Wow, 2009 Already!

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2009     Okay, I know that I sound like an old fuddie duddie when I say, “Oh my, where did the time go? Another year come and gone!” Well, dangit, that’s exactly how I feel, and I just cannot believe that another year’s rolling ’round.

     And what a historic year it was. New leaders. World changes. So, the eternal question. How did things change in your world? Did you accomplish your goals this year? Are you afraid to look?

     I didn’t finish my next novel, but I did get far in it, which was my stated goal this year. It sure would have been nice to finish it, though. *Sigh.* And I’m planning on revamping a past work that’s garnering some interest, so there’s promising work ahead.

     Here’s to wishing you and yours a great 2009. Much happiness and many blessings.

Everyone’s a Critic

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A+     But not everyone does it well. There are angry critics who reject everything they see. There are unhelpful critics who expound without explanation. There are sunshiny, happy critics who see toil behind every work and inevitably praise every effort. Finally, there are objective, helpful critics who judge a work systematically and with professionalism.

     I’m in a crit group that’s working on our style of critique, and one member helpfully suggested author Victory Crayne’s detailed method for critiquing fiction, found here. I liked its itemized, blow-by-blow approach to offering truly helpful critiques. Nicely done and worth a look!

Ages & Illos

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Julie Bowe     I’ve been posting for several days now on the speakers at SCBWI-WI’s fall retreat. The two I’ll highlight today were informative and funny, and their ideas were excellent.

     Author Julie Bowe started her session with prompts to get us thinking back to our childhood selves. We’re talking thoughts such as, “It makes me so mad when … ” or “I love it when … ,” and we were to complete the sentence as if we were our 3rd-to-5th grade selves. That was a fun little mental vacation back to my elementary-school playground (I can still remember the concrete tubes we climbed on.). The idea was to mentally return to the age of your protagonist, an absolute necessity if your writing is to resonate with that group of readers. Julie took us through fantastic research highlighting the physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development of older elementary-school kids. Armed with this knowlegdge, authors can have their protagonists meet and resolve their own problems within their ability and intellectual capability.

Henry Cole     Illustrator Henry Cole took us from rough sketches to final art on several of his books. His overhead projections showed how illustrations progress, how much they can change, and how very much emotion they evoke. We remember the art of our favorite picture books, and great art stays with us forever.

     Well, great books in their totality stay with us forever, and no doubt kids who’ve enjoyed Julie’s and Henry’s works would count their books among them.

Economy of Language

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Stacy Cantor    The “economy of language” is how one guest at the retreat summed up children’s picture books. Associate Editor Stacy Cantor of Walker Books for Young Readers, shown right, made us all think about just how tightly we must write for this kind of book. She suggests 300 – 1,000 words. She cited Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are at 338 words.

     As someone who’s used to writing news, I’m familiar with the techniques of slashing and burning copy. Stacy’s suggestions fit with news as much as picture books, but let’s focus on the latter here.

     She suggests authors introduce the characters and conflict early in the story, preferably on page one. Each sentence should progress the story, and repetition should be employed only if truly necessary. Lastly, keep in mind the mentality of the child and the creative license of the illustrator, who will tell half the story visually.

     Stacy showed an original manuscript of a picture book and the subsequent markings and revisions made before publication. That little gem was wonderfully illustrative; less is more.

A Story Primer

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Linda Sue Park     Pull out your English grammar book because it’s time to review story structure. Yay, yippie, I eat this stuff up! 🙂 Here we go…

     Speaking at the SCBWI-WI fall retreal, Newbery Award winner Linda Sue Park admits that she doesn’t really know her writing process. She says she reads so much that plot, for her, is innate; automatic. And she’s read enough and written enough to know good work when she sees it.

     So first, a bit on structure or, as Linda puts it, how to tell the story. There’s macro-structure, that is, the method used to tell the story; through letters (think C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters), poetry, etc. Then there’s micro-structure, that is, point of view, first or third person, past or present tense, etc. Linda makes a strong case against first person present (I run away) because it’s meant to showcase repetitive or recurring action, whereas third person is the traditional method of storytelling and one she calls the hallmark of good writing.

     Next, Linda gave great advice on voice. She finds it helpful to think of her narrator as a person instead of a disembodied voice with a motive to tell the story. That doesn’t mean the narrator must be reliable nor serious; (s)he could be comical or ironic. Linda nails this down before starting.

     Lastly, Linda spoke of scenes, defined as progress toward the quest or impediments blocking the way. Writing them in a sentence helps narrow them. Revisions are your friend.

     Honestly, I could have listened to her talk about story structure and writing for hours. Her writing is clear evidence that she knows her craft.

Rules of Writing Fantasy

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Jeff Miracola, Holly Black, Silvia Acevedo     It had been a really long time since I’d seen Holly Black, so it was great to see her again at the SCBWI-WI fall retreat this weekend. You all know of her, through her Spiderwick and Faerie Tales series or her other works. She’s hilarious and very friendly and was a big hit at the event.

     Holly presented her ten rules of writing fantasy. I won’t give them all here (let her reveal them to the world as she wishes), but I will point out one rule which really spoke to me: Fantasy needs to be rooted in a sense of place. To further explain, she continues, your world has to be real enough so as to allow a person to “walk” into it. She recommends knowing your world so thoroughly that you can detail a great deal more of it than what you necessarily include in your story. For example, what is the primary form of communication, transportation, business, etc, in your imaginary world? Furthermore, she emphasizes that both the fantastical and the real must be described equally to distribute their weight throughout the book.

     Holly also gave some funny anecdotes about her childhood. Apparently, her mother was quite convinced of the supernatural. Her mother’s childhood stories of playing in the attic with ghosts naturally made Holly a wee bit tense, especially living in the “creepy” house that they inhabited. The dangling branches of a large tree regularly scraped against her bedroom window, so, whenever forced to pass said tree, Holly would flat-out sprint past them. She confessed to her mother her fear that the trees would reach down and snatch her. “Don’t worry,” her mother replied. “That probably won’t happen.” Nice.

     Pictured here are my husband Jeff, Holly, and me. It was a good time.

Brevity

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     Remember that novel you read awhile back — the one with three, four, five (seemingly endless) pages describing a room/field/plaza/whatever? Guh. Yeah, you remember. That may have been the point where you put the thing down. Maybe you never picked it back up.

     That is exactly what can’t happen for the writer, and it was a danger mentioned several times at the retreat I spoke of in my last post. We’re talking about children’s books here. You know, shorter attention spans. Yes, adults too.

     So the warning was put out by people in the know; people like Newbery Award winner Linda Sue Park, who spoke so well about story structure and style that she will merit her own post. That’s coming, but for descriptions and internal monologues, she says she tends to limit herself to a few paragraphs because any more kills the action (progress) in the scene.

     Author and editor Ann Angel compared description to an actor on stage suspending the scene to address the audience directly, pulling their attention right out of the story.

     No doubt description has its place. How else would a reader understand the author’s world? The description’s got to have relevance, though, and can’t drag on forever. As I don’t wish this post to drag forever, I’ll end here. More on the retreat soon.

Deep Fried Writin’

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Fair     Is it wrong to sneak in a line or two — maybe even a whole paragraph — of writing while your kids are in a long line for the roller coaster? I hope not, because that’s exactly what I did. In fact, I’m sure it’s awesome, so I’m blogging on it.

     See, every year, my family spends the first day of the Wisconsin State Fair’s 11-day run at the Midway. Riding rides. All day long. Until we drop. Wellllll, let me be more specific so you don’t get the wrong idea. The kids go on the rides. I watch over them and occasionally feed them and regularly take pictures. Then the other days of the fair are devoted to all the other things that make the WSF the great event that it is.

     But this year, at the Midway, I snuck in some writing as well. I know, you’re thinking, “How can you write when you’re at such a place and your kids expect to see you waving at them?” Well, there were a few spare moments, when they were in lines or were inside closed-off rides (think Haunted House) where I could sneak in a few minutes of writing. So out came my teeny tiny purse notebook and in went, well, whatever I could spit out in a moment’s notice.

     We know some truly great writers suggest using every moment to one’s advantage. I spent 99 percent of my moments that day enjoying a great day with my family, but I also got a few precious moments with pen to paper, and a lot of character study done as well.

A Fun Exercise

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     Once in a while, someone in your sphere offers an interesting glimpse into their or your own psyche through some sort of exercise. Be it Rorschach’s ink blots or some open-ended question, these exercises can sometimes offer you moments to slow down and really ponder an issue.

     Such is the case with the 123 Meme exercise that blogger Michele posts at http://writingthecyberhighway.blogspot.com. It’s simple. The rules are:

     1) Pick up the book nearest you
     2) Open to page 123
     3) Find the 5th sentence
     4) Post the following 3 sentences
     5) Tag five others (I skipped this one. I don’t tag people.)

     The book nearest me at the time was The New Nation by Joy Hakim. It’s the fourth book in the series A History of US, which is part of my eldest daughter’s course on American history. It is an excellent series, by the way; thoroughly researched and written just for the child’s ability. Page 123 speaks of Sequoyah’s attempts to understand written language and create just such a working system for the Cherokee nation, in the hopes of preserving their history and knowledge, as well as learn to speak from a distance, through the use of correspondence.

     Here are the sentences following the fifth: “A white man would take words, turn them into shapes, and scratch them on a slate or draw them on a piece of paper. Then another man could look at those shapes and say the first man’s words. Was it magic?”

     It took Sequoyah more than a decade to succeed in creating a writing system for the Cherokee language. What an incredibly lofty goal, to create “talking leaves,” yet what an amazing success to have a written language, something we perhaps don’t often consider amazing.

     May we all cherish the gift — in every language.

Tweaking… and tweaking… and tweaking…

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     It’s just not right. You think you’re done with a story. You’re proud. You’ve accomplished something. Then you go back to bask in your achievement.

     Only, you realize it needs something.

     So you tweak.

     Then you move a paragraph.

     Then you change the storyline.

     Next thing you know, you’re in a full re-write.

     I must admit, this is rather foreign territory to me. In news, the explanatory copy and sound bites/quotes have a general sensical order, to be expressed clearly and in few words. Even if I had hour after hour to rewrite, which I don’t, the order of events doesn’t change drastically. What happened, happened in a certain way. I can change how I approach or back into the story, but getting too creative in the mere minutes that I have to tell a story can hamper understanding.

     Writing fiction, though, isn’t at all like that. The story’s yours, obviously, so you can order events however you’d like.

     And you do.

     Ad nauseum.

     I’m finding that when I have no deadline, I keep going back and “tweaking” a story, and I wonder if I’ll ever be happy with it.

     Do you walk away? Do you say “good enough is good enough?” Or do you keep tweaking because you have no deadline? In the end, the goal is the best piece of writing you are capable of producing. The problem is, that line keeps moving as your writing experience evolves.