Dress for Success

One interview tip that prospective employees are given is to dress for the job you want. This is one of those tips that can carry over into everything you do, as the way you dress reflects how other people view you. I know there are many people out there already saying, "But I don't care what other people think!"  Well, that's all fine and dandy, but if you walk into your bank hoping to get some help with an erroneous fee and you are dressed like a local streetwalker, there is a better than good chance that the level of assistance that you receive will be directly related to your appearance.

The same holds true for how you speak. For the same naysayers that are getting ready to argue that how you speak does not reflect who you are and/or how qualified you are for something, I just want to say... BS.

Outrage Alert! The following fictional pieces of dialogue are based on stereotypes, for better or worse. Their point is to make a point, not make a subjective observation about groups of people and their potential grammar skills. If you are outraged by my dialogue examples, I encourage you to remember that this is a HUMOR writing tips site and that these are FICTIONAL characters and dialogues nippets. End Alert.

Doctor #1: "Hi, I'm Dr. Smith, your anesthesiologist. I'll be taking good care of you today, Sky. I like to repeat my patient's names to help me remember them. -wink-  Here is how your surgery will play out. First, you will get an IV to give you fluids. I will inject the IV line with a drug that will make you drowsy. After that, you won't remember a thing until you wake up with me by your side in the recovery area. Did you have any questions?"

Doctor #2: "Howdy, I'm Doc Bill, and I'll be puttin' ya'll to sleep today. I done forgot your name. Sky? Oh, okay. I've wroten it down here so I remember. Ok... Sky... here's how today's gonna go for ya. I writ a perscripshen fer a little bit of happy medicine. You get the happy medicine, you sleep, you wake up. All done! Any questions, sweetie?"

We can go so far as to have our fictional doctors being at the top of their classes in med school with a stellar track record, but which doctor sounds more professional?  I'll give you a hint: It's not Doctor #2.

Of course, I hear the whispering, "But I LIKE doctor #2. He's more real. More down-to-earth and approachable!"

Ok, a new #2 for you:

Doctor #2a: "Yo, I'm Doc MC and I got the fishizzle for yo grizzle. Now, I don't make all deese Bejamins fo' nuttin', yo. Trust yo Daddy. You'll wake up, girl, and it'll all be good. Straight?"

Or how about Doctor #2b? -The doctor enters and sets your cell on the bed next to you and then picks up his cell. He texts you.- "hihi lololo im ur doc 2day i has teh drugs dis wil b soooo fun! yay!"

All right, ignore the fact that you should not have your cell phone in the OR, okay? Look at the bigger picture and point I am trying to make.

The problem is that many people just don't care what they sound like, what they look like, or how they write. Yet like how you dress, how you present yourself in the written or spoken word is important. There are grammar rules for a reason, and they are not to make the speaker sound pretentious. Proper grammar is like proper grooming--it shows that you care about yourself.  And if you don't care about yourself, how can you expect others to?

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Book Review: Corregidora

[T]hey didn't want to leave no evidence of what they done ... [a]nd I'm leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up.

Thanks to my advanced literature courses, I am introduced to many interesting novels that I may have otherwise never have read; Corregidora is one of these novels. Like many of my planned reviews, it is not a new novel and probably has been reviewed hundreds of times, but being new is not a requirement here on my blog.

For those unfamiliar with the author, Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Random House, 1975) is her first novel, yet it does not feel like a first effort. Perhaps this is why it has stood the test of time. Though a work of fiction, it is a stark, gritty, and real look at the legacy of slavery. In the interest of brutal honesty, I have to admit that I am not a fan of this novel. While the language and various scenes can be considered, to some, to be obscene, it is the writing itself that was off-putting, rather than her almost gratuitous use of vulgarity. Still, Corregidora is a worthy read whose message is too valuable to be missed due to a story whose form may not be for everyone.

Corregidora is about a woman named Ursa Corregidora, a songstress in the mid-twentieth century whose foremothers were slaves. The story chronicles her two failed marriages, her brush with and obvious disgust for a lesbian experience, and the eventual glimmer of hope that she is finally growing and moving past the legacy left to her by her grandmother and great-grandmother.

This story is peppered with memories embedded into Ursa by her grandmothers beginning at the tender age of five. These memories are the most vital aspects of the novel; they are Ursa's inheritance, her heritage. They are not stories of perseverance and hope in the lives of enslaved women, rather, they are horror stories of forced and incestuous sex between the slaveowner and his male clientele and his female slaves, the grandmothers included. These stories are key to understanding Ursa and her struggle with intimacy and even her eventual decision in regards to her first husband which many readers might have considered a weakness or failing, but is actually a sign of her growth past the birthright passed down to her by her grandmothers.

Jones' writing in this novel is often celebrated as unique and stirring, but I found the writing stilted and sometimes rambling. Not rambling in the sense that she over-describes scenes, but rambling in that "suddenly distracted by another thought" kind of way. Whether this is purposeful and meant to act as a stream of consciousness or not, it is not my favorite style to read and distracted me from the story itself time and again. However, for a first novel, Jones' command of storytelling and novel writing is obvious and my own issues with the novel are purely subjective. Your mileage may vary.

If you are interested in learning how to craft a novel that is layered like an onion and filled with meaning, Corregidora is the ideal study. If you are searching for a novel that reflects the legacy that slavery left on later generations, this is an amazing book for that. If you are looking for a truly happy ending or a book that can go more than a page or two before using vulgarity, then this book may not be for you. It certainly is a novel that shouldn't be missed, either by true readers or true writers, but it is literary fiction and since the job of literary fiction is to make the reader uncomfortable, or to challenge them, or to make them think, it fulfills that role admirably.

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An Eye on the Prize: About Desire

When creating a complete character, one of the first things that any writer needs to consider is the desire that drives the character. What does your character need or want? How will your character's pursuit of this desire contribute to the story? It isn't enough to simply flesh out your character's appearance and basic personality, you must also glean from your character what it is that he or she wants, and wants badly. Without a desire, your character is not only flat, your story is flat. You can create grand vistas in words so powerful that the readers feel that they are there, but without that carrot-on-a-stick known as desire, your mule simply won't go.

You might be saying, "Well, duh. Of course my character needs a desire. That's why I decided that my character's desire is to not feel like such a slouching, ambling, insecure dope." Well, that's a fine start, but it's not enough. A better way to think about your character and desire is in the terms of general and specific. Perhaps your character's general desire is to be more suave than the aforementioned dope, but that is not enough for a complete story. In order to truly bring your character to life, you need to couple that general desire with a specific desire. A specific desire for the same character could be that he wants to step outside of his comfort zone (by joining the military, or taking public speaking classes, or throwing a ring into a molten mountain) in order to achieve his general desire of being awesome.

Depending on the length of your story, your character could have many desires that help propel the story forward, but in all cases, these desires need to reflect specific wants or needs that will help the character achieve general wants or needs. In fact, your character doesn't even really need to know his own desires - learning about what he wants could be a part of his growth in the story - but you need to know. You are your character's creator, his mother or father, his god. You have to know your character better than you know yourself.

Now some writers might prefer to learn about their characters as they write them, and that's fine, but if you come to the end of your story and have never laid out your character's general and specific desire(s), then you are missing a vital piece that will make your story complete.

Exercise: Study the following picture and create a list of three possible general desires and three possible specific desires that this person has. Feel free to share in the comments!

Steampunk player. Burning Man 2011. Photo by Trey Ratcliff

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Distractions and Focus

A Google search of writing advice returns over 300,000,000 results. Of these results, many of the samples offer the following tidbit of information: Write what you know. Some people, like Marg Gilks, says that the phrase "write what you know" is misleading. Early in her article, she states that writing what you know "builds walls in the writer's mind, imposing artificial limitations bred of uncertainty. How many writers, hearing those four words, have despaired?"

I know I have despaired. The funny thing is, my problem isn't because I don't feel that I have lived an exciting enough life to draw on that for my writing. I have had so many experiences, that if I wrote an autobiography from my teenage years up until now, no one would believe it was true. Not only that, but my experiences are SO varied, that I would certainly get flack from publishers for not having focused writing even though it would be my experiences, and not the writing, that were unfocused.

The good news is that if I am writing fiction, this means I have a wealth of varied experiences to draw from to create realism in my writing. The bad news is that if I am writing fiction, this means I have a wealth of varied experiences to draw from to create realism in my writing. You see the dilemma, yes?

If you were to look in my writing journal, you would see pages of 5-6 line story ideas. Pages. Each idea stems from one of two things: (1) a story I want to read which has not yet been written, or (2) things I have come across in my wild journey that I would like to expand into a story. The problem is where to focus so that I can actually (finally) get a complete story out on paper.

It seems as if every time I settle down with a single plan, something happens in my life to veer me off course and steer me towards a different story. I was going to write a novel that revolved around dragons as a challenge that was given to me, but I set that aside (after some good progress) and began a vampire story that I have wanted to tell for years.  Then I set that aside to explore two different stories that would fall under literary fiction and not fantasy and would be at home in any Women's Studies course. Now I have set those aside to write a young adult fantasy novel that was prompted by a rather ridiculous conversation I had yesterday.

Writing what you know sure sounds easy -- until the things you know keep jostling for your attention. How do you keep focused enough to get one of those ideas fleshed out without letting other, just as worthy, ideas get you off track?

I think I have a solution to my dilemma, and (among other things) that is a self-imposed deadline, but how do others do it? I would love to hear how you fight distractions, especially distractions that are not in the form of games or web surfing, but are in the form of other equally fascinating stories dancing in your head and urging you to write them.

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