Nerd for Hire

Rios de la Luz 143 pages Broken River Books (2017)

Read this if you like: Isabel Allende, V. Castro, Arundhati Roy

tl;dr summary: A pair of sisters in a magical family navigate the grief of losing their Abuelita, grow up

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It’s New Year Resolution time again—when we all look back over our past year, what we accomplished, what we didn’t, and what we want to do better our next time around the sun. From talking to the writers in my circle, it seems like establishing a more consistent, regular writing routine is a popular resolution this year.

This is one area where I have some first-hand expertise to share. I’ve always been pretty good at establishing and maintaining routines when I put my mind to it, but I fell out of my daily writing routine a few years ago when both work and life in general got hectic. One of my goals for 2024 was getting back into a regular writing habit, and I’m pleased with the new routine I’ve developed over the past year. 

Part of what has helped me to do that is finding the right tools to keep me accountable and give me a bit of extra motivation on the days I’m not quite feeling it. So I figured I’d share some of the tools I either use currently or have used successfully in the past to keep myself writing regularly.

There's a long and strong tradition of writing poems and stories based on works of visual arts. Such a strong tradition there's a whole genre devoted to it, ekphrastic writing, which is a term that can mean either a vivid, dramatic description of a work of art or a piece inspired by a work of visual art, depending on the context and who you're talking to. 

I've experimented with ekphrasis in the past and find it to be a fun exercise. I also find that music can be an excellent source of creative inspiration, either as a direct prompt for story ideas or as a way to set the right atmosphere for a setting or home in on the personality of a character. Then there are other forms of art that have a very direct and obvious way of potentially inspiring stories. Things like drama and movies, for instance, which can be directly adapted into a story or poem, or can serve as the jumping-off point to extend the story beyond what's shown in the original. Many songs fit into this category too, I think, especially ones with lyrics that already tell a story or introduce characters, and visual art that depicts an action-in-progress can function in the same way. I'll group these things together as “narrative art” because they have some kind of built-in plot progression. 

What I wanted to focus on in this post are a few prompts for getting story ideas from non-narrative works of art—things like instrumental music, music with abstract lyrics, or visual works like statues, abstracts, still lifes, and landscapes. Here are some ways I've gotten ideas from other works of art that I thought might be helpful for other writers, too. 

Isabelle Allende 443 pages Vintage Español (2011)

Read this if you like: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Chilean history, genre-blurring coming-of-age novels

tl;dr summary: Teenager on the LAM finds refuge in a small village in Chile and learns about both herself and her family’s history in the process.

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Writing flash fiction in any genre is hard for me. I love a well-built world, a complex plot, a big cast of characters—all things that are tricky to fit into any short story length, much less in 1,000 words or less.

This is also what I’ve come to love about writing flash fiction, though. It’s a valuable exercise in focus and economy of language. Any flash story is condensed in some way, but that’s especially true for fantasy, sci-fi, or historical—any genre where you need to establish a world the reader doesn’t know yet. It takes a deft hand to immerse someone in a new reality, introduce them to a character they care about, and give them an actual plot to follow, without letting the story sprawl beyond a flash piece’s limited real estate.

I've had a soft spot for stories told as found documents since I first watched the Blair Witch Project in high school. And, yes, while there are legitimate criticisms of movies made in that kind of shaky-hand, “no this is real, though” style, I do appreciate the extra level of immersion it brings. It's a full commitment to the lie. Typical movies say, “Here, watch this idea I came up with and let's pretend together that it's something that happened.” But when it's found footage, the person behind the camera is saying: “This really happened.” And no, they don't really believe that—but there's more of a sense that they want the reader to believe it, more of an invitation to inhabit the story's world.

The same applies when the story is told in book form. High school was also around when I first read other people's published journals, Anne Frank's first for class then Sylvia Plath's on my own. Real-life journals are even more intimate than a memoir or autobiography. The author isn't curating their life to present it to the audience. They're showing their inner thoughts, day-to-day, exposing their full, theoretically uncensored selves on the page.

Anthony Veasna So 260 pages Ecco (2021) 

Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Jennifer Egan, Alan Heathcock

Tl;dr summary: Various views of the day-to-day lives of Cambodian refugees in California. 

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Harvest deities are recurring figures in world mythologies—which makes sense. Food is kind of important for a civilization’s survival, for one thing. As a mediocre gardener, I can also understand why ancient people would have assumed the success and failure of crops happened at the whim of some capricious spirit, because the whole thing really does seem inexplicable sometimes. 

I’ve been going back through my mythology research for a couple of projects. I always find it interesting to track the ways different cultures viewed similar figures in their pantheon—the relative importance given to one area compared to others, or what other areas of responsibility were under that same deity’s domain. With that in mind, here’s a round-up of some of the harvest gods I’ve taken notes on in my research.

November is upon us, and with it the annual return of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as the cool kids call it). For those unfamiliar, the idea behind NaNoWriMo is to produce an entire novel draft in a month, which is typically defined as writing 50,000 words. I’ve dabbled with taking part in these challenges in the past, but admittedly not for many years—and, the few times I did attempt the challenge, I gave up well before reaching that 50K word count aim.

I’m a very achievement-oriented human overall, so it bothers me more than it probably should when I fail to meet a goal—even an arbitrary goal that I set for myself and no one else cares if I hit or not. This is, honestly, part of why I don’t try to do the NaNoWriMo thing most years. My usual approach to long projects isn’t to just vomit all the words out at once in a torrent. I’m typically more inclined to write a few chapters at a time, bouncing back and forth between generating new words, editing earlier chapters, and stepping back even further to fill in details of the world or characters.

This year, though, I happened to have a novel idea that’s been sitting in my head waiting for me to have time to write it. I’ve already built a lot of the world, created several of my characters, and have a rough idea of where I want the plot to go. Because of this, it felt like the perfect opportunity to give this whole NaNoWriMo thing another shot. But this has also gotten me thinking about creative goals in general, and just what makes a goal valuable.

I’ve completed another novel draft, which means I’m at that delightfully terrifying stage again: pitch time. A process I’ve yet to unlock the secrets of; the last novel I shopped around has yet to find a home. Granted, the manuscript itself could be to blame—it’s a beast of a novel, around 173,000 words, which is a hard sell even in hard sci-fi land—but I suspect there are also still plenty of things I could improve about my query packet and process.

One strategy I haven’t yet attempted is doing live pitches. I go to a lot of conferences where this is an option but have always talked myself out of signing up. I’m enough of an introvert that just thinking about selling my project face-to-face in real-time makes me want to find some dark corner to hide in. The thing is, I don’t want to let myself miss opportunities just because something makes me uncomfortable. So I’ve resolved to start taking my shot with live pitches. 

Like the good Virgo I am, this means I’ve also been doing a lot of research into just what’s involved in live pitches and how to get the most out of them. I don’t have any first-hand advice to offer on the subject yet, but I have found some very helpful (and reassuring) advice from people who are actually experts in this whole thing. I figured I’d share them with folks here in case anyone else out there is in need of some live pitching pointers.