Fighting Writer's Plaque

23,000+ words into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I have to say I'm feeling pretty good. True, I am about 2,000 words behind today's target of 25,000 words, but I know I'll catch up.

After all, I had one very busy weekend and a few very strenuous days at work which put me 3,000 words behind by Sunday, but I caught up.

Little by little. Being persistent. And...I think that's the most common thing writers lose perspective on while tackling this month-long challenge. In many ways, NaNo is like a writer's diet. You put your novel on the scales at the end of every day and see if target numbers match up.

The first week feels great. Most writers hit well over the daily targets. They fist-pump until they contract a mild case of carpal tunnel.

But then the fateful day arrives when they inevitably slip up. Like a dieter indulging in a velvety bowl of chocolate pudding, the writer indulges in a blank page. It feels good. Boy, was that little break needed! But then the next day, the guilt is an ax hacking at you! The numbers are off. You're behind. You suck. What were you thinking? Now whatever words you cobble together on the page feel worthless. What's the point? This is too overwhelming! Too big to tackle. What the hell were you thinking a few days ago -- bragging on Facebook like some kind moron!?

But to all that, I say: Whoa! Breathe! Calm down!

Despite all the daily word targets, all the numbers, stats, and pep-talks, NaNo is neither a diet nor a race. Sure, it can be, but I don't think that's the true intention behind the concept.

Because I suspect many writer's lose perspective, I want to try to take a few steps back and look at this whole thing from another angle. Climb up on the monkey bars with me, will you? Hook your legs to the bars and hang down from your knees. Remember how? I know its been a while for most of us.

Okay, now that we're looking at NaNo from a whole new perspective, what do we see? Well, I see that rooted in its name is the word "nano." Think of that not as a contraction of National and Novel, but as just nano. Something small, minute.

I don't mean to suggest that NaNo is a some small, insignificant event and thus you can totally give up on it and not even care, because you've been told before not to sweat the small stuff. I DO mean to suggest that what NaNo is asking you to do is attempt something small in order to lead to a huge payoff.

In effect, all this month is asking you to do is write. Consistently. Persistently. It encourages and seduces you to make writing part of your daily cycle. Rather than treating writing like the divine miracle that only comes about when the ether of muses oozes at its strongest, NaNo purports that writing can be as routine and simple an act as brushing your teeth. (Yes, I am assuming you brush your teeth daily.)

Remember how when you were little, your mom or dad always had to remind (read: nag) you to brush your teeth? It just wasn't incorporated into the fabric of your lifestyle. But eventually, with persistence and practice, it was. Eventually, you needed no reminders. And to this day, you do not skip it because when you do, you go around with bad breath. You go the whole day feeling icky and yuck.

And the same is true for writing.

So you missed a day. So you're behind on the daily targets. So what? When you do forget to brush your teeth or plum run out of time, do you kick yourself  and condemn your whole future to the dungeons of acrid plaque, rotting gums, and tooth-blackening cavities? No.

Why? Because dental hygiene is a life-long activity. It's small in the grand scale of all that you do with your day, and its payoff is huge. Take good daily care of your teeth, and you won't wind up in dentures when your forty. You can crack into as many apples as you want. You can crunch-anunch all the crunch-anunchy things the world has to offer. In short, you can indulge in all the splendifous flavors of life!

And the same is true for writing when you do it every day. So, if you are at this point in NaNo, kicking/hating/bagging on yourself: STOP IT. The more you do that, the more discouraged you'll feel and the less likely you'll be to take up writing again. Then your plaque just builds and builds around your imagination. And then it calcifies! And then, you've got this big smelly crust around your once beautiful mind!

"A Beautiful Mind" by TheLionofOz on deviantart.com.

Pick up that pen and perform a small, seemingly innocuous act. Remember that it is a life-long activity requiring very little effort for a very big payoff. Working it into the fabric of your lifestyle means that you will continue doing it in December...in January, then February, and so on.

Now I can see that all the blood as run to your head. Ease yourself off the monkey bars. Look at NaNo now that you're upright once more. Can you see now that it is not a race? Rather, it is a path we all travel at our own pace. It is a path you chose as much as it chose you.

Remember, too, that it is not a diet -- a quick-fix with temporary results. It is a way for you to indulge in all the marvelous flavors of storycrafting everyday of your writing life!

And speaking of storycrafting flavors, be sure to tune in again soon when I take a look at the kinds of writing that may not be ideal for completing NaNo. It's like when you decide to turn over a whole new leaf and get yourself in better shape. You take up jogging, buy bushels of fruits and veggies, and evict all the junk food inhabiting in your pantry. How long does that last? Yeah, not long at all. In my next post, I'll look at similar patterns in writing that lead to ultimate self-defeat.

Join me then, but for now, go write! Go remove some plaque! And smile more (knowing you stink a whole lot less than you thought you did a few minutes ago)!    

Chrysalis and Entropy: A Celebration of Adolescence

I have a monthly Google calendar reminder to check on several interesting children's/YA publishing industry related blogs. Actually, I have many calendar reminders set to pretty much boss me around day-to-day and month-to-month. Many of the tasks I set up on a revolving basis are treats. Like writing 2,000 words each day. I love that one and it pops up first thing every morning at 8 a.m.

Others pop up and I scoff and send my eyes in search of the top-most textures of my head. Checking those blogs, I admit, can sometimes be a scoff-task. But this time around, I came across the following video on the Carolrhoda Lab, and it made me clap and cheer!

The footage reveals a large group of very young musicians totally rocking out. And the short blog post accompanying the video on the Carolrhoda site praises young folks for doing intricate, complicated, and spectacular things!

And the post+video made me cheer out loud not only because it is true, but also because it encapsulated my philosophy and methodology in writing for adolescent audiences.

Manymanymany novels out on the retail shelves depict teens coping with, causing, and sometimes solving drastic, catastrophic, world-bending events. And in the midst of all that hubbub, they intermingle elements of the adolescent experience. Puberty. Relationships. Dermatological disasters. Family drama. Love.

Books that exhibit this approach include Those That Wake, The Hunger Games trilogy, or the Divergent trilogy. 

And on its own, that approach sounds perfectly respectable. It certainly hasn't cost any of those authors any profits. There is, after all, a world with teenagers in it.

But the-world-with-teens paradigm does a disservice to the adolescent experience. From the vantage of a teen, there is, first, exhilarating chaos within the body, then exquisite madness beyond the body. It's more like there are teens with a world around them. 

Sounds neurotic? Self-centered? Maybe even a little narcissistic? Well, that's because it is...and what the hell's wrong with that? The neurology of the adolescent brain resembles a rain forest feasting on Miracle-Gro. The heart is simultaneously shredded and nourished by hormones that swell and crash with more force than a thousand tsunamis. 

The lyrics of Tool's song in the video above encapsulate precisely the teens-with-a-world paradigm. "Change is coming through my shadow...." "My shadow's shedding skin...." "Change is coming through...."

The song depicts the itchy, uncomfortable, scabby, bloody process of growing up -- that epic war between entropy and chrysalis. The childlike husk of the self erodes while the new but-not-fully-formed shroud of the teen emerges. 

I maintain that when it comes to writing YA, the metamorphosis a child goes through while "growing up" is substantially more important than evil forces scheming to take over the world, dystopian governments, or even, the apocalypse! Make no mistake: the primacy of the experience receives no short shrift in a novel like Martine Leavitt's The Book of Life by Angel or in any John Green novel (include any novel considered kith and kin to Green and Leavitt). But I suspect that a "genre" or "spec-fic" writer is just as capable as the real world chronicler when it comes to depicting adolescence. 

When I write, I seek to celebrate the complexity and profundity of teenage ability and creativity. Beyond that, I strive to honor the glory, the pain, the horror, and the beauty of adolescence.

Guest blogging: The Nectar of Success

For writers, success is like nectar. It's oh-so-sweet, but comes in small servings and only after lots and lots of diligent toil. 

Recently, I got to be the guest-blogger on Zach Hively long-running blog of books, thoughts, and other interesting ephemera. In that post, I announced to the world my latest little drops of nectar-success! Check out all the juicy details here: http://znhively.blogspot.com/2013/10/guest-blogger-jennifer-mason-ink.html

I am so pleased to announce that my writing is now available for the world to enjoy in two different volumes of Chicken Soup for the Soul! To read more about what I contributed, please visit Zach's blog!

 

N-Infomaniacs

Now that I'm finally done with the whole "I'm-gonna-do-two-Masters-degrees-in-two-countries" thing, I have time to read all the really juicy books on my must-read list. All the ones that stacked up as research reading and critical reading had to get done. All the ones that beckoned to me from bookstore and library shelves.

Read us! You know you'd much rather read us than Ball's theories on mise-en-abyme, or Ron's counterarguments on embedded narratives.

Well, those siren books weren't wrong. And now I am indulging. Mostly in nonfiction.

I just got through Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City and (for a second time) Deborah Heiligman's Charles and Emma: The Darwin's Leap of Faith.

I think for the purposes of this discussion, we can forget that these books were written for two different audiences. Heiligman crafted her work for young adults while Larson was targeting adults (historically knowledgeable adults, at that).

On the most basic levels, both books are simply creative nonfiction -- that is to say, nonfiction crafted to read like a fiction novel. Unlike textbooks, which present researched facts assembled from various primary sources in a dry and unbiased tone, creative nonfiction seeks to render mood, tension, and stakes out of its sources so that facts come alive and the story electrifies the reader!

To do that, creative nonfiction writers are sworn to never make anything up. If they deploy descriptions of settings loaded with descriptive adjectives, then by golly, those adjectives had better come from actual sources and not the imaginative warehouse of the writer's brain.

Both authors can be trusted to present only factual details; however, both authors do not exert the same pressures on those details to make them relevant, startling, surprising, and compelling. In other words, one book suffocated under the weight of its factoids. It choked on its own research, failing to properly cut the information into bite-size, digestible bits. The author fell victim to research and became a festering, throbbing, unrelenting n-infomaniac.

And I am sympathetic. With more than a decade of research and nonfiction writing under my belt, I can attest to the seductive lure of information. The more you find, the more you crave. Uncover one lost, but juicy tidbit, and that's all it takes to set the writer off in pursuit of more tender fact morsels.

But the devil is in the details.

And Heiligman faces the devil down. She executes her story with more restraint. Undoubtedly, her research churned up countless gems of unknown secrets lost to time and obscurity. Did she share them all? Nope. Share shared only what the reader needed to understand and love the personal story of Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma.

Heiligman strikes a comfortable balance between her sources and her story. She relies heavily on the personal correspondance of Charles and Emma Darwin, but she puts these letters to work in a storycrafting sense. Quotes from letters come alive as if they were dialogue being spoken. She achieves banter and repartee. Other times, Heiligman pulls out notes from Charles Darwin's notebooks. These she uses like thoughts he is having, in media res.

And in every chapter, Heiligman establishes stakes. In one chapter, Charles privately debates on a sheet of paper whether or not to get married. Why should that matter? Oh, no reason -- except that to not get married would mean a lonely lifetime in a grimy London apartment, while to get married might keep him from pursuing research that will eventually upend the foundations of science into the foreseeable future.

No biggie.

Larson, on the other hand, sets out with a provocative hook: compare the builder of the 1893 World's Fair to the psychopathic serial killer who murdered many of the fair goers. Essentially, the dust jacket would have you believe that Larson was going to compare a man who built a fantasy-land (Daniel Burnham) with another man who constructed a hotel-of-horror (H.H. Holmes).

Like Heiligman, Larson attempts to have personal correspondence masquerade as dialogue and live-action thought. In reality, the book flounders under a menagerie of alternating viewpoints. Chapters flip between Burnham, Burnham's partner, other World's Fair designers, Holmes, the then-mayor of Chicago, one of the mayor's staffers, to a quack-nut named Prendergrast (who will go on to assassinate the mayor), a police officer, and on and on the list goes. The effect is like an ensemble-cast Love Actually filmed with an attention deficite camera that keeps wandering away from the Emma Thompson's and Colin Firth's to follow up with the blurry extras in the background.

And because of the text's wayward narrative lens, Larson is not able to sustain the ominous mood and skin-rippling suspense one expects from a book involving psychopathic torture alongside monumental architectural achievement. (Okay, maybe I'm the only one with those expectations...) The slow-yet-sudden pattern of revelation throughout the book winds up feeling like a Hitchcock movie where the director teases viewers with a slow pan up into a box of macabre delight only to suddenly kick the box over and spill all of its sinister secrets.

In the end, the lesson for writers and storycrafters: avoid temptation and descend not into the murky depths of n-infomania!

   

How to Write with Forks and Spoons

I had a writer's epiphany.

It happened while I was making my usual Wednesday night drive home from the dojo. I'd just spent two hours on the mat practicing Aikido, a martial art founded on principles of ki (energy) rather than combat. Essentially, Aikido teaches its practitioners not to hit back when hit, but to a.) avoid the hit, b.) absorb its energy, and c.) give it back to the attacker in a harmonious way. "In a harmonious way" tends to mean incapacitating the attacker. Pinning them down...which is comparatively harmonious.

So, I'm heading home, all amped up with leftover ki, feeling harmonious with everything -- admittedly, I'm in an absorbent and impressionable state of mind. I'm listening to American Routes on the local public radio station.

Producer and host Nick Spitzer is interviewing Pat Martino, Philadelphia jazz modernist. Martino left home when he was a teen and pursued jazz in Harlem. He played ensemble for a while, then went solo and got big. But in 1979, he underwent an emergency operation to correct an aneurysm. The surgery damaged a part of his brain and left him with amnesia. Family, friends, and how to play music: all forgotten.

(Pat's story comprises a portion of the second hour on the show called "Guitar Heroes: Pat Martino & Ben Hall." Jump to about a half-hour in, unless you want to groove to the whole show.)

As Martino recovered, his father pressured him constantly to pick up the guitar and play. But the guitar felt alien to Martino. He didn't understand what he was supposed to do with it. He avoided it.

But not playing began to feel "volatile" so he picked it back up. He learned how to play again, bit by bit, and returned to all-new realms of jazz greatness.

To achieve any level of greatness, Pat talks about having to simultaneously reduce and elevate the guitar. He likens it to any necessary, functional item around his house, specifically spoons and forks. They are tools he takes out when he needs them. They are tool that serve their purpose.

Oh, baby, that admission walloped me hard.

I thought immediately about the writer's tools: pen/paper or e-pens/paper (laptops). Some writers, both famous and unpublished, often fuss over having just the right kind of pen (roller ball vs gel ink, smooth flowing vs scrape-heavy) or the right kind of journal (hardback spiral-bound vs soft, sturdy leather-bound), or the right kind of laptop (tiny, lightweight vs a good, ol' fashioned typewriter). I used to fuss over these exact things. And while I fussed, I did not have to worry about writing. How could I possibly write when  all I had was a Bic click pencil and a floppy five-subject notebook to scrawl in?

But when I finally got the exact pen I wanted and the precise kind of journal, I emptied the one and filled the other with words. Not stories. Meaningless, rambling, disconnected words. By themselves, words do not tell stories. They are just words.

But I had all the right tools to tell stories, didn't I? Shouldn't the stories just be pouring from my ballpoint?

Well, no. Stories don't come from the pen, the paper, or the keyboard. They come from the storyteller.

The same is true for jazz guitarists. Notes may come out of an instrument, but music flows only from a musician.

Pluckers may pull strings and writers may scribble, but it's musicians and storytellers who do the real work. And to transition from one level to the next, the artist must learn how to properly use her tools.

I was not using my pens/papers like tools. Instead, I treated them like divine totems. Years ago, when I finished my undergraduate degree and had to push writing out of my prime time and into my spare time, I learned how to reduce the pen/paper to tools. Because I worked full-time and managed a household, time was tight. When I sat down to write (around 11 p.m.) I felt the necessity to get the story out because 2 a.m. was gonna creep up like an assassin and kill my writing time. When I commuted on the bus to and from work, I wrote with anything I had on hand. I wrote on anything that had blank sheets of paper. And I wrote despite the bumps and sudden swerves that mangled my handwriting.

Oh, how I would bemoan the corrosion  and corruption of my writing. It used to be magical. It used to come out in gorgeous swirling script from a fancy pen on smooth stone-ground paper. Now it was relegated to pragmatic, get-it-done taskery.

And that was how I continued to work, even when I left my job and took up graduate school. Every month, I had to produce twenty pages of creative work. Twenty pages of story. So I sat down (anywhere, anytime possible) and I wrote (with anything available).

And it wasn't until I heard Pat Martino talk about his guitars like spoons that I realized what a huge favor I had done myself. My pen/paper, and all the other craft elements that go with writing (using metaphors, crafting settings, exploring objective correlatives, mapping character arcs, engineering storyboards, etc) had all become tools. No more mysterious or elusive than spoons and forks.

Spoon slave by Forked Up Art.

I could take them out and use them when I needed them.

They were there to serve me.

Imagine if every time you sat down for breakfast, you had to summon the spoon-muses just to eat your bran flakes! Imagine what you'd look like if you only ate when the mood struck just right.

Writing IS eating to me. It is sustenance. I can't wait till the mood is ambient and gods are friendly. Screw moods and gods -- I'M HUNGRY!

Yes, I have relegated my pens and paper to mere tools, but I have not demoted my storytelling. Because I had mastered my tools, I could use them to construct many amazing things!

Art by Matthew Bartik.

 

Welcome

Welcome to my website.

I know, I know. It says blog and it's hosted by Blogger, but this is really my space to share what I do with the world.

In brief, I am a writer. Specifically, a novelist. Additionally, a work for hire writer and editor. Yeah, that's right. A freelancer. Or, as I prefer to be called, a word-wielding warrior! An ink-slinging samurai.

I write daily, diligently, ritualistically, passionately, spiritually, and preferably for children and young adults.

I've spread lots of information across the pages of this site, so have a look around. If you have a project that demands creativity, wit, research, and above all, excellent writing, please email me (jen.michelle.mason at gmail dot com). Also, feel free to friend me on Facebook, tweet me on Twitter, or plus me on Google+.

(Unfortunately, I've yet to tumble onto Tumblr...my knees just ain't what they used to be. I also have yet to snag on Pinterest.)