Writing « 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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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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September 29, 2012

The Hardest Thing

Filed under: Religion,Uncategorized,Writing — Francisco Stork @ 10:15 am

I’m often asked by some of the young people I visit: What is the hardest thing about writing? I like it when the question is “What is the hardest thing about writing” and not “What is the hardest thing about being a writer?” Being a “writer” is an ego-construction that we are tempted to bring out when we are sitting next to someone attractive in an airplane. The hardest (and most dangerous) thing about “being a writer” is seeing yourself as one, identifying yourself to yourself as a “writer”. It’s hard when this happens because of all the mental junk that this type of identification conjures and because wearing the writer’s hat has an effect (not a good one, I think) on your writing. So, now that we cleared that up! What’s the hardest thing about writing? The hardest thing about writing is pouring your heart and soul and effort into writing and having your work be deemed not worthy of publication. Everywhere I go I meet people who love to write, people who have been writing since they were children, people who feel they are called to write, but whose work has not been published despite their life-long attempts to do so. I’ve had the privilege of reading the work of some of these people. Sometimes, it is fairly obvious that the person is more interested in being a writer (see above) than in writing. There are works where the author clearly needs to practice more. (Yes, writing, like any other art requires repetition and mastery of form.) There are other cases where the work is stylistically perfect but something is missing, some soul, some spark is not there. Then there are those where you can just feel the author’s heart and passion, where you can see the author’s care for words and structure and everything that makes good writing, and still no publication despite repeated efforts. And I say to myself, “My gosh, this book is so much better than so many others floating out there in the published world.” I write a book that comes from the deepest part of myself. I do my best, my very best. I reflect for months, maybe years. I give the characters all the time to grow and become real in me. I revise. The story and the people in the story touches me. I work until there’s nothing more than I can change. I’ve taken the book as far as I can. I give it to my Beta readers (and to one or two Alphas!) They love it. They give me one or two suggestions which I make. I send it out. Days go by. Surprisingly, no one picks up the phone and says “You hit this one out the ball park! I found two typos we should fix, but otherwise it’s ready to go out.” Then it happens. Through letters or dry, despairing silence it hits you that this story that you wrung out with your heart’s blood with a life-time of learning, with all the gifts God gave you, this story does not click, does not resonate with, does not impress, does not economically or otherwise persuade the persons who have the power to publish it. This is the hardest thing about writing. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There are, of course, a number of consolations that I tell myself and others. Heartfelt consolations. “Look,” I say, “when you face your maker, you are not going to be asked why you didn’t publish. You’re going to be asked why you didn’t write. So keep writing, no matter what.” I pull out my Bhagavad Gita and point to the passages where Krishna urges Arjuna to give it all he has and then forget about the results. Do what you have to do, which includes trying your hardest to publish your work, but do it without anxiety knowing that you did your part, the rest is up to the Great Mystery that rescues and uses all our good deeds and good thoughts and puts them to use in ways unknown to us. So I recite all these words of comfort and still it hurts. There’s no way of avoiding the hurt. There’s no way. Keep trying? There’s no need to say this. If you like writing rather than being a writer, you’ll keep on writing. If only we would not let this “failure” affect us, damage who we are. If only we could cradle and succor our aspirations the way we do a tender child. If only we could see the goodness and the power that is there at the source of our writing and let it fill us with gratitude for its uniqueness, for the way it makes us see the world, for the compassion it brought to our life, for the lessons it has taught us, for the way its pain softened us and brought us closer to those who suffer much, so much more than us. If only we could. Take care of yourself my dear friend. The hardest thing is hard, but faith, hope and love are in the hard things.

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