Signing alert: I’ll be signing books, along with many other terrific kids book writers, this Saturday, May 1st, in Hudson, NY, from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. If you’re in the vicinity and can come, I would love to see you. Here’s a link to the event: http://www.hudsonchildrensbookfestival.com/.
On February 24, 2010 Silver the Wanderer wrote, Do you have any advice for writing about fantasy worlds (environment, culture, etc.) without creating a massive "information dump"?
I once googled “rules for writing fantasy” for a talk I was going to give. The results were interesting, and I suggest you try it. You’ll find a lot of ideas from a lot of viewpoints. One person felt that a writer shouldn’t write about a world without knowing its entire history, culture, economy, judicial system - more than I know about the real world I actually live in! This person thought an information dump was unobjectionable, in fact essential.
I disagree, unless this is the sort of book you enjoy reading. Then it may be the kind of book you should write. Otherwise, if the economy doesn’t come into your story, the reader doesn’t have be told about it, and you don’t have to invent it. In fact, if you include unnecessary information, you create pressure on the reader to remember everything and an expectation that it will all be important. What’s more, in creating this useless stuff, you’ll probably make it interesting to keep yourself from going crazy, and then the poor reader will be disappointed when the coinage, silver leaves harvested from a magical and environmentally threatened forest, never shows up again.
Start your fantasy in the ordinary way, with what’s important to the story: character, action, setting, dialogue. In most cases you want to let the reader know right away that this is fantasy. In Ella Enchanted, I began with a curse by “that fool of a fairy,” but I didn’t go into what a fairy looked like till page 25. Initially the reader had to know only that there were fairies.
If there is going to be a plot development later in your story that involves a particular fantasy element, you do need to prepare the reader. For example, if late in the tale your main character rides a flying horse, you don’t want the reader to see her leap on the horse’s back at the same moment he discovers that there are such horses.
This doesn’t mean you have to plan your whole story out ahead of time. You yourself may not know about the flying horse until your heroine needs to make a fast getaway. In that case, you can go back to earlier pages and add references to these creatures.
In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, I needed to bring in the epic poem about the hero Drualt right away, because it was such an important plot thread, but the poem had nothing to do with what was going on in the first pages. I didn’t want to confuse the reader and make him unsure which way to direct his interest, so I rewrote that beginning dozens of times before I got it right. You may have to, too.
When you write contemporary realistic fiction, you and your audience have the benefit of shared experience. Most readers can imagine a school, a city street, a park. They won’t visualize exactly the school, street, or park in your mind’s eye, but close enough. In your narrative, you can describe the important landmarks so the reader sees them as you do.
There’s less shared experience in fantasy, but there’s some. If you’re writing a medieval or Renaissance fantasy, most readers have seen enough movies and TV and read enough books to picture a castle, a princess gown, swordplay. You don’t have to say that a castle has towers and a moat, but if it lacks one or the other or both, the reader should probably be told. Also, you need to show the reader the setting, so even if the towers are ordinary, you may want to point them out the first time they come into view. They may add to the mood or have emotional meaning for your main character, represent home or the enemy, for example.
Ever (for readers age ten and up) is set in two quite different cultures in a fantasy of ancient Mesopotamia, which is less familiar to readers than the Middle Ages. So I had to show more, but information about the world is still incorporated into the action. How to do this? In the second chapter, for example, the mortal girl Kezi is introduced. A snake is oozing through the house’s courtyard, where Kezi is drawing in clay what will become a design for a rug. If instead she were chopping vegetables and the house were struck by lightning, the reader wouldn’t have a clue about the historical nature of this fantasy universe. So consider where you set your action and how you can drop in clues, which the reader will pick up quickly.
Your reader will assume that the rules of our natural world apply to your story unless told otherwise. You don’t have to mention that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and the sky is blue. But if the planet in your story has two suns, the reader must be told. However, don’t give your planet two suns just for the heck of it. You need a plot, character, or mood reason. Simplicity is usually best, and take pity on the poor reader who has a lot to follow. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (middle school and up, I think, but middle schoolers should check with a parent or librarian) is beautifully set on quite a different planet from ours. You may want to read the book to see a master at work.
Readers should be able to imagine your fantasy elements, see them, hear them, smell them, feel them. If something is invisible or inaudible, then the other senses should be able to fill in. This bit of advice, of course, reflects what I like. I have little patience for silent, invisible force fields crashing into immovable, invisible, imperceptible objects - unless the writer is being funny and I get the joke.
I’m sure I’ve written this on the blog before: Don’t have one character tell another something they both already know just so the reader can find out about it. For example, Princess Phillippa shouldn’t say to Prince Phillip, “Remember last month when the evil knight visited the castle and used his magic net to kidnap our father the king?” Prince Phillip, unless he has amnesia, is unlikely to have forgotten the event, and he also knows that the king is his father.
If you have any suggestions for Silver the Wanderer about building fantasy worlds, please jump in.
Here are four prompts:
• Write a scene in which you introduce a fortune teller and show the reader that his power is real.
• Begin a story with dialogue among a statue, an elf, and a sorcerer.
• Write a market scene, and show how commerce is conducted in this world (without going into the entire monetary system). Make something threatening happen.
• Start a story with the arrival of a character who is more than he seems. Show the reader hints of the hidden aspects of this character, but don’t reveal everything.
If you like, keep going with the story. Have fun, and save what you write! And I hope to see some of you on Saturday!
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
The Old Character
On February 22, 2010, Priyanka wrote, ...as a young author, how do you convincingly write an older character?
I'm currently working on a story that revolves around three women- a 19 year old born in the US, her 45 year old mother, who immigrated to the US as a newlywed, and her 65 year old grandmother, who has lived in India her whole life but is deeply involved in the lives of her family overseas.
Now, as a nineteen-year-old myself, it's very easy to get into the mind and thoughts of that character.
However, I immediately run into problems when trying to create a convincing inner voice for both the mother and the grandmother. I've attempted to observe my own family and their friends to get a grasp on how they interact with each other and how they see the world, but I always feel so...artificial, I suppose, is the best way of putting it-when I try and write a passage from the perspective of someone so much older than me. I feel almost presumptuous to be making the assumption that I could possibly understand their perspective.
In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, one of the sisters, Addie, is very shy. Although I’m not off-the-charts outgoing, I’m comfortably sociable. I didn’t know how to write Addie, so I went too far and made her shyness almost catatonic. My friend Joan, who is genuinely shy, helped me and pulled me back from the brink of caricature.
So you may benefit from showing the parts of your writing that feel artificial to actual older people. If you’re reluctant to share with your family, try a teacher, a librarian, a friend’s grandparent. Also, you probably should approach your character’s age with a light touch, which I failed to do at first.
You certainly don’t want to lapse into stereotype. Nothing (well, almost nothing) is likely to annoy an older person as much as seeing older characters playing Bingo every evening and taking out their false teeth at night and talking about those gosh-darned newfangled telly phones. I don’t care for it, and my friend who will turn ninety in July wouldn’t care for it, either.
I’m sixty-two, and, frankly, I could go on beyond the tolerance of anyone under fifty about being this semi-advanced age. Age is a big part of our lives, no matter how old we are and how old we feel. Age suffuses work, family, romance, health, even if we’re healthy, as I am. What we do for most of the day has an age aspect. When we’re young, we’re in school; older, we’re working or taking care of children; older still, we may be working or retired.
A friend to whom I posed Priyanka’s question said, “Language,” and language is certainly worth thinking about. I don’t mean the “gosh darned” I mentioned above, but something more subtle. The “wow” and “out of sight” of my ‘60s adolescence has faded from my conversation, and when I use more current expressions I’m generally being playful and deliberate. I may say “down with it” or “dude” or “awesome,” but not by accident, so my English is probably a little more standard than it used to be. I have nothing against “dude” or “go” instead of “say.” They just don’t bubble out of me. You can apply this both to dialogue and thought. I never think, “Dude.”
The next several paragraphs are more my ideas about age than direct writing advice. I hope some of you reading the post will weigh in with your thoughts to help Priyanka and other young writers.
Viewed optimistically, the human race ages and acquires wisdom as time passes. I have wisdom that I can’t attribute to age, that has come to me because of advances in knowledge. For example, when I was younger things like relaxation techniques and meditation were unknown in my circle of friends and family. I don’t remember any talk about stress, although certainly stress existed. We’re in a more self-aware age now, and I’m wiser because of it.
An older person is more likely to have experienced loss of a loved one through death, is more likely to have had some health challenges, will certainly have suffered more from “ageism.” But young people can also be very sick, can have lost someone, can have gone through some other kind of hurtful discrimination. Each of us - old, middle-aged, young - react to these life events uniquely. One person will talk about his troubles. Someone else will hold it all in. There are complainers and people who rise above circumstances at every age. The saying, People die as they lived, is also true of aging. People age as they’ve lived.
I don’t mean we fail to change and grow. Some of us do, most, I hope. But even when we do, we don’t disconnect completely from our former selves. It’s like looking at a family photo album. You can usually pick your mother out of her kindergarten class, even though she’s much taller now and hardly ever wears pigtails anymore.
This is true of our inner lives, too. We start an interior monologue as soon as we learn words. It’s continuous, absorbing new understanding so slowly that we don’t notice the difference. It’s like seeing someone who’s on a diet every day. The dieter may be disappointed that his family isn’t commenting much on the change. It takes a family reunion for a distant cousin to tell him how great he looks. When my father turned seventy, he commented at how surprised he felt about his age. Inside, he said, he felt no different.
Naturally, some things are likely to dramatically change an inner life: dementia; mental illness; a catastrophic event, like surviving being in the World Trade Center on 9/11. But for most of us, change comes almost imperceptibly.
You can do research. Read about geriatrics. There are books about the stages of life. Try reading a few issues of the magazine that AARP publishes. Join in activities in which you will be the youngest participant, maybe your mother’s book club. Visit a kindergarten class and feel yourself the oldest person in the room after the teacher.
Most important, respect your characters, and try not to worry about their age. A joyous character is likely to stay joyous, and a whiner is likely to go on whining. Write them as you see them - joyous, whining, brilliant, stupid, selfless, selfish - and as they feel to you on the inside. Put it down, and you can go back later to fine tune.
This prompt is to write about an extended family’s a move to a new home. You can write about moving day or packing up or the moment the decision to move is made. Write the move separately in first person from each of the perspectives below. Be sure to include the characters’ thoughts. When you’re done, if you like, weave them together into a story.
• The thirteen-year-old son.
• The seventeen-year-old daughter.
• The four-year-old daughter or son. In my opinion, this is the hardest (maybe impossible) to get right, because there is so much a young child doesn’t understand and is likely to interpret unexpectedly.
• The mother or father in her or his forties.
• The grandmother in her sixties.
• The great-grandfather in his eighties.
For extra credit, now go back and make one of the characters blind. Put another one in a wheelchair.
Have fun! Save what you write!
I'm currently working on a story that revolves around three women- a 19 year old born in the US, her 45 year old mother, who immigrated to the US as a newlywed, and her 65 year old grandmother, who has lived in India her whole life but is deeply involved in the lives of her family overseas.
Now, as a nineteen-year-old myself, it's very easy to get into the mind and thoughts of that character.
However, I immediately run into problems when trying to create a convincing inner voice for both the mother and the grandmother. I've attempted to observe my own family and their friends to get a grasp on how they interact with each other and how they see the world, but I always feel so...artificial, I suppose, is the best way of putting it-when I try and write a passage from the perspective of someone so much older than me. I feel almost presumptuous to be making the assumption that I could possibly understand their perspective.
In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, one of the sisters, Addie, is very shy. Although I’m not off-the-charts outgoing, I’m comfortably sociable. I didn’t know how to write Addie, so I went too far and made her shyness almost catatonic. My friend Joan, who is genuinely shy, helped me and pulled me back from the brink of caricature.
So you may benefit from showing the parts of your writing that feel artificial to actual older people. If you’re reluctant to share with your family, try a teacher, a librarian, a friend’s grandparent. Also, you probably should approach your character’s age with a light touch, which I failed to do at first.
You certainly don’t want to lapse into stereotype. Nothing (well, almost nothing) is likely to annoy an older person as much as seeing older characters playing Bingo every evening and taking out their false teeth at night and talking about those gosh-darned newfangled telly phones. I don’t care for it, and my friend who will turn ninety in July wouldn’t care for it, either.
I’m sixty-two, and, frankly, I could go on beyond the tolerance of anyone under fifty about being this semi-advanced age. Age is a big part of our lives, no matter how old we are and how old we feel. Age suffuses work, family, romance, health, even if we’re healthy, as I am. What we do for most of the day has an age aspect. When we’re young, we’re in school; older, we’re working or taking care of children; older still, we may be working or retired.
A friend to whom I posed Priyanka’s question said, “Language,” and language is certainly worth thinking about. I don’t mean the “gosh darned” I mentioned above, but something more subtle. The “wow” and “out of sight” of my ‘60s adolescence has faded from my conversation, and when I use more current expressions I’m generally being playful and deliberate. I may say “down with it” or “dude” or “awesome,” but not by accident, so my English is probably a little more standard than it used to be. I have nothing against “dude” or “go” instead of “say.” They just don’t bubble out of me. You can apply this both to dialogue and thought. I never think, “Dude.”
The next several paragraphs are more my ideas about age than direct writing advice. I hope some of you reading the post will weigh in with your thoughts to help Priyanka and other young writers.
Viewed optimistically, the human race ages and acquires wisdom as time passes. I have wisdom that I can’t attribute to age, that has come to me because of advances in knowledge. For example, when I was younger things like relaxation techniques and meditation were unknown in my circle of friends and family. I don’t remember any talk about stress, although certainly stress existed. We’re in a more self-aware age now, and I’m wiser because of it.
An older person is more likely to have experienced loss of a loved one through death, is more likely to have had some health challenges, will certainly have suffered more from “ageism.” But young people can also be very sick, can have lost someone, can have gone through some other kind of hurtful discrimination. Each of us - old, middle-aged, young - react to these life events uniquely. One person will talk about his troubles. Someone else will hold it all in. There are complainers and people who rise above circumstances at every age. The saying, People die as they lived, is also true of aging. People age as they’ve lived.
I don’t mean we fail to change and grow. Some of us do, most, I hope. But even when we do, we don’t disconnect completely from our former selves. It’s like looking at a family photo album. You can usually pick your mother out of her kindergarten class, even though she’s much taller now and hardly ever wears pigtails anymore.
This is true of our inner lives, too. We start an interior monologue as soon as we learn words. It’s continuous, absorbing new understanding so slowly that we don’t notice the difference. It’s like seeing someone who’s on a diet every day. The dieter may be disappointed that his family isn’t commenting much on the change. It takes a family reunion for a distant cousin to tell him how great he looks. When my father turned seventy, he commented at how surprised he felt about his age. Inside, he said, he felt no different.
Naturally, some things are likely to dramatically change an inner life: dementia; mental illness; a catastrophic event, like surviving being in the World Trade Center on 9/11. But for most of us, change comes almost imperceptibly.
You can do research. Read about geriatrics. There are books about the stages of life. Try reading a few issues of the magazine that AARP publishes. Join in activities in which you will be the youngest participant, maybe your mother’s book club. Visit a kindergarten class and feel yourself the oldest person in the room after the teacher.
Most important, respect your characters, and try not to worry about their age. A joyous character is likely to stay joyous, and a whiner is likely to go on whining. Write them as you see them - joyous, whining, brilliant, stupid, selfless, selfish - and as they feel to you on the inside. Put it down, and you can go back later to fine tune.
This prompt is to write about an extended family’s a move to a new home. You can write about moving day or packing up or the moment the decision to move is made. Write the move separately in first person from each of the perspectives below. Be sure to include the characters’ thoughts. When you’re done, if you like, weave them together into a story.
• The thirteen-year-old son.
• The seventeen-year-old daughter.
• The four-year-old daughter or son. In my opinion, this is the hardest (maybe impossible) to get right, because there is so much a young child doesn’t understand and is likely to interpret unexpectedly.
• The mother or father in her or his forties.
• The grandmother in her sixties.
• The great-grandfather in his eighties.
For extra credit, now go back and make one of the characters blind. Put another one in a wheelchair.
Have fun! Save what you write!
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Titled
On February 21, 2010, Mary wrote, ...I'm having title trouble. Last year, we had to write a fully fledged book for a contest at school. Mine was probably the longest and was 12 pages long, typed. I came up with a cute title, but now that I'm revising it, I'm not sure it fits.... I'm halfway done with my second draft and it's 21 pages long, and much less whimsical than my title. I'm sort of attached to the title, it's what I've called my story from the very beginning, almost a year ago. I don't really want to change it, but I feel that I have to. The title doesn't represent the main idea any more, but I don't know how to fix it. Any ideas?
In Writing Magic there’s a chapter called “The Right Moniker” that talks about book titles as well as about naming characters, so you may want to take a look at that.
The first title of Ella Enchanted was Charmont and Ella, because I originally thought that Char was going to be as important a character as Ella. When I realized he wouldn’t be, I shortened the title to Ella, but when the book was accepted for publication, my editor didn’t think that title good enough, so I was asked to come up with a list of alternative titles. One of the titles I thought of was Spellbound, which I still like. It’s also the title of a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Another title I submitted was Enchanted Ella. My editor switched the words around, and the book had a title.
The title of the third book in the Disney Fairies series (to be released in June) is Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, which is okay, but not my favorite of the titles I came up with, which I had to agree were far too long. They would have taken up the whole cover, leaving no room for art.
But sometimes a long title is a plus. I’m thinking of The Curious incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Actually, I’m in title trouble right now. The fantasy mystery I’ve been telling you about has no title. All along I called it A Mansioner’s Tale, which has not met with my publisher’s approval.
Here are some ideas I've considered for this book and for others that may help you find your own titles :
The main character’s name may be enough. Think of Heidi and Peter Pan. Or you can use more than one name, as I tried with Charmont and Ella. Or you can make the name part of the title, as in another “Cinderella” variant, Just Ella.
A location can be a title. Think of Wuthering Heights. The location can be combined with the main character’s name, as in one of my childhood favorites, Anne of Green Gables.
You can list words and phrases that reflect the nature of your story. My novel Ever has this kind of title. If none of the words and phrases is right, go to a thesaurus and look for synonyms of the words. One may be your title.
If you are retelling a fairy tale, your title can come from the original. Most people can guess that my Princess Tale called Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep is based on “Sleeping Beauty.” Beauty by Robin McKinley and Beast by Donna Jo Napoli are both versions of “Beauty and the Beast.”
I haven’t tried this, but I’m going to when I get home (I’m on a train to New York City): I’m going to look at titles in my bookshelves, not to use one of them, but for ideas. Likewise, I’ll look at our collection of DVDs and CDs.
Alliteration can help make a title sing, such as The Wind in the Willows or Ella Enchanted. So keep alliteration in mind in your title search.
Sometimes a book grows into its title. I’m not sure The Two Princesses of Bamarre is the best I could have done, although I thought it was at the time. Still, the book has had that title for so long that by now it fits.
As you know, notes are always part of my process. I write down the possibilities and think about them and try to conjure up some more.
When Mary wrote that her title is now too whimsical for her story, she was definitely on the right track. You want the title to reflect the mood of your work. Not only the mood, but also the genre and the age group it’s intended for. For example, Enigma reflects the mystery in my book, but the title is too serious, too thriller-ish. The Case of... can be a good title for a whodunit, but probably not for a fantasy whodunit set in the Middle Ages, which mine is.
If your story is going to be published, you don’t have only yourself and your audience to please. The publisher has to be happy too, and the publisher is happy when you present a title that its sales people think will sell. The sales force has experience and should be heeded, but, of course, no one can predict with certainty what will take off, and a strong story is the most important factor of all. (And a good cover. A book can fail because of the wrong cover.)
Here are two prompts:
• Go back to three stories you’ve already found titles for and think of four new titles for each one. Use the methods I suggest above and any others you think of. You may come up with a better title or decide in the end that you like the original one best, but you’ll have had the experience of exploring, if you’ve never approached titles this way.
• Try to come up with the title for my mystery. If you suggest a title that becomes the title, I will acknowledge your contribution in print in the book itself. This is probably a one-week deal, because the publisher is getting impatient. Maybe the challenge is impossible, because I can’t give away the whole story, but here’s a little bit to go on: Elodie, age twelve, arrives in the town of Two Castles. Her parents have sent her off alone to be apprenticed to a weaver, but that doesn’t work out, and she is on her own. She is a talented mansioner (an actor). The most important characters are: Elodie; the dragon, Masteress Meenore (not a he or a she, but an IT); and the ogre, Count Jonty Um. The story is a mystery. The mood is upbeat, happy, humorous, and it’s written for kids from eight to fourteen. HarperCollins would like a one-word title, but I have proposed longer ones, and I will continue to. The people there don’t want the word ogre or dragon in the title. I’ve decided not to tell you the myriad titles that have been rejected because I don’t want to send your minds down any particular path. I hope you can think of something. If you do, post it (one or more) as a comment. Otherwise the book may have a cover and no title! Good luck to you and me!
Have fun, and save your titles!
In Writing Magic there’s a chapter called “The Right Moniker” that talks about book titles as well as about naming characters, so you may want to take a look at that.
The first title of Ella Enchanted was Charmont and Ella, because I originally thought that Char was going to be as important a character as Ella. When I realized he wouldn’t be, I shortened the title to Ella, but when the book was accepted for publication, my editor didn’t think that title good enough, so I was asked to come up with a list of alternative titles. One of the titles I thought of was Spellbound, which I still like. It’s also the title of a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Another title I submitted was Enchanted Ella. My editor switched the words around, and the book had a title.
The title of the third book in the Disney Fairies series (to be released in June) is Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, which is okay, but not my favorite of the titles I came up with, which I had to agree were far too long. They would have taken up the whole cover, leaving no room for art.
But sometimes a long title is a plus. I’m thinking of The Curious incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Actually, I’m in title trouble right now. The fantasy mystery I’ve been telling you about has no title. All along I called it A Mansioner’s Tale, which has not met with my publisher’s approval.
Here are some ideas I've considered for this book and for others that may help you find your own titles :
The main character’s name may be enough. Think of Heidi and Peter Pan. Or you can use more than one name, as I tried with Charmont and Ella. Or you can make the name part of the title, as in another “Cinderella” variant, Just Ella.
A location can be a title. Think of Wuthering Heights. The location can be combined with the main character’s name, as in one of my childhood favorites, Anne of Green Gables.
You can list words and phrases that reflect the nature of your story. My novel Ever has this kind of title. If none of the words and phrases is right, go to a thesaurus and look for synonyms of the words. One may be your title.
If you are retelling a fairy tale, your title can come from the original. Most people can guess that my Princess Tale called Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep is based on “Sleeping Beauty.” Beauty by Robin McKinley and Beast by Donna Jo Napoli are both versions of “Beauty and the Beast.”
I haven’t tried this, but I’m going to when I get home (I’m on a train to New York City): I’m going to look at titles in my bookshelves, not to use one of them, but for ideas. Likewise, I’ll look at our collection of DVDs and CDs.
Alliteration can help make a title sing, such as The Wind in the Willows or Ella Enchanted. So keep alliteration in mind in your title search.
Sometimes a book grows into its title. I’m not sure The Two Princesses of Bamarre is the best I could have done, although I thought it was at the time. Still, the book has had that title for so long that by now it fits.
As you know, notes are always part of my process. I write down the possibilities and think about them and try to conjure up some more.
When Mary wrote that her title is now too whimsical for her story, she was definitely on the right track. You want the title to reflect the mood of your work. Not only the mood, but also the genre and the age group it’s intended for. For example, Enigma reflects the mystery in my book, but the title is too serious, too thriller-ish. The Case of... can be a good title for a whodunit, but probably not for a fantasy whodunit set in the Middle Ages, which mine is.
If your story is going to be published, you don’t have only yourself and your audience to please. The publisher has to be happy too, and the publisher is happy when you present a title that its sales people think will sell. The sales force has experience and should be heeded, but, of course, no one can predict with certainty what will take off, and a strong story is the most important factor of all. (And a good cover. A book can fail because of the wrong cover.)
Here are two prompts:
• Go back to three stories you’ve already found titles for and think of four new titles for each one. Use the methods I suggest above and any others you think of. You may come up with a better title or decide in the end that you like the original one best, but you’ll have had the experience of exploring, if you’ve never approached titles this way.
• Try to come up with the title for my mystery. If you suggest a title that becomes the title, I will acknowledge your contribution in print in the book itself. This is probably a one-week deal, because the publisher is getting impatient. Maybe the challenge is impossible, because I can’t give away the whole story, but here’s a little bit to go on: Elodie, age twelve, arrives in the town of Two Castles. Her parents have sent her off alone to be apprenticed to a weaver, but that doesn’t work out, and she is on her own. She is a talented mansioner (an actor). The most important characters are: Elodie; the dragon, Masteress Meenore (not a he or a she, but an IT); and the ogre, Count Jonty Um. The story is a mystery. The mood is upbeat, happy, humorous, and it’s written for kids from eight to fourteen. HarperCollins would like a one-word title, but I have proposed longer ones, and I will continue to. The people there don’t want the word ogre or dragon in the title. I’ve decided not to tell you the myriad titles that have been rejected because I don’t want to send your minds down any particular path. I hope you can think of something. If you do, post it (one or more) as a comment. Otherwise the book may have a cover and no title! Good luck to you and me!
Have fun, and save your titles!
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Idea-ology
On February 19, 2010 Katie wrote, ...how do you get... ideas? I really like to write, but I can never think of anything good to write about. How do you come up with such good ideas?
In Writing Magic there’s a chapter called “Eureka!” about getting ideas. You may want to read that as well as this post.
In my opinion, the most important word in Katie’s question is good, which is a stifling word, especially when you’re in the idea stage. My definition of a good idea is an idea that makes me think of more ideas. It may feel stupid, for example, to write a story about a girl with an enormous left thumb. So you abandon the idea and feel hopeless about ideas. But suppose you don't abandon that thumb and let your mind roam. What would happen if you yourself had a big thumb? Would you keep injuring it because it gets in the way? Might you spend a lot of time in the nurse’s office at school? And in the nurse’s office might you discover a boy who’s there almost constantly, a boy who’s been seen by hardly any other of the students? What’s he like? Why is he always sick? This line of thought could get you started on a story.
Or suppose the thumb belongs to your main character. It’s a family trait that has skipped five generations. The last one to have the thumb was a pirate who was hanged, and the queen herself came to the hanging. But there’s a family legend that someone else was executed in his place, and he’s still sailing the high seas.
Or suppose the big thumb hurts at particular times–during family arguments or before earthquakes or whenever a political figure anywhere in the world is about to be assassinated.
If you decide too soon that an idea is rotten, you lose the chance to hop on its back and fly to all the follow-up ideas. So I say relax. When you’re fooling around with ideas, nothing is at stake but some thinking time.
Ideas come to you for a reason, often a reason you (and I) aren’t aware of. Whatever the idea is, stupid or not, it has meaning. You don’t ever have to find out what that meaning is, just know that it’s there and try not to judge your idea, because it’s part of you. Conceivably it’s the goofy part, but goofy is playful, and playful is good.
Suppose you really are dreadful at coming up with initiating ideas, the ones that start a story. Well, you can borrow someone else’s idea. This is not theft. As Maybeawriter commented on the last post, nobody owns an idea. It’s the expression of an idea that becomes the writer’s intellectual property. If you want to write about a maiden who’s strangely obedient, feel free.
Copyright law is complicated. If you write about a character named Ella who is cursed with obedience by a fairy named Lucinda, you may be poaching on my work. But just the bare bones idea is yours for the taking. If the story you’re thinking about is very old, you can even borrow the characters including their names. If you want to call a character Hansel or Gretel, you can.
People have built on stories forever. Shakespeare did it. The playwright George Bernard Shaw did it. I do it (to put myself in exalted company) when I adapt fairy tales for my own use.
Once you pick up an established idea, obviously you have to make it your own, which calls for secondary ideas. Even a short story needs lots of ideas. Where is your story going to go? What characters do you need to take it there? What obstacles can you throw up to make it hard to reach the ending? Staying with a goofy idea, you may want goofy obstacles and goofy characters. The ideas in my series The Princess Tales are mostly goofy. Goofy, not bad, not stupid.
Without drawing on a particular story, you can ask yourself the kind of story you want to tell: fantasy, historical, romance, contemporary, mystery, whatever. Write down your answer or answers. Think about subcategories. For example, if you love mysteries, do you especially enjoy the historical ones or the contemporary? Hard-boiled or soft? Do you like the emphasis to be on the puzzle or on the action? Speculate about how you might write that kind of story, where it would take place, who would be in it. Write notes.
Before I started my mystery novel, I remembered how much I loved the Nero Wolfe series (okay for middle school and above and maybe below, I think, but check with a parent or a librarian. If you want to build up your vocabulary, these books are great.) My favorite aspect of the series was the relationship between Nero Wolfe and his faithful assistant, Archie Goodwin. (We named our first dog Archie.) I wanted to do something similar, create a detecting duo, in my case a girl and a dragon.
For what to do when no ideas come, when you are utterly empty of ideas, try notes. If idea emptiness describes you, look at the chapter in Writing Magic, because I have a bunch of suggestions there, which I don’t want to repeat.
Here are a few idea-priming prompts:
• Pick an object, something in your house, anything, the stove, your violin, your uncle’s needlepoint. Separate it in your mind from its real history and invent a history for it. Think of the drama, the tragedy, the comedy that went into its creation, its passage from owner to owner, its effect on the lives of its owners. Write a story about it.
• Pick an emotion: anger, joy, sadness, fear. Remember the last time you felt that emotion or you watched someone else experience it. Now move that feeling to a new setting. Suppose your brother was mad at you for hogging the computer. Put a character who stands in for him on a rowboat, and make him be the one who wants to row. What happens? Or move him to archery practice in Sherwood Forest, and he thinks it’s his turn next. Think of situations that have built-in tension (possible drowning, arrow wounds).
If the emotion you pick is joy, you need to make the feeling short-lived. What will destroy your character’s happiness?
• Pick two characters from stories you know and put them together in a tight situation, a sinking ship, for example. Rapunzel and Cinderella. Captain Hook and the witch from "Hansel and Gretel." Jack from "Jack in the Beanstalk" and Snow White. What would they make of each other? Would they understand each other? How can you make them join forces?
Have fun, and save what you write!
In Writing Magic there’s a chapter called “Eureka!” about getting ideas. You may want to read that as well as this post.
In my opinion, the most important word in Katie’s question is good, which is a stifling word, especially when you’re in the idea stage. My definition of a good idea is an idea that makes me think of more ideas. It may feel stupid, for example, to write a story about a girl with an enormous left thumb. So you abandon the idea and feel hopeless about ideas. But suppose you don't abandon that thumb and let your mind roam. What would happen if you yourself had a big thumb? Would you keep injuring it because it gets in the way? Might you spend a lot of time in the nurse’s office at school? And in the nurse’s office might you discover a boy who’s there almost constantly, a boy who’s been seen by hardly any other of the students? What’s he like? Why is he always sick? This line of thought could get you started on a story.
Or suppose the thumb belongs to your main character. It’s a family trait that has skipped five generations. The last one to have the thumb was a pirate who was hanged, and the queen herself came to the hanging. But there’s a family legend that someone else was executed in his place, and he’s still sailing the high seas.
Or suppose the big thumb hurts at particular times–during family arguments or before earthquakes or whenever a political figure anywhere in the world is about to be assassinated.
If you decide too soon that an idea is rotten, you lose the chance to hop on its back and fly to all the follow-up ideas. So I say relax. When you’re fooling around with ideas, nothing is at stake but some thinking time.
Ideas come to you for a reason, often a reason you (and I) aren’t aware of. Whatever the idea is, stupid or not, it has meaning. You don’t ever have to find out what that meaning is, just know that it’s there and try not to judge your idea, because it’s part of you. Conceivably it’s the goofy part, but goofy is playful, and playful is good.
Suppose you really are dreadful at coming up with initiating ideas, the ones that start a story. Well, you can borrow someone else’s idea. This is not theft. As Maybeawriter commented on the last post, nobody owns an idea. It’s the expression of an idea that becomes the writer’s intellectual property. If you want to write about a maiden who’s strangely obedient, feel free.
Copyright law is complicated. If you write about a character named Ella who is cursed with obedience by a fairy named Lucinda, you may be poaching on my work. But just the bare bones idea is yours for the taking. If the story you’re thinking about is very old, you can even borrow the characters including their names. If you want to call a character Hansel or Gretel, you can.
People have built on stories forever. Shakespeare did it. The playwright George Bernard Shaw did it. I do it (to put myself in exalted company) when I adapt fairy tales for my own use.
Once you pick up an established idea, obviously you have to make it your own, which calls for secondary ideas. Even a short story needs lots of ideas. Where is your story going to go? What characters do you need to take it there? What obstacles can you throw up to make it hard to reach the ending? Staying with a goofy idea, you may want goofy obstacles and goofy characters. The ideas in my series The Princess Tales are mostly goofy. Goofy, not bad, not stupid.
Without drawing on a particular story, you can ask yourself the kind of story you want to tell: fantasy, historical, romance, contemporary, mystery, whatever. Write down your answer or answers. Think about subcategories. For example, if you love mysteries, do you especially enjoy the historical ones or the contemporary? Hard-boiled or soft? Do you like the emphasis to be on the puzzle or on the action? Speculate about how you might write that kind of story, where it would take place, who would be in it. Write notes.
Before I started my mystery novel, I remembered how much I loved the Nero Wolfe series (okay for middle school and above and maybe below, I think, but check with a parent or a librarian. If you want to build up your vocabulary, these books are great.) My favorite aspect of the series was the relationship between Nero Wolfe and his faithful assistant, Archie Goodwin. (We named our first dog Archie.) I wanted to do something similar, create a detecting duo, in my case a girl and a dragon.
For what to do when no ideas come, when you are utterly empty of ideas, try notes. If idea emptiness describes you, look at the chapter in Writing Magic, because I have a bunch of suggestions there, which I don’t want to repeat.
Here are a few idea-priming prompts:
• Pick an object, something in your house, anything, the stove, your violin, your uncle’s needlepoint. Separate it in your mind from its real history and invent a history for it. Think of the drama, the tragedy, the comedy that went into its creation, its passage from owner to owner, its effect on the lives of its owners. Write a story about it.
• Pick an emotion: anger, joy, sadness, fear. Remember the last time you felt that emotion or you watched someone else experience it. Now move that feeling to a new setting. Suppose your brother was mad at you for hogging the computer. Put a character who stands in for him on a rowboat, and make him be the one who wants to row. What happens? Or move him to archery practice in Sherwood Forest, and he thinks it’s his turn next. Think of situations that have built-in tension (possible drowning, arrow wounds).
If the emotion you pick is joy, you need to make the feeling short-lived. What will destroy your character’s happiness?
• Pick two characters from stories you know and put them together in a tight situation, a sinking ship, for example. Rapunzel and Cinderella. Captain Hook and the witch from "Hansel and Gretel." Jack from "Jack in the Beanstalk" and Snow White. What would they make of each other? Would they understand each other? How can you make them join forces?
Have fun, and save what you write!
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