Barbara Gregorich's Blog, page 11

The F Words: Thinking of F Words

In an earlier blog, The F Words: A Writing Coach, I mentioned that Esther Hershenhorn (the writing coach!) gave me a list of six “threads” to follow throughout my novel, making certain that I didn’t drop any of those threads for too long. One of those six threads was “Cole thinking about F words.” 

As I mentioned, this thread surprised me. I would not, I think, have come up with it on my own. Cole’s actually writing F-word poems: Yes, that I would have listed as an important thread. But his t...

The F Words: Subplots

Subplots are delicious. These little stories within the larger story give readers a great taste of something else: they are breathers from the tension of the main plot. They also show us, indirectly, more about the main character. I’ve written about the importance of subplots before (see The Beguilement of Subplots).

I can’t really say that I think a lot about subplots when I’m writing a book. They seem to come naturally to me. The story is moving along, and something happens and I realize: O...

The F Words: A Writing Coach

As a professional writer, I’m usually sure when my finished work is ready to be published. Of course, as a professional writer I hope that editors will make changes that clarify and enhance the work I gave them. Almost always, they do.

But I also know that, sometimes, what I’ve written needs help before I can submit it — there’s something that I just can’t see, or that I’m doing wrong. I can sense this. But I don’t know what that something is. When this is the case, I ask for help from my wri...

The F Words: English Teacher Hero

In my high school, Brookfield High (Brookfield, Ohio), my favorite teacher was my English teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Drummond. I was fortunate enough to have her as my teacher for two years rather than one. She influenced me  greatly with her love of learning, her wide range of knowledge, her understanding of the human condition as expressed through literature, and her love of language. In addition, she had a great sense of humor. 

It’s possible that I would have become a writer no matter what, bu...

The F Words: Conflict

Conflict is at the heart of all good fiction. The main character is in conflict with something: another person; society; himself/herself; the forces of nature. The attempts of the main character to achieve his or her goals results in conflicts, some small, some large. Conflict engages reader interest. Conflict helps the main character grow. Without conflict, a novel would be slow. Even dull. 

In the opening scene of The F Words, Cole is in conflict with society: the city of Chicago has senten...

The F Words: Poetry and the Middle

In my previous blog I mentioned that in writing The F Words based on the advice in Write Your Novel from the Middle, by James Scott Bell, I reaped not only the benefit of writing a book more easily and more quickly, but also the benefit of improving one of my thematic elements precisely because I was writing the novel toward its middle.

That thematic element was Cole’s writing of poetry. Specifically, only poetry about words that began with the letter f. As I mentioned in a previous blog, The...

The F Words: Writing from the Middle

My usual method for writing a novel is to come up with a situation first (as in a woman playing major league baseball), then create both the characters and plot within that situation. As I’m thinking of these things (often this takes months and months), I envision the novel’s beginning and its ending — so that, when I sit down to write the book, I know how it starts, and I know how it ends.

Everything in between is unknown. So I usually take it step by step: event A causes event B, which ...

The F Words: Poetry

If you’ve been reading my blogs on how I wrote The F Words, you might remember that I set out to write a YA novel about student rights, immigrant rights, and political protest. Never did it cross my mind that I would also be writing a novel about poetry. Or writing poems themselves.

But somehow, that happened. It happened in the first few pages, with the inciting incident: Cole’s English teacher, Mr. Nachman, catches him tagging the high school wall with the f word and makes him atone for it ...

The F Words: Inciting Incident

In fiction the main character experiences an “inciting incident.” The inciting incident is an event — not just any event, but one that propels the main character into the actions that will constitute the story. To state it another way, the inciting incident  (which need not be the first event in the book) triggers the primary actions of the story. 

In The F Words the inciting incident, which thrusts Cole into the actions of the story, is his spray-painting the f word on the brick wall of his ...

The F Words: Cross-Country Running

In all of my novels, athletics/exercise is a part of the protagonist’s life. I think that’s because I believe that we, humans, are both body and mind, and wherever possible one of these shouldn’t be neglected in favor of the other. So in The F Words Cole is a cross-country runner. Because I never ran cross-country, I had to learn something about it as I was writing the book. And research is almost always fun.

To learn more about cross-country running for The F Words, I read articles on th...