Threes

On Saturday, preparing for a little road trip with my mom, I was next in line when the car wash broke. “Need to order a part,” they said; wouldn’t be repaired for two days. I backed out and drove home.

On Sunday, I was on my next-to-last load of laundry when the washing machine broke. “We’ve already repaired it once,” my husband and I said; we’d shop for a new one in four days, when I got back from my trip. We gathered the last loads and drove to the laundromat.

These things come in threes, yes? And in themes, yes?

I never dreamed that the third thing to break would be my mom. “Need to go to the hospital,” she said on Tuesday; she stayed six days. I stayed close for three, then my sister came and stayed close until discharge.

But what’s the theme?

Setting Maps

Further along into the book with the Scene Map that I blogged about the other day, was a Setting Map -- an overhead, blueprint-style rendering of the TV town of Mayberry, North Carolina, laid out by postal worker/artist Mark Bennett.

Interesting! So I googled Bennett and discovered he’s released a whole book of similar maps: TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes. I’ve mapped floorplans myself -- childhood classrooms, my house, a neighbor’s house, the house on my first favorite TV show (Bewitched). I borrowed Bennett's book from the library and am making my way through it as a series of puzzles about TV shows from the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s: I cover Bennett’s map with a sheet of paper while I re-assemble my own mental image, then slide the paper away little by little to reveal his map and see how closely we match. The process feels like a really slow computer trying to load a screen image.

Next to Bennett’s book on the library shelf was Diana Friedman’s Sitcom Style: Inside America's Favorite TV Homes, loaded with both wide-angle and close-up photographs of familiar rooms from 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s series. I leafed through her book from back to front (to avoid chapter-heading spoilers) and instantly recognized almost every set. Then I read the accompanying design notes to learn how the furnishings and decor were selected to develop story, characterization, and theme.

While looking through both books, it seemed that my mind had organized and remembered the layouts and details of rooms more along the style of Bennett’s overhead blueprints, but that I now recognized them faster via Friedman’s front-facing photographs. Either way, I’m encouraged that, decades later, the TV fictions are so memorable … kudos to the storytellers who developed them so fittingly.

Scene Map

From You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon, this image was created by graphic designer Tibor Kalman to promote a NYC restaurant. (Click on image to see larger size.)

Notice one napkin on the floor, the other curving onto a lap. See how the forks are held, take in the atmosphere of mirth.

Try mapping a still-shot of one of your scenes … noticing details like these along the way … then write out a first draft.

Men in Trees

What's this guy's backstory? (Click on image to see larger size.)

What's his next maneuver?

Baaaaack

The big picture: competing anchors from the three network evening-news programs appeared together, non-competitively, on this morning's Today show to promote Stand up to Cancer, a collaborative cancer-research fundraiser to be simulcast on September 5.

The detail: after a two-year absence, Katie Couric was back on the set of Today.

Surely everyone has experienced such a scene: a beloved or respected (or detested) employee returns to the workplace after an absence. What's your scene like? Or imagine your own return: how do you behave? how do others? how about your
"replacement"? Toss a twist into the mix, to throw everyone off-guard, and see what happens.

Unbuttoned

From a tailor's workspace:

What led to this collection of 17?

Characterization

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is full of insightful passages, among them a proposition that we tend to define people’s character in simple, binary ways (e.g. good or bad; aggressive or passive) rather than muddy things up by acknowledging their behavioral complexities. But Gladwell argues:

Character […] isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits […]. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. (emphasis added; page 163, pbk ed)

Gladwell’s comment pertains to real-people personality traits, but it also speaks to characterization in the writerly sense. Writers are advised to let characters develop beyond simple cliches, into surprising, conflicting, complex people. We’re advised to let more, and worse, things go wrong for them. Aha, I get it: it’s precisely when things begin to go wrong -- when characters lose control of their environments -- that they begin to reveal their complex selves.

Ouch

From a retail display:

And I thought "work of art" referred to the words on the pages.

O! The Suspense!

Oh, to be able to dramatize tension this tight ... but by using words on a page ...

Try it, why don'tcha?

Tipping Points

I’m finally reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, an engaging exploration of how social trends ignite and spread.

It brings to mind an email from a friend who owns a restaurant franchise. He sees people do the same thing at the same time, seemingly out of nowhere:

Sunday was only moderately busy, with lunch rush ending early at about 12:30. Then at 2:50, we had 10 large orders within a 10-minute period. All 10 included a taco pizza.

We see it all the time in all areas of the business: one day everyone pays with checks, one day with credit cards, one day with twenties, one day with exact change, one day with fifties. One day everyone wants breasts, one day thighs, legs, wings, mashed potatoes, green beans, coleslaw, ranch dressing, deep dish crust, original crust, thin crust, on and on and on. Something clearly affects us that we are unaware of.

What trend (repetition) can you weave in to deepen your current piece of writing?

Three Windows

The floorplans are probably similar on all levels of this Chicago 3-flat, but the occupants might use the rooms differently.

Like those windows in the building's narrow extension on the left -- what's in the rooms behind each of them?

[Click on image to see larger view.]

Word Count

Although tending to length isn’t critical while drafting a novel, I decided I wanted some parameters … that I might as well try to keep my manuscript within the realm of acceptable length all along rather than over-write now and need to seriously prune later.

So I researched publishers and gathered their preferred word-count ranges. Then I opened some of my favorite novels and estimated their word counts: the general number of words per line, multiplied by the number of lines per page, multiplied by number of pages in the book. For novels I don’t own but which are similar to the one I’m drafting, I planned to go to Amazon.com, where I’d view a page of the book and proceed as above. In the process, I stumbled upon a cool feature.

For some (Amazon says all) of the books with the “Search Inside!” feature, Amazon now provides text statistics, including word count. Simply select a book and scroll down the page past the Editorial Reviews and past the Product Details to the Inside This Book space. In the New! section, click on Text Stats. I’d estimated 60,000 words for Harriet the Spy, my favorite middle-grade (ages 9-12) novel; Amazon says 57,959.

You can compare the word count (and the book’s readability statistics) to other books -- by default, the comparison is against all others; click the arrow to target it to related titles, e.g. other books for children aged 9-12. Harriet the Spy is a slightly easier read than other middle-grade books, but much longer. And though it still sells today, it was first published in 1964; it will be important to consider the lengths of recently published novels.

[As to the absurdity of Amazon’s Text Stats, read this and this.]

Uncommonality

It's not the common things we notice, but the exceptions -- the contrast tells us something. On an early morning walk, the overwhelming majority of lawns go unnoticed until I come upon one that bears a fresh-delivered newspaper.

A writer could generalize stories about those households, based first upon the presence of a newspaper and then the choice of which one: most around here are Chicago Tribunes, a few are the Sun-Times. And then there's the lone yard with Britain's pink-orange Financial Times. What related uncommonalities does it suggest? Which of them could be tweaked to make a unique household even more surprising?

Ad Men

Maybe I was an ad man in a previous life.

As a small-town kid in this life, I loved the 1960s TV series, Bewitched, with its peek into a Manhattan advertising office and the spillover of work into home life. Two decades later, I liked thirtysomething’s ad-agency scenes, especially with the evil boss Miles Drentell (and despite their mocking of Bewitched). Today, my to-be-read bookshelves include Joshua Ferris’s Chicago-agency novel, Then We Came to the End and Peter Mayle’s nonfiction, Up the Agency.

And four weeks ago, I added a fifth: AMC-TV’s original series, Mad Men. I missed its premiere last summer; I missed its two Golden Globe awards at this year’s strike-abbreviated telecast. But I finally stumbled onto the series late in the replay of Season 1; I watched four episodes and I’m hooked. What’s not to be intrigued about: 1960 with its pervasive sexism, racism, alcohol and cigarettes. The behaviors are so, so wrong, yet they’re our history. Unfortunately, in some places they're still very much our present.

Season 2 begins in primetime in July, but another replay of Season 1 begins with Episode 1 tonight. Check it out and set your recorder for midnight (Eastern time) on Sunday nights on AMC-TV.

A View To A...

The image is a teaser for MSN.com's article about view-blocking neighbors.

Read the article but for now, forget the non-fiction. Right now, sit your character in that chair and write the scene.

Access Point

For a homecoming? Or an exodus?

What's the story?

Trust Me

At age nine, my classmate Mark was small with dark eyes and dark hair -- even dark peach fuzz on cheeks still round as a baby’s. His terrible grades belied a quick mind and, sitting across the aisle from me, he’d pranked me countless times. Whenever Sister Mary Albertina reminded us to use our talents for good, I was torn -- between watching how long her eyes stayed on Mark, and looking at him myself.

So, after nearly a year of fourth grade, I was ready when his heyday came around. By the afternoon, he’d been able to squeal, “April Fool!” a dozen times to other kids. But not to me. Finally, he did lean across the aisle and poke me.

I ignored him.

“Hey,” he persisted, “there’s a dollar on the floor.”

Was he crazy? Did he think I was still that easy?

“Yeah, right.”

“No, really! It’s on the floor in front of your desk.”

I could feel others listening in. So I didn’t look at Mark and I didn’t look where his hand reached over and pointed.

Instead, I shrugged. “You can have it.”

“All right!”

He jumped up and as he took a step, I peered around my desk. And saw a dollar on the floor. He snatched it and waved it at me and I heard laughing as my face got hot.

No. Way.

[Amazing find, Cute Overload!]

Reading Globally

I mapped my armchair travels after reviewing the settings of some geographically memorable books I’ve read.

It seems backward, but I've physically visited almost twice as many U.S. states as I’ve visited through books -- 43 in body versus 24 in mind. (Maybe it's a dearth of books set in certain states ... "they say" it takes extraordinary content to overcome a flyover-country setting.)

My international travels are more parallel in number, although the literary locales have been markedly more exotic.

I’m shocked by the amount of white space on these maps! To remedy that, I'd love to hear recommendations for books (fiction or nonfiction) that explore the planet.

[Then go map some international or stateside
aspect of your own life.]

Many-Me

While it's unlikely you've experienced a doppelganger (a physical double of yourself), it's quite likely you have numerous googlegangers -- virtual doubles -- people who share your name and whose hits are mixed with yours on the result pages of a Google search.

I don’t have a googleganger; my name is unique. But my maiden name gets a few pages of hits, among them a firefighter, realtor, yachtswoman and psychologist. Until I noticed that one had been a guest on Sally Jessy Raphael’s TV show, I’d forgotten that I was once an on-air caller to her 1980s radio program.

That maiden self did come close to having a doppelganger. I walked into my small-town high school as a freshman and discovered that my 'til-then unique first name was already in use by an outgoing, assertive senior. (Three years older + popular = very intimidating.) Unbelievably, she later married a man with my surname!

Who are your doubles? What details about them spark energy?

It Takes a Thief

From the Chicago Tribune:

“[A national pharmacy chain agreed] to pay $36.7 million to settle charges it routinely overbilled Medicaid for a popular generic antacid drug, cheating federal and state governments out of millions of dollars over more than six years. Prosecutors say the pharmacy chain illegally substituted a more expensive capsule form of the drug instead of the prescribed tablets to increase its Medicaid reimbursement.”

A similar case, involving another pharmacy corporation, was settled for $49.5 million in 2006. The cases have in common a pharmacist who noticed something amiss, contacted an attorney and the rest is history.

All hail this crusading whistle-blower -- an unadulterated hero!

Hmm, not so fast.

Consider that the law provides him with a share of the settlements -- in his case, more than $10 million. Consider that he himself was arrested in 1992 as part of another Medicaid-fraud scheme, the FBI’s Operation Goldpill. He was sentenced with a fine, probation, and temporary suspension of his pharmacist license.

In a novel, would readers still view his whistle-blowing as altruistic? Or as greed? Or as paying a debt to society? It’s a tough call … it’s known as complex characterization.

Miracle Money

The well-dressed twentysomething ahead of me in line at Starbucks talked on his cell phone while the cashier poured his grande coffee. When she set the cup in front of him and announced the price, he held out a crisp, double-folded bill.

She didn’t take it, but asked, “Do you have something smaller?”

He shook his head.

“Do you have a debit or credit card?”

He shook his head.

She held up her hands in surrender. “It’s on us.”

WTF?

It’s a great scam: make the rounds of Starbucks locations with a $50 bill that never gets used because the cafes won’t accept currency larger than $20. Another customer this morning had offered a $100 bill. Note to Starbucks: Complete the financial transaction, then pour the coffee!

Note to creatives: Look deep … find these customers' consciences. What is a positive explanation for them expecting (heck, for wanting the bulkiness of) $98 in change?

Equinox

Astrapo’s comment yesterday about extreme latitudes is perfect timing for today’s astronomic equinox.

Today's pattern of sunlight (top image, as of a few minutes ago) is centered onto the earth and is moderate even at the extremes of the north and south poles. But just two months ago (below, at about the same time of day), it was near-continuous dark at the northernmost latitudes; it was dark even longer during the December solstice. Things get squirrelly when diurnality and nocturnality collide … so get ready, southern hemisphere!

You can keep an eye on the daily and seasonal sunlight patterns through the blogroll link to the World Sunlight Map.

Zoned Out

Presently, the earth is divided into time zones that organize the day similarly around the planet: dawn arrives in the early morning hours and nightfall comes toward the end of the 24-hour cycle.

But what if there were no zones -- what if time were constant around the world? Which location might evolve as the authority that dictates how the clock is set? And what might it be like to live halfway around the world from there -- to function where daylight and the clock are inversely correlated?

Records Keeper

You've heard about records getting mixed up.

But New Scientist magazine reports:

The average number of people wrongly declared dead every day in the US as a result of data input errors by Social Security staff: 35.

In the realm of 10,000 per year, suppose they're not erroneous mix-ups. Who is the clerk and what's in common among the people s/he's targeting?

Careful

What kind of person goes to this trouble -- to destroy data on a technology that's already dead?

Or maybe the question is: What kind of data needed such absolute destruction?

Moving On

I've been recently mulling some ironic timing: a friend's husband who died on Valentine's Day, another friend's mom who died on Mother's Day.

But this week, a coincidence seems a little sweeter: a friend's 97-year-old stepfather, a life-long farmer, passed away on March 1 -- farmers' traditional moving day.

Such a Girl

I hate road salt. Hate following snowplows that spray it directly at my car's undercarriage. Hate that it turns my parkway lawn into brown florist's moss. My husband and I are more likely to risk a fall than sprinkle salt on our sidewalk.

Then again, I didn't know it came in pretty colors...

Six-Word Memoirs

It’s said that Ernest Hemingway wrote the shortest story ever:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

In 2006, the storytelling website SMITH Magazine challenged people to do the same with memoir. Now, editors Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith have compiled nearly a thousand of the best into Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

While some resemble epitaphs (It was worth it, I think - by Annette Laitinen), most, like Hemingway, say enough in six words to evoke a full narrative arc (After Harvard, had baby with crackhead - Robin Templeton).

There are stories of vulnerability:
I was born some assembly required. - Eric Jordan
Quiet guy; please pay closer attention. - Jonathan Lesser
Can my words have footnotes, please? - Amy Harbottle

…and misfit:
Right brain working left brain job. - Dave Terry
Type A personality. Type B capability. - Keith Lang
Fact-checker by day, liar by night. - Andy Young

…of humor and joy:
Four children in four decades; whew! - Loretta Serrano
The day just kept getting better. - Jeff Cranmer

…and heat:
Brought it to a boil, often. - Mario Batali
Asked to quiet down; spoke louder. - Wendy Lee
Asked and answered, asshole, next question. - Joe Lockhart

…and cleverness:
Palindromic novels fall apart halfway through. - Chuck Clark
EDITOR. Get it? - Kate Hamill

The compilation is not only entertaining, it's inspiring. You can’t help but consider your own memoir, even while you mind-write some of these into full-length fiction.

Very Wet Snow

What I learned while shoveling snow today:

1) trying to clear a sidewalk of standing water is as futile as trying to shovel a lake empty;

2) all it takes to sound like Monica Seles is to lift a shovel-full of this stuff; and

3) when you hear the rumble of a 10-ton snowplow barreling down the road toward you (and spraying a 20-foot arc of slush across lawns, sidewalks, and sides of houses along its way) ... the driver will slow appreciably if he sees you freak, throw down your shovel, and run for cover.

Call to Order

Go ahead -- anthropomorphize.

Take the dysfunctional drama that lies beneath the calm facade of meetings at your workplace...

...and bring it to life in this group of bird-brains.

Younger, Prettier?

Once upon a time, there was a settled, committed couple. They’d been together for years and had twice become Mom and Dad to sets of triplets (triplets!). Incredibly, they seemed to be on their way to another set again this spring.

Then a younger woman showed up at their house and started hanging around. Mom alternately tried to befriend her and get rid of her, turning at times to vicious behavior. Then, suddenly, it was Mom who was gone -- out of the house and away from the young ones, who immediately regressed. Next thing anyone knew, there’s Dad and the new girl, taking up together.

I hear your response: "Such a cliched story! Give me something surprising."

Well, would it help to remove the personification -- to realize that the story’s characters aren’t human but rather American bald eagles? Their unfolding drama surprised everyone who watched the Norfolk Botanical Garden’s Eagle Nest-cam over the past week.

Scientists are already hoping for new eggs from the new couple this season. I’m a scientist too, but I need a little more time to remove the last traces of personification before I wish those birds my best.

Delivery

I hear an engine idling on the street below. I hate that our house seems to be the perfect spot to pull over to the side of the road and take care of business. Sales reps stop to look through big binders on the passenger seat. Cautious moms make cell-phone calls.

When the low rumble continues, I look out a window. Ack! -- a FedEx truck. They require a signature for delivery and here I’ve been, working upstairs, out of range of the doorbell. I race downstairs, hoping to get the driver’s attention before he leaves the arrange-for-redelivery slip and zooms off. I throw open the front door.

The truck is still there! But there’s no package, no slip; I check again. Then I stand at the door and notice the driver’s seat is empty. He must still be in the back, looking for my package. He appears at the door of his truck, a Gatorade bottle in hand. He leans out the door and tosses a few ounces of pale liquid across my parkway.

Oh.

Ewww.

That pisses me off and I stand behind the storm door, hands on hips and scowling, hoping he’ll notice my disapproval before he drives off. Instead, he hops out of the truck and carries a large box up my sidewalk.

I open the door. “Thanks,” I say neutrally.

“You are so welcome!” he says, and he winks, and I let him win me over.

Prompt Yourself #3

I’ve collected writing prompts by flipping through TV channels, but today’s come from my answers to someone’s query: What book titles are complete sentences?

Consider the titles below as a dialogue. The “hard work” -- crafting the words -- is done! Now just play with transitions until the conversation flows…

A Complaint is a Gift
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Are Your Lights On?
Does Anything Eat Wasps?
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
I Could Tell You Stories
I Feel Bad About My Neck
I Like You
I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Middle School is Worse Than Meatloaf
No One Belongs Here More Than You
Ron Carlson Writes a Story
Something Happened
The Devil Wears Prada
There Are No Children Here
This is Your Brain on Music
We Are All Welcome Here
What Einstein Told His Cook
When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull up a Chair
You Are a Dog
You’re Lucky You’re Funny

Lesson Learned

I studied Spanish for two years back in high school, and remember the exhilarating moment when I caught myself thinking in Spanish.

I've studied writing for longer than that now, but felt the same exhilaration this afternoon when I noticed that the snow was sticking like whipped marshmallow to the east side of everything.

Oh, Right...

... You need to vent the potatoes before you bake them.

What caution did you ignore and then things blew up?

They're Back!

American bald eagles are headed back into parenting mode at the Norfolk Botanical Garden!

Since their three chicks fledged last summer, this pair has built a new nest in a different tree, and spent January courting and mating.

The Norfolk Botanical Garden has relocated its terrific eagle nest-cam (linked on my blogroll), and upgraded it with night-vision capabilities to provide 24/7 streaming video of the nest.

Cross your fingers for egg-laying in early February.

Cloak of Invisibility

You probably haven’t hidden in a cabinet during a Nazi attack, as this little guy did in the screenshot from the film Life Is Beautiful.

But you've been inconspicuous somewhere. What did you see and hear?

Be inconspicuous again today. See which eavesdropped details gather juice, and put them together into a story.

Rebate

Say it isn't so.

Tell me Americans aren't getting another government rebate check.

I was happy enough when the first check was announced, $600 per couple, back in the spring of 2001. They were going to be distributed in consecutive order, according to the last digits of taxpayers’ social security numbers. And you couldn't get numbers lower than mine! Except -- it went by the (grrr) Head of Household’s number, and you couldn't get higher than my husband’s.

We could afford what we needed then, and most of what we wanted -- overall, we’re not big consumers. But we’d been heads-down in work for a very long time, and it was fun to spend June, July, and August mentally putting the check toward an end-of-summer splurge.

Until finally, the last checks were mailed.

And the next week was 9/11.

The $600 is still in our bank.

Rental Agreement

Consider this: A white man asks to rent the basement of a house deep in a black neighborhood.

What’s your story?

It’s the premise of Walter Mosley’s 2004 novel, The Man in My Basement. Into the story, we learn that the white man wants the basement for 65 days, starting July 1, paying $750 per day.

Now what’s your story?

[See the comments for a non-spoiler take on what Mosley did.]

American Pastoral

Your basic farm, one of thousands in the breadbasket that is America's rural Midwest. Except...

... what's that tower about?

Cry Room

A teenage boy sat alone in the cry room at the back of my church yesterday, his 15- or 16-year-old self vertical against the back wall, head propped neatly in the join of the back and side walls -- and still asleep despite the entire church having emptied out past him.

The obvious story involves some late-night adolescent exploits versus an early-morning service.

But what if his story were opposite of the obvious? That’s where it leaves stereotype and gets interesting, since each writer’s conception of opposite will be personal ... and unique.

Used Books

I keep about half of the books I buy, but sell or give away the rest after I've read them, taking great care to clear out any stray marks or papers before I part with the book.

Maybe I shouldn't be so careful?

Happy New Year

Big, Fun, Scary

I love the new year.

It’s like the morning -- or a new piece of writing -- that stands ahead, wide-open and welcoming.

The possibilities are infinite.

Wanna read about some possibilities? Check out what the NaNoWriMo folks have put together at The Big, Fun, Scary Adventure Challenge (read the overview here). Then read the list of challenges people have taken up for themselves. Guaranteed, some will resonate as ideas for your characters.

Maybe even for yourself.

888 Challenge

I’m taking the 888 Challenge: "Read 8 books each in 8 different categories in 2008."

It feels big -- 64 books! -- since I’ve read only ~45 books per year in each of the last 5 years. But my choices are well-screened: every book (except four) in the first 7 categories comes from my to-be-read shelves -- books I already own and am so excited about that I’d buy them again in a nanosecond.

And the best part? I left a whole category open for books I discover in 2008!

I’ll be posting updates ... accessible through the link on my blogroll.

------------

Biography/Memoir
Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak
I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl
Journal of a Novel by John Steinbeck
Letters to a Young Doctor by Richard Selzer
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes
Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire

I’ve Started and Want to Finish...
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Story by Robert McKee
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

By My Favorite Writers
Airframe by Michael Crichton
Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie
Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
(tba)
(tba)

Children’s/YA
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Holes by Louis Sachar
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
(tba)
(tba)
(tba)
(tba)

Nonfiction
The Annotated Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard Cytowic
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
The Quantum Zoo by Marcus Chown
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Zen of Eating by Ronna Kabatznick
This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

Short Stories
Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber
Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Best American Short Stories 2007
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
(tba)

On Writing
Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri
Dialogue by Gloria Kempton
Fingerpainting on the Moon by Peter Levitt
If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
The Anatomy of Story by John Truby
The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler
Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider

Discovered in 2008!
(all tba)

Number 1,014

At 8 a.m. one week ago, at a Marysville, Washington Starbucks, a woman paid for her drink and then extended season’s greetings to the next customer in line by paying for that drink, too.

That customer did the same, as did the next, and the next, creating a pay-it-forward chain that grew through Wednesday and Thursday and involved 1,013 customers by Friday morning.

For now, put a pin in whether you think this kind of cheer chain is spontaneous or a corporate PR tactic. Instead, imagine a writerly interview with Customer #1,014 … conjure the story that led him or her to break the Marysville chain at 6:20 last Friday morning.

Say Yes

"Scales fell from my eyes" … a couple years ago when I learned that, in good improvisation, the actors always say yes to one another. Not a literal “Yes” of dialogue, but a creative Yes -- an agreement to openness; that whatever is offered from one actor is accepted, built upon, pivoted on, by the other. Saying yes moves the improvisation forward; otherwise, it dies.

Yesterday, while marinating on Astrapo’s comment about how to construct ideas, improvisation came again to mind. But how could a solitary writer use it to develop a story?

A few hours later, a writer-friend handed me Ron Carlson Writes a Story. Discussing first sentences, Carlson writes that, disregarding (during the writing phase) whether it’s good for the reader, a first sentence is good for the writer if it creates...

What I’ll call inventory -- there’s something in it. The writer David Boswell says it perfectly: “ ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ is not a terrible sentence from a reader’s point of view, but it is a terrible sentence for the writer because there’s no help in it. ‘Lightning struck the fence post’ is much better because there’s that charred and smoking fence post which I might have to use later.” I’m constantly looking for things that are going to help me find the next sentence, survive the story.

Say Yes to your drafts. More scales!

On Storytelling

It's worth taking 5 minutes each to watch these four video snips on storytelling from Ira Glass, host and producer of public radio's (and now, premium cable TV's) This American Life:

#1 Components of story: action and reflection

#2 Finding the story ... trimming the story ... and (sigh) sometimes killing the story

#3 Pursuing through the it's-not-as-good-as-you-want-it-to-be phase

#4 Finding your voice and including others' voices

Menorot

I’ll never again read about Hanukkah and be satisfied with a generic image from the term, “menorah.”

Nope, not since Dr. Dino shared photos of the literal works of art in his [my favorite!] menorah collection.

He defines the relevant terms and orders them from general to specific: candle-holder, candelabra/menorah, hanukiah. A writer always likes specific words best. But as Dino’s photos show, even “hanukiah” is far, far, far from specific.

Fabulous!

Blogblog

From the xkcd blog: "Wikipedia’s entry on blogs, with everything that is not the word ‘blog’ (or a derivative thereof) removed."

Exaggerated, maybe, but something to think about: What do you do too-much-the-same-of in your writing?

[For a fun side trip, click on the picture to get a larger view, then let your eyes lose focus and cross -- as with those Magic Eye pictures from the '90s -- until you see the words in 3-D ... until they pop like John Nash's hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind.]

Cluster Effect

In the first-season finale of The Gilmore Girls, a thousand yellow daisies were prelude to a marriage proposal.

What purpose might a cluster of something serve ... in your story?

Mr. Nice Guy

In a writers’ workshop, each participant chose a bunch of their favorite words and wrote a different one on each of a bunch of index cards. (A solitary writer could gather words by pointing blindly in a dictionary.) Then participants exchanged cards and used their new stack of words in a story.

My word stack:
accolade
barrel
cement
exercise
flashy
foreknowledge
genre
intricate
jangle
obnoxious
please
role
silly
snow
tear
usability

My story:
Yeah, I like to please the customer, I like to get accolades from the boss. But what can I do on the jobsite when I’m halfway through pouring cement and snow starts falling -- those intricate little flakes that melt into drool all over my work? C’mon, do I have foreknowledge of the weather?

And right away, the obnoxious little lady-of-the-house comes tearing out the front door, her wrists loaded with those flashy bracelets that make her jangle like she’s wearing silverware. She barrels down the steps toward me and screams that her sidewalk’s ruined. I want to tell her it’s not even done yet! It’s gonna have perfect usability, she just needs to exercise a little patience. But she’s from that genre of female that should only come out after dark -- the kind that inspires me to forget my role as a nice guy.

I step aside and let the silly woman march right into the muck.

Three Day Dirty

Our Protagonist stands next-in-line for coffee and sees the blonde barista step back from the espresso machine. He watches her tug a scrunchie off her pony tail, run both hands across her scalp, shake out her three-day-dirty hair, then pull it into one bunch again and twist the scrunchie around it in a couple of figure-eights. In the moment it takes her to step to the bar again, he considers fleeing the line.

Too late! “Sir?” the cashier asks, and he reluctantly gives his drink order. While the cashier marks his cup, the barista impossibly steps back again and removes the scrunchie, fluffs her hair once, twice, three times, then leaves it loose. She reaches for a gallon of milk and a frothing pitcher. At the register, the cashier’s face startles when she meets our Protagonist’s eyes. He leans in. “Tell her to wash her hands!”

What happens next?

Road Trip

You're driving a rental car, a thousand miles from home, and come up behind a car like the one back home in your garage.

And not merely its model, you realize, but its identical twin.

You draw close enough to read the license plate. Your eyes widen.

What's the story?

Prompt Yourself #2

As I do periodically, I collected writing prompts yesterday by running through the TV channels and writing down the first sentence I heard on each.

I narrowed my list to the following dozen. Pick five or ten and let your subconscious connect them into a story.

How’s that harmonica solo coming?

I don’t want to say my vows with you.

I’ll forgive you if you want to use a fork.

I’m going to make the most of the daylight.

It’s all going to be done by e-mail.

Mom’s cooking sucks!

On an unrelated note, why don’t you take this pie?

One of my colleagues developed an instrument.

They laid sod over it.

We always follow state regulations.

Who cares about better blood-sugar control?

You remembered my name?

SimpliFLY?

My husband is certain: only Melvin Udall (below) and I pack like this.

So how can the TSA think a one-minute video will convert the traveling public?

No Na No

I’m not doing National Novel Writing Month this year, but when a fellow WriMo (hi Leo!) challenged me to race him to write 10,000 words over the weekend, I couldn’t resist. He’d work on his novel; I’d draft a short story I’ve been marinating.

Surely anyone who’s interested already knows about this annual novel-writing frenzy that includes 99,000+ writers in its ninth year this year. But as I wandered around the site yesterday, I peeked into its Young Writers Program (an off-shoot that supports independent writers age 12 and younger, and in-school writing programs in grades K-12) and noticed a couple things to mention here. One is the archive of writing prompts in the Writers Block (if you’re not up for fun, just the merest flip of a brain cell can turn silliness deliciously serious). Another is the downloadable Young Novelist Workbooks, which include NaNo founder Chris Baty’s not-to-be-missed Magna Carta premise -- that what you love most and hate most while reading novels are exactly what you should include and exclude, respectively (and will be easiest/hardest for you to write), in your own novels.

In the end, a weekend of high-velocity writing reminded me to turn off the editor and create ... forward, forward, forward; to "turn the camera out" occasionally (thanks Nancy Beckett!) and be amazed at the surprises a wide angle will capture; and that I need about 100 times more plot than comes easily.

The Obvious Story ...

... is that the sock slipped off a baby's foot during a neighborhood walk, and whoever found it posted it in hopes the parents would reclaim it on their next walk.

But the sock is still there two weeks later.

So what's the not-so-obvious story?

Location, Location, Location

A woman, stopped at a light on a 4-lane street, noticed the driver in the car alongside motioning for her to lower her window.

“Can you tell me where we are?” he asked.

She named the street and said they were heading northbound.

“No, no,” the other driver said. “What city and state?”

It really happened -- but what are the circumstances that would make it believable in fiction?

Reverse the genders and see what happens. Fiddle with the ages and see how your story changes.

[Inspired by a caller to the John Williams radio show.]

Mail Pouch

When I opened a letter today, the lining pulled away a bit from the envelope -- enabling something to be secreted inside between the layers.

What could be there … and what's the story?

Addams Family Exorcist

The most horrifying movie ever? The Exorcist -- scary on the surface and profoundly disturbing deeper in.

Still, I'm drawn to watch it.

No, it's too intense!

This year, I stumbled on the perfect solution: audio and video of The Exorcist via my TV's smallest picture-in-picture window ... diluted by full-screen images of an all-day Addams Family marathon.

With a nod to Joey Tribbiani, who kept his copy of The Shining in the freezer.

Two Newspapers

A Sunday paper and a daily paper, unretrieved. What's going on?

My mind's first three possibilities are obvious or cliche: 1) the paper boy delivered to the wrong address; 2) the household residents are away; 3) they're ill or dead or being held captive inside the house.

My second three: 4) a neighbor planted the papers there; 5) a tornado dropped them from a distant city; 6) squirrels dragged them into position along an earth-energy line.

What's another possibility?

Decades Ago

Okay, I’ll consider myself tagged by Dr. Dino’s meme: What were you doing 10, 20 and 30 years ago?

My old day-planners let me drill down to the actual days and their surprising details.

30 years ago, I was 20 and in my third year of pharmacy school in Michigan. I’d had exams four days that week and had worked the other three in a hospital pharmacy. Always the least boy-crazy girl in the room, I’m shocked to see notations that “Steve called” and “Jerry called” and I “sat with Al at the library” (ah, I remember them all); and that I “saw John!” at a bar (he got an exclamation point then but now I have no idea who he was). My planner: Hallmark’s “A Woman’s Year” with two-pages-per-week spreads.

20 years ago, I’d been married a day shy of 2 months and there isn’t an entry in my planner for weeks in either direction of this date. I’d moved from Michigan to Chicago, leaving my apartment, friends, some nearby family, and my job as director of a hospital pharmacy. Probably, my days were filled with sex, errands, museums, parties, and generally getting to know Chicago before I looked for work after the holidays. But it had been a lot of change that never felt adequately acknowledged, and I’m freshly stunned to see my response reflected on page after blank page. I’m desperate to peek into the next year’s calendar to be comforted that life did quickly pick up again. My planner: The New Yorker Diary with two-pages-per-week spreads.

10 years ago, I was free of an abusive boss, but also out of a job I’d loved. Considering paths for the next half of my career life, I had coffee with a hospital exec, lunch with a non-profit exec, and bought an LSAT (law school admissions test) review book. (In the end, I rejected all three.) My planner: FranklinQuest (now FranklinCovey) Seasons, Classic size, two-pages-per-day spreads. My penmanship was beautiful--the only time in my life I can claim that.

Wanna play? Consider yourself tagged!

Found

When you can't get out to observe people and gather up prompts from their interesting backstories and current conflicts...

...the Internet can bring them to you via Found -- a peek inside people's lives through their found notes, lists, and stray papers.

A Million Words

"They" say that career-ending disaster strikes when someone is promoted up to their level of incompetence.

But I think it’s less a case of rising too far and more a case of just too fast.

Consider this, from Buzz Bissinger’s New York Times profile of Chicago Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood:

"Although the act of pitching a baseball repeatedly is exceedingly stressful, doctors now generally accept that it is not the act itself that causes injury nearly so much as pitching while fatigued. …

"The tried-and-true method of preventing young pitchers from throwing when they are fatigued has been to keep them on strict pitch counts in the minor leagues -- 100 pitches per game has become something of an industry standard. ... [But] pitch counts prevent young pitchers from learning to pitch while tired, to pace themselves during a game, to get out of jams without simply handing the ball to the bullpen. …

"Instead, too many young pitchers, particularly those who have attracted media attention, come up to the majors too soon and feel an obligation to go full bore all the time. They are constantly reaching back for extra velocity, and if they are doing it as fatigue begins to set in, the possibility of their arms breaking down only multiplies."

Similarly, in the New Yorker article Fallen Idols (abstract online), David Denby makes a case for the 20th century’s movie-studio contract system over today’s free-agency:

"Seventy years ago, these actors would have been tested in a variety of small roles or B-movies -- tested to see whether both they could act and whether the audience perked up when they came onscreen. They would have been allowed to grow slowly. Now they are thrown into big roles in expensive movies, and they’re forced to overdraw on themselves before their temperament has found the right shape. They don’t know the camera yet, and the camera doesn’t always find much in their faces."

Reading two such similar cautions should perk up writers to the message for our own work. We learn the craft of writing; then we need to stay buckled down, doing the daily pages -- practicing the techniques one by one and in combination, practicing them when we're fresh and through fatigue, and noticing the effects on readers.

"They" also say that it takes a million notes to make a musician.

And a million words to make a writer.

But It Really Happened, Part 2

I live a generally careful life, unwilling to give too robust a test to the down side of karma. Fine. But then I need to at least give my imagination free rein ... to somewhere near the realm of things that happen, one after another, in real life.

We cynics get a bonus in the last paragraph.

We realists get smacked by the more somber reportage here.

Your Interesting Life

Inspiration from the November 2007 Shambhala Sun’s Q&A with director/writer/actress Miranda July (or treat yourself to her book website ) -- on what holds people back about making art from their lives:

There's not a lot of positive feedback, especially early on. You need people around you saying, “What happened to you today that was interesting?” You have to genuinely believe that there is something interesting and special about daily life and your experience of it. I think people feel this innately [… but …] you’re quickly told it’s self-indulgent or selfish or just so off topic.

Committed Co-worker

Prompted by the release of the film Michael Clayton, Slate.com's Juliet Lapidos writes that most anyone, including a co-worker, can petition a judge to involuntarily commit a person to psychiatric care.

So go on, indulge yourself. Draft the petition letter about some current or former co-worker.

Measuring Stick

This ruler seriously disturbs my brain.

Sci-fi and fantasy novelists could build worlds where its rules make sense.

But in my real world, when people's behavior seems as crazy-making as these markings, it's time to pay attention.

[Ruler is from a print ad for Accenture Technology Consulting.]

She Nodded

Characters tend to nod a lot in the first drafts of my stories. So I was delighted to hear Fred Shafer (scroll down) speak about gestures yesterday at the Off Campus Writers’ Workshop. His premise: gestures are useful not only in showing character and driving plot, but also -- during the story-drafting process -- in aiding a writer’s discovery of character and plot.

Shafer referenced Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer (Chapter 9) and echoed her advice to not use gestures merely to fill space on the page or as beats to alter the pace. But it’s no good to leave them out altogether, either.

Rather, writers must find the right gestures. They need to go beyond the first ones that come to mind -- the stereotypes, the cliches -- and be willing to discover the spontaneous / unusual / uncommon gestures that actually mean something ... that tilt the direction of an interaction (and maybe even the story) one way or another.

He acknowledged that it’s difficult for writers, alone at a keyboard, to think up gestures. So he suggested that writers be like actors, who observe people and then steal their gestures. He told of a director and actors in rehearsal, needing a meaningful gesture but not knowing what it should be. Eventually, the director called over a theater cleaning lady and offered her a sheet of paper. He got exactly the gesture he needed: before she took the paper, she wiped her hands on her uniform.

But what’s a writer to do without a notebook full of previously observed gestures, or someone upon whom to experiment? Use the imagination to experiment, Fred advised. Stay deeply within the scene and watch the characters. More importantly, watch them long enough -- often, what begins as a cliched gesture continues into something more telling. He offered examples from the short stories of Antonya Nelson to illustrate that staying with characters a moment longer leads to discovering unique details:

Abby grabbed Lucia’s hand and Lucia returned the squeeze.

Lucia leaned her head back, her throat moving with her last swallow.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, her hair loosening as she did so.

Edith put her face to his and kissed him, not on the mouth but around it, the way you might kiss an envelope containing a letter to your beloved …

Morning Break

Quarterly Orkin pest-prevention service: $84.80.
Grande whole-milk latte: $3.68.
Side glass of ice-water: free.

An hour's escape to Starbucks to read The New Yorker while the house airs out: priceless.

Preparations

I've been thinking about yesterday's post, which touched on my feelings about the preparatory stages involved in whatever I'm doing ... and my frustration when the preparations cause delays.

It reminds me of a passage from E. L. Konigsburg’s novel, "The View from Saturday", wherein sixth-grader Noah learns calligraphy from Tillie, a friend of his grandparents. But before the calligraphy, comes the intricate, six-step process of filling the old-fashioned pen with ink. Noah narrates: "When I told Tillie that six steps seemed a lot to have to do before you begin, she said, 'You must think of those six steps not as the preparation for the beginning, but as the beginning itself.' "

My frustration with delays leaks into writing, too, where progress is tracked mostly by word-counts or page-counts. It helps me to remember Jerry Weinberg's counsel that "Writing" involves many stages … and the "writing down the words" part is but one of them.

Good advice, both, which I am learning to follow.

Mending Kits

I traveled often in a previous job, and the only hotel freebies I routinely collected were shower caps and mending kits.

Last weekend, when I could no longer close the catch-all drawer of my bedroom dresser, I purged and reorganized its contents, including dozens of remaining mending kits. Those pictured here on the right surprised me in their sameness and now prompt some kind of story reminiscent of Groundhog Day.

But I remember the reverence I felt toward hotels that supplied the kits on the left, with their pre-threaded needles -- a requisite, I’d assumed, for male guests, and pure luxury for women. It’s not difficult to thread a needle (although I haven’t tried lately, with presbyopic eyes); it only requires a molecule of spit to seal the thread's flyaway end, and then a moment’s pause in breathing while the end is aimed to and through the eye of the needle. It’s the delay that frustrates -- the 10-second pause in the midst of getting on with things and out the door.

And now I notice the unique kit here -- with its 10 colors of thread and needle threader; buttons, needles and pearl-topped straight pins; scissors; and a tape measure! The tape measure -- a tailor’s tool, not a mender’s tool -- is what prompts this kit into its own story.

Pick 3

You have three pair of ladies' legs in your life, yes? What's the story?

Better yet, pick a pair from a woman in each of three different stages in your life and put them together on the sofa.

I remember a nun -- {{shudder}} school principal and my teacher in seventh and eighth grade -- whose legs looked like this, newly visible in the shorter-skirted habits that emerged in the late 1960s. I think I'll toss her into the mix.

So Many Writers ...

… so little time. I can’t possibly listen to all of the web’s audio/video about what writers write and how they go about it. But I do check the following sites periodically and choose judiciously:

Amazon’s Amazon Wire

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s Writers on Writing

Barnes & Noble’s Meet the Writers

Penguin USA’s The Penguin Podcast

The Tattered Cover Bookstore’s Authors on Tour

and

Live (*note -- not recorded*) audio from Prairie Lights Bookstore’s visiting authors, streamed at WSUI online

Close-up

I'm intrigued by class distinctions, for example the differences in accommodation among the various passengers aboard the Titanic. But comparing differences at the big-picture level of staterooms, or dining rooms, feels abstract and distant ...

... getting down to the details feels personal ... and a story begins.

Cover Story

Are you a writer who can develop the initial burst of inspiration from a visual prompt into a full short story?

Then take a look at this cover-art prompt for Ruins Metropolis, an upcoming anthology of mainstream and genre (science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance) stories.

See guidelines here. Submission deadline is October 31, 2007.

Archaeology

The thing I’m enjoying most about Jonathan Safran Foer’s ”Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is the 9-year-old protagonist’s mission of talking with every person named Brown in New York City -- and its affirmation that an interesting life exists behind each anonymous face and closed door.

It reminds me of Steve Hartman's “Everybody has a Story” segments on CBS News. Hartman throws a dart at a US map to choose a city, then randomly opens a phone book there and chooses a person to interview. He invariably discovers a fascinating story.

It reminds me of The Oxford Project, wherein Peter Feldstein photographed every resident in the tiny town of Oxford, Iowa. Twenty-one years later, in 2005, he photographed the same residents again, this time accompanied by writer Stephen Bloom, who interviewed them. And hidden behind one ordinary face in this flyover-country town is Jim Hoyt: “… the last living of the first four American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.”

Novelist Orson Scott Card wrote, “If you look at somebody and think he or she is normal, that often means you don't know them well enough yet.” Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”

It just takes some excavating around the details.

On the Edge

I'm a believer in method writing. Should you find yourself stuck about what a moment of panic feels like, here's inspiration.

Point of View

If you're not periodically checking out the sites on my Blogroll, you're missing interesting ideas ...

... and alternative views, like this one from Cute Overload.

Truth in Advertising

The quietest solicitor, ever, stood outside the coffee shop this morning.

In his forties, outfitted with a donation canister and an identifying tie-on vest, he held a neutral face mostly toward the cars passing on the street rather than to the people passing next to him on the sidewalk.

Inside, I waited for my latte and watched him pace slowly, a few steps this way, a few steps back that way. I wondered what charity he was (not very effectively) soliciting for, and when he turned, the lettering on the back of his vest answered: "Help Kids With Autism."

Separated at Birth

Which is Archbishop Fulton Sheen (shown circa 1956 from an EWTN program) ...


... and which is vampire Barnabas Collins (shown circa 1967 from Dark Shadows)?

Back to School

Schools in my suburb started a couple weeks ago, but Chicago-proper's first day was today. It influenced the small talk at my coffee shop this morning, and characterized the moms in line.

Barista: "Are your kids back in school?"

Customer #1: (smiles) "Yeah."

Customer #2: (answers via a solemn, silent nod)

Customer #3: (flips hair) "Two weeks already."