New characters with history

On May 6, 2011, Monica Mari wrote, ….I spend pages introducing characters, and am trying to figure out a way around it. And I have a few events that take place before some of my characters are introduced, and so it seems to come out of nowhere. Would you have any advice?

I asked for clarification, and Monica Mari answered, ….I end up introducing semi-main characters halfway through my stories, and they end up playing large roles later on, but for things to go as planned, they must be introduced after events that occur beforehand. Friends and family have told me that they are a bit confused with the suddenly introduced characters, as they appear out of nowhere as they were not introduced beforehand, and then they became important to large points in the plot.

This sounds like two questions, one about introducing characters and the second about plot. My post of 6/29/11 relates to the first, so you may want to revisit it. I’ll add only a few new thoughts:

When we meet people in real life we don’t get the benefit of introductory material, which might come in handy. A friend, let’s call her Justine, just today told me how a friend of hers, let’s call her Irma, made it hard for Justine to get necessary dental work. Justine couldn’t understand why Irma was being unhelpful (Justine needed help) until Irma confessed a childhood dental trauma. Ah. But if they hadn’t been friends the confession might never have been made and Irma’s actions would have remained a mystery.

In fiction we usually do include the confession because we want our characters’ behavior to be believable. But generally we don’t jump in with the secret information instantly. We wait and let the characters reveal themselves just as people do, through action, dialogue, maybe appearance, and, in the case of main characters, thoughts. Lengthy introductions hold up the story.

If your characters need lengthy introductions – I’m just guessing – your plot may be over-complicated or there may be a lot of back story that you’re trying to bring in. If the back story is the problem, you may want to start your story at an earlier time and let the back story be part of the actual tale.

I tend to over-complicate. My too energetic imagination waves new ideas in front of my mind’s eye, and I start weaving them in. Often they work, but sometimes they don’t. I told one of my versions of Beloved Elodie to my husband, and his eyes rolled back in his head. I wound up starting over.

Not that you have to go back to the beginning. But you may want to think about what’s important to your story and how you can streamline. It should be possible to summarize your plot briefly. Let’s try this on a few classics. Hamlet: A just, ethical, and feeling prince suspects his mother and uncle of murdering his father and can’t decide how to act. Pride and Prejudice: A single young woman of sense and decided opinions is wooed by a wealthy young man with sense and deep feelings but an exaggerated idea of his importance. Jane Eyre: An unloved child grows into a young woman with the inner resources to fall in love and yet resist the man she adores.

You may quarrel with my thumbnail sketches and make up your own, but I’d guess yours will be short too, although each of these works is rich with detail and wide in scope. Pride and Prejudice, for example, tells us about marriage and the relation between the sexes in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it’s a great story as well.

I suspect this over-complication causes the confusion when you introduce important characters well into a story. Let’s suppose there’s a plot against King Philip the Great, who is despotic and erratic. Five conspirators, important characters in this story, meet weekly to conspire. The reader has met them all. However, there’s Sorceress Moira who cast a spell on the king fifteen years ago to make him a tyrant. The conspirators don’t know about her, but she has to come into the story later on.

That seems hard to me. I’d want to start with the sorceress, maybe show her in a prologue (although child readers often skip prologues) or introduce a legend about her to lay the groundwork. for her appearance. The characters who don’t know about her can continue not to know, but the reader has been warned. If the reader knows and the main characters don’t, you’ve got delightful tension going, and when she finally shows up, the reader won’t be confused.

Monica Mari, I’m hoping this post got at your question. If not, please ask follow-up questions.

Here are three back story prompts:

• Let’s take the tyrannical king situation. Not only is there a sorceress lurking, one of the conspirators, Alphonso, is concealing from the others that he was once imprisoned in the king’s dungeons and would do anything to avoid another imprisonment. Another, Gretchen, hasn’t told anyone that she and the king’s nephew are in love. Write a meeting of the plotters in which the back stories of the two are revealed to the reader but not to the other members of the cabal. Write a scene in which Gretchen confesses her secret to Alphonso. How does he use this information? Write the scene that follows.

• Romance is a great place for secret back stories. Danny is drawn to Lana, a singer, although Danny’s mother, also a singer, deserted the family when he was six. Lena writes her own songs, which she bases on her romantic experiences. Danny may be material for her next CD. He’s heard her sing about her last boyfriend but not about the one before that and the one before that. Their first date went marvelously well. Write their second date.

• Back stories can get very psychological. This is a memory prompt. I thought I’d written about my own example here on the blog, but I can’t find it on a search. The incident appears in an anthology called Thanks and Giving edited by Marlo Thomas, and here’s a quick summary: I was sick on my third or fourth birthday, nothing serious but I was running a high fever. My grandfather, out of pity, bought me an expensive, beautiful, not at all cuddly, hard bisque doll, very old-fashioned. My parents gave it to me along with a hundred warnings about how I’d better take wonderful care of it or I’d be a very bad girl, which caused me to instantly hate it. When I got well I destroyed it, which I felt guilty about but justified with the belief that a gift was a gift and they should have given the doll to me without all the restrictions and then I might have treated it more respectfully. I didn’t understand what was behind my parents’ warnings until many many years later when I began to write for children and was casting about for topics. I remembered this birthday, and understanding came. My grandfather was very poor and buying this doll must have forced him to scrimp in other ways. My mother would have been touched and would have wanted me to treat his gift with reverence that equaled his generosity. My father, the orphan, probably never had a toy of his own. He would have been bowled over by the magnificence of this treasure, and he would have wanted me to appreciate my good fortune. The back story became clear decades after the event. So the prompt is to think of an incident in your own life when people acted incomprehensibly based on factors you had no knowledge of, which you still may not understand. Write it down and then fictionalize it a little or a lot. If you still don’t know the back story, invent one. Write a scene or a story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Short and Young

On May 6, 2011, welliewalks wrote, How do you go about writing short stories or children’s books (children as in ages 7-9)? I like writing loooong stories and novellas because I can take a while to develop (and “solve” it) the plot and add more details. I feel like short stories can’t have a complicated plot because it would take longer to write them. Does anyone have advice on writing short stories and kid’s books?

And Emma wrote, I’m writing what I thought was a children’s book, and I’m realizing it may not be for the age I expected. It involves things like court trials, attacks from other nations, espionage, etc., granted the good guys always win. How much is too much for little kids? How much can the different age groups handle?

And more from Emma (or from a different Emma) two months later: I got a book about publishing with 30 pages of writing contests for amateur novelists, and it’s great, except for one thing; almost all of them must be short stories, and all of them have word limits, but I’m a very long-winded writer. How do you deal with word limits, and what details should you cut?
In answer to Emma’s second question, Charlotte wrote, I thought I’d weigh in on the word limits thing because I have had some experience in this. I’ve done several 500-word stories for the sake of writing contests, and I also had word limits on a lot of the scholarship essays I did the year I graduated high school. The thing about working with a limit is that every word and every sentence counts a lot more than in a longer piece. You’re free to get picky with your adjectives, because you want to get ones that give you a strong sense of the setting in place of a long description. I find that my words are a lot more vivid in my short stuff, probably because with something that small, you can easily go over it about 300 times before submitting it, combing out the unnecessary words, changing adjectives around and changing them back, etc., etc. Always keep in mind exactly how many words you’re at and how many you have left–Microsoft Word will tell you, and if you print your story off (I do a lot of my best editing manually), write the number at the top and keep track of what you take off and what you add on. Knowing what your budget is can help you decide what you can keep and what needs to go.

Along that same line, the plot itself obviously can’t be that long in a short story. Judging by a lot of the short stories I’ve read in school, etc., this is more of a genre that focuses on one event or emotion or aspect of life, rather than being a series of events like a novel is. There are a million and one different ways of writing a short story where all the action consists of the protagonist making herself a cup of coffee, or walking around her house, etc. It’s what’s going through her mind that makes it great. What I guess I’m trying to say is that short stories are more mood-driven than plot-driven–that’s why it’s a different genre–so the details that don’t contribute well to the mood and theme of the story are the ones to drop.

Excellent advice!

If you like inventing many scenes and building a story slowly, the short story may not be for you, but it’s worthwhile to try something new. As for detail, although you have fewer scenes, you still want richness so the reader can enter them fully, and you still want to portray rounded characters. You’ll need setting, but maybe not more than one or two, and dialogue, and thoughts, and action, all the facets of longer fiction. You can be long-winded in a short-winded way.

Along the same lines as Charlotte’s comment, trimming excess words, sentences, paragraphs, pages tightens the work. When I revise even a novel, I delete. And when I return to one of my books for one reason or another after it’s been published, I always find more I wish I had cut. When I go over the blog post before moving ahead with it, I use my knife. If writing short stories makes you a more concise writer of long stories, that’s a big benefit.

Although I don’t read many short stories, I’ve had a few published in anthologies for children anyway. In spite of my bad example, I’d suggest you read short stories, a bunch of them, to get a feel for their scope and economy. If you have a word limit, like 500 words, which is very short, I’d read a collection or two of short short stories (which there are). By reading you gain an intuitive sense of the genre, which will come through when you start writing.

My stories have ranged from ten to twenty-five pages, which is much more than 500 words. However, I’ve written narrative poems in fewer words, and in them, as in the short story, compression is key. One poem (not written for children) is about a modern-day Cassandra attempting and failing to warn a class of fourth graders about the troubles that lie ahead for each of them. The reader sees them listen and believe and then forget the moment they leave Cassandra’s tent at the state fair. That’s it, but the reader knows that each child will suffer as Cassandra said and that Cassandra suffers already from knowing she couldn’t help. The poem is 300 words long, and a short story could do the same thing, and so could a 600-page novel. In the novel we would see the dismal future played out for each child, but that isn’t necessary to convey the meaning.

My poem centers on an idea, but it could focus on a character, which many short stories do. There will be fewer characters in a short story than a novel, but they should still be well developed.

An important aspect of many novels (discussed in a long-ago blog) is character change or failure to change, a feature shared by many short stories. In the poem I described, the characters fail to change, which makes it sad. My novels focus outward on the world, usually a fantasy world. My short stories have a narrow field of vision, family or a few friends. In one, for example, the main character comes to understand and accept that her parents are more involved with her sister, who constantly creates problems. All that happens is that the main gets the lead in the class play and the sister threatens to change religions. In a single scene the reader sees the family in action.

An analogy might be an oven (the novel) versus a pressure cooker (the short story). In the oven the ingredients cook gradually while in the pressure cooker the boiling point is unnaturally high and comes fast. Another analogy might be a house versus a tree. In a house, many posts support the weight of the roof; with a tree, a single trunk holds up the canopy of leaves. In the novel, many incidents build to the climax; in the short story very few, and each one must bear a lot of weight.

On to writing for children. A reference book you may want to read is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books by Harold Underdown, which, alas, didn’t exist when I got started. The book I read and went back to again and again is How to Write a Children’s Book and Get It Published by Barbara Seuling. Both are excellent.

I also read tons of kids’ books, including the books in the Newbery bookcase at my library and the new novels that were generating a lot of buzz. Later, when my editor asked me to write The Princess Tales as chapter books she sent me sample chapter books to read and study. (My favorite was Is He a Girl? in the Marvin Redpost series by Louis Sachar of Holes fame.) If you want to write for seven-to-nine year olds, read the books they’re reading, which covers a lot of ground. Some seven-year-olds read Ella Enchanted and Harry Potter. Some nine-year-olds read Junie B. Jones.

My education as a children’s book writer also included taking classes, joining critique groups, attending conferences, and joining the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. It was a process that took nine years to earn me my first book acceptance.

Some people – no one reading this blog, I’m sure – think writing for kids is easy. These people, I believe, have forgotten what it was like to be a child, how complicated it was, maybe more complicated than being an adult. Kids have to negotiate at least two universes, the world of adults and the world of their peers and possibly a third, the world of school, and all the while learning at an incredible pace, learning not only school subjects but the everyday science of being human.

Because of this complexity, children can handle the kinds of topics Emma asks about, such as “court trials, attacks from other nations, espionage, etc.” In fact, many kids are drawn to high drama and like to watch stories played out on a grand stage. I think that’s why children enjoy fairy tales and fantasy, because the events are huge, involving royalty and kingdoms, love, jealousy, rage, death.

The biggest difference between children’s and adult literature is the age of the main character. In a kids’ book the main will be a child, usually a little older than the reader. Occasionally the main will be an animal. Of course the reason is that the child can more easily identify with a child than with an adult.

I don’t mean to minimize the differences between books for children and books for grownups. I’m teaching my summer workshop for kids now, and each week I’ve been reading a poem aloud to them. It’s been a challenge to find the right poem, not because of subject matter but because of tone and sophistication and sometimes language. If I say that children can’t handle sophistication, it wouldn’t be entirely true, but we have to develop an ear for what succeeds and what doesn’t, which we do by reading and by writing and trying what we’ve written out on writing buddies and friends. Not necessarily by trying our stuff out on kids, who may be too polite, who may not know what standards to apply, who may be too forgiving.

And there are differences between writing for teens and writing for younger children. You can go darker with teens and more psychological. I’m distinguishing between dark and sad. Sad works with the elementary school crowd, dark not so much. Young kids understand the death of Bambi’s mother in Bambi, while the meaning of Hamlet’s indecisiveness and eventual death might elude them.

As for psychological, I once asked my workshop students to write a self-portrait, not only of their looks but also of their inner qualities. Those over eleven loved the assignment; those under couldn’t do it, and I had them write a portrait of a best friend instead, and that they enjoyed. Older kids like to look within. Younger children focus out.

Sometimes the author herself doesn’t know who her proper audience is. When my friend Suzanne Fisher Staples wrote her first novel, the wonderful Shabanu, she thought she was writing for adults until her editor told her she wasn’t, and the book went on to win a Newbery honor in 1989. Suzanne isn’t the only writer to whom this has happened. I’ve heard similar stories, and the people at HarperCollins thinks my book of mean poems, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It (out next March), may appeal to adults as well as to children, but I thought I was writing it strictly for kids. So we can be surprised.

These are the prompts I was given (and remember) for the short stories I’ve written. See what you do with them:

• A character on the edge (not specified what kind of edge).

• A brush with religion.

• A mystery or mysterious story.

• A wish.

• A grandmother story.

I was also asked to write a story about menstruation. I came up empty on that one, but you may have more success.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Appearances

A few comments came in late on the last post, so you may want to check them out before or after you read this.

On April 29, 2011, Jill wrote, Shakespeare would spell words differently or make up words to make his sentences sound “pretty” and Daphne du Maurier never said the name of the narrator in Rebecca.
I have a story and I never want to describe her appearance because I want anyone to see themselves as her. With this and the other examples, do you like it or not? Who else did things like this?

I don’t know examples of works in which the main character isn’t described although there may be many. In some genres – romance, for example – physical description is pretty much required. Mystery as well, I think.

As a reader, I’m not sure. I’m reading a novel now, The Good Son by Craig Nova (high school and above), which is told from alternating first-person POVs. I don’t remember if one of the POV characters is described, but I’ve fashioned a mental picture of him anyway. He’s a he, obviously, and I still manage to identify with him. So far I find him the most sympathetic character in the book.

Jill, I’m not sure if you’re making a distinction between identifying with a character and seeing oneself as that character. The first can happen, usually should happen, the second can’t and probably shouldn’t.

One of my favorite books when I was growing up was Anne of Green Gables, and one of my favorite moments was when Anne breaks her writing slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head . I identified totally with Anne, but in real life I never would have hit anyone’s pate with anything, regardless of the provocation. My delight in Anne’s defiant act was complete. She surprised me and I loved her for it, but I couldn’t have seen myself as her.

We go to books, in part, for alternatives to our narrow selves. After reading Anne of Green Gables, even if I still couldn’t avenge myself physically, maybe I could figure out a satisfying retort to an offense. At the least, I could take pleasure in imagining what Anne would have done.

As we write, our characters make decisions. They can’t be Everyman because each man acts differently. As a reader – and a writer – I slip inside selves other than my own. My characters behave differently from me.

In most cases, I guess I’d rather have physical description than not. We’re physical beings and we form impressions of people, rightly or wrongly, based in part by looks. And other people respond to us on the same basis. I’m very short, four-foot-ten-and-a-half, to be precise. This perspective affects me profoundly. My life probably would have been different, for better or worse, if I had seven more inches. I like being short, but I wouldn’t pass up a chance to be tall for a day, just for the experience. When I make a character tall I have to think about that decision and be aware of it as I write.

Long ago on the blog I mentioned a memoir, Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy (also high school and above), who had some sort of cancer as a child that left her face deformed. It’s a book of suffering. Appearance, like it or not, is important.

I read Autobiography of a Face when I was preparing to write Fairest, in which Aza, my heroine, is ugly. There would be no story without her ugliness. Still, readers identify with her, and we identify with Lucy Grealy, too. Appearance, no matter what it is, doesn’t stop us from entering an emotionally appealing character.

Contrariwise, in an early draft of A Tale of Two Castles I gave Elodie a big nose. My editor asked me to take the nose out and I did. She felt it would be off-putting to the reader. And maybe she was right. Unlike Aza’s ugliness in Fairest, Elodie’s nose had nothing to do with her story. Not, I hasten to say, that a big nose is ugly. It’s a strong feature, which is what I wanted for Elodie.

What I don’t care for is a description of the main character that’s plopped into a first chapter because the author feels it has to be there. So the main is made to look in a mirror. In first person she’s forced to assess herself. In third, we’re just told what she sees.

I don’t think there’s a rush. You can get to it in a later chapter and wait for a spot where the description belongs. I’m proud of the way I did it in A Tale of Two Castles. Elodie is considering buying a cap from a mending mistress, who tells her ingratiatingly that she’s pretty. And she thinks:

I wished I could subtract her lie from the price of the cap. I wasn’t pretty. My eyes were too big, my eyebrows too thick, my mouth too wide, my jaw too pronounced. But if you were in an audience, even standing behind the benches, far from the mansion stage, you would still be able to make out my features.

That’s it. I drop in a little earlier that she’s tall for her age. We don’t have to include a great deal of detail if the story doesn’t call for it. In Fairest, which does call for it, Aza’s brother first calls attention to her looks by calling her ugly, and she often thinks about her appearance, so the reader can visualize her clearly and see her the way I want her to be seen. But in many stories, we can give a few hints and let the reader fill in the rest.

In both examples from my books, a comment by another character introduces the description. You can use this technique too. For instance, Neil, not known for his tact, could tell Marisa she resembles a kindergartner’s stick figure drawing. Warren could pipe in, “Yeah, and your hair looks like you were electrocuted.” Kind Tomasina might say, “I wish I had curly hair, and I’d die for hazel eyes.” That’s probably enough.

But there are other ways. In The Wish the hook is simple. Wilma thinks about her name, describes herself in thoughts as looking like a Wilma, then goes on to explain what she means by that. In Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, an old photograph leads into the description. You can use action. A character can be especially suited or not suited for an activity, like a sport or a role in a play, by virtue of his looks.

As a reader, I rarely think about the main character’s description once it’s given. I’m inside him, peering out, remembering how he looks only when the subject comes up in thoughts, action, or dialogue.

A few prompts:

• Look at a few of your favorite books and notice how the author handled introducing the main character’s appearance and how detailed or sketchy these descriptions are. Then revisit some of your own old stories and think about how you did it. If you decide you might have been more inventive and you’re in a revising mood, try a new way or more than one.

• Leonard is at a Halloween party dressed in a spacesuit. Without removing a bit of his costume, find a way to describe him. Find another way. And another.

• Carlie Werme, Tony Foote, and Blair Bratt are each teased unmercifully by their classmates about their names, and each responds differently to the teasing. Write a scene for each one, showing how he or she reacts. If you like, bring them together as an alliance and write what happens. Write the first meeting of their club and cause an argument to break out. Show how each one argues. Keep going. See what happens when they confront their tormentors as a group, but don’t let their individuality get lost in their united front.

Have fun and save what you write!

Lost in Revision

On April 28, 2011, Grace wrote, ….So I have a manuscript that I kind of edited to death- meaning I wrote it and I edited it so it was better but I got so obsessed with making it *perfect* that I kind of sucked the life out of it. Now it’s just listless words meandering across the page that are all painstakingly grammatically correct and technically *perfect* but it has no life, it has no flare, no sparkle. This breaks my heart to make me think I killed the very thing I wanted to improve, so do you have any suggestions about how to raise my manuscript from the dead? Do you know how I can pump some life back into it and make it my own again instead of it sounding like something any generic computer program could have thought up? Any ideas about how to change my manuscript from being flat stiff sentences to something worth reading again would be most welcome…

And in response April wrote, ….it sounds like you need to back away from the manuscript for a while. Don’t look at it for a few months (or possibly longer). Work on something else while it sits. When you go back to it, you’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes and make more objective judgements.
I agree with April. Clarity comes with time and distance. You may like your story better when you go back to it. You may even think it has plenty of life, and what were you worried about? But if not, you may see the places that you flattened in revision. Then you may know what to do to resuscitate the prose.

If you have your old drafts, you can look at them too and pick back up the bits the bits that used to make your blood dance.

Long ago, when I was unpublished and writing only picture books because I was afraid to try a novel, one of my manuscripts interested several editors, who asked for revision. One of them said he wanted my story to be more “warmly told” and suggested I read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka. I did, and I loved it, and I knew exactly what the editor wanted, and I rewrote my story, and he hated it and wouldn’t look at further revisions. Other editors wanted other changes, and gradually my story died. What was good in it vanished beyond recovery and I never got it back. So, sadly, this can happen.

But, today, I could have another go at it. If I wanted to return to the story, I would look at my old versions (if I could find them after about twenty years and many computers). If they didn’t show me what to do, I’d just start again from scratch, working from my original idea.

You might succeed with the same strategy. Think about the basic idea and what excited you about it. If you’re like me you’ll write some notes on what you used to love and how to approach the story this time. Most likely you’ve learned things in the many rewrites, and your discoveries will fuel the new beginning.

When I used to paint, this approach worked for me. A painting failed, but I loved what I was going for. I might have been in a class and working from a model. In my first attempt I painted her proportions all wrong, but when I started over I found that I’d learned from my mistakes and she materialized correctly on my canvas this time. Or I was working from a still life or a photograph. A second attempt usually paid off.

But, you may be wailing, I wrote 300 pages!

There may be efficient writers but I’m not one of them. I toss hundreds of pages, which I’ve mentioned many times on the blog. Well, last weekend I found comforting company. The novelist Craig Nova spoke at a conference where I was the kids’ book workshop leader. He talked of his endless rewrites and swore that he’s dumped 100,000 pages during his writing life. That’s thousand with a T. He’s not a young man, but he’s not Methuselah either. And he has twelve novels for adults under his belt.

Craig Nova kept track of those 100,000 pages, and I keep a rough tally of the pages I throw out for each book. I struggled with them as much as I did with the pages that succeeded, so I might as well be proud of them. And you might as well, too.

Goes without saying (but I’ll say it) that you may find it helpful to ask a writing buddy or trusted person to look at your moribund story. She may see where you went wrong better than you can. And she may love parts of your story, which may rekindle your affection for them.

I doubt the problem lies in excellent grammar or technical perfection. We want proper grammar, punctuation, capitalization (unless we have a powerful story reason for ignoring the rules). We don’t want too much word repetition or monotonous sentence structure. Attention to the basics doesn’t suck the life out of a story. It adds to the liveliness of our prose.

You can ask yourself some questions to gain an understanding of how your story floundered:

Why was perfection so important this time? The answer might lie outside the story, in criticism you’d received or a hundred other things. Or you loved your idea so much, more than anything else you ever tried, that you tensed up.

Did you edit out the characters’ thoughts and feelings? This might be the first place to look. Without emotion and an inner life a story will be bloodless.

Is there something inside the story that you were afraid of? If you figure that out, you may decide you don’t want to tackle it right now. Or you may find that identifying the scary element pulls you in and the story catches fire again.

Are there parts that might offend someone? Did you tiptoe around those aspects of the story even without realizing it?

When you answer these questions you may be able to reenter your story with enthusiasm.

The subject of revival sent my mind off to myths and old stories, so here are three prompts:

∙ One of my favorite myths is “Pygmalion and Galatea,” which is the basis of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion and Lerner and Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady. In the myth, Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with one of his sculptures. Unlike many Greek myths, this one has a happily-ever-after ending with Galatea coming to life. Write your own story of Galatea coming alive with unexpected consequences. What’s she like? How does she adjust to being alive? How does she fit into Pygmalion’s ordinary existence?

∙ The myth of Orpheus, alas, doesn’t end well. He tries and fails to fetch his dead wife back from Hades. In your version make Geraldine succeed in reviving her friend or boyfriend Henry, but he wakes up changed. Write what happens. Though this can be a scary story it doesn’t have to be.

∙ Now I’m thinking of the opposite of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Jeremy’s friend Karen is too easygoing, and Jeremy sets himself the task of making her more lively. Write what happens.

Have fun and save what you write!

Private Property

New on my website: an audio clip of me reading the third chapter of Writing Magic, the chapter called “Shut Up!”

On April 22, 2011, Mya wrote, “….I’ve had a few incidents happen in my life that are definitely out of the ordinary, and involve love.=) I’m just dying to pen it down, but I wonder how I should do so, without making it obviously similar to what really happened, so that I don’t feel like I’m offending the other people’s privacy. Any help?=)

Opinions differ.

Say, for instance, in real life Ira kissed Ondine tentatively, a quick peck. Ondine set down her big purple pocketbook for a longer, more satisfying meeting of the lips. Just as her arms went around Ira’s neck, a three-legged dog ran off with the purse and a chase through Riverfront Park ensued. Later that night, Ondine told her friend Priscilla the whole story, which ended with the recovery of the purse but no more kisses.

If Priscilla asks and gets permission from Ira and Ondine to write the incident down, even to post it on her blog, she’s home free, even if Ira’s father isn’t happy when he happens to read the post. But if she posts the story, names included, without asking, I say it’s an invasion of privacy, whether or not Ondine explicitly said the anecdote was confidential.

However, some believe that the price of friendship or even family connection with a writer is the chance of being exposed in print. Writers write, so this reasoning goes, and everything is fodder.

Now let’s say Priscilla loves the anecdote and she’s a writer but also a loyal friend. She lets a year go by then writes a short story that revolves around this incident, but she changes the names of the characters. The story is one of her best and it’s published in a magazine neither Ira nor Ondine or any of their friends or relatives ever read.

Is this okay?

I’m not sure. I think so, as long as the names were changed. It’s certainly fine if Priscilla calls Ira Anthony and Ondine Sonya and she has Sonya kiss Anthony first, and Anthony sets down his Moroccan leather briefcase, which is taken by a three-legged coyote on 169th Street in New York City. Priscilla has definitely changed enough, more than enough, to protect the privacy of the real players.

A few weeks ago I attended a reunion for retirees of a place where I used to work. I was the youngest one there and I’m not young, and some of it made me sad, so afterward I wrote a poem in which I changed the names and a few details but not many. I think it’s a good poem, and I may send it out to see if anybody wants to publish it. No one who was there will read it, and even if they did, I doubt they’d mind.

In Priscilla’s case, she may have improved the story by altering it, which often happens. You cast about for ways to change the events without losing their essence and ideas pop up that add interest. Sometimes the essence actually becomes more concentrated. Real life meanders. Fiction is tighter.

You can also combine true stories. Think about romantic moments in your life and in the lives of people you know. Ask your parents and other relatives about their dating days. Ask friends, teachers, librarians. List what you get and stare at the list. Maybe you’ve got these three among others: The first time Daryl met Frank he had a hamster poking out of his shirt pocket. Gene wouldn’t date Hester until she stopped smoking cigarettes. Joanne was on her way to meet Kenneth when her car got a flat and Leonard stopped to help her, and that was the beginning of their romance.

I’ve probably mentioned before that years ago I was asked to contribute to a book of memoirs by kids’ book writers about their grandmothers. I had only one since my father was an orphan, and I hated her. The editor said that was okay. So I used family history and added fictional elements, but before I went ahead I called her last living child, my uncle, the only one whose permission I felt counted. He said I could write whatever I wanted and added an anecdote or two to my collection. If he had asked me not to, however, I would have honored his wishes. The story was published in an anthology called In My Grandmother’s House, which is out of print but probably available online. Most of the pieces in it are about charming, cookie-baking grandmas.

My sister, who supplied the event that fuels the story, was delighted because I recaptured a long-ago place and time. In the writing, details came back to me that I’d forgotten.

Intention counts. I didn’t write the story to be mean or to hurt feelings. If you’re respecting the real life people, if you’re even honoring them, they’re likely to be pleased. They may feel important and be gratified that you paid attention. My friend Joan, who had a brain injury, likes it when I write a poem about her even when it reflects the downside of memory loss.

I’m not a memoirist, and even in the grandma book my contribution was fiction. If you’re writing about something that happened to you, if you’re not telling someone else’s story, I don’t know that you need to censor yourself at all. Let’s say, for instance, you’re writing about your tenth grade year when you had two boyfriends although they didn’t know about each other. Let’s say three years have passed since then but you still know both of them although neither is currently romantically involved with you. Well, you may want to consider the consequences of revealing your past double love life (they may be mad at you), but if you decide to go ahead I don’t think there are any moral impediments. It’s your life. You own the rights to it.

These prompts are based on the post.

∙ Inquire into the romantic pasts of people you know. Romance heightens memory, so you’ll probably hear funny and poignant stories. Cobble them together into a story of your own, changing the names and fictionalizing here and there.

∙ Use my invented anecdotes about Daryl, Frank, Gene, Hester, Joanne, Kenneth, and Leonard and weave them into a story.

∙ Priscilla posts Ondine’s story on her blog. Ondine is merely furious, but Ira, also a writer, is vengeful. Write what happens.

∙ There is nothing wrong with writing what you shouldn’t reveal if you don’t reveal it. Write solely for your own purposes a story you have no business sharing with anyone. If you feel like being mean, be mean. If you have feelings that might not meet with general approval, include them. Hide what you’ve written where it won’t be found but don’t destroy it. A day may come when no harm will be done by sharing. And you may want to look at it now and then.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Shifting Idea Sands

On April 7, 2011, Angie wrote, …While writing a first draft, I find myself constantly having new ideas for the plot that require me to go back and change several details. This becomes bothersome the further into the story I am, and it also worries me that I will lose some of the original integrity of the story the more I do this. What if, after changing a ton of details and scenes to accommodate a new idea, I realize that my grand new idea actually doesn’t work at all? Then I need to go back and change those scenes back, but will most likely lose a lot of my original work in the process.
As much as I try to plan my plot out ahead of time, I am still at heart an organic sort of writer; I discover the story as I move along. How do I keep from ruining my story as I come up with fresh ideas?

I may have quoted this before from W. Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

!!!

How I wish this weren’t true.

In hunting online for the above quotation, I found this on a blog I’d never visited before, but which you may all already know:
http://kendaturner.blogspot.com/2011/04/three-rules-for-writing-novel.html. More quotes, some funny too.

First to answer the easy part of the question, the only part that I can respond to definitively: You never have to lose original work if you start a new version and save your old one. You can name the old one something descriptive or you can write a note at the top of it that tells you what version it is and what made you start a new one. Then you can go back to the old if your new idea isn’t working out, or you can find those parts of the old that you want to re-insert.

I’m a make-it-up-as-I-go writer too, which makes me inefficient, very inefficient. Take the book I’m working on now, possibly the hardest ever for me. It’s a mystery, but it keeps wanting to be an adventure story, a form I’m more comfortable with, so it frequently veers the wrong way. I’ve mentioned before that I wrote many pages and then realized I’d forgotten to include any suspects. I went back to the beginning, putting in maybe too many suspects, but I made the mystery impossible to solve. In one instance, I don’t remember which, I wrote about 260 pages, in the other about 120. Then I wrote 90 new pages and felt lost, so I sent the thing to my editor, who said the problem was the book wasn’t compelling enough. Started again, and I’m now on page 72. It’s going better but very slowly.

Some writers get it right more quickly than I do, and even I do better on some books than on others. Some writers are even slower than I. This may be scant comfort, but writing is often difficult. I slog from confusion to confusion with clarity coming very gradually. Once, after visiting a school and speaking to the children there, I got a letter from one of them that said something like, I used to want to be a writer but since you came I don’t anymore. It’s too hard.

Of course I groaned. I probably shouldn’t have emphasized the problems to kindergartners. (Joke.) But the kids really were in elementary school, as some of you reading the blog may be. If you are, know that the rewards of writing are at least as great as the pain.

Patience is the first virtue a writer needs to cultivate. Skill won’t ever come if we don’t have the patience to develop it.

Don’t marry your first idea or your second, or your twelfth, but don’t divorce them either. They are each links to the final idea, the one that succeeds, which you couldn’t have gotten to without the others.

As for the ideas you abandon, which you’re now saving, they may be useful in another story or a germ from them may be. Our minds are deep lakes. Idea fish swim there and evolve, eat other fish or get eaten. When you catch your old idea that failed in one story and reel it in, it may have changed so much that you don’t recognize it, but the original is there in its belly, like the golden ring that appears in a fish’s stomach in more than one fairytale.

If you worry about running out of ideas, please don’t. We have new experiences, even when we think nothing is happening in our lives. Our brains are not only lakes but also soil, and new experiences are mulch, which our minds turn over and over and reshape, and ideas sprout.

I just reread a wonderful poem called “Skater” by Ted Kooser that captures this instant-by-instant change in us. Here’s a link to the poem: http://milan-poetry.blogspot.com/2007/01/skater-ted-kooser.html. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote that one cannot step twice into the same river (because the water is always flowing). I’d add that the same person can’t step twice into any river because he is always changing.

This is very philosophical, but basically I mean that new ideas and then bungled new ideas and bungled old ideas are inevitable for some writers, like me. We just have to keep going.

Some writing advice urges the writer to write forward always and never go back. You can try this. If you can do it, great. This method worked for me on A Tale of Two Castles, but not on the new book. Write down your new ideas in your manuscript so you don’t lose them and march on. Then pick up what you had in mind in revision.

However, often the people who write this way hate revising because they’ve got such a mess on their hands by the time they type, The End. I love to revise because by the time I reach the last page I’ve worked out most of the kinks and all I have to do is polish – and usually cut.

A few prompts:

∙ Tessa is sitting in a classroom or studying at home when something happens that changes her forever. Write the scene and make it occurrence that changes her a small moment, the change almost imperceptible but real. Then think again; put her back in the same place and make something different but equally significant happen. Repeat once more. Pick your favorite and turn it into a story.

∙ This can be fantasy or not. Ivan can be a modern boy or a prince who is buying a present for his dad’s birthday. They haven’t been getting along lately, and Ivan wants the present to bring them closer. Write the scene and its effect on the father-son relationship.

∙ Now let’s change it. Ivan wants the present to show his father how distant he feels they’ve grown, so he picks something emblematic of this. Write this scene.

∙ Bring a third character into the scene, Ivan’s older sister Yvette whose relationship with their father is unlike Ivan’s, maybe better, maybe worse. Write the gift giving again. Then think of yet another way to handle it and try that. Expand either one into a scene, a story, a novel, a seven-book series!

Have fun and save what you write!

Pleased to meet you

On April 6, 2011, Wendy wrote, …I’m trying to write a story that has a lot of characters, and they all have an important part in the story. But I’m not sure if I need to show my main character meeting them all, or if she should just know them when the story begins. How should I introduce everyone? How specific do I need to be, and how much should I assume on the part of the reader? Would it be confusing for me to throw characters in there without an introduction? How soon should I show character developing scenes for them?

I discussed a similar question about a year ago, in my post of June 23rd, 2010, so you may want to look at that.

Novels, especially ones with an old-fashioned tone, occasionally begin with a list of characters and brief character descriptions, just as you see when you read a play. This device is sometimes used when there are many characters. Might go something like this:

Abigail – Twenty-something, ramrod-straight posture, perfect diction, wholehearted about everything she undertakes, first in a long line of seamstresses to complete her college education, assistant to the comptroller of a manufacturer of sports socks.

Bartholomew – Fourteen, narrow face, narrow shoulders, small for his age but no one dares tease him because he’s master of the secret revenge, ninth grader studying masters-level physics. Son of Abigail’s boss.

Christopher – sentient lizard, three inches long, brown-and-green scales, Abigail’s pet although she is unaware of his special powers.

And so on, offering the information that you, the author, want the reader to know.

The advantage is that you don’t have to introduce the characters inside the story. They can just walk on when their turn comes, again as in a play, and the reader can thumb back to the beginning to find out who’s made an entrance. Of course, as the story progresses, the characters won’t remain static. The author still has to develop them, and the thumbnails don’t cover very much.

The disadvantage is that the reader has to thumb back and forth until he gets to know the characters. Some don’t mind this; I’m not fond of it. On the other hand, an e-reader, which I have no experience with, may make this jumping around a snap.

Since there are no laws of story writing, you can develop your own form. You might give each major character her own scene at the beginning so she’s fixed in the reader’s mind. Naturally, the scenes have to be interesting, and it will help if they connect with the events that follow. Then you can launch the body of the story in whatever POV you like.

But if you prefer standard storytelling, I’d say variety is the key. You can have your main meet one or two of the characters for the first time. The others she may already know.

What I would avoid is a blitz of new characters. If your main, Toni, goes to a party and meets the twelve significant characters all at once, the reader is likely to be overloaded no matter how clever you are at setting them apart. Suppose you arrange it as a memory game. Toni may even see it this way. She’s trying to remember the people along with the reader, so she’s thinking, I met Ken and Karen in the kitchen. Look at that! Two K’s in the kitchen, which starts with a k. Ken was washing dishes and whistling, Clean Ken. Karen dropped the bag of potato chips. Klutzy Karen. Toni stays with them for a while and gets a deeper impression of each, which she passes along to the reader.

A little later, while she waits in the hallway to get into the bathroom, she chats with Beryl. Look at that, Beryl and bathroom, more alliteration! Beryl reveals secrets about the host that she shouldn’t. Toni and the reader are put off by her lack of discretion.

You tour Toni from room to room through the party, introducing characters. You’ve done a great job. When the chapter ends, the reader has a fix on everybody.

The problem is that if Karen doesn’t show up again until four more chapters go by, your reader may recognize her name and may remember that she’s Klutzy Karen, but little else. Your hard work in the first chapter was wasted.

Of course, some characters are memorable whenever they appear. The reader is likely to remember Christopher, the sentient lizard, even if fifty pages go by between appearances – unless your other characters include five other thinking animals. A potential love interest is likely to stand out and be remembered, likewise a character who threatens the safety of your main.

The advantage of a first-time meeting is that you don’t need an excuse to describe the new character. Toni will be paying particular attention to someone unfamiliar. She’ll notice Abigail’s erect posture and perfect speech. However, if she’s known Abigail for three years, you’ll have a harder time revealing these traits. You’ll need a hook. You can have Bartholomew comment on Abigail’s characteristics, if he’s likely to. You can have Abigail herself say something about them, for example, if someone made fun of her, she can tell her pal Toni about the ridicule. Or you can have the traits become temporarily prominent in Toni’s mind, as in, Abigail was freaked. She always talked like every word was worth ten dollars, but today each one was a museum piece. I wanted to hug her, but she was standing so straight and sharp I thought I might cut myself.

If you bring characters in only as they’re needed, the new entries will be fresh when they appear. Some may be necessary only for a scene or two, and you don’t have to burden the reader with remembering them from an earlier point in the story.

In the comments that followed my recent post called “Foggy First Page” I was surprised at how many people are untroubled by ambiguity, so I wouldn’t worry much about starting new characters in the middle of your story. A common writer’s maxim is: Trust the reader. If Bartholomew barges into Abigail’s work cubicle ranting about Chaos Theory, the reader will probably be willing to wait to understand him and his role in the story.

As for character-developing scenes, I suggest you reveal your other characters’ development only in relation to your main. If Bartholomew is your main, for example, and Abigail an important secondary, she will be fleshed out as needed in relation to Bartholomew. If Abigail’s emotional growth isn’t important to him, it doesn’t matter how her character evolves. You don’t want to distract the reader from the thrust of your tale.

A few prompts:

• Christopher the lizard is the main character in a love story between him and – you pick, another lizard or anybody else, a different animal, an extra-terrestrial, a human, an elf. Abigail and Bartholomew are important secondary characters. Write the story.

• Write a cast-of-characters list along with short descriptions of each one. Start a story in which you rely on your list and bring on your characters as if the reader has always known them.

• Make a cast-of-characters list for a story you’re already working on. Rewrite your first three chapters (or as much as you like) relying on the list and not repeating any of the information. Then drop the list and descriptions and put back in only what you need to help the reader identify these characters. Do you find that you have to return your story to its original state, or have you been able to leave some material out? Is your revision leaner?

• Write the party scene I started above. Have Toni meet lots of people and make as many as possible memorable. This may be a lively party, with arguments, food fights, vigorous dancing, whatever.

• Toni is twelve years old. She’s just been taken to her new foster home. It’s dinnertime, and she’s meeting the characters in her new, large family. Write the scene and as much that follows as you like.

Have fun and save what you write!

The Scene-ic Route

Before I start, you may not know this but June is National Audio Book Month. It’s also forty-two Other-Things Month, like Accordion Awareness, Turkey Lovers, Papaya (also September – greedy papaya people), Dairy, and, weirdly, Dairy Alternative. My favorite is Bathroom Reading. Really! Here’s the link: http://womeninbusiness.about.com/od/diversityeventcalendars/a/nat-month-june.htm. See for yourself.

Back to National Audio Book Month, Random House is releasing a CD audio book of Dave at Night, and I was interviewed to promote the release. If you go to my website and click on videos, you can watch it. I like the interview and I’m thrilled about the release. Dave at Night is probably my least known novel and possibly my favorite. The reading is also my favorite of all my book recordings, so I hope the audio book finds lots of listeners.

Also, I missed an opportunity in last week’s post. I made up this passage: Marisette gizoxed down the previo at zyonga speed. If the ashymi didn’t boosheg, she’d find herself and the precious kizage in the boiling svik and all would be owped. But I didn’t think of mentioning “Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carroll’s amazing nonsense poem from Through the Looking Glass. The poem is full of action that’s understandable and exciting and words that either have no meaning or an elusive meaning that we can almost grasp but not quite. If you don’t know the poem, I recommend it and recommend that you read it aloud after you’ve read it to yourself a few times. Here’s the second stanza:

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Now for the main post. On April 1, 2011, bluekiwii wrote, …I don’t have a problem with linking a few scenes together, but instead, have a problem with how the scenes fit in the grand scheme of things–in the overall storyline. I would have no problem linking two scenes together, but linking 4 or more scenes together that are very different from each other to form a cohesive story–an overall theme–is far more difficult. Still the entry gave me some food for thought. Should writers have a clear picture of what the story will be about or should you flesh out each scene, edit them to form a cohesive whole, and think of possibilities as it goes along? Personally, I want to have a good picture of what type of story I want to create, instead of spontaneously making random scenes with the same characters.

No two writers write alike, and the only wrong way to write is not to write.

I write consecutively for the most part, start to finish. Occasionally I’ll see a scene glimmering in the near distance and write it. But even though I write in order, I don’t have a clear picture of the story as a whole. In the case of the mystery I’m struggling through right now, I know the it will be solved but have no clue as to how, nor have I figured out who the villain is. But I have a detailed image of a moment at the end that will put the source of the story problem away forever.

Does this murkiness make me worry? Yes.

Some of my books have been easier to steer through than others, but my process is generally to hack my way across a plot jungle. Occasionally I climb to higher ground, but – murdering the metaphor – usually I can’t see the forest for the trees.

Meanwhile, I’m writing tons of notes, asking myself plot questions, sometimes confusing myself even more, sometimes gaining understanding.

I’ve recently been able to frame the new mystery, Beloved Elodie (although this no longer seems a fitting title), in my mind as a quest, a simple story shape that I’ve used many times and that I’m hoping will help me now. Elodie’s quest is to discover a thief, and my job alternates between throwing up obstacles and helping her out.

If you can see your story this way, as a quest, my strategy may help you too. You may not know what the obstacles will be, but you don’t have to, you only have to know that you’ll need to create them and then solve them.

I read somewhere that if you can’t express your plot in a few sentences it’s not working. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m sure that a simple story shape is easier to work with. I love simple story shapes, which may be why I go to fairytales for inspiration. The charm of a simple plot is that you can fool around, embroider, have a great time, and still rely on a straight course from start to finish. The occasions when I’ve understood the simplicity of my form have been my happiest writing experiences.

A quest is simple. Here’s another simple idea: Two characters hate each other, and the story is about their enmity and each one’s attempts to destroy the other. Maybe one character is bad and the other good, or maybe they’re both good or bad, or they’re both an ordinary complicated assortment of qualities. Three possibilities suggest themselves: one will defeat the other (a suspense story); both will be vanquished (a tragedy); they’ll come together and both triumph (a love story). Maybe this is a quest tale too, a double quest, one for each protagonist.

See if you can come up with simple story shapes you can use. Think of books you love and search for the simplicity. Hamlet can be seen as a quest for understanding, Pride and Prejudice a quest for balance. You can take these frameworks and adapt them. Probably you won’t have your hero addressed by his father’s ghost, but he could receive a mysterious communication about the death of a loved one. You can bring in false friends and true and a dastardly deed by characters who seem above reproach.

However, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the scene approach bluekiwii asks about. I like books of linked short stories, the same characters, more or less, appearing in each story. Some characters grow and change, some remain the same. There’s no overall climax but there’s drama in each story. I come to care about the important characters. The end doesn’t have to nail everything down, just has to make me feel I’ve traveled with these people and we’ve had an interesting time together.

There may be another way to look at your scenes, other than as linked short stories. If you have a bunch of scenes that don’t line up, hunt for common themes. See if the conflicts repeat. Consider what your characters want. Is there conflict in their desires? If Quinn gets what he wants, will Wendy lose out? Who from all the scenes can be your main characters?

Try writing a short summary of each scene on an index card then spread them out somewhere. Move them around. Do they fall into a natural order? Does one suggest itself as a beginning? One as the end or, if not the absolute end, as coming late in the overall story? When you think about the characters, do you see threads? Can you find a simple story shape?

You can even bring in scenes from some of your other stories that haven’t worked out but seem like they might connect thematically to the new one. Edgar in your old story can turn into Quinn with a few personality adjustments.

Not that I’ve tried it, but this seems like a wonderful way to write a book.

Some prompts courtesy of Lewis Carroll:

∙ Alice In Wonderland is beloved by many but not me, and if you adore it this prompt may not be for you. In my opinion, Alice’s actions are random. She’s curious but never concerned. She has no skin in the game, which I believe makes it a book with plot problems. So write a scene for Alice, could be a new beginning for the novel or come from a later point, that gives her a problem and a reason to do what she does. Or choose another character and make him or her the main character of a story or a novel.

∙ Reread “Jabberwocky.” There’s a simple story shape if I’ve ever seen one. Flesh it out with detail. What’s the relationship between the narrator and his (her?) son? What’s at stake in the battle? Develop other characters. Turn it into a novel if you like.

∙ From last week, incorporate nonsense words into a paragraph or a poem. Max out on the made-up words while still letting the reader gain a sense of what’s going on. If you try a poem, remember that rhyming is a snap with nonsense words. Then, if you feel like it, post your results here. I’d love to see them.

Have fun and save what you write!

Foggy first page

On March 31, 2011, Jill wrote, How confused do you think readers are willing to be in the very beginning of a story? Most of the time the reason I quit on a book is because I can only handle so much confusion on the first page. I like to be ambiguous in my stories to keep readers interested but I am afraid to do that at the beginning. Any thoughts?

Tastes differ. I’m with you, though. I’m daunted if I have to contend with too much on the first page. I’ll probably hang in a while unless the grammar is bad. If it is, I’m out. And if the confusion doesn’t clear up by the second chapter, I’m done – unless something in the incomprehensibility has charmed me.

Recently I began The Good Son by Craig Nova, definitely a serious novel for adults. I don’t read much literary fiction and the jacket copy got me worried that I’d be in over my head. But the beginning of the book was so welcoming that I jumped right in. Here’s the first sentence: My father is a coarse, charming man, a lawyer, and a good one, and when I was flying over the desert and the German pursuit pilot began pouring round after round into my plane (a P-40), I was thinking of how I learned to drive, and how it affected my father.

What an achievement this sentence is! Three topics are introduced and I want to know about all of them: the father, the war, and the driving. I’m not far into the book, but the learning-to-drive incident does not disappoint.

Some readers are perfectly content not to understand immediately. Some like the challenge and don’t want anything straightforward. When such readers are also writers, they’re likely to write prose of the sort they like to read.

This is fine. Fortunately, nothing is for everybody. It’s a losing proposition to try to write a book that no one will fail to love. You’re doomed to frustration.

However, some books succeed with millions of readers, and some of these are great books, Pride and Prejudice, for example. Some bestsellers may not be beautifully written or the characters well developed, but the theme is universal or the subject fascinating.

If events are very exciting at the beginning of a story, I’ll probably stick around. For instance, I’d keep reading beyond this: Marisette gizoxed down the previo at zyonga speed. If the ashymi didn’t boosheg, she’d find herself and her precious kizage in the boiling svik and all would be owped.

I’d understand that Marisette was in trouble and I’d want to know what the precious kizage and the hot svik were and why I should care. But if the crazy words went on much longer without an explanation in standard English, I’d give up.

Jill, I’m not sure what you mean by ambiguous in your question. If you mean you like to misdirect your reader for a purpose, I’m all for it. Suppose a drapery tie is the murder weapon in a mystery and you’re describing the living room where the drapery tie stays when it’s not strangling anyone. The victim, a high school student named Hope, is only a missing person at this point, but she’s beginning to be presumed dead. Detective Rosalie Swift has been talking to Hope’s teachers, and right now she’s in the living room of Algebra teacher Max Kilcannon, who will turn out to be the murderer. It’s the detective’s curse, Rosalie thought, to look for murder weapons everywhere. She scanned the room, a fuddy-duddy place, she thought – over-stuffed chairs, the couch with cloth protectors at the ends of the arms, side tables in dark wood, a coffee-table book on the coffee table, still lifes of flowers hanging on the walls in ornate frames, heavy green drapes tied back with cream-colored, ties, and a gas fireplace. Why a poker for a gas fire? How pretentious! The poker could be the weapon, except that a poker appeared in so many detective stories that no self-respecting murderer would use one. The coffee-table book, too, could bludgeon someone to death. The good teacher would also have his pick of cushions to suffocate poor Hope with. Or he could just leave her alone in here for a few hours and she’d die of boredom.

There. The drapery ties are shown, but they’re buried in the rest of the description. When the murder weapon is revealed, the reader can page back to this spot and find it.

In The Two Princesses of Bamarre I used specters more than once to misdirect the reader, and what fun that was!

But in Two Princesses and in the example above, the writing is clear, nothing ambiguous about it. Clarity is a sine qua non (an essential condition) of good storytelling. We don’t want to throw mud in the reader’s eyes. If you’re worried about catching the reader’s interest from the outset, go with action. Excellent beginnings can open many ways, but action is the most direct, the glucose of storytelling.

Here are some misdirecting prompts:

∙ Hope is in Jim Kilcannon’s living room. Her parents have hired him to tutor her to get her grade up. In this version he may or may not be the murderer; you, the author, haven’t decided yet. Write a scene in which you make Hope and the reader alternately creeped out and reassured by Kilcannon .

∙ On her way home from her first tutoring session, Hope passes a psychic’s shop and goes in. Being behind in Algebra isn’t her only problem. Write the scene with the psychic and mislead the reader about the source of Hope’s danger.

∙ Hope is now a baronet’s daughter in the Kingdom of Kestor. She’s been warned that her life is at risk, and has been invited to tea at the palace of the king’s youngest brother. She has reason to suspect that one of the other guests intends to kill her. Write the tea and make the reader suspect several guests.

Have fun and save what you write!

Unfinished business

Last week welliewalks posted to the guestbook on my website that she hadn’t been able to post directly on the blog, so I asked you all, and the problem seems to be more widespread than just one person, although not universal. The trouble isn’t with us, says David, my high-tech husband, so we can’t fix it. If you can’t get through, just post your comment on the guestbook (following the link on the right to the website) and I’ll approve it there and move it to the blog. I love to hear from you!

On March 29, 2011, Erica wrote, Okay, so I was wondering, I always have tons of different story ideas (like notebooks full of them) but I can never finish them. At this point I have one short story done and one picture book rough draft for my English class. I can think in my head of almost exactly how I want it to end but I can never get it out on paper. My mom thinks that it’s because if I finish something then I will feel the need to do something with it and she thinks that it’s because I’m afraid people won’t like it. Whatever the reason I don’t know how to fix it. Help?

Many are afflicted with unfinished-itis, and the reasons vary, so here are some possibilities:

Erica’s mother suggested one. Finishing is the first step toward exposing your work to criticism and even rejection in the sometimes cold, cruel publishing world. Your fingers may curl into fists at the prospect, and fists can’t type.

A solution to this may be to find friends, relatives, teachers, librarians, a critique group, to show your stories to even before they’re finished. Encouragement may push you to completion. The writers in particular may have useful ideas about where to go next in your tale. Showing at an early stage can reduce the fear of criticism, if not wipe it out entirely. You’re in an early stage. Naturally your story needs work. Helpful advice is welcome.

And just a word about unhelpful advice and unhelpful criticism. See it for what it is, unhelpful, useless, irrelevant. If somebody reads what you’ve got and says something like, “I hope you have other talents, dear,” ignore and do not show your writing to this person again. To yourself you can say, Yeah, and how many books have you written, Mister or Missus?

Unhelpful advice can masquerade as the helpful sort and sometimes it’s hard to tell one from the other. Someone might say, “You should try to make your prose more lyrical.” Press for specifics. “What do you mean?” you ask. “Where in my story is lyricism needed?” If your critic can explain, then this may be useful, but if she says, “That’s just what I think,” put it in the unhelpful category.

You may be someone who needs a deadline. If you’re not writing a piece that’s due in school and no publisher is clamoring for your work, you may not feel the urgency, and when another idea comes along, you may jump ship. So set a deadline. If you need to, enlist a friend to help you stick to your writing. Whether you meet the deadline or not, you’ll get more done, and you can always set a new deadline. I think this is why NaNoWriMo is so terrific. It pushes you. Even if you don’t make the word count, you’ve written a lot.

You may not have found the right story, the one that finishes itself. If you keep writing, you’ll get there.

The plodding nature of writing gets to you. You start resisting writing the details. Your story is magical, thrilling. Why do you have to mention that your main character’s feet hurt or that her best friend has a dab of catsup on her chin? And why can’t you just tell the reader that the friend is loyal and also illogical? Why do you also have to demonstrate it? You want to put in the broad strokes, the essence of your story, and be done with it. Eventually you get so sick of the details that you give up and start something shiny and new. Or you write down ideas, which don’t have to be detailed at all.

The remedy here is to limit the task. Write a scene. Don’t think about how many scenes remain. After you’ve written one, write another, little dotted lines along the road of your narrative.

If you despise writing the scenes and can’t bring yourself to complete any of them, but you adore coming up with ideas and planning out stories, you may be more of a storyteller than a novelist. Or graphic novels may be the right form for you.

You don’t want the characters you love to suffer, so you get stuck. I suspect this is afflicting me now in the second mystery. I love Elodie, and I have to make some awful things happen to her, so I’m progressing at the speed of an inchworm. Since I’m facing this myself, it’s hard to know what the solution is. In my case it’s probably just inching along, and possibly that will work for you, too. Pat yourself heartily on the back at the end of each completed page.

Or jump right in and bring the dreadful event about. Then write up to it, if you’re not at that point in your story. If you don’t even know what the tragedy will be yet, write a scene in which your main endures misery, which may not be the misery you eventually use. See how he responds. Decide what helps him pull through if he does pull through. Then, when you get to the actual crisis you’ll have prepared yourself. I think I’m going to try this as soon as I finish wrtiting this post!

You haven’t explored any of your ideas sufficiently to know which ones are keepers. Pick three of your ideas or your petered-out drafts. In notes ask yourself questions. What lit you up when you started? What turned you off? What will it take to bring back the spark? (No negativity allowed.) How can you define your main character so you want to have a long-term relationship with her? What fascinates you about her? Ask yourself about setting, plot, other characters. Quit note-writing and move over to the story when you find yourself eager to start.

What I’m suggesting are just ideas, which may not work for you. The most important thing is to keep writing, whether you finish something next month or three years from now.

These prompts need some setting up:

Right now I’m riding home from New York on a commuter train, a wonderful place for observation. Most of the seats face the backs of the seats ahead, like in an airplane, but some, the less desirable ones, where I am, face the fronts of the seats ahead without good legroom between. I’m in an aisle seat. There’s a middle seat and a window seat next to me, across from me the same. When I sat down at Grand Central where the train originates, the only other occupant of our six-seat grouping was a man in the window seat facing me, who had placed his briefcase on the seat facing him, a little piggishly, I think, but it’s not interfering with my comfort so I don’t care.

After a few minutes a woman sits across from me and we arrange our legs so they don’t touch. She puts her huge purse on the seat between her and the man, also a little piggishly. Then a woman comes along and wants to sit in the other window seat, the one next to me, with one empty seat between us. She asks if the briefcase is mine and I say no. The man across from her says it’s his and doesn’t move it or offer to move it. How selfish! The woman doesn’t ask him to move it either and rides awkwardly on the (slightly) raised area between the window seat and the middle seat next to me. How meek! I resist the temptation to tell the man to be a gentleman and the woman to grow a spine.

(Of course they may each have had reasonable reasons for their behavior.) So here come the prompts:

• Write a scene from the childhood of each passenger that suggests how they became their future adult selves.

• He is King Oogu the Terrible, ruler of the kingdom of Ploog (or more serious names), and she is a member of a rebel group plotting to overthrow him. Write a scene. How will her meekness play out? How will his selfishness?

• He is Oogu, dictator of a small republic. She is a diplomat given the task of reforming him. Write a scene.

• As young people, they oppose each other on their school debating team. Pick a debate topic you know something about. Write a debate with him winning; then rewrite it with her winning.

• They’re in high school. He asks her to the junior prom. Write what happens.

• Both are fleeing the devastation caused by Queen Ooga the Awful. He’s the son of a peasant, she the daughter of a scholar. Circumstances throw them together, both in danger. They will survive only if they cooperate. Write a scene.

• Invent any other situations you like for these two.

Have fun and save what you write!