I have 51 days left to finish revising my novel writing for The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club and to turn it in to SMU’s The Writer’s Path program.
I have spent time each of the past few days with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil in Adobe Sketch and in Notes drawing out scenes and characters of my book. Why would I devote time to draw when I’m in a writing medium?
Creative writing is NOT about capturing emotions on paper. Not expressly. Creative writing IS about drawing word pictures with words. If you aren’t telling a story with word pictures, you’re locked into telling your readers how you or your character feels. And that’s BORING.
So I have been stepping back from the keyboard and spending more time focusing on what I could see if I was in the scene with my characters. Not how I feel, that I’m mad that Rose dumped Kirk for Billy Banks, or that Billy Banks is a bully, or Billy’s mom is pretty hot. Those things can be told by drawing word pictures that set the scene. How does a character move his/her face? How are they sitting? Are they biting their lip?
Creating ‘Little Laughing Whitefish Falls.’
The Little Laughing Whitefish Falls, KI Sawyer AFB. Drawing by Donald J Claxton for The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club.
A crucial piece of the work is Little Laughing Whitefish Falls. The problem is, that there is no such place outside the back gate of KI Sawyer AFB in 1977. There is Laughing Whitefish Falls, which is a beautiful place. But there is no Chimney Rock and a lagoon where kids of all ages can jump from four levels into the water. The highest height is called The Devil’s Ledge. It’s 55-feet above the water.
Blend all that together and you have a whole new fictional place to build some incredibly important scenes around in The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club. I wind up using the lagoon from behind it, under it, down the face of it, and from the four levels to jump.
So I decided if I’m going to write about it, I need to SEE what it looks like. The only real way to do that is to blend elements of each place into a piece of art. And this is where the drawing of the Little Laughing Whitefish Falls came from.
Consider giving this a try to boost your writing.
You might try doing this, too, for your own writing.
It doesn’t have to look like a Norman Rockwell piece of art. It just needs to have enough visual cues in it that will prompt you in your writing, to help you draw better, more convincing word pictures and leave the emotional dumps and figuring out to the imaginations of your readers. They’ll love you for it. They will.
Even before I reached Week Four of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, where she says to stop reading for a week, I had scaled back my time on Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook because the noise from the Petulant Left–largely haters of President Donald Trump, largely haters of anything that goes against Judeo-Christian principles of the past 2,500 years–has become too shrill to bother with.
One of my true friends sent me this picture of the sun setting in Mariposa, CA this past week. It’s just amazing.
And thanks for Julia Cameron, thanks to Rick Warren and The Daniel Plan, and God and myself, I’m doing a reset of my life regardless.
I am focusing my life on what’s most important–God, me and what I put into my body so that I might continue to serve him.
I just went through the worst year of my life. Surgeries from severe pain, opioids, doctor appoint after doctor appointment, and more and more pain.
To boot, the person I have been most in love with my entire life copped out on me, succumbed to the threats of her daughter and mother–they are the ones who decide who she’s in love with, not her–and a week before Christmas she walked out of my life. Boom, gone. She lied to her kids and mom for four years about me. Treating me like a mistress. Hiding my contact information in her phone under the graduate college she’s attending so in case I called and they were around, they’d see the school calling, not me.
Shame on her for lying to her family. Shame on me for letting her treat me like that. It won’t happen again.
That led me to write a perfect iambic pentameter Shakespearean Sonnet Tuesday night expressing in very poignant terms how I feel about what my friend did. For now it’s folded over and put into the book. The temptation is there to record audio, then lace it with video of all the places we went in the past four years so that those who need to know she’s a balled-faced liar will finally know the truth as she parades around as some sort of super Christian. That’s not meant as judgmental. It’s just the truth.
But as importantly, I’ve stopped looking at the news feed on Facebook and the top hits on Twitter. Most of it is rage at the president. Hate.
I have no time or inclination to listen to that bull any longer. President Obama did a lot to wreck this country and Trump is trying to fix some of it. He’s also trying to make America safe and why the Petulant Left is in favor of leaving the country vulnerable to people who like to commit mass shootings or blow things up is beyond me. That’s not us, they say. Well, I’d rather be alive than have been shot or blown up by a terrorist, or have a family member or friend who was.
Such craziness.
I’m focusing on God. My healing. Eating healthier. Walking. Getting my life back on track. If you or your noise is set on being a distraction to that, I really don’t need/want/like you being in my life at all. So, like Julia Cameron talks about in her book, I am putting new, healthier boundaries in place. And walking every day with my Lord. Much closer than ever before.
I walked a mile into the woods today to be further away from you and closer to me.
Perhaps I succeeded.
But it was time for another view.
I walked a mile into the woods today.
I hear planes in the distance.
The wind rushing over my ears.
The rustle of the leaves.
Feet padding along the trail.
Cars way off in the distance.
Birds.
Cracks and smacks of branches and sticks.
The whisper of the wind across my ear drums.
The pulse of God’s breath moving across my arms.
The bursts of sunlight breaking through the crown of the trees above.
The dancing shadows across the ground.
The to and fro of branches wafting in the wind.
The colors, greens, darker; brown, black, bright green and gray.
I hold out my hand and the sun catches it, throwing a shadow across the ground.
But it’s not crisp, it weaves in and out of light.
There, it’s solid.
No, now it’s not.
There are patterns from shoes that have been here before me.
V-shapes, circles, squares.
At deeper depths.
Tire tracks, from bikes.
A broken branch lies a few feet away.
The light above illuminates the top, worn from who knows what.
The rest of the bark is intact.
A tiny yellow flower, no bigger than a diamond clings to nature’s floor, protected by fronds of green petals.
A yellow star of a flower.
It’s a miniature star, yellow, with a darker yellow center.
And it was waiting for me to come along and sit here today, for me alone to capture.
Or maybe, just maybe it’s my metaphorical reflection, a quantum physics of sorts I do not yet comprehend.
But I’m trying.
My eyes are open.
Again.
A bird chirps overhead. Now it’s gone.
Divergent travelers surround me.
Another over-crowded airliner moans eastward overhead.
I hear a truck far off, backing up, backing up, backing up.
Both are in a race.
While I sit here.
Still.
Forgetting to breathe.
Or think about anything but the moment.
The sky above is blue.
The leaves above reflect the white light of the sun—not greenness at all.
While others are shades far darker in the shade.
And then there are the branches where from many feet below I can see the chloroplastered canals of leaf after leaf after leaf.
Like a playground bully, the wind pushes the leaves.
Like me in my inner frights of seeing too many parental fights, they never push back.
So many forces working against them and they continue a dance in the wind as if none of their opposition matters.
These are Spring leaves.
Deep inside I must resemble a crumbling one in Fall.
I see bees buzzing past me.
Clumps of white spores float along in the air.
A blue butterfly.
Then a Monarch.
A bird is somewhere off in the distance.
This snack he’s missing.
I’m glad.
There go two more now, chasing each other into the leaves like lovers in a Hollywood musical.
A water fall of sorts is no more than forty yards from where I sit.
The water rushes.
Like the mass of human drama beyond, it doesn’t relent.
A constant wash of white noise blending in with all the other orchestral parts employed around me.
The wind is blowing the branches above my head making the leaves look like a million pinwheels as they sway two and fro.
A kaleidoscope of light and shadow and mystery.
I want to lie down on the path in front of me.
On my back and flatten against the earth, staring up into the azure blue, and then just close my eyes and take it all in all the more.
But my inner parent voice says that’s not allowed.
Or maybe it’s an echo of an actual parent voice.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring a blanket or a towel.
Or maybe I should just try it.
Who will know?
Those damned inner parent voices.
What do they really know?
Now a dog behind me somewhere has joined his bit part in the symphony of outdoor sounds I am awash in.
At home, if it were my dog, this would bug me, but in the distance, the sound is different.
Not annoying.
Not troublesome.
Now it’s stopped.
No, it hasn’t.
To my distant right I see one lone purple flower at the seam where the grass is no longer edged and bushes, Mother Nature, takes over.
The pink/purple flower. I took a picture anyway.
Just a lone purple and pinkish dot on the horizon.
And it, too, dances in and out of the bright light overhead.
Maybe I should go take a picture.
Maybe I should let the one in my mind’s eye be enough.
Click.
There goes a wasp.
Keep going.
Arms dropping.
Pincers ready.
I’ve been stung by you and life too many times already.
Keep going.
Maybe it’s time to load up the pack and head back.
Or maybe I should close the computer and open my mind more.
There went a shadow of a plane from overhead, racing on its way.
Why do I want to follow in pursuit?
A yellow butterfly just swooshed off to my left.
It doesn’t need clearance to fly.
No flight plan required.
Without a set destination.
Gate to gate time is of no concern.
Pushback.
Just the will to be.
It’s gone now.
I’ll go now, too.
There is so much more to see.
I recently had the opportunity to read Chris Pavone’s The Travelers, a spy thriller and a great example for anyone living on the edge of morality not sure if their actions can or will have consequences.
Will Rhodes is living on the edge and makes a costly mistake after making every attempt, well, a fair attempt, to keep from being persuaded to do something he should not. It is succumbing to that temptation that gives this story it’s thrust. The bad guys trick him and then begin to make him do their bidding, or else what he did will get out.
Mix on top of that the questionable operations of his employer and you have a four-hundred page thriller that leaps from one continent to another with guns, knives and bad guys a step ahead or behind, depending on where in the story one is.
Largely this is a page turner that hangs its hat on a couple of basic principles—obviously the one noted above—what can happen if you’re unfaithful to your spouse in a world of spies when your wife is a spy and you don’t know it—but the application is there for all regardless.
Pavone also explores the essence of society on page 208:
“Everyone is acting all the time. Smiling and laughing, great to meet you, that’s awesome. Wearing this and not that, keeping quiet when you want to scream, saying things you know aren’t true. You do it every day … and you did it before you ever met me. We all dot. That’s what keeps society going. That’s what life is. Acting.”
“Organizations are like organisms. They have deeply ingrained survival instincts. Which isn’t surprising, is it? After all, organizations are made up of people, and people are motivated by self-interest. We’re all self-preservationists. First and foremost, what people want is what’s best for themselves. We want to survive, we want to flourish. We get jobs, then we develop loyalty to our employers, and our loyalty helps our employers achieve success, which in turn help people survive. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
“The vast majority of espionage is committed for a very simple reason: money.”
The book obviously has some darker perspectives on humans in general, and that’s what helps supply the gasoline for the fire this book burns.
I don’t regularly read thrillers like this because I normally read books that seem to have more to say, but I read the book in the matter of a few days and am glad I did. If you’re headed to the beach in the next few months and need something that will keep you company in the sand, this is a great book to take with you.
ABOUT THE TRAVELERS
A pulse-racing international thriller from the New York Timesbestselling author of The Expats and The Accident
It’s 3:00am. Do you know where your husband is?
Meet Will Rhodes: travel writer, recently married, barely solvent, his idealism rapidly giving way to disillusionment and the worry that he’s living the wrong life. Then one night, on assignment for the award-winning Travelers magazine in the wine region of Argentina, a beautiful woman makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Soon Will’s bad choices—and dark secrets—take him across Europe, from a chateau in Bordeaux to a midnight raid on a Paris mansion, from a dive bar in Dublin to a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean and an isolated cabin perched on the rugged cliffs of Iceland. As he’s drawn further into a tangled web of international intrigue, it becomes clear that nothing about Will Rhodes was ever ordinary, that the network of deception ensnaring him is part of an immense and deadly conspiracy with terrifying global implications—and that the people closest to him may pose the greatest threat of all.
That was one of that sun-ray shining only on you during dark, dank, cloudy day moments. My mirror moment in my present draft of The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club is heavy, but with the aid of Mr. Maass’ study suggestions, it’s about to become a whole lot more intense.
Example from my WIP, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club.
Case in point: Kirk Carson, 14, has worked with his three closest friends all summer to build the treehouse of his dreams in the woods off KI Sawyer AFB, (Upper Peninsula of Michigan), in 1977, largely in an effort to forget about his first true love, Rose Maxwell, dumping him for the base bully, Billy Banks, the son of the Wing Commander.
While in the woods, the boys are met with a series of triumphs and setbacks, natural, self-inflicted, and mysterious–Lewis Luntz keeps saying it’s the Chippewa Haints who still roam the woods of Hiawatha–but what they don’t know is it’s a Soviet spy hiding out in the woods tracking the number of B-52s armed with nuclear weapons and by being in the woods off base, the boys have encroached on his hideout.
The way it turns out, the spy has made it look like the boys will be safer under the leadership of Billy Banks and they vote to remove Kirk, and he feels their act is the ultimate betrayal.
Now to apply The Emotional Craft of Fiction to my WIP.
I have all that in decent shape in my MSS, but what I now need to do is the exercises in Maass’ The Emotional Craft of Fiction, to help my readers feel the utter agony and humiliation Kirk feels as he learns the other three have already made the decision, have invited Billy–and Rose–to their “secret” fort in the woods and everything he has worked for and dreamed of, has been ripped away from him like a scab.
Did I mention that the day before, Kirk was also humiliated by Billy Banks–coaxed into jumping off the Devil’s Ledge at Chimney Rock, a sixty-five-foot plunge to a Little Laughing Whitefish Falls Lagoon liquid enema?
Kirk has had two bad days back to back and so now it’s time to do some of the exercises Maass has on page 99.
“Is your protagonist lost or seeing a way forward?”
“What does it feel like to be suspended, lifted out of time, in a moment of pure being?”
I’m ready to write those answers.
The Emotional Craft of Fiction is a FANTASTIC read for anyone in the throws of writing any revision of their WIP.
I’ve had a dustup with some dude on Twitter the past few hours who is all bent up about marked/unmarked linguistics.
Pet Peeve: Using BOTH when you can simply write ‘1 and 2’.
Both 1 and 2 = Both Both. It’s like saying something is ‘a tiny, little house.’
You see I tried to respectfully convey to Mr. Maass that for me, he overuses the word BOTH when he links two items together with the conjunction AND.
In my copy of the book, I simply began marking them out–there are that many.
One of my peeves.
There’s nothing wrong with the use of the word BOTH, but it becomes a visual stop sign with repeated use and many writers on my Heather Sellers-inspired 101 book list do it, too.
The Emotional Craft of Fiction offers great insights and tips for writers of any stripe.
Other than that, I love Mr. Maass’ insight and his devotion to helping writers like myself learn more about the craft of fiction writing.
This is a very good book.
I think, for where I am right now, the most important of the three Maass has written and it could not have come along for me at a better time.
Thank you, Donald Maass.
I’m looking forward to what you do next.
Oh, and by the way, Suzanne said yesterday she was jumping over to Amazon to order her own copy.
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