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An Interview with Author Melody Groves

Posted on July 12, 2016 by

Author and ex-gunfighter Melody Groves weaves her passion for the Old West into her writing. Her articles have been published in numerous magazines including American Cowboy, Wild West, True West, and New Mexico Magazine. She’s also the author of three nonfiction books and four novels in the Colton Brothers Saga series. Her newest historical western novel, She Was Sheriff (Five Star Publishing, 2016), introduces a set of likeable characters her readers will love to cheer on. You can find Melody on her website at MelodyGroves.net and her Amazon author page.

What is your elevator pitch for She was Sheriff?
All she ever wanted was a gold band. Instead, all she got was a tin star.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
Not being from northern California, writing the terrain was tough. In 2014, I toured the area. I also did that when I researched Kansas for Kansas Bleeds (the fourth book in the Colton Brothers Saga).

Tell us about your main character and why readers will connect with her.
Maud is the lead character who is challenged to do (1) things she’s never done before and (2) things 1872 society frowned upon—especially for a woman. I hope readers connect because she’s breaking societal barriers as well as her own perceived limits.

What makes this novel unique in the historical western market?
At a recent Western Writers of American convention, my novel was held up as an example of the up and coming “strong female protagonist” Western! My publisher has a new line of novels called “Women Frontier Fiction” and I’m proud to be one of the first. Westerns are no longer typical “shoot ‘em ups”—although that’s my favorite kind.

Did you discover anything interesting while doing research for this book?
I do tons of research for all my novels and that era was fascinating in that the world was changing so quickly. We think of our 21st century as spinning—well, the West had the train, telegraph, East coast fashions, and thousands of immigrants from all over the world that spun their lives. People moved from place to place trying to make a living, trying to find the proverbial pot of gold. It was a relatively transient society full of various characters and in many instances, very little law.

Tell us more about She Was Sheriff: what sparked the initial story idea, how long it took to write, etc.
I have no idea where the story came from other than I have a t-shirt with a woman on a horse and the title is She Was Sheriff (there are no copyright laws on titles). My imagination kept spinning a story that, piece by piece, came together. The book itself took most of a year to write, then a couple of months of editing and rewriting. After a tad bit of final rewriting, selling it to my publisher wasn’t hard.

What is it about the Old West that keeps you writing in that world?
I love the Old West. It was a time of lawlessness, but also a time where people re-established themselves. They became someone they wanted to be. That still goes on today. The West is a magical, open, awe-inspiring place. I was born here and have always loved it.

How did your gunfighting re-enactment affect your writing?
For ten years I walked the streets of Old Town and other places, shooting good guys, bad guys, and sheriffs. I’m quite comfortable using my .22 Ruger, being shot, and shooting as a group. We performed in the O.K. Corral (a true Mecca for re-enactors), and I swear I was back in 1881. I use the experiences (and remembered bruises) in my writing. In re-enacting, the bullets may be fake, but the adrenalin is real.

You’ve written four novels in the Colton Brothers Saga. What are the challenges to writing a series? Do your protagonists still surprise you as you write their stories?
Series are hard to keep fresh. Thankfully, turns out there are four Colton brothers, so they’re always getting in trouble or making bad decisions—singularly or together. Hopefully, they stay fresh that way. My protagonists surprise me all the time. It’s truly fun to let them “do their thing” by not putting restrictions on their character. As their creator, I may have one thing in mind, then they turn around and do the opposite. Just like your own children!

What are your strengths as a writer, and what do you do to overcome your weaknesses?
I do pretty good dialogue, but then again, it’s my characters talking. I just write down what they say. I’m fairly good at reversals—when the reader thinks one thing will happen then it changes. As for weaknesses, women’s roles are hard for me to write, but I’m hoping I learned from She Was Sheriff. I’m not crazy about women in traditional Westerns, so I don’t give them big parts.

You have a knack for writing distinct characters, both heroes we love and villains we love to hate. What process do you use to develop your characters?
Developing characters is an ongoing writing exercise. When coming up with new characters, I find ones who have flaws, which make them interesting. I spend a lot of time thinking about people I know, then choose something from them. Or at times, I simply sit and watch strangers. I see terrific body types and then add characteristics—kind of like Frankenstein.

What are the hardest kinds of scenes for you to write, and what do you do to get over this hurdle?
The hardest scenes to write are fights or cattle stampedes. There are so many moving parts (literally), I find keeping them all in my mind’s eye difficult. So, I do two things—use pieces of “stuff” to place my characters on my desk. I’ll use a pencil eraser, a marble or whatever is handy and march them around like kids do with little tin soldiers. It looks silly, but logistically, it works well. The other thing I do is watch movies/TV shows with fights or stampedes. Those always inspire me.

Looking back to the beginning of your writing career, what do you know now that you wish you’d known then?
Isn’t that the million dollar question? If I could go back, I’d become a journalist instead of an educator. The most successful writers I know started in newspapers. I wouldn’t spend my time in the classroom, I’d be out hunting stories and writing my own. I recommend to younger writers to take as many journalism classes as possible and get a job in that field. I guarantee they’ll be great writers sooner than those of us who started later in life.

What’s the best encouragement or advice you’ve received on your writing journey?
Best advice—“trust your reader.” At first I didn’t understand, but it means your reader is smarter than you think. Give them the information once, and they’ve got it. No need to remind them time and time again. In my band, the keyboard player one day said “trust your bandmate,” meaning assume he’s doing what he’s supposed to do—to the best of his ability. Readers are the same way. Just trust them.

Best other advice—choose what’s the most interesting. At the end of my book Sonoran Rage, it was a toss-up if James’ (the main character) fiancé would be waiting for him when he returned from being captured by Cochise. What everyone wanted, including me, was to have her there and fall into his bruised arms. But that’s what was expected. So, the more interesting choice was—no, she’d moved on (in all fairness, she thought he was dead). That opened up the future plotline that developed into several novels.

What are you working on now? Will we see Maud, Seth, and Pokey from She Was Sheriff again?
I’ll be starting book 7 of the Colton Brothers Saga as well as intense research for a book based on my Irish ancestors who immigrated to New Orleans during the potato famine. It’s a true Western, too, as they came to an unknown land to re-invent themselves. Maud, Seth, and Pokey are trying to find a story I’d like to write. While I’m working on the other two books, I’ll let these three characters play.

KLWagoner150_2 KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.

An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 2

Posted on July 5, 2016 by

Readers of Jeanne Shannon’s work find her “vitally rich and engaging” poetry to be imaginative, captivating, and meticulously crafted. Her articles, poems, memoir pieces, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications. Summoning (Mercury HeartLink, 2015) is her newest book of collected poems. You can find Jeanne on her Amazon author page.

What inspired you to create Summoning?
I wanted to publish a “collected poems.” The poems in this book have been published in journals and in my chapbooks over the course of decades, and I wanted to gather them into one volume. But it turns out that this is just “Volume One” of my collected works, for I have enough poems for another book the size of Summoning that I hope to publish in a year or two.

How did you choose the poems/prose to include in this book?
I divided the book into sections organized around themes that I most often write about, such as the natural world (“Honey Locust”) and memories of childhood and meditations on mortality (“Summoning”), and chose poems that would fit into those themes. I tried to include only the poems that I consider to be my best work. No pieces were written specifically for this book. I wrote a first draft of one of the poems as long ago as 1955, and the rest of the poems date from the early 1980’s to around 2010.

What was the most rewarding aspect of putting Summoning together?
Knowing that I had complete control over the content of the book—it would be exactly what I wanted to give to the world. Because it was self-published, there would be no editor or other person trying to put their imprint on my work by telling me what to include or what to leave out or what to change. I take full responsibility for whatever shortcomings the collection may have.

Should a reader have to work to understand a poem?
No. Reading poetry should be a pleasure, not a classroom exercise in which a hard-and-fast meaning has to be identified. I think the idea of having to figure out what a poem means has caused many people to avoid reading poetry. Poetry can have its own logic, which doesn’t always match ordinary, “logical” logic. Archibald MacLeish said it best, “A poem should not mean, but be.” Learning to read differently—to listen for the music of the language, for example, as I did in the case of T.S. Eliot (see part one of the interview)—will free the reader from the notion that we always have to know exactly what the poet had in mind in writing the poem. As Eliot himself said, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

What do poorly written poems have in common?
That’s a big subject, but I think that too much focus on the ego of the poet is a common failing. Too many first-person pronouns. That is, instead of focusing on the subject of the poem (the view from the top of a mountain, for instance) the focus is often on the “I” of the poem. The spotlight is on the poet—“Look at me, how perceptive I am to see what I’m seeing down below”—rather than on the scene itself.

Another common failing is what Steve Kowit calls “sentimentality and emotional slither.” That is, vague and generic declarations of emotions without providing scenes and concrete images that convey those emotions that let the reader experience the emotions rather than simply hearing a boring recitation of what the emotions are.

Then there’s the dull prose that’s broken into lines to look like poetry. Dull prose is still dull prose, no matter what it looks like on the page. And there are gimmicks to make the poem look more interesting than it is; centering every line is one example. Occasionally that can be effective, but it can easily be overdone and call too much attention to itself.

What do well-written poems have in common?
♦ Charged, compressed language: words selected for conciseness and clarity and for their emotive quality.
♦ Musical elements such as rhyme (if it is used well and not just cobbled together for the sake of rhyming), meter and repetition.
♦ Intensity of detail (concrete rather than abstract).
♦ Simile, metaphor, and sometimes symbolism.
♦ Vivid and fresh imagery (images that appeal to the senses—all or most of the senses, not just the visual).
♦ Euphony—a pleasing combination of words. Poets must think about how they want something to sound as well as the thought they want to convey.
♦ Effective use of line breaks and stanza breaks.
♦ If it is a narrative poem, attention to the narrative arc and the scenes just as in fiction.

Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable. Poet Marie Howe defines poetry as “a cup of language to hold what can’t be said.” The best poetry is “the language beneath the language.” Any poem that can be completely paraphrased is not a poem, but simply versified or emotive prose.

Readers who want to learn more about what makes a poem work or fail to work can find few better sources of information than Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop (Tilbury House Publishers, 1995).

In part one of the interview you told us about your favorite poets. Who are your favorite fiction authors, and what do you admire most about their writing?
Paula McLain (The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun) comes to mind, because her prose is often vivid and lyrical and she tells compelling stories. Lydia Davis for, among other things, her flash fiction that is like nobody else’s. (She has been characterized as “one of the most original minds in American fiction today.”) Carole Maso for her unique novels and her willingness to “break every rule.” Kate Braverman, especially for her novel Palm Latitudes that seems like a long poem in prose. Ron Hansen for Mariette in Ecstasy. James Salter for A Sport and a Pastime and everything else by him that I’ve read. Truman Capote for Other Voices, Other Rooms and some of his short stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald for The Great Gatsby. Lee Smith, especially for her novel Fair and Tender Ladies. She writes about the South where she and I grew up (about fifty miles from each other), and is the author I most want to emulate when writing fiction set in the Appalachian South. And always, always, Eudora Welty, especially for The Golden Apples. What all these authors have in common is language that burns with intensity and is perfect for its purpose.

What are you working on now?
Short fiction (I recently finished one short story and am working on another one) and a novel that is a blend of memoir and fiction.

For the first part of this interview, go to An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 1.

An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 1

Posted on June 28, 2016 by

How do you describe Summoning?
Summoning is a collection of poems and hybrid works—that is, pieces that blur the boundary between prose and poetry. Historically, poetry has been thought of as a rigid structure to hold the movement of the poet’s mind. At the very least it had to be broken into rather short lines and “look like a poem.” But that has changed with the acceptance of the prose poem and the lyric essay into the poetry family, and I am drawn to writing in those forms.

What do you hope readers will take away from it?
I hope readers will experience some of the poems as paintings in words, and just enjoy the language—the way the words “bounce off each other”—and the imagery. That they will be reminded to pay more attention to the natural world, particularly the plant life, that is all around them. That they will feel free to attach their own meaning or significance to the poems that may not seem particularly accessible. I hope readers who also write poetry will feel more liberated from conventional ideas about what a poem must be, and will be inspired to experiment with different ways of shaping their creative expression.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
It was difficult to decide where in the book to put certain poems that seemed to fit into more than one theme. And I had a few other poems that didn’t seem to be appropriate for any of the sections, so I put them aside for a future collection.

Do you remember what inspired you to write your first poem?
What inspired me was reading poems in two books my family owned. One was a collection of classic poems, One Hundred and One Famous Poems. The other (which I preferred) was The Lyric South, a 1924 anthology of poems by Southern poets that my mother had studied in college in Virginia where she and I grew up. The first poem I wrote was about “the people sleeping” in the graves in Bruton Parish Churchyard in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I had never been. It was inspired by a poem on the same theme in The Lyric South. I promptly copied it out on lined Blue Horse notebook paper and sent it to Grit newspaper without a self-addressed stamped envelope. Needless to say I got no reply. That was around the time of my eleventh birthday. By then I knew that writing was what I was going to do. Maybe I knew that even earlier, at age six or seven, when I wrote the life stories of the animals on our farm. When I was twelve I read Gone with the Wind and wanted to write a novel, but since I couldn’t think of a plot I decided to stick with poetry.

How important is accessibility of meaning?
Not very. At least not for me. For example, I did not major in English in college (chose music and French instead), so I never studied the “difficult” poems of T. S. Eliot such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, but when I read them years later I was spellbound by the language, and I didn’t care what Eliot meant. In recent years I’ve taken classes on Eliot’s work and when the instructor assured us that such-and-such was what Eliot meant, I thought, “That’s plausible, but I still don’t care. It’s Eliot’s magnificent language that matters.” And I once read a remark attributed to Eliot to the effect that too much significance was being attached to what he is supposed to have intended when he wrote The Waste Land.

Who are your favorite poets, and what do you admire most about their writing?
Charles Wright is my favorite poet. He writes like nobody else. His poems have a sweet-and-sour melody, a jagged elegance. They jump-cut and loop back. His images are like no other poet’s—not only the images themselves, but also the way he juxtaposes and layers them. And I feel a kinship with him because much of his work has echoes of the upper South. He grew up in eastern Tennessee, not far from where I grew up in southwestern Virginia.

Other favorite poets include Ronald Johnson, Denise Levertov, Jane Kenyon, Robert Hass, and Mark Strand. I am also drawn to the highly individualistic poetry of C.D. Wright and I was saddened by her recent death. She was not a member of any of the postmodern schools of poetry such as the Language poets,* but her work is not easily accessible. She was from Arkansas, and had a lot of that mountain-woman “rules be damned, I’ll do what I want to do” attitude—which I certainly have as well.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Readers of Summoning will notice many references to science and to spirituality. I believe that the two are related, and that quantum physics can point toward the way that connection works. I read books about quantum physics and spirituality, as my biography on Amazon says. I probably started with Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe. Then I read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, the 1975 book that brought the mystical implications of subatomic physics to popular consciousness for the first time. More recently I have read, for example, Amit Goswami’s The Physics of the Soul and T. L. Baumann’s God at the Speed of Light: The Melding of Science and Spirituality.

*Language poetry, dismissed by some as “gibberish,” was a movement that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It emphasized the reader’s role in bringing significance out of a work and was at pains to avoid indicating any “meaning.” It saw the poem as a construction in and of language itself. Expression of emotion, use of musical language, and letting the poem “tell a story” were not permitted. While the movement itself is somewhat passé now, it opened the door for other kinds of experiments in poetry.

For the second part of this interview, go to An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 2.

An Interview with Author L. Phillips Carlson

Posted on June 14, 2016 by

Being an author wasn’t L. Phillips Carlson’s first choice of profession, but once the writing bug finally hit, she published over 130 articles, short stories, and poems. Her debut novel, A Matter of Possession (Snowsnake Press, 2014), was the winner in the science fiction/fantasy category of the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. You can find Ms. Carlson on her Amazon author page and her website at LPhillipsCarlson.com.

AMatterOfPossession200 What is your elevator pitch for A Matter of Possession?
New P.I. Joe Shurjack investigates a rich woman’s murder and the theft of a rare butterfly collection while hampered by the ghost of his flirtatious co-worker.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
This book is a paranormal mystery, which involved planting clues throughout the story. So I tried plotting backwards from the ending to the beginning. Then I found it hard to stick to the outline, since new possibilities always crop up as one writes. I did manage to stick to the basic plot, but barely!

What is it about your main protagonist that makes readers connect with him?
Joe is an average guy who has a crappy boss and a lackluster marriage. He’s really at a crossroads in life, and has been put down enough to not have a lot of confidence in himself. Yet he’s plucky and manages to forge ahead anyway. He makes mistakes but is persistent, a quality that helps him greatly.

Why did you decide to use St. Louis as the setting for the book?
I’d visited St. Louis numerous times while my daughter was in Washington University’s medical school, and found the area to have a variety of interesting settings. Both St. Louis and Albuquerque figure prominently in my story. Joe visits Albuquerque on a shaky but profitable lead, with wife Teri in tow. Being a transplanted Midwesterner myself, I could relate his culture shock with humor and real-life experience.

Is there a scene in the book you’d love to see play out in a movie?
Besides all of them? One of my favorites is when Joe encounters the ghost in his kitchen. I also like the revealing scenes in the eclectic City Museum (actual place) and the Lotus Moon Antiques store (made-up, but partially based on a moon-themed hotel in University City).

Tell us how the book came together: where the story idea came from, how long it took to write, editing cycle, etc.
I’m not sure where some of it came from, honestly. I usually combine several ideas for my stories. It’s the way my mind works, and I blame it on my Czech heritage. I can usually find inspiration in settings, which was the case with this story. St. Louis has the fabulous Forest Park, for instance, which is twice as large as New York’s Central Park and contains museums, zoo, skating rink, paddle boats and more. I also like to deal with real issues like relationships, work, and other life problems.

I write in spurts, and then things lie fallow forever, so it’s hard to say how long it took to complete the novel. It probably only took a half-hour or an hour per page, editing included, but spread out over a couple of years. My rough drafts aren’t so rough anymore. I tend to self-edit as I go, usually in several chapter chunks to keep consistency. So the final draft only needs some clean-up and proofing. I trade critique and editing services with several people, who are both writers and editors themselves, so I end up with a polished project. I met them all at SouthWest Writers (SWW), by the way.

What makes A Matter of Possession unique in the paranormal market?
It’s a short novel—the print version is 165 pages—so it’s a quick read, popular with today’s rushed lifestyle. Several readers have told me they read it in a single sitting! I like to think A Matter of Possession is quirky, fun, and adventurous, but that’s up to the judgment of the reader.

Why did you decide to start Snowsnake Press and take the indie route to publishing?
I’ve had several short pieces published with traditional magazines, so I’ve done the submit-and-wait routine. With the tremendous flux in publishing today, writers have choices, and it only makes sense to consider both legacy (traditional) and indie publishing to determine what’s best for your particular project. I went indie because there are a lot of bad deals out there right now, and I’m trying to avoid them. You’re on your own much of the time, in either path to being published. And there’s no shortage of companies who will take your money and do nothing for you.

I found that it’s not easier to go the independent route. It may even be harder. So far, after writing and editing the best story I can, I’ve concentrated on the product: formatting ebooks and trade paperbacks, doing art and covers, comparing print services, learning about copyrights, ISBNs, and passive marketing (blurbs, website, Facebook, search terms, etc.). Next up, I’m going to study more advanced marketing. There’s so much to learn!

Why did you decide to use a pen name?
I googled myself and found several prolific writers with the same name as mine and my info was nowhere to be found. So, for SEO (search engine optimization) I combined my first initial, maiden name and married name—which usually don’t go together—and now my work pops up on the first page. I’m told that it’s useful to have different pen names if you write different genres, especially if they are not compatible (like Christian and Erotica). It makes it easier for readers to find what they like. I’m not out of my comfort zone on that yet, so I’ll keep L. Phillips Carlson for my newer work, at least for now.

What inspired you to become a writer?
My daughter started writing as a youngster and actually got published before I did. She won a contest in grade school and we went to an awards ceremony with Madge Harrah (from SWW) as speaker. Madge was wonderfully sweet and genuine, with a real affinity for kids. Maybe some of you remember her. She told the kids that if they wanted to write, they could certainly become writers. As I listened to her inspired talk, I was caught up, too.

What is your writing routine like?
Don’t copy me—I’m a bad example. My writing routine is abysmal! I need large chunks of time to write and I get distracted easily. My extended family is demanding, and I often go weeks without putting a word on paper. I also travel a lot. But you know? It’s okay. I’m living life and that all becomes fodder for stories at some point.

What is the best encouragement you’ve received in your writing journey? What advice do you have for discouraged writers?
When someone tells me that my story has touched them, made them feel better, or gave them a good laugh, then it makes me feel like I’ve really communicated! Getting an award or two is a great atta girl, as well—A Matter of Possession won top honors in the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards in the science fiction and fantasy category.

We all get discouraged. Writing is hard, or anyone could do it. Writing well takes time, like learning to play the piano. You can plunk out a tune early on, but to make it sound like music takes a lot of practice. Try to be patient with yourself while you’re learning. One thing that has kept me going is to examine my goals. Very few people become bestselling authors. Even though I’ve made a few foreign sales, and people in half a dozen countries have read my work, I don’t think of myself as having “made it.” Maybe I’ll end up selling mostly to friends and family, but I love the process of writing and that’s what counts. If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I’m writing a series of connected short stories set in the 1920s, right after King Tut’s tomb was discovered. It will, of course, involve paranormal aspects—I’ve got a ghost running amok again! My working title is The Pharaoh Rests Lightly. I also have a sequel started for A Matter of Possession, and I’m planning to resurrect a sci-fi novel I wrote years ago that has promise but needs a thorough scrubbing. In addition, I hope to do more with my website: http://lphillipscarlson.com. I’ll be getting my email sign-up in order soon and will actually get going on the blog there. I have a number of topics in mind for the blog, but I’m leaning toward some of the odd things that I’ve encountered while travelling.

An Interview with Author Lois Ruby

Posted on May 31, 2016 by

Ex-librarian Lois Ruby is the award-winning author of 18 middle-grade and young adult books. Whether the stories are contemporary or historical fiction, reality-based or paranormal, her characters are ordinary kids in extraordinary circumstances who always have options but don’t always make the best choices. Her latest novel, The Doll Graveyard, is a “gently spooky” work published by Scholastic Paperbacks (2014). You can find Lois on her website at LoisRuby.com.

TheDollGraveyard200 What is your elevator pitch for The Doll Graveyard?
What if you’re twelve-year-old Shelby, and you’ve just moved into a house populated by mysterious, mischievous, highly spooky dolls that refuse to stay buried in your backyard? And they keep changing before your eyes!

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
I’m a person steeped in pragmatic realism. I don’t believe in supernatural hokum. But that doesn’t stop me from writing about it. The challenge for me is making it sound plausible, as if (under the right circumstances) everything in the story could happen. So, I had to avoid outrageous leaps that couldn’t, even by the wildest stretch, have realistic explanations. I also had to overcome my resistance to writing such an absurd story and cope with the truth: that I had a great time writing it.

What is it about your main protagonist that makes readers connect with her? Did your characters surprise you as you wrote their story?
My characters always surprise me. I do an extensive inventory on each of the main characters as if I were interviewing them for a biography. Just when I’m sure I know them, know what motivates them, know what stumps them or terrifies them, they turn on me and do something I never expected. What’s worse (or maybe it’s better) characters appear on the page that I never invited and sort of thumb their noses at me and say, “Hah! I’m here now, so what are you going to do about it?” My first inclination is to scold them and send them back into the hazy oblivion from which they reared their heads. Then I decide to trust them for a while and see where they lead me. Sometimes they’re pretty clever and bend themselves to just the plot turn I needed. As for my main protagonist in The Doll Graveyard, I hope what makes readers connect with her is that she’s normal, healthy, inquisitive, and secure in a loving family—but lonely and vulnerable just the same. Like the best of us in this life.

Tell us about the setting and why you chose it.
As I’ll explain later, the idea wasn’t my own. It came from a wonderful editor as just a wisp of a preposterous plot, with lots of freedom to develop it any way I wanted to. The only absolute was that there would be a girl named Shelby and a bunch of tiny dolls that refused to stay buried. I decided to set the story in a remote part of Colorado. Why Colorado? Honestly, because my only nonfiction book, which has garnered as much attention as, say, soggy coffee grounds, is entitled Mother Jones and the Colorado Coal Field War. I thought a paranormal novel also set in Colorado might cause a librarian or teacher or two to suddenly discover Mother Jones. (It didn’t work.) Anyway, Shelby’s house is one of two lone, scary old houses up on a hill in the middle of nowhere, and the graveyard behind the house is home to a bunch of small, mysterious graves. The novel has all the standard creaky floors and doors, hidden places and dark corridors savored in this sort of story, plus creepy, misbehaving dolls.

Is there a scene in the book you’d love to see play out in a movie?
Oh, yes! There’s a scene at the end of the book where all the disparate characters come together in the graveyard for a funeral for the stubborn dolls, each of whom represents something dramatic that happened in the history of the house. Now each doll merits a touching testimonial, as he or she is laid to rest. Good, satisfying ending. They’re buried for good, right? Believe me, my readers are sure they shall rise again! Do I hear sequel?

What makes this novel unique in the children’s/teen market?
I suspect it’s not unique but is rather one in a slew of gently spooky paranormals that tickle the fancy of young readers. And when I say gently spooky, that means nothing horribly violent happens. To the disappointment of children I talk to in schools, these dolls are not Chucky and Annabelle, the killer dolls. They’re just mischievous and stubborn and creepy. So, maybe I’m trying to say that what’s unique is that this book is relatively safe for readers who don’t want, or can’t handle, really intense supernatural or hyper-violent material, but still like chills to race up and down their spines.

Tell us more about the book: where the story idea came from, how long it took to write, editing cycle, etc.
As I mentioned, the idea came from an editor, generated in-house at Scholastic. But she gave me free rein to develop it any way I wanted and to complicate the story way beyond her expectations. I’ve often been chastised for including too many characters and too many complex issues in an otherwise simple story. That’s what makes it worthwhile for me. So, this was pure fun to write, and it wrote itself very quickly in about six months. I ran a fairly detailed plot proposal by the editor and got her go-ahead. Then she didn’t see it again until I’d written and revised it about six times. When next her eyes fell on it, she had some good suggestions for the logical tying up of loose ends, and for one or two more dramatic scenes, all of which I gratefully heeded. And then it took very little more work. This experience was totally different from the process of my more serious books; the books that consume me for two, three, five years; the books that touch my heart and challenge me after I’ve researched them to death, but aren’t as jaunty and fun to play with.

StealAwayHome150 Steal Away Home (Aladdin Paperbacks/Simon & Schuster, 1994) is your most well-known book. Why do you think it continues to be so popular?
It’s an absolute conundrum as to why this book continues to have a vibrant life 22 years after publication, while so many of my other books have quickly vanished into the miasma. (As some famous author once said, “First you’re an unknown. Then you write one book and quickly sink into obscurity.”) I like to think it’s because Steal Away Home is a magnificent masterpiece of brilliantly universal appeal. Yeah, sure. There are a few more likely reasons. It’s set in Kansas in two periods—the present, and 1856. I wrote it while I was living in Kansas, and it caught immediate attention as a local book by a local author. But it moved beyond that designation and continued to be read in schools all over the country and in some foreign countries, as well. Right now it’s being used in a school in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I’ve been invited to speak. The main reason for its longevity, however, is that five years ago the state of Georgia adopted this novel for its fifth grade Civil War curriculum. So, this anti-slavery book has reached a much wider audience than I ever dreamed possible, and in a former slave state.

Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you started your publishing career today?
I would have found a young, hungry agent who would read my manuscripts immediately, make a few suggestions for quick revision, and submit them to a dozen editors at once. Alas, that’s not what I have, though—can I brag a little?—that’s what just occurred in my son’s life. He wrote a wonderful middle grade novel, found an aggressive agent who submitted it to eleven houses, and within a month he had three offers and just signed a contract with Random House. I, on the other hand, wait six months to two years for response. Often it’s a rejection, but after blubbering for a day or two, I ask my agent to send it out again. Sometimes she does.

What is your writing routine like? What is your writing process like? What part do beta readers or critique groups play in your writing process?
Calling it a routine is a big stretch, as each day is different, and life intervenes. What generally works is that I’m up about 5:30am, take care of a few emails that dared to come in while I slept, then get right to writing the ideas that I’d processed in those few precious minutes before I fell asleep the night before. About 8:30 I saunter into the kitchen for a cup of tea and a bowl of cereal. Then, on an ideal day, I return to the writing until noon. More likely, other pressing engagements, such as reconnecting with my sweet husband, or running errands, overtake my compulsion to write.

As for process, I do not outline a novel. I do extensive, character sketches of the principal people who populate (talk about alliteration!) the story at hand, and let them take over. I complete one scene, print, revise, print, revise, sigh, then move on to the next scene. When I think I’ve reached something approaching a cliffhanger after two or three conjoined scenes, I declare it a chapter and move on to the first scene of the next chapter. I keep revising the completed chapters maybe a dozen times more, until I discover that they’re woefully out of sequence. That calls for a detailed summary of what I’ve done so far, chapter by chapter, and then I begin shifting. Sometimes I jot a few key words of each scene on a Post-It note and tack them to the big picture window above my computer, then juggle Post-Its until something makes sense.

Now, about critique groups. I’ve been in some fabulous ones, in some humdingers, and a couple that did me little good because no one in the group understood how novels for youth were different from novels for adults. Still, any kind of critique group is better than laboring in the field alone without anyone’s help with the back-breaking (mind-bending) work.

If you suffer from writer’s block, how do you break through?
I don’t suffer from writer’s block. Just the opposite. I suffer from resistance to taking up the work in progress because I’ll be reluctant to quit and do something else that’s more necessary but less satisfying. I suffer from fear that I’ll submerge myself in my work, become a cranky hermit who never brushes her teeth and lives on cold pizza or macaroni and cheese, and neglects loved ones who deserve something better from me.

Do you have a message or a theme that recurs in your writing?
Message, no. But I discovered after about nine books, that a theme pervades all of them, despite their diverse subjects and eras. The theme is justice, whether I’m writing about abolition of slavery, faith healing, skinheads, the Battle of Gettysburg, Holocaust refugees in China, or even my sweetly weird paranormals. As it says in the Good Book, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” I try.

How has the teen market changed since you first started publishing?
Interesting question that stumps me, yet one I’ve puzzled about quite a lot. In terms of the emotional preoccupations of young people, nothing has changed. There are still the terrors of the emotional dark, the confusion over identity and purpose, the family entanglements, and school. Books for this readership need to deal with those unchanging issues along with the joys and optimism of youth. But there are differences. Thanks to the Janus effect of technology, it being a blessing and a curse, kids have much more limited attention spans. You’ve got to hit them right away, scene by scene, and keep it short and immediate, or they abandon you. Harry Potter and a few other long and complicated books are delightful exceptions, of course. And books for teens are definitely edgier; there are no subjects, violent events, or unsavory language off-limits.

All the above is from the standpoint of subject and style. As for marketing, that’s where I’m clueless. I can’t fathom why some books get published and widely/wildly read, while others more worthy languish, if they see print at all. The one thing I do know is this: it’s no harder now to get published than it was 35 years ago when my first books came out. It’s always been difficult and very much a crapshoot.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Yes, I’ve got to add this: no matter how things change in history or in our social milieu, books for young readers must offer hope, must assure them there are caring and responsible adults to turn to, and must remind them that the universe is not indifferent to their highest aspirations.

The Writing Life: Is Technology an Advance or a Hindrance?

Posted on May 24, 2016 by

by Sherri Burr

In our advanced technological age, we are bombarded by the latest gadgets for everything from appliances to voice recording apps, all claiming to make lives more efficient. But do they?

This question occurred to me after two home appliances broke, and I replaced them with “high efficiency” models. The new washing machine included a sensing device that calculated the amount of water it needed. Since it had a glass top, I watched the machine twist the load back and forth before it turned on the water. Although I had piled in clothes to reach the top of the tub, the machine added water to fill only about a quarter of its capacity. Eighty minutes later a load was finished, yet several items had dry spots. A load of whites took two hours, and I tricked the machine into filling up the tub by first bleaching clothes in a bucket, which made them heavier.

My initial reaction was astonishment. The machine took nearly three times as long to wash loads, and it didn’t get them as clean as my 1989 Kenmore machine that went to washing machine heaven after three attempts to fix it failed to produce a functional apparatus. I questioned the term “high efficiency,” and realized it only referred to the machine’s miserly water use. When it came to electricity, my bill would go up because it now took nearly all day to wash four loads of laundry, instead of two hours. When I went back to the store, the clerk questioned whether I had loaded the machine correctly. I thought, given the cost, the machine should have loaded itself. I requested the store pick up the machine and return my money before purchasing a non-high efficiency machine that allowed me to set water levels, and clean loads in half the time.

I share this story to challenge writers to question whether the new technology in their lives is an advance or a hindrance. Are we better off interviewing subjects and typing our notes on our laptop at the same time? Are we better off interviewing subjects and exclusively using our iPhone’s or iPad’s Siri to record the notes?

As someone who has used technology to her detriment in interviews, I submit that both questions must be answered with “no.” I interviewed someone and placed my “iDevice” on the table to record the conversation, while I actively listened and took notes on a paper pad. Thank goodness I did the latter because Siri recorded gibberish. I learned the hard way with voice-recognition software that if it doesn’t recognize the nuances in a person’s speech patterns, it may not accurately translate the person’s sentences.

The other problem I’ve found with recording devices is that subjects are intimidated by them. After getting nothing from a former bachelor from the television show The Bachelor, I put away the recording device. He immediately started talking. Since I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the conversation, I just actively listened. The minute we finished, I ran to my car and wrote everything I could remember. I went to bed that night thinking I had nonsense, but awoke the next morning with a complete story organized in my head. My subconscious had sorted out the text while I slept.

In a law class simulation, I asked four students to role play as clients and lawyers. In the first group, the lawyer wanted to use his iPad to take notes. As the interview progressed, he didn’t use his iPad once. Rather, he focused on the client’s pre-interview sheet to ask questions. Because he was reading from the sheet, he didn’t observe his client. In the second demonstration, the law student used no electronic device and, even though he had the pre-interview sheet, he focused on talking and listening to the client. The second interview was more effective.

My final technology concern focuses on studies demonstrating that students who type their lecture notes on computers produce more complete notes but do not processes the material as well and do worse on exams. Other studies have proven that reading material on electronic devices leads to less recall of the material learned.

Thus, before you ditch your paper products in favor of electronics, think about whether they will advance or hinder the cause of obtaining effective interviews and learning material. Those who feel they are listened to will tell more. Look directly at interviewees, and actively tune your ears to capture all that you can from them.

Sherri Burr is the Regents’ Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law where she teaches Entertainment Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Art Law. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Princeton University, and the Yale Law School, she has authored or co-authored 20 books, including A Short and Happy Guide to Financial Well-Being (West Academic, 2014). Sherri is also a long-time member of SouthWest Writers and a regular contributor to the organization’s newsletter SouthWest Sage.

An Interview with Author Corran Harrington

Posted on May 17, 2016 by

Corran Harrington is a former attorney who writes literary fiction described as radiant and revealing. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Bosque Fiction Contest finalist, and a New Millennium Writings Award semifinalist. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary publications. Corran’s first book, Follow the River Home, is an Arbor Farm Press release (2016). You can find her at CorranHarrington.com, on her SouthWest Writers’ author page, and on LinkedIn.

What is your elevator pitch for Follow the River Home?
Daniel Arroyo has suffered a lifetime of guilt over the sudden death of his infant sister, who died when he was eight years old. He now lives his middle years between that guilt and worsening episodes of PTSD from a Vietnam he left thirty years ago. When a violent encounter on a dusty highway forces Daniel to face what haunts him, he finds himself pulled back to the neighborhood of his youth, where old houses hold tired secrets. What really happened on that steamy August afternoon? The answer comes spilling from the old neighborhood, and Daniel begins to find his way home.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
On the surface, I want readers who may not be familiar with New Mexico’s middle Rio Grande region to gain an understanding of the physical setting and some of the cultural aspects present in that setting. I enjoy reading fiction that is set in places and among people I do not otherwise know. But I mostly want the reader to experience the rich emotional and psychological landscapes my characters traverse. For me, the joy in reading is when I resonate emotionally with a line or phrase, and that is what I want my readers to experience. Someone who I don’t know well wrote to me the other day, just to tell me that my book had given him the chills and caused him to tear up on more than one occasion. That he felt moved in that way was moving to me.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
Prior to this book, I had only written short fiction. So it was challenging to structure a longer piece, which became the first part of the book called “The River Reader.” The other main challenge, then, was to make consistent all the stories, which formed the second part of the book called “The River Flyway.” It was like putting together a huge puzzle, which was actually very fun for me.

Tell us about your main protagonist’s flaws and strengths and the hurdles he’s trying to overcome.
Daniel Arroyo is an ordinary man who comes from ordinary means. But he is scarred as a young boy by a family tragedy that goes unexplained for decades, and that consumes him with guilt. He is also a product of his times, and is often rendered fragile because of what he experienced in Vietnam. His guilt and his PTSD contribute to marital problems, and to identity issues. But Daniel Arroyo has a vast capacity for kindness and generosity, which is what ultimately saves him, and lets him begin to find peace for himself.

Why did you choose New Mexico as the setting for the book? How does the setting impact the story and the characters?
The setting is essential to Follow the River Home, as it forms the spine for the entire story. It is practically a character in its own. I see the setting of the Rio Grande as it courses through New Mexico as a series of detailed paintings against which the plot unfolds. As I say below, the book was originally going to be a short story collection, where the only link between the stories was the Rio Grande. As it turns out, though, the main characters’ lives had all intersected. The river, as a flyway for the migration of the sandhill cranes, becomes a metaphor for Daniel finding his own way home.

What was the most rewarding aspect of writing Follow the River Home?
I was fortunate to be able to work with a wonderful editor, Ladette Randolph, who is the editor of Ploughshares, one of the most esteemed literary journals in the country. I became a better writer for it, which is what I aspire to with any writing project.

Tell us more about the book: where the story idea came from; how long it took to write; editing cycle, etc.
I’m often asked how long it took to write this book. Since this is not the book I set out to write, my answer is somewhere between 2 and 15 years! I started writing short stories in the late nineties, and the first one was published in 2000. My intent was to create a short story collection where the only link between the stories was that each story would at least reference the Rio Grande. So the stories were set in various places along the river, from the headwaters to the sea, though most were set in the middle Rio Grande valley.

A few years ago, I realized two of the stories had main characters named Daniel, but with different last names and different lives. I began to wonder, what if they were the same character? Almost immediately, all the characters and stories came together. It turned out that the main characters grew up together in the same neighborhood during the fifties and sixties, and that many of their lives intersected again in adulthood.

I then wrote the whole story as a novella, which became the first part of the book. The previously written short stories became the second part of the book, and each story casts a different light on the characters and scenes from the first part of the book. It’s almost a retelling of the whole story, but from very different points of view and in a different order. The stories informed the novella, and then I went back to each story to tweak for consistency.

Do you have other creative outlets besides writing?
When I was twenty, I announced to my grandmother that I was going to start writing novels. She very tactfully and wisely suggested that I first get a little more life experience. So I wrote songs for the next twenty years or so, just to keep the creative juices flowing (guitar and vocals). Sometimes I steal lyrics from my songs, and put them in my fiction. For example, a recurring line about the sandhill cranes in Follow the River Home comes from one of my old songs.

What first inspired you to become a writer?
I was first, of course, a reader. I had a great passion for books from the time I could read. My grandmother (who was an artist and librarian) and I came up with a plan where I would write children’s books and she would illustrate them. That never came to fruition, but it tells me I wanted to write from a very young age. My first serious attempts were in high school, with some poetry and short stories that were published in the high school creative writing magazine. At that time I submitted to a national writing competition for high school students. My work did not make the cut, but it was a valuable experience that taught me to not be afraid of submitting work, to not be afraid of rejection letters.

Who are your favorite authors, and what do you admire most about their writing?
I have to answer this with respect to two different parts of my life. My first favorite author was John Steinbeck, who I discovered in junior high school. I read everything he wrote, and found it very evocative. He could write about social and political issues through the eyes of a character’s psychological landscape, and without being pedantic. I don’t enjoy his writing so much as an adult now but was very influenced by him. And now, I have too many favorite authors to name them all. I love literary fiction—beautiful writing that aspires to be art, that is evocative, and that portrays characters’ rich, internal landscapes set against compelling plots and/or physical/cultural settings that are almost visceral. I love learning about places and people that are foreign to me. A few of my favorite authors are Andrei Makine, J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Annie Proulx, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Cunningham, David Guterson, and Graham Swift.

Share a bit of your journey to publication.
I started writing and submitting short fiction as a serious endeavor in the late nineties. I spent a lot of time learning everything I could about the process of submissions. My first story was published in a small college review in Kentucky in 2000. I wrote short stories for many years thereafter and was lucky enough to have all my stories published (amidst a wealth of rejection letters!). The thirteen stories in the second half of Follow the River Home were all previously published. Follow the River Home, published by Arbor Farm Press, is my first full-length book.

Do you have a message or a theme that recurs in your writing?
I like to celebrate ordinary people who are capable of extraordinary deeds. There is something redemptive about every human being, no matter how ordinary—no matter how flawed.

What are your strengths as a writer, and what do you do to overcome your weaknesses?
My prose is very lyrical, sometimes almost poetic. Writing is an auditory experience for me. I can hear my internal writer’s voice, which is the same voice that does public readings. I can also paint vivid physical settings and rich, emotional landscapes against which my characters’ lives play out. Readers often tell me my writing is very evocative. What I struggle with mostly, though, is dialogue, presumably because it cannot come from my own voice. It has to be contrived, by definition. I have overcome this weakness by being a careful listener of other people. I have also come to embrace dialogue as an effective tool to move the writing forward when I otherwise might feel stuck.

What are the hardest kinds of scenes for you to write?
I struggle with scenes that might be offensive to a reader, such as a racist term used by a character in a line of dialogue, or a scene that is particularly graphic. I never write scenes that contain gratuitous violence, or anything else purely for shock value. But I believe strongly that a writer must “write brave.” And sometimes that means writing a passage that makes me, as the author, cringe a little. But, if it’s true, I don’t water it down. To me, that is “writing brave.”

What advice do you have for beginning or discouraged writers?
First, be willing to write embarrassingly bad prose! No one will see it but you. Second, be brutal with your editing, and meticulous with your research. Learn all you can about the craft of writing. Read books about it, and read books by authors you admire. Third, be professional when you make submissions, and follow all the submission guidelines of the publisher. Finally, be welcoming of rejections. Every writer probably has enough to wallpaper his or her house! Rejections are rarely hurtful, and occasionally an editor will write a personal note, which can be very helpful and encouraging. Rejection letters are a sign that you take your writing career seriously.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I am almost done with a first draft of a novel based on one of the stories in Follow the River Home. It is set in the Pacific Northwest. I am also writing two short stories, one of which is almost completed; and I just found a home for a third short story in a literary review in Wisconsin.

Hanging by the Fingernails: Writing Cliffhangers

Posted on May 10, 2016 by

by Chris Eboch

Several years ago I ghostwrote a novel about a well-known girl sleuth. The series used cliffhanger chapter endings. That seemed easy enough—find a dramatic moment and end the chapter.

Turns out writing strong cliffhangers is trickier than that. The editor responded to my effort with this comment: “I would like to see more of a slow build-up toward the intense action. In horror movies, it’s always the ominous music and the main character slowly opening the closet door that scares us the most, not the moment right after she opens the door.”

She’s noting the difference between suspense and surprise.

When something happens suddenly and unexpectedly, that’s a surprise. If you’re walking down the street and something falls onto your head, you’ll be surprised. But since the surprise came out of nowhere, it wasn’t suspenseful.

When writing, we may be tempted to keep secrets and then let them out—bang! But suspense comes from suspecting that something will happen and worrying about it or anticipating it.

To build up dramatic chapter endings, give the reader clues that something bad—or excitingly good—is happening. Here’s an example from Haunted: The Ghost on the Stairs, a novel for ages 8 to 12. The narrator, Jon, isn’t sure he believes his sister Tania saw a ghost, but goes with her to look as their stepfather films his ghost hunter TV show.

At the top of the stairs, my stepfather stood in the glare of a spotlight, a few feet away from a camera. I took a step backward and tugged at Tania’s arm. No one had seen us yet, and we could still escape.Tania turned to me. The look in her eyes made my stomach flip.The moment isn’t bad for a cliffhanger, but it needs more buildup. Here’s the published version:

At the top of the stairs, my stepfather stood in the glare of a spotlight, a few feet away from a camera. I took a step backward and tugged at Tania’s arm. No one had seen us yet, and we could still escape.She didn’t back up. She swayed.I took a quick step forward and put my arm around her so she wouldn’t fall. I looked down into her face. I’d never seen anyone so white. White as death. Or white as a ghost.“Tania,” I whispered. I gave her a shake. She took a quick breath and dragged her eyes away from the staircase and to my face. The look in them made my stomach flip.To get the most out of dramatic moments, you actually slow the pace by using more detail. Focus on sensory details with emotional impact.

Powerful Paragraphing

Long paragraphs are fine for description. Short paragraphs are best for action, because the eye moves more quickly down the page, making the story read faster. You can also emphasize an important sentence by putting that sentence into a paragraph by itself. Compare these examples:

Version 1:

My car picked up speed as it rolled down the steep hill. The light at the bottom turned yellow so I stepped on the brakes. The car didn’t slow down. The light turned red as I pressed harder, leaning back in my seat, using my whole leg to force the brake pedal toward the floor. I sped toward the intersection while other cars entered from the sides. I sailed into the intersection, horns blaring and brakes squealing around me as I passed within inches of two cars coming from each side.Version 2:

My car picked up speed as it rolled down the steep hill. The light at the bottom turned yellow.I stepped on the brakes. The car didn’t slow down.The light turned red.I pressed harder, leaning back in my seat, using my whole leg to force the brake pedal toward the floor.I sped toward the intersection. Other cars entered from the sides.I sailed into the intersection. Horns blared and brakes squealed around me.I passed within inches of two cars coming from each side.These use nearly the same words, but in the second version I broke up long sentences, and I used seven paragraphs instead of one. The second version better captures the narrator’s breathless panic.

You can have dramatic chapter endings even if the characters aren’t in physical danger. In a young adult romance, for example, the drama may come from social humiliation at school and awkward or exciting moments with the love interest. Play up those moments for maximum effect.

Not every chapter has to end with a major cliffhanger. You can end in a quieter moment, as long as you’re still looking forward, reminding the reader that the character’s troubles are not over.

Cliffhangers are a powerful tool to build suspense. Choose a dramatic moment and expand the moment with sensory details for drama. You’ll keep readers turning the page.

Chris Eboch writes fiction and nonfiction for all ages. In Bandits Peak, a teenage boy meets strangers hiding on the mountains and gets drawn into their crimes, until he risks his life to expose them. The Eyes of Pharaoh is an action-packed mystery set in ancient Egypt. The Genie’s Gift is an Arabian Nights-inspired fantasy adventure. In The Well of Sacrifice, a Mayan girl in ninth-century Guatemala rebels against the High Priest who sacrifices anyone challenging his power. Her writing craft books include You Can Write for Children: How to Write Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers and Advanced Plotting.

Learn more at www.chriseboch.com or her Amazon page, or check out her writing tips at her Write Like a Pro! blog. Sign up for her Workshop newsletter for classes and critique offers.

Chris also writes novels of suspense and romance for adults under the name Kris Bock; read excerpts at www.krisbock.com.

This article was originally published in the August 2011 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Revising Fiction: Avoid These 4 Common Characterization Pitfalls

Posted on May 3, 2016 by

by Kirt Hickman

You’ve fleshed out your characters. You’ve given them flaws as well as virtues, internal struggles and external conflict, past lives and prior relationships. In short, they’ve become real people with real goals, real motivations, real relationships, and real emotions. Great! Now go back and make sure you’ve avoided the following characterization pitfalls:

1. Characters That Are Too Similar

Make sure each character’s personality is different from that of every other character. You don’t want all your characters to behave in the same way or talk like one another. They’re people, not automatons. If each is like the others, none will seem real. And if your characters don’t seem real, your reader won’t care about what happens to them.

2. A Weak-willed Hero

It’s hard for your reader to relate to a wimp or a pushover. If your hero doesn’t care enough about his cause to assert himself to achieve it, why should the reader care enough to read about it?

Make your hero a doer, not a watcher. If he just stands by while somebody else solves his problems and overcomes his obstacles for him, he’s not much of a hero. Your reader wants a hero who rises to the challenge, faces his problems head-on, overcomes adversity, and either achieves his goal or becomes ennobled by his effort to do so. Put your hero in the driver’s seat, literally and figuratively, at every opportunity.

3. Cliché Character Traits

Go back though your list of traits for each character. Have you created a dumb blonde, a mad scientist, a brutish albino hit man, a crooked sheriff, or any one of dozens of character types that have been done to death in books and movies? Take your dumb blonde and make her not dumb or not a blond. Make your mad scientist not mad or not a scientist.

Consider a western with a stereotypical crooked sheriff. He owns the town, rules by fear, accepts bribes from criminal elements, and has the judge in his back pocket. Too cliché! When I find a cliché character in my own writing, I play “What if…” or “Suppose…” These words help me brainstorm ideas to twist my character until he no longer feels cliché.

For example, suppose the sheriff is a woman. Suppose she’s corrupt in actions, but not in motivation. Suppose she was made sheriff by her father, a powerful and corrupt politician who not only threatens her life, but that of her children as well. Suppose she must find a way to overthrow her father’s influence in order to free herself from his web of corruption.

You see how it works? More subtly, do you have an otherwise-original character who exhibits a single trait that’s a cliché for his character type? The brutish hit man who happens to be albino might fall into this category. Albinos are certainly rare, but in literature and movies, they almost always appear as brutish villains. Move this trait to a sophisticated good guy, maybe even the hero. How might that affect his life, the way people treat him, or his opportunities for social, political, or economic advancement? Is his society tolerant of such aesthetic differences? Does it hinder him in his quest?

Here I must make a distinction between realism and cliché. What if you create a 10-year-old boy who never cleans his room? Is he realistic or cliché? Here’s my test: Do most real ten-year-old boys live in dirty rooms, or do most keep them clean? I suspect the former. If so, a character with this trait is realistic. He should have some trait that’s unusual for his demographic, however, so he doesn’t feel to the reader like a cardboard cutout. If most real ten-year-old boys live in clean rooms but a high percentage of fictional ten-year-old boys are characterized by dirty rooms, a ten-year-old boy with a messy room falls into the realm of cliché.

By contrast, are most sheriffs really corrupt, or are they just portrayed that way too often? In this case, the latter is true. This is what makes the crooked sheriff, the dumb blonde, the mad scientist, and numerous other character types clichés.

Apply this test to each of your characters. If you find a single cliché trait in an otherwise-original character, one solution is to replace the trait with its opposite. Do what the reader won’t expect.

4. Forgetting Secondary Characters

The waiter, the cab driver, the shoeshine boy, and other characters who appear fleetingly need not be fleshed out as completely as your main characters, but that doesn’t mean you should leave them as cardboard cutouts. Give each character at least one interesting trait.

It’s not enough for your characters to be realistic. Make sure each one is both unique and memorable.

Kirt Hickman is a technical writer turned fiction author. His books include three sci-fi thriller novels Worlds Asunder (2008), Venus Rain (2010) and Mercury Sun (2014), the high fantasy novel Fabler’s Legend (2011), and the writers’ how-to Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness (2009).

This article was originally published in the August 2009 issue of SouthWest Sage and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

An Interview with Author Amy Reece

Posted on April 28, 2016 by

Amy Reece is a high school teacher who writes Young Adult novels from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has four books in the paranormal romance series The Seeker from Limitless Publishing. Her latest release is the romantic suspense novel The Way to Her Heart (Limitless Publishing, 2016). You can find her on her websites AmyReece.com and AmyReeceAuthor.com. Also, check out her author page on SouthWestWriters.com.

What is your elevator pitch for The Way to Her Heart?
Step 1: Google “elevator pitch.” I’m mostly kidding, but it has been a while! Step 2: Realize the original blurb you wrote (which your publisher ruthlessly re-wrote) is essentially your pitch:

When 18-year-old Josh Harris finds himself captivated by his new economics partner, he knows he’s in trouble. First, he already has a girlfriend. Second, his life has been completely overturned by tragedy.

Bernie Abeyta has major troubles of her own. Her dad’s in prison and her mom is a drug addict. Things get so bad at home she finds herself living out of her car.

Josh tries to ignore his feelings for this troubled girl, but finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into her life. He insists she move in with him and his mother temporarily and tries to help her find out what happened to her best friend, who has been missing for several months. Bernie refuses to believe Gabby ran away and is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s part love story, part mystery, part cookbook, and all heart. Can this young couple overcome the odds stacked against them?

When readers turn the last page in the book, what do you hope they take away from it?
I hope readers are touched emotionally. Isn’t that what we want in a good book? I hope readers have laughed and cried along with Josh and Bernie. I hope they continue to think about them and wonder what else happens in their lives. What happens with Claire and Mike? What about Diego? I also hope they make a large donation to a homeless shelter here in Albuquerque. That would be nice!

What is it about your protagonists that make readers connect to them? You alternate point of view (POV) between Bernie and Josh—which one did you enjoy writing the most? Did your characters surprise you as you wrote their story?
I think readers connect to these two protagonists because there’s a little Josh and Bernie in all of us. At least there is in me. I really like to look beyond the surface appearance. Josh is so much more than the popular, handsome jock. Bernie has layers and dreams that her life in a run-down trailer park doesn’t begin to touch. As far as which I enjoyed writing the most? That’s like asking a mother to choose her favorite child! I loved creating them both and they constantly surprised me! For example, when Bernie kissed Josh for the first time—total surprise to me! That is not what I had planned! She, however, insisted I keep it in the manuscript. She can be very bossy!

Why did you decide to use New Mexico as the setting for the book?
Official answer: I simply love New Mexico. Real answer: I’m too lazy to research other places. I’m sort of kidding! I do love New Mexico and always knew I wanted to set my novels here. The Seeker Series is based in New Mexico, although they travel quite often to Ireland and France. I have vivid dreams of traveling a lot in the future to find great new settings for future novels. I have traveled a bit in France, specifically the Normandy region, which features in Seer and Oracle from The Seeker Series. I’ve never been to Ireland (insert sad face here) so I had to do quite a bit of research. I also wanted to bring attention to the problem of homeless teens right here in Albuquerque. We have such a great city, but this is a scourge that needs to be fixed.

What makes this novel unique in the Young Adult (YA) romantic/suspense market?
Looking at what’s available on amazon in the YA romantic suspense market, it seems like much of it is futuristic or dystopian. I think my book is unique, perhaps, because Josh and Bernie are such normal people. I also think the recipe section is fairly unique to YA.

How does this novel differ from your paranormal The Seeker Series?
First, there is nothing magical or other-worldly in The Way to Her Heart, with the possible exception of Josh’s dreams. The other major difference is in the POV. The Seeker Series was, with exception of a short scene in Dreamer, all first person from Ally. The Way to Her Heart is told from a third person alternating POV so readers get to know what both Josh and Bernie are thinking.

Why did you decide to make food an integral part of the story? (You’ve even included recipes at the back of the book— any plans for marketing tie-ins?)
Marketing tie-ins??? I love this idea! I think I decided to make food so integral because of the importance food has as a basic human need. Bernie is homeless and hunger is a reality for her. Josh has never known hunger, but recognizes the importance of food. Cooking has been a powerful thing in his life, especially since his dad died, and he feels a need to share it with others, especially Bernie. One of my favorite lines in the whole book is when Bernie tells him he doesn’t always have to provide dinner for her when she goes to his house. “It’s what I do, Bernie,” is how he answers her.

Tell us more about the book: where the story idea came from, how long it took to write, editing cycle, etc.
The basic idea for the story really came from seeing students (I’m a high school teacher by day) who are experiencing various levels of homelessness and being able to do so little about it. I had a student last year who had to leave home and spent most of the second semester couch-surfing among various friends and relatives. The counselor and I tried so hard to get him some help, but the bureaucratic red tape was unbelievable! When he turned 18, there was nothing else we could do. It was heartbreaking. I think I exorcised a few demons by writing this book. It took me about three months to write the first draft, which is pretty typical for me. It was another month or so to revise and get feedback from my street team. I submitted it to my publisher in late October 2015, began the official editing process in January, and the book was released March 29, 2016.

Share a bit of your journey to publication.
When I finished Seeker, I went to a writer’s conference and started looking into the process of querying agents and publishers. I was working on Dreamer, the second book in The Seeker Series, and trying to figure out how to get the series out to the big, wide world. Several dozen rejections later I decided to self-publish. I had some great (I thought) literary titles for the books and designed my own covers. Let’s just say I should not give up my day job to become a cover designer. I self-pubbed the first two books in the series, but kept querying—apparently I am a glutton for punishment. I had quite a few responses that asked for the first 50 pages or the entire manuscript, but no firm offers. I was working on the cover for the third book when things changed. Imagine my surprise when a small press, Limitless Publishing, wrote back and said they wanted to offer me a contract for the whole series. #HappyDance! It has been lots of fun working with them to get The Seeker Series out to the public. The first thing they said was I needed to change the titles. Boo. But they had a point, and I actually went back to the original titles I’d chosen.

What are the challenges of writing for a YA market?
It’s a tough, oversaturated market with somewhat limited readership. I’m actually working on an adult contemporary romance right now, and I’m amazed at how quickly it is gaining new reads on Wattpad compared with my YA stories. I will always love YA, but market realities are swiftly convincing me to focus more time on the adult romance market. I have some fun story ideas for that, so it’s all good. I just like to write.

When did you know you were a writer?
I’ve always suspected I was a writer, and for many years had vague plans to write a novel “some day.” After raising three kids and completing two graduate degrees, it was time to see if I could actually complete a novel. Turns out that writing is something I fully enjoy, and I don’t have to “make” myself do it. I look forward to my writing time every evening and on the weekends. The summer is pure joy because I can write every day.

What are the hardest kinds of scenes for you to write, and what do you do to get over this hurdle?
For me the hardest scenes have proved to be the violent scenes. I get so involved and sucked in that I end up very emotional and usually with a pounding headache.

Do you have other creative outlets besides writing?
My other creative outlets are music related. I was a band director in a previous life and I still enjoy playing, particularly flute and piano. I play and sing frequently at church and recently took part in a faculty band for the school talent show. We rewrote Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” and made it “Eye of the Griffin”—we totally rocked it!!! Seriously, you should check it out on youtube: Cat and the Critical Friends.

What advice do you have for writers still striving for publication?
Just keep writing, just keep writing…. Seriously, though. DO NOT GIVE UP!!! If you love it, write it. Every writer has a different journey and you have so many options available now. Write, query, revise. Repeat.

What writing projects are you working on now?
As I said before, I’m working on an adult contemporary romantic suspense, tentatively titled So They Loved. The title comes from Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and Turtle. It’s the first book in a six-book series called The DeLucas. I’m having an absolute blast writing it. You can check it out as I write it on Wattpad.