We all have stressful times in our lives that can suck energy from us and leave us worn out. The first six to twelve months of caring for a newborn infant. The massive work project with a looming deadline. The weeks to months preparing for a wedding. The process of moving to a new location. The details involved in dealing with the aftermath of death. The process of grieving. Living through a pandemic. Some events are even cyclical, like tax season for a CPA, or what some moms dub “Maycember.”
How do you recover when your writing output is decreasing because your mental and physical resources are stretched too thin?
Some people take a vacation. My favorite solution to recharge is to go walk on a beach somewhere and let the ocean waves sooth my soul for as many days as possible. The beach is my happy place. I’m lucky that Texas has 367 miles of shoreline, most of it with sandy beaches. The closest ones to me are a four hour drive away. The farthest (with a view of the Space X launch tower at Boca Chica in the distance) is an eight hour drive. But I’m not picky. Any beach will do. At the beach, my mind is free to roam, allowing new ideas to increase from a trickle to a flood.
But what if I can’t get away for a vacation?
Exercise. Take walks in a nearby park and listen to the birds in the trees. (But not when the heat index is 118 degrees Fahrenheit, as it is this week.) Exercise indoors if that’s the only option. Don’t fall off the wagon when it comes to exercise or that decrease in writing output may become a complete stoppage.
What else?
Read widely. Read to learn something new. Which isn’t to say I don’t read all the time. However, most of my reading during madly busy times is for “work” purposes. I’m constantly reading what’s being published in the magazines to which I submit short stories. Some of the stories I love. Others are well done, but not necessarily to my taste. But this, for me, is survival mode reading because it is limited in scope.
Reading nonfiction- long articles and whole books- about people, places, events, and eras that are unfamiliar to me is one of the ways that I recharge my creative batteries. Learning stimulates my brain. Letting myself enjoy everything from short stories and novels to science, history, and philosophy helps me thrive and keeps my writing flowing.
Allow myself large blocks of reading time. Knowing I only have a few minutes to read, while half my brain is on alert, watching or waiting for someone or something, doesn’t recharge me. So when the pace of life slows after a period of frenetic activity, I take the time to read in large blocks, for several hours at a time and devour new material.
So what do you do? What helps keep your writing flowing during times when the emotional and physical demands of life drain your resources?
*****
N. M. Cedeño is a short story writer and novelist living in Texas. She is active in Sisters in Crime- Heart of Texas Chapter and is a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find out more at nmcedeno.com
In My Reading Life, a grand book about reading and writing, author Pat Conroy says, “The most powerful words in English are ‘tell me a story…'” bit.ly/3PpSoHF
Yes! And don’t we know stories demand––require––insist on characters? Fairy tales––Jack in the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel. Epics––The Fellowship of the Ring, Star Wars.
I love the beginning of Emily Wilson’s recent translation of The Odyssey: bit.ly/43Bdjvi
Tell me about a complicated man,
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy…
…Now, goddess, child of Zeus,
Tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
So, how do writers create memorable characters? What works to create character? And why do we care? Isn’t it because character drives narrative?
Recall Shakespeare’s famous terse description in Julius Caesar: “Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look…” Those ambiguous words reach beyond the man’s shape or facial expression to hint at driving ambition…the very subject which drives the play’s narrative.
How does Jane Austen create character? Looking back, I am surprised by the lack of physical description. She doesn’t tell us what Mr. or Mrs. Bennet, or the five daughters, look like. We’re given a few visual breadcrumbs, told that Bingley and Darcy are “handsome” and that Bingley “wore a blue coat and rode a black horse.” But her characters, with their personalities, their actions, largely come to life in our minds otherwise: by conversation.
Elizabeth overhears Mr. Darcy describing her as “tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me”—a criticism she later recounts to friends, “for she had a lively, playful disposition.” Okay, there’s one aspect of Elizabeth—lively and playful. Yet after telling friends that Elizabeth “had hardly a good feature in her face,” Darcy “began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.” So she’s also intelligent! Elizabeth tells her sister Jane, “you are a great deal too apt…to like people in general. You never see a fault in any body.” Elizabeth is not just “playful” and “intelligent,” but a critical observer.
Using dialogue––what Elizabeth and Darcy say––Austen shows us how Elizabeth—and ultimately Darcy––think. In a world focused on superficiality—class, wealth, appearance, social skills and niceties––Austen makes us care about two characters who are too smart, too critical, too thoughtful, not to keep thinking and––ultimately––change their minds. Their characteristics (both pride and prejudice!) drive the narrative.
But hey, what about those dark eyes? Mr. Darcy disturbs the haughty Miss Bingley by saying he’s meditating on “the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.” As all Austen readers know, that specific detail––“[A] pair of fine eyes”––will also powerfully move the plot.
Texas’s Larry McMurtry shows us how conflict between characters drives narrative. In his Lonesome Dove, the first character we meet is Augustus, sitting on the porch at the Hat Creek Cattle Company, in “the smidgin of shade he had to work with.” He has retrieved his jug from the springhouse and, as is his custom, he’s drinking Tennessee mash whiskey, which makes him feel “feel nicely misty inside.”
We’re in Augustus’s point of view when we meet his counterpoint, the other key character, his stubborn partner Captain Woodrow Call. Augustus, when he hears the whir of a nervous rattler in the corner of the springhouse, believes “in giving creatures a little time to think.” He doesn’t shoot the snake; he waits until the rattler has “calmed down” and crawled out a hole. He contrasts his own behavior to Call’s:
Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever tool he had in hand. “A man that slows down for snakes might as well walk,” he often said.
As Call and their diffident hand, PeaEye, arrive at the porch, Augustus notes that while he himself stands four inches taller than Call, and Pea Eye three inches taller, there’s no way to convince Pea Eye that Call is the short man: “Call had him buffaloed.” Augustus knows that if a man means to hold his own with Call, that man must keep in mind that Call isn’t as big as he seemed. Thus Augustus begins many a day by remarking, “You know, Call, you ain’t really no giant.”
McMurtry doesn’t give us a detailed physical description of Augustus or Call. Instead, we hear them banter. We see Call’s impact on others, and how Augustus works to maintain his own status vis à vis Call. Right off the bat McMurtry makes us feel the sheer force of two characters, two magnetic and conflicting personalities, and their relationship, as we’re launched into this epic tale. Their characters, the combined magnetism and conflict, drive us to Montana…and back…
We first meet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, when Holmes is introduced to the narrator, Dr. Watson, as a potential roommate. Watson walks into the lab: “There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it,’ he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand.” Then he shakes hands with Watson: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” Watson is astonished. bit.ly/3N0U4Ep
We get no actual physical description of Holmes until Chapter Two. Instead, we confront Holmes’s vigor, curiosity, perspicacity, confidence in his own powers. Similarly, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson first describes Holmes’s “immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation” in deciphering clues. Then, looking up from the street, Watson sees the detective’s silhouette on the window-shade: “I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice…He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him.” Watson instantly knows, “He was at work again.”
The author engraves that image of Holmes, pacing eagerly, on our imaginations. We can’t wait to see Holmes in action: that’s what we’re reading for.
Herman Melville deprives the reader as well as Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, of even one glance at Captain Ahab until Chapter 28, when Ishmael is well out to sea on the whaling ship Pequod. Ahab finally appears on deck and stands erect, holding on by a shroud, his bone peg-leg planted in the auger hole drilled on deck for that purpose:
There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though…they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master eye…moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.
The word “character” comes from the Greek root for “engraving tool.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/character If ever character was engraved on a person’s body, Melville’s description of Ahab and his impact on his shipmates qualifies. The uneasy silence of the officers! The crucifixion in Ahab’s face! His unsurrenderable wilfulness, fixed and fearless!
If that’s not enough foreshadowing, in Chapter 36, Ahab demands the entire crew to assemble and then hammers a gold piece to the mast for the first man who sees the white whale which took off Ahab’s leg—Moby Dick. Starbuck objects: he signed on to hunt whales, not to take vengeance on a mere animal, which he calls blasphemous. But Ahab makes the rest of the crew swear: “Death to Moby Dick!” Melville creates a character whose physical description conveys tragic history and deep emotion, and whose forceful actions persuade the crew to follow him. We know there’s no stopping Ahab now. And we haven’t yet met the whale.
Pat Conroy also tells us, in My Reading Life, of the day his beloved high school English teacher, Greg Norris, took sixteen-year old Conroy to visit the poet Archibald Rutledge. Rutledge “suggested that I make the close observation of nature part of my life’s work and that I learn the actual names of things,” because “specifics always proved fruitful to the validity of any narrative”:
“A Cherokee rose, not just a rose. A swallowtail butterfly, not just a butterfly. That kind of thing,” he said. “Get the details right. Always the details.”
Always a great reminder for mystery writers. My character Alice, in the Alice MacDonald Greer Mystery series––stays on me to get the details right. https://bit.ly/3qC2fzI
So–tell me a story! Show me the character! Get the details! And we’re off!
Two women are walking down the road and pass a frog sitting in the grass. “Hey,” says the frog.
“Wow. It’s a talking frog,” says one of the women. She picks the frog up and holds it in her hand.
The frog says, “Listen, I’m not really a frog. Actually, I’m a critically acclaimed writer. A spell was cast on me and I was turned into a frog. But if you kiss me I’ll turn back into a critically acclaimed writer.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” says the woman, and puts the frog in her pocket.
Her friend asks, “Aren’t you going to kiss it?”
And she answers, “Hell, no. I’ll make a lot more money with a talking frog.”
*
In 2009, I accepted a challenge to write a four-sentence review of Nancy Peacock’s memoir A Broom of One’s Own. Starting well before the due date, I wrote the first sentence of the review—over and over—and deleted it. Over and over. Sometimes I wrote the same sentence several times in a row. Sometimes I composed a new sentence to demolish. After weeks of literary and rhetorical torment, I produced the following:
*
I like Nancy Peacock’s A Broom of One’s Own: Words About Writing, Housecleaning & Life so much that it’s taken me over two months and two missed deadlines to untangle my thoughts and write this four-sentence review, an irony Peacock, author of two critically acclaimed novels, would no doubt address were I in one of her writing classes.
She would probably tell me that there is no perfect writing life; that her job as a part-time housecleaner, begun when full-time writing wouldn’t pay the bills, afforded time, solitude, and the “foundation of regular work” she needed; that engaging in physical labor allowed her unconscious mind to “kick into gear,” so she became not the writer but the “receiver” of her stories.
She’d probably say that writing is hard; that sitting at a desk doesn’t automatically bring brilliance; that writers have to work with what they have; that “if I don’t have the pages I hate I will never have the pages I love”; that there are a million “saner” things to do and a “million good reasons to quit” and that the only good reason to continue is, “This is what I want.”
So, having composed at least two dozen subordinated, coordinated, appositived, participial-phrase-stuffed first sentences and having discarded them before completion; having practically memorized the book’s text searching for the perfect quotation to end with; and having once again stayed awake into the night, racing another missed deadline, I am completing this review—because I value Nancy Peacock’s advice; and because I love A Broom of One’s Own; and because I consider it the equal of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird; and because I want other readers to know about it; and because this is what I want.
*
Waller Answers Directly with One Sentence: When it takes you over two months to eke out four sentences, don’t quit your day job.
*
Hear Nancy Peacock talk about A Broom of One’s Own, and about her early novels, on North Carolina Bookwatch.
This review first appeared on Whiskertips. Part of the post appeared here in June 2022. Part of it didn’t.
Ink-Stained Wretches 