First page from my novel "The Surface of the Sun"

I write for the same reasons I photograph, for the sake of art and the understanding of the universe, life and everything. Certainly being recognized is important, but that's not my motivation. My wife has me on the starving artist plan. She intends to wrap me up in a scandalous gay love triangle which results in my murder, that way she can sell everything I create and die wealthy. I'm helping her plan this, btw. :)

I can't even imagine the crap you must have encountered, though.
 
The romance "novelists" were the most humorous...

Take it all in good spirit. My intent is always honorable.
 
My intent is always honorable.

I realize this. When you first posted, you came across as an arrogant, pretentious teenager with a list of vague problems offered as critique. This kind of thing drives me UP A FRIKKIN WALL. Frankly, you just touched on a peeve.
 
My intent is always honorable.

I realize this. When you first posted, you came across as an arrogant, pretentious teenager with a list of vague problems offered as critique. This kind of thing drives me UP A FRIKKIN WALL. Frankly, you just touched on a peeve.

wow, i dodged a bullet there...i have NO desire to touch on your peeve :lmao:
 
This seems like a reasonable time for this quote from "Throw Momma From the Train": "Remember, a writer writes, always."
 
My intent is always honorable.

I realize this. When you first posted, you came across as an arrogant, pretentious teenager with a list of vague problems offered as critique. This kind of thing drives me UP A FRIKKIN WALL. Frankly, you just touched on a peeve.

Well, you caught me in a kind mode...it is a rare moment and lady luck was on your side...no, really just kidding. I've never seen a student, friend or anyone for that matter grow as an artist by kicking them in the teeth with "superiority." What's the point? I was a very quiet, unassuming teenager. It wasn't until I'd had enough of arrogance and pretentiousness that I assumed a similar role. :wink: Then the fun really began.

One of my favorite times was when I ran a forum to assist teachers in aquiring their National Board Certification. I guess it never dawned on me there were teachers who couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. Assumption, as someone else here recently stated, is highly overrated. Serendipitous fate as it were led me to write an article in a local NBTS publication on the art of showing and not telling which led a publisher to contact me and invite me to do some work for them...and the rest is history...well, it is an ongoing history.

Writing is a craft. Writing is as much a craft as faces the painter, sculptor or photographer. Very little art is spontaneously achieved (okay, that's a lie - Keith Leaman and old friend, could draw anything from the first day he picked up a pencil - weird, but true). There are the idiot savants who can do most anyting but cannot figure out how to dress themselves each morning. It takes work. When I was a fledgling art student in college, I had a drawing teacher who would make us write (in grand, bold style), "Art is Work" a hundred times before starting the day's exercises...yes, it loosened up the arms, wrists and hands, but it also served as a reminder of what it would take to make a living as an artist. I went into teaching...ha-ha-ha. I liked eating.

Teaching, of course was way harder than being an artist. What did I know? :lmao:
 
... which I will likely never finish:

Chapter 1. There is a buzzing.



Looking towered the afternoon sky, a flock of geese fly overhead. And I think to myself how these geese fly back and forth in some preordained fashion; how much simpler it must be. I com to realize that this ay not be the case at all, and rather these geese, and their romantic rendezvous, through exotic locations, over mountain passes from some northern lake in british columbia or alberta to vacation over winter in southern California or Louisiana are not migratory at all - rather these geese are stationary, receiving all that they need from the nearby townspeople, year-round without needing anything more - generation after generation subsiding winter long on stale bread crumbs provided by the hands of enthusiastic toddlers as their parents nervously take photographs.

These geese know nothing of a desert oasis or southern swamps with those odd trees: the ones which rise with roots which resemble a bundle of a hundred legs. They know nothing of Alberta or the Canadian Rockies or The Cascades of British Columbia. They only know of this lake, as naturally formed as the Wonderbread which they are fed, and the plastic bags left behind, to litter their environment, as if the bags themselves are somehow any less natural than the dam that created this habitat. A dam created when the trains needed water to feed into steam engines; today, the lake serves no practical purpose. No need for water. No need for geese. These things remain only decorative, and without function.

At this time of year, late in the summer, the Kansas sky turns a brilliant orange as the sun sets. As is the case everywhere, but there is a certain quality to the Western Kansas sky that is no where else. I'd say that this sky makes living here almost bearable, if it weren't for the fact that it isn't true. Life in Western Kansas is fickle. A sense of something missing, a sense that there is an entire universe out there, but the horizon is so wide you wouldn't know it. Like there is something you're forever missing out on, but you have no idea what it might be. The world is a distant mystery, or a concept in our heads. You can feel the rest of it all around you, but no telescope or binoculars or any other instrument could ever be so powerful that you could see it, or even know if it's any better. If you try, all you would see is more wheat, more grass, more sagebrush, more of the same landscape before you, off into an existential infinite in every direction. The only way to know for sure that there is something else is to travel. It's a funny thing, travel, for those who are born and raised here travel is a temporary thing no matter how much your intentions are to make it permanent. People go out into the exciting world and always, without exception eventually come back.

I came here in the mid 1990's for no particular reason. The barren isolation which makes this place so unbearable provides exactly the contemplative, yet torturous self discovery I did not realize I was seeking. I'm not a new age psuedo-buddhist. I haven't given up my excessive lifestyle of eating animal products yet. I have no problem driving a Mercedes SUV. If I were, I wouldn't have come to the realization that I was seeking in the first place - I'd be too busy complaining about the narrow minded hicks that inhabit this place, longing for a decent sushi bar or a place to get a fat free chai latte. I'd be too busy seeing this place for what it's not than what it is, and paradoxically, the two are not mutually exclusive. The minds here are narrow. The people are typically judgmental, unfriendly and unwittingly under-cultured, each with a haircut unchanged since 1952. In truth, I will not make this realization for some time, long after I also, an outsider, pack my things and move on leaving this place untouched, as does everyone else who travels here. Unlike the locals, those who travel here never stay.

© 2012, Shawn Kearney


I like, thanks for sharing
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Serendipitous fate

look who's pulling out the cliches now :) but that's ok, kitsch is the new hip, after all.

I agree that writing is a craft, but only to an extent. At some point the technical limits art, and makes it academically exclusive. I see this a bit in your critique, especially when your advise I limit my ambitions, reserving it to the "pros". This and what you wrote above reminds me of the fallacious argument "well... Picaso knew how to paint realistically". This is historically misinterpreted as well as irrelevant, events in art history which lead to cubism freed us from classical art, not bound us to it. The problem is that people often use modernism (and they would postmodernism if they knew it wasn't an oxymoron) to try and disguise their lack of artistic abilities, "I paint abstract because I can't paint realism" not "I paint because I am an abstract artist". While I am not the best writer in the world, hiding behind artsyfartsy composition isn't my intention. I know what an incomplete sentence is, even if run ons are my bad habit!

While perhaps I don't want to be a "word smith", a phrase which conjures up well composed mediocrity of limited consequence, certainly there is a degree of craftsmanship which must be maintained. But the good little postmodernist in me says that the craft should only extend as far as necessary. Technique should only be used to convey a concept, not support the work on it's own. I'm not interested in visual are to "wow" my audience through technique, to me this is narcissistic, I don't want to be remembered as a great painter, photographer or writer, I want to be remembered as a great *artist*.
 
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Kitsch is the new hip and has been since I was in college...40 years ago. I love cliche's, just not in manuscripts. As I noted to Agent Drex in another thread, I am not a writer. I am a reader. I don't give two flips and a somersault about post modernism, well composed mediocrity or Pablo Picasso; I only care about well crafted stories. I care about good grammar, good punctuation, good sentence structure, great plot, setting and sense of place. Either I get that or the manuscript goes into box #3. Me, I'm content to read.

Keep in mind, I am but one of thousands (I suspect) reader/editors. There are houses out there who will print anything for a buck; the good houses don't. Or, one can always self-publish, which to me is egotistical masturbation, but that is but yet one more opinion.
 
Sense of setting I find distracting, along with "strong characters". I strongly dislike yarns that are all about tangible matters.

My feeling is that 99% of fiction isn't worth the paper it's written on. I'd be better off watching TV, it takes less effort and is about as mind numbing. But that 1% is what makes up for the genre.
 
unpopular said:
Sense of setting I find distracting, along with "strong characters". I strongly dislike yarns that are all about tangible matters.

My feeling is that 99% of fiction isn't worth the paper it's written on. I'd be better off watching TV, it takes less effort and is about as mind numbing. But that 1% is what makes up for the genre.

Then you should probably decide who to are writing for lol. Most readers I would think like to know where they are and who the characters are.

I find completely abstract literary concepts to be frustrating and boring because I don't have the mental context of the writer.

I also don't like metaphors that overpower the object that represents them. The tangible aspects do matter in my opinion.

Maybe you'd be more at home in poetry?

The Thing is that technical issues may seem limiting, but I can't think of anyone who got great before being really technically competent....except maybe Postmodernists...But that's a whole different argument.

Not all muddy puddles are deep.
 
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I do need to clarify what my position is with these houses. I am the first stumbling block for novice writers. Novice writers or those jumping from the short story to the full novel are the only writers I ever see. Everything else goes to the second tier - upstairs, so to speak. I cull according to how well the writer can put five or more words together in 21-25 sentences (though I most often read an entire middle chapter just to be sure). The real crap never gets past 21 sentences, so-so may get me two pages in, okay, perhaps another page and hmmmm, possibilities here a bit more. I read the first chapter (If I get that far), a middle chapter and the last chapter. I may get 10 manuscripts for a day's reading. I don't have time to make pretty, be nice or give someone a chance...just because.

Sorry to all you aspiring writers but while there are great authors out there who flaunt at every writing rule; they can because they have already been published and generally more than once. You newbies aren't going to get away with it unless you are damnably lucky, luckier than surviving two hits by lightning while standing in the same spot. Writing, as I said before is a craft. Being published is the reward for learning how to craft. Wordsmithing is how you craft, it is not mediocrity of limited consequence, it is quite the opposite and guys like me are going to weed those who think this way out abruptly and without apology. Wordsmithing to a writer is what a fine plane is to a furniture maker. That's a cliche you have to fully embrace. Of course, if you just want to write to please yourself, no publishing in mind, then it's all good.

I don't read for content, alliteration, philospohical ideologies, or really even to genre. I just read sentences and how the words are placed in a manner which allows me to see setting, place and character. Plot, set point, counterpoint, etc are up to the middle level editors, then to the third floor, final editors. Given that analogy, I am in the basement but you have to get by me to get to the first floor.

Now, I am coming across as an arrogant, petulant child...but that's my job and they pay me well to be an A**h*** So it goes.
 
unpopular said:
Sense of setting I find distracting, along with "strong characters". I strongly dislike yarns that are all about tangible matters.

My feeling is that 99% of fiction isn't worth the paper it's written on. I'd be better off watching TV, it takes less effort and is about as mind numbing. But that 1% is what makes up for the genre.

Then you should probably decide who to are writing for lol. Most readers I would think like to know where they are and who the characters are.

I find completely abstract literary concepts to be frustrating and boring because I don't have the mental context of the writer.

I also don't like metaphors that overpower the object that represents them. The tangible aspects do matter in my opinion.

Maybe you'd be more at home in poetry?

The Thing is that technical issues may seem limiting, but I can't think of anyone who got great before being really technically competent....except maybe Postmodernists...But that's a whole different argument.

Not all muddy puddles are deep.

Very astute reply!
 
I'm not about to pandor to an audience.
 

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