“FOR writing three ill-conceived sentences in a novel that sold fewer than 10 copies, Melbourne man Harry Nicolaides was yesterday sentenced to three years in a Thai prison.” (click to read entire news story)

Consider what would result in the world if everyone reacted to a perceived insult in this manner.

Imagine the silencing effect.

Even more disturbing, in another article on this topic — Thailand sentences writer for insults — it seems clear that this is probably a case of a writer getting caught in the middle of political maneuvering that has nothing much to do with insulting the royal family or with three sentences in the writer’s self-published work of fiction that only sold 10 copies. It has much more to do with someone else’s power play, or their fears about what will happen when the current Thai monarch dies.

Still it’s enough to make every writer in the world think hard about what freedom is and how much freedom of expression he or she really has. And on the Internet, we’re all writers.

Bev Jackson has awarded me the Shameless Lion Award. This award originated with Seamus Kearney of Shameless Words and the Shameless Lion Writing Circle, who wrote:

“Those people I’ve given this award to are encouraged to post it on their own blogs; list three things they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing; and then pass the award on to the five blogs they want to honour, who in turn pass it on to five others, etc etc. Let’s send a roar through the blogosphere!” (read award details here)

I’m always happy to give a loud roar for good writing, and I agree with Seamus’ three things — innnovation, truth, and humanism — to which I’ll add three more things I think are necessary for good, powerful writing:

1) Love of learning. I’m not talking about the letters after your name. Love of learning (call it natural curiosity if you will) makes the writer a sponge for details from which to draw just the right ones. Love of learning makes us thorough researchers, who sometimes need a 12-step program to get us to stop researching and write. It keeps us open to new ways of telling a story and to experimentation and practice. One never finishes learning.

2) Awareness, including empathy. Awareness of the world around us helps a writer catch those fleeting details that make a story come to life. There’s a whole world inside a story, and the writer’s awareness of her outer world helps her select just the right details to make the world of the story seem real. A great writer also understands people and their feelings, and can stand in another’s shoes and experience their perspective. Of course we never do this perfectly, as each person’s experience is unique; but a powerful writer comes oh so close.

3) Courage. A powerful writer must be willing to take risks, to face conflict head on, to take up subjects others may be afraid to tackle. Sometimes the risk is writing about an issue personal to the writer, a past trauma, or something the people in her life may not be happy that she writes. Sometimes it’s a matter of getting a character to a conflict instead of writing circles around it. Sometimes it’s an artistic risk, writing in a style or form that’s new and untested, or on a topic that’s unpopular or politically charged. To illustrate this, I’ll quote yet another line from a movie, The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). (Warning, if you haven’t seen the movie this setup may be a spoiler.) Detective Michael McCann, played by Denis Leary, presses insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) for information about their art theft suspect, Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan), who’s also at this point Catherine’s lover. Catherine hesitates, and the detective says, “You know what? Life is full of shitty conflicts, okay? Give!” That line encapsulates for me the power of conflict and risk-taking in writing. It has to be there for writing to be powerful, and the writer has to face it head-on. Give!

Now for the people I want to award with a Roar. For starters, I wish I could pass this award right back to Bev for her poem, To My Young Husband, 1963.

Here’s my list:

1) Cate at Trailing Light
2) Susan at Spinning
3) Bruce Black at Wordswimmer
4) Eric Mayer at Byzantine Blog
5) Wayne at Nutty Steamers

There, five! I won’t have to cheat, in fact I could’ve gone on. In closing I want to point to Bev’s new art gallery website, Art Shack Studio.

With a mystery, the question of how to end the story begins with which character did the crime. I no longer start with a specific villain in mind. The story often changes so much in the writing that a pre-planned ending has no choice but to change as well, or it wouldn’t make much sense.

In the last couple of mysteries I’ve written, I was as surprised as anyone by who the villain turned out to be once I got to the second draft or later. That’s okay, and it has a lot to do with how I develop characters. If I know who the villain is too early, I’m in danger of giving it away, offering hints I’m not even aware of because of my judgments about that character.

If I start out thinking the villain isn’t a villain, I can get to the heart of that character sooner in my own mind. I can get to know him, let him grow and round out on the page. I’m an idealist, and I really like to see the best in people, so there needs to be that spark of sympathy first, without letting on even to myself that he or she is a killer in the making. I guess in that regard my characterization is as organic as raising a child. What mother imagines her infant would harm anyone?

This process forces me to explore the shadows, my characters’ shadows as well as my own, to see possible motivations, both conscious and unconscious.

I first encountered the shadow, as a human concept, in stories I read. I confess that I didn’t understand the concept very well when I was young and still in denial that I had a shadow or that any good person did. But one encounters this idea many times, if one reads at all widely, and the reason for that is it’s a universal truth about human nature.

In exploring the shadows, I’ve come to see that a fully rounded character, even if he’s the good guy, has a shadow, whether that shadow is clear on the page or not, whether that shadow is negative or positive. I want to know each major character’s background as well as possible, so I start with the positives and work my way into the negatives. Though it hurts me to watch a character I’ve come to like or sympathize with cross the line into murder, at least the biggest puzzle of the mystery isn’t lost on me, and I’m not giving the killer away up front. If I decide the murderer needs to be someone else, not the person I thought it was going to be, I don’t have to cast about too far for someone else who could have done it. In truth, any one of the characters might be capable of killing, given the right circumstances and motivation. They all have their shadows. By the time I get to my final draft, I usually have a few characters that, with nudges into poor choices and flawed rationalization, could become much darker individuals. That’s usually a key to how I end the story. Which character, which nudges, and which choices? Which fits this need best? What motivates the villain to do the awful deed and also causes him or her to get caught in the end? How will the reader be surprised and at the same time see that this person and the clues leading there were present all along? (Foreshadowing will have to wait for another post.)

My exploration of the shadows has made me think a lot about the choices we make in life, and how important each one is, especially when we stack one choice on top of another in the way that we sometimes come to think of as inevitable. We don’t have a choice in everything, certainly, but sometimes when we look back over our lives or a course of events, we can see the turnings we’ve made, and many of them were choices, that brought each of us to be who, where, and what we are today. When we’re accountable for those choices, I think we improve our ability to move forward and make better ones.

If there’s one positive effect fiction can have, perhaps it’s to get us to take a look at the cause and effect of choices. What are we capable of? What would we do in the same situation, and where might that take us or what might it make of us, and our world with us? The stories that get me to think in those terms are the stories that stay with me.

Working with people in non-fiction-related activities has fed into my fiction quite a lot. That was especially true when I worked in an office. I don’t mean anything as obvious as basing a character on a real person. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. Working with people helped me understand better how we interact, provided observations about life, and helped me train my ear for how people talk. In fact everything I experience while away from creative activity tends to feed into it. This includes all the trials, lessons, emotions both powerful and subtle, and all other information and events that life sends my way. In creative expression we have the opportunity to turn dross into riches, or one form of richness into another.

I think perhaps creativity is 50% input and 50% output, or maybe it’s a form of breath, inhaling one thing, processing it, then exhaling something different. The inhalation has to take place, or . . . you run out of air, you suffocate. It follows that the exhalation must also take place, which may be why people who experience trauma sometimes wind up with post-traumatic stress (PTSD). They have no opportunity or ability to process, honor, and exhale what that trauma creates inside them. We can get stuck in grief, too, whether it be grief for a loved one who’s died, or something else in our lives that has moved on or faded away.

Of course what we breathe in is critical to the process. But fiction and art are so eclectic, almost anything will feed them, depending on our willingness to shape the product of our creativity to fit what must be expressed.

There are times when we attempt to create but haven’t gone through enough inhalation to sustain the process. I suspect that’s the cause of many blocks we experience, except when they’re caused by our unwillingness to face whatever in us we must face to fully process it as creative product.

Now that I spend more time at home, even a walk or a drive to the grocery store and talking to the clerks or people in line can be part of that inhalation process. The same goes for reading, listening to music, poetry, interacting with neighbors or my pets.

Fiction or art — or any creative activity — is where we can take in the confusion and chaos that the world dishes out and make sense and order out of it. Creativity doesn’t have to be engaged in with the hope of making money. Perhaps in many ways it’s more satisfying when it’s not. Many people enjoy needlework, cooking, gardening, decorating, woodwork, or photography. Even self-grooming and assembling a wardrobe can provide an important outlet. I don’t think of that as vain, I think instead of hunter-gatherer clans in which self-decoration is a primary creative endeavor.

I put my own peculiar stamp on whatever I take in before returning it to the world. We all do. We might as well do so creatively, constructively, lovingly. It could be that we need this as much as the air we breathe.

I know a little about this tendency of writers to give up and give in, because I was one of them.

In a sense I gave up on what is probably still my best work to date, by self-publishing rather than continuing to go through rejection and revision. Now I wish I’d kept looking for an agent or publisher, kept rewriting when all the rejections (where anyone bothered to read past the cover letter) pointed out problems. Now what do I do with a book that’s been published first by a POD subsidy outfit and again by me? I’d still like to see it published by a “real” publisher, but I fear that I gave it a premature funeral.

Some good has come of all this. My mother and a few other older relatives got to see my name in print and read the story in book form, before they passed away. I’ll never regret that, but I never intended to give my book such a limited audience. I never will again.

If you don’t want to go the distance, find something else worthwhile to spend all your free hours on. If you want to be a writer, if you know in your heart you’re a writer, go for the gold. Stop reading articles about POD and self-publishing. Stop subscribing to writer’s magazines that print them. The publishing industry may very well be ripe with middle men and favoritism, with big money interests and maybe even corruption. But you the lowly unknown writer aren’t going to change that by self-publishing. Read more articles on good writing, the market, getting an agent. Learn how to structure a story or novel. Give each sentence its due attention. Read more Richard Adams. Read Annie Dillard. Keep writing. Keep rewriting. Keep submitting. Keep rewriting. Keep rewriting. (That bears repeating.) Rework it until you can see your face in it, and submit it until either it’s published or the post office runs out of stamps.

Late in 1993, after a lot of discouraging experiences attempting to sell my fiction, I decided to “quit fiction writing for good” and I wrote nothing but personal journals and technical manuals for a year. I began writing fiction again early in 1995, but with a difference. I did it, as I’d begun as a girl, to please myself, primarily to complete a story I thought had to be written or it would drive me nuts. That story had been percolating inside me since I was seventeen. I surprised myself then by doing some of the best fiction writing I had in my life to that point. My decision at that point to please only myself with what I wrote carried me through a kind of barrier into a different way of looking at writing fiction.

There’s a point where the writer has to throw out all the advice, all other opinions, and write the story that’s inside her, the one that haunts her, that begs to be written. If she begins to do it only to earn money or fame, her enthusiasm may dampen. If she exposes her writing to the wrong kinds of criticism at the wrong time, her passion may be crushed, or she may write more to please others than herself—sometimes so many others that she feels pulled in all directions at once. I’ve done that in the past, and I found myself doing it again recently—writing to please too many others. Maybe from time to time I need to “give up” again, if only to get back on track with the writing I’m supposed to do.

Of course the writer needs to learn the basics, hone her skills. Then, after writing for self, she needs to be willing to let someone edit her work and be open to revisions. The two-minute rule mentioned in the blog Eric referred to makes sense, too. Something in any story needs to draw the reader’s interest in as soon as possible, unless the writer just wants to hide her novel in a drawer and bring it out to read on her own now and then.

But I think a writer needs to begin any work of fiction out of love, a personal hunger to write it. Something has to draw the writer in, make it worth the effort, and perhaps make it impossible not to write. It may very well break the writer’s heart. In fact, maybe a writer has to let a story break her heart a little to do it right. Maybe fiction is meant to break out of one’s heart, the way love does. I usually know I’ve gotten somewhere or succeeded at something in a manuscript, when I find it brings me to some deep, heartfelt emotion.

Writing for myself sounds selfish and not very businesslike, but I think my best writing happens when I do. I’ve learned the most about myself when writing this way, and it’s the most honest writing I’ve done.

Themes emerge in what we write, truths we’ve learned about life show up in our stories, and we sometimes come face to face with our own humanity when we realize what we’re capable of imagining, when we think about what we’d do in the situations we place our characters in. These are things that don’t show up in a story intentionally, but in unconscious, serendipitous ways, through the interlocking and intersecting of seemingly disparate elements. The best writing is in many ways a revelation to the writer as much as to the reader. If getting to that necessitates shutting out what others want from our fiction, it’s worth the effort.

I can’t tell anyone how to make money writing fiction. It’s possible no one can tell anyone how. Publishers seem as mystified as anyone as to what will pay off and what won’t. But I do know how to plumb my own heart while writing, how to answer the call of a story. That’s what has kept me doing this so long in spite of all my frustrations and failures. If all I wanted were to make money, I’d have quit—for real and for good—long ago. I don’t advise anyone to write fiction for money. I plan from now on to write fiction that draws me in a way I can’t ignore and can’t resist. Even so, I know it may break my heart. But anything worthwhile in life carries that risk.

Is that the way you like it?

We expect truth when we pay for nonfiction. I think we also want it when we pay for fiction. That anyone should suggest lying is okay, in nonfiction, news, education, politics, advertising, government, or even in fiction, disturbs me. The fact that we too often don’t get the truth when we expect it is more a comment on those feeding us the lies than a statement about what we value or what we’ll accept. Yes, mistakes happen. Sometimes we pass lies on that we don’t realize are lies, we make errors, we don’t carry research far enough or ask the right questions, we use poor judgement, we misinterpret, and we frequently mistake opinions, theories, or beliefs for fact. I can forgive almost any of these as human, within limits. But there is a limit.

Even in our common definitions of good fiction, most of us think it should contain a core of truth, of realism. We want to be able to believe the illusion, at least while we’re in the story. We prefer, at best, to carry away some seed of truth that works for us in everyday life. Fiction can be fun, lighthearted, humorous, frightening, outlandish, or fanciful. But there are elements the reader needs to be able to believe. By the end of Lord of the Rings, I knew something about what a hero is, even though the story is classic fantasy. A kind of trust builds between reader and author as soon as a reader opens a book. If the author has done his job, the memory of how well the author lives up to that trust will stay with the reader long after the end of the story.