GRABBING HOLD OF CHARACTER

I get so caught up in my story I think I tend to forget my characters. I recently had one of my 4Corners buddies tell me my chapters were like short stories. They didn't tend to move the story forward which is an absolute no no to a writer.

I have had this criticism before, in fact it's the most frequent criticism I get. I've never really understood the criticism before but I think I finally do. My 4Corners buddy talked about something having to happen in each chapter to move the characters along to their final destination and some hint of the final destination has to be there. Even now I'm a little fuzzy as to how I manage that.

OK. Hypothesis. Let's say your final destination is a whole series of events that end with one of your characters getting arrested. This is my story RUN. There will be a trial. In the 1920's teenage runaways were routinely put into jail and younger siblings returned home. My characters have run from an abusive household and being returned home is not a good option.

The adults who have befriended them, Cecil and the Nuns and the old men from the hotel come to their rescue and spirit Kate and Pearl out of the courthouse. The brother, Ben, sees their plight in a newspaper and has come to the courthouse as well and he is also spirited away, with his friend Abel. There will be a surprise ending and I don't want to give that away but the upshot of that ending will be that Ben will join the girls on their next adventure. He will no longer be in Penn Station. Abel may join them; I'm not sure of that as yet.

How do I move my characters toward that series of events? Perhaps I have the girls see a mysterious stranger in the neighborhood of the hotel. Perhaps they worry about the nephew who remembered some runaways whose father would pay a mint to get them back and, when last seen, was running for the library to look them up.

I think both of these options would work to move the story forward. I think it would make sense for Pearl and Kate to worry about being found and what would happen if they were. The children's father is a lawyer and Kate has seen him in court and undoubtedly knows what would be in store for them if she and Pearl were found.

The key to this is my rendering of character. If I don't get a good hold on my characters the story takes over. I think that's what's happened here. I need to grab hold of my characters and not let go.

THE TARTER SWEPT

Why is it we find the unfamiliar so hard to digest? I didn't think about this too much, frankly, until Kerri, in a recent blog posting, brought up the amazing poem "The Love Life of j alfred prufrock.

I love T. S. Elliot's poetry and I love the aforementioned poem. To death. I mean, I really like it! But did I buy a book of his poetry? No. I don't think I loved that wonderful poem that much, when I first read it.

Why? That's what bothers me.

Which brings me to the poet August Kleinzahler. Can I move beyond the strangeness of his poetry and truly love it? It's not Robert Frost you're reading here. This is hard, city-bred boy speaking. But his poetry lives and breathes.


He recently won the National Book Critic's Circle Award. I find his poetry difficult, but when I read it (and I'll have to read it many times, I'm sure to truly get it) I have the feeling--just beginning, you understand--of being transported and isn't that what reading a good piece of writing is all about--being transported?

The Tartar Swept

The Tartar swept across the plain

In their furs and silk panties

Snub-nosed monkey men with cinders for eyes

Attached to their ponies like centaurs

Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians

Streaming from defiles like columns of ants

Arraying their host in a vasty wheel

White, gray, black and chestnut steeds

10,000 each to a quadrant

Turning, turning at the Jenuye's command

This terrible pinwheel

Gathering speed like a Bulgar dance

Faster and faster

Until it explodes, columns of horsemen

Peeling away in all the four directions

Hard across the puszta

Dust from their hooves darkening the sky

They fall upon village and town

Like raptors, like tigers, like wolves on the fold

Mauling the sza-szas

And leaving them senseless in puddles of goaty drool

Smashing balalaikas

Ripping the ears off hussars and pissing in the wounds

They for whom the back of a horse

Is their only country

For whom a roof and four walls is like unto a grave

And a city, ptuh, a city

A pullulating sore that exists to be scourged

Stinky dumb nomads with blood still caked

On shield and cuirass

And the yellow loess from the dunes of the Takla Makan

And the Corridor of Kansu

Between their toes and caught in their scalps

Like storm clouds in the distance

Fast approaching

With news of the steppes, the lagoons and Bitter Lakes

Edicts, torchings, infestation

The smoke of chronicles

Finding their way by the upper reaches

Of the Selinga and the Irtysh

To Issyk-Kul, the Aral, and then the Caspian

Vanquishing the Bashkirs and Alans

By their speed outstripping rumor

Tireless mounts, short-legged and strong

From whose backs arrows are expertly dispatched

As fast as they can be pulled from the quiver

Samarkand, Bukhara, Harat, Nishapur

More violent in every destruction

This race of men which had never before been seen

With their roving fierceness

Scarcely known to ancient documents

From beyond the edge of Scythia

From beyond the frozen ocean

Pouring out of the Caucasus

Surpassing every extreme of ferocity

From the Don to the Dniester

The Black Sea to the Pripet Marshes

Laying waste the Ostrogoth villages

Taking with them every last cookie

Then dicking the help

These wanton boys of nature

Who shot forward like a bolt from on high

Routing with great slaughter

All that they could come to grips with

In their wild career

Their beautiful shifting formations

Thousands advancing at the wave of a scarf

Then doubling back or making a turn

With their diabolical sallies and feints

Remorseless and in poor humor

So they arrived at the gates of Christendom

From The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, by August Kleinzahler
Copyright © 2003

I'M THREE QUARTERS DONE WITH RUN!!!

I was thinking just now how much I enjoy writing my middle grade novel RUN!! It wasn't too long ago I was stuck in the middle of it, why I don't know, but I now feel I'm three quarters done, which is huge for me. This is a first draft but I've done a lot of editing as I've written it, so perhaps there won't be a lot more to do, at least that's what I'm hoping.

I have a family of two girls and a boy fleeing an abusive home in 1924 and ending up in New York City. The boy, Ben, gets left behind in Penn Central and hooks up with a boy named Abel who knows everything you need to know about getting along in Penn Central. The girls, Kate and Pearl, are settled in a wonderful home with a woman named Esther but are threatened with exposure when her nephew arrives and find themselves on the run again. They settle in a old men's hotel so decrepit Pearl, the younger, nearly faints at the prospect of staying there.

At this point some nasty rats come into the picture for the girls; for Ben and Abel, the problem is fleas. The girls prove to be the means for salvation for the old men in the hotel. Ben and Abel find getting rid of the fleas is more difficult, involving ultimately a run-in with some nasty older boys and a perilous run for safety into the night minus their clothes.

What gets Kate and Pearl and Ben together once again is some mysterious gifts which arrive in Penn Station earmarked for Abel. Ben's and Abel's mysterious benefactor will bring everybody together at the end and Ben will have to make a difficult decision: whether to stay with Abel in Penn Station, or rejoin his sisters on the run.

KETTLE RIVER CAPTAIN, CAPPY FOR SHORT

I have talked about one of our important family members before but I thought tonight I'd start with a important family member of mine from years ago. His name was Kettle River Captain--Cappy for short. He was a member of my family when I was growing up and many stories are told about him.

Cappy was a Golden Retriever. My father brought him home as a puppy with the idea that he would use him as a hunting dog, this being the midwest. Cappy hated the water, strangely enough for a retriever, and refused to cooperate. He went into the water only once. He retrieved a stick from the middle of the Mississippi River for my brother. Cappy was really David's dog and Cappy braved Old Man River at the end of his life for him. David had three more Golden Retrievers during his life in honor of Cappy: Moose, Annie, and Cody, but dogs, like anything else of great importance, are irreplaceable. Those dogs were amazing too--each a wonderful character--all worthy of a separate post, but none, of course, like Cappy.

I have a favorite story about Cappy. Cappy had a nemesis--a cat named Buttons who lived across the street from us. Buttons knew just what to do to get Cappy's ire. Our livingroom had floor to ceiling windows. Buttons would sit just outside the window and nonchalantly peer in at Cappy. Cappy would see her and come tearing across the livingroom, forgetting totally there was glass in between him and the pesky cat. He never learned. Buttons got him every time.

My brother talked about when he was grade school Cappy would walk to school with him and when he came out to walk home again who would be there but Cappy. Cappy had his own internal clock.

It nearly killed my brother when Cappy died. I found some images of golden retrievers, having no way to find an image of Cappy to share. I found this wonderful image of a retriever on Photobucket. Much to my delight, he really looks and feels like Cappy. I am a fan of Photobucket for life.

BLADE RUNNER

Tonight I have been watching Blade Runner, the story set in a futuristic society in 2019. Much as I enjoy the story my memory fastens on the last moments of a Replicant. Replicants are indistinguishable from humans except they have no memories--until they are four years old. It is the job of Blade Runners to kill rogue Replicants. I love Harrison Ford in the role of the Blade Runner but it is Rutger Hauer who gets my attention in the role of the Replicant Roy Batty.

A Replicant denied feelings until the moment he dies defies understanding. This is what you see as Roy Batty dies: the birth of feelings. It is unbearably poignant.

I couldn't help but reflect on the future as I watched Blade Runner. In the film cars have taken to the skies. My husband was in Osaka, Japan some years ago and talks about freeways six stories in the air which seems to me to be very much the same thing. Would we be able to get in a car to shop if that car was going six stories in the air? Yet in San Francisco we ride trains that travel under San Francisco Bay and think nothing of it.

What do you think the future will be like?

IMPROVING ON REAL LIFE

I am planning on a particular move in my novel RUN!! which I feel I need to think through. It involves my mother.

I have mixed feelings about my mother. I adored her for a lot of my life and then the feeling went. For no good reason. Life wasn't easy for me or my siblings but then life wasn't easy for her. She did the best she could.

Now I find myself thinking about her, wondering how life can be so unfair. She was mentally ill at a time when very few people understood it. People generally thought she was just someone with a bad temper. She could make you laugh, and that was a gift. She should have had help a lot sooner than she got it.

When she was a little girl, she wanted to be an actress. Her stories could make you laugh until your sides hurt. She would have been an amazing actress if she had had the chance.

The picture shows her with my father. I've always loved this picture as the couch seems to be literally groaning under their combined weights.

Only time will tell what happens with her in RUN!! Somehow I feel like I should be able to improve on real life somehow.

FRIENDSHIP (WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO JEN)

I have this feeling if I start writing I will bring out some great epic piece today. If I start writing, something will click.



Ah, Friendship. That's what I will deal out here today in an epic way, complete with pictures, although arranging pictures is new to me and the results, I'm afraid, show it.



First, I have to explain something. I had a weird childhood, in that I feel there were two parts to it, the before the age of eight part and after the age of eight part. I was a scorcher before the age of 8. I mean I just did it--whatever needed doing I did it with aplomb! I belonged to a group of young ruffians; we all got together every night and played on our street. We only came in from the street when our mothers called. I have a great memory of a seven-year-old and the games we played.




When I turned eight we moved; something settled down deep in my childish bones and I retreated, in a big way. Something in my family went haywire, school left a lot to be desired so I got suspicious, and didn't let anyone in. I've always wanted to go back to my seven-year-old self.




The problem with a dichotomy settling in like that is it hovers over you well into adulthood. I've been particularly suspicious of friendship because I had so little of it growing up. Thank God I've changed, finally. When I make friends now, I really value them.







The day before yesterday a friend took me out to lunch: her name is Barbara. We go back a long ways. For the first time I got more detail on her growing up years, although the hurts didn't come into it, as I've described mine, and there were almost certainly hurts. Just the fascinating stuff, like growing up in New York City before moving to Pennsylvania to a chicken farm, of all things. How could I have known Barb all these years and not known she lived on a chicken farm!






That weird dichotomy still hovers, you see.







Barbara, or Barb, as I call her, is among a group of friends I've had for a lot of years now. Anne, Laura, and Judy are the others in this group of friends. Anne and I are making faces at each other in the pictures, I'm the one on the right with the purple sweater.
Laura and Judy look on tolerantly. We've gone through a lot of things together and I've probably been the only one who hasn't reached out as much as I would have liked. These friends are the ones who reached out when I lost my brother. We go out together to celebrate birthdays every year. May there be many more birthday celebrations!







Max goes back just as many years. In the picture you see we were in one of our wonderful adventure spots: maybe Morocco? We have shared wonderful times together. Max is always there for me. This year was one of the first years we haven't had one of our adventures, like being thrown out of Slovakia or getting lost in the Egyptian Exhibit at the Louvre. Next year, Max!






Jen is my newest friend. You see her here with her husband Soeren and my husband Jerry. Jen's is a friendship I can't even begin to describe: like sending innumerable emails, How Are You Doing? What's Up? And meaning it. And wanting to know. Like thinking through how to help with a writing problem that was causing real knock down, drag out depression and coming forth with the one thing that helped.

Jen and I met in an online writing group, soon found it not to our liking and together left to form our own. From there she signed me up (without my knowledge! Thank you, Jen!) with another writing group that was forming so now I have all these other friends whose pictures I don't have on me and available but then, friends, you know who you are: the wonderful HW, HtH, Erin, Brit, Kerri--The Four Corners Online Writing Group!




Here's to all my friends: Barb, Anne, Laura, Judy, Max, Jen, HW, HtH, Erin, Brit, Kerri. I wish we were all together. I'd lift a glass of wine in your honor!



With special thanks to Jen. May Possum Summer find a publisher and soon!