Happy anniversary!

And goodbye.

Okay. Not really goodbye.

But today is the one year anniversary of this blog. (Cake!)

When I set out, I wasn’t sure I could manage a daily blog for six weeks let alone six months. When I made it to the six month mark, I wondered if I could manage a year.

When I hit the three-quarter mark, I realized that the mental overhead of coming up with something to write every day for the rest of my life and then writing it was probably not really how I wanted to be spending my time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do hope to be writing most days, if not all, for the rest of my life. But I have decided that is more likely to happen if I turn my attention back to fiction or playwriting and away from blogging.

I’m not closing down the blog.

I’ve enjoyed doing it.

I’ve enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten, and I’ve loved having subscribers. Even if some of you are ignoring the daily invasion of your inbox—(I know, I’ve subscribed to some blogs, too. There isn’t always time to read them all)—I have enjoyed the feeling that we are communicating. It has been a privilege to be allowed to enter there.

Thank you for your attention.

The blog will stay open. I just won’t be posting daily. You may not hear from me for days, weeks, months. But, who knows? If I have something to say, I’ll speak up.

If you’ve signed up for the RSS feed or the email subscription, you’ll know when that happens.

The rest of you are welcome to subscribe now or pop back in here from time to time to check.

It’s been fun! I’m proud to know that I managed it 365 days in a row.

So here is the final entry for Smith Sundays.

Elaine Smith—once upon a time, she wrote a blog post every day for a whole year!

Don’t tell me it’s not time for cake!

3.14…..

life of pi

Maybe you’ve already seen the movie?

I understand it did rather well. And I hear that it is visually spectacular. Having been directed by Ang Lee, I don’t doubt that. Nor do I doubt that it is as faithful as possible to the novel.

I haven’t seen the movie yet. I am going to put it at the top of my list, though. And I’m going to use this Friday Find post to tell you that the book is is a FIND.

If you haven’t read life of pi, get thee to a library. Or a bookstore.

This novel is a work of art, destined to be a classic.

A sea story, an adventure yarn, a word painting, a philosophical fascination.

Author Yann Martel has pulled off a miracle.

Compelling plot, beautiful prose, ideas to linger and provoke thought.

This is one of those books that is both dangerous and inspirational to those of us trying to be writers. The inspiration comes from the illustration of what’s possible, the dangling carrot of poetry and plot. The danger comes from the very well-founded fear that I am not capable of transcending my limitations and achieving something close to this.

The hope lies in the story itself.

Pi transcended his limitations.

Maybe we can, too.

Anna Deveare Smith

National treasure.

Anna Deveare Smith is a playwright, professor and one of the most extraordinary actresses you will ever see.

She is a pioneer of documentary theatre and became widely known for her one-person shows in which she used material from countless interviews to construct a script and embody the people interviewed. Her best known pieces using this technique are Fires in the Mirror about the Crown Heights Riot of 1991 and Twilight: Los Angeles about the 1992 L.A. riots. If you get a chance to see them, do!

She is now known to a wider public due to her recurring roles as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on The West Wing and as the hospital administrator on Nurse Jackie.

Her ability to fully embody, physically and vocally, the people she has interviewed has been rightfully described as chameleon-like. It’s truly amazing.

I’m really excited about an interview she recently gave to The Boston Globe in which she talks about writing a fictional play for the first time. I can’t wait to see what that turns out to be.

Go take a look at the complete interview, of course, but here’s a little bit that caught my attention and explains a lot about Ms. Smith’s work:

The thing that speaks to me the most is the idea that a child understands, an early, primal idea, which is: That’s not fair. When somebody tells me something in the course of the interview that’s not fair, I become very interested because I know what’s going to happen linguistically is that as they tell me about a moment or something that shattered their sense of who they were, they will then have to go to their most rich resources to make the world right again, in front of me. And that’s when I start working.

It sure is good work.

Take a look at this TED Talk and see for yourself.

The soul of wit

Brevity.

Brevity is the soul of wit. ~ Shakespeare, Hamlet

If that is the case, the wittiest website I know might be Book-a-Minute, summarizing your favorites. With sections for Classics, Children’s Stories and SF, you can take the modern obsession with efficiency a little too far in several genres.

As the site itself says, “when even the Cliff Notes are too long.”

It’s harder to write a ten minute play than a full-length play. It’s harder to write a short story than a novel, and I am sure it’s harder to write a one-minute summary than a full review of a book.

And, I’d say that this site proves it.

Most of these summaries are just silly.

I do have to say, though, that I think the summary of Hamlet will save you a lot of time.

Mind Mapping

A cartographer’s nightmare.

Mind mapping is a brainstorming technique used by artists, advertisers, programmers and members of countless other disciplines.

It’s a way to visualize connections among and between things. It’s a way to chart the flow of a process, of a story, of an idea.

I like mind mapping and project management software. For a while now, I have been partial to Personal Brain software—now, I guess, called just The Brain. It’s a great way to tie together a lot of disparate items, allowing you to link to web pages, photographs and other files, notes, etc.

It’s fairly resource intensive, eating up your RAM and disk space, though, to say nothing of the overhead in maintaining it if you really want to use it well.

Still, I like it—if only for the pleasure of saying, “hold on a minute while I open up my brain.”

But I found a simpler, web-based mind mapping tool at bubbl.us.

It’s very easy to use with clear and simple directions.

So, get on over there and start planning your next novel.

When your mind is a blank

You’ve got “Room to Write”

The only thing worse than a blank page (or better?) is a blank mind.

For a writer, however, it can feel like the end of the world. Certainly, of that career that you are still struggling to get off the ground.

With the internet, of course, come lots of websites full of writing prompts. Random. Daily. Whatever you need. And they are all useful—and used.

If you’d like something a little more portable—and, arguably, more substantive, I invite you to take a look at Bonni Goldberg’s Room to Write.

With 200 “daily invitations to a writer’s life,” you ought to be able to find something to jump-start those moments of blankness.

These “invitations” are different from the ordinary prompt in that they are accompanied by mini-essays on writing along with the assignment. Each entry takes up a single page (of this smallish-sized book). There’s the little essay: Goldberg’s own meditation on the day’s prompt. There’s the assignment. And, there’s an applicable quote or two from other writers.

Some of the assignments seem too complex and weighty for me when I’m just looking for a way to get my hand moving across the page. Some don’t interest me. Others are spot-on perfect. And, of course, each entry’s classification changes with time.

You can work your way through in order. Or you can open the book randomly and get to work.

Plenty of free prompts available elsewhere, of course. But this is a useful find.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Sillier, too.

Writers are always trying to dream up things that are original. Strange, even. (Hence, you may imagine, almost any Stephen King novel.)

I think we should just give it up.

Because, here are a bunch of purportedly true stories. And if I put any one of them in a play, nobody would believe it. Although, I’m thinking that Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin could have made good use of a few of them.

The gentleman with the insurance claim and the tools in the barrel was made for Keaton, for sure.

The man in the lawn chair with the balloons—a Chaplin short, undoubtedly.

I don’t know what to make of poor Brian Finnegan, though.

Here’s what I know

About writing what you know.

“Write what you know,” they say.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” you think. “How boring.”

Many times, we write to escape what we conceive to be our hum-drum lives. What is fiction, after all, but a child’s game of make-believe in which the writer gets to play all the parts?

No more “You be the sheriff, and I’ll be the bank robber.”

As a writer it’s, “I’ll be the sheriff, and I’ll be the bank robber. And the Pinkerton detective and the Apache on the hill and the dance hall girl and the coyote, too.”

And that’s great.

Nobody said not to use your imagination.

But you can write with more confidence if you know something about the scenery of the West. Because if you are drawing you description of tumbleweeds from Zane Grey novels, you are bordering on plagiarism, and you’re always going to wonder if you got it right. If you’ve seen a tumbleweed tumbling, you will know.

Aside from the confidence issue, in addition to accuracy, you’re just going to write faster. You’re not going to be stuck for details, because they are just part of your knowledge base.

And if you are missing details, you better acquire them. Google is your friend. As is any book you’ve ever read, every book you haven’t read, anybody you talk to and anything you do.

There may be only One Plot, but the details to make it your own are legion. And you know what they say. God is in the details.

Work on your powers of observation and memory. Work on your research skills. Work on empathy and understanding.

There’s a great episode, ‘We Was Robbed‘ from Season Three of NYPD Blue in which a detective is showing his would-be cop son the ropes. He tells him a story about a near-disaster in which he almost shot a man coming out of a building with what appeared to be a gun until he remembered the building was a toy factory. He says a cop should always know “people, places, the things they do, and the times they do them.”

It’s pretty good advice for a writer, too.

The answer

To one of the six horrible questions writers get asked.

One of the six horrible questions writers get asked is “Where do you get your ideas?”

My answer, lately, tends to be “I don’t have any ideas,” but I suspect the proper answer for most of us is “god only knows.”

But here’s a thing that could generate ideas. I haven’t used it. I don’t know if the ideas are good ones. But I figure anything that generates some ideas could lead to more ideas, so it’s probably worth a look.

In fact, it’s not just one idea generator, it’s a couple dozen. (Or several. I didn’t actually count.)

You should check it out.

Seventh Sanctum^TM

I suppose there may be some of you out there all worried that using an idea generator leads to a lack of originality.

Maybe.

But remember when we were discussing the One Plot?

You can’t have an original idea.

But you can execute an idea with originality.

What is Pygmalion and My Fair Lady but a recycling of an idea? That one’s easy, right? But here’s one you may not have considered. Isn’t The Karate Kid a Pygmalion story? Dirty Dancing? You probably didn’t think “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait” had anything in common with “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” but it does. Is drilling “the rain in Spain” really so far afield from “wax on, wax off?”

The movie Dave is The Prisoner of Zenda.

There are no new ideas. We all have to do the best we can with the old ones.

So, if you can find a tool that suggests some possibilities to you, I say use it. Idea generators are launching pads. Diving boards. The struck match just before it lights the fuse.

Dynamite not included.

Now, this!

Is a writing tip I think I can use.

Came across this piece a couple of months ago in the New York Times. I love the Times. There’s a reason people refer to it as the “paper of record.” It’s going to be sad when the ease and ubiquity of online news pushes it out of business. (I’m hoping it figures out a way to reinvent itself—but, if anybody on the publishing staff is listening, I really don’t think higher and higher price are the way to go.)

All that aside, however, this column by Aaron Hamburger was an Aha! moment for me.

The piece is about outlining.

If you’ve read anything about writing—or went to high school—I’m sure you’ve been taught about outlining. You may even have used it. Term papers and so on.

When you get into creative writing, people still recommend outlines. Sometimes, they suggest 3×5 cards rather than Roman numerals. If you’re in film or TV, you might have heard of storyboarding. It’s kind of the same idea.

The problem for me is that I never know what any piece of work is about until I get done with the first draft. I don’t know what’s going to happen. The events are a mystery to me. Often, the characters with which I start aren’t the characters with which I end.

Sometimes, I just have a line in my head. Or one scene between a couple of people.

The idea that there are writers out there who know the whole arc of the story before they begin—that boggles my mind. BOGGLES. With extra G’s.

Consequently, I threw outlines out the window fairly early.

But this idea of outlining after you’ve finished the first draft…this is a good idea.

Reading Mr. Hamburger’s explanation was a light bulb. Of course, it would be helpful. Of course!

If there’s a surer way to spot a hole in something, I can’t imagine what it could be. Depending on how you structure your outline and what information you put into it, I’m thinking it could shine a spotlight on all kinds of difficulties. Plot, pacing, logic…you name it.

So, I think you should read the article.

Meanwhile, I’ll just be over here outlining my play.

(Oh! And pick up a copy of the Times. They still have a great crossword puzzle!)

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Category Archives: Writing