Allison Starkweather

This is not the writing content you’re looking for

allikat — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 14:41:17 +0000

This is PIE CRUUUUUUST!

Okay, I’m a dork. Sorry! I couldn’t help myself.

Anyway. The recipe! This is courtesy of The Smitten Kitchen, and will make two pie crusts. I’m making a half batch in all the pictures I took.

2 1/2 c. flour
1 T sugar
1 t. salt
8 oz (2 sticks) unsalted butter

(We never have unsalted butter in the house, so I used regular and omitted the teaspoon of salt and it worked out fine)

Chill everything. Or at least the butter. Make sure it’s COLD. The refrigerator is your friend.

Cut the butter into cubes. I cut the stick of butter in quarters lengthwise, then cut those sticks into cubes. Dump everything into a really big mixing bowl. Significantly bigger than you’d think you’d need. Making pie crust is messy, and you don’t want to fling your flour all over your kitchen, or yourself. Like so:

See how that bowl looks way too big for such a small pile of ingredients? I was glad to have it. And I still ended up with flour on my pants.

Get one of these:

I guess you could cut the butter into your dough using two knives, but that sounds like an awful lot of work to me. This makes it much faster, and much easier.

Speaking of which: Cut the butter into your dough.

I used to be under the impression that the goal of cutting the butter in was to get a homogenous butter/flour mixture. Apparently, I was completely wrong. I have this irresistible urge to get Everything Completely And Thoroughly Combined, but I have to resist it when making pie, because apparently, you want chunks of butter. That’s what creates flakiness. D’oh!

This is good news, though, because it means you get to stop much sooner than you’re inclined to.

The general guideline I read is to cut the butter into your dough until it’s in “pea-sized chunks”. They really mean this. So when you’re cutting it in, stop every so often, squint at your butter chunks, and really ask yourself if peas are that size. Resist the inner voice that says, “No! Make them smaller!” Really look.

For reference’s sake, this is what my butter looked like when I decided it was done:

Look how chunky and uneven that is! It makes my poor baker’s heart weep with its lack of homogeneity. But it’s going to be delicious.

Now, get a glass of ice water and a spatula. Give the ice water a minute to really get chilled. Remember: cold. Cold cold cold.

Now dribble ice water onto your dough a little bit at a time, and mix it up with the spatula in between. You don’t want this to be too wet, or it’ll be sticky and unmanageable. Just add water until comes together and you don’t have any dry flour left in the bottom of the bowl. With this half batch, I dribbled water in two tablespoons at a time, and ended up putting in about 5 tablespoons of water total. It’ll look like this:

Now reach in there and mash it together. Just a little bit! I probably squeezed it four times total. You don’t want to work this much because that’ll form gluten, and gluten will make it chewy, not flaky. You definitely don’t want to knead it.

Form it into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and flatten it into a disc. (If you’re making a full batch, divide it in half, and form it into two separate discs.)

See how it looks kina blotchy there? With darker-yellow spots in the middle of lighter-yellow bits? The darker yellow there is your chunks of butter. This makes my baker’s heart cry a little, too. But your taste buds will thank you. Just remind yourself that it’s good for it to be uneven.

Then stick it in the fridge and go read a book. Or write one, if you’re so inclined! It needs time to cool off after all that handling.

How to Revise Without Losing Your Sanity

Allison — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:00:53 +0000

I’m reposting this in a slightly edited form from a comment I left on Stephanie Damore’s blog yesterday. She was asking for advice about how to approach a major revision, and this was my answer:If you’re tackling a structural revision, this is the way I did my last one. It’s a little labor intensive, but it’s got structure out the wazoo, which I find incredibly helpful for keeping me from flying into a panic.First: Go watch Dan Wells’ talk on story structure, if you haven’t. The video is here, and you can download his powerpoint to follow along here.Then, what I did for my novel, which was “finished” but had some serious structural issues I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to solve, was I wrote down every plot thread that I could think of in the book.Next, I used Dan Wells’ method to build a 7-point system for each plot thread. Many of them, I didn’t all seven points — those were places where I had structural problems, so I worked on making sure that I had the complete chart filled out for every single thread, making sure that each had a solid arc, progression, and conclusion. Being able to work with just one thread at a time really helped keep the panic down because I could focus on just that one, instead of getting overwhelmed by the book as a whole.You can see in the image above how I color coded the threads. Then I printed them out on 3×5 cards, one point per card, and spent a while crawling around on my living room floor, arranging everything into chronological order. When I was done with that, I’d turned my half-a-dozen threads into one long plot.The places where there are multiple cards next to each other are where the same plot point spread across multiple threads. When I was satisfied with my layout, I typed the cards up into an outline. With that in hand, I went through the book, using the outline to identify scenes that were superfluous to the plot and needed to be gotten rid of, as well as places where new scenes had to be written to fill in the holes of my first draft.Although this does take a fair bit of work beforehand, I’ve found it so incredibly helpful, because it eliminates away the panic of “oh my god, I don’t know how to fix this”. Using Dan Wells’ structure helps me to identify exactly where the problems are and how to fix them, and having the whole thing outlined beforehand means that once I’m actually working on the book, I only have to focus on the scene in front of me, instead of getting pulled a million different directions by a hundred different scenes that all need to be fixed.It also works great for outlining the book before you start writing the first draft, but I like pantsing well enough that I usually only do that if I’m feeling really intimidated by a book.Does anyone else use Dan Wells’ system? What other methods do you use for structuring your books? Please share! I’m always on the look out for more tools.

Going to the motherf*cking DENTIST like an ADULT

Allison — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:24:29 +0000

(For those who don’t get the reference: run, don’t walk, to this post, and discover the sheer, unadulterated hilarity that is Hyperbole and a Half)When I was a kid, I used to love going to the dentist. They had a fish tank with tons of awesome, exotic fish that I got to stare at while we waited, Dr. Lamb was awesome and funny, and at the end of every visit, we got to pick a toy out of this treasure chest to take home with us. I knew that there was this prevalent trope about people being afraid of the dentist, but I really didn’t understand why.Sometime between then and now, I contracted the disease, and now I understand it all too well. I had an appointment with the dentist this morning, and I spent much of the past 24 hours trying to think up plausible excuses to miss it. The thing is, for me, the reluctance doesn’t actually have anything to do with the dental work. My dread is focused on the actual dentist, and how at my last appointment, I was made to feel like a horrible excuse for a human being because I had the temerity to need a root canal. Needles and drills I can handle, but shaming? Oh hell no. That’s the quickest way to get me to avoid coming in for a cleaning. Which then leads to needing root canals. You see the problem…In any case, I may have been praying for a Hail Mary save or a spontaneously dead car battery up until the very last minute, but in the end, I put on my big girl panties and went to the dentist. Turns out, they were much more respectful this time. The worst (and longest) part were the x-rays. My geeky heart thinks that the fact that they can do digital x-rays now is completely kick-ass, but my gag reflex begs to differ.

People Behaving Badly

Allison — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:34:14 +0000

This has been making its way around the intertubes, especially amongst writerly folk, but for those who haven’t seen it yet: Jacqueline Howett loses her shit over a mildly-unpleasant review.Seriously, people. Don’t be That Guy. Bad reviews suck, but the internet is forever, and acting like a big enough ass that everyone and their brother is talking about it and people are even selling CafePress items commemorating your idiocy sucks even worse.I read an article recently about a man who runs an online shop and is horrifically nasty to his customers. Why? Because even negative chatter boosts his site’s Google ranking, which gives him greater visibility and therefore more sales. Personally, I think maintaining that level of vitriol sounds exhausting, and I don’t think the take-away from that piece should be that acting like an ass on the internet can increase your sales. It may be true in the short run, but it’s not going to get you many long-term fans.I think the more important thing to take from that article is that even negative publicity can boost your sales. So the next time you get a review that hurts, take a deep breath and please, walk away. I’ve been known to buy a book based on a negative review, because even while it was clearly not the reviewer’s cup of tea, it sounded like mine. But I will not give my money to authors who behave badly on the internet, and even just a cursory look at the comments on that article shows that I’m not alone.

The Kubler-Ross model for writers

Allison — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:21:05 +0000

Yesterday, I discovered that the Kübler-Ross Model applies equally well to realizing the hard truth about your story’s length as it does to grief, and slid through the first three stages in the course of one conversation.

Stage 1: Denial
“This book is totally going to come in at the right length. Absolutely. Not a problem. What do you mean, you think the fact that I’ve already blown half the word count on the first 24 hours of action might be a problem? Don’t worry about it. I’ve totally got this under control.”

Stage 2: Anger
“God DAMN it! This book is going to run long. Son of a bitch. Damn word count limits! Stupid book! I hate you!”

Stage 3: Bargaining
“Well…maybe if I just run a little bit over… just a couple thousand words. Ten thousand, maybe? I could totally trim that out and get it in at the right length. Maybe it won’t be too bad.”

This is where I am right now. This book’s supposed to have an upper limit of 35k, and I’m kind of hoping that maybe if I can keep it to 45k, I can cut that extra flab out. 10k’s not so much, right? I mean, it’s only 22% of the book…

Next up, Stage 4: Depression
“OMG, this sucks. I am never going to get this short enough. I’m doomed. All this work, and it’s going to be for nothing because the stupid story’s too long. Why bother? I should just go knit instead.”

And maybe, if I’m lucky…eventually… Stage 5: Acceptance
“*whew* Well, that’s not so bad. I guess it’s not too long. And I can probably trim up that first scene, it’s a bit rambly. That’ll take care of a couple thousand words right off the bat. Oh, and maybe if I condense those other scenes… Yes, this is definitely doable.”

Spinning

Allison — Sun, 16 May 2010 21:42:14 +0000

Well, I’ve found that bloodhound metaphor very useful in the past week or so. The point I was working myself up to with that last post is that I don’t just have a writing bloodhound — I’ve got a whole pack of them, stored up there in my brain. There’s the general purpose bloodhound, which latches on to things like, “omg, let’s get a puppy!“, but also, to my surprise, I have a knitting/spinning bloodhound.I’ve been knitting for about four or five years, but it’s only since I started spinning, last Christmas, that it’s really started to engage my bloodhound. There’s much more creative liberty and decision-making in choosing how to spin up a yarn than there is in following a pattern. So while, previously, I may have gone, “Oh, that’s a pretty pattern, I think it might be fun to knit”, now…Now I see fiber like this:and my heart skips a beat, my bloodhound catches a scent, and suddenly we are racing off after it, thinking, “OMG, progression dyes, our last progression dye came out SO WELL, this would make such a lovely shawl, oh, we could spin it into a nice laceweight 2-ply, preserving the progression, and oh, oh, we need to find a shawl pattern that looks like wings, or like feathers. Ohmigod, Seraphim.How awesome would that be? Fading from grey out to charcoal, and then crimson just at the very edges? Dude.”And the next thing I know, I’ve bought half a pound and am feeling a bit woozy about it all. (It’s going to be an awesome shawl, though.)

Metaphors

Allison — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:44:44 +0000

In high school, my best friend and I took AP English together. In one of the lessons, we read Paradise Lost and then spent a significant amount of time learning about poetic devices Milton used, such as epic similes — a simile which was dragged out for paragraphs, or even pages.Sometime not too long after that lesson, I had gone out to dinner with and her family. She wanted to taste what I was having, and I told her she could have a bite.The next thing I knew, she’d taken several. “Jen!” I cried. “I said a bite!”And she looked at me and said, “It was an epic bite.”That story’s kind of tangential to my point in this post, but it’s an anecdote that still cracks me up to this day.Anyway, the point– over the past few years of conversations with on any and every topic imaginable, including relatively frequent heavy, emotional ones with a lot of soul searching, it has occurred to me just how much of our conversations are steeped in metaphor. Sometimes, we have entire, lengthy conversations that are nothing but one big epic metaphor.And it’s awesome. I can’t really put words to how much I enjoy those conversations, the ones where we sit together analyzing all the ways in which revising a novel is like renovating or rebuilding a house (if the floorplan’s problematic, you really ought to deal with that first, and leave obsessing over the wallpaper or the bathroom faucets for later in the process).One of the ones she came up with that we use a lot is the metaphor of her “muse” (for lack of a better term) being like a dog. A Saluki, in particular. Eager, excitable, with a keen prey drive that has it tearing off and bringing back ideas for her very frequently, but also a bit hyperactive and easily distracted from its intended quarry by shiny ideas or squeaky toys.It took us a bit longer to find the proper metaphor for my “muse”, on the other hand. We finally landed on one a few days ago. Mine is the sort of dog that catches a scent and goes tearing off after it, dragging me along behind hoping I can hang on for the ride, and pursuing it with the sort of singleminded determination that led me to write Blood & Roses in one giant rush over less than a week in which every waking moment was spent living, working, breathing that book. It’s focused and intent, and if it loses the trail of the scent that it’s on, it gets frustrated and upset, and all the squeaky toys in the world aren’t going to distract it from that.It’s not a Saluki–It’s a bloodhound. It’s only been a few days, and already I’m finding this to be a very helpful way of thinking about my writing process.More later, I think. I was working my way up to a point (though it’s a non-writing one), but I’m getting a bit rambly here.

Sanctuary

Allison — Sun, 09 May 2010 00:27:07 +0000

I’ve discovered a new addiction, and it’s delightfully awful.I have a long history of loving awful things. One of my favorite ways to spend time with my best friend in high school was to hang out at her house watching Army of Darkness. A few years ago, I had the time of my life spending a weekend sprawled out on my bed, reading a truly terrible romance novel and giggling about it to my college roommate over IM.I think I’ve lost a lot of my patience for bad things lately, though. I’m not sure if it’s because of the critical eye I’ve been developing as I grow as a writer, or if it’s because now that I work full time, there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to spend on the quality things I enjoy, much less the awful ones.But this past weekend, I discovered the BBC show Sanctuary, and somehow managed to stick with it past my initial “Oh my god, this is terrible writing” reaction. The next thing I knew, I’d finished the first season and was frantically waiting for the second to finishing downloading from iTunes.It is so insanely cracky, and the best part is that it’s completely deadpan about it. It’s like, “This woman is a hundred and fifty seven years old! Because she injected herself with a serum distilled from vampire blood! Also, back in the day, she was in love with the guy who was REALLY Jack the Ripper. And conceived his baby! But she wasn’t ready to have a kid so she froze the embryo until ‘the time was right’. Oh, also, Jack The Ripper can teleport. And he’s still alive today, too. Oh, and they were both BFFs with Nicola Tesla! Who is really a vampire. And is trying to recreate the race and take over the world. Also John Watson, who’s really Sherlock Holmes. (He’s alive, too, but only because a bionic exoskeleton is keeping him that way.) Also, she was present at signing of the peace treaty at the end of WWII. And watched the sunrise with the Beatles. (But only one of them.)”When I told my writing buddy about it, she accused me of making that up, and I can’t blame her. But cross my heart and hope to die, I swear I didn’t make up a single word. It’s all there.Is it any wonder I love it? Talk about kitchen sink writing! It’s been a very fun lesson in remembering that sometimes throwing quality to the wind and just having fun with something can be one heck of a ride.Not that I’m taking any writing lessons from this. I’m not about to start taking this as permission to write terrible, over-the-top fiction. I am going to keep watching, though.

Gnothi Sauton

Allison — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:09:00 +0000

I’ve recently received more than a little flack from writers on Twitter for setting daily word counts for myself, which mystifies me more than I can say. When I observed that it’s difficult to count your progress in daily words when you’re editing instead of writing new material, someone commented, “It’s easy if you don’t track progress at all!”

I’ve got many years of writing experience under my belt and I’m pretty comfortable with my process, so I didn’t have any problem answering him, “If I did that, then I wouldn’t make any progress at all,” and continuing on with my day. But if I’d received that sort of advice as a new writer, unsure of myself and what I was doing? Just the idea makes me shudder.

I thrive under the pressure of a deadline. Give me a goal, even an insane one, and I’ll be stepping up to bat trying to figure out a way to accomplish it before you’ve even finished speaking. I once tried to write 50,000 words in a day, just to see if I could. (I made it to 16k and decided I wanted food and sleep more than I wanted to achieve some arbitrary ambition) But without a goal to propel me and keep me typing away?

I web surf. I catch up on my TV shows. I knit. What I don’t do is write. I need that pressure to keep me going, keep me moving forward, keep me choosing to write when there are so many other ways to squander my time that require much less effort.

The prevalence of this attitude that tracking progress, setting goals, and keeping yourself accountable is a bad thing has bewildered me since I first encountered it, but I ran into a situation today that I think may be what people fear when they give this advice. Things snowballed on top of one another for me this morning and before I knew it it was almost lunch time and I hadn’t written a word. Every time I thought about writing my chest clenched a little bit tighter and another burst of adrenaline clawed through my system. I was staring at the clock practically hyperventilating in my seat, and every time I started to think about putting words to paper, all that came to mind was, “Oh God, I have to write three thousand words a day for the rest of the month in order to finish this book when I want to. It’s 10am and I haven’t written anything. I will never make it. I’m not going to make it today, and I’m not going to finish this book on time, either. It’s too late. It’ll never happen.”

It’s a truly awful state to be in, and if this is what people are imagining others devolving into when they give the advice not to set goals, I can understand it at least a little. It’s not a productive state of mind, and does far more harm than good. But it’s not a reason to not to set them.

The problem comes, I think, when people get in a mindset where they can’t reevaluate goals. When I realized the state I was getting myself into, I didn’t try to force myself through it. That would have done more harm than good. I took a step back and said. “Okay, you know what? Sanity is more important than word count. I’m giving myself the day off.”

Gnothi Sauton. Know thyself. That’s is the part that’s important. Not the setting or abandoning of goals, but the ability to look at what you’re doing and evaluate whether it works for you or not, instead of stubbornly forcing yourself down the road you think you ought to take, when all it ever does is lead you to a dead end. I know that goal setting is vital to my process the same way I know that phase drafting, which everyone seems to be getting excited about these days, would be lethal to it. Does that mean that every time someone mentions the technique, I suggest that they’d be better off pantsing it?

Of course not. There are as many ways to write a book as there are people writing them, and what works for me may not work for everyone else, or even anyone else. It’s my process — that’s all.

I think a vital part of learning to write is learning what works for you, and what doesn’t, and too the ability to reevaluate when circumstances change. And it’s just as important that we let others do the same. One True Way-isms hurt more people than they help.

The Dreaded Question

Allison — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:15:00 +0000

I’ve heard it said that the question writers most dread hearing is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Well, not this writer. I could wax rhapsodic for hours about where I find my inspiration, about how I love to take fairly well-known legends like the romance of Eros and Psyche in Greek lore, or more obscure tidbits like the gwrach-y-rhibyn of Wales and twist them on their heads to find something new. That question is an easy one for me.No, the question that I hate to hear, that I absolutely dread, is “What’s your book about?” Arrgh! Bad enough that we writers are expected to condense tens of thousands of words of story into a few pages for our synopses, or a few lines for our blurbs. Now laymen expect us to be able to spout out a pithy one-liner that will adequately convey to them the story that’s in our heads? I don’t know about any of you — but I can’t do it!This morning, I told a coworker that I started writing on a new book this weekend, and this was the first question out of his mouth. Now, for all that I’ve just started, I feel I have a fairly solid grasp of what this story is and what it’s going to be about. But in order to convey to him what’s in my head, I’d have had to sit down with him for an hour. Not exactly an appropriate answer for an early-morning run to the cafeteria.If we’d had the time, I’d have told him that it’s about the choices we make without even knowing it, and how the repurcussions of those decisions can shape the rest of our lives. It’s about learning to love — others, yes, but mostly learning to love ourselves, flaws and all. I’d have told him that it’s heavily based on the lore of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Enoch, and other apocrypha, and that it’s influenced by the steampunk genre and the Hero’s Journey structure.If I’d had the time to tell him, and the time to prepare, I could have shared a glimpse of this story that’s growing in my head. Instead, I stammered out, “It’s about fallen angels. Kind of,” and kicked myself for the rest of the morning. Because it is very much about fallen angels — kind of — but that’s not the half of it.What about the other writers out there? Do you dread this question as much as I do? Or is there another question that makes you cringe at the thought of having to answer it?