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ALISON GAYLIN, “The Plot Thickens”

October 9, 2014 By Word Cafe

ALISON GAYLIN‘s debut book Hide Your Eyes was nominated for an Edgar Award in the Best First Novel category. Her critically acclaimed suspense novels have been published in such countries as the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway and Japan. She has been nominated for the ITW Thriller, Anthony and RT Awards and won the Shamus Award for And She Was, the first book in the Brenna Spector series. Her books have been on bestseller lists in the US and Germany. She is currently at work on her ninth book, a standalone suspense novel entitled What Remains of Me, which will be released in 2015 from HarperCollins. She lives in Woodstock with her family.

“The Plot Thickens” 10/9/14 – The Exercises

Alison Gaylin treated us to a galvanizing reading of the prologue to her latest Brenna Spector mystery, Stay With Me.

Our theme was “The Plot Thickens”–how to build conflict and suspense–and Alison’s reading exemplified the chart she displayed, with PLOT “at the top of the food chain,” right above CHARACTER and ACTION (connected to each other by DIALOGUE, with DESCRIPTION and PACING feeding both). Some plot tips from Alison:

— Start in mid-scene, with something important about to happen
— The more urgent a character’s need, the more compelling the story becomes
— If two characters’ needs are at cross-purposes, conflict builds naturally
— If one character needs information from another, give then an opinion about each other to animate the scene. The waitress is irritated by the cop who’s questioning her, the cop is attracted to her, etc.

Even though plot is king, you do not need to have the whole story in view when you start your first draft. Alison cited E.L.Doctorow’s analogy of driving at night, only able to see as far as the headlights reach. She likes to have a sense of where she’s headed (“I’m heading for LA, but I may take a northern rather than a southern route, or wind up in San Francisco instead of LA. But I know I’m heading west.”) If you get lost along the way, go back and see what you have so far. Often you’ve instinctively included a character or incident you can make use of later.

Rewriting involves ruthless cutting. If it doesn’t move the plot forward, it goes into the discard file. (Note it’s not deleted, but saved in a separate file, because it might be useful later, or in something else.)

When Alison was starting out, she didn’t feel she was as good as plot as characters and dialogue, so read 100 crime novels of all kinds–Dostoevsky to James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard, and Laura Lippmann–to study how they worked.

Nina offered a redux of the three-act “story arc” in screenwriting:
Act One: Character gets up a tree (i.e. start on the day something changes)
Act Two: People throw rocks at him (i.e. obstacles he must face)
Act Three: He gets down on the other side (i.e. changed by the journey)

Alison says she writes for the pleasure of being scared. “If I scare myself, I’ll scare the reader.”

The best villains have unexpected good qualities, and the best heroes have flaws and weaknesses. This shadow side will create a three-dimensional character.

ALISON’S EXERCISE:
Think of the most heinous action you can imagine (but something you want to write about). Now think of the most noble action. Write a scene in which your character is doing one of these two actions, and the other is in that character’s past and comes into play in the current scene.

NINA’S EXERCISE:
Your character boards a train at the last minute and rushes into an empty seat, sitting on a discarded newspaper. Then realizes there’s something underneath it. What is it, and what does the character do?

AMITAVA KUMAR, “Location, Location”

October 2, 2014 By Word Cafe

AMITAVA KUMAR is a writer and journalist. He was born in Ara, India, and grew up in the nearby town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty and delicious mangoes. Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction (A Matter of Rats, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, Husband of a Fanatic, Bombay-London-New York, Passport Photos) and a novel (Nobody Does the Right Thing, also published as Home Products). A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb was adjudged the best nonfiction book of the year by the Page Turner Awards in 2011; in 2007, Home Products was short-listed for India’s premier literary award, the Crossword Award; Husband of a Fanatic was an “Editors’ Choice” book at the New York Times. In 2015, a collection of essays entitled Lunch With A Bigot will be published by Duke University Press. He lives in Poughkeepsie, where he is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“Location, Location” 10/2/14 – The Exercises

Our topic on October 2 was “Location, Location.” Vassar professor and multigenre writer Amitava Kumar delighted a rapt audience by reading several passages from his book A Matter of Rats, sprinkling in stories about how he constructed this short biography of his hometown, Patna, India.

Amitava passed out a page with 11 brief writings by Arundhati Roy, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, David Wojnarowicz, Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, J.M. Coetzee, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, and Ismat Chughtai. Volunteers read several of these aloud, and we had a lively discussion about the specific choices and details that bring them to life.

Nina quoted an essay by Nancy Willard, recounting a game she’d played with her sister in which one girl would close her eyes as the other described a place, adding details until the listener cried out, “I’m there!”

We talked about using a concrete detail to anchor a fictional description of a place you’ve never been, or asking someone who does live there to vet the details; James Joyce sent his sister to check on things while writing about Dublin from Paris. It’s often easier to write about a place you remember than one where you’re living now, because memory distills it to essentials. Amitava likened this to the difference between the depth of field of an iPhone camera, which renders everything in a photo in focus, and a professional SLR camera, which can be focused selectively so that one object is sharp and others are blurred or pushed into the shadows.

Amitava read a passage from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland including a phrase about “Poughkeepsie, a merry name that sounds like children crying out in a game.” He asked each of us to consider the sound and feel of our hometown’s name and write a sentence or two connecting that name to the place. (The ones people read were wonderful!)
Another exercise from Amitava: Describe what can you see outside the window closest to where you write.
Click to open Amitava Kumar’s handout.
From Nina: Write a detailed description of leaving home for a place you (or your character, if you’re writing fiction) have never gone before. Part two: write about arriving in that new place, using all five senses.

Amitava recommended a daily practice of writing a small, achievable amount, citing “as much as it takes to cover a Post-It” from Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. He sets his students a mantra: “Write every day and walk every day.” 150 words and ten minutes of mindful walking. It all adds up.

BEVERLY DONOFRIO, “The Telling Detail”

September 25, 2014 By Word Cafe

BEVERLY DONOFRIO‘s first memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys, has been translated into sixteen languages and transformed into a popular motion picture. Her second memoir, Looking for Mary (or, the Blessed Mother and Me), began as a documentary on NPR and was chosen as a Discover Book at Barnes & Noble. She is the author of two picture books illustrated by Barbara McClintock, and a book for middle-graders. Beverly is an award–winning radio documentarian and essayist and can be heard on All Things Considered. Her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Allure, Cosmopolitan, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, O, Marie Claire, and Spirituality & Health. She lived for four years as a lay Carmelite at Nada Hermitage in Colorado, where she began her new memoir, Astonished, published by Viking in 2013. Beverly lives in Woodstock, and teaches at the low residency MFA program at Wilkes University.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“The Telling Detail” 9/25/14 – The Exercises

Beverly Donofrio delighted the Word Café crowd by reading an exuberant new piece called “Anthem” which she’d just written in a TMI workshop.

Our subject was “The Telling Detail,” and we talked the way in which a carefully chosen detail can paint the whole picture.

Bev said that though many writers spill out a lot in the first draft and then cut, she tends to write short and then fill in more and more detail. But rewriting can also be a winnowing process. She described a short chapter in Astonished about a bunny, which started out with a lot of step by step detail. Something about it didn’t feel right, and she set it aside for awhile. (Her process includes a lot of stopping, walking away to do other things, and starting again–what she cheerfully called “ADD.”) When she reread it, she realized the story she wanted to tell began midway through her draft, and cut nearly half of the chapter.

Asked if there’s such a thing as too much detail, Bev asserted that if you’re really passionate about something and every detail excites you, the reader will share your excitement.

She also said that the most important thing about writing memoir is “being absolutely and completely who you are.” Writing “is not therapy, but it is therapeutic,” and telling the truth about difficult things is cathartic.

Here are the writing prompts we gave in class, all of which inspired wonderful work from participants:

Bev read a short passage from Margaux Fragoso’s memoir Tiger, Tiger written in third person sentences which all begin, “Picture a girl who…” Write a series of sentences beginning with “Picture a girl (or boy) who…,” revealing how you became something you still are today.
Write about a moment when everything changed, an event that divided your life into a “before” and “after.” (Bev)
Nina’s exercise borrowed a two-step process from Mark Wunderlich’s word-list poems. Describe a significant room from your past in as much detail as possible: list everything in it, sounds, smells, textures. Then go back over this list and circle three details that gave the room its characteristic feel and atmosphere.

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