Morning sky is a pale, smoky blue. I taught writing workshops at the Write on the Sound Conference last weekend in the lovely town of Edmonds, Washington and on Saturday afternoon attended the talk given by the keynote speaker, Samuel Green. He is a poet and his talk was entitled Singing the World into Being: The Discipline & Consolation of Poetry. He is the first Poet Laureate of Washington State, has taught poetry in Ireland, and lives with his wife on a remote island without electricity where they run the Brooding Heron Press. This press specializes in producing the poetry of the likes of Donald Hall, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov. He has other accolades, but it was clear that the man who has chosen a wardrobe of all black to make his life easier since he travels a lot as poet laureate, spouted poetry and the knowledge of poetry with such ease that I felt practically illiterate in his company.
Green began the talk by telling a story from his boyhood. When he and his brother were together in the back seat and started acting up his father would recite poetry to quiet them. This led to a lifetime interest in story poems and poetry of all types which broadened into trying his hand at writing them. When he fell in love at age 10 he wrote a poem to impress the girl of his dreams. He read that poem to the audience and when he finished, sitting near the front of the theater, I started clapping. To which he replied, “Where were you forty years ago?”
Throughout his talk he wove in the poems of his friends and favorites, ee cummings, Robert Service, Marilyn Hacker, Jane Kenyon, John O’Leary, and Hayden Carruth who died about a week ago. In Carruth’s New York Times obituary it was written: “He had a greater variety of poems than almost anybody,” said the poet Galway Kinnell, a longtime friend. “He was interested — superinterested — in everything and he could write about anything.” You can find poems by Carruth and other poets at www.poemhunter.com.
But mostly Green starting talking about how he turned to language to figure out his struggles, to allow the heart to speak. To quell the terror of not being able to connect. And as he talked, I remembered listening to NPR in the days following the 9/11 attacks. They ran a show that featured a number of poets reading their favorite poems, offering solace. I recalled how the voice of W.S. Merwin came over the airwaves from France and as I listened to him read, as Green said, I was willing to come out differently on the other side of the poem. And did. And for the first time since those terrible events I felt like we were all going to be able to go on.
After Green’s talk, drunk on poetry, I slipped into a Thai restaurant and ordered tea and a bowl of Tom Kha soup. Maybe it was the poetry, or the autumn afternoon, looking at the brooding sky, trees shivering in the autumn wind, and people bustling past bent against the wind, but it was probably the best bowl of soup I’ve ever eaten. The soup was creamy from coconut milk and had been simmered with complex flavors of lime, chili, and lemongrass.
Later I walked up to the Edmonds library and settled into a chair with a book of poems by W.S. Merwin and another by Ted Kooser, Winter Morning Walks. They were written as postcards to his friend Jim Harrison. In Kooser’s book he wrote poems, mostly haikus, about his walks as he was recovering from cancer and his poems are filled with acute awareness of his surroundings and all seem touched with the fragility of the human body. In the preface to his book, Kooser wrote: “In the autumn of 1998, during my recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer, I began taking a two-mile walk each morning. I’d been told by my radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity, so I exercised before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near where I live, sometimes with my wife but most often alone.”
Each poem begins with a brief comment on the weather and conditions. If you’ve never read Kooser’s work, you’re missing his painter’s eye and deft hand with metaphor. The library is perched on a hill far above the harbor and was lined in windows. Between reading poems I watched the ever-changing sky as clouds in shades of funereal gray and cigarette smoke and fresh bruises scuttled northward as if heading beyond Canada.
Now that I’m home, I’m going to make my own version of Tom Kha and watch the autumn sky from here, and read more poetry. I’m going to be traveling down to Newport, Oregon to teach a class on Story People on October 25. For more information write me or check out the description at Craig’s List. Happy writing to all.
Monday, September 29, 2008
It’s Monday night and despite feeling so tired I wanted to topple onto my couch like a rag doll, I did the at-home sort of thing tonight—cooked kabobs for dinner, watered outside plants and flowerbeds, cleaned up the kitchen, watched the sky. Gorgeous clouds moved in at about 7 and the sky was pale, not grey, not white, and the clouds were blue—a sort of reverse canvas and after wind breezing through here earlier today, all became still and the sky looked so peaceful, it made you want to become a kite or find some means to float up to meet the mystical clouds.
I was home after yet another doctor’s appointment and running errands, and feeling awe that the dwindling days of September felt so much like July. A few times in the past few days of summer-like heat I was forced to check on my flower beds, and sure enough, there is that sort of creepy, mold-looking stuff overtaking some varieties, the roses are tired, the ferns not exactly sprightly. Summer is over, the evidence is everywhere despite our record high temperatures.
As the sky was turning to true dusk, I stepped out for a walk. I still was running conversations in my head as I walked along. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and I was imagining a conversation with one of my doctors (perhaps doc number 3 or 4) because I was worried about what another doctor (perhaps number 5) had told me during our 3-hour appointment a few days ago. As they say, I was still ‘processing’ this appointment and his recommendations for medications and proclamations about the possible state of my head/brain health.
And to add to my personal drama, the previous evening I had driven to attend my book club meeting when my memory shorted out and I could not remember a major cross street although I had taught at a building located on this street for three years, following this same route, week after week, hundreds of times. By the time I reached the house where we were meeting I was rattled, and then proceeded to forget the names of every member of the cast in the book we’d read. (In my favor, I remembered what I liked and disliked about the book). So today I had a memory failure hangover because when both your long and short-term memory disappear in short order you don’t know if you should laugh or cry.
So I’m sauntering along tonight amid air so soft and so like Key West or Santa Barbara without the smell of ocean, and I cannot help myself, I start looking into windows. One of the reasons that this is my favorite time of year is because the farmer’s markets are like culinary jewelry stores and I get to look into my neighbor’s window at dusk as I stroll past. And the first window I peered into (from the sidewalk—I must explain because I fear my reputation is at stake) featured a mother walking her infant tucked to her chest, head lowered. She walked with the ancient cadence of condolence, patting him with that timeless gesture of comfort. And somewhere inside something started to shift and I counseled myself to stop talking to my doctors who weren’t around about my worries that I couldn’t do anything about in the moment and instead told myself ‘hush’. I repeated ‘hush’ as I stepped off the curb and then ahead of me in the gathering gloom a young couple turned the corner and preceded me. She was carrying a tote from L.L. Bean (I recognized the model) and an infant who looked like a newborn was strapped to the man’s chest. They murmured a bit and when they stepped into their yard, he paused and tucked her ahead of him in a gesture of such chivalry and tenderness that my heart almost broke.
I was walking faster by now, but I was slowing down inside my head. Next I passed a house that was dark except for a Tiffany-like lamp in the front window, bejeweled in deep greens and orange and leaf patterns. Next to the lamp was perched a Siamese who was peering out as if its owners would surely appear at any moment. And so the walk went—with one tableau after another until I arrived home unwound and softened and full of the small moments of domesticity and normalcy.
The sky is falling on Wall Street. Congress is afraid and the American people are pissed off. The world might change as we know it because China doesn’t want to keep loaning us a $billion a day to keep this country afloat. People are finally waking up to the scandalous and corrupt ways in which our economy has been managed. It just might be time for a sea change although my money is on the lobbyists who surely are putting in long hours these shaky days.
As for me, I’m grateful to be able to sit at my computer for awhile. On Saturday I was sitting in my living room and all of a sudden I felt a pop in my right ear and I couldn’t hear for a few minutes. Then my hearing loss faded and later I discovered that the vertigo that made me feel like a Saturday night drunk most of the time had eased some for a few days. If you’ve never had vertigo and you don’t drink, I don’t quite know how to explain it. Because you need to drink a LOT of alcohol until the room starts spinning to know what it feels like. I was trying to remember the last time I had the spins, and then to my embarrassment, realized it was only two years ago.
It happened after I hosted an end-of the summer party. My flowers were still blooming, the back yard was lovely, and I felt celebratory. So I rounded up about a dozen friends and I went out and bought a bunch of lobsters to boil. I picked dahlias and simmered a lovely basil-infused butter for dipping the lobster parts. Now, I had never cooked a lobster in my life before and somehow believed it was time I did. I had seen some photogenic lobster bake party in a Martha-Stewart like magazine and the recipes and lovely colors and beachy ease of it all appealed to me. Trouble is, when you buy a giant (as in fill up the trunk of your car) box of lobsters, it’s like you’re carting home your own personal zoo of mini-dinosaurs. They are frighteningly alive and prehistoric looking. I was freaked. Luckily, I talked one of my dear friends into boiling the beastly things for me while I attended to my various salads, bread, corn on the cob, deserts and keeping the champagne flowing and generally hiding out from killing our main course.
It was the sort of party where the sunset goes on for a long time and a lot of wine/champagne is ingested. At one point in the party I ventured out to stop the heated political discussion in which the only Republican and Viet Nam War vet in attendance was told to f—himself. At least one guest was staggering even after all my food and another guest supposed that perhaps Hitler wasn’t evil after all. A series of dramas were breaking out all over and I developed a tic in my right eye. (come to think of it, it has returned in the past few days) When finally everyone had gone home and I was singing along to my CD player and cleaning up a surprising mess, I consoled myself by finishing off the dregs of several bottles of wine. Which was when vertigo set in and I toddled off to bed.
Previous to that had been after a prolonged a Tilt-o-Whirl ride at the Clark County fair in about 1996 but that’s a long story and the ride operator was a flirt and sadist. Just trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to experience vertigo when you’re trying to buy lettuce or a pair of shoes or walk across a parking lot. I wish everyone sturdy steps or an otherwise firm ballast as you write and go about your days. I hope your pension and 401Ks are safe. Now, as for your dreams, I’m not sure firmness can be wished for, but happy writing anyway.
I was home after yet another doctor’s appointment and running errands, and feeling awe that the dwindling days of September felt so much like July. A few times in the past few days of summer-like heat I was forced to check on my flower beds, and sure enough, there is that sort of creepy, mold-looking stuff overtaking some varieties, the roses are tired, the ferns not exactly sprightly. Summer is over, the evidence is everywhere despite our record high temperatures.
As the sky was turning to true dusk, I stepped out for a walk. I still was running conversations in my head as I walked along. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and I was imagining a conversation with one of my doctors (perhaps doc number 3 or 4) because I was worried about what another doctor (perhaps number 5) had told me during our 3-hour appointment a few days ago. As they say, I was still ‘processing’ this appointment and his recommendations for medications and proclamations about the possible state of my head/brain health.
And to add to my personal drama, the previous evening I had driven to attend my book club meeting when my memory shorted out and I could not remember a major cross street although I had taught at a building located on this street for three years, following this same route, week after week, hundreds of times. By the time I reached the house where we were meeting I was rattled, and then proceeded to forget the names of every member of the cast in the book we’d read. (In my favor, I remembered what I liked and disliked about the book). So today I had a memory failure hangover because when both your long and short-term memory disappear in short order you don’t know if you should laugh or cry.
So I’m sauntering along tonight amid air so soft and so like Key West or Santa Barbara without the smell of ocean, and I cannot help myself, I start looking into windows. One of the reasons that this is my favorite time of year is because the farmer’s markets are like culinary jewelry stores and I get to look into my neighbor’s window at dusk as I stroll past. And the first window I peered into (from the sidewalk—I must explain because I fear my reputation is at stake) featured a mother walking her infant tucked to her chest, head lowered. She walked with the ancient cadence of condolence, patting him with that timeless gesture of comfort. And somewhere inside something started to shift and I counseled myself to stop talking to my doctors who weren’t around about my worries that I couldn’t do anything about in the moment and instead told myself ‘hush’. I repeated ‘hush’ as I stepped off the curb and then ahead of me in the gathering gloom a young couple turned the corner and preceded me. She was carrying a tote from L.L. Bean (I recognized the model) and an infant who looked like a newborn was strapped to the man’s chest. They murmured a bit and when they stepped into their yard, he paused and tucked her ahead of him in a gesture of such chivalry and tenderness that my heart almost broke.
I was walking faster by now, but I was slowing down inside my head. Next I passed a house that was dark except for a Tiffany-like lamp in the front window, bejeweled in deep greens and orange and leaf patterns. Next to the lamp was perched a Siamese who was peering out as if its owners would surely appear at any moment. And so the walk went—with one tableau after another until I arrived home unwound and softened and full of the small moments of domesticity and normalcy.
The sky is falling on Wall Street. Congress is afraid and the American people are pissed off. The world might change as we know it because China doesn’t want to keep loaning us a $billion a day to keep this country afloat. People are finally waking up to the scandalous and corrupt ways in which our economy has been managed. It just might be time for a sea change although my money is on the lobbyists who surely are putting in long hours these shaky days.
As for me, I’m grateful to be able to sit at my computer for awhile. On Saturday I was sitting in my living room and all of a sudden I felt a pop in my right ear and I couldn’t hear for a few minutes. Then my hearing loss faded and later I discovered that the vertigo that made me feel like a Saturday night drunk most of the time had eased some for a few days. If you’ve never had vertigo and you don’t drink, I don’t quite know how to explain it. Because you need to drink a LOT of alcohol until the room starts spinning to know what it feels like. I was trying to remember the last time I had the spins, and then to my embarrassment, realized it was only two years ago.
It happened after I hosted an end-of the summer party. My flowers were still blooming, the back yard was lovely, and I felt celebratory. So I rounded up about a dozen friends and I went out and bought a bunch of lobsters to boil. I picked dahlias and simmered a lovely basil-infused butter for dipping the lobster parts. Now, I had never cooked a lobster in my life before and somehow believed it was time I did. I had seen some photogenic lobster bake party in a Martha-Stewart like magazine and the recipes and lovely colors and beachy ease of it all appealed to me. Trouble is, when you buy a giant (as in fill up the trunk of your car) box of lobsters, it’s like you’re carting home your own personal zoo of mini-dinosaurs. They are frighteningly alive and prehistoric looking. I was freaked. Luckily, I talked one of my dear friends into boiling the beastly things for me while I attended to my various salads, bread, corn on the cob, deserts and keeping the champagne flowing and generally hiding out from killing our main course.
It was the sort of party where the sunset goes on for a long time and a lot of wine/champagne is ingested. At one point in the party I ventured out to stop the heated political discussion in which the only Republican and Viet Nam War vet in attendance was told to f—himself. At least one guest was staggering even after all my food and another guest supposed that perhaps Hitler wasn’t evil after all. A series of dramas were breaking out all over and I developed a tic in my right eye. (come to think of it, it has returned in the past few days) When finally everyone had gone home and I was singing along to my CD player and cleaning up a surprising mess, I consoled myself by finishing off the dregs of several bottles of wine. Which was when vertigo set in and I toddled off to bed.
Previous to that had been after a prolonged a Tilt-o-Whirl ride at the Clark County fair in about 1996 but that’s a long story and the ride operator was a flirt and sadist. Just trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to experience vertigo when you’re trying to buy lettuce or a pair of shoes or walk across a parking lot. I wish everyone sturdy steps or an otherwise firm ballast as you write and go about your days. I hope your pension and 401Ks are safe. Now, as for your dreams, I’m not sure firmness can be wished for, but happy writing anyway.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sky is drizzling rain and the neighborhood is still and quiet except for geese honking past. Today is Stephen King’s birthday and one of my favorite quotes from the maestro is “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” When I was a girl the Milwaukee Journal had a section called the Green Sheet. It was a four page section printed on pale green paper and contained comic strips, a crossword puzzle, games, columns, and quirky news stories. It was a beloved section of the paper discontinued in the 1990s when the paper merged with the Sentinel. Like many kids, I grew up learning how to read from the Green Sheet. That section of the paper featured a long-forgotten comic strip called Brother Jupiter. He was a chubby little friar with a fringe of hair and of course, always wore a clerical robe. For some reason I remembered him last night for the first time in years, possibly decades. I’m not sure why Juniper came to mind, but my grandmother, dead many years was fond of the comic strip and I’ve been thinking about her lately.
I spent most of the day in bed yesterday resting and then went to two parties after cutting large bouquets of multi-hued dahlias. The first was my neighbors who were celebrating an anniversary and have turned their yard nestled under two giant firs into a fairyland of ponds and cozy seating areas, archways, paths twisting throughout made from pottery mosaics, and lanterns twinkling. Another guest told a story about how she met the hostess years ago, then lost track of her. Then she started dreaming about her night after night and resumed their friendship. We talked about how dreams are threaded from the past and the present meeting, how fun it is to try and dissect their origins and meaning.
The second was a 60th birthday party and people dressed in 60s garb and many had come to celebrate long and hard. The hostess had added lava lamps, strings of beads and Janis Joplin posters for ambiance and there were so many people and movement, that I needed to step outdoors several times to rest my brain from all the stimulation. And sometimes when people were talking to me it felt like a movie scene where the camera makes everything look close up and distorted. My head is a band of pain this morning, but then I remember a particularly silly costume from the night before and it’s worth it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately because mine has been affected by my car accident. My short and long-term memory are still shockingly unreliable and I’m in a new county here. In this country, I’m not a complete stranger, since my memory has been far from perfect in recent years, but at times if feels like I’ve stepped into a particularly psychedelic Bergman movie with a constantly shifting landscape. These days I need to make lists about everything, I need to google names and words that were once easily recalled, most projects I undertake take me twice or three times as long as they once did, and I need to rest my injured brain a lot. I don’t shop much because the bright lights and movement in stores is sending me into bouts of vertigo so dizzying that my legs become unreliable putty beneath me. So life feels like an acid-laced carnival ride at times and if you notice that I’m not in the blogosphere much these days it’s because I’m lying in the dark blocking out stimulation. And thinking that a brain injury is fascinating, but not to experience firsthand.
Since I don’t have a stock portfolio, from a distance I’ve been watching the stock market tank, the plans for a trillion-dollar bailout for financial institutions that haven’t been regulated in decades taking shape, and our country’s economy pretty much going down the tubes. It’s clear we’re in a huge recession and an economic meltdown. Can we weather this storm and who will pay the price for all this greed and madness? You might want to revisit the insanity of Reaganomics and the 1999 vote in the Senate about deregulation. Of course there’s lot of blame to go around. Freddy, Fanny, AIG, Bear Sterns all gone or on life support. Who, what is next? We’ve lost 600,000 jobs this year in the U.S. And then the residents of Texas who are still suffering from the ravages of Ike need ice and electricity and FEMA still isn’t working. Meanwhile, rescuers are pulling bodies from the charred ruins of the bombsite in Pakistan and suicides are up among our troops. My mind is spinning, but wait, I have vertigo so that’s not an apt metaphor.
Enough. Here is a tip on writing: You Can’t Write about People You don’t Know When you write fiction you create your major players by making choices about their physical appearance, flaws, quirks, habits, back story, outlook on life, values, emotional needs, as well as their friends or supportive cast members and enemies. With your major characters you’ll want to know what pushes their buttons, how they act when intoxicated, how far they’ll go to get what they want, and what passions, desires, and emotional needs drive them.
Now, not everything you know about your main characters will end up in the pages of your manuscript. You’ll always know more about your characters than you can use. You create complex characters and then make choices about which aspects of them should be exposed. You also hold back at times, realizing that readers can fill in the blanks with their imagination. Some things about your character you’ll state explicitly, some you’ll hint at, some will lie in the subtext of conversations and other parts of the story.
To get started in shaping main characters here are questions that you’ll want to answer:
What was the character’s home life like in childhood?
Was he shaped by any traumatic events or losses?
What is his or her chief flaw? Can it be showcased in the story? Transformed?
What does he do on his day off—hang out at comic book stores, wax his sport car, or sleep till noon?
What does his home or apartment reveal about him? Consider here his collections, furnishings, books and music. What do his housekeeping habits reveal?
How would his best friend describe him?
How would his mother describe him?
What does his style of dress reveal?
Does he take care of himself as in exercising, taking vitamins, eating well?
What is his emotional range—how does he act when angry, sad, euphoric?
How far will he go to get what he wants?
What is in the refrigerator, kitchen junk drawer and car’s glove compartment?
How does your character react under pressure, especially physical danger?
Think about it—you know what’s in your mother’s refrigerator (or at least have a rough sense of her food preferences, condiments, and the like) just as you’re familiar with your best friend’s car and your brother’s temper when opposed. We have intimate knowledge of some people in our lives and this knowledge is used as context in all our dealings with them. Likewise, in fiction, readers need intimate knowledge of the main players and use this knowledge as context as the story unfolds.
I wish every writer out there fine writing and rainbows of inspiration and that you keep laughing at yourself. I’ve found that even a brain injury is funny. Keep writing, keep dreaming and happy autumn to all. Guest bloggers will win a place in paradise.
I spent most of the day in bed yesterday resting and then went to two parties after cutting large bouquets of multi-hued dahlias. The first was my neighbors who were celebrating an anniversary and have turned their yard nestled under two giant firs into a fairyland of ponds and cozy seating areas, archways, paths twisting throughout made from pottery mosaics, and lanterns twinkling. Another guest told a story about how she met the hostess years ago, then lost track of her. Then she started dreaming about her night after night and resumed their friendship. We talked about how dreams are threaded from the past and the present meeting, how fun it is to try and dissect their origins and meaning.
The second was a 60th birthday party and people dressed in 60s garb and many had come to celebrate long and hard. The hostess had added lava lamps, strings of beads and Janis Joplin posters for ambiance and there were so many people and movement, that I needed to step outdoors several times to rest my brain from all the stimulation. And sometimes when people were talking to me it felt like a movie scene where the camera makes everything look close up and distorted. My head is a band of pain this morning, but then I remember a particularly silly costume from the night before and it’s worth it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately because mine has been affected by my car accident. My short and long-term memory are still shockingly unreliable and I’m in a new county here. In this country, I’m not a complete stranger, since my memory has been far from perfect in recent years, but at times if feels like I’ve stepped into a particularly psychedelic Bergman movie with a constantly shifting landscape. These days I need to make lists about everything, I need to google names and words that were once easily recalled, most projects I undertake take me twice or three times as long as they once did, and I need to rest my injured brain a lot. I don’t shop much because the bright lights and movement in stores is sending me into bouts of vertigo so dizzying that my legs become unreliable putty beneath me. So life feels like an acid-laced carnival ride at times and if you notice that I’m not in the blogosphere much these days it’s because I’m lying in the dark blocking out stimulation. And thinking that a brain injury is fascinating, but not to experience firsthand.
Since I don’t have a stock portfolio, from a distance I’ve been watching the stock market tank, the plans for a trillion-dollar bailout for financial institutions that haven’t been regulated in decades taking shape, and our country’s economy pretty much going down the tubes. It’s clear we’re in a huge recession and an economic meltdown. Can we weather this storm and who will pay the price for all this greed and madness? You might want to revisit the insanity of Reaganomics and the 1999 vote in the Senate about deregulation. Of course there’s lot of blame to go around. Freddy, Fanny, AIG, Bear Sterns all gone or on life support. Who, what is next? We’ve lost 600,000 jobs this year in the U.S. And then the residents of Texas who are still suffering from the ravages of Ike need ice and electricity and FEMA still isn’t working. Meanwhile, rescuers are pulling bodies from the charred ruins of the bombsite in Pakistan and suicides are up among our troops. My mind is spinning, but wait, I have vertigo so that’s not an apt metaphor.
Enough. Here is a tip on writing: You Can’t Write about People You don’t Know When you write fiction you create your major players by making choices about their physical appearance, flaws, quirks, habits, back story, outlook on life, values, emotional needs, as well as their friends or supportive cast members and enemies. With your major characters you’ll want to know what pushes their buttons, how they act when intoxicated, how far they’ll go to get what they want, and what passions, desires, and emotional needs drive them.
Now, not everything you know about your main characters will end up in the pages of your manuscript. You’ll always know more about your characters than you can use. You create complex characters and then make choices about which aspects of them should be exposed. You also hold back at times, realizing that readers can fill in the blanks with their imagination. Some things about your character you’ll state explicitly, some you’ll hint at, some will lie in the subtext of conversations and other parts of the story.
To get started in shaping main characters here are questions that you’ll want to answer:
What was the character’s home life like in childhood?
Was he shaped by any traumatic events or losses?
What is his or her chief flaw? Can it be showcased in the story? Transformed?
What does he do on his day off—hang out at comic book stores, wax his sport car, or sleep till noon?
What does his home or apartment reveal about him? Consider here his collections, furnishings, books and music. What do his housekeeping habits reveal?
How would his best friend describe him?
How would his mother describe him?
What does his style of dress reveal?
Does he take care of himself as in exercising, taking vitamins, eating well?
What is his emotional range—how does he act when angry, sad, euphoric?
How far will he go to get what he wants?
What is in the refrigerator, kitchen junk drawer and car’s glove compartment?
How does your character react under pressure, especially physical danger?
Think about it—you know what’s in your mother’s refrigerator (or at least have a rough sense of her food preferences, condiments, and the like) just as you’re familiar with your best friend’s car and your brother’s temper when opposed. We have intimate knowledge of some people in our lives and this knowledge is used as context in all our dealings with them. Likewise, in fiction, readers need intimate knowledge of the main players and use this knowledge as context as the story unfolds.
I wish every writer out there fine writing and rainbows of inspiration and that you keep laughing at yourself. I’ve found that even a brain injury is funny. Keep writing, keep dreaming and happy autumn to all. Guest bloggers will win a place in paradise.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Overcast sky this morning. I tried earlier to post a blog but keep getting an html error message. So because I cannot figure it out, I wanted to post this interesting quote from Seven Days: A Diary by David Grossman published in the October issue of The Sun. Grossman lives in a suburb of Jerusalem and wrote his diary in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. (By the way, you might want to check out this issue of The Sun, because it has one of the most beautiful cover photograph of all time.)
He writes: “Several months have gone by since I finished my last book, and I felt that not writing was having a bad effect on me. When I’m not writing, I have a feeling that I don’t really understand anything; that everything that happens to me, all events and statements and encounters, exist only side by side, without any real contact between them. But the minute I begin writing a new story, everything suddenly becomes intertwined into a single cord: every event feeds into and imbues all other events with life. Every sight I see, every person I meet is a clue that’s been sent to me, waiting for me to decipher.”
Monday, September 15, 2008
So the morning sky is tinged with pink and full of promise—of heat that is. I know we’re much better off here in Portland than all those pitiful folks in the path of Hurricane Ike, so I’ll try not to complain that the temperatures are going to top 90 today when people are still missing from the hurricane. The financial markets aren’t open yet, but there is more news that the banking industry is in big trouble. Merrill Lynch has found a buyer, but Nieman Brothers has not and is filing for bankruptcy. Hang on to your butts….
Meanwhile, we lost a great writer when David Foster Wallace hanged himself on September 12. He was 46 and a great voice was silenced. I’ve never read his fiction, although Infinite Jest has long been on my radar screen, but at more than 1,000 pages I haven’t dug into to it yet. But his nonfiction was darkly witty, innovative, accurate, and deep. You might want to read his essay McCain's Promise that was recently republished. I’m so sorry for his wife, family, friends, and students.
Yesterday afternoon I returned from a trip to Central Oregon, weaving through mountains and canyons and sage and past pastures of grazing horses and cattle. I stayed in a small town oozing with charm and decided I’d move to a small town in a heartbeat if there was a way to make a living and there were enough progressives around. However, I returned home with too many symptoms and problems from my travels. So because of my continued saga of body and brain injuries, and on the advice of one of my doctors, I’ve canceled my gigs for the next two weekends. My apologies to anyone planning on attending—the spirit is willing, the flesh is falling apart. Enough about my dilapidated self (remember: don’t answer your cell phone when you’re driving, you never know who you might crash into). Also, I’m still looking for guest bloggers.
Here’s a tip on writing: Effective fiction is nuanced and layered. It also, in a sense, haunts the reader with its subtle refrains like a powerful melody. So how is this accomplished without creating a muddled mess or a story as naked as a newborn hatchling?Let’s focus on details, the mainstay of fiction that resonates. Details stir a reader’s senses and haunt with their clarity. Yet details should never be catalogued or listed. Instead, they need to appear natural, enhancing the story in some way. If the details aren’t adding to the story, then leave them out.
Remember, too, that description is static, another reason to insert it sparingly. If you constantly stop your story to describe sunsets, seashores, interiors, hairstyles, and heartbeats, your story will likely lose its momentum. Readers are interested in the forward motion of the story and their eyes veer to dialogue and other places where action and movement is on the page.
A solution is to put description in motion or slip it in through a character’s viewpoint. Thus, insert details via a character’s thoughts, amid action scenes, in the middle of dialogue, while characters are moving.
Old School, a novel by Tobias Wolff, is told with a kind of aching subtlety. Dialogue is spare, descriptions pared down to essentials, but still the story manages to soar, to offer moments when the reader pauses and lingers over words and scenes because they contain so much yet seem to be written with so little. It is a story of a boy who is an outsider, attending a small New England prep school on a scholarship in the early 1960s. In a school filled with “book drunk boys,” there are a number of contests and honors centered on writing and literature. These prizes bring out the best and worst in the boys and eventually result in disgrace for the narrator.
Here is a brief passage right before his downfall, the story’s major reversal:
I was glad for the day of grace I’d been given. After my last class that afternoon I went AWOL across the river and mucked through freshly ploughed fields to the tallest of the neighboring hills, Mount Winston as we called it. …
I paced the hilltop, exhausted but too nervous to sit. In my classes the blood-roar in my head had rendered me nearly deaf. Most of this was explosive relief and exhilaration, yet with a thumping underpulse of dread. It was one thing to confide your hidden life to a piece of paper in an empty room, quite another to have it broadcast.
A warm wind blew across the hilltop, and with it the faint cries of boys chasing balls. The school lawns and fields were a rich, unreal green against the muddy brown expanse of surrounding farmland. Between the wooded banks of the river two shells raced upstream, oars flashing. The chapel with its tall crenellated bell tower and streaming pennant looked like an engraving in a child’s book. From this height it was possible to see into the dream that produced the school, not mere English-envy but the yearning for a chivalric world apart from the din of scandal and cheap dispute, the hustles and schemes of modernity itself. As I recognized this dream I also sensed its futility, but so what? I loved my school no less for begging gallantly unequal to our appetites—more, if anything. With still a month to graduation I was already damp with nostalgia.
I stretched out on a slab of rock. The sun in my face and radiant warmth on my back lulled me to sleep. Then the wind cooled and I woke with a wolfish hunger and started back.
This passage, a transition leading to the action that follows, creates a moment of significance because it reveals his love for the school; it shows us the school from a fresh perspective, a hillside; it reveals the stakes involved; it foreshadows what is to come; and yet lulls the reader with its pastoral mood so that the events that follow are more disturbing. And while it is a fairly long descriptive passage, it is not an inert blob. One technique that keeps this passage from being static is the active verbs scattered throughout: mucked, paced, blew, chasing, raced, flashing, yearning, sensed, loved, begging, stretched, lulled, cooled, and started.
Wolf’s example is a good reminder to add life to descriptions by writing in the active voice whenever possible. For example, here is the passive version: There were hundreds of spectators on the lawn. The active voice can be written: Hundreds of spectators dotted the lawn. An easy tip is to avoid using There is, There was, There are, or It was to begin your sentences because this construction guarantees these sentences will be passive.
Meanwhile, we lost a great writer when David Foster Wallace hanged himself on September 12. He was 46 and a great voice was silenced. I’ve never read his fiction, although Infinite Jest has long been on my radar screen, but at more than 1,000 pages I haven’t dug into to it yet. But his nonfiction was darkly witty, innovative, accurate, and deep. You might want to read his essay McCain's Promise that was recently republished. I’m so sorry for his wife, family, friends, and students.
Yesterday afternoon I returned from a trip to Central Oregon, weaving through mountains and canyons and sage and past pastures of grazing horses and cattle. I stayed in a small town oozing with charm and decided I’d move to a small town in a heartbeat if there was a way to make a living and there were enough progressives around. However, I returned home with too many symptoms and problems from my travels. So because of my continued saga of body and brain injuries, and on the advice of one of my doctors, I’ve canceled my gigs for the next two weekends. My apologies to anyone planning on attending—the spirit is willing, the flesh is falling apart. Enough about my dilapidated self (remember: don’t answer your cell phone when you’re driving, you never know who you might crash into). Also, I’m still looking for guest bloggers.
Here’s a tip on writing: Effective fiction is nuanced and layered. It also, in a sense, haunts the reader with its subtle refrains like a powerful melody. So how is this accomplished without creating a muddled mess or a story as naked as a newborn hatchling?Let’s focus on details, the mainstay of fiction that resonates. Details stir a reader’s senses and haunt with their clarity. Yet details should never be catalogued or listed. Instead, they need to appear natural, enhancing the story in some way. If the details aren’t adding to the story, then leave them out.
Remember, too, that description is static, another reason to insert it sparingly. If you constantly stop your story to describe sunsets, seashores, interiors, hairstyles, and heartbeats, your story will likely lose its momentum. Readers are interested in the forward motion of the story and their eyes veer to dialogue and other places where action and movement is on the page.
A solution is to put description in motion or slip it in through a character’s viewpoint. Thus, insert details via a character’s thoughts, amid action scenes, in the middle of dialogue, while characters are moving.
Old School, a novel by Tobias Wolff, is told with a kind of aching subtlety. Dialogue is spare, descriptions pared down to essentials, but still the story manages to soar, to offer moments when the reader pauses and lingers over words and scenes because they contain so much yet seem to be written with so little. It is a story of a boy who is an outsider, attending a small New England prep school on a scholarship in the early 1960s. In a school filled with “book drunk boys,” there are a number of contests and honors centered on writing and literature. These prizes bring out the best and worst in the boys and eventually result in disgrace for the narrator.
Here is a brief passage right before his downfall, the story’s major reversal:
I was glad for the day of grace I’d been given. After my last class that afternoon I went AWOL across the river and mucked through freshly ploughed fields to the tallest of the neighboring hills, Mount Winston as we called it. …
I paced the hilltop, exhausted but too nervous to sit. In my classes the blood-roar in my head had rendered me nearly deaf. Most of this was explosive relief and exhilaration, yet with a thumping underpulse of dread. It was one thing to confide your hidden life to a piece of paper in an empty room, quite another to have it broadcast.
A warm wind blew across the hilltop, and with it the faint cries of boys chasing balls. The school lawns and fields were a rich, unreal green against the muddy brown expanse of surrounding farmland. Between the wooded banks of the river two shells raced upstream, oars flashing. The chapel with its tall crenellated bell tower and streaming pennant looked like an engraving in a child’s book. From this height it was possible to see into the dream that produced the school, not mere English-envy but the yearning for a chivalric world apart from the din of scandal and cheap dispute, the hustles and schemes of modernity itself. As I recognized this dream I also sensed its futility, but so what? I loved my school no less for begging gallantly unequal to our appetites—more, if anything. With still a month to graduation I was already damp with nostalgia.
I stretched out on a slab of rock. The sun in my face and radiant warmth on my back lulled me to sleep. Then the wind cooled and I woke with a wolfish hunger and started back.
This passage, a transition leading to the action that follows, creates a moment of significance because it reveals his love for the school; it shows us the school from a fresh perspective, a hillside; it reveals the stakes involved; it foreshadows what is to come; and yet lulls the reader with its pastoral mood so that the events that follow are more disturbing. And while it is a fairly long descriptive passage, it is not an inert blob. One technique that keeps this passage from being static is the active verbs scattered throughout: mucked, paced, blew, chasing, raced, flashing, yearning, sensed, loved, begging, stretched, lulled, cooled, and started.
Wolf’s example is a good reminder to add life to descriptions by writing in the active voice whenever possible. For example, here is the passive version: There were hundreds of spectators on the lawn. The active voice can be written: Hundreds of spectators dotted the lawn. An easy tip is to avoid using There is, There was, There are, or It was to begin your sentences because this construction guarantees these sentences will be passive.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Sky is pale, pale blue and temperatures should be in the 80s here today. Later I’m heading out later today for Oregon’s high desert. I’ll be talking about characters and signing books at Paulina Springs Books in Sisters tonight and tomorrow at their Redmond store. I know I mention salon.com a lot here—it’s because some of my favorite writers are regular contributors. The second Wednesday of every month Camille Paglia writes a column. Paglia, who calls herself a “dissident feminist” is
always articulate, provocative, and witty. And yikes, what a vocabulary! Her latest column on 9/10/08 is called Fresh Blood for the Vampire and warns progressives not to sound shrill or hyperbolic in their denouncements of Sarah Palin. Good advice since I’m feeling pretty darn shrill these days……
In the same issue Cintra Wilson has written Pissed About Palin and (McCain’s running mate is a Christian Stepford wife in a sexy librarian costume. Women, it’s time to get furious.) She writes: “She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she's anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.
She should, however, be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.” And the debate continues.
Also, this was emailed to me so I wanted to pass it along for people in the Northwest: Just a reminder, Dan Poynter, who is widely known as the guru of Independent Publishing, is coming to Portland hosted by NW Association of Book Publishers and National Speakers Association - Oregon.
I've seen him before and he is really down to earth about the publishing business -- the next step for authors, of course, whether by traditional publishing or the increasingly popular independent publishing.
Here are the bare essentials:
Dan Poynter
Sponsored by Northwest Assn. of Book Publishers and the Oregon Chapter of
National Speaker's Association.
October 1, 6-9 PM
Ambridge Event Center
300 NE Multnomah (near the Lloyd Center) Portland
$35 per person includes Dan, appetizers and no-host bar
To reserve: http://www.nsaoregon.net/calendar.html - scroll down to the
event - space is limited
For more information: http://nwabp.org/pages/poynter.html
always articulate, provocative, and witty. And yikes, what a vocabulary! Her latest column on 9/10/08 is called Fresh Blood for the Vampire and warns progressives not to sound shrill or hyperbolic in their denouncements of Sarah Palin. Good advice since I’m feeling pretty darn shrill these days……
In the same issue Cintra Wilson has written Pissed About Palin and (McCain’s running mate is a Christian Stepford wife in a sexy librarian costume. Women, it’s time to get furious.) She writes: “She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she's anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.
She should, however, be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women's liberation movement in the 1970s.” And the debate continues.
Also, this was emailed to me so I wanted to pass it along for people in the Northwest: Just a reminder, Dan Poynter, who is widely known as the guru of Independent Publishing, is coming to Portland hosted by NW Association of Book Publishers and National Speakers Association - Oregon.
I've seen him before and he is really down to earth about the publishing business -- the next step for authors, of course, whether by traditional publishing or the increasingly popular independent publishing.
Here are the bare essentials:
Dan Poynter
Sponsored by Northwest Assn. of Book Publishers and the Oregon Chapter of
National Speaker's Association.
October 1, 6-9 PM
Ambridge Event Center
300 NE Multnomah (near the Lloyd Center) Portland
$35 per person includes Dan, appetizers and no-host bar
To reserve: http://www.nsaoregon.net/calendar.html - scroll down to the
event - space is limited
For more information: http://nwabp.org/pages/poynter.html
Friday, September 05, 2008
Greetings to readers of Jessica’s blog from guest blogger, Libby Jacobs. I met Jessica at a writers’ conference two years ago, and have been an eager reader of her newsletter since then. Although I had never “blogged,” I was intrigued by her request for guest writers. The topic, three books that influenced me, sounded almost too easy until I started thinking about favorite books, important books, books whose characters, plots, and emotional impact have stayed with me for decades. Limiting the discussion to three seemed overwhelming, so I restricted the choices to books that influenced me as a writer.
Using my imaginative prerogative as a writer, I’ll pretend that I can’t count to three, and ever-so-briefly mention the Nancy Drew books that seem to be part of the childhood of most women who grow up to be writers. The books taught me that a secret, a mystery, must be hidden in the heart of any good story regardless of genre.
The first book I’d like to mention is Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, the grim story of Quentin, a sexual predator and serial killer. While Oates frequently explores the dark side of human nature, this work is a particularly horrifying study of a deviant criminal. Not content to examine the mind of the killer from the outside, she takes the bold step of putting herself in Quentin’s mind and engaging the reader through the first person device of a diary. Lines like “My whole body is a numb tongue” establish a chilling authenticity.
Oates backs away from no gruesome detail of the serial killer’s search for a handsome, compliant slave, his “zombie.” Especially unsettling is her suggestion that Quentin appears ordinary, and could be someone the reader knows and comes into contact with every day.
Not an easy read, this novel taught me a valuable lesson: If you can think it, if it is part of your story, write it without apology. “Wolf Note,” the first story in my collection of the same name, deals with a young female cellist who has an incestuous relationship with her brother. The last story is a monologue by a disturbed adolescent patient in a mental ward. Without the courageous example of Joyce Carol Oates in Zombie, I might have pulled back in these stories or dropped them from the collection. Zombie kept me honest.
When working on my novel about a concert pianist who leaves music, I read Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. In an unnamed South American country, Roxane Coss, renowned American soprano, has presented a recital for a group of international guests gathered in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman. At the end of the evening, armed terrorists take the group hostage. Over the four-month siege, captors and captives become allies, friends, and lovers. I studied the book to learn how she had so skillfully interwoven love stories and international intrigue. Because she wrote so sensitively and knowledgably about opera, and music in general, I was surprised to learn that she had not been an opera aficionado before writing Bel Canto, and I examined her language for clues to how she created lines so lyrical that they supported the musical theme like breath supports a singer’s voice. And talk about a stunning first line in a novel, Bel Canto’s “When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her” is magnificent.
Each time I approach Bel Canto as a textbook to illuminate some issue in my writing, I find myself lost in the beauty of the story. Perhaps that is the most important lesson we can learn from a novel: we are storytellers above all.
I’m cheating a bit on the third book because it’s neither published nor a single volume. I recently found and have begun rereading my mother’s poetry notebooks, yellowed lined pages spiral-bound in brown cardboard covers. She was young when she died forty years ago, but if I listen closely as I read the poems she wrote and collected, I can almost hear a whisper of her voice.
She was a nurse who volunteered to serve in the Army Air Corps during WWII. Her Irish father loved poetry, and she inherited his passion for words. In the notebooks she pasted poems cut from magazines, poems copied in fading blue pen from books, and verse she had written. Occasionally a poem appears in a different handwriting, an addition by a poetry-loving friend, perhaps written in a hospital ward overseas.
I remember my mother reciting poetry to my sister and me before bedtime. It was not always good poetry; one of my favorites, probably because of the tragic narrative, was “Lasca” about a young woman, “wild as the breezes that blow,” who sacrifices her life to save her lover in a Texas cattle stampede. Not your typical bedtime story for a five or six year old, but a loving introduction to the passionate, rhythmic, musical language of poetry. The memories remind me that before I was a writer, I was a reader; and before I was a reader, I was a listener, absorbing words spoken with an Irish passion for language.
On the cover of her notebooks she wrote: “I am a miser of rhyme and verse.” But “miser” suggests a selfish quality, and if long ago she gathered the poems for her own pleasure, she also saved them – for my sister and me, for my daughter, and for my granddaughter who is just learning to read.
Keep writing, and, if you like, visit my website at www.libbyjacobs.com.
Using my imaginative prerogative as a writer, I’ll pretend that I can’t count to three, and ever-so-briefly mention the Nancy Drew books that seem to be part of the childhood of most women who grow up to be writers. The books taught me that a secret, a mystery, must be hidden in the heart of any good story regardless of genre.
The first book I’d like to mention is Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, the grim story of Quentin, a sexual predator and serial killer. While Oates frequently explores the dark side of human nature, this work is a particularly horrifying study of a deviant criminal. Not content to examine the mind of the killer from the outside, she takes the bold step of putting herself in Quentin’s mind and engaging the reader through the first person device of a diary. Lines like “My whole body is a numb tongue” establish a chilling authenticity.
Oates backs away from no gruesome detail of the serial killer’s search for a handsome, compliant slave, his “zombie.” Especially unsettling is her suggestion that Quentin appears ordinary, and could be someone the reader knows and comes into contact with every day.
Not an easy read, this novel taught me a valuable lesson: If you can think it, if it is part of your story, write it without apology. “Wolf Note,” the first story in my collection of the same name, deals with a young female cellist who has an incestuous relationship with her brother. The last story is a monologue by a disturbed adolescent patient in a mental ward. Without the courageous example of Joyce Carol Oates in Zombie, I might have pulled back in these stories or dropped them from the collection. Zombie kept me honest.
When working on my novel about a concert pianist who leaves music, I read Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. In an unnamed South American country, Roxane Coss, renowned American soprano, has presented a recital for a group of international guests gathered in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman. At the end of the evening, armed terrorists take the group hostage. Over the four-month siege, captors and captives become allies, friends, and lovers. I studied the book to learn how she had so skillfully interwoven love stories and international intrigue. Because she wrote so sensitively and knowledgably about opera, and music in general, I was surprised to learn that she had not been an opera aficionado before writing Bel Canto, and I examined her language for clues to how she created lines so lyrical that they supported the musical theme like breath supports a singer’s voice. And talk about a stunning first line in a novel, Bel Canto’s “When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her” is magnificent.
Each time I approach Bel Canto as a textbook to illuminate some issue in my writing, I find myself lost in the beauty of the story. Perhaps that is the most important lesson we can learn from a novel: we are storytellers above all.
I’m cheating a bit on the third book because it’s neither published nor a single volume. I recently found and have begun rereading my mother’s poetry notebooks, yellowed lined pages spiral-bound in brown cardboard covers. She was young when she died forty years ago, but if I listen closely as I read the poems she wrote and collected, I can almost hear a whisper of her voice.
She was a nurse who volunteered to serve in the Army Air Corps during WWII. Her Irish father loved poetry, and she inherited his passion for words. In the notebooks she pasted poems cut from magazines, poems copied in fading blue pen from books, and verse she had written. Occasionally a poem appears in a different handwriting, an addition by a poetry-loving friend, perhaps written in a hospital ward overseas.
I remember my mother reciting poetry to my sister and me before bedtime. It was not always good poetry; one of my favorites, probably because of the tragic narrative, was “Lasca” about a young woman, “wild as the breezes that blow,” who sacrifices her life to save her lover in a Texas cattle stampede. Not your typical bedtime story for a five or six year old, but a loving introduction to the passionate, rhythmic, musical language of poetry. The memories remind me that before I was a writer, I was a reader; and before I was a reader, I was a listener, absorbing words spoken with an Irish passion for language.
On the cover of her notebooks she wrote: “I am a miser of rhyme and verse.” But “miser” suggests a selfish quality, and if long ago she gathered the poems for her own pleasure, she also saved them – for my sister and me, for my daughter, and for my granddaughter who is just learning to read.
Keep writing, and, if you like, visit my website at www.libbyjacobs.com.
"Bullies, Bastards and Bitches...with sub-plots" re: the fiction of T.C. Boyle (guest entry by W. Dale Sturdavant
There's a light that fills you up when you're writing; there's a magic...It's a miracle and it's a rush...It's so utterly thrilling to me, it's all I want to do...T. Caraghessan Boyle
Apologies to Jessica for borrowing the title of her newest book, but Boyle creates some of the most loathsome bad guys in the fictional universe. These are sinister fellows; sociopaths with hearts of stone, brains blazing with evil. Boyle fleshes out their nefarious traits in sub-plots. The bullies creep and slither through the pages, tormenting, raping, pillaging. Boyle's abused protagonists, meanwhile, push ahead, vulnerable, but resilient, fighting back with wit, courage and spunk. Sometimes they even win. Regardless of the outcome, the battles always entertain.
Boyle opens his most recent novel, Talk, Talk (2006), with a hearing-impaired young woman panicked at discovering an identity thief has turned her life upside down: checking and savings accounts drained, credit cards run up to their limits, herself perceived as villain by a legal system not yet adapted to computer crime. Her plight unfolds in increments, each new twist compounding her disaster. She could crumple, reach for the Valium, wallow in victim hood; but Boyle makes her a fighter, a pit bull on two legs and steroids.
We turn the page and enter an underworld inhabited by our reprehensible villain. He's a narcissistic, ex-con, con man with expensive tastes--and a "material girl" fiance (the "bitch" of Jessica's pantheon of antagonists)who pesters him with ever more lavish demands. Keeping his woman plush with goodies, his own body be-jeweled like a pimp's, our thief cruises from coast to coast in his new Cadillac (leased with another man's credit), feeling like a Man, smugly superior to the working fools who unwittingly fill his coffers. Providing for his "family" (fiance has a young son) becomes the bastard's rationale for increasingly grandiose schemes to plunder other people's money. He partner's up with an old prison buddy and learns to use black-market software. With a little research and a few clicks of the mouse, he upgrades his victims pool and garnishes their wealth in larger and larger chunks.
Informed with extensive research, a quality evident in all his novels, Boyle leads us through the shady world of financial terrorism. Tension builds between plot and sub-plot and sparks begin to fly. Our implacable heroine, having lost her teaching job at a school for the deaf, quickly realizes the system isn't on her side. She sets out to track down the thief who's made such a shambles of her life.
Boyle tosses a cascade of obstacles into the paths of both heroine and villain. Plot and sub-plot twist, churn, bump against each other and finally intersect.
"Talk, Talk" ( a phrase the hearing impaired use to describe what the rest of us do)shook me up, left me feeling almost vulnerable, a mere mouse click from financial ruin. And not nearly as clever and courageous as the heroine. I loved the suspense, the writing, the realistic foray into a mind frozen in cold-blooded greed. So did Universal Pictures, which purchased the rights to Talk, Talk and is currently producing a film version.
There's a light that fills you up when you're writing; there's a magic...It's a miracle and it's a rush...It's so utterly thrilling to me, it's all I want to do...T. Caraghessan Boyle
Apologies to Jessica for borrowing the title of her newest book, but Boyle creates some of the most loathsome bad guys in the fictional universe. These are sinister fellows; sociopaths with hearts of stone, brains blazing with evil. Boyle fleshes out their nefarious traits in sub-plots. The bullies creep and slither through the pages, tormenting, raping, pillaging. Boyle's abused protagonists, meanwhile, push ahead, vulnerable, but resilient, fighting back with wit, courage and spunk. Sometimes they even win. Regardless of the outcome, the battles always entertain.
Boyle opens his most recent novel, Talk, Talk (2006), with a hearing-impaired young woman panicked at discovering an identity thief has turned her life upside down: checking and savings accounts drained, credit cards run up to their limits, herself perceived as villain by a legal system not yet adapted to computer crime. Her plight unfolds in increments, each new twist compounding her disaster. She could crumple, reach for the Valium, wallow in victim hood; but Boyle makes her a fighter, a pit bull on two legs and steroids.
We turn the page and enter an underworld inhabited by our reprehensible villain. He's a narcissistic, ex-con, con man with expensive tastes--and a "material girl" fiance (the "bitch" of Jessica's pantheon of antagonists)who pesters him with ever more lavish demands. Keeping his woman plush with goodies, his own body be-jeweled like a pimp's, our thief cruises from coast to coast in his new Cadillac (leased with another man's credit), feeling like a Man, smugly superior to the working fools who unwittingly fill his coffers. Providing for his "family" (fiance has a young son) becomes the bastard's rationale for increasingly grandiose schemes to plunder other people's money. He partner's up with an old prison buddy and learns to use black-market software. With a little research and a few clicks of the mouse, he upgrades his victims pool and garnishes their wealth in larger and larger chunks.
Informed with extensive research, a quality evident in all his novels, Boyle leads us through the shady world of financial terrorism. Tension builds between plot and sub-plot and sparks begin to fly. Our implacable heroine, having lost her teaching job at a school for the deaf, quickly realizes the system isn't on her side. She sets out to track down the thief who's made such a shambles of her life.
Boyle tosses a cascade of obstacles into the paths of both heroine and villain. Plot and sub-plot twist, churn, bump against each other and finally intersect.
"Talk, Talk" ( a phrase the hearing impaired use to describe what the rest of us do)shook me up, left me feeling almost vulnerable, a mere mouse click from financial ruin. And not nearly as clever and courageous as the heroine. I loved the suspense, the writing, the realistic foray into a mind frozen in cold-blooded greed. So did Universal Pictures, which purchased the rights to Talk, Talk and is currently producing a film version.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Partly cloudy skies and the weather is supposed to be drying up and warming up this week. The good news is that Hurricane Gustav has been downgraded to a Category 2 storm and the main brunt will miss New Orleans, although there will still be 100 mph winds in the city. I think we’re all holding our breaths about whether the levees will hold….And why haven’t they been fixed? Because all our money is going into Iraq which has a huge surplus of cash? I finished reading Lin Enger’s Undiscovered Country yesterday—he’s the brother of Leif Enger of Peace Like a River. That family has words in their veins….it’s a satisfying read and I think I’m going to search out the mystery series that they penned together.
Anyway, yesterday I was writing my column for my September newsletter, and wanted to throw out a few general writing tips. Open scenes with a swoosh. Hop into the action or important information without prelude. Start in the midst of action whenever possible. Don’t set up every scene, or follow characters around endlessly as they head toward the scene. Jump in and the reader will follow.
Find fresh images. In The Witchfinder by Loren D. Estleman the image isn’t complex but still gives goosebumps: “In a little while the streetlights would blink on and then the headlamps, a set at a time like bats awakening, and the city would turn itself darkside out like a reversible jacket, shaking out the creatures that breathed and bred it is folds.
Avoid overpopulation. I was talking with a writer I recently met about his early draft of his novel and while he had a terrific idea for a novel, he needed to nail down the smaller techniques that make a novel complete. I noticed he was especially having problems with scenes that were overpopulated. If you find you’ll need a group scene, be sure to give the reader a wide angle shot to establish the scene (read the opening of chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby to note how Fitzgerald introduces Gatsby’s parties).
Emphasis is helped by honing your scenes to the most important players. Beginning writers tend to overpopulate stories and scenes. And while it’s true that sometimes we need a crowd scene when your character attends a party, a ceremony, or sporting event, but still the action always hones in on a few key players. Important characters get lost in a mob scene. You also might be able to combine two or three supporting characters into one.
Trade in bland verbs—look, see, get, put, got, run, ran, walked, turned, crossed, leave, left, go, gone, have, had—for vibrant ones. But beware of using florid verbs (the car grumbled to a stop)—powerhouse verbs are important but you can’t hire muscle for each sentence.
When in doubt, use restraint.
Focus on beginnings and endings. Researchers have shown that the human brain pays more attention to beginnings and endings, and that people also remember them best. So, as a writer, you want to load your most potent ideas and vivid words at the beginning and ending of sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters.
One tip-off that there is not enough action in your story is when your protagonist spends a lot of time alone in scenes. Unless you’re a highly skilled writer, the proportion of the time your protagonist spends alone should be small, perhaps 5 percent of the story. Now, there are exceptions, but generally you want other characters on stage with him to mix it up. Beware of especially spending too much time alone with the character reflecting on events that have already happened or traveling to and from scene locales. (Enger did a good job of making these moments push the dramatic in Undiscovered Country.)
Another tip-off to not enough action is the amount of words spent on introspection. If you’re often inside your character’s head, there typically will not be enough action or outer conflict. While of course there are exceptions, character thoughts are more like the icing on the chocolate cake, not the meal.
Don’t overdescribe. Avoid catalaogues, lists and endless weather reports. Many things in fiction are never written, they’re implied, empowering the reader to slip in his own imagining.
Don’t overpower the reader in every sentence—choose when to emphasize, when to back off. Use sentence fragments for emphasis. When it works for the type of book you’re writing, create sentence structures that mimic natural speech patterns, that is conversational with a strong mix of short, simple sentences.
Be concrete and specific, never vague.
Generally it’s okay if your opening scenes and chapters are longer than later chapters as you need to establish the world of the story.
Not every scene will be followed by a sequel followed by another scene. Sequels occur as a means of pacing and deepening characterization. The pattern you develop for scene-sequel will depend on the needs of the overall structure and level of drama in the scenes. You can slip a flashback into a sequel because if it was inserted into the scene, it would dilute the drama. The amount of sequel contained in a plot depends on the genre. Romance novels have more sequels than action novels because they are focused intensely on the characters’ emotional experiences, while action plots are woven tightly around scenes, not characters reacting to the action.
Guest bloggers still needed—contact me. Happy writing to all, Jessica
Anyway, yesterday I was writing my column for my September newsletter, and wanted to throw out a few general writing tips. Open scenes with a swoosh. Hop into the action or important information without prelude. Start in the midst of action whenever possible. Don’t set up every scene, or follow characters around endlessly as they head toward the scene. Jump in and the reader will follow.
Find fresh images. In The Witchfinder by Loren D. Estleman the image isn’t complex but still gives goosebumps: “In a little while the streetlights would blink on and then the headlamps, a set at a time like bats awakening, and the city would turn itself darkside out like a reversible jacket, shaking out the creatures that breathed and bred it is folds.
Avoid overpopulation. I was talking with a writer I recently met about his early draft of his novel and while he had a terrific idea for a novel, he needed to nail down the smaller techniques that make a novel complete. I noticed he was especially having problems with scenes that were overpopulated. If you find you’ll need a group scene, be sure to give the reader a wide angle shot to establish the scene (read the opening of chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby to note how Fitzgerald introduces Gatsby’s parties).
Emphasis is helped by honing your scenes to the most important players. Beginning writers tend to overpopulate stories and scenes. And while it’s true that sometimes we need a crowd scene when your character attends a party, a ceremony, or sporting event, but still the action always hones in on a few key players. Important characters get lost in a mob scene. You also might be able to combine two or three supporting characters into one.
Trade in bland verbs—look, see, get, put, got, run, ran, walked, turned, crossed, leave, left, go, gone, have, had—for vibrant ones. But beware of using florid verbs (the car grumbled to a stop)—powerhouse verbs are important but you can’t hire muscle for each sentence.
When in doubt, use restraint.
Focus on beginnings and endings. Researchers have shown that the human brain pays more attention to beginnings and endings, and that people also remember them best. So, as a writer, you want to load your most potent ideas and vivid words at the beginning and ending of sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters.
One tip-off that there is not enough action in your story is when your protagonist spends a lot of time alone in scenes. Unless you’re a highly skilled writer, the proportion of the time your protagonist spends alone should be small, perhaps 5 percent of the story. Now, there are exceptions, but generally you want other characters on stage with him to mix it up. Beware of especially spending too much time alone with the character reflecting on events that have already happened or traveling to and from scene locales. (Enger did a good job of making these moments push the dramatic in Undiscovered Country.)
Another tip-off to not enough action is the amount of words spent on introspection. If you’re often inside your character’s head, there typically will not be enough action or outer conflict. While of course there are exceptions, character thoughts are more like the icing on the chocolate cake, not the meal.
Don’t overdescribe. Avoid catalaogues, lists and endless weather reports. Many things in fiction are never written, they’re implied, empowering the reader to slip in his own imagining.
Don’t overpower the reader in every sentence—choose when to emphasize, when to back off. Use sentence fragments for emphasis. When it works for the type of book you’re writing, create sentence structures that mimic natural speech patterns, that is conversational with a strong mix of short, simple sentences.
Be concrete and specific, never vague.
Generally it’s okay if your opening scenes and chapters are longer than later chapters as you need to establish the world of the story.
Not every scene will be followed by a sequel followed by another scene. Sequels occur as a means of pacing and deepening characterization. The pattern you develop for scene-sequel will depend on the needs of the overall structure and level of drama in the scenes. You can slip a flashback into a sequel because if it was inserted into the scene, it would dilute the drama. The amount of sequel contained in a plot depends on the genre. Romance novels have more sequels than action novels because they are focused intensely on the characters’ emotional experiences, while action plots are woven tightly around scenes, not characters reacting to the action.
Guest bloggers still needed—contact me. Happy writing to all, Jessica
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Marine clouds still scattered across the dawn sky. I ran across this bit of advice from Sandra Brown I wanted to pass along because I agree with it so wholeheartedly: “The worst piece of advice I was ever given was to write about what I know. I took stock of what I knew and, from a creative standpoint, none of it was very stimulating. Nor did it have much potential for being engaging and entertaining to a reading audience. I have no personal knowledge of, or experience with, paramilitary hate groups, or heart transplantation, or escapees from a maximum security prisons, or what it’s like to be profoundly deaf. But I’ve written about all these topics, and the books became bestsellers.
I figure that if something interests me, there’s a reasonably good chance that it’s going to interest the reader, too. As I approach the keyboard each day, I remind myself to have a good time—as good a time as one can have doing the hardest work there is.”
I figure that if something interests me, there’s a reasonably good chance that it’s going to interest the reader, too. As I approach the keyboard each day, I remind myself to have a good time—as good a time as one can have doing the hardest work there is.”
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Soot-colored skies and it looks like rain is coming. Yesterday after a particularly hellish chiropractic session when my doc was digging into places in my neck until I was sure I would throw up all over his office although I only vomit when pregnant, I managed to quell my nausea long enough to visit the post office and send off copies of Writing Out the Storm (out of print) to amazon. It’s been a tough last few days and I’m especially having problems with blurred vision and eye strain and doing much of anything that is productive…..In fact, a bit of despair and self pity had set in and this had been increased by a rude email from a writer whose opening chapters I’d critiqued, a request from a writer to review and critique her writing as a favor (no favors in me at the moment although I often feel a bit guilty for saying no) a crappy review of my Bullies, Bastards & Bitches book at amazon.com by someone who missed the point entirely of what I’m trying to say, and having difficulty walking and doing anything without huge amounts of pain. So a pity party was in progress, with wild, sad saxophone notes playing in my head and feelings like a flood had just swept me downriver. Make that the muddy Mississippi or one crawling with alligators. So to my surprise whilst at the post office I found a large box addressed to me. It was from my students and fellow writers—a writing group in Olympia. And it contained Godiva chocolates in one of those beguiling gold boxes that demand to be opened. So after Hillary made nice at the Convention I nibbled a few. And felt so much better as chocolate melted on my tongue and slipped into my soul and the knowledge that my peeps –wherever they may be--care about me and my world. Gratitude feels so much better than self pity. Here are two sites you might want to visit: poetrydaily.org.and blackbird.vcu.edu Keep writing…..
Monday, August 25, 2008
Morning sky is a tapestry of clouds and I slept in this morning—a rare thing. I returned home from the Oregon coast yesterday afternoon and spent hours unpacking and doing laundry. Car is still full of mud and sand. It’s sort of shocking how many items I dragged there for a week away from home—most of them used, although we didn’t eat all the food. I’m afraid I’m missing the ocean already, especially the constant roar of the surf that accompanies your days while you’re there. Every morning when I’m at the coast I sit at a kitchen table with a notebook and write down my dreams and make notes about future writing projects and watch the endless sea. I deliberately left my laptop at home because I wanted to write by hand, I wanted to rest and slow down.
And I did—-lulled by the ocean and walks along the beach and naps. I also spotted and an amazing number of birds I hadn’t seen before including a Steller’s Jay -–a majestic bird. I’ve decided I am going to learn the names and songs of all the birds around me so had bird books open on the table at all times (unlike John McCain I only have one kitchen table and the cabin I visit is rented), and watched the various finches and chickadees and red-winged blackbirds busy at the feeders—although only one species at a time seemed to gather. No interspecies feeding allowed….
Last night after returning from a family dinner I started checking emails and deleting hundreds of spam emails (a huge number of them about Paris Hilton) and read the last three guest entries in my blog. Many thanks to Kari, Dale, and Mindy!
I’m going to cheat a bit here and supply the link to Jessica's Publishing Dictionary by Jessica Faust at Bookends http://bookends.blogspot.com/2008/08/publishing dictionary.html which lists a lot of publishing terms from AAR to world rights. It always helps to know the lingo…..and I recommend that unpublished writers read the blogs from literary agents and publishing houses. Happy writing to all.
And I did—-lulled by the ocean and walks along the beach and naps. I also spotted and an amazing number of birds I hadn’t seen before including a Steller’s Jay -–a majestic bird. I’ve decided I am going to learn the names and songs of all the birds around me so had bird books open on the table at all times (unlike John McCain I only have one kitchen table and the cabin I visit is rented), and watched the various finches and chickadees and red-winged blackbirds busy at the feeders—although only one species at a time seemed to gather. No interspecies feeding allowed….
Last night after returning from a family dinner I started checking emails and deleting hundreds of spam emails (a huge number of them about Paris Hilton) and read the last three guest entries in my blog. Many thanks to Kari, Dale, and Mindy!
I’m going to cheat a bit here and supply the link to Jessica's Publishing Dictionary by Jessica Faust at Bookends http://bookends.blogspot.com/2008/08/publishing dictionary.html which lists a lot of publishing terms from AAR to world rights. It always helps to know the lingo…..and I recommend that unpublished writers read the blogs from literary agents and publishing houses. Happy writing to all.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Hey there, Kari Luna, here. Writer, whimsicologist, client of Jessica’s. While she’s away I offered to guest blog about a book or books that influenced me. What fun! Choose a book that influenced me? How about a million? In the interest of time (mine and yours) I'll go with one: "Betsy In Spite of Herself" by Maud Hart Lovelace. I'll be shocked if anyone's read it. In fact, if you have read it, we should get together and have a picnic, like they do in the book. This book was one in a series, but my favorite one. It's here that our heroine, Betsy, starts to call herself an author. In fact, even though she's a sophomore in high school in 1907, she finds time to split her interests between writing and boys. (How feminist of you, Betsy!)
I read this book when I was six or seven, probably. Before I fell in love with "Little Women." But it made writing sound so romantic, I swooned. Betsy did a lot of swooning, too, over Phil Brandish, the handsome but not-so-smart hunk and Joe Willard, the smartypants who beat her the year before in the essay contest. This year she's determined not to be distracted by boys. From page one, she commits herself to her writing. Good girl! Of course, the year progresses and things happen. My favorite of which was coming down with "la grippe." For years after that I magically came down with the same disease, driving my mother crazy and earning days at home under the covers, curled up in between my own journals and books. Betsy made writing seem romantic. In fact, I think it was the first book I ever read where the heroine was or wanted to be a writer instead of a doctor, dancer or whatever was popular that year. It was a new concept. And it was something I understood the importance of, even at six years old.
Betsy used her journal as a way to explore the human condition; to ask the big questions; to vent and whine; to doodle and dream. She taught me that these things were important, just as important as making good grades, winning the gymnastics match or cleaning my room. And while other books have inspired me more in my later years, it was this one that gave me permission to do something no one within a 50 miles radius of me seemed to be doing: writing. Thank you, Maud Hart Lovelace.
I read this book when I was six or seven, probably. Before I fell in love with "Little Women." But it made writing sound so romantic, I swooned. Betsy did a lot of swooning, too, over Phil Brandish, the handsome but not-so-smart hunk and Joe Willard, the smartypants who beat her the year before in the essay contest. This year she's determined not to be distracted by boys. From page one, she commits herself to her writing. Good girl! Of course, the year progresses and things happen. My favorite of which was coming down with "la grippe." For years after that I magically came down with the same disease, driving my mother crazy and earning days at home under the covers, curled up in between my own journals and books. Betsy made writing seem romantic. In fact, I think it was the first book I ever read where the heroine was or wanted to be a writer instead of a doctor, dancer or whatever was popular that year. It was a new concept. And it was something I understood the importance of, even at six years old.
Betsy used her journal as a way to explore the human condition; to ask the big questions; to vent and whine; to doodle and dream. She taught me that these things were important, just as important as making good grades, winning the gymnastics match or cleaning my room. And while other books have inspired me more in my later years, it was this one that gave me permission to do something no one within a 50 miles radius of me seemed to be doing: writing. Thank you, Maud Hart Lovelace.
Oh yeah! These books are inspiring me, on my night table, right now:
The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
Lunch Poems - Frank O'Hara
McSweeney's #22
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami
Lunch Poems - Frank O'Hara
McSweeney's #22
Happy writing! (You can visit me at www.kariluna.com, if you're so inclined.)
Last weekend, just before Jessica fled Portland's heat wave to chill on the Oregon coast, she invited me to jot out a few opinionated paragraphs about a book that's been important to my writing. My name is Dale Sturdavant. I'm a retired history/literature teacher currently finishing up a "travel memoir" of my 2006 adventures in China. My journey started out as a visit to my then 29 year old daughter Kai in Lanzhou City on the occasion of my first granddaughter, Olivia's first birthday, but quickly morphed into a series of harrowing brushes with catastrophe. At every turn, it seemed, I bumped into another aspect of China's ecological crisis: toxic, coal-smudged air; tightly-rationed, undrinkable tap water; rice contaminated by acid rain and polluted irrigation water; and two violent sandstorms blowing off the expanding desert to our north.
Lanzhou is a city of 3.5 million on China's northwestern frontier, a rapidly growing metropolis on the banks of the Yellow River stuck in the awkward and dangerous limbo between a bicycle culture and an explosion of new cars, taxis and buses. Lacking an infrastructure of cross-walks, signals, traffic police and experienced drivers, anarchy reigns on the streets of Lanzhou. Crossing four lanes of speeding traffic without the advantages of signals or cross walks, and riding inside those speeding cabs as they darted between buses and other cabs proved terrifying. Watching my daughter do it carrying Olivia almost gave me heart failure. "Too many ways to die here," I concluded, and resolved to do all I could to convince Kai to come home. As it turned out Kai's judgment matched my own, and by June 2007 she, her husband and their two daughters were back in Oregon. The book I discuss below, Elizabeth Economy's The River Runs Black: the Environmental Challenge to China's Future (2004), proved enormously helpful in fitting my raw impressions into a larger context. Economy, who serves as Director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations is generally regarded, along with Lester Brown at the World Watch Institute, as this country's foremost authority on China's ecological crisis. Her book is readable and informative. Intended as an alarm bell to rouse American policy makers and activists, the book makes explicit the dangers China's ecological crisis pose to our own future. Unfortunately, glimmers of hope, while sometimes visible, pale in comparison to the sobering reality Economy describes. "Spaceship Earth" is headed on a disastrous trajectory.
As Economy makes painfully clear, China's environmental woes extend far beyond its infamous air pollution, glimpses of which were beamed into the world's living rooms during the Beijing Olympics, and which in most of China's northern cities, where coal provides the principal source of heat, is far more toxic than the smog of my LA youth. The World Bank estimates that at least 800,000 Chinese die from the effects of air pollution each year: a figure toned down to 400,000 in domestic Chinese media. But the environmental abuses stemming from thirty years of rapid economic growth threaten an abrupt halt to China's economic miracle. More importantly, as both Economy and China's Environmental Minister Pan Yue point out, the cumulative effects of decades of environmental abuse now threaten the basic underpinnings that make life possible: air, water, food and soil.
China leads the world in per capita birth defects, many of which are attributable to the tiny particles of mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium in their coal-besotted air, and to the pervasive contaminants in their drinking water. China's water, Economy makes clear, rivals its air in lethality. The Huai River, which "ran black" during a disastrous chemical spill in 2001, giving Economy's book its title, is merely one extreme example among many of rivers killed by China's reckless style of development. Almost all of China's major rivers serve as dumping grounds for urban sewage and industrial waste, resulting in a proliferation of "cancer villages" and epidemics of gastrointestinal diseases. Virtually all of China's cities, including Beijing which masks its crisis to sustain its "First World City" image, suffer severe water shortages and survive day to day through plundering their non-renewable aquifers. As home to China's Communist Party leaders, Beijing manages to bully water away from farmers and outlying villages. Even so its wells are projected to run dry by 2015, perhaps sooner.
In a heroic effort to save China's capital, politicians ordered engineers to design the $80 billion dollar South-North Water Transfer Project to sluice abundant Yangtze River water through 600 miles of canals, though a tunnel under the withering Yellow River, and into the faucets of Beijing's hotels, office towers and apartment buildings. Originally slated for completion in time for the Olympics, the project stalled as a proliferation of new chemical plants, refineries and factories along the banks of the Yangtze spewed volumes of toxic waste into what was already referred to as the world's largest open sewer. Officials now say Beijing will get its new water supply in 2010, and construction workers are racing to complete dozens of additional water treatment plants along the route. Economy doubts they can ever make the water drinkable.
In an update of her research in the September/October 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs Journal, Economy paints an increasingly gloomy picture of China's water crisis. Because of surface water pollution, seventy percent of the country's total drinking water now comes from over-taxed aquifers. But 90 percent of the aquifers in China's cities are now polluted! Corrupt local officials continue to ignore the numerous laws requiring factories to treat their effluent and municipalities to treat their sewage. When citizens protest, the officials often unleash thugs to intimidate or arrest them. They muzzle journalists who might dare expose their malfeasance. Victories have been few, but the number of protests may be approaching a critical tipping point.
Other than the terrifying image of the planet's most populous nation unraveling into chaos because of water shortages, the prospect of China continuing to pump increasing volumes of greenhouse gases into our common atmosphere is the most alarming aspect of China's wanton disregard for environmental health. A popular slogan exhorts the people to "rush forward to modern prosperity," promising the average Chinese a lifestyle equivalent to that of an average America--if they persevere on their current path to development. And thus, our own lifestyle and stubborn refusal to live sustainably becomes implicated in any effort to convince the Chinese they should lower their aspirations so we don't have to lower our own.
Economy notes that China is rife with environmental NGO's and would-be activists chafing to redirect their society on a more sustainable path if only their leadership would support rather than repress them. Likewise we in the West have thus far lacked the leadership and sense of urgency to reach out to the Chinese (and Indians) and to develop the technologies and strategies for sustainable living that might inspire them to do likewise. In that task Economy's writings provide a good beginning point for anyone curious about what China's ecological crisis has in store for all of us.
Lanzhou is a city of 3.5 million on China's northwestern frontier, a rapidly growing metropolis on the banks of the Yellow River stuck in the awkward and dangerous limbo between a bicycle culture and an explosion of new cars, taxis and buses. Lacking an infrastructure of cross-walks, signals, traffic police and experienced drivers, anarchy reigns on the streets of Lanzhou. Crossing four lanes of speeding traffic without the advantages of signals or cross walks, and riding inside those speeding cabs as they darted between buses and other cabs proved terrifying. Watching my daughter do it carrying Olivia almost gave me heart failure. "Too many ways to die here," I concluded, and resolved to do all I could to convince Kai to come home. As it turned out Kai's judgment matched my own, and by June 2007 she, her husband and their two daughters were back in Oregon. The book I discuss below, Elizabeth Economy's The River Runs Black: the Environmental Challenge to China's Future (2004), proved enormously helpful in fitting my raw impressions into a larger context. Economy, who serves as Director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations is generally regarded, along with Lester Brown at the World Watch Institute, as this country's foremost authority on China's ecological crisis. Her book is readable and informative. Intended as an alarm bell to rouse American policy makers and activists, the book makes explicit the dangers China's ecological crisis pose to our own future. Unfortunately, glimmers of hope, while sometimes visible, pale in comparison to the sobering reality Economy describes. "Spaceship Earth" is headed on a disastrous trajectory.
As Economy makes painfully clear, China's environmental woes extend far beyond its infamous air pollution, glimpses of which were beamed into the world's living rooms during the Beijing Olympics, and which in most of China's northern cities, where coal provides the principal source of heat, is far more toxic than the smog of my LA youth. The World Bank estimates that at least 800,000 Chinese die from the effects of air pollution each year: a figure toned down to 400,000 in domestic Chinese media. But the environmental abuses stemming from thirty years of rapid economic growth threaten an abrupt halt to China's economic miracle. More importantly, as both Economy and China's Environmental Minister Pan Yue point out, the cumulative effects of decades of environmental abuse now threaten the basic underpinnings that make life possible: air, water, food and soil.
China leads the world in per capita birth defects, many of which are attributable to the tiny particles of mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium in their coal-besotted air, and to the pervasive contaminants in their drinking water. China's water, Economy makes clear, rivals its air in lethality. The Huai River, which "ran black" during a disastrous chemical spill in 2001, giving Economy's book its title, is merely one extreme example among many of rivers killed by China's reckless style of development. Almost all of China's major rivers serve as dumping grounds for urban sewage and industrial waste, resulting in a proliferation of "cancer villages" and epidemics of gastrointestinal diseases. Virtually all of China's cities, including Beijing which masks its crisis to sustain its "First World City" image, suffer severe water shortages and survive day to day through plundering their non-renewable aquifers. As home to China's Communist Party leaders, Beijing manages to bully water away from farmers and outlying villages. Even so its wells are projected to run dry by 2015, perhaps sooner.
In a heroic effort to save China's capital, politicians ordered engineers to design the $80 billion dollar South-North Water Transfer Project to sluice abundant Yangtze River water through 600 miles of canals, though a tunnel under the withering Yellow River, and into the faucets of Beijing's hotels, office towers and apartment buildings. Originally slated for completion in time for the Olympics, the project stalled as a proliferation of new chemical plants, refineries and factories along the banks of the Yangtze spewed volumes of toxic waste into what was already referred to as the world's largest open sewer. Officials now say Beijing will get its new water supply in 2010, and construction workers are racing to complete dozens of additional water treatment plants along the route. Economy doubts they can ever make the water drinkable.
In an update of her research in the September/October 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs Journal, Economy paints an increasingly gloomy picture of China's water crisis. Because of surface water pollution, seventy percent of the country's total drinking water now comes from over-taxed aquifers. But 90 percent of the aquifers in China's cities are now polluted! Corrupt local officials continue to ignore the numerous laws requiring factories to treat their effluent and municipalities to treat their sewage. When citizens protest, the officials often unleash thugs to intimidate or arrest them. They muzzle journalists who might dare expose their malfeasance. Victories have been few, but the number of protests may be approaching a critical tipping point.
Other than the terrifying image of the planet's most populous nation unraveling into chaos because of water shortages, the prospect of China continuing to pump increasing volumes of greenhouse gases into our common atmosphere is the most alarming aspect of China's wanton disregard for environmental health. A popular slogan exhorts the people to "rush forward to modern prosperity," promising the average Chinese a lifestyle equivalent to that of an average America--if they persevere on their current path to development. And thus, our own lifestyle and stubborn refusal to live sustainably becomes implicated in any effort to convince the Chinese they should lower their aspirations so we don't have to lower our own.
Economy notes that China is rife with environmental NGO's and would-be activists chafing to redirect their society on a more sustainable path if only their leadership would support rather than repress them. Likewise we in the West have thus far lacked the leadership and sense of urgency to reach out to the Chinese (and Indians) and to develop the technologies and strategies for sustainable living that might inspire them to do likewise. In that task Economy's writings provide a good beginning point for anyone curious about what China's ecological crisis has in store for all of us.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Jessica Morrell asked me to guest blog this week, so here I am. My name is Mindy Sitton-Halleck and the topic is ‘Three books that have greatly influenced me’.
I was three years old when I first knew I would always love books. I’d burrow into my grandfather’s worn out chair. It was scratchy and smelled of cigar smoke, but I loved it. Grandpa paced back and forth in his humble living room and recited poetry from a book of Tennyson, Thoreau or Poe; especially Poe.
Some folks laugh about how people love Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, saying they are a poor man’s poetry (whatever that means). Well, maybe so. And my grandfather was a poor man by monetary standards, but his devotion to the written word made him the wealthiest man I’ve ever known.
He read to me whenever I visited, every other week or so. I seldom understood the words, then, but I loved the passion with which he read. His emotions captured my imagination like Dorothy listening to the Wizard. Grandpa often ended our reading sessions because he had tears in his eyes. I never saw behind his veil, but to this day I can cry when I read Anna Bell Lee, still hearing the profound sense of loss in his voice.
Flash forward more years than I’m willing to say and I still gravitate to books written with a lyrical tone and profound humanity. The Prince of Tides is one I can read over and over again because of the rhythmic language; say nothing of it being a great story. From the legendary first line, “My wound is geography.” I am swept along by author Pat Conroy's seductive narrative and often poetic prose, his ironic insights into the darkest nature of man and the wealth of humanity found in the simplest of gestures. Conroy is the kind of skilled writer I can only aspire to become. When I’m struggling with a scene I often pick it up and thumb through for inspiration. I can close my eyes and see the savannah’s, smell the waterways and hear his rich story world. I know my grandfather would have loved The Prince of Tides.
More recently a favorite novel was Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. This is an eloquent novel that unravels in compelling twists and turns to create one of the most enchanting stories I’ve ever read. Her first line grabs me, “When they write my obituary.” And then it goes on, “Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit.” Now how could I not read on after that? Poor, funny Leo.
Krauss’s use of language and her creation of completely unique voices for her characters are fascinating. From the first few pages I felt I knew the main character, Leo Gursky and his captivating story. At the core of Leo, are painful loneliness, and the need to fill an emptiness left by lost love.
The story is sheer spiritual poetry. I seek that kind of reading experience in every book I buy. I am seldom satisfied. Krauss set the bar high.
Lastly, The Madonna’s of Leningrad by Debra Dean. I was thankful I took this beautifully written novel to Paris with me last year. Each day I visited museums and every evening I read Debra Deans elegant story. She takes us on a carefully crafted journey about an aging woman with Alzheimer’s who was once an Hermitage Museum docent. The first line, “This way please.” Sets us on our journey with her as our docent-guide. Most of the story takes place during the siege of Leningrad during WWII. This character disappears into her memories. The first line of page three, chapter two, “It is as though she has been transported into a two dimensional world, a book perhaps, and she exists only on this page.” Truly sums up the story. As I read I experienced her youth and her devastating memory loss as she slipped in and out of time.
Dean takes her readers on a beautiful re-creation of what the character went through; the good and the awful. Her descriptions of the art are magical and the way she dances back and forth in her characters memory is masterful.
I’ll never know what made my grandfather cry when he read Anna Bell Lee, but when I read great stories like these, I feel I touch on his spirit one more time. As a writer I work to create similar experiences in my stories.
Thank you for allowing me some of your blog time. As a blog virgin, this has been a fun experience. Keep reading writing and creating great stories. Mindy Sitton-Halleck, Freelance Writer, Seattle, WA
I was three years old when I first knew I would always love books. I’d burrow into my grandfather’s worn out chair. It was scratchy and smelled of cigar smoke, but I loved it. Grandpa paced back and forth in his humble living room and recited poetry from a book of Tennyson, Thoreau or Poe; especially Poe.
Some folks laugh about how people love Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, saying they are a poor man’s poetry (whatever that means). Well, maybe so. And my grandfather was a poor man by monetary standards, but his devotion to the written word made him the wealthiest man I’ve ever known.
He read to me whenever I visited, every other week or so. I seldom understood the words, then, but I loved the passion with which he read. His emotions captured my imagination like Dorothy listening to the Wizard. Grandpa often ended our reading sessions because he had tears in his eyes. I never saw behind his veil, but to this day I can cry when I read Anna Bell Lee, still hearing the profound sense of loss in his voice.
Flash forward more years than I’m willing to say and I still gravitate to books written with a lyrical tone and profound humanity. The Prince of Tides is one I can read over and over again because of the rhythmic language; say nothing of it being a great story. From the legendary first line, “My wound is geography.” I am swept along by author Pat Conroy's seductive narrative and often poetic prose, his ironic insights into the darkest nature of man and the wealth of humanity found in the simplest of gestures. Conroy is the kind of skilled writer I can only aspire to become. When I’m struggling with a scene I often pick it up and thumb through for inspiration. I can close my eyes and see the savannah’s, smell the waterways and hear his rich story world. I know my grandfather would have loved The Prince of Tides.
More recently a favorite novel was Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. This is an eloquent novel that unravels in compelling twists and turns to create one of the most enchanting stories I’ve ever read. Her first line grabs me, “When they write my obituary.” And then it goes on, “Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit.” Now how could I not read on after that? Poor, funny Leo.
Krauss’s use of language and her creation of completely unique voices for her characters are fascinating. From the first few pages I felt I knew the main character, Leo Gursky and his captivating story. At the core of Leo, are painful loneliness, and the need to fill an emptiness left by lost love.
The story is sheer spiritual poetry. I seek that kind of reading experience in every book I buy. I am seldom satisfied. Krauss set the bar high.
Lastly, The Madonna’s of Leningrad by Debra Dean. I was thankful I took this beautifully written novel to Paris with me last year. Each day I visited museums and every evening I read Debra Deans elegant story. She takes us on a carefully crafted journey about an aging woman with Alzheimer’s who was once an Hermitage Museum docent. The first line, “This way please.” Sets us on our journey with her as our docent-guide. Most of the story takes place during the siege of Leningrad during WWII. This character disappears into her memories. The first line of page three, chapter two, “It is as though she has been transported into a two dimensional world, a book perhaps, and she exists only on this page.” Truly sums up the story. As I read I experienced her youth and her devastating memory loss as she slipped in and out of time.
Dean takes her readers on a beautiful re-creation of what the character went through; the good and the awful. Her descriptions of the art are magical and the way she dances back and forth in her characters memory is masterful.
I’ll never know what made my grandfather cry when he read Anna Bell Lee, but when I read great stories like these, I feel I touch on his spirit one more time. As a writer I work to create similar experiences in my stories.
Thank you for allowing me some of your blog time. As a blog virgin, this has been a fun experience. Keep reading writing and creating great stories. Mindy Sitton-Halleck, Freelance Writer, Seattle, WA
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Well it’s been hotter than a bordello in
When I was growing up in a small town in northern
My hometown is wrapped in rivers amid a land laced in lakes and forests. Water and the sound of it like a lullaby. Summer skies as blue as cornflowers and night skies like a magic show. Somehow the rivers and water, the power of place have slipped into my veins, echo in all I write.
The other factor that sculpted me as a writer was that my parents owned books and were readers. In my childhood the heyday of the timber industry was over (most of
When I was about four and my older brother
In the library I met Miss Violet the children’s librarian who wore sweater sets and her pointy-rimmed glasses on a pearl chain. Under her benevolent gaze I discovered many writers, but most importantly The Box Car Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner which is the story of four orphans who for awhile live in the woods in a box car. The story of plucky orphanhood so sparked my imagination that I coerced my sister, cousins, and neighbors into acting out this scenario again and again on wintry afternoons, converting a closet to the boxcar or in the summer in a hidden place under cedars branches in our back yard.
But what I hadn’t realized until I was much older was that my parents were the only adults in the neighborhood who owned books besides the Bible. There was a book case that held my father’s books collected since he was a boy by Zane Grey, Jack London and Louis L’Amour about dogs and horses and the West. And then when I was about ten a young man with severe acne knocked on the door, selling Colliers encyclopedias to work his way through college. My parents bought the set on an installment plan and the books arrived one by one in the mail along with a set of Junior Classics that included Gulliver’s Travels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and
At Christmas we were also given books as gifts and I received The Bobbsey Twins, Little Women and Nancy Drew mysteries and learned that perhaps it’s not always bad to be an uppity girl and a big dreamer.
Fast forward through the years and when I moved to
A few years ago I stumbled across Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. It’s narrated by Reuben Land who is eleven during the story’s events and the story has never left me since I read his first words. Jeremiah Land the patriarch of the tale is a Christ figure, Davy his older brother gets caught up in a deadly feud, and the story is woven through with a series of miracles. It introduces Jape Waltzer one of the most dastardly villains written in years, and it features one of the best children characters to grace the pages of fiction,
Place figures prominently in the story but Enger’s language or should I say his magical prose will make the skin on your neck prickle and you’ll be delighted by fresh word combinations. Over the years of teaching writers I have urged them to keep an inspiration notebook—a place where they can scavenge, eavesdrop, and collect the beauty of language and sensory treasures that are all around us. About four years ago when I was writing three books at about the same time I discovered that my vocabulary was anemic and I was overly fond of using ‘dazzle’ and ‘whisper’.
So I started a word list in my notebooks and when I read Enger, my list doubles and I add these sorts of writerly gems: spectral, screeling, biggity, snuffy, foundering, guttered, wattled, knuckly, stipply, trounce, bilious, and sanguine.
I also scatter my notebook with his descriptions and figurative language such as when he compares a character’s voice to a kazoo and describes another as “trim as a leprechaun” and “up the stairs he flew like a witch.” He also wrote, “In times of dread it’s good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.” These words are from Enger’s new novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome. It’s another adventure tale and quest, it contains another complicated bad guy who thinks he’s a good guy, it’s filled with the mystique of the West, and a battle for redemption.
It’s also another story that makes me feel as I did when I first discovered fiction and a story cast its spell and the world disappeared except for the bubbling creek that I was sitting next to, the sound of water over rock adding to the story’s potency. I sent my father a copy of Enger’s latest book for Father’s Day so we can talk about it the next time I visit him completing the circle of how stories teach us about life and crack open the human heart.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Clouds are moving out and a big heat wave is on the way. Alas, I’m going to be at the
So after I talked about some of the main points of my new book there was a question and answer session. One woman asked about secondary characters and we talked about how they provided a chance for color, verve, and taking risks. Somehow it was mentioned that it was good to feature a blurter in the story—or a character who says things, acts in ways that most people wouldn’t dare. And somewhere along the way I mentioned ‘son of a bitch’. There was a kid of about 8 in the audience and I apologized for my language. He said, “I don’t mind. My dad’s girlfriend talks like that all the time.” Amid laughter I pointed out how a blurter can enliven things….
He was asking about names for characters and wondered if Bob was a good name for a bad guy. To which I answered that a name like Bob likely wouldn’t worry readers—a bad guy’s name needs to suggest menace or strength. Characters are first of all, the sound of their names.
Naming people and things has a practical purpose because it appeals to the reader’s logic and memory. In fiction we name characters to differentiate them, to suggest their age, social standing and personality, to make them solid and distinctive, and signal readers that the story person is worth noting. Generally, the more complicated your character, the more distinct his or her name should be, (think Ebenezer Scrooge) keeping in mind that names, and like characters evoke a response in readers and ignites their imagination. All fiction writes need to collect names in a writer’s notebook starting with the standard methods of gathering names by perusing phone books, obituaries, and baby name books.
Take care with creating your character’s names, especially your villain’s name, and be especially careful not to choose a name that works against type. Generally you wouldn’t choose a name for a villain that suggests a softie, nor would you give a good guy a name that has dark connotation. The best names are suggestive, reflect the genre type such as Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, and reflect an era. In the opening books in the series, Voldemort’s name is so feared that few people speak it out loud, instead say, “he who can’t be named.” If your story has a true villain, his name should reflect menace, coldness, and/or strength. Use hard consonants and sounds to suggest menace or other characteristics. For example in Stephen King’s The Dark Hall, his villain’s name is Stark. Conversely, good guys will have names that suggest goodness, or perhaps strength, such as Tolkein’s characters and hobbits, Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin.
Interestingly, in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy saga, one royal family is also named Stark. The family is from a kingdom of the north, Winterfell and their emblem is a grey direwolf (an extra-large, extra-fierce species of wolf) on a snowy white background. The Starks are tough and cunning and hardened, with a lower hall filled with the bones of their ancestors. In the series they’re often referred to as wolves, the children in the family find direwolves and keep them as pets, and the name and mascot reflects their fierceness.
Writers are also wise to use names that are suggestive such as Romeo suggesting romance, Holly Golightly suggesting a light hearted nature, and Scarlett O’Hara a flamboyant beauty. In Dean Koontz’s Forever Odd the villainess is named Datura which reflects her kinkiness, coldness, and cruelty. However, Koontz cleverly has chosen a name with layers of meaning, something fiction writers are always striving for. Datura is a flowering plant that is also called Devil’s Trumpets and Angel’s Trumpet. There are many myths associated it with it in cultures worldwide such as the Zuni myth about twins who had powers to give people visionary dreams and help them find lost objects. Their enemies decided to put an end to their powers, and after they disappeared forever into the earth twin plants grew where they disappeared.
The Datura species, which has beautiful trumpet-like flowers exudes a narcotic-like scent, especially at night and is considered a sacred visionary plant. Datura plants have been used in many regions and by many cultures for medicinal and spiritual reasons, especially by shamans who use it for its clairvoyant powers. It is also interesting to note that all the Datura species contain potent alkaloids which when taken in sufficient quantity have the power to kill.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
A marine layer of clouds has settled over the city and I’m sitting here in the quietest of dawns except for a few geese honking past. Is it just me, or are geese rarely quiet? Last night I went to the Aladdin Theater with a friend to hear the Portland Cello Project. I don’t know about you, but cellos are my favorite instruments—so haunting and rich and when 5 or 10 or 15 cellists pick up their bows the music seems to slip straight into your blood stream. It was their CD release party and on the recording they play with a number of
Yesterday The Oregonian ran a great piece about me and my new book Bullies, Bastards, & Bitches, How to Write the Bad Guys in Fiction. I wasn’t expecting the coverage so it’s always nice when a surprise turns out to be a good one, as opposed to someone crashing into your car, let’s say. In the article the reporter wrote about how busy I was with my new book out. Truth is, I had nine medical appointments this week, which I guess qualifies me for ‘busy’. So the article and the various performers and gorgeous cello notes filling the old theater helped me focus on the future, not my current body problems.
Happy writing to all.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Skies are the color of soot and it's supposed to cool down for a few days. I wanted to try to post the opening to a talk I gave last week at the Willamette Writers Conference. It was called Fiction's Delicate Balancing Act and I talked a lot about learning how to judge the proportions in your stories, when to describe, when to slow down, when to summarize.
I wish there was a magical recipe that I give you for writing fiction. In this recipe I’d list the ingredients needed to create a novel or short story so you would know how many cups of dialogue, setting, description, backstory and the like that must be stirred into the batter. Then I’d explain at what temperature to bake it and how to test if it’s done and what it’s supposed to taste and look like. But there is no recipe, although there are timeless techniques and underpinnings that can help you become a better writer.
But I do want to make sure that several key points come across this morning: First, as you write think more in terms of batter or a meld of techniques than in separating techniques or elements into separate entities. Second, every technique, every sentence and every detail you write should accomplish more than one task in a story. So if you’re describing setting, it also creates mood or atmosphere. If you’re writing dialogue it’s creating tension and revealing characters. Your story’s details and atmosphere suggests to readers how they should react. It hints if the reader should be worried or alarmed, if the scene is comic, gritty, or romantic. So I want you understand the underpinnings of fiction, but I also want you to sweat the small stuff. Because the smallest details—a shadow, a character ignoring a question asked of him, a button missing on a blouse can telegraph meaning.
To create a fictional world that seems real to readers, writers use a minimum of six key elements: (1) Plot, the sequence of events in a story and its structure; (2) setting; (3) characters; (4) point of view; (5) prose; and (6) theme.
A starting place to writing fiction is to understand the 3-act structure, along with other underpinnings such as conflict, scene structure, and character development. Without an understanding and mastery of the basics, you might write 2, 3 or 400 pages, but you won’t end up with a story; instead you’ll simply produce a lot of words typed on a lot of pages or a haphazard pile of scenes loosely clustered around characters that never quite come to life.
The subplots don’t overshadow the main story, nor do the secondary characters steal the show. But balance also implies that the language and metaphors strike a consistent note; that the fictional world makes sense; and that the pace is controlled yet advances the story.
Balance also means that there is not too much or too little dialogue; skimpy or excess exposition; or flashbacks that intrude on the forward progress of the storyline. In a balanced story, we come to know characters by how they act and react rather than by how they think. It also means that important events are foreshadowed and dominate the stage when they occur. And along that line, your story doesn’t consist of a series of surprises or bombs that unsettle the reader instead of enlivening the plot. Balance implies that sometimes things are unspoken or merely hinted at so that the reader brings his own judgment into a scene rather than being spoon-fed meaning.
Every decision and every word a fiction writer uses telegraphs to readers what is important to his story and what is not. Thus, if you spend three paragraphs on describing an old wall school, this suggests to readers that the wall is important somehow, perhaps will be featured as the scene of a crime. If the wall never appears again in the story, the reader is left with a vague unease and it comes from an unfulfilled promised and lack of balance.
By lavishing a person, place or object with descriptive details we expect them to have a corresponding importance. Keep this in mind when you invent a minor character who twirls into scene after scene dropping funny one-liners or profound truths while the protagonist seems to shrink in her shadow. Or if you create an incident where your character shops for new shoes which you find amusing, but it has nothing to do with the story. Unconnected threads or people or objects that have been granted too much weight add up in the reader’s mind and serve to confuse and annoy.
If the characters never change or grow the story will also be unbalanced. If we never hear the characters speak or if they chit chat endlessly, the story will be unbalanced. Likewise is the setting is clumsily handled or barely discernible, if the middle bogs down, if there is never a pause or reflection after major events or if simply not enough happens in the story or the events have no consequences.
Fiction is about interesting people in a great deal of difficulty. If your protagonist is not in a boatload of trouble, the story won’t matter. The stakes in the story are significant and will have either be life or death consequences or determine the protagonist’s future happiness or misery. Usually the story is designed around a central problem with a series of complicating factors that make solving the problem difficult.
If the protagonist’s problem is not difficult to overcome, the story is out of balance and flat. Likewise, if it is solved too quickly, that is before the climatic scenes, unbalance results. If the solution to the problem is not in doubt, the story will lack suspense and thus be out of balance.
Then balance has a second interpretation—within every story lies a stressful situation that must be resolved to restore order. Reading fiction is an emotional experience, also a way to live vicariously and to explore psychological issues. Many novels are written to reestablish symmetry in a chaotic world, sets things right, suggest endings and resolution that don’t always occur in the real world.
The opening of a novel or short story portrays a dynamic, simmering world that is upset by the inciting incident so that balance is turned topsy-turvy, the protagonist is thrown into a situation he might not have entered willingly and then the story progresses with an urgent need to reinstate that equilibrium. This second aspect of balance depicts the fictional world and its characters always straining toward stability, after the first incident throws the protagonist’s world off kilter.
Balance is fairly easy to analyze in your work. First, you can keep track of the word count that you allot to characters, scenes and exposition to determine if these elements are proportional. You notice when you’re showing and when you’re telling and make certain that the most important moments are shown, or staged, not summarized or told secondhand. Second, you can make certain that you’re portraying a world and characters who are unbalanced, in fact, suffering because their lives have been upset and these characters are profoundly changed and struggling to restore order.
Monday, August 04, 2008
The morning sky is mostly blue and the temperatures are supposed to soar into the 90s today and tomorrow. I was at the Willamette Writers Conference on and off over the weekend (the off part was because I’m still spending a fair amount of time in bed and it’s hard for me to be on my feet and last week I also had the flu) but it looked to be a big success. Yesterday I gave a talk on pacing and in the audience a tiny 94-year-old woman pushing a walker announced she had signed with an agent (she's written a historical novel). I also met another fabulously talented writer and artist who signed with an agent and is on her way to getting a cookbook published. This particular conference has a fairly high rate of success as in writers landing book deals and agents. I can’t speak to the screenwriting side of the conference because I just don’t know if deals are falling into place.
However, on Friday afternoon I was in the bar of the Sheraton with Hallie Ephron, Elizabeth Lyon and Christina Katz and we were talking about the business and what comes next in our careers. One of my friends joined us—she has written a terrific mystery that is set at the
So then Hallie piped in that she doesn’t think that conferences are good for pitching to agents and editors. So I asked how writers are supposed to break through and Hallie mentioned that she believes that a beautifully-written query letter will push your foot in the door. Years ago I interviewed Betsy Lerner (The Forest for the Trees) and this was also her main advice for writers. But the times they are a-changing, and most writers don’t have Ephron for a last name or Hallie’s contacts and most editors, agents, and editorial assistants just don’t have enough time to read all the queries that pile up in their office. I happen to believe that trying to meet people in the biz at conferences is still your best bet at breaking in—and it will also let you know if your pitch or novel concept has holes in it.
At the conference my Bullies, Bastards & Bitches was on sale and I also had donated three copies to the conference’s silent auction. And someone stole a copy—so I guess that’s flattering although I’d classify the thief as one of the types of my book title. Also while at the conference I talked with Jeff Baker the book editor of The Oregonian about the book—he had emailed me on Friday when I wasn’t home. A story will be appearing in the paper’s A & E section on Friday, August 8. On Tuesday, August 11, I’ll be at Powells on
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