C. Aubrey Hall's Blog, page 26

Now or Later

When it comes to writing, are you a doer or a procrastinator? Do you write steadily and daily according to the BIC principle (Butt in Chair)? Or do you catch up on your tweets, play games on your phone, and allow yourself just five little minutes on Facebook before you get started?

And how often do those five little minutes suck up all the time you’ve allotted for your writing session?

One of my favorite films is THE BISHOP’S WIFE (1948), staring Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven. It features a subplot involving an elderly professor (played by Monty Woolley) who is friends with the protagonist Julia and her husband Henry. Professor Wutheridge is poor, retired, and without family. He has talked for years about the book on Roman history he’s writing. Everyone assumes that this is his life’s work and he’s been slaving away on it steadily.

In fact, he hasn’t written a word–as he finally confesses to Julia and the angel Dudley. When asked why, he blurts out, “Because I couldn’t think of anything to say!”

That’s as good a cause for procrastination as any.

Generally, I find myself putting things off for three basic reasons: fear, laziness, or dislike.

Fear:

If I’m doubtful of my ability to perform a task or try a new experience, that’s letting fear hold me back.

It’s so much easier to delay, promising myself that tomorrow I won’t be so anxious about possible mistakes. Or the next day, or a week from now, or how about next month?

Another variation of fear-procrastination stems from perfectionism. It’s good to hold yourself to high standards in your written work (and elsewhere), but not to the point of paralyzing yourself lest you make a mistake.

I once tried to coach a woman who expected to write a bestselling masterpiece with her first writing effort. Having shackled herself to this very unrealistic expectation, she spent several weeks plotting and then delayed and delayed and delayed before she finally wrote a 12-page first chapter.

It featured beautifully couched sentences, good depiction of story action, and little else. It needed tweaking and stronger scenes, but she couldn’t accept constructive criticism. Nor could she embrace the concept that this effort of hers had not achieved perfection.

She abandoned the project and did not return.

I’m a perfectionist, too, and yet I know that writing is seldom–if ever–perfect. It’s not going to happen. Whatever lovely exchange of dialogue is playing in my mind, somehow it’s never quite as good once I convey it to paper. I give my work the best I’ve got at the time, within the deadline assigned to me, and that’s all I can do. Sometimes, what I produce pleases me and sometimes, later on, I find certain aspects of it embarrassing. (Why are my characters such dopes? Why, oh, why didn’t I catch that plot hole? Etc.)

The fear of making a mistake should never hold us back from trying.

Don’t know how to write the scene you envision? Try it anyway. Put words in your characters’ mouths and figure out how they can be opposed to each other. Then, go for it.

The result might be rotten, laughable, or halfway decent.

Procrastination due to fear simply requires scraping together enough gumption, determination, or willpower to push past it.

Laziness:

I frequently cause myself problems because I put off doing things I should.

I don’t want to clean off my desk each day. Result? A piled-up mess of papers, notebooks, Post-Its, and receipts that slithers onto the floor when I’m using the computer mouse or eats the scrap of paper where I’ve scribbled the KEY MOTIVATION OF MY VILLAIN, WITHOUT WHICH THE ENTIRE NOVEL WILL COLLAPSE.

I don’t want to bother shelving the novel I’ve just read, so I stack it beside my reading chair. Pretty soon another book is placed on top of it, then another, then another. Eventually I have a teetering, dusty tower of read books that are bound to be knocked over either by myself or the dogs. Down they slide under the sofa or into an awkward corner that I can’t reach without stooping, bending myself into a pretzel, or–much to the amusement of my dogs–crawling. The very best book of the group–the one I intended to keep forever–lands edge down, crumpling the pages.

A calamity that didn’t have to occur.

Laziness can also apply to writing. What if you have two scenes in mind. Scene 1 will be a confrontation between Pete Protagonist and his brother Amos. They’re fighting over … over … well, they’re fighting. You know they’re angry at each other, but you haven’t worked out why. Because you don’t know their motivations, you’re hazy on their positions in this argument.

Furthermore, you haven’t really thought through Pete’s goal for this scene. You don’t want to bother with all of that. It’ll come to me once I get going, you think. No need to waste time planning every detail.

So you type a few paragraphs. The brothers stand there–where? Oh, they’re just standing there … somewhere. You’ll fill that detail in later.

They’re standing there. They’re angry. They utter a few dialogue exchanges, but the conversation doesn’t get far. You force them through one page, and yet it’s like wading through sludge. Everything they’re saying seems trite or clichéd. The story just isn’t advancing.

You stop and sigh. This is too hard. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Or, let’s say you’re vague about what’s going to happen in Scene 1. All you know is that the brothers will argue and part, feeling bitter.

Meanwhile, Scene 2 is clear and shining in your mind. It’s going to be straight action. No need for awkward character motivation here. You’ve planned every moment in detail. You know a storm is going to blow up while Pete is sailing. He’ll struggle alone with sails and rigging. Then the tiller will be jerked from his grasp. The jib will fall on him, knocking him unconscious … no! Better if he’s swept overboard. Now he’s swimming for his life in rough seas … and sharks are coming.

Excited about that story segment and unwilling to work out the knots in Scene 1, you skip over the bothersome Scene 1 and write Scene 2 first. Maybe you take the time to research how unlikely it is that sharks will be circling a swimmer during a ferocious ocean storm, but maybe you don’t because your laziness has made you procrastinate about researching, too.

As you continue writing your book, you keep skipping the tough sections and writing only the bits that you like. You tell yourself that it will be easier to fill in the skipped stuff later, when you know exactly where the book is going and why the characters are behaving as they do.

Trouble is, this kind of procrastinator may never realize why the draft is so bad, why his characters keep reaching dead ends, or how a revision will be so tangled an entire rewrite will probably be necessary.

If the motivations and goals in Scene 1 are skipped instead of being worked out plausibly, how can there be a connection between the events of Scene 1 and those that take place in Scene 2?

Or, if the argument between Pete and Amos in Scene 1 had spilled over to Scene 2, what if the brothers had gone sailing together and when the storm burst over them, sweeping Pete overboard … would Amos have still been so angry and resentful about what occurred in Scene 1 that he delayed helping Pete and hesitated at the moment that a quick grab of Pete’s arm would have saved him?

Amos may spend the next five chapters leading a search-and-rescue operation. He could be bitterly blaming himself and experiencing all kinds of agonized guilt for what he’s done.

And when Pete is finally found, soaked with brine, starved, and half-dead, he might believe Amos deliberately tried to kill him.

By working through each plot problem as it arises, by not skipping ahead or just writing the bits of story that are the most fun, you could end up with a draft that makes sense and is much richer in layers, nuance, and context than you originally planned.

Intense Dislike:

Whenever we are faced with a task that we find distasteful, we’re likely to put it off for as long as possible.

Do you enjoy cleaning the bathroom? Some people do, but I don’t. Because my dislike of a dirty bathroom is even stronger, I perform the chore.

Do you enjoy working on your income tax? I loathe accounting work so much that I do it once a year. Although I know that prepping for my tax return would be quick and simple if I maintained the books weekly, or even monthly, I just won’t do it.

The result is that, yes, I only have to face the ledgers once a year, but it’s an awful experience. After twelve months of neglect, my accounts are in such a tangle that it takes weeks to straighten everything out and bring order to the mess.

By then, I’m behind on the new year’s accounts, and so I procrastinate again. It remains a vicious cycle that I never seem to break, year after year.

The only way to conquer this is through sheer discipline. Rather like being ordered by a dentist to floss daily, and having to create a new habit by forcing myself to perform the task at the same time every day until the habit is created.

In writing, perhaps you hate writing the first draft and enjoy the revision process. Or perhaps you love writing the rough draft and loathe revision. Either way, you need to create incentives for yourself and form the habits of discipline in order to get through the tasks you dislike.

Sometimes, people who are actually talented at writing never sit down and do it. They aren’t afraid of the task. They aren’t lazy. They want to write, but they just never do it.

Probe into their reasons, and sometimes the answer is, “I just don’t feel comfortable writing fiction. I can write essays fine. But putting stories together is hard and confusing.”

My response is always going to be, “So why aren’t you writing those articles or essays instead of pushing yourself toward the Great American Novel?”

Are you writing a story you just don’t like? Are you writing in a genre that’s not really your métier?

Why?

Do you secretly love true confession stories but fear that you’ll be laughed at by your friends if you wrote them? Do you struggle to write mainstream literature when your heart belongs to space opera? Are you stumped by your mystery plot that won’t gel when what you wish you could be writing are picture books for three-year-olds?

Snobbery and fear can push us in directions we truly don’t wish to go. Because we can’t write what we actually want, we don’t write at all.

Now, how is that going to get you anywhere?

Carrot or stick … or both … is the only way to get past this form of procrastination.

Jump Forward, Fold Back

Linear plotting may be straightforward and designed for readers to follow easily, but that doesn’t mean it has to plod or be predictable.

Hooks and plot twists serve to jazz up a story and hold off monotony.

One variant of the hook technique is known as the jump forward, fold back strategy. It can be used to open a book chapter partway through a story. It can be used in the middle of a short story to keep readers slightly off-balance and intrigued.

Generally, it’s most often employed after the protagonist has planned what he or she will do next. Okay, Reader thinks. This is what we’re going to do next.

Except that when the page is turned, Reader finds herself jumped ahead of the planned event with the characters already involved in what follows it. Then there is a foldback that summarizes what was jumped over.

This technique injects a little excitement into a story event where something important to the characters is going to occur, but it lacks enough conflict to be dramatized into an actual scene.

Let’s draw an example from romance author Betty Neels, one of Harlequin’s most successful authors, who wrote well into her 90s. Often in these “sweet romance” stories, the waif-heroine will be offered an outing or a date with the handsome, rich hero. It’s built up with much anticipation. The heroine has to plan the outfit she’ll wear, and she usually worries a little about how the date will turn out. Directly after this build-up, Ms. Neels jumps forward with a transition sentence such as …

“Late that night, Heroine climbed into bed and thought over the evening. It had been more special than she’d ever dreamed possible. The restaurant was … ” And then the high points of the lobster thermidor gourmet meal, the dancing, etc. are mulled over in the heroine’s thoughts.

Another variant of this technique is when the event that’s jumped over is both dramatic and vital to the development of the story. In such an instance, the fold back becomes a flashback delivered in full scene/sequel structure. In novels, it’s useful in the middle to convey backstory and explain character motivation by dramatizing some key points of conflict between the protagonist and another major character. Televised soap operas also employ this method.

It can also be used to open a story at an exciting point and then deal with what led up to it.

An example would be this week’s episode of the television program CASTLE. Generally, CASTLE is one of the better-written shows on television. Aside from the little injections of humor, a deftly handled romantic subplot that’s broken the so-called MOONLIGHTING Curse, and engaging characters, the show is worth being studied for the way its scripts are written.

Last night’s teaser opened with a night-shot. A huge building fire roars in the background. Firemen, cops, and paramedics are standing around helplessly. Beckett is on the phone with tears in her eyes, telling the pregnant wife of a fellow officer that “something’s happened.”

Then the story rolls back twelve hours and brings us up to speed on the case and the investigation.

This was a brilliant plotting strategy, given that the crime of arson this time overshadows the crime of murder. And the best way to effectively convey arson isn’t by showing a ruined ash heap but by showing fire engulfing a building.

Jumping forward and folding back is simple enough to use. It works effectively, yet it’s not confusing. Just make sure that you work out your plotline in a straightforward, linear, step-by-step fashion for your own understanding. Pick the slowest spot in your story and jump over it, making sure that you then inform or show the reader what initially seemed to be skipped.

Plot Extinction

Since the days of antiquity, since before the alphabet and written literature, story plots in western civilization have been linear in design.

Meaning, they have a beginning, a middle, and an ending whereby the hero struggles against forces of antagonism, nearly fails, but prevails through sacrifice and heroism. The hero is changed by the experience, and as a result, the closing lines of the story point to this individual living a better life in future.

This basic template is founded on the structure of mythological tales. We respond to it as instinctively as we do anything that starts with “Once upon a time …”

However, in the last decade the linear plot has fallen out of fashion. Editors sometimes reject it in favor of a nonlinear storyline. Writers are told that readers are now web-thinkers (and we ain’t talking spiders).

A while back, I lost what would have been a very lucrative book deal because I was offering a story that was “too linear.” At first, I tried to make rocket science out of this new plotting concept. Then I figured out that all editors want are multiple viewpoints, cross-cutting, and lots of flashbacks mixed with a blistering-fast pace.

Not so revolutionary, after all. Thriller writers have been employing strategic viewpoint shifts and cross-cutting between subplots for years.

However, the trendy push is to employ these web-like plots to all genres, especially those for young readers. So far, fine.

But what I’ve been noticing lately is a more disturbing result of this trend–in plots that are increasingly frenetic and chaotic. They’re fast. They jump about with forward progress counter-balanced with flashbacks. They feature a lot of characters, sometimes to the point of making it difficult to tell who exactly is the protagonist. At their best, they’re lively, engaging, intriguing, and complex. At their worst–and I’m seeing more and more of the worst–they’re impossible to follow, confusing, and boring.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with a novel–the latest in a long-running and fairly successful series. In this author’s books, the characters and their backstories are emphasized over the plots, which are simple and small in scope. That’s perfectly fine. Sometimes I enjoy a book that’s more character-driven. But this particular novel had no plot. It featured instead a situation: a reunion of characters. The characters could barely speak to each other without us flowing into reverse for long flashbacks culled from past novels. The novel was short, but it took me forever to finish it.

Normally I would toss it aside with a shrug, chalking it up to a writer temporarily out of ideas who had to meet a contractual deadline.

Except that recently I read another novel that rambled around. It was a genre book, not mainstream at all. It should have had a plot. But it couldn’t seem to get going. Reading it was like trying to drive with a clutch for the first time. Jerky starts. Lurching stops. Stalled.

Normally I would say, new writer lacking in experience. But it wasn’t. This author has written many novels.

Television is on a similar trajectory, perhaps even more so than novels. Once upon a time, a TV show was episodic, meaning each weekly episode served a complete story. It had a beginning, middle, and end. The problem was resolved; the star saved the day; we knew that on the following week there would be a new story problem and new guest stars to see.

Of course, TV–in a rather odd development–now moves along a novel-type structure with each weekly segment of the show contributing to a continuing storyline. The entire season comprises the story arc. If you miss an episode of these dramas–let’s call it instead a weekly chapter–you’re in trouble. Still, that’s what DVDs are for. You can settle down with your popcorn in your living room and watch the entire season in one weekend marathon.

But even TV’s grip on plot is slipping more and more as it attempts to juggle the novel structure of linked weekly installments with the trend of web-like plots.

In September 2013, I sat down in excited anticipation to watch the season opener of PERSON OF INTEREST. Normally this is a well-written, intriguing show. The flashbacks feeding backstory on various characters takes some getting used to, but generally it goes well.

Not the season opener. I couldn’t follow it. Was I experiencing the onset of senile dementia? Or was I trying to watch a mish-mash of too much cross-cutting and references to past events from prior seasons? It’s TV. I shouldn’t have to work that hard to watch an episode. I shouldn’t have to have watched every second of multiple seasons in order to follow the plot. Granted, if I had done so I might have gotten all the nuances written into the script, but I should be able to click on, understand the gist of the story, and reach the closing credits without saying, “Huh?”

Okay, it’s supposed to be intelligent and complex. But this season has been a mix of shows that made sense and were very satisfying and shows that made me say, “Huh?”

I couldn’t help but compare it to another popular program, BURN NOTICE. Splashy, colorful, action-driven. A lot of plots and subplots woven through the seasons. However, I could miss half of a season, click on and pick up easily. The episodes made sense, even if I didn’t recognize a new character that had been on for several weeks during my absence.

Over this weekend, I came across a Dr. Who episode. It began with a great hook. The sets and costumes were a marvelous steampunk montage. Alien lizard girls in Victorian dresses–YES! The modern Dr. Who shows have better budgets, better set design, and better makeup departments than the low-budget versions of the past. Woo-hoo!I thought. Let’s watch this!

What I saw began well, shoved great concepts at me, and failed to deliver. The script hopped here and there among the characters, tried to handle more characters and subplots than the writer evidently could manage, cross-cut with all the reckless abandon of a drunken driver veering down a highway, and grew increasingly chaotic, fast-paced, and pointless. By the finish, I’d moved on from “Huh?” to “Who cares?”

Now, if someone wanted to defend this program, he might mutter to me about my having seen only the conclusion of that particular plot segment. Doesn’t matter. I should still be able to follow the story.

I’ll contrast it with another modern Dr. Who episode that I saw a couple of years ago. Different doctor as the star. It, too, was the concluding episode of a plot segment. The setting was Venice and some girls’ school where all the young maidens were vampires. Evil aliens were about to conquer Earth. (The Whosians out there will probably recognize this one.) In three minutes–I was up to speed. I could follow the story, and I didn’t have to strain to do it. The script made sense. It clearly wrapped up all the threads in the storyline. It served a satisfying conclusion with the little trademark twist of the program. Terrific and fun.

So what’s my point besides a rant about how plotting is falling into the decay of anarchy?

Plotting is falling victim to anarchy.

It doesn’t have to, of course. But writers have to stand fast against sloppy plotting, weak storylines, and the mistaken notion that chaos equals complexity, that speedy pace alone guarantees reader/viewer involvement, and that giving all the characters equal attention delivers satisfaction.

Methods of storytelling evolve with changing times. But the linear plot works well, if you’ll let it. Complexity is desirable, if we don’t unleash it like kudzu and let it smother the forward progress of the story.

Balance and control. Managing the story so that it unfolds quickly and unpredictably, intriguing our audience while holding them enthralled. That’s a writer’s job. That’s a writer’s responsibility. Trends come and go, but effective story design has to be preserved … and delivered to our readers.

Maybe I’m just an alarmist, paranoid enough to see the fall of civilization based on a few badly written books and teleplays. And maybe I’m an individual who grew up reading every novel I could get my hands on, watching television written by people trained in the old studio systems to deliver solid plots week after week. I’m not satisfied with the drivel of reality shows and book plots that crumble like cupcakes baked without eggs. I want more than that, and so should you.

Deadline Walking

It goes without saying that holidays and writing deadlines mix as well as oil and water. Although most of the time I make some Herculean effort to avoid having any deadline hovering over the end of the year, occasionally it happens. Then, instead of shopping, decorating, or enjoying family fun, I’m hunched over my keyboard and muttering resentfully.

For much of my life, the highlight of Christmastime was the l-o-n-g drive to grandma’s house. It was only about 1,900 miles away, so after my parents worked all day we would load the car and head out about 9 p.m., driving through the night and all the next day until we got there. Then it was an explosion of good times and laughter, stoking a blazing fireplace to ward off the crisp cold of desert nights, eating T-bone steaks and delicious slabs of homemade pie or soup-bone soup with steaming hot cornbread.

Probably the worst such Christmas was when I had a tight January book deadline hanging over me. I arrived with my computer, and although I explained to my grandmother that I had to work during at least part of my visit , she was disappointed and upset every time I shut myself away to put in a few hours of writing. The only quiet place in which to work was my unheated bedroom. So I shivered, ostracized and lonely, slaving away over the next chapter while the rest of my family chatted and played games.

So–as the violins play–the point of this journey into nostalgia is that deadlines happen. We hate them. We moan about them. We sometimes resent them.

We also need them.

Why?

Because deadlines get the job done.

Writers without firm deadlines tend to procrastinate. They dream. They mull over their intended prose. They imagine a scene one way and then another. They putter. They mean to sit down and work a little, but somehow the week goes by without fingers ever tapping across that keyboard.

A long time ago, I learned that whether I have a legal, signed book contract or not, I must set deadlines if I’m to accomplish the writing tasks I’ve set for myself.

I organize backwards from the point of the contract deadline. For example, if I have a September 2014 delivery date, then I calculate the word count of my project and tabulate how many words per day or how many pages per week I have to produce.

The September deadline is what I call the hard deadline.

It’s the one I will meet. Failure is not an option for professionals. I have signed a legal contract, and my reputation is on the line.

You might be thinking that’s three-quarters of a year away. Plenty of time! Right?

Well, maybe not.

I next estimate how much time I’ll need for revision and polishing. Generally I allow four to six weeks. So a September delivery means I need to have an entire draft completed no later than the end of July. If I intend for the manuscript to be read by a trusted friend for feedback before I submit it to my editor, then I need to reduce my available writing time by two more weeks.

Now, I have a soft deadline of mid-July. I consider it soft because I’ve got some play there. I might complete a satisfactory draft earlier or I might need an extra week. But I have plenty of padding to allow for the latter situation.

Once again, I calculate how much I’ll have to produce per day.

Depending on the type of project, I may or may not have to factor in plot development time.

For example, these days I usually sell on a proposal, which means I submit a plot outline and sample chapters in order to land a contract. That way, as soon as a deal is struck and my signature is scrawled on the contract, I can start working. The entire story has already been worked out.

However, sometimes I contract for a series. In that situation, I will pitch a series concept, but the individual plots of each book may be sketchy. It depends on the editor and how familiar that individual is with my work. I’ve had book deals that specified only “a fantasy novel of 100,000 words.”

Such a deal is flattering to the ego, but it means I have to again reduce my available writing time by allowing a month for idea development and plotting. I have friends who can plot quicker than that, but I’m slow at working a story out.

Again, with more compression of actual writing time, I can devise a reasonable, realistic working quota.

Do I have a year to write a 100,000-word manuscript based on characters and a setting I’ve written about before? That gives me about 10 months of actual writing time. That’s 300 days, unless I take the weekends off. So, let’s say 280 days. The math says that I only have to write 357 words per day IF I write every single one of those 280 days. Less than two pages a day.

If I flitter off to chase rainbows or browse the local Barnes & Noble instead of writing, then the next day I’ll have to write four pages to catch up.

But if I tell myself that I have lots of time and I set no quotas, no page production demands, on myself, the days will slip by faster than I realize. Like some lotus-eater, I will lose track of time until I suddenly wake up to the hard deadline looming huge. Do I want to find myself desperately sweating to finish? No, I do not.

We each devise our own methods, our own little rituals. One writer I knew printed out his pages each day and took satisfaction in watching the manuscript grow physically in size, week by week.

Another writer friend of mine used to determine his daily page quota, then stack that number of pennies next to his computer screen. As he completed a page, he would shift a penny to the opposite side of the screen. It was a method of increasing his stamina and developing the professional discipline necessary to get jobs done.

As writers and creative types, we tend to hate knobby, unfriendly words such as discipline, production, deadline, and quota. Their connotations seem to contradict those lovely concepts of freedom, imagination, and joy.

But experience has taught me that professionalism and discipline are the harness I must put on in order to finish the stories teeming in my brain.

Even when I lack a contract, I set my own hard and soft deadlines for my writing projects.

Case in point: Currently I’m working on something that I want to show my agent. My soft deadline was to get it to him before Christmas. But the holidays arrived, and my Christmas company arrived a few days earlier than expected. I am perhaps one day’s work shy of finishing the project. It hangs, suspended and frozen, in my mind, in my computer, on my desk.

I could have shooed my guests out of the house for several hours or lined them up in front of the television like children glued to the Teletubbies program on PBS, but it was Christmas; it was a soft deadline; and New York tends to shut down this time of year.

However, all such excuses have melted like the ice that coated my world last week. If my agent has departed New York for warmer climes, so be it. The email umbilical cord remains uncut.

Another project looms now. And the more I dawdle with Project One, the less time I have to spend with Projects Two and Three.

Which means, I’m setting a new deadline for myself: Project One has to be wrapped up by Monday. That’s it. No matter how many post-Christmas sales are beckoning. No matter how much I yearn to take down the tree and put the poinsettias away. The most magical time of the year is over, and there are stories to be written.

After all, September is getting closer every minute.

New Collections of Old Things

Some years ago, I embraced the principle of serendipity when it comes to creative interests. No longer do I yank the choke chain on my curiosity or stop an impulsive desire to learn more about a topic. Instead, I see where it will lead me.

Sometimes, I end up with nothing more than a collection of dusty items that I quickly tire of. Other times, however, I’m inspired to develop a story. Like a prospector panning for gold, I sift and sift, never knowing what will come of it all.

Since April, I’ve been on a serendipitous quest to gather old cookbooks. My criteria are as follows: They can’t be musty. They can’t smell of cigarette smoke. They must mention oleo.

Let me back up a bit.

Psychologically, this sudden yen for vintage cookery probably began in January, when a doctor put me on a modified Paleo diet to help me throw off the lingering after-effects of a long bout of walking pneumonia. As some of you may know, the Paleo diet nixes flours, grains, potatoes, dairy, and sugar. In fact, it’s easier to say what the diet allows … meat and vegetables. It was harsh. It was horrible. It was effective. I kicked the pneumonia. I lost a lot of weight.

However, like an exile banned by Caesar from living in ancient Rome, I crave the comfort foods of yore. Foods from my childhood before fast food, packaged, and convenience food became epidemic.

In April, I was out shopping with a friend who must now live gluten and dairy free. We stopped to browse in an antiques mall, and she went digging in the cookbook section for something published before 1975. Her reasoning was this: she wanted recipes of foods from before the invention of pre-packaged convenience. With the actual recipes for things like Dijon mustard, mayonnaise, or crescent rolls (did you know they used to be made from scratch in the days before Pillsbury?), she could then substitute problematic ingredients with those she’s able to eat.

She struck pay dirt with a Junior League cookbook from Jackson, Mississippi. As we drove away, I flipped through the cookbook idly and discovered wonderful dishes within its covers. It was, in effect, a treasure trove of delicious food.

But what struck my writer’s imagination even more was the quaint formality of the original contributors.

Mrs. Walter Something.

Mrs. Theodore Somebody III

Mrs. Henry Whosit, Jr.

All these ladies, publishing their recipes under their married names. There was dignity in that … the value of tradition.

Growing up, I often pored over my grandmother’s cookbook compiled by the women in her ranchers’ wives group. But those recipes were more casual, and the contributors had simply included their names as Betty This and Sandra That. They were just sharing good food from their kitchens without getting fancy about it.

During the early summer, I was attending an estate sale–since I can’t resist the lure of digging through someone’s dusty old possessions. An acquaintance of mine purchased an accordion file of bits of paper–all scribbled with recipes. “I’m looking for a good carrot cake recipe,” she announced as we stood in line together. “When I’m done looking through these, you can have them.”

(That file is now on a shelf in my garage, waiting until I have a few hours to sift and sort for whatever culinary treasures it may contain.)

A few weeks after that, I attended another sale and came across an old hardbound book. It had originally contained late Victorian dress patterns, but someone had pasted over the pages with newspaper clippings of recipes. The estate liquidator was disgusted by such misguided thriftiness. The dress patterns would have been valuable had they not been defaced by the recipes.

A little voice inside me whispered, “Buy it. Read the recipes.” So I shelled out $2 and came home with it. What I’ve lost to fashion history I’ve gained in food from the Great Depression.

During this Thanksgiving, I visited my hometown and spent one cold, rainy afternoon in a small antiques shop. On a shelf I found several small tin boxes, the kind that used to hold 3 x 5 index cards.

Inside were recipes, some written carefully on recipe cards, others clipped from yellowed newspapers, and still others scribbled on the backs of old letters–stamps and addresses still affixed–that were folded in half and tucked in firmly.

I chose two of the boxes and brought them home with me. In the yellow box, the first card says:

“Oatmeal Cookies” Mrs. Sallee Thorly – Cream 1 cup shortening – 1 cup brown sugar – 1 cup white – add 2 beaten egg yolks …

The second card is written in a different hand. It’s for cheese cake.

The third recipe is scrawled on a scrap of paper advertising Brillo soap pads. It’s for Yorkshire Pudding.

Behind it is an untitled recipe involving hot milk, eggs, sugar, etc. on the back of an envelope. There’s a 5-cent stamp and the postmark date is July 1966. The address is written in lovely, straight-as-a-rule cursive.

I can imagine the owner of this box, collecting recipes over the years from friends and family, especially ladies attending her church. Sharing and mingling traditions and customs. All of them bound by a single thread of purpose: supplying delicious food to their families.

The green recipe box is more organized. There are tabbed dividers for “Bread,” “Cake,” “Candy,” “Pastry,” “Cookies,” “Casseroles,” “Fish,” “Pickles,” and “Ices.”

The old-fashioned word, “Ices,” intrigued me most. That section contains a single recipe for vanilla ice cream. It’s been typed via a manual typewriter on a yellowing index card as follows:

2 envelopes Knox gelentin (sic)

1/2 C. cold milk

1 Qt. scalded milk

1 pt. cream & 1 can of cream

etc.

Imagine the fun of researching exactly how much a “can of cream” measures. Is it an actual measurement, or is it peculiar to this woman’s kitchen?

My college roommate used to talk about her mother’s pie crust recipe including “half an eggshell of water.” My grandmother measured her vanilla extract with the bottle lid.

I can sum all this up in a single word … nostalgia.

Of course! I miss the comfort of my grandmother’s steamy kitchen–a plain, straightforward room without any frills beyond a flirty yellow stripe on the window valance. White-painted cabinets, a long expanse of Formica counter in white with little gold speckles, a boxy stove in Harvest Gold with a wonky oven door that required you to slam it with your knee just so to make it close properly. She made bread-and-butter pickles in a huge yellow Pyrex bowl with a dinner plate on top. She mixed her pie crust with her fingers–no fancy pastry cutter needed. Her soup-bone soup smelled delicious on a cold winter’s day. And Sunday chicken was fried up right in a huge iron skillet.

Somewhere in the family boxes is a tattered little notebook of the recipes my grandfather cooked while a bachelor. It served as my grandmother’s first cookbook, the one she learned from when she married.

Two drawers in my mother’s china hutch are filled with cuttings of recipes from newspapers and magazines. I haven’t yet gone through them all.

But I still love stumbling across a ring-bound cookbook from a church group, the kind with oleo in the ingredients lists. Not because I intend to use margarine, but because it tells me the era when these recipes were compiled and shared … or sold to raise funds for some worthy project.

I love finding the page with a long-dried smear on it. The page with the corner turned down. The penciled annotations of “Use less salt!” or “Tommy’s favorite!” or simply, “Good!”

I’m no longer starving on the Paleo diet, and I don’t know where my recipe odyssey is taking me. Perhaps nowhere. Perhaps to a character or a setting or a plot down the road.

In this day and time, when our kitchens are fancier and the Food Network instructs us on preparing coulis and reductions, I think of how all we really need is a rolling pin, a few simple ingredients, and a Pyrex mixing bowl to turn out something mouth-watering.

Writing with Flair

Commercial genre fiction is not for the timid, or the mousey, or the quiet, retiring individual.

As a writer, you can be any or all of those things in real life, but when you put your fingertips on the keyboard, you should channel whatever inner flamboyance and verve you possess. Feed it right into your characters.

Your characters need to leap off the page. They need to be sharp, vivid, bold, exaggerated, and unpredictable.

“But I’m not any of those things,” you may be protesting. “That’s not who I am. How do I identify with that kind of artificial, clownish character?”

Ah … perhaps the key word here is “artificial.”

When did it become the norm to believe our characters are anything BUT artificial constructions?

The so-called “realistic” character is too often an excuse to hide behind when we lack the nerve to write anything that’s flamboyant.

When I sit down to read fiction, I don’t want characters that are modeled closely on real life. Real life is boring, mundane, filled with endless banal tasks, the drudgery of chores, and meaningless small talk. I chat with my next-door neighbors maybe twice a year while picking up the newspaper or rolling out the garbage Polycart. The topic is never earth-shattering: the new recycle pickup schedule, or can I recommend a plumber … that sort of thing. Not the stuff of fiction!

When I was a child, one of my favorite cartoon characters was Snaggletooth. He was some kind of cat or tiger–which is probably why I gravitated to him–and his main distinguishing tag was when he would stand on one foot, poised in the direction he was about to run, and he would announce grandly: “Exit stage left!” or “Exit stage right!”

For all I know, that cartoon may have taught me right from left. I don’t remember anything else about the character except those vivid departures. Yet, despite the murky mush of childhood memories, Snaggletooth has never been forgotten.

How does one of your characters enter the story? How does she exit a scene? What does she do while she’s stage centered on the page, involved in the story’s action?

Is she making ANY impression on readers?

If not, why not?

One of my favorite old-movie actresses is Bette Davis. You may or may not have seen any of her films, but you’ve probably heard of her.

Even in her earliest films, when she was just a studio player and miscast in little roles of flighty society girls, she carried a presence with her. She knew how to walk, how to carry herself, how to move about so that she held the audience’s eye. That’s stagecraft, and she learned her acting from the stage before she ever went to Hollywood.

All actors of that era were trained to do that. They weren’t trying to be natural or realistic. They were driving the story action forward and doing their best to make you remember them.

One of my favorite film entrances of a character is in the William Wyler film, THE LETTER, based on a short story by Somerset Maugham. The audience is shown the moonlight shining down on a peaceful rubber plantation. All is quiet. The workers are sleeping in hammocks under thatched sheds. Then a pistol shot rings out. A man bursts from the bungalow and staggers down the porch steps. Bette Davis follows him.

She’s wearing an evening gown. She holds a pistol in one hand. Her arm is extended and rigid. She fires into his back. And fires again, emptying the revolver into his dying body. As she shoots, she descends a porch step, then another, until she’s standing over him.

The camera zooms in on her face. She’s intent, cold-blooded, lethal. There’s no hesitation in her, no fear, no regret. She knows exactly what she’s just done, and it was precisely what she intended to do. She has shot this man down the way I might destroy a rabid dog.

Then, as the plantation workers wake up and run toward her in alarm, the predator in Bette vanishes. She pulls on a mask of teary weakness and begins to lie about what just happened and why.

But the audience has seen the truth and can settle in to watch what she does next in trying to trick the police and the prosecutors.

“Realistic?” Not at all. Vivid and effective? You bet!

A vivid character doesn’t have to possess superhuman powers in order to compel reader attention.

Just ask Mr. Dickens. He created some of the most memorable characters still in print, and they have been in print a mighty long time.

Is Ebeneezer Scrooge “realistic” or drawn closely from real life?

No!

He’s such an exaggeration of miserly behavior that his name has been absorbed into the English language as a label for a tight-fisted, grouchy individual who values money over human kindness.

Was Edgar Allen Poe trying to share the mundane, everyday details of ordinary human existence in his stories?

No!

Instead, we have a madman creeping through a possessed house in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Would Sherlock Holmes continue to fascinate us were he more ordinary?

No!

This man has extraordinary powers of observation. He keeps his pipe tobacco in a Persian slipper on the mantel. From time to time, he celebrates his patriotism for his queen by firing bullets into the wall in the shape of her initials.

[If I want to be realistic about Holmes, I would be thinking about his landlady and asking myself why didn't she throw him out. But who cares about realism? We LOVE Holmes just as he is, flaws, quirks, peculiarities, and all.]

Even the current book du jour–THE BOOK THIEF–which is pretty darn mainstream and literary–has vivid characters. Death is its narrator and the book features a little girl who is struggling to learn to read while stealing books ordered burned by the Nazis. A realistic character wouldn’t be defying a Nazi edict. She would be staying home, helping with the laundry, and doing exactly as she was told.

Characters have to be exaggerated in order to ignite readers’ imaginations.

Whether it’s a little boy who mysteriously eludes destruction by the evil Voldemort, or the three musketeers cheerfully taking on Cardinal Richelieu’s guards despite being outnumbered, or Eliza Bennett refusing to dance with the handsome and fantastically wealthy Mr. Darcy … these characters capture us and enchant us because they are boldly drawn and anything but realistic.

The desire to avoid the bold, seemingly unnatural character is understandable. It’s also fatal to a story’s success.

Quiet nonentities go flat on the page. They scan as B-O-R-I-N-G. They’re too careful, too shy, too prudent to move the story forward. This type would be the hobbit that stays home, unlike Bilbo Baggins.

I happen to be an introvert. Over the years, I have forced myself to be able to mingle in a crowd, to socialize, to lecture, and to interact, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. At the end of such occasions, I’m usually drained. My first instinct, whenever I’m invited to any public function, is to refuse the invitation.

Beyond that, in real life, I avoid confrontations. I don’t like to get into arguments. I don’t like to witness conflict of any kind. Ugly or angry behavior stresses me.

That’s my real nature.

But when I write, I recognize that my characters are NOT me. They cannot live or survive in their story world if they are shy, avoid social interaction, or elude conflict.

Their functions and responsibilities as fictional characters are far different from mine because I am a real person in a real world.

The character must not be built or evaluated on a real-world model.

The character must instead fit a fictional model and do what the story requires of him.

Stories–particularly genre fiction–are not realistic. They are entertainment, and they are structured in certain ways to fulfill that function.

That’s why fictional characters need to be exaggerated into creatures that are weird or wild or zany or colorful or predatory or just more darned courageous than anyone else.

They aren’t–and never will be–real.

They’re not–and shouldn’t be–intended to be real.

Make them as bold as you can, and as vivid as you dare.

And then push them a little farther out there … way past your comfort zone.

Just ask Janet Evanovich, who creates old ladies who carry Glocks strapped to their walkers and monkeys that escape research laboratories wearing little hats made from aluminum foil.

Silly? You bet.

And she laughs all the way to the bank.

Longing For a Pond

In times of hardship or extreme interference, it can be helpful to the writing process to adopt mottoes. Anything that will boost our fragile writer egos and keep us going, right?

Right.

Here’s one that I’ve always liked: Illegitimi non carborundum.

It’s catchy. It looks swanky and erudite if you post it on your wall or desk. It’s even possible to remember so that you can mutter it beneath your breath as you put up with yet another distraction.

Translation: a quote from a Kris Kristofferson song with the lyrics “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

The language: pseudo-Latin cooked up as a joke to make us smile when things get tough.

People who enjoy such things have also translated the saying into real Latin. Here are two versions: Noli sinere nothos te opprimere, and Noli nothis permittere te terere.

So what … is … the … point?

The Thanksgiving holiday gave me a much-needed respite, a little time off to loaf, visit family, and relax. On the nine-hour drive home I left the radio off and just experienced the peace of my own thoughts. About halfway through the journey, I decided to solve a minor plot hiccup in my current work-in-progress.

I gave it some thought and came up with a solution. With no distractions except keeping my eyes on the road and minding my mirrors, I found it easy to decide on a plausible, simple motivation for this particular character’s actions.

The problem has been that I’ve been home for two days. Forty-eight hours have gone by, and I’ve yet to find a moment to jot down my solution, much less actually write it into the manuscript.

All I can do is be thankful for the peace and quiet around me when I thought it up. That’s enabled me to be very clear in my mind about what I want my character to do. The clarity has stamped it firmly on my memory. So often, when I’m plotting while on the run in my daily course, I forget what I came up with. Too distracted to remember more than, I HAD it, and it was perfect!

Yesterday, while heaving groceries through my front door, I found myself thinking of Thoreau and longing for a pond of my own. Oh, Walden, Walden, wherefore art thou and why can’t I have you?

There was a time, a long-ago age, when poets and bards had patrons who fed them in exchange for good stories. It wasn’t a perfect system. What system is? Were these storytellers given a chance to gnaw on their quill pens in peace while they cooked up the next installment of “The Distress of the Dying Damsel?”

I’d like to think so, but the cynical side of me wonders if maybe they weren’t wedged into a corner of the Great Hall with their lord and master yelling at his minions and belching over the stewed onions while a pack of flea-bitten hounds bayed at the cat crouched in the rafters.

Well, okay. Let’s choose someone from a more civilized age. Nathaniel Hawthorne was surely left in peace. No emails to answer. No text messages beeping for attention. No minivan of children clamoring for soccer games and piano recitals. Just a gabled house and a snowy afternoon, the quiet drawn close like a warm shawl around the shoulders.

Maybe. I’m going to think so. Surely Mr. Hawthorne wasn’t afflicted with the butcher pounding on the door to be paid or termites in his attic.

I need some hope that someday, somehow I’ll find a way to enforce more of that peace and quiet, that mental space around me similar to what I enjoyed on my long drive home.

I need that pond. I need someone to deliver my groceries in silence. I need all the paperwork, bank statements, and mail to blow to the winds of perdition for a while. I need the housework done. I need the dogs washed and the Christmas tree put up. I need the larger battery backup connected to my writing computer. I need a thousand hours to my day. And I would like more chocolate in my life, thank you.

Meanwhile, I’m hunting for a scrap of paper so I can write down that character motivation …

Plot Is a Four-Letter Word

Lately, quite a few people have been requesting more information about plotting, so let’s consider a few basics:

1) P is for persistence:

Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “persist” as to go on resolutely or stubbornly in spite of opposition, importunity, or warning.

Your protagonist must be a character who persists in pursuing the story’s objective, no matter how difficult the circumstances or opposition become.

Plot hinges on conflict, and conflict comes from two goals in opposition. Therefore, both the protagonist and antagonist are persistent people. They are focused on what they want or are trying to achieve. They are highly motivated. They are determined to succeed. They refuse to give up. And each scene of the story … each event within the plot should center on these stubborn, focused people who are maneuvering against each other to win.

2) L is for length:

How long will your story be? Short, say about 3,000 words? Or long, about 70,000? Whatever the length, that is your border. The story has to fit within its perimeters, whether those are set by genre or publication specifications. Knowing your intended length helps you determine your priorities as you select the list of events that will occur in your story.

If, for example, you’re supposed to be writing a novel about star-crossed lovers and your assigned length is 65,000 words, you’re going to need a lot more happening than they meet, they feel instant attraction, they quarrel, and they make up in time to live happily ever after.

Consider the comedy film, THE LADY EVE, by Preston Sturges. Starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, the story revolves around a con artist father and daughter who set up a meeting with a wealthy, reclusive, naive young man. Eve weaves a rapid spell around him, and he quickly succumbs to her charm and beauty. By the end of a few days they’re engaged to be married. That comprises the movie’s first act. How will Sturges fill the remaining two-thirds of the film’s length?

Act Two must have a breakup between the two lovers. So Henry’s character discovers that Eve is an adventuress and her father is a professional card sharp. He breaks off the engagement at once. However, Eve has truly fallen in love with him. Angered by his dumping her, she sets out for revenge and “meets” him once again, this time posing as her identical twin half-sister. And she makes him fall in love with her a second time.

Act Three is where she marries him, then–on their wedding night–talks about her numerous liaisons with countless other men. All of this is invented, of course, but poor Henry doesn’t know it. He flees again, heartbroken and distraught, only to encounter Eve a third time–once again in her “real” card-playing persona.

Beyond this bare bones summary of the central storyline, there are subplots, amusing secondary characters, and comedic stunts to help fill the length.

However, trying to fit a story of this scope into a short story’s limited word count would involve chopping it down to a mere sketch of two or three scenes. A LOT would have to be left out. In effect, it would be a radically different plot.

3) O is for outline:

Most writers start out with a character in mind or perhaps a setting or a handful of events. From that kernel of inspiration, the actual plotting has to be worked out. Outlining can be challenging, but no matter how difficult it may prove to be, the time invested is nearly always worthwhile. Would you rather spend your hours writing and rewriting an outline of five to ten pages, or write fifty to one hundred pages of poorly thought through manuscript that then has to be thrown away?

*Start with your protagonist. What does she want? Why?

*Next, create your antagonist. Who is opposed to your protagonist achieving that objective? Why?

*Write down a list of possible plot events as quickly as possible. Don’t edit or analyze. Just jot them down.

*Later, determine which of the events to keep and which to toss aside.

*Put the kept events in sequential order. Don’t worry if they don’t precisely connect. These will possibly be your key turning points.

*What signifies a huge or significant change in your protagonist’s life? Put that first.

*Look at your list of events again. Do any of them follow logically from the event of change? If not, think about what might happen next. Toss and keep events as needed.

*What is your protagonist’s plan to achieve the goal?

*What step will your protagonist take first?

*What is the immediate outcome of that attempt?

*How does the antagonist thwart this attempt?

*What will your protagonist do next?

*How does the antagonist thwart that?

*Do any of these attempts and failures lead logically to one of the plot events on your list?

*If not, what crisis do they lead to? That will be your first turning point.

*Think about what might happen next after the first major crisis. Plot from there to the next crisis/turning point. Follow cause-and-effect logic.

*The climax of the story should be a big showdown between the protagonist and antagonist. Plan for it. Make sure that what happens in the story leads in that direction. It is your story’s destination.

*Look at your outline again. If anything seems contrived or out of place, shift it or motivate it. If it still seems wrong, delete it.

4) T is for trajectory:

Think of your plot as an arc spanning the story from its start to its ending. At all times, the protagonist is working toward achieving his objective. With each attempt, and failure, the protagonist should find a plausible motivation for why he’s willing to continue. And he should try again.

All of those efforts will result in gradually changing the protagonist. That alteration may be slight or it may be profound. Either way, the protagonist should be forced to either grow as an individual or devolve.

Consider two examples of trajectory: Scarlett O’Hara from GONE WITH THE WIND and Michael Corleone from THE GODFATHER.

Scarlett starts out as a pretty, willful, headstrong young girl who is infatuated with her neighbor Ashley Wilkes. When he chooses to marry his cousin, Scarlett plunges into an impulsive marriage of her own. Through the course of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that follows, she changes into a survivor, a businesswoman, and a mother. She’s so goal-driven and stubborn that it takes a lot of heartache to shake her from her infatuation with Ashley. By the end of the story, she realizes who she actually loves instead and is finally willing to at least try to work out a real relationship with him. Her character trajectory seems slight because it’s so gradual, but at the end of the story she has at least set her feet on the path of true change.

Michael starts out as a young man who knows what his father does for a living but thinks naively that he can remain separate from the mob activities. He’s distinguished himself heroically in WWII and is planning a political career. It’s not until his father is gunned down in an assassination attempt and lying helpless in the hospital that Michael involves himself directly in his father’s business. He protects his father, saving the don’s life. Beyond that, Michael takes revenge on those behind the plot by coldly executing them in a restaurant. Then he seizes the reins of his father’s empire from his older brother. He lies to his wife, promising her that this is temporary and that he’ll get out of the business. But instead he goes in deeper and deeper into the cesspool of organized crime. He eventually becomes far more ruthless than his father ever was. And when he orders the execution of his remaining brother, his trajectory downward from a respectable young man to a ruthless monster is complete.

Story plot, ideally, should be an entwining of the protagonist’s outer story problem and attempts to solve it and the inner problem or trajectory of change that happens along the way. The plot events should affect the protagonist in one way or the other from start to finish.

Simple Persistence

All summer, the weeds in my flowerbeds grew unchecked. All summer, I fretted about it. I like my house to look cared for and tidy.

I hated to see the mess when I would come home. I expected my neighbors to complain, but they politely, kindly ignored the situation. Several times, I intended to hire someone to pull weeds and root out the grass taking hold, but then I never got around to it. With my back injury, I remain under orders not to dig or pull.

This week, I stepped outside to hang small flags in honor of Veteran’s Day. The sparrows fluttered up from the rose bushes and tall weeds in the flowerbed. Mice rustled through brown crab grass, scuttling for cover. Angrily I chastised myself once again for this state of affairs. “Got to get this cleared out,” I told myself for the countless time.

One particular species of unsightly weed has grown head tall, a gnarly, thick-stemmed monster. Last week, it bloomed with numerous tiny white flowers. There it stands, taller than me and blooming in a pretty, if feral way. I refused, however, to admire it. Ugly. Wrong. Odious. I’ve got all sorts of adjectives for it, and a few flowers weren’t going to change my mind about it.

But as I put out the flag, I heard a faint humming sound and saw a honeybee busily working those fingernail-sized flowers. I had no idea that bees would still be harvesting pollen this late in the year. And all my shame and embarrassment over the weeds fell away. Unwittingly and unintentionally, I had provided a last bit of food for the honeybees.

In this modern day and time, when honeybees are beleaguered by virus, pesticides, and the loss of natural habitat, to even see one at work is a rarity. Yet we cannot survive without them. They help keep our food supply going.

I was glad to see this single bee. I’ve missed them since moving here. My last residence had two hollies along the front facade that attracted them. Dozens of them would be buzzing through the holly blooms, and yet none of the bees ever bothered me there. This house has been devoid of bees … until now.

I choose to take it as a good sign, a positive omen that somehow, sometimes, the world just works the way it should. If I’d been capable of keeping the bed in order, there might not have been a lingering wildflower for this bee to sample before winter closes the door.

Seeing the bee at work also reminded me of the merit of simple persistence. I don’t know how far the bee had to fly to find these stingy little bits of harvest. The season is dying away, and the fingers of winter are reaching out for us, and yet little bee was still harvesting, still working hard. The bee works by instinct and the mysterious rituals of its species. It doesn’t quit until it dies. Regardless of the encroachment of humans, it continues to find a way to feed the hive and its queen.

So, too, is writing a process of simple persistence. You plan. You imagine. And then you simply work and work and work and work, day by day, hour by hour, unable perhaps to see your way clearly through the story at times. You must keep going. You must persevere until the story is finished, the draft completed. You can’t abandon it partway through or you will never learn, never grow. You will never achieve a comb of honey, the nectar of your imagination and talent.

You can rely on your outline or you can fly strictly on the wings of story sense and intuition. Either way, you move forward, from beginning to end, as many times as it takes to get the words right.

The Joyless Child

Well, the great candy-fest has come and gone. I spent an intense two hours Halloween night standing at my front door, ready to spring into action the moment my doorbell rang. Youngsters dressed as The Incredible Hulk with green faces and foam-rubber muscles have the patience of a gnat and will destroy the doorbell if you don’t respond within nano-seconds. Had I ever sat down, I would have been too slow springing up again.

Although I can’t call Halloween my favorite day (I outgrew that several years ago), I still hand out candy so I can see the little ones in their costumes.

As we writers know, humans in all guises are fascinating creatures and an endless source of writing material. My doorstep saw the polite, well-mannered children who greeted me and thanked me. Then there were the barbarians, too young as yet to be hooligans, but give them about four to six more years and a driver’s license. You haven’t lived until a ten-year-old brandishes a wooden dagger at your throat and demands your Snickers Bars or else!

Of course, the best entertainment in my small-people watching came from the little ones. The two-year-olds just don’t get it yet. The three-year-olds are the ones reaching to grab candy for themselves. The four-year-olds are circling the group for second and third helpings.

The top charmer was the toddler in a T-Rex costume who was so fascinated by the cement dog on my porch that not even the prospect of candy could lure her attention away from the engrossing process of inserting her index finger into the dog’s mouth. The best costume of the night went to the clever young lady who was dressed as a bag of jelly beans. She’d designed and made the costume herself, but she confessed that it was terribly hot. Runner-up was the child who came as a candy cane–complete with red-and-white striped tights–and carried a Christmas stocking to hold her swag. She was young, but she already had style.

And then there were the kids who’d tried to make costumes for themselves despite next-to-nothing to work with. Those take me back to my childhood.

My first costume was home-made by my mother. I went as a ghost fashioned from a bedsheet and one of Dad’s old white undershirts, and Mom gave me strict orders not to say a word so no one would recognize my voice. Let’s just say that no one at school guessed who I was, and I was thrilled to be Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

I can recall having only one store-bought costume. It was black with a skeleton painted on it. I got it when I was seven, and it had to last through several other Halloweens until I completely outgrew it. Thereafter, my outfits were always home-made, devised first by my innovative mother and, later, myself.

Last night, I saw kids who’d been pretty clever, given limited resources. Some had painted their faces. Others wore hand-me-down party frocks for the Princess look. The least imaginative were the boys clad in football jerseys. But perhaps they were fantasizing about someday playing for the OU Sooners.

And then … there came my last trick-or-treater of the night. A grim-faced little girl of maybe ten in a cheap school dress and stringy hair, carrying a battered plastic Walmart sack. No face paint, no hat, no borrowed finery or ghoulish robes. She came alone, without any buddies to giggle with in the dark spans between houses.

There was no excited shout of “Trick or Treat!” and no “Thank you” for what I gave her.

Her eyes held a dull determination, and there was no smile on her face. Certainly there was no joy in her heart. I saw no excitement in her, no giddiness, and none of that eager-to-greedy anticipation that had carried the others before her.

There wasn’t much candy in her sack either.

When I closed the door, I couldn’t forget her, this joyless child. My writer’s imagination leapt to work, immediately playing the “what if” game. I had to speculate on what could so deaden a child’s sense of fun and adventure.

Was she out there against her will? Was she sulking because she didn’t have a costume? Or had there been domestic trouble in the family that evening to spoil the outing for her? Did she have an alcoholic parent who’d shouted at her, or belittled her before she went out?

Maybe she was unhappy because she had no friends or siblings to go with. Or maybe she was the unfortunate kid who didn’t get invited to the big Halloween party.

Was she afflicted with a lack of imagination? Was there no adult in her family sufficiently interested in her to even try to dress her up? How much effort does it take to work a bit of magic with a tube of lipstick or even a smear of shoe polish or Magic Marker?

Maybe too much, if no one cares.

And yet, how did she come to be tramping doggedly alone in my neighborhood after dark if no one had bothered to drive her there? Or did she walk to our houses, a stolid little figure braving the shadows alone? At the age of ten, I would have loved doing that. But this child was not having fun.

I shall never know this odd little girl who came last. I can only imagine what brought her to my door and where she went next.

She’ll appear in one of my stories someday. Of that, I can be sure.