Creating a People List

 

How do you keep track of all your writing related info? I have books about intriguing topics. Newspaper and magazine articles stuffed into the idea file in my file cabinet. I’m also a list keeper. Lists of plotlines. Lists of topics for essays. Lists of agents. Lists of publishers. 

There used to be business cards too. But business cards have gone the way of the Rolodex and with them, the memory of many interesting people I meet. In the past few weeks I’ve touched base – either in real life or virtually -- with so many unusual people:

1. A race car driver
2. A writer who accidentally wrote a blog that became a novel --- in Sweden
3. A woman trying to open her own home bakery
4. A kitchen and bathroom designer
5. A fireworks technician
6. Several marathon runners
7. A tween who started his own business
8. Someone who attended a Taylor Swift concert in London.
9. A volunteer in a program introducing middle and high school students to careers in the medical field
10. A blueberry salesperson

All have fascinating stories to tell but none fit anything I’m working with right now. In the past I would promise myself to file these people away in my memory for later. When I had time to find the ideal market or angle. The problem is that later never seems to come. I get busy with this or that and eventually that fascinating person is just a vague wisp of a memory of something I should have jumped on but didn’t. Names, places, contact information fades away.

For years I’ve been telling myself I have a terrible memory. I promise myself I will remember these fascinating people and for a time I do. Then I forget. Turns out I don’t have a bad memory.

According to researchers at the University of Southern California, forgetting isn’t a failure of your brain to work properly. Instead, it’s your brain working properly, weeding out what it determines is unimportant knowledge. That’s why you remember where you store the slow cooker but not the ant traps. You and your family rely on that slow cooker for some great stew every winter. You haven’t used an ant trap since the invasion of 2014 so although you know there are ant traps somewhere in the house, sometime in the past decade your brain did some sorting and tossed ant trap location information into the not needed pile. But now you need that info! So this sorting business is a little tricky.

One day the practical part of my brain (let’s call her Ms. Brain) is in the middle of the sorting process and realizes there are no articles about blueberries, fireworks or race cars in my immediate future. Obviously, she should jettison the blueberry salesperson, marathon runners and race car driver memories. Ms. Brain is certain she’s doing a good job kicking them to the curb. The difficulty occurs months later when the Writer decides to query a magazine with an article about dangerous jobs and can’t remember the name of that race car driver or fireworks technician! The Writer is frustrated with struggling to remember while I’m certain Ms. Brain is saying, “Seriously, you have never written anything about racing. You expected me to keep the racecar driver?”

Since Ms. Brain and The Writer can't agree, I’ve started a new list. The People List. Now, when I meet interesting people I immediately add them to my People List along with any details like how we met, their contact info, what makes them an interesting person. I’ve also found it’s a great way to encourage people to keep me apprised of updates in their story. “I don’t have any articles featuring fill-in-the-blank right now. However, you’re so fascinating I’d like to add you to my Interesting People List. Please let me know if you have any new developments.”

Now, when I come across a new writing market or need an idea for a story, instead of struggling to pull back discarded memories I have my handy People List to prompt me. I may have had no direction when I met these people but with time, sometimes an article idea begins to take shape. But it’s a lot easier if I remember people’s names!

How do you remember interesting people and facts that you may one day use in your writing?

Jodi M. Webb writes from her home in the Pennsylvania mountains. She is hoping to meet lots of interesting people this summer to add to her People List. She's also a blog tour manager for WOW-Women on Writing and a freelance writer for anyone who will have her. Get to know her @jodiwebbwrites,  Facebook and blogging at Words by Webb.

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2 comments Jodi M. Webb, memory, writing tips

Friday Speak Out!: From Protest to Plague and Back Again: Researching Memory, Living the Past

by Sarah Relyea

Can we ever know the past? Sure, we have research—records, documents, and archaeological sites—but long-ago words and stones leave huge gaps. Sensory memory rushes to fill those gaps, dangling its low-hanging fruit, coloring today's pandemic and protest with our forgotten fears and longings.

Through the strange brew of research and memory, novels can bring the past to life. Novels make the past come alive in much the same way they make anything else come alive—by creating assumptions and then breaking them. By creating a seemingly stable world and then setting loose an orphan, a killer cop—or maybe a plague. Once you’ve opened the barn door and overturned your readers’ safe assumptions—the assumptions you set up—you can let the horses run pretty far before you start rounding them up. Your readers will follow, because they’re looking for resolution. They’ll want your character’s ordeal to end—by death, if necessary, as long as that ushers in a new world order.

World-Building

Consider fairy tales. They begin by sketching a world and its usual cause-and-effect. When Hansel and Gretel’s father abandons them in the forest, for example, Hansel saves them by leaving a trail of pebbles. As the scene begins to repeat, the reader assumes it will follow the same pattern. But seemingly minor changes—this time Hansel has bread rather than pebbles—end up overturning the reader’s expectations.

Fairy tales are sketches. By contrast, world-building in a novel demands more than bare-bones narrative. It calls for dense description of outer and inner worlds, and for that reason novels are research-based. In writing your novel, you will need to engage in lengthy world-building, laying down patterns and assumptions—developing your readers’ expectations. Then, just as your reader is getting comfortable in your fictional world, go ahead and do something slightly freaky. Change the pebbles to bread. If you’re subtle, the reader may not even notice. Now you can lead them deep in the primeval forest—where you’ve planned on taking them all along.

If you’re taking your reader through the forest, you’ll need to know all about trees and wildflowers. Dig out your nature guides, pack a notebook, and head for a redwood canyon. By the way, make sure you know how to spot mountain lion tracks. Bear tracks, too. Research can save your life!

1969 Protests

Along with research on everything from clothing styles to historical events to bear tracks, you’ll need to delve into memory. In my novel Playground Zero, I stayed close to home. As a very young person, I’d spent several years in 1960s Berkeley, a place of fantasy and anarchy where fences were for jumping, boys and girls on LSD roamed the streets, and tear gas was as common as patchouli. Places and events from those years appear in Playground Zero—including the 1969 confrontations over People’s Park, when cops and protesters fought over a park, tear-gas-spewing helicopters choked the skies, and Governor Reagan called in the National Guard. I searched through newspaper databases and historical works; and I dredged my own deeply-buried memories.

Novels set in the past are more suspenseful when the author does not always know where the story is going. Remember that research seeks enlightenment. Focus on unresolved problems from the past that reverberate today.

Not Pebbles, Not Bread

Tonight, as the pandemic fades and protesters and looters rage through the streets of Brooklyn after the blatant police killing of a black man, George Floyd, I hear the drone of choppers overhead. The People’s Park riot was years ago and thousands of miles away, yet for me the sounds convey a whole world. They carry the seeds of a new scene. Research and memory together could bring it to life on the page, but for now there’s no need. The tragedy is already much too real.

I close my eyes and wonder what people are throwing. Not pebbles, and certainly not bread.

A sudden explosion rocks my desk. I pray it’s not another Princeton-educated lawyer tossing a Molotov cocktail into a police car.

* * *

Harvard grad Sarah Relyea is author of the upcoming novel, Playground Zero (She Writes Press, 2020), a coming-of-age story set in Berkeley in the late 1960s. Her first book was the nonfiction Outsider Citizens: The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin. Follow Sarah on Facebook and Goodreads.
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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!
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1 comment book research, Friday Speak Out, historical events, memory, novel writing, protests, Sarah Relyea, world building

Don’t Rely on Memory Alone

When I sat down to work on my novel, I knew I needed to work on my character descriptions. They were, at best, scant. I wanted them to be rich and full. I wanted my characters to be so familiar to the reader that they would be recognizable on the street.

That's how I feel about Sharon Shinn's characters.  If I were to pass Senneth or Gabriel on the street, I would immediately know who it was.  I would probably go a little fan girl.  Okay, a lot fan girl.  I want readers to feel this about my characters so I pulled out Shinn's Mystic and Rider. I decided to study up on how Shinn had made Senneth so familiar to me. Skimming the first two chapters, I looked for the character description. I saw a word here and a phrase there but not the passages that I recalled. I read on and eventually realized that I had misremembered.

Yes, Shinn had brought her characters to life, but she didn’t do it through key passages. She did it a word here and a sentence there. She did it through action and experience and time. It was a lot like getting to know a real person which could explain why her characters feel so real. If I had tried to accomplish this working from what I misremembered, I would have failed.  I needed to refresh my memory.

Whether you are writing a book inspired by reading from your youth or a favorite adult book, get that book out. Give it another read and this time read it as a writer. You know the emotion that it elicited in you, but now look at how that was done. Don’t assume that you remember because the very best techniques are subtle and almost silent.

Love Yolen for her lyrical prose? Pull down your favorite book, whether it’s The Devil’s Arithmetic or Owl Moon, and refresh your memory.

Perhaps you’re drawn to the impish humor of Bruce Coville? Reread Jennifer Murdley’s Toad or I Was a Sixth Grade Alien. Take another look at how he does it – do the laughs follow physical gags or jokes in dialogue?

Trying to emulate the descriptive passages of Anne Rice? Don’t try it for yourself until you’ve reacquainted yourself with The Vampire Lestat or Memnoch the Devil.

The problem is that although we remember very well how books and stories make us feel, we aren’t very good at remembering how the author did it. In reality, that’s a good thing because it means that you were immersed in the story.  This is, of course, the same experience that you want for your own readers.

Don't rely on your memory. Take the time to renew your acquaintance with the books that made you want to give writing a try. Once you’ve studied how they did it, you’ll be ready to put this knowledge to use at the keyboard.

--SueBE

Sue is the instructor for our course, Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults. The next session begins on June 6, 2016.

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2 comments memory, mentor texts, reading

Freeze Frame: Writing Life Moments

By Jane Hertenstein

As a writer and a working woman, it’s easy for me to get overwhelmed—especially when facing the blank page. In freshman comp we’re told to “write what you know,” but that is sometimes easier said than done. At the end of a busy day, I’m not sure anymore what I actually know or if it is simply assumed.

The same goes for memory. If writing what one knows or, put another way, memoir, is about what happened, then there is still room for a thousand different angles. What “happened” depends on where one stands in the story.

Your story. Anne Sexton is quoted as saying, “It doesn’t matter who my father was; what matters is who I remember he was.”

Your memoir matters. Many of us are looking to write memories—either in the form of literary memoir or simply to record family history, in order to pass down stories to children or grandchildren. Writing about the past can be therapeutic, helping us to make sense of the here-and-now. For some, myself included, writing can be the cause of anxiety.

So what I do is look at life in bite-size pieces. In my book Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir I de-construct the process I use to stir up memories and write about them. Just like how a camera focuses and gives us a snapshot, I freeze-frame a memory from the past, something that actually happened, crop it or enlarge it, and bring it into focus. Flash!

Publishers of literary journals are eager for flash, the haiku of prose, where every word counts. There is no widely accepted definition for the length. Some journals are asking for no more than 100 words. Six Minute Magazine is looking for quality fiction that can be read in under six minutes. Morgen Bailey has put out a call for six-word flashes for Flash Fridays. The upper limits of flash might be 1,000 words. Tin House Magazine runs a column every Friday for flash a 1,000 words or less. Regardless of length—flash is hot. In one 12-month period I’ve had over 20 such flashes accepted.

For some, flash is a proper story with a beginning, middle, and end. I propose with flash memoir that one not look for plot but write for the “ah ha” moment. That may be an impression, a vignette or scene with a simple take-away, or a stream-of-conscious journaling, where the present is captured and poured out onto the page.

One way I do this is to improvise. Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way instructs us to “make time,” not wait to “find time” for writing. She suggests free writing where for 10 – 20 minutes you write whatever comes into your head without editing, without even lifting your pen from the page. Her method is called Morning Pages.

Flash memories come unbidden, unconnected—yet can stay with us like last night’s undigested roast beef. Try not to get bogged down with facts—or exactly how it happened. Our memories are flitting fireflies, one minute we see them like the light of day and in the next instant we are floundering in darkness. Allow yourself to get distracted and let your mind wander. But, no matter what, stick with it.

In my book Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir and at my blog Memoirous I have a section on where to submit flash memoir. Good luck flashing!

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Jane Hertenstein’s current obsession is flash. She is the author of over 40 published stories, a combination of fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre both micro and macro. In addition she has published a YA novel, Beyond Paradise, and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, which garnered national reviews. She is a 2x recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Hunger Mountain, Rosebud, Word Riot, Flashquake, Fiction Fix, Frostwriting, and several themed anthologies. Her latest book Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir is available through Amazon. She can be found blogging about Flash Memoir at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/

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5 comments flash memoir, Freeze Frame, Jane Hertenstein, memory