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But researching and reading  is a LOT easier than writing an exciting story, and I don't want to let the research become an excuse for not writing......so I'm limiting myself to looking at these (and other fascinating objects from the time, like candidates for the miniature the heroine wears) in the evening, outlining in the morning.

Or at least that is the plan. And I won't start actually writing until both are done -- that is, when the story has reached a satisfying conclusion and the world is solid and clear.

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You can listen to Roald's Dahls' answers here. The interview was given in 1988, two years before his death, in the gypsy caravan (or shepherd's hut?)

in his garden. The interviewer was Todd McCormack.

WHAT IS IT LIKE WRITING A BOOK?
When you’re writing, it’s rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe you up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it’s got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you’ve done all ties up. But it’s a very, very long, slow process.

HOW DO YOU GET THE IDEAS FOR YOUR STORIES?
It starts always with a tiny little seed of an idea, a little germ, and that even doesn’t come very easily. You can be mooching around for a year or so before you get a good one. When I do get a good one, mind you, I quickly write it down so that I won’t forget it, because it disappears otherwise rather like a dream. But when I get it, I don’t dash up here and start to write it. I’m very careful. I walk around it and look at it and sniff it and then see if I think it will go. Because once you start, you’re embarked on a year’s work and so it’s a big decision.

HOW DID YOU GET THE IDEA FOR JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH?
I had a kind of fascination with the thought that an apple-there’re a lot of apple trees around here, and fruit trees, and you can watch them through the summer getting bigger and bigger from a tiny little apple to bigger and bigger ones, and it seemed to me an obvious thought-what would happen if it didn’t stop growing? Why should it stop growing at a certain size? And this appealed to me and I thought this was quite a nice little idea and [then I had to think] of which fruit I should take for my story. I thought apple, pear, plum, peach. Peach is rather nice, a lovely fruit. It’s pretty and it’s big and it’s squishy and you can go into it and it’s got a big seen in the middle that you can play with. And so the story started.

WHAT IS YOUR WORK ROUTINE?
My work routine is very simple and it’s always been so for the last 45 years. The great thing, of course, is never to work too long at a stretch, because after about two hours you are not at your highest peak of concentration, so you have to stop. Some writers choose certain times to write, others [choose] other times, and it suits me to start rather late. I start at 10 o’clock and I stop at 12. Always. However well I’m going, I will stay there until 12, even if I’m a bit stuck. You have to keep your bottom on the chair and stick it out. Otherwise, if you start getting in the habit of walking away, you’ll never get it done.

HOW DO YOU KEEP THAT MOMENTUM GOING WHEN YOU ARE WRITING A NOVEL?
One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, the you are in trouble!

WHAT IS THE SECRET TO KEEPING YOUR READERS ENTERTAINED?
My lucky thing is I laugh at exactly the same jokes that children laugh at and that’s one reason I’m able to do it. I don’t sit out here roaring with laughter, but you have wonderful inside jokes all the time and it’s got to be exciting, it’s got to be fast, it’s got to have a good plot, but it’s got to be funny. It’s got to be funny. And each book I do is a different level of that. Oh, The Witches is quite different from The BFG or James [and the Giant Peach] or Danny [the Champion of the World]. The line between roaring with laughter and crying because it’s a disaster is a very, very fine one. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he’s broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it’s not a joke anymore. I don’t know, there’s a fine line and you just have to try to find it.

HOW DO YOU CREATE INTERESTING CHARACTERS?
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good have people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books. I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.

HOW DO YOU INCLUDE HORRIFIC EVENTS WITHOUT SCARING YOUR READERS?
You never describe any horrors happening, you just say that they do happen. Children who got crunched up in Willy Wonka’s chocolate machine were carries away and that was the end of it. When the parents screamed, “Where has he gone?” and Wonka said, “Well, he’s gone to be made into fudge,” that’s where you laugh, because you don’t see it happening, you don’t hear the child screaming or anything like that ever, ever, ever.

HOW MUCH HAS LIVING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE INFLUENCED YOU?
I wouldn’t live anywhere else except in the country, here. And, of course, if you live in the country, your work is bound to be influenced by it in a lot of ways, not pure fantasy like Charlie with chocolate factories, witches, and BFG’s, but the others that are influenced by everything around you. I suppose the one [book] that is most dependent purely on this countryside around here is Danny the Champion of the World, and I rather love that book. And when I was planning it, wondering where I was going to let Danny and his father live, all I had to do, I didn’t realize it, all I had to do was look around my own garden and there it was.

ROALD DAHL ON THE SUBJECT OF CHOCOLATE:
In the seven years of this glorious and golden decade [the 1930s], all the great classic chocolates were invented: the Crunchie, the Whole Nut bar, the Mars bar, the Black Magic assortment, Tiffin, Caramello, Aero, Malteser, the Quality Street assortment, Kit Kat, Rolo, and Smarties. In music the equivalent would be the golden age when compositions by Bach and Mozart and Beethoven were given to us. In painting it was the equivalent of the Renaissance in Italian art and the advent of the Impressionsists toward the end of the nineteenth century. In literature it was Tolstoy and Balzac and Dickens. I tell you, there has been nothing like it in the history of chocolate and there never will be.
_______________________________________________________

I find what he said about writing being like a long, long walk through a landscape and not seeing the whole book until you're standing on a high hill at the end very encouraging. As I write things often I don't know what I'm doing -- or where I'm going -- only now at the end (I am ALMOST done with my last chapter!) do I see what is important (to me, anyhow!) in what I've written.

To Roald Dahl, "everything fit" (but maybe that was after rewriting?). I will have to take out some things and rewrite others in order for the whole landscape to work -- but that, as a friend said, is what revisions are for!

The idea of stopping for the day when you know what is going to happen next is one I had read before (in some Hemingway essay or biography). But Hemingway didn't explain it or admit the part about being stuck if you don't do it -- so I GET IT when Roald Dahl says it.

Hurray for Roald Dahl and children's books!

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Lately I've been coaching people writing fiction, and have noticed some big differences between published and unpublished manuscripts.  The first 4 can all be corrected if the writer wants to take the trouble to correct them; the next 3 three I think depend upon having some talent......

The list helped me fix my OWN writing and I sent it along to one of the people I coach, too. He also found it helpful -- maybe some of you will.

If you disagree with some or can think of others I haven't mentioned, PLEASE comment.

1. Published writers use dialog to move the story along or develop character. Unpublished writers use it to take up space or give the reader information that could be more economically given in some other way --
"Hello, Tom -- we haven't seen each other since the Gold Rush, though of course I"ve known you since your unknown mother deposited you on my doorstep in 1828....."
or left out completely.

UPWs almost always let their dialog go on way too long. Conversations in books (unlike conversations in real life!) should end as soon as their dramatic purpose has been achieved.

2. PWs give readers just the right amount of back story/information about the characters and situation -- not too much, not too little. UPWs tend to either give WAY too much -- telling us all much more about the characters' pasts or the present situation than we need to know -- or so little that we are completely confused.

3. Simiarly, UPWs often spend more time describing a scene/setting it up than letting it play out. PWs concentrate their energies and our attention on what happens -- and in every scene, something does.

4. UPWs introduce characters, facts, situations and then abandon them without developing them or bringing them to a conclusion. PWs make sure that if there is a gun lying on the table, it goes off, or fails to go off, or gets confused for the murder weapon or plays some other role in the story. Otherwise, why mention it? Similarly, if they describe a character in Chapter 4, that character has a role in what happens. He doesn't just get introduced in a paragraph of backstory, stroll in to ask about the weather, and then disappear.


5. It is amazing HOW MUCH HAPPENS in a well-constructed novel. Many amateurish attempts simply contain too little -- they're too slight to be interesting.

6. PWs write about people who come to life in the readers' minds -- their characters seem real, we care what happens to them. UPWs' characters are hard to tell apart or remember, or they're unconvincing -- they seem made-up/flat/fake and we don't care what happens to them (and often,  not much does -- see #5). Conveying what a person is like with a few well-chosen details IS an art, but being interested in other people and noticing things about them is a really good start!

I remember an amateur writer -- a doctor -- who was incredibly good at this, even though he had no writing experience. For example, he described a character as dressed in a cowboy hat and boots, and adding the comment that on anyone else, it would have looked silly or affected; but on him, it looked natural and stylish. Later in the scene, when this character replied to something another character had said, the narrator commented that he couldn't tell what he was thinking:
"His was a poker face."
When, later, this same character saved the day with a really brilliant move, it all fit, we believed it -- because the author had chosen the right details to describe him/let us know what he was like.

7. Some writers (both published and unpublished, IMHO) simply have nothing to say -- and these people shouldn't be writing at all, or should wait until they've thought of something.

8. PWs
"Use the right word, not its second cousin." -- Mark Twain

Some UPWs just plain can't write: they misuse words, make grammatical mistakes, are incredibly wordy, use way too many adjectives, always embellish the word "said" or avoid it in favor of words they consider more interesting -- which is like avoiding the word "the".....

This (#8) can be corrected by a little work on the part of the writer: using a dictionary (not a Thesaurus, a dictionary), mastering the concepts in a book like The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, simply paying attention!

Of course, #8 can also be fixed by a good editor, but it's been my experience that those who commit #8 also do so many of the others that I don't think any editor is likely to bother. So the ms. will never get that far.

____

Lastly, I hope this doesn't sound snobbish: I did begin by admitting that MY writing, especially in the earlier drafts, contains some of these things ...and maybe that brings me to one more:

9. PWs usually rewrite -- many, many times. UPWs seem to think one draft is enough, and when it isn't, they give up.

One of the hardest things about writing is that YOU JUST DON'T KNOW -- maybe those who give up are saving themselves a lot of wasted time and energy (if writing something that never sells is a waste of both). Or maybe they're missing the chance to find out, or get something great out into the world.

There are no guarantees, and until you've done your very, very best work I don't think anyone can tell you.

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Ever since Linda Wingerter held out these beautiful eggs she'd made (photograph by Alvina) at a long-ago Easter party,

I've loved Easter (a celebration of rebirth, after all --eggs have been used to celebrate spring and beginnings since pagan times) and home-made Easter eggs.

This past week, some children in town made these string eggs and their mother shared them with me:



They also made these, using onion skins to make the patterns and dye the eggs:



So, I choose these eggs as my image (or images) of the week. I think they say better than words can my hopes for rebirth and happy beginnings.


What are your image or images of the week (and to our readers, since blogger doesn't let you post images: words can create images, too)?

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"Procrastination is the thief of time" -- I never knew Charles Dickens said that, though it's one of my favorite sayings. He went on to add something I hadn't heard until yesterday: "Collar him!"

Excellent advice that he took himself: he never missed a deadline (even though he had weekly ones for many years) and once even climbed back into a crashed railroad carriage that was teetering on a bridge to get his due-at-the-printers-that-day ms.

The train fell into the river minutes later -- but he got his chapter in on time.

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Ed Young, author-illustrator, text as told to Libby Koponen,
The House Baba Built: An Artist’s Childhood in China
Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Age 4-8 and up

Born in 1931 the fourth of five siblings, Ed Young spent the years of the great depression, Japanese occupation, and World War II in a magnificent environment thanks to his father’s building skills and negotiating acumen. The esteemed Young, a senior talent in the world of children’s literature, celebrates his baba’s loving care and his extended family’s safe passage through terrible times in this collage-illustrated memoir.

In exchange for building the house on a Shanghai property he couldn’t afford to buy (a safe suburb of embassy housing), Baba secured use of the home for 20 years. He designed a substantial two-story edifice with many outdoor spaces and even a swimming pool. (Empty most of the time, the pool was used for riding bikes.) Young’s large-format book with several fold-out pages incorporates many old family photographs, sketches of siblings and relatives, and detailed diagrams of the house that Baba built. At the close of the story, double foldout pages display a layout sketch of both floors of the house, with tiny images of people pasted in the various rooms. Thirteen rooms are depicted, plus outdoor decks and a rooftop playground.

Koponen shapes Young’s words into a lyrical account of family life, repeating the phrase “the house that Baba built” to poetic effect. Text is interspersed scrapbook-style amongst cutouts of Young’s sketches–household members on a see-saw, roller-skating on the rooftop, dancing in the large ground floor living room. Baba, who had received a graduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1917, was cultured and somewhat westernized, but like everyone in Shanghai, the family suffered food shortages and overcrowded conditions for many years. Bombs fell nearby towards the end, but the house withstood the attacks, thanks to Baba’s sturdy construction.

Back matter includes the location of the house on a contemporary map of Shanghai, a family time line from 1915-1947, and an author’s note describing his 1990 visit to the house and how this book came into being. A fascinating window into Shanghai history, Young’s heartfelt tribute to his baba will endear children yet again to his stunning visual imagery and, this time, to his personal story as well.

Charlotte Richardson
November 2011

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Plot is definitely the thing I struggle most with in writing-- I over-think and over-complicate. So in an effort to understand what makes for a really good story, I tried to boil some books that have lasted down into one or two sentences.

My aim was to:
* get their essence -- if I've missed it, please correct me! -* try and figure out what if any patterns there are
* summarize my own work in progress the same way and see how it stacks up

If anyone has more examples I'd love to read them!

THE PLOTS

A plane crash leaves a boy alone in the wilderness, where he survives until rescued.

A plane crash leaves a group of boys on an island where some kill others until (just as the pack is hunting the hero down) they are rescued.A teenager who doesn't fit in travels in time to rescue her father from evil, finding love and self-acceptance along the way.

When a mother abandones her children in a car parking lot, the oldest daughter leads them all on a journey that ends in them finding a home with their grandmother.

A set-in-his-ways hobbit goes off to be a burgle treasure for some dwarves; he comes home rich and unrespectable.

A bratty little girl loses both parents to cholera and goes to live in a house with 100 rooms all shut up and a garden. She tends the garden, makes friends, and turns into a nice child.

An adored only daughter is left at a boarding school, where she's the pet pupil -- until her father dies penniless. The girl is made into a servant until she is rescued by a friend of her father's.

Four siblings are sent to the country during the air raids; they find their way to another world, where they fight a witch, save the land from her power, and become its kings and queens -- and then come home, to find that no time at all has elapsed in their own world.

An orphan finds out he's the son of two famous wizards and is a wizard himself. He is taken to a school, where he is famous, too; there he makes friends, learns magic, and battles enemies.

A kind-hearted girl doesn't do anything to stop the other girls from being mean to a poor girl who claims she has 100 dresses--and then, when the poor girl moves away, is very sorry.

Two children who have lost their mother are excited when a woman from Maine agrees to come live with them and hope she will stay; she does.

A girl is blown by a tornado to another world, where she goes on a perilous journey to ask a wizard how to get home, not knowing that she had the power all along.

THE PATTERNS
The character can be tested, but stay the same; or the character can be changed by the adventure--discover strengths he didn't know he possessed -- either can work. It doesn't matter. The character can have a goal (find that treasure!), or things can just happen to her (stay at this school). Either way, the character is clearly defined at the beginning and then, because of who she is, one thing leads to another.

Usually, but not always, the things that happen or that she does -- the external circumstances -- are dramatic, exciting. But I think they can be small, too, as long as the emotional stakes are high (will Sarah stay to be our mother?).

Maybe it's just because I know how successful the books were, but to me, most of these stories sound rich and satisfying. They have a kind of elegant simplicity and symmetry as well as high stakes....and most though not all of them would make me want to pick up the book.

Now if I can just refine MINE until it makes me feel the same way I'll be off to a good start.

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This is where I'm going -- not EXACTLY where (or maybe exactly where). As I said in my last post, I only have a general idea.....and since then that idea has expanded a little to include The Western Isles, where this picture was taken and not by me.

But it's how I feel right now -- I really don't know what this trip will be like, but I'm going.

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Rudyard Kipling once saw the Taj Mahal from a train window and it was so beautiful that he vowed never to go closer: nothing could equal that vision.

Since I was a teenager, I've dreamed of the islands off the coast of Scotland:
*the Orkneys as they were described in THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING by TH White (a tall stone tower castle surrounded by sea and wind)

*Iona as it looked in the film CIVILIZATION by Kenneth Clark -- again, a tower, but this one surrounded by wildflowers and wind

*a small island in the Hebrides as John MacPhee described it in the NEW YORKER--he lived there for a year, there was nothing commercial on the island except a combination of Post Office and shop, labeled with a card on the door that said "The Shop"

*another island in the Hebrides as described by Josephine Tey, one of my favorite authors, in THE SINGING SANDS -- it rains, the wind literally knocks the hero down, he comes back to his hotel really hungry and wonders what they'll give him for dinner.

He wouldn't turn up his nose at a piece of grilled sea trout, if it turned out to be that. Grilled with local butter. But he hoped for lobster --the island was famous for its lobsters -- and failing that, some herring fresh from the sea, split, and fried after being dipped in oatmeal.

His first meal in the isles of delight consisted of a couple of bright orange kippers cured and liberally dyed in Aberdeen, bread made in Glasgow...the only local produce was a pallid, haggis-shaped mound of crowdie, a white crumbly byproduct without smell or taste

.

Even though the wind has knocked him down, there's no fresh air in his room because the window won't open -- and the hero lies in his bed and laughs and laughs, for the first time in months. Other things happen and the trip turns out to be wonderful (and the island beautiful), despite the weather and the food.

*not an island (though I thought for a long time that it had been filmed on the Isle of Skye) but the village and landscape in the movie LOCAL HERO -- houses huddled by the sea, green field, no trees, white sandy beaches that go on for miles and miles.

This landscape has dominated my imagination all my life. Almost every day, I've imagined being there, in the Northern light I love and have experienced elsewhere, with the wind and the sea and the grass (I love those open landscapes) and sometimes cliffs or white beaches and whatever else is around....in some places, villages by the sea where every house is a different color (as the houses in New England were until the Greek Revival when everything got painted white).

But I've never been. Once, I had a trip all planned -- and then Blow Out the Moon was accepted and needed rewriting, so I didn't go.

Now, I AM going. At this moment, I'm more scared than excited -- WILL it be as I imagine? Probably not. For one thing, in my imagination, it's sunny-- and I know from reading and other people that it rains almost every day: one island had only 18 days without rain in a year! It may be hard to get to some islands-- there may be long waits at ferry and train stations, missed boats, hotels that are a long walk from where I land (and what I will really object to, more expensive: but it's silly to make reservations because I won't really know when I'll arrive, since when the weather is bad the ferries don't go). But that's not what worries me: I'm like Kipling, except that he saw the Taj Mahal from a train and I've seen these places in my mind's eye and on film.

But it's better to find out what they're really like -- and I hope that even if they're very different from what I'm imagining, they will be wonderful. And (this just occurred to me as I was writing this post!) even if it isn't, I will always have my imagined version. Maybe I'll even write about it someday, or the new reality the trip gives me.

In the meantime, I'll post what I do see here in

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This is (I think) the first time I've ever posted done two posts, one about something I planned to do AND one about what happened when I actually did it.