Writing Inspirations: “In Which Eve Names Everything Else”

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My mini-play/story, “In Which Eve Names Everything Else,” recently won 2nd place in the 2013 Mormon Lit Blitz contest. (If you’re interested, you can also read the discussion of my play.)

The stories that I write are often inspired by a strange combination of things that I’ve been interacting with. Sometimes I have no idea what those inspirations are; other times it’s quite clear. For this story, I can trace four direct influences:

1. A Barenaked Ladies song

barenaked ladies

The day before writing the story I was listening to “A Word for That” on Toddler Radio. Here’s the opening lyrics of the song:

There’s a word for that
But I don’t seem to know it
Sometimes I grow a mustache
Just so I don’t have to show it

The word for that
That someone somewhere chose
For that little dented skin
Between my upper lip and nose

There’s a word for that
What does it start with, the word for that?
I’d sound so smart if I only knew
The word for that, perhaps you do

The word you’re looking for is philtrum

If you’ve short story, it’s pretty clear how the song impacted my ideas.

2. The History of Science

Francis BaconOver the past few years I’ve been reading lots of articles or books on the history of science. And in one of those texts (or perhaps several of them) it mentioned that alchemists used new words to obscure things, make them more mystical and less understandable, but in the “new science” of the Enlightenment, people like Bacon used new words to make things clearer.

For several months I had been thinking about how you need a word for something if it becomes an object of study in and of itself.

3. A Book on Writing Scenes

Crafting ScenesJust a few days before writing the play, I finished reading an excellent book, The Novelist’s Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes. I honestly had never thought about the scene as a unit before reading this book, and thinking about what a scene has to do really influenced the style in which I wrote the mini-scenes in my play (one of which is only two lines long, yet I feel is a complete scene).

4. A college class from my undergrad years

Paradise Painting by Lucas CranachBack in 2007 I took a Humanities capstone course, “The Eden Theme in Western Culture.” We read all sorts of Adam and Eve stories, and looked at how the Eden them influenced exploration, gardening, religion, and even film. This ideas sunk into me, and have forever changed the way I see Adam and Eve.

After my story was published, a reader pointed out that Mark Twain also wrote a humorous story about Adam and Eve naming things. I’d never heard of it before writing my play, but having read it, I can say there are some similarities, though Twain’s is much longer and much less reverent. (Twain actually wrote a whole set of Adam and Eve works. The one I just read is called “Extracts from Adam’s Diary.” I still need to read “Eve’s Diary,” which looks like it has amazing illustrations.)

On Writing the Play

I have never written the play before. I composed the first half, basically word for word, while I was in the shower. It was a long shower. I came out and transcribed it in between feeding kids, and wrote the rest that day.

A trusted reader gave me back a short set of revision notes. I submitted it to the 2013 Mormon Lit Blitz contest. It was chosen as one of 11 finalists from about 200 entries. The contest editors gave me a few minor revision notes. I revised. And then it was published.

It was one of those unusual circumstances where I felt like the story was largely given to me, where not very much changed from the first draft to the final version. You can call it a muse if you want, though I don’t believe in Greek goddesses. I’ll call it a blessing.

 

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Point of View and Imaginative Empathy

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Last Friday I went to a writing workshop by award winning author Susan Palwick, whose new book Mending the Moon was just released.

Mending the Moon

Susan Palwick gave a workshop on point of view. We commonly think about point of view as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd–who is telling the story? A great analogy for this is camera angle, which was a major focus of a great book on point of view, Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint.

After Palwick’s workshop I realized that while that approach is useful, it’s just one small way that authors can use point of view in writing. For example, Palwick talked about “cultural point of view,” the way in which one’s culture, family, and group identifications are going to impact how he/she perceives a certain situation.

Point of view, suddenly, becomes not just a choice on whether we want to be in a character’s head or not. Choosing a point of view, choosing what our characters and our readers see and experience, is suddenly a social responsibility.

During the workshop, Palwick stated that “the job of fiction is to create imaginative empathy.” As a reader, when I engage with a point of view, I have a possibility of recognizing their joys and sorrows, then understanding them, and finally, through living with them, empathizing them. The imagination becomes a powerful tool then in creating or tearing down prejudices, displaying and perhaps advocating different lifestyles, and allowing us to reconsider our own places in the world.

Character Recipe: Kathy Soup

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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

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

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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.

Frustration

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

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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.