Tag: Writing advice

Writing Tip — Digging into Research

IMG_8547I recently returned from a trip to Tucker County, West Virginia. My novel is set in a fictional county of West Virginia, but shares many characteristics with Tucker and neighboring Grant County.

Because my novel is set in current times, I have a much easier time doing my research than if I was using a historical context.

Here are three rules to follow if you are fortunate enough to be able to live in the setting your characters occupy:

1. Walk the walk. Or drive the drive. However you need to move around to familiarize yourself with a location, do it. We hiked through the mountains. I drove through three local towns and the twisty, heart-stopping roads between them. Such on-the-spot research reveals aspects I couldn’t learn from just reading books. For example, I went on a night walk because this is something my characters do. Apart from just feeling what the night is like in the mountains, I learned when it’s too dark to see my feet, I get a feeling of vertigo, like every step drops into a bottomless pit.

IMG_85262. Talk to the locals. Nothing beats learning from the people who live in a location. We stayed at Blackwater Falls State Park. While one of my kids made a craft at a program in the nature center, I talked to the assistant naturalist and found out all kind of interesting facts about the area. Such as how the beautiful eastern hemlocks are under attack from an invasive insect.

3. Visit a local library if there is one. Since I am a former librarian, it’s not surprising I like to do my research in libraries. Often, libraries have resources on the local area you can’t find online. I went to the library in Parsons, the county seat of Tucker County, and read through some old newspapers on microfilm (haven’t used that in a while), researching an idea I have for a mystery novel. It was difficult to print off the microfilm machine, so I asked if any of these old newspapers were online. The librarian told me they weren’t, so visiting the local library was my only option.

If your story isn’t set where you live, and it isn’t on the third planet from Altair, do your best to visit your setting. What you learn will surprise you.

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Writing Tip — Writing in Time — August and the Eclipse

summer-922549_1280Much more than December, August feels like the end of the year to me. The summer is winding down, school starts, and sports and arts seasons begin. This is my favorite time of the year. From August on, each month holds something interesting for me.

Unless it’s been a brutally hot summer, most people where I live aren’t fed up with the season when August rolls in, like we are with winter when it’s February. I don’t feel anxious for the changes August heralds, just a quiet contentment — content to say farewell to the summer schedule and hello to the autumn one.

The evenings are bathed in gold during August, perhaps contributing to my content feelings. I love how the evening light looks in the summer. One of the best descriptions of golden evenings I have read is in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

With these impressions in mind, I think August is the perfect month to end a story if you want a warm or nostalgic or even a bittersweet finish.

wallpaper-1492818_1280Where I live, no major holidays occur in August, but this year on the 21st, North America will experience a solar eclipse, the first of its kind to cover so much of the United States since 1970. To learn more, click here.

I am always interested in how sunlight changes within the day and the season and then using those observations as settings for my writing. I wrote a post on it last year. I am very excited to watch how the eclipse affects the light. I bet it will appear otherworldly, making this unusual natural phenomenon a perfect setting for some unnatural fiction. So if you are in North America on August 21, get outside!

How do you view August as a setting for your writing?

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Writing Tip — How to Write Anything

IMG_1106How to Write Anything: a Complete Guide by Laura Brown is not really about how to accomplish every kind of writing there is. It’s a guide to what I call technical writing. Ms. Brown covers personal writing, like holiday newsletters, wedding announcements, and complaints, school writing which includes everything from note-taking to lab reports and essays, and business writing. She also discusses writing online.

What does this great book have to do with creative writing? Ms. Brown states in her introduction that all this technical writing can be accomplished by dividing the process into six parts: purpose, reader, brainstorm, organize, draft, and revise. I think those six sections work for creative writing, too.

  1. Purpose — Why are you writing a particular piece? Is it to entertain yourself? Share a message with others?
  2. Reader — What reader is your writing aimed at? Yourself? Friends? If you want to be published, you must know the audience you are writing for. Publishers expect you to know that information and tailor your work to your readers.
  3. Brainstorm — Everybody knows what this means. I will add I sometimes think of great ideas and then believe I will remember them. When it comes time to write them down, I forget what they were. So write down your brainstorming ideas.
  4. Organize — This may take many forms when you are writing creatively. Some people work best with a detailed outline and others may need to jot down just the significant plot points and write to connect those dots.
  5. Draft — Pull your brainstorming and organization together in a first draft.
  6. Revise — Always review and rewrite. Even if it’s just a cute poem for a friend to celebrate her birthday, review and rewrite. Very, very few writers, and I’m definitely not one of them, write something great the first time.

This process will serve any writer well for any kind of writing. If you need examples of technical writing, check out How to Write Anything. I found much of the advice about writing online especially helpful.

Ms. Brown writes in Chapter 2 that a person doesn’t have to use the process in the order listed above but should consider all the parts sometime during  writing, if he has the time. I think creative writers should always consider all six parts for every piece of writing.

Does this process sound like it would work for you? Maybe you already have a productive writing process. Let me know what it is. I am always ready to learn!

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Writing Tip — Lesson #2 from The Deer on a Bicycle

group-1825513_1280“Pat, your characters are always yakking away at each other. How come?”

Mr. McManus answers that he “enjoys writing dialogue.” He also writes that “when I have trouble coming up with a story idea, I will put two characters in a scene and start them talking. Often, an idea for the story will emerge from their conversation.”

I think this is great advice if you are brainstorming for some kind of story, or if you are stalled in a scene of a larger work.

This is espeically helpful to me because I am a character-driven writer. I develop characters first, get to know them inside and out, and then try to concoct a plot for them. When I really know my characters — and some I have known longer than my husband — scenes sometimes just write themselves.

One Sunday I sat down to write fiction just for the fun of it and used characters from my novel. I had had a scene in mind for a long time. Like many of my scenes, I knew how I wanted it to start and how it should end, but the journey between those points was completely unknown.  That’s when the fun began.

The scene consisted of only three characters in a conversation. Once I began writing, my regular characters took over. I found myself writing dialogue that surprised me and yet I was thinking, “Yes, that’s exactly what Mike would say.” It felt like, as Mr. McManus writes, I was “eavesdropping on my own characters.”

If you like creating characters and writing dialogue, get your characters yakking. You could find a new approach to your writing. Or just a lot of fun.

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Writing Tip — Lesson #1 from The Deer on a Bicycle

teaching-311348_1280I could write for three months on what I have learned from The Deer on a Bicycle by Patrick F. McManus. Instead, I will just discuss a couple things I have found the most interesting.

“Why do you give your characters and places such odd names?”

Mr. McManus explains that naming his characters Retch or Rancid or the Troll immediately tells the reader something about those characters. He adds, “Because of the brevity required for short humor, one must continually look for way to save words. Comically descriptive names for characters and places are one of mine.”

Descriptive nicknames can work in longer fiction, too. In the mystery A Fool and His Monet by Sandra Orchard, FBI agent Serena Jones catches two men peddling stolen art. Since she doesn’t know their names, she calls them “Baldy” and “Sidekick”.  The main character in Marissa Shrock’s The First Principle, a dystopian Christian fiction YA novel, overhears a conversation between two women who are strangers to her. Based on their appearances, she calls them “Puffy” and “Pudgy”.

In both examples, the main characters nickname minor ones because they don’t know their names. The nicknames tell readers something about those minor characters and it’s more concise for the author to write “Baldy” rather than “the bald man” or Puffy rather than “the woman with the puffy face.”

735600I have a special affection for nicknames because I use them for family members. In my novel, I have character who nicknames almost everyone. He calls his nephew who is a drummer “Sticks” and another nephew who wears a cowboy hat “Cowboy”.

Nicknames not only tell you something about the character with the name, but also about the person who invented it. If a teen calls his math teacher “the Fuhrer”, that reveals qualities about the teacher and the teen.

I think having a character hand out nicknames and giving them to major characters make all your characters seem more real. Many of us have nicknames, sometimes tied to our family relationships, hobbies, jobs, or physical characteristics, and those nicknames highlight different aspects of our life.  They can do the same for your characters.

Keep nicknames in mind for humor, brevity, description, or character development.

 

 

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