Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing

Gone Writing – Day 18

Posted on January 19, 2016

While watching the sun rise over Lanikai Beach, Kirsten and I talked about how music and beats and general noise, like the lapping of waves on the beach, spurs us on while writing and the different kind of music or sound we need when we’re thinking, creating.

 

For thinking, plotting, creating I need a quiet beat, either classical music, native American chants or just nature sounds. I love the sound of water and the sound of wind. A wordless beat that half-hypnotizes me and shuts me off from the real world. Uptempo or downtempo depends on the kind of project I’m working on.

When I’m ready to write the story I connect it to music that will drive me toward a certain mood, a state of mind that allows me to get deeper into my character’s life (or my characters’ lives when I’m writing a dual narrated story). It takes some time figuring out which music will do the trick, but I always find it. Often it’s just one song or one track, which I will put on repeat. Listening to that same song over and over again puts me into a trance. I don’t have to listen to the lyrics anymore. I can just write.

Sometimes it’s an entire album that’s connected to the story, like with this project, where Elvis Costello’s North and ‘Someone took the words away’ in particular, carries me to the right place to write Sunshine’s story.

To me it works like method acting, this music/trance thing. Love it.

 

So, I have my music, I have this super inspiring friend around me, these gorgeous view, if only I had been able to convince my muse to travel with me my writer’s life would be perfect. Haven’t spotted him here yet, so the thinking is all on me.

 

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Categories: A Bit of Everything

Gone Writing – Day 17

Posted on January 18, 2016

The biggest advantage of traveling without Internet is time. Time to read. Time to write. On my way to my next destination I wrote three scenes for the novel, read two books and reread part of another.

The first two books were excellent but dark reads. Becoming Chloe by Catherine Ryan Hyde is the heartbreaking story of two teens on the streets. Throwaways, as Ryan Hyde calls them, not runaways because runaways have parents who want them back. Nobody wants Jordy and Chloe back. A dark book but one with a hopeful ending.

The other one was The Nest by Kenneth Oppel, one of my favorite writers since his Silverwing trilogy, with gorgeous dark illustrations by Jon Klassen. The Nest is a harrowing story, of the sort that grabs you by the throat and won’t let go, about an anxious boy who becomes convinced that angels will save his sick baby brother. But there’s a twist. A dark twist.

 

Both books were right up my alley and especially The Nest left me gasping for air. And gasping for air reminded me of a scene in My Struggle: Book 1 where Knausgård, after the death of his father, says that he no longer poached air, because that’s what you do when you breathe, you trespass on the world. I remembered that I grappled with the vision of breathing as trespassing on the world. After The Nest I went back to My Struggle: Book 1 and reread that particular scene. I can see the poaching, the stealing of air from the world. The breathing as trespassing. Not so much. I would say that living is trespassing on the world and while you trespass you poach the air.

 

Man, my brain rambles when it’s up in the air…

 

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Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books, YA books

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Gone Writing – Day 16

Posted on January 17, 2016

While on my way

I remind myself of

my muse’s mastery

replay his voice

his words like mist

on my skin

tender

brisk

smoothing the serpentine twists

of my memory

rousing the radical thinking

in my mind

as he challenges me to live

the sober lines

and daunting scenes

of my novel

like a first

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Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books, YA books

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Gone Writing – Day 15

Posted on January 16, 2016

One more day and night to go before I travel on to my next destination.

 

These past weeks were intense with days of glorious, sometimes even demonic writing and days of calm and reflective composing. Days of solitude and days when my muse popped in to shake up my thinking. Days when I shamelessly called in my writer friends Jim, Donna and Scott to brainstorm about this wretched project of mine. Days that I plunged so deep into the dark that I was beyond grateful to be enveloped by the loving care of the Adelson family. Good weeks. Productive weeks. Weeks that taught me my writing soars when I’m alone.

 

The book ain’t half done and I have decided that I need to come back here to finish it. It’ll be a few months because I will have to tend to my other baby first – my editor will have the line edits of my Dutch middle grade adventure Boreas and The Thousand Islands on my desk when I return home. The book is scheduled to come out in April.

After the book’s launch I will again settle down in the Bay Area, I hope. I’m already looking for an affordable writer’s den (anyone?).

 

But for now I’ve marked my next waypoint: 21.3000° N, 157.8167° W. One more day of writing here before I’ll lower the ship’s screw and cast off for some Boreas 3 research.

 

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My writer’s den? If only…

 

Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books, YA books

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Gone Writing – Day 14

Posted on January 15, 2016

Fog view. Fog brain. One scene written. Protagonist fleeing from the light into the dark.

Will she find her way back to the light?

No.

 

I’ve thought long and hard about the novel’s ending and I’ve decided there is only one plausible ending. Bad. Sad. Dark. There will be light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but she won’t see it. Or maybe she does but too late. Showing the reader how she slides down the slope and away from the light will be the biggest challenge of this project. I will need to make the reader believe that she has not other options left.

Then again… how often does the story take me into a different direction? Everything can change with the first, second, third, fourth round of revisions. But for now, it’s dark.

 

Will I manage? Maybe. My time in San Francisco has almost come to an end. I’m incredibly sad that I can’t stay and finish the novel here. If I could, I would. In a heartbeat. In less than a heartbeat. I have one consolation: my muse doesn’t do goodbyes so I’m counting on him to travel with me, to think with me, wherever I go.

 

A writer friend asked if my muse had a name (hers has the most adorable name, but she’ll tell you about it herself some day). Does a muse need a name? I don’t know. I usually call him boy or sir, depending on my mood and how he inspires me, how he keeps me thinking.

 

I can reveal one other name, though. My protagonist’s name. Sunshine.

 

 

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Categories: A Bit of Everything

Gone Writing – Day 13

Posted on January 14, 2016

Until today I was so wrapped up in my story that I never realized that there was more than yesterday’s flash fiction kernel that started it, or maybe not started it but at least unconsciously spurred me on to write it. I should’ve known when I started my journey at Schiphol Airport and took out my passport, because I carry my passport with me in a Penguin card holder that depicts the cover of D.H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl. I should’ve known when I pulled out my travel pouch and notebook to scribble down my thoughts during the 11-hour flight to San Francisco, because I carry my pens, sharpies, pencils, my good luck trinkets with me in a Penguin travel pouch that is printed with the cover of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

 

How did I not notice this? I mean, for beat’s sake, my protagonist is The Lost Girl and she is On The Road! And while writing her story I often feel like a lost girl on the road too. (That’s not a bad thing. It merely brings me the right state of mind.)

 

I think my muse would appreciate these signs. I can almost hear him mutter something about stars aligning or realigning and urging me to revisit On The Road and The Lost Girl. And even if he’s far away and I can only hear his voice like a whisper on the wind, this time I’ll do as he urges me.

So if you don’t find me online or at my desk, don’t worry. I’m not lost or on the road. I’ll be curled up in bed with Jack.

 

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Signs and doodles

Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books, YA books

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Gone Writing – Day 12

Posted on January 13, 2016

Besides writing longer novels, I write short stories. For the young but also for adults. My adult short stories are flash fiction pieces, often no more than a few lines or 250 words at the most.

I love writing flash fiction. It forces me to be concise, sharp, snappy. It forces me to be harsh and merciless. Not necessarily topic- or story-wise, although my flash fiction often turns out a tad gruesome, but harsh and merciless when it comes to trimming the word count. I mostly write the flash fiction in English and there’s no fluffing up with a limited vocabulary. It pushes me to not skirt the core of the story but to go straight for the kill.

 

Sometimes a flash fiction story germinates and grows into a novel, like with the one I’m writing now. The kernel that started it was a flash fiction piece I wrote for a contest. It didn’t win me a prize but it did end up in the anthology as the editor’s pick. I already knew then that some day I had to write the full story, but it took me a couple of years to find the courage. I’m here now. And this was the piece that sparked it all:

 

Nothing Changed

 

He had hesitated about the tights. It was chilly enough, but tights were little forgiving, pressed every missed hair on the skin as if between the glass slides of a microscope. He’d done it anyway. It had made one of the red high heels slip from his foot. 

A gust of wind spun him. The diaphanous dress whipped up and caressed his thighs, his hips, now filled with silicone for a more gentle shape. A vain attempt. He’d fastened the bra underneath with an elastic band, more suited as it was for a thirteen-year-old girl’s chest than for a man of fifty. Would she recognize it? It had been her first: black satin, printed with tiny flowers in delicate pink and white. She had hated him when she caught him wearing it, still hated him for it, even if he had had no choice. She would see that now. 

There had been no hesitation about the place. The elm tree near the water had been exactly what he was looking for: strong and feminine, like he wanted to be, like she was. A bough reached out to her window like a hand. The noose hanging from it welted his neck, pushed out his tongue, now purple and engorged. His dead eyes stared into her room. Into her. 

 

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Ceci n’est pas une orme

Categories: A Bit of Everything, YA books

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