November 2013 Issue of The Scribblers Newsletter
Welcome to the November issue of the Scribblers. This being National Novel Writing month, we have a short piece on Nanowrimo, writing prompts, an article about a mystery writer with an unusual past by Jamie Baker, a few writing resources and an article about US Poet Laureate Billy Collins.
November is Nanowrimo Month
November is National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) which begins November first of each year. As of this moment, Nanowrimo is upon us. The goal of Nanowrimo is to write a novel, or at least 50,000 words, new and original, by the end of the month.
Technically, fifty thousand words does not a novel make, but it is a very good start toward the 80 thousand to 220 thousand that comprise most novels.. So grab that pen or get in front of your keyboard and ignore the little voice that we all have whispering in our ears 'you can't do it, na, na, na, na, na', and give it your best try.
Several of our members, Laura (in California) for the first time, Jamie (in Chambersburg) for the second time, and I (in Lancaster) also for the second time, will be taking up the challenge.
Best of luck to all who take part. For encouragement and suggestions and downright nagging and a few laughs, go to nanowrimo.org to sign up and take advantage of all their resources. It's free!
“Moider” She Wrote
by
Jamie Baker
In 1938, Juliet Hulme was born, daughter of British
physicist, Dr. Henry Hulme. Hulme moved
his family several times to advance his career and in 1951 they moved to New
Zealand. Juliet was 13 years old, an impressionable
young teenager who had spent several years isolated from her family recovering
from tuberculosis.
In New Zealand, Juliet met Pauline Parker, one year older
than Juliet, who also suffered with health problems, having been born with
osteomyelitis. The girls became inseparable
friends and over the next few years developed a rich fantasy life fueled by
their imagined futures in Hollywood and peopled with famous actors and invented
characters.
In 1954, Juliet’s parents decided the family should return
to England. The girls were frantic to
remain together and they asked that Pauline by allowed to accompany the Hulme
family. Both sets of parents declined this
request, a reflection of their growing concerns about the girls’ obsessive
fantasy life.
The girls devised a plan to kill Pauline’s sole parent, her
mother, Honorah Rieper. On June 22, 1954,
during a walk in Victoria Park, the girls bludgeoned her to death with half a
brick wrapped in a stocking. Some
reports claim that more than 24 blows were delivered to the mother’s face and
head, others put the count closer to 40.
By some accounts, Juliet was only an accessory, but in others the 2 girls
took turns with the brick that killed Pauline’s mother.
The girls were arrested the next day after police
investigators read Pauline’s diary. In
the diary, Pauline gleefully described the “moider” plan as “brilliantly
clever”, one that “we are both thrilled with”.
On her calendar, she marked June 22 as “The Day of the Happy Event”.
Both girls were charged with the murder. The trial was a sensation with speculations
about the girls’ possible lesbianism and insanity. In August
of 1954 they were both convicted of murder; too young for the death penalty they
were sentenced to be “detained at her majesty’s pleasure”. They were sent to separate prisons were they
each served 5 years and were then released and allowed to assume new identities.
Fifty years later, the 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures, was released, a fictionalized account of the
murder. A few months later, the identity
of Juliet Hulme was revealed. This
person is a well-known author who has written and published over 30
novels. She specializes in 2 genres,
historical murder mysteries and detective fiction. Who is this famous person?
November Writing Prompts
Every month we try to provide you with two or three writing prompts to get you started on a story of your own. Pick one, two or all of these prompts from Poets & Writers Magazine and write 500 to 1,000 words using the prompt/s as the foundation of your story. Above all, have fun with it.
1. Resist the temptation to build characters according to stereotypes.
Character development must reflect the complexities of real people. Even
Pure Evil buys his favorite niece a pony for her birthday. Learn to
love your villains as people, and they will reward you as characters.
Write a scene where the most despicable character in your fiction does
something deeply touching and loving. Then send them on their evil way.
2. “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of
water.” This writing axiom extolled by Kurt Vonnegut underscores the
importance of human desire. However, desire often stems from human
frailty: the need to fill or compensate for something we lack—a mothers’
love, approval from society, the ability to forgive ourselves. Write
about what your protagonist's desires; this is where the story begins.
3. Human beings are unpredictable. We can snap, betraying decades of
impeccable behavior and moral living. A devoted wife cheats with her
son’s tennis coach. A respected policeman steals M&Ms from a
convenience store. A shy boy kicks a cup from the hands of a homeless
woman. Human frailty is an important part of humanity, and our
characters. Our attempts to hide indiscretions often lead to
unfathomable tragedy. Write a scene where your protagonist snaps. Show,
don’t tell.
Billy Collins, the most popular poet in America
by Jamie Baker
I’m not a big fan of poetry, I prefer straightforward prose,
but recently I heard Billy Collins read his poem Aimless Love on NPR. I was
intrigued; the poem was clear, clever and evocative. I went to the library and read some of his
other poems. Here is one that I liked.
Dharma
The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.
Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?
Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.
If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment,
if only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.
Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003, was born in New York
City in 1941. He is the author of 10
books of poetry and a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton in
New York.
Writing Resources
Almost every day I receive email from a variety of sources concerning writing and I'd like to share some of them as they may be helpful to you.
Daily Writing Tips offers a variety of tips on writing on a daily basis. These are worth keeping in an email folder. Everything from basic writing, punctuation, style, grammar and much, much more. And...it's free. To take a look, go here: http://www.dailywritingtips.com
Children's Writer is a great monthly resource for anyone who wants to write for kids. This is a full color online newsletter covering everything from writing advice, contests, and new publishers to writing style and techniques. It is not free, but the cost is only $18.00 per year (12 issues). Well worth the cost. To check out a sample issue go here: http://childrenswriter.com/
Writing Whims, a blog by P.C. Zick, is delivered on a more-or-less random basis. Recently it's been every day or every other day. It's pretty interesting and offers writing tips, interviews with authors, book reviews and more. To check it out, go here: http://pczick.com/
The Writer, a monthly magazine which offers articles on fiction, non-fiction, screen play, children's lit, poetry, interviews and profiles, book reviews and more. The cost to subscribe is $32.95 per year (12 issues). To take a look, go here: http://www.writermag.com
Poets & Writers, a bi-monthly magazine which offers articles about fiction, non-fiction, jobs available, calls for manuscripts, writing prompts and more. I personally like Poets & Writers more than most writing magazines. The cost for a 2 year (12 issues) subscription is $25.95. To have a look, go here: http://www.pw.org/
Target character and conflict with a handy checklist
from The Writer magazine
To write a compelling story, you must thwart your character's desire. These questions will keep you on the right track.
By Gregory Martin | Published: December 29, 2009
Your character wants something badly. Your reader wants your character to get what he wants. Your job is to disappoint both of them.
Ironic? Sure. Narratives are driven by desire: 1) the character’s desire, 2) the reader’s desire that the character succeeds, or at least, the reader’s desire to see what happens to all this yearning, and 3) the author’s desire to thwart both the character and the reader.
It’s this thwarting of desire that beginning writers need to cultivate. It doesn’t come naturally. Far too often, writers are unwilling to let their characters make mistakes and get themselves into trouble that has both cost and consequence for which the story holds them accountable. In stories with this kind of trouble, the protagonists are too passive, too coddled by their author, to make the kind of graceless mistakes born of the yearning and desperation that create good fiction.
You, the writer, can be as poised as you want, act with aplomb, reserve, tact, polish. But your characters can’t. Your task is to put your characters in true dilemmas, where they make hard choices and don’t always make good decisions. These situations, and these choices, ought to be open to the reader’s moral imagination, allowing the reader to participate in the life of the story—so that the reader has to ask: What would I do?
The following checklist is a craft guide to characterization and conflict. It’s not a crutch or simple remedy. It’s asking a lot of you and your story. It should make you feel slightly despairing. It’s designed to help your draft become more of a story, less a rough assemblage of unsuspenseful, incoherent narrative-ish moments.
The checklist is also a form of triage. It helps you to focus on necessary elements, without which your draft is not a story. The movement from an early draft to a middle draft is predicated entirely on focusing on major flaws. Your job is to stop the bleeding where the bleeding is most profuse. Don’t worry about hangnails. Too many beginning writers think that tinkering around with syntax and punctuation constitutes revision. Not at the early stages it doesn’t. Steven Koch, in his great book The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, says, “Don’t polish a mess.”
Some students find applying a rubric like this “constraining”; they feel less intuitive and spontaneous. It’s supposed to feel constraining. Form is a container, a constrainer; it gives shape to what was amorphous and lacking. You need it because your intuition and spontaneity are not enough to render meaning to readers.
1. What is your character’s ground situation? The ground situation, according to John Barth, is the unstable but static (tense but unchanging) situation prior to whatever comes along and kicks the story into gear.
2. What does your character want?
3. Why? What are your characters’ motivations? Why do they want what they want? Often this is related in some meaningful way to the answer to question No. 4.
4. What is your character’s problem—rooted not in the situation but in the character? Put another way: What is your character’s existential dilemma? Dumbo’s problem is not his big ears. His problem is how he feels about his ears.
5. What’s in the way of your character getting what he or she wants?
6. What happens to make this static situation dynamic? I sometimes call this the story’s trigger. Things were like this and this, and then one day … a wig turned up in the garbage … a blind man came to spend the night.
7. How does this trigger change the nature of the ground situation? How does this trigger present new obstacles that weren’t there before?
8. Are these obstacles formidable? How? (Each one needs to be formidable.)
9. Is there complication or rising action? Are these obstacles of a different kind? (They can’t just be, in essence, the same obstacle but in a sequence.)
10. How is the story a record of choices? Are these choices true dilemmas, open to the reader’s moral imagination?
11. Describe your character’s reversal. In order for your story to be a story, your character must, in some way, change. No one grabs your collar and says, “You’ve got to listen to what happened to me. After this happened, I was the same as I was before.” That’s not a story.
12. How is this reversal both related to a) action—to something that happens in the story —and b) a choice the character made, and how is it related to some kind of c) recognition on her part?
13. Do your characters get what they want? They shouldn’t, at least not in some meaningful way.
Are these questions hard to answer without first having a draft finished—without a beginning, middle and ending? Yes, so write your draft first. How do you write something that has a beginning, middle and end, without first knowing all the subtle, profound complexities? Here’s how. Write down the basic sequence of events. This happened. And then this happened. And then this happened. And then this happened. Until you’re done.
Then, apply the checklist. Revise accordingly. Then, go back and make it subtle and profound.
Gregory Martin is the author of the memoir Mountain City, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. He teaches at the University of New Mexico. This article first appeared in The New Writer’s Handbook 2007: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career, edited by Philip Martin, from Scarletta Press.
By Gregory Martin | Published: December 29, 2009
Your character wants something badly. Your reader wants your character to get what he wants. Your job is to disappoint both of them.
Ironic? Sure. Narratives are driven by desire: 1) the character’s desire, 2) the reader’s desire that the character succeeds, or at least, the reader’s desire to see what happens to all this yearning, and 3) the author’s desire to thwart both the character and the reader.
It’s this thwarting of desire that beginning writers need to cultivate. It doesn’t come naturally. Far too often, writers are unwilling to let their characters make mistakes and get themselves into trouble that has both cost and consequence for which the story holds them accountable. In stories with this kind of trouble, the protagonists are too passive, too coddled by their author, to make the kind of graceless mistakes born of the yearning and desperation that create good fiction.
You, the writer, can be as poised as you want, act with aplomb, reserve, tact, polish. But your characters can’t. Your task is to put your characters in true dilemmas, where they make hard choices and don’t always make good decisions. These situations, and these choices, ought to be open to the reader’s moral imagination, allowing the reader to participate in the life of the story—so that the reader has to ask: What would I do?
The following checklist is a craft guide to characterization and conflict. It’s not a crutch or simple remedy. It’s asking a lot of you and your story. It should make you feel slightly despairing. It’s designed to help your draft become more of a story, less a rough assemblage of unsuspenseful, incoherent narrative-ish moments.
The checklist is also a form of triage. It helps you to focus on necessary elements, without which your draft is not a story. The movement from an early draft to a middle draft is predicated entirely on focusing on major flaws. Your job is to stop the bleeding where the bleeding is most profuse. Don’t worry about hangnails. Too many beginning writers think that tinkering around with syntax and punctuation constitutes revision. Not at the early stages it doesn’t. Steven Koch, in his great book The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, says, “Don’t polish a mess.”
Some students find applying a rubric like this “constraining”; they feel less intuitive and spontaneous. It’s supposed to feel constraining. Form is a container, a constrainer; it gives shape to what was amorphous and lacking. You need it because your intuition and spontaneity are not enough to render meaning to readers.
1. What is your character’s ground situation? The ground situation, according to John Barth, is the unstable but static (tense but unchanging) situation prior to whatever comes along and kicks the story into gear.
2. What does your character want?
3. Why? What are your characters’ motivations? Why do they want what they want? Often this is related in some meaningful way to the answer to question No. 4.
4. What is your character’s problem—rooted not in the situation but in the character? Put another way: What is your character’s existential dilemma? Dumbo’s problem is not his big ears. His problem is how he feels about his ears.
5. What’s in the way of your character getting what he or she wants?
6. What happens to make this static situation dynamic? I sometimes call this the story’s trigger. Things were like this and this, and then one day … a wig turned up in the garbage … a blind man came to spend the night.
7. How does this trigger change the nature of the ground situation? How does this trigger present new obstacles that weren’t there before?
8. Are these obstacles formidable? How? (Each one needs to be formidable.)
9. Is there complication or rising action? Are these obstacles of a different kind? (They can’t just be, in essence, the same obstacle but in a sequence.)
10. How is the story a record of choices? Are these choices true dilemmas, open to the reader’s moral imagination?
11. Describe your character’s reversal. In order for your story to be a story, your character must, in some way, change. No one grabs your collar and says, “You’ve got to listen to what happened to me. After this happened, I was the same as I was before.” That’s not a story.
12. How is this reversal both related to a) action—to something that happens in the story —and b) a choice the character made, and how is it related to some kind of c) recognition on her part?
13. Do your characters get what they want? They shouldn’t, at least not in some meaningful way.
Are these questions hard to answer without first having a draft finished—without a beginning, middle and ending? Yes, so write your draft first. How do you write something that has a beginning, middle and end, without first knowing all the subtle, profound complexities? Here’s how. Write down the basic sequence of events. This happened. And then this happened. And then this happened. And then this happened. Until you’re done.
Then, apply the checklist. Revise accordingly. Then, go back and make it subtle and profound.
Gregory Martin is the author of the memoir Mountain City, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. He teaches at the University of New Mexico. This article first appeared in The New Writer’s Handbook 2007: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career, edited by Philip Martin, from Scarletta Press.
And Finally...
We are always looking for articles, suggestions for the newsletter, short stories to publish. Please send any ideas, stories, etc. to colleen. We'd love to see any contributions you'd like to make to The Scribblers.
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