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!

Is There A Problem?

A mid-week post to ask if people are having trouble posting to the blog. Welliewalks posted to the guestbook page on my website because she couldn’t get through. If you’re having a problem too, would you also let me know on my guestbook page? If no problem, please post to the blog. If something is wrong we’ll get right on it. I love to hear from you!

Playing doubles

On March 27, 2011, welliewalks wrote, I have two MCs in my story and I switch off writing them- they each get their own chapters. They’ve never seen each other before, but in the book, their lives are entwined and they end up meeting each other (kinda early on). They are very different- one doesn’t trust anyone but is close to her family (and trusts them). The other is hurt (emotionally) and feels betrayed by one family member. I’m having trouble making them have their own voices. Any suggestions?

Then Jenna Royal wrote, @Welliewalks – If you’ve ever read The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan, that is a really good example of different voices. I’ve never attempted to write a story with multiple characters in first person POV, but I would think that it might help to give each character a distinct way of reacting to certain situations, or maybe a list of words that each character uses frequently. By making your characters recognizable, you make the voices more obvious. Also, maybe setting characteristics such as a squeaky door or a cold climate, or a view or sudden storms would help. If you can give traits that will show through in the narration, it will lend itself to a more distinct voice.
These are great ideas. I haven’t read The Red Pyramid, but I did use the Search-Inside-This-Book feature on Amazon to get an impression. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I noticed that the sentences were shorter and more direct in the Carter chapters I looked at, while his sister seemed to use more modifiers and more dependent clauses.

For all of you who are writing from multiple narrators or who might like to, for the next week listen to the conversation around you. (This is a always good practice for writers.) You may notice that your best friend has trouble staying on topic. One thing reminds him of another, and soon he’s forgotten what he started with. Your other close friend keeps tugging him back. A third pal tires of any subject quickly. And you, writer that you are, find yourself suggesting ways to improve the telling. Each of you would be different narrators on the page.

Here’s a prompt early in the post: Pick a day during your week of listening, a day you haven’t spent alone. Write this day in the persona of each of the people you were with, a page or so for each person, up to, say, five narrators. You are likely to find that it’s harder with some, easier with others. For one or two it may be agony to squeeze out a page and for others you can hardly stop writing. Your cousin Ida may baffle you. You never know where she’s coming from, so how can you write her take on the day? That’s where being a fiction writer comes in. If Ida gives you little to go on, imagine the possibilities. Speculate about what might have happened to her before you got together. Was she awake half the night? Did she win a tennis match the day before? She may be very private, so you have to invent her opinions. Make her adore someone and have only contempt for someone else. Give her a sore knee that saps her attention. Have her mentally working on a homework assignment.

When you’re finished, revise until each telling is distinctive. Remember Jenna Royal’s suggestions. Here are some more: Along the lines of word choice, main character Jayne may be more educated than main character Jerry. Her vocabulary may be studded with fifty-dollar words; his may be monosyllabic. Try what Rick Riordan seems to do, too – vary the sentence structure from one character to the other. You can change the emotional tone as well. Jerry worries constantly, so his chapters are full of dire predictions and better-than-expected outcomes. Jayne analyzes everyone; her chapters teem with insight, right or wrong. Thought process is involved here. Jerry is intuitive. He doesn’t reason carefully but jumps from A to M without stopping at each letter in between, and his thoughts on the page reveal his process. Jayne plods in her thinking. She gets from A to M but she lingers at each letter; she may even pause at C-and-a-half before moving on to D.

Character traits come into it, too. Jerry is quick to anger, and his narration will reflect that. Jayne buries her rage; her narration may show the effort this causes her. She makes excuses for people, while Jerry won’t give anyone a break.

So far we have vocabulary, sentence structure, emotional tone, thought process, and character. Situation is essential also. The two main characters won’t always be together. If Jerry is in a desert and Jayne in a castle, the reader will have no trouble distinguishing them, as Jenna Royal suggested.

Two narrators are, naturally, two voices. My chapter on voice in Writing Magic may be helpful as well as my post on the subject on September 8th, 2010. The prompt at the end of the Writing Magic chapter and the suggestions above may seem mechanical, but much of writing is mechanical. Inspiration pours in, and we write in a mad burst. Then we go back to deal with the mechanics, which we can call by the more elevated name of technique.

Having said all this, I have to ask if two narrators are necessary. Writing is so hard that there’s no disgrace in making the job easier when we can. An omniscient third-person point of view might succeed here, or a limited third person that shifts from Jerry to Jayne might too. By using third person you can show how each character views events, but you don’t have to invent a voice for each except in dialogue, when you will certainly want them to sound different. I use two narrators in my Mesopotamian fantasy, Ever, because I couldn’t seem to tell the story any other way, and I tried. If this is the case for you or even if you’re just experimenting, go for it, but if the split narration isn’t working, remember that there are other options.

Welliewalks, your two main characters both seem to have been hurt, one by people outside the family and the other from within. You may be having trouble because of the similarity. I know this is a fundamental change (the kind I often find myself making 250 pages into a novel), but might you lift the burden from one of them and make him or her quirky in some other way? If you try this, you may find that they will write themselves, always a writer’s dream.

There’s a prompt near the beginning of the post, and here’s another:

Jerry and Jayne are classmates separated by disaster, political or meteorological or geological, whatever. Jerry is trying to find Jayne, and Jayne is trying not to be found. You decide if they have cell phones or if this isn’t a high-tech world. Write a single chapter from the POV of each. Keep going if you like.

Have fun, and save what you write!

We Are What We Read

Blog readers have asked me several times about publication possibilities for teens, and yesterday I spent a few hours with HarperCollins people who told me about an interesting opportunity. Some of you may know about it already, but for those who don’t, it’s Inkpop (inkpop.com), where you can post your writing for peer review (review by other Inkpoppers). The five highest ranked pieces are looked at by HarperCollins editors, and publication is possible. I just visited the site, and there’s also a contest that looks promising. If you try the site, please let me know how it goes. And good luck!

Also, the HarperCollins folks confirmed what I’ve said and others on the blog have said, particularly April, that editors don’t care how old you are if your writing shines.

I’ve muddied the waters about foreshadowing, which seems to be a broader term than I thought. Dictionary.com defines foreshadow as “to show or indicate beforehand; prefigure” – totally nonspecific. I googled the word and was forced to conclude that any sort of hint to the reader regarding future events is foreshadowing. A hint could be in the setting, like, of course, a haunted house. Or in dialogue. I got this from Wikipedia: “In Romeo and Juliet, both main characters state early on that they would rather defy their families and be in love than live apart.” Apparently that’s an example of foreshadowing.

Wikipedia also includes omens and prophesies as forms of foreshadowing. It refers to the classic instance of the Greek myth of Oedipus, whose father is told by the Delphic oracle that his son will kill him. We read the myth never doubting that the oracle will be proven right no matter what Laius (the father) does to save himself. I don’t think foreknowledge spoils the story, and Laius’s demise comes in the middle not the end. After that we’re waiting for Oedipus to discover his crime, committed casually, in ignorance, because the oracle didn’t speak to him. The inevitability of the tragedy adds to its weight.

Foreshadowing in this broader definition is quite inclusive, and I’m getting confused. I suppose one could call character development foreshadowing. As we readers get to know a character the field of possible actions for him narrows. For example, we learn that Jim never lies. When a situation arises where lying would spare him a ton of trouble, we worry. We’ve been warned. Does the author think, I’m foreshadowing, when she establishes Jim’s personality? Darned if I know.

Here’s a funny article about foreshadowing: http://www.theonion.com/articles/now-that-ive-learned-about-foreshadowing-im-going,11392/. It covers all the bases and shows how hackneyed foreshadowing can be when handled clumsily or as it’s been used a billion times before by other writers.

On Wikipedia I came across Chekhov’s gun as an example of foreshadowing, and I’d never thought of it this way before. Paraphrasing, the idea is that if a gun is shown in the first act of a play, it has to go off in the last act. When the audience sees that gun, it’s put on notice.

I’d always thought the meaning of Chekhov’s gun had to do with economy not foreshadowing, with not cluttering up a story. If we put a gun in we have to do something with it or we wasted words. On the other hand, clutter can misdirect a reader delightfully. And what if the gun is part of a weapon’s display? Or a key to a character rather than to the story’s crisis?

Storytelling is complicated. My husband and I watch a TV mystery series called Bones. One of the characters is pregnant, and in the show both she and her husband have a recessive gene that causes blindness, so there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the baby will be blind. The latest episode we watched involved a deaf-mute girl, and I’ve been wondering if this is foreshadowing that means the baby will be blind, or if the viewer is just meant to fret more. I’m fine either way. If it’s foreshadowing it’s subtle–

Which I recommend. It’s the heavy-handed kind I described in the last post that I’m not fond of, except in the instances I mentioned.

Now for this week’s question. On March 3, 2011, Elizabeth wrote, At some point would you be able to address the question of “Why do we read” and the (very hard) issue of balancing your reading with both fiction and non-fiction?

I asked for clarification and Elizabeth wrote, Last semester my husband taught a literature course, and he opened the semester with the question, “Why do we read?”

There is no one right answer, and it can be summed up that we read to expand our intellect and imagination. Which leads to the next question I asked about: Limiting yourself (the reader) to only one type of material.

The problem of reading only fantasy books for whatever reason: because you’re escaping from trouble at home or school, because you think you’re a vampire, or even because you’re afraid of learning something new.

I know that young people do this a lot and I’m finding as I get older that it’s not something that’s solved just by passing your 21st (and I don’t anticipate 30 to be magical either) birthday. I ask, Ms. Levine, because I hope that you can help encourage me (there I said it) and others like me, to be better.
Oy! I am not a reading paragon, and I’m not much of a reader at all these days. As a young person I was much better. One summer in high school I decided to read Russian novels, and I did. I decided to try Faulkner and loved the book I picked.

In those days I zoomed through books. I would have sworn off eating before I’d have sworn off reading, if I’d been forced to give up either one. And I used to fantasize about having to make that kind of choice!

Nowadays I read like a writer, which means I edit as I read. If I find myself editing a sentence in every paragraph, I abandon the book because there’s no pleasure in it. I just read Victory, a middle-grade historical fiction novel by Susan Cooper. The writing is lovely, so I was able to lose myself in it. Before that I tried a mystery but the author used the word slightly so often I gave up. Each slightly grated on me more than the one before. Why couldn’t the author commit the characters completely to an action?

I have nothing against pleasure reading and escape reading. I’ve mentioned before that I adore Terry Pratchett. When I’m reading one of his books I’m wallowing in delight. I haven’t zipped through his entire body of work only because I’m not reading much.

Every summer I teach the writing-for-children workshop at a conference in Pennsylvania, and there’s always a reading list that gets me out of my comfort zone. I read two novels for adults and a middle-grade nonfiction book that I never would have come across otherwise and that I loved. The novels were The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean and You’re Not You by Michelle Wildgen. The nonfiction was Shipwrecked at the Bottom of the World by Jennifer Armstrong. I’ve struggled through several other books on the lists, too. I even attempted to read a nonfiction tome about chaos theory that was a mile or more above my math skills. I gave up when the only words I understood were the articles and prepositions! Still, the effort expended on all these books was worthwhile; I strengthened my reading muscles, and I believe my writing muscles benefited too.

If you’re still in school, books are being assigned to you. I think this is good even when it feels bad. If you’re out of school, ask a librarian or bookseller for suggestions. Tell him you want to explore new reading worlds – mysteries, historical fiction, sci fi, literary fiction, history, economics, memoir, science. Maybe you write only fantasy and that’s all you ever want to write, but it’s probably best to read other genres. Sticking to yours may narrow your concept of what’s possible and may make you too imitative. I’ll avoid reading a novel based on a fairy tale I might want to use someday because the other writer’s take would lodge in my mind. A contemporary fiction book, on the other hand, may give me a great, utterly original fantasy idea.

I hesitate to say this, but if you’re glued to a single genre you may be reading junk sometimes. The story may be exciting but the writing uninspired. And you may become inured to this kind of prose; you may lose or never gain the ability to tell the mediocre from the magnificent. Sorry! However, if you push yourself, you’re likely to encounter writing that will stun you with its beauty, elegance, risk-taking, surprise. Think about style as you read. Consider what’s a good sentence and what’s less pleasing. The effort will show in your own work. Anyway, that’s what I believe.

Not that you should try to write like Fitzgerald or anybody else. Or torment yourself because your sentences aren’t as shapely as, say, Gregory McDonald’s. Let the process be unconscious. Let the language seep into you, slosh around in your gray matter, and descend, slowly, slowly, into your writing fingers.

Prompts:

∙ Consider yourself. Write a list of your qualities, physical, emotional, intellectual. Don’t be hard on yourself, just objective so that the next step will work. Now design a character who is your opposite. Changing gender is optional, but if you have a strong chin, give your character a weak one. If you are calm, make her excitable. Think about a challenge one of your friends is facing right now. If it’s not a difficult challenge, make it harder and throw your opposite into dealing with it. Write a story about what happens. You can always move the problem into the realm of fantasy. If your friend, for example, has a difficult stepfather, you can turn him into an evil magician guardian.

∙ If you never have, read a book by Mark Twain, one of my absolute favorite writers. If you’re in high school and above, read a novel by Anne Tyler, another of my faves. Ask your librarian to recommend a book that he thinks is beautifully written. Read it.

∙ This is, I believe, an impossible prompt, so the idea is to push against the impossible. Write a story about a child (any age) who is lost in a city, fantasy or real, past or present. Attempt to write about him without doing any sort of foreshadowing. Try to make the reader surprised at every turn.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Futurology

Before I start, I’ve been worrying about this: If you’ve asked me a question on the blog and I’ve said that I put it on my list but I never seem to get to it, please remind me. I work on three computers and my fear is that I may fail to transfer a question to all the computers and then it may get overwritten. If this has happened to you, sorry!

On March 5, 2011, Piper wrote, …I was wondering if you could write a post on how to write beginnings… I rewrite mine about a thousand times...

Piper, when I promised you a post, I forgot that I’d already written one on the subject. My post of November 3, 2010, is all about beginnings, and two chapters of Writing Magic are devoted to the subject. I suggest you look in both places. Then, if you have more specific questions, please post them.

However, I do want to respond to the rewriting part of your question. A thousand times is too many! A hundred times is too many. If you keep revising before going on to the rest of your story, you may be making extra work for yourself. You may not know what the beginning needs to be until you reach the end. If you do finish and go back and find yourself polishing and polishing and never feeling satisfied, put your story aside for a month – or a week, if you can’t bear to wait a month – and then see what you think. You may discover that your beginning works just fine.

Moving along to the next question, on March 6, 2011, Kitty wrote, ...I was wondering if you had any advice on foreshadowing? I feel like the slight hints that I drop are too obvious or so slight that no one picks up on them, but I’m not sure how to make them less obvious.

My beloved writing teacher, who taught a workshop that I took again and again, disliked foreshadowing, so I eschew it. If Bunny (my teacher) was against it, so was I.

However, to answer the question, I have to consider and reconsider.

First of all, as usual, if you can make foreshadowing work, go for it.

Second, many great books, especially old books, classics even, use foreshadowing. You might see something like, Dear Reader, if I had known in 1842 what I now know in 1862, I never would have entered the Tea Emporium on that fateful July day.
If you’re writing an old-fashioned story in an old-timey voice, foreshadowing may be perfect.

And foreshadowing can be funny if you want to be funny. Take the example above: Dear Reader, if I had known in 1842 what I now know in 1862, I never would have entered the Tea Emporium on that fateful July day. You can add: I would have been spared many sleepless nights and a right earlobe the size of a grapefruit. Sprinkle silly foreshadowing in at regular intervals and the reader will be looking for it and laughing in advance.

Where the problem comes in is when we foreshadow to prop up a dull part of our story. It’s tempting. Things are going slow right now, but I’m letting you know that the action is going to pick up. The main character is eating a PBJ sandwich. Ordinary, right? We don’t want the reader to get bored so we tell her that there will be dire consequences later. However, we want to keep the story interesting in the present moment, not through foreshadowing but through the ordinary devices of good storytelling: characters the reader cares about, tension between characters, a difficult goal, a terrible situation.

Also, foreshadowing takes the reader out of the immediate moment and makes her aware of the narrator. If the book is told by a first-person main character, foreshadowing reminds the reader that the narrator isn’t participating in events as they unfold but looking back on them. Sometimes this is okay, but sometimes the foreshadowing is an interruption.

There are many ways of suggesting future trouble without foreshadowing. In both Ella Enchanted and Fairest, gnomes can see into the future, although dimly, and in both books they prophesy for the main character. The prophesies make the reader worry about the future without interrupting the action. Dreams, too, can augur ill. If I remember right, dreams are used effectively in Gone With the Wind. It’s a bad sign when Scarlet O’Hara dreams of a child.

However, you don’t need portents or dreams to worry the reader. The most mundane events can do it. For example, Ron Banks-Butler is talking to Hallie Butler, his older cousin, who’s two grades ahead of him in high school. Hallie asks him who he has for History. Here’s the dialogue:
    Ron says, “Mr. Twillet. Is he good?”
    “Good? Twillet doesn’t know what good means, and he has it in for kids with two last names.”
    “What does he do to them?”
    “Ron, you don’t want to know. It will just give you nightmares.”

Uh oh.

Or Clara is boarding an airplane in winter. The pilot announces that they have to wait while the ground crew de-ices the wings. Finally the plane begins to taxi, but Clara sees out her window a slick patch on the wing. She’s sure it’s ice. When she points the patch out the patch to the flight attendant, he tells her everything is fine.

Uh oh.

If you are a devoted foreshadower and are having withdrawal symptoms even thinking about changing your method, stick with what you’re doing. But when you’ve finished your first draft, try deleting the foreshadowing as you revise. If the story is better with it, put it back in. Otherwise, leave it out.

Kitty, I’d stay away from the obvious hints and, if you’re going to foreshadow at all, be subtle. Trust your reader. She’ll catch more than you expect, and even if she misses your hint she’ll understand as events unfold.

Prompts!

∙ Ron is eating that PBJ sandwich. By the time he goes to bed at night a vampire will have sucked the life out of his great uncle who is right now asleep in the den. Without foreshadowing, convey to the reader that disaster lurks.

∙ Clara is on her way to school. It’s an ordinary day. She likes the school, has friends, has studied for her French quiz. Using a different method from the prompt above, show the reader that this will not be an ordinary day, but don’t foreshadow. After you’ve done that, find yet another way to suggest future problems.

∙ Write the first page of a story about a child who lives in a quiet house deep in the countryside. Use foreshadowing to achieve an old-fashioned voice.

∙ Hallie’s cousin has just died in a harrowing way. The death is the start of Hallie’s troubles. Use foreshadowing to make the tragedies funny. Pile dire prediction on dire prediction.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Time’s Up!

I’m happy happy happy to announce that A Tale of Two Castles is out! Released yesterday, and I’m now on tour. Thanks to all you blog readers for your support and eagerness to read the book! Thanks to those of you who weighed in on the title, and more thanks to April for the actual title. This is my nineteenth book, not counting my early, unpublished efforts, and it never ceases to be thrilling.

New on the website is another stop on my book tour, this one in New York City on May 28th. Hope to see a few of you there or at the other events on my tour.

Also, the absolute final cover of Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It, is posted on the website, and I think it’s a hoot. There’s no poem in the book to go with it; my editor said no, but I did write one. I don’t think I posted it on the blog before, so here it is, a blog exclusive:

This Is Just to Say

I have taken a chomp
out
of your precious boat
on its maiden voyage

which
you optimistically
hoped would take you
around the world

Forgive me
I need
more fiberglass
in my diet

End of poem. Please laugh.

On March 4, 2011, Kilmeny of the Ozarks wrote, A couple of posts back you mentioned how often you restart your book. Does that ever make it hard to meet deadlines? I’m having a problem somewhat like this. I’m a “planner” and have to know my plot outline, characters and setting before I start the first draft. And right now I’m taking a course on novel writing from the Institute of Children’s Literature. I’m on my fourth assignment, where I’m supposed to write the first third of my novel. The problem is, when I started to do the edits my instructor noted on my chapter outline–my entire plot changed. Completely. My main character moved out of the real world into the fantasy world and her quest changed, etc. So I had to rewrite that and redo my characters… and I’m still not done. My deadline is in mid April, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to meet it. I guess what I’m asking is: how can I work on this “pre-planning” (characters, setting, research) while also writing? Sorry, I know it’s confusing. Maybe I just need some organizational tips!
And Charlotte wrote, I agree with Kilmeny of the Ozarks–it would be great to see a post about writing with deadlines. Personally, I’ve been working on the same novel for a little over five years now, and I’ve changed and changed and changed the entire plot over and over. It gets me worried that I’ll never finish–and as I want to write books for a living, this is kind of problematic!
How long did Ella take to write? Did you do a lot of editing before sending it to publishers? How did you know when you were done?

I can write about only my own method, and right now it seems as if I work like someone blindfolded, wearing oven mittens, and trying to repair a watch! I don’t outline. Whenever I’ve tried I haven’t been able to stick with the plan. Research is somewhat different, but I don’t know how to pre-plan my characters and my setting except in the most rudimentary way. Everything shifts once I start. Even my research needs change. A Tale of Two Castles is set in a fantasy Middle Ages, so I read about daily life during the period, but when I needed to know about medieval banquets, I returned to the books. (I don’t want to pass the novel off as historically accurate. It’s not. When my plot was incompatible with the facts, the facts went out the window.)

As far as deadlines go, I try to make mine distant enough that I don’t have to stress over meeting them. This mystery novel that’s giving me so much trouble isn’t due until 2014. At this point I’m still pretty secure about making it.

For those who don’t know, if a writer misses a deadline with a book, the book gets rolled over to the publisher’s next list, the next season. My editor assures me this wouldn’t ever be a problem, but I suspect otherwise. Editors move to other publishing houses. Publishers change direction. It’s best to be on time if you can.

Revision deadlines are tighter, but I’m a revising warrior and I blast straight through. I’m known for meeting deadlines, which, I think, gives editors a nice comfort level.

BUT meeting a deadline comes second to making the story as good as you can make it, and often that can’t be rushed. Of course, some working writers don’t have the luxury of lengthy rewriting and repeated fresh starts if the deadline can’t be moved. Then they have to settle for the best they can do in a limited time. Kilmeny of the Ozarks, I missed your mid-April deadline, but for others who are taking courses or attending school, this is another situation where you may have to accept a result you’re not entirely satisfied with. You have to meet school deadlines or sacrifice a good grade, but you can continue with your revisions later if the project interests you.

Kilmeny of the Ozarks, I hope the instructor’s comments that caused all your changes were helpful, even exciting and you thought something like, Wow! If I do this, then I can do that, and it will work in this new way I never thought of before. When I make a u-turn in a manuscript, it’s usually because I’ve glimpsed a better way to go forward. I may not celebrate the hundred or two hundred or three hundred pages I have to rewrite, but probably I should. The understanding I come to, which seems obvious in hindsight, I couldn’t have reached without the blunders.

Every writer has a unique process. You may have to re-outline. Do it or you try a different way of working. I think it’s good advice when possible to just keep going when the story changes, advice that I often don’t have the self control to follow. A friend once told me one should continue even if the gender of the main character changes! I can’t, not when the underlying assumptions of a story shift. Otherwise I soldier on.

When rewriting against a deadline, when actually writing, not taking a shower or walking the dog, put the deadline out of your mind. It’s a distraction. You’re doing the work, which is hard enough without also worrying.

Writing speed varies from writer to writer. Some of us can bang out a novel in three months, some in five years. Ella Enchanted took me two years and I was working full-time at a non-writing job; Fairest took four years and I had quit my day job. Sometimes it depends on the book. Charlotte, you may spend seven years on this book and finish the next one in six months. I find that my struggle alternates: hard book (hard to write), easier, hard, easier. I suspect my subconscious is so exhausted by the difficult ones that it sends me a simpler project next.

On the other hand, maybe what your subconscious is sending up is fear, fear of finishing, fear of sending your work out, fear of rejection, fear of never having another good idea. All of these fears are unsurprising, whether you have them or other readers of the blog do. So maybe it’s time to stick with the latest plot, improve it as much as you can, and move on. Whatever happens to it ultimately, you’ve learned from the writing.

The worth of a book has nothing to do with how long it took to write. The reader doesn’t know if we spent a decade laboring over it or a fevered twenty-one days. He can’t tell if we revised a gross of times or if it went straight from our computers to the copy editor, who didn’t change even a comma.

I had a lot of help with Ella. I was taking a writing class and I belonged to a critique group, but that didn’t stop me from detouring two-hundred pages while my teacher and my critique buddies kept wondering out loud where I was going. When I got back on track I did revise a great deal. I always know I’m done when I find myself changing words and then changing them back.

Writing is weird and mysterious. We control the story and yet it feels like we have no control at all. And both are true.

Prompt time!

∙ Your main character, Eraxo, has an awful case of writer’s block and a looming deadline. Although his writing is blocked, his ingenuity isn’t. In the time freed up by not writing he invents a device to slow time and give himself as long as he needs to work through his writing paralysis. He sits at his strange machine, dons the headset, turns the dials, lifts the levers, and pushes the start button. Everything works. He’s slowed time. But he discovers that place changes with time and that creatures live here who are invisible at humanity’s ordinary tempo, and they are not happy about being discovered. What happens?

∙ Your main character, Eraxa, recognizes she lacks the writing spark, but she wants it. She loves books and the glamour (ha!) of being an author, and her ethics are not strong. She’s as clever as her brother Eraxo, so she invents a time-travel machine. She will go into the future and steal a bestseller, then return to the present and submit it to the book’s publisher as her own. However, in the future she makes a dire discovery about the future of books and reading and publishing. When she returns to the present she has new and unexpected choices that challenge her questionable moral fiber, her courage, and her foresight. What happens?

Have fun, and save what you write!

Getting to Know You

More new stuff on the website: All my book tour appearances are now posted. Just click on News and then on Appearances and you’re there. But to give you an idea, the cities I’ll be in or near are Chicago, Salt Lake City, L.A., Houston, and Boston. I’ll be in Orlando and Milwaukee too, but no signings. This came up the last time I toured, so I’ll repeat that I don’t simply sign at a signing. I read from the new book, talk about it, and take questions before I start signing, and generally there’s time to get a little acquainted. Hope to see some of you!

Also new on the website: The first chapters of all my books have now been posted, so you can take a look. Let me particularly direct you to my least known novel, Dave at Night, which may be my favorite.

Since I’ll be touring for the next two weeks the appearance of the blog is iffy, but I’m going to try to keep it up.

On March 3, 2011, maricafajaffa wrote, …I have this habit of jumping right into the plot. In the story I have been writing, the characters are introduced with a small amount of background and then suddenly the main plot line is introduced. I have tried to stretch it out but I haven’t been able to work it out properly. Please help me. You can read my story on one of my blogs:
http://maricafajaffa-writemyfuture.blogspot.com

and maricafajaffa later added:

I’m not sure if it is bad, but I just get the feeling that I’m getting into the story too quickly and there isn’t much for readers to really get acquainted with the characters.
Then Charlotte commented, @maricafajaffa– sometimes I find you need to write a bunch before even you can get acquainted with the characters. I know I’ve found that it really doesn’t matter how much I figure out about my characters before I start writing (I’m a total fan of the age/gender/height/weight/likes/dislikes/etc forms), because once I’m in the story, they often end up going off and doing their own thing anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s always time to add more about who your characters are in the beginning AFTER you’ve written enough to know that yourself. There’s a huge difference between the first draft and the final product. You don’t have to get it perfect on the first try. Heaven knows I never have. 🙂
Hope this has been helpful…

Thanks, Charlotte. Very helpful, I believe.

maricafajaffa, if you’re worried about us readers, we aren’t likely to care about the characters until they’re in at least a tiny bit of trouble or somehow at risk, no matter what their backgrounds are. Let’s imagine Irena, an abused teenager, for example, in a foster home, living with Mr. and Mrs. Nembler. Irena has her own bedroom and she’s on the phone with her cousin Jeb from her old life. She tells Jeb how much better her situation is now, and the conversation reveals a lot about her. We hear her voice. She says “You’ll never believe” frequently. She tells Jeb about the shopping spree her foster mom took her on. From the elaborate description we get Irena’s fashion sense. From her enthusiasm we realize that her fashion sense has rarely been indulged. We sympathize with her. If she asks Jeb what’s going on with him we see she cares about other people and we may begin to like her. But the stakes are low.

Suppose she ends the phone call and lights a cigarette. Uh oh. A seed of worry has been planted. Is she allowed to smoke in her room? Do her foster parents know she smokes? Is she sabotaging her wonderful new place? We may wonder where she got the money for cigarettes. When the cigarette dwindles to a nubbin she puts it out between her thumb and forefinger. Youch! How self-destructive is this girl? The conversation with Jeb has put us on Irena’s side, and now we’re worried. Now we care.

A million other things can pull us in. The Nemblers’ youngest son, theirs by birth, can announce he doesn’t want Irena living there. Mr. Nembler can enter Irena’s room and close the door behind him, enough to tinkle our alarm bells. Another foster child can warn Irena about Mrs. Nembler’s temper.

I’m naming mundane but potentially important problems; however, you don’t have to go that way. Irena can go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. She glimpses Mr. Nembler in the living room watching TV. She knows it’s him because he’s wearing the same University of Kentucky sweatshirt, only his human head has been replaced by the head of a horse.

I agree with Charlotte. We need to put our characters into a situation and imagine what they might do. Sometimes they’ll take matters into their own hands and act independently seemingly without our intervention. But more often, especially at the beginning of a story, we have to consider the options for them and pick. If we have a sense of the story we’re telling, we think of possibilities that will take our character where we want her to go. Best not to force her. We don’t want to make her do something strange just because our plot needs her to.

If we ourselves don’t have a clue about Irena, we may have her do something generic when the action begins or behave as we would, and the results may not be as interesting as we’d wish. If I were Irena I’d sneak out the back door and go to the police. But first, being a cautious soul, I’d peek in the police station window to make sure the cops don’t have horse’s heads too. That’s me and one version of Irena. One of my friends adores horses. She’d probably imitate a whinny and march right in and strike up a conversation. Another friend would be likely to question her own sanity. Sometimes it helps to think of actual people you know to develop options. What would your best friend do? How about your daredevil cousin? Your older brother? Your mother? When you finish running through actual people, imagine other options. Might Irena wonder if Mrs. Nembler has a horse’s head too? Might she go back to her room and push the bureau against the door? And so on.

Whatever Irena does in this situation, or in any of the other scenarios, begins to establish her character for both the reader and the writer more vividly than any amount of background can. Once you have a start on her – once she begins to act – then future options are narrowed. The girl who marches into the kitchen to speak to the horse is unlikely to run away when Mrs. Nembler comes out of the bathroom with the head of a sheep in place of her human head. Irena may bolt, but if she does, you have to explain.

The events that follow also depend on what Mr. Nembler says or does, how his personality shapes up and the personalities of the other people in the family, possibly the town.

I’ve written this before, that sometimes I start with a character’s back story because I need to know his history before jumping into the present problem, but the back story gums up my beginning and the book doesn’t get off to a clean start and I wind up amputating the back story. So I think it’s generally fine to get into the action quickly. And, yes, I agree with Charlotte that in revision you’ll be better able to see what you need in order to introduce your characters. When the whole sweep of your story is behind you, your perspective clarifies.

You’ve probably guessed the prompt. Write about Irena in any one or more of the difficulties I suggested. She’s self-destructive; a member of the family doesn’t want her; Mrs. Nembler has a terrible temper; Mr. Nembler, and possibly others, is transformed at night. He doesn’t necessarily have to get a horse’s head, either. The animal could be far less benign. Also, you can give Irena problems I haven’t even dreamed of.

Have fun and save what you write!

Inspired

First off: We put the first chapter of A Tale of Two Castles up on my website. Click here to read it: http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/tcas_prev.html. And click here for the cool book trailer that HarperCollins created: http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/video/tcas_trailer.mov. If you have trouble opening it, you can also watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK05DTpbOn8.

Also new on the website, we added first chapters to three other of my books, Dave at Night, Fairest, and Writing Magic. We hope to have the rest available soon.

And, if you click here, http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/news.html you’ll see the latest photograph of puppy Reggie, who grows more adorable every day, in our opinion. And housebreaking is starting to take. Whoopee!

February 20, 2011 Piper wrote, …where do you get your inspiration?

I don’t think of myself as an inspired writer so much as one who plugs away, so when I use the word in the post, I’m not certain I’m using it in the way inspiration is commonly used or even that I’m answering the question, but here’s hoping.

That concern aside, my inspiration for being a writer is my childhood reading. Reading ranked just below breathing in importance when I was little. Privacy was in short supply in our cramped apartment. I shared a bedroom with my older sister, who believed I had been created to plague her. Books pulled down the walls that confined me. The ones I read as a child made me a writer for children. I still love to read, but reading isn’t as important to me now as it was then.

The books I attached to were mostly old: Louisa May Alcott’s novels, L. M. Montgomery’s, Heidi, Bambi, Black Beauty, Peter Pan. I relished books about Robin Hood and King Arthur, tall tales, and of course fairy tales. If I liked a book I read it over and over. Through my favorite books and rereading them I absorbed a sense of plot, character, language, even grammar and usage. The old books didn’t limit their vocabulary to what a child would know. What a gift!

When I write, I’m writing for my younger self, which is probably my most fundamental and continuing inspiration.

There are certainly writers for children, however, who weren’t big readers when they were small, some who may be inspired to write because they disliked reading. They want to write books for their younger selves, too, in their case books for today’s children who pick up a book only when they have to for school. These writers may eschew difficult vocabulary words for the reasonable reason that they hated them. I once got a letter from a child who didn’t like Ella Enchanted because of the made-up languages, which he or she (I don’t remember which) didn’t understand. Hard words can frustrate a child and make her feel stupid. I don’t avoid them, but I understand why some writers do.

In 1987 when I started to write for children, I read the books in the Newbery bookcase at the library. I found in many of them the same old-fashioned approach to storytelling that I knew from my childhood, which made me feel right at home and as if I could join in. Another inspiration.

I took writing courses, too, and met fellow writers. My favorite class was a workshop. Every week our teacher would read three or four selections of student work that had been submitted to her the week before. After she read, the class would comment and then she would. Many published writers took this course. The same writing issues (like the ones that come up on the blog) would appear in different guises week after week, so advice would be repeated. The effect was much like rereading books; I absorbed the comments of the more experienced writers, and now their voices are in my mind when I write. I hear them ask me what my characters are thinking and feeling or if I’ve written information that the reader doesn’t need to know and that only I do. My teachers and my classmates are another inspiration.

Today, my writing friends inspire me. Every month two friends come over for lunch. There’s no purpose. We don’t critique each other’s work. Sometimes we shop talk about publishing. Often our own writing comes up. It’s rarely smooth sailing for any of us, which is a comfort and, in an odd way, an inspiration. My critique buddy and I meet monthly too. My book deadline isn’t looming, so having pages for her is a goal.

I still go to fairy tales for ideas and inspiration. The book I’m struggling with now was inspired by a nineteenth century fairy tale called “The King of the Golden River” by John Ruskin, a morality tale about greed. Two rapacious brothers are turned into black stones and their younger, generous brother is rewarded. What I love about the story is the gothic atmosphere. The wind roars into the brothers’ house; the king of the river is a golden mug that melts; the brothers have to climb a forbidding mountain. I wondered what the story’s sequel might be if the stone brothers came back to life. Then my tale changed, and it isn’t about that any more, but the seed probably remains.

What keeps me writing may be the internal-ness of the process, the communion with myself. Like reading, writing is intensely private. We’re fishing in our own minds, and sometimes we pull out magic fish.

There’s also the fact that I earn my living as a writer, which, if not an inspiration, is a goad. What else? Meditating, which I used to do more regularly before Reggie arrived, sometimes causes ideas to bubble up. Exercise also. Plus the drive that artists have to create. I’m at a loss if I’m not working on something.

So here’s something for you to work on, some classic themes that you may have enjoyed as children. Write a story about one or more of these:

• a dog, horse, or any pet who thinks in language and is separated from her owners.

• an orphan traveling to an unknown place.

• a child separated from her family by war.

• a stowaway on a ship of the royal fleet.

• a family struggling with poverty.

• an outlaw set against an unjust society.

Have fun and save what you write!

Enhancing experience

February 19, 2011, Alice wrote, ...do you have any ideas for writing realistically about a cross-country road trip when you’ve never actually taken one yourself, and you can’t go on one because your whole summer is completely booked?

Alice’s question applies to any writing outside one’s first-hand experience. When you read this, I hope you’ll apply my ideas to your own stories.

First off, Alice, you know a lot about road trips even if you’ve never crossed the nation on one. And even if you had, you’d have only one experience, which might not be enough. You need those shorter trips to draw on, all your experience of car trips.

You can start with your knowledge of humans in cars then move onto your characters. Any story needs conflict, and the cramped space in an automobile, where personalities can’t help but rub up against one another, is perfect.

We all have different driving styles and different styles of being a passenger. If the driving is shared, that can be a source of trouble. And the radio! Or CD player or iPod. What kind of music to listen to? Who prefers news or a recorded book? Open window? Closed window? How high to crank the heat or the air-conditioner? Who pays for gas? Who sits in front? Anybody gets carsick? Conflict galore. As well as opportunities to make peace. The emotional ride can be bumpy!

And what about the car itself, inside and out? Are soda cans rattling around on the floor? Does the car smell like the family dog? Or does it still have a new-car smell after seven years? Is it in good repair? Is it a junker? Does it have a spare tire? Jumper cables? Whose car is it?

My parents loved and respected each other – ordinarily – but they were at their worst in the car. We lived in New York City, where a car and a driver’s license aren’t necessary. My father didn’t get either one until he was in his early forties, and my mother didn’t get hers until the last year of her life, after my dad had died.

My father’s late start and his diffidence combined with my mother’s nervousness and her inability to tell her left from her right (this was long before GPS) made every excursion an expedition into the unknown. If we (my parents, my sister, and I) had set off across country from northern Manhattan where we lived, we might well have driven three thousand miles and wound up in the Bronx, five miles from home.

We played word games in the car and sang car songs. What stands out in memory, however, is the mounting tension. We inevitably got lost, and my parents each blamed the other. Then, at the end of the trip, we had to go home, and it happened all over again.

What I’ve described applies to ordinary trips, and this is a magic ice cream truck (a lovely idea). Still. How does the truck look? Smell? Does Sam the ice-cream man keep the driver’s cab clean? Has the engine had its latest inspection? How high are the driver and passenger from the road? Is the truck noisy? How does it feel different from being in a car? And of course there’s the magic part.

What sort of driver is Sam? Does he love to tell stories and forget to watch the road? Or does he demand silence so he can concentrate? Does he tailgate? Drive too fast? Too slow?

What kind of passenger is the girl, whom I’m calling Honey? Relaxed? Or nervous? Chatty? Silent?

What time of year is the trip? What sort of weather might they encounter?

All this – the characters, the car or truck – are available to the writer before the engine has even turned over. And you don’t have to know the slightest thing about cross-country trips to write this part.

For the cross-country aspect, there’s lots you can do. You should certainly consult a map to plot the truck’s course. Get online directions for the recommended route and alternate routes. Find tourist attractions along the way. Explore the topography. Pretend you were planning the trip for yourself. Decide if Sam and Honey want to go through cities or skirt them. Are they going to stay in motels or camp out? Can they live in the truck? If so, where are the recreational vehicle camps? Research traveling in an RV if that’s going to be their choice.

Before starting this post I googled “worst car trip.” I was thinking conflict again. Lots of items popped up. I read only one, so I don’t know what’s out there. You can google “cross-country road trip” and see what you find.

Also, I’d suggest you ask people you know about their cross-country and long-distance car trips. Here’s a wacky idea: Listen to “Car Talk,” a weekly car-repair program on National Public Radio. You can stream it online. The program is more than car-repair; it’s funny, and you may hear a wealth of material that you can fictionalize.

Readers of the blog, you can help Alice by posting reminiscences of long road trips that you’re willing to share.

Of course, the danger of research is not knowing when to stop. We fall in love with all the discoveries we’re making. You may want to stay in road-trip-research land forever and never progress to the rougher terrain of writing land. So I’d suggest that you research enough to get you started. Then, if Sam and Honey are riding through the Sonoran desert, for example, and you need to know what the landscape looks like, return to the research phase until you’re ready to continue. When you began you might not have known that they would detour into the desert. You certainly wouldn’t have known they’d decide to go to a fancy restaurant for dinner and you have to learn about Southwest cuisine.

When I wrote my historical novel, Dave at Night, I started with general research about New York City in the 1920s, especially about Harlem and the Lower East Side. Then I started writing. Dave’s father dies at the beginning of the book, the first page. A little further on I needed to know what route the hearse would take to the cemetery in 1926. Back to research. Later on, Dave is on the street outside a Harlem rent party in 1926. (A rent party was held when a tenant couldn’t pay the rent. She’d hold a party, serve food, bring in jazz musicians, and collect a small admission fee, which would bring in enough to cover the rent.) These parties were egalitarian affairs. Poor folk and rich attended. I wondered what kind of cars might have been parked at the curb near where Dave stood. This led me to reading about classic cars and interviewing a classic car expert.

Even when I’m writing fantasy, I research. For example, in For Biddle’s Sake, one of my Princess Tales, the fairy Bombina loves to turn people and things into toads, so I researched toads. I used little of what I learned, but knowledge made me more confident. In A Tale of Two Castles (out soon!) one of the major characters is a dragon. To describe him I googled images of dragons, but I wasn’t satisfied, so I looked at Komodo dragons (online, not in person), and that’s what I described, except for the wings, which I made up. Research helps with detail, and, as we all know, detail brings stories to life.

Naturally these prompts revolve around car trips. Perry is invited to vacation with his best friend Letty Pewer and her parents. They are traveling from Minnesota to Florida for a winter week in the sun. Below are some possibilities to fool around with. Pick as many as you like or make up your own or do a combo of mine and yours.

• Letty’s father is peculiar. You decide how.

• Letty’s mom is a dangerous driver. You decide how.

• Letty’s younger brother and older sister are coming along. They don’t get along with Letty and dislike Perry.

• The car is older than Perry. The radio doesn’t work. There is no iPod, no CD player.

• The Pewers are economizing and haven’t bought a GPS. Good old maps are good enough for them. They plan to camp out and save on motel costs as soon as they reach warm enough weather.

• The car is bewitched – not in a good way.

• This is the snowiest winter in the history of Minnesota and surrounding states.

• The scenic route will take the family and Perry through an old mining town. Unbeknownst to the authorities, one of the abandoned mines is now occupied by squatters who may be dangerous.

Have fun, and save what you write!