Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

This dog is driving me nuts! Dog people, help!

My wife and kids are gone until Sunday night. I’ve got to take care of this new dog until they get home. And I’m losing my mind.

The dog is a stray who showed up on our doorstep three weeks ago. She’s an Irish setter, looks to be about a year old, and I can’t tell that she’s had much in the way of training. She doesn’t go for walks, she goes for RUNS. She’s a strong dog and very … dogged when she gets running. On a leash, she just pulls you along at high speed. Off the leash, she’s impossible to catch. She’s got way more energy than I do.

She also likes to jump up at me and paw me and bite at my hands. Not hard biting, just kind of nipping. If she was serious, she could do major damage, so I’m pretty sure she’s just playing, but even so, I don’t know how to handle it. I’m not a dog person, never had a dog, and I don’t like this kind of playing. How can I make her stop? Or can I? She also likes to grab the leash in her jaws and do a tug of war. And then she just won’t let go. How can I make her quit playing? Or can I?

How do I handle this beast? She’s a nice dog, I’m sure, but I don’t know what’s normal and I’ve never had to deal with this kind of thing before. Any advice would be appreciated. I’m willing to trade her for a good used tiger.

Once again, there were many good answers to my question, “Why Do You Read Fiction?” But the winner was clearcut:

Josh Vogt.

Here’s what Josh wrote:

“I read bad fiction so I know all the ways I should never write. I read good fiction so I know all the ways I should write. And I read fiction in general because there are only so many technical manuals and textbooks you can go through before they start looking like a viable food source.”

Josh gets points for brevity, for originality, and for wit. Check out Josh’s web site.

I’d have been a little quicker judging the entries, but I was in New York yesterday and didn’t get home until nearly midnight. Um, that’s 1896 New York, where I was helping solve the mystery of a serial killer who was terrorizing boy prostitutes.

That’s, right, I was reading a psychological thriller, THE ALIENIST, by Caleb Carr. It’s a book I’d been wanting to read for a long time and I finally bought a copy of it on Saturday and started reading it Sunday. The book was excellent, not to mention timely, given the horrible shooting at Virginia Tech this week. If you’d like to know how somebody becomes a serial killer, this is your book.

A surprising number of you have emailed me to ask what happened to the dog. If you’ve read my last Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, you’ll remember that on the day I left for a writing conference three weeks ago, a stray dog showed up on our back porch. And I’m not a dog person, so I told my wife NOT to feed it. So of course, she fed it.

Somehow, in the twists and turns of writing about the conference, I forgot to say what happened to the dog.

Here’s what happened to the dog. She’s lying on a blanket in our dining room, making herself very much at home, ignoring the bowl of dog food, and stealing cat food.

She’s also terrorizing the cats. We have a twenty-pound-plus cat named Zephyr who doesn’t do much running. Today, after a Powerful Emotional Experience with the dog, Zephyr took off running about as fast as any cat has ever run. Our #2 cat Rocky also had a run-in with the dog, which ended with Rocky racing off at top speed and the dog barking like a banshee.

We haven’t been able to find the owner of this dog, and my wife and daughters really want to keep her. Our neighbor wants her for a hunting dog. The humane society said that if nobody claims her in a month, we can keep her.

I think we’re going to keep her. She really is a beautiful dog, although she needs a little training. OK, she needs a LOT of training. She grins a lot, so we’ve named her Happy. She runs like the wind.

My wife and daughters promised that they’d take care of Happy if I let them keep her. I should have known how long that would last. They flew to Colorado today for a speech tournament. They’re going to be gone for four days. And they left me to take care of Happy.

So that’s what happened to the dog. I’m trying to figure out if I’m happy about this. I know the cats are horribly unhappy. But Happy is happy.

Last Friday, I asked what it was that drives you to write. Now I have another question.

Why do you read fiction?

Fiction, after all, isn’t “true.” Most novelists would agree that fiction contains “truth” in some metaphorical sense, but we also know good and well that it isn’t really a factual recounting of events. (And if it is, and those events violate some real person’s privacy, then we can be sued for invasion of privacy, even if it’s exactly true.)

But I don’t think most of us read fiction in order to extract that “truth” from fiction. Most of us read because we like to, because it’s fun, because it’s escape.

Why do you read fiction? Leave a comment telling why. The coolest or funniest or quirkiest answer (in my sole judgment) by midnight Pacific time on Wednesday will get a free autographed copy of my novel DOUBLE VISION.

Thanks to everybody who posted comments on my first blog posting last Friday! As of now, there are 189 comments. I read through all of them and laughed my socks off several times.

I promised a free book to the person with the “best” comment. That turned out to be incredibly difficult to decide. Many of you made me laugh, and most of you made me think.

I was offline most of the weekend doing family stuff. I read through all the best comments again just now and here’s the winner:

Danica/Dream. Check out Danica’s blog here.

Here’s what Danica wrote:

“I write for three reasons:

1. The voices tell me to.
2. It keeps me from killing real people.
3. To help everyone else around me stay sane.”

While I can’t relate to #3 (none of the people around me were ever sane to begin with), #1 and #2 somehow tickled my funny bone. Congratulations, Danica!

What drives you to write fiction? After all, writing fiction is hard work. You might spend years learning the craft of writing fiction. Then more years trying to get your work published. Then the reviewers sink their fangs into your precious baby. Then your book hits the shelves, sells a few copies, and disappears in the flood of new titles. All for a LOT less money per hour than you’d earn flipping burgers.

Why do we put up with up with this? Are we sick? Are we stupid? Are we that desperate for attention? Why do you write fiction?

I’ll tell you why I write fiction. It’s because . . . I can’t NOT write fiction. Yes, writing is painful, hard, knuckle-busting work. But I love it. I love starting with a third of an idea. I love composting that idea for years and years. I love adding to it little by little. I love developing the design for a beautifully structured story. I love hanging out with characters who don’t really exist anywhere except in that small space between my ears. I love writing proposals and selling them to editors. I love sitting down to a clean page and typing that first sentence. I love drilling out my daily word count. I love finishing the story and typing THE END and knowing that I’ve done something most people can’t do. I love editing it. I love the adrenaline rush of doing final edits at 3 AM and emailing it in to my editor at the last possible second. I love reviewing the proofs. I love getting the first copy of my new book in the mail.

I love it all.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But let me tell you, a story is worth a million pictures. There is something about Story that makes us human. Story gives us meaning in a random, crazy universe. Story gives us the strength to get up in the morning and face a faceless day. Story gives us hope. Without Story, we’re all a bunch of buck-naked apes.

With Story, we’re humans.

It’s writers who create stories. We make up our own little universes. We get to play God in our story-worlds. The creation story in the book of Genesis tells us that we are made in God’s image. I have a hunch that part of what that means is that we are creative beings. We speak, and story-universes leap into existence. That’s cool. That’s massively cool. What could be cooler than that?

That’s why I write fiction.

What about you? Why do you write fiction? Leave a comment and tell me why. The best comment (in my sole judgment) as of Friday night at midnight, Pacific time, wins a free autographed copy of my latest novel, DOUBLE VISION, which features multiple universes and tough decisions.

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