Month: July 2012

Good morning, writers! Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Von Sanders – Congratulations! You won our Friday drawing for a copy of REAL MERMAIDS DON’T HOLD THEIR BREATH by Helene Boudreau. Please email me your mailing address (kmessner at kate messner   dot  com) so she can send your book.

For those of you who want to dive right into writing today,  Jo’s Monday Morning Warm-Up for the day is here!

And we have not one but TWO terrific Mini-Lesson Monday posts this morning. This one features guest author Anne Marie Pace with wise words on Reading to Write, so be sure to check it out.

And the one you’re reading now features guest author Alex Lidell with a character workshop!  Alex is a YA fantasy writer and author of ABNA Finalist THE CADET OF TILDOR (Penguin, 2013). Learn more at her website: http://alexlidell.com.

Today we will work on describing a character to the reader without stopping the story to give a Miss America introduction.  John entered the room.  He was a rude, grouchy school principal in his late 60s who enjoyed telling everyone about how hard his job is.  Blah.  Let’s do better than that.   

 Let’s see how much we can learn about a character just by what he says about something else.  If we can pull this off, not only will our character be more vivid but our writing will be tighter, since each sentence will do double duty – developing character AND moving the plot forward.

 Take a look at the picture below and then read what five different characters had to say about the scene.  What can you tell about the speaker from his words?

Adam: “35 year old female found supine in cardiac arrest.  Penetrating trauma noted beneath left scapula.  Clothes are blood soaked, wound no longer bleeding.  Asystole was confirmed in two leads.  No resuscitation efforts were initiated.  Time of death 4:32 pm.  The body was left in custody of the local PD.”

Bob: “35 year old female found deceased on third floor apartment of 123 Main St.  Body is bloody, apparently from a single stab wound to the back.  Neighbor reported hearing an argument around 3:30pm, and found the victim “dead” when he went to check on her at 4pm.”

Charles: “35 years old.  Mary Bell was only 35 year sold.  Bless her heart, but I knew something like this was coming.  Kept telling her to just forget John, to move out of the city.  But she thought she knew better.  All the young kids think they know better.”

Derek: “The lady was lying there bleeding and no one was doing anything to help!  I told dad we should bandage her up and he just yelled at me to go home.  That isn’t right.”

Eddy: “She was happy, you know.  She always wanted to die.  Everyday, she kept saying that – over and over and over.  Begging me for it.  Begging everybody for it.  And now she has what she wanted all along.  I even let her wear her favorite dress.  I wanted her to be happy.”

Note that Adam, Bob, Charles, Derek, and Eddy are all talking about the dead woman – not about themselves.  Yet, the WAY they talk about her tells us a lot about them.  Let’s look at how this happens:

Adam and Bob seem to be professionals.  There is no emotion in their voice, and they sound like they are giving a report to someone.  The sentences are chopped and sometimes grammatically incorrect – but not ignorant.  No hesitation, no repeated words, just the facts. 

Although Adam and Bob are both professionals, we can tell that their profession is not the same. Adam is using medical words.  He says “cardiac arrest” and “penetrating trauma” where Bob says “deceased” and “stab wound”.  They are also both covering their basis, but in different ways – it’s important for Adam to justify that the woman is in fact dead (asystole was confirmed in two leads), where as Bob is more concerned about what may have happened before the woman died (neighbor reported hearing an argument).  Most likely, Adam is a paramedic and Bob is a police officer. Do you agree?

Charles is a bit more personal.  He’s calling the woman by name.  Still, he does not seem overly distressed.  Charles is more focused on telling us that he had been right all long, then on grieving.  Why?  Maybe because he is self centered human being who could care less about others.  Maybe he just didn’t know her that well.  What if we add just two words to his statement: “My daughter, Mary Bell…”  Wouldn’t this reaction tell you a lot about him and his relationship with his daughter?  Also, from the way he refers to a 35-year-old woman as a kid, so we can guess that Charles is older.

Derek’s indignation that no one is helping shows us his naiveté about death.  He is likely a child. 

What about Eddy?  Now he’s different all together.  Unlike everyone else who was talking about the scene, Eddy is more concerned evaluating the morality of the murder.  She wanted it.  She wanted to be dead.  Note that he LET her wear a certain dress. Eddy thinks it’s his right and power to decide what other people should wear.  He is emotional, but not empathetic. He repeats words (over and over and over).  Probably someone mentally unstable, right? 

Look how much we learned about each character by listening to them describe something!  Now let’s see you try it.

Describe the picture from your character’s point of view, and the rest of us will try and figure what your character is like.  Let’s see how close we get it.  You may use a character from your work in progress on invent a new one.  I recommend doing the exercise twice, from two different character’s POV, to better understand how this works.  If you have any questions, or if I missed commenting on your homework, please email me at Alex@alexlidell.com

Good morning, writers! Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Von Sanders – Congratulations! You won our Friday drawing for a copy of REAL MERMAIDS DON’T HOLD THEIR BREATH by Helene Boudreau. Please email me your mailing address (kmessner at kate messner   dot  com) so she can send your book.

For those of you who want to dive right into writing today, here’s the link for Jo’s Monday Morning Warm-Up.

And we have not one but TWO terrific Mini-Lesson Monday posts this morning. This one features guest author Alex Lidell with a character workshop, so be sure to check it out.

And the post you’re reading now features guest author Anne Marie Pace with wise words on Reading to Write. Anne Marie is the author of the forthcoming picture book VAMPIRINA BALLERINA as well as A TEACHER FOR BEAR and NEVER EVER TALK TO STRANGERS. Learn more at her website.

READING TO WRITE

One day, when my oldest daughter was about 9, she handed me a sheaf of papers with a story scrawled across the pages and asked me to read it.  As I read, I started chuckling.  In her story, my daughter had unconsciously mimicked the books in Ann M. Martin’s Babysitters’ Club Little Sisters series.  The characters’ names and situations were different, but the pacing, style and voice were spot-on.  It made perfect sense.  She had devoured the series, reading the books again and again.  Of course, that voice poured out when she began to write. 

LEARNING TO SPEAK, LEARNING TO WRITE

We learn spoken language through immersion.  Babies are born unable to speak but within a relatively brief time, most can ask for juice and name their body parts.  Learning to write is somewhat more complicated, of course, but few would dispute that most avid readers find writing easier than those who read less. You’ve probably observed this in your students.

 In fact, new writers are sometimes counseled to read one thousand books in the genre they wish to write in before they start to write. Chances are good that you write in a certain format or genre because you enjoy reading it.  If you’ve read enough, the basic conventions of the genre may come easily to you.  But learning by osmosis only takes you so far. You can’t just read the thousand books and hope for the best; you have to pay attention to what you read. If you want to write with more effective craft than just the bits and pieces you’ve picked up along the way, you have to study good writing and figure out just how authors do what they do.

 WHY WE USE MODELS

 Teachers use models with students all the time, whether it’s a model essay or research paper in English class, a model lab report in biology, or a model still life in art.

 Why do we do this for our students?  Sometimes, the model simply sets an expectation:  this is what you should include in your lab report.  Sometimes, it’s freeing.  Writing poetry to some predetermined structure (say, modeling an apology poem on William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say”) means you don’t have to think about structure.  That part is done for you, so you have more time to think about ideas, themes, or word choice.  Sometimes, studying a model is empowering. Breaking the writing down into manageable chunks makes a daunting larger task seem possible.

What’s true for our students is true for writers as well. Studying models sets expectations:  this is the quality of writing I want to aim for.  It’s freeing:  I know from my study that chapter books of the kind I’d like to write tend to be about 10,000 words, so I will write in a style that allows me to tell a fully-developed story in that number of words.  And it’s empowering:  writing a novel is a huge task, and I don’t know how to do it, but I can learn, one step at a time, from studying the best.

 HOW TO USE MODELS

 If this were a longer lesson, I’d want to spend some time at this point talking about using models at the macro-level or story level, the Big Picture.  However, this isn’t a week-long workshop, so if you would like more on this, I’ll recommend two books:  HOOKED by Les Edgerton and Ann Whitford Paul’s WRITING PICTURE BOOKS.  Both make excellent use of models in their discussion.

What I’d like to do instead is give you some examples of reading-to-write along my own writing journey, in hopes that they might inspire you to do something similar, in whatever way they might work for you. 

About eight years ago or so, I decided to recast a short story I’d written into a middle-grade novel. I had the plot, characters, setting, etc. already laid out (in short story form), but I was having trouble beginning.  So I filled in this sentence:

The readers who will like my work probably liked __________ and ___________.

 In this case, the answer to one of those blanks was Patricia MacLachlan’s SARAH PLAIN AND TALL.  (Yes, a collective sigh at its glory is appropriate here.) I pulled it off the shelf and began to take notes.

 Chapter 1 10 short pages; around 200 words per page; total for chapter around 1400 words

 Introduces immediately that Mama is gone, that novel is set in the past (fire), time of day, dogs “Did Mama sing every day?” asked Caleb.  2nd paragraph–that years have passed since Mama died, that Anna has been “raising” Caleb and is somewhat tired of it. Sets up that Papa has changed

a few sensory details fill in.  Interesting that they are sound details, maybe to replace the missing song – but they are not beautiful sounds, a “hollow scraping sound,” the crackling of a log breaking apart

 humor–caleb looks like bread dough with hair

 worst thing about Caleb takes her into memory of Mama’s death, which take her to description of setting and how now it’s winter but it has seemed like winter since Mama died

Caleb brings her back to the present, talk more about Mama, she starts to cry but Papa comes in

 Life continues, with small brief details Then Caleb asks Papa about singing—Papa says he’s forgotten but here’s a way to remember–tells about Sarah. Sarah’s letter is brief, poignant, more literary than factual.

 end of chapter loops back to the singing “Ask her if she sings, I said.”

Some notes were directly helpful, other were less so.  But as I thought about SARAH’s first chapter, two points stood out:  the importance of sensory detail and how MacLachlan picked them to highlight Caleb’s and Anna’s emotions, and the looping from the first sentence to the last, with the motif threaded in (in this case, singing).  When I began to write, this is what came to me:

            The scents of ginger and molasses curl around me like a patchwork quilt, warming the kitchen in the way that only the smell of baking cookies can do.

            I can’t help remembering how ginger cookies are Billy’s favorite, how he had a sixth sense about them.  Even if he was working way up the hill, he would manage to bound into the kitchen as soon as the first batch was pulled from the oven.  He would eat half the tray in one fell swoop, until Mama slapped his hand away and told him to save a few for Christmas Day. But as I open my mouth to say so, I see the tightness of Mama’s lips and her tired eyes and know she is already remembering the same thing.  I shut my mouth again, drawing the thought back inside me tightly. 

            Billy isn’t here this year.  He isn’t here now, and he won’t be here for Christmas, and he won’t be here in the New Year.  And maybe never.

            Mama wraps a towel around her hand and reaches into the oven to pull the tin baking sheet from the oven.  She bangs it on the table to loosen the cookies, a little harder than maybe it needs to be banged.  I wonder if she’s wishing she hadn’t baked ginger cookies at all.

            But maybe she’s hoping like I am–hoping that, wherever Billy is, that the smell of ginger cookies will drift like smoke just as far as he has drifted, will seek him out and tap him on the shoulder, as if he were just up on the ridge, and lead him back to our kitchen.  And he’ll follow that smell to the railroad track, he’ll swing onto a passing car and he’ll ride the rails back to Gordonsville, he’ll hitch a ride as farther more along as he can hitch, he’ll make the rest of the way on foot up the road and into the hollow. 

            He’ll find his cookies waiting, and find me waiting, too.

That exercise helped me shape that passage, which at the time I thought was a first chapter (after many revisions, it’s now just a section in the middle of the manuscript).  But I also used my notes on a smaller level.  Take a look at these lines from SARAH.

            “Well, Papa doesn’t sing anymore,” said Caleb very softly.  A log broke apart and crackled in the fireplace.

 In simple terms, it’s dialogue followed by a bit of scene-setting.  To me, it has more depth; that particular image of the breaking log emphasizes the brokenness of Anna’s and Caleb’s family because of their mother’s death.  If it were just a question of word count or pacing, MacLachlan could have used a whistling teakettle or a flickering light or Papa’s stomping boots outside to fill in that spot, but she didn’t; she chose a breaking log.  Now, I have absolutely no idea if that choice was intentional or if I’m reading something into it that MacLachlan didn’t intend.  For our purposes, that doesn’t matter.  What I learn from this bit is that I can make conscious choices about my words to give them deeper meaning.  Thus I chose to have my main character imagine the scent of baking cookies drifting outside and even across the country, mirroring her brother’s journey. 

 ANOTHER WAY TO GROW YOUR CRAFT THROUGH READING

 An exercise I have occasionally done involves writing in the style of another author–not to plagiarize, but simply as practice.  There’s not enough room to go into that exercise in depth here, but if you are interested, you might check out these blog entries of mine from February.  The first link leads you to the writing I did while doing this exercise and the second link discusses its benefits for me.

http://annemariepace.livejournal.com/298796.html

http://annemariepace.livejournal.com/298717.html

TODAY’S ASSIGNMENT:

 Fill in the blank:

 The readers who will like my work probably like __________ . 

 Study the opening section or chapter of whatever work you used to fill in that blank.  What about that work do you think readers respond to?  Why does it work so well?  What reaction does it evoke in you?  HOW?  What specific techniques does the author use to make it work?  How can you apply what you have learned to your own writing?

 Now take a paragraph from your work-in-progress.  Use your answers to the above questions to help you revise it into a stronger, more effective piece of writing.

 If you decide to share your efforts with us, please let us know what book/poem/story you were studying and what you learned from it, as well as your new writing.

Welcome to another Friday at Teachers Write!  We have another book giveaway today – this time from author Hélène Boudreau.

To enter the drawing for a copy of REAL MERMAIDS DON’T HOLD THEIR BREATH, just leave any comment on this post by 11pm EST Saturday, July 7th. I’ll draw a winner over the weekend & announce it on Monday.

So…how was your week?  Did it get swallowed up in sparklers and fireworks?  Or did you get some writing done, even with roasted marshmallows stuck in your hair?  (Or am I the only one who always ends up with sticky hair after campfires?)

Fridays here are a chance to relax and share comments about our progress, goals, accomplishments, and whatever else is on your mind.  If you’d like feedback on a snippet of writing, head on over to Gae Polisner’s blog for Friday Feedback, where you can share a few paragraphs of your work and offer feedback to others, too.

 Enjoy your weekend, and remember to check in at Jen’s Teach Mentor Texts blog on Sunday.  I’ll see you back here Monday morning!

Today’s Thursday Quick-Write is courtesy of guest author D. Dina Friedman, whose titles include ESCAPING INTO THE NIGHT and PLAYING DAD’S SONG. Dina grew up in New York City and can be found online at  http://ddinafriedman.com/

When I’m stuck, I generally do one of two things:

I thumb through a book of poetry, writing down lines that appeal to me. It’s important not to think, “Oh, I could write a poem about this,” or “This would be a good thing to say about my character.” I try to simply pick lines that intrigue me, and then free-write whatever images they might bring up. Here are two lines that have worked well for me, but if they don’t work for you, feel free to pick your own.

The day is a woman who loves you…

                                                  –Richard Hugo

When the wind ended …

                –William Stafford

 A variation of the first-line exercise is to pick a line that can repeat itself and use that as a jumping off point. When you get stuck, come back to the original words, generating a list. Some good lines to start with:

 I remember ….

If only ….

I believe in ….

A second thing I tend to do when I’m stuck is look out the window, especially if I’m not at home. “Writing landscapes” helps me hone in on the key details, which are often the small unnoticed things—dust particles in the sunlight, a crumpled leaf, the bird dropping staining a cracked brick step. I try to start by simply describing what I’m seeing, but I  let that writing take me to different places. The initial attempt at literal description helps me hone my visual skills and also challenges me to use evocative, sensory language that goes beyond the physical details and helps to convey metaphor and mood.  

If your window does not jazz you, you can do the same thing by thumbing through a book of landscape photographs. I highly recommend Earth from Above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. You can find many of these images on-line.

Have fun!

Happy Independence Day to our Teachers Write campers in the United States!

Before you start asking questions today, I want to say a HUGE thanks to everyone who ordered signed copies of CAPTURE THE FLAG and my other books from my signing at The Bookstore Plus on Monday. It was SO much fun to sign so many books to familiar names – almost as great as having you all there.

A couple more book-notes before we get rolling today…

 Joanne Levy’s debut novel SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE came out this week! I loved this book (and I love Joanne, who despite having never met me, jumped in and offered to help with Teachers Write organization. “I am an organizational goddess,” she told me on Twitter. “How can I help?”  See? How do you not love someone like that? She ended up pulling together our TeachersWrite Twitter list.)   Anyway, organizational skills aside, she is also a warm, funny, wonderful writer, and you should check out her new book here.

Second, my picture book OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW is a finalist for the Cardozo Award for Children’s Literature, along with four other great books. I’d love it if you’d visit the award website and vote for your favorite, whether it’s my book or one of the others. Here’s the link for that…  On to the Q and A now…

Feel free to sit this one out if you’re busy eating hamburgers and twirling around with sparklers today, but if you have questions, we’re still keeping Q and A Wednesday open, and guest authors Jody Feldman, Hélène Boudreau, Jean Reidy, David Lubar, Laura Wynkoop, and Danette Haworth have volunteered to come by to answer questions. Please visit their websites and check out their books. And be patient with them today, okay? It may be later on when they get to answer questions. I’m sure they have picnics to attend, too!

Teachers & librarians – Feel free to ask your questions in the comments.  Published author guests have volunteered to drop in and respond when they can. And I’ll be around today, too – I hear it’s going to be a rainy Fourth in our part of the world.

Got your pencil sharpened or laptop charged?  Today’s Tuesday Quick-Write is courtesy of teacher, poet, and picture book author Kristy Dempsey, whose titles include ME WITH YOU, SURFER CHICK, and MINI-RACER. Kristy lives in Brazil with her family and is here today to get us thinking & writing about prized possessions and what they say about character.

At the end of this school year the first graders were studying the elements of story through fairy tales. We talked about imagination, we talked about the cultural aspects of fairy tales from around the world, we talked about what gave these characters believable qualities even though the stories themselves might have magical elements. Toward the end of our unit we watched the film, “A Little Princess”. I was rather amazed as the first graders identified that Sara’s locket and the importance it held for her made the story feel believable to them. One student even said, “It’s like her locket held everything her daddy had ever given her and when Miss Minchin took it away from her, Sara knew she still had all that in her heart.”  These first graders understood the importance of emotional truth!

Think of the physical item that is most important to your main character. What does it represent? Now, imagine it being lost or taken away from your main character. How would he/she respond? Sara Crewe’s response, of course, was fairly noble. But what if your character pitched a fit? Or what if he/she embarked on a series of misadventures to try to recoup what was lost? (In fact, one of the funniest scenes in the movie is when Sara’s friends enter Miss Minchin’s office to try to get the locket back.) Write a scene that shows the emotional importance of this physical item to your main character and then show us how he/she responds when it is lost or taken.

I can’t wait to read the serious or funny or fantastical emotionally true scenes you come up with!

Note from Kate: If you don’t have a character from a work-in-progress just yet, you can write this piece about yourself or someone you know.

Good morning! It’s time for a Monday  mini-lesson, but first, let’s announce the winner of Friday’s giveaway.  Congratulations, Margaret Simon!  You’ve won an audiobook of Rosanne Parry’s SECOND FIDDLE.  Please email me your mailing address (kmessner at kate messner dot com) so that Rosanne can send along your book.

Today’s featured author guest is Jo Whitmore, the author of funny middle grade books like D IS FOR DRAMA, ODD GIRL IN, and FRONT PAGE FACE-OFF. Visit Jo at her website: http://www.jowhittemore.com/

Good morning, ladies and gents!

This week we’re pushing back our sleeves and getting up to our elbows in humor.

Let’s start with this statement: HUMOR IS ABOUT THE UNEXPECTED

This is true 80% of the time. The remaining 20% is humor that you know is coming but is still ridiculous enough to make you laugh (A toddler carrying a whiffle ball bat with Dad walking behind him? You just KNOW what’s going to happen)

But for the most part, we laugh at something because we didn’t expect it. It’s an interesting twist on an ordinary situation. You’re taking something familiar to the reader and letting them see it in a new light. That’s humor.

Keep that in mind throughout this lesson.

The four important things to remember about writing humor are:

1. Setup & Execution
2. Timing
3. Word choice
4. Audience

1. Setup & Execution

The setup is the lead-in to a joke. The execution is the punchline.

THE SETUP WILL NEVER BE FUNNIER THAN THE EXECUTION.

In riddle form, setup is usually a question. “What flowers are the best kissers?”

With the execution being the answer. “Tulips.”

In novel-writing, we see setup as narration (in the form of an observation) or dialogue (in the form of banter). Oftentimes, the setup will give no sign that there’s humor ahead (remember: humor is in the unexpected) and may simply be a statement of fact.

Setup: It’s really hot outside.

Execution: I saw a chicken lay a hard-boiled egg.

Was that setup funny? No. Just a simple observation. It’s up to the execution to bring the fun. Setups…so lazy!

When it comes to dialogue, the rule is usually the same, the first character offering an observation that the second one turns into a joke. If the first character poses a question, it’s usually rhetorical OR the answer provided by the second character is a humorous but indirect response.

“Do you think people treat me like a baby?” I ask.

She eyes my plate. “You’re eating pre-cut steak with a spork.”

2. Timing

Timing encompasses both the pause between setup and execution AND the rhythmic beats WITHIN the setup and execution.

If you’re setting up a joke, the execution should follow in the next one or two sentences. Otherwise, the tie breaks down between the two.

Example of bad timing, using an earlier joke:

It’s really hot outside. I know because I went for a walk, seriously craving ice cream…Rocky Road, which is my favorite. But they were out so I got Bubble Gum instead and then on the way home I saw a chicken lay a hard-boiled egg.

We lose the joke.

Just set it up and knock it down.

Your sentence structure should also have a rhythm to it, like poetry. If a setup/execution is too short, it falls flat. If a setup/execution is too long, it falls flat. Read both parts aloud and pay attention to the number of beats you use and how it flows.

And don’t forget the importance of the pause at the END of a joke. It gives the reader a chance to process it and realize you are hilarious.

How do you pause in writing? By letting the characters react. That’s a sign to the reader that they should react too.

3. Word Choice

It’s not just how you say something, it’s WHAT you say. If you’ve heard the “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke, you know there are dozens of answers, some funnier than others. Why? Because of the words chosen for the response.

You want your punchline to be unexpected but not far-fetched. You want ridiculous but not impossible. Readers will suspend disbelief for humor, but only so much.

Okay: My mom cooks the weirdest things. At least no one can say they make a better squirrel pie.

Too far: My mom cooks the weirdest things. At least no one can say they make a better unicorn pie.

Why is that too far? Because if this is a contemporary novel, unicorns don’t exist (sorry, kids). You’re making a joke about something that couldn’t possibly happen.

Also, to bring timing back up…did you notice the rhythm seemed better with the squirrel punchline? It was only one beat off from unicorn, but it flowed better.

Back to word choice.

NEVER SETTLE ON THE FIRST JOKE

You can, and usually will, make a joke better by switching out words in the punchline or going for a completely different punchline. Sometimes, you may have the perfect punchline but the setup just needs to be tweaked to meet it. That joke I wrote about the steak and the spork? I knew that’s what I wanted the punchline to be. I just had to reword the setup to lead into it.

4. Audience

All jokes will not work for all audiences. You have to take into account the age of your reader/gender/intelligence/pop culture awareness/etc when writing any joke. For example, if I’m writing for tween girls, I’m not going to throw in humor about the stock market because most aren’t old enough to know/care what that is. Your setup can usually work for any reader. It’s the execution that will vary. And be careful with sarcasm, especially for younger audiences that haven’t yet grasped the concept. If you MUST use sarcasm with them, make sure to include a gesture that shows the speaker isn’t serious, such as an eye roll.

And there you have the bare bones of humor.

Now go out there and make ‘em laugh!

Assignment choices for this week:

Take the setup for a joke from your current WIP and write three different punchlines for it. If you’re writing a serious piece, take the observation below and write three different punchlines for it:

I don’t get the appeal of clowns.

OR

This adorable picture is your setup.

Caption it with something funny (your punchline)

Want more to write about today?  Check out Jo’s Monday morning warm-up, too. Happy writing!