To major or not to major–that is the question

Here is the cover of The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre, which will come out on May 2nd. I love it, and I’m super-excited about the release. If you remember, this is the prequel to The Two Princesses of Bamarre.

And I’m now on Instagram, where you can find me under my name gailcarsonlevine. I’m finding my way, feeling like a total newbie, but at least you’ll see my dog. I’ll also–if I can figure out how–be directing people to the blog, so that may be old for you. (This is why I shouldn’t self-publish–I warn people away!)

On September 22, 2016, Veralidaine Sarrasri wrote, My mother keeps going on and on about how I should do something in college besides creative writing as my major, and keep writing as a hobby. I feel like I really want to become an author and not much else, so I want to take creative writing as my major. What do you think? I could really use your opinions.

You guys had a lot to say:

Christie V Powell: I can’t tell you what to do, but I can give you a few case examples from my siblings who are grown up now and what they’re doing:

I actually had a similar argument with my mom. She had an idea of “acceptable” majors that would get me a good job, but I was more interested in learning interesting things. I took Wildlife and Wildlands Conservation because I wanted to know more about it. I’m now a mother, author, and hobby farmer, while my husband works as a school teacher. So I’m doing the kind of things I’ve always wanted to do, but there is a cost. We struggle with money quite a bit. If my husband couldn’t work and I had to, I would have a lot of trouble earning enough money to pay for daycare. It wouldn’t be too hard to find a decent job in my area with my degree, though.

My little sister got a degree in English (another degree my mother disapproved of). She got a divorce a few months ago. Now she lives at home where my mom and other siblings can watch her little daughter while she works. She has an entry-level job at a movie theater. I know she likes to write and participates in NaNoWriMo, but I don’t know if she has any plans to use her degree.

My closest brother didn’t finish college. He has a job in pest management (spraying for bugs and such), which he seems to enjoy. He struggled over the summer when they laid him off for the off season, but he can afford his apartment and an engagement ring. Another sister chose a degree in Family Counseling, but she’s currently on a mission for our church. Maybe some of the younger ones will take a more traditional path.

Kitty: I’m in the exact same boat as you right now. Everybody is different, but here’s my plan if you want a reference point:

-I’m applying to college right now. I’m probably going to major in Economics/Business since I really like it, with maybe one writing class. I plan to write the whole time, though, and hopefully will have a few novels self-published and more ready-to-go by the time I graduate.

-When I graduate, I’m going find a job (fingers crossed!) in some economics-related field that pays decently but is relatively light on the workload. (A standard 9-5 job, no need to work overtime or on weekends, etc.) I like to think that I’ll work in a company’s marketing department, an economics research facility (I love science, but lean towards the social sciences), but realistically, I’ll probably end up an accountant or financial analyst. Or something boring but stable along those lines, which I’m not wild about, but it’ll only be temporary.

– Hopefully by now, I’ll have a nice backlist of books that are making decent returns. An economics/marketing/business degree will *definitely* give me an advantage with the marketing. If I’m doing well enough after a few years of saving up, I might quit and become a full time indie author/entrepreneur like Johanna Penn. If not, that’s fine too, I’ll just work a day job and write at night, just like when I’m in school.

My dream is also to become a full-time author, but personally, I don’t think it’s worth it to get a Creative Writing/English degree. For starters, if the author thing doesn’t pan out (and you have to be prepared for the possibility that it might not, self-pubbed or traditionally), you don’t really have anything job-wise to fall back on, unless you like teaching, which I don’t.

Second, a business degree will help you a *lot*, more so if you want to self-publish, but even traditionally-published authors are expected to do more and more marketing nowadays. And if you self-publish and essentially run your own business, you will pretty much *need* to know how to do accounting, bookkeeping, and other stuff. I did DECA, which is an international business/finance competition, in the Business Finance Category last year, and trust me, anything involving numbers and math (as to, say, more creative pursuits like marketing) is *not* something you can BS without actually having learned how to do it. Sure, you can learn on your own like I did, but having a class would make things *much* easier. Writing is becoming more and more of a business, so a degree will serve you well.

Third (and this is *very* much my own opinion, so take it with a heavy grain of salt), I don’t think a Creative Writing/English degree will teach you much. I’ve taken three years of high school English, and apart from things like literary devices and parts of a sentence, I haven’t really *learned* that much. Of course, I’ve only taken expository writing/literary analysis courses, so Creative Writing or college classes might be different. Maybe Gail or somebody else who has taken them can weigh in on that. Once you have the basics, the “tools” of the English language out of the way, everything else is very much the honing of the craft. And I don’t think that’s something you have to–or even *can*–learn in a classroom. For me, I learn by “osmosis” and practice. I read *a lot*, and sort of just subconsciously absorb how sentences are formed, how stories are formed, that kind of stuff. Sometimes I’ll consciously analyze books and what makes them good or bad, or seek out blog posts or articles online that teach the craft of writing. But all of it is free and unstructured, not something you necessarily need a class for. And practice. Just keep writing, the more the better, and sooner or later you’ll get better. You might need some help along the way, but that’s what critique groups are for. And from I’ve heard about Creative Writing classes, most of the course is just enforced writing and critiquing. I can go grab a CP from the NaNoWriMo or PitchWars community and do the same thing on my own, for free. Since I learned writing this way, and it works fine for me. I just don’t think it’s worth shelling out several tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars for. But others who have taken a college writing course might be better informed on that topic.

Christie V Powell: Kitty has a good point. I can see how a business degree would be really useful.

I just wanted to point out that there are other ways to take creative writing classes, even when you’re not at college. Brandon Sanderson, a Sci-fi fantasy writer, teaches a college course on writing and posts his lectures on youtube for free. Here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ZDBOc2tX8. You can also attend writing conferences and groups near you. Some are very pricey, some aren’t. The Festival of Books in Tucson Arizona, for instance, has free writing courses one weekend in March. I also attend a writing group that has a very class-like structure, with lectures and lessons and everything.

Melissa Mead: For what it’s worth, I only found one of my college English classes helpful for fiction writing. I majored in Psychology instead, which I actually think comes in handy more often, because it helps me get into my characters’ heads.

I actually LIKE keeping my writing as a hobby. It takes the pressure off having to write to survive, so it’s still fun.

Besides, if I had to write for a living I’d have starved by now. I made my first professional-level story sale in 2004, and published one e-book, and there have only been 2 years since then that I’ve earned enough to pay the mortgage. For a month. Not a year, a month. Plus writers don’t generally get health insurance. So I’ll stick with writing for fun for now. Maybe I’ll get famous after I retire.

These are so interesting! Everyone carves out a writing life differently.

When I started college and after I finished, I had no plan, no list of what I hoped to accomplish during my life. Due to a damaging remark by my high school creative writing teacher, which I may have mentioned on the blog, I believed I had no potential as a writer.

As a planless person, I majored in Philosophy because I admired a particular professor. It later turned out I didn’t like the subject particularly, but by then I had too many credits to switch. Philosophy is a useful pre-law major or good for going on to a PhD and then teaching, but otherwise, it and $2 (or whatever) will buy you a cup of coffee.

What I did know was that I wanted to help people, so I got a job in New York State government helping people on welfare find jobs. I loved it and stayed with it until I got promoted into administration, when the loving petered out. As a security-minded person, I stayed on. At first, my creative outlet was painting and drawing, but I was too self-critical to be happy. When I started writing, I felt that I had finally found myself.

By then, years had passed. I didn’t start writing until I was thirty-nine and didn’t get published until I was forty-nine.

Of course I was a big reader, and I had a tight grip on grammar. When I wrote a memo, the meaning was clear. My job at the time had me writing correspondence and reports, and my bosses were encouraging. One day, while meditating, I thought how much I loved stories but never made up any. I opened my eyes and picked up my pen–in pre-computer days. That was the beginning.

You can see that my trajectory until Ella Enchanted got published was the same as Melissa Mead’s and much like Kitty’s intended path. Six months after Ella came out (before the Newbery honor and long before the movie), when I thought I could have some kind of writing career and income, I took early retirement, knowing that I’d get a small pension when I turned fifty-five–security-minded again.

In my ten years to publication, I did what Christie V Powell suggests: I took adult-ed classes. Mine were at New York City colleges and universities. I left myself back in one marvelous class and took it five or six times. (The year Ella won the Newbery honor, another honor book, Lily’s Crossing, was by another alum of that class, Patricia Reilly Giff.)

Also to prepare myself–in a pre-blog universe–I read books about writing. I read everything on the Newbery shelf of my library. I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, attended conferences, joined critique groups–did everything I could think of to improve my craft. And I sent my work out and accumulated a four-inch thick stack of personalized (not just form) rejection letters.

Publishers in children’s literature don’t care if an author dropped out of school in the third grade and certainly don’t care what her major was–as long as her manuscript is good and also likely to find a market. Adult literary publishing may be different. The poetry world smiles on an MFA–but almost no one earns a living by publishing poetry.

The good of a degree in creative writing is probably in the classes, in sharing work, seeing what other students are doing, getting feedback, having readers. Frankly, since it’s so hard to earn a living as a writer, the quality of college writing teachers is likely to be very high. A professor may mentor you. If publication is discussed, you may also get a leg up there. However, you can find all of this in other ways, as I did. I’m not coming down on one side or the other.

If some other, possibly more practical, major interests you, too, you can minor in creative writing or even have a double major. But if nothing else is appealing, you’ll get your degree and spend the time doing what you love.

Whatever you decide, there’s commercial value in writing well, because few do. Clarity in business and government writing is priceless, say I, who had to read a lot of murk. The creative writing program I completed sends out job notices, and I just saw one for an assistant in a law firm. The posting said that the position had been held for the last nineteen years by a succession of poets!

There are also writing-related fields. There’s journalism, a possible major. Suzanne Fisher Staples, author of the young adult, Newbery honor Shabanu, studied journalism and worked as a journalist before she got published. There’s business and technical writing, public relations, advertising–though I don’t know if these are majors.

You know yourself. Do you need security, as I did? Some people don’t, but if you do, you may want to factor that into your plans. You may or may not care a great deal about possessions and money. Your lifestyle may be simple, and there’s freedom in that, but–just saying and maybe sounding like a mom–worrying about enough money for necessities is miserable.

One other thing to throw in the mix of considerations: automation. The most complicated, high-skill jobs are being replaced or partially replaced by machines. When you think about a field, you might research its chances of continuing to exist. Novelists, according to something I read, are unlikely to be replaced by robots. And here’s the link to where I read it: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/21/408234543/will-your-job-be-done-by-a-machine. Writers and authors have a 3.8% chance of being automated out of existence. Not bad.

Finally, there’s chance. Nobody knows what marvelous and terrible curves are going to be thrown at us, no matter how carefully we plan. I’m proof of that. I couldn’t have guessed how my life would go, and more surprises may lie ahead. So we can relax, at least a little.

Long post! Here are three prompts:

∙ Your MC is a writer. Whenever she introduces a character, that character comes to life and appears in her non-book reality, in ordinary circumstances that are nothing like what she’s writing. How does she proceed? Write a scene or the whole story.

∙ Cinderella marries Prince Charming. They ascend to the throne. She loves Charming but has no aptitude for queening. Write what happens.

∙ Cinderella is a fine queen, and Charming is a great king, but an invading army defeats their soldiers. They’re taken captive and have to reinvent themselves. Write what happens.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Lachrymose lugubriousness

On August 30, 2016, Jordan W wrote, I was wondering if anyone had any tips for writing emotional scenes. Ways you can really make the reader FEEL what is going on, and make them emotionally invested in the story. Whenever I feel like a particular scene needs to be more dramatic and powerful, I overwrite it and make is cheesy.

Several of you responded.

Lady Laisa: Think of a time when you felt the same emotion. Write about your own feelings. I never used to be able to write about death until one night I had an EXTREMELY vivid dream in which my father died. It was horrible and it was so real that when I woke up I wasn’t sure if what I had experienced was a dream or not. Now when I write death scenes, I remember what it was like believing my father was dead.

While dreams are useful, real life is useful too. I have one story that I write especially when I’m angry, because the MC is an angry, bitter person, and writing her when I’m angry really makes her come alive. Sometimes I simply don’t have time to wait until I’m angry, though, so instead I remember past injustices, and try to be as riled up as I can.

I find I get caustically sarcastic and extremely cynical after writing in Pen’s mind-set, and I spend the rest of the day in a red fog of annoyance and disgust. Whoops.

Something I do to help me get into a particular mood is listen to atmospheric music. Creating playlists to boost an emotion has been really helpful.

Emma: I do the exact same things- remember the times when I felt that way, and channel those emotions into the story, as well as listen to music. Also, considering the fact that all characters are different, all characters will end up acting differently in different emotional situations. By taking a close look at a character’s personality, you can figure out how he or she will act in an emotional situation. One of my characters in my WIP, let’s call her A, tends to not express her emotions very much, unless she’s talking to someone she absolutely, 100% trusts. This is because she hates drama and thinks emotions are unnecessary and messy. She normally always bases her decisions on logic, and likes to push her emotions to the back seat of the car in important situations. Thus, after she witnessed her mentor and great friend die, she kept her emotions inside. She cries in a scene when no one is around, and only talks about it to two people. Take a look at your character’s personality in order to write a very real, not forced, emotional scene. If you’re not sure how your character would react, try taking the personality test at www.16personalities.com (which was brought up in comments on a recent post) as your character in question. This test will assign a personality to your character and will give you several lists describing different aspects of your character’s personality, which can help you find out how your character would act and react.

Also, if you feel like an emotional scene is too cliche or cheesy, try changing something like the setting, or the way the characters describe their emotions. Let’s pretend your MC’s mom just died. The funeral has just gotten over, everyone is clad in black and are slowly leaving the graveyard through the drizzle. Your MC is standing alone in front of her mom’s grave when her best, childhood friend walks up and lays a hand on her shoulder. What could you do to make this scene less cliche? What if, instead of an ordinary day, it’s Christmas day, in southern Texas? Begone drizzle, hello dry air. What if the gravestone has something written on it that doesn’t make sense to anyone, but was requested by her dying mother to be engraved on her tombstone? Maybe the friend asks the MC what it means. Maybe they take their minds off the sadness by trying to figure out the odd saying. The emotional scene is no longer cheesy, because it’s different. It’s still emotional. Her mom is still dead, she still has a tear on her cheek, and she’s trying to take her mind off of the sad event. But now, it’s less cliche which means it’s less cheesy. And it’s also more interesting.

Christie V Powell: I find that the more powerful you want your scene to be, the less you need to say. Understatement and zeroing in on details are what I find the most powerful.

Here’s a scene from my second book (ebook is out now; hard copy should be here in a couple weeks!!):

Brian gestured to the unmarred sand ahead. “This is the dangerous Boar Island?”
“Anything’ s better than this boat,” Sienna groaned.
The fisherwoman was quiet—or was she tired from all that rowing? The hull of the boat scraped against the sand, and Brian leapt out to pull it further. Sienna half-climbed, half-rolled out of it and collapsed on the sand. Keita and Avie hurried to help her. In that instant, the boat gave a great jerk. Brian leapt back as it shot back into the water. They all stared as the fisherwoman pulled the oars as hard as she could. “Wait!” Brian called. “How do we contact you to get back?”
“You don’ t.”
“But we’ ll pay you!” Avie reached for her pocket and then gasped. Her hand emerged, empty.
No one said a thing. They stood on that beautiful white sand, watching the rowboat disappear into the great empty sea.

I agree with Lady Laisa that drawing on one’s own experience can be useful. When I wrote in Ella Enchanted about the death of Ella’s mother I remembered my own mother’s death a few years before. The gravesite moment comes straight from my response at the cemetery. And when Ella thinks about people saying she’d lost her mother, that her mother is gone, not lost–well, that was my thought.

Music lyrics, if we’re writing something contemporary, can help. After each of my parents died, I couldn’t help crying whenever I listened to a jazz song I adore, “Our Love Is Here To Stay,” because the lyrics seemed suddenly cruel and deceptive. Of course, we have to be aware of copyright law if we use lyrics that aren’t in the public domain. However, whether we’re writing contemporary or fantasy, we can always use a song’s sentiment to write our own lyrics. Music and song cut straight to feeling.

But what if we and our character don’t have similar experiences? Or if our character is so different from us that she’s unlikely to respond the way we do? I’m with Emma on this. In this situation, I write lists. We can list how our MC might respond to a death, for example. Could be directly with anger or sadness, or by walling off all feeling, or something else. Once we have a response that seems right, we can list how she might enact it, what she might do to release it or keep it bottled in. My mother, who keeps cropping up in this post, was a worrier and, consequently, a frequent insomniac. If we have a character who worries and is up in the middle of the night, we can list what she might do during those dark hours. The action is likely to convey the feeling to the reader.

I agree with Christie V Powell about the power of detail to carry emotional weight. Let’s imagine that our MC has lost a memento of a friend. For whatever reason–death, distance, a quarrel–the friendship is over but the memory lingers. Let’s say the memento is a medal. Instead of telling the reader that our MC is suffering because of the loss, we can show her looking frantically for it. We can describe the box that held it: what it’s made of, the sound it makes when it opens, the material the medal nested in, the smell of the box. Maybe there’s a letter that goes with it, and we can reveal what it says.

Regret is powerful, because it’s painful and we’ve all experienced it, so we can have our MC think about her responsibility for the loss–whether she’s really responsible of not. She can consider what she might have done to keep the medal safe.

However, regret may not be her feeling. She could be angry, and we can write her angry thoughts. She may be angry at herself for losing the medal, or she may be angry at someone else for the loss, or even angry at the old friend for the dissolution of the friendship.

That’s three strategies–action, detail, and thoughts to bring us and the reader into our character’s emotional life. Notice that neither one have to mention the feeling itself. The feeling is intrinsic to the actions, details, and thoughts. We can also bring in body responses, like a churning stomach or a headache. So that’s one more.

Emotional connection with a character will grow as the reader gets to know her. We don’t always have to work hard. Suppose, for example, our character is given to feeling stupid and the reader understands this about her, then we can cause her to say something that comes out wrong. As soon as she does and realizes her mistake, the reader will suffer for her. Whatever she thinks or does next will be infused in the reader’s mind with her pain.

Here are three prompts:

∙ As sort of a mirror image of Lady Laisa’s dream, a few months after my father died, I dreamed him alive again. He and my mother wintered in Florida after they had both retired and would call me on Sundays. My father’s usual mood was buoyant, even joyous, and I dreamed a phone call from him that was so realistic I was convinced for the first moments after I woke up that he was still alive. I had to experience his death all over again, which, of course, was devastating. Dreams are often–not always–hyper-emotional. Keep a pad next to your bed for, say, the next four nights, and write down your dreams. In the interest of going back to sleep, don’t turn on the light and use your free hand to guide your writing hand so you don’t write over your lines. After you have a few dreams, use one or a combo to write an emotional scene that isn’t a dream.

∙ I love Emma’s idea of changing a setting. Imagine your MC and another character are at odds. Their conflict can be major, as in, hero versus villain, or micro, as in, two friends arguing over hurt feelings. As they’re carrying out their fight, which might involve swordplay or yelling or whatever you decide, they’re magically transported to a circus arena, where thirty clowns are exiting a clown car, acrobats are performing overhead, and the animal trainer is entering with a caged lion. Continue the scene in this circumstance.

∙ Apropos of nothing, I heard a poetry prompt on the radio that I’ve been wanting to share. It’s to start a poem with the words I come from… The radio show was a call-in, and people called in their poem beginnings, which tended to go something like, I come from a long line of strong women whose strength was tested… etc. I thought, Meh. In your poem, avoid the general for the specific. For example, when I tried it, I included my husband’s origins as well as my own. He told me about Mr. Dibble, his boyhood barber, and, in the barber shop, the plastic behind the chairs of the people waiting for a haircut that protected the knotty-pine wallpaper from pomade–and I put those wonderful details into my poem. What a peek into mid-twentieth century small-city life! So think about your early toys, pets, bedroom, shops and anchor your poem in detail. (For my I come from stanza, I wrote about times with my friends when we pried mica up with our fingernails from Hudson River rocks in our local park in northern Manhattan.)

Have fun, and save what you write!