Summer is winding down and I have several nice emails from writers with essays for us and other writers with questions. So we’ll hit the ground running come September. But for now…this caught my attention.
This Netflix movie, filmed in Colorado, caught my eye Friday and sent me on a hunt for the book and Colorado author, Kent Haruf. I found his story fascinating.
Kent Haruf pulled a wool cap over his eyes when he sat down at his manual typewriter each morning so he could “write blind,” fully immersing himself in the fictitious small town in eastern Colorado where he set a series of quiet, acclaimed novels, including “Plainsong,” a 1999 best seller. Mr. Haruf often wrote a chapter a day…
Punctuation, capitalization, paragraphs — they waited for the second draft. The first draft usually came quickly, a stream of imagery and dialogue that ran to the margins, single-spaced.
His wife did the copy editing on Our Souls at Night, after imploring, “Don’t you dare die before you finish it”, which he finished just before he died. It’s now in my book queue. Has anyone read Plainsong?
How is your summer writing coming along?
ArchTeryx
I actually finished my fanfic The White Changeling, basically a retelling of Who Goes There? (better known by many as John Carpenter’s movie The Thing) set as a spooky campfire story in the MLP universe. I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Had a fellow brony read it over. He thought it was excellent but – no surprise – too much like the original. I agreed; it was more a writing exercise then meant for public consumption. The trouble I ran into is: How can you improve on perfection? The original stories, both novella and screenplay, were scary as f*ck (though both are somewhat dated now).
The intended audience is a bunch of young’uns (at least to me – these aren’t actual age-of-minority kids) in a paper-and pencil RPG that have never seen the original movie or read the short story. They get it green, and if it gives the lot of them nightmares, it served its intended purpose.
TaMara (HFG)
@ArchTeryx: I really liked The Thing, but original movie, The Thing from Another Planet is still one of my favorite scary B&W movies – usually watched on a Saturday night horror movie night on TV when I was a kid.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@ArchTeryx:
My daughter loves MLP still (she turns 16 in two weeks). I saw the Brony documentary. Can’t quite claim to be one myself, but I do appreciate the series.
ArchTeryx
@TaMara (HFG): I admit I found the 50s movie pretty cheesy, but I grew up in the 80s, during the Gore Is Horror phase that John Carpenter latched onto. He – wrongly in my opinion – got tarred with the backlash against that by critics and audiences alike, when The Thing bombed so badly it permanently damaged his career and nearly sunk it completely.
But now it’s regarded even by the same critics that pasted it in the 80s as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and very true to the original story. That’s why I had such trouble rewriting it, even though it used a first-person perspective (like the original story) and set in a very different universe.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@TaMara (HFG):
My ex and I showed the Kurt Russell version to our daughter when she was about 12. She was not swept up. I loved it when it came out, but compared to more recent horror/sci-fi, it doesn’t hold up super well. YMMV.
dimmsdale
To answer your question, sure I’ve read Plainsong. Like all of his work that I’ve read so far, it’s about (in my interpretation anyway) fundamentally honest, decent people endeavoring to do the right thing under sometimes crushing vicissitudes. It’s balm for my soul, and possibly just the thing to dip into today, after the horrors of yesterday. I have, but have not yet read, “Our Souls at Night.” Would have read it by now, except I know there won’t be one after it, so I’m kind of….saving it. I have no doubt he used a manual typewriter–the thing about a manual is, when you start typing it requires enough of a physical commitment that you better know where your sentence is going before you start. thanks for the thread, by the way. Just what I wanted to read today!
ArchTeryx
@West of the Rockies (been a while): The weird thing is that I never expected to write grimdark fiction. There are a couple of truly infamous examples of it (and one very famous one). The infamous ones used the same characters as the show. The famous series (Fallout: Equestria) used an entirely different staple and avoided the controversy. I followed the latter path – my story is set in the distant past and has no relation to “current” (i.e. canon) events or characters. It just is a spooky story.
Few novellas are creepier to me then the original Who Goes There?, though. And what I had to do to the main character of my story made me a little queasy inside, but that’s the way the story has to go.
Tom Levenson
My summer writing is mixed. I’m making progress on the current manuscript, just over the half way mark to roughly 100,000 words. And the book’s logic is now working the way I want. But both the continuing drain of politics (and now, ramped up domestic terrorism) and a bunch of somewhat to very difficult family stuff keeps me from the kind of rhythm that makes me happy: write from 10-3, 700 words a day, every day.
That said, the good news is that both my US and UK editors are pleased with the first half of the work, and the fact that my deadline is now an increasingly distant memory seems not to trouble them. In fact, a bit of delay is welcome, I’m told, as the industry hopes to recover from the Trump trough in the sales of just about everything other than dead-on-the-moment political stuff. So I can be like my beloved Tikka, and look around at the shambles of my desk, saying “I meant to do that.”
Heidi Mom
I’m not a writer, just stopped in to say that I’ve read Plainsong and Our Souls at Night. Both are beautiful books that quietly highlight the hopes and dreams of “ordinary” people, without sugarcoating the evils that can threaten them. Didn’t Ayn Rand say something to the effect that the lives of the vast majority of people are dull and uninteresting? (I read The Fountainhead a very long time ago and do not intend to re-read it.) If so, consider Kent Haruf the anti-Ayn Rand.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Okay, from the opening launch of this writing thread in spring, I’ve hoped to see a method to workshop projects, get some honest critical reviews.
Is anyone else at all interested in such opportunities?
ArchTeryx
@West of the Rockies (been a while): I’m curious as to why. My feeling was the exact opposite: The practical effects are so damn good that it holds up better to me than a lot of recent sci-fi/horror, including the 2011 prequel. CGI just does not look as real, and having monsters that looked real was so important to John Carpenter his effects lead almost worked himself literally to death building them.
The original was like a Lovecraft story mixed with an Alfred Hitchcock murder mystery, and far more of a slow boil then what the kids are used to these days.
And get off my damn lawn before I sic my Thing on you kids.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Tom Levenson:
Can you offer a teaser? Is your new project anything along the lines of The Hunt For Vulcan?
ArchTeryx
@Heidi Mom: Heh. I’d consider my life dull and uninteresting, but I still consider myself as having a right to it, without entire political groups trying to murder me. We need real populist advocates now more then ever. I will have to read these books some time.
oatler.
OF COURSE this thread turns out to be more about movies than books because Reading Is Hard. So I’ll recommend “Hamlet 2” with Steve Coogan and Catherine Keener, which starts with a failed high school drama teacher who only stages plays based on popular movies like Erin Brockovich and Mississippi Burning.
Iowa Old Lady
@ArchTeryx: Retelling a story is tricky. Some YA writers do retold fairy tales. You have to have enough the original to reward the fans who read because of it, but you also have to offer something new.
I got good news today. A small press offered me a contract for a YA fantasy I’ve been hawking around. Nothing’s signed yet, but I’m relieved. I was staring to worry I’d never sell another book.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@ArchTeryx:
I think, AT, that having first seen LoTR, the first few Pirates movies, and, of course, Harry Potter, The Thing was just not visually astonishing to her. She’s a very bright young lady, but at 12 probably did not appreciate the animatronics and psychological horror.
ArchTeryx
@oatler.: I’m probably the main culprit there, but in my defense, it’s mostly because I was writing based off of both a film and a short story, the latter of which I’ve highlighted alot in the thread as well.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Iowa Old Lady:
Mega congratulations, IOL!
debbie
Another great illustration! Thanks!
ArchTeryx
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Have her read some H.P. Lovecraft then go back and see it again. The images from the 80s movie have a lot more punch if you’ve read both the original novella and Lovecraft, particularly At the Mountains of Madness, which both Who Goes There? and The Thing were heavily based off of.
The Thing is a straight-up Eldritch Abomination – more or less the cross between an Elder Thing and a Shoggoth – and those practical effects make it look every square inch the part. Lovecraft would have been proud.
Radiumgirl
Interesting that you have a regular thread for writers. Not a fiction writer, I’m a playwright. Revising a script that will have a reading at the Kennedy Center on Labor Day. Under the gun, but not so badly I can’t check in here once or twice a day.
Greg
I was working on a story about the woman who will engineer the downfall of the people who overthrew the gods. While I was working on the background of the war that overthrew the gods I realized I also must write the story of the overthrow of the gods. So there’s that. Unfortunately I’ve worked 5 weeks in the past 3 so I’ve only managed about 200 words.
As an aside, what’s an unhealthy amount of coffee to drink every day? 2 liters is fine, just fine, right?
debbie
@Iowa Old Lady:
Nice! Congratulations!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@ArchTeryx:
I’m about to put Cheri Priest’s Lizzie Borden/Cthulhu series in front of her.
stinger
@Iowa Old Lady: Congratulations!
I’d always assumed (and later, hoped) that once an author proved she could write books that sell, she’d have a more-or-less permanent relationship with her publisher. Sigh. I hate real life.
Iowa Old Lady
@Tom Levenson: Has there really been a Trump slump in book sales? My most recent book came out in November and tanked. I’d like to blame it on people being too freaked out to sit down and read fiction.
ArchTeryx
@West of the Rockies (been a while): Good for you! Someone else mentioned that the thread was, for a writer’s thread, a bit overmuch about the film. I agree. The film derived alot of its power to terrify from much older and very much written source material – part of why it failed in theaters, IMHO. But just because the average horror fan from the 80s wasn’t very well read doesn’t mean we can’t be!
Mnemosyne
So I have a very specific writing dilemma that I’m probably thinking way too much about, but it’s holding me back:
I’m trying to start a daily writing habit, because I’m just one of those people who does better with daily habits (thanks, ADHD!) I did pretty well for the month of July because I had Camp NaNoWriMo to keep me on track, but I now realize that I may have messed myself up with my methodology.
What I did during Camp NaNo was create a separate Doc every day with that day’s date, which made it easy to figure out which days I’d written. I then entered the word count from each day onto a Sheets spreadsheet to get a running total. So far, so good, right?
But now I have a ton of individual Docs that I need to incorporate into my Scrivener manuscript, which is going to be kind of a pain, so I decided to try and have just a single Doc in Google Docs with a different spreadsheet. But then I immediately messed that up by creating a different Doc for a different scene, which then messed up my Sheets count. Argh!
I get very easily derailed by stupid stuff like this (again, ADHD), so now I’ve wasted a couple of weeks beating myself up for not having a good way to do this and why can’t I be better at this stuff and I’m never going to be able to finish the book, etc etc etc ad nauseum.
tmulcaire
Kent Haruf is a fine and beautiful writer. Plainsong and its sequel Eventide are both wonderful. Our Souls at Night and Benediction, his two last, are also very fine. Perhaps it’s the age I’m getting to, but Benediction strikes me as a very rare and excellent story about an old man who is dying. Not a lot of those out there. Haruf always sounds on the page like a good and decent and sensitive person working patiently and successfully to tell the truth about the lives he observes and shares.
ArchTeryx
@Mnemosyne: Admittedly, I use Microsoft Word and upload it to Google Docs, Dropbox, or my instant message client once it’s ready on an old fashioned non-cloud word processor. It’s far easier to manipulate that way.
Mnemosyne
@Radiumgirl:
Mustang Bobby and gwangung are both playwrights as well, though the latter hasn’t been around as much lately. MB had his annual reading of his new work at the Inge festival a month or two ago (or it’s still pending — I can’t remember which).
Iowa Old Lady
@stinger: This is my third small press. They’re like small businesses everywhere. They’re often family run, on a shoestring, labors of love. My first one closed. That book did all right and when the publisher went down, the rights came back to me and I self-published because it was already edited with a cover etc. The second publisher is probably reeling from the lousy sales of that book. So now I’m on my third. Good times.
Thank you all for being so nice about this. It’s good to have people to share good news with.
Iowa Old Lady
@Radiumgirl: Wow. The Kennedy Center. Go you!
Greg
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t know how to fix the current problem, but Scrivener let’s you arrange scenes. You could start each day as a scene in your next project, just leave notes for yourself in the scene title, or arrange them in folders via Viewpoint Character or some other way of tracking. That will let you keep daily goals, and keep everything arranged in one project.
Also, Scrivener lets you set daily and project goals. You can have that running and use a spreadsheet to track which days you wrote and how much you wrote.
On the other hand, if the current system worked for you and you liked everything up to the point where it broke, sorry I don’t have a solution for fixing it.
Tom Levenson
@West of the Rockies (been a while): This one has the working title Money for Nothing. It’s sort of a sequel to the book before Hunt for Vulcan, Newton and the Counterfeiter. It’s a revisionist account of the South Sea Bubble that connects Britain’s financial revolution to its scientific one, and shows how the two combine to create a genuinely new concept of money and credit. It’s really about the birth of modern finance, and how both our wealth and much of our woe turns how well we learned — or didn’t — the implications of those original ideas about credit, value, change over time, and the use and misuse of mathematics in the analysis of everyday life.
Plus its got great and nefarious characters, fraud, deceit, great brilliance, rapine, suicide and the construction of the wealth or nations on, at times, the shattered hopes of individual fortunes.
Iowa Old Lady
@Mnemosyne: I have to do daily writing too. I also set a time limit. I can do two hours every weekday and that’s what I do. It helps me manage my writer’s anxiety to make a routine out of it.
Reading your electronic issues made me hyperventilate.
Thursday
@Mnemosyne: Mileage may vary, but I’ve always found I absolutely cannot let myself get sidetracked by process. If I give in to those feelings, I’ll soon realize I’ve spent a week setting up with just the right set of tools and rituals and haven’t actually accomplished anything with them, and will lose another week as soon as I find a deficiency with my new system and stop to redesign it.
I’d choose a system after a max of ten minutes of consideration, accept it won’t be perfect, and just stick with it.
Tom Levenson
@Iowa Old Lady: Wonderful!
Josie
@Mnemosyne: I am such a beginner that I don’t have Scrivener yet. I am writing on a Mac with Pages. In the last part of my book, I was having trouble with doing chapters, so I started writing scenes and naming them. As I looked at them in the folder, I began to move different scenes apart and together in different configurations, always sticking with my historical timeline. Does that make sense? Somehow the visual of the scenes with names was helpful in seeing how the story organized itself. On Pages, there is a word count for each separate chapter or scene, so I can keep up with my word count. The good news is that I seem to be three quarters of the way through, so yay me.
All this is to say, would a visual setup help you to organize your thoughts?
ETA: I hope to be able to afford Scrivener at some point. I hope it is not too difficult to move my work over when I do.
Oh, well. Baby steps.
Josie
@Iowa Old Lady: Congratulations on your good news. Such an accomplishment.
schrodingers_cat
@Iowa Old Lady: Congratulations!!
Writer Kitteh is back and has a question.
Tom Levenson
@Iowa Old Lady: I only have this anecdotally, but my editor at Random House said so, and he’s got a pretty good perch from which to survey the industry. Also, when I shared his woe with a writers’ list serve I hang out on, some of the other folks in the midst of books mentioned they’d heard the same.
That said, given the broad innumeracy of publishing and writers trying to account for their own unpleasing results, I’d treat this with a grain of salt. But I wouldn’t discount it altogether either. My own sense is that either on-the-nose attempts to explain our current predicament or escapism would be the most likely categories to do well, and everything else may be suffering. Certainly, I’m spending less on everything I can right now, as I’m really unsure when Trump’s going to tank the economy (and my retirement accounts), and/or whether it might get so bad I’ll have to really think about leaving the country, and need every dime I can scrape together.
How’s that for cheerful?
Hungry Joe
Haruf’s “Plainsong” is sweet, powerful, warm, wonderful, but somehow unsentimental and without so much as a tenth of a teaspoon of treacle. Now I’m wanting to re-read it.
TaMara (HFG)
@Iowa Old Lady: This. Opening up a fiction book, a non-fiction book…even looking for a new series to binge-watch has been difficult. My brain just cannot turn off long enough to dive into an alternate world for escape.
I’ve been sticking to spiritual/inspirational audio books…everything else feels like I want to save it for later…when the world is no longer upside-down.
TaMara (HFG)
I haven’t been writing. And I love writing. My brain has just been other places. Then suddenly and probably not coincidentally, after two weeks of going up to RMNP and just being, the creative side of my brain kicked in and has not stopped.
Snarkworth, short-fingered Bulgarian
@Iowa Old Lady: Congratulations! Hope it swathes you in clouds of glory.
Amaranthine RBG
@Mnemosyne:
I always get stuck when I focus on daily word counts. Instead, I use an IBM Electric II (with the correction tape removed) and try to hit 6 pages a day. (Space and 1/2 with courier 12 point font.) Then I scan the results into Evernote. Duplicate notes into “Character”, “Theme”, “Backstory” and “Chronology” notebooks so you can sort each according to what you are working on at the time. You’ll always have the “Chronology” notebook to track development so you don’t duplicate.
I also take the daily typewritten pages and photocopy them and reduce them to 4 a page and then pin those to a grid on the wall so I can visually track the work.
The most important thing is to develop a rigid process. You have to absolutely focus on perfecting that day in and day out. Once you have optimized the process the results will flow effortlessly. The biggest mistake a writer can make is to just start writing blindly without a structure.
karensky
I read all of Haruf’s books. He is a not sentimental and writes truly about his characters who always managed to move me, sometimes to tears. The eastern plains of Colorado are beautiful to me but I am not tough enough to live there.
Snarkworth, short-fingered Bulgarian
I am waiting for my editor to return the next round of edits on my mystery novel, which I hope will come out sometime during the 21st century.
I’m eager to move it along, but every day I don’t receive them is a day to myself. Ah, summer!
debbie
@Tom Levenson:
Publishing has always been affected by the outside world. I worked in publishing (Scribner, Macmillan) during Reagan, IranContra, S&L crisis, and a couple market crashes, and the ups and downs were constant (as were the down-sizings). Today is same as it ever was.
I’m not reading any less, but I can’t afford to buy books and so am dependent on the local library (happily, just two blocks away).
Is self-publishing not a viable alternative any more?
WaterGirl
@Iowa Old Lady: Go you! Very happy for you!.
WaterGirl
@Radiumgirl: How exciting for you!
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: I don’t have any suggestions or solutions to your problem, but I do have a thank you. My sister has add and I never really get who/why everyday things that would barely be a blip to me can be real roadblocks for her. Thanks for the glimpse that helps me understand her better.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: Set aside time for doing non-writing related writing stuff say 15 min, and then say an hour to write. BTW you can import Word docs into Scrivener.
PaulWartenberg
Am struggling right now to finish a short story idea prompted by a magazine submission request.
This next Saturday August 19 I will be in Albany GA to promote my works at the EpiCon event. I will also be speaking at a writers’ panel about getting published.
Major Major Major Major
Well, as always, I’m late to the party here.
My therapist asked me on Tuesday, well, if we were going to get nuked in two weeks, what would you want to have done? And I was like, well, I guess I’d like to have finished my novel.
Now, this hasn’t actually changed the pace of my writing (~400 words/day on the train to work), but I’m nearing the end (112,000 words already, three major scenes remaining plus connective tissue; next draft is trimming down), and it’s good at keeping me motivated to pull out the laptop when I sit down without a big sigh. I guess it’s maybe pushed me to do an extra 100 words each time, actually, though I’m not sure how high-quality the “extra” stuff is.
Meanwhile my comic continues apace! I’m managing one full-color strip per week, and I’d like to get to two, but there are so many set pieces right now since it’s the beginning. I’ll get there once I don’t have to do so many of those. Dialogue strips are much faster. That one’s much easier to write since there’s much less to write, and what’s coming out has already undergone, essentially, several revisions.
Reading-wise a friend loaned me Magpie Murders, which is about an editor who’s working on a manuscript of a cozy (basically an Agatha Christie clone) that ends 90% of the way through. She goes to find the writer, who’s been murdered. So it’s a cozy framed in a procedural. I also picked up a copy of Seveneves at the Tattered Cover during my Denver trip last weekend because I always buy a book there when I’m in town, and I hadn’t read that one yet. On my Kindle, which is where I do the bulk of my reading on account of my preference for doorstops, I’ve got some Scalzi, and I just finished the newest Laundry Files book by Stross.
Brachiator
@ArchTeryx:
Weird. I remember seeing the film in a packed movie theater and loving it. Looking at the Wiki article, the film did good box office for three weeks, so I am surprised to see it was regarded as a failure. I think it was always liked by a core of fans and this may have helped shape its later high regard.
Also, Starman from 1984 was well regarded, so here I am surprised that Carpenter had a fall in regard that affected his career. Showbiz sure is strange.
Snarkworth, short-fingered Bulgarian
@Major Major Major Major: That Magpie Murders sounds like my cup of tea.
Steve Morrison
I loved Plainsong. Read it years ago in an MFA class, so there was a focus on technique, but it was lovely and powerful. As I recall (poorly, I suspect), there was something unusual about the writing. I think it was a third person POV, but with no access to the thoughts of the characters. Very tough to pull off, and stunning that he did so.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I’m downsizing, going through books to donate to the library sale. Found a 1954 Tom Swift and His Rocket. OMG, but it’s terrible! Why did I enjoy these as a kid?
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
There is zero character development, minimal description, shallow characters spouting dull dialogue, a villain who remains unseen until after page 200 of a 208 page book… the science is crap, too.
PaulWartenberg
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
Alan Moore didn’t have a fond opinion of the Tom Swift series either: http://lxg.wikia.com/wiki/Tom_Swyfte
PaulWartenberg
There’s a book I read as a pre-teen, part of a mystery series by the same author Wylie Folk St. John called “Secret of the Seven Crows.” Sadly it got dropped off for book donation when I headed to college, and now the series is out of print with very few libraries or book dealers providing it. :/
MomSense
@Mnemosyne:
It sounds like you are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. You put words on paper! It took me 24 years to put one of my stories on paper. That’s the part I find agonizing. I’m so impressed that you are able to do the writing.
So it seems like you can either just continue the way you are just focusing on getting your words on paper in separate docs or you can merge them or cut and paste them into one document.
Maybe the thing to do is to just get words on paper on days you feel creative and focus on format on days where you don’t feel as creative and have more of an organizing focus.
The most important thing is to keep working. If you really get stuck worrying about the chaotic state of the documents, can you find a friend or someone with some facility for putting documents together and pay them for a few hours of helping you do this? Sometimes just having a person with you to help you problem solve is all it takes.
I have a friend who writes massive NIH grants and she is so good at it but every now and then she gets completely overwhelmed and she pays me for two hours of helping her with her documents. The funny thing is that she always comes up with the solutions herself. Somehow having me sit with her as a sounding board for a planned period of time helps her focus.
Let me know if you think these ideas might help. I’m happy to talk through them with you.
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
Something similar happened to me only it was a talk with my dad who could drop dead at any time (really. He had bad news last week) so now Im determined to write every day.
Mel
@Iowa Old Lady: There’s an older series of anthologies (edited by Terry Windling and Ellen Datlow) that collect retellings of world fairytales for older readers, although mature teenaged readers with an eye for quality fantasy lit would likely enjoy them as well.
The first book in the anthology was “Snow White, Blood Red”. The majority of the re-envisioned tales are beautifully told and honor the dark, lyrical, visceral nature of the originals- definitely NOT an easy task to accomplish, as you noted!!
I have found re-reading these and some other beautifully crafted re-imaginings to be a much needed temporary escape from all the horrors going on of late.
Datlow and Windling also edited the “Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy” short story collections for a number of years.