Month: July 2012

It’s time for your Thursday Quick-Write!  Today, guest author Katy Duffield challenges us to get specific!

Katy writes fiction and nonfiction for children and is the author of sixteen books including Farmer McPeepers and his Missing Milk Cow. Her latest nonfiction title, California History for Kids: Missions, Miners, and Moviemakers in the Golden State, was released this year. Learn more at her website.

My favorite types of writing prompts are those that carry with them certain restrictions. If I’m being honest, I’ll admit that I’m often too unfocused or too indecisive to write to a more general prompt such as “Write about a time when you were angry” or “Describe your childhood bedroom.” These prompts are simply too “wide open” for me. I usually feel that the writing I’m producing with these prompts is too general (too blah!) and often not as applicable to a specific story or work-in-progress. These are, of course, extremely useful prompts, but I seem to make more progress when I am asked to focus in a little tighter using specifics.

A teacher in a creative writing class I recently took was a master at these types of prompts. In working through her prompts, I was amazed by the wide-ranging, atypical work I was creating. I kept asking myself: “Did I write that?” Simply by including certain parameters within the prompts, I was led in surprising directions. I hope you’ll find this type of prompt as valuable as I have.

 Today’s prompt will help you focus on “knowing” your character. As writers, we understand that our characters do not live in a vacuum. If we want them to resonate with readers, they have to feel real, right? One way to bring them to life is to consider what their lives were like before and after your story takes place. Take the character you’re working with (or one you think you would like to write about) and write about a time when that character is five or ten years older than he/she is within your story. Then go back and write about a time where he/she is five to ten years younger (you can adjust the time range, of course, to suit the current age of your main character). And in order to follow the more specific prompt type that I mentioned above, try this—within your writings, include the following: an argument, a food that no one wants to eat, two specific place names, and an article of sports clothing. If you’re writing for a younger audience, such as for a picture book or a chapter book, try coming up with a complete story using the listed requirements—without the age range restrictions—(and here’s a hint for picture book writers—try beginning your story with the argument).

 Ready…Set…Get Specific!

Wednesday is Q and A Day at Teachers Write! Virtual Summer Writing Camp, | so if you have questions about writing, ask away!

Authors are always welcome to drop by and answer questions (you never quite know who you’ll run into here!) But today’s official author volunteers are Jennifer Brown, Sarah Darer Littman, Amy Guglielmo, and Pam Bachorz. They’ve promised to be around to respond to your questions today, so please visit their websites & check out their books!

Teachers & librarians – Feel free to ask your questions in the comments.  Published author guests have volunteered to drop in and respond when they can.

 

It’s time for our Tuesday Quick-Write, and I am super-excited to introduce you to guest author and scientist Loree Griffin Burns. Loree is a gifted author of nonfiction, and someone I’m also lucky enough to call a critique partner and friend.  She writes award-winning Scientists in the Field titles like TRACKING TRASH and THE HIVE DETECTIVES and is also the author of the newly released CITIZEN SCIENTISTS: BE PART OF A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD, which is one the best books I’ve ever seen for classrooms and families that value inquiry, exploration, and time spent in nature. Learn more at Loree’s website.  And now here’s Loree with some thoughts on characterization.

I love that I get to follow Sarah Albee’s Nonfiction Friday with a Nonfiction Tuesday. And how could I start anywhere else but with a link to the Nonfiction Monday that fell in between?  It’s the perfect way for me to be sure all you teacher-writers and librarian-writers know that on Mondays, nonfiction bloggers around the web celebrate children’s nonfiction with reviews and book-related links and activities.  You can find the weekly roundup by visiting the official  Nonfiction Monday website.

Now, on to the subject of my guest post: characterization.

 Be honest: are you surprised that a writer like me—one who writes about ocean trash and honey bees and backyard science—would choose to write a feature on the topic of characterization? Do you think of character development as a strictly fictional device? For a long time, I did too.  For most of my reading and writing life, in fact, I had it in my head that fiction writers were storytellers and nonfiction writers were, well, reporters. The former, in my misguided mind, had access to all the neat storytelling tools—characterization, setting, conflict, foreshadowing, pacing, etc—and the latter were meant to simply share the facts.

 This misunderstanding was blown to bits when I read THE BEAK OF THE FINCH back in 1995. In this nonfiction title, Jonathan Weiner opened my eyes to an important truth: all writers must use every tool at their disposal to make their storytelling engaging. Weiner shared the true story of Peter and Rosemary Grant—evolutionary biologists who have recorded, over the course of more than twenty years of Galapagos fieldwork, the process of evolution in action—in a book that reads like a novel. (And remains, for the record, one of my all time favorites in the genre.)

 Let readers know your character, ground those readers in a setting, entice them with a unique voice, thrill them with tension and strong pacing, include telling details, rich dialog, and don’t forget to share memorable images, literal ones of the sort Sarah talked about on Friday, or figurative ones you draw with your words.  Structure your story so that all these elements work together, pulling your readers through the narrative page by page.  These are tasks for all of us who share stories, whether the stories we tell are true or are born from our imaginations.  

 Here’s an example from my current work in progress …

 I’m drafting a book about an entomologist.  Clint McFarland is a passionate scientist and a true lover of insects … and yet his job (and this is the heart of my story) is to kill every last Asian longhorned beetle in North America. A man who kills beetles for a living will be hard enough for my young readers to take; when I tell them that the way one kills this particular beetle is by cutting down and chipping every single host tree in its range—no matter if those trees shade a schoolyard or sport backyard treehouses—well, I might lose them.  Before I share this part of the story, then, it’s important that I let readers see Clint as the caring and passionate guy he is. This man adores insects. Passionately. Deeply. How do I show this side of Clint? By sharing his personality on the page. By paying close attention to how I introduce him. In short, with careful characterization.

 To this end, I spent several hours last week reading through all the interviews I’ve conducted with Clint. (For the record, our five in-person interviews resulted in forty-one pages of transcribed notes.) I hunted for details that will help readers understand the type of guy Clint is. There was the surprising confession that he cuts his long hair every so often in order to donate a ponytail to Locks of Love. (I told you he was a nice guy!) And evidence of his passion for insects was everywhere: the set of ladybug life cycle toys on his office bookshelves (“biologically accurate egg, larva, pupa, and adult,” he told me), the worn copy of Thomas Eisner’s <i>For Love of Insects</i>. My favorite detail by far, though, was a scene I recorded when a member of Clint’s staff found an insect in the parking lot and brought it in to show Clint during our interview. “You’ll love this,” the staff member said, holding out a cup with a dead Dobsonfly inside.  I’d never seen one before, but I can now tell you this: Dobsonflies are sort of hideous. This particular beast was over two inches long, but gained almost another full inch from the set of curved, scythe-like mandibles stretching out the top of its head. The mandibles looked like pincers, and as I was trying to figure out if they could pierce human skin, Clint turned the creature into his bare hand, marveled over its ‘amazing wings’, and ran a gentle finger over its ‘gorgeous mandibles.’

 If I can craft a chapter that shares these details with readers, I won’t need to tell them Clint is a compassionate man with a heart for insects. They will have learned it for themselves.

 Writing Exercise:

The good thing about this prompt, I think, is that everyone can play along, fiction and nonfiction writers alike. 

Choose a character from one of your works in progress—a real person (if you are working on a nonfiction piece) or a made up person (if you are working on a novel or a short story).  Comb through all your files—physical or mental—on this person, and pull out the details that tell you the most about his/her character.

If this feels overwhelming, start small. Does s/he have an office? Go there and look around. Is it messy? Or crazy-neat? What’s the desktop look like? Is there a half glass of orange juice on board? A reusable thermal coffee mug? An army of old Dunkin’ Donuts cups? What is the dust situation? Is there anything hanging on the walls? Are there bookshelves? Are the books on them just what you’d expect to see, or does something there surprise you?

I think you get the idea. All writers can benefit from some quality time spent observing the little details—settings (as I’ve talked about here and in my post), but also habits, dialog, and actions—that tell us who our characters are.  

Nonfiction writers will finish this exercise realizing, if they hadn’t already, that the best way to get these details is to meet your subject—or someone with a passion for your topic—in person. Push your nerves aside and set up that interview!

Hi, everybody! Hope it was a great weekend for you. Mine included finishing a draft of a book that’s due soon (woo-hoo!), catching fish and eating  s’mores. Ah…summer!

Before we have today’s mini-lesson, we need to announce the winner of Friday’s book giveaway. Congratulations, Denise Krebs! You’ve won Joanne Levy’s SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE. Please send me an email (kmessner at kate messner  dot com) with your mailing address so she can send your book.

Guest author Pamela Voelkel joins us now for today’s mini-lesson. Pamela and Jon write the Jaguar Stones books set in Latin America, MIDDLEWORLD and THE END OF THE WORLD CLUB. Read more at their website – and right now, Pamela joins us to talk about research.

CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN

The worst advice I was ever given was: “Write what you know”. Those four little words gave me a twenty-year writer’s block. It was only when I’d spent half my life as an advertising copywriter that the truth hit me. If I didn’t want to write about what I knew, all I had to do was know about something else.

So when my husband Jon started writing adventure stories based on his childhood in South and Central America, I joined him on the project. At first, they were just ripping yarns, with some cool Maya pyramids in the background for local color. But as we started to read about the Maya, we discovered that their story was more amazing than anything we could make up. We also discovered that many of the books in print were out of date. So that’s when we decided to turn our website into a portal for teachers to access the latest research into the Maya, and offer free lesson plan CDs.

Time was passing. Jon had completed a course at Harvard on reading and writing Maya glyphs, but I was still struggling with writing English. I was concerned that I couldn’t describe the sights and sounds of the jungle if I’d never been there so, when I saw an ad for a cheap flight to Belize, I persuaded Jon that we had to go. Not just us, but also our three children – then aged 2, 9 and 12 – to observe their reactions to spooky pyramids and creepy-crawlies and whatever else may await us.

After that we went down every year. It was our second trip that changed everything. We were at a remote site in Guatemala, on a day that was free entry to locals. Our son is very tall and he attracted a crowd of local youths who followed him around, giggling and taking pictures of him. Our tour guide watched this for a while, then puffed out his chest and stepped forward. “Remember these people,” he said in Spanish, “but not because their son is tall. Remember them because they are writing books about the Maya and, thanks to them, children in North America will be reading about your history and culture.” There was a moment of silence. Then these hoodie-wearing, gum-chewing Guatemalan teenagers burst into applause, with the ancient pyramids right there behind them. My heart sank into my jungle boots. Now we had a responsibility to these kids. Now we would have to tell the story of the modern Maya as well. And that’s where our lead character (and everyone’s favorite) Lola the Maya girl came from.

So my advice regarding research would be read everything you can, double/triple check your facts, take nothing for granted, wander down every blind alley you come across, and be prepared for what you find to fundamentally change your story. In the best possible way.
 

Note from Kate: No…we are not sending you all off on airplanes for a giant field trip for research today…but we are sending you on a virtual field trip.  Like Pamela, I’ve been fortunate enough to spend time in many of the places where my books are set and to travel for interviews and other research.  I spent a week in the rainforest of Costa Rica researching HIDE AND SEEK, the sequel to CAPTURE THE FLAG, and interviewed one of the world’s leading tornado experts in Norman, Oklahoma while I was working on EYE OF THE STORM. But what happens when there’s no book contract yet, and no advance to pay for that travel?  Or what if the trip just isn’t feasible for another reason – like safety, or travel regulations, or child care issues?  That’s when the Internet is your best friend.

Assignment: Google Maps and Google Earth have satellite images and photographs that will show you the view from many addresses all over the world. This Salon piece has a great tutorial on how to use that street-view feature so you can take a virtual field trip to the setting of your novel.

YouTube, too, has videos that writers can use for virtual visits when a real one might not be possible. In my mystery CAPTURE THE FLAG, for example, some of the chase scenes happen in the underbelly of the airport, on the twists and turns of baggage conveyer belts. Airport security, sadly, does not allow for nosy writers to ride baggage carts, and so my descriptions of characters in those areas were all based on online videos like this one.

Get the idea? Find a video or street-view map or a collection of images of your setting online today. Check it out and take some notes, paying attention not only to what you see, but also what you hear, what you might feel, and what you imagine it would smell like. How would your characters see that place?  Share some thoughts in the comments if you’d like!

Guest author Sarah Albee is visiting Teachers Write to talk nonfiction and images today. I got to spend a few days writing with Sarah at our retreat on Lake Champlain recently, and she is the sort of person you wish lived next door all the time instead of just for a few days a year. Sarah wrote POOP HAPPENED: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD FROM THE BOTTOM UP, which immediately tells you that a) she is a history and science geek, and b) she has a great sense of humor. You can get to know her a little more at her website. Now…here’s Sarah!

Hello, teachers and librarians! Welcome to Nonfiction Friday! (I just made that up. Hope you don’t mind, Kate.)

I am honored to have been invited by Kate to participate in this virtual summer writing camp. I’ve been following your daily postings and am amazed at the high-level discussions about craft, character, and setting. If you’re up for putting on your nonfiction-writers’ hats today, I thought I’d launch the discussion by talking about how I approach nonfiction—and particularly history.

I’m going to start by sharing with you the shrewdest career move I ever made: *drumroll* I married a history teacher. I have learned a lot from my husband about how to make history fun, and interesting, and relevant. My goal as a writer is pretty close to his goal as a teacher: to reach that ever-elusive group of kids who think they don’t like history, and to get them excited about it. Wait. We’ve gone too long without a visual. Here’s a picture of my husband:

Photo by Gaby Hoffman

Here’s another thing I’ve learned from my history-teacher-husband: there are always going to be those self-motivated, naturally-curious, superstar kids who are born loving history. But by the time kids land in his high school classroom, the vast majority of them have decided that history is boring. These are the kids he has to win over. As a middle-grade writer, my goal is to start converting them earlier.

I’m constantly scheming up ways to snag the attention of a reluctant reader, to get him or her to open my book or read my history blog. I try to approach my topic from an offbeat angle, something a kid will relate to. Like the history of how civilizations from the Stone Age to the present have dealt with their waste. Or how bugs have affected human history.

I also try to use humor wherever possible. Kids of all ages love to laugh. Maybe this approach stems from my Sesame Street background (I worked there for nine years). We subversively disguised our preschool teaching curriculum in the form of game shows, TV commercials, silly songs, and parodies. (My book Brought to you by the Letter B! is still one of my proudest achievements!)

 But my most effective attention-grabbing strategy is to use visuals to enhance my topic. This will come as a surprise to none of you, of course—you’re all educators. But you’re wearing your writers’ hats today.

I’m constantly asking myself, what makes a compelling picture? What will draw kids into the book?

On my blog, I like to lead with the coolest picture I can find. Like this one in a post about what babies used to wear.

Or this one about how little boys used to be forced to wear dresses.

Do the pictures catch your eye? Snag your interest? Let’s face it: like it or not, as writers, we’re also salesmen. We’re luring readers toward our writing. And kids these days are savvy consumers. As teachers, you know better than anyone that there’s a lot of competition out there, calling for their attention.

That’s the challenge—and the fun—of using pictures to enhance your writing. And one of the best parts of being a nonfiction writer is that we writers get to play a big role in choosing the pictures that will accompany our text.

I absolutely love finding images. Sometimes you can acquire a picture just by asking. People can be so gracious. I’ve gotten permission to use incredible pictures taken by contemporary photographer-scientists. And I’ve found other images through fellow-writer friends.

Here’s one of a “zombie bee,” a phorid fly parasitizing a honeybee.

Photo by Christopher Quock

It was snapped by an undergraduate at USC named Chris Quock. I tracked Chris down by contacting his professor, and Chris then sent me his picture to include in my book (and in this post).

Many public domain images are digitized and available for download online. But it can be even more fun to find pictures yourself. I wrote about my recent research trip to DC here, where I visited the “still pictures” divisions at both the National Archives and the Library of Congress. It’s such a thrill to find a photo that has never before been published. It can take hours to find that one picture, but it’s worth it.

As educators, you have all kinds of image resources available to you that can help your lesson plan come alive for your students. As writers, our job gets slightly trickier securing permission for pictures we’d like to use in a book. But it’s totally worth it.

If you’re working on a nonfiction book and need assistance figuring out where to start with image research, I am happy to help. Please stop by my website and leave me a comment, or leave a comment here, or email me directly at albees AT taftschool DOT org (and include “Teachers Write” in the subject line).

I’ll check in with you today from time to time, so please feel free to post your comments and questions about all things nonfiction. Happy writing!

Today’s regular Friday Happy Hour Post is up, too, so when you finish chatting with Sarah, click here to share your progress for the week and enter to win a book.

Welcome to Friday Writing Happy Hour! First…I need to send you to a bonus Friday post from guest author Sarah Albee, who is sharing some great, great thoughts on nonfiction, making science and history interesting to kids, and photos.  Really…don’t miss it.

More Friday stuff… We’ve got another book giveaway today – SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE from guest author Joanne Levy.

To enter the drawing, leave a comment on this post before 11:30pm EST Saturday night. A winner will be announced Monday morning.

So…how was your writing week?

Friday Writing Happy Hour is 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 Gigi Amateau, the author of the young adult novel, A Certain Strain of Peculiar, a 2010 Bank Street College Best Children’s Books of the Year. She also wrote Chancey of the Maury River, a William Allen White Masters List title for grades 3-5. Her debut novel, Claiming Georgia Tate was selected as a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. Come August, Come Freedom, a work of historical fiction for young adults, will be released from Candlewick Press in September 2012. Connect with Gigi at www.gigiamateau.com <http://www.gigiamateau.com>  or on twitter: https://twitter.com/giamateau

 Good morning, writers!  First of all, thank you, Kate Messner, for organizing TeachersWrite! What a great opportunity to learn from and grow alongside all of you. Today, I’d like to share a practice that I use almost daily to improve my observation skills and to tune in to nature and the natural world. I find that these exercises help me draw more vivid settings, see beyond the obvious, and heighten my sensory experience of the environment.

As writers and teachers, you already know that two of your greatest skills are your strong sense of curiosity and your keen superpower of observation. Curiosity and observation team up to help us understand our thoughts and feelings about the real world; curiosity and observation are the foundation upon which we write new worlds – whether through fiction, poetry, essay, or song. Asking questions, noticing details, and identifying patterns begin inside a writer’s heart or mind then, with practice, make their way down the arm, into the fingertips, and onto the page or screen.

  Can we really train ourselves to become more curious? Is observation really a superpower?

 Absolutely!

 To me, the greatest gymnasium or auditorium or home field for a writer to train and practice is in the natural world. In his little book Walking, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “all good things are wild and free.” The outdoors is our wild and free writing laboratory – a place to conduct experiments with language and punctuation, a place to explore new territory in our thinking, our feelings, and our storytelling.

 So, let’s begin by heading outdoors. That’s right! Set down your tea and walk outside. Just for a couple of minutes, I promise. If it’s nasty out or you’re just snug as bug, go ahead and practice right where you are.

 To get started, shake up your body a bit. Take a quick scan up, down, and all around to notice where you’re holding tension or whether you feel stiff. Give those places that are begging for it, your permission to relax and a pathway to let go. Roll your shoulders back; now roll your shoulders forward. Inhale. Exhale. And, if that felt good, repeat!

 Now, look around. Don’t alter the way you’re watching the world, but notice how you’re watching. Chances are that you’re focusing in on one section of the panorama before you. This is good! As your gaze adjusts to what you’re seeing, notice how you slice up the landscape in order to process what you see. Good job.

 Let’s bring a different type of concentration to the act of observing. What happens when you try to take in the whole landscape without focusing on any single image? What changes within your field of vision?

 I find that it’s difficult to hold keep panoramic lens going for very long; I naturally seem to return to observing one piece of the picture. That’s okay! Notice when you’ve lost the wide-angle and simply return to it. A little trick to help if you’re having trouble: keep your gaze straight ahead, but bring your peripheral vision into focus. Then, keeping the wide view, go exploring.

 As I write this, I’m sitting on the front porch of an antebellum house in Norwood, Virginia, facing the Blue Ridge Mountains. When I practice these magic eyes, I see this place differently than when I’m focused on the butterfly bush that drapes the front walkway. Looking out toward the mountain ridge, and taking in the whole panorama, I see: a red-tailed hawk riding the current, a dappling of shadow and sunlight across the canopy, a savannah of cumulus clouds against a watery sky, and an old chestnut hound lost in puppy dreams beneath my feet. Each image urges me to turn my glance only upon it, but what else will I see if I keep my wide eyes? The ties of the awning slapping against the porch post, the loop-di-loop of a bumblebee, the zig-zag of a dragonfly, an empty white rocker resisting the breeze, and swallows dipping in and out of the treetops, down near the river.

 Record your own experience with wide-angle watching. What did you observe in your wild and free writer’s studio?

 Let’s switch it up. Which of those images from the landscape would you like to know more intimately?

Now, form an O with Pointer and Thumbkin, as if you were signaling, “okay!” Bring the O to one eye and close the other eye. Turn your attention to your subject, and shrink the O by curling your index finger down your thumb to toward your palm. Now, really examine your subject.

Here’s what I see: The dog is not entirely chestnut, only in the darkest places like the top of her back, the outsides of her thighs, and the points of her ankles. Her belly is almost white. She rests her head under the shade of the bench where I’m sitting. She sleeps with her front and back paws crossed, all-ladylike. Her breath rises and falls in an easy cadence. Not even the coal train passing by at the bottom of the hill causes her to stir. The old napper is tired for good reason, I think.

Pollen and leaves and dirt are strewn across her back, her belly, and her haunches. She’s been on an adventure today.

 Record what you observed with your tiny finger-monocular.

Experimenting with different lenses is a fun practice all on its own. You may find a trail of breadcrumbs leading into new ideas or realize that you really enjoy one lens more than the other. You could also use these practices to examine and inform a specific scene of your work in progress by closing your eyes and shifting your mind’s eye back and forth between the panoramic and narrow lenses of that scene.

Before we start Q and A today, let’s talk a little about revision. Some people hate revising. Lots of students really hate it.  But I LOVE revision. I love it so much, in fact, that I wrote a book about revision, about how to revise and how to teach students to revise using authors’ strategies.  At one point, I spent weeks revising my revision book, which felt like a very meta thing to do. But I digress.

Anyway…I believe that all great writing is re-writing, so toward the end of Teachers Write in August, we’re going to host a blog and Twitter chat all about revision. I’ll invite lots of authors to come talk about how they revise and to blog about their processes and we’ll link to all of those, too.  If you’d like, you can also treat it as a book club and read REAL REVISION (that book I wrote about revision) ahead of time so that you can ask questions and we can all talk about it.

Stenhouse, which published REAL REVISION, is offering a discount for those who would like to participate in our virtual book club this summer. If you go to the Stenhouse website and place any order that includes REAL REVISION, you’ll get 20% off the whole order, plus free shipping if you enter the discount code KATE.  (How cool is it that I have a discount code? I told my family that this really calls for more respect and chocolate, but they are unimpressed.) More info on the revision chat will be forthcoming in a few weeks, but for now, go ahead and order your book (or request it from your library!) if you’d like to be part of the book club conversation. And if you have other favorite Stenhouse books that you’d like to recommend to one another, please share titles in the comments, because you can totally take advantage of that REAL REVISION discount to get other professional books, too.

On to the questions now! Wednesday is Q and A Day at Teachers Write Virtual Summer Writing Camp, so if you have questions about writing, it’s time to fire away.

Today’s official author volunteers are Jo Knowles, Donna Gephart, Megan Miranda, Erica S. Perl, David Lubar, and Raymond Bean.  They’ve promised to be around to respond to your questions today, so please visit their websites & check out their books!

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 checking in from my retreat, too.

Good morning, Teachers Write campers! I’m  on a four-day writers’ retreat myself this week, scribbling away with 18 other authors at a big old inn on Lake Champlain. (I so wish all of you could be here, too!)  I’ve been writing-writing-writing, and not commenting so much. But rest assured, I’ll check in and get caught up by the weekend. Keep cheering for one another, too, okay?

Our Tuesday Quick-Write guest author today is Megan Miranda.  Megan was a scientist and high school teacher before writing Fracture, which came out of her fascination with scientific mysteries—especially those associated with the brain. Megan has a BS in biology from MIT and spent her post-college years either rocking a lab coat or reading books. She lives near Charlotte, North Carolina, where she volunteers as an MIT Educational Counselor. Fracture is her first novel, and Hysteria will be forthcoming this winter. Learn more at her website: http://www.meganmiranda.com/

 

I have a confession: I am not an outliner. And because of this, my first drafts are very much discovery drafts. This is an exercise I do whenever I get stuck with the external plot (and as someone who typically has to write nearly an entire draft before finding the right plot, this happens a lot):

 

 

Add rain.

 

Rain makes things happen: Things go wrong in the rain. Accidents happen. Houses flood. People are late, appointments are missed, plans are canceled. Evidence gets washed away. Strangers help each other on the side of the road, people share umbrellas, people meet. Or people don’t meet.

 

 

Rain reveals character: Do your characters carry umbrellas, or are they totally unprepared? Do they stomp in the puddles? Does she run with a newspaper over her head? Or smile because she gets to wear those totally impractical neon green galoshes she spent way too much money on?

 

 

Something as simple as changing the weather opens me up to many other possibilities. It’s my way of brainstorming inside a scene. Truth is, the rain doesn’t always make the cut during revision, but the heart of the scene—the events, the character reactions—they become my story.

So, as an exercise, whatever scene you’re currently writing (or if you’re starting something new), try this: make it rain. And if it’s already raining, make it snow. See what happens. See how your character reacts.

 

 It’s always a surprise for me.

 

 

(Right now, I’m about halfway through a first draft. I’m pretty sure it’s been raining for a month straight.)

Note from Kate: If you don’t have a fiction work-in-progress, try this quick-write with a favorite scene from any favorite novel. Play weather god and change one of the scenes by making it rain. What happens?