[stylist] stylist Digest, Vol 80, Issue 26

[Kerry Thompson]

Hi friends,

Jim, do you mean strong spirits? Or spirituous liquor? You're right 
though that there is another phrase. I'll try to remember it.

Atty, IMO your friend is very foolish. Avid reading is the first 
requisite for being a writer. Every successful writer I've ever heard 
talk about the subject says this.

The question of his facts and details being incorrect is another matter. 
In that case, he simply is not researching adequately if at all, but 
going with his imagination or vague impressions from, well, obviously 
not from books, from TV and movies I suppose. Forgive me for speaking 
bluntly, but such behavior is both arrogant and amateurish. Nobody is 
going to take his work seriously if he can't even be bothered to get his 
facts straight. Even seasoned writers have to do research, and even then 
either they or their editors occasionally let some error slip through, 
an error that is glaringly obvious to some reader somewhere. I remember 
reading, though not who said it, that fudging never works because 
there's always a reader who'll catch you out.

And it's not just out and out errors, sometimes inconsistencies slip 
through. For instance, after having seen the new Harry Potter movie, 
I've been rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in which are 
two really major inconsistencies. I can't imagine how either Rowling or 
her editor let them through, but they did. No matter how hard you try, 
it's all but impossible to hand in a totally clean manuscript. There's 
always that stray, misplaced comma or that mention in passing on page 
713 of Maurine's blue eyes when on page 57 Tex was intrigued by her 
green eyes. We're only human and can't help such slips. But that makes 
it all the more imperative to check and double check and re-re-double 
check facts. Your friend does himself no favors by refusing to do so.

Flat characters? I'm not sure how much of this problem is attributable 
to your friends lack of reading and how much to his failure to let his 
imagination go. He may be scared, without quite knowing it himself, to 
give his imagination and his characters free reign. It can be scary. If 
you regard them as people, rather than game pieces or whatever, then you 
run the risk of their taking the story into their ownhands and doing 
things you didn't plan. For myself, this very unpredictability is part 
of the fun and exhilaration of writing. Sometimes you end up going in a 
totally different direction than you expected, finding totally new 
scenes and settings and even characters unfolding before you just 
because you gave one character his head rather than forcing him into the 
path you predetermined for him. Lots of professional writers say they 
keep writing to find out what happens next. While it's often helpful to 
have an outline of your storyline, either formally written down and 
worked out or informally in your mind, still the most exciting and 
rewarding things often happen ifyou're willing to explore hitherto 
unthought of possibilities as they arise.

Unfortunately, this willingness to go with the flow only comes with 
confidence. And confidence, by its nature, is something that beginning 
writers lack.

As an aside, a "beginning writer" needn't be someone who has only been 
writing for a short time. It's a frame of mind, very much your friend's 
frame ofmind. I can't remember how I got past it, if I have altogether. 
I'm afraid that's something everyone has to do for her/himself.

Many writers, myself included, find that there is something of 
themselves in most ifnot all of their characters. I think that's 
natural. If you're writing about a bad guy, you call on the darkness, 
anger and unhappiness within yourself to lendhim verisimilitude. 
Similarly, you may take what you consider your own best features and 
exaggerate, idealize them as the basis ofyour heroine. In a 
novel-in-progress I recently gave Robert to read, he remarked that he 
thought the first person narrator was me. That gave me a smile. She is 
my alter ego in some ways, but her life has been very different from 
mine. The reason, I think, Felicity seems so real to Robert is that I am 
very fond of her and do indeed pour a great deal of my own intellectual 
and emotional life into her even though in so many ways she is very 
different from me.

In most of my stories, I put some degree of myself and/or my experience 
of other people into the characters. They become very real and alive to 
me, occasionally more real and alive than so called real life. While I'm 
writing I become the character I'm writing. This is easiest with a first 
person narrator, but it can happen with third person narration as well. 
It ismost easy and natural with a female character, but it happens with 
male characters as well. My favorite characters in my other 
novel-in-progress are the young men, one of whom is a first person 
narrator and the other is written third person. My first experience, 
many years ago, of writing a first person narration of a young man 
alarmed me rather. What did I know about being a good looking and 
talented young journalist? How could I presume to write through him? 
But, eventually I realized that the truth of who he was is what 
mattered, not that he was of a different gender, living in a different 
state, pursuing a different calling than myself. I haven't looked at 
that story in a long time. No doubt there's a good deal more of me in 
Ross than I realized while writing. But thinking about him, he is as 
vivid and real to me as anybody I've met in the real world.

That may be the key. The characters have to be people, people who are 
real to the writer. If they're all merely aspects of the writer himself 
they won't be real to anyone, not even him. There again, though, this is 
something each writer needs to discover for her/himself. I don't know 
how to teach it, and you can't force it. The person has to come to it on 
his own.

Donna, LOL. I wrote the above before reading other people's responses. 
Interesting that both you and I use the terms "arrogant" and "foolish."

Your point about the joy of reading is a good one. I can't imagine life 
without reading!

Anita, well said.

It's difficult to come to that open mindedness and willingness to 
consider criticism. It took me quite some time to get there. And it is 
important to recognize what criticism you don't need.

For instance, I once showed a newly finished story with which I was very 
pleased to someone who read it and told me that it wasn't worth the 
finger power needed to type it. I was devastated. But a very dear 
friend, when I told him, asked in gentle exasperation why I persisted in 
showing that particular person my fiction. She seems to likemy poetry, 
but her response to my fiction has never been favorable or, in most 
cases, even understanding. The observation kind of knocked me for a 
loop, but eventually I realized that my friend was right. I'm fond of 
this person, but that's no reason to continue to subject myself to her 
totally non-constructive, non-supportive remarks. So, I don't. Life's 
too short, and there are plenty of other people whose opinion I value 
who are willing to read and talk to me about my fiction.

Jim, it seems to me that arrogance and fear often reinforce and feed off 
each other in many aspects of life, not just writing. You may well be 
right. Fear and insecurity do lead to a closing in on oneself. As I've 
said, though, I don't know how Atty can help her friend. If he won't 
listen, he won't listen. He has to live and grow in his own time. Enough 
rejection slips may break down his resistance, start him thinking that 
maybe he's not an island. On the other hand, rejections may justharden 
his resolve. I don't know.

Lori, yes, writing in someone else's style can be a good exercise. It 
can also be fun and productive. Think of fan fiction.

Solidarity and Peace,

Kerry