First Impressions
There is another aspect of character building that’s important to keep in mind; first impressions. A reader wants a rough sketch of major characters when they appear on the page so he can classify them in his imagination. But something else must happen in these first meetings. In your story opening, the opening scenes and inciting incident will always portray at least one character under stress. Because there are so many ways of beginning a story, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your protagonist will be under stress, but it’s usually a major character in the story. When a reader first encounters a character under pressure, he begins building sympathy for the fictional person and then over time, this sympathy becomes empathy and involvement.

A terrific example of this technique can be found in Agatha Christie’s What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! She evokes sympathy for her character in the first paragraph:  Mrs. McGillicuddy panted along the platform in the wake of the porter carrying her suitcase. Mrs. McGillicuddy was short and stout, the porter was tall and free-striding. In addition, Mrs. McGillicuddy was burdened with a large quantity of parcels; the result of a day’s Christmas shopping. The race was, therefore an uneven one, and the porter turned the corner at the end of the platform while Mrs. McGillicuddy was still coming up the straight.

Notice how we’re immediately sympathizing with the character, especially after we read panting, because as we all know, when we’re panting, we’re often in difficulty. We then learn that the train station is especially crowded and “Mrs. McGillicuddy and her parcels were buffeted to and fro.” Again, most of us have experienced a crowded train station or airport and know the difficulty of navigating while carrying a lot of packages. Christie then adds a raucous announcement of a train leaving and readers understand that the station is a cacophony, an onslaught to the nerves. Added to this, we all know how tired a person can be after a day of Christmas shopping.

Next, we discover that her bored-looking porter mistakenly leads her to a third class carriage when she’s paid for a first class ticket and when she tips him, his miffed expression of disappointment indicates that the tip is better suited for a person traveling third class. She settles into the plush cushions and opens a magazine and the train leaves the station. Within three minutes Mrs. McGillicuddy is asleep and wakes refreshed. She looks around the carriage, pleased with her purchases. By this time, the reader is also experiencing empathy with her because we also know what it’s like to take stock after a successful shopping trip.

Then, events on the train turn distressingly interesting. This happens when her train slows down and at the same time a train traveling in the same direction slows also. At the moment when the two trains gave the illusion of being stationary, a blind in one of the carriages flew up with a snap. Mrs. McGillicuddy looked into the lighted carriage that was only a few feet away.
Then she drew her breath in with a gasp and half rose to her feet.
Standing with his back to the window and to her was a man. His hands were round the throat of a woman who faced him, and he was slowly, remorselessly, strangling her. Her eyes were starting from their sockets, her face was purple and congested. As Mrs. McGillicuddy watched, fascinated, the end came, the body went limp and crumpled in the man’s hands.

Next, the train sped away and she tries to explain what she has witnessed to the ticket collector. He doesn’t believe her, and although he remains polite, suggests she had been dreaming. Then, adding to her growing distress at not being believed, his eyes drop to her magazine with a garish cover depicting a woman being strangled. Again, readers all know what it’s like not to be believed or to be considered foolish or imaginative. By the time Mrs. McGillicuddy arrives in St. Mary Mead at Jane Marple’s home, we’re thoroughly in sympathy with her and wondering who was murdered and why.

You cannot write words without learning the alphabet, you cannot write sentences without words, and you cannot write fiction or memoir without scenes. Scenes are the building blocks of fiction and memoir where you stage drama in a continuous unit of action taking place in one location, depicting characters up close.

Scenes are built from a goal and then the conflict which arises when that goal is opposed. Scenes always have an outcome– a win, lose or draw– and portray some form of change in the story, and if possible, emotional reversal. Scenes also drive the story forward, dramatize events and conflicts, provide context for the unfolding drama, and information and characterization.

And scenes are always based on change.

Components of Scenes:

All scenes will contain some combination of the following elements. Not every element will appear in every scene, but most scenes will feature most of these elements.

Action: Something happens, movement is going on, the narrative is progressing.

Character: Scenes involve people acting and although most scenes involve more than one character, occasionally scenes can depict one character alone up against some obstacle, and sometimes a nonhuman obstacle as in The Old Man and the Sea.

Conflict: Threat always hangs over your main characters. It’a staged through struggle and  opposition. Typically the story says no to the protagonist again and again. NO, you cannot solve the murder by suspecting the people closest to the victim. NO, you cannot get out of rehab and easily slip back into your old life. NO, you cannot return to your hometown and find warmth, welcome, and ease. Conflict often involves two characters vying for the same prize, an antagonist trying to stop the protagonist from achieving a goal, a character trying to enter a place he’s been warned away from, a character trying to avoid a dangerous move or confrontation and failing.

Description: All scenes need immediacy, visual elements, and atmosphere. And don’t be afraid of using props as proofs of the storyworld. Where are your characters standing or sitting? Is the room dimily lit, the echoey warehouse shadowy and smelling like rat crap? The overhead thunderheads threatening to burst? And don’t forget you’re delivering the scenes through a viewpoint character’s distint lens as if the chaacter is filming a movie.

Dialogue: People interacting with each other by speaking or arguing. Dialogue is not a copy of real speech, rather it is tighter and more intense, usually contains conflict or tension, subtext, and some sort of power exchange.

Dialogue tags: The ‘he said, she said’ that attributes words to specific characters In contemporary fiction they’re not used a lot once readers understand who is talking.

Emotional Reversal: In simplest terms, this means the viewpoint character is experiencing much different emotions at the end of the scene than when the scene commenced.

Exposition:  Information and data that is strictly necessary for understanding some aspect of the story and scene, written so that it doesn’t sound like a report. So, if your detective is stepping into a factory and spots a wicked-looking piece of information, the scene might pause for a few sentences to explain it’s uses. Let’s say the detective visits a junkyard and amid the racket, it’s explained how much force the car crusher exerts to pancake a vehicle.

Gestures, movements: Characters don’t merely stand still, blank faced. They react, twitch, move about the room, run from a pursuer, and wash the dishes because they’re too nervous to talk while motionless. Gestures and movements add the visual elements, subtext, and emotions necessary to make the scene realistic and potent.

Goal: The goal and the difficulty in achieving it is the engine of every scene. In every scene a character, usually the protagonist, wants something. A goal is immediate and the reader witnesses the character acting to achieve that goal. In every scene something or someone will oppose this goal and the results will be a win, lose or draw.  The protagonist can want to acquire an object or result, want to escape or relief from some force, desire revenge, search for information or answers, uncover a secret, ask for something, etc.

Inner dialogue: Scenes can also include inner dialogue or character thoughts as a character muses or considers things in the story or actions in the scene. In general, keep inner thoughts to a minimum and employ a variety of methods to reveal characters.

Intimate detail: Intimate detail, told through all the senses makes your scene seem real.

Point of view: Scenes are filtered through a specific viewpoint. In first person the protagonist is relating events; with a limited third person you are within the thoughts of one character; while an omniscient narrator can roam and express many characters’ thoughts and a large view of the world.

 Setting: The specific location where the action unfolds.

 Subtext: The river of emotions that runs beneath the spoken words or actions, but are not spoken out loud.

Transition: Words that indicate that the story has moved on from the previous scene or is passing into the next scene.

Questions to evaluate your scenes:

• Does the scene make the reader worry?
• What does the protagonist want in the scene?
• Does my character have choices or decisions to make at this point?
• Have I surprised the reader somehow, and if so, does the surprise work or is it contrived or melodramatic?
• Are there visual details in the scene?
• Do my sensory details stir the reader’s emotions?
• Is there enough at stake in this scene?
• Have the conflicts/obstacles/motivations in the story grown in complexity or evolved in unexpected ways?

The Story in All

Examine human nature and you’ll find a primitive creature, afraid of the night, spooked by unexplained noises, and troubled by the mysteries of nature and death and heartbreak. To be human is to need answers and solace. And ever since there was a fire and a circle gathered round its warmth and protection, there have been stories.
Stories explain birth, death, love, loss, and longing. Stories keep the roaming beasts and night away. Stories sweep us from our small lives into something grander and more powerful than our own imaginings. Thus, a writer must start with the ancient and oh-so satisfying concept of story, if you’re writing fiction or nonfiction.

Story is for luring readers, not peacefully, but gracefully or perhaps forcefully into another place, involving them emotionally, and thrilling them vicariously. Story is also a powerful, soothing ritual we’ve known since we were small. It has that “Once upon a time” unfolding and that delicious promise that the words come from the practiced hands of someone who appreciates the art of story.
No matter what your genre—nonfiction article, essay, memoir or novel, somewhere in those words lies a story. And when I say story, it means that events in the story cause other events to happen; there is a thoughtful exploration of themes, and all the elements MATTER to someone, especially the reader.
Sweep the reader into the story world with authority so only the story exists beyond the dailiness of the room or plane where the book is propped open. Effective openings blend conflict, vivid details and an authentic, compelling voice.

Stories are meaningful, but don’t allow themes to bury them and know the difference between teaching and preaching. Don’t rant, but instead show us the consequences of unfairness or injustice, without resorting to melodrama or sentimentality.
Most writing, whatever the genre, is revealing a person’s life so that a reader muddles amid his or her burdens, sorrows and dilemmas. In fiction, a reader wants to on take these burdens on as if they’re her own.
Readers read for entertainment, information, for distraction, but also to understand the nature of humanness. Create moments of truth that pierce their bruised hearts, force them to peer deep inward.Writing is about revelation—shows readers how people or characters think and feel by staging scenes.
And finally, somehow, sprinkle a bit of fairy dust into it all. Use artful language and fresh images. Transport your reader to another realm or a gritty reality. Remember that stories were first told to keep the night away, to escape the hungry eyes beyond the safe ring of firelight. Remember that stories live on.

Last week I taught an all day workshop on voice and as I was talking to my friend about it he mentioned that the workshop was just what people who are taking part in NaNoWriMo needed. You see, writing, especially writing fast and furious during November for NaNoWriMo, comes much easier when you find your voice. Voice is the glue that holds a story together. No voice and you just have a bunch of words on a page.

So what is voice? It’s the identifiable, authentic, and memorable sound of your narrator or viewpoint character on the page. It’s the personality, sensibility, and truth of the character bubbling through. It contains the attitude and mood toward the events in the story and a persona. Voice makes the story feel real. Voice creates trust in a reader. Voice is what readers connect with before they connect with all the happenings in the story.

No voice, no story.

Peter Elbow says, “People often lack any voice at all in their writing because they stop so often in the act of writing a sentence and worry and change their minds about which words to use. They have none of the natural breath in their writing that they have in speaking. . . .We have so little practice in writing, but so much more time to stop and fiddle as we write each sentence.”

Develop Your Voice:

• Describe yourself or your character in three-four adjectives. Example: witty, serious, driven, fun, and flirty, excitable.
• Ask (and answer) the question: Is this how I (or my character) sounds like on the page?
• Recall the most successful piece (s) you’ve written. What made them successful?
• Identify the qualities and tone of the voice in those pieces.
• List your favorite (or your character’s favorite) artistic and cultural influences. (Impressionist paintings, Breaking Bad,  Shakespeare, Steam Punk) Are  these inextricable links references in your stories, or are you avoiding them, because you don’t think people would understand them?
• List the socio-economic influences that identify you or your character: Southern, small town, world traveler, prep schools and Ivy League college, working class, rural upbringing, etc.
• List adjectives that might apply to your voice. (lively, thoughtful, conversational)
• List attributes that you don’t want to convey (long-winded, dull, arrogant)
•  If you’re writing fiction write in the character’s journal even if the journal isn’t part of story.
•  What is your character’s emotional bandwidth? That is how does he or she act when depressed, happy, confronted by unfairness or rudeness, or enraged.
•  How does your character talk when in the midst of lovemaking?
•  What words or expressions crop up often in your everyday conversations? What about your character’s favorites?
•  Prune words that don’t add enhance the voice.
•  Write down three of your favorite authors or books. Now list qualities of their voice. How is your voice distinct from theirs?

Storyline summary:

In the story opening, your protagonist, a person with scars, shortcomings and a deep wound caused by a previous trauma (s) is affected by a troubling change in his life. This change of the status quo forces him to choose a goal or direction which he pursues. But a series of ever-increasing obstacles stand in his way, causing him to doubt himself and for his inner demons to surface. As he struggles to overcome  obstacles, his inner demons make it harder to reach his goals and fight off trouble. But somehow, by perhaps learning a new skill and drawing on his inner resources and strengths, the protagonist manages to face down his inner demons and solve the largest obstacles.  As the story ends, the obstacles are overcome; problems, large and small are solved, and the protagonist has been changed by his successes and by new knowledge, confidence and stature. Thus, his wounds are now not as painful, his scars less noticeable.

“I am an artist. It’s self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, “I know all about it. I’ve already found it.” As far as I’m concerned, the word means, “I am looking. I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved.”
~ Vincent van Gogh

“Then, at last, sitting on her stretcher-bed, she took from the very bottom of her pack an old peacock-blue scarf folded around a heavy, square book. She unwrapped it and opened it very carefully, as if guilty secrets might fall from between its pages like pressed flowers. This was Harry’s secret. She was a writer.”

-from The Tricksters, by Margaret Mahy

Going Home

Jessica P. Morrell

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.  ~Doug Larson

Last month I went home to the small town in northern Wisconsin where I lived until I was fourteen. The occasion was my father’s 80^th birthday and I found a place changed by time, and sometimes as I drove down the streets it seemed that I was seeing it for the first time because the reality of this place doesn’t match what exists in my memory and dreams.

I experienced the biggest gap between now and memory when at night the fireflies didn’t appear with their tiny inner lanterns. An uncle suggested they liked open meadows, a brother said they had them in their Illinois backyard. I since have learned that their best habitat includes standing water and long grass, and since the house I grew up was located near a creek and surrounded by meadows, I understand why I didn’t spot any in the town, city, and lakesides that we stayed in. But I was disappointed since I live in the West where fireflies mostly don’t exist and they were everywhere at night when I was a girl, they were part of dusk, part of dark, lighting the shadows and night and our gladiator arena where we played nighttime games and laughed about ghosts and spooks.

As writers we all need to return in memory to the places of childhood or our roots because without memory our writing cannot represent us fully and cannot be well-charged with emotion and sensory detail. We need to visit our origins to understand this queer pastime we’ve chosen, the reasons for why we became a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging and re-arranging words. Because going home illuminates our grown-up lives and if you’re a writer there are no forgotten children and there is always shelter and sky and seasons.

Even without knowing it, we all write from a sense of place and from the jumble of our pasts. And in these pasts were our confused emotions and hurts and secrets, the seed or source of our writing.  Going home you can find your first literary idols and the library with its smell of books and wood and rain. You can find the specificity of detail that brings a place, and thus a story to life. Going home you might find the haunts and shadows, or the impetus for your feral imagination.

We can never truly recover our pasts, not even if we have reams of photographs and grainy films and boxes of childhood trophies. But we can search for them, and we can use sojourns into the land of memory as inspiration, or even a road map for writing.  Memory and storytelling are as linked as right hand, left hand joining forces on a keyboard to shape words.  We can trace our family dynamics or our cousin’s family dynamics into a story remembering if things were tense or easygoing or if secrets lurked.  We can mine the senses, feel the intensity of times past, especially feelings of vulnerability or not knowing.

Unspooling the past we recognize how it adds breath and energy to our writing. That writing from experience, even if it’s emotional experiences, as opposed to actual experiences, has huge value. You ask yourself questions about your simple desire to tell stories and why your eight-year-old self wrote spy stories or horror tales and poems.

From the safe perch of adulthood I look back at the girl I was with all her longings, passions, and black-hearted jealousies. I can feel the keys of my Royal typewriter I owned as a girl, can see the desk I sat at, filled with such importance that I had my own desk, my own place to write.  I find my clumsy metaphors, my girlhood griefs, the big and small cruelties of childhood, the words stuck or stalled in my throat, the bottled-up anger at small and large injustices,  the insecurities and obsessions, the joys of running along the creek and playing games of make-believe, the breadcrumbs that lead to my starting point as a writer.

When going home you find the music of previous eras the songs that tug you back in time yet live on. You never forget these lyrics and their reminders of heartbreak or first love, or the giddiness of youth. It’s all there, the richness and texture and tangle of memory, the old and retold stories.  At times the soft edges of the past and sharp lines of the present clash and groan like winter ice breaking up in the spring. And as we write from memory, more memories arrive, and with memory comes associations and inspirations and more stories. And we find patterns, sometimes that have gone unnoticed for years, threading through events and truths and discoveries.

But mostly when you go home, you see stories, a narrative, everywhere in the remembered and the now.  Stories practically grow on trees and swim in the familiar air. The air of my past is heated and bathed in humidity and my grown up body finds these temperatures unbearable, but the baked summers of my childhood were spent in creeks and rivers, not air conditioning and summer arriving always returns me to childhood.

Of course we’ve changed from that person of past decades. It’s natural to grow and evolve and have new strivings and yearnings. But retrieve why you became a writer in the first place. The why of your writing self. Become a detective, a seeker after the treasure of your desires.

Go home to make peace with your past, with the pains and sorrows and lessons of all that was. This is not a sentimental journey, rather it’s an un-rosy pilgrimage, a necessary voyage.

Driving through my former hometown the streets were unpeopled and sleepy, the yards unoccupied, the windows blank. It seemed like a sound stage, when it wasn’t amplified by emotions and memories. The downtown is now mostly cell phone stores, secondhand shops, and auto parts stores.  Missing was the J.C.Penney department store, the Woolworths and Ben Franklin, the shoe stores, dress stores, the daily newspaper office, the mom and pop bakeries, and family-owned diners.

While the downtown has withered, the town has blossomed on the outer edges near a freeway exit with chain motels, a Subway, McDonalds, a Wal Mart where you’ll find more people than anywhere else, a Piggly Wiggly, Dollar Store and Hallmark store. But there is still the majestic court house with its four-sided clock, the many graceful churches planted amid quiet neighborhoods, the library where I spent so much time as a girl which now houses some of my books. The legacy of the forest industry visible in the blocks of  grand historic homes as well as in the forests that surround the town.

The Wisconsin River winds through the town, splashing over rocks and dams before joining the Mississippi. When I think back it’s the place where the sound of rivers and streams have slipped into my blood, a great birthplace for a writer. We all know that time changes us and places and things, but for writers the question is how.

Note: This column was written in August, 2010