Marsha Casper Cook : 2013-02-03

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Writing Women’s Lit from a Man’s POV -Jack Remick does it well!

Saturday, February 9, 2013

The Joy of Writing Women’s Lit from a Man’s POV

Gabriela and The Widow is the third novel I’ve written with women protagonists. Early on, I worked out a post-apocalyptic novel called Citadel and later I came up with Lemon Custard. I got some static about Lemon Custard for not pulling a Nora Helmer (from A Doll’s House) and turning Olive, my protagonist, into some kind of liberation heroine. But Olive is a regular woman with kids trying to find a way to make it when the odds roll against her. Gabriela is a different kind of woman. She’s been hurt, displaced, damaged. Writing from her POV was a challenge.

I think that men are uneasy writing in a woman’s voice but I find it provoking and rewarding. The challenges are enormous because we’re always bugged by the limiting specter of American Realism in the literary novel: Write what you know. If you haven’t lived it, you can’t write about it.

This tells us that because I’m not a woman I can’t write either for women or about women. Realism is a trap I won’t fall into even when I get the question that drives me nuts: Did this really happen?

Look at me—I’m six feet tall, weigh 190, wear cowboy boots and ride a Harley. Do I look like a 19 year old Mexican woman? No, it didn’t happen to me and it’s not based on a “True Story”. This is fiction. I love to create good women who stand toe to toe with good men. Reality belongs in a memoir. In fiction, it’s about emotion.

Fear, Love, Anger, Grief, Joy, Surprise. If you want to write human characters and bring down everything we are onto the written page, and if you want to reach into the minds and senses of readers, you give the reader what the characters feel and project. Men feel fear. Women show surprise. Women get angry, men do too. We all have the same emotions. In writing, it’s reaction that gives you character and character has nothing to do with gender.

Jack Remick and books

Some Techniques and Tips:

Follow this url for more: Writing Tips for the Committed Novelist

I want to share with you a few words about how I write. Every Tuesday and Friday, I sit down with a bunch of writers at Louisa’s Bakery Café in Seattle. We write for forty-five minutes under the clock. For years I wrote alone until Robert Ray introduced me to Natalie Goldberg and timed writing. Working with other writers—especially writers who know more than you do—gets you outside your head. You get feedback faster, you get to the rewrite quicker. The way I see it, the art is in the rewrite so the sooner you get a working draft the better you’ll write. With timed writing you don’t die in Act Two.

Timed writing—what Natalie Goldberg calls “Writing Practice”—is either the devil’s design to stifle your creativity or the gateway to a paradise of writing. For me, timed writing is liberation. Timed writing is easy: you get a kitchen timer, set it for five, ten, fifteen minutes and write as deep and rich as your hand will let you. I like the physical connection of the fountain pen on paper, so I write longhand. Some writers at Louisa’s write on laptops. That’s okay. The idea is to finish what you start—that’s the major discipline. Finish what you start.

I use “start lines” to get going. If I’m working on a novel, I might use—“Today I rewrite the scene called…

If I’m with my group at Louisa’s and I’m not locked into a novel or a story, the start line “today I’m writing about…” gives me plenty of room to explode. I use timed writing to write treatments, scene summaries, memoir moments, short stories, screenplay scenes. The big thing with timed writing is that you can use it to go nuts on the page, or you can use it in a very structured way to create tight, hard, clear, clean sentences, scenes, stories. I don’t think in terms of paragraphs, but I do think in terms of “action” and “image.” When I’m writing in a more structured way, I use a directed set of start lines. For instance, to write a three-act treatment for a novel here’s a set of start lines you can use:

Act One opens when….
Act One ends when….
Act Two opens in a scene called….
At the middle of my story, my protagonist….
Act Two ends when….
Act Three opens when….
My story climaxes in a scene called….
My story ends with this final image….

I keep a blog with Robert J Ray, author of the Matt Murdock detective novels. We’ve posted everything we know about writing there—http://bobandjackswritingblog.com. Take a look. It’s there for the asking.

Guest post by Jack Remick, a poet, short story writer and novelist. In 2012, Coffeetown Press published the first two volumes of Jack’s California Quartet series, The Deification and Valley Boy. The final two volumes will be released in 2013: The Book of Changes and Trio of Lost Souls. Blood, A Novel was published by Camel Press, an imprint of Coffeetown Press, in 2011. You can find Jack online at http://jackremick.com

You can find out more about Jack Remick, his books and World of Ink Author/Book Tour at http://tinyurl.com/akw7kk6

Jack Remick - Women's Lit from a Man's POV

Saturday, February 9, 2013

The Joy of Writing Women’s Lit from a Man’s POV

Jack Remick and books

Some Techniques and Tips:

Follow this url for more: Writing Tips for the Committed Novelist

I use “start lines” to get going. If I’m working on a novel, I might use—“Today I rewrite the scene called…

Act One opens when….
Act One ends when….
Act Two opens in a scene called….
At the middle of my story, my protagonist….
Act Two ends when….
Act Three opens when….
My story climaxes in a scene called….
My story ends with this final image….

You can find out more about Jack Remick, his books and World of Ink Author/Book Tour at http://tinyurl.com/akw7kk6

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

A GOOD STORY IS A GOOD STORY- WORLD OF INK NETWORK

When I Was in School, They Didn’t Teach Multi-Tasking

Linda Lee Greene

I hail from the generation right after Farmer John lost his universal influence on the culture and right before the American Girl threw away her bras. In a way, mine is a lost generation, caught in some uncomfortable cog between the old and the new. Nurtured by parents firmly planted in the old ways, while drawn to our younger brothers and sisters who were forging new and exciting paths, we were often torn and befuddled. Despite the push and pull, the strong tentacles of the agrarian concept of how to live life were more firmly dug into our souls, however, and linger to this day.

Get married; raise a family; stick close to your generational home; share Sunday dinner with grandma, grandpa, aunts and uncles and cousins; from birth to death, attend the same house of worship and have the same friends; retire with a gold watch and a good pension from your first and only job; share your home with your widowed sister after your husband passes away: these were the bricks in the foundation of the life into which I was born and raised.

Setting aside the drawbacks of such a lifestyle, for the purpose of this essay, I wish to point out a decided advantage of it, and that is the sharing of the work-load, and by extension, the reaping of its benefits, which included the time to do something once in awhile other than work. There was a clear distinction between who did what and when then: Dad went off to work and brought home the bacon—mom stayed home and cooked it; dad took care of the outside of the house—mom’s territory was the inside of it; the male youngsters pitched in and helped dad—the females assisted mom. The school curriculum for boys included shop and for girls, home economics, but nobody, anywhere, ever taught us the art of MULTI-TASKING! And who ever thought that computers would become the most essential part of the game of life?

I’ll get right down to it: life played a dirty trick on us—it changed tempo. It’s like we started out doing a sensual slow dance and ended up clogging—that’s a highly energetic, mountain-style quick-step/square dance, the whole of it performed at arm’s-length and only if you are young and possess the know-how of having been born into it. That’s the way it is with multi-tasking—if you aren’t a whole lot younger than I am and weren’t born with keyboards and keypads and all of the rest of life’s technological gimmickry as extensions of your person, and a brain hard-wired to thrive on hyperactivity, it’s daunting. You’ve guessed by now that multi-tasking is the bane of my existence. Without it, I’m told I’m dead in the water; with it, I’m miserable. I’m a focused, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of gal. I was taught to finish what was on my plate before I could eat dessert; to complete my homework before I could go outside to play, and to clean my room before I could go out on a date. One thing at a time, and each thing in its time, is the only way I know how to live life. But life isn’t built my way anymore. So what have am I doing about it?

In addition to being a writer, I am an artist and an interior designer, and guess what the Golden Rule of good design is? It’s “Less is More.” That means the best artwork leaves a lot of white space on the canvas where the eye can rest. Likewise, a lot of breathing room among objects in interior spaces of structures is superior to clutter. Otherwise, all of the busyness will eventually land you in the loony bin. The same credo applies to writing…and I’ve figured out that it applies to the entire process of writing, including the marketing of written work, at least for me. Maybe it’s a better way for you, too.

Are you suggesting that I walk away from the ten thousand sites into which I pour my promo material every day—to clear out my inboxes? you are asking. I’m just telling you what I’m doing for me. My answer to the dilemma boils down to quality rather than quantity. Do you know what comprises a beautifully designed and desirable room? The prerequisite is a few well-placed, quality pieces that POP! I think a better marketing plan for anyone’s written work should follow the same rule.

If you want to get off the non-stop merry-go-round of present-day online marketing, you’ll have to whittle down your current busy schedule, and it will require some honest analysis of your working status quo, as well as of your own psyche. I just don’t believe that anybody pays attention to those ten thousand, one-minute promo bites that we send out every day, especially when they are lost among the millions of others that are showing up at the same time in the same inboxes all over the world? I learned the fallacy, and the folly, of this activity through my own experience. It boils down to time…who has the time for it? I don’t, and the result is that the delete buttons on my internet devices get real workouts before anything even gets read, as I imagine yours do, too. The way I see it is that our best recourse is to manifest the one thing that is authentically you, and authentically me, and to put it out there discriminately. I believe that the answer is to make what we do POP by being unique and keyed to interested and empathetic audiences who might actually do us some good.

I also suggest following the directive of Roy Eugene Davis in The Spiritual Basis of Real Prosperity: “Learn to let the universe satisfy your needs. The universe is whole; nothing is lacking. Whatever is needed for your well-being, for desires to be fulfilled or for meaningful purposes to be accomplished, is either already available, can be attracted if necessary, or can be manifested by the universe.” Dr. Deepak Chopra says it this way in his The Book of Secrets, Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life. “The glories of creation are in your very cells; you are made of the same mindstuff as the angels, the stars, and God himself.”

We have to put some white spaces in our days, to take the time to turn our eyes to the universe. And if we do, I’ll just bet that before we know it, in our own extraordinary ways, we’ll shine like the brightest stars.

info - Linda Lee Greene
Author, Guardians and Other Angels http://amzn.to/PUOXl9; co-author, Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams http://www.amazon.com/Linda-Lee-Greene/e/B00864OVWA; art web site www.gallery-llgreene.com; blog http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com; Amazon Author Page www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene; Twitter @LLGreeneAuthor.

Linda will be a guest on A Good Story Is A Good Story on February 15, 1PM EST

A GOOD STORY IS A GOOD STORY -

Monday, February 04, 2013

Interview with Spotlight Author Jack Remick!

As part of this month's Spotlight on Jack Remick, author of Gabriela and the Widow, we had the following Q&A exchange - and found him to be every bit as interesting a person as he is a writer!

Q: When did you begin writing? What got you started?
A: Nancy, I think the question isn’t when, but Why? Writing as a novelist, screenwriter, short story writer, and poet, I’ve explored form and structure to see if I can find a way back into my own brain. All writing is not disguised autobiography as Joyce is supposed to have said, but all writing is archetypal extrapolation of the great myths that live in us and derive from our furious and far flung journey to being. In a way I feel some kinship with the scribes in China who wrote on oracle bones, and with the mud-daubers in Babylon who scratched their cuneiform words with reed styluses, and I feel, in my blood, the madness of the stone carvers in Belize who cut their hieroglyphs in such a psychedelic way that at first we didn’t know it was writing. No other beast can write. We were born to write and writing makes us what we are. In her book Proust and the Squid, Marianne Wolf suggests that we first wrote when we looked at animal tracks in the sand and copied the bird tracks, the deer tracks and called them pictographs. So you could say that I got started writing two hundred thousand years ago.

Q: You're writing from the POV of two females - and writing rather intimately about female experiences. How do you manage that?
A: Embryologically men are women. Somewhere in our development men get a double shot of testosterone and we end up with external gonads and a lot of interest in sex. Somehow I’ve maintained my embryological connection to the state before my second shot of male hormone. Am I joking? No. But, the other reality is that I come from a family with four sisters. I’ve watched the changes in my sisters, watched my women age and talk and cry together. I lived in South America where I wore clothing I bought on the street so as to become like the people around me. In my family life, my father was gone a lot. My sisters, my mother, my aunts, my grandmother became my reality. To write Gabriela and The Widow I became them in the same way I became Ecuadorian in Quito or the way I became Mexican in Cosala.

Q: You also write in the character of a young woman who is not a native English speaker. Your "voice" is very authentic. Tell me about that.
A: Guilt. Shame. Fear. Love. Anger. Human. Every language, I am sure—though I’m not a linguist, anthropologist or psychiatrist—has those words. Every human has those feelings. Gabriela is damaged, she’s been ruined. She shows fear, guilt, shame, and love. When I write from that level, that deep, I find an approximation, in words, of emotion. My words are an intermediate step between my feeling and the feeling I evoke in a reader. Writers, sooner or later, come to the conclusion that there are three levels here: To tell (which is a no no); to show (which is good); and Evoke. I capitalize Evoke because it is Truth. Evoking, you never say Love, you evoke it. You show Anger. You evoke fear by action and image. Evoking emotion is such a powerful way to reach into the brain of the reader that if you write from fear, from guilt, from shame then the character in whom you invest becomes a true carrier of those emotions. Someone once asked Samuel Beckett why, if everything was pointless, did he write. His answer: Words are all I have. Words are pathways into emotion. Another way to look at it is from the method actor’s point of view. An actor, it is said, becomes the character and in some cases has a hard time leaving that character. The writer’s job is ten times that—the writer has to be all the characters. If the writer can’t achieve that identity with the characters, then all but one will be wooden. I learned from Ellen Gilchrist, who wrote I Cannot Get You Close Enough, that the writer must render every character strong enough to become the protagonist of the next novel. If you do that, work from the inside, then writing has meaning in the same way meaning in music is not semantic, but evocative. I became Gabriela and I became La Viuda, and I became El Señor. When Gabriela stands on the walls of Troy in that blue gown…the breeze on the silk was on my skin. And in the end? The skinny dogs. Man, let me tell you, I could taste the fat…That’s why writers are crazy.

Q: This novel seemed very visual to me - have you ever wondered about seeing this book made into a movie? If so, how would you cast it?
A: A few years ago, I taught in a screenwriting program with Robert J Ray, Stewart Stern, and Randy Sue Coburn. Earlier, Bob Ray and I had worked out a path for our writing in this century. From the beginning, art has been about getting pictures to move. From cave paintings in Chauvet to sculpture at Angkor Wat, art is movement. Movies, one still at a time, realize that long arc of development—the illusion of movement. You could say that we’ve waited a million years for movies. In movies we see stories told with Action and Image. It’s hard to film a “thought” except by flashback or some other direct means. To the screenwriter, the right word is Behavior. What the character does. How do you handle that in writing? When Bob and I settled on Action and Image as our technique, we came to the conclusion, as have other writers, that we needed to speak directly to the visual cortex where images are decoded to emotion and one way to get into your reader’s brain is to attach characters to objects (in Gabriela--the coins, the jewelry, the clothing, the toads) and put them in motion. We “see” everything. In Gabriela, I used this technique in as many ways as I was able—from the image of the two women on the patio watching the meteor showers, to the action of La Viuda’s seduction by the Russian on the sable coat. If film is the highest form of art in our time—in a way film is the logical development of Wagner’s “total theatre” as realized in his Ring Cycle—then it is telling us something about the way our brains decode reality. In this, once a fiction has been read, it shares the brain-space of historical fact as if it were a reality and in a sense it is. Art is stored the same way history is. In memory, there is little difference between fact and fiction, because fiction becomes a fact once internalized. It is our destiny, as writers, to bring visual reality to our readers in the same way the film makers, directors, and actors bring filmic reality to the viewer. We have to “make them see”. When I wrote Gabriela and The Widow I did not see the novel as a mid-point between written word and cinematic image. The novel is itself. I wanted to put into writing what the film makers know. Writing Action and Image is, then, a novelist’s way of getting the pictures to move. If I were to imagine a filmed Gabriela, I would acquiesce to the artistic reality that screenwriters confront—movie-making is a collaboration. In that process, the writer learns not to do the director’s work, not to do the costumer’s work, not to do the actors’ work but to deliver a solid story that can be rendered into moving images using the expertise of each of the collaborators. So, to answer the last part of your question—I wouldn’t cast it. I couldn’t. My vision of Gabriela is just one vision. Other artists will see her as they need to see her. And they will see La Viuda as she exists in her relationship to Gabriela.

Q: Who are your favorite authors and why?
A: I wish I could answer that in a few words. I think a lot about Cormac McCarthy. Not the Cormac of the movies, but Cormac who wrote Blood Meridian. That novel is an American Divine Comedy. It is a novel about a journey through hell. It is, in my view, the best American work since Twain. As you know, in The Green Hills of Africa Hemingway wrote that before Huck, there was nothing. He saw it as the liberation of American writing. And he wasn’t wrong.

Q: What's up next for you?
A: I’m writing a new novel which at the moment has half a dozen working titles. I don’t know enough about it yet to make a coherent statement but I do know that it is, in part, about Western women at a unique time in time and it is about the sisterhood of pain, rape, and the war on vaginas that’s being waged right now. There has to be an accounting.

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Tuesday, February 5, 2013

A GOOD STORY IS A GOOD STORY

Romance is in the air!

A Good Story Is A Good Story

Join in on the fun...

Please join Marsha Casper Cook on February 5 at 9PM EST 8 PM CST 7 PM MT 6PM PST for a very special night of romance. Romance for Valentine' s Day - The day of love!
The phone line will be open and you can chat with the guests and the host. Guests for the show are Em Petrova, Lindsay Downs and Bethany Cross all very successful romance writers. It's going to be a very hot steamy romance show. There will be many surprises so don't forget to listen live or on demand.

For more info and author services go to :
http://www.worldofinknetwork.com
www.michiganavenuemedia.com
http://www.authorstalkromance.blogspot.com

LOVE CHANGES

When lies come back to haunt Elaine, can she find a way to forgive herself? We’ve all heard the comment, “Sometimes life is too damn hard.” That’s what people say when they aren’t ready to move forward with their lives. Elaine Lewis was one of those people. She had made some bad decisions, but after spending months in therapy at the Castleberry, her future depended on her ability to forgive herself. With the help of a wonderfully patient nurse, a secure and passionate doctor, and a husband who loved her very much, she was able to find the miracle she had been looking for. Life is but a dream, with many flashing moments.