Tuesdays with Story

TUESDAYS WITH STORY
WRITER’S MAIL FOR JULY 14, 2010
by Greg Spry

Meeting Recap: Tuesday, July 13th – 2nd & 4th
To borrow the immortal words of “Pogo,” “Friday the Thirteenth came on a Tuesday this month.” But it was a good 13th as 13 people gathered at Barnes & Noble for talk of divorce, fairy tales, lobster fishing, science fiction, and the grapes of death. . .

Holly Bonnicksen-Jones started things off with a scene from Coming Up for Air. There was some confusion regarding the phrase “Little Sister Lecture” – we weren’t sure which one was the little sister. Have Liza tune out for a second, not a minute. That’s too long. And the love of Ty isn’t being question, it’s whether Liza is being a good mom. Maybe move some of the ruminating to the scene with the psychologist.

Randy Haselow read chapter three of Hona and the Dragon. Be sure to have Hona tell her friend the name of the dragon, now that she knows it. The dialog had a lot of complete sentences – chop that up a bit. There was a lot of discussion about Hona’s character – should she have more attitude and strength now, or is it all part of the Master Fairy Tale plan to have the character develop more later on? We agreed that the dragon and flying carpet are driving the story now, but it seems to be a quietly building classic fairy tale, and the other elements will come through soon.

Jack Freiburger presented a scene from Path to Bray’s Head. Tighten up a bit – there’s some redundancy about folks not talking, but keep details like the “whine of the winch.” Also, “Immediately I realized” seems too long of a phrase to best serve Sean’s sudden realization that Dick isn’t there. The action was nicely upped at the end with that revelation.

Patrick Tomlinson read a segment of his novel A Hole in the Fence. The humor works well, but an absurd plot or quirky characters are needed sooner to engage the reader. Too much narration, could use more dialog. There seemed to be an odd mix of technological description and nature metaphors, and there were times that the hard core science fiction was conflicting with the fun, humorous bits. Watch the point of view – stick to one character per scene, and be careful of description for the sake of description.

Andrea Kirchman finished things up with chapter 3 of Reunion. Lots of great descriptions and funny lines. There were some continuity issues – can’t describe someone’s face if the character can’t see her face. Take out some of the eye rolls (but keep the last one, where it’s passed on to the children). And why does she throw the grapes away? Have her react, give her an emotional reason to chuck ‘em in the trash.

Who’s Up Next?
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”), Patrick Tomlinson (short story/part 2, “Downloading Death”), and Karl Bryan (short story, “Dubai Stopwatch”/part 2).

July 27: Terry Hoffman (chapter, The Journal), Karen Zachary (Oak Arena), Karl Bryan (short story, “Dubai Stopwatch” part 3), Dan Hamre (either “Afterthought” or “Tractor Jockey”), Annie Potter (chapter, memoir)

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

August 10: Patrick Tomlinson (A Hole in the Fence), Jen Wilcher (???), Holly Bonnicksen-Jones (Coming Up For Air), Jack Freiburger (Path to Bray’s Head), Randy Haselow (Hona and the Dragon)

August 17: John Schneller (chapter 1, book 3), Millie Mader (poem), Patrick Tomlinson (???), Judith McNeil (???), and Aaron Boehm (???).

Next Fifth Tuesday: August 31st, 2010
Still looking for a place for our next Fifth Tuesday feast and festival of writing, August 31. But we’re no longer looking for a writing challenge. We have that: You’re late for work because you overslept. Your boss hates oversleepers, but he does love entertaining stories. Create the most outlandish excuse for why you were late . . . and do it in no more than 400 words.

Got our date on your calendar? Have you started writing your mini-masterpiece?

First Pages (Article talks about writing the first few pages of a story)
by Kate Pepper
Published: August 12, 2005

Context, character and conflict — I call them “the three c’s.” They are the essential fictional elements a writer should braid together on the first page of a story or novel in the quest for a sparkling beginning. If you save all the good stuff for page fifty, but you haven’t held your readers’ attention, no one will ever find out what a great writer you are because they will have already put your work aside.

Your very first readers will be the most jaded: the agents and editors whose help you need to reach the reading public. Generally, agents and editors are so overwhelmed by submissions that they’ll skim just a few pages to find out whether the work is competent and, better yet, magical; more accurately, they’ll have their young assistants make that evaluation. On a practical level, you must engage your first readers or your work will have a form-letter rejection slapped on it and sent back to you. On a creative level, you don’t want your story or novel to begin so slowly or clumsily that it’s plain boring. Writing a good first page is a discipline, but it isn’t as hard as you might think.

Begin by delving right into the story’s action. One of the biggest mistakes new writers make is over-writing their beginnings. There is an inclination to wax poetic about weather or to delve into the thoughts of a character we don’t yet know or care about. If you need to do some pre-writing to get yourself started, go for it, but then set it aside in your personal file of “Gems to Save for Later.” Now, choose an opening moment that will ignite the story in your reader’s mind. Something should be in the process of happening on that first page; it doesn’t need to be momentous, but it should engage your reader’s curiosity.

Context. Quickly give us a sense of where we are — in an urban penthouse; on a farm in summertime; in a space ship; on an ocean liner; looking at a storefront on Madison Avenue; in an office. Identifying the setting will orient your reader; otherwise, he may have to re-read just to put the story into accurate perspective. The moment he has to regroup, you have pretty much burst the bubble of his suspended disbelief and possibly lost his attention all together. If you know your character — let’s call her Marcella — is going to pour herself a cup of coffee, then make sure to place her in a setting where there would be a coffee pot. But don’t just inform us of the context, or setting; integrate it into the action. Action doesn’t need to be dramatic, just the sense that something is happening or about to happen. To echo an old chestnut: action is story, and story is character.

Character. Your character experiences your story’s context; it informs her, and she informs it. If it’s cold, she puts on a sweater and turns up the heat; if it’s hot, she strips to her underwear and opens all the windows (or turns on the air conditioning). If she’s in an office and her feet ache, she still keeps on those toe-pinching high heels; or maybe she stows a pair of fluffy pink slippers under her desk. In the particular, idiosyncratic world of her mind, she experiences her world uniquely. Context and character fuse and play off each other. It’s all in the details, so choose carefully. Think about what you want to show readers as you introduce them to your fictional world. Marcella’s in her office, she’s pouring herself a cup of coffee, her feet are killing her and she’s thinking about those fluffy slippers under her desk. Good, but nothing’s really happening and you’re halfway down your first page. Someone once said that every character must want something, even if it’s a glass of water. Know what your character wants, and set her quest, however minor, into motion.

Conflict. What’s at stake? What does Marcella care about? What does she want? Maybe she’s been up all night with a dying pet and has come into the office to meet an important deadline. She pours a cup of coffee and can smell that it’s burned before it scalds her tongue. She screams at her coffee-brewing secretary, who quits. If we can smell the burned coffee and feel the scald on her tongue, then we’ll also feel her exhaustion and frustration. Despite her loss of control, we’re sympathetic, because her beloved pet is dying at home, alone, while she had to come into work. And now, without the help of her secretary, she’ll be at the office hours longer than planned. The vet’s office closes at six o’clock, but her boss has made it clear that she’ll lose her job if she doesn’t meet her deadline . . . you get the idea. By now, you’re at the bottom of page one and your readers are going to feel compelled to turn the page to find out what happens.

By quickly establishing context, character and conflict, you have set in motion some of the essential fictional elements that will resonate throughout your story or novel. Marcella’s off on her quest, you have conquered another first page and won the hearts and minds of readers who will probably go easier on you next time. But the trick is this: in the future, you won’t need their mercy, because through practice and discipline you have come that much closer to mastery of your craft.

Copyright © 2005 Kate Pepper -Posted Aug. 12, 2005

Kate Pepper
Author of Seven Minutes to Noon
Kate Pepper is the pseudonym of author Katia Spiegelman, who teaches fiction writing at New School University; “First Pages” is based on an original exercise she developed for her workshop. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children. Her most recent Kate Pepper thriller is Seven Minutes to Noon (Signet; May 2005; $6.99US/$9.99CAN; 0-451-21579-6)

For more information, please visit the author’s Web site at www.katepepper.com.

Meet Our New Poet Laureate
We have a new top poet in our country – W.S. Merwin, the appointment made two weeks ago.

Merwin looks the role – a mop of white hair, somewhat bushy eyebrows. It’s as if he had studied the portraits of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and said, “I can look like that.”

But more important than “the look”, Merwin’s a sterling poet who has gathered in a basketful of honors for his work, including two Pulitzer prizes – in 1971 for his poetry collection The Carrier of Ladders and last year for his collection The Shadow of Sirius – and a National Book Award. He got that one for his 2004 collection Migration: New and Selected Poems.

Merwin also served a previous hitch with the Library of Congress, in 1999 as a poetry consultant.

The poet’s muse touched Merwin early. At age 18, he contacted Ezra Pound and asked for advice on what he should do to become a poet. Pound came back with write 75 lines of poetry every day and, oh, by the way, you ought to translate poetry from other languages into English, to learn what a person can do with language. Merwin has done both.

In the 1960s, he became, with Allen Ginsberg and others on the New York scene, a hell raiser. He opposed the Vietnam war. He condemned it. It’s all there in his 1967 collection of poems, The Lice.

In that decade Merwin began writing poems without any punctuation, and then without capital letters, except for the first letter of each line. Said he, “I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page. I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word.”

He also works toward that in the manner in which he writes. No computer. No typewriter. Too inhibiting, says Merwin. He writes with a pencil or pen in a small spiral notebook and on napkins. “It’s the nearest thing to not writing,” Merwin said. “The more self-conscious it [the act of writing] gets, the stiffer it gets.”

Merwin is more than a poet. He’s also a playwright, and he’s written a novel, Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, published in 1998. The novel is in verse, and it deals with Hawaii’s history and legend – Hawaii, where Merwin has lived for the past three decades.

You’re not likely to see much of Merwin, our 17th U.S. poet laureate. He’s a recluse. He has agreed to come to Washington, D.C., in October and give a reading at the opening of the Library of Congress’s annual literary series.

That may be it for his travels as poet laureate.
– Jerry Peterson, posted on his “Talking Books” blog on 7-13

Great Word
Courtesy of Wordsmith Anu Garg:
bibliolatry
PRONUNCIATION: bib-lee-OL-uh-tree)
MEANING (noun): Extreme devotion to books.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek biblio- (book) + -latry (worship).
USAGE: “Bibliophilia: the love, and collecting, of books. No problems there… But watch out. The next step up may be bibliolatry: an extreme fondness for books.”
David McKie; The Baron of Bibliomania; The Guardian (London, UK); May 5, 2008.

epigraph
PRONUNCIATION: (EP-i-graf)
MEANING (noun): A quotation introducing a book or a chapter. ETYMOLOGY: From Greek epi- (on, upon) + -graph (writing).
USAGE: “A Counterfeit Silence includes an epigraph from Thornton Wilder: ‘Even speech was for them a debased form of silence.’”
William Grono and Dennis Haskell; Solitary Writer Randolph Stow Chose Silence; The Australian (Sydney); Jun 1, 2010.

The Final Word
“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.” — Tochee from Pandora’s Star, written by Peter Hamilton