The finale – readers favs of 2018: bring on 2019!

Talk about beginning 2019 with a bang – two of my (and readers!) favorite posts of 2018, are combined here in a double edition! Today’s post combines the fast and furious recaps of the inimitable Tex Thompson’s Juice Box Hero format, published here first on September 25 and October 1, 2018.

***

Boy, does Tex Thompson know how to put new twists on creative writing issues – witness such discussions as her analogy of book revision to Dante’s tour of the Inferno which I blogged about earlier this year. She didn’t disappoint with a world premiere of her newest program – Juice Box Hero: Squeezing Plot from Character – at this month’s meeting of the Writers Guild of Texas .

Because nothing can equal the actual experience of being in the same room with Tex, I’ll only provide a brief summary in this post. If you want to hear the full deal, you’ll have to urge your own writing group to book her next performance.

Which comes first in creative writing – character or plot -- she asked her audience. The fact is, both are essential, but putting too much emphasis on either results in a story as dry as a squeezed-out lemon. 

Enter Tex’s “10 Big Ideas” for extracting the maximum juice from both elements:

1.   Dial up the contrast

Whether it’s contrast between the main character and another, between characters and their environment, or a character’s “other self” – the person they want (or fear) to be, “this works for any manuscript problem,” Tex assured us. “If the contrast has been sitting at a 3, try dialing it up to 11.”

2.   Turn “and then” into “but” or “so” (or “therefore”)

If the plot has turned into what I once heard an editor call “a bus ride” (“A happens and then B happens”) try changing the format to “A happens, but then B happens.” Or “A happens, therefore B happens,” to create a domino effect of consequences.

3.  Take away the “reasonable” option or add a conflicting gain

mage: pixabay

Either forget that old “lesser of two evils” choice by taking the “right” choice completely off the table. Or, set up “mutually exclusive good” choices. And yes, you can do both! 

4.   Add a different kind of conflict

Given the three major kinds of conflict characters can experience -- internal, interpersonal, and external – give them more than one. The effect of internal and interpersonal conflicts is to elicit sympathy from readers. External conflict elicits admiration for the character. Now juice things up by adding a temptation or cost for each decision the character makes during the conflict. Think: “is there something a character would never do but that he/she must do to accomplish a goal?”

5.    “Force the wizard to throw a punch”

That thing your character is absolutely worst at? Make that the thing she must do. Tex noted that when a masculine character is forced to perform a job with feminine associations, the conventional result is comedy, i.e., Kindergarten Cop. On the other hand, when a feminine character must perform an act conventionally considered masculine, the usual result is a drama, i.e., Aliens or Kill Bill. Tex of course, being Tex, urged us to subvert these conventions. 

***

Today it’s the conclusion of the inimitable Tex Thompson’s Juice Box Hero: Squeezing Plot from Character presentation. And since nothing beats hearing Texas in person, I’ll only give the barest skeleton of the writerly techniques which received their world before the recent meeting of the Writers Guild of Texas. Want more? You’ll have to persuade your own writing group to host Tex herself for the full meal deal!

Now – are you ready for the final five ideas? Ta-da!

6.     Use the four stages of competence 

Uh, what? Right, that’s how I felt. Like, you’re either competent or not, aren’t you? So Tex expanded this concept for us. She also graphed it, which I’m sorry I can’t show you. But as I said – consult Tex herself for the whole show. 

Here are those four stages of competence: unconscious incompetence (the we don’t know what we don’t know stage); conscious incompetence (we’re at least aware of our own inadequacy); conscious competence (we can do it, but we have to think about it); and unconscious competence (the never forgetting how to ride a bike stage). 

Tex also mapped these onto the three-act plot structure, remembering that Act 2 has two parts, with a major change in the middle: Act 1 – the character is unaware that a problem exists until, boing! his incompetence reaches his conscious level. Act 2 – the character starts to figure things out (moving from conscious incompetence to conscious competence), with numerous falls off the bike. Act 3 – ride the heck out of that bike! 

7.     “Jump before you’re pushed” 

Which in Tex-speak means, “that awful thing that happens to your character is something she brought on herself.” (Review the three forms of conflict and “choose whichever one most advances the story.”) 

In the beginning, a dark and stormy night – Not!

The title of the discussion at the 2017 Roanoke Writers Conference was “First Chapter Fatal Errors,” led by Texas writer A. Lee Martinez. With years of writing (Martinez has published nearly a dozen books) behind them, years of participating in writing critiques at the North Texas DFW Writers Workshop, “I’ve heard a billion chapters,” Martinez said, “including plenty that make the same mistakes over and over.”

Never fear, Martinez was here, to help his audience of writers deal with the dreaded opening sentence, scene, character introduction, even first chapter. 

He started with the easiest things to fix – clichéd openings. His list of don’ts: 

• Don’t start with descriptions of weather (goodbye, dark and stormy nights)


• Don’t start with a character waking up


• Don’t start with a character looking in a mirror


• Don’t start with a dream sequence 

(“Well, maybe you can have one of the dreaded cliché openings," he admitted, “but they have to be really exciting.”)

A. Lee Martinez

“I know somebody here will raise your hand and say, ‘but James Patterson did it.’ James Patterson can break the rules. (New writers) can’t.”

However, Martinez was willing to relax pressure on another major writerly hang up: opening sentences. I feel like raising my hand here and saying, but aren’t we constantly told that the first sentence is what will hook the reader?

Look, he said, “agents and editors know that first sentences are the easiest things to fix. Don’t worry about being perfect,” Martinez said. “Agents don’t expect you to have perfect copy editing. (Just) try not to have typos in your first sentence.”

Think a little larger, he said, such as first chapters.

“The biggest problem people will have with first chapters is, they don’t know where the story starts. The best way to start your novel is to know why you’re starting it. Nobody cares about characters thinking about thinking. I write fantasy and science fiction, where it’s common to spend pages establishing the world. What we need are characters and a problem.”

Use the opening, he said, to introduce a character and the unusual moment that changes that person’s life, “that propels the story. . . You can almost never go wrong by going with a character doing something interesting.”

“It’s real easy to do this thing where the characters spend too much time thinking. Have your characters interacting with the world. What they’re doing should be relevant to their life. It doesn’t have to be something big. . . Emotional tone is so important. Establish the character, establish the problem. Physical action is always good, but as you go on, emotional action is better.”

What about character dumps, with an entire cast introduced in a single page or two? Or opening with violent action? 

At the beginning, Martinez advised against introducing more than two or three characters, which is enough to provide conflict. And neither action nor conflict have to be violent. 

“Characters can be on the same path but have different methods.” It’s that difference in methods that can give the story a satisfying conflict.

“Depending on the genre, it never hurts to open with a mystery. Then have a tone you’re establishing. You have to find your style – and your weakness. The reason it’s hard to teach creative writing is because it requires an honest look at your own works." 

This is one of his reasons for joining a writing critique group.

"Any artistic creation is an attempt to communicate." If it can't be done in a small group, how can a writer expect to communicate with a wider audience? 

What about length, an audience member asked. How long should a first chapter be?

“As long as it needs to be,” Martinez answered. “You have to know why you’re writing the chapter, and then you’ll know where it ends. The easiest thing to remember about a chapter is, end it sooner than you think you should. Start it later and end it sooner. And then,” he added wryly, “end it sooner than that.”

Wordcraft – Naughty or nice? Making a list, checking it twice

Steal from the best. – Kurt Vonnegut

  

Dallas literary agent Jim Donovan was generous in sharing helpful lists for writers after his appearance earlier this month at the Southwestern Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Last Tuesday I mentioned the first of his “15 Most Important Things to Remember in Writing Fiction.” But we’ll want the other 14, especially as we’re rounding the last turn this week with our NaNoWriMo manuscripts. So here, with no apologies for the theft, is Donovan’s complete list.

1. Resist the Urge to Explain. “The reader will respond proper if your dialogue and action do their job,” Donovan writes. “So let them. Which leads to. . .

2. Show, Don’t Tell. Joseph Conrad said a writer should make the reader HEAR, FEEL, and above all SEE. . . to do this, use concrete, sensory details. (But note Donovan’s caution: “if a description goes on too long, I start skipping. . . ”)

3. Be Aware of Rhythm. Reading aloud helps.

4. Involve the Reader First. If possible, begin in the middle of action or a scene.

5. Kill Your Darlings. (Or as the late, great, eminently theft-worthy Elmore Leonard said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”)

6. Use Subject-Verb-Object. Avoid backing into a sentence with a modifying clause, especially if it starts with an “ing” verbal.

7. Avoid!!! Use exclamation points as sparingly as possible – almost never.

8. Know Your Characters More Than You Need To. “You should know them – at least the half-dozen or so most important ones – inside out.”

9. Use Markers. One way to make characters more vivid is to use “markers” (visual or otherwise) . . such as clothing, mannerisms, habits. . .and most obviously, how they speak. (See below.)

10. Make Your Characters a Mix of Good and Bad. No Dudley DoRights or Snidely Whiplashes. (I’d add an exclamation point, but that would violate Rule # 7.)

11. Read Dialogue Aloud. “Or aloud in your head, if you know what I mean,” Donovan writes.

12. Just Use “Said.” Unless someone is screaming, yelling, or whispering, don’t use anything but “said” with dialogue, and don’t use an adverb with “said.”

13. Everyone Talks Differently. Each character’s dialogue should be distinct, whether it’s through grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary, rhythm, etc. (See Rule #9 above.)

14. Add Business. Another way to subtly drop in details about your character is to add some “business” during the dialogue – show the speaking doing something at the beginning or middle of a speech.

15. Advance the Story, or Reveal Character. Remember, dialogue should do one of two things: move the story along, or reveal character. That’s all.

For true listaholics, Donovan also has Sol Stein’s “Secrets of Good Dialogue” (expanding Rule #15), “Helpful Lists for Fiction Writers,” “Oakley Hall’s Writing Tips,” “Elmore’s Rules for Writing” and “Creating Unforgettable Characters.” Perhaps if you ask at his email address, he’ll send them to you. Say something nice about his books, too. You don’t want to get on an agent’s naughty list.

Wordcraft – Jaye Wells on building a world all your own

For the past several years I’ve treated myself to the weekend writing workshop at Dallas-area FenCon’s science fiction/fantasyconvention. We’ve had some amazing workshop instructors: Mike Resnick (note to Mr. Resnick: after a few revisions, that crazy dragon story of mine you read actually sold – twice!), Karl Schroeder, Lou Anders of Pyre, Patrick and Teresa Hayden Nielsen of Tor, Carrie Vaughn and more. But this year was the first with a local North Texas writer as our instructor. The honor goes to Jaye Wells, author of the Prospero's World paranormal series, the Sabina Kane series, novellas, short stories, and writing as Kate Eden, the Murdoch Vampire series. Writing that many stories requires a lot of worlds, and Wells shared her “down and dirty” tips on building the worlds of our stories with workshop participants.

World building, she told us, isn’t a requirement limited to science fiction or fantasy stories. All genres require it, although not all will admit it. So what exactly is “world building”? It’s “about creating a sandbox for your characters, including such things as the world’s physical characteristics, culture, history, religions – “everything that affects your character.”

More than “a set design, with an actor standing in front of it, it has to be in the round. . . If it interests you, fascinates you, your world cannot help but be interesting.”

World building has macro and micro levels. At the macro level, Wells makes big decisions, “setting up the rules for the world. The rules you set up have to drive your story. Otherwise, why set it there?” At the micro level, she decides on “the specific details (that) make your story feel real, that people can picture.”

With macro and micro dimensions in mind, here are her Five P’s of World Building:

-- People (gender, age, race, background, profession?)

-- Places (city/town/village/planet? Geography?)

-- Problems (What’s the problem facing this person or people in this place?)

-- Practices (cultural items, civic life, education, etc.)

-- Peculiarities (“the unique details that give your world color and texture”)

All five P’s are required for the sixth P: Plot! (the actual details of your story).

To spark her imagination, Wells is fond of collaging (see http://pinterest.com/jayewells/). Still stuck? Try this list of links and resources for filling in the details and, as she said, “nurturing your god complex”:

-- Fantasy World Building Questions by Patricia C. Wrede, www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuildingquestions/

-- World Building in Urban Fantasy, http://bookyurt.com/scouting/world-building-in-urban-fantasy-rt-convention-2011/

-- Magic systems, www.writing-world.com/sf/magic.shtml

-- Building a magical system, www.superheronation.com/2011/08/11/building-a-magical-system-a-questionnaire/

-- Character names, www.lowchensaustralia.com/names.htm (originally for pet names, but don’t be alarmed!)

-- Settings, www.robotviking.com/2012/03/05/10-amazing-real-world-locations-for-fantasy-worldbuilding/

Wordcraft – Don’t be afraid to make a scene

A fellow critique partner writing a novel asked, why do we have to write in scenes? After all, as long as the information is on the page, why does it matter whether it’s in a “scene”, with characters thinking, speaking, acting in a particular place and time, or in paragraphs of straight prose. Taken aback, I gave her a short and truthful, if silly answer: because it’s a convention of English language fiction.

A short and truthful answer, because writing in scenes has been a convention of English language fiction, actually, almost any long-form prose such as novels, memoirs and creative nonfiction, for at least the past couple of centuries. But a silly answer because it didn’t address why the convention arose in the first place. Or why it really matters, whether it results in publication or not.

A story written in scenes is the closest we can humanly get to being inside the mind of another person. And longing to know how others, other human beings, feel and think and why they do the things they do, goes to the core of being human. Living as a human being means living in a particular place, with particular people, particular actions, particular thoughts, in real time. We don’t live in, can’t live in, whether we’d like to or not, an exposition-only world.

Given the importance of scenes, I was surprised when I reviewed my bookshelves without finding any books dedicated to writing scenes. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of discussion about scenes deep inside books about writing the things scenes comprise – novels and screenplays.

“A good plot is about disturbance to characters’ inner and outer lives. Scenes are what we use to illustrate and dramatize those disturbances,” novelist/writing instructor James Scott Bell writes in his Plot & Fiction. “Scenes are the essential building blocks of plot.”

Like the plot that they’re a subunit of, scenes need at least one character, a setting (time and place), and a disturbance. To paraphrase Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, scenes as well as novels have a protagonist, an ordinary world, and an inciting incident. What they lack, at least until the novel nears its conclusion is, well, a conclusion. And very often, the disturbance or inciting incident of one scene will have occurred in the previous scene, so that scene after scene links together, each depending on, but deepening what has gone before.

I’ve found that I learn as much from reading books I love – and looking more closely at why I love them – than from reading about them. So I looked at an early scene from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, with neighborhood gossip Rachel Lynde at her window, spying reclusive neighbor Matthew Cuthbert, who had earlier expressed his intention of planning his turnip seed that afternoon, instead “placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill. . . . Now where was Matthew Cuthbert going and why was he going there?”

Mrs. Lynde devotes the remainder of the scene (indeed, the entire chapter) to solving the riddle of Matthew’s strange behavior, only to learn things that will astonish her still further, continuing until the book’s end.

That opening scene ends with Rachel Lynde, having teased out the reason for Matthew’s journey, to bring home an orphan to help with his farm work, and asserting “I wouldn’t be in that orphan’s shoes for anything.” And so the story goes.

For more suggestions about scenes and their structure, I like “How to Write a Scene” by John August, posted September 21, 2015, on The Writer’s Circle magazine’s Facebook page, and “Make Your Scenes Earn Their Way” by Brooke Warner on SheWrites. I’ve posted both of these on my own Facebook page as well as Writer’s Circle’s September 15, 2015, Facebook post entitled, “Chapter Breaks,” for suggestions on scene endings.

Wordcraft -- The 21st century’s changing fiction

“What’s happening with fiction in the twenty-first century?” author/agent Donald Maass asked the writers who turned out for his workshop at this year’s DFW Writers’ Conference. “I started to notice changes a couple of years ago when I looked at the New York Times hardcover bestseller list.”

The names of the authors, primarily of thrillers were, for the most part, familiar. What was different were the numbers indicating how long a book had been on the bestseller list. The numbers generally were small, usually single digits, indicating short durations on the list.

But when he looked at the bestseller list of trade paperbacks, the venue for books first published in hardcover, he found books that had been on the bestseller list “40 weeks, 44 weeks, even 111 weeks.” What he also noticed was that “these books with long legs were books that had been published as literary. Literary fiction selling at bestseller levels?

“Nothing can explain why these books are successful except people are having an amazing reading experience and telling their friends. Buzz doesn’t last two years. It’s the book itself that doing that. I started reading to find out what these books are doing. They’re beautifully written. And they have a great story.”

What does he mean by a great story? It’s not necessarily nonstop action. The prompts he gives us for writing great story include suggestions like “writing the thing you’re afraid to write down because it’s too painful, too scary, too wrong, too inappropriate. What’s the moment when your protagonist says the thing you can’t say? Can you write it that straight, that direct, that undiluted?”

Maass isn’t more than average in height. He’s slightly built, okay looking but no head turner, the kind of guy you’d pass on the street without a second glance. And probably many of us at the workshop, many of you reading this, have read his books--Writing the Breakout Novel (with its companion workbook), The Fire in Fiction, and the newest, Writing 21^st Century Fiction. But he’s standing in front of us, so intense he’s electric, pushing us to do these exercises, right now. We write, mostly in notebooks because we’re afraid of running our computer batteries down in a room with limited power outlets. We write about the scary, the painful, the inappropriate.

We do the same for other emotions. “Don’t just name the emotion,” Maass tells us. “Describe the experience of having this emotion.”

He goes on. “Let’s take some of this emotional work we’ve been doing and build an arc, the change a character goes through. How can that transformation, the complete change in a human being infuse the whole story? What is the protagonist’s worst habit, failing, blind spot? Where does this flaw humiliate your character? If you’re got that already, try to make it stronger.

I find the room almost unbearably warm. Others complain it’s too cold. Problems with the thermostat, or symptoms of our own inner turmoil? And wait, we haven’t even gotten to the beautiful writing part.

“Pretty words, lovely images are often what we call beautiful writing,” Maass says. “But there are better ways. Write in it generic words. Now create another event that’s the same thing, but smaller.”

We write more, about locations, time, characters. What does any of this have to do with beautiful writing?

“We’re creating parallels and reversals,” Maass says. “Things that associate in the readers’ minds.” As do symbols. “Go to the climax,” he tells us. “Pick one object there, one thing your protagonist would particularly notice. How many times can you plant this image, this object in this novel?

“It’s not all about lovely imagery. When you give readers a great reading experience, what you’re actually doing it giving extra layers of meaning. When you start writing from a place that’s personal, when you let go of the fear or embrace the fear and let it guide you, you’re writing twenty-first century fiction.”

(Next Monday--about that scary stuff? How about this for scary--I’ll show you the sample query letter I submitted to Maass. And what he said about it, and what I learned.)

Wordcraft -- How to get ourselves unstuck

“One of the things you should know about me,” author host Susannah Charleson told the audience at the April meeting of Writers’ Guild of Texas, “is that I’m completely sympathetic to all aspects of the writing process.

Including the part where writers get stuck, the euphemism she uses for the dreaded writer’s block.

Charleson has written in formats as diverse as online fiction for AOL and radio scripts for NPR, and everything in between. Her first nonfiction book was the bestselling Scent of the Missing, the story of her work with search and rescue dogs. Her second book, The Possibility Dogs, deals with psychiatric service dogs. She is currently working on a young adult novel, After the Storm, based on her work with young survivors of the tornadoes at Moore, Oklahoma, and Joplin, Missouri.

She’s also spent 30 years teaching college students how to write for television and film as a professor of communications. She was at the Writers’ Guild meeting in Richardson, Texas, to share techniques for getting unstuck, techniques tested from her own writing experience and that of her students.

For those who have been stuck so long we can hardly remember what our book is, the first need is to get back on track. For that, Charleson urged, “Get thee to a bookstore. The bookstore is a testament that it can be done, a chance to see a book as a finished product. And if you haven’t done it already, write your dedication. Connect with the reason you’re writing and the people you’re writing for.“

Next, “Pull away from the keyboard and spend some time getting primary. If you have a character who’s mushy, go somewhere your character goes and look around. Sometimes from strangers you’ll see something and say, that’s my Danny’s, that’s my Molly, nine months pregnant.”

A similar technique is what Charleson calls “shopping without your wallet.” When we’re out shopping, let’s take a look around. What would our character buy? What would catch her eye? What would she turn away from? How do our characters furnish their homes? “Would they buy the 1,000-count sheets or the cheapest sheets possible, and sleep on them?”

Another method for getting unstuck is pulling ourselves out of the mud pit of linear thinking. “Because we write linearly, we’re persuaded that we have to write chapter 1, then chapter 2, 3, and so on. I think there is a point where, like Wile E. Coyote, we look down and realize that we have run off the cliff,” Charleson said.  "Give yourself permission to write out of sequence. If you’re stuck at point C but you absolutely know what happened at point E, give yourself permission to write point E.”
And instead of "writing what you know,"  "write what you see. Writing what you know can lead to a lot of telling. Instead of writing ‘I’m conflicted, I’m sad,’ write how those things look. How do they sound, how do they smell? You are in possession of this limitless mind. Going into that sensory experience of being in a character may shake something loose.”

Finally, “when you come to that place of pain, all you have to do is decide what technique works for you. Look at it as an opportunity to explore.”

See http://susannahcharleson.com and Susannah Charleson, Author, on Facebook for more about Charleson and her work.

The Writers’ Guild of Texas meets on the third Monday of each month at the Richardson Public Library. See www.writersguildoftexas.org for more information about its upcoming programs.

(Next Monday -- direct from the DFW Writers’ Conference, its workshops, schmoozing, agents galore, and the dreaded but fascinating writers’ gong show)

Wordcraft -- Treasures for writers, avoiding the trolls

Questions I’ve heard lately from writers: how can I get my work published? how do I find an agent? where can I find somebody to read my work? Even, most provocatively, Dallas Morning News online editor Robert Wilonsky’s question from last Monday: whether it’s even possible to teach creative writing.

To offer help, I’ve put together a list of resources which should help point the way to the treasures of creative writing while avoiding the trolls.

First, before you apply for that master’s program in creative writing, consider dipping a toe into the writing waters by checking out free to moderately-priced, non-degreed classes, such as:

-- Dallas Public Library creative writing classes. Free, every Friday from 2 - 4 p.m. at the Central Branch, 1515 Young Street. In the third floor conference room A, or ask at the information desk. Classes are geared for beginning writers, and explore themes, topics and techniques to help aspiring writers improve their creative writing skills.

-- Dallas Writer’s Garret Literary Center, 10809 Garland Road, Dallas. Free creative writing exercises the first Saturday of every month, noon to 1 p.m., at the Nasher Sculpture Center and Crow Collection of Asian Art. The Writer’s Garret also offers moderately-priced one-day, weekend, and three week to six week long courses, often without prerequisites. See www.writersgarret.org for classes starting this month. The Writer’s Garret also sponsors critique groups (free for first-timers, $3 thereafter).

-- Dallas County Community Colleges. Several colleges in the DCCC system offer creative writing as part of their continuing education programs. For class schedules, costs and perpetuates, see www.dcccd.edu/.

-- SMU Creative Writing Program, typically $450 for five class sessions, one per week. For details, see www.smu.edu/Simmons/Enrichment/CreativeWriting/.

Maybe you’re already immersed in writing, and you want to refine your skills, connect with other writers. Then consider attending conferences, such as:

-- DFW Writer’s Conference, Hurst Conference Center, 1601 Campus Dr., Hurst, Texas. The conference is May 3-4, $390, which includes lots of face time with both pro and aspiring writers, and a chance to pitch your manuscript to an agent. Add, or take as a stand-alone, pre-conference workshops with author Les Edgerton ($75) or agent/author Donald Maass ($100). I can speak for the value of Maass’s class. He’s amazing and this is a bargain price. For details, see
http://dfwcon.org/.

-- Writers’ League of Texas Agents and Editors Conference, June 27 – 29, Hyatt Regency Austin, 208 Barton Springs Road, Austin, Texas. Cost: $459, with agent pitches for an additional charge. For details, see www.writersleague.org/.

-- ArmadilloCon, July 25-27, Omni Southpark, 4140 Governors Row, Austin, Texas. I‘ve got a soft spot for this fantasy/sci-fi convention. It’s cheap ($35 for the conference plus $70 for its writers workshop) and Austin-weird. I sold my first story as well as my most recent one based on feedback from the workshop. No agents, but plenty of other writers to talk to. Stories are due June 15 to secure a place in the workshop. See
www.armadillocon.org/.

Or, maybe you need a support group (and who doesn’t?) to lean on, listen to your writing, give you tips, share your gripes. In addition to some options listed above, consider these:

-- Writers Guild of Texas, meetings on third Mondays, 7-8:30 p.m., Richardson Public Library, 900 Civic Dr., Richardson, Texas. Visitors welcome. Tonight’s meeting features Susannah Charleson, bestselling author of Scent of the Missing and The Possibility Dogs. See http://writersguildoftexas.org/ for programs and lists of additional critique groups.

-- Mystery Writers of America, Dallas chapter, meets first Saturdays, 9:30 -11:30 a.m., Texas Land & Cattle, 812 South Central Expressway, Richardson, Texas. Fee is $5 per meeting, cash only (correct change greatly appreciated). Even non-mystery writers can  love MWA’s programs, which recently featured Dallas Morning News book reviewer Joy Tipping and Southern vampire series author Charlaine Harris. For information, see http://dallasmysterywriters.com.

Wordcraft -- Charlaine Harris tells all -- almost -- to MWA

Bestselling author Charlaine Harris was happy to talk about everything to do with writing at last Saturday’s meeting of the Dallas Mystery Writers of America. Everything except one, that is.

“I can’t tell you how to write a query letter, because I’ve been published so long they don’t expect them from me.” Her first mystery was published in 1981, although she’s been most famous since 2008 for her Sookie Stackhouse urban fantasies, basis for HBO’s True Blood TV series.

“I got published over the transom, when there were transoms,” she said. “And there were more publishers. Now you almost have to have an agent, or at least a connection. My agent called and asked if he could represent me. I’ve had one agent for my entire career--I’ve had him longer than I’ve had my daughter.”

That magical call didn’t actually occur out of thin air. She had already written two well-reviewed mysteries that earned her the respect of another writer who recommended her to the agent, Harris said. “It was not natural for me to self-promote. A famous writer once walked up to me and said, I’ve published 25 million books. And I thought, I don’t recall asking. I don’t want to be like that but. . .”

But aren’t agents superfluous in this day of Internet publishing, an audience member asked.

“Poppycock,” Harris replied. “If you want to be published conventionally, you need an agent. Even if you (self) publish by e-book, what about foreign rights, movie rights, TV rights?”

She gave an enthusiastic “yes!” to a question about whether conferences (such as next month’s DFW Writer’s Conference) are good places to make necessary contacts. She also recommended contests--provided you win, of course--as ways to make worthwhile connections with agents and editors.

So how does a woman with as many writing credits as Harris, and TV spin-off, and movie options, start a writing project? “With a character or a place,” she said. The setting for her newest book, Midnight Crossroad, out next month, is a crossroad, “which is very significant in the magical world. And then I have a key scene I want to write. Hopefully, it’s in the middle of the book.” Having in mind a significant scene set mid-book helps avoid the problem of sagging midsections, although, “when my books get slow,” Harris said, her trademark solution is to “kill somebody, and the messier, the better.”

Her usual writing goal is eight new pages a day, which she edits as she goes along. In addition to self-editing, “I have a couple of friends that read my books before I send them to my editor. You’ve got to have somebody you trust, somebody you consider your peer, to point out the black holes in your writing, the things that are invisible to you. Other than that, you’ve got to write the best book you can.”

For more about Harris, books she’s written and books she loves, see her site, http://charlaineharris.com/, and at this site, “Harris gets deadly serious about character,” December 16, 2013.

For more about the Dallas chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and their programs, see http://dallasmysterwriters.com/.

(Next Monday, local writers the Dallas Library’s April 12 Book Fair.)

Wordcraft -- Our imaginary friends talk back

Last week, I let Dallas writer and editor Joe Milazzo walk us through a recent class on developing fictional characters sponsored by the Dallas Writer’s Garret. But of course, characters are no dummies, no matter what their IQ. Whether based on people we know or dredged from the deepest recesses of our own minds, they don’t just stand around waiting for us as writers to put words into their mouths. In fact, they seldom stand around at all.

“There’s a concept in theater called blocking -- where you’re aware of the actions taking place around the actual dialogue,” Milazzo said.

With that in mind, he led class members through exercises designed to build character development through dialogue.

But first, we had to make our characters move. Why put movement first? Because, “even in a purely auditory work, like radio, there’s a sense of blocking.


So he asked each of us to write a list of gestures or facial expressions we felt were particularly communicative. With other people in the class, jotting ten or a dozen gestures was simple. If, like me, you often write in public places, take a minute now to glance around the park, the café, the bookstore. How about making notes of the people you see while waiting to be called for jury duty, during class, in a doctor’s or hospital waiting room? Waiting for the bus, in shops, at the gym? Just don’t be intrusive -- you want to notice how people look and move when they don’t feel on stage.

Once we had a list of gestures to refer to, Milazzo provided a scene written entirely in dialogue, the speakers unseen but overheard by the principal character, and asked to imagine seeing the speakers and inserting their gestures, expressions and movements. This exercise would also work using plays, especially classics available online.

For now, I’ll use a few lines from Milazzo’s example, the scene on pages 336-337 of Degrees by Michel Butor, in the English translation by Richard Howard. This is available in the Dallas Public Library system.

“Say, isn’t tomorrow Uncle Pierre’s birthday: Mother want to know if we’ve done anything.”
“Done anything?”
“Jacques and I haven’t, but you’re his pet. . .”
“Are we celebrating tomorrow night?”
“No, he’s coming to lunch?”
“Lunch? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Does he tell you everything?”

“By adding blocking and gesturing, you are remaking things about that character that readers can use to get to know your characters,” Milazzo said.

Some of these actions can be used instead of speech tags -- “he said, she said” -- to indicate the speaker as well as the action occurring. The emotional content of gestures lets readers discover facets of a character’s life without exposition on the writer’s part. Use of movement and gesture also slows the pace of dialogue, if needed for the story. Although it’s often advisable to keep action and speech tags to a minimum, even to the point of eliminating them completely from portions of dialogue, knowing where they underlie the speech will keep our characters grounded.

For more about Milazzo and his work, see www.slowstudies.net/.

For more about the Dallas Writer’s Garret and its programs, visit www.writersgarret.org/.

#

Today, August 12, is the last day to reserve a seat for Dallas author Ben Fountain discussion of his National Book Award finalist, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. To sign up, go to www.dallasnews.com/benfountain/. I’ll follow up on Fountain’s appearance next Monday. My biggest what if -- if Fountain could satirize the poor old imploded Texas Stadium, what couldn’t he have done with the Cowboys’ new billion dollar digs in Arlington?

Wordcraft -- Storytelling, write or wrong

The headline of a recent article in the opinion section of the Dallas Morning News caught my attention: “The moral of the story -- Does literature make us more virtuous? Evidence is scant.”

“You agree with me, I expect, that exposure to challenging works of literary fiction is good for us,” writes Gregory Currie, whose biography listed him as a professor of philosophy. “Wouldn’t reading about Anna Karenina, the good folk of Middlemarch and Marcel and his friends expand our imaginations and refine our moral and social sensibilities?”

As a writer of sometimes gory fiction, I’m inclined to agree that reading about adultery and suicide, maybe even the evocative scent of madeleines, to pick a few topics from Currie’s list, can expand readers’ imaginations. And I’m generally in favor of expanding imaginations, although recent discussions with my seven-year-old grandsons convince me their imaginations have already expanded to universe-engulfing dimensions.

How about literature as a refiner of social sensibilities? Sounds good, although I’m not sure what literary work would alert the boys to the social insensibility of pointing out that I’m old, a fact I’m already only too aware of.

It’s the idea that literature’s role should involve the refining of moral sensibilities that bothers me. Or that, if it doesn’t improve our morals, it has no intrinsic value and no claim on our attention.

Not that it’s Currie making such a demand, he assures us. Instead, he uses it to undercut the argument he attributes to others of pushing fiction as an arbiter of morality. Proclaiming himself an anti-elitist, he holds that fiction’s only benefit is aesthetic. He hints, as the greater philosopher Plato did, that literature can’t be trusted to be moral, and therefore has no grounds for its existence other than the questionable one of aesthetics.

Although Plato’s discussion in his Republic makes it clear that his beef was with storytelling as such, the term he used for literature is usually translated “poetry” -- the way people recorded fictional stories for most of human history, and probably, prehistory. Prose fiction is a relatively recent introduction. Plato, of course, wasn’t above using the aesthetic devices of fiction to make many of his own works delightful.

The assumption both by Currie and those he says he criticizes -- that morality, even in its smallest details, only comes in one size and style -- is the one that most bothers me. But if literature -- if storytelling -- isn’t a source of moral arbitration, what is it good for? If its only value is aesthetic, how does it differ from, or claim superiority, to any other aesthetic practice -- say cooking or knitting -- which at any rate have obvious utilitarian benefits as well? Why write literature, read it, urge it on our loved ones?

I’ll let another author speak to that. “Every story worth telling in some way mirrors our lives,” writes David Corbett, who specializes in crime fiction, in his introduction to The Art of Character. “It can’t provide scientific certainty and it shouldn’t try. . . It remains rooted far more in searching than in finding, more wedded to the hypothetical ‘what if’ than any conclusive QED.”

To some extent, Currie agrees -- after all, how would we even quantify the effect of reading great books on morality?

“I have never been persuaded by arguments purporting to show that literature is an arbitrary category that functions merely as a badge of membership in an elite,” Currie writes. But “advocates of the view that literature educates and civilizes don’t overrate the evidence -- they don’t even think that evidence comes into it. While the value of literature ought not to be a matter of faith, it looks as if, for many of us, that is exactly what it is.”

I’ll quote Corbett again for an answer. “As long as we’re alive, the questions of who we are and how we should live remains open. No one convinces us less than the person who crows, ‘I have the answer.’ And ironically, this is precisely why fiction provides a more satisfying depiction of human life than any scientific or otherwise theoretical rendering can offer.”

It was just this modeling of real life instead of theoretical concepts that caused Plato to condemn storytelling. Theoretical concepts are clean. Real life is messy. Even Plato might have itched at the irony of becoming a revered literary figure through the influence of his fictionalized dialogues, based on real life of his beloved friend Socrates, his students, his enemies, instead of through the often pompous arguments of The Republic.

(For more about Corbett and his writing, see www.davidcorbett.com/. For the complete text of Currie’s article, see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/does-great-literature-make-us-better/.)