Considering Writing

Suppose someone gave you a pen.

Suppose someone gave you a pen, and like in a fairy tale, you had to keep it moving until it ran dry.

I think it was Faulkner who said a writer finds out what his themes are when the book is reviewed. I’m afraid I must fall into the same camp.

Honestly, I used to feel like I started with character because I heard a voice, even though it sounded remarkably like my own. And there’s that question always being leveled at us, what comes first, character or plot, as if these were the only possibilities. It felt like character came to me before plot. Except, not entirely before plot, and that got me thinking.

The first thing a beginning writer does is look at other people’s books, wondering if they can do the same thing. This approach leads to an assortment of strategies: looking at who is telling the story, where does the writer begin, how many pages do they spend telling this part and that part?

Many writers set their stories in deeply familiar locales, even unchanging locales. Anne Tyler in Baltimore, Jack London in the frozen north (although he lived there for only a couple of years, making an argument for an intense experience being as valuable to a writer as a lengthy one), Bailey White’s characters live in a small town, Larry McMurtry’s are lost at sea in a changing environment.

I’m opening this essay with a digression. That is, I’ve finished the essay and it brought back a memory I replay for myself more often than anyone might guess, more often than I recall birthday parties or holiday dinners.

Conflict comes in many forms; societal, political, environmental and more. I read somewhere there are five platforms, story-wise, but for me, conflict is summed up in two words: other people.

About growing only on the north sides of trees, that is. While I stood there, I had a thought on the language of drama.
I write for children. Mostly.

If you’re a certain age, like under sixty, you may not know that movies once came with an intermission. A chance for youngsters to run out to the lobby and line up for popcorn and Milk Duds again. Old gals could put on a little lipstick, and old guys could ease their prostates.

We all have belief systems that are the set of rules we live by. We like to assume that the people we know, or at least the people we love, live by the same values. This is rarely the case.

Where I asked, when was the last difficult encounter you can remember having with the family member you wrote about, what was your answer to what was it about? Categorize that answer in some generic way: who owns what and didn’t say they’d loan it; who is taking advantage of another’s good nature; who said they would and then didn’t, or vice versa

One of the most helpful concepts I found in the agreement of several screenwriting books (that had nothing to say about archetypes) was this: three part structure. This is essentially three acts, and if you’re familiar, you know that the first act is roughly one quarter of the written text or story.