My muse's name is Fiona

There is something inherently cruel about my writing muse, which most of my acquaintance would say is fitting. When I was trying to write short stories, in the lull while I let the zero draft of Border Patrol rest, I couldn't find an idea for a story with a pick and a miner's hat. I'd sit down to write and there was nothing. The soil was rocky, and the only thing underneath the rocks was more rock.

Now that I'm in the midst of doing my first revision of the novel, and gearing up for the second revision based on critiques of the first few chapters, story ideas are flinging themselves at me furiously, pinging off my forehead like little flints -- after, mind you, taking a hunk of flesh with them. I will never have enough time to write these stories!

You see, I have plans to start writing the sequel to Border Patrol on Monday. So unless I can incorporate some of these flint-stories lying at my feet into the next novel, I'm going to have a notebook full of fabulous ideas and no energy to write them. For at the same time I'm doing rewrites, I'm also committed to helping other people with their novels. Critiquing an entire novel takes a lot of work and energy.

The key, I believe, is cloning.

When I, good friends, was called to the bar

Today, I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to talk about lawyering. If you want to draw any inferences about or comparisons to the profession of writing, you may feel free to do so.

Becoming a lawyer is hard work and takes a lot of money. You have to get good undergraduate grades to get into a good law school, and get high scores on your LSAT. Once in law school, it takes a lot of money to stay there for the three years it takes to come out the other end with your diploma in hand. There are all kinds of hard courses you have to take.

Exam week is grim. Students huddle together in study rooms of the law library, at their apartments or dorms, at Perkins because it's open all night and they won't throw you out if you do nothing but drink coffee for seven hours. Then, after three years, those of you who are still left (and yes, the numbers do drop alarmingly) must face the bar exam. You sign up for a bar review course, another big chunk of money spent, and toil up to six hours a day in a classroom watching bar review videos, then go to the library or home to study some more.

The bar exam in our state is held twice a year, in one of the three major cities, in a hotel. The year I took it, they held it at the Galt House in Louisville. Those of us not native to that city drove down (or up or across), plunked down the cost of a room at the Galt House and waited for our face-to-face meeting with Grim Destiny. The exam takes two days.

Then you drive home and spend the next two to three months waiting for the results. For me, this was a period of excruciating back pain and stomach problems for which the doctors could find no cause. Of course not. It was just anxiety.

The exam results finally arrive. You console your friends who flunked, celebrate briefly with the friends who passed, and set about trying to find a job. You also go down to the state capital to get sworn in. At the swearing in ceremony, the Chief Justice of the state or federal court will shake your hand. This is a big deal. It means, you are in the club now. It's a club you've worked long and hard to become a member of.

You get a job. You go to your first bar conference. You are overwhelmed by the ethics panels. You read the ethics rules in law school, but now the enormity of them sinks into your stomach like a lead weight. One slip could cost you your license, that license for which you worked and sacrificed.

Every month, the state law reporter mails out copies of the state supreme court's rulings on ethics charges. You read about fines, suspensions, and even lawyers losing their licenses for good.

And you look around you at all your colleagues. You know they worked just as hard as you did to get where they are. They walk the same tightrope as you.

So here's the thing. Lawyers never rat each other out. It's what outsiders jokingly refer to as "professional courtesy," while thinking about that cartoon of sharks not eating each other. But it's true.

Lawyers are a band of brothers. We are faced with enemies on two sides -- clients and the state ethics committee. Frivolous and false charges are leveled against us all the time. Sometimes the charges aren't false or frivolous. But they come from the outside. We don't rat each other out.

Becoming a writer does not require jumping through any of the hoops I've outlined above. You need merely plant your butt and start writing. No ethics committee is waiting breathlessly for you to make one slip before yanking away your license to write, because you don't need a license to write. There is no common enemy that writers share. Well, except one.

What if I created a blog and never wrote in it?

Forgive me, blogworld, for I have sinned. It has been nine days since my last post, and that one really didn't count.

The reason I have been so dilatory is that I've been actually editing. I know, pretty amazing. My novel-in-progress, Border Patrol, is slowly moving from rough draft to first draft stage, and I'm about one-third of the way through it. I edited three chapters of it yesterday before my brain threatened to explode.

I also plead in my defense the excuse that we at The Town Drunk have been in the midst of our second reading period, which just closed.

Here's what I have learned from reading slush:

1. A great opening paragraph won't sell your story, but it will keep it from getting pitched right away. Yes, slush readers really do write a story off if its opening is terribly written.

2. Narrating the entire plot is a really bad idea. Show us stuff happening. Invent characters, make them talk to each other, make them do stuff.

3. A concept is not a story. Stuff has to happen. See item 2, above.

4. It's okay when you're sitting down to write your story if you don't know where it's going. Take your time, let it wander around until it figures out what it wants to be about. But don't send that first draft. Once you know what your story is about, once that first draft is done, go back through it and ruthlessly hack out everything that doesn't hew to that story arc. Your story is not the forest, but the map through the forest. Show us the way.

5. And I realize this is not something that all slush readers and editors require, but it's something I need -- make me care about what happens to the protagonist. The way you do that is through characterization. Show me who the protagonist is, make him or her human -- even if he's actually a three-headed bugman from Alpha Centauri. It's human emotions that allow me as a reader to connect with a character. The best story I read in the slush pile this period is one that had me leaning forward until my breath was almost fogging the monitor, so anxious was I to see everything turn out okay for the protagonist. If that story doesn't make the cut, I've determined to write the author of it a letter encouraging him (he's a new writer) to market the hell out of it. That's a story that will find a home somewhere.

6. Read the damn guidelines.

I'm sure there are more things I've learned from the slushpile, but that's all that occurs to me right now, and it's time to go off and do some actual writing. A bientôt, mes amis.

The Funniest Thing I've Seen In a Long Time

From the blog of Charles Coleman Finlay, the author of The Prodigal Troll and Wild Things, this meme of what kind of writer he should be.

Where do you want to go today?

An idea came to me yesterday morning, in the form of a dream, for a new project. It would probably be novel-length, and would most probably be a straight murder mystery, with no speculative element currently in sight.

I had feelings of great anxiety about the project all day, which made me rethink my position on why I write about people and places much different from me.

I lack objectivity.

The protagonist of the proposed novel would essentially be the Me that was seven or eight years ago. She would live in a small town similar to the one I lived in then, she would have the same profession I did then, she would have the same trauma that I did then (or shortly thereafter).

Just the thought of writing such a character, and about her at such length, put my stomach in knots. I finally thought, 'I can't do it.'

Well, maybe I can, but that's a topic for another day.

What I want to talk about today is the importance of objective distance from one's protagonist. My stories always come back to me in the end. Even if I think I'm writing about someone else, usually it's my neuroses and issues that end up there on the page. But I have to start off in Antarctica or New Guinea or Portugal, and work my way back there. I have to start off with a balding, overweight guy, or a ten-year-old black girl, or a group of T'ang Chinese. Because if I start out with the intention of writing about me, about the stuff I know, the people I know, I bog down in too much reality.

I've been discussing the issues of depth and distance with wonderful, underappreciated writers like Miquela Faure and P.J. Thompson, and I realize that I've been dancing around my own problems with the page like Muhammad Ali in the ring. I cannot start at zero and work my way to one hundred. I have to start at two million, and hope I find my way back to zero. As a writer, I have to write from the outside in, rather from the inside out.

And I realize now that writers who do it just the opposite way are doing it the right way for them. It's just not the right way for me.

Moreover, while I'm up on the soapbox, let me take this opportunity to pimp an excellent essay by J. Steven York on the "rules" of writing, link helpfully provided by Jay Lake.