by Alexandra Sokoloff

I am (THANK YOU GOD, ANGELS, AND THE UNIVERSE) closing in on the end of my current book, my first paranormal, part of The Keepers trilogy coming out in the fall.  

This is the stage of a book in which I have no earthly interest in doing anything other than to just get the damn thing done.    Even though I am comfortably within my deadline, though not entirely of my own doing,  I am not doing much of anything these days but waking and working, pausing once during the day to go work out (because if I didn’t, I would kill people).   And falling into an exhausted sleep after, if not during.

Not that there isn’t a lot of procrastination going on within the day, but I really don’t WANT to do anything else – I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to watch movies or TV, I definitely don’t want to blog, I don’t want to go out to lunch or dinner or Superbowl parties (although I was thrilled  at the outcome).   The state of discomfort of being near the end of a book but not quite finished is so great to me that I would rather put everything else aside and push through to the end and pick up the pieces of whatever life I have left when it’s actually over and there is that feeling of relief so vast that you actually remember why you ever wanted to write in the first place.

But I find myself in an interesting dilemma, for maybe the first time in my professional writing life.

I don’t know what to write next.

That’s not entirely true – I am 3/4ths done with a YA I was writing at the same time that I was writing this paranormal, but I bailed on it around Christmas when I realized it was just too hard to be writing two books at the same stage of the writing process – that is, first draft, second half.   That’s the HARDEST stage of any book for me and I couldn’t handle doing two at that same stage.    So yes, I will go back and finish that book with some of this new “I finished the book!” energy.

Oh yeah, and also about the same time I was finishing my Screenwriting Tricks For Authors workbook.  (Um, the next time anyone hears me whining about not getting enough work done, can you just gently remind me…)

What I mean is, I don’t know what I’m writing after that YA, and that’s an issue, because as you know, or for those of you who don’t know, as I’m about to tell you, you always need to be at least a year ahead of publication, so I need to have another book in the pipeline for NEXT year.

Now the fact is, I have several complete proposals done.   Whole stories worked out.  Could bash out a screenplay on any number of them in six weeks, easily  – have done it a million times before.   (Well, dozens.)   Actually I have a whole first draft of a book done, too, but that I can’t go back to right now because it’s just too painful a reminder of a very painful year last year – I need more distance to finish that one sanely.

And I probably will write the books in those proposals one day.   Or I won’t.   I have so many books I am never going to be able to write.    But I know they’re not the right book right now.   At this stage of writing I can’t afford to be working on any book that isn’t the RIGHT book.

In the past I would have just jumped into one of those ideas, just decided and soldiered on.    I HATE the not knowing.    It is excruciating.   But we really have such limited time – as writers and on earth.   

And the truth is, I’ve had a cataclysmic year.  Profound changes.  I’m not the same person I was when I wrote those proposals.  I feel I need to start from where I am now – wherever that is, and I’m not even pretending that I know.

So as uncomfortable as I am about it, I am not jumping into the first thing that I think of, or the first thing that pleases me but that might not be a big enough book.    I am waiting. I am meditating.    I am reading randomly.   I am paying attention to dream images, songs, people, that catch my attention.    And I am taking my own writing advice.   I am making lists.

On my own blog, at the prompting of a reader, I have started a gargantuan series on “How to Write A Novel, From Start To Finish.”   (No, I never once said I wasn’t insane).

And I’m doing it for ME as much as anyone. 

I’ve already done four or five posts on just generating that perfect idea  – and I intend to do several more –  because this is a part of the writing process that people rarely spend enough time on, and is crucial if you want to develop a riveting book, even more crucial if you have any hope of being paid to write. You are going to spend two years of your life, minimum, on this book (and that’s truly a minimum). 

So that brings us to the eternal question:   

How DO you get your ideas?

When people ask this of authors, many of us tend to clam up or worse, get sarcastic – because the only real answer to that is, “Where DON’T I get ideas?” or even more to the point, “How do I turn these ideas OFF?”

The thing is, “Where do you get your ideas?” is not the real question these people are asking. The real question is “How do you go from an idea to a coherent story line that holds up – and holds a reader’s interest – for 400 pages of a book?”

Or more concisely: “How do you come up with your PREMISES?”

We all have story ideas all the time. Even non-writers, and non-aspiring writers – I truly mean, EVERYONE, has story ideas all the time. Those story ideas are called daydreams, or fantasies, or often “Porn starring me and Edward Cullen, or me and Stringer Bell,” (or maybe both. Wrap your mind around that one for a second…)

But you see what I mean.

We all create stories in our own heads all the time, minimal as some of our – uh – plot lines may be.

A better question is “What’s a GOOD story idea?”

I see two essential ingredients:

a) What idea gets you excited enough to spend a year (or most likely more) of your life completely immersed in it –

and

b) Gets other people excited enough about it to buy it and read it and even maybe possibly make it into a movie or TV series with an amusement park ride spinoff and a Guess clothing line based on the story?

a) is good if you just want to write for yourself.

But b) is essential if you want to be a professional writer.

As many of you know, I’m all about learning by making lists. Because let’s face it – we have to trick ourselves into writing, every single day, and what could be simpler and more non-threatening than making a list? Anything to avoid the actual rest of it!

So here are two lists I encourage my workshop students to do to get those ideas flowing, which I am now doing for myself.

List # 1: Make a list of all your story ideas.
 
This is a great exercise because it gets your subconscious churning and invites it to choose what it truly wants to be working on. Your subconscious knows WAY more than you do about writing. None of us can do the kind of deep work that writing is all on our own. And with a little help from the Universe you could find yourself writing the next Harry Potter or Twilight.   That’s my plan, anyway.  

Also this exercise gives you an overall idea of what your THEMES are as a writer (and very likely the themes you have as a person). I absolutely believe that writers only have about six or seven themes that they’re dealing with over and over and over again. It’s my experience that your writing improves exponentially when you become more aware of the themes that you’re working with.

You may be amazed, looking over this list that you’ve generated, how much overlap there is in theme (and in central characters, hero/ines and villains, and dynamics between characters, and tone of endings).

You may even find that two of your story ideas, or a premise line plus a character from a totally different premise line, might combine to form a bigger, more exciting idea.

But in any case, you should have a much better idea at the end of the exercise of what turns you on as a writer, and what would sustain you emotionally over the long process of writing a novel.

Then just let that percolate for a while. Give yourself a little time for the right idea to take hold of you.  We all know what that feels like – it’s a little like falling in love.

List # 2: The Master List

The other list I always encourage my workshop students to do is a list of your ten (at least) favorite movies and books in the genre that you’re writing, or if you don’t have a premise yet, ten movies and books that you WISH you had written.

It’s good to compare and contrast your idea list with this IDEAL list.

So that’s another thing I’ve been doing again for myself.   Here’s part of it, in no particular order.

Rosemary’s Baby
Silence of the Lambs
Alice in Wonderland
The Haunting of Hill House (book and film)
The Shining (book and film)
Room with a View (film)
Withnail and I
A Wrinkle in Time
The Witching Hour
Pet Sematery
Hamlet
Arcadia
Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
Notorious
Vertigo
Suspicion
Rebecca (book and film)
Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None
It (the book)
Bringing Up Baby
The Thin Man
The Little Foxes
The Children’s Hour
Pride and Prejudice
Bridget Jones’ Diary (book and film)
The Wire
Deadwood
Mad Men
I, Claudius
Fawlty Towers
Rome
Philadelphia Story
It’s A Wonderful Life
Groundhog Day
The Breakfast Club
Poltergeist
The Stand (book)
Carrie (book and film)

I included my favorite TV, and I could go into musicals, too, but I’ll spare you. Well, except I have to mention Sweeny Todd. And Phantom of the Opera. And Chicago. And…

And on the myth and fairy tale front:

Ariadne (Theseus and the Minotaur)
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Eros and Psyche
Beauty and the Beast (all three of those last are the same story, essentially).
The Handless Maiden
The Yellow Dwarf
1001 Nights
Sleeping Beauty

Now, that’s a BIG list, of all-time favorites that I see/read over and over and over again, and it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.  And on the surface, it seems to have a lot of disparate genres there. But there are underlying commonalities that are very specific to my own taste (and I’m the only one who can truly say what those are, just as you are the only one who can say what your emotional preferences are).

What do I see about that list?

Dark dark dark dark dark…. Except for the romantic comedies and swoony Room With A View.

Lots of horror, but more psychological than gory. Lots of psychological thrillers. Some adventure fantasy and fantasy fantasy. The Stoppard is about trippy extra-dimensional occurrences, plus he’s a genius. Actually that goes for Shakespeare, too, extra-dimensionally. Lots of psychology – the Lillian Hellman plays are dramas, but very dark ones that explore ordinary and completely chilling human evil. I especially like human evil so big it seems almost supernatural (as in Silence of the Lambs and Rebecca). Withnail and I is a flat-out drug movie, and has the British comedy of chaos I so love in Fawlty Towers. Lots of sex, or at least, the sex is part of what I love about a lot of those choices. (The Wire and Deadwood, for example…). Lots of Cary Grant. Oh, right, that would be sex.

What are some of the themes and subthemes of these stories? (For me, personally, I mean, and not trying to be too analytical about it – just spewing:)

Good vs. evil (and good usually triumphing, ambiguously). Inability to distinguish the supernatural from reality. Inter-dimensionality. Erotic tension. Loss of control (and that absolutely includes the comedies on there – Fawlty Towers, Bringing Up Baby, Withnail and I, are complete rollercoaster rides of hysteria.) What is reality? Man Must Not Meddle. The deal wit
h the devil. What it means to be a hero or heroine. Unlikely heroes and heroines. Coming to terms (or not) with one’s extraordinary gifts. Disparate people uniting to accomplish something as a team. A man and a woman who don’t trust each other having to work together, discovering they are divinely matched.

And even more importantly, what FEELING am I looking for when I read and watch these stories? What EXPERIENCE am I looking for? Again, this may be the most important indicator of what genre you’re writing in.

I like a lot of sensation in my stories. That is, I want a story to make me experience a lot of sensation. And not easy, light, fun sensations either, for the most part. Fear, thrills, doubt, sex, urgency, loss of control, violent surprise. I love the overwhelming feeling of having something huge, possibly supernatural, going on around me (in the form of the characters I’m projecting myself onto). Something evil, even, but so powerful and mesmerizing I have to explore it, understand it. And that can be a situation, as in Rosemary’s Baby or The Shining, or a person, as in The Children’s Hour. I want a sense of cosmic wonder. I want a sense that good does conquer evil, that good people can make a difference, but without sugar coating. I like a lot of game playing, matching wits (Philadelphia Story, Thin Man, Silence of the Lambs).

So, what I write is psychological horror, or supernatural thriller, or supernatural mystery, or psychological thrillers with an extra-dimensional twist. And while that sometimes makes my books frustratingly hard to categorize (in libraries, for example…) it also has branded me in a way that has been useful to me as an author, and that I’m pretty obligated to stick with now.    Let’s face it – I’m not going to suddenly resurrect the chick lit genre.   And in a happy non-coincidence, what I’m looking for in a book is what my readers read my books for, or so they tell me.  

So this week as I make my lists (and finish that damn book), I am concentrating on the FEELING of my next book, and letting the details come as they will.

I hope.

Authors, my question for the day is – What are you trying to make your reader or audience FEEL? Horror? Thrills? The glow of romance? The adrenaline and exhilaration of adventure?

And readers, what are you hoping a book will make you feel?

– Alex

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PS.  The Price was released in the UK this week, from Little, Brown:

 

Buy it here…

 

 



– Alex

Thought I’d better post this breaking news, which Rob and Louise and Stephen and Dusty and I just found out about and which affects many, many of our writer/readers: 

Amazon.com has pulled books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, in a dispute over the pricing on e-books on the site.

Here’s the story:

Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E Book Price Disagreement

Amazon Removes Macmillan Books

 Publishers’ Weekly Special Bulletin

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I have been fretting this week about questions and comments I’ve gotten, publicly and privately, which I guess go along with the territory of teaching and blogging and writing about writing as if I really know anything at all about what I’m talking about.

(But I have to say there have been a few questions that I should never have gotten at all – it’s mystifying.   For the record, if you have a grammar question, DO NOT write to an author to get the answer.   That is not our job, you will have burned a valuable opportunity to ask something actually worth asking, and it will make us crazier than we already are, and you really don’t want to do that.)

All these questions, aside from the grammar ones,  have made me want to say this again, and repeat it often:

While I blog about, and write about in the Screenwriting Tricks workbook, a formula for film structure that is widely used in Hollywood, the MAIN POINT of what I am always writing about here is that you study the specific structures of movies and books in your genre and that specifically appeal to you, so that you can discover the specific tricks that great storytellers use to create the stories you love.

And whatever it is you think they’re doing, you might try doing it yourself.  
 
That is the bottom line of every single thing I have ever written about writing.

It’s the same with creating character.   

As much as I get asked to teach, I never teach workshops on character.   Not solely on character, anyway.   I just don’t.   It’s not that I couldn’t figure out something to say.    It’s just that – as I’ve said before – I think writers live with characters in our heads on a daily and nightly basis.   I could be totally wrong, but I suspect people don’t become writers if they don’t have characters living in their heads.   We don’t live with structure quite so intimately, and therefore it seems more teachable.

And honestly, I very, very rarely hear anyone say anything about creating character that makes me think – WOW, that’s it, I get it now.  Of course, I’ve never taken Rob’s class on character but that’s only because he’s refused to let me in.  

But I see other workshop instructors at conferences handing out character charts, breaking down movies or stories I know pretty well myself, and will occasionally swipe one of those charts to see what the secret might be, and am sometimes absolutely horrified at what I see.

Case in point… people love to break down The Wizard of Oz.   God knows I understand that.   I’ve used tons of examples from Wizard myself.   We all KNOW Wizard, so it makes sense to reference it.   But The Wizard of Oz is such a special case.   It is an iconic movie for reasons that I wouldn’t possibly want to have to explain – it’s like explaining sunlight, or – a rainbow.   You can break it down into its elements, but that will never give you the experience.  There was a special magic looking over that movie through all its harrowing changes of writers, directors, actors, etc. – and let’s not forget that it was based on a classic SERIES of books – and, oh, yeah – it’s a MUSICAL.   And all that terrifying mess somehow combined to make a classic.   It is not something anyone could ever duplicate.

It’s confusing even to break the movie conveniently into sequences, because it is a musical, and musical numbers were cut and rearranged (and rightly so!) which would have made the timing of the sequence structure make more conventional sense.   Just as an example – the studio wanted “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” cut because it made the first Kansas sequence too long, but the movie gods apparently intervened, the song remained, completely screwing with the sequence timing, and film students have been arguing about the Act One break ever since.

So when I see the characters of a movie like The Wizard of Oz dissected on a chart, I am wary and skeptical.   I am hard–pressed to believe that you ever even come close to developing a story as rich and enduring as The Wizard of Oz based on the two-dimensional layout of a chart.

Just consider what The Wizard of Oz would have looked like had Shirley Temple (often named as the top choice for the role) been cast instead of Judy Garland, as Dorothy.
 
The casting of Judy Garland, and her lush, just blossoming, completely vulnerable sexuality, TOTALLY changed the dynamic of the character and every single interaction she had with the other characters in the movie.   It changed the meaning of the journey.  A young woman’s dream, or fantasy, or metaphorical journey – whatever you want to call that adventure to Oz – is completely different from a child’s.    Teenagers yearn for significantly different things than children do.   

When I was a preteen I became firmly convinced that the whole Wizard of Oz journey was Dorothy’s dream letting her explore which one of the three farmhands she wanted to marry – as a young woman reaching marriageable age, those would be her obvious choices in such a farm town.   In Oz, Hunk/the Scarecrow is the first one she meets, and over and over and over again the Scarecrow steps forward as the problem solver and her biggest defender.   (She also dances with him in a musical number that was cut from the final film – The Jitterbug, and as any dancer or choreographer knows, when two characters dance in a musical, that means they’ve just had sex.).  When she leaves Oz, she tells the Scarecrow she’ll miss him most of all, and when she wakes up in bed, he kneels by the bed and she touches his face.  She’s chosen.

I would tell people this occasionally in college and they’d laugh – but years later I read much more about the elaborate history of the film and learned that the final scene of an earlier script really had concluded with Hunk going off to agricultural school and winning a promise from her to write to him – implying a romance that would continue (and marriage once “The Scarecrow” had his real-life diploma).

What I’m saying is, there was a structure built in to the script, as well as the magic of casting, that resonates in a way that is not capturable on a character chart.

Okay, you might be saying now that I’m the only person who’s ever watched the Wizard of Oz and gotten that out of it.   But you’re wrong.   My author sister friend Ann Voss Peterson has always felt the same way, so there.  And even if there weren’t at least one other person who sees the truth of it – my analysis of the subtext is meaningful to me, just as my analysis of Ophelia’s role in Hamlet is, and my strong personal opinions on the movies I watch and the books I read, however obscure they may seem to other people, have been invaluable to my growth as a writer.

Plus, I have more to say about what makes Dorothy a great character.

Another level of my take on Dorothy – and I know I’m not alone in this one – is that
she is going through an inner journey to internalize the qualities of braininess, heart, and courage – and her higher self, Glinda –  so that as she grows into a woman, she will be able to use those qualities against enemies like Miss Gulch instead of running away as she does at the beginning of the movie.

And another big change that happens with Dorothy is that we see her in situation after situation go from a scared little girl who needs protecting to a woman who will step forward and protect her friends.   It’s a big character arc for a teenager, growing up like that.

I guess what I’m saying is that a LOT goes into creating a character, and even if some writer or teacher or workshop leader breaks it down brilliantly for you, it’s even more important to figure out what YOU think is going on with that character.

And I’m also saying – and this is very true of the Wizard of Oz film in particular – sometimes it is absolutely impossible to track how something was written.   There were so many writers, directors, artists, producers who worked on this one – somehow certainly the movie gods were watching over it to create the alchemy that makes it the classic it is.

Some things are quantifiable, but some simply aren’t.   And please don’t be satisfied with anyone else’s quantification.
   
You are the writer.   Ultimately, it’s you and the page.  You are God, baby.  Make your own rules.

So I’m snowed in here in Raleigh, after being in 90 degree Cozumel four days ago.   My body has no idea what it’s supposed to be feeling anymore.

Since I’m not going anywhere today, does anyone have any unique interpretations of movies or books to share?   Some deeper theme you’re convinced of, but somehow no one else sees it?  

And what about Dorothy?  Does she marry Hunk?

– Alex

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Related posts:

What Makes a Great Protagonist?   Case Study: Jake Gittes

What Makes a Great Villain?

Creating Character – The Protagonist

Collecting Character

Screenwriting Tricks For Authors – now available on Kindle and for PC!

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Well, Tess said something apocalyptically frightening in her post on Tuesday:

E-book land is going to be a busy, anarchic universe with a dizzying array of great books sold along with bad books, and lord knows how it’s all going to shake out.

And hanging over us all will be the one thing that could doom us all.  Piracy.  Once books can be copied and disseminated for free, there will be no way to make a living in the writing profession. I fear that it’s only a matter of time before that happens.

And we will look back on this era as the last age of the professional writer.

Thanks, Tess, just what I needed to hear going into a new year.

I guess it’s no big secret anymore that the publishing industry is undergoing a revolution that has us all in shock, awe, fear, or simple paralysis.

One of the components of this revolution is the e reader, as Tess talks about in her post.

At the end of the year, along with my agent, I made the decision to publish Screenwriting Tricks For Authors, the workbook I wrote based on my blog and the story structure articles I’ve posted here at Murderati, at the Kindle store.   It’s now up for sale here.

There were a million reasons.   Well, okay, not a million, I just always like the sound of that number, and I’m a Pisces and can’t count to save my life.

But some of the reasons are –

– I TRULY needed to get the information on my blog into a coherent order, and a blog is not the greatest format for what I am trying to convey.

– I’m being asked to teach a lot, these days, and I can’t possibly take the time anymore to print the workbook at Kinko’s for distribution to my students, and when Amazon started making Kindle books available to PC users, and is promising a Mac version imminently, that made Kindle publishing the easiest instant solution.   And a Kindle or PC version is far cheaper for students to buy than a hardcopy version, about a third of the cost.   That part was just a no-brainer.

– I am constantly adding to the info on my blog and with Kindle, you can republish a new version any time, instantly, without cost.   Now that is cool.

– It’s not huge money, but a LOT more in royalties, comparatively, than other options.

– Publishing on Kindle doesn’t tie up other publication rights – if I am offered a good book contract for the workbook, I can just take it.

– Peer pressure from Joe Konrath, who has a lot to say about Kindle and other e publishing, but you could start here.     

Really, this is a revolution, and while I’m not personally comfortable publishing a novel on Kindle, at least not yet, I am excited to stick at least a toe in the water by publishing this workbook.   Anyone can take the time and click through links on my blog and get a lot of the same info for free, but if you find what I’ve written on the subject is useful,  $9.99 is not such a huge chunk of change to put down to have the whole deal in coherent order.   Plus, you know, supporting an author whose information you are using is good karma.

So this is a New Year’s experiment, which I’ll keep everyone posted on.  So far the only drawback I’ve experienced is intense complaining from non-Kindle, non-PC (meaning Mac) readers who want the book downloadable or in hardcopy for them NOW.  

In the meantime I’ll keep blogging about craft, because God knows it’s exhausting – if not outright terrifying – trying to keep come up with posts on your personal life. 

So I’ve been teaching another online class these last two weeks.   NOT the greatest time for an online class, actually, because everyone is still so dazed from the holidays and just trying to get back in the swing of things.   Um… especially me.  Still, I am as always finding the teaching completely inspiring  – I love hearing other writers talk about their stories and characters and writing processes.   And new writers have all that, you know – hope.

The discussion so far has completely reinforced my belief that the best thing that you can do to help yourself with story structure is to look at and compare in depth 5-10 (ten being best!) stories – films, novels, and plays – that are structurally similar to yours.

The late and much-missed Blake Snyder said that all film stories break down into just ten patterns that he outlined in his Save The Cat! books.  Dramatist Georges Polti claimed there are Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations and outlined those in his classic book.

I think those books on the subject are truly useful – as I say often, I think you should read everything.  But I believe you also have to get much more specific than ten plots or even thirty-six.

(I also think it’s plainly lazy to use someone else’s analysis of a story pattern instead of identifying your own.  Relying on anyone else’s analysis, and that for sure includes mine, is not going to make you the writer you want to be.)

For example, in the class that I’m teaching now, without giving details of anyone’s plots, there is a reluctant witness story, a wartime romance story, an ensemble mystery plot, a mentor plot, a heroine in disguise plot.   And others.  

Each of those stories has a story pattern that you could force into one of ten general  overall patterns – I guess – but they also have unique qualities that would get lost in such a generalization.  And all of those stories could also be categorized in OTHER ways besides “reluctant witness” or “hero in disguise”.   

Harry Potter, for example, is what you could call a King Arthur story – the chosen one coming into his or her own (also see Star Wars, The Matrix…)  but it is told as a traditional mystery, with clues and red herrings and the three kids playing detectives.   It’s also got strong fairy tale elements.   So if you’re writing a story that combines those three (and more) types of stories, looking at examples of ANY of those types of stories is going to help you structure and brainstorm your own story.

If you find you’re writing a “reluctant witness” or “accidental witness” story, whether it’s a detective story, a sci-fi setting, a period piece, or a romance, it’s extremely useful to look at other stories you like that fall into that “reluctant witness” category – like Witness, North By Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Conspiracy Theory, Someone To Watch Over Me.

If you’re writing a mentor plot, you could take a look at Silence of the Lambs, The Karate Kid, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, An Officer and a Gentleman, Dirty Dancing, all stories in completely different genres with strong mentor plot lines, with vastly different mentor types.

A Mysterious Stranger story has a very specific plotline, too:  a “fixer” character comes into the life of a main character, or characters, and turns it upside down – for the good, and the main character, not the Mysterious Stranger, is the one with the character arc  (look at Mary Poppins, Shane, Nanny McPhee, and the Jack Reacher books).

A Cinderella story, well, where do you even start?  Pretty Woman, Cinderella of course, Arthur, Rebecca,  Suspicion, Maid to Order (I think that’s the one I mean), Slumdog Millionaire.

A deal with the devil story – The Firm, Silence of the Lambs, Damn Yankees, The Little Mermaid, Rosemary’s Baby, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Devil’s Advocate.

And you might violently disagree with some of my examples, or have a completely different designation for what kind of story some of the above are…

But that is exactly my point.  You have to create your own definitions of types of stories, and find your own examples to help you learn what works in those stories.   All of writing is about creating your own rules and believing in them.

So I guess that’s what I wanted to say today.   Identifying genres is not enough.   Identifying categories of stories is not enough.   What’s the kind of story you’re writing – by your own definition?

When you start to get specific about that, that’s when your writing starts to get truly interesting.

So what kind of story ARE you writing?  Would love to hear some, and brainstorm some great examples.

Have a great holiday weekend, everyone!

– Alex

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Related posts:

What’s YOUR structure?

Meta Structure

Fairy Tale Structure

What is High Concept?

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Ah, a New Year.   Thank God, is all I can say.

There’s a great line from Bridget Jones’ Diary, the book, which I always re-read around this time of year, that I would quote here verbatim if I had the book with me, which I don’t, as you will understand in a minute, so I’ll sum up: she is ranting about now unfair it is of – whoever – that just as we’ve all gotten used to putting whatever we feel like in our mouths for a month straight we’re suddenly expected to resume work and perfect discipline as if the whole past month’s debauch never happened.   

Well, I agree. 

Furthermore, I know I am not the only writer in this community who feels I am so off track with my writing after the holidays that I have no idea how to get back on, so I just thought I’d out myself on that subject right away in case anyone else can relate.

I have such a hard time with the week between Christmas and New Year’s in general that this week I impulsively – and perhaps ill-advisedly, given that it’s WINTER – decided to drive across the country with two cats and my Southern California wardrobe, just to have something to keep my mind off this end of the year panic.  

Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but still – when in doubt, road trip, is what I say.

Of course, being from Southern California, I still have no real concept of winter, so when I found myself driving in SNOW with two really angry cats screaming at me from the back seat, I started to reconsider the plan.   By then of course I was too far along to go back, so, well, anyway, I was snowed in for a day somewhere in Arizona, but we got out of it okay enough.  Even without this thing you apparently are supposed to have for snow, called chains.   I mean, tire chains.  Where do they come up with these things?

So I spent my New Year’s Eve in a hotel in Albuquerque, doing galley corrections.   (Did I mention that I got galleys two days before Christmas?   Due just after New Year’s?  That seems to be when they show up, as I know others here can attest).

Look, there are worse things, and I’m not really complaining.   I have two books coming out this year.   I have to remember that.   And it IS the New Year, now, or really Monday it will be, because this weekend is just strange.  

But despite the fact that I wouldn’t really recommend driving anywhere  (much less across the entire country in winter) with two cats unless there’s no other way around it, I feel a lot better being on the road.   There’s nothing else to do but drive and space out, enforced meditation, and then I did my galleys in the hotels at night, and movement just feels like – movement.  Which I needed.

It occurred to me on the drive portion of today (gorgeous) – that my malaise had a lot to do with the fact that I am at the exact same place in BOTH books that I am in the process of writing.  That would be – in the first draft, my least favorite part of the writing process, and in the third quarter of each draft – usually my least favorite part of any book or script.   So no wonder I freaked out and thought it would be a good idea to drive across the country in winter.  I would have done just about anything to get away, and that was the first semi-justifiable thing that came to mind.

But I got my galleys done (finding someplace to mail them in is another story), there was no snow today, and the road trip is having the intended effect of vacuuming out my brain, which it sorely needed after the last year (don’t ask…), and now I can focus in the afternoons on teaching my online Screenwriting Tricks For Authors class, and teaching always makes me remember why I write.   I can’t very well coax a class into keeping going on that $#%^&*!  first draft without talking myself into it as well.

So okay, this all might be a strange way to start off the year, but it IS a new year, and we all have a chance to start fresh.  And I don’t know about you all, but man, do I need that.

That was my week.  

How was yours?

– Alex

 

 

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Last month I found myself in Jungian analysis by mistake.

(I know this doesn’t sound probable, but trust me, it can be done.)

I guess if you subscribe to the synchronistic (and Jungian) theory that there are no accidents, which I pretty much do when I remember to, then it wasn’t a mistake, but it certainly wasn’t intentional.

But ever one to go with the flow, this perhaps being an extreme case, I am now committed.

I always loved the idea of doing Jungian therapy (because for one thing, as a woman, why would I ever trust anything Freud had to say?), but somewhere along the way I forgot.

So I was intrigued to find myself in this situation.   It did seem destined.  Also, the first thing my therapist did was buy and read my books, which you have to admire in a therapist.

I’ve had two bouts with therapy before.   I think a lot of people go into therapy looking to be fixed, and when a certain period of time goes by and you notice that you’re still not fixed, you look to do it again.  

On the other hand, I think a lot of writers, maybe other artists too, are wary of therapy and analysis because, hey, if you take away our demons, what’s left?

But a Jungian-based approach is very artist/writer friendly because you’re dealing with

A)   Dreams

B)   Fairy Tales

and

C)   All those people in your head.

All of which are writers’ stock in trade.

The dream landscape has been very interesting – it’s amusing how reading Jungian books makes you dream in Jungian symbols almost instantly.   I’ve never dreamed of a castle in my life that I can remember, but the other night after reading Robert A. Johnson’s Fisher King/Handless Maiden, there I was that night in a full-on medieval castle, interacting with a studious adolescent boy who was, I am gathering, one aspect of my animus, my inner male.   (He was not happy with me.  At all.)

And then the next night, another animus figure and I and this little wild girl child were excavating a statue of a goddess, or the goddess, but it felt like Aphrodite, which had become damaged, I believe cracked in the head, in the process of excavation and we had to stop.

Not my usual dreams at all, but the theory is that the unconscious really WANTS us to get the message and will obligingly adopt whatever symbolic language will make us get it the fastest.   At any rate, my dreams, which are usually interesting, have become suddenly very pointedly clear about my life situation.  

One big element of Jungian therapy is this idea of the anima and animus, that we all have masculine and feminine sides, or aspects, really.   (I will not even attempt to explain this myself, yet – here’s a great article. )

And what we do when we’re unconscious (not meaning asleep, but the general waking unconsciousness of most human beings on the planet) is project our own anima (for men) or animus (for women) onto the men and women we fall in love with.   And a true relationship is only possible when both partners are able to withdraw the projection and see their partner for the real person they are.

So (if I’ve got this right) theoretically, you do that by becoming aware of your anima/animus to begin with, which you can do by studying who and what shows up in your dreams.

In most of my dreams for the last week I have been interacting with a male figure, all different ages, or there is simply one by my side while I go about whatever else I am doing:  my brother, that brainy adolescent boy from the castle, an alarming number of exes, a completely insane homeless person, Alfred Hitchcock (I loved that one), and Joe Konrath.    (Yes, I know, scary, but the truth shall set you free.)

All aspects of my animus.  

One of my particular life problems is about balancing my male and female sides, which have been unbalanced for a long time, so this first step, becoming aware of what’s actually in there, is being fascinating.   It’s a marvelous thing that everything we need to know about ourselves is actually right there, playing itself out in our dreams every night.    It’s actually kind of addictive, to look at your life more as a novel, with its own structure and design, and to not be the writer for once, but the audience.

And of course, it’s all research – SO many new characters to keep in that character warehouse for when next I need them.

There’s another thing that’s being fascinating, in fictional terms as well as therapeutic, and that’s how my dreams will keep presenting the same symbols and variations on the same setting or situation – there are obvious themes, and a progression to the dreams, as if when I figure out what one is saying, the next dream will take it to the next level and there will be a new puzzle to work out to get to the next step.  

I find myself impatient to get through the day and get to sleep so I can see what happens next.

ALL of the above so obviously applicable to writing:  thematic image systems, a series of progressive puzzles, recurring characters, male and female sides in opposition, and the drive to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

Now, I admit, I can’t see that the writing I’m doing during the day has taken any quantum leap because of my more conscious nightly adventures – yet – but on the other hand, I never know what I’m writing or how good it is until I’m finished.   And I can’t help but think that it’s going to help.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted.

So how about you out there?   Any Jungians?   Has therapy helped your writing or your life?  Any interesting dreams, lately?

Happy Solstice, Christmas, Hannuka, Kwanzaa, and everything else that everyone celebrates!

—————————————————————————————–

I will be teaching an online Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop through the Yellow Rose Romance Writers, Jan. 1 through Jan. 18. 

These online workshops are a fantastic deal, just $25 for two weeks, and here’s where you can get one-on-one feedback on the craft techniques I blog about here as they apply to your own story.  All genres welcome!

Go here to register.

More info on Screenwriting Tricks For Authors.

- Alex

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I have a posse of mystery writer friends (I should say goddesses or divas!) I hang with when I’m in Raleigh: Margaret Maron, Sarah Shaber, Diane Chamberlain, Katy Munger, Mary Kay Andrews and Brynn Bonner.   We’re more a regular lunch group than a critique group, but several times a year we go on retreat to the beach or the mountains or some generally fantastic place.   We work all day long by ourselves and then convene at night to drink wine and brainstorm on any problem that any one of us is having (and of course, compare page counts!).

 

And one of our favorite retreats is the Artist in Residence program at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines, NC.  

Weymouth is an amazing place – a 9000 sq. foot mansion on 1200 acres (including several formal gardens and a 9-hole golf course) that’s really three houses melded together. It was what they called a “Yankee Playtime Plantation” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the fox hunting lodge of coal magnate James Boyd.  James Boyd’s grandson James rebelled against the family business to become – what else? – a novelist. Boyd wrote historical novels, and his editor was the great Maxwell Perkins (“Editor of Genius”), and in the 1920’s and 30’s Weymouth became a Southern party venue for the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Thomas Wolfe. That literary aura pervades the house, especially the library, with all its photos and portraits of the writers who have stayed at the house.

It’s a fantastic place to write – pages just fly.  

We have our own rooms, meet for coffee in the morning and set goals for the day, work all day, and then reconvene at night for dinner and to discuss progress and spitball plot problems.

When I started plotting THE UNSEEN, I needed a haunted mansion that I could know and convey intimately, so of course the Weymouth mansion, with its rich and strange history, convoluted architecture,  isolation, vast grounds, and haunted reputation, was a no-brainer.    I truly believe that when you commit to a story, the Universe opens all kinds of opportunities to you.    And as it happened, we were able to stay in the house again for a week as I was writing the book last year

We came down to the house on the very day that my characters were moving into THEIR haunted house.

(I’m telling you, writing is a little scary.   More than a little scary, in this case…)

Now, some of us had some truly spooky encounters in that place.   Every time I turned around there was knocking on the walls (the pipes in the kitchen), weird manifestations (a ghostly team of horses trotting by with a buggy on the road outside) and rooms that were just too creepy to go into after dark.  One night I had to go all the way back upstairs, across the upstairs hall and around to the front stairs to get to a room I wanted to go to because I was too freaked out to cross the Great Room in the dark.   And another one of us had the classic “Night Hag” visitation:  she woke up feeling that someone or something was sitting on her chest.    Brrrrr…..

One prevalent theory of hauntings is that a haunting is an imprint of a violent or strong emotion that lingers in a place like an echo or recording.   I’ve always liked that explanation.

Well, this house was imprinted, all right, but far beyond what I had expected.

Because besides the requisite spooky things… that house was downright sexy.  There’s no other way to say it.   Seriously – hot.

I had ridiculously, I mean – embarrassingly –  erotic dreams every night.  There were rooms I walked into that made my knees go completely weak.   The house, the gardens, even the golf course, just vibrated with sex.

Now, maybe that was just the imprint of creativity – the whole mansion is constantly inhabited by writers and musicians, and as we all know, creativity is a turn-on.  

But also, consider the history.   As I said – Weymouth was a “Yankee Playtime Plantation”.   Rich people used that house specifically to party – in the Roaring Twenties, no less.   (Think THE GREAT GATSBY!).   God only knows how many trysts, even orgies, went on.   So could sex imprint on a place, just as violence or trauma is supposed to be able to imprint?

It makes sense to me.

And the history continues today –  the mansion and gardens are constantly used for weddings, loading more sexual energy into the place, and last night, for example, there was a junior high cotillion practice in the great room, which I snuck down to watch – talk about sexual energy bouncing off the walls!

That sexual dynamic surprised the hell out of me, but it completely worked with my main character’s back story – she’s a young California psychology professor who impulsively flees to North Carolina after she catches her fiancé cheating on her.  (Actually, she dreams her fiancé is cheating on her, in exactly the scenario that she catches him in later.)    So her wound is a specifically sexual one, and one of her great weaknesses is that she’s vulnerable to being sexually manipulated.  

Add to that that the most prevalent explanation of a poltergeist is that it’s hormones run amok:  that the projected sexual energy of an adolescent or young adult can randomly cause objects to move or break.

So of course I went with it.   It wasn’t anything to do with my outline, but California girl that I am, how can I not go with the obvious flow?

I think it adds a great dimension to the story, in a way I never could have anticipated, and I’m pleased to have been true to the – um, spirit – of poltergeists.

And this year, one of the books I’m working on at the manor is my dark paranormal for Harlequin Nocturne, about a witch and a shapeshifter.   Shapeshifter erotica – in THIS house – well, you can imagine…

So I have two questions, first, re: research.    Has a place you’ve researched ever significantly changed a story for you?    How?

But also I’d love to know – what’s the sexiest place you’ve ever been, and why?    I wouldn’t mind having a list to file away.   You never know when you might need it.

–        Alex

 

And here’s a bit of the introduction to the house, from The Unseen:

————————————————————————————————

……..They had turned off the narrow road and onto a dirt one that led up to the stone gateposts from the photos.     Laurel felt a little buzz of déjà vu at the sight of the sleek stone hunting dogs seated atop them, permanently frozen at attention.

            A metal gate stretched between the posts, padlocked.   Audra reached for the keys  on the dash, and Brendan gallantly jumped out to unlock and open the gate for her.

            As he did, Laurel caught Audra eyeing her in the rear view mirror and felt uneasily that they might not be pulling as much over on her as Brendan assumed they were.

            But before either of the women could say anything, if either was going to, Brendan was back in the car, presenting the keys to Audra with a smile.

            They drove forward, gravel crunching under the tires, past a perfect curve of pink-blossomed crape myrtles lining both sides of a split rail fence along the road.   Wind stirred the tall, spare pines around them.   Laurel found herself craning forward to look.   As the house appeared between the trees, she felt a jolt.

             It was an English country house of white-painted brick with a steeply pitched roof of what looked like real gray slate, two chimneys, a round upper balcony with white-painted iron railing, and gray shutters.    It seemed whole from the front, but the overwhelming feeling was that it was not.    There was part that just seemed to be missing.

            And angry, Laurel thought absurdly. 

            As Audra drove the circle to come up to the front, Laurel got a glimpse of the rest of the house, and realized what was so wrong.   There was another whole house connected to the front one, this one much longer, made of brick with white columns and trim, set perpendicular to the white front part.   Unbelievably, there seemed to be yet another white house behind that, at the other end of the brick part, but just as soon as Laurel had spied it that glimpse was gone.   Audra stopped by the path leading to the front door and shut off the engine.

            “Welcome to the Folger House.”

 

            The solid oak door creaked open into a small entry with glazed brick floors, surprisingly dark compared to the lightness of the house outside.   The room had a greenish tinge, from the garden green-painted wainscoting running halfway up the wall.   Laurel was reminded of the Spanish-style houses around Santa Barbara, and she had a sudden, painful memory of  – the dream – and her midnight ride from the hotel.   She pushed the thought away and forced herself back to the present as she followed Audra and Brendan into the house.

Across the green entry there were two steps up into a second, larger entry with a fireplace and a long wood bench like a church pew facing it.   Laurel glanced over a family portrait above the fireplace mantel, a crude, colorful painting of two parents and two children that gave her a strange sense of unease, but she had no time to study it before Audra stepped forward to begin her narration.   “This is actually the newer portion of the house,” she explained, “The part that was added on when James and Julia moved in permanently.”   Laurel looked around her at the cool, quiet rooms. 

 Past the fireplace were stairs down to a small empty room of indeterminate function to the right, with the same glazed brick floors, and what looked like a bathroom beyond.   On the left there was a short hall with a glimpse of a dark-paneled study at the end.    Very odd rooms to have at the entry of a house, Laurel thought.   There was dust like a fine sprinkling of baby powder everywhere, but otherwise the house was in surprisingly good condition.

            “Hmmm,” Laurel smiled vaguely at Audra.

             On the fourth wall of the second entry there was a door into a much wider and taller hall with dark hardwood floors and white walls.   Laurel and Brendan followed Audra into it.    An elegant staircase curved up to the right, with a tall bay window that looked out over enormous, overgrown gardens.   Past a window seat, the stairs took another upward turn and disappeared.

            Brendan took Laurel’s hand again as they walked forward.  She frowned at him and he nodded ahead toward Audra, shrugging helplessly (with a  What can I do? look.)   Laurel pressed her lips together and went along.   His hand was strong and warm around her fingers and she was suddenly electrically aware of his presence beside her.

            At the end of this hall there was an archway, with three short steps leading down, and then out of nowhere, a huge room, the size of a small ballroom, with two fireplaces, smoky mirrors in gilt frames lining the walls and a wide, rectangular expanse of hardwood floor.  

Laurel was about to follow Audra through the archway when she felt a chill run through her entire body.

            “Here,” she said aloud, and Brendan turned back to look at her.   Laurel pulled her hand from his and touched the doorjamb and thought she felt the faintest shock, like static electricity.   “They cut the house here.”

            “Yes, I believe you’re right,” Audra acknowledged, with an appraising glance at Laurel.

            They all moved down the steps into the great room.  Aside from a few end tables with marble tops, the only furniture in the room was a battered, dusty grand piano.

            “This is the older house,” Audra said, unnecessarily; the feeling of the room was completely different, much older and more complicated.   The ceiling was high with a raised ornamental design in the dome, and the crown molding had plaster medallions  at intervals all the way around the room.  Two bay windows with dusty panes flanked a set of equally filmy French doors which led out onto what must have been absolutely stunning gardens, several acres of them, now so overgrown with wisteria and yellow jasmine and honeysuckle Laurel thought instantly of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

          The bare floors shone even through their layer of dust and Laurel noted they were heart of pine (heart pine) but far older than the floors in her own house… she could see the wide planks had been fastened by hand-carved wood dowels instead of nails.

            Then she froze, staring at a spot halfway across the floor.

            Brendan opened his mouth to speak to Audra, but Laurel dug her nails into his palm and pointed.

            In the solid layer of dust on the floor, there were footprints.    Smallish and soft-soled, like footsteps on the beach, headed away from them, toward the archway to the next room.

            But they began in the middle of the floor, and left off well before the doorway, just five or six of them, and then nothing but undisturbed dust.

by Alexandra Sokoloff

You all get more tour journal today because tour is ALL I’ve been doing, since – I can’t even calculate since when.  I don’t even remember what it’s like to write, by now, which scares me, oh, just a little.   This is the last day of traveling, though, at least until one big week at the end of the month, but apart from some cool publicity with that, that week is going to be just about writing, MY writing.

Whatever that is.

My last stint has been teaching Screenwriting Tricks For Authors on a beach in Charleston – an incredible week long retreat for writers and aspiring writers sponsored every year by the Lowcountry Romance Writers.  It’s all women except for one man, who is taking those odds very much in stride, and the focus is paranormal, historical romance, and romantic suspense, although to my delight there is one horror chick so I don’t feel like the complete voice of doom.

I had a fabulous drive from Raleigh to Charleston, nice to be on the road again.  The great thing about driving toward South Carolina is that you get all that beach music, which I never knew it was its own genre of music until I actually lived in the South, and then I could see it in EVERYTHING – the Spinners and Temptations and Marvin Gaye and everyone. 

I got to the bridge over to the island where our retreat house is, just at sunset – WOW.  I drove straight out to the beach strip and pulled into this – incredible – mansion.   To say it is luxe is the understatement of the year.  Exquisite.  Cherrywood floors, and three levels of absolute perfection, elevator accessible of course –  but in a very beach, livable way – there’s a lot of Southwest influence, which is where the family of owners is from.   This porch that I’m out on now, or terrace or whatever you call it in the South, has multiple living areas, with fireplaces of course, and the ocean is right there, in front of me (past the pool and volleyball court, naturally) and  that SOUND, and the air –  I’m just in a tank top and I’m fine, and this incredible fragrance – it’s not jasmine, but something sweet and completely intoxicating, and there are turtles, apparently, out there in the sand doing their thing in a way that is so protected that you can be arrested for turning on porch or pool lights after sunset.

And my room.   Well, the word is suite.   With sweeping ocean view, entertainment center and kitchen, and spa bath.   Yes, I could get used to this.

I truly believe that anyone who commits to this kind of week-long writing intensive, at the prices that get charged for them, is ready to move to another, professional level, and I’ve never been disappointed in the calibre of students.  

We had a fantastic dinner and got to know each other a bit, and out of 25 people about half are either psychiatric professionals or law enforcement or social welfare.    Unbelievable stories at dinner, I’m so psyched to be here – as usual, I’m going to learn every bit as much and more as the students.

—–

Funny, here, how it’s incredibly cloudy, layered and stormy and brooding and you look away for a second and when you look back the whole sky has gone dazzlingly sunny, just the slightest wisps of clouds.   I have noticed, oh man, have I, how Southern temperaments are just like that weather.   Violent moods and storms that shake the earth and are forgotten in the next minute.   Not what I’m used to.

It’s another warm day but not so humid, easier.    I’m on the terrace again (and that sweet smell is jasmine, I found the vines) and I am noticing that in the overgrown yard next door there is a swing set, rusting, covered in brambles.   Tragic.   It would be lovely to swing and look out over the ocean.   But an overgrown swing set is a good image…

Romance conferences are great – for many reasons, but what I’m thinking of specifically right now is the swag.   Authors who can’t come contribute these extravagant giveaways for the swag bags – lush beauty products, flavored condoms, chocolate lip gloss, chocolate cock suckers (chocolate, chocolate, women and chocolate – someone’s in the kitchen right now making double chocolate biscotti).  Once in a while there’s even a mini-vibrator.   I used the body lotion from my bag and now, in the sun, my whole skin is sparkling with tiny iridescent flakes – the label on the bottle says it’s mica.  It’s making me feel like a mermaid or something.

People here are great.   The entire house is now vibrating with deep creativity.   Four of us who just had their periods have started them again from all the free-floating estrogen, just like in college.   Everyone is so excited.    And for me there is nothing like being able to draw a fantastic plot line out of a beginning writer – who up until that second didn’t even think she could do it.   I tell people:   “You would not have had the idea if you were not capable of executing it.”    (Something I am always fervently hoping for myself…)

Whether they do execute it or not, you never know – that’s more about endurance and a certain ruthlessness than about talent.   But I have been privileged and proud to see people I taught show up at a conference a year later with book deals – NOT saying I did it, but that I could see that it would happen, and told them so.

 

—PM—–

 

I taught my class again today and people are now constantly laughing out loud in surprise when they saw how brilliantly formulaic film structure is and how much easier their lives are going to be from now on, knowing a few simple tricks.  

And my horror chick is a real author.   One of those that I wouldn’t dare give notes to, she is so dead on about what she’s doing.  Naturally the most nervous one here, almost fainted before she had to read, and the most surprised that what she’s written is what it is.   And it is so great and logical and right that the Universe has put her here because I’m one of the few women out there writing what she’s writing and I will be able to save her about a year of grief  and possible disaster when it comes time to get an agent, the right agent, and between me and my other dark female author friends we can help her navigate what’s going to be her new life.    

(And this happens over and over and over again at these workshops and conferences – for authors, for aspiring authors, for me personally.   If you do it, the Universe understands that you’re serious about your writing and lifts you to the next step in a way you could never do for yourself.)

She’s one of the ones I bonded with last night, staying up way too late watching an excruciatingly bad horror movie called Orphan.   But finally there was a plot twist so sublimely ludicrous we were screaming, laughing – worth ever single minute we wasted with the rest of the movie.

Sunset was about three hours long, wave after wave of color crashing over the clouds, with a full moon on top of that, and dinner was Fettuccini Alfredo, from scratch.

No.   It doesn’t suck.

 

——

 

Things I love about this place.

– The spiral staircase, going up three floors, that polished, cherry wood…

– The elephant tapestries on the second floor.   Ganesh, god of happiness.

– The knockout 180 view of the ocean you get walking through the archway into the living room.

– The theme of palms – I’ve always loved that as a design element anyway, and I was in THE palm room, they were on everything, pillows, pictures, shower tiles, ceiling fan. Just like the Atlantic ocean is a softer ocean than the Pacific, these are softer palms than California palms, feathery and feminine.

– That sea foam.   Didn’t Venus come from sea foam – the sperm of Zeus?  Never got how of course the Greeks would think that, before this trip.   Totally fitting for a romance retreat.

– Omg, the food.   As anyone who has read this blog for a while has no doubt noticed I am NOT a foodie but we have had some spectacular meals –  one night crab legs and oysters, which were cracked and fed to us by the Charlestonians – this beautiful auburn-haired lithe elegant woman named Kathy, with the sexiest, butteriest accent – standing in front of me with a knife and opening oysters for me – full well knowing the picture she was creating and the primal pleasure of it all…

– And sparkly Lisa from Florida, who owns an apparently quite famous bakery/café in St. Augustine, the Cookery, made a five course Hungarian feast:  sweet beets with sour cream, flat herbed egg noodles for goulash, this incredible sour cream and dill cucumber salad, green beans.   And homemade, soft granola in the morning… ummm….

– The surfers.   It cracks me up to see surfers trying to surf the baby waves here, but some of these guys were actually catching some rides…. Mystifying.   Looked great in the wetsuits, too.

– The butterflies – so many of them, little animas, everywhere, fluttering right in front of our faces, fearless: bright yellow ones and tiger-striped.

– The company of women.   The comfort level – open, loving, supportive, sexy, giggly, earthy, hilarious.

 

—-

 

As you can probably tell, I had a cosmically wonderful time, and got some seriously good teaching done.

And yet I kept getting these anxiety – not attacks, but prickles, that I was not getting any of my own work done, that any time I had a free moment, not that there were many, I’d walk on the beach or get talked into another horror movie marathon or just sit on the porch baking in the sun and staring out at the ocean.

Why do we do that to ourselves?  

I’ve been touring NON-STOP for over a month now, because of the Halloween thing and because The Harrowing came out in the U.K. in September.   It was a total, Universal gift to have a week on the beach, in such overwhelmingly beautiful circumstances.  I wasn’t slacking, I was teaching, and yet I was beating myself up that I had gotten no further on deciding my next book (that would be after the next TWO that I’m writing at the moment).

Is there not something a little crazy about that?

Well, finally I relaxed and decided I was just going to take the gift.   And maybe instead of forcing a decision on my next book, I will just listen, and see what I might be being told to write, if I just manage to stay quiet enough to hear.

So that’s my message today.   We’re given all these gifts, all the time.   Life is so abundant, and a writer’s life seemingly even more so – just magic things, all the time.   Do you take the gifts you’re given?    Doesn’t it work better that way?

by Alexandra Sokoloff

So the reason I’ve been so scarce around here for the last month is that it’s October.   When you write scary books you quickly realize you will never have a Halloween season to yourself ever again.  

Also, because of a family illness, I had to get back to California – with my cats.   Instead of flying, I decided to drive, and luckily my sister was up for doing it with me.   I kept a journal and am excerpting it here, because anyone who hasn’t driven this country really is missing the experience of a lifetime.

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Road trip, Day One, Saturday  (Raleigh NC to Hickory NC)

A friend of mine who’s obsessed with ON THE ROAD has pointed out to me that in that book, going West is always happy and optimistic and full of adventure, and going East is always sad and depressively introspective and fraught with setbacks.   Which obviously means that just by geographical orientation this has to be a happy trip.

Actually my sister and brother and I live for road trips.  We were programmed for it early on during the family’s summer cross-country trips – pile into the station wagon and drive a different route every year so we could experience the country.   Like, all of it.   A huge, priceless gift we got from our parents.   Well, and Dad just loved to drive.

We’ll miss M. on this one, but E. and I travel pretty much perfectly together – she’s really one of a kind: Dorothy Parker’s wit, Julia Child’s effervescence (and cooking skills), and the artistic sense and surrealist mind of Salvador Dali.   We drive until we drop, tell each other stories, pull off whenever anything looks interesting, and laugh until we’re sick.  The trick here is, we’re going to have to drive eight good hours a day to make it to an event I have to do in Vegas this week, AND – we’re taking my 14-year old cats, also sisters, but who hate each other and Do Not Travel Well.  We have kitty Valium but they’re still way too old for this on top of everything else they’ve been through in the last few months, and most of the stress I have is about how they’re going to hold up.

This first day was a little – um – nuts: I was committed to teach a writing workshop for a half day before we could hit the road.   Lucky for me I could do this one in my sleep, because I’d had all of 20 minutes the night before.

The workshop went spectacularly well even in my unconsciousness and then I had to race back to get the house in order, pack more stuff into the car than I would have thought possible and then hit the road…

… just in time to get caught in a crazy traffic jam around the U 2 concert at local Carter-Finley Stadium.  (I heard people were just abandoning their cars along I-40 and walking, a mini-Woodstock.)  It took us 20 minutes to get a half a mile, but then we were out of it (saw the back up for the next 30 minutes of driving, though).   I’d been blocking that U 2 was in town that night and I’d miss them, but there was a radio station playing A to Z U 2 songs that night, so E. and I got a mini-concert of our own.

The full moon was up and the sky was so bright that we could see the whole landscape on the road to Asheville, a totally different experience than that tunnel of black that I-40 here usually is, just beautiful.  

The open road is always about endless, infinite possibility to me.   The world is huge and it’s all available to us, every second.  I am grateful to have this chance to vacuum out my head, and become open to everything.

 

Day 2, Sunday  (Hickory, NC  to Somewhere, Tennessee)

 7 pm            

We are now in a rather dubious motel at the side of I 40 in Tennessee, somewhere between Nashville and Memphis.   Not as bad as those scary motels conveniently located right behind the ubiquitous “Adult Superstores” along 40 (is “Adult Superstore” a Southern code word for brothel?).  The room is actually clean, and totally fine for a night but I suspect illicit truck stop activity is soon to come.   It was just raining too hard not to pull off, and no other options in sight.

But the door is double-bolted and chained, the cats are mellower tonight, and we’re watching Titanic on HBO as I write this.   Will never make it up to the end; I don’t care to see Leo’s oh-so-romantically-tragic death anyway.   But man, those eyes…

So the day…

Not much sleep between 3 am and 7 because of feline hysteria, but still felt fine in the morning.   E and I drank five cups each of that incredibly sugary motel vanilla cappuccino (which I think is like a whole week’s worth of calories) and then hit the road.   A gorgeous fall day: blue, blue sky with wispy clouds, and even saw some turning leaves – just a taste of the psychedelia to come.

We made a brief stop in Little San Francisco – I mean, Asheville, and did a quick tour around downtown – stopped in at Malaprops to sign books and at Street Fair to buy hippie clothes.   I got at totally great orange and purple and teal leaf-embroidered tank top for fall.  I absolutely love Asheville, really must spend more time there.   It has that sensual, mystical quality of San Francisco and New Orleans – and what a riot of fragrances and colors and art and books and architecture and coffee and every sensual pleasure.

Too, too short a time there, but we got a taste.  Then up over the mountains (love that one tunnel, very filmic) and crossed into Tennessee, which immediately has a different feel to it.   Still forest and leaves, but the roads are carved between rock cliffs.   The sky was getting gray and truckers honked at us every few miles.

My sister is on a quest – she’s obsessively trying to recreate – food-wise – the eating highlights of a West-to-East cross country trip we took about four years ago.    Her rule is that we eat regionally, and today her mission was The Bean Pot in Crossville, TN (where the time changes from Eastern to Central).   I have to say she was right – those are the best beans and cornbread sticks I’ve had anywhere, ever.   The restaurant itself is almost a parody… I think I hope it’s a parody.   Beside the door is a horrifyingly realistic mannequin of a mountain boy straight out of Deliverance – or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.   He’s in a wheelchair, legless, wearing denim overalls, gap-toothed and vacant-eyed.   One of his arms is attached to an invisible wire and the woman behind the register will pull the wire to make him wave hello and goodbye to customers.  Nightmare-inducing.  The souvenir shop next door sells racist table implements and statues of dogs lifting their legs to piss, along with all manner of Confederate flag apparel – but sadly, not a trace of the cactus penises we remembered from our last trip and have always regretted not buying, even just to prove they exist.

The rain started early afternoon and got steadily harder.   I was glad to have remembered to have the windshield wipers changed, something that never would have occurred to me in Southern California, but after five years in NC, I was ready.   The rain made it easier to have to drive right by Nashville, another totally great city that we had a charmed evening in on our last road trip.   But with JT and Randy living there,  I can go play any time I want.

The soundtrack today was nonstop 70’s, lots of singing along, and let me tell you, no matter what you think your problems are, it’s nothing compared to the travails of poor Lola at the Copa – Copacabana.

 

Day Three:   Monday   (East of Memphis, TN  to Fort Smith, Arkansas)

It’s so nice to wake up in the middle of nowhere! Foggy and cool this morning, very green all around, trees and fields.

E. wanted BBQ but we couldn’t find any that early in the morning, and she had never been to a Waffle House and we don’t have them on the West Coast, so we did that for the experience.  

Crossed through Memphis, over the Mississippi, my favorite river, on that great bridge, into Arkansas.

E. had some business to do today so she made some phone calls while I drove and spaced out.

Arkansas is a state I know not much about, except of course for the Clintons, but visually and geographically it seems to be divided along I-40 into three very different terrains: the Eastern side is relatively flat with fields of this almost surreal marigold color, bordered by very unforesty trees, more like oaks and apple trees.   After Little Rock, the Western side turns into woodland with lots of water – lakes, rivers, creeks.   And then suddenly, the Ozarks, which are stunning, very low hills and vegetation I’m not familiar with, but just beautiful vistas.   And apparently it’s wine country. 

We got a lot of driving done today – left early and pushed through, but the cats were not happy campers for most of the time, and we were tired, too, so we gave up around five and found an Ozarks motel with a view out the window that goes on forever and the perfect local restaurant right across the parking lot: Big Jake’s, with photos of prize-winning livestock in the lobby, a very cool model train running all the way around the balcony of the dining hall, and dead animals hung on the walls.

We had big plans of doing yoga in the room tonight with a DVD we brought, but maybe tomorrow!  It’s not even nine, but I’m crashing.

Oklahoma next, which means a day of roadside tamales of the gods.

 

Day 4 – Tuesday –  Fort Smith, OK to Amarillo, TX

Today was Oklahoma – where the wind really does come sweeping down the plain.

There was a thunderstorm when we woke up this morning so we waited it out a little but still managed to leave by nine.   There was instantly a different feel to the day.   The sky is enormous, a huge bowl, and it was so liberating to be able to see horizon again.   That is one thing that really continues to unnerve me about Raleigh:  no vistas. 

As I remembered, Oklahoma is a gorgeous state in a totally different way from anything in the South:  vast fields…. All kinds of fields… of yellow flowers, sage green ones with shiny pretty waving grasses by the road, red freshly plowed ones, and even black ones dotted with white cotton.    We had a spectacular cloud show all day long in that endless sky, constantly changing layers, some dark funnels of rain, and then the sun coming out after a few hours.    And signs every few miles marking a different tribal nation.   Would really love to go back to graduate school in American history… um, next lifetime.

Oklahoma City would be interesting to hang out in for a day or two, just for the wonderful historical downtown – SO Midwestern:  all shopfronts and great examples of Plains architecture, which I recently learned about on an architectural tour of Chicago during ALA that made me just about rabid to read more about the history of American architecture.   That I might be able to get to before the next life.

We couldn’t stop, though, because in the afternoon I had to stop for 45 minutes to do a four-way phone interview with a Vegas radio station and Rhodi Hawk and Sarah Langan, the other dark suspense authors I’m going to be doing this Southwest tour with.   Elaine and I were in the middle of nowhere so we pulled off at a Cherokee Trading Post with a huge cutout billboard of a feather-headdressed chief against that bowl of blue sky, and I did the interview on my cell phone in the parking lot with a strong and really noisy wind whistling around me and a family of bison staring at me from a nearby field.  The connection was terrible on my end and I could hear the host’s questions but not a single word of Rhodi’s and Sarah’s answers, and I can only hope what I said was vaguely in the ballpark of a coherent conversation.   And on top of all that, halfway through the interview I had to run out into the parking lot, phone in hand, and help E. rescue a turtle heading straight for the freeway in an apparent suicide attempt.

One of those absurd moments my screenwriting partner and I used to call – EXTREMELY ironically – “The glamorous life of a Hollywood screenwriter.”  

It was pretty great, even so.

Back on the road, and the cats were being placid after spending the interview prowling around the car and eating, so we pushed on, and crossed into Texas just after four.  The landscape, again, was immediately completely different; I always marvel at that fact of border crossings.   Who decides these things?  Or does the landscape change to fit the character of the state after it becomes a state?

Texas is much flatter than OK, and a lot of scrub brush and smaller trees at the border.  Signs for bail bonds, derelict gas stations, and oil wells almost immediately, even if they’re tiny ones.

And then the land opens up into this immense, bare flatness, with very gentle curves of hills and low dry grass and patches of yellow, and the occasional steer, under a HUGE sky.

Now you can really tell you’re on Route 66; the Americana is non-stop.   The billboards are endlessly entertaining:  “Free 72 ounce steak”   (isn’t a usual steak, like, eight ounces? The mind boggles.)   “Five miles to the Jesus Christ is Lord Travel Center.”  (We didn’t have the nerve to stop.)   “Two miles ahead: the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere, a spiritual experience you will never forget.”

I wouldn’t call it a spiritual experience, but it WAS a big cross, sort of ominously impressive against the darkening sunset.

But the sunset – now that was a spiritual experience all on its own – it started out pearlescent, all those clouds in that huge sky, and then went on for HOURS, climaxing in shimmering reds and golds and purples – and then even more spectacularly, the sky went deep blue and the clouds appeared backlit, as if painted on to an enormous theater scrim.   Just jaw-dropping.

We hit Amarillo exhausted – just enough energy left to stop for tamales.

Which were, of course, divine.

 

Day 9 – Los Angeles

She’s seen her share of devils in this angel town.

–       Shawn Mullins, Rockabye

You can check out any time you like… but you can never leave.

  –  The Eagles, Hotel California

Aaaahhh!!!!   L.A.!!!  Again!   How did I end up here again???

Well, okay, my trip journal went to hell once we hit the Southwest – some very crazy driving back and forth – dropping my sister and the cats off at a hotel in Vegas (E. threatening the cats with a debauched night of bourbon and whores once I left), meeting Rhodi and Sarah for our booksigning in Vegas (Books in Vegas!  Who knew?), jumping in the car with Rhodi and driving back to Phoenix to meet Sarah for another signing, circling down to San Diego for another, then up to L.A. for yet another signing and then cruising around the Southland for about two dozen bookstore drop-ins.   I have one whole day off and then flying to Indianapolis (up at 3 in the morning – please just kill me) for the World Mystery Convention.   (Which Steve has recounted beautifully here).

There were four border checkpoints en route to San Diego because of some recent drug cartel shootout, and I kid you not, Rhodi and I froze like deer in the headlights each time a border cop leaned in the window to ask us, “Where are you coming from?”

I mean, how do you possibly start?

And then one of them threw in a trick question:  “Where are you headed?”

I swear, it was something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It’s a good thing we don’t look like Mexican drug runners, and/or were perhaps showing some leg at the time, or you may never have heard from me again.

– Alex

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November is Nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month, in which thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of writers, commit to writing 50,000 words of a novel from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30.

I’ve been doing a Nanowrimo prep on my blog, and there’s still time to get yourself in gear.   Come on, you know you want to!