The Writing Life Too

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.