Fantasy Literature and the Writer’s Itch

“I write to relive the itch in my head.”

So said American fantasy author N.D. Wilson, author of Dandelion Fire and 100 Cupboards, a wonderful emerging trilogy (set in Kansas) for young readers (and up!) who enjoy Harry Potter and the great works of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

I have to admit, that “itch in the head” thing comes closest to describing why I write.

I just wanted to mention that my newest book, A Guide to Fantasy Literature, is in print. For more, visit my Fantasy Literature website, or the book’s blog, Creeping Past Dragons, to celebrate fantasy storytelling in all its diverse forms, exploring why it delights and enchants readers of all ages.

The book, by the way, is a substantially revised edition of book I did in 2002, called The Writer’s Guide to Fantasy Literature, focused on advice for writers. The 2002 edition sold well (about 5,000 copies), but the company later dropped that line of books, and the rights to the title reverted to me. I felt (there’s that itch!) the material had broad applicability beyond writers, and revised and tightened it to focus on points about the diverse types of fantasy and the building blocks of the genre interesting to a general reader . . . while still offering many bits of advice, ideas, and creative paths for writers.

A lot of the book addresses core issues of storytelling, and imagination, and the role of sense of place, theme, and such in good stories, as practiced by some of the finest storytellers ever – from Tolkien and Lewis to the pantheon of other greats: George MacDonald and Lord Dunsany to James Thurber and John Steinbeck to modern literary wizards like Ursula Le Guin, Jonathan Carroll, and others.

So if you want to scratch that itch in your head with the magical wand of fantasy, check out that book, website, blog.

As always, let me know any feedback or comments. I’m happy to try to address them here or in my Creeping Past Dragons blog.

July Hodgepodge – Creative Names and Cars

I’ve been driving cars around the block. Lots of them. I’m car shopping, looking to replace a venerable Suburu wagon that almost made it to 200,000 miles, but sadly stopped short of that celestial goal in a cloud of smoke a couple of weeks ago.

Accordingly (hey, that’s a Honda pun!) I’ve been studying the names of cars. For some, I can only scratch my head. The Dodge Avenger? What exactly are they avenging . . . and how do they plan to go about it? Should I be worried?

Or the Nissan Armada. Hey, didn’t the most famous armada, the Spanish Armada, end up being blown to bits by the English or running aground on the Irish coast, in one of the greatest disasters of all time? (And can a single vehicle be a whole armada? Isn’t that a little vainglorious? Does the SUV come with an admiral’s jacket with epaulets and a funny hat?)

Great car names? It’s the story of Marianne Moore (1887–1972),  a celebrated American poet. (One of her great lines was to describe poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”) In a 1925 essay, William Carlos Williams wrote about Moore’s ability to capture the vastness of the particular: “So that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events.”

In 1955, Moore was invited informally to submit ideas for names for Ford’s “E-car” (which stood for “experimental” car) project. Her poetic list included:

• “Resilient Bullet”
• “Mongoose Civique”
• “Varsity Stroke”
• “Pastelogram”
• “Intelligent Whale”

And the exquisite offering:

• “Utopian Turtletop.”

Ford, however, in its wisdom, went with the name Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, and slapped it on the car that would up up as perhaps the greatest marketing failure in American history.

Was it the lame name? Ford had also hired an ad firm to come up with a name. However, the ad agency’s report offered an astounding 18,000 possibilities. Wow, now that’s a consultant’s report! When pressed . . . they managed to trim the list to just 6,000 names.

The executives got an eventual 10 names to choose from, none of which they liked, so in a whim, someone offered the name of Henry Ford’s son. In that high-level committee setting, it must have seemed brilliant . . . or impossible to vote against.

Myself, I’d love to drive a Utopian Turtletop.

To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, what I’d like in a car is simply: “So that in driving some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events.”

Such as a good speedy merge from an uphill ramp onto the freeway?

Words Can Change the World, I Think

Words can change the world . . . or a small piece of it.

Or so I believe.

However, in a writer’s discussion not long ago, someone asked: what are some examples as proof of that?

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Writing is so often meant to carry our thoughts and words far beyond us, to places where we won’t always see their effect.

Well, here’s something. A little fable. Not proof of anything, since it’s fictional.

It’s a link to a beautiful 5-minute film. I ran across it on a Milwaukee marketing firm’s blog, so I’ll send it to you via their page. Check it out (and thanks, Data Dog, for helping us discover this.)

Click here to watch:
Historia de un letrero (A short original film, with subtitles)
written & directed by Alonso Alvarez Barreda

Take a few moment to check it out.

And let’s keep thinking about that question.
As writers, can we make a real difference in the world with our words?

How? (And if we do . . . will we know?)

Top Ten Books for Writers (recommended book #2)

I’m reviewing my library of hundreds of books of writing advice for top recommendations for your library. Here’s my take on essential works, IMHO, for writers. (Full list on a permanent page of this blog.)

I’ll tell why I think a particular book makes the top list.
Here’s the second (in no particular order) likely candidate:

A Writer’s Coach:
The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies that Work
by Jack Hart (2006)
[Note: the hardcover edition had a slightly different subtitle.]

To order from Amazon.com, click here.

Focus: Nonfiction (Journalism)
Audience: Writers at all levels

Why I’m recommending this: I learn something every time I pick up this amazing book.

Jack Hart is editor at large for The Oregonian and has coached writers for many years while mastering the craft himself. His book is a clear, well-organized set of great advice on how to craft the journalistic report or story (and by extension, many other forms of writing).

The Table of Contents shows the approach: Method, Process, Structure, Force, Brevity, Clarity, Rhythm, Humanity, Color, Voice, Mechanics, Mastery.

A reviewer on Amazon.com (Roy Wenzl, reporter from Wichita, KS), says:

What appears underneath those simple chapter headings is some of the best instruction anyone could have about how to become a skilled writer, and Jack does it by bringing clarity to the most complex ideas.

I love any list for what good writing needs that includes force, brevity, clarity, rhythm. Too many writers can produce run-of-the-mill work, but haven’t learned to elevate their work to the next level.

Jack Hart’s techniques will help you.

Best of all, he practices what he preaches. The book’s succinctness is wonderful.

For example, in just a dozen pages, in the Method chapter, his advice on finding Ideas is brilliantly outlined into precise, useful methods: from very structured brainstorming . . . to distinguishing topics from ideas . . . to finding the thematic focus of your piece.

Or check out his brief explanation of types of “Report Leads” (Summary, Blind, Wraps, Shirttail) . . . or “Feature & Story Leads” (7 types) . . . or “Dangerous Leads” (dangerous for the writer!) . . . and “Loser Leads.”

This is one of the least-fluff, most bang-for-the-buck book on writing I have on my bookshelf. I’ll second the quote on the book’s front cover by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief:

Wise, practical, and smart, A WRITER’S COACH is an exceptional book, offering advice with good humor and great insight.

Did I make it clear I love this book? It’s definitely one of the best books on craft for nonfiction writers. Get it. You’ll read it many times . . . and enjoy it each time.

December Hodgepodge (on creativity)

As 2008 prepares to lead us into 2009, here are a few thoughts (about creativity, the writing process, and looking ahead) to savor:

Fiction. . . . It’s like goading a mongoose and a cobra into battle and staying with them to see who wins.
– Shauna Singh Baldwin, author of What the Body Remembers and The Tiger Claw

Q: What is your writing process like?
I sit down and think: “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”
– Carrie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth
[I think she means the worst thing that can happen to her characters . . . not to the writer.]

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus

Q: Where is your favorite place to write?
In my car. An old habit, I guess . . . when my daughter was a baby she wouldn’t nap in her crib. I used to drive around until she fell asleep, then I’d pull over and write for a few hours. Now she’s a teenager, but I find I still do my best work in the car – I’m not tempted to walk away and do something else, and no one interrupts me!
– Jen Bryant. author of books for young readers, including A River of Words (about William Carlos Williams) and Georgia’s Bones (about Georgia O’Keefe)

The moment one gives close attention to anything,
even a blade of grass,
it becomes a mysterious, awesome,
indescribably magnificent world in itself.
– Henry Miller, novelist

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach; one can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Tips for Writers from Jack Kerouac
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
[from a longer list, but you get the point.]

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
– Ansel Adams

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
– George Carlin

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
– Yogi Berra

Today
– (a single word, carved on a stone that sat on John Ruskin’s desk)

What lies behind us and what lies before us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Sacred Idleness

“Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.”

Author of that quote, George MacDonald (1824–1905) was an 19th-century Scottish fantasy writer and Congregationalist minister; his novels had an enormous influence on C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle among others.

I’m just back from a bit of sacred idleness myself, a week-long vacation across the big pond (Lake Michigan) to the other side: the State of Michigan’s dune-swept, sunset-prone western shoreline. I’ve been recharging the batteries of creativity, trudging around Sleeping Bear Dunes national lakeshore, through a sparse beauty of dune flowers and grasses, looking out at horizons blue with water and dark low islands.

I recalled this line from Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose book Gift from the Sea is a personal favorite.

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. . . . It’s stimulating loneliness.

I also recalled this quote from Kafka. When I first read it a few years ago, I thought frankly it was the most ridiculous bit of advice I’d encounter. I’m not sure I’d turn to Kafka for advice on the well-balanced life. But the core of the advice, to occasionally be still and just listen, rings true.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
– Franz Kafka

Just ignore the part about not needing to leave your room. Oh yes, you do!

It doesn’t need to be a week-long outing, sitting on sandy beaches and watching fiery waves turn silvery-blue at sunset.

Daily, I get a lot from a neighborhood walk. I like my 20-minute loop, just enough time on the way out to stretch, breath, relax, and leave some mental clutter behind. Then, fresher ideas start popping in. I’m not sure I’d say the world, per Kafka, rolls in ecstasy at my feet. But I feel rejuvenated and walk back briskly, trying to remember the best of the ideas so I can sit down and pound them out.

(Sometime, I just like to pound the keyboard a bit harder, just because I like the sound of ideas emerging.)

Relaxation, clearing the mind, listening . . . creativity draws on this like a deep, mysterious well to overcome a bit of drought. The Japanese have a word, mushin (the empty mind). A Zen concept, it refers to a mind clear of clutter and active knowledge. It is essential to seeing things fresh.

And it is reached by techniques designed to reach that state: sitting, breathing, walking, looking at nature.

At a museum I used to work at, creating exhibits, we used to walk away from first rough layouts, leaving the space, muttering the mantra: erase, erase, erase. Then, we’d re-enter the space and look at it through the eyes of a newcomer.

There is another state, muga, beyond the empty mind, of mushin, which is closer to uniting with the cosmos. It is a total centering, described by Japanese Zen master Takuan Sōhō, author of The Unfettered Mind, talking about the connection of long practice, mind-free centering, and the flow of powerful activity. He wrote:

When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, nor of himself, nor of his enemy’s sword movements. He just stands there with his sword which, forgetful of all technique, is ready only to follow the dictates of the subconscious. The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hand of the man’s subconscious that strikes.

For the writer, the sword is the pen, and the opponent the blank page, perhaps.

So empty your mind. Go for a walk. Breathe. Become just little more blissful. And excited to get back to work.

After all, even crazy Kafka knew what it comes down to in the end:

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
– Franz Kafka

Successful Writers: Pig-Headed and Obstinate

Isak Dinesen said, “I write a little everyday, without hope and without despair.”

She meant that writing is not a matter of hope or wishful thinking, but of the discipline of doing it.

Writing. A little every day. Pen to paper, finger to keyboard.

Kelly James-Enger, successful freelancer and author of Six-Figure Freelancing and Ready, Aim, Specialize, has said she has a drawing in her office of a man in a sailboat, with an old proverb, “If there is no wind, row.” That’s probably the best advice for writers I’ve heard.

In a similar vein, check out the website of Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy, launched in 1995 with The Golden Compass (Northern Lights in its original British edition).

On his web page About the Writing, Pullman notes the three things that inspire him: (1) Money (as a professional writer with bills to pay), (2) “the desire to make some sort of mark on the world,” and (3) “the sheer pleasure of craftsmanship.”

And he hones in on the prime ingredient of a writer: “pig-headed obstinacy.”

If you’re going to make a living at this business — more importantly, if you’re going to write anything that will last — you have to realise that a lot of the time, you’re going to be writing without inspiration. The trick is to write just as well without it as with. Of course, you write less readily and fluently without it; but . . . Amateurs think that if they were inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professional know that if they relied on inspiration, they’d be amateurs.

Words to heed, from an obstinate, brilliant storyteller.

We Are Lonesome Animals

I gave a recent talk on being a successful writer (craft tips, pitching advice, and a few other helpful hints) to a public library near Milwaukee (Muskego Public Library), a truly wonderful place with a gorgeous, inspired, high vaulted ceiling, lots of local artwork, and happily, plenty of people using it . . . even in the midst of a snowy, slippery January blizzard. One person on her way drove into a ditch, but got pulled out and still made it to my program. It made me want to share good thoughts on writing!

Here’s one:

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”
– John Steinbeck

A related thought, from the website of Australian author Morris Gleitzman:

I don’t think you can make emotions up, no matter how good your imagination is. I’ve never met a writer who knows how to invent new emotions. All we can do is use the emotions we all feel every day. Love, hate, hope, fear, excitement, jealousy, sadness, guilt, joy, anxiety etc. The characters in our stories may be feeling them for different reasons to us, but they’re the same emotions.
– Morris Gleitzman

And:

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
– Willa Cather

The point: we need to connect to our readers with stories and characters and feelings that resonate with them, that touch on those simplest, oldest, most powerful of stories.

Walt Whitman: Twirl of My Tongue

What is the calling of a great writer?

To write. To celebrate. To see how everything is connected and equal. To share the smallest of epiphanies, and to show how it is the same as the largeness of the universe. “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” said Walt Whitman.

According to Walt Whitman, in his excited, extravagant, effusive, ecstatic rant on great poetry and bold expression in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass:

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
and with the young, and with the mothers or families,
read these leaves in the open air every season
of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told in school or church
or in any book,
and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
and your very flesh shall be a great poem . . . .
The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work.
He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed
and manured . . .
He shall go directly to the creation.

The ground is already ready for the writer, ploughed and manured. Go directly to the process of creativity. Again, from Whitman (in Song of Myself):

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds
and volumes of worlds.

With a twirl of the tongue . . . or flourish of the pen . . . or clickety-clack of the keyboard.

Go forth and encompass worlds. Today.