A Long Recovery For Haiti

Update 5:  And the other donor has sent me her confirmation email too.  I'm not going to post it because once I blur out the personal details, it looks exactly the same as mine.  
Update 4:  Made my matching donation!

Update 3:  Thank you to all 32 donors who participated!  Will update with the final wrapup in a couple days.


Update 2:  There seems to be a trend of anonymous donors now.  It's totally fine to donate anonymously, but if you do, could you give some kind of nickname or hometown just so it's more personalized?  Thanks!


Update: An additional donor has also agreed to match donations, so now, for every donor, $20 will be donated to the American Red Cross, up to a limit of $1000.  Because of this new development, we are extending it one more day, to the end of Friday night. Thanks to all who have participated already. 

Recovery efforts are underway for the Haiti earthquake, but they still have a long way to go.  Please consider making a donation to relief efforts.  To try to jump start things, we're going to try a fundraiser of sorts on the blog.



Here's how it will work.
1.  Please make a donation to Haiti relief efforts.  You can donate to the American Red Cross by texting "HAITI" to 90999 (A $10 donation will be taken off your phone bill).  Or, make a donation via their web page* or another charity of choice. 
2.  Leave a comment in this post noting that you made a donation.  My husband and I will donate $10 to the American Red Cross for every donation listed in the comment section between now and the end of Thursday, up to a limit of $500 dollars.  

We're just going to go by the honor system here.  Please do consider making a donation.  Thank you!


*I've heard that with text donations, the money doesn't get there for 90 days, so a web page donation is better, but if you're short on time, a text donation is better than nothing!  Also, if you choose to make a web page donation, I recommend specifying the International Relief Fund rather than earmarking the funds for Haiti specifically, so that it gives the Red Cross some freedom to be flexible as circumstances dictate.

Current techniques for brain research

This is part two of a series of a posts in which I provide background knowledge for evaluating neuroscience findings reported in the news.  This post is rather basic, but it's important groundwork for my future posts on neuroscience and writing.

When evaluating experimental results, you have to understand the techniques used to get them.  Here is a summary of three ways neuroscientists learn about the brain.

Flash fiction should matter

Note:  Today we have a guest post on flash fiction from Simon Larter.  Some of Simon's flash pieces include Twister (published at Per Contra) and Rise, Lazarus (Flashquake).  In this article, Simon shares about a piece  that didn't make it to publication and draws some principles about what makes good flash fiction.

Thus far in my writing career (such as it is), I’ve specialized in flash fiction. That’s mainly due to my fiction writing class in my last term of college, which focused almost exclusively on flash, but I’ve found I enjoy the form. It allows me to explore small, yet important ideas without the burden of a minimum word count or expectations of elaboration.

Despite the low word count, though, flash fiction has to tell an interesting story, or it won’t work. The same strictures that apply to novels apply to flash, they’re just distilled and amplified due to the brevity of the form. Characters have to be immediately interesting, or at least identifiable; situations must be compelling, or at least evocative.



With those things in mind, why don’t we look at a bit of flash fiction? Hop on over to my blog to read the piece I’ll be examining. (I’m posting it there because I don’t want to clutter Livia’s blog with an epic-length post.)

(Waits. Whistles. Taps toes.)

You’re back? Good. Thanks for reading that.

So did you see anything wrong with it? On the surface, it’s not so bad. I feel that the prose is fairly decent, and I like a couple of turns of phrase in it—I kind of dig the “porcelain crescent” bit, and I’m quite pleased with the flashback scene in the bathroom. The editors at Flash Fiction Online thought it was all right too: this piece made it through the first round of editorial review, which places it in the top 20% of all submissions in a given time period. So again, is there anything wrong with it?

Needless to say (since you haven’t seen this piece in FFO recently), Cake and Coffee didn’t get accepted. In the second round of editorial reviews, I got some pretty crushing feedback. Here’s one of the comments:

The writing was good up to the ending. Even if I could figure out what angered Jean so violently, the story would still have no plot.

And that was the best of it. “Totally miserable and unappealing MC,” was another comment. Yeah. Not so good.

But what can that teach us about what good flash fiction should be? For my part, I think it tells us that something significant must happen to the characters. You might say that allowing someone to be scalded and possibly disfigured is significant, and in real life, yes, it is. But in fiction, being burned by hot coffee is only significant if it produces a change in the characters. Feeling “small and cruel inside” is not a significant change. And have I really set Jean up as capable of this kind of cruelty? I don’t think I have. It seems almost arbitrary, and at the very least, it’s a disproportionate response to the loss of a slice of cake, of all things.

Another problem—and all the rejecting editors noted this—is that I have a seriously unlikable main character. I might have been able to get away with that in a novel, where there’s potential for development and change. But in flash? There’s not much room for that. My main POV character was neither interesting nor sympathetic, and that brings the whole story down.

I hesitate to draw any concrete conclusions about flash fiction from this one example, since with all art, there are exceptions to every rule. A more talented writer might have been able to easily surmount the difficulties I’ve presented. Still, in my own fiction, I want to be able to learn from what I perceive are my mistakes.

In the end, I feel that Cake and Coffee turned out as a glorified anecdote, and not a particularly pleasant one. Flash fiction should be more than that. I feel it should mean something, express something true, tell an important story. Flash fiction should matter.


Simon is rediscovering writing after a 15 year hiatus, and wondering why he waited so long. He is a husband and father of three whose day job in lightning protection may someday provide a wealth of anecdotes for the next great American novel (although he’s Scottish by birth). Between work, home renovations, and child duty, he still manages to find time to write short stories and flash fiction. He graduated from Drexel University with a degree in Civil Engineering.

Three Ways the Opening of Graceling Draws the Reader In

I recently attended Kristin Cashore's reading of Fire at the Harvard Bookstore. Afterwards, I bought a copy of Graceling and started reading it as I waited in the signing line.  By the time my turn arrived, I was hooked.  Cashore does a great job of engaging the reader right away. Here's why I think it effectively drew me in:



1.  The story starts with movement.

In these dungeons the darkness was complete, but Katsa had a map in her mind.  One that had so far proven correct, as Oll's maps tended to do.  Katsa ran her hand along the cold walls and counted doors and passageways as she went...

The opening paragraph puts us in the middle of something interesting --  a heroine running through a dungeon.  A few paragraphs later, she single handedly defeats 5 dungeon guards.   Intriguing.  I wanted to know more.

2.  The opening establishes the main character as worth rooting for.

...Oll and Giddon, and most of the rest of the secret Council, had wanted her to kill [the dungeon guards].  But at the meeting to plan this mission, she'd argued that killing them would gain no time. . . . 
She wouldn't kill, not if she didn't have to.  A killing couldn't be undone, and she'd killed enough....

For a reader to invest several hours in a character, he has to be convinced that the character is worth rooting for.  Given that our first impression of Katsa is fairly violent, it's not clear immediately whether she is likeable or sympathetic.  Therefore,  it was helpful for Cashore to establish early on that Katsa, though deadly, has principles and sticks to them.

3.  There is a Sexy Mysterious Guy on page 12 -- ahem, I mean --  It ends with a mystery.



...She caught the fall of every leaf in the garden, the rustle of every branch.  And so she was astonished when a man stepped out of the darkness and grabbed her from behind.  He wrapped his arm around her chest and held a knife to her throat.  He started to speak, but in an instant she had deadened his arm, wrenched the knife from his hand, and thrown the blade to the ground.  She flung him forward, over her shoulder.
He landed on his feet.

We spent the first few pages watching Katsa beating multiple armed men senseless with her bare hands. Now someone manages to sneak up on superhuman Katsa without her knowing, and when she throws him, he lands on his feet? Who is this guy? The scene ends without revealing the mystery man's identity, an I keep reading to find out more.


In your story openings, do you give thought to drawing the reader in?  What are your strategies?

Kristin Cashore on Adverbs

We're going to have a few posts on Kristin Cashore's Graceling and Fire coming up.  To start us off, here's a funny quote (paraphrase) from her recent author reading at the Harvard Bookstore.



Kristin Cashore:  Some people say that adverbs are bad in writing.  I think that's a stupid rule.  If used correctly, adverbs can be a really useful tool--
Audience member interrupts:  How useful?

Hehe.

How do you feel about adverbs?

VQJNV4MWVQ6R

Three Exercises for Character Development from James Frey

I recently ran into a road block on my work-in-progress. While my critique group enjoyed scenes involving my main character, they didn't feel invested in a second story arc involving another second character named Tristam.

Peta suggested I didn't know Tristam well enough and recommended that I flesh him out.  At the time, I was reading How to Write an Damn Good Novel by James Frey (Which I won in a drawing on Jordan McCollum's blog.  Thanks Jordan!), so I decided to try his methods.  They were fun and helpful.  I'll share them with you here.

1.  The Autobiography - Not just the facts of a character's life, but a character's autobiography in his own voice, complete with ramblings, tangents, pontifications, and commentary.  Frey suggests that for a main character, this could be 10-50 pages long!

2.  Psychoanalysis - Pretend to be your character's therapist, sit them on the couch, and start asking them questions.  You can have fun with this.  How do they feel about their mother?  Will they be offended when you ask?  Taking the roll of psychoanlalyst helped me get under the surface to the issues that were important to Tristam.

3.  Ruling passion - What is your character's one driving passion, the "sum total of all the forces and drives within him?"  Power?  Career?  Self worth? Love?  Figure it out and write it down.

Epilogue -- I tried all three exercises (plus an additional one, see below*) and then revised the scenes in question.  The critique group all thought they were much improved.

What is your favorite way to get to know your characters?

*I rewrote the scenes in first person, present tense even though the manuscript is in 3rd person, past tense.  I was able to use phrases and details generated from first person version to add immediacy to the final versions


I hope you enjoyed the post!  To get regular updates from this blog, use one of the options in the left sidebar to subscribe.

A Brain Link and Blog Holiday

The holiday season is here, along with the sporadic internet access that it often entails. Therefore, the blog is also on holiday until after the New Year. I have grand plans of hunkering down with the work-in-progress during my downtime -- we'll see if that actually happens

I leave you with a link. Denver Bibliophile wrote an article about the same study that Narrative and the Brain was based on. He has some interesting things to say about using scripts in narrative.

See you in 2010!