What I Learned On My Summer Vacation

I am not a natural storyteller. I may have stengths as a writer, but spinning a good yarn is not one of them. Earlier this year, I finished a draft of a novel and much of the criticism I received was along these lines. The story didn't flow well.

I think, in part, this may have been because I was trying to do too much. I had multiple POV characters - one of which was a child - and was trying to tackle themes like faith vs. reason. I can also see now that I didn't clearly identify what was at stake for my characters.

In hopes of learning how to edit my novel, over the summer I read Scene & Structure by Jack Bickham. If you haven't read this book yet, I would highly recommend it. After reading it, I decided that if I am going to keep writing, I better learn how to tell a story. For now, I think this means putting that other story aside, and trying something simpler. I've started another story - one with just one POV character, and, as I write, I am trying to stick fairly closely to the principles I learned from Scene & Structure.

To summarize, Bickham states that there are essentially 2 components to a story - scene, or the part where something happens, and structure, the part where the character reflects on what has happened. According to Bickham, scene and structure usually play out in the following pattern:

Scene

-Statement of goal

-Introduction & development of conflict

-Failure of the character to reach goal, a tactical disaster

Sequel

-Emotion: how the character emotionally responds to the disaster

-Thought- the character reviews the disaster that just happened, analyzes it, and considers a new course of action

-Decision - the character decides what course of action to take to correct the disaster

-Action - the character takes action to pursue the new course of action (goal) and is plunged into another scene

I am trying to implement these patterns in my new WIP. It is harder than I thought it would be, but I find that keeping these concepts in mind is helping me structure my story.

What about you? What have you found to help you master the art of storytelling?

The Price of a Good Story

The woman at the gas station knows how to tell a story. She approaches me just after I slide my credit card through the reader, my wallet still in hand. Her frizzy hair is pulled back into a haphazard ponytail, and she looks as if she's been crying. "I'm sorry I look like such a mess," she says to me, and, without waiting for me to respond to this unsolicited apology, she starts into a story about how she's just fled her abusive husband and the state of Nevada, and how she needs some money for gas to get to a safe house somewhere in Idaho. A police officer gave her a dollar she says, and some discount coupons to the Hart gas station down the road. As she says this, she motions to her car. Sure enough, the amount paid on the monitor reads $1.00 even.

I get completely caught up in the frantic urgency of her words. She has two boys, she says, the twelve year old in the front seat and the seven year old sleeping in the back. I think of my own two children at home, and, without hesitation, open my wallet and hand her a twenty. She gives me a hug and calls me sister. As she rushes back to her car, I hear her say to the boy in the front seat that I am a "very nice lady." I watch her drive away, feeling satisfied and compassionate.

It is only after she leaves that I start to wonder about the veracity of her story. I never did catch a glimpse of that seven year old sleeping in the back seat. And I have my doubts about those discount gas coupons to Harts. Why couldn't she have just filled up at this gas station? I wonder. I can't shake the feeling that I have been had. I should have offered to buy her gas, I think, just to be sure that gas was what she was really after, and not my twenty dollars. I should have offered to buy her gas, I think, just to be sure that I wasn't being scammed.

I get in my car and drive home, thinking about the woman's story, hoping it's true for my sake, and false for hers.

A Thousand Words

Today I went to Glaus Bakery to pick up a cake for my husband's 34th birthday, and there, hanging on the wall, was this picture:

This picture hung on the kitchen wall in my maternal grandparents' home and bore the subscription: "Give us this day, our daily bread." I haven't seen this picture since my Nana died twelve years ago this past July, but, seeing it again was like stepping back into my grandparents' home. I remembered how the picture hung above the buffet against the kitchen’s west wall, next to a photograph of Credence, a beloved German Shepherd who had died before I was born. And then I began to remember other things, and started to catalogue the items in my grandparents house: a bunch of ripe bananas on the kitchen counter, a box of Honeycombs in the cupboard, a plastic bottle of aquamarine Dawn on the sink, and, always, a stick of butter sweating on a dish, translucent, like a yellow ice cube. The kitchen smelled like pure sunshine. There was a cork board in the corner, where slender pins with colorful, bulbous heads tacked down curling Campbell’s soup labels and memos from the Relief Society. There was a box fan whirring in the front room, and the hall closet with a canister of dominoes and a waxy paper cup filled with seashells from a long-ago vacation to California. Nana taught my sisters and me how to hold the shells to our ears to hear the roar of the ocean.

There was the bathroom with the porcelain pink sink and watered houseplants draining in the tub. There was the spare bedroom where we girls played with the typewriter and hid between the wedding and bridesmaid dresses hanging in the closet. There was the bookshelf with the textured orange spines of Childcraft books, and the big, blue comforter speckled with white dots that, when spread out, covered nearly the whole of the living room floor, and then, just as quickly, was folded back up again, like some collapsible universe.

There was the garden, with peonies, ferns, snapdragons, bachelor buttons, iris, and lilacs. There was the narrow space between my grandparents' home and the small rental home beside it, a home that originally had been built in the days when polygamy was still practiced. There was the long gravel driveway, where Nana would scatter breadcrumbs to feed the birds.

There was the whir of the box fan and the weight of a domino in my hand and the satisfying clacking of the typewriter - evidence of a world that was mechanical and gritty, but also solid. And, of course, there was the picture of the man saying grace, and the subscription "Give us this day, our daily bread."

There were the stories, the ones Grandpa told about his childhood, when he worked on the railroad and caddied for F.O. Haymond. As an adult, Grandpa had worked at Stover's six days a week, hauling furniture, but as a young man, he had been the fastest runner west of the Mississippi. There were other stories, too, stories that I didn't learn until I was older. Stories about my Grandpa's Irish father, a handsome Mormon bishop, who had hung himself in the church during the Depression. Stories about my Nana, who had contracted spinal meningitis at fifteen and laid at death's door for a better part of a year before she recovered, and her father, who had died in a car crash when she herself was just a young mother.

Surely, my grandparents were acquainted with grief, and yet, there were stories of our Father in Heaven, and there were prayers offered to Him as we gathered at the kitchen table, "Give us this day, our daily bread," - a refrain at times insistent, at times resigned, but always uttered.

I looked at that picture in the bakery, but in my mind's eye, I was back in my maternal grandparents' home, standing beside my Nana, scattering bread crumbs for the birds across the gravel driveway.

5 Books You Probably Haven't Read

Every so often, you happen across a book that is not The Help or The Hunger Games. By which I mean, a book that, despite being kind of wonderful, no one you know is talking about. Below are some books I've read that fall into this quiet little category.




Why you should read this: It's a wonderfully quirky peek at the poor "serfs" who worked at the Microsoft campus in the early 1990s. The story is presented as a series of diary entries on a PowerBook... sound familiar, fellow bloggers?

Why you should read this: Language. Language. Language. Probably some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read.

Why you should read this: Simply put, this book is a masterpiece. There's a reason it won the Pulitzer.

Why you should read this: Because it's Joan Didion. The memoir is an insightful mix of Didion's personal history with that of the great state of California's.

Why you should read this: Because it's the only book I've read that is told from a second-person narration (other than Choose-Your-Adventure). The perspective fully engages you in the story - you are the protagonist, after all. It's delightful.

The Moral of the Story

When you write, do you try to tell a story, or teach a lesson? Is it possible to do both?

There is a passage in Ian McEwan's Atonement, where young Briony, an aspiring author herself, contemplates this question. She concludes: "There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have."

But here's the rub: When you create fictional characters in a fictional world, is this in any way a true representation or different minds in the real world? The more I study fiction writing, the more I realize that fictional characters aren't supposed to act like real people. In fact, in Scene and Structure, Jack Bickham states that "fiction must make more sense than real life," and that involves creating characters who, to some extent, make sense also.

But do people make sense? Kant wrote that "We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action." In The Social Animal, David Brooks describes our attempt to define our character in life as virtually impossible. Instead, life is a series of fragmented events, where we are sometimes motivated by ambition, money, etc., and sometimes not. We wear different masks, but is there a true self beneath these masks?

Sebastian Faulks wrote "Books explain the real world." Do they? Or do they just explain the world we'd like to believe in?

Thank you for being a friend...

So, the wonderful Angie Cothran of Live to Write generously granted me The Liebster Award. Angie is among the many talented writers I have met in the past few months. Her posts are always thoughtful, informational, and worth the read. If you haven't visited her blog yet, check it out. Now....

I've kind of been absent from the blogosphere the past few days, and many of the people who I had wanted to share this award with have already received it. Even though the Liebster Award train has already left the station, I still wanted to share the love and highlight some of the blogs I've encountered:

Curtis Moser is hilarious and an exceptional writer. I know, because he let me read the manuscript of his latest novel and it was wonderful. Also, he recently made a collection of short stories available on Kindle. For more info, check out his blog.

Shelly Brown - oh, wait. I don't need to tell you about her. She is fast becoming one of the most popular bloggers on the planet. But I need to give her a shout out, because she has been so supportive of me, and reading her posts always makes me smile.

Girl Wizard - Thanks to the wonder of the internet, I have access to the mind of one of the most thoughtful, intelligent, creative people on this planet. I luckily stumbled across her blog one day, and I am so glad that I did. If you haven't had the chance to get to know her, check her blog out. It will knock your socks off.

Hektor Karl is another virtual acquaintance that I've been happy to make. If you're up for reading something that will test you're brain capacity, read his blog. And, as an added bonus, there's always plenty of engaging dialogue going on in the comments.

Family Reunion

At 5 A.M. on the day of the family reunion I wake up thinking about homonyms. I don't know why I am being assaulted by a grammatical phenomenon I haven't thought about since grade school. Still, rather than settling back to sleep, my mind obliges this random hook of thought and foggily fishes for words: lush, sound, mind. Vein and vane. Ferry and fairy.

I meet my sister at my parents' house and we caravan up to Idaho for the reunion. We are heading to a small town near Bear Lake where my aunt and uncle have recently moved, ostensibly because the fresh air is good for my ailing aunt. My sister and I discuss this as we drive, how this move reminds us of those old, flowery British novels where the feeble and sick are always relocating to the seaside. This remedy of fresh air seems improbable, although somewhat romantic. As we reach the lake, we roll the windows down and I rest my feet on the dashboard. There is something to say for fresh air.

We turn off the highway and follow a narrow dirt road for several miles. As we roll into the small town, the dust settles and we assess our surroundings. My sister confides that the thought of living here makes her feel "panicky." I agree. Somehow, the unbound landscape is oddly claustrophobic.

The family reunion is held at the town's one and only park. We arrive just as they are finishing the raffle. We have missed dinner. Our small delegation walks toward the pavilion, my sister and I trailing our parents and clutching weary children to our chests. "If you had made it on time, we would have had 107 for dinner," my aunt says by way of greeting. 107. A big number, but not big enough, considering that I have 66 first cousins and more than twice that many second cousins. Obviously, my dad's siblings have sent small delegations of their own. Too many of us are not here, most notably the two who started it all - Grandma passed away nearly a decade ago, and Grandpa is in a care center.

We exchange sideways hugs and polite conversation with cousins and aunts and uncles. My children gravitate to the whirling, riotous merry-go-round on the playground. They manage to climb aboard and wrap their slender, tanned arms around the bars and hold on tight. I watch them, remembering the summers of my childhood, when my dad's side of the family met at the park every Monday night for a potluck dinner. That was when my cousins and aunts and uncles were at the core of my world. We were a livelier bunch then, without the strained conversations and perfunctory hugs.

The sun starts to set, and as I look across the fields, I understand how a setting like this could be therapeutic. It really is lovely, but it's getting late and we still haven't had dinner. There's a Taco Time in Montpelier, someone says. Just before we leave, my dad notices his Acadia has a flat tire. We wait as he puts on the spare. The tire looks too small for such a big car. We say our goodbyes and drive into Montpelier, behind the lopsided Acadia that is still lumbering on, despite the small tire. Tire is a homonym, too, I think. It belongs to that tricky category of words that look alike but have more than one meaning. I think about the rather enervated family reunion we have just left, and how time has a way of making homonyms out of more than just words.