Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

L. Darby Gibbs

Creativity: get it in capture mode

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Be ready to pounce on the writing moment.

So last week I blogged about how creativity can be dependent upon routine.  I do use this to a degree during the summer months, but I am just as likely to use the capture mode.

This is when you sit down to do one thing and inspiration hits.  It stops everything: “I have to write now” time. This happens to me fairly regularly. It is not that I have the kind of life that I can put things off any time I want to sit down and write. I don’t, far from it. But I have learned that when I feel the need to write, I better look around and see if I can arrange it without delay.

I teach English, probably one of the most planned, graded and time-consuming subjects to teach. I happen to enjoy teaching it, but it is a life eater. So if there is a moment free, the first thing I do is sit a quite moment and see if anything has been waiting to bubble up. There will be a rise of excitement in my chest, much like when I know there are only three more days before I am heading out on a long-awaited trip. I listen for a stream of dialogue running through my mind, look for an image rising out of the silence and words playing bumper cars between my ears.  Time to sit down and write.

This is capture mode. Grab it while the grabbing has a chance at nipping at the heels of a plot, post, character sketch, etc. I once stopped my husband mid-drive to a bicycle race to buy me a notebook and pencil. I needed to write that moment and had potentially hours of quiet writing time ahead of me between driving to the race and back over the mountains to and from Eugene’s Tandem Classic (the Burley Classic, I believe now defunct, and before you ask, this is before the invention of the laptop).  When the urge is there, take advantage of a ready mind.

This is writing on the run and has the likelihood of being intensely productive because the time could disappear at any moment, so there is no room for sharpening a row of pencils, finding the perfectly flat piece of paper or the cozy niche no one is likely to stumble into. You may have to sit in the stiff- backed wooden chair with the tippy corner; ignore the seat belt, blasting radio and kid kicking the back of your seat; lean against the wall, hair whipping in your face, paper leaping up where your fingers can’t stretch to hold it down while you write. Yup, you don’t even have time to hunt; just pounce and land on the scittering, scattering words, grab with straining claws, pull them to your chest, and start laying out one word at a time (though if any one knows of a way to simultaneous set out words in lumps I want to hear about it).

So that’s capture mode. What examples of capture mode have you experienced?  I’m sure you’ve had a few wild writing stories you could tell, so share them here.

Next creative post: building desire to write.

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#creativity
#writing
#inspiration

Creativity: the routine of it can be inspiring

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Be ready to write

Creativity is such a personal experience.  No matter who we are, we search for it. A kid wants to say something funny to his buddies, a man needs a good line to catch the woman’s attention, a painter dreams of that perfect aesthetic impression on canvas, the computer programmer must revise for simplicity, clarity, reduced expense. Let’s not forget the writer who seeks a killer plot, equally killer characters and amazing killer dialogue, not to mention variety of diction. We are all in search of the creative moment and its reliable, reproducible inspiration.

Routine has long been tauted as the writer’s key to inspiration.  You know the drill:

  • write at the same time every day
  • create a space dedicated to writing
  • set yourself  up for the muse by having little routine steps: sharpen your pencil, restack your paper square, sort through your list of ideas, sit down and make your mind quiet, whatever
  • don’t tell anyone your idea until after it is down on paper
  • always leave your writing with a sense of urgency to write the next scene, or leave notes to pick up with next time you sit down
  • don’t stop until you have 1000 words down (or however many)
  • stop after 1000 words no matter what (That will certainly leave a sense of urgency to get back to the scene, unless of course you have been telling yourself, like a bonking runner, just 167 more words and I get to stop.)

Routine certainly has is good points. You know when, where, for how long, and how you are going to write, so there are no excuses. Bang you’re off and typing, scribbling, recording, etc.

It frees you up for inspiration to fly in or roll on.

When you are in your “place,” everyone knows to leave you alone.  That does not mean they will, just that they know.

And routine has other perks as well.

  • It’s already scheduled into your day, so work, kids, spouse, laundry, Twitter have already been factored in and can be controlled and worked around.  
  • Laundry can be done at the same time, brushing your teeth and showering can be brainstorming time, and you have an excuse not to watch that mind-numbing TV show everybody is talking about.
  • And when you are done, you can tell yourself, “I wrote today,” just as others might say, “I exercised before breakfast.” Be the first to pat yourself on the back.
  • It is scheduled into your “most creative work” time because you have worked out that you write best from 5 AM to 9 AM, or 10 PM to midnight, or etc.
  • And all those inspiring million-words-a-day gurus often provide very specific routines, and it works for them, why not you?

All very well, but this post was imagined just as I was starting up my school laptop to begin lesson planning for the new year. I had to shut the lid, send it into sleep mode and restart my personal laptop and begin this post I had scheduled into my day tomorrow.  Routine, I like it best when I can break it into a million pieces and around 500 words.

What is your routine or non-routine? Do you mix and match?

See me next week when I approach creativity in capture mode.  Don’t know what that is: see me next week, maybe I’ll know then, too.
#writing
#creativity
#routine

SF genres: where do I fit in?

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mixing it up in SF genres

One of the really difficult things I have found about
writing SF is that there are so many subgenres. I have been doing research so I can be certain which one(s) I fall into.

After reviewing the various sites that explain SF subgenres, I sat down to list the qualities that exist in my Students of Jump series: 

  • time travel 
  • crisis of character 
  • interpersonal relationships 
  • alternate history 
  • family dynasty 
  • Retro Futurism: I write in a style I remember from my days of
    reading science fiction as a preteen and teenager, and apparently they have a
    name for that. 
  • strong female characters 
  • light romance 
  • genetic engineering
  • artificial intelligence 
  • soft science

I found a pretty good list at SciFi Lists.  The explanations were brief but adequate enough to help me decide if my work fit in the category.  
My intention for looking into the subgenres was to make sure I was tagging mine correctly. 
After all, I don’t want to have people searching for novels in the style
I write and have mine slipping by them because I have used tags that don’t
describe my work well.
I found three that seemed to cover my series: time travel,
alternate history and artificial intelligence under the umbrella of Retro
Futurism.  Three of these tags I need to add to my books.
Now I am not certain I fit under Retro Futurism, but I do
know I was heavily influenced by the writers that it is named for: Heinlein,
Asimov, Bradbury, Anderson, Savage, the list goes on. I’ve read plenty of Crichton,
Pohl, Niven, Pournelle, and Norton, but I don’t feel they influenced me as
much.

How did you decide what genre best described you?  Did you look at what authors influenced you, what you read, make a list like I did or some other means to select what best covered your work?

#genre
#SF
#Heinlein

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Regional word choice: would you rather a frappe or a cabinet?

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Not just plants are regional: words, too.

I moved all over the place when I was a kid, and I collected words and differences in pronunciation of words like most kids collected bubble gum trading cards.

Milkshake, cabinet, frappe

Even though these words reference the same thing, each brings a different feel to the image. When I think of a frappe being served at my table, the imagined tall glass of white is full of lumpy froth at the top with condensation on the glass so thick it is opaque, and the only places where I can see the milky fluid is where the fingertips of the waitress touched.  And the container is cold, and I cannot view it as any color other than white, with the smell of vanilla beans thick in the breath I take before slurping in the first taste of half air half tantalizing sponginess that sounds like distant firecrackers as the tiny bubbles pop against my lips. 

Tennis shoe, sneaker

I wore sneakers into my teens.  When I first heard there were shoes called tennis shoes, I thought I had to play tennis to wear them.

route: route (root) or route (rout)

Don’t ask me for directions unless you are prepared to hear me switch back and forth in my pronunciation of this word and not even know I am doing it.

aunt: aunt (ant) or aunt (awnt) or aunt (tante)

I only used the first two of this one.  I had two aunts, one on each coast.  I met them when I was a child.  I thought saying Aunt (ant) Sue and Aunt (awnt) Peg was just a case of that being their names, similar to Sally Ann or Jim Bob. Later I understood that they resided on different coasts and geography made all the difference.

submarine sandwich, hoagie, grinder, sub, Italian, hero, wedge

I can still remember when my family was moving from Massachusetts to New Jersey.  We had been traveling for what seemed like all day, and we went into one shop to get something to eat.  I looked at the menu and had no idea what they were offering.  I wanted a submarine sandwich, but there were none listed.  Would a hoagie taste good?  I was about 12 years old and thought this was probably the only place in the US silly enough to call them hoagies.

purse, pocketbook, bag, handbag

This one still gets me in trouble.  I say pocketbook and my students give me blank looks. They trust that I know what I am talking about, but they don’t know what I am talking about.

toilet, john, head, loo, porcelain pony, commode

I only came across the first three of these in my travels.  Toilet is my word of choice, but recently my husband was explaining what a room in the house we are building was and said “commode.”  My daughter looked at me unsure of what we were putting in the house. So I had to explain.

The second one I am very familiar with, but “john” is one I just can’t use.  Both my grandfathers were named John, my brother and my father.  But my mom thought it was quite funny to say things like, “John is in the john” or “We have several johns, are you looking to talk or use?”  My dad was a Navy man, and when out on the ocean fishing, he always said “head” but never in the house.  And he never referred to a toilet as a john.

What makes word choice so important? It adds characterization and settings if you are picking a specific region for your story. What regional words have you noted?  Do you know the reason behind their use?

Seeking the perfect junction: crossing the gap between what is written & what is read

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Readers need to connect the content to their own lives.

Recently I was reading Jane
Eyre.  The narrator and main
character Jane was describing a view of Rochester seated alone in a darkened
room, and suddenly I was transported back about ten years and the memory of
walking into my father’s office to see him seated at his desk, quiet, lost in
thought, came quickly to mind. 

My father
had lost much of his vision, which for a man who loved to read and tinker with
electronics in his retirement was tragic. 
He did not know I had entered, so for just that brief moment I saw how
disappointed he was in his situation.   One of his hands reached to run fingers over his watch and prompt it to tell him the time. A magnifying glass mounted on an articulating arm was close to his face, and just inches beneath the glass a second magnifying glass hung. 

Of
course, as soon as he was aware I was there, his whole countenance changed to
one of pleasure and good cheer.  He
joked, worked hard to track my movements with his eyes, told me how much I
looked like his father, but I knew I was mostly blur for him.  His once lovely penmanship was a broken
scrawl, and the confidence at which he moved about the house or located things
was because he had memorized where everything was and was precise in keeping
each to its proper place.

Moved by this memory of my father, I could not but be moved by poor Rochester’s fate.  This is how writers connect their work to their readers.  They strike a chord that links to some piece
of our lives, one we have or one we wish we had, as well as those we wish we didn’t. 


My beta reader, Marcy Peska, read the first book in my series Students of Jump (In Times Passed).  In her notes on my draft, she would comment on what a scene triggered in her or how a piece of dialogue caught her attention.  At one point halfway through the novel, she had written in a note “Nooo, I did not see this coming. I have to break away.”  Then the note continued explaining that she had needed to stop for a “mini-meltdown.”  Marcy had been immersed in the scene and what occurred had caught her up so emotionally, she could not go on reading without some distance to recover her equilibrium.  She loved the scene and hated it at the same time because it had bridged the gap between the text and the imagination.  Goal achieved.  It was a tough scene to write and tough to read, which was precisely what I was going for.

Rochester’s injuries had that effect on me.  I hated seeing my father that way, but because of the quality of Bronte’s writing, I could imagine what Rochester must look like and what Jane must be feeling. The scene was real to me. I had sympathy for both characters, and the scene was authentic because it bridged the two events: fiction and reality.

This is the challenge of every writer and the need that every reader wants filled.  We want to connect, to find some essence of our own experience that draws us into the scene.  The writer must still supply well-written dialogue, description, imagery, finely drawn characters, etc., but what is most vital is that the reader have a way to travel the created moment with a sense of familiarity and originality combined.

What work of fiction or biography caught you, the reader, in such a moment?  Please share that moment of connectiveness, the author, text scene.

#writing
#readers
#connection

Reading the Heinlein Biography, part 2: the writer’s personhood

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My previous post on William H. Patterson, Jr.’s, Heinlein biography focused on what I learned about the writing business.  But that wasn’t all I gained from the reading.  In many ways, Heinlein’s life provided general rules to live by as a writer and a person.

  • Take care of your mortality: physical health, mental health, diet and process of aging.  Heinlein had numerous health problems. And he was immediate about making change to improve his chances of continuing doing what he loved: writing.  So he changed his diet to deal with his many allergies, changed his diet again to deal with his heart health. He studied a variety of mental viewpoints to find a strong way to approach life positively and honestly (self-honesty in particular). He wanted to live a whole lot longer than he did, but considering what he had to battle, he lived a whole lot longer than expected.
  • Maintain and foster friendships inside and outside the field of writing.  Heinlein kept his Navy friends, childhood friends, and writer friends as part of his life no matter what changes were going on.  He moved every few years for various reasons and made close friendships with neighbors and maintained those from his previous residences.  I noticed that Heinlein was also slow to let go of a troubling friendship.  He wanted to be certain that he was taking the friendship as it came, not molding it into some prerequisite construct.  He seemed to dislike a great deal having to cut off a friendship and was willing to reassess if it appeared the person had changed.
  • Travel: He was interested in other cultures and enjoyed experiencing new viewpoints and lifestyles. I got the impression he did not want to get his information from books.  He wanted to see it for himself, talk to people, see the worst and the best in their countries.  I haven’t been too many places: Mexico, Canada and Sweden, but each offered me different outlooks on life that I came to embrace.  I have been all over the US, which has offered quite a bit of
    difference in diet, interpersonal communication between sexes and
    personal philosophy. Travel and exposure to variety is a growing experience as a person and a writer.
  • Stand up for yourself.  Heinlein had to deal with plagiarism in writing, TV and movie production.  There were times he had to fight for his rights (The Puppet Masters) and times he had to clarify a point, less the legal applications (The Rolling Stones vs. Star Trek’s “Trouble with Tribbles”).
  • Work to aid humanity. Aside from his political endeavors and his efforts to encourage education in the sciences in his juvenile (YA) books, I think Heinlein was most pleased with the work he did in blood drives, especially as it related to rare bloods.  I had not been aware of all his work in this area and was much impressed with his effort to improve participation and increase availability of rare blood. There is a platform for each of us, small or large that can bring positive change.
  • Make friends with your agent, editors, etc.  Much of his communications in the biography came from his interactions and friendships with those involved in the publication of his novels, stories and essays.  I think often we think of the publishing world as a necessary enemy.  Heinlein built lifelong friendships with many of his contacts.
  • Keep family close and value them.  Heinlein was not a “I remember you when” kind of writer.  His friends prior to writing and his family were important to him.  Sometimes it seems that the writer is assumed to separate him or herself from the family as if such contact will ruin the muse.  Stay close.  It is from family that we grow into who we are and gain our greatest strengths.
  • Be responsible for your self and your family.  When Heinlein’s mother needed to go into a nursing home, it occurred when he had the money to maintain her care.  His sister had been the main caretaker for many years, and he was ready when the responsibility needed to be moved. He volunteered to be the main provider taking the financial burden off his siblings when it was a struggle for them, and he was able to carry it.
  • Recognize your own belief system and be tolerant of others. Heinlein had strong beliefs, , but he seemed to be willing to accept a variety of differences as a natural right. He did draw the line at love of country,  patriotism.
  • Use your medium to teach and challenge your readers.  Heinlein advocated patriotism, blood drives, right to bear arms, education, sexual equality (but give him some latitude, he was born in 1907), racial equality, and a variety of political viewpoints.  As with everyone, as he aged, his beliefs evolved, some growing stronger, others altering based on society, new experiences, research and personal evaluation.  He had an agenda, two main ones: make his readers think and entertain them.

What author has helped your grow as a person?  What about them strengthens your resolve, provides focus or motivation?

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#Heinlein
#Writers