Today’s prompt used as our starting point the following quote:
Dr. Amy Uehlman, Georgetown Law School
“Our goal in debating provocative topics is actually not to reach a consensus or agreement. We’re not looking for common ground; we’re looking for something much deeper. We’re looking for a sharing of personal narrative, a genuine respect for one another and understanding of others’ experiences that helped to shape their opinions even if, especially if, those opinions are divergent from our own. Not because we merely tolerate them, but because we truly see them and we truly care.”
Write about how we might be able to really listen to another point of view very different from our own and attempt to appreciate the experience of the person expressing it.
I was surprised during our weekly Writers in the Grove free Monday workshop meeting that some of my fellow members didn’t know about the concept of world building in writing.
When you write fiction, you create a world, literally. It may represent the real world or a fantasy world. It consists of scenes, places where events occur in your story.
Your fictional world is made up of places, people, cultures, traditions, habits and routines, weather, geology, current events, and politics.
I’m working on a story that takes place in 1979. I begin my world building by researching historical events in 1979, then branch into newsworthy stories and topics, and even some trivia. If my story is concentrated solely in the United States, and specifically a location, say Seattle, then most of my research would focus on what happened in Seattle in and around 1979. Here are some of the results of my web search.
In my research, I discover that the average income that year in the United States was $17,500, and the average monthly rent was $280, a far cry from today’s prices. A gallon of gas cost 86 cents, oil was $24 a barrel, and the Toyota Corolla was one of the most popular cars on the road and the $200 Sony Walkman was in demand by most teenagers and college students. Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album won awards and played out of boomboxes everywhere, blasting “Y.M.C.A.” by The Village People off the charts. The daily news included updates on Voyager 1 as it made its closest pass by Jupiter, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Moral Majority religious movement by Jerry Falwell, 63 American hostages taken in Iran, and Saddam Hussein becoming president of Iraq. John McEnroe, Tracy Austin, Bjorn Borg, and Martinia Navratilova became household names as tennis champions. We watched MASH, The Jeffersons, The Dukes of Hazzard, One Day at a Time, and Three’s Company on television. The big screen played Alien, All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, Start Trek: The Motion Picture, Norma Rae, The China Syndrome, Being There, Life of Brian, Mad Max, and the Muppet Movie.
If you are writing about 1979, this is the world your characters lived in. They listened to that music, watched that news, those movies, and said funny things like quotes from movies and television such as “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” (Brooke Shields ad for Calvin Klein), “Reach out and touch someone” (AT&T ad), “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (Apocalypse Now), and “You need this for your rent, boy” (Richard Pryor).
Cultural stories might filter into conversations or even the thoughts of your characters such as when then-President Jimmy Carter explained how he almost tipped when an enraged swamp rabbit swam toward his fishing boat, or comment on the first time a milk carton featured a picture of a missing child. Or the fears that swept the globe as NASA’s Skylab fell to Earth, landing in Australia, made fun of afterwards by many when the Shire of Esperance in Western Australia fined NASA $400 for littering. Or maybe how Charles Manson sent a Monopoly “Get Out of Jail Free” card in a humorous attempt to be released by the parole board. Or maybe the dinner table discussion that night might be about the work of Mother Teresa after she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The world your characters live in influences their personalities, behaviors, even habits. A worker in 1979 living and/or working in downtown Seattle would have made sure they made a swing by Starbucks at 1912 Pike Place for a cup of their soon-to-be-famous coffee.
Now think about your characters and their relationship to this place and this time. Are all of your characters from here? Or maybe one or more of them are from different places, creating conflict when their worlds come together such as a white woman from Seattle falling in love with a black man from Mississippi in 1958, or the reverse. What about a new immigrant from Europe or Africa landing on the shores of the United States or Canada in the 1800s? Or maybe you have a person from Germany finding their way in Alabama in 1943 at the height of World War II? When we travel, we bring our worlds with us no matter where we go.
Your story may begin in any time and place. The world existed for your characters before the start of your story, and they might survive your story. Reveal the world they live in, as well as the world of history and experiences they carry with them through your story, to your readers as they shake hands and get to know your characters.
Here are a list of questions to help you define the world in which your characters live.
Why are your characters here?
How did your characters get here?
Why here now?
What makes this place special to the character(s)?
What makes this time necessary to the character(s)?
What’s important in this place and time?
What is it about this place that welcomes your characters?
What is about this place that challenges your characters?
What is about this place that creates conflict in or between your characters?
How is this place different from other places, and how does it matter to your characters?
What’s the weather like? Now and seasonally?
What’s the landscape, geology, terrain?
Is it crowded with buildings, people, or things? Or wide open and spacious, distance between buildings, people, and things?
What does it sound like here?
What does it feel like here?
What does it smell like here?
Who comes here? Who stays away from here?
How many people live here?
What do they do?
How do they do it?
What are their rituals, habits, routines, traditions?
How do people live here?
Where do people live here?
What do they eat and drink? How is it grown? Where do they get their food?
Are there races, ethnic groups, or other signs of diversity?
Is there a class system? Social, justice, gender, ethnic, cultural, or economic? How do they interact and react to the world around them?
Who are the leaders?
What’s hot in the news and gossip columns here? What are people worried or talking about?
How do the people interact here? In the streets, cafes, plazas, town squares, virtually, meetings, social hours?
What are the laws? How do the laws impact the characters?
What happens when a law is broken?
Is this a stable society or one on the edge or dropped into chaos?
How was this place made? Immigration, governance, wars, etc.?
What’s the health of the place? Epidemics? Do the people have an active or inactive lifestyles?
How safe is the place?
What makes people feel safe or unsafe here? Why?
What are the philosophies that guide this society and community?
Is this community/society religious? How? Why?
How does this society’s infrastructure function? Are there roads? Who builds them? Garbage? Power? Housing?
What did it take to build this world?
If this world would come to an end, what would it take?
This is just a few of the questions to consider. Go through these, and the questions and suggestions offered in the resources below, then ask yourself: Could this scene happen anywhere else? How would it change? How would it change the characters? How would it change the story? See what happens.
If you introduce something new to the world in which your characters live, ask yourself if this change their world. How does it? If it is magic or technology, does it impact only your characters or everyone in society? How? Why? Is it good, bad, or indifferent? How do they adapt to the change? is it good for everyone or just a few?
Remember, your characters live in the test tube of your imagination. Every twist or turn in the story may create a tsunami of change beyond the bubble that is your main characters. Let your readers see and feel the change.
Monday, November 6, 2018, author Tim Applegate will be speak at our Monday morning workshop from 9AM-11AM at the Forest Grove Senior and Community Center in Forest Grove, Oregon. This is a free, regular workshop event and all are welcome to join us. Bring pen and paper and an open mind as usual.
Tim Applegate will be speaking about publishing submission acceptance and rejections. He is the author of the novel Fever Tree and three books of poetry. A commercial contractor specializing in furniture and wood restoration for the hotel and cruise ship industry, he retired in 2015 to dedicate the next part of his life to writing full-time. He is the co-winner of the Tillie Olsen award for Creative Writing, and his work has been published in the Florida Review, The South Dakota Review, Lake Effect, The Briar Cliff Review, and others. He currently lives in the foothills of the Coast Range in Oregon.
It’s NaNoWriMo time again, National Novel Writing Month. Get out your spreadsheet word trackers and timers and dust them off. The fun begins at midnight October 31 as you plow through toward your 50,000 words or 50 hour goal of writing every day for thirty days.
For Writers in the Grove, here are our rules for November’s NaNoWriMo writing event.
Write daily from November 1-30 by either committing to write:
50,000 words (1,667 a day)
Or one hour a day minimum.
You may write however, whenever, whatever you wish. Here are some tips to help you get started.
You do not have to write a “book,” whatever “book” means to you.
You may write short stories, world building material, character sketches, technical guides, whatever you wish, though working on fiction is the goal of NaNoWriMo, as long as you commit to write toward your end month goal, writing is writing.
Pantsers write by the seat of their pants. Plotters write from an outline or plot. Plotsers or Plantsers write a little of both, found to be the most common technique for NaNoWriMo.
This isn’t a word game, though it is played like one. It is a head game. Get your head in the writing game and keep writing. If something jumps in your path, either kick it to the curb or confront and deal, but don’t let it stop you writing.
You can write anywhere and at any time. If you like writing in a social space, there are a wide range of NaNoWriMo events held around the world, including in Washington and Multnomah Counties of Oregon. There are meetups, write-ins, lock-ins, and a variety of social events to help you write better, longer, and faster, all adding up to the word count or hour tracking goals. If you like writing in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning or before you go to bed in the quiet of your home or office, write then. Are you a commuter? Write while you commute using voice recognition, a tablet, or phone, but only voice while driving, and do so with care.
Want to participate but don’t have anything to write about? Writers in the Grove will be releasing a NaNoWriMo prompt of the day during November. We have some great NaNoWriMo prompts from previous years, and years of weekly prompts from our creative writing group meetings for you to find something to get you writing.
Want to join us? Here is how to participate, and each step, other than the writing, is optional.
Commit to one hour a day or 50,000 words a day. Pick one.
Go to NaNoWriMo. Registration is free. Create a profile, announce your project (make it up if you don’t have one), and read the instructions on how to proceed starting November 1.
Set up your writing environment, be it on your computer, tablet, phone, or a location in your home or office.
Set up your writing experience. It could be Scrivener (we have a list of great NaNoWriMo project templates and are introducing our own), Word, Pages, a text editor, voice recognition software, whatever you write in. Clean off the keyboard, your mouse, computer monitor screen, your desk, your office, your space. Remove all distractions and leave only inspiration in your writing space.
Prepare by creating or working on your outline, collecting prompts, bookmarking creative writing prompt sites (like Writers in the Grove), and/or collecting all the material you need for inspiration.
Check out our NaNoWriMo Survival Guide with tips, techniques, lists, inspiration, techniques, prompts, Scrivener project templates, and word tracker spreadsheets.
Explore the various Scrivener project templates for NaNoWriMo, including our new one. Select one and set it up with notes, outline, research, and whatever material you nee to keep writing.
Set your ground rules. Most participants are successful when they set the following ground rules during November:
Write only. No editing. None. Zilch. Not even a spell check. N.O. E.D.I.T.I.N.G. PERIOD.
No research or a 2-5 minute limit on research per day. Trust yourself. It’s all in your head. Pull it out. Put it down.
Keep daily appointments with yourself to write. Block out the times on your calendar and keep them, like a doctor or dentist appointment. Show up even if you don’t want to.
Learn how to turn off your phone and internet, and keep it off during your writing appointment time. Seriously.
Tell friends, family, and pets that you are not to be disturbed unless guts or bones are exposed to the air. This is an excellent time to teach your family and friends how to live without you for an hour or two a day. If you have to, lock them up before you start. The pets.
Create a backup plan. What are you going to write if your brain locks up on what you are writing? Make a list of world building, character sketches, place sketches, experience sketches, subplots, stories within stories, background information, historical timelines, and other material to help you write the stories that aren’t in your story that help define your story. Include a backup list of prompts and completely off topic subjects to write about to help you step away mentally from your story for a breather, then dive right back in again.
Find loyal supporters and ass-kickers. We have some great ass-kickers in our Writers in the Grove group, but you need your own if you aren’t a member of a writing group. Tap into your friends, close and long distance, and ask them for a weekly nag or check-in to help you keep going. Find a local or genre group on the NaNoWriMo groups list and introduce yourself.
Learn how to add your daily word count to NaNoWriMo. You add the update of your total word count for the month so far, not your daily word count, to the NaNoWriMo word count total.
Learn how to verify your final word count to help you complete your goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. Achieve your goal on the NaNoWriMo site and win some great prizes and discounts.
Before you get too overwhelmed, we’ve created a NaNoWriMo Guide featuring all the tutorials, tips, techniques, and prompts we’ve published here on participating in NaNoWriMo. Enjoy.
Writers in the Grove members have been participating in the annual National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, for several years. Along the way we’ve shared many word trackers and NaNoWriMo Scrivener Templates, and this year, we are introducing our own.
NaNoWriMo Template by Writers in the Grove: In Scrivener, go to File > New Project > Options > Import Templates and import this template into Scrivener. To use, look in the Fiction section and select it. Edit to suit your needs.
NaNoWriMo Word and Hour Tracker by Lorelle and Writers in the Grove: An Excel spreadsheet for tracking your NaNoWriMo progress by word count or hour count. Instructions included.
NaNoWriMo Scrivener Project by Lorelle: This is the original NaNoWriMo project for the Scrivener template if you wish to open it and explore and modify it as your own. Please use File > Save As to rename it to protect the original.
All files are designed to be reused over and over again. We may make changes, so stop by for updates once a year, or more would be appreciated.
As with all new ventures, we’d appreciate feedback and corrections and we will update the files here accordingly.
The discussion and prompt today was on diversity in writing. The discussion was inspired by the New York Times article, “I’m Indian. Can I Write Black Characters?” by Thrity Umrigar:
I’ve always thought about it this way: If men can write about women and science fiction writers can write about space aliens, surely I can write about someone from a different race. And I have spent my entire adult life in the United States. Why shouldn’t I write about that most American of topics — race and race relations?
The debate about whether writers should create worlds and characters based in cultures other than their own is an important one. At its core, pushback in this area serves as a corrective to centuries of colonialism, stereotypical portrayals and racist caricatures. But I worry about how we balance pertinent questions about appropriation with the creative freedom to push boundaries and take risks that are essential to good writing.
To add another wrinkle to this debate, I have never been asked about the appropriateness of creating white American characters, as I did in an earlier novel, “The Weight of Heaven.” Of course, this probably has to do with our country’s ignoble history of racism and racist stereotypes, especially about African-Americans. There’s justifiably less concern about misrepresentation of white Americans.
We talked about how the industry whitewashes the characters we write about, and the confusion from the writers and publishers about the growing demand today for diverse characters. We discussed the struggles and challenges associated with writing a character unlike the author, and techniques to see the world through different eyes.
The prompt is to get inside the skin of someone not like you and write from that perspective.
As Umrigar wrote in the article:
I have made my peace with the fact that I have to defer to the publisher’s expertise about the realities of the marketplace. But to limit myself to write books only about India is to condemn me to tell the same stories. And that kind of pigeonholing is a creative death.
So, I will continue to tell the stories that I am called upon to tell. I know I’ll spend many more interviews explaining the characters I create, and that this tension contains its own revealing, dramatic and painful story about our culture and history.
If you are participating in NaNoWriMo, or wish to, Writers in the Grove offers an extensive range of NaNoWriMo tips and techniques to help you through the month long writing project.
Choose an object in a room or scene and tell the story of what happens (or has happened over the years) from the object’s perspective and voice. The goal is to treat an object as a character.
If you are participating in NaNoWriMo, or wish to, Writers in the Grove offers an extensive range of NaNoWriMo tips and techniques to help you through the month long writing project.
In my research, I discover that the average income that year in the United States was $17,500, and the average monthly rent was $280, a far cry from today’s prices. A gallon of gas cost 86 cents, oil was $24 a barrel, and the Toyota Corolla was one of the most popular cars on the road and the $200 Sony Walkman was in demand by most teenagers and college students. Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” album won awards and played out of boomboxes everywhere, blasting “Y.M.C.A.” by The Village People off the charts. The daily news included updates on Voyager 1 as it made its closest pass by Jupiter, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Moral Majority religious movement by Jerry Falwell, 63 American hostages taken in Iran, and Saddam Hussein becoming president of Iraq. John McEnroe, Tracy Austin, Bjorn Borg, and Martinia Navratilova became household names as tennis champions. We watched MASH, The Jeffersons, The Dukes of Hazzard, One Day at a Time, and Three’s Company on television. The big screen played Alien, All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, Start Trek: The Motion Picture, Norma Rae, The China Syndrome, Being There, Life of Brian, Mad Max, and the Muppet Movie.
The world your characters live in influences their personalities, behaviors, even habits. A worker in 1979 living and/or working in downtown Seattle would have made sure they made a swing by Starbucks at 1912 Pike Place for a cup of their soon-to-be-famous coffee.
Writers in the Grove 