Tales from the Ice(pack)...continued

Where we last left Luke Murphy, he’d been seriously injured playing hockey, did not know if he’d ever return to the sport, and began to ponder his alternatives. One of those involved taking up the pen...

From Professional Hockey Player to Published Novelist, Part Two

I really enjoyed the process: coming up with a plot, developing characters and organizing a setting, problem and conclusion. It only lasted a couple of weeks, and once we were done, I kind of missed inventing, creating my own little world and characters.

 I remember walking to my bedroom one morning and seeing my roommate’s laptop sitting on the desk, and I thought…why not?

I sat down at the desk, took the characters my girlfriend and I had created, and wrote an extension to the story we had written together.

I didn’t write with the intention of being published. I wrote for the love of writing, as a hobby, a way to pass the time. Even after my eye healed up, and I returned to hockey, I continued to hobby write through the years, honing my craft, making time between work and family obligations.

Then I made a decision to take my interest one step further. I’ve never been one to take things lightly or jump in half way. I took a full year off from writing to study the craft.

I constantly read, from novels in my favorite genres to books written by experts in the writing field. My first two purchases were “Stein on Writing”, a book written by successful editor Sol Stein, and “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers” by Renni Browne and Dave King.

I read through these novels and highlighted important answers to my questions. My major breakthrough from Stein’s book was to “Show don’t Tell”. I had to trust my readers. I even wrote that phrase on a sticky note and put it on my computer monitor.

The Self-Editing book helped me learn how to cut the FAT off my manuscript, eliminating unnecessary details, making it more lean and crisp, with a better flow. I learned to cut repetition and remain consistent throughout the novel.

I continually researched the internet, reading up on the industry and process “What is selling?” and “Who is buying?” were my two major questions.

I attended the “Bloody Words” writing conference in Ottawa, Canada, rubbing elbows with other writers, editors, agents and publishers. I made friends (published and unpublished authors), bombarding them with questions, learning what it took to become successful.

Feeling that I was finally prepared, in the winter of 2007, with an idea in mind and an outline on paper, I started to write DEAD MAN`S HAND. It took me two years (working around full time jobs) to complete the first draft of my novel.

The first person to read my completed manuscript was my former high school English teacher. With her experience and wisdom, she gave me some very helpful advice. I then hired McCarthy Creative Services to help edit DEAD MAN’S HAND, to make it the best possible novel.

I joined a critique group, teaming up with published authors Nadine Doolittle and Kathy Leveille, and exchanging manuscripts and information. Working with an editor and other authors was very rewarding and not only made my novel better, but made me a better writer.

When I was ready, I researched agents who fit my criteria (successful, worked with my genres, etc.) and sent out query letters. After six months of rejections, I pulled my manuscript back and worked on it again. Then in my next round of proposals, I was offered representation by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.

After months of editing with Jennifer, and more rejections from publishers, my dream was finally realized in April, 2012, when I signed a publishing contract with Imajin Books (Edmonton, Alberta).

Even today, a year after publishing my first book, I’m stall amazed at the direction my life has taken. Never in my wildest dreams would I have believed I would someday get paid to write books. Sometimes life can be impossible to predict.

_________________________
For more information on Luke and his work, go to: www.authorlukemurphy.com, or check him out on Facebook www.facebook.com/#!/AuthorLukeMurphy or Twitter www.twitter.com/#!/AuthorLMurphy

Brain Dump

I guess it's spring. I've been on one of those "sorting, throwing out, wondering what this thing is and why I have it" fire sales. Partly it's because I want to get back on the play submission routine, which usually consists of setting unrealistic expectations, then getting depressed when I can't live up to them and/or the rejections roll in. (And, yes, beginning writers: I've been at this for years and still get bounced all the time. There's no escape.)

Things have been on this sort of mad tilt-o-whirl ever since the beginning of the year, so this is just one of those, sweep it up and get it over with posts. "Everything's a dollar/In this box."

Fertile Ground...Portland's big new works theatre festival...came in like some kind of overwhelming force, flattening everything in front of it. At the same time, I was helping Playwrights West get up and rolling, which meant not only having a play read, but sending out press on the event, hurriedly getting a Web site up and rolling, producing programs, posters, photographs, etc. Concurrently, "The Rewrite Man" had a reading at Pulp Diction, so I found myself with two plays/events going up in the same week. It sounds exciting--and I guess it was--but it was also thoroughly exhausting. The Playwrights West gig went extremely well: we sold out, raised our profile nicely in the Portland theatre community, and had a solid, professional production that people seemed to enjoy. Now the heavy lifting begins: fundraising, business matters, and other such challenging fare. Stay tuned.

"The Rewrite Man"...well, it was pretty decently attended, given that it was 10:30 on a Tuesday night. The Pulp Diction people were terrific, and the cast and crew did a spirited production of the play. As to the work itself, ironically enough, it needs a rewrite, and I found myself getting kind of unwound by it. Nothing to do with the production: it's just that a lot of work went into plotting and figuring out angles--the play is almost entirely a series of bank shots that attempt to top each other. Somewhere in there, I kind of feel like I lost the heart: I began to feel like I was watching some kind of game instead of a play. Plus there was a bunch of stuff that needs to be cut, simply places where I repeated myself and where the gambits didn't live up to what I was shooting for. I love bending the audience's collective mind, but I think my talent for that lies more in surrealism. Anyway, vaguely unsatisfied by the whole thing, and I think "The Rewrite Man" goes into a drawer for awhile. Thinking about it reminds me of a still lake under overcast skies.

Rushed to finished a rewrite of "Farmhouse," which is another mindbender that I've found altogether more satisfying. Right now is kind of one of those waiting periods, where you know there's stuff out there being considered, and you know theatres are soon announcing their seasons, and that means you will, mostly likely, be disappointed. It's the way the game goes. Sometimes you're surprised, which is more or less why we keep at this stuff.

Everybody I know is hellishly busy, and it's hard to get together with friends. The whole politics/economy/employment/staying alive/keeping projects in the air scene seems to be draining folks. I've found myself missing friends of late and trying not to take their silence personal. (And, if it is personal, honestly, there's not much I can do about it.) The zeitgeist seems to be churning, a little chaotic, with flashes of hope mixed in with the change blenderizer. I think we're all ready for winter to end.

The Day Job: busy. Very.

The guitar continues to be huge fun, partly because it doesn't mean anything. When you've been a professional artist for most of your adult life, it's really, really nice to have an art that you can just plain suck at and have a kick with. Last night, I spent the evening cranking the distortion and volume to insane levels and absurdly working over the Strat's tremelo arm and wah-wah pedal into psychdelic blather. Awful, awful, awful. And just fun as hell. Attempting to resist the pulls of effects pedals: at this point, I can pretty much make any guitar sound I can imagine, and a lot I don't want to imagine, but they still have this...weird...hypnotic...power. What would happen if I bought this and plugged it into...this?

And, if I do decide to write about guitar, I don't feel like it'll take away from the forget-the-world freedom it brings: playing guitar has become a fine kind of meditation.

I have to finish some monologues I promised for a friend, and then I have to get the ball rolling for a workshop production of a play and the rewrite that'll require. Other than that and researching the book, I'm kind of blissfully free from writing at the moment. Having written three full-length plays in two years, I feel like I'm due a breather. And then some other stupid idea will come along, and off we go.

So that's what I've been doing. Well. That's wasn't too bad. Time to be domestic, throw the laundry in, and maybe go futz around in the garden, because the plants are waiting for me. The fruit trees are blooming. The daphne is in full flower and spreading its incredible scent across the patio, and new leaves are unfurling among the oriental poppies, sedums, and so many more. I attempted to sit down with a gardening magazine the other day, but it's still too early. But, soon enough, Portland Nursery will be calling my name, and I'll find the car driving itself there. And there won't a thing I can do to stop it.

And just because I can, a shout out to my friends: I love you crazy bastards. Here's to better days.

By God, this is ART...

...or something. Anyway, enjoy.

Options

As I've noted on my blog, I recently bought a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, and I'm learning--slowly--to play. Over the years, I've tried a number of kinds of art: writing (obviously), photography, painting, drawing, playing piano and organ, garden design, making prints, stage directing, and even a half-assed attempt at sculpting. Though I've enjoyed all of these, writing and photography were the only two that I thought I showed any aptitude for. And, though I love photography and think I've grown in the field, selling a print now and then, and even having a couple of shows, I am and always have been a writer. (One day, when I was six, I sat down and wrote a short story. Something about living under the sea. Wish I still had it, but it's vanished over the years. To me, the funny part was that I took it to my mom and demanded she type it up. I think she was a little taken aback, but she did type it for me. Unlike many artists, I had parents who always supported my efforts. I hit a fallow period between six and eight, and then I distinctly remember thinking, writing that was kind of fun: let's try it again. So I wrote another short story, and another, and, pretty much, never stopped.)

When I bought the guitar--which I call "Red" because it is a shockingly pure candyapple red--the store provided a free lesson. The instructor was showing me how each fret represented a half-step, which clicked for me as it corresponded to a piano's keys (and I can read music). I noted the similarity to the instructor, and he said, "Yeah. It's like having six pianos." (Which is really not true, because it takes two hands to make a chord on the guitar and one for a keyboard. You also can't individually bend or vibrate a piano's strings, but I digress.)

What has struck me are the seemingly infinite options for making sound the electric guitar offers, which I'm just starting to grasp as I've learned how chords are formed, how scales apply to solos, the many ways strings can be thumped, rubbed, stretched, and mauled, and the many voicings that emerge from which pickup you've selected (three on the Strat with two settings combining pickups), the pickup tone controls, the amp settings, and, in my outfit, with a nifty little foot-operated box called a Digitech RP50, the mind-blowing array of available voicings--from clear, ringing notes with a touch of reverb to create the feeling of playing in a large hall to absolutely demented, psychedelic overdrive, flangers, phase-shifters, noise gates, delays, and various amplifier modulators. You can make it sing, cry, scream, and simulate jet aircraft. It's absolutely marvelous. I'll be deaf in no time.

One evening, after playing some teeth-rattling distortion, I just kind of reeled, overwhelmed by athe choices the guitar offered, and I suddenly thought of a favorite quote from Miles Davis, which has actually informed my writing as much as my understanding of music: it's not just the notes you play, Miles said, it's also the notes you don't play.

Which seems obvious, but it lies at the heart of making art, for we're offered so many techniques, colors, effects, traditions, schools of thought, theories, pacings, and structures, that, once you get past the puppy love period where you want to do everything right now, you understand how holding back is just as important as holding forth. It's not just a matter of making the right choices: it's a matter of knowing when to stop, when to step back. Of knowing when, essentially, it's right.

And, if you're dedicated enough to be honest with yourself, doing an art--any art--really well is so terribly, terribly difficult that you'd lock up if you thought about it directly. Someone once asked Walter Cronkite if he ever thought about the millions watching his newscasts, and he said no, he thought of it as speaking one-to-one with a single person because, if he really thought about all the people out there, he'd be too terrified to do his job.

I don't know how much aptitude I have with the guitar. I feel like I'm learning, and once in awhile, I make sounds that please me, and that's all I'm really in it for. That and developing sufficient skills to play a song or two with friends. It's refreshing to do an art that's not a profession. But playing the guitar is devilishly hard to get right, and the more I seem to grasp, the more complicated it becomes. The relationship between difficulty and reward reminds me of an evening at a fiction writing workshop nearly 30 years ago when I'd presented a short story, which, frankly, was terrible--an utter cliche from beginning to end (and not even an interesting cliche). Out came the knives, and, when it was over, my self-esteem had been thoroughly diced. The woman running the workshop said, hey, how about we take a break, and everyone trooped off into the kitchen while I sat immobile, staring at the carpet. A minute or so later, the workshop leader came back and handed me a glass of wine.

"Christ," I said. "Does it ever get any easier?"

She gently patted me on the shoulder and said, "You better hope not."

Roots

Until this winter, I hadn't worked as a producer since 2003, when Pavement Productions, my little indie production company, staged my play "Altered States of America." We were still riding high from producing a hit--"Delusion of Darkness"--and figured we'd kill, we had a good rep with the critics, we were doing a big "important" show dealing with big "important" topics.

And we died. Critical reaction was lukewarm. Audiences were small. A couple times we cancelled shows because the cast outnumbered the audience (learned my lesson there--we run even if we're empty to keep the chops up). There were a multitude of reasons the show failed, none of them artistic, which just kills your soul more than doing a show that sucks. I'd go home each night and listen to "Wild Horses" over and over until I was exhausted enough to sleep. At the end of the run, for the first time working as a producer, I couldn't pay my cast or reimburse my backer. It was no fun. ("Altered States of America" went on to be a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, so there was some vindication there, but it was bittersweet.)

So I hung up my producer hat, not really knowing if I'd ever wear it again, but I ended up taking it off the shelf because the time was right, the situation right, I had the right collaborators, and because of the reason I got into the theatre in the first place: there was a show I wanted to see done and no one else in town would do it (for plenty of good reasons that had nothing to do with the piece). So we did "Dead of Winter" on a small scale, at the right ticket prices, and we did very well, sold out a bunch of nights, spent some wonderful theatre time together with a sweet little theatre family, and, indeed, had a bucketful of fun.

I was going through my archives this weekend, trying to find some documents, and it certainly didn't feel like 17 years of work, the impressions and memories of productions back to the beginning still vibrant. And it struck me, having now been produced in theatres big and small, with padded seats and metal folding chairs, with state-of-art instruments and clip lights, that what theatre really comes down to is a one-to-one transaction between production and audience member. Whether you're getting a nice paycheck or you're writing the checks, what matters is the transmission. And that can happen in a fantastic performing arts center with a carpeted lobby and brass water fountains or it can happen in a tiny dance studio around the corner from a barbeque bikers joint. It can be a big weighty drama that burns the audience down or fun, entertaining stories. What matters is the experience. The relationship. It's intimate and intense, and it's different every time. And then it's gone. Over. Never to be repeated the same way. You give it life then let it go.

I like having my work staged in big professional theatres, and I like getting a check and not having to be anything but the playwright (like that isn't enough work). But it's good to go back to the place you started because it reminds you why you began, why you've kept at it, what it's all about.

What is it all about? Well, hell, if you could name it, you wouldn't have to do it.

Status Report

Here we are, coming down to the end of the year, and where the hell am I?

Well...busy. Upcoming production of "Dead of Winter" in Portland, come February. "Waiting on Sean Flynn" goes up in Detroit in March, and a short piece is scheduled to be part of a "Seven Deadly Sins" show in L.A. in May (my sin is greed, which I know practically nothing about). Reading 10-minute plays based on/insprired by Pere Ubu, an amazing stack of stuff with more coming in every day, for a reading and possible production next year. Plus a TBA production for June. Working on some other super secret for your eyes only projects that, ahem, of course I can't reveal at the moment.

After a long bout of writer's block--very uncharacteristic for me, been writing like a bastard. Since summer, first drafts of a surreal one hour, one-act called "Farmhouse"; a shorter one-act about politics tentatively called "Night Flight from Houston"; a serious two-act called "Next of Kin"; and a rather unhinged two-act called (wait for it)..."Rimbaud's Daughter in Louisiana (or the Drunken Pirogue." Christ. What the hell's wrong with me?

A bunch of stuff out with theatres that I'm waiting to hear on (a feeling akin to being stuck on the tarmac sans AC in August), but it's time to get back on the marketing bandwagon, so I figure I'll take some of the Christmas holidays to get some queries stuffed in envelopes. When I look at the backlog, I must have at least four or five full-lengths that have been done and that I'm comfortable shopping around, and it's time to hunt premieres for "Lost Wavelengths" and "Turquoise and Obsidian." Of course, still searching for that elusive New York production. And, when I take a deep breath, I sometimes think about the joys of pursuing an agent, but then this kind of gray and purple, Jackson Pollock mist slithers into my brain and my eyes glaze over and my head lists slightly to the side and drool begins to drip from my open mouth....

Jesus, Patterson, we don't have the slightest idea what the hell you're talking about! You writers are so goddamned self-involved! Get back to...dissing politicians or something.

Okay. Scott McClellan, Bush's former press secretary, is coming out with a new book in which he says, yeah, yeah, we all knew who outed Valerie Plame and it was the president and vice-president, and I stood in front of everybody and lied my ass off, but it was my job, all right, and, by the way, the president is a filthy liar. Liar, liar, liar.

But then, you already knew that.