Cheri's Blog

Good morning, universe.

Let's begin the writing day with a copying exercise. I'll set a timer for five minutes and type out a section of Craig Johnson's The Dark Horse.

It was the third week of a high-plains October, and an unseasonably extended summer had baked the color from the landscape and had turned the rusted girders of the old bridge a thinned-out, tired brown.

I topped the hill and pulled the gunmetal Lincoln Town Car alongside the Pratt truss structure. There weren't very many of them in the Powder River country, and the few bridges that were left were being auctioned off to private owners for use on their ranches. I had grown up with those old camelback bridges and was sorry to see the last of them go.

My eyes were pulled to the town balanced on the banks of the anemic river and pressed hard against the scoria hills like the singing blade of a sharp knife. The water, the land, and the bridge were sepia-toned, depleted.

I told Dog to stay in the backseat and got out of the car, slipped on my hat and an aged, burnished-brown horsehide jacket, and walked across the dirt lot. I studied the dusty, wide-planked surface of the bridge, and, between the cracks, the few reflecting slivers of the Powder River below. The Wyoming Department of transportation had condemned and, in turn, posted the bridge with bright yellow signs—it was to be removed next week. I could see the abutments that they had constructed off to the right on which the new bridge would rest.

A Range Telephone Cooperative trailer sat by a power pole holding a junction box and a blue plastic service phone that gently tapped against the creosote-soaked wood like a forgotten telegraph, receiving no answer.

“You lost?”

I like to start work with a copying exercise a few times per week. I open up a novel — any novel will do, but one with high quality writing is best — and I simply type out a page or two. In going through those motions, I can almost feel the shape of the author's hands beneath mine. Where do they put their commas? How is this writing different than my own? What have they done here that's interesting?

Johnson has a strong sense of place in his writing, brought to life by Walt Longmire's knowledge of the setting, combined with all those specific details. Right away, I notice his use of hyphenated descriptors.

thinned-out sepia-toned burnished-brown wide-planked creosote-soaked

There's a lot of color in the text. Not just sepia or that burnished-brown but also a gunmetal town car and those bright yellow signs. It's a lot of description, but it doesn't feel like too much because it's all tied in with Walt's actions. He's interested in the bridge. He's taking in his surroundings and we're watching, enjoying the view but also noticing the way he thinks, what the man pays attention to. And right at the point where the description might begin to feel like too much we're interrupted by dialog. No dialog tag, because Walt doesn't know who it is. When he turns, we want to know who is standing there.

I appreciate his writing. It feels specific and grounded. Fifteen minutes after starting the exercise, I've jotted down some notes, considered some tricks I might borrow in my own work. I'll think about colors, and hyphenated descriptors. I'll muse on how a protagonist thinks about familiar territory, how a reader can sense if someone knows the ground they're walking on, or not.

But I won't think too hard about those things today. It's more like they're in the back of my mind, bubbling away.

Offlining, continued

My new writing setup is working well for me. I'm using Novelwriter, but by setup I'm not really talking about software. A tool is a tool is a tool. You find the one that fits you, and you're grateful for it. But what I mean by setup is everything that surrounds the writing.

Sleep is always important. If my sleep is shit, I can't write. My focus lately has been on moving away from distractions, especially those that clutter up my brain. Switching to a dumbphone has been great. My latest obsession? Learning how to avoid mindless web browsing.

I took an old page from a tide calendar and cut it into four pieces. Scrap paper! When there's something I want to look up online, I write it down. When my list starts to add up, I'll pop online and take care of business.

I'm so jazzed by this dumb little trick. Yesterday, I grabbed my list. Over the course of half an hour, I added some books to my wishlist, looked up several things I'd been curious about, and made a quick purchase on eBay. Before I knew it, I was finished!

Bim bam boom.

Any online stuff that involves communicating with actual people is still fine and good. Internet friends are indeed friends, so that means I have a few blogs to read, and people to chat with. Yet beyond that, I think I'm simply... happier offline. And creativity comes easier when my mind is uncluttered.

It's been a good week for discovery.

Onward

Well, I've done my writing exercise, and I've had some time to jot down what's working for me lately. It's time to get back into The Hard Way Home, to keep the story rolling forward.

There's an action piece coming up, and I'm setting up the moments that lead into it. When it comes to action, I find it helpful to think about cinema. The director might show you different groups of people, all moving toward a showdown. You see group A, then group B, and maybe group C. They're speeding toward a big collision, and the pace picks way up. For me, that means shorter chapters, more concise narration. It gets tricky because I can't reveal everything to the reader. I want surprises in that action piece, so I have to make each lead-up scene believable and natural without giving the whole game away.

When I was a baby writer, I used to worry more about things like chapter length. I believed chapters needed to be fairly uniform or else the story would feel jumbled and chaotic. Now though, I think about the chapter's length and pace as something you can use intentionally. These are short chapters, and I hope, exciting ones. The drumbeat is speeding up, and I can't wait for the moment when it all goes POW.

In space opera, I live for the POW. 😁

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