Tensing

First off, welliewalks’ comment last week about setting a goal to get something published before the next school year gave me an idea: how nice if you would post your publishing triumphs here so we can all bask in the reflected glory. Please do!

Now for the post. On October 20, 2011, Charlotte wrote, I’ve been thinking lately about tense, as in past or present. I’ve read some fantastic stuff in the present tense (read: THE HUNGER GAMES and other less fantastic things) and I’ve been wondering what everyone thinks about which tense a story should be written in, and how to decide.
I reckon it depends on the needs of your tale, like POV does, but I’m interested to hear other people’s thoughts, especially on choosing which to use….

Going quickly through my bookshelf I notice that young adult novels in a contemporary setting are more often written in present tense than books for younger children, which seem generally to be in the past tense. This isn’t a scientific survey, just my impression. Not sure why this may be. Maybe present tense seems more immediate and real, less storybook-like. I haven’t done any sort of survey of novels for adults, so I don’t know.

Historical novels on my bookshelf are written in the past tense, except for my historical fantasy, Ever. I chose present because the survival of Kezi, one of my POV characters, is in doubt, and I felt that past tense would suggest to readers that she’s okay at the end. I used present tense for a short story, too, in that case because my main character has a decision to make, and I felt that past tense would suggest one choice or another. I wanted the reader right there with her as she chooses. Aside from those two instances, however, I’ve stuck with past tense. I don’t think Ella Enchanted or most of my fantasies would have succeeded in present tense.

Susan Cooper’s novel Victory alternates between a modern narrator and a nineteenth century one. The current-day chapters are written in the present tense, the historical ones in the past tense. I suppose they both could have been in one or the other, but this way works beautifully – and it’s a terrific book.

So, yes, the decision depends on the needs of your story. You can ask yourself if you want to create a storybook atmosphere or if you want the grittier reality of present tense. You can also see if you gravitate one way or the other and then decide whether you want to go with your own flow or if you want to write against it.

I suppose I have a bias, which you may or may not agree with. Sometimes you won’t have a strong reason to choose one tense over another. In those cases I’m prejudiced in favor of past tense, which I think is more flexible. You can achieve a noir reality using the past tense, as in, Mickey spat cigar juice into the gutter and muttered, “You do that again, I’ll knot your legs into a pretzel.” But it’s harder to get that timeless aura in, say a medieval fantasy, as in, Sir Grathnath turns to his liege lord and says, “I pledge my allegiance until the firmaments ripple and the seas grow trees.” Then he dons his armor and buckles on his trusty sword. Doesn’t sound right.

When I say I have a bias I mean as a writer, not as a reader. As a reader I’m fine with either tense. If I like the story, I’m just happy. As a writer, though, present tense seems like more of a DECISION. Past tense seems more like, for good or ill, choosing the common path.

Flashbacks are a little different in the different tenses. If you’re writing in present tense, you just have to switch to simple past. If you’re already in past tense you need past perfect, with the auxiliary verb had, as in, Nancy had seen this blue-headed boy before. It had been during school break in the fall when she and her father had gone to the shore for one of their long rambles. They picked up knobby skipping tortoise shells and smooth driftwood. Notice that after the first two hads I revert to simple past tense. That’s what all the writing books I’ve read tell me to do. Then, at the end of the flashback, you bring in the hads again once or twice to bracket the anecdote. The reason not to use them constantly is that all those hads draw attention to themselves and are an obstacle to the reader’s complete entry into the flashback. This little bit of complexity isn’t enough of a reason, in my opinion, to write in the present tense.

I’ve never read anything in the future tense. Has anyone out there?

Future tense, now that I’m thinking about it, lends an air of inevitability, as in, Cinderella will step into her pumpkin coach and set out for the first ball. She will smooth her satin skirts and stare at the grand houses scrolling by. Hmm.

I just called my editor to ask if she has a bias (I didn’t tell her mine). She doesn’t. She said the tense just needs to serve the story. I asked what kind of story is best served by which tense, and she thought that mystery and suspense stories sometimes benefit from present tense, allowing the reader to get inside the action. She also opined that present tense can be harder to pull off. She felt that flashbacks can be harder in present tense, the shift from present to past more jarring. She added that some authors try one, find it isn’t working, and shift to the other.

I called my agent, who had no preference either at first, then, after thinking a minute, said she might like present tense better. Then she became unsure again. Then we segued into great first lines, like, “Call me Ishmael,” the beginning of Moby Dick (which, I confess, I’ve never read), a present-tense, powerful start to a book written mostly in the past tense. So you can change it up even if you’re writing in the past tense.

When I read student work I sometimes see tense drift. The story is steaming along in past tense when it suddenly shifts to present and then veers back. This isn’t a big deal, just another thing to mop up in revision. When the story is finished, of course we want it to be consistent.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Rewrite the beginning few pages of one of your stories in the other tense, past if you’re using present, present if you’re using past. How do you feel about it? Which do you like better?

∙ Use my sentences above as a story starter. Change tenses if you like. Here they are again: Nancy had seen this blue-headed boy before. It had been during school break in the fall when she and her father had gone to the shore for one of their long rambles. They picked up knobby skipping tortoise shells and smooth driftwood.

∙ Try writing a story in future tense. I suspect you need either a very tragic ending or a very happy one for this, no bitter-sweet or you may get a let down. A sad Greek myth might work well, like the story of Oedipus.

Have fun, and save what you write!

In a word

On October 14, 2011, maybeawriter wrote, I have a problem with my stories. I like the ideas but the words never seem right. Please help!

I asked for clarification, and maybeawriter added, Well, it seems like they don’t flow right or seems like there is another word that might fit in better, but I can’t really think of any, like there could be a better word for just walking, or the feel of the water.

Word choice influences everything, but it especially affects voice, tone, and mood. I recently read M. T. Anderson’s young adult novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, which astonished me in the best possible way. Here’s a sentence early in the book: And so the answer to my perplexities, which must appear in all its clarity to those who look from above, was finally clear to me: that I too was the subject of a zoological experiment. Even earlier Mr. Anderson describes the house where Octavian lives as “gaunt,” such an imaginative and evocative adjective. The word choices perfectly represent my idea of 18th century expression. And, despite the elaborate sentences, Mr. Anderson tells a riveting story. When things get tough, Octavian becomes Observant. The term exactly expresses the character’s experience, and it breaks the reader’s heart, my heart anyway.

As I read I kept wishing I’d written the book. I couldn’t. I can write only what I can write although I can try to expand my style and my sentences. Reading a lot helps with that. While I was reading Octavian Nothing, I had to hold back from letting his sorts of sentences infiltrate my writing where they didn’t belong. The voices of other writers get inside us. When it’s no longer so fresh, in this case probably a few months from now, Mr. Anderson’s work will influence me subtly, appropriately.

Writing and reading poetry help me, too. I’m much more aware of consonant and vowel sounds than I used to be. In the sentence before this one, for example, I find the m’s in I’m much more and the ow’s in vowel sounds pleasing. I notice them as I write, and sometimes I shorten the distance between words to bring like sounds closer together. Other times I deliberately go against the harmony. You can do this without writing or reading poetry (although I’m a big fan of doing both). Here’s a prompt: Pick a paragraph (notice the alliteration; I could have written choose a paragraph) in a story you’re working on. Underline any alliteration and any repeat vowel sounds. I suspect you’ll find at least a few, because English is full of similar sounds. Look for substitutions you can make to increase the effect. Try them out. Does the paragraph read better?

Now go the other way. Substitute to move away from the similarities. Read the paragraph out loud and decide which you prefer and which goes more with the feeling of your story. There’s no right answer. The purpose is just to become more alert to sound and its subtle effects.

Maybeawriter, words are a pale reflection of experience. We can never precisely convey the feeling of water; not even Shakespeare could have. If we were writing for the man on the moon who has never felt rain, we couldn’t represent clearly enough the sensation of wetness. If he flew his spaceship into an ocean and swam out, then he might say, I get it now. Before I was just guessing. This suggests another prompt: Describe water for the man in the moon. You won’t succeed, but create a longing in him with your description, so that the distance between him and the nearest cloud becomes unbearable.

You can then go ahead and write a story about his visit to earth.

Some friends and I were just discussing the impossibility of describing the color red to someone blind from birth. We can talk about warm colors and cool colors and heat and power, blood, and even anger. We can describe the color wheel. A blind person will understand heat and blood and emotions and the idea of a color wheel, but he won’t experience red, I don’t think. In Fairest, I invented the color htun, and I describe it, but I’ve never seen it – wish I could. But I can come closer to picturing it than a blind person could because I already see colors.

What tools do we have to show our readers what they and the writer haven’t experienced? Writers of fantasy and sci fi and historical fiction voyage to places we’ve never been and never will go, and the glory in the writing is in creating something utterly new. We do it by moving from what we have experienced to what we haven’t. Suppose we’re describing charged mimo particles, which have the power to suck seeds out of the ground. In nature, the nature of this world, they appear only in huge colonies; you won’t encounter a single mimo on its own except in the laboratory. A colony will slide slowly down a slope, like fudge sauce over ice cream, all the while sparkling like a billion brown fireflies. If they’re important to your story, you can go further and tell the reader that Sal had a brush with them once. She was snoozing in a meadow on the west side of Chotig Mountain when a colony oozed out of an abandoned mine shaft and slithered down. She woke up when her pinky finger started tingling. Luckily she jumped to the right, out of its path. Her pinky was gone completely, leaving only a tiny blue scar, and that meadow will never bloom again. If you want more you can introduce a science teacher at Sal’s high school delivering a lecture about mimos.

None of us has encountered mimos, but we have seen dirt fields, scars, fireflies, and hot fudge descending on ice cream, and we know how tingling feels. Even if you’re home schooled, you’ve probably been lectured to, if only on television. We work toward the unknown from the familiar.

But when it comes to the familiar, like water, a perfectly acceptable choice is to zip by it quickly. Everybody knows the sensation of water, so it’s fine to say, the water was icy. But suppose this is a moment of heightened experience. Sal has been lost in the desert. She’s just reached an oasis and is drinking her first water in thirty-six hours. Or she’s covered in worm slime and is finally taking a shower. You want to describe either of these. Well, you might go for metaphor and call the water a surprise party, rebirth, birdsong. I’m choosing images that are somehow water-like. Water, even though it’s familiar, is often pleasantly shocking, like a surprise party. Rebirth is a common idea when it comes to water, which is essential for life. And birdsong is a fluid sound. I wouldn’t use a metaphor like The water was a shoe because it’s hard to imagine anything less like water than a shoe.

Going in a more practical direction, the best boon for word choice is a thesaurus. I often use www.thesaurus.com to take me beyond the words I usually use. Sometimes the synonyms I see persuade me to rephrase my whole sentence more pleasingly.

Now, on the blog I may make everything sound easy, and then, when we start writing, we struggle. So I’ll end with a sort-of quote, sort of because I don’t know where it comes from, but not from me, because I’m rarely so delightfully loose. The not-quite-a-quote goes something like, When my writing isn’t up to my standards, I lower my standards. Excellent advice if we’re going to slog all the way to the end.

Prompts are scattered through the post, but here’s one more: Invent a substance and incorporate it into a scene, using a new main character or a character in a story you’re working on.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Dragons and fairies and more, oh my!

On the evening of Friday, April 13th, I’ll be speaking in Longmont, Colorado. If you can make it, check out the details on the Appearances page of my website (click on the right). Hope to see you there!

On October 12, 2011, Elizabeth wrote, I’m working on a novella right now about dragons, Gail, and I was curious about your take on dealing with magical creatures, as my novella will have lots of them. Do you have any advice on how to deal with them? I’d be happy to hear what other people have to say, too! 😀

So please add your contributions to mine.

I love to introduce new magical creatures or dream up a fresh take on the ones we all know about: fairies, elves, dragons, gnomes, and so on.

The first consideration, before I let my imagination run wild, is the role this kind of creature is going to play in my story. It’s not very different from the approach I take when I dream up a human character. I ask myself what this character is going to have do and be. I suggest you ask yourself the same questions.

In The Two Princess of Bamarre, for example, the dragons are one of the species of monsters that plague Bamarre, so they can’t be good, and I wanted them to present yet another obstacle to the success of Addie’s quest. After I knew that, I considered what form their evil might take. And that’s the second question you can ask yourself. Evil, yes. But evil how?

Suppose I want my dragons to be allies of the tree-dwelling clan, Opkos, against the cave-dwelling termite people, the Ditnits. Lots of follow-up questions flow from this decision: How do the dragons help? Are these flying dragons? How smart are they? How do they communicate with their human friends? Through speech, ordinary speech, or in some other way? So here’s an early prompt: List ten more questions you can ask about the dragons in this scenario. Answer them. Write a scene involving first contact between a main character of the Opkos clan and a dragon who is going to be important in your story.

Once I start writing I may discover that I’ve imagined features for the creatures that don’t fit my plot as it develops, so I have to go back and revise, which is fine and necessary. This happened with the tiffens in Fairies and the Quest for Never Land. I got too elaborate, and some of the characteristics didn’t work, so I dropped them. In Beloved Elodie the same happened with the brunkas, which I hope you’ll read about some day.

At some point in the questions you’ve asked yourself you probably moved from plot demands to pure invention, another fun part. For this, I generally think about the usual portrayal of these creatures and ask myself how I can diverge while still keeping enough of the idea of a dragon so that my creature is recognizable. There’s a lot of leeway here. I think I could get away even with a dragon mouse, a scaly mouse with a long snout, and a flame no bigger than a match flame. In Ella Enchanted, where the dragon provides only a little richness, it’s a baby, tiny with a tiny flame.

Your dragons don’t have to be evil. Masteress Meenore in A Tale of Two Castles and Beloved Elodie isn’t exactly kindly, but IT is essentially good, very good. If yours aren’t evil either, the questions are pretty much the same: How do the dragons fit in my story? What are their attributes? How can I distinguish them from the run of dragons in other stories?

Unless you’re writing fan fiction, you should stay away from dragon representations you’ve encountered in contemporary books. Anne McCaffrey’s series springs to mind, also Ursula Le Guin Earthsea Cycle, and I’m sure there are more. If there are dragons in novels you’ve read, think about how you can make yours different. Let’s take my Masteress Meenore for example. IT is a detective dragon. You can write a detective dragon too, I think without stepping on my authorial toes, but then don’t also make IT stink of sulfur and refuse to reveal ITs gender and have gorgeous translucent wings.

I like a sense of wonder in fantasy. I achieve this in Meenore with ITs lovely wings, ITs smoke that changes color according to ITs emotional state, ITs facility at the game of knucklebones. So there’s another question: What is likely to astonish the reader in a good way?

Another consideration is the amount of power you give your creatures. This often comes up for me with fairies, who in traditional fairy tales have limitless power, which won’t work in most stories, because we don’t want the fairies swooping in and solving everything. Which leads to the question, How much power do your fairies or dragons have? How does their power work? For example, for fairies does the power reside in the magic wand? Or in spells? Or somehow inherent in the fairy? In my Disney Fairies books, the fairies’ power is limited to their talents. The water talent fairies, for example, control only water. The magic of all of them is enhanced by fairy dust; without the dust they’d hardly be magical at all.

Power for evil has to be limited too. If your dragon is evil and can destroy everything and is unstoppable, there is no story either. Your evil creature needs an Achilles heel.

You needn’t limit yourself to the standard roster of imaginary creations. You can go to mythology for other kinds of critters. And you can create your own. Again, think of your story and the kind of creature you may need.

Do you want to make it up entirely or combine creatures? A coyote and an eagle? A boa constrictor and a sphinx? If made up entirely, how big is it? How does it communicate? Does it communicate at all? Another prompt: Think of ten more questions you can ask about your new creation. Answer them.

Of course you don’t need to think of your story first. You can start with your creature and think of a story to go with him. If you’re taking this route, consider what his problems may be. The next step is likely to figure out how he might approach his problems. Then, as in any story about anybody, your job is to make trouble for him and keep him from achieving his goals easily. So that’s another prompt: Decide what your creature’s problem is or what he wants. List several possibilities. Pick one and start your story. Keep going.

One last prompt: Write a story about the winged steed Pegasus.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Filler doldrums

Our detour into my books is over, at least for now. Back to writing yours.

On October 14, 2011, Jenna Royal wrote, ...I have problems with filler scenes. They’re important for the flow of the story – I can’t have just conflict or it gets crazy, but the in-between is hard.

Then, on Feb 11, 2012, Brianna wrote, ….I’ve got a ton of ideas for big scenes that move the plot along, but obviously I can’t jump from some guy threatening them in their house to her being shoved in a locker at school to jumping off a cliff. The one thing I have trouble with is the things that go in between, the sort-of mundane things that we don’t think about but we have to make them interesting enough to keep the reader hooked.
….I never quite get how some authors can take normal school life and write an entire novel…

The key may be the over-arching problem of the story. Let’s take Brianna’s three action scenes: the threat, the locker lock-up, the cliff leap. Mila, who dropped out of high school three years earlier, who broke the principal’s arm but was never even charged, who lives in a shack on the edge of the sewage treatment plant, tells Nadia that she’d better not go home (okay, she’s supposed to be at home for the threat, but I forgot and only realized later) after school or she will live the rest of her life in an unpleasant altered state. That’s the threat.

The reader is told through Nadia’s thoughts that her little brother, Petey, is home with a fever along with his babysitter, Oona, who’s on break from college.

Now we have to get to the locker incarceration scene. In Chemistry class, which follows Mila’s threat, Nadia texts a warning to Oona but gets no response. Nadia is frantic with fear. Is someone or something in the house, or is the target Petey or Oona? Or Nadia’s parents? In class, Ms. Pashkin drones on about the Periodic Table. Nothing can happen until the bell, and there are three classes after Chemistry.

We have Nadia’s thoughts to keep us interested, because she’s so distressed. She’s looking around. She’s not supposed to go home, but maybe someone else can. Her friend Quentin is a martial arts master, and he would be happy to help. But should she send him into danger? What else can she do?

In the middle of everything, Randall, whom Nadia has had a crush on since fourth grade, sends her a note, asking if she wants to study with him after school. She can’t really enjoy this, and she just shrugs, which makes him turn bright red with embarrassment or anger. Nadia doesn’t, but the reader wonders if Randall is in league with Mila.

The rest of Chemistry passes in a blur. You can do this, make a scene just go by if there’s a reason, and in this case there is. Nadia is too freaked out to concentrate. In the hallway between classes she calls her dad but his cell goes to voice mail, and he doesn’t text. She calls his office and is told he hasn’t returned from lunch, which is odd because he brought a sandwich to work. Same with her mother. In Language Arts she texts home again and again gets no response. Mr. Handel, the Language Arts teacher, sees her repeatedly pulling out her phone, and he takes it away from her. In growing desperation, Nadia decides to sneak out at the end of this class and go home. She was warned against heading home after school; maybe during school doesn’t count.

But when she gets to the lobby Randall is there, ostensibly waiting for band practice to begin but really on guard to keep Nadia from skipping out. He’s the one who stuffs her in the locker and leaves.

The locker area is deserted this time of day, and Nadia doesn’t have a phone. She has to wait, and she fills this time by worrying and listening. She can also sing or even fall asleep as people sometimes do in times of high stress, low activity. A few paragraphs will do.

At the end of the school day kids come to their lockers, making so much noise that they fail to hear Nadia’s desperate pounding until only one student remains, who finds the school custodian to get her out. Then you need the scene with the principal who wants to know who stuck her in the locker. Probably this won’t be dull because we’re so worried, but if you want to pile on the excitement, you can have her name someone who didn’t do it.

Finally she starts for home, running along the edge of the cliff above the Salitachee River, where the spring rapids are in full flow. Not hard from here to imagine circumstances that force her to jump.

So, worry about the larger issue will help pull the reader through the slower scenes. And you can drop in smaller events that feed the worry and ramp up the tension, like when Mr. Handel takes the cell phone.

You may want to reread the first part of my post of October 12, 1211, for more ideas about ancillary scenes.

It’s sometimes a juggling act. Suppose in the example above that Randall is innocent, that he doesn’t put Nadia in the locker, that he’s just waking up to how appealing she is, and suppose you want to show the reader his charms, too. Also, suppose Nadia’s best friend is upset because her grandmother is very ill and she wants comfort. But with Nadia’s brother, his babysitter, and her parents in danger the reader may see this other stuff as distractions and may even skip pages to find out what’s going on with the house. You may want to introduce these less life-threatening issues before Nadia is threatened or after she gets through the cliff scene and finds out everyone is okay for the time being.

If you don’t have a larger issue, then the slow scenes will be particularly hard to write, and even the action ones may lack impact because the reader won’t know why she should care. I’ve written in other posts that a book doesn’t have to have major conflict, but it does need something that will draw the reader through. The pull could be Nadia herself, an extraordinary character whom the reader loves to love or loves to hate, and in every scene, the one with the threat and the one in Chemistry class, the reader wants to see what Nadia will do. Or the pull can be an amazing place that has an effect on whoever is there. In this instance the place could be a special school or Nadia’s house, which is special in some way.

The larger issue, if you have one, doesn’t need to be of thriller magnitude. Nadia’s big problem can be that her friends are all mad at her or that she feels useless or stupid. Readers who read only fantasy may not be satisfied, but many will. Some like only realistic fiction. Or this kind of trouble can be dropped into a fantasy setting. In Fairest, for example, the basic conflict is that Aza feels (with some reason) unattractive.

On to prompts:

∙ Here are three action scenes: Tess is in her bank when it’s robbed, and she recognizes one of the robbers; in her fencing class her instructor duels with her and she realizes he’s using a real sword with a lethal tip; she is followed through her local shopping mall by three strangers. Figure out an overarching problem and start the story, including the scenes that get her from one place to another.

∙ Here are three potentially dull scenes: Tess is home on a summer afternoon with her childhood friend Victoria; Tess is in the kitchen with her dad who is making lunch for the two of them; she’s straightening her room. Without a serious overarching problem write these three scenes and make them interesting.

∙ Keep going with Nadia’s story. Write the scenes that follow; don’t just summarize them as I did.

∙ Write the story from Randall’s point of view.

Have fun and save what you write!

Finale My Books

First off, the lovely reviews that Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It has gotten are now posted on the website. You can visit them, if you like, and rejoice with me!

I believe this is the final post about my books, at least until more questions accumulate. The first questions come from Elizabeth: Does A Tale of Two Castles take place in the same world as Ella Enchanted? And does Ever take place in the same world as Ella Enchanted? Basically, how are all the different countries in your books related to each other and which ones are?
Fairest and Ella Enchanted take place in the same world although not in the same kingdoms. Fairest is set in Ayortha and Ella in its neighbor Kyrria. The languages are different, but the exotic creatures (ogres, gnomes, elves, giants) and the fairies are the same. A Tale of Two Castles takes place in an entirely different world,in the kingdom of Lepai, likewise Beloved Elodie and any other books I may write about Elodie and the dragon Meenore. Ever unfolds in a fantasy version of ancient Mesopotamia and The Two Princesses of Bamarre in Bamarre of course. The fairies in the Disney Fairies books flit about in the Never Land of Peter Pan, which was created by James M. Barrie. My Princess Tales romp through the kingdom of Biddle.

I enjoy inventing worlds and especially making up fairy tale and mythical creatures. What can my ogres or my fairies be like this time? I wonder and start writing down possibilities. I think about the roles that the creatures are going to play in my story. For instance, I needed a detective in A Tale of Two Castles, so I gave the job to the dragon. Lately, my medieval fantasies incorporate facts about daily life during the period, but I’m not reliable – don’t count on me for a research paper!

And Caitlin Flowers wrote, ….I know that it took you nine years to get Ella Enchanted published, but what was it like writing the book? How did you think of all the languages? And how did you turn the classic story of Cinderella into something so new and exciting?

Thank you. To take the last question first, the newness comes from the curse, I think, which was merely a plot device to explain to myself Cinderella’s strange obedience and kindness to her horrible stepfamily. I didn’t understand or like her compliance or her unrelieved sweetness, so, after a couple of weeks of misery and writing in circles, I thought of a fairy’s gift, and then I had her. Ella’s magic book was another plot device to help me over the limitations of writing in first person. The book enabled me to drop hints about events Ella would otherwise have been ignorant of.

It took nine years to get anything published but not Ella, which I discussed last week. Much of the novel was written on the train, commuting home from my job in New York City. (On my morning commute, I slept.) Writing it wasn’t so different from writing any of my books. Some parts flew out of my fingers and others dripped out like little beads of sweat. If I remember correctly, the romantic parts with Char, like their letters or sliding down the stair rails, went smoothly, the languages, for example, not so much.

As for creating the languages, I wanted each one to sound different, so I gave the gnomes a lot of throat sounds and the giants those emotive noises. I made Ogrese soft and slithery, a sneaky tongue. Ayorthaian reminds me of Italian, in which most words ends in a vowel; in Ayorthaian they all begin and end with the same vowel. My teacher (I was taking a writing class) suggested that each should look different. Not all do, but Abdegi, the giants’ language, is interrupted often by whoops and hollers. In Ogrese all the double letters are capitalized, and Gnomic is capitalized and punctuated backwards. I kept a glossary. If a word appears twice it means the same thing in both places. I didn’t do much with grammar, though. My languages aren’t linguistically real, like, for example the tongue of the Na’vi in movie Avatar. My languages weren’t hard to write, just dull. But I’m glad I put them in. I think they make the book richer, and I love made-up languages when I read.

The last question goes with this from writeforfun ….how did you make up all the names in your books, like some of the ones for your fairies and the ones for the ogres and gnomes in Ella and Fairest? They are very original.
Some of them in Ella and Fairest derive from the languages. The human names in Fairest follow the Ayorthaian rule; they start with a vowel and end with the same vowel, like Aza and Ijori. Ivi’s name had to change from Ivy to Ivi when she came to Ayortha. The king’s name is Oscaro – take Oscar and add an o at the end. The ogre names are soft, while the gnome names are, to my ear, harsh. Gnomes themselves aren’t, but they are uncompromising, like their names.

Often I try for names that reflect something about the character, like the ogre in A Tale of Two Castles is Jonty Um, which comes from the French gentil homme, which means gentleman. But I don’t like to be obvious. I wouldn’t call a happy character Merry, for example. The young wizard in The Two Princesses of Bamarre is Rhys, which seemed like a mysterious name. For Beloved Elodie, I’m Googling German names.

Last question, this from Brianna: ….why was the ending of the Princesses of Bamarre so sad? (It was, in my opinion.) I think all of your other juvenile books have a relatively “happy” ending.

Spoiler alert! If you haven’t read Two Princesses and intend to, I suggest you jump to the prompts.

Yes, most of my other books end unambiguously happily, although there’s some bitter-sweet at the end of Ever. It’s funny; not everyone thinks the Two Princesses ending is sad. But some agree with you. I received a letter from a girl who had nightmares for months after reading it and wanted me to rewrite the book or write a sequel that fixed the ending.

Seemed to me that if Aza simply saved Meryl it would be too pat, too easy, disappointing. And if Meryl just died that would be just tragic and I hadn’t built up to a tragedy, and everything Aza had done would have come to nothing. So I found a middle way that satisfied me.

Last week the prompts were about fairies. Let’s try some with other creatures this time, a witch, two genies, a golden goose, a little gray man. Think about what these beings are usually like and see what you can come up with that’s different. Here goes:

• In “Aladdin” there are two genies, the lesser genie of the ring and the more powerful genie of the lamp. Write a story about them and how their world intersects with the story. I’d like to know how the lamp genie can make an enormous, ornate, splendid palace overnight and how it feels to do so.

• Donna Jo Napoli wrote Zel, a fascinating young adult retelling of “Rapunzel” that explains how the witch becomes the witch. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you do, but only after you try the prompt, which is to write the witch’s back story and explain why she’s trapped Rapunzel in the tower.

• My The Fairy’s Return is a version of “The Golden Goose.” In it I use the goose as a story prop, much as she’s used in the original fairy tale, and I substitute the fairy Ethelinda for the little gray man. Your challenge is to explain either the goose or the little old man or both. Reread the original fairy tale if you need to.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Even more my books

Thanks to Agnes last week who posted the link to The New York Times Sunday Book Review review of Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It, which came out yesterday. For those of you who missed it, here it is again: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/books/review/bookshelf-poetry.html?_r=1&ref=books. And for you poetry buffs, there was an amazing essay in The Atlantic online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/why-poetry-should-be-more-playful/254188/. I’m delighted to say the book has gotten a marvelous send-off!

Now for more questions from Charlotte. Here’s the first: Did you get annoying non-writers asking to read it (your manuscript) when it was so rough it wouldn’t have made any sense to anyone?
No. My non-writer friends were encouraging about my new and then not-so-new and then unending endeavor, but no one asked to read. I asked the children’s librarians at the main branch of the Brooklyn public library to look at my first effort. They did and were enthusiastic and set up a reading for children – who got bored and wandered away mid-reading. The librarians stuck around to the end, though. The book was never published, but it was lovely to have that little cheering section wishing me well.

And the second and third: Did anyone ever say something so mean (well-intentioned or not) that it still haunts your writing confidence today? Not a publisher, I mean (I remember you said in Writing Magic you got a terrible letter about Ella when you were starting out…), but a friend?

No one did. I did take a class in getting published that was taught by an editor, and she was discouraging to all her students, so I didn’t feel singled out. The terrible letter wasn’t for Ella, it was for a picture book manuscript called Sweet Fanopps about a kingdom that had forgotten how to sleep and had lost all the words associated with sleep. When sleep is rediscovered no one has language to go with it. Fanopps, of course, means dreams, and I invented other sleep-related words. Poodge was the one for sleep. In the course of the letter the editor misspelled Fanopps as Fanoops. Tut tut.

And more: What did it mean (monetarily and emotionally) to be “able to quit your day job”? Or is that too personal a question?

Not too personal. Money first. I quit seven months after Ella Enchanted came out and two months before it won the Newbery honor. I was fifty years old, and I had worked for New York State government for twenty-seven years. At fifty-five I would collect a small pension no matter what happened with my writing career, so I had a measure of security although I had five years to get through. My husband and I decided to risk it. My friend, the wonderful young adult author Joan Abelove, who was supporting herself as a technical writer, promised to teach me technical writing if I needed something to fall back on, which I still feel grateful for. But luckily the Newbery honor came along and my prospects improved and have stayed pretty darn good.

Now for emotional. My work with New York State government mostly had to do with welfare. By the end my job was administrative and I was in an unhappy patch. I was glad to leave. But I’m a social person, and I worried about the solitary life of a writer, so that’s when I started my workshop, and I continued to take a writing class and participate in a critique group. Naturally I was delighted to be able to devote myself to writing, but sometimes I missed feeling part of a shared enterprise, which is what my job gave me.

And: Do you still muse about characters whose books are written and over?

Sometimes I think about Ivi in Fairest. Because I wrote hundreds of pages that I tossed, I know much more about her than the reader does. For example, I wrote a scene in which she worries to her brother (cut) that she won’t be a good queen. And one in which we see Ivi’s mother’s mindless approval of Ivi no matter her deficiencies. I wrote scenes between her and Skulni in which she tries to win his approval and he toys with her.

And I wonder about the future happiness of Addie and Rhys from The Two Princesses of Bamarre. His life span is so much longer than hers. She’s going to get caught up in the drama of ruling and he in his wizardly studies. What will they share?

There’s also Irma Lee from Dave at Night, with her over-protective mother and the Great Depression on the way. Dave, who’s known nothing but poverty, will be okay. But Irma Lee? And I left Mike with tuberculosis. I don’t even know if he lives.

Then, on December 9, 2011, Melissa asked, …How come you never self-published Ella Enchanted since it was taking so long?

Ella Enchanted didn’t take that long, only a year or so, and it was rejected only once. It was the many other manuscripts that nobody wanted. All but one of them (Dave at Night) were picture books, and I would have had to find an illustrator. Also, self-publishing, although possible, wasn’t as available as it is now. Print-on-demand was in its infancy, I think. There were no online booksellers, so I would have had to try to get stores to carry my titles, an uphill battle. The opportunities in self-publishing are much improved today.

On October 5, 2011, Lizzy wrote, ….If you had started writing Ella Enchanted today instead of a couple years ago, how different would you think the story would turn out? Do you think that it would turn out as a totally different story, or would it stay around the same?

Hard to speculate. If I’d written all the other books first and was working on Ella now, it would certainly be a different book. I once heard the wonderful children’s book writer E. L. Konigsburg (author of the Newbery winning From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and many others) say in a speech that you can only write your first book once. She may have meant something else, but what I understood was that you have a wealth of ideas stored up from however many years of living and reading, and the riches come pouring out in a first book. After that, you have to work harder. I think I had two first novels: Ella Enchanted and Dave at Night, because each drew on different parts of my writing imagination. And two other books have felt utterly fresh, Writing Magic, because it was my first nonfiction venture, and the new book, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It, because it’s entirely unlike anything else I’ve done. If I were writing Ella now and I’d delayed writing until now, well, I can’t guess what would come out. Who knows what I would have done in the intervening years.

More about my books next week, but, looking ahead, I think that will be the final post about them, at least for the time being.

Charlotte’s question about the future fate of some of my characters got me thinking about sequel possibilities, which led me to these prompts:

∙ J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan leaves Peter unresolved, and he’s kind of a tragic figure at the end. Write the rest of his story. You can give him a sad or happy ending, but make the outcome settled for him.

∙ What happens to Jack and Jill after the nursery rhyme? Jack’s skull is cracked, I think. Does he live? How badly injured is Jane? Are they modern protagonists? Or when else do they live and possibly die? Continue their tale.

∙ How does Pinocchio’s story go after he becomes a real boy? Write it!

Have fun, and save what you write!

More my books

News! Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It is getting a lovely short review in The New York Times Book Review this coming Sunday, March 11th. I’m so happy! It will be great for the book.

Last week I overlooked this question from Charlotte about the Fairies books: Can fairies die of old age, or just disbelief/hawks/drowning/etc.?

In my idea of it these fairies don’t age. If disbelief, hawks, drowning, and so forth don’t get them they can go on forever. The fairies in Ella Enchanted, on the other hand, do age, but slowly. I never had to imagine fairy death in Ella’s world but I guess they can die of old age, probably not of disease – they would be able to cure themselves with unicorn-hair soup or something else. The fairies in The Two Princesses of Bamarre are probably immortal and probably never seem to get older, since they’re whirls of light, although I can’t be sure because the problem didn’t come up so I didn’t have to decide.

Next question, this one from Elizabeth: ….how long did it take you to write Writing Magic? It seems like it wouldn’t have taken very long, because you have so much writing advice stored up, but you never know!

You’re right. Writing Magic grew out of my writing workshops. The narrative was sitting in my head and the exercises were in my workshop notes. When I wrote, it all came pouring out, took about six months, which is quick for me. The publication was delayed, however, because the people at HarperCollins felt they could launch the book more successfully if they paired it with my next novel, which was Fairest, and that was not quick! The dual publication allowed me to tour for both books, whereas HarperCollins generally tours me only for my novels. And Writing Magic has found lots of readers and writers – oh, joy!

As I’ve mentioned here before, my editor and I are thinking about a second writing book, this one based on the blog, which should go quickly too, as it will be more of an assembly job and deciding which blog posts are worthy and which aren’t.

Back to Charlotte, who had more questions:

I was going to ask which is your favourite, but I think you’ve already said it’s Dave at Night. What’s your second favourite?

There are contenders for second place: Writing Magic, Ever, Ella Enchanted, The Princess Tales, especially Princess Sonora and the Long Sleep and For Biddle’s Sake. The Princess Tales don’t come up often here, but I’m very proud of them because they’re funny, and I love humor and I laughed my way through writing them.

And: How do you start a book? Like, do you have a bunch of tentative ideas and when you finish one you start working on another? And when do you tell your publisher what you’re doing? (You said you have x amount of time to finish Beloved Elodie, right? So there’s contracty stuff already?)

After I finish a book I give myself a little break, a few weeks generally. When I finish Beloved Elodie I plan to start excavating the pile of I-no-longer-know-what on my desk and cleaning out the closet downstairs where the ruined boots of winters past have collected. If I’m going to do the writing book next that will be easy to jump into, but when I start my next novel, yes, I will look over my list of idea notes. I hope the novel will be a third Elodie book, so I’ll be hunting for an idea I can frame as a mystery. If I don’t see anything in my notes that appeals to me, I’ll let my mind wander and take notes on anything it brings back. I may read a mystery or two. Often I reread fairy tales in my home collection. As I go along I write more notes. The ideas that appeal to me generate more musing and more writing than the others. Eventually I find most of my speculation settling on one big idea. The next thing that happens is that a beginning swims up to me. And I’m off.

There’s no set time when I tell my editor what I’m doing. I don’t make a secret of it. The contracty stuff specifies only that the book has to be fantasy, and of course it has to be a novel for kids. Rosemary (my editor) doesn’t have to approve my idea. Naturally, if I tell her and she spots a problem I want to know about it. For example, at one point I was considering extending a short story I wrote several years ago into a novel. I told her and she said there was a glut of dystopian books. What I had in mind was more utopian than dys, but I couldn’t figure out where I wanted to take the story. If I had worked it out (or if I do in the future) I would have had another conversation with her. After I explained what I wanted to do, if she thought it was still dystopian I might have held off on the idea until the dystopian craze faded.

And: Which is the more agonizing first draft–Two Princesses of Bamarre or Beloved Elodie? Or another one?

There are three contenders, the two you named and Fairest. Fairest might have been the worst. I couldn’t get the POV right. I thought I wouldn’t be able to write from Aza’s perspective because she’d be in a coma, so I tried it from the gnome zhamM’s, Prince Ijori’s, and third-person omniscient, and I wrote about 300 pages in each before realizing it wasn’t working. Finally I figured out the coma and I was able to have Aza tell her own story. I was able to use some of the 900 pages, but I had to recast everything.

On the other hand, whatever book I’m working seems toughest because the struggle is uppermost in my consciousness. Past pain fades.

On the third hand (hah!), each of these miserable books had its own delights too. In Two Princesses I loved fooling the reader with the specters and I loved writing the epic poem fragments. In Fairest writing the songs was a joy. In Beloved Elodie my favorite part is switching POVs chapter by chapter and finding voices for the four different speakers. Masteress Meenore’s dry voice is the most fun to write. And figuring out the mystery is fascinating, plus there’s some reader fooling here too.

And: Before you published Ella, were you feeling a bit lost, like you might not ever get published? Did you get that “why am I wasting my time on this?” feeling? The one where everyone looks at you funny because you’re the only person you know who’s writing a book on top of everything else?

Yeah, at around the nine-year mark I did get discouraged and thought of quitting. I don’t know how much longer I would have kept going, but then I got lucky and Harper accepted Ella. It’s even harder to get published today, I believe, when no publishers I know of look at unsolicited work. And yet people break in all the time. There’s hope, but writing and publishing both call for reserves of patience.

More questions from Charlotte and others next week.

Here are three prompts:

• Fairies are absent from many fairy tales, like “Snow White” and “Rumpelstiltskin.” In some, however, they’re critical, like “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Toads and Diamonds.” Pick one of these tales with fairies and imagine a back story that causes the fairy or fairies to care about the plight of these particular humans. Invent your own species of fairies and write a back story scene or an entire novel in which the known fairy tale is only a small part of the action.

• Imagine that Cinderella’s stepsisters have their own fairy godmothers. Rewrite the fairy tale and get these new fairies involved. What happens to them and to Cinderella? Heck, you can give everyone a fairy godmother: the stepmother, Cinderella’s father, the prince.

• Speaking of beginnings, see what you can do with this (you can change any of it): Once upon a time a girl saw a dryad slip out of a tree. The tree was oak. The girl was eleven and her eleven-year-old beagle had just died.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Disney FAIRIES, of course

A few months ago, some questions came in about my books. Maybeawriter started it off with this: You know, I’ve been wondering about the Disney thing for ages, but for some reason never brought it up. I was wondering, how much did Disney give you as a jumping-off point, and how much was your own ideas? Was it your idea to make the sequels, or did Disney want you to? What about Vidia? How much of her was your idea? Do you feel annoyed that they changed her personality so much in the Tinker Bell movies? And the Tinker Bell movies as a rule. It grates on me every time somebody calls her “Miss Bell,” although it’s mostly this one fairy that you could argue is incomplete.

I adore Rani! She’s my favorite fairy, although Beck runs a close second. Water talent powers are just so awesome! In fact, if I got my wish to be able to switch between a human and a fairy whenever I wanted, I’d want to be a water talent. I also love Rani because was her selfless, noble sacrifice of her wings. – Sniff – It’s so beautiful!

Also… I think you said at some point that even though the fairy you named your sister after was your personal favorite, she wasn’t completely happy about it. I wonder, what could she possibly dislike about such a noble fairy?

And then Charlotte asked, also on the subject of the Disney Fairies books, Who chose David Christiana as the Fairies illustrator? Did you work with him in some capacity, or did your finished manuscript get shipped off to him for illustrations? Do you like what he did with it–are his illustrations true to what you imagined?

Three editors from Disney took me to lunch and proposed the idea of a series based on the fairies J. M. Barrie created in Peter Pan. I was interested because I adored the book as a child. The editors brought with them some drawings that had been done by Disney artists for one of their movies, Bambi, I think. Included in the drawings was one of a dove, which I loved. That dove became the inspiration for Mother Dove, although David Christiana’s interpretation of her is quite different, and I love his, too. Disney had been kicking around the idea for the series with their video department, and the editors also gave me proposed names of some fairy characters, one of which was a wicked fairy named Invidia. I didn’t like the In, so I shortened the name to Vidia, and that’s how she came about.

The only absolutes that Disney gave me were that Tinker Bell had to be in the story and Captain Hook couldn’t be. But I put him in anyway, only in the first draft I didn’t let him speak. I thought I might be able to get away with that. My editor asked for more Hook in the revisions!

My only absolute was editorial control. I had an editor, naturally. I need criticism! But not a word could be changed without my approval. The books I wrote are entirely mine. If you don’t like them, blame me. If you do, I take the bow.

I didn’t expect to write sequels, which was freeing. I knew there would be more books, but I thought other writers would write them. I enjoyed tossing in features that might give these future writers trouble, ha ha!, like the fact that fairies can’t fly with wet wings. Then, to my surprise, I was asked to write a second book and had to deal with the booby traps I’d built in!

Before I started writing, I reread Peter Pan and found that I still adore it. Barrie was a marvelously supple writer, who could make sentences do figure eights and turn cartwheels. I wanted to suggest a flavor of his writing but I found that I couldn’t imitate his style. The best I could do was to follow his habit of sprinkling the phrase of course willy-nilly throughout. If you’ve never read the original Peter Pan, I can’t recommend it highly enough no matter how old you are. If you have read it, I suggest you take another look and pay attention to Barrie’s sentences for their originality, fluidity, flexibility – they are triple-jointed!

More controlling than the few constraints imposed by Disney was my wish to do honor to Barrie. I hope that my Peter and my Hook are close cousins to his. The baby’s first laugh turning into a fairy comes directly from Barrie, likewise human disbelief killing fairies, and, of course, the clapping cure.

But the hundred years that divide my books from his also made some variation necessary. Barrie calls Tiger Lily and her tribe redskins, which would be objectionable today, so I eliminated this strand. And Tink’s only words in Peter Pan are “You silly ass!” She needed to say more and not that!

I watched the first movie, but I haven’t seen any after that. I’m not annoyed. Disney has the right to do as it pleases, and they know their market. I have Prilla call Tink Miss Bell in the first book, but Tink doesn’t like it.

Yes, Rani is my favorite, because of her deep feelings, her sympathy, enthusiasm, and generosity. My sister gave me permission to use her name, and I don’t think she’s entirely unhappy about the result.

I didn’t choose David Christiana. I’ve never picked any of my illustrators or cover artists. That’s generally the publisher’s purview, but I’ve rarely been disappointed (I like some covers more than others). I think David is a marvelous artist and illustrator and draftsman. Disney didn’t consult me on sketches either; I saw David’s work when it was finished or close to finished. We’ve since become friends, and when I wrote the second and third books, I emailed him secret hints of what I was doing. His illustrations weren’t what I imagined, which is fine, better maybe, for the surprise and for the insight into what my story brought out in one reader.

More about others of my books next week.

These prompts are based on Peter Pan. Questions have come up about using the prompts on the blog, and in general, go ahead. Write stories, novels, seven-book series. Publish them, and please let me know. It’s all good. In this case, however, a little caution: When I wrote the Disney Fairies books, the term of copyright for Peter Pan was at the edge of ending. The book may be in the public domain by now. If that’s the case, you can do whatever you like with Barrie’s characters, but not with the ones I wrote and the others in the Disney series, for which Disney owns the copyright. You can write anything for pleasure and for sharing with friends, family, teachers, but not for publication. So here goes:

∙ A submarine surfaces off the coast of Never Land. What follows is a meeting of modernity and the island. Write what happens.

∙ A UFO touches down on Never Land. Write the scene.

∙ Wendy, at eighteen, too old to fly over, starts sailing for the island. Write the story.

∙ Tootles and Curly, two Lost Boys, come down with a high fever. They’re close to death. Peter wants to save them. Write what happens.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Beset by settings

Agnes, thank you for referring Maddi to my post about Ella Enchanted the movie. I just want to add one comment, which I make whenever I talk about the film at schools and conferences. The movie has brought many readers to the book, for which I’m exceedingly grateful – so, if any of you are producers or directors or future producers or directors, please keep in mind that I have lots of other books! Making a movie costs a great deal and you’ll need studio support, but I’ll be eager for you to succeed.

On to the post question: In September Julia wrote, I have some problems with settings. I don’t like to include big hunks of nothing but setting descriptions because they seem unnatural. But when I try to slip in details about the setting in little tidbits, (for example: She ran her fingers down the rough tree bark. She was sure they had been through here before. “Are we lost?”) there aren’t enough of them, and the reader is left feeling as though he too is lost in a hazy, half-invisible environment with a couple of rough-barked trees. Does anybody have any suggestions on making setting descriptions seem more natural, while still having enough details that the setting is clear and rich?

I agree about avoiding long chunks of nothing but setting, if you can. Crime fiction writer Elmore Leonard has offered the world his Ten Rules for Writing, which you can Google. Rule number nine is, “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” And rule ten is, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

You all know that I don’t approve of blanket rules. Sometimes we have to spend a lot of words on places and things, and sometimes we need to force readers to pay attention to what they might like to skim. But these rules are worth thinking about.

I’m thinking about them right now in Beloved Elodie. Our heroine has recently reached the brunkas’ Oase. (Never mind what a brunka is.) The Oase is the brunka sanctuary and museum, which is built into Ineberg Mountain. (If you speak German, get it?) Something that’s kept at the Oase has been stolen. If it isn’t recovered and the thief caught the consequences will be dire.

The first time a character encounters a new place is the best moment to show it to the reader, whose interest will be at its peak. I took advantage of this in a way I’m especially proud of when I wrote Dave at Night. This is the moment when Dave first sees the orphanage he’s going to live in:

….We turned the corner, and I saw the front of the asylum. My eyes traveled up to where a pointy tower rose, like a witch’s hat, three stories above the entrance. Below the tower was a clock, and on each side of the clock was a smaller pointy tower. The whole building was only four stories high in the highest part, the middle section. The rest was just three, but each story was very tall. The building wasn’t made for people. It was made for witches, with plenty of room for their hats.
Too bad I can’t do something similar for Elodie. When she goes into the great hall at the Oase, the chamber is dark compared to the outside daylight, and it’s smoky compared to anything but a chimney, and I’m writing in first person, so the reader can’t sense anything she can’t sense. What’s more, the reader’s interest in the setting, while high, is much less than his worry about her danger from the thief and his curiosity about the people in this new place. It’s a moment of high tension and I can’t be long-winded.

What I did was write a short paragraph about the little she can see and a sentence about what she hears and moved on. A few pages later, when her eyes adjust to the dimness I added another paragraph of description but only one, because the scene is still pretty tense.

Tension is what we all want most of the time. Any kind of tension, not necessarily action tension as in a battle scene. Can be interpersonal tension, like when Phillippa and Wes are arguing, or psychological tension as when Phillippa faces the examiners who can expel her from her interstellar exploration program. Or any other kind of tension. But tension makes it hard to insert description. Phillippa enters the exam room. We need to show the room to the reader but we don’t want the suspense to dissipate.

Details that heighten the worry are great. The room is torrid, and Phillippa doesn’t know how she’s going to keep the beads of sweat from running down her nose or how she’s going to concentrate while she’s melting. The examiners are on a dais, which makes her feel like a child, and she has to crank her neck to look at them. The huge windows behind the examiners turn them into black shadows that she can hardly make out because the sun is in her eyes.

But if we want to tell the reader that the room is rectangular and the ceilings are high, we simply may not be able to. We may have to leave those elements to his imagination. You can let him know that the desk is made of oak if a former examinee has carved a warning into the wood grain, maybe something like, “Watch their teeth.”

In my book, Elodie is about to be taken to her room at the Oase. I haven’t yet had a chance to make the great hall come to life, but I figure I can do something with the corridor on her way to her room, so I’m wondering what she can see or smell or feel that will knock her medieval socks off. Since the Oase is in a mountain and I love caves, I’m thinking rock formations. The point is, when you can, make a detail striking. Make it leave an impression on the reader’s mind.

In the forest example that Julia gives, the tension is in the question, “Are we lost?” That question will likely awaken setting curiosity in the reader, because being lost requires a place to be lost in – the writer’s opportunity. Now we can look around. What kind of trees are in our main character’s destination? What kind have we got here? What’s the sunlight doing? Can we tell east from west or have we lost all sense of direction? What noises are we hearing? Is anything howling? As for striking, what can distinguish this forest from the generality of woods? What can rouse the reader’s sense of wonder? The size of the leaves or their color? The enormity of the tree trunks? It doesn’t have to be anything big; the tameness of the squirrels will do, or the bright blue caterpillars.

Here are three rompts:

∙ Phillippa is playing Monopoly with two enemies who have been tormenting her at school. If she wins, the torment will stop, but if she loses, they’ve devised a particularly embarrassing penalty. Write the scene, and find a way to bring in a description of the setting, the bedroom of the meanest enemy.

∙ Write Phillippa’s interstellar examination from the point of view of one of her examiners. Work in a description of the setting.

∙ In “Rumpelstiltskin,” the imp is overheard by one of the queen’s messengers as the creature sings a ditty about his name. Describe the interior of Rumpelstiltskin’s cottage. Show him bustling about, in a good way or an evil way, preparing for the baby’s arrival.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Writer’s Theme Park

Some of you may already know about this historic practice that I happened on during the week: In the middle ages books, which were hand copied and thus very expensive, were often chained to their shelves, like chain-gang prisoners or kidnap victims. Here’s a link to an image of what was called a “chained library:” http://atlasobscura.com/place/hereford-cathedral-chained-library.

Now for the main post. On September 11, 2011, Pororo wrote, ….Do you have any suggestions for themes I could have in a story? For example I read a story and it was basically about having a dream. The theme of that story was that once you have a dream, chase after it as hard as you can and that there’s no such thing as a foolish/fake dream.
That kind of theme. I would like my story to be inspirational to someone like that story was inspirational to me. I would also like to base my story around a pretty broad theme that hopefully people can relate to. <3
Early in the life of the blog, on June 10, 2009, I wrote a post on this subject, so you may want to peek at it. In that post I suggested that themes are unavoidable, whether we’re thinking about them or not. When I write a book, I don’t start with a theme. I start with an idea. And yet, themes creep in.

Let’s take A Tale of Two Castles as an example. The theme, which you’ll find on the book jacket, is that “goodness and evil come in all shapes and sizes.” But I wasn’t thinking about that when I began writing notes for the book. I wanted to write a mystery, and I was looking for one where I often look, in fairy tales. “Puss ‘N Boots” struck me in a new light when I examined it under my potential mystery lens. The vanquishing of the ogre is witnessed by no one but Puss. What if it didn’t go down the way he reported it? And I was off. I never thought about the theme until I was asked to weigh in on proposed jacket copy. The editors at HarperCollins got it right away, but I didn’t.

In Ella Enchanted, I was trying to explain Cinderella’s weird compliance with her awful stepfamily, which is how the curse of obedience came about. For Fairest, I reread “Snow White” and realized that black hair, snow white skin, and blood-red lips weren’t an attractive combination. For The Two Princesses of Bamarre, I was attempting to tell the story of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and getting nowhere until the story took itself in a new direction. Darned if I know what the theme of Beloved Elodie is.

As a reader, theme isn’t important to me. Story is. If the theme is very evident, I’m likely to be annoyed. I don’t read to be lectured to. I may even close the book forever. But if I loved a book I may ruminate about the theme afterward. An example of this is a book I read a few years ago, You’re Not You by Michelle Wildgen (high school and above, I think). The theme as I see it is in the title, but I didn’t realize until this moment. For me, it’s that personality growth can’t happen until we get outside ourselves. We have to become “Not You.”

I say “for me” because people take different messages from books. I’ve heard from several readers that Ella Enchanted made them more obedient. That’s an advantage of not declaring a theme on every page – the reader can shape the message to suit her needs. Pororo, it’s possible that the author of the dream story had something entirely different in mind from the message you took away.

Maybe it’s possible to write a themeless book, but offhand I can’t think of one I’ve ever read. People instill meaning in everything, probably writers do most of all. So here’s a negative prompt: Try to write a story without a theme, I mean a story that hangs together, has a coherent beginning, middle, and end but no theme. If you can’t find a theme after you’re done, show it to a friend and ask him if he can find one (without saying your story isn’t supposed to have one). You may succeed.

Going the other way, maybe you can start with a theme and build a story around it. Here’s another prompt: Write a story around this theme: Home is where you’re loved. Write it without pushing the theme in the reader’s face. If you lose track of the theme as you get involved in the characters and the action, so much the better. If you feel like it, post a summary of your story or a few sentences on the blog. I’ll bet everybody interprets the theme differently and we’ll get as many stories from the theme as people who try it.

As for the broadness of a theme and its relatable-ness, I have mixed emotions about this. Many years ago, when I was just starting out as a writer, not yet published, not yet daring to try a novel, I sent my picture book manuscripts to a particular editor who kept returning them with the criticism that they were “too slight.”

One story was about a girl, probably five or six years old, whose nose itched. The people in her life offered her superstitious predictions based on her itchy nose. One that I remember is that she would take a trip. In the course of the book each prediction came true in a small way. Another story was about a girl who believed her earlobes were going to shrink, and so she kept holding them to prevent the shrinkage. Hilarity ensued. At least I thought so.

I had no idea what the editor meant about “too slight,” but now I think she meant the themes weren’t universal; the stories were too small. I think there’s a place for small stories and themes that touch a limited audience. Blood Secret by Kathryn Lasky, a young adult novel, is about the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a fine book and I couldn’t put it down, partly because my ancestors were Jews in Spain during the early days of the Inquisition. The Carasso (my father’s birth name) family left Spain for Turkey when Queen Isabella expelled the Jews in 1492 – and stubbornly continued to speak Spanish for over 400 years! Turns out that the Inquisition wasn’t directed at the Jews but at former Jews who’d converted to Christianity but who were accused of practicing their old faith in secret. I’m not sure if this book has wide appeal, but it continues to be important to me. I’m grateful to the author for writing it and to the publisher for taking a chance on it.

That got pretty serious! Time for more theme-based prompts, but don’t forget about the prompts above.

∙ Write a story based on the dream theme Pororo suggested but without the dream per se. The theme is, No defeat is final.

∙ Here’s a more subtle theme: Success and failure are in the eye of the beholder. Base your story on that.

Have fun, and save what you write!