Talking About Story

This week, I'm making a presentation at Word Lab, an after-school writing center for students. I'm a proud volunteer of the Young Writers Program, and this is one of the places where I spend my time. I thought I would share what I plan to say with you:

Today, I'm here to talk about story, specifically how to figure out what you want to write. So, first let's talk about what makes up a story. In a story, a main character has a dream. She has internal and external obstacles that make it difficult to achieve that goal. The character will struggle, try different tactics, and eventually succeed or fail at what she wanted to do.

When I sat down to write my first book, Joy Returns!, I knew that music had to be a part of it because music is very important to me, and if I was going to spend a lot of time on a project, I wanted to be writing about something that I loved. So, how would music fit into my story? I thought about when I was young and played piano and how magical it felt to sit down at that bench, put my hands on the keyboard, and start to play. I wanted to try to recapture that on paper. So, in real life, after studying piano for several years, my family moved to California, and I stopped playing. If I was writing an essay or a memoir about that time, I would write about that experience. But I want to write fiction. So I need to make things up. In my book, the girl continue to play the piano.That's my happy ending. But I need complications in my story. I need obstacles. I thought about, when I was young, what would have made life horrible? If my father had died, it would have been devastating. So, in Joy Returns!, the girl's father dies right before the story begins. The mother is overwhelmed. The grandmother insists that the mother is an unfit parent, and the girl should live with her. In the book, the girl has to figure out how to live in a world that has turned upside-down. Can music be a force to lift her out of her despair and find happiness again?

While I was writing Joy Returns!, I made a decision. I realized that I would always need to find time to write and that I always wanted to write books. On days where I couldn't write, I felt like I was stranded in the middle of the desert without any water. So after I wrote Joy Returns!, I wondered what I would write next, and I promptly had a dream. I dreamed an entire adult murder mystery. Everything was already organized in chapters. In the middle of the night, I woke up and wondered if I should write it down. “No,” I thought, “I'm tired. I will remember this in the morning. It's engraved in my soul.”

When I woke up the next morning, all I could remember was that I had dreamed an adult mystery novel, and that it had featured horses. I first resolved to try in the future to always write down my ideas as soon as possible. And then I thought about horses. When I was young and playing music, I also lived near a stable and rode horses. I started thinking about them—first their names, then their looks, then their personalities, and then . . . here is the crazy part. I started imagining their voices, how they would sound, what they would say, how they felt about their lives.

I tried to stop that imagining. It felt too weird to write about talking horses. But once they started, the horses wouldn't stop talking. So I wrote Kate and the Horses, a story about a girl who had a knack for saying and doing the wrong things and could not make friends, even though that was what she wanted most in the whole world, who was bullied and teased and misunderstood until some horses started talking to her and changed her life.

I hope I have given you some ideas on ways to write and think about stories. I'm going to end with a short reading, the first chapter from Kate and the Horses. Thank you. [Note: Blog readers can read that first chapter in the Amazon sample.]

Take Off Your Pants!

Writers are generally divided into two categories: plotters and pantsers. Plotters outline their stories. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants. Both approaches are valid. It just depends on which style suits you.

When I was s young writer, I was a pantser. I couldn't imagine being a plotter. It felt too daunting to me. That type of approach, I thought, was for people with scientific brains. I was an artiste with flights of fancy. I just needed to attend my muse, and the pages would flow.

Except they didn't. In my twenties and thirties, I had a half a dozen never-completed projects that I quietly shelved when I couldn't figure them out. It got to the point where I wouldn't say that I was writing a novel any more. It was too embarrassing to admit to abandoning them.

When I decided that I truly needed to finish a book, I started studying craft. I discovered Libbie Hawker and her work on a Creative Penn podcast episode. I immediately liked her. I was impressed with her productivity, her confidence, and her smarts. After I heard the interview, I bought one of her books, Take Off Your Pants: Outline Your Book for Faster, Better Writing. And it is the right kind of book for me. It's short, straightforward, and it said things in a way that made sense and felt important. Also, there were plenty of examples to back up each point. Now, when I'm working on a project, I think of things Hawker stressed in this book: Is my protagonist horribly flawed? (She needs to be at the start of the story.) Does she have a dream? What does she try to achieve it? How is she thwarted? Who is her antagonist? Does her goals mirror the dream of the protagonist? Who is the protagonist's ally? What does our main character learn by the end?

And here's the true confession:  I'm still really a plotter with an asterisk. I wish I could throw that star away and stand tall as a plotter, but, honestly, I'm not there yet, and perhaps I never will be. I still can't tolerate graphs and bar grids. I read craft books all the time and take notes and think about them, and I try to do all the exercises in the book, but I never get through filling out everything I'm supposed to do. I do latch on to concepts though, and I do love making lists and outlines, and I brainstorm quite a bit, and I don't start a novel until I have a solid sense of the story, and now I do finish. So I have a bit of a pantser soul, but I take solace in as many plotter activities as I can stand. And when I'm in story trouble, I often turn to Libbie Hawker and Take Off Your Pants!

The Talking Cure

This is a great strategy to use when you're about to start a project, and you want some guidance. I've also used it when I've been in the middle of writing something and felt stuck in a hole. Here's how it works: you contact a friend. You ask if you can meet. You tell her that you need to talk out your story. You ask if she would be willing to listen and take notes. If your friend is a writer, you make a deal that you will be happy to do the same for her when she needs someone to listen to her work.

In the meeting, the writer tells the story—no reading from text, no notes. She just tells the story. When I am the friend in this scenario, I write “mind map” notes. I jot down key words that the writer uses in her story, and I put bubbles around each word. I connect words with lines. If it feels right in the meeting, I may ask questions while the writer presents her story. Other times, I wait until the story is over, and then I will ask if anything seems unclear or if I want to know more about something. I may make one or two general comments, usually about themes or patterns.

At the end of the process, the friend hands the writer her notes. The writer now has a map for her project, one that is built out of her own words, one that was always there for her. It just needed to be pointed out. And that's it. Then the writer goes home, cranks up her favorite writing music, and puts the words on the page. It's a fun, effective way to write.

Toggl

A few weeks ago, I discovered my new favorite writing, Toggl. Toggl provides a way to track my time. With Toggl, I can enter in my various writing activities (novel, blog posts, writing group, and volunteer work (more on that in a future post)), and I can see at a glance how much time I actually spend as a writer each day.  Toggl surprised me. If you had asked me before about my writing schedule, I would have told you that it was an hour a day. That's the time I spend on my novel. I generally hadn't thought of my other writing gigs as writing time. Toggl has cured me of that. I can now look at my entries and see very clearly my commitment to my creative life.

Since I've started using Toggl, I talk about it when I hang out with friends.  (Yes, I am a nerd.) Some also love to track their time. But others were resistant to the idea. They said that it was a frightening option to consider, that it was actually something they would never want to do. But Toggl makes me happy. The Hermione in me loves to keep a record of my work. It makes me accountable. I really don't like it if I look at a day, and my writing self is underrepresented. With Toggl, I'm a more productive writer.

How Guided-Prompt Writing Groups Saved My Life

It was a dark and stormy number of years. I'm actually horrible in tracking the actual passage of time, but it felt like there was a forever period where I did not write a thing. For me, that feels like a vulture is perched on a tree, licking his lips, looking down at me, a wanna-be corpse on the side of the road. If I'm not writing, I may as well not live.

However, one day, I saw an ad in the local weekly promoting a free event at our big independent bookstore, a guided-prompt writing session. Bring your notebook. I felt a faint ping in the base of my spine. “I should go,” I thought and waited a year and a half before I actually did.

In a guided-prompt writing group, the leader throws out a suggestion, and then we write about that or whatever we'd like for a specified amount of time, often ten to twenty minutes.Then there's an option to read your work aloud to the group. There is no feedback. The group just listens. Perhaps they say thank you.

When I first heard this description as I sat on a folding chair at the bookstore, I inwardly scoffed. I have an MA in creative writing. I taught introductory creative writing at that university. What could this process possibly teach me?

The short answer: a ton. First, I realized that it was a powerful experience, especially after this long drought, to say my words aloud to a group of people who actively listened. It was a huge relief to know that I would hear no judgement of this collection of words that I had just plucked out of thin air. The thank yous felt like a balm to my soul who, in retrospect, should never have been subjected to two years of intensive workshop method. That process is just not me.

Since that day, I've been actively involved in guided-prompt writing groups, as a participant and as a leader. (You can find me at the table twice a month for the Mountain Spirit Writing Group in Felton, California.) Now, when I introduce this process to others, I tell them that this group will strengthen your writing muscles. It will heighten your focus. It will help you learn to tell the editor side of yourself to go take a vacation while the writer in you rolls up her sleeves. You will learn how much you can accomplish in fifteen minutes. You can take that out of this room and start your own writing practice, starting with that small unit of time, and watch your work grow and flourish. I say you may be surprised. I tell them that even though I am the one throwing out the prompts, I often am still shocked by what comes out when I set my pen on the page. I tell them it's a great way to discover what are your themes, what keeps coming up as things important to you.

In addition, guided-prompt writing groups gave me steps to write. In one session, the leader first had us write mind maps, sometimes also called “clusters” or “balloons,” scattered words in circles all across the page with lines connecting them. She encouraged us to think about an experience using all our senses, seeing it both from an up close and personal viewpoint and as an outsider further away. We didn't read those mind maps out loud, but we then wrote for a period of time in a linear fashion, using that mind map as our guide. When we read those words out loud, it was evident that the stories came from a deeper place when we included that step. It's a process that I have incorporated into my writing practice, the way I approach any new scene.

Guided-prompt writing groups led me back back to fiction. In another group, the leader asked us to write about a challenging situation. After we read those accounts, she asked us to write about the same situation but, this time, find ways to change it. I added some new characters, included dialogue that contradicted my memory. It was fun. It was exhilarating. And, after that night, I returned to fiction. I was so happy to be back.