…and I’m an alcoholic. Last Sunday, April 1, marked the conclusion of my twenty-seventh year of sobriety. I’ve had six additional days of sobriety as I am typing this and I’m hoping for another one as you are reading this.

I’ve talked about alcoholism and sobriety before in this venue — most recently two years ago — and I’m going to do it again. If you are writing and working on your twelfth book or the first five pages of your first one you might think that four or five glasses of wine help to lubricate the creative glands either while you are writing or before you even start. Fair enough. All I ask is that you keep yourself open to the possibility that your intake — if it is regular and excessive — may be holding you back rather than helping you.

Addiction can find a home with anyone but especially with creative folks. Evict it, and it just hides in a tree in the backyard and waits patiently for an open door or window to creep right back in. It can take a while to recognize that you might have a problem if indeed you have a problem. Once you realize that you have a problem, don’t be afraid to look up “rehab center near me” online to see where you can get help. I met a man in 1988 who told me straight up, within ten minutes of our introduction, that he was an alcoholic. “I’ve been sober for nine years!” he said. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, Nine years! Without a drink?! I can’t even go for nine days. It’s a good thing I don’t have a problem! Yep. That’s what denial looks like, and I’m not talking about the river in Egypt. It took me three years after that and a near tragedy to get myself together.

Actually, make that several near tragedies. It is a miracle I’m sitting here. I’m glad that justice is a rare thing. If justice were in great supply I would be dead or in prison or on the street, rather than waking up in a nice home in a great neighborhood and having the privilege — and it is a privilege — of sitting here writing something for TKZ and having you read it.

It took me a while to figure something out. If you are going to write you have to treat it like you would a job, even if you’re not yet making any money from your endeavors or are making just enough to keep going. You wouldn’t show up at a regular job drunk or high — not with all those employee drug tests — because you would get fired. Don’t show up at your writing desk drunk, either. You’re on the road to firing yourself from the best job in the world.

If you think you have a problem — whether it’s with alcohol or drugs or gambling or whatever — you probably do. There is a test that you can take that might give you some guidance. The argument about whether alcoholism is a disease or a character disorder has vigorous and excellent proponents on both sides. It ultimately doesn’t make any difference. It’s a problem and it won’t go away on its own. You need to take a step. What is now hysterically funny to me is that a couple of times I almost stopped but didn’t because I didn’t know how. That’s funny, in a way. But it’s also pretty sad, in retrospect. You would be surprised at how many people needing to take that important first step down the road to sobriety feel the same way. If you feel comfortable going to your physician about it, please do so. If you reflexively shy away from doing that, please try an AA meeting. If you Google “AA” and your city you’ll find a schedule. I guarantee that you will find several. Some target specific groups. Others are quite the mixed bag. I attended a meeting several weeks ago in support of a friend attaining his first year of sobriety. There were doctors, attorneys, bikers, mechanics…but we were all siblings for an hour or so. If you don’t feel up to that just yet, then email me. I promise that I will get back to you immediately, do whatever I can to help, and take our conversation to my grave.

One last thing…if you do not have an addiction but have a family member who does then run — seriously, run — to an Al-Anon meeting. Again, just Google “Al-Anon” and your city. You are almost certainly one hour away from feeling less alone. You might attend one meeting and wonder who these strangers are who lead a life identical to yours.

That’s me today. Thank you for being here. You all are the best. And keep writing. Don’t let anything — like a bottle — or anyone, including yourself, get in your way.

Note: This post erroneously made a brief, premature appearance before its scheduled due date. Re-upping it for today.

By Kathryn Lilley

Photo purchased from Shutterstock by KL

Recently the dynamics on commercial social media have become…a tad weird. So about a fortnight ago, after one too many hacking episodes, privacy scares, and nasty encounters with online trolls, I took the plunge and deactivated my Facebook account. I’ll miss the ease of staying in touch with certain folks (and of course I’ll miss “Yoga with Baby Goats” and other video gems), but it was long past time to cut my ties with advertising-supported social media.

I started feeling conflicted about commercial social media as far back as 2013, when I wrote Is Social Media Developing a Personality Disorder?  

Five years later, the answer (for me, anyway) is an emphatic “Yes.”

Here at TKZ we made a firm decision at the outset not to go down the commercial advertising route. It’s wonderful that out little corner of the cyber sphere continues to serve as a little oasis of calm amidst the winds of the social media Furies.

I’ll miss seeing my friends and family on Facebook, of course. (And I’ll really miss my daily dose of baby goats.)

How about you? Is anyone else rethinking their relationship to social media these days?

Postscript: it’s been two weeks since I cut the cord with Facebook; I’ve been surprised by how much I haven’t missed it. I think what Facebook actually provided was simply that endorphin rush one feels as one frequently checks for Likes, posts, and messages. It does feel a bit like kicking a habit, but not nearly as difficult as I’d imagined.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

What aspects of writing brings you vitality and what parts of the process are exhausting?

By John Gilstrap

We all know the drill by now.  A brave author has taken a big risk that we all respect.  First, the submission, and I’ll join you on the flip side:

Endless Tomorrow (TITLE)

The message from the Consul arrived before breakfast. Agnes had just wiped the last of the shaving lather from his face when Congressman John Paul opened the embossed and sealed envelope. He stared for far longer than it took to read the few words on the short scrap of paper.

“Well, what is it now?” asked Agnes.

Not the reserve a housekeeper should show to an employer but his momentary flash of irritation was soon forgotten. His fingers slid numbly over still tingling cheeks. “They know how to make guns.”

“Guns?” Her disbelief was evident. “Who’s got guns?”

John might as well have told her he could do magic. Guns were a relic of the past and long since gone from the world. “Strangers from behind the Eastern Mountains. We got word of them yesterday at the Ministers’ Meeting but there was no talk of guns.” He stared absently ahead. “A messenger must have come in the night.”

She laughed dismissively. “No one has guns anymore. Not for hundreds of years.” Agnes gently slapped powder on his cheeks and untied the barber cloth.

“Don’t be so sure, Agnes. I learned about them once in school. They are not complicated—at least in theory.”

“Oh, goodness. What else does the Consul’s note say about these people? They have rocket planes too?”

John had the feeling that rockets and planes were two different devices but his memory was fuzzy on the subject of the Moderns’ technology. He read the Consul’s note aloud. That was what Agnes wanted anyway. She was never satisfied until she knew everything.

Dozens of strangers from east now camped in field by Beaker’s Farm. Requesting our presence. Tech and crops unclear. Claim to have guns!? Ministers meeting at eleven. Then we ride. Richard.

Her voice was scolding. “Guns! Don’t believe those people—telling whatever lies they think might impress us. They’ll be wanting to settle here in the valley, just like every wanderer coming from the east. We both know it!” Her fingers moved adeptly over the contents of his shaving kit, brushing the blades clean, packing everything.

He folded the note away and regarded the woman beside him as she busily tidied his dressing room. Short in stature with a curvy figure slowly going plump, long dark hair done up in a bun, sharp gray eyes that never hesitated to meet his own. Clever she was, a bit of a schemer, a good source of town gossip—useful in every way but she had spent her whole life in the quiet town of Newhaven. Can she imagine the violence and slave-taking that reign outside our valley? Maybe none of us can. 

John shook his head and wished suddenly that he had heard fewer stories from terrified refugees who had fled from over the mountains. The era of the great seed traders was over. Only the wretched came now.

It’s Gilstrap again.

First the full disclosure: This piece is not from any genre that I care to read.  I don’t even know what genre it is.  And Author, that was not an insult, merely a confession.  That said, storytelling is storytelling, and from that perspective, this piece is troubled.  First, some general observations, and then I’ll dig a little deeper.

Adverbs.  Goodness gracious, there are a lot of them, and none are necessary. At a glance, I got numbly, absently, dismissively, gently, adeptly, busily, slowly, and suddenly. It’s a mistake to believe that -ly adverbs clarify meaning, because they never do. Either the modified verb will do the job on its own, or the writer has chosen the wrong verb in the first place.  There are exceptions, but I can’t think of one as I write this.  And yes, we’re all guilty of it.

Point of view.  The piece doesn’t have one.  I don’t know whose story we’re telling here.  The head-hopping detracts from the narrative pull of the story.

Setting.  Clearly, we are hundreds of years into the future, but the technology clock has for some reason spun the other way.  I don’t buy it.  This could very well be my unfamiliarity with the genre.

You started your story in the wrong place.  Getting a shave and receiving a note are not barn-burners of crises.  As it’s currently written, the opening is mainly a framework on which to hang backstory that we don’t yet need.  Assuming that guns are a big part of the McGuffin, I suggest starting with a holy-crap reaction that those new strangers have them.

Now, let’s get picky . . .

Endless Tomorrow (TITLE) JG: Years ago, I was told by an editor never to make a title an easy target for a snarky reviewer.  Casting no aspersions on this piece, Endless Tomorrow invites something like, “Endless Story” in the review. Just a thought.

The message from the Consul [Why capitalized?] arrived before breakfast. Agnes had just wiped the last of the shaving lather from his face [gramatically, the “his” here refers to Agnes] when Congressman John Paul opened the embossed and sealed envelope. [What did it look like? Thick, thin? How did it arrive?] He stared for far longer than it took to read the few words on the short scrap of paper. [So? what does Agnes think about that?]

“Well, what is it now?” asked Agnes.

Not the reserve a housekeeper should show to an employer [according to whom? Whose POV are we in?] but his momentary flash of irritation was soon forgotten [by whom?]. His fingers slid numbly [Why are his fingers numb?] over still tingling cheeks. “They know how to make guns.”

“Guns?” Her disbelief was evident [How? In what way?]. “Who’s got guns?”

John might as well have told her he could do magic. [POV?] Guns were a relic of the past and long since gone from the world. “Strangers from behind the Eastern Mountains. We got word of them yesterday at the Ministers’ Meeting but there was no talk of guns.” He stared absently ahead. “A messenger must have come in the night.”

[She laughed dismissively. “No one has guns anymore. Not for hundreds of years.” Agnes gently slapped powder on his cheeks and untied the barber cloth.

“Don’t be so sure, Agnes. I learned about them once in school. They are not complicated—at least in theory.”

“Oh, goodness. What else does the Consul’s note say about these people? They have rocket planes too?”

John had the feeling that rockets and planes were two different devices but his memory was fuzzy on the subject of the Moderns’ technology. He read the Consul’s note aloud. That was what Agnes wanted anyway. She was never satisfied until she knew everything.] The bracketed and underlined section is unnecessary backstory, and mostly redundant.  Recommend deleting it.

Dozens of strangers from east now camped in field by Beaker’s Farm. Requesting our presence. Tech and crops unclear. Claim to have guns!? Ministers meeting at eleven. Then we ride. Richard.

Her voice was scolding [What is a scolding voice? Tone, maybe?]. “Guns! Don’t believe those people—telling whatever lies they think might impress us. They’ll be wanting to settle here in the valley, just like every wanderer coming from the east. We both know it!” Her fingers moved adeptly over the contents of his shaving kit, brushing the blades clean, packing everything.

He folded the note away [What does “folded away” mean? Where did he put it?] and regarded the woman beside him as she busily tidied his dressing room. Short in stature with a curvy figure slowly going plump, long dark hair done up in a bun, sharp gray eyes that never hesitated to meet his own. Clever she was,[this structure sounds like Yoda] a bit of a schemer, a good source of town gossip—useful in every way but she had spent her whole life in the quiet town of Newhaven. Can [Could?–keep it in past tense] she imagine the violence and slave-taking that reign outside our valley? Maybe none of us can [Could?]. 

John shook his head and wished suddenly that he had heard fewer stories from terrified refugees who had fled from over the mountains. The era of the great seed traders was over. Only the wretched came now.

Overall, this piece feels like a very early draft to me.  Okay, TKZers, what say you?

Write hard and clear about what hurts. – Ernest Hemingway

By PJ Parrish

Years back, I had the pleasure to hear David Morrell speak as luncheon guest of honor at a writer’s conference. Now, if you’ve ever been lucky enough to hear David or better yet, talk to him, you know he’s a fount of fabulous advice for a writer, no matter where you are on the food chain.

That day I heard him speak, I was well into my own career, so I was munching away on my carrot cake, listening but also mind-wandering. Then he said something that made the hairs stand up on my neck.

“Write about what you fear most.”

I sat there stunned. Tears threatened. Because David had poked a wound in me as a writer. I had been struggling with a short story. It felt artificial and too cool. And I realized, sitting in that ballroom fork in mid-air why. I had been unwilling – or unable – to confront my demons.

I knew the demons were there. That was why I had chosen the story I did. (Or did it chose me?) But I was holding the demons at arm’s length. Or maybe hiding from them. The next day, I went back and started over. It was a hard story to write. But I finished it. I didn’t publish it, but I finished it. And it taught me a great hard lesson.

You have to be willing to open a vein.

David Morrell talks often about a book called The Gift of Fear. The author Gavin de Becker says we should all learn to trust our gut instincts to protect us from life’s traumas and, ultimately violence. But David suggests the book has lessons for writers:

As de Becker says, we have all these signals coming at us all the time, and some people choose to ignore them, and get mugged, or have their car stolen, or terrible stuff, because they say, “I kind of knew there was something wrong there, but I thought, oh heck, it doesn’t matter.” Well, when you feel that, it, it does matter, and basically that’s what my books are about: the gift of fear.

David speaks from experience, and is not shy about sharing this. After his father died in WWII, his mother was forced to put him in an orphanage for a time. When she remarried, his step-father was a brute who hated kids and there was constant fighting in the house. From an interview:

I was in fear for much of my early years. And in my fear, I told myself stories. I was at the time, four years, five years, six years old, and I told myself stories in which I was the hero, and rescuing people or whatever—in effect, rescuing myself.

He carried this into his career as a bestselling thriller writer. If you’ve lived under a rock, you might not know that he is the father of Rambo. He has produced a long, stellar, bestselling list of other novels that range from spy novels to Victorian mysteries. But his theme is always human fear, and his characters’ struggle to suppress it or else give in to it.

He’s not afraid of fear.

In 1987, his teenage son died from complications from a rare bone cancer. David took his panic attacks, despair, grief and deepest fears and turned them into a memoir, Fire Flies. Stephen King wrote of it: “I found myself almost speechless…It left me feeling shaken, uplifted, and terribly moved.”

Many other writers have found their voices in what they fear. John Green, author of The Fault Is In Our Stars, was stricken with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, unable to escape “the spiral of my own thoughts,” as he put it. With therapy and medication, he recovered and wrote Turtles All the Way Down, a wrenching novel about what it is like to live in constant fear of your own mind.

“Coming out of that, it was difficult to write about anything else,” he told an interviewer. “The topic demanded itself.”

One of my favorite early reads, The Bell Jar, is irrevocably associated with Sylvia Plath’s experience with depression, with the character Esther Greenwood’s mental breakdown mirroring Plath’s own. On the Road is based on Jack Kerouac’s real life drugged out road trip with his friend Neal Cassady. Amy Tan’s brilliant novel Joy Luck Club is based on her immigrant childhood in San Francisco. In an interview, Tan talked about how writing the novel moved her to connect with her difficult mother:

When I was writing, it was so much for my mother and myself…I wanted her to know what I thought about China and what I thought about growing up in this country. And I wanted those words to almost fall off the page, so that she could just see the story, that the language would be simple enough, almost like a little curtain would fall away.”

The story I like most on this subject involves Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Of course.

Fitzgerald, flush from his success with The Great Gatsby, started working on his next novel. It was about a glamorous couple living in the South of France. By this point, his wife Zelda was hospitalized with schizophrenia and Fitzgerald was broke, borrowing money from his editor, and drowning in alcohol. The novel, Tender is the Night, told the sad tale of the self-destructive Dick and Nicole Diver.

A month after it came out, Fitzgerald wrote to Hemingway to ask his friend’s honest opinion of the book. Hemingway wrote back: “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.”

There’s a lesson in that for us mortal writers. Yes, write what you fear most. Plumb your life experiences. Use your pain. Write what you know.  But there’s a trick.

I have a writer friend named Jessica Lourey. Jess writes two terrific mystery series, kids books, women’s fiction and fantasy. But her non-fiction book Rewrite Your Life, is what I’d like you to take a look at for our purposes today. Jess writes about how writing fiction can help you heal the wounds in your life. She gives TED talks to non-writers about the power of memoir writing. But her book is full of good advice for novelists:

When writers base fiction too closely on their own experiences, they can sometimes lose the ability to truly play with the story. I think this is because they are not consciously making as many decisions as a writer of “pure” fiction. They can be tempted to simply record what happened in real life (and to skip inventing material to fill in the gaps of their own knowledge about other people’s motivations or bits of the experience that they didn’t notice), instead of pondering how to best tell a good story. I’ve known writers whose story details should have been changed or expanded to better support their theme or create atmosphere, but who resisted the suggestion that they do so because “this is how it really happened.”

Most of us have encountered folks who say, “Boy, do I have a story to tell.” Or “my life would make a great novel.”  Instinctively, all fiction writers know the problem with this. Yes, every human walking the earth has a unique story to tell. But few have the ability to tell it in a way that emotionally touches others.

That’s the trick.

The trick is to face your fear and turn it inside out and upside down. Your own true experiences – be it the horror of war, the loneliness of childhood or the terror of domestic violence – is only fodder. If you spill it out too raw on the page, it can feel strangely trite and, in the case of my short story, artificial. The trick is to take your specific and deeply personal emotions and experiences and make them feel universal. Your pain has to become something bigger.

Your story begins inside you. But in the end, it belongs to your reader.