On my way to the MTCW Think Tank meeting Saturday, I heard an interview with Philippe Petit, the performance artist featured in this year’s Academy Award–winning documentary Man on Wire—the high-wire walker who walked a wire suspended between the World Trade Center towers. He was interviewed by NPR host Scott Simon, and there was one section of the interview that really resonated with me:

Simon: Can I get you to recall what that first step was like?

Petit: That moment, the slow-motion shifting of my weight, from the position where I have one weight anchored on the building and one weight—one foot touching the cable to turn the page from pedestrian and to open the page to life, to a short life as a bird, is of course for the wire-walker a point of no return. And for me, it was stepping into the live moment of living my dream after six-and-a-half years of dreaming my dream.

Simon: …What would have happened if you’d slipped?

Petit: That’s a very wrong question, because it doesn’t apply to me. I do not put myself in a state of question mark on the wire. Actually, the question mark, I transform it in[to] an exclamation point. And, again, when I say I’m writing in the sky, it’s not a beautiful image, it’s actually exactly what I’m doing. I have composed my text in my head, and I’m just now writing. I force my body to follow my will; and I will never put myself in a state of risk, only a state of ‘I hope the wire is strong enough; I hope I have enough training to do…to walk on that wire.’ And, at the same time, what I am sharing with you, this solidity, I am completely lying because here I am in the most fragile state and the most fragile universe there is. But this combination of extreme, the solidity in my heart and in my body, and the fragility of being a man on a wire, is actually the beauty of the miracle of wire-walking. So let’s not try to explain it further than that.

[The entire interview can be heard here.]

Petit’s statement about turning the question mark into an exclamation point struck me—especially since he reinforced it with the image of himself as a writer (and later in the interview as a poet). How many times when we sit down to write do we do it in a state of Question Mark instead of a mind set of Exclamation Point? For example:

Can I do this?
Am I really called to be a writer?
What if my story isn’t good?
What if no one likes my writing style?
What if everything I write gets rejected?
What if it’s never good enough?
Am I following the rules?
How am I ever going to get to 50,000 (100,000) words?

Sitting down to write in a state of Question Mark can paralyze us—we, like Petit, are at the point where we have one foot on the solid surface of “real world” (for him, the building) and “writing world” (the high wire). To be able to step out into that writing world, we have to turn those paralyzing questions into Exclamation Points:

I can do this!
I am called to be a writer!
My story is good!
I like my writing style!
Rejection isn’t the end of the world!
It’s good enough for me!
I can worry about the rules later!
All I have to write today is one page…one paragraph…one sentence…one word!

Self-doubt never led anyone into success. If you read/listen to interviews with successful people—whether they’re successful in business, the arts, raising their families, philanthropy, or whatever area of life in which they’ve applied themselves—you’re going to find out that though doubts may have surfaced, they didn’t listen to them, didn’t give them any ability to take a foothold in their lives.

If Petit stood at the wire thinking, What will happen if I slip?, he would never get that anchor foot off the solid ground. He doesn’t allow himself to think fatalistically—and yet at the same time, he recognizes the fragility of life. He’s not going out on the wire with a casual disregard for his own mortality. For him, it is the combination of the fragility of life and the solidity of the confidence he has generated in his own heart and mind as to his calling that allows him to pull that anchor foot off the building and onto the wire. To live life, as he said, for a short time as a bird in flight.

I wrote last week about the difficulty I have in shutting off that left-brain side of my mind when I sit down to write. Today, as I wrote this post, I realized it may not be physiological, but emotional—I may have reached a point where I’m living in the realm of Question Mark instead of Exclamation Point. I’ve allowed so many Question Marks to permeate my mind that it’s made me afraid to take my anchor foot off the solid ground and put it on the wire. So that’s my goal from now on. No more Question Marks. Only Exclamation Points.

In closing, I’d like to share this quote from Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking and founder of Guideposts:

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture… Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.
~Norman Vincent Peale

What Question Marks are you dealing with in your life (writing, work, family, etc.)? How can you change them into Exclamation Points?

Once again, great thanks to Alexandra for giving me an idea for a blog post!

Alexandra commented:

“…what would you suggest to people (me) who have finished their novel but haven’t the faintest idea for a title? What do you do for ideas? It’s beginning to make me very nervous. I normally don’t think up the title until I’m halfway through the story, but this is a little ridiculous. I’ve all ready given it two, and neither one was right for it. It goes by ‘Story’ around here, and I’ve had nightmares of seeing it published in bookstores with the title ‘STORY’ emblazoned across the cover.”

Titles are something that have given me trouble since I started seriously pursuing the craft of writing. So, as I do with all aspects of writing, I started studying it. And the way I did that was by pulling out all of my CDs (this would be so much easier now that all of my music is on the computer!!!) and making a list of the song titles that resonated with me, such as:
Walk on Faith
Love Remains (still using this title for a book I’ll be proposing soon)
Not a Moment Too Soon
What Matters Most (title of my first complete novel)
Not on Your Love
The Way You Love Me
Blame It on Your Heart
In This Life
Time Marches On
How Forever Feels
There’s Your Trouble

(I couldn’t find my original list, so I went online and searched for “Top Country Songs of the 1990s” and found this link. Country songs are great if you’re looking for a romance title.)

Looking at those titles, do they make you start thinking of situations, characters, or stories? That’s what you want a story title to do.

Of course, you don’t just want to assign any title to your story. One of the most important things you can do is figure out what the main theme of your story is. What’s your story about? Forgiveness? First Love? Surprises? Overcoming Bitterness?

As most of my regular readers know, the original title of Stand-In Groom was Happy Endings Inc. and the proposed title for the second book was A Major Event Inc. But when Barbour asked me to come up with a different title for the first book, I was quite taken aback—that book had been entitled Happy Endings Inc. for more than three years. That’s the title that’s imprinted in gold letters on my bound master’s thesis copy of it. But I wasn’t going to argue. So I sat down and started thinking of all the possibilities I could, by thinking about what the important themes and ideas in the book were. The three we finally narrowed it down to were:

Once Upon a Wedding
Wedding of the Year
Stand-In Groom

And you know which one won.

I was actually thinking about movie titles the other day and about how they’ve kind of gotten strange or have gone for a snappy sound without really telling us much about what the movie might be about. Like Push or Eleven Minutes or Seven Pounds.

You don’t want to go with something that’s such an obscure theme in the story that it doesn’t give readers a feel for what your story’s about. But you also don’t want a title that’s so descriptive that it’ll have to be in 10-point font on the front cover.

So, how do you figure it out?
–Figure out the main themes of your story (as already mentioned).

–Go to Brainy Quote or The Quotations Page or The Quote Garden and do a search for the one or two key words in the themes you come up with (forgiveness, love, anger, fear, etc.). Do any of the quotes you find there give you an idea for a three to four word title. For example, my second completed novel features an architect, but also features four characters who have their own ideas of where their romantic futures lay—and find out God has other ideas for them, so I entitled it The Best Laid Plans.

–Look at every single title of every single song on every single CD you own and write down the ones that resonate with you/your story.

–Study books you’ve already read. How does the title tie in with the story? Does it make sense?

–Write back cover/marketing copy. Write your one-sentence pitch. (See this post for suggestions on how to do this if you’ve never done it before.) Keep whittling that one sentence pitch down until it’s as short as possible. Does it suggest a title to you?

–How does your story end? What I like to do is tie the title in with either one of the major themes of the story (as with Stand-In Groom and Ransome’s Honor) or with something that happens that’s important to how the story ends (as with Menu for Romance).

Now, get to work, and if you want help, post your options, themes, one-sentence summaries, etc., here, and we’ll all help!

Monday night at the Ted Dekker book-signing event at the Lifeway in Cool Springs, I had the opportunity to chat with several fellow MTCW members. One of the topics that came up is how it seems like recently we’d much rather re-read a book than pick up a new one, and how we (or at least I) would rather revise than compose when it comes to writing.

I used to love to go to the bookstore and buy five or six new novels. And I’d be back in two or three weeks to get more, having devoured those in just a few days each. Now, I go to the bookstore and (after looking to see if they have Stand-In Groom and how many copies are on the shelf) after looking at the covers and reading back cover copy, I put the books back on the shelf thinking, I’d probably really enjoy that story; but I know if I buy it, it’ll just sit on a shelf for a couple of years unopened, unread, so what’s the point? (Yes, I think with semicolons.)

Excuse me? What’s the point of buying new books to read? When did I sink so low? I used to read 50+ new books every year! I could lose myself in just about any book. And there were very few that I would put away unfinished. If I started reading it, I finished it, even if it wasn’t the most interesting/enthralling story. I had favorite authors whose books I bought without even reading the cover copy, simply because it had the author’s name on the cover.

Then, when it came to writing, it used to be that I constantly had folded up pieces of paper or napkins or church bulletins in my purse or in a stack or folder beside the computer waiting to be typed in, because I so enjoyed writing that I did it anywhere/everywhere I went (including at work, waiting for appointments, at concerts, etc.). It was what I looked forward to getting home from work to do in the evenings. I completed first drafts of novels in months instead of years. And even if I didn’t “feel” like writing, I powered through and did it anyway, because I knew I couldn’t let a little thing like apathy keep me from doing it. Once I completed one manuscript, I couldn’t wait to go on to write the next story. I loved the composition process. I loved getting lost in the world of my story. I loved spending time with my characters. I loved sitting down each day to discover what they were going to do/where the story was going that day.

Now, I have to force myself to sit down to write. And even when I do, all I can think about is everything else I’d rather be doing. (Of course, maybe part of the problem is that I always was the most prolific when I didn’t logically seem to have time to write—like my second-to-last semester of college when I was working full-time, taking 9 semester hours of senior-level classes with tons of reading and papers, and serving as an officer with ACFW for an additional 10-15 hours per week, not to mention a couple of physical therapy appointments each week for the ruptured disc in my lower back—and I wrote a 75,000 word manuscript.) (Wow, that was a long parenthetical statement.)

The more I started thinking about how things used to be, the more I started analyzing how I’ve changed since then that precipitated this turn-around in attitude.

And it comes down to one thing: knowing the rules.

Learning about and continuing to study the craft of writing brought about a fundamental change in the way my brain works when performing the functions of reading and writing.

We’ve all heard that analytical functions (math, science, accounting, taxes, rules, regulations, calorie counting, etc.) are done with the left-side of the brain, while creative functions (art, crafts, music, creating, singing, painting, dancing, day-dreaming, laughing, entertainment, etc.) are done with the right-side. So, it’s logical to follow that when reading and writing, we’re using mostly the right-side of the brain (with a little help from the left brain to control interpretation of the symbols on the printed page, comprehension, choosing the right words, spelling said words, and using whatever punctuation it wants to throw in for good measure.!$,.

However, once I started learning the rules, once I started getting feedback on my own writing, whenever I sat down to write, I had all these things that the left-side was trying to impose on the right-side (the write-side) that kept me from slipping fully into that creative slip-stream that used to carry me away when composing. But this is also what makes the revision process so rewarding for me: because at least in that process, having both sides operating at about equal strength is a benefit. Not only do I need the creative side for rewriting, but I need the analytical side for telling me what needs to be revised, how, and why.

This equilibrium between the hemispheres of gray matter has wreaked equal havoc with my enjoyment of reading. Again, I used to be able to slide very easily into the right-brain slip-stream and lose myself in someone else’s world, with someone else’s characters. Now, though I might enjoy the story I’m reading at a visceral level, my brain is constantly working, analyzing the plot structure and trying to think ahead and figure out what’s going to happen next, analyzing the characters, analyzing the style and voice and tone, analyzing the author’s choice of POV and tense and pacing, and so on. And that’s a lot of effort, even if it is on more of a subconscious level (if it’s a book I’m really enjoying) or more to the surface (if it’s a book I’m reading critically). However, one of the reasons I’d much rather read an old favorite is because, for some reason, the left-brain shuts up and doesn’t bother me, letting me enjoy the process of reading.

Is there a way to go back, to quiet the left-brain and let the write-brain out to play with no rules again? Probably not. But just as stroke or brain-injury victims often make miraculous recoveries when their brains figure out how to redirect/reconfigure the way messages get sent from one side to the other as well as to different parts of the body, there has to be a way for me to silence the left-side whenever I need to and find the slip-stream and enjoy the composing process once more.

Have you noticed a change in your attitudes toward writing/revising/reading in the time you’ve been studying the craft of writing? How do you deal with it?

In an effort not only to make myself a better housekeeper, but to keep my house in such a condition that anyone could drop by at anytime (though no one does, and I do prefer a little notice) and I wouldn’t be embarrassed by it, I’ve set myself a daily housekeeping task. So far, I haven’t been great at keeping up with most of them, except for the Monday (Kitchen) and Friday (Laundry and change bedding) tasks. I’m getting really good at making those a habit, so maybe it’s just a matter of adding each additional room one at a time on its specified day to make them all habits.

But anyway, that’s not the point of this post. Yesterday, as I mentioned, I had an onsite at a client, which threw my whole Monday routine into chaos. This was compounded by going out last night: down to the Cool Springs area to (a) stop at Barnes & Noble to see if they have Stand-In Groom yet (THEY DON’T!!!!) and (b) to go over to Lifeway for Ted Dekker’s book signing. I’ve been to several book signings that that particular store many times—usually on a Saturday afternoon—and they’ve never had a ton of traffic. So I always like to show up, even if I’ve never met the author nor read his books before, just so that someone’s there. Plus, I’m almost always likely to run into one or more members of MTCW at these events.

All that to say: I didn’t get around to my housekeeping task yesterday.

Today, I wasn’t really sure what to blog about. I thought about giving y’all another refresher post, but I’m as tired of those as I’m sure you are. But until I knew what I wanted to blog about, there was no point in trying. So, instead, I decided if I wasn’t going to do my Tuesday housekeeping task (clean up, dust, sweep, and mop in the living room), I would do the kitchen. (It’s also so much easier to lose weight with a kitchen that’s always clean, but that’s a post for my other blog.)

Because of cleaning the kitchen, including wiping down all surfaces (when was the last time you wiped off the top of your fridge?), it’s made it a lot easier to keep it clean throughout the week—in fact, it’s made it so that I don’t like leaving anything out because I know if I do, it’ll just make my Monday task that much harder (see, this is what I’m going for—and hope to get to with the rest of the house). For many, many years, I’ve been the kind of housekeeper where, if it’s out of my line of sight, or if I don’t have to look at it often, I didn’t worry about it. And “out of my line of sight” includes everything from about the waist down. One of the (very many) downsides of being overweight is that leaning over to pick something up or clean it is highly uncomfortable—between the back hurting and not being able to breathe, it’s just hard to get down there. Now that I’m losing weight, this excuse is waning somewhat, as it’s much easier to just bend over and pick something up (or wipe up a spill) as soon as it falls.

So as I’m mopping the floor today (I usually use the Swiffer Wet Jet, but it’s amazing how much cleaner the mop gets the floor, and how things I have to scrub at with the Swiffer come up with one swipe of the mop), I remember for the umteenth time that there’s a produce sticker stuck to the floor.

Now, I don’t see it every day to be reminded of it, because it’s usually covered up by the rug that I have on the floor at the sink. But I’ve seen it every week for the past several that I’ve been doing this. Yet by the time I think that I need to scrape it up, I’m already tired from sweeping and mopping the whole kitchen (no, it’s not really that large).

But it made me start thinking about writing.

(You knew it would, right?)

As writers, we all have our little pet/favorite things in our story, whether it’s an opening line/scene, a certain word used repetitively, a character who doesn’t add much but we love him, info dumps, or whatever it may be. Or it could be that there’s a certain place in our story we know could be stronger if we put a little more effort into it, but we just don’t feel like it.

Critique partners or contest judges may ding us on these “stickers” in our writing. But we stubbornly go along, either not wanting to get rid of it or not wanting to put the effort into fixing the problem. Or we try to cover it up. We move it, we revise the scene even though we’ve been told to cut it, or we throw a couple of “showing” verbs into a passage we’ve been told is passive/telling.

The sticker’s still there. It’s just under the rug.

As writers, we have to be willing to face the pain that comes from removing the sticker. The shortness of breath that comes from cutting those little pet scenes/words/characters. The back pain from applying butt to chair to spend the time necessary to revise or completely rewrite those passages that aren’t working. Or, in my case, applying butt to chair and getting the first draft written!

Now, while I go scrape up that sticker, I want you to tell me what your “sticker” in your writing is and how you’re prepared to deal with it.