McWriting

Have you ever had a week where things kept popping up that set you down a long path of thinking about a topic? Sure you have. My topic this week was writing outside of the publishing parameters.

What put me on this path was a comment on a newscast about Sarah Palin developing her "brand". Writers are often told to create a brand, build a platform and write what publishers want. All of which have created a half million vampire books, Harry Potter wannabes and cozy mysteries populated with hobbies, recipes, and pets. Gimmicks. In case no one ever noticed, ranchers brand their cows because they all look alike. Do you, as a writer, really want your story to be a pale imitation of everyone else's story? And the flip side is this question. Do you want to keep writing the same story over and over because that's the brand you've stuck on your work?

This last year, I stepped out of my comfort zone of writing hard noir crime fiction. Why? Because I couldn't crack into ThugLit or Plots with Guns and I couldn't figure out why. I was writing in all the curse words all the nasty degenerate things I could think of but my heart wasn't in it. My stories disgusted me. And I expect it showed. Once I cleaned up those stories and put a little heart in them, they sold to places like Shred of Evidence and Mouth Full of Bullets. Not the "holy grail" of noir but respected zines. And readers let me know that they enjoyed these stories.

I love writing crime stories, and noir especially, but I also wanted to experiment, to write stories that revolved around families, to play in the sci-fi and western playgrounds, to not keep writing the same story of screwed up characters over and over. If I brand myself as a crime writer, do I lose the option of writing the other stories that bubble up in me? Do I have to take every idea and spin it around a crime in order to be published?

Next, there was the discussion on SMFS about writing for the reader or writing for yourself, which I kind of instigated. If you want to published by a specific zine or NY publisher you have to write to their specs. There's nothing wrong with that if that's what you crave as a writer and if you have the skills to do it. Me? Been there and done that. It doesn't work for me.

A good example is my story "Glory in the Flower". I had bent that story so many ways over the years and had it rejected by so many zines, I finally tossed it in a drawer. When I was asked to contribute a gardening story to "Seeds" that was the first story that popped into my mind. The only editorial requirement was to keep it G rated and under a thousand words. Since the story was 1200 words and your standard revenge, bury the body in the garden story, I started slicing and dicing.

By cutting back to the bare bones, I found the sweet spot that could change the story into something different. I followed the heart of the story. As writers, that's what we should always seek to find when we're writing, the heart, not the gimmick. Will it be what an editor is looking for? Not always, but then it could be more than they're looking for. It could be that "give me something different" that they always say they're looking for but a writer can never quite find when they're trying too hard to please an editor.

And then this morning I read Scott Parker's post over at Do Some Damage. http://dosomedamage.blogspot.com/2010/02/we-are-world-and-losing-our-voice.html While Scott's post is about music, my mind jumped immediately to writing, to books and short stories that all read the same. We're all taught the same rules, start with the action then go faster until the story explodes with a mind-boggling twist. If you read any of the current crop of crime zines, that's what you'll find, the same formula over and over. But if you step back and think about it, the stories that really slap you in the face are the ones that don't follow the formula or that do, and give you something different within the formula. Those writers who get your attention have probably followed the heart of the story, crossed over the line of formula and into a place that tugs at your emotions or makes you sit up and think, yeah, okay, I can go here with this writer.

I know a lot of people didn't like "The DaVinci Code" but it's a prime example of taking a stroll off the beaten path. Dan Brown asked his readers to travel a "what if" path with him. What if Jesus had been married? After all, God sent his son to earth to experience being human and having a wife and child is part of that process, so why not? If a reader trusts the writer, he can take them anywhere. You just have write a "what if" that readers can believe in on some level. Readers love when you surprise them and take them on a journey where they least expect to go. Trust yourself, and trust your story. Choose not to be a McWriter. Unless that's really the path you want to take.

It's your choice how you write. You're the one behind the keyboard of your writing journey.

Now this is all written from my perspective as a writer who is learning to follow the story's path, who doesn't expect to ever have a published novel or make a billion dollars and I'm happy with that. And every writer who reads this has to decide what makes them happy, what they're looking for from their writing and do what's best for them. I'm no shining example of how its done - I'm just tapping away at the keyboard with the rest of you, trying to figure it all out.