Character Recipe: Kathy Soup
I went to a writing event last night and author Cindy R. Williams taught about Character Recipes, an approach she uses to get to know her characters. Basically, you create a recipe for your character that includes things like physical characteristics, personality traits, flaws, fears, and dreams.
Instead of doing it on a character, we practiced it by doing it on ourselves. Other people wrote recipes that were much cleverer than mine, but mine still paints a fairly decent picture of who I am today. So here is my character recipe:
Kathy Soup
- 1 husband in graduate school and 2 tiny girls
- 1 pair of hazel eyes
- 3 Tablespoons of sleep deprivation
- 1 pair of holey jeans, best obtained by crawling on the floor
- Broth of dreams (prepared in advance by boiling writing, piano, yarn, film, and teaching; strain out any large chunks)
- 10 unpolished fingernails
- 1 classroom filled with freshmen writing students
- 500 words of writing a day
- Heaping scoop of perfectionism
Directions: Find a house with two little girls and a male graduate student. Watch them carefully while mincing sleep deprivation and holey jeans; sauté in hot oil. Add a broth of dreams, and with unpolished fingers, stir in a classroom of writing students and 500 words of personal writing a day. Season with a bit too much perfectionism and then be self-critical about it and everything else. Simmer for several uninterrupted hours. As this time will likely be unavailable, consider boiling rapidly for 20 minutes, hoping that will be long enough for the flavors to combine, and stirring continuously to avoid burning. Serve dinner 30 minutes late. But at least there is food on the table and the kids are still alive.
And now I think I need to do this exercise for some of my characters.
Photo Credit: essgee51, Creative Commons license
New Page: Metaphors about the Writing Process
I’ve added a new page to my site with quotes and metaphors about the writing process. Okay, there’s a fair number of similes too, but similes are a type of metaphor.
The first semester I taught a college writing class, I got to the day I was supposed to teach about writing process and thought, I don’t know how to teach this.
A visual metaphor for how I feel when I don’t know how to teach something.
Other parts of argumentation feel much more concrete and learnable: for example, you can clearly look at the examples a writer used to support their argument and analyze why they did or did not work.
Yet you can’t look at the final piece of writing and see the processes or strategies it took to get there. You may be able to tell if it was rushed or hurried, or sloppy and undeveloped thinking. But if it’s good writing, the process is basically invisible.
In regards to writing process, there are principles I believe firmly hold true: write everyday, if you’re going to procrastinate then do so wisely, research early and deeply, and turn off your internal editor while you’re writing a first draft.
Now you can say those things about writing, but how do you teach them, remember them, ingrain them? To me, that’s where metaphors about writing really come in handy. For example, if I think about writing as exercise, it makes sense that I should be writing everyday: I wouldn’t compete in a 10K without running regularly in advance.
So head on over and check out my page about writing metaphors. It’s a work in progress that will continue to evolve.
Image Credit: Sybren A. Stüvel, Creative Commons license
Writing is like Plate Spinning
This is a metaphor that I’m borrowing from mystery writer Michael Connelly. He writes:
From somewhere in my memory, either amateur hour TV or the boardwalk in Venice, I remember a sideshow act called plate spinning. The object of this entertainment endeavor is to rotate plates balanced on thin wooden dowels. The practitioner gets several pieces of supposedly good china spinning at once and then must quickly move from dowel to dowel, keeping everything spinning and aloft. Paid particular attention is the plate in the middle of the formation. By virtue of its position, it is the most important of the plates. If it goes down, it invariably takes several other plates with it and you have broken china all over the ground and an empty tip bucket.
In my mind I often liken writing a book to spinning plates. There are many, many different things you have to keep up and spinning at all times.
Connelly describes some of the plates that you keep spinning when you write a novel, include story structure, writing style, pacing, and background research. For him, the central plate is characterization: if that plate falls, all the other plates are going to fall with it.
If you’re writing an argument, the plates you’re spinning will include ethos, pathos, and logos, your reasons and supporting evidence, your style, your awareness of the audience, and many other things. To me, the central plate is your main overriding claim or your thesis–if it topples or loses focus, there goes your entire argument.
Here’s an awesome video of plate spinning, a little different from the show Connelly saw, but quite impressive. This is from a Beijing Acrobat show:
Make sure to check out my Metaphors about Writing page for quotes on writing and other Writing is like… posts.
Photo Credit: lissalou66, Creative Commons license
The quote by Michael Connelly is from a book chapter called “Characterization,” in the book Writing Mysteries: A Handbook by the Mystery Writers of America (edited by Sue Grafton). See page 57.
Everyday Rhetoric
A lot of times, rhetoric is taught in college with the immediate purpose of helping students become better at writing college papers.
But what I love about rhetoric is it’s everyday, normal uses.
When we first moved into this apartment, my daughter’s door would jam, and sometimes I would have a really hard time opening it. Twice I couldn’t open it at all and had to have my husband do it.
Maintenance said they couldn’t fix it, and that it was normal for the doors to jam. Something to do with air pressure and humidity, ya dah ya dah ya dah.
So I thought, what is the strongest possible reason I can make for why my daughter’s door needs to be fixed? The fact that it was annoying, irritating, or challenging was obviously not good enough.
I told the office that I was worried about it being a fire hazard: what if there was a fire and I couldn’t get the door opened because it was jammed?
Within an hour, my daughter’s door was fixed.
Now fast forward. Several weeks ago, I put in a work order for maintenance to fix a number of small, yet irritating things. Like my towel rack. I like to hang up my towel. Yet for some reason or another, my request got lost in the shuffle.
One of the things on the list was switching the air filter (the office had said maintenance could do it the first time so I could see how it was done). So this morning, I removed the 20 inch by 20 inch air filter from the ceiling vent. It was one of the filthiest things I have ever seen. I brought my baby, my toddler, and the filthy air filter to the main office.
Within an hour, everything on my list had been fixed.
I intentionally didn’t bring the baby backpack, a stroller, or anything that would have made my trip easier. That would have damaged the visual impact. The office assistant said, “You know you can just throw that air filter away.” What I didn’t tell her is that I knew I could just go to the office and they’d give me a new air filter, but I had brought the old one with me because I wanted all my maintenance requests to be fixed.
And it worked.
And that’s why I love rhetoric. As Aristotle wrote, rhetoric is using “the available means of persuasion.” It’s not just about getting an A on a college paper–though rhetoric can certainly help you do that as well. It’s about using your voice to make changes in the world, particularly when they’re not changes you can make on your own.
Photo Credits:
- Pen and paper by Guudmorning!
- Dirty air filter by AJC1
Writing is Like… (Part 5)
Writing is like taking care of sick kids. It takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of time. Your kids and your writing always seem to need you, and sometimes they keep you up all night.
Like taking care of sick kids, writing can involve cleaning up gross messes.
Sometimes you need to seek professional advice and go to a doctor (or a writing instructor, writing tutor, or critique group). The doctor, ideally, has spent a lot of time with sick kids and has seen these sorts of problems before. The doctor then gives you one or more prescriptions—be it antibiotics, a grammar prescription, a prescription on your argument, your research, or your writing style.
With sick kids and with writing you do all that you can, and you often experience slow improvements. Sometimes you just need to let time play its part.
Writing is not always fun and games. Neither is taking care of sick kids, something I can attest to, as I’ve been taking care of a sick baby and a sick toddler for the last few weeks. It may not always be fun, but it is worth it.
Photo Credit: Lauren Grace Picture Place
If you want to know why writing is like kissing and a great number of other things, make sure to check out all my “Writing is Like” posts.
You Know it’s a First Draft When…
You know it’s a first draft of your novel when you write the following sentences in one of the closing scenes of your book:
They kissed. And then they kissed some more.
Yes. I just put that in my novel. It will be much different in the second draft. It will still involve kissing, but that will probably be the only similarity.
In good news, I just finished the first draft of my electric eels novel. It came in at 48,615 words, and is missing a number of scenes that won’t be added to the second draft, simply because I need to completely revamp one of the main story lines.
But I know that I’m done with this draft. Do you know how I can tell? I just got to the point in the story where I could type the following two words:
Having seen the quality of what else I wrote today, I’m sure you’ll agree those are the best two words I wrote today.