The Conflict Count

This question has come up a few times, so let me say it here: The prompts in Writing Magic and on this blog are yours to use. If the resulting fiction is published I want to hear about it so I can cheer along with you, and a print acknowledgement, if you can, is always appreciated.

On August 31, 2011, Lexa wrote, How much conflict is too much/not enough?

My story has one main conflict— Lana’s parents are killed and she finds out she has powers. The problem is nothing else ever happens.

This happens in all my novels— there is a huge, tragic conflict that I really enjoy writing, and then it’s all perfectly easy to fix it by using a spell, fighting the king, etc., after ___ pages. I find myself keeping on saying ‘Have Lana’s flashlight blink out. Make Brielle’s wings unusable. Make Demi too tired to fight’ and as a result, my story is a lot more interesting, but my reviewers say it’s “Laying it on a bit thick” and that it “Seems forced”. Please help!
I’m divining two questions here: how much conflict, and how to avoid making problems seem forced.

We find major and minor conflict in most stories . Let’s use my quest novel The Two Princesses of Bamarre as an example because it’s simple and there’s only one major conflict, finding a cure for the Gray Death.

Not that there can’t be more than one major conflict. In Little Women, for instance, there’s Jo’s relationship with Laurie, Beth’s health, the family’s poverty, the challenges that each sister presents to herself. That’s four, and I may have missed some; the result is that the book is somewhat episodic. Jo is the main main character but each of the others takes center stage sometimes. Maybe the single major conflict is a family’s struggle to bump along in the absence of the father, although that seems pretty loose.

In Beloved Elodie (I’m liking the name again), the major conflict shifts when the biggest problem gets resolved and another urgent one pops up.

If you’re writing humor, always the wild card, the sky may be the limit for major conflicts. You can toss in the downfall of civilization, lost love, dead siblings, drowned cats, a curse on green-eyed men, and the spontaneous combustion of cookbooks!

I don’t know how many major conflicts are too many in a non-humor novel, but I certainly wouldn’t want to need more than the fingers of one hand to count them. In fact, I’d worry if I went beyond three, Louisa May Alcott notwithstanding.

Returning to Two Princesses, I included many sub-conflicts: monsters, Addie’s timidity, the king’s uselessness, the developing romance with Rhys, even the equipment Addie takes along to help her. Each of these sub-conflicts themselves subdivide in various ways. There are four kinds of monsters –  dragons, specters, ogres, and gryphons – and each presents a different threat. Addie’s timidity and the king’s coldness and cowardice take different forms in different situations. Addie’s magical gear presents diverse problems too. The seven-league boots bring her perilously close to an ogre, and her magic spyglass eventually irritates the dragon Vollys.

Can you have disaster overload? Sure. Anything can go on too long. This may be sacrilege, but, in my opinion, The Lord of the Rings trilogy could do without a battle or two. Which leads to another potential pitfall: sameness. We want to vary the troubles. Lexa, I like the flashlight failure and the wings malfunction and the exhaustion, because each is different from the others. If I were reading I’d be off balance, not sure what to worry about next.

However, for your inventiveness to work you don’t want the crises to erupt out of the blue. The out-of-the-blue-ness may be why your readers say your stories seem forced. Set-up is crucial. Maybe not in the case of the flashlight, because flashlights are prone to give out, but for the wings and the tiredness, the reader should have been given a hint that the wings could stop working (I’m guessing these aren’t organic wings) and that Demi’s energy sometimes flags.

I love tucking in hints like this because I love fooling the reader. You want to suggest possible trouble while making the reader not pay attention at the same time. So, for example, fifty pages earlier when Brielle receives her wings from master wing-maker Yuri and he says, “They will not fail you,” Lana mutters, “Yuri’s pride goes before Brielle’s fall.” Then the two skip off to look at Yuri’s other amazing creations. The reader is lulled, but when the wings give out, he remembers. Along with alarm for Brielle he feels a zzzt! of pleasure when he makes the connection.

In Two Princesses I didn’t think about major and minor conflict. I never do. And Two Princesses was one of my books that was the most miserable to write. As I’ve said here and on my website, I was trying to write a novelized version of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which has an entirely different conflict. I came to the Gray Death very gradually. Initially it was just the reason the princesses’ mother was dead. And I no longer remember how I arrived at the monsters.

The point is, you don’t need to think it all out ahead of time or plan out your conflict levels unless your mind works that way. Maybe just decide what you want your main character’s problem to be. Lexa, it’s great that that part comes so easily to you. Start writing or outlining, whichever you prefer; consider what obstacles you can throw at your main, imagine a few secondary characters with troubles of their own, and keep going. As for the hints ahead of time, you can go back and write them in, as I often do.

In the case of Lana, the death of her parents is probably permanent, and she’ll have to keep dealing with it. Your summary suggests some interesting questions: How did they die? Does Lana want revenge? Or does she want to save others or herself from suffering the same fate? Who else has powers? How are these other powerful characters using theirs? What powers?

Here are three prompts:

∙    Let’s set up a situation not so different from Lana’s. Josie’s best friend dies of suffocation, but whatever smothered her is gone. A week later another girl dies the same way. Meanwhile Josie finds that blushing enables her to teleport but only when she’s really embarrassed. She can’t fake it or squeeze her cheeks to make them red. Write Josie’s quest to discover what happened to the two victims. You can change either the cause of death or Josie’s strange power to suit your story needs. Build in at least three obstacles to Josie’s success.

∙    Take the funny road with the disaster deluge above. Write a story that involves the downfall of civilization, lost love, dead siblings, drowned cats, a curse on green-eyed men, and the spontaneous combustion of cookbooks! Handicap your main character with double vision, an inability to pronounce the letter t, and a fear of metal.

∙    The fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” is simple. After the last fairy ameliorates the awful gift of her predecessor, the conflict is over. The finger pricking is expected and the hedge is no obstacle for the prince. Dream up more conflict. Make the prince and princess earn that wake-up kiss.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Start the heart throbs

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

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

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

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!

December 28, 2011

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

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

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

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

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!