VOICES Heard While OUT AND ABOUT

I’ve been out and about the past few days in The Big Apple, taking in both sights AND sounds while attending the 2014 Annual SCBWI Winter Conference at the Grand Hyatt New York. 

Imagine: 1085 children’s book creators from 47 states and 20 countries gathered together in one beautiful ballroom to celebrate our community, our books, our creative efforts, each other while learning and taking heart from the words of the esteemed faculty. 

YOU can attend too, sort of and vicariously, thanks to Team Blog.  Just click here. 

I heartily recommend you do so, with a cup o'coffee or two by your side. It's an Instant Education courtesy of our Children's Book World's Best and Brightest.

You will be two-hat-sizes smarter by the time you reach Nikki Grimes' closing keynote.

Speaking of "smarter,"

why not test everything you’ve learned about voice from our past weeks’ TeachingAuthors posts by matching these unique 2014 SCBWI Winter Conference speakers (and one or two non-Conference folks I happened to meet) -

 A.   Sylvia, The Grand Central Hyatt

B.     Lin Oliver, Executive Director of SCBWI 

C.     Author Jack Gantos

D.    Author Kate Messner

E.     Author and Poet Nikki Grimes

F.     Gabriella Pizzolo, of MATILDA                             

G.    TeachingAuthor Jill Esbaum

with their identifiably-distinctive spoken words :

(1)   If you’re drawing characters, really swing your cat!”

Keynote Address: How everything I learned about fiction and nonfiction in picture books, poetry, short stories, novellas, or, angst, dialog, a hundred drafts, and good luck all end up in the crown jewel of literature: THE NOVEL

(2)  “Rule #1: You can’t have brave without scared.
Rule #2:  Never underestimate the power of failure.
Failure is a pretty good trail marker to let us know we’re going in the right direction.”
Keynote address: The Spectacular Power of Failure

(3)  “We love everyone and you’re all welcome here!  Your success is our success. The
only thing we’re missing is the Jamaican bobsledders.”
Welcome and Introduction

(4)  “May I help you, please?”

(5)  “I HATCHED was named a Sunday Book Review Editors’ Choice in today’s New York Times!!!”

(6)  It’s so important that we ask ourselves the hard questions.
Just keep writing.  You’ll figure it out eventually.
The key is to learn to trust the process.
Take 2 poems and call me in the morning.”
Keynote address: Creating the Dream through Fiction for Young Readers

(6)  “Just because you find that life's not fair, it
Doesn't mean that you just have to grin and bear it.
If you always take it on the chin and wear it,
You might as well be saying you think that it's OK.
And that's not right.
And if it's not right, you have to put it right.
But nobody else is gonna put it right for me.
Nobody but me is gonna change my story.
Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty.”
From: MATILDA, “Naughty,” lyrics and music by Tim Minchin

Here’s hoping you earned a perfect score and took heart from the above Truths that left me hopeful, grateful, and determined to use my voice to tell my stories.

Esther Hershenhorn

P.S.

Here are the correct answers: 1-C, 2-D, 3-B, 4-A, 5-G, 6-E, 7-F

P.P.S.
Alas, I still dream of winning an SCBWI Conference Joke Contest. This year's theme? Placing a children's book character in a Winter Olympics headline.  My favorite winner was "Humpty Dumpty Disqualified for Possession of Crack."

Wednesday Writing Workout: Distilling Your Writer's Voice

In last Friday's post on "voice," I mentioned the book Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall (St. Martin's), and how it provides specific exercises for helping a writer develop his or her distinctive voice. As promised, for today's Wednesday Writing Workout I'm sharing an exercise based on one in the book. It's from Chapter Seven, "Distilling Voice." I encourage you to borrow the book from a library (or better still, buy your own copy) to read more about this exercise and others in the book.

This is basically a freewriting exercise. Since there are many variations of freewriting, let me start by describing my "rules" for freewriting (which I first introduced back in this blog post):

• the idea is to keep your pen moving without pausing and definitely without editing
• write with pen and paper rather than at a keyboard
• if you find yourself stuck, write something like "I don't know what to write next but I'll think of something soon" until you do think of something
• if your mind wanders away from your main topic, that's fine. Just keep writing.  

Now, for today's Wednesday Writing Workout: Distilling Voice.

1. Using a timer, freewrite for ten minutes each day for a week. Write as quickly as you can, without thinking, judging, or editing. You can start something new each day, or continue where you left off the day before. 
2. After the week is over, put aside what you've written. Take a week off without looking back at what you wrote. 
3. After the second week, pull out your notebook and read aloud your freewrites. As you read, mark the words, phrases, or passages that "leap out at you, that grab your attention."
4. Repeat step 1, only this time, begin each freewrite session with one of your marked words or phrases. As it says in Finding Your Writer's Voice: "Using your most exciting writing as your point of departure helps you avoid introductions and leap right into what's vital."
5. After you've done this for seven days, again put your writing aside for a week.
6. Repeat step 3, only this time, after marking the words and phrases that most captivate you, cross out any words that you don't find interesting or unique. Read aloud what's left. What you have now should really "sing." If the writing still feels bland or weak, repeat steps 4-6.

I first did this exercise years ago and found it extremely enlightening. To quote Finding Your Writer's Voice:

"You may end up with a prose poem, a surprising non sequitur with its own sense of wholeness, a surreal story, humorous nonsense. Consider this one of your best pieces of writing. Pin it above your desk. Let it inspire you."

If you give this exercise a try, do let us know how it works for you.
Happy writing!
Carmela

Replay of "Wrestling with Voice"

Hello, Readers! Carmela here with a quick announcement. Today would normally be Mary Ann Rodman's turn to post. However, she is taking a blogging break. We hope she'll be able to return soon. Meanwhile, we've lined up a terrific new "voice" to join us. I'll post an official welcome to her in a few weeks. For today, since we've been discussing Voice as the third of the Six Traits of Writing, I'm providing you with an excerpt from Mary Ann's post, "Wrestling with Voice," which she published back in March 2010.   

So now, I turn the microphone over to Mary Ann. Enjoy!

Trying to define “voice” in writing is like trying to define “air” (the invisible stuff you breathe) or “love”( an emotion that makes you act stupid). After much hairpulling and consulting a bunch of writing manuals, I think I have a definition.

     Writing is what you say, and how you say it. Voice is the “how you say it” part. The term can be used in different ways. One is the writer’s voice. Since I am not a literature scholar, I’m not going to try analyzing writer’s voice, within the confines of a blog post!

     A more manageable topic is character voice. In this context, “voice” consists of the vocabulary, speech pattern and tone used by the individuals. Think of some memorable fictional figures. Could you ever confuse Jane Eyre with Scarlett O’Hara? Huck Finn with Holden Caulfield? Ramona Quimby with Laura Ingalls? Is there another literary child who sounds even remotely like Eloise? Each of them speak and think in a way that is completely their own.

     What influences character voice? The character's gender, age, setting, cultural background, education, family, economic status, occupation and on and on. Taking these factors into consideration, even persons who share some these aspects will still sound unique. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield are both teenage boys. The uneducated, resourceful and adventuresome Huck, narrates in the dialect of a 19th century Mississippi River “rat.” Holden, immature and introspective, uses repetition, slang and fairly limited vocabulary, that reflects his isolated, upper-middle class, Post-World-War-II American prep school life.

     Even characters who may share many of the same characteristics, should be distinguishable from one another. One of the best examples of this is Rachel Vail’s Daring to Be Abigail. The story takes place in a camp cabin of 11-year-old girls who at first glance, seem to share exactly the same background. Within two pages, the reader knows each of the eight main characters as separate entities. I have read this book over and over, trying to figure out how she established characterization through voice so rapidly, without resorting to stereotype. I’m still reading!

     My students sometimes have trouble creating distinct character voices. For instance, a conversation between two ten-year-old boys, whose dialog could be interchangeable, because they speak exactly alike. When I ask the writer to tell me about these characters…who is their BFF? what’s in their school backpack? what is their least favorite school subject? …the answer is often “I don’t know.” The problem is that the student is trying to write about characters they don’t really “know”.

     My characters live in my head for years and years before I get around to bringing them to life. I keep notebooks, computer files and file folders on future characters, as they "share" with me such diverse information as their favorite baseball player, what their side of a shared dresser top looks like, how they feel about various family members. Sometimes I learn more about my characters through the writing process, but I would never presume to tell their stories without having at least a working knowledge of them.

written by Mary Ann Rodman

Finding Your Writer's Voice

Happy Valentine's Day to all our

TeachingAuthors Readers!
 

Since today is also Poetry Friday, I'll be sharing an excerpt from a favorite love poem at the end of this post. But first, I want to continue our current discussion of Voice, the third of the Six Traits of Writing.

As JoAnn said when she kicked off the topic last Friday: "we each have a writer’s voice that is all our own." Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall (St. Martin's) calls voice "your most powerful tool" as a writer, saying:

"Your voice is actually a very ordinary thing: It is just who you are, projected artistically. It is often linked to your speaking voice, and your breath, and the rhythms and sense of pace that you draw on when you are too absorbed in what you are saying to listen to yourself from a distance. It is also linked to your body, the language or dialect you spoke in childhood, and whatever naturally interests you. Your voice is how you write when you don't have time to be elegant."

I also agree with what JoAnn said about a writer's voice developing over time. But Finding Your Writer's Voice provides specific exercises to help speed up the process. I plan to share one in our next Wednesday Writing Workout. (If you happen to live in the Chicago area, you may be interested in a course I'll be teaching this spring in Oak Brook, Illinois, using the book as our text. See my website for details.)

I love the experiment Jill mentioned in her post on Monday, in which students easily identified the author of something written by one of their classmates. It reminded me of feedback I've heard from several of our email subscribers. When they receive a TeachingAuthors post, they don't know who wrote it until they see the byline at the end. But after subscribing to our blog for awhile, they're able to guess the author long before then.

Jill also shared some wonderful examples of distinctive voices in picture book texts, in both first-person and third-person narratives. One thing my students often struggle with is making a first-person narrator's voice different from their own writing voice. I try to help by sharing this excerpt from Monica Wood's book Description (Writer's Digest Books):

"Consider the differences in the following line delivered by different narrators:
         Sandra's son reminded me of a prince, only more imperious.
Or:
         Sandra's kid looked kind of like my cousin Gino, only loads cuter.
Or:
         Sandra's little boy reminded me of that boy in the shelter, only fatter, and a cleaner face. . . . 

All of these narrators have a set of experiences and prejudices and obsessions that is unique to them. As their author you must allow them their own visions."

There's so much more I could say on the topic of voice, but I'll leave that to my fellow TeachingAuthors.

Before I share the poetry excerpt I promised, I want to remind you that today is the last day to enter for a chance to win Crystal Chan's acclaimed debut novel, Bird. You can read all about it here.

Now, for today's poem. One of my favorite love poems is "[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]" by e.e. cummings. Wow, talk about a distinctive voice! Here's how the poem ends:

            from [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
                     by e.e. cummings 
            . . .
           here is the deepest secret nobody knows
           (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
           and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
          higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
          and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

          i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

You can read the whole poem at the Poetry Foundation website. And then visit Linda's TeacherDance blog to check out the full Poetry Friday round-up.

Happy writing!
Carmela

Picture Book Magic: Voice

I visited a high school class one afternoon. I had them all write a paragraph about something – any little thing – that had happened to them that day. Then, with permission, I read them aloud and asked the kids to guess who had written each. The results were eye opening – for all of us. They guessed correctly about 80% of the time.

That’s voice. It’s in a story’s point of view, in word choices and phrasing, tone and style, sentence lengths, rhythms, even the way an author uses white space on a page. I wrote months ago about Alan Bradley’s swoon-worthy similes … I think I could pick out his work if somebody read it to me blindfolded. Me blindfolded, not them.

Those of us who read middle grade and YA would know within a few paragraphs whether something had been written by Kate DiCamillo or Rick Riordan, by Maggie Stiefvater or John Green.

Carrying a consistent voice through a novel-length story is a challenge of daunting proportions. Picture books … well, fewer words, so … easier? Um, you probably don’t want to say that in a roomful of picture book authors who work long and hard to craft a story, to employ an authentic voice that makes that story ring true.

I thought it might be fun to look at a few picture book openings, paying special attention to voice.

I’m Bad!, Kate & Jim McMullan

  Are you BAD?
     I’m REALLY bad.
     Scare-the-tails-off-the-other-dinosaurs
     BAD.
     Got rip-‘em-up CLAWS.
     Got bite-‘em-up FANGS.
     Bad breath?
     Yeaaahhhhhhh

Whoa, talk about a strong voice. Add a little attitude, a little growl, to your read-aloud voice, and what kiddo wouldn’t follow this dino anywhere? When it turns out that he’s a baby dino who gets scared and has to run for his mommy… perfection.


Edwin Speaks Up, April Stevens

  Mrs. Finnemore was racing around the house.
  “Gloo poop SHOE noogie froo KEY,” Baby Edwin was babbling. He was all dressed and ready to go to the supermarket.

So Baby Edwin can’t talk coherently yet. So what? Ms. Stevens just lets him talk anyway. And the resulting lines of dialogue are a blast to read aloud – and will have young listeners rolling on the floor. When it turns out that the family’s series of misadventures (occurring during a trip to the grocery store) could have been avoided if they’d only LISTENED to baby Edwin? Priceless and adorable and lets kids feel smart. Win-win-win.


A Visitor for Bear, Bonnie Becker

  One morning, Bear heard a tap, tap, tapping on his front door.
     When he opened his door, there was a mouse, small and gray and bright-eyed.
     “No visitors allowed,” Bear said, pointing to the sign. “Go away.”
     He closed the door and went back to the business of making his breakfast.

Awww, don’t you just know this crusty bear has a big soft heart buried somewhere under all that chest hair? Ms. Becker’s language does that, with her “tap, tap, tapping” and her light-hearted description of the mouse as “small and gray and bright-eyed.” Kids instantly know they can sit back and relax. This grumpy Bear isn’t as scary as he seems (after all, the mouse isn’t afraid). Only a few lines in, and already we know that these two clashing personalities are here to entertain us – and steal our hearts.


There Goes Lowell’s Party, Esther Hershenhorn

  In the whole of Crumm County, past Piggott’s Peak and Slocum’s Bluff, no one loved his birthday better than Lowell.
     No siree.
     From one spring to the next, past summer, fall, and winter, Lowell rose each morning saying, “Hey, there, sun!” Next he’d X out the date on his trusty calendar, peeking at the pages, gauging the months and weeks to go.

All Esther had to do to zoom us waaay out into the country was include those terrific names:  Crumm County. Piggott’s Peak. Slocum’s Bluff. Add a gung-ho kid who loves his birthday so much he X’s out days on his “trusty calendar” months ahead of time, and who could resist turning the page? I mean, clearly something’s going to rain on the ever-upbeat Lowell’s parade (and boy-howdy, does it ever!), and we’re curious about how he’ll deal with the adversity ahead. Not that we think of all that consciously when reading this (or hearing it read aloud). But that’s what the best writing does. Masterfully - and subtly - manipulates our emotions.


I Hatched!, Jill Esbaum

  A patch of light!
     One final peck.
     I give a shove and s-t-r-e-t-c-h my neck.
     Then–

     CRACK!

     Ta-da!
     My head pokes through.
     At last, I’m hatched!
     Hello, what’s new?
     ME!

Nothing subtle here. Just a bouncy little killdeer in a rush to break free and launch himself into the world. Reviewers have been great about recognizing the energy and exuberance I was trying to capture, so … hope it works for anybody else who reads the book.   :)

Honestly, the manuscripts I’ve had the best luck with are the ones with the strongest voices, the ones I was a wee bit embarrassed to send an editor, lest they think I was crackers….

Go ahead, aliens. Give it your best shot.

So when it comes to voice, my best advice is this:  Reveal the story in the voice that serves it best. Whether that voice is a dino with an attitude, a baby with his own language, or a down-home twang, go ahead. Let ‘er rip.

Jill Esbaum

P.S.  Congrats to Liz Steinglass, WINNER of an autographed copy of I HATCHED! Thanks, everybody, for entering!

P.P.S. And you can still win a signed copy of Crystal Chan's BIRD by entering our contest, here! Hurry!

Voice and a Voice Poem

Today, I’m kicking off a new series of posts on voice, the third of the Six Traits of Writing. We addressed the first trait, ideas, in a series of posts that Carmela kicked off. Our series on the second trait, organization, began with Jeanne Marie’s post. Visit them if you'd like to catch up.

On to voice!

Discussions about voice often include vague statements like “I’ll know it when I see it.” But voice is not really so hard to explain. Just as we each have a unique speaking voice, we each have a writer’s voice that is all our own.

Your writer’s voice develops over time, both from being yourself and from making a conscious effort to express your thoughts in new ways. Your ideas and the words you use to describe them come from your own unique experience and perspective. Your writer’s voice shows your personality through point of view, word choice, and language patterns, including rhythm and rhyme.

A character’s voice is not necessarily the same as the author’s voice. If it were, all our characters would sound the same.

It’s Poetry Friday, so I’m adding a voice poem I wrote (in my writer’s voice) about the voice of a character who might be me. You decide.

I Have a Voice

I have a voice.

My voice is mine.

And when the creeping tendrils twine

around the everblossom vine,

I’ll whisper in the darkest night.

I’ll shout out loud in broad daylight:

I have a voice.

My voice is mine.

I’ll buzz with fuzzy bumblebees.

I’ll chirp with chickadee-dee-dees.

I’ll sing until the stars all freeze:

I have a voice.

It’s mine alone.

I’ll laugh when I am on my own.

I’ll share with wild unruly bears,

elephants and dogs and hares,

even if nobody cares.

I’m generous that way.

I have a lot to say.

Today’s Poetry Friday Roundup is at No Water River. Enjoy!

JoAnn Early Macken

Full-Body Workout

To quote April Halprin Wayland's wonderful Friday post about clutter-busting:

Before we get started, run over and read the dynamite interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith by Teaching Author Carmela Martino and enter our latest book give-away! Note that the deadline for entry is 11 pm (CST) Wednesday, February 2, 2011. Make sure you follow the rules by posting a comment at the bottom of that blog post and include your contact information. And you must have a USA mailing address.



Teaching Author Esther Hershenhorn kicked off our current topic with a great intro to 6 + 1 Trait Writing: Organization. Teaching Author JoAnn Early Macken followed with Getting Your Ducks in a Row. Teaching Author Mary Ann Rodman's It Just Looks Disorganized came next. All include practical and inspiring Writing Workouts, so check them out.



As the absolutely least organized of the Teaching Authors (the one who took my son to preschool on Friday when there was no school; the one who this week mailed our new church registration to my mom and a handmade card from my daughter to the church; the one who "ran" to amazon and purchased my copy of Clutter Busting as soon as I read April's post) -- it is my pleasure to tackle this topic last.

In fact, my college classes this week (when they haven't been canceled due to snow) have been learning about essay and paragraph organization.  Our text suggests the most obvious methods: chronological; spatial; most to least important or, conversely, least to most important.  We have also been stressing the use of appropriate transitions. 

To illustrate how writing instruction is similar across the grades, my daughter brought home the following exercise from kindergarten on Friday:

(She did not quite have time to finish, but you get the idea.)

It took me a long time to realize that, as a writer, I crave the structure that I lack in my real life.  Even as a kid, I loved the predictability of the series books that I read voraciously.  My favorite genre is the mystery.  If actual life is rarely neat and tidy, I want pretend life to be perfectly so!

The three-act screenplay format is widely applicable to nearly every form of fiction.  Extrapolating on this concept, I feel exceedingly comfortable with the teaser-plus-seven-acts format of Days of Our Lives, the predictable mid-break (Act 3) cliffhanger, the end-of-day "tags" (hooks), and all of the soapy norms for handling recap and flashbacks.  I also wrote Nancy Drews tailored to a very specific word count, structure, and, of course, the rules of Nancyland.

When it came time to write a novel of "my own," I decided to hang it on the structure of a science fair project report.  The big plus to this method was that the general plot trajectory was laid out for me from the outset.  Of course there were obvious drawbacks.  The book started to drag quite a bit in the 'methodology' section, and it wasn't until a brilliant critiquer suggested that I add interstitial chapters that it really began to come together.
 
Since I began writing MIND GAMES, I've sought out children's books written in 'nontraditional' (i.e., nonlinear formats): Walter Dean Myers (screenplay), Lauren Myracle (instant messages) Paul Fleischman's multi-POV wonders, novels in verse.  As ebooks and apps become increasingly popular, interactive elements will certainly become more widely used, as in the Choose-Your-Own adventure books that were beloved in my youth.

Picture book writers have both the structure and the stricture of the 32-page format.  Novelists have the privilege (and the curse) of a wide-open world of possibilities! --Jeanne Marie

Writing Workout

For the busy multitaskers among us, we must often choose between finding time to do a "writing workout" or a more traditional workout of the full-body sort.  I have devised a semi-solution to this dilemma by converting my workspace to look like this:

What changes can you make to the organization of your life to make your work easier, more dynamic, or more productive?  Please share!

Let's get Organized! Or not.

Hi there--and happy Poetry Friday!

Before we get started, run over and read the dynamite interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith by TeachingAuthor Carmela Martino and enter our latest book give-away!  Note that the deadline for entry is 11 pm (CST) Wednesday, February 2, 2011.  Make sure you follow the rules by posting a comment at the bottom of that blog post and include your contact information.  And you must have a USA mailing address.

TeachingAuthor Esther Hershenhorn kicked off our current topic with a great intro to 6 + 1 Trait Writing: Organization. TeachingAuthor JoAnn Early Macken followed with Getting Your Ducks in a Row.  TeachingAuthor Mary Ann Rodman's It Just Looks Disorganized came next.  All include practical and inspiring Writing Workouts, so check them out.

Well...I can certainly relate to our topic of Organization as it relates to both writing and life.  For example, in my writing, Girl Coming in for a Landing, was essentially a shoebox full of poems all written in a teen voice when my editor at Knopf accepted it.  She literally spread the poems out on the floor of her office in New York while I spread them out on my floor in California and we talked about how best to tell this teen's story.  

Finally, we organized it around a school year divided into Autumn, Winter, Spring, with (roughly) an equal number of poems in each section.

I could analyze the organization of each of my books in this post.  But for me (unlike Mary Ann Rodman, who deliciously describes what she needs to research her books) it also comes down to decluttering my house and my office (especially the floor around my desk!) so that my mind is free to let each poem or the story tiptoe out.

I don't have much trouble getting rid of unused kitchen utensils and coffee mugs.  I'm happy to give old dresses to the Goodwill.  But paper paralyzes me.  

Or paper DID paralyze me, until I read Clutter Busting--Letting Go of What's Holding You Back.  

Actually, I'm lying. I hired the author and Clutter Buster extraordinaire Brooks Palmer to help me get out from under the paper clutter of my office first.  Then I discovered his book--which is gentle.  And gentle is what I need to be with myself, whether it's about the pile near my desk or the book I'm afraid to keep writing.x

I decided to ask Brooks how he organized his Clutter Busting book.

"I didn't know how to write a non-fiction book. But I felt the need to write my clutter busting book.  So I wrote it stream of consciousness.  I enjoyed the process.  But when people read what I wrote, it made very little sense to them.


So I used my clutter busting process on my book. I went through page by page and cut out anything that wasn't an encouragement for the reader to let go of their clutter.  At one point I printed up all the pages and spread them out on my living room floor.  I read the book thinking, "Is this serving the book or not?"  When I found clutter, I cut it out with scissors.

As I got rid of things that weren't serving the book, the book started to make sense.  I could have tried to organize what I originally wrote to make this happen.  But that would have kept in the things that weren't making it a strong book and it would have been bogged down with chaos.

As I got the book down to its bare essentials, I was able to start moving pieces around in a way that continued to serve the book.  By the time it got to a publisher, it had a strong impact because it just had the things that mattered.  Luckily the publisher assigned the book to an editor who continued the letting go process.  And then I got to do one last clutter busting of the book.

Essentially it was the chopping away of the clutter in the book that gave me the clarity to make it a powerful book."

Thank you, Brooks (his comic above reminds me not to stuff too many things into my life...or my books).  Now I see how I need to clutter bust my current novel.  Yikes--lots of decluttering ahead!  But at least I understand what my book needs...it needs LESS to be stronger.

And my office?  Now I hire Brooks once a year to keep me on track.

before...

                      after!

 WRITING WORKOUT
Are you stuck on a picture book, a short story or a poem?

Try this: cut out half the words.

Really.  Then tell us about it!

And finally, here's today's poem:

CLEANING OUT

by April Halprin Wayland

this big shirt  

used to fit

but today I swim around in it—

out go all my give-away clothes

now my closet opens wide

it's easy to find the clothes inside

hangers dangle

unoccupied

this old idea

used to fit

but today I reconsider it—

out goes what I used to know 

now my life is opened wide

it's clean-swept, wind-blown...simplified—

it's easy to find the me inside

poem and drawings (c) 2011 April Halprin Wayland (except the comic by Brooks Palmer)

It Just Looks Disorganized

     If you looked in my office, you might start dialing the number for the show Hoarders.  Disorganized as it may appear, everything in there relates directly to a writing project.

     A quick inventory would include: Gibson Girl prints, three nun dolls, turn-of-the-century textbooks, s 16 Magazines 1963-68,  The Searchlight Cookbook, copyright 1931 ("Spring Beauty Salad, anyone?), a 1940 edition of Hymnal for Christian Worship, a WWII vintage volume, Song and Service Book for Ship and Field; Army Navy (did the Marines and Coast Guard have their own editions? reproductions of old Sears & Roebuck catalogs, an actual mostly intact copy of the Sears Fall 1941 catalog, a Sherwin-Williams store display book, Colors and Rooms for Your Jet Age Home (very Mad Men!), floor plans for 1920's homes...and that's just the top layer. BTW, the source for 99% of this stuff was the online Goodwill auction site (www.shopgoodwill.com) I got most of this for under five dollars.

    In case you couldn't guess, I was once a librarian. I am now an ex-librarian who writes historical fiction.  I also live in an area where library funds are nil, the collections meager, and interlibrary loan fees astronomical. So I maintain my own research library.  I always have three books in my head; the one I am writing, and the next two I have planned. The WWII stuff was for Jimmy's Stars, the nun dolls and hymnals for my current project, and the 60's items for a possible sequel to Yankee Girl. (I said possible!)

    I am something of a chicken in writing historical fiction. So far, I haven't written anything that takes place before the 1880's because I can't find primary sources that old on Shop Goodwill, and previous to that, my family was an illiterate crew so there are no family letters or documents to rely on. (Hence, Karen Cushman will have no competition from me...chuckle, chuckle.)

     It takes me a year minimum to research my books.  Step one is to find a calendar for the year(s) of the story. (You can find these on line using the search term "perpetual calendar"  That calendar is taped to the lid of my laptop, so I can instantly see which day of the week was Christmas, or any other holiday or historical event.

      So once I have my calendar, I start researching and writing in the dates that are important to my story.  My calendar for Jimmy's Stars, in addition to marking off the usual holidays as the dates for certain battles and the day in which they became news in the United States. There was usually quite a gap, due to time zones and wartime censorship. What day did the movie The Sullivans open? (For anything you need to know about every movie ever made, www.imdb.com is a life saver. It's also good for settling movie arguments!)  What days did certain items become rationed?  Filling out my calendar is always step one.


     I also need maps. I usually fictionalize a real neighborhood, in a real town. The Macken Street Hill neighborhood of Jimmy's Stars is based on the place my mother's family lived during WWII, West View. Macken Street Hill was fictional but Pittsburgh is not. I needed old streetcar schedules, maps of "downtown" and where the department stores and theaters were. 


At some point you have to name your characters. I have stacks of 'what-to-name-the-baby" books (which I have learned not to read in public at my age!) There are several websites that can tell you the most popular baby names for any given year, back to 1880. The book I am working on right now takes place in 1925, which means that most of the characters were born between 1907 and 1917. There are

Woodrow and Wilson, for the president, Margaret,  Mildred, Ted (Theodore, again for a president), Dorothy, Muriel, Louisa, etc. You just can't write a book about 1925 with characters named Dillon and Dawn.

     Next I think about dialog. What sort of slang was used, or words that are no longer part of our vocabulary, or have changed meanings?  I was lucky with Jimmy's Stars; both of my parents were still alive while I was writing it, and their speech still reeked of 1943. I grew up hearing such expressions as
"malarkey," "That's just banana oil," and "She's some sad apple." To complicate things, Jimmy took place in Pittsburgh, which has it's own distinct dialect, "Pittsburghese." And yes there are Pittsburghese dictionaries online! To me, the most important elements in historical fiction are how your characters think and speak. Nothing drives me crazier than to read a book that takes place during WWII, with characters using anachronisms (i.e.nerd) or words that have changed meaning.


     Last, and the one that takes the longest (and drives me the craziest) are The Daily Details. What sort of food did they eat.  Even as recently as the 1930's, citrus fruit was a rare treat, due to growing and shipping methods, What were the radio/TV stations and their schedules? What did their homes look like? How were they furnished.? How did the characters dress. What sort of make-up or perfume or patent medicine did they use?  This is where those old Sears catalogs come into play. Originally, Sears was meant as a mail order catalog for those who lived far from anything other than a general store. Up until the 1950s, the Sears catalog sold nearly everything; corsets,tractor parts, bedroom furniture, "smoking jackets," acne remedies, perfume, and my personal favorite, a book in the 1922 catalog coyly titled Advice and Instruction for the Married (and you knew they didn't mean a recipe for "Spring Beauty Salad!) The first Sears & Roebuck catalog was published in 1894, which may explain my hesitation to write about anything before that time. I would be one sad apple without my "Wishbooks" to give me the tiniest details of life in that year.


    After a year or more of research (and I am writing or editing another book at the same time) I start to write. and no matter how thoroughly you think you may have done your homework, something always
comes up that stops you in your tracks. In my current book, I have puzzled over how a town in 1925
with a contaminated water source obtain clean water (I'm talking raw sewage here, so just boiling it wouldn't do the trick). I wrote around that detail, but it was one I would eventually have to address. I stewed over that rotten water for over a year when a casual conversation with a former student pointed me in the right direction.


     Now you might write contemporary fiction. This does not excuse you from doing your homework.  At least half of my research questions are ones you need to answer for yourself before writing one word of your book.  Most of the problems you might have in writing, is in writing too soon, before you know your characters and the setting. A question I always ask a student who is stuck is this: Tell me about this character's bedroom. Now that bedroom may never appear in the story, but they tell you an awful lot about the character. Usually my answers are "I never thought about it" or "Hunh?" I tell them that when they can describe that bedroom from the posters on the wall to the clothes he throws in the closet instead of hanging them up, they are then ready to write.


      Now if you will excuse me, I am logging on to Shopgoodwill.com. Maybe they'll have a copy of Advice and Instruction for the Married for auction today.


Posted by Mary Ann Rodman


    

Writer's Workout

This exercise could very easily take a week if you go crazy with it.  Please adjust the instructions to fit your available time.

Each student is to invent a contemporary character of the opposite sex, and describe their sleeping space/bedroom. The opposite sex thing is important; otherwise most students will simply describe their own room.  When they have finished, have them write a character sketch, based on what they learned from describing the bedroom.

If you have more time, do the same assignment, only this time assign the character a specific year before 1998 (I picked that year because it was before the age of I-pod and teeny cell phones that can do everything except mow your lawn)  Keep the time frame within the last fifty years so that research materials will be easy to find. Again, what have they learned about their character from this exercise.

And if you've really got time to spare (but who does these days?) compare how their characters personalities are affected by their time in history.

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