Let me overthink this through…
I’ve never met an idea I couldn’t overthink. Thank my glorious neuro-spicy brain, generational anxiety, or the well developed imagination that keeps me churning out thoughts day and night. Welcome to a peek inside my head.
Where We Write: An Overthinking
Every once in a while it is nice to step out of the familiar and look for inspiration out in the world. This might mean grabbing your computer and finding a shady spot in the park, taking over a booth in a quiet restaurant, or taking off for a week (or more) on a writing adventure. Stepping away from the desk doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, but it does take some planning and knowledge of what you’re looking for.
If you have a free afternoon, or want to carve out a few hours of page time, heading into the outdoors is an option. I like to do “write-arounds” where I go to a summer garden or park and write for twenty minutes or so in a variety of locations. If the weather is nasty I look for places that have quiet inside spaces. Our local river center has a birding room that is often empty and a lovely place to observe and write.
Many writing groups also have group writing events. I’ve been to one in Renton, WA hosted by the Tipsy Typers that lasted about four hours, had snacks, activities, and a raffle. It was maybe $50 to cover costs, and it was well worth the drive. I made some new writing friends and won a gift certificate for an elevator talk session (it’s a thing).
For a few days of out of the house writing time, I look to State and National Parks. Many camping parks have yurts or small cabins with electricity for very reasonable rates, especially in the off season. Rental rooms and houses can also be incredibly affordable if you are a person on your own. I generally pair longer trips with research so that costs become tax deductible, and I have some built in writing breaks.
I have found some of my best research libraries in tiny town museums staffed by history enthusiasts with loads of time on their hands.
Maybe you want to stay somewhere for weeks to months. Look into writing residencies. Residencies require applications. You send in samples of your work with the application and if accepted spend a week, or maybe even a year at the residency center.
Last spring I attended a two week residency in a cabin a couple hours from home. It was free of cost, but in return I led a workshop at a wine bar in town. Some residencies are highly competitive and include financial benefits; some may cost money, or require work hours. It can be a bit daunting to have weeks of free time to let your brain create, but I highly recommend the experience.
If you are looking for something more directed, writing retreats are an option. Retreats may offer generative periods as well as craft workshops, meetups, and networking. Writer Groups will often offer these, or you can pay to attend for-profit retreats that will be well organized. If this isn’t your style, get a few writer friends together and go in on a house for the weekend.
Maybe it isn’t quiet time you are looking for, but writing CTE’s. We all need to hone our craft! Libraries, senior centers, community centers, and writers groups are great places to find offerings of free or inexpensive writing workshops. I teach some at Squatchcon in Port Angeles every spring. People pop in for an hour and listen to the presenter discuss just about anything you can imagine.
I like to have plenty of writing exercises in my workshops so folks can try out what we’re discussing. Over the years I have offered classes on Finding Historical Characters, Creating and Sustaining Narrative Tension, Worldbuilding, and Character development. This year I am shaking things up and offering a Writing Relationships 101, and a two hour seminar for teens on Getting your Ideas from Brain to Page. In SquatchCon’s case, workshops are included in the price of a ticket so people can come listen to me talk for free!
Looking for a lot of workshops in one place? Go to a writing conference. Most regions have a huge writing conference every year with loads of speakers, panels who will listen to book proposals, agents and publishers, and workshops on any topic you can imagine. There are also vendors, meetups, and hundreds to thousands of participants.
If that is too much, look for more specialized conferences. The Historical Novelist Society of North America hosts a conference every two years on a slightly smaller scale. Other genres have their own events. Two smaller towns on the Olympic Peninsula have their own small writing conferences; less overwhelming. Expect to pay hundreds of dollars for a multi-day conference, though some have scholarship or student rates.
And finally, I would highly recommend finding a writing group. Some groups discuss craft, others workshop, some get together and write (introverts), but all offer support and encouragement.
The White Crane Philosophical Society Literary Conclave meets monthly. We send out 5k words or so to the other members and make notes. When we come together we discuss everyone’s work. We are a fairly small group so we can spend quite a bit time with our thoughts.
Writing groups can be like therapists, you have to find a good fit. You are sharing the most vulnerable parts of yourself and opening it up to comments and criticism which can be absolutely terrifying. It can also make your work stronger.
As writers, we take inspiration from the world around us. We listen to conversations in restaurants, we turn peculiar people into characters, we need to experience places in order to describe in 200 words the way the desert gravel crunches under boots. We also need to pull ourselves away from the daily distractions and carve out moments to put words onto the page. There are plenty of places to do this if only we know where to look.
Overthinkings: Reading
I’ve always heard that to be a good writer you have to be a good reader. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read, but what about people who don’t? Can you be a “good” writer without picking up books that other people have written? (Note: I am including audiobooks as reading.)
Modeling is important. No question. In grad school we were encouraged to read books in the genres in which we dabbled. In undergrad we did an exercise where we took a book we loved and used it as a jumping off point for a short story of our own—not to plagiarize but to have an outline of sorts. I used a Stephanie Plum novel as the basis for my short story “Gucci Good” about a shoe loving woman who tracks down run away rich kids while driving her octogenarian grandfather around to Costco on sample day. It was the first thing I published.
The ideas behind this exercise is that we tend to write what we like to read and if you have a familiar outline, it takes the pressure off to create something fully from scratch.
There are no new ideas under the sun. Solomon said that— or whomever wrote proverbs—and generally yeah, everyone is recycling something. Reading keeps us from recycling too closely. Most submissions ask you for comps—books that are similar to your own—and it saves a lot of time to keep a list of current offerings. Book trends fade quickly and agents want to know how your work stacks up against popular work of the now.
Reading great books can be incredibly inspiring. Reading mediocre books can be a great lesson in what not to do. Don’t finish bad books; take them back to the used bookstore.
So what makes a book good? Well, my metric is “how long does it keep me in the bathtub?” If I’ve had to add more hot water, I’m probably going to recommend. That said, there have been a handful of good books in my life that I have had to read slowly. One Hundred Years of Solitude took me weeks to read (I had a very understanding college prof) because it was so rich with things to ponder.
I tell my kids that they need to be familiar with some books, but they don’t need to love them. As a grownup who isn’t being tested on my knowledge of 19th century British lit, I can pretty much read what I want. At this stage in my life reading is an escape, or I am doing research. The only way Proust is making it on my shelf is if he is showing up as a background character somewhere. Especially for busy parents, life is too short to read books that don’t keep you in the tub till you’re wrinkly.
So reading is important, but do you have to read to be a writer? I don’t know. I get plenty of great ideas and inspiration from visual media. I create a lot of stories collaboratively through RPG’s. But while tv shows might offer great dialogue or plot arcs, they won’t model how to describe setting. There is no need to explain how a character gets from place to place. We see expression on faces which must be dictated on the pages of books.
I am going to admit something here: all of my writer friends are also readers. Maybe not three hundred books a year readers (me either) but all of us have stuffed bookshelves and piles around the house. So while I can’t definitively say “Yes you must be a reader to write” I will say that it helps. A lot.
Writing Exercise! Think of your favorite book/short story. Use it as a template for a short story of your own.
Overthinkings: Names
Names are hard. Real life naming kids is fairly tiresome and naming characters is not far behind. With my real kids I spent a lot of time rhyming and coming up with word associations that could haunt them through middle school; I also wanted names short and simple enough that they could write independently by kindergarten. Moss is my favoritely named child, but Violet and Linden are lovely as well.
The thing about real people names is that they can be changed. Pepper hated her birth name (Ava) even before preschool. She informed me at some point that her name was now “Beeta”. She went through a few more iterations before landing on Pepper. I didn’t take it personally. When I named her in Germany Ava was an uncommon name; by the time we came back to the states it was #1 on the SSN list and hovered in the top three for the next twenty years. By kindergarten she wasn’t even just Ava R. because there were three Ava R’s.
Naming fictional characters is only slightly less difficult because at least you have time to try out different ideas before committing. Sometimes I have three or four different iterations of a name before it sticks. Sometimes I just have a letter followed by a line for half the novel (R_______).
You would think writing historical fiction based on real people would solve the naming problem. You would be wrong. In colonial days there were about three common names. Margaret/Mary, Elizabeth, and Hannah. I have so many Hannahs in my first book that I literally started calling a few of them “the Hannahs” (not to be confused with “Little Hannah”). I ended up choosing some characters just because their names weren’t on that Big Three list.
Modern names aren’t any easier.
Character names have a feel to them. Lloyd, Clarence, Frank, Ted evoke a very different protagonist than Lars, Chisel, Flash, and Troy. Bertram can only be British; Bentley’s mom grew up in a trailer. Clara is either an old woman or the child of ballet enthusiasts.
Someone once told me that your protagonist’s name is the word you will write the most, so don’t hate it. I would add that if it has an uncommon spelling it will be flagged by spell check and your work will be riddled with obnoxious red lines until you go in and add the name to your dictionary.
When you finally find the perfect name for that one character and write it for seven chapters, someone will read your work and point out that in fact, many of the names of your characters are quite similar and they can’t remember who is whom. (I am thankful that this advice came seven chapters in and not somewhere in book three.) Sure enough, humans like patterns and some of us have favorite letters. Mine is F. I still have three pivotal characters with F names, but that is better than it was.
Now this is not just a rant about the difficulties of names; I do have a few well won suggestions for successful naming of characters.
1. Get a book on the subject. I recently found one at a bookstall and promptly gave it to my friend who hates naming characters more than anything on earth, so I know they exist.
2. Name generators. The internet is a magical place with random name generators available. Friends use these for RPG’s and literary fiction alike.
3. Ask a buddy. Some weirdos are actually good at naming. If you find one of these people, become pals and text them things like “Sexy protagonist with lisp who can’t have an F last name” and they will reply with a list of five perfect options. Treasure them.
4. Reference books. I have a couple volumes of Bonded Passengers from America, and some general reference texts like Stackpole’s Old Kittery and her Families. Bonded Passengers is compilations of names in alphabetical order by last name. Stackpole’s book is a comprehensive list of generations of families found in one small area in Maine, but there are similar books written about many places around the world. I use the first when I am wanting to pull Western names out of a hat, and the second when I need something historically accurate to Kittery.
5. Non western names shouldn’t be pulled out of hats. There is a balance between appropriation and representation. If it is not your culture, do the research. Find out what the names mean, how they fit into the culture from whence they come, and what the associations of those names might be. Don’t borrow carelessly.
6.Names have power; nicknames can show power dynamics and relationship status. My best friend is head of a martial arts dojo and most people address him with a bow and a “Master Robert”. He’s in my phone as Burt The Younger, and his nicknames run from Rob, Robbie, Robbie-O, Rob-B, etc.
We’ve sung karaoke in two different continents, played weekly boardgames for the past five years, and he reliably tries anything weird after I’ve taken a bite and said “Gross! Try this.” I’ve earned the right to use those nicknames.
The right nickname (or codename) can also save you from a Hannah situation. Elizabeth might be Bess, Betsy, Liz, Lizzie, El, Ellie, E, Eliza, Beth, etc. But just as a name has to fit, so doth the nickname. Bess and Lizzie are as different as Clara and Bernice.
7.Change All. Both Word and Scrivener have a change all function that makes name changes a breeze. When you do land on a solid name, a quick word-processing function and boom, whole thing like new.
Back to the “names have power” thought: In real life and on the page, there is a power to using someone’s name. It creates an intimacy between the speaker and the person being spoken to. There is inherent acknowledgment of existence in one breath.
And on that note, a non sequitur! Happy New Year from Mamasquatch and Family!
The last writing prompt of the year: “If only ____________’s mother had thought through her name choice a little better, the misunderstanding could have been avoided.”
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Mamasquatch the Writer 