Wordcraft -- Secret to a great story: it’s in the bowl

When my adopted hometown of Dallas, Texas, came to a stand still from a recent ice storm I spent some of my enforced indoor time cleaning out bookshelves, finding information from writing workshops too good to part with. I vowed to share it, in an occasional series.

I’ll add a warning at this point: I don’t cook. If the illustration for this post made you dig out your cooking post, pass on by. But if you’re looking for a way to create the characters of your story, to make them multidimensional, to give them someone to fight and someone to fight for, embrace the concept of the spaghetti bowl.

Paradoxically, if you’re searching for ways to whittle down your cast of thousands to manageable proportions, you’ll find the spaghetti bowl is your friend also. Because what looks overwhelming at first sight may involve relatively few strands.

I was introduced to the “spaghetti bowl” by J. Suzanne Frank, author and director of the Writer’s Path Program at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. The concept isn’t original to Frank, and I’ve heard it called other names. I like it because it helps me discover connections I hadn’t consciously known existed between characters. And besides, it’s fun.

To start cooking, draw a big circle and list the names of major and secondary characters around the rim of the bowl. Then simply draw lines between characters to indicate their relationships--parent/child, friends, doctor/patient, waitress/customer, and so on. Which characters have a lot of common bonds? Which have few?  Now try to find more connections between those characters to strengthen their relationships.

When I first dipped into the spaghetti bowl, I had a novel with a problem. The main character had overcome the obvious villain, the hulking, heavily armed, mean as sin character, by mid-book. But even with the villain out for the count, the good guy was still swatting a multitude of problems. In real life, these continuing crises might be coincidence. But coincidences are anathema to a fiction writer. (There’s a reason conspiracy theories always sound like fiction.) More likely, there was someone in the background, a bigger though still undiscovered antagonist behind my hero’s continuing problems.

Through the spaghetti bowl exercise, I found a significant character my protagonist had no, repeat no, relationship with. The two connected multiple times with other characters but not with each other. Why were they so intent on avoiding each other? The answer, to my surprise, was that the character the protagonist didn’t want to connect with was, although apparently a nice guy, the main character’s natural antagonist. At once, these previously unconnected characters had a relationship, a string of spaghetti I could exploit in so many ways to put them in conflict with each other.

(For more on why a story’s antagonist doesn’t always have to be a villain, see Pyr editor Lou Anders on “Bones of a novel, part 1” at this site, October 12, 2011.)

On the other side of the spaghetti bowl, what if you find yourself with more characters and character relationships than you (or your readers) can keep track of?    

Again, the answer may lie right in that bowl of tangled spaghetti. When faced with a multitude of characters who have similar relationships, consider combining the roles of those multiple characters. This automatically adds more thicker, stronger bonds between the remaining characters. Think of it as trading strands of angel hair pasta for fettuccine. J.R.R. Tolkien did so famously, condensing several secondary hobbits into Peregrin Took (Pippin) and Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry).

I’ve found in my own work that a major character’s lawyer can also fill the roles of best friend and AA sponsor. An ex-girlfriend can become the best friend of a character’s new wife. Or the client of his worst enemy, forming a delightfully tangled platter of pasta. Try stirring that spaghetti for your own works and see what savory dishes emerge.

And for more about SMU writing classes, see www.smu.edu/Simmons/CommunityEnrichment/creativewriting/.

(Next Monday, I dish up more tasty writing tips from mystery writer Hallie Ephron’s upcoming workshop on romantic suspense.)

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One of my personal resolutions for 2014 was to highlight Texas literary birthdays. This week: Patricia Highsmith, born January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth; and Robert E. Howard, born January 22, 1906, in Peaster, Texas.
 

Wordcraft -- Bones of a novel, part III

With one week left in this November’s NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month), I’m hearing cries of anguish as even writers who have kept pace with goal of writing fifty thousand words in thirty days feel the strain. The main reason, I think, is starting the race without a map.

Okay, I’m crazy about structure. But I got crazy by learning the hard way how tough it is run a race without knowing where the track is. A reminder came earlier this fall at Pyr editor Lou Anders’ writing workshop.

I’m writing a contemporary novel, but, desperate to enter the science fiction/fantasy workshop, I pulled out the first chapter of a nearly decade old fantasy novel to enter. Despite some qualms, Anders liked the premise and characters, but when he asked for a pitch-length synopsis, I was stuck. The remainder of the novel sprawled too hopelessly even to summarize.

It’s coming together now, thanks to help from Anders’ one-day novel writing workshop.

I posted about the three-act format of screenwriter Dan Decker (author of Anatomy of a Screenplay) last month. But with only a week of NaNoWriMo to go, how about fantasy author Michael Moorcock’s suggestions for writing a novel in three days? Yes, THREE DAYS!

First step -- have a lot of people after the same thing. And make it something concrete. (Sorry, world peace isn’t achieved in three days.)

At first glance, this sounds like every fantasy quest plot. But the more I thought, the more it seemed to apply to a multitude of genres -- a search for a ring of power or a wedding ring. For Princess Leia or Rapunzel. For the evidence to convict a suspect or to clear a family’s honor.

Second step -- have a protagonist ready to walk out on the whole thing when something else comes along. Notice, you don’t need to open with the heroine’s birth. Just her moment of decision, her fateful choice, her call to adventure -- whatever term appeals to you. He gets an offer he can’t refuse. The doorbell rings and an old love appears. (Just don’t make it the alarm clock sounding. It’s been done too often. Trust me.)

Third step -- the end. (Wiping the sweat from your brow!) But don’t ignore the end. According to Anders, for the ending, Moorcock suggests looking back to the beginning and picking a character from the past.

I love having the end mirror the beginning. I’ve heard suggestions elsewhere to have the final scene echo the opening one, but with a difference. Bilbo returns to his hobbit hole, only to find all his possessions being sold at auction. Or, to look forward to Friday’s adventure classic, A Wrinkle in Time, the opening sentence, “It was a dark and stormy wind,” is permuted into the final one, “But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind and they were gone.”

I’ll write more later about structure, and suggest you take a look at what author and former editor Kristen Lamb has to say at www.warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ But for now, watch out for the bones, and a happy ending to all!

Wordcraft -- What an editor wants to read

Recently, Lou Anders conducted what he says on his blog was his first ever writing workshop at FenCon VIII in Addison, Texas. Few workshop leaders would be better equipped to tell us what an editor wants to see in the first pages of a novel. He’s this year’s winner of the Hugo Award for editing, long form, and the editorial director for Pyr books. He hears twelve to fifteen pitches for books daily, and he and his assistant at Pyr look at, by his calculation, a thousand manuscripts annually. Of those, Pyr publishes thirty.

After talking through a few of the nineteen workshop submissions, he tactfully formulated “the no prologue, no multiple POV (point of view), no unlikable protagonists rule” of things that turn off readers within the first few pages. Our starting goal as writers is to “give people as few reasons as possible to drop out” of reading a story.

What else turns him off? Perhaps surprisingly for a hard-boiled looking guy -- profanity. “I like to save profanity for the moments that count,” he said.

That’s partly because, he said, for all the emphasis on action in science fiction and fantasy, women and girls constitute the overwhelming majority of readers -- 75 to 90 percent. For YA (young adult), the reader demographic is even stricter -- teen girls and their mothers. Writers must master the art of “getting it past the mothers -- and getting the mothers to read it.”

So what does Lou Anders like? Contemporary sounding language, for one thing. Telling details, for another. He commended a writer for a passage in which a character flipped her long hair from under the handle of her bag, although admitting he might forget to add something like that because “I don’t have hair. . . (but) little tiny details that are realistic prepare people for the nonsense to follow.”

He also likes humor. “Find a way to be upbeat even when you’re downbeat. . .Even dark books have moments of humor, and the darker they are, the more humorous.”

And how to get those sympathetic protagonists? Not by making them pathetic or overwhelmed. But for a struggling character, “If we see what she’s given up and what she’s juggling, we’ll sympathize with her.”


Want more of Lou’s writing advice? See his blog, “bowing to the future,”
http://louanders.blogspot.com And check back here next Wednesday for his discussion of novel structure from a former screenwriter’s point of view and ways to break into writing.

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Looking for markets? Don’t get tricked into forgetting these small publishers’ deadlines timed to coincide with Halloween:

CLIFFHANGER BOOKS -- Submissions window for its second anthology of Paramourtal romances closes October 31. See www.cliffhangerbooks.com
DARK TALES OF LOST CIVILIZATIONS -- Also closing October 31. See
http://ericjguignard.blogspot.com

NAKED READER PRESS -- Quarterly open reading period ends October 31. See www.nakedreader.com

Other deadlines at www.duotrope.com/ although Naked Reader wasn’t there when I last checked.

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Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators, North Central/Northeast Texas, holds its annual conference this Friday and Saturday, October 7-8, at Fielder Road Baptist Church, 2011 S. Fielder Road, in Arlington. Authors, editors and agents will be there. See
www.scbwi.org for registration and details.