Erin Thomas

Last week I found out that my friend, Carole Enahoro, has been shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers Prize for her first novel, Doing Dangerously Well. Regional winners will be announced in early March and final results in May.

Carole was a member of my writing group here in Whitby. Actually, she was the one who invited me to join, so I owe her a lot. But don’t tell her I said that; it’ll go to her head.

Anyhow, it’s wonderful to see a Whitby writer doing well. (Okay, so she grew up in Britain and Nigeria and even lived in Oshawa for a bit, but once a Whitby girl, always a Whitby girl.)

I read Carole’s book last June. It was my first time reading it; DDW passed through the writing group long before I ever got there. I’ve read friends’ published novels before, but this was different. I’ve taken a couple of writing courses from Carole, so I know something about how she puts her books together. It was incredible, reading her story through that lens.

Here’s something I learned from Carole: words count. (Well, duh, you say. Isn’t that what being a writer is supposed to be about?) But Carole is very particular about word choice. I doubt that there’s a noun or a verb in her book that she hasn’t examined.

An example: she has two sisters in her book, Barbara and Mary Glass. A main theme in her book is water. Think about what glass has in common with water. With ice. With mirrors. A name is such a little thing, but when Carole names a character, it isn’t. You could probably write a whole thesis about the water, glass and ice images in DDW, the ways they’re used, and what that’s meant to reveal about each character and moment in the book.

Here’s the best part of the post: the lesson. This is a tiny snippet of something Carole taught me. I can’t give it all away, or Carole will get mad and use some of her schmancy British insults on me. And since I have to look most of them up, it gets embarrassing. Still, I’m willing to risk it to share this.

Think about your manuscript. Think about a central theme. Now come up with an image or word to represent that theme. Write it in the centre of a blank page. I’m willing to bet that Carole started with “water.”

Brainstorm. Brainstorm off your brainstorm ideas. Don’t stop until your whole page is covered. Get into opposites. Water might lead to wet, which might lead to dry, which might lead to desert, sand, sun, heat. And sun might lead to moon and stars. Or to fire which you might already have on your pages as an opposite of water. Draw a line to connect it to sun. Moon and stars might lead to night, black, ink. Just keep going.

When your pages is covered in spidery scribbles, sit back and look at it. Read the words. Circle the ones that resonate for you — the ones that strike you as particularly strong, or that just feel right for some reason you can’t explain.

Now put it away until your book is written. This isn’t early draft stuff. Wait until you’re pretty sure of your story and ready to think about specific word choices that will make your novel stronger. And then, when you need to introduce a minor character or a town name, take a look at your page. See if there’s a word or an idea that might work. “Smith” is boring. Maybe there’s a name that can link to theme in some way — either by falling in with it or by highlighting its opposite.

When you’re describing something, see if some of those powerful words will work for you. Is that skinny, silvery cat tail curved like a scimitar or like a crescent moon? It depends. But when you choose words that resonate with your theme on that weird, subconscious level that you access when you’re brainstorming, cool stuff happens.

I don’t make a lot of grown-up book recommendations. I write for kids, so most of what I read is written for kids. I will say this, though. Once I started reading Carole’s book, I couldn’t put it down. It was vastly different than anything I had ever read. It was funnier, sadder, richer, and just plan more than I expected. And once you read it, you won’t look at water, or words, the same way again.

Happy New Year!

In honour of resolutions and all that, I decided to start out the new year by sorting through my collection of books about writing. (Okay, the truth is that I need to move the bookshelf so I can plug in a phone cord.) There are some discards — books that never really spoke to me, books about kinds of writing that I’ve decided not to pursue. But there are also some treasures.

Some of these aren’t the usual writer’s list. I have those, too — Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott, and a daunting and as-yet-unread copy of Story by Robert McKee. The copy of ‘A Passion for Narrative’ by Jack Hodgins that I won at my high school graduation. But those aren’t the ones that I find myself going back to. And maybe it’s because my focus of late has been on craft, but I’m tending to choose the books that give me something of the nuts-and-bolts of the whole process, rather than the books that inspire.

Without further blathering, here are the books that I pulled from my shelf that I would not part with.

The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler. This was the first book that I read that dealt with mythic structure and the hero’s journey. I liked the second edition so much that I bought the third edition when it came out. I haven’t bonded with the new one the same way, though; it doesn’t have that lovely, dog-eared look that the old one had.

Chapter after Chapter, by Heather Sellers. There are some similarities between this book and Bird by Bird, at least thematically. This is the one that keeps me on track, though. It’s a wonderful guide to have with you when you tackle a novel.

Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maas. I hate the title of this one. Hate it so much that I’m tempted to get out my sewing machine and stitch together one of those cutesy, quilted book jackets that are sold at craft fairs in Harlequin sizes, just for this book. But if you can get past the presumption and oily-slick feeling of the title, it’s a great book with some wonderful advice on improving your work.

On Writing, by Stephen King. Okay, so one of the classics made the list. I love this book. It’s the first book that I recommend to anyone who tells me they want to write. I’m not a big Stephen King fan, mostly because I’m a big chicken and reading scary books=sleepless nights, but I love what he has to say about the craft of writing and his own journey.

Room to Write, by Bonni Goldberg. Yup. Not the usual Goldberg. But this is, hands-down, my absolute favourite book of writing exercises.

Novel Metamorphosis, by Darcy Pattison. What I like best about this book? It tells me things that I hadn’t thought of before. Things that, in retrospect, should have been obvious. I discovered this book when I was already partway through a major revision, and I hate to interrupt a revision mid-stream. But once I finish, I’m going back and tackling the manuscript again, with Pattison’s book in hand. (Take that, work-in-progress!)  My only regret is that it’s a workbook, and I refuse to write in the book. I’ve been creating my own set of worksheets to go along with the exercises. It’s a cumbersome process, but at least I’ll be able to use them more than once. (I’d offer them for download, but that’s not exactly fair to Darcy Pattison, is it?)

And of course, the book on character that I’ve already written one post about: Getting Into Character, by Brandilyn Collins. This one takes a look at what writers can learn from the method actor’s craft. I struggle, sometimes, with really getting into a character’s skin, and this book gave me some new ways to approach the problem. Lots of books will give you lists and lists of interview questions and facts that you need to know about your character. Noah Lukeman’s ‘The Plot Thickens’ does that, and does it well, so that the questions force you to really get inside your character’s head. But I’ve never liked the lists of questions. I have trouble taking them seriously. Collins’ book was something new, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Finally, and maybe it shouldn’t even be on this list because I’m still reading it for the first time, Scene & Structure by Jack M. Bickhkam. I’m pretty sure that I’m driving my husband nuts with this one. I’m working through it slowly, and it seems like every section has a new little gem to offer–which I feel the need to blab about non-stop until I’ve internalized it and worked out how it applies to each one of my seventeen gazillionty works in progress. It will probably deserve its own post, once I’ve finished reading it. At this rate, that should be sometime in 2012…

So there you have it. Many writing books are dear to my heart, but these are my current favourites. If you’re working your way through a new year’s resolution that has to do with finally finishing that novel, or polishing your manuscript so it’s ready for submission, you might want to check them out. Heck, if you live nearby, I’ll lend you my copy. But only if you promise to give it back.