Author Archives: Cindy

On Holidays, Canadian Writers, and Books

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Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! And right after that, Happy Islander Day, a.k.a. Family Day in the rest of Canada. In a way, I think it’s great that we call it Islander Day on PEI because that includes everyone and not just those with families. Not everyone has a family to be with on Family Day, so Islander Day is a great way to celebrate everyone. It’s funny that the holiday was created just so there would be a break in an otherwise holiday-less stretch between Christmas and Holy Week, because February happened to be the only month in the year without a public holiday. Not that it matters to me, because I’ve got my very own personal holiday in February! Yay! That said, we can always declare our own holidays, but we don’t always get paid for them. Of course, if you’re unemployed or a freelancer or own your business, then holidays become moot, because you can take any day you want off as a holiday. Believe me, that’s not the way it works because you end up working odd hours and just about any day of the year, because it’s always ‘no work, no pay’ for you. When you answer to an employer, you get paid for public holidays because the law requires it. Why am talking about holidays? Because I’m back working at full time job and will get paid for the holiday! Woohoo!

Holidays aside, a large group of island writers showed up at the PEI Writers’ Guild Winter Social to find out who won bragging rights for the first ever PEI Battle Tales week-long writing contest and to duke it out at a literary trivia contest for free beer and a handful of gift cards, but really, to duke it out. What I found so revealing is that we Canadians know so little of our literary history! My excuse is I didn’t grow up here and I didn’t attend school or university here. Still, the information we have about Canadian literature is so meager, it surprised me. Canada is the only country I am aware of, at present, that emphasizes reading and books so much, particularly through the CBC’s Canada Reads program. I have to admit I do not know how long it has been running–it will take a bit of research and I’m sure there are those of you who know when it started. My point is that even in the study of world literature (and I mastered in literature), Canadian literature never featured prominently. Probably because there never was as much Canadian literature contributed to the corpus of World Literature. In fact, I had been familiar with Stephen Leacock, who seems to be the earliest writer of note on record who has been anthologized worldwide, but he had never been touted as Canadian. Alice Munro was another name that gained international prominence; ater on, I discovered Margaret Atwood, and much later, Michael Ondaatje. Determined to learn more about writers in my chosen new country, I found Guy Gavriel Kay, re-discovered L.M. Montgomery, and Mordecai Richtler, as well as a few others I am still getting acquainted with. I can’t say I know my Canadian authors well enough and I have a great deal of reading to catch up on.

On another note, I just learned tonight that, according to UNESCO*, Canada published 19,900 books, but also discovered the information is from 1996; but more recent data published by Canada Business** puts the number at over 10,000 books annually, mainly because of an increase in the number of publishers or publishing houses in Canada. I would consider that information skewed and not reflective of the actual number of books written by Canadians, because many Canadian writers are actually published in the US and the UK. The rise of self-publishing in the new millenium probably adds much more to that number. That said, we rank 20th in the UNESCO list, which listed total books published in different countries over a broad range of years, from 1990 to 2014. It’s certainly a long way from Oman’s 7 books published in 1996, but nowhere close to China’s 440,000 in 2013, the US’s 304,912 also in 2013, or the UK’s 184,000 in 2011. Taken viz the population, in 1996, Canada published a book for every 1491 people; which is much better than China’s 1 book for every 3084 people; surprisingly close to the US’s 1 book for every 1038 people; but nowhere near the UK’s 1 book for every 344 people, which I pretty much expected. (By books, I mean book titles and not physical copies.) I think that’s a pretty decent ratio, all things considered.

*Book publishing numbers from UNESCO were sourced from Wikipedia

**Jason McBride, “It’s Alive! Canadian Book Publishing Stirs.” August 30, 2013. From http://www.canadianbusiness.com/companies-and-industries/its-alive-canadian-book-publishing-stirs/

 

Character Types: Dynamic vs Static

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Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.
~Leigh Brackett, WD

 

We’ve been discussing how to make characters more interesting in your writing. One of the best ways to guarantee interesting characters, besides making them ROUND is to make your characters DYNAMIC as opposed to STATIC. Granted, literature needs its share of static characters, because sometimes the stories just need the characters to be the same. People come back to certain writers because their characters are the same, predictable, reliable. Procedural stories, which would be the basis of procedural drama in television, often have static characters. As the term suggests, static characters do not change. They remain the same from beginning to end. They often don’t grow older and they don’t generally have life-shattering experiences. There are hundreds of highly popular static characters in serial books, and there are quite a few I remember and enjoyed reading: Nancy Drew, Perry Mason, James Bond, the Bobbsey Twins, the Dana girls, the Hardy Boys, Miss Marple, and Sherlock Holmes. More recent serial publications with static characters? To some extent, the Bourne series and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoos series. Sometimes, the static characters don’t age, sometimes they do, but in every book, they pretty much think, act, and speak the same way. They do not undergo deep transformations. That’s why they’re suited to adventure and action series. Don’t get me wrong, you can write static characters and they can be very successful, as you can see from the examples I’ve given. They serve a very good purpose, and that is, the series. When the characters grow up, change, achieve their goals and move on, the series either ends or changes. Best example? The Harry Potter series. That’s a limited series because Harry Potter has achieved his goal of seeking revenge on his parents’ killer. Anything else after that time will be a new story. Those characters are prime examples of DYNAMIC characters. You’ve probably surmised by now, that dynamic characters are the opposite of static characters. They develop, change, become different, grow into someone else. They have life-changing and eye-opening experiences that alter their characters so that the way they are when you first encounter them is not who they are by the end of the book. Sometimes, the change is almost indiscernible. It could be a change in attitude or values that show how a character matures. These changes are not always accompanied by life-shattering events or dramatic physical changes. It also depends on the time span of your work. A story that takes place over a longer time is more likely to affect the characters or show how characters change in many different ways. No matter what the situation, your story involves characters with human sentiments, human traits, human foibles. What makes humanity makes your story. What moves humanity will move your readers.

There’s Always Something to Write About

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We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
~John Updike, WD

I would not quickly agree with Updike that we’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. While our current world might not warrant wandering about on horses or in armor with swords at our sides or even bows slung across our backs, we have our chariots and our props, tools of the trade that we use to struggle through life. Probably the biggest challenge in contemporary literature is finding characters that are interesting enough to write about. We forget that people are interesting and as writers, we need to learn to bring out everything that is interesting about them. In my memoir writing classes, I have encountered people saying they have nothing to write about because nothing interesting has happened in their lives. Yet, as I guide them with tips, techniques, questions, and prompts, they suddenly find that there are so many interesting things that have happened in their lives. Now, they have more than enough to actually write about. I, on the other hand, have the quandary of what to write about first. I have encountered so many interesting people, places, and events in my modest and not too short life thus far, and the accumulation of memories is startling, when I think of it. People don’t need to be highly imaginative to become writers. They just need to learn how to use vivid descriptions, picturesque language, detailed imagery. It’s the details that make things more interesting. Remember when someone, possibly a grandparent or an uncle or aunt or even your parents, told a story that everyone enjoyed? They remember details that involve all our senses–sights, smells, sounds, textures, feelings–every little detail adds to creating a picture, a painting of something that happened, and if the action is as vividly described, then the painting becomes a movie clip or a staged scene, and when enough of those are strung together, you have a living, breathing movie in words. Isn’t writing grand?

Character Types: Round vs Flat

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We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
~John Updike, WD

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We started talking about character creation and description in our last installment. Creating characters is such an intricate process and I’ve already described how to develop a character profile in “How to Create Memorable Characters” and, more recently, “Writing Realistic Characters.” What many of you might not be familiar with are the different types of characters. Knowing the different types helps you decide how to develop your characters and how much to develop them. I’ve already discussed the most common type, the STOCK character. A stock character is a common type found in literature through the ages. They’re also called stereotypes. Many of these characters came from classical literature and, because they have the same general traits and purpose in a story, they’re easy to integrate in a story. Stock characters are pull-of-the-shelf varieties and if you look at fairy tales, legends, and classical drama, you’ll find a wide variety of stock characters. I remembering describing stock characters in an earlier article, calling to mind Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, or fairy tale Cinderellas and wicked stepmothers. The next two character types are ROUND vs FLAT characters. Round characters are well-developed characters with complex characteristics. These are the realistic characters I’ve been talking about. They have personalities, quirks, families, histories, and futures. Round characters are like real people because you create them that way. When you include physical, psychological, and biographical information about a character, you have a round character. Your main characters are most interesting when they are round, so you should plan around that. On the other hand, you could have FLAT characters. Flat characters are one-dimensional or, at most, two-dimensional. They are like cartoons on a page, caricatures, because they take the one outstanding trait of a character and you do not see anything else about that character. Flat characters are completely predictable. They always react the same way, they don’t have thoughts, let alone deep ones; they rarely have relationships, deep or complex personalities, histories. You’re probably thinking, why do flat characters exist at all? In short fiction, flat characters are not likely to even exist. In longer fiction, we use flat characters to fill in the role of extras, such as the nosy next-door neighbor, the cranky garbage collector, the crotchety spinster, the 97-pound weakling, the brawny football hero, the dumb blonde. Stock characters can also be flat characters, but don’t have to be. You can take stock characters and give them complex personalities and problems, something you’ll never really find with flat characters. You need flat characters in your stories because your main characters need to interact with those flat characters as they get through their days; you need flat characters to remain flat because they provide your main characters incredible contrast and color; despite their flatness, your flat characters also provide color in your story, albeit background color. Just don’t overdo it. Like a painting, keep your flat characters in the background and your round, three-dimensional characters in the foreground.

Next time: Dynamic vs Static Characters

 

Writing Realistic Characters

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Character creation might seem a daunting task to the unseasoned writer, because it isn’t easy to create literary characters who seem real. It’s like creating people on paper, who are real in every way except physically. In fact, truly realistic characters can sometimes feel so alive they could walk out of the pages of their books. There are several ways to create characters, but my recommended method is to create a character profile. Why is this important? There are several reasons: It helps the writer (1) create different individuals, (2) keep those characters separate and different from each other, (3) keep those characters separate and different from the narrator, (4) keep those characters separate and different from the author, (5) define each character’s story more clearly, (6) ensure character consistency from beginning to end, (7) create a source file from which to pull descriptions and even dialogue. While these might not seem particularly necessary when writing short stories, character profiles become extremely useful when writing novels, and practically essential when writing series. For instance, if a character in the first volume of a series is left handed, you can’t have him picking up a pen and writing with his right hand in the third volume. Or, she could celebrate a birthday in December in one novel, then later on, you might refer to her as a Gemini in a sequel. Your profile can be as detailed or as general as you need it; the longer your work, the more detailed it should be, simply because there are more instances for you to reveal your characters and make them as real as possible for your readers. Simply because when your characters are more, they become more believable, more sympathetic, and easier to identify with.

Writing characters is not easy, but there are ways of getting around the problem of how to develop characters. One way is to do what Shakespeare, Gore Vidal, and, I’m sure, many other prolific writers have done: have a repertory company of stock characters. Your stock characters will be general types you can tweak, change a bit, give different names, set in different situations, and otherwise write different stories about. You probably know more stock characters than you think you do. Besides the bard’s works, stock characters can also be found in fairy tales. Some of the most commonly-used stock characters are: the Cinderella character, the cunning villain, the thief with a golden heart, the wicked stepmother, the cuckold husband, the jester, Prince Charming, the orphan boy, the wicked stepsisters–these are characters common in fairy tales and legends. Shakespeare uses quite a few of these, as well as others we all recognize: the star-crossed lovers, the young lovers with feuding families, the megalomaniac, the cheating wife/husband, the seer. He also borrows characters from classical literature, which has many stock characters, such as the wandering hero, the guilt-ridden son/daughter, the adulterous wife/husband, the adventurer in disguise, the benevolent spirit–these also being characters from mythology. Many modern writers have taken advantage of stock characters and rewritten them in a variety of original and interesting ways, including James Joyce’s Ulysses or Arthur Laurents’s West Side Story. It’s a good thing to know all these characters from older literature because people, after all, are people, no matter what the setting. What makes characters more realistic is what makes humans–their foibles and follies, their loves and losses, their lives and deaths.

*coming soon: How to Create Characters

You Can’t Cheat the Muse

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Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
—William S. Burroughs

 

First things first: I don’t advocate cheating at all, but I will look for the most efficient ways to expedite a job. It’s called looking for shortcuts. This does not apply to skills at all—no less to writing than to any sport that requires athletes to practice up to eight hours a day or more. Granted, some people are more talented than others, their talent is what gives their work an innate grace and beauty that the merely skilled do not have. Some people might be more creative than others and be able to produce work after work after work; that does not mean the work will be outstanding. So many people want to be writers, want to be published, but aren’t willing to put in the work to ensure their writing is of excellent quality. That’s why we have so much pulp fiction on the bookstands. Even if the writing per se is technically excellent, those works do not find their way to the must-read lists. Those works will not win awards or recognition except, perhaps, finding their way to occasional bestseller lists—and disappearing from reading lists as soon as the next new book shows up. These works most likely will entertain readers momentarily, but they are not the works people will want to keep on their limited bookshelf space to read over and over again. The quality of writing begins with a strong foundation in the most basic skill of writing good sentences. Masterful writing necessarily uses masterful sentences, and there are more than enough guidebooks, lessons, tips, and courses that teach us to write masterful sentences. Sometimes, it’s all just a matter of remembering what we learned in school, unless we were not fortunate to have a teacher who ensured we could write really good sentences. To write excellent sentences, we need to know grammar and trust it as well as we know our bodies will function without our having to tell them how. We need to become intimate with figurative language so we can use it at will and manipulate words to create the images we want to paint. We need to accumulate a vocabulary broad enough for us so the words tumble out of our pens and we are not left grasping for ways to describe what we observe. This three-point foundation is what we build our writing on. Lacking that, I suggest always having at hand a good grammar book, a book on writing style (Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is a popular and favourite go-to source for many writers; many more have been written since and can be just as useful as well as entertaining), a good dictionary (I always defer to the Oxford English dictionary, but I also check Merriam-Webster’s localized editions, e.g. a Canadian edition, that includes Can-spelling and Can-idioms), a good thesaurus (Roget’s Thesaurus is the default), and a dictionary of idioms (I collect dictionaries and have several books of idioms, no two of which are the same). Lacking physical editions of these valuable references, you can always check the Internet for unlimited resources. The Internet has several standard online dictionaries (Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and WikiDictionary or Wiktionary), dictionaries of idioms, rhyming dictionaries, and thesaurii. The nice thing about the Internet is the search throws a very wide net and offers answers, suggestions, examples—all in a matter of seconds. Unless your typing takes minutes.

On Writing: Voice and Theme

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To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. —Allen Ginsberg, WD

 

Some amateur writers launch into writing with a purpose, the determination to be heard by sharing their knowledge with the world and hoping to impart their ‘wisdom’ through their works. This might be fine when writing non-fiction, although it could border on preaching. As a writer, you might sometimes feel you are full of ideas that you need to share and want to share, so you try to cram everything you have to say about just about every topic under the sun into your writing. This results in several problems, the first being that the writer’s personality projects onto everything written and the whole tone of the work, including the characters, take on the writer’s personality. This eventually becomes boring and leads to bad writing because there is no distinction between characters, nor between the characters and the narrator, nor the works and the author, especially if the author has more than one work. One of the most difficult things to do, as a writer, is to achieve distance between you and your work, so that your work becomes an entity that is not you, the writer. One way to solve this problem is to learn to focus. Each piece of writing you create should focus on a single theme if it is a short piece, or a very limited selection of related themes for longer pieces. The less themes you include in your work, the more focused it becomes; limiting yourself to one theme automatically gives your work unity of theme. Many times, in fact, it is better to write a work of fiction without thinking of a theme first, because the actions and choices of your characters will carry the theme and neither you, as a writer, nor your narrator, will need to worry about sending any message at all. In many great works, the protagonist often personifies the theme or message the author wants to convey, and it is the protagonist whose words, actions, and thoughts say whatever it is the author wants said. The ability to do that creates a voice, the author does not need to explain any further.

On Teaching Writing

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Cindy's avatarThe Writing Pool

We’re just over a week into the new year and what a busy week it was! My two short story writing classes began and I only hope my students are enjoying it as much as I am. One of my students asked if I planned to read and comment on everything they submit. I can’t imagine being a writing teacher and not read what my students write, at the very least. And because I’m teaching the course, I can’t not comment on whatever they submit. It is a writing class, after all, not a lecture class. I always believe that people learn best by doing and, if there’s a teacher available, it’s that teacher’s responsibility to provide whatever guidance can be given. I’ve always been a very involved teacher, and teaching how to write requires a great deal more involvement than, maybe, teaching literature, which I also love, by the…

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On Writing: Dealing with Adverbs

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The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

~Stephen King

Quite recently in the world of writing, adverbs have been shunned, probably because of what Stephen King wrote in his iconic book On Writing, which provides writers with a great deal of advice on how to improve writing with his unique writing style and perspective. This really isn’t anything new. Ever since the very fist edition of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style was published in 1959, writing teachers have tried to impress on students of writing the concept of “less is more.” That King specifically cites adverbs has everyone jumping the bandwagon and cutting out any word ending in –ly from their works. I’d say that’s really a rash reaction, because adverbs are beautiful words that help the reader create an image in their mind. What writers need to remember is that there are different kinds of adverbs, and some are worse than others, insofar as leading a writer down the road to hell. The use of adverbs is closely linked with the need for writers to “show, not tell,” a skill that is more difficult to master than many writers think. Because adverbs, especially adverbs of manner, tell us how verbs act. For example, we say “He ran quickly” using the adverb “quickly” to describe how he ran. In this example, I’d say the use of the adverb ‘quickly’ is lazy, just because there are so many ways to describe running. The preferred and more effective option is to use the exact word, and in this case, ‘ran’ is not exact enough. To show how a person runs quickly, we can more effectively use the words raced, rushed, dashed, hurried—you get the idea. Choosing the more exact word is using more picturesque language with less words. Alternately, you can say “His legs pumped up and down as he pounded the ground with his feet, his face drenched with sweat pouring from his brow with the effort, touching all he passed with a rush of warm air.”

On the other hand, there are adverbs that have no better way of being said, such as adverbs of time and place. There’s no better way to say “today” than with the word ‘today’; there’s no easier way to say ‘up’ or ‘down’ than by using the adverbs exactly as they are. When using linking adverbs, you need to make sure they are necessary. Linking adverbs help describe sequence (then), cause and effect (consequently), and contrast (however) and give us better transition between ideas, phrases, and sentences. Be careful not to overuse linking adverbs, though. I advise against the use of evaluative adverbs in writing fiction because it introduces too much of the author’s opinion into the text; use evaluative adverbs only when they reflect a specific character’s thoughts. Authors need to be very careful not to be actively present in their stories, and leave the stories to the characters and their narrator. Even if you use the omniscient narrator, who sees and knows everything, you must be careful to maintain your narrator’s persona. If you want to write your personal opinions, then write creative nonfiction. Unless you want to sound like today’s younger speakers, be careful how you use degree adverbs—adverbs that show to what extent or degree something happens. Modern language has seen the introduction of some words to replace the word ‘much’ so instead of saying ‘much more’ or ‘much less’ we hear people saying ‘way more’ or ‘way less’ and so on. Unless your character has a terribly limited vocabulary, I’d limit the use of this colloquialism. Focusing adverbs can also be dispensed with most of the time because they tell the reader what to think, rather than show them things, and are generally a matter of opinion (in the same way I used the word ‘generally’ in this sentence).

All this is not to say that we shouldn’t use adverbs at all. Adverbs can be very effective when used judiciously. Sometimes, there isn’t enough time to ‘show’ the reader everything in full picturesque detail because sometimes the details are not that important. In that case, you can either use the adverb or eliminate the details, because they probably aren’t significant enough to include.

On Writing: Should you talk about your writing?

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I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.  ~Norman Mailer

It’s called suspense. When you have a big secret and want it to be a surprise, the tension grows and everyone becomes more excited about what’s coming. Sometimes, I feel the same way about writing. I won’t say what I’m working on at the moment because I like running it through my mind over and over again, usually completing the work in my head before I even write anything down. For one thing, it makes the writing a lot easier, because then, the ideas just keep tumbling out. I’ve also tried writing from kernels or what seemed like a good idea, but did not let that foment in my mind at all, and to this day, they’re still just that—kernels. Well, maybe a few popped kernels, but not enough to complete a story. Maybe it’s superstition, too. Maybe some of us writers don’t want to jinx the work. If you’re all excited about what you’re writing and start telling everyone about it, your work might not turn out as good as you hoped or expected. Then, it becomes a big disappointment to everyone. I don’t like disappointing people, so I’d rather not tell until it’s there and ready to show. Maybe when my works are more widespread and well-known, and I’ve established myself as a great writer, then I’ll start talking about works in progress more. Yeah, okay, I do that a wee bit with very select people—okay, one person—but that’s also because I do have that lack of confidence and insecurity about my writing. I still can’t imagine my writing is good enough to put out there, but if I won a national competition, then I guess there’s something good about it. Still and all, I think I need to keep on practicing and improving on my work because I don’t feel it’s “up there” with my most admired works. Does any writer ever get over these insecurities? On the other hand, I have come across several writer-hopefuls who are confident that they’ve got a great story and write it and when I read it or, heaven help me, have to edit it, I find the most atrocious grammar and spelling, terrible sentences, poorly constructed characters, and a story line that’s either all muddled or going nowhere. Maybe I’m just too self-critical, and too critical of other works, as well, but I still believe in certain minimum standards in writing, and bad sentences, poor spelling, and highly detailed graphical descriptions of insignificant events make for poor writing. The only suspense there is in that kind of writing is when it will ever end!