Penny Draper's Blog, page 3

-5: A Camel

WikipediaYesterday I wanted epic. Today, I’m into detail.

For some reason, my research took me on an exploration of camels. Did you know that there is a camel conference every year in the UK? Camel people from all over the world (and they don’t have a cool name like potamologist, I checked) to get together and talk about camels. Fascinating.

Unfortunately, ever since I read about camels, I haven’t been able to get them off my mind. I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch, but surely there’s a place in a flood book for a camel?

-6: A Sense of Epic

Wikipedia

Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates was one of my favourite books growing up. I was a skater, for one thing, which first drew me to the book. Then I became enamoured with the “Hero of Haarlem”, the embedded story of the boy who put his finger in the dike to hold back the sea. Such heroism! Such ingenuity! I was captivated by the idea that such a small problem could lead to such calamity, and that such a small helper could save the day. The contest was almost biblical.

I kept a picture of the statue of the Hero of Haarlem with me while I wrote this book. It was to remind me of the epic nature of floods, and the insignificant amount of power we can wield against them. Floods really are epic – just think, this lazy river went from approximately 100 metres to 35 kilometres wide during the flood of 1997. If that’s not epic, I don’t know what is.

RRR is not an epic. But I do want there to be a sense of epic, a gut feeling that the climax is being driven by a force that is colossal, boundless and monumental.

I don’t think I’m there yet.

My solution: I’m going to watch a DVD of Joseph Campbell for inspiration while walking at my treadmill desk. Epic, mythic…I don’t want to deal with details today. I want to feel limitless. Is that so much to ask?

-7: The Disconnect

Kathryn, dear Kathryn, thank you! Her editor’s eyes have just caught a major disconnect in the timeline.

I blame this, absolutely, on my computer, and the ease with which it allows the “cut and paste” function to operate. Honestly, it’s a wonder more timelines do not find themselves victims to computer slashers.

I am not so very old, and yet I have seen colossal change in the ways with which we put words to paper. I started writing with an HB pencil.  I still bear scars from Grade Three, because my unenlightened teacher rapped my knuckles with the wooden pointer every time she caught me clutching the precious pencil in my left hand. (For the record, I started to stutter. I needed a note from my doctor citing medical disability before being allowed to use my left hand without punishment.)

In Grade Five, we were finally allowed to write in ink. No ball point pens were allowed, the thinking being that they caused pens to glide too quickly and thus promoted poor penmanship. I still remember choosing my first fountain pen at Grand and Toy, and going on to destroy my mom’s favourite tablecloth when I spilled the ink bottle.

In high school, essays were written in long hand. Since we were required to keep a copy “for our portfolio”, we had to use carbon paper. Ball point pens were now allowed even if they promoted sloppiness, as they were better for pushing through the layers to the bottom sheet.

My graduation present was a portable typewriter. Electric, no less. It fit into a latched traveling case and would be my key to university success. The typewriter created a beautiful finished product compared to longhand carbons, but required gallons of LiquidPaper. My finished papers tended to be lumpy, sometimes even damp.

Summer vacations I worked for a large firm of chartered accountants. While I was there, they created a brand new department called “Word Processing”. Jobs in the WP department were highly paid as the work required technical expertise, so the positions were offered by seniority. The older secretaries wanted nothing to do with those ridiculous machines, so “Word Processing” became the place for the cool kids to work. It was my very first bull pen. Word processing meant that sometimes whole paragraphs went missing from documents, never to be found again, but they were pretty boring paragraphs anyway.

So has the convenience of technology encouraged better writing or sloppy formatting? It certainly has made the proof-readers’ job harder. And for writers who feel a thrill when they cut, paste, shift scenes and move crises forwards and backwards – beware, unless you have Kathryn on your team!

I know I’m ranting, but this is embarrassing. I should have caught the fact that there were too many days between Tuesday and Friday and Finn couldn’t be both at the Forks and at the riverbank on the same morning.

Don’t worry, it’s fixed. Readers may now proceed through the book in an orderly fashion.

 

 

-8: Building tension

So I’ve decided on the climax and found a place for Finn to be. Now I have to build towards the event. My desire, of course, is for the building tension to be so engrossing that readers simply cannot put the book down. It is a daunting task at the best of times, and this is not the best of times. I alluded earlier to the slow and agonizing nature of floods. A flood is worrisome. Exciting? Not so much.

I’ve been playing with a couple of different tension-creating devices. (Hmm, that sounds a little like torture, doesn’t it?) The only other book I’ve written that is similar is Ice Storm. It was also a slow build: freezing rain kept falling, ice buildups grew, and the infrastructure of the city began to dismember itself. In that book, I built tension by using the days of the week. So if the rain started falling on Monday, how much worse was it on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc.? It worked well because that whole disaster took place over about a ten day period. Oh, there was a lot of trouble for the next month, but the climax was definitely the day that three million people were potentially going to be evacuated from the city. The day by day, inch by inch, drop by drop development pattern worked for that book.

It won’t work for RRR. The tension takes months to develop, starting from the time when first flood estimates are released, followed by days and days of waiting interspersed with flurries of activity. That’s too erratic to hold interest. So then I thought I could use the rising water. We’ve all seen flood markers along rivers; maybe Finn and his friends could make a practice of checking the levels. But that’s no good either, because the water just doesn’t rise consistently. I’d be too bored to even write the book much less think anyone would read it if I did it that way.

Next idea was to follow the crest of the river. That would give me a series of small disasters as the crest passed through other communities and made its way towards my hero. Collateral damage, if you will. No, in this case it’s Finn who would probably get so bored waiting for the story to catch up to him that he’d lose patience and go on walkabout.

There has to be a way to create a rising sense of dread.

Whenever I am stuck like this, I go back to my roots in oral storytelling. Before I started writing my stories down, I went to schools and libraries and festivals and told them aloud. There are some obvious differences between writing and telling a story. The tale can’t be too long; there can’t be too many characters or sub-plots; excessive description must be eliminated. It’s all about narrative.

So here’s the trick if you’re ever stuck in your writing: tell your book aloud. No notes. No longer than twenty minutes. Preferably to six to ten year olds, because they’ll tell you what they really think. Otherwise, your dog or in my case, the glass doors of my fireplace, will do fine as an audience. Start with a version of “Once upon a time” and end with “and finally, this happened…” Don’t stop. Don’t backtrack. Talk your way out of any holes you dig for yourself.

This is what happens. If you get lost in a sub-plot, talking your way back to the main path will show you where you went wrong. If your characters don’t behave well, having them act out their scenes will help you determine what kind of shock therapy is in order. If your dialogue is stilted, speaking the parts will help. And if your pacing is off, if tension is not built steadily to the climax, your listeners will start to get bored. This works even for dogs, by the way, because they can tell how compelling the story is from the tone of your voice.

The goal is a moment of collective silence, a caught breath. You want your listeners in the palm of your hand at that moment, hanging on to your every word.

Storytelling takes you back to bare bones, and shows every flaw. It also gives you a golden opportunity to redress the bones in more suitable clothing. So excuse me, I’m off to talk to my fireplace.

-9: Plot hole

So now I know what the climax is, as well as when and where it happens, and obviously I need Finn to be there. But in real life, he couldn’t be. That scenario defies belief. So now what?

In order for him to be where I want him to be, Finn will have to defy the evacuation order. I’ve just written a great long scene in which he does just that. The military try to explain to him the importance of leaving and his grandmother is distraught, but Finn remains defiant. Now, there is a core of local men remaining behind with the military to mind the dikes. Finn’s become really good at checking for leaks – could he be known as some sort of expert in this? And that’s why a thirteen-year-old is allowed to stay with the men?

Or, could he be foolish enough to run away and hide in his house? Why would he do that? Just what is so important that he can’t leave? Armstrong’s secret? It would have to be a good enough reason to counteract his stupidity, especially after the incident in Morris. ( A little foreshadowing there.)

Is there any way I can connect him with the event from a distance? It feels unlikely to me, as there needs to be an element of the eyewitness in this scene for the climax to ring true. There has to be immediacy.

There may have to be a suspension of disbelief. How far can I take it before readers will throw down the book in disgust and say, “That could never happen!”?

Another digression…

I interrupt your regular programming…

The fact that I keep interrupting my writing process says something about the process, doesn’t it? Sigh. But I’m off on another tangent. I’ve just left Turkey, and it has left me a lot to think about.

We have said good-bye to the bus, not without some sense of relief. Four to five hours a day for two weeks is a lot of hours on a bus. But it did enable us to see a great deal of the country. So how to sum up?

Many of the other tour participants kept journals, which was quite necessary as we saw so much in such a short time. The danger is that you can’t remember which ruin was which. But one of the ladies was an art teacher, and her journal did much more than that. It was a pictograph of images of the country; things we’d seen, people we’d met, jokes we’d shared. The coke bottles on top of chimneys, indicating that inside was a young lady looking for a husband. The thin-waisted tea glasses; the kerchiefed women; our bus squeezing through narrow cobblestoned alleys. The ongoing argument between the Greek woman on the tour and our Turkish guide as to which country owned Santa Claus (you had to be there!) Mostly the drawings were hers, but additions were made along the way by Turks we met and other tour members. Her diary ended up being the most accurate compilation, as Turkey was really a series of images rather than a storyline.

After two weeks what I have are images of a modern secular republic that can boast 10,000 years of history. Of rainbow staircases in Istanbul and cave dwellers in Cappadocia. Of safe streets, good wine and friendly people. Of lots of rock – Bronze Age rock fashioned into fantastic cities, eroded stone chimneys that hid the persecuted Christians, rocks that break your ankles and modern women working around it in the fields. Of feral cats, shepherds, backgammon and storks swirling over olive trees. Add images of the evocative lifestyle: the sultans, the harems, the great riches and the near constant wars to keep it all.

The exotic place names left me reeling with an overwhelming sense of history and strategic importance. Turkey shares a border with Bulgaria, Greece, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. All names from history; all names in the news. When we were in Konya listening to the Turkish fighter jets overhead, the bombing in Aleppo felt very close.

Even the waterways sound exotic: the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, the Aegean Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates River. And from Grade Four social studies, the historic names: Mesopotamia, Ephesus, Heliopolis, Troy, Constantinople and Gallipoli. Add the people: the Apostle John, the Virgin Mary, Alexander the Great, Suleiman, Rumi and Ataturk. And finally, Turkey’s contributions to the world in literacy, philosophy, politics, law and of course, their gift of tulips.

The images whirl. Did I mention the Dervishes?

-10: The Climax

All good stories build to a climactic peak. I’m just not sure what mine is going to be.

I feel a little embarrassed to admit this, as surely most authors have this critical point in their heads well before they begin. But as you’ve undoubtedly noticed, this is what you’d call an “evolving” story. And I can approach my climax in several different ways.

Will it be the moment when the river crests and the flooding, for better or worse, is at its height? Or could it be something other than the flood, something that is happening in Finn’s life against the backdrop of the flood? Perhaps I could combine the two. Maybe the flood can sock it to Finn personally.

I’m leaning toward Idea #3, the “Sock it to Finn personally” approach. I am after all, a nasty son on a gun to put perfectly nice characters in such situations in the first place, right?

The only thing I know for sure is that it has to be a moment, an instant in time when readers will gasp and say, “Oh, no!” They will be horrified, and sad, and will wonder what happens next. How will our hero resolve whatever problem has just occurred? It’s Finn’s big moment, and it’s got to be epic.

-11: The science

from the Winnipeg Free Sun

Why does the Red River flood? Year after year the waters rise, then rage. For a time, the people ran from the water; now they try to make the water run from them. (And the people of the Red River Valley are pretty good water wranglers.) I find the “why” fascinating, but that’s not the real issue here. The question is: does anybody else care?

I always have to remind myself that I’m writing for children. I happen to hold children in rather high regard, and probably bestow upon them attributes that may be beyond their years. I’d like to assume that they are as excited by the science of weather as I am, and that putting it in the book will make the story more interesting. Yes, yes, I know I’m entering dangerous territory here. It’s a story, not a lesson. But the science gives context. It’s hard enough to understand why, in an instant, our lives could be changed forever by a tsunami or a tornado or a flood. Wouldn’t it help to at least understand how it happens?

The Red River is particularly interesting in this regard. You see, it runs backwards. Finn would be quick to tell you (he’s the son of a potamologist, remember?) that it doesn’t run backwards, it runs from high to low. But in the case of the Red, “high” is in the south, and “low” is in the north. Which means the river melts first at its headwaters, leaving the bottom reaches frozen and blocked with ice. Of course the river has to flood.

It’s so interesting that I’ve just written a whole science chapter to explain the process, under the guise of a geography lesson for Finn’s class. I tried to make the section short and sweet, but my editor still thinks it’s a little too much. The explanation stops the flow of the story. She’s right, of course. I knew it all along but I didn’t want to let the passage go. So we’ve compromised. It’s in, but it’s short.

I guess this is why this series is almost more popular with adults than kids. Maybe, just maybe, I go a little heavy on the science. Is there a support group for that?

By the way, that’s Alf Warkentin himself in the photo.

 

 

-15: Progress Report

I took the first third of the manuscript to one of my early readers. I usually like to wait until I have a full first draft but time is of the essence and I need advice. Ideas are swirling, but disordered. It’s sort of like the flood; ideas are pushing past the confines of the structure and spreading out in all directions. The direction of flow is obscured and I need a compass. Or a paddle.

My reader tells me what I was expecting. Really, I knew all along what was wrong but was simply hoping otherwise. Just like the potential of the blank screen on Day One, there is always hope that the first readers will be overwhelmed, that they will see your words as molten gold.

Who am I kidding? I’m looking at a major overhaul.

 

-13: The mysterious Stranger

Writing in the first person was my first personal challenge in this book, and the character of the Mysterious Stranger is the second. I’ve never written about such a person before. And I won’t here either, because if I did he wouldn’t be mysterious any more.  This will be a short post.

By definition, “mysterious” refers to something that is “difficult or impossible to understand, explain or identify”, and when in reference to a person, it is someone who is “deliberately enigmatic”. And herein lies the difficulty with mystery. When you want to tease out information in a deliberate fashion, how do you set the pace? How do you ensure that your readers are keep in the dark until exactly the right moment to elicit the greatest surprise, especially when you know what’s going to happen?

A second set of eyes helps a lot. On her first pass through the book, my editor, Kathryn, didn’t know how it was all going to turn out, so she was able to give me a second opinion on the release of clues. Given more time, it would have been useful to have even more readers give their opinions. But one thing is for sure: less is more.

And that’s all you’re going to hear about that.