Welcome to the Two Writing Buddies dialogs, where we talk about our creative process and issues that arise in our writing.

We’re experimenting with using an author quote as a jump-off point in our discussion on writing. This time it’s one by John Gardner on plot:

In nearly all good fiction, the basic—all but inescapable—plot form is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.
–John Gardner

Robine: The key element in this oversimplified plot description is opposition, that is, conflict. The problem in my novel Marshall’s Child, according to the instructor of a writing course I took recently, is that the conflict—Kat wants a baby but her husband Marshall does not—is not compelling enough. The instructor also felt that the action should more directly be focused on advancing the plot and should not be just a sequence of events.

So the question for you, Denise, is how strong does the conflict in a story have to be? How much does a story have to rely on plot, as described above by Gardner? And does conflict equal plot? Can you have a good story “whose strength,” as Gardner suggests elsewhere, “is language or structure or playfulness, and whose plot is weak and ailing?”
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Welcome to the Two Writing Buddies dialogs, where we talk about our creative process and issues that arise in our writing.

This week’s dialog is inspired by an article by Henriette Lazaridis Power called Embracing Discomfort. It’s on the Beyond the Margins web site, a great resource for writers.

Denise: In her article, Henriette Lazaridis Power talks about the ways we avoid things that make us uneasy, and how confronting these issues  makes us better writers. She asks “What’s your greatest writing weakness? And what do you do to overcome it?”

Those questions inspired me to approach the idea of embracing discomfort on a more personal level. I’ve always liked the quote from the poet John Berryman, “Travel in the direction of your fear.” Like Henriette Lazaridis Power, I think it’s fruitful to meet your fear and discomfort head on.

So, my questions for our discussion today are: What are the sore points in your personal life and history? How do these experiences inform your writing?

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Welcome to the Two Writing Buddies dialogs (2WB for those in the know), one of a series of posts in which we talk about our creative process and issues that arise in our writing.

This week’s dialog is inspired by an interview in The Atlantic with Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog.

Robine: According to the inteview, Dubus writes his masterful works longhand with a special #2 pencil (who does that nowadays?) in a cramped, windowless, basement closetlike office. I felt suffocated when I read that. It makes me appreciate my new laptop and my office’s view onto the ever-changing woods behind my house.

As Dubus described his writing process, I so wanted to climb into his rowboat with him and his characters as he heads out to sea without a compass or a map, trusting that if he keeps on rowing, his characters will point the way and they will eventually reach some wonderful island.

Or, to drop the rowboat image, it sounds as though the author’s process is to put himself in a trancelike dream state and wait for the characters to come to life and take over the action. And, apparently, in his case they do.

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Welcome to the Two Writing Buddies dialogs (2WB for those in the know), one of a series of posts in which we talk about our creative process and issues that arise in our writing.

Robine: Denise, you and I approach the daunting task of creating back stories for our characters quite differently. Unlike you, when I sit down to write–at least in works longer than my 750-to-800-word “vignettes”–I like to have a clear idea of where I’m going. Not that I need to outline the entire novel and set it in stone, but I do need to make a road map.

Two aspects of that road map for me are

(1) creating the “what-if” sentence:

What if a woman pushing forty, who agreed to a child-free marriage to a man 10 years her senior, now wants a child of her own, but finds her world turned upside down with the appearance of 6-year-old boy her husband had fathered with another woman on the day before her wedding to him.

and (2) creating the back stories of the main characters.
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Welcome to the Two Writing Buddies dialogs (2WB for those in the know), one of a series of posts in which we talk about our creative process and issues that arise in our writing.

Denise: Hey Robine. I’m currently obsessed with creating some new characters for my latest story. Do you have any advice on bringing characters to life?

Robine: H-m-m-m ….[thinking] …. I don’t have much experience writing fictional characters, but the technique I use to bring people/characters alive in my “vignettes,” the little stories of real events and people that I sketch in my First Person Singular column for the Scituate Mariner, is probably similar. I try to give the reader a “visual” of the character. Instead of a lengthy, boring description of eye color, hair, shape, size, clothes, blah, blah, blah, I try to pick a couple of telling, unique features or characteristics of the person.

For example, here are two people from two of my vignettes. From “A Summer Day” (this story is posted in this blog):

John had a wide mouth, a shock of untamed brown hair, and a hearty deep-chested rumble of a laugh.

and from “Mrs. Cleveland and the Dickens:”

Mrs. Cleveland was a small lady with a scrunched-together face, a little like an apple left too long in the fridge’s fruit drawer…. Her false teeth clacked, which made me wonder whether her gums had shrunken too.

Note also that, at least in these two cases, I’ve asked the reader not only to picture the characters but aslo to “hear” them–i.e., rumbling laugh, clacking teeth.
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