Wednesday Writing Workout: CONNECTING WITH YOUR CHARACTER EMOTIONALLY

I owe buckets of thanks to award-winning children’s book author and my friend Ruth Vander Zee for contributing today’s hands-on WWW: "Connecting with Your Character Emotionally."  Ruth’s hands-on exercise will help you probe your heart so your character’s story resounds in readers’ hearts.

Ruth’s newest book, NEXT YEAR (Creative Editions, 2017) is the story of one young boy who finds a way to endure the next four years of dust storms and drought following the April 14, 1935 dust storm known as “Black Sunday.” Like the characters whose stories Ruth tells in her other works - ERIKA’S STORY, ELI REMEMBERS, ALWAYS WITH YOU and MISSISSIPPI MORNING, Calvin and his family face their tragedy while clinging to hope and acting courageously. Throughout the book, Ruth’s lyrical text is paired with the gorgeous artwork of Gary Kelley, giving readers a moving and memorable reading experience.

  

A resident now of Coconut Grove, Florida, Ruth believes her love of stories was kindled at the kitchen table of her childhood home on the south side of Chicago.  Her father told stories and had the ability to make each day’s activities sound like an ongoing novella. She considers herself a Late Bloomer, deciding to earn a college degree in education at the age of 40, then later to write stories for children. Those two decisions proved life-changing, not only for Ruth, but for legions of young readers, the fellow children’s book writers with whom she generously shares her expertise and experience and all who come to know her. 

In today’s WWW below, Ruth shares how she delved into the characters in her stories in ways she would have never dared.

Thank you, Ruth, for gifting us with an exercise to get both us and our readers feeling.

Esther Hershenhorn

P.S. Hours are running out to enter our Giveaway for the 2018 Children’s Writers and Illustrator’s Market! Click here to enter if you haven't already.

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CONNECTING WITH YOUR CHARACTER EMOTIONALLY

When I was writing my first book, I received this critique: “You are writing an amazing story, but I don’t feel anything.”  That was the worst and best critique EVER.  It got me delving into the characters in my stories in ways I would never have dared. 

I had a habit of holding my characters off a bit.  It’s safer that way.  Because, truth be told, finding the hearts of my characters meant finding myself in those characters.  And that brought me to places I had legitimately forgotten, chose to forget, avoided, and dismissed as unimportant.  However, when I dug up that stuff, my characters became alive.  I probably saved myself a lot of counselling fees.

For instance, when I was writing Erika’s Story, the protagonist told me that “a woman picked me up and cared for me.”  If you know the story, this child was thrown from a train.  The woman she mentioned took her home, cared for her and raised her to adulthood.  But for her to dismiss her by calling her “a woman” gave me pause. 

To write that one paragraph, I began the exercise I am sharing today.  I have done this same process with every character I have written.  Picture book writers have very few words to convey a lot.  Every word has to count, drive the story forward, and deliver the emotional connection which makes a story great.

I give myself at least a half hour.

Go to a quiet place with a pen and piece of paper.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and sit quietly for a moment. 

Then begin using your five senses.

Go the place you are trying to discover.  In the case of my “woman,” I went to my grandmother.  She was my mother’s stepmother.  She always did the right thing for my mother but my mother had a deep longing to know the love of her real mother.  There were many reasons for that.

So I went to my grandmother’s living room where we often sat when visiting.

I started with what I could see.

With eyes closed, I looked around the room, stood in the middle of the room and turned around several times taking everything in, from the horsehair sofa to the peppermint dish, to the people in the room, wallpaper on the walls…everything.  I took a long time doing this.  Turned this way and that and made sure I didn’t miss anything.

Then I went to the smells…dirty diaper on one baby, latent cigar on my grandfather.

The tastes in the room…the peppermints, the cookies my grandmother always baked.

The touch…the hot tea pot, the feel of the covering on the sofa if I ran my hand one way or the other, the silky hair of my cousin.

The sounds…chattering children, the conversations of a lot of people all happening at one time, my grandfather’s teeth clattering in his mouth.

This can take at least a half hour.

When you feel you have taken everything in, open your eyes and immediately write down, with no restrictions, what you have just experienced through your senses.

Write fast and fill your paper.  When you have put all those memories on paper, go through what you have written and cross out any words which are unimportant.  Leave all important verbs, nouns and adjectives.

Then take those words and write them in a list.

What you are left with is a distillation of a memory you may have never thought of or one that lingers in your heart every day.

You have essentially written a poem of that event.

What I discovered that day…my grandmother was not in my memory.  I’m sure she was there but I could not place her anywhere in my memory.  Her peppermints were there.  Her cookies were there.  I’m sure she brewed the tea.  But she was not there.

That experience informed how I wrote the one paragraph about the woman who picked up Erika.  I sensed her doing right by a girl she did not necessarily love but to whom she gave a lot of care.  Her resoluteness in continuing the care.  How that care could be misinterpreted as nice but not filling an emotional void.  There are many layers in that one paragraph and all need to be said with the greatest economy of words while still delivering an emotional connection to anyone who has experienced something similar.

You are not writing what you lived through but what you lived through is informing your writing. It gives authenticity and honesty to your writing.

This also works particularly well if you are needing to write authentically about a feeling.  For instance, if you remember a time you felt sad and go to the place you felt sad and walk through your five senses, you will have layers of information with which to write.

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Wednesday Writing Workout: Connecting with our Characters

For this, my third and final post celebrating the release of my young-adult historical, Playing by Heart from Vinspire Publishing, I'm sharing a Wednesday Writing Workout based on my experience with not only the novel, but also the nonfiction biography that led to my writing Playing by Heart in the first place.

I've found that whether I'm writing fiction or nonfiction, if I want to create multi-dimensional characters I need to connect with them personally in some way. As I've mentioned before, Playing by Heart was inspired by two amazing sisters who lived in 18th-century Milan, and the novel grew out of my research for a nonfiction biography of linguist and mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi. I was drawn to Maria Gaetana's story because of my interest in math (I have an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science) and in women's history. But when I sat down to write a biography of her, I was stumped. How do you bring a character to life who was born nearly 300 years ago and who lived in a completely foreign society and culture?

The two-volume math text Maria Gaetana Agnesi wrote.
I photographed it at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library in 2008

For me, the answer lay in finding a personal connection with the character. Our mutual love of math was an obvious bond, but it wasn't enough. We're also both firstborn daughters. That didn't feel like enough either. The connection that really clicked for me was Maria Gaetana's relationship with her father. Pietro Agnesi used to hold academic salons in his home for Milan's aristocracy. After discovering Maria Gaetana's talents, he made her a regular part of his meetings, beginning when she was only nine years old. She spoke to his guests about her studies, in Latin, Italian, French, or whatever language her father wanted. By her teen years, she also debated with her tutors about what she'd learned. Maria Gaetana was a shy girl and supposedly hated being made to perform in this way.

Unlike Maria, I wasn't born into an upper-class family. In fact, my Italian-immigrant parents struggled to make ends meet when I was a child. But, like Maria Gaetana's father, when my father learned I had a knack for memorizing things--prayers, songs, baseball stats, etc., he had me "show off" at family gatherings. Like Maria Gaetana, I hated it. After I recognized that we shared that experience/feeling, I was finally able to connect with her as a character and write her biography, which I'm still hoping to eventually see published.

When I decided to take the research I'd done into Maria Gaetana's life and use it as the foundation for a historical romance, I had a new problem. Since the main character of my novel is based on Maria Gaetana's younger sister, musician and composer Maria Teresa Agnesi, I now had to find a way to connect with her as a character. Much less is known about Maria Teresa Agnesi than about her older sister, so finding something we had in common was more challenging.

I've always loved music but I wouldn’t call myself a musician. When I was six, we moved into a house that had an old upright piano in the basement. I used to pick out simple tunes on it, like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” I longed to study piano, but that wasn’t one of the instruments my Catholic elementary school offered for instruction. Instead, I studied the clarinet. I played clarinet in high school marching band and orchestra, but haven’t touched it in decades. I never lost my desire to learn piano though, and even considered studying it as an adult but never did.

courtesy of pixabay

To connect with my character Emilia, who was inspired by Maria Teresa Agnesi, I tapped into the longing I felt as a young girl wanting to learn how to play the piano. I imagined that Emilia had a similar longing to play the harpsichord. And when Emilia suffers a terrible loss, she turns to composing music for consolation in the same way I sometimes do with writing. Emilia is a singer, too. I could relate to that since I sang in our church choir during my teen and young adult years. I used to make up my own songs, too, though I never wrote them down. In a way, writing Emilia’s story allowed me to indulge my fantasy of being a keyboard musician and composer.

(The following YouTube clip is a performance of Maria Teresa Agnesi's Overture II, Ulisse in Campania performed by La Donna Musicale. You can find it online here.)

Now for today's writing exercise:

Wednesday Writing Workout: 
Connecting with your Characters

Part 1: Make a list of your main character's personality traits.
Is she or he shy? Or outgoing?
Sensitive? Or thick-skinned?
(If you need help with this, check out this Big Long List of Personality Traits.)

Now, review the list and see if you can find any traits you share with your character.

Part 2: Make a list of your main character's interests, especially any that set her or him apart from what's typical. Does she like math? Does he like to design clothing?

Now, see if you have any interests in common. If not, can you give your character one of your traits or interests?

(If you come up empty with both parts, check out this article about "2 Simple Ways to Connect with Your Characters.")

When you're done, take a scene from your work-in-progress that's been giving you trouble and rewrite it with your new connections in mind. Then come back here and share your experience in the comments.

By the way: don't forget to do this exercise for your villains, too. If there isn't something about "the bad guy" that you can relate to on some level, your villain will likely come across as flat.

Some of you may have your own tips or tricks for connecting with your characters. If so, please share them in the comments.

And don't forget to enter to win a copy of Playing by Heart if you haven't already done so. Details in this post.

Remember, always Write with Joy!

Carmela

Crafting Character: The Heart-to-Heart Connection

I confess: I found out the hard way just how important characterization is.
I wasted the first third of my Writer’s Journey as I went my merry way manipulating my characters.
Plot derives from character?  What character-plot connection? My manuscript was the exception!
I was One Happy Puppeteer, pulling my characters’ strings non-stop.
I was also One Unhappy Wannabe Author.

Like April, I was fortunate to have some mighty wise teachers who set me straight.
For example, Barbara Lucas, the former Harcourt Brace Jovanovich children’s book publisher, who helped open my eyes to what I wasn’t doing.
“Esther,” she pronounced, after reading my middle grade novel THE CONFE$$ION$ AND $ECRETS OF HOWARD J. FINGERHUT at the Vassar Children’s Book Publishing Institute, “you’re writing above your plot line!  You’re disconnected to your characters.”

Editor Melanie Kroupa illuminated Barbara’s insight a few years later, turning back two of my revisions of the aforementioned novel, but sharing a Nugget that furthered my understanding of how to craft a character.
“Who a character is,” she told me, “gets him INTO Trouble. But…..who a character is also gets him OUT of Trouble!”

By the time I was ready to revise my HOWIE – finally under contract - for Mary Cash at Holiday House many years later, I was a whole lot smarter.

Bobbi speaks the truth: we do need to know our character’s heart.
April does too: we need to know our character’s flaws.
And so does Carla: we need to know the facts of their lives.
JoAnn’s questionnaire helps reveal all three.

It was Marian Dane Bauer, though, who helped me see the light, first in her
WHAT’S YOUR STORY?, sadly out of print now, then next in an all-day seminar.
(Her blog JUST THINKING is must reading.)
Marian taught me: a writer needs to know and put his heart, his flaws, his facts - in other words, his  story, into the story he’s telling in order for that story to resound in a reader’s heart.
Period.
We need to find pieces of ourselves to share with our characters.
“There is one basic question you will need to ask yourself over and over again,” Marian writes in WHAT’S YOUR STORY?  “How would I feel?”

Just look how worn my copy of WHAT’S YOUR STORY? is!

Thanks to Marian, those eyes Barbara Lucas opened years before have stayed open.
Here’s just one example of how I put Barbara Lucas’, Melanie Kroupa’s and Marian Dane Bauer’s wise words to work.

The situation: time was running out; Mary Cash had turned back two of my revisions; I needed an accepted revision to receive the final payment of my Holiday House advance; I needed to connect to my HOWIE!

I focused on Melanie Kroupa’s advice.  To learn just WHO Howie is and what got him into Trouble, I had Howie create a Name Poem – one of my favorite character exercises, and he included it in the book he was writing.
Howie proved to be TOO everything all right – too hopeful, too original, too willing, too intelligent, too enthusiastic. Predictably, his lawn-care business was going down the tubes.
A few of  his uber traits, though, could/would/should surely save his business, his classmates’ businesses and the business contest sponsor’s reputation, not to mention, the day.

Except, where was I in Howie’s story so I could craft him in a true-blue BELIEVABLE organic way that allowed him to solve his dilemma?  I needed to connect with him at his crucial “OH, NO!” moment.

So I created my name poem.

This exercise took me close, but no cigar – as in, revision acceptance and paid-in-full advance.

So out of desperation, I sat down and wrote good ol’ Howie a letter, telling him of the Trouble we both were in. And I mean Trouble with a capital “T.”
(Writing a character, by the way, is yet another one of my favorite character exercises.)
I spoke earnestly.
I needed to know WHY he needed to win the H. Marion Muckley Junor Businessperson of the Year Contest. Or else.

Howie’s answer forged an immediate heart-to-heart connection with mine.
“When I won,” he shared, “I was gonna change the “I” word in my Name Poem to “important.”

Suddenly, I knew what Howie was feeling.  I knew what was at stake.  He wanted to matter.
That knowledge allowed me to craft a character who not only lived on the page, fully-realized.  He could best of all live in readers' hearts.

Here’s hoping sharing the above confession helps you craft characters who can do the same!

Esther Hershenhorn