Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Christine tells me that October is DV awareness month in the USA.  I’d like to start our discussion on the subject by looking at a less publicized aspect of DV – sibling abuse.

Sibling abuse is defined as being physical, emotional or sexual abuse of a child carried out by a sibling.  Sounds obvious, I know, but there’s more to it than you might think.  Sibling sexual abuse is clear case of abuse but where are the boundaries for (sibling) physical and emotional abuse?   If you have children (or brothers and sisters), I challenge you to recall a week where you didn’t observe (or participate in) a fight of some description. The main difference between sibling rivalry and sibling abuse is that in the case of abuse, one child is always the victim and the other child is always the aggressor. 

Let’s look at some specific examples:

Physical

* hitting             * slapping         * shoving       * punching

* biting              * choking          * kicking        * excessive tickling

Emotional

* teasing            * name calling     * belittling     * ridiculing

* intimidating   * annoying          * provoking    * destroy victim’s belongings

* threaten or harm family pet to elicit an emotional response from the victim

Sexual

* unwanted touching     * indecent exposure    * attempted penetration

* intercourse                     * rape                              * sodomy

Siblings may experience physical, emotional or sexual abuse in isolation or in any combination.  It’s important to note that emotional abuse is always present in physical and/or sexual abuse.

The University of Michigan’s Sibling Abuse page suggests that the following signs may suggest that sibling abuse is taking place:

* One child always avoids their sibling

* Changes in behavior such as eating and sleeping habits and nightmares

* Reenacting abuse during play

* Inappropriate sexually based play

* Violence between siblings escalates over time

* Constant complaints to parents

* Abusing a younger sibling in turn

In my post next week, I will discuss risk factors and preventative measures.   In the meantime, really watch the ‘play’ that takes place between your children.  Is there any cause for concern?

Meme??

I’ve been tagged by Helen Ginger to tell six book related things about myself.

1. My to-be-read pile consists of E-books, audio books on the Mp3 and paper books by my couch in the living room. I don’t know how people get through chores and workouts without a good audio book to focus on during the boring/grueling parts and a back lit e-book is the ONLY way I can read in bed, since my eye doctor insists I not sleep in my contacts.

2. I am a contributer to Robin Bayne’s devotional book for writers, Words to Write By

3. I HATED Nancy Drew books as a child. (Something NO mystery writer ever really admits to.) My older sisters left a stash of them in the attic and I tried to plow through them, but I never even figured out what a “roadster” was, and my brothers laughed at me when I asked.

4. On the other hand, I loved Louisa Mae Alcott and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and still do.

5. I wanted to have a bookshelf in every room of my house–but managed to restrain myself when it came to the bathroom.

6. I was one of those disgusting parents who read to my children in the womb.

Okay, who to tag, who to tag?

All right, fellow Coloradan, Beth Groundwater,
Karen Duvall
Lillie Ammann
Georgie B
Jean Henry Mead
Robin Bayne

Okay, Taggees, this is your challenge, should you decide to accept it:

The rules to play are easy:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random bookish things about yourself.
4. Tag sixish people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know he or she has been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

My Take on Sex Scenes

Narelle’s post on stretching your writing skills by writing a sex scene seems to have hit a chord with some of you.  So in the interest of the Rule of Three, I thought I’d add my two cents–recently devalued here in the American economy to just under a penny.

I not only don’t write sex scenes, I don’t read them either.  I know that they are a part of many books out there, but they’re just not my type of books.  I’m not saying I have anything against them.  I like sex–but not in my books.

Does not writing sex scenes limit me as Georgie B poses in his blog?  Sure probably. I’ve come to believe all writer have limits.

I can’t write romance. I have nothing against it. But I don’t have the right words. Recently in a chat with colleagues who DO write romance, we all were discussing certain actors as a possible hero for one woman’s book. I rejected one because I thought he was too sulky. The romance writers in the group corrected me right away. The man wasn’t sulky–the term was brooding–or even smoldering. So that’s what all that stuff means!

I have other limitations. I can’t write s/f either. I love the genre and really don’t know why I can’t write it. But it requires a bit of vision not in my makeup.

  As far as stretching my writing skills by writing sex scenes, I agree with Narelle’s assessment there– it can really help. But then I happen to believe that rendering any emotional moment from the death in a family to a conflict between a teen and her parent can stretch my skills.

To tell you the truth, all of this came as a surprise to me as a writer.  It wasn’t until I started putting the words down, that I found my limitations.  But all of this is something you don’t know (all right, I didn’t know) until you try.  What surprised you lately in your writing?  What limitations have you found?

Being taught how to write

. Tomorrow I start my first writing class. I’ve avoided them before, partly because I’m nervous about being told I’m rubbish, partly because some writing classes tend to change everyone’s style to the teachers. But tomorrow I take the plunge.

The leaflet accompanying the class claims ‘everyone can be taught to write’. I’m not sure I agree with that. It is possible to teach someone how to put a story together, how to define and introduce characters, how to put together a plot. But is it possible to teach style, or those flashes of inspiration, or the occasional perfect sentence? I’m not sure it is. Everyone can be taught to put together a story, but can they really be taught to write?

For a while I belonged to an internet group that assessed and critiqued their members writing. I was told, occasionally, that if I wanted to be published, I needed to change my style. There was nothing wrong with it, per se, but it was too individual, too much my own voice. If I wanted to be published, I was told I ‘had to write like everyone else’. I had to become blander, more homogeneous.

I refused. I wanted to stick to my own style, which I liked. And yet, I’m still not published.

So what will the class teach me? Will it really teach me to write better, to improve myself, whilst still staying true to myself? Or will it teach me to write to a formula, a formula I don’t particularly care for, but one that will earn me money.

I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

Sexual tension

Ok, lets get down to the nitty gritty.  Writing sex scenes is difficult.  Too much of the wrong type of information or God forbid, poorly chosen words, will be a turnoff.  On the other hand, omit crucial details and your readers will feel excluded and unsatisfied.  Another issue with sex scenes is that they need to advance the plot.

Plan B contains a couple of sex scenes.   The first one was based around the protagonist and her love interest having sex with each other for the first time.   That scene was easy to write because I’d built the sexual tension in the preceding scenes and, being their first time with each other, it was pretty intense.  With the buildup of desire and questions such as, ‘is this even going to happen’ and ’are we sexually compatible’ already addressed in the first scene, the second scene was a little trickier to write.  It ended up being shorter in length but still pretty effective.

I realize only a few genres support sex scenes, however, mastering the art of putting hot sex into words is a creative challenge that will enhance your writing skills.  Give it a go and report back.

More on Editing and Finding Writing Time

I want to tie up a couple of loose ends that I found after I posted last week. First the very talented Pauline Jones tweeted to me that she gets her editing checklists from the book, Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. There are lists at the end of each chapter. I don’t know how I forgot that one, because I love that book. (Whoever borrowed that one from me, please give it back!).

As to the subject of juggling our works in progress, our other writing, and just our lives, telling myself I can’t go to bed until I’ve written a page a day is working for me. I have written without fail since I started back doing that. For those of you who need accountability, I found a group called the club 100 writers. The idea is to write 100 words a day for 100 days. Members report in with their word counts each day.  If you are more motivated by prizes, try the Novelsisterhood. They offer a challenge each month for the member who can write the most words.

Me? I’m trying both, but since I am usually writing late at night, so I can finally go to sleep, I am lousy at reporting in. On the other hand, I wrote this blog while I was running this morning (I was 3 feet from a doe–it was so cool.) so I haven’t given up on the MP3 recording/writing quite yet.

Found something new to help you write? Tell me! I can use the help.

Living life

. One of the many, many, MANY things that annoy me is people who say to me ‘You spend too much time reading, instead of living a real life. Get your head out of your book, and go and live’.

Well, for a start, their idea of ‘living life’ is to spend every evening in the pub – which I don’t enjoy more than once or twice a month.

As for ‘living life’ – it doesn’t matter how much I do, or where I go, my life can only ever be what happens to me. In books, however, I get to live a hundred thousand lives. This week alone, I have walked the gardens of Versailles with the Sun King, fought evil villains in the Carribean, hunted down Jack the Ripper and danced in a ballroom the nightbefore Waterloo. Where could I do all that outside a book?

And even when I do lift my head up, and go travelling, my reading brings a life to the places I visit. I walk down by the Tate Gallery, and think of the people of Our Mutual Friend, I visit Rochester and think of Great Expectations. Egypt is beautiful, but it is made even more so when I remember Lord Caernavon asking ‘what do you see?’ and Howard Carter breathlessly replying ‘beautiful things!’ as he opens Tutanhamun’s tomb. That is an experience I could never have myself, but there it is, in a book, for me to relive.

One person once told me (thinking she was being complimentary) that she envied the way I lived outside reality, engrossed in my books. She’s wrong. I don’t escape reality by reading. I make reality far more wondrous than she could ever imagine, and I live realities she has never heard of.

Love it or hate it?

As I develop my writing skills, I’m learning how to recognise and omit needless words.   I recall having a having an e-mail chat with a writer friend, Stephanie Elliot  http://www.stephanieelliot.com/, about our least favourite words and sayings.

 

I’m sure Stephanie won’t mind me sharing that she was the first one to point out that I use the phrases “needless to say” and “it goes without saying” in my writing.  Do I need to tell you what she told me to do with those phrase?  Obviously can also be removed from your writing.

 

Stephanie also shared that she can’t stand ”can I just say?” or “I have to say…”.  While I don’t use these in my writing, I have been guilty of saying them (luckily not to Stephanie).   

 

My personal dislikes are: moist and panties (whether they appear in the same sentence or not!).  I can’t stand it when people say the word moist, it always sounds sordid.  Besides, there are alternatives such as damp or wet.  As for panties, well they’re called undies Downunder (ok, well maybe not everyone in Australia calls them undies but damn it, they should). 

 

Onto my favourites…I use the word “just” way too often in my writing.  In fact, I have I’ve just started using the search and replace function just to check how many ‘justs’ I use.  The result is usually alarming. 

 

My favourite spoken words are ’seriously’, ’shocking’ and ‘chevapchichi’ (a Croatian sausage).  Chevapchichi is fun just because it sounds like a made up word but it’s actually real and if you say fast you can make it sound like a train.  I guess I use ’seriously’ for affect.  I didn’t know I said ’shocking’ a lot until my friends Jan and Sean from L.A. came out for a visit.  Sean said that my overuse of the word appealed to him so much that he’d resolved to take ’shocking’ home and start hammering it himself.    Nice!

 

What are your most and least favourite words and phrases?  Which word to you overuse in your writing?

An Aha Moment

My second book (Safe House), is out in electronic version and about to come out in print, so in between promotion for that book, blogging here, and trying to write a new book, (see Narelle’s post on Writing Projects) I’m trying to spruce up book three (Safe Reunion) of the series to send out. I took the manuscript to critique as I wrote it and edited it like crazy so it should have been easy. The manuscript was fun, and light.  But it was only okay.  I didn’t love it.

So back in July, I entered the secret agent contest on Miss Snark’s first victim to see what other entrants and the agent would say about the first 250 words. (If you missed this contest, don’t blame me, I wrote about it here–but check out the blog, she may have more.)
It was a great help because the agent said this:”I wish we could have a little more of the narrator–I feel like I have a baseline on Patty but not Kaye.”

Hold on  a sec!  Say what?  I had violated a rule that I’ve known about for years.  I had failed to put down what Kaye, my heroine wanted–needed. Robert Olen Butler calls it yearning in “From Where You Dream, The Process of Writing Fiction.”  Dwight Swain and Jack Bickham (“Scene and Structure”) call it goal. What does the hero really want? What does the bad guy/antagonist want? It’s essential for the reader to know that if we want the reader to root for the home team. And I hadn’t put that in.

Naturally, I revised immediately–and I’m looking over the rest of the manuscript to make sure it remains in the forefront of every scene. I’m known in my critique groups for looking for just this thing.  Just a small statement of the long term (book) goal, helps get the book started. A statement in every scene about the short term desire (“All I really want,” said Rose as she trudged through the desert, “is to get out of this blasted sun.”) Wow! And I forgot.  I definitely am putting this one as number one on my “things to check when you do the final edit” list.

So what is on your list of things to check when you revise your final draft? What do you say in critique so often that all of your critique members KNOW you will thump them on it, if they forget?  Tell all here!

Creating as therapy

. I’m going to be controversial today.

I was reading a book about mental health, and I read about a man who suffered from schizophrenia. It had started when he was young, in a dead-end, boring job, when to amuse his active, creative, intelligent mind, he had started a rich fantasy life as a spy. The fantasy life took over reality, and he ended up in a mental hospital, totally zoned out on drugs that left him empty. Eventually, he recovered – not through drugs, which he refused to take, but by sheer self-will

That reminded me of when I was younger, also stuck in a dead end job, which involved standing doing nothing for ages (never work in a library!). I also took refuge in a rich fantasy life. However, when I realised that I was spending more time in my mind than in reality, and it was taking a bit of effort to snap out of it into a reality that threatened to drown me in depression, I took steps.

I did not go to the doctor. I did not take pills. Instead, I wrote my fantasies down. I could slip fully into my dream life, create my stories, put the pen down and step back into a reality that seemed brighter and more joyful because I was happier.

Many writers and artists could be defined as mentally ill. William Blake was almost certainly schizophrenic, as was Van Gogh, Charlotte Bronte was depressed. I used to perform a comedy sketch, written by Victora Wood, which said if Charlotte Bronte were alive today, she’d be on pills, or have a perm, and be much happier.

That’s true. If she were alive today, she’d be on anti-depressants – and Jane Eyre would never have been written. If William Blake were alive today, he’d be locked up, and those wonderful poems and utterly unique art would not exist. Van Gogh would probably be zoned out on heavy medication, and Starry Starry Night would never have be seen.

Someone once described mental illness as an excess of creativity. Perhaps that should be how we treat it. Write and paint and sing your way out of mental unrest. Blake died happy, knowing where he was going – he’d already seen angels. Van Gogh found peace only when he painted. Charlotte wrote her depression out, creating four great novels. The final photograph of her shows a married woman, pleasantly surprised, happy.

I don’t think pills should be the way we deal with unhappiness, or loneliness, or boredom, or an overwhelming fantasy life. I think perhaps, for a lot of people dealing with mental illness, we should put a pencil in their hand and say ‘Go ahead – put your mind on the paper’.

See, I told you I was going to be controversial. But don’t you just hate the idea that so many overwhelming creative talents out there are being strangled by drugs, because they do fit the norm of how we should behave? That was nearly me, and I thank goodness that I escaped that.