The Royal Wedding, Rowan Williams, and Generosity

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Having declined the invitation from a British friend to watch the Royal Wedding live, Mary set the DVR, and we watched the event when we were home during the day.  I was busy with other things, but looked up at several points, for there is something hopeful and compelling about such a pageant.  At the same time, I’d watched Helen Mirren in The Queen the previous week, so I couldn’t help but think of Diana.  You have to wish this couple a happier fate.

What really caught my attention – and we backed this up to hear it again – was the homily delivered by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after the vows were taken.  The gist of it was, as faith in God or a Higher Power has receded, we do a disservice to our marriage partners by demanding of them a fulfillment another human being cannot provide.

I searched online this morning but could not find the sermon.  I did find this interview with Williams conducted before the ceremony.  The word I most often heard him use was “generosity.”  He hoped that watching this service might renew our sense of generosity to ourselves and to others.  It’s a very nice way to think of the Royal Wedding.

Any priest or minister conducting a wedding is bound to feel a huge sense of privilege.  You’re invited into some intimate places in people’s lives.  You’re invited to take part in a very significant moment, a moment of hope; a moment of affirmation about people’s present and future.  And I’ve felt very privileged to be part of this event for those reasons.  Here are young people sending a message of hopefulness, sending a message of generosity across the world.  And it’s my privilege to be able to bless that in the name of God, to witness it in the name of God, and to send them on their way. – Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury

http://www.youtube.com/user/lambethpress?blend=23&ob=5

Four Key Ingredients – Part Two

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Wrestling with Originality:  A real-life Example.

It’s easy to talk in the abstract about things good fiction needs, but “originality” is an issue I have been wrestling with for real lately.  Recent “market research” – checking book jacket blurbs in stores and online – revealed a mass of new titles in the fantasy sub-genre where I have been working, in a two steps forward one back fashion, for several years.  Now that even the diehard fans are satiated with vampires, many hopeful writers have trooped to Faerie.

How many?  Well, two of the first half-dozen titles I sampled featured half-human/half-fairy protagonists – like mine.  A few discoveries like that throw the very possibility of being original into question.

I noticed something else too – several of these new books reuse a plot that was common in 1980’s adult fantasy – a war of good and bad fairies in which a human participant somehow tips the balance.  What I suspected then, I am sure of now – that storyline originated in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and online role-playing games.  It is simply not present in the original sources.

Given this seeming recycling of recycled plots, my choice seems fairly straightforward – give it up or dig deeper.  Donald Maass’ writing is full of encouragement for the latter choice, and I’m getting excited about some of the new ideas welling up since I started this process.  Here are a few of my current thoughts:

  • Go back to original sources.  In traditional fairy stories, there are no “good” and “bad” fairies – all encounters are problematic for humans.  Maass’ criterion of “inherent conflict” is built into the old tales and ballads of the relation between humans and the fey.
  • I’ve found a simple way around my heroine’s ancestry, since being half-fairy is now a cliche.  I like this even better.
  • I am probably going to rename the fairies and Faerie the way Sharon Shinn did in her 1995 YA story, Summer’s at Castle Auburn.  There the land and people are called, “Alora.”  Everyone gets it in “quack like a duck” fashion.

The point of giving these personal details is to underscore my belief in Donald Maass’ suggested lines of digging deeper.  “What if?” is a good question for any storyteller.  I have a long way to go, but I am enjoying the process again, and confident that I am on the right track.

Gut Emotional Appeal – Donald Maass’ Fourth Criterion for Really Good Novels:

There’s a formula for this:  create a likable character who must struggle to achieve something important.  Good as far as it goes, which is not very far.  And never mind that someone like Jonathan Franzen can throw out the advice and still win critical acclaim – the rest of us should not try that at home.  Most writers I know really care about their characters; the problem is how to make an audience care.

At a recent conference, a presenter used the Michelangelo analogy – chipping away what doesn’t belong – for the writer’s craft as well.  I think this is pertinent to the character breakthroughs I watch others make – they keep working, and eventually come to characters who somehow embody some of their own deeper truths.  In practice it isn’t nearly as weighty and ponderous as it sounds.

One critique group friend has long been enamored of Raymond Chandler type hard boiled detectives, with a dash of James Bond thrown in.  My friend worked and worked, creating better and better versions of characters we have seen before.  Recently, his own humor and mischievousness got into the mix, and a hero emerged who parallels, in my opinion, the tongue-in-cheek charm of the chick-lit detective who curses the bad guys if she breaks a nail while taking them down.  My friend’s character, Jonathan, a wastrel ex-Royal Marine, returns fire when assassins attack him on the golf course, furious that they ruined his score.  The battle had me in stitches as it caught up a foursome of startled ministers who realize the Lord moves in more mysterious ways than they had imagined.

Another critique group friend, writing about a troubled teen, made a quieter but equally profound breakthrough.  You see it in a little shift.  The bravado falls away, and the character is quietly real and telling her truth beyond any stereotype.

We have to start with characters and situations that matter to us, and then go deeper into ourselves that we expected – this much I am sure of.  How and when that happens is a mystery.  None the less, I find Donald Maass’ criteria:  Plausibility, Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal valuable questions to ask of my own or anyone else’s writing.

You can’t always say what or how but you know writing that has these things.  And if they are missing?  It simply means there is more chipping away to do.

Four Key Ingredients – Part One

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Stories begin with ideas and these can come from anywhere. For some writers, some of the time, they may arrive fully formed, but I suspect that for most of us, they show up as seeds which we have to nourish and grow, in acorn-to-oak fashion.

Since I have allowed myself to drop back to the “acorn stage” of my own story, I turned once again to Donald Maas who has a lot to say about brainstorming and the care and feeding of story ideas as the critical first step in writing what he calls, “the breakout novel.”

Another name for that is simply “publishable novel,” because according to Maass, good is not good enough anymore.  I see antecdotal evidence to support his claim.  I still find the phrase “breakout novel” a bit high-falutin, so I just tend to think of “really good novels.”  Really good novels begin with a really good premise.

Maass uses the word “premise” both for the initial seed idea (“What if there were a whole other world at the bottom of that rabbit hole”) and for a more polished, high level description (“A girl named Alice follows a talking rabbit and…”).  He insists that really good, breakout ideas can be made.  He gives many useful examples of brainstorming and suggests that a key skill is learning to ask “what if” questions and then throw away one’s first responses which are likely to be obvious and cliched.

In the second chapter of Writing the Breakout Novel, he asks the reader to go find their three all time favorite books – the one’s we have read so many times the bindings are cracked.  The ones that have nourished our hearts and spirits for decades.  Maass suggests that four elements common to our favorite stories are likely to be, Plausibility, Inherent Conflict, Originality, and Gut Emotional Appeal.

Plausibility is perhaps the easiest of these concepts to understand and build into a story.  Avoid the extremes of the obvious and the impossible; according to Maass, we want our stories “surprising yet credible.”   As a fan of fantasy and science fiction, I would add that this applies to alternate universes as well.  Google on “world building” and you find a ton of information – much of it coming from gamers – on constructing internally consistent fantasy or extra-terrestrial worlds.  The internal consistency is what matters.  Orcs are all right in Middle Earth, in fact we expect them; Martians would be over the top.

Inherent Conflict:  If the story is set in an era and world where conflict is part of the situation, it aids the writer, but with craft, we can find or create conflict anywhere.  The nominally placid suburbs can be battlegrounds according to John Updike, and now Jonathan Franzen.  Anywhere you have teachers and students, parents and children, boys and girls you have the raw materials for conflict and tension.  Even better, according to Maass – you have conflict between groups or individuals who both have a claim to be “right.”.  It is our job as writers to find the conflict and keep in in the spotlight, for this is the stuff that generates excitement.

Originality:  This is one of those magical qualities – we know it and applaud it when we see it, but can we set out to deliberately be original?  To a degree, I think we can.  If we can allow ourselves to brainstorm or play with ideas, and are willing to reject our first (and usually obvious) solutions, we put ourselves in a place where something new can emerge.  (strictly speaking there may not be any “new” stories, but in practical terms, there are books that make us think, “Wow, I wish I had thought of that”).

I assume we all have practical ways of generating ideas – taking a walk, sinking into reverie, listening to music, keeping things silent, free writing, or some combination of methods like this.  The next step is to apply it.  If one can pull an entire plot out of ether, like a magician pulls an endless string of scarves out of a hat, bravo, but at some point, we’ll get stuck or have decisions to make.  I cannot remember where I got this piece of advice but I find it effective.  Ask an important plot question.  Write down 20 solutions.  Throw out the first 19 and the one that is left will be something original.  Twenty or ten or pick a number that works, as long as it doesn’t make things go too easy.

NEXT:  A real-life example and the fourth ingredient

Water for Elephants: A Movie Review

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There surely has been a drought this spring of movies worth venturing out to see, so I was pleased when Water for Elephants, based on a best selling novel, hit the theaters.

The story is narrated by ninety year old Jacob Janowski after his family forgets to show up at the “home” where he lives to take him to the circus.  He relates how a personal tragedy interrupted his plans in 1931 and sent him out on the rails where he joined the Benzini Brother’s Circus as a vet.  Times were tough and circus life was gritty and often violent.

Jacob falls in love with Marlena, wife of August, the ringmaster, whose brutality sparks the biggest disaster in circus history.  Jacob and Marlena survive, rescue Rosie the elephant and a Jack Russell terrier, and after a successful stint with Ringling Brothers, settle down to raise five sons who forget about Jacob when he is 90.  The circus boss he tells the story to offers him a job, and Jacob feels like he’s coming home.

It’s a decent story, but…

The “but” is that I never really engaged with the characters.  What is the magic that causes us to bond and identify with a character in a movie or a novel?  You can’t say what it is, but you know it when it happens and you know when it doesn’t.  I actually felt worse when Rosie the elephant was beaten that when the goons beat up Jacob.

In contrast to Water for Elephants, my heart was really gripped by another movie about an old man who loses his wife and home but reinvents himself at the end of life.  This was the animated feature, Up (2009).  Up required a surreptitious kleenex in the theater.  Water for Elephants?  Not even close.

I would be curious to hear a response to the movie by someone who read the book first.  In retrospect, I feel like the movie made unsuccessful attempts to manipulate me.  Take August, the villain.  At one point during the movie, Mary leaned over and whispered, “bipolar.”  I said, “alcoholic.”  On the way home we agreed on a dual diagnosis, and now, on Wikipedia, I read that in the book he was pegged as a paranoid schizophrenic – not that circus roustabouts in 1931 knew what that is.  And regardless, if understanding of the villain’s bad behavior depends on a diagnosis, something is missing from the story.

I’m not sorry I went to see this movie, but unfortunately, I have to suggest that others save their money.

Simple Things or Peeling Onions

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Since I couldn’t settle on one title to express what I wanted to say in this post, I chose a compound name which conveniently illustrates the opposite of what I am getting at.  I find myself wanting to get to the bottom of things, the root, the core, the ground, the seed idea.  For example:

  • I am back to the Tassajara Breadbook, and this time I’ve got some homemade sourdough starter going.  It’s appealing not only because I love sourdough, but because it is the simplest way to make yeasted bread.  Even so, something even more simple than that has gripped my imagination.  In an article called “Easy Dough,” in the Spring issue of Tricycle, Noa Jones describes a trip across the Sinai with Bedouins.  She describes how intrigued she was upon seeing how few supplies they carried.  None the less, each evening they mixed up dough and cooked it right on the campfire.  Jones describes the procedure but gives no exact recipe – figure it out for yourselves, she says.  I really can’t wait to try – flour, water, fire, and a pinch of salt; you can’t make a simpler bread than that.  This is the sort of thing I am getting at.
  • I’m at a similar point in my meditation practice.  Over the years I have learned and used some complicated techniques, but I find that all I want to do right now is the simplest practice I know.  It has a Japanese name which is usually translated as, “just sitting.”

I have mentioned that in my writing, I’m reviewing a half-dozen books to pick up ideas on spicing up plots, but I’ve even taken a small break from that to ask more fundamental questions about the story I’m working on.  Questions about all my current assumptions – everything on the table.

For instance, do I really want to write fantasy?  Well, yeah, at the moment I do – gut preference.

Do I really want to write young adult vs. adult fantasy?  I’m not so sure on that point – I sometimes go back and forth, but overall, yes, I am drawn to reading and writing YA fantasy.  Reminds me of the keynote speaker at a conference I went to saying, “You should be thankful for your crappy childhoods, since now you get to be writers!”

And finally – maybe the key question: what is my story?  Not for all time, but for now.  Clarity is required.  What is the core story I want to tell?

Well, I did some free writing, and out of that exercise, extracted a brief description and it hit me – the basic pattern of the story is, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”  And beyond that lies Pandora.  Pandora has meaning for all of us, especially, when we are young.  We fling open doors and rip open boxes before we know what we’re doing.  No way to avoid it.  As Jung said, “All the major decisions in life are made on the basis of insufficient information.”  As Pandora discovered, we discover, once the horse is out of the barn…

I was very pleased to arrive at that point.  This is a solid discovery, the outcome of really important work.  Something to build on.  There are many more questions, a whole list of them, and I will be discussing more of them.

Meanwhile, to end this post, I found a version of a great old Shaker song that’s been going through my head for several days.  At first I could not find it, since I thought the name was “Simple Things.”   It is actually called, “Simple Gifts,” and it’s a nice hymn for the end of a post on Easter.

Between the Beginning and the End

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I recently wrote of my intention to take a step back from my current writing project to read six books with a view to understanding how their plots are put together.  https://thefirstgates.com/2011/04/04/a-conference-and-a-resolution/  As promised, I’ve posted reviews of the first three books I read.

I had not planned in advance what I would read next.  As I scanned my shelves, I happily found something I had overlooked, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.  I picked up a signed copy of the book a year ago when Ms. DuPrau was a presenter at the 2010 NorCal SCBWI conference (the link above explains what that is and has notes on the 2011 conference).

Author Jeanne DuPrau

The City of Ember (2003) is a middle-grade, post-apocalyptic fantasy – (is it just me, or is that really in the air these days?).  A movie version, starring Tim Robbins and Bill Murray was released in 2008.  I will review the book when I finish, but now I want to talk about some of the comments DuPrau made at the conference, since she shared some of the ups and downs she experiences in plotting.

Beginnings are relatively easy, she said, and her goal is to know the ending (more or less) when she starts, so her story has a destination.  She said wrote the first chapter of Ember, and knew the ending, ten years before she was able to complete the middle of the book.  She was working a day job at the time, but even so, months went by when she didn’t take Chapter One out of the drawer because she didn’t know how to proceed.  Traditional methods failed her, notably outlining.

Now this is stuff I personally identify with.  At the end of the conference, I picked up a written critique of my opening by Ms DuPrau that I had arranged for in advance.  It was pretty positive.  I think I do openings well, and then bog down in the middle, as she describes.  Outlining works to organize ideas I already have, but I’ve never been able to think my way into inventing something new.  I can write my way there and imagine my way there – sometimes – but these can be round about methods.  If I set out for San Francisco, but decide on the way to visit Carmel, I may eventually reach my destination, if I have enough time.  In plain terms, I’d rather not break DuPrau’s ten year record!

So what does she do?  According to my notes, she writes and imagines her way through the plot and keeps herself focused by asking one very specific question at a time.  Both free-writing and “focused” dog walks are methods she has evolved – ones that I have also applied, though not in so concentrated a manner.  In fact I found several pages of free-writing I’d done at breaks in that conference and appreciated the reminder that here is something valuable – a “disciplined” method of aiming toward an unknown destination!

***

The final thing DuPrau shared that day was the story of her success, and she revealed her method for that as well.  After Ember was finally done, she combed Publisher’s Weekly for contact information on new agents who were just setting up shop and looking for clients.  She cut a deal with the first agent she applied to who was actively seeking fantasy.  DuPrau’s story is living proof that even in this notoriously difficult age for publishing, the right combination of hard work, inventiveness, and luck can open doors to success.

One More By William Stafford

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I really wanted to include this poem in my discussion of William Stafford yesterday, but I didn’t because the post threatened to get too long.  Several appreciative comments persuaded me to send it out today.  This selection is available in The Way It Is, the collection of Stafford’s poetry I referenced, with a link, at the bottom of yesterday’s post.  This, along with other William Stafford poems, can also be found on various poetry websites.  It was first published in a 1960 collection called, West of Your City.  Enjoy.

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Notes On William Stafford

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Now, more than ever, I’ve come to trust ideas that are unexpected.  That’s one reason I like to get up early, when the mind of fixed ideas is still half-asleep.  It’s a good time to sit in the meditation room.  Or work on a chapter that’s giving me trouble.  Or simply take a cup of coffee out to the back porch and watch.

I had something in mind to write about for today.  Over coffee on the back porch I came up with topic two.  I gave them both up a moment ago when I went to look up something by William Stafford.

William Stafford, 1914-1993

Yesterday afternoon, I pruned a branch from the apple tree that would have broken under the weight of even one apple.  I carried the branch and its blossom inside and put it in a little vase of the greenish kind of glass you see on old telephone insulators.  How startling it was!  How unexpected that something so simple should resonate so deeply in its silence.  One day the Buddha was scheduled to give a sermon, and all he did was hold up a flower.  That is like the experience of William Stafford’s poetry.

This is the poem I went to look up, one I have read again and again.  Stafford wrote it on August 2, 1993, three weeks before he died:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

Stafford was born in Kansas, started publishing late in life, taught Creative Writing at Lewis and Clark College, and was named Poet Laureate of Oregon in 1975.  I feel like skipping over the biographical details in favor of letting Stafford’s poetry speak for itself, but thanks to Google I did come up with one gem, an excerpt from a 1990 interview where Stafford talks of the connection between poetry and listening  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9859873

The image in the interview – Stafford and his father listening to coyotes on the banks of the Arkansas bring to mind this poem:

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by-
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?” –
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”

There are several other poems by William Stafford that are important to me that I’d like to quote, but I think it will be enought to end with a passage that brings me back to the apple blossom.  This is the last stanza of the poem Stafford wrote on the morning of Aug. 28, 1993, the day he died:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. “You don’t have to
prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.