NOVEMBER 15 IN HISTORY

 

On November 15, 1777, the Second Continental Congress ratified the Articles of Confederation, which was the precursor to the United States Constitution. 

 

Maybe this should remind us why we banded together, and why we have been better for it.

 

Instead of the constant banter about having uniform ways for all people, and if they won’t do as we think is right, let them be banned, shunned, or let us call it a divorce*, consider the quiet ways of tolerance.

*(Divorce: In the context of the union of states, is the unspeakable abomination that are Civil Wars anywhere, the most tragic type of wars for what is already a tragic human impulse.)

Let’s consider living and let others live as they deem right.

 

Fighting is not glorious, regardless of some movies and their parlor tricks. Real heroes get along.

 

I’d like to see a lot more of these heroes in stories, especially for young readers; quiet get-along main characters. They seek not glory and thus are glorious.

Blessed are the peacemakers, especially the quiet ones who live what they say, and do not tell others how they must speak, think, or be.

 

The USA constitution strove for a balance. Let’s remember what it’s about.

DOES ANALYZING OTHERS’ WORK MAKE A YOU A BETTER WRITER?

 

One of the many gifts of being a beta reader is learning how a story hits the spot (or doesn’t) on the reader’s end. I have gained as much from being a Beta as from being the one who received feedback from another.

 

There is another form of reading, one cultivated in academia, that imposes analysis on renowned books. The philosophies behind different forms of analysis are super-imposed on the text. I’ve done my share in school, and have never found it to help my writing. For that matter, I haven’t found those who excelled in literary analysis to be strong writers of original fiction. I have personal friends I will never name who fit into this category: strong academic background, and their original fiction suffered from the indoctrination.

 

One may argue, reading this article, that any analysis of others’ work is beneficial when forging with your own story. I will not deny this can and does happen. But as a rule, effective original fiction is intuitive, and the analyzing mind needs to go into lower gear, like a barely audible background hum, in order to tell a story well.

 

Another pithy way of saying this, paraphrasing Dr. Seuss: try to forget what you learned in Rule-going School. Let the intuitive life force flow. Get on the boat, and let it sail down the river, only occasionally resorting to use the oars.

©Geraldine Aikman

MEMOIRES

 

Memoirists have a special challenge: tell a good story, driven by themes which must not overwhelm the plot.

My late father was urged to write a memoire/autobiography, because his life’s story encompassed the momentous events of Jewish history of the 20^th century. He survived the Holocaust (ghetto and concentration camp) to go to what was then Palestine, and fight to establish the Jewish state of Israel. He was critically wounded in the battle for Jerusalem. He was part of a group that established a kibbutz. He went on the represent Israel in cultural aspects in France and Argentina.

 

Even one of these chapters would have made a poignant book. He was an academic historian, and wrote beautifully, having had poems published. He was the one to tell his story, right?

 

But he refused to write his memoires. He told me that people who write their life story inevitably lie, embellish, or seek justification.

“Fiction allows the writer to tell much deeper truths,” my father told me.

 

When I first wrote the story that would evolve into a published novel for middle grades, it was half biographical. By the time it took its final form, the details were more fiction than fact, and I submitted it as such. I was told by one editor who wanted to take it to acquisitions that it would be more likely to be acquired as a memoire. I, like my father, turned that down. The story had left the honest facts of my life’s story long before, in order (as my father would have put it) to tell the deeper truth and tell it as a better, tighter story.

One blurb I got referred to The Voice of Thunder as “fictionalized biography.” Fair enough.

 

Memoirists have the advantage that when submitting their story, they present it as true, and it is easier to sell it that way. But keeping it true while making it tight and compelling is a hard hill to climb.

See this post about the special challenges of seeking to traditionally  publish memoires.

WHEN CHARACTERS TEACH

 

Another writer, lamenting the steep odds to traditional publishing, told me she doesn’t need to write and will cease writing fiction if her journey doesn’t make an upward turn in the near future.

 

I was surprised. This writer is gifted, exceptionally so. She spends many hours at her craft. I assumed she, like me, writes for herself first. I told her that the writing process is a way of clarifying thoughts, and I couldn’t imagine not doing it regardless of what markets open (or don’t) for my stories.

 

She responded that Journaling, (=keeping a diary) serves that purpose for her. Fiction is a craft that is firstly labor, not a gift to self.

 

It’s different for me. Because, and this is a confession that could put me in the loony-bin in some folks’ eyes, my characters always surprise me with their insights. They say things I never knew, or never knew I knew. I grow and learn a lot from them.

 

Another way of putting it is the unconscious mind needed the conscious self to open a narrow portal and allow insights to slither out into the space that words inhabit.

 

 

Journaling has never served this for me, and I stopped keeping a diary many years ago. For me, the entries consisted of emotions of the moment that overwhelmed any chance for deep reflection.

 

In this blog I write of what I already know or hope to learn. In fiction, I learn what I didn’t know I knew.

 

So, to each their own. I am grateful for all that my fictional characters taught me, and while I’d love to share them with you, I will not abandon them regardless of who else chooses not to make their acquaintance.

SEASONS and SEASONINGS

 

Where I live, in California’s bay area, there is basically only one season.

Lucky us, the season is SPRING.

It goes something like this:

Bay area summer = Spring with morning fog

Bay area fall = Spring without the morning fog

Bay area winter = Spring with some rain

Bay area spring = well, just spring

I have dealt with this boring blessing by creating seasonality in artificial ways.

Example—

I change the bed’s quilt, and thus my bed reflects seasonality.

SUMMER^

FALL^

WINTER^

SPRING^

The cats are perennial.

 

It occurred to me that the stories I write are similar. My life is a steady road with mini-bumps for variety. The stories are life accentuated, outlined, marked with eye-popping swatches of drama.

The bed frame is akin to the daily discipline of writing, and the cats (i.e., the stand-ins for the narrator who is me) are the constant sentient beings. The quilts serve to delineate the titles from each other. 

Thus, stories are life with spicy seasoning.

🌻Happy Spring🌻

Literary Characters from One’s Real Life

 

Question: How many of your story characters are from your real life?

Answer: All of them

Answer: None of them

Answer: All of the above

 

My late father, a man who lived an astonishingly rich life and also possessed great writing talents, was often urged to write his autobiography. He refused, saying autobiographies are always exercises in self-justification, and in many instances also in self-beautification. He preferred fiction because he thought it more honest.

 

After penning quite a few fictional stories, I find that I agree with his assessment of fiction. The writer’s truth is in them, though it is not “just as it was in life.”

 

I trust these truths, and would even go so far as to call them self-evident,* at least in a roundabout way. *(With apologies to the brilliant wording of the United States Declaration of Independence)

Yes, even cute animal picture book stories are really people you know. Think of Aesop’s fables.

Now you got it.

Double and Triple-layered Lives

Say you found out someone you were related to and thought you knew well turned out to have been a major spook? Not a little cog in a big machine, but an honest to goodness give-away-the-store (i.e. vital national security) sort of spy?

 

That’s what happened to me about half a year ago. Someone (now gone from this earth) turned out in now-released documents to have spied for the K.G.B. on the state of Israel. He wasn’t just “someone,” he was a member of the Israeli Knesset, (think of the American Congress or Senate) and a member of the most security sensitive committee there at the time of becoming, what the documents describe, “ a K.G.B. agent.”

 

He was also a published poet and a founding part of the state. Go figure.

 

All this is only a bit surprising. Put another way; upon reflection, some pieces fell into place.

 

And all this is a crisp reminder that fictional characters must be layered, too. They have the presentation all can see, the presentation only the closest to them see, and the layer no one sees. 

Truth is richer than fiction? Right. But the storytellers’ control of their characters means we must never forget to have this third most hidden layer present in some form, even if it’s never explicit on the page.

P.S.

Passive construction in this post is deliberate. Hidden operators and hinted obfuscation in actions require this vagueness. 😎

Character and Theme

Most good stories are memorable because of their characters.

Most writerly how-to advice says to start with character.

I always had the themes first. What is this about? Only then the “who is this about” seeped in.

Developing the characters took care and deliberateness. The theme came naturally, the characters less so.

A few months ago, an unusual character popped in, and I followed this character to the end of the story.

One member of my critique group said, “Cute character, but you need to develop the theme.”

Blasted bubblegum! My way of writing had changed.

Of course, it isn’t either or. There’s more than one way. But for the first time I realize that no matter how old I am or how long I’ve been at it, I, too, am a writerly work-in-progress.

So the theme of this post is change is eternal 😉

Writers Need More Readers

With official summer around the corner, some think it the season for pleasure reading.

After all, when else will career busy folks put down their technical must-read-for-work books? When else will school children pick up books they want to read but don’t have to?

Turns out that a whole nation embraces creative writing, and we now have a National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a NaNoWriMo every November. But as more people are writing novels than ever before, fewer are reading them.

Leisure time is precious. Between movie streaming and internet news and animal videos, people have found time to write and encourage each other to publish. But who will read all that output?
Other than committed writers who read and write year-round, (not only in November) and children assigned books at school, most Americans do not read much fiction for pleasure. To illustrate the point, more than ninety percent of book groups are middle aged (and older) women. This leaves out a lot of people, many of whom don’t read a single work of fiction if they don't have to.

I think it’s time for National Novel Reading Month.

The internet tells us there is a National Reading Month. it falls in March, in honor of Doctor Seuss’s birthday. The great doctor should be honored, but this suggests a designation aimed at very young readers only. What happened to all the novels written in November if in March we read picture books? Besides, who’s ever heard of this NaRe[ading]Mo if they didn’t search? Where is the engine that drives this to be an actual national event?

I think July is a better candidate for the honor. But any month will do. 

Just sayin’.

Cultural Appropriation

The other day I ran into Rona.*

*(name changed)

Rona was a girl I knew in one of my children’s classes. Rona has changed a lot. Rona is now going by Ron. They are transitioning.

I wish them well. People seek their authentic selves all their lives, and there are many ways to that. But something occurred to me right then and there. There is nothing inside my being that has insight into this particular transition.

Oh, sure. Like most humans, there were parts of my physic that I wished were different at various times, though this has lessened greatly as I gained in years. Who hasn’t wanted a different nose/eye color/height or whatever? But the feeling of being in the wrong body was never one I had.

Which brought another insight: I could never write such a fictional character from the inside. I could and would write characters who are very different from me, but only as secondary characters, the way a main character whose inner world is one I know intimately, experiences them. We encounter and appreciate many people as we live, and my main characters will also. But it is the inner world, or point of view, (POV) that will remain someone I can vouch for.

This means that a black/Asian/Muslim/Trans character will not be the POV (first person or third person personal) for a story I will write. I’m guessing this is what the cry about cultural appropriation in fiction is about, and to that extent, I understand it.

But I do not begrudge any writer of fiction who does attempt this, because here also we must allow others to tackle what they feel strongly about. If they do so convincingly, that’s just fine with me.

And, in the end, there is no end to appropriation in fiction: main characters who are male written by female writers, (and vice versa) or a story taking place at a time so long ago the writer couldn’t have lived it except in their mind. It’s fiction.

I just don’t think I could do it well, so I will strive to appreciate but not appropriate.

©Luis Rodriguez 2018

Writers as Liars

April Fool’s, and it got me thinking about spy stories.

“Heh?” I imagine you’re saying. “Why?”

April Fool’s is a day of sanctioned pranking, deceiving, and let’s just say it, lying.

Spies, too, are sanctioned to lie by professional code. They lie to their loved ones about what they’re really doing. They lie to people they meet on assignment because they are spying on them. They even lie to their superiors about the small infractions they may have inadvertently committed on the job. They are trained to lie all the time. Don’t ask me how I know because I know it for a fact and I am not lying about that. But maybe I am.

I’ve only written one story (a novel for MG) with spies in its center. The theme of the story is lies, deception and betrayal. Not your usual glamorous depiction of brave action for a great cause, around which most spy novels are centered. Betraying people you know or meet is not noble.

Writers are constant liars also, even as we couch it as fibbing or stretching the truth. We conjure stories and insist none of the characters have relation to living or dead people. That’s a lie. We write memoirs and insist it is as it was, which is a lie because a good story needs to mute or enhance and also mainstream the telling.  We conjure and make believe and become so adept at it that we occasionally confuse ourselves.

It’s all in service of humans' endless fascination with other humans.

But one day a year, we do this openly and rejoice at this life art.

I hope your April Fools is worthy of its delightful possibilities.

Not even what I wrote here.

TITLES and Working Titles

In one of the funniest episodes of the TV series Seinfeld, Elaine wants to impress a famous Russian novelist with her inside knowledge. “Did you know that War and Peace was not Tolstoy’s original title? The original was War—WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?”

She was half-right. The working title was The Year 1805.

Stories abound, which I cannot vouch for, that many famous titles almost weren’t.

The Great Gatsby’s working title was The High Bouncing Lover.

To Kill a Mocking Bird’s working title was Atticus.

Of Mice and Men’s working title was Something that Happened.

Titles are an art all its own. If you ever marveled at a beautifully wrapped gift only to find that the content was less impressive, you got a glimpse as to what great titles can do. They are an enticing invitation to look inside without revealing the content. Fiction titles are evocative, not informative.

Titles cannot be copyrighted. They are often the brainchild of the publisher, not the author. Most publishing contracts don’t even give the author the right to veto a title they don’t care for.

For myself, I consider all my titles to be working-titles only. The title serves as a lamppost to remind me where or what or even why I’m telling this story, and sometimes whose story it is. But once the last line of the first draft materializes, all bets are off. I got to the finish line in one piece, and renaming the journey is wide open.

Heroes— Faux or Fearless

“Courage is not the towering oak 
that sees storms come and go;

It is the fragile blossom 
that opens in the snow.”

― Alice Mackenzie Swaim

Not only the news, but also all fiction (save some literary strains) focuses on active heroism. Rescue someone from a fire, face a serial killer, stand up to a bully and punch ‘em back, and a story worth the readers’ time is also deemed worth telling.

Thus, we lose the heroes of everyday that are all around us. Those who carry on while others give them nary a glance, those who continue to think independently in times and places where pressure to conform is overwhelming. As they remain authentic, they do not convert this independence to a ruckus riot.

And most of all, those who retain their creativity and humanity while humbly considering others’ feedback, but not breaking under the weight of negation.

So many of the people in my life are heroes. I salute them. Maybe we should write more stories about them. The quiet blossoms in the snow.

Dream, and Dream Some More

My late father was a holocaust survivor who lost every member of his family. He lived this dark nightmare in his teens, and came out of it not only a physical survivor, but also a person capable of deep love for humanity.

When my stepmother asked him how he survived, she was not asking about factual practical details. She was asking about his psyche, which was exceptional in endurance and creativity.

“I dreamed,” he said. “I’m still a dreamer.” I imagine that wherever he is now, he's surely dreaming.

I realize that I’m his daughter in this sense. I have not had to endure the horrors of his youth, but I have had challenging times. From an early age, I, too, dreamed.

When I was in kindergarten, I imagined that I had a real Mickey Mouse for a special friend. My secret pet lived under my bed, where no one else ever saw him. When everyone went to bed, Mickey and I would talk for hours, and he even gave good advice, that mouse.

I continue to dream. Only now, it’s a focused engagement that winds up in the form of manuscripts for young readers. This is part of why first drafting a story is my mental and emotional salvation. The rest of the work is dues I pay for spending so many hours dreaming.

When friends tell me they can’t write fiction, I know they are not focused dreamers. Or perhaps they don’t realize that when they use their imagination to solve problems, there is focused dreaming going on, which they could use in serving a story.

To all you dreamers~~~

Blessed Are the Friends

You’ve heard the ubiquitous question, “where do your stories/ideas come from?”

Invariably the sweeping answer is, “everywhere.”

But a truer answer is that different people tend to get ideas in idiosyncratic ways, specific to them.

I know writers who get a lot of stories for fiction novels from newspaper accounts of real life stories.

I know writers who get story ideas while walking and looking at houses, imagining the families who live there.

I know writers who get ideas for fiction from reading others’ fiction, and imagining how much more they’d have done with those stories.

About a year ago, I realized many of my longer stories got their themes or protagonists from a friend of mine. One specific friend. We have our regular walk & talk, and I’d be telling her something I had experienced way back, when she’d say, “why don’t you write your next story about it?”

She is not a writer, but an excellent reader. I owe the last five MG novel themes to her.

When Fiction is Unbelievable

Many moons ago a professional in the publishing world said one of my stories belied credulity. A fancy way of saying it had too much this-and-that to pass for a realistic tale, as it was realistic fiction.

My first reaction was to hyperventilate. This particular middle grade novel depicted real events from real life. Not necessarily mine, but the life of a trustworthy person close to me who had nothing whatsoever to gain from making it up.

To me, this criticism meant one of two things. Either the reader had a limited range of what they could absorb as realistic, or I had failed to tell this story in such a way that it could pass for what might, just possibly, be something that could have happened.

The first possibility, regarding the reader’s limited imagination, is something I could do nothing about. The second was completely up to me.

When there’s a choice between what I can do nothing about and what is up to me, I choose the second. Helplessness is depressing, and what I can fix is empowering.

I know, my first instinctive reaction was to push such onto other people and, well, not my fault is a mantra we learn from a young age. Not only does it spare us possible punishment, (“the dog ate my homework”) but the adults around us model such reaction every day. Just look at our elected officials and almost anyone accused of a crime.

But, as I told my kids when they were growing up, only you can undo the things that are your doing. This is powerful.

When DS was a toddler and going through the “mine” phase, I remember some unfortunate thing happening that resulted in my saying to him it was not his fault. I don’t recall what that something was, but I never forgot his response. “It is my fault! It’s all mine!”

It was funny, but also a teachable moment for both of us.

So, moving forward, I combed over the fictionalized biographical story and labored to make it stronger and more vivid. In the process, I discovered a writing technique that might work for you if you encounter this reservation from a reader.

It’s in the details.

If you write concrete and specific details into the story, it gains a dimension of reality that wasn’t there before. The more details the better. Go all out. Describe the shape of the doorknob and the sound it made when the protagonist twisted it slowly, or the smell of specific herbs cooking next door. Don’t think of the details as unnecessary, but as part of concertizing. Not only fantasy stories deserve world building.

The true story I refashioned into fiction came my way without details. I had to invent them. But the fiction I imagined made the bones of a true story more realistic.

Don’t despair, fix it.

Can you tell I’m in the throes of just such?

Why REALITY is All the Rage

When James Frey couldn’t sell his excellent story (A Million Little Pieces) as fiction, he presented it as nonfiction and it sold with an explosive marketing campaign. What followed was Oprah’s endorsement and NYT bestselling status until...

A website called The Smoking Gun exposed it as fictional, after all.

Every story has some of the writer’s reality in it. But if you label it non-fiction, you should stick very closely to documentable events. Where you take liberties, such as name changes to protect people or omissions for the sake of expediency, you must acknowledge this right off the bat.

Even when reading fiction, the reader wants it to be real. We secretly think that though the writer states this is a work of fiction, it’s *likely, mostly, basically, please-be* a true story.

This is why the how-to books admonish not to start a story with a dream sequence or a flashback. A reader invests in what is happening, only to find out it was just a dream or something that happened long before the main narrative. Na-ah. Not nice. Don’t do it to them.

Readers want that “happening now” feel, an exclamatory phrase CNN uses with abandon. It is much easier to sell a story if the storyteller prefaces it with BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

Long ago, the sight of an old Victorian house in an adjacent town inspired me to imagine a ghost story that could have occurred in it. Actually, I based the story on something a friend told me did happen to the family that lived there.

The next time I walked by with my kids, (then five and eight years old) I told them the story. Don’t be alarmed, it was a kid-friendly version. They were riveted.

{Full disclosure: photo is not that very house^ but one very similar looking J}

Then the question came. “This I a true story. Right, Mom?”

The way they phrased the question begged me to lie. But they were my kids, not some nameless unseen readers. I told the truth.

“Well, no. I made it up. But the house inspired it.”

The instant deflation of their spirits testified to how much it mattered.

There are ways to sort of get around this.
Think of the lines that precede the first chapter of The Da Vinci Code. It’s a list of two little-known things that are factual, investing the reader in what is a work of fiction.
The Movie (and made for TV series) Fargo begins with “this is a true story,” but phrased in an enigmatic way that works as a disclaimer, too.

Because if we are to follow a narrative we need to believe it. At the very least, we need to have our incredulous nature suspended for the duration.

WHAT IS WORTH HAVING AND KEEPING...

“Nothing worth having comes easily”

Theodore Roosevelt

Ever wonder about stories of worldly success that went something like...

 “I wrote it in an afternoon and knew a friend of a friend of an editor, so I passed it on to them never thinking about it amounting to anything and was surprised a week later to have an offer of publication. The rest is history.”

From the writer of a children’s classic picture book.

"I was working selling shoes when I became an actor after a talent agent approached me one rainy afternoon, and a few months later I became a movie star never having imagined my life would go anywhere near such, and the rest is history."

 From a forty-year acting career veteran and much $$$ later.

 "I never thought of myself as an inventor. I accidentally mixed some ingredients in the kitchen while making a failed birthday cake for my dog, and wound up with something the whole world needed, and the rest is history."

From A Nobel Prize winner

If you don’t know these stories, you haven’t been to the movies in a very long time, and possibly avoid reading fiction, also.

I think we all secretly live with such fantastic hopes for ourselves, even as they are not the way it usually goes. (That's an understatement.)


I don’t think that if it came easily it isn’t worth having. That thinking is too puritanical, even for me.

But I think a creative worthwhile life begins when you can let go of this sort of narrative and make the assumption that it just ain’t so.

That’s when I get to work.

“The work praises the person”

An Irish saying

NINE / ELEVEN

This Day in History

Any day before a reader was born is history.

If you write stories for children, (which, to me, means young readers/listeners up to the age of fourteen) September the eleventh two-thousand and one is history.

There are already some good Kidlit books that either tell of that day, or have it in the background of a story. I wrote one such, and my agent wondered if it was too soon. Less than six months later, a whole slew of children’s books came out telling of that day. It was not too soon.

It was a seismic shock for the United States, one whose reverberations are operational today. We fear depicting the religion in whose name the perverted individuals chose to act, because many innocent adherents should not be implicated. But if we tippy-toe around that, we can’t tell the story of that day honestly.

And if we tell it honestly, how do we tell it to a child?

For my grandparents’ generation, there was another day that lived in infamy. It was the day where Pearl Harbor, where most of the United States navy was docked, another nation whom we did not provoke chose to decimate the American fleet in a few hours.  Listen to the then president of the United States speaking to the nation here. Franklin Roosevelt said it clearly: December seventh nineteen-forty-one, a date that shall live in infamy.

The country of Japan is an ally now, after we defeated it. Few kids know that date. But it would not be farfetched to say that the events of that day are still reverberating in all we think, feel and do today.

I don’t know what we should do about nine-eleven, except that I am sure we should write about it, and tell young readers what happened. Best to do it with riveting stories, preferably engrossing fiction where imagined characters live through real events, because these are the stories kids read out of school.

Someday, through the haze of the passing time, we will not fear naming the perpetrators. We’ll be breaking bread with their grandchildren, and together we’ll confront new challenges.

But for now, today, nine eleven is still a date that lives in infamy.

Loving What We Do

Back to doing what we love, and loving what we do, I am in deep doo-doo preliminary plotting my next novel.

Some writers are pansters. They write by the seat of their pants, and do not know where the story is going. It is as much a surprise to them as it will be for the readers.

Some writers are planners. They plot carefully before writing the first paragraph. They know every bone of the story, and only need to do the work and flesh out the details.

I’m a rough planner. I know the general outline of the beginning, middle, and end. I know little of the details, and the writing process offers many surprises for me. But I always felt I needed a general arc and direction before I so much as conjure the first sentence.

I considered doing it differently this time. I thought jumping in without the safety net of an outline would be a challenge that could revive the creative sprits. I wanted to leave the comfort zone of the tried and true, and who knows--- Maybe the results will be truer than ever.

But I chickened out.

So here I am again, beginning to fill in the boxes of a rough outline for what I hope would be a very good story. Only I feel somewhat defeated because, well, here I am again.

Maybe next time.