Writing

Posts will reflect my journey to become a “real” writer, i.e. my attempts to become a published author.

Am I Getting Any Better?

| rachelhamm

Okay, my next attempt in the writing exercise to work on character description.  How am I doing?

Tom Witherspoon was no one special back in high school, unless Aribelle’s love made him special.  He wasn’t short and he wasn’t tall, he wasn’t ugly and he wasn’t handsome, but Aribelle loved him.  He was the kind of guy you had to get to know to love, and once Aribelle got to know him, she couldn’t get enough of him.  He was funny in a subtle way, one really had to think about what he was saying and realize the irony.

Aribelle’s friends didn’t get the appeal, but it didn’t matter, because once she made up her mind, there was no changing it.  And she adored his grey eyes and strawberry blonde hair.  He just wasn’t like the other guys- that’s what she liked the most about him.

He scheduled the appointment at the salon because his mother kept harassing him about his long hair.  She complained that he was never going to meet anyone else if he looked like a hobo.  Of course, after his five-year marriage ended, he wasn’t exactly looking for a new relationship.  He had his hands full enough with Emmy, his three-year old daughter, and learning how to cook, clean, and pay bills for himself all over again.

The marriage hadn’t been bad.  It just hadn’t worked.  After Emmy’s birth, things became strained.  Julia felt more and more tied down and began to resent Tom’s “free-spirited” existence.  He could never figure out where she got the idea that he lived a “free-spirited” existence, but stopped arguing the point after a while.  He finally supposed that the fact that he left every morning to go to work and she was “stuck” at home every day with the baby gave her the idea that he could go off gallivanting with his friends whenever he felt like it.

Now she was working again and Emmy spent the day with one of her grandmothers.  Tom had her for two weeks straight, then Julia had her for two weeks.  It was the easiest and best solution for the time being, but Tom worried when Emmy reached school age that the constant moving back and forth would cause problems.   Julia never wanted to talk about that, even though kindergarten was only a year and a half away.

Writing Exercise

| rachelhamm

I’m in need of practice, specifically with character description and prose.  I suck at these two aspects of storytelling.  I like to be all Dialogue, Dialogue, Dialogue.  So, I’m going to start a writing exercise where at least once a day I spend thirty minutes to an hour trying to write as much as I can in terms of character description/development WITHOUT ANY DIALOGUE.  I started last night, here’s what I came up with:

Aribelle Justice loved her job.  She counted herself lucky.  How many people could actually say they loved their job?  She loved that every day was the same, yet different.  She loved making people beautiful.

When she went into work on a Saturday, she didn’t consider life unfair.  She never once thought, “I never get a real weekend!  Why didn’t I choose a normal 9-to-5 type career?”

Aribelle Justice loved her boyfriend, once.  Not so much anymore.  But she hadn’t realized it yet.  Things were comfortable with him.  He was handsome and intelligent; he treated her with respect.  But the spark was gone.

When she left work on a Saturday evening, she wasn’t excited to go home.  She wanted to stay at the salon, see a few more guests, make someone else’s date night incredible.

Aribelle had been one of the pretty girls in high school, though no one would claim she was beautiful.  She had deep brown eyes and long dark hair, a round face and slightly chubby cheeks.  The boys loved her because she was fearless and never took herself too seriously.  Senior year, she climbed to the top of the school’s clock tower, in a bikini, to protest the strict dress code.  Now, ten years later, her face slightly rounder, her hair slightly lighter and much shorter, she used that same fearlessness and a pair of shears to transform her guests from shlumpy housewives into fierce sex kittens.

She walked into the salon every day with her head high, thanks to two-inch heels.  She hadn’t felt her toes in over six years, but she didn’t care.  “Beauty is worth a little pain every now and then,” was her motto and she took nothing more seriously than beauty.  It was her job, after all.

So it wasn’t fate that she happened to be wearing a stunning outfit on a Wednesday afternoon in March.  Dark jeans, a fitted royal blue top, and a killer black blazer.  She always dressed to impress.  But perhaps it was fate that caused Tom Witherspoon to schedule an appointment with her best friend and co-worker, Lacey, on that same Wednesday afternoon.  Or, it might have been fate, if she believed in fate.  But she didn’t.

Now I’d like your help.  In the comments, give me the name of a character and one or two thoughts on who this character is.  I’ll post my practices here and everyone is free to critique to help my improve my writing in this area.  Sound like fun?  Thanks in advance for your help!

What I Learned This Week

| rachelhamm

I’m often told that my writing is very honest- that I’m not afraid of putting myself out there on the page.  And I definitely find this is true.  In fact, I’m more honest in my writing than in actual conversation.  Not because I am untruthful in real conversation, but because I often just can’t find the right way to express myself.  Somehow, in writing, I always can.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon a lot lately.  Namely due to this guy I went out on a couple of dates with.  Let me emphasize A COUPLE OF DATES.  I’ll be more precise.  TWO dates.  You’ll see why the number is important in a minute.

This guy is very nice and we had a good time hanging out together.  He’s also very religious.  Not religious in the sense that he thinks you’ll go to hell for smoking, drinking, and cursing, because he certainly does those things, but religious in the sense that he feels a very deep faith in God and Jesus.

I respect his faith.  I respect anyone who is able to have an unwavering belief that God is the answer to anything.  But.  I am not one of those people/  I believe in God, but I don’t always like him.  This turned out to be a problem for said guy.

Personally, I think discussing religion on the first couple of dates is a BIG MISTAKE.  But, God isn’t as important to me as it is to him, so the subject came up.  I tried to explain I wasn’t comfortable talking about it, but it was important to him.  I finally wrote down my entire history with church and God because I felt like I wasn’t expressing myself very well verbally.

I am really proud of what I wrote.  I found it incredibly beautiful and honest.  One day maybe I’ll share it with you, but it is still very personal.

The whole experience also made me think about myself in a new way.  I’ve decided I’m pretty awesome.  I’m not saying that from a conceited place, but from a it’s-time-I-had-a-little-more-confidence place.  Because really, I’m an awesome person.  If things had worked out with the guy, he would have been lucky to have me.  Because I’m funny, and witty, and I don’t always take everything so seriously.  I can have fun sitting in the Garden Center at Wal-Mart playing dots.  (One of the activities on our first date.)  I’m smart, and dammit, I’m going to do something incredible in life.  I don’t know what that thing is yet, but I believe it’s going to happen.  I have passion.  I care about people.  I’m thoughtful.  I’m pretty when I get dressed up.  I’m freaking awesome, and just because no guy has been able to handle all of my awesomeness up til now, doesn’t mean that no guy ever will.  Because some guy is going to see it.  And he is going to be incredibly awesome, too.

One other thing I learned this week (which has absolutely nothing to do with the other two things), thanks to Nathan Bransford’s blog: I use too much repetition in my writing.  It is always good when you see a post by an agent that helps you recognize and remedy a problem!  Thank you, Nathan!

So, to recap, what I’ve learned this week:

1) I’m able to express myself more completely through written words.

2) I’m pretty f***ing awesome.

3) I need to edit for repetition.

A pretty good week, I think!

God, I love to read…

| rachelhamm

I really really really love how a good book makes you forget you are reading and makes you say, “Oh, I’ll do it in the morning,” when you realize you were supposed to pack over an hour ago, and even though you KNOW you are not a morning person.

I am really not a morning person.  And I really was supposed to pack my bag for Saturday and Sunday in Fayetteville, including one visit to church, which means ironed clothes, not just something I pull out of the laundry basket (the clean one, that is), and one night out with a friend of my friends which means clothes that look like I put some thought into them, not just something I pull out of the laundry basket (yes, still the clean one).  But instead of ironing and packing tonight, I read.  I read a book I could not put down.

And truly, I forgot I was reading.  I was just immersed in the life of the characters: watching them, easedropping on their conversations, praying for that kiss right along with them.  God, I LOVE a good book!  And this was just a DAMN good book.

Funnily enough, it was a book I never would have read if I hadn’t started writing.  It was the second book of Claire LaZebnik’s (both the second she published and the second I read, though I read her last one first and still have read the first one): Knitting Under the Influence.  I honestly have not been so mesmerized by a book since Pride and Prejudice or Harry Potter.  And yes, I feel no shame in putting Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter in the same league.  Both excellent, wonderful, beautifully written stories.   But back to Mrs. LaZebnik.  I only found her because I was looking to support other authors, as you may remember from my post about Judging a Book by It’s Cover.  And today, I was sitting in Barnes and Noble, typing away the handwritten pages I had collected over the past week for TDE and I needed to use the restroom.  On the way back to my table, I happen to walk through the aisle where I found The Smart One and The Pretty One back in January.  And lo and behold, right there beside it, Knitting.  It wasn’t there last time.  I liked Smart/Pretty, but I LOVED Knitting!  And I never would have thought to pick it up in the bookstore if I hadn’t written my own book and wanted to support other people out there like me trying to “live the dream.”

You want to know something else that’s funny?  Immediately upon completion, I felt the urge to write.  I was literally compelled.  I said out loud, “I need to write,” grabbed a notebook from the bed/nightstand beside me, fumbled around in my laptop bag for a pen and started journaling.  It probably would have been more productive if my immediate desire had been to work on TDE, but all writing is practice, even if it is just writing for yourself, to work out your own feelings. (And I know you are all probably scratching your heads about the bed-slash-nightstand thing, but take my word for it, you don’t want the long explanation.)

Also, and this is pretty hilarious, my mom walks into my room at some point looking for something and she asks what I’m reading.  I show her and she says, “I think I’ve read that.”  I’m all like, “Okay, whatever,” and go on with my reading.  About half an hour later she comes back in with a list in her hand and asks me the author’s name.  I tell her, she finds it on her list and reads off the title.  Yep, she’s read it.  She owns a copy!  She bought it at a yard sale!  But, if she had ever asked me to read it, I probably would have said no.  I don’t know why, but I don’t like to read books that other people tell me to read.  I just re-read this and realized it doesn’t sound hilarious, but I still find it amusing, personally.

And now it’s past midnight, I’m all jacked up on my reading-a-good-book high, I still haven’t packed, and still have no desire to pack.  Guess I’ll just be running late in the morning.

A Taste of TDE

| rachelhamm

I’m in the mood to share some writing.  So here’s a chapter of The Death Effect for your enjoyment.  It hasn’t been edited or critiqued yet, and I’m not looking for anything like that here.  Just wanted to give the universe a taste of my story.  There shouldn’t be any spoilers, if you’ve read any of my previous posts about TDE, you know the girl dies…

Chapter Twelve: Her Sister

Why?  Why did this happen to her?

Taylor watched, her breath snagged inside her throat, as her father stood up and approached the door.  It’s just Jake, she thought, just Jake coming to find me. But the rational voice in her head told her she was wrong.  Jake would have called first.  And Jake knew she was there, she’d texted him when she got off work.

Her father’s steps fell heavily as he approached the door.  Thud.  Thud.  Thud.  Taylor massaged her right temple with her thumb, trying to rub the fear and guilt away.  She heard the squeak as her father turned the handle and pulled the door inwards.  She turned her eyes down to the table, unable to face the officer or detective she knew would be standing there.

“Mr. Maxwell?”

“Yes?  Please tell me you found Lisa.”

“Sir, I’m so sorry…”

Taylor slumped forward and felt rather than saw her mother jump up from the table and fly across the room.

“No,” her mom cried out, “no!”

“I’m so sorry, ma’am, but a body…”

“Noooooo!”

Taylor finally looked up, only to see her mother wailing and falling to her knees, her father trying to hold her up.

“… a body was found in Bear Lake not long ago.  It matches the description of your daughter.”

“It has to be a mistake,” her father mumbled, “it can’t be Lisa.  It has to be a mistake.”

“I know how difficult this is, but I need someone to come down to the morgue with me and identify the body.”

Her mother’s cries increased and her father sank to his knees, wrapping his arms around Geri’s shoulders, neither answered the officer.  Taylor stood on shaking legs and shuffled to the door.  She looked the officer in the face.  His jaw drew his mouth into a tight line, his dark brown eyes gazed with concern into hers.  It was Officer Kasey, the same man who’d taken the initial missing person report.  But now, he cared.  The tears that had been pooling in her eyes finally broke free and gushed down her face.

“I’ll go.  I’ll go and identify her.”

The officer nodded.  Taylor retrieved her heavy winter coat and purse from the kitchen table.

“It’s not her, Tay, it can’t be.”  Her dad grabbed her arm as she passed by to follow Office Kasey.  She squeezed his hand and walked out the door, with one last glance at her parents, left devastated and clinging to each other.

“Why didn’t Detective Carson come?”  Taylor asked as Officer Kasey opened the passenger door to his patrol car for her.

“He’s finishing things up at the crime scene.  He wanted to come and give the news himself, but I volunteered and it was more important for him to be there, gathering evidence, than me.”

Taylor gulped, the words “crime scene” hitting her like a knife to the gut.  She slid into the seat and he shut the door and moved around to get in the driver’s side while she buckled her seat belt.  After he got in, started the car, and maneuvered onto the highway, she turned to look at him.

“Why did you volunteer?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why did you volunteer to come and tell my family that my sister is…” she couldn’t finish the sentence, the word left unsaid lingered in the air, stunning them both into silence.  Kasey shifted in his seat, looked in the rearview and sideview mirrors, anywhere and everywhere but the passenger seat.

“I mean, I can’t imagine anyone actually wants to be that person, the one who destroys all hope.”

“No.  No one wants to be that person,” he agreed.  He cleared his throat.  “I guess I volunteered because I felt guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“I didn’t really take the case seriously when I filled out your report.”

“What?”

“Well, I did everything I was supposed to do, I filled out the report, asked the standard questions.  But I didn’t really believe there was anything wrong.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.  Things like this happen all the time.  A family member doesn’t hear from their loved one in a day or two and automatically thinks the worst, when ninety-nine percent of the time, they just took a vacation without telling anyone, or something like that.”

Taylor pulled her coat tighter around her and breathed hot air onto her numb fingers.  She wished something could warm her heart.

“So, I guess I volunteered so I could say I’m sorry to you, to your parents.  I could have dug deeper, asked more questions, treated you with more respect.”

“You think the body they found is really her?” she whispered.

“I’m sorry, but, yes.  The picture you gave me…”

“Right.”  They didn’t speak throughout the rest of the drive.  Taylor couldn’t talk, the flow of tears was too overwhelming.

When they approached the brick building, Kasey disturbed the tension.  “Are you sure you can do this?  It can wait until one of your parents can come.”

“No, I don’t know if I can do this, but I can’t let them go through it, they’re in enough pain.”

He led her inside, instructed her to sign in, then they descended a dark, narrow staircase to reach the basement.  Taylor almost wanted to laugh- it was so stereotypical, like she was an actor in a film and the set director had made the scene as dreary and unwelcoming as possible.  But then, why would they make the stairway to the worst moment in life anything but bleak?

A grey steel door greeted them at the bottom of the steps.  Kasey punched a code into the panel beside the handle, then held the door open for Taylor.  She took a step forward and stopped.

She couldn’t go any further.  She knew that in another few feet or so she’d be face-to-face with the corpse of her baby sister.  She couldn’t do it.  Her feet trapped her firmly in place, cemented to the ground.  Any step forward was just one step closer to the truth that she’d never said “sorry” and would now never have the chance.

“Taylor?”  Kasey’s voice echoed off the blood-red bricks, but she didn’t hear him.  She could only hear the fighting, the bickering, the nasty words thrown between her and Lisa.

“Why didn’t I make it right?”

“What?”

Taylor turned to Kasey and grabbed his shirt with both hands.  “Why didn’t I make it right?  We fought so much the past couple of years.  I didn’t want to fix things between us.”   She collapsed against him, sobbing out her guilt and pain.  “And now it’s too late.  It’s too late!”

One Happy Post, Seriously

| rachelhamm

I want to do a happy post, since so many of my thoughts on writing lately have been downers.  So, here you are, one bonafide sparkling happy post!

When I get a book published, I’m getting a tattoo.  I already know where I want it, in fact, I let my MC in Twenty-Five get a tattoo in the same spot, on the outside of my wrist, where my arm meets the base of my hand.  Easily covered up with long sleeves or a bracelet if necessary.  If Twenty-Five is the first book to be published, I’ll get the roman numerals for Twenty-Five, XXV.  If it’s one of my other projects, well, I guess I’ll have to think of something that symbolizes them.  I’m not sure I want anything representing Death on my arm, but I can probably come up with something for The Death Effect.  Perhaps the Greek or Roman letters for TDE.  Who knows.

When I get a book published, I hope I make a little bit of money so I can get myself out of debt.  It would be so nice not to have to worry about going to the doctor, or getting my oil changed, or something like that, because I’m worried the payment won’t go through.  Okay, that wasn’t very happy, but focus on the positive- making a little bit of money 🙂

When I get published, I’m going to let my mother read my book.  I haven’t let her yet.  The MC is so much like me and I don’t know how she’d react to it.  I think she’d like the book and I know she’d be supportive, but there are still some secrets about myself I’d like to keep to myself for now.

When I get published, the acknowledgements or dedication is going to read:

For all those tired and weary souls who sit down at a desk or computer, who balance notebooks in their laps, who fight with their pens- this book is for you.

For all the friends who read my book before I even knew how to write a book- this book is for you.

For everyone who knows what it feels like to be alone, wishing for love and friendship- this book is for you.

For C, J, A to the third power, and V and everyone over at The Next Big Writer- thank you thank you thank you for being my toughest and most loving critics.  Thank you for pushing me to be better.  For telling me that my story had heart, hope, passion, and beauty- this book is for you.

And lastly, for Mom, Daddy, Theresa, Amanda, and Danny, though we fight and argue, tease and laugh at one another, I love you with all the depths of my heart.  Thank you for being my family- this book is for you.

Now THAT makes me very happy.

I had a really good weekend.  I’m going to try very hard to be less of a grumpy, woe-is-me, person.  I hope this is a good start.  I’m determined, I have this dream, I’m going to keep going after it.  What’s the point of having a dream if you just let it die?  Thinking it’s never going to happen isn’t healthy and it isn’t productive.  I’m going to try and have the attitude from now on, WHEN I get published, not IF I get published.

When I get published…

When I get published…

When I get published…

What the F***

| rachelhamm

You may remember a few weeks ago when I found a brand new motto for life: What the hell?  It can’t hurt to try.

Yeah.

Well, that’s pretty much down the drain.

The contest I entered, I didn’t make it through to the next round.  1000 entries made it through.  Mine was not one of them.  So, yeah.

I knew going in I wasn’t going to win.  I knew going in that no one thinks my attempts at queries are any good.  So it’s not a surprise that I didn’t make it through to the next round.  But it does suck.  It kinda pisses me off that no one in the publishing world is ever going to read my book because I can’t write an interesting query.

Maybe my book sucks.  Maybe it isn’t just the query.  But I don’t really believe that my book is bad.  I really don’t.  It’s not the greatest thing ever written, but I think it’s pretty good.  And yet, I can’t move forward with it because I can’t get an agent interested in it.

Or maybe that’s my real problem: my book is bad, but I don’t realize it.  Which may just be the saddest thing ever.

So my new motto is What the F***.  I like it better than the other one.  It’s more me, I think.

Creative Void

| rachelhamm

I’m feeling a bit of a creative void.  It’s not writer’s block, it’s more of a listlessness.  A non-desire to write, create, produce.

I got a really bad review of a chapter of Twenty-Five a couple of weeks ago.  The reader said the characters were cookie cutter, the sentence structure monotonous, and the dialogue cliche.  They said “there’s no story here.”

Of course, reading a review like that is like diving head first into freezing cold water.  It’s a shock to the system.  You wonder- did this person read my work and actually think that?  or were they just being mean and spiteful?  I have to believe that it’s a little bit of a mixture of the two extremes.

I know, deep in my heart, that my characters are not cookie cutter.  They have histories, dreams, plans for the future.  I know what they look like, how they act, their likes and dislikes.  I’ve thought them through completely and I didn’t just base them on the archetypal characters you see in book after book, story after story.  However, I can understand how, in an isolated chapter, without the buildup of the beginning of the story and their relationship, a reader would miss their complexity and depth.

With the monotonous sentence structure comment, I think the reader may have a point.  I’ve been reading through my book slowly the last couple of nights and I think I do have issues with varying sentence structure.  There just aren’t that many ways to structure a series of actions without getting into lavish descriptions and similes and metaphors, which I hate.  So, one of my goals is to find fresher ways of saying what I want to say.

As far as the dialogue being cliche, I have to say- WHOA.  I am really surprised anyone would say that about my dialogue because if there’s one thing  that 99.99% of my readers have agreed on, it’s my realistic dialogue.  I can only assume that this is another instance of the isolated chapter, but will defend myself a little in saying that real people in real life use cliches when they talk.  Cliches are around for a reason- they are recognizable, memorable.  Just about everything we say in everyday life can be considered cliche.  For example, if I write this exchange:

“Hey.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Fine, you?”

“Fine.”

is the cliche police going to strike it down and tell me I can’t use it?

The last comment is the one that really hurt.  “There’s no story here.”  I’ve put my blood, sweat, and tears into this book for the past year (and yes, I realize blood, sweat, and tears is cliche, too) and for someone to tell me there’s no story there, I mean, I can’t even express how much that hurts.  I know its not the first bad review that I’ve gotten, and I know it won’t be the last, but DAMN!  I would never tell someone that there was no “story” in their story.  Because anyone who writes has a story they are trying to tell.  And yes, some stories need more work than others, but everything is a story.  Life is a story.

So all of that to say that it’s been really hard for me to write lately.  I don’t want to be a failure and yet that’s how a review like that makes me feel.  Everyone says, “you’ve got to have a thick skin to make it in this industry.”  But isn’t that true of any industry, of any career?  Is that why I’m still stuck in limbo, I don’t have a thick enough skin?  Am I going to be a failure for the rest of my life?  Am I going to be stuck in the void for the rest of my life?