Cover Reveal: THE LIGHTHOUSE BETWEEN THE WORLDS by Melanie Crowder

In the fall of 2016, Melanie Crowder and I met for the first time. We'd known each other on line (I reviewed her first novel, PARCHED, right here on Project Mayhem!) and finally got to meet in person on our way to the Virginia Library Association's annual meeting (where our books were both awarded the Jefferson Cup for Historical Fiction).

On that drive, we talked about the work we were doing. Melanie mentioned a new project that involved a lighthouse.

Now that book, The Lighthouse Between the Worlds, will meet the world this fall.

I asked Melanie what first drew her to this story. Here's what she had to say:

I grew up in Oregon, and the lighthouse that inspired the book, Heceta Head, is just down the coast highway from where my family went camping for our summer vacations. I go home to Oregon every year—I'm still a west coast girl at heart.  

I thought of the story when I was out in the wilderness, and wondering what it must have been like when the telegraph, or AC currents, or the Fresnel lens came to the West. It must have seemed like magic. And I thought—what if it was? I had no idea at the time that a portal fantasy, with characters jumping between worlds would be the result, but isn’t that the fun of writing—finding those surprises in the process? 

Here's a description of the story:

Griffin and his father tend to their lighthouse on the craggy coast of Oregon with the same careful routine each day. There are hardly ever any visitors, but they like it that way. Which is why, when a group of oddly dressed strangers suddenly appears, Griffin begins to see just how many secrets his father has been keeping. He never imagined that his lighthouse contains a portal to strange and dangerous worlds, or that a Society of Lighthouse Keepers exists to protect the Earth from a fearsome enemy invasion.

But then Griffin’s dad is pulled through the lens of the lighthouse into one of those other worlds. With his father gone, nobody from the Society is giving Griffin any answers, so he’s on his own. Armed only with a book of mysterious notes from his parents, Griffin is determined to find his dad, no matter what dangers lurk on the other side of the portal.

And here's the gorgeous cover!

You can find out more about Melanie and all her books at her website, www.melaniecrowder.net.

Fasting Story by Joanna Roddy

Photo by: Marco Ottobelli, Source: Wikimedia Commons

This fall, I was up to my eyebrows in work commitments with very little time to write. I knew the new semester in February would bring half the teaching load and twice the scope for creativity. In the months when my fiction writing lay fallow, I came to terms with the end of a long-hoped-for project and realized that the time I wasn't writing was actually rich creative time in a totally different way. 

Freed from the responsibilities of writing, missing writing and wishing I could have the time to do it again, I was suddenly filled with new ideas for stories. I've never felt like much of an idea factory, but it seemed like every day I had some new exciting thought for a character or setting or plot element. They were all thoroughly disconnected, of course, but I was swimming in a rich primordial soup of creative life. It felt like I was on the edge of something new, and I leaned into that with the total freedom of someone who doesn't have to do anything about it yet. 

Finally, in December, with the new semester coming and past projects shelved, I realized it was time to channel the next story. I didn't know what it would be, or if any of the myriad ideas I'd been entertaining would play into it, but I knew it was time to start dreaming something larger. 

Then I did something weird--something I've never done before. First you have to understand that I'm a total book gobbler. I get audio books through my library, I have several e-books on my phone or printed books on my nightstand (or in my purse--anyone else? Lit. nerds unite!), and at any given time, I am voraciously reading at least one or two of them at every possible opportunity. But in December I decided that if I wanted to receive something new, I needed to get other people's words out of my head. I needed to carve out quiet, empty spaces where my own words and ideas could form. So I decided to fast story. 

Yes, fasting. Like a spiritual practice, or a diet. That meant no books, no audio books, not even podcasts. I also took a break from mindless phone games that I sometimes play while listening to an enthralling novel. Instead, I sat with the silence and I waited. 

I'm not a saint, and I'm not a liar, so I'll be honest: it was uncomfortable. There were times I cheated with a podcast. But I pressed into my story fast anyway with the kind of dogged faith we creative people have to have, believing that there are stories for me to tell and trying to make my mind and heart open to receiving them. I had a piece of paper on my dresser that I looked at every day that said simply, "Let it come."

One night at the end of December, I lay in my bed, very tired and a little sick after all the holiday hoopla, and it happened. A story began to come into my mind in a series of images, scenes, characters, and plot twists. I could see it all unfolding in front of me. I was a bit bent on getting a good night's sleep, so I actually fought the idea of getting out of bed to write it down for a good ten minutes. But the idea was so vivid that all hopes of sleep had fled, and finally I went out to the dark dining room, sat down at the table, and filled a page in my notebook with lines and lines of small print as I shaped the idea into words.

And I'm excited about this new story. I feel it burning in me, waiting for the chance to move from my mind to the page. 

I don't know whether all this is merely coincidental--perhaps it is--but I think there's something true in the idea that our lives are so full of clamor that we miss quieter voices within us that would guide us in transformative ways if only we stopped to hear them. I know that for me, the act of faith precedes the miracle. If inspiration is to find a way in, leaving the door open to her can't hurt. 

The Ghost of a Memory Becomes a Seed

When I was in elementary school in Argentina, we didn't read from novels, except for the time the teacher read us Dailan Kifki (about a pet elephant), by María Elena Walsh when I was in sixth or seventh grade. (More on María Elena on another post. She deserves one to herself). We had "reading primers" vetted by the Ministry of Education.

Our language "manual" contained excerpts of books, little snippets to teach us whatever we

Dailan Kifki, the Elefant

needed to learn in grammar, or syntax, or sometimes even history.

When I was in 5th grade, my parents couldn't afford to buy me the Language Arts textbook, but they borrowed it from a neighbor. Hermione-style, the first night I got ahold of a new book, I read it back to back. I don't remember much about what I read, except for an excerpt about a boy who waits for the train every afternoon, and then hurls rocks at the engine. One day the locomotive gets so fed up with the abuse, that "she" throws back her whistle at the boy. The boy can't speak anymore. The piece ended with him realizing that he can't talk. His fear and desperation when his mother thinks he's being silly by not using words and instead whistling like an engine.

That's all there was.

I loved that piece so much that I cut the rectangle with the beginning of this story and kept it for years, like a puzzle piece I tried to match to other excerpts I found. I'm sure it got lost when my family moved from Argentina to Utah. I like to think that my journals and newspaper clippings huddled together in a box, waiting for me in a corner of my godmother's house.

Cutting this story got my parents and me in a lot of trouble because when the neighbors got their book back for their kid who was younger than me, of course they saw it was missing sections (although I don't remember cutting out anything else. I honestly thought no one would ever notice the one missing piece--which makes me think, why didn't I just rip the whole page? I don't know. I was ten). The stealing of a section of a book got me in the bad side of the girls of my apartment building and led to years-long ostracism (more on that in another blog post).

Ladies and gentlemen, Laura Devetach! 

At the time, I didn't care that the neighbor girl was mad at me for cutting up the book. All I cared about was knowing the ending of the story. I wanted to know so badly, it physically hurt. And I never forgot it.

You think Rick Riordan's cliffhangers are cruel? You think waiting three years for Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix was an eternity? How about waiting 28 years to know how a story ends? A story whose title and author you don't even know.

I knew the story took place in the Argentine sierras. I've never been there, but the way the author described the place was so vivid, I could smell the ripe peaches in the trees. I didn't even remember the words she used. I remember feeling. The feeling of summer bliss. The feeling of a kid getting into mischief when he thinks no one's watching. The feeling of doing something terrible that you can't take back. You know that feeling in the center of your chest when you've made a mistake and you don't know how to fix it or how to confess? That one. That's what I felt. I wanted to know what fixing a mistake feels like too.

La Torre de Cubos
(The Block Tower)

Fast forward to me, writing my creative thesis for my MFA in writing. I wanted to write a short story to honor this piece from my childhood, but I wanted to credit the author. I searched online, and I found plenty stories about trains, but not the one I was looking for. Finally, I asked on Facebook, and I tagged three friends. One from elementary school, one from my church, and another one I met online. Within minutes, my friend from elementary school replied: "Could it be La Torre de Cubos (The Block Tower), by Laura Devetach? The military junta banned her works for a long time because they were subversive."

I immediately looked up Laura Devetach, and friends, let me tell you:
First of all, yes! The story is Mauricio y su Silbido (Mauricio's Whistling). After 28 years of anticipation, I savored the whole story as if it were the most decadent treat. But not only is this particular story delicious. The whole little collection of short stories is a delight. I "understand" why the military banned her. Her work is for children, but like all the best children's literature, it isn't childish. Laura Devetach writes for children with respect. She addresses social injustice, individual responsibility for one's actions (as in Mauricio's story), white privilege, gender equality, and a lot of other concepts I didn't learn about until I was an adult. Although she's been recognized around the world for her contribution to children's literature, as a child, I never even knew the name of this author from my own province, Santa Fe.

After the first burst of euphoria for having found what I'd been searching for years, a feeling of mourning and then anger filled me. I missed so much during my childhood! The books that showed characters like me, who spoke my language, literally, who drank máte (the Argentine herbal tea) with their families, the kids who couldn't afford enough notebooks to write all their stories, the kids who were alone all day while their moms were at work were robbed from me.

I was born at the cusp of the military government, and by the time I started elementary school my country was under the governance of Ricardo Alfonsín, our democratically elected president. However, it took a long time for democracy to trickle down into education. I asked my friend, the genius one who knew exactly what story I was looking for, "Why do you think we never learned about Laura? Why didn't she ever come visit our school? Why?" Her reply was, "Maybe because our teachers were so scared by the dark years of the dictatorship that they didn't know we needed Laura's words, or that even they were allowed to teach us about her and our other bright writers" (like Alma Maritano, more on her on another post too).

Now that I know her name, (Thank you, Laura Devetach!) I pledge to honor her legacy. I want to write stories that will resonate with readers even when they don't remember my name anymore or the details of a story, but who remember what they feel and are inspired to write their own stories.

The story I wrote doesn't have to do at all with a boy and a train. But it has to do with the power of taking control of our actions, and how to go on after we make a terrible mistake. This new story of mine was born almost three decades ago after reading an excerpt. That's the power of writing, my friends. That's why we do it. So even when darkness looms ahead, or when we're rushed by deadlines or other obligations, remember why we write, and write. Out there, there's a child waiting for your words. Even if it's only a paragraph.

Learning From Masters: Diana Wynne Jones by Joanna Roddy

Have you ever been saddened by the thought that you've already read all of your favorite childhood novels, and you'll never again have the intoxicating experience of discovering them and entering their worlds for the first time? I do often. Whenever someone tells me that they've never read Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, or Narnia, I never think negative thoughts. Rather, I think, How lucky for them. They have all that just waiting to be discovered. 

However, some good gifts do come late, and for me this has been discovering the writings of Diana Wynne Jones. If you have never heard of her, your reading material is about to get a major boost. I am no expert on Diana Wynne Jones, but I began reading her books a few years ago and feel as though some vital readership that was withheld from me in childhood has now resurfaced and leads me into a second youth. 

Jones was an author who wrote many children's books. She was British and attended C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien's lectures as a student at Oxford. I think that Jones was quite popular in her own country, but she may not have been so common in the average U.S. library, especially as she wrote during the rise of realist books for children, and fantasy had a sort of dangerous frivolity attached to it by well-meaning adults. 

My first introduction to Jones was through the film Howl's Moving Castle by Japanese film-maker Hayao Miyazaki (another delightful discovery, if you've not watched his enchanting animated films). I grew curious about the author and began reading the Howl Series. Since then I've devoured the Chrestomanci Series, which I enjoyed even more than Howl and have read many of her collected essays and speeches in Reflections on the Magic of Writing (the recent edition has an introduction by Neil Gaiman, who was a friend and admirer of her work). 

As a writer, I always bring a kind of apprenticeship mindset to my reading. I pay attention to plot, characterization, language, style, and anything else done masterfully or differently than I've seen before. Jones is remarkable for her complex plots that seem deceptively simple, never faltering in their tone and readability for a young audience. It's a kind of genius how her plots unfold, how surprising are her turnings, yet how every ingredient is there from the beginning. 

It strikes me that her books must occur to children much as life itself. There is a great, almost unknowable complexity to the world around them, but their own course through it is quite linear and understandable and familiar. And then when mundanities suddenly erupt with magic, meaning, and purpose, it's no great surprise. The latent power of every day things is always there, obvious to any child who suddenly discovers that balls are actually three-dimensional circles, or that certain animals can learn to talk or use sign language. 

Image by AnneCat at Deviant Art

Another thing I'm learning from Jones is her characterizations of children. They are neither miniature adults nor two-dimensional partial humans. They are children in the way one remembers one's own childhood. In your memory, aren't you fully yourself: reasoning, understanding, but without experience to inform you, and often in the frustrating position of having very little power? Jones's child characters are spot on.

Something surprising about her work is that books within the same series often seem wholly unrelated to one another until one approaches the end of the novel. There are always new characters and settings. I don't know how this would go over in today's publishing industry, but Jones pulls it off beautifully, drawing you into a new world with the tantalizing promise that an already beloved fantasy universe will make itself known sooner or later.  

I encourage anyone to start on Diana Wynne Jones's novels. She has written for adults as well as children. It makes me exceedingly happy to know there are many more of Jones's books for me to read and many an hour to sit with a warm cuppa in a comfortable chair enjoying them. Is there really any other kind of happiness?  

I would also very much love to know of any other children's authors or series that readers and Project Mayhemmers have discovered in their adulthood. Please share!

Takeaways from Elizabeth Gilbert's BIG MAGIC and my favorite books on craft by Joanna Roddy

I'm forever reading books from other writers about the craft of writing. Writing is solitary in many ways. I'm always looking for coyotes of the borderlands to show my wandering writer's soul the way into the land of plenty. 

This spring I read Elizabeth Gilbert's BIG MAGIC. I never read EAT, PRAY, LOVE, but I fell utterly in love with Gilbert's TED talk on creative genius, in which she argues for the classical idea of the muse. She says that the modern concept of artistic genius is too much pressure and is silently killing off our artists through addiction, self-destruction, and despair. She offers instead the ancient idea of having a genius: a creative entity that brings inspiration to collaborate with the artist. Today we typically think of this as a muse. The artist is the servant of the muse, offering the grunt labor to bring the idea into being. As a co-collaborator, the artist is only partially responsible for the success or failure of the work.  

The video is 20 minutes long, but if you can give yourself a learning/ inspiration break today, it's worth the watch.

BIG MAGIC expands on the TED talk, and it is a rich, nurturing baptism into the good news of creative living free from fear. It may be the psychologically healthiest thing I've ever read about being an artist. A lot of writers on craft focus on all the barriers to creativity--resistance, apathy, difficulty, fear. I think this can sometimes lead to the paradigm of the tortured artist who believes that their creative work requires brutal sacrifice and torture. Gilbert reminds us that ideas want to be brought to life by artists and that our creativity chose us and is dependent on us to produce anything in the world. So why would we think it hates us and is trying to punish us? One line from BIG MAGIC I quite like on this theme is this:

“I’ve always had the sense that the muse of the tormented artist—while the artist himself is throwing temper tantrums—is sitting quietly in a corner of the studio, buffing its fingernails, patiently waiting for the guy to calm down and sober up so everyone can get back to work.”

Here are my main takeaways from the book:

• Ideas are seekers of human collaboration and we have the freedom to say yes or no to them. If you say no, someone else will get that idea and run with it. If you say yes, but don't show up to do the work, eventually the power of that idea will leave you, looking for another collaborator.
• You're never too old to begin.
• Take the long view of failure and rejection: I plan to do this for the rest of my life. Many years of rejection is only short-term. 
• Do not pressure your creative work to succeed or provide for you financially. That's the quickest way to kill it off. You provide for both yourself and your creative work. (Don't quit your day job.)
• Stop complaining. Complaining about your creative life is bad juju and ideas will not want to collaborate with you. Treat your work with respect, approach it with love, and see how that alters your experience of doing the work.
• Create because you love to do it. There may be no other reward.
• Your work is not your baby. Cut, change, adapt if you must. Your creative power is precious, but your projects will never find their way in the world if you feel that you must forever hover over them protectively. 
•  You are unlikely to get the outcome in the world that you desire from your work. Not that you will never succeed. But even success takes longer and comes in unexpected ways. You cannot control the outcome. Create anyway.
• Put fierce trust in the love you bear for your creativity, trust for which the qualifiers of success or failure effectively lose their meaning.

This mantra toward the end of the book brought me to tears:

"Fierce trust asks you to stand strong within this truth: You are worthy, dear one, regardless of the outcome. You will keep making your work, regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. And you will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don't understand the outcome."

I can't recommend this book more. It's a gem, unlike anything in its class.

Here are a list of other books I've enjoyed as creative inspiration and writing craft:

On Writing, Stephen King: The most practical and helpful book on writing and craft I've read. The memoir portion feels erroneous to the reader looking for writing advice, until you realize it's integral. Try not to feel as though you too must produce 2000 words a day after reading it. 

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott: This was the first book of writing advice I ever read. It's hilarious and honest and focuses on getting past our own hang-ups in order to do the work. 

Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle: A Christian spiritual reflection on writing by the author of A WRINKLE IN TIME. Deep and moving, abstract but inspiring. 

The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron: A twelve week creative recovery workbook, not unlike a twelve step program. Great for digging deep into oneself and mining out the reasons for blockage and reconnecting with your creative dreams.

Reflections on the Magic of Writing, Diana Wynne Jones: A hodge-podge of lectures and essays by the great children's fantasy writer who studied under Lewis and Tolkein at Oxford and authored many books, including HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE. The latest edition has an introduction by Neil Gaiman. 

The Writing Life, Annie Dillard: A soulful memoir by the Pulitzer Prize winning Dillard, reflecting on the experience of her own writing life. 

Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg: This is a book filled with practical exercises and the exhortation to keep the pen moving! A huge proponent of free writing, Goldberg, a Zen Buddhist, approaches writing as a practice, much like yoga or meditation.

Question for you: What are your favorite books of writing advice? (I'm always adding to my reading list.) If you've read BIG MAGIC, what was your number one takeaway?

The Enneagram for character development by Joanna Roddy

I have to confess, I put little stock in personality tests. They seem too generic, like magazine horoscopes that, with a little finagling, could apply to anyone. The tests are fun to take, but they're more like acceptable vanity exercises. Only the saints and psychologists among us really dig into understanding types other than their own. At best we say: "Oh you're an INFJ? I'm an ENFJ!" and remark on our shared traits and the differences between introverts and extroverts. 

But recently a psychologist friend introduced me to a personality system she uses in her practice, and I have found it incredibly helpful, both personally and in my relationships. Recently I decided to use it in my writing as well. I was having a hard time making certain characters distinct and clear. Using this system, two-dimensional characters suddenly popped up off the page. I began to understand what motivated them, how they would react in situations, what they might say (or not say), what vice they might gravitate toward, and what core virtue would emerge under the right circumstances. In short, it was character development magic. 

The Enneagram:

The personality typing system is called the Enneagram, and it articulates nine personality types that are interrelated. In an extremely condensed form, here are the nine types and their core motivations:

Type 1: The Reformer/ Perfectionist. "I must be/ do right."

Type 2: The Helper/ Giver. "I must help others."

Type 3: The Achiever/ Motivator/ Performer. "I must succeed."

Type 4: The Individualist/ Artist/ Romantic. "I must be unique."

Type 5: The Observer/ Investigator/ Thinker. "I must understand the world around me."

Type 6: The Loyalist/ Skeptic. "I must be secure."

Type 7: The Enthusiast/ Adventurer. "I must seek new experiences."

Type 8: The Challenger/ Leader. "I must be in control."

Type 9: The Peacemaker/ Mediator. "I must have/make peace."

Each personality type perceives these motivations as the means for them to be safe, to have meaning in their lives, or to be loved.

There are a lot more details to each type, like key fears and desires, and basic virtues and vices. Check out this cheat sheet from Wikipedia (click to enlarge):

Integration/ Disintegration:

What I like about the Enneagram is its nuance and complexity. We all know that a healthy or growing person and an unhealthy or stressed person behave in totally different ways, even if they share personality traits. The Enneagram predicts what traits emerge under stress and during personal growth.  Every Enneagram type uniquely integrates to the healthiest characteristics of another type and disintegrates to the least healthy behaviors of a different type.

For example, threes integrate to a six and disintegrate to a nine. Achieving threes can be self-focused, but with maturity, they look more like other-focused healthy sixes. Threes can be driven, but under stress they begin to look like unhealthy nines: disengaged and apathetic.

Wings:

Enneagram types can have an even greater degree of complexity by demonstrating traits from one of the numbers adjacent to them, which are called wings. The wing augments the primary personality. So you can have an observant five with an artistic four wing, which might produce a professorial art school type, or an achieving three with a helpful two wing might be an front-person for a non-profit organization. These are gross generalizations, but I find the flexibility of wings accounts for a wide array of personality manifestations, even among people who share a primary type. It keeps it all from becoming too canned and stereotyped, but not so general as to become meaningless. 

In Writing:

The Enneagram goes much farther and deeper than this crash course, and those who are interested could spend a lot of time learning about it. I think most of us instinctively pick up on others' personalities, especially writerly types who want to write believable characters. If people were clocks, we immediately perceive the difference between a cuckoo clock, a grandfather clock, a digital clock and an alarm clock. We get, on a basic level, what makes them tick. The Enneagram, then, is effectively like a screwdriver that removes the backing so we can see the actual mechanics at work. 

The most helpful aspect of the Enneagram for me is the basic fears and desires. It helps me to know how a character is going to react to the sticky situations I put them in. For example, one of my characters is an adventurous seven. When his parents want him to go into the military for a war he doesn't agree with, his response is to hop a plane out of the country. A seven's core fear is being trapped or in pain and their spontaneity can make them impulsive, so this response makes sense for him, drastic though it may seem. Another of my characters is a loyal six. A six's basic fear is making the wrong decision. They need guidance to orient themselves. In this situation, my six character would have struggled with living up to his parents' expectations. In fear of making the wrong decision for himself, he probably would have enlisted despite his own reservations. And that would have made for an entirely different plot.

A Warning: 

Fully fledged characters will still surprise us. They should never act against their own character, but they might step out of the box that a personality type wants to put them in. A challenger-leader eight who tends toward domineering might unexpectedly resist the urge to step into an argument, which would mean something substantial for that character. Perhaps they are moving in their direction of integration to look like a helping two, or they've newly realized that winning a fight is less effective than leading by example. This flexibility is how we avoid stereotypes and wooden characters. I like that the Enneagram allows for the changes brought on by maturing or devolving or blending a couple of personality types together. But once these type of tools have helped you build your writing, like scaffolding, they should fall away and let the real, living world on the page play itself out as it must. Using the Enneagram as a tool, not as a law, is the best way. 

Resources:

Start with the Enneagram Institute site and the Enneagram of Personality Wikipedia page. From there, there are lots of books, sites, and articles available to learn more about the Enneagram. And here's a link the the long version of the test if you want to find out what Enneagram type you are and to a shorter version and another type of short test. The last one is my favorite. I apologize in advance for the productive time you will inevitably lose on those tests, but if it gets you to an understanding of good character building, then I think you don't have to feel too guilty about it. 

Please leave a comment if you've used the Enneagram or other personality typing for character building! I'd love to hear your insights. And here's something I'm deeply curious to know: do the main characters you write have the same personality type as you do? Happy writing!

Marrying Story Structure and Character Arcs by Joanna Roddy

I'm a natural planner, but over the past year or two, I've been trying to loosen up and just write, as I've shared here before. But, at least for me, even when I'm letting the story lead me step by step as I'm writing it, I like to still have in my head the big beats I need to hit and where I hope to arrive at the end. I've also tried to press into character arcs as an equally important motion of the plot. 

As I've been working on my current project, I've discovered an approach that is giving me what seems to be the perfect balance between plan and discovery and between plot and character. I've been wanting to share this technique with you, and it makes a nice dovetail to Chris's post last week on layering plot and character in story. 

You may have heard about seven point plot structure before. It's kind of a hero's journey lite, if you're familiar with that approach. I heard about seven point plot structure from a writer friend, but when I looked it up, the blogs I found only confused me. Hook? Pinch Point? Plot Turn? The descriptions were vague and uninspiring. 

But then my friend directed me to the videos of Dan Wells presenting at a writing symposium using the seven points for story structure. If you want a quick master class on writing, I encourage you to set aside forty-five minutes and take yourself out to coffee with headphones, a laptop, and this link. 

In the case that you don't have time to go watch the whole thing right now, I'll give you the one paragraph summary in the order Wells directs you to plan the points (which is not the order they will happen in your story): 

1. Figure out how you want the story to end (Resolution). 
2. Create a beginning with an opposite status quo (Hook). 
3. The middle should be when your character makes the deliberate choice to pursue the Resolution (Midpoint). 
4. Set the character in motion from the Hook toward the Midpoint. Call them out of the status quo and introduce conflict (Plot Turn 1). 
5. Get the character the last and most important thing they need to accomplish the Resolution (Plot Turn 2). 
6. Apply pressure, force your characters to action, and create hurdles to their goals on either side of your Midpoint (Pinch Points 1 and 2). 

So now you have your seven points. This is the order they'll occur for your reader:

This is pretty straightforward stuff. It's a way to do it, and it pretty nearly encompasses most story-telling from a western worldview. What I like most about Wells's presentation is when he takes the character arcs, main plot, and subplots (using The Matrix as his example) and charts where each point of the the story structure occurs for each one and how they then weave together in the chronology of the story. 

This got me excited and it got me thinking about how seven point plotting takes shape for characters, something Wells doesn't have time to fully unpack during his presentation.

I understood the idea of a Hook to Resolution arc for any character, but the finer details evaded me. I had to dig a little deeper to understand what a Midpoint would mean for a character arc. That's when I discovered this excellent series of posts by K.M. Weiland. 

She argues that in the beginning of a story, the hero is operating from a lie about who they are, what they are capable of, or what the world is like. This lie shapes who they are and how they are. The Resolution for that character will be to reject the lie and learn, accept, and live out the truth instead. So, then, the Midpoint is when the character is able to finally see and accept the truth, but still has not rejected the lie or its effects on their choices. This enlightens the rest of the seven points for character arc. The Plot Turns introduce the truth, expose the lie, and give the character what they need to reach the Resolution. The Pinch Points refute the truth, reinforce the lie, and create barriers to the character's journey to truth. 

Brilliant stuff, right? To have this internally-driven structure woven into the externally-driven one allows for complexity, ingenuity, and well-rounded characters amidst a satisfying story. 

As I'm drafting a novel right now, the seven plot points are really helping. Some of the story points will happen simultaneously with character points, but some will occur separately. Many of the points are already clear scenes in my mind. But there are so many other scenes and so much happening between the points in order to get the story there, they serve more as guideposts than outline. It's definitely pacifying my inner Hermione Granger who needs to have answers, but it's giving spaciousness for the story to open itself to me as I write it. I'm loving that balance.

Have you used seven point plot structure before? Have you applied it to character development? Have you encountered other teachers/bloggers/writers who have an approach to it that you've found helpful? Please share in the comments below!

The Creative Value of a Binge by Kell Andrews

My winter vacation comes to an end, and with it the end of a binge -- not the usual holiday eating indulgence (although plenty of Christmas cookies were involved) but of a lengthy reading binge spent immersed in Regency romance. I started with Austen, went deep into the Georgette Heyer catalog, then branched out into modern writers, then back to Austen.

The holiday binge is over.

As after most binges, I've ended feeling slightly overindulged -- I've had enough younger brothers with gambling problems, dukes with rakish reputations, and haute ton society gatekeepers to last me another six months. I also have completed a crash course in rule-bound historical romantic tension, which is just what I need for the YA historical fantasy I'm writing.

Prolonged reading binges are how I became literate in the fantasy genre and in the middle-grade category. Until those self-directed educations, I read primarily adult literary fiction, and I haven't gone back yet. Deep and wide immersive reading is form of research for fiction writers, and for me a purely pleasurable one. I had to know the voice and rhythms before I could find my own. I needed to learn the tropes and conventions so that I could avoid or deploy them purposefully, rather than falling into them inadvertently.

Binges are the modern way of consuming media. Binge TV watching started with broadcast marathons, then exploded with DVD box sets. Now digital streaming has turned video consumption from a rationed-out, once a week television appointment to on-demand indulgence. Netflix and Amazon now release whole series at once, and Amazon boasts that its series are "bingeworthy." Why watch one episode at a time when you can watch two or three in a night or a whole series in a weekend?

That kind of immediate gratification is the same for books -- finish one book by an author, then download the rest of the backlist or series. It's how many experience video gaming -- a weekend spent in MMORPG. They're all vicarious forms of living, from which we emerge slightly bleary-eyed, but with a sense of having lived in these imagined worlds and genres.

The difference between a binge that saps energy or feeds creativity is how you feel when it's over. Does it leave you with a hangover or an afterglow? Do you feel as drained as if you were really the one battling invaders, solving murder mysteries, or saving the world, or are you energized to create something new?

For fiction writer, an uninterrupted immersion is just what many of us need -- especially in the form of a binge of inspired writing, whether National Novel Writing Month, a writers' retreat, or just a really good writing day when we somehow quadruple our usual output. For me, my writing binge lasted from August through October, when I wrote 75,000 words, before I fell back into a reading cycle. I've used that extended reading cycle to recharge my creative juices so I can finish this manuscript and try to make it a book.

Today I am back at work, back in the real world after a vacation binge of family and fiction. I'm back to reading middle-grade fantasy (right now The Wrinkled Crown by Mayhemmer Anne Nesbet), and my writing will likely each go back to an hour a day, which is enough to get me where I need to go if I keep working consistently. But I can only do it because I let my creative spirit vacation somewhere else, for just a little while.

(And it probably is time to cool it on the Christmas cookies.)

Resistance by Joanna Roddy

"Sea captain in storm," illustration by N.C. Wyeth from The Rakish Brigantine

We all know that feeling.

The early morning alarm has gone off...
...or we've just got the kids out the door for school...
...or we've finally made it to our favorite coffee shop and sat down with our favorite cup of warm...
...or we've rented an actual cabin and have finally arrived and settled in...

...and now we're supposed to sit down and write. 

Because we carved out the time and the space and we planned to do it and here we are. We fought tooth and nail for this time. 

But what rises to the surface is the simple mantra that destroys everything we've worked so hard for:

I don't want to. 

Which materializes in the form of checking Facebook, or email, or twitter, just one last time before really getting down to it... 
...or getting a snack...
...or turning off the alarm and promising ourselves we'll put in some time later in the day...
...or wondering what ever made us think renting a cabin would be a good idea and reaching for the nearest book about writing...
...or starting a sewing/cooking/building/organizing/art/charity/garden project that's been lying dormant for months...
...or any number of seemingly worthy distractions that all sound reasonable, but come from the same source: 

Resistance. 

Resistance is almost always there. It's the part of you that wants entertainment, or distraction, or rest instead of doing the hard work required to sit there and put words on the page. Resistance keeps kids from doing their chores, adults from keeping their New Year's resolutions, and dieters from keeping off the weight. And Resistance keeps writers from writing, and creatives from creating.

I've been thinking about Resistance lately because Steven Pressfield in his books DO THE WORK and THE WAR OF ART talks a lot about it. His books read like missives from the front lines, like letters back East from Clint Eastwood on the frontier of the wild west. It's gritty, and real, and wise in the way that old sea captains are wise about the sea, or a hunter is wise about the wolf. Pressfield can describe Resistance with the intimacy of an opponent and the accuracy of a scholar.

Ok, so it's there. But what do you DO about it?

Pressfield puts a lot of stock in outwitting, outmaneuvering, and outlasting Resistance and he has some very salient things to say about how to deal with it. He gets it.

But I've been thinking about how I deal with resistance and I've decided that the most powerful tool I have is the truth. Not my wits or my stubbornness or my blind faith. 

Because once you realize that Resistance exists, and it borrows your voice, and your doubts, and your insecurities, and your vices, and it puts them on like a costume to pretend to be you and manipulate you away from doing the work, the thing that can stop it mid-stride is just this:

That isn't me. 

Because, actually, I do want to do this. I do want to write the book. I just do. And all that other stuff that's telling me how hard it is: that's not me. 

The dance with Resistance is different every day, but when I remember that it's outside of me, and stand on the truth of who I am and what I want, I stop confusing Resistance's voice with my own. And I'm free. 

And I don't have to be a warrior most of the time. I can just be me. 

Write on, writers. You actually do want to do the work. Really, you do.

Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation (aka Revision) by Joanna Roddy

Photo courtesy: Moving Picture World
Wikimedia Commons

It was just before Christmas two years ago and I was on the phone with my agent...having the conversation everyone dreads.

Back when I first signed with my agency, I knew they wanted a big revision and I was more than willing to do it. I *wanted* someone to tell me what to do next. I was good at being a student--doing my assignments, acing tests, and regurgitating my teacher's ideas--but all this author-ity was kind of unnerving to me. The creative process was so lonely and hard and I had no one to tell me if I was doing it right. So I took my agent's revision notes and treated them like my study guide. When I was done checking off all the boxes, I sent off my manuscript, sick of the thing and glad to be done working on it.

But then my agent let me know that although I had made some good changes, I still wasn't done. The manuscript needed more work. I was honestly a bit lost about what to do. The new revision notes reiterated problems I had tried to fix the first time. I wrote up a sample chapter and asked my agent for some feedback, desperately hoping I was now moving in the right direction. 

And here we were on the phone just a few weeks before Christmas when my to-do list was miles long (and the last thing I wanted to do was take on a major writing project) and she was telling me what I absolutely did NOT want to hear:

This revision wasn't working. Maybe I should take some time off and reassess. Maybe I needed to get a book doctor to work with me. Maybe I should go back and revisit craft. 

Ouch. 

So I took some time off, tried not to think about it, and enjoyed the holidays with my family.  

Then I thought hard about what to do next. I was embarrassed and confused and a big part of me wanted to give up--the part of me that didn't know if I had whatever skill it would take to revive my book. 

But after a few months, I swallowed my bruised pride and I started to reach out. I contacted two published authors I know and asked if they'd meet with me to talk about my situation. I shared with them the painful truth and each in their own way offered perspective, advice, and got me thinking about craft in new ways. ON WRITING by Stephen King and Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling were game-changers for me.

After these conversations, something shifted inside me. I realized that I had to stop waiting for someone else to tell me how to write my book. I *already knew* what I needed to do to make it what I wanted it to be. I just needed to do it and stop waiting for someone to give me permission. I also needed to roll up my sleeves for some more(!) hard work and stop clinging to my earlier efforts.

I dropped the first five chapters and rewrote the beginning from scratch. I cut characters and scenes. I combined repetitive elements, reordered the plot, and even mashed two major characters together into one. I tied up loose plot ends. I took two-dimensional aspects of the book and examined them from new perspectives until I understood them more deeply. I clarified my point of view. I thought of new plot twists. I simplified unnecessary complications. 

By the time I was done, not a single scene was left untouched, much of the previous draft was discarded, and I'd estimate at least 60% of the manuscript was entirely new. It wasn't so much a revision as a rewrite.

And for the first time, I truly loved my book. It felt right in a way it never had before. 

I sent it off. When my agent and I had that next call, she said words that I almost never thought I'd hear: "Joanna, this is such a huge leap forward! How did you do it?"

Are you stuck? It's pretty likely you already know what you need to do. Keep learning your craft, trust yourself, trust your work, and don't give up.

A Writing Exercise from HARRIET THE SPY by Joanna Roddy

I was reading HARRIET THE SPY the other day and was absolutely smitten with Harriet's writer's game from the beginning of the book. Check it out:

Harriet was trying to explain to Sport how to play Town. "See, first you make up the name of the town. Then you write down the names of all the people who live in it. You can't have too many or it gets too hard. I usually have twenty-five....Then when you know who lives there, you make up what they do. For instance, Mr Charles Hanley runs the filling station on the corner."

She goes on to explain that once you know the names of all the families and how many kids they have and what they do for a living, that's when the fun begins. She starts imagining situations that happen in the town and how the people's lives intersect. While one farmhouse is getting robbed in the dead of night, a baby is being born in the hospital and the police chief is strolling down Main Street and senses that something is amiss. And so on.

I thought to myself, now there's an idea. 

So many children's books happen in the center of a community: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, and HARRY POTTER, to name a few. The setting could be a town, a school, a secret government training facility, or a summer camp, but when there's a cast of characters around your heroes, it's good to know who they are and where they come from right off the bat. Then you can start imagining situations that would arise between these characters in this setting, instead of (as I so often do) waiting for scenes and characters to present themselves as you write or outline. I would imagine that this is where great subplots, interesting characters, and plot complexities can emerge. Kind of like real life. 

Anyone want to play town?

Let us know if you have any great exercises for constructing characters, world-building, or beginning a new story idea. We'd love to hear from you!

The Importance of Beginnings by: Joanna Roddy

Story beginnings have been tricky for me. When I started editing with my agent, that was one of the first and hardest things I had to work on. At one point she said, "Your main character wakes up thinking about chess. So we think he's a chess geek. Is that what you were going for?" My adventurous hero with a burning desire to travel the world with his archeologist grandpa? No. Chess geek was not what I was going for. I was just trying to get him to an important scene as quickly as possible. Back to the blank page for me.  

Something I've learned since then is that the beginning of a story has more weight than the rest of it. Your reader is trying to orient themselves to the world, to the characters, and to your voice. The first few things your character does and says DEFINE that character for your reader. 

The beginning of your story is like a resume, trying to get your reader to hire you for the job of temporary entertainer--and if that reader is an agent or editor you want to work with, then you want those pages to shine. 

As I entered a season of ruthless and wholescale editing, I noticed how the Pixar movies that my kids watch are so tightly written. Everything has a purpose: humor, plot, character, or setting, and usually several at once. In a 100 page screenplay for an audience with a notoriously short attention-span, there is no dross. And within the first few minutes, you clearly understand the main character, the world they live in, and what they want.  

Pixar screenplay writer, Michael Arndt, made a YouTube video about Pixar's approach to story beginnings. This is just packed with great ideas. Have a look if you have a few minutes.

His basic formula for the very beginning of a story:

1. Right away, introduce your character, the world they live in, and show them doing the thing they love most.

2. Show that they have a flaw, which flows out of their grand passion--some way in which they take it too far.

3. Show clouds on the horizon--some hint of the conflict or emotional challenge the character will face for the rest of the story.

He goes on to explain the rest of Act 1, by the end of which your character has a goal and has set off on the journey of the rest of the story. He summarizes: "So your story is coming out of your character's deepest desires and their darkest fears. The thing they love gets taken away from them and the world is revealed to be unfair. To put things right, they have to make the journey that is the rest of the film. And by the end of the journey, hopefully they'll not only get back what they lost but they'll be forced to fix that little flaw they had when we first met them."

Formulas can be prisons or wings, depending on how you work, but as a jumping off place, I found this advice super helpful. 

How do you start a new story? Do you use a formula or have any advice to offer? I'd love to hear!