Category: Writing

Amnesia for character development

I finished watching the Dead Boy Detectives. Quite enjoyed it (if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I’m a Neil Gaiman fan). There were lots of fun bits. I want to know more about Kashina, whom the Night Nurse met in the sea monster. I actually liked the Night Nurse, even though her character was drawn to be unlikable.

But the story line I liked most was about the Dead Boys’ living psychic sidekick, Crystal Palace. Not having read The Dead Boy Detectives comics  nor watched the Max Doom Patrol series (in which both the eponymous dead boy detectives and Crystal appear), she was new to me. *** Spoilers below***

A depiction of the interior of the character’s namesake structure as a spoiler buffer.

As the result of a demon possession, when we meet Crystal she has lost almost all her memories. She only remembers part of her name and nothing of her background. The demon has stolen her memories. What really intrigued me was the end of the amnesia plot line. Towards the end. Crystal, who has become a decent human being under the influence of her new friends, gets her memories back and realizes she wasn’t just slightly unlikeable (which she had a vague memory about) but a truly horrendous human being (give people night terrors or make them walk into traffic bad). She also learns about her dysfunctional family and how that had contributed to her toxic personality.

I really liked how the writing played with the potential of the amnesia in character development. Take a slightly blank slate character seeking for their identity. Build up their personality through their new experiences and social circle. even while desperate to remember their past.  In a nod to be careful what you wish for, have them regain their memories (or at least some of them) only to realize their pre-amnesia personality was very different – and one they now despise – and must live with. Kudos to the writers.

Following one’s passions

It’s always fun when something intersects with both my passions for the ancient Mediterranean and writing. Over on WriterUnboxed, Kristin South wrote this nice little piece on episodic passions that gives a great background to the decipherment of hieroglyphs and the roles therein of Champollion (who was monofocused in his passions) and Thomas Young (who was more wide-ranging in his passions) and brings it back around to writing. I enjoyed it greatly (and learned somethings new).

Art, Morality, and (Dis)Comfort

A great OpEd from the NYTimes. Jen Silverman (the author of the OpEd and a playwright/novelist) identifies “a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.” Silverman goes on to say:

When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things. Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort.

In my own teaching, I’ve run into this confusion of character voice with authorial voice.  But the bigger point, that great writing/art is not just a morality tale. I’m reminded of Les liaisons dangereuses which suddenly had a heyday with three movie adaptations, Dangerous Liaisons(1988), Valmont (1989), and later the teen adaptation Cruel Intentions(1999). My impression is that Dangerous Liaisons made the bigger splash, but I preferred Valmont precisely because it wasn’t a neat, little morality play were the bad people got their comeuppance. It had a more complex, perhaps less comfortable ending.

I’ve never been a fan of the comfortable. The comfort zone is not a zone of growth. That’s not to say the comfort zone doesn’t have its very important place (give me a good book, good cup of tea, cat in the lap, and fire in the fireplace). But it’s not the place to spend one’s entire life.

Silverman sums it up beautifully:

But what art offers us is crucial precisely because it is not a bland backdrop or a platform for simple directives. Our books, plays, films and TV shows can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals but allow us to glimpse our own hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain.

We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them.

…the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity.

Toni Morrison’s rejection letters

No, not the letters she received as a writer querying her own work, but those she wrote to authors when she was an editor at Random House (back in the day when authors could/would directly query the publisher). Los Angeles Book Review has an interesting post, not just on that collection and other correspondence she wrote as an editor and her responses to the consolidation of the publishing houses (which gained steam during that period, the 1970’s) and the ill-effects of this consolidation on books.

But perhaps most interesting is the craft advice of her letters. This bit caught my eye:

What Morrison repeatedly stressed, trusting her exceptional acuity as both a reader and writer, is that writing is a skill of its own—one that doesn’t automatically follow from intellectual brilliance, nor from simply being an interesting or important person. She told one young writer that his ideas were good, but warned that concept was the first and lowest hurdle he would face:

“Your work needs force—some manner of making these potentially powerful characters alive and of giving texture to the setting. Giving details about the people—more than what they look like—what idiosyncrasies they have, what distinguished mannerism—and details about where the action takes place: what is in the room, what is the light like, the smells, etc.—all of that would give us texture and tone.”

I do recommend hopping over and taking at look at the whole thing on LABR.

The Parable of the Pots

My father pointed me to this parable (apparently the actual experiment was about photography, but the originator of putting the parable out there changed it to ceramics):

There’s a famous business-book parable about “quantity leading to quality”: in a ceramics class, one group of students get told they’ll be graded on how good their very best pot is, and another group are told they’ll be graded simply on how many pots they made, without even checking their quality.

At the end of the experiment, of course, the “quantity” group had made much better pots – because they’d been working and practicing every day, so we’re told – while the “quality” group didn’t even make one good pot, because their perfectionism had stopped them getting their hands dirty and learning as they went.

This could easily be told of writing. Certainly I’ve run across many students who are so concerned about getting it right/perfect that they are stuck frozen and unable to complete their writing. It fits in with the notion of 10,000 hours to master something. Clearly you need to worry about quality along the way (editing stage for writing), but it’s important not to let that keep you from that initial stage of getting words on the page to play with and polish.

So you got an offer…

Might as well round up the week with one last WriterUnboxed post. Kasey LeBlanc posted Tuesday “What to Do After Receiving an Offer of Representation: A Comprehensive Action Plan.” It looks very  valuable, alas not (yet) for me. My most recent reject arrived Monday. It didn’t really impact me emotionally, because it was a query 206 days old and one I had marked CNR (Closed, no response) at 120 days (the default CNR on QueryTracker) so had long given up on it. BTW, QueryTracker itself is a very valuable tool when querying agents. I’d highly recommend the paid version (which gives access to further data about agents), though there is a free version. The paid is only $25 a year and supports a valuable service.

The Hook

Still catching up on my Writer Unboxed reading and came across Sarah Callender discussing a book that hadn’t hooked her at the start (but she kept reading because it was for her book club). In retrospect, she says,

These sentences did not pique my interest or ground me in the story. The narrative voice was dry, and I didn’t immediately see a desire or a conflict in Rask. And where on earth were the aliens?!? I simply could not get my bearings.

Of course, after listening to the whole story, the style, the narrative distance, and the rather “blah” collection of opening details made sense, but perhaps Diaz was giving readers too much credit? Perhaps he trusted that readers would stick with him, would trust his storytelling, no matter what? But what if they didn’t? What if he lost readers because they couldn’t get their bearings in the story?

Callender got me thinking again about openings. What makes a good opening? What will help hook readers to keep reading?

(Just have to get off my chest:  I do hate the impatience of our society. Not just with book openings. How the opening weekend so defines the success of a film. The first primaries/caucuses define the winning candidate (I remember when that wasn’t the case). Etc. Okay, enough griping about the state of the world. )

In my writing class, I had the students do an exercise of generating 20 opening lines (adapted from a writing course I took many, many years ago). The guidance was:

The only criteria are that they must be active, contain if not a name, then a suggestion of a character, and not be 20 of the same thing.

Like a Freewriting Exercise, don’t think about it too hard. The idea here is write ’em fast and not try to control them very much. Turn off the brain that wants to make sense of the images that pop into your head. However absurd, dark, bland…write them down.

If you get stumped…then you’re trying too much to use your analytical brain to do this. Stop analyzing and just write something ridiculous and see what it is.

It’s a great brainstorming exercise. I hadn’t really been looking  for great openings, just self-created prompts for story ideas. The students return to them after letting them rest for at least a day, see if they can expand 3-4 out to paragraph, and then choose one to write still further on.

But the first time I did this, wow were students challenged by the guidance to make them active and have a suggestion of character. Which made me think deeper on the exercise and how to better scaffold it for students – and teach more about hooks.

So second time, I started with the classic bad opening line:

It was a dark and stormy night…

I had to explain that Madeleine L’Engle had intentionally used the already notorious bad opening for her A Wrinkle In Time, rather than being the originator of it (which goes back to the 19th century). And then noted how it’s been also parodied by other writers, such as Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett‘s Good Omens:

IT WAS A NICE DAY. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet.

Wikipedia has a whole article on it and its parodies.

Then we settled down to discussing why it is bad. Now, Wikipedia says it is

“the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing”,[1] also known as purple prose.

But for me, it boils down to “It was” rather than an action verb or any suggestion of a character. Are these essential to an opening? Well, no. Look at, again, A Wrinkle in Time, and Good Omens. But damn, they’re helpful if you want to hook readers.

To further guide them, I gave them some examples of openings with action and suggestion of a character. Here are the ones I selected.

  • “She felt their eyes, all those executioners.” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023)
  • “Why be in such a hurry, old fool? What good is hurry going to do you?” Conrad Aiken  Great Circle (1933)
  • “I remember it all with a vividness that marks the moment as the watershed it would be.” Ayad Akhtar  American Dervish (2012)
  • “On the day the world received its first phone call from heaven, Tess Rafferty was unwrapping a box of tea bags.” Mitch Albom  The First Phone Call From Heaven (2013)

The first three provide the hint of the character merely in a personal pronoun (from 3rd, 2nd, and 1st person POVs) and the third actually gives a name.

Callender, in her Writer Unboxed post, offers up her own selection of opening lines she likes. She also goes beyond the hook to discuss opening paragraphs and orienting readers. For her,

Ideally, these first paragraphs do at least a few of the following:

  • Establish a compelling narrative voice
  • Allude to the protagonist’s desire or need
  • Center the reader in the world of the story
  • Pique the reader’s interest

Looking over opening lines of books you like is a great exercise (or looking at opening shots in movies and how they set up the themes. I think of the opening of The Searchers, so echoed in its close – or the opening of The Godfather). Find ones that hook you – and I bet they have action and suggestion of character.

Relationship diagrams

I was reading Writer Unboxed (a favorite pastime) and Kristan Hoffman was passing along tips from a writers’ conference (and about navigating such a conference). One thing in particular caught my eye:

  • Diagram the relationships between your characters. The more connections between them, the more interesting it will be. (“It’s supposed to be messy!”) — Julia Vee

Along with it was this accompanying examples:

That immediately got me diagramming how my characters in my novels relate. The image on the left, as I would read it, is not that all the supporting characters simply relate to the main character (not just boring, but unlikely), but that they only relate to each other via the main character and their relationship to that person. That would be boring. I thought it was an interesting – and valuable exercise – so thought I would pass it along. 

One other tip that stood out to me was:

Even with a bad pitch, you might still get your sample pages read — but a good pitch can get an agent excited, and that’s a whole different mindset. — Mary C. Moore

I’ve ended up doing a lot of interviewing of candidates for jobs along the way and always recall reading that one subconsciously makes a decision in the first few minutes and (unless one is very alert to it) the rest is confirmation bias – subconsciously looking for things to confirm that positive or negative first impression (which can lead to bad decision making). But essentially that’s sort of what Moore is referring to: a good pitch can lead to a positive trending confirmation bias.  

Grit vs. Inspiration

I’ve written a few times before about Octavia Butler’s quote, “Screw inspiration” – a nod to the potential excuse of lack of inspiration to keep one from writing everyday. Now I have a corresponding Stephen King quote vs. Rachel Toalson’s post “How to Get Your Butt in the Chair and Build a Writing Practice” over at WriterUnboxed:

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

The whole piece is a nice reflection from that quote. Toalson says,

Writers often ask me how I get so much done. How I write so many books. Well, I do the work. I work really hard at the work. I schedule writing sessions, and I write. And sometimes that writing is terrible, and sometimes it’s almost great. Sometimes it’s a little of both. I just keep moving forward, regardless of how the session is going at that point in time.

And there’s a hint in my process: I schedule my writing sessions. I realize not everyone works well with a schedule—but it does help develop a habit. My kids now know what time I write, and they know not to disturb me during a writing session unless it’s an emergency (and we’ve had multiple conversations about what constitutes an emergency, trust me; no, it is not an emergency that someone lost his favorite Pokémon card).

Toalson goes on to offer 12 steps on how to do the work (yep, writing as a 12-step program).  I particularly appreciate her final step:

And remember there’s room for bad writing

Bad writing is part of the process, just as failure is part of experimentation and discovery. If you are focused on getting out polished, ready-to-go writing, you are likely not going to get anywhere with your project. Like with gemstones, you’ve got to mine your ideas first. Start with the draft. Get it down on paper. Then polish and cut to end up with that (hopefully publishable) gem.

Anne Carson on writing

My father sent me an old profile on Anne Caron.  I’ve employed her If Not, Winter in a Sappho class. For a class which sadly lost a member, I used Catullus 101 and Carson’s Nox (based in part on the Catullus poem) – both lamenting the loss of a brother – as the basis for a project to allow the students to express their grief. So it was a delight to read this profile and I would highly recommend it. Among the other tidbits of insight, her description of writing struck a cord:

On writing: “we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy. i mean, every thought starts over, so every expression of a thought has to do the same. every accuracy has to be invented. . . . i feel i am blundering in concepts too fine for me.”