Writing Prompts

Today is my daughter Mindy's 38th birthday. Wow, is that hard to believe. I'll call her at 10:00 a.m., the time she was born. That's been my practice for years. My daughter Deanne was born at 5:30 a.m. That's a little harder to do, but I manage. So, Mindy, happy birthday with all my love.

I loved Debbie's post on Friday. Loved the old photo, which could be such an inspiration for a novel, as several of you pointed out. Imagination is such an amazing thing. There's no end to the things that inspire our imaginations, which are truly a gift from our creative God. A few weeks ago, Katy made the comment that writing is very close to dreaming. While I don't dream a lot -- or if I do, I don't remember the dreams -- that time just before sleep is the time my imagination is most engaged, particularly when I'm in the thick of writing a novel. It's a very creative time for me. I look forward to it as though it's the dessert to the end of my day.

Debbie's post got me thinking about writing exercises, like taking a photo and writing an opening paragraph for the story it inspires. Or perhaps writing an entire synopsis. Warm-up exercises are an important part to any number of endeavors. Athletes do them before they run that big race, or play that big game. Musicians do them to limber their fingers. Singers do them to prepare their vocal chords. And many writers do them as well to get the creative juices flowing.

I admit I often skip the exercises at the end of the chapters in the writing books I read, even my favorite ones, like Jim Scott Bell's Plot & Structure, which is a great resource and has some fine writing exercises to drive home the lessons he teaches. The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer by Sandra Scofield is another good resource. It too has good exercises at the end of the chapters. So why do I skip them? True confession: It's a combination of laziness and a desire to move on to the next chapter.

But some exercises can be fun, even turned into a game if you approach it the right way. For example, Dragon Writing Prompts, a blog for fantasy and science fiction writers, has this prompt: "...drop a letter from a book, movie, play song, TV show to come up with a new title. Then add on a short plot summary that is, preferably, related in a twisted way to the original." They give some examples: "The Velveteen Rabbi, Huckleberry Inn, Little Omen, Planet of the Aps." You get the idea.

Another terrific resource for writing prompts is found at writersdigest.com. There are exercises like The Tooth Fairy is a Thief, The Ghost of Your Grandmother, Note Behind the Picture. Are you up for the challenge? Can you give us a creative title by dropping or adding a letter to an existing title, then writing a brief plot for the story? Or will you go so far as to write an opening sentence/paragraph for one of the Writers Digest prompts? How do you feel about writing exercises? Do you skip them, or do you enjoy the opportunity to stretch your brain? Where do your best ideas for your creative writing come from?

Wading and Plunking

There's almost nothing I'd rather do than fish. No kidding. I love it. For me there's nothing like being out on a lake in a little fishing boat with my husband. I never go without him, because, you see, we have this agreement. He doesn't iron his own shirts, and I don't bait my own hook. It's a wonderful agreement. Except that I've done a lot more ironing than he's done baiting in the past couple of years. But he told me just the other day he's going to Montana in June for business, and that he's taking me with him so that after the business we can spend a couple of days fishing. There's almost nothing I'd rather do than fish in Montana. I can hardly wait.

So Bonnie's post on Monday about "hook" vs. "invite" made me chuckle, especially when I went to the TBR shelf of my bookcase and found that Hooked by Les Edgerton was the very next writer's book I planned to read. It was right there beside Truby's book, The Anatomy of Story, which I stuffed back on the shelf after wading my way through the first two chapters a few months ago, underlining everything in sight, while simultaneously scratching my head. Like Katy, I do plan to read it. Really. I do. And soon.

But back to Hooked. It's a nice little easy-to-read, easy-to-follow book on beginnings, and nothing but. Edgerton writes, "...a story is a movement from stability to instability to a new stability." I like that. It makes sense to me, like simple math. And then he says, "What is different about today's story structure is that the first part of the equation--stability--has been shortened considerably and, in many cases, completely omitted ... Many times that period of stability is only implied." Well, he's the expert, but personally, I'd rather wade into a story than be plunked into it, as though I'd been pushed off the dock way out there in the deep end of the lake. There are genres where implied stability is perfectly suited, but the type of fiction I write and mostly love to read has more of a wade-in feel than a plunked-in feel.

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Here are some of my favorite examples of wading in:

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"Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that's what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning." The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.

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"Outside the airplane window the clouds are thick and rippled, unbroken as acres of land. They are suffused with peach-colored, early morning sun, gilded at the edges. Across the aisle, a man is taking a picture of them. Even the pilot couldn't keep still---'Folks,' he just said, 'we've got quite a sunrise out there. Might want to have a look.' I like it when pilots make such comments. It lets me know they're awake." What We Keep, Elizabeth Berg.

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"Lying on her daughter's bed, Dottie Puckett heard sounds as if they were magnified a hundred times that day. She heard the usual things you'd expect to hear--an airplane, distant traffic, the air conditioning turning on and off. And she heard other things, too--a high-pitched motorized whine from somewhere nearby, the chatter of a squirrel outside the window, a tree branch brushing against the gutter, the coursing sound of water through a pipe, her own breathing. Sounds told you a lot. Today they told her that people and things were going about their normal business in spite of what had happened here at this house only three weeks ago. Though everybody thought she was mild-mannered and good-natured, Dottie knew that what she felt right now was closer to anger than anything else. Not that she was angry at the planes and cars and water pipes, for goodness' sake, but why is it, she thought, that I have to go on breathing in and out when Bonita is lying in a box a mile down the road?" By the Light of a Thousand Stars, Jamie Langston Turner.

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"Likely it was only two dreams crisscrossing paths, one snagging on the other in passing, but somehow the face that walked by me this morning, not four feet away, got tangled up with one from my past. The way-back and way-faraway, all quiet and almost forgotten, got yanked up and placed alongside today, where two minutes before I'd have told you I was: in Boston. At the Public Garden. Not a stone's throw from Beacon Hill, where I live and work, and pay as much for my own private parking space as folks back home do for a decent slab ranch and enough acres for the dogs to tree themselves something other than city-soft squirrel ... And I swear time backstitched on itself, and at that very moment, I was barefoot--not with black pumps stowed under a park bench, but the right kind of barefoot. The kind of barefoot that went with the truck bed of a pickup. I was back with the wind standing my ponytail straight up over my head, the Blue Hole just around the next curve. And I was tracing my cheek where a kiss had just landed." Blue Hole Back Home, Joy Jordan Lake.

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Contrast these with James Scott Bell's thrilling suspense novel, Try Dying: "On a wet Tuesday morning in December, Ernesto Bonilla, twenty-eight, shot his twenty-three-year-old wife, Alejandra, in the backyard of their West Forty-fifth Street home in South Los Angeles. As Alejandra lay bleeding to death, Ernesto proceeded to drive their Ford Explorer to the westbound Century Freeway connector ... Bonilla stepped around the back of the SUV ... placed the barrel of his .38 caliber pistol into his mouth, and fired." Plunked. Most definitely. With the former stability not even implied. And exactly how a fast-paced suspense novel should begin.

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But back to fishing. I love to drop my line in the water and begin to entice; to wait as the bait lands, then sinks to just the right depth; to tug ever-so-slightly two or three times while the worm works its magic; to let it sink a bit more, then tug again. And then ... to feel the hit, to sink the hook, and reel in. I love it. Here is the writing equivalent to my fishing method from the opening to my WIP. "Grief, it is said, is a sea that ebbs and flows. Comes in waves that roll over the shore, then recede in a dizzying, lose-your-footing-in-the-sand sensation, leaving you unsettled but standing. Well. Whoever said that never felt the tsunami effect, the drowning, sucking, tidal wave of grief. I know, because I haven't come up for air in five days short of a year. A suffocating, black hole of a year, each day collapsing in on itself like sand too long unwatered. Eighty six hundred, forty hours; five hundred eighteen thousand, four hundred minutes; thirty one million, one hundred four thousand seconds of a smothering nightmare I can't wake up from. A long slow terror, like free-falling in the dark with no cord to pull. I don't plan to be here for the anniversary five days from now."

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I understand completely where Bonnie's coming from when she says, "But 'hook?' If I recall, it ends badly for the fish. I prefer 'invite.' Semantics, right?" Right. She'll be happy to know that, often, for the fish I catch it's not an unhappy ending, because I typically catch and release. Especially in Montana. And that's what I like to do with my readers. Catch and release--but hopefully not to swim completely away. I want them to stay in the pond with me, so the next time I cast in, I might draw them back.

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And speaking of lines, I laughed and laughed over Dina Sleiman's comment on Katy's post Wednesday. "I got my nose pierced last year, and it's so freeing because no one expects me to be normal anymore." I love it. It would make a great opening line for a novel. And, Dina, for that line I'd like to send you one of my novels. Just email me with your address and tell me which one you'd prefer.
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Everyone else, leave a comment telling me what you think the "anniversary" of my novel deals with and your name will go into a drawing for a copy of Lying on Sunday or Every Good & Perfect Gift, winner's choice. Be specific with your guess. And creative.

What Did You Say?

The book club I participate in just read Havah by Tosca Lee for our January selection. It's a remarkable novel about Adam and Eve, before and after the fall, from Eve's perspective. Tosca did an amazing job of filling in the gaps and telling a story of how it might have been to be the mother of all mankind. We all enjoyed the book, and gave it an A, but early in our discussion my daughter Mindy said, "I ended up loving the book, but it took me a while to get into it because I couldn't find her voice." Sometimes we just don't click with a story but we're not sure why, so I'm glad Mindy was able to identify the problem, and then to continue reading until she did find the character's voice, because ultimately she really enjoyed the novel.
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Voice is such a vital element of fiction. Without it a story can be flat and one dimensional. We may see the words, but they don't come to life in our heads and hearts. As readers, we all bring something of ourselves to a character's voice. I may hear Harper Lee's "Scout" differently than you hear her, but there's no question that we'll hear her voice, because it's written with such texture and clarity. I could already hear Scout's voice by paragraph two of To Kill a Mockingbird when she said, "I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out. I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson."

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Who couldn't love a girl who talked like that? Who couldn't wait to hear the whole story? There's a wonderful cadence to her voice, and certainly an accent. And my very favorite "voice" is going to have a southern accent. Maybe it's my family roots (I'm California born and bred but my parents and grandparents were from the South) but I can get lost in a southern accent and forget entirely to come up for air. If you ever watched Ken Burns' Civil War series, I fell in love with author and historian Shelby Foote, who I could have listened to for hours on end, even if he was merely reading the dictionary. That's just me. So while we all bring something different to a reading experience, we as authors have to give our readers something to work with, and that's where cadence, word choice, sentence structure, etc., come into play.

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We agree that some writers books can be hard to understand, way too subjective, conflicting, and even elitest, but there are some exceptional ones we recommend (see our Resources page), as our Roundtable discussion this week bears out. Elizabeth George, in Write Away, says, "The narrative voice of your novel is the point-of-view character's defining way of speaking and thinking. Mind you, I'm not referring to the point-of-view character's style of dialogue, however. I'm referring to the tone that comes through the narrative itself ..." Case in point, the excerpt I used from To Kill a Mockingbird above is not a passage of dialogue; rather it's narrative. But it's as entertaining as dialogue thanks to Scout's distinctive voice.

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In The Help by Kathryn Stockett, it takes only a few chapters to be able to identify the three POV characters, even without the chapter headings, by their voice alone, because Ms. Stockett has given each her own distinct characteristics. Elizabeth George says voice comes from background, education or lack thereof, position in society, distinctive use of language, vocabulary, tone and "most important ... attitude. More than anything that you can do to illustrate voice for your reader, the character's attitude will differentiate one character from another."

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Jim Scott Bell, in Plot & Structure, says, "No two characters should sound exactly alike ... the words they use should tell us something about who they are." Think of the people you know. Most of the time you don't have to ask who's calling if they fail to identify themselves on the telephone. You know them by their voice. Characters should be as easily identifiable a good deal of the time. To accomplish this, you have to know your characters. They must be distinctive in your mind if they're to be distinctive to your readers. I've learned over time the value of writing character profiles before I begin writing a novel. Some writers create profiles of a character's life from cradle to grave, that go on for pages, even for minor characters. I have no doubt there's great benefit to that, but my profiles tend to be leaner, which allows me the great pleasure of learning new things about a character as I go along, but that new thing should enhance what I already know about that character, and not detract from it.

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Here's an exercise for you: Write a half-page passage that includes dialogue and narrative from a POV character. Don't use attributes or character description. Then write a similar passage for an entirely different character. Maybe someone of the opposite sex, twenty years younger or older, or who comes from a different part of the country or world. Ask someone to read the two passages and tell you what they know about the each person. How close are they to describing the character you created?

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What favorite fictional character springs to mind when you think of voice? Have you read anything lately that lacked voice, and if so, how did that impact your reading experience? (You don't have to name names.)