Category — On Writing

One of the biggest challenges for me when I began writing fiction was getting comfortable with the notion of putting my characters in really awkward situations, of having bad things happen to them, of having them do bad things to others. (Readers of my work know I’ve overcome this little obstacle, to say the least.)

As a writer, you need to create tension in your stories, which means creating conflict. And this means showing us the not-so-honorable sides of human beings. And this doesn’t mean your characters have to be terrible people — it means only that they need to show us their secret dark sides. And they need to surprise us.

Write about your — or your character’s — dark side. This can be a secret wish, a family secret, a forbidden relationship — anything that might motivate your character either to act out or to hide.

Because most of us writers are writing around our day jobs, childcare, housework, yard work, volunteering, and everything else, this week I’m offering these Quickies, which means you have no excuse not to write this week!

These writing exercises can be done in five minutes or fewer — perfect for the busy writer. Enjoy!

- Write about burning dinner.

- Describe your neighbor’s dog.

- Write about a really bad first date.

- Describe the way your house looked on moving day.

- Write about coffee.

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — for the laws of motion as well as for characters. Without getting into physics here, let’s look at this in terms of character, i.e., the idea that from a writerly perspective, this means conflict — and this is where the fun begins.

Take two characters and put them into a situation in which they do not agree (this can be anything from where to have dinner to whether or not to have children). Then write. You can write this as dialogue, from one character’s POV, or from both –  the only condition is that neither character gives in.

It was a couple of years ago that I first saw an Espresso Book Machine (EBM) at work, at Village Books in Bellingham, Washington. It was impressive to see an entire book printed and bound in less than ten minutes — and even more impressive than the technology is the print-on-demand aspect itself: Books are made to order, which means no print overruns, which means no waste, which means more trees get to live.

Formerly used mainly for self-publishing, the EBMs are showing signs of going more mainstream. HarperCollins recently announced that it plans to make about 5,000 trade paperback backlist available for printing via EBM — and On Demand Books (the company behind the EBM) has also just announced that it plans to register with Google so that all EBM titles will become available through the Google Books website.

I caught a firsthand glimpse of the mainstreaming of the EBM on my recent book tour, when Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, printed up copies of Forgetting English rather than ordering the books and having them shipped. A couple of readers got to see their books being printed, which was fun — and the quality was amazing. The book cover was matte rather than glossy, and the pages were thick, the print crisp, and the binding strong. And I got a kick out of seeing a new and different version of Forgetting English, made to order.

The Espresso Book Machine at Northshire is located in a little nook near the front of the store, close to the cash registers.  Northshire also has its own imprint, Shires Press, which offers a variety of packages for authors who want to self-publish their books — a very smart idea and likely one of the many reasons this bookstore is celebrating its 35th birthday and going strong.

And Northshire is far from the only indie bookstore to have an EBM: Check out this list of EBM locations, which comprises indie bookstores, university bookstores, and libraries all over the world, including in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, China, the Philippines, Australia, and England. If there’s an EBM located anywhere near you, I recommend checking it out (and printing up a book!); it’s a fascinating machine that may very well play a very large role in the way publishing looks in the future.

When writing fiction, the fun part is creating characters who can behave badly (at least, I find this fun). In real life, most of us are all-too-aware of the consequences of what we say and do; we’re generally careful and law-abiding. But sometimes, wouldn’t it be a lot more interesting not to be?

Write about a character who does something without thinking of the consequences. It needn’t be too outrageous, but it should be something this character wouldn’t normally do, whether it’s playing hooky from work or having an affair. Include the moment he/she makes the decision to go forward as well as the consequences of his/her actions.

One of the things that often gets neglected in scenes is a sense of place. This week’s prompt is more of a revision, designed to infuse your work with a stronger sense of setting.

Take a scene from your writing project that lacks a sense of the physical. Add details, including where the scene takes place; how it looks, feels, smells, sounds; what the lighting conditions are; and what the weather is. Make sure that the setting you create reflects the mood and tone of the scene itself.

Detours are on my mind today, after an exhilarating ten days on the road with my friend and fellow author Wendy Call as part of our joint book tour stretching from the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast to the Midwest. Several of our events took us through hurricane-damaged Vermont, where we encountered closed roads, detours, and ravaged homes and businesses. For us, the detours were minor inconveniences; for those living in these flooded towns, the detours are life-changing.

So with good thoughts and wishes for those still recovering in Vermont, here is this week’s writing exercise:

Write about a detour, large or small.

Often what gets neglected in a scene — at least, in my first drafts it does — is a sense of where the characters are physically. Yet this is so important: These details tell us so much about the characters’ personalities, their relationships to others in the scene, how they feel about what is happening.

Take a scene you’re working on, and think like a stage director. Note where each character is, whether he or she is standing, sitting, pacing. Get these characters in their places — wherever they need to be to reveal what’s happening in the scene, how they feel about it, and where they’re headed from here.

This week, I’m delighted to feature a guest prompt by the very talented David Hubbard, who is one of those rare writers who excels at both poetry and prose.

David is a writer/poet living in Carlsbad, California, about thirty-five miles north of San Diego, where he works as an environmental law attorney. He published poetry in the late 1990s, stopped writing for about fifteen years to pursue a law career, and recently started up again. Last year, he had a story published in the May issue of Marginalia and also has a poem forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine.

When David recently told me about an inspiring writing exercise he did, which resulted not only in solving a writing issue but also led to the publication of a new poem (see below), I invited him to do this guest prompt. It’s a fabulous exercise for all writers, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Best of all, you’ll find a link to the published poem that grew out of it. Enjoy:

When I write a short story, I usually have a pretty good idea how to move the narrative from point A to point Z.  There aren’t many scenes or episodes to keep track of and I don’t often get stuck.  But now I’m writing a novel about the travels and trials of a young American photographer.  There are a lot more things to juggle, technically speaking, and I recently ran into a problem that seemed intractable.  I was trying to write an important scene that involves a house fire in New Orleans, and I couldn’t get the pieces to fit together. No matter what angle I attempted, I couldn’t make it right.  I wasn’t blocked – I had plenty of words and ideas – I just couldn’t figure out how to make the movie in my head play out on the page.

So I did something to trick myself out of the rut.   

Rather than beat my head to a pulp, I decided to alter the format by which I was attempting to write the scene in question.  I stopped attacking it as prose and attacked it as a poem instead.  The concision required of a good poem forced me to tease out the essentials of the scene and select the absolute best words to create the images and carry the story.  In addition, the poetic form freed me of the kind of long descriptive passages that make a novel feel like – well – a novel.  I also didn’t have to worry about dialogue. 

When the poem was finished, I liked it well enough to send it out to some literary journals, one of which picked it up for publication.  More important, however, it wiped the fog from my eyes and brain and I could sense for the first time how to render the scene in prose, thus allowing the novel to move forward (toward the next frustrating ditch, no doubt).

So the prompt is this:  Take one of your incomplete stories (everybody’s got at least five) or your unfinished novel and locate the scene where the narrative ran off the rails – that point where you gave up and shoved the whole mess into the desk drawer or trash can.  Now approach that scene not as a prose problem but as a poetry problem.  Or try a third format, like pure dialogue, as if you were writing a play instead of a novel or short story.  I think you’ll find that this switch in writing formats will yank you out of the loop that was causing you to drink too much.

A million thanks to David for sharing his insights and this prompt — and  here is a link to David’s poem, “Arriving Home Late One Night,” published by Autumn Sky Poetry this past summer.

The changing of seasons is often something that happens in the background of a story — but every character, fictional or real, has thoughts and feelings associated with the seasons, whether it’s a love of summer or getting depressed during the winter.

With summer ending, have a look at the main character in your work-in-progress. Even if your project is set in a different season, write a scene that takes place at the end of summer (you can always use this for backstory, or just for deeper insight into your character). Write about what the end of the summer season means for this character — going back to school for him/her, or for the kids; the loss of something; the arrival of something, etc. What will come with this change — and how does your character react to it?

As a fiction writer with a journalism background, I’ve always thought of myself as a keen observer. (Don’t we all?) Then, one recent evening, my illusion was shattered when I was sitting with several people in a park near a duck pond. We were all watching the ducks as well as the two little kids standing near the edge — then we looked up to see three young men passing by. The men were walking off the designated path, which is probably what got our attention — and moments later, my husband said, “I wonder what was up with the gun?”

And I said, “What gun?”

My husband, who will say we’re out of peanut butter while staring into a pantry with three jars of it right in front of him,  was very pleased to have caught something I’d missed. And his eyes weren’t deceiving him this time; someone else had seen exactly what he had: One of the young men who’d passed by wore a large handgun on a holster, right out in the open.

And all I remembered was that one of the guys wore a green T-shirt.

Soon after this, I picked up a fascinating book called The Invisible Gorilla, which is excellent reading, especially for all of us who think we’re so observant. Written by two cognitive psychologists, it shows us how little we actually see and how limited our focus can be — and they have plenty of data to back it up. If you haven’t read the book, go first to the videos on their web site to check out your own powers of observation and memory. Even after reading the book, I still bombed on a few of these little tests (they’re challenging, really — see for yourself!).

I like the point that the book makes — that we’re not all perfect. This is why we shouldn’t talk on our cell phones when we drive, and why we need to be extra careful about being so sure of ourselves — say, as jury members at a trial. And as a writer, what I got out of this more than anything is the notion of how much I miss when my eyes aren’t wide open. I probably miss a lot even when they are, but all this inspired me to be even more aware of the world around me…as all of us writers should be.

Enjoy … and I’d love to hear what you think about those tests!

This writing exercise comes from a recent evening on which my husband found a box of old photos — from high school, college, grad school — and because they were prints (yes, very old),  he scanned a bunch of them so that we could save them digitally and send them to friends, and alternately mourn our lost youth and laugh over those bad hair days.

Anyway…that was fun. And it reminded me of how wonderful old photos are for our writing lives as well. So here is today’s prompt:

Pick an old photo out of a box or an album (yes, this means a photo so old it’s from the pre-digital camera days). (Note: If you are so young as not to remember pre-digital camera days, simply pick the oldest photo you can find on your smartphone or laptop or iPad or whatever.)

Next, write about three things: 1) write about what you were doing that day/night the photo was taken; and 2) write about that time in your life and where you thought you were headed next; and 3) write about where you are now and how you feel about looking back on that time (nostalgic, sad, happy, etc.).

Enjoy.

I loved talking about character in one of my afternoon workshops at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and this prompt is inspired by that afternoon. There really is never too much you can know about your characters (whether in fiction or memoir) — and while there is a limit to what you can put on the page, don’t let this stop you from exploring all angles as part of your writing process.

So here are a few character-related prompts for the week:

- Write about your character’s favorite piece of jewelry (note: it could be something he/she owns, or something he/she covets).

- Write about your character’s biggest disappointment.

- Write about your character’s secret wish — the one he/she hasn’t shared with anyone, ever.

While this post touches on some of the points from Book Promo 101: The bookstore reading, I wanted to devote a little extra time to the art of reading aloud, especially given the wonderful tips I received recently from Jack Straw Productions and Elizabeth Austen.

As part of the preparation for our joint book tour, Wendy Call and I visited Seattle’s Jack Straw Productions, the Northwest’s only non-profit multidisciplinary audio arts center, to record excerpts from our books.

 Producer Moe Provencher had wonderful advice for me as I stumbled through a practice reading — an excerpt I’d never rehearsed until that afternoon — and I found her tips  as relevant and useful for live readings as they are for audio recordings:

• Mark up the text from which you’re reading so that you’ll know when to pause, what to emphasize, etc.
• Develop a facial expression that reflects a character’s voice and/or mood; when you use your face to express something, this mood and tone will come through in your voice.
• Read far more slowly than you think you need to — to the point at which you feel ridiculous — and this will likely be the perfect pace.
• Practice. Aloud. Many times.
• Breathe.

The good news for Seattle-area writers is that Jack Straw offers a Writers Program (Wendy was a 2008 Jack Straw Writer) in which writers spend several months developing a project while learning tips for readings, doing interviews, and more.

I learned a few more invaluable tips when, the week after the recording, I attended Elizabeth Austen‘s workshop at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference: “Beyond the Page: Poems Aloud, Poems Alive” (a session I recommend all prose writers take as well). Elizabeth, with her background in theater, has a gift for the spoken word, and she reminded us first and foremost that language is physical, that we need to remember this when we read aloud, and to feel every word. She offered a few examples — words such as awe, hiss, tip, trapeze — and in speaking them we could hear and appreciate their pitch and length, their sharpness or languidness. (Give it a try, right now. It’s pretty cool.) Elizabeth gave us tips on everything from rehearsing (avoid mirrors or recordings; ask a friend to listen and offer feedback instead) to what to wear to a reading (whatever makes you feel comfortable and confident; also, avoid high heels, and rehearse in the shoes you’ll be wearing at the event).

Among Elizabeth’s wisest tips was this: “The performance requires you, but it’s not about you.” As readers, she explains, we are conduits for getting the words out into the room and to the audience. I love this eye-opening tip, not only because it takes the edge off the self-consciousness most of us feel when we read, but because it reminds us that our words need to speak for themselves — that, now that we’ve written them, it’s time to let them shine on their own.

Sometimes random writing can yield the most wonderful results. So let’s be a little random today.

Go to a bookshelf, run your fingers along the spines, and pick one. Open it to a random page. Run your fingers along the page, stopping 5 times and writing down the words you land on. (If it’s a word such as “the” or “and,” use the previous word instead.)

Write for 5 minutes on each of these random words, and see what sort of magic happens.