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!

Seeking conflict

I’m hoping to see a few of you tonight at the library in Chelsea, Michigan! Details on my website. Many more Reggie photos on David’s for you puppy-ophiles.

On February 17, 2011, bluekiwii asked, How do you find out what the major conflict of your story is and why do you stick to it?

I just looked up The Lord of the Rings trilogy on Wikipedia. According to that source, and I haven’t done further research, Tolkien didn’t realize right away that it was all about an evil ring held by the forces of good and desired by arch-villain Sauron. Originally, Tolkien thought Bilbo would run out of the treasure he’d found during The Hobbit and would go adventuring for more. Then Tolkien remembered the ring and developed that idea.

In the case of The Lord of the Rings, conflict is evident. Good and evil fight it out in situation after situation, battle after battle. But conflict can be much softer. Take Pride and Prejudice, for example, my all-time favorite, or any of Jane Austen’s novels. Maybe the conflict is always “the battle of the sexes,” but that trivializes what Austen does. Maybe the conflict is women against society, although against is too strong. In each book, the problem may be a particular woman, beautifully drawn in the Jane Austen way, finding happiness (and often economic security) in marriage against many odds. Or maybe the conflict is the individual in opposition to the family.

Often conflict arises out of a character’s desire and the obstacles to obtaining it. Ella Enchanted runs on Ella’s need to get rid of her curse. Black Beauty is an interesting example of this. Throughout, the horse wants to live and be treated well, but he’s a horse and can do little to influence his fate. It’s quite an achievement to write an exciting book about a passive main character. In most stories about animals, the animal manages to take matters into his own hooves or paws or mandibles or whatever.

I’d be hard pressed to say what the major conflict in my book, Fairest, is. Aza would like to be beautiful, but she doesn’t do much to get what she wants, because success seems unattainable. The conflict could be a girl against her own body. Possibly, but it doesn’t play out exactly that way. Mostly she’s struggling against the selfish and screwy Queen Ivi, and there’s also her budding romance with Prince Ijori, and also the politics of a kingdom under despotic rule.

The point is, you may not know what your major conflict is. You may write the whole story and not know. Your readers may debate the issue. As I said in my last post, holding reader interest is what counts, not what the major conflict is or anything else, and there are many ways to accomplish that.

I don’t know if you have to stick with one conflict. In my book, The Wish, Wilma gets her wish to be the most popular student in her middle school. The first part of the book is about her adjustment to popularity; the last part deals with what happens when she discovers the catch to the wish. There’s also the love interest with an unpopular boy. The theme throughout is popularity, but the story looks at the topic through a variety of moments. (If you read it, notice that the dog, an important character, is an Airedale coincidentally named Reggie.)

Another example, in my opinion, is Gone With the Wind. Initially, Scarlett O’Hara wants forbidden love; later she wants to survive. Then, later still, it’s back to love, or I’m not sure what she wants at the end.

The conflicts that I stick with, at least temporarily, are the ones that lead me to further incidents and more action – the ones that stimulate ideas. For instance, suppose we’re writing a science fiction story about space exploration. Inga is our heroine. Do we want her to have her own spaceship? Could be. Technology in the world of our story has advanced to the point that a single person can do everything to run a spaceship. If she lands on an unexplored planet alone, she’s in the middle of it with no one to turn to for help. Assuming the planet is populated with an alien life form, she has only her own resources to lean on to figure the aliens out. The advantage of this is that there’s no one to save her if she gets into trouble. The disadvantage is the absence of the complexity of personalities acting on one another. Such complexity may arise once Inga gets to know the aliens, or maybe not. If I were going to write this story, I’d think about what kind of aliens they might be and what crew mates she might have, and as I wrote notes, one of the two options would excite me, would start me thinking, more than the other, this could happen and this and this. That’s the one I’d go with, and eventually I’d start writing.

Please notice: I’m not saying that I stick to a certain major conflict because it’s good. I try not to make such judgments while I’m writing, because if I start making them, I’m more likely to think it’s bad. I keep going with something when I can. I’ve been bewailing the number of times I’ve restarted Beloved Elodie, and that’s because I reach a point where I recognize the thing isn’t working, not because I think it’s bad. In my longest attempt so far (about 250 pages) I came to a dead end when I realized that the mystery I’d set up couldn’t be solved. The next-to-longest attempt, about 140 pages, I abandoned because I’d forgotten to include any suspects. Basically when I’m onto something that I can stick with and get to the end, I do.

I’m not a very analytic writer. I don’t think about what my major conflict is, at least not in those terms. I’m more engaged in events as they happen and as far ahead as I can see. Sometimes I know what the ending is going to be. There are writers who work out what they’re doing ahead of time, who think of rising action and falling action, who number their crises and know exactly when the last lap should begin and the resolution should be formed. My method is more muddle and a dim belief that if I crawl along I’ll get to the end eventually.

I can imagine starting a story and finding that I object to where I seem to be going on, I guess, ethical grounds. Something like that happened to me when I tried to write a novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” I discussed this in my post on fairy tales, my favorite post for the comments it sparked. In the original fairy tale, the princesses are complicit in the deaths of an untold number of young men, and yet they’re the heroines of the story. I couldn’t write it, and I had to move the story in a new direction, to what eventually became The Two Princesses of Bamarre.

At least as important as the major conflict is what you do with it. For instance, a brother and a sister are feuding. That’s the problem. But how are they feuding? Sending each other angry emails? Subtly ruining one another’s lives? Gathering armies to conquer the other one’s half of the kingdom? Having a pillow fight?

Here are a few prompts on the theme of major conflict:

∙ Write about the feuding brother and sister. Write the seeds of the feud and how it’s expressed.

∙ Write a story in the Black Beauty mold. Write about a helpless main character and make it exciting. This is hard. See what happens.

∙ Decide for yourself whether Inga is alone in her spaceship. If you’re so inclined, try it both ways and see what happens to the story.

∙ Rethink The Lord of the Rings. Write what happens if Frodo claims the ring for his own.

∙ Lord of the Rings again. Write a story that follows the action of the final book. Come up with a new major conflict.

Have fun, and save what you write!

When to press the trigger

Before I start, there are pictures of Reggie the puppy on my website. Click on News to see them. And if you haven’t had enough, there are more on my husband’s website, www.dmlevine.com.

Also on the website are details about my appearance next week at the public library in Chelsea, Michigan. For this, click on News, and then on Appearances. Hope to see some of you in Michigan!

On February 17, 2011, Grace wrote, How long can one write without introducing the main problem of a story? In my newest project I have my main character in a new place with a lot of wacky characters I love to write about. They’ve had some small problems that keep the plot going thus far but I’m getting on 20k words now and I still haven’t introduced the main conflict that will guide the story and hopefully the rest of the planned series. Is this too long? Do you think the reader will get bored? I hesitate to rush the plot too much because then the characters would have to leave their current location and I really love where they are right now and all the characters there.

Many of you commented most helpfully on Grace’s question, and you can go back and read what everyone said. Some mentioned foreshadowing, and I have a future post coming up on that subject, so you can keep an eye out for it. I’m including Erin Edwards’s comment in the post, because it’s so helpful. Here it is:

@ Grace – Lots of really good published books seem to put off the main problem and they do a really good job of immersing the reader in the story world – but they aren’t necessarily ones who would easily get an agent or publisher in the current climate. Getting to the main problem quickly is kind of a trend right now, especially when agents and editors only read the first 10 pages! But really you shouldn’t worry too much about getting published as you write; a lot can happen in revising.

    Things you can keep in mind:
    – Keep writing. It may be that after you finish you can reorder your scenes and alter this scene you love into a middle scene.
    – Go back over what you’ve written and see if you can drop hints about the main problem that’s to come. Build the anticipation.
    – Or maybe, your main problem that you have in mind isn’t going to work and that’s why you’re avoiding it. As you keep exploring you may come up with a better main problem.
Writing is rule-free territory, so there’s no rule about how quickly the main story problem needs to start. Some books have no main story problem, or the main problem is soft-edged. Going back to Little Women, which we discussed two weeks ago, what’s the thrust of the story? Beth’s death? No. Jo’s love life? No. A family enduring poverty? I don’t think so. The girls don’t engage in a get-rich scheme to reclaim the family fortune or pack a bag and set off into the Civil War to find their father . We’re propelled through the story by our interest in the characters and the series of incidents Louisa May Alcott presents. The theme, I suppose, is growing up.

Time and Again by Jack Finney (middle school and up, I’d guess), a time-travel novel I love, doesn’t get moving for fifty pages, and the first fifty, in my opinion, are dull. I used to be a more forgiving reader than I am now, so I hung in. Then the story, once it got going, was impossible to put down. I read the book many years ago, so I don’t remember if those first fifty pages were essential, and I still recommend the book heartily. It’s charming and light-hearted and full of details about old New York City.

In a writing class I took over and over when I was getting started, our teacher would read a few students’ chapters out loud every week and then ask for comments. Often, when she read a first chapter, people said that we’d heard just “back story,” information that the writer needs to know but the reader doesn’t. The advice would be to keep writing and find the story’s real beginning later.

Grace, it sounds like you do have a strong story line in mind. What you’ve been writing may be back story, which you may need to cut later. Or maybe you’re writing a different book in the first 20,000 words. Maybe you want to split the two apart.

If you need to cut, remember the writing advice from William Faulkner to “kill all your darlings.” I think what he meant is that we protect our most gorgeous phrases, our most fascinating scenes. We write around them; we twist our plots so our beautiful lines can stay. After a while, they just get in the way and they have to go.

But they don’t have to vanish. I save my “darlings” for each of my books in a document I call “Extra.” I’ve eliminated more than a thousand pages in the course of writing my books, possibly over two thousand. Of course, most of those weren’t darlings, but some were. In my case, the darlings are usually scenes of exquisite character development, and it hurts to give them up, but I do, because writers have to be ruthless.

This is a prompt in the middle of the post: Become aware of your darlings. Go through a story you’re working on and underline the parts you would rather chop off your arm than cut. Save your old version, then delete those bits and see what happens to your story. Does it become cleaner? Is it better? Is it worse? If worse, put the parts back.

I’m a plot-driven writer. My stories don’t depend on the charm of the characters, although I hope some are charming. My books focus most of all on action. Alas, you might not be able to tell that from Beloved Elodie, which I’ve started yet again. The book begins on a boat. In the next-to-next-to-last version the action then moved to an inn, where I introduced the suspects but I held off on the mystery. Ho hum! said the reader. Why do I care about these people? Nothing is at stake.

To make matters worse, I had my characters journey together for pages and pages before they reached the place where the mystery was going to begin. Meanwhile, they revealed motives for committing the crime whenever we got to it. My critique buddy asked me, in the kindest possible way, what the heck I thought I was doing.

So I realized I could move all my suspects to the place where the mystery would start. Elodie could meet them when she arrived. Still, I kept the scene in the boat and then took her to the inn, where the problem was introduced in a theoretical way, and I didn’t get to the scene of the action until page 59. Double-ho-double-hum!

In this latest revision I’ve kept the scene on the boat, which is essential, and I begin the crisis there, on page 10. In revision I may trim even more, but the first nine pages are pretty exciting.

On the other hand, in A Tale of Two Castles, which you will soon be able to read (Yay!), the mystery takes even longer to get going, but it’s okay, because Elodie has a pressing problem at the beginning, and the reader cares about that. So it’s fine.

As usual, the key is reader interest. If the reader falls in love with your wacky characters, Grace, and is as happy to read about them spreading jam on toast as escaping from a burning building, all is well, and you can delay conflict as long as you like. However, it’s very hard to keep a reader engaged when there’s nothing to worry about. Also, conflict will bring out sides of these marvelous people that the reader wouldn’t see in a pleasant scene around the breakfast table. For example, Melba is having lunch with her friends in the school cafeteria. She’s the one who goes back for more ice or helps mop up spilled apple juice. But when a fire starts, she may behave unexpectedly, and the reader will see her in a new light.

Grace and anyone else with this question, you may want to show your story to a fellow writer or a good reader. Ask him if he longed for something to worry about. Have him tell you the spot where he began to feel frustrated and also to point out the places where the story picked up again, if it did.

Here’s another prompt: After school, Melba is going to discover that her house has vanished. She has no idea, however, that this is going to happen, and neither does the reader. Write a scene with Melba and her two best friends before she goes home. Let the reader get to know Melba a little. Try to keep up his interest without foreshadowing. Introduce minor problems, but hold off on the house disappearance. Feel when you think the reader is detaching, and stop before boredom sets in. Feel free to write more of the rest of the story after the disappearance.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Tempo!

I’m posting early because I’m traveling tomorrow.

Oops! Erin Edwards, you commented on Jenna Royal’s question from last week when she asked it in February, and I intended to include your comment along with my own response, but I didn’t look far enough down my list to see it. I agreed entirely, so here it is: @ Jenna Royal – while you’re waiting for Ms. Levine’s post on pacing, you might find it interesting to try to read Inkheart again and figure out *why* the romance change didn’t work for you. What little insights could have made it easier for you to believe? Like did you need a little hint that she was starting to get dissatisfied before she dumped the first boyfriend and how many times does that need to be mentioned and how early?

And I had promised a post on pacing and didn’t get to it. I am getting to it now in response to this from Caitlin Flowers on March 4, 2011: I have trouble pacing my stories. I’d enjoy writing action or an important moment for the characters more than writing the necessary slower scenes to give the reader a chance to keep up. Do you have any suggestions?

Seems to me there’s more than one question here, if I’m understanding right. There’s balancing high-action scenes and low-action scenes, and there’s fitting information in that the reader needs to know. I’ve written some about the latter in my post on flashbacks on May 5, 2010, so you may want to take a look.

But here’s some more. I’ve said this before too. We don’t want Millie to say to her brother Noah, “Remember the day Mom and Dad split up and we had to come here to live?” She wouldn’t say this unless Noah has amnesia and she’s checking to see if his memory has come back. Of course he remembers, but the reader doesn’t know. The dialogue is artificial; it’s manufactured solely to clue the reader in.

However, there’s nothing wrong with conveying information in direct narration. Say Noah is making dinner for his younger sister, which he’s had to do since the separation, whether they’re staying with their mom or their dad. He can think something like, I was trying my hand at frittatas. I never even made toast when Mom and Dad were together. I felt lousy when they split up, but cooking was cool. The narration can stop there or continue on to, I wished we still had the island from our old kitchen. Mom’s whole apartment wasn’t much bigger than that island. Dad’s wasn’t a lot larger, and his kitchen was just a wall at one end of the living room. The reader gains an impression of the setting and learns that both parents have less money now.

You don’t need a whole scene to convey information; you can just tuck it in here and there in narration in whatever POV you’re using.

Onto pacing. I’ve been having a pacing problem in my new mystery. Without giving much away, night is coming. Elodie can spend it in a cottage with her parents or in the stable with her employer, the dragon Meenore, and there has to be some discussion about which it will be. I had a stomachache over how boring the conversation was going to be, a malady I’ve been experiencing often in writing this book. It got so bad that I sent my manuscript so far to my editor for her feedback.

I’ve never ever before sent in a partial manuscript. Ordinarily I like my editor to come fresh to the entire thing. This was an act of desperation. You may have read on the blog that I’ve started this book over four times, and each time an alarm has gone off in my mind that it wasn’t right. My editor wrote back that she thinks the trouble sinking the book is that the danger hanging over the story is too abstract and not nearly immediate enough to engage the reader. Wonderful editor that she is, she suggested a solution that may do the trick.

Naturally, I’m going to have to go back to the beginning again.

Of course I’m lucky. Because I’m published and my editor has edited several of my books, I can avail myself of her help. If you’re just getting started, you’ll have to rely for manuscript first aid on critique buddies, teachers, librarians, and the good readers in your lives.

Caitlin Flowers and others with pacing issues, you may have the same problem I do. The action and the big character scenes bring the story temporarily to life, but the in-between segments fall flat because there isn’t enough overall for the reader to worry about.

I got it right in Ella Enchanted. As long as Ella is under the curse of obedience, the reader is going to stay engaged. I can get away with a relaxed scene here and there, like the scene with the elves. Nothing earthshattering happens, but the reader meets these charming creatures and gets a break from the tension. Such relief heightens the scenes that are full of action or feeling. If a story is constant crisis, it plateaus and the high points don’t stand out. It’s like listening to loud music; there can never be a crescendo. You may know someone who gets upset over the smallest thing. When genuine trouble comes along, he lacks emotional range.

A variety of kinds of scenes livens up a story. Unless the tale demands it, move your characters to different locations. If Noah and Millie, for example, have been in the kitchen for a few pages, move them into the backyard or, better yet, to school. After they’ve been alone together for a while, separate them or bring in another character. End a scene and start the next one in a different place or at a later time. If you’re writing from an omniscient third person POV, switch over to entirely different characters for the next scene.

If you can, also alternate the kinds of scene. In Ella Enchanted again, there are romantic scenes with Char and conflict-filled scenes with Hattie and Olive and scary scenes with ogres and I-don’t-know-what-kind of scenes with Mandy.

Most important of all, the reader has to care about the main character. By now I know a lot of writing tricks (which I’m sharing as they come up), but nothing works if the reader doesn’t care. Take Noah. He may be misguided and may be handling his parents’ separation badly. We may groan at his idiotic attempts to repair his family and himself. We’ll even endure when he hurts his sister Millie as long as he isn’t callous, as long as we can connect with his humanity and see our own flawed selves in him. We’ll put up with a slow scene or two (since no book is perfect), if Noah has a firm grip on our feelings and our imaginations.

Here are two prompts:

• Noah is in the kitchen with his sister, Millie, while their mother is on her first date since the breakup. Sister and brother are reacting according to their separate natures. Mix dialogue with action in writing the scene. Be sensitive to your own intuition about when the situation is starting to drag. Change something to wake the story up again – the location, the characters. The phone can ring or one of them can get a text message. Some cooking catastrophe can occur. Whatever. If you like, keep writing.

• This is a battle scene. A troop of elves is holding their mountain keep against an attack of trolls. In the midst of action-action-action, work in a soft, feeling moment between two characters. Then return to the action.

Have fun and save what you write!

Fickle

On February 5, 2011 Jenna Royal wrote, …in one of my novels, my MC falls in love twice. The first person he falls in love with is someone he’s not supposed to, and it doesn’t work. It starts out that way. Throughout the book, he tries to keep away from the girl, and he ends up with another girl a lot, whom he doesn’t like well at first but over time he falls in love with her instead. Is this too complicated with readers’ emotions? The reason I’m asking is because a couple years ago I read a trilogy (Inkheart by Cornelia Funke) where the MC had the same boyfriend for most of the book but then decided she wanted a new one at the end. I felt the MC was a little unfair, and I found it to be a bit of an unsatisfying ending. What are your thoughts on this?
Hmm…I haven’t read Inkheart, but I’m thinking of Jo in Little Women deserting Laurie for Professor Bhaer. Now I’m thinking of Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice switching from Wickham to Darcy. Changing boyfriends – or, in your case, girlfriends – isn’t uncommon in literature.

I’ve never been entirely happy with Jo’s choice. I suppose Laurie isn’t right for her, and I guess the professor is, but, gee, Laurie is so romantic and interestingly difficult, like Jo, and the professor is dullsville! (I’m not being fair to him.) I certainly don’t want Amy to get Laurie. It would be better, in my opinion, if he never marries and regrets Jo and his own character limitations forever.

But I’m delighted about Darcy and Elizabeth, although I do root for Wickham in the beginning. Austen does a great job of convincing me that Wickham is a cad, and we see how smitten Darcy is with Elizabeth – which may be the key. We love Elizabeth, and Darcy appreciates her just as much as we do, so we think well of him. Wickham, on the other hand, doesn’t value her nearly highly enough, since he prefers any rich wife to any impecunious one.

Near the end of Pride and Prejudice the narrator implies that Elizabeth is going to improve Darcy’s sense of humor, make him unbend a little, and he’s going to expand her mind, so there’s equality. But, if I remember Little Women correctly, Jo is the sole one to benefit. Professor Bhaer is going to make her better, but he’s already perfect. He’s good for her, like a multivitamin, and vitamins are not romantic.

Also Professor Bhaer comes on the scene late, and Laurie has been in the book almost from the beginning. We don’t have a chance to get to know the professor or to see in slow motion how he falls for Jo.

Maybe I’m all wet. I haven’t read Little Women in many years, but I reread Pride and Prejudice regularly. Anyway, I think your hero can go through scads of girlfriends if your real heroine is there all along, on the sidelines, being delightful, appreciating him more completely than anyone else.

There are other approaches too. You may know couples that you can’t figure out. He’s so nice and she’s so full of herself. Or she’s terrific, but you can count on him to say the wrong thing on every occasion. Fictionally, you can make the first girlfriend so loathsome that we’re totally relieved when he moves on.

Or the first girl is terrific, but there’s a tiny thing wrong with her, like she’s a ghost or she lives a thousand miles away and they can be together only online or she’s a six-hundred-year-old elf or she’s from another galaxy. Again, the reader is likely to be glad when our hero finds someone more possible.

Or he could act badly in the first relationship and their romance sours. It’s his fault, but he ends it, recognizing that the damage he’s done is irreparable. We see him start fresh. A moment comes with the new girl when his buttons are pushed, but he chooses to behave better. Whew! we think. This time they’re going to be happy. Yay!

Or many other possibilities.

In the interest of not jerking the reader around, you probably want to make it clear that the old relationship is over before the new one starts – unless the story is about the hero’s flip-flops.

Generally, we don’t want to stop loving the main. In the case of Little Women, Jo goes down in my estimation for choosing Professor Bhaer because he’s good for her. I like her emotional side – her temper, her storminess – which humanizes her. I don’t want her with a man who’s going to smooth her out. When your main chooses a new love for reasons the reader doesn’t understand, the reader disconnects a little or a lot.

I’m also not pleased when a character unaccountably changes. In Jenna Royal’s example, let’s suppose the main, Lester, say, loves a woman, Peony, in a rival clan. His family and the girl’s oppose the match and try to keep the two apart, but they find ways to meet because they’re wild about each other. They take a long walk together on the beach. If Lester, whom we’ve known to be a guy with good values, notices she’s knock-kneed and her speech is less educated than his and he loses interest, we’re likely to feel confused. This isn’t the Lester we know and care about. If, however, Peony repeats hostile remarks she’s heard about his clan, like they’re dirty and they steal, we’re right with him if he dumps her.

Even if the new love interest arrives near the end of the story, it may be important to devote at least a few pages to their fresh beginning. Sometimes not, but you don’t want the ending to feel rushed.

Three prompts:

∙ It’s the beginning of senior year in high school. Justin and Flora are an item as are Peter and Rose and Horace and Tulip. They spend a wilderness weekend together with their class, and by the time they return home, the romances have shifted twice to different people in their group. Write how it happens.

∙ In my book, The Wish, Wilma magically becomes the most popular person in her middle school. All the boys want to go to the graduation dance with her. This doesn’t happen in the book, but imagine Wilma holding an audition for being her date. Write the audition. For extra credit, manipulate the reader’s feelings so that he roots for one boy after another. If you like, keep going and show Wilma’s decision and how she arrives at it.

∙ Let’s complicate the situation for Lester and Peony. They take their beach walk, the longest time they’ve ever spent together, and he realizes she’s not right for him. She’s not bad, but maybe she chatters, and he finds himself getting impatient, and maybe she has a nervous laugh that grates on him – or whatever qualities you pick. The trouble is that the objections of his clan members make it hard for him to give her up. He’s angry at them, and he doesn’t want them to think they were right. Besides, she’s risked a lot to be with him. Take it from there.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Clarity

Before I start, I may be late with the blog over the next few weeks. Those of you who’ve looked at my website have seen our dog Baxter, who died in December. I didn’t mention this when it happened, because it was sad and I was sad. But now we have a new puppy, eight-week old Reggie. When things calm down, my husband will post pictures on the website, but now it’s puppy all the time and I’m having trouble getting anything done. We think he’s going to be worth it.

On January 21, 2011, Susan Lee wrote, Do you have any tips on writing. As in making sure people who read it will understand what you wrote?

Unless you’re writing experimental fiction, clarity is the primary objective, ahead of plot, characterization, setting – any of the elements of story telling. Clarity isn’t even an element! It’s the air a reader breathes.

Being clear doesn’t mean we can’t be complex. We can suggest something that will be more fully explained later. Our reader doesn’t have to understand what we intend at exactly the moment we suggest it. Realization can be delayed. Mysteries delay understanding constantly. That isn’t lack of clarity, that’s simply interesting storytelling.

But we don’t want to confuse the reader accidentally, and we can do so especially effectively by making technical mistakes. In dialogue, for example, the reader needs to know who’s speaking, and this isn’t the place to delay understanding. Each speaker should have her own paragraph, along with any body language. When two people speak in a single paragraph, even if the speech is attributed (using said or asked or the like), the reader has to work too hard.

You don’t always have to attribute speech. If only two people are present, you don’t need to name the speaker every time. In fact, you shouldn’t or the writing won’t flow. But don’t wait so long that the reader has to go back and count, as in, that was June speaking, now it’s Jake, June, Jake, June, Jake, June. Ah, Jake said this. I hate that.

I’ve written about dialogue in more detail in previous posts and in Writing Magic, so I won’t repeat it all here, but dialogue often makes the reader muddled.

So do loose pronouns. If I write, The food was overcooked and everybody was arguing. It made me sick. the reader doesn’t know what it refers to – the meal or the arguing or both. And sick is vague, too, although it’s not a pronoun. Heart sick or stomach sick? Explaining in later sentences helps, but being specific from the beginning is even better.

When two men or two women are together in a scene, or two distinct groups are together, clarity can be hard to achieve, as in, Jack waited an hour for Justin to show up. When Justin finally arrived he was very angry. Well, who was angry? Jack for having had to wait or Justin for some other reason? And yet When Justin finally arrived Justin was very angry. sounds terrible. What to do?

Recast it. Jack waited an hour for Justin to show up. New paragraph. Justin entered the restaurant pale with anger. “If I have to sit through another three-hour meeting about the wording of a mission statement, I’m going to…” No confusion.

In A Tale of Two Castles the dragon character makes the pronoun business easier. Masteress Meenore is an IT because dragons rarely reveal their gender, so IT can be in a scene with a male character and a female character and, unless another dragon is present, confusion is impossible, and since IT is capitalized IT can’t be confused with an inanimate object, like a bowl of soup or a shoe.

Finnish, I’m told, has no masculine and feminine pronouns. A man is an it and a woman is an it. I don’t know if this creates a problem for writers writing in Finnish, but I’m told it makes translation difficult, and examples of sentences like the one above, When Justin finally arrived Justin was very angry. are sometimes unavoidable.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White is a slim book about style and English usage. For a guide to clear writing it can’t be beat, in my opinion. I recommend it for middle school and above. Children of any age can read it, but I don’t think it will be helpful at a much younger age.

It’s a good idea to make friends with an English usage book. Usage means the way a word is used, and a usage books explains how a word should or shouldn’t be used. The usage issue that gets me into trouble every time is the difference between take and bring. The examples that a usage book provides makes me understand for at least five minutes. Often – almost universally – people misuse lay and lie, a pet peeve with me. I’ve recommended Garner’s Modern American Usage before. Some readers on the blog are reading from outside the States, and you may find Fowler’s Modern English Usage more helpful. Usage books are arranged alphabetically, dictionary-style, a cinch to figure out.

Misplaced or wrong punctuation can also make trouble for the reader. A book has been written on this subject, which I confess I haven’t read. I know it’s for adults, but I can’t assess the level. Still, it might be worth picking up: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. If anyone reading this post has read the book, I’d welcome your comments.

In A Tale of Two Castles there is what seems like an addition mistake. (If you read the book see if you can find it.) The people who were recording the audio version called me to ask if they should change it. I panicked because it’s too late to fix the book, and I told them to make the correction. Then I emailed my editor, and she said I had made the mistake intentionally to provide a little subtext between two characters, and she had noted it in one of her edits and she likes it and hopes I won’t change it for the second printing. I thought, Whew! At least we all know how to count. But, alas, I don’t remember what I intended. So that’s muddiness I inflicted on myself. I guess the lesson is to try to know what you’re doing!

Loose pronouns and sloppy usage and incorrect punctuation are micro problems, but there can be macro ones as well. If I’m reading and I can’t see where the characters are in the setting I get confused and start having trouble following the plot. When I’m writing and the locale is complicated, I often draw a chart. Sometimes I worry that including setting slows down the action, but we have to put it in, although we probably want to establish the place before a crisis hits.

Too many subplots can make a story hard to follow and even dull. My husband and I started out as fans of the TV series Lost, but when back stories and new directions started to pile up, we both lost track and stopped caring. We never watched the last season.

When characters abruptly switch their natures I feel at sea and I don’t know what the author intends. In general, character is particularly tricky because everybody sees people differently. A few years ago, one of my critique buddies was writing a family story. She thought the mother was loving, but I saw her as harsh. I was able to point out why, and she softened the mother’s interactions with her daughter. I’ve mentioned in other posts that I sometimes have trouble making my main characters likable even though I want them to be. I’ve needed my editor to point out the spots where my main is unsympathetic.

So it often helps to have other eyes on a story or just on passages that you think may not do or say what you want them to. I’ve written about writers’ groups in other posts, but for getting clarity all you really need is a good reader who can say where he got confused.

Speaking of confusion, life with a puppy is full of it. I don’t know what he wants, what he needs, what would be best for his growth into a happy, responsive dog. Sometimes he might as well be a Martian for all I understand him. So for the prompt, an alien encounter. Your main character seeks out another creature, could be a Martian or an elf or a dog, whatever. Each needs something from the other, but they don’t speak the same language, or maybe they do but the cultures are so different the meaning is quite different. They may not even think the same way. Write their meeting and their attempts to get what they want. See if you can work the story around so they are able to figure each other out, but don’t make it easy.

Have fun and save what you write!

Ready or Not

Before I start, if you go to Books on my website and click on Other, you’ll see a sketch for the cover of my book of mean poems, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It. The final cover will have some color but won’t be much different from what you see. I adore it. It perfectly captures the book’s mood of malevolent complacency, and I can’t look at it without grinning evilly. The book won’t be out until April, 2012, so it’s way too early to pre-order.

On December 27, 2010, Jenna Royal wrote …I recently read an interview with an author who said that you shouldn’t try to get published as a teen, just keep trying to improve your writing skills and not try to put your writing out there because it isn’t worth your trouble and the rejection is too hard on your self-confidence at this point. What are people’s thoughts on this? I for one know that I’m not going to try publishing until I know that I’ve got something worth putting out there, that I’m really proud of, something that I’ve put myself into and polished and perfected until it’s the best it can be. Even if I feel I have something like this, should I still wait?

Jenna Royal, you asked about teens, but at least part of your question applies to every age as well.

I sent the first book I ever wrote straight out to publishers (I was thirty-nine). It had merit, and I thought it was great, but it was unpublishable. I hadn’t read a children’s book in many years and had no notion of what was going on. My story line was simple, possibly good for young children, but the ideas I explored (art appreciation) were more appropriate for a much older audience. The two parts didn’t go together, and the manuscript was universally rejected.

So I started educating myself and kept sending picture book manuscripts out. I was not shy, and although rejection made me unhappy, it didn’t devastate me. Were my later stories (the ones that never were accepted) good enough to be published? I don’t know. I did my best and released them into the world.

I’ve talked about my road to publication in other posts, so I won’t repeat here. Years later, while I was still unpublished, an editor visited a writing class I was taking. He said that the two fastest ways to get published were to write on a subject nobody else knew much about or to write something completely great. And I thought, Then I’ll never get published. The only subject I knew thoroughly was welfare policy, which wasn’t promising for a children’s book, and I didn’t think I was writing anything great or ever would. I was working on Ella Enchanted at the time, which turned out well. But I still don’t think about writing a great book when I write. Mostly I think about figuring it out and getting through it.

There are many ways to divide the world into two categories. You may have heard the theory that everyone resembles either a pig or a fox, which I don’t see. But I believe people divide into those who over-appreciate themselves and those who under-appreciate themselves. It’s hard to advise on sending work out to a publisher without knowing which group a person falls into.

Alas, over-appreciators, in my experience, rarely have the insight to know what they are. So they flood publishers’ slush piles with bad books insufficiently revised and are the reason everyone else has to wait so long for an editorial response. If you are the rare over-appreciator who recognizes this quality in yourself, you shouldn’t put anything into the mail or cyberspace until at least three people say it’s ready.

If you’re a severe under-appreciator of any age, you should push yourself to get your work out or you never will and readers will be the losers.

Another problem with being an under-appreciator is that if an editor rejects your work, you may say to yourself, Aha, I knew it wasn’t any good. Then you may never send it out again. You don’t know what was going on at the publisher when your manuscript was read. An editorial assistant may have sat down to a stack of submissions up to the ceiling. Four hours later he was drooling and muttering gibberish to himself and unable to identify the next Jane Austen if he came across one of her manuscripts.

One way to get a sense of the worth of what you have is to set it aside for a few weeks. If you under-appreciate you may be surprised at the high quality of what you’ve written. If you over-appreciate, you may be able to see the flaws.

In this process of deciding whether to submit a manuscript, you may want to ask yourself how you handle rejection. If you take turndowns hard, I don’t say not to submit, I say think about supports to help you if – and more likely when – rejection comes. Tell friends what you’re doing. Assemble a cheering section. If you’re in a writers’ group you’ll have your pals’ misery to keep company with. Read about all the famous writers whose work was initially rejected. There are collections of rejection letters for renowned books. Buy one or borrow one from your library.

You may also want to start small. Lots of kids’ book writers begin by submitting stories to children’s magazines before submitting to book publishers. If you’re writing for adults, there may be online publishing opportunities that may be easier to break into than the big publishing houses. If you’re a teen or even younger, googling young writers will lead you to opportunities. I’m not saying you have to start small, only that you can if that’s where your comfort zone is.

As for being a teen per se, I can’t imagine that an excellent manuscript wouldn’t get the same treatment if it came from a teen as if it came from an older person – that is, its excellence may or may not be noticed, as in the example above of the exhausted editorial assistant. Sometimes good writing isn’t picked up.

Do I think a teen can write a terrific story or book? I imagine so. Some of my students have been very talented.

On the other hand, a few years ago I came across my folder from my creative writing class when I was a senior in high school. Now I’ve lost it again, but one story sticks out in my memory. Before I tell you about it I need to reveal a little about my family history. My grandmother and my aunts – my mother’s mother and her sisters – criticized my mother often, not in a helpful way or even a forthright way, but in snide, indirect digs. I knew, and I was totally on my mother’s side. I hated the three of them. When I was in middle school my aunt got sick, and the story I found was about an unpleasant, selfish old lady in a hospital.

My writing was okay. But reading the story as an adult I was shocked at how meanspirited it was. When I wrote it, I knew that I was imagining my aunt as the main character. She and my other aunt and my grandmother are long dead now, and I still don’t think of them fondly, but today I couldn’t approach them as characters or, if they could be brought back to life, as people in such an unsympathetic way. I’ve grown up.

I don’t mean to suggest that teens are heartless. I wasn’t heartless myself. And you may be nothing like me. You may at a young age be able to get inside the mind and spirit of lots of different sorts of characters. You may have oceans of empathy. But you may lack some other depth of experience or character growth that will improve your writing later on. It would be terrible if, at fifteen or eighteen, you were finished, complete, as good as you were going to get.

So, write and send your writing out if you want to test the waters. If you have early success, how lovely, and how marvelous that the best is probably still to come.

Here are two prompts:

∙ Improve on my early effort. Write about an unpleasant, selfish old woman in the hospital, but reveal her inner life, so the reader feels for her. Why is she in the hospital? How sick is she? Does anyone visit? Is there anyone she especially wants to see?

∙ Over-appreciation and under-appreciation can pervade any aspect of life, not only writing. A dragon descends on the greater metropolitan area of Cincinnati, wrecking homes and incinerating maidens in Ohio and Kentucky. The governor of each state sends an adventurer to dispense with the monster. Unbeknownst to the governor, one adventurer is an over-appreciator and one is an under. Write about how each one prepares to encounter the dragon and how it comes out. If you like, turn the action into a story, a novel, or a seven-book series.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Perpetual-motion characters

Before I talk about this week’s question, I want you to know that you can now pre-order A Tale of Two Castles through the website (and other places, too). And – thank you, April, for this question on the blog! – for me it’s best if you buy from the website because I get a tad more money when you do.

Also, on the appearances page of the website are the places I’ll be on my book tour in May – no details yet, just the cities.

And there was an article in yesterday’s Health and Science Section of the New York Times about self-compassion and diet, which reminded me of last week’s post. If you substitute writing for diet and eating, everything applies. You can read the article by following the link: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/go-easy-on-yourself-a-new-wave-of-research-urges/?scp=1&sq=well,%20tara%20parker%20pope&st=cse

On December 10, 2010, Ruthie wrote …I tend to get overly obsessive about my stories–or, more accurately, my characters. For example, I have been vomiting up increasingly esoteric facts about the same fictitious people for over a year. I can tell you everything from their childhood hobbies right down to the shoe size for even my most minor characters. Whenever I write (whenever I think, really), it ends up being superfluous conversations between them or them just doing everyday tasks. And nothing happens. They all have their own flaws and friends and jobs and niches in their world; they could all continue the way they are right now, like a literary perpetual motion machine that never goes anywhere. If this isn’t to vague a request… help?

You may have heard this before: When we fall in love with our characters it can be hard to make bad things happen to them, which of course is what we have to do. I fall victim to this sometimes. But an in-depth understanding is a fabulous asset. When our characters’ situation does worsen, we know exactly what will work best to make them unravel.

We don’t have to start big with the misery. Often we want to begin with a little crisis and work gradually into tougher trouble. You know your characters’ flaws, so that’s a great place to start. Put two of them together. They’re outside the principal’s office, say, for talking during an assembly when a visiting children’s book author was speaking. Nan is self-centered, and she goes on about how her dad will combust if the principal calls him. Fran listens sympathetically, then starts to recount her own worry, which could be about the Algebra test she’s now missing. Nan listens for a minute, then says, “Yeah, I failed my French test last week,” and starts in on how mad her dad was. Fran feels rising anger and says, “You always do that.” Nan, although self-involved, is good about recognizing her faults, and she apologizes unstintingly. Then the principal comes out and calls the two girls in. Whatever happens there happens. Back to the argument. Fran’s flaw is to hold a grudge. Even though her friend apologized, she doesn’t forgive or forget. Later in the day, she texts, “I’m still mad at you.” Nan now adds Fran to her list of troubles, even ahead of her dad, and she confides what Fran did to their mutual friend Dan. Dan, alas, likes to separate people. And the story is launched. Your intimate knowledge of these characters fuels the conflict until this tempest in a teapot threatens to go nuclear.

An important plot question, much discussed in books about writing, is to ask yourself what a character wants and erect barriers to her achieving her goal. This is a cinch for us if we have an exhaustive knowledge of our characters. What obstacles will most drive Nan nuts? If, for example, she has to really pay attention to somebody else, someone important to her, she will be very challenged. She can fail and fail again, starting in small ways and moving up, until the reader is biting his nails up to his elbows.

We can also throw our character in at the deep end. Instead of asking what Nan most wants, ask what she most fears and make it happen right at the start of the story. I’d guess that Nan is needy, probably insecure, but one person makes her feel safe, her Aunt Jacqueline. So give Aunt J cancer. How does Nan deal with this? We know her inside out, so we know. Up until the diagnosis she’s terrific, calling her aunt every day, visiting her every other day. But aside from that, she isn’t sleeping or keeping up with her schoolwork, and she has to visit the principal’s office again. Then the diagnosis is bad. Nan gets the news from her mother and doesn’t call Aunt J. In fact, she won’t pick up when Aunt J calls. Nan becomes self-destructive in the ways that we who get her completely can most easily imagine.

The problem doesn’t have to be close to home, either. Aliens can invade. Centaurs can take over Nan’s village. If she has an inflated idea of herself as well as being self-centered, she can think the incursion has to do with her, and she can act accordingly with hilarious or tragic results. Only you will know what she’ll wear for her first meeting with the alien captain. Only you can guess how she’ll react to a ceremonial dinner of rattlesnake-eyeball stew.

If you love your characters so much that you freeze when you try to make trouble for them, think about their inner resources. Maybe this is the only area you haven’t developed. Nan is insecure, but maybe she’s got a stubborn core that keeps her from being overwhelmed. Or she can laugh at herself, which rescues her in her worst moments. If you figure out how your characters can rise above whatever befalls them, you may be more willing to unleash the worst.

There’s conflict in your question, Ruthie. Your characters may not be in the middle of a problem, but you are, so you can write about yourself as a fictional character. How does the character Ruthie learn how to put her marvelous creations into a story? Maybe she takes a creative writing class from a teacher who humiliates her in front of everybody (remember, this is the fictional Ruthie) and the pain gets her writing, but the characters she knows so well refuse to do what she expects them to. She discusses the problem with one of her classmates, Nan, who seems a lot like one of her characters, which is not good. The reader may not care much about the characters who continue to chat and shop and eat their favorite foods, but he does care about Ruthie.

Or Ruthie can go to a party and find the entire cast of her fictional world there, in the flesh. How did this happen? What does it mean? How is her friend Nan, who came with her, doing with all these people? Has Nan figured it out? Is Nan even experiencing these people the way Ruthie is?

Here’s another thought: Throw your characters together without Ruthie and write their dialogue. Don’t force anything. Just let it happen. Write at least ten pages without worrying about plot. When you’re ready to go through it, look for places where there’s the slightest hint of trouble, or more than a hint. Exploit these moments. Make them worse. Make someone cry. Keep going.

Here’s an off-the-wall idea: Invite some friends over, or try this with family. Give each friend one of your character descriptions. Suggest a situation with inherent trouble. In character, your pals are trapped together in the bottom of a mine. Or they have a school assignment to write together about mining, and half their final grade will depend on it. Or they’re going against one another in some kind of competition. Don’t you be one of the characters. You’re the observer, writing notes. When you see something promising for a story, write it down. You can stop the action whenever you want and ask a character to repeat a line that went by too fast. You can tell them to take their improvisation in a direction that looks promising to you. Or you can just let them rip. The advantage of this is that you’re bringing in people who will be perfectly willing to create drama, who won’t love the characters as much as you do, and you’ll be able to see what can happen to them. Of course, it also may not work, but everyone may still enjoy trying.

A bunch of prompts are embedded in this post:

∙ Use my argument starter and make up your own situation to put it in, or use mine, the two main characters outside the principal’s office. The argument starter is, “You always do that.”

∙ Pick a character you don’t know what to do with and ask what he fears most. Or use a secondary character from one of your other stories. Bring his worst fear down on him. Write about how he responds. Does he overcome? Or are you writing a tragedy, and he succumbs?

∙ Stage an alien invasion or village takeover by non-human creatures. Invent or use as an existing character as your main character, someone who will respond to this trouble in a surprising way.

∙ Write about a writer who can’t figure out what to do with her characters. Have her take a writing class from a sadistic teacher and meet a classmate who could be straight out of one of her failed stories.

∙ Send your writer to a party attended by her characters. Make them get mad at her. Write what happens.

∙ Write dialogue for your purposeless characters. After ten pages, go back and look for hints of conflict and blow them up. Keep writing.

∙ Turn your characters into an improvisation for friends or family. Take notes while they perform. If trouble erupts, write it down. Push the plot they’re creating with suggestions. You can even videotape them in action.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Drops of blood

On November 29, 2010 Bluekiwii wrote, …I always have the problem of actually starting to write. The story I want to write blanks from my mind, and I freeze before I’ve even begun to write a word. Or I’ll write something–realize it’s rubbish–and cross it out and begin again, and I’ll continue on this way through the story until I give it up halfway. Or I sit in front of the page thinking of ideas/possibilities and reject each one. Have you ever felt this way and what have you done to get rid of this feeling in order to write? How do you start the process of writing a story? Do you outline what you are doing first, a simple two-liner that will guide the plot? Do you plan each chapter? How do you visualize what you’re trying to write before you do it? Do you make a rough sketch of what your characters are like before fleshing them out in the story?
I love this quote by Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

Years ago, before I became a writer, I painted, and my favorite medium was watercolor, which is not forgiving, because you can’t cover your mistakes. Some watercolorists outline in pencil so they know what they’re doing. Some paint so loosely that a mistake just becomes part of the artistry, which I admire the most. I did neither. I just expected myself to get it right, and I disappointed myself again and again. As soon as I started a new painting I’d be all over myself about how I was going to louse it up.

The quality of my painting became a measurement of my worth, not of my financial worth of course, but of whether I was worthy of respect, of being considered an artist, almost of living. There was much too much riding on the outcome every time I picked up a paintbrush. Eventually I stopped painting and started writing.

I didn’t come to writing with the same negativity, and I was lucky in the teachers and the books I found to help me learn. I talk about this in Writing Magic, and I’ve written about it on the blog now and then. The most helpful book I read back then, the most helpful in exactly this regard, which I’ve also mentioned before, is Writing on Both Sides of the Brain (middle school and up) by Henriette Anne Klauser. Even today, when I’m particularly stuck, that’s the book I go to.

If I remember right, there’s an approach in another writing book, Bird by Bird (also middle school and up, I’d guess) by Anne Lamott, that might be helpful. It’s called “Short Assignments.” In short assignments the writer has to write, but for a limited time. Building on Lamott’s idea, Bluekiwii and anyone who feels like Bluekiwii, I’d recommend that you write for fifteen minutes and stop for a while. Don’t evaluate what you’ve written. Just leave it. Then write for another fifteen minutes, without evaluating your new work or what went before. Your job for now is to write without judgment.

I love the computer, because it’s the opposite of watercolor; it’s infinitely forgiving. You can make a million mistakes and a million fixes. Here’s something else to try: Write without crossing out. When you don’t like what went before, just hit Enter twice and write the sentences better or differently or even worse and keep going.

Or try this: When you think you wrote something awful, write the judgment and keep going, as in, Maxine and her brother Isaac left the apartment to buy a carton of milk. What tripe. Who cares? The elevator didn’t come for a full five minutes, so they took the stairs. What difference does that make? I should just cut it all. Maxine told her mother she didn’t want to go to the store. The store was boring. This is boring. I should shoot Maxine.

Keep going. Maybe it will turn out that the elevator was delayed because Maxine’s upstairs neighbor, the one who gives her piano lessons, had a heart attack, and he was being carried into the elevator on a stretcher. Or maybe there will be a unicorn in the store when Maxine and Isaac finally get there. Or you’ll find other characters that interest you more than the two of them.

At the end of every post I write, “Have fun, and save what you write!” I don’t mean you should save only the pieces you approve of. I mean, save it all. You may never look at your old efforts again, but someday you may want to. You may be curious about your progress or about what you were thinking in 2011. Your biographer may be interested in every word you ever wrote.

Recently I bought a book on writing mysteries because I’ve been having so much trouble with my second mystery novel. I hoped that book would give me a formula that I could follow, that I could dress up and disguise, which I would really be happy to do if it made writing easier. I gave up on the book, although some of it was interesting, but it didn’t give me the formula. Probably because there is none for me. My writing process is messy. I muddle along, and some books are harder than others, but eventually I find my way, or so far I have.

I don’t have much trouble starting a story. I spend a few weeks thinking about what I may want to do and writing notes, and then I’m off. No outline, but a rough idea of where I’m going, which may be entirely not where I go. I don’t plan each chapter, but I do have an idea of a scene before I write it, and I have an internal alarm that shrills when things are getting dull and I need to shake them up or throw in a surprise. As for my characters, I discover them as I write. When they feel blank I use the character questionnaire you can find in Writing Magic. The one thing I do do is visualize. I need to see my characters moving through a scene, to know where they are and what they’re seeing, hearing, touching, smelling.

This second mystery, which may or may not be called Beloved Elodie – I’ve now started it four times. The first time I wrote about 140 pages, but I forgot to put in any suspects. (!!!) So I started over with suspects but the same core mystery, which was too complicated and impossible to solve. I told my husband the story, and his eyes rolled back in his head, and I knew it wasn’t working, but I’d written about 260 pages and I’m not getting any younger. Then I made the mystery something that can be solved, but I was taking too long to get the problem going. Remember I mentioned that I was meeting with my new critique buddy? I’d given her the first thirty pages and she picked up on what was wrong immediately. This time, happily, I’d written only about 45 pages. Now I think I’m on track until I get into trouble again.

I am not a role model, but I could be someone to wallow with in the writing mud.

Here are some prompts:

• If you’re too self-critical, try the suggestions above. Write in fifteen-minute stretches. Write without crossing anything out. Include your self put-downs in your writing. Read the chapter in Writing Magic called “Shut Up!” and read Writing on Both Sides of the Brain and Bird by Bird.

• Write a list of ten story ideas. Pick the worst, stupidest one and write twenty minutes worth of notes on where you could go with it. If you get inspired, write the story.

• Write about Maxine and Isaac and their trip to the store or about their refusal to go to the store. Make something unexpected happen. Then create another surprise. And another.

Have fun, and save what you write!