Detailing

December 28, 2011, writeforfun wrote, …the thing that I struggle with the most is detail (how much is too much, when do you use less, when do you need more, what details are good, etc.).

While I reread writeforfun’s question, a public service announcement was running on the radio, advising people about licensing their dogs. It was a very short spot, and then the news resumed. But if the organization that sponsored the ad, the ASPCA or whatever, had the air time, details might have sent dog owners flocking to register their dogs: a hundred signs all over the neighborhood for a lost dog, some carefully crayoned by a seven-year old, the sightings (“I could tell people love her, with that poodle cut on a mutt.”), mention of a floppy ear or an exclamation-point tail, the reunion after eight days of worry, how her collar jingles with a shiny new license, and look how cute it is, shaped like a fire hydrant!

This is detail designed to engage our emotions. Advertising is full of ploys like this. I just looked online at historic ads for cigarettes. Predating the Marlboro man was the Marlboro baby, saying, “Before you scold me, Mom, maybe you better light up a… Marlboro.” Doctors appear in tons of ads. In one, a dentist. In another, Mickey Mantle. If you look, you’ll also find scientists, romantic moments, even a young Ronald Reagan.

Of course we need the right details to get the message across. In a dog licensing promotion, we wouldn’t mention that the missing dog snarls at old people or that, Oops!, her owners forgot to get her her last rabies shot, and we wouldn’t put in anything emotionally neutral either, like that she bites her tail.

If a book or story is theme driven, detail delivers the message. For example, Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty to persuade people to treat horses better. The emotional details make the reader identify with a cast of mostly ill-treated horses. After the book became a bestseller, use of the checkrein was abolished.

We use detail not only to engage emotion, but also to reveal setting and character and move plot along, and sometimes, when we’re really cooking, to do two or three at once. For instance, when Addie is taken to Vollys’s cave in The Two Princesses of Bamarre, we discover that the cave is luxurious. We see carpets, cushions, chests, and wardrobes, and we learn that a former captor was a carpenter. Vollys says that his “remains remain” with her. The cave details show us the setting, but also tell us what Vollys’s taste is, and we’re horrified, and in a creepy way we start to like her – our emotions are engaged.

So how do we pick the details?

We think about the purpose of the scene. In this case it’s to reveal the setting, to continue the introduction of Vollys that began in the chapter before, and to make us afraid for Addie. We don’t want details that will work against these goals. We won’t put anything in that makes us feel better, like we won’t mention the shovel that Addie might use to dig herself out (in the book there is none). We won’t let Vollys say anything soothing.

And we won’t lay it on too thick. Once the reader has seen the scene, has formed an impression of Vollys, has gotten thoroughly scared, we can move on. We don’t have to watch Vollys deliberately incinerate a mouse or Addie count the number of human skeletons. But it’s okay if we go over the top in early drafts. It’s usually better to trim in revision than to bulk up, although we can also add detail later.

When I’m looking for the right details I often make lists. Let’s say Val has accepted a dare to enter a haunted house, and we want this not to be a stock scary house, so what can we do? For starters, it doesn’t have to be a house. What else can it be? I just made a little list:

library
museum
tunnel
bedroom
drugstore
airport
dress shop
garden

Each locale suggests a different kind of haunting. I particularly like the museum, drugstore, and airport, because of the variety in each. In the museum, for example, the suits of armor could be jousting. If our character, Simon, gets caught in the wrong spot, he could be skewered. In the next gallery, the Chinese ceramic dragons can spring to life, and, several rooms over, Picasso’s disembodied Head of a Woman can bounce after Simon, clacking her nail-like teeth.

The details we come up with may lead us to discover the reason for the haunting, or vice versa: our knowledge of the reason can determine the details. In the museum example, the haunting might be the doing of a mad art collector who, in life, felt priced out of buying the works she loved. As a ghost, maybe her targets are the new acquisitions, which she believes sold for outrageous sums. Following this thread, who is Simon? Did he merely take a dare, or is he a detective employed by the museum to find out why attendance has fallen off and why more museum goers enter every day than exit.

In Beloved Elodie, many of the characters are suspects, so I use detail to keep the reader off balance about them. For instance, Brunka (defined in the book) Poldie expresses concern for Elodie, who appears ill. A few minutes later, Brunka Poldie is discovered to have stolen three valuable lapis beads.

Sometimes a detail solves a plot glitch. The setting of much of Beloved Elodie is the Oase, a brunka establishment built into a mountain. There are few windows, almost no natural light. People have to shlep lamps everywhere, which get in the way, and sometimes I forget, so I brought in glowworms.

When we introduce details, we should be recruiting all our senses, not merely the visual. Picasso’s Head clacking her teeth is auditory. In Vollys’s cave, the most tense detail is thermal. How hot is it? How much is Addie in danger of boiling? I haven’t mentioned any scent details, but smell goes straight to the emotions.

You can question yourself on your use of detail: Am I making my readers feel an emotion? Am I making them see, hear, smell, feel, touch? Am I making them care? Am I solving a plot problem? A single detail may not produce the desired effect. You may need a bunch working together.

Here are three prompt:s:

•    Your villain, who wants people to act a particular way for her nefarious ends, can afford a national publicity campaign. Write a public service announcement putting forward her position on whatever. For instance, maybe she wants to persuade the populace that child slavery is beneficial. Incorporate emotional details that are hard to resist. Write how it works out for her.

•    Describe the bedroom of a girl who will one day be the first female president of the United States. If you find it helpful, write a list of possible items to include. Through your details, guide our opinion of her. Write a scene or a story about her early effort to act like a politician. Show how that turns out badly. Keep going.

•    Pick one or more of the haunted locales I mentioned above. Describe it. Include all the senses. Begin a story in it. Keep going.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Surprise!

Mending my ways and letting you know a little sooner – I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 16th because the library system has chosen Dave at Night for its Kids Read Across Rhode Island. I am so honored! Here’s a link: http://www.newportlibraryri.org/npl/2012/05/06/kids-reading-across-rhode-island/.

Last December M.K.B. wrote, I was curious about surprises in stories. Do you have to give hints of what surprise (I’m talking about in non-mystery stories)? Like in that movie “Tangled” (well, they actually told you she was a princess in the beginning but I couldn’t really think of anything else) they let her see a picture of the baby princess and she recognized her eyes as her own. Do you have to do something like that or can I just hit my readers with the frying pan of surprise?

I love that, “the frying pan of surprise” as an expression! And I love surprises in stories.

There are two kinds of frying-pan surprises. The good kind smacks you, astonishes you, and knocks all the preceding plot elements into place.

The bad kind slams you and leaves you gasping, “Whuh?”

The most effective use of the good frying pan comes throughout the original (I haven’t read the later books) Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. The series was written for adults, but I’d say the three books I read are appropriate for middle school kids and above. The surprises keep whamming you between the eyes and yet they make perfect sense.

The bad frying pan, in my opinion, is epitomized by the TV series Lost (high school at least). Time travel, smoke monsters, polar bears in the tropics, good guys who turn bad, bad guys who turn good, why did I watch this? Nothing adds up. There’s an LOL video summary of all seasons but the last on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC6jcj3V53E, also with adult content. The last season, alas, resolves nothing.

This has come up before on the blog: the temptation, which I feel, too, near the end of a story, to drop a bomb on all the characters or to have an asteroid hit the earth and wipe it out. This is the bad frying pan at its worst.

So how do we achieve the good fp and eschew the bad?

We drop in hints and bury them.

Things happen in real life that are unbelievable, that you can’t put into fiction because suspension of disbelief will fall apart. Here are two minor examples. If you have better ones, please post them.

In the first, my husband, David, was walking in the winter in New York City, icicles hanging from skyscrapers above. He saw a clock in a store window and drew back to look at the time just as an icicle crashed down from thirty stories above. If he hadn’t pulled back, that icicle would have clocked him, so to speak. In fiction, this would seem contrived, the surprise of the icicle canceled by the contrivance.

In the second, my parents and I many years ago visited a sick aunt at her apartment. I was grown up and married by then. David had shortly before had a job interview during which he filled out a psychological questionnaire aimed at revealing his management style. Thoughtfully thinking I’d be interested, he asked for extra copies. When I visited Aunt Harriet, I brought the copies with me to entertain everyone. The test was long, maybe five or six pages. My father took his to another room and spent forty-five minutes on it. My mother breezed through hers in ten minutes, sitting right in the room with me and my aunt. The two of them, my father and my mother, answered every single question the same way, although my parents had such different personalities: my father sunny, my mother worried; my father stubborn, my mother persuadable; my father an appreciator of humor, my mother actively funny. Not credible in a story.

Let’s take the first real-life event and see if we can make it work in fiction with the buried-hints approach. David’s clock radio wakes him to a meteorologist’s warnings about an ongoing ice storm. At breakfast he and his wife (not me, this is fiction now) quarrel about the family finances. The wife’s work hours have been cut back, and David’s been unemployed for a year. Money fights keep cropping up. He’s pawned his watch, and she gave her heirloom china set to the consignment shop. After the argument, they stop speaking to each other. He opens the local paper and reads his horoscope, which predicts a lucky day. Encouraged, he shows the prediction to his wife. They make up. He sets off for his job interview, where he’s given the management style questionnaire, which I’m dragging in from my other anecdote. His style turns out to be emotional, but the company is seeking someone with an intuitive bent, so he doesn’t get the position. He leaves the office building in a black mood, even thinking of tossing himself in the icy river. But more sensible thoughts prevail. He pauses to check the time in a store window to see if he can catch the early train home, and the icicle descends exactly where he would have been if he hadn’t stopped, fulfilling the prophesy and enabling him to apply for another job another day.

The icicle still drops out of a clear blue sky. It’s still a surprise, but now it satisfies, now that we’re set up for it by the horoscope and the pawned watch, which are buried by the details of the argument and money woes. If you were really writing this as a story and not merely a summary, you would do the burying more effectively by including the actual dialogue during the argument, showing the receptionist at the job interview, the office itself, David (poor man) liking what he sees, getting his hopes up, feeling that he’s connecting with the HR person who’s describing what his future duties might be. With all this, the watch recedes to nothing but a trivial detail, and the horoscope hovers pleasantly as a question mark that we hope will take us to a happy ending.

With preparation surprises satisfy. Without, they fall flat. In Fairest (SPOILER ALERT), for example, the creature in the mirror comes as a surprise, but the reader is prepared for something about that mirror for a long while. If the mirror hadn’t been performing tricks, Aza’s arrival inside it would be just weird.

It’s total fun to drop in the hints and set up the surprises, so here are some prompts:

∙    Take one of your own improbable, real-life experiences and fictionalize it so that the surprise works. If you don’t have one, ask friends and family for anecdotes.

∙    Three students at a school for odd children love table tennis and are the most enthusiastic members of the school ping-pong club. Sonja’s special skill is the power to force her voice and words out of the mouths of hamsters. Tom can make his hair stand on end at will. Raymond turns to stone when he’s bored and liquifies when he’s excited. These traits have so far been useless in their game. Raymond even dissolves into an orange puddle at tense moments. Drop in and bury hints that lead to a surprise victory when the team plays against the reigning non-odd champions.

∙    This is your chance to use that asteroid. The Monot tribe and the Hurlens have been at war in the mountains of Ael for decades. Make it satisfying when the asteroid hits and destroys them all (or all but two, if you’re tenderhearted).

Have fun, and save what you write!

Entitled

On December 2, 2011, writeforfun wrote, …my writing buddy and I were talking about names, and since she’s not a blogger, I thought I’d ask and see what you and the other bloggers thought on the subject. How important do you think the name of your book is? On one hand, it’s just a name. But on the other, when you’re at a library or bookstore, all you see is the spine of a book – just the name and the author, no description, no picture. How important do you think the name of a book is if you’re going to have it published, and how do you come up with the title? I loved the names of The Wish because it made me want to know what the wish was, and Fairest because it gave me the idea, right away, that it was a fairytale, probably snow white. But I have a lot of trouble figuring out good titles, and so does my friend. Your thoughts?

Yes, titles are important. They help sell books. In libraries and bookstores they contribute to a reader’s decision to lift the cover.

I just had fun googling “original titles of famous books.” I’m quoting from the internet, so I can’t swear to complete accuracy, but here are a few examples of what I found: Impressions for Pride and Prejudice; All’s Well that Ends Well for War and Peace; Trimalchio in West Egg for The Great Gatsby; Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice for Mein Kampf; The Last Man in Europe for 1984. For a few minutes’ entertainment, you can google more titles.

The worst title of any book I’ve read, in my opinion, is War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (for adults). Interesting book, but, whoa!, that title. I think Chris Hedges, the author, tried to cram his entire thesis into those few words. If you look at the first titles above, some of those early attempts may have had the same problem. Too bad Hitler thought up a better title for his opus! The course of history might have been different if he’d gone with his first impulse!

Let’s analyze a little what makes the good titles work. Alliteration helps a title along. Pride and Prejudice and The Great Gatsby have it. Ella Enchanted, too, although I think short vowels make the weakest kind of alliteration and hard consonants, like p and k or hard c, make the strongest. Peter Pan is better than Silas San would have been, not that James M. Barrie ever thought of Silas for his hero.

Short titles pack a punch, which is why 1984 is better than The Last Man in Europe. Same for Great Gatsby. I like the title of Katherine Hepburn’s autobiography, Me, although it may be a tad egotistical. The movie makers shortened The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which I prefer) to Hugo, I suspect to power up the punch.

War and Peace is conceptual because the terms are opposites, obviously. Pride and Prejudice is conceptual too, but the meaning of both words has altered somewhat over time, so the title probably doesn’t convey the sense of the book the way it must have in the early 1800s; still, the alliteration makes it work. I’m spinning here, but Sensibility in Sense and Sensibility also has had a meaning shift, and I don’t think that title is as successful anymore because the alliteration isn’t as strong.

1984 is intriguing, or was when the year was in the future. What will life be like then? The Great Gatsby intrigues too. Who or what’s a Gatsby, and what’s great about him or it? As writeforfun says, The Wish makes the reader wonder. In the young-adult novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, it’s the Nothing that revs up the curiosity more than the Astonishing. A made-up word can work if the sound of it is satisfying – and if there’s a reason for it within the book.

I’ve suggested a few hallmarks of a successful title that you can use in crafting your own: alliteration, punch, intrigue, conceptual interest. For punch, try a one-word title or two short words. You can get intrigue with a title of any reasonable length, like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the novel by Carson McCullers (high school and above, if I remember correctly), a terrifically appealing title.

Try a title with emotional appeal, too. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter has that too. Or your title can have psychic or psychological interest, like the word “mad” in the title (if it applies) will get the imagination going. Of course any title we come up with has to connect with the story. A clever title out of left field will infuriate the reader.

Legions of books are eponymous: Harry Potter, Peter Pan, Heidi, Bambi, Emma, Zorro (good one!), Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Eragon, Forrest Gump. They’ve lasted. A name is always an option, even a plain name. Names fascinate us. They’re portals to the person within or the book within.

My titles generally arrive without much thought, but they’re not always the final title. Originally I called Ella Enchanted Charmont and Ella. Then Char stopped being quite as important as Ella and it became Ella. The HarperCollins people thought that wasn’t good enough (I agree), and asked me for other suggestions. One was Enchanted Ella; they switched the words, and voila! The Wish was The Wish until my editor asked me for something else and I came up with a long and trendy title, which I also liked and no longer remember. She took it and then returned to The Wish again. Originally I called Ever Dancing the Wind, which works for the story. HarperCollins people said that title wasn’t “big” enough, so I suggested a title that also went with the story – Gone With the Wind! Everyone laughed, and I had to think of something else.

In my mind Beloved Elodie has always been that, except for a while there when I didn’t know what the title would be. Originally when I thought of it, my idea was that all the people in her life love her but no one does what she wants. The book evolved, and that’s no longer the case, but the title still applies. However, my editor has already expressed doubt about the title. It’s emotional, simple, powerful, but it may suggest a love story, which the book isn’t.

So I’ll make lists. After writing this post I’ll think about alliteration, punch, intrigue, meaning, emotional and psychic appeal and I’ll probably tear out some hair. I may ask for help here as I did with A Tale of Two Castles and got it from lots of you, and April came up with the final title. So you can ask for aid. Your editor will help, too, will probably make suggestions, and, at the very least, will tell you if your title isn’t working.

I just looked at the spines of a few books. Even though there’s little space, the publisher uses that narrow strip to great advantage. There’s type, type size, relative size of name to title, color, a logo, maybe even a smidgen of art. Your title doesn’t have to go it entirely alone. I’ve pulled out books on the strength of the appeal of the spine. Then the words have to take it from there.

Here are some title prompts:

∙    Retitle a book you love. Some classics have beloved titles because they’re established and it’s hard to think of them by another name. But can you? For example, maybe you can improve on Little Women.

∙    Write the flap copy (the description that appears on the flap of hard-cover books and on the back of paperbacks) for a book called Evil. Make up what it’s about without writing the story. It’s fun to write flap copy. You get to throw in all the adjectives and adverbs that you avoid in your actual stories. The more hype the better.

∙    Without writing the stories, jot down a dozen great titles.

∙    Pick one of the titles and write the first chapter. If you like, keep going.

∙    List ten titles for the story you’re working on now, even if it already has a title.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Open-ended

For anyone in the area and able to come, on Saturday I’ll be at the Children’s Festival of Reading in Knoxville, Tennessee. Here’s a link to the event: http://knoxrooms.sirsi.net/rooms/html/KCPL/calendar.html#/?i=2. I’m speaking at 10:45 am and 12:45 pm and signing books after each presentation. If you come, please let me know you heard about it here.

On to the post topic, on November 27, 2011, Jenna Royal wrote, Does anyone have any thoughts on open or unresolved endings? I’ve been fascinated with endings lately that don’t end up where you think they do, or that don’t really end at all. How do you make one that’s still satisfying, even though it’s unexpected?

I’ve written one unresolved ending. It was in my short story “Little Time” that was published in an anthology called Unexpected, which is probably long out of print, but you may be able to find a copy somewhere. It’s one of my favorite of my few short stories. Here’s the gist: Erica, a middle schooler, recently moved to a new school where she has no friends. Her parents are super busy with their careers and not interested in her. In fact, in the first scene she overhears them saying she bores them.

On her spring break she walks on open land not far from her house and follows a sign that reads Hidden Village. In a barn she discovers an enormous town of doll houses complete with dolls and animals, dogs, a zoo. Turns out that the dolls and animals are alive, shrunken, and that the village is a benign utopian experiment. (Among other things, these tiny people and animals age very slowly.) Erica is invited to join by being shrunk too.

At the end I don’t reveal Erica’s decision, although it’s clear to me, but I didn’t want to tie the story up with a bow.

The key to a satisfying ending lies long before the end is reached. In “Little Time” the seeds are sewn in that first scene; Erica is unmoored to her life. Most of us would be sorely missed if we vanished; we’d be irresponsible and cruel to just go. Not Erica. But I didn’t stack the deck so the reader thinks, You have to join. I wish I could. It’s a real choice.

In a mystery series, the mystery itself is usually tied up with that bow by the end of the book, but the larger, ongoing story of the detective is left open. This is a neat way to end. The reader gets the satisfaction of a solution and the sizzle of no solution. We remain attached to the heroine and her troubles. She may be lonely, afraid of the dark, uncontrollably honest, whatever. She may not even have troubles, but the future course of her life isn’t established. Elodie at the end of A Tale of Two Castles is happy, but we know she’s going to have more adventures, and we don’t know whom she’s going to marry (if she’s going to marry), where she’s going to live, whether she’ll stay a dragon’s assistant. And we haven’t found out if the dragon Meenore is male or female or if the ogre Count Jonty Um can find a place among humans where he’s accepted and not feared.

In my opinion, this kind of series (not just mysteries) doesn’t ever have to be resolved for the main characters. I’m thinking of comic book characters, and I’m sure there are legions of other examples. We don’t want Superman or Spiderman to achieve permanent happiness. If they get a break from their troubles, we enjoy it with a little lump in our throats. It’s all the more beautiful because their moment of relief is fragile and certain to end.

A mystery series is kind of an ending cop-out, I guess. The author has the (somewhat) easier task of solving the mystery and never has to face the more difficult work of finding an ultimate ending. Nancy Drew sleuths on with new authors.

In the classics, there are no absolute final endings either. Writers keep going back and resuscitating established stories. I assume James M. Barrie thought he’d finished Peter Pan, but writers, including me, are forever spinning new takes on the original. William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and many more get the same treatment. Even the Greek myths, which generally end in death, are revivified.

If you haven’t read the young adult novel The Giver by Lois Lowry, spoiler alert! Skip this paragraph. The book ends in uncertainty. We don’t know if Jonas makes it to safety, but I wouldn’t call the story unresolved. Jonas leaves the security of his home and acts morally. The problem that the book raises is answered whether or not Jonas survives.

This was a prompt from my post of January 26, 2011, which was also about endings: You may know the story, “The Lady and the Tiger.” If you don’t, it’s basically this: A princess, whose nature is jealous, falls in love with a man below her station. The king finds out and arranges a punishment for him. The man is thrown into an arena with two doors. Behind one is a beautiful maiden and behind the other a tiger. If he picks the maiden door, he lives, but he has to marry her. If he chooses the tiger door, he gets eaten. In the arena he looks to the princess, who knows what’s behind each door, for a signal. She has to decide whether to endure his marriage to someone else or condemn him to death. The story has no ending; the reader is asked to decide what the princess will do. So the prompt is to write the ending. If you didn’t do it then, you can now.

“The Lady and the Tiger” is certainly unresolved, and it does this curious and marvelous thing: it turns the problem around to point at the reader. Until we get to the final question mark it’s about the princess and her forbidden love. When it finishes without an answer, the problem, jealousy, becomes us. What do we think of human nature? How would I behave in this situation? How do I believe others would act?

The strangest non-ending I’ve ever read was Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (adult), which the author, Thomas Mann, never finished – he died the next year. If I remember correctly (which I may not – I read it many decades ago), it ended mid-sentence. I had loved the book up until then, and I knew this would happen, but it was still a teeth-gnashing experience.

The only real ending sin is failing to respond to the problem a story sets out. I don’t know how that failure could be made to work and satisfy; maybe if you’re writing humor it could be done. The conclusion of Ella Enchanted, for example, had to be about the curse. The end of all Jane Austen’s books had to be about a young lady unraveling her own character flaw that stood between her and a suitable match. The finale of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca had to be about innocence, although that problem is wonderfully disguised in the novel.

Here are a couple of prompts:

•    The Giver succeeds, I think, because, while the surface ending is uncertain, the deeper problem is resolved. You do the same thing. Simone is preparing for a competition, whatever kind you like, real world or fantasy. Write the story and end it without the reader finding out how she fares. However, decide on the real issue underlying her struggle and solve that. The real issue could be gaining self-confidence, winning someone’s approval, or something else.

•    I’m not a fan of Alice in Wonderland because I think the story lacks a problem. One fantastical thing happens after another without any reason. Rewrite the beginning, giving Alice a problem or something she desperately wants. Then write your own ending and anything in the middle that you need.

Have fun, and save what you write!

And a reminder: please share any writing success you’ve been having on the blog.

Pop!

On November 14, 2011, writeforfun wrote, …I’ve already read your extremely helpful section in Writing Magic about developing characters and I’ve filled out a character questionnaire for each of my characters, but they still seem sort of flat and Mary-Sue like, especially compared to the ones in my last book. I think part of my problem may be that they don’t have lots of quirks and faults, despite my efforts to think up some and apply them. Any ideas on how to make these characters pop?
  
Despite the troubles I’ve been having with Beloved Elodie, which I’ve written a little about here, a bright spot has been the secondary characters. The key has been getting inside their heads, and each head is different. Let’s take Mistress Sirka, for example. She’s a barber who’s secretly in love with Brunka Dror. Brunkas are people who pledge themselves to helping others and to never marrying and who drink a magic potion that sharpens all their senses. Sirka has done something extreme in pursuit of her love, and that’s the key to her: she’s impulsive, feels everything very strongly, takes risks, and doesn’t care what people think of her. She’s not one of the POV characters, so we get to know her through her dialogue and through Elodie, the POV character in the scenes Sirka is in. Whenever it’s time for Sirka to talk I mentally run through her qualities and decide what such a person would say. I think about what gestures she’d make. She has this amazing smile, the kind of smile you might wear when you’re merrily riding a roller coaster.

So that’s one approach. When you’re writing dialogue, consider who the speaker is. Keep his personality in mind. When would he chime in? When would he keep mum? If he’s silent, have your narrator notice and speculate why. Sometimes you may need your dialogue to carry exposition. Certain things must be said and it doesn’t matter who says them, so there may be patches where the speaker can be identified only by attribution, by Nadia said or Ondine said. But mostly your dialogue should reflect the nature of the speaker.

I haven’t given Sirka any speech mannerisms, but I have given them to other characters. Master Tuomo often ends his sentences with, “I tell you.” He makes pronouncements. He’s just a tad angry, and he’s sure he’s right on every subject. Master Albin, a theatrical personality, often speaks as if he were the narrator of the play of his life. So there’s another suggestion: dream up speech mannerisms for some of your characters, not all. All is too many. And don’t use them every time the character opens his mouth. Now and then is enough.

Most chapters in Beloved Elodie are from Elodie’s POV, but a big minority are in the voice either of the dragon Masteress Meenore or of the ogre Count Jonty Um. And when they’re from Jonty Um’s POV, well, he’s a shape-shifter, so when he’s shifted his chapter would be in the POV of whatever animal he is. Meenore, Jonty Um and his shape-shifts, and Elodie all have quite different voices. This question came up in the comments on last week’s post, about identifying the narrator of a chapter without having to refer to the chapter heading. I hope the reader will be able to figure out to whom the chapter belongs from the voice. I hope reading a single paragraph will reveal all, although I do identify the narrator under the chapter heading. Meenore uses the biggest words I can think of, and I rely a lot on my thesaurus when I write in ITs voice. Jonty Um uses short sentences and simple vocabulary with the expressions “Fee fi” or “Fo fum” sprinkled here and there. The thoughts of the animals are as simple as I can get. Elodie is the least distinctive voice, she’s the Everyman of the story. Each narrator focuses on what he or she or IT would most naturally notice.

Which leads to another suggestion, an early prompt: If a character is refusing to emerge, write a chapter from his POV. Afterwards, consider what you learned. What caught his eye, his ear, his nose? What was different from the way the chapter would have unfolded from your chosen POV character? Then write it again in the POV you’ve been using but incorporating the insights you’ve gained.

Here’s another early prompt to make characters “pop.” Think of a few of the most complicated people you know. Start a new story and put one of them in, under an assumed name, in a different body and changed circumstances, the circumstances of your story, but herself nonetheless. See if someone else you know can go in as well. These characters are likely to “pop.” Their complexity, which you know well, will influence their actions, decisions, speech.

Or you can mix and match, a quality from this person, a fault from that one, a virtue from another.

Or choose a fictional character you feel you know well. In my mind, although I never told my editor, the ogre Jonty Um in A Tale of Two Castles is sort of Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. He’s eleven feet tall and inarticulate, but he seems stern and haughty while he’s really kind and decent. The secret Darcy helped me get Jonty Um.

Think of how real people make an impression on us, through their clothing, their hair style, their mannerisms, the choices they make when they present themselves to the world. Many physical attributes are given to us – height, beauty or plainness, eye color, hair (curly, straight, thick, thin) – but we adapt them uniquely to ourselves. I took the train to New York City this morning. A woman sat next to me and went to sleep, but she didn’t relax into sleep, didn’t slump, didn’t lose her grip on her magazine. Her feet were planted neatly side by side. When I woke her because I had to get by her to exit, she didn’t jump. She segued smoothly from sleep to wakefulness. In fact she might be anything but, but my impression was of a gentle, conforming, pleasant, somewhat predictable person. Her clothing added to the impression. She was dressed for business, nothing flashy, muted colors, small earrings, low-heeled shoes. She was a miracle of ordinariness.

You’re writers. You probably already watch people. If you don’t already, take notes. If you’re among strangers, draw conclusions from the superficial (not a good character trait in life, but fine for fiction). If you’re with family, friends, or schoolmates, imagine what a stranger would make of them – and of you! Keep your discoveries in mind when you write.

There are prompts sprinkled in above, but here are a few more:

∙    Take my miracle of ordinariness and make something happen on the train that reveals her. It can be something big, like a terrorist attack, or little, like a loud cell phone talker. Is her mild persona camouflage and she’s really extraordinarily brave or angry? Or is she just as she appears?

∙    Keep going with the train event. Develop the other characters. A delay in public transportation is a catalyst for people to get to know each other and to rub against one another.

∙    So is a jury. If you’ve never been a juror, draw on movies and books. A bunch of strangers are thrown together to evaluate a situation and make ethical choices. Your courtroom drama can be contemporary or fantastic or historical, a murder trial or a trial about the treatment of unicorns. Write it.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Villainy

On November 2, 2011, Rina wrote, I need motivations for my villains, you see. If anyone has any good motivations for villains…?

This is a perfect companion question for last week’s post about backstories. Motivation can be backstory, or front story. Let’s put front story up front and take it first.

Here’s an example:Training in alien communication at the Starship Academy begins with a placement exam, part of which is a chess game. First-year student Anthea intuits the meaning behind the game and intentionally loses to her opponent, Bennett, whose triumph twists into rage when she’s assigned to a higher study group than he is. Thereafter, he’s her enemy, the villain of the story.

Lots of front-story events can motivate a villain. Chuck can inadvertently witness something that no one was supposed to see. He can accidentally say the wrong thing. He can be new in town and just be his adorable, outgoing self, which may threaten Dava, the reigning popular kid.

Going back to Starship Academy, now we know Bennett’s motivation: anger at Anthea for divining what he failed to understand, and fury at himself for being used by her. But we don’t know why he responds with rage. Instead, he could concede with good grace. He could even admire Anthea and ask her to explain how she understood the test when he hadn’t. The writer can provide backstory. We can learn that Bennett’s father, who was constantly passed over for promotion, called almost everyone else a loser. Or his mother used to beat him whenever he brought home less than an A on his report card, or, for you homeschoolers, whenever she found fault with one of his projects.

The writer can put this information in, and the knowledge may enrich the story or may make interesting reading, but it doesn’t precisely explain Bennett; we all respond uniquely to our histories and our circumstances.

Motivation doesn’t always matter. Think of Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories. He’s simply bad to the core. There’s a chilling moment in the wonderful old movie, The List of Adrian Messenger, when Kirk Douglas says, “Evil is.”

The motivation can be lost in history. Think of feuding clans. The parties may not even remember the reason they hate each other, but the hatred is carried forward from generation to generation until something breaks the cycle.

Power is a frequent villain motivator. Villainy itself requires a degree of power. The villain doesn’t float in the river of time; he puts his oar in. Real-life historical villains, many of them, are motivated by power.

Indifference can be a motivator. The villain wants what he wants and doesn’t care who’s hurt.

Prejudice can be your villain’s goad to action. Inga hates everyone in the Yunnu tribe. When a young Yunnu boy enters the village she behaves despicably toward him.

Lack of empathy, even solipsism (look it up, if you don’t know – it’s a great word) can cause a villain to act as he does. Georgio doesn’t necessarily mean to do ill, but he doesn’t believe that Helena will feel unhappy if he kidnaps her. He just wants the ransom.

As important as motivation, in my opinion, is consistency. Bennett is going to be a certain kind of villain. He’s gotten into Starship Academy so he’s smart. Is he patient or impatient? Does he enlist henchpeople who do his villainy for him, or does he work alone? Does he pretend to be Anthea’s friend to get under her guard? Whatever you decide, he should always be that. Moriarty will always be subtle and clever. Hattie in Ella Enchanted, not so much, and Olive, never. The ogres in Ella are sneaky and crafty; in The Two Princesses of Bamarre they’re brutish and doltish.

Complexity in a villain is nice but not necessary. The decision may rest on how close or how distant he is. In the Sherlock Holmes stories again, he’s distant. In the Starship Academy example he’s close, and the reader will probably need to know him well, so he should be well-rounded. You may want to give him a good quality or two. The pirate Smee in Peter Pan is lovable, at least partly due to his spectacles. Captain Hook is lovable too, I think, even though he kills without mercy. Maybe it’s because he’s pathetic. After all, his ambition is to kill a little boy. And he has good manners.

What good quality might you give your villain? I’ve known a few baddies (not many). One was very generous, and another had a great sense of humor; the others had no redeeming qualities that I could discover.

An element to consider may be the power relationship between the villain and hero. Anthea and Bennett and Chuck and Dava are equals, but Edwina could be Fred’s horrible boss. Or Fred could be the horrible one, undermining everything that Edwina is trying to accomplish. A powerful villain can exercise his villainy out in the open, not always, but often. An underling villain has to be sneaky. The need for subterfuge can be part of Fred’s motivation.

We look for motivation in a villain, but I’m not sure we do in a hero. Anthea does her best in the chess test. Her goal is to show her skill in nonverbal communication; she isn’t out to defeat Bennett, even though he sees it that way. We don’t generally ask, however, why the good character is good. Interesting.

Sometimes the villain motivates the hero and shapes her actions. Edwina, as the good boss, has to learn how to succeed in spite of Fred. She has to become the kind of supervisor who knows how to deal with subtle insubordination. She can become better or worse because of Fred.

And sometimes the hero shapes the villain. Peter Pan is unchanged by Hook, but Hook is profoundly affected by the sort of enemy Peter is. He becomes a tragic figure (in a lighthearted way) because of Peter.
  
Here are three prompts:

∙    Anthea’s mentor, who sets her course through the academy, assigns her to use Bennett’s enmity. For training purposes, he’s her alien, and she has to manipulate him through understanding. Write the story.

∙    Bennett’s mentor sets him up for repeated failure. His task is self-understanding. He’ll never succeed with an alien until he understands himself. Write his story.

∙    June’s cousin Kyle comes to live with her family for the summer. Kyle is a year older than June, bigger, and a bully. June, however, has inner resources. Decide what they are. Write what they do to set each other off. Tell the story of their summer.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Backstory story

On October 31, 2011, writeforfun wrote, …how do you know where to put those important backstories, the ones that are pivotal to a character? Is there any way to know, or do you just put it where it seems “right”?
There are lots of ways and places and times to work in a backstory, and I think where it seems right is a good guide.

You can do it in dialogue. For example, Elizabeth and Pamela are sleeping over at Marianne’s house. They’re in their pajamas in Marianne’s room. They’ve been friends since they were in kindergarten. Pamela starts a conversation about the first time she was in this bedroom. Others chime in with their early memories. These reveal their backstories.

Or Elizabeth, Pamela and Marianne are marching against the umbertis, enormous intelligent crabs that have invaded their homeland. The soldiers have a long way to go, and they pass the time talking about memories of home, their backstories.

Or you can do the same in thought. Pamela is the POV character. At the sleepover she thinks about her friendship with the two girls. She’s felt close to Marianne since the beginning, but her relationship with Elizabeth has had ups and downs. She can obsess over details of their run-ins. Or she can think about her own home, where she’s never invited the others to sleep over. Or, on the march against the umbertis she can think about her fellow soldiers or she can think about her mother’s teachings on warfare.

Or in narration. An omniscient narrator can chronicle the sleepover or the foot soldiers’ advance. The narrator can directly provide background for each girl.

The danger with backstory, which I suspect writeforfun is worrying about, is interrupting the flow of the story. For backstory to work, in most cases anyway, the front story needs to be underway. The reader has to care about the character with the backstory and the ongoing action of the story. Again in most cases, backstory will fit best in, say, the first third of the novel. Much later than that the reader is likely to have come to his own conclusions and backstory may just annoy. And at the end of a book backstory may feel too convenient, like a deus ex machina arrived to save the day or at least to explain it.

Let’s take the case of the umbertis. The reader has watched with Marianne as a crab’s purple pincer cruelly pinches her little brother Patrick and pulls him away. Another crab’s beady metallic eyes scan Marianne’s family’s living room, where she is crouched in horror behind a couch. Patrick’s screams are heard from the hallway. This is not the time for backstory about how much Marianne loves her brother or how much he annoys her. Unless–

Unless this interrupted action is going to be a motif in the story. Whenever things get exciting, the narrator switches to something else, which could be backstory. The reader groans while smiling, knowing that the main storyline will continue later. This is a way of creating distance and making the reader aware that he’s reading, reading the work of a very clever author. I’ve enjoyed books like this. I think the crime novelists Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake (high school and above) have written this kind of thing, although I can’t think of a particular title.

However, in this sort of story, even if it’s really well done, sometimes I will gnash my teeth and thumb ahead to where the action resumes. Then, after I’ve read the continuing crab drama, I may be reluctant to go back to the intervening pages. If I don’t, I may lose the thread of the story and I may abandon the book entirely. So there’s a risk. In general, quiet moments are best for backstory.

When I wrote the early drafts of Fairest, writing in omniscient third-person POV (I switched to first person later), I put in backstory for Queen Ivi. I included several scenes between her and Skulni, the creature in the mirror, and one between her, her mother, and her brother (who didn’t make the final cut). The scenes and backstory explained Ivi’s behavior. But third person didn’t work and most of the backstory had to go. I miss these scenes. They deepened Ivi’s character for me. But they weren’t necessary, and they gunked up the story. The reader accepts Ivi without the explanations.

What I’m saying is, consider if you need the backstory at all. You may need it for yourself, to understand why your character behaves as she does and to figure out what she’ll do in future situations, but the reader may not. Take the sleepover example. Let’s say Elizabeth makes fun of Marianne’s pajamas, which are cotton with a print of climbing vines that Elizabeth calls poison ivy. And Elizabeth keeps complaining that she isn’t going to be able to sleep because of Pamela’s snoring. I don’t think the reader needs to know that Elizabeth’s mother is hypercritical and her father is uninvolved in family life. The reader takes Elizabeth as he finds her. He’ll also be watching Elizabeth’s and Pamela’s response to her. If they treat her with understanding he’s going to suspect they understand her or that she has virtues he hasn’t experienced yet.

I’ve been watching the HBO series Girls, which is definitely without a doubt for adults. One of the girls, I don’t have the names down yet, the one with the British accent, is so far unfailingly unkind to her friends. I can’t figure out why they like her, and no amount of backstory would condone her bad behavior for me.

And lets go back to Elizabeth and her judgmental mother and disengaged father. Well, plenty of people have terrible parents and they rise above them. The moral is: Be judicious with your backstories. You can put them in (you may need to) in early drafts but try your story without them as you revise.

If the backstory is important and you’re sure you don’t want to cut it, consider telling it in forward time. Start the tale at an earlier moment. In Fairest again, I could have begun the book with Aza’s arrival at Ontio castle and slipped her earlier life in through flashbacks and thoughts and dialogue, but that would have been tricky and it might have given the book a jumpy quality I didn’t want. Same thing has happened to me with other books. I start somewhere and then I move the beginning back and back and back. You can too.

Here are four prompts:

∙    Write from the POV of the umberti crab who kidnapped Marianne’s brother and work in the backstory of these intelligent creatures. Do they come from outer space or are they mutations of ordinary crabs? Why do they hate humans?

∙    Invent a backstory for each of the sleepover girls. Telling the sleepover in the voice of an omniscient narrator, insert each backstory through thoughts, narration, and dialogue. Cause an argument among the three and have the backstory come into play.

∙    In the crab story, invent a backstory for Pamela and include it in the marching scene. After the army reaches the crabs, Pamela and a crab face off in hand-to-claw combat. Have Pamela’s backstory influence her fighting.

∙    Ina is a writer. Whenever she meets people she makes up their backstories. Her boyfriend brings her to dinner at his parents’ house. She’s meeting his family for the first time, and she engages in her pastime. Write the scene and make the imagined backstories get her into trouble.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Tensing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are three prompts:

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

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

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

Have fun, and save what you write!

In a word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have fun, and save what you write!

Dragons and fairies and more, oh my!

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

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

So please add your contributions to mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have fun, and save what you write!