Teresa Fannin, reader, writer, gardener, chocolate fan & tea drinker

Category: Art & Craft (Page 10 of 17)

Takeaways

Over the weekend of February 21 to 23 I participated in the SCBWI Mid Winter Conference in New York City. There is a lot crammed into two and a half days, it is one event after another. This year they added craft for the writers. I’ve done the roundtable, and while it was an interesting experience, I don’t know that it gave me much to take away beyond what applied to the 200 words I brought with me. This year there was a daylong intensive on plot and structure with four presentations: Emma Dryden, Jill Santopolo, Jane Yolen and Elizabeth Wein, all on plot and structure.

While I feel pretty confident I can do plot [versus character] I do have a tendency to wind the plot into knots trying to make the red herrings more red and the obstacles more difficult. And the problem with that is it leaves me confused about what my character really wants to do, which parts of the plots are subplots and which part truly belong to the through line of the story arc.

The craft benefit of this intensive was not just the handouts, but the exercises. The fact that I learned how to identify not just the action [which is the part I dearly love] but also the emotional aspect of the action plot on my character. Now I can sit down and apply these exercises to each and every book I have. Oh, my!

I like my characters, I really do. But initially when I come up with a story I’m more interested in how the plot unfolds and what that means. Not quite theme, although that emerges when I realize where the book ends, but more what kind of scrapes and messes [that old saw–have your character run up a tree and then make them figure out how to get down] the character can get into, and how full of action and adventure they are.

I grew up with mystery books where the character really never changed, never grew, hardly aged. And, although I like books where the character grows up or becomes something other than what they were in the beginning of the story, it is not that huge for me. So the best part of this was not discussing the action plot, but the emotional plot, also called the heartline by one of the speakers. This is how the character goes from the beginning, maybe being cherished and coddled to frightened and in danger to solving the mystery, to the end, realizing he/she is now in charge of his/her own destiny.

When I think of it, I realize how my personal heartline changed from elementary school, through college, to adult hood and beyond. Every person has a heartline. That’s pretty cool!

 

 

 

 

 

Compelling Personal Story

I don’t have one, a compelling personal story. Nope, nary a really good tale, let alone a whole life story, just one pleasant ordinary life. I always thought CPS was the one told when you, you know, did something MAJOR. I was raised on the lives of the saints as CPS…those who suffered and died for their faith, believing that eternal life with God was the better deal. Or the biographies of those who were first–first to see a river, or first to climb the highest mountain, or first meet a new ethnic group [but we didn’t call them ethnic groups back then]. And being first meant the unknown, the fact that you had no idea what hazards lay ahead but you went anyway. And, the one thing these CPSs had in common? They were about dead people, lives well led, fully spent, done.

There’s a saying in the Euripides story of the Trojan Women when Troy has been sacked, the husbands killed and the children are sacrificed to the gods or turned into slaves. Somewhere along the way, Hucuba, wife of Priam, Queen of Troy says, “Count no one happy, however fortunate, before he dies.” That made sense.

Which brings me to the Orson Welles quote, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” The political climate of now being what it is, you don’t need a whole story anymore, and so the converse must be true [I studied Logic in college, the logic syllogism—if A is true and B is true, then C must be true or not] then, If you want a compelling personal story, that depends, of course, on where you start your story,” meaning it may not be the whole story, just one compelling personal vignette. Because that’s what many of these CPSs are today, a brief evocative description, account, or episode, not a story, a whole story.

So, to me, a verification of a compelling personal story is the whole story, not just a couple of years, but the WHOLE of it.

I’m writing a narrative non-fiction. This is the story of a man of fortunate background, aristocratic, well-educated, in a stable home, loving parents, older brothers, raised in a castle, having a brilliant mind, excellent in school, transferring into a career, successful. Very little in this is compelling, it all seems so easy, excellent name recognition opening doors, a life of interest, but not so that you’d write a book about it fifty years later. In this case, the CPS comes from his death. A meaningless, stupid, senseless death that did not have to be. And because it is so meaningless, stupid and senseless, changing the world, mourned by millions for what would now NOT happen, his life now is compelling, because everything he did, all that was in him, all that he worked to accomplish was over, perhaps never to return again. How sad for the rest of us.

Every one should tell at least one compelling personal story, it doesn’t have to be their own, it doesn’t even have to be real, but it does have to be a whole story, compelling and necessary. I hope I can do this one justice.

 

Epiphany

There are more words than I care to admit to that I first learned, that  started with a capital letter. Epiphany is one. It’s one of those words that roll nicely off the tongue, with a hard fssst sound in the middle. Very satisfying to say. But it was not just a word, or only a feast day, it was a major event.

While Jesus was born to the Jews, he was made manifest, revealed, to the Gentiles when the Magi found him, twelve days after Christmas. I’m a Gentile, and i always thought it was sad it was called Little Christmas. A strong word like Epiphany should be enough. Revealed. Manifest. Very powerful words.  It was a non-Latin word, not English, not one of the romance languages. Like the Kyrie Eleison, the only Greek in the mass, so it stands out when you singI like that.

There are not many of our feast days where we use the Greek, most are with Latin reference. But back to epiphany, in small letters. The word means a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being, a moment of sudden revelation or insight. I like that we don’t overuse the word in English. There was a time though, people would say “I had an epiphany.” No mention of what was now known, more that something was. Like a lot of words, epiphany has felt its fair share of abuse.

There are some words I’d like to use more. Epiphany is one. Catholic in the small ‘c’ sense of universal. But I wonder if today, readers, especially kids, would even know they are common nouns not just names. Sort of reminds me of the term ‘elevator’. In business school we learned that Otis designed the first vertical stairway. He named it an elevator. It has become a common noun, not a proper noun. Companies have spent a truck load of money protecting what could be common nouns, Coke, Kleenex, Xerox, just to name a few. They identify, they immediately bring up an image. Go into a restaurant and order a Coke, if they only serve Pepsi, the waitstaff will ask if a Pepsi is okay. Why, because it’s not just soda, it is a Coke!

With so many words being coined, made up, ginormous, selfie, ugh, functionality, which may be among the worst of them, it’s almost sad we’ve lost some great words. And it is fun to have an epiphany, to reveal, with sudden insight, what I think about common and proper nouns.

Top Ten

There is a new posting going through Facebook. You are to write a list of ten books that influenced you. Ten! Seriously? I do not subscribe to the Captain Jean-Luc Picard one event changed my life theory. I think that’s silly and a bit unreal. First of all, it took Jean-Luc until his early middle age to realize the one event changed everything, so how did that shape his life. And secondly, hmm, not sure there is a secondly.

Back to the ten.  For me that would mean I only read ten books. I’ve read thousands. I am a reader. I don’t remember not reading. I’ll read anything–graffiti on walls, cereal boxes, labels–to read is to live.  More than the number of books, I think it is the type of books that shaped me. I am not a coming-of-age reader. My favorite story is that I read LORD OF THE FLIES in eighth grade and that cured me forever of coming of age. In truth, it made me think that as kids we are really barbarians, and civilization is a veneer. Personally, I like that something makes us nicer, less barbarous and violent toward each other, even if it is only a thin, almost not-real coating.  After LOTF all other COA books looked rather tame and ordinary. And, really? It’s not like we don’t know the plot. An unhappy ending might be more interesting.

Back to the not-only-ten books and the type of books. I read mysteries because I LOVE to find out. As a kid I made maps of the neighborhood, charted the chores I had to do, listed all the things I needed to get done. In mysteries all of that detail work was what paid off. Oh yeah, there was some leap-of-faith stuff thrown in. No matter how you looked at it though it really only came together because the detecting brought out all the clues, relevant and not so relevant.

I read biography. If there are any books that are cool, it’s biography. Real biographies, not these written while the person is still around and doing. The ones where we’ve got some perspective on the person, we’ve read their diaries, their mail, their speeches, their actions, their relationships, their commitments. Biography more than anything made me look into myself, not to impress myself, or to be impressed, but to see what was wanting in me that made a person biography-worthy.

I read science fiction and fantasy. Well, first of all it’s cool to be on another planet, in another universe. Beyond that, sic-fi/fantasy taps into what we can become, how we are evolving. In some ways, it is a basic need to know that we will go on. The terror lies in the fact that we might not.

So, ten books? Bah! Every book I ever read influenced me, supported me, built me up, made me think, even the not so good ones.

What I learned today

I need a critique group. I need the imposed discipline. I need the conversation. I need the support. But mostly, I need the brutal truth about my writing. I don’t want, “oh that’s really good.” Or, “I like this.” What I want is––”no, you used that same word five times on the same page,” or, “collapse this part it’s definitely too much information.”

I’m lucky, I get it all from my critique group. But today, it was less about the writing and more about where I was going with the writing. What was I trying to get to. I’m writing a non-fiction. I’ve been toying with ‘is it a biography or is it just about a historical time period?’  I’ve worried that the subject matter is not easily translated into kids-speak. And, what is less history and more my life, I am concerned that the stuff that I think is important maybe isn’t.

So, I’ve been reading a lot of NF and trying to work out what makes a good NF tick. I don’t want a straight time line, you know, born, schooled, lived, died type of story. I’m not working for the kind of book a kid picks up and reads because of a book report. And, I don’t want it to be so full of fundamental facts that a kid will start to read and his/her eyes will glaze over. Oh, my! No! I want a book a kid will pick up and say, “Hey, this is cool!”

The problem is always, where do you start? At the beginning, and if so, which beginning, whose beginning. I’ve tried starting at the very beginning, but if you don’t know the historical figure, then WHOMP, who cares where he’s been born and lived, even if castles are involved. If you start in the middle, where he stepped onto the national and international stage, well, again, who cares. He’s just some dude who was important in the last century. So last century! It you start where he’s made a huge impact on the world––well then, why isn’t he remembered already?

So I was going for the mystery and trying to articulate what that meant to me, the whole raison d’être  of writing this book. And there is was. And one of my critique partners said it out loud.
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 Yes. Yes, indeed. It is certainly, most absolutely about the WHY.

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