Character Recipe: Kathy Soup

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I went to a writing event last night and author Cindy R. Williams taught about Character Recipes, an approach she uses to get to know her characters. Basically, you create a recipe for your character that includes things like physical characteristics, personality traits, flaws, fears, and dreams.

Instead of doing it on a character, we practiced it by doing it on ourselves. Other people wrote recipes that were much cleverer than mine, but mine still paints a fairly decent picture of who I am today. So here is my character recipe:

Kathy Soup

Soup

  • 1 husband in graduate school and 2 tiny girls
  • 1 pair of hazel eyes
  • 3 Tablespoons of sleep deprivation
  • 1 pair of holey jeans, best obtained by crawling on the floor
  • Broth of dreams (prepared in advance by boiling writing, piano, yarn, film, and teaching; strain out any large chunks)
  • 10 unpolished fingernails
  • 1 classroom filled with freshmen writing students
  • 500 words of writing a day
  • Heaping scoop of perfectionism

Directions: Find a house with two little girls and a male graduate student. Watch them carefully while mincing sleep deprivation and holey jeans; sauté in hot oil. Add a broth of dreams, and with unpolished fingers, stir in a classroom of writing students and 500 words of personal writing a day. Season with a bit too much perfectionism and then be self-critical about it and everything else. Simmer for several uninterrupted hours. As this time will likely be unavailable, consider boiling rapidly for 20 minutes, hoping that will be long enough for the flavors to combine, and stirring continuously to avoid burning. Serve dinner 30 minutes late. But at least there is food on the table and the kids are still alive.

 

And now I think I need to do this exercise for some of my characters.

Photo Credit: essgee51, Creative Commons license

New Page: Metaphors about the Writing Process

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I’ve added a new page to my site with quotes and metaphors about the writing process. Okay, there’s a fair number of similes too, but similes are a type of metaphor.

The first semester I taught a college writing class, I got to the day I was supposed to teach about writing process and thought, I don’t know how to teach this.

Frustration

A visual metaphor for how I feel when I don’t know how to teach something.

Other parts of argumentation feel much more concrete and learnable: for example, you can clearly look at the examples a writer used to support their argument and analyze why they did or did not work.

Yet you can’t look at the final piece of writing and see the processes or strategies it took to get there. You may be able to tell if it was rushed or hurried, or sloppy and undeveloped thinking. But if it’s good writing, the process is basically invisible.

In regards to writing process, there are principles I believe firmly hold true: write everyday, if you’re going to procrastinate then do so wisely, research early and deeply, and turn off your internal editor while you’re writing a first draft.

Now you can say those things about writing, but how do you teach them, remember them, ingrain them? To me, that’s where metaphors about writing really come in handy. For example, if I think about writing as exercise, it makes sense that I should be writing everyday: I wouldn’t compete in a 10K without running regularly in advance.

So head on over and check out my page about writing metaphors. It’s a work in progress that will continue to evolve.

 

Image Credit: Sybren A. Stüvel, Creative Commons license

Writing is like Plate Spinning

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Plate spinning

This is a metaphor that I’m borrowing from mystery writer Michael Connelly. He writes:

From somewhere in my memory, either amateur hour TV or the boardwalk in Venice, I remember a sideshow act called plate spinning. The object of this entertainment endeavor is to rotate plates balanced on thin wooden dowels. The practitioner gets several pieces of supposedly good china spinning at once and then must quickly move from dowel to dowel, keeping everything spinning and aloft. Paid particular attention is the plate in the middle of the formation. By virtue of its position, it is the most important of the plates. If it goes down, it invariably takes several other plates with it and you have broken china all over the ground and an empty tip bucket.

In my mind I often liken writing a book to spinning plates. There are many, many different things you have to keep up and spinning at all times.

Connelly describes some of the plates that you keep spinning when you write a novel, include story structure, writing style, pacing, and background research. For him, the central plate is characterization: if that plate falls, all the other plates are going to fall with it.

If you’re writing an argument, the plates you’re spinning will include ethos, pathos, and logos, your reasons and supporting evidence, your style, your awareness of the audience, and many other things. To me, the central plate is your main overriding claim or your thesis–if it topples or loses focus, there goes your entire argument.

Here’s an awesome video of plate spinning, a little different from the show Connelly saw, but quite impressive. This is from a Beijing Acrobat show:

Make sure to check out my Metaphors about Writing page for quotes on writing and other Writing is like… posts.

 

Photo Credit: lissalou66, Creative Commons license

The quote by Michael Connelly is from a book chapter called “Characterization,” in the book Writing Mysteries: A Handbook by the Mystery Writers of America (edited by Sue Grafton). See page 57.