When the Character Fits

I'm in the home stretch of my WIP. I've worked on the flow. I've cut out repetition. My dialogue sparkles. But it still needs a little work. I need to make my minor characters as rich and full as my main character.

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NaNoWriMo...Specifically

I've started NaNoWriMo a few times before, but never got further than around 5000 words. This year, I'm still behind, but I've written 14,046 words. If I write just under 2000 words a day, I can finish on time.

But do I still want to?

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Companions Along the Journey

Let me introduce you to my writing partner: 

Max has been a part of our family for close to fourteen years now.  He was a gift for my son on his fifth birthday, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. 

That was just a ruse. 

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Defining YA

A few weeks ago, PW Shelftalker asked a simple question with a not-so-simple answer -- how do you define YA? They asked their readers to contribute their thoughts to craft the ultimate definition of YA. I did, and guess what? They liked me, they really liked me!

I am one of three contributors whose responses were merged into one ultimate YA definition:

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WWED?

Farewell, Elmore Leonard, father of five children and 45 novels.  Glimpses of your hugely successful writing process will continue to inspire those of us struggling to find a fraction of your writer's life.

• Elmore Leonard talked about his approach to Bob Greene (Wall Street Journal): "When I get into the writing, I have a pretty good idea of who the main characters will be. But I still don't know exactly how the story will work. And something happens to me in almost every book: A character that, in my mind, may have been fairly minor turns into a major character. I hear him talking, and I realize: This guy is interesting."
• Elmore Leonard always wrote a scene from a single character’s point of view, then often rewrote the same scene from another character’s POV to see if it was more effective.  
• His use of dialogue is legendary.
• Though he started writing in the 1950’s, he ‘found his style’ after reading George V. Higgins’ classic 1970 crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with its prolific profane dialogue: “I read it and I changed my style somewhat…I started to use expletives where they belonged. I started to open my scenes with dialogue. Higgins set me free.”

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Old School Index Cards Rule

As I zeroed in on the ending of the second major revision of my WIP, I came to a terrible realization. My ending sucked.

First reaction: Overwhelmed. How can I fix it? It's too much work. Maybe I should trash it and start something new. Maybe I should go find some chocolate.

Second reaction: Find the chocolate and think things through.

Third reaction: Okay, I think I've got a new ending, but holy shit! It's too much work. New ending requires new stuff sprinkled throughout. Maybe I should trash it and start something new. Maybe I should open up a bottle of wine.

Fourth reaction: Open up a bottle of wine and get to work.

Here's what I did.

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Why Famous Writers Should Complain About Writing

Anne Lamott says ”Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”  Writers, if you don’t feel that way—if you happen to find writing effortless and easy—do the rest of us a favor and lie.

J.K. Rowling apparently wrote the complete story arc for the Harry Potter series on a long train ride, and then wrote most of Sorcerer’s Stone in cafes while her new baby was napping. Napping??? People, I was barely groomed the first year of my child’s life, let alone able to churn out a groundbreaking, genre-busting bestseller. It’s true that Rowling was on welfare at the time, her manuscript was rejected repeatedly before going on to revolutionize the industry, and from what I’ve read, all that success couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. But still. Jo, couldn’t you have worked up some writing block story to make the rest of us feel a little better?

By way of contrast, I give you Michael Chabon's story of writing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

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POV Problem

                                                                                                          

Is 1st person point of view a good choice for a picture book? It was for Alexander and the Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Yes, it's written in 1st person POV, but he is named. Who can forget Alexander?
Can you think of a picture book in 1st person where the narrator isn't named? As of this minute, I can't.

This week something dawned on me. It took a while!

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Sound Resources

In the process of revising a manuscript AGAIN, I’ve been digging in to some familiar and newly-found websites to ignite my creative flame. (And, darn it, yes, I am able to make the manuscript better, even though I swore the *#@$ thing was finished.)  I thought others might find some of these resources useful. 

One of my revision goals has been to use more powerful and descriptive words, especially since this story uses a lot of onomatopoeia—sound words.  If words like sizzle, snarl, twang, whallop, belch, boosh, flump get you thinking and describing more vividly, then check some of these sites out. 

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In Which I Discover My Character Has Purple Hair

Guess what, everybody? I'm using Pinterest and Google Images to help with my writing research!  I got the idea from wonderful   Stephanie Burgis, author of the wonderful  Kat, Incorrigible series of middle grade Regency romances with magic.

Here's an example of how it's working for me. One of my characters, Alastair, is a rocker kid with dyed hair and eyeliner. When I did a Google Images search  for BOY EYELINER I found him! 



Is he not adorable? Love the ironic eyeroll! Must incorporate the purple hair!  After some sleuthing, I discovered that in real life, his name is Adrian Heard and he lives in Australia. But to me he's clearly Alastair Templeton, a British-born rocker, New York resident and magic-loving sidekick to my heroines. Here's what else I learned:

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Getting Out of the Story

Last month I wrote about pulling the reader into the story, hooking him so he couldn't put the book down. This month I'll write on getting out of the story, that is, the author getting out, not the reader.

Recently I line-edited a manuscript where the author, charming as he is, was ever present, directing the characters, commenting on their foibles, mulling over their actions and dialogue, with "in facts," "indeeds," and explanations of the characters' feelings. This is, by the way, a great story with an unusual theme and an action-packed plot. But as you can guess, as the author followed his characters' every move and thought, the plot thread grew dimmer and harder to find. With some good cutting, the plot popped out and sparkled.

It's easy to point out where others err. It's much harder to take the scissors or ax to one's own work. But trust me, unless it's a personal essay, the reader does not care what the writer thinks.

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The Idea File

An hour after I read Robin's last post and video about where she got her inspiration, I found a ten-year-old idea file. I had forgotten this file existed. It wasn't in the right place. (At least it was in a folder in a file drawer.)

I pulled it out, wondering what stories interested me when I first began my writing journey.

Turns out I was interested in crime. Teen-age crime.

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Stoking the Creative Fire

Years ago I had the opportunity to hear Anne Lamott speak.  A friend in my critique group happened to have an extra ticket for her lecture and I JUMPED at the chance to listen to one of my favorite authors discuss the writing process. I don’t quite remember the venue, suffice to say a large, old, theater/auditorium somewhere in mid-town Manhattan, and I’d be hard pressed to come up with an exact quote, but I remember nervously handing Ms. Lamott my copy of Bird by Bird, and squeaking out something that was supposed to sound like thank you as I scuttled away.  I do remember laughing a lot as she talked about her process.   And I do remember leaving inspired to dive into my own writing.

One of the writing tricks/tools that Ms. Lamott spoke about that day was The Observation Deck – A Tool Kit for Writers by Naomi Epel.    I may have ordered it that night when I got home, but I think if Anne had said that it was important to eat artichokes and hop on one leg for ten minutes before sitting down to write, I probably would have done that too.  (So glad she didn’t recommend that, btw.)

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The Role of Character

I despise a story with weak characters. No matter how many car races or love-stories the author throws in, a novel is boring unless it centers around vivid, interesting characters who are changing and growing in unexpected ways to respond to their situations--or sometimes resisting change and growth, like Scarlett O'Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND. I loved Katniss Everdeen in HUNGER GAMES for defying the Capitol to protect her sister. Though mostly I hated Bella Swan in TWILIGHT for being so passive and whiny, at least she had the guts to love a vampire.

Young adult literature is so particularly compelling partly because kids by their very nature are always changing and growing and on cusp of such critically important changes. They are constantly being forced to make choices about their own characters. As GraceAnne diCandido, my literature instructor at Rutgers used to put it, the central question of a young adult novel is "Who am I and what am I going to do about it?"

How do you create your own unforgettable characters? Or is there a character in recent literature that you find especially compelling?

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Weaving a Sense of Place

Sharon Wildey Calle

After a week's vacation in the "Land of Enchantment" (New Mexico), I have come home inspired and ready to write.

My only challenge... How do I recreate the diverse and magical spirit of this environment as a setting for a story?

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Building a World

The best fiction is like a pyramid mostly submerged in water; only the very top pokes above the page but it must give us the sense that we will find a solid, three-dimensional creation no matter how far down we dive to explore it. This is true whether you're writing about aliens with three genders and lavender tentacles, twelfth-century Scots clansmen in kilts, or just a bunch of kids hanging out behind a 7-11 in Cranford, NJ.

The question is, how far do you have to go to create that sense of reality, of faithfulness?

When it comes to research, no one could say I'm a shirker. My WIP is a fantasy novel based on Jewish folklore, so for years now I've been reading everything from the Biblical books of the Prophets, medieval wonder tales, the novels of Isaac Baashevitz Singer, Hasidic tales of the Holocaust, collected Jewish folk tales and Apochrypha, scholarly treatments of ancient Jewish magic and the like.

But now that I've gotten my characters to my fantasy world, I'm having trouble imagining myself there and I couldn't figure out why...until I read Jane Yolen's wonderful essay, Turtles All the Way Down (first published in Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov and published by St. Martins Press in 1991). The prolific Yolen, no slouch at building worlds herself, suggests that we base our fantasy worlds on landscapes we know intimately. "In fantasy, outer landscape reflects inner landscape…. If the place is real enough, then the fantasy creatures and characters--dragon or elf lord or one-eyed god or the devil himself--will stride across that landscape leaving footprints that sink down into the mud. And if those creatures are also compelling, having taken root in the old lore and been brought forward in literary time by the carefully observing author, those footprints in the mud can be taken out, dried, and mounted on the wall."

How do YOU make your writing come to life? How do you build a world?

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Recipe for Writing Success

We all have our tried-and-true recipes that we return to time after time for potlucks, dinner parties, or family meals. But what is your recipe for writing success?

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Filling Up Notebooks

Confession. I'm a victim of the Palmer Method. I went to Catholic School and learned to write cursive in those notebooks with the dotted lines through the center. I spent many an hour looping my ds, ps, and qs to just the right height, my wrist never touching the desk. Somewhere along the line, I rebelled, and now even I have a hard time reading my scrawl.

But that doesn't stop me from filling up notebooks.

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Mo Willems - "Why Books?"

Mo Willems and his pigeon. Smile material. Masterful picture books!
In 2011, Mo was invited to give the prestigious Zena Sutherland Lecture. He titled his talk "Why Books?"
Here are some highlights:

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Wrongs and Writes

Like many writers, I suffer from a dreaded writerly disease: trying to write it right the first time. I agonize over sentence structure, search my thesaurus for the perfect synonym, and doubt every plot line.

So when I came across this New York Times Magazine Article that reminded me how important it is to be wrong -- and "to be wrong as fast as you can," I considered once again how overrated right is. In the article, Hugo Lindgren reviews a list of ideas he's had throughout the years and wonders why he hasn't written them. He recounts a Charlie Rose interview with Pixar's John Lasseter:  

Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another,” Lasseter said. “People don’t believe that, but it’s true. But we don’t give up on the films."

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