Gail Carson Levine

Start the heart throbs

2012-02-01T09:17:00.000-05:00

Back from vacation in sunny Tucson. Thanks for keeping the blog going last week!

Before the post starts, here’s a great, over the top review of my upcoming book, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/afuse8production/2012/01/25/review-of-the-day-forgive-me-i-meant-to-do-it-by-gail-carson-levine/.

In August, M.K.B. wrote, ....I'm having some difficulty showing romance in my story. I mean, I can easily show that they like each other, but it's kind of difficult to decide when it happens and all that. How do I decide when it’s right to show it?

If your story is primarily a romance, you probably want the reader to get that pretty quickly. The two lovebirds don’t have to start cooing as soon as they meet, but the idea should be introduced, not necessarily by the main characters. For example, Jack can be with his friend Kath when she says, “I see you as Romance Guy in a movie.” Jack, astonished, blurts out, “But I have cowlicks!” Kath responds, “Cowlicks are nothing compared to intensity. You are a laser. When you choose someone to focus on, there will be combustion. Trust me.”

Then the story can return to whatever the subplots may be: Jack’s difficulty mastering geography or his general lack of self-confidence (which could affect the romance later on), Kath’s running argument with her older sister, anything. Maybe we glimpse our heroine Wanda alone in the school cafeteria, hunched over a volume of Shakespearean sonnets.

The point is, the reader should know early on what genre he’s wandered into. The book jacket will tell, but we can’t rely on that. If the romantic element is delayed for forty pages the reader is likely to feel confused, maybe even cheated by the hype on the cover.

Then, how quickly the romance develops will depend on your story. Everything can move along at a fast pace if big problems are on the way. The reader will see 200 more pages ahead and steel himself for trouble. Will an old love interest show up? Will Jack’s family be relocated from Cincinnati to Belgium? Will Jack, because of his low self-esteem, doubt Wanda’s affection? Or the romance can be beset with trouble from the start. It can be one-sided, for example, as in Pride and Prejudice. The two can be separated by distance, as in the movie, Sleepless in Seattle, or by misconception, as in the movie While You Were Sleeping, or by a curse, as in You-Know-What. There are myriad devices you can use.

If your story isn’t primarily a romance, you can take your time. Lots of readers like a little love enrichment to another kind of tale. Jack’s problem may be his hyper self-criticism rather than his love life. The climax will center around that. Wanda, who can be introduced on page 112, helps him see himself more positively, and she may provide relief for the reader who is suffering because of his self-negativity. But the primary problem is his to solve.

Or Jack is Prince Jack setting out to reconquer a rogue province overrun by the mole people, and coincidentally his regent’s daughter is being held hostage by the mole folks. There may be merely the slightest hint of romantic possibilities between the dashing Jack and the pulchritudinous Wanda. Nothing has to flower ever.

In a related question, Alex wrote on January 5, 2012, So I have a question about cliches. I know some of them are inevitable, but I want to stay away from them as much as possible.

In my book, I guess you could say the romantic plot starts off as cliche (he's the new boy in town). But it ends in a way that I don't think is cliche at all - it's complicated, but it ends sadly. My question is this - how should I make it so that the beginning, even if it is cliched, keeps readers hooked and not groaning at yet another cliched book? Or is there a way to introduce a male character as someone the MC has never known before in a non-cliched way?

Later, Alex added, ....The thing is, it doesn't start off as a romance, not really. The romance starts around 27k in. And the romance is just a subplot. I'm just worried that people will think it's like all the other Insta-love YA romances there are today, when it's not.

I mention the reader a lot on the blog. I’ve even brought him up a few times in this post, but I think we tend to worry about him too much sometimes, and we don’t give him enough credit. If he’s reading Alex’s book and he’s 27k in (not sure how far in this is, but I’m guessing it’s beyond the first chapter), he should know by now that the story isn’t cliched.

People travel. Boys and girls arrive in towns, are treated well or badly, fall in love or not, stay for years or leave quickly. There’s drama in a new personality acting on the old cast of characters, either from the POV of a long-time resident or of the newcomer. If we avoid writing about this for fear of introducing a cliche, we’re cutting ourselves off from an important subject.

An old post is about cliches. You can reread it at http://gailcarsonlevine.blogspot.com/search/label/cliches. But that post is about cliched language not cliched ideas. What’s important about ideas is how they’re expressed: what the writing is like, how the idea is developed. One might make a case that romance itself is cliched, but zillions of books, poems, movies, operas, plays have been written on the subject and people keep finding something fresh to say.

I don’t mean there isn’t work that’s unoriginal. We’ve all started books or movies and known what’s coming next. The problem in these imitations may be a failure of invention or timidity, but I doubt it’s simply the new guy in town.

Of course, you can change the newness. Sean can be new because he’s returning after an absence. Maybe he suffered a long illness or an alien abduction or two years at a school for acrobats. He’s old but he’s new. Or he can be old but changed. He’s had an epiphany. He’s out of pig wrestling and into Edwardian novels. Or he had a quick, overnight alien abduction. Or his mother died. So he’s different. Or Amy is changed; she perceives Sean in a new way because she’s given up pig wrestling or been abducted by aliens or her mother died.

Here are four prompts:

∙    Challenge yourself. Think of unusual ways to separate your lovers. Write a list of ten possibilities. Pick one or more and write a story.

∙    Here’s what I think may be an unusual pairing: She’s a dryad who’s been in her tree since ancient times. He’s modern, a techie, forest phobic. Write their romance. Try it from one POV and then switch.

∙    Write a scene between Jack and Wanda if the story is about his lack of self-confidence. Allow the romance to develop but don’t let it solve his problem.

∙    Amy returns to school after a weekend in a spaceship with aliens from Alpha Centauri who impress her with their civilized ways. She finds herself viewing her own classmates as savages, except for Sean, whom she now sees in a new light. Write a lunch scene.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Brave new world

2012-01-18T09:16:00.000-05:00

Just to let you all know, the blog may take next week off. I'll be vacationing, tra la, and I don't know if I'll get to it.

On August 29th, 2011, Charlotte wrote, ....I've got the plot set down pretty well in the novel I'm working on, but what I'm having trouble with is the world itself. It's fantasy, and it's set in a world other than this one, and I don't want it to come off quite as modern as our world--e.g. skyscrapers, cars, etc. But there are some modern aspects that I do want to use--e.g. Polaroids but not digital cameras, flashlights but not streetlights, pianos and acoustic guitars but not keyboards and electrics, trains but not cars, etc. And there are also period aspects that aren't necessary to get into, such as how people wash their clothes or go to the bathroom, which are never significant to the story, but I feel I have to put in anyway because I know I'm wondering how these things work, though I don't remember ever wondering that when reading any other book.

Is it okay to have only some modern inventions, and even more in the background? Or do I need some major reason why there aren't highways and a million electric appliances--like how in Harry Potter they explain that Muggle inventions tend to "go haywire" around heavy concentrations of magic, which is why there are no computers or electric lights at Hogwarts?

If it works, it’s fine. If the reader accepts whatever you’ve laid down, you’ve done well. But not so well if your reader starts scratching her head and loses interest in your story because she doesn’t understand why your zebras are plaid not striped but they’re still called zebras.

If you’re writing about a sort of modern world, like ours in some respects, different in others, readers will assume that details not mentioned (toilets, laundry, banks) work in the regular way. You don’t have to haul them into your plot just to show them in operation. Even if they’re different, if the differences don’t influence events, you can omit them. When they’re needed, say in the eleventh volume of your series, you can bring them in. If you’ve set the stage for a world in which mattresses turn sleepers over like pancakes at two am every night, the reader will go with the flow, or, in this case, the flip.

You mention Polaroids as a kind of camera you want to keep. The trouble I have with that is simply the name. Polaroid seems to belong solidly to planet earth, because of the link to Polaroid Corporation. I’d look for a generic term, like instant-image camera. In my fantasy novels I avoid references to our reality. Of course this is impossible to do entirely. Gnomes and ogres, for example, are our invention. Still, we’re not going to meet up with them at the supermarket. In another example, when I write dark-skinned characters I don’t call them African, and I don’t call light-skinned characters European. There is no Europe, no Africa. Dark-skinned characters don’t have to come from a warm climate or fair-skinned from a cold. In my world the effects of sun on skin color are up to me.

It can be helpful, as in your Harry Potter example, if you know why some features of modern life were invented in your world and others weren’t. Knowing can guide your future choices. But it’s okay if you don’t know. In our real world modern inventions come about because people think them up. Sometimes new technology makes the thinking possible, but sometimes someone just comes up with a fresh way to use old materials. I believe post-its are an example of this. Alas, there must be myriad potential devices that could help us that no one has dreamed up so far.

If you do know the reason behind the state of technology and tell the reader, you may enhance her pleasure. Here’s a small detail from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series: The trolls in this universe are slow thinkers, actually stupid. The reason, we discover, is that room temperature isn’t their natural climate. The colder it is the smarter they get. At sub-zero they’re brilliant. I love having that explained.

The Discworld series is written in third-person. Most books begin with a short preface about the world, explaining that it rides on the back of a giant turtle. Once the reader sees that, she’s ready for anything. If this kind of approach suits what you’re doing, you can introduce your world in this sort of way even if the rest of the book is told in first person. It’s a quick way of bringing the reader in.

But you don’t have to do this. I never have.

Still, the reader will have a leg up if you introduce your world quickly. I discuss this in Writing Magic, so you may want to take a look. Your beginning sets up expectations for the whole book. Beginnings are hard because you have to do so much: start the conflict, introduce the major characters, begin to establish the world. You can bring on the fantasy after the first chapter, have your main character borrow Grandma’s pearls in the third and get transported to her sixteenth birthday party. Readers may enjoy the surprise but it’s nice if you can work in a tiny hint that such a switcheroo is possible. The reader will remember the earlier brief mention of culottes and be happy.

I often don’t know what my world is going to need until I’ve figured out my whole story, sometimes after hundreds of pages of looking for signs in a forest of plot possibilities. So soldier on!

As always, it can be helpful to show your story to someone. Based on the comments following last week’s post, some of you are nervous when fresh eyes read your writing. I am too! But it’s usually worth it. You can ask a friend or another writer to read the first couple of chapters while looking only at your world building or only at your technology. You can say you don’t want to hear a word about your plot or your characters, just this one thing, and you’re feeling a tiny bit fragile, so please be gentle.

Here are three prompts:

∙    I sometimes wonder how progress happened, especially early human progress. For instance, how did somebody realize that metal could be extracted from ore? How did farming start? Who invented shoelaces? I once read that in the Middle Ages buttons were purely decorative, sewn on clothing just to look pretty; they didn’t fasten anything. How did buttons migrate from decorative to useful? Imagine how something was invented without looking it up. Who was there? What was the dialogue? Was there an argument? Write the scene.

∙    Invent a new imaginary creature, not a fairy or an elf or an ogre. Describe it. Put it in a story.

∙    Consider Rumplestiltskin, who is described by Wikipedia as an “impish creature.” Where does he live? What’s the technology in his culture? How is it that he can spin straw into gold? Write a scene from his backstory.

Have fun and save what you write!

Quirks

2012-01-11T12:19:00.000-05:00

On April 28th, 2011, Squid, writer, wrote:
1- Where do you write? Virginia Woolf famously said it's important to have a room of one's own... How do you arrange your supplies, do you write indoors or outdoors? I'd like to know.
2- What supplies do you use? Do you write first drafts longhand, or do you type them? What journals and pens do you use?
And on January 7, 2012, April wrote, I'm curious for more peeks into your life. Perhaps you could divulge a little more in another post? For example, I read the linked post today about writers' various quirks. What are some of yours? How do your husband, family, and friends react to your quirks, or to your writerly profession in general (both in the past and presently)?

    http://www.rachellegardner.com/2012/01/writers-quirks/

I write anywhere. Well, not in the shower, but in airports, on planes, in doctors' waiting rooms (routine exams - I’m not sick). Wherever I shlep my computer I write if I have at least fifteen minutes. At home, I write in my office or on my laptop, which lives in the kitchen when it isn’t traveling with me. In the kitchen, it’s on a counter. I could put it on the table, but I once read that it’s not healthy for people to sit for long periods, so when I’m downstairs, I write standing up. The laptop is called Reggie, named after the dog character in The Wish, years before we got our puppy Reggie.

In my office I sit, except when I get up to pace or to stare out the window. The view is lovely no matter the season: stone walls, ancient tall hemlock, antique outhouse (we do have indoor plumbing).

Right now I’m at a poetry retreat waiting for the day’s session to start. I’m in an austere place, a former orphanage on the grounds of a current convent. My room was once an orphan’s bedroom, and it’s small! There’s no desk, only a bed, wooden chair (no cushion), metal gym locker, narrow bed, high dresser, no private bathroom, alas. I’m standing on tiptoes to type on my laptop atop the dresser.

I wonder what my father, who was an orphan and grew up in an orphanage, would think of me being here. Laugh? Roll over in his grave?

The reason I work anywhere is because I trained myself to be able to many years ago after reading Becoming A Writer (middle school and up, I'd guess; the language is old-fashioned but the ideas are modern) by Dorothea Brande. I travel a fair amount, and I don’t want my work to grind to a halt whenever I leave home. People who can write only when the moon is full and the stars are in a certain alignment don’t finish many books. In an airport, under a giant TV blasting endless headlines, weather, and commercials, I can work. I’m irritated. I wish the thing would shut up, but I work.

I don’t write outdoors much. In winter it’s too cold, obviously. In warm weather there are bugs and beauty. Beauty distracts me!

My desk in my office is a disaster area. I swear when I finish the first draft of used-to-be-called Beloved Elodie, I’m going to clean it up. If I need a pen, I have to feel through the layers to find it. On the desk is a memento of my father, a gift from one of his friends. It looks like a hinged wooden box. On top there’s writing that says, “For the man who has nothing, something to put it in.” The joke is that when you open the box, it turns out to be just a block of wood. There’s no cavity. My father loved the joke.

This is a poem I wrote about my office, imagining it as part of a museum show of offices of kids’ book writers:

My office

stands in for me, part of an exhibition
children wander through. Jason heads
for the wooden skull from Mexico.
Brianna goes, Ew! and Yuck, don’t touch that.
Ella likes the hand-made Christmas-tree ornaments
around my windows: the quilted heart in muted pinks,
edged by brass beads; the striped parrot;
the black paisley angel. Sara picks up the small,
lead Tinker Bell on my desk. Everyone marvels
at my origami swan made from a Tokyo candy wrapper.
Ms. Kramer points out my English usage books.
Outside, somebody calls, Wow!
J.K. Rowling’s office!

        They’re gone. No one paid attention
to my quiescent computer, with a hundred e-mails
locked inside. The children didn’t notice
the hand-hewn, 1790 oak beam or the 1920s
pewter lamp. They glanced past the photograph
of the rosebud with its red petals folding
in on themselves, its shadowy hole, the two
droplets of dew.

When I’m home I don’t listen to music while I work; I prefer silence.

If the writing isn’t going well, I get sleepy, and I have to take frequent breaks, to stretch, answer an email, anything that will wake me up. I like to write while I eat breakfast and lunch and my nightly snack because I can’t sleep and chew at the same time.

I almost always write directly on the computer, but when I use a pen, it’s a cheap gel pen on a steno pad. I don’t like ballpoints because you have to press too hard, and I don’t like Sharpies because the ink bleeds through to the other side of the paper.

I don’t have a big family, but my husband is delightfully proud of my books. When I’m stuck and suffering, David, who is supremely sympathetic, suffers too.

My sister and his sisters and my brothers-in-law like my work. His sister Amy directs a public library, and I went there to speak. Libraries run in David’s blood; Amy and four cousins are or were librarians (one is retired).

I’m trying to think of a quirky quirk for you. You all know from the blog that I don’t plan my books out ahead of time, that sometimes I wander around in a fog for a ridiculously long time. If I thought it would do any good, I would tie a shoe around my neck, touch Reggie’s nose, stand on my head (if I could) for an hour to make the writing flow. How about this? When I’m describing a facial expression, I’ll do an Google images search for the emotion I want to show, but I’ll also make faces at myself in the mirror.

When I wrote the Disney fairy books I had to keep scale in mind because the fairies are only five inches tall. I had to ask myself, What’s a five-inch creature in relation to a quart of milk, to a caterpillar, a potato, a cherry? To remind myself I kept a five-inch bottle of hair goop on my desk the whole time.

Here are a few prompts:

∙    One of the exercises we did at the poetry retreat was to write a list poem, which is basically a list. So write a list poem about your writing place. To make it work as a poem, the items should be detailed, can be fantastical. Surprises are nice, and it’s good to end with an item that goes against expectation or packs an emotional wallop.

∙    Sometime before next week’s post, write outside your comfort zone. Write in the living room while the family is watching television. Bring your pad to breakfast and write while you chomp down on your pancakes or your high-fiber cereal. See if you can zone out of the distractions, see if the distractions themselves take you somewhere unexpected.

∙    Again, before next week’s post, write in an unaccustomed mode. If you usually write longhand first, go directly to a computer, or vice versa. See if there’s a change in your writing. Does the new method open you up? (You can then return to your usual way, but sometimes it’s good to shake things up.)

∙    Write a chapter in your future memoir about yourself as a writer, whether or not writing will be your career. What got you started? Write about your real past, but also imagine the future. What has been a turning point or what will be? Describe your greatest past triumph and your greatest upcoming one.

∙    If you like, post your own writing quirks here.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The Writing Days of Summer

2012-01-04T09:23:00.000-05:00

On August 22, 2011, Melissa wrote, ....I still want to know what you're doing at your summer workshop. Or if you could tell me some of the homework you gave the kids. Hopefully I can find your answer this time.
Thirty to thirty-five children sign up and usually about twenty or so are there each week. The age range is ten years to eighteen. Debby, a fifth grade teacher volunteer helps me. (I’m also a volunteer. The local library hosts us.) I hold six sessions, each an hour-and-a-half long. We always start with a vocabulary word, often a word that’s new to me that I got online from Wordsmith at http://wordsmith.org/words/today.html. I’m looking for interesting words, interesting meaning. My favorite word last summer was poetaster.

The kids know what to do as soon as I write the word on the eraser board. They make up a definition and guess what part of speech the word is and write both on a scrap of paper, which I collect. I pick four or five to read aloud and slip in the real definition, written in a kid vernacular. Then they vote for the one they think is the true meaning. My hope is that they won’t pick mine so there’s a surprise. When the real definition is revealed we applaud the person who came up with the most persuasive wrong definition. Kids return to the workshop year after year and get better and better at inventing the fakes. They also start thinking about roots of words and etymology. My goal is to help them fall in love with English. Most are at least halfway there already.

Next, I read a poem I like and suspect will appeal to them. I’m not always right.

During the first class I ask the kids what they hope to get out of the summer. Last year several wanted to work on conflict. Great choice!

So I looked online for help and found an article that listed four kinds of conflict (interpersonal, internal, situational, societal). For the second class of the season I introduced the four and we started on one, interpersonal conflict. I’ve discovered over the years that some prep helps before the writing commences. Here are my notes to myself for leading the introductory discussion on conflict:

Why does a story need suffering, humorous suffering or serious suffering?

Why do readers seek out entertainment in which terrible things happen, villains behave monstrously, people die? I’m not sure, but maybe because we’re preparing for the worst that life can throw at us. When we make Sammy suffer we’re helping our readers, which should stiffen us to do it. We may hurt him, but we’re helping them.

Conflict doesn’t have to be huge, though. Worry about a report card and a parent’s reaction, worry about something foolish a character said.

How do you convey that a character feels bad?

Thoughts.
Perception, like stomach clench.
Dialogue.
Action (like leaving, or being wounded literally).
Possibly even setting.
After the discussion, when I think everyone is ready, I give out the writing exercise. You’ll see that I offer two choices. The age range in the class is huge - we’re like a one-room writing schoolhouse - and I want to appeal to them all. Here’s the in-class choice of exercises. You can use either or both as a blog-post prompt:

Carl or Carlie, who doesn’t like to share, has something that’s very precious to him or her, may have magical properties. His or her best friend Tom or Tomasina wants it. Write what happens. Make each one do or say something he or she doesn’t mean. Make them both feel bad. (I emphasized that we weren’t going for a happy ending here; we were working on conflict, which means distress.)

A new bicycle
Book by author they both love
Ten dollars

Or Carl or Carlie says to Tom or Tomasina, “I hate when you do that.” Write their argument. Make each one do or say something he or she doesn’t mean. Make them both feel bad.
I can’t find the handout I gave the kids or I would have shown it to you here, but I usually give them something to look at while they work.

Then they write. I ask them to let me or Debby know if they need help. We also watch for kids who’ve stopped working and seem stuck.

After about twenty to twenty-five minutes I stop them and break them into groups for sharing and critique. Often I arrange the groups by age, and Debby and I join groups of the younger kids, because the older ones generally need no assistance. Part of the first class is devoted to a discussion of critiquing protocol.

Then I give out the homework. Below is what I handed out for the internal conflict class. It’s one of my favorites ever, and it can be another prompt for you. I don’t think I used it on the blog, but often my blog prompts are the source of class exercises and vice versa. Here is is:

A car is a great place for conflict. Who picks the radio station? Or CD player or iPod. Who prefers news or a recorded book? Open window? Closed window? How high to crank the heat or the air-conditioner? Who sits in front? Anybody gets carsick? Are the grownups arguing about driving style? Are the kids pushing, pinching, teasing? In doing this exercise you can draw on your own miserable car experiences.

Perry is invited to vacation with his best friend Letty Pewer and her parents. They are traveling from Brewster to Florida for a winter week in the sun. Write a scene or a story about their trip. Below are some possibilities to fool around with. Pick as many as you like or make up your own or do a combo of mine and yours.

•    Letty’s father is peculiar. You decide how.

•    Letty’s mom is a dangerous driver. You decide how.

•    Letty’s younger brother and older sister are coming along. They don’t get along with Letty and dislike Perry.

•    The car is older than Perry. The radio doesn’t work. There is no iPod, no CD player.

•    The Pewers are economizing and haven’t bought a GPS. Good old maps are good enough for them. They plan to camp out and save on motel costs as soon as they reach warm enough weather.

•    The car is bewitched - not in a good way.

•    This is the snowiest winter in the history of New York and surrounding states.

•    The scenic route will take the family and Perry through an old mining town in Pennsylvania. Unbeknownst to the authorities, one of the abandoned mines is now occupied by squatters who may be dangerous.
The children aren’t required to do the homework; this is summer and the workshop isn’t a school, but usually they do. I don’t grade their work but I do comment and return it. The emphasis in my comments is on story not on spelling and grammar.

For those of you who are teachers, I think you’ll understand this: I always show up with a longer lesson plan than I think I’ll need. Sometimes what I think is going to take half an hour gets done in five minutes. There is nothing (well, hardly anything) worse than running out of material.

Then we go home.

Two sessions are devoted to writing poetry. Since I’m still a newbie poet I just do my best and hope I don’t make too many mistakes. (I still shudder at the crazy advice I gave the kids about how to write a sestina.) I’ve found that structured poetry works best. Last summer we did poems that use anaphora and we did rhymed poetry. For the poetry sessions we follow the same structure as for fiction writing: discussion, in-class exercise, homework.

For the session on rhyme, the vocabulary word was apocope, a word I hadn’t known before, which I found in my preparation and which connected to the class topic. These are my notes for what I wanted to say about rhyme before giving out the exercise:

Rhyme:

the good - satisfying, pleasing, when clever surprising

the bad - too often not surprising, forced with word inversion, using not the best word

we’re waiting for the rhyme, may miss the meaning, like limericks

read from Poet’s Companion, define kinds of rhyme, make sure they know what accented vs. unaccented syllables are.

internal rhyme

rhyme scheme, aa bb, abab,

hand out Molly’s poems, go over rhymes

bouts-rimes - give example of rhymes in Handbook of Poetic Forms, put examples of these in your words, but not my examples

The exercise was a bouts-rimes, which is a kind of poem challenge. I think I had them do it in pairs. Each pair wrote a list of rhyming words then passed them off to the pair to their left. The next step was to write a poem using the rhymes. Fun. So another prompt would be to try this with a friend or a few friends.

Near the end of class I handed out Edward Lear’s poem, “Alphabet” and gave this homework assignment:

Write your own alphabet poem. In the example I gave you, some of the rhymes are forced. Avoid forced rhymes in your own poem. You can start with these first two lines or make up your own, but make the subject something lost:

A lost her Amulet, though she ransacked the Attic for it.
B said: Might it have been taken by a Bandit?

You can use any kind of rhyme:

∙    Masculine perfect rhyme, as in book with look

∙    Feminine perfect rhyme, as in riding with gliding

∙    Slant rhyme, as in blade with head

∙    Apocopated rhyme, as in beak with speaker

∙    Assonance or vowel rhyme, as in why with pride

∙    Identical rhyme, as in book with book (you can’t do this constantly)

∙    Eye rhyme, as in though with cough

For extra credit, after Z, end the poem with two or three lines (serious or not) about lost things.
Some of the poems I got back were amazing. You can look up the Lear poem and try it yourself.

The other thing I do each summer, although with decreasing enthusiasm, is a group novel. I keep offering it as a possibility because the kids like the idea, but then I think it disappoints them. I suggest a theme, and the first child writes a first chapter during the week and brings two copies of it in the next week. Debby keeps a master copy and passes the other on to someone to write the next chapter. By the end there’s a story in five chapters and everyone in the workshop gets a copy. Since there are more than five participants, there are several novels in the works, the number depending on the level of interest. Those who don't participate in the novel can submit a piece they worked on during the summer for distribution.

And that’s the summer workshop in a very long post. For prompts, try the exercise I gave the kids. Have fun, and save what you write!

2011-12-28T09:27:00.000-05:00

Before I start, here’s a link to a poem I read this week and loved that seems to me to get (metaphorically) to the essence of fiction and poetry: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/12/20.

On August 16, 2011, bluekiwii wrote, ....The best stories are the ones which show more than tell. I've heard this advice many times in articles and books on how-to-write. Yet I wonder sometimes if I'm not underestimating the value of telling. I feel that telling instead of showing helps the reader get inside the character's head more easily than a simple chronicling of events (she runs, she slides, she fidgets) ever could. As I write, I wonder if I should focus on describing the events only or if I should probe at the thoughts and inner monologues of the character (for isn't telling readers how the character feels considered less powerful then showing?) Is it okay for a character to say that they are nervous: “There is no need to be nervous—why it is so very silly really...” ? Or is it better to show the character's nervous state instead: “the old man looked away from the person's face and fiddled with the zipper of his sweater.” In other words, is it really important to be able to display what a character is thinking or should a reader get to know a character purely through actions? How do you pick when it is more advantageous to “tell” instead of “show”? Is there any value at all to telling instead of showing?

My chapter in Writing Magic called “Show and Tell” discusses the difference between the two, so I hope everyone who’s puzzled over this will take a look.

I believe that thoughts fall into the category of showing, just as dialogue does. Telling, in my opinion, is narration. Here’s an example: The young princess collapsed on the bed in a deep sleep while beads of blood from her finger stained the counterpane. And showing might be: Her mind went cobwebby; her knees turned rubbery; the bed seemed to rise to meet her. Her last waking thought: The prince, when he comes, will not approve of blood on the counterpane.

But the difference is hard to tease out and may even be a matter of debate. In my telling sentence above, I’m not even sure about the end of the sentence. The young princess collapsed on the bed in a deep sleep is certainly telling (I think!), but while beads of blood from her finger stained the counterpane may be showing.

Unless we’re writing from the POV of an omniscient narrator who reveals everyone’s thoughts and emotions, we have to rely mostly on action for our non-POV characters. But we learn tons about people from what they do, and dialogue, revealing dialogue, is also action. We have other cues, too, like dress, facial expression, and body language. If, for example, Yolanda is usually a fashion plate, the reader and other characters are going to wonder what’s going on when she comes to school looking like she dressed with her eyes closed. If she’s usually quiet in class but now her arm is waving wildly at the teacher, we’re likely to think something is up.

But, when it comes to the POV character, if we omit his thoughts and feelings, we’re writing handicapped. He has thoughts and feelings. Why would we keep them secret? In sleeping princess’s thought above, we learn a fair amount about her from just thirteen words. She’s fastidious and worries about making a good impression a hundred years off but not about nightmares, and she isn’t looking forward to all that rest.

This blog is mostly telling. I just looked at a magazine article and concluded that it was basically telling with a few incidents sprinkled in, examples of showing that livened up the prose. I also looked online at the front page of two major newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Just about all telling there, reflecting the reportorial nature of telling, which certainly has a place in fiction.

These three sentences of pure telling start a chapter in Fairest: A week passed. The mood in the castle was bleak. The corridor troubadours sang of pain and grief. For some reason that I no longer remember I needed that time span to go by but I didn’t want to show a week in which nothing of plot importance happened. Telling is great at moving a story along.

Showing allows the reader to draw his own conclusions about the characters and the unfolding tale, and usually that’s preferable. But sometimes we want to nail a thing down and say nothing that could be misunderstood. Sometimes we want to say, Perry hated Willa.

I just revisited The Birthday Room (ten and up, I’d guess) by Kevin Henkes, a book I love. The first page is strictly telling and, as I skipped through, it seemed to me that there’s more telling throughout than I usually use, and yet it’s a marvelous book. I think the telling contributes to the thoughtful tone. Read it, if you haven’t already, and learn.

The maxim, Show don’t tell, may be a shibboleth we can do just as well without. Writing that, as bluekiwii said, gets the reader inside the character’s head (when we want him to be there) is doing its job whether it’s showing or telling.

A more useful distinction may be between high detail and low. A week passed is low detail. This is from later in the chapter: I put the letters in the top drawer of my bureau and dressed in yet another of Dame Ethele’s horrors. This one had so much draped cloth in the sleeves that they would have been useful on a sailing ship. The headdress too was cursed with excess cloth, which culminated in flaps that fell on each side of my face like the long droopy ears of an Ayorthaian hare.

Is it telling or showing? Don't know. I’m pretty sure, though, that there’s high detail. I loved describing the costumes in Fairest, most of which came from fashion history books. The silly outfits people used to wear! (And still do!)

I could have gone into much greater detail. Notice I didn’t mention the color of the “horror” or the kind of fabric or the quality of the dressmaking. The goal was to demonstrate how ridiculous Aza felt. With that accomplished I moved on.

So purpose can guide you when you choose between showing and telling and level of detail. When you’ve done what you’ve set out to do, stop. That can be hard to tell in a first draft. You may need to wait for revision and revision and revision to arrive at certainty about where to cut and where to expand.

Prompts:

•    This is the first sentence of “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp” from Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book: “There once lived a poor tailor, who had a son called Aladdin, a careless, idle boy who would do nothing but play ball all day long in the streets with little idle boys like himself.” This is an example of extreme telling, very compressed. Unpack the sentence using detail and showing to draw the reader in. Interest the reader in Aladdin and his unhappy dad. See if you can get at least three pages out of the one sentence. (The Lang fairy books are the source of most of my books based on fairytales. If you don’t know them, each is a different color. They’re in the public domain so you don’t have to worry about copyright, and they’re available online for free.)

•    Let’s take Perry hated Willa from above. Write a scene that shows the hatred without stating it outright. Then revise the scene with tiny tweaks that turn the hatred into a different emotion, like love or curiosity or despair.

•    This is a prompt for the blog itself. Are there other rules of writing (some we’ve discussed here, like words teachers despise) that mystify you? Post about them.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Writing in tongues

2011-12-21T09:45:00.000-05:00

On August 12, 2011, Caitlyn wrote, ....My story is set in modern times, but it has a group of major characters who have been around for a few thousand years, and English is not their first language. Though they speak English around the MC, in stressful or emotional situations they revert to their native tongue. Many of those lines of dialogue are left uninterpreted, at least for a while.
    I feel like the language needs to be included for authenticity's sake, so I was wondering: what is the best way to include another language in a story? Is it necessary to interpret every single thing they say immediately? And is it better for the author to say something like "He spoke to his companion in German," or to include the actual German dialogue?

I’m with you, Caitlyn. I think your impulse to have your characters lapse into their home tongue is good, very likely what they’d do.

Naturally, as in most things writing, how to handle a language other than English (or the native language of the writer) is up to you. My only certainty is that if the other language exists and you decide to include it, everything needs to be correct, not only grammar and spelling but also expression. If the language is German it has to read as if a German-speaker had written it. (Kudos to you if you’re fluent in another language!)

Of course if you include more than a few words at a time in the other language most readers will skip the passage. Some will read through even without comprehension, especially if the sounds are pleasing or interesting. When I read and reread The Lord of the Rings trilogy I used to say the language of the orcs out loud because I loved the sound. The more euphonious elves’ tongue didn’t appeal to me as much.

It's fun to use languages in books, in my opinion. There’s French in A Tale of Two Castles, anglicized French, meaning that I gave French words an English spelling. One of the streets is Roo Street. In French, as you may know, rue means street. Fun! The ogre’s name is Count Jonty Um, which comes from the French gentil homme, and the meaning of his name has significance for the story, although it’s okay if the reader doesn’t get it.

I think it’s fine to write out the foreign bits sometimes and at other times to say merely that Karl switched to German to better express his feeling of elation, for example. You want to be kind to your readers and not use so many unknown words that they get frustrated. I don’t think you need to translate everything, but you don’t want readers to feel lost - except when you do want them to. You could heighten suspense by putting in a few critical words in an unknown tongue. The judge pronounces Milo rewnee and sentences him to seven ubils in yokto. The reader cares about Milo and zips on to the next chapter desperate to find out if rewnee and ubils and yokto are good or awful. You can write a romantic moment in which all the terms of endearment are incomprehensible. Or you can have Milo ream out his assistant Kristen entirely in the language of Xic, and Kristen can blush and babble an apology.

It’s cool to teach your reader a new word in an existing language or in a made-up one. A former student of mine is now in the Peace Corps in Moldova where Romanian is spoken. I read her fascinating blog about her experiences, and she uses the word frumos so often that I’ve picked it up. Means beautiful but, as far as I can tell, as relates only to a person; I don’t think you’d call a sunset frumos.

I’ve made up fragments of several languages, and there are some decisions to be made:

∙    How will the language look? Gnomic in Ella Enchanted, for example, is punctuated backwards and the capitals appear at the end of a name and at the end of the sentence. When the reader sees these features he knows that he’s looking at the language of the gnomes. You have punctuation marks, capitals, and repeat letters or omitted letters to work with. If you come up with exotic signs that require calligraphy, you’ll be creating a problem for your publisher, so I’d suggest staying away from them.

∙    How will the language sound? Each of the languages in Ella Enchanted has a particular sound. Abdegi, the language of the giants, for example, is accompanied by emotive noises, like whoops and howls. Every word in Ayorthaian begins with a vowel and ends with the same vowel.

∙    Will there be consistent meaning? When a word repeats in one of the languages in Ella Enchanted, it’s the same each time. For example, the Gnomic word brzzay always means digging. By contrast, in Ever the word for digging might be ioopll the first time it shows up and eressc the next. I just hit keys on my keyboard at random. My thinking was that Wadir where the language is spoken is a dreamlike place with shifting meaning.

∙    Are you going to deal with grammar, tenses, plurals, etc.? I never have. I did a little with plurals and past tense in Ella Enchanted but not much and I wasn’t consistent. However, more power to you if you go all out.

At the beginning of Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand there’s a sad song in Mermish, the language of the mermaids, which has no consonants, only vowels, because I decided that consonants would be hard to form underwater. I performed the song once for some friends. Afterward, one of them asked me why I had to read, why I couldn’t simply sing any vowels that came to mind. I just looked at him in astonishment.

When we fool around with other languages we’re exploring language itself, a worthy endeavor for a writer. Here are some prompts to prime your language pump:

∙    Above I wrote, You can write a romantic moment in which all the terms of endearment are incomprehensible. Try doing exactly that, you adorable quayth. It’s up to you whether or not both people in the romance speak this strange tongue.

∙    And I wrote, Or you can have Milo ream out his assistant Kristen entirely in the language of Xic, and Kristen can blush and babble an apology. Now write the tirade in Xic, maybe along with thoughts in English. Make decisions about the kind of language you want, how it should sound and look on the page.

∙    I like invented sayings as well as invented languages. In A Tale of Two Castles, Elodie spouts expressions from her home, the island of Lahnt. Here’s one with a creepy medieval feel: Love your lice. Only skeletons have none. Here’s a moralistic one: He who gambles his worth has already lost his worth. Go to a story you’re working on or one you’ve finished. Make up three proverbs that would go with the culture of your world or the personality of one of your characters. For example, I would expect the aphorisms of ancient Sparta to be warlike.

Have fun and save what you write!

Going crazy

2011-12-14T09:17:00.003-05:00

Before I start the post, in case anyone will be near Pawling, New York, this Saturday, I’m signing and talking. Details are on my website.

In August, Alexbella Sara wrote, How does one get across that a character is, to put it quite bluntly, going insane? I have one who is going insane and I don't know how to show it.

And Lexi commented, I wrote a story where my MC temporarily lost his mind. Now I'm not saying that this is the best way to do it or anything, but when I did it, I gradually began interrupting his normal thoughts with less logical thoughts until he wasn't thinking or saying anything sensible. I made him wonder every now and then in the beginning why he head felt so foggy, but soon he stopped wondering. And since I was writing in third person, I was able to make other characters reflect on how strange he was acting until they all knew that he was completely insane. Of course, I'm just a beginner and may not know what I'm talking about, and it may not work with your story, but just thought I'd let you know what worked for me. Hope that helps!
Lexi’s advice sounds good. Here are some more thoughts:

I’m not a psychologist, but I’m sure there are lots of ways to be crazy; schizophrenia, manic depression, multiple personality leap to mind. And every crazy person is nuts in his own unique fashion. A schizophrenic may hear voices, but Vera’s voices will say different things from Victor’s. So you may want to consider what Vera is like before she disappears around the bend. If she’s just a tad jealous, for example, and begins to hear voices, they may tell her that her best friend Zinnia has been spending an awful lot of time with their classmate Caroline. If Vera is boring, her voices may instruct her to memorize home appliance owner’s manuals.

Madness is fun! (Fun for the writer, not for a real person.) You can be inventive. You can be wild. You can design your own kind of madness. Victor can suddenly start making animal noises. Or he can spend hours licking the china in his great-grandmother’s tea set. So here’s an early prompt: List seven unheard-of symptoms of madness, symptoms you’ve made up.

Detail is crucial in establishing balminess, as in every other sort of writing. Suppose we were trying to develop me as a character going bonkers. Every morning, in actual fact, I pour my high fiber cereal into my beautiful pottery bowl made by my sister-in-law Betsy Levine (www.prescotthillpottery.com - just a little family product placement!). Suppose on the first day of the rest of my nutty life I start pouring and pouring and pouring. Cereal spills onto the counter, onto the floor, mounds around my feet because I started with a full cereal box. Reggie trots into the kitchen and scarfs up cereal, which could be bad for his stomach, but I don’t notice because I’m so involved in staring at the design on the counter top. I’m wondering why I never noticed before how the colors bleed into each other, like drops in an ocean, like souls in love, like blood in war. Reggie, sensing something amiss, barks, and I snap out of it and am surprised to see cereal everywhere.

So we can start with some little thing, pouring cereal or anything else, and make it grow. It can be a tiny comment in a conversation, a momentary thought. But it needs to be specific and in some way off.

Lana’s lunacy can be concealed. Her inner life may be crazy as a bedbug’s, but she can be entirely aware of how she’s perceived and she can keep a tight lid on herself, at least in the early stages. We often see this in crazy villains. The reader witnesses the madness in Lena’s thoughts and actions when she’s alone, but when other characters are present she’s as ordinary as green peas.

If Kevin starts out sympathetic before he falls off his rocker, the reader will suffer, maybe more than he does. He may not be aware of what he does, but we are and we squirm. Say he has a crush on Jane. Yesterday, their romance was showing promise, but today he’s wrapped his muffler around his head and is pretending to be an injured Civil War veteran, which Jane doesn’t know how to deal with.

Or, and this is exceedingly painful, if Harriet is aware of her transformation from sane to wacko and is tormented by the change, we’ll writhe with her.

You also don’t have to take the sad, sympathetic route. In my short novel, The Princess Test, the maid Trudy slowly goes berserk. The book is funny, and her descent into madness is too. So your handling of psychosis depends on the genre you’re writing in. Humorous book: humorous treatment. In fantasy, you can make up your own version of crazy. For a historical story you may need to do some research. In the Romantic-period novel Jane Eyre, Rochester’s wife is mostly heard and is glimpsed only fleetingly, but we never doubt that she’s loony. You may need research as well for a contemporary tale if you want the insanity to be realistic.

A wonderful novel about insanity is I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg, which was popular when I was a young adult. (I’d guess it’s appropriate for age twelve and up, but check with a librarian.) For high school and up there’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. I’ve never watched this horror movie or read the book because I’m a wimp, but I believe The Shining by Stephen King is an amazing portrait of someone going crazy. And an old horror movie I did see and would never ever see again (definitely on an adult level) is Repulsion. The audience gets to understand the main character’s madness from the inside out, because some of the movie is shown through her eyes. It is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. And one of the most tragic.

As I’ve been writing this post, I’ve been aware of the multitude of synonyms for madness. I’ve used many of them, but here are some more: ape, bizarro, cracked, daft, deranged, dingy, dippy, flaky, flipped out, fruity, moonstruck, unsound, out to lunch, potty, screwy, touched, unbalanced, unhinged, unglued, wigged out. You may know additional terms. Please post any colorful ones. Why do you think we can say crazy so many ways? A little psychosis in our forebears? A little obsessiveness? Mnah hah hah!

Here are three prompts:

∙    Use yourself as an example. As you go through your day, jot down little things you could do that would show your mental deterioration. Make your mad self the main character in a short story. If you have an understanding family, try something out. Startle someone and see if it works. Then, hasten to explain.

∙    Gina, an investigative reporter, checks herself into a lunatic asylum to expose administrative abuses, but being in this environment begins to change her. She wonders why she volunteered for this particular assignment. Write how she gradually goes mental.

∙    Invent a secret government (any government) project to induce insanity in captured spies. Write how the scientists accomplish their goals. Write the effects on the prisoners. Pick a hero or heroine and write the story.

Have fun and save what you write!

Mind swap

2011-12-07T11:03:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to all you NaNoWriMo writers! Whether you made your word count or not, you worked hard, and I’m guessing you have lots of new material to fuel your writing for the year. Kudos to you!

If you’re going to be in the vicinity of Tarrytown, New York, this Saturday, I’m signing. Check out the details on my website. If you come, I’ll just be signing, not reading or speaking, but I expect to have plenty of time to chat. If you come, please let me know you read about the event on the blog.

On July 29th, 2011, Emma wrote, This comment is really just food for thought, but I wondered what you and the bloggers would think. You see, my brothers were watching a Myth Busters episode called "Mission Impossible Mask" where Jamie and the other guy were trying to use a mask to fool people into believing that they were each other. However, their mannerisms gave them away so they had to have an actor teach them how to behave like one another. More recently I watched an episode of "Gilligan's Island" where everyone got mind-swapped, and it was hilarious because they were all acting like each other and you could clearly tell who had been swapped with whom. All of that got me thinking: is there any way to make our characters and their mannerisms that recognizable? I tried a writing exercise just for fun where my MCs got mind swapped, and it's really hard because you can't actually see them. Do you think that's a bad thing?

That’s a wonderful prompt, which I’ll hold for the end.

Everyone has mannerisms, some people more than others, some mannerisms more pronounced than others; everyone can be impersonated. Each way of speaking, each physical presentation, is unique. The bits that we do, our personal shtick, are myriad, so many and so slight that they’re hard to write and catch them all but obvious to see and hear. Whenever I see myself in a taped interview I’m amazed. I move around so much, like a puppet. I tilt and bob my head; my voice is breathy, which I never hear as I’m speaking. Aaa!

Here’s a prompt early in the post. List every element of physical description you can think of. Just a list. Don’t do anything with it. Here are a few items to start you off:

round shouldered
bow-legged
soft voice
baby talk
a lot of hand gestures
small eyes

See if you can get a page or two in your list, a few words to a line. Add to the list whenever you think of something or observe something unusual. Watch people over the next few days with your list in mind. Notice that I included in my starter list both characteristics that have nothing to do with the personality inside the body, like small eyes, and characteristics that are mutable, that would change in a mind swap, like the hand gestures. Include both kinds of characteristics in your list, which can become a resource for you whenever you write physical description.

I was on the New York City subway yesterday. Sitting across the train car from me was a woman who managed to look up at me beseechingly even though our eyes were at a level. How did she do that? She said nothing; she wasn’t crying. But I got a sense of sadness and need. Was it the blue eye shadow, the bags under her eyes? I don’t know. I do know that she sat pigeon-toed, and the turned-in toes added to the woe somehow. The eyes and the toes would go on my list.

Here’s another prompt: Take a look at a story you’re working on. Find the spot where you introduced a character. If the physical description is solid, terrific. But if it’s a little vague, drop in something from your list.

Mannerisms are particularly useful because they reveal character as well as help the reader see the physical person. But we have to watch out and not succumb to stereotype. A slouch, for example, can mean a bunch of things. May mean Nathan feels too tall. Or his father always told him to stand straight, so, rebellious by nature, he trained himself to slouch. Or he admires an actor who slouches. You try it (another prompt): List three possible psychological explanations for Nadine’s almost inaudible speech.

Sometimes it can feel awkward to introduce physical qualities and we have to plan how to bring in the information. We can make Norman, the gesturer, do something, as in, He gestured so wildly he knocked over a Ming dynasty vase valued at $300,000. Or Nancy can say to him, “Are you swatting a fly?” Or Ned can think, Norman uses his hands a lot as if his words need extra help. These are the three ways I can come up with for inserting physical information: action, dialogue, and thoughts.

The POV character is a special case. Nellie, the narrator, can easily show other characters’ looks in her thoughts. She can also think about her own appearance and mannerisms, but she has to have a reason or she may seem vain or self-involved or self-critical - which, of course, she can certainly be. But if not, she needs an excuse. Maybe she’s about to meet new people, and she’s preparing herself by imagining how they’re going to view her. A little self-involved, but it’s a special occasion. And you still have action and dialogue. Nancy can make the fly-swatting crack to her. Nellie can knock over the Ming vase.

But we may not want to give Nellie a lot of odd characteristics or the reader may have trouble identifying. We may want her to be a blankish slate, so the reader can slip inside. If she keeps licking her lips, if she shrugs every few minutes, if she starts almost every sentence with, “Sorry, but,” the reader may find her unappealing. I keep saying “may” because you may want such a character, and some of the most endearing main characters in literature are odd. So if you want to, go for it.

Once we introduce a mannerism we don’t want to keep bringing it up. An occasional, very occasional, reminder is plenty or the reader will get irritated. And that’s what makes the mind swap harder for a writer than for an actor. When we’re watching a movie, the character’s presentation is always before us. He’s always slouching, always gesticulating, always speaking softly. Those lucky actors!

So now for the mind swap.

∙    Pick two characters in the story you’re working on and write a mind swap scene. Or pick three and make it a round-robin swap.

∙    Swap the villain from one of your stories with the villain from another and rewrite the climax. Swap the villain in one story with the hero in another.

∙    Invent new characters for your mind swap. Think of characters who wouldn’t be happy to be inside each other’s selves. For example, someone who’s terrified of heights wouldn’t do well in the body of a sky diver. You can make the switch happen right before a jump. The sky diver might be bored to death in the body of a writer.

∙    Swap the minds of two characters from books you love. For me, I’d switch Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Then, in a separate effort, with Jane and Elizabeth back in their proper bodies, I might try exchanging Rochester and Darcy. The possibilities are endless: put Hamlet in Macbeth’s place; trade Sherlock Holmes and Peter Pan; Anne of Anne of Green Gables with Jo of Little Women. Or whatever you like.

Have fun, and save what you write!

To Delve or Not To Delve

2011-11-30T10:06:00.000-05:00

On July 26, 2011, Emma wrote, ...I’m wondering how much, um, delving is necessary? That may not be the right word, but (this is the only example I can think of right this second) on Food Network Star, the judges are always telling the Food Network wannabees to show the viewers more personality and more of their background. They say they can’t get enough of it when they learn more about each hopeful and, well, do you think our readers are the same way about our characters? Or would they be fine if we just went through the series of actions without bothering to really do some soul searching? This sort of seems like a rambling post, but it’s the only way I can think of to put it. If you can decipher what I’m trying to say, do you have any advice?

Emma, you’re completely clear. Alas, as usual when it comes to writing, there’s no conclusive answer. For starters, reader taste varies. In the old movie, My Dinner With Andre (for adults), two characters spend an evening in conversation, and personality is revealed by chat. I could barely sit through it. I wanted to scream at the actors (in the movie theater), “Stand up and do something!” But the film is beloved by many and has become a classic. Same with books: opinions differ. If you concentrate on your characters’ thoughts and feelings and revelations of backstory, some readers will be delighted, others impatient. You can’t please everyone.

So you might as well please yourself. (You can repeat this phrase to yourself often: You might as well please yourself. Hang it over your work space, write it in your notebooks in bubble writing or calligraphy, because it applies to just about every aspect of writing.)

Think about what you enjoy. Do you like to elaborate on your characters’ thoughts? Do you revel in soul-searching dialogue? If you’re fascinated, many readers are likely to be, too. And you can field test what you’re doing when you show your work to a friend or to your critique group. If they tell you to dial it back, if you hear from more than one reader that it’s too much, then you can start cutting. This tends to be my way. I put in too much introspection that I have to trim in revision.

If you prefer to write action-action-action, indulge yourself and see what your critique buddies say. If they tell you your characters’ activities seem motiveless, then you need to build in more thought, feeling, dialogue, and maybe backstory.

The decision also depends on the character you’re working with. If Inga is not introspective, she won’t be doing much deep rumination on the page no matter how much you want her to. You’ll be stuck with her actions, her limited thinking, what other characters say to her about herself and what they say about her when she’s not there. However, if Inga revels in exploring her feelings and her reasoning, then you need to give the reader at least a taste of this or more than a taste if you like.

Genre also influences how much “delving” you do. An adventure story, for example, is likely to be action-oriented. Thoughts, feelings, backstory may be introduced, but the story won’t linger on them. Terrific examples of action novels are the books by Richard Stark (high school and above), pseudonym of the late Donald Westlake. I haven’t read one in years, but I used to inhale them in one long gasp.

As soon as I wrote the paragraph about adventure stories I thought of Hamlet, which I’d call an action play since it has a ghost, suicide, and murder all going on. But it’s also supremely introspective because Hamlet deliberates and vacillates constantly on his proper course of action. Like Shakespeare, you can do both, write an action story that’s rich in thought and feeling or a character-driven tale full of excitement.

In stories, character is everything or almost everything. A pile-up of events won’t draw a reader in (taste doesn’t vary on this, I don’t think) if the reader doesn’t know who the players are. These characters don’t necessarily need to be sympathetic, but they have to be understandable, which probably calls for some indication of thought and feeling.

And action is a tool of character development. In A Tale of Two Castles the ogre, Count Jonty Um, isn’t the POV character, so we don’t experience his inner life and he doesn’t say much. The reader gets to know him mostly through his actions, his generosity, for example. He buys a humongous meal full of rich delicacies for Elodie, the POV character, who only once before tasted an expensive treat - because it had fallen on the ground and been partially stepped on.

Real people express themselves through action. We say something about ourselves every second: the way we eat, what we do in our spare time, how we get ready to leave the house, our little rituals. Many of these acts are so ingrained we perform them without thought, certainly without being conscious that we’re every second making a personality declaration. I would even argue that these characteristic actions say more about us than even our thoughts and feelings, which are fleeting.

I’ve never watched The Food Network. Maybe there isn’t scope there for revelation through action. Maybe it all comes through telling, by participants talking about themselves. If that’s the case, what a limitation! No wonder they encourage the soul searching. But maybe I’m way off base. Sorry, Food Network!

Here come three prompts:

∙    Lately I’ve been reading health and science articles about people in hospitals in what they call a “vegetative state,” and now there’s starting to be evidence that some of them, who can’t speak or move, can think and are thinking and have an emotional life. Scary! So your character, Irene, is in a coma. She can hear and think. Write a story about her. You can include the sounds she hears from the activity around her. Unaware of her alertness, people may say things they would keep to themselves if they thought someone was listening.

∙    Ira is studying to be a mime. His teacher tells him and the other students in his class that they aren’t allowed to speak for a week. Write about part of that week or the whole week. Oh, and you can’t write in first person, and you have no access to Ira’s thoughts, only his actions. Give him something important that he has to communicate.

∙    Character X is chasing Character Y through a shopping mall. Don’t give them names or thoughts or feelings and very limited speech, but put in lots of close calls and narrow escapes. Don't even decide which is the hero and which the villain. See what happens.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Cheering Up

2011-11-23T09:26:00.000-05:00

Before I start the post, I want to let you know that a poem of mine for adults (pretty sad, about the death of my mother) is in a collection of short poems called Bigger Than They Appear, which just came out. This isn’t a book for kids. So far I’ve read only a few of the poems, so I can’t vouch for language or subject matter for young readers. But if you’re in high school and above and interested, here’s the link to the publisher’s site where you can get a copy: http://www.accents-publishing.com/biggerthantheyappear.html. My poem is called "This Is Just to Say." For those of you who recognize the title, my poem is based on a poem with the same name by William Carlos Williams.

On July 25th, 2011, Farina wrote, I mostly write fan fiction, usually one-shots, but today I looked back at my work and realized most of it was tragedy. I almost always follow the same pattern (and even sometimes with the same characters!) one side of the love interest gets hurt/dies. Funeral/waiting for help/backup scene or touching scene about how they can't stop and abandon the mission. Surviving character goes into deep depression and seclusion, if other one survives, (it's usually the male that goes into the depression) looks like she has it all together but is also depressed, 1) Committing suicide, 2) Ends with them crying/sighing/just sitting there sadly. How can I break away from tragedy and violence? (because while I'm too young to use sexual themes in my stories, I do use an awful lot of violence) Because I enjoy, however morbid it seems, a character's hopelessness, depression, and loneliness, however, not many, if any, readers enjoy that sort of thing. I also don't have a problem with death at all (though some of my stories have made me cry) and enjoy writing death scenes (I have one for every character I've written about) and love writing about topics like insanity and death. But when I try to write funny, happy stories, I reread them and I realize there is a definite 'Fake Smiling' air to them. How can I write happier stories without seemingly trying too hard?
This may be tragic (joke) to say, but what you’re writing right now may be what you need to write right now. In a year or two you may be effortlessly heading in another direction.

And in defense of what you’re doing, it’s excellent to be thorough. If you go deep into a character’s unhappiness, if you make it believable and specific to that particular character, you’ve achieved a lot. If your suffering character is sympathetic, your reader will be with him. She may cry, but she’ll be engaged.

Still, if you’re determined to change, here are a few ideas:

Push on after your ending. If your hero Lance is depressed but hasn’t committed suicide, write the arc of his recovery. You can make this slow and detail all his slumps back into misery, but the trajectory should be upward toward a better life. You can end then on a hopeful note. If he has killed himself, continue on to his survivor, his sister Leslie, for instance, who has to come to terms with the loss and find her way to happier days.

Get interested in minor characters who aren’t miserable. Let Lance be despondent. Go to town on him. But also develop some other characters who are cheerier. Think of people you know and how they don’t let adversity destroy them. Even think of yourself, merrily writing wretchedness.

Impose a quota on misery. Allow yourself one episode of doldrums per story, which can be at the beginning, middle, or end. The rest has to be something else, which doesn’t have to be jumping-up-and-down joy - can be action, anger, intellectual reasoning, dialogue, relationship-building, whatever.

Remove the reason for the depression. Don’t kill off the love interest. Have the two quarrel instead, or have the love interest be captured, so the hero has to act not mope.

Go even further and make it funny. Have Lance meet Lily, an equally depressed person, possibly a new love interest. Let them get so enchanted with their sadness that they create new causes for it. Have them slash their stuffed animals, or, if you go over to the dark side, do worse. If you push it enough, it will be funny, and your readers will be laughing and wanting more.

Explore other genres. The alternative to tragedy isn’t necessarily a smiley face or a happy-ending love story. There are thrillers and mysteries and historical novels and adventure stories. Try one of these.

Often, the problem with the smiley face, in my opinion, is sentimentality, and sentimentality often comes from generalizing, from statements like, “I knew she would always be there for me,” or “I realized how special we both were.” Detail takes out the sentimentality. What do you do when you’re happy? What does your best friend do? Maybe you hug someone, but maybe you get uncomfortable and make fun of the feeling because it’s too good. Maybe your best friend gets quiet because she has to absorb the news, because joy is new to her. Maybe your cousin keeps his happiness secret because he’s afraid people will be jealous. Lance can do any of these too, if he emerges from his funk, and the reader will understand if she knows Lance. None of these will feel fake because they’re rooted in detail and character.

Also, it usually doesn’t work to dwell on happiness. I bet we’ve all experienced this in books we’ve read and loved: we adore the characters and follow them through vicissitudes of every stripe. Finally they win out, and two pages later the book ends. Unfair! Four hundred pages of trial and struggle, two of triumph. We want more! We want to wallow in their success. We want to revel with them. But that part quickly falls flat. So even if you want to write happier, you’ll still probably need to keep the joy short.

A few prompts:

∙    Pick the happy ending of a book you adore, one that made you want to bathe in your beloved characters’ joy. Indulge yourself and write a final chapter that is solid good times, good feelings. Put in action, a real scene, but no suspense, no worry. I suspect this may be hard, but I think it can be done. Maybe it will even improve the actual book. Try it.

∙    Lance’s friends and family plan an intervention to blast him out of his depression. The intervention doesn’t merely have to be a meeting; it can be anything. Have the other characters reveal themselves in the ways they use to reach Lance, in the appeals they make. If you’re not Farina, you can have them fail or succeed, whatever you like. But if you’re Farina, Lance has to cheer up. And whoever you are, avoid the fake smiley face feeling if Lance does come out of his doldrums.

∙    Departing from this prompt and building on Jenna Royal’s question from the end of last week, write a story in which one of the main characters never makes an appearance. She is there only in the thoughts and feelings and dialogue of other characters. Give her depth and individuality. Make the reader know her as well as the characters who are present.

Have fun, and save what you write!

On tiptoe

2011-11-16T09:44:00.000-05:00

On July 20, 2011, Jenna Royal wrote, quoting, but I no longer know where the quote came from: "Are there parts that might offend someone? Did you tiptoe around those aspects of the story even without realizing it?"
    How do you handle this situation? It’s something I worry about often enough. The story might need the element, but is it worth the risk of offending someone?
And along similar lines, welliewalks wrote, My question has something to do with Jenna R's. Most of my characters, especially my MCs(!), are like me, in their skin color and build (white and really thin). I'm afraid that I'll end up insulting someone- like what if they read my stuff and think “She obviously doesn't like people of other races or overweight people, because none of her characters are ever those.” Because it's NOT true (my sister is adopted and 50% of my friends are of different race, from Indian to Chinese). I just use those characteristics because it comes naturally to me and I feel so comfortable with these. Do I need to change things up and use different races and builds? Oh, and I never write anything against the characteristics of build and race.

If you are lucky enough to be widely read, you will offend someone, guaranteed, no matter how hard you try not to. Someone may even be annoyed that your work is too bland, that you seem to take too much trouble not to offend. Some people - I’ll bet you know one or two - look for reasons to be affronted, aren’t satisfied until they find a cause for righteous anger. You will never escape their fault-finding no matter how hard you try.

In Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep, Sonora, who talks in sentences soon after she’s born, tells her mother she doesn’t want to be breast fed and calls the practice cannibalism. I got into trouble with a few people for that. In fact, I favor breast feeding or whatever is best for a particular baby, but my character opposed it for herself. In another instance, somebody was mad at me for making Hattie and Olive plump and for giving Hattie thin hair, which surprised me because I have thin hair and I struggled with my weight all through my childhood and into my twenties.

It’s worthy to provoke thought. Ideas change, and you can be the instrument of that change. Some beliefs that are accepted today were on the fringe or even despised in the past. The arts are at the forefront of the growth of a society. Impressionist paintings, beloved today, were derided in the beginning. Same thing for rock music. My husband’s grandfather used to say, “When I’m hearing rock and roll I’m being annoyed.”

Think of racial equality and women’s rights. Important books helped change opinion in both cases. Louisa May Alcott, for instance, showed women (sometimes) as more independent than was widely accepted in her day. Her ideas about education were also very new. Through Black Beauty, Anna Sewell ended the use of the bearing rein or checkrein on horses that had been widespread - and painful. Even the notion in Ella Enchanted that obedience is a curse goes against some people’s and some culture’s convictions.

If you do tiptoe around everything that might be the slightest bit controversial, you risk your originality, and originality is one of the pillars of art (I’m not sure what the other pillars are!). And you may inhibit your voice and even your ability to keep going. So I think you should push through your worries and write what you want or what your story demands. In fact, I think the inner voice of censorship may just be part of the internal chorus of self-criticism that most of us hear (I do) sometimes when we’re creating.

In general, I’m not crazy about preachy books, books that push a point of view, even if it’s a point of view I endorse. I don’t go to fiction to be lectured to. I want a good story. But if, wound into that good story, are snippets of history or surprising facts or an exploration of complex ideas, or all three, I’m triply entertained.

I don’t mean writers should push buttons just to push them. I think I’ve written on the blog that I put the “N-word” in the original manuscript of Dave at Night. The usage was in dialogue and was appropriate for the situation, but I took it out. The book didn’t hinge on the word; I didn’t need it, and it’s hurtful, so it went. I had a little queasy feeling that I was censoring myself, but I think I made the right decision.

welliwalks, I’ve thought about your question in my fairy tale books, which come out of a European tradition. Originally, in the classics like “Snow White” and “Cinderella” the characters would have been white and the readers or listeners would have been too. But in my adaptations there is no Europe. The kingdoms are invented, so I decided people can be light-skinned and dark, and there needn’t be racial disharmony. Some of my characters are light, some dark, but without the usual connotations of race. Skin color is merely a characteristic, like height or hair color and no more significant. One reason for including dark-skinned characters is that I want to be inclusive. I don’t want to raise obstacles that will keep readers from feeling they can enter my stories.

More challenging for me than skin color is height. I’m very short. I like to imagine being tall, so I enjoy writing tall characters, but it’s a stretch (hah!). I suggest you take the challenge of inventing characters whose body type is different from your own. You’ve said you’re thin. You could deliberately write an overweight character and you could decide what attitude your character has about his weight, from untroubled to very troubled. Think about how being thin has affected you and speculate on what the effects would be of being fat. You can decide how heavy this character is, could be a little or a lot. To make yourself comfortable, you could try making this a kind character, someone who won’t mind how you portray him. Or make him female and just like you in every way except for this one thing. It’s often good to push out of the comfort zone.

Here are two prompts:

∙    Take one or more of these widely held ideas–
        talking is good for a relationship;
        people should think before acting;
        selfishness is bad;
        dogs love people–
and examine it from every angle. Then base a story on the opposite of the idea or on a new interpretation of it.

∙    Give a character in a new story or in one already in progress a prominent physical characteristic you’ve never tried before. Let that characteristic affect the character’s behavior. A fabulous example of this is the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. The modern movie adaptation, Roxanne with Steve Martin, is also great.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Ouch!

2011-11-09T08:31:00.000-05:00

On July 16th, 2011, Ella wrote, So I've finished my novel and I've to shown it to some people and let them critique me. However, I've never been very good at taking criticism, and I'm having a hard time using their comments. It just sort of makes me queasy when someone says there's something I should change about my precious book, and I get so worried about what they say that I want to give up, or at best, overcorrect. I guess all I'm really asking is if you or the bloggers have any advice on accepting criticism and using it to your advantage. Thanks!

Great question!

Criticism is hard. Tomorrow I’m going to meet with my critique buddy, the wonderful kids' book, YA, and science writer Karen Romano Young, to discuss my work-in-progress and hers, and I will be scared. I’m scared already, even though we’re friends and she’s a really nice person and her criticisms have been very helpful. I’ll be so scared I’ll want to talk about her book first and then ease into mine.

Although it’s hard and sometimes torture, criticism is essential. Few writers (but definitely some) can revise entirely on their own and turn in prose that needs only a light editorial dusting. The early chapters of Beloved Elodie have big boring patches. I’m hoping the pages I gave Wren (Karen) this time are tighter, but they may not be, and I have to know. She may see other problems, too, that I’m not aware of, which will be especially useful to learn about.

You don’t have to process criticism right on the spot, and you probably can't. It may be impossible. A great line when you’re getting criticism is, “Thank you. I’ll think about that.”

Later, in the privacy of your room or office, you can go through the five stages of grief (classically applied to the response to a diagnosis of terminal illness, but no hyperbole is too extreme when applied to writing criticism!):

∙    Denial — The manuscript is fine exactly as it is!

∙    Anger — My writing pal is just jealous!

∙    Bargaining — I can change this paragraph on page 75 and the second sentence on page 112, even though I spent seven hours on each one, but if I revise them, I won’t have to rewrite the entire middle section.

∙    Depression — My story never was any good, never will be, and I might as well trash it. (Some of you, I suspect, skip the first three stages and go right here. If you must, you must, but try not to inhabit this step for long.)

∙    Acceptance — Hmm, hmm, hmm. If I make my villain more likeable, as my writing buddy suggests, then the conflict with the hero will have more tension. Oh, this is cool! I see how I can make everything better.

The best strategy for getting comfortable with a dose of criticism is to sit with it for a while. Let your readers’ suggestions percolate in your brain without making judgments. Take a walk, pet the dog, play with the cat, bake muffins. Let a few hours go by. If you find self-hatred settling in - if you think the criticism also means you’re a terrible person - remind yourself of your virtues and the people who love you.

I’m talking here about constructive criticism. My advice is different if what you’ve been told is global and non-specific, as in “Sorry, I just didn’t like it.” Or, “I hate it when you give me something to read. I always hope it will better but it never is.” Or, “I think you should take up another hobby.” When you get this kind of thing, ignore it and show your story as quick as you can to someone else and never to this frenemy again.

Constructive criticism is criticism you can use. I’ve mentioned on the blog that editors have responded to my manuscripts in the past with criticism that my heroines aren’t likeable. These editors have meant well, but that statement isn’t helpful all by itself. I haven’t intentionally made my heroines unsympathetic. What I need are specifics. What did my character do or say or think or fail to do or say or think at which moment in the manuscript to convey that she isn’t likeable? Show me the places: which action, which line of dialogue, which paragraph of thought. Then I can fix.

Your critics may not be gifted at helpful criticism. They’re probably not professional editors, so they may be vaguer in their ideas than you’d like. In this case, after your period of silent absorption of the criticism, you can ask your readers questions, the questions that have come to you while you contemplated.

When you get specifics, when you know the problem is that the action drags in the second chapter, for example, then you may stop feeling overwhelmed. You start to think that you can cut half a page of dialogue and you don’t have to name every book in your main character’s bookcase. And instead of thinking your manuscript is bad, you can start thinking how great it can be.

I’ve written about this before, but when I started out as a writer, I used to take all criticism. After my first writing course ever I formed a writing group. We were all beginners making our best guesses about what would improve our pals’ stories. I tried whatever was offered, figuring I would learn and I could always go back if the suggestion didn’t work (I saved my old versions even them). This strategy helped, because I did learn. Plus, it desensitized me by taking me out of the realm of hurt feelings. I didn’t have to decide in a vacuum about the validity of a comment. I could try it out and see if it held water.

Of course this goes back to the need for specific criticism. It’s hard to try out a broad suggestion like, "Make it more exciting."

You can show your revisions to your readers and ask if you’ve addressed their concerns and if new things are bothering them. If you’re in a critique group, you can come back and back with the same pages until you’re satisfied.

I no longer take all the criticism that comes my way, but when I ignore a suggestion I always have a reason. My character wouldn’t do this. Or, this idea doesn’t jibe with the tone of my story. Or, this is factually incorrect. If I’m not sure, I usually try the suggestion.

It may help with your criticism aversion to know that every writer gets criticism. Nobody writes a perfect book. And everybody has to take her share of hurtful criticism, criticism that isn’t well-intentioned. It comes from friends or reviewers in the media or on Amazon.com. We take it, and sometimes we stew for a week or a decade - there was one miserable review of The Two Princesses of Bamarre that I can still quote word for word - but we keep writing.

Finishing a first draft is an achievement worthy of whooping and dancing and shouting from the rooftops. So is finishing a revision. Make the good, useful criticism your friend. Make it a reason for gratitude and celebration. You’re getting help with what you love. Hooray!

Here are three prompts:

∙    Snow White cooks and cleans for the seven dwarves while they’re digging in the mines, but they’re never satisfied with the results. Write about how she deals with their constant criticism. Write several versions for several different Snow Whites, if you like.

∙    Through magical intervention, your main character, Marcia Masters, who yesterday was a ninth grader, is now a teacher and her students are her former teachers reduced to children. Write how her teaching goes over the course of a class or a few days.

∙    Your main character, Michael Monroe, is working on a project with his father. Michael is eager for this, but nothing he does pleases Mr. Monroe. Write the scene.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Real reacting

2011-11-02T09:25:00.000-04:00

Before I start, just a word to the NaNoWriMo writers: You are heroes! Sleep, eating, family, TV, normal life are all overrated. Go for it! Have fun!

On July 10, 2011, Lexi wrote, My MC in the real world is kidnapped by some strange-looking people. They kidnap him to protect him, but my MC doesn’t understand that at first so he should be freaked-out by them. The problem is, the characters who kidnapped him are good so I have a hard time making my MC dislike them. How do you make the main react realistically?

I’m thinking a lot about realistic reacting as I’m writing Beloved Elodie, not only for Elodie and the other POV characters (I’m writing from several points of view), but also for the secondary characters.

Of course I haven’t seen your story, Lexi, so I can’t be sure, but you might approach this by sticking close to events. For some reason or no reason, I’m thinking of these kidnappers as aliens, so I’ll give them alien names: Fllep and Yunk. Suppose Fllep and Yunk enter Keith’s house in the middle of the night and tie him to his bedstead. They leave him, and a minute or two later he hears bumps and crashes from his younger sister’s room. The situation seems clear, at least to him. They’re baddies, and, depending on his personality, he’s terrified or angry, or, I suppose, if he’s evil too, amused. Or amused if he happens to have some secret weapon or if he knows his sister can handle an alien duo. The possibilities multiply fast even in the simplest situation.

Now, suppose before leaving Keith alone, Fllep and Yunk bring his stuffed elephant over from the bureau for him to cuddle with. What’s Keith’s realistic reaction to this? Could be confusion. The reader is likely to be unsure how to understand this surprising development. Keith can have other responses here too, depending on his nature. For instance, he could be annoyed that these aliens think he’s so babyish that he needs his elephant - even while he clutches it to his chest.

So, realism depends on action and personality and probably a few hundred other factors, like, for example, what else has been going on in the story. Obviously, if we’re in the middle of the tale, Keith is likely to have some ideas about the aliens.

I often interview my characters to learn their take on events. In this method I might do this:

Me: What do you think of the beings who just broke into your home and strapped you to the headboard of your bed?

Keith: I’m terrified. They weren’t wearing masks so I can identify them. What are they going to do to me? I’m freezing even though it’s warm in here, and I can’t seem to put two thoughts together. I wish I could untie knots with my toes.

Or,

Keith: Some costumes on those dudes! Wait till Sis sees them. She’ll laugh her head off while she’s decapitating them. I hope she remembers to check on her big brother afterward.

If it’s early days for your story and you don’t know Keith well yet, interviewing can flesh him out. He may answer your questions in surprising ways that will help. So you can ask him how he’d feel and what he’d do in a Fllep-Yunk situation.

Interviewing characters doesn’t always work. Nothing works every time, but usually this is a good technique for me. Characters who lie in my story don’t lie in the interview; they know we’re having a behind-the-scenes conversation.

When interviewing a character fails, I can ask myself how I would respond in Keith’s place, knowing what he knows and doesn’t know. If he’s anything like me, I can be a reasonably reliable guide. And I can ask other real people. When I was writing The Two Princesses of Bamarre the character of Addie, who’s very shy, sometimes eluded me, so I would ask my writing buddy, Joan, who’s also shy, and she’d tell me how a particular situation would affect her.

Character responses take three forms, or I can’t come up with more than three: emotional, thinking, and physical. In Keith’s first reaction, he says he’s scared, his emotion. He’s cold in a warm room, a physical reaction brought on by emotion. He says he can’t think, which is thinking, likewise wishing for more flexible toes is thinking. You don’t have include all three each time, but remember the possibilities.

You’ve set up the situation that creates the reaction. A question you may want to ask yourself is whether you’ve given Keith enough information to go on. Maybe the aliens have deposited him somewhere. He’s gagged, blindfolded, and tied up. He’s frightened, yes, and you can write about that, but it can’t go very far without external input. What clues are you giving him (like the stuffed elephant, also possible sounds and smells) to build a response on? It’s these clues, the objective data, combined with Keith’s personality that will get you a realistic response.

And realistic doesn’t necessarily mean predictable. Keith may be happy when one would expect him to be scared. He may be thinking more about something surprising a classmate said that day than about the aliens.

Beloved Elodie, many of you know, is a mystery, and my secondary characters have hidden motives and backstories that are unknown to the reader and to Elodie, and these motives and backstories come into play. What’s more, I’m not entirely certain who my villain is, although one particular character is looking more and more likely. In any given situation I’m asking my characters how they would respond if they’re innocent and how if they’re guilty. I’ve been suspecting that the solution to the whole story hinges on realistic reactions.

Masteress Meenore, the dragon detective, presents a special challenge when it comes to realistic response, not only because IT’s a dragon but also because IT’s brilliant. Can I think of everything IT would? Am I drawing all the conclusions IT would? This is another case of the character’s nature shaping a response.

Enough about me. Prompts time. When you do these, think about including all three kinds of reaction, physical, emotional, and thought.

∙    Let’s start with Keith, tied to his bedstead, elephant on his lap, bangs and crashes reverberating through the house. Write three different reactions for him and make each one believable.

∙    Fllep and Yunk enter Keith’s sister’s room and find her wielding a sword, waiting for them. How does each alien react? Remember, they’re good guys.

∙    Erisette arrives for the second week of her training as a scout for King Aldric and is told that she’s been dropped from the cadre. Write three realistic responses from her. If you like, choose your favorite and keep going.

∙    Victor’s best friend, Caylie, texts him that he’s never there for her, that he’s selfish, and thoughtless, and everyone agrees with her, and she doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore, and he shouldn’t even text her back. Write three responses. Again, if you like, pick one and finish the story.

Have fun and save what you write!

Character in the round

2011-10-26T11:34:00.000-04:00

Early in July, M.K.B. wrote, ....Sometimes I feel some of my characters don't have enough volume and they don't feel as real to me as some of my other characters. I was trying to formulate a system to create characters. Do you have any suggestions?

And Lexi asked a related question: I know everything about my characters; there are reasons for the jobs I chose for them and backstories that explain their personalities. I just don’t know how much or how to tell my reader. How do you pack in as much information as possible without sounding stilted, and how much is too much?

In Writing Magic I offer a character questionnaire that is a kind of character-development system. (I just looked at it and was embarrassed to discover that, although I asked about appearance, I didn’t specifically mention apparel, a sad omission.) If you answer most of the questions, your character will be quite rounded - in the questionnaire. How to get all that information into your story, and whether you need to, are other matters.

There are real-life people, people I’ll bet you’ve known almost always who still surprise you. An elderly friend of mine, let’s call her Betty, pampered from childhood on, who doesn’t cope well with ordinary vicissitudes, has been battling cancer for the last five years, and about the cancer she is uncomplaining. I would never have guessed. If she were a character I would have had to give her cancer to find out.

And yet we size people up in two seconds. Someone - let’s call her Hetty - called in to a talk radio show I was listening to recently, and I disliked her by the time she’d spoken three sentences. Her hearty voice (too hearty, in my opinion) seemed to my warped ears to proclaim, Look how delightful I am. I didn’t even see her! I don’t know if she kicks her cat or volunteers at a nursing home, and even if I learned she does volunteer and is unfailingly kind to animals, I’d have to recite her virtues in my mind over and over to get past that voice.

So let’s make me and Hetty minor characters in a story. Hetty’s overbearing voice and overconfidence establish her, at least partially. My dislike of a boaster sets me up too - let’s change my name to Bonnie for this post. The reader, Lenny, who knows nothing more about these two, feels that he’s encountered two complicated people. He hasn't read much about them, but the little suggests that more is there.

If they’re minor characters, that’s all we need. In fact, it may be too much. It’s too much if Lenny is distracted, if he wishes the story would veer off and have Hetty and Bonnie meet in person and develop their relationship. Sometimes all you need is a long, trailing scarf or an interesting name. And sometimes characters aren’t important enough even to warrant a name; male or female and old or young may be sufficient. We don’t want to burden Lenny’s brain with characters he doesn’t have to remember.

Or Hetty and Bonnie may be fine with the amount of detail provided. Lenny appreciates how we populate our stories with intriguing oddballs.

What reveals character?

Hetty has an unpleasant voice, so voice helps define a character. Along with voice, there’s dialogue. What does Hetty say and how does she say it? Does she interrupt people? Does she disagree with whatever is said to her, or does she always agree? How’s her enunciation? Her grammar? And many other speech possibilities.

Bonnie’s thoughts show her to be a tad prickly or sound sensitive; thoughts bring character to light. Of course we have access to the thoughts of POV characters only - unless we’re writing in third-person omniscient.

Lenny may be a writer as well as a reader. If he becomes a character, and if his writing enters the narrative, then it will help reveal him. Introducing a character's writing, a diary, for example, is a way to slip in the thoughts of non-POV characters.

What else?

Those aspects of appearance that a person can control, which covers a lot of territory. Bonnie, for instance, is short (I am). Does she wear three-inch heels or flats? Does her erect bearing suggest a taller person? Lenny sports a goatee and chooses to wear glasses rather than contact lenses.

Clothing. One could write about this forever. Not only clothing itself, but also about clothing in a setting. Does Hetty wear a suit to the company picnic?

The setting that a character controls, Lenny’s house, his room if he’s too young to have a house (forget the goatee in this case). What’s his taste? Is he neat or sloppy?

These seemingly little things, Hetty’s bedroom with the martial arts posters, the free weights in the corner, the biography of Helen Keller on the desk, or Lenny’s goatee or Betty’s weighty painted beads around her neck and the four bracelets on each arm, suggest developed, deep characters.

Actions, which may be more important than anything else, define character. Hetty listens and calls in to a talk show. Bonnie just listens. Betty calls her son and complains, but never about the cancer. Lenny reads.

Everything is subject to interpretation. Does Hetty listen and call in out of loneliness? She lives alone and likes to hear voices on the radio. Then she gets so caught up she has to respond. Or does she call for some other reason? Does Lenny have a goatee and glasses because he wants to appear professorial? Or is the goatee hiding a weak chin, and he wears glasses because contact lenses seem vain to him? Or a thousand other reasons. If Lenny moves from reader to important character, we may learn what his motivations are. We learn motivation from further action, possibly from his explanations in dialogue, from his thoughts if he’s a POV character.

I’m not sure about backstory. If the backstory doesn’t move to the front story, I think it’s more for the writer to know than for the reader. Backstory will influence a character's actions, but Lenny doesn’t have to know that Hetty’s father locked her in the cellar when he was in a bad mood - unless the father or the cellar or something directly related comes into the story.

Coming into the story is the key to what character development to put in and what to leave out. If you need it for the plot, then include it. If you don’t and the information makes the story drag, leave it out. If you don’t need it but it’s fascinating in its own right and Lenny doesn’t get bored, it’s up to you and the kind of story you’re writing. You can’t please everybody. Lenny may like an embellished story but his brother Lonny may prefer his fiction stripped down to action action action.

Only one prompt today:

Betty, Bonnie, Hetty, and Lenny, strangers to one another, all attend a reading by the famous teenage fantasist Tammy Millhart. At the end she announces that before the event she hid a talisman, an ebony ball, somewhere in the local amusement park. She chooses three teams, one of one of them comprising our characters, to look for the ball. Whichever team finds it will be given a far more serious mission; the entire population of a mid-size city will be at risk. Write our quartet’s search while developing each one as a complex personality. Do all of them want their search to succeed? Tammy can be an important character too if you like. She can attach herself to your team or wander from team to team. Is she helping or getting in the way?

Description galore

2011-10-19T10:26:00.000-04:00

On June 27, 2011, Agnes wrote, When I write a story the writing process goes like this. I have an idea, so I think about it and act it out until my plot has a basic shape. Then I start writing it down, my problem is that my descriptions get way too long. How can I stop this?

Acting your story out is a terrific idea!

I wouldn’t worry about the length of your descriptions while you’re writing them. Just keep going. When you’re finished, you can see what you need and what you can do without.

When you go back, regard your adjectives and adverbs with suspicion. Test your sentences without them. If nothing is lost by removing the word lovely, for example, delete it. Usually, the adjectives and adverbs that we can’t do without are the ones that convey information, like green, hot, wobbly, sparsely.

More general adjectives sometimes have their place. For example, I used the word terrific above in a sentence of less than spellbinding prose. If I had been going for something better I might have written that acting your idea out ensures that your story has tension and feeling. Terrific is a summary word, and in this case I wanted speed. I wanted to convey approval, not necessarily the reason for the approval.

Generally, nouns and verbs should do your heavy lifting. Better than “Don’t eviscerate me with that long weapon,” he said softly would be “Don’t eviscerate me with that saber,” he whispered. Better and shorter.

I’ve said this before: Take care with words that weaken, like almost, slightly, somewhat. Occasionally they’re essential, but often they reflect an unwillingness to take a stand, as in Hilda felt almost jealous. Let’s let her go lime-green with envy.

More broadly, think about what you want your description to do. Description sets the movie going in your reader’s mind, so you need to provide enough to let him see and possibly hear, touch, and smell his surroundings. When Hilda goes into her bedroom and the reader sees it for the first time, he needs to know more than that there’s a bed in there, but he doesn’t need a raft of specifics. He probably should be told if the bed is a bunk bed. Let’s suppose it isn’t. Let’s suppose the room is fussy. There’s a dust ruffle around the bed, which is an antique reproduction of Benjamin Franklin’s bed (I have no idea if this is possible). Roses are stenciled on the bureau. Atop the dresser, real roses fill a rose-colored vase, and under the vase, a doily. The walls are covered with William Morris wallpaper. The floor sports two braided rugs. A quilt in a classic pattern hangs on the wall.

The poor reader doesn’t have to be burdened with all this; a few details will do. But I’d like him to know who decorated the room, especially if Hilda chose everything, and she’s seven years old! Seriously, because then the description reveals character, and that’s cool.

As a sidebar, the reader doesn’t have to know what William Morris wallpaper is. He’ll get the idea, or he can look it up. You don’t have to worry about his comprehension in such a little matter. If William Morris wallpaper is exactly what you want, keep it in. You can even make up a kind of wallpaper if you like, Millicent Popper paper, say, and no one will ever discover more about it than you reveal.

Another consideration is what’s going to happen. Suppose there’s a rocking chair in the room, and Hilda is about to rock so enthusiastically that it falls apart, which will be the last straw for her foster parents, and they’re going to call Social Services. Then the reader has to know there's a chair, probably before she sits down in it.

Description can convey feeling. Hilda is sent to jail, maybe for bad home decorating decisions. You want your description to convey how bad the prison conditions are: the stink, the chill, the iron bed, the single blanket, the cockroaches. If this is a comedy, the lack of art on the walls. Then Hilda is released. Again, you may want to describe her new situation for contrast. But you don’t want to go too far. Enough to let the reader experience the place, not so much that boredom sets in.

You can use description to heighten suspense. Hilda’s foster parents tell her that she can’t live with them anymore. The scene takes place in the kitchen. Everyone is waiting for the social worker to come. Hilda spends the time noticing the abundance of food in the kitchen, the bowl of fruit, the cake cooling on the counter, the soup pot on the stove, the fridge with its automatic ice dispenser, the spice rack, the branch of basil hanging by the window. The reader gulps and wonders when Hilda will experience such abundance again.

Often we put in a lot of detail so that we know where everything is and we can see the movie. When we revise, we need to ask ourselves what purpose our description is serving.

•    Is it creating the movie?
•    Is it revealing character?
•    Is it making a mood?
•    Is it conveying feeling?
•    Is it heightening suspense?

This may not be an exhaustive list. If you can identify some other objective your description is fulfilling or if it’s serving one of the ones I’ve listed, then it deserves to live. But if not, or if it has a purpose but you’ve gone on too long, that’s the time to cut.

Sometimes we fall in love with our words and it’s hard to give them up. I particularly like the doily under the rose-colored vase, but if the reader wants to shred it and flush the bits, then it’s doing no good, and it should go.

Of course, it can be hard to tell what should stay and what should be deleted. For that, you need the usual resources: time away from the manuscript to give you objectivity, helpful criticism, and experience. The more you write the better you’ll get at this one particular thing. I guarantee it.

Time for prompts:

•    Hilda has taken refuge from her foster family with the seven dwarves. It’s two months after Snow White left. The dwarves have gone to the mines for the day, and she’s alone in their cottage. Describe the cottage through her eyes.

•    After deliberating a while, Hilda makes some changes to the dwarves’ home. Their cottage can be in the middle of a village of dwarves’ cottages with shops and so forth, or it can be alone in a forest. Describe what she does.

•    Describe what happens when the dwarves return.

•    Put what you’ve written aside for three days.

•    Now look at it all again. What can you cut? What do you need to add? Revise.

Have fun, and save what you wrote!

The Gap

2011-10-12T09:32:00.000-04:00

Before I start, hope to see some of you this weekend in Rhode Island. If you haven’t seen where I’ll be, check the Appearances page of my website.

Josiphine, whose first question I discussed last week, had a second: ...any tips on rewriting would be extremely appreciated.

In thinking about my response, I remembered a post on the subject and looked it up. My post of November 18th, 2009, is all about revision. If you read it and have further questions, please ask.

Along the same lines, Ella wrote, I’m the kind of writer that plans everything out before I write. When I come to the few spots that I didn’t plan, I skip over them and go on. But now I’m revising and I have to fill in those gaps, and go back and add details and emotions, but it’s really hard. Any tips?
Let’s go to pre-revision. In your next story, which you may be working on now, I suggest not skipping these unplanned parts. Since you’re a planner, when you reach such a place, try planning it out and writing it then and there in your first draft.

It’s possible that these spots don’t fit into your overall story scheme. They may reveal plot problems that get worse if you just soldier on. When you fill in later, the emotions may not feel genuine because you’re forcing your characters to act according to your outline, not according to how they’d actually behave in the situation.

You may discover that these junctures are the keys to your story. They may take it in directions that surprise you but represent, or represent more effectively, your underlying theme.

Now let’s fast forward to revision, to the situation you asked about. You’ve got these gaps. It's too late for the first draft. What to do?

First off, do you need these scenes? If not, cut them and problem solved.

Do they need to be scenes? Or do they merely represent information that needs to be conveyed, which you can tuck into the narrative or dialogue in another scene? Suppose, for example, that main character Eliot’s uncle has just died, which is important because he was going to pay Eliot’s college tuition. We don’t need the death scene. We may not even need the scene when Eliot finds out. What may be important, however, is his blow-up at his girlfriend Amy because he’s distressed that his education, his hoped-for career, his entire future, is now in doubt. After the argument, during the making up, if he wasn’t too horrible for a reconciliation, he confesses what’s really eating him. Amy and the reader find out together.

If your omissions do have to be scenes, why not plan them even at this late date? (Remember that I’m not a planner and am just guessing how planners make their magic.) Look at where your caesura (If you don't know the word, look it up!) fits into your outline. Reread what went before and what comes after. Think about how your characters, acting according to their natures, can bridge the gap. How can they express their feelings through thoughts, action, dialogue? What can you find that interests you, that will make the process fun? Is there some aspect of Eliot, for example, that you haven’t explored before? Has the reader experienced his sense of humor or his intellectual side? Can you bring one of these into the new scene? Outline and then write.

Do the new scenes take place in old settings? Can you move the action somewhere else, somewhere you may enjoy describing? Or, can you highlight unexplored aspects of your setting? Eliot will have needs in this scene, or his girlfriend Amy will. Suppose their argument happens in her bedroom. She’s chilly, so she opens the door to her closet where her sweater and tee-shirt shelves are. Above the sweaters is a shelf of stuffed animals that she’s outgrown but can’t bring herself to throw out. She touches the nose of her stuffed penguin for comfort. The stuffed animals and the gesture brings Eliot to his senses, and he realizes how much he’s upset Amy and how adorable and sweet she is.

I’ve exhausted my ideas on this aspect of revision, but I’d welcome follow-up questions.

So, changing the subject. I’m a radio addict. I love to listen to programs that I can learn from, and one of these is Freakonomics Radio, which applies economic theory to surprising topics. I recently listened to a podcast about quitting, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The economists who narrate the show have a position, that quitting is good. They advocate quitting - anything! - and quitting quickly.

I’ve been mulling over the program's ideas as applied to writing, and I think the good economists left out a lot of complexity. Naturally, they’re arguing against the prevailing idea that quitting - being a quitter - is always bad.

Questions come in to the blog sometimes about not finishing stories, and I always say it’s okay not to finish, because we learn from everything we write, fragments as well as completed stories - as long as we keep writing. Many of you are about to participate in NaNoWriMo, and you’re resolved not to quit. In a month you’ll have a big first draft, and then what?

Since they’re economists, the podcasters talk about costs, in this case two kinds of costs relating to quitting or not quitting. There’s opportunity costs and sunk costs, and they’re kind of opposed to each other. You finish your NaNoWriMo book. Maybe you’ve met your word count, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. You start revising and the going gets rough.

The opportunity costs start beckoning. Every hour you devote to revision is an hour you can’t spend starting a new story - or eating, sleeping, studying for your Physics exam. You think about quitting, but you remember your sunk costs. You’ve sunk a month into this book, a month when you could have been eating, sleeping, or studying for your Physics exam. If you walk away, you may have wasted that time and energy and creativity.

I’ve been working on Beloved Elodie for a dauntingly long time. I’m finally making progress but I don’t think I’m even at the halfway point. Should I have quit, maybe after my second false start?

Possibly, but I guess I’m a sunk-costs type. If I had quit I wouldn’t find out where the story goes. I would find out what other tale was waiting for me, but that other tale isn’t as alive for me as the one I’m butting my head against.

Actually, I did quit. Each time I started over I abandoned the storyline that wasn’t working and I’ll never know if I could have pushed on and made it succeed. This hurts. There were good aspects to each attempt, one in particular that I wish I could have figured out.

I guess this is where I wished for more complexity from the radio. There’s loss when you quit, even when quitting is right. And there’s loss when you continue and don’t write whatever else you might have. And there are gains on each side. We have to weigh one against the other. The only certainty I have is that there's no disgrace in either decision.

Now I’m quitting. Time for prompts:

∙    Find a time gap in one of your stories, a day, a week, whatever. Invent a new scene that takes place during the gap. When you’re finished, ask yourself if you’ve you discovered anything new that will deepen the reader’s understanding of what’s going on.

∙    Write the dust-up between Eliot and Amy. Decide how he would pick a fight. What’s he like when he argues? Show him at his worst.

∙    Now write Eliot’s journal entry about his uncle’s death and his behavior to Amy.

∙    Think of the fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which we discussed at length in a long-ago post. If you don’t remember the story, look it up. At the end, the soldier chooses the oldest princess for his bride. Let’s imagine that she can accept him or quit being a princess. She’s hardly met him and has hardly been kind to him. Write the scene in which she decides. Write the scene following her decision.

∙    Yes, Cinderella inexplicably continues to obey her stepsisters and stepmother in the original story, not my version, but they also continue to torment her, which cannot be good for their self-esteem. Write a version in which one of the stepsisters decides to do something different, to quit her role. What happens?

∙    Rewrite the tall tale of John Henry and have him quit pounding his hammer and live. What happens next?

Have fun, and save what you write!

Dreams, glimpses, and other tantalizing story morsels

2011-10-05T09:40:00.000-04:00

To start, I’ll be speaking and signing books in Rhode Island on Saturday, October 15th, along with a bunch of other terrific kids’ book writers. You can find out where and when on my website. Hope to see some of you!

And, a few questions have come in about my Disney Fairies books and about Writing Magic and others. If you want to ask me about any of my books, please let me know and I’ll answer in a post - if I can. Sometimes I forget what I had in mind when I was writing and sometimes ideas pop out of nowhere and I can’t explain them.

And, puppy Reggie is almost nine months old and got his first haircut. My husband has posted new photos on the News page of my website. My fave is the one with his best friend, Sage, in which Reggie is revealed as a supremely happy maniac.

Now for this week’s post topic. On June 25th, 2011, Maddie wrote, ....I keep on getting very vivid "glimpses" of stories, but I don't know anything about the characters or plot besides what is in the "glimpses." Can you help me with this? I think that I can probably start working on a story if I can get past this.
    Also, I had a dream a few months ago, and since I wrote it down, I'm thinking about basing a story off it. Do you have any suggestions?

And on July 2nd, 2011, Josiphine asked a related question: ....I'm an aspiring writer and have completed several books. But my problem is making my books book-length. Most people I know say that each time they do a rewrite they cut back so their novel isn't as long. I'm in the opposite predicament. My books are never long enough, a short story, or a novella at a stretch.
    Do you have any suggestions about making my books the right length? I know that my plots have enough meat to last...I just can't make them do so.

Some fairytales remind me of dreams. Putting a pea under twenty mattresses to test potential princess is dreamlike in its lack of logic. I love to work with these kinds of fairytales. The ones that make complete sense, like (in my opinion) “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” offer less fodder for fooling around. So I say, Maddie, go with your dream.

You can begin with the events that lead up to the dream. These are some questions you might ask yourself:

∙    Who is the main character in the dream? Is it you? Or someone else?

∙    Who are the other characters? Describe them.

∙    What is the world of the dream?

∙    What happens after the dream ends?

∙    What is the conflict?

∙    What scenes can you write to dramatize the conflict, extend it, deepen it?

∙    What concrete, specific details can you include in your scenes to make the dreamscape real?

If you make your reader aware that the story is a dream, he may not get emotionally involved, so I would avoid this. Likewise, I suggest you not end your story by having the main character wake up, which usually results in a reader feeling cheated. In other words, the dream should be the story’s reality.

Same approach for your glimpses. Ask yourself questions to flesh out what you have. What went before the glimpse? What can come next? What’s the conflict? Write the answers in notes. Try writing the glimpse, fragmentary though it is, not in notes but in story form. Just the writing may elicit more.

As I suggested in an earlier post, think about your other glimpses. Can you string them together to make a fuller story? Is there anything else you can bring in? A memory? A myth? A news item?

Suppose you try, and you write part of a story then can’t go any further. I say, count this as a victory. Save your pages, of course. Maybe the fragment needs something for completion that you can’t get to yet, something you’re going to write next month or even three years from now. Or maybe this bit will seed a seven-book series. Or you’ll cannibalize it in five other stories - or for the rest of your life.

Josiphine, my most helpful writing teacher used to say there was no right length for a story, which needs to be as long as it needs to be. I’d add that padding isn’t the right technique for achieving length.

Having said that, my suggestions for Maddie may work for you, too,. Look at your conflict. Have you come up with a variety of ways to reveal and intensify it? In Ella Enchanted, for instance, I kept devising ways to have obedience make Ella suffer. She loses a friend because of it early in the book and then, when she’s older, is forced to give up Areida. The ogres show the physical side of the obedience curse, the parrot Chock the humorous aspect, and so on. If your reader cares, she won’t tire of new ways for your main character to struggle.

Are you including your main character’s thoughts and feelings? Leaving these out will speed up your scenes, but in a bad way, because the action is likely to fall flat. Adding them will probably engage the reader more deeply and may involve you more, too. You’ll know your main better, and that inner understanding may suggest follow-up scenes that you hadn’t thought of before.

Consider your setting, too. Our goal is to start a movie in the reader’s mind. Have you put in enough detail to get the movie going?

Look at your transitions. Have you filled in the movement from one scene to the next? Are there any leaps of logic that leave the reader flummoxed? Are you jumping from plot point to plot point?

Last, you may get the best help from a reader. Ask a fellow writer (the best choice, if possible), a friend, a teacher, a librarian, a relative to read one of your stories. Then ask this person if anything seems to be missing, if your tale seems truncated. Ask her to be as specific as she can be. Then, if you want a second opinion, ask someone else as well.

Here are three dream prompts. First, I offer two of my dreams to turn into stories if you can. For these prompts you’ll need to do a lot of expanding.

∙    This is a recurring nightmare. I’m climbing the subway stairs in New York City and my legs become very heavy. I can’t drag them up. The people behind me are angry and I’m terrified because I don’t know what’s happened to me. That’s it. It hasn’t visited me lately, maybe because I turned it into a pantoum (a poem form), which appeared in a book of short horror fiction for kids called Half-Minute Horrors (because each one can be read in thirty seconds).

∙    I’m at a dinner, a wedding or some other celebratory event. I know that if I eat the shrimp I’ll turn transparent. I don’t serve myself any, but they appear on my plate anyway. Use this any way you like.

∙    Write down your own dreams for a week. Keep a pad next to your bed. Use one or all of your dreams in a story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Threading the Plot Needle

2011-09-28T08:57:00.000-04:00

First, here’s a link to an interview with me: http://www.bookshoptalk.com/2011/09/interview-with-one-and-only-gail-carson.html. On the site you’ll find interviews with other authors and lots more for us bookish types.

And I heard something horrifying (in a writerly sense) on the radio in an interview with Patricia T. O’Conner, whose books Woe Is I and Woe Is I Jr. I keep recommending. She said that a question came in on her blog, http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/, a fascinating site, about the meaning of head nodding and head shaking. The questioner wrote that she’d (I think it was a she) had always thought a nod meant yes and a shake meant no, but lately she’d come across instances of the reverse. Pat looked into it and discovered that the meaning had shifted somewhat and the questioner was correct; sometimes a nod means no and a shake means yes. Aaa! Talk about shaking. My world is shook, rattled, and rolled. I’ve always used head nods for yes and shakes for no. Have I confused my readers? Have these neat, quick, formerly unambiguous gestures been taken away from me? And from you, too?

I don’t know what I’m going to do from now on, maybe ignore this bulletin from the front-lines of English usage and assume that most readers will understand my meaning. Or maybe make each nod and shake so clear no one can be mistaken, but, ugh, that will require extra words I didn’t need before. Anyway, I wanted to share the news with you because confusion loves company.

The interview moved on to naming places where a nod always means no and a shake always means yes, like Bulgaria and India, which is interesting, but not particularly worrisome.

Now on to this weeks question. On June 24, 2011, maybeawriter wrote, What's driving me nutty is that I barely have any scenes for my main story, and the one or two I have are no longer completely relevant to my story. I think my problem is that my storyline keeps changing in notes, conversations and deep thoughts. Not that a changing storyline is a problem, but it’s almost changing too fast. And now I had this new, completely story-changing idea. And now my story is shattered and I have no idea how to put it back together and make something from it, something that makes sense and somehow involves my oldest ideas. Maybe I just have trouble letting go of my old storyline. And maybe I fear the blank nothingness of the unknown, of the ever-changing story where nothing is sure, nothing set in stone, nothing to keep this story, well, this story. If I change too much, is it still the same story, or something new and unfamiliar?

I love to get together with writer friends and talk about current projects because the discussion is almost always reassuring. I’m making up names here, not using real friends: Annabelle says she’s trashing her novel and starting over; she had to write the wrong book so now she can write the right one; this has happened to her before. Randy says he hadn’t been able to write anything for two months but he wrote three pages last week and hopes he can keep going. Inga says she doesn’t know what her book is about fundamentally, which is making the going rough for her. I say I’ve started my novel over five times, once after writing 260 pages.

Nobody I know ever ever ever says, I sit down at the computer every morning without fail and pop out seven glorious pages. Isn’t writing the merriest occupation going?

No, writing is strange and inexplicably hard. It all comes out of our heads. Our materials are ideas, so why can’t we shape them easily? Why don’t they just chink into place?

They don’t, and that’s why it’s delightful to be with other writers, the only people who really understand. Maybeawriter, I don’t have a solution for you. What you’re going through is, in my experience, the writer’s lot. But I have a suggestion, which you may do already: when you’re most miserable, talk to other writers or read writers’ blogs or books about writing. I love the name you’ve given yourself: maybeawriter. That uncertainty is wonderfully honest about the writer’s state.

I glean two questions from you, one about scenes and the other about story direction. Scenes first.

Suppose we have a character, Mallory, who is starting a new school, say it’s magic sculpture school. Graduates create manikins that assist people in subtle ways, physically and emotionally. Mallory’s problems are that she’s brutally honest and has trouble taking criticism. Her strengths are her creativity and her sympathy. The major conflict in this story will revolve around these traits.

We need scenes to show Mallory in action. Where to set them? With which characters? Do we start by getting her in trouble in a small way and build or do we make it bad right away?

This is where I would begin to wander if I were taking this on, because I don’t know how to answer my own questions. Maybe I’ll write a scene with Mallory and her mother. Mallory has insulted her cousin, and her mother is taking her to task for it, and Mallory isn’t responding well.

But the action isn’t going to take place at home, so that scene won't advance the plot. Probably I won't use it. Still, I’ve seen Mallory in her home environment, which is informative. Now let me try one at the new school. In this scene we'll see her creativity and her touchiness and we'll introduce a character or two who may be important later on.

With luck this second scene moves us into the story and suggests scenes that can follow. Mallory antagonizes one of her teachers but interests another. A fellow student hates her; another falls in love with her. How will the teacher she antagonized react? How will the others? We temporarily forget our thematic ideas in the excitement of the detailed moment-to-moment writing.

Then we stop writing for the day. We walk the dog and ruminate about plot direction. Ideally our ideas support the direction we’ve started in, and sometimes this actually happens to me. But sometimes I anticipate problems based on what I’ve written. I think I need to go back to establish a new path ahead or I see a different route entirely, and I know that’s the way I have to go.

In an earlier version of Beloved Elodie, which finally is moving along, I had madness descend on Elodie’s island of Lahnt. Elodie’s mother is possessed by greed. She imagines herself as King Midas and has no regrets about turning her daughter to gold. It’s a disturbing and powerful scene, and I still love it for its power. I mourn giving it up, which I had to do to take my story in a viable direction. My tale isn’t what I started with, but now it’s one I can write. Maybe someday I can use the ideas in the mother-Midas scene and maybe not.

We have to go with what we can do. I’ve said before that I’m an unconscious writer. This is the way I see it: Our selves below the surface guide what we write. There are layers to that hidden self, which is why we veer this way and that, why the road through a story takes many detours. Although I’m often not happy about how long I need to meander to follow my story thread, I believe the added complexity serves our art. Maybeawriter, “the blank nothingness of the unknown” is where writers operate and where we shape our magic sculptures.

Here are three prompts about Mallory:

∙    Mallory is assigned to create a sculpture that will help a depressed eight-year-old boy. Write the scene in which she meets the boy for the first time.

∙    Write the scene I mentioned above in which Mallory alienates one teacher and interests another, causes a student to hate her and another to fall in love with her.

∙    Write a scene in which Mallory begins to create the sculpture for the boy.

Have fun and save what you write!

Speech!

2011-09-21T09:54:00.000-04:00

Starting off with a reminder that I’ll be at the children’s book festival in Tarrytown, New York, on Sunday. The event is held at historic Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s home, a literary destination in its own right.

On June 20, 2011, Jen wrote, ....I am a very introverted person. But I've read in a lot of places that self-promotion is just as much a part of being a successful author as good writing is. Do you agree with that perspective? Is there any hope for someone like me that would rather not be in front of people?

I would never ever ever agree that anything is as important for an author as good writing. Success is a separate matter, hinging on many things, including luck and timing. And yes, self-promotion is useful. You, all of you reading the blog, should do some when you get published. If you already are published, you know.

And if you’re already published, I hope you’ll chime in with what worked and what disappointed you.

Self-promotion doesn’t necessarily mean public speaking. There are more ways today to promote your book than ever before, and new ones keep springing up. I’m not an authority on the subject, but there are lots of books that may help. Your library may have some, or your local bookstore may suggest some titles.

I googled “self-promotion for authors” and lots of links popped up. One of them, a fascinating and funny New York Times article, goes over author self-promotion from a historical perspective. To my amazement the practice goes way, way, way back. Many of the examples do not involve speech at all. The article’s tone is adult and may not be right for elementary schoolers. Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/how-writers-build-the-brand.html.

Luck is luck, and you can’t do much about that, and timing is hard to control too. Your first picture book comes out when the market is down for picture books. Your paranormal novel is released just when the trend is fading, or your historical novel about the San Francisco earthquake hits the bookstores just after an earthquake strikes... somewhere, and interest is high.

The internet is the self-promoting author’s good buddy. You can create a website, a blog; you can tweet, use Facebook and, I suppose, LinkedIn for publicity. You can link to other sites that may link to yours as well. Some literary blogs interview authors, and these interviews are written, no speaking necessary. You can shoot something for YouTube about your book. Some authors develop online book trailers, not cheap, but not a fortune either. A friend has created an e-newsletter for teachers and librarians. She promotes her own work but also offers articles of more general interest.

I have a website and a blog (as you know!). The website is mostly for people who are interested in my books. The blog, obviously, is about writing, and it offers value even if you never read a word inside one of my books. But I do often mention a title or two to illustrate a point and to remind you that I’ve written this book or that one. I don’t do it so frequently that the blog is all about me, but the self-promotion is there, subtly. And of course I want to encourage you to come to appearances, where it will be hard to resist buying a book.

However, the results of promotion are hard to measure unless you score a huge coup, like an interview that is sure to result in thousands of sales. I have no idea how many books have been bought as a result of this blog, but I like writing my posts, so I continue to do it. It’s not worthwhile to promote in a way that makes you unhappy.

I don’t tweet, and I keep meaning to set up a fan Facebook page, but I haven’t gotten around to it, so I could do more. Everyone can do more. We have to choose between promotion and writing or hiking or talking to friends or flossing our teeth.

Off the internet, you can have postcards made and send them to everyone you know and leave them at local libraries and stores, especially bookstores. Your editor will almost certainly give you a PDF of the book cover to use. Heck, the publisher may even go halvsies with you on the cost or may pay for the whole thing. I always do a postcard mailing for my books. If nothing else, the postcards keep me in touch with cousins and friends I rarely see.

Friends can host book parties for you, although I’ve heard that doesn’t do much for sales. Still, a book is an achievement worth celebrating. You can write a press release and send it to local newspapers. If an editor wants to interview you, that will be one-on-one, most likely by phone, and your shyness may not be activated.

You can arrange a signing at a local bookstore and pressure your friends and family to come to hear you talk about your book. You may not sell many, but your supportive audience will give you experience in discussing your work.

Kids’ book writers can visit schools, which I’ve talked about before on the blog. School visits are a direct source of income as well as promotion, because we get honoraria for our visits. Some people who are shy with adults are comfortable with people half their size.

If you’re willing to give speeches or run workshops and if you have a particular expertise that relates to your writing, which might be in writing gothic mysteries for teens, for example, you can develop presentations for conferences and apply to showcase them. Often you’ll get an honorarium for this too.

I like to speak publicly, but it wasn’t always so. I got nervous. I feared that my nervousness showed, and my audience was suffering for me, miserable in the face of my misery. This was years before I started writing. Luckily, management at my job at the time brought in a public speaking consultant to work with me and a bunch of other newbies. He videotaped us (or whatever the technology was at the time) so we could see how we did. My big discovery was that I didn’t look afraid. No one but me knew how scared I was, which put me at ease. Now I regard nervousness as a boon for my energy level, and I never begin a speech as some do by confessing my fear.

If you can get training in public speaking, I suggest you go for it. It’s comforting to know you can handle yourself in from of a crowd. After all, if success does come your way, you may need to make acceptance speeches.

I remember a lot of the public speaking advice the consultant gave us, which I’m happy to share. He was opposed to written speeches and even speeches from notes. He said if you don’t know your topic well enough to talk from memory, you shouldn’t give a speech about it. I’ve taken some of that advice. I use notes to make sure I get to everything, but never a written speech. However, I do practice my speeches in the privacy of my office until I have what I want to say down solid, even to the cadence of my clauses, the expressions I’ll use, a particular wording. Then, except for an occasional glance at my notes, I’m looking at my audience the whole time.

The consultant was against podiums too. He wanted to be able to walk in the aisles and lock eyes with anyone on the verge of falling asleep. An assertive fellow, he refused ever to speak after his audience had had a meal, when they’d be drowsy. I don’t love podiums either, but I speak from behind them when I have to, and I certainly speak after a meal. And I have observed people fall asleep, which throws me off my game a little, but I soldier on.

I don’t remember if these are his techniques or if I’ve come upon them myself: I never use a power-point presentation, although I do project images on a screen when I need them. Power point, in my opinion, like a written speech, lacks spontaneity. If the room isn’t full, I urge my audience to move up to the front rows. I ask for the lighting to be as bright as it can be and still have people able to see the images on the screen. The most distressing speech (distressing for me) I’ve ever given was in a darkened auditorium with lights only on me. Afterwards, I was told it went well, but I couldn’t judge audience reaction and I felt boring and foolish. I know I would have been better if I could have seen a few people nodding or smiling.

The point of the consultant’s advice and my own strategies is to shrink the distance between audience and speaker. It’s that distance that causes the horror, but when you close it, the experience becomes more intimate even when hundreds of people are listening. Intimate is familiar. We often do intimate.

Here are three prompts:

∙    If you belong to a writing group, my guess is that sometimes talk wanders to publishing and even self-promotion. Take turns with group members in giving a chat about your story. Listen to the others. What worked? What didn’t? What can you incorporate into your own presentation?

∙    Write a variant of (part of) Cyrano de Bergerac. Your main character, Bethany, has published her first book. The publisher has set up a local signing, but she’s terrified. So she enlists a friend, Wanda, to speak for her. Wanda, however, isn’t much of a reader. She’s told Bethany that she read her book and loved it, but in truth she got only as far as the first chapter. Write the scene.

∙    Every year the empress of the Ocean Islands judges a poetry competition among her islands. The winning island hosts the empress until the next contest, and her presence brings the people of that island both esteem and wealth. On Parrot Island the judges have chosen Alti’s poem as the one to represent them this year. Alti will have to read the poem to the empress, and his delivery will be part of her evaluation. Trouble is, he suffers from awful stage fright. His teacher, Yora, has been charged with helping him prepare, but she preferred a different poem by another student, and she’s decided to sabotage Alti rather than help him. Write what happens.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Mysterious

2011-09-14T10:51:00.000-04:00

First off, for those of you who may live a little north of New York City, I’ll be signing books at a children’s book festival a week from Sunday, on September 25th, in Tarrytown. I’ll just be signing, not speaking, but I’ll be there for two-and-a-half hours, and unless a miracle happens, I’ll have time to chat. This is a wonderful event, with many terrific kids’ book writers. Details are on the website. Hope some of you can come!

On June 16, 2011 AngieBelle wrote, ...I have read many mysteries and am always fascinated by how the author ties everything together- even in seemingly simple children's mysteries, which are usually what I'm reading. How does one come up with all the details that lead to solving the mystery?

I’ve written two other posts about writing mysteries, one on May 27th, 2009, and one on January 6th, 2010, which you may want to look at too. These are additional thoughts. I said in the earlier posts that I’m a newbie mystery writer, and I still am. In fact, I would welcome tips from other mystery writers who read the blog.

In my first mystery, A Tale of Two Castles, I didn’t know who the villain was until I’d written two-thirds of the book, and this worried me, as you can imagine. But then this character did something revealing, and I knew. The advantage of this is that the bad guy’s identity may come as more of a surprise to the reader if it was also a surprise to the writer. I’m not saying that careful plotters and outliners can’t create mysteries that feel unpredictable, only that this is the approach that worked for me, on a single book.

I’m trying it again in the new book, Beloved Elodie (tentative title). I’m making several characters potential villains, and I’ve invented back stories for each that could give them a motive for the crime, the theft of a flask, which, if not recovered, will cause hundreds of lives to be lost.

These back stories can supply the details that pile up in a reader’s mind. In A Tale of Two Castles again, two of my characters were spies, which I didn’t reveal until near the end of the book. Their undercover activity caused them to act suspiciously. I knew why but the reader didn’t, and I could sort the details out because of my secret knowledge.

The back story technique goes something like this: Madame Peppercorn is knifed to death at midnight. Mr. Marjoram is found with a knife. Congresswoman Thyme was seen loitering near the scene of the crime. Professor Basil was overheard arguing with Madame Peppercorn the day before the murder. Madame Peppercorn’s daughter, Miss Allspice, has been corresponding with a lawyer about declaring her mother incompetent. Doctor Nutmeg was prescribing sedatives to Madame Peppercorn for her anxiety. Detective Tarragon finds clues galore, details galore. The reader goes to sleep at night counting spices.

But the author knows the following: Mr. Marjoram had the knife to protect himself from a colleague who threatened him; Congresswoman Thyme lost her engagement ring somewhere near Madame Peppercorn’s estate; Madame Peppercorn demanded an acknowledgment from Professor Basil in his forthcoming book about rich old ladies; Miss Allspice is worried about her mother’s recent memory lapses; Doctor Nutmeg murdered Madame Peppercorn because she threatened him with a malpractice suit, which he knows would cost him his license. He visited her, ostensibly to explain his prescriptions, knocked her out with something that leaves the digestive system quickly (Is there such a thing?), and stabbed her to death.

The author can keep it all straight because he knows who’s doing what for which reasons.

I’m not as organized as the above herbal mystery suggests. I toss in clues and details willy-nilly, hoping they’ll come in handy later, but I do make up the back stories - usually. In A Tale of Two Castles I had a mild-mannered character speak harshly at one point. I didn’t really have a reason, simply that it was late at night and he was alone. My editor asked me to tie up that loose thread and fondly told me she was sure I knew the character’s motivation. I didn’t, but at that point the book was written. All the elements were in place, and I found the character’s reason, and it fit.

It fit because writing is magical or the human mind is magical, which I’ve said before on the blog. We plunk in details to enrich our stories, to flesh out our characters, hoping the details will come do double duty and be useful for the plot, but when we write them in we have no idea how that will happen. We keep writing and find, often enough to be remarkable, that this little thing, for example a character’s fascination with a certain painting by Toulouse-Lautrec, turns out to be the key to the entire story.

Some of what I throw in turns out not to belong, and I waste time on plot points that don’t take me the right way, but these come out in revision, and some points were interesting to explore even if ultimately not right. Writing isn’t efficient, at least not when I do it.

A few months ago I bought a book on writing mysteries, then read only part of it because most of the advice offered didn’t apply to fantasy. But I do remember one rule: neither too many suspects or too few. The author suggested at least three and no more than six, a good rule, I think.

In A Tale of Two Castles, suspects abounded because my victim was despised and feared by many. I narrowed the field simply by authorial spotlight. The people I shined my beam on were implicated; the hundreds of others never entered the picture. The mayor, for example, was present when the crime was committed, but I paid no attention to him, so he didn’t become a suspect.

Is this fair? I’m not sure, but without this technique many stories couldn’t be told.

The crime in Beloved Elodie takes place in an isolated spot, so the number of suspects is limited. Still, a few more characters are present than I can use, so these extras’ time on the story stage will be short.

As readers, we anticipate future events, even in a non-mystery. The writer gives us clues that the story characters can’t pick up on. Watch out! we want to scream to the main. This friend is treacherous!

Mystery readers tend to be extra vigilant about clues. I don’t read mysteries with a pencil and paper, taking notes, trying to figure everything out logically, but I do keep an eye out for the likely villain. This habit as a reader is worrying me as a writer. If, for example, I make Ms. Clove an unpleasant character, the reader may think, It will be too obvious if Ms. Clove does it. She can’t be the thief. Then if I make Mr. Turmeric nice, the reader may think, He’s too sweet to endanger all these people; he can’t be the one. But maybe the author will think I won’t suspect Mr. Turmeric, and he really did do it.

If it turns out that Mr. Turmeric is the villain, the reader will think that’s predictable and be disappointed. If Ms. Clove did it, the ending may feel too easy. The solution has to be layered, surprising characters. I’m working on that, but the predictability factor is on my mind.

Here are three prompts:

•    In the mystery of Madame Peppercorn’s murder, write interviews between Detective Tarragon and the suspects. Have the detective discover the meaning behind some of the statements and misunderstand others. (You can pick a different villain if you like.)

•    In 1967 silk magnate Jim Thompson disappeared while visiting a friend in Malaysia and was never seen again. Here’s a link to Jim Thompson on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thompson_%28designer%29. The entry goes into the disappearance in some detail, and you need to read that part in order to do the prompt. Your challenge is to solve the disappearance. If you like, you can turn the circumstances into fantasy.

•    Now for a children’s mystery. You may know the nursery game, “Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?” It’s just an accusation and denial. Turn it into a story and solve the mystery. The trouble, of course, is that the most important evidence gets eaten.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Start-stop, start-stop

2011-09-07T10:48:00.000-04:00

On June 10, 2011, Limegreen wrote, I find that most of the stories I don't finish are because I just start writing. I jot down some random beginning to a story and get a random idea for the story. However, when I do that, I have no idea where the story is going and the plot putters out after a few pages or so. But I also can't seem to find a good way to outline my stories. I either over plot it and have no fun with the story, or I under-plot and my story putters out too. Any advice on how to fix that?

I’m not an outliner either, as I’ve said many times on the blog. Sometimes I attempt outlining, but when I start to write, I realize problems that didn’t occur to me earlier, and the outline doesn’t accommodate them. I suspect serious outliners spend as much time, or almost as much, outlining as actually writing. They anticipate the issues and also manage not to over-plot. Wish I knew how to do it.

Even without outlining, however, you might restrain yourself from starting your story until your idea gels a little. Write notes instead of actual story. Write what ideas interest you in the beginning you have in mind. Consider where you might go with them, loosely, and put your thoughts on paper. Think (in writing) about a few characters who might fit. I also like to think of real people I know whose personalities fascinate me. Can you put any of your fascinating people in, in a fictionalized fashion?

Then ruminate over how the story might end. Write a few alternate endings. You can commit to one if it strikes you as perfect or you can leave them all hanging out there as possibilities. As you write, keep them in mind. One may become more probable as you move along.

I hope you’ve been saving your petered-out beginnings. Go through them and pick one. Tentatively decide that you just didn’t stick with it long enough. Stare at it. See if you can coax a new paragraph out of the void and then another. What do you make of your main character? Ask yourself questions about him. Who are his friends? His family? What’s easy for him? What’s hard? What tempts him into trouble? Can you move the story toward that trouble? Did you start in the right place? Is it possible that your beginning is really the end, and what you have to do is write toward it?

Ask yourself these questions and any others you can dream up. Then go back to your beginning and see if you can make more progress.

Look over your false starts again. Do any belong together? If you combine them, do they move you deeper into your story? If yes, keep going.

You describe your beginnings and ideas as random, but I believe nothing in writing is random. I say in Writing Magic, and I think I’ve said on the blog that writing comes from a very deep place. Even the simplest, lightest stories do. Let’s take "Little Bo Peep" for example. Here we go:

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
and doesn’t know where to find them.
Leave them alone
and they’ll come home,
wagging their tails behind them.

I may not have broken the lines correctly. Sorry. But there’s profundity to spare here. We’ve all felt the desperation of losing something important, could be homework, money, even trust. And we’ve all (I think) had the experience of letting the lost thing go, and the relief of that. Sometimes the loss is never recovered, but sometimes we get whatever it was back, and it seems that the letting go made the return possible. All that out of a nursery rhyme!

Themes repeat, not just story lines. Look at your beginnings once more. Is there something that unites them? If you can’t find a thread, ask your friends or family to read them and suggest a theme. They may see more than one, which is great.

A frequent story thread I see in kids’ stories is a main character being kidnapped. So what might be going on underneath? You may think of more possibilities, but here are two of mine: the victim, Eloise, is wanted, needed, so desired for some quality (her mind, her lovableness, her beautiful voice, her paranormal power) that the kidnappers put themselves at risk to capture her; or Eloise is in danger of being taken over, of losing her will, even her self, to her captors. Or both. So where can the writer take these themes? How can he play them out? Who are her captors? What are their personalities, flaws, virtues?

In both these examples, Bo Peep and the kidnapping, what chokes off the writing may be the underlying depth. It may be scary to explore, in the kidnapping case for instance, what it means for a main character, the one both reader and writer most identify with, to be so valuable. It reminds me of the sequence in the old movie It's a Wonderful Life when the angel shows George Bailey what his town would have been like without him. I love that part, but it also embarrasses me - kind of like imagining your own funeral and how much everyone loved you.

Now I don’t mean that we’re aware in the slightest of feeling frightened when we write our failed beginnings. The idea simply peters out. But if we look at our themes, bring them out in the open, that lurking uneasiness may melt away. What we have turns into mere story and we see where we can go with it.

Contrariwise, ordinarily I resist examining my underlying motifs because I suspect that their subterranean natures give my stories power. But these cut-off beginnings are a special case and make the exploration worthwhile.

Here are some prompts:

•    If you too have trouble staying with your beginnings, review your false starts. Seek out your themes. Ask friends for help. When you have a few ideas, see where they take you. If a particular thread makes your heart race a little, keep going. If your heart persists in beating according to its ordinary rhythm, keep going anyway.

•    Expand Little Bo Peep’s situation, showing her story rather than telling it. How did she lose the sheep? Where does she search? What will the consequences be if the sheep stay lost? Who will be angry? How will Bo Peep suffer? If you like, turn the nursery rhyme into a novel or a series, The Bo Peep Chronicles.

•    Look up nursery rhymes, like "Little Bo Peep." Pick one or two or more and speculate about their deeper meanings. Write down what you think.

•    This familiar lullaby is totally crazy (and creepy), in my opinion:
          Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop,
            When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
            When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
            And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Who put Baby up there? Does somebody want to kill him? Turn this one into a story or a novel. If you want to see my silly interpretation, look for it in my book of mean poems, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It, coming out next March.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Who’s on first? Who’s on third?

2011-08-31T10:57:00.000-04:00

Just to let you all know, I'm copying the latest comments for the blog that came in to the website here rather than with last week's post so they're more likely to be read. Reminder, if you can post directly to the blog, please do because it's easier for me, but if not, I'll keep copying your comments over.

Now here goes with two questions about point of view (POV). On June 3, 2011, Rina wrote, I have a question regarding first-person narrators. In one story I'm writing, I worry about how I can possibly get my narrator to observe everything important to the plot. She's not the most useful or important person. Should I use another narrator, change to third person, or just try to have her hanging around whenever something important happens?

And on June 10, 2011, ToNature wrote, ...I usually write from first person but I decided for a new story I'm working on... that I would try to use third person. My problem is that though I'm writing about a person, my story sounds more like a dry biography than anything. I've read excellent books from 3rd person and have found it just as easy to get to know a character as when an author writes from 1st person, but I'm having trouble doing this myself. Do you have any suggestions?

Choice of POV character is one of the most important story decisions we make, and I sometimes take a long time making it. When I wrote Fairest, I couldn’t get the POV right. I wrote about 300 pages from each of two wrong first-person POVs and another 300 from an omniscient third-person narrator before I found my final first-person POV character.

I wouldn’t wish this 900-page misery on anyone, but sometimes we have to fumble around for a while before we get the POV right. In Beloved Elodie, which I’m working on now, although I know that Elodie is my main first-person narrator, I’ve recently decided to add a few more first-person narrators who will chime in now and then. Part of my purpose is to solve exactly the problem Rina mentions. These other narrators will be able to report on events Elodie can’t be present for. However, until I thought of using other narrators, I didn’t plan for there to be important action at a distance from her.

Additional narrators can not only inform the reader of what takes place elsewhere, they can also provide another perspective. In Ever, the chapters alternate between two main characters. Sometimes they're separated, but often they’re together, and the reader (and I as I wrote) experiences what happens through two different sets of senses.

I’ve mentioned before that I love Terry Pratchett’s novels. He sometimes tells snippets of his story from his villain’s POV. These are usually teasers and don’t tell much, but the reader gets a glimpse into an evil mind, and the tension is heightened.

So using multiple first-person narrators is one way to present plot moments to your reader when your first-person narrator can’t be there. Writing in omniscient third person is another, of course. You can take a stretch of your story and try one way and then another. You need length for this, say fifty pages (maybe less), so you can narrate a few events and see how the perspectives work for you. Testing may bring clarity.

Rina writes that her POV character isn’t the most important in the story, and this is another decision to consider. A narrator who’s on the periphery can be fine. It works in The Great Gatsby and in the Sherlock Holmes tales, for example. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby doesn’t seem reflective enough to tell his own story, and there is the matter of the ending. In the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, author Arthur Conan Doyle may have decided that there would have been no suspense if Holmes himself had narrated. Doyle may even have tried to make Holmes the narrator. He may have attempted third-person, too, and may have torn out chunks of his hair deciding. I’m not a Sherlock Holmes or Arthur Conan Doyle scholar. Maybe he knew what he was doing from the start, or maybe he struggled like the rest of us.

If we choose a peripheral character’s point of view, however, there are challenges. This character may not be as emotionally engaged in what’s happening as the major players are, and she may have less at stake in the outcome. Then the reader will have less at stake too, and we may lose him.

It's likely to be awkward to force our first-person POV character to be on the spot whenever plot developments happen. Luckily there are myriad other ways to keep her informed. If you’re writing a contemporary story, you have snail mail, email, texting, tweeting, cell phones, land-line phones, Facebook and the like, as well as news reports on radio and television. You can even make blogs convey information. If you’re writing a historical novel, you can use period methods: telegrams, messengers, smoke signals, whatever. If your genre is sci-fi or fantasy or the paranormal, the options are legion, and you can invent more. In Ella Enchanted I gave Ella a magic book to clue her in about events she wouldn’t know of otherwise.

A character’s absence can ratchet up the tension. Say for example that Marcus is under house arrest. His cell phone and computer have been confiscated. He found out just before his detention that his friend Michael is a spy. He needs to warn his pal and secret cellmate Millicent, who is to meet Michael this afternoon - but he can't. Will she reveal secrets Michael shouldn’t know? Aaa! She’ll endanger everyone and their cause. Marcus worries and the reader worries.

What’s more, in terms of tension, the main character can question the reliability of the intelligence he’s getting. Marcus sends a verbal message to Millicent through his neighbor’s young daughter. The daughter returns with a note from Millicent. Marcus is surprised that Millicent would put anything in writing. He wonders if the daughter actually delivered his message or delivered it to the right person, Millicent.

ToNature, I’m assuming you’ve chosen third person for plot reasons. You might try switching back to first person for the beginning of your story so you can get into your main character’s thoughts and emotions. Then, when you’re comfortable in her skin, translate what you’ve got back into third and keep going. If the writing gets stiff again, revert to first. If you have to, you can write a whole book in this back-and-forth way.

Or, you might pick a different first-person narrator, as I suggested before. Try choosing one who feels strongly about your main, an interesting character in his own right who can bring your story to life with his particular take on your main.

It’s also possible to shift between a first and third-person narrative. For those parts when your main can tell her own tale, let her. But when she can’t, have your third-person narrator step in - or a different first-person character.

Here are three prompts:

∙    Read or reread a Sherlock Holmes story; some are short. Tell it from Sherlock Holmes’s POV. He has a strange mind and is probably not a linear thinker. Reflect his thought process through his voice. What does he think of Dr. Watson?

∙    Continue the story of Marcus, stuck in his house while events swirl around him. Help him find out what’s going on and influence events.

∙    Tell the fairy tale Snow White from several points of view: the evil queen, the hunter, a dwarf, Snow White’s father, her pet gerbil, as reported in the castle gazette. Or pick a different fairy tale and other points of view. As I suggested before, rewrite a swath of one of your stories from several POVs.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Name Dropping

2011-08-24T10:26:00.000-04:00

On May 20, 2011, Jill wrote, ....Is it possible to say a name too many times? One of my biggest pet peeves is when writers use the same word too many times, so I am really conscientious about it when I am writing. I was just now writing and realized I was using one of the character's names a lot to avoid using the pronoun too many times. How can I avoid this?

Then bluekiwii wrote, @ Jill
    I read somewhere that words such as "she", "he", or "I" tend to be invisible--which means that when readers read them they don't tend to notice them. I normally use names when using the pronouns would be too confusing (like when two women are having a conversation). Does this help? It had never occurred to me that saying a name too many times would be annoying to read, but, on reflection, I agree. It will also be a useful device to use on a specific character to make him appear obnoxious.

And Jenna Royal wrote, I definitely have a problem with using he, she and it. I know they become invisible to the reader, but as the writer they really bother me. I find myself inserting the words "the girl" or "the boy" or "the woman" a lot, which I don't really like either. It's not the right voice for my stories, and it's kind of jarring. I guess I will just have to get brave and use the pronouns. :)

I googled but couldn’t find anything I could quote about the invisibility of pronouns. I did find a blog post in which the author opined that good writing is invisible, that the reader should be so lost in a story that the words disappear, which I half agree with and half don’t. When the writing is stunning I am sometimes aware of it even if I’m engrossed in the action.

By stunning I don’t mean the author is using exalted language. The words may be everyday, but they’re perfect in the moment. A character says something simple but surprising, exactly what she would say. A detail is revealed in a character’s bedroom, and it’s the right detail. There are many, but a few young adult and children’s book writers who jump to mind for great writing are Sharon Creech, Laurie Halse Anderson, Kimberly Willis Holt, and of course my friend Joan Abelove.

If I reread a book, when I’m no longer so worried about what’s going to happen next, then I’m likely to notice the writing.

I also notice when the writing is annoying, and annoying sometimes means confusing, which can happen in a scene when I don’t know which character a pronoun represents.

Referring to characters often feels awkward to me, too. When I have a character who has a title and a name, I vary their use, referring to him sometimes by name, sometimes by title, and, when it’s clear, by pronoun. In A Tale of Two Castles the ogre’s name is Count Jonty Um. I refer to him by turns as he, the count, His Lordship, and, at the beginning of the novel when I want to establish firmly what he is in the reader’s mind, the ogre. Often doing this feels mechanical, and I don’t know whether or not it reads smoothly. But I don’t like the alternative of sticking to just the name and pronoun. I guess I agree that a name can be overused.

And, as I think about it, I do believe the pronoun disappears, which may make it the best choice as long as you’re sure the reader will understand who is meant and isn’t going to forget the character’s name.

The charm of writing scenes with the dragon Meenore is that IT keeps ITs gender secret, so it’s an IT. Ordinarily in scenes involving three characters there have to be two of one sex, but if Meenore is among them and there’s a male and a female, no problem! I capitalize IT because, while there’s no danger of mixing IT up with another character, a small i t IT can be confused with a chair or a rock!

First person has a similar effect. The narrator is I, and so you can include a male and female character in a scene without activating the pronoun problem. With Elodie as I and Masteress Meenore as IT, I can crowd in two more characters and be home free.

Of course, we don’t structure our scenes around pronouns. When a scene calls for two or more same-sex characters, we write it with clarity and name repetition as needed. Story needs trump pronoun considerations.

I question using "the woman," "the man," which Jenna Royal wondered about. I think those expressions may distance the reader from the story. Naturally you can do it if distancing is the effect you’re going for, which is valid. But if you’re not, and you want the reader fully engaged, I say repetition of name or pronoun is the lesser evil.

What I really dislike, especially in a story for kids, is when a writer alternates the name and the pronoun with "the little girl” or “the little boy.” The reader, presumably, is a little boy or girl, and the description seems condescending as well as distancing. In my opinion, the writer of a children’s book should be inhabiting a child’s point of view and those terms make me doubt that’s happening.

Pity the poor Finns, who have no masculine or feminine pronouns! Everyone is it. I spoke to a person at a Finnish publisher who told me that translators from other languages do resort to “the man” or “the woman” for clarity. And I don’t know what happens in languages where objects have gender. La plume (the pen) is female in French, and the pronoun is elle, same as for a woman. Oy!

In dialogue, it’s nice when you can eliminate the need for names or pronouns entirely here and there. I discuss this a little on the blog and even more in Writing Magic. If the reader knows who’s speaking, no identification is needed. In A Tale of Two Castles, for example, the princess says La! a lot, and she’s the only one who does it. Another character characteristically says By thunder, and he’s the only one who does it. When the reader sees La! he knows the speaker is Princess Renn, and when he sees By thunder, he knows it’s the cook, Jak. In the Disney Fairies books the character Rani finishes people’s sentences for them. When the reader sees this, he knows the speaker is Rani. Of course, you can overdo this. If Jak said By thunder every time he spoke, the reader soon would wish lightning would strike him.

Melissa asked what I’ve been doing at my summer workshop, and I’ll answer in a future post, but the first of these prompts was adapted from prompts I gave the kids. Write your stories or scenes in third person and go on at least long enough to have to make decisions about repeating names and using pronouns. (Naturally, if you like, finish the story or the novel or the series.)

•    Carl, who doesn’t like to share, possesses something that’s very precious to him, something that can have magical properties - or not. You decide. His three friends, Tomasina, Max, and Wendy, want it. The four are at a local park. Write what happens, including action and dialogue.

•    Beauty is visiting home from her Beast’s castle. As in the fairytale, her older sisters are jealous and want to keep her from returning. The three are in their father’s modest parlor. Write what happens.

•    Three characters are around a campfire, conspiring to overthrow their king. The discussion isn’t going well, and one threatens to leave their group. They also hear noises in the woods. Write what happens.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Disappearing secondaries

2011-08-17T10:40:00.000-04:00

On May 13, 2011, bluekiwii wrote, ....I often have the problem that I concentrate solely on one character as I do a scene and the result is that I often neglect the other characters in the scene --making his/her speech patterns, overall behavior, and, well, "character" inconsistent. This often happens because I'm so in tune with the main character's mind-set, that I sort of forget the mind processes that the characters reacting to the MC have. How do guys avoid this?

In A Tale of Two Castles, the ogre Count Jonty Um is usually with his dog Nesspa, who’s important to the story, but, since this isn’t a talking-animal tale, he doesn’t speak. As I wrote I tended to forget the dog was there, and the reader would forget, too. Then, when he comes into the action, the reader has to leave the story for a moment to think, Nesspa? Then the reader may page back to make sure Nesspa was in the scene to begin with. By that time the reader is feeling sleepy or hungry or checking to see what her own dog is doing, and the book is closed to be picked up later or never again.

The solution was to cause a refrain to go through my head as I wrote and as I revised. Where’s Nesspa? When did I mention him last? Put him in. Put him in. Put him in.

Since he doesn’t talk, I needed other ways to bring him forward. Count Jonty Um, who loves him, could look around for him. Elodie, my POV character, could think about him or make sure he isn’t putting his nose where his nose shouldn’t be. Somebody could give him a command or say something else to him. Or he could bark, snuffle, whine, put his head in somebody’s lap. When you write this kind of situation, your mentions can and probably should be short, but a page shouldn’t go by without one.

In Beloved Elodie which I'm working on now, Count Jonty Um himself is the problem. In A Tale of Two Castles, he’s central to the action so he never fades into the background. But in the new book he’s not the focus and he does tend to disappear, for all he’s eleven feet tall. Trouble is, he’s shy and not talkative; he can speak, but he rarely does. I have to treat him almost as if he’s a dog, give him actions, have Elodie think about him, have a character speak to him or ask him a question, forcing him to speak.

I’ve decided to intersperse chapters here and there from other characters’ POV, including Count Jonty Um’s. One reason for doing this is to bring the ogre more to the fore. If I’m writing from his POV the reader hears his thoughts.

If you neglect characters in a scene, you keep happy accidents from happening. Let’s say the star of a scene is Harlin, who, along with his friends, Jana and Sylvie, is in the wizard Florian’s stronghold and meeting the wizard for the first time. Florian has been causing havoc in the friends’ home town: tornados, spontaneous fires, rampaging bears on Main Street. The friends have designated Harlin as their spokesman. The temptation will be to focus on Harlin and the wizard, but if we do, we may not give Jana a chance to surreptitiously lift the edge of a wall hanging and see a secret door behind it. We may not be aware that Sylvie thinks Harlin is bungling things, and she’s getting angrier and angrier until she has to burst into speech. Maybe she provokes Florian into revealing something he doesn’t want to tell.

Part of the solution to bringing your secondaries in is mechanical, merely a matter of reminding yourself until it’s automatic that there are four people in the scene, and all of them have thoughts, feelings, actions. Although you don’t have direct access to your non-POV characters’ thoughts and feelings, your main can guess at them or they can express them in dialogue and action. So, get a reminder refrain going as I do, both while you write and as you revise.What's doing with my secondaries? What are they doing, thinking, feeling, saying?

The rest of the solution is to ask yourself questions about your subordinate characters, to get interested in them in this scene in which they aren’t the most important actors. How does Jana react when Florian pulls out his wand? Why is Sylvie crossing her arms? What got Florian muttering in a language nobody else understands?

You might try recasting your scene, just in your notes, not in the ongoing story. In my example, I’d make Jana the main for the purposes of the exercise. She might be the one to speak to Florian, or, Harlin may still be the speaker, but the scene is told by Jana, focusing on what she notices and thinks and feels. Then you can write it again from Sylvie’s POV and Florian’s. When you have all four versions, you can roll them together, probably omitting a lot from Jana, Sylvie, and Florian, but still coming up with a more rounded whole.

And, as always, it can be helpful to have someone read your scene and say if your secondary characters seem to disappear and where that happens. This someone may also see opportunities to show them off.

Alas, I have the opposite problem, a tendency to let my secondaries steal the show. In Fairest, for example, I became fascinated by Queen Ivi and Skulni, the being in the mirror. I wrote scenes for them that had no place in the story, and when they were in scenes with my main, Aza, I gave them too much attention. The manuscript called forth an eighteen page, single-spaced letter from my editor, much of which was about the pages and entire chapters I should cut - sections I had spent months writing.

The downside, of course, is the wasted time and energy. The upside is that I got to know these intriguing characters, and they live for me outside the book that got published. (Too bad for the reader!) Often my side characters are even more interesting than my main, who has to be sympathetic and normal enough for the reader to identify with. There’s no restriction on secondary characters; they can be wild, eccentric, downright peculiar. If you let them breathe and expand in the scenes they’re in, they may dazzle you with their exotic natures.

Here are a few prompts:

•    Write four versions of the scene with Harlin, Jana, Sylvie, and wizard Florian, one from the POV of each. Then write a composite scene in third-person omniscient. Decide which you like best. Rewrite your pick so that your main is dominant but the others also shine.

•    Write the story “Snow-White and Rose-Red” from the point of view of the bear. Then write it from the point of view of the dwarf. (If you don’t know this fairy tale, I found a synopsis on Wikipedia.)

•    Write the scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth first meets Wickham from Wickham’s POV. And/or write the dance scene in which Elizabeth first meets Darcy from the POV of Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte. And/or pick a scene in a different book you know well and write it from the POV of any side character.

Have fun, and save what you write!

New characters with history

2011-08-10T11:12:00.000-04:00

On May 6, 2011, Monica Mari wrote, ....I spend pages introducing characters, and am trying to figure out a way around it. And I have a few events that take place before some of my characters are introduced, and so it seems to come out of nowhere. Would you have any advice?

I asked for clarification, and Monica Mari answered, ....I end up introducing semi-main characters halfway through my stories, and they end up playing large roles later on, but for things to go as planned, they must be introduced after events that occur beforehand. Friends and family have told me that they are a bit confused with the suddenly introduced characters, as they appear out of nowhere as they were not introduced beforehand, and then they became important to large points in the plot.

This sounds like two questions, one about introducing characters and the second about plot. My post of 6/29/11 relates to the first, so you may want to revisit it. I’ll add only a few new thoughts:

When we meet people in real life we don’t get the benefit of introductory material, which might come in handy. A friend, let’s call her Justine, just today told me how a friend of hers, let’s call her Irma, made it hard for Justine to get necessary dental work. Justine couldn’t understand why Irma was being unhelpful (Justine needed help) until Irma confessed a childhood dental trauma. Ah. But if they hadn’t been friends the confession might never have been made and Irma’s actions would have remained a mystery.

In fiction we usually do include the confession because we want our characters’ behavior to be believable. But generally we don’t jump in with the secret information instantly. We wait and let the characters reveal themselves just as people do, through action, dialogue, maybe appearance, and, in the case of main characters, thoughts. Lengthy introductions hold up the story.

If your characters need lengthy introductions - I’m just guessing - your plot may be over-complicated or there may be a lot of back story that you’re trying to bring in. If the back story is the problem, you may want to start your story at an earlier time and let the back story be part of the actual tale.

I tend to over-complicate. My too energetic imagination waves new ideas in front of my mind’s eye, and I start weaving them in. Often they work, but sometimes they don’t. I told one of my versions of Beloved Elodie to my husband, and his eyes rolled back in his head. I wound up starting over.

Not that you have to go back to the beginning. But you may want to think about what’s important to your story and how you can streamline. It should be possible to summarize your plot briefly. Let’s try this on a few classics. Hamlet: A just, ethical, and feeling prince suspects his mother and uncle of murdering his father and can’t decide how to act. Pride and Prejudice: A single young woman of sense and decided opinions is wooed by a wealthy young man with sense and deep feelings but an exaggerated idea of his importance. Jane Eyre: An unloved child grows into a young woman with the inner resources to fall in love and yet resist the man she adores.

You may quarrel with my thumbnail sketches and make up your own, but I’d guess yours will be short too, although each of these works is rich with detail and wide in scope. Pride and Prejudice, for example, tells us about marriage and the relation between the sexes in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it's a great story as well.

I suspect this over-complication causes the confusion when you introduce important characters well into a story. Let’s suppose there’s a plot against King Philip the Great, who is despotic and erratic. Five conspirators, important characters in this story, meet weekly to conspire. The reader has met them all. However, there’s Sorceress Moira who cast a spell on the king fifteen years ago to make him a tyrant. The conspirators don’t know about her, but she has to come into the story later on.

That seems hard to me. I’d want to start with the sorceress, maybe show her in a prologue (although child readers often skip prologues) or introduce a legend about her to lay the groundwork. for her appearance. The characters who don’t know about her can continue not to know, but the reader has been warned. If the reader knows and the main characters don’t, you’ve got delightful tension going, and when she finally shows up, the reader won't be confused.

Monica Mari, I’m hoping this post got at your question. If not, please ask follow-up questions.

Here are three back story prompts:

•    Let’s take the tyrannical king situation. Not only is there a sorceress lurking, one of the conspirators, Alphonso, is concealing from the others that he was once imprisoned in the king’s dungeons and would do anything to avoid another imprisonment. Another, Gretchen, hasn’t told anyone that she and the king’s nephew are in love. Write a meeting of the plotters in which the back stories of the two are revealed to the reader but not to the other members of the cabal. Write a scene in which Gretchen confesses her secret to Alphonso. How does he use this information? Write the scene that follows.

•    Romance is a great place for secret back stories. Danny is drawn to Lana, a singer, although Danny’s mother, also a singer, deserted the family when he was six. Lena writes her own songs, which she bases on her romantic experiences. Danny may be material for her next CD. He’s heard her sing about her last boyfriend but not about the one before that and the one before that. Their first date went marvelously well. Write their second date.

•    Back stories can get very psychological. This is a memory prompt. I thought I’d written about my own example here on the blog, but I can’t find it on a search. The incident appears in an anthology called Thanks and Giving edited by Marlo Thomas, and here’s a quick summary: I was sick on my third or fourth birthday, nothing serious but I was running a high fever. My grandfather, out of pity, bought me an expensive, beautiful, not at all cuddly, hard bisque doll, very old-fashioned. My parents gave it to me along with a hundred warnings about how I’d better take wonderful care of it or I’d be a very bad girl, which caused me to instantly hate it. When I got well I destroyed it, which I felt guilty about but justified with the belief that a gift was a gift and they should have given the doll to me without all the restrictions and then I might have treated it more respectfully. I didn’t understand what was behind my parents' warnings until many many years later when I began to write for children and was casting about for topics. I remembered this birthday, and understanding came. My grandfather was very poor and buying this doll must have forced him to scrimp in other ways. My mother would have been touched and would have wanted me to treat his gift with reverence that equaled his generosity. My father, the orphan, probably never had a toy of his own. He would have been bowled over by the magnificence of this treasure, and he would have wanted me to appreciate my good fortune. The back story became clear decades after the event. So the prompt is to think of an incident in your own life when people acted incomprehensibly based on factors you had no knowledge of, which you still may not understand. Write it down and then fictionalize it a little or a lot. If you still don't know the back story, invent one. Write a scene or a story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Short and Young

2011-08-03T11:42:00.000-04:00

On May 6, 2011, welliewalks wrote, How do you go about writing short stories or children's books (children as in ages 7-9)? I like writing loooong stories and novellas because I can take a while to develop (and “solve” it) the plot and add more details. I feel like short stories can't have a complicated plot because it would take longer to write them. Does anyone have advice on writing short stories and kid's books?

And Emma wrote, I’m writing what I thought was a children’s book, and I’m realizing it may not be for the age I expected. It involves things like court trials, attacks from other nations, espionage, etc., granted the good guys always win. How much is too much for little kids? How much can the different age groups handle?

And more from Emma (or from a different Emma) two months later: I got a book about publishing with 30 pages of writing contests for amateur novelists, and it's great, except for one thing; almost all of them must be short stories, and all of them have word limits, but I’m a very long-winded writer. How do you deal with word limits, and what details should you cut?
In answer to Emma’s second question, Charlotte wrote, I thought I'd weigh in on the word limits thing because I have had some experience in this. I've done several 500-word stories for the sake of writing contests, and I also had word limits on a lot of the scholarship essays I did the year I graduated high school. The thing about working with a limit is that every word and every sentence counts a lot more than in a longer piece. You're free to get picky with your adjectives, because you want to get ones that give you a strong sense of the setting in place of a long description. I find that my words are a lot more vivid in my short stuff, probably because with something that small, you can easily go over it about 300 times before submitting it, combing out the unnecessary words, changing adjectives around and changing them back, etc., etc. Always keep in mind exactly how many words you're at and how many you have left--Microsoft Word will tell you, and if you print your story off (I do a lot of my best editing manually), write the number at the top and keep track of what you take off and what you add on. Knowing what your budget is can help you decide what you can keep and what needs to go.

Along that same line, the plot itself obviously can't be that long in a short story. Judging by a lot of the short stories I've read in school, etc., this is more of a genre that focuses on one event or emotion or aspect of life, rather than being a series of events like a novel is. There are a million and one different ways of writing a short story where all the action consists of the protagonist making herself a cup of coffee, or walking around her house, etc. It's what's going through her mind that makes it great. What I guess I'm trying to say is that short stories are more mood-driven than plot-driven--that's why it's a different genre--so the details that don't contribute well to the mood and theme of the story are the ones to drop.

Excellent advice!

If you like inventing many scenes and building a story slowly, the short story may not be for you, but it’s worthwhile to try something new. As for detail, although you have fewer scenes, you still want richness so the reader can enter them fully, and you still want to portray rounded characters. You’ll need setting, but maybe not more than one or two, and dialogue, and thoughts, and action, all the facets of longer fiction. You can be long-winded in a short-winded way.

Along the same lines as Charlotte’s comment, trimming excess words, sentences, paragraphs, pages tightens the work. When I revise even a novel, I delete. And when I return to one of my books for one reason or another after it’s been published, I always find more I wish I had cut. When I go over the blog post before moving ahead with it, I use my knife. If writing short stories makes you a more concise writer of long stories, that’s a big benefit.

Although I don’t read many short stories, I’ve had a few published in anthologies for children anyway. In spite of my bad example, I’d suggest you read short stories, a bunch of them, to get a feel for their scope and economy. If you have a word limit, like 500 words, which is very short, I’d read a collection or two of short short stories (which there are). By reading you gain an intuitive sense of the genre, which will come through when you start writing.

My stories have ranged from ten to twenty-five pages, which is much more than 500 words. However, I’ve written narrative poems in fewer words, and in them, as in the short story, compression is key. One poem (not written for children) is about a modern-day Cassandra attempting and failing to warn a class of fourth graders about the troubles that lie ahead for each of them. The reader sees them listen and believe and then forget the moment they leave Cassandra’s tent at the state fair. That’s it, but the reader knows that each child will suffer as Cassandra said and that Cassandra suffers already from knowing she couldn’t help. The poem is 300 words long, and a short story could do the same thing, and so could a 600-page novel. In the novel we would see the dismal future played out for each child, but that isn’t necessary to convey the meaning.

My poem centers on an idea, but it could focus on a character, which many short stories do. There will be fewer characters in a short story than a novel, but they should still be well developed.

An important aspect of many novels (discussed in a long-ago blog) is character change or failure to change, a feature shared by many short stories. In the poem I described, the characters fail to change, which makes it sad. My novels focus outward on the world, usually a fantasy world. My short stories have a narrow field of vision, family or a few friends. In one, for example, the main character comes to understand and accept that her parents are more involved with her sister, who constantly creates problems. All that happens is that the main gets the lead in the class play and the sister threatens to change religions. In a single scene the reader sees the family in action.

An analogy might be an oven (the novel) versus a pressure cooker (the short story). In the oven the ingredients cook gradually while in the pressure cooker the boiling point is unnaturally high and comes fast. Another analogy might be a house versus a tree. In a house, many posts support the weight of the roof; with a tree, a single trunk holds up the canopy of leaves. In the novel, many incidents build to the climax; in the short story very few, and each one must bear a lot of weight.

On to writing for children. A reference book you may want to read is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books by Harold Underdown, which, alas, didn’t exist when I got started. The book I read and went back to again and again is How to Write a Children’s Book and Get It Published by Barbara Seuling. Both are excellent.

I also read tons of kids’ books, including the books in the Newbery bookcase at my library and the new novels that were generating a lot of buzz. Later, when my editor asked me to write The Princess Tales as chapter books she sent me sample chapter books to read and study. (My favorite was Is He a Girl? in the Marvin Redpost series by Louis Sachar of Holes fame.) If you want to write for seven-to-nine year olds, read the books they’re reading, which covers a lot of ground. Some seven-year-olds read Ella Enchanted and Harry Potter. Some nine-year-olds read Junie B. Jones.

My education as a children’s book writer also included taking classes, joining critique groups, attending conferences, and joining the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. It was a process that took nine years to earn me my first book acceptance.

Some people - no one reading this blog, I’m sure - think writing for kids is easy. These people, I believe, have forgotten what it was like to be a child, how complicated it was, maybe more complicated than being an adult. Kids have to negotiate at least two universes, the world of adults and the world of their peers and possibly a third, the world of school, and all the while learning at an incredible pace, learning not only school subjects but the everyday science of being human.

Because of this complexity, children can handle the kinds of topics Emma asks about, such as “court trials, attacks from other nations, espionage, etc.” In fact, many kids are drawn to high drama and like to watch stories played out on a grand stage. I think that’s why children enjoy fairy tales and fantasy, because the events are huge, involving royalty and kingdoms, love, jealousy, rage, death.

The biggest difference between children’s and adult literature is the age of the main character. In a kids’ book the main will be a child, usually a little older than the reader. Occasionally the main will be an animal. Of course the reason is that the child can more easily identify with a child than with an adult.

I don’t mean to minimize the differences between books for children and books for grownups. I’m teaching my summer workshop for kids now, and each week I’ve been reading a poem aloud to them. It’s been a challenge to find the right poem, not because of subject matter but because of tone and sophistication and sometimes language. If I say that children can’t handle sophistication, it wouldn’t be entirely true, but we have to develop an ear for what succeeds and what doesn’t, which we do by reading and by writing and trying what we’ve written out on writing buddies and friends. Not necessarily by trying our stuff out on kids, who may be too polite, who may not know what standards to apply, who may be too forgiving.

And there are differences between writing for teens and writing for younger children. You can go darker with teens and more psychological. I’m distinguishing between dark and sad. Sad works with the elementary school crowd, dark not so much. Young kids understand the death of Bambi’s mother in Bambi, while the meaning of Hamlet’s indecisiveness and eventual death might elude them.

As for psychological, I once asked my workshop students to write a self-portrait, not only of their looks but also of their inner qualities. Those over eleven loved the assignment; those under couldn’t do it, and I had them write a portrait of a best friend instead, and that they enjoyed. Older kids like to look within. Younger children focus out.

Sometimes the author herself doesn’t know who her proper audience is. When my friend Suzanne Fisher Staples wrote her first novel, the wonderful Shabanu, she thought she was writing for adults until her editor told her she wasn’t, and the book went on to win a Newbery honor in 1989. Suzanne isn’t the only writer to whom this has happened. I've heard similar stories, and the people at HarperCollins thinks my book of mean poems, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It (out next March), may appeal to adults as well as to children, but I thought I was writing it strictly for kids. So we can be surprised.

These are the prompts I was given (and remember) for the short stories I’ve written. See what you do with them:

•    A character on the edge (not specified what kind of edge).

•    A brush with religion.

•    A mystery or mysterious story.

•    A wish.

•    A grandmother story.

I was also asked to write a story about menstruation. I came up empty on that one, but you may have more success.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Appearances

2011-07-27T13:44:00.000-04:00

A few comments came in late on the last post, so you may want to check them out before or after you read this.

On April 29, 2011, Jill wrote, Shakespeare would spell words differently or make up words to make his sentences sound "pretty" and Daphne du Maurier never said the name of the narrator in Rebecca.
    I have a story and I never want to describe her appearance because I want anyone to see themselves as her. With this and the other examples, do you like it or not? Who else did things like this?

I don’t know examples of works in which the main character isn’t described although there may be many. In some genres - romance, for example - physical description is pretty much required. Mystery as well, I think.

As a reader, I’m not sure. I’m reading a novel now, The Good Son by Craig Nova (high school and above), which is told from alternating first-person POVs. I don’t remember if one of the POV characters is described, but I’ve fashioned a mental picture of him anyway. He’s a he, obviously, and I still manage to identify with him. So far I find him the most sympathetic character in the book.

Jill, I’m not sure if you’re making a distinction between identifying with a character and seeing oneself as that character. The first can happen, usually should happen, the second can’t and probably shouldn’t.

One of my favorite books when I was growing up was Anne of Green Gables, and one of my favorite moments was when Anne breaks her writing slate over Gilbert Blythe's head . I identified totally with Anne, but in real life I never would have hit anyone’s pate with anything, regardless of the provocation. My delight in Anne’s defiant act was complete. She surprised me and I loved her for it, but I couldn’t have seen myself as her.

We go to books, in part, for alternatives to our narrow selves. After reading Anne of Green Gables, even if I still couldn’t avenge myself physically, maybe I could figure out a satisfying retort to an offense. At the least, I could take pleasure in imagining what Anne would have done.

As we write, our characters make decisions. They can’t be Everyman because each man acts differently. As a reader - and a writer - I slip inside selves other than my own. My characters behave differently from me.

In most cases, I guess I’d rather have physical description than not. We’re physical beings and we form impressions of people, rightly or wrongly, based in part by looks. And other people respond to us on the same basis. I’m very short, four-foot-ten-and-a-half, to be precise. This perspective affects me profoundly. My life probably would have been different, for better or worse, if I had seven more inches. I like being short, but I wouldn’t pass up a chance to be tall for a day, just for the experience. When I make a character tall I have to think about that decision and be aware of it as I write.

Long ago on the blog I mentioned a memoir, Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy (also high school and above), who had some sort of cancer as a child that left her face deformed. It’s a book of suffering. Appearance, like it or not, is important.

I read Autobiography of a Face when I was preparing to write Fairest, in which Aza, my heroine, is ugly. There would be no story without her ugliness. Still, readers identify with her, and we identify with Lucy Grealy, too. Appearance, no matter what it is, doesn’t stop us from entering an emotionally appealing character.

Contrariwise, in an early draft of A Tale of Two Castles I gave Elodie a big nose. My editor asked me to take the nose out and I did. She felt it would be off-putting to the reader. And maybe she was right. Unlike Aza’s ugliness in Fairest, Elodie’s nose had nothing to do with her story. Not, I hasten to say, that a big nose is ugly. It’s a strong feature, which is what I wanted for Elodie.

What I don’t care for is a description of the main character that’s plopped into a first chapter because the author feels it has to be there. So the main is made to look in a mirror. In first person she’s forced to assess herself. In third, we’re just told what she sees.

I don’t think there’s a rush. You can get to it in a later chapter and wait for a spot where the description belongs. I’m proud of the way I did it in A Tale of Two Castles. Elodie is considering buying a cap from a mending mistress, who tells her ingratiatingly that she’s pretty. And she thinks:

    I wished I could subtract her lie from the price of the cap. I wasn’t pretty. My eyes were too big, my eyebrows too thick, my mouth too wide, my jaw too pronounced. But if you were in an audience, even standing behind the benches, far from the mansion stage, you would still be able to make out my features.

That’s it. I drop in a little earlier that she’s tall for her age. We don’t have to include a great deal of detail if the story doesn’t call for it. In Fairest, which does call for it, Aza’s brother first calls attention to her looks by calling her ugly, and she often thinks about her appearance, so the reader can visualize her clearly and see her the way I want her to be seen. But in many stories, we can give a few hints and let the reader fill in the rest.

In both examples from my books, a comment by another character introduces the description. You can use this technique too. For instance, Neil, not known for his tact, could tell Marisa she resembles a kindergartner's stick figure drawing. Warren could pipe in, "Yeah, and your hair looks like you were electrocuted." Kind Tomasina might say, "I wish I had curly hair, and I'd die for hazel eyes." That's probably enough.

But there are other ways. In The Wish the hook is simple. Wilma thinks about her name, describes herself in thoughts as looking like a Wilma, then goes on to explain what she means by that. In Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, an old photograph leads into the description. You can use action. A character can be especially suited or not suited for an activity, like a sport or a role in a play, by virtue of his looks.

As a reader, I rarely think about the main character’s description once it’s given. I’m inside him, peering out, remembering how he looks only when the subject comes up in thoughts, action, or dialogue.

A few prompts:

•    Look at a few of your favorite books and notice how the author handled introducing the main character’s appearance and how detailed or sketchy these descriptions are. Then revisit some of your own old stories and think about how you did it. If you decide you might have been more inventive and you’re in a revising mood, try a new way or more than one.

•    Leonard is at a Halloween party dressed in a spacesuit. Without removing a bit of his costume, find a way to describe him. Find another way. And another.

•    Carlie Werme, Tony Foote, and Blair Bratt are each teased unmercifully by their classmates about their names, and each responds differently to the teasing. Write a scene for each one, showing how he or she reacts. If you like, bring them together as an alliance and write what happens. Write the first meeting of their club and cause an argument to break out. Show how each one argues. Keep going. See what happens when they confront their tormentors as a group, but don’t let their individuality get lost in their united front.

Have fun and save what you write!

Lost in Revision

2011-07-20T09:24:00.000-04:00

On April 28, 2011, Grace wrote, ....So I have a manuscript that I kind of edited to death- meaning I wrote it and I edited it so it was better but I got so obsessed with making it *perfect* that I kind of sucked the life out of it. Now it's just listless words meandering across the page that are all painstakingly grammatically correct and technically *perfect* but it has no life, it has no flare, no sparkle. This breaks my heart to make me think I killed the very thing I wanted to improve, so do you have any suggestions about how to raise my manuscript from the dead? Do you know how I can pump some life back into it and make it my own again instead of it sounding like something any generic computer program could have thought up? Any ideas about how to change my manuscript from being flat stiff sentences to something worth reading again would be most welcome...

And in response April wrote, ....it sounds like you need to back away from the manuscript for a while. Don't look at it for a few months (or possibly longer). Work on something else while it sits. When you go back to it, you'll be able to look at it with fresh eyes and make more objective judgements.
I agree with April. Clarity comes with time and distance. You may like your story better when you go back to it. You may even think it has plenty of life, and what were you worried about? But if not, you may see the places that you flattened in revision. Then you may know what to do to resuscitate the prose.

If you have your old drafts, you can look at them too and pick back up the bits the bits that used to make your blood dance.

Long ago, when I was unpublished and writing only picture books because I was afraid to try a novel, one of my manuscripts interested several editors, who asked for revision. One of them said he wanted my story to be more “warmly told” and suggested I read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka. I did, and I loved it, and I knew exactly what the editor wanted, and I rewrote my story, and he hated it and wouldn’t look at further revisions. Other editors wanted other changes, and gradually my story died. What was good in it vanished beyond recovery and I never got it back. So, sadly, this can happen.

But, today, I could have another go at it. If I wanted to return to the story, I would look at my old versions (if I could find them after about twenty years and many computers). If they didn't show me what to do, I’d just start again from scratch, working from my original idea.

You might succeed with the same strategy. Think about the basic idea and what excited you about it. If you’re like me you’ll write some notes on what you used to love and how to approach the story this time. Most likely you’ve learned things in the many rewrites, and your discoveries will fuel the new beginning.

When I used to paint, this approach worked for me. A painting failed, but I loved what I was going for. I might have been in a class and working from a model. In my first attempt I painted her proportions all wrong, but when I started over I found that I’d learned from my mistakes and she materialized correctly on my canvas this time. Or I was working from a still life or a photograph. A second attempt usually paid off.

But, you may be wailing, I wrote 300 pages!

There may be efficient writers but I’m not one of them. I toss hundreds of pages, which I’ve mentioned many times on the blog. Well, last weekend I found comforting company. The novelist Craig Nova spoke at a conference where I was the kids’ book workshop leader. He talked of his endless rewrites and swore that he’s dumped 100,000 pages during his writing life. That’s thousand with a T. He’s not a young man, but he’s not Methuselah either. And he has twelve novels for adults under his belt.

Craig Nova kept track of those 100,000 pages, and I keep a rough tally of the pages I throw out for each book. I struggled with them as much as I did with the pages that succeeded, so I might as well be proud of them. And you might as well, too.

Goes without saying (but I’ll say it) that you may find it helpful to ask a writing buddy or trusted person to look at your moribund story. She may see where you went wrong better than you can. And she may love parts of your story, which may rekindle your affection for them.

I doubt the problem lies in excellent grammar or technical perfection. We want proper grammar, punctuation, capitalization (unless we have a powerful story reason for ignoring the rules). We don’t want too much word repetition or monotonous sentence structure. Attention to the basics doesn’t suck the life out of a story. It adds to the liveliness of our prose.

You can ask yourself some questions to gain an understanding of how your story floundered:

Why was perfection so important this time? The answer might lie outside the story, in criticism you’d received or a hundred other things. Or you loved your idea so much, more than anything else you ever tried, that you tensed up.

Did you edit out the characters’ thoughts and feelings? This might be the first place to look. Without emotion and an inner life a story will be bloodless.

Is there something inside the story that you were afraid of? If you figure that out, you may decide you don’t want to tackle it right now. Or you may find that identifying the scary element pulls you in and the story catches fire again.

Are there parts that might offend someone? Did you tiptoe around those aspects of the story even without realizing it?

When you answer these questions you may be able to reenter your story with enthusiasm.

The subject of revival sent my mind off to myths and old stories, so here are three prompts:

∙    One of my favorite myths is “Pygmalion and Galatea,” which is the basis of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and Lerner and Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady. In the myth, Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with one of his sculptures. Unlike many Greek myths, this one has a happily-ever-after ending with Galatea coming to life. Write your own story of Galatea coming alive with unexpected consequences. What’s she like? How does she adjust to being alive? How does she fit into Pygmalion’s ordinary existence?

∙    The myth of Orpheus, alas, doesn’t end well. He tries and fails to fetch his dead wife back from Hades. In your version make Geraldine succeed in reviving her friend or boyfriend Henry, but he wakes up changed. Write what happens. Though this can be a scary story it doesn’t have to be.

∙    Now I’m thinking of the opposite of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Jeremy’s friend Karen is too easygoing, and Jeremy sets himself the task of making her more lively. Write what happens.

Have fun and save what you write!

Private Property

2011-07-13T08:18:00.000-04:00

New on my website: an audio clip of me reading the third chapter of Writing Magic, the chapter called “Shut Up!”

On April 22, 2011, Mya wrote, “....I've had a few incidents happen in my life that are definitely out of the ordinary, and involve love.=) I'm just dying to pen it down, but I wonder how I should do so, without making it obviously similar to what really happened, so that I don't feel like I'm offending the other people's privacy. Any help?=)

Opinions differ.

Say, for instance, in real life Ira kissed Ondine tentatively, a quick peck. Ondine set down her big purple pocketbook for a longer, more satisfying meeting of the lips. Just as her arms went around Ira’s neck, a three-legged dog ran off with the purse and a chase through Riverfront Park ensued. Later that night, Ondine told her friend Priscilla the whole story, which ended with the recovery of the purse but no more kisses.

If Priscilla asks and gets permission from Ira and Ondine to write the incident down, even to post it on her blog, she’s home free, even if Ira’s father isn’t happy when he happens to read the post. But if she posts the story, names included, without asking, I say it’s an invasion of privacy, whether or not Ondine explicitly said the anecdote was confidential.

However, some believe that the price of friendship or even family connection with a writer is the chance of being exposed in print. Writers write, so this reasoning goes, and everything is fodder.

Now let’s say Priscilla loves the anecdote and she’s a writer but also a loyal friend. She lets a year go by then writes a short story that revolves around this incident, but she changes the names of the characters. The story is one of her best and it’s published in a magazine neither Ira nor Ondine or any of their friends or relatives ever read.

Is this okay?

I’m not sure. I think so, as long as the names were changed. It’s certainly fine if Priscilla calls Ira Anthony and Ondine Sonya and she has Sonya kiss Anthony first, and Anthony sets down his Moroccan leather briefcase, which is taken by a three-legged coyote on 169th Street in New York City. Priscilla has definitely changed enough, more than enough, to protect the privacy of the real players.

A few weeks ago I attended a reunion for retirees of a place where I used to work. I was the youngest one there and I’m not young, and some of it made me sad, so afterward I wrote a poem in which I changed the names and a few details but not many. I think it’s a good poem, and I may send it out to see if anybody wants to publish it. No one who was there will read it, and even if they did, I doubt they’d mind.

In Priscilla’s case, she may have improved the story by altering it, which often happens. You cast about for ways to change the events without losing their essence and ideas pop up that add interest. Sometimes the essence actually becomes more concentrated. Real life meanders. Fiction is tighter.

You can also combine true stories. Think about romantic moments in your life and in the lives of people you know. Ask your parents and other relatives about their dating days. Ask friends, teachers, librarians. List what you get and stare at the list. Maybe you’ve got these three among others: The first time Daryl met Frank he had a hamster poking out of his shirt pocket. Gene wouldn’t date Hester until she stopped smoking cigarettes. Joanne was on her way to meet Kenneth when her car got a flat and Leonard stopped to help her, and that was the beginning of their romance.

I’ve probably mentioned before that years ago I was asked to contribute to a book of memoirs by kids’ book writers about their grandmothers. I had only one since my father was an orphan, and I hated her. The editor said that was okay. So I used family history and added fictional elements, but before I went ahead I called her last living child, my uncle, the only one whose permission I felt counted. He said I could write whatever I wanted and added an anecdote or two to my collection. If he had asked me not to, however, I would have honored his wishes. The story was published in an anthology called In My Grandmother’s House, which is out of print but probably available online. Most of the pieces in it are about charming, cookie-baking grandmas.

My sister, who supplied the event that fuels the story, was delighted because I recaptured a long-ago place and time. In the writing, details came back to me that I’d forgotten.

Intention counts. I didn’t write the story to be mean or to hurt feelings. If you’re respecting the real life people, if you’re even honoring them, they’re likely to be pleased. They may feel important and be gratified that you paid attention. My friend Joan, who had a brain injury, likes it when I write a poem about her even when it reflects the downside of memory loss.

I’m not a memoirist, and even in the grandma book my contribution was fiction. If you’re writing about something that happened to you, if you’re not telling someone else’s story, I don’t know that you need to censor yourself at all. Let’s say, for instance, you’re writing about your tenth grade year when you had two boyfriends although they didn’t know about each other. Let’s say three years have passed since then but you still know both of them although neither is currently romantically involved with you. Well, you may want to consider the consequences of revealing your past double love life (they may be mad at you), but if you decide to go ahead I don’t think there are any moral impediments. It’s your life. You own the rights to it.

These prompts are based on the post.

∙    Inquire into the romantic pasts of people you know. Romance heightens memory, so you’ll probably hear funny and poignant stories. Cobble them together into a story of your own, changing the names and fictionalizing here and there.

∙    Use my invented anecdotes about Daryl, Frank, Gene, Hester, Joanne, Kenneth, and Leonard and weave them into a story.

∙    Priscilla posts Ondine’s story on her blog. Ondine is merely furious, but Ira, also a writer, is vengeful. Write what happens.

∙    There is nothing wrong with writing what you shouldn’t reveal if you don’t reveal it. Write solely for your own purposes a story you have no business sharing with anyone. If you feel like being mean, be mean. If you have feelings that might not meet with general approval, include them. Hide what you’ve written where it won’t be found but don’t destroy it. A day may come when no harm will be done by sharing. And you may want to look at it now and then.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Shifting Idea Sands

2011-07-06T09:39:00.000-04:00

On April 7, 2011, Angie wrote, ...While writing a first draft, I find myself constantly having new ideas for the plot that require me to go back and change several details. This becomes bothersome the further into the story I am, and it also worries me that I will lose some of the original integrity of the story the more I do this. What if, after changing a ton of details and scenes to accommodate a new idea, I realize that my grand new idea actually doesn't work at all? Then I need to go back and change those scenes back, but will most likely lose a lot of my original work in the process.
    As much as I try to plan my plot out ahead of time, I am still at heart an organic sort of writer; I discover the story as I move along. How do I keep from ruining my story as I come up with fresh ideas?

I may have quoted this before from W. Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

!!!

How I wish this weren’t true.

In hunting online for the above quotation, I found this on a blog I’d never visited before, but which you may all already know:
http://kendaturner.blogspot.com/2011/04/three-rules-for-writing-novel.html. More quotes, some funny too.

First to answer the easy part of the question, the only part that I can respond to definitively: You never have to lose original work if you start a new version and save your old one. You can name the old one something descriptive or you can write a note at the top of it that tells you what version it is and what made you start a new one. Then you can go back to the old if your new idea isn’t working out, or you can find those parts of the old that you want to re-insert.

I’m a make-it-up-as-I-go writer too, which makes me inefficient, very inefficient. Take the book I’m working on now, possibly the hardest ever for me. It’s a mystery, but it keeps wanting to be an adventure story, a form I’m more comfortable with, so it frequently veers the wrong way. I’ve mentioned before that I wrote many pages and then realized I’d forgotten to include any suspects. I went back to the beginning, putting in maybe too many suspects, but I made the mystery impossible to solve. In one instance, I don’t remember which, I wrote about 260 pages, in the other about 120. Then I wrote 90 new pages and felt lost, so I sent the thing to my editor, who said the problem was the book wasn’t compelling enough. Started again, and I’m now on page 72. It’s going better but very slowly.

Some writers get it right more quickly than I do, and even I do better on some books than on others. Some writers are even slower than I. This may be scant comfort, but writing is often difficult. I slog from confusion to confusion with clarity coming very gradually. Once, after visiting a school and speaking to the children there, I got a letter from one of them that said something like, I used to want to be a writer but since you came I don’t anymore. It’s too hard.

Of course I groaned. I probably shouldn’t have emphasized the problems to kindergartners. (Joke.) But the kids really were in elementary school, as some of you reading the blog may be. If you are, know that the rewards of writing are at least as great as the pain.

Patience is the first virtue a writer needs to cultivate. Skill won’t ever come if we don’t have the patience to develop it.

Don’t marry your first idea or your second, or your twelfth, but don’t divorce them either. They are each links to the final idea, the one that succeeds, which you couldn’t have gotten to without the others.

As for the ideas you abandon, which you’re now saving, they may be useful in another story or a germ from them may be. Our minds are deep lakes. Idea fish swim there and evolve, eat other fish or get eaten. When you catch your old idea that failed in one story and reel it in, it may have changed so much that you don’t recognize it, but the original is there in its belly, like the golden ring that appears in a fish’s stomach in more than one fairytale.

If you worry about running out of ideas, please don’t. We have new experiences, even when we think nothing is happening in our lives. Our brains are not only lakes but also soil, and new experiences are mulch, which our minds turn over and over and reshape, and ideas sprout.

I just reread a wonderful poem called “Skater” by Ted Kooser that captures this instant-by-instant change in us. Here’s a link to the poem: http://milan-poetry.blogspot.com/2007/01/skater-ted-kooser.html. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote that one cannot step twice into the same river (because the water is always flowing). I’d add that the same person can’t step twice into any river because he is always changing.

This is very philosophical, but basically I mean that new ideas and then bungled new ideas and bungled old ideas are inevitable for some writers, like me. We just have to keep going.

Some writing advice urges the writer to write forward always and never go back. You can try this. If you can do it, great. This method worked for me on A Tale of Two Castles, but not on the new book. Write down your new ideas in your manuscript so you don’t lose them and march on. Then pick up what you had in mind in revision.

However, often the people who write this way hate revising because they’ve got such a mess on their hands by the time they type, The End. I love to revise because by the time I reach the last page I’ve worked out most of the kinks and all I have to do is polish - and usually cut.

A few prompts:

∙    Tessa is sitting in a classroom or studying at home when something happens that changes her forever. Write the scene and make it the occurrence that changes her a small moment, the change almost imperceptible but real. Then think again; put her back in the same place and make something different but equally significant happen. Repeat once more. Pick your favorite and turn it into a story.

∙    This can be fantasy or not. Ivan can be a modern boy or a prince who is buying a present for his dad’s birthday. They haven’t been getting along lately, and Ivan wants the present to bring them closer. Write the scene and its affect on the father-son relationship.

∙    Now let’s change it. Ivan wants the present to show his father how distant he feels they’ve grown, so he picks something emblematic of this. Write this scene.

∙    Bring a third character into the scene, Ivan’s older sister Yvette whose relationship with their father is unlike Ivan’s, maybe better, maybe worse. Write the gift giving again. Then think of yet another way to handle it and try that. Expand either one into a scene, a story, a novel, a seven-book series!

Have fun and save what you write!

Pleased to meet you

2011-06-29T09:47:00.000-04:00

On April 6, 2011, Wendy wrote, ...I'm trying to write a story that has a lot of characters, and they all have an important part in the story. But I'm not sure if I need to show my main character meeting them all, or if she should just know them when the story begins. How should I introduce everyone? How specific do I need to be, and how much should I assume on the part of the reader? Would it be confusing for me to throw characters in there without an introduction? How soon should I show character developing scenes for them?

I discussed a similar question about a year ago, in my post of June 23rd, 2010, so you may want to look at that.

Novels, especially ones with an old-fashioned tone, occasionally begin with a list of characters and brief character descriptions, just as you see when you read a play. This device is sometimes used when there are many characters. Might go something like this:

Abigail - Twenty-something, ramrod-straight posture, perfect diction, wholehearted about everything she undertakes, first in a long line of seamstresses to complete her college education, assistant to the comptroller of a manufacturer of sports socks.

Bartholomew - Fourteen, narrow face, narrow shoulders, small for his age but no one dares tease him because he’s master of the secret revenge, ninth grader studying masters-level physics. Son of Abigail’s boss.

Christopher - sentient lizard, three inches long, brown-and-green scales, Abigail’s pet although she is unaware of his special powers.

And so on, offering the information that you, the author, want the reader to know.

The advantage is that you don’t have to introduce the characters inside the story. They can just walk on when their turn comes, again as in a play, and the reader can thumb back to the beginning to find out who’s made an entrance. Of course, as the story progresses, the characters won’t remain static. The author still has to develop them, and the thumbnails don’t cover very much.

The disadvantage is that the reader has to thumb back and forth until he gets to know the characters. Some don’t mind this; I’m not fond of it. On the other hand, an e-reader, which I have no experience with, may make this jumping around a snap.

Since there are no laws of story writing, you can develop your own form. You might give each major character her own scene at the beginning so she’s fixed in the reader’s mind. Naturally, the scenes have to be interesting, and it will help if they connect with the events that follow. Then you can launch the body of the story in whatever POV you like.

But if you prefer standard storytelling, I’d say variety is the key. You can have your main meet one or two of the characters for the first time. The others she may already know.

What I would avoid is a blitz of new characters. If your main, Toni, goes to a party and meets the twelve significant characters all at once, the reader is likely to be overloaded no matter how clever you are at setting them apart. Suppose you arrange it as a memory game. Toni may even see it this way. She’s trying to remember the people along with the reader, so she’s thinking, I met Ken and Karen in the kitchen. Look at that! Two K’s in the kitchen, which starts with a k. Ken was washing dishes and whistling, Clean Ken. Karen dropped the bag of potato chips. Klutzy Karen. Toni stays with them for a while and gets a deeper impression of each, which she passes along to the reader.

A little later, while she waits in the hallway to get into the bathroom, she chats with Beryl. Look at that, Beryl and bathroom, more alliteration! Beryl reveals secrets about the host that she shouldn’t. Toni and the reader are put off by her lack of discretion.

You tour Toni from room to room through the party, introducing characters. You’ve done a great job. When the chapter ends, the reader has a fix on everybody.

The problem is that if Karen doesn’t show up again until four more chapters go by, your reader may recognize her name and may remember that she’s Klutzy Karen, but little else. Your hard work in the first chapter was wasted.

Of course, some characters are memorable whenever they appear. The reader is likely to remember Christopher, the sentient lizard, even if fifty pages go by between appearances - unless your other characters include five other thinking animals. A potential love interest is likely to stand out and be remembered, likewise a character who threatens the safety of your main.

The advantage of a first-time meeting is that you don’t need an excuse to describe the new character. Toni will be paying particular attention to someone unfamiliar. She’ll notice Abigail’s erect posture and perfect speech. However, if she’s known Abigail for three years, you’ll have a harder time revealing these traits. You’ll need a hook. You can have Bartholomew comment on Abigail’s characteristics, if he’s likely to. You can have Abigail herself say something about them, for example, if someone made fun of her, she can tell her pal Toni about the ridicule. Or you can have the traits become temporarily prominent in Toni’s mind, as in, Abigail was freaked. She always talked like every word was worth ten dollars, but today each one was a museum piece. I wanted to hug her, but she was standing so straight and sharp I thought I might cut myself.

If you bring characters in only as they’re needed, the new entries will be fresh when they appear. Some may be necessary only for a scene or two, and you don’t have to burden the reader with remembering them from an earlier point in the story.

In the comments that followed my recent post called “Foggy First Page” I was surprised at how many people are untroubled by ambiguity, so I wouldn’t worry much about starting new characters in the middle of your story. A common writer’s maxim is: Trust the reader. If Bartholomew barges into Abigail’s work cubicle ranting about Chaos Theory, the reader will probably be willing to wait to understand him and his role in the story.

As for character-developing scenes, I suggest you reveal your other characters’ development only in relation to your main. If Bartholomew is your main, for example, and Abigail an important secondary, she will be fleshed out as needed in relation to Bartholomew. If Abigail’s emotional growth isn’t important to him, it doesn’t matter how her character evolves. You don’t want to distract the reader from the thrust of your tale.

A few prompts:

•    Christopher the lizard is the main character in a love story between him and - you pick, another lizard or anybody else, a different animal, an extra-terrestrial, a human, an elf. Abigail and Bartholomew are important secondary characters. Write the story.

•    Write a cast-of-characters list along with short descriptions of each one. Start a story in which you rely on your list and bring on your characters as if the reader has always known them.

•    Make a cast-of-characters list for a story you’re already working on. Rewrite your first three chapters (or as much as you like) relying on the list and not repeating any of the information. Then drop the list and descriptions and put back in only what you need to help the reader identify these characters. Do you find that you have to return your story to its original state, or have you been able to leave some material out? Is your revision leaner?

•    Write the party scene I started above. Have Toni meet lots of people and make as many as possible memorable. This may be a lively party, with arguments, food fights, vigorous dancing, whatever.

•    Toni is twelve years old. She’s just been taken to her new foster home. It’s dinnertime, and she’s meeting the characters in her new, large family. Write the scene and as much that follows as you like.

Have fun and save what you write!

The Scene-ic Route

2011-06-22T15:50:00.000-04:00

Before I start, you may not know this but June is National Audio Book Month. It’s also forty-two Other-Things Month, like Accordion Awareness, Turkey Lovers, Papaya (also September - greedy papaya people), Dairy, and, weirdly, Dairy Alternative. My favorite is Bathroom Reading. Really! Here’s the link: http://womeninbusiness.about.com/od/diversityeventcalendars/a/nat-month-june.htm. See for yourself.

Back to National Audio Book Month, Random House is releasing a CD audio book of Dave at Night, and I was interviewed to promote the release. If you go to my website and click on videos, you can watch it. I like the interview and I’m thrilled about the release. Dave at Night is probably my least known novel and possibly my favorite. The reading is also my favorite of all my book recordings, so I hope the audio book finds lots of listeners.

Also, I missed an opportunity in last week’s post. I made up this passage: Marisette gizoxed down the previo at zyonga speed. If the ashymi didn’t boosheg, she’d find herself and the precious kizage in the boiling svik and all would be owped. But I didn’t think of mentioning “Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carroll’s amazing nonsense poem from Through the Looking Glass. The poem is full of action that’s understandable and exciting and words that either have no meaning or an elusive meaning that we can almost grasp but not quite. If you don’t know the poem, I recommend it and recommend that you read it aloud after you’ve read it to yourself a few times. Here’s the second stanza:

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

Now for the main post. On April 1, 2011, bluekiwii wrote, ...I don't have a problem with linking a few scenes together, but instead, have a problem with how the scenes fit in the grand scheme of things--in the overall storyline. I would have no problem linking two scenes together, but linking 4 or more scenes together that are very different from each other to form a cohesive story--an overall theme--is far more difficult. Still the entry gave me some food for thought. Should writers have a clear picture of what the story will be about or should you flesh out each scene, edit them to form a cohesive whole, and think of possibilities as it goes along? Personally, I want to have a good picture of what type of story I want to create, instead of spontaneously making random scenes with the same characters.

No two writers write alike, and the only wrong way to write is not to write.

I write consecutively for the most part, start to finish. Occasionally I’ll see a scene glimmering in the near distance and write it. But even though I write in order, I don’t have a clear picture of the story as a whole. In the case of the mystery I’m struggling through right now, I know the it will be solved but have no clue as to how, nor have I figured out who the villain is. But I have a detailed image of a moment at the end that will put the source of the story problem away forever.

Does this murkiness make me worry? Yes.

Some of my books have been easier to steer through than others, but my process is generally to hack my way across a plot jungle. Occasionally I climb to higher ground, but - murdering the metaphor - usually I can’t see the forest for the trees.

Meanwhile, I’m writing tons of notes, asking myself plot questions, sometimes confusing myself even more, sometimes gaining understanding.

I’ve recently been able to frame the new mystery, Beloved Elodie (although this no longer seems a fitting title), in my mind as a quest, a simple story shape that I’ve used many times and that I’m hoping will help me now. Elodie’s quest is to discover a thief, and my job alternates between throwing up obstacles and helping her out.

If you can see your story this way, as a quest, my strategy may help you too. You may not know what the obstacles will be, but you don’t have to, you only have to know that you’ll need to create them and then solve them.

I read somewhere that if you can’t express your plot in a few sentences it’s not working. I don’t know if that’s true, but I'm sure that a simple story shape is easier to work with. I love simple story shapes, which may be why I go to fairytales for inspiration. The charm of a simple plot is that you can fool around, embroider, have a great time, and still rely on a straight course from start to finish. The occasions when I’ve understood the simplicity of my form have been my happiest writing experiences.

A quest is simple. Here’s another simple idea: Two characters hate each other, and the story is about their enmity and each one's attempts to destroy the other. Maybe one character is bad and the other good, or maybe they’re both good or bad, or they're both an ordinary complicated assortment of qualities. Three possibilities suggest themselves: one will defeat the other (a suspense story); both will be vanquished (a tragedy); they’ll come together and both triumph (a love story). Maybe this is a quest tale too, a double quest, one for each protagonist.

See if you can come up with simple story shapes you can use. Think of books you love and search for the simplicity. Hamlet can be seen as a quest for understanding, Pride and Prejudice a quest for balance. You can take these frameworks and adapt them. Probably you won’t have your hero addressed by his father’s ghost, but he could receive a mysterious communication about the death of a loved one. You can bring in false friends and true and a dastardly deed by characters who seem above reproach.

However, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the scene approach bluekiwii asks about. I like books of linked short stories, the same characters, more or less, appearing in each story. Some characters grow and change, some remain the same. There’s no overall climax but there’s drama in each story. I come to care about the important characters. The end doesn’t have to nail everything down, just has to make me feel I’ve traveled with these people and we’ve had an interesting time together.

There may be another way to look at your scenes, other than as linked short stories. If you have a bunch of scenes that don’t line up, hunt for common themes. See if the conflicts repeat. Consider what your characters want. Is there conflict in their desires? If Quinn gets what he wants, will Wendy lose out? Who from all the scenes can be your main characters?

Try writing a short summary of each scene on an index card then spread them out somewhere. Move them around. Do they fall into a natural order? Does one suggest itself as a beginning? One as the end or, if not the absolute end, as coming late in the overall story? When you think about the characters, do you see threads? Can you find a simple story shape?

You can even bring in scenes from some of your other stories that haven’t worked out but seem like they might connect thematically to the new one. Edgar in your old story can turn into Quinn with a few personality adjustments.

Not that I’ve tried it, but this seems like a wonderful way to write a book.

Some prompts courtesy of Lewis Carroll:

∙    Alice In Wonderland is beloved by many but not me, and if you adore it this prompt may not be for you. In my opinion, Alice’s actions are random. She’s curious but never concerned. She has no skin in the game, which I believe makes it a book with plot problems. So write a scene for Alice, could be a new beginning for the novel or come from a later point, that gives her a problem and a reason to do what she does. Or choose another character and make him or her the main character of a story or a novel.

∙    Reread “Jabberwocky.” There’s a simple story shape if I’ve ever seen one. Flesh it out with detail. What’s the relationship between the narrator and his (her?) son? What’s at stake in the battle? Develop other characters. Turn it into a novel if you like.

∙    From last week, incorporate nonsense words into a paragraph or a poem. Max out on the made-up words while still letting the reader gain a sense of what’s going on. If you try a poem, remember that rhyming is a snap with nonsense words. Then, if you feel like it, post your results here. I’d love to see them.

Have fun and save what you write!

Foggy first page

2011-06-15T11:15:00.001-04:00

On March 31, 2011, Jill wrote, How confused do you think readers are willing to be in the very beginning of a story? Most of the time the reason I quit on a book is because I can only handle so much confusion on the first page. I like to be ambiguous in my stories to keep readers interested but I am afraid to do that at the beginning. Any thoughts?

Tastes differ. I’m with you, though. I’m daunted if I have to contend with too much on the first page. I’ll probably hang in a while unless the grammar is bad. If it is, I’m out. And if the confusion doesn’t clear up by the second chapter, I’m done - unless something in the incomprehensibility has charmed me.

Recently I began The Good Son by Craig Nova, definitely a serious novel for adults. I don’t read much literary fiction and the jacket copy got me worried that I’d be in over my head. But the beginning of the book was so welcoming that I jumped right in. Here’s the first sentence: My father is a coarse, charming man, a lawyer, and a good one, and when I was flying over the desert and the German pursuit pilot began pouring round after round into my plane (a P-40), I was thinking of how I learned to drive, and how it affected my father.

What an achievement this sentence is! Three topics are introduced and I want to know about all of them: the father, the war, and the driving. I’m not far into the book, but the learning-to-drive incident does not disappoint.

Some readers are perfectly content not to understand immediately. Some like the challenge and don’t want anything straightforward. When such readers are also writers, they’re likely to write prose of the sort they like to read.

This is fine. Fortunately, nothing is for everybody. It’s a losing proposition to try to write a book that no one will fail to love. You’re doomed to frustration.

However, some books succeed with millions of readers, and some of these are great books, Pride and Prejudice, for example. Some bestsellers may not be beautifully written or the characters well developed, but the theme is universal or the subject fascinating.

If events are very exciting at the beginning of a story, I’ll probably stick around. For instance, I’d keep reading beyond this: Marisette gizoxed down the previo at zyonga speed. If the ashymi didn’t boosheg, she’d find herself and her precious kizage in the boiling svik and all would be owped.

I’d understand that Marisette was in trouble and I’d want to know what the precious kizage and the hot svik were and why I should care. But if the crazy words went on much longer without an explanation in standard English, I’d give up.

Jill, I’m not sure what you mean by ambiguous in your question. If you mean you like to misdirect your reader for a purpose, I’m all for it. Suppose a drapery tie is the murder weapon in a mystery and you’re describing the living room where the drapery tie stays when it’s not strangling anyone. The victim, a high school student named Hope, is only a missing person at this point, but she’s beginning to be presumed dead. Detective Rosalie Swift has been talking to Hope’s teachers, and right now she’s in the living room of Algebra teacher Max Kilcannon, who will turn out to be the murderer. It’s the detective’s curse, Rosalie thought, to look for murder weapons everywhere. She scanned the room, a fuddy-duddy place, she thought - over-stuffed chairs, the couch with cloth protectors at the ends of the arms, side tables in dark wood, a coffee-table book on the coffee table, still lifes of flowers hanging on the walls in ornate frames, heavy green drapes tied back with cream-colored, ties, and a gas fireplace. Why a poker for a gas fire? How pretentious! The poker could be the weapon, except that a poker appeared in so many detective stories that no self-respecting murderer would use one. The coffee-table book, too, could bludgeon someone to death. The good teacher would also have his pick of cushions to suffocate poor Hope with. Or he could just leave her alone in here for a few hours and she’d die of boredom.

There. The drapery ties are shown, but they’re buried in the rest of the description. When the murder weapon is revealed, the reader can page back to this spot and find it.

In The Two Princesses of Bamarre I used specters more than once to misdirect the reader, and what fun that was!

But in Two Princesses and in the example above, the writing is clear, nothing ambiguous about it. Clarity is a sine qua non (an essential condition) of good storytelling. We don’t want to throw mud in the reader’s eyes. If you’re worried about catching the reader’s interest from the outset, go with action. Excellent beginnings can open many ways, but action is the most direct, the glucose of storytelling.

Here are some misdirecting prompts:

∙    Hope is in Jim Kilcannon’s living room. Her parents have hired him to tutor her to get her grade up. In this version he may or may not be the murderer; you, the author, haven’t decided yet. Write a scene in which you make Hope and the reader alternately creeped out and reassured by Kilcannon .

∙    On her way home from her first tutoring session, Hope passes a psychic’s shop and goes in. Being behind in Algebra isn’t her only problem. Write the scene with the psychic and mislead the reader about the source of Hope’s danger.

∙    Hope is now a baronet’s daughter in the Kingdom of Kestor. She’s been warned that her life is at risk, and has been invited to tea at the palace of the king’s youngest brother. She has reason to suspect that one of the other guests intends to kill her. Write the tea and make the reader suspect several guests.

Have fun and save what you write!

Unfinished business

2011-06-08T11:59:00.001-04:00

Last week welliewalks posted to the guestbook on my website that she hadn’t been able to post directly on the blog, so I asked you all, and the problem seems to be more widespread than just one person, although not universal. The trouble isn’t with us, says David, my high-tech husband, so we can’t fix it. If you can’t get through, just post your comment on the guestbook (following the link on the right to the website) and I’ll approve it there and move it to the blog. I love to hear from you!

On March 29, 2011, Erica wrote, Okay, so I was wondering, I always have tons of different story ideas (like notebooks full of them) but I can never finish them. At this point I have one short story done and one picture book rough draft for my English class. I can think in my head of almost exactly how I want it to end but I can never get it out on paper. My mom thinks that it's because if I finish something then I will feel the need to do something with it and she thinks that it's because I'm afraid people won't like it. Whatever the reason I don't know how to fix it. Help?

Many are afflicted with unfinished-itis, and the reasons vary, so here are some possibilities:

Erica’s mother suggested one. Finishing is the first step toward exposing your work to criticism and even rejection in the sometimes cold, cruel publishing world. Your fingers may curl into fists at the prospect, and fists can’t type.

A solution to this may be to find friends, relatives, teachers, librarians, a critique group, to show your stories to even before they’re finished. Encouragement may push you to completion. The writers in particular may have useful ideas about where to go next in your tale. Showing at an early stage can reduce the fear of criticism, if not wipe it out entirely. You’re in an early stage. Naturally your story needs work. Helpful advice is welcome.

And just a word about unhelpful advice and unhelpful criticism. See it for what it is, unhelpful, useless, irrelevant. If somebody reads what you’ve got and says something like, "I hope you have other talents, dear," ignore and do not show your writing to this person again. To yourself you can say, Yeah, and how many books have you written, Mister or Missus?

Unhelpful advice can masquerade as the helpful sort and sometimes it’s hard to tell one from the other. Someone might say, "You should try to make your prose more lyrical." Press for specifics. "What do you mean?" you ask. "Where in my story is lyricism needed?" If your critic can explain, then this may be useful, but if she says, "That’s just what I think," put it in the unhelpful category.

You may be someone who needs a deadline. If you’re not writing a piece that’s due in school and no publisher is clamoring for your work, you may not feel the urgency, and when another idea comes along, you may jump ship. So set a deadline. If you need to, enlist a friend to help you stick to your writing. Whether you meet the deadline or not, you’ll get more done, and you can always set a new deadline. I think this is why NaNoWriMo is so terrific. It pushes you. Even if you don’t make the word count, you’ve written a lot.

You may not have found the right story, the one that finishes itself. If you keep writing, you’ll get there.

The plodding nature of writing gets to you. You start resisting writing the details. Your story is magical, thrilling. Why do you have to mention that your main character’s feet hurt or that her best friend has a dab of catsup on her chin? And why can’t you just tell the reader that the friend is loyal and also illogical? Why do you also have to demonstrate it? You want to put in the broad strokes, the essence of your story, and be done with it. Eventually you get so sick of the details that you give up and start something shiny and new. Or you write down ideas, which don’t have to be detailed at all.

The remedy here is to limit the task. Write a scene. Don’t think about how many scenes remain. After you’ve written one, write another, little dotted lines along the road of your narrative.

If you despise writing the scenes and can’t bring yourself to complete any of them, but you adore coming up with ideas and planning out stories, you may be more of a storyteller than a novelist. Or graphic novels may be the right form for you.

You don’t want the characters you love to suffer, so you get stuck. I suspect this is afflicting me now in the second mystery. I love Elodie, and I have to make some awful things happen to her, so I’m progressing at the speed of an inchworm. Since I’m facing this myself, it’s hard to know what the solution is. In my case it’s probably just inching along, and possibly that will work for you, too. Pat yourself heartily on the back at the end of each completed page.

Or jump right in and bring the dreadful event about. Then write up to it, if you’re not at that point in your story. If you don’t even know what the tragedy will be yet, write a scene in which your main endures misery, which may not be the misery you eventually use. See how he responds. Decide what helps him pull through if he does pull through. Then, when you get to the actual crisis you’ll have prepared yourself. I think I'm going to try this as soon as I finish wrtiting this post!

You haven’t explored any of your ideas sufficiently to know which ones are keepers. Pick three of your ideas or your petered-out drafts. In notes ask yourself questions. What lit you up when you started? What turned you off? What will it take to bring back the spark? (No negativity allowed.) How can you define your main character so you want to have a long-term relationship with her? What fascinates you about her? Ask yourself about setting, plot, other characters. Quit note-writing and move over to the story when you find yourself eager to start.

What I’m suggesting are just ideas, which may not work for you. The most important thing is to keep writing, whether you finish something next month or three years from now.

These prompts need some setting up:

Right now I’m riding home from New York on a commuter train, a wonderful place for observation. Most of the seats face the backs of the seats ahead, like in an airplane, but some, the less desirable ones, where I am, face the fronts of the seats ahead without good legroom between. I’m in an aisle seat. There’s a middle seat and a window seat next to me, across from me the same. When I sat down at Grand Central where the train originates, the only other occupant of our six-seat grouping was a man in the window seat facing me, who had placed his briefcase on the seat facing him, a little piggishly, I think, but it's not interfering with my comfort so I don't care.

After a few minutes a woman sits across from me and we arrange our legs so they don’t touch. She puts her huge purse on the seat between her and the man, also a little piggishly. Then a woman comes along and wants to sit in the other window seat, the one next to me, with one empty seat between us. She asks if the briefcase is mine and I say no. The man across from her says it’s his and doesn’t move it or offer to move it. How selfish! The woman doesn’t ask him to move it either and rides awkwardly on the (slightly) raised area between the window seat and the middle seat next to me. How meek! I resist the temptation to tell the man to be a gentleman and the woman to grow a spine.

(Of course they may each have had reasonable reasons for their behavior.) So here come the prompts:

•    Write a scene from the childhood of each passenger that suggests how they became their future adult selves.

•    He is King Oogu the Terrible, ruler of the kingdom of Ploog (or more serious names), and she is a member of a rebel group plotting to overthrow him. Write a scene. How will her meekness play out? How will his selfishness?

•    He is Oogu, dictator of a small republic. She is a diplomat given the task of reforming him. Write a scene.

•    As young people, they oppose each other on their school debating team. Pick a debate topic you know something about. Write a debate with him winning; then rewrite it with her winning.

•    They're in high school. He asks her to the junior prom. Write what happens.

•    Both are fleeing the devastation caused by Queen Ooga the Awful. He’s the son of a peasant, she the daughter of a scholar. Circumstances throw them together, both in danger. They will survive only if they cooperate. Write a scene.

•    Invent any other situations you like for these two.

Have fun and save what you write!

Is There A Problem?

2011-06-03T08:58:00.003-04:00

A mid-week post to ask if people are having trouble posting to the blog. Welliewalks posted to the guestbook page on my website because she couldn't get through. If you're having a problem too, would you also let me know on my guestbook page? If no problem, please post to the blog. If something is wrong we'll get right on it. I love to hear from you!

Playing doubles

2011-06-01T11:57:00.000-04:00

On March 27, 2011, welliewalks wrote, I have two MCs in my story and I switch off writing them- they each get their own chapters. They've never seen each other before, but in the book, their lives are entwined and they end up meeting each other (kinda early on). They are very different- one doesn't trust anyone but is close to her family (and trusts them). The other is hurt (emotionally) and feels betrayed by one family member. I'm having trouble making them have their own voices. Any suggestions?

Then Jenna Royal wrote, @Welliewalks - If you've ever read The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan, that is a really good example of different voices. I've never attempted to write a story with multiple characters in first person POV, but I would think that it might help to give each character a distinct way of reacting to certain situations, or maybe a list of words that each character uses frequently. By making your characters recognizable, you make the voices more obvious. Also, maybe setting characteristics such as a squeaky door or a cold climate, or a view or sudden storms would help. If you can give traits that will show through in the narration, it will lend itself to a more distinct voice.
These are great ideas. I haven’t read The Red Pyramid, but I did use the Search-Inside-This-Book feature on Amazon to get an impression. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I noticed that the sentences were shorter and more direct in the Carter chapters I looked at, while his sister seemed to use more modifiers and more dependent clauses.

For all of you who are writing from multiple narrators or who might like to, for the next week listen to the conversation around you. (This is a always good practice for writers.) You may notice that your best friend has trouble staying on topic. One thing reminds him of another, and soon he’s forgotten what he started with. Your other close friend keeps tugging him back. A third pal tires of any subject quickly. And you, writer that you are, find yourself suggesting ways to improve the telling. Each of you would be different narrators on the page.

Here’s a prompt early in the post: Pick a day during your week of listening, a day you haven’t spent alone. Write this day in the persona of each of the people you were with, a page or so for each person, up to, say, five narrators. You are likely to find that it’s harder with some, easier with others. For one or two it may be agony to squeeze out a page and for others you can hardly stop writing. Your cousin Ida may baffle you. You never know where she’s coming from, so how can you write her take on the day? That’s where being a fiction writer comes in. If Ida gives you little to go on, imagine the possibilities. Speculate about what might have happened to her before you got together. Was she awake half the night? Did she win a tennis match the day before? She may be very private, so you have to invent her opinions. Make her adore someone and have only contempt for someone else. Give her a sore knee that saps her attention. Have her mentally working on a homework assignment.

When you’re finished, revise until each telling is distinctive. Remember Jenna Royal’s suggestions. Here are some more: Along the lines of word choice, main character Jayne may be more educated than main character Jerry. Her vocabulary may be studded with fifty-dollar words; his may be monosyllabic. Try what Rick Riordan seems to do, too - vary the sentence structure from one character to the other. You can change the emotional tone as well. Jerry worries constantly, so his chapters are full of dire predictions and better-than-expected outcomes. Jayne analyzes everyone; her chapters teem with insight, right or wrong. Thought process is involved here. Jerry is intuitive. He doesn’t reason carefully but jumps from A to M without stopping at each letter in between, and his thoughts on the page reveal his process. Jayne plods in her thinking. She gets from A to M but she lingers at each letter; she may even pause at C-and-a-half before moving on to D.

Character traits come into it, too. Jerry is quick to anger, and his narration will reflect that. Jayne buries her rage; her narration may show the effort this causes her. She makes excuses for people, while Jerry won't give anyone a break.

So far we have vocabulary, sentence structure, emotional tone, thought process, and character. Situation is essential also. The two main characters won’t always be together. If Jerry is in a desert and Jayne in a castle, the reader will have no trouble distinguishing them, as Jenna Royal suggested.

Two narrators are, naturally, two voices. My chapter on voice in Writing Magic may be helpful as well as my post on the subject on September 8th, 2010. The prompt at the end of the Writing Magic chapter and the suggestions above may seem mechanical, but much of writing is mechanical. Inspiration pours in, and we write in a mad burst. Then we go back to deal with the mechanics, which we can call by the more elevated name of technique.

Having said all this, I have to ask if two narrators are necessary. Writing is so hard that there’s no disgrace in making the job easier when we can. An omniscient third-person point of view might succeed here, or a limited third person that shifts from Jerry to Jayne might too. By using third person you can show how each character views events, but you don’t have to invent a voice for each except in dialogue, when you will certainly want them to sound different. I use two narrators in my Mesopotamian fantasy, Ever, because I couldn’t seem to tell the story any other way, and I tried. If this is the case for you or even if you’re just experimenting, go for it, but if the split narration isn’t working, remember that there are other options.

Welliewalks, your two main characters both seem to have been hurt, one by people outside the family and the other from within. You may be having trouble because of the similarity. I know this is a fundamental change (the kind I often find myself making 250 pages into a novel), but might you lift the burden from one of them and make him or her quirky in some other way? If you try this, you may find that they will write themselves, always a writer’s dream.

There’s a prompt near the beginning of the post, and here’s another:

Jerry and Jayne are classmates separated by disaster, political or meteorological or geological, whatever. Jerry is trying to find Jayne, and Jayne is trying not to be found. You decide if they have cell phones or if this isn’t a high-tech world. Write a single chapter from the POV of each. Keep going if you like.

Have fun, and save what you write!

We Are What We Read

2011-05-25T14:01:00.001-04:00

Blog readers have asked me several times about publication possibilities for teens, and yesterday I spent a few hours with HarperCollins people who told me about an interesting opportunity. Some of you may know about it already, but for those who don’t, it’s Inkpop (inkpop.com), where you can post your writing for peer review (review by other Inkpoppers). The five highest ranked pieces are looked at by HarperCollins editors, and publication is possible. I just visited the site, and there’s also a contest that looks promising. If you try the site, please let me know how it goes. And good luck!

Also, the HarperCollins folks confirmed what I’ve said and others on the blog have said, particularly April, that editors don’t care how old you are if your writing shines.

I’ve muddied the waters about foreshadowing, which seems to be a broader term than I thought. Dictionary.com defines foreshadow as "to show or indicate beforehand; prefigure" - totally nonspecific. I googled the word and was forced to conclude that any sort of hint to the reader regarding future events is foreshadowing. A hint could be in the setting, like, of course, a haunted house. Or in dialogue. I got this from Wikipedia: “In Romeo and Juliet, both main characters state early on that they would rather defy their families and be in love than live apart.” Apparently that’s an example of foreshadowing.

Wikipedia also includes omens and prophesies as forms of foreshadowing. It refers to the classic instance of the Greek myth of Oedipus, whose father is told by the Delphic oracle that his son will kill him. We read the myth never doubting that the oracle will be proven right no matter what Laius (the father) does to save himself. I don’t think foreknowledge spoils the story, and Laius’s demise comes in the middle not the end. After that we’re waiting for Oedipus to discover his crime, committed casually, in ignorance, because the oracle didn’t speak to him. The inevitability of the tragedy adds to its weight.

Foreshadowing in this broader definition is quite inclusive, and I’m getting confused. I suppose one could call character development foreshadowing. As we readers get to know a character the field of possible actions for him narrows. For example, we learn that Jim never lies. When a situation arises where lying would spare him a ton of trouble, we worry. We’ve been warned. Does the author think, I’m foreshadowing, when she establishes Jim’s personality? Darned if I know.

Here’s a funny article about foreshadowing: http://www.theonion.com/articles/now-that-ive-learned-about-foreshadowing-im-going,11392/. It covers all the bases and shows how hackneyed foreshadowing can be when handled clumsily or as it’s been used a billion times before by other writers.

On Wikipedia I came across Chekhov’s gun as an example of foreshadowing, and I’d never thought of it this way before. Paraphrasing, the idea is that if a gun is shown in the first act of a play, it has to go off in the last act. When the audience sees that gun, it’s put on notice.

I’d always thought the meaning of Chekhov’s gun had to do with economy not foreshadowing, with not cluttering up a story. If we put a gun in we have to do something with it or we wasted words. On the other hand, clutter can misdirect a reader delightfully. And what if the gun is part of a weapon’s display? Or a key to a character rather than to the story’s crisis?

Storytelling is complicated. My husband and I watch a TV mystery series called Bones. One of the characters is pregnant, and in the show both she and her husband have a recessive gene that causes blindness, so there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the baby will be blind. The latest episode we watched involved a deaf-mute girl, and I’ve been wondering if this is foreshadowing that means the baby will be blind, or if the viewer is just meant to fret more. I’m fine either way. If it’s foreshadowing it’s subtle–

Which I recommend. It’s the heavy-handed kind I described in the last post that I’m not fond of, except in the instances I mentioned.

Now for this week’s question. On March 3, 2011, Elizabeth wrote,   At some point would you be able to address the question of "Why do we read" and the (very hard) issue of balancing your reading with both fiction and non-fiction?

I asked for clarification and Elizabeth wrote, Last semester my husband taught a literature course, and he opened the semester with the question, "Why do we read?"

    There is no one right answer, and it can be summed up that we read to expand our intellect and imagination. Which leads to the next question I asked about: Limiting yourself (the reader) to only one type of material.

    The problem of reading only fantasy books for whatever reason: because you're escaping from trouble at home or school, because you think you're a vampire, or even because you're afraid of learning something new.

    I know that young people do this a lot and I'm finding as I get older that it's not something that's solved just by passing your 21st (and I don't anticipate 30 to be magical either) birthday. I ask, Ms. Levine, because I hope that you can help encourage me (there I said it) and others like me, to be better.
Oy! I am not a reading paragon, and I’m not much of a reader at all these days. As a young person I was much better. One summer in high school I decided to read Russian novels, and I did. I decided to try Faulkner and loved the book I picked.

In those days I zoomed through books. I would have sworn off eating before I’d have sworn off reading, if I’d been forced to give up either one. And I used to fantasize about having to make that kind of choice!

Nowadays I read like a writer, which means I edit as I read. If I find myself editing a sentence in every paragraph, I abandon the book because there’s no pleasure in it. I just read Victory, a middle-grade historical fiction novel by Susan Cooper. The writing is lovely, so I was able to lose myself in it. Before that I tried a mystery but the author used the word slightly so often I gave up. Each slightly grated on me more than the one before. Why couldn’t the author commit the characters completely to an action?

I have nothing against pleasure reading and escape reading. I’ve mentioned before that I adore Terry Pratchett. When I’m reading one of his books I’m wallowing in delight. I haven’t zipped through his entire body of work only because I’m not reading much.

Every summer I teach the writing-for-children workshop at a conference in Pennsylvania, and there’s always a reading list that gets me out of my comfort zone. I read two novels for adults and a middle-grade nonfiction book that I never would have come across otherwise and that I loved. The novels were The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean and You’re Not You by Michelle Wildgen. The nonfiction was Shipwrecked at the Bottom of the World by Jennifer Armstrong. I’ve struggled through several other books on the lists, too. I even attempted to read a nonfiction tome about chaos theory that was a mile or more above my math skills. I gave up when the only words I understood were the articles and prepositions! Still, the effort expended on all these books was worthwhile; I strengthened my reading muscles, and I believe my writing muscles benefited too.

If you’re still in school, books are being assigned to you. I think this is good even when it feels bad. If you’re out of school, ask a librarian or bookseller for suggestions. Tell him you want to explore new reading worlds - mysteries, historical fiction, sci fi, literary fiction, history, economics, memoir, science. Maybe you write only fantasy and that’s all you ever want to write, but it’s probably best to read other genres. Sticking to yours may narrow your concept of what’s possible and may make you too imitative. I’ll avoid reading a novel based on a fairy tale I might want to use someday because the other writer’s take would lodge in my mind. A contemporary fiction book, on the other hand, may give me a great, utterly original fantasy idea.

I hesitate to say this, but if you’re glued to a single genre you may be reading junk sometimes. The story may be exciting but the writing uninspired. And you may become inured to this kind of prose; you may lose or never gain the ability to tell the mediocre from the magnificent. Sorry! However, if you push yourself, you’re likely to encounter writing that will stun you with its beauty, elegance, risk-taking, surprise. Think about style as you read. Consider what’s a good sentence and what’s less pleasing. The effort will show in your own work. Anyway, that’s what I believe.

Not that you should try to write like Fitzgerald or anybody else. Or torment yourself because your sentences aren’t as shapely as, say, Gregory McDonald’s. Let the process be unconscious. Let the language seep into you, slosh around in your gray matter, and descend, slowly, slowly, into your writing fingers.

Prompts:

∙    Consider yourself. Write a list of your qualities, physical, emotional, intellectual. Don’t be hard on yourself, just objective so that the next step will work. Now design a character who is your opposite. Changing gender is optional, but if you have a strong chin, give your character a weak one. If you are calm, make her excitable. Think about a challenge one of your friends is facing right now. If it’s not a difficult challenge, make it harder and throw your opposite into dealing with it. Write a story about what happens. You can always move the problem into the realm of fantasy. If your friend, for example, has a difficult stepfather, you can turn him into an evil magician guardian.

∙    If you never have, read a book by Mark Twain, one of my absolute favorite writers. If you’re in high school and above, read a novel by Anne Tyler, another of my faves. Ask your librarian to recommend a book that he thinks is beautifully written. Read it.

∙    This is, I believe, an impossible prompt, so the idea is to push against the impossible. Write a story about a child (any age) who is lost in a city, fantasy or real, past or present. Attempt to write about him without doing any sort of foreshadowing. Try to make the reader surprised at every turn.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Futurology

2011-05-18T18:38:00.000-04:00

Before I start, I've been worrying about this: If you’ve asked me a question on the blog and I’ve said that I put it on my list but I never seem to get to it, please remind me. I work on three computers and my fear is that I may fail to transfer a question to all the computers and then it may get overwritten. If this has happened to you, sorry!

On March 5, 2011, Piper wrote, ...I was wondering if you could write a post on how to write beginnings... I rewrite mine about a thousand times...

Piper, when I promised you a post, I forgot that I’d already written one on the subject. My post of November 3, 2010, is all about beginnings, and two chapters of Writing Magic are devoted to the subject. I suggest you look in both places. Then, if you have more specific questions, please post them.

However, I do want to respond to the rewriting part of your question. A thousand times is too many! A hundred times is too many. If you keep revising before going on to the rest of your story, you may be making extra work for yourself. You may not know what the beginning needs to be until you reach the end. If you do finish and go back and find yourself polishing and polishing and never feeling satisfied, put your story aside for a month - or a week, if you can’t bear to wait a month - and then see what you think. You may discover that your beginning works just fine.

Moving along to the next question, on March 6, 2011, Kitty wrote, ...I was wondering if you had any advice on foreshadowing? I feel like the slight hints that I drop are too obvious or so slight that no one picks up on them, but I'm not sure how to make them less obvious.

My beloved writing teacher, who taught a workshop that I took again and again, disliked foreshadowing, so I eschew it. If Bunny (my teacher) was against it, so was I.

However, to answer the question, I have to consider and reconsider.

First of all, as usual, if you can make foreshadowing work, go for it.

Second, many great books, especially old books, classics even, use foreshadowing. You might see something like, Dear Reader, if I had known in 1842 what I now know in 1862, I never would have entered the Tea Emporium on that fateful July day.
If you’re writing an old-fashioned story in an old-timey voice, foreshadowing may be perfect.

And foreshadowing can be funny if you want to be funny. Take the example above: Dear Reader, if I had known in 1842 what I now know in 1862, I never would have entered the Tea Emporium on that fateful July day. You can add: I would have been spared many sleepless nights and a right earlobe the size of a grapefruit. Sprinkle silly foreshadowing in at regular intervals and the reader will be looking for it and laughing in advance.

Where the problem comes in is when we foreshadow to prop up a dull part of our story. It’s tempting. Things are going slow right now, but I’m letting you know that the action is going to pick up. The main character is eating a PBJ sandwich. Ordinary, right? We don’t want the reader to get bored so we tell her that there will be dire consequences later. However, we want to keep the story interesting in the present moment, not through foreshadowing but through the ordinary devices of good storytelling: characters the reader cares about, tension between characters, a difficult goal, a terrible situation.

Also, foreshadowing takes the reader out of the immediate moment and makes her aware of the narrator. If the book is told by a first-person main character, foreshadowing reminds the reader that the narrator isn’t participating in events as they unfold but looking back on them. Sometimes this is okay, but sometimes the foreshadowing is an interruption.

There are many ways of suggesting future trouble without foreshadowing. In both Ella Enchanted and Fairest, gnomes can see into the future, although dimly, and in both books they prophesy for the main character. The prophesies make the reader worry about the future without interrupting the action. Dreams, too, can augur ill. If I remember right, dreams are used effectively in Gone With the Wind. It’s a bad sign when Scarlet O’Hara dreams of a child.

However, you don’t need portents or dreams to worry the reader. The most mundane events can do it. For example, Ron Banks-Butler is talking to Hallie Butler, his older cousin, who’s two grades ahead of him in high school. Hallie asks him who he has for History. Here’s the dialogue:
    Ron says, “Mr. Twillet. Is he good?”
    “Good? Twillet doesn’t know what good means, and he has it in for kids with two last names.”
    “What does he do to them?”
    “Ron, you don’t want to know. It will just give you nightmares.”

Uh oh.

Or Clara is boarding an airplane in winter. The pilot announces that they have to wait while the ground crew de-ices the wings. Finally the plane begins to taxi, but Clara sees out her window a slick patch on the wing. She’s sure it’s ice. When she points the patch out the patch to the flight attendant, he tells her everything is fine.

Uh oh.

If you are a devoted foreshadower and are having withdrawal symptoms even thinking about changing your method, stick with what you’re doing. But when you’ve finished your first draft, try deleting the foreshadowing as you revise. If the story is better with it, put it back in. Otherwise, leave it out.

Kitty, I’d stay away from the obvious hints and, if you’re going to foreshadow at all, be subtle. Trust your reader. She’ll catch more than you expect, and even if she misses your hint she’ll understand as events unfold.

Prompts!

∙    Ron is eating that PBJ sandwich. By the time he goes to bed at night a vampire will have sucked the life out of his great uncle who is right now asleep in the den. Without foreshadowing, convey to the reader that disaster lurks.

∙    Clara is on her way to school. It’s an ordinary day. She likes the school, has friends, has studied for her French quiz. Using a different method from the prompt above, show the reader that this will not be an ordinary day, but don’t foreshadow. After you’ve done that, find yet another way to suggest future problems.

∙    Write the first page of a story about a child who lives in a quiet house deep in the countryside. Use foreshadowing to achieve an old-fashioned voice.

∙    Hallie’s cousin has just died in a harrowing way. The death is the start of Hallie’s troubles. Use foreshadowing to make the tragedies funny. Pile dire prediction on dire prediction.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Time's Up!

2011-05-11T09:09:00.000-04:00

I’m happy happy happy to announce that A Tale of Two Castles is out! Released yesterday, and I’m now on tour. Thanks to all you blog readers for your support and eagerness to read the book! Thanks to those of you who weighed in on the title, and more thanks to April for the actual title. This is my nineteenth book, not counting my early, unpublished efforts, and it never ceases to be thrilling.

New on the website is another stop on my book tour, this one in New York City on May 28th. Hope to see a few of you there or at the other events on my tour.

Also, the absolute final cover of Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It, is posted on the website, and I think it’s a hoot. There’s no poem in the book to go with it; my editor said no, but I did write one. I don’t think I posted it on the blog before, so here it is, a blog exclusive:

This Is Just to Say

I have taken a chomp
out
of your precious boat
on its maiden voyage

which
you optimistically
hoped would take you
around the world

Forgive me
I need
more fiberglass
in my diet

End of poem. Please laugh.

On March 4, 2011, Kilmeny of the Ozarks wrote, A couple of posts back you mentioned how often you restart your book. Does that ever make it hard to meet deadlines? I'm having a problem somewhat like this. I'm a "planner" and have to know my plot outline, characters and setting before I start the first draft. And right now I'm taking a course on novel writing from the Institute of Children's Literature. I'm on my fourth assignment, where I'm supposed to write the first third of my novel. The problem is, when I started to do the edits my instructor noted on my chapter outline--my entire plot changed. Completely. My main character moved out of the real world into the fantasy world and her quest changed, etc. So I had to rewrite that and redo my characters... and I'm still not done. My deadline is in mid April, and I'm afraid I won't be able to meet it. I guess what I'm asking is: how can I work on this "pre-planning" (characters, setting, research) while also writing? Sorry, I know it’s confusing. Maybe I just need some organizational tips!
And Charlotte wrote, I agree with Kilmeny of the Ozarks--it would be great to see a post about writing with deadlines. Personally, I've been working on the same novel for a little over five years now, and I've changed and changed and changed the entire plot over and over. It gets me worried that I'll never finish--and as I want to write books for a living, this is kind of problematic!
    How long did Ella take to write? Did you do a lot of editing before sending it to publishers? How did you know when you were done?

I can write about only my own method, and right now it seems as if I work like someone blindfolded, wearing oven mittens, and trying to repair a watch! I don’t outline. Whenever I’ve tried I haven’t been able to stick with the plan. Research is somewhat different, but I don’t know how to pre-plan my characters and my setting except in the most rudimentary way. Everything shifts once I start. Even my research needs change. A Tale of Two Castles is set in a fantasy Middle Ages, so I read about daily life during the period, but when I needed to know about medieval banquets, I returned to the books. (I don’t want to pass the novel off as historically accurate. It’s not. When my plot was incompatible with the facts, the facts went out the window.)

As far as deadlines go, I try to make mine distant enough that I don’t have to stress over meeting them. This mystery novel that’s giving me so much trouble isn’t due until 2014. At this point I’m still pretty secure about making it.

For those who don’t know, if a writer misses a deadline with a book, the book gets rolled over to the publisher’s next list, the next season. My editor assures me this wouldn’t ever be a problem, but I suspect otherwise. Editors move to other publishing houses. Publishers change direction. It’s best to be on time if you can.

Revision deadlines are tighter, but I’m a revising warrior and I blast straight through. I’m known for meeting deadlines, which, I think, gives editors a nice comfort level.

BUT meeting a deadline comes second to making the story as good as you can make it, and often that can’t be rushed. Of course, some working writers don’t have the luxury of lengthy rewriting and repeated fresh starts if the deadline can’t be moved. Then they have to settle for the best they can do in a limited time. Kilmeny of the Ozarks, I missed your mid-April deadline, but for others who are taking courses or attending school, this is another situation where you may have to accept a result you’re not entirely satisfied with. You have to meet school deadlines or sacrifice a good grade, but you can continue with your revisions later if the project interests you.

Kilmeny of the Ozarks, I hope the instructor’s comments that caused all your changes were helpful, even exciting and you thought something like, Wow! If I do this, then I can do that, and it will work in this new way I never thought of before. When I make a u-turn in a manuscript, it’s usually because I’ve glimpsed a better way to go forward. I may not celebrate the hundred or two hundred or three hundred pages I have to rewrite, but probably I should. The understanding I come to, which seems obvious in hindsight, I couldn’t have reached without the blunders.

Every writer has a unique process. You may have to re-outline. Do it or you try a different way of working. I think it’s good advice when possible to just keep going when the story changes, advice that I often don’t have the self control to follow. A friend once told me one should continue even if the gender of the main character changes! I can’t, not when the underlying assumptions of a story shift. Otherwise I soldier on.

When rewriting against a deadline, when actually writing, not taking a shower or walking the dog, put the deadline out of your mind. It’s a distraction. You’re doing the work, which is hard enough without also worrying.

Writing speed varies from writer to writer. Some of us can bang out a novel in three months, some in five years. Ella Enchanted took me two years and I was working full-time at a non-writing job; Fairest took four years and I had quit my day job. Sometimes it depends on the book. Charlotte, you may spend seven years on this book and finish the next one in six months. I find that my struggle alternates: hard book (hard to write), easier, hard, easier. I suspect my subconscious is so exhausted by the difficult ones that it sends me a simpler project next.

On the other hand, maybe what your subconscious is sending up is fear, fear of finishing, fear of sending your work out, fear of rejection, fear of never having another good idea. All of these fears are unsurprising, whether you have them or other readers of the blog do. So maybe it’s time to stick with the latest plot, improve it as much as you can, and move on. Whatever happens to it ultimately, you’ve learned from the writing.

The worth of a book has nothing to do with how long it took to write. The reader doesn’t know if we spent a decade laboring over it or a fevered twenty-one days. He can’t tell if we revised a gross of times or if it went straight from our computers to the copy editor, who didn’t change even a comma.

I had a lot of help with Ella. I was taking a writing class and I belonged to a critique group, but that didn’t stop me from detouring two-hundred pages while my teacher and my critique buddies kept wondering out loud where I was going. When I got back on track I did revise a great deal. I always know I’m done when I find myself changing words and then changing them back.

Writing is weird and mysterious. We control the story and yet it feels like we have no control at all. And both are true.

Prompt time!

∙    Your main character, Eraxo, has an awful case of writer’s block and a looming deadline. Although his writing is blocked, his ingenuity isn’t. In the time freed up by not writing he invents a device to slow time and give himself as long as he needs to work through his writing paralysis. He sits at his strange machine, dons the headset, turns the dials, lifts the levers, and pushes the start button. Everything works. He’s slowed time. But he discovers that place changes with time and that creatures live here who are invisible at humanity’s ordinary tempo, and they are not happy about being discovered. What happens?

∙    Your main character, Eraxa, recognizes she lacks the writing spark, but she wants it. She loves books and the glamour (ha!) of being an author, and her ethics are not strong. She’s as clever as her brother Eraxo, so she invents a time-travel machine. She will go into the future and steal a bestseller, then return to the present and submit it to the book’s publisher as her own. However, in the future she makes a dire discovery about the future of books and reading and publishing. When she returns to the present she has new and unexpected choices that challenge her questionable moral fiber, her courage, and her foresight. What happens?

Have fun, and save what you write!

Getting to Know You

2011-05-04T10:05:00.000-04:00

More new stuff on the website: All my book tour appearances are now posted. Just click on News and then on Appearances and you’re there. But to give you an idea, the cities I’ll be in or near are Chicago, Salt Lake City, L.A., Houston, and Boston. I’ll be in Orlando and Milwaukee too, but no signings. This came up the last time I toured, so I’ll repeat that I don’t simply sign at a signing. I read from the new book, talk about it, and take questions before I start signing, and generally there’s time to get a little acquainted. Hope to see some of you!

Also new on the website: The first chapters of all my books have now been posted, so you can take a look. Let me particularly direct you to my least known novel, Dave at Night, which may be my favorite.

Since I’ll be touring for the next two weeks the appearance of the blog is iffy, but I’m going to try to keep it up.

On March 3, 2011, maricafajaffa wrote, ...I have this habit of jumping right into the plot. In the story I have been writing, the characters are introduced with a small amount of background and then suddenly the main plot line is introduced. I have tried to stretch it out but I haven't been able to work it out properly. Please help me. You can read my story on one of my blogs:
    http://maricafajaffa-writemyfuture.blogspot.com

and maricafajaffa later added:

    I'm not sure if it is bad, but I just get the feeling that I'm getting into the story too quickly and there isn't much for readers to really get acquainted with the characters.
Then Charlotte commented, @maricafajaffa-- sometimes I find you need to write a bunch before even you can get acquainted with the characters. I know I've found that it really doesn't matter how much I figure out about my characters before I start writing (I'm a total fan of the age/gender/height/weight/likes/dislikes/etc forms), because once I'm in the story, they often end up going off and doing their own thing anyway. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's always time to add more about who your characters are in the beginning AFTER you've written enough to know that yourself. There's a huge difference between the first draft and the final product. You don't have to get it perfect on the first try. Heaven knows I never have. :)
    Hope this has been helpful...

Thanks, Charlotte. Very helpful, I believe.

maricafajaffa, if you’re worried about us readers, we aren’t likely to care about the characters until they’re in at least a tiny bit of trouble or somehow at risk, no matter what their backgrounds are. Let’s imagine Irena, an abused teenager, for example, in a foster home, living with Mr. and Mrs. Nembler. Irena has her own bedroom and she’s on the phone with her cousin Jeb from her old life. She tells Jeb how much better her situation is now, and the conversation reveals a lot about her. We hear her voice. She says “You’ll never believe” frequently. She tells Jeb about the shopping spree her foster mom took her on. From the elaborate description we get Irena’s fashion sense. From her enthusiasm we realize that her fashion sense has rarely been indulged. We sympathize with her. If she asks Jeb what’s going on with him we see she cares about other people and we may begin to like her. But the stakes are low.

Suppose she ends the phone call and lights a cigarette. Uh oh. A seed of worry has been planted. Is she allowed to smoke in her room? Do her foster parents know she smokes? Is she sabotaging her wonderful new place? We may wonder where she got the money for cigarettes. When the cigarette dwindles to a nubbin she puts it out between her thumb and forefinger. Youch! How self-destructive is this girl? The conversation with Jeb has put us on Irena’s side, and now we’re worried. Now we care.

A million other things can pull us in. The Nemblers’ youngest son, theirs by birth, can announce he doesn’t want Irena living there. Mr. Nembler can enter Irena’s room and close the door behind him, enough to tinkle our alarm bells. Another foster child can warn Irena about Mrs. Nembler’s temper.

I’m naming mundane but potentially important problems; however, you don’t have to go that way. Irena can go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She glimpses Mr. Nembler in the living room watching TV. She knows it’s him because he’s wearing the same University of Kentucky sweatshirt, only his human head has been replaced by the head of a horse.

I agree with Charlotte. We need to put our characters into a situation and imagine what they might do. Sometimes they’ll take matters into their own hands and act independently seemingly without our intervention. But more often, especially at the beginning of a story, we have to consider the options for them and pick. If we have a sense of the story we’re telling, we think of possibilities that will take our character where we want her to go. Best not to force her. We don’t want to make her do something strange just because our plot needs her to.

If we ourselves don’t have a clue about Irena, we may have her do something generic when the action begins or behave as we would, and the results may not be as interesting as we’d wish. If I were Irena I’d sneak out the back door and go to the police. But first, being a cautious soul, I’d peek in the police station window to make sure the cops don’t have horse’s heads too. That’s me and one version of Irena. One of my friends adores horses. She’d probably imitate a whinny and march right in and strike up a conversation. Another friend would be likely to question her own sanity. Sometimes it helps to think of actual people you know to develop options. What would your best friend do? How about your daredevil cousin? Your older brother? Your mother? When you finish running through actual people, imagine other options. Might Irena wonder if Mrs. Nembler has a horse’s head too? Might she go back to her room and push the bureau against the door? And so on.

Whatever Irena does in this situation, or in any of the other scenarios, begins to establish her character for both the reader and the writer more vividly than any amount of background can. Once you have a start on her - once she begins to act - then future options are narrowed. The girl who marches into the kitchen to speak to the horse is unlikely to run away when Mrs. Nembler comes out of the bathroom with the head of a sheep in place of her human head. Irena may bolt, but if she does, you have to explain.

The events that follow also depend on what Mr. Nembler says or does, how his personality shapes up and the personalities of the other people in the family, possibly the town.

I’ve written this before, that sometimes I start with a character’s back story because I need to know his history before jumping into the present problem, but the back story gums up my beginning and the book doesn’t get off to a clean start and I wind up amputating the back story. So I think it’s generally fine to get into the action quickly. And, yes, I agree with Charlotte that in revision you’ll be better able to see what you need in order to introduce your characters. When the whole sweep of your story is behind you, your perspective clarifies.

You’ve probably guessed the prompt. Write about Irena in any one or more of the difficulties I suggested. She’s self-destructive; a member of the family doesn’t want her; Mrs. Nembler has a terrible temper; Mr. Nembler, and possibly others, is transformed at night. He doesn’t necessarily have to get a horse’s head, either. The animal could be far less benign. Also, you can give Irena problems I haven’t even dreamed of.

Have fun and save what you write!

Inspired

2011-04-27T10:05:00.000-04:00

First off: We put the first chapter of A Tale of Two Castles up on my website. Click here to read it: http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/tcas_prev.html. And click here for the cool book trailer that HarperCollins created: http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/video/tcas_trailer.mov. If you have trouble opening it, you can also watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK05DTpbOn8.

Also new on the website, we added first chapters to three other of my books, Dave at Night, Fairest, and Writing Magic. We hope to have the rest available soon.

And, if you click here, http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/news.html you’ll see the latest photograph of puppy Reggie, who grows more adorable every day, in our opinion. And housebreaking is starting to take. Whoopee!

February 20, 2011 Piper wrote, ...where do you get your inspiration?

I don’t think of myself as an inspired writer so much as one who plugs away, so when I use the word in the post, I’m not certain I’m using it in the way inspiration is commonly used or even that I’m answering the question, but here’s hoping.

That concern aside, my inspiration for being a writer is my childhood reading. Reading ranked just below breathing in importance when I was little. Privacy was in short supply in our cramped apartment. I shared a bedroom with my older sister, who believed I had been created to plague her. Books pulled down the walls that confined me. The ones I read as a child made me a writer for children. I still love to read, but reading isn’t as important to me now as it was then.

The books I attached to were mostly old: Louisa May Alcott’s novels, L. M. Montgomery’s, Heidi, Bambi, Black Beauty, Peter Pan. I relished books about Robin Hood and King Arthur, tall tales, and of course fairy tales. If I liked a book I read it over and over. Through my favorite books and rereading them I absorbed a sense of plot, character, language, even grammar and usage. The old books didn’t limit their vocabulary to what a child would know. What a gift!

When I write, I’m writing for my younger self, which is probably my most fundamental and continuing inspiration.

There are certainly writers for children, however, who weren’t big readers when they were small, some who may be inspired to write because they disliked reading. They want to write books for their younger selves, too, in their case books for today’s children who pick up a book only when they have to for school. These writers may eschew difficult vocabulary words for the reasonable reason that they hated them. I once got a letter from a child who didn’t like Ella Enchanted because of the made-up languages, which he or she (I don’t remember which) didn’t understand. Hard words can frustrate a child and make her feel stupid. I don’t avoid them, but I understand why some writers do.

In 1987 when I started to write for children, I read the books in the Newbery bookcase at the library. I found in many of them the same old-fashioned approach to storytelling that I knew from my childhood, which made me feel right at home and as if I could join in. Another inspiration.

I took writing courses, too, and met fellow writers. My favorite class was a workshop. Every week our teacher would read three or four selections of student work that had been submitted to her the week before. After she read, the class would comment and then she would. Many published writers took this course. The same writing issues (like the ones that come up on the blog) would appear in different guises week after week, so advice would be repeated. The effect was much like rereading books; I absorbed the comments of the more experienced writers, and now their voices are in my mind when I write. I hear them ask me what my characters are thinking and feeling or if I’ve written information that the reader doesn’t need to know and that only I do. My teachers and my classmates are another inspiration.

Today, my writing friends inspire me. Every month two friends come over for lunch. There’s no purpose. We don’t critique each other’s work. Sometimes we shop talk about publishing. Often our own writing comes up. It’s rarely smooth sailing for any of us, which is a comfort and, in an odd way, an inspiration. My critique buddy and I meet monthly too. My book deadline isn’t looming, so having pages for her is a goal.

I still go to fairy tales for ideas and inspiration. The book I’m struggling with now was inspired by a nineteenth century fairy tale called “The King of the Golden River” by John Ruskin, a morality tale about greed. Two rapacious brothers are turned into black stones and their younger, generous brother is rewarded. What I love about the story is the gothic atmosphere. The wind roars into the brothers’ house; the king of the river is a golden mug that melts; the brothers have to climb a forbidding mountain. I wondered what the story’s sequel might be if the stone brothers came back to life. Then my tale changed, and it isn’t about that any more, but the seed probably remains.

What keeps me writing may be the internal-ness of the process, the communion with myself. Like reading, writing is intensely private. We’re fishing in our own minds, and sometimes we pull out magic fish.

There’s also the fact that I earn my living as a writer, which, if not an inspiration, is a goad. What else? Meditating, which I used to do more regularly before Reggie arrived, sometimes causes ideas to bubble up. Exercise also. Plus the drive that artists have to create. I’m at a loss if I’m not working on something.

So here’s something for you to work on, some classic themes that you may have enjoyed as children. Write a story about one or more of these:

•    a dog, horse, or any pet who thinks in language and is separated from her owners.

•    an orphan traveling to an unknown place.

•    a child separated from her family by war.

•    a stowaway on a ship of the royal fleet.

•    a family struggling with poverty.

•    an outlaw set against an unjust society.

Have fun and save what you write!

Enhancing experience

2011-04-20T10:05:00.000-04:00

February 19, 2011, Alice wrote, ...do you have any ideas for writing realistically about a cross-country road trip when you've never actually taken one yourself, and you can't go on one because your whole summer is completely booked?

Alice's question applies to any writing outside one's first-hand experience. When you read this, I hope you'll apply my ideas to your own stories.

First off, Alice, you know a lot about road trips even if you’ve never crossed the nation on one. And even if you had, you’d have only one experience, which might not be enough. You need those shorter trips to draw on, all your experience of car trips.

You can start with your knowledge of humans in cars then move onto your characters. Any story needs conflict, and the cramped space in an automobile, where personalities can’t help but rub up against one another, is perfect.

We all have different driving styles and different styles of being a passenger. If the driving is shared, that can be a source of trouble. And the radio! Or CD player or iPod. What kind of music to listen to? Who prefers news or a recorded book? Open window? Closed window? How high to crank the heat or the air-conditioner? Who pays for gas? Who sits in front? Anybody gets carsick? Conflict galore. As well as opportunities to make peace. The emotional ride can be bumpy!

And what about the car itself, inside and out? Are soda cans rattling around on the floor? Does the car smell like the family dog? Or does it still have a new-car smell after seven years? Is it in good repair? Is it a junker? Does it have a spare tire? Jumper cables? Whose car is it?

My parents loved and respected each other - ordinarily - but they were at their worst in the car. We lived in New York City, where a car and a driver’s license aren’t necessary. My father didn’t get either one until he was in his early forties, and my mother didn’t get hers until the last year of her life, after my dad had died.

My father’s late start and his diffidence combined with my mother’s nervousness and her inability to tell her left from her right (this was long before GPS) made every excursion an expedition into the unknown. If we (my parents, my sister, and I) had set off across country from northern Manhattan where we lived, we might well have driven three thousand miles and wound up in the Bronx, five miles from home.

We played word games in the car and sang car songs. What stands out in memory, however, is the mounting tension. We inevitably got lost, and my parents each blamed the other. Then, at the end of the trip, we had to go home, and it happened all over again.

What I’ve described applies to ordinary trips, and this is a magic ice cream truck (a lovely idea). Still. How does the truck look? Smell? Does Sam the ice-cream man keep the driver’s cab clean? Has the engine had its latest inspection? How high are the driver and passenger from the road? Is the truck noisy? How does it feel different from being in a car? And of course there’s the magic part.

What sort of driver is Sam? Does he love to tell stories and forget to watch the road? Or does he demand silence so he can concentrate? Does he tailgate? Drive too fast? Too slow?

What kind of passenger is the girl, whom I’m calling Honey? Relaxed? Or nervous? Chatty? Silent?

What time of year is the trip? What sort of weather might they encounter?

All this - the characters, the car or truck - are available to the writer before the engine has even turned over. And you don’t have to know the slightest thing about cross-country trips to write this part.

For the cross-country aspect, there’s lots you can do. You should certainly consult a map to plot the truck’s course. Get online directions for the recommended route and alternate routes. Find tourist attractions along the way. Explore the topography. Pretend you were planning the trip for yourself. Decide if Sam and Honey want to go through cities or skirt them. Are they going to stay in motels or camp out? Can they live in the truck? If so, where are the recreational vehicle camps? Research traveling in an RV if that’s going to be their choice.

Before starting this post I googled “worst car trip.” I was thinking conflict again. Lots of items popped up. I read only one, so I don’t know what’s out there. You can google “cross-country road trip” and see what you find.

Also, I’d suggest you ask people you know about their cross-country and long-distance car trips. Here’s a wacky idea: Listen to “Car Talk,” a weekly car-repair program on National Public Radio. You can stream it online. The program is more than car-repair; it’s funny, and you may hear a wealth of material that you can fictionalize.

Readers of the blog, you can help Alice by posting reminiscences of long road trips that you’re willing to share.

Of course, the danger of research is not knowing when to stop. We fall in love with all the discoveries we’re making. You may want to stay in road-trip-research land forever and never progress to the rougher terrain of writing land. So I’d suggest that you research enough to get you started. Then, if Sam and Honey are riding through the Sonoran desert, for example, and you need to know what the landscape looks like, return to the research phase until you’re ready to continue. When you began you might not have known that they would detour into the desert. You certainly wouldn’t have known they’d decide to go to a fancy restaurant for dinner and you have to learn about Southwest cuisine.

When I wrote my historical novel, Dave at Night, I started with general research about New York City in the 1920s, especially about Harlem and the Lower East Side. Then I started writing. Dave’s father dies at the beginning of the book, the first page. A little further on I needed to know what route the hearse would take to the cemetery in 1926. Back to research. Later on, Dave is on the street outside a Harlem rent party in 1926. (A rent party was held when a tenant couldn’t pay the rent. She’d hold a party, serve food, bring in jazz musicians, and collect a small admission fee, which would bring in enough to cover the rent.) These parties were egalitarian affairs. Poor folk and rich attended. I wondered what kind of cars might have been parked at the curb near where Dave stood. This led me to reading about classic cars and interviewing a classic car expert.

Even when I’m writing fantasy, I research. For example, in For Biddle’s Sake, one of my Princess Tales, the fairy Bombina loves to turn people and things into toads, so I researched toads. I used little of what I learned, but knowledge made me more confident. In A Tale of Two Castles (out soon!) one of the major characters is a dragon. To describe him I googled images of dragons, but I wasn’t satisfied, so I looked at Komodo dragons (online, not in person), and that’s what I described, except for the wings, which I made up. Research helps with detail, and, as we all know, detail brings stories to life.

Naturally these prompts revolve around car trips. Perry is invited to vacation with his best friend Letty Pewer and her parents. They are traveling from Minnesota to Florida for a winter week in the sun. Below are some possibilities to fool around with. Pick as many as you like or make up your own or do a combo of mine and yours.

•    Letty’s father is peculiar. You decide how.

•    Letty’s mom is a dangerous driver. You decide how.

•    Letty’s younger brother and older sister are coming along. They don’t get along with Letty and dislike Perry.

•    The car is older than Perry. The radio doesn’t work. There is no iPod, no CD player.

•    The Pewers are economizing and haven’t bought a GPS. Good old maps are good enough for them. They plan to camp out and save on motel costs as soon as they reach warm enough weather.

•    The car is bewitched - not in a good way.

•    This is the snowiest winter in the history of Minnesota and surrounding states.

•    The scenic route will take the family and Perry through an old mining town. Unbeknownst to the authorities, one of the abandoned mines is now occupied by squatters who may be dangerous.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Seeking conflict

2011-04-13T13:27:00.000-04:00

I’m hoping to see a few of you tonight at the library in Chelsea, Michigan! Details on my website. Many more Reggie photos on David’s for you puppy-ophiles.

On February 17, 2011, bluekiwii asked, How do you find out what the major conflict of your story is and why do you stick to it?

I just looked up The Lord of the Rings trilogy on Wikipedia. According to that source, and I haven’t done further research, Tolkien didn’t realize right away that it was all about an evil ring held by the forces of good and desired by arch-villain Sauron. Originally, Tolkien thought Bilbo would run out of the treasure he’d found during The Hobbit and would go adventuring for more. Then Tolkien remembered the ring and developed that idea.

In the case of The Lord of the Rings, conflict is evident. Good and evil fight it out in situation after situation, battle after battle. But conflict can be much softer. Take Pride and Prejudice, for example, my all-time favorite, or any of Jane Austen’s novels. Maybe the conflict is always “the battle of the sexes,” but that trivializes what Austen does. Maybe the conflict is women against society, although against is too strong. In each book, the problem may be a particular woman, beautifully drawn in the Jane Austen way, finding happiness (and often economic security) in marriage against many odds. Or maybe the conflict is the individual in opposition to the family.

Often conflict arises out of a character’s desire and the obstacles to obtaining it. Ella Enchanted runs on Ella’s need to get rid of her curse. Black Beauty is an interesting example of this. Throughout, the horse wants to live and be treated well, but he’s a horse and can do little to influence his fate. It’s quite an achievement to write an exciting book about a passive main character. In most stories about animals, the animal manages to take matters into his own hooves or paws or mandibles or whatever.

I’d be hard pressed to say what the major conflict in my book, Fairest, is. Aza would like to be beautiful, but she doesn’t do much to get what she wants, because success seems unattainable. The conflict could be a girl against her own body. Possibly, but it doesn’t play out exactly that way. Mostly she’s struggling against the selfish and screwy Queen Ivi, and there’s also her budding romance with Prince Ijori, and also the politics of a kingdom under despotic rule.

The point is, you may not know what your major conflict is. You may write the whole story and not know. Your readers may debate the issue. As I said in my last post, holding reader interest is what counts, not what the major conflict is or anything else, and there are many ways to accomplish that.

I don’t know if you have to stick with one conflict. In my book, The Wish, Wilma gets her wish to be the most popular student in her middle school. The first part of the book is about her adjustment to popularity; the last part deals with what happens when she discovers the catch to the wish. There’s also the love interest with an unpopular boy. The theme throughout is popularity, but the story looks at the topic through a variety of moments. (If you read it, notice that the dog, an important character, is an Airedale coincidentally named Reggie.)

Another example, in my opinion, is Gone With the Wind. Initially, Scarlett O’Hara wants forbidden love; later she wants to survive. Then, later still, it’s back to love, or I’m not sure what she wants at the end.

The conflicts that I stick with, at least temporarily, are the ones that lead me to further incidents and more action - the ones that stimulate ideas. For instance, suppose we’re writing a science fiction story about space exploration. Inga is our heroine. Do we want her to have her own spaceship? Could be. Technology in the world of our story has advanced to the point that a single person can do everything to run a spaceship. If she lands on an unexplored planet alone, she’s in the middle of it with no one to turn to for help. Assuming the planet is populated with an alien life form, she has only her own resources to lean on to figure the aliens out. The advantage of this is that there’s no one to save her if she gets into trouble. The disadvantage is the absence of the complexity of personalities acting on one another. Such complexity may arise once Inga gets to know the aliens, or maybe not. If I were going to write this story, I’d think about what kind of aliens they might be and what crew mates she might have, and as I wrote notes, one of the two options would excite me, would start me thinking, more than the other, this could happen and this and this. That’s the one I’d go with, and eventually I’d start writing.

Please notice: I’m not saying that I stick to a certain major conflict because it’s good. I try not to make such judgments while I’m writing, because if I start making them, I’m more likely to think it’s bad. I keep going with something when I can. I’ve been bewailing the number of times I’ve restarted Beloved Elodie, and that’s because I reach a point where I recognize the thing isn’t working, not because I think it's bad. In my longest attempt so far (about 250 pages) I came to a dead end when I realized that the mystery I’d set up couldn’t be solved. The next-to-longest attempt, about 140 pages, I abandoned because I’d forgotten to include any suspects. Basically when I’m onto something that I can stick with and get to the end, I do.

I’m not a very analytic writer. I don’t think about what my major conflict is, at least not in those terms. I’m more engaged in events as they happen and as far ahead as I can see. Sometimes I know what the ending is going to be. There are writers who work out what they’re doing ahead of time, who think of rising action and falling action, who number their crises and know exactly when the last lap should begin and the resolution should be formed. My method is more muddle and a dim belief that if I crawl along I’ll get to the end eventually.

I can imagine starting a story and finding that I object to where I seem to be going on, I guess, ethical grounds. Something like that happened to me when I tried to write a novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” I discussed this in my post on fairy tales, my favorite post for the comments it sparked. In the original fairy tale, the princesses are complicit in the deaths of an untold number of young men, and yet they’re the heroines of the story. I couldn’t write it, and I had to move the story in a new direction, to what eventually became The Two Princesses of Bamarre.

At least as important as the major conflict is what you do with it. For instance, a brother and a sister are feuding. That’s the problem. But how are they feuding? Sending each other angry emails? Subtly ruining one another’s lives? Gathering armies to conquer the other one’s half of the kingdom? Having a pillow fight?

Here are a few prompts on the theme of major conflict:

∙    Write about the feuding brother and sister. Write the seeds of the feud and how it’s expressed.

∙    Write a story in the Black Beauty mold. Write about a helpless main character and make it exciting. This is hard. See what happens.

∙    Decide for yourself whether Inga is alone in her spaceship. If you’re so inclined, try it both ways and see what happens to the story.

∙    Rethink The Lord of the Rings. Write what happens if Frodo claims the ring for his own.

∙    Lord of the Rings again. Write a story that follows the action of the final book. Come up with a new major conflict.

Have fun, and save what you write!

When to press the trigger

2011-04-06T13:44:00.000-04:00

Before I start, there are pictures of Reggie the puppy on my website. Click on News to see them. And if you haven’t had enough, there are more on my husband’s website, www.dmlevine.com.

Also on the website are details about my appearance next week at the public library in Chelsea, Michigan. For this, click on News, and then on Appearances. Hope to see some of you in Michigan!

On February 17, 2011, Grace wrote, How long can one write without introducing the main problem of a story? In my newest project I have my main character in a new place with a lot of wacky characters I love to write about. They've had some small problems that keep the plot going thus far but I'm getting on 20k words now and I still haven't introduced the main conflict that will guide the story and hopefully the rest of the planned series. Is this too long? Do you think the reader will get bored? I hesitate to rush the plot too much because then the characters would have to leave their current location and I really love where they are right now and all the characters there.

Many of you commented most helpfully on Grace’s question, and you can go back and read what everyone said. Some mentioned foreshadowing, and I have a future post coming up on that subject, so you can keep an eye out for it. I’m including Erin Edwards’s comment in the post, because it’s so helpful. Here it is:

    @ Grace - Lots of really good published books seem to put off the main problem and they do a really good job of immersing the reader in the story world - but they aren't necessarily ones who would easily get an agent or publisher in the current climate. Getting to the main problem quickly is kind of a trend right now, especially when agents and editors only read the first 10 pages! But really you shouldn't worry too much about getting published as you write; a lot can happen in revising.

    Things you can keep in mind:
    - Keep writing. It may be that after you finish you can reorder your scenes and alter this scene you love into a middle scene.
    - Go back over what you've written and see if you can drop hints about the main problem that's to come. Build the anticipation.
    - Or maybe, your main problem that you have in mind isn't going to work and that's why you're avoiding it. As you keep exploring you may come up with a better main problem.
Writing is rule-free territory, so there’s no rule about how quickly the main story problem needs to start. Some books have no main story problem, or the main problem is soft-edged. Going back to Little Women, which we discussed two weeks ago, what’s the thrust of the story? Beth’s death? No. Jo’s love life? No. A family enduring poverty? I don’t think so. The girls don’t engage in a get-rich scheme to reclaim the family fortune or pack a bag and set off into the Civil War to find their father . We’re propelled through the story by our interest in the characters and the series of incidents Louisa May Alcott presents. The theme, I suppose, is growing up.

Time and Again by Jack Finney (middle school and up, I’d guess), a time-travel novel I love, doesn’t get moving for fifty pages, and the first fifty, in my opinion, are dull. I used to be a more forgiving reader than I am now, so I hung in. Then the story, once it got going, was impossible to put down. I read the book many years ago, so I don’t remember if those first fifty pages were essential, and I still recommend the book heartily. It’s charming and light-hearted and full of details about old New York City.

In a writing class I took over and over when I was getting started, our teacher would read a few students’ chapters out loud every week and then ask for comments. Often, when she read a first chapter, people said that we’d heard just “back story,” information that the writer needs to know but the reader doesn’t. The advice would be to keep writing and find the story’s real beginning later.

Grace, it sounds like you do have a strong story line in mind. What you’ve been writing may be back story, which you may need to cut later. Or maybe you’re writing a different book in the first 20,000 words. Maybe you want to split the two apart.

If you need to cut, remember the writing advice from William Faulkner to “kill all your darlings.” I think what he meant is that we protect our most gorgeous phrases, our most fascinating scenes. We write around them; we twist our plots so our beautiful lines can stay. After a while, they just get in the way and they have to go.

But they don’t have to vanish. I save my “darlings” for each of my books in a document I call “Extra.” I’ve eliminated more than a thousand pages in the course of writing my books, possibly over two thousand. Of course, most of those weren’t darlings, but some were. In my case, the darlings are usually scenes of exquisite character development, and it hurts to give them up, but I do, because writers have to be ruthless.

This is a prompt in the middle of the post: Become aware of your darlings. Go through a story you’re working on and underline the parts you would rather chop off your arm than cut. Save your old version, then delete those bits and see what happens to your story. Does it become cleaner? Is it better? Is it worse? If worse, put the parts back.

I’m a plot-driven writer. My stories don’t depend on the charm of the characters, although I hope some are charming. My books focus most of all on action. Alas, you might not be able to tell that from Beloved Elodie, which I’ve started yet again. The book begins on a boat. In the next-to-next-to-last version the action then moved to an inn, where I introduced the suspects but I held off on the mystery. Ho hum! said the reader. Why do I care about these people? Nothing is at stake.

To make matters worse, I had my characters journey together for pages and pages before they reached the place where the mystery was going to begin. Meanwhile, they revealed motives for committing the crime whenever we got to it. My critique buddy asked me, in the kindest possible way, what the heck I thought I was doing.

So I realized I could move all my suspects to the place where the mystery would start. Elodie could meet them when she arrived. Still, I kept the scene in the boat and then took her to the inn, where the problem was introduced in a theoretical way, and I didn’t get to the scene of the action until page 59. Double-ho-double-hum!

In this latest revision I’ve kept the scene on the boat, which is essential, and I begin the crisis there, on page 10. In revision I may trim even more, but the first nine pages are pretty exciting.

On the other hand, in A Tale of Two Castles, which you will soon be able to read (Yay!), the mystery takes even longer to get going, but it’s okay, because Elodie has a pressing problem at the beginning, and the reader cares about that. So it’s fine.

As usual, the key is reader interest. If the reader falls in love with your wacky characters, Grace, and is as happy to read about them spreading jam on toast as escaping from a burning building, all is well, and you can delay conflict as long as you like. However, it's very hard to keep a reader engaged when there’s nothing to worry about. Also, conflict will bring out sides of these marvelous people that the reader wouldn’t see in a pleasant scene around the breakfast table. For example, Melba is having lunch with her friends in the school cafeteria. She’s the one who goes back for more ice or helps mop up spilled apple juice. But when a fire starts, she may behave unexpectedly, and the reader will see her in a new light.

Grace and anyone else with this question, you may want to show your story to a fellow writer or a good reader. Ask him if he longed for something to worry about. Have him tell you the spot where he began to feel frustrated and also to point out the places where the story picked up again, if it did.

Here’s another prompt: After school, Melba is going to discover that her house has vanished. She has no idea, however, that this is going to happen, and neither does the reader. Write a scene with Melba and her two best friends before she goes home. Let the reader get to know Melba a little. Try to keep up his interest without foreshadowing. Introduce minor problems, but hold off on the house disappearance. Feel when you think the reader is detaching, and stop before boredom sets in. Feel free to write more of the rest of the story after the disappearance.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Tempo!

2011-03-29T17:12:00.000-04:00

I’m posting early because I’m traveling tomorrow.

Oops! Erin Edwards, you commented on Jenna Royal’s question from last week when she asked it in February, and I intended to include your comment along with my own response, but I didn’t look far enough down my list to see it. I agreed entirely, so here it is: @ Jenna Royal - while you're waiting for Ms. Levine's post on pacing, you might find it interesting to try to read Inkheart again and figure out *why* the romance change didn't work for you. What little insights could have made it easier for you to believe? Like did you need a little hint that she was starting to get dissatisfied before she dumped the first boyfriend and how many times does that need to be mentioned and how early?

And I had promised a post on pacing and didn’t get to it. I am getting to it now in response to this from Caitlin Flowers on March 4, 2011: I have trouble pacing my stories. I'd enjoy writing action or an important moment for the characters more than writing the necessary slower scenes to give the reader a chance to keep up. Do you have any suggestions?

Seems to me there’s more than one question here, if I’m understanding right. There’s balancing high-action scenes and low-action scenes, and there’s fitting information in that the reader needs to know. I’ve written some about the latter in my post on flashbacks on May 5, 2010, so you may want to take a look.

But here’s some more. I’ve said this before too. We don’t want Millie to say to her brother Noah, “Remember the day Mom and Dad split up and we had to come here to live?” She wouldn’t say this unless Noah has amnesia and she’s checking to see if his memory has come back. Of course he remembers, but the reader doesn’t know. The dialogue is artificial; it’s manufactured solely to clue the reader in.

However, there’s nothing wrong with conveying information in direct narration. Say Noah is making dinner for his younger sister, which he’s had to do since the separation, whether they’re staying with their mom or their dad. He can think something like, I was trying my hand at frittatas. I never even made toast when Mom and Dad were together. I felt lousy when they split up, but cooking was cool. The narration can stop there or continue on to, I wished we still had the island from our old kitchen. Mom’s whole apartment wasn’t much bigger than that island. Dad’s wasn’t a lot larger, and his kitchen was just a wall at one end of the living room. The reader gains an impression of the setting and learns that both parents have less money now.

You don’t need a whole scene to convey information; you can just tuck it in here and there in narration in whatever POV you're using.

Onto pacing. I’ve been having a pacing problem in my new mystery. Without giving much away, night is coming. Elodie can spend it in a cottage with her parents or in the stable with her employer, the dragon Meenore, and there has to be some discussion about which it will be. I had a stomachache over how boring the conversation was going to be, a malady I’ve been experiencing often in writing this book. It got so bad that I sent my manuscript so far to my editor for her feedback.

I’ve never ever before sent in a partial manuscript. Ordinarily I like my editor to come fresh to the entire thing. This was an act of desperation. You may have read on the blog that I’ve started this book over four times, and each time an alarm has gone off in my mind that it wasn’t right. My editor wrote back that she thinks the trouble sinking the book is that the danger hanging over the story is too abstract and not nearly immediate enough to engage the reader. Wonderful editor that she is, she suggested a solution that may do the trick.

Naturally, I’m going to have to go back to the beginning again.

Of course I’m lucky. Because I’m published and my editor has edited several of my books, I can avail myself of her help. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to rely for manuscript first aid on critique buddies, teachers, librarians, and the good readers in your lives.

Caitlin Flowers and others with pacing issues, you may have the same problem I do. The action and the big character scenes bring the story temporarily to life, but the in-between segments fall flat because there isn’t enough overall for the reader to worry about.

I got it right in Ella Enchanted. As long as Ella is under the curse of obedience, the reader is going to stay engaged. I can get away with a relaxed scene here and there, like the scene with the elves. Nothing earthshattering happens, but the reader meets these charming creatures and gets a break from the tension. Such relief heightens the scenes that are full of action or feeling. If a story is constant crisis, it plateaus and the high points don’t stand out. It’s like listening to loud music; there can never be a crescendo. You may know someone who gets upset over the smallest thing. When genuine trouble comes along, he lacks emotional range.

A variety of kinds of scenes livens up a story. Unless the tale demands it, move your characters to different locations. If Noah and Millie, for example, have been in the kitchen for a few pages, move them into the backyard or, better yet, to school. After they’ve been alone together for a while, separate them or bring in another character. End a scene and start the next one in a different place or at a later time. If you’re writing from an omniscient third person POV, switch over to entirely different characters for the next scene.

If you can, also alternate the kinds of scene. In Ella Enchanted again, there are romantic scenes with Char and conflict-filled scenes with Hattie and Olive and scary scenes with ogres and I-don’t-know-what-kind of scenes with Mandy.

Most important of all, the reader has to care about the main character. By now I know a lot of writing tricks (which I’m sharing as they come up), but nothing works if the reader doesn’t care. Take Noah. He may be misguided and may be handling his parents’ separation badly. We may groan at his idiotic attempts to repair his family and himself. We’ll even endure when he hurts his sister Millie as long as he isn’t callous, as long as we can connect with his humanity and see our own flawed selves in him. We’ll put up with a slow scene or two (since no book is perfect), if Noah has a firm grip on our feelings and our imaginations.

Here are two prompts:

• Noah is in the kitchen with his sister, Millie, while their mother is on her first date since the breakup. Sister and brother are reacting according to their separate natures. Mix dialogue with action in writing the scene. Be sensitive to your own intuition about when the situation is starting to drag. Change something to wake the story up again - the location, the characters. The phone can ring or one of them can get a text message. Some cooking catastrophe can occur. Whatever. If you like, keep writing.

• This is a battle scene. A troop of elves is holding their mountain keep against an attack of trolls. In the midst of action-action-action, work in a soft, feeling moment between two characters. Then return to the action.

Have fun and save what you write!

Fickle

2011-03-23T14:35:00.002-04:00

On February 5, 2011 Jenna Royal wrote, ...in one of my novels, my MC falls in love twice. The first person he falls in love with is someone he's not supposed to, and it doesn't work. It starts out that way. Throughout the book, he tries to keep away from the girl, and he ends up with another girl a lot, whom he doesn't like well at first but over time he falls in love with her instead. Is this too complicated with readers’ emotions? The reason I'm asking is because a couple years ago I read a trilogy (Inkheart by Cornelia Funke) where the MC had the same boyfriend for most of the book but then decided she wanted a new one at the end. I felt the MC was a little unfair, and I found it to be a bit of an unsatisfying ending. What are your thoughts on this?
Hmm...I haven’t read Inkheart, but I’m thinking of Jo in Little Women deserting Laurie for Professor Bhaer. Now I’m thinking of Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice switching from Wickham to Darcy. Changing boyfriends - or, in your case, girlfriends - isn’t uncommon in literature.

I’ve never been entirely happy with Jo’s choice. I suppose Laurie isn’t right for her, and I guess the professor is, but, gee, Laurie is so romantic and interestingly difficult, like Jo, and the professor is dullsville! (I’m not being fair to him.) I certainly don’t want Amy to get Laurie. It would be better, in my opinion, if he never marries and regrets Jo and his own character limitations forever.

But I’m delighted about Darcy and Elizabeth, although I do root for Wickham in the beginning. Austen does a great job of convincing me that Wickham is a cad, and we see how smitten Darcy is with Elizabeth - which may be the key. We love Elizabeth, and Darcy appreciates her just as much as we do, so we think well of him. Wickham, on the other hand, doesn’t value her nearly highly enough, since he prefers any rich wife to any impecunious one.

Near the end of Pride and Prejudice the narrator implies that Elizabeth is going to improve Darcy’s sense of humor, make him unbend a little, and he’s going to expand her mind, so there’s equality. But, if I remember Little Women correctly, Jo is the sole one to benefit. Professor Bhaer is going to make her better, but he’s already perfect. He’s good for her, like a multivitamin, and vitamins are not romantic.

Also Professor Bhaer comes on the scene late, and Laurie has been in the book almost from the beginning. We don’t have a chance to get to know the professor or to see in slow motion how he falls for Jo.

Maybe I’m all wet. I haven’t read Little Women in many years, but I reread Pride and Prejudice regularly. Anyway, I think your hero can go through scads of girlfriends if your real heroine is there all along, on the sidelines, being delightful, appreciating him more completely than anyone else.

There are other approaches too. You may know couples that you can’t figure out. He’s so nice and she’s so full of herself. Or she’s terrific, but you can count on him to say the wrong thing on every occasion. Fictionally, you can make the first girlfriend so loathsome that we’re totally relieved when he moves on.

Or the first girl is terrific, but there’s a tiny thing wrong with her, like she’s a ghost or she lives a thousand miles away and they can be together only online or she’s a six-hundred-year-old elf or she’s from another galaxy. Again, the reader is likely to be glad when our hero finds someone more possible.

Or he could act badly in the first relationship and their romance sours. It’s his fault, but he ends it, recognizing that the damage he's done is irreparable. We see him start fresh. A moment comes with the new girl when his buttons are pushed, but he chooses to behave better. Whew! we think. This time they’re going to be happy. Yay!

Or many other possibilities.

In the interest of not jerking the reader around, you probably want to make it clear that the old relationship is over before the new one starts - unless the story is about the hero’s flip-flops.

Generally, we don’t want to stop loving the main. In the case of Little Women, Jo goes down in my estimation for choosing Professor Bhaer because he’s good for her. I like her emotional side - her temper, her storminess - which humanizes her. I don’t want her with a man who’s going to smooth her out. When your main chooses a new love for reasons the reader doesn’t understand, the reader disconnects a little or a lot.

I’m also not pleased when a character unaccountably changes. In Jenna Royal’s example, let’s suppose the main, Lester, say, loves a woman, Peony, in a rival clan. His family and the girl’s oppose the match and try to keep the two apart, but they find ways to meet because they’re wild about each other. They take a long walk together on the beach. If Lester, whom we’ve known to be a guy with good values, notices she’s knock-kneed and her speech is less educated than his and he loses interest, we’re likely to feel confused. This isn’t the Lester we know and care about. If, however, Peony repeats hostile remarks she’s heard about his clan, like they’re dirty and they steal, we’re right with him if he dumps her.

Even if the new love interest arrives near the end of the story, it may be important to devote at least a few pages to their fresh beginning. Sometimes not, but you don’t want the ending to feel rushed.

Three prompts:

∙    It’s the beginning of senior year in high school. Justin and Flora are an item as are Peter and Rose and Horace and Tulip. They spend a wilderness weekend together with their class, and by the time they return home, the romances have shifted twice to different people in their group. Write how it happens.

∙    In my book, The Wish, Wilma magically becomes the most popular person in her middle school. All the boys want to go to the graduation dance with her. This doesn’t happen in the book, but imagine Wilma holding an audition for being her date. Write the audition. For extra credit, manipulate the reader’s feelings so that he roots for one boy after another. If you like, keep going and show Wilma’s decision and how she arrives at it.

∙    Let’s complicate the situation for Lester and Peony. They take their beach walk, the longest time they’ve ever spent together, and he realizes she’s not right for him. She’s not bad, but maybe she chatters, and he finds himself getting impatient, and maybe she has a nervous laugh that grates on him - or whatever qualities you pick. The trouble is that the objections of his clan members make it hard for him to give her up. He’s angry at them, and he doesn’t want them to think they were right. Besides, she’s risked a lot to be with him. Take it from there.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Clarity

2011-03-16T11:23:00.000-04:00

Before I start, I may be late with the blog over the next few weeks. Those of you who’ve looked at my website have seen our dog Baxter, who died in December. I didn’t mention this when it happened, because it was sad and I was sad. But now we have a new puppy, eight-week old Reggie. When things calm down, my husband will post pictures on the website, but now it’s puppy all the time and I’m having trouble getting anything done. We think he’s going to be worth it.

On January 21, 2011, Susan Lee wrote, Do you have any tips on writing. As in making sure people who read it will understand what you wrote?

Unless you’re writing experimental fiction, clarity is the primary objective, ahead of plot, characterization, setting - any of the elements of story telling. Clarity isn’t even an element! It’s the air a reader breathes.

Being clear doesn’t mean we can’t be complex. We can suggest something that will be more fully explained later. Our reader doesn’t have to understand what we intend at exactly the moment we suggest it. Realization can be delayed. Mysteries delay understanding constantly. That isn’t lack of clarity, that’s simply interesting storytelling.

But we don’t want to confuse the reader accidentally, and we can do so especially effectively by making technical mistakes. In dialogue, for example, the reader needs to know who’s speaking, and this isn’t the place to delay understanding. Each speaker should have her own paragraph, along with any body language. When two people speak in a single paragraph, even if the speech is attributed (using said or asked or the like), the reader has to work too hard.

You don’t always have to attribute speech. If only two people are present, you don’t need to name the speaker every time. In fact, you shouldn’t or the writing won’t flow. But don’t wait so long that the reader has to go back and count, as in, that was June speaking, now it’s Jake, June, Jake, June, Jake, June. Ah, Jake said this. I hate that.

I’ve written about dialogue in more detail in previous posts and in Writing Magic, so I won’t repeat it all here, but dialogue often makes the reader muddled.

So do loose pronouns. If I write, The food was overcooked and everybody was arguing. It made me sick. the reader doesn’t know what it refers to - the meal or the arguing or both. And sick is vague, too, although it's not a pronoun. Heart sick or stomach sick? Explaining in later sentences helps, but being specific from the beginning is even better.

When two men or two women are together in a scene, or two distinct groups are together, clarity can be hard to achieve, as in, Jack waited an hour for Justin to show up. When Justin finally arrived he was very angry. Well, who was angry? Jack for having had to wait or Justin for some other reason? And yet When Justin finally arrived Justin was very angry. sounds terrible. What to do?

Recast it. Jack waited an hour for Justin to show up. New paragraph. Justin entered the restaurant pale with anger. “If I have to sit through another three-hour meeting about the wording of a mission statement, I’m going to...” No confusion.

In A Tale of Two Castles the dragon character makes the pronoun business easier. Masteress Meenore is an IT because dragons rarely reveal their gender, so IT can be in a scene with a male character and a female character and, unless another dragon is present, confusion is impossible, and since IT is capitalized IT can’t be confused with an inanimate object, like a bowl of soup or a shoe.

Finnish, I’m told, has no masculine and feminine pronouns. A man is an it and a woman is an it. I don’t know if this creates a problem for writers writing in Finnish, but I’m told it makes translation difficult, and examples of sentences like the one above, When Justin finally arrived Justin was very angry. are sometimes unavoidable.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White is a slim book about style and English usage. For a guide to clear writing it can’t be beat, in my opinion. I recommend it for middle school and above. Children of any age can read it, but I don’t think it will be helpful at a much younger age.

It’s a good idea to make friends with an English usage book. Usage means the way a word is used, and a usage books explains how a word should or shouldn't be used. The usage issue that gets me into trouble every time is the difference between take and bring. The examples that a usage book provides makes me understand for at least five minutes. Often - almost universally - people misuse lay and lie, a pet peeve with me. I’ve recommended Garner’s Modern American Usage before. Some readers on the blog are reading from outside the States, and you may find Fowler's Modern English Usage more helpful. Usage books are arranged alphabetically, dictionary-style, a cinch to figure out.

Misplaced or wrong punctuation can also make trouble for the reader. A book has been written on this subject, which I confess I haven't read. I know it's for adults, but I can't assess the level. Still, it might be worth picking up: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. If anyone reading this post has read the book, I'd welcome your comments.

In A Tale of Two Castles there is what seems like an addition mistake. (If you read the book see if you can find it.) The people who were recording the audio version called me to ask if they should change it. I panicked because it’s too late to fix the book, and I told them to make the correction. Then I emailed my editor, and she said I had made the mistake intentionally to provide a little subtext between two characters, and she had noted it in one of her edits and she likes it and hopes I won’t change it for the second printing. I thought, Whew! At least we all know how to count. But, alas, I don’t remember what I intended. So that’s muddiness I inflicted on myself. I guess the lesson is to try to know what you're doing!

Loose pronouns and sloppy usage and incorrect punctuation are micro problems, but there can be macro ones as well. If I’m reading and I can’t see where the characters are in the setting I get confused and start having trouble following the plot. When I’m writing and the locale is complicated, I often draw a chart. Sometimes I worry that including setting slows down the action, but we have to put it in, although we probably want to establish the place before a crisis hits.

Too many subplots can make a story hard to follow and even dull. My husband and I started out as fans of the TV series Lost, but when back stories and new directions started to pile up, we both lost track and stopped caring. We never watched the last season.

When characters abruptly switch their natures I feel at sea and I don’t know what the author intends. In general, character is particularly tricky because everybody sees people differently. A few years ago, one of my critique buddies was writing a family story. She thought the mother was loving, but I saw her as harsh. I was able to point out why, and she softened the mother’s interactions with her daughter. I’ve mentioned in other posts that I sometimes have trouble making my main characters likable even though I want them to be. I’ve needed my editor to point out the spots where my main is unsympathetic.

So it often helps to have other eyes on a story or just on passages that you think may not do or say what you want them to. I’ve written about writers’ groups in other posts, but for getting clarity all you really need is a good reader who can say where he got confused.

Speaking of confusion, life with a puppy is full of it. I don’t know what he wants, what he needs, what would be best for his growth into a happy, responsive dog. Sometimes he might as well be a Martian for all I understand him. So for the prompt, an alien encounter. Your main character seeks out another creature, could be a Martian or an elf or a dog, whatever. Each needs something from the other, but they don’t speak the same language, or maybe they do but the cultures are so different the meaning is quite different. They may not even think the same way. Write their meeting and their attempts to get what they want. See if you can work the story around so they are able to figure each other out, but don't make it easy.

Have fun and save what you write!

Ready or Not

2011-03-09T14:34:00.000-05:00

Before I start, if you go to Books on my website and click on Other, you’ll see a sketch for the cover of my book of mean poems, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It. The final cover will have some color but won’t be much different from what you see. I adore it. It perfectly captures the book’s mood of malevolent complacency, and I can’t look at it without grinning evilly. The book won’t be out until April, 2012, so it’s way too early to pre-order.

On December 27, 2010, Jenna Royal wrote ...I recently read an interview with an author who said that you shouldn't try to get published as a teen, just keep trying to improve your writing skills and not try to put your writing out there because it isn't worth your trouble and the rejection is too hard on your self-confidence at this point. What are people’s thoughts on this? I for one know that I'm not going to try publishing until I know that I've got something worth putting out there, that I'm really proud of, something that I've put myself into and polished and perfected until it's the best it can be. Even if I feel I have something like this, should I still wait?

Jenna Royal, you asked about teens, but at least part of your question applies to every age as well.

I sent the first book I ever wrote straight out to publishers (I was thirty-nine). It had merit, and I thought it was great, but it was unpublishable. I hadn’t read a children’s book in many years and had no notion of what was going on. My story line was simple, possibly good for young children, but the ideas I explored (art appreciation) were more appropriate for a much older audience. The two parts didn't go together, and the manuscript was universally rejected.

So I started educating myself and kept sending picture book manuscripts out. I was not shy, and although rejection made me unhappy, it didn’t devastate me. Were my later stories (the ones that never were accepted) good enough to be published? I don't know. I did my best and released them into the world.

I’ve talked about my road to publication in other posts, so I won’t repeat here. Years later, while I was still unpublished, an editor visited a writing class I was taking. He said that the two fastest ways to get published were to write on a subject nobody else knew much about or to write something completely great. And I thought, Then I’ll never get published. The only subject I knew thoroughly was welfare policy, which wasn’t promising for a children’s book, and I didn’t think I was writing anything great or ever would. I was working on Ella Enchanted at the time, which turned out well. But I still don’t think about writing a great book when I write. Mostly I think about figuring it out and getting through it.

There are many ways to divide the world into two categories. You may have heard the theory that everyone resembles either a pig or a fox, which I don’t see. But I believe people divide into those who over-appreciate themselves and those who under-appreciate themselves. It’s hard to advise on sending work out to a publisher without knowing which group a person falls into.

Alas, over-appreciators, in my experience, rarely have the insight to know what they are. So they flood publishers’ slush piles with bad books insufficiently revised and are the reason everyone else has to wait so long for an editorial response. If you are the rare over-appreciator who recognizes this quality in yourself, you shouldn’t put anything into the mail or cyberspace until at least three people say it’s ready.

If you’re a severe under-appreciator of any age, you should push yourself to get your work out or you never will and readers will be the losers.

Another problem with being an under-appreciator is that if an editor rejects your work, you may say to yourself, Aha, I knew it wasn’t any good. Then you may never send it out again. You don’t know what was going on at the publisher when your manuscript was read. An editorial assistant may have sat down to a stack of submissions up to the ceiling. Four hours later he was drooling and muttering gibberish to himself and unable to identify the next Jane Austen if he came across one of her manuscripts.

One way to get a sense of the worth of what you have is to set it aside for a few weeks. If you under-appreciate you may be surprised at the high quality of what you’ve written. If you over-appreciate, you may be able to see the flaws.

In this process of deciding whether to submit a manuscript, you may want to ask yourself how you handle rejection. If you take turndowns hard, I don’t say not to submit, I say think about supports to help you if - and more likely when - rejection comes. Tell friends what you’re doing. Assemble a cheering section. If you’re in a writers’ group you’ll have your pals' misery to keep company with. Read about all the famous writers whose work was initially rejected. There are collections of rejection letters for renowned books. Buy one or borrow one from your library.

You may also want to start small. Lots of kids’ book writers begin by submitting stories to children’s magazines before submitting to book publishers. If you’re writing for adults, there may be online publishing opportunities that may be easier to break into than the big publishing houses. If you’re a teen or even younger, googling young writers will lead you to opportunities. I’m not saying you have to start small, only that you can if that’s where your comfort zone is.

As for being a teen per se, I can’t imagine that an excellent manuscript wouldn’t get the same treatment if it came from a teen as if it came from an older person - that is, its excellence may or may not be noticed, as in the example above of the exhausted editorial assistant. Sometimes good writing isn’t picked up.

Do I think a teen can write a terrific story or book? I imagine so. Some of my students have been very talented.

On the other hand, a few years ago I came across my folder from my creative writing class when I was a senior in high school. Now I’ve lost it again, but one story sticks out in my memory. Before I tell you about it I need to reveal a little about my family history. My grandmother and my aunts - my mother’s mother and her sisters - criticized my mother often, not in a helpful way or even a forthright way, but in snide, indirect digs. I knew, and I was totally on my mother’s side. I hated the three of them. When I was in middle school my aunt got sick, and the story I found was about an unpleasant, selfish old lady in a hospital.

My writing was okay. But reading the story as an adult I was shocked at how meanspirited it was. When I wrote it, I knew that I was imagining my aunt as the main character. She and my other aunt and my grandmother are long dead now, and I still don’t think of them fondly, but today I couldn’t approach them as characters or, if they could be brought back to life, as people in such an unsympathetic way. I’ve grown up.

I don’t mean to suggest that teens are heartless. I wasn’t heartless myself. And you may be nothing like me. You may at a young age be able to get inside the mind and spirit of lots of different sorts of characters. You may have oceans of empathy. But you may lack some other depth of experience or character growth that will improve your writing later on. It would be terrible if, at fifteen or eighteen, you were finished, complete, as good as you were going to get.

So, write and send your writing out if you want to test the waters. If you have early success, how lovely, and how marvelous that the best is probably still to come.

Here are two prompts:

∙ Improve on my early effort. Write about an unpleasant, selfish old woman in the hospital, but reveal her inner life, so the reader feels for her. Why is she in the hospital? How sick is she? Does anyone visit? Is there anyone she especially wants to see?

∙ Over-appreciation and under-appreciation can pervade any aspect of life, not only writing. A dragon descends on the greater metropolitan area of Cincinnati, wrecking homes and incinerating maidens in Ohio and Kentucky. The governor of each state sends an adventurer to dispense with the monster. Unbeknownst to the governor, one adventurer is an over-appreciator and one is an under. Write about how each one prepares to encounter the dragon and how it comes out. If you like, turn the action into a story, a novel, or a seven-book series.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Perpetual-motion characters

2011-03-02T10:58:00.000-05:00

Before I talk about this week’s question, I want you to know that you can now pre-order A Tale of Two Castles through the website (and other places, too). And - thank you, April, for this question on the blog! - for me it’s best if you buy from the website because I get a tad more money when you do.

Also, on the appearances page of the website are the places I’ll be on my book tour in May - no details yet, just the cities.

And there was an article in yesterday’s Health and Science Section of the New York Times about self-compassion and diet, which reminded me of last week’s post. If you substitute writing for diet and eating, everything applies. You can read the article by following the link: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/go-easy-on-yourself-a-new-wave-of-research-urges/?scp=1&sq=well,%20tara%20parker%20pope&st=cse

On December 10, 2010, Ruthie wrote ...I tend to get overly obsessive about my stories--or, more accurately, my characters. For example, I have been vomiting up increasingly esoteric facts about the same fictitious people for over a year. I can tell you everything from their childhood hobbies right down to the shoe size for even my most minor characters. Whenever I write (whenever I think, really), it ends up being superfluous conversations between them or them just doing everyday tasks. And nothing happens. They all have their own flaws and friends and jobs and niches in their world; they could all continue the way they are right now, like a literary perpetual motion machine that never goes anywhere. If this isn't to vague a request... help?

You may have heard this before: When we fall in love with our characters it can be hard to make bad things happen to them, which of course is what we have to do. I fall victim to this sometimes. But an in-depth understanding is a fabulous asset. When our characters’ situation does worsen, we know exactly what will work best to make them unravel.

We don’t have to start big with the misery. Often we want to begin with a little crisis and work gradually into tougher trouble. You know your characters’ flaws, so that’s a great place to start. Put two of them together. They’re outside the principal’s office, say, for talking during an assembly when a visiting children’s book author was speaking. Nan is self-centered, and she goes on about how her dad will combust if the principal calls him. Fran listens sympathetically, then starts to recount her own worry, which could be about the Algebra test she’s now missing. Nan listens for a minute, then says, “Yeah, I failed my French test last week,” and starts in on how mad her dad was. Fran feels rising anger and says, “You always do that.” Nan, although self-involved, is good about recognizing her faults, and she apologizes unstintingly. Then the principal comes out and calls the two girls in. Whatever happens there happens. Back to the argument. Fran’s flaw is to hold a grudge. Even though her friend apologized, she doesn’t forgive or forget. Later in the day, she texts, “I’m still mad at you.” Nan now adds Fran to her list of troubles, even ahead of her dad, and she confides what Fran did to their mutual friend Dan. Dan, alas, likes to separate people. And the story is launched. Your intimate knowledge of these characters fuels the conflict until this tempest in a teapot threatens to go nuclear.

An important plot question, much discussed in books about writing, is to ask yourself what a character wants and erect barriers to her achieving her goal. This is a cinch for us if we have an exhaustive knowledge of our characters. What obstacles will most drive Nan nuts? If, for example, she has to really pay attention to somebody else, someone important to her, she will be very challenged. She can fail and fail again, starting in small ways and moving up, until the reader is biting his nails up to his elbows.

We can also throw our character in at the deep end. Instead of asking what Nan most wants, ask what she most fears and make it happen right at the start of the story. I’d guess that Nan is needy, probably insecure, but one person makes her feel safe, her Aunt Jacqueline. So give Aunt J cancer. How does Nan deal with this? We know her inside out, so we know. Up until the diagnosis she’s terrific, calling her aunt every day, visiting her every other day. But aside from that, she isn’t sleeping or keeping up with her schoolwork, and she has to visit the principal’s office again. Then the diagnosis is bad. Nan gets the news from her mother and doesn’t call Aunt J. In fact, she won’t pick up when Aunt J calls. Nan becomes self-destructive in the ways that we who get her completely can most easily imagine.

The problem doesn’t have to be close to home, either. Aliens can invade. Centaurs can take over Nan’s village. If she has an inflated idea of herself as well as being self-centered, she can think the incursion has to do with her, and she can act accordingly with hilarious or tragic results. Only you will know what she’ll wear for her first meeting with the alien captain. Only you can guess how she’ll react to a ceremonial dinner of rattlesnake-eyeball stew.

If you love your characters so much that you freeze when you try to make trouble for them, think about their inner resources. Maybe this is the only area you haven’t developed. Nan is insecure, but maybe she’s got a stubborn core that keeps her from being overwhelmed. Or she can laugh at herself, which rescues her in her worst moments. If you figure out how your characters can rise above whatever befalls them, you may be more willing to unleash the worst.

There’s conflict in your question, Ruthie. Your characters may not be in the middle of a problem, but you are, so you can write about yourself as a fictional character. How does the character Ruthie learn how to put her marvelous creations into a story? Maybe she takes a creative writing class from a teacher who humiliates her in front of everybody (remember, this is the fictional Ruthie) and the pain gets her writing, but the characters she knows so well refuse to do what she expects them to. She discusses the problem with one of her classmates, Nan, who seems a lot like one of her characters, which is not good. The reader may not care much about the characters who continue to chat and shop and eat their favorite foods, but he does care about Ruthie.

Or Ruthie can go to a party and find the entire cast of her fictional world there, in the flesh. How did this happen? What does it mean? How is her friend Nan, who came with her, doing with all these people? Has Nan figured it out? Is Nan even experiencing these people the way Ruthie is?

Here’s another thought: Throw your characters together without Ruthie and write their dialogue. Don’t force anything. Just let it happen. Write at least ten pages without worrying about plot. When you’re ready to go through it, look for places where there’s the slightest hint of trouble, or more than a hint. Exploit these moments. Make them worse. Make someone cry. Keep going.

Here’s an off-the-wall idea: Invite some friends over, or try this with family. Give each friend one of your character descriptions. Suggest a situation with inherent trouble. In character, your pals are trapped together in the bottom of a mine. Or they have a school assignment to write together about mining, and half their final grade will depend on it. Or they’re going against one another in some kind of competition. Don’t you be one of the characters. You’re the observer, writing notes. When you see something promising for a story, write it down. You can stop the action whenever you want and ask a character to repeat a line that went by too fast. You can tell them to take their improvisation in a direction that looks promising to you. Or you can just let them rip. The advantage of this is that you’re bringing in people who will be perfectly willing to create drama, who won't love the characters as much as you do, and you’ll be able to see what can happen to them. Of course, it also may not work, but everyone may still enjoy trying.

A bunch of prompts are embedded in this post:

∙    Use my argument starter and make up your own situation to put it in, or use mine, the two main characters outside the principal’s office. The argument starter is, “You always do that.”

∙    Pick a character you don’t know what to do with and ask what he fears most. Or use a secondary character from one of your other stories. Bring his worst fear down on him. Write about how he responds. Does he overcome? Or are you writing a tragedy, and he succumbs?

∙    Stage an alien invasion or village takeover by non-human creatures. Invent or use as an existing character as your main character, someone who will respond to this trouble in a surprising way.

∙    Write about a writer who can’t figure out what to do with her characters. Have her take a writing class from a sadistic teacher and meet a classmate who could be straight out of one of her failed stories.

∙    Send your writer to a party attended by her characters. Make them get mad at her. Write what happens.

∙    Write dialogue for your purposeless characters. After ten pages, go back and look for hints of conflict and blow them up. Keep writing.

∙    Turn your characters into an improvisation for friends or family. Take notes while they perform. If trouble erupts, write it down. Push the plot they’re creating with suggestions. You can even videotape them in action.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Drops of blood

2011-02-23T09:03:00.000-05:00

On November 29, 2010 Bluekiwii wrote, ...I always have the problem of actually starting to write. The story I want to write blanks from my mind, and I freeze before I’ve even begun to write a word. Or I'll write something--realize it's rubbish--and cross it out and begin again, and I'll continue on this way through the story until I give it up halfway. Or I sit in front of the page thinking of ideas/possibilities and reject each one. Have you ever felt this way and what have you done to get rid of this feeling in order to write? How do you start the process of writing a story? Do you outline what you are doing first, a simple two-liner that will guide the plot? Do you plan each chapter? How do you visualize what you’re trying to write before you do it? Do you make a rough sketch of what your characters are like before fleshing them out in the story?
I love this quote by Gene Fowler: "Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."

Years ago, before I became a writer, I painted, and my favorite medium was watercolor, which is not forgiving, because you can’t cover your mistakes. Some watercolorists outline in pencil so they know what they’re doing. Some paint so loosely that a mistake just becomes part of the artistry, which I admire the most. I did neither. I just expected myself to get it right, and I disappointed myself again and again. As soon as I started a new painting I’d be all over myself about how I was going to louse it up.

The quality of my painting became a measurement of my worth, not of my financial worth of course, but of whether I was worthy of respect, of being considered an artist, almost of living. There was much too much riding on the outcome every time I picked up a paintbrush. Eventually I stopped painting and started writing.

I didn’t come to writing with the same negativity, and I was lucky in the teachers and the books I found to help me learn. I talk about this in Writing Magic, and I’ve written about it on the blog now and then. The most helpful book I read back then, the most helpful in exactly this regard, which I’ve also mentioned before, is Writing on Both Sides of the Brain (middle school and up) by Henriette Anne Klauser. Even today, when I’m particularly stuck, that’s the book I go to.

If I remember right, there’s an approach in another writing book, Bird by Bird (also middle school and up, I’d guess) by Anne Lamott, that might be helpful. It’s called “Short Assignments.” In short assignments the writer has to write, but for a limited time. Building on Lamott’s idea, Bluekiwii and anyone who feels like Bluekiwii, I’d recommend that you write for fifteen minutes and stop for a while. Don’t evaluate what you’ve written. Just leave it. Then write for another fifteen minutes, without evaluating your new work or what went before. Your job for now is to write without judgment.

I love the computer, because it’s the opposite of watercolor; it’s infinitely forgiving. You can make a million mistakes and a million fixes. Here’s something else to try: Write without crossing out. When you don’t like what went before, just hit Enter twice and write the sentences better or differently or even worse and keep going.

Or try this: When you think you wrote something awful, write the judgment and keep going, as in, Maxine and her brother Isaac left the apartment to buy a carton of milk. What tripe. Who cares? The elevator didn’t come for a full five minutes, so they took the stairs. What difference does that make? I should just cut it all. Maxine told her mother she didn’t want to go to the store. The store was boring. This is boring. I should shoot Maxine.

Keep going. Maybe it will turn out that the elevator was delayed because Maxine’s upstairs neighbor, the one who gives her piano lessons, had a heart attack, and he was being carried into the elevator on a stretcher. Or maybe there will be a unicorn in the store when Maxine and Isaac finally get there. Or you’ll find other characters that interest you more than the two of them.

At the end of every post I write, “Have fun, and save what you write!” I don’t mean you should save only the pieces you approve of. I mean, save it all. You may never look at your old efforts again, but someday you may want to. You may be curious about your progress or about what you were thinking in 2011. Your biographer may be interested in every word you ever wrote.

Recently I bought a book on writing mysteries because I’ve been having so much trouble with my second mystery novel. I hoped that book would give me a formula that I could follow, that I could dress up and disguise, which I would really be happy to do if it made writing easier. I gave up on the book, although some of it was interesting, but it didn’t give me the formula. Probably because there is none for me. My writing process is messy. I muddle along, and some books are harder than others, but eventually I find my way, or so far I have.

I don’t have much trouble starting a story. I spend a few weeks thinking about what I may want to do and writing notes, and then I’m off. No outline, but a rough idea of where I’m going, which may be entirely not where I go. I don’t plan each chapter, but I do have an idea of a scene before I write it, and I have an internal alarm that shrills when things are getting dull and I need to shake them up or throw in a surprise. As for my characters, I discover them as I write. When they feel blank I use the character questionnaire you can find in Writing Magic. The one thing I do do is visualize. I need to see my characters moving through a scene, to know where they are and what they’re seeing, hearing, touching, smelling.

This second mystery, which may or may not be called Beloved Elodie - I’ve now started it four times. The first time I wrote about 140 pages, but I forgot to put in any suspects. (!!!) So I started over with suspects but the same core mystery, which was too complicated and impossible to solve. I told my husband the story, and his eyes rolled back in his head, and I knew it wasn’t working, but I’d written about 260 pages and I’m not getting any younger. Then I made the mystery something that can be solved, but I was taking too long to get the problem going. Remember I mentioned that I was meeting with my new critique buddy? I’d given her the first thirty pages and she picked up on what was wrong immediately. This time, happily, I’d written only about 45 pages. Now I think I’m on track until I get into trouble again.

I am not a role model, but I could be someone to wallow with in the writing mud.

Here are some prompts:

•    If you’re too self-critical, try the suggestions above. Write in fifteen-minute stretches. Write without crossing anything out. Include your self put-downs in your writing. Read the chapter in Writing Magic called “Shut Up!” and read Writing on Both Sides of the Brain and Bird by Bird.

•    Write a list of ten story ideas. Pick the worst, stupidest one and write twenty minutes worth of notes on where you could go with it. If you get inspired, write the story.

•    Write about Maxine and Isaac and their trip to the store or about their refusal to go to the store. Make something unexpected happen. Then create another surprise. And another.

Have fun, and save what you write!