Aaa! Ha!

First, I’ll hearken back to my recent post about poetry. In my final (sob) class of poetry school, we’ve been assigned a textbook that I think may interest people on the blog who’ve caught the poetry bug. It’s Introduction to Poetry by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia–high school and above–very comprehensive. There are a few poem prompts but not many. The value is in the discussion of all the topics in poetry and the selection of poems, from classic to modern. Also phenomenally expensive, so I’d suggest asking your library to get it for you or buying it used. Try to find the latest edition, which contains the most up-to-date poems.

On January 27, 2016, Bookworm wrote, I need help with some things in my novel. I have it pretty much figured out, but the scenes seem to zoom by. I don’t think my MC is really getting enough challenge in some of the scenes.

I also need some help with a side MC. He’s the main comedian, and I don’t have many jokes and puns for him. I could really use some help to get some good puns and jokes. Can you help me?

First question first. Writer of Magic weighed in with, What I would do to make it more challenging is to go through each sentence and see if you need more detail. Example: Her jeans ripped. Or: The seam on her jeans ripped. Blood seeped out. Sorry for the gore.

I’m all for detail, which does more than add length. Detail puts the reader in the scene. There’s nothing like it to increase tension. What do the jeans rip on? How deep is the cut? How painful? Who sees the event? Is anyone there to help? What else is going on? Does our MC–let’s call her Rose–have time to see how badly injured she is? Is she in danger of passing out from loss of blood? If a lot is happening, we can slow down to a kind of play-by-play.

A scene won’t zoom if we present our details through Rose’s head and heart. What is she thinking? Is she worrying about something even more pressing than bleeding? Is she phobic about blood? What’s her state of mind when the injury happens? Is she angry? At whom? Frightened? Sad? Even happy? Maybe cutting her leg solves some other problem for her. Now she thinks she won’t have to spend a week with her despised cousin. She wonders if she can make the injury worse.

Detail also contributes to humor. Rose’s jeans rip, revealing the laughing frogs on the long underwear her mother makes her wear. A dot of blood seeps through the flannel and reddens a frog’s nose. Can she conceal the whole disaster? What can she wrap around herself? A tablecloth! Can she pull it out without disturbing all the dishes, the way they do in movies?

And how might we challenge our Rose more?

We’re always finding a balance between barriers and abilities, locks and keys. Leaving behind the bleeding situation, let’s say Rose is loyal to Queen Lorraine, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with her rule. Attracted by the noise, Rose joins a crowd surrounding a street speaker who’s inciting the mob to storm City Hall, where the queen’s representatives hold sway. The mayor happens to be away, leaving Rose’s mother, the chief constable, in charge with only three guards to help her. Rose decides she has to persuade the crowd not to attack.

Suppose we want Rose to fail ultimately. The Hall will be attacked, which will propel our plot into its next phase. But we don’t want her to fail quickly. We want to make the most of our dramatic situation.

We might consider what Rose has going for her and what her obstacles are, but let’s start with the obstacles. The anger of the rabble rouser is infectious. He’s a good speaker with valid arguments on his side. The queen’s subjects are tired of a war that’s continued for a decade–although she’s been on the throne for only six months. Many able-bodied people have been forced to become soldiers. A promised school in the town hasn’t been built.

Rose thinks the queen should be given more time. If the throne is overthrown, who will step in? Chaos will follow, and the enemy is sure to take advantage. Rose has made this argument to a few friends, whom she’s persuaded to agree with her. Plus, she knows a lot of the people in the crowd, and she’s well-liked.

Going back to obstacles, she’s soft-spoken. No one will hear her if she speaks up. So we start the scene. Rose clears her throat. “Excuse me.” No one hears. What is she feeling? Thinking? Who’s standing next to her? What’s the weather?

We use these details to create a scene with ups and downs and plenty of challenges for Rose. When one effort fails, she tries something else, seems to make progress until some other upset comes along. We end with her the loser, but she isn’t entirely defeated.

Moving along. When it came to jokes, Writer of Magic asked, What era is this? Then I could probably make up some jokes.

Bookworm answered, The era is modern times, but the action takes place in different dimensions. For example, there’s the real world, then there’s Destiny Forest, and another dimension is Musical Hills. There’s not more than one of the MC though, like a doppelganger.

Humor helped poured in.

From Mary:
What type of bagel can fly?
A plain bagel!!!

NPennyworth:
What’s brown and sticky?
A stick!

Two man walk into a bar. One turns to the other and says “Ouch.”

“A train just passed by here!”
“How can you tell?”
“It left it’s tracks!”

“Did you get a haircut?”
“No, I got all of them cut.”

If you need more try searching Google.

As for puns I find that they work best in the situation. If the character drinks chicken soup they can say it tastes “fowl.” Fish is always really heavy because it has so many scales. Cheese has many “ Gouda” puns attached, and can be “grate” to use. Horses also have many puns attached. (Behooved is a good word, and people can mention neighbors, both of which can be used in many “tales.”) A mention of eyes can lead to many puns, such as “eye see,” mention of pupil(s) (for teachers or students), and complaints that people will always “lash” out. Cars are “wheely” good, and if you’re getting “tired” of my examples Google can help with some more specific examples. I hope this gives you a few ideas!

These are great! I’d just add that a list of homonyms (words that are spelled and sound the same but have different meanings, like bear) and homophones (words that may be spelled differently but sound the same, like plain and plane in Mary’s pun or bear and bare), which you can google, can be helpful for thinking up puns. Heteronyms (words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, like bass, the fish, and bass, the low musical pitch) probably won’t be as useful, because our puns will probably crop up in dialogue, but there may be times when we can use them, too. Of course, some puns are pure inspiration, which can arise only from sub-basement Y of our brains, like the joke about the chicken, the frog, and the librarian, which is best said out loud. If you don’t know it, here’s a link: http://allaboutfrogs.org/funstuff/jokes/lbrry.html. For best effect, sound like a chicken for her lines and like a frog for his (hers? its?).

Here are prompts:

∙ I find it helpful to think of categories when I fool around with puns. So, looking at your googled lists, come up with three puns in each of these categories: food, occupations, and animals.

∙ Remember a time when you were injured: sports injury, clumsy injury (as most of mine have been), kitchen injury–whatever. Not life threatening, because we want to take something with medium intensity and deepen it. Write it and milk it for every smidgen of detail you can dredge up: the moment before the event, how it happened, how it felt and looked, who was there, who said what, what you said and thought, what made it better, what made it worse, plus whatever I’m leaving out. Now move into fiction. Make yourself a character, and make the other people who were there characters, too. If it fits, turn one of them into a villain. By using detail, make this a scene that doesn’t zoom by and that maintains tension.

∙ Injure your MC in your WIP and use some of the moments from your life and your fictionalized version of your life. Write the scene.

∙ Write the scene in which Rose tries to calm the crowd.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Strange New World

On December 20, 2015, Zoe wrote, So I’m working on inventing the world where my story is set right now, and I’m totally overwhelmed with having to invent languages, cultures, religions, political structure, geography, history, all that stuff. I was just wondering, how in depth do you go when you invent the world for your stories, like Kyrria, Bamarre, etc.? How much do you invent about your worlds?

It’s hard to remember what my thinking was with Kyrria and Bamarre, because I wrote the books so long ago. The latest world that I invented entirely was for my mysteries, A Tale of Two Castles and Stolen Magic. And even those I don’t remember well. A kind of amnesia falls over me about the hard parts of writing a book, and the whole first draft is always hard.

So for that reason, I looked at the beginning of my notes on A Tale of Two Castles–and found virtually nothing about world building. The novel is super loosely based on “Puss ‘N’ Boots,” and what I see is me wondering about Puss and why he’s so weirdly clever, not to mention why he can talk. So the world would have to accommodate magical cats. I speculated about introducing a genie, so then this would also be a world with genies, probably because I’ve never written a genie, and they interest me. (Neither the genies nor the magical cats made it into my story. Maybe in a future book.)

A word search on world in my notes. gave me nothing about creating the universe of my story. What I was doing was starting to work out my plot. I do remember that I wanted to use as much as I could of the Middle Ages. In Ella Enchanted, Fairest, and The Two Princesses of Bamarre I invented a fairy tale land that never was historical–but some readers intuited a medieval setting–and must have gotten a prettified idea of the period. In Fairest, for example, I dwelled a lot on fashion, and I used actual clothing, mostly gowns, from several reference books. However, I leaped centuries back and forth, and the outfits were post-medieval, because medieval dress was much simpler than the periods that followed, and I wanted to make Aza look ridiculous.

For the Middle Ages, I bought Castle by David Macaulay, which cannot be beat for clarity, and used his castle as the blueprint for mine. I got two books on daily life in the Middle Ages, not that I read all of either of them–just the parts I needed. And I supplemented the books with googling. For example, I learned what covered the floors in a medieval house: reeds. No carpets yet. And tapestries came later than the thirteenth century, which is the time I focused on.

Unless you enjoy world-building–some people do–why make up more than we have to? I do like to create new versions of imaginary creatures, like dragons, and there aren’t any real-life models anyway, so I spend time on them. In Stolen Magic, I made up an entire new kind of being, the brunka, and that was fun, too.

But my kingdoms have always been monarchies, although I could invent a new system of government, which probably would be fascinating. However, I might also lose myself in it. And when I get lost, when I haven’t made trouble for a character in a while, I get bored.

When my stories involve travel, I do have to come up with geography. But, again, I’ve never developed a new kind of landscape. I’m an admirer, though, of writers who have. I’m thinking of the forest of Ents in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, and the geography in the Discworld invented by Terry Pratchett.

I did create parts of languages in Ella Enchanted, Fairest, and Ever, but I did that because I wanted to, because I loved the languages in The Lord of the Rings, especially the orcs’. I didn’t have to, I could have made all the creatures speak Kyrrian.

Our universe, in my opinion, pales in importance next to plot and character. We don’t have to defy the laws of earth if our plot doesn’t demand it. But, since many of us are into fantasy, it’s nice to indulge ourselves if we want to.

However, sometimes the world steers our plot. In my Disney Fairies books, which take place in Fairy Haven and in which the fairies are the main characters, I had to think about this sort of fairy, and I did create a partially new world, which leaned a lot on the one invented by James M. Barrie in Peter Pan. Looking at my earliest notes, I see myself grappling with the world, but always in hopes of finding conflict. My first idea was that humans were building a bridge to Neverland. Then I decided that the island, which had floated, would get stuck on something. And my notion was that either of these would disrupt the island’s power to confer eternal youth on its inhabitants. I didn’t use these set-ups, but the one I finally came up with did create a crisis in aging, and I had a blast nudging the classic characters along the trajectory of life. Peter Pan, for example, loses some baby teeth!

So, I’d say we should let making trouble be our guide in our world-building. If we are going to invent a legal system, for instance, let’s come up with a law or two that endangers citizens, especially our characters. If we’re going to dream up customs, let’s include a few that oppose what our MC wants or needs.

We can toggle back and forth between world and plot. We can think, What kind of government do we want? And when we think, let’s not leap immediately to tyranny for maximum trouble. We can list possibilities. Maybe, for example, our kingdom is governed by a committee of university deans who want the best for everyone. How might this go wrong? Considering potential problems, we begin to imagine our MC. Who might she be, and what might she want that would run counter to her benevolent rulers?

Here are three prompts.

∙ Imagine that world ruled by university deans. Write a page of description. Write a scene in which your MC bumps up against authority. If you like, keep going.

∙ Your fictional world is our real one, contemporary modern life. Make it a slice of the ordinary that you know well, your neighborhood or your town or the theater group you’re part of. Change only one thing to make it fantasy. Make a list of what that single thing might be, and consider how it might affect your main character. Write a scene. Keep writing.

∙ Going entirely into the strange and unknown, your story is set inside a black hole in dark matter. Take a half hour to google black holes and dark matter (which I haven’t done). Write a page of notes about the possibilities. Write a scene. Be as strange as you can while still being understandable.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The Sneaky Snake

Before the post, a little news. Some of you may have wondered: I’m restarting my summer workshop this year. For writers from ten through high school age who live not impossibly far from Brewster, New York, it will run on Wednesdays from 1:30 to 3:00 for six weeks starting on July 6th. Interested writers need to commit for the whole time, although if you miss a week the world won’t end. It’s free, my gift to budding writers! If you’re interested, you should call the Brewster library to sign up. You know I’d love to have you.

On December 4, 2015, Nessa wrote, Congratulations to everyone who finished NaNoWriMo! My sister and my best friend’s brother encouraged me to do it this year, and I said I’d try, but it was really only a half-hearted attempt. I ended up with a measly 2,900 words instead of 50,000. :/ I think my biggest problem (besides schoolwork, and all the time-destroying other things I have to get done) is that I’m a perfectionist. I don’t really have an “inner critic,” exactly–I’ve read some less-than-stellar books before, and I figure if people like them, they’ll like mine–but whenever I write something, I always think, “It doesn’t sound quite right,” so I re-phrase it… and re-phrase it… and rephrase it. Getting 350 words in a day is basically a miracle. Anyone have any tips on how I can handle my debilitating writing perfectionism? (Seriously, it took me about an hour just to write this comment…)

Lots of you chimed in.

NPennyworth: I think the only way to do this is remembering that nobody can manage to churn out a 50K word story perfectly on the first try. You may need to take a step back and remind yourself that you can fix it later, but you can’t fix the story if you haven’t written enough of it.

Melissa Mead: I can’t remember where I saw this, who told me, but one writer said that rough drafts are basically putting clay on a wheel. You just pile clay/words on. It’s SUPPOSED to be a big messy lump. Then, when you get to an ending, you shape it into something beautiful.

Kitty: I feel you. I had the exact same problem until I discovered the various word crawls on the NaNo forums. They are super fun and addicting, and I found myself sprinting a couple thousand words a day and enjoying it. My fav is the Harry Potter one: (http://nanowrimo.org/forums/word-wars-prompts-sprints/threads/251242), but there are plenty of others, from pirate themed to NaNo themed, to Mean Girls themed. The full list of those, and other activities, is here: (http://nanowrimo.org/forums/word-wars-prompts-sprints). Maybe try one of those next year, or even just whenever you want to write. When you’re focusing on getting words down so that you can progress to the next “level” of the game, you’ll find yourself focusing less on the quality of the words, and instead on the quantity, which is essentially what NaNo is about. Also, the timed word sprints really help get your pulse and mind racing, so that you’re thinking less and writing more. Especially the fifty-headed-hydra. You won’t have time to even think for that one. They are incredibly fun and addicting, and got me out of a rather large word count hole that I dug for myself after the second week.

That being said, just because you didn’t meet the official word count goal and “win” doesn’t mean that you aren’t a winner. You wrote 2,900 words, which is 2,900 words more than you had at the beginning of the month. You developed a consistent habit of writing, and that’s something you should be very, very proud of. This pep talk (http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/n-k-jemisin) and this blog post (http://blog.nanowrimo.org/post/134534953571/didnt-win-nanowrimo-here-are-3-reasons-to) say so themselves. So celebrate! You’ve still accomplished a remarkable feat, and you should be extremely proud of yourself.

One more tip: If you’re under 16 right now, and if you decide to do this next year, you might want to consider joining the Young Writers Program (http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/) instead of the normal NaNoWriMo. It lets you set your word count goal instead of the default 50,000. That might help you finish and officially “win” a bit easier if you’re super busy.

Ann: I have this exact problem, so I tried handwriting for a bit instead of typing on a computer. It’s so easy to go back and fix things on word processing, I think it magnifies the problem somewhat. It didn’t work out for the long term for me, and I think of it as a temporary fix, but as an exercise in not ending up reworking the same page over and over, it really helped me. (Try it in pen if you’re feeling brave).

These are great and encouraging! I particularly like the word-sprint and switching-to-pen ideas, which focus us away from feeling bad about being perfectionists and toward action. I tend to get too much into revising, too, when I’m in first-draft stage. I may try NPennyworth’s and Ann’s suggestions to bypass my bad proclivities, or I may start typing with my nose or gripping a pen with my toes. Any words I get out that way will be good enough!

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: I once read a description of a book–I don’t remember the source, so I can’t quote it exactly–as a long document that has something wrong with it. There are no perfect novels, probably no perfect essays or perfect poems. My next novel, after The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre, is going to be set in Ella’s world, so recently I reread Ella Enchanted, which was my first published book, and I’ve learned a few things since then. I’d revise quite a bit if I were starting over. For example, I’ve learned about the placement of the word only. Here’s an example that makes me grind my teeth: Ogres weren’t only dangerous because of their size and their cruelty. It should be: Ogres weren’t dangerous only because of their size and their cruelty. The difference is trivial, but the second is more precise than the first.

The only mistake I learned about from HarperCollins’ copy edits on some manuscript or other. I often see it in the work of wonderful writers, who have less gifted copy editors, but I don’t like to see it in moi! Getting deep into the weeds, I don’t think it’s a mistake when it shows up in dialogue, which reflects how people actually speak–generally with misplaced onlys, but in narration, I like to get it right.

Here’s another foolish move I constantly make as I write a first draft: I fix sentences I’m going to wind up cutting. I don’t know that at the time, but I do know that my most frequent action when I revise is to snip. Perfect sentences on the cutting room floor are useless.

Having said that, though, this may be a necessary part of my process, even a comforting one. I start every writing session by rereading a few of my latest pages, and when I reread, inevitably, I revise. Since I love to revise, since it’s my favorite part of writing, by the time I start on fresh work, I’m in the groove.

For those of you who struggle with this along with me and who are high school age at least, a good antidote may be to read a mystery by Elmore Leonard, whose writing is a marvel of simplicity. I don’t know how much he revised to get there, but he goes for a thing plainly said.

In her comment, Nessa says she doesn’t have an inner critic exactly. I beg to differ. When her thought slithers into her brain: It doesn’t sound quite right, who else is whispering but that reptilian inner critic? And once we recognize him, we can talk back or stuff a sock in his mouth. We can say, You may be right, but let me keep writing and after I type or pen The End, I want to know all about the problems. We can even flatter him by pointing out that he’ll be even more helpful once he knows the whole arc of our story.

Also, by the time we get to the end, he may be so pleased with us (since he is us), that he couches his criticism in an encouraging way.

As many of us have said many times, no two writers write alike. Some of us soldier through a first draft uncritically, without ever coming up for air. Some of us are compulsive nitpickers. We may learn to rein ourselves in, but we may never entirely eliminate our three-steps-forward-two-steps-back methodology. And we should respect that. And let me add that Nessa’s question, even though she took an hour to frame it, was clear enough and poignant enough to elicit the help she got. I say, Good work!

Looking for a title for this post, I googled quotations about perfectionism and found this link: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/perfectionism. I didn’t find my title, but there are lots of gems. I already knew this quote from Oscar Wilde: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

Here are three prompts:

∙ I’ll try a sprint prompt. If I understand right, there needs to be a reward for success. My reward would be a game of Free Cell solitaire, so pick some time sucking pastime you usually feel guilty about and indulge guilt free for up to half an hour. Here’s the challenge: Write an argument between two friends. You can come up with your own starter line, or use this phrase: Your first mistake was… Write for fifteen minutes without stopping or fixing anything.

∙ Write a page about your WIP as if you were describing it to an admiring friend in conversation. There is nothing to correct, because you’re just talking on the page.

∙ Write the next page of your WIP with your eyes closed. I can type with my eyes closed, although the temptation to look is very strong. Don’t give in to it! If you can’t type with closed eyes, write longhand on paper. If your eyes are closed, you can’t correct. When you’re finished, don’t go back to fix it. Just keep going, eyes open or closed.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Lemme out!–convincingly

I am proud and relieved to announce that the Two Princesses prequel has a title. Alas, the dragons in sales and marketing nixed all other suggestions, including excellent choices from the blog, and I had to cudgel my head again. But finally, I came up with this one, which they like, my editor likes, and I like, and I hope you will like, and which I don’t think I gave you enough information to come up with. Here it is: The Lost Kingdom of Bamarre. Hooray!

So, there’s a lesson in this for all of us: We needn’t seek the perfect title until we have a publisher, because publishers have final say anyway. We can go eponymous and just call our book by the name of our MC and then dig deeper when the time comes.

And, if not a lesson, an idea: To loosen myself up and get out of the title groove I was mired in, I googled “popular fantasy novels for children” and clicked on a selection from Goodreads, which helped me realize that almost anything can be a fine title. Thus freed, my mind started wandering and got me where I needed to go.

Thanks again, many thanks, to all of you who posted title possibilities! I’ll probably ask for your help again.

Now for this week’s post:

On November 20, 2015, Kitty wrote, I need some ideas for a way for my MC to escape a prison cell. However, I would like to avoid anything involving the following:
1. Cliches (air vents and the ol’ fake escape gambit are out).
2. Mary Sue-like abilities (so no “Oh, I just happen to know some obscure physics/chemistry fact that I can totally apply to the situation, plus I can pick locks and dangle from walls). The MC is twelve, so anything that would be obviously beyond the ability/knowledge of a 7th grader is a no-go.
3. Outside help. She has to do it alone. Her friends are in different cells, so she’s not going to get any help from them, or anyone else. And
4. Excessive violence. PG 13 is probably okay. R is probably not. I’ll let you use your best judgement on that one.
5. Deus ex machinas. No “Oh, look, somebody left the door unlocked! Lucky me!”, or “Look, I happen to have a magical door unlocking device with me! I grabbed it when I got kidnapped, but I guess they didn’t notice!”

The cell is modern day with fairly heavy security (though I’m willing to make adjustments on the exact nature of the cell/security system), something that perhaps the CIA or FBI might have at their offices. There probably will be security cameras, though I’m flexible about that one. I don’t need her to escape the whole compound (I already have that planned out), just to get out of the cell she’s stuck in.

NPennyworth suggested: It sounds like the only way she’s getting out is if someone lets her out. Maybe she can use her age to her advantage and trick a guard into taking her out, maybe something like she says she has a stomach bug and pretends to throw up, or insists she needs to go to the bathroom. Once the guard opens the door maybe she could stomp on his foot and incapacitate him, and take it from there.

And Poppie said, I agree with NPennyworth about your escape scene: being let out is the only logical way to get away. I have never written about breakouts, so the only other thing I can recommend, is reading and watching some appropriate books and movies about the subject.

I’m with Poppie, in that research may be useful. We can google “famous prison escapes,” and even try “escapes from juvenile facilities,” since Kitty’s MC is twelve. Then we can mix and match what we come up with to suit our circumstances.

Kitty seems to be after originality in solving her incarceration problem, and the key, in my opinion, to original solutions is character.

Who is our MC? What characteristics that we’ve already established can she use to get herself out? NPennyworth suggests she pretends to throw up to get out of her cell. This becomes more plausible if she has a history of feigning illness to evade going to school, and the reader knows she’s really good at it. She’s discovered ingenious ways to make herself look pale and clammy or turn green or pink with fever. We have her decide which illness will  most likely get her out, possibly make the guards uneasy and unlikely to scrutinize her closely. This can be a lot of fun to write–and to read.

But we can give her other useful qualities. She can be artistic or persuasive or over-the-top charming. Let’s go with artistic. There isn’t much to work with in her cell, but she pulls a few strands of horsehair out of her ratty mattress and fashions a convincing tarantula in the corner. It won’t bear close examination, but from across the cell, it’s a stunner. The reader already knows that the prison is in the desert, so tarantulas aren’t an impossibility. Then she starts screaming. Guard rushes in, stands in the doorway, annoyed, says, “What?” She points. He runs in or runs out, leaves the door open.

This escape, or any escape, will be most believable if our MC has tried once or twice before and failed.

When we use character, the qualities we exploit have to be revealed earlier, when our MC is established. If she becomes artistic in her cell half an hour before she makes the fake spider, the reader is likely to be unconvinced and may shout “Mary Sue!”

In fact, Kitty’s Mary Sue example typifies the problem of the solution that pops out of nowhere. We may be able to pull off a knowledge of obscure physics or chemistry principles if the reader knows she’s a genius in those subjects, and this is established very early in the story. But scientific brilliance plus the ability to dangle from walls, even if set up early, will probably be too much for a reader to buy and may move our MC from a real  girl to a young super-heroine.

Our MC isn’t the only character we can use. If she’s observant (a really handy quality that we can give to almost any MC, along with whatever else we give her), she’ll pay attention to prison routine, the personality of this guard and that and of her fellow prisoners (which Kitty suggests she already knows). She can plan to use the nice guard in one way, the one who does everything by the book in another. Any other characters in her prison life can also be brought in to serve her purpose.

We don’t want to make the escape too easy. In the same way we use our MC’s character to let her escape, we can use her character to cause her to fail in an early attempt or to almost fail in her final successful one. Suppose she’s the spider artist, but she needs her creations to be admired, she may give herself away the first time. The reader will be terrified for her. An added benefit of an MC’s flaw is that it will counteract any Mary Sue’ishness the reader may have detected in her.

In the same way we use character we can also use the prison setting to develop the escape–although character will usually be part of it. Here again research may help. We can google prisons: maps, routines, personnel. It may be useful to search on well-run prisons and badly run prisons. Think about how your MC can use what you discover. Again, we need to set this up as early as possible so that whatever she turns to her advantage doesn’t seem too convenient to the reader. If there happens to be an abandoned aqueduct, for example, just outside the prison walls, our MC and the reader need to know about it before escape planning begins.

A lovely aspect of writing is that time inside our story doesn’t behave for us as it does for our characters. We can realize as we’re writing her escape that she doesn’t realize a crucial fact she needs to realize. Zip! We jump back three days and twenty pages and sew the fact in seamlessly so it’s there when she has to have it.

Obviously, these strategies apply not only to prison breaks, but also to any pickle our MC may find herself in.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Design an escape for a character using another quality other than artistic ability. Make one up or pick one or use one of these: persuasiveness, charm, taciturnity, short attention span, high energy. Write the escape.

∙ Rewrite the scene, but this time make it fail because of a character flaw. Keep her alive, though, and have her try again. If you haven’t before, bring in secondary characters and use their personalities in the scheme.

∙ Write an escape in which the prison itself, its routine or layout, possibly its computer system, is crucial to success.

Have fun, and save what you write!

I’m trying to think, but nothing happens

First off, many, many thanks to everyone who suggested titles, which I will soon present to my editor, and you will be first, after my husband and dog, to know the outcome. I can count on you guys!

On October 23, 2015 Rayne Simone wrote, I hope to find an answer to this question and present it clearly-it’s very important in a story I’m working on. Often, story ideas fizzle out, and I have about a hundred 10 pg. stories in my computer. Now that I have started a novel, I plan on delving more into my character and her growth, but I’m finding it hard with her thoughts. When she’s struggling over a decision, or coming up with an idea, I don’t know how I should properly convey her thought process. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions I’m all ears. I hope that this is clear enough.

NPennyworth wrote back, If this persists, you may want to try to write another 10-page story that is just the character talking or her backstory. It doesn’t have to be featured in your novel but may help you to get to know the character better and write her thoughts. You could also try switching your point of view to see if that will work better for your novel.

And Rayne Simone answered. Thank you for your advice, and I will be glad to try it, although I think I understand her character, I just don’t specifically know how to articulate what I want to be written. For example, I could go on and on forever in her voice (I love using it) and write many paragraphs about her home, family, and friends, but I can’t write one sentence of her figuring out a problem. If there was a situation where, let’s say, she was given a riddle or problem that she had to solve, I wouldn’t know how to begin. How do you describe the thought process of people? Thank you for answering, and I am certainly going to try all of your suggestions, and I’m glad that you wrote back.

MisplacedPoetry weighed in, too. Maybe you should just let her go on and get all that out of her system; then she might be ready for some problem solving and you might get how to do it?

And this from Melissa Mead: Can you demonstrate her thoughts through her actions?

Giving credit where it’s due, the title of this post comes from The Three Stooges.

In poetry school, we often do close readings of poems, looking at language, sound, sentence length, meaning. Let’s do a close reading of Rayne Simone’s two comments above, but in this case we’ll consider how we might express thoughts in writing. And let’s intuit her thoughts as she was writing. Rayne Simone, I hope you don’t object to the invasive mind-reading (which may be entirely wrong). I’ve put the guessed-at thoughts in bold:

I hope to find an answer to this question and present it clearly-it’s very important in a story I’m working on. I want them to be crystal clear about how much I need this. Often, story ideas fizzle out, and I have about a hundred 10 pg. stories in my computer. See how urgent this is! Now that I have started a novel, My first! I hope they understand what a big deal this is. I plan on delving more into my character and her growth, but I’m finding it hard with her thoughts. When she’s struggling over a decision, or coming up with an idea, I don’t know how I should properly convey her thought process. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions I’m all ears. I hope that this is clear enough. Will they get it? Will they respond?

And:

Thank you for your advice, and I will be glad to try it, although I think I understand her character, I just don’t specifically know how to articulate what I want to be written. Maybe I didn’t ask the question in the right way. For example, I could go on and on forever in her voice (I love using it) and write many paragraphs about her home, family, and friends, I’ve really done that! but I can’t write one sentence of her figuring out a problem. If there was a situation where, let’s say, she was given a riddle or problem that she had to solve, I wouldn’t know how to begin. How do you describe the thought process of people? Thank you for answering, and I am certainly going to try all of your suggestions, and I’m glad that you wrote back. I want to be sure NPennyworth knows I’m grateful. I don’t want her (him?) to think her effort was wasted on me, and I want other blog commenters to see how carefully I’ll consider and use whatever they send me.

Actually, I think Rayne Simone’s posts are chiefly thoughts  expressed (well) on the page, and I’ve just added some of what she didn’t write. So what gives her phrases a thought quality?

The struggle to get it right. Rayne Simone is refining what she says to convey just what she wants. If she were a character narrating action or feeling, there wouldn’t be–couldn’t be–that struggle. Our MC either draws a sword or doesn’t, or even draws it out halfway. Her heart pounds or doesn’t pound. If we write, She fought back tears, that’s action. If we write, She fought back tears. There was nothing to cry over, anyway. She hadn’t lost anything because she hadn’t had anything in the first place, that’s action followed by thoughts. (I’ve written this in third person, but we can easily switch it to first. Thoughts can be expressed either way.)

What other strategies can we introduce to convey that thinking is happening?

∙ A debating quality. Not all thoughts go this way, but many do, especially when we or our characters are coming to a decision. We question: Is this the right way to go? What else is there? What would Manny think? Doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. Wait! Maybe it does.

∙ Sometimes we order ourselves around in thoughts: Wake up! Get up! Don’t put it off!

∙ Sometimes we address ourselves: Way to go, Sylvie! Or, You are a bleeping idiot, Sylvie!

∙ Sometimes (usually) thoughts continue in interpersonal situations, a running commentary on what’s passing, like the crawl at the bottom of a TV screen: I love this teacher! Or, Who wears shorts over leggings? (Do people do this?) What a weirdo!

∙ Simple language. Most of us don’t think in elevated prose. However, you may have a character who does, who will be an exception.

The rest of the post will be prompts to try out these ideas. Keep the strategies above in mind as you write.

∙ Pick a decision you need to make now or in the next few months. Write down your thoughts about it. You won’t get them all, because thoughts fly by too fast, but snag as many as you can. Fill a page or more.

∙ Pick a character, major or minor, in your WIP, and think what you know about her, what she’s like. Keeping those qualities in mind, either have her debate in her thoughts your real decision, or write her thoughts about your thoughts. Or both!

∙ Snow White has asked the dwarves to give her asylum. You can use Disney’s dwarves or your own. Do this with at least three dwarves, each with a different personality. Write down their thoughts about the decision, because everybody’s thought process is a little different.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Help! And poetry!

Happy holidays! Happy New Year! Next post in 2016!

First off, this is an appeal: I need title help again. I wanted to call the Two Princesses prequel just plain Bamarre. But my editor nixed that, alas, so I’m back in title misery.

This no more than what is revealed in the first chapter, but I think you need to know something to get in title mode: The story starts off Rapunzel’ish. Peregrine, nicknamed Perry, is born into an underclass Bamarre family. Impoverished, the father steals from the local Lakti lord’s garden and is caught by Lady Klausine, who takes toddler Perry to raise as her own daughter (concealing her Bamarre origins), and she takes her older sister to be Perry’s maid. Perry isn’t to be told about her birth family or that she was born Bamarre.

I don’t know if this is enough to go on, but I hate to give more away. However, if you need more, please ask, and I’ll answer if I can without too many spoilers. Please post your ideas, whether they look good to you or not. This is no time to activate your inner critic–I need you!

And, as in the past, if you come up with a title, I will acknowledge you in the book and you will get a free copy.

Now for the post: On October 18, 2015, Bug wrote, I love poetry, and would love to be able to write it well. But I’m also not very good at it. Does practice help with this kind of thing? With writing in general? Or do you have to actually figure out exactly what’s wrong with what you’re writing and try to fix that?

Last week, in my poetry class, my teacher asked us, all students in the MFA Creative Writing program at NYU and most of us going for the Poetry degree, if we read mostly poetry as children.

Not a single hand went up. We all read more fiction than anything else and fell in love with poetry later. We became writers, I believe, because of fiction, which gave us our fascination with language along with story. Most of you, I’m guessing, read obsessively. The words get inside us. The first step in becoming fiction writers happened without our noticing, a lot like learning to walk and talk.

But to become poets, since we’re older, we have to take that first step deliberately. We have to read poems, lots of them, old poems and new, rhyming poems and ones that don’t rhyme. Since we’re older, we can sample widely and then concentrate on poems and poets that speak to us. I don’t think reading poetry should be bitter medicine; we should mostly go with what we like. If we’re very virtuous, we can occasionally sample poems that are harder for us to chew.

A warning, though: For those of you who are younger than high school age, get guidance. The erotic is a frequent (and legitimate) theme in poetry.

Another warning: Reading poems by other beginning poets doesn’t count. Read poems that have been published somewhere, picked by an editor. You can find many important poets and poems online. The Poetry Foundation website is a great source of poems, and the poets on the site have been published. Here’s a link: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/. But Warning #1 applies; some of the poems won’t be appropriate for all ages.

A confession: I tend to read poems at the same breakneck speed I read prose, which is better than not reading them at all though not ideal. But if a poem grabs me, I reread and reread and remember. My favorite poems lodge in my brain. And by taking up residence there, they make me more of a poet. Same as with fiction.

If you like a poem, reread it. Read it out loud. Observe the tools of poetry at work! Notice the sounds. Pay attention to the sentence structure. Does the poet vary her sentence length? Or not? (No way is better than any other.) Do most of the lines end in punctuation? Or not? Is the poem punctuated at all (it’s up to the poet)? Is the punctuation regular? Are the lines long or short or varied in length? Does the poem tell a story? Or not? Does it even make sense? Do you understand it? You don’t have to, and it doesn’t mean you’re stupid. (I am susceptible to feeling stupid if I don’t understand, and I’m not fond of poems that leave me feeling that way, but some poets are more interested in sound than meaning, and some readers enjoy that. You may discover that you’re one of them.)

Does it rhyme? Does it rhyme sometimes? Are the rhymes unexpected? Does the tense change surprisingly? Does the person (first, second, third) stay the same or shift? Are there metaphors and similes (not all poems have them)? Is there a surprise near the end? Or anywhere else?

And pay attention to what you feel as you read. Some poems are intellectual, but many go straight to the gut or the heart. I love the emotional wallop a poem can pack.

So reading poems is the absolutely essential, sine qua non step to becoming a poet. A lovely collection to get you started is Step Lightly: Poems for the Journey, anthologized by Nancy Willard. Though I haven’t read it in a long time,  I think this one is fine for middle school and up, but check with an adult to be sure. Nancy Willard is a wonderful poet with exquisite taste. Years ago, I took a workshop led by her.

As you read, notice how vast the world of poetry is. Some poems are short and as light as air. The poet isn’t making a STATEMENT. Some are deeply emotional. Some are intellectual. Some advocate causes.

When you write poems, experiment! Poems are generally short enough that we can play around and try many approaches and many kinds of poems. Write serious and silly. Rhyme and don’t rhyme. Learn about meter and try a metrical poem. Go for feeling, and go for intellect. Write long poems and short. Try some of the short forms, like haiku, cinquain, tritina. Try other forms, like sonnets, pantoums, sonnets. If you’re feeling like a challenge, try a sestina. You’ll find descriptions of all these forms online. And my go-to reference book on forms is The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett (high school and up).

Suppose you write ten poems today… Don’t judge them! Put them aside for, say, ten days. Read poems by other poets in the meanwhile. Look at your poems again. Still don’t judge them, but revise without judgment. See if you can push the sounds by switching to synonyms with more alliteration and more assonance. Try breaking the lines in different places. Put them aside again and write new poems. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Most, maybe all, learning is subconscious. In reading, we writers give our brains poems and stories, which they churn while we’re unaware, and learning happens.

Aside from improving as a poet and becoming friends with great  poets decades younger than I am, what has poetry school done for me and for my fiction? Most of all, I’ve become more aware of sounds in my prose. I notice especially when I use alliteration, which I push sometimes and take out others. I’ve gotten better at noticing words and clauses I don’t need, because poetry is often compressed, so my prose has become leaner, which I like in my work and in everybody else’s. Sometimes I’ve used poems to try out in this short form ideas that I might use in a novel. For example, I’m thinking that I might like my next book to be a strange fairy tale variation on “Beauty and the Beast,” and I explored the idea in a poem.

Back to Bug’s question. Improvement in poetry and fiction comes with practice, more than with identifying what’s wrong and fixing it, although that helps, too. If we can figure out what doesn’t work, of course we should look for ways to address the problem, but we should avoid that negative voice. What we identify should be concrete, like too many adjectives and adverbs, not enough thoughts and feelings, taking too long to get to the conflict. Not: Today I’m going to transform my writing from lousy to good.

There are lots of prompts above, and here are three more:

∙ Write an unsentimental poem about a pet. An example of this is a disturbing and funny poem by Billy Collins. A dog dies and its soul reveals that it never liked its owner.

∙ In a poem, argue a position you feel strongly about, but also bring yourself into it. Show in the poem why you care, why you have something at stake.

∙ Pick a last line from one of the many poems you’ve been reading and make it the last line of your own new poem. This isn’t stealing, because you’re going to acknowledge your debt. Under the title of your poem, write After Name of Poem by Name of Poet.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Spark Notes

On August 31, 2015, Jordan W. wrote, I have finally figured out my entire plot and I’m about to start writing my first draft, But there is one minor problem. I have no idea how to make my MC meet the love interest. I know what happens before and after they meet I just don’t know how to go about the actual confrontation. Can anyone offer any inspiration?

Yulia weighed in with useful ideas, some of which make my ears burn: I’m not a romance expert, but I’ve read lots of romance stories, and I can recount how the love interests were introduced there. Gail herself has written many great books, so let’s look at her versions:

In ELLA ENCHANTED, the MC Ella’s feeling bad because her mother died and love interest Char cheers her up.

In FAIREST, the MC Aza sees love interest Ijori at a wedding, and he saves her from embarrassment in the receiving line.

In EVER, the love interest Olus rescues MC Kezi from a mean, creepy guy. (Actually, both Olus and Kezi are MC’s, but you get the idea.)

Some other examples:

In Shannon Hale’s THE GOOSE GIRL, the MC Ani is sitting in a goose pasture when love interest Geric comes riding in on an unruly horse. Ani jumps on the horse and rides around before Geric tells her that it’s not her horse; they have a spat, and the next day he comes with flowers.

In Soman Chainani’s THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL, the love interest Tedros throws a rose (which signifies his love) into the audience of girls. MC Sophie is so desperate to catch it, but she misses.

In books with younger MCs, the romance is a lot slower. Take Emily and Aaron in Liz Kessler’s EMILY WINDSNAP series (she’s 12 or 13 and he’s about 14). They’re just friends for a long time before they dive in.

These are great examples, and they each share a quality: a vulnerable moment. In Ella Enchanted, for example, Ella might have been more guarded with a stranger if her mother hadn’t died recently. Also, I know from sad experience that after the loss of a loved one, people and characters are eager to hear the departed remembered, to know that his or her life mattered. Char, without calculation, does this.

This absence of calculation is a common element, too, in the incitement to romance. If Char were intentionally endearing himself to Ella, he would come off as disturbing, possibly villainous.

So that’s a strategy to keep in mind, to put our MC at risk, not serious risk, because we don’t want to overwhelm the moment. And I don’t mean that the hero has to save the heroine. She can save him, or they can be in trouble together.

Here’s an approach to crafting the meeting: Make it reflect a reason the two wind up loving each other. In Ella Enchanted again, Char admires Lady Eleanor’s sense of humor. As the romance develops, Ella enjoys making Char laugh, and he, the more serious of the two, loves that she can.

So first we think about what elements cause the two to mesh. We can make a list. For example:

∙ They’re both adventurous, even risk-taking.

∙ She’s direct; he’s diplomatic. Each wishes for some of the other’s quality.

∙ They grew up in different cultures, and she loves his exoticism. He loves teaching her about his village.

And so on in large ways and small. When you write your list, go for five to ten elements. Some of the meshing can be physical, so put those on your list, too, but, unless we have strangely shallow MCs, there need to be emotional and probably intellectual traits that attract as well.

Now how can we use what we have? Taking the first one, they can meet on a wilderness adventure. He proposes something the group could do, which the tour guide nixes, nastily. She can support the idea. The first spark has flared. If my second bullet also applies, she can tell the tour guide off. He can admire her fearlessness. If the tour guide has a fit, he can use his diplomacy to lower the temperature, and she can be impressed. Spark two.

Notice that nothing enormous has happened. We’re setting the stage to let their feelings build.

Notice also that we’ve used their characters to create the situation. It isn’t enough to engineer events so that they’re in the same place at the same time. The two have to work together.

Here’s another way to think about it: When we consider how to bring them together, we can use the ways they’re alike and the ways they’re opposite. Characteristics that are unrelated won’t help much. If she loves dogs and he likes to walk on the beach, we’ll have to work harder. But if he hates dogs or is afraid of them and she loves them, ideas stop popping.

Before I go to prompts, I just want to remember my favorite romantic beginning, which comes from Anne of Green Gables: Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe are classmates, each fuzzily aware of the other, but the awareness doesn’t sharpen until he calls her hair carroty and she slams her slate over his head. I love that romantic beginning!

Here are three prompts:

∙ Think of two people you know in real life. If they aren’t near in age, imagine that they are. It doesn’t matter if they know each other. Think about how they might work as a couple. Write the scene that sets off their romance.

∙ Using my third bullet, have her be a tourist in his village and have her commit some social faux pas. Use the incident to incite their romance.

∙ Write the wilderness adventure that I set up.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Buzzkill

To those of you who are scaling Mount NaNoWriMo, I salute you at your three-quarter mark, where the oxygen may be getting thin. Breathe deep! Stay hydrated! Dip into your trail mix! And here, again, is the link for Kitty’s support-and-encouragement forum: http://nanowrimo.org/forums/writing-groups-and-clubs/threads/260467. I’ve been lurking now and then.

On August 18, 2015, Li’l Ol’ Me wrote, Does anyone have some motivation tips? I get anywhere from 20-60 pages into a story/novel and I just give up after one too many bad scenes. My writing also always seems so, to quote your editor, Gail, “flat.” Same sentence structure, simply awful adjectives and boring characters. Help!

In Writing Magic, I talk a lot about the negative voice that afflicts many of us when we write or do anything creative. In the book, I recommend telling that voice to Shut up! And, nine years after publication, I haven’t changed my mind. Self-criticism is a potion that kills motivation. I’ve written this many times here, but it always bears repeating: we mustn’t sabotage ourselves.

The negative voice masquerades as valuable. How can we improve if we can’t tell whether our work is good or bad?

But the truth is that we will improve if we keep writing. That’s all that’s necessary. It’s just like learning a physical skill. Suppose I want to throw a ball farther for Reggie to chase. I throw and throw. My arm starts to figure things out, and I improve. If I’m dissatisfied, it doesn’t help to call myself a ninety pound weakling (I’m very tiny), but it may help to look online for advice on throwing and to watch videos of, say, pitchers. If I can afford to, I can hire a coach, and I wager she will not say, “Gee, you stink at this. How pathetic.”

Aside from many wonderful books on writing, there are lots of online resources in addition to this blog. But let me mention a few books that I found helpful when I was starting out. I haven’t looked at them lately, so to be safe, I’ll say they’re at the high school and above level. My favorite for dealing with the negative voice is Writing on Both Sides of the Brain by Henriette Anne Klauser. These that follow are more general, but most deal to some extent with self-criticism: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, What If? by Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays, and Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande (old-fashioned in tone, but modern in ideas).

So that’s advice for getting rid of or minimizing the buzzkill effects of self-criticism. As for positive motivation, I’d suggest imagining an admiring reader who really gets you, who delights in every twist of your fascinating mind.

Real, live people can help, too, friends who can be counted on to be positive if you say you might be feeling a tad fragile, or siblings when they’re in a good mood. And let’s not forget pets and stuffed animals. We’re looking for approval here!

It can help, too, to set goals, a length of time or page count that you want to accomplish in a day or a week. I love NaNoWriMo for this, and for the support contestants get. But–and this is critical–we have to forgive ourselves when we fail to meet our targets, even when we fail again and again. This is exactly what I do. When I start to write, I note the time. When I stop, I note the time. I may start and stop many times. I’m not looking for time in a single sitting, but over the course of a day. My goal is two-and-a-quarter hour minimum. Usually I make it, but sometimes I don’t, and I forgive myself. If I didn’t, starting the next day would be harder.

I rarely say what I’m about to, but maybe I should. Before I became a writer, I painted and drew, and had the worst negative voice in creation, which I also discuss in Writing Magic. When I started writing, I found that I was kinder to myself. It is possible that if you can’t quiet that negative voice, if you can’t imagine an admiring reader, if you don’t believe the praise that comes in from people who think highly of you (and from your pets and stuffed animals), maybe writing is not for you. Your creativity may be expressed more happily in another way. You can be a great reader; you can esteem marvelous writing–but you don’t have to be a writer yourself. You may be creative in another one of the arts, or in science, or you may be amazingly intuitive about people, which is an art, too. Writing is hard and sometimes miserable, but it shouldn’t always be so. There should be moments, possibly even consecutive hours, of exhilaration.

I’ve written a post about repeated sentence structure, which I won’t repeat. I’m sure I’ve also written about adjectives, basically that we should do without them whenever we can. We should question every one. If, for example, we describe a puppy as adorable, can we eliminate the adjective, and instead show the puppy and make the reader understand that it’s cute? But if we must have an adjective and we’re sick of the ones we use and reuse, the thesaurus is our friend. We don’t have to think up all our words. A thesaurus makes us more successful, not less original. I consult one often, just put the word vexed in a poem, which popped up as a synonym for chafe. I never would have thought of it on my own.

As for characters, I suspect that here Li’l Ol’ Me is being hard on herself, and this might be a good time to ask a sympathetic friend for an opinion. Have him read a scene and ask him to describe the character you want to know about. If he says boring–well, he won’t. But be sure not to prompt him.

Characters and people are interesting because of what they say, do, and think. If we’re having trouble making a character come alive, we can list possibilities. If she has to say something, we can list five possible lines of dialogue. Same with thoughts and actions. Once she comes alive, you probably will find yourself needing lists less and less, but you still may from time to time, which is not a failure.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Your MC discovers she’s a character in a book when all action ceases because its author is in the hospital, comatose, unlikely to survive. The story has been halted at a climactic moment. Give her the task of finishing the story, and fill her with self-doubt about the artistic choices she makes. Put her life at risk. (Years ago, I read Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man–high school and up–which was unfinished because Mann died. If I remember right, the book ends in the middle of a sentence. Very bad for a reader’s health, too!)

∙ For the rest of the week, notice how often people apologize and what they apologize for. Then write a scene for a character who apologizes for inconsequentials. She is always sorry when she’s done nothing wrong. Make her actually do something bad or hurtful. Decide if she apologizes then. Continue with the scene.

∙ Do you think evildoers have high self esteem? Write a story with a villain who has a low opinion of himself. How does that play out?

∙ Now go the other way with a villain who loves herself. How does it go?

Have fun, and save what you write!

In Transit

To all of you who are in the middle of NaNoWriMo, may the wind fill your sails! If you have time or need a break, please let the rest of us know how you’re faring. And here’s the link to Kitty’s NaNoWriMo forum, which she put together particularly for this blog’s writer-participants: http://nanowrimo.org/forums/writing-groups-and-clubs/threads/260467.

On July 16, 2015 Abigail wrote, I know you did a post on this already, but it’s not so much story hopping, but losing interest. I have a story called “The Luckbringer” that currently has over 27,000 words. And I haven’t written in it since school ended (early June).

Partially, it’s because I’m in a filler/standstill part in the story. What do you do when you’re at those? I hate them, and sometimes I manage to slog through them, but usually I end up with seven different subplots I started to get it moving. Uggggh.

Also, I guess I don’t know where the story is going RIGHT NOW. I know where it’s supposed to end, and what I need to do to get there, but I’m not really sure what to write. Do you write a huge, detailed outline explaining what happens in every chapter? I have a few friends who do that, and personally I think it’s a waste of time and a restriction on your creativity, but I guess it’d also help you out during those filler chapters. What’s your thought on that?

And one more thing: When I want to sit down and write (or at least, feel like I should), sometimes I stare at my computer screen for fifteen minutes without writing anything, then go do something else. I’ve tried ‘tickling the keys’ and writing in a notebook, but it doesn’t help much.

To start with, on the subject of outlining or not, please take a look at my recent post, called “Plan or Pants,” on September 2nd, and don’t read just my words. Be sure to check out the comments, because lots of people weighed in. Everyone works differently, and there’s a long spectrum from outliner to pantser.

Onto filler scenes. I’m not sure, but we might do better if we dream up another name for them, like transition scenes or going deeper scenes, because just the word filler makes me sleepy.

However, sometimes–whatever we call them–they’re necessary, I guess. Please speak up if you disagree.

So, what to do?

At the beginning of my prequel to The Two Princesses of Bamarre, tentatively called Bamarre, MC Perry is a child in a Sparta-like culture, and she has to be trained in the arts of war. If she were awkward and weak, tension would come easily. She could fail, and she and the reader would suffer. But she’s a strong, gifted athlete. Are you yawning yet? I was, but it seemed essential to completing this world to show what its children have to go through.

I did a few things, not just to keep myself awake, but also to round out Perry’s character and to advance the plot. I made the other children, except one, dislike her, and I explored the exception.

Possibly, I could have used the enmity of the other children to create conflict, but their dislike wasn’t going to be a significant plot thread, and I kept it to a minimum. (I tend to over-complicate, so I was wary of myself.) Also, because I didn’t want to overburden this part of the story, I didn’t enlarge much on the new friendship.

Wrapped up in this example are three strategies:

∙ Truncate. Suspect every sentence. If we don’t need it, out it goes. Switching from showing to telling will help in the shortening. In my example, we can show one sort of training and tell the others, briefly. This truncating can be done both while we’re writing the scene and in revision as soon as we finish. If we’ve introduced seven subplots to get us through, we can consider each one, because there may be gold among them, and then we can ditch the dross. In fact, question your entire transition scene. Do you really need it. Can you cover it in a single sentence and move on?

∙ Reveal character. What a character does when she’s disliked may expose aspects of her not otherwise seen. Does she try harder? Withdraw? Comfort herself in other ways? Become belligerent? Whatever choice she makes will teach us and the reader more about her–and will make the pages interesting, even exciting.

∙ Advance plot. In my story, the single friendship becomes important. To come up with ways to advance the plot, think about the main conflict and how your intermediate scene can contribute to it. This has nothing to do with my manuscript, but let’s imagine that Perry’s new friend is going to die (somehow) later in the story. Well, what little thing can we drop into this scene to hint at the trouble to come. Since these pages are transitional, we don’t want it to be a big deal, just a bell that chimes softly. The reader will hear.

On Abigail’s last question, about being stuck and unable to write, I sympathize. At the moment, I’m figuring out what to write next and I’m not making much progress. But I do believe in tickling the keys. I’d suggest writing off topic about something that matters to you. Rant or obsess (in writing) or describe the latest funny thing that happened in your family or with friends. Don’t make yourself write your story or write about your story until and unless it just starts coming. And don’t do what I’ve been doing lately, an addiction, which is switching from writing to playing a solitaire game called Free Cell. Do not do that! Especially if you’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo, do not do that!

Here are three prompts:

∙ Your MC has left his old life behind. He’s on a train or in a caravan or a commercial spaceship, off to–you decide where and what. An interlude is needed for the transition. Nothing major is going to happen, but a few small things may. Write the scene. Do not let it go more than five pages, or, if it does, cut it back in revision.

∙ Use the situation I described above. Your MC is learning a new skill and has just made a friend, though no one else likes her. The new skill is the transition part, so let it be something dull, like stringing beads. Make the reader worry just the slightest bit about the safety of the new friend. Again, keep the scene short.

∙ Your MC and another character, you decide who, are in a boat in the middle of one of the Great Lakes. Think big body of water. The engine has died. Swimming to shore is not an option, and if no one realizes what’s happened, they will be in terrible trouble. But for now, the water is calm, the sky is blue. Write the scene before everything starts to fall apart.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The Establishment

For any of you who can get to Long Island, New York, on Saturday, November 14th, I’ll be speaking and signing at 2:00 at the Longwood Public Library, 800 Middle Country Road in Middle Island. I’d love to meet you!

For those of you who: are eighteen or will be by next fall, are writing for children or young adults, and can get to New Jersey for a one-day conference, I want to mention the one at Rutgers University, where I mentor every year. You have to apply, I think by April. People who are accepted are paired with a mentor who is either an editor, agent, or published kids’ book writer. Most of the mentors are editors and agents. I’m one of the few writers. I met my agent at this conference many years ago. I encourage you to apply. The website is http://ruccl.org/about one-on-one plus.html, and information for next year will be posted soon. If you come, please be sure to introduce yourself to me.

On July 16, 2015, Mikayla wrote, I have a new idea that I want to work on, and I already know that two points of view are required for it. What I’m struggling with is knowing when to switch POVs (or, to begin, when to introduce the second character). How many chapters is a good average to have? And how many to establish the first character before switching?

There are exceptions to everything, and anything goes if it does go, but in general, it is best to start anything major early. For example, if we’re writing contemporary fantasy set in an ordinary place, say Trenton, New Jersey, but there’s going to be a dragon in our story, we should bring it in early or our reader may feel unprepared and may even refuse to accept our creature. In the case of a dragon I’d say the first page isn’t too soon and after the first chapter may be too late. The dragon doesn’t have to appear in person then, necessarily, but it should at least be hinted at.

In the case of a POV switch, I’d say Chapter One for the first POV and Chapter Two for the second. That’s what I did in Ever, and the two POV characters alternate chapters for the whole book although I don’t think we have to be as consistent as that. Once the reader knows that there will be more than one POV, we don’t need to stay regular, but we do have to make sure the reader knows whose head she’s in. In my mystery, Stolen Magic, which is written in limited third person, I shift POV among my three main characters, but the default character is the dragon detective’s assistant, Elodie. She has the POV whenever she’s around. The other characters take over only in her absence. The POV shifts aren’t regular, but I don’t think they shock the reader.

As for establishing an MC, I don’t think that happens quickly, so we don’t have to wait before introducing a second MC. They can even both be introduced at once. For example, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson is the narrator. The reader gets to know Holmes through Watson and to know Watson, to a large degree, through how Holmes reacts to him and what he says about his assistant. The two happen simultaneously.

Harking back to our outliner/pantser discussion, you outliners may invent your characters as part of the preparation process. You may work through your outlines and create character descriptions before you start the actual writing. But for this pantser, I discover my characters as I go along.

But regardless of which method we use, the reader develops an understanding of the MCs as the story moves along. Sometimes, most of a story can be over before the reader has a full understanding of an MC. I’m remembering Little Women and my astonishment when Jo falls for Professor Baer. I had no idea she could love such a settled and, to my thinking, unromantic man. And Amy and Laurie! But their preferences were part of their personalities that were revealed late in the story. I don’t think Louisa May Alcott changed them suddenly to make her plot work.

In my historical novel, Dave at Night, I, pantser that I am, didn’t find out that Dave is a budding artist until Dave did, in an art class. And, when I found out, I had no idea how his talent would play out in my story.

Of course our characters have to be distinctive, and of course we establish them from the first moment our reader meets them. How does that happen?

Last weekend when I was mentoring. I saw only five pages of my mentee’s book, but she did a splendid job of beginning her characterization. In the first half of the first page I found out that the MC is very attached to her father, because she’s distressed that he failed to wake her up before leaving on a business trip, which told me as well that she has strong feelings. Just like me, our reader will be eager for clues to each character and will start assembling a complex personality.

In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, I begin with Addie’s fears. In Dave at Night, Dave begins by telling the reader what a trouble-maker he is. So if we start firmly in our MC’s head, he can introduce himself by narrating about what’s most important to him. Oh, the reader thinks, that’s what this character cares about.

That’s just one way. We can start with dialogue to give the reader a taste of our MC’s voice and his relationships. Or action, in which our MC reveals his response to a situation or demonstrates how he creates a situation.

For example, let’s take the fairy tale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” We’re starting the story at night. A poor, drugged prince sleeps in an adjoining room, and the princesses are about to descend to the enchanted lake and their enchanted princes. Our MC is right in the middle, the fifth eldest princess. I’ll call her Maisie. How can we introduce her to the reader?

Through her thoughts. She can wonder if the prince next door is really out cold. The reader discovers that she’s careful, maybe a bit of a worrier.

Does she act on her worry? Maybe she does. The prince is asleep, but the casement window in his room is wide open. Worried again, she closes it, because April nights get cold. The reader understands that she’s kind. Or, she closes it because she doesn’t want an outside noise to wake him up. Not particularly kind, but very thorough.

Or, though she’s worried she doesn’t check on him because she knows delay will infuriate her oldest sister, and she’s scared of her sister’s rage. Failure to act is acting too. The reader learns something else, which is likely to be developed further.

So we have her think and act. We can have her say something too, to her sisters or to the sleeping prince, so the reader will discover how she expresses herself in dialogue.

The sisters descend the staircase. Maisie puts the prince-sleep worry out of her mind. Or, the sisters descend the staircase, and Maisie can’t get the prince out of her mind. Her enchanted prince will know something is troubling her. Whichever she does, the reader accumulates more data.

At this point, we probably haven’t written more than a page or two, but Maisie is taking shape. If our second POV character is her enchanted prince, we can certainly let him take over in the next chapter.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Write the scene I’ve described. Decide what Maisie does with the prince in the next room and reveal what she thinks and does.

∙ Write the next scene, narrated by Maisie’s enchanted prince or any other character you’d like to have take over.

∙ Aladdin, in his eponymous fairy tale, has always seemed a nonentity to me. Things are done to him and for him. If you know him just from Disney, reread the original fairy tale, and you will find that the only actions he takes involve telling a genie what to do. Write the beginning of the fairy tale and bring him to life as someone who wants something and acts to get it.

Have fun, and for those of you who are participating, good luck with NaNoWriMo. Save what you write!