Yesterday I read an interview that Marie (Fireside Musings) did with Lise Haines, and one of the questions and answers jumped out at me.

Marie asked:

What obstacles would you warn beginning authors of?

And Lise answered:

One of the primary things an author has to come to grips with is: who holds the emotion in a work of fiction—the author or your reader. If you dump your emotions onto the page, the author holds the emotional content—and the reader observes things from a distance. If you show some restraint and simply convey very specific, concrete details and show us what happened, the reader feels the emotion in an almost effortless, and deeply satisfying way.

I think that’s worth considering. One of the things that Stephen Roxburgh kept repeating at the workshop I went to last month was, “Ask yourself what you want to the reader to be feeling at this moment.”

So at the bottom of one of my pages he wrote something like, “This is getting long and boring.”

I laughed and laughed, thinking, “No, that was definitely not what I wanted my reader to be feeling there.”

But I guess my point is this: We do need to care about what our readers are feeling. We do need to manipulate the readers’ emotions. The question is: How best to do this?

Do we do it by pouring our emotions onto the page? What does Lise mean she says we should paint the specific details and then let the reader have the emotional response?

I think of several scenes in Girl in the Arena–sad scenes. I wasn’t crying for any of them. I think I felt what the main character felt. She was rather numb and I felt numb. It was well done. I assume that numbness was exactly what the author wanted me to feel.

But I want to know how to make people sob the way Bridge to Terabithia made me sob.

I cry when a character I love cries. But I also cry when people I don’t know cry. I am a huge sympathy crier. So I can turn on a TV show with characters I’ve never met, standing around a grave crying and within a few seconds, I’ll be crying, too. I sympathize with the crying people at the grave because I know what it feels like to lose a loved one to death.

On the other hand I was watching a TV show the other night where a character I liked died, and I didn’t even tear up.

The show ended with her death so there were no pictures of anyone mourning her. And the death was not foreshadowed. Not even a hint. So the death came as such a shock I didn’t have time to build up an expectant dread and sorrow. The death flashed on and off very quickly. What a waste of a huge moment. Why did the writers do that? Why didn’t they wring some emotion from me?

Maybe they didn’t know how. I plan to read up on this. I’ll try to have something helpful to say about it shortly.

Even so, that book never worked. There was no pay-off. The ending fell flat.

Why? Because when you don’t know the end from the beginning, you can’t foreshadow the end. You can’t build reader anticipation. You can’t hint early on that there is a problem needing to be solved and there is only one way to solve it.

This is not to say that seat of the pantsers can’t write books with stellar endings that wrap up the trouble that was introduced in the beginning in a satisfying way. I believe, though, that once they find their endings they have to go back to their beginnings and do a lot of revising.

This is a necessary step.

And yet, so many writers seem to want to skip this.

You can see this on the big scale–the end of the book has nothing to do with the beginning. That’s how my first novel was going. But I wonder if writers will learn how to foreshadow the smaller steps along the way,  if they won’t also learn to foreshadow their endings.

You can’t introduce a completely new element into the middle of book. Let’s say you’ve decided that the main character needs a ladder so he can climb into a window. He’s outside a warehouse in the middle of the night. You can’t just make him stumble upon the ladder left behind by the painter. You have to show that ladder three chapters earlier. You have to have the character visit that warehouse earlier in the day and notice the painter working.

Do you want your character to be kidnapped? You have to show us the kidnappers taking kids that fit your character’s description, early on. Do you want your character to run away from home? you have to show us that he’s attempted to run away a couple of time previously. Do you want your adult to be called away by a phone call so your kids can be left alone? You have to show that the adult has pressing business matters that often make him take phone calls even when he should be watching the kids.

Books that are made up of a series of convenient coincidences aren’t satisfying. They feel false. We can’t get into the dream. We can’t get lost in the story world and feel like we’re visiting a real place and reading about real people.

So whether you’re a plotter and planner or a seat of the pantser, take the time to foreshadow. Your readers will thank you.

It’s hard to relate to a character that is reactive and not proactive. To throw a character into a life and death situation and have him running, works for one chapter, maybe. But pretty quickly you have to give us a character that takes control of his life. Otherwise we lose interest. Maybe authors have pulled off books with characters who drift along, blown about by the winds of change, I don’t know. But, for me, this book didn’t pull it off. As soon as Janner took control of his destiny (for good or ill), he was a great hero. Up until then, he was not easy to root for.

:::::::SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW::::::

READ

AT

YOUR

OWN

RISK 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, wondering what Mr. Peterson could have done differently to draw in this hard-to-please reader. (I know I’m hard to please. Wayne Thomas Batson once told me I’m a tough grader. heh heh He’s a school teacher–maybe he thought I should grade on a curve.) Yes, I was grading North! or Be Eaten with my usual toughness. Mr. Peterson gave us a kid who was thinking and moving and acting.  Janner’s life was in danger and all he had time for was choosing his next step. But we had an overall goal–get to the ice prairies. We also had minute-by-minute goals–get to the bridge, get the dog to take the wounded man across the chasm, etc.

So what else could Andrew have done to please me? Why do I say that Janner had not taken control of his own destiny?

The family was running instead of fighting.

I really fell in love with Janner when he was taken to the fork factory and he planned an escape and failed, planned another escape and failed, and finally planned an escape and succeeded.

This is what makes me fall for a character. To see him set a goal and make matter worse. Set another goal and make matters worse again. And only after doing this several times, does the character succeed. (I mean if the character is likable to begin with. I don’t fall in love with the villain who is setting goals.) I want to see a character acting even if, and especially when, his actions get him into more trouble.

I first became aware of this technique in a Shannon Hale book. I can’t remember which book now, they are all excellent, I think it was Goose Girl. Anyway, everything the character tried backfired and got her into more trouble. She’d start with a plan. A good plan. A smart plan. A reasonable plan. She was a smart girl. And by the end of the scene she’d be on the verge of death as a direct result of her great plan.

I loved the character, and I was reading breathlessly. Why? Because she was trying, because she was smart, because she was fighting for her life and I was fighting with her.

I guess it’s confusing for me to say that I love proactive characters as opposed to reactive  when all characters in books are reactive in a sense. An inciting incident comes upon them, they react by making a plan.

In Janner’s case the fangs were coming and his family reacted–what’s not to love? Janner’s family ran. So they’re not taking control of their lives, they’re fleeing for their lives. There’s a difference.

As soon as the family met up with the Stranders, they started making choices. They fought back. A character who is fighting back is so much more interesting than a character who is running away. So when they ran into the Stranders, the story got interesting for me. And when Janner was in the fork factory choosing how to escape, trying different methods, then I found myself loving him and rooting for him.

Sure, early on the family chose to go look for the bridge, and that was a wee bit interesting. But it wasn’t much of a choice.  There was no other viable option.

And they chose the right thing.

What if there were two bridges? What if they had gone looking for the bridge, because Janner insisted, and then discovered there was no bridge.  Now what? Now you’re in a pickle, Janner, and it’s all because you wouldn’t listen. This adds complexity–it demands deeper characters and it adds conflict. This is what sucks me in. This is what makes me love a character–he’s trying hard, he’s doing what looks smart, but he’s making matters worse.

What do you think? When you write, do you give conscious thought to these things or do you just let your characters make the first choices that come into their heads? Do you let your characters run or do you make them turn and fight?

I can’t resist looking at another passage from Savvy. That book is full of gems:

“WASH YOUR HAND, WILL JUNIOR,” I screamed again, raising my voice to be heard over the brawl and over the sound of breaking glass. As my brother’s pressure system grew, the window closest to Fish began to fracture, spreading splintering cracks outward like spiderwebs zipping and pinging through the glass as Fish’s gusts and gales swelled in speed and strength. Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out as first one and then another window shattered outward. Ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching with every new explosion of glass, Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off his bus with Bobbi following after.

Screamed and raising her voice  are redundant, aren’t they?

You could say, “I screamed, trying to make myself heard over…” I suppose. But it’s not necessary. In the flow of conversation it works as written. 

But what I love about this passage is all the stuff that follows. The fracture spreading splintering cracks and the gusts and gales swelling with speed and strength. I love that Bobbi screamed and Lester cried out. I love the ducking and dancing and wincing and flinching and I love that Lester grabbed both boys by their collars and pushed and pulled and dragged them off the bus.

It’s extravagant.

And I guess it’s a matter of taste. I have heard over and over and over that with action scenes you are to use short sentences  and fragments to speed up time. And I understand how that works. But in the midst of the storm Fish is making on the bus, I’m glad that Ingrid Law didn’t use short bursts. Instead she blusters and blows, piling up words like thunderclouds–like a storm building to a climax. She puts me in the middle of the noise and confusion. It’s kind of a “sensory overload” thing going on in that bus.

There’s only one thing I’d change in that paragraph if it were mine to change–I’d make the spider webs pop and ping. But perhaps she was right not to do that. With gusts and gales in the same sentence it probably would have been overkill to have popping and pinging, too.

Anyway, it’s beautiful writing. And it goes against all kinds of rules. It’s full of redundancies. It has long sentences cluttered with unnecessary words.

But there’s more to need than expressing a thought. Readers need beauty. They need sensory input. Cutting dead wood doesn’t mean you strip away all redundancies.

Pushed and pulled and dragged…is all that really necessary? It’s not necessary, at all, that’s what makes you feel like Ms. Law is giving you a generous helping of apple pie ala mode on top of the huge helping of meat and potatoes you just ate. The paragraph is fat. But fat doesn’t always mean bloated. 

Pushed and pulled and dragged gives you a picture of chaos, of a man trying desperately to restore order and not quite sure how to do that. He’s acting because he has to act and he’s deciding as he goes how he should act. First he pushes and then he pulls. But why dragged? It says the exact same thing as pulled.

It’s about rhythm. If you are looking at meaning, dragged is dead wood. It adds nothing to the story. If you are looking at rhythm it adds to the story. Pushed and pulled, for one thing, need dragged to keep you from feeling like there’s too much cutesy alliteration, I think.

But more importantly, it’s about mood-setting. In the paragraph above there is a storm going on in the bus, so the author paints a scene using words that give us a feeling of noise and chaos. 

When you match your prose to your content it gives the reader a fuller experience. Do you ever take time to write a paragraph several different ways? Lean and mean, fat and friendly? Noisy, quiet, crashing, dashing, plodding, plinking…there all kinds of ways to write the same thoughts.  

If you want to post a paragraph below that sets a mood, feel free. I’d love to see what you come up with.

The KidzBookBuzz.com blog tour for Savvy, by Ingird Law, is in full swing just now, so I thought this would be a good time to post a little bit about what I learned about writing for children from Ingrid Law’s wonderful book. There is good reason this little book has won such prestigious awards and landed on the NY Times Bestseller List.

Unfortunately, the blog tour is in full swing and I don’t have time to do a decent post about the writing in the book.

What I am able to do is suggest you buy the book (get your own copy so you can mark it up) and study it. If you want to learn about fun language and rhythm, or quirky character descriptions, this is the book to study.

I think you ought also to study the last book we toured,  The Year the Swallows Came Early, by Kathryn Fitzmaurice. That book, in my mind, is perfectly executed with prose that dances, wit, and theme woven in beautifully. I plan to look at both of these on this blog in the near future (If I ever manage to come up with any more time in my day).