Boxes and Bookends

There's nothing like a little mid-week alliteration, is there?

THE INSPIRATION: Creativity in Community

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

—Maya Angelou

Last Saturday was our first group creativity session over on the YouTube channel. The next two Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. EST I’ll be there running 25s—that is 25 minutes of working on creative projects and five minutes chatting… although I’ll admit, the five minutes usually end up being more like eight. What can I say?

I’m chatty.

I found the experience to be insanely productive; I’m editing my super-rough draft of the “How Story Works” book to get a solid first draft to Dr. Kelly Jones by October 15, which was her command, so that I can have it out to you all by the beginning of January. Everyone else is working on a wide variety of things. Some people were writing, some were doing household tasks, others were working on various creative projects.

If you have something you want to get done, the 25/5 (known at the Pomodoro Technique) is proving very effective in our little sample group. Come join us, if you can! It’s pretty fun! It is even possible I might continue running them from time to time after the book deadline.

I have a lot of stuff to get done in an average week, you guys. :)

THE FAT ORANGE CAT: Box it up

There’s something about boxes. Be they cardboard boxes that come in the mail with something inside that we’d forgotten we ordered; or gift boxes with some special treasure inside… or maybe something dangerous from a trickster; or a version of Schroedinger’s box, something magical that offers up knowledge that doesn’t exist until you look inside.

Today, put a box in your writing, and discover what’s inside it.

This link will bring you to an item I selected specifically to accompany this post, but you do not have to buy that thing in order to support me. Just keep popping through Amazon and buy the stuff you were going to buy anyway, and they’ll throw a couple of pennies my way.

THE TROPE: Bookends

Last week, we talked about the value of one of my least favorite writing devices: Voice Over, or VO. This week, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite writing devices: Bookends.

Bookending is when a writer opens and closes a story or a section of a story (like a chapter, or an act) with scenes that mirror each other. So we start with a scene where something happens, or an idea is introduced, and we run through our story, and then we end with a similar scene or idea or piece of dialogue. The same event is a mirror that shows us how things have changed, and as we all know, what changes in a story is how we know what it means. Bookends take a story and reflect it back upon itself, and I love it, especially when, at the end of the story, I’d completely forgotten how it began.

THE QUESTION: Nano Prep

“My recent binge of How Story Works has inspired me to - gasp! - jump back on the NaNoWriMo bandwagon. I'm trying to figure out the best way to approach this adventure. I ‘won’ NaNoWriMo back in 2009, and then made two failed attempts in 2012 and 2016. I have definite planner tendencies, but my one-and-only win was completely pantsed.

So, my question is this (and I fully acknowledge that the ‘right’ answer will be different for each writer): What are your best tips for NaNoWriMo prep? Any magic spells up your sleeve? Any tried-and-true rituals or practices?”

—Plantser

Dear Plantser,

I’m glad I’ve inspired you to come back to Nano! I think it’s a wonderful thing, for any creative endeavor, and I love seeing people join in. But where you fall on the plotter/pantser spectrum definitely will affect the way you approach it.

I think Nano, with its HEY, LET’S DO THIS energy, probably aligns most with the pantser style, someone who can run in without a plan and just do the thing. Plotters tend to like to think about things first. Make the plan, execute the plan. So my advice is going to be different depending on which way you want to go.

For everyone:

In the six weeks or so before Nano starts, do your discovery work. This means think about your story and your characters, and dabble in the following

• Build a soundtrack of music that is new to you that has the energy you want. You can pick songs for a particular character at a particular point in the story, or for a scene or event, or for general mood. Whatever.

• Create a collage, digital or physical, that has pictures of actors who might play your characters, settings for your story, mood art that evokes the tone you want. Pinterest is a great place to build a super-easy digital collage; I like 12-inch scrapbooks with pages for different characters, events, moods if I’m going physical.

• Do some discovery writing, which is writing that is not intended for the book, so it’s not cheating. Write a prologue, explain some backstory, fill out a personality test for your characters. That kind of thing.

For pantsers:

Try to forget everything you know about story structure and narrative theory until you’re done. You can apply that stuff in revision. Create the marble block now; carve it later.

For plotters:

Unlike pantsers, you need to remember your narrative theory, and use it to fill out a spreadsheet detailing your story progression. What happens, when it happens, how it happens. Plot it out but make this deal with yourself; if at any point your story needs you to deviate from the plan, you deviate from the plan.

And of course, everyone should go into Nano with the intent to write glorious crap. It’s the only way to fly.

THE PRACTICAL: The beautiful goodbye

There’s something about sitcoms, y’all. When things are hard—and they’ve been hard a lot in recent years—I spend my spare time knitting or playing Hearthstone while watching the classic sitcoms I already know by heart. In the last few years, I’ve been through “The Office” three times, “Parks and Recreation” two times, “The Good Place” thrice and “Cheers” and “Frasier” once each, which is a big haul, because they ran for eleven seasons each. Anyway, I recently came back around to “Cheers” for another round, and I just got to the part when Diane left.

Look, there are a lot of criticisms you could throw at “Cheers,” and I would argue with none of them. It celebrated toxic romance with Sam and Diane; the jokes are often fatphobic and homophobic and misogynistic; and the show is the whitest thing that has ever whited.

But all that aside, there is one thing they did right.

They ended the Sam and Diane love story beautifully.

After five tumultuous years of what was an emotionally abusive relationship to everyone involved, including the spectators, Sam and Diane are happy and relatively healthy and ready to get married. At this moment, Diane’s dream comes true; a publisher wants to publish her novel. But in order to get it ready for publication, Diane needs to go away for six months to write. Sam says “I don’t,” at their wedding, so that she can go and get her book done… but really, it’s because he knows that her life is going in a different direction now, and he’ll only hold her back.

Here’s the scene:

I love everything about this. I think it’s the best scene ever written in “Cheers.” It’s one of the best scenes ever written, period.

This scene beautifully illustrates something we so often forget, at least in mainstream American culture, and that is that the mark of a successful relationship is not that it lasts forever, but that it ends well.

There is something about “forever” that trips us up; for some reason, we think that a good relationship is one that ends in death. But that’s not true. There are lots of terrible relationships that end in death because the people involved were too stubborn or scared to get out, and they just languished together until one of them finally kicked it, likely leaving the other person a hollowed-out husk. I’d hardly call that a success.

A successful relationship is the one that leaves the people involved better than they were when they found each other.

This relationship can last a day or a lifetime; it doesn’t matter. Here, Sam is loving Diane with everything he has, and that requires letting her go. Neither of them has ever been better than they were in that moment, at the very end.

What Sam and Diane had up until this moment was a romance; in this final turn, it truly becomes a love story. Yes, there was just a shit-ton of toxicity up until this point, but they got past it, and when they left each other, they left each other better than they found each other. Yes, it’s sad, and yes, I cried, but that’s not just okay; it’s great. Fiction almost never shows us this part, and it really should, because as a culture we’ve lionized the languishing, and I don’t think that serves anyone.

Look, the inevitable consequence of love is grief. If you’re going to love anyone or anything, there is absolutely no dodging the grief bullet. No matter how a relationship ends, it will end sadly. The best we can hope for is that, when our most meaningful relationships end, we can love each other so much that we send each other along on our paths better for having known each other.

That’s the goal. That’s what you work for. That is…

Everything,

L