Q & A. "Writerly" Questions--Part 2

Continuing with questions  I'm often asked ...

Q. How do you plot? Chapter by chapter or an overall synopsis? Do you use detailed outlines?

A. Thanks for making this easy for me to answer. I don't plot. Never have. My story evolves through my characters. I believe it was the great Ray Bradbury who indicated that he simply found out what his hero or heroine wanted and then just followed them around all day. Well--that's how I write. Before I start writing, I know my characters. I know them well. I live with them eat with them, listen to them and just "follow them around all day." The story starts, continues, and ends through those characters.

Bradbury also said  that he doesn't outline, doesn't plot because "when you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out of them. There's no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do things." (Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews by Sam Weller).  

You'd probably be surprised by how many writers don't plot. For many of us, the story is born and developed in a variety of ways. With some, like myself, it's totally character driven. Other writers plot and plan to the final detail. I've always wished I could be one of those. I would love knowing exactly where to begin, where I'm going, and where I'm going to land. 

I do keep a notebook (on the laptop, not the hand-written kind) in which I keep a record of character details, notes about the setting, about any back-story that's important to the book, etc., but that's simply for detail memory, not for "plotting."

Each writer has to learn what works for her/him and follow the road that eventually takes them to where the characters want to go. In my case, there are always detours and wrong turns. But that's all right. Learning how to get back on the right road is a vital part of the novel journey. 

Q. If you were to make a list of the most important things you'd like to tell the beginning fiction writer, what would be at the top of the list? 

A. Know your characters. Know them well. Really, really know them. Don't start writing until you do. If you're interested in developing characters with depth rather than one-dimensional talking heads--"real" people--keep the actual process of writing on hold until you know those characters as well as you know your family members or your closest friends. Or even better. 

Q. Some of the questions I'm asked have to do with settings. One young writer asked me how to "build the worlds" of our novels so they become more than just backgrounds or stages for the story but instead seem to take on a life of their own. 

I think that begins with using a setting that's interesting and appealing to the writer. One suggestion I offer is to make the setting a character.  Unfortunately, attempts to bring this about are often futile because that advice is taken to mean applying more and more detailed description--a kind of tourist guide. Even the combination of description and the interplay of the senses isn't enough to accomplish this. After all, readers often admit to skipping description and detail--unless it's so dynamic, so intriguing, they're unaware that they're actually reading about setting.

How does a writer achieve this? There's more than one way, but here are a couple of ideas to help make a setting "come alive"--to create the kind of setting readers won't find boring or skip altogether: tie emotions to a setting's development. 

Nostalgia, contentment, dread, fear, depression, tension, and other emotions familiar to a character's experience can be evoked by carefully written scenes and will go far to draw a reader into the story and the heart and soul of a story's characters. It's easier to show than tell, so let me use a brief example from one of my own books here--The Wind Harp, Book Two of the Mountain Song Legacy. Early in the story Maggie MacAuley is already beginning to second-guess the decision she's made to stay in her Kentucky hometown of Skingle Creek, a small coal-company community, rather than return to her former position as a teacher with Hull House in Chicago.  I'm excerpting, but you get the idea:

"Maggie slipped out of bed and padded in her bare feet to the window. It was open, but not the slightest breeze stirred the curtains. The air was already muggy and thick, heavy with the acrid smell of coal dust. Trying to ignore the quarrel in the kitchen, she drew the curtain enough to look out on the narrow side yard, faded to a dull brown from lack of rain and the heat wave that had held steady for nearly three weeks.

A clothesline sagged from the side of the house to a limb on the gnarled old maple tree across the lot. A shovel leaned against the wall of the cellar near two overturned coal buckets ... From here she couldn't see Dredd's Mountain, where the mine dug into the hillside, but she was aware of its hovering presence all the same.

The coal company still owned the town, and the mine still spilled its ash and dust over the entirety of Skingle Creek, painting it a relentless gray. The house next door, which Tom Quigley religiously painted white every five years, wore the same smoky coat as her parents' home and every other house in town...

Maggie's feelings about Skingle Creek had never been as bitter or as sharply defined as those of her siblings or many of her now-relocated schoolmates. She too disliked the drabness, the oppressive veil of dust and grime that colored the town, where boredom bred mischief or worse trouble among the young people, and where heavy spirits were all too prevalent among their parents.

But Skingle Creek was home, and in a way she couldn't begin to understand, she had never lost her sense of belonging to this place. Her roots seemed to have grown deeper and stronger than those of her sisters, and although she'd eventually gone away, she had never felt a total separation from her hometown.

Where her sisters saw hopelessness and an intolerable monotony of days, Maggie had always sensed the heart of the town and believed in the goodness of its people and in a way of life that, hard as it was, was meant to be valued and preserved."

Notice some key words in the above: muggy, thick, heavy, faded, sagged, hovering presence, ash, dust, relentless gray, bitter, drabness, oppressive veil, roots, heart of the town, goodness of the people.

No doubt you've also read scenes where the weather becomes a kind of character. For example, a thunder and lightning storm often mirrors the tumultuous emotions of one character or more, or a cozy fire on a winter's night reflects a character's contentment. Often used, these "weather characters" can become stereotypes--but drawn with creativity and taking on the original voice of the narrator, they can go a long way in establishing mood and emotion.

A great way to provide setting with mood and ambiance is to feature a house and let it strike some characterization of its own. I absolutely love using this device. In my unabashedly Gothic Winds of Graystone Manor, Roman St.Clare, a Civil War photographer, has temporarily lost his way during his search for the inn where he'll be staying on Staten Island. It's cold, there's a thick fog, the wind is up, and Roman is suddenly disoriented. So far he's found the Island grim, with its "unsettling silence and a forlorn stillness that hinted of abandonment and desolation." Finally, he comes upon the road to the inn--Graystone Manor. See it through the character's eyes--always the best way to observe a setting or even another character ...

"Unexpectedly, the road leveled off. Soon after, it merged with a narrow, secluded lane. Roman slowed the wagon for a moment before going on, following what was little more than a rutted path, almost entirely dark and nearly hidden by the thickening fog and overhanging tree branches on either side ...

He was almost upon the lodging before he realized it. Dense stands of towering trees shielded most of the stone front, leaving only the immense entrance doors and adjacent windows in view. At the back of the property, a forested hill rose upward. Concealed as it was by trees and the fog-draped gloaming, the structure gave little evidence of life. Three windows were lit, two beside each other on the left corner of the second story and another on the ground level, near the doors.

What he could see was impressive, if slightly forbidding in its austerity. The rambling stone structure was one of those many-turreted, gabled manor houses that at the least would be a hundred years old, possibly much older. The stone was dark, deeply weathered, and in places stamped with ivy. It looked to be wholly surrounded by trees, many of a size that indicated an age even greater than that of the house. In several places, their branches scraped against the stone as if to seek entrance ..."

Key words? Secluded, dark, night descending, shroud, concealed, fog-draped gloaming, forbidding, austerity.

One more scene, this one with yet another house:

"Only moments later, the sun seemed to have disappeared, and Roman found himself hemmed in by woodland, dense and dark. An unexpected feeling of confusion and isolation swept over him at this sudden change of scene, and he realized his thoughts had gone wandering again ...

Within minutes, he realized that he'd misjudged his direction. Again he turned, and with the wolfhound now trotting ahead of him, he headed west. So intent was he on making his way back that he was completely unprepared for the monstrosity of a house that suddenly loomed in front of him. Like some sort of hulking, primeval beast, it seemed to appear out of nowhere, leering down from a slight rise just ahead.

Roman saw now that they had entered a kind of clearing, surrounded by dense foliage. The road leading up to the house could scarcely be made out, obscured as it was by the rank overgrowth of bramble bushes and weeds. Coarse brown grass grew high and out of control all about the house, pushing its way through the openings of a rusted iron fence and gate.

The house itself, reminiscent of Postmedieval English, appeared to be abandoned. The massive central chimney was missing a large chunk, and at the narrow second-story windows, darkness gaped out from behind shattered panes. Several wood shingles were broken off from the siding, perhaps from the gnarled tree branches that pressed in on either side, as if to squeeze the very life from the place. The steeply pitched tin roof, which looked to have been lifted on one side by years of windstorms, was leprous with rust spots ...

The low growl from Conor's throat startled him. As he looked from the dog back to the house, a vague feeling of unease spread over him. The wolfhound had the keen instincts characteristic of the breed, and Roman had learned to pay attention to those instincts.

But it was more than that, something he sensed on his own. He had always been excessively sensitive to mood--to the emotional barometer of other persons, as well as to the ambiance of whatever setting in which he happened to find himself. In truth, he thought it might be the very thing that had drawn him to photography. He found a keen satisfaction in attempting to capture the mood of a person or a place--even a house--and conveying it in realistic, oftentimes starkly dramatic ways with his camera.

At the moment, he sensed an almost oppressive air of malevolence, an impression of some sort of wintry menace out of all proportion to the actual setting ..."

Again, some key words: dense, dark, confusion, isolation, shuddering, dank chill, monstrosity of a house, loomed, leering, rusted, abandoned, darkness gaped, shattered panes, squeeze the very life, leprous, low growl, unease, oppressive air, malevolence, wintry menace.

I'm not certain, but I'd venture a guess that in almost all my books you'll find emotion linked to settings, and more than a few houses that hint of a personality of their own!

As I said above, there's more than one way to create settings that seem to "breathe" with their own life. The examples above are simply two of my personal favorites.

BJ