Take Me Along

How does a story come into being? Quite a few of my peers start with an image—an old woman trundles down the street pushing a baby carriage full of aluminum cans. How did she get there? A dirty child sits in a corner sucking his thumb. Why isn’t he playing with the other children? A man snaps at a woman, and she runs away, crying. Are they married? Why are they fighting? These are writers’ questions. Fair questions. Good questions.

They are also a trap. These questions create great back story. They give the character a history and bring the protagonist to life. But these kinds of questions lead to a bad ending. While we tell the story of all the things the man did to the woman that caused her to end up crying and fleeing him, we as writers are likely to miss the key elements that make stories most intriguing to readers. Examine satisfying stories, and you’re likely to find protagonists making decisions that affect their life. Writers often run like terrified rabbits from the responsibility of making decisions for their characters. Yet that is what readers want most to participate in, even if the protagonist makes the wrong decision.

Part of the fun of watching B-rated horror flicks is cringing, biting our nails, and muttering under our breath, “Don’t, don’t, don’t open that door…” We can’t believe how stupid the blonde girl is when she reaches for the doorknob, but we are totally engaged in Blondie’s decision-making process. The best stories invoke an emotional response in the reader, and that reaction hinges on the decisions made by the protagonist, right or wrong, we want to go along.

Finding Time to Live the Dream

One of the first hints I get that someone knows his or her purpose in life is when they are simultaneously pretty sure they can’t have the dream and security too. Most dreams don’t seem to have anything to do with paying the mortgage, feeding the kids, setting aside a nest egg for retirement. They almost seem mutually exclusive. My greatest fear about living the writer’s life was living it under a leaky roof and eating peanut butter three times a day. I wasn’t about to jump willingly into that world. I wanted a compromise, a way to test the water before it started pouring down on my head.

I found my compromise in a question: What would you do if you had an extra hour a day? (And you can’t say sleep.) That came out of a Stephen Covey time management course I took. My answer was always the same. (I took the course twice, but asked myself that question many times.)

The answer: Write novels.

The fear: Starving while shivering alone in a hovel.

The solution: Devote one hour a day to writing novels.

Right away I realized that I might not have an hour every day, but I also knew that I could probably find extra time some evenings and weekends. If I set a goal of seven hours a week and only achieved half of that, I was still ahead of wishing but not writing. Before the year was out, I had the first draft of a novel completed. On top of that, I met people who wanted to help and support me. The road was wider than I could see from behind that first little crack that I opened in the door. That’s what happens when you give your dream even half a chance. It picks you up and carries you away, without demanding you give up on the mortgage, the grocery bill, the nest egg. It’s a safer journey that it seems, and then again, it’s not. It wouldn’t be any fun if there weren’t a few surprises.

Finding the time to sit and write can be a challenge. I’ve heard a few successful writers say that they write every day, seven days a week. I’ve done that before, but I also find that time away from the page can be invigorating. Chances to meet people, watch the world, listen, and live. While vacationing in Cancun last week, I thought I would find writing time every day. It didn’t happen. But I came away refreshed and full of new experiences. I met interesting people from different parts of the US and from around the world, people with ideas different from my own. If I had it to do over, instead of taking my computer, I would have taken my Little Book of Ideas.

I agree with the adage: A writer writes, but that is not all a writer does—she observes, contemplates, and forms opinions. I’m leaning toward a goal of six and six—six hours, six days a week. How important is downtime to your writing? Do you get your best ideas staring at the page or from your life experiences?

The Writing Process

Sometimes it’s fun to sit down and just start writing, see where it leads. This might start with a character, a setting, or a situation. The writer sits down on the park bench and observes two lovers arguing or climbs aboard a bus and watches the world go by. Taking off on these journeys to points unknown can be delightful, but they can also lead to dead ends. The writer pours out thoughts and images and suddenly she stops and asks, “What am I doing here? Where do I go now?”

Adopting this process can lead to a lot of retraced steps, which in a writer’s world means going back over recently traveled territory. I like meandering. I don’t like rework. That isn’t to say that I don’t like rewriting, but I like to start with a first draft that feels as if it has at least landed in the general vicinity indicated by the flight plan. Of course, that means I have to start with a flight plan.

I find that my chances of getting a story where I want it to go increase when I have done some background work—character sketches, summaries of the main conflict, and descriptions of the setting. I’m still surprised by the twists and turns the story makes as it glides over unexpected air currents and runs into storms that weren’t predicted by the original plan. I have more fun because I stay on track and arrive at an interesting destination. I can’t predict everything that might happen along the way, but I have tools to help me stay the course. I find I can cut back the rewriting process by as much as 75 percent. I use that time to develop new stories.

How do you feel about using outlines or other tools to guide your fiction writing? If you do use them, what tools are you using? Does the planning process improve your stories? Save you time?

Embarrassing Moments Enrich Stories

Embarrassing moments make better memories than current events. I don't want to live through them, but they are great fodder for stories, books, and movies. Some of my favorite stories center around the most mundane events—like running into someone wearing the same clothes as you (or me). Events that turn the cheeks red even in retrospect. Flannery O’Connor’s story, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” explores one potential result of living through just such an embarrassing moment.

My last personal embarrassing experience was seeing someone and waving as if I knew the person (I thought I did), only to realize it was a case of mistaken identity. Why I should feel stupid because someone I don't know reminded me of someone I do know remains a mystery.

Willing to share some embarrassing moments, either lived through or experienced vicariously?

Adjectives and Adverbs: Should we use them?

The temptation when writing seems to be to use loads of adjectives and adverbs. Why are we so fond of them, when renowned writers, at least as far back as Mark Twain, speak of these parts of speech as if they were viruses?

Newspapers and magazines use word counts to manage the space dedicated to articles, opinions, and advertisements. Thinking back to my school days, when teachers (and professors) assigned essays in terms of pages or number of words, I remember losing points for coming up a paragraph short on a three-page essay.

In moments of desperation, when I started writing school assignments on computers, I played with line spacing and font size, edging up to 26-point line spacing and 12.5 font. Are editors and educators to blame for our affinity for adjectives and adverbs, for encouraging the padding that improved our acceptance rate on freelance assignments and bumped our English grades from middle B to B+ or even A-?

Does the very best writing include bucket loads of adjectives? How often should we use words like “very,” “great,” and “interesting”? A friend of mine traveled frequently to Finland during his days as a consultant. His Finnish friends commented that, for Americans (at least those of us in the United States), we always felt “good,” and everything was “interesting.”

Mark Twain suggested the following: “Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

Do you agree or disagree?

Just answering yes or no would be too simple, so here is the challenge…

Write your best sentence, or provide a quote from your favorite writer. Keep the example to two or three sentences, please. And don’t wander down the middle of the road, you’re liable to get run over coming and going.