5 Tips for Writing CharacterDescription

Artists draw pictures with ink, or paint, or pencil; but writers are challenged to draw pictures of their characters using words alone.  What does the character look like?  What are his/her personality traits, habits, shortcomings, strengths or idiosyncrasies?  The secret lies in outlining their  characters in detail, then introducing them slowly, through description and action.  Some helpful tips include: 

1. Develop a Character Chart 

The first step is to create a Character Chart outlining everything you know about your character. Many examples of Character Charts can be found online; some are very comprehensive, but you can tailor them to meet your needs.  The more complete your profile, the easier you'll find it to describe your character through words and action.   

2. Don't Make a List

An item-by-item list of characteristics, or giving too much information at one time, is boring for the reader and considered lackluster writing.  Skilled writers introduce the character then sprinkle tidbits throughout the story, allowing the reader to “discover” the true nature of the character in small doses.  The reader gets the same information, but in a much more enjoyable way. 

Sharon Rose might sit on the floor beside her bed like a sick child.  She often felt drained of her proper nature.  Her mind was like a liquid in a sloppy container.  Her soul rolled from side to side of a rocking boat. – Wright Morris, Plains Song

3. Beware Adjective Addiction
Adjectives don't add the spice you are looking for and result in making a boring list longer. Effective writers follow Mark Twain’s advice on adjectives:

When you catch an adjective, kill it.  No, I don't mean utterly,  but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice. – Mark Twain 

4. Choose Not “To Be”

Don’t fall into the habit of using the common “ to be” verbs which are considered weak because they don’t show action.  Replacing these verbs with action verbs results in powerful and concise writing. 

Nature forgot to shade him off, I think... A little too boisterous--like the sea. A little too vehement--like a bull who has made up his mind to consider every colour scarlet. But I grant a sledge-hammering sort of merit in him.  ― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

5. Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Following the old rule of “show, don't tell" enables writers to introduce their characters in a more interesting way, drawing a picture that is complete and well rounded.  If a particular trait is vital to the storyline, find different ways to imprint the trait you consider important through the character’s actions and/or interactions with supporting characters.

She [Sybil Vane] crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiseled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There is always something ridiculous about the emotion of people whom one has ceased to love. ― Oscar Wilde, the Picture of Dorian Gray

"The Rough and Often Beautiful Mess"

In the heat of mid summer and through the days of the full moon, I have been absorbed in two events: one being the birth of the future King and the other reading, The Yonahlosse Riding Camp for Girls. Anton Disclafoni's first novel is a breathtaking story. Set amid orange groves in Florida and then at an old riding camp in the hills of North Carolina, this book does what we hope for in our summer reading; it transports us to another time and a well imagined place.

Having been a veteran of both boarding school and summer camp, I know the cloistered worlds where young woman were sent to build friendships, to gain skills, and hopefully, to stay out of trouble. As my camp had horses and a riding ring, I am very familiar with the obsessions that accompany equestrian pursuits. Disclafani, herself a skilled horsewoman who competed nationally, brings an ability to describe riding to a new level. The reader absorbs her fearlessness with admiration and awe. Never have I read a better description of an annual competition then in this debut novel.

Aside from it being a great read for horsey types, it captures something of the Depression, the thirties, the ruin that grabbed the most secure families, as if it had a hand on the back of their necks and pulled them down with tremendous force. Abandoned houses, quiet declines, suicide and peril are woven into this tale. As the Depression haunted the parents of my generation who were children during those frightening years, we are too quick to joke about all the carefully wrapped and preserved little bits of food in the freezer, the grandmothers who still collected rubber bands, the women who washed and saved the tin foil, even the ones who washed and dried plastic bags and hung them on the line; they kept up with these practices because they never lost their fear of the wolf at the door. In this book, the Depression is not depicted in dust bowls and bread lines, but rather stalking the genteel and ordered world of the privileged, where girls are suddenly yanked from their known realities and set out into an uncertain future. Family life seems similarly fragile, as if the precious and beautiful life in the orange groves left them vulnerable, only to be toppled by an unwelcome frost. The mothers were cocooned in their beautiful homes, with all rooms seen as exquisite and in perfect balance and order. Yet one event could destroy all and young women could heap shame on their families by one imprudent night.

 I remember that world; I remember my grandmothers with their dresses, and their silver tea services, their china, and their housekeepers, their luncheons and their stories, often involving one false move that led to ruin. You had to get a good husband at all costs; your house was, as Disclafani states, "both mother and father." Your daughters were kept at a curious distance; sexual awakening was feared and mistrusted. All of this is beautifully captured in this smart and terrific novel. What Disclafani manages to impart is that the camp girls were not delicate flowers- not girls who rode horses anyway. They were made of flesh and blood; they were familiar with the sound of their bones cracking, they took their cues from magnificent creatures whose noble blood they cherished. The barns were full of sweat and muck. They girls were expected to travel from the bold and the beautiful, from the rough and the wild, from the sheer abandon of a mad gallop, to the starched linen and polite conversation of the dinner table. Disclafani writes:

"I took pleasure in how good I was in the saddle, how well I knew my way around a horse. I was good at something in a way most people are never good at anything in their lives. Horses were a gift; how many people have such a constant in their life, separate from the rough and often beautiful mess that is their family?"

If you are heading to the beach or the cottage, if you are boarding a plane, or packing the camper, I would toss the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls into your weekend, canvas bag. If you know a great horsewoman, or two, or three, give this to them with a five star recommendation.

Historical Fiction, Timely Writ

Before writing a review of this book for Amazon.com, I asked myself this question: What should great historical fiction do? Given the fact that I am drawn to this challenge as a writer, the question is apt. It has always been my intention to bring back to life, an event, an era, and a moment in time. In order to accomplish this feat, I need to know and these aspects: the setting, the date, the place, the county, the town, the house, the kitchen and the back garden. Do the events of the past have any significance in the present? Was there a struggle? Did our heroine fight her way through it, delivering us to the comfortable time in which we now find ourselves? 

In The Last Runaway, Tracy Chevalier who many readers may know from Girl with a Pearl Earring, can take a bow as an author who can transport us all back to a particular time and place. She tells the the story of Honor Bright, a dignified Quaker woman who leaves England to accompany her sister to America. When yellow fever takes her sister's life, she is stranded, is alone and is traveling to a small community in Ohio. The first and most obvious question as to why she does not return home, has a simple explanation. Plagued with ghastly seasickness, she simply can not stomach the idea of another voyage. Marooned, her challenge is to find her place. As in all great stories involving a journey, memorable characters help her along the way. A milliner, a slave catcher and her sister's intended, are her first ports of call. However, the path is not smooth. Even though she is with fellow Quakers, she finds they are different. America, caught in the crossfire of the last days of slavery, is tense and guarded.  From the beginning, George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, set down the tenant that all people carry the same light of God within, and therefore, are not to be enslaved, owned, or sold. For Honor, this belief is a given, but in England they were not living with slaves in their midst. In Ohio, the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Law means those who seek to aid escapees, face steep penalties.

As time goes on, Honor marries. Both her husband and his mother forbid Honor to use their farm as a link in the chain. She is in the grips of a moral dilemma. Her friendship with the milliner, means that she is caught up with the  underground railroad  from the moment she arrives in Ohio. Her beliefs and her conscience are tested. How far are we willing to go to right a wrong of which we are entirely certain? This is the central question.

Chevalier uses her considerable skill to put us in the time and place. England, she points out, is a land ordered by hedgerows, and settled for over one thousand years where houses built of stone sit on ample farms, giving it a delicious and pleasing air. In Ohio, Honor balks at the size and scope of the new territory; it looms large and terrifying in her mind. The diet she finds less varied, the eternal corn mush, tasteless, the climate, too cold and then too hot, the people more outspoken, and the needlework, less skilled. Yet she presses on with the inherent, gentle persistence that makes up her sensibility. Her new family are less than friendly and when she takes matters into her own hands, she is chastised. A baby is born, and in their frustration, they let her know that they will take the child from her and send her on her way. Conform, or be shunned and abandoned with no maternal rights; that is where she finds herself.

With the same skill that brought us right into a Vermeer, as in Girl with a Pearl Earring, Chevalier leads us to the harsh farms and small minded communities of nineteenth century America. A character who lives in our mind, one of  whom it can be said almost walks and breathes, is what makes Tracy Chevalier a remarkable author. Honor Bright is not a one dimensional heroine, just as the slave catcher Donovan is not an evil antagonist. Characters in this novel have painterly shades, as does the landscape and the culture. Certainly, the paradox of slavery and its long aftermath is a worthy subject for any American tale. In the capable hands of Tracy Chevalier, it is pieced together as remarkable quilt: rich, textured, varied, but composed of great design.

Of the millions enslaved in nineteenth century America, only thirty thousand escaped. One can only imagine that Lake Erie never looked more beautiful, as it loomed large before these brave souls, the watery passage from bondage to freedom

 

In Your Wheelhouse

Upon returning from a trip to Nelson, British Columbia, I happened upon an old expression. Technically, the term in your wheelhouse, refers to your particular skill set. Literally, a wheelhouse is the enclosed compartment from which a vessel can be navigated. So it would make sense then that a writer casting about for subjects topics and ideas, would do well to consider this idiom.

In Nelson, I enjoyed basking in the culture of my native land. With my family off ripping up the powder at Whitewater, a ski resort blessed with both magnificent terrain and fine cuisine, I decided to take a personal day and wander around the town. My love affair with the city of Nelson began in my early twenties with it being the destination of a never to be forgotten drive across Canada. What we discovered along the shores of surely one of the most magnificent lakes on the planet, had much to do with the course of my adult life.

Vessels powered by steam, were the life blood of small towns on northern lakes. The mail, the groceries, the summer guests and the news of the day arrived with the welcoming sound of a steam ship whistle. This sent islanders and lake dwellers scurrying down to the docks; missing the boat meant waiting another week and doing without vital supplies. My mother told me tales of hearing shouts from upstairs windows in summer cottages: bread, milk, eggs, and get all the vegetables you can! Yes, the concept of a wheelhouse is ingrained in my mind, but taken to the idea of stories waiting to be told, I find it to be a useful concept.  After all, when writing, I alone am the captain.

As I wandered happily about Nelson, I was thrilled to find the local museum open. In I went, knowing that because I was alone, I could stay there for hours and hours. Inside, I found much fodder for inspiration. A beautiful white linen summer costume, complete with  a lace collar and straw hat filled me with awe.  Photographs of old yachts, races and regatta days from the golden era before World War 1,  found me marveling, as I do here in North Idaho, at the courage of the settlers of long ago days. In every photograph of that era, here and to the north of us, and across the wide expanse of the nation, you see pictures of men standing beside a string of huge fish. The first skis, those huge curved planks, the photos of brave souls out in their warm sweaters, the parades, the soldiers returning from war, the wagons, and the horses, it is all there for anyone to see. Nothing inspires me more, or gets my creative juices flowing, like an afternoon spent at a local museum. It is not just the artifacts, it is the stories, the curiosity I feel in the presence of the past, brought lovingly back to life by the curators. Then, of course, there is the gift shop, the small volumes which would otherwise go unnoticed, depicting the lives of early settlers. If you are at a loss for words, find yourself out of ideas, fearing that your tank is running on empty, then I would suggest a wee trip and a small museum where something may just spring to mind. Keep your own culture, your own history, your community in the forefront, and write from your heart, from the seat of all passion, from your own particular wheelhouse. Do not be surprised if you are suddenly so inspired that your fingers can barely type quickly enough to match the rush of ideas.

As for Nelson, it is a welcoming destination for people from all over the world. If you take a trip there, don't be surprised if you find yourself falling in love with the place. 

New Year's Resolutions, 2013

After a beautiful Christmas, filled with the joy of family, friends and laughter, it is time to turn the corner. Sharing  my usual, tiresome list of New Year's Resolutions is a task I find a bit embarrassing.  It usually reads something like this:

1. Lose weight.
I believe I am the exact same weight I was last year and the year before.  I am active and I enjoy life.

2.Write every day.
Mission accomplished! I wrote something every day in 2012, kept up with my blog schedule and completed the second draft of my novel in progress, now entitled Four Stanley Cups and a Funeral. 

3. Be grateful for my wonderful life.
In spite of being a terrible complainer, I give thanks for my great, good fortune every day. This category needs improving and this year I will do better.

4. Read incessantly.
I cannot breathe without reading and I believe my hands shake if I am four hours into my day without absorbing something. Perhaps it is not really wise to make my New Year's Resolutions about the things I love best. It stands to reason though, that a reminder about the cherished aspects of my existence will not fall too far off the mark. I would like to get up to reading a book a week, reading more non-fiction, write more non-fiction and expand my reading list. What works best for me is setting aside certain times of the day, getting into my great chair with its comfortable ottoman, putting my feet up and taking an interesting journey, guided by a fine writer. One of the best pieces of advice and this seems to be everywhere, is to give yourself the time to do what you love best.

5. Worship.
The further I go down this list, the more I feel I should reverse it.

6. Begin the year by jumping in the lake.
Once again, I will join friends, neighbors and perfect strangers in the annual Polar Bear Plunge. If you can meet the challenge of running across the snowy sand and into the frigid waters, going under so as to come up with wet hair, and charging to shore without being trampled, means you start the new year with joy and laughter. After receiving a blessing from a tribal elder, I make this a sacred act of reverence for the people who have inhabited these shores since time immemorial. 

In the midst of pondering this annual challenge, my weekly pep talk arrived, thanks to an email list I signed up for and highly recommend you do the same. My old friend Tim Cork takes a new look at the challenge of New Year's Resolutions. This year, my list will not lie buried in a notebook. I will tape it up to something in my line of sight. It won't even be my list! This concept represents one of the greatest feelings of liberation I can possibly imagine. Tim is an expert at this game.  I begin 2013 with a professional look at what will make my year perhaps the best ever. Oh, I feel lighter already!

I will be grateful

I will listen… focus on being present
I will do my best everyday
I will share
I will collaborate
I will compliment people
I will live without regret
I will respect myself at all times
I will forgive and accept myself when I make a mistake
I will read something new every day
I will write in my journals
I will read 40 books this year
I will launch my new book … “G3”
I will speak to over 25,000 people this year
I will listen to self-help audio books in my car … your car is just a University on wheels
I will make those around me feel loved
I will forever pursue happiness regardless of what occurs
I will take responsibility for my actions
I will surround myself with people who inspire me
I will laugh at myself
I will hug my wife and children often
I will help those in need
I will use kind words in difficult situations
I will live with an attitude of gratitude
I will respect others points of view
I will pick myself up when I fall
I will work out every day
I will drink lots of water (and wine)
I will say sorry when I make a mistake and mean it
I will take a break when I need it
I will live every day as if it is the first and the last
I will not be driven by fear
I will find extraordinary in every day
I will enjoy my food
I will be patient
I will get up early
I will teach leaders and learn from leaders through my work
I will read this list every morning
I will not take myself too seriously
I will cry when my emotions tell me to
I will listen to my inner voice
I will focus on the attitude of giving
I will play hockey, golf, tennis, swim and ski regularly in season and stay very active

"Whether you think you can or can't, you are right" - Henry Ford       

I read my list every day when I wake up and it jump starts my day … positive affirmations & repetition creates excellent habits and a life of abundance and success.

Make it Straight A's Week & Year!  
Seasons Greeting and all the best for 2013!

Tim Cork
President, Straight A’s Inc.
An Insight Marketing Company
416-882-9650
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Are you getting Straight A's in life?
Find out at www.timcork.com

The Antagonists

As I have been working on a novel based largely on my early life, I am now at the point of beginning again for the third draft. To give myself a clear direction forward, I asked a few writers to take a look at my unwieldy manuscript and weigh in. When you find two or three people in complete agreement, a rare enough occurrence in real life, you have a pretty strong sense of where the structure of the story may be lacking. Writing from real experience can be quite maddening, as the events of anyone's life do not fall into the lines of story structure. Even in straight memoir form, even if you have had the most fascinating life imaginable, you would still need something of a dramatic arc in order to carry the story forward. While  I have filled five hundred pages  full of snippets of memory, it has been made clear that I need to fix something in the structure.

After much tossing, turning, casting about and questioning the fates, the answer came to me late at night when I asked Google for help. I found a blog, very much like this one, where a writer tried to process a constant piece of criticism she faced with alarming regularity from friends and agents alike. Her stories were too nice, she was told, about nice people and that her writing lacked conflict. The woman went on to describe how she avoids conflict in real life, and like me, turns herself inside out and backwards to give other people their way rather than face down any transgressors. Bingo, I thought. This is me.

Upon further reflection, I realized that I had no desire to create an antagonist in any of my fiction. I would rather not spend my time thinking about people compelled to make themselves into a veritable roadblock. To tell you the truth, in my own life, I consider those types, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of them, to be avoided at all costs. While most are well meaning and tend to question whether any course of action has been thought through well enough, for their liking at least, it still drives me crazy to be second guessed.  After all, I think I do enough of that for myself.

 In taking an existing true story, as was the case with my novel entitled, My American Eden, I did not have this problem as the antagonist came with the territory. It was the Puritan minister, the man who preached to the first citizens of Boston on board the Arabella, headed to the new world, where they were about to have a second chance at paradise who distrusted women and feared a second Eve would be their undoing. Believing God would not be merciful a second time, under his theocratic jurisdiction, women were tied to the whipping post, stripped to the waist and thrashed. When that did not exert enough control, he fined, jailed and then executed those who disagreed with him. Tying his own handkerchief over the face of my heroine as she willing faced her execution, he was her antagonist to the bitter end.  In a story based on the true events of my childhood, a person in complete opposition to me is harder to come by.  The answer will have to  spring from my imagination and it is this conundrum that has me up in the middle of the night.

If you feel that your story is starting to sag in the middle, not gaining in momentum, or lacking a certain zing, take a look at your protagonist and put more obstacles in his or her path. The protagonist has to want something, and the antagonist has to stand in the way. That is the long and the short of it. Get every rejected work out of the drawer, cupboard or filing cabinet and look at it through this lens. You'd be surprised at what a good, old fashioned Snidely Whiplash kind of character can do for your story. 

Up Half the Night Reading

In an earlier post, I announced to the world that Hilary Mantel's, Bringing up the Bodies, had been selected for my summer reading. As the season slid into fall, it was mid October, glorious and ripe with color and the bounty of my garden, that I reached the end of this fabulous book. The night table lamp, put to such good use over the previous weeks, I finally  turned off. With a scant few hours sleep before the cruel alarm would shake me unwillingly from my rest, I still had trouble nodding off as my mind continued to reel.

Even though I have stopped reading it, the book is still with me and in my thoughts. I find I return to it several times a day. Discussing the novel over dinner with our book club, I found fellow readers in complete agreement as to the utter majesty of the work. Over the years, we have read so many fine authors,  and this week were were able to toast the first British woman to win the Man Booker Prize not once, but twice. Wolf Hall, being the first to claim the coveted honor covers the rise of Thomas Cromwell, the mastermind in Henry VIII's turbulent reign. In Bringing up the Bodies, the book covers a shorter time span, the scant weeks leading up to Anne Boleyn's ultimate demise. We know the story, it has been told before, but not at all like this. Exquisite descriptive power pushes the story forward; the action moves swiftly and the details of Anne Boleyns execution seem so real that one forgets to breathe. So many times I put out the light, and then lay there in the dark, sat up and turned the light on again. 

Here is a glimpse of Mantel's style from page 36. of Bringing up the Bodies:

“His relations with the queen, as summer draws to it official end, are chary, uncertain and frought with distrust. Anne Boleyn in now thirty four years old, an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant. Once sinuous, she has become angular. She retains her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places. Her prominent dark eyes she uses to good effect, and in this fashion she glances at a man's face, then her regard flits away, as if unconcerned, indifferent. There is a pause: as it might be a breath. Then slowly, as if compelled, she turns her gaze back to him. Her eyes rest on his face. She examines this man. She examines him as if he is the only man in the world. She looks as if she is seeing him for the first time, and considering all sorts of uses for him, all sorts of possibilities which he has not even thought of himself. To her victim the moment seems to last an age, during which shivers run up his spine. Though in fact the trick is quick, cheap, effective and repeatable, it seems to the poor fellow that he is now distinguished among all men. He smirks. He preens himself. He grows a little taller. He grows a little more foolish.” 

Years ago, I was informed by a group of editors in New York, top men in their fields that "history does not sell." Repeating this statement to all in sundry, I heard many many times  readers tell me that they liked it best.  Now that Mantel has won this most revered prize twice it will serve to lift the form back to its proper place. For all those who have always loved history and fiction, I can promise you will not be disappointed. This book represents historical fiction at its absolute finest. 

I

http://www.amazon.com/Bring-Up-Bodies-Hilary-Mantel/dp/0805090037

Guest Post: Burying Frank

 Courtesy of Bill Pigott, a Toronto Writer

What saved it from being unbearable was the hawthorn. In full bloom, it enveloped us in the breath of Spring.

If you counted the robin, there were five of us at the interment.

Frank had died at 84, alone. What family Frank had lived, perhaps understandably, far away.

Few people epitomized a name as well as Frank. For, Frank had been issued the deck of life with the people suit missing.

Frank’s unmarried crust had thickened with age. A great battlement shutting in profound neediness. Our last visit together looked like a disaster - unless you understood the codes.

“Turn down that goddam T.V.!” I walked across Frank’s living room and obeyed.

Frank’s right hand held a cigarette, precariously. The inch long ash threatening harm to a fine Persian rug. Frank’s body inscribed a “C” in the chair. The pose of slouching indifference reading “go away”. But, meaning “stay - please”.

In Frank’s right hand was a glass of Canadian whiskey - neat, dark brown. Soon, Frank would demand another drink. Please and thank you would not figure in that transaction either.

We had spent the afternoon watching golf - in silence. The Master’s was Frank’s favorite. All dressed, we would be going to Tachet, a neighborhood restaurant. A treat reserved for my visits to town. Frank looked natty in grey flannels, white shirt and black cardigan.

At Tachet, the food was French and they fussed. Perhaps they mistook Frank’s snarly nature as merely Parisian. By the end of dinner, it would be touch and go whether there was more food on Frank than in.

As we readied to go out, I knew we would have to face the “gauntlet”. The gauntlet was a steep wooden stairway that dropped about fifteen feet to the garage under Frank’s house. Frank insisted on taking those stairs unaided in spite of virtual blindness, and no sense of balance - the after effects of several mild strokes. And, three stiff whiskeys.

Frank teetered at the top of the stairs risking a five metre plunge. I stood two steps down, just in case. “Get out of my goddam way!” I didn’t. Frank fell forward grasping for the banister bars and found them. Four more heart-stopping lunges and Frank reached the bottom.

Fifteen minutes later, exhausted, I wheeled Frank into Tachet, set the brake and let the French take over.

Over dinner, Frank reprised one of the hidden things in Frank’s life - creativity.

Frank had worked for a large ad agency in Philadelphia - writing tag lines transforming product to image. I imagined the agency carefully sliding Frank’s meals under a door marked “Beware of Frank.”

“It was 1948," Frank said. An old client was seeking new directions. “Goddamned if they didn’t want a timeless catch phrase. Something simple. Simple is best. But, simple is the goddamned hardest. And, the bastards wanted it over night.”

With a morning deadline, Frank sat at home, rejected thoughts balled on the floor. Listening, I imagined Frank in the half light, shrouded in muse-choking smoke and railing.

“At 3:00 in the morning, I was done in. I had a line in front of me that looked promising. I decided to sleep on it. When I woke up, I knew I had it. “A Diamond Is Forever”. I wrote that. Put DeBeer’s on the map. Got a handshake from the boss. Bugger all else. Number one advertising slogan of the century - did you know that?” The tone was proud. “The goddam agency fired me in 1972 when it moved to New York. I guess I wasn’t forever.”

I cleaned as much of Frank’s dinner off Frank as I could without being obvious. We drove home. Frank went to bed and I left for the last time.

The robin brought me back to grave side. I heard the priest. But, I was thinking about Frank’s antisocial ways. And, imaging the obstacles she faced in the business world of the 1940's.

“Rest in peace Mary Frances Gerety. May God have mercy on you.” The priest concluded his ministrations with a splash of holy water and murmured condolences.

Then, we left Frank, alone. Under the hawthorn.

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