Random Thoughts

A good storyteller, like a good photographer, is able to see the extraordinary in the ordinary...


... find the treasure among the mundane...

... and turn a rainy day into something worth waiting for.

And Then Came the Birds

Spring is here. The leaves on the tree came out sometime between Friday and Sunday. The azaleas are in full bloom. The ants are making mountains out of anthills in the grass that is finally growing. And the birds have moved in.

I love birds. I even set up a bird feeder in the backyard to lure them away from the neighbors. My husband calls it my socialist welfare system. It worked.

I have a family of cardinals that moved in last year. Just a girl and boy with an egg. We watched the hubby come to the feeder, get seeds, and take them back to the tree and place them in the wife's mouth. This year, they have a little girl with them.

I have two tufted titmouses, two pileated woodpeckers, a couple chickadees, one morning dove, and some goldfinches. There's also two wrens, some sparrows, an undetermined number of ruby-throated hummingbirds, and a family of seven blue jays that must live on the left side of the driveway because every time I drive down it they all fly to the right side. (I always want to ask them why, if the right side feels safer, they built their nest on the left side)

I know I built this little fiefdom for them, but today as I watched them take over yard I began to think that a little bit of etiquette on their part wouldn't be too much to ask.

I layer the feeder with two kinds of food: bird seed mix, and sunflower seeds. That way, everyone is happy. Except that today, when the chickadees came to the feeder, they apparently wanted sunflower seeds, but on the top post only the seed mix was available. Rather than flying down a notch to get what he wanted, he proceeded to pick out the stuff he didn't like, dropping it on the ground, until he got what he wanted. Over and over.

The squirrels sat happily under the feeder and ate everything the chickadee didn't want.

I'd chase them all away, but I'm too busy taking photos!

If You Have a Choice, Choose a Strong Voice

BookEnds has a guest post today about voice. Voice seems like that ever-elusive, hard to capture but easy to spot element that can absolutely sell a book. And the lack of which can sink a book, even one of strong character and plot. I recently read an article about how to write well takes a devotion much like method acting: become your character - get inside their skin.

My own opinion is this is easier with first person than with third person.

With the book I am writing, I deliberately chose first person to allow Bab's quirky side and very Texas roots come through. By taking her voice instead of my own, the story has come alive much more than my first book, in which the narrator is really a outside, objective, and frankly, a boring storyteller. Try as I might in that first work, I had the hardest time infusing personality into a narrator which was only a disembodied (and uninvolved) voice.

Editorial Anonymous addressed that this week in a great post on voice as well. She answered a question that I've been pondering a lot lately: Is it possible to have a really strong voice in the third-person narrator?

Her answer: absolutely! And to prove it, she gives excerpts from books with strong third-person voice. My favorite is this example from Ivy and Bean, one of my daughter's favorite book series:

It all began because Bean was playing a trick on her older sister. Bean's older sister was named Nancy. She was eleven. Nancy thought Bean was a pain and a pest. Bean thought Nancy was a booger-head.

That one word, booger-head, sets a tone, and essentially establishes the side the narrator will take. It places the narrator more at Bean's level of maturity instead of an adults. It is playful. It's exactly the kind of book a seven year old girl would love.

This post, especially with all the examples, focuses on how important word choice is. It's important to know whose side you are on as the narrator. Writing novels isn't like writing the news (or at least how the news is suppose to be: objective!). As writers, we can choose to identify with a character. Even if we do it as a third person narrator.

The most difficult part for me as a writer is to let go of who I am and to allow myself to be someone else. There are times I start to write things and stop because it is not something I would do or say. If it goes against my own beliefs, for example, or if it is harsh, or mean, or emphatically politically incorrect. Babs, for example, uses the word fat a lot. For people. To their faces. She isn't trying to be mean, but she just "calls 'em as she sees 'em."

Of course, that one only made me wince a teesy bit. There is a whole element of the story I am approaching now that deals with religion. I find myself not wanting to step on anyone's toes. Not offend anyone. And then I realize, this isn't about me. It isn't me saying these words; it isn't my history - my baggage. If I write it the way my life is, or the way I think, I completely lose Babs. Her voice disappears. And frankly, my own voice isn't that interesting.

For all the agents that write about queries, I wish there were equal amounts of posts on voice, because it seems to me that if you can capture that, the rest will fall into place. Including the query.

Do you think first person is easier than third person to create a strong voice?
What books do you know that have strong voices that drew you in immediately?

From the Blogosphere

I actually wrote this early in the week, and blogger made it disappear. This info is probably old news now, but just in case anyone hasn't discovered them, I thought I'd go ahead and try to repost it.

Cool new blogs (or old ones I've just discovered)

Agent Janet Reid dissects your query letter at queryshark.blogspot.com
Ms. Reid is direct, specific and spot-on in her assessments in what could be the most helpful website on getting the query thing right. If you are brave enough, you can submit yours to her for an "insider's" evaluation.

Folio Literary Management now has their own blog, foliolit.blogspot.com. Folio Lit is one of my top 3 agencies, and every one of their agents is amazing. One would do well with any of them. I'm sure their blog will be a treasure trove of insights.

I've mentioned her before, but Elizabeth Jote deserves her own shout-out here. She's blogging at elizabethjote.wordpress.com, in what she describes as "random thoughts and loveliness from inside the publishing beast." What I like about her blog is that she makes me think, and sometimes reevaluate the writing process. That, and she makes me laugh sometimes too.

Rachelle Gardner, an agent at WordServe Literary, is blogging at cba-ramblings.blogspot.com. Her blog isn't new, but I'm new to it, and I've found lots of very helpful advice, doled out very politely. She is unique, too, touching topics I haven't seen in other agent blogs.

Moonrat is self-described as a "recovering editorial assistant" on her blog, editorialass.blogspot.com. She's just plain good, and funny. Check it out.

Later: author blogs I just like

It's Friday; It's a Good Thing

Today when I walked over to the library to write they were having a book sale. Thousands of books, a buck or less a piece, waiting for new homes.

Hey, I have bookshelves now. Why not?

I ended up with only five books, two of which I've already read but don't own (Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which I've read many, many times and finally admitted I needed to just buy, and Anita Shreve's The Pilot's Wife), and three that I've been wanting to read but didn't want to spend the money on them (The Kite Runner, A Million Little Pieces, and The Victors, by Stephen Ambrose).

While perusing one of the tables, a man across from me kept plucking out books and adding them to a dangerously high stack he was carrying, all the while making very satisfied sounds. He finally looked up at me, a wide smile, and said, "Isn't this great? If I could breathe books I would!"

Amen to that!

The Rant That Isn't Mine

It's good to know sometimes I'm not the only one.

Of course, my lack of eloquence on this matter make me question my qualifications for being a writer.