Updates

This has been a busy week for the writing side of my life:

• I completed a 500 word essay this past Monday that I’d worked on for the last month.  I e-mailed it to an editor I know.  I thought I’d finally nailed what she was looking for in this type of essay, but alas, the rejection came the next day.  She complimented my essay, but offered no clear, specific problems with it that caused her to pass on it. 
• Two more essays are in different stages of completion.  I worked on one of them also on Monday.  It has an 8/15/09 deadline.
• I’ve been working on a publisher query to a specific editor.  When I checked their website today, I discovered that they accept unsolicited submissions, which is quite rare for a publisher.  So, rather than sending only a letter, I’ll include the first 50 pages of Perceval, as requested in their guidelines.  I expect to mail the query tomorrow or Friday.
• I’ve been generating ideas for mini-essays for a website that $pay$ for them. 

On the job search side of my life, to date I’ve submitted 3 job applications for a medical coder position.  I’ve not seen any new listings this week.  I’m a member of AAPC, the professional association for coders, and talked with the membership officer of the local chapter last week.  She gave me several good tips and ideas for my job search.  I now plan to take the certification exam in about 6 months, and have purchased study guides to help me prepare.  I’ll watch for opportunities to practice taking the exam from my local AAPC chapter.

Psychology in Fiction

Why do characters do what they do?  Why do people do what they do?  For me, writing fiction is a way to learn, explore and understand human behavior.  Characters drive my fiction, not the plot.  Motivations behind a character’s behavior fascinate me, just as I wonder why on earth did Michael Jackson screw around so much with his face?  A character’s motivation also determines narrative structure, as I discussed in my “Narrative Structure” post on May 9, 2009.

Evan Quinn’s psychological state influences his story, in terms of his behavior, his thoughts, his feelings.  Evan is the main character of Perceval and subsequent novels in the series, so his psychological state dominates while those of other characters provide conflicts and obstacles for him.  What does Evan want?  The answer to this question propels Evan through the story.  What do his antagonists want?  The answers will provide the action and suspense throughout the story.  Evan decides what choices he makes based on what he wants, and his psychological background influences those choices.  The novel is set in Vienna, Austria for most of the story, but Evan’s psychological setting is America, 2048.  He feels that he’s lost all his experience, a ”stranger in a strange land,” in Vienna, a child exploring a new world and how people think there. 

Is there psychobabble in Perceval?  NO.  Evan’s, and every other character’s, actions and speech reveal their psychology.  For example, Evan wants to be free.  This is his goal, his desire, and it determines everything he does, the choices he makes.  Why does he want to be free?  The answer is in his psychological state, his past, and at some point, I hope readers question just how healthy he is psychologically, based on the choices he has made in the past.  When I first began the first draft, though, all Evan had given me was his desire to be free and lots of questions.  I wrote to discover the answers.

Evan’s desire helped me decide on the point of view for Perceval.  I knew first person would be too close, too claustrophobic, and I wanted the ability to write another character’s perspective as needed.  Straight omniscient POV is too distant although it allows for a broader view of external events and characters’ reactions.  Second person would have been too snarky, considering how Evan and some of the characters are.  So, I settled on omniscient third, i.e. omniscient but focused on one character, Evan.  This gave me freedom to switch focus, also, to other characters, but I decided to switch as little as possible in order to heighten suspense. 

A character’s psychology is as important a factor in his development as the action and other characters.  Human behavior and the motivations behind it, the reasons for the motivations, provide endless possibilities for stories….

The “Worst” Advice for Writers

A good friend sent me the link to another writer’s blog post entitled For Aspiring Writers: the Worst Advice You’ll Ever Read.  Charles Hugh Smith, a journalist writing for The San Francisco Chronicle, offers a down-to-earth perspective on writing and making a living as a writer in this rich, elegant blog post.  A lot of people in this world think writing is easy, that getting published is easy, that a person can become famous by writing novels, and Charles Hugh Smith begs to differ.  He tells it like it is. 

I have no plans to give up the search for a publisher for the Perceval novels.  In fact, a couple weeks ago, I sent the literary agent who requested the manuscript of Perceval over 15 months ago another follow-up letter requesting a response.  It’s probably the last one I’ll send him.  I reason that if he were truly interested in my novel the way I would want an agent to be interested, he would have read it over 15 months ago.  Such is the writer’s life.

My writer’s work will soon become a part-time job.  The problems with the economy and our recession has hit me harder than any recession before.  I’m now searching for a full-time job.  I plan to continue writing here at least once a week, and will shift my writing work to weekends and the week nights I’m not totally exhausted.  My past experience, however, has been that working 8+ hours and the commute from home and back sends my imagination for creative writing into hiding.  I’d love it to be different this time.  We shall see…..

Chamber Music and Conductors

Conductors are first and foremost musicians.  Their primary musical instrument is the orchestra (or chamber orchestra, or choral group, or band), but they usually play other instruments also.  Choosing Evan Quinn’s other instrument(s) in Perceval turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected.  At least until I realized that he would want to be in a string quartet, which narrowed the choices.  It could have been viola or cello, but I settled on violin.  He also plays the piano although not all that well.  He’s a string player, and like all conductors, he also has a general knowledge of all the other instruments in the orchestra.  But it was chamber music that guided me in choosing what he would have played as a child.

Chamber music resembles solo performance more than orchestral performance.  In a string quartet, each member’s performance is like a solo, equal in weight to the other players.  And there’s no hiding in a crowd.  Chamber music tends to also be transparent but that doesn’t mean it’s easy or simple.  So the players need to know their parts and play at the top of their game, and they need to think as one.  I think of it also as a spiritual experience, both to play in a chamber ensemble and to listen to one.  I often feel like each line of music reaches out to me like tendrils to caress my ears.  This kind of performance mesmerizes children because of its intimacy.  They can see exactly what’s going on as well as hear it.

A little girl sat next to me yesterday, with her father, at the first concert in the Minnesota Orchestra’s annual Sommerfest.  It happened to be a chamber concert.  She was restless, as young children are (all that energy!), but during the music she was quiet, listening, sitting on her father’s lap so she could see the stage more clearly.  At the end of each piece, she said, “What’s next?”  Two words that are music to a writer’s ears!  I spotted other children at the concert, all engrossed in the music. 

The first piece on the program was “Selections from Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano,” Op. 83 by Max Bruch.   The musicians of this trio included the principal violist of the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vanska, the music director.  A conductor playing chamber music.  I felt as if Evan Quinn sat next to me, grinning.  But it was that young girl, perched on her father’s lap.  Mr. Vanska plays the clarinet and rather well.  In his opening remarks, he commented that for this piece, it was just him and the clarinet playing.  This is not something he does on a regular basis, at least not publically.  Intense, luscious Bruch, played by this accomplished trio of players, and for Mr. Vanska, far from conducting.  He was now a peer, expected to pull his own weight.  This is a conversation among friends in comparison to the orchestra’s performance.  Chamber music offers an opportunity for an intimate relationship with the music, to experience it on a spiritual level as a player, to be inside of it.  An audience joins in that experience and contributes its energy to the performance.  Musicians love chamber music.

The concert was excellent, with a Lennox Berkeley Quartet for Oboe and String Trio and Robert Schumann’s Quartet in E-flat major for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello following the Bruch.  The young girl applauded like an old girl.  I wondered what musical instrument she played.  I imagined that Evan Quinn grinned.  He would have loved this concert as much as I did….