There’s a Fanatic in my Attic

According to the Little Oxford English Dictionary, a fanatic is someone who is too enthusiastic about something. Is that a bad thing?

If you want to win gold at the Olympics, if you want to achieve spiritual enlightenment, if you want to become a world champion Scrabble player, if you want to be great at just about anything, you must practice as if your life depended on it: you must become a fanatic.

Becoming a fanatic will set you apart from the also-rans and rank amateurs. Your fanaticism is the difference between you and those who are not prepared to devote their lives to the achievement of their goals.

This message came to me in a blinding flash as I devoured Stefan Fatsis’ book, Word Freak.  Fatsis introduces his reader to the world of elite Scrabble. It’s a world in which obsessive-compulsive word nerds memorise tens of thousands of nonsense words and anagrams in an attempt to become the world’s best Scrabblers. Their devotion to the game is both pathological and inspirational.

You might scoff: “Who cares about Scrabble?” And you might have a point: Scrabble is just a silly board game. But your goal is not silly. My goal is not silly. And, speaking for myself, I am not prepared to be out out-fanaticked by a bunch of Scrabble geeks.

Are you?

Free Book Inside

I don’t think Thomas Monteleone will mind me telling you that his book, ‘The Complete Idiots Guide to Writing a Novel’, doesn’t actually tell you how to write a novel. His book is not about the laborious task of typing a very long story. It is about, well, everything else.

Here’s what I got out of it:

• If you want to be a world famous novelist, you have to write a book that appeals to a lot of people;
• Most top selling novels fit into a genre;
• There’s more to selling a novel than banging out 300 pages and sending them to a publisher.

If you dream of becoming a published author then Mentelone’s Idiot’s Guide is well worth your time. However, if this doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, you could try something completely different.

Steve Hely’s novel, ‘How I Became a Famous Novelist’, examines the world of literature form the point of view of a Gen-Y male who wants to be famous. The New York Times Book Review described this novel as ‘A gleeful skewering of the publishing industry and every cliché of the writing life.’ What better way to get the facts?

I have a spare copy of ‘How I Became a Famous Novelist’, which can be yours – free. Leave a comment bellow telling me why you want to write a novel; I’ll send the book to the person who leaves the best comment.

Three things:

1. I’m the judge of this contest.
2. The competition closes on the 31 March 2012.
3. The book is a little worse for wear.

Good luck.

The Business of Loving

The sun was all light and no warmth the day I first saw you. I sought shelter in the public library; alone – yes – achingly so. Do you remember how my fingers brushed against you as I walked past? It was no accident.

After that, for the next two weeks, we were inseparable. You cast a spell upon me that made my eyes open a little wider. New life started to blossom in the desert of my heart.

You were my delight.

But I knew from the first that you belonged to another, that I could not in could conscience keep you as my own.

The separation was bitter, yet I took solace in the changes you had wrought in me. Because of you, I no longer felt alone in this world.

It was because of this, because of my fond memories of you that, years later, I tried so hard to find you. I scoured the Internet searching for you. But my memories did not make suitable search terms. I could not search for Love: of course not.

I looked for you until, one day, after years of searching, I made contact. We were to meet, and I knew that this time you would be mine.

I was nervous. I wondered if you had changed since last I saw you. And at first, it seemed that you had. There were times I worried that I barely knew you. But slowly the memories flooded back, and it soon felt as if the intervening years were but moments.

The eyes-wide-open feeling you engendered within me when I was young has returned. I am so glad that I have found you again; so glad that I can hold you again; so glad to be reading you again.

The Unwritten

Oh Story of a Love Letter, how long will you elude me? Your twists and turns, the gentle curves of you, have proved too subtle for my cumbersome prose.

I sat with you, in the midst of your broken sentences and your un-linkable paragraphs.  I sat, typing endlessly, constantly trying to find the right words to express you. But, even as I worked, you were moving away from me.

The closest I got to you was this:

But, as he approached the letterbox, John realised that it wasn’t a flyer at all: it was an eggshell-blue envelope with a postage stamp placed perfectly in its top right-hand corner.

It seems I was not ready for the next sentence. I was not ready to hear your secret.

Now we must part company, and I am left wondering: were my efforts in vain?

But perhaps, my dear Story, we will meet again? Maybe when my novel is in its tenth chapter, you will come back to me and share your sweet words.

Until then, stay safe.

When the Wind Blows

Last night the wind raged. It roared through our pine tree sending loose bark and small branches down upon the roof of our little house.

I lay in bed and tried to estimate the weight of that tree: 30 tonnes, perhaps? What if that angry wind tore down our ancient conifer, pulled its mighty boughs from their heavenly home and brought them crashing down upon our earthly one. If that happened, would my small family make a sound, I wondered.

I thought, if that tree falls, it would spell the end of me lying in bed thinking about what would happen if that tree falls.

And, as I drifted into sleep, a menagerie of wild images swirled around in my mind. Pines and spines, sap and sinew, limbs and limbs, all overlapping each in a bizarre collage, a phantasmagorical nightmare.

By morning the wind had abated.

Voiced

There will come a time when you will be asked to read your writing aloud. You will be in a room with other people. They will stop what they are doing; they will turn their full attention on you; and they will listen as you give voice to your precious words.

Preparing for this time – reading your work aloud in private – has two benefits. First, you will learn to read in a way that is engaging and interesting. Second, you will gain a deeper insight into your own writing.

How our work sounds is not something we writer’s necessarily think about as we write. We think about punctuation and grammar, we think about syntax and sentences, but we don’t automatically think about cadence and meter. We should.

When words are read aloud, letters, punctuation and sentence-structure are replaced by subtle changes in rhythm and breath. Interesting writing – writing that is enjoyable to read – captures the nuance of spoken language. This is why listening to the spoken word can inform one’s writing in ways that reading silently cannot.

But there’s no use whispering your story to your computer screen. Engage your vocal cords, give voice to your words, listen to what they are telling you about your writing.

I have found this to be helpful.

Lights! Camera! Huh?

I can’t write scenes in which people are doing things. This is a new discovery for me.

Stuck for a blog idea and itching to write something, I sat down and started a short-story. The story was to take place on a bus. My main character had to get on the bus and pay for his ticket. The bus would then take off, forcing my character to stagger down the aisle while trying to find an empty seat. He would eventually find a place to sit that was next to an old man with spiky hair.

Should be easy to describe that, right?

Not for me. Turns out I’m more proficient with adjectives than adverbs. Apparently I prefer ideas to action.

I tried to write those opening man-stagers-to-empty-seat sentences. Nothing sounded right. My words sounded clunky, heavy, and, worst of all, boring. In the end I gave up.

Here’s what I wrote instead:

James sat next to a wispy haired old man and closed his eyes.

What’s wrong with that, I hear you ask. Well, nothing, if you’re writing a short-story. I’ve taken the reader straight to the action without all that unnecessary stumbling around. But what if I was writing something longer? What if I was writing a story that encompassed more than one scene? Is my character going to magically appear at the right place at the right time in every scene?

Probably not, right?

So here’s what I’ve decided to do: I am going to write that man-stagers-to-empty-seat scene. I am going to get my man on the bus and into his seat if it kills me, or him, or both of us.

I’ll let you know how it goes.