Whether you're a writer lucky enough to be published and out there talking to groups, or a reader who frequents groups that talk about books, face to face or online, eventually someone will ask, "Which term is preferable, writer or author?" Which of course leads to the further question -- is there any difference?
I used to think "Who cares?" and I can't remember what I answered whenever I was asked that question. I thought of the two terms as interchangeable and I still tend to use them that way myself. However, just recently as I've struggled with whether or not to seriously start writing again after almost ten years of retirement, and particularly within the past week, it has occurred to me that there is a difference between a writer and an author. And I do care. And what I am, for better or worse, is a writer.
So what's the difference? (This is according to me, you understand, I have no clue what the correctness police would say.) The difference is, a writer is a person whose natural and preferred form of expression is to write, and who practices that form of expression often, in various different ways. An author is a person who writes, who has published what he or she has written, and who works hard to see that her book or poem or play reaches as many people as possible. The distribution of the work -- which usually involves selling -- is only slightly less important than the act of creating it.
Where I fall down is in that part. I am no good at selling stuff, particularly when it's basically me have to sell. The publicity side of writing always was hard for me. Yes, I do like to talk to people and I've been told I'm even good at speaking to large groups, but it scares me, every single time. And because it scares me, I used to dread it -- even to the point of sometimes it made me physically ill. That's not something I like to admit, but there you have it.
An author has a sort of persona, a public reputation, to maintain. I was so naive about this when I went to my first Bouchercon, in Minneapolis in I think the fall of 1995, I didn't have a clue what to expect -- the crowds, the people, the lines, the noise. Most of all the noise -- I felt unreal a lot of the time. And that was only the beginning. I did enjoy meeting people but I was totally unprepared for it, and for how strange it would make me feel, kind of awed by the whole thing, and vaguely embarrassed. It's hard to describe. That feeling never quite went away, and over the years when I made mistakes and alienated people, as inevitably happens at least a few times, it was out of an awkwardness I never got over, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. I'm so impressed by people who carry off the author persona thing well. There are a lot of them who do; I started to name names but decided not to, for concern I might cause offense. You just never know about that.
But: I was supposed to be an author. I had responsibilities to my editor, my publisher, my agent, and so I tried to do it right. There must have been more of an author in me than I ever realized, because I just found her again during the past few days.
I found her while I've been trying to understand why it was so important to me to have a surprise element to my "tales of the latents" idea, why I cared so much when I found out that other, much bigger people are going with a concept I'd thought was unique, and thus the surprise is gone. Cared so much, the Muses help me, that I almost gave up. Only, I didn't. because guess what? It was only the author in me who cared. The part of me that once learned it's important not just to write it, you have to sell it too. And it's going to be a much harder sell now than it would have been if it had stayed unique.
This is how I know now that what I really am is a writer and not an author: Because I'm going ahead with my tale of the latents anyway. I have a story I really want to tell, and I'm going to tell it, no matter what. There are real-world tehnicalities to be considered, such as an agent who has his own standards to uphold, and a publisher who has an option on my "next work of fiction" (quoting the contract), apparently until the end of time (I'd been hoping there might be a 10 year limit, the way you can't prosecute some crimes after a certain number of years have gone by, but no such luck). So they can have their say, but I'm sticking with this regardless. Because I'm a writer, and writing is what I do, and this is what I'm writing now.
I make you guys, who are good enough to be reading Nonny's blog, a promise: If I can't distribute this story, when it's done, any other way, I'll put it up here chapter by chapter. For free. So hang in there with me. Meanwhile, from time to time when I get writing-type thoughts that seem of broad enough interest, I'll continue to put them here.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Those Perverse Muses are At It Again, Big-Time
There is one word for this: Aaaaarrrrgggghhh!!!
Please recall two posts ago, about the perversity of the Muses. Now they've hit prime time tv: ABC at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, a new show starring none other than the great Michael Chiklis, late of The Shield. Titled No Ordinary Family.
All these people in the family have a special power, a different one for each. Mother is super-fast. Father (Chiklis) is super-man, can fly, lift trucks, etc., wants to be a crimestopper. Daughter can hear thoughts, son is a budding math genius whose teacher thinks he's cheating because suddenly he's doing higher mathematics.
Maybe I really should give up. By the time my great, I thought unique, idea has gone prime time on such a scale, all the surprise factor is gone and it becomes hohum.
Not sure what to do here.
But, this blog is about writing and a work in progress. Doesn't necessarily have to be any particular work.
Your comments are welcome.
Love,
Nonny
Please recall two posts ago, about the perversity of the Muses. Now they've hit prime time tv: ABC at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, a new show starring none other than the great Michael Chiklis, late of The Shield. Titled No Ordinary Family.
All these people in the family have a special power, a different one for each. Mother is super-fast. Father (Chiklis) is super-man, can fly, lift trucks, etc., wants to be a crimestopper. Daughter can hear thoughts, son is a budding math genius whose teacher thinks he's cheating because suddenly he's doing higher mathematics.
Maybe I really should give up. By the time my great, I thought unique, idea has gone prime time on such a scale, all the surprise factor is gone and it becomes hohum.
Not sure what to do here.
But, this blog is about writing and a work in progress. Doesn't necessarily have to be any particular work.
Your comments are welcome.
Love,
Nonny
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Creativity and the Subconscious Mind
A couple of people have asked me to say more about how I come up with those characters that stick in your head, and then become the sort that leap off the page once you write them into a novel. If you were one of them, I apologize for how long it's taken me to get this done; the truth is, I had to think on it for quite a while, because I don't really know the answer to the question.
The best I can come up with is this: I believe such characters come straight from my subconscious mind. From the part that gives us the content of our dreams. For example, as I used to say when talking on request in bookstores and libraries, the character Fremont Jones came to me first in a dream. It was one of those you dream right before waking. There she was, clear as a bell, that very same voice that comes through in the opening pages of the first book, STRANGE FILES. In my dream she said, "My name is Fremont, and I am a typewriter." I woke up immediately with that voice in my head, plus the interesting fact that she didn't say "I'm a secretary," or "I'm a typist," she said "I am a typewriter." It wasn't later until I found out that back in the time when she lived (that is, if she had really lived at all), the person who did the typing was indeed called by the same word as the machine, typewriter. I've never understood that, how I came up with that, and I still don't know. Which is why I think these things have to happen via the subconscious.
That doesn't mean they can only come in dreams. Other characters who are equally off-the-page-jumpers -- one that comes to mind is a restoration contractor named Paul Starbuck who appears in a little book I wrote for Harlequin Intrigue called LAIRD'S MOUNT, which I wrote with the pseudonym Madelyn Sanders -- can come to you in a waking state. Paul appeared in my head when I was doing some research for the book, before I'd started actually writing it. I was walking around in a very large house that had once been turned into a restaurant, then allowed to go into decline after its owners death. This building had been constructed as a sort of replica (meaning it was a far from perfect reproduction) of the Isabella Stewart Gardner House Museum in Boston, so I was already having some deja vu kind of things going on, which I think is another thing that gets triggered by the subconscious. And suddenly, I could see this man, almost as if he were walking right along by my side, and I knew he was a contractor specializing in that kind of restoration. I also knew his name was Paul, and that he had a dog that was a cross between a German shepherd and a wolf, that the dog was in fact named Wolf, and was waiting for Paul outside in his truck. This was such a vivid experience that when I got done with my walk-through (which I had been allowed by the realtor to do on my own, because I had explained to her why I wanted to see it and that I am able to do the kind of thinking I need to do for that purpose if I'm by myself) and went from the late-afternoon gloom of the no-electricity indoors to the outside light of day, I was surprised there was no truck with a very large dog waiting in the parking lot.
There have been other such experiences, with other characters, but I won't describe any more of them because I'm sure you get the picture.
How is this useful to anyone else who might already be writing a piece of fiction, or who might want to do it? I'm not sure, except that we all do have the subconscious mind working for us all the time. And there are ways we can each increase our acceses to its contents. The best way to do this is to make an organized effort -- such as keeping a notebook and pen by the bed -- to remember our dreams. Even if you think you don't dream, you certainly do because sleep researchers have found that if people are deprived of their ability to dream by being awakened every time REM sleep begins (rapid eye movements beneath closed lids signal a dream state), they will soon show symptoms of irritability and accident proneness at the least, and irrationality and even hallucinations at worst. A resolution to recall and to record dreams will help even someone who says he doesn't dream begin to remember them. That's one way.
Another way is to meditate. Although the purest form of meditation involves no thinking at all, there is a stage on the way to getting to the no-thoughts place in which the contents of the subconscious will begin to bubble up. If you practice meditation and pay attention to that, you will find access. It can quickly become habitual enough that such access is not hard to achieve, you just sort of put yourself into an abstracted frame of mind. There are plenty of people who go into that kind of frame of mind naturally, all the time. It's commonly called "daydreaming". Just don't do it when you're chopping onions or driving a car.
I like to take long walks in a quiet place. Or, lately now that I'm not so mobile, simply to sit in a quiet place. If I have a particular writing thing I'm working on and needing to make some progress, I'll hold that in my mind and soon some answers will begin to flow. It doesn't always happen, but usually it does.
I'm pretty sure any creative process works, or happens, because there has been some connection between the subconcious and conscious minds. Scientiests, neurologists and such who study the workings of the mind and brain and processes like sleeping and dreaming, tell us that we use less than half the capacity of the brain. Since they now can do scans that show what areas of the brain are involved in certain activities, such as reading or speaking or recognizing faces, this fact that much of the brain goes unused at present has now been documented. All the thoughts and observations we make but have no immediate use for get stored somewhere, and I personally think that's where the contents of the subconscious come from. The conscious mind can access them if an effort is made.
I also, being a child of the 60s (but I think I'd be this way even if I hadn't matured, at least sort of, in the 1960s), believe there is, as Carl Jung said, a Collective Unconscious. This would be the contents of combined knowledge and experiences over many cultures, coded into universal symbols and stored somehow in the DNA, and passed on. I think in Jung's time they didn't know so much about DNA so he may have not used that terminology, but that's the idea. The creative process taps into this kind of stored stuff, even if it's not overt. The most powerful themes and ideas in any kind of literature will carry echoes of these shared universal elements, even if they are not blatantly expressed.
In recent years, I've thought a lot about the nature of conciousness in general, and I expect in this book I'm working on now, FIREFLASH, because of the latent unusual ability idea, at least some of that will get in somehow.
That's the thing about writing -- nothing you've ever done will go to waste, which is OK, so long as you don't bore people to death with it. And if you can do it right, it might be a good thing. As I think I said, and surely intended when I began this blog, anyone who wants to write should go ahead and do it. Bring up those ideas whether they are in the conscious or the subconscious mind, because you never know who may enjoy sharing what you put on a page. Or how much it may benefit you just in the writing thereof, even if you decide to keep it to yourself.
The best I can come up with is this: I believe such characters come straight from my subconscious mind. From the part that gives us the content of our dreams. For example, as I used to say when talking on request in bookstores and libraries, the character Fremont Jones came to me first in a dream. It was one of those you dream right before waking. There she was, clear as a bell, that very same voice that comes through in the opening pages of the first book, STRANGE FILES. In my dream she said, "My name is Fremont, and I am a typewriter." I woke up immediately with that voice in my head, plus the interesting fact that she didn't say "I'm a secretary," or "I'm a typist," she said "I am a typewriter." It wasn't later until I found out that back in the time when she lived (that is, if she had really lived at all), the person who did the typing was indeed called by the same word as the machine, typewriter. I've never understood that, how I came up with that, and I still don't know. Which is why I think these things have to happen via the subconscious.
That doesn't mean they can only come in dreams. Other characters who are equally off-the-page-jumpers -- one that comes to mind is a restoration contractor named Paul Starbuck who appears in a little book I wrote for Harlequin Intrigue called LAIRD'S MOUNT, which I wrote with the pseudonym Madelyn Sanders -- can come to you in a waking state. Paul appeared in my head when I was doing some research for the book, before I'd started actually writing it. I was walking around in a very large house that had once been turned into a restaurant, then allowed to go into decline after its owners death. This building had been constructed as a sort of replica (meaning it was a far from perfect reproduction) of the Isabella Stewart Gardner House Museum in Boston, so I was already having some deja vu kind of things going on, which I think is another thing that gets triggered by the subconscious. And suddenly, I could see this man, almost as if he were walking right along by my side, and I knew he was a contractor specializing in that kind of restoration. I also knew his name was Paul, and that he had a dog that was a cross between a German shepherd and a wolf, that the dog was in fact named Wolf, and was waiting for Paul outside in his truck. This was such a vivid experience that when I got done with my walk-through (which I had been allowed by the realtor to do on my own, because I had explained to her why I wanted to see it and that I am able to do the kind of thinking I need to do for that purpose if I'm by myself) and went from the late-afternoon gloom of the no-electricity indoors to the outside light of day, I was surprised there was no truck with a very large dog waiting in the parking lot.
There have been other such experiences, with other characters, but I won't describe any more of them because I'm sure you get the picture.
How is this useful to anyone else who might already be writing a piece of fiction, or who might want to do it? I'm not sure, except that we all do have the subconscious mind working for us all the time. And there are ways we can each increase our acceses to its contents. The best way to do this is to make an organized effort -- such as keeping a notebook and pen by the bed -- to remember our dreams. Even if you think you don't dream, you certainly do because sleep researchers have found that if people are deprived of their ability to dream by being awakened every time REM sleep begins (rapid eye movements beneath closed lids signal a dream state), they will soon show symptoms of irritability and accident proneness at the least, and irrationality and even hallucinations at worst. A resolution to recall and to record dreams will help even someone who says he doesn't dream begin to remember them. That's one way.
Another way is to meditate. Although the purest form of meditation involves no thinking at all, there is a stage on the way to getting to the no-thoughts place in which the contents of the subconscious will begin to bubble up. If you practice meditation and pay attention to that, you will find access. It can quickly become habitual enough that such access is not hard to achieve, you just sort of put yourself into an abstracted frame of mind. There are plenty of people who go into that kind of frame of mind naturally, all the time. It's commonly called "daydreaming". Just don't do it when you're chopping onions or driving a car.
I like to take long walks in a quiet place. Or, lately now that I'm not so mobile, simply to sit in a quiet place. If I have a particular writing thing I'm working on and needing to make some progress, I'll hold that in my mind and soon some answers will begin to flow. It doesn't always happen, but usually it does.
I'm pretty sure any creative process works, or happens, because there has been some connection between the subconcious and conscious minds. Scientiests, neurologists and such who study the workings of the mind and brain and processes like sleeping and dreaming, tell us that we use less than half the capacity of the brain. Since they now can do scans that show what areas of the brain are involved in certain activities, such as reading or speaking or recognizing faces, this fact that much of the brain goes unused at present has now been documented. All the thoughts and observations we make but have no immediate use for get stored somewhere, and I personally think that's where the contents of the subconscious come from. The conscious mind can access them if an effort is made.
I also, being a child of the 60s (but I think I'd be this way even if I hadn't matured, at least sort of, in the 1960s), believe there is, as Carl Jung said, a Collective Unconscious. This would be the contents of combined knowledge and experiences over many cultures, coded into universal symbols and stored somehow in the DNA, and passed on. I think in Jung's time they didn't know so much about DNA so he may have not used that terminology, but that's the idea. The creative process taps into this kind of stored stuff, even if it's not overt. The most powerful themes and ideas in any kind of literature will carry echoes of these shared universal elements, even if they are not blatantly expressed.
In recent years, I've thought a lot about the nature of conciousness in general, and I expect in this book I'm working on now, FIREFLASH, because of the latent unusual ability idea, at least some of that will get in somehow.
That's the thing about writing -- nothing you've ever done will go to waste, which is OK, so long as you don't bore people to death with it. And if you can do it right, it might be a good thing. As I think I said, and surely intended when I began this blog, anyone who wants to write should go ahead and do it. Bring up those ideas whether they are in the conscious or the subconscious mind, because you never know who may enjoy sharing what you put on a page. Or how much it may benefit you just in the writing thereof, even if you decide to keep it to yourself.
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