Zen and the Art of #WritingCommunity

Ever since discovering them in a book entitled Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, I have loved the quiet wisdom to be found in Zen parables.

 

Here’s one of my favorites:

A Cup of Tea

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

 

Nan-in’s actions are difficult to fathom, especially for the professor. The scene is humorous if not surreal. Seated with his cup extended to receive his tea, the professor believes this the preamble to learning about Zen. One can almost see him watching the cup overflow its brim, the tea pouring down the sides and puddling on the floor. He must be wondering if Nan-in is senile.

Nan-in’s actions and words say, “Zen is unlike any other understanding of how to conduct oneself in the world. To truly be receptive to what I have to teach, you can’t question anything that happens in this room. You must be empty and come to Zen like a child.”

“Outside of this room,” Nan-in seems to say, “you are an expert in your field. Here, though, sitting at my knee to learn Zen, you know nothing. Start from nothingness, and we might go somewhere.”

The parable speaks to more than just learning Zen or the ability to release a heightened sense of knowledge and assumptions. In many situations, we bring preconceived notions about ourselves and about the subject that we might experience.

For instance, we might start a math class and already decide we are going to hate it because we’ve hated math classes in the past. We sit in the back of the room with our arms crossed, already shutting out an experience that we have yet to experience. This could be the professor that really makes math click, but we shut her out because our cup is full of our own resistance.

I think about my own experiences and assumptions when I became part of the #WritingCommunity on Twitter. My first assumption was that I wouldn’t like it, but it was a necessary evil because writers have to have a “platform” and a place to share their work. I assumed I would do banal activities like posting Amazon links to my books, even as I cringed doing it. I certainly didn’t think I would meet really interesting and supportive people. I assumed all would be self-serving and looking for the same sales opportunities for their books. I assumed my feed would be filled with self-promoting garbage (and I would be filling the feeds of others with my own seemingly necessary, but self-promoting garbage).

For anyone just getting into the #WritingCommunity, I would encourage you to empty your cup. Ease into the community. Look around. Find out what it’s about. Engage in meaningful ways with others. Also, watch what others do. What works? What doesn’t work?

(Just a note… I don’t think it works just to shout in a tweet, “I need followers! I’m at 300, let’s get me to 400!” These are people you’re trying to connect with, not numbers to be collected. The followers will come naturally if you conduct yourself naturally.)

I can already tell you, just arbitrarily posting links to your amazon page isn’t going to get you very far either… and might even get you muted.

In my experience, people in the community want genuine connections (at least many do). They don’t want to be marketed to. But if they become genuinely interested in you, they might be interested in what you write. And more importantly, you might have genuine human interactions that are even more rewarding than sales and branding.

I can say that I’m very glad that, somehow, I managed to empty my cup. I’m enjoying my experiences (for the most part) in the #WritingCommunity. I’ve changed my mindset from “I need this to brand myself and sell books” to “Hey, I actually enjoy some of the people I’m meeting. This is adding meaning to my life.”

I started this blog thinking about how I would use it to market my books. Instead, I realized I could be useful by sharing what I know after nearly thirty years of writing and twenty years of teaching fiction.

Some of my assumptions about being in the community are true. There are posts that annoy me, but they are far outweighed by positive interactions… especially with the folks who are finding my instructive blog posts… well, instructive.

So, by all means, get involved with the #WritingCommunity, but empty your cup first. Make no assumptions about what the experience will be like, and instead find ways to make the experience meaningful to you.

It’s not a platform; it’s an opportunity for genuine connections in a creative genre that’s often lonely.

In the end, genuine connections will likely mean more for your writing and your sales. It will certainly mean more for your soul.

Film Festival Directors in Their Own Words: Mike DeMasi

I came to independent filmmaking a little late in life. If you'd told me in my twenties that I would make independent short films in my forties, I would have said, "No I won't. I have no interest in that." We are so sure of the world in our twenties. We think we know who we are and who we will always be. Most of us don't know yet at that time that life is about evolution and reinvention. It's what makes life rich... embracing new interests!

And so I ended up making short films.

You can find a film festival that deals with just about any theme. Imagine my surprise, though, when I discovered the Over Forty Film Festival! Yes, they focus on filmmakers that are forty years old or older. I was even more excited when they selected my short film HEALTHIER CHOICES for the festival.

It was the festival's inaugural run. I was going to have a film in it. Everything was going great, and then...

Covid-19

I have watched through emails as Mike DeMasi - instead of canceling the festival like many have - decided to reinvent the festival for these times. He collaborated with the filmmakers he accepted and...

Oh, I'll just let him tell you about it.

"Ever since I can remember I always wanted to be a filmmaker. As a kid I didn’t really know what that meant, and had no more insight as a young adult. All I knew was filmmakers put those wonderful stories up on the big screen and I forget about me for a couple hours.

I grew up….and didn’t pursue filmmaking but always thought about it. But wonderful luck came when financial devastation upended the world in 2008.

I was laid off.

In Fall 2009, at the ripe age of thirty-three, I was in a Master of Fine Arts program and I started making films; very amateurish films filled with flaws and a cheese factor beyond Velveeta on steroids, but I felt like a wizard. I finished a thesis film for the degree and I expanded it into a feature length production.  To say that OF STARLIGHT is “low budget” greatly overestimates the production values, but many told me that just having a project in the can was a great accomplishment.

Film number two, BOSTONIAN was made little by little over the course of a year from 2013-2014, Production values slightly better, slightly. I was able to find a sales agent and both BOSTONIAN and Of STARLIGHT were picked up by L.A. based companies and are currently in wide digital distribution.

On these filmmaking journeys I found that resources and grants were very much geared to young filmmakers, meaning filmmakers that are chronologically not that familiar with existence itself. It didn’t matter if one was young at filmmaking (and of any age).  I thought what if someone discovered their love and or talent of filmmaking at the age of forty, fifty, sixty-seven…?  Surely having lived a full life must impart a certain perspective, no doubt many interesting stories heard and told. There are few if any resources and venues for experienced voices.  I coupled that thought with the growing desire to start a new festival, but I knew a festival must have a niche. And the light bulb brightened.

The inaugural fest had a decent response in terms of submissions, and a humbling talent those submissions displayed, especially in the shorts categories, they have provided me with great education and inspiration.

I found the perfect venue, an old refurbished 1920s cinema house with old thyme concessions but juiced up with digital projection.  Starting late summer 2019 word of the fest grew and submissions came in. But once again the world had other plans.

PANDEMIC

Another opportunity in dark times (?)

As the time for the festival drew near COVID-19 began raking it’s way across the planet. The venue cancelled or postponed April events and was told May (the festival was schedule for May 31) was “not looking good”.  As I told the filmmakers I was definitely cancelling the date but was worried about the “fall resurgence” the science community is talking about. I didn’t want to put anyone in danger so the thought of rescheduling didn’t sit well. I scrambled to somehow save the festival, the first festival. Online was certainly an option, but due to a myriad of reasons just putting things out is a danger to the filmmakers and the plans for their work, as well as anticlimactic. After some research I found another festival with an on demand style process that was a wonderful substitution to tickets to a live event. With the overhead cost of a venue a moot point our expenses became near zero. The Over Forty Film Festival morphed from a one-day live event to a collaborative limited time distribution deal for all the filmmakers in which they would share in the proceeds. Viewers can see the festival selection online for less than the price of a live ticket, and the number of views is essentially unlimited (as opposed to the 300 seat capacity at the cinema). And best of all nobody needs to wear pants.

At the end of the day this may be a BETTER festival because of the pandemic. Going forward, assuming it is safe to go out next spring, we will have both the online on demand festival as well as live screenings; more exposure, more opportunity."

Please take some time and check out the festival at the link below.

www.vimeo.com/ondemand/offf

Reading isn't Proofreading

What did you just read? Did you see “Paris in the spring”?

Look again if you did. And then maybe look again.

You see it right… “Paris in the the spring.” The word “the” is repeated.

That’s the thing about your eyes. When it comes to reading, they’ve been taught to see what they expect to see and not necessarily what is there.

When we are learning to read and then striving to excel at reading, our teachers work on two things: reading comprehension and reading speed. I’m sure you remember reading tests in school. There were questions to see if you understood what you read, but then also marking where you stopped reading to see how many words you’re reading a minute. The goal is to read with speed and understanding and to achieve a satisfactory mix of both. (Don't quote me, but I read somewhere that 300 words per minute was the average reading speed)

You see little kids when they start to read… they move one finger at a time under each word and then sound them out. It’s painstakingly slow and could never be sustained as a satisfactory reading approach.

What’s happening when your eyes/brain read is pretty amazing. In fractions of seconds, your eyes and brain are processing words. And, your eyes don’t see linearly. They see in word blocks. And the more words you can fit into a block, the faster you read. That’s why most speed reading programs work on increasing your peripheral intake… more words in your word blocks means faster reading.

It also means trust. Your eyes trust that there are no errors. When you actually looked at the phrase above, your eyes (in a fraction of a second saw “Paris” saw “spring” and glimpsed just enough of “in” and “the” to immediately put together “Paris in the spring.”) It doesn’t help that the phrase is fairly familiar. Your eyes certainly don’t expect to see two “the’s” so instead your eyes/mind cancel one of them out. They often will not see what they don’t expect to see.

Now, a little kid, going one word at a time will always catch the two “the’s”. Maybe little kids would make pretty good proofreaders!

My proof copy of my new collection of stories just came back from the printer. I was excited to hold it.

But, the point wasn’t for me to hold it. It was to give it one more proofread. To be honest, my heart wasn’t in it. I’m an English professor, and I’d already been through galley drafts a number of times. I was sick of my own stories and confident that I'd caught the errors that I could. Also, my publisher at Whistling Shade Press is a technical writer by trade. He’d poured over the galley drafts too. I trust his eye, and he caught many little things that I didn’t catch in my read-throughs. I would suspect that happened because I am so familiar with the stories. My eyes saw what they expected to see.

In any case, I mustered the energy to read through the book one more time. And, no surprise, I caught a few things. Mainly they were forgivable errors. Once, in dialogue, a character said, “What, do you want to live at an airport now, dad?” Well, in that instance, because dad is being used as a name, it needs to be capitalized. It’s the difference between: “Oh, my dad just went to the store” versus “Oh, Dad just went to the store.”

So, those are sort of proofreading errors, but fairly nuanced. But, then (and I wasn’t going to at first) I read over the back cover blurbs… and I found an extra word!

If you look at the picture above, you can see where there is an extra “a” after “who’ve”.

So, I’m really glad I looked at the back cover. And maybe I was better at catching an error there because I was less familiar with the blurbs versus my own stories.

In any case, I’m sure there’s still an error or two in the book… that’s just the nature of proofreading, sadly (unless of course you pay for someone to proofread, which isn’t a bad idea).

The point I want to make goes back to the title of this post: Reading isn’t proofreading. They have two separate goals. With reading, we want comprehension and speed. With proofreading, we want to catch errors. One is built on trust and word blocks. The other needs to assume distrust (don’t trust that the text is perfect) and taking things slowly.

But, too often when we sit down to proofread… well, we just end up reading. And with proofing fiction, it’s very easy to just get caught up in the story (even your own story). And then your eyes go back to their old habits… taking in word blocks, trusting, and missing the errors.

So, what do we do? Well, like I said, hiring a proofreader can make a huge difference. They have specific techniques (usually) and they are motivated to do a good job. They also aren’t as familiar with the text. When you proofread your own work, you are often in a mindset of “I just want to be done with this; I’m sure it’s fine.” A proofreader, however, says, “I know there are errors in here. I’m going to find them. This is my reputation as a proofreader on the line.”

If you can’t afford a proofreader, there is a technique you can try that will slow you down. Just read your manuscript backwards. I don’t literally mean backwards. I mean go to the last sentence, find the beginning of it, and then proof it. Now, find the second to last sentence, find the beginning of it, and proof it. And so on… until you get back to the beginning.

This has several benefits. It slows you down. It forces you to take each sentence one at a time. There’s no story to get caught up in because the story shouldn’t make sense read that way. And, having to find the beginning of each subsequent sentence makes certain you are pausing in between each sentence. (Probably wouldn’t hurt to run your finger under each word, either… just like a little kid).

I’ve done this with my students, and they are always floored by how many errors they find in a story or paper that they were just getting ready to turn in for a grade.

I know the technique I described sounds meticulous and painfully slow. But, it's much less painful than finally holding your book... only to begin reading it and finding silly errors. Just the other day, while reading Love Medicine by Louis Eldrich, I found one of those silly errors. It happens even in big authors' books.

Next time you’re proofreading (and you can’t afford a proofreader) try reading your manuscript backwards.

If you find my blog posts instructive, please consider purchasing a copy of my new book of short stories, The Neighborhood Division, as a donated payment for the "class."

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Cutting Unnecessary Words in Fiction

I heard once that when asked how he sculpted, Rodin said, “I look at a stone, and then knock away everything that isn’t statue.”

I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for line editing fiction. When line editing, you knock away any words that aren’t in service of the story. Most writing is usually stuffed with unnecessary words. You just need to turn that critical eye toward your sentences.

Obviously adverbs are problematic because they are usually masking a shorter, stronger sentence.

            He ran quickly out of the room.

Ran quickly? We have a word that means that. Write instead:

            He sprinted out of the room.

I think it was Stephen King who said that anytime you think you’re finished, go back and cut 10% from the manuscript. So, you have a 10 thousand-word story? Well, Stephen King says you should be able to cut 1k words. Obviously that would probably take cutting some verbose scenes or even unnecessary scenes, but some of that is simply cutting words that aren’t in service of the story.

My father, John Vande Zande (you can still find copies of his short story collection Night Driving if you look) had a poet friend named Phil Legler. When Phil was working on poems, he’d share drafts with my father. It fascinated my dad how each version of the poem was subsequently shorter, but better.

“You poets,” my dad said, “you’d cut poems down to one word if you could.”

“If we only could find the right word, John, we would,” Phil said.

Of course, fiction isn’t poetry (though at its best it has a poetic quality). You need words to tell a story (good luck selling that one-word novel!).

But, you often don’t need as many words as you think. What our manuscripts are littered with are what I call “first draft” sentences. And somehow, draft after draft, those first-draft sentences keep lingering… until we truly turn a critical eye on them.

When my first collection of short stories came out, a reviewer praised the stories but panned the clunky style. He even quoted the opening line of a story to talk about how many words could be cut.

The opening line from my story “Trainee”:

            He always seemed to try to do everything very fast.

He claimed as many as six words could be cut. My first reaction was “shut up, what do you know?” But then I spent some time studying that sentence and realized what it should have been:

            He did everything quickly.

Not only does that take a 10-word sentence down to 4, but now the brevity (the quickness of the sentence) echoes the quickness being commented upon in the sentence.

I credit that reviewer to giving me a sharp eye when it comes to line editing. I never looked at my fiction the same again after that review.

And, one thing that I noticed that I do and many writers do is that we account for how stimulus comes into our character’s existence. Let me give an example:

            He saw a black cat slink across his path.

In this instance, the writer, by making “saw” the main verb, is essentially telling the reader that the main character used his eyes to take in the black cat.

But, what if the sentence were this?

            A black cat slinked across his path.

First, now the main verb becomes “slinked” … and storytelling-wise, the verb is your most powerful word. But, also, is there any doubt that the main character is seeing the cat? No. Vision is implied by this sentence without having to state it. No reason to say he saw the cat, when the seeing is implicit in the sentence.

As writers, I think we account for the senses quite a bit… especially in first drafts.

            She heard an owl scream into the night.

Should be…

            An owl screamed into the night.

(Again, is there any other way to take in a scream except through hearing or the ears?)

            She smelled apple pie in the air when she walked in the door.

Should be…

            The aroma of apple pie permeated the foyer when she walked in.

First, “permeated”… much better verb! And, again, the smelling of the aroma is implied, so no reason to tell the reader it was “smelled" or that the nose was used.

Of course, it’s important to activate the senses, and I’m often telling my students to get a range of senses into their work. Don’t just tell us what they see, but work in smells, sounds, touch, and even taste when applicable.

But, that doesn’t mean you have to account for what sense was used to take in the stimulus.

This happens in other ways too.

            Suddenly, he decided he’d turn around and drive back to his friend’s house.

Should be…

            Suddenly, he turned around and drove back to his friend’s.

I cut three words, and his “decision” to turn around is implied, so really no need to say he made this decision when the reader clearly experiences him making the decision without ever being told it was a decision.

Or…

            I remembered that near the end of his life, my father took up gardening out of the blue.

Should be (especially in a first person narrative)…

            Out of the blue, my father took up gardening near the end of his life.

Now, again, in the context of the story, we’ve probably already learned that the father is deceased. So, the fact that this is a memory is implied. No need to tell the reader it’s a memory through “remembered” when it’s clearly a memory.

Culling through your work with an eye toward cutting these words that account for how stimulus comes onto your character’s radar can often see you cutting 100 to 500 unnecessary words from your manuscript, depending on the length. And, often, it has you using sharper verbs, too.

Slowly but surely, you’re chipping it down to just statue… masterpiece.

If you find my blog posts instructive, please consider purchasing a copy of my new book of short stories, The Neighborhood Division, as a donated payment for the "class."

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Writing Prompts for Starting Short Stories (or Even Novels)

Often we have the itch to write, but the muse just doesn’t hit us. Put more bluntly, “we got nothing to write about” or nothing is hitting us.

That’s a tough feeling when we want to write, but have no ideas. I often see it in my students after they turn in their first story. And for them, it’s not only that they want to write… they have to write. No second story? Then no workshop. And then no finished story. And then failing the class. (That’s never happened, but I still sometimes see the panic in their eyes when they realize they have seven weeks to write a story and seemingly nothing to write about).

That’s where writing prompts can help.

Here are three that I use. They are usually for starting short stories, but I can see where they could be used to start a novel or even a novel chapter that needs a jump start.

Here’s three possible scenarios. I keep them intentionally vague so students can make them their own.

1.     Your character is in a line. (grocery store line, line at the bank, waiting room at the dentist, line at the soup kitchen, etc). Being in the line brings its own frustrations (and likely interactions with/eavesdropping on strangers), but the character is also mulling over some deeper problem going on in his/her life. Something with real consequence.

(Sometimes I’ll even challenge students with… “Can you write the entire story while the character is in line?”)

2.     Your character is somewhere unfamiliar (business travel, vacation, another country, etc). The unfamiliarity of the place brings its own challenges (surface conflict), but your character is still carrying the troubles of home. The character doesn’t have to be alone, but like in the first prompt, they are mulling over/troubled by what’s happening on the home front.

3.     Your character is returning to their childhood home after a long absence (military service, living in another city, college, etc). The greetings are already over, and the character is back in their childhood bedroom looking around at what’s the same/what’s different. Unresolved conflicts of the past come up. You’ll need to take some time to figure out why the character is home (funeral, wedding, little sister’s high school graduation, sudden unemployment, etc)

If you’re stuck, hopefully one of the above gets the wheels turning.

If you find my blog posts instructive, please consider purchasing a copy of my new book of short stories, The Neighborhood Division, as a donated payment for the "class."

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Musings on Titles for Novels

Titles in fiction are tricky, I think… especially for novels. You’ve spent months or years writing this big thing. It needs the perfect title. What follows is my experience with titling a few novels. It may or may not be instructive. My musings here might be most geared to literary novels, but then that might not be true either.

It can be interesting to search online to see what the working titles of novels were before they got their actual title.

Fahrenheit 451 was originally just called The Fireman. (I’m glad Bradbury kept thinking)

The Great Gatsby had the working title of Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue.

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone was called Lightning Bolt Forehead (ok, I made that one up)

I did read once that when Hemingway finished a novel, he’d commit to making a list of 100 possible titles. Sometimes, finding nothing that stuck, he’d make another list of 100.

My first novel was titled Into the Desperate Country. The novel explores some themes of living a simple life, so it was influenced by Thoreau’s Walden. As a result, I eventually used a snippet of Walden for the title:

            “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.”

I knew too if I ever wrote a sequel, it would be called The Desperate City. (I never did write a sequel)

That’s one way to go… pluck a part of a line from an existing poem or fictional piece (be warned, the well-known ones are often already taken.) I know Hemingway and Fitzgerald often plucked from the bible… see The Sun Also Rises and East of Eden.

For my second novel, about a painter, I wanted to find a term associated with painting that seemed metaphorically apropos for my character’s situation. (That’s another way to go… look at what your character does and see if there’s a term/lingo associated with it that carries some metaphorical/symbolic weight)

I found “fugitive colors”:

“A fugitive color is a pigment that, when exposed to certain environmental conditions such as sunlight, humidity, temperature or even pollution, is less permanent. Over time the color can change, lighten, darken or even almost disappear. Basically think of fugitive colors as temporary.”

Seemed great, but an amazon search turned up three books with the title Fugitive Colors. I love the phrase too… very poetic.

I ended up titling the novel much like I’ve seen painters title their paintings. I ended up calling the novel Landscape with Fragmented Figures. (Still like Fugitive Colors better!)

My next novel, I went with a more broad, sweeping title: American Poet. Yes, my main character is an aspiring poet in America, so it works on that level. But, I also was trying to get at what it means to be a poet in America. It’s a country that does not really love its poets. My novel is set in Saginaw, MI… birthplace to Theodore Roethke, a great American poet. Aside from a group that struggles to maintain his boyhood home as a museum, you’d hardly know that Roethke was from Saginaw. The town doesn’t really care. That’s what my novel is about… my main character returns to Saginaw after finishing his BFA in poetry, only to find that it can’t help him land a job in his blue collar town. He eventually finds purpose in trying to save the Theodore Roethke Home Museum after it experiences an attic fire.

Finally, my next novel, Detroit Muscle, is about a young man returning to Michigan after a stint in rehab. The title works because he and his grandpa do take a redemptive road trip across Michigan in a ’68 Firebird (a muscle car… or what is called Detroit Muscle). But, the muscle memory in the book is also about the grandpa and the kid remembering who they once were and trying to use that memory to develop into something else. They are flexing their own muscle.

I like titles like that. I call them concrete/symbolic titles. In this instance, concrete, because yes there’s a muscle car in the book. But symbolic too because the title has symbolic ramifications for the characters.

If you find my blog posts instructive, please consider purchasing a copy of my new book of short stories, The Neighborhood Division, as a donated payment for the "class."

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Character Description by Slow Degrees

My students often wonder how much they should describe their characters. My own advice… not much. The reader will form their own vision of how this person looks, and your character will make their presence felt through thoughts, words, and actions more than appearance or clothing.

As much as I often use film terms to talk to my students about writing, I remind them that they aren’t writing a movie. Descriptions of characters, though sometimes fun to write, are pretty boring to read, and they slow the story down.

In a movie, yes, it’s quite the moment when an Indiana Jones or a Terminator or a Lara Croft are visually revealed. But, the movie keeps moving, and the viewer can take in the details. Yes, sometimes the cinematographer will do a reveal, tilting from foot to head. It usually doesn’t take more than a few seconds. And, a head to foot reveal is much more interesting in film than in fiction. Unlike, film, your sentences can only focus on one thing at a time. So, your story gets bogged down in a descriptive paragraph. In a movie, things can keep happening.

For instance:

            The new kid had missed his first morning of classes, but made it on time for the lunch period. He walked into the cafeteria and stood framed in the doorway for a moment. He was about six foot and wearing a pair of scuffed cowboy boots, the tops of which were covered by faded blue jeans. The knees of the jeans looked like he’d kneeled in motor oil at one point and no amount of washing had ever fully vanished the stain. His gray belt held his pants up over his thin waist with a belt buckle in the shape of Texas. His Deep Purple t-shirt was tucked into pants. His arms couldn’t be described as muscular so much as wiry. He had a cleft chin, a hawk’s beak of a nose and steely blue eyes. His face was framed by stringy blonde hair that had pulled loose from his hastily arranged ponytail. I swallowed as he started toward the empty chair at our table.

Ok, I have a few issues with that. First, why is the narrator studying the new kid like that? Nobody does that when they see someone for the first time. They don’t study every little detail. And how long is the kid standing there for someone to take in every detail? More importantly, at least in my opinion, this is a lot for the reader to take in. Kinda boring to read, I’d say. And, this paragraph stops the story cold. Nothing else happens until he finally starts moving toward their table.

So… why not instead release these details by soft degrees? Feed it out slowly. Let the action keep going, and sprinkle in the details.

For instance:

            The new kid had missed his first morning of classes, but made it on time for the lunch period. Looming at about six feet tall in the cafeteria doorway, he looked around the room and then spotted an empty chair at our table.

            I swallowed as he approached us. Even under the murmur of everyone talking around me, I could hear the heavy thwack of each of his scuffed cowboy boots as he walked.

            He looked at me with steely blue eyes when he got to the table. “I’m going to sit here.”

            I nodded. “Yeah yeah, go ahead.”

            He pulled out the chair. I noticed the dull gray stain of what must have been motor oil on the knees of his faded blue jeans before he scooted his seat in and his legs disappeared.

            “Deep Purple?” Jake said.

            I shook my head. Jake’s mouth was about useless most of the time.

            The new kid looked down at his shirt and then at Jake. “Your reading classes are paying off,” he said. He crossed his wiry arms over his chest.

            A few of us laughed.

            “What?” Jake asked, ever the dimwit.

            The new kid reached across the table and picked my hamburger up off my tray. He studied it a moment, brushing aside a few strands of  stringy blonde hair that had pulled loose from his ponytail and dangled in his face. “This any good?”

            I told him it was if he liked soy pretending to be beef.

            He looked at me for a moment. He set the burger back on my tray. I felt like I was getting interrogated… just something about his cleft chin and hawk’s beak of nose that made him feel like someone who was always seeking hidden answers.

            “Really, they’re not bad,” I said.

            He slowly nodded, never taking his stare off of me. When he finally stood up, his Texas shaped belt buckle scraped against the table. He retucked his t-shirt into his pants, edging his fingers around his thin waist like a letter opener.

            “Guess I’ll try one,” he said, glancing around the room. “I’ll get the lay of the land, too.”

In this second scenario, I’m able to get all of my descriptions in, but I’m not bludgeoning the reader with them. And, I would still argue that this character is more interesting and makes his presence felt more by what he’s doing and saying in this scene.

And, by doing it this way, I get him to the table and talking and doing much faster.

If you find my blog posts instructive, please consider purchasing a copy of my new book of short stories, The Neighborhood Division, as a donated payment for the "class."

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