Ideas on Ideas

My four-year-old daughter woke up yesterday morning and announced, with terrific enthusiasm, that she wanted to "write a book for Dr. (Martin Luther) King."  After much concern about how to make "the outside part of the book" and time spent on selection of workspace, paper, and appropriate markers, she sat down to work, turned to me, and said, "Now what should I write?"

Our next topic is the first of the "Six Traits of Writing."  Of course it all begins with the IDEA.

It occurs to me that my daughter's writing process is much like mine -- and many of my students' -- and probably at least some of yours.  I get an idea.  I get excited.  I sit down to write.  I discover I have no clue where I'm going.  And that, alas, may be the end of that.

In my exit conferences with students at the end of the semester, they tell me almost universally that they feel that topic selection is the most important part of the writing process.  When I give assignments, I always tell them that I want to "feel their passion" (in a PG sense, of course).  If they don't have so much to begin with -- which is often the case, let's face it, when dealing with an assigned essay -- I think one of my most important jobs is to help them do so.

Often students are able to identify a general idea about which to write ("world hunger"), but when it comes to distilling their paper into a thesis or, as we say in fiction, that one-sentence pitch -- homing in on exactly what they want to say is often the most difficult part.  I have frequently been asked where I get my ideas.  A better question might be how to decide whether an "idea" is worth writing about. 

I have at least five unpublished novels in a drawer, to say nothing of the unfinished ones.  Mind Games is (so far) my notable exception.  What makes it different is, I'm quite sure, something that happened before I ever put a word to paper.  I chose a topic that mattered not only to me but would also, theoretically, be of interest to parents, teachers, kids, and/or editors (not necessarily in that order).

The first series books I read as a kid were The Bobbsey Twins.  Thanks to Bert and Nan (Freddie and Flossie, not so much), I spent most of my childhood wishing I were a twin. Another book that had a big impact was And This is Laura, by Ellen Conford.  I was certain I had a latent case of ESP.  After all, there was that time I dreamed a gerbil lost its tail in my hand (eew), and this very same disgusting circumstance happened in real-life the next day.  So in eighth grade, when it came time to pick a topic for the science fair, I chose ESP.  I read about the Minnesota Twin Study (fascinating!).  I was even able to use identical twins as subjects.  I did not conclusively prove anything -- but of course it is impossible to DISPROVE that something like ESP exists. 

My grandmother used to dream of her old house at 305 Broomall Street in Chester, and the next morning she would tell my mom to play that number in the Pick-3 lottery.  And more often than not, she won.  As I think about it, I started writing Mind Games just after my grandmother died.  She was, of course, my inspiration for the character of Babushka.  And, despite the fact that she could not read and had no regrets about this fact, I know she would be very, very proud of her published author granddaughter today.

The idea of writing a book told from multiple viewpoints appealed to me for several reasons.  (At the time I undertook this project, the multi-POV middle grade novel was not quite so faddish as it is today.)  However, ever since I read the Beverly Cleary books -- Beezus and then Ramona, Ellen Tebbits and then Otis Spofford -- I became conscious of trying very hard to see the world from different perspectives.  As a scriptwriter, one of my alleged skills is in writing characters' specific voices.  Because a television script has a preordained structure and length and because the scientific method lends itself, IMO, to plenty of natural drama (and yes, mystery), I decided to use the format of a science fair project report.  This structure was a crutch, a terrible constraint, and a great challenge.  I also found it amazing fun.

My husband teaches sixth-grade reading, and apparently the current curricular push centers on "reading to perform a task" (i.e., pass a test) at the expense of novel analysis, which he has essentially been told can only be taught supplementally.  Cross-curricular novels are thus becoming increasingly popular.  Of course this was hardly on my mind when I decided to incorporate the scientific method into my storytelling process.

I would also like to comment briefly on writing-for-hire and the problem of what to do when you don't have a burning passion for your subject but need to write about it anyway.  (This situation is probably analogous to what many of my English Comp. students go through with every assignment.)   Of course one always does one's best in the assignment selection department but, failing that, TRY to find SOMETHING to like and relate to, even if this thing is not immediately evident.  (Writing for a soap opera requires frequent use of this tactic.  I love my job, but I had a boss once who felt that women did not belong in the workplace.  That was a tough year.  We also had aluminum-foil-clad "aliens" who landed in a pod.   That was another tough year.  I won't even discuss Satan in Salem!)

Please see Carmela's latest post for details on entering our new book giveaway contest for teachers and homeschoolers!  Unless you want a DAYS script or an old Nancy Drew, I am offering a copy of Mind Games up for grabs.  Happy reading, happy Monday, and Happy Birthday, Dr. King!

Serendipity and the Art of Life

My novel, Mind Games, began, in its way, when I was in eighth grade. It began with my quest to prove for the sake of science (and my grade -- like Benjamin D. Lloyd, I was all about grades) that ESP does, in fact, exist. My project was successful to the extent that it won (I think) an honorable mention at the state science fair. But in the end, I neither proved nor disproved my hypothesis -- that life is too full of "coincidence" for there not to be a guiding hand behind it all.

In life, I call that hand God's. In art, of course, that hand belongs to the writer.

Eighth grade was the beginning of a long agnostic period for me that ended shortly before I began writing Mind Games. An all-powerful, ever-loving, omniscient God is, after all, the ultimate in terms of Supernatural. And so that favorite writerly question -- what if? -- began to needle me. What if a group of students undertook a project similar to mine and actually got an answer?

At Vermont College, I remember being advised that it was helpful to mentally "cast" characters when writing fiction. Since I always have an actor in mind when penning a line of (ever-sparkling) soap dialogue, this advice was tremendously helpful to me. True, my casting was a little unorthodox, as once I imagined my grandmother in the role of a ten-year-old sibling. And there's always a little (maybe a big) part of me in every character I create. Mine is the only skin I've lived in, so I find that I need to grab on to something familiar in order to believably assume someone else's made-up life.

My ultimate casting coup in my writing thus far would have to be Bonnie. Bonnie is a friend from church, an adult in her fifties with special needs, and the basis of Kathleen in Mind Games. Since "twin ESP" is a subject of interest to me and since I'd had identical twins in my original eighth grade project testing group, it seemed natural to have twins appear in my novel. Then I started to think about the interesting story possibilities of making Kathleen a twin. Thus Claire was born. (Ironically, the last character to show up in the novel, she is probably the one most like me.)

The real-life Bonnie has two siblings. She'd told me that her older brother also had special needs and was institutionalized; and that she and her sister were "about the same age." I assumed that this meant that her sister was slightly younger but habitually took on a caregiving role, so Bonnie was no longer sure which of them was older. One day, many months after I'd begun writing Mind Games, we celebrated Bonnie's birthday at church and I discovered that it was also her sister's birthday. Indeed, they were "about the same age" -- they were twins! But because they were not as close as Bonnie felt twins were typically thought to be, she did not freely share this information.

Serendipity, indeed! In a book about interconnectedness and the lack of true coincidence in life, the existence of a real-life Claire was the ultimate validation.

I don't steal plots from life, but I do steal incidents, details, the things I see and hear and wish and dream that make me the person and the writer I am. In writing for soap operas, where the ideas are not mine and the words I write are spoken by actors who may not say what is written on the page, my sole contribution (for what it's worth) is usually in those details -- my daughter who said "laloo" instead of "I love you" when she first began to talk; the sound of my grandmother snoring in the bed beside mine; the feeling in my heart on that perfect day on which I married my husband.

Mr. Ford is a middle school teacher, so he brings home LOTS of stories about students, which I feel free to use (and which I cheerfully tell them when I come in for class visits). Of course, these are snippets, anecdotes -- I don't actually know the kids, so the heart of their stories becomes fiction easily and by necessity.

My next writing project is set in the Civil War era and partly based on the diaries and letters of a girl from Maryland. I already have a complete draft of the manuscript, in which I managed to turn an intriguing story into a plodding one. Back to the drawing board, my first order of business will be to get to know the characters all over again -- this time, inside my own head.


WRITING WORKOUT
"Method" Writing
by Jeanne Marie Grunwell Ford

Years ago, I decided to take an acting class so that I might have some sense as to what occurs in the creative process after I turn in a script. I was living in LA at the time, so I enrolled at UCLA Extension (shout-out to April), and my teacher, Barbara Tarbuck, is a wonderful and very busy working actress. We delved into the basics of Stanislavski's teaching, aka "The Method." In a nutshell, Stanislavski developed a number of exercises to help actors inhabit their characters more fully.

The very same process is, perhaps obviously, just as applicable to writers. I might not typically do "morning pages" or other writerly exercises (see my next post for more on time management); but, in germinating a novel in its earliest stages, I have found a variation of these exercises invaluable in helping with character development.

For the classroom:

1) Practice people-watching (a favorite activity of most actors and writer I know). Pay attention to the details of conversation and action you observe. Use what you see to extrapolate and build a believable character biography. (Though we usually think of biographies as non-fiction, what you are doing here is turning life into fiction in its most basic form.)

For writers:

2) Create a biography of each of your novel's major characters. Where do they come from, and what incidents have been most important in shaping them into who they are today? What are their likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, quirks, fears? And of course, the most important question you must answer for every character: WHAT DO THEY WANT?