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Joseph E Bird

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Writing Tip – Slow Down

At a recent gathering of the Shelton College Review, three colleagues happened to be writing the pivotal scenes in their novels at the same time.  When submitted to the Review for critique, each scene fell short of the author’s desired emotional affect.

In each case, the advice was the same:  Take your time.  Let the scene develop.  Give the reader the nuances of what’s happening, both in the external environment, but more importantly, in what the characters are thinking and feeling.  The subsequent revisions proved the advice correct.

As the author, you’ve been building up to this moment for the entire book.  You feel it before you even write the scene. The temptation is to get right to the pivotal moment.  But the reader is probably not quite there yet and probably needs a little more time to catch up.  Slow down and embellish.  Let the reader steep in the moment and soak in the importance of what’s happening.  If you do, you’ll have a stronger emotional connection.

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Lucas

If she were being truthful – and she wasn’t – she would have acknowledged that she was calling just to hear his crazy Cajun-Jersey accent, his easy and relaxed way of talking, to imagine his comfortable, confident masculinity, his close-cut hair, his stubbled beard, his crooked smile, his worn t-shirt and his muscled arms weathered from years on the rig, his jeans hanging loosely on his hips, his sneakers, white at one time, but now a dirty gray from days on the pier and the beach and the sidewalks of Galveston. If she were being truthful, she would have told him that she just needed an excuse, any excuse, to call, because her days were few and her opportunities to smile were fewer, and it had been so long since she even had a reason to smile and that simply hearing his voice had accomplished that and more, and she knew right then that she wanted to see him, to be in his company, and that she would, even if she had to steal a car and drive to Galveston.

copyright 2018, joseph e bird, from the novel Heather Girl.

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Writing Tip – Coincidence?

Is there such a thing as coincidence?

Of course.  Or not.  It all depends on your philosophical or religious leanings.

The truth is, they happen all the time.  Explain them as you wish.

Example:

Heather is on her way to Houston to see her father.  She happens to stop at Galveston on her way.  She happens to take a walk on a fishing pier.  She happens to meet the very guy who was working at the pier when her mother was killed there ten years earlier.

Wow.  That’s a big coincidence.  Almost unbelievable.

But what if you knew early in the story that Heather knew that her mother was killed on a fishing pier in Galveston.  And that there are only two fishing piers in all of Galveston.  And that she stopped in Galveston for the very purpose of finding that pier. It goes from coincidence to purposeful event.  What about the guy at the pier?  Well, Heather knew his name because he provided eye-witness testimony ten years earlier.  He didn’t just work at the pier, he owned the tackle shop that operated on the pier.  An internet search told her he was still alive living in Galveston.  The odds of him working at the pier on the day she shows up?  Yeah, that takes a little fortuitous timing.  But stranger things happen all the time.

The key is foreshadowing and structuring the story in a way that dumb luck is taken out of the equation.  Be careful with coincidence.  Your credibility is on the line.

 

 

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Writing Tip: Talk it Out

writing

I’m fortunate to belong to the Shelton College Review, a small group of writers who gather once a week to offer critique and encouragement – both are enormously important for writers – on our works in progress.

In reviewing one of my recent submittals, Larry was saying that he had been so caught up in the narrative, that he forgot that he was critiquing and was simply enjoying the story.  Until, that is, I threw in heaping helping of backstory.  His engagement came to a screeching halt.

I know better than to do that.  It’s one thing to sprinkle in a paragraph or two of backstory, but I took the reader out of a dramatic moment – in the back of an ambulance! – to tell about Heather’s life in high school.  Duh.

Thanks, Larry, for pointing that out. And as painful as that was to hear (that I could be so dumb), it was even harder to fix.  I’ve spent several hours setting things right, hours that I could have been using to write something new.

How did I fix it?

First, I spread it around a little.  Backstory in small doses (a couple of sentences) is acceptable.

Then I let the dramatic scene in the ambulance play out.  After things had calmed down, I worked some of the backstory into dialogue.  Things are still happening.  There’s still tension. There’s still character development as Heather and Lucas talk.  And the reader learns a little bit more about Heather and why she is the way she is.

And then there’s the little problem about coincidences.  More on that later.

 

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into the night

When the last lingering light of day had finally disappeared, she waited another twenty minutes. Then she walked through the automatic doors of the ER, completely unnoticed, into the night.

She headed east, toward the homeless shelters. She had driven through that neighborhood many times during the day, where ragged men with shopping carts gather under the interstate bridge, where young kids, barely in their teens, mingle with older addicts on the steps of the treatment center, where the women who would later stroll the streets sat on the curb smoking cigarettes outside their run-down apartment buildings. In the light of day, they were there, but the street belonged to those whose lives were comfortably insulated from the stench of unwashed clothes and grimy hands with broken fingernails and shattered liquor bottles and needles in the gutter and the ever-present hint of mind-altering chemicals breezing through the air. It belonged to those who shopped at the open-air market and dined at the sidewalk cafes and visited the plush offices of medical specialists that appeared like satellites around the hospital, not far from the free clinic or the street doctors who offered their own cures for those who had no other choice. In the daytime, they were all there together, some living, others waiting.

She walked the first block away from the hospital as she always walked, quickly and with purpose. She crossed the street and onto the sidewalk that fronted a medical office building. She began to slow, not completely sure of her destination. At the other end of the block, behind the office building, the parking lot was almost completely vacant. In the next block, where houses once stood, was another parking lot, this one unpaved and ungated, sometimes attended by a man in small hut, but now the hut was empty. Across the way near the opposite corner two men stood smoking cigarettes.

She kept walking, her hands stuffed in her jacket pockets.

Another block.

A man pulling a hand cart, slight of build with long, stringy hair passed by her without even looking up.

In the next block, a woman stood near the corner, another in the middle of the block on the other side of the street. Heather crossed the street at the corner, avoiding the first woman. The second woman at the middle of the block stepped back, giving her room to pass. They made brief eye contact, each sizing the other up. After she had passed, Heather slowed and finally stopped. She turned back to the woman. She stared back at Heather.

“Yeah?”

Heather took a step toward her. The woman didn’t move. Heather took another step and saw that the woman was too young to be on the street.  A runaway, no doubt. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week. Her eyes were wide, accentuated with heavy eyeliner and too much blue eye shadow. She shifted from one foot to another and kept her arms crossed, a habit Heather surmised was developed to hide the needle tracks.

“What do you want?”

“I’m…uh…looking…”

“Get it out lady. What are you looking for?”

“Hydrocodone.”

“You a cop?”

“No. I’ve got a serious health condition. It affects my nerves. I’m just looking for some relief.”

“Right. Can’t help you lady.”

Heather could see that she didn’t trust her. Not that getting busted by an undercover cop would ruin her life. More like an inconvenience.

Heather glanced around and then pulled a bill from her jacket pocket. She made sure the woman saw that it was a hundred, then folded it and tucked into the woman’s hand which was still gripping her arm. The woman didn’t hesitate. She took the bill and stuck it in the back pocket of her jeans.

“You too stupid to be a cop. Hang on.”

She pulled a phone from her front pocket and made a call.

“Hey, Bobcat. I got a woman here looking for tabs. Can you set her up? She’s legit. She’s too scared to be a cop.”

She turned to Heather.

“How much you need?”

That’s something Heather hadn’t considered. She had no idea.

“Twenty?”

The woman spoke to Bobcat, then back to Heather.

“Two hundred bills. You got that?”

Heather nodded.

The woman stuck the phone back in her pocket.

“Two blocks down, take a right. Bobcat’ll be on the front porch.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. Curse me.”

copyright 2018, joseph e bird
from the novel, Heather Girl

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