Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

Character Control

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You have to keep an eye on your secondary characters, because some of them are sneaky — there’s a couple of kinds, especially, who’ll take over the plot if you let them.

First, you have all those characters whose main role in the plot is to be a source of help and knowledge:  fairy godmothers, wise old men, kindly librarians who happen to have exactly the book the protagonist needs, colorful informants who can tell the detective about the word on the street, and all their fictional ancestors and descendants.  It’s necessary to make them interesting in their own right if they’re going to have more than one appearance in the work, lest their true nature as plot devices be discovered; the danger is that once they’re fully-rounded characters they can start to overshadow the hero or heroine they’re supposed to be assisting.  The cure is to strictly ration their helpful appearances, and to let them be wrong or unhelpful once in a while, so that asking for their assistance isn’t the first thing that the protagonist (and the reader) inevitably thinks of in a pinch.

More dangerous than the helpful secondary characters, though, are the ones who exert such a strong magnetic pull that they’ll warp your intended plot out of shape around them if you don’t watch out.  My co-author and I have had to deal with characters like that once or twice — one of them, we hit on the head with a piece of rebar and put into a multi-chapter coma, and he still damn-near took over what was supposed to be somebody else’s book.  With another such character, we had to arrange the plot so that he was well out of the way of the main action when the crisis hit, because if he’d been in place during the crisis he would have dealt with it handily and there wouldn’t have been another book-and-a-half to the story.

(We also had to promise to write him his own book later, when we were done.  That also works.)

Back Again

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I’m home from a week spent teaching at the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop on Martha’s Vineyard.  As usual, I did as much learning as teaching; a stretch of time spent in the company of other writers is always invigorating.

It’s also exhausting, especially when you have to plunge directly into a couple of editing gigs and a heavy deadline.

But I’ll try to keep y’all posted, as it were.

(Yes, my native dialect is one of the many variants of American Southern, tempered by seven years of grad school in Philadelphia, fifteen years as a camp follower Navy spouse, and a couple of decades’ residence in far northern New England.  What this means, in practice, is that I have access to an actual second-person plural, which is something that a functioning language really ought to have.)

 

On the Road Again

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Posts here are likely to be thin on the ground for the next week and a bit, because I’m on Martha’s Vineyard, gearing up to teach at this year’s Viable Paradise workshop.

But I’ll be back, I promise.

 

Metaphor Made Edible

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Let’s start with the recipe.  It’s another one of those Busy Writer Crockpot Specials, this one known formally as Cheesy Kielbasa Potato Soup (“cheesy” in recipe-land, appears to be a code word for “contains Velveeta”.)

Ingredients

1 (30 ounce) bag frozen hash browns
14 ounces kielbasa, cut into bite sized pieces
4 cups chicken broth (for a 32 oz bag of hash browns, make it ~5 cups)
2 onions, diced
8 ounces Velveeta cheese, at room temperature

Directions

In crock pot, combine hash browns, kielbasa, broth, and onions. Stir well and cook on low 6-8 hours.

30 minutes before serving, cut Velveeta into cubes and stir into soup. Cover and cook on high 30 minutes or until cheese is melted.

This recipe can be seasoned further by individual diners with hot sauce, or sour cream, or horseradish, or whatever they want.

What does this have to do with writing?

First, let me tell you about the time I made a much more authentic (i.e., it contained neither frozen hash browns nor Velveeta) potato soup from scratch, including the part where I peeled and diced 8 cups of potatoes.  It turned out as it was supposed to, but the only person in the family who liked it was me — and at that point in time we were six people around the dinner table, so I wasn’t going to put a dish that labor-intensive into permanent rotation when the majority verdict was at best meh.

Some time later, I found this recipe, and because I still liked potato soup, I decided to give it a try.  It wasn’t terribly expensive — the kielbasa was on sale — and it looked dead simple to make.  Kind of low-rent, what with the Velveeta and all, but this time I wasn’t going for Genuine Potato Soup, I was just going for a quick and easy dinner.

The family cleaned their plates and went back for seconds.

“Do this one again!” they all said.

And the way in which my potato soup experience is like unto the writer’s life experience is this:  You can never predict which one of your works, or what part of a work, your readers are going to like based on how much effort you put into it.

Useful Bits of Hard-Earned Knowledge

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…presented here for anyone who might need them:

  •  If the transmission dies on your car, don’t bother with getting it replaced. Instead, take this as a Sign From God that you are meant to trade in that car for a new — and different — model.
  •  If you are a freelancer, credit cards are the work of the devil. Nevertheless, if you are a freelancer, you will almost certainly need to have at least one. None of the ways out of this dilemma are optimal.
  • If you’re a freelancer, pay up front and in cash for whatever you can. There’s never any guarantee that you’ll have the money in your account later.
  • If the thought of having a poor credit rating makes you feel all dirty inside, you’re probably better off not trying for a freelance career in the arts or entertainment industries. Keep your day job and do the art on the side.
  • And if you can’t work a day job and still make time enough somehow to do the art you love, you probably don’t love it enough to do it full-time, either.

Wanted: One Crystal Ball, in Good Working Order

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Estimating the length of time it’s going to take to finish a project is a dark art at the best of times. Other times . . . .

“Four weeks? Sure.”
typity-typity-typity
…time passes…
“Make that five, and I’ll have it by close of business on Friday.”
typity-type-type
…more time passes…
typity-type-type-damn!
“Um . . . Monday morning?”

Let’s just say it can make me feel like Achilles trying to catch that damned tortoise.

It’s Different in the Real World

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Or, more reasons why in-person research is still important.  Some things just aren’t the way they look or sound on television and in the movies.

For example — explosions.  Black powder explosions (which is what you’ll be  getting with just about anything pre-dynamite, which is to say 1867) don’t go up in a blaze of flame like they do on television.  And they don’t go bang! either, they go whump! — a really loud, earthshaking whump!  When the gunpowder factory in our town blew up, the force of the explosion was enough to shake the car I was riding in, several blocks away. (The first thing I thought was, “Oh, no, the transmission’s fallen out again!”, which says more about the bad luck we’d had with our previous vehicle than anything else.)

Artillery, now . . . artillery makes a noise more like pom!, and distant artillery really does sound like thunder.  And musket fire rattles like a string of firecrackers going off.  It also fills the air with white smoke — the classic “fog of war”.  (I spent an enlightening afternoon, once, at a Revolutionary War re-enactment.  Being a writer, I took lots of mental notes.  If you’re doing anything historical, re-enactors can be a useful resource for hands-on look-and-feel stuff.)

And if your characters aren’t wearing ear protection, it’s going to be a while before they can have a conversation that isn’t mostly shouting and hand gestures.  That long talk full of angst and conscience-searching will have to be deferred until later.

Quick and Easy Deadline Dinners #2

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Another meal that doesn’t require much in the way of effort, or of watching, or of thought, for those days when your supply of all three is directed elsewhere.  This one is really easy, if you have a crockpot, and even easier if you also have a food processor.

1 or 2 pounds of cut-up chicken, depending upon how much chicken you’ve got and how many people you’re going to feed.  Boneless chicken thighs are best for slow cooking.

1 large or 2 medium onions, finely chopped.  This is where the food processor comes in.  If you don’t have a food processor, chopping up the onion will take a couple of minutes longer.

1 jar Roland’s yellow curry paste.

1 can coconut milk (the kind for cooking, not the sweetened kind they sometimes sell to put into mixed drinks.)

Put the cut-up chicken, the chopped onion, and the curry paste into your slow cooker, and cook on high for 2-3 hours or on low for 5-6 hours.

Half an hour before you want to serve dinner, stir in the coconut milk.

Serve over rice, or with naan from the grocery store if your grocery store carries naan, or with whatever starch pleases you.

Common Errors of Fantasy, Transportation Division

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Horses are not motorcycles.

If your protagonist’s interactions with his/her gallant steed could equally well (with a change of costume) be interactions with his/her Harley-Davidson, then you have a problem.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing the horse stuff, but are dealing with a fictional milieu where horsepower is what you’ve got, then either do the research (as I’ve said here before, horse people are, taken as a group, glad to be helpful in this regard) or keep your characters indoors and on foot as much as possible.

While you’re at it, take a moment to consider whether or not the horses-as-motorcycles issue might be symptomatic of a larger problem with your story.  Pre-industrial societies are different from modern ones, even if they’re entirely imaginary, and it takes doing the research (again) to get them right.

Other People’s Endings

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When it comes to works in a series — novels, films, television, it doesn’t matter which — I like playing the how-would-I-end-this game.  It’s the fiction-writing equivalent of that improvisational drama exercise where you have to construct a skit around four or five random objects drawn from a grab bag (an argyle sock, a popsicle stick, an outdated guidebook to Tblisi on Five Dollars a Day, and a fishing lure with the hook snipped off…you have ten minutes to brainstorm with your group and then we’ll begin) –the idea is to get from where you are to an acceptable victory condition in five moves or less.

It’s an amusing game; but while I’m playing it I have to keep a firm grasp on the fact that the story I’m ending in my head is, despite any surface resemblances, a different story than the one the author is ending.