Monkey PoopA Weblog of Unparalleled Eloquence

This year’s winter olympics was fun to watch, wasn’t it? The drama, the excitement, the heartbreak.  Hearing the athletes’ stories was inspiring and compelling. And while I was watching, I couldn’t help but think that as a writer, I could learn a lot from these top athletes.

#1: Practice, practice, practice

Tip #1 is fairly obvious. You don’t make it to the olympics without practicing your skills, and the same thing is true for writing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to do writing exercises, but it does mean that you will need to revise, revise, revise. No one writes things perfectly the first time.

#2: Perseverance

Many of the athlete’s stories included some kind of serious personal injury (like Zhao Hongbo, gold medalist in pairs figure skating). Seriously, it’s amazing how many of them ended up needing surgery at some point in their athletic careers. But instead of giving up, they kept training and kept going. While you might not get physically injured as a writer–except for maybe repetitive strain injuries–you do get emotionally injured quite a bit. Receiving rejection letters and criticism of your work can really kill the ego. But don’t give up! Every writer has stories of rejection (remember when I mentioned Shannon Hale’s rejection reel?) , but if you give up, you’ll never get anywhere.

#3: Confidence

Have you noticed that the athletes who win tend to be the most confident athletes? Here’s what Apolo Ohno said about returning to the Olympics:

“This is where I want to be,” Ohno said. “I love what I do, I love competition, I love training. The losses, the wins, the struggles — I love. I’m blessed to be able to use this gift. I still feel like I’m one of the best, and on any given day I can still vie for being on top of the podium.”

And then he went on to win 3 more medals in Vancouver. Likewise, successful writers take their writing seriously and take themselves seriously as writers. If you want to be published, you can’t just hope that someone will discover you and want to publish your novel. You have to be able to sell your novel with confidence. If you don’t believe in your book, no one else will either.

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other Tips from TV posts:

Lessons from Project Runway

3 Reasons Why ABC’s V Doesn’t Work

3 Writing Lessons from Battlestar Galactica

Writing Lessons from Gossip Girl

Image by the last minute / CC BY 2.0

Apparently Mary was from Somerville! According to the article, Mary’s family owned a farm in Sterling, MA and one of the ewe’s had twin lambs. The ewe wouldn’t feed one of the lambs, so Mary took it in and cared for it herself. The lamb thought Mary was her mother and followed her to school.
Cute!
When Mary was older and got married, she moved to Somerville (to a home which is now the Greek Orthodox Church on Central street for those of you familiar with the area).

(via SomervilleMom’s mailing list; image from the Somerville Journal)

Mary Elizabeth Sawyer Taylor, painted 1883

Writer and Blogger Shelli posted a great blog post this week with some lessons on handling rejection from American Idol.

So last time I talked about finding sources. This time I’ll talk about how I incorporated the research into my novel. Here is kind of how I thought about it:

1) Insert only relevant facts

The easiest thing to incorporate into my book was facts. Solid facts from solid evidence. Foods they ate, clothes they wore, specific architecture, though incidentally this type of information was the hardest to find. It was tempting to just throw in everything I read and learned while trying to create a setting for the novel, but after doing this a few times and boring even myself during revisions, I learned quickly to only add relevant details. Gone were the details about wars that were fought that my character might not have known about. And I didn’t even try to talk much about building materials. Remember, this is a story, not a research paper! This of course meant that I didn’t use most of what I learned and I will just have to live with that.

2) Change the story if necessary

Okay, so while I was doing research it became obvious that some of my plot ideas weren’t going to work out. For example, I wanted the bad guy to end up in jail at one point, but…it turned out there wasn’t a jail! Things just didn’t work that way in 11th century South India, so I ha to come up with something else.

Don’t be afraid to do this if you need to. You want your story to be as accurate as you can make it. That being said…

3) Don’t be afraid to take some liberties with history

A lot of arguing goes on about whether you should be allowed to make up events about historical figures, particularly in children’s literature. Because if you write it in a book, kids may believe it really happened.

However, my view about my story anyway is that it wasn’t intended to be a tale about a historical figure or about anything historical really–it was meant to be an adventure story that takes place in a certain time period with a few historical tidbits thrown in. I think it’s fairly obvious from my manuscript that the story didn’t really happen. While there are historical figures in the book doing things they certainly didn’t do, and while I’ve given them personalities in the book that I felt fit with the story, I don’t think this is a problem.

Why not? For many reasons, chief of which is that no one knows what these people were like. They didn’t leave behind long accounts or biographies about their lives, they left behind temple statues or carvings that stated the wars they won, etc. So if I wanted these characters to come alive, they had to seem like real people. I couldn’t just not have a character say anything or do anything that might not be accurate just because I was worried it didn’t really happen. It is fiction after all… (though I did throw in an author’s note since I was worried about it!)

That’s my opinion about my story anyway. Thankfully, my time period is remote enough that no one really knows what went on. :) I might be singing a different tune if my book took place in the 20th century.

Well that’s it for now. I hope you find my account of my research useful. Any questions?

(via The Book Bench and via Book Patrol)

My twitter followers will have seen this link already to writing rules from famous authors, but I just can’t help sharing some of my favorites:

From Margaret Atwood:

“7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.”

From Roddy Doyle:

“1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”

and

“9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven’t written yet.”

From Neil Gaiman:

“5 Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.”

From AL Kennedy:

“9 Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

10 Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.”

Last time I talked about how I came to write a historical fiction novel and how I chose a time period. Next, I’ll talk a bit about how I found sources.

I’ll break this down by the types of sources I used:

1) Books

Since I live in the US and not India, finding sources was a little tough. I started out just doing the not-recommended-by-librarians thing: working backwards. I started by looking at wikipedia articles and looked to see what their sources were. I found a few highly useful books that way (and found that most of the wikipedia articles I read were actually just slightly more readable summaries of these books), but the trick was getting them from the library! Thank you interlibrary loan system! A few of the books were available for in library use only, so I also got to take a field trip to the Boston Public Library central branch, which is always fun. Once I had a few books, I looked at their bibliography to find more.

I also tried emailing a librarian for help finding sources, but unfortunately, they basically told me to do what I was already doing: search google, and the library catalog. Lame. I was hoping they would help me with some search terms or something, but not so much. Perhaps if my topic had been a little more mainstream, they would have been much more helpful.

The problem with ILL of course is that you can only keep books for a limited amount of time–I actually ended up buying a few of the books I needed for longer than a few weeks from Abebooks.com.

2) Magazine/Journal articles

Check out your library’s website. There are all sorts of search engines to try in order to find the information you want. Google works too. I found a few scholarly articles about my time period, but most of them were a bit too in depth about highly specific topics to be useful for my purposes.

3) Websites

As everyone knows, you have to be careful using websites for research (especially sites like wikipedia) but sometimes you can get lucky. I found a great website about life in Medieval India called Kamat’s Potpourri showcasing the work of some Indian historians. There are tons of great pictures and references on that website that helped me find even more great sources of information.

I also just used some of the more spurious looking website while brainstorming ideas and not for actual concrete information (unless I really couldn’t find what I was looking for elsewhere).

4) Primary Sources

I am not  historian, so I would much prefer reading the conclusions of historians than coming up with my own based on primary evidence. That being said, I found that seeing actual items from 11th century India helped with the creative aspects of my work.

The more accessible way to find things for me was to look in museum. There are lots of indian artifacts in US museums. I happened to visit the Art Institute of Chicago and saw many sculptures from the time period I was researching.

Also (because my family was going anyway) I traveled to India to visit a few of the towns mentioned in my novel. I had mostly finished my novel at htis point was was surprised to find that I through my research (including looking at google maps, photos from people’s websites, and books with numerous photographs) I was able to construct a fairly decent idea of what it was like in the towns I mentioned. Though, it probably helped that I had been to India before, so I knew what to expect, though I hadn’t been to these specific towns before (see my trip to India posts for some of my pictures).

So these are just a few ideas of how to get started with research. Despite the fact that I didn’t find it useful, I would recommend talking to a librarian if you’re not sure how to get started. I had done a lot of medical/scientific research in the past, so research wasn’t  a completely new thing for me, though I wasn’t used to reading hand-wavy social science-type research. :)

Next time: Using your research in your writing

P.S. I have one caution–when you are taking notes, make sure you take notes about where you got some of your ideas, even if they were just loosely inspired by one of your sources. Trust me, this is helpful later when you’re revising. I really wish I had done this.

Image of Bates Hall reading room at BPL by pobrecito33 / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Okay this is a bit off-topic but in the spirit of my new motherhood I thought I’d share a few of my favorite Disney lullabies with you. These are songs I enjoyed as a kid and my baby daughter seems to like them too:

“La La Lu” from Lady and the Tramp

“Stay Awake” from Mary Poppins

“Friends Lullaby” by Larry Groce from Disney’s Children’s Favorites Vol. 1

And here’s a non-Disney related one that I really like (and only recently discovered on a world lullaby CD called Dreamland that I got for Xmas on year): “Lullabye“ as sung by Teresa Doyle (I’ve seen this called “Hush-a-bye birdie”or “Hush-a-ba burdie” when searching for lyrics on the internet–apparently it’s a traditional Scottish lullaby)

I also like Numi Numi from this same CD, but since it’s in Hebrew, it’s not as easy for me to sing along with. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from trying. :)

And for those rock-and-roll types check out Rockabye Baby! (I found the Bjork samples disappointing, but the Radiohead ones seem pretty good.)

What are some of your favorite lullabies?

My second novel, Necklace of Tears, started off with an idea: a girl, stranded in the middle of the ocean. How did she get there? Where was she from? I initially came up with the idea of writing something about the Polynesian sailors that explored the Pacific Ocean, but quickly abandoned that, thinking that it would be strange to research someone else’s culture, when I could be researching my own. But I’d never heard of Indian sailors before…

Knowing absolutely nothing about Indian history (being an American), I did some quick google searches and found that during the 11th century, the Chola Empire of South India expanded all around the Bay of Bengal. Which meant that they must have been sailing around, right? This makes sense to me, but actually this leap is a bit controversial despite the numerous art works and things from this time period in India there aren’t many sculptures or paintings of ocean-going vessels. Many historians have concluded that this means that Indians weren’t sailing, but I disagree with this idea since there was a lot of money to be made in trade and where there is money, there are willing travelers. (And how else would the Cholas have expanded their empire so widely?)

So I had chosen a time period for this story—now what?

Next week: The Journey Part Two: Finding Sources and Ideas

Click here for more photos from my research trip to India.

Sorry I’ve been pretty bad at posting lately but I have a good excuse: I just had a baby and am slowly getting back into the swing of things! I promise to add some blog posts next week.

In the meantime: check out an interview with Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes –one of my favorite comic strips (via bookninja)

Which reminds me I have to get around to finishing the complete collection my husband gave me several Xmases ago…