscious focus, desire, and application of will.
We write stories for as many different reasons as there are people who write. Some people write as personal therapy. Some write to set the world straight. Some write to heal others, and some to heal wounds from their childhoods. We have stories that instruct, deny, teach, explore, justify, and warn. We have stories that do all these things at once. Yet, aspiring writers still ask these perennial questions:
How do I become a writer?
Where do I start a story?
What should I write?
In order, the truest answers I know are:
By writing.
With the writing.
And whatever you write.
You may have chuckled in humorous agreement after you read the questions and their answers. You may have become a bit angry and resentful at my apparently useless and flippant answer. You may have just skimmed forward to get to the bits you think you need.
Please don’t laugh, resent, or skim.
The questions are legitimate.
The answers are true.
We have all asked them, and we have all had to answer them for ourselves and others.
Let’s look at them one at a time.
How do I become a writer?
The word “writer” is the agentive nominalized form of the infinitive verb “to write.” In the strictest sense, a person who writes is a writer. If that’s as far as we take the answer, the writers were justified in their little chuckle. The haters were justified in their little moment of resentment. The skimmers were justified in moving on.
However, I want to bring a bit of karma into the concept of becoming a writer. Some writers are born into families where professional writing parents read stories to them in the womb, where the family played endless word games for fun, where no TV was allowed, where a giant dictionary lived in the living room, and where telling stories to one another was a form of entertainment every night after dinner. From families like that, writers emerge into academic and commercial circles carrying the burden of “talent.” Those writers are not kidding at all when they say things like “Just tell the story,” “I know if it sounds right,” and “the characters just do what they are going to do.” For those rare and highly talented people who were genetically predisposed to solid language skills and then internalized the patterns of success in language and story at very early ages, “Just write,” is a true, complete, and self-sufficient answer to the question.
I wasn’t born into one of those families. Most people weren’t. Sure, we all have some degree of the magical thing called talent, but talent is just the degree to which you were genetically predisposed to then trained to early life fluency in language and story. Luckily, many successful writers had little or no talent when they came to the craft. They compensated by working hard. It turns out that behaving like a writer creates writers.
That’s what I mean by karma. One definition of karma is that every choice we make turns us into a person who has made that choice. Having chosen, we benefit from all the pleasures and pains that go with that choice. If we choose to drive on the wrong side of the road, we gain the freedom and joy that comes with being unconstrained by law. We might even live through the experience. We might also experience the accident and death that can come with having made that choice. Either way, we create ourselves into the person who experiences the result.
By writing, we become writers. Showing up every morning at the keyboard causes our bodies and minds to adapt to the task of writing. By attending seminars, classes, and conferences, we train body and mind to become sensitive to the patterns of success in behavior and technique that make a writer a writer.
A person who says, “I am a writer,” but doesn’t touch the keys is the same person not writing today that they were yesterday. A person who says nothing but does sit down at their desk and reads, studies, and practices the craft becomes a writer. Mind and body adapt to what we do. Writers write. Writing makes writers.
Where do I start a story?
The entry point to any story can be any moment in the story. By entry point, I mean the first text on the page. I do not mean the opening line. As you would guess from what has come before in this little essay, it means that writers write in order to figure out what they are going to write.
Since the first shaman spit pigment onto a cave wall, writers have been struggling with blank stone, clay, or page. I can’t count how many different methods of beginning I have studied over the years, and all of them have been correct. I will say that my all-time favorite came from Meg Chittenden, who taught the Carlo Rossi Method of plotting, but that’s another story and not really mine to tell. Here are a few non-Carlo Rossi entry points along with an example of each:
Start with A Theme: e.g.: Developing listening skills creates understanding, deeper respect for others, and greater success in family and life.
A Social Issue: Prejudice against intelligence
Personal, Emotional Issue: Unrequited love
Trauma: Limitations in relationships because of early life sibling abuse
Random Topics: A dirty coffee mug, a newspaper article about hauling ice from glaciers in Canada to L.A. as a water supply, and a Country Western Song. (This starting point actually became my sold short story “Running Water for L.A.”)
Idea in The Shower: What would it be like to be a spider living in the sewer?
Image or Images: My reflected house on a dew drop on the rust-damaged petal of a blue rose.
A fast Scene: Just wrote five pages as fast as I could. Now, is there anything in there to work with?
The Beginning: Her first day at Garver Road Middle School was triumphant and terrible in equal parts.
Someplace in The Middle: By the time Gordon arrived at the farm, the dogs had eaten most of the flesh from Millicent’s corpse.
The Climax: She held the flame of the sword close enough to his head to singe the hair of his beard and raise acrid smoke. When he closed his battered eye to avoid the flame, she said, “For my sister and my village.”
The Final Moment: Susurrate waves tickled his toes and tugged at the beach sand, washing away his foundations and forcing him to shift his footing from time to time. The Corrilla’s black flag disappeared over the horizon. The breath he’d been holding slipped past his lips in a long sigh before he turned toward home, his wife, and their new child.
Any one of these could become the entry point for a story. Any one can provide the spark that allows the writer to begin asking the questions that define context, present a problem for solution, and result in answers that drive the project forward toward completion.
What would it be like to be a spider in a sewer? Replace spider with rat and watch the film Flushed Away. Go back to spider, and ask what makes the spider worth following in the sewer? She loves her children—deep fried with vinegar and salt. Nothing in the sewer can satisfy her hunger. Why does that matter? Because she is the only spider of her kind in the sewer and the other sewer spiders shun her for her culinary peculiarities. So what? She can solve murder mysteries in the sewer, and that will bring her back to the bathroom where she meets her grown children but no longer only sees them as food. So, the sewer is a metaphor for her exploration of the shadow self and her resentment that her children are a part of herself she wants to recover by eating them, and the murders force her to recognize the deeper value of every life and the interconnectedness of each life to all….
The above example of uncensored, question-driven brainstorming would not end with the ellipsis. It would go on and on until enough silliness and non-silliness appeared on the page to allow the writer to begin to see a story worth telling.
The point is that writers start by starting. Any start is a start provided we keep going.
What should I write?
Did you read the bit about the spider? Did you shake your head and think, “Oh, for the love of…”? Now, go back and look at the list of starting places. Which one is the one we should pick as the story we want to write?
Exactly. Any of them. All of them. Just pick. The one that you picked is the right one. Don’t pick. Start a different way. Toss a coin and write about the glimmer of it spinning in the sunlight. Travel to a festival and write about carnies. Write about not being able to write. However you start is the right way to start. Whatever shows up in your writing is the right thing to write about. Later, you can do the work of turning it into a story.
One of the most disturbing phrases I hear from writers at conferences and in seminars is, “My story is about…” Compare that opening phrase to “This story is about…” Writing a lot of stories allows writers to learn faster, understand story more deeply, and discover which stories, themes, concepts, and issues are most powerful for them. Additionally, writing a lot of stories results in, well, a lot of stories. More stories provides a broader range for possible sales and reduces the worry surrounding any one story.
Let’s change the question just a little bit. Instead of asking “What should I write,” ask, “What the hell did I just write?” The answer will often be, “Huh. Well, I’ll be damned. That was fun.”
As one of the mottos of the Literary Non-Profit WordCrafters says, “Don’t be a writer. Be writing.” To become a writer, write. To start a story, write. To figure out what to write about, write. The shaman who spit pigment over their hand on the cave wall didn’t get it right the first time. They choked on ashes, ochre, and dust. They practiced. They experimented. They figured it out. The doing creates the doer. The doer does in order to create.
ShadowSpinners 