HOW WRITING HAS IMPACTED MY READING

By Sharon Ewing

I’ve always been an avid reader beginning with picture books, illustrated classics, fairy tales, and even textbooks. As a youth I read compulsively, even the cereal boxes we sat on the breakfast table before school.  I wasn’t exactly a discriminating reader. My sister looked at me as though I’d lost my mind when I told her, as we walked to school, how excited I was to get my new textbooks. I just loved words. I loved learning about anything new.  In my teen years, dad and I would walk to the library and lug home an armload of books. I never thought about how a story was put together, or much about the person behind the words.

I’ve always liked books with tons of detail and words I’d never encountered. I’ve poured over Hawthorne, Cooper, Michener, Tolstoy and reveled in their marathon-like sentences, using punctuation I knew I could never hope to imitate.  I sat many summers with my head in books required for the next year.  I could choose a few.  I read them all.

 I continue to be a lover of detail and vocabulary, but now have a deeper understanding of the beauty of simple concise sentences as well. I understand better the need for sentence variety. Through new reading choices, I’ve developed an appreciation for different styles.

Now I’m not so much a compulsive reader. I’m much more likely to discard a book when the plot lags, the characters need a transfusion or the dialogue becomes redundant.  Before my transition from reader to writer, I often felt guilty when I didn’t finish a book.  If someone had asked me why I didn’t like the book, I would have likely have said that it had become boring; I’d lost interest.  Now when I discard a book or a story, I can usually detail the reason. 

I still carve time out of my day to read and enjoy many different genres, but I observe my story more, as I read. I have found authors who can satisfy my love of place through poetic description but also move the story and the reader more through action scenes and dialogue. I’ve studied their economy of words, and my writing has changed because of these stories.

I believe we all go through an evolution of reading styles and genres from cradle to grave.  But I don’t think I’d ever have become as engrossed in analyzing the elements of a great story along the way if I hadn’t chosen to try my hand at constructing my own stories.  We can never know, as we chose a path to explore, what lies ahead.  My adventure has just begun.

THE ANATOMY OF A CHAPTER

By El Ochiis

Chapters tend to get little, if any, respect, yet, for most writers, they are a non-negotiable part of the novel-reading experience.  Unless you have a very good reason to not have chapters, you need them.  For me, as a writer, chapters and their titles are a necessity for creating structure within my novels and/or short stories. 

Your story may be fascinating and bewitching, but humans aren’t meant to consume an entire 200-plus page novel in one sitting. It’s just too much to process. Chapters give the reader a chance to think about what’s happened in the story thus far and anticipate what happens next - helping you tighten your storytelling so that the readers stay on the edge of their seats. Thematically relevant titles connect to the story and give cohesion to your novels and stories:

“He disagreed with something that ate him,” chapter 14, Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming. 

“I Begin Life on My Own Account, And Don’t Like It,” chapter 11, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens. 

Writers tend to get confused between a chapter and a scene.  A scene happens when your characters interact with each other. The scene does not mean scenery. In other words, a scene is not the same thing as the setting or the location where the action takes place. The scene is the action. Each scene has a beginning, middle, and end.

A chapter, on the other hand, may contain one scene, or, it may contain multiple scenes. A chapter is not a scene. Rather, a chapter is a division in your book. It’s where you, the writer, decide to give the reader a chance to process what they’ve read while you rearrange stuff in the background: 

 “Nikki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name and I – perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past – insisted on an English one.” - A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro.  In only two sentences the narrator has hinted at tensions between past and present, mother and father, England and Japan.

“Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.” - Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin.  Deliciously clear language, yet, the content is about how brutal and controlling an inherited story can be, how the repeated words of others can predetermine the life of another. 

Here are some tips you can use when building out book chapters:

Start with action - try opening a chapter in the middle of a scene.  Shape around plot development – an unresolved conflict between characters, a new crucial piece of information, or an actual cliff, keep the reader engaged. Approach each chapter with a specific goal - One chapter might be focused on a chase scene; The goal of another might be introducing the hero; Use chapter titling to distill your focus - Chapter titles can be a summary not only of where the story has come from, but where it plans to go next.  Consider pacing – the chance for your main character to recap all that’s happened and plan what he/she will do next.; show a different point of view - Each new chapter can allow different characters to take over as the main POV and chime in with their view of an unfolding event; seek balance - mark the passages that are scenes, leaving the passages that are dramatic narration unmarked. Is there an imbalance between the two types of narration? If so, add some dramatic narration into scenes or vice versa.

Above all, be sure to give each chapter a purpose that ties into the bigger story.

 

INSPIRATION

By Sharon May

We all have those moments when a jolt of inspiration infuses our writing. A conversation had or overheard, a book read, a sunset seen, anything can inspire us and bring us closer to the spirit of the subjects we tackle. By spirit, I mean that essence of what we are trying to re-create in our writing, those qualities that make the subject different and noteworthy.

Eastern Kentucky mountain landscapes and the inhabitants usually give me that jolt. But trips to see family in 2020 were depressing, not inspirational. I felt the lifelines to my birthplace fading away, and just maybe the Appalachian ways of life were dying too.

The hollow where I visited grandparents and other family and friends no longer exists, having been bulldozed for a new road that will reduce drive time radically between McDowell and Pikeville area. For most of my life, family gatherings included upwards of 30 people. Last year with the pandemic and recent deaths and illnesses, we couldn’t get a foursome for Pinochle.

Last month, I was home to celebrate my dad’s birthday and decorate graves for Memorial Day (in the hills, we celebrate everyone who has died, not just those in military service). Traveling from my parents’ house on US 23 to the two cemeteries up Left Beaver, we moved from “civilization” (what I call the world of fast-food and Walmart) to the reality of Appalachia. Four-laned highways dwindled to one-and-a-half lanes that require someone pull off the road if you meet another car, which in turn become one lane that curls its way up mountains without the benefit of shoulders nor guard rails.

Deep in the mountains where crumbling shacks, some of which are inhabited, sit precariously on mountain sides or in flood plains, I find inspiration. There is beauty, even in those shacks, in the lush greens of summer, constant reminders of the poverty and hopelessness that prevail.

Appalachian people are simultaneously complex and stereotypical, providing me with wonderful characters. We are a quare folk, as we say when we refer to our strange ways and honor code. Imagine waking up from a nap, only to find a middle-aged stranger dressed in all black from cowboy boots to leather cowboy hat sitting in your parents’ dining room, chatting about smoking pot as if he’s known the family all his life. Turns out, he is the new companion of my widowed aunt, and from a family, my dad knows well, having worked his several of his relatives. “Who you kin to?” and “Where are you from?” establish our links to our pasts.

Appalachia has changed, like all of America, as a result of media and transportation, but it is still a unique part of America, a culture with a story to tell. Even as my family shrinks, the hills still stand, and I am inspired.

WHITE AUTHOR, BLACK CHARACTERS

By Kasie Whitener

My characters are real to me and I think I’ve written them authentically. But how can I know for sure?

My own friendships have shaped all my characters and it’s from those relationships that I’ve written my main character Brian’s friends.

The topic of race is only briefly mentioned in After December but there are two scenes in Before Pittsburgh where Brian’s friend Chris is treated differently because he’s Black. The way Brian, Chris, Joel, and Jason navigate those experiences helps build their brotherhood.

In Before Pittsburgh, Brian needed his heart broken. Jada popped off the page for me. She was exactly who I wanted Brian to meet in grad school. She challenged him, confused him, and rejected him.

I had a beta reader, John, who grew up one of a few Black kids in his white suburb in the 90s, and he said the passages were all fine. But I sought my friend Len Lawson’s perspective after he made this observation to our SCWA diversity committee:

“Fictional characters of color, especially black characters, tend to fall either into two categories: in need of a white savior to rescue them or as the magical Negro savior to scaffold a white character’s enlightenment.”

I emailed him and asked if he’d be willing to have a conversation with me. It’s a difficult conversation to have. Even inviting John to read the piece and give me feedback was complicated. If the work was completely off base, insulting, or racist, they would say so. It’s hard to admit I may have written that. Hard to ask someone to tell me I had.

“Why did you make these characters Black?” Len asked.

“I didn’t. That’s just who they are.” Chris and Jada didn’t have to be Black. The novel could work with all white characters, but it wouldn’t be authentic for me or Brian.

Diversity and inclusivity are not a political climate. Asking for John and Len to review Before Pittsburgh and give feedback was not about virtue signaling or being woke. I asked them to review the work because I’m not Black.

I’m also not a lesbian. And since one of the characters in Before Pittsburgh is, I asked my friend Agata to read Abbie’s scenes and give me feedback. I’ve had white men read Brian and give me feedback on him because I’m female.

I genuinely want to get this right. My characters deserve my best work. My readers deserve my best work. Just as I’ve asked for help with dialogue, plot development, and dramatic tension, I asked for help with the characterization of characters whose experience is different than my own.

The scope of Brian’s relationships is what Before Pittsburgh is all about. The friendships he earns are what make him who he is. Just as my own friends have grown me up by sharing their lives with me. Experience is where authenticity comes from.

There’s nothing wrong with seeking input from diverse readers. We all have blind spots. It’s best to correct them before the book is published.