Three Inspiring Thoughts on Writing

Before I share my three favorite quotes about writing, I have to twirl a bit over my big news this week. THE TALON OF THE HAWK was nominated for Best Fantasy Romance of 2015 in the RT Book Reviews Reviewers Choice Awards! I'm so honored to be in the company of such amazing writers, many of whom are my very favorites from way back. Such a thrill!

My three favorite quotes about writing.

There is in each of us an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground around it into a swamp. ~Mark Rutherford

I found this quote in the book WALKING ON ALLIGATORS, a book of meditations for writers, by Susan Shaunghnessy, which I bought back in 1993 when I first set my cap to being a writer instead of (or, in addition to, as it turned out) being a scientist. I've come back to this quote over and over, to explain to myself why I get depressed if my breaks from writing are too long. Ye olde swamp. Yes, exactly.

Tons of great quotes in that book - I highly recommend!

Take the donuts!

Okay, if you haven't read Amanda Palmer's THE ART OF ASKING, you won't get this. Also, this is an amazing book for any kind of creative. Maybe for anyone at all! Seriously, this book lit up my life and answered questions I didn't even know I had. Anyway, she explains this so much better than I could, that I'm copying from the book. Some of this might not make sense because she references previous thought threads, but that's all the more reason to read the book!

Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail about how he chose to remove himself from society to live by his own means in a little ten-by-fifteen-foot hand-hewn cabin on the side of a pond. What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought him a basket of freshly baked goods for him, including donuts.

The idea of Thoreau gazing thoughtfully over the expanse of transcendental Walden Pond, a bluebird alighting onto his threadbare shoe, all the while eating donuts that his mom brought him just doesn’t jibe with most people’s picture of him as a self-reliant, noble, marrow-sucking back-to-the-woods folk hero. In the book An Underground Education, Richard Zacks declares: Let it be known that Nature Boy went home on weekends to raid the family cookie jar.

Thoreau also lived at Walden for a total of two or three years, but he condensed the book down to a single year, the four seasons, to make the book flow better, to work as a piece of art, and to best reflect his emotional experience.

Taking the donuts is hard for a lot of people.

It’s not the act of taking that’s so difficult, it’s more the fear of what other people are going to think when they see us slaving away at our manuscript about the pure transcendence of nature and the importance of self-reliance and simplicity. While munching on someone else’s donut.

Maybe it comes back to that same old issue: we just can’t see what we do as important enough to merit the help, the love. Try to picture getting angry at Einstein devouring a donut brought to him by his assistant while he sat slaving on the theory of relativity. Try to picture getting angry at Florence Nightingale for snacking on a donut while taking a break from tirelessly helping the sick. It’s difficult.

So, a plea.

To the artists, creators, scientists, nonprofit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers, and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept the help, in whatever form it’s appearing:

Please, take the donuts.

To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band:

Take the donuts.

To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer and stripper living on less than $700 a month, who went on to marry a best-selling author whom she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can’t break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please…

Everybody.

Please.

Just take the fucking donuts.

And my most recent favorite, that I have tacked up next to my desk:

What would you write if you weren't afraid?

This one isn't cited to anyone that I can find. It's interesting because when I mention it to some people, they come right back with "I'm not afraid of anything!" Which is great. More power to them. Other people though, particularly well-established, multi-published authors, nod and say, "Oh, yes." It's not fear precisely, but that works well as a good umbrella term. It's caution. It's those voices of the marketplace whispering that something like it has been done. Or has never been done. It's the comments of critique partners warning that readers won't like something. It's the ever-present doubt in one's own instincts.

Whenever I hesitate on going somewhere in a story, I look a that quote.

And I write as if I'm not afraid.

Conversations and Twelve Kingdoms Sneak Peeks

We're talking about dialogue this week in the Bordello.

Now, I spent the last couple of days doing stuff with LERA, my local RWA chapter, as it was the weekend of our biannual Enchanting the Page conference. Alexandra Sokoloff gave her excellent workshop on Screenwriting Tricks for Authors. So, my head is chalk full of ideas about structure and set pieces, not about dialogue at all.

Ironic, considering screenwriting is hugely about dialogue.

At any rate, dialogue is fun for me. I love revealing how the characters interact through dialogue. One really fun thing about writing THE TALON OF THE HAWK was transcribing the conversations between Ursula and Harlan, with all their banter and verbal fencing. Their love affair truly deepens first through conversation, largely because physical expression is out of the question.

(In the upcoming THE PAGES OF THE MIND, the situation is reversed, with conversation impossible. *That* was a bear to write!)

At any rate, I thought I'd share some of my favorite bits of Ursula and Harlan's ongoing conversation. Along with a few glimpses of as yet unpublished conversations. :D

* * *

“Addressing me as ‘Your Highness’ can become cumbersome. You may call me Princess Ursula.”

            “The former has two less syllables than the latter.” His face did not move from its stern lines, but I received the distinct impression of amusement from him—along with the recognition that he had surprised me indeed. He had to know that no one expected a man who looked like the side of a cliff to be articulate or clever.

            “As you wish—either is appropriate,” I replied, deliberately casting a bored-seeming eye over the assembly as I lent half an ear to Uorsin’s conversation.

            “No dispensation for a less formal accolade in conversation, then, Your Highness? What do your men call you?”

            I turned and met his eye, allowed a slight smile. “Captain.”

            He laughed, as resonant and booming as his voice. “Touché, Captain.”

            “Are we fencing, then?”

            “I witnessed your practice today, as you know, Your Highness. It would be interesting indeed to match blades with you.”

            “And yet we are allies, it seems, so such a scenario is unlikely to occur.”

            “You do not spar?”

            “Rarely. Only to teach.” Only with my Hawks. “Are you asking for lessons, Captain Harlan of the Vervaldr?”

            He grinned, and it belatedly occurred to me that the remark, which I’d intended as mildly insulting, had possibly sounded salacious.

   * * *

“You didn’t tell me I could call you Captain,” the mercenary said quietly, folding those massive arms to watch. 

                “Maybe I like it when you call me Your Highness.”

* * *

 

“You’re worried,” Harlan commented quietly to me after we’d ridden for a time, still unrested and fed only from our much-reduced provisions.

            I gave him a sidelong glance. “Being worried would imply that I lack confidence in our forces. I am…thinking.”

            He made a snorting sound. “Not much of a distinction. How’s the head?”

            “Fine.”

            “You’ve lost color. You need to rest.”

            “Thank you, Mother.”

            Harlan raised his brows at me. “Shall I cuddle you on my lap and sing you a baby-sparrow song?”

            My turn to snort. “What in the Twelve is a ‘baby-sparrow song’?”

            “Eh, not in the Twelve. I don’t know your word for it. A soothing tune, usually with a lot of silliness, that you sing to infants to make them sleep.”

            “A lullaby, we call it.”

            He nodded, once, filing that away. Truly his command of our Common Tongue was excellent. He showed flexibility in substituting phrases for words he couldn’t translate. An admirable skill. “Sing me one of your lullabies.”

            I had to laugh. “Danu, no. You do not want to hear me sing. Unless we’re attacked by wolves—then it might serve to drive them off.”

            “Perhaps sometime I’ll convince you to sing for me when we’re alone, then.”

            “Not happening. And before you ask, I mean both that we’ll ever be alone and that I’ll ever sing.”

*  *  *

from THE CROWN OF THE QUEEN

“Are you managing me, librarian?” Ursula asked mildly. A tone that didn’t fool me for a moment.

“Somebody needs to,” Harlan commented in the same tone.

“Don’t start with me.” She shot him a glare over my head. “Just when I was feeling all sentimental over missing you.”

He grinned at her. “I love you, too, my fierce hawk.”

*  *  *

from THE PAGES OF THE MIND

“Dafne is right,” Harlan inserted before Ursula could vent the angry words she had ready. “He’ll be looking for weakness. And I’m sorry to say it, but he’ll assume that of a woman.”

“Then he’ll be in for a surprise,” she snapped. 

“Yes. He will. I’m actually looking forward to witnessing that.”