I meet the Best People doing what I do – for example Chicago writer, colleague, fellow teacher and SCBWI kin Barbara Gregorich who authors fiction and nonfiction for adults and children in a variety of formats on a variety of subjects.You can read a sample chapter of Guide here. To celebrate Barbara’s newest book, I invited her to share a Wednesday Writing Workout and lucky us – she agreed!Scroll down to read, enjoy and try Barbara’s exercises that demystify the all-important narrative element SETTING.Thanks, Barbara, for so generously sharing your smarts!Esther Hershenhorn
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Give Me Place, Lots of PlaceTwo summers ago I taught a week-long course on novel writing to 25 students: the youngest was fifteen, the oldest eighty-five. On our last day of class, three students read the first three pages of their novels-in-progress to all of us. All three novels were fantasy: two had human characters, one did not. Even now I remember those three stories vividly. Through skill, serendipity, or maybe even through my teaching, each of the students offered a piece in which the sense of place was palpable, and I’m convinced that one of the reasons I remember these three stories, their characters and conflicts, was because the settings were so well depicted.One of the three was set in a dungeon, and the writer (the 15-year-old) was able to make us feel the environment. The prison cell was dank: we felt the chill and the damp. We saw the gray-green moss clinging to the wet stone walls. The bars were thick, rusty, and unbendable. We felt their tormenting power just as we felt the cold sea air that entered at will, just as we recoiled at the thin, gray, tasteless gruel delivered through the food slot each morning.
In fiction, place isn’t just something for the reader to experience vicariously — though it is partly that. Place is the world the characters live in, and it helps shape these characters. Put your characters in a different setting, and they will behave differently.
A writer who can create lifelike places through a few carefully chosen words that appeal to the senses is also well on the road to creating empathetic characters. When we see how place affects a fictional character we empathize, probably because we realize how real-life places affect us — isolated windowless work environments; cluttered, dog-hair-covered, stale-food-smelling cars; un-shoveled, foot-high hummocks of ice on city sidewalks; the welcome coolness of wet sand just below the scorching top layer on a summer day.
Place, as I explain to my students, should never be depicted in such a way that it seems more important than the characters within that place. No description for description’s sake. Setting lets readers enter the world the characters live in and helps readers understand where the story is taking place. More than that, the more palpable the place, the better readers can see how setting influences character and how character modifies setting. In the dungeon story, for example, the place limited what the prisoner could do, but the prisoner also had an impact on the setting: he nurtured a small plant inside the cell, and he moved one of the stone blocks to where he could stand on it to look out the high, barred window.
Here are some exercises I gave my 15-to-85-year-old students.
Perhaps these, or modifications thereof, will inspire your and/or your students to think about the importance of place in fiction, and how setting and character shine light on one another.
Keep the Character, Change the Place
Ask students to take an existing story and change the setting completely. Have them rewrite the first two or three pages of the story with the new setting. Then compare the two stories: how does the character change? What is it that setting does to character?
Comfortable Place or Not? Do your students tend to place their characters in places where the characters are comfortable? Say a dancer in the dance studio, or a great basketball player on the court? Or do they place their characters outside the comfort zone? Say a boy who has never, ever helped in the kitchen suddenly finds himself obligated to work in one to help his best friend. You might ask students to write acomfort-setting story first, and then rewrite it as an outside-the-comfort-zone story. It’s instructive to note how happy or sad setting can make characters feel, how good or bad, how confident or unconfident.Same Place, Different Characters
Yet another approach to place is to have students write a two-different-POVs story, first from Character A’s POV, then from Character B’s. Both characters are in the same place at the same time. But are their reactions the same? How does setting impact each character? My experience has been that when students are asked to treat the setting as more than background information, they excel at bringing places to life and at showing how characters function in a particular setting.
In answering a question posed by a reader, I felt this worth sharing with a lot of readers and possibly of interest to many a writer:
Dear Joe et al --- There are too many variables to gain a simple answer to your reflections and questions regarding why an authur chooses to do a series rather than a "series" of stand-a-lone titles. I will give it a stab at some sort of answer(s), and you will see some of the variables and reasons why an author does a stand-alone and why he or she does a series.
First - money. A series is often bought in a crop of two, four, etc. books that have as yet to be written. Publishers seek out characters strong enough to shoulder multiple storylines...plots. Multiple plots to challenge a character or ensemble.
Character + Plots - plots are easy if an author truly establishes what I call a fully-realized character. Take the notion to TV's Star Trek or any TV drama with continuing character or ensemble, say Law & Order, for instance and the situation is thus: We writers establish the bedrock character traits of our principal characters first, as is done with HOUSE, The Sopranos, etc., and once well established, we know what a Jim Kirk, Captain of the Starship Enterprise is all about and capable of. Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke fame - once we know what kind of character we are dealing with, what we have in hand, then we can "attack" that character which is exactly what we do as novelists and storytellers.
Obstacles vs. Goals - We then go about the business of throwing curve balls, brick-a-brack, stormes, obstacles at him--whoever she may be. We know what character X is capable of in the first story established, so now what is he capable of if we perhaps double the threat? My one 11-book series is a model of this type of writing, and each can stand alone, yes....I work to make that so, but in order of 1 to 11 the reader gets all facets and all exploits in the order the character got them.
Love that characters - Writers do fall in love with certain of their characters and without prompting of a contract or a publisher's blessing, they often want to keep exploring the nature of one or more characters, asking WHAT IF Jessica or Alastair or Kirk or Tony or Matt Dillon is put into this position...what if given this to problem to solve (or medical mystery to solve - House). What size hoop to jump through? What will the character do and how will readers react to her being relocated to say Hawaii or London or some back bayou outside of New Orleans? What if I could get Alastair Ransom aboard the good ship Titanic on a clear April night in 1912?
There are as many reasons to continue with a character as one has storylines or obstacles to throw in front of him her. Often a publisher will stop paying for a series--effectively END an author's series way before the author is finished making life hell for said character. Long before the author is DONE...leaving the author wishing to explore the complexities of a James T. Kirk or a given medical examiner or detective.
Back to Money - When a publisheer's balance sheet says a character or series is over...when this fate occurs and you hold a wake for the series character rather than a book signing, the series typically is dead in the publishing waters, and the author has nowhere to place a new story. No placment, no sell, no money said character is making! Comes back to money and the author's time.
New Life for Dead Characters or Series - However, now with the advent of Indie publishing, the Indie author, thanks again to Kindle technology and Amazon cajunas, we who wish to continue on with a "dead" series can do so at our pleasure. No wake necessary. Rather a RESURRECTION is in order....
As I have done already and am continuing to do--I resurrect out of print books and therefore "dead" characters. In other words my four-book series called EDGE or my trilogy with Ransom, or
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By:
Kristi Holl,
on 6/30/2010
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Is the advice “write what you know” valid? Yes, definitely. And no, not always.
It’s confusing advice!
Practical Knowledge
“Write what you know” makes sense when you’re ignorant in some area. For example, I know nothing about vampires, have never read a vampire book, can’t understand the whole vampire movie thing, and can’t for the life of me figure out why a blood-sucking boyfriend would be romantic. It’s just me.
This is the point though: I don’t know about vampires, and I have no business sitting down today to write a vampire novel. It would be so full of ridiculous ideas and mistakes that it would be laughable. I don’t care to look that foolish.
Use Yourself
On the other hand, says Ursula K. Le Guin in “Make your fiction truthful” (The Writer, July, 2010), “Write what you know doesn’t mean you have to know a lot. It just tells you to take what you have, take who you are, and use it. Don’t try to use secondhand feeling: use yourself.” So, does ”write what you know” mean “write exclusively about your personal experiences”?
No, I don’t think so. What you “know” can come from your personal experience–that’s true. But it also comes from other people’s experiences, from books you’ve read and movies that moved you, from research and travel–all blended together when you use your imagination.
The Best of Both Worlds
I believe in “write what you know,” but I’ve also had eleven mysteries published. I will swear to you that I’ve never stolen, kidnapped, set a place on fire, or blackmailed anyone, but I’ve written about it.
However, I made aspects of those stories familiar too. I set those mysteries in the midwest, where I lived all my life. Five are set in real places I’d visited many times. I used many people I knew for my characters. I developed themes that were coming true in my own life or my children’s lives. The character growth and change was real–and it was often me.
Get to Know Yourself
Le Guin says it this way: “If you take it in its deepest meaning, ‘write about what you know’ means write from your heart, from your own real being, your own thoughts and emotions…If you don’t know who you are and what you know, if you haven’t worked to find out what you yourself truly feel and think, then your work will probably be imitation work, borrowed from other writers.” (I hope you’ll get a copy of The Writer and read her entire article.)
You may not think you know much or have had enough interesting experiences, but you’d be wrong. If you have my Writer’s First Aid book, read the chapter on “Getting to Know You…” Take the lengthy survey about your life and
keep the information in a writer’s notebook.
The answers to that survey will unearth enough information about YOU to last you a writer’s lifetime.
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To thrive in the present publishing climate, our manuscripts need to be submitted in the best condition possible. I’ve written previously about the need to continue studying the writing craft. [Strong Writers Do This, Self-Study Advanced Writing Program]
“But how do you find the TIME to study on top of writing and marketing?” I’ve been asked time and again. Actually, it’s simple.
Shorten the Learning Curve
Whenever possible, I piggyback on someone else’s research. For example, I prefer a book like Time to Write by Kelly L. Stone, who interviewed more than 100 professional writers about how they fit writing into their busy lives. All that experience condensed into one book is a gold mine.
Likewise, last week I put together two e-booklets that could also shorten your learning curve. First is 50 Tension Techniques: Hold a Reader’s Attention from Beginning to End. I teach a writing workshop called “Tension Techniques,” based on my thirty years of writing and selling 35 books. A few months ago in Austin, I met a woman who had attended that workshop years ago; she told me she’d worn out her hand-out and wished she had another one. I use the hand-out myself in my fiction writing when I come to spots that drag or when things are too calm for too long!
Editors tell us that we need tension on every page in order to keep readers hooked. But what exactly is tension? And how can you possibly increase tension on every page? The fifty simple techniques in this e-booklet show you how to infuse page-turning tension into your dialogue (15 techniques), your plot (14), your characterization (12), and setting descriptions (9). I’ve gathered these techniques from years of reading how-to and writing craft books. (I have six bookcases full of writing books in my office.)
Special Tension Needed
I love mysteries and have had eleven mysteries published (one won a children’s choice award), and mystery stories and books never seem to go out of fashion with kids. A few years ago I wrote a monthly magazine column on mystery
writing. I’ve gathered those columns into a 50-page e-booklet called Writing Mysteries for Young People.
I’ve studied close to two dozen books on mystery writing, and these sixteen short chapters are the best techniques I’ve found. Writing Mysteries for Young People will show you how to construct a mystery. This includes the development of heroes, victims and villains, plotting and planting clues, creating the sett
Barbara's titles include more than 150 educational activity books, a score of School Zone Start to Read and Read and Think books, two Houghton early readers – Walter Buys a Pig in a Poke and Other Stories and Walter Paints Himself into a Corner and Other Stories, She’s On First, Jack and Larryand her most recent book, Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Lots of Examples, Plus Dead Bodies (Create Space, 2014), which Midwest Book Review called “an accessible primer for writers of all skill and experienced levels.”
It's funny--I can't see myself writing a series, at least not a traditional one with a repeat protagonist, but one of my favorite authors (Lee Child) does exactly that. Maybe we most admire what we don't or can't do?
Interesting response, Rob.
My work in progress may be part of a short series of two or three books, depending how things go. I always have trouble thinking up new plots for my characters. Usually once they've been through the mill, my mind says to give them a break and let them enjoy life then. (g)
Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com