Matt W Cook

writer.former fundamentalist.christianly fellow

Category: writing

November 16, 2011

Opening Paragraphs

     I decide if I care about a story or not in the first couple lines.

     In a perfect world, this wouldn’t happen. In a perfect world, I’d read every story. I’d give every author the chance to tell their tale. But I don’t have the time or energy. So I give them a couple sentences. Or, if the book comes recommended or the world seems interesting, a chapter.

     Some books open like a textbook. Like the author wants you to understand how wonderfully complex their world is before you meet the people in it. Frankly, though, I hardly care about your world if I don’t love the people in it.

     Other authors try a bait-and-switch. I did this with my first novel. It was dirty. My opening scene was an action sequence with guns and blood and stuff. But the novel was about love and culture and a bunch of people chatting in coffee shops. Dishonest. If I ever resurrect it, that opening will be cut.

     But sometimes, glorious times, the author makes you care in a single line. It’s not a formula. It’s not a science. It’s like meeting a new person. Sometimes you just hit it off. Sometimes you just decide to be yourself and that authenticity works.

     Here’s an idea for a slick writing exercise: Write the first few paragraphs to a novel that you never plan to write. Make it good enough to bother you that it doesn’t exist. If you can pull that off, you’re dancing.

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November 7, 2011

Revision, Rewriting, Redoing

     I finished the first draft to my second novel on October 30th. It’s a rush to hit the save button and laugh over the epic word-count.

     Now what? Print, pack and send off to the drooling masses?

     Not for a long, long time.

     I’ve compared the creative process to giving birth. It’s messy, painful, and sometimes you can’t remember why you’re doing it. But the baby at the end is always worth it. After the baby (novel) is born, what do you do with her? Do you dress her up, pat her on the head and send her off into the world? Not a chance. She’s not ready. She’s not complete. She cannot stand on her own two feet yet. So you spend the next few years raising her.    

‘The first draft of anything is shit.’ – Ernest Hemingway

     Thankfully I love rewriting and revising. I’m already halfway done my first pass. I have no idea how many passes I’ll need. It’s a great feeling to finally squeeze out the first draft. It’s an even better feeling to mark it up with red pen and turn it into the novel that it’s meant to be.

     I think a lot of people get discouraged as they write because they recognize what they’re writing is crap. The thing is, it’s supposed to be crap. The first draft is just giving birth. It’s bloody, loud and not a thing you’d invite your neighbour to be a part of. You do it in secret, or maybe with a ridiculously close person. The baby needs to be cleaned up before you trust her with extended family. And most of the world doesn’t get to play with her until you decide she’s ready.

     It’s the same with your novel. Don’t worry if it seems whiny or trite. Don’t worry about the shallow dialogue and the painfully obvious plot holes. It’s supposed to be that way. Your revisions will fix everything. Everything.

     So write that crap. You can clean it up later.

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October 12, 2011

It’s Quiet … Too Quiet

     I’ve heard preachers claim that noise is the music of hell. Have you heard that before? Silly, eh?

     I used to try writing in the library. I went nearly every day for a month. I think I managed a couple hundred words a day. A pittance. Good enough to keep the dream alive but not enough to give it breath.

     The problem with writing in a library is that it’s too quiet. And when it’s too quiet, it gets really loud. I can hear the gentle tinkling of the air conditioner. Down on the other side of the library two people are having a conversation in hushed whispers that I can hear perfectly. The employees are gently putting books on the shelf. And they’re all so damned quiet that the noise is overwhelming.

     One of my favorite places to write is the mall food court. There is not a drop of quietness to be found.

     Teens yelling and goofing off at the table next to me. Janitors cleaning up spills and emptying garbage bins. The loud smells of food and coffee dancing throughout the place. Always movement. Always life. Always noise.

     When everyone is special, no one is. When everyone is quiet, no one is. And when everything is loud and chaotic, in truth it is peace and quiet of a purity that is hard to manufacture.

     When there is noise and movement all around you, it’s easy to sink into that special place where all the good things flow. But when everyone around you is trying to be quiet, then the tiniest change in the artificial stasis is jarring.

     Don’t seek for peace and quiet. It only exists in places where there is no life. And don’t dare try to create art in a place where there is no life. Noise is a gift, not a curse. Embrace it. Love it. It charges your art and soothes your psyche if you let it. And if you’re writing at home and your wife and kids are trying their best to create an environment of peace and quietness, tell them to watch a loud movie and listen to music and wrestle in the next room. It’ll make your process that much better.

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October 7, 2011

Writing in Coffee Shops

     My brother showed me that after he caught me writing in a coffee shop.

     Thankfully, when I write in tea stores and coffee shops, I don’t do it to be watched. I do it to create a place where I can feel alone, isolated and nurtured with a hot drink.

     But art sometimes has that showy temptation to it. That shadowy urge to front and say ‘Yeah, I’m creative and making things that few mortals can make. I’m kind of a superhero that way. No big.’

     We need to ask ourselves an important question. Do we love being called ‘artist’? Do we love the attention we receive because of our product? Do we love the good reviews and the accolades and the recognition and all the other perks that come from making good art?

     Or do we love the creation itself?

     One of those loves is mercenary. The other is born of Imago Dei. One moves us toward becoming celebrities. The other moves us toward becoming creators.

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October 3, 2011

Moral Ambiguity in Fiction

     Real life in ambiguous. You’d rather it not be, but it is. In every action we become someone’s hero and another’s villain. We try to do the best and sometimes we pull off real, pure actions. But usually the human race bounces back and forth between good, evil and something squishy in between.

     So I sometimes get wearied when I read most stories with very clear-cut villains and heros. The world is full of Boromirs and Gollums; not Saurons and Aragorns. And our stories are meant to be elevated life, not idealized life. And all our good stories must be true, even if they never happened. So our villains must have good and our heroes must be tainted.

     These stories force us to think and bring us face-to-face with difficult questions and uncertainties. We are forced to think when Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke tries to choose a side in the war between the humans and the forest gods. We are forced to think when Michael Corelone takes his father’s place as godfather of a criminal organization. We are forced to think when we see Jaime the Kingslayer waffle between hero and villain.

     I understand most people don’t share my love for this kind of ambiguity in stories. They find it frustrating and ill-satisfing. We like our lessons easy. We like it when the world is easy to judge. We like to tell our kids that good and evil are very clear and good people and evil people are just as clear.

     But life isn’t like that. And even the greatest of Books shows that, doesn’t it? King David the murderer is called a hero. Lot is called righteous, though he tried to convince a mob to rape his daughters. Moses murdered and was a saviour. And I still can’t figure out if Joab was billed as a hero or a villain.

     Life is complex; good, true stories reflect that complexity. Yes, there are some wild-eyed heroes devoted to nothing but the higher good. Yes, there are some black-hearted villains, consumed with hate and greed. But only a few. There are no armies of black-hearted soldiers. There are no legions of light-blessed paladins. Most of us are a mix and that tells me that most of our stories should be mixed.

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September 28, 2011

The Storyteller as Translator or Calliope Mumbles

       Creative people debate about where creativity comes from. It’s either something born deep within us that we painstaking bring out. Or it’s something on the outside that we reach out and touch. For the most part, whichever view helps you be creative is probably the best.

       I’m in the second group, though I think the first group is on to something. I think the stories come from an outside Source. I believe that muses are spiritual thingies (yes, thingies) that whisper our stories in our ears. And I think that they’re always whispering.

       Have you heard them? You probably have. Whenever a brilliant idea for a story or a painting or a recipe or a dance forms in your mind, that’s the muse poking you. You’re filled with excitement and you rush to your computer or sketch pad to throw that idea into the world. But as you pick up your pen, you stop understanding. Your muse is mumbling. Or she’s speaking a higher tongue. Either way, the story is not as clear as you thought it was.

       Two choices, at this point: (a) Decide you’re not really an artist after all and the story sucks and throw your tool away and walk because it was a stupid idea to begin with. Or (b) write it down anyway. Move forward. Trust that you are not being given a crap story and commit to seeing it through.

       (b) is, of course, better.

       The muses always give good stories. Alas, they speak no English. As creative people we are meant to listen deeply to their sublime tongues and work out the story they want us to tell. It’s a hard, harsh discipline. But if we’re faithful to the story, the muses will be faithful to us. The universe wants her story told, after all. But she needs a translator.

       Stories are from the Outside. But it’s our painstaking translations and revisions that show them to be the glories that they really are.

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August 31, 2011

When Your Story Isn’t True

    I was stuck.

    Ever been stuck?

    On a creative project?

    It’s not writer’s block. It’s something different. Something elusive and singularly frustrating. A large, pulsating tumor of Resistance.

    This particular Resistance was centered around a certain section of the story. It pricked at me because I knew exactly what needed to happen. I tried every strategy I had heard of to break it.

    I tried outlining it to death. Useful, but the Resistance stayed.

    I tried leaving it and rewriting other parts of the book. Productive, but the Resistance stayed.

    I tried reading lots of fantasy books to jump-start my inspiration. Fun, but the Resistance stayed.

    I figured it out last night.

    I was bored. Restless. Distracted.

    That meant my story wasn’t quite true.

    You see;

Every good story is true. Even if it never happened.

So if the story is not good, it’s not true. And there are two possibilities when you find that your story is not true.

    (a) You have added false things to your story. Is there something false about your plot, characters or world? Falseness stands out in a story like the sound of nails on a board. Find the false and cut it out.

    (b) There is some important truth missing.

    It was (b). There was something missing. Once I realized it I immediately knew what it was. Scenes. Characters. An entire sub-plot. It’s a lot of stuff. Maybe ten thousand words of stuff. Or more.

    Now, if this was any other job I’d be upset about it. I’d be tempted not to add it, because of all the work it’s going to be. It could be a full two weeks of writing. And that’s if all my writing sessions are good ones.

    But I wasn’t upset.

    I wasn’t discouraged.

    I was elated.

    It doesn’t matter how much work a good story needs. I’m not too upset that George R.R. Martin took 5 years to write A Dance With Dragons. It was a good story. A true story. It was worth 5 years.

    And my story will be worth however long it takes to write.

    Will yours?

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June 27, 2011

Writing Tools I’ve Used

Pen and Paper
        I used to resort to this quite often. I was enamored by the organic classiness of it. I was in love with that conservative idea that whatever we did in the past is better than whatever we’re doing now. It made me feel pretty cool and puritanical. And, yes, sometimes those two can go together.
        There were even a few benefits to this system. It forced me to write slower, which gave me a chance to think clearer about what I was writing. But, in the end, I did not accomplish much. It was too slow and my hands are not used to long periods of pen-writing.

Typewriter
        I nearly swooned when I saw the electric typewriter in Goodwill. It was glorious. I bought it instantly. Visions of becoming the trendiest writer in the world danced in my head. I could see myself, in the middle of the night with one light hanging above me from the ceiling, pounding away at the typewriter, the gratifying tack-tack-tack encouraging me as I went.
        I imagined that the typewriter would have freed my eyes from the distractions of a word processor. And it did, I suppose. But that tack-tack-tack got mind-numbing rather quick. And it was hard to read what I was writing, as the paper kept falling backward. In the end, I packed it up and put it away.

Generic Word Processors
        Not very romantic, I know. But what do I care about? The romance I write or the romance in the way I write it? I wrote my first novel using Microsoft Word. It was … fine. Nothing especially good or bad about the experience. It only became difficult when the novel inched toward 100k words and the chapters threatened to get disorganized.

Scrivener
        And then I found it. And, lo, great was the finding of … it.
        Scrivener is a word processor made for creative writing. When I first downloaded the demo version a little voice in my head started to whisper. ‘Another fad for your writing, Matt? Another nifty thing to distract you from the work you’re supposed to be doing?’
        I’m so very happy I did not listen to that voice.
        Scrivener has blown my mind. I’ve been using it for months and I can hardly imagine what it was like to use anything else. Why so cool? I tell, I tell.
        Scrivener organizes your work into parts, chapters, scenes, notes, research and more. You can write them together, move them around, organize them however you want. All your work goes into one file.
        Scrivener has a very sexy full-screen mode. All you see is your writing. Distraction-free.
        Scrivener formats your entire project automatically according to traditional manuscript standards. Or according to whatever standards you want.
        Scrivener helps you to take a step back and look at your entire work at once. It’s hard to do that when your manuscript is over 130k words and spread across different files on your hard drive.
        Scrivener automatically backs up your work to wherever you want it backed up. This is important, as I learned the second after my daughter poured a glass of milk over my old laptop.

        I was only two weeks into my demo version when I bought it. And I haven’t looked back since. At the time of this writing, it’s only available for Mac. But I hear rumors they’re making a Windows version. Check it out. It has taken a lot of the clutter out of my process.

        What do you use to write? Why?

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May 23, 2011

The Problem with Cliche

    They’re too big for their britches (Mua ha! Irony!).

    You ever notice how many times the word ‘said’ appears in a novel? Or ‘the’? Nope. You haven’t. Haven’t noticed at all. But if a book repeated a different word, like ‘noticed’, you’d notice. You’d notice fast. But you didn’t notice ‘the’ or ‘said’. Because those words are invisible. And that’s a good thing, because it’s kinda hard to write much without those words appearing on nearly every page.

    Cliches are invisible. That sucks, because the concepts packed into them are mind-bogglingly powerful.

    Armed to the teeth. Give yourself a mental picture there. That dude is seriously armed. His freakin’ teeth have weapons! Too bad it was written in a cliche and you didn’t notice it.
    He did it religiously. Religious people are generally unstable. They don’t listen to reason. They refuse to compromise or slow down. Anyone that does something religiously is suddenly an interesting person. Unless you use this tired cliche to describe them. Then they’re boring.
    The elephant in the room. Another great mental picture that has lost all of its power just because it’s been used a billion times. Though in The Kite Runner it made an appearance that breathed new life into it. Don’t ask me where, just go buy the book.
    What Would Jesus Do. Seriously?! Have you ever read what Jesus did? Don’t freakin’ use this unless we’re talking about someone who devoted their life to spreading love around everyone he met, preached a wild doctrine of love toward enemies and then embraced non-violence so much that he allowed a corrupt religious system to torture him to death all the while forgiving them. Seriously. Just don’t.
    On thin ice. Ever been on thin ice? It’s freakin’ scary. But if you read that you won’t be scared. Because it’s a gutted cliche. So there.
    Raining cats and dogs. Check out the mental image. Be blown away from that kind of rain. And think of a different way to express it.
    Smart as a whip. Whips smart, friends. They smart a lot. Just ask anyone who’s been whipped.

    All this to say that cliches are packed with power. Their substance is wonderful and I love having a list of cliches handy just so I can dig into them and feel their depth. But when it comes time to express their meaning, I have to pack them in a different box. Because they’re invisible. It’s like those preachers who use their religious words so often that, suddenly, they become invisible and no one has any clue what they mean by gospel or word or saved.

    So walk away from cliches, friends. Avoid them like the plague.

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June 7, 2010

Almost Shameless Contest

I like books and I think people ought to read a lot of them.
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I find it hard to justify owning anything superfluous.
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I own superfluous amounts of books.
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I own a blog that gets very little traffic.
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I’d like more traffic.
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An opportunity for a contest of glory!

I have made a list of 101 books pulled off my shelf that I deem superfluous. Would you like one? I will hold a contest over the next week in which you will have a decent chance of getting the book of your choice, delivered to your house for free. Sounds like fun, eh? You bet it is. Here’s how you enter:

For one day, make this your status in your social media of choice (Twitter, Facebook, etc.):

The Illiterate Scribe is giving away free books! Check it out: http://alturl.com/d78a

After you make that your status, leave a comment on the blog itself or on the Facebook feed I’ve made for it letting me know that you’ve done it. Then I will collect your name, put it into a hat and pick a random one exactly one week from now (June 14, 2010). If you win, I’ll let you know from the blog and through e-mail and you can tell me which book you want.

Does this seem shameless? Does it feel like some sort of cyber prostitution to change your Facebook status for gain? Maybe. But we all win, don’t we?

Here is the excel spreadsheet with the 101 books. If this is successful I’ll do this every month until I run out of books. Enter early for you best chance of winning!

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