Ask the Author

Q. How do you deal with writer’s block?


A. One sure way to combat writer’s block is to write every day at about the same time of day. It’s almost as if you’re making an appointment with the muse. Once you start standing her up, she might not come 'round no more.

Sometimes a writer is blocked because he or she has made a wrong turn in the story or is forcing a character to do something he or she doesn’t want to do. Try going in a totally different direction and see if that doesn’t clear up the block.

Leaving the computer for a few minutes can usually clear up minor blocks. Do something mindless and repetitive like running, vaccuming or swilling scotch (jest kidding... kind of) to allow your subconscious to work on the problem.

When it comes to heavy-duty blocks, it might be a good idea to abandon the manuscript for a while and start on something completely different. Stephen King was blocked when he wrote The Stand and he dumped it, thinking he’d never solve his narrative problems. Shortly after he started working on something else, a solution arrived.

It’s important to know that almost every writer experiences block at one time or another, but the block always clears up. Don’t be in a hurry; don’t start freaking out about a deadline. Always have complete faith that the answer will come, grasshopper.

Here are some additional tips.

Feel free to chime in with your own tips.

Have a question for Ask the Author? Email nechespublicity @ knology.net

Lit Links

Free lectures to make you a better writer.

Checklist of fiction faults from science fiction writer Ray Nelson

How to increase your word count from author Jennifer Hudson Taylor

How to write the second novel by Stephanie Kallos

Very funny essay on an embarrassing book signing by Ken Burger

Faceboo? Twitter? Negotiating the thorny world of social networks

The Next Fedora: On Writing As A Second Career

The sun is sinking low over another workday in Rotunda Town, the air so humid you’d be thankful for Marlowe’s infamous Santa Ana wind, when it hits you. You’re staring down the barrel of a half-century’s tenure on the planet. With no backup. No ammunition and no prospects standing between you and the end of the fun house. Life has boiled down to a scratched DVD of The Office skipping on permanent rerun interspersed with the occasional eight AM city road rage.

Take heart.

Millions of your compadres are discovering another lease on life. They even have a nifty buzzword for it these days: “Encore Career.” While you may be feeling that your first career is hardly deserving of an encore, don’t let that distract you. Get on with plans for whatever you’re supposed to be getting on to.

And for many of us, what better endeavor might that be than getting in touch with our own latent literary talents? After all, what poor part-time scribbler with years full of journals, stories, or just ideas, hasn’t dreamed about making the leap to the promised land of commercial publication, there to discover fame and riches not to mention critical adulation? The very notion conjures up visions of peace, contentment, and relaxation, interrupted only on occasion by inspiring bits of work far removed from the nine-to-five variety.

Get a grip.

Writing for publication is a job. It can be an exciting and rewarding job, full of variety and even the occasional inspiration, but unless the would-be career changer is willing to fall in love with the work of writing itself the most likely prognosis is for great disappointment if not downright disillusionment.

If you’re serious about pursuing a second career in writing, you’ll need to make an honest assessment of your abilities and prospects and detailed plans for enhancing both. You’ll need to spend some serious time researching your options. Do you go for a job in journalism, for example, or do you freelance? Will you write articles, essays, or short stories? Non-fiction or fiction? Books or shorter works? What about poetry? Can you afford to live with an inconsistent source of income? The answers to each of these questions will determine, in great part, how your writing career develops.

My advice? Figure out where your passion lies. Weighed down with years of training, maybe even prestigious degrees in your first career, you may be tempted to want to piggy back on your previous years of experience. Indeed, in some cases this might be a wise choice. But a better question might be: What do you love to read for pleasure? If you choose to right in the same field or genre(s) you read in your spare time then your chances of developing a fulfilling career will be much higher.

I was lucky—my own mid-life dream of being a writer bloomed about ten years early, but even then it took me a while to find my particular voice, a discovery I finally made by asking myself the above question and realizing how much I enjoyed reading crime fiction and especially private eye novels.

The classic Bogey-style fedora has long been recognized as a symbol of the PI genre. But I also remember my father, an engineer industrialist sportin

g one back in the nineteen sixties. The fedora didn’t signify anything so romantic as the mythical midnight detective for me then. I associated the hat with my father going off to work each morning, day after day after day. Writing is like that: A blast, for sure, but for most of us, also a lot of plain hard work.

What will be your next fedora?

You say you want to write. The shingle is hung and the office door lies open. I’ll leave a light on for you.

(The next novel in the Shamus award-winning Frank Pavlieck series, Kitty Hitter, will be released in August.)

www.andystraka.com

Saying Goodbye

My Chocolate Lab was more than a faithful friend, loyal protector and traveling companion: he was my writing buddy. Every morning for nearly fifteen years, Jefferson found his favorite spot on the rug underneath my desk where he endured everything with equal aplomb – my mutterings when a character didn’t behave, my tears over career disappointments, my giddiness over finding just the right phrase, just the right word. He’d let me know with wet, sloppy licks to my hands and bare feet that I was not only his beloved human mama and favorite person in the whole Universe, but I was also a genius.

Though I provided his food and shelter, bought his toys and treats, and trained him in doggie manners, I never “owned” Jefferson. We simply took care of each other.

In winter when the temperatures in Mississippi dropped below freezing and my house felt cold no matter what the thermostat read, he’d let me slip off my shoes and warm my cold feet against his warm fur. In spring when daffodils and forsythia, azaleas and Bradford pear blossoms festooned my yard, he’d grab his Frisbee in his big mouth, press it into my hands and insist I leave the computer to go outside for a romp in the sunshine.

In the summer of 2007 when I was searching for a way to transform an ordinary mystery plot into something extraordinary, he gave me the perfect answer. Make Elvis a dog.

In the deep winter of 1997 as I drove the fifteen hundred miles home from New Hampshire where I’d attended the birth of my second granddaughter, gentle-natured Jefferson showed just how fierce a hundred-pound dog can be. When I was frightened by a trucker in a small Pennsylvania town whose name I no longer remember, when I took a ten-minute nap on the grass in a welcome center in the Shenandoah Valley, when we got caught in the middle of a thunderstorm in Knoxville and somebody tried to get into our less-than-desirable motel room, Jefferson became “Killer,” all hackles and fearsome growls and warning barks.

Jefferson and I pranced our way from the rocky seacoasts of Maine to the white sandy beaches of Florida. We frolicked through the summers of his youth and my prime. We grew gray together.

Then it came time to say goodbye. A stroke stole his ability to walk, but it couldn’t steal his courage and his great heart. And I wouldn’t let it steal his dignity.

I called my very compassionate vet, who came to the house to assist my big guy. With his head in my lap, the feel of sunshine on his back and the sound of birdsong all around, Jefferson slipped quietly into deep sleep.
A simple rock marks his resting place. It’s engraved with one word: courage. Yellow roses bloom where he lies. This summer I’ll add more roses. This fall I’ll plant daffodils and tulips, day lilies and iris.

When I sit in Jefferson’s garden, I’ll understand that indomitable spirits can’t be broken, that kindness is more important than wealth, that true friends are precious beyond measure.
And I will always remember.

Peggy Webb is the award-winning author of 60 plus romance novels, 200 magazine humor columns and two screenplays. Her comedic Southern Cousins Mystery Series, launched in 2008 with Elvis and the Dearly Departed, features amateur sleuths Callie Jones, her cousin Lovie (who’s had more lovers than Elvis has fleas), and her Basset Hound who thinks he’s the reincarnated King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Peggy is former adjunct instructor at MS State University. Her website is http://www.peggywebb.com/

Author Spotlight: Lauretta Hannon author of the Cracker Queen

WHAT IS A CRACKER QUEEN? Aren’t you dying to know? A Cracker Queen is a strong, authentic Southern woman. She is the anti-Southern Belle. She has a raucous sense of humor and can open up a can of whup-ass as needed. She holds her head and her cigarette up high. She cusses, raises t-total hell when a line is crossed, and she knows loss and hurt; these things have made her beautiful, resourceful and, above all, real.

The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of Jagged, Joyful Life begins with the childhood experiences and adventures of Lauretta in backwater Warner Robins. Her mama on the edge and jazz musician daddy have a deep and disorderly love with years of booze, infidelities and nervous breakdowns but through it all she feels cherished.

The stories of her deeply dysfunctional family include chain gangs, guns, ghost hunting, moonshine stands, scooterpootin’, the famous Goat Man of Georgia and Crazy Aunt Carrie who is arrested for assaulting a police dog. The early years of hardship and hard living all gave Hannon the resilience and humor that are now the hallmarks of her Cracker Queen way of life.

From Warner Robins she moves to Savannah’s most eccentric neighborhoods and its lively crew of hellions, heroines, bad seeds, thugs and renegades including a lady who keeps the Baby Jesus chained up in her front yard, a woman who looks like a rutabaga, and the root doctor that works a hoodoo on her.

This is what Lee Smith had to say:

“I raced through this book—horrified, laughing out loud, and weeping by turns. I say, let’s throw out all the self-help and inspirational books in the country, and put up The Cracker Queen displays instead! Hannon really made me think, and I’m going to whup some ass, too.”

Here’s our little sit down with the soon-to-be famous Cracker Queen:

You have a one-woman show. What's that all about?

It’s a show based on the stories in the book. I also add elements such as large photos of the real-life people and settings depicted in The Cracker Queen. It’s a lot of fun to “perform” the book in this way.

I also get to riff on favorite topics such as how Southerners talk about their health and embellish their illnesses. My Me-Maw was the perfect example of this. She enjoyed poor health even though she was quite robust. She always claimed to have “Cadillacs” on her eyes and “the sugar.”
And do you ever notice how we try to outdo each other when we’re talking about the size of tumors? If you had a grapefruit-sized tumor, then I’m going to tell you about somebody who had a watermelon-sized tumor. It’s pretty funny when you think about it.

What made you decide to finally write all of your experiences down? Was it cathartic?

I could no longer bear the weight of the story—it had to come out. Before I began to write it down, I would have recurring nightmares that I was expelling horrible things from my mouth. I finally got the message and began the work.

Putting it down on paper enabled me to release that burden for once and for all. It made way for great healing. Whether you ever publish it or not, writing a memoir is life-transforming.

How did you come to be a commentator on NPR?

During my lunch hour one day I thought about a favorite quote from Goethe that I had posted in my office:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

I realized that I needed to make some sort of bold attempt at getting my stories out there, so I went to NPR’s website and submitted a commentary. Within 30 minutes I got a response. The producer said no but asked to see more of my writing. Everything that has happened for me began with a “no.” So those aspiring writers out there should not be discouraged when they hear that word.

How have family and friends reacted to your memoir?

The reactions from my family have run the gamut from pride and approval to discomfort and anger. My mom loves the book. Some readers find that surprising, but they have to remember that Mama is the Queen of all Cracker Queens.

The response I get most often from friends is, “Good Lord, I didn’t know you had that kind of childhood!”

What influences in your background shaped you into an “anti-Southern Belle?

I grew up in the margins and never related to the Belle or her world. People like us were at the bottom of the heap and had no access to her strata of Southern society. My ancestors were too poor to even be sharecroppers. My kin worked for the sharecroppers!

The women I knew and admired were Cracker Queens: authentic, strong, and wise as a result of the hard times they’d endured and conquered. And through it all these women never lost their raucous sense of humor or their willingness to whup some ass.

Who are some of your favorite authors and how have they shaped your own writing?

Poetry is my first love, so William Butler Yeats and William Blake are my favorites. Their work made me aware of the importance of rhythm. I approach my writing as if I’m composing music. I listen hard to the words. In the genre of modern memoir, I adore Mary Karr and Rick Bragg.

What are you working on now?

Two things: a follow-up to The Cracker Queen and I’m tinkering with an idea for a novel. As someone has said, I’m afraid if I talk too much about it the magic might leak out, so that's all I'll say for now.

The Digitization Of People

Frances Dinkelspiel has written a brilliant book about her great-great grandfather. Isaias W. Hellman left his native Germany, moved to pre-Gold Rush Los Angeles and proceeded to become one of the most significant financial powerhouses in California. Wells Fargo, Farmers and Merchants Bank, transportation, utilities, oil, real estate - all major Hellman investments.

Frances was among the 180-plus generous, talented and ambitious classmates I was honored to get to know at Columbia University’s Journalism School Class of 1986. Frances now lives in San Francisco, where she’s a scholar, writer, mom, blogger. She and I share the same publishing house, St. Martin’s Press. These days, many of our friends and classmates wake up every day wondering whether they’ll keep their newspaper jobs. Whether their newspapers will continue to operate. Whether The Newspaper as we know it will, like the polar bear and mountain gorilla, become extinct.

As I read Frances’ TOWERS OF GOLD, what struck me, aside from her concise, fluid and razor-sharp writing, is the same thing that struck everyone else who applauds her: Her microscopic research. Frances spent eight years digging through musty archives, countless boxes and newspapers, towering stacks of them (probably tons of that unwieldy microfiche and microfilm, too).

While we all wonder whether books, with actual paper, will be around in their current form in, oh, let’s say, a decade or so, what about Frances’s kind of scholarship? What about nonfiction?

Somewhere among the digital Kudzu of Webfomation, I found an article about how the stories that cavepeople told on their walls still exist. Think about it. Tales about prehistoric hunts, Egyptian hieroglyphs carved into pyramids telling us about being dead all still inform us, still legible for us to read and share.

Today, we leave our histories on hard drives, CDs and flash drives. They’re all devices susceptible to melting, crashing, destruction, getting misplaced. History wiped out within minutes, not millennia.

So what’s going to happen? When scholars begin sifting through the rivers of peoples’ lives, sifting for golden nuggets of their compelling histories, where could they pan for anything? Blogs? Facebook? Myspace? Twitter? We don’t even write letters anymore. We send emails. Billions of them, and the vast majority are deleted, aren’t they?

While Frances painstakingly pored through dust and must and actual paper that carries that rich fragrance of inky history in search of her great-great-grandfather, I fingered some cool-as-hell documents my own grandfather left behind. That’s how I made my way to THE PLUNDER ROOM, my novel. That, and Google.

We novelists don’t necessarily have to camp out in the very libraries we grew up to love to do our research.

But search engines have their pitfalls. I found in one Google that I was dead.

According to a Virginia publication, the “Daily Review,” John Jeter had passed away in 1893. The article, dated March 21 of that year, read:

Old Mr. Jeter Dead

John Jeter, an aged colored man of this place, died on Saturday last about six o’clock, quite suddenly. He was about town as usual on Friday. The old man was a familiar and well known figure upon our streets; for many years he has done the bell ringing and street calling for every auction that has been held. [John Jeter's photo at right]
Mr. Jeter was about ninety years of age. The funeral services were held yesterday afternoon; interment at Riverside cemetery.

Undoubtedly, Old Mr. Jeter was greatly missed.

So, too, will be the stuff of real scholarship when paper, which becomes yellowed and perfumey and offers a useful long-lasting record, gives way to fully digitized people whose histories, whose distant lives could vanish in one click.

If Santayana’s argument that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, well … I guess I’ll stick with making stuff up.

John Jeter's novel, THE PLUNDER ROOM (St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books), tells the story of one slacker/paraplegic's mandate to salvage his family's proud legacy, an allegory of the national zeitgeist, the cultural and core-values erosion from the Greatest Generation to Generation X. He's currently wondering about his current projects.

Big Lip Models Coloring Outside the Lines

A couple weeks ago I addressed a topic at my place, (for the uninitiated that's All Things Southern on the web,radio, and TV), that I had recently broached with a few live audiences. I figured it was time to lay all the the cards on the table.

The point I made there, and I'm feeling the need to broaden the announcement, so I think I'll make it here as well, is that I have not been running all over the country espousing the value of lip color and forgetting to apply my own. I never, but never leave home without my color. I have thin lips, okay? No, I don't like it,but I've tried to accept it, in a-that's-just-the-way-the-Good-Lord-made-me sort of way. It'd be easier if folks weren't always reminding me.

The funny thing I've noticed about being in the public eye, (and am I the only one who has always found that phrase invites a really strange visual, being singular, the eye I mean), is that people think they can tell you anything, any---thang! When I first started doing my online videos, I got a few emails from folks telling me I look like Reba McIntyre. I couldn't see it. She's a little bitty blue eyed redhead. I'm a tall brown eyed brunette. Then some folks wrote in and said I looked like Trisha Yearwood. I didn't see that either, although she was more of a blondish brunette and

she's a bigger girl, no offense intended. Then it hit me. Do you see the connection? We all have thin lips.

Once I even got an email from a lady who said, "I just love watching you on TV, Shellie. You look just like family. None of us have any lips." She went on to tell me about the lip surgery she had to plump hers up and how she was happy with it, but it faded away after a little while and she was gonna have to do it again. She told me I should think hard before I did as it was painful and expensive. I didn't even know I was considering it.

She meant well. That's another one of Mama's lines. In related news, I’ve posted some pictures here of some big lip models from a recent style show in Paris. Check this out! These models have taken coloring outside the lines to a whole new level. Amen?

Seriously, it looks like they’ve been eating their red lipstick. Reminds me of the time Jessica Ann found my lipstick and painted herself up nicely, only she was four! Perhaps somebody needs a time-out. I’m just saying...

Hugs,

Shellie