Question:

Answer: You are the writer, the one in charge, which means you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. However, there are some major benefits to doing character studies for each of the character’s who might appear in your story. While you’re doing your character sketch you are in the mind of that character long enough to really think about their life. What were that person’s goals, flaws, hates, fears, secrets and dreams? If you take the time to get to know your characters, your memory is refreshed and you begin to tell a more integrated story.

The place I find myself pulling character sketches out most is when I’m stuck in a scene that lacks energy. I look at what I’ve written and then throw a new concept into the scene. I pretend the character’s secret, greatest fear or biggest dream has just walked in the door. Then I have the character’s respond to each other. The scene usually takes off and I know what to write.

You may even want to cross off characteristics from your sketch as you add them to your story. Your character is fully developed by the end and you know you haven’t repeated yourself.

Answer: The most important thing is to get to your own emotional truth. One mistake you do not want to make is to reveal all the truths about everyone else in your life without being transparent about yourself. The more you reveal your emotional truths, the more your reader can relate. It is in the secrets we keep, what we don’t want others to know about us that draws people in.

As far as making it up-you have to trust your intuition. If you ever feel you are writing something to get someone back or from a place of revenge, you want to question what you’re writing and why. It is a fine line we walk when telling a memoir because other people’s lives are woven with ours and you have to be careful to write with integrity.

Enjoy the Class Replay!

Questions Asked During Class

1. How do you know when a piece of writing is good enough to call it finished?
2. Is it fair to guess at other character’s emotional truth? How can you really know what they were feeling if, lets say they are dead and you can’t ask them?
3. Do we really have to write backstory for every character?

Answer: Remember all the bits of insight I give you about writing are just guidelines. You as the writer gets to choose when you use them. There might be a scene where you need to describe the entire room, for example, your apartment is broken into and everything is trashed. You decide whether you emphasize one detail and show the reader the emotional impact of that one detail, or if it is best to give an overview of the setting.

Maybe you pick the one thing in that room that was most important to you and focus on your emotional connection to that one thing and how it feels to have it destroyed. Based on your experience, you need to determine which approach would work best. Do we need to see the entire room, or do you lead us into connecting with that one thing so we feel what it was like to lose it?

The reason I say to focus on one detail is because if you focus on a general description, it doesn’t allow us to SEE anything. We know where we are but we have no connection to it. For example, you can give a description of going to get the mail. You let us know that we are walking down a country road toward a group of mailboxes. We know where you are but we have no feeling about how the setting or space feels or relates to you.  Lets say you decide to take one detail-the mailboxes. It might go like this.

I stood rooted at my communal post drop, where rickety wood boxes hovelled together attached to a central metal pipe. A few were covered with hand painted mosaic tile, one had wood cut in the shape of a horse head, and another was dappled with colorful rocks. Mine was plain in comparison; the whole box was painted blue. It was these boxes that made me stay here. Every time I thought of moving, I’d go and look at the boxes and remember my crazy, supportive, last minute, communal neighbors who would make the trek up to my door to check on me if my mail was left for a day.

One good detail can set you in the scene in a way that a general description does not.

I can give you guidelines, to push you to look at things from a different way, but in the end you are the writer and the choice is always yours. So take what I say and use what works for you.

Question:

Answer: We’re talking about how you can move through a period of time so the most important parts of the story get stretched. We want to pull our readers into our story and to do so in a way that allows them to be where we want them to be for the longest period of time. Let’s say there’s an emotional revelation, I’m pregnant. What if we don’t stretch it out and we tell it in real time; girl walks into room, parents are eating dinner, she says I’m pregnant, dad screams, mom pulls her hair out and then they start discussing it.

If we’ve been leading up to how afraid this girl is, then we don’t want this fact that will change her life forever, to be revealed in a moment. We want to know that she’s sitting at the table looking around, poking her food, wishing she could be talking to her friends, and then maybe within the dialogue the parents are having at the dinner table, she injects a hint-they keep eating and don’t respond. We draw out and stretch that emotional revelation that interchange, that argument, the realization of an important point so the reader can get into what is happening. We want to stretch it even if she said it in two seconds.

Answer: To launch a scene that will pull your readers in you need some sort of action. It doesn’t have to be a chase scene or BIG action. It can be as simple as a vase falling over and breaking into pieces. That vase might be a gift from a husband who has just died, the last gift given of maybe an intruder has walked into the room and knocked it over. We are immediately drawn into why the vase broke, who broke it and what is going to happen next. We’re drawn into the scene to find out what happens next.

You can launch a scene in dialogue as well. But you want to use dialogue that involves. For example, “What are you doing going through my drawers?”
We are immediately in the scene and involved in the conflict that the action of going through someone’s drawers without permission would create.

It’s about telling our stories. Like all great storytellers we have to pull our readers with us by launching our scenes in a way that gets them involved right away.

Question: How do you create tension and excitement in the dialogue when the scene you are writing isn’t exactly high tension?

Answer: What is dialogue? Dialogue is an interaction between human beings and you can always find or create tension between two people. It doesn’t matter if they are the best of friends. Lets say you feel like your dialogue is a little boring, you are revealing things and trying to move the plot along, but there is no real tension created. You want to look at the two characters who are having the dialogue.

We’ll use an example of two sisters. What was it that bugged one sister about the other? Maybe it was that one sister borrowed clothes and never returned them. Guess what, you can throw that into the scene and immediately create tension. They are having a dialogue and the sister looks down and sees her best dress crumpled up in the corner. Tension is mounting and the dialogue they were going to have is added to by tension you know existed in the relationship.

In memoir you know your characters very well, so it’s easy to add tension. You want to be true to what actually happened, but lets say that during that exact conversation there really wasn’t a crumpled dress on the floor, is it OK to put it there? Yes because it did happen, maybe not in that moment, but it did happen so it is a true and creates a believable depiction of the relationship.

Answer: When you feel stuck ask yourself what do I want to write about today? What scene can I actually see and have some emotional connection with? You do not have to write your story in order. You need to use your intuition as writers, if you feel stuck, skip it and move on to something you do want to write. You may find that you need to put a project aside for a few days or weeks and write small things like a dialogue you overheard, a phone conversation with a sister, a poem or review of a movie you just watched–anything that gets your creative juices flowing.

Often being stuck has something to do with judgement and too much thinking about what you’re writing. The goal is to take what is in your head and get it onto paper, don’t judge it just write. You can change it later, nobody has to read it, just think of it as a mind excercise.

It also helps to start collecting a binder or at least a list of significant moments in your life. That way when you are stuck you can go to that binder or list and pick something and do a free write on it and see what you come up with. It makes your writing feel more like play than work when you give yourself the freedom to go with what you really feel like writing. Make sure to put all these writings into the binder of significant  moments so you can refer to them or use them in a later piece of writing you might do.

Questions Asked During Class

1.You mentioned a dialogue rule; that you shouldn’t say in dialogue something the character’s already know. Can you clarify that?
2. How can you use dialogue to reveal character?
3. What do you do when you get stuck and aren’t sure how to go forward with your memoir?
4. How do you create tension and excitement in the dialogue when the scene you are writing isn’t exactly high tension?
5. Can you please talk about how to launch a scene.
6. Please go over stretching time to add more interest to a story.
7. Can you talk a little about bridges and how they are different than condensing?
8. Why is it important to emphasize just one detail in a scene?