The Saturday Creativity Quote — stuck on what happens next?

“If you are stuck and asking what should happen next, head straight for what cannot happen. That’s the direction you want to go. The goal is not to play within the rules, but to break them. Story is not about what is realistic, reasonable, safe and ordinary. It is about the extreme things that happen to people who are not ready. It’s about the dramatic things that people like you and me might do-but do not-under duress.”

– Don Maass, Writer Unboxed: It Can’t Happen Here, 3/4/2020

I first heard Don say this years ago when he spoke at the Flathead River Writers Conference held by the Authors of the Flathead, a multi-genre writers’ group based in Kalispell, Montana. I remember the moment clearly. “What is one thing your main character would never do?” he asked. “Wear lipstick,” I wrote in my notebook, clueless enough not to realize what he would say next. “Now make them do it.”

photo of welded sculpture of a heron, with a mountain lake in the background

And that’s become one of my most important tools for unfolding plot from the characters themselves. Not wearing lipstick might seem trivial, but in that unpublished manuscript, it led me to think about where my MC, a deputy sheriff, might feel she had to wear lipstick. Another character is a national news reporter who’s just been fired from her job and retreats to her summer home in Montana where, naturally, she responds to her lover’s unsolved murder by filming a television segment, including an interview with the deputy sheriff.

In my Spice Shop mysteries, Pepper Reece would never ask her ex-husband, a Seattle cop on the bike patrol, for help — until she has to.

What would your character never do? Betray a friend? Betray a confidence? Fire a gun? Run into a burning building? Run from a burning building? Take a welding class? Wear pink? Eat a sweet potato? Make it matter. Make her do it.

Well, except maybe for that the sweet potato.

The Saturday Creativity Quote — the importance of writing from within

“Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don’t forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.” — Paula Danziger

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.” — Virginia Woolf

“You are a writer. You have a story to tell. You have something worthwhile to say. What you’ve already learned on your journey will play a part in what you write, one way or another. And your writing has a job to do: entertainment, teaching, healing, passing on wisdom or passion or comfort.” – Juliet Marillier, on Writer Unboxed

“You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.” – Anne Wilson Schaef, who wrote extensively about addiction and popularized the concept of co-dependence

I think you catch my drift.

The Saturday Creativity Quote — outlining a book you admire

One of the best tools for improving our writing is to analyze what we read. I mentioned this last week when I talked about reading. Let’s take that to the next level.

“The ability to see our own work clearly is one of the greatest challenges of writing. Authors fill in the blanks of their characters and world and stories in their heads without realizing whether it’s coming across effectively on the page to readers. It’s almost impossible to assess our own work as objectively as we can with other people’s.” — editor and novelist Tiffany Yates Martin, writing on publishing guru Jane Friedman’s blog

An open box of colored pencils
Pencils (photo by the author)

Start, Martin says, with yourself. Your reaction. Then dive in, analyzing more deeply.

I’ve suggested this before, offering specific suggestions for outlining a book you want to learn from. Yes, colored pencils or highlighters are involved. I’m actually gearing up to do this myself, reading several books by an author I admire, then choosing one to outline deeply to watch how she handles story. Heck, I might do two. She’s doing something readers love and respond to, and I want to grasp it more fully. There’s no better way than breaking it down, scene by scene, element by element.

Sharpen your pencils — or your highlighters — and go!

The Saturday Creativity Quote — simple tools for improving our work

I’ve been talking a lot here lately about the importance of diving in, of getting started. Of moving past our fears and doubts and into the work. Sometimes that means pausing to look more deeply at those fears and doubts, investigating what is holding us back from actually doing the work. Sometimes it means finding tools that help us deepen and improve our work. I’ll be talking about a few of those tools over the next few weeks.

First up, reading. Reading like a writer. In On Writing, Stephen King famously wrote “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

Schedule it. Ten minutes a night before you fall asleep won’t do. You can’t fully dive into a story and connect with it unless you’ve given yourself the time. Mystery writer Catriona McPherson says reading is as much a part of our job as writers as putting words on the page.

Read up. I got this tip from Elizabeth George, at a fabulous week-long workshop when I was a beginning writer. (I reconnected with her at the New England Crime Bake in 2015, when this photo was taken.) Read the authors whose work you most enjoy, who are writing what you write or want to write, whose careers and success you admire. The writers who inspire you. If you’re already published, reading authors in your genre who are publishing at the same level as you may not teach you much about craft, but if they’re stretching the genre in some way, striking readers in a way you want to emulate, or in a way you don’t quite grasp, read them, too. Choose what you read with a purpose.

Analyze what you read. I’ve written about “reading like a writer” before, and I still believe it’s a critical skill. Sum up a book by writing a review, just for yourself. (If you want to write a review on BookBub or another site, that’s great, but it’s a very different type of review!) Reread my earlier post for a few tips on what to note as you write your own reviews. (We’ll talk about more in-depth analysis later.)

Find more tools for reading like a writer in Francine Prose’s book of the same name.

“Reading superior novels arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does,” wrote Joseph Epstein in The Novel, Who Needs It?, quoted by Jacob Brogan in the Washington Post.

He’s right. And it will improve your writing like nothing else, too.


The Saturday Creativity Quote — a gift to yourself

Earlier this month, I gave a presentation to the Authors of the Flathead, my local multigenre wrriters’ group, on Building Character. The members were very kind, even when I made them write in class! I’m a big believer in celebrating accomplishments, big and small, with a moment of recognition, and so I wrapped up by congratulating everyone for being there. For showing up for themselves and their writing. Creative work is not always valued in our culture, especially if it doesn’t lead to fame or fortune, or even publication, the easy markers of success. But I firmly believe that creative work heals us. It connects us. It matters.

And I want to congratulate you, too. Take a moment to celebrate your creative accomplishments this past year. Maybe you didn’t write as many pages as you’d planned, or finish the novel. Maybe you didn’t find an agent or a publisher, or sell as many books as you’d hoped.

We all find it easy to criticize ourselves. Please, take a moment to give yourself the gift of acknowledging what you did. If nothing else, you held the intention of being creative, and that matters. Give yourself a gift to support the work in the year to come: a class, a notebook, a new paintbrush. Time. Permission to take a risk. A partnership or collaboration. A subscription to a newsletter or podcast that teaches or inspires you.

And I’ll be write — HA! — right here with you, cheering you on.

The Saturday Creativity Quote — the gift of creativity

With much of the world preparing to celebrate Christmas, or having just celebrated the Solstice or Hanukkah, I thought about the gift of creativity — not just in the arts, but in our lives. Working artists spend a lot of our time struggling with our creativity, bemoaning its limitations, wondering how to expand it and best use it. And so I’m sharing a few quotes from my collection that focus on the gift.

“One of your gifts as a writer is that you are a sensitive witness to the Universe.”
– novelist and teacher Johnny Worthen

“To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe.”
~ Eckhart Tolle

Change is a constant in your career. The gift is doing the work.
– musician Mike Mattison

“An insight is an unexpected shift in the way we understand things. It comes without warning. It’s not something that we think is going to happen and that’s why it’s unexpected. It feels like a gift and in fact it is.”
– Gary Klein, an expert on decision-making, quoted in Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire

Thank you, friends, for sharing the gift of your creativity with the rest of us.

Saturday Creativity Quote — the themes of our work

Many of us find ourselves returning to the same themes in our work, exploring them in different stories or eras or configurations, or examining different aspects of them. Are we repeating ourselves, we worry, or getting at deeper truths?

“The artistic evidence for the constancy of interior issues is everywhere. It shows in the way most artists return to the same to or three stories again and again. … We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in—and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing—the only work you can do convincingly—is the work that focuses on the things you care about.”

Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland (The Image Continuum, 1993

The issues that matter the most to you—those are the heart and root and source of the stories only you can tell. And as the poet W. H. Auden said, “You owe it to all of us all get on with what you’re good at.”

Saturday Creativity Quote – On Finding Your Place

I’ve been rereading Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland (The Image Continuum, 1993), spurred by my own bout of fear as I dive into a project that presents some craft and culture challenges. I was struck by this comment by the authors, both primarily photographers, on finding your place in the art world:

[T]he unease many artists feel today betrays a lack of fit between the work of their heart and the emotionally remote concerns of curators, publishers and promoters. It’s hart to overstate the magnitude of this problem. Finding your place in the art world is no easy matter, if indeed there is a place for you at all. In fact one of the few sure things about the contemporary art scene is that someone besides you is deciding which art—and which artists—belong in it. It’s been a touch century for modesty, craftsmanship and tenderness.”

They wrote that 30 years ago. Their premise, which I’m paraphrasing, still holds true: We must find the meaning of the work in the work itself and in the working, not in its reception — or ours — in the larger world.

The Saturday Creativity Quote — Intentional Creativity

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Belgrade MT PEO chapter’s annual “Books and Bites” fundraiser, helping raise money for scholarships for women, a cause I believe in deeply. The event features a Montana author or two, great food, and nearly 150 fabulous readers and supporters. I opened with a talk on my writing journey and my books, and in my second session, focused on creativity. I’m a big believer in intentional creativity – that is, setting the stage and deciding to create something, without waiting for inspiration to strike.

As Jack London said, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” After decades working in law firms, I’m partial to the way Somerset Maugham put it: “I only write when I am inspired. I see to it that I am inspired every morning at 9:00.”

So I loved the story about the always-amazing Dolly Parton. She didn’t feel like she’d earned her seat in the Rock Hall of Fame, so she went out and created a rock album.

Talk about a rock star.

The 77-year-old’s new album, called Rockstar, is a collection of new songs she wrote, covers, and collaborations with bona fide rock stars like Ann Wilson, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. Collaboration is another great example of intentional creativity. Did you see Get Back, Peter Jackson’s series on the making of the Beatles’ album? Collaboration and intentional creativity in action.

But you don’t need a band to get intentional. Me, I sat down on a Monday morning to write a short story, knowing nothing but the theme of the anthology, the word count, and that I wanted to set it in my Spice Shop world. Finished by Saturday. And did it again the next week.

Reaching and stretching isn’t just good for the physical muscles. It’s good for the creative muscles, too. So go do something on purpose. Something you didn’t think you could do. Be a rock star.

Saturday Creativity Quote

Brass desk lamp with green shade, desk, binder open to a printed manuscript
Leslie’s desk

“My view is that everybody can write about everything. If that’s not true, then the art of the novel ceases to exist…. If we’re in a world where only women can write about women and only people from India can write about people from India and only straight people can write about straight people, etc., then that’s the death of the art. The whole point about the novel is that you invent the world that is not, and that includes inventing people who are not like yourself. If all you can do is invent people like yourself, that’s nothing.”

– Salman Rushdie at the Frankfurt Book Fair, quoted in Shelf Awareness, 10/20/23