creative writing

September 20, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

The Boy Who Could Not Lie

I WASN’T LOOKING FOR a subject for a new novel. I was in the midst of re-writing a novel that I’d been working on for a few years, and the finish line was in sight. But one day—this was about a year before I began writing The Underground River—I had one of those moments, more oh:this! than ah-ha.

I was talking to a friend of mine, when she said in a very off-hand manner:

“Well, you know,” she told me, “my son can’t lie.”

It was a startling moment, for me. I stopped listening (sorry, friend!) and thought about what she had said. It was true, I decided. I knew her son. He always went to great pains to tell the truth as accurately as possible.

Now that would be an interesting trait for a character, I thought. And thus my character May Bedloe was born.

How much trouble could a character who couldn’t lie, not even a white lie, get into? A lot, perhaps. That’s always good for drama. And what if that character not only had to lie, but break the law as well? Could they do it?

We all lie all the time. Little lies to spare feelings; big lies to try to get out of speeding tickets. My mother used to call her father the morning after we’d return from a trip to let him know we were home. “If he knew we were driving at night he’d worry, so I just let him think we drove back in the morning.”

When May Bedloe, the character who cannot lie, finds herself blackmailed into helping ferry slaves along the Underground Railroad, she is scared of punishment, yes (she could be fined at best and hung at worst, depending on who finds her and where), but she is also very, very uncomfortable. At one point, May thinks:

On the one hand I did not want to know too much, because
if anyone asked me anything, I was in danger of blurting out
whatever I knew. On the other hand, I did not like to
undertake any activity without specific directions. Step A,
step B. step C.

Many readers have asked me if May is “on the Spectrum,” in the parlance of our times. And the answer is yes. Having a sister with autism gave me some knowledge of what May might be like, although May also (since she’s the main character) has to change by the end of the story. She does not grow out of her fundamental traits, however; rather, she accommodates for them. An actor teaches her a trick for lying, and after one scene she realized she lied without even thinking about it: “That was fear, I suppose.”

In 1838, a person like May might just be called socially awkward. But she is more than that. She has a sense of humor, like my sister, and she is able to rise to the many challenges I threw at her as I was constructing the plot. When my friend talked about her son, I saw a boy who was trying to navigate the world as best he could with his own inner sense of right and wrong. Just like May.

And really, the same can be said of all of us.
Previous Posts in Writing The River series:

Steamboats and Slavery
A Victorian Partridge Family

Next up: Travels with my Father

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June 3, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

A Victorian Partridge Family

ALL I KNEW AT FIRST was that I wanted my next novel to have something to do with theatre — early American theatre, since I’m currently on a nineteenth-century kick.

I got lucky. On the very first day of doing research, as I paged through a crushingly large volume called Theater in America, I came upon a reference to an Englishman named William Chapman. Chapman was a professional actor who had been trained at the Covent Garden Theatre in London. In 1831, Chapman came to America with his family, found the theatre scene there wanting, and built himself his own “floating theatre” — a flatboat with a stage and benches nailed to the deck.

The boat was a just a long, flat barge (no sail, no steam engine), but Chapman poled it down the Ohio River, landing in the little towns on either side of the water and performing shows every night but Sunday. Most fortunately, Chapman had a wife and eight children with him, all of whom acted, played musical instruments, and sang.

Basically, the Chapmans were a Victorian Partridge Family. Only on a flatbed boat instead of a school bus.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on boats, except for elementary school field trips on “The Good Time II” in Cleveland, where I grew up. That was on the Cuyohoga River, the one that caught on fire. (The Ohio River has not, to my knowledge, ever caught on fire.) So it’s not surprising that I came across a lot of boat terms I didn’t know.

Broadhorns, sweeps, and gougers—these are all kinds of poles or oars.

And there were a lot of names for ill-placed trees:

Snags — dead trees in the water (floating or otherwise)
Deadfall — a tree blown down by the wind

And some fun slang:

Arkansas toothpick — a large, pointed dagger used by river men
Grease hunger — to be hungry for meat
Holler calf rope — to surrender (I still don’t understand that)

Sadly, I couldn’t use all the slang I found for fear the text would begin to sound like the Song of the South ride in Disneyland. But the variety of boats—the keelboats, the passenger steamers, the packet steamers (think UPS trucks on the water), the sailboats and canoes, the rafts and barges—suddenly I had the sense of a crowded, watery highway.

And, of course, one riverboat theatre on a flatbed boat. That was where my character, May Bedloe, ended up.

If you were the Victorian version of The Partridge Family, you might have some fun, crazy antics (instigated by a boy named Danny) that almost but didn’t quite ruin your next show. In 1838, though, on the Ohio River, things were a bit more serious. To the north of the river lay Ohio and Indiana and Illinois; to the south was Virginia and Kentucky. Free states and slave states, with only one watery highway between them.

I decided that in this novel I needed to explore that conflict, too.

Next up: Runaway slaves and steamboats

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May 8, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

The Cold Open – Get Scary!

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE Stephen King to start your narrative with something scary. You don’t even have to be writing a horror story. Maybe you just want to grab your reader’s attention right away. Starting with a scary scene or description not only grabs a reader’s emotion—which is a wonderful way to keep them on the page—but also creates a compelling visual image in the reader’s mind. An alley where the dumpsters are overflowing with garbage. Footsteps. A sudden cold breeze.

This technique works well with certain genres, such as mysteries, thrillers, and, of course, horror stories. But it can and has been used with literary novels and contemporary up-market stories as well. Maybe the scene you write is a misdirect — at the start it seems as though a boy is about to get killed by a stranger, and then the stranger turns out to be the boy’s mother. But guess what? In that first page you’ve already done some of the heavy lifting of writing: establishing the characters and time and place in an interesting way.

Even if you don’t want to start with a fright, you can get the same effect in other ways. Because what I’m really talking about is setting a specific, compelling atmosphere. Setting up a specific atmosphere—whether it’s scary, eerie, bucolic, festive, exotic, or other-worldly—is a great way to captivate your reader. It also gives you almost instant style.

“The primary thing you must do is encourage your reader to think about your situation in such detail that she can’t help but keep thinking about it. This what compelling, picturesque, and vivid details are for.”
(Jane Smiley)

You can evoke the Christmas spirit by beginning your novel on the day before Christmas, or the Halloween spirit by beginning (where else) on Halloween. You can set your novel in a foggy swamp (evoking mystery, possibly danger) or an eighteenth-century cove (innocence, romance, or maybe danger if it’s a pirate’s cove). The immediate sense of place does much more to anchor a story than almost anything else.

The setting also draws readers in. As we read we like to paint pictures in our minds, and the more specific the picture, the better. This coupled with a strong emotional pull may not guarantee that every reader will stay with you, but it puts the odds up quite a bit.

So get scary (or romantic or bizarre or exciting). Play with your readers’ emotions. Be manipulative. Start fast and then slow down. This is not the only way to begin, but it’s a tried and true technique.

And after that first scene, you can draw a breath and begin to spin out your story more slowly. You’ll have your readers’ attention now, and that’s exactly what you want.

Other posts in “The Cold Open” series:

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April 1, 2017 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

The Cold Open – Begin with a question

WHEN YOU BEGIN your novel using certain techniques, such as “In media res” (in the middle of the thing) or “At the last possible moment,” you are deliberately planting a question in your readers mind. In the first instance, the question is “What is going on?” and in the second, “What will happen now?” These are great ways to trigger a reader’s curiosity.

But you can also pull that trigger by, literally, asking a question.

Such as the question that begins perhaps the most famous work of fiction:

“Who’s there?”

(Hamlet, William Shakespeare)

Or how about this:

“What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me?”

(Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer)

This technique immediately engages the reader. It calls on the reader to be, almost, part of the narrative itself. The story is not being told as much as it is being explored together, reader and writer.

And—bonus!—asking a question has the added attraction of “breaking the fourth wall,” as they say in theatre. Since you’re addressing the reader, he or she is instantly (we hope) engaged. There is an intimacy created on the spot. If we do it well, that reader will be more involved than usual.

But here’s a warning: If you start with a question, you must then consider how much you want to engage the reader as you go along. Too much involvement is intrusive; too little feels as though the use of your initial involvement was merely a trick. And of course it is a trick—although you don’t want the reader to feel as though it is!

Naturally this trick works better with some forms of fiction—such as literary fiction—than others. But there are work-arounds. Let’s say you’re writing science fiction. Maybe a computer asks the question. Or—for a romance—a young man asks the pretty heroine if he can share her cab. These aren’t questions to the reader, of course, but in the heady confusion of beginning a new story, a reader might well feel at first as though she’s being addressed. And voila, she feels connected.

Even if it doesn’t work with your beginning scene, asking a question at the start of a chapter or section adds energy to your story. Just as an exercise, try using this writing prompt to start a scene. . .

“What do you want from me?”

. . .and see where it gets you. What have you got to lose?

Other posts in “The Cold Open” series:

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October 23, 2016 By Martha Conway Leave a Comment

The Cold Open – Start at the Last Possible Moment

THERE IS A MOMENT WHEN, in your story world, everything has changed. The stranger has come to town, the father has died, the mother has left, the best friend has announced that she’s moving to Pakistan. And that moment is a great place to start your novel. Forget backstory, forget building up to it—just lay out the stakes right away.

Like In Media Res, in which you begin in the middle of the action, this technique relies on triggering a reader’s curiosity. The world has suddenly changed. What will happen now? That’s the question you want in the back of your readers’ minds at all times, but especially at the beginning.

Some examples: In The Lovely Bones, it is the moment when Susie, a teenage girl, gets lured into a neighbor’s secret bunker. In The Hobbit, it is the moment when the wizard Gandalf appears and talks to Bilbo, then leaves a mysterious mark on Bilbo’s front door. In The Light Between Oceans, this is when the childless couple manning a lighthouse finds a baby in a lifeboat.

This technique answers the question of why a reader should care by creating drama immediately that will result in—what? We want to know what. If you start big, you can afford to fall back a bit afterwards, a least for a bit. Layer in some characteristics; maybe even give a bit of back story. You have won the first battle: getting the reader’s attention.

Starting at the last moment possible allows for a dramatic chapter one, which is great, but it raises the stakes. Your reader will probably want more of the same. Of course, it would be difficult for the writer and tiring for the reader to have constant, building drama. There is an ebb and flow to everything, even our attention. Down time is important—but not too much. The writer needs to create enough sparks in chapters two, three, and so on to prepare for the next dramatic moment without losing readers.

And a dramatic moment doesn’t have to be a natural disaster or a gunfight; it can be as small as one character’s timely decision. Drama in the Greek means “Action.” Think of how many kinds of action there are in life! So don’t worry if your novel begins not with a death, but with a simple decision to write an anonymous letter. That’s an action. That’s drama. That’s starting at the last possible moment.

Other posts in “The Cold Open” series:

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