Tag: writing fiction

Hurricane Baby the Play Update

I finally got to talk to the artistic director of Mississippi Repertory Theatre, the group that is going to put on Hurricane Baby this spring. We had been missing connecting for a while–we talked once over Facebook, and I had made a few calls trying to catch him at the theater but always missed him. So we finally had a chat.

He had a lot of good ideas about putting the play together–he talked about using news footage of Hurricane Katrina on the projection screen the theater has during scene changes (which there are several). We had a very productive discussion about fees, which is the main reason I wanted to talk to him–some theater companies I won’t name like to nickel-and-dime their playwrights, but he didn’t sound like that type at all.

He told me I would get a royalty for the rights to use the play and I would get a percentage of the tickets as well, which is what I had been told to look for by another theater-friend of mine. He said he would invite me to a rehearsal to see a run-through and get my ideas about costuming, the scenery, the tech rehearsals, etc.

And we closed the discussion with me sending him another play of mine that he said he would be interested in for the next season–it’s set at a suicide hotline, a very simple two-person show that could be used for touring. So we will see what comes of this collaboration with them.

I was very pleased talking to him and hearing about his vision for how to produce it. I look forward to working with them. He talked about doing it in early April, which would be great. I will keep you all updated as to its progress in the next few months. Thanks for reading!

To-Be-Read Pile

So I have a nice pile of books to be read stacked up for the new year. I plan to be a lot more intentional about reading now that I am a year-and-a-half out of graduate school. I was so TIRED of reading. But now I plan to really get back into it and see where I go. I am going to list my books out and log when I read them on here as they are completed. The list (so far) contains:

–Defining New Yorker Humor, University Press of Mississippi, 2000

–Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear After 100 Years, University Press of Mississippi, 2021

–Best American Essays 2021, Mariner Press, 2021

–Best American Essays 2020, Mariner Press, 2020

–Best American Short Stories 2019, Mariner Press, 2019

–Best American Short Stories 2018, Mariner Press, 2018

–Always Happy Hour, Liveright Publishing, 2017

–Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond, University Press of Mississippi, 2019

–A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring The Spiritual Life and Work of Charles Schulz, University Press of Mississippi, 2015

–A Year In Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 2017

–Born To Shine, Hachette Book Group, 2022

–What If? 2, Riverhead Books, 2022

–Little Pieces of Hope: Happy-Making Things in a Difficult World, Penguin Books, 2021

–The Potlikker Papers, Penguin, 2017

–American Housewife, Anchor Books, 2019

–Dispatches From The Golden Age, St Martin’s Press, 2022

–Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light, Anchor Books, 2021

There’s a list. There’s a plan. Off I go!

Doing a Little Research

I read an article recently talking about an illustrator who lost the ability to visualize what he was supposed to be drawing–for him, it happened after he went back to work from a three-week bout of COVID.

Going through the article, I learned a new word: aphantasia.

It means the inability to visualize images in your mind.

I found out that most people are able to “see” imagined images.

Now I have heard all my life about the “mind’s eye”–where you can recall how a person looks or imagine a scene in your mind to relax. I’ve read a lot of literature talking about visualization–imagining the outcome you want, and that imagining preparing you for various scenarios, such a public speaking, etc.

I never knew, however, that most people, when closing their eyes and being asked to visualize something, ACTUALLY SEE SOMETHING. This bit of knowledge was surprising because–

All I see are the backs of my eyelids.

I don’t see ANYTHING when I try to visualize. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Why am I talking about this? Well, it seems that most writers do a bang-up job imagining people, places, and things and are then able to narrate what they see in their mind’s eye, describing their characters, settings, and action.

I have always been told my writing is missing that kind of description. It was something I worked hard to try to do in my writing for graduate school for my MFA, something I tried to learn as a matter of craft.

But now I know it’s a case of my brain, again, being different from other writers’ brains.

I’ve been chewing this insight over for a while.

And right now, I am in a bit of despair about it.

Do I need to give up fiction? And on the hope of succeeding with my fiction? Are readers now so addicted to visual stimuli that if I can’t do this thing, I don’t have a writing future?

What should I do?

Writing Resolutions

I’m not typically much for New Year’s Resolutions. I tend to take a random day out of the year and think over the past year’s successes and then make a list of ways to improve whatever it was I felt could use more work in my life (I usually do this on my birthday).

But I am finding myself trying to think of ways to improve the writing experience for next year regardless.

–I plan to start back my podcast Imaginary People, Places, and Things. https://anchor.fm/julie-liddell-whitehead

It’s a podcast of short Southern fiction by various writers, but mostly by me. I have a pretty long short story I want to serialize for it. I am of two minds if I want to do it weekly (like I did last year) or monthly for this year. I am going to have to think on that some more.

–I have fifteen more presses I want to send Hurricane Baby to in the new year. I have them written out with the day the press opens to submissions again and will start sending out when we get back from Florida visiting my oldest daughter’s family during New Year’s.

Depending of course on what kind of responses I get between here and next year :). I figure a lot of people will try to clear their inboxes before the end of the year, so I am bracing for a lot of rejections in the next two weeks as well.

–I want to read more books in the New Year. I plan to take my new books into the bathroom and read while I am soaking in the tub to relax after taking a bath. I hope that will help stir my creativity more in the new year as well.

–I also want to complete my new story idea in a first draft by this time next year. I’m not sure where I’m going to squeeze in the extra writing, but either I am serious about it or I’m not. Long past time for getting serious about it if I’m going to do it.

What are your new writing resolutions for the new year?

Starting Again From Scratch (Almost)

So this afternoon I typed the first paragraph of my new linked short-story collection with a working title of “Strong. Southern. Women.” (periods are intentional) The story is about a widow who was left to raise three young daughters on her own. Each of the twenty stories currently planned is about how the girls grow up, leave home, and (because each has an individual fatal flaw) fall from grace, destroying their lives–they think. One goes to white-collar prison. One descends into opioid addiction. And one winds up in a battered women’s shelter with her young son.

But their mother, who is both the one who held them together and who instilled the seeds of their self-destruction, gives them space, after they make the hard decision to reorder their lives, to grow, to gather up the pieces, and to get back on their feet. It’s going to be Southern Gothic again, but much more inspirational and happy-ending than Hurricane Baby.

I have an outline of all the stories and the backstory, and I’ve so far finally gotten started. We will see where this writing journey takes me. Wish me well!

Next Stage

So all of the writing contests that I’ve already entered closed on September 30. Some have already undertaken a review of my manuscript, some will probably start reviewing on Monday, and others may not get to it for a long time. So what am I going to do in the meantime?

I’ll get busy on something else.

Waiting around for publishers/agents to get back to you is rough. You check your email every day. several times a day, to see if you’ve heard from anyone. Or you check QueryTracker and Submittable multiple times a day. Or you resist the urge to write follow-up emails asking if they received the manuscript.

Keep resisting. No one wants to be pestered. What you need to do is keep writing. On something else.

This method works on several levels–1) You distract your mind from the constant drumbeat of “I haven’t heard anything yet; what is taking so long?” 2) You have a fresh store of enthusiasm for the new project that may have been simmering in your mind for a while now. 3) You actually accomplish something in the waiting period, besides driving yourself crazy over the finished project.

Am I done with Hurricane Baby? Maybe not. I have two people who agreed to read Hurricane Baby but said they couldn’t do it right then when I was looking for feedback for these contests. So one has gotten back in touch, and I sent the manuscript to him just for kicks. Another lady from my summer workshop had agreed to swap manuscripts with me but didn’t think she would have a complete draft until December. So I will get back in touch with her then and see if she is ready.

Why am I doing that? If Hurricane Baby isn’t picked up in its current form, having another batch of feedback by the first of next year will enable me to revise again to get ready to enter another string of contests that open in the first three months of the year. Remember: writing is a long game. Persistence pays off.

So I have started another project in the waiting. I will keep writing here weekly to discuss different craft ideas, to update you on Hurricane Baby’s progress, and maybe to discuss the new project. We will see. But I hope you hang around for more ideas, insights, and if-not-this-then-that about the writing life. Stay tuned.

And Just Like That

I. FINISHED. THE. BOOK.

I got on a writing roll the Saturday before Labor Day and did not stop until I finished midweek last week. I wrote like a crazy person. (Which I am, but that’s another blog.) I revised both storylines until the tension was white-hot in each one and the knife was buried up to the hilt in my insides with not being sure what the characters were going to do next. But as all stories do, they ended and my eighth revision of Hurricane Baby is in the books.

And I decided I had enough. I ran it through spell-and-grammar-check a few more times as I refined certain passages and finally found a search-and-replace that fixed the worst of the mistakes I had introduced accidentally. I bit the bullet on some things that my reader said needed to be changed that I had resisted changing when I was rewriting new passages, but I finally broke down and took out some dialogue tags that had been near and dear to my heart. I searched for words that were used too often and found replacements.

And now I am going to start sending it out to small publishers and university presses. I’m entering three contests for short-story collections and sending to someone who already published a novella of mine just for a try to market it as a novel-in-stories. And I picked out two others to send to because they are known to be open to Southern writing. So that’s six so far. Then I will wait and send to others if none of those work out.

It’s an exhilarating feeling to be done with this round. I’m certain that anyone who is interested in publishing it will require more. Because perfection is not of this world. But I think I have taken it pretty far and done some pretty honest work in telling these stories I have carried around in my head and on my hard drive for far too long. (I also finally saved it into the cloud!) That’s all I meant to do–tell some honest stories.

So now we wait. I hope I can have some good news in the coming weeks. I’ll keep you posted!

Plans For Revision

So I heard back from Laurie Marshall, my workshop mate that read Hurricane Baby. We swapped manuscripts–I read her fiction chapbook and read mine. She did a wonderful job with feedback–giving me notes in the manuscript, then writing me a document that noted big trends and suggestions for throughout the manuscript.

It was all very positive and uplifting with a lot of practical advice sandwiched in that I agree with. A few things are issues I always struggle with, like descriptions of settings and characters. I try every manuscript to get better at that and am glad when someone can push me to get even better at it because I know I struggle with it.

But the cast of characters is set, the plot is set, and the form is set. So that represents a huge advance in the process. She only judged one story as being much weaker than the others, and it was among one of the last I wrote, so I’m not surprised. It’s the last section of Tommy Hebert and Cindi Delafosse’s story, the new arc I added in this revision.

Tommy’s Hurricane Katrina story opens with him doing rescue work throughout the parish, and the subsequent drinking problem he develops after seeing a scene that scars him for life. I plan to plant the seeds for the resolution that is in that story earlier in the timeline throughout the other stories in that arc and plan to put in as much work as possible to bring that arc up to the standards of the others. I’m looking forward to starting Monday on the revisions!

Revision Finished

Revision number I’ve-lost-track is in the books. Now I am cleaning up typos, etc. in the typescript. I have a ton of backwards quotation marks. Not sure how that happened. I’m proofing a story a day while waiting on another read by various people and seeing what they have to say, and then I’ll dive into another workover based on that feedback.

I’ve collected a list of small presses to send to in the first round–they are all hospitable to Southern lit and I hope one of them takes an interest in it. I am looking over publishing guidelines and all those details to get them fixed in my mind so the final copies will hold up.

So Hurricane Baby is a few steps closer to reality. I hope you are enjoying this trip into the innards of writing a book. I’m still going to be posting on how everything goes with the new revisions and all the developments I anticipate in this journey. Come along for the ride!

Hard-Won Knowledge

Well, something interesting happened yesterday. I have always been a very particular writer. I write it out and don’t finish a piece until every word is as good as I can make it–the first time I write it. I am used to turning out very clean copy in a first draft and not having to revise. I’ve never been one to subscribe to the “crappy first drafts” mode of writing–where you just get a bunch of stuff on the page and sort it out later.

But yesterday I did exactly that on this fiction project. I was writing one of the last stories and wanted to get everything down that was in my head about this scene, but I realized halfway through that it needed more attention than I was giving it–I was “telling” a lot in summary when I needed to be showing it in scene.

But I just kept plugging along and finally finished what I could do that day. I went back and read it and made a big cut, and immediately the scene felt a lot better. Now I need to go back and put in the scenes I was summarizing. I have never really been able to revise my own work–I think it’s all good until someone tells me otherwise, then I can see how to fix it. So I think yesterday was a step forward for me as a writer in that I know I have to fix it and know what I have to do to fix it. Instead of just thinking it’s wonderful from the get-go :).

So today’s craft tip–go ahead and write the garbage. At least sorting through it later will help you separate the recyclable from the trash and find the treasures within that you didn’t notice at first. I’m awfully late to this awareness, but I’m glad I finally have it. Happy writing!