Category: Reading

Letters from Anne Lamott

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Motivation

No, I have not written correspondance with Anne Lamott, and I don’t have copies of any of her epistles. I do, however, have a copy of Bird by Bird, which I reread cover to cover today.

Two things that resonated with me particularly during this read had to do with letters, namely the first five of the alphabet.

Alice Adams’ ABDCE

In her chapter on Plot, Lamott reference’s Alice Adam’s formula for writing short stories. It goes like this:

  1. Action—This is how you start, how you get the reader reading.
  2. Backstory—This is how you set up for that action, after the fact, when the reader is already hooked and curious about your characters.
  3. Development—This is when you develop the characters based on their personalities and what’s at stake. If you know your characters, the plot will flow naturally.
  4. Climax—Everything comes together for the characters during the climax. Lamott says the climax needs to include a killing, a healing, or a domination. These could be literal or metaphorical. Either way, the characters are not the same after the climax.
  5. Ending—After the climax, the ending needs to make sense. “What is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?” (page 62)

Plotters and Pantsers

There are two basic types of writers: the plotter and the pantser. I’ll use extremes to illustrate my point, and hopefully you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle.

The extreme plotter plans before writing and risks writing something plot-driven rather than character-driven (I talk about that here). These are the people that write 28 trashy novels per year and somehow end up on the best-seller list. Their films generate a buzz and sell a lot of popcorn, but end up in the discount DVD bin five months after release. The extreme pantser writes by the seat of his or her pants, letting the story develop naturally and organically, and risks having an artfully written convolution that is unpublishable. These are the people who write fine literature that nobody particularly understands. Their movies are discussed primarily in film classes.

Sometimes you plan out a 4-foot-by-4-foot garden plot. You plant the seeds in even little rows, pushing them inches down into the Ph-balanced soil. But then you have a number of cold days, or not enough rain, and the spinach wilts and the corn grows and casts an eternal shadow over the unsuspecting peonies. Before you know it, the tomatoes are creating their own political party of radicals, hatching a plan to overthrow the oligarchy that is your authorship. Then you have to wonder if your garden needs a serious thrashing, if you should just plow it up and turn the whole thing into a compost pile, or if you should start a new, nonfiction book entitled “1001 Uses for Tomatoes.”

Sometimes you wander, barefooted, into a patch of wildflowers and lie gazing up at the clouds and enjoying the smells and sounds of the rustling, absorbing them into memory. You come back, day after day, while the Earth spins around and the seasons change, observing and absorbing, until you have a collection of lovely vignettes. But your editor just doesn’t see a story there. So you go back to your wildflower patch with a shovel, find a spot with a nice view, and you dig yourself a grave there and bury yourself up to your waist in dirt, and call a friend to come finish the job for you, because you can’t cover yourself completely without leaving some arm waving around pathetically.

Whether you are a plotter or a pantser, whether you’ve got a messy draft or are in the middle of a draft with no foreseeable future, you might want to consider a plot treatment.

Plot Treatment

A plot treatment addresses what happens and why. It tells you “who the people [are] and what the story [is],” (page 91).

Here’s how Lamott did it:

“I sat down every day and wrote five hundred to a thousand words describing what was going on in each chapter. I discussed who the characters were turning out to be, where they’d been, what they were up to, and why. [And] I figured out, over and over, point A, where the chapter began, and point B, where it ended, and what needed to happen to get my people from A to B. And then how the B of the last chapter would lead organically into point A of the next chapter. The book moved along like the alphabet, like a vivid and continuous dream.” (92-3)

Sound familiar? It’s a lot like Suzanne Johnson’s Relationship Arcs. Try my twist of a plot treatment with my Chapter Outlining Like a Pantser technique.

Don’t be afraid to plot. Plotting helps make your story a story. It gives you that beginning, middle, and end. Without it, you might have some nice images, but so does the Alzheimer’s patient down at Happy Acres. They might be real, truthful, and beautiful, but if you don’t link together the cat with three legs, your great aunt’s penchance for covering furniture with doilies, and the lingering smell of buttercream frosting together in a logical order, no one is going to have any idea what you are talking about, or why those things are important.

 

I’m a plotter, and I have an outline, but that plan has grown from my knowledge of my characters. They still surprise me from time to time, so if my outline changes, it changes. I don’t change my characters to fit the story, I change the story to fit them, but I have a pretty good idea of what decisions they’ll make for themselves based on their character.

I’ve spent half a decade with my characters, virtually taking them out to eat. Gareth and I always get cheeseburgers or waffles at indecent hours, constantly wiping our mouths of the ketchup or blueberry syrup as we talk about movies. Isolde and I get frozen ice cream topped generously with fruit and white chocolate or coconut, unless we are having a self-conscious day, when we’ll chat over salads between sips of lemon water. Robin is less predictable, wanting salmon one day and Wisconsin cheese baked macaroni another. I gaze at the menu in indecision while he talks about his latest wedding gig.

If you know your characters, the story will develop while they develop. If you don’t know your characters, take them out for coffee and let them order whatever they want. Listen to their story, and then go home and write it down.

I recommend borrowing Bird by Bird from the library, at least. If you are a habitual highlighter or underliner like myself, however, you can buy the book on Amazon here: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

[Historical Fiction] Friday

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Historical Fiction

I can’t believe that NaNoWriMo is less than a week away! I’ve been trying to prep by doing research, since my novel is set mostly in an alternate 12th century England (I know…I know). My intention was to be historically accurate—as much as possible. But when I started researching castles, I realized that my mental image was going to have to change in some respects. For example, here’s a rough idea of what I was picturing:

But Alas, Conwy Castle was begun in the 13th century. One hundred years later. Keep reading to see a progression showing how difficult it is to date a castle, and how people really have almost no idea what castles looked like in the 12th century.

Here’s a floor plan of Chepstow Castle, showing how many renovations the castle received over a few hundred years.

Here’s a model of what the castle looked like in the 1500s, during the Tudor time period which followed the Middle Ages.

And here’s what it looked like roughly around the 12th century.

Exciting, right? A stone “tower” that looks sort of like a prison building, with a couple wooden huts outside? Okay, I exaggerate a bit. But seeing this castle made me go, Eeesh, not what I was expecting, for my heroine who will be living in something like this.

But then to complicate things further, you are not only supposed to get the time period right, but you should also get the class distinction right. Thankfully—as far as I can tell—Chepstow, as lovely as it is, is a fairly modest castle compared to others built in the 12th century. A King’s castle would be more luxurious. Kings’ castles usually get refurbished and rebuilt more often that other castles, though, which is why many (if not most) of the castle ruins in the UK are remnants of much more contemporary designs.

I’ll tell you that I DID find a castle that will and does inspire me and is from the correct time period, and belongs within the correct financial ranking. But all of this research led me to have a discussion with one of my writer friends, and I’d like to hear your input on it, too. Yes, even if you read this post a few years down the line. I’m curious to what you think! And I’ll probably still be working on the novel then, anyway.

How important is historical accuracy in a novel? Would you rather read a novel that 1) gets its history right or 2) tweaks the facts for the sake of their story?

I recently read Christy English’s The Queen’s Pawn. I don’t recommend it. The whole premise of the book was an inaccuracy, but it turns out, finding historical inaccuracies was the only entertainment I squeezed out of the reading. My conclusion is that if you are going to get history completely wrong, you had better write an engaging story so that I the reader will forgive you. I haven’t forgiven Christy English, because the story was not interesting to me. Rewriting history just so you can write about a middle-aged man fornicating with a pubescent teenager is not my idea of worthwhile literature. Lolita it wasn’t.

Ahem. Anyway, your thoughts on historical accuracy?

Fiction Friday: Newbery Medal Winners in Fiction, 1980-2012

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Yes! A day in advance! Again!

You know how I mentioned earlier this week that I started a book club reading and rereading Newbery Award Winners? Well, in preparation for the first meeting, I really wanted a poster of the Newbery Award Winners. And I thought it would be even more nice to have a super short description of the book, to jog our minds if we have already read it, or to make us interested in books we maybe never heard of.

Well, those posters they have in libraries are apparently only available to libraries. I tried to make an account as a homeschool—no dice.

Those nice pretty posters also don’t have a blurb about the books. They have the book name, author, date, and cover. I don’t judge a book by its cover, but I do judge a book by its title. Let’s just say The View from Saturday sounded like a kid version of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and why read Sarah, Plain and Tall when you can read something like Julie of the Wolves?

I remember really liking Sarah, Plain and Tall. I don’t remember it being about a mail-order bride.

So I made my own posters. And since I love you all dearly, I’m going to share them with you to download, for free. (Note, the link to download the printable version is near the end of the post)

This is a preview image. Click the link at the bottom of the page to download.

I have to admit, though, that I have a couple of confessions to make. 1) I am no longer any good at math. The Newbery Award gave its first medal in 1922. This year is 2012. That means there are 90 books, right? 2012-1922=90. No, there are 91 books. If you just subtract, you aren’t counting the current year. Problem: my layout was 30 books per page. In lieu of creating a new layout (this was my 3rd or 4th), I decided rather to eliminate from my posters the books that were biographies and the books that were collections of poems. While I might be interested in someday reading A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers (1989), I can honestly say that I have no desire to pick up Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices (1982) after hearing that all of the poems are about insects.

Confession 2) I haven’t read most of these books. Some of them I hadn’t even ever heard of. I think I read mostly Newbery Honors books as a child, with some major exceptions, like The Giver, Number the Stars, and A Wrinkle in Time. So when I went about writing blurbs about the books, I had to read the synopses of the novels from sites like Amazon and Goodreads. I could only fit about 100 characters per novel to keep the posters to a page each. That’s less than a Tweet, and is about 20 words. Try summarizing a book you’ve never read into 20 words or fewer sometime—it’s definitely a head-scratcher.

As much as I enjoyed the challenge (and hope it will help me come up with elevator speeches of my own novels in the future), it is very time-consuming. That’s why I’m going to release one page per week.

So, for today, I give you the Newbery Medal Winners 1980-2012.

A couple other notes:

  • The boxes by the cover images include the date of the award and serve as a check box, so you can keep track of which ones you’ve read.
  • Since I haven’t read some of these books, the blurb may not be the best representation of the novel.
  • I haven’t printed this out myself yet. If the images are a bit fuzzy, it’s because I couldn’t find high-res images of the covers.
  • This is for educational or personal use only. You MAY NOT use these posters for any sort of commercial gain.

See you next week!

Favorite Passage in Literature

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“There are books that are so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?” —Marina Tsvetaeva

I’m going to go ahead and let my nerd flag fly as I share my favorite passage in all of literature.

Backstory that you may feel free to skip over

In high school, I became a die-hard Lord of the Rings fan. Not so die-hard that I could speak Elvish fluently, but enough that I could beat the pants off anyone playing LOTR Trivial Pursuit. As I left for college to become a literature and writing major, I was overwhelmed with assigned reading. For the first time in years, I didn’t read the Lord of the Rings trilogy that summer (It gets better with every reading, I’ll have you know. I know the first run can be a bit rough—plenty of exposition that Tolkien fellow writes). I also didn’t want to be defined by my hard core geekiness. College was a new start, and a way for me to leave behind the high school angst and discover who I really was.

Over the last few years, I’d still cry at the credit music of The Return of the King, and the trailers for the movies still gave me goosebumps, but I haven’t picked up the books in nearly a decade. The literature major lasted only a couple of semesters before I despised my assigned reading. I soon dropped the Lit major and focused on writing. Sure, I still had stacks of reading material, but I was reading Billy Collins and Li-Young Lee and Aristotle instead of the monotonous feminist drivel that I had previously been beaten over the head with. You’ve read one feminist awakening novel, you’ve read them all. Trust me. (I much prefer feminist characters or themes in a book that isn’t just about feminism. Any book with rounded, realistic female characters is a feminist novel, IMHO.)

Now I’m the one writing too much expository. Anyway, since I’ve graduated, I’ve been able to coddle my love for reading and nurse it back to health. Yesterday I finished The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and read his Newbery Award acceptance speech, in which he wrote about the unadulterated love for books that he had as a youth. Today, I stumbled upon some Tolkien quotes, and as I was rereading the passage below—many years ago underlined and circled and starred in my first, now tattered paperback copy—I realized what a profound impact these words had on me as a teenager.

The novel version

(Frodo) “I don’t like anything here at all, step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”
(Sam) “Yes, that’s so. And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say.
“But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same—like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” [Book IV, chapter 8]

The movie version

“I can’t do this, Sam.”
“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
“What are we holding onto, Sam?”
“That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”

Reflection

The scene in the movie is a tender one, but even though it is rendered verbatim, as far as I can remember, it doesn’t come close to the impact I get from reading the dialogue. Reading lets my mind absorb the words and mull over them in a way that listening doesn’t. When I read these words today, I realized that this passage had—pardon the cliche—changed my life, or at least reflected the change that was already taking place. Like most American teenagers, I was moody and hard-hearted and pessimistic about the future. As I matured, I became more of an optimistic realist. Sure, things might be crappy, but they aren’t all that bad. Could be worse. Now I try to see the positive in everything. I hold on to the promise that things will get better if I just keep fighting. This belief has gotten me through many shadows—heartaches, losses, failures. Did this passage in The Two Towers eloquently state what I was already understanding, or did Tolkien’s words play a part in my transformation? I can’t say for certain which was the cause and which was the effect, but what I do know is that art is truth, and though fiction is made up, the best fiction is truthful.

As an adult, we can read the same book we treasured as a child and come to a completely different understanding of the novel. That’s why I love books. That’s also why I’ve started a book club of adults rereading (or reading for the first time) Newbery Medal and Carnegie Medal winners for juvenile fiction. Newbery is the US award, and Carnegie is the UK equivalent. This month is The Graveyard Book, which is the first book to ever win both medals and was a fairly appropriate choice for the month of October. If you are interested in following along with us, I will post the next few months’ of books on my blog as we come to them. I’ll also post my review of the books the following month.

Today’s post was a lengthy one! And I’m even posting it a day early. Two rarities on this blog. And to be even stranger, today I’m going to ask YOU a personal question.

Respond: Is there a fictional passage that impacted you in a profound way? Is there a book you read as a child and reread as an adult? Share your experiences below.