Diane Chamberlain's Blog, page 26

Story Weekend Theme: Candy

[image error]What pops into your mind when you think of candy? What little snippet from your life can you share? It's probably obvious that my sweet tooth is hungry!

If you're new to Story Weekend, here's how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme. Thanks to all of you who've been contributing. I've loved reading your (very short!) stories. As always, there are a few "rules":

The story must be true.
Try to keep it under 100 words. That's about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it's too long. I know how tough it is to "write tight" but I hope you'll accept this as a challenge.
Avoid offensive language.

As usual, I'll kick it off with my own comment and then I hope you'll join in the fun.

 

The Midwife has Never Been so Strange

Like most writers, I have Google Alerts set to let me know when my books are mentioned on the Internet. Today, I received just such an alert for The Midwife's Confession and it's very, very weird. Not only is there a YouTube video connected to the alert for a Christmas season sale (Midwife is a June book), but it has the following description of the book. Since the description was originally in English and this description is in broken English, I can only guess that it was somehow translated into another language and then translated back. At any rate, it gave me a laugh and we can all use a laugh on a Monday morning, right? Enjoy!

 The Midwife's Confession (MIRA)

I don't know how to characterize you what i did. Would you read a letter never meant to be opened? would you need to know privates never meant to be told?  or should a woman's mistakes stay buried?  an unfinished letter was hidden amongstst tara and emerson's better friend's things after her suicide. Noelle was the woman they entrusted to deliver their costly babies into the world, a preferred friend. Her suicide shocked them dual. But her legacy could destroy them. For her letter reveals a terrible private that challenges everything they idea they knew. Taking them on a journey that will irrevocably replacement their own lives – and the liveliness of a desperate stranger – forever. "a marvellously gifted author. Every book she writes is a gem."  diane chamberlain regains to the heart of the story…

Story Weekend: Computer Games

[image error]My theme for this week's Story Weekend came to me from my seven-year-old grandson. I've managed to avoid Angry Birds all this time, but while spending the day with him Tuesday, he introduced me to the vengeful little critters, and in an effort to bond more fully with him, I indulged. And now I pay the price in full-out addiction.

I'd love to hear your experience with computer games, so here's your chance to tell me and the rest of the world about the time wasters in your life.

If you're new to Story Weekend, here's how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme. Thanks to all of you who've been contributing. I've loved reading your (very short!) stories. As always, there are a few "rules":

The story must be true.
Try to keep it under 100 words. That's about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it's too long. I know how tough it is to "write tight" but I hope you'll accept this as a challenge.
Avoid offensive language.

I usually kick off Story Weekend with my own comment, but I'll be out of town when this post goes live and I'm not sure my comment will show up right away, so if it doesn't, I hope one of you will be brave and get us started. Have fun!

 

Feeling Like a Flower Child

[image error]The last couple of weeks have been very exciting for me, since I've been up for a new contract and I've enjoyed the thrill of feeling wanted by publishers in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The new book I plan to write is one I've wanted to work on for several years–a true "book of my heart"–and it's been so validating to see that publishers feel the same way about it. I've made the decision to publish with St. Martin's Press in the US and Macmillan in the UK and I couldn't be more thrilled. I'll be forever grateful to my agents in both countries for all their hard work on my behalf. 

I wasn't  surprised, then, when a florist van pulled up in front of my house Saturday, but I was surprised to see the massive size of the arrangement the driver pulled out of the back of the van. He staggered under the weight of it as he carried to my front door, and the only space big enough for it in my house was in front of [image error]my fireplace. As the driver dragged himself back to his van, I opened the little envelope sticking from the arrangement, quite certain it would be from my agent. But the card inside read In Sympathy and Joy and was signed by strangers. I ran outside and managed to wave the driver down before he took off. He checked his records to find that I had the wrong card but the right arrangement. He gave me a different card, this one with a warm and happy message from my agent, and I took a picture of the floral arrangement to send her in a thank you email. I felt just a little uncomfortable about the whole situation, because in addition to being insanely large (it's in a galvanized tin basin!) there was something, well, funereal, about the arrangement.

So this morning my agent called me to say ACK! They're not the flowers I sent! She'd carefully selected a florist in my area and just as carefully designed the arrangement she wanted delivered to me, but apparently I received one that was to go to a family celebrating a simultaneous joy and sorrow (which set my fiction writing imagination afire, you can be [image error]sure. My heart does go out to this family and the person who wanted to touch them with the flowers he'd selected for them). Within an hour, though, I had the flowers my agent had wanted me to receive (oh, wow, does she have phenomenal taste, or what? They are stunning!), plus the florist sent along the little vase of blooms at the top of this post as an apology. My house now smells unbelievably delicious and I love being surrounded by all this color!

What's the funniest (in retrospect, of course) experience you've had with a delivery? 

 

 

Welcome Alex Sokoloff to my Blog!

Please welcome my good friend and fellow writer, Alexandra Sokoloff, to the blog. I use Alex's wonderful writing tips when structuring my books and I'm grateful to her for sharing them so generously. Welcome, Alex!

[image error]Hi everyone!  If you've been reading Diane's blog for any amount of time you've probably heard about her writers' group, the Weymouth Seven, that goes off several times a year to have fabulous and productive retreats in great places like the Weymouth Center for the Arts.

 Well, I'm one of those writers.

 Diane invited me here today because I have two new books out: The Space Between, a spooky YA thriller that I was working on at our last retreat, and Writing Love: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors II,  a non-fiction writing workbook that she's really familiar with, since all of us W 7 tend to use the methods I detail in the book when we're stuck.  I was a screenwriter before I was a novelist, and basically the book is about solving story problems by stealing—I mean borrowing—the tricks the filmmakers who have made our favorite movies use, to help us with our own books.

[image error]I think the biggest, most useful trick to steal from film structure is the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence structure.

Most writers and a lot of readers know about the Three-Act Structure: 

- Act I (the first 30 minutes of a 2-hour movie or the first 100 pages of a 400-page book) is the SET UP: we learn everything we need to know about the main characters, what their secret hopes and dreams and fears are, and the particular problem that this story is going to be about. 

 - Act II is usually longer  (from 30 minutes to 90 minutes in a 2-hour movie, page 100 to 300 of a 400-page book), because all the meat and action of the story happens here: whatever the main character wants, the antagonist or villain opposes the main character, and the two (or sometimes more!) forces struggle against each other to get what they want, with lots of twists and complications.

 - Act III  (from 90 minutes in to the end in a 2-hour movie, p. 300 to 400 in a 400-page novel) is where the main character and the villain or forces of opposition come head-to-head in the final battle and resolution.

 But movies divide that Three-Act structure further into an Eight-Sequence structure. In almost any two-hour movie, there are eight 15-minute sequences, and if you start looking for sequences, you'll be amazed at how often movies fall precisely into this format.  You can recognize a sequence, a series of scenes, because it all takes place in relatively the same location, or it's all about the same main action. And the easiest way to see where a sequence begins and ends is to watch for big location changes and big SETPIECE scenes:  the cool action or suspense scenes, or thrilling romance or sex scenes, or big comedy scenes, that usually end up in the trailers of movies, like Indiana Jones escaping the booby-trapped cave in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Clarice Starling bargaining with Hannibal Lecter to save a victim's life in Silence of the Lambs, or Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a diner in When Harry Met Sally.  Those unforgettable scenes are generally the climaxes of sequences, and while they're not the only reason we go to the movies, they're for sure a big reason we love movies.

Well, once an author understands the power of setpieces, s/he can start thinking how to use sequences and setpieces to great advantage in her/his own writing. 

After all, novelists have always understood the power of setpieces, even if they didn't call them that.  Think of all the wonderful setpiece scenes and sequences in Gone With the Wind: the burning of Atlanta, Rhett and Scarlett's scandalous dance at the charity ball, Scarlett's murder of the Union soldier… the film got all those great setpieces directly from the book. 

Rochester taking Jane Eyre up those dark stairs to see his mad wife; the dance scene where Elizabeth Bennet encounters Darcy for the first time; the execution of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities… novelists have always known how to milk those great scenes for maximum visual impact and suspense – but it's fun and easy to look at movies for inspiration.  One of the things I do in Writing Love is break down ten romantic comedies, sexy thrillers, and romantic adventure and fantasy films in detail to show the structure, setpieces, and other tricks that the filmmakers are using that authors can use in their own love stories.

Another useful trick I talk about in Writing Love is how popular movies and books use the structure and elements of fairy tales.  Obviously movies like Arthur (the original) and Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries are Cinderella stories, and the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping is an interesting twist on Sleeping Beauty.  But a lot of great movies have fairy tale elements without being obvious fairy tales.  As grittily realistic as it is, The Godfather is still a retelling of the old tale of the old king who has three sons, one of whom will inherit the kingdom, and it's the youngest and least likely son who ends up ascending to the throne.   Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist are stories of changeling children—and you don't even want to get me started on all the fairy tale elements that made the Harry Potter series and Twilight series such modern classics.

[image error]I always use fairy tale elements in my own supernatural thrillers, and my newest, The Space Between, is definitely what I'd consider a fairy tale structure, even though it looks on the surface like a dark, edgy supernatural thriller. 

Here's the story:

Sixteen-year old Anna Sullivan is having terrible dreams of a massacre at her school. Anna's father is a mentally unstable veteran, her mother vanished when Anna was five, and Anna might just chalk the dreams up to a reflection of her crazy waking life — except that Tyler Marsh, the most popular guy at the school and Anna's secret crush, is having the exact same dream.

Despite the gulf between them in social status, Anna and Tyler connect, first in the dream and then in reality. As the dreams reveal more, with clues from the school social structure, quantum physics, probability, and Anna's own past, Anna becomes convinced that they are being shown the future so they can prevent the shooting…

If they can survive the shooter — and the dream.

You could say it's a very modern and topical story, dealing with the possibility of a school shooting on a high school campus, but it's also a Cinderella story, with a lonely, alienated girl secretly in love with a boy who is part of the hierarchical royalty of the school, and instead of a prince rescuing a princess, in this story this commoner girl is committed to rescuing the prince. She has prophetic dreams; she finds very strange help in the form of a dwarf who seems to have witchlike powers; and she takes on power of her own.   It's the fairy tale undercurrent that I feel drives the book, and gives it the dreamlike sense I'm always looking for in a spooky thriller.

So I'd love to hear some examples of your favorite setpiece scenes, in books or movies. And what about this fairy tale element?  Do you see it working in books and movies that you love?

—————

The Space Between is available in all e-formats, pdf and online viewing:  $2.99

Amazon  Nook  Smashwords

Writing Love: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, II is also available in all e-formats, pdf and online viewing:  $2.99

 Amazon   Nook   Smashwords

 

Story Weekend: Gardening

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Welcome to another Story Weekend! Quite honestly, this week's theme is not my cup of tea, but that's okay. I still have a story about it, and I bet you do, too.  

Are you new to Story Weekend? This is your time on my blog. Here's how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme. Thanks to all of you who've been contributing. I've loved reading your (very short!) stories. As always, there are a few "rules":

The story must be true.
Try to keep it under 100 words. That's about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it's too long. I know how tough it is to "write tight" but I hope you'll accept this as a challenge.
Avoid offensive language.

Have fun, and as usual, I'll kick it off with my own comment.

 

Old Friends, Fantasies and Strippers

[image error]This evening was a special treat. My very first friend and her husband are passing through town and we met them and some other friends for dinner. I love visiting with Barb. We go back to kindergarten, so you can imagine the memories we have to share. Here we are starring in Rumpelstilsken. That's me on the left and Barb on the right and our classmate Carol between us. Actually, we were not starring at all. We were the "ladies in waiting", sort of like the "extras" in a Hollywood movie. I had one line–"Maybe it's Needlenose"–as my character tried to guess Rumpelstilsken's name.

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But here is one of my favorite Barb memories (which will give away both my age and my pre-adolescent yearnings). 77 Sunset Strip was a popular detective show when we were kids. We both had a crush on one of the characters, Jeff Spencer, played by Roger Smith (top guy in the picture). Since we both wanted him, we pretended that one of us was married to Jeff (we think it was Barb) and the other to Roger (we think it was me). I was so obsessed with Roger Smith that when it came time to pick my middle name for my confirmation, I picked his wife's name (which, at that time, was Victoria. He has long been married to Ann Margret. Imagine picking Ann Margret over me!)

One time on the show, the characters were talking about "strippers", and we somehow figured out that strippers had tassles on their breasts. So we got the tassles off our sisters' graduation caps and taped them to our flat chests and tried to make them whirl around. I'm so glad we had no video cameras back then! (I added strippers to the blog post title just to get more hits. I'm shameless!).

[image error]So here we are tonight, all grown up, trying to remember which one of us was married to Roger and which to Jeff and very glad we ended up with the real men in our lives.

ps: How do you spell Rumpelstilsken??

 

Please Judge a Book by its Cover

[image error]Most of you know I've made five of m[image error]y out-of-print books available as e-books. They sell very well on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, i-Books, and a few other less known e-readers, and I'm so happy to give them a second life. I'm particularly pleased that my newer readers finally have the chance to read those older books.

When I published the e-books, I designed most of the covers myself (and I admit it: I'm not a graphic artist). You blog readers helped me decide from among a bunch of designs for each one and I thank you for that. But I had no idea when I made them available that they would become so popular, and now I'd like to create a more professional and unified look for them. 

So I'd love you to vote on which of these five covers appeals to you the most. That will give me an idea of the design direction I should go in. If you could also tell me what country you live in, I'd appreciate it! Thanks in advance for your help.

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The Theme for this Story Weekend: Trees

[image error]I don't know about you, but I can think of dozens of personal stories to write about trees, from the cathedral they formed over my childhood backyard to the yearning I had for them that led me to move back to the east coast from San Diego. How about you? What tree stories are in your life?  

Are you new to Story Weekend? This is your time on my blog. Here's how it works: I pick a theme and you share something from your life that relates to that theme. Thanks to all of you who've been contributing. I've loved reading your (very short!) stories. As always, there are a few "rules":

The story must be true.
Try to keep it under 100 words. That's about six or seven lines in the comment form. I want others to read your story, and most people tend to skip if it's too long. I know how tough it is to "write tight" but I hope you'll accept this as a challenge.
Avoid offensive language.

Have fun, and as usual, I'll kick it off with my own comment.

My "Early Works"

[image error][image error]I was digging through some memorabilia and came across a few books I wrote when I was twelve. I've shared Witchville with the blog before, but I'd forgotten about these two. The 'stories' are three short novellas, all simply dreadful. I wrote The Tonsil Twins for my younger brother and cousin, who had their tonsils out at the same time. [image error](The staples in the covers drive me crazy!). I'm not sure what prompted this creativity in my twelfth year, but it disappeared for the next twenty! Still, if you have kids, I hope you'll encourage them to make up stories. You never know where it might lead.