Guest Post: Writing on the Go

A guest post by Blair Hurley from www.blairhurley.com listing some hints on how to make sure you’re writing on the go.

Writing on the Go by Blair Hurley

Writers use their own environment constantly to enrich their stories. We draw upon our settings and the people around us to create worlds. So when we travel, it’s crucial to take advantage of the new environment and use it to improve our fiction. But when you’re on the go in a new place, how’s a writer supposed to get down information? Read on!

Get a notebook! It’s hardly rocket science to decide to have a notebook handy, but when you’re traveling it’s especially important. Find a small, easy-to-handle notebook (I suggest a Moleskine, which are very popular right now and are affordable and tough) and slip it in your purse or back pocket. While on your trip or just during your usual daily travels, you should get used to being attached at the hip to that notebook (and a pen, too). Whenever you leave the house, take the notebook with you. Eventually it will become a habit and then you’ll never be without writing material when an idea or an interesting observation strikes.

Write down even the obvious. Our brains are pretty extraordinary and we’re all used to storing a tremendous amount of varied information without writing it down. But once you start writing down your observations, you’ll realize how much you actually lost before. Whenever you see an interesting-looking stranger, a beautiful building, a food you’ve never seen before, or an unusual event, jot down some notes. Later, when you’re wondering what to write or how to make it seem genuine, you’ll have these interesting details to call upon.

Use all your senses, and participate in your world. When we travel around, too much these days we shut ourselves out from all external stimulation by putting on headphones. Listening to music is great, but it closes us off from the world, as evidenced by the number of traffic accidents that are iPod-related. The more you engage with your surroundings, the more you’ll notice and the more material you’ll get. So if you’re going to a new place, turn off that Mp3 player and look, listen, smell and touch. Remember not just how a place looked, but how it smelled and felt as well. These sensory details are invaluable material for your fiction.

So in conclusion, whenever you’re on the go, you don’t have to wait until you get back to write about it. Take down notes on all aspects of the experience — while you’re on a subway, while walking down a street, even on a plane. Use your small moments to pull out that notebook and record the details of your environment, and it will prove a gold mine of resources for your next stories.

Blair Hurley is a creative writing student at Princeton University. She writes the blog Creative Writing Corner at blairhurley.com, which offers daily writing exercises, how-to’s, and thoughts on the writing life.

Next week, a guest post from Bethany (Word Nerd). She’s going to give us a guide to reading science fiction/fantasy!

Relating to my Characters: Penmanship and Fountain Pens

I envy my own characters even though they live in my head and therefore, are technically me anyway. Why the envy? They have distinctive penmanship and can wield a fountain pen with a flourish. I silently wail against the loss of the importance of penmanship in the real world, and especially the loss of my own penmanship, due to the efficiency of computers and e-mail, and the rising cost of snail mail. Or rather, I wail against the fact that I had no real patience to excel at penmanship in the first place. I could blame this on the now-now-now of today’s culture, but I won’t. I love to get mail, so I should write more of it, which should encourage more people to send me mail in the first place.

Sometimes I think that the historical fiction part of me is entirely at odds with the computer scientist part. For instance, despite my obsession with efficiency, I would love to write in a scrawling hand that visibly defines my personality. I want to take the time to create evidence of my handwriting that, years later, my children and grandchildren can gawk over and infer that I was a determined woman given to fanciful thoughts… or something sentimental like that.

So I decided the other day to buy a fountain pen set and train myself to write the way my characters do. I did some research about fountain pens and found that today, if you want a nice fountain pen, it will cost you at least fifty American dollars. And that technology has advanced the pen so that you can actually buy them in a disposable format, the way you would buy a Pilot rollerball pen. (I, of course, bought the disposable kind. And I love them!)

However, I couldn’t stop there with the modern fountain pen; I had to go back to first fountain pen thanks to my thirst for irrelevant knowledge. Sadly, there is a discrepancy between how old the fountain pen is. Some claim the oldest known was created by a Frenchman in 1702, whereas other resources say Egyptian caliphs commissioned the first one in the 10th Century, and still others say there were experimentations as early as the 1st Century.

The fountain pen that we know today, where a capillary feed regulates the ink flow, was first patented in 1884 by Lewis Waterman. He invented this capillary feed after his new, extravagant pen leaked all over an important contract that he subsequently lost to a competing broker. Funny how desperation and irritation are the true mothers of invention.

Today, there are multiple ways for filling the ink cartridge of a fountain pen. There is the traditional way of filling it with an eyedropper, and then there are button, lever, coin, and click mechanisms which alter the internal pressure of the pen, allowing it to “suck up” the ink. In the 1950s, pre-filled replaceable cartridges became all the rage because they were easy to insert and cheap to buy…but the invention of the ballpoint pen overshadowed the improvement and I don’t think the fountain pen has gotten over the shock yet.

Even though modern fountain pens are expensive compared to ballpoint pens, there is still a valid use for them in the pen market. For instance, many arthritis/carpal tunnel sufferers feel it’s easier to write with a fountain pen because of the effortless ink flow and large diameter of the pen (to allow for cartridge size). There is a larger variety of colors in comparison to the ballpoint pen. And then there’s the snob factor: There’s something classic, regal, and elegant about writing with a fountain pen. People respect a person who writes with a fountain pen because it’s assumed to be a harder instrument to write with.

…Or maybe that’s just what I like to think people are thinking about me when they see me writing with my fountain pens.

*Information compiled from Wikipedia, About.com: fountain pens, and About.com: Lewis Waterman.
*Fountain pen nib image found at Wikimedia Commons, cartoon found at Cartoon Stock.

From the Notebook: All About Lovers

In the fall I read many wonderful texts from American Lit (circa 1820 – 1860), especially some great things by feminist writers of the time. To celebrate the coming of Valentine’s Day, here is Fanny Fern’s hilarious satire of lovers and love.

For a little bit of background, Fanny Fern was the pen-name of Sarah Willis Parton, a woman writing in the 1850s onward. Sarah began her writing career because her second marriage was a bust (the first made her a widow, she left the second, presumably because he was abusive), and neither her family nor her in-laws wanted to support her or her children. (To be fair, it wasn’t their fault that she couldn’t keep a husband… and… I’m being completely sarcastic.) Unable to support her girls, she sent her eldest to live with family, and began writing.

Sarah’s best work comes out in the short narrative, often in her articles written for local newspapers. She had a huge following, both men and women, and had a healthy dose of critics who thought she was much too assertive and aggressive of a writer to be a true woman. She had a great sense of humor about it all, as exampled in one of her articles where she describes going to the theatre only to watch a more glamorous woman be pointed out as “that writer, Fanny Fern.”

Sarah wrote both sentimentally and sarcastically, (read Ruth Hall for a great example of both), but I’m providing a sample of one of her more satirical works. The following article advises young women to test their young men with little annoyances, just to see how they might fare in marriage.

All About Lovers

Nothing like the old-fashioned long “engagements,” say we. Then you have a chance to find out something about a young man before marriage. Now-a-days matrimony follows so close upon the heels of “an offer,” that it is no wonder our young people have a deal of sad thinking to do afterward. There are a thousand little things in daily intercourse of my duration, which are constantly resolving themselves into test of character; slight they may be, but very significant.

Some forlorn old lady must have an escort home of a cold evening; she walks slow, and tells the same story many times: see how your lover comports himself under this. He is asked to read aloud in some home circle, some book he has already perused in private, or some one in which he is not at all interested: watch him then. Notice, also, if he invariably takes the most comfortable chair in the room, “never thinking” to offer it to a person who may enter till he or she is already seated. Invite him to carve for you at the table. Give him a letter to drop in the post-office, and find out if it ever leaves that grave–his pocket. Open and read his favorite favorite newspaper before he gets a chance to do so. Mislay his cigar-case. Lose his cane. Sit accidentally on his new beaver [hat]. Praise another man’s coat or cravat. Differ from him in a favorite opinion. Put a spoonful of gravy on his meat instead of his potatoes.

Ah, you may laugh! But just try him in these ways, and see how he will wear; for it is not the great things of life over which we mortals stumble. A rock we walk around; a mountain we cross: it is the unobserved, unexpected, unlooked-for little sticks and pebbles which cause us to halt on life’s journey.

New York Ledger July 30, 1859

When I first read this list of annoyances, I couldn’t help but laugh, but Fanny Fern is completely right. For all her satire, she gives excellent advice for anyone in a relationship or about to start a new one. We “stumbling mortals” never seem to pay attention to the little things, but I know it’s the build-up of the little things that make me just explode sometimes. So to those of you reading this blog, if the significant person in your life starts to really annoy you, take a second look. They might be doing it on purpose.

From the Notebook: Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888

Things are definitely crazy here on campus (did I mention I’m a Buckeye?), what with it being my last undergraduate year (!!). Grad school applications are slowly going out, and I will admit that a couple of these posts have been timestamped ahead of time just to keep up.

On to the subject of this post. This past summer I found treasure: Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888 is amazing. It’s written by Charles Dickens’s son, Charles Dickens, and covers everything from how much admission will cost (according to where you sit) in every major theatre in London, to how a person should walk down the street if you don’t want to get mugged. Here is an interesting article about fog that had me chuckling:

Fogs are, no doubt, not peculiar to London. Even Paris itself can occasionally turn out very respectable work in this way, and the American visitor to England will very probably think, in passing the banks of Newfoundland, that he has very little to learn on the subject of fog. But what Mr Guppy called “a London particular,” and what is more usually known to the natives as a “peasouper,” will very speedily dispel any little hallucination of this sort.

As the east wind brings up the exhalations of the Essex and Kentish marshes, and as the damp-laden winter air prevents the dispersion of the partly consumed carbon from hundreds of thousands of chimneys, the strangest atmospheric compound known to science fills the valley of the Thames. At such times almost all of the senses have their share of trouble. Not only does a strange and worse than Cimmerian darkness hide familiar landmarks from the sight, but the taste and smell are offended by an unhallowed compound of flavours, and all things become greasy and clammy to the touch. During the continuance of a real London fog–which may be black, or grey, or more probably orange-coloured–the happiest of men is he who can stay at home…

From Dickens’s Dictionary of London 1888: An Unconventional Handbook by Charles Dickens © 2006 by Old House Books

So… I basically read this “dictionary” cover-to-cover. Shows how much of a research nerd I am, right? I still can’t believe my luck that I found a guide to London published exactly in the middle of my novel’s time line. Dickens is a wonderful writer, as you can tell by the passage above. Who knew fog could be so interesting? You can tell Dickens loved London, that he knew it intimately, and that he was probably a spirited conversationalist. The first couple of pages in the book include a detailed map of London, which is indispensable for a history writer like me.

So let me ask you writers, have you ever found that one source that proved to make the others pale in comparison? A primary source that gives you an insider look? What about sources that sent you on a wild goose chase? Do you even care about research?

From the Notebook: Victorians and the Environment

By the High Victorian era, which describes the 1870s and beyond, many activists and doctors were starting to connect the welfare and livelihood of Londoners to their environment around them. In the 1860s, the Thames in London was so fetid, so polluted, that Parliament scheduled its activities so the smell wouldn’t sit stagnant in the heat. It was too hot to sit in the rooms with the windows shut, but with the windows open, the smell was so unbearable that men compared it to actual torture. Cholera, spread by bacteria in liquids, was a great epidemic in the 19th Century because of the sanitary conditions.

William Farr was able to prove that contaminated water spread the disease, rather than the popular belief in miasma. As such, water and sewage treatment facilities were put in place, though not in time to prevent a cholera outbreak in London’s East End, where all of the manufacturing plants were.

By the late 1870s, Londoners could punt on the Thames, with the river actually becoming a tourist event rather than a place to studiously avoid… Ten years earlier, one saw dead fish and the occasional person, smelled garbage and human waste; it was a mess.

Luckily, the Victorians, with their obsession with cleanliness (as it is close to Godliness), turned their eye to their environment and started to make a change.

This entry was part of Blog Action day.

Being Worderella

Things have been crazy around Worderella’s part of the world lately. I took the GRE yesterday, my second time, just to see if I could improve my somewhat decent score. I did, so huzzah! I have been reading a lot, which explains the lack of article-posting and the proliferation of book-review-posting. I’m also working on graduate school applications, my college’s magazine, and my appeal to graduate form which gets me priority scheduling for the next year.

I have not been writing. I wrote about ten thousand words last month, and this month, maybe two. I’m not too worried about this, however, because I came to a scene where I realized my character, who is very spirited, was doing something no girl in her right mind would do in 1887 London. Back to the research books for me! I have this horrible habit of doing enough general research to get the muse flowing, and then once I need actual details, I start the real research, the hunting in my university’s huge library (how I’m going to miss it when I graduate!), the desperate eBay buys for books long out of print and discarded from libraries.

My current dilemma: how would a spirited American girl, attempting to marry an English title, act in London? Basically, I need her to embarrass herself without causing so great a scandal that she becomes un-marriageable. Thus, I’m reading this great book called To Marry an English Lord, Or, How Anglomania Really Got Started by Gail MacColl. Having already read the biography of Jennie Churchill nee Jerome, I had a good idea of how an American like Jennie might get married, but this book gives details for all the major Pan-Atlantic marriages, as well as a more approachable look at the royal family and their interaction with the aristocracy…so much material, so many ideas, and I’m only 22 pages in!

Over at History Hoydens, one of my favorite blogs, they talk about the research they do for their historical romance. Today they have an amazing post on the truth behind Jane Austen and Tom LeFroy…I couldn’t have written it better, so anyone interested in seeing Becoming Jane ought to read that post first. Tom LeFroy was not the inspiration for Mr Darcy. I’m sorry, but it is true.

In other news, the new Writer’s Digest is out, and I’m in it! My author website, Worderella.com, was submitted for the Top Author Website Contest, and I placed top ten! In celebration, I’ve added a few items to the website, such as samples of my old writings; short stories from high school, poetry from college. I’ve also added an announcements section to the index page…I hope to keep the content fresh on the website but it’s hard as a full-time engineering student, so I’ll update you here at the blog if new things show up.

And for those of you who think you might never become a published author, check out Erica Writes August 15 post about how one procrastinating woman not only impressed the great Miss Snark with a hook that had no manuscript to go with it, she has since gotten representation for it! A great story, and she’s holding a title contest. Check her out!

The Heart of the Story

Though this is more about feature writing in a newsmagazine or some such publication, I thought this article was helpful for us fiction writers as well. Just um…whenever he writes “journalist,” substitute “fiction writer.” In general, it works out.

The Heart of the Story
by Jon Ronson, feature writer for The Guardian

Finding a Story to Tell
How do you begin your story? All journalists are, to a greater or lesser degree, paranoid conspiracy theorists. This is because stories do not have natural boundaries, every lead can take you to another lead, every thought to another thought, and eventually – if you allow yourself to become crazy – every story you write can incorporate the past, present, and future of all human civilisation. You don’t believe me? Okay, I’m going to pick a topic at random. The Paris fashion shows.

Every journalist is – at some point in their career – asked to cover the Paris fashion shows. The brief is this: we are slobs with no fashion sense. Wouldn’t it be funny to send us to this strange world, where we can be wide-eyed, sardonic innocents, making fun of the pomposity, the circus, and the expensive clothes?

So you start with that very brief, but the conspicuous, garish wealth on display starts to grind you down. Where are the clothes produced? Are they stitched together in some sweatshop where the workers are beaten up for complaining about their conditions? So it becomes a story about that. And you feel so superior in your slobbishness, and you think it’s all a con, but what if you’re wrong? I don’t like looking like a slob. Are they happier than me? What is happiness? How old is that girl? Oh my God, am I a dirty old man for finding her attractive? Why does the age of consent differ from country to country? Is the Law as fragile as a shifting sandbank? Should the Law respond to the moral climate or dictate it? Is she too thin? She looks ill, yet attractive. Why is that? Why did Ali McGraw become better looking the sicker she got in Love Story?

From the Notebook: Inside the Victorian Home

I have so many notes dedicated to life in the Victorian home that I could probably dedicate an entire month’s worth of posts to the topic. I won’t, but here are some tidbits here and there that I found interesting.

Currency controlled by the Royal Mint after 1884, thus…

• One pound (denoted £) = 20 shillings
• One shilling (denoted s) = 12 pence
• One pence (denoted d) = 1 penny

Prosperous Middle Class: generally earned around £ 50 per year (annum), which allowed for 5 bedrooms, dressing rooms, bathrooms (upper middle class often had 12+ rooms in a house)

• top floor: servants, childrens bedrooms (2-3)
• half-landing: bathroom
  • 1880s bath and sink were iron, tin, stoneware, earthenware
  • bathroom walls covered in varnished wallpaper
  • floor covered in enamel paint
  • tub had lead plate with turned up edges and waste pipe for extra water
• 2nd floor: master bedroom, dressing room, second bedroom
• 1st floor: drawing room
• ground floor: dining room, morning room
• basement: kitchen, scullery*, breakfast room

* Scullery aka back kitchen; had running water and used for food preparation that was messy (fish, veggies, cleaning pots)
* Pantry has wooden sink lined with lead to prevent chipping; stored china, glass, silver, sink to wash aforementioned items
* Larder was used for fresh food storage
* Store-room held dried goods and the cleaning equipment

Linoleum was popular in kitchens, passageways, and sculleries because they were easy to clean.
- patented in 1860

From Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England by Judith Flanders. © 2003

From the Notebook: Victorian Courting Customs

First thing’s first: someone has randomly thanked me for posting in this journal, and encouraged me to keep up the good work. I don’t know who wrote the comment, but let me thank you for leaving it. Writing is a lonely adventure sometimes. Random, anonymous comments, while frustrating because the commenter remains mysterious, are greatly appreciated. Not to gush or anything, because the comment is a little sparse, but I’ve been having a semi-bad week thanks to school stresses and residual back/leg pain from an injury, and this random comment completely made my day.

All right. Now that I’ve managed to contain my pleasure, I thought I’d treat you all with a little bit of something something from my notes about courtships. I missed Valentine’s Day, but February is the month of love and hey, I am a romance writer, so here’s an excerpt from my research journal:

Courtship at most formal:

• Man wants to marry?
  1. Consider future prospects, financial position –> justify his trying to attract women?
  2. See if chosen women return his affection “with delicacy and caution to avoid compromising her” (can happen even before meeting the girl)
     -Might see her in church, at a ball, be family friend
  3. If haven’t met her before, arrange for mutual friend to introduce him to family
     -If no mutual friend, good sign the idea should be dropped cuz families don’t run in same social circle
• Girl and Guy meet in family circles with at least one married member present…allows girl to “assess his worth”
  -Does he diss women? Does he attend church? Are his hobbies “low and vulgar?”
  -He also can’t be lazy, eccentric, frivolous or foppish
  -He better have enough biz interest to ensure they’ll have future $$ 

  -Also allows him to see if she is attentive to her duties, respectful/affectionate to parents, kind to siblings, mellow…

• If she turns out to be a flirt or he a jerk, they can remove themselves from the courtship at this process and not feel guilty
• Now he can speak to her father. If dad’s agreeable, speak to daughter

Parent’s involvement along gender lines: dad takes care of financial concerns, mom looks at social compatability.

If all looks good, invitations set so couple can meet, give talking opportunities…

Information gleaned from Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England by Judith Flanders

In other words, courtship was a business back then. I’m not sure how many happy couples were created out of such a courtship system, but given the number of romantic fiction authors, I hope there were a lot. Or at least a few. But then, given the divorce rate these days, and, knowing that for many couples, the divisive topic was money, maybe we should consider marriage more of a business than we do?

Anyway, Happy belated Valentine’s Day! May your muse bless you with beautiful prose that befits the month of love.

Research: Text and Games

Getting stuck on finding the texts you need for your research? Believe me, I’ve been there. After reading one book, liking some of the information but wishing I could read the book that a certain chapter referenced, I then start the hunt. I look at my local library, I look in my university library. Given that my university is huge, when the book isn’t here, I begin to despair. I look at the bookstores, but all the chain stores around here have no imaginative texts at all. I look online, only to find the book is completely out of print, or, I could use my soul and some change as payment to get a mint condition version of the book from Amazon or eBay. If I’m lucky.

And then came Project Gutenberg. Oh, it’s wonderful. Maybe your book is completely out of print, and you don’t want to buy it off of eBay or Amazon for the $1506483-gajillion dollars the used merchant is asking for. Project Gutenberg is a group of people working to bring copyright-free (aka really old) texts online. There’s a book here that was published three different times, and I needed the 1886 version, specifically. Guess what? Project Gutenberg has all three versions. I think they even take requests for new titles. And they’re always looking for helpers! Wink wink nudge nudge, you know what I mean.

And something else to tickle your history bone: Rules to Period Games. I think the ones listed here are mainly card games, but nonetheless, if you’re writing a period piece, or a fantasy and want something to spark your gaming imagination, check this place out.

All right, it’s back to Finals Week for me. I just finished writing my second paper and I need to print it, then I get to cram for my evening exam AND my 8am tomorrow morning exam. Continue writing, everyone!