the character poem

An exercise I like, a variation on the traditional character sketch, is a character poem I adapted from a now forgotten source (sorry source) a couple decades back. (The bookends of the poem are based on the Biblical idea that if a city had even one good person living in it, God would save that city for the sake of that righteous soul.) The exercise appeals to me because it demonstrates how, in only a few words, a character can seem real to the reader. Here’s the formula.

Line #1: Surely the world would be saved for ________________ (insert character’s name here.)

Line #2: (One sentence describing some aspect of that character’s body or face. Make it detailed or unusual.)

Line #3: (One sentence describing something this character can do. A talent or skill or personality trait that is again either unusual or described in great detail.)

Line #4: (One sentence describing some action this character has taken. Works best if it’s a gesture or act that betters the world in some way.)

Line #5: Surely the world will be saved for _______________ (insert the name again.)

Here’s an example:

Surely the world would be saved for Gus.

His hands are so big he can hold his baby son in one palm.

He can carve any animal out of a chunk or pine, even ones he’s never laid eyes on, in less time than it takes to sing all the verses of a hymn.

He built a fake mill over a dry stream for the slaves to rest in on their way north.

Surely the world will be saved for Gus.

Or :

Surely the world would be saved for Hannah.

She has a scar on her right knee from trying to fly out her window toward Neverland.

She can do the call of thirteen different birds good enough to fool a cat at ten paces.

She once spent three days in jail for protecting the identity of a source for her story on battered women.

Surely the world will be saved for Hannah.

I usually use this exercise for my protagonist or secondary characters, but it would be interesting to use on an antagonist.

I wonder if the world might be saved for Lillian?

In an attempt to look young, she has tanned herself into cocoa-brown creases.

She can bring a waitress to tears in under a minute.

In her high school production of Little Women she read for the role of Jo, but was cast as Aunt Josephine.

Surely the world could be saved even for Lillian.

Try this exercise on your hero or villain. Or your best friend or mom. You could even write one about yourself.

December Give-Away!

The winner of the November Give-Away, a signed copy of NOVEL SHORTCUTS, is P.E. of Grants Pass, Oregon.

For December the Give-Away is a signed copy of THE FETCH. Email your name and address via my website (www.laurawhitcomb.com) before New Years. (Let me know if you do NOT want to be on my snail mail list for the sending out of groovy things like bookmarks and postcards when new books come out.)

I hope all you Nanowrimo contestants had great results. Although I didn’t get 50K words, I did write 115 pages on UNDER THE LIGHT.

Let them speak!

Sometimes when you’re writing along on your novel, your gut instinct directs your protagonist to say or do something controversial, but you censor yourself and your character. You decide, almost as fast as you thought of the idea, that it is too harsh, too off the wall, too dangerous. But often that gut instinct is right.

When I was younger I tended to have a character think about saying a certain thing but explain why she doesn’t. Now I try to let my people speak out or act out. Better to let your protagonist get in trouble and then have to get herself out of it. So, let your hero call her boss a name, make an unforgivable joke during a funeral, say what she’s really thinking about a man she’s just met right to his face. Let your characters make their lives messy. It’s more interesting (fun) for you as the writer and readers remember (and love) a character who gets herself out on the end of a skinny limb.

Resist resolution . . .

To keep your scenes full of tension, resist the temptation to resolve things. If a character says something terrible to someone she loves, don’t have her apologize. Yet. Let the suspense of that fracture in the relationship span over into another chapter. Or several. Let the readers feel the full impact of the hurt and the betrayal.

 

 

 

One of my favorite examples of creating tension by leaving something hurtful hanging is from the movie The Queen of Hearts (1989, screenplay by Tony Grisoni.) Our protagonist is a little boy who looks up to his older brother and whose best friend was abandoned by his parents and lives with a relative. When the two have a falling out, they say the worst things they can possibly say to each other. The best friend tells our hero, “Your brother works for the villain—he’s a traitor.” Our hero tells his best friend, “Your parents didn’t even want you – they threw you away.” (I’m paraphrasing here.)

When I was young, I would’ve immediately had the hero say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” Or I would at least have had him think to himself, “That was a terrible thing to say!” But it’s better not to. Let the reader suffer for a while. It will give the wound in the relationship more impact and make the delayed resolution more satisfying.

Make the bad stuff worse . . .

When I landed my excellent agent, Ann Rittenberg, and she offered me advice for rewriting my manuscript so it would sell well, one of the general notes she gave me (that absolutely made A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT a better book) was . . . make the bad stuff worse. When I asked what she meant, she told me to look at all the bad stuff that happens to the characters in my story and make those things even harder for them.

If you suspect you might be treating your characters too kindly (a common problem with first novels) go back through your manuscript and make the problems thrown at your people bigger problems, make the danger more dangerous, make the disturbing circumstances more disturbing. (That’s how the Prayer Corner in SLANT was created.) The higher the stakes, the more the readers will need to keep reading.

Backtracking . . .

Another tip for getting a rough draft down faster is to go back and change your path when you start to feel like you don’t love what you’re writing. In my earlier years I would plod along even if I was slowed by the feeling that my story wasn’t as good as I thought it was going to be. With age and experience I learned to avoid those periods of sluggish writing by stopping when I feel like I hate my sentences and paragraphs. I learned to backtrack.

Now as soon as I get that “crappy writing” sensation, I stop and look at the sentence I’m composing. Don’t like it? Erase it. The sentence before? Good? No? Delete that one too. I go all the way back to the last great sentence (or really right sentence) that I wrote and start again from there.

In the old days I might have tried to rewrite those sentences, instead of erasing them, but then I would end up with better written crap. The world does not need better written crap. So now I clear them out so I can see the way more clearly. My last great sentence reminds me of what the next sentence should be like.

(Again this may be a quirky thing that only works for me, but, like I’ve said, life’s too short to be shy. I’ll share my tips, weird or reasonable, because you never know.)

Skipping transitions . . .

When I’m trying to write a rough draft of a novel fast, as so many people are at this very moment for Nanowrimo, I sometimes find I can get more done if I skip from one scene to another and don’t worry about the transitions.

I list all the scenes I have left to write in the whole book (jane and joe meet at park, jane visits her father at the shop, john gets a call from the priest, and so on) and I simply choose the one I feel like writing at the moment. I don’t worry about the transition from the scenes that will come before and after it. I just type the letters TRANS on the page so later I can easily see which transitions I will have left to smooth out later.

It’s much less daunting if my novel writing  ”to do” list says “write 14 transitions” instead of “write the five last chapters.” (Hmmm, this may be one of those weird things that only works for me, but I’m not shy. I like sharing ideas. Hopefully it’ll work for someone else out there.)        =)

To self-publish or not to self-publish . . .

Every day it gets easier (and less expensive) to self-publish your writing. And under certain circumstances, it can be a great idea.

Your title here?

Self-publishing is good for people who have a specific topic they teach. They want their students to be able to find their research/examples/philosophy in a concise package. Good idea.

It’s good if you have a niche of special interest you can share with other enthusiasts. My brother, for instance, has researched the possibility of discovering Ropen (similar to pterodactyls) in Pau Pau New Guinea and has self-published his travel adventures – fans of his topic find him on the web every day.

It’s good for people who want to write fiction especially for someone — a picture book tailored to the author’s child or grandchild, for instance.

It’s good for a personal memoir produced for one’s own pleasure or to send to family members and close friends.

But self-publishing is usually not so good for novelists. One of the editors who spoke at a recent Willamette Writers conference told her workshop audience that if you’ve self-published, do NOT tell the agent you are trying to sign with unless you have sold at least 5,000 to 10,000 copies of your book.

Without meaning to, self-publishing a novel while you’re waiting to break into the industry might send one or more of these unintended messages to the agent or editor you are approaching:

I’m not patient enough to wait for a real book deal.

I’m not smart enough to listen to people’s advice about improving my work before I send it out.

I’m not organized enough to market my work to agents and editors successfully.

I don’t really want to put in the work it takes to hone my skills.

I think my writing is great, but actually my novel isn’t good enough.

Once in a while a self-published book can lead to a traditional book deal. For example, in fiction: Eragon by Christopher Paolini (2007), Spartacus by Howard Fast (1952); Non-Fiction: The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer (1931), What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles (1970) were self-published and later picked up by big houses and became bestsellers.

But self-publishing does not usually lead to critical and financial success. For instance, here is a list of extremely important things you probably won’t get with a self-published novel:

Distribution – it’s almost impossible to sell your book in big numbers without getting it into book store chains and distributors’ warehouses;

Reviews — most periodicals don’t review self-published books;

Blurbs – it’s unlikely you’ll get famous authors to endorse your work if you don’t have a publishing house behind you;

Placement on prestigious lists  — recommendations that are sent out to public libraries, school libraries, and indy book stores will probably be out of your reach.

If you want to self publish in order simply to hold your novel in your hands (with your name on the front, an ISBN number on the back, and a nice cover),  to see it listed on Amazon,  to be able to give it as Christmas gifts to your relatives and friends . . . than more power to you. Self-publish away! But if you want to take a step closer to an agent and a nice book deal (and advance) from the publishing house of your dreams, look at the issues before you leap.

If your dream is to make a living as a full-time novelist, to land an agent like William Morris or Ann Rittenberg, to get a fat advance from Random House or Houghton Mifflin and glowing reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and the New York Times, keep writing. Keep rewriting. Give your work to readers you trust and listen to their notes thoughtfully. Research agents. Take the time to write a well-crafted query letter. Send out those letters and when you get rejections, don’t fret. Keep writing, rewriting, resending. Never give up. Every day you keep trying you’re one day closer to breaking in. (And remember, if you’ve already self-published, it’s okay. Do everything I listed in this paragraph, but don’t mention that you are self-published in your query letter. Believe in your story. All will be well!)

 

 

Book By Book

After A CERTAIN SLANT OF LIGHT was published, I was honored to be the guest at a Mother-Daughter book club founded by Cindy Hudson. These women and their girls had been reading and exchanging their thoughts about literature since the daughters were in elementary school. And they had great insights, fascinating questions. I loved the experience.

 

Now Cindy shares her advice on how to start your own Mother-Daughter reading club in BOOK BY BOOK published by Seal Press in September. Visit her website at www.motherdaughterbookclub.com. She talks about book lists, club guidelines, who to invite, and tips on how to help the club adapt as the girls grow up. A great idea. I highly recommend both the book and the concept. I wish I could have been in a reading group with my own mom.

Culling the Poetry

The Heartstorming part of the Shortcut to the Scene exercise (from my last blog) may be a new concept for you. If you’re having trouble letting go and allowing your inner poet to babble, you could try this poetry exercise as a warm up.

          Write a stream of consciousness page on something other than a scene from your novel. It doesn’t matter what you say, but try using a topic that holds plenty of emotion. Something frightening or heartbreaking or hilarious or inexplicable.

          Afterwards, take a highlighter and mark your favorite phrases. Even if you don’t think there’s anything worth keeping, choose ten or more phrases that you like. Start with your very favorites and work down. Then line them up like a poem, enhancing the phrasing or not, whichever appeals to you. Finally, read it back as if it were composed as a poem.

          Have fun. Good luck. And if you come up with something you love, feel free to send it in.