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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

Aug 9

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Naming your fear is the first step to conquering it

Different cultures throughout time have taught us that naming things gives us power over them.  At the recent Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference, New York Times best-selling author, Bob Mayer, spoke on the last day about fear. He started his talk with a quote from Stephen King:

“I’m convinced fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

I’ve taken Mayer’s Write It Forward online class and the first thing he does is have us name our fear. I couldn’t do it. For years, I’ve worked hard on conquering my fears and felt as if I’d pretty much conquered them all (even my extreme fear of snakes). I know all about the concept of “going fearward” and often recommend it to my clients. So when Mayer suggested I probably hadn’t been faced with my current fear yet, I thought, “Uh, huh. Right.”

But there was something wrong in my writing life. I’d been working on my next book and procrastinating terribly but not understanding why. I thought maybe my subconscious was trying to work something out with the plot. But that wasn’t it. Read more

Aug 8

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What place does weather have in your writing?

You’ve probably heard this piece of advice from writer Elmore Leonard: Don’t start your novel by describing the weather. In his 10 rules of writing, Leonard advised against writing about the weather if it’s only used to create atmosphere and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather.

While this may be true, weather has a place in literature.

Weather can amplify the emotion of a scene. What if it was a grey, drizzly day when your character realized she would never be a mother? Maybe the raindrops trickling down her window were a metaphor for tears and despair.

Or maybe your character realized his marriage was over the same day an ice storm in his town sent cars crashing and people slipping on black ice.

Consider your own writing and see how you could use the weather to deepen a scene or heighten tension.

Aug 5

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Use word-gathering to become a better writer

Writing a poem or a paragraph is like solving a puzzle. I seek the perfect word not just for its meaning but also for sound and rhythm. In the process, I stumble upon other words that draw my attention and, before I know it, I’m off on an adventure. Words are like gems, sparkly and seductive in their power.

Priscilla Long, in her book, The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, says she knows writers who have worked hard for years that do “pretty good work” but have never made the transition to great writing. The reason? Often, these writers—though hard workers—approach language passively. They only use words they grew up with or use in everyday language. Long doesn’t mean that we should suddenly spout elongated Latinate words but that we should become word gatherers, seeking out words that call to us with their sound, texture, rhythm, or meaning. Read more

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