The Fairytale of Writing

Once Upon a Time… no, this isn’t about writing fairytales. As a child I loved fairytales, so by natural extension when Once Upon a Time aired, I was right in front of my TV, popcorn in hand.

In a recent episode (The Miller’s Daughter) one of the main characters, Mary Margaret, aka Snow White, was handed a life-altering decision. That got me to wondering whether, my black moments are truly as dark as they should be. Am I putting enough at stake? Maybe not.

All her life, Snow has battled against dark magic by doing the right thing. She holds tight to goodness. That’s what her mother taught her. That’s her core.

Her defeats teach her that good doesn’t always triumph. As a child, she had the opportunity to save her mother’s life, but to do so she’d have to choose someone else to die in her mother’s place. She couldn’t do it and her mother died.

Now the black moment. Snow is forced to make a decision that goes completely against her being. In “The Miller’s Daughter,” Snow’s choices are to either give Regina and Cora (the truly bad guys) Rumplestiltskin’s dagger, thus giving them complete magic power and saving her childhood nurse, Johanna. Or she can retain the dagger, let Rumplestiltskin die (who has turned into sort of a good guy, and she’s just found out he’s the other grandfather of Snow’s grandson), which will keep the people of Storybrook safe.

Snow ends up giving Regina and Cora the dagger in exchange for Johanna. Their reunion is short-lived when Regina murders Johanna anyway.

Each time Snow has done the right and good thing, it has cost her dearly. With the death of her childhood nurse, she tells Prince Charming she doesn’t care about justice anymore. Wow! This is our hero, Snow White.

If you don’t watch “Once Upon a Time,” it’s well worth the hour. It is so valuable that I’m thinking of counting that time as a writing class and taking my cable bill off my taxes. Um, maybe not.

Here’s the trick (and it sounds easier than it is):

• Root the current crisis in with the hero’s past.

Thus making the crisis more personal and more rooted in their core.

• Give the character two choices, neither of which is good.

The consequences of the two choices need to be really bad and worse.

• Then force your character to pick one.

They have to make the choice or something even worse will happen.

In stories, as in life it’s all in the choices. You have to make your characters—all of them—the products of their choices. It’s more work, but your stories will shine for it and be memorable. The Miller’s Daughter is one I’m going to use as a template. If you’d like to read the whole synopsis, go to http://beta.abc.go.com/shows/once-upon-a-time/episode-guide/once-upon-a-time-episode-216-the-millers-daughter

How do you make your characters memorable?

How do you make your black moments dark enough?

 

Realer than Real

I once helped a friend commit identity fraud on a foreign government. Now, if you knew me at all you’d think I was lying about that. I’m a rule follower, a former lawyer for heaven’s sake. But somewhere in the depths of some small South East Asian country’s immigration files there is evidence that, when push came to shove, when I was tired and hot and grumpy I most definitely did not follow the rules.

Now, we didn’t mean to do it. My friend Bailey* is a lawyer and a rule follower too. But when we got off the plane and saw that we’d have to get our visas before we made our way to baggage claim we were stumped. I had an envelope full of passport photos in my carry-on, but her photos were in her checked luggage, out of reach and unavailable. We did the only thing we could think to do. In a country still bearing the scars of rule by a military junta, where, weeks later a taxi driver would ask us if we wanted to go to the genocide museum or the torture museum (answer: NEITHER thanks), I gave Bailey one of my photos and we got in line.

Now, Bailey and I really don’t look much alike. We’re fair-skinned and have grey-streaked brown hair but that’s where the resemblance ends. She’s got brown eyes, mine are blue. Our faces are entirely different shapes. And yet we stood in line and watched a row of five officials, one after the other, look at my visa application and pass it on, then look at hers, and pass it on. Applications with different names, different passports, but the same photo attached. We were standing right there. They looked at us, and looked at the photos, and looked at our passports, and just kept passing those applications down the line until they were back in our grubby, guilty hands. And then we collected our luggage and left the airport and vowed not to speak of it again until we’d left the country.

Myanmar was not the country we entered illegally. But isn’t it pretty?

So, what lessons did I learn from this little experience? (1) When in doubt, carry on. (2) Cross-racial identifications really are as difficult and unreliable as researchers claim. (Shorter: we really all look the same to them. “We” and “them” being any different racial or ethnic groups.) (3) That just because something may have happened in real life doesn’t mean it would fly in fiction. I write romantic suspense and I could never expect to write a scene like this and get away with it. Nobody would believe that border officials would be that lax.

What about you, have you ever had an experience where you think: “God, I wish a character could get past this as easily as I just did” but know that no one would think it was realistic? Why does fiction have to be more believable than real life?

*Name changed to protect at least one of the guilty parties. Oh god. We are both so guilty. I still can’t believe we did this.

 

Anticipation

Carly Simon’s song, “Anticipation,” was featured in a ketchup commercial in the ’70s. Remember that? The ketchup flowed oh so slowly, but it was totally worth waiting for. I can still remember her sultry voice over singing “Anticipation” while the actor on the commercial waited with watering mouth for the ketchup to finally reach his hamburger.

This past summer, I attended Jay Asher’s talk about Anticipation at the SCBWI international conference. His basic point was that as we writers create tension within our stories, anticipation is a great way to heighten that tension. After all, if a scary monster just shows up and says “boo,” it’s not nearly as scary as if the character hears a noise, goes to investigate, finds nothing, worries and frets and works herself up for a good scare, and THEN the scary monster shows up.

I love anticipation in novels. It keeps me reading, because I want to find out what is really going on. I want to know if my suspicions are correct, or if the scary thing is something else. (I’m just using scary as an example. Anticipation can apply to happy, joyous, momentous, nervous, and life or death moments as well.)

One way to increase the anticipation of events is to slow down. My first drafts usually barrel straight through without slowing down, so when I revise this is one element I am particularly aware of. Let the scene or chapter unfold gradually and include bits that will build the anticipation. The character might wonder what that noise was. Or worry about what kind of trouble she might in with the headmistress. Or the best friend saw something and is telling the main character about it.

Another device, depending on how you tell the story, could be switching points of view. Some of my favorite authors use multiple points of view in succession, and just at the cliffhanger moment, a chapter with character A ends and we move on to a chapter told from character B’s point of view, leaving the anticipation of finding out what happens to A still in place. I usually curse the author for torturing me, but I keep reading, of course.

Ways NOT to use anticipation: When you have a scene filled with cryptic images and lots of anticipation, only to have the character awake and realize it was only a dream, the reader will feel cheated. Or if the character is building up in his head a horrible, horrible consequence, and it comes to nothing, again the reader will feel cheated. You can’t just include anticipation for anticipation’s sake. If that ketchup never reaches the hamburger, it doesn’t work.

Anticipation doesn’t always have to be very overt. It can be indicated by a tiny mannerism. For example, you set up early in the novel that character A has a nervous mannerism of twisting her wedding ring around when she’s worried. Then throughout the novel, if she’s twisting her wedding ring, we know she’s worried. That is a tiny indication that we should be anticipating something. All the better if the ring twisting is directly connected to something to do with her marriage, as the symbolism will just strengthen the anticipation. In Harry Potter, his scar burned every time Voldemort was near. Talk about anticipation! The reader knew immediately that a big something was about to take place. And kept reading.

As the holidays approach, we can all remember the anticipation we had as children. It seemed that Christmas took forever to finally arrive. I spent many moments shaking presents and trying to guess what was inside. So much so that my mom put in beans and trinkets and other things just to throw me off track. The anticipation of Christmas morning was almost more enjoyable than the actual moment itself.

Of course, not every child has a happy Christmas. Or birthdays. Sometimes the anticipation is the happy part and the reality is the tragic part. That makes for great stories. This kind of emotional anticipation and the failure of reality to match up is the ultimate tension.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to. . .oh, what was that noise? Why are the dogs barking so frantically? Find out in our next episode!

 

Election Day Tidbits

I’m going to keep today’s blog pretty short. It’s election day and I have lots of election day related activities.

I know the rest of the country is focused on the election, but we writers also observe something else in November, called NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month. If you’ve never participated, basically you commit to writing 50,000 words (a novel) in one month. It’s a tough challenge. The one and only time I actually participated for real, I managed 20,000 words. But that’s okay, because it’s now a finished novel that I’m almost done revising. The magazine Mental Floss has a list of novels that started out as NaNoWriMo projects.

What you may not know about this yearly tradition is that students can do it too. Boise author Amy Cook and I are working with a group of students at North Jr. High in Boise as they accept the challenge. It works a little differently with students, but it is incredibly fun and rewarding to see kids excited to write and willing to spend free time doing it. We are trying to make it even more meaningful by bringing in published authors to talk to them and setting up revision meetings for January and February.

In other news, there are still slots for the Plot Master Class with Arthur A. Levine editor Cheryl Klein on November 17. This isn’t just for children’s authors. Anybody writing a book with a plot will benefit from this workshop. It is simply amazing how much knowledge you’ll cram into your brain in one day.

Okay, now GO VOTE.

 

Pacing: A Primer

I’ve been thinking about pacing a lot lately, as I’m revising my current work in progress, and pacing is always something I completely forget about in the first draft stage. Pacing is a really important element of writing fiction, and one many writers don’t really understand. So I decided to try to break it down.

Pacing to me refers to the speed of the action of the plot. If you think of that standard plot arc we’re all taught in school, the portion that takes the longest is the rising action. Once you reach the climax, the action quickly resolves and ends. That’s a truncated explanation of pacing. Pacing affects each scene as well as the entire plot. Here are some ways pacing can go wrong and what to do about them:

Problem #1: Too much backstory. Backstory is just what it sounds like—things that happened to the characters before the current story begins. Beginning writers notoriously include way too much backstory, which slows down the action of the story you’re trying to tell. Sometimes, though, the backstory is pretty important to understanding where the character is emotionally or physically. The trick is to balance these needs.

• I would venture to say that you ought never to start your story with backstory. Get right into the current story. You can include important backstory bits as necessary.
• Do not stop the action to give a long flashback or piece of information from the past. Backstory works best when woven into the current action.
• Leave out all backstory in the first draft, then see if things make sense to your initial readers. If so, don’t even bother putting any of it in. If first readers don’t get a character’s motivation, for example, and a little backstory will help, then find a way to include it unobtrusively.

Problem #2: Rushing through a scene. This is something I am guilty of, especially in first drafts. If a scene is important enough for the story, it’s important enough to flesh out. I often find that I have summarized a scene rather than actually let it take place on the page.

• One indicator of a rushed scene is one made up entirely of dialogue. You can slow down such a scene by giving the characters “beats” of action interspersed with the dialogue. You can also show the reader the main character’s thoughts, as well as the reactions of all the characters to what is being said.
• Another indicator of rushing through a scene is the feeling a reader gets of not knowing where they are or what’s happening. Be sure to give your reader enough scene setting (without stopping the action for long paragraphs of description) to feel grounded and present in the scene with the characters.

Problem #3: A scene that moves too slowly or feels like nothing is happening. These can be scenes that are entirely dialogue, but they might also contain lots of moments in the character’s head while she’s thinking and deciding what to do next. Or they might be scenes full of backstory (see above) or full of description with no action. They might just be transitional scenes to get the characters from one scene to another.

• Make sure every single scene in a story moves the story and the plot forward. A scene with character’s sitting around trying to decide what to do next might be realistic, but not interesting to read. I will often write these scenes in the first draft because I need them to understand where I’m going, but I cut them entirely in revision.
• Avoid long descriptions, especially of what characters are wearing or their facial expressions, height, build, etc. One personal characteristic can give us much more insight into a character than what color her hair is. Does she bite her nails incessantly? Also avoid long descriptions of confusing places, as it just serves to confuse readers. If the character is trapped in a giant castle, we only need to see the immediate stone walls dripping with moss, not the entire layout of the castle.

Problem #4: Starting the story in the wrong place. This often involves starting with a bunch of backstory, most of which you can usually eliminate in revision. But it can also involve not really knowing where your story truly starts.

• The best advice I’ve received as far as the beginning of a story is to start on the day everything changes for the character. But even this can be tricky. You want to give enough indication of what the character’s “normal” is before you get to what changes.
• I used to always hear this advice: start with action. But more and more, I am finding that is not good advice. Yes, you don’t want to start with boredom, either, but often an action scene to open a story only serves to confuse the reader. They don’t know the characters yet, so they don’t care what happens in this death defying moment. First get the reader to care about your character.
• Avoid starting with dialogue. Like action openings, we don’t know who’s talking, where they are, or what’s going on.
• On the flip side, don’t spend so much time grounding us that we get bored.
• I like books in which within the first two to three pages I see the main character and get a sense of who he/she is, have a sense of where we are, and can understand what the character’s conflict revolves around and why that is important to him/her.
• Avoid beginnings that are dreams and then the character wakes up. The reader feels cheated.
• Avoid beginning a story and then going back to a flashback to explain how we got here. (It sometimes works in movies, but only if done really well.)

Problem #5: An ending that drags on too long. Once the character has resolved whatever the conflict was, you can pretty much end the story. You don’t need to tie up everything in a tidy pink bow.

• Leave the reader with a sense of what the character’s life will be like now, the “new normal” and that the character will be okay. Unless of course, you are writing horror or something.
• Allow the reader enough uncertainty that we can imagine for ourselves what might happen if there were a next page.
• Don’t try to explain every lesson learned or every plot point. Trust the reader to get it.

This is just a small portion of the revision that involves pacing. There are those murky middles, the endless horrific events problems in thrillers, and more. But if you follow these few guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to better pacing.

And don’t forget the amazing Plot Master Class with Cheryl Klein that will be held in Salt Lake City on November 17, sponsored by the Utah/southern Idaho region of SCBWI. More information can be found here: http://www.scbwi.org/Regional-Chapters.aspx?R=49&sec=Conf.