anna katherine

Author crazies — we all have them. Fears and worries that — as artists, craftsmen, and business people — drive us a peculiar kind of nuts. One of the biggest crazies, though, is the thought, “I’m the only one thinking this.” One by one we’ll be taking those thoughts out of the back of our brains and showcasing just how universal they are. In this entry, Kat talks about being a hack.

You want to know my biggest issue? I’ll tell you right now: I think I’m a hack.

I hear other people talk about how they write — the muse who gives them brilliant words, the dreams they’ve had where they discovered their next scene, how their characters have appeared to them and explained their entire backstory and what they want to do for the rest of the book — all sorts of stuff like that. All very artistic, sometimes aggressively so.

I don’t have that. I don’t have any of that. I don’t have words that come to me from nothing, I don’t have deep conversations with imaginary people. I just sit in front of my computer and use dozens of tricks to put together a story. I’m not even “writing for me,” the ultimate artistic excuse for just about anything — I’m writing for a reader. (And if we really want to get into deep hack territory, I’m doing it for the money, too.) I’ll use any trick, perform any mind-hack it takes to get the reader to the end of a story.

I don’t think about it in any sort of grand way, and my deepest author crazy is that this makes me somehow less of an artist, less of a writer. What if really great prose needs to be dreamt up beforehand and laid on the page with suffering angels crying each word into my ear? That’s what I hear so many other writers talk about (even writers I admire) and I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing some important part of being an author — and if the reader will notice.

What if the reader looks at what I write and realizes that I’m using a specific style of punctuation to get them to feel exactly what I want them to feel? What if the reader feels manipulated? (What if they realize that was my intention all along?)

I don’t like the idea of my ideas, my skills, being attributed to some Other being or subconscious silliness — I feel like it takes away the accomplishment — but I hate the idea of my work being called bad just because I’m practical about it. And the other half of this author crazy is that, naturally, I think everyone thinks my work is bad.

I don’t really have much of a solution for this one. I just sort of power through it, because I don’t know how to suddenly conjure a character up to talk to over tea — I can only fall back on the stuff I’ve taught myself to do. Maybe it’ll keep fooling the readers into thinking I’m artistic — at least until everyone realizes how much of a hack I really am.

In a recent post I talked about the smell of cigarette smoke being used a description. Smell is actually an incredibly evocative sense for me, and I love reading it and working with it in my own writing. Readers of Salt and Silver may remember that our main character Allie spends a lot of time talking about what things smell like. For example:

I open my eyes when I feel Roxie’s hand on me. I know it’s her. I can smell her the way I can smell demons and Ryan. The way I can smell Amanda (vodka and a slowly rotting liver and the Dr. Pepper-flavored lip gloss she used for years because I gave it to her); the way I can smell Stan (stale makeup and stale sex that never quite washes off and the burned plastic smell of a perflectly executed wallride on a really top of the line skateboard); the way I can smell the diner (bleach, pancakes, pot roast, blood); the way I smelled the dead underneath Bath & Body Works (blood, blood, copper, iron, blood, and horrible horrible flowers).

For me, describing the smell of something can bring a level of realism to an otherwise fantastical narrative — it can be a way of giving the reader an entrance into something they’ve never experienced (and in the case of demons, probably never will). It can also be an immediately accessible universal, if you want to play around with those — almost everyone knows what burning wood smells like, or the smell of the air after a thunderstorm. If you need to do a quick description to catch the reader up, throwing in a universal scent can get you where you need to go quickly and with a bit of panache.

Explore your own senses beyond just the visual — scent, texture, hot/cold/wet/dry, sounds, pressure… Then see how it can be applied to your writing to create something interesting and evocative for your reader.

Here’s an excellent blog post on a similar subject: Read React Review‘s “Smells Like Romance Spirit: On the super noses of our heroines and heroes.” Allie has a psychic nose! That is my only excuse.