I hated that. Not because it was rude — because it was wrong! I am nowhere near a saint, and middle-schoolers are the icing of the cupcake that is school — the very best and most delicious part. Overflowing with wacky ideas, irrepressible, and often surprisingly uninhibited, they touch my heart with their turns of phrase and always make me laugh. Best of all, they throw themselves into projects, like Dasha did on this thank-you note for my Skype visit to her school about Nice and Mean:

There are sixteen of these cute little doors, all with parts of a message behind them!

Holy cabooses!  I can’t imagine how much work went into that. And it’s just like the 1991 Egoiste commercial*, but without the scary screaming women and with the phrase, “Signed, your admiring readers.” I enjoy my high-schoolers, but they would never reveal themselves enough to say anything like that, even in jest.

How about this one, from Emma? Her little book with the words “Video Nightmare” and “Black Book” showcase the official documents of Nice and Mean’s main characters, Marina and Sachi.

All those stripey exclamation points — how could someone not love middle-schoolers?

Now, the piece de resistance, from Kyra:

I should really laminate this.

Man alive! That’s my cover, recreated! As you can see, it’s no Fault in Our Stars cover (in case you have been living under a rock, that book, by John Green, has three colors and some clouds.) The Nice and Mean cover features lots of lines and squiggles, and she captures them all perfectly. Who would have the focus and talent to apply to that? A middle-schooler, that’s who.

I’m so glad that Laurie Morrison, teacher, writer and awesome blogger, invited me to Skype with her class, and that she was thoughtful enough to shepherd her students through the thank-you note process.  It reminded me of everything I love about the age I write for.

You’re still wondering about the Egoiste commercial, aren’t you? Does this jog your memory?

My friend and I spent an entire weekend jumping out of the laundry-room door at my mom, inspired this commercial. I’m sure she’s so grateful to Jean-Paul Goude.  Click the link to re-live it in its glory:  ”Egoiste! Egoiste!” C’est catchy, non?

Jumping on the bed was apparently so last-millenium. Now monkeys are doing something else entirely.

As some of you know, I have a daughter who will soon be two. We call her Mrs. McNoodle. She knows that her Mama (my partner) works at an office, and will even point out the office when we walk by it. Lately, we’ve been trying to round out the picture by telling her that Mommy (that’s me) writes stories.

One morning when I was asleep (ahh), my partner asked her, “What do you think Mommy is writing a book about?”

“Monkeys,” said Mrs. McNoodle. “Wiggle.”

So. There you have it. According to Mrs. McNoodle, I am writing about monkeys who wiggle. At the time we asked, I didn’t even know she knew the word ‘wiggle’! (Note: I do not write picture books. I pretty much always write about people. So far, not one has memorably wiggled.)

But this is no passing fancy. It’s stuck with her. Sometimes, I ask her what the monkeys should do in my book today. Recently, she said, “Haircut.”

“The monkeys should get a haircut?” I clarified.

“Yes.”

“Do you want to tell me anything else about the monkeys?”

She thought about it.  ”Tall.”

“So I’m writing about tall monkeys who wiggle?”

“Yes.”

In my one of my favorite episodes of Story Corps, Scott Simon interviews his 6-year-old daughter about the process of adopting her from China. He tells her,

SIMON: We wanted to get over there immediately. So we waited and waited and waited and we finally got to China….First we went to Beijing, and we–

DAUGHTER: First Chicago, then Beijing.

SIMON: Chicago, then Beijing, you’re right…(to the listener): She’s like an editor.

Me and Scott Simon, we’re getting that editorial advice right and left. If I radically change genres, you know who to thank.

I digress.

I’m also not sure how I feel about having put a cat photo on my blog.

The point is, I edged away from research. But since I started setting novels in places I don’t know well, now, I think: research! It’s great! Especially when you can interview someone. Yes, I could have found out about police procedure from the books and the internets, but when I talked to a retired homicide detective last week, I got so much more than just the facts, ma’am.

I asked, Would it look disorganized if the police questioned my main character once, then asked her back? Does it make them look disorganized? He laughed.

Would you take this detective for a major brain? Me, neither, but he always got his man. Or woman.

“Did you ever watch Columbo?” he asked. “Peter Falk played the part of the dumb old cop who kept asking, ‘Excuse me, just one more question.’ People would get so frustrated with him, but he was the wise old owl. He recognized that you could play dumb and be wiser than got credit for.

“Being an investigator, you have to play a game with people. The study of individuals and gathering info is something I’ve always loved about the job. I loved to play the mind games. You’ll identify who the person is but play the mind-game until you’re ready to take them down. When I ask you a question, I’ve done my homework, so I already know the answer or I wouldn’t be asking. If they answer truthfully, great. If they start trying to deceive you, you know they are and ask them why. It’s like talking to your kids. You know what they’ve done, but you ask them to tell you.”

How great is his language? And how much better will my interrogation scene be now that I’m not just making up questions but having the detective already know the answer? My protagonist might not have done a thing to commit the crime, but if the detective asks her a question, knowing the answer, and she somehow stumbles and gets it wrong–nerves! Suspicion! Drama! In fact, I could use this technique with anyone in any story–principal, parent–even friend.

Thank you, Lieutenant T, for your words and your attitude. You just opened a whole bunch of doors. As for me, I’m going to research 19th-century Dutch furniture so I can figure out what the partner-in-crime is dirtying with his Vans.

There wasn’t even a Google auto-complete for 19th-century Dutch furniture, but I must admit that the furniture itself is not that singular. Still, glad I checked!

Writing is Always Better with Cake.

No idea how she came up with that title. Will have to ponder.

Have I told you yet about Cake-Out, which makes amazing layered cakes in take-out containers, somehow managing to maintain amazing freshness even with layers of frosting and ganache? Probably not, because I am only marginally interested in cake.

For those of you who haven’t read Gone Girl and or seen Side Effects, I’ve titled this post noting the Sad, Twisty women in both. If you’re still planning on checking them out, stop reading: spoilers abound. If you know the stories, or don’t plan to read them, I will now unveil the real title, which is

If You Disappoint a Woman, She’ll Hatch a Psycho Murder Plot That Frames You as the Perpetrator! Watch out!

Briefly: In Gone Girl, Nick comes home one day to find his wife, Amy, abducted. We pretty much know that he hasn’t done it (unless he’s lying to us, and we’re pretty sure he isn’t.) As the police find more and more evidence that points to him, he embarks on his own investigation and realizes that since high school, Amy has staged crimes against herself and framed her friends and lovers. The reason for insanity, we find out, is that her parents plagarized her life for their book series and then needed to take back her trust fund when they made bad investments. Nick also isn’t the husband Amy wanted him to be, either, losing his job in the recession, relocating her (without much choice) to his ailing hometown to care for his mean, dying father, and cheating on her with a student.  The author, Gillian Flynn, manages to make both Amy and Nick sympathetic, despite their many flaws–Nick for being duped and following the trail; Amy for her lame parents and her scheming brilliance. However, when I saw the movie Side Effects last night, I started to see Amy’s actions in a darker shade.

The woman bottom-right is not who she seems. She’s sad AND twisty!

In Side Effects, another women with a simple name, Emily Taylor, has her money taken away, this time when her husband is busted for insider trading at a Gatsby lawn party. In the past, her ambitions centered around graphic design. However, she sets her sights higher when she gets treated for depression by a shrink with lesbian tendencies and embarks on a plot to make back the money, kill her husband, and get away with it. (Beware the shrink with lesbian tendencies, though fear not, she will always be unmasked as the bad seed.)

Not what they seem, either.

Enter Jude Law as Dr. Banks, this movie’s Nick, as the psychiatrist who sees Emily next as part of the murder plan. Emily gets him to prescribe her anti-depressants that induce somnolent activities, like knifing your husband in the back as you’re cooking him dinner. Dr. Banks testifies that Emily did this entirely unconsciously and helps Emily get institutionalized instead of imprisoned, but his job and marriage are upended with the taint of his bad prescriptions. Desperate to gain back his reputation, he, too, goes on his own investigation, in this case to learn that Ms. Emily Taylor is not actually the sleepwalker she claims to be.

So–what is that?  Some women–both white–are so unable to accept disappointment that they go crazy, concocting elaborate deceptions that free themselves and destroy others’ lives? Okay, yes: insider trading, spousal cheating, and the sudden loss of money would throw me for a loop, too, and yes, this is genre fiction and entertainment. Still, I find it alarming that two authors in one year thought the public would find it satisfying to learn that cruel crimes and psychotic behavior were motivated by a woman’s disappointment in losing her station.

I can’t imagine this story ever being made with reverse gender roles, either because the disappointed man would go out and make something of himself or because we’d just think it was too mean for a man to frame his wife. It wouldn’t be entertaining. In contrast, we think it’s great for these bad men to be punished for their crimes against the seemingly defenseless women they wronged. “Go get ‘im, Lorena!” we cheer, until we learn–oh, noes!–that our Emily is psycho.

Except–wait! Lorena doesn’t come out on top. By the end of the story, Dr. Banks, however flawed and responsible for Emily’s circumstances, has the brains and tenacity to pursue his beliefs and seek out the she-devil and her truth. Side Effects ends with Emily, formerly only aping depression, now drugged to her pretty eyeteeth and staring out one of many indistinguishable windows of the mental institution. I felt a sense of justice, but what about Dr. Banks, who the movie makes clear was a little freehanded with the medication? Why does he get to drive off with his hot wife and cute stepkid at the end? No punishment for the man with the prescription pad?

I must give Gone Girl credit for a more savvy ending, or at least an attempt at one (of the two stories, it is by far the more finely crafted.) Amy gets pregnant with Nick’s kid, and even after all this crazy behavior, the two of them choose to stay with each other. It’s a perverse and, to me, witty take on the fact that people with families choose to be pinned down when we pick one partner and hope for the best.  To that extent, Gone Girl does take responsibility for its story by having its female protagonist get what she so desperately sought to escape: life with an imperfect man. Or is it that she gets what she wants–a husband who chooses her, warts and all, while he has to live with someone whose flaws might only kindly be referred to as imperfections?

I just don’t feel that, as a woman, I’m being given much credit for my ability to accept reality. Yes, there is something exciting about women constructing new lives after they get handed a poop sandwich, but can the lives please not involve lies and murder? Just wondering.

For another feminist take on “Side Effects,” look here: 

A showtunes sing-a-long. And if you’re going to read on in the hopes of an ironic sneer at the process, forget it! I love showtunes, and I love singing with people. It’s the closest thing in my life right now to organized religion: everybody engaged, with common knowledge and enthusiasm. Okay, we’re not seeking moral guidance, and for sure the carolers aren’t wrestling with the problematics of the song “Mame” (“The whole plantation’s hummin?” And really, people still do this show?). Still, I love singing with people, especially songs from musicals, which I’ve listened to all my life.

I did walk into Signature Theatre, who was hosting this month, with trepidation. I’d

I am no Fraulein Sally Bowles. Alas.

thought it was going to be songbook-style, but when I came in late (since I can never manage to reach any DC destination without getting lost), only one person was singing, in a very jazzy cabaret. Uh-oh. Would this be amateur piano karaoke? I like to sing, but I”m nothing to make people listen to, and I definitely wasn’t going to belt out “Maria” for a crowd of strangers. I started to wonder if I’d driven extra on Glebe Road for nothing.

However, when I reached the friend who worked there, she assured me that the event was, in fact, sing-a-long style; the lounge lizard was just doing a little publicity for an upcoming Signature show. Phew. I happily abandoned myself to the 50-page songbook and crooning crowd. Singing! Belting! With others and a piano! The piano player was totally into it, adding little flourishes that you hear on the soundtrack but have to add in on your own when you a capella in your car. I’m in my 30s and was definitely below the median age, but I was touched by the cluster of men in their 60s, letting others use the songbooks and signaling to the piano player to pause as they looked up the words to “Impossible Dream” and “Tomorrow” on their iPads. They were straight-seeming, too, which surprised and charmed me. People had come out of their demographic for the night, and I gave my gamest alto along with them.

Not without moments of self-consciousness, of course. We ventured into the late 20th century with “525,600 minutes” from “Rent,” and one young redhead in too short of a shirt-dress got WAY more into it than I thought was seemly, doing little kicky dances and flirting cutely with her friend across the circle. Or–even worse–the crowd requested “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Miserables and then proceeded to belt it out from memory, since it wasn’t in the songbook.

There was an unwritten rule to loving musical theatre, I decided. It was perfectly fine to know the words to “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No,” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Those songs were just in the vernacular. Your parents sang from those shows, or you were in a production of one of them at camp. But to know the words to any song other than the major ballads of “Les Miserables” was just shameful. People shouldn’t admit to that sort of malarkey. Or maybe I didn’t want to be there when they did.

Just as I was feeling the need for a bathroom escape, though, two new, young women sauntered through in impressively tailored coats. The one with glossy curls caught my eye and intoned, “The blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of France!” I couldn’t help but laugh. There was a little irony in the night after all. Or at least, just enough.

Now, pardon me while I play a game of Spider solitaire so I can pay attention to the words to “Impossible Dream.” That’s a good song, yo!

See? No period after ‘Dr’

I think I’m good with details of everyday life, especially food. Food just comes to me, whether it’s Diet Dr Pepper (with no period after ‘Dr’–copy-editor found this one!) or cookie dough. What I’m not as good at, at the get-go, are the surrounding details. Yes, I know how to tell you what the school hallway

I kind of do like pictures of field hockey players, even though I never played.

looks like, or even the main character’s bedroom, but when I do that in a first draft, the information I include often feels random. I could tell you that the main character has posters of field hockey players, but don’t you already know that? Is there something else I could be telling you?

In fact, as I realized when I did a polish of a recent MS, yes. There are some details that are better than others to share–I just don’t always know it when I’m first-drafting. Take this one hallway scene. Initially, I talked about how it was crowded with kids, crushed together and chatting, blah blah blah. When I reread it, I grimaced at the filler-y nature of it all.

Then I realized, Wait, I had wanted an opportunity to introduce this character Travis, who’s not a main guy but plays an important role in the 4th act (call him Shakespeare’s Messenger.) I wanted to establish that he was into science, so bingo! The hall is full of Travis staggering through the door  under the weight of his science project. And oh, now that I think of it, I need to show how it’s getting colder–now some of us are wearing coats! Early on in the drafting, I might not have realized when it was important to show the onset of cold, but later on in the process, I could swap out the filler details and put in evocative ones.

Now that I’ve moved on to a new project, I’m not going to sweat the background details–setting, I guess–so much in the first draft. Sure, there are bits of information I want to share, and I’ll try to sprinkle them deftly, although I’m sure some will end up getting hacked out entirely! But if I get to a scene and I don’t know how to paint the background, I’m not going to drive myself crazy making something up. Instead, I’ll let myself slip in filler, or maybe even write “Blah blah blah,” until the time comes when I know exactly what I want to announce  or evoke.

Not the food, though. That stuff bubbles up in draft one. Like the British tea I mentioned on Twitter a few weeks ago. I’m hoping that kid stays in the picture.

This isn’t even as delicious as the one I wrote about.

ps I hope you’ll vote in the poll to the left! What’s the focus of your writing resolutions?

 Do you see this face? It is one of the first GoogleImage search results for the word suspicious.

This dog? Suspicious.

This dog is so suspicious, it wouldn’t even appear. 

And why are we suspicious today? I’ll tell you.

We should actually have been suspicious a few weeks ago. We were writing a series of scenes (okay, I was writing a series of scenes) in which my protagonist was experiencing the fallout of a seriously bad decision. As I was chronicling this, I was grappling with the results of my own questionable decision to have the character merely ‘experience’ the fallout. Stuck with the chore of writing scene after scene like this, I asked my fellow MFA alums, “What can you do to break the monotony of things going godawfully bad for your character?”

The main suggestion was to add humor, to make us like the character amid her whininess. But hello, the real problem was that the character should have been wanting things and going after them! Lois Lowry was big on this when I heard her speak at the National Festival of the Book (I really should have blogged about that experience-of-a-lifetime, but instead, I’ll just show you the photo):

She was showing a character reaching for something she wanted! True story!

If I needed to ask how to make some  more interesting, it was probably a giveaway that they weren’t the right scenes. Next time, include wanting.

Have any of you had revelations like this?

Last time I wrote, I implicitly compared the act of filling out character questionnaires to finding barf in your refrigerator. By ‘character questionnaire,’ I mean questions writers ask themselves about the characters they plan to put into a novel. Most writers have a vague idea of the character’s age, appearance, occupation, and personality, but of course it’s useful to think ahead of time about the character’s background and the things that motivate her. The more you know about those, the more you know how she will respond to external forces. Response=action, and that’s plot, baby!

That said, so many writers I know cringe as they face, or even consider facing, a character questionnaire, and I’ve been one of them. So many of the questions are overly generic or, worse,  silly but without ammunition–no power. Until I found one that included questions like this:

•  How does the character handle stress and problems?

Such a good one. I have a character whom I pictured as an uber-confident, uber-cabaple, uber-connected uber-goober, but when I got to this question, I realized that in a crisis, the character blamed others as much as he possibly could.  Will that create action? You betcha!

So will this question:

What does this character notice when he walks into a room?

Does anyone get the pun here?

From the get-go, I might think that’s a refrigerator question (my new term for useless questions like, ‘What does your character keep in her refrigerator?) On second glance, though, the answer to this question will generate action as well. Does this character notice things first, or people? A character who obsessively

Doesn’t this scene end with a collapse of these bones?

notices if something’s out of place will try to fix it and maybe other people will react to that, creating action once again. A character who desperately hopes no one in the room will embarrass her will become tense if the room contains someone threatening, and maybe do something embarrassing just because.  Maybe she’ll even do something suspicious, which, in a mystery, would further fuel the plot.

A final series of questions I really liked:

• Best trait?
• Worst trait?
• What is this character’s opinion of self?
• What kind of person do others think s/he is?

Answer these back-to-back and you’ve got multiple dimensions.

Is that Lou Reed?

This does not provide an exhaustive list of the questions I found helpful, and if you find these loathsome, no worries–don’t answer them. I was just pleasantly surprised to find some useful questions that went beyond, “What do you want? What do you fear?” and I thought I’d share.

Final note: strange to say, although I thought these all came from a list I was going to share with you, apparently I’d cobbled them together with other lists,

I find this image a little chilling. Much less bad than playing H and S with Google.

and cut and pasted. Maybe Google is hiding what it once gave me so readily; maybe I forgot my search terms. In any case, here‘s the closest thing I can find to the list of questions I’ve been using, although it must be said that there are a great many herein that give me the barfs.

Happy question-and-answer!

ps If you get my picture-pun, put it in the comments.

I didn’t have to do them, I know. I chose a few characters from the nifty Scrivener column and jotted down things about them in the categories I’ve internalized and care about: biggest hope, biggest fear, and—that pretty much covers it.  I mean, What The Character Wants (and its twin, What the Character Doesn’t Want to Happen) is mostly enough to drive the novel, right?  Couldn’t I get away with answering just that?

Deep inside, I felt like No. It wasn’t enough.  And that the more I forced myself to dig, the more fodder I’d have for action in this novel, which was my own motivation behind outlining the characters.  I mean, see deep t-shirt truism below.

I gamely Googled, Getting to Know Your Character and looked at the results:

“What is in your character’s refrigerator right now?”

omg, can you believe this came up when I image-searched ‘Barf in a Fridge’? I really do think this may be barf. Barf!

Barf!  (Ha, not barf in her refrigerator. That would be quite a hilarious character, though.)  I mean ‘barf’ as in, is that really going to help me get to the heart of this person—knowing whether she drinks non-fat or 1%, whether her mouffetard is at fumes-level, as mine is, or whether she’s topped off with the Grey Poupon?

Here was another helpful character question: “What kind of distinguishing facial features does your character have?”

She has a tongue sticking out at you, because you are being annoying again! (Not you, Reader; you the website writer.)  This strikes me as the kind of question a non-writer English teacher would ask her students to answer about their characters,  then wind up with an inbox full of short stories about wandering eyes, drooping lips, and moles.

I shouldn’t be such a categorical Negative Nelly here.  As they say on Diff’rent Strokes, what might be right for you may not be right for some.  If these questions work for you, I’m happy for you, because you’ve got the process all laid out by this website: http://www.writingclasses.com/InformationPages/index.php/PageID/106

Knowing I had to embark on some kind of question-answering, I skimmed another and found this: “What does your character first notice when s/he walks into a room?”

For some reason, this didn’t seem as irrelevant as the others.  It might well to some of you.  I answered that for one of my characters, and Lo, I realized a new dimension to his illegal activity.  For another character, it crystallized one of her fears.  Maybe that’s what all questions do after you answer, “What is her hope? What is her fear?”: they concretize the main driving forces.

For me, questions like, “What does your character have in her refrigerator?” just get to personality quirks that I’m good at making up as the story goes along when I know the important things about my character.  If I create too many quirks beforehand, I’m likely to try too hard to fit them in, leading to meandering sections of dialogue that exist for the purpose of establishing that one character puts ice cream back in the fridge with only scrapings left.  Possibly important, but not something I can know will be important this far ahead.

In addition, not all quirks reveal anything dynamic. For years, my desired superhero power has been to snap my fingers and move from on the couch, TV recently turned off, to upstairs, in bed, contacts out, teeth brushed, pjs on, ready to snoozle. I happen to think this is a fun superhero power (it’s so mundane, but I’d use it all the time!), but it doesn’t really say that much about me, except that I don’t get much out of the face-washing ritual. If a character really loves the washing and flossing, okay, that might be a useful way to see her, and maybe I would stumble on that fact through a fridge-like questionnaire, but also maybe no.

There have got to be more usefully generative questions out there, right?   Which ones work for you all?  I’d love to poach.  With luck, I will find poached eggs in my refrigerator by the end of the day, and not barf.

This came up in GoogleImage under “delicious poached eggs.” I love GoogleImage.