Feb
14
2011

I’m not a mystic, but what I am about to tell you is the true story of Jim Hathaway, a crotchety old editor who found a way to give me the exact writing advice I needed, at the critical moment — and even better — several years after he was dead and buried. Given Jim’s strength of will, I doubt even cremation would have stopped him.
Jim was a member of The Lafayette Park Writers, a critique group of retired editors, columnists, English professors, novelists, and one traveling actress. Each week they met in a city parks and rec building and enthusiastically welcomed each newbie who fell in off the street. Each of the core members was experienced and nurturing, and each in his own right could have lit up Sin City on the sheer strength of his personality and charm. But even in that group, Jim stood out.
Tall, svelte, and mostly bald, Jim wore double-knit pants and white shoes. He had a pugnacious delivery, a voice like a cheese grater, and in spite of his liver-spotted skin and huge ears, blue eyes as round and eager as any eight-year-old boy’s. I admired a lot about Jim, but the quality I most respected was his life-long elasticity, his willingness to reinvent his skills, his writing, and himself with each new physical challenge or technical advance placed before him. In writing and in life you could always spot Jim; he was the barefoot, shirtless boy skateboarding fearlessly down Breakneck Hill.
Continue reading
10 comments | tags: actress, address, Breakneck Hill, business, cardinal, cat, char, cheese grater, columnist, comfort, copyright, cremation, crisis, critique, daughter, double-knit, editor, elastic, English professor, essay, family, fiction, film, final draft, funeral, ghost, grief, in-laws, infancy, Lafayette Park, linoleum, liver spots, mailbox, mentor, mother, mystic, novelist, paper, pen, personality, physical challenge, poem, priest, reinvent, revelation, short story, sign of the cross, Sin City, skill, suicide, supernatural, teacher, technical advance, technique, white shoes, will, writing, writing advice | posted in On Writing
Feb
1
2011
Listen to fiction writers describe how we work, and you’ll think we’re all Rokus — those small black boxes that sit on your entertainment center and stream programs from the internet to your TV. Most writers will say we sit at our keyboards and type chapters that flow through our heads like scenes in a movie. This sounds easy, but it isn’t. To get to that point takes hard work.
And after we’re done with all the plotting and dialogue, description and pace, our protagonists still need to live and breathe. For this to occur, we must know them well. Authors build their characters in many ways – we cut out pictures of interesting faces, write in-depth histories we’ll never use, poke through our characters’ pockets, their closets, their refrigerators, create lists of hobbies and musical tastes.
Often we come to know our characters better than ourselves, but even then, we aren’t done. There is one more step we must take. For our character and her story to become as vivid for the reader as they are for ourselves, we have to convince the reader to climb inside our protagonist’s head. Continue reading
10 comments | tags: building characters, character, creating vivid characters, degrees of separation, fiction, involving your reader, Kevin Bacon, protagonist, reader experience, Roku, scene, thriller, writing, writing advice | posted in On Writing