Paying Attention?

Perhaps if you have read my first novel, To Dance In the Desert, you'll remember something my terminally ill character, Glenda said: "If you pay attention, five minutes is enough."

Confession: Glenda said that, I didn't. At the time, I had no idea what she meant by it, but she insisted, and I wrote.

But I think it's a little clearer now.

I write this post at the end of a long day, so I'll tell you now that the threads I'm about to lay on the table won't connect in any obvious way, not till I braid them together.

Here's the first:
On Monday, wise Debbie suggested we "spend time away from writing and reading and being connected to social networking in order to feed that place where great stories originate."

The second:
In his nonfiction book, Nudge, Leonard Sweet suggests that every time Jesus says "Verily, verily" in The Gospels, he really is saying, "Pay attention."

In fact, Sweet goes on to say something worth cross-stitching into a tea towel:

"You are what you pay attention to ... In a world of inattentiveness, a world that goes largely unregarded, it is the special mission given to humans to bring the world to life. How do we save the world? How do we keep the world alive? Through loving attention. … by 'tending and tilling,' naming and cherishing the tiniest part of what God has created." 

(I wish I could tell you more of what he says about paying attention, without pushing the fair-use laws into a breakdown.)

Before I pull in the third thread, let's twist these two together a bit:

My spiritual walk of the last few years has led me to reflect again and again how few things are about me. How much of life - real life, my own life - lies outside my skin. How life experiences that differ from mine might create an experience of life far different from my own. How people send signals to say things they have no words for - to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

I have often been frustrated by my failure to write a third book - and I still mean to do that. But the moments in this past year I have managed to catch the view outside my skin have enthralled me enough to lessen the pain.

Here's the third thread: In case you haven't met her before, I'm going to introduce you to a woman named Vivian Maier, who paid attention. By design, she had no audience till after her death. The audience seemed to matter far less than the seeing.

She's a hero of mine. And while I'm glad that someone at last allowed me to be her audience, and I'm grateful that many wonderful authors have cared enough to publish their work, I want to remember that seeing comes first. I want to remember that the "verilies" of Jesus are his command to me to pay attention.

Dancing In the Desert

Would you believe me if I told you that when I wrote my first novel, "To Dance In the Desert," I didn't exactly know what I was writing about?

You might believe it if you didn’t like the book.

Or if you did like it, but you’ve written one yourself, you might understand completely.

Or if you pay attention to the mysterious ways of God. If so, you weren’t surprised at the words Ariel brought us from Neil Gaiman.  Perhaps, like me, it comforted you to remember how often you’d reached for the words, and found them there waiting.

Ariel asked what our droughts looked like. Mine has been, for several years, a drought of words, brought on, at least in part, by the economic dryness we’ve all experienced.  The other ladies on this blog have suffered worse than I have, and by their friendship and example, have kept me from despair.  They have been Jane to me, the ones who showed  me how to dance.

Lately, I’ve sensed a turning, a small, first pirouette (it starts inside, where it doesn’t yet surprise the neighbors). It feels like a strange kind of joy, like a last kiss to the world we’ve lost, and a desire to assert myself into the new one, to explore it  for possibilities.

The turn manifested first in a desire to make a few changes of my own. I woke one morning resolved that all the wallpaper had to go. We’re still painting.

And for the next step – a sashay left? – I got myself a real, get-up-and-go-to-work job, and one I think I’ll love. It’s at a local non-profit that will allow free reign for all my flower-girl impulses toward service and community.

Then, just to buck the obvious assumption that I will now spend even less time writing, I’ve already begun a new regimen of getting up at dark-thirty, and going to the keyboard.  I’m pleased to say it’s going well.

Ariel mentioned Gaiman’s commencement speech, and I looked it up, and loved every word. As happens on YouTube, one video led to another  (Neil Gaiman on the Greg Ferguson Show) to another (Neil Gaiman talking about copyright and the web) to another (Neil Gaiman’s advice to new writers). If my husband hadn’t asked for spaghetti, I’d be there still.

But in the commencement speech, Gaiman had something to say about this new, strange world that made me pirouette again:

The rules, the assumptions, the now-we’re-supposed-to’s of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, they’re breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be, to get your work seen. YouTube ande the web and whatever comes after YouTube and the web can give you more people watching than old television ever did. The old rules are crumbling, and nobody knows what the new rules are. So make up your own rules. 

Look at that.  It only takes a little turn for the end to look like the beginning.

I'm proud of these ladies - of Sharon and her new novel, "Unraveled;" of Latayne and her courage and persistence; of Bonnie, forging her new paths in fiction; of Patti, diving into the creative process in brave new ways; of Debbie for proving that great stories can be written in small bits of time -  and of you - for striking out like Abraham for a promised land you haven't seen.

Have you made a pirouette lately? Do tell. We’d love to read what you have to say.

I’d better go make that spaghetti.

Musings of a Minimalist

I am not a packrat. Okay, let me try that again. I am not a packrat, except when it comes to books. I never have been, never will be. As I look back over the years, there are things I wish I'd kept for their sentimental value, but for the most part I'm not sorry that I regularly cull my possessions.

If you walked into my home, you'd see immediately that I'm a minimalist. The rooms in my house aren't cluttered. My walls aren't cluttered. The furniture in every room is evenly centered, aligned, arranged to everything else in that room, and kept as neat as possible at all times. Pictures are centered on the wall and straightened on a regular basis. I call that good housekeeping; my kids call it anal (although both our daughters are just like me now. Ha! I love it!).

A funny aside to this revealing info about me: My daughter Mindy's mother-in-law is the exact opposite of me. The 100-year-old Victorian home she and her husband have lived in for more than 40 years is chock-full of collectibles and ... stuff, from the basement to the upstairs bedrooms. There's a path that leads from the kitchen and goes through the dining room, into the living room, to the front door. Every other inch of floor space is filled up, and there's hardly an inch of wall space left to hang another picture or Gone With the Wind collectible plate. They were in town visiting Mindy & Corey when Jayden, now 5, was about 2. We all took a drive to Sutter Creek, a quaint little town in the foothills known for its antique shops. We entered the first little shop, which was wall-to-wall merchandise with little room for walking. Jayden took one look around and said, "Grandma? Is this your house?" I couldn't stop laughing.

I'm also a minimalist when it comes to talking. I know people who use 1,000 words to my one, and it boggles my mind that someone could talk that much. Boggles. My. Mind. I'm not the best conversationalist, but I am a good listener, I will say that. I'm not anti-social by any means. I just tend to be quiet.

So it's not surprising that I'm also a minimalist when it comes to my writing. I tend to write novels with just a handful of characters, and only a few plot lines. I'm always impressed with complex novels and wish I could pull off that kind of writing, but my story worlds tend to be small and anything but epic. Maybe that's because I so love to become emotionally intimate with my characters. I want to get inside their heads. Literally. I tend to write in first person, and especially love first person, present tense. In order to pull that off, there's a lot of internal dialogue on my pages. I find that reflective of me, internal dialogue going on inside my head all the time. I'm sure that's true of most writers.

The novel I'm reading now, And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer, is one of those epics I could never see myself writing. It's historical fiction and spans six decades, with a large enough cast of characters that a family tree or two would have been helpful in keeping everyone straight after the 2nd or 3rd generation. It's typically NOT the type of novel I read, because I much prefer contemporary to historical. But it was on my TBR list for the longest time (not sure how it got there). It took me months to locate it. Finally, my library was able to borrow it from another library so with that much effort I felt obligated to read the almost 1,200 page behemoth. I have about 100 pages to go, and I have loved every word. I plan to write a review about it before long.

What matters most to me in the novels I read, no matter the genre, is being able to truly connect with one or more of the characters. It's so much more important to me than the plot. That doesn't mean I must be able to empathize with a character's situation. I may never experience anything like what they're going through -- for instance, Katniss in The Hunger Games Trilogy. But I want to be able to draw near just the same. Like Debbie, I'm a fan of Stein on Writing (read her She Reads post on Everyday People). I remember reading the quote Debbie cites as I made my way through his book the first time: "I have seen talented writers hurt their chances of publication because they persist in writing about 'perfectly ordinary people' ... characters who are seemingly no different from the run of people we meet who do not seem in any way distinctive." I took exception with it. Because most novels I read and enjoy are stories about perfectly ordinary people ... who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, doing extraordinary things. I think of characters like Turtle in Joy Jordan Lake's Blue Hole Back Home, Ginny Young in Elizabeth Berg's What We Keep, Dara Brogan in Katy Popa's exceptional To Dance in the Desert. Ordinary people, caught in extraordinary circumstances. How else could I relate to them if that weren't so?

Reading preferences are so subjective that is seems rash to make such a sweeping statement as Stein's. I actually thought it arrogant, though that one statement doesn't alter my opinion of Stein on Writing. It's one of those books I read, re-read and refer back to as I write. But as my daughter Deanne would say, I chew the meat and spit out the bones, and there's a lot of good meat within its pages.

So what about you? If you're a writer, are you minimalist or epic when it comes to your story world? As a reader, which do you prefer? What matters most to you about the novels you read?

Love Your Villain As Yourself

It's become the fashion, among authors in Christian circles, to say, "I'm not a Christian Writer; I'm a writer who is a Christian." There's good enough reason for this: to pin the label on an author changes the way people view his book. Correctly or not, it alters expectations. In some ways it raises them: this book will likely uphold Christian Values. In other ways, it lowers them: the writing will likely display weaknesses common to Christian fiction. One can draw a short line from the first expectation to the second: the felt obligation to present a positive witness so easily stifles a writer's abilily to paint the darkness dark, to draw three dimensional heroes with real faults and three dimensional villains with real virtues.

But I set myself one rule when I first began to write fiction, that actually improved my writing, though my purpose at first had more to do with behaving Christianly toward my readers. Or rather, toward my reader: at first, I thought only of the one woman whose story had provided the outline for Dara, my main character in To Dance In the Desert. Would this woman recognize herself in Dara? And if so, would she feel that I'd treated her badly, by misjudging her motivations, or minimizing the experiences that had led her to act as she had done?

As I progressed, I realized that Dara had changed enough in the writing that the woman on whom she was based would never recognize herself in the story, but by this time I understood that other woman or men might well see themselves in my characters. When I held that mirror up to show them their faces, I wanted to do it kindly, with love.

That went for Finis too, that legalistic, worst-nightmare of a self-help preacher. If some minister heard his own voice in the cadence of Finis' sales pitch, he must sense the same understanding and grace that each one of us needs.

This morning I discussed with a friend the rare insight a parent has into the core personality of her grown child, because she was there early to see what caused him joy, what made his eyes tear and his shoulders curl in around his heart.

I believe we should have that same insight into our characters - especially the less positive ones. Not only does that uphold the golden rule, but it rounds out the writing as well, adds a complexity that both rings true and offers insight to the reader.

To illustrate, here is a picture that has fascinated and troubled me since I first saw it several years ago. A beautiful, sweet-faced boy, who loved to play cowboys and Indians, whose childhood ambition was to be a priest. What was his name? Adolf Hitler.

What happened to this child? What was he thinking, as the photographer took his picture? What was done to him as he grew, and why did it affect him one way, and not another?

We all come out of the box as children, beautiful, with joys and vulnerabilities. To quote Marcus Zusak in The Book Thief, "I am haunted by humans."

Please Lord, let my readers be, as well.

From Scene to Shining Scene

Happy Memorial Day, especially to those who have served our great nation in the military to protect our liberty. God bless you all.

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Scenes are the building blocks of fiction. No matter the tense or point of view, nothing puts a reader into the story like a good scene. Sandra Scofield, in The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer says, "The scene is the most vivid and immediate part of the story." She's right, of course. Scenes are what draw the reader into the circle of activity, connecting him or her to the characters and plot of a novel in a way the finest narrative can't do. Each has a purpose, and the purpose of a scene is to grab the reader by her pearls and pull her into the action.

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A scene may contain description, dialogue and/or internal thought in any combination, but what it must have is action. Scofield writes, "All too often, the apprentice fiction writer gets caught up in the thoughts of characters and forgets to make something happen in a scene. The writer forgets that actions cause reactions." Avoid talking heads in your fiction. Flesh out your characters, show us what they're doing while they're delivering their lines. But don't give them something to do just for the sake of activity. Give us action beats to go with the dialogue, but make those beats count for something. Make every line and every action important to the story. Don't waste an opportunity to show us what the character is thinking, feeling, wanting, by the things she does in any given conversation or span of silence. Make her actions speak louder than her words. Contradict them, even. For example, consider:

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"I'm going out," she said to Martin. "I won't be long." She ran her finger over her grocery list to make sure she'd not forgotten anything.

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"I'm going out," she said to Martin. "I won't be long." She twisted her wedding band round and round her finger, then tugged it off and slipped it in her pocket.

The characters and dialogue are exactly the same, but the actions tell two entirely different stories.

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Think of scenes as vignettes in your story. To be effective, your vignette needs a beginning, middle and end. It should be self-contained, or it leaves the observer hanging, confused. That's not to say that each scene you write needs to answer every immediate question. On the contrary, delayed information is what keeps the reader turning the page, no matter the genre. TMI certainly applies here. Give it in doses, when absolutely necessary, to keep taut the line between you and your reader. That's what tension in fiction is all about. And tension "is caused when a question is raised and the reader's sense of anticipation is heightened." Again, this is from Sandra Scofield's primer, which I've added to our Resources page, and highly recommend, no matter how long you've been writing.

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Scenes are where you, as writer or reader, find yourself present in the telling of a story. You connect with one character or another and suddenly you have a stake in the game. What happens to these people matters now. Here's one of my favorite scenes from Katy Popa's To Dance in the Desert:

"What you need are lighter clothes," said Una, fingering the long polyester sleeve of Sophie's blouse.

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It was one of two blouses she'd worn on alternate days since she'd first shown up at the Studmuffin. She'd pushed her sleeves up, but they were just too tight to push far.

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"I didn't bring many clothes with me," she said.

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"Well, come on then." Una stood. "Let's go see what I've got that'll fit you."

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Sophie held back. Her eyes scanned Una's outfit, and Dara resisted a chuckle.

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"Some of my clothes are quite ordinary," said Una. "Aren't they, Amy?"

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"Just the ones you don't wear, Gram."

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"Well, there you go, then."

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Amy's place had the haphazard charm of a home furnished with yard-sale finds, but Una's piece of it left nothing to chance. The bed was covered in moss velvet to match the draperies. The headboard, dresser, and tables were all carved mahogany with flashes of gold touched to the rosebuds. She had an actual dressing table skirted in the same gold chiffon that filtered light between the drapes.

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And by her bed was a crystal vase with a single white silk lily.

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Una opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a sleeveless shell, soft blue. "This should do the trick," she said. "It's really too big in the top for me. I used to be bigger, but ..." She waved her hands around her two cleavages. "One too many trips to the knocker press!"

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"It's what she calls a mammogram." Amy smiled.

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Sophie chuckled, just a little.

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"It's a better name," said Ivy, settling into the green brocade reading chair.

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Una shook her head. "Take a warning from me, girls. You can't put these things through the pasta press and expect them to bounce back every time. One day they just give out, and what have you got but cooked lasagna to stuff in your brassiere?"

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Jane sat on the bed. "I once heard of a woman who yanked herself out of the wicked contraption too quickly, and they curled up just like gift ribbon."

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"Well, that would keep them off your knees, at least," said Una.

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Sweet little Amy grinned like she'd hoped exactly this would happen.

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Sophie had started laughing--holding her hand up, still hiding her teeth, but she was audibly laughing.

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Dara caught her eye, and the two burst out in a mutual snort. Then Jane and Una snorted, and Ivy and Amy, and they had themselves a pig party right there in Una's boudoir.

There's more, but even this part of the scene is self-contained, not a word or action wasted, right down to Katy's choice of boudoir for Una's bedroom. That alone tells us something about the character. Can't you picture yourself there with these women, jumping into the conversation?

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Here's an exercise for you. Observe someone whose path you cross today in your activities. It may be someone you notice behind the wheel at a stop light, someone hurrying into an office building, or peering into a mailbox. Create a complete scene, with beginning, middle and end, using one set of action beats. Then change the initial action beat and rewrite the scene. See what a difference it makes.

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On Wednesday we're pleased to present some observations about staging the scene by Arthur Plotnik, renowned author of Spunk & Bite: An Author's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style. You won't want to miss this.

The Face Behind the Name

I'd like to welcome our new followers, and remind everyone of our amazing, exclusive Audience With an Agent contest. Six winning fiction entries will be read by Wendy Lawton of Books & Such Literary Agency. Click on the "promotions" tab for submission guidelines. Please read and follow the guidelines carefully, and get your manuscripts to us by July 31.

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As I sit at my desk writing my latest novel, I have a collage of my main characters before me. When I create characters for a new book, their names have to be just right. I experiment with different names, as if they were a taste to be savored, until I hit on exactly the right one. I always know when I've found it, for it's as if someone has just introduced me to that "person."

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But not until two books ago, when I wrote Lying on Sunday, did I spend as much time searching for the right faces to go with the names. Now as I develop my character profiles I spend a day or two navigating through "headshot" sites until I find the perfect image that correlates to the one in my mind for each of my main characters. The benefits are that I feel I know them better than ever before, and it's easier to keep track of their physical attributes, so I don't give someone green eyes in Chapter 1 and brown eyes in Chapter 12. For me it's added another dimension to the discovery process. And after all, that's what a novel is all about--for the reader and the writer: becoming acquainted with someone new and learning as much of her story as she's willing to share.

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But that doesn't mean I have to paint a portrait for the reader. In fact, the more I write the less inclined I am to give details about physical appearance that aren't necessary to the story. It may be far more important to know that my protagonist has a scar on her ring finger than that she has blond hair or dimples. Here's a perfect example of germane description from Joy Jordan Lake's Blue Hole Back Home:

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"I watched the new girl swing her leg out from under her red skirt--a brown leg, darker at the knee than the thigh, and darker still more at the calf. And I watched the boys watching the brown, or maybe the shape--I wouldn't know what boys see when they watch--of first one leg then the other, and not a one of them . . . able to talk . . . Me, I had a spasm of wanting to stay put myself, of fear that tripped up my feet and made me wish desperately I could miss this one trip to the Blue Hole with our mangy pack and the new girl. Because I was beginning to think what a bad, what a truly remarkably bad idea this whole thing might be." Trust me, it only gets better from there.

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Here are some passages from my talented Novel Matters colleagues that tell us more than outright physical descriptions ever could:

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"Laura-Lea marched to the center of the room and, hands on her oh-so-slim hips, she planted her feet far apart on the floor. I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd produced pom-poms and broke out into a catchy cheer" from Bonnie Grove's Talking to the Dead.

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"But Jane isn't a paralytic, and she isn't a child at rest in my lap. I may lower her through the roof to Jesus' presence, but chances are she hops off the mat and elbows through the crowd toward the door" from Patti Hill's upcoming novel Seeing Things.

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"'I really didn't know I had an audience, or I might have spent more time on my costume . . . You know, something with veils. Orange and pink and red ones, I think. Maybe a belly button ring.' She lifted her shirt and tugged at her waistband to regard a freckled stomach. Like a sack of Jell-O, Dara thought" from Kathleen Popa's To Dance in the Desert.

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"Kirsten Young lay on her back, a serence Ophelia in her dusky pond of blood . . . No, no, she wasn't Ophelia at all, he thought. She was Eve, temptress and sinner cast from the garden of Utah, wearing a hasty apron of cottonwood leaves heaped around and across her plump belly" from Latayne C. Scott's Latter-Day Cipher.

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"If my life was a made-for-TV movie, it would start this same way, with the monster truck pulling up in front of Grandma's and this Barbie-wannabe getting out" from Debbie Thomas's Tuesday Night at the Blue Moon.

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As a writer, what methods do you use to create your characters? How detailed are you in their development? And as a reader, how much information do you want to know about a character's appearance? Does too much or too little affect your enjoyment of the story?