The Things We Don’t Notice

When I first started writing novels, I researched intensively, making copious notes about setting, architecture, and historical data about a town. Next I would make a list of traits that I thought might make the character seem more interesting, like the type of clothing worn, or their preference for foods. While you have to do that type of pre-writing and researching, it is also important that you research the interior landscape of your character.

Good fiction writing pays attention to research. But great fiction writing hardwires the reader into the mind of the character. Therefore, you must know your character through intimate details, the thoughts that seem fleeting to you; perhaps you don’t recognize them speeding past the thoughts you capture through cognizance. These are thoughts we’re taught not to blurt out in polite settings, and for good reason. But they are the things that humanize your character, that give the reader a glimpse into their soul. I often think when I read this deeper type of writing, “I’ve thought the same thing.” True, but I had to train myself to capture them and fit them into my story. Good fiction writing pays attention to research. But great fiction writing hardwires the reader into the mind of the character. Therefore, you must know your character through intimate details.

How do you capture such humanizing material? Do keep a journal so that while you are practicing watching the human condition up close, you are recording your observations. Then work at observing your own internal landscape. Next is the most difficult part–dramatizing the things you learned by writing them artfully into your narrative. The temptation will be at first to make a list of those internal thoughts. I do that because I’m setting the elements of thoughts into the story, like a gem into a setting. But writing them so that they become a natural, almost invisible, part of the interior monologue takes skill that separates the great writing from the good.

You can rush an ordinary novel, but you can’t rush a great one. Aim for great stories that are intimate and make the reader feel as if she is thinking those thoughts herself. Invite them into the character’s worries, tensions, repressed desires, and fleeting thoughts that seem like nothing, but in the end are powerful applications that become a part of the story’s movement. It will separate your writing from the average offerings and get you noticed.

Photography by Cory Hines

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The Story in Your Attic

I keep a photo jpg of a friend’s granddaughter. I’ve not met the child, but when the child’s mother was a baby, she was the same age as my firstborn son. She looks exactly like her mother at that age. When I look at the photo, memories rise up and tumble out through my emotions. I see her mother seated in a car seat next to my son in his little seat. He is tiny, she is twice his size. My son loved to sing, and would make up little mono-syllabic tunes since he could not yet speak. One afternoon as I was driving them for an outing, he broke into a song that must have been welling up for it spilled out of him with great joy. At once, this baby girl joined him and they sang together. A high soprano tune was coming out of him while she sort of grunted in a low bass. Both of them were bobbing rhythmically. I could not stop laughing.

A photo can evoke a story in you either because it summons up one that is already crouched dormant in your head, waiting to pounce. Or it may evoke a story in you from the tangle of your imagination. If you’re having trouble getting started, find a photo that summons to your imagination. Don’t bind it with too many elements. Free it up; write it down in colored pencil or in your journal. Stories are scattered all around, so pluck one out of the air or the attic and start writing.

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The Art of Getting Started

First sentences are a novelist’s signature. They should evoke a question in the reader answered by the novel. A first sentence should compel the editor to want to see the rest of the manuscript too. I spend hours on a first sentence and its opening paragraph. I’ve tossed more than I’ve kept.

“A bit of trouble with attempted murder sent Jeb Nubey over the Texarkana border in the unfortunate direction of hunger.” Fallen Angels

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TAKING THE HIGH ROAD. . . A WRITER’S JOURNEY TO LONGEVITY

Because the self-publishing market is so accessible and the general market outwardly tepid, it seems at the outset cruel to advise unpubbed writers not to self-publish. I remember how desire took over my emerging writer’s imagination. I managed to keep emotions in check, though, and that early choice became foundational to longevity as a novelist. If getting published gives you wings and not being published keeps you pecking on the ground with the chickens, I would opt, as a new writer, for flying lessons from those who’ve learned to soar.

I’m impressed with the small presses that create avenues for publishing and then work diligently to market those new writers to an eager readership that craves excellent fiction. That said, my advice to emerging writers is that you should not sell yourselves short by shortcuts that might serve only to circumvent the journey to high quality writing and publishing. Once you have developed a clear and lucid voice and a compelling story that’s un-put-down-able, the publishers will beat a path to your door. They’re all, both big and small houses, looking for the next fresh new voice. Be the answer to that challenge and you will not want for writing contracts. Believe, write every day, and stick to your mission until it is legitimately accomplished.

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Revealing Stories

Because novels are not film, characters cannot emote like actors. So desire, fear, anger and other internal beliefs  are revealed through the central character’s dialogue, exposition, and thought. These thought methods expose to  the reader the things that are not revealed through dialogue and action. Choosing to use internals instead of dialogue allows the reader to eavesdrop, but not the peripheral characters.  Learning when to use them is a matter of trial and error.

In Austen’s day, because of the mores of polite society, the heroine’s internal landscape served the story by revealing the conscious mind of the protagonist, the character who was too polite or fearful to reveal her true self to the other characters. The reader was allowed to know her intimately, and, therefore, believe her when her emotions finally erupted or succumbed to passion. When you hear that your reader must care about your character, this internal landscape is one of the skills you’ll use to achieve a reader’s emotional investment in your story.

Clotted exposition can either reveal too much or cover up important specificity when detailed revelation is needed. You are balancing your character’s life on a tense tightrope. The unknown is as important as the known to keep the story taut and pace flowing forward. You want to keep your character balanced on the story line and not have it collapse under her.

“Thought,” says Aristotle, is the process by which a person works backward in his mind from his goal to determine what action he can take toward that goal at a given moment.

The character may not fully understand what she wants, but we as the writer should know and be moving them toward subtle self-revelation, be it a guilty pleasure or a shocking disclosure.

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Story

Not every writer can pinpoint the exact moment she or he wrote down the first few passionate words that changed everything. We’re more likely to remember the feeling it gave us. Remember when that was more important than knowing how to write?

My first essays were guided by a published novelist who had come to our small Arkansas college to teach freshman English. Instead of the typical research essays, he directed us to write confessional narrative. It was within those early pages that my writing voice sputtered to the surface.

Confessional writing gives the emerging writer free rein to explore voice through brief introspective vignettes. I think I wrote about the muddy sneakers in my dorm room or something that seemed meaningless. It was a jumpstart subject. Nonetheless, the confessional piece awakens the desire to write with a greater intent, truthfully interpreting   the human condition beneath the epidermis, so to speak. I remember how meaningful personal writing became even if I could not exactly express why. It forced me to interpret first my life and then persons whose lives touched mine, whether negatively or positively.

Through a narrative I dictated and clarified what was within my grasp to peel back honestly and see. While I may not remember the exact language that led me to that experience, I remember the feeling; it was as if I were breaking through forbidden walls. It’s a common thread among some contemporary American writers to explore issues like liberation from an autocratic existence. (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Bebe Moore Campbell) You may have employed one or both strategies in your fiction. But the feeling of breaking through to find that raw layer of truth is a place of  deep satisfaction, no matter what the theme.

Somewhere in that bruised place of discovery, we may eventually find that our writing voice becomes intertwined with our reason to write, the two engines inseparable. Writing provides a microcosm of why humans respond as they do and what causes a life to grow and then disintegrate. I know and understand the flawed life of the character after I’ve interpreted that character more reflectively. Digging for the truth helps each of us to be honest about our own deficiencies. Suffice it to say, we writers often find voice when we embark on the journey to find out why we need it.

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Writing the Bonfire

I started out grabbing any writing contract that I could find, no worries for how I was going to churn out the books. I drove myself crazy trying to meet the expectations of a market. Markets are impersonal. They are beasts. There is a groove we all can find; but if everyone is doing it, then the market’s glutted with a lot of similarly written stories. Acquisitions editors are looking for new and fresh, so where has all of the wheel spinning gotten us? My breaking point was at a conference where I wrestled with the angst that I did not fit in.

There was an actual codified language those authors spoke at their workshops, their fans dewey-eyed over the pearls they were casting about in their talks. The rooms were packed with emerging writers. I had to sit on the floor, the room was so full. I sat listening, but not connecting. I had just finished my fifth novel “for the market.” I did not possess this writer’s passion for book mill writing. I went to my hotel room, ordered room service, buried my face in a pillow, and hid. Writing for publication was being sold like snake oil, strewn as freely as those authors were throwing out their tomes for how to get published. But it was both a death and an awakening. If I could climb out of this suffocating pattern of writing, I’d find a quiet place to write my stories. It was a terrifying thought.

I knew that readers are looking for stories that they can’t put down. They want to be courted and then swept away–and I don’t mean pillow talk.  But to write the kind of story that was firing my imagination was going to take time. The white hot ember that creates kinesis for my character is not in the first draft that is laid down. It is around the seventh or eighth revision I’m finally able to locate the kinesis for the character and connection for the reader. Could I find a readership willing to wait for a story of depth?

Sure, book fans all read one after another; but I had to be at peace with realizing there are plenty of books for that. Why do we have to try and be a reader’s only author?  It was frightening to think such a thing! I needed to connect with fellow sojourners who found my story intersected with theirs. What books do you keep and which ones do you give to the library? The goal should be that my book is the keeper.

At the close of that conference, I headed back to the airport believing that if I had to fit into some sort of pre-formed mold, that I was going to look for a different kind of work. To my surprise, New York Times bestselling novelist Francine Rivers was on my same departure schedule.  Frani and I had an hour and a half wait until our flight at the same terminal. I shared my angst. Frani so practically said to me, “Forget following the pack. Write your story of passion and the market will find you.”

I’m not by any means an example of success for any writer to follow. But I’ve kept a steady spate of contracts since that encounter in a LA airport. I went home and wrote my first book of passion calling it Katrina’s Wings.  I sold it two weeks after writing it and vetted my first topnotch agent to boot!  Best of all,  I’ve been at peace ever since.  With grace I add that  if a writer is happy churning out one book after another–and I think each one who does that will hit a wall–then he or she should do that, if they are at peace with themselves.

The rest should keep blowing on the story until it becomes a bonfire.

PH