Author: kmessner

Today’s Thursday Quick-Write is courtesy of guest author Lynne Kelly, whose debut novel CHAINED was published this spring from Farrar, Straus, & Giroux/Margaret Ferguson Books. Learn more at her website: http://lynnekellybooks.com/wordpress/

Before my manuscript of CHAINED was submitted to editors, my agent Joanna Volpe asked me to do some revisions. After a while, many of the comments started sounding familiar: “And how does he feel about that?” “How does that make him feel?” “And he feels…?”

I’d received similar feedback before. Sometimes the comments on chapters I’d brought to critique meetings showed that readers wanted to see more about how the character was feeling or what they were thinking. A couple of agents who were nice enough to send feedback with the rejection letters indicated the same thing– I wasn’t showing enough about what was going on in the character’s head. Maybe I was worried about the dreaded “telling” too much instead of “showing.” Sure, if I filled the story with internal thoughts like, “I was sad,” and “I was so angry,” that would be really boring, but there are ways of showing those feelings that help readers connect with characters more, and thereby root for them and keep reading the story to see how things turn out.

So it took some work, since for whatever reason the feelings thing doesn’t come naturally for me. Here are a few before-and-after lines, showing how I revised those parts of the manuscript using Joanna’s notes.

Before: I try my best to look brave.
Jo: But inside he feels…?
Me: Um…not brave?
Revision: I try my best to look brave, but I worry I’ll never feel safe again.

This is from a scene where Hastin surprises his mom with a visit after not seeing her for a couple of weeks, and he notices her smile seems forced:

Before: I run toward her, then stop. Doesn’t she want to see me?
Jo: How does that make him feel? Tie it to his elation, then being deflated in some way.
Revision: I run toward her, then stop. Doesn’t she want to see me? All this time, I thought she must be missing me as much as I’ve missed her, but not it feels like I’ve done something wrong.

I went through the manuscript and highlighted all the places where I could show Hastin’s reaction to what was happening. And there were a lot. Then I tackled each highlighted scene by doing a little freewriting about how he felt at that time, and how I’d feel if I were in his place–not just the emotion, but what it would feel like physically too. Is there a sinking feeling in his stomach? Does he hit something out of anger? Does he feel like things are so bad, he’ll never be happy again? I picked out my favorite words and phrases from the freewriting to add a concise description of the character’s feelings to the scene.  HYPERLINK “http://thebookshelfmuse.blogspot.com/”The Bookshelf Muse has an Emotional Thesaurus that helped tremendously. (It’s also great for setting descriptions, so bookmark it!)

In your own writing, look for places you can show more about how your character is feeling. Think about when you’ve felt the same way, and freewrite about that. Don’t worry about overwriting it– get everything on the page first, and the editing can come later if you need to scale it back. On the surface it might seem that you don’t have much in common with your character, but everyone has at times felt afraid, lonely, sad, desperate, or whatever else that character is feeling at the time.

After writing all you can about that feeling or experience, look over what you’ve written and see what you can you can apply to a scene you’re working on. Or, you may even want to start a new scene for a new character. Often it takes only one strong sentence or two to make an impact on your readers so they feel what your characters feel.

We’ve spent a lot of time this summer talking about getting your work-in-progress moving — developing characters and painting settings and plotting tightly crafted plots.  And I’ve answered a handful of questions about genre: “If I’m working on a story about xyz, do you think it would be best as a picture book or a middle grade novel, or what?”

I’m happy to answer those questions,  but I also want to let you in on a secret. Not everything you write has to grow up to be something else. One of email asked me if I ever write things that “just don’t go anywhere.”  Do I write things that don’t get published?  Gosh, yes. I write things that I hope might be published but that aren’t good enough (or good enough yet), and I write things that I don’t have any plans to publish. I write lots of those things, because publishing isn’t the only reason to write, or even the most important reason, in my opinion. I write to figure out what I think about things, to share those thoughts, to amuse my family and friends, to preserve family stories, and to keep memories just the way I experienced them, including sounds and feelings and wind on my face — stuff that a photograph won’t capture.

So today, let’s write for that reason. Here’s your prompt:

I’d like you to tell us all a good campfire story. It shouldn’t have anything at all to do with your work-in-progress if you have one. This is just for fun. It can be a true narrative — something funny or life-changing or embarrassing or goofy that happened when you were little (my kids LOVE these stories) — or a story you make up to make us laugh or shiver in the dark.

I’ve started a campfire for us with that good smoky smell and some virtual s’mores.

Get writing, and share a few paragraphs in the comments later on if you’d like.

First, congratulations to Kristen Kilpatrick! You’ve won a copy of A WHOLE LOT OF LUCKY from Danette Haworth. Please email me your mailing address at kmessner at kate messner dot com so that Danette can get your book in the mail.

It’s a double-dose Mini-Lesson Monday on Teachers Write today, with guest authors Karen Day and Danette Haworth. Feel free to do either or both assignments & comment to let us know how it’s going!

Karen Day  is the author of middle grade novels, TALL TALES and NO CREAM PUFFS, and A MILLION MILES FROM BOSTON, all published by Wendy Lamb/Random House. Karen’s love of reading and writing has taken her through careers in journalism and teaching. She can be found at www.klday.com.  And Karen’s chatting with us today about how to keep moving forward with writing…when you’re stuck.

You finally started that novel you always wanted to write. You brainstormed, made an outline, found a main character and plot. You set aside time to work. You made progress – several chapters are written (and it was easier than you anticipated)! You feel good about it. Inspired! You’re so happy you found Kate Messner and the other writers/teachers this summer. You can’t wait to wake up and work. 

Then one day, perhaps quite suddenly, something changes. Your main character seems flat. The tension has fizzled. The plot has disappeared. You don’t know where to go, what to do. You forget what your novel is about. You get discouraged. You weed the garden and clean your closet. You decide not to write for a couple of days. You think you have to start over. You wonder if you’re a writer, after all.

Does any part of this sound familiar?

If so, do NOT despair. You’re experiencing something that every writer, both published and unpublished, experiences. Expect to be lost at multiple times in your first or second or even third draft. It’s part of the job. Don’t let it scare you.

To help, I thought I’d give you a couple of suggestions to keep you going when times get tough. I often resort to one or two (or all of them) when I’m working on early drafts. Hang in there. Take a deep breath. And don’t give up!

1.)  When writing a first draft, you must write every day. This will keep your story fresh in your conscious and unconscious mind. Don’t worry if all you have is 15 minutes. Sometimes you can get a lot done in short amounts of time. The important thing is consistency and forward momentum.

2.)  Don’t circle back and rewrite early chapters until you have a draft finished. When writing, I always keep paper next to my computer where I list the changes I’ll make in the next draft. If you continually make changes, you’ll never finish a draft. Besides, how can you rewrite the opening chapter when you don’t exactly know how your book will end?

3.)  Which leads me to this point. A first draft is an ugly mess that I wouldn’t even show my dog. It’s filled with holes, melodrama and threads that appear and disappear with no resolution. It’s terrible. Which is terrific!! Because revision is where the real writing is done. But you can’t revise until you have something to work with.

4.)  I lose track of my main theme/themes when I write, and so I always write the main ones (two or three) on a piece of paper that I tape to my computer. For example, while writing A MILLION MILES FROM BOSTON, I had this on my computer: Lucy believes, (mostly unconsciously), that accepting change in her life means rejecting her dead mother. So, when I got stuck, or wondered why I was writing a particularly scene, I’d look at that paper and say, how does this scene fit with my theme/themes? Or does it?

5.)  Sometimes I’ll be 60 pages into a manuscript and lose my way. Then, writing an entire chapter seems daunting. So I tell myself that I’ll just write a scene. A conversation with the antagonist. A resolution. Something my main character discovers. I might write 10 pages or more of these short “scenes”. Out of this, I usually can get myself going again. Don’t worry if this part of your manuscript doesn’t look like the other parts. Remember, it’s a draft!

6.)  At different places in a draft I’ll stop and assess. Has my plot shifted? Do my characters want different things than they I thought they did? Is the antagonist no longer the antagonist? This is okay, of course, but you might try and write up a new synopsis. It will help you stay focused.

Maybe you’ve tried these suggestions, and others, and nothing works. You’re still stuck. How do you know when to abandon something? Several times I’ve been 50-60 pages into a book, then put it aside. But I never totally abandon anything. I might pull out characters or plots and use them elsewhere.

Sometimes when you’re stuck, it’s because your story isn’t “quite right.” The setting is off. Or maybe the wrong character is telling the story. So, here is today’s writing assignment: if you feel stuck, and none of these other suggestions work, try writing a couple of chapters from your antagonist’s point of view. Or a minor character’s point of view. Is this awkward? Easier? Should the entire story be told from this point of view? Or does the exercise help you see your original narrator more clearly?

Good luck, write well, and I’m happy to respond personally if you want to send me an email: klday1@verizon.net.

And now on to Guest Author #2…

Danette Haworth is the author of great middle grade novels like VIOLET RAINES ALMOST GOT STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, THE SUMMER OF MOONLIGHT SECRETS, ME AND JACK, and coming in September,  A WHOLE LOT OF LUCKY. Learn more at her website. Danette’s here now with a special Flash Fiction Challenge!

Shortest Story I Ever Told—Flash Fiction 101 with Danette Haworth

 Shot cheating husband. Jail not bad.

Flash fiction is a compressed story form. Sometimes called microfiction, postcard fiction, sudden fiction, short short fiction, flash fiction is a complete story told in five hundred words or less. Some define flash fiction as containing up to one thousand words, but, for me, one thousand words allows too much wiggle room; five hundred words poses a bigger challenge.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Blaine Pascal

In writing flash fiction, as in writing poetry, the writer must make use of potent imagery and say things in the shortest way possible. Wait, let me rephrase that: As in writing poetry, the flash fiction author must use potent imagery and write concisely. These two sentences say the same thing, but the second sentence has nine fewer words.

With flash fiction, don’t expend your words explaining the nitty-gritty of the who, what, when, where, and why; instead, use only those details that will evoke for your reader more words and images than you’ve actually written.

Let’s go back to the six word story above. If we were writing a short story with a conventional word count, we’d be able to give the shooter’s name, and the husband’s, too. We’d know if they lived in a penthouse or a trailer, if the wife had just come home from her job on the second shift, or if she’d discovered her husband’s car at that nice little B&B just outside of town.

Shot cheating husband. I imagine that the wife has long suspected the husband of cheating and has finally caught him in the act. Maybe she was following him; maybe she stumbled upon this discovery. In any case, BLAM! She shoots him. It feels like a moment of passion, not something planned out.

Cheating husband—well, that can imply a lot. He’s negligent, aloof, gone all the time—a player. By using the word cheating, we’ve told the reader all they need to know about the husband, and we’ve given the wife the motivation for her actions. We’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that one word.

Jail not bad. 911 call, arrest details, courtroom drama—we don’t waste precious words outlining these events. We imply the details and trust the reader to understand what’s transpired between words. By the second sentence, the wife has already been tried, convicted and sentenced. Rather than writing all of that out, we trust the reader to infer that the wife has been through the judicial process and is now incarcerated. We move on to the denouement, catching her in reverie, reflecting on her sentence. Her rage is so deep-seated that, for her, jail time is not a bad price to pay for alleviating herself of a cheating husband.

One mistake some writers make when trying to write flash fiction is they write what is really an evocative sentence or paragraph—a piece that doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, but would serve as a great lead to a longer piece.

Here are two six word stories that don’t work for different reasons:

Armstrong: “One small step—”    Director: “Cut!”

I thought this one was funny when I wrote it, but it doesn’t work as a story because its impact is dependent upon the reader’s familiarity with the theory that the moon landing was an elaborate hoax staged by our government. Though we want readers to infer the unwritten information, it must be unwritten information we’ve intimated. We can’t rely on information they might not be familiar with.

Suicide noose broke. Must lose weight.

I had this picture in my mind of a person who thought he was depressed enough to kill himself, but deep down, he doesn’t want to die; he just wants things to get better, but he’s lackadaisical. Notice he doesn’t think of a more efficient way to kill himself; he determines instead that if the rope is to work, he will need to shed a few pounds, which will take time. Maybe he’ll try again; maybe he won’t. Even though I wrote these words, I can tell they don’t have the ability to convey all the details I’ve imagined. We don’t see much conviction here, and that lack of a definitive arc is why this six word piece doesn’t work as a story.

Tips on writing flash fiction:

• Use strong verbs. In flash fiction, no one walks—they stride, straggle, lumber, etc.
• Choose names with the purpose of evoking income level and environment. Where do you think a young woman named Elizabeth might live? What about a character named Wanda?
• Write dialogue that also builds the stage the characters are acting on. Someone who calls out, “Hey, Ma!” is probably in a different environment from someone who murmurs, “Excuse me, Mother.”
• Omit adverbs and adjectives. Search for the word that will carry the most meaning on its back.
• Use contractions and fragments as long as they make sense.

Places to read good flash fiction:

• Sudden Fiction, edited by Robert Shapard, James Thomas. This title has several editions. I discovered the 1983 edition in the library. Warning: this is a gateway book; you may become addicted.
• Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Fifty Really Short Stories, edited by Jerome Stern. This book is the tip of the iceberg known as World’s Best Short Short Story Contest held annually by the Southeast Review, literary journal of the Florida State University.
• Annual edition the Southeast Review containing the year’s winners for the World’s Best Short Short Story Contest.
• WOW! Women on Writing! website. Read the archives of past winning stories, then check out the quarterly flash fiction contest! This is a great place to try your hand at flash fiction because the contest is usually judged by an agent, and you can opt for a critique, which you’ll receive whether or not your piece places.

There are many more places and websites for you to read and submit flash fiction. I’ve listed the above entries because I either own them, have read them multiple times, or have submitted to them.

Writing flash fiction is precision work. It really does take a lot of time to write a shorter letter! I urge you to try your hand at it. Even if you don’t get hooked as I have, this writing experience will carry over to your novel writing. You will write tighter and your story will not stray from its path.

Now that I’ve done all this talking, I submit for your perusal my favorite flash fiction piece, “Manifest Destiny,” which won an Honorable Mention at the now dark website Whim’s Place (495 words). I originally wrote this piece for a contest in which the prompt stated that your five hundred word piece must include a credit card and making a car payment. Stick around afterward for your assignment.

Manifest Destiny by Danette Haworth

 Ever since the cat started speaking, Lisa felt differently towards him. It wasn’t the same I-feed-you, you-love-me relationship. Now they had to talk; they had to read the newspaper, and recently, the cat wanted to watch the news when Lisa wanted to watch  reality television.

Lisa looked up from the bills at the orange and white cat curled up on the rug. He was watching the MacNeil Lehrer Report. That was the worst part, Lisa realized. The cat was smarter than she was.

Lisa couldn’t stand his constant suggestions, his nagging. He made her spread out the financial pages and then he would cry out, “I told you to buy that stock!” He was right, of course, but Lisa couldn’t bring herself to listen to a cat.

In fact, she couldn’t take the cat any more. As she ripped out the last car payment and slid it into the envelope, an idea formed in her head. Lisa waited for the commercials before addressing the cat.

“Hey,” she said. “I just paid off the car. This calls for a celebration, don’t you think?”

The cat lifted his head. “Like what?”

“We ought to take a vacation.” It was spring break next week and even the clerks in Admin had the week off.

The cat glanced at the TV, then said, “Let’s go to Washington—that would be incredible.”

The cat would think so; he also enjoyed CNN and The History Channel.

“Great!” Lisa said. She grabbed her credit card, threw a few things into her suitcase, and carried the cat to the car.

Lisa drove straight for six hours. She could have stopped anywhere, really, but she felt she owed it to the cat to hit the Capitol. They arrived in the wee hours, parking in view of the Lincoln Memorial. When Lisa lifted the cat out of the car, she noticed his eyes had welled with tears.

The cat laughed self-deprecatingly, shaking his head. “Wow. Never thought I’d see this.”

Lisa’s eyes filled with tears, too. “I forgot something.”

The cat nodded and Lisa hurried to the driver’s side. She hopped in the car, slammed the door, and squealed out. In her rearview mirror, she saw the cat’s shocked eyes staring at her, his mouth forming a perfect O, the last part of “meow.”

Lisa didn’t think she’d miss the cat, but she did. The cat had kept her feet warm at night and kept her abreast of current events. Lisa began to watch CNN. The president had ended the war and initiated peace in the Middle East; tonight he announced a cure for AIDS. When the news conference was over, the president reached into the podium, pulled out an orange and white cat, and held him close.

Lisa gasped in her living room.

The president raised the cat to his ear. It looked like cuddling, but Lisa stared hard at the TV screen. She could see the cat’s lips moving.

The president was listening.

* * *

 Your assignment: Write a five hundred word piece (title not included) that somehow includes getting a cup of coffee. Think outside the box! A car payment and a credit card don’t scream Talking Cat! Go wild, but don’t go over five hundred words. Good luck!

 

Happy Friday, all! Today’s book giveaway is Danette Haworth’s A WHOLE LOT OF LUCKY, which I really, really loved.

It’s about a girl whose family wins the lottery, one of those pitch-perfect books for middle school kids. If you leave a comment on today’s post before 11:30 EST Saturday night, you’ll be entered to win a copy from Danette.

So…I’m not sure if you can hear it from where you live, but every Friday when I read your update posts, I cheer. With great gusto. Just in case I’m not loud enough, though, we have a special guest author visiting to cheer you on today. Sarah Darer Littman, who writes fantastic books for teens, will be popping in to join our conversation today, too.

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!

 

Hi, everybody! I’ve gotten some emails & requests lately from people who are excited about Teachers Write (which is great!) and want to share the content with the whole entire world (which can be great or not-so-great, depending on how you do it.)

Here’s the thing… Material posted on blogs is protected under copyright.  Copying and pasting an entire blog post and posting it on another blog or website or wiki, or turning it into a pdf and offering it for download is kind of like scanning a published book into your computer and uploading it to an illegal download site for book pirating.

When people do that with books & music, they are stealing from authors and artists. I’m not making any money from this blog, but the fact that you are here, on my website, reading my content is important to me. If the content that I share here (or that Gae shares on her blog or Jen on TMT)  is suddenly published in a zillion other places, that makes it less special.  It also makes it harder for me to defend the many hours I’m spending on this writing camp to my publishers when they ask when my next book will be done.

More importantly than that, though, I feel a responsibility to the guest authors who have been sharing their time and ideas here. I asked them for — and received — permission to post their mini-lessons and essays and prompts here, on this blog as part of the official Teachers Write camp.  That’s all. They haven’t given permission for their stuff to be shared elsewhere, and while finding it in other places might be okay with some of them, it will most certainly ruffle the feathers of others, and rightfully so. Because the words belong to them, and it’s not what they gave permission for.

I totally understand that you are all awesome people who respect authors and artists and ideas, and I know that your only goal here is to share what you think is useful content. But please, please do that in a way that respects the creators of that content as well as copyright laws. Here are some guidelines:

 

OKAY: Writing a blog post with the writing that you created in response to a writing prompt or assignment, with a link to the assignment at its original URL.

NOT OKAY: Copying and pasting the entire assignment or prompt on  your own blog or website.

 

OKAY: Copying and pasting the content of an assignment or prompt into a Word document to save in a file or print for a paper binder for your own personal use.

NOT OKAY: Copying and pasting assignments/prompts into a Word document and offering it as a download online. (Essentially, this is the file-sharing model used by Napster and other pirating sites.)

 

OKAY: Creating a “Best of Teachers Write” list with post titles and the original URL links to your favorite assignments and prompts, and sharing this list that you created on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else you like.

NOT OKAY: Copying and pasting a guest author’s prompt that you loved into your blog, facebook update, or someplace else online.

 

When in doubt, don’t copy and paste. Link to the original content on the site where it was originally published.

Please don’t fret if you broke one of these guidelines before you read this.  Just fix it if you can. I know that you are all awesome people, and you don’t need to email me to ask if I still love you. I do. 🙂

But really….these are good guidelines for any website or book or other artistic content that you like. Send people to the original source — the original website, the published book, the link to purchase the song on iTunes — rather than copying or sharing in a way that takes away from the creator of that work.

Many of you have written to me or talked in blog comments about wanting to have this Teachers Write content in one place where it’s easier to access. I hear you loud and clear, and one of the publishers I work with has already approached me about the possibility of putting together a Teachers Write book.  I love that idea. I hope it works out and gives us that place to have all the lessons and prompts easy to access, and I hope we can include some excerpts of the great writing you’ve done this summer, too. But doing that the right way — writing to every author who contributed a guest post to see if they’d like to have it included or not — will take time.  I’m working on it — I promise — and I do think we’ll end up with what you’ve asked for, which is all of the material in one place as both a paper book and an e-book.  (I also have this fantasy that if it comes together & people buy it, I’ll be able to offer a one-time scholarship for teachers who want to attend a writing conference or retreat…but that is a post for another day.)

Anyway…I know you want all the Teachers Write stuff in one place.

I’m working on it, but I really want to do it the right way, legally, and in a way that respects all the authors who have contributed. In the mean time, all the Teachers Write posts will be here, on my blog, and you can bookmark any post and visit any time.

If you’d help me out with that by following the sharing guidelines above, I’d really appreciate it.

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!