Mr. Spock's Tips for Writers

Last week, while over at a friend's house, I noticed the intriguing title, I Am Spock, on the spine of a book. Of course I'd heard of Leonard Nimoy's previous book, I Am Not Spock. Sure enough, this book was another Nimoy memoir, published twenty years after the first one. I wondered what had made him change his mind.

I asked to borrow the book, and as I read it I learned that Nimoy now considers his previous title something of a mistake. He was only trying to be clever, not denounce his role as one of the best-loved science-fiction characters of all time. Nimoy cares deeply about the character of Mr. Spock, and has fiercely defended him against script writers and directors that just didn't understand the half-Vulcan, half-human Starfleet officer.

Which brings up two invaluable things I learned about storytelling as I read this book.

First of all, the audience will not always understand what you're trying to do. The title, I Am Not Spock, for instance. Fans were furious. It haunted Leonard Nimoy for years. In fact, he almost lost the chance to direct Star Trek IV because the producer erroneously thought Nimoy had written a whole book about how much he hated Spock. That's not what the book was about at all. Few had bothered to read it, apparently. They'd only looked at the title and jumped to a conclusion.

What to do? Beware ambiguity. When misunderstood, move on to your next project.

Sub-point: Being misunderstood can be agonizing, but it won't necessarily ruin your career.

Now for Mr. Spock's second tip for writers. This one is about character. It took a  few episodes of the original Star Trek series for Leonard Nimoy to get a firm grasp on who Spock was, on what made him tick. But once he knew, he was ready to defend his concept of Spock. Time after time, a script-writer would come along who wanted to have Spock lose his temper, or be violent, or let down his Vulcan dignity in some other way, and Nimoy would have to go in and say, "I can't play this scene." He got some writers mad at him, especially since most of them had two other scripts to finish yesterday and they didn't want to re-write some scene for this pointy-eared alien. But because Nimoy insisted, and because Mr. Spock was so true to his character on the show, the fans responded. They loved him. They believed in him.

Know your characters. Then be willing to fight for them. Don't let anything compromise the integrity of their personality. If they wouldn't do something, it doesn't belong in the story. Rewrite!

Subpoint: Audiences love a character with a powerful internal conflict. But don't make the character constantly swing between one side and the other. That makes the character seem wishy-washy. Mr. Spock succeeds as a character because he almost always goes with his Vulcan side, though there are enough glimpses of the human side to let the audience know what a pressure-cooker is going on inside.

Thanks for the tips, Mr. Spock.

Technology and Fiction

I recently read a contemporary romance novel, Someone Else's Fairytale by E.M. Tippets, in which the college-aged characters were constantly video-chatting on their lap-top computers. If that book had been written ten years ago, it would have been science fiction.

It used to be that I could tell a book had been written in some previous decade by the technology alone. Now I can almost pinpoint the year. When reading World War Z, I could tell it was written before social media became a massive phenomenon. If there were zombies anywhere on the planet, my Facebook friends would totally have told me about it. World War Z Publication date? 2006. I thought so.

The world is changing so fast that if you write a piece of contemporary fiction, by the time it hits the shelves it's historical. Maybe this is a good thing. As author David Farland has pointed out, the biggest best-selling novels are stories that transport the reader to another time and place. Now it's nearly impossible not to transport your reader away from here and now. Even authors who write about now can't capture now fast enough. They're writing about then already. If you want to read about now, you have to go blog trawling.

Fortunately for me, I've never wanted to write about here and now.

Writers Club Wednesday: The Objective Correlative

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

    --T.S. Eliot

Translation: when it comes to emotion, SHOW DON'T TELL.

We've all heard that, but HOW IS IT DONE?

When does tell become show?

George was nervous. (definitely telling)

George's heart pounded. (Sort of showing, but still mostly telling. I'm telling you his heart pounded. Why is that different from telling you he was nervous? It's even more ambiguous. Is he scared or excited?)

"Relax. This won't hurt a bit." The dentist held the drill poised over George's face. The drill motor whirred. George stared at the yellow-brown stain on the ceiling and wished he had paid for better dental insurance.

Now I don't need to tell you that George is nervous or that his heart is pounding. I've put you in his head and you're seeing things through his current emotional filter. He's noticing the drill in front of his nose, the sound of the motor, the stained ceiling. How does he feel? Mommy, get me out of this chair!

This is the objective correlative. You've got to choose what your characters notice based on how the characters are feeling at the time, then relate those things to the reader. Paint an emotional picture with objects, situations, and events. Give your reader the facts, and let the emotion come out on its own.

Here's your writing exercise. Get your notebook and write down four emotional states, spacing them out on the page. Then walk into another room in your house. Any room you like. Describe that room through each of your four emotional filters.

Happy writing!

Writing Exercise: Telephone Poem

At our last Laie Young Writers Club meeting, we did an exercise I learned from Tim Wynne-Jones at this year's Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop.

1. Write your phone number in a column down the left-hand side of the paper.
2. Write a poem. Each line has the same number of words as the telephone number. A zero is a wild card, you pick the number of words.

Here's my example (slightly altered so you don't know my phone number)

Waves leave lines in the sand
Delicate ridges
At the farthest reach of the water.
Rainbow foam
Sparkles and fades

Along traces
Like ridges
Of distant mountains
Etched momentarily
On the sandy canvas smoothed by the sea.

What I Learned at WIFYR

Sorry I've been absent the last two weeks. I've been off island, in Utah, at the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop. In a lot of ways, it was my best experience at the workshop that I've ever had. Here's the four most important things I learned this year:

1. Online Social Networking: It's not about you.

Elissa Cruz, one of the founders of the blog, From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle Grade Authors, gave a great lecture about building your online platform. The main thing I took away from it was that if you are online only to promote yourself, everyone will go away. It is not about you. Instead, think of yourself as part of a team where everyone can win if we help each other. Find the good stuff and share it.

2. Embrace the Delete Key

This one comes from Cynthia Leitich Smith. Apparently she's been known to write the first draft of a novel, then DELETE THE WHOLE THING. Now this sounds insane, until I remember that the less I've revised a piece, the better response I get from my test readers. So next time maybe instead of revising, I'll re-draft and see what happens.

3. Give Stories Time

I took a morning workshop class led by author Tim Wynne-Jones. One of the most valuable things I learned from him was to give stories time. Sometimes you have to leave a story in the drawer for years before you figure out what it needs, and then one day it comes to you. So that's when you pull it out, finish it up, and send it off.

4. Do Sound Checks Before Any Vocal Performance

With the agony still fresh in my mind, I'm not going to say anything more about this one.

But I do want to say a big THANK-YOU to all the authors, the editors, and the agent who so generously gave of their time and shared their knowledge with us at WIFYR. Best. Workshop. Ever.

The Last Hukilau

There was a man who was the fisherman for the village. He wasn’t a fisherman like we think of today. Everyone in the village fished. The fisherman was THE BOSS. He had a huge net, yards and yards of panels twelve feet across. When it came time to fish, the fisherman would pile the net in canoes and take the men out to lay it all around the bay. Then he would go climb a tree and watch for the schools of fish to come in. 

A new e-mail popped up on my screen. Subject: Hukilau. I clicked on it.

Hey, lovelies!
Tomorrow, at 9:00 AM, there is going to be a hukilau at-you guessed it-Hukilau Beach. We're going to fish, and then I think cook the fish. And people have promised that we'll get at least one :)
So come!
Love y'all

The next morning I asked my children at breakfast, “Does anyone want to go to the hukilau?”

“NO!” they said. It was the first day of summer vacation, and they didn’t want to have to leave the house. At least not so early in the morning. We were going to a pot luck picnic at a different beach later in the day, and that would take them away from their computers long enough. I decided not to push it.

I went by myself.

When he saw the fish, he’d call for the villagers to come. Everyone ran down to the beach, men, women, and children.

There were other people on the sidewalk, moving toward the beach; a plump elderly couple in tourist clothes and sunhats, an athletic young woman with a blond pony tail, a red-haired man, his bare back nearly sunburned. A pick-up truck with its back end full of Polynesian kids passed me and turned into the beach parking lot.

The dirt-paved parking lot was packed with cars. A black tarp canopy, strung on aluminum poles, snapped in the wind. I hiked over the dunes and through round-leaved plants with purple flowers to reach the edge of the water. A cool wind blew spray off the ocean, mingled with spatters of rain from the gray clouds in the sky. People stood around a green rowboat, big Polynesians in t-shirts and swim trunks, stylish Japanese tourists in sun hats with shiny black cameras, children in blond curls chasing in and out of the water. Some of the men loaded fishnets made of thin nylon thread into the boat, making the boat look like it was filled with green mist.

When everything was ready, the men pushed the boat into the water. Swimmers with snorkels and fins followed, dark heads bobbing in the waves, as the man in the boat rowed out into the bay. With each pull of his oars, another length of net dropped into the water. After the net came a rope strung with long, brown leaves. The boat circled around and came back to land down the beach, where another group of people stood waiting to pull in the nets.

They would take up the ropes with leaves, lau, and pull on them, huki. Hence hukilau. Pull the leaves. The men would be out in the water, watching the net, to make sure it didn’t snag on any coral or rock.

Everyone on the beach grabbed the wet, sandy rope. People from all over the world; the woman with the blond pony-tail I’d seen on the way to the beach, next to a little Polynesian boy in a green tank-top, next to an old man with mutton-chop whiskers, next to a skinny Asian woman in a white blouse and pink shorts, next to me. We pulled, then stopped on signal for the swimmers to lift the net over the coral, then pulled again.

“Did you bring your kids?” asked one of my neighbors, the one who had sent me the e-mail.

“They didn’t want to come.”

“They only do this ever ten years. You’d think they’d want to see it.”

So the people pulled, and soon the nets would come up, flopping with fish. There would be more fish, and more, until the nets were full to bursting.

We walked the rope down the beach, pulling and winding it at the end, until the nets began to come up. Yards and yards of empty nets. I watched for the fish, wondering if we’d caught any at all. Something dark in one of the nets made my heart move a little faster, but it was only a bit of seaweed.

Slowly, panel by panel, the nets came out of the water. People lined up on either side of the nylon mesh, keeping it low to the sand, easing it along whenever the swimmers gave the signal. Out of the white surf came one small white shape. One lone fish, struggling in the net until his fins bled pink.

More and more net came up from the water, until the last panel broke from the waves. A scattering of fish twisted and shimmered as the divers stretched the net out on the sand. Children gathered close, everyone crouched around the net, working with their fingers to free the fish.

“They all babies,” said a Polynesian woman with a black-eyed toddler on her hip. She laughed. “Put them back in the water!"

When the catch was on the beach at last, everyone lined up. The children took their shirts and held them out at the bottom to make a basket. Each child got 3-4 fish, and adults would get ten or more. They would eat them raw, boil them, bake them, and dry the rest.

  

 A woman walked around with a mesh bag, collecting the fish. Children pinching silver fish about the size of an iphone ran to the water and rinsed them off, then put them in the bag. When all the fish had been collected, it wasn't enough to fill a three-gallon bucket.

"Can't schedule a hukilau, can you?" I asked one of the fishermen. "You have to wait until the fish come in."

He laughed. "This time of year the fish are still tiny. Every summer UH releases more fish out here, they have an orange tag on them, when you catch them you see it, it's really neat. But those are all gone by now. We didn't catch much today, but everyone had fun, yah?"

Special thanks to Uncle Joe Ah Quin for sharing his memories of the hukilau in old Laie Bay with the BYU Hawaii Women's Organization in October 2011. The historical details in this post were summarized from his words.

Come Thou Fount

On Saturday, my son Daniel and I had our musical duo debut at his end-of-year violin recital. He's only been playing for one year, so I'm singing the praises of the Suzuki Method for enabling my son to quickly pick up this tune that I usually do with my Irish band, South Wind.

We've got a few kinks to work out. First of all, Daniel started playing the instant I had my harp on my lap, before I was really ready, so the camera didn't catch the first few notes and my music stand isn't quite where I'd like it to be. Second, I made the mistake of putting my hair up with a chopstick. Every time I turn my head to look at the sheet music, my hair is being yanked as my chopstick catches on the top of the harp.

I made it through in spite of it all, and Daniel did a wonderful job. A big thank-you to Daniel's teacher, Amy Gold, for all she does to promote music learning in our community, and also to Dr. Suzuki! Arigato Gozaimasu!