Francisco's Journal

December 1, 2013

Loving Your Characters

Filed under: Characters,Craftsmanship,Love,Uncategorized,Writing — Francisco Stork @ 12:50 pm

A few weeks ago, I was invited to give a lecture on character development at a writing workshop. I spent a lot of time talking about the “Iceberg Theory” of character development – that the main work involved in developing characters takes place outside of the written page, in the hours and days the author spends imagining the characters in his or her mind. This “below the surface” work is long and arduous and painful. In other words, it is a lot like learning to love another person. Here is an excerpt from that lecture, revised a little, to add some thoughts that came to me since then.

Loving your characters may seem at first like an abstract concept, a concept that authors toss around whose meaning like the word “love” itself has been lost through overuse. But I want to tell you that for me love of a character is real and is more important than any technique we may learn about how to create realistic characters. Love for a character includes many of the qualities of the kind of true, mature love that we experience in real life. On a basic level, to love your character is to like them, to like spending time with them, to find them interesting, to be patient with them and be willing to continue imagining them until they reveal themselves to you completely, until you know them as fully as one can know another, inside and out, body, mind and heart. As in the real world, love increases the more you get to know and understand the other. As in the real world, character love involves a respect for the individuality and autonomy of the other. As in real life, careful listening is needed. Who is this character telling you he or she is? As in life, character love means you will put the interests of the character above your own and you will not treat them as a means to an end. You don’t have sufficient love if your character is simply there to represent an idea or a type or a mental condition or is simply there so you can manipulate the emotions of the reader. Of course characters are only a part of the greater whole which makes up the world of the novel. But to love your character is different from loving your plot or your setting. There is something about loving your character that makes them distinct and independent and that touches you in a way different, more personal, that any other aspect of your novel. Loving your character hurts because it sometimes happens that to love them you first need to love a part of yourself that is embodied in your character. It is love that makes you want to know your character deeply even if you know that what you discover might be painful. It is through love that you discover your character’s uniqueness and in love that you understand and accept that character’s humanity, flaws and all. And finally it is love that guides you in how you present that character to the readers so that they too might share in the understanding and compassion you’ve developed for your character, in your awe at your character’s complex concreteness, in your love.

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August 7, 2013

If You Want To Write

Filed under: Uncategorized — Francisco Stork @ 9:25 am

One of my favorite books on writing is “If you Want to Write” by Brenda Ueland. What I like the most about this little book, written in 1938 by a mostly unknown writer and teacher is its tone – a lack of pretentiousness about the act of writing together with it’s encouragement to write from the heart. Here are some of Brenda Ueland’s words put together by me from different parts of her book. (I’ve read her book many times and so I know unequivocally that she doesn’t mind.)

All people long to write (this is natural and right) – but we become timid, anxious, perfectionists. So many people are afraid of writing a poor story they never write. The thing to say to such people is: “See how bad a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. I will give you ten dollars if you write something thoroughly dull.” All people have in them this power to write greatly and will, when they express freely and carelessly what is in THEM. The writer has a feeling and utters it from his true self, the reader reads it and is immediately infected. If the writer has good ideas but is not good himself, there is no infection, nobody will be really affected by his ideas, enkindled or changed. Now to have things alive and interesting, it must be personal, it must come from the “I”. What I know, what I feel. Art is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple passionate way, you try to show this beauty in things to others. The creative power does not come from ambition. Ambition injures it and makes it a nervous strain and hard work. Writing is not a performance but a generosity. Write to enlarge the soul. Work freely and rollickingly as if you were talking to a friend who loves you.

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June 8, 2013

Passion

Filed under: memories,passion,Uncategorized,Vocation,Writing — Francisco Stork @ 12:54 pm

(A question by a young friend and my answer to her)

Q: How did you discover that writing was your passion and how did you actively pursue that career path.

A: I’ve been thinking about your question for a while now. I think the word “passion” threw me off. Is writing my passion? These days we tend to lift the word “passion” from the context of romantic love where it often means a kind of absorbing, exploding obsession, and apply it to other aspects of life. I’ve heard the word used with respect to golf, the stock market and rock climbing. But writing doesn’t quite feel like this kind of passion to me. There is another meaning to the word “passion” that is not much in use these days: suffering. Writing often resembles that kind of passion.

More than a passion, I like to think of my writing as a vocation — something that I am called to do. Whether you believe in a “caller” who is doing the calling or not, a vocation is, as one author said, the place where the gladness in your heart meets the world’s great need. Vocation happens when you discover your talent, something you are good at, and you find a way to make the world a little better place through the use of the talent.

I’m not exactly sure when I got the idea that I wanted to be a writer. Maybe it was when I was eight years old after I finished reading my first book and said I was going to write one too and my father gave me a typewriter. But there’s a difference between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write. I didn’t want to write until I was fifteen years old and I started keeping a daily journal. It was around that time that I first suffered an episode of depression and writing was the one thing that helped. I put everything in these journals: poems, thoughts, stories, rants of love and despair. I didn’t think too much about what or how I was writing. I simply wrote and the writing became a habit, the training ground that allowed me to write and publish a novel thirty or so years later.

I went to college and then to graduate school hoping to be a writer. But graduate school wanted scholars who wrote about an obscure area of literature that no one knew anything about, and that was not the kind of writing I wanted to do. So I went to law school thinking that I could practice law and write on the side. But the legal jobs I worked in were so demanding and time-consuming there was no time to write or even read books that were not legal books.

I was about forty-five years old when I discovered that ignoring the call to be who you are meant to be will eventually lead to very devastating and painful personal results. If you don’t exercise a talent given to you, the energy behind that talent will explode in addictions or depression or in physical illness or in countless other painful ways. So, I took it upon myself to turn my daily habit of journal writing into the writing of a novel. I woke up at 4:00 A.M. and wrote for two hours before going to my legal job. After a year or so I had a draft that I sent out and five years later, after many rejections and many revisions, I found someone willing to publish it.

I am sixty now and my sixth novel will be published next year. I’ve written four of my novels while working as a lawyer for a state agency that builds homes for low-income persons. I was fortunate enough to find a legal job that is less demanding and less stressful than those early jobs I took right out of law school. But it is still hard to find enough mental and emotional energy to do both the legal work and the creative work. I find a way to do it by realizing that it is a slow process that requires patience and persistence and lots of kindness to myself. I write because I’m somewhat good at it and the world needs us to do the things we’re good at.

But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that writing does not share any of the enthusiasm and fun that is associated with passion. There’s a joy that I find in writing that is deep and meaningful, a joy that, strange as this may sound, doesn’t always feel good, but is always worth having. If you ever find yourself doing the right thing, no matter how hard it is, you’ll know the joy I’m talking about.

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