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Posts from the ‘Craft’ Category

Aug 29

Getting inside your character’s mind

Recently, I read Jacki Lyden’s memoir again, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba: A Memoir. I don’t normally read memoirs more than once. But I wanted to re-experience her word riffs and stream of consciousness writing to see if I could find a way to use these tools to go deeper into the minds of my own characters.

Lyden tells the story of growing up and living with a mentally ill mother. Her parents divorced when she was young and, after her mother marries a doctor who turns out to be controlling and abusive, she begins to speak to God and believe that she is the Queen of Sheba.

The author writes the lines below in response to a letter from her mother, who says that she was really never mentally ill, and that her behavior was the result of the prescription drugs her doctor-husband gave her. Lyden writes:

“Never crazy. It never happened to you. Ant Trap Zap! It never happened to me. We’ll throw out those old pages and get some new ones at the K Mart. There is a life I’d like you to try, size six. We can always take it back if it doesn’t fit. You will be a housewife heroine, pushed into adversity by a demanding doctor-husband and prescription drugs, and I will be free forever from the taint of your insanity. Prescription drugs, I tell my friends confidently. Misdiagnosis. Miss Diagnosis. Clodhopper attendants, Nurse Ratched on the case. Dolores naked and chained in a pit. Lions and tigers and bears.” Read more

Aug 25

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Writing to a positive resolution

“Listen, Paula. I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.”

Thus begins Isabel Allende’s heartrending story of the death of her daughter, Paula, who suffered a seizure and fell into an irreversible coma when she was 26 years old.

Hoping that someday her daughter will be able to read her words, Allende began writing as Paula lay in a Madrid hospital. The author deftly weaves the story of her family history, her upbringing, and the history of her country, Chile, with the story of her daughter’s illness. Though Paula: A Memoir is a tragic story of the loss of her child, Allende turns it into a beautiful tribute full of lyrical, mystical, and sometimes humorous writing. Though we suffer with her over her child’s fate, and feel her pain, she eventually leads us to a place of transcendence.

Instead of ending her book with an artificial, tacked-on “happy ending” or a moralistic treatise on “what she learned” from her journey, Allende begins long before the end of the book to show us her turns. Read more

Aug 16

Weather as a character in “Breaking Clean”

Weather may seem mundane, but crafted with finesse, weather becomes an antagonistic force and a “character” to be reckoned with in the memoir, Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt.

Blunt wrote about living in a remote area of Montana and of being separated from her true self. Vivid sensory descriptions and scenes of weather illustrate the natural elements that contributed to Blunt’s isolation and search for her identity.

Blunt and her family lived at the mercy of blowing snow, frigid temperatures, and driving rain that turned roads into impassable muddy troughs. Her description of constant wind is eerie and violent:

“It whipped down out of Canada in gusts and gales unhampered by mountains or trees. Wind blew for days on end, a relentless pushing at your back, a constant moan we listened around and shouted over without really hearing.” Read more

Aug 15

Buck, the movie: how your characters reflect you

Last night I saw the documentary Buck about horse whisperer Buck Brannaman. This movie is not just for horse lovers. It’s a touching story of hope and humanity—how one man overcame the pain and horrors of his early childhood and turned that experience, with the help of loving foster parents, into helping horses and their owners. Instead of repeating the cycle of abuse his father perpetrated on him, Buck found a way to transmute that pain into love, understanding, patience, and compassion.

Buck is a modern-day cowboy version of Gandhi.

The film shows Buck at work—his 40 weeks on the road each year traveling from town to town putting on horse clinics for the locals, showing them how to communicate with and handle their horses. The film shows us where Buck comes from—his harsh early years where he developed the survival skills and insights that eventually set his personal philosophy. We also get to see him working on the set of the movie the Horse Whisperer with Robert Redford.

What does this story have to do with writing? As writers, we’re constantly on the lookout for good characterization, setting, dialogue, etc. This movie has it all—but there was something else I learned about being a writer. Read more

Aug 12

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What is your writing’s ripple effect?

As a writer, think about the impact you have. Your words have the power to do more than entertain. Literature is how people make sense of the world. Writers have a tremendous power to change and even save people through stories.

Author Donna Jo Napoli, who spoke at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators summer conference August 5-8, said she was once asked, “Why do you take a perfectly good book and put something awful in it?”

The question spurred Napoli to think more about why she writes what she does and its ripple effect.

Read more

Aug 11

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The shape of a scene: endings

Each scene in your novel has a shape. The beginning is the set up. The middle is the rise of action with alternating beats. And then there’s the end of the scene which should have a little, or sometimes big, rise in tension.

Best-selling fantasy and sci-fi author, Nancy Kress, says that tension comes from two things pulling in opposite directions. The tension at the end of a scene could be something as small as a character’s thoughts conflicting with their actions. Or something as large as good vs. evil locked in immortal combat.

Kress says a rise in tension can be effected in several ways. Two specific ways are as follows: Read more

Aug 10

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Create memorable characters instead of cardboard cutouts

As writers, we don’t want characters who are empty shells, cardboard cutouts. As young adult author Libba Bray says, “You don’t want characters to be blank slates filled in by the reader.”

Author of Beauty Queensand Going Bovine to name a few, Bray spoke at the 40th annual Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Aug. 5-8.

It’s hard to create a plot with interesting twists if your characters are boring and don’t react in interesting ways, she said. So how do you create compelling characters? Try these techniques: Read more

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