Five Writing Lessons I Learned From TV

I used to spurn TV. Why would I waste all that time sitting in front of the tube when there are so many other things to do in life? Why not spend the time writing, instead?

*Photo credit

Well, despite that lovely black-and-white vision of the world, I now watch the occasional TV series. Why? From a writer's perspective, there are numerous reasons to indulge in this visual form of storytelling:

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Finals! (and Other Teenage Troubles)

FINALS. They have descended on our kids—and, therefore, on the entire household, a week of exams preceded by what seems like two months of building stress, final projects, deadlines, and kids with too little sleep. It brings back memories of my own high school career—the intense emotions of being a teenager coupled with the stress that comes with knowing that what I did mattered, like, for the rest of my life. Teens are in that awkward middle place where they want to be in charge of their own lives—and yet, at the same time, they don’t. Being in charge is scary. Being grown-up is scary. The stakes are starting to get higher.

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Mix-and-Match Characters

I played with a cool “puzzle” as a kid: three blocks stacked on top of one another, with a rod threaded through them so they can rotate independently. The result is a 3-cube stack with a different picture on each of the four sides. The top third of each image shows a head, the middle third a body, and the bottom pictures the legs and feet.

Line up the images, and you have four simple characters: for ex., a cartoon tiger, alligator, hippo, and monkey. You can also twist the blocks to connect the monkey body to the hippo head and alligator legs, or connect the alligator body to a tiger’s tail and a monkey’s head. (Now, of course, this puzzle is available as a smart phone app….)

Sometimes I think character creation works the same way: you borrow the geeky appearance of one person, add in the always-in-motion high energy of another, mix in a quirky turn of speech you overheard in the elevator and the girl-next-door’s fluorescent pink high tops…and pretty soon you’ve pieced together your protagonist.

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Using Archetypes to Create Characters

It’s been on my list for a while to write a post about character archetypes and how they can inspire your writing…

…but Mark Nichol over at DailyWritingTips has such a comprehensive post about character archetypes—including the use of horoscope signs, Jungian psychology, Shakespeare characters, and the “personality enneagram” for character inspiration that instead of writing my own post, I’m going to point you over there.

Here’s a taste:

In essence, any literary character is drawn from one or more archetypes. An archetype is basically the pattern for a character, associated with a trait or a concept. Archetypes are most easily recognized in genre fiction — science fiction, fantasy, horror, thriller — but they are applicable to any fiction, whether of high or low literary aspiration. The key is to select one or more archetypes as just the first step in character building.

But there are many types of archetypes from various belief systems and other sources. Try, for example, associating a character with one of the figures from the Chinese zodiac — boar, dog, dragon, horse, goat, monkey, ox, rabbit, rat, rooster, snake, and tiger — each of which is endowed with a complex array of both positive and negative traits….

See? Don’t you have to go read the rest?

Enjoy!

:-) Cheryl

Thursday’s Thing to Love about Being a Writer…

…Traveling amazing places! Learning new stuff! Interviewing cool people!

Early early early tomorrow morning, I leave for Texas to spend a long weekend with a writer friend, exploring the Columbia Bottomlands, meeting with some wildlife biologists, sea kayaking, bird watching…

I wish I could say I was cool enough to have set all this up, but I’m just riding along on her coat tails as she collects material for a freelance writing assignment. But don’t worry, I will be collecting material right alongside her.

Yeah. I love being a writer. Happy writing today!

:-) Cheryl

What do you love about your writing life this week?

I love my job…

I needed to research the sound of wind and waves for a sailing segment of my WIP, and this is my inspiration (skip ahead 30 seconds to get to the sailing):

Wow, I love being a writer in this day and age!

Mwaa-ha-ha!

Since I’m working a book for middle grade kids right now, I have the irresistible urge to spy on…I mean, pay attention to…my 11-year-old and his friends.

What do 11-year-olds spend their time doing? It’s an excellent question for the children’s writer to ask, so I thought I would share my research with you.

Eleven-year-olds train their boxers to lie in the hammock:

They climb trees, spend hours online researching the best cards for their next Magic: the Gathering deck, ambush their older brothers with homemade rubber band guns, work on their tree houses, and create elaborate ropes courses in the back yard.

 

Ah, gotta love summer….

:) Cheryl

Studying Beginnings

I’m working on a new type of writing project right now. A memoir. (No, it’s not my own—I’m working with someone who is MUCH more interesting than I am on THEIR  memoir.) But since it’s new kind of writing for me, I’ve been reading and taking notes on a LOT of memoir to see how other authors handle it.

In the process, I’ve stumbled upon a wonderful tool for studying book beginnings: the Kindle. In my case, the Kindle for iPhone.

Did you know that the Kindle allows you to download sample chapters from most, if not all, available books? I knew this, but it wasn’t until I was sitting in a kid’s orchestra rehearsal, wishing I had a pile of memoirs with me so I could check out how various authors begin their stories, that I put two and two together. With the Kindle, it’s incredibly simple to download and compare ten or twenty of fifty book beginnings.

As a fellow writer, I did, in fact, wrestle with whether it was fair to the authors I was reading to download their book openings for free. I decided it was. First, I could have accomplished the same thing by picking up the books at my local library and spending a few afternoons at my local bookstore. I’d already done the first and was planning on the second—the Kindle just made the browsing process a bit easier.

Second, when I scan through 20+ book beginnings, I inevitably find a must-buy title that I would not have found otherwise, just like I go out and buy the best of the library books I read.

Meanwhile, I was able to peruse a wide range of memoir openings from the relative comfort of my folding chair during orchestra rehearsal. What more could a writer want?

:) Cheryl

PS: For those of you who do not own the Kindle or iPhone, many books are available to “browse” online through author websites, Amazon, or other bookselling websites.

The Barefoot Burglar

I’m writing draft #1 of my latest YA novel—and every once in a while, I lose my forward momentum. That’s usually a sign that I’m missing something. Even though I *attempt* to do a thorough job mapping out plot, characters, and setting ahead of time, I hit inevitable bumps and hitches when I actually write the story. The trick is knowing what to do about them.

One of my favorite strategies is to travel to the area where the story is set—in this case, in the San Juan Islands in the Pacific NW. Unfortunately, I don’t have the funds to hop on a plane, fly up there, and rent a sailboat for a week, so sometimes I substitute research of a more practical bent…like reading the area’s local newspaper.

You gotta love living in a time when you can read about the sheriff’s clothing choice at a recent speech to the San Juan Lion’s Club, or find a blow-by-blow account of the Wolverines’ latest soccer match.

Not that I’ll use the soccer game scores in my book. However, the case of the barefoot burglar is definitely going to inspire some local color for the tale.

The barefoot burglar is a local teen who’s been on an 18-month spree of breaking and entering, theft, and, most recently, joyriding in airplanes. Apparently, he has little trouble avoiding the local police force—which shouldn’t be such a big surprise, because the islands don’t have the manpower to track down one kid on several islands filled with vacation homes, trees, deer, and the occasional bald eagle.

My favorite character in the tale isn’t the kid, though. It’s the mother, who threatened to chase reporters off her property with a shotgun—and then proceeded to give them a lengthy interview. She talks about her son with a mixture of sympathy, worry, and pride. She told reporters "I hope to hell he stole those airplanes — I would be so proud. But put in there that I want him to wear a parachute next time." (from Gene Johnson’s AP article “Teenage burglar moves on to stealing planes, eludes police on islands north of Seattle”.)

Yeah, this is the kind of character detail that makes me grin. Two sentences and you can totally picture this woman, right? Thanks, Ms. Kohler. You’ve helped me find my way back into the story!

:-) Cheryl

The sidetracked writer

Theoretically, there are many ways a writer might get distracted when working on the first draft of her latest YA project. For instance, she might:

• Stop to research the perfect name an orca might give to itself
• Need to discover whether harbor seals sleep hauled out on land or if they sleep in the water—and then need to spend time learning about “bottling” (see above pic), the tricky seal habit of sleeping while bobbing upright in the water
• Check email, Facebook, etc.
• Go to get a coffee refill
• Pay attention to the laundry piles growing in the laundry room
• …and after all that, she might forget that her original purpose was to write the darned scene, with or without the above information.

This is why all writers need to discover brackets. You keep forward momentum much better when you’re willing to write [insert clever comeback here] instead of stopping the writing to actually come up with said clever comeback.

Could you please remind me of that the next time I stop writing to find out the social habits of harbor seals?

:) Cheryl

I love being a writer…

…because I spent the afternoon watching videos like these and can honestly say it was for my work. These are research for my current WIP, because the main character recently lived on the Valdez Peninsula in Argentina, where she and her father studied orcas.

I wanted to discover details about what it might be like to live there—and since I don’t have a few thousand to plunk down on a trip (as always, my first research choice) I took a virtual journey a la You-Tube.

Researching First Love

I'm writing a YA novel in which love plays a major role—the first, fluttery, uncertainty of a girl with a crush on a guy she really, really likes. I need to do a bit of research, a bit of remembering, because I want to capture all the painful magic of the experience on the page...and I've made the delightful discovery that I can commission my significant other to help me.

Maybe this idea works for me because I've been away from sweetheart and family for 5 days. I find myself savoring each moment as if we've first met. It takes me back to a snowy college night when I had my first true-love kiss.

I like it. I like the rediscovered headiness and uncertainty of first love—probably better this time around, when I'm not actually afraid of rejection or hurt. I know how this story ends.

I think I'll call this sweetheart-o-mine and ask him on a date—a goofy date that costs nothing but time and imagination, like those we used to have before jobs, marriage, kids and such. And we'll do a bit of lovely research.

Theoretical distractions in snowy Colorado

Theoretically, a Colorado writer could get totally derailed because the next words in her sentence are supposed to be the name of a teen folk-rock band.

Theoretically, she could then spend an hour or so looking up teen bands, band names, and baby names (that might become a cool band name;) and, also theoretically, that might lead to time spent reading blogs, researching the local band scene, and investigating the band names that are already out there.

This could take up a lot of a writer’s time.

I’m just sayin’.

:) Cheryl

Putting on my story-filter

There’s this thing I do, now that I’m a “real writer.”* I do it without even noticing, most of the time. I do it when listening to the news, while watching kids joke around at the bus stop, even when I’m on a romantic date (sorry, sweetie….it’s the danger of dating a writer.)

What is this thing of which I speak?

Here it is: I put on my story filter. 

A story filter is a mindset, a pair of mental glasses through which I view everything around me. It’s the filter that takes a snatch of conversation and directs it to the part of my brain that’s working on a YA novel; it sends the image of a kid with straight blond hair, sunburned cheeks and a gap-toothed grin and files it as a possible picture book character. It takes the NPR news story heard in the car and slots it in with possible article ideas, and it analyzes the heartsickness of losing a treasured necklace so I’ll know how to describe that emotion later, when it’s felt by my character.

I feel as if the world is my textbook and I’m constantly studying. These tidbits, recorded in my memory or, if I’m lucky, in a journal or on a scrap of paper, give me a rich source of ideas when I sit down at the page.

So is this story-filter automatic? For me, yes, it is now something I do automatically—but it hasn’t always been. At the beginning, it was something I had to cultivate. Something I had to practice. But if you do…well, it does cause rather odd thoughts to slip through your head at random moments, but it also helps you to notice all those little details that will bring your writing to life.

So go ahead: start developing your own story filter! If nothing else, it gives you a great answer for the next person who asks you what you’re thinking!

:) Cheryl

*By “real writer,” I mean a writer who’s convinced herself that that is what she is, who actually admits that’s what she does for a living, and who devotes regular, consistent time to the practices of writing, marketing, and continuing education. Publication is nice, too, but not essential. Just in case you were wondering….

The List Post

I keep coming across tres cool list posts from other bloggers (maybe because I've been catching up on my blog reading this week? Nah, that couldn't be it....) so I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

1. Literary Rambles: Blog Topics for Writers (as featured on Alice Pope's CWIM blog). This is a great reference for those days when you just can't think what to write....


2. Agent Nathan Bransford's "10 Commandments for the Happy Writer". My personal favorite? #10: Keep writing. Or, in Nathan's words: "Didn't find an agent? Keep writing. Book didn't sell? Keep writing. Book sold? Keep writing. OMG an asteroid is going to crash into Earth and enshroud the planet in ten feet of ash? Keep writing. People will need something to read in the resulting permanent winter."


3. Writer's Digest "There are No Rules" blogger Jane Friedman's "WD's Editors Intensive Cheat Sheet", an AWESOME list of online resources for the writer-in-training, including websites for agent research, community writing/publishing sites, blogging, self-publishing, and social networking.


4. 57 Useful Google Tools You've Never Heard of", a list of resources for specialized search tools, mapping utilities (if you haven't checked out Google Earth, you definitely need to do so!), social networking, document sharing, calendar sharing, and much more.


5. "The First Five Minutes: How Editors Evaluate Your Manuscript", also by Jane Friedman. This post not only lists 14 common first-page problems, it also includes links to several other valuable online resources.

:) Cheryl

Research Woes

I'm currently working on a YA novel that takes place primarily in Peru. I've been to Peru--once. That was enough time to collect some wonderful photos and notes on the people, places, and cultural details I saw, but unfortunately, I wasn't there long enough to learn everything I now need to know for the book. For the most part, I've been able to fill in the gaps by reading what other travelers have to say about the country. Sites such as Life in Peru, Virtual Tourist, and Rachel in Peru have been extremely helpful, as have a variety of humanitarian websites and sites advertising bicycle and jungle tours...but I still have some unanswered questions.

I'm finding that it's not too difficult to track down information about even extremely small, off-the-beaten-track villages. Travelers and expatriates chronicle their experiences and share photos online--I was even able to find a photo of a particular suspension bridge along the (mostly unpaved) road from Urcos to Puerto Maldonado, Peru. What I need now, though, is a closer look at what life is like for the people in Peru, especially the 50% of the population that lives at or below the poverty line.

Needless to say, these are the people who are writing about their lives online. They also aren't the people most tourists get to know.

My first and best choice is to visit Peru again and, this time, interview a lot of the kids who spend their days selling postcards and finger puppets; but since that doesn't seem an option for the near future, does anyone have any suggestions for me?

:) Cheryl

(Photo from Flickr archives)

Getting into character--not for the faint of heart!

If you've read my blog much, you know that I do this acting thing for my church. I play a middle school, straight-A, type-A, super-social cheerleader named Cammie. (Hee-hee...and if you know me, you know how funny that is.)

Thing is, actors and writers both have to put on the psyche of characters who are somehow different. In this case, introverted and reserved Cheryl has to figure out how to be Miss Chipper-Popular. Think Legally Blond with poms. In the words of our director extraordinaire, I need more physicality in my role.

So last night I was up late doing a bit of character research...on YouTube. Did you know that you can learn to do cheerleading moves on YouTube? Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cQg4XOkC5Y (Sorry--embedding is disabled for this one.)

I've found YouTube useful for other areas of writing. Need to observe a bear raiding a trashcan?



Or need to see a rattlesnake in action?



Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, YouTube is an amazing resource for seeing things you can't manage to see in your real life.

:) Cheryl

Virtual Travel (for the cash-strapped writer)

I need to return to Peru. I'm in the midst of writing this novel that takes place almost entirely in this beautiful country--and I need to collect more details. You know, the stuff that brings a story to life. The way the bus smells, the little girl giving her stuffed puppy a drink from a puddle, the boom of ABBA's "Money, Money, Money" from a passing taxi. Yes, I have quite a lot of this info from my trip in January--but I want to take my characters to places I haven't been.

I'm trying to plan a return journey to South America, but realistically, I'm not sure if and when it's going to happen. I do have kids, husband, dogs, work, and other real-life things to give myself to, as well!

Luckily, this is one of the wonderful ways that the Internet helps out writers. Many world-travelers post blogs about their travels, complete with the awesome sorts of details that you won't find in a run-of-the-mill guidebook. Are you thinking about setting your story in a location far from home? Check out some of these sites for travelers' accounts:

• http://www.virtualtourist.com/


• http://palinstravels.co.uk/book-962


• http://www.travbuddy.com/


• http://maps.google.com/ (no first-person travel accounts, but this site will let you take a look at satellite images of the area in question)

Enjoy! :) Cheryl

How to Make a Magazine Sale

Last week I promised more on how I sold my first article--and how, maybe, you might do the same. I followed my advice from last week: studied my target market, kept my eyes open for cool ideas, and wrote my article with a similar sample article close at hand.

Now for the specifics. I had just started the Institute for Children's Literature writing course. That meant I had a pile of great reference material and not enough writing to do, because the first few assignments were too short and simple to offer much challenge. (It's a fantastic course, I just didn't click with the first (read beginner) assignments.) So, being me, I read ahead.

I learned that nonfiction is easier to sell than fiction, so I spent time studying sample articles collected in one of the ICL publications. I particularly loved one from Highlights: "Watching a Bee Keeper" by Joan Davis (http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/docs/accountability/testing/eog/g5/ReadingSamples/Gr5WS6beekeeper1615.pdf). It was written in an appealing conversational style. Its story-like format draws in the reader--guerrilla educational reading.

I thought I could write an article like that--if I had a topic.

The next step took a bit longer: I kept a lookout for news that would catch hook a second-grader. I found what I needed when I passed a herd of goats chomping weeds along a nearby bike path. A story!

Over the next months, I performed hours and hours of research, visited the goat ranch, interviewed the goat herder, wrote the article, and polished, polished, polished. I compared it, paragraph by paragraph, with the “Bee Keeper” article. I compared the amount of time I spent on description versus education. I looked at sentence lengths, word choices, point of view. I gave it to my critique group. Finally, I rewrote the article twice based on much-studied comments from Highlights’ editors.

Want to break into the magazine market? Find a publication you love and study, study, study. When you learn what the magazine likes, you’ll be able to write for them.

:) Cheryl

Seized by the Muse?

Cynthia Morris's "Original Impulse" newsletter showed up in my inbox with just the right thoughts for me today. Remember that Peru story that's overtaken my life of late? She calls the phenomenon being "taken over by the Muse." For affirmation and encouragement from a fellow writer, you have to read her February newsletter: http://www.originalimpulse.com/impulses/impulses-feb08b.htm

And before you ask--yes, her description fit me perfectly. Unfortunately for my family this past weekend! Fortunately, though, I captured several uninterrupted hours today to pour out another chapter. I feel much more settled.

But I need to go back to Peru for more research...!

:) Cheryl