I saw this on Flickr and had to favorite it because other than the poofy shirt sleeve, she looks just like I envision the main character of my WIP for most of the first half of the story. Dagger in hand but at her side, looking over her shoulder. She was just on her way to slay her nemesis when you called her name — and she is unamused by the interruption.

The other reason I like this image is because there’s none of the hypersexual T and A that is even nowadays so typical of genre fiction book covers. No skin to speak of at all, no damsel-in-distress pose or come-hither expression, no beefy savior oggling in the background. Angel is all business and get the fuck out of her way.

The artist is female. Coincidence? I think not.

T

Fanfare for Angel is part of a mystery series featuring detective Angel Brown, written in the late 60′s by Graham Montrose.  Dust jacket art by Barbara Walton. Uploaded to Flickr by 54mge.

1 Never open a book with weather.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword.
3 Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely.¹
5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control.
6 Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9 Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

1. Uppity’s note:  Unless you are J. K. Rowling, the Queen of Adverbia. [↩]

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

Some time back, I read an interview with Neil Gaiman in which he said he got the idea for The Graveyard Book many years before he tried to write it. The reason he waited so long, he said, was because he didn’t have chops yet and “didn’t want to ruin it.”

Ah the pain of watching your beloved story go from flying in your imagination to floundering the page. How many of us let this depressing thought keep us from creating?  It’s been one of the toughest growing pains for this fledgling fiction writer, that’s for sure.

There’s a great post by Julie Cohen on The Heroine Addicts blog about how rarely any writer is able to transcribe perfectly the story she sees in her mind, and that luckily her readers never know it’s only Good-Enough because they never saw the original Perfection in the first place. Another addition to my list of Things In Which I Can Take Solace, right in between “Even Steinbeck thought his first drafts sucked ass” and “Grandma Moses didn’t begin painting until she was 73.”

When I was first struggling with writing my story, it was all a great big jumble of random plot points and intensely-felt but undefined characters. Thinking about it was great fun to a point… that point being an abrupt ledge into the deep sea Overwhelm. One afternoon I flopped down on the couch, thinking all this thinking was getting exhausting and I needed a nap.

As I lie there in that headspace between thinking and sleeping, I wondered vaguely how I was supposed to contain all of my teeming imagination into something that resembled a narrative, a coherent story. And then I had a vision, a very clear image appeared unbidden before my eyes: an acorn.

An acorn?

Now I’ve done my share of reading in dream interpretation and symbology and whathaveyou, and I couldn’t really come up with anything better than perhaps an acorn was my subconscious’s way of saying we are all trees. We start out tiny and buried, but within us we hold the stuff that, given half a chance, with a little nurturing, can eventually touch the sky.

That was around two years ago and since then I haven’t thought a lot about acorns. Then the other day I had a conversation with a friend in which we discussed our next steps in Life, like you do when you’re 40-something and start to realize that life ain’t gonna live itself. And I mentioned I’d been always been interested in Jungian psychology, that I feel alive when I read that stuff.

So when I got home I started window-shopping on Amazon and eventually landed on a book by James Hillman called The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. It sounded interesting so I bought it.  Imagine how I felt a few days later when I read in the book’s preface that it is all about Acorn Theory.

As stated so succinctly by Wikipedia, “[Hillman's Acorn] theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It describes how a unique, individual energy of the soul is contained within each human being, and is displayed throughout their lifetime, and shown in their calling and life’s work when it is fully blossomed or actualized.”

Holy synchronicity, Batman.