Lip stuck in the details

On March 4, 2013 Jasmine Smith wrote, …how detailed is TOO detailed? I mean, I know there are some events that are just not included in stories. Like getting your lip stuck in your braces. Would you tell about that happening to your character? Or does it just not matter?

Along the same lines in the latest post, Bug wrote, When I write, I try to write in as many details as I can. This produces one of three things: a) too much detail; b) not enough detail; c) just right, but this doesn’t happen much. Then again, I’ve had people tell me there is no such thing as too much detail. What do you guys think about this? How do I avoid a) and b)?

And Michelle Dyck replied, Try to have your characters interact with many of the details, in order to mix the descriptions with action. (For example, one character may run her hand along the ugly, floral wallpaper, another may walk across the fuzzy carpet, and a third may sneeze at the dust on the furniture.) I guess balancing the right amount of detail, though, comes with practice. You have to decide what is necessary to draw the reader into the setting and what can be cut out without making the story suffer. You’d be surprised, however, how few details are necessary to paint a picture in the reader’s mind. They can fill in a lot. On the other hand, you don’t want too few details, otherwise the readers might feel they’re floating in a featureless grey cloud.

I agree completely with Michelle Dyck, and I love the idea of integrating detail and action. Action as it occurs in real life is loaded with detail. Right this minute, for example, I’m on the train to New York City, typing on my laptop, in a window seat on the sunny side of the train because they tend to crank the air conditioning up too high and I want the sun to mediate the cold. It’s early in the trip, so the seat next to me is empty. And so on. The conductor just strode past my seat. Oh, there he goes again. I could fill in with myriad other details: the scenery outside my window, the condition of the train, what I’m wearing. It will all get boring very quickly, because there’s no tension. The train isn’t about to derail, I hope. None of these travel details will get us anywhere (oops, pun!).

But in fiction, action and its attendant details are the building blocks of plot. Let’s take Jasmine Smith’s detail of our MC’s lip getting stuck in his braces. (British blog readers: Please post to say if this is also the British term for orthodontia wires on the teeth. If not, what do you say?) I think it’s a great detail! Suppose Martin is about to give a speech at his youth group, a speech he’s practiced for a month, a speech that’s meant to quiet unrest in his village. He’s so badly stuck on his teeth that he can’t speak, and his lips start bleeding uncontrollably. He has to go to the hospital. In his place, his friend Wanda leaps onto the stage to speak in his place, but she’s much less persuasive than he is. In fact, she offends her audience and riots break out.

Wow! A lot comes out of that one detail, when we combine it with the action of trying to give a speech.

Let’s go back and fill in with more details, because so far we have a quick summary. Martin starts bleeding and soaks his tissue immediately. A young woman on his panel gives him her handkerchief to stanch the bleeding. He’s surprised that she has an actual cloth handkerchief, which is delicate and flimsy and not much use. As he raises it to his lip he sees a blue rose embroidered in the corner, the symbol of the secret society for the liberation of mutated foxes. He sees the same symbol tattooed on her impossibly slender wrist, and her eyes, an intense blue-black, bore into his when he looks up.

Lots of detail here, and they all draw us into the gathering plot.

What would be too much detail? Suppose we have Martin look down and see another rose on her ankle. Well, we already know about the wrist and the handkerchief, so the ankle may be overload – unless ankle skin must be kept unadorned by order of the Tyrant.

So detail becomes overload when it piles on what we already know – even if it’s clever, even if we have a great time writing it. We can enjoy ourselves and lay it on thick, but then we need to snip the excess out in revision.

Unless we’re writing humor and the point is the overabundance of everything and it’s really funny and the reader will laugh, or some readers will laugh. Then the more the merrier.

Let’s go back to Michelle Dyck’s suggestions: one character may run her hand along the ugly, floral wallpaper, another may walk across the fuzzy carpet, and a third may sneeze at the dust on the furniture. Our details don’t have to set off major plot events. They can work to set the scene. In this one, we can imagine that three young women are looking at a house they may rent together for their junior year in college. When we bring in dialogue and the thoughts of the POV character we begin to enter the story. June, our MC, hears the sneeze and worries that April may not be able to tolerate Mary’s cat. Someone else can be dismayed that the place hasn’t been kept up. And so on.

The point is that detail, when it’s working well, folds into everything else: character, action, plot. If our detail does that, we’ve got Bug’s option c) every time.

Here are a bunch of prompts:

• Write the story of Martin and his bloody lip. Use as many of my details as you like.

• List three other consequences of a caught lip that could give rise to a story. Pick one and write.

• Pick another of your stuck lip plot possibilities. Make the consequences include one or more of these: the downfall of a civilization, a flowering of the arts, the invention of flying.

• Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger a week after she got her braces. Write the story.

• In a story, make my train derail. Use some of the details that I provided and bring in lots of your own.

• Write the story of the three young woman and the house.

• Use Michelle Dyck’s details in a different story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Revision methodology

On February 13, 2013, Requien wrote, I was wondering if you have any advice on self-editing. This past NaNoWriMo, I cheated a little and finished my previous manuscript. After deleting my midnight-German rants that ended up just being word count boosts, the novel is hovering around 92-94k words. There are several passages that need expansion, and some details must be added in.

However, I’m not really sure where to start: do I add in the passages and lace it up, or edit the strange, awkward layers first? As an extended note, I have three different perspectives from the third person omniscient- would this be considered acceptable in a writing community, or strange?

First off, congratulations on finishing your NaNoWriMo novel, whichever year it belongs to! This is a big accomplishment. Kudos to you!

Let’s start with the last question. I don’t know of any monolithic writing community that rules on acceptability. Writers worth their salt know that each book is unique; each book demands its own treatment and requires of the writer whatever approach is best for the story.

I’ve said this before on the blog: the primary writing objective is clarity, unless we’re writing experimental fiction. I don’t mean instant clarity. We can blow smoke in the reader’s eyes now and then. We can write an ending that’s open to interpretation. But the reader should finish a book believing that it was coherent, that he understood what he read. (Careful attention to grammar and punctuation will help this along.) If three different perspectives are needed to tell the story clearly or interestingly, then that’s the right way to go.

I’m a little confused, though, about three third-person omniscient perspectives. Omniscient means all-knowing. When we write in third-person omniscient, we can dip into the thoughts of any character. The god of the story is narrating, and I’m not sure how there can be three of them. However, as I’m writing this, I’m thinking, maybe… Sounds fascinating.

We can certainly have three non-omniscient third-person perspectives. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings trilogy adopts this approach throughout. By turns we see events unfold through the eyes of Samwise, Frodo, Pippin, Aragorn, even Gandalf, and I’m sure I’ve left out a few. I’m alternating third-person perspectives in Stolen Magic, and I’ve done so before in my Princess Tales.

Requien’s question comes at a good time. I’m more or less close to finishing the second complete first draft of Stolen Magic, and I’m thinking about how to approach revising. But before I talk about me, let me say that people revise differently, and you may find your own method as you go along. Some begin with a plot edit; then maybe a character edit; a dialogue edit; a setting edit; and, finally, a word choice, grammar, and punctuation edit. There’s no right way.

Usually I just start at the beginning and work my way through, fixing everything at once. And then I do it again. And again. But I’m going to go about the process a little differently this time. I have edits from my editor on the middle section, which I haven’t addressed, because I wanted to get to the end first. So I plan to start with her notes.

(If she had objected to anything structural, anything that would have called for a complete overhaul, I would have stopped my forward momentum, and addressed her issues.)

Then, I have notes and line edits from my critique buddy, the terrific middle-grade and young adult writer Karen Romano Young, biding their time in a pile in my office. My second step will be to review her big-picture notes and then address her line edits as I page through the manuscript, making my own changes and those of hers that seem to fit. (I don’t do everything that either my editor or Karen wants, although I take their comments very seriously; most of all, I need to please myself.)

So, Requien and anyone else who’s reached this point, it may be helpful to show your rough first draft to someone you trust, preferably another writer, who will know how ungainly a first draft can be. That person’s comments may help direct your revisions.

But even before that, I’d expand whatever needs expanding and add the required details, so that your reader gets the full story.

If you feel the manuscript is too much of a mess and allowing other eyes to see it will reduce you to a trembling, anxious jellyfish, I’d suggest listing the issues you see as major and keeping the list visible as you revise. For example, Requien’s list might start with “strange, awkward layers” and continue on to other major problem areas.

Then, when you get your manuscript into more acceptable shape, consider letting some trusted other take a look.

One thing I always always always do when I revise is delete. To me, good writing is succinct. As my book goes on a diet, it gets tighter, clearer, and more pleasurable to read. A great resource to help you toward concision is Stunk and White’s The Elements of Style, a short book that packs a potent punch. And when I say “delete” I don’t necessarily mean whole chapters, although sometimes I do cut that much, but more often I’m snipping within sentences, excising a word here, a word there, that doesn’t add anything to meaning or rhythm.

Here are three prompts:

• Take a page of a current story or an old one. Cut fifty words, more or less.

• Take a page of the same story or a different one. Find a spot that you can develop more or in a new direction. Turn your one page into three.

• Your main character acquires a magic revising wand – you decide how. Excited, she applies it to her story, and the result is a masterpiece. As she’s rereading it and marveling, her dad calls her to dinner. She brings the wand with her to show everyone. After she’s shown it, dinner progresses. Her brother says something annoying. Her mother reminds her she has homework due without even asking her if she’s already finished it, which she has. Her dad tells a truly dumb joke. Believing that the wand revises only the written word, and to express her irritation, she waves it at her family. Everything changes. Tell the story. You can take this beyond the family and explore the effects of the wand on the family dog, people at the supermarket, the supermarket itself, the local park – wherever you want her to wave it.

Have fun, and save what you write!

When?

I’m announcing, proudly, that I’ve had a poem published in each of these two anthologies: On the Dark Path, An Anthology of Fairy Tale Poetry, and the cancer poetry project 2. The first is probably appropriate for high school and above. My poem, called “Becoming Cinderella,” presents an entirely different version of the story from Ella Enchanted. I love that the fairy tale can accommodate both interpretations. The cancer anthology is also for high school and above, but I think it will be most meaningful if you at least know someone who’s struggled with cancer. My poem, “Because,” is in the “friend” category – I don’t have cancer.

Now for the post. On February 13, 2013, Athira Abraham wrote, I had a question that involved voice. My story might be from the middle ages or 1800s or something like that, but I also wanted to include things that were modern, like a camera, a café (yes, a café, not a bakery) and also events like Valentine’s Day, but I’m not sure how I would express it in the story to myself and the readers. I’m also finding it hard to include religion, like a church, if my story is a fantasy and includes a witch, or a sorceress, because some religions can be against this. How could I express these things in a story without making it sound too complicated?

Several subjects are wrapped up in here. First, time period. The middle ages and the 1800s are vastly different, politically, technologically, culturally, even religiously, and probably more. If we really want to give an impression of a particular period, it’s worth doing a little reading. There are books about the daily life of just about every period. I have two on the middle ages and one on ancient Mesopotamia. I usually read the chapters that have bearing on my story. For example, I’m always interested in food and the home. If we’re writing fantasy, we don’t have to stick slavishly to the information, but it’s helpful to have a general idea. In addition to daily life, it may be useful to google geopolitics for the period just to get a sense of what was going on.

And our research pays off delightfully in the details that we come across that inform and enrich our story, details we never would have thought of on our own.

It is possible to write a story that pulls in bits and pieces from all over the time line. Terry Pratchett is a master of this in his Discworld series. If we’re going to do something like that, we need to establish it very early in our story, certainly in the first chapter, so our readers don’t get confused.

If we’re not going to hop all over the historical map, let’s back up to consider why we pick a particular period. The answer doesn’t have to be deep, but, in my opinion, we should have one. Maybe we want a medieval story because we want the action to take place in a castle, and we don’t want to write twenty-first century people who are renovating a twelfth century castle. That’s good enough for me.

Generally, we need a reason for everything! Let’s take the three Athira Abraham mentions: a camera, a café, and Valentine’s day. It’s not good enough, in my opinion again, merely to like these elements. They need to fit into our plot. We can like one of them, say Valentine’s Day and what happens on that day, and decide to build a book around it. That’s fine. But then we need a reason for the café and the camera. Maybe our lovebirds meet at a café and ask a stranger to take a photo of them, and the photo falls into the wrong hands, because one of our MCs has been hiding from her great enemy, the powerful and vicious Earl of Eagleton. Cool!

These three elements may suggest our time period. As I wrote in my comment to Athira Abraham when she posted on the blog, the camera (not the digital camera, not a phone camera) has a pretty long history, and its forerunners go back even further. But in the old days you couldn’t just point and shoot. Taking a photo took time. Look it up.

Valentine’s Day goes way, way back, I discovered in my quick peek into Wikipedia, but the traditions evolved. Look it up, too.

Often etymology (word origin) will give you a sense of when something came into existence. According to Dictionary.com, the word café came into English at the end of the eighteenth century, so there probably weren’t cafes before then. If you’re alarmed about how long research will take, this filled about twenty seconds.

Suppose we decide to set our story in the middle ages. Valentine’s Day, in whatever form it took then, works. Cameras and cafes don’t. What to do?

We need some sort of substitute. Maybe for the camera it will be an artist who excels in recording impressions in charcoal on parchment. Or maybe, since this is fantasy, it’s a certain kind of owl that fixes images in its eyes. If you feed it a mouse and say the magic words, the moment you wanted to preserve will appear in the owl’s eyes. For a café, we’ll need to dream up something else, a gathering place of some sort.

Onto religion. We can have witches and sorceresses without mentioning religion – my opinion again. But if we need religion, this is fantasy, and it can be a fantasy religion. We can invent gods, demons, witches, sorcerers, sorceresses, cherubs, half-gods, creatures that are lower than humans in the creation hierarchy, whatever we like, whatever serves our story. The more different our fantasy religion is from actual religions, the less likely we’re to offend anyone. If our main god is in the shape of a dishwasher or, since this may be a medieval fantasy, a pot of porridge or even a unicorn, it’s unlikely to be connected by readers to their beliefs.

But, and I’ve written about this on the blog before, we may offend someone or more than one, and the anger may be for something we entirely did not predict. It may have nothing to do with religion (or it may – the religious aspects of Ever have bothered some readers). Maybe it has to do with the knights’ code of chivalry, which we expected would please everybody. The point is, if we worry about offending people, we may as well stop writing – and speaking, and leaving our bedrooms!

Here are four prompts:

• Put Valentine’s Day, the café, and the camera into a story set 200 years in the future. Each one has changed. Invent what they’ve become and decide how they fit into your tale.

• Research an aspect of life in the middle ages, could be market life, or costume, or cooking. Put your MC in the middle of it and give her an objective and obstacles to fulfilling it. Write the scene.

• Make her a modern girl in this medieval situation. Write the scene again, including her mistakes and her bungling good luck. A book I adore along these lines is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – funny and exciting.

• In the middle of an escape from the villain, both your MC Mallory and your villain Hamilton wander into a religious ceremony unlike any either of them have known before. Mallory’s goal is survival; Hamilton’s is destruction. But nothing in this religion is as it seems. There are hallucinations, mazes, smoke, weather events, disembodied voices, and whatever other mayhem you want to toss in. Write the scene. If you like, continue and write the story or the novel.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Pickles

If you’d like to see spring in all its glory at our house, just click on my husband’s website on the right. And scroll down to see the latest (two) photos of Reggie. The second one shows his maniacal glee in a play fight with his BFF Demi.

On to the post. On February 11, 2013, Kenzi Anne wrote, I have trouble finishing stories because I get my characters into pickles and I’ll think “wow! this is great!…snap, now how do they get out of it?” In other words…I’m not clever enough to get my characters out of their pit. If I’d been in most of my characters’ situations, I wouldn’t have a clue what to do, and probably would have just thrown up the white flag–not a very interesting story! So I guess my question is, how do I write a character that’s cleverer than I am?

And writeforfun replied, I tend to have that problem, too! My current story is a spy novel, so I have to get my characters in and out of pickles all the time, and it gets tricky! Lucky for me, I have a genius brother who can usually think of a way out when I can’t. So, although this may not be an option for you, my first piece of advice would be to find someone you can trust (that won’t tell you “forget it – this is terrible!”) who could help you brainstorm a way out. Another method I’ve found is to give the characters objects in advance that will help them out of the tricky situation. I have one character who always carries a file with him (long story), and when he was put into an old jail, he used the file to break out. It would have been weird if he had been in the jail and said, “Oh, well would you look at that? I have a file in my pocket!” but he’s been carrying around a file since he first showed up in my last book. Since it was already there, it doesn’t make you think, “Seriously? A file?” but rather something like, “Wow, who would have thought that would actually come in handy?” It seems that if you mention the thing (or person, or animal, or whatever) that will help them out BEFORE they actually need it, it seems clever instead of cheesy. And, if all else fails, I usually alter the situation a tad so that my impossible situation has one little escape hole in it to work with. I know, all of these suggestions might not necessarily help – maybe even none of them will – but I hope this gives you some ideas. Good luck!

I’m entirely with writeforfun. I don’t have a brother, genius or otherwise, but I do use her other two ideas: arm my MC in advance with something that will get her out of trouble, and build an escape hatch into any pickle I put her in.

You don’t have to see ahead to do either one. If she doesn’t already have a file in her pocket, you can go back fifty pages and give her one. The file in writeforfun’s example works especially well because it was planted in an earlier book, so it’s really well established.

It’s particularly nice if the instrument comes as a surprise, if it’s not obviously a weapon or a means of escape. For example, suppose our MC, Rona, is wearing a ceremonial sash that has to be tied in a particular way, and it’s very long because it has to go over her shoulder, around her waist three times, and over the other shoulder and then hang behind her almost to the ground. The reader has seen the tying-of-the-sash ceremony and worried with Rona that it will slip off her shoulder and trail through something disgusting. There may even be taboos about this. In the next chapter, she’s imprisoned. Despondent, she thinks of hanging herself with the scarf until her own thoughts frighten her, and it occurs to her to use the sash as the means of her escape. There’s a grate overhead and one in the floor, and the window is barred. Plus, the guard comes in once a day to bring her bread and water and remove the chamberpot, and he has a neck the scarf could wind around and – mnah hah hah – tighten.

This scarf has more charming possibilities. Suppose Rona, in preparation for her ceremony, whatever it is, has learned The Dance of the Sash, which involves snapping it, making it ripple in the air. She could even have mastered tricks that cause the sash to tie itself into knots in the air, potentially weaponizing it.

Or maybe she’s even been taught how to turn it into a python!

But we don’t want to make things too easy for her, either. The snake may do that, unless the reader knows that it’s just at likely to strike Rona as her enemies.

Or the escape hatch. Rona is imprisoned in a cell with a tin roof, solid wooden door, solid plaster walls, and windows too high to reach. No scarf. Nothing that could be a weapon, not even a spoon. Through the high-up windows, she sees the sky darken. Rain starts, and the cell ceiling leaks a lot. She realizes this has happened many times before, and it occurs to her that the floorboards may be rotten. She takes it from there.

We writers have one advantage that enables us to write characters who are cleverer than we are. It’s time. Our characters can snap out sharp comebacks in an instant – because we’ve taken hours to think them up. They’re definitely smarter. In real life we could never answer so fast.

I bump into this constantly with my dragon detective, Masteress Meenore, who is totally brilliant, which makes IT great fun to write. I’m always figuring out ways to make IT shine. IT’s teaching my MC Elodie to deduce and induce and use her common sense, and when IT questions her, she often gets a headache.

Here’s an example from Stolen Magic. The background is that this item, the Replica, has been stolen from within the Oase, which is like a museum, with many rooms of shelves and cupboards. If the Replica isn’t found the consequences will be terrible. I won’t say what they are. This little bit includes Masteress Meenore, Elodie, and another character her age (twelve), Master Robbie. The three are in a stable outside the Oase. Masteress Meenore is the first speaker:

“When you return, do not waste your energy searching shelves, although there are many and a month could be spent combing them. Let others do it, because it must be done, but the thief, who is no fool, will not have hidden the Replica there, not even in the most shadowy corner of a cupboard in the most distant chamber. Why is that?”

Can you think of the answer? Close your eyes to think, think, think.

You may have come up with something else, but this is my solution:

The two were silent. Master Robbie’s face wore a strained look, which Elodie recognized.
“Think, Lodie, Master Robbie!”
She wanted to be the one to realize. Think! she thought. Prove I have an original mind!
Ah. “Because, Masteress, the thief couldn’t guess where the searchers would look first. Anyone might stumble on the Replica in an unlikely spot just by luck.”

We’re forever giving our characters powers we don’t have. Ella in Ella Enchanted has an amazing talent for languages. I don’t. Areida in Fairest can throw her voice beyond the ability of any ventriloquist. Why not intelligence?

Here are four prompts:

• You were expecting this. Imprison Rona and get her out using nothing but her sash.

• Try an underwater rescue. Your MC, who doesn’t know how to swim, is tied up in the trunk of a car that goes off a bridge into a river. Write a preceding scene or two to set up what will make her able to survive, the escape hatch or her special ability. Then get her out of there by her own efforts and have her save herself. I mean, she can get an octopus on her side, who can open the trunk and untie the knots, but she has to persuade the octopus.

• This one is sad. Write an argument between two characters, maybe they’re romantically involved, maybe they’re siblings, whatever. One of them feels betrayed; the other feels falsely accused. Make them both brilliant, much smarter than any of us. The fight never gets physical, but have them wound each other emotionally, because neither holds back. Depending on where you want to take it, you can bring them to reconciliation, or they can wind up estranged.

• Too bad Easter is over. This is an armchair Easter egg hunt. You have rivals or two teams of rivals. Twelve eggs have been hidden. The challenge for the contestants is to write down – without going to look – where each egg is hidden. The winner is the one (or the team) who predicts the location of more eggs than the loser. You can make the stakes high even though they’re just eggs. A life may hang in the balance. You probably should use a setting you know very well, either a fictional setting you’ve been writing about or a real place. The place will help your characters guess and so will the nature of whoever is doing the hiding, but the contestants will have to be very clever.

Have fun, and save what you write!

On Being a Writer

Thanks again to Jane Collen for her informative blog post on intellectual property!

Sarah wrote this on the website in January: I’ve loved writing stories for as long as I can remember. Even before I could write actual words, I’d draw pictures and make up stories to go along with them. I’ve always hoped that one day I might be able to be an author.

Now, I’m in high school, and I still love writing. I’m getting to a point where I need to begin thinking seriously about what I want to do. I’d still like to be an author, but I’m not sure that’s possible. I write all the time in a journal, and love it, but I’m hesitant to share my writing with anyone else, because I’m scared of what others might think. I know that when someone sends something to get published, it’s very likely to be rejected. I guess I’m afraid to pursue a career where I might never get anything published and never be successful. So, my question to you would be, do you think I should pursue a writing career, or continue to enjoy writing for my own enjoyment but look into a different career. Any advice you could offer for an aspiring writer would be much appreciated. Thank you!

Let’s start with careers. If your goal is to be a novelist, few people who aren’t very wealthy can graduate from college and devote a year or two or four to writing without some other source of income. During the ten years it took me to get published (nine to get an acceptance), I worked for New York State government. I wrote mostly on the train during my very long commute. So I think it makes sense to prepare for a job while you also continue to write. I’m not a career counselor, but I am certain that good writing is an asset in almost any job. If any of you reading the blog know something about this, please weigh in. You may want to prepare for a career that will use your writing skills directly. Public relations, grant writing, technical writing, and advertising leap to mind. I have no idea what the opportunities are in those fields. There must be more fields for writers, too. If there are career counselors at your high school or college, I suggest you consult them. And again, if you’re reading the blog and write on the job, please tell us what you do.

I say, look for a field that interests you, that you think will be fun to do most days. And – I hope this isn’t presumptuous – cultivate in yourself the capacity to have fun in whatever you’re doing. One of the charms of being a writer, professionally or not, is the ability to stand outside what’s going on. You can satirize it or dramatize it. You can invent backstories for the players, your fellow toilers, the boss, the boss’s boss. You can imagine the meetings that led to the insane employees’ manual.

You may need to decide whether you want the kind of career that will engage you fully, that will demand sixteen hour days of you, or the kind that will let you go home at night and write. There are pluses and minuses of each.

I must confess that I did no such planning. I graduated from college during a recession, and I had been a philosophy major, and I took the first job I could get, which was with an economics research firm, a very bad fit. I took a test for a government job and began to work for the long-defunct WIN Program, placing welfare recipients in jobs. I loved it, because it fulfilled a need in me to be helpful. But it really was dumb luck. Then I got promoted out of what pleased me, and the second fifteen years of my twenty-seven years in state government were only intermittently satisfying. I stayed because I needed the security – not a good reason. However, my job didn’t demand much overtime, and I started writing in my last ten years there, and you know the rest.

The point is, life is full of surprises. The path you start down may be the right one, but if not, you can veer off, change your mind, do something else. I was almost fifty when Ella Enchanted was published.

Onto success. I am extremely lucky (because of the Newbery honor, the movie, the Disney books, the confidence that HarperCollins had in me from the start) to be able to earn my living as a writer. Not many writers do, and they are still successful. Let me repeat that: They are still successful. In the arts, where competition is extreme, success needs to be defined in other than monetary ways. If you’ve written an entire novel, that’s a measure of success. If you’ve gotten something published that is success too. If someone – one person! – has read your work, has been moved by it, even changed, that’s success. You don’t have to have the whole enchilada to be successful. And no matter how much success you do accumulate, someone else will have more.

An aside. You may be thinking that the Newbery honor wasn’t luck because I’d written a good book. But plenty of good books don’t get the recognition they deserve. I once judged picture book texts for a contest. My fellow judges and I had to come up with one winner and, if I remember correctly, one runner-up. The book I loved the most didn’t appeal in the slightest to the other judges, so it was out. From the other ten that I adored it was almost impossible to choose which was best, and yet we had to. If I had eaten a different breakfast on the morning when we decided, if one of the judges had seen a different movie the night before, if the day had been rainy, we might have made a different selection. There was definitely an element of luck.

And now onto, criticism, which is everyone’s lot in life. I confess that I can tolerate writing criticism much more comfortably than I can take criticism of my character or of the stupid things I sometimes do or the thoughtless remarks I sometimes make. Being called up for those really makes me cringe. If the criticism is on target I endure a period of miserable shame.

Some writing criticism I actually like, if it shows me how to improve my work. If it lights a path to a better story, if it inspires new creativity, I’m ecstatic.

And some writing criticism I dislike. If I start to feel that my whole effort was a failure, I find that as hard to tolerate as the personal criticism. But once I see how I can make my story better, the pain fades.

For most writers criticism is essential. Few of us bang out perfect prose, and few of us can see all our flaws. We need an objective eye.

If writing criticism is intolerable to you, I’d suggest you reassess your position. Try to take the criticism in, in a way that’s less painful. You might read some of my other posts on criticism and rejection. However, if you try and you just can’t deal with it positively, then writing professionally may not be for you. You may be happier keeping it as a hobby.

From criticism to rejection. We all experience it, as writers and not as writers. In ordinary life, we get rejected by our first choice school or by a crush or by a potential friend. In writing, rejection is as common as the flu and just as welcome. I’m still experiencing it. Not too long ago my editor turned down a picture book project I wanted to do. And my poetry is garnering more rejections than acceptances. It’s hard not to take it personally, but writing rejection is affected by many factors. One, of course, is the quality of the work. But others may be the market or similarity to something else the publishing house is putting out or the personal preferences of the editor. The problem is, you may never know what the real reason is. It may be impossible not to feel bad, and it’s fine to wallow in your misery – but not forever. It’s important, probably crucial, not to let a rejection make you dislike your work. The trick is to send it back out and keep writing and using criticism to get better.

Whew! Time to get off my soapbox! Here are two prompts:

• Write a journal entry about yourself and your future and your attitudes toward success, criticism, and rejection. Assess yourself. Consider what you think will make you happy in your professional life. Write about what you need to do to get there. Do not heap criticism on yourself in the process!

• You know The Rule of Three? Cinderella goes to three balls. The queen in “Rumpelstiltskin” guesses his name three times. The evil queen in “Snow White” visits her in her home with the dwarves three times. That’s three examples, but there are lots more, because three seems to be a satisfying number. Write a fairy tale about an aspiring writer using The Rule of Three. If you like, turn her into a toad (or anything else), bring in a dragon, an actual fairy, a talking wolf.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Copyright, the Double-Edged Sword

Here is the promised guest post on copyright, very kindly contributed by Jane Collen, who asked me to add the website of her law firm, where you’ll find more information: http://www.collenip.com/. I visited the site and found it most helpful to click on “News and Events” and then on “Podcasts and Blogs” and then on the blog on copyrights. It’s wonderful for those of you who have a legal bent and like getting into the weeds.

If you have questions about the post or about other aspects of copyright or about projects you’re working on that make you wonder about copyright, you can get in touch with Jane directly in the ways she suggests at the bottom of the post, or you can post your questions here, which I’d prefer for this week, so we can all learn from them and from Jane’s answers, because she’s going to keep an eye on the blog and respond. Ta da! Here it is:

I had the pleasure of meeting Gail at the recent Author’s
Tea in Chappaqua, NY. We began chatting
and I mentioned I was a lawyer practicing in the field of Intellectual Property
– patent, trademark and copyright law, and she mentioned her readers had a lot
of copyright questions. I quickly
volunteered for the honor of doing a guest blog – two of my favorite things,
which go hand in hand: writing and copyrights!

COPYRIGHT PROTECTION – AUTHORS SEE THE DOUBLE EDGE OF THE
SWORD (which is still not mightier than the pen (word processor))

by Jane F. Collen,

The right
to a limited protection of the fruits of our creativity is so fundamental that
it is guaranteed by our Constitution.
This blog post is meant to serve as a primer on how to capture those
rights bundled into Copyright, without inadvertently trespassing on anyone
else’s rights, and does not serve to provide legal advice.

Beginning at the source, Article 1
Section 8 states “Congress shall have Power. . . To Promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times, to Authors and
Inventors, the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

In order to
be protectable by copyright, a work must be an original work, fixed in any
tangible medium of expression. The
protection covers the work – whether it is a novel, a picture, a photograph, a
motion picture, a dramatic work, a dance, sculpture, music, sound recording or
architectural work—it does not cover the idea behind it.

There is no
way to protect the idea with a copyright. (That is the job of patents – a much
more complex form of protection.) We can
protect what we call it (that is the brand or the source indicating language by
a trademark registration), how we present or perform it, how we write about it
and how we manufacture it. But we cannot
we protect the title of a book, or characters.
You CAN protect the brand of a series of books (I am working on book
three of the Enjella™ Adventures) but not the title of a single creative
work. Nor can you completely protect the
plot of the book.

Therefore,
sometimes it is not easy to establish if the work is an “original work of
authorship”. To be original, the work
must be produced by “the author’s own intellectual effort,” as opposed to
merely copying a preexisting work. But
it does not necessarily have to be novel (meaning new, innovative); it just
must have an appreciable amount of creative authorship. Usually, however, the level of creativity
required is exceptionally low. You
can’t protect a one word “composition” or a short bumper-sticker phrase. But
just about anything else you write will be original, as long as you’re not
copying the writing of someone else. The
best example of work which may not qualify for originality purposes may be just
compiling a list, for instance. As the courts see it, “the sweat of the brow”
that you put into your work won’t necessarily make it original. But writing just about anything in your own
words satisfies “originality”. The gamut of protection runs from courts finding
a compilation of non-protectable facts is copyrightable if it “features an
original selection and arrangement of facts” to finding even an original
expression not protectable “when there is essentially only one way to express
an idea”.

Copyright protection
actually conveys more than just one right.
The author has the right to reproduce her work, prepare derivative
works, distribute copies of the work to the public (by sale, or lease, or
rental or lending), perform the work publicly, display it publicly and perform
it publicly by means of digital transmission.
As you can imagine there have been all kinds of lawsuits concerning the
definition and extent of these rights. The
Copyright Law was recently revised (1998) to make the rights clear in the digital
millennium. In fact the revised law is
called The Digital Millennium Copyright Law.
(Our forefathers did not foresee ebooks – as omniscient as they seemed
to be.)

            “For how
long do these rights last?” you ask.
For works created on or after January 1, 1978 for individual authors,
copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. (This term was just recently extended from
author’s life plus 50 years by the 1998 revision).   For corporate authors, the term was extended
to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication.

The author
owns the copyright. Simple, right? Not so fast!
What about your web site that you paid a graphic designer to create copy
and art for? Do you own that? Are you sure?
There is such a thing as a “work for hire” if someone is explicitly
hired to prepare a work, then the employer, or person who hired the author owns
the copyright. But sometimes it is
difficult to establish that the arrangement truly is a work for hire.

A work for
hire usually is defined as a work prepared by an employee within the scope of
his or her employment; or a work specially commissioned for use as a
contribution to a collective work. Are
you thinking author/illustrator? Well,
you are right, but unless the parties agree in a written instrument signed by
each party that the work shall be considered a work for hire, the illustrator,
even if hired by the author, probably still has the right to make derivative
works and reproduce the illustrations apart from the published book.

And to add
to your agita, websites created by independent contractors are NOT considered
works for hire, so if you don’t want anyone else to have the same logo as you
and the same web design, you must be sure to require a written copyright assignment
from your web designer.

Gail
recently featured an interesting audio clip from NPR about the fact that the
song Happy Birthday still enjoys copyright protection. Even though the music, originally composed by
the Hill sisters who were savvy enough to obtain copyright protection, just
recently went into the public domain, the words are still protected since the
copyright was assigned to a publishing company.
Which leads me to my point – copyrights are transferable by written
agreement.

These days
it is possible to claim copyrights in a work simply by putting the author’s
name and the date on the (ideally) first publication or public
display/performance of the work. Unlike
the old days, it is not necessary to register the copyright with the Library of
Congress. But registration brings
additional rights, and makes the copyrights more easily enforceable. Hence the double-edged sword – be careful
where you garner your ideas and your material – there are only limited
circumstances that allow you to use copyrighted material without permission of
the author, like for educational purposes, news, or parody. You cannot use any copyrighted material for
your own economic benefit. The simple
rule: Always make sure your work reflects your own creative intellectual
effort.

Any questions? Gail has invited me to stay tuned to help you
process this information. And you can
always reach me through the website for my Enjella™ children’s book series – www.enjella.com, or jane@enjella.com.

Robin’s Merry Band of Secondary Characters

I recently met an intellectual property attorney (patents and copyright) at a fund raiser for a book festival. We started talking – she’s writing for kids, too – and I told her about the blog and the questions that sometimes arise about copyright, and she offered to write a guest post, so that’s coming up in the next few weeks.

Now for today’s post. On January 26, 2013, Anna Marie wrote, I let a very close friend of mine read a story I wrote and she has recently gotten back to me. One of the things she mentioned was character development, she says I could go a little deeper. I totally agree, but I’m not sure how to effectively and smoothly go about adding deeper details about my characters. The story is in first person present tense, and it switches between two different characters. I’ve tried to tell the story in easier ways (3rd person, 1st person past only one character, etc.) but I keep coming back to the way I’ve got it. Very much like your story EVER which I hadn’t read when I first started but have read since (I must say, it’s pretty awesome). Can you give me any help? It’d be much appreciated.

The problem is with my other characters, my friend said that my MCs came to life very well, but that the others were still just words on a page. My story is a flip off Robin Hood, my MCs a female Robin and a boy who joins the band. The story jumps between their points of view. My trouble is in working character descriptions into the story through them. If that makes any sense whatsoever…

One of my favorite moments in Ella Enchanted, which is told in first-person, past tense, comes when Ella, Hattie, and Olive are in a carriage chased by ogres, and Hattie shrieks, “Eat me last!” If she were in the book for only that moment (she’s not), the reader would still know her: selfish, self-centered, self-involved, self-important, self, self, self.

One trick is to give your minor characters the opportunity to express themselves. Ella could be so frozen with terror in the carriage that she’s oblivious to what’s around her. Instead, she’s scared but she’s thinking about a way to save herself, and the one she comes up with requires the help of her stepsisters. Thus she gives both Hattie and Olive the chance to be their horrible selves.

Another trick, which I think is critical, is to make your MCs observant. If you’ve got an MC who isn’t (that’s fine), you may need to write in the third person – or your reader is going to miss a lot.

Elodie in A Tale of Two Castles and Stolen Magic has to be observant for her job as assistant to a detective dragon. Plus, she’s an actor, and acting calls for observational skills. Addie in The Two Princesses of Bamarre is fearful, and fear calls for heightened alertness. When she goes off to save her sister, her survival depends on her observations.

Power relationships affect the observations of people, and this works for characters, too. We watch those who have power over us the most closely. Teachers and bosses are the victims of this hyper-vigilance. If a teacher, for example, habitually adjusts her bra strap, or if he rubs his nose, or she pulls her ear, pupils notice. They notice everything. If they don’t like the teacher, oy!, these mannerisms become the butt of jokes.

In the Robin Hood story, the boy who joins the band, let’s call him Thomas, may be low in the hierarchy. Say he wants to be accepted, so he pays sharp attention to everybody. If a chapter is told from his POV, he’s going to think about who says what, how it’s said, how the others behave, how they relate to Robin, and his thoughts are going to show up on the page.

The first three out of these five tools of character development – dialogue, action, appearance, feelings, and thoughts – are available for non-POV characters. Suppose the band is walking through Sherwood Forest and we’re in Robin’s POV. She notices that Simon is stepping carelessly as usual and Jack is falling behind. She wonders if Jack’s fever is back. She sees that Melanie’s lips are pursed, which means she’s whistling in her head. These are actions that reveal character, filtered through Robin’s perspective.

Dialogue next. Let’s take careless Simon. The band reaches the safety of their hideout. Robin says, “Simon, if the sheriff had been within a mile of us, he’d have heard us and we’d be trussed up and on our way to the dungeons.”

What Simon says is an opportunity to reveal him. Here are some possibilities, but there are a million more:

“You’re dreaming. I was as quiet as a clam.”
“Your whipping boy at your service. Who would you pick on if you didn’t have me?”
“Sorry, chief! I didn’t mean to.”
“I’ll get it. You’ll be proud of me next time.”
“I can’t keep my mind on my feet. I try. You know I try, don’t you?”

If I were Robin, I’d probably find the last one the most annoying.

More action: Is Simon meeting Robin’s eyes? Is he blushing? Folding his arms across his chest? Tapping one foot? Each is an opening into his character.

Onto appearance. Let’s move into Thomas’s POV, because a character who’s new will have the freshest perspective on everybody else. He’s in the hide-out for the first time and seeing the band at their leisure. Maybe he’s thinking, What am I getting into? This is the legendary band that gives the sheriff apoplexy if even its name is mentioned? Simon is so knock-kneed it’s a wonder he can walk at all. Jack looks like the first strong breeze will blow him away. And I don’t like how caved-in his cheeks are. The band may be short one merry man by next week. I don’t see what the sheriff doesn’t like about Melanie. A smile permanently glimmers in the corner of her mouth. Nothing menacing about such a round, jolly face.

The POV characters can speculate about the thoughts and feelings of the secondary characters, too. If Robin knows that Simon is sensitive, she can think about his easily hurt feelings and couch her criticism in a way that doesn’t distress him – or that does. And characters can say how they feel and what they think. Not as direct a source as actually being in the head and heart of a POV character, but useful.

If you think about these tools, you’ll find yourself building them in, and your secondary characters will put on depth and weight.

Three prompts:

• Maid Marian is being held in the sheriff’s jail. The band that I’ve described needs to get a message to her without being discovered. Write the scene from Thomas’s POV. You can make them succeed or fail.

• Write the christening scene in “Sleeping Beauty” from the POV of one of the fairies. Use her narration to reveal the characters of the king and queen and at least two other fairies. Everyone is trying to keep the evil fairy from doing her worst.

• The next time you go to the supermarket or any big store, watch everyone you see. Notice how they reveal themselves and think what you would do with them if you put them in a story. When you get home, imagine some crisis in the store, whatever you like. Maybe there’s a large rat or a thief, or the power suddenly goes out. It’s night, and it’s suddenly dark outside and in and the power doors won’t open. Or somebody has a heart attack. You pick. Write a story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The beginning of the beginning

On January 2, 2013, Kathryn Briggs wrote, I was wondering if you could write a post on actually ‘starting’, about what you do as soon as you get an idea, then when you write notes, what notes you write, and how you start off writing with out hitting a big brick wall that stretches for ever.

Starting backwards with the brick wall, the problem may be a matter of perspective. I never expect smooth sailing. I do expect to mess up, find my way, meander, get lost, discover a new path until, eventually, I figure the whole thing out. If you don’t march into the wall but walk next to it, it may become a guide, like the guard rail or the shoulder on a highway (freeway, interstate, whatever); it may loop and curve and turn corners and take you where you need to go. Or there may be a gate. I would make friends with that wall. Examine it. Decide whether it’s made of bricks or stone or wood or chain link. Decorate it. If it’s brick, paint it. If it’s stone, stick messages or pretty things in the chinks. If it’s chain link, weave flowers through the links.

Right now I’m just starting to think about my next book, although I’m a long way from finishing the revision of Stolen Magic. I’m talking about it because Kathryn Briggs asked about getting started, and this is the earliest phase. I’m considering – although I may abandon the idea – of writing a prequel to The Two Princesses of Bamarre. If you remember the legend of Drualt, the Bamarrians had to leave their former home, which was “ravaged.” My ancestors had to leave Spain in 1492 because they were Jews, although Spain wasn’t ravaged (I don’t know how I’ll handle that), and I’d like to incorporate some of the history. So I’ve been reading up on the subject, looking for facts that intrigue me.

Here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Before the expulsion, some Jews converted to Christianity, under violent pressure, but many of these “conversos” remained in their Jewish surroundings and were accused of secret “Judaizing,” keeping up their former worship and traditions. This would stop, or so the reasoning went, if the Jews were removed.

• The Inquisition, which began before the expulsion and lasted long after, had nothing to do with Jews who weren’t pretending to be anything else. It tried conversos for Judaizing.

• In preparing to leave Spain, young Jewish girls, maybe even younger than teenage, but I’m not sure, were married off for their protection during the journey. This, in particular, has possibilities for fiction.

This is a passive stage. I’m collecting information and ideas. I am not – this is important! – forcing anything. The data and my thoughts are sitting in the back of my mind collecting mold and, I hope, fermenting, growing tentacles, connecting to each other. When I enter a more active phase, they’ll be waiting.

Here are my very first notes for Stolen Magic. None of these ideas – zero! – are in the story I’m working on now. My original idea was to write a sequel to the fairy tale “The King of the Golden River” by John Ruskin. It helps to know the story, so you might want to look it up. MM stands for Masteress Meenore and L stands for Elodie, because the book is a sequel to A Tale of Two Castles. I hope you can figure out my other abbreviations.

spose t youngest bro, Gluck, has always bn troubled by his bros as black stones. Hires MM and L to turn them back into his bros. Gluck cd b old by now. He has no one to leave valley to. This doesn’t seem so deductive now. Maybe Gluck has been too generous. He nds bros to hold him back, but they’re so evil. Gluck has persuaded himself they’re not so bad.

Spose there have been groanings heard from t stones. Spose G believes t bros have repented. Spose tides have turned. T river isn’t flowing. T winds have returned and are wreaking havoc. T river not flowing cd b bec someone has dammed it. Too simple.

What if there’s a romantic feeling to t story? Bronteish, so that nature reflects t feelings. Is this me thinking, oh people will think this is great, not I think it’s great?

People believe they’re groaning.

Gluck wants them restored. Mm says a fairy cd do it, but how wd she b persuaded to? If there’s a king of t river, he cd do it, but how cd he b found and persuaded to? Why does Gluck want this? Is he somehow being threatened? Was he not so great to begin w?

Gluck is demented in old age. Leaves valley to his bros. King or count or whoever wants to take it. Two men show up, say they’re t bros. MM & L are hired to find out truth, whether these are bros, who they are. How wd they prove this?

Looking at this, it all seems very interesting and I no longer remember why I didn’t go this way.

My first beginning isn’t worth sharing, because it only introduces the characters in the first book. One of the problems with this early start is that it took forever for the action to get going. At one point, Elodie reads to the dragon and the ogre long passages from a book about philanthropy and greed. Yawn. I even say in the text, The book would make a cup of tea sleepy.

Here’s a segment from this early version:

I looked up. A few clouds, a light breeze. No immediate danger from the weather. I looked around at the still forest. A crow cawed. Dead leaves rustled, likely a wood mouse.

A deep, aching groan. His lordship reined in his oxen, and IT did the same with ours.

An elm tree crashed down on the count’s cart.

Chapter (I didn’t number them)

“Your Lordship!” I shouted. I couldn’t see him. Had he been hit?

“Nesspa?”

Relief flooded through me. Count Jonty Um’s voice was strong. Nesspa barked, also sounding strong.

IT grasped my arm. “Stay, Lodie. More trees may fall.” IT backed into the cart then hauled ITself out.

Why would be I be safer here than somewhere else? IT wasn’t deducing clearly. I waited a minute or two for a show of obedience, then stepped down.

IT and his lordship stood in the road. His lordship held Nesspa’s collar. Both were unharmed.

But the tree had smashed the front of the cart. If the count had pulled the oxen up a moment sooner, he would probably have been killed. I didn’t think even an ogre’s skull or an ogre’s back could withstand a huge tree.

The elm had come from the left side of the road.

“There may be footprints,” IT warned, advancing into the woods with surprising delicacy, balancing on ITs nails.

His lordship let Nesspa go and rose on tiptoes. We both placed our feet with care.

None of this is in the current draft. The part you just read comes from the version (of a mystery) in which I forgot to include suspects. Oops!

Going back to the brick wall, when I remembered, after more than 200 pages, that mysteries need suspects, I had to trace my steps back to just about the beginning of the road and find a new branch. But I didn’t regard it as a dead end. I wasn’t precisely cheerful; maybe I was precisely irritated and unhappy, but I bulldozed sideways in a new direction.

Here are three prompts involving walls:

• Write about an attempt by someone (or more than one) other than the prince to get through the hedge that surrounds Sleeping Beauty. Start with a description of the wonders of that impervious hedge and keep going.

• Walls work two ways, obviously. Your MC is desperately reinforcing a wall to keep something out, a flood, a monster, an army of sentient termites, whatever you decide. Tell the story.

• Reread a few of your unfinished beginnings. Pick one of them and write a wall into the plot. See what happens.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Fairy tale fad

First off, I got an email this week from The Alliance for Independent Authors saying that “you have been nominated to receive a ‘Top Website for Self-Publishers Award’ by our members.” This stamp of approval goes to blogs or websites, and in this case I have to assume that the recognition belongs to the blog (which is part of my website). And lots of the credit goes to you, faithful readers, for your insightful comments and important questions. Kudos all around!

On December 22, 2012, Tiki Armsford wrote, I was just noticing earlier how books and movies based on fairy tales are starting to become more and more popular (something that’s incredibly joyful for me, since I love fairy tales with a passion) and I was just wondering what your take on this is? Why you think they’re rising in popularity, and what are some tips you could give to someone who’s considering adapting a fairytale?

I’m ashamed to say I’ve read few of these new books and have seen none of the movies or tv series, but I have a few ideas.

Fairy tales deal in universals: love, jealousy, rage, fear, death, beauty, acceptance, good, evil, and probably more. They provide instant entry into these deep topics. Take “Snow White,” which may beat out all the competition with seven out of nine: love (Snow White’s mother, the dwarves, the prince), jealousy (the queen), rage (ditto), death (Snow White), beauty (ditto), good (ditto, the hunter, the dwarves, the prince), evil (the queen).

Universals appeal, obviously, because everybody relates.

In “Snow White,” we’re glad when the evil queen dances in those red hot slippers because she represents parts of us (of me, certainly) – the rage and jealousy – that we’d like to kill off (even though we can’t entirely). We go back to the tale because those disowned parts keep cropping back up in us.

In “The Princess and the Pea,” to pick another example, the MCs virtues come through despite her unpromising appearance – soaked through, hair plastered to her scalp, nose probably running. We get confirmation from her for every time we’ve been misunderstood and underestimated.

Coming at it from a more commercial direction, I think film makers and tv series makers (not so much book writers, in my opinion) look for the familiar to help them find the enormous audiences they need. Many kids today don’t read the original tales, the Brothers Grimm or the Perrault versions, but they read picture book adaptations (or sit cozily in a lap while the story is read) or they see a Disney recreation. The stories are in our bones. This is a leg up for those who survive only if lots and lots of people watch. I don’t mean a criticism; if the stories are well told, I’m happy.

And then there’s magic. If I were an animator, I’d bet magic would be my favorite thing, a license to go wild. And even in live action, I suspect the special effects possibilities are vast and irresistible. And audiences love the wonder.

I do, too. I love fooling around with magic. My editor was disappointed that there wasn’t more in Beloved Elodie, which has become Stolen Magic. So I worked in a few things, and boy, did I have fun! And I felt the story perk up.

The most helpful aspect of fairy tales for me, probably the reason I go back and back to them, is that they provide a rough story framework. Plot may be more important to me than any other story element, but I struggle with it. A fairy tale structure helps me make the plot work.

Let’s look at “The Princess and the Pea” again, which became my The Princess Test in my Princess Tales. The original tale is simple, only a few pages. I can tell it even more briefly: A king and queen want their son to marry a true princess, so they devise a test: the young lady will spend a night of luxury atop twenty mattresses, and underneath the bottom one lies a pea. If that tiny pea disturbs her sleep, she is a true princess and deserves the hand of their son.

There. Two sentences.

But look what’s locked up inside those few words. What sort of character could possibly feel the pea? What made the king and queen come up with such a test? What does the prince think of it? What’s going on with all the princesses who show up for the trial? Isn’t it humiliating?

I came up with one solution, but there are many ways to go, and now that I’m thinking about it, I’m getting really curious about the damsels who failed the test. Where did they go next? Did they have a kingdom to go back to? Are they really not princesses because they failed?

As for tips, I look for lapses in logic. I haven’t attempted “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” a fairy tale I love, because it’s perfect, in my opinion. The plot makes sense, and the characters behave reasonably within the context of the story. In many of the stories I fool with, the damsel is passive, and my job is to give her gumption. But here, the slave girl Morgiana takes action and saves the day.

If the story is kind of a mess, I’m in my element. I pointed out the absurdities of “The Princess and the Pea,” but there are other absurd stories. And they’ll strike you differently from the way they appear to me. Love in fairy tales is a target for me. It happens too fast and for the wrong reasons: beauty, handsomeness, rank. Even goodness can be lame. I like a little idiosyncracy mixed in with pure goodness. So those are the places where I get to work.

If you love a story but you’re also mad at it, that can get you going. For instance, my picture book Betsy Who Cried Wolf grew out of my irritation with the grownups in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” for abandoning the boy when he clearly isn’t old enough for the responsibility he’s been given.

There are some fairy tales that I haven’t figured out how to approach: “Rapunzel,” “Aladdin,” and “The Shoemaker and the Elves.” They interest me, so who knows? Maybe I’ll figure it out. Or you will. Fairy tales are free for all of us to play with.

Here are two prompts:

• Try your hand at “Aladdin.” What strikes you as illogical? What can you make of it? Write the first scene, including the sort of detail and realism that suits a novel, moment by moment. Write the scene when Aladdin rubs the lamp.

• Think of the bare bones of a fairy tale: damsel or lad in distressed circumstances, some magical element, possibly a fairy, probably a prince or princess, possibly an evil character or several, who may have magic on his side. Put them together to create your own fairy tale.

Have fun, and save what you write!

April 3, 2013

On December 19, 2012, Seaspray Wonderlust wrote, Just in case you were wondering:
A BOB:
Someone who tells you you can’t do something, someone who you want to think good of you. This person criticizes you and haunts you until you no longer believe in your dream. But, being a BOB, them criticizing you, although they don’t know it, and maybe you don’t, makes you want your dream more, often making you succeed. In other words,
Do it for BOB!
I noticed you have something in Writing Magic about this, but I think this is a bad problem, and you should- not make a whole post about it, but add it in to your next one. Bearing in mind, BOB sits in his comfy chair eating your compassion and belief while you are sitting and thinking that your dream sucks. When you are like this, BOB, who is not a nice guy, wins. SO do your dream, and BOB will fall out of his chair, and have to go make his own food. Don’t Become a BOB, and don’t let a BOB posses you. Refuse to listen to BOB, and he will go. I know I shouldn’t be encouraging this type of behavior, but Kick BOB out of your head. BOB is an impostor, and an idiot. Prove BOB wrong. You will, as long as you don’t believe him.
Do it for BOB!

Interesting! There are internal and external BOBs.

I tell this story often when I visit schools and kids ask me when I started writing. I can’t remember if I’ve told it here before or if I put it in Writing Magic. Anyway, I wrote stories in elementary school and junior high (no middle school back then), and high school – until I took Creative Writing with Mr. Pashkin, who turned out to be my BOB. Several years ago I found the folder with my writing from that class. In the beginning Mr. Pashkin wrote nice comments on the upper margin of my stories and poems. Then I came to the one on which he wrote, “You know your problem – you’re pedestrian.”

Pedestrian has two meanings, the less well known of which is plodding, dull, boring. Mr. Pashkin didn’t merely say that my story was boring, which would have been bad enough, he said I was. Up until then Mr. Pashkin had seemed really nice – interested in his students, encouraging, etc., and then BOOM!

I remember believing his judgment. I’m very practical, always was, very down-to-earth, which I equated with boring. Since I agreed that I was boring, I felt ashamed at having been found out, and I never asked him what he meant. Probably he didn’t mean much. Maybe he was just trying to get a rise out of me.

For twenty-five years, I didn’t write. Well, I wrote a musical for children, but I thought of it as just a vehicle for my husband’s music. I didn’t think I had any talent as a writer. I thought my writing couldn’t be anything but dull.

A job finally got me past this. I was assigned to writing the public service announcements and meeting notes for my state government office, and people admired my work. Then I tried my hand at picture books and embarked on the nine years it took me to get an acceptance from a publisher.

So Mr. Pashkin is an example of an external BOB whom I internalized. After I graduated from high school I carried Mr. Pashkin around inside me and didn’t dare take a writing class in college.

Defiance is one approach to dealing with BOB. If that works for you, let him be your motivator. You’re writing to prove him wrong, and you get deep satisfaction from doing so. Every well-crafted scene, every thrilling moment, every deft characterization is a screw twisted into BOB’s soul, a nail in his coffin. Hooray!

The other approach, which works better for me, is to fill my writing mind with countervailing, positive voices from people who admire my writing or even from people I think would admire it. And often I remember my younger self and write for that version of me. I write what I would have enjoyed reading.

Unhelpful criticism is pernicious. It poisons what we love, and we have to guard against it, whether the enemy is someone else or, as Pogo said, “The enemy is us.” Many writers who stop writing, artists who stop painting, musicians who stop making music do so because they let BOB strangle them. Let’s not join their ranks!

Be aware of self-put-downs. In a poetry workshop I took, after we finished an exercise, we’d take turns reading what we’d written. Our teacher imposed a $5 fine on anyone who introduced a poem with a derogatory remark, like, “This isn’t very good.” Or, worse, “This is really bad.” The fine brought us up short, woke us up to what we were doing to ourselves. In your writing groups you can do something like this. And you can ask friends to alert you when you’ve been hard on yourself.

The poems in the workshop were all first efforts. We hadn’t revised. There is absolutely no value gained from dumping on work in its early stages. What I think we were saying to each other is, “I’m not stupid enough to think this is any good,” an irrelevant comment. It’s also a warning to other people to go easy, which isn’t what we want. We want helpful, honest, specific criticism that will help us write better, in this case better poems.

So we also need to be able to differentiate between BOBs and people whose criticism is useful. Sometimes BOBs are sneaky. We think we’re getting something useful, so how come we feel so bad? I’d say if you feel rotten three times in a row after showing a piece of writing to a friend who appears to be kind, figure this is a disguised BOB, and don’t continue showing your stories to this person. You can still be friends. Go ice skating together. Go to the movies. Criticize other people’s books together – as long as the BOB doesn’t make you feel dumb doing this.

And here are BOB prompts:

• Your MC is BOB. He is paid by a foreign power or a neighboring kingdom or an alien civilization to stifle creativity at home. If his treachery succeeds, his homeland will atrophy on the world stage. His cover job is as an arts critic. Write a scene in which he interviews a top artist. Get inside his head. Help him along. At the end of the scene, the artist is riddled with self-doubt.

• BOB decides to pen his own book, since no one else can get it right. Does he approve of his own work? Or is he as self-critical as he is critical of others? (Could go either way.) Is he a good writer? Write what happens.

• BOB is lonely, so he decides he’ll feel better if he has a girlfriend. Write a story about his quest for love.

Have fun, and save what you write!