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 Years later, while I was still unpublished, an editor visited a writing class I was taking.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!

Chop chop choppy

Here are two related questions from late last November:

Jenna Royal wrote, ...my current story has a few gaps in the writing, and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions as how to fix that? There isn’t a lot filling in the space between the events in the story, and that leaves it feeling a little forced and just dull. What do I need to fill the spaces with?

Later she added, …my MC has a mystery to solve, and she has three sources, two of them people and the third an old journal. So all the important events are either dialogue or reading, which gets kind of dull with nothing in between. And the gaps in between are just . . . gaps. The problem is that there is nothing there. My story jumps from one important scene to another, and I’m not sure what to put in between to lead from one event to another to interest my reader. I don’t want a lot of extra stuff, but do I need it to keep my story interesting?

And Marissa wrote, When I read my stories I feel like they flow well in some places, but then other spots are choppy and they just skip around.

Jenna Royal, I don’t know if, when the journal appears, you simply show it, and everything is journal for that section, or if you’re including action. For example, your main character Nathaniel can try to turn a page but his hands are trembling. The reader feels for him. He can put the book aside briefly to think about it, and you show his thoughts. He can reread an important sentence or copy it into his own journal. It’s okay to just place the journal parts in by themselves. That can certainly work, and many books take that approach, but including context can heighten reader engagement. Nathaniel’s attention to some passages more than others will direct or misdirect the reader’s attention. I love to fool the reader. If Nathaniel thinks a certain passage is important, she will too and will give less heed to other, really vital information. When the truth comes out, the reader may thumb back to the relevant lines and grin in admiration at your cleverness.

And the dialogue parts shouldn’t be just dialogue, as you may know. I talk about this in Writing Magic and here and there on the blog. Dialogue needs to be supported by gesture, thoughts, setting. The scaffolding around the speech add interest and liveliness and let the reader see and hear. Yes, hear. Just words on the page don’t convey sound. We don’t know that a character is mumbling, for example, unless we’re told. Then the mumbling heightens our curiosity. Why is this character mumbling? Shyness, fear, an attempt at concealment?

Jenna Royal and Marissa and everyone else, these suggestions will slow your story down, which in this instance is good, because the dullness and choppiness may come from rushing it. Expanding will actually make your plot fly for the reader.

Silver the Wanderer made some suggestions. She (I’m guessing you’re a she) wrote, @Jenna, about your gap problem – maybe you should consider adding in little events that help the reader get to know your characters better? Maybe two of them could play a game, or go for a walk? Maybe the walk could be on the way to one of the people who are the sources? And they have to eat, after all. Some of these little things might turn out to be just filler, but you’ll learn more about your characters by the way they act. And who knows? Maybe one of the events might turn out to be important? It’s happened to me before, and it’s always interesting to see how these things seem to tie into the rest of the story without really meaning to.

(Have I mentioned lately that I love the sharing and support and advice that happen on the blog?)

I agree. Writing is magical. Something we throw in, thinking we may get rid of it later, turns out to be the key to an entire story. As Silver the Wanderer suggested, the two characters walk together to a source, and the secondary character mentions that he collects nineteenth century monocles, and they stop to look in the window of a hardware store, and Nathaniel thinks about the tiny tools needed to repair monocles or about glass grinding, and click! he has solved the mystery.

When we give a few characters an activity, they can’t just do it and nothing else or we might as well be writing an instructional manual. We need to enrich the action with setting, dialogue, body language, thoughts. We think we’re picking at random, but our minds in their sneaky depths know what the story may eventually need, and so, miraculously, we insert just the details that will later prove crucial.

For example, in Ever, Olus, the main male character and the god of the wind, thinks of himself also as the god of loneliness. His mother is the goddess of the earth and of pottery. I wasn’t think of the future when I wrote them that way, but their dual god roles help my main female character enormously – I won’t say how.

Not that this always works for me. Sometimes I just sow confusion. Or I write an interesting scene that enhances character but doesn’t do much for future plot, which is okay too.

More than okay. These in-between periods create texture and fill out the world of the story. We shouldn’t let them go on too long, and we want to remind the reader of the ongoing tension, but short interims of down time are often exactly what a story needs.

Having said all that – the subconscious and softer story interludes – it’s a good idea to keep the story problem in mind even as you’re writing transitions. While the two characters are walking together, Nathaniel can be chewing over the mystery. He can ask the secondary for advice and then maybe worry that he’s asked an indiscreet question or given something away or that his companion won’t keep a secret or that she isn’t trustworthy. She may say something that sets off alarm bells.

Mysteries are a special case, because there may be two problems, the mystery that needs solving and the main character’s difficulty, whatever that is. Nathaniel needs to find his missing sister. The mystery and his problem are the same. Or he’s been hired to look for the missing uncle of a classmate he doesn’t even know very well. In the second case, what’s at stake for Nathaniel?

If the answer is nothing, then the reader is unlikely to care about any of it. No matter how baffling the mystery is or how cleverly Nathaniel goes about solving it, it will still be an intellectual exercise. What’s at stake can be anything, can be directly related to the mystery or not. Nathaniel may be proving to a potential girlfriend that he’s really a detective. We want him to get the girl, so we want him to solve the mystery. Or he can fall for the classmate with the missing uncle. Or he can uncover a connection between the uncle and himself.

Focusing on Nathaniel’s problem may smooth out choppiness. His thoughts may also. However, sometimes all that’s needed is an introductory word or clause, like Meanwhile or After Nathaniel finished at the dentist; then continue the story.

Here are some prompts that draw from this post:

∙ Your main character Helena goes into a store, can be a hardware store or any other sort, but be sure you know enough about the merchandise to find a mystery there. Whatever it is, the mystery is in the goods the store sells. Find a way to tie it to Helena’s life.

∙ Helena finds a journal in her father’s bathrobe pocket after he’s gone to the hospital for emergency surgery. The journal entries are written in a secret language he taught her when she was eight years old, but the journal is older than that.

∙ Nathaniel goes home with Helena to see her collection of antique monocles. He picks one up and raises it to his eyes. Helena shrieks and pushes his arm away but too late, because he’s already seen…

∙ Nathaniel and Helena have left the house of one of the sources after breaking into her greenhouse in search of a clue. The source came home, but they managed to escape without being caught. The tension has been very high for the last twenty pages and you want to give the two and the reader a break. Helena and Nathaniel go to a local park and collapse on the grass. Write this scene and in dialogue, action (small actions, gestures, body language), and thoughts, shift their relationship.

∙ Perry and Nathaniel go to high school together, but they hardly know each other. Perry asks Nathaniel for help with a mystery in his life because Nathaniel has a skill Perry needs, whatever it is. Nathaniel asks why he should care, and Perry tells him. You write Perry’s answer and take it from there.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Time to write

Before I start I want to mention the book I just finished, Telling Time: Angels, Ancestors, and Stories by Nancy Willard, a wonderful collection of essays about writing. It’s not so much a how-to as reflections. I recommend it to anyone high school and above. You can certainly try it if you’re younger, but I think it will have more meaning later on.

On November 23, 2010, Mya wrote, Homework load seems to increase every year through high school, and though I badly want to write, sometimes I can’t seem to find the time. So I was wondering, how do you organize your writing time? And there is also the fact real life can drain so much energy that makes you too tired to type a single word. How do you get inspired once more, and relax into the mood?

I don’t have the tiredness problem. I have lots of energy. For that, my suggestions are mostly general health ones, like getting enough sleep (not always possible), eating sensibly, etc., etc. The only other thought is to journal. If real life is getting in the way, it may be helpful to write about what’s going on. Vent. Scream and rant on the page. Then you may find you’ve cleared space for your creative work.

A few years ago my long-time critique buddy got very sick. She’s better now, but she had a brain injury and isn’t writing the way she used to and can’t evaluate my work anymore either. Aside from the sadness of this, her absence has slowed me down. She and I used to meet weekly, and I always wanted to have work to show her, which was a goad to keep me going. I’ve written several books since she and I stopped sharing, but it’s been harder.

Next week I’m starting with a new critique pal, which I hope will help me the way my friend used to.

So that’s one strategy, to hook up with another writer or join a writing group, which I’ve written about in earlier posts. In order for this to work, your writing partner needs to be someone encouraging, someone who likes your work. There’s no better incentive than thinking, I can’t wait for him to see this. He’s going to love it. But if your critique-mate is hyper-critical and seems not to admire your work, you may actually write less, and you may regard your sessions together as the equivalent of oral surgery.

When I was starting to write, one of the most helpful books I discovered was Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It was written almost a century ago, and the language is dated, but the ideas aren’t. At one point the author instructs the reader to set aside a particular fifteen minutes a day for writing. No matter what may come for a week, a month – I don’t remember which – you have to write during that time. Then she tells you to write for fifteen minutes at different times, random times. The idea is to accustom yourself to writing whenever possible in any circumstance and not to depend on a muse or a mood. If you can write only in your office or only when there’s absolute silence, your opportunities narrow. I write in airports, on planes and trains, in hotel rooms. Sometimes it’s hard, like if someone nearby is talking on a cell phone, but usually I can block out the noise.

Dorothea Brande has another suggestion, which I haven’t followed, but which I offer because it’s probably worthwhile, and that is to write right after waking up, before you’ve had your coffee or changed out of your jammies, and especially before you read anything, preferably before you speak to anyone. The idea here is that your mind will be empty of your conventional way of thinking and surprising ideas will pop up.

Mya, I am not good at organizing my writing time. I write while I eat breakfast and while I eat lunch and at night when I have my snack. That’s an hour or so. And then I write in between, but I’m very distractible. If an email comes in, I look at it. People rarely have to wait long for an answer from me. Phone rings, I pick it up. Right now, in addition to working on my next book, I’m preparing two speeches, and tomorrow I’ll spend most of the day on them. I’m not a role model. Better to follow authors who set a page goal for themselves and stick to it. These admirable folk turn out their quota even if they have to stay up till three in the morning to do it, or if they have a fever of 104, or if their furnace dies. Or follow the authors who write for four hours a day, every day.

A book that’s wonderful on the subject of discipline is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (middle school and above). Lamott is eloquent and funny about staying focused and how hard that is. Besides, her writing is a pleasure to read.

Still, whenever there’s nothing that seems more pressing, which is often, I write. I take my laptop with me when I think I may have down time, like when I have a doctor’s appointment. And in my slow, erratic way I complete books. My publishers and my readers might be happier if I wrote more, and maybe someday I’ll figure out how to do that. Until then, I’m plodding along.

I’m much better at revising. When I’m revising I don’t get up to look out the window every half hour. I stick with it, because I love revising more than I love grinding out a first draft. Revising never lasts long enough; I enjoy it so much I finish it quicker. We’re all different, of course. You may hate revising.

Anyway, the point is to keep writing. If you continue to write, you’ll finish one story and then another and then another, and you’ll build up a body of work, something to be mighty proud of.

Here are some prompts:

∙ Try these exercises based on Dorothea Brande’s book. For the next week, write for fifteen minutes as soon as you wake up. For the week after that, write for fifteen minutes when you get home at the end of your day. And for the following week, write at a variety of times and places for fifteen minutes every day.

∙ There are a zillion books and movies about blocked writers, probably because the authors and screenwriters are writing what they know. It’s your turn. Aster, your main character, is taking a creative writing class and has to write something and can think of nothing. Her failure spills over into other parts of her life: friends, family, pet frog, after-school job, whatever. Write her misery and then decide whether or not to rescue her. Of course you can move this into fantasy, so long as writing is involved. Aster can be a gnome who has to write a book about mining.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Just words

This post is going to be about words, starting with Maddie’s question on November 11, 2010: I have a little spell-checker on my computer. It also tells me the average reading level of the stuff that I’m writing, and it’s not huge. Is it always necessary to add in bigger words, or is it ok to not use huge words as long as your plot is suitably twisted? (i.e., I don’t want to be the next Dr. Seuss, although I do love his stuff… :D)

My advice is to ignore the reading level on your spell checker, because it doesn’t tell you much that’s meaningful. Word length and reading level based on word length and average number of words in each sentence may determine the age of the child who can read a particular book, but they have nothing to do with the age of the child who should read it. Animal Farm (middle school and up) by George Orwell is a perfect example. I read it when I was in third or fourth grade and thought it an interesting story about animals. The allegory flew over my head until my older sister let me in on the secret.

In the case of Animal Farm, it’s not a matter of plot twists either. The story is straightforward, no subplots that I remember; the book is only 128 pages long. What’s sophisticated is the meaning.

Another example is What Jamie Saw by Carolyn Coman, which is a miracle of a book. It’s told from the POV of a nine-year-old boy. Very simple story, also no plot complications that I recall, only 126 pages long, yet it’s a young adult book, definitely not for actual nine-year-olds. In this case, the reason is the subject, which is child abuse.

I like short words (and long and medium-size ones). Short words have power. And so do short sentences. They’re punchy. Sometimes we can get a good rhythm going with short sentences – and sometimes with long.

POV is another determinant of the sort of vocabulary that best suits a story. In What Jamie Saw, the author was limited to words that Jamie would know, and he wasn’t a child vocabulary prodigy. If you’re telling your story from the POV of a child or someone without much education, you’re stuck with a limited vocabulary. But even if your POV character is erudite, she may prefer not to show off her erudition. She may like to be simple and clear, even when she’s in a complicated situation or dealing with a difficult subject, like chaos theory. The sesquipedalian word may come to her only when it’s the sole way to express an idea.

When you’re using a third-person narrator, it’s up to you and whatever serves your story.

When I’m reading I like to come upon a few words to look up, but I don’t want to need my dictionary three times in every paragraph. When I write I don’t dumb down my vocabulary for kids. If they need to go to the dictionary more often than I enjoy as a reader, that’s okay. They’re kids, and their vocabularies need building. On the other hand, I don’t want to write an impenetrable book. Sometimes I help by making a meaning clear through context.

A convoluted plot is unconnected to word choice. You can tell a complex story using simple language or six-syllable vocabulary. I don’t think most third graders will be able to follow a tale that weaves together six subplots, for example. Adults will get lost too in a Byzantine plot. I will, and I’ll give up unless I’m completely in love with some element of the story.

Moving along to a related topic, Mysterygirl, Alexandra, April, and Marissa, all posted comments about words that were banned in school. Some teachers called these “jail” words, mostly simple words. Mysterygirl gave examples: good, bad, said, sad, mad, happy, grumpy, big, small, medium, love, calm. One of April’s teachers hated nice.

I sympathize with these teachers, who want to develop their students’ vocabularies. If this is what your teacher is demanding, I suggest going along in your school work. I’d say go your teachers one better. Wow them. For example, instead of grumpy, give them irascible, peevish, querulous, vinegarish. Use your thesaurus. It will help all your writing. For the heck of it, try for words your teachers will have to look up – unless they have no sense of humor.

After you blow your teacher away with your fab vocab, you might ask for an exemption from her rule just for you, unless everyone in your class will hate you. But if you don’t get the exemption, tough it out.

And in the stories you’re not writing for school, forget about jail words and words that are allowed to run free. The dictionary is your pasture. Graze at will on the weeds along with the grass and the flowers. Be a free-range writer.

Out of curiosity I just did a word search on the word nice in one of my Princess Tales, Cinderellis and the Glass Hill. In that book I used nice eleven times, which I was aware of and did deliberately. The main characters in this book are simple people, even though one of them is a princess. Nice appears in the thoughts of the two mains. It’s what they’re both looking for. I used pleasant once, amiable not at all. Amiable wouldn’t have fit the tone I’d set.

Having said that, I am alert to word repetition when I write and when I edit. If I think I’m overusing a word, I write it in a list above my story, and when I’m done, I search for the word. If it is showing up too much, I hunt for synonyms to substitute. My editor is amazing at picking up word repetition too. She catches the ones I miss.

Obviously there are words we have to use again and again. Prepositions are unavoidable, for example, and we can’t do without the appearing a million times.

Marissa’s teacher didn’t let her students use the word said. Again, if you have to listen to your teacher, you have to. But said is a special case, and it should be used repeatedly. I devote an entire chapter to said in Writing Magic. In brief, said (and ask, too) disappear. We see who’s speaking and move on. Substitute words, like exclaim, question, state, just draw attention to themselves and away from the action and what’s being said. What’s more, exclaim and question and query are unnecessary because the punctuation tells us everything. Words like vocalize and express are simply awful, in my opinion.

Sometimes repetition sets up a rhythm that’s pleasing, and sometimes you want to break the rhythm. Sometimes you’re not sure and just have to pick, and sometimes both choices are equal. Aaa! Writing is hard!

Here’s a prompt:

I learned to read on the Dick and Jane books, which were heavy on repetition and low on excitement, but they did the job for me. Below are four sentences from one of the books. I don’t know why each sentence gets its own line within a single quotation:

Father said, “Down, Spot.
Run away, Spot.
You can not go.
You can not go in the car.”

There’s drama here. I wouldn’t want anybody’s father to tell the family dog to run away. Your challenge is to rewrite the dialogue at least three ways, fooling around with vocabulary. Father’s speech can go on for four pages. He can be a vampire if you like or whatever else. Spot can be a talking dog or a werewolf.

If you want to, turn the situation into a story, a novel, a seven-book series.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The End. Period.

On November 6, 2010, Marissa wrote, I have a question about endings… I decide if I like a book mostly based on how it ends and how it leaves me feeling, but I can never get that sense of closure in my stories.

Often when I approach the end of a book I’m writing, I want to have a bomb land on everybody. Problem solved.

But not satisfying.

A great story for satisfaction, in my opinion, is an anecdote in my friend Joan Abelove’s young adult novel, Go and Come Back (middle school and up). Joan was an anthropologist in the Peruvian jungle, and her book, which is told from the POV of a young tribal woman, is based on her experiences. Every incident in the book is essentially true.

In this one, Margarita, one of the two anthropologists is sick late one night. The narrator, Alicia, discovers this by hearing voices from their house. She asks what’s wrong and is told by Joanna, the healthy one, that Margarita has been vomiting for hours and nothing in their first aid kit has helped. Alicia asks Joanna if she has sent for Papaisi. Joanna snaps that she hasn’t, so Alicia gets him. He leads the sick woman out to the porch. By then everyone in the village has gathered to watch. Papaisi has his patient lie down. First he blows smoke from his pipe across her stomach. Then he seems to bite something off and immediately throws up over the side of the porch. As soon as he does, everyone in the village sighs with relief. Margarita sits up perfectly fine, cured.

Joanna gives Papaisi a pack of cigarettes to show her gratitude (this was the early 1970’s when smoking was much more prevalent). He accepts but then says that what he really would like is four aspirin.

End of incident. It’s just right. We have high stakes: the sick woman, the whole village as witnesses, the bizarre treatment from a Western perspective, the recovery. We start to wonder what else smoke blown across a belly will cure. Then, boom!, the request for a gift that’s almost a symbol of modern medicine.

That’s the ending with a twist. O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” is a well-known twist story.

Another pleasing shape comes in the circular story. I wrote about this kind in my blog post of July 9th, 2009. A circular tale ends where it began. The Lord of the Rings, for example, starts in the calm, peaceful Shire and ends there, but Frodo will never be the same. Two of my books are circular: The Wish and Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg. Of course, a circular ending may not be any easier to achieve than a more linear one. We still have to figure out how to return to that point of origin.

Often the key to the ending lies in the story problem. In The Lord of the Rings again, the issue is danger to Middle Earth. By returning to the Shire, Tolkien demonstrates that order has been restored.

In Ella Enchanted, which isn’t circular, the problem is the curse of obedience, and the ending has to resolve it. Either Ella will be cursed for the rest of her life or she’ll escape for the rest of her life. In my Dave at Night, as another example, the problem is finding a home. Dave lives at an orphanage, which doesn’t feel like one. By the end he has to be where he believes he should be – or know that he will be rootless at least until he grows up.

Figuring out your ending may take some thinking about the problem at the heart of your story. We can get too involved in the showing and the telling to ponder what it’s all about. I had that difficulty with Dave at Night and figured it out at a book signing for Ella Enchanted. Nobody came, and I sat there at a little desk in the book store and thought about Dave. By the time I gave up hoping for customers, I had my ending worked out.

Once you know the problem, reaching the solution may still be hard. In the case of Ella, I couldn’t work out how she could break the curse. At first I thought she could do it through rebellion against the tyranny of Hattie, but that wasn’t strong enough. You’d think it would have been clear right away that her love for Char was the crux of it, but I took a long time to get there.

Delaying the solution can keep a story going through a series of books. If Tolkien had gotten the ring to Mordor in The Fellowship of the Ring, that would have been it.

Sometimes I know my ending from the beginning, and I write toward it, but provisionally, knowing that my conception may change. Or, more often, I foresee the ending in a general way, but no specifics. In The Wish, for example, I knew that Wilma’s wish had to end, and the reader understands this too by the middle of the book, but I wasn’t sure what shape Wilma would be in after it ended. This isn’t bad, just having a general notion. Security and insecurity mixed together are good for writing, I think.

When I follow a traditional fairy tale, I have the fairy tale ending glimmering ahead of me. What I have to figure out is how to get there. Marissa, and others who have trouble with endings, you might try expanding a common story, which doesn’t have to be a fairy tale. Could be a myth, a religious story, a family anecdote that has a satisfying shape and a settled ending. Consider this a prompt.

In Go and Come Back, Joan uses the simplest of devices to end the book. The anthropologists are in the village for a year, and the entire story revolves around their time there. When the year ends so does the book. There is no bang, but no whimper either. Much has happened, and Alicia, the narrator, has changed. What makes the reader really happy, though, is that she’s left a deep impression on the visitors. They’ll never be the same.

Any time period will work for this technique – last year of high school, a summer, an internship, whatever. Naturally, you need to create action during the time you’ve allotted yourself, and characters have to evolve, but you don’t have to invent a climax of high drama for the reader to feel closure.

I’ve used an epilogue in several books to tie things up and make the whole feel complete. As a child I liked epilogues, because I wanted to know what became of this character and that. If I loved the book, an epilogue never told enough. I wanted to follow the characters into the sunset and watch their happy futures unfold – which would have been boring.

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

Have fun, and save what you write!

Villains galore

After my post of October 27, 2010, Jenna Royal wrote, Is it important to make your villains likable? It is common that in a good book I will both enjoy a villain’s strategy and understand and relate to their desires. I never really thought about making my villains likable, though. They were just the bad guys, nothing more. Would it add more diversity to my writing to make my villains a little more human and easier to sympathize with?

And Silver the Wanderer wrote, I also realize I might have to do some work on my villain, for I fear his character is a tad underdeveloped. However, he doesn’t play a huge role in my book. He’s the instigator of events, but we don’t actually see him until the end of the book. From hearing about him, we know that he is smart, devious, and a traitor. He is also no coward. He might be evil, or he might just have some messed-up moral standards. But sometimes I wonder if his motives are enough to make his wrongdoings believable. He can’t just be evil for the sake of being evil. Does anyone have ideas on how to craft a believable villain?
And Mya wrote, I find balancing a villain’s ‘evilness’ rather hard sometimes. More frequently though, it’s the opposite. I make the villains too nice, and can’t help but forgive, or let them be humbled at the end. Are there ways I can be more awful to them? =)

There is no one way villains should be. The villain – or if not the villain, strictly speaking, certainly the antagonist – doesn’t even have to be a character; it can be a disease (as in my Two Princesses of Bamarre) or weather or a cosmological force. In Norse mythology, as I understand it from my ancient Mythology, Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, by Edith Hamilton, evil is destined to win eventually – not a particular embodiment of evil, like Loki, but evil itself.

The antagonist can even be a belief. I once worked with a man who believed himself unlucky, although I didn’t see it; he had a good job, a fine mind, a sense of humor, a girlfriend. Whenever anything bad happened to him, he blamed it on his rotten luck. If he were a main character, there would be no human adversary, only an idea. Political theories can play the part of the villain. In Ayn Rand’s novels the underlying evil is Communism.

When your villain is a character, human or otherwise, it’s okay to make him – or her or it – entirely bad. The reader doesn’t have to like him in the slightest. Sometimes he operates in the background of the story, as in Silver the Wanderer’s example. The narrator can speculate about him from his actions, but the reader doesn’t encounter him directly. Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes series is this kind of villain. He never becomes a fleshed-out character like Holmes or Watson, and the reader certainly neither likes him nor sympathizes with him.

When the reader does come face to face with a villain, however, he should be interesting, not necessarily likable or sympathetic. In my Dave at Night, the main villain is the superintendent of the orphanage where Dave lives. He is simply a terrible man. His name is Mr. Bloom, but the orphans call him Mr. Doom. Here are snippets from his monologue before he beats Dave up:

“Mrs. Bloom and I love the finer things in life, the theater, concerts…. Mrs. Bloom’s little hobby is following the doings of high society…. So one might wonder at my choice of vocation. I admit it’s a sacrifice, but someone has to do the dirty work. Someone has to take in children like you…. Otherwise you’d have nowhere to go. However, it’s like putting a rattlesnake to your bosom.”

He’s awful, but he has a personality, and the reader hates him even more for knowing him. At the end when he’s fired, the reader feels no guilt for rejoicing at his downfall. (I haven’t given very much away; there’s a lot more to the resolution of the book.) Happiness at the demise of an all-out villain is fun. In movie theaters we cheer.

Of course, in order for Mr. Bloom to be understood as evil, Dave has to be sympathetic. If he’s a young arsonist who’s just burned down an old age home, Mr. Bloom’s sacrifice may seem real.

Although it’s fine to create villains who are simply evil, diversifying is always good. Try your hand at a sympathetic villain. Make her more than likable; make her lovable. Maybe she takes such delight in her dastardly deeds that we can’t help but chortle along. Maybe he’s his own worst enemy, and everyone else’s, but his remorse makes us forgive him again and again.

Believability may depend on genre. In a superhero story, for example, the reader checks her disbelief when she opens the book. If the hero can change from weak and mild-mannered to almost invincible just by changing his outfit in a phone booth, the villain doesn’t have to have much depth or motivation either. This kind of hero is born good and the bad guy is born bad. In some fantasies, evil needs no explanation either. In some thrillers too. As Kirk Douglas says chillingly in the wonderful old movie The List of Adrian Messenger, “Evil is.”

Complexity makes any character more believable, and I’m all for it. One way to craft a complex villain is through surprises. Your villain Monique is unlikely to be the main character, so you probably won’t have her thoughts to make her layered, but you do have all the other tools of character creation. If any of the story takes place at her house, the reader can discover that she collects Hummel figurines. If you want her to be sympathetic, she can bake cookies – not poisoned – for a homeless shelter. She can feed oatmeal cookie dough to her cocker spaniel.

In dialogue, Monique can be witty. She may be an American history buff or love puns. When your hero says something that puts him at a disadvantage she can astonish the reader by letting it slide – although she may use the information later.

You can reveal her diary in which she writes only about her visits to the homeless shelter and nothing about her cruel impulses. Or maybe she alludes to them in a vague way, like, “Mother scolded me today. I have no idea what she was going on about, but she was very angry.”

Even description can make her more complicated – dark eye makeup with pink lipstick. Pudgy face, muscular body. Terrible posture. An unexplained bandage on her arm.

If you decide to make Monique sympathetic, which usually involves complexity, there is the danger that the reader won’t understand when she acts on her wickedness. He may think, “I identify with Monique, and I like her, I don’t believe she’d behave so despicably.” The solution is to introduce her badness as soon as the reader meets her. Show her being awful, or have a character the reader trusts talk about some vileness she’s committed. Establish right from the start that she isn’t good.

Mya, I tend to let my villains off the hook too. Even when Mr. Bloom gets fired, the information is conveyed in a single sentence in narration. I don’t show him coming before the orphanage board and being publicly disgraced. I don’t say what follows, whether Mrs. Bloom has to give up her concert and theater subscriptions or if she divorces him and he winds up sweeping a factory floor for a living. I’m not sure it matters. At this point the story is over and what happens to Mr. Bloom is an afterthought.

However, if you want to be tougher, try it just as an exercise. Imagine five ways your baddie can be punished. Imagine the scenes and write them down. What do you think? If you decide that one of the grimmer endings is better, use it. (This is a prompt for everyone.)

Villains can be more fun to write than other characters. They can be over the top, think the unthinkable, do the unmentionable. So I hope you go all out with these prompts:

∙ The scene is a social event, could be a child’s birthday party, a charity benefit, the annual fairy ball. The villain Sammy (male or female), one of the guests, makes trouble repeatedly in subtle ways. Show him or her in action.

∙ Estelle and Joe have been assigned a homework project together in magic school, and they hate each other. Each plans to make the other look bad. They meet at Joe’s house to work on the project. As the omniscient narrator, show how it goes, dipping freely into the thoughts of each one. They should connive differently. Both are villains, but they’re differently bad. For extra credit, make us like one and hate the other, although both are up to no good, and both are fundamentally flawed.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Making Misery

On October 19, 2010, Mysterygirl123 wrote, I’ve started to love and protect my character so, so, so much, but I know something (else) bad needs to happen for the story to work. How do I get over that?

We create a lovable main character – let’s call him Sammy – so our readers will love him, and then we fall in love, too. The love we bring into being is a kind of self-love, not only for us but also for the reader, who lives inside that character. When I even think about making something bad happen to my main, I don’t want to do it, although I know I have to. When I’m reading a novel by someone else and a terrible event occurs, sometimes I have to close the book for a few minutes, or I may go forward very slowly.

Many years ago I read and adored a book for adults called Happy All the Time. As I recall, the author, Laurie Colwin, managed to write an amiable novel, catastrophe-free, that was riveting. So here’s a prompt, right at the beginning of the post: Write a short story, an interesting one, that’s upbeat from start to finish. There has to be conflict, because I don’t think you can have a story without conflict, but make it small; keep the stakes low. Picture books for very young children achieve this regularly, because their audience isn’t ready for Sturm and Drang. But your story needn’t be a picture book. If you try the prompt, I think it will be hard, but it’s just an exercise, so how the story turns out doesn’t matter.

Generally, the size of the bad events you subject Sammy to depends on the genre you’re working in. If you’re writing romantic comedy, the problem may be rejection by the love interest. His life in other respects can be fine. One might even want to tell him to Get Over It, but in this kind of story the scale is just right. In a middle-grade contemporary novel, there may be a bunch of problems – not being popular, flunking social studies, arguing with a younger sister – not serious, but serious in this world.

However, the heroine of a thriller would howl with laughter if she heard that Sammy was worried about popularity. In Jill’s story from last week she just lost her whole family in a civil war!

I hesitate to read a tragic book or a horror story. I’m a wimp. I’ve never read anything by Stephen King, for example, although millions can’t get enough of his books. But I’d have an easier time writing horror than reading it, and the reason is that when I write I have control. I may squirm but I recover. Hmm, should I make Sammy’s best friend die by poison, or should someone push her out a window? At this point I may pause in my typing to cackle gleefully. Whether I choose poison or defenestration should have nothing to do with which is an easier death or which will cause Sammy less pain. The decision should depend on what the plot consequences will be for each option and which is likely to better serve the story.

There are ways to comfort yourself, though. You can tell yourself that Sammy is going to prove himself through his suffering. He’ll learn from it and be better prepared for whatever comes next. You can point out that if nothing bad ever befalls him he’ll wind up a shallow person.

I read an article along these lines last week in The New York Times health and science section. Research was done on the happiness and satisfaction levels of people who’d survived a few terrible situations or many or none at all. The finding as I understood it was that the people who’d gone through a few serious difficulties were the happiest, the most satisfied, the most at peace. The ones who’d undergone the most misery and those who’d endured the least were the unhappiest. The theory was that people who’d been relentlessly traumatized became exhausted and lost hope. I don’t remember why the people who’d endured nothing were dissatisfied, but I do remember why those in the middle group were in such good shape. They’d been tested and discovered they could cope; they’d found out whom they could count on and strategies they could use to pull themselves through – valuable lessons for them and for Sammy, too. Your characters need the trouble you send them, but don’t overdo, because you don’t want to wear them or the reader out.

You may be writing a tragedy. If so, there will be no strengthening or happy ending for Sammy. But readers who like tragedy, who enjoy a good cry, will thank you. And secondary characters may be strengthened.

Writing Magic has a chapter on this topic called “Suffer!”, which got the entire book banned from a middle school district in Illinois. Here’s the paragraph that caused the trouble:

“Intensify your brutality. Make sure that we, your readers, know exactly how much your hero is suffering. Plunge us into his mind and heart. Tell us what Robin Hood is thinking and feeling when dire things are happening – and even when dire things aren’t happening. When we read the hero’s thoughts and feelings we are lifted out of ourselves and plunked down inside his skin. We breathe with him. We sigh with him. We see through his eyes, hear through his ears, think his thoughts, feel his emotions. We are in the story, exactly where you want us to be. No way we’re going to stop reading then.”

The banning came not long after the shooting at Virginia Tech University that killed thirty-two people. The Illinois school district administration worried that I was inciting children to violent behavior, not merely to – possibly – violent writing. There may be ill effects from violence in books and movies and on television – I’m not an authority – but I’m pretty sure that writing about writing powerful stories never hurt anyone and that bland writing never prevented carnage.

Mystery Girl123’s question came up on my list today, so soon after the shooting in Tucson, a sad time but an opportune one for this topic. Why is it hard to write a good story without suffering, humorous suffering or serious suffering? Why do we seek out entertainment in which people die, in cop shows or medical shows or dramas or even in comedy? I’m not sure, but maybe because we’re preparing for the worst that life can throw at us. When we make Sammy suffer we’re helping our readers, which should stiffen us to do it. We may hurt him, but we’re helping them.

In addition to feeling sad over the recent events, I’ve thought about them fictionally. What world could I put what happened in? How could I reimagine it? Who would my heroine be? Could she at least save the nine-year-old girl who was there?

We’re lucky to be writers and to come to grips with these elemental subjects. Maybe I’m being grandiose, but I believe we work with the nightmares of the world and shape them, even make them beautiful, so that we all become stronger and grow in understanding of – eek, a cliche! – the human condition.

So the prompt is to use what happened in Tucson or any other real-life tragedy in a new story. You can pick a news event or a personal one that hardly anyone knows about. The bad thing that happens to your main character is handed to you by the event you choose. You can soften it a little to make it bearable or to serve the story. Don’t feel you have to stick to the facts. Your characters can be elves or jinns or barnyard animals. You’re looking for the essence. Shape your story so that it reaches an ending that pleases you, not necessarily a happy ending but a satisfying one. If the writing makes you sad, that’s okay.

Still, have fun and save what you write!

Book of the living dead!

On October 17, 2010, Jill wrote, I have just decided to go ahead and ask my complicated question that has been bugging me for a very long time now.
I am writing a story about revenge. This girl is getting revenge for her family. Her whole family was killed during a civil war in her kingdom (her family was in power, and she was the princess). Everyone except her brother was killed so she and her brother are working together for revenge, actually.
….How can I make the reader truly mourn for the girl’s family with her? I definitely want them killed off in the beginning. I have fallen in love with her family during all my planning and the fact is that I based them on my own loved ones (living and deceased), so I know I am mourning for them but how can I make sure the reader at least feels for the main character and doesn’t just think she is a drama queen who needs to get over the fact she isn’t in power anymore?

This is a specific question from a particular story, but there’s a more general question about making a reader feel sad about a fictional death.

I don’t know the ins and outs of this story, but let’s suppose the girl’s mother, father, grandparents, and two older sisters were killed, and let’s assume the girl (I’ll call her Octavia) was old enough when they were killed to have known them and to have a store of memories. We want to commemorate all the dead and make sure Octavia is sympathetic.

Suppose the girl’s birthday comes around, her first birthday without her family. Let’s say her present circumstances are bleak. She’s alone or with her brother, who is so unhappy he’s forgotten what day it is, and she remembers the last year’s celebration. This can be from her first-person POV, or it can be in third person. At the party the year before, her grandfather recited a poem for her, and she remembers the words and her grandfather’s rumbling voice as he said the words. A dish was served that she hated, and her grandmother helped her get away with not eating it. One older sister, who used to tease her about her wild hair, gave her silver barrette and spent an hour showing her how to roll her hair on top of her head.

The reminiscences don’t have to be all good. Octavia’s mother might have scolded her for not thanking someone properly for a gift. Now Octavia misses having someone who cares enough to scold, or she wishes she hadn’t snapped back at her mother. It torments her that their final words were sharp.

What I just suggested combines the qualities of the members of Octavia’s family and her perspective on them. If the mother had beaten Octavia with a belt or stopped talking to her for months at a time, Octavia might still grieve, but her feelings would be more complex. If Octavia were the selfish drama queen Jill is worrying about, her thoughts would all revolve around herself; she wouldn’t be capable of bringing the departed to life.

You can and probably should recall the beloved dead frequently. Doing so will keep them alive in the reader’s mind and will make Olympia more sympathetic too. There are lots of ways to pull this off. You don’t have to stage a birthday to make it happen. Olympia meets a possible ally and her sister’s voice in her mind sizes him up. She mentally debates a course of action and internally asks her father for guidance. In an argument with her brother she calls him by her mother’s pet name for him. Other people can remind her of her dead. She can see someone from a distance who has the same build as her grandfather and for a moment she thinks the killing didn’t happen. She can even think that the people she lost are so much with her that she’d like to get away from them occasionally. I don’t think that thought will make her unsympathetic.

Of course you don’t want to slow down an action scene with long memories. These are just touches, a little here, a little there.

If Octavia isn’t introspective or if she’s traumatized, the writer’s job is harder. Her feelings are suppressed. She may be sad without understanding why, or she’s always tired. When her birthday comes she may push aside the memories because a year has passed since the deaths and she thinks she should be over them. You may need a device to reveal the people you want her to mourn and the depth of her feelings. Make her find a box of letters that the reader can read. Or have someone else talk about the family. And think of other devices.

There may be after-effects of the killings that you can dramatize, ones that aren’t as personal. The country’s new rulers are despotic. The old queen, Octavia’s mother, wouldn’t have tolerated the corruption. The old king, Octavia’s father, strengthened the parliament, but the new king has dissolved it. Beggars’ Day, which Octavia’s grandmother initiated, is no longer observed, and the poor are rounded up and imprisoned.

Here are a couple of fanciful ideas:

• The dead can return as ghosts that only Octavia can see and hear or that everyone can. They’re not forgotten because they’re present. They can urge her on to revenge, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father does, or argue against it or disagree among themselves.

• This society can be ancestor worshipers. Octavia can light candles nightly at their shrines and pray to them.

Back to the worry about Octavia being a drama queen who’s sulking because she isn’t a princess anymore – this may be Octavia’s fear, that she isn’t really grieving for the people she loved, that she’s actually moping over a loss of status. If so, you can have her think this in writing, like, I missed being wealthy and having everyone notice when I entered a room and people talking if I wore my orange gown rather than my blue one. It was shameful to care about these things, and sometimes I wondered if I regretted the objects the war took away more than I regretted the people I lost. These thoughts don’t make her less sympathetic, in my opinion. Self-doubt is touchingly human, and the reader is likely to feel more for Octavia and know that of course she misses her family most.

A few prompts:

• Lon is haunted (literally) by ghosts of ancestors who died a century before in some terrible way. He is familiar with their story from family lore, but as far as he knows no other relatives have been visited by these people. Write a scene involving Lon and his ghosts. Make the ghosts come to life, so to speak, as individuals. If you like, go on to write a story about how Lon deals with them.

• Tina’s dad dies suddenly when she’s fourteen. They were very close, and she misses him intensely. Write a session between her and a grief counselor. Have Tina bring up some of her emotions that shame her, as well as more acceptable feelings.

• Sticking with Tina, a month later she and her mom move her father’s desk into her bedroom because his desk is bigger and better. Write about her first night with the desk in her room.

• Tina again. In the back of the top desk drawer she finds a big brown envelope. The contents – letters? newspaper clippings? a journal? – throw Tina back into turmoil. Write what was in the envelope and what happens next.

Have fun, and save what you write!