Writing from Minor Character POVs: Getting Your Fiction Muscles Working

I miss writing fiction.

I'm thankful beyond words that I am writing as much as I am right now. I enjoy writing reviews and even, in a strange way, boring web content. Writing is writing. I love crafting sentences. I'd rather do it than anything else I do, even the workhorse parts of writing.

But oh, I miss writing fiction. It's not just a matter of finding the time to do it, though that is a perpetual challenge. It's a matter of being able to dive in and do it in the seven minutes here, three minutes there that I can squeeze in. It's feeling frustrated when I only have a little bit of time and discover that a lack of writing fiction over the past couple of weeks has made my fiction muscles rusty. We all know that sometimes it can take a couple of pages to warm up and even get to a place where you're writing anything worth keeping, and sometimes the warm up time is all I can manage.

The other morning I woke up from a dream about the characters in my novel -- the novel I haven't had time to work on for several weeks. Dreaming about characters is a lovely gift to any writer. You wake up hearing echoes of their voices, and if you're really blessed, you've got the contours of a scene all ready and waiting to make the leap to paper.

Dream scenes fade quickly though, and in this particular case, I had "one of those days" where I simply could not grab any space or time to write. The scene slithered away from me. Argh.

When it's been a while since I've been in story mode, I sometimes find that playing around in someone else's story world is just what I need to get my fiction muscles working again. It takes less creative and mental energy than diving into something completely original, but it can definitely provide terrific writing practice.

Yes, this is what most people call fan-fiction, and it can be fun to write it just for the fun of writing it (nothing wrong with that)! But I've been discovering lately that in addition to a mental health break, writing this kind of fiction can be a great exercise in story crafting.

It's especially helpful if you approach a story from the perspective of a minor character. Give this a try the next time you only have a few minutes to write and need to get yourself in gear quickly. Pick a favorite movie or a book, one you know really well, and dive into an already established scene. But dive into it from the perspective of a minor character --- someone who doesn't have a big role to play, someone in the crowd observing the action, someone completely on the sidelines. Maybe it's a character from another part of the story who isn't there in the original action, but whom you put there, eavesdropping behind a door. Maybe it's a character in the original scene who says one thing but looks like they're dying to say something else, and you, the writer, can climb inside their head and think through their unvoiced thoughts and motivations. This kind of writing becomes an exercise in thinking through character as well as plot and tone.

Writing a scene you already know but from an entirely different perspective is a great exercise -- both in thinking through what you want to include, and what slant you want to give it, and thinking through why the original author of a scene wrote it they way she or he did. Once you get going, you may find yourself inventing new scenes for the story -- scenes only hinted at but never shown, scenes that you wish had been there, scenes that must have been there in the skeleton background but were never brought forward.

Why Do We Learn?

This list is from a brainstorming session at our house today. I thought it was worth sharing!

Why do we learn?

We learn in order to….

Try new skills

Appreciate the past

Look at the future

Gain wisdom

So we can teach others

Practice paying attention

Gain patience

Have our questions answered

Ask new questions

Have new questions answered

Ask more questions!

Try new skills

Help us later in life with jobs

Practice listening

Try hard things

Smile

So we won’t be bored

Exercise our brains

Exercise our hearts

Exercise our bodies

Enjoy new ideas

Enjoy beauty and order

Learn from failing

Learn from succeeding

Practice following directions

So we don’t keep making the same mistakes

Have something to do

Appreciate how people different from us do things

"Decorating Tips for Crazily Creative Familes..."

Another fun day in a highly creative household. My husband continues to build a dragon in our dining room (okay, he's actually only working on the tail section at home at this point).

Meanwhile....

One of the ways I bring in money as a writer is by ghost-writing web content for various clients through a freelance site. This means I write all sorts of odd and interesting little articles and blurbs (good thing I'm a research geek). They may be on all sorts of topics: travel, food, parenting, home repair, books (once in a while, if I'm lucky), etc.

Today I was working on an article about home decor. More specifically on tips for making a more peaceful environment in your home.

This just cracks me up. I'm sitting in my crowded little office corner behind my eighty-three year old couch that is positively begging for a slip cover I can't afford to give it. Yes, listening to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (I do get peaceful touches in where I can!) but my living space is basically a leaning tower of boxes, books, papers, and yes...dragon innards.

Wouldn't it be fun if someone wanted to pay me to write an article on "Decorating Tips for Crazily Creative Families"? File that under "writer dreams..."!

Praising Him For Pine Needles

We've been studying plant cells this week. Our own microscope revealed wonders to us at the kitchen table. The membrane of an onion really is a marvel of beauty when you look at its inner structure.

Then we turned to some micrographs online. And this one blew me away.

It's the cross section of a pine needle.

Let me say that again, just so you can marvel over it with me one more time: it's the cross section of a pine needle.

Is it any wonder that the world is so beautiful? This is the secret, inner life of a pine needle, the kind of needle lying by thousands on the forest floor, here today and gone tomorrow. This is the beauty of the inner structure that no one sees, unless they really go looking, with intention and attention. 

And who puts that desire in us to look? And who puts the desire in us to create beautiful designs? And where does our drive and ability to create such intricate, lovely designs (think Celtic knotwork, Tiffany stained glass, Van Gogh poplars) come from? From the one who makes pine needles look like this. Praise Him!

Bilbo's Song (An Original Poem)

I have a dragon in my living room. Okay, just the skeleton of one. My husband continues to build Smaug for the middle-school production of The Hobbit he's directing this spring. And I continue to be on a total Tolkien tear, reading more literary criticism than I have in quite a while.

More on some of the things I'm reading soon. For now, a poem I penned a couple of days ago. It sure is lovely to be hanging out with Bilbo again.

Bilbo’s Song

As anyone who knows me likely knows,

at home my life is filled with lovely prose.

Green hills, good food, a round and solid door,

my pipe and blooming garden, heathered moor.

All’s quiet here until the kettle sings.

You’ll find me on the doorstep blowing rings.

But you can read me like an open book.

Away? My life’s a poem, a rushing brook.

The cozy, prosy things so sure and sweet

are like a dream. They keep me on my feet

when journey’s long and all becomes a quest.

And sometimes I’m not sure which I love best.

The homey prose, it fills my traveler’s pack,

but it’s poetry that sings me there and back.

I couldn’t live without the deep, familiar places.

But oh! Indeed I love the wilder spaces.

~EMP 4/15/13

Pondering Good and Evil (And So Very Thankful for All That's Good)

In the wake of the tragedy in Boston yesterday, a number of people have been posting comments and quotes on Facebook. That’s not a bad thing. I’ve begun to realize that FB is truly becoming a place where people gather to grieve, to get angry, to try to make sense of complex, crazy things happening in our world. While the quotes and captions nearly always over-simplify any complex event, they can act as springboards to help us think and pray through what’s going on around us.

Social media also often gives us comfort  – even on days when people are grieving and angry over something that has just happened, there are blessed reminders that life goes on and blessings still abound. People still post beautiful pictures (of their grandkids, their cats, the place they wish they could travel). People still post recipes of good food that they’re thinking of making for their family, or creative ideas about teaching their children. And it can give us a sense of confluence or serendipity as people post reminders of this day in history – it might be the birthday of someone inspiring, or the anniversary of an important event.

Today, for instance, happens to be the 50^th anniversary of the day that Martin Luther King began writing his letter from the Birmingham Jail. The confluence of that memorable moment in history and the tragedy of yesterday have coalesced in such a way that it seems to make sense to turn to MLK for wisdom, comfort, and strength. The letter, which points to the importance of non-violence resistance in the face of evil, seems as pertinent now as it did then, because evil never entirely goes away in this world – it just takes on different forms and tries different tactics. And as the Christian vision reminds us, it’s still on its way to ultimate defeat.

One of the quotes I’ve seen today is this: “When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.” This quote is being attributed to MLK, and out of curiosity, I went to look it up. I haven’t been able to find a source for it yet (if anyone knows, let me know please) but at any rate, whether he said it or not, it’s understandable why it would surface today. There’s a lot of good to chew on in that quote, but I think we need to be careful with it too.

A quote like this is clearly snipped from a larger piece of rhetoric. It sounds like a speech or sermon. (Again, frustrated I can’t find its context.) As such, it reads in a rhythmic way, paralleling good and evil and contrasting what they each do. Evil plots, burns, bombs, shouts hatred. Good plans, builds, binds, commits to love. Yes. I find myself feeling a little cautious though, about using this kind of speech within every day conversation. I think what the quote is saying, in a sense, is that this is what evil looks like when it is manifested in a person’s actions. If someone is committed to evil, he or she will do these things. And this is what good looks like, when manifested in a person’s actions. If a person is committed to good, he or she will do these things.

The truth of the gospel is that we’re all sinners, lost and broken, in need of healing. At our best we are sinners saved by grace. While it’s true that certain actions most definitely deserve the adjective “evil” – an accurate description to cover what someone did yesterday in Boston – I do think we have to be careful when throw around evil as an adjective to describe people. It can too quickly turn into a picture of “them” and “us.”

It’s not that the adjective is not sometimes accurate or deserved. We’ve all done it, called someone “an evil person” if we see that their habitual commitment to darkness and cruelty earns them such an appellation. We’ve also done the reverse. “He’s a good man,” we will say about someone who has shown a long commitment to compassion and care and decency. But just as our saying “he’s a good man,” doesn’t negate the fact that the person we say that about is still a sinner, prone to human frailties and mistakes, our saying that someone is evil, even if they have truly committed awful acts, cannot negate the fact that they may actually still have it within them to do something good. Or, more importantly, we cannot let ourselves forget that such a person is still within the reach of mercy and redemption – not unless we are willing to say that evil is stronger than grace and forgiveness. Which it is most emphatically not.

If I’m meandering here, forgive me, but this is something I think we need to work through on real heart levels as Christians. Naming evil for what it is – yes, that’s important. Realizing that people can truly become corrupted by darkness and sin – yes, that’s important too, not least because it helps us guard our own hearts. What we commit our hearts, minds, and lives to can shape who we become, in the direction of good or evil.

But we are not intrinsically “evil people” or “good people.” We are all people created in the image of a very good God, but that image has been corrupted in us. How far it has been corrupted (or redeemed) will show forth in our acts, our words, our lives. What – and mostly importantly who -- we choose to commit our lives to matters.

One thing I have been heartened by in the response of many people to yesterday’s tragedy is how quickly they have gone on to say it’s time to overcome such evil with good. I think that must be the impetus behind sharing the quote above and others like it. That’s a deeply Christian response, and yet I am seeing it – in various forms – from people who don’t self-identify as Christians, as well as from those who do. There seems to be some sort of latent understanding, even in our post-Christian culture, that to give into the power of hatred and evil by trying to combat it with its own methods is not only misguided and short-sighted but ultimately just plain wrong. It won’t work, and even if it seemed to (in the short run) it runs the risk of moving us and shaping us in the very direction of the evil we abhor.

What I find myself longing to say to well-meaning friends and acquaintances longing for peace is that it’s not just enough to commit ourselves to well-meaning hopes, or even to kind and loving actions, as important as both of those things are. It’s not enough because ultimately, in our human sinfulness, we will fail in those commitments. I know this, because I fail in them dozens of times a day in small ways, and sometimes in big ways. It’s why I keep needing to confess my sins against God and my neighbors. We need more than just good will and pretty pictures and inspiring captions (as seriously helpful as all of those can be) to keep us committed to light and love and impossible seeming forgiveness in the face of heinous evil. We need the empowerment of someone outside us (and within us) who *cannot* and *does not* fail in little ways or big ways when it comes to loving and forgiving. We need the Holy Spirit.

Without him, without the triune God who is love at work within us to love, we risk become noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. We may be clanging “love” and ringing “peace,” and those are good words and important things to be making noise over. But without him, we may find ourselves falling into understandable anger and despair at the many awful things we see in the world, and yes even in people, around us. We need God to turn to, not only for the empowerment and strength he gives us to stay committed to light in a world that can feel awfully dark sometimes, but because we need loving ears that will listen and strong arms that will hold us when we really do need to lament and grieve and shout out against the darkness. (See the Psalms.)

More on this as I continue to ponder. And please, feel free to ponder with me.

Homeschool Challenge #314

"Moooommm! I can't study while you're singing!"

(At least it's a happy challenge!)