Laura Brewer's Blog, page 3

The Ones Who Matter Are The Ones Who Care

The ones who matter are the ones who care – and the ones who don’t care, don’t matter.

I guess we all have people we love who don’t really seem to love us back. Friends, even family, for whom our caring is of no consequence. They can’t be bothered to keep us in the loop about things happening in their lives. It’s sad and sometimes deeply disturbing to see casual disregard by someone you should have close ties with. I have reached a point in my life where I can no longer let them matter to me either.

There comes a time when you have to take stock and clear out the clutter in your heart. You still care, but you have to shield your own feelings against the callousness of others. You can’t expend much of your energy on one-sided relationships.

The ones who matter are the ones who care. Those who share their thoughts, their lives with you. They stay connected. They are there when you need them – and when you don’t. If something important happens in their life, they take the time to share it with you. They not only expect you to share with them, they welcome it. They stay in touch.

I will focus my energy on those who are in my life, who stick with me whatever happens to be going on in our lives. Maybe we don’t get to see each other very often. Maybe life keeps us going in different directions most of the time, but the connection remains.The caring remains.

There are a very few who I feel would be there- no matter what. You know, I’d be there for them – no matter what, too. Most of those are not even related to us. That does not keep them from being brothers and sisters of the heart.

 

A Panther In The Yard!

A few years ago, we had four Fainting goats. I happened to look out the kitchen window one Friday morning just as all four of them fell over, as they do when threatened. My instant reaction was to yell for my husband to bring his gun, something was after the goats. I was right – and wrong. Soon, he was in the yard, scanning the edge of the woods and saw a rather large black panther (yes, they do live in the Southeast).  We were somewhat alarmed that his shot missed and changed our plans for the weekend.

Instead of going with the rest of the family on a trip that weekend, he stayed behind to make sure it didn’t come back. Before the rest of us left, he’d already called the local game warden to report it. The game warden said he’d get back to him.

The facts surprised us all. The panther turned out to be a pregnant female that had gone missing from her cage at a nearby truck stop while she was on her way to Florida. Her cubs were to be raised for release into the Everglades. She had managed to get out of her cage, looking for a secure place to give birth. She found what she wanted in a small cave near our house. When she terrified our goats, she wasn’t after them. She had been raised on cat food and had never eaten fresh meat. She had smelled our cats and was looking for a handout!

After they tracked her down and collected her and her new cubs, they stopped by our house to let us know what had happened. Roland even got to pet her and said she was just a very large hearth kitty. Boy, was he ever glad that his scope was off that day!

Our own black cat took one look at the panther Roland was petting and gave him her worst stink eye, as if to say, “You are NOT bringing THAT into the house!”

Our beagle had long since done the prudent thing and hid under the computer desk.

I Can Be Consistently Inconsistent

I hit the walking track this morning for the first time in several days. Walking is good. It’s healthy for your body and gives you uninterrupted thinking time. One thought led to another. Yes, I really do need to make the effort to walk every day, or at least more often. When the word consistent popped into my head, I remembered a statement I heard years ago at a seminar, “You may not be consistent, but you can be consistently inconsistent“. Okay, I can do that.

I may not walk every day, but I do walk. I may not write daily like I should, but I still write. Sometimes, I even get a touch of consistency with my writing, for a week, or a month, or a year before life intervenes and disrupts the pattern. I am consistently inconsistent. Sometimes I’m slow. Sometimes I stall altogether, but words do get written. I haven’t quit.

I even have times where the words flow so effortlessly that I have to depend on my family to make sure I come out for meals. I wish those times were far more often, and I’ll bet you do too. That’s what the Blog Challenge is all about. It helps build habits of daily writing, or restores lost ones.

It’s encouraging, I think, that even when we can’t be consistent, we can be consistently inconsistent and still move forward.

Happy Writing

Some Days the Humor Just Isn’t There

I admit it, I am still not on my game here. I was sick yesterday and didn’t write a thing. This afternoon, I had in mind a topic on humor in writing as in life. You know, to keep it from being bland or grim? The post has been saved for later. The topic is a worthy one, the writing was – well, too serious. I’m not kidding. I was trying to write about adding humor and had none myself!

Some days it just isn’t there. Now, yesterday, I would have had a hard time writing two coherent sentences. At least I am past that point.

So, at least I can find humor in having lost it? Sigh. Some days you just have to put the cat back over your head and go to sleep.

First Kiss Of Autumn

Blustery winds

Cold snap

Kitten burrows in my robe

Hot chocolate

Life is Good!

Dialect and Dialogue

My son is currently reading Mark Twain’s, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for school and immediately began to comment on how hard it was to read because of Twain’s rendering of the local dialect. I took another look at it then and, much as I hate to say it, he’s right. More than any of the other works by Twain, this book is made more challenging by excessive use of dialect and incredibly bad grammar. Granted, it’s written in Huck’s POV, but Twain was a little too dedicated to the idea that Huck was uneducated and, shall we say, rough around the edges. The style get’s in the way of the story.

I am sure some of the examples from classical literature use dialects, including coy, phonetic spellings, to convey the sound of regional speech to those who hadn’t heard it before. This style of writing is more difficult to follow than trying to understand a thick, unfamiliar accent when spoken. Trying to read that kind of thing is like decoding a foreign language. It takes away from the story you are trying to tell. These days it should be avoided, since most people have at least some exposure to different kinds of speech. There are better approaches to the problem.

You can convey regional (or uneducated) flavor by word choices and syntax without resorting to an attempt to write words the way they are spoken.

“Lordy, child! Get in here and get out of those muddy things before your mother gets home or she’ll skin you alive.”  - Now just try to read that in anything other than a Deep Southern drawl and get automatically sounded like git.

“John Micheal, I’m thinking it’s to the pub we’re going.” This one is equally obvious as Irish brogue and I’ll bet you rolled the ‘r’.

Syntax and word choice. While some of the grammar may be unorthodox, it’s not actually incorrect. The word choices and syntax alone carry the dialect without being unreadable.

We also need to be careful how we render dialects or the sense of someone who’s first language is different. I say different, as opposed to not-English, because, if you want to get technical, none of the characters in the Talmanor series would actually be speaking English. Selarial speaks Common quite fluently, but you will see a shift in syntax if she gets angry. It signifies the natural tendency to make that kind of linguistic slip under stress. If you have a character with incomplete command of the language, syntax and word choices can go further than any other technique to convey that circumstance. Real people do it everyday.

Should you ever write coy, phonetic spellings and horrid grammar? Of course you should! Just keep it limited to small doses in strategic places.

Please note, I happen to love Mark Twain’s writing. That particular book is just difficult for anyone over the age of eight to read.

 

 

It’s In The Details Or Is It?

We all want to write wonderful prose that will paint pictures in the mind of readers, images of people, places, both ordinary and exotic, or events. We want to capture the essence of the character, the feel of the place, the sense of witnessing the events. To do this, we use words instead of visual media. This can be easier in that it’s more interactive and the reader’s imagination supplies the interpretation of our words. It’s harder because you need to focus images through the eye of the character even when the character might not pay attention to things the reader wants to see. I am having that problem with the Ghost stories. He’s a cat. He doesn’t pay attention to the same things a person does.

You can write long, narrative paragraphs filled with painstaking details, but that will cause most readers eyes to glaze over. Too many details can be information overload that quickly becomes counter productive. A reader may actually try to visualize the details offered into a coherent picture only to discover they have completely lost the point to the scene.

A few well chosen words can create instant understanding in most, though seldom all, of our readers. Surprisingly enough, you do not need a lot of descriptive detail to convey ideas. Ultimately, the ideas are the important thing. If you are describing a place, say a neighborhood your character drives into, you probably don’t need detailed descriptions, but rather a quick and concise evaluation of the place that the reader can instantly visualize to ground the scene.

Two examples:

He turned onto River Drive and the houses must have been built by a man who’d just discovered the jig saw and used it with gleeful abandon. – A Victorian neighborhood.

You could ignore the broken windows, the trash overflowing into the street, but dirty children playing on the steps at this late hour was deeply disturbing. - Any city slum, anywhere in the world.

To say the images generated by those two examples are radically different would be an understatement. In both cases they convey the kind of place it is without a lot of extraneous words. They are short. They say what they need to say and then they shut up.

If I need to ground a scene in time and place, I do my very best to apply the KISS principal – keep it simple stupid! Why write involved detailed descriptions of the elaborate scroll work that decorates a Victorian house, or the myriad of ugly things found in a slum late at night when what you really want to convey is the fanciful, overdecorated style or the depressing, perhaps slightly scary, squalor?

If I did try to write detailed descriptions of either scene, the character’s (and therefore the reader’s) reaction to the scene would be blunted. If it’s detailed enough, it might throw them out of the scene entirely. It will certainly bog down the flow of the story.

The same is true of characters, especially minor walkons like a hotel desk clerk or a waitress. In this case, the amount and kind of detail you write determines how important the character will be in the story. Give your walkons a single identifying characteristic and move on.

This KISS principal is, perhaps, most important when describing action. I can most easily explain why using battle scenes. Unless you are writing a treatise on combat techniques, you want to stay out of nearly all the fine details, in favor of a broader sense of what is happening.

If you have a small conflict involving two or three characters, say a mugging, you can use a few details seen through your main character’s POV and capture that character’s response to the situation. In a larger fight or a full fledged battle you cannot detail everything that happens or it simply won’t make sense. Those blow-by-blow descriptions will turn it into a tangled mess. Okay, a large battlefield is a tangled mess, but your writing about it should not be.

The larger the battle, the more of an overall view you need to take, at least if the battle itself is important to the story. You add details by jumping to different characters in different parts of the battle and picking up their POV for a brief glimpse of those parts. You don’t want to overdo even that. Keep those closeups to a minimum of what is both needful and beneficial for the story.

The big battle scenes in the Star Wars movies are a good video example. You have a large battle with different kinds of action taking place in separate locations at the same time. You don’t need to see every single thing that happens in every part , only what’s important.

No, creating images in the mind of a reader is not really in the details. The strong images come directly from within the characters as we experience them through their stories. The only important details are the ones the character finds important. Yeah, we writers need to keep our noses out of it.

 

Review: Paradise by Jason K. Lewis

I found this story refreshingly well written. There is a compelling quality to John focusing on his family, while in the midst of “things are not as they seem”. It does read more like the first chapter in a novel, than a stand alone story. I would have an issue with this if the author had not stated up front that this story came out of a larger, related work in progress.

It is a stunning lead in. I will definitely be on the watch for Bird of Paradise to come out in 2015. Hopefully it will answer the tantalizing questions this story poses. I want to know what this paradise is and what happens to John’s family.

Check out Jason’s blog 

Stitching Up Your Story

To be more precise, stitching up my story. Well, I did know there were areas that needed expansion, a few scenes were missing, but now I think it more resembles a body with gaping, bleeding holes. Sigh.

This all started because I was looking for a more satisfactory resolution to the story’s conflict, a conflict that stretches back over a thousand years. My characters wanted to find a way to break the cycle and genocide isn’t in their vocabulary. Something else would be required, but what? Well, I came up with the what, now I just have to make it work. That’s where the gaping holes come into play. It isn’t necessary to go back and add elements in the previous books, for which I’m thankful. I do have to go back and fit the parts in what I’ve already written for the final book. A previously minor character will now be doing something that will (hopefully) change the course of the future.

To accomplish this believably, I have to lay a stronger foundation for the character early in the book. I have to get in his head and his POV so the reader can get to know him too. Rewriting those small scenes bigger and from his perspective will be challenging.

Especially when I’m well over half way finished.

It’s more that just adding or expanding scenes. It’s the dynamic of the story arc, a sort of synergy that major changes will sometimes make stronger and sometimes breakup like a tornado hitting a cliff. (Yeah, they do that,)

Like stitching a badly torn wound, you have to get the ragged pieces to fit together. Scenes will be taking place in parts of my universe I have never really explored and those scene shifts must fit precisely for the story to flow and the dynamic to build. I also need to do this without adding much in the way of additional named characters. I already have what feels like a cast of thousands.

This is going to affect everything from dialogue between other characters to chapter breaks.

I did even more rewriting on the first book, but had not anticipated blindsiding myself like this again. If I hadn’t already published the first two, I might think about throwing the whole thing in a closet somewhere for a while.

This is all to let you know that roadblocks and course changes happen to all of us. It’s usually for the better once you get over having to do it at all. We don’t give up. We will not throw the manuscript in a closet (this time). We are writers and we will overcome all manner of trials to finish our stories.

It helps if you keep reminding yourself of that.

Writing and Picking Blueberries

Writing can be like picking blueberries. I am not constitutionally wired for leaving any leaf unturned or ripe berry unpicked, no matter how much I must stretch and contort to reach it. This tends to drive my family nuts when they pick with me – I expect the same dedication (obsession?) from them. In writing, it means hunting for just the right words that are fully ‘ripe’ for the idea. As with the berries, I have sometimes left one that wasn’t quite right. That doesn’t mean the word or the idea was bad. Occasionally words or ideas need to ripen in the mind before they’re ready to pick.

I have also written a few truly beautiful scenes that had to be cut because the story simply didn’t need to go there. Rather like the huge, juicy berry that I couldn’t ever quite reach. No matter how I stretched and contorted the story, the scene simply wasn’t going to go into it. Leaving that tantalizing berry on the tree bothers me. I don’t like waste. I can taste the sweetness of it and find it hard to move to a more accessible spot. I find it distressing to leave out a scene that is juicy and ripe, full of humor, heart wrenching sorrow or riveting action just because the story doesn’t need to go in that direction.

At least with writing, those scenes may find a place, in one form or another, in a different story. I suppose I don’t really begrudge the birds their share either. Though I often wonder why the very best fruit seems to be where I can’t get it.