To Be or Not to Be…”The Writer” At the Party

Karen Harrington

Absolutely true comments made to me at a recent party after the host introduced me as a writer.

Guest: Oh, what’s your book about?
Me: A family tragedy. A husband is shocked to learn his gentle wife has committed murder and begins looking for clues about impulsive violence in her family tree.
Guest: Ooooooh. Maybe the next one will be more hopeful.
[Goes in search of dip.]

Guest: Where do you get your inspiration?
Me: I like exploring the perspective of being the fly on the wall when something happens.
Guest: My ex-husband is a psychopath. Now there’s a story.

Guest: Really? You wrote a book? I have a great story. Let me tell you about it. . .
[Ten minutes tick by]
Me: Really? You should write that. You have a lot of passion for it.
Guest: No, this needs to be told. These people ripped people off. They were bad people.
Me: So you quit?
Guest: No way. It’s a good company to work for.

Guest: Your book is about generations? Let me tell you about mine. I know I just met you but. . .
Me: [accepts grateful drink from passing waiter]
Guest: Okay, so I wasn’t my father’s favorite child.

Guest: A book? A big person book?
Me: Uh, yes.

This got me to thinking: I wonder what kind of responses artists of all disciplines receive when they are introduced as The Writer. The Painter. The Photographer. The Sculptor.

So tell me, what’s the most interesting thing someone has asked or said to you?

Karen Harrington is the author of JANEOLOGY (spring 2008). Visit her at www.karenharringtonbooks.com

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 26

by Karen Harrington

As of 9:45 pm this past Sunday, I completed the 2007 NaNoWriMo challenge. Coming in at just under 51,000 words, I have a first draft of No Teddy Bears. A first draft I am proud of because I crossed the finish line, I have a story with a beginning, middle and end. And unlike some of my NaNoWriMo colleagues, I think I have something worthy of the editing process. Now, if there’s a one-month editing challenge lurking about somewhere, count me out!

So do I have any lessons to share?

Nothing really revolutionary to the writing process. But this adventure did reinforce several basic writing habits that separate writers from wanna-be writers.

1. Write every day.
• This is a must just to build up one’s writing muscle. Just as a concert pianist must practice for a recital each day, so, too, a writer must practice her skills each day so that when the brilliant idea strikes, her metaphorical pencil is sharpened.

2. Write, don’t tell.
• You cannot talk about your story while you are writing it. Someone told me this years ago and it took a long time to understand why this is a good rule. Why? Because your enthusiasm for the story must flow from your fingers first. If it comes from your mouth first, you have just leached off some of the energy in the talking about it and your passion will want. Write it. Then talk about it. (Of course, I realize I broke this rule for NaNoWriMo somewhat. But I knew you would hold me accountable to the finish and that’s a pretty decent motivator.)

3. Begin with the seed of a scene that fascinates you.
• It’s almost imperative to begin any piece of writing with a scene or idea you cannot wait to write. It’s the imaginary carrot that you get to chase for a month, a year, whatever amount of time. For example, Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, found the genesis of that story in an image of a plane falling from the sky. This was his original idea. The story of who was in the plane, why it was falling and onto what country it was falling all started from that first compelling image.

In much the same way, one seminal image fed my process throughout the NaNoWriMo challenge. It was a simple exchange of dialogue that I heard on an investigative news report between a reporter and a four year old little girl. I was pleased to find that story still exists in cyperspace. Here’s the link.

Read to the end of this feature, and you’ll have some idea about why this was such a powerful inspiration.

Have you read it now? Good. Then there will be no spoilers as I share the following.

I wanted to know about those children. Who they were? What kind of spirit they had to weather such a horrible storm? I wanted to see what kind of moxie was within a little girl who boiled down her abusive foster home experience by saying, “There were no teddy bears.” It’s a cautionary tale about the ideals of childhood. Her foster parents had robbed her of part of her childhood. She interpreted this as an absence of her teddy bear – a symbol of childish innocence. Wonderful. That was my carrot. My quest to get to the end of my story, to be able to flesh out the scene where my little girl, Claire Chaucer, gets to say that line and the cusp of her rescue.

And now I think I will relax. Let the story marinate for a while in its present stew of adverbs, clunky transitions and bad grammar.

Until next time.

Karen Harrington is a former speechwriter and the author of the upcoming Kunati Books release JANEOLOGY. For more info, visit her at www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 18

by Karen Harrington

November 18, 2007

Much as I had anticipated, the fire is burning out in the writing of my NaNoWriMo Dickensian-foster children in peril novel No Teddy Bears. I hit this slump in the middle of last week. A big Oh Well. I’m feeling a tad Eeyorish about, well, how I feel. I want to go on. Press on. But it is getting tougher. Thanksgiving is a mere few days away and I have a giant vat of homemade Zinfandel Cranberry Sauce to make. (It’s Dee-Lish.) And, I have a leak in my roof. (An actual drywall has fallen off the ceiling kind of leak.) Thus, much of last week, my writing time (generally 2-4 each afternoon when my toddlers nap) was usurped by roofing repair folks with clipboards and business cards who have a lot of questions and don’t care that I have a novel to write. They just want to know if I want 20 or 30 year shingles or ones made out of a product called Malarkey. I’m not kidding. Malarkey. He wrote it down. Arghhh!

Well, about two on Saturday afternoon, my burning ember of inspiration shored up into a full fledged crackling fire when my evil character Ms. Vallop suddenly had an epiphany at the Stop N Shop.

…It was at this moment that a strange fate stepped into the life of Ms. Vallop. There, on the break room table, the American Enquirer stared back at her in all its large type print.

Woman In Trailer Park Wins Texas Lottery

For as long as she could remember, her dream had been to live in a trailer park. To her, it seemed like a small paradise. A house that was too small to get really dirty. A house you could drive almost anywhere. And best of all, a house with such a low payment, she would no longer have to work. Yes, her mind began spinning. She saw how she could rent her house on Bellevue Drive. That income plus the $1372 from the SYSTEM would be plenty to live on and not have to work.

She thought it was a most ingenious idea. So she quickly used the rest of her break time rummaging through the classifieds in the newspapers, in search of her new dream house on wheels.

How did this idea come about? I’m not sure, but I can tell you that I was once a grocery store checker. I always spent my breaks eating damaged, discounted Oreeios and reading the worst tabloid papers. They always featured stories about trailer parks or aliens, or both. (This was back in the 80s so the stories are probably different now, right?) All I know is that as soon as I had a dramatic change of location for this novel, I could finally see how my four foster kids were going to beat the odds and survive in their own scheming way. I tell you, they are going to have to go through a few more knocks before they are rescued, but dear reader, they will be rescued and Ms. Vallop is going to get a nice comeuppance.

As of today, No Teddy Bears consists of about 38,000 words. It looks like I’ll cross the finish line by the deadline. That is, if the roof does not fall in first. Fortunately, the weather forecast looks clear.

Until next time.

Karen Harrington is the author of the upcoming novel JANEOLOGY. Visit www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor for more information.

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 12

by Karen Harrington

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow

If you are someone who attempts to write a novel in thirty days, this sentiment applies to you. Yours truly is feeling very schizophrenic today.

Why? Because I have multiple good and evil characters competing for space in my brain’s hard drive and I am telling them to speed things up so I can cross the finish line for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by November 30th.

If you’ve been following the plot of No Teddy Bears, you know I have a story about four orphans whose parents died, leaving them in the foster care system. A former neighbor decides to host the children in her home for a two-week holiday break – but her intentions are anything but charitable. She wants to collect the money from the foster care system to buy presents for herself and her bratty son.

I’ve worked on No Teddy Bears for eleven days and just achieved 25,000 of the required 50,000 words. Not bad considering I’m starting to feel the creep of holiday gift buying pressure and the pull to reorganize my closet.

The initial steam of inspiration petered out a couple of days ago. My inner writer broke a major rule of NaNoWriMo and EDITED. I went back and bulked up a chapter that I thought needed more heft (read: word count). Specifically, a scene in which my four orphan children break into a locked and dark library. Think the 1980s movie The Breakfast Club only with six to eight year olds climbing the bookcases, misusing the copy machine and being as loud as possible just because they can. Until the lights suddenly come on and . . .

Despite these barriers, I learned two important things:

NUMERO UNO
• Writing in the genre of young adult fiction has the interesting benefit of writing few or no internal monologues. This type of writing is a real no-no for some fiction aficionados, despite its proliferation in most novels. And I’m as guilty as anyone by having my characters bow into one too many long reminiscences about how “The yawning sunset made him think about the time he and Mary first kissed. He thought how nice it would be to have that day back again….” BORING!! Okay, maybe that’s good sometimes, but I didn’t realize until this project that I lean into those episodes more than I should. My orphans are putting an end to this habit. You cannot write those types of inner thoughts for young children because they don’t sit and ponder. They wonder. It doesn’t take long before their wondering turns to action or shows up in the questions they ask grown ups.

NUMERO DOS
• I am more conscious about having each chapter filled with conflict so I can have as much of the above mentioned action taking place. I am ending each chapter with the omniscient narrator having knowledge of something foreboding. I don’t know if this builds the tension or not, but it gives this lazy writer a great springboard into the following chapter. (And it’s going to be heck to edit this novel later because, well, character motivations have largely been tossed out the window. If I want them to photocopy their bum, they will photocopy their bum.)

With the steam gone, I am now into the pure, hard, decidedly unfun work of a novelist. Sit down and write. Write anything. Write a lot of crap. Out of 1,000 words, accept that 995 of them will be a mix of crap and adverbs.

Back to it.

—

Karen Harrington is the author of the upcoming novel JANEOLOGY. Visit www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor for more information.

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 7

by Karen Harrington

NaNoWriMo Update – Harry Potter meets Running With Scissors

My progress is going in fits and starts as I approach a major turning point of my story, No Teddy Bears. I’m 12,000 words in and the story set-up is almost complete. The next big turning point is getting the family into their horrible foster home. I hope to hit the 20k word mark by next Monday.

One of the interesting things I am learning from this speed-writing experience is that no event or comment in my own life is off limits to being included. I’m sure God will forgive me for this, but I even clipped a few notes from Pastor Jeff’s sermon in church yesterday. (An anecdote about Gandhi.) This just goes to prove that all things inform a writer’s work, no matter how small or large.

Another observation I’ve made is that I had envisioned more of a This Boy’s Life tone for this story, but the children are taking over and it’s becoming a mix of Harry Potter meets Running With Scissors.

Here’s a short break-down thus far:

- Introduction of the happy Delano Family
- Mother “comes down with cancer” and dies
- Father, a librarian, pays the unkind obnoxious neighbor, Ms. Vallop, to look after the four children after school.
- Children are tormented by Ms. Vallop’s bully son and his two henchmen (what’s the word for a nine-year old henchman?) who demand to have their feet rubbed and to eat all the family snacks. Fearing for the last package of cookies, the children cut off the ends of dog biscuits and sprinkle them with cinnamon and feed them to their oppressors.
- The children visit the library and are questioned by Mr. Goodknuckle, the head librarian and their father’s boss.

The children could see there was something strange about Mr. Goodknuckle.
- Mr. Delano dies of an apparent broken heart on the one-year anniversary of his wife’s death.
- The children are scooped into the SYSTEM in hopes they will be adopted by foster parents.
- While waiting for new parents, the children all live at an RTF (residential treatment facility) where they have a miserable Halloween Party, trick-or-treating from door to door getting candy, but mostly coupons.

“What are we supposed to do with coupons,” shouted Frank Faulkner Fudge as the lines of his cat face scrunched up. “That’s just downright mean!”

“Be grateful for what you get,” said Miss Mallard, the headmistress of the RTF. “Some children have less.”

“How can you have less than a coupon,” Frank Faulkner Fudge cried, looking down at his slip of meaningless paper. “It says it’s for an oil change, too. Ten dollars off. What kind of seven year old needs an oil change?”

- The children have their photos made at the RTF. The photos are to be placed on the Angel Trees in various malls in hopes someone will give them a new, unwrapped toy – or even inquire about being a foster parent.

So, are you wondering who the evil foster parent will be?

Until next time, write on!

Karen Harrington is a former speechwriter and the author of the upcoming Kunati Books release JANEOLOGY. For more info, visit her at www.myspace.com/karenharringtonauthor

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal, Day 1

by Karen Harrington

Nov 1, 2007

First day of NaNoWriMo. I started writing at 9:30 a.m. after dropping my girls off at school. Thankfully, they go to school two days a week and this is prized writing/laundry folding time.

I put on a music selection of Enya.

I wrote until 10:30 a.m. I checked the word count two times, I admit it. The first time, I had accumulated 769 words. Not too bad for the first sprint.

Then, I got up to vacuum. Vacuuming is one of this writer’s best-kept secrets because it stretches the whole body and is a great interruption from the writer’s posture. (Please don’t tell my husband.)

Then, back to the computer. While vacuuming I came up with another new idea and went back to the computer, abandoning the vacuum in the entryway.

I wrote another half-hour and found I had amassed 2,177 words. Of course, the first entry into any writing project is the most fun. I actually like starting something new over the tireless editing of a work I am no longer objective about. So don’t pat me on the back too much for that effort. I was fueled by caffeine-laden, Halloween candy enthusiasm and all the story ideas I had made notes on the night before.

Here’s how it begins:

Come with me now. Don’t be afraid. Take my hand. I want to tell you a story. Yes, it will have some scary parts. And, there may be a time or two when you need to run off to mother and fetch a tissue. But there are going to be many, many happy moments as well. There are going to be times when you want me to retell a section of the story so you can commit it to memory. So come on in. Sit down on one of the many colorful cushions with all the other children and I will tell you the wonderful story of the Delano children and how the youngest, Claire, finally got her teddy bear. If you like teddy bears as much as she does, you will understand why this story needs to be told. Because in the end, you will see that no one has the right to take away someone’s teddy bear. Ever.

To begin with the Delano family of 1600 Bellvue Drive in Caketop, Texas, live a very quiet and peaceful life.

So far, my story, No Teddy Bears, follows the Delano family of Caketop, Texas, as the four siblings are forced into foster care after the untimely death of both of their parents. The first 2000 words have thus far dealt with describing the Delano’s home and inhabitants. I chose a young adult theme and approach because:

1/ I have never written in this genre before. And I must say, trick-or-treating with my tots for the first time last night was great inspiration for wanting to recreate the delight in a child’s face about something as small as lolli-pop.

2/ I knew I could be inventive about descriptions and names. For example, I have given all four of the children three names. Graham Greene Grape Delano; Prosperity Plath Peaches Delano; Frank Faulkner Fudge Delano; and, Claire Chaucer Cupcake Delano.

Yes, this is in part to beef up the word count. But also because I think this whimsy fits the story, don’t you?

Until next time, Write on!

Karen Harrington is a Texas native who has been writing fiction for more than twenty years. Her writing has received honors from the Hemingway Short Story Festival, the Texas Film Institute Screenplay Contest and the Writers’ Digest National Script Contest. A graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, she has worked as a speechwriter and editor for major corporations and non-profit organizations.

She authored and published There’s a Dog in the Doorway, a children’s book created expressly for the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Foundation’s “My Stuff Bags.” My Stuff bags go to children in need who must leave their home due to abuse, neglect or abandonment.

Her first novel, JANEOLOGY, will be released in Spring 2008 from Kunati Books (www.kunati.com).

She lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and two children.

Technorati Tags: NaNoWoMo, Writing

National Novel Writing Month: One Author’s Journal

by Karen Harrington

Writing a novel in one month? Can it be done?

I’ve been just about every kind of writer you can imagine. Articles. Brochures. Speeches. Screenplays. Novels. Short Stories. You name it. I’m good at deadlines. I like deadlines.

But I’ve never had a deadline loom this large. I’m talking about the National Novel Writing Month challenge, or NaNoWriMo. This is an annual (November) novel writing project that challenges writers to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days. The organizers of NaNoWriMo promote turning off one’s internal editor and writing through and past writer’s block, fear or limitations of any kind. I’m excited by this prospect because most of the time, we all have our internal editor in the “on” position.

But how to do it? What am I going to write about that will carry enough passion to go the distance? What do I have? A loose idea titled No Teddy Bears about four siblings forced into the foster care system who rely on imagination to survive the indignities of their so-called caregiver.

So I came up with a two things that already have me energized.

THING ONE
I went through my editor’s notes from my last novel (to be published next spring) and was reminded that I have a tendency to under describe settings. I don’t paint the whole bedroom because I assume all readers know what a bedroom looks like. I stumble on this because I want to race on to the action of the story. That’s fine and good, but not if a reader wants to know the color of the walls. Is the bedspread down or chenille? And what exactly is on the dresser? Watches? Perfume? Motes of dust? The truth is I envy writers who use an entire page to observe the seemingly mundane with all five senses.

THING TWO
I was a screenwriter before I was a novelist. In that art form, the point of view is omniscient as can be. Scripts are filled with “We see her room has not recently been cleaned.” “She looks about the room. Stops. Stares. Recoils with fear. We now see what she is looking at. It is a….”

Some recent novels have been written this way with a loose, inventive tone that is both omniscient and virtually first person at the same time. Lynn Hoffman’s bang, Bang is a great example of this technique used to wonderful effect. Check this out to read an excerpt.

So I plan to use this opportunity to over describe every single scene. To toss aside the need for considering if each sentence is correct and true and err on the side of sensory description. And I will experiment with using the camera’s eye point of view to narrate the story.

All of this should fill, what, a few thousand words? Maybe by November 25th I will be a Thanksgiving turkey leg wielding crazy person, forced to adopt a new approach. Perhaps like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining who types “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over again in many variations.

Stay tuned. It’s going to be an interesting 30 days.

Karen Harrington is a Texas native who has been writing fiction for more than twenty years. Her writing has received honors from the Hemingway Short Story Festival, the Texas Film Institute Screenplay Contest and the Writers’ Digest National Script Contest. A graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, she has worked as a speechwriter and editor for major corporations and non-profit organizations.

She authored and published There’s a Dog in the Doorway, a children’s book created expressly for the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Foundation’s “My Stuff Bags.” My Stuff bags go to children in need who must leave their home due to abuse, neglect or abandonment.

Her first novel, JANEOLOGY, will be released in Spring 2008 from Kunati Books (www.kunati.com).

She lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and two children.

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