Jessica Leader

Cementing the Gaps

Posted in Writerliness on 01/08/2013 12:19 pm by jess

I’m going to admit it. I struggle with writing the setting.

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?

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If it’s in the way, it IS the way.

Posted in Uncategorized on 11/15/2012 12:37 pm by jess

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?

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The Dilemma of Character Questionnaires, Part the Second

Posted in Uncategorized, Writerliness on 08/19/2012 03:39 pm by jess

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.

Tags: Character exploration
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Des Your Character Keep Barf in Her Refrigerator?

Posted in Writerliness on 07/24/2012 10:41 am by jess

I’m going to be honest. Yesterday, I said I was going to explore my characters, but answering questionnaires about my characters makes me a little queasy. Even facing those questionnaires makes me queasy.

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.

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Commitment!

Posted in Uncategorized on 07/23/2012 09:30 am by jess

In theory and some practice, I am pro-commitment. Take relationships, for example. Just the other day, I was saying that the decision to get married had actually strengthened a relationship that had already lasted for years. Before my sweetheart and I got married, I would come away from bad disagreements thinking, “That’s it! We’re not meant to be together. We should break up.” After we got engaged, however, I approached our disagreements differently. “We want to be in this for the long haul,” I’d think, “so the focus is not as much on winning. It’s on creating long-term strategies for us to avoid these issues in the future.” Though I may have just wanted to get married for vague reasons, I see now that committing has brought its own benefits. I think we’re a better team now than we were before.

I like commitment in theatre, too (I mean, who doesn’t?) It brings to mind John Adams during the second-act crisis number of “1776,” when he belts out, “Commitment!” (I am not even going to bother inserting the YouTube link here, because if you haven’t seen this late-60s show, I doubt I’m going to move you to do so. If you have already seen it, you know it’s awesome and you know what moment I’m talking about.) This past year, I met a Master Teaching Artist in the field of educational theatre who used to watch my students rehearse and say, “Commit,” doing the Sign-Language sign for it under her chin (I don’t remember exactly how it looked, but it looked very cool.)

So, commitment: yes! I didn’t think I had much trouble with it in writing. (Don’t worry, this laughable assertion will soon get debunked.) But it was on my mind during a recent work and letter exchange with another writer, my excellent grad school roommate, Rachel Wilson (her novel, DON’T TOUCH, will be published by HarperChildren’s in the summer of 2014. Yeah!) She is starting a new project, like I am, and she was pushing herself to write a synopsis for me by a certain deadline, since she says that the hardest thing for her in writing is committing to one path or idea. At the time of our exchange, I thought, “Hunh, that’s interesting. I’ve never thought about that. I guess that’s not a problem I have as a writer.”

Ha. Ha. HA.

My memory must be making me delusional. I haven’t started a new project in a while, since the thing I just finished was a revival of something I’d let lie. Now, though, I am starting a new project, and while I’ve been able to push myself into a certain amount of plotting by reading some plotting books, zoiks, I’m reaching a scaredy moment!

It has to do with character. The piece I’m planning is full of action, much more plot-driven than what I usually write. I’ll shape the characters to serve the plot, rather than the other way around. At this juncture, I know a lot of what I basically want to happen, but zeroing in on the people who carry out those actions is scary! What if I get it wrong? What if the unarticulated ferment pit of my brain has all these great ideas, but in committing to getting them down, I leave out one slimy strand and the whole thing crashes to pieces? So much better to just let it malinger in the brain, right??

Not my brain. Actually The Bog of Eternal Stench, from Labyrinth

Well. Probably not. For one thing, I’d just have to start something new and face the whole process all over again. For two, I should probably give in to my suspicions that if I can’t articulate some of my thoughts for my characters, they’re probably just ghosts and feelings in the first place. Sometimes, when I’m stuck in a scene, particularly in rewrites, I go back to my notes, hoping I’ll have included some guidance for myself. Where I’ll hope to see some brilliant mechanism for getting Zoe and Jackie back into each others’ good graces, I’m most likely to find something like, “Then Zoe and Jackie will find something mutual to laugh at, and the ice will melt.”

‘Something mutual to laugh at’? Wow, self, that was helpful! So glad I took those elaborate notes.

So I suspect it’s similar ghosts and haze up here with the characters of the current piece, and that when I commit to articulating something about their hopes and fears, I won’t be killing off sad, better versions of the characters. Rather, I’ll be killing off my own fears that I can’t bring them to life in a perfect manner and embracing the chance to move forward. Now, if only I can get myself to believe it. It’s painfully unshocking how the fear of committing today was so hard that I updated this blog, something I haven’t done for real in over a year.

To further inspire myself, in lieu of visiting the YouTube, I’ll post this picture of John Adams (okay, an actor playing John Adams. The real John Adams didn’t have any photos taken, and the portraits are less than stirring.)

“Commitment!”

To quote Campbell’s Soup (at least, I think it’s Campbell’s Soup), how can you argue with that face?

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I’m still here!

Posted in Writerliness on 04/09/2012 09:14 pm by jess

…and that is pretty much all I have to say. I’m actually logged into my blog right now, to edit the spam that I didn’t want (see last post), so I thought I’d say halloa. I’m busy teaching, writing, and parenting the chewy little noodle that is my daughter, and I’m looking forward to having a book that is done-ish so I can breathe a little and reconnect with readers. In the meantime, know that I am still thinking lots of thoughts about books, kids, writing, and revision, and one day, I will share some of them!

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Spamathon! Spam to Raise Money for a Food Pantry

Posted in Uncategorized on 11/01/2011 06:53 pm by jess

Oh wow, now I’m really going to get a lot of spam.

I’m back! I’m back after a hugely long absence! I’m not even going to calculate the number of months I’ve been away. I have a good excuse: I’ve been busy. Moved, bought a house, moved in, had a baby, found a job. All good (one superlative); all stressful and time-consuming. Throughout, I’ve been thinking, “Oh, I keep meaning to go back to that blog. But I should also order another swaddle blanket/deal with that car insurance issue/run the wash/write a snatch of my novel/collapse.” Tonight, something urgent brought me to the site: spam.

I don’t know how many of you have blogs, but if you do, unless you have some surefire firewall that I don’t have here on WordPress, spam will crop up in your comment feed. You probably get all excited, thinking, ‘Someone’s hopped off Facebook and actually read and commented on my blog post!’ but no, it’s just someone trolling for cash. I will say that at least today’s blog spammers are sort of creative. Sure, there’s the generic. They’ll say things like,

Thank you for your whole hard work on this blog. My mom delights in working on research and it’s obvious why. All of us learn all concerning the powerful tactic you render very useful guidelines through your website and therefore invigorate response from other people on that content so our favorite child is without question being taught a great deal. Have fun with the remaining portion of the year. Your conducting a useful job.

[Who is their favorite child, I might ask, and what is happening to their less favored child as a result? And why do those with favorites have trouble using apostrophes?]

There’s also the lengthier:

My husband and i have been absolutely ecstatic that Albert could finish up his researching out of the precious recommendations he was given from your very own web pages. It is now and again perplexing just to always be giving out secrets that others have been making money from. We really take into account we’ve got you to appreciate for this. All the explanations you’ve made, the straightforward site menu, the relationships you can give support to promote – it is many terrific, and it’s really aiding our son in addition to the family consider that this topic is amusing, and that’s especially important. Thanks for the whole thing!

I’ve always had a fondness for that Albert. So glad I could help him out. Many terrific. And I agree that it is perplexing to give our secrets that others can make money from. It happens to me all the time, and what can I say — I’m perplexed!

The most inventive and surprising spam was deleted a few months ago, but it mentioned oatmeal! First of all — really, oatmeal? Secondly, how did they know I am married to a marked lover of oatmeal?

When I hopped online to delete this madness (nothing says ghost-town blog like piles of spam), I reread some previous posts, and by gum, you all are fabulous commenters. I would definitely be motivated to blog more if I saw more of the likes of you, and I’d like my return to do a little good for the world. Thankgiving is coming up (bye-bye, Halloween!), and some people will have a hard time coming by their turkey or tofu, so I decided, for every person who posts fake spam in the comments, I will donate $1 to a food pantry. (Now you might ask, how will I know if it’s real spam or fake spam? I won’t. I’ll have to guess.)

Winner gets bragging rights. Everyone else gets the joy of sounding like a spammer. Blunt your pencils and begin!

Oh, and since this post brought a certain video to mind, I thought I’d share:

Follow-up note: I am closing this post to comments, because, ironically, it is getting too much actual spam! Unless my friends are excellent at creating fake spam and interested in disguising it, but that just doesn’t sound like what they have time for these days.

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Things worth celebrating

Posted in Uncategorized on 04/18/2011 09:08 am by jess

Check out Jennifer Hubbard’s blog for a breakdown of how writers, bloggers, and all of you raised $1667 for libraries around the country!

Tags: big news
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We Have Reached Our Fund-Raising Goal!

Posted in Libraries on 04/03/2011 11:11 am by jess

Linda N, one of the commenters, sent this picture of people cheering the opening of a library

Thanks to all you library-lovers out there, plus FFLL (Friends and Family of Library Lovers), I have exceeded my goal of $50 and raised $62 for the Louisville Free Public Library! I especially like this number because I grew up on 62nd Street, so any flash of resonance is especially pleasing.

Thanks especially to Emily and Ginger, whose guest posts brought in fresh sources of fun and funds, and to those wacky pals at Vermont College who commented in droves. I must admit that part of the reason I undertook this challenge was to kick-start myself back into blogging, and I really enjoyed the dialogue. Maybe some of you will even come back!

Off to have brunch at a new place (new to me, I mean)–

~Jess

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Cheers for Sylvester the Librarian

Posted in Libraries on 04/01/2011 03:01 pm by jess

And now, the final post for the Library-Lovin’ Blog challenge, from my good friend Emily! She told me recently about how much she loves Sylvester, the librarian at Louisville’s Eline Library, and I thought, “She must do a guest post for me!” Thankfully, she has ceded to my command, and now you get to hear this sweet story.

Also thankfully, you readers have raised at least $40 for the library with your comments this week! Think you can get it to $50? Do I hear $55? Comment away, me hardies, and thanks for visiting!

And now for Emily’s post (ooh! Like Emily Post!)

When I was a little girl, my family used to go to Cape Cod for two weeks

every summer, and the local library was within walking distance. I’d roll my little red wagon there, and the librarians greeted me each year with a “Welcome back!” I’d fill the wagon with books, and on the way home we’d stop for blue raspberry slushies and possibly, if my mother was in a very good mood, a Ring Pop. So libraries fill me with warm, fuzzy feelings, and also a desire for slushies.

Not Emily's actual toddler, but look! Cute toddler!

When I was pregnant with my first child, I knew I wanted the library to be special to him as well. As soon as the doctor gave me the go ahead to take him out in public, and as soon as I got over my fear of driving with him in the car, we went to the library. Now he’s a sturdy toddler, and I can no longer carry him into the library. He must walk, thank you very much. The entrance to our particular library is a long hallway, with the children’s section on the right, the adult section on the left, and panes of glass dividing the hallway from the books. Every single time we go, my son gets so excited to see the books (“Story!” he says. “Story!”) that he presses up against the glass. He’s so eager to get to the books that he cannot fathom he has to walk down the hall and around the glass. Instead, he bangs on the glass in frustration. He can see the books! Why can he not get to them?

But what makes the library really special is the librarians. First of all, they greet my son by name. Second of all, when he pulls many books off the shelf in his sheer joy at being surrounded by stories, they manage to hide their exasperation really, really well. And finally, when he cries in despair at having to leave, turning bright red and wailing as loudly as he can (which very loudly, in case you were wondering), they smile and make clucking noises and tell him they’ll see him soon.

The Ur-Sylvester. Am I right?

And if that doesn’t work, we see Sylvester. Sylvester is my son’s favorite librarian, and mine too, I admit. Partially because his name is Sylvester, which is awesome, but mostly because he’s a very nice man. The last time we were at the library, my son had a fit because I wouldn’t let him bang on a computer keyboard. Red-faced, tears streaming down his cheeks…he was pathetic. All the little old ladies there looked very concerned. So I took him to the check-out desk, and there was Sylvester.

“Hi, Evan,” he said cheerfully.

The screaming stopped, and Evan eyed him.

“Tough day today, huh?” he asked.

Sniffles from Evan.

“Here are your books!” he said, and handed them to me.

A tiny voice piped up. “Thank you. Bye bye, Sylv.”

I kind of want to take Sylvester home with me and have him hand me books every time a tantrum occurs, but I think I’ll have to stick with regular visits to the library.

Again–leave a comment below, or here, here, or here, and Jess will donate $1 so librarians like Sylvester can have consistent hours and help kids like Evan and moms like Emily.

Also, thanks to Jennifer Hubbard, author of The Secret Year, for brain-childing the Library-Lovin’ Blog Challenge! See all you library fans next year!

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