Secrets to Writing Fiction

My writer’s group, The Northwest Arkansas Writers, to whom I owe any success I’ve had being published, held a conference a few weeks ago, which I attended. There were two things, especially that I took away. One was from the lecture given by member Dusty Richards, the foremost writer in the Western Genre today, with over a hundred twenty books to his credit.

He was discussing chapters. His first advice: Never simply end a chapter. Always add a hook, or a sense of what is to come, so your reader won’t put down the book, but turn the page and continue. Good advice. Go back and check your work in progress to be sure you did that.

The second advice is really a writing technique. He says it is his secret to being so successful, but he willingly shared it:  Start each chapter with a strong sense of place, so the reader knows where he is, but don’t mention the name of the Point of View Character until you must, for clarity. Use the pronoun ‘he,’ or ‘she,’ as long as possible before you say the name.

For instance: He looked around and saw unfamiliar landscape, dry, dusty, empty of life. He was lost.

 Or: She felt the sun as the clouds cleared, revealing the tops of the mountains. Her soul was filled with happiness. What does this do? It brings your reader into the scene. The reader becomes the character and starts living the story. When you have your reader truly hooked, mention the character.

This next comes from member Duke Pennell, owner of Pen-L Publishing, editor and publisher of the e-magazine, of Frontier Tales. Duke@Pen-L.com. His advice: What publisher’s want, is not only someone who has obviously worked to perfect their writing skills, but someone who is easy to work with. Make the corrections. Don’t be a drama lemon. Take criticism gracefully, at least until you’ve carefully considered it. Just might be the publisher or editor knows more about what is good and what sells than you do.

Second: Remember that, although writing a book involves creativity and talent, once you’ve sold the book, you’ve become a businessman, not a writer. Publishing is a business. It means return on investment. Take it seriously, learn marketing and social media, take your publisher’s suggestions and do what you can gain readers.

 It was a Saturday well spent. I even sold a book.

Build Your Characters From Reality. Show, Don't Tell.

Characters build the novel. If your protagonists don’t have enough substance so you can get into their soul and experience what they feel, or you can predict how they are going to respond to a situation, you are going to lose your reader. Beginning writers hear, from their writer’s group constantly, the words, “Show, don’t tell.” Isn’t enough to say, ‘he felt lonely, alone and abandoned’?

No, it is not. Consider my male protagonist, Gideon, in Maddie’s Choice. Grandparents raised Gideon and his brother when their parents were killed. Zeke was about ten. Gid was about six. His grandfather, who had no time for the rebellious Gid, favored Zeke. After Gid’s grandmother died, when he was about ten, there was no love at all for Gid, so he joined the military right after high school, and became a sniper in Afghanistan, which led to his return to the ranch with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Now, this is entirely too much backstory to dump on a reader during a scene. Bits and pieces of this are revealed throughout the book, but I use a flashback scene to reveal the source of Gideon’s loneliness. To whit:

“A wisp of memory floated through his mind, of a time right after his parents disappeared. He was six years old, feeling sad and lost because his dad had gone. He wondered if they were dead, but the word was never used. He’d been told Dad and Mom went to “a better place,” and it confused him. They were his whole world. Why would they go someplace better and leave him behind?

On that day, lonely and yearning for comfort, he’d found his grandfather working in his office. Needing to be held. He tried to climb up onto his lap, only to be pushed off.

“I don’t have time to play with you, Gideon. Go find Zeke.”

As young as he was, he understood that is grandfather was lost to him. His older brother, Zeke, was the favored one with lap privileges.”

Where did that scene come from? It came to mind when I remembered something similar happening to my young son and his grandfather.

As I said before, draw from within yourself to give life to your writing. This tale is a preface to a PTSD attack in which Gideon seeks refuge in the corner of the barn, where Maddie finds him.

This is much better than simply saying, “Lonely, and distraught, he sought refuge in the corner of the barn.”

I’ve had readers ask me if Maddie was somehow me in this book. Well, yeah, as it will be in every other book. If you don’t pour yourself into your book . . . the famous advice to ‘open a vein and bleed,’ your readers won’t sense the realness of the story. It doesn’t have to be you, but you have to listen to every conversation you will ever have and sense the story underneath, so you might use it.

There is a t-shirt out there that says, ”Careful, you might be in my next book.”

So true! 

Where Do Writers Find Characters?

 

All writers use bits and pieces of people they’ve known to create characters. Your mind “collects” memories, scenes and bits of dialogue that show up when you’re in the middle of a story. At least that’s the way it happens with me. I have a closet full of notebooks with observations and people I’ve met throughout my life. If you want to write, start with a notebook.

For instance, here is a fragment about someone from my army basic training days at Ft. Lee, Virginia, September of 1950. Someday she will be in a book.

     The Women’s Army Corps was still in its infancy when I joined. Recruits were women wanting something different, recently released from foster homes, or escaping poverty or abuse and had nowhere else to go. Remember we didn't have the job opportunities available today. We were expected to live at home until we got married. This was before Ms. Magazine changed all that.

New recruits lived in old wooden barracks, one long, narrow room, twenty-five cots on each side. No privacy. A recruit’s “area” consisted of two feet on either side of the cot and room for a footlocker at the foot.  A short pole on the wall was for hanging uniforms. The inadequacy of the housing, however, didn’t deter our enthusiasm. Cultural shock is an efficient bonding agent. Most of us bonded quickly. We looked out for each other. You need to know this to understand how we all banded together for the “re-making” of Private Kierkgaard.

      Alice was a Wisconsin farm girl, about twenty, who was so shy she never talked. She was awkward, physically clumsy, knew nothing of “female things” like ironing her clothes, shaving her legs, etc., and bathing. We decided she must have lived in abject poverty because she had never seen a flush toilet. She was terrified of the communal shower in the latrine, convinced she’d drown under the water, and refused to have anything to do with it. After about a week, this became a crisis. The whole platoon pitied her, and six of us who had become good friends, decided to take her in hand. We assigned duties: one would teach ironing, one bed making, one shoe shining, etc. It took all of us to get her into the shower, kicking, and screaming, but we persisted. A miracle happened. Once she felt safe, she gloried in the hot water, the soapsuds, shampoo, the whole thing. She became obsessed, spending every available minute there.

Our biggest challenge was teaching her how to march. Alice had two left feet.  We devoted hours to marching up and down the barracks, chanting, “left, right,” but by God, we succeeded. By graduation Alice was a real WAC, and proud of her new assignment as a cook. It was all she ever wanted.

Alice taught me a lot. I learned about compassionate leadership, group loyalty, and never, never to pre-judge. No matter how hopeless you think someone is, they have something of value. When we were packing to go to our next assignment, Alice’s battered paperboard suitcase was open on her bed. Inside were dozens of blue ribbons and small trophies from state fairs—awards for baking. Alice was a champion pastry chef. Who knew?

So what’s the message here? The possibilities of a novel about Alice are endless. The story of women in the military has never been told, especially women in combat. We don’t behave like men when we're in a group. I have dozens of stories from that period of my life that I’ll never get around to telling. 

Open yourself to the people around you—at a party, a shopping mall, or a restaurant. Get inside their heads. Who are they? Fantasize then write it down. Gideon, the hero from my novel, Maddie’s Choice, is the result of thousands of conversations I’ve had with men, in the military, on air planes, standing in line at the supermarket, and memories of those days drinking beer at the NCO club. There are characters everywhere. Find them, and then write the book.

UPYO, or, A Politically Correct Christmas Greeting

 I have had occasion to research teen language for dialogue revisions to my new work of fiction, a romance due out next summer, working title: Love in a Small Town. They talk in shorthand, like OMG, meaning Oh, My God. Hence my addition to the lexicon. I have invented a new response for all you twitters and texters to reply to opinionated tools who want to tell all of us what to think.
     UPYO.  Meaning get out of my face. To all those haters who want to trash Christmas Carols, remove patriotic or religious monuments, denigrate our servicemen by objecting to flag displays, and pick on Duck Dynasty for expressing religious belief, UPYO.
     This country was founded by brave men and women who felt they should be entitled to have an opinion, be heard, and decide on their leaders without minority interference. We've fought several wars defending that notion, so UPYO.
      You want to accuse my four-year-old of sexual predation if he hugs his little sister? UPYO.
      You want to You want to suspend my fourth grader because his half-eaten ham sandwich resembles a gun? UPYO. I could go on, but I'm offering the ultimate in ridiculous . . . a piece of writing I found in my file with no indication of the original author. It expresses how far we've gone to be politically correct about Christmas and how silly we all are behaving in the face of bullying by a few. That's what it is. Adult bullying by trying to outlaw wearing red t-shirts at Christmas. So, UPYO. Enjoy.
                                                 
                                                         Seasonal Greetings
     Please accept, with no obligation implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally correct, socially conscious celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the parameters of your religious/secular persuasion, or not, for the calendar year of 2014, but not without due respect for the calendar of your choice in other cultures without regard to race, creed, color, origin age, or physical ability, computer platform or sexual reference to the wishee, with an amount of affection and sincerity you might deem appropriate.
    Disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawl. It implies no intent upon the wisher to actually implement any of these good wishes and is void where prohibited by law.
 Merry (00000)mas!  

Thanksgiving Traditions Better Forgotten

I live alone these days. That means I’m no longer in charge of making Thanksgiving Dinner happen, starting two days ahead to prepare, faithfully producing all the expected dishes. I our house, turkey was a must--not negotiable. Pleas for rib roast or duck met deaf ears. One year I had a revolt because the pumpkin pie was souffléd, instead of flat. These days,  I leave that to my grown children and their families.They’re creating their own customs and traditions.

I marvel, everytime I go to the supermarket how modern innovation has made the whole dinner thing simpler. The other day I came across a Holiday Dinner display, and what to my wondering eyes did appear, but a complete dinner—all the traditional dishes prepared in oven-ready-to-table casseroles, individually priced, ready to heat and eat. I found the inevitable green bean/mushroom soup casserole, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, mashed potatoes, and even cranberry relish in tidy pint servers. There were two kinds of turkey stuffing: cornbread and regular, and even an entirely cooked and ready to serve turkey, vacuumed packed, with giblet gravy in pint containers. Amazing. A trip to the bakery section for pie, and we’re ready to go. Ah, but the feast would never have passed muster in our house.  If I would have tried that, I’d have been sent to my room without supper.

THE RELISH TRAY was missing, a thing that was such a tradition, no  holiday dinner could proceed without it. I don’t know how this got started. I blame it on my mother-in-law. Hopefully this is one of the sillier customs that will not find its way to my children’s tables. 

The thing is, even though nobody ever ate from THE RELISH TRAY because they all hated the stuff on it, it had to be there. Two kinds of olives, pickles, celery sticks, and those pickled crabapples with the stems on, all had to be present and remained untouched throughout the meal. Afterward, during cleanup, I’d carefully sort it out and return all the items to their original containers to be held in the refrigerator until Christmas Dinner, four weeks away. The whole thing would be reassembled and served, except this time, after dinner, everything would go in the garbage and we’d start over next year.

All families have their own "things." I know one family that always serves Ligonberries, although nobody is quite sure what they are, except Swedish.

Sometimes I miss all those little jars in the fridge. At such times, I mix another martini and relax. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I’m invited out to dinner.

Where Are All The Heroes?

I attended a ceremony yesterday to honor three Viet Nam War veterans for their service to their country. Fifty years it has taken us to recognize and say ‘thank you’ for what they endured. At their discharge, these three men had simply been handed an envelope, containing at least six medals for service and valor. One veteran recalled that when they got off the plane they were warned to keep a low profile because people might spit on them.

 There was a Purple Heart, which brought a lump to my throat, because I had never seen one and the recipient is profoundly disabled with PTSD and has two service dogs with him at all times. It has only taken fifty years for us to honor their service.

As I sat in that small room in a shopping center in Fayetteville, Arkansas, among some fifty friends who had shown up to honor these men, I listened to their stories and the history of these wars. I’m old enough to remember the Second World War and the ensuing conflicts and, as I listened, I recalled the monstrous acts of brutality perpetrated on our soldiers by the Japanese, the Germans, the Koreans, and the Vietnamese. How could we have forgotten this? The Bataan Death March? The tortures the VC perpetrated? These men haven’t forgotten. The rage is still there.

Why do we react with such outrage to interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo, which are part of the militant Muslim’s culture and expected by them? Indeed, our disgust is, to them, an example of our weakness.

I think it’s time, on this Veteran’s Day, to take another look at what I feel is one of the finest films on the Viet Nam War—Born On The Fourth of July. Tom Cruise earned his acting chops on this one. It is told from the disabled veteran’s point of view and is the story of a young man who bought the whole myth of men proving their courage by fighting for their country, an attitude championed by his parents. He joined up, came home in a wheelchair, and had to deal with the scorn of his fellow countrymen. His scream of rage at the end when he demands to know, “What was it all for?” says it all.

You can rent this film for $2.99 from Amazon Film Library and play it on your Kindle or computer. Let’s give real homage to these veterans of all these thankless wars including Iraq and Afghanistan by remembering. Watch the film.  

Short Term Memory-Making It Better

There is so much talk about failing memory and symptoms of Alzheimer Memory loss these days that the subject is on every mind. I am an older persons and I’m acutely aware of this. Because my children are instantly suspicious of the slightest sign that Mom might be “losing it,” it being short-term memory. I’m sure they have had the conversation, among themselves, that begins, “What are we going to do about Mom when her mind begins to go?” I’m over eighty and besides forgetting, sometimes, what I have entered a room looking for, I’m sharp as a tack, because I exercise my mind.

After much consideration I’ve become convinced that mental function declines in direct ratio to boredom. If you don’t exercise your mind, challenge yourself with new tasks, and stay current with what is going on, you’ll lose your mental acuity rapidly. I’m a writer. I write novels that deal with subjects new to me because it requires research and much note taking. In the course of the six books I’ve written I’ve explored American history, cattle ranching, Texas Hold’em Poker, and time travel. I know more about whale parasites, drug addiction and ghostly manifestations than I ever want to.

I’m also involved in local government because I’m an elected official, which is a whole new world requiring study. The point of all this is that I exercise my mind constantly and it is in better shape than the rest of me.

But, you are not me and you don’t have this interest. What can the average person, concerned about mental aging, do to stay sharp?

In the thirty years I had a retail store with many daily conversations with customers, I’ve discovered everybody worries about this problem. I discovered one simple thing we all can do to keep short-term memory sharp—work jigsaw puzzles.

Consider the process. First you have to create a system to deal with the various size and shapes of the pieces. I recommend starting with no more than 700 so you won’t get bogged down. I sort according to color and subject—sky, grass, roads, etc. Find all the pieces with straight edges because these are your border pieces and you’ll start with the border.  Keep them in a special place.

By now your brain is working and ready to begin. The reason why jigsaw puzzles work so well is because you have to memorize the shape and size of the whole you want to fill while you look for the shape and color of the piece you need to fill that whole. This requires short-term memory. At first you’ll be slow, but in about three or four days you’re going to see tremendous improvement in the way your eyes see things. 

I recommend painted street scenes or landscapes with some activity or a few people. The Thomas Kincade style puzzles are perfect. They usually have flowers, grass, houses and some people and even though at first glance there seems to be a lot of grass or shrubbery, you’ll notice that the character of the brush strokes changes from one spot to another. Lots of variety is what you need. Stay away from photos of a pizza or monotonous stuff.

Try this for a month and you can stop worrying about aging memory.