Marcia Thornton Jones's Blog, page 112

Writing Without Writing by Deborah Lytton

Writing inspires writing. Any of us who have committed to sitting down either with a pen and paper or in front of a keyboard know this to be true. The more we write, the more we want to write. We become so involved with our characters and their stories that we can lose track of time and place.

As much as the action of writing words on a page gives rise to more words, experience gives rise to story. Sometimes it helps to step away from the desk and put myself into the same circumstance as my character to view the world from his or her perspective. For example, if my character bakes cookies, then I will go and bake some cookies as well. I want to touch what she would touch and smell what she would smell and taste what she would taste. In that way, I can write a much more effective description of the scene and her reactions. Sometimes, these experiences might take me on a field trip of sorts. This is how I write without writing. For on the field trip, I am gathering ideas, forming opinions and becoming inspired. Whether it is a walk down my street and feeling the breeze on my face or taking in the view from the top of a hill overlooking the entire city. My imagination can fill in the details. In this way, I am always writing, even when I am not sitting at my desk. The stories continue to evolve with detail and creativity and are enhanced by traveling into the world. Even if the story involves fantasy or science fiction or historical elements, there will always be similarities we can connect with because they come from our own world. I challenge you to use those elements and see what you can experience today. Feed your imagination. See what you can discover.

In Which Dr. Seuss Helps Define My Writing Space

Where I write: it could be a (very bad) Dr. Seuss book:
I can write under a starI can write in my carI can write anywherenear or far!
I'm actually far too restless to write in any one place. I've got one of those brains that needs variety! freshness! something new! (I'm like this with food and exercise, too.)
For me, routine very often means “rut” and depression for. Which is fine for being a writer! Because what practice is more portable than writing? All I need is my brain (which I happen to carry around with me most of the time anyway), my heart (yep, still thumping), and some way to record my thoughts. Sometimes that's a notebook and pen. Most times it's my computer. In the middle of the night it's the Notes feature on my phone. I could be anywhere!
In an airportOn a planeIn the bathtubriding across Spain...
I do have spots I return to again, and again, like this one, especially this time of year:

Happy writing, all, wherever you are!-------------Irene Latham is an Alabama author of more than a dozen current and forthcoming poetry, fiction and picture books for children and adults, including Leaving Gee's Bend, 2011 ALLA Children's Book of the Year and Can I Touch Your Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes and Friendship (with Charles Waters). Winner of the 2016 ILA Lee Bennett Hopkins Promising Poet Award, she also serves as poetry editor for the Birmingham Arts Journal. 

Schools Scents

By Charlotte Bennardo

The most powerful memories of my younger school days is not friends (which I can no longer remember), or any one significant teacher (they came in high school), or even a subject I loved (I started school at four because I'm a November birthday and I struggled up to 7th seventh grade). What stirs the most memories are the smells of returning back to school.

Before computers there were pencils and notebooks. Before nylon backpacks there were school bags. Before there were glue sticks, there was Elmer's White School glue. Before there were copy machines, there were mimeographed ditto sheets. Before Nikes, there were new shoes and canvas gym sneaker. When I sit back with my eyes closed, I can smell those pencils, freshly sharpened, the pine wood shavings forest fragrant. School bags, which looked like little briefcases, had the plastic smell like new pool toys or bouncy balls. Elmer's glue, and even rubber cement had their unique scents; Elmer's had a milky quality and the rubber cement gave off a sharp, alcohol smell. When worksheets were passed out, every kid sniffed them, the ink odor not unpleasant, but strangely attractive. And new shoes! Whether leather or canvas, nothing smells like a new pair. A whiff of any of these scents catapults my mind back to those years, reminding me of both good and sad memories.

The last few times I've been in a school, whether doing a book event like nErDCamp Long Island, or back to school for one of my sons, none of those smells was present. Kind of made me a little sad, it smelled so sterile. Technology has no scent.

But at least there is always the joy of the smell of a new box of Crayola crayons...

Photo courtesy of Pexels

THE IDEA JOURNAL (HOLLY SCHINDLER)

Each fall, as new school years kick into gear, I’m flooded with feelings of new beginnings. Fresh starts. And how much I love, love, love the fresh start of a new project…
I’ll admit it: I’m a complete idea junkie. I live for those ah-ha! moments. To me, the beginning of a new project is the sweetest part. The middle is always the hardest—the most sluggish. I can sooo easily get distracted by a shiny new idea.
I started keeping idea journals. I had to. It was the only way I could stay on track. I found that if I just wrote down what was on my mind, I could put it aside and refocus on the project in hand.
But in the process, I realized just how invaluable those journals really are.
The thing is, I think that we have passing ideas all the time that would make great books. But we’re usually in the midst of driving to work or doing homework with our kids or a meeting or at the doctor’s office or, or, or…
And then, when we NEED the idea—when we’re looking a new file or a blank page in the face, it feels like great ideas are few and far between.
That’s not true. Like I said, we have ideas ALL THE TIME. But because they haven’t been recorded, we lose them.
Get a journal. I mean it. One of those cheap little wirebound pocket notebooks. Put it in your purse. Or your glove compartment. Or your laptop case. Get a regular-sized notebook and keep it in your desk drawer. Put another in the kitchen. Put one in the bathroom and one by your bed. Pepper your entire home and office space with the things. And write every single idea down.
By “idea,” I’m not just talking about BIG ideas. I don’t just mean over-arching ideas for what a novel will be. I mean passing thoughts. Fragments of ideas. Phrases that might make cool titles. Quick character ideas—maybe a name, or a personality quirk.
Because the thing is, ideas for books don’t just come all at once, fully formed. They come piecemeal. They’re what happens when about a hundred different weird thoughts, fragments all come together into a single cohesive picture.
When you need to start a new project—or you get stuck in a current WIP—gather up all those journals. Start poring through them. Pull out anything that might possibly help. You don’t even have to know why or how—you might just get kind of a tingle of interest. Pull it. Then look at all the pieces you’ve pulled. Brainstorm a connecting thread. You’ll find your next book. Or you’ll work your way out of the corner you’ve written yourself into. I guarantee.
One of the best part about the idea journal is that not only does it wind up saving you when you need it, it also strengthens your imagination. Before you know it, you’ll soon find that you’re an idea junkie, too!

Wrap Yourself in Quotes of Imagination: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

Fall rushes this way with its promise and flurry of new projects, new school year, and new hopes.
This time of year, my mother always took us shopping for new school clothes. What fun it was. In that spirit, here are some of my favorite quotes about imagination. Wrap them around yourself, as you would a new dress, as you venture into Fall.
"What is now proved was once only imagined." --William Blake

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” --Albert Einstein

Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”  --Albert Einstein

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” --Terry Pratchett

“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” --Philip Jose Farmer

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” --Lewis Carroll
"When I was little, I had an imaginary friend who wasn't allowed to play with me." --Dia Calhoun

Before the Book: A Conversation with H. M. Bouwman

First, congratulations on your forthcoming book A Tear in the Ocean.   I love to check in with authors in the busy months leading up to publication. Tell me when it’s scheduled to be published?
January 22, 2019.
Let’s start with the burning question: What’s this new book about? 
In another world, a boy, Putnam, and a girl, Artie, run away from their homes and meet up with each other in a sailboat they both think they own—Putnam because he left some money on the beach when he took it, and Artie because she stole it first. By the time they argue about it, they’re far out at sea and stuck with each other. From there they head to the deep south, discover they’re being followed, have adventures, and realize something is terribly wrong with the world.Meanwhile—or not meanwhile at all, since it happens a hundred years in the past—a girl named Rayel also runs away from home and heads for the deep south, where she experiences both astounding magic and tremendous loss. Though they are a hundred years apart, these two stories come together (did I mention there’s magic involved?) and Artie, Putnam, and Rayel must save their world together.
I understand this new book is a companion to A Crack in the Sea.  I’m curious about the distinction for you between a companion and a sequel.  Will readers need to have read A Crack in the Sea to enter this book.  Is there a desired reading order? 
No, you don’t have to read one to read the other! A companion book is simply set in the same world as the first book—in this case, the second world of A Crack in the Sea, with the Islands and Raftworld.            There isn’t a necessary reading order for the books, either. I want to say that you should read Crack in the Sea first, if possible, and then Tear in the Ocean. But that’s because that’s the order I wrote them. Readers don’t need to follow that order! It seems to me that companion novels simply benefit from rubbing against each other, like flint and steel—the order isn’t that significant. And in fact, reading them in a different order than the author wrote them might be really interesting.            For those who have read Crack in the Sea, I’ll say this: there are some things you’ll know about Putnam that others will not…so try not to give things away! You’ll see a few characters from Crack in the new novel, too: Putnam, of course; and Jupiter makes a brief appearance. And there’s one other person I won’t name, because I’m wondering how many people will notice. Let me know if you find this last person.
You’ve mentioned that fairy tales influenced the book.  Were you attracted to the content or structure?  Or some other quality of fairy tales?   Were you a reader of fairy tales as a child? 
I love fairy tales, and yes, I read a lot of them as a child. We had a Jaro Hess print on our wall—The Land of Make-Believe (which is also on my website!) and my sisters and I used to trace the road with our index finger and talk about where we’d live in the painting…often after we were supposed to be in bed and asleep. I still have this print on my wall as an adult, and I stare at it often, daydreaming. It’s faded considerably over the years, but it’s still snug in the frame my grandfather made for it when he framed it for my mom and her siblings.            I loved the content of fairy tales, the stories—the stories in that Hess painting and all the others, too—but as an adult I’ve come to appreciate the structure of fairy tales as well. More to the point, I like the feel of a fairy tale. When I write I’m not trying to replicate the structure in any regimented way; I’m just trying to recapture how fairy tales feel; and how, when we listen to them, we accept the magic as a matter of course and move forward from there.
How did the book evolve for you during the writing and revision process? 
The book started with a question from Crack in the Sea: if the ocean is sweet (as it is and as it has to be in Crack), then how did it get that way? Ultimately I didn’t exactlywrite that story, but that is where it started, with a question about how the world worked.            I knew too that I wanted a story about transformation: the transformations caused by trauma as well the transformations that can happen with recovery. I was thinking about transformation in a very literal way, so I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses (…okay, mostly I read Ted Hughes’s gorgeous and shorter version of this very long work, but I also dabbled in several translations). Ovid’s epic poem is all about transformation: people turn into animals, into trees, into water—so many changes. And of course I re-read fairy tales about transformation. There are so many!             After that it was really a matter of thinking about what really needed to transform in this book. Where were the big moments of change? And how would these changes manifest in the world of this book?            (I’m sorry to be a bit vague here—I’m trying not to do any spoilers!)
The months leading up to a book release are incredibly busy with work that happens behind the scenes.  Could you talk a bit about what you’ll be doing in the next few months to prepare the book for publication? 
I’m a full-time college professor, so I’ll be teaching! Beyond that, I’ll be setting up school and library visits (…you can contact me through my website…) and arranging as much travel as I’m able to do while still teaching. And of course, I’m working on my next book. J
Books take a lot of time, and often those that share our worlds have to wait while we do the work.  I know you’ve written in the company of cats and kids and loyal writing pals.   Any stories from that process to share with fellow writers and readers? 
I’ve been really lucky in that while I’ve been writing, my kids have been reading and loving stories. I’ve read all my manuscripts aloud to them them while the books are still in draft form (usually right before I send them off to my agent). My kids are the kindest and most supportive readers you can imagine. I have critique partners, too—grownup amazing writer friends who read my work and give me honest and often difficult feedback that helps me revise—but having these two young people who love me and shower me with undiluted praise for my stories? That’s crucial. It’s magic.
I can’t wait to be in the audience for the release of this book.  Where can readers follow your news? 
You can find publication information on my website blog, which I update…quite infrequently, honestly. But I do list upcoming books and publication dates there: www.hmbouwman.com. For more frequent updates and a cringe-worthy number of cat photos, you might check Facebook (Heather Bouwman) or Twitter (hmbouwman).

Sheila O'Connor is the author of five novels, including her most recent middle-grade novel, Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth.  

School Supplies: Guilty Pleasure or Creative Inspiration?

Back-to-school time brings one of my favorite things into the limelight - School Supplies.  I loved them when I was a kid.  I loved them when I was a teacher.  And, even though I don't head back to school anymore, every fall I still love school supply season just as much as I always have.


I have one daughter who is still in high school, and though high schoolers don't need crayons and scissors and glue, I'm glad they need notebooks, folders, and planners because that means I still get to enjoy real back-to-school shopping for a few more years.  High schoolers are of course more than capable of shopping for their own school supplies, but even so, I eagerly volunteer to accompany my daughter as she peruses the back-to-school aisles of our favorite stores comparing prices, colors, and designs.  And while she chooses what she needs, I drool over all the things I want - bright-colored sticky notes in different shapes and sizes, cool accordion-style file folder pouches, and plastic packages full of pencils.  Oh how I love the pencils!  Those long, colorful, real-wood pencils with the brand new erasers that haven't erased even the faintest pencil mark.

Some people might think the purchasing I do of the unnecessary school supplies I drool over sounds like a guilty pleasure, which I guess is technically true since I usually don't really need any of the things I buy.  (I mean, you should see my office.)  But for me, I find that all these brand new, full-of-potential pencils, fancy file folders, and slick sticky notes somehow feed my creative soul.  The sticky notes make me want to mark up my current work-in-progress with all kinds of revisions and notes to myself.  The accordion-style file folder pouches make me want to organize new ideas I have for future projects.  And those pencils are just begging me to sharpen them up with the electric pencil sharpener in my office so that I can fill up a new spiral notebook with the details I have for that new character who's been stumbling around in my brain just waiting for me to give them life.


So, guilty pleasure?  Maybe.
Creative inspiration?  Definitely!
Happy Back-to-School Season to All!

Wishing everyone a year full of creative inspiration!
Nancy

The Most Asked Question

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Oh, how I wish I knew.

See if I knew, I could actually manage and manipulate my ideas. Not to mention control the plot bunnies that tend to run away with my works in progress.

I also wish I had a good answer. That I could say my ideas from the hollowed-out ancient oak tree in the middle of the woods where I grew up. Or maybe on the pads of feet of little gray kittens with eyes of two different colors. Perhaps from behind the trap door in the basement of my grandma’s old cottage on the Wisconsin River.

They don’t.

Most of them arrive scattered and half-formed. Typically in the form of a voice of an insistent main character with a story to tell. There is a sentence, or a half-formed paragraph, a misty plot with a vague ending.
I am the story teller.

It is my task to take the roughly-formed idea and actually turn it into something.

My ideas tend to range from the darker sides of growing up with a sassy young girl coming of age to lighter mysteries of stubborn cats with a gleam in their eyes and a passion for crime reporting. I’ve started a variety of manuscripts that had a lot to tell me to begin with, but aren’t quite ready to provide the ending. Sometimes it takes me years to finish these – the stories comes as they are ready to be told.

I’ve never been able to force my writing.

Which isn’t to say I don’t write on a regular basis or wait around for the perfect idea. There are days I don’t want to write, but do, and I feel better for it. There’s always something better that comes from writing versus not at all.

So where do my ideas come from?

Me. Simply stated, they are my dreams and my passions, my experiences, and those I’ve yet to encounter. They are who I was, and who I am, and who I will be. They are the people and pets I have met, those I want to meet, and those I hope I have yet to meet.

They are the volumes of stories I’ve always wanted to share. 

Happy reading!

Getting Ideas from . . . School

This month's blog theme is a double one: 1) where we get our ideas; and 2) heading back to school. For me, this combo is extra-perfect because where I get the vast majority of my book ideas is . . . school!

My specialty is writing school stories. I loved school as a child, and I want to share this love of school with kids through books that celebrate the school experience. So I tell the kids in the audience for my author visits that I come to their school as a spy, snooping around for book ideas. I always try to squeeze in time to walk up and down the halls, thrilled to see their completed projects on display, each one a possible story-sparker.

One school's bulletin board featured kids' essays answering the question, "How would you change the world?" BINGO! I hurried home and started writing How Oliver Olson Changed the World.
School readathons provided plenty of material for Kelsey Green, Reading Queen.
Shamelessly I borrow brilliant ideas from my own sons' elementary and middle-school teachers. An assignment to keep a diary in the persona of a Civil War-era character was the seed for The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish. The annual "biography tea" became Being Teddy Roosevelt.
One of the sweetest moments in my writing career came last year when a school in Virginia invited me to join them for the tenth anniversary of their biography tea, inspired by the biography tea in my book, which was inspired by the biography tea at my boys' elementary school here in Colorado. I loved so much that the brainchild of one amazing fifth-grade teacher in Boulder, Colorado, could have such fertile results, spanning thousands of miles and ten whole years, thanks to the power of real-life school to become transformed into story.

Hooray for school!

Summer is in Session!

Great is the sun, and wide he goes
Through empty heaven with repose;
And in the blue and glowing days
More thick than rain he showers his rays.
-- Summer Sun by Robert Louis Stevenson

 Summer time! The perfect time for new adventures, new beginnings, and new things! Besides beginning my third term teaching MFA grad students and learning all this new techno-stuff, I continue to search for a new agent. Until my stories find this champion, I continue to study in hopes of mastering my craft. And to that end, let me tell you about a new discovery, Donald Maass’ book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction.


Fiction is primarily an emotional exchange. The reader stays connected to the hero because she feels the story. The reader wants to see the character succeed, or at least wants to see what happens next. The character’s motivation creates empathy between herself and the reader. After all, readers can empathize with a character’s motivation, especially if it’s similar to her own. Readers want to know why these characters are in the mess they are in. They what to know what happens to these characters. If the plot is what happens to your character, then her motivation is the force that sets the plot into motion and keeps it going. It’s why she goes after her goal in the first place.

Maass explores the emotional modes of writing, and demonstrates how to “how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers.” According to Maass, the language of emotion makes the difference to a reader’s experience. And plot can be understood as a sequence of emotional milestones...

“Because that’s the way readers read. They don’t so much read as respond. They do not automatically adopt your outlook and outrage. They formulate their own.”

In other words, as Maass suggests, you are not the author of what readers feel. You are the provocateur of those feelings.

With this in mind, Maass explores three primary paths that an author can use to create this emotional experience.

One. Report what characters are feeling, using language and images that evoke feeling. As we know, words can have multiple meanings. The denotative meaning is the explicit definition as listed in a dictionary. Childhood, for example, means the state of being a child. However, the emotional weight, or the expressiveness of language, comes from the connotative meaning. The connotation of the word impacts the tone and themes of the narrative. When Dorothy says "there's no place like home," she is referring to the emotional impact of her family. Because fiction is an emotional exchange, a writer chooses words to create a larger emotional impact. Maass calls this the inner mode, the telling of emotions.

Two. Imply the characters emotional – or inner – state through external action. Maass calls this the outer mode, the showing of emotions.

“Like billiard balls colliding … a character’s actions transfer an emotional impact to the reader, who feels it with equal force, and the reader caroms across the table.”

Three. Create an emotional dialogue between author and reader. Maass calls this the other mode, in which readers feel something that a character does not feel. The reader reacts, resists and sometimes succumbs, but “…she can never escape the churn and flow of her own feelings.”

Just like when we don’t fully understand why we do the things we do, a character does not always understand her behavior. This confusion, however, makes your character real to the reader. Her confusion reinforces her struggle. Madeleine L’Engle (The Heroic Personality, Origins of Story, 1999) offers that the heroic personality is human, not perfect. What it means to be human is “to be perfectly and thoroughly human, and that is what is meant by being perfect: human, not infallible or impeccable or faultless, but human.” A character’s confusion is authentic. This sense of authenticity is important in keeping the reader connected to your story.

Human beings are complex, messy, flimsy, brave, heroic, cowardly and courageous and infinitely interesting. Emotions skim the surface and run deep, creating conflict and contradictions in the character’s life. When an author masters this emotional connection in her writing, it becomes the difference between a reader simply reading the story, and experiencing the story.

Story – whether in prose or verse – can do things, Maass reminds us, that no other art form can. It engages the imagination on a deeper level. It can stir hearts and bring about change in a way that other art forms rarely achieve.

“Writing a novel is itself an emotional journey akin to falling in love, living together, hating each other, separating, reconciling, gaining perspective, accepting each other, and finally finding deep and abiding love. Writing fiction is like living…The emotional craft of fiction is a set of tools, yes, but more than anything it’s an instrument beyond the range of any book: the gracious gift of your own loving heart.”

Hope you are enjoying your summer!
Bobbi Miller