by CWC Marin administrator | Oct 2, 2015 | Craft, Events
David Corbett, Author of The Art of Character
Our speaker for the September 27 CWC-Marin meeting, David Corbett, was late, very late actually, but he then more than made up for it with his insightful and stimulating presentation on creating memorable characters.
Corbett, a former private investigator and author of six crime novels, including Mercy of the Night, wrote a highly acclaimed primer called The Art of Character two years ago, and ran down the highlights for the CWC members and guests.
He focused on five key components of character: desire, adjustments, vulnerability, secrets, and contradictions.
“You want to keep torturing your protagonist. Things are bad? Make them worse.”
1. Desire
“Stories without desire are stillborn,” he said. It is desire, Corbett says, that drives story even more than conflict. Desire leads to conflict. Someone wants something, but they can’t get it. Someone or something is in the way.
The best characters yearn deeply for something, whether it’s Ahab’s white whale or Gatsby’s Daisy. It’s what we can’t get, but we can’t stop wanting. And if the character stops pursuing their desire, then they have to live with what they didn’t do.
Usually characters start with a lack. They’re not living the life they want to live.
Why? Four possible reasons:
- Weakness — laziness, cowardice, shyness, lack of confidence
- Wound — some incident in the past that hold them back
- Limitation — youth, inexperience, gender, class, poverty
- Flaw — moral failure, greed, cruelty, dishonesty
Many characters turn themselves inside out trying to protect themselves from pain.
While Corbett said that mapping these reasons for thwarted desire are helpful, it’s best to show them in scene, whether you include that scene in your final draft or not.
Opportunity or misfortune strikes. Desire arises.
2. Adjustments — How We Cope With not Getting What We Want
Denial is the great wall between what we want and where we are. It’s pretty common to pretend that desire isn’t that important.
Of course, adjusting can be a mature response. Sublimating your desire so you can achieve long-term goals. LIke students who study instead of skiing in order to get into medical school. They don’t deny the yearning as much as put it off.
3. Vulnerability
As readers, sometimes we’re turned off by neediness, but usually when people are vulnerable, when we see the hurt from not getting what they want, we are attracted to them. If they’re never vulnerable, why would we care about them?
Vulnerability can manifest in a variety of ways — existential, physical, emotional. One common situation is when characters do something, knowing they will be judged.
In Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche is vulnerable because she has no home, and, barely under the surface, she is asking her sister, is this my home?
4. Secrets — the Bigger, the Better
The minute you give your characters a secret, you create an illusion of depth. The best secrets are those that, if revealed, will change the person’s life.
5. Contradictions — Acting Out of Character
No one acts the same way all the time. They may act out of character in times of stress, or because of some wound in the past.
When someone acts out of character, it shakes up our expectations. Creates intrigue. Like the take-charge supermom, who goes out on a date and we see her tentative, deferential, uncertain. We are all many things to many people. We act differently in the boardroom than in the bedroom.
Writers often put their characters in situations that take them out of their comfort zone, where they become more unpredictable. A shy young man goes off to war. An impatient woman is confronted with a husband getting dementia.
Some other questions to consider? When did your character exhibit courage? How about fear? When does your character feel shame, feel like he or she is a bad person, a loser? Maybe losing a job. Getting divorced.
And then there’s the opposite of that. The moment of triumph. Pride.
Two other dichotomies Corbett called out were guilt and forgiveness — some people never forget — and death/loss and love/connection.
One theme he kept returning to was the idea that you want to keep making life more difficult for your characters. How they respond to these troubles shows us who they are.
“You want to keep torturing your protagonist,” he said. “Things are bad? Make them worse.”
“At some point,” he said, “characters have stopped believing in the promise of life. It’s that wound that you lick for the rest of your life that defines character. “
At their lowest point, when they have to change or die, sometimes literally — that’s where discovery comes.
“Until then,” Corbett says, “flog them like a mule.
— by John Byrne Barry, author of Bones in the Wash and Wasted, and Laura Lopez, author of Escape the Will-Power Trap: 7 Secrets to Doubling Your Energy & Getting Your Life Back.
by CWC Marin administrator | Jul 29, 2015 | Events
Every other year, each California Writers Club branch may nominate one member to receive a Jack London Award in recognition of outstanding service to the organization. Joan Steidinger was one of 14 awardees honored at the CWC annual meeting last weekend in Oakland. (That’s Joan with the big smile, second from right near the back.)
Jack London Award Winners 2015 Back Row, left to right: Arthur Carey (Fremont Area Writers), Daniel Stallings (East Sierra), Dennis VanderWerff (Writers of Kern), Paula Chinick (Tri-Valley), Colin Seymour (South Bay). Third Row, left to right: Steve Liddick (Sacramento), Leslie Patiño (Central Coast), Dwight Norris (High Desert), Joan Steidinger, Ph.D. (Marin). Second Row, left to right: Doug Fortier (Mendocino Coast), Jeane Slone (Redwood Writers), Barbara Bentley (Mt. Diablo), Carole J. Bumpus (San Francisco/Peninsula), Jeanette Fratto (Orange County). Front Row, left to right: Donna McCrohan Rosenthal (Jack London Awards committee), David George (CWC president), Joyce Krieg (Jack London Awards committee). Also, Doug Fortier (second row, far left) served as Jack London Awards committee chair.
Joan Steidinger (Marin)
Joan served on the board of CWC-Marin (practically her whole time as a member) since 2010, beginning as director-at-large, program chair, vice president, 2013 CWC-Marin conference chair, and currently as president. Belonging to CWC-Marin and promoting the club has served as a springboard for her general-interest style of writing. You will see her running the trails of Mt. Tam in Mill Valley, California where she lives with her husband, JP, and two goldie dogs, Spencer and Parker.
Joan Steidinger, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist, Certified Consultant through the Association of Applied Sports Psychology and on the United States Olympic Committee’s Registry of Sport Psychology. She has written columns online for PsychologyToday.com and SFGate.com. She has worked as a clinical & sports psychologist for close to 30 years with offices in Mill Valley and San Francisco. Two of her particular interests are women’s issues and sports psychology. She’s been a lifelong athlete. In October 2014, she released her first book, Sisterhood in Sports: How Female Athletes Collaborate and Compete. The book has won the sports category of the following three contests: International Book Awards, National Indie Excellence Awards, and the Beverly Hills Book Awards. The book is a finalist in Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Years Awards in the Women’s Issues category.
— See the other winners at calwriters.org
by CWC Marin administrator | Jun 14, 2015 | Events, interview
Short-story writer, essayist, and now novelist Marianne Lonsdale is a founding member of Write On Mamas, a San Francisco Bay Area writers group. She will be presenting “Finding Your Writing Community,” Sunday, June 28, 2 p.m. at the California Writers Club–Marin Branch meeting at Book Passage. I interviewed her on the phone the week after the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, which we both attended, though we never crossed paths.
Q: Tell me about your writing.
I’m working on a novel now, literary fiction. About a woman in her mid-30s in Oakland, in 1991. It follows the arc of a stormy relationship. The novel being such a long form, I’m usually also working on a personal essay, which is mostly what I write.
Q: Your talk is on finding your writing community. Why is that important?
For me, finding a writing a community that I liked was a surprise. I usually think of myself as introverted. But I found that being involved with other writers keeps me energized. I hear a lot of the same stuff at these workshops and gatherings, but I’m riveted nonetheless. I feel like I’ve found my passion. Last year, Brooke Warner, my writing coach, asked me on behalf of someone she was working with what tips I would give someone about being involved in writing communities, and at first I was taken aback, and then I realized how much I’ve become engaged in these communities, several of them.
I’m not a very published writer. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to get my work out there if I weren’t making connections.
Q: How have you made those connections?
One was through Left Coast Writers, led by Linda Watanabe McFerrin, at Book Passage. She pushed me to pitch my work, helped me find a home at this literary website called Literary Mamas. I stumbled into an opportunity I would not have otherwise known about. The other place was the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, where what I gained more than anything tangible was the feeling of community. It was the first time I felt such a bond with other writers. I wanted to keep that bond going. After I joined Left Coast Writers, I help found Write on Mamas in 2012.
It started as a small group. We write for the first 90 minutes of the meeting, and for some people, that’s the only time of the month they carve out time to write. We meet meet the second Sunday of every month at Mill Valley’s O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, and we also have been sponsoring some readings and interviews at the Mill Valley Library.
Q: How have you benefited most from your writing community?
Write On Mamas published an anthology that included a piece of mine, and we had readings all around the bay. I was thrilled to read as part of the launch at Diesel Books. I would not have been part of that anthology if I hadn’t been part of this community.
Some of the women I met at Write on Mamas also produced “Listen to Your Mother,” a national event leading up to Mothers’ Day that grew out of the blogging community. The national organization looks for local moms to put on the show. We sold out the Brava Theater in San Francisco.
Last year, I also curated a Write On Mamas’ event for LitCrawl, called “Your Mom Had Sex.”
Q: In Write On Mamas, how do you balance skilled and published authors with newbies?
The group is open to writers of all levels, published as well as those who do more thinking about writing than writing. It’s more of a salon than critique group. We write, then get short critiques, what I call “critique lite.” It’s a very nurturing community.
Q: What do you do when you’re not writing?
I work full time at Clorox, manage HR operations. I live in Oakland with my husband and 18-year-old son, who’s soon to leave for college. I’m going to take over his bedroom for a study. A big step. A writing space of my own.
Q: When did you first start identifying yourself as a writer?
That what my piece in the Write On Mama’s anthology is about. I remember as young child being interested in writing, but I didn’t start until I was in my 40s, after the birth of my son. I took a writing class Piedmont Adult School.
Q: Who do you like to read?
I read widely. Literary fiction, personal essays. I love the essays in The Sun. I recently finished Armistead Maupin’s Last Tales of the City. An Irish mystery writer named Tana French. We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, was fabulous. I also liked The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman.
Q: What do you know now that you didn’t used to know about writing?
I used to think that being part of writing groups and writing communities would take time away from my writing. Instead, I get more pages written because of the energy and opportunity. In my early years of writing, I didn’t meet people. I didn’t realize how welcome I’d be at most readings and workshops.
Join Marianne Lonsdale Sunday, June 28, 2 p.m. at Book Passage for the California Writers Club–Marin June meeting. You can find her essay, “Giving Birth to Creativity,” in Mamas Write: 29 Tales of Truth, Wit, and Grit. There’s more at mariannelonsdale.com.
