Part Three- Finding Your Characters

All writers work differently, and there's no right way or wrong way to create and tell a story. Many writers (or so I've heard) start with a character and then build the story around that.

I start with a situation and people it with the characters I'll need to tell that story. Since that's the system that works best for me, that's the one I'll go into in potentially tedious fashion.

I'll start with Life As We Knew It to appease the Google Alert folk. I knew the story was going to be about a teenager who lives through a worldwide disaster. I picked sixteen year old girl because sixteen year old girl is my default option. I didn't have to worry about making her sympathetic from page one, since enough bad things were going to happen to her that as long as she behaved decently, readers would care about her.

Since I was concentrating on family, the family characters came next. I wanted (this was very important to me) a mother who was a character on her own, not just the heroine's mom, so I gave her strong political views and a sharp tongue. I didn't want my heroine to be the oldest (too much responsibility for her), and it's a completely different book if she has an older sister. Besides, I like older brothers, having one myself. If my heroine wasn't going to have all that responsibility, her older brother had to be strong and willing to take it on. But I didn't want my heroine to be the baby of the family. Again, if she has a younger sister, the conflicts are different, so I gave her a younger brother. Dad was best left out of the story, but I didn't want him to have no connection with the family, so I saddled him with a different set of responsibilities, a young pregnant wife. Poof- there's the primary cast of LAWKI.

It's easy enough to explain what I did, but I figured I owed it to all of us to go through the same process with a brand new story. I went back to the endless list of Team stories, and because 4 is my favorite number, decided to select the fourth one as the situation to create characters to go with.

I tell you, it's hard being honest. Number 4 was: What if you love the sport but you're part of a gang and the cops haul you in for questioning the day of the big game?

That's definitely not a story I use over and over again.

But all right, here goes (and I've given this about 1 minute's worth of thought; this is a surprise quiz for me too):

A boy, maybe 15, so he's at an age where he could go bad. He loves a sport,doesn't have to be baseball, doesn't even have to be a team sport, maybe chess. But if it's chess, his loyalty will be to the game and the coach, not the team. For the time being, I'll stick with baseball, since that's the sport I know the best.

Okay, 15 year old boy, loves baseball. Is he good at it? I don't think that matters right now, just that he loves the game. Maybe he's an immigrant and he comes from a Central American country where everyone plays baseball. Maybe he's an illegal alien, just to annoy Lou Dobbs. Anyway, he loves baseball. Family? I don't need them yet, this is a Team book.

He has a cousin who's in a gang and is recruiting him (my hero needs a name; I'll call him M for Mariano Rivera, at least for the time being). Okay, M has a cousin who's recruiting him for his gang. Is cousin bad? Maybe not bad bad, but certainly the gang breaks the law. Drugs. But the gang also provides group support. Maybe M is living with his cousin's family. That could make for some neat conflicts, and make M more vulnerable.

Baseball could represent M's home, the gang his new home. I like that; it's kind of a wicked twist on assimilation. Okay, the gang is what his cousin knows, baseball is what M knows. M moves in with cousin's family (an aunt, an uncle, boy cousin a couple of years older than M, maybe a girl cousin M's age who's opposed to gangs, not a girlfriend option, being cousins and all, but a friend and a girl that girl readers could identify with). M finds a ball club almost immediately. Or maybe he gets recruited for that as well by a boy that could become M's friend, his gang alternative.

Maybe cousin is under pressure to bring in new recruits. Maybe he tells M it's just for a meeting (do gangs have meetings? Do they use Robert's Rules?). Anyway, it's not a lifetime commitment, so M goes along. But M has to do it voluntarily and with full knowledge. Otherwise he's just a poor innocent victim and I don't like that. He knows the score, but he figures it's just a one shot deal.

Does M commit a crime? I'd prefer not, although he's in a position where he could. Maybe cousin commits the crime, and M's conflict is whether he clears his own name by turning in his cousin. Or if that's too tough, maybe the conflict is whether to turn in the leader of the gang, which will clear both M and his cousin, but his cousin is opposed to doing that- lack of loyalty to the gang.

So M's loyalty conflict is between his cousin and his ball club. Is there an adult M can confide in? I think I'd prefer not, in which case he can't be that close to the team's manager. M's girl cousin would have no doubts about what to do, but maybe if M turns the gang leader in, girl cousin will be in serious jeopardy.

Poor M! Poor me! Already I can see M, a decent kid who's been brought up to love family and baseball, trying to fit in to a whole new world. I like his cousin too. He's amoral but appealing. Maybe we see him being protective of someone, so he doesn't come off as a complete villain. Girl cousin can be spunky; she's on the assimilation fast track. Aunt and Uncle are decent people (after all, they've taken M in), but somewhat overwhelmed with issues of language and money. Maybe M's baseball buddy isn't any sweetheart either, but sees M as a way the team can make it to the championship; the team in its own way is exploiting M just as much as the gang is. Heh.

Now if M is older, shrewder, meaner, it's a whole other story. He's got to be strong, or at least have the potential to grow. I think it's better if he's somewhat of a realist; I really want to avoid M The Victim just as much as I want to avoid M The Criminal. Same really with all the characters. None of them (including the gang leader) should be all bad or all good. That would be too easy.

Enough, enough! This is a book I'm never going to write. It's way beyond what I can do. But it's exactly the way I people a story. I use the characters to propel the plot, but the plot is dependent on the characters as well. M The Victim is a whole other story, same as M The Criminal or M The Chess Player.

Oh, by the way, please notice how little The Story Of M resembles The Bad News Bears. That's the great thing about starting off points. What you end up with is your theme, your story, your characters, your multi-millions.

Next week, I'll cover outlining your story (quicker and less boring than you might fear), followed by one final blog entry to tie up loose strings. And then you'll all go off and write masterpieces and make those multi-millions.

I ask only that you, oh beloved slowly gained readership, remember me at Christmas, preferably with small deposits in my soon to be established Swiss banking account.

Part Two- From Theme To Story

So there I was one lazy afternoon watching the reasonably bad movie Meteor when I asked myself, What if a teenager had to cope with the world coming to an end?

The next thing I knew (within weeks really), I was writing Life As We Knew It.

I tell this tawdry tale partly to feed my Google Alert system, and partly to show that ideas for stories are around us all the time. We just have to be receptive to them.

Last night I thought about movies that my beloved slowly gained readership would be familiar with, and finally settled on The Bad News Bears. Whether you've seen it or not, you know it. Its theme, which is one that doesn't resonate with me hardly at all, is Misfits Come Together As A Team And Achieve Success. We'll call the theme Team as a time saver.

Team is a very popular theme in movies. Of course there are the various sports Team movies, such as The Mighty Ducks and Major League. But emotionally troubled misfits come together to solve a crime in The Dream Team. Misfits win World War Two in The Dirty Dozen. Misfits make music together in School Of Rock and unite to cheerlead against great odds in Bring It On (okay, most cheerleaders aren't really misfits). These are all movies with Team as their theme.

Here's the basic plot of The Bad News Bears: There's a kids' baseball team that doesn't play well. Walter Matthau is hired to coach. He brings in Tatum O'Neal (I had to look that up; I thought it was Jodie Foster), who's a great pitcher. A juvenile delinquent in training joins the team, the kids all learn to play together, and victory ultimately is theirs (although Jodie Foster ended up with a better career than Tatun O'Neal).

Here's all you need to do to make The Bad News Bears the story you want to tell. You just look at it from a different angle and play the What If game.

What if you're the pitcher Tatun O'Neal replaces?
What if you're inept and you stay inept even as your team gets better?
What if your dad is the coach and you hate baseball but he insists you join the team?
What if you love the sport but you're part of a gang and the cops haul you in for questioning the day of the big game?
What if you're the best player on the team and you get hurt the day of the game and the team goes on to win without you?
What if you're thrown off the team because you miss practice?
What if you flat out hate the coach?
What if you're a pretty good ballplayer and then your game suffers because you fall in love with Tatun O'Neal?
What if your team goes on to win the Little League World Series and you go back to school as heroes?
What if your team goes on to lose the Little League World Series and you go back to school as losers?
What if your team makes it to the Little League World Series and gets disqualified because one team member is a cheat?
What if your team makes it to the Little League World Series and you're falsely accused of being a cheat?
What if the only way your team can make it to the championship is if you do cheat?
What if there's a plane crash/ bus crash/ train crash/ car crash and one or more of your teammates is killed?

Even I, not particularly responsive to Team, could have fun with a few of these possibilities (the ones that involve Consequences or Family).

So to come up with a basic plot for your story, all you have to do is determine the themes you respond to most deeply. Then, using as an inspiration one of the books or movies that showcase that theme, start asking What If. Most likely you'll go through a whole bunch of What Ifs before you find the right one for you, and that's as it should be. Bill Lancaster, who wrote The Bad News Bears, probably went through any number of What Ifs before he was satisfied.

You think this is easy? You're right, it is. Next stop, Characters, and they're easy also.

Part One- Coming Up With An Idea

You know how they always used to say writers should write about something they know? Well, that's silly. What writers should write about is something they feel.

Think about your favorite stories. They can be books or movies or TV series or songs, just as long as they have a narrative. Concentrate on the ones you love the most, the movies you watch over and over or the book you reread every summer or the TV series that ran three years longer than it should have but you watch it in reruns anyway.

Then melt those favorites down to their bare essence. What we're looking for is the themes you are most responsive to.

Take me, for example. I love Consequences. I realized that when I was in high school and saw The Desperate Hours on TV and immediately wondered what happened to the family as a result of all they'd gone through. I also love Families, which is why I'll see any version of Long Day's Journey Into Night that shows up. (and how I wish that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward had once played James and Mary Tyrone). I also love How Things Get Started, which is why I prefer the early parts of biographies to the middles and ends.

Put Consequences and Family and How Things Get Started together, and you end up with a lot of my YA fiction, including Life As We Knew It and the dead & the gone.

But this isn't about my favorites. It's about yours. Say you love The Wizard Of Oz. Well, that's about Quest and Friendship. Jane Eyre is Love And Acceptance. Or Gone With The Wind, which I never read but I did see the movie. That's about What You Can't Have (at least that's what the movie was about). Macbeth is about What You Can't Have also, although I like it for the witches and the murder.

Everyone has certain themes that resonate strongly within them. The writing that's the most fun (and there's not much point writing unless it's fun) is the writing that allows you to explore those themes.

Let's look at What You Can't Have. Scarlett wants Ashley, and one traditional version of WYCH is a romantic triangle. You want your best friend's boyfriend, for example. But Romeo And Juliet is also WYCH (I guess Shakespeare liked that theme, understandably since it has conflict built in). An Armenian girl in love with a Turkish boy would work. So would Scarlett in love with Ashley only Ashley's in love with Rhett. Or maybe you're a nice American girl and you've fallen in love with Gorgo from the Planet Zantac and the problem is Gorgo is a plant, like a dandelion puff, and he's programed in three months time to be blown into a thousand different spores which will sprout into a thousand new Gorgos.

It's very frustrating to have a meaningful love affair with a plant.

But the great thing about WYCH (about all themes) is that it doesn't have to be limited to love (Macbeth proves that). It can be about a kid whose father left the family when the kid was young, and what he wants and needs more than anything is a relationship with his father. It can be about a girl with rheumatoid arthritis who yearns to be a cheerleader. It can be about a girl who lives in a community that doesn't approve of education for females and yet she wants to go to college. It can be about a boy with no talent whatsoever who wants to star in the class play. Or a kid who wants a kitten but his sister is allergic. Or an unpopular kid who wants to be class president (which is what Election is about).

The point (other than it's so much fun to come up with these things) is to ponder what your themes are, because now you know you have them. Then once you come up with the themes that have the most meaning for you, start asking yourself what interests you (kittens, plays, fathers, religion, romance, sci fi) and what kind of story best utilizes the themes you really love. And keep in mind, while you're doing this, that it's a very short trip from Tara to the Planet Zantac.

A Blog Entry To Explain The Next Blog Entry

A couple of years ago, I vowed to stop giving advice. I've had about an 80% success rate and the world has been a better place.

The problem is I still love to pontificate, and now there are fewer opportunities to do so. The other problem is it's always best to pontificate about something you really know about, and I don't know much about anything. Which is what happens when you're six years old and decide on a career and don't spend a lot of time veering away from the original plan.

But one thing I do know about is how to create a story, and it occurred to me that some of my slowly gained readership might be interested in doing so themselves. So I've decided to pontificate, in my own adorable fashion. I figure it'll take four blog entries, one on coming up with an idea, then one on characters, one on plotting, and one on how to get the writing actually done.

Here are the ground rules: Feel free to ask questions in the comments section, or to answer other people's questions if there are any. But I'm not going to discuss the business end, how to get an agent, how to submit a manuscript, how to negotiate, all the things people really want to know about. Sorry (well, I'm not really). And I'm not volunteering to read anyone's manuscript, because I stink at that sort of thing.

But figuring out a story is my favorite part of writing, and pontificating is such a glorious thing to do. So if you're interested, read the next (about to be written) entry. And if you're not, trust me, I've pontificated to an empty room on more than one occasion.

Another One Dusts The Byte

I didn't win the Quill Award.

Wait a second while I remove the razor blades from my wrists...

Okay, that's better. The keyboard was getting sticky from the dripping blood.

Meanwhile in a desperate effort to salvage the final dregs of my pathetic career, I read an article in the Author Guilds Bulletin on writing a blog. My eyes were immediately drawn to this part:

" ...a well-written, thoughtful blog with a unique perspective may slowly gain readership."

I'm far too modest and thoughtful to notice how well-written my blog is, so I checked out the unique part. I read every single blog on the internet (okay, maybe I missed one or two), and mine is the only one that says bad things about George Bush! I got that unique thing down pat.

When I wasn't reading every single blog on the internet (give or take), I spent the past week cleaning my apartment in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. I was quite excited to find there was actual furniture under all that dust. I also kept busy making up Rosh Hashanah resolutions. I made so many of them, it'll take me until Jan. 1 to break them all.

My personal favorite resolution (because it didn't call on me to eat less or stop spending money like a drunken sailor) is to be agreeable. My How To Be Happy Page A Day calendar specifically suggested that I be agreeable, and who am I to argue. So to get a good head start on the new year (which doesn't actually start until tomorrow evening, but why wait), I've written a very agreeable Rosh Hashanah song. Feel free to sing along.

Happy Rosh Hashanah To You
Happy Rosh Hashanah To You
Happy Rosh Hashanah Dear Slowly Gained Readership
Happy Rosh Hashanah From Sue

If that isn't well-written, thoughtful, unique and agreeable, I don't know what is.

Within the past couple of days, I've gotten requests (more than one, less than three) for the audio book of Life As We Knew It, with Emily Bauer having done such a great job as the reader. I still have more than I need, so if anyone wants one, just send me an e-mail via that neat little Lycos link to the left. I'll be going to the post office sometime next week, most likely, and I'll be happy to send them off then.

Have a happy and healthy new year. May the entire world see better days.

Happy Birthday Freda Pfeffer!

Tomorrow is my mother's 96th birthday.

To put this in historical context, until my mother was nine years old, women couldn't vote in her home state of North Carolina. To give it a more personal touch, my mother left her hometown of Winston Salem (where John Phillip Sousa gave a concert at her high school) when she was eighteen, and she hasn't been back in more than seventy five years.

My mother has an apartment in an assisted living facility. She reads two newspapers a day, one or two books a week, and watches Newshour on PBS nightly. She loves figure skating (Scott Hamilton and Sasha Cohen are her favorites, and we're talking about going to Stars On Ice if the schedule works out), and enjoys tennis (she roots for the Williams sisters). She clips out the sports section of the Daily News for me and any articles she finds about American Idol.

I read an essay once that said mothers can be at their best at different stages of their children's lives. Some mothers are great with infants, others with teenagers. My mother is the best mother of adults I've ever seen. She is tolerant,generous, supportive, undemanding, and always willing to listen. My friends love her (can you blame them?). She also has an extraordinary talent for adapting to whatever life throws her way. Of all her skills, that's the one I most try to learn from her.

She's getting two small birthday celebrations this week. Today my brother, sister-in-law and I will pop in. Alan and Esther are bringing a cake, and we'll go to her brand new computer (Alan and Esther gave her one a couple of weeks ago) and check out her e-mails (she hasn't been practicing her internet skills because of the U.S. Open taking so much time). Tomorrow she and I will have brunch at the Goshen Diner, followed by a trip to the place where she used to do her volunteer work (and where I still do mine). I already got the cake (although tragically I jostled it, and the cake now reads Happy Birthday eda). People will be delighted to see her there, no matter what the cake says.

Next Monday the Quill Award winners will be announced. Since Barnes & Noble listed Life As We Knew It as an also ran from the getgo, I don't anticipate LAWKI winning. I've already gone through my Kubler-Ross stages of grieving (denial was my favorite, with rage a close second).

But the reality is, it doesn't matter. Next Monday my mother will be 96 and she will still love me.

Great Haircut! And Speaking Of Words That End In Cut...

I am not a boastful person.

I know this because when waitresses ask me how I'm doing, my answer never lasts longer than eleven minutes, thirty nine seconds (I carry a stopwatch just to make sure).

If you, oh skeptical one (I never overestimate the number of people who read this blog), have any doubts, then consider this: I have yet to boast, in public at least, about the two pounds I've lost (four if I stand on the scale a seventy five degree angle), or that I'm still on budget in my clothes shopping mania (in spite of the adorable brown jacket, the three darling sweaters, and those nine positively cuddly pairs of socks).

All boastworthy accomplishments, I'm sure you'd agree.

The other day, while taking a break from my obsessive googling by obsessively yahooing, I discovered that The Extremely Great State Of Connecticut was offering a one half credit course enticingly entitled "Modern Literature Session 2" in its adult education high school diploma program.

Why, oh skeptical one asks, should I care? Because the first half of this six week course, three whole weeks, is devoted to the study of Life As We Knew It. Meaning, The Extremely Great State Of Connecticut thinks my very own LAWKI is worth one entire quarter credit!

Since I'm such a failure at boasting, I've been working on other means of informing all humanity of this extraordinary fact. Thus far I've worked out three exceedingly subtle approaches.

Approach Number One: Making Use Of My Film History Degree

So I see Turner Classic Movies will be showing that wonderful Barbara Stanwyck comedy, Christmas In Connecticut. Speaking of Connecticut, did you know that The Extremely Great State Of Connecticut is offering a one half credit course called Modern Literature Session 2, with the first half devoted to studying Life As We Knew It?

Approach The Second: Current Affairs

No matter what I think of the man, I truly believe George Bush deserves full credit for what's happening in Iraq. Speaking of full credit, did you know The Extremely Great State Of Connecticut is offering a one half credit course in Modern Literature Session 2, with one half of that one half credit going for study of Life As We Knew It?

Approach Da Toid: Other Greats Of Literature

Boy, they sure don't make them like Elinor Glyn anymore. What a writer! Classics like Beyond The Rocks and Three Weeks. Speaking of three weeks, did you know that The Extremely Great State Of Connecticut, in its fabulous Modern Literature Session 2 course, is devoting three weeks to studying Life As We Knew It?

Now if I can only work out a connection between studyingLife As We Knew It and lewd behavior in the men's room of the Minneapolis Airport, well then I'd truly have something to boast about.