5 No-Cost Steps to Begin Your Journey as a Writer: Part Two

 Bo Madsen

Hopefully after reading Part One of this series, you've been feeling your little notebooks calling to you from every direction.  Maybe you've been responding the call to write-doesn't it feel good?! And maybe, you still feel inhibited.  If you do, get over it.  Writers, real writers, are a brave bunch.  If you really want to write, put the pen to the paper and just write.  As long as you are writing, you are a writer.  And don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The act of writing itself is both the easiest and the hardest part about being a writer.  But only when you've censored, (okay, who am I kidding?) when you've learned to quell the pernicious voice in your head telling you that you're a loser, you've got nothing to say and even if you did, nobody, not a single one of the 6.8 billion people on this planet wants to hear it, only then will you be able to continue your journey uninhibited.

Writing consistently is the one and only way you will learn to ignore these comments and quell that voice of treason; a skill which, of course, will come in very handy later when agents and publishers tell you the same thing with their polite pass.


So off we go to step Two.  You're writing, you're in the groove, you've become steadily addicted to writing every thought and whimsy down, you've even had dozens of "Shut up." / "No, you shut up." conversations in your head. Now is the time to lay down the foundation of ensuring that your writing is not going to be crap.  The one and only way to do this is to read.  NO, not the damn how-to-write books, throw those away! Okay, wait, don't throw them away, just put them aside for a while.  Our only chance of learning to write anything of quality is by reading the Masters.


Go to your local public library.  Check out the classics and immerse yourself in Literature.  Read the authors you respect, and then read the authors they respect.  Scatter these great works around your home and pick at them constantly.  If a work speaks to you, read it aloud; read it twice, three times, four times, write your favorite passages down.  Always remember, Literature is art; just because it is respected and admired, it doesn't mean every piece will speak to you, so start with a broad range and soon, you will have favorites.  Spend time with those favorites. Lots of time. 


When I discovered Chekhov, I would get giddy towards night-time.  I found myself retiring to bed earlier than usual, skipping the news to spend time with his short stories.  I joked that I was having an affair with a Russian man who had been dead for 100 years! The memory of this whirlwind love affair still brings a smile to my face.  Treasure your firsts.  This is Step 2, yet it's a step that throughout our journey as writers, never truly ends.


Here are some suggested Masters and authors who they respect:

Toni Morrison: Ernest Hemingway, Mary Flannery O'Conner, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald

William Faulkner: Sherwood Anderson, Charles Dickens, Miguel de Cervantes (Faulkner read Don Quixote every year)

Gabriel García Márquez: Franz Kafka, Miguel Angel Asturias, Virginia Woolf

Herman Melville: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Nikolay Nekrasov

This is a great starter list, you can print it out and take it to your local library and see what treasures await you-Happy reading my friends, but don't forget to write down your thoughts and inspirations!

Oh, and here's a picture of my Russian hottie - mind you, I fell for his stories not his looks, but still...

 Anton Chekhov

Now I'd love to hear from you:

Who are some of your favorite Literary Masters?  Have you fallen in love yet? Who else belongs on this list?

Lucha Corpi: Virtual Latino Book Tour Stopping at Musings

LUCHA CORPI

Death at Solstice: A Gloria Damasco Mystery
Arte Publico.  2009. c.240p. ISBN 978-1-55885-547-2. pap. $15.95. M  
Detective Gloria Damasco has a "dark gift", an extrasensory prescience that underscores her investigations and compels her to solve numerous cases.

In Death at Solstice, Gloria is asked to help the owners of the Oro Blanco winery in California's Shenandoah Valley, the legendary Gold Country.   She can't help but wonder if the ever-more persistent visions--two pairs of dark eyes watching her, a phantom horse and rider, the sensation of being trapped underwater--might foreshadow this new case that involves the theft of a family heirloom, a pair of antique Diamond and emerald earrings rumored to have belonged to Mexico's Empress Carlota.

But Gloria learns that there's more to the case than stolen jewelry.  Mysterious accidents, threatening anonymous notes, the disappearance of a woman believed to be a saint and a ghost horse thought to have belonged to notorious bandit Joaquín Murrieta are some of the pieces Gloria struggles to fit together.  Soon a gruesome murder sends Gloria on a fateful journey to a Witches' Sabbath to find the final pieces of the puzzle before someone else is killed.

Corpi weaves the rich cultural history of California's Gold Country into this suspenseful and engrossing mystery, the latest adventure in the Gloria Damasco Mystery series.

  

About the Author:

For Lucha Corpi, art has always meant activism. As a woman, a Hispanic, an immigrant and a mother, she has always found herself breaking down barriers in both life and literature.

Corpi was born in 1945 in Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, a small tropical village on the Gulf of Mexico into a community that fostered creativity, performances and an appreciation for music, poetry and storytelling.

In 1964, she married and moved with her husband to Berkeley, California, a city in the throes of the students’ Free Speech Movement, which ignited the most turbulent decade in the history of the University of California-Berkley campus. It also coincided with the inception of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the southwestern United States.
 

Following an emotionally devastating divorce in 1970, Corpi found herself alone and in pain, with no family except her young son and very few friends. She turned to writing simply to get hold of her feelings, to face her contradictions and keep chaos at bay.

Her initial writing forays led to the exploration of poetry in Spanish as an outlet for her creativity. In 1970, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for poems later included in Palabras de mediodia / Noon Words(Fuego de Aztlán Publications, 1980; bilingual edition Arte Público Press, 2001). Her first collection of poems appeared in Fireflight: ThreeLatin American Poets (Oyes, 1976), and a third poetry collection followed: Variaciones sobre una tempestad / Variations on a Storm(Third Woman Press, 1990).

During that same decade, Corpi resumed her university studies, which had been interrupted by her marriage and supporting her husband while he studied. The UC-Berkeley campus provided an excellent forum for her political activism. Among other pursuits, Corpi was one of five founding members of the Aztlán Cultural, an arts service organization that years later would merge with Centro Chicano de Escritores (Chicano Writers Center). She also joined the Comité Popular Educativo de la Raza, an organization of parents, students and teachers in Oakland that sought to establish bilingual child care centers and other programs in the city's unified school district.

After her first collection of poetry appeared, Corpi experienced a long and personally worrisome poetic silence. To ease the tension, she turned to prose, penning several award-winning short stories. In 1984, she wrote her first story in English and her first English-language novel, Delia's Song, was published by Arte Público Press in 1989.

In 1990, Corpi was twice honored: she was awarded a Creative Arts Fellowship in fiction by the City of Oakland, and she was named poet laureate at Indian University Northwest.

The publication of Eulogy for a Brown Angel: A Mystery Novel (Arte Público Press, 1992) was the culmination of a life-long dream. The novel won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Best Book of Fiction. Corpi’s second mystery novel featuring Chicana detective Gloria Damasco is Cactus Blood (Arte Público Press, 1995), which was reissued in paperback in 2009. Black Widow’s Wardrobe (Arte Público Press, 1999) and Death at Solstice (Arte Público Press, 2009) are the two most recent editions to The Gloria Damasco Series. In between the publication of these works of fiction, she compiled and edited Máscaras (Third Woman Press, 1997), a collection of essays on writing by prominent Chicana and Latina authors.

Fans can also turn to Corpi’s first mystery novel in a new series, Crimson Moon: A Brown Angel Mystery (Arte Público Press, 2004). Weaving the student movements at Berkeley, a serial rapist within the government’s ranks, a militant Chicano brown power group in Denver, and even the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, Corpi has once again penned an intriguing thriller that revisits one of the most disturbing chapters for the American psyche: the civil rights struggles and student revolts during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In addition to poetry and mystery novels, Lucha Corpi also writes for children. In 1997, she published her first bilingual picture book, Where Fireflies Dance / Ahí, donde bailan las luciérnagas (Children’s Book Press), and The Triple Banana Split Boy / El niño goloso (Arte Público Press) was published in 2009.

Corpi holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkley and an M.A. in World and Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University. A tenured teacher in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for 30 years, she retired in 2005.


I had the wonderful privilege of interviewing Lucha Corpi for BronzeWord Latino Book Tours.  Although at the time of this post, I have yet to finish editing our interview, it will be available soon for your listening pleasure at www.LatinoBookTours.com 

I interviewed Lucha Corpi nearing the end of her two week Virtual Book Tour, where she was an active participant daily at hosts' blogs.  Although she had spent the last eight days answering questions and providing material for the tour, Lucha Corpi offered deep and insightful answers to my questions.  Her soft and gentle voice, as well as her thorough commentary delivered with an elegant demeanor, made this interview a true pleasure to experience. 



The following is an abbreviated transcription of our interview:


nb: Death at Solstice has an amazing setting of California's Shenandoah Valley, the legendary Gold Country.  In your previous novels, the setting has also played an important role.  How do you create your stories?  Are you attracted by a setting and then mold a story around the setting, is it historical events that grab you, or does an idea start with the main character's personal journey? 


LC: Well, in a way it's a combination.  My novels tend to have a historical background so obviously that is something that attracts my attention immediately, when I think of something that could be highlighted and become integral part of the plot, but it's also Gloria Damasco's personal quest. In some ways she tells me where she wants to go for Death at Solstice, I actually visited the Gold Country a long time ago.  The first time I went I was really captured by the whole era because it seemed to be such a turning point in the history of California of Mexican-Americans in California because of the war of the U.S and Mexico, in 1848, (after)which the U.S. annexed the whole North-Western part of Mexico after Mexico lost the war, and became the South West of the United States. By that time, 1848, gold had been discovered in California and a lot of people just flocked to San Francisco, in particular, because it was the Golden Gate, the entrance to the gold country and so I think that's when California became the multicultural, multi-ethnic state that it is. 


And so that captured my attention and I read a little bit about it, visited, but I never thought that it would  be the actual setting for one of my novels until about two or three years ago, when I went back and I saw how it had changed since the time i had visited about eighteen years ago and then it just stuck with me but I had no idea that Gloria had something to do with it, and that she wanted to explore that in her next adventure, so in some ways it's interesting.  I waited for her to tell me.  That's basically what I do.  I go to many places and research and then she tells me where she wants to go.  And so it happened that she wanted to explore the Gold Country. I didn't know what exactly was going to happen there or how it was going to happen.    



nb: How do you describe your personal writing process?

LC: I think that I start my research for this novel almost a year before I begin writing because it involved a lot of history.  I had to research all these things thoroughly before I sit down to write so that I feel comfortable writing them.  In a way, I over-research. That means that when I sit down to write it I will feel comfortable writing about facts, about things that are part of history.  Then, when I actually start the process, I write every day.  Except when I travel. When I travel I don't even take my lap-top.

nb:  As writers, we know we aren't always in full control of our stories or characters, and many times, things just happen that we weren't planning on.  What was the most surprising thing that any of your characters did in this book, Death at Solstice?

LC: Well, I had no idea there was going to be a mountain lion in the midst!  Although from the very beginning, Gloria told me, but I thought it was just because Gloria has these visions, extrasensory perceptions.  She calls them her "dark gift" because they come to her in dreams, these visions can be about smells and sounds and all kinds of things that bombard her dreams and so I kind of have some kind of idea of what some elements might be down the line, but she just told me she heard an animal growl, and I thought, well it could be a dog...then little by little the whole thing of the mountain lion comes into being into the novel.  So, I was surprised about that.  And I was surprised at the way it came about, that chapter in the novel, but it was very organic and I liked that.  It was a surprise, but it was wonderful to work with it.

And then the other thing was the whole thing with Joaquín Murrieta and El Zorro, which to me, yes, it was completely possible because Joaquín Murrieta was considered a hero by Mexican-Americans and a bandit by Anglo-Americans and his legend was over the whole country.  But the way it happened in the novel was a surprise. 

In my first novel (Eulogy for a Brown Angel) it was the death of Gloria's best friend. I even had nightmares the night before I had to write that part.  I was in mourning.  I felt grief, and I didn't know exactly why I was feeling that.  The next morning I got up and wrote the chapter where her best friend dies, and I was just torn apart.  I cried for days.

So there are always surprises!

nb:  When you finish a book and are now sharing this particular novel, where are you in terms of the next novel?

LC: I really don't know.  You know, I become obsessed with something, for some reason, I never question why, I just go with my obsession but there's a line that keeps coming back to me, and keeps recurring when I least expect it, when I'm doing the dishes, driving some place, especially when I'm quiet and my attention is not taken by so many different tasks at once, I have a line that keeps coming back and it says "There won't be a happy ending".

nb: Uh-Oh!

LC: And I somehow know that that line belongs in a novel but I don't know yet what else.  And I'm trying to keep track of my obsessions these days because I know they're all related and when I will start the research depends on when it's clear to me what I have to research. So that will be the beginning of the novel. But I just don't know when or where it's going to happen, or how it's going to happen.  

Thanks for stopping by Musings today and visiting with Lucha Corpi!



To win a signed copy of Death at Solstice leave a comment and you will be entered the amount of times indicated below!

+1 Comment with a valid email address
+2 for asking the author a question in the comments
+2 for linking to this contest (tell me where)
+1 for being/becoming a follower

BONUS GIVEAWAY! The person that comments the most blogs on each blog in this tour will receive a collection of all four books in the Gloria Damasco series at the end of the tour.

Musings is the last stop of Lucha Corpi's Death at Solstice Latino Book Tour.  Her book tour has been fascinating though, with a little bit of everything.  Make sure you go back and check out all these fabulous blogs which include interviews, essays by Corpi, reviews and more wonderful insight to this fascinating author and "killer" series!

Nov 30 Richard Unloaded
Dec 1 Mayra Calvani Latino Book Examiner
Dec 2 Terri Behind Brown Eyes
Dec 3 Lara Rios Julia Amante
Dec 4 Anna The Sol Within 
Dec 7 Misa Chasing Heroes 
Dec 8 Monie Reading With Monie
Dec 9 Carol Book-luver Carol
Dec 10 Tasha Heidenkind's Hideaway
Dec 11 Nilki Musings


To find out more about BronzeWord Latino Book Tours visit www.latinobooktours.com


As always, thanks for stopping by.  I love to hear your comments!

Inhale love, exhale fear...

xoxo

 

NaNoWriMo

Ahhh....it's that fabulous time of the year when, still in denial that the lazy, carefree days of summer are long-gone, I embark on a spectacular, mind-boggling writing frenzy. Just when many people start clearing their schedules in preparation for the swarm of activity that accompanies the American Holiday season, I stack another little, teensy, tiny thing on my plate. This November, like last, I will take up the challenge to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. A very, very, rough draft of a novel, but a novel nonetheless. It is now officially National Novel Writing Month. 'Tis the season to be loony. 'Tis the season of NaNoWriMo! Around this time last year I had recently applied for a spot at a women's writing retreat. I imagined myself the following summer spending two weeks in pure writing indulgence, in an ideallic setting, with free meals prepared around the organic garden on the grounds, a beach not too far away, the salt air invigorating my clear mind to the point of literary genius and then I got my rejection letter. Apparently, my writing sample which consisted of some of my first attempts at poetry and a synopsis of a futuristic tale where the country is divided among the technologically advanced and the back-to-basics rebels were not strong enough to fulfill my hopes of "feeling like a real writer when I emerge from the retreat". Can you blame them? Me neither. But what happened instead was that somehow I stumbled upon this insane concept of NaNoWriMo. The first week of NaNo I spent staring at my computer screen, lurking in forums and then staring some more. Week two I started babbling through my fingers, and boy was it fun! For the first time ever, I missed a family function: "I'm so sorry, I can't make it, I didn't reach my word count." Wow. I could just imagine the head-scratching! Week Three, the dishes piled high and mighty and we either ordered out or had leftovers. The "we-eat-healthy-meals-together-at-the-kitchen-table-and-talk Tyrant was unavailable, and my family took full advantage by eating pizza and Chinese in front of the TV every single night! Wow! It was exhilarating! I was a real writer and my family supported me! Week Four came and went like a desert storm and then...Peace. I had done it! I emerged a bona fide writer; not from a respected, exclusive women's writing retreat, but from my own den. Instead of the support of other up-and-coming or established literary soul-mates, I had the support of my family. And most importantly, myself. I still haven't quite finished that novel. But it has lived and grown with me for a full year. What I gained from NanoWriMo was not an agent or a publishing deal, or even a completed manuscript to shop around. What I did gain was my own respect. Looking back, I realize that since completing NaNo last year, I have done some really amazing things. I started telling people I am a writer. I created Musings and started sharing with an audience. I now have clips! I've interviewed wonderfully talented people. I slowly started coming out of my shell and through networking, I've met people I know will be part of my life for as long as I live. I have become the writer I wanted to become. And yes, I got all of this because I participated in NaNoWriMo. I look forward to embarking on a very different journey this time around at NanoWriMo, and I can only imagine where and who I'll be, come December 1st. I'd like to invite every single one of you to participate in NaNoWriMo. There is no one to respond to. There is no money to spend. There is everything to gain. I hope you will join NaNoWriMo 2009 and if you do, keep me posted on how things are going for you. I will certainly post about my experience throughout the month. I wish you all the best with your undertakings this month and always! Inhale love, and exhale fear.

Quotes from the Best

I've put together a short list of quotes from some of literature's Greatest. I hope they serve to inspire you and support you in your quest towards writing. One thing I've taken away from reading about writers is how individually unique we all are. There is no ONE way to write. So always follow your heart, connect with your soul, and you will never fail. Simone De Beauvoir What is the imagination? In the long run, it's a matter of attaining a certain degree of generality, of truth about what is, about what one actually lives. Gabriel Garcia Marquez The writer's very attempt to portray reality often leads him to a distorted view of it. In trying to transpose reality he can end up losing contact with it. Joyce Carol Oats One must be pitiless about this matter of "mood." In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function-a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind-then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Kurt Vonnegut If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again. Toni Morrison I feel the most intelligent, and the most free, and the most excited, when my characters are fully invented people. If they're based on somebody else, in a funny way it's an infringement of a copyright. That person owns his life, has a patent on it. It shouldn't be available for fiction. T.S. Eliot I feel quite sure that if I'd started by having independent means, if I hadn't had to bother about earning a living and could have given all my time to poetry, it would have had a deadening influence on me. I think also that the difficulty of not having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of concentration. The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts. Edna O'Brien So for both men and women writers, writing is an eminently masochistic exercise. But a woman wirter has a double dose of masochism: the masochism of the woman and that of the artist. No way to dodge it or escape from it. But there is a certain dogged strength in realizing that you can make those delirious journeys and come through. It is only by the grace of god, and perhaps willpower, that one comes through each time.

Script Writing Tip--sometimes you just have to let it sit for a while

Yesterday I wrote about writing and rewriting, and I decided to follow my orders of "Go Write!"  Today I picked up my very first script, dusted it off and decided to start polishing.  

After having worked on this script for a solid year, and then sporadically through another two years it has now been almost six months since I even looked at this script.  But that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it.  This is a really important point.  

I've found that after working exclusively on a project there comes a time when there's not much more I can do, and then I just have to put it aside for a while.  I imagine it's a lot like winemaking.  A good vintage must sit and cure for some time.  A story sometimes has to sit and mature in a corner of the mind where it is not constantly being judged or manipulated.  During this time, we are processing our ideas, our characters' personalities are solidifying, and their intentions are crystallizing.  I suspect that with practice and increased skill, this phase of story cohesion, or "maturation" occurs within a much shortened period of time.  However, I do not believe that it ever becomes obsolete. 

Unlike winemaking, though, a writer has the opportunity to continue to tweak the story after this period, and to rewrite and edit with regards to the direction in which the story has gone.

So today I opened up my laptop and started clicking away.  An idea that has long been looming in my mind (which by now has become essential to the story) found it's place and pace perfectly within the story.  As if that wasn't thrilling enough, I happened to have been invited to accompany a friend to a meeting at a production company, and so I clicked away, back into my very first script, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of deals and meetings at an epic production company.  Now, for me, that was epic in and of itself.  

A little bit of random information

Here's a little bit of random information that I've picked up, bit by bit, along the way.  These tips, although they seem obvious, are essential:

1.  Don't even think about sending your work out, contacting agents or production companies or anyone until you've written at least 

4 SCRIPTS!!!

Two reasons why:

 

First, as writers, we become attached to our work and by the time we finally have a finished product, we tend to think it's a masterpiece.  It isn't.  

A major accomplishment? Yes. 

A reason to break out the bubbly?  Yes.

A product ready to go out to anyone other than a peer review?  Absolutely not.

A script needs revisions.  Remember the exhausted but undying cliche:

To Write is to Rewrite

We learn a tremendous amount simply by completing our first script. Things like formatting.

We learn even more after our second, third and fourth scripts.  Things like pace, effective dialogue.  We learn as we go.  

We didn't get on that bike once and learn how to ride, right?  Same thing here.  Don't confuse completion with mastery. 

The second reason why we must wait until we have amassed a small collection of work before we contact the Powers That Be, is that we may have a beautifully polished script and we may miraculously get that jewel of a script into the hands of a Somebody, but if that's not exactly the kind of material they're looking for, they're going to want to see what else we have for them.  

A ProdCo loves our work, Great news, right?

Not if we don't have anything else to show them.  We just got their hopes up, and then let them fall flat.  I think it's pretty safe to say that this is not how we want to be known by a Director of Development in any Production Company.  

In this one-shot planet called Hollywood, we can not afford to leave a bad taste in any one's mouth.  We have to have those other scripts polished and ready to offer up.

So forget the agent, forget the competition, forget the submissions.  Write, write and then write some more.  Join peer critiques, ask other writers to give you feedback (NO Family) and then rewrite and rewrite and then do it all over again at least four times.

I know, I know, so much for the glitz.  Good.  Get over it.  We're writers.  Go write!

Secrets of THE INDUSTRY Part I

So, the adventure begins!  For the following five weeks I will be immersed in my quest to uncover the Secrets of The Industry for baby writers. 

Are you a baby writer?  Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a writer or actually follow through with your dream of being a writer?  Do you yearn to see the movies that run through your head projected upon the Great Silver Screen??

I am, and I have.  So come along with me on this summer-long adventure where I will be interviewing people in the Biz, tracking down the best and most current information on crucial topics for the beginning scribe, and giving you an authentic feel for what we need to do to commence on this fantastic journey.  

If you have questions or comments please post them.  I may be able to get them answered for you!!  I will certainly try.  Together, we will find out what it takes to break in to the world of the TV/Feature writer.

I've been passively gathering information for the last several years, but now I am jumping in with both feet!  Some of the information I will post will stem from this collective knowledge that I have aquired, some will come directly from a source's mouth (or fingers).

I can't wait to get started and start sharing with you everything I learn!

Now's the time to inhale love, exhale fear...and go for it!!!