by CWC Marin administrator | May 28, 2016 | Classes and Workshops, Craft, Events
To write books that are authentic, compelling, and memorable, says Petaluma author Amanda McTigue, speaking at the CWC-Marin May meeting, you need to develop your voice. Voice is the secret sauce that distinguishes what you write from what other authors write.
But it’s not an add-on, she stresses, it is the telling in storytelling. The voice is the story.
McTigue is author of the novel Going to Solace, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she grew up. The story follows family members and caregivers whose paths cross as they go to local hospice, called Solace. McTigue, who also writes short stories and plays, is a longtime member of Redwood Writers.
How does an author find his or her voice? Well, that’s not easy to distill in a few sentences.
One simple way, says McTigue, is to change your focus. She led us through an exercise at the meeting. First, she asked us to take a minute to describe the room we were in. Then she showed us some photos, including one of a barefoot refugee child in front of a row of tents, peeking over a fence. Another of a old woman with a scowl on her face.. Then she said, describe the room again, through the eyes of that child or woman. I wrote about how the refugee child would see a bunch of older people sitting in chair and wearing shoes. Just having a different person looking at the scene changes the voice.
McTigue also stressed that asking questions about your work is key to finding your voice. Questions like who are we writing for and why? She used two examples to illustrate how these questions might be answered. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene: An Intimate History, is writing a popular science book for readers who are open to what he is writing. On the other hand, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, writes the book as a letter to his son, but the actual audience is white people who are clueless about what it’s like to be black.
The choices those authors make about their audience and the goal of their book influence the voice.
You can learn more about Amanda McTigue at amandamctigue.com.
(This is but a brief sample of what we learned. There’s no substitute for attending these valuable meetings in person. Don’t miss short story writer extraordinaire Molly Giles, who will be presenting her wit and wisdom at the June 26 meeting.)
PHOTO BY TIBIDABO PHOTOGRAPHY
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 | May 1, 2013 | Craft
The first thing: When writing stories, long pieces, articles, memoirs, anything, the first thing to realize is: be nice to yourself, or better yet, kick yourself down the stairs, that feel better? You choose.
How silly, of course you will be nice to yourself. Of course you will put your critic in the back closet and ignore all those voices that say your critique group won’t like this. Of course you will ignore voices in your head that say your friends will think this is so stupid, that you shouldn’t be doing this, that there is nothing you can write about.
You have all heard these voices. These voices will be there no matter what you do. See how you can ignore them.
The second thing: if you think of something really goofy, like “She talks to bees”, use it. First drafts are to put anything down that comes to mind. It’s okay. You hear character voices in your head, and they don’t make sense, use them. If your characters take off in new directions and you want to control them, don’t even try. If they will want to play, let them.
The third thing: time yourself. Set an hour a day to write. Write down your start time. You only have to sit with a pencil or paper, or typewriter or computer for that hour only. And write down whatever comes to mind. Use cafes and use other people’s conversations to start. Or have your characters in your stories talk like people in a cafe. Or have them playing cards like people in the cafe. The thing is to use everything. Want to stop? Wait for that hour to come up, then put down your pencil. When you write first drafts, anything goes. Honor the process. This is called creative writing for a reason, be goofy, be terrible, and while you do it, you may think this is the worst thing you ever wrote. So?
The fourth thing: don’t edit as you go, don’t erase anything, and don’t edit what you’ve written. Read over what you have done, admire your ability to sit quietly for an hour, and give yourself praise. You are a genius.
See? Told you so.
Now, you have a manuscript to edit.
Susanna Solomon is author of Sheriffs’ Calls From the Point Reyes Light,
Aahort story collection, coming out this year from Harper Davis Publishers.
