Tuesdays with Story

Tuesdays With Story Writers Mail, June 28, 2010
by Jen Wilcher

Tuesday Night at the Bookstore

Kim: City of Winter: Hero’s age is unclear. Snotty nose kids are usually younger than thirteen, need to clarify age, scene a bit thin, discussion on how to develop his anger at the ocean, Jack carried on as usual about cinemagraphic writing, landscape levels and referent development, etc. Group moved on to …

Dan: Idolatry: Most liked the dialogue, but some suggest the story could use some compression, street light in a blackout? Patrick suggested “a miracle”, Jack a burning dumpster as the Christmas Star, second wave objections to Mary Magdalene as a stripper, Patrick lead group prayer for divine guidance. As no guidance came we turned to….

Jen: Group applauded big improvement in the rewrite of her chapter, most corrections were grammatical, migraines discussed, some objections to type of headache

Randy: Hona and the Dragon: Does a child know what an Equinox is? Is a dragon feline or leonine? Extensive discussion on lengths of sword and daggers, simile for claws, Hona at eleven must not baby talk, possibly change her mis-pronunciation of Firebreath’s name, Jack liked even tone and it quality.

Ann Potter: Memoir: A nasty scene well done, ending in a faint, discussion on how to craft jump-cut to the unconscious/regained consciousness, changes in tense useful but not consistent.

Jack: Bray’s Head: Problem with old men’s dialogue, sounds southern, Andrea says what Jack reads is an improvement over what he writes. He hopes she takes shorthand.

Two new members joined us:
Aaron Boehm
Interesting in film, sci-fi and horror stories and screen play

Skye Winspur
Interested in fantasy, sci-fi and historical fiction.

Who’s Up Next
June 29: Fifth Tuesday at Terry and Jan Hoffman’s home in Oregon.

July 6: Jerry Peterson (chapter 11, For Want of a Hand), and Greg Spry (novella/part 2, Goodbye, Mars), Pat Edwards (poems), Elijah Meeker (???) , Karen Zethmayr’s son (???), and Clayton Gill (chapter 13, Fishing Derby).

July 13: Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon) Ann Potter (chapter), Jack, Patrick, Andrea with Dan as alternate as time allows

July 20: Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon), Nicole Rosario (???), Jen Wilcher (chapter, Memories Awakened), Judith McNeil (radio play/part 2, “South to Sunday”), and Patrick Tomlinson (short story/part 2, “Downloading Death”).

August 6: Kim Simmons (chapters 41-42, James Hyde), Jerry Peterson (chapter 12, For Want of a Hand), Greg Spry (novella/part 3, Goodbye, Mars), Randy Haselow (chapter, Hona and the Dragon), Amber Boudreau (chapter 15), and Clayton Gill (chapter 15, Fishing Derby).

Fifth Tuesday
It’s next week, June 29 at Terry and Jan Hoffman’s place in Oregon. Terry also email you a map. If you have not already done so, email Shel Ellestad, and tell him you are coming and who you’re bringing as a guest. Yes, guests are welcome. Also tell him what you are bringing for the food table.

And write your Fifth Tuesday challenge story now – a commencement speech aimed at a target audience such as ghouls, kindergarteners, Divas, trolls . . . whatever group you wish. Your choice. 500 words or less. Email your story to Jerry Peterson by 6 p.m. Friday.

Special event
TWS alumnae Leslie Huber will be in Madison on July 8 to promote her book, The Journey Takers. It’s a family history unlike any other you’ve ever read before.

Several of us will have dinner with Leslie at 5 p.m. at Cafe Porta Alba. That’s in the Hilldale Mall area and about a 10-minute drive north of the Sequoyah branch library where Leslie will do an author talk and signing at 7:00. Come and be with us.

Short story writers
You want to read short stories written by people outside our writers group? You want to get the best of your short stories published online and maybe in print? Check out Short Story America. Here’s the link: http://www.shortstoryamerica.com/index.html

You can subscribe for free. That’s Step 1. Once you’re a subscriber, then you can submit your stories.

Character Tags in Fiction (thanks Alicia)

In the parlance of fiction writing, a character tag is a repetitive verbal device used to identify a character in the mind of the reader. More than a simple description, a character tag calls to mind aspects of the character’s personality and uniqueness. Uriah Heep’s clammy hands, his constant hand rubbing, and his use of the word “humble” to describe himself and his mother are character tags that make him unforgettable. Sherlock Holmes and his violin, his shag tobacco, and his uncanny aptitude for noting and interpreting details others ignore, are only three of the numerous character tags that make him live in our imagination.

Character tags may be drawn from any aspect of the character’s appearance or behavior:
voice
gestures
body carriage
dialect and speech mannerisms
hair
clothing
scent
mental state

A sympathetic character who has red hair may be described as having “carrot red hair,” while a creepy character might have “hair the color of dried blood.” Some characters in a novel may appear only a few times, but the most minor character needs a character tag or two to make him memorable. In The Mummers Curse Gillian Roberts introduces a minor character with this description: “didn’t recognize him, but I didn’t think I should be scared. He was polite, his voice low-pitched and confident, and apparently he knew me. Besides, he was elegant. In his early forties, I thought, with prematurely silver hair uncovered despite the freezing wind, and looking none the worse for it. His topcoat was visibly soft, cashmere, I suspected, and his hands, encased in buttery brown gloves, held a leather-bound book with gold-edged pages.” When the character appears again, the author reiterates some of these details, for example, the silver hair that defies the elements, the expensive attire, and the book.

C. R. Corwin’s “Morgue Mama Mysteries” feature a newspaper librarian in her sixties. Many of her character tags have to do with her appearance: “My name is Dolly Madison Sprowls. I’m 68 years old. I’m short, a little dumpy, and I haven’t changed my hairstyle since college. I looked up and found Chick Glass. “I figured that was you, Maddy,” he said. He playfully flicked my Prince Valiant bangs with his fingers.”

Used judiciously, character tags add dimension to the characters and enable the reader to tell them apart. Depending on what mental baggage the reader brings to the story, however, character tags can jar the reader out of the dream and cause annoyance. In the Amanda Pepper mysteries by Gillian Roberts, Amanda is a native of Philadelphia. Her boyfriend Mackenzie is from the South. One of his character tags is that he lapses into his native speech when stressed. Speech tags involving dialect and speech mannerisms can be effective, but Roberts doesn’t just make use of the tag and move on; she has Amanda comment at such length on Mackenzie’s lapses that I grow annoyed at what seems to me to be a display of a misplaced sense of regional superiority.

The Maddy Sprowls character has two character tags that yank me out of the story every time they occur. One is a speech tag and the other involves a habitual gesture. Here are examples:
“Are you saying Gordon was gay?”
“Good gravy, does everything have to be about sex?”
She took the brick…”How much did you pay for it?”
I pawed the air. “It was a steal.”

Every time I read the interjection “Good gravy,” I pictured Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica from the comics. I don’t know if they said it, but that’s what I thought of every time and there are lots of “good gravies” in Dig. The other tag that never failed to jar is “I pawed the air.” Maddy paws the air a lot. Every time I read that tag I imagined a rearing horse. I finally decided that Corwin intended to convey the dismissive gesture one might make while saying “Pshaw!” Character tags are great ways to make fictional characters live, but take care to avoid any that may defeat the purpose of keeping the reader engaged in the story.

Research Oh My! . . . Various members experiences:

Alicia: I did a lot of research for my nonfiction novel, Lawyer Lincoln In Transit to Freedom. As I wrote, I probably used 100 online sites and sources of information such as Goggling names and places. I also used Google images a lot for clothing, furniture and other period details. I read portions of a lot of books, 25 or so, many through inter-library loans. Some included Lincoln’s writings or words via his friends and acquaintances. This gave me a good feel for the way he spoke, in distinctly long sentences, with phrases injected between the noun and verb and sometimes country style. I found a detailed legal database at the U law school, which recorded all of Lincoln’s cases and scoured it for a few hours. I made a trip to Springfield Illinois and visited Lincoln’s law office, the Old State Office Building which includes the old Illinois Supreme Court, Lincoln’s home, the living outdoor museum of New Salem, Lincoln’s fathers’ farm and Dr. Rutherford’s home in Oakland, Illinois (closed; could only walk around outside and peer in through windows).
I also went to the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. These helped me find details I would not have had otherwise (e.g., the green fabric laid over law office and court tables is called baise cloth; men used a brass boot jack to remove their boots when entering the court anteroom; Stuart & Lincoln kept a buffalo coat for riding the circuit in the fall; Lincoln and other circuit lawyers once had a pillow fight with the judge where they were lodging; Lincoln’s hat was made from beaver fur and perhaps later, silk.) The law office, the Supreme Court and New Salem were very helpful — like literally walking through history. The main difficulty I encountered was that most information dealt with Lincoln as President and my book is set in the decade of 1837-1847. Although I have legal background, I did not do much legal research. I did find the original court opinion of Bailey v. Cromwell from 1847 by requesting it from the state law library. It cost me about $3.00. There wasn’t regular case research available. Although my book dealt with the law, I used only a few actual legal cases but otherwise used larger concepts such as habeas corpus, generic evidentiary rules and the fact that Black Code statutes existed in Illinois at the time. “Knowing the law” was only a slight advantage in my research. I think I was hampered by not being a historian. There were details I tried to find but couldn’t and didn’t know where else to look. For many of Lincoln’s physical movements and mannerisms, I simply imagined one of my brothers, who practically has Lincoln’s exact frame except for being an inch shorter. I think I would keep better records of everything I looked at as I often found myself going back, trying to find a web site or book which referenced a detail that I initially ignored but later wanted to use.

Anne Allen: Where I (for one) do my research for writing – well, the world wide web is the greatest thing since ground beef in that area. My mystery is set in a small Iowa town, and while I know Iowans fairly well, I lived in a largish college town, not a small rural one. But most towns these days have their own websites, so I looked up several that were similar to my imaginary one, finding out such things as what kinds of stores locate there, how large rural county sheriffs’ departments are, etc. When I write historical articles (which is where I’ve been published most often), I find a lot of supportive material on the web. And there is something you can access from home through the library, called Newspaper Archive, that lets you look up newspaper articles in many, many communities (not, unfortunately, all I’ve looked for, but some surprising ones) going back into the 19th century, and forward to the late 20th. And don’t hesitate to use Wikipedia; while it has its problems, a lot of its articles are quite accurate, and you can usually double check anything that sounds wrong through other sites.

Newsletter duty roster:
July – Greg
August – Clayton
September -Kim

The Last Word (thanks Jerry)
Here’s another great word courtesy of Wordsmith Anu Garg:

persnickety
PRONUNCIATION: (puhr-SNIK-i-tee)

MEANING: adjective:
1. Fussy about minor details.
2. Snobbish.
3. Requiring keen attention to detail, as a job.

ETYMOLOGY: Variant of pernickety (the spelling still used in the UK). Of unknown origin.

USAGE: “My father and I are both persnickety. We don’t like noise in the kitchen, and a few grains of salt on a tablecloth make us shiver.”
Cedric Vongerichten; Le Fils; New York Magazine; Sep 20, 2009.

“And what will the filmmakers eventually get for more than 12 hours of painstaking persnickety work?”
Tina Maples; “Dillinger”: Gangsters Hit the Library For a Long Shoot; Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, Wisconsin); May 28, 1990