Long, rambling post on many subjects...

Some thoughts for the day....

Clearly I'm not tracking on all cylinders because I went grocery shopping at lunch and carefully read all the ingredients on everything I bought to make sure they didn't have high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated anything, or gluten... then bought a bag of candy corn on my way out and ate that before anything else. *eyeroll*

Ezzo

I was discussing Gary Ezzo and his book Babywise/Growing Kids God's Way yesterday with a friend of mine and couldn't sleep all night thinking of the horror that is Ezzo. I try to steer clear of contraversial subjects on my blog. I try to stay mostly light hearted and focused on fun things the kids are doing, writing, gardening, things like that. But I will say that while book burning and/or banning is creative terrorism in my mind, like the death penalty it may just have it's place every now and then. If anyone out there in the blogosphere is considering using this method of child rearing without moderation (and Ezzo certainly does not encourage moderation or a blending of methods), I'd ask you to please check out these resources first:
http://www.fix.net/~rprewett/concerns.html
http://www.fresnofamily.com/ap/ezzo.htm
http://www.equip.org/free/DG233.htm
http://www.nospank.net/ezzo4.htm
http://www.ezzo.info/
I won't get into much more here, but just had to include some of these links in a post, to add one more "anti-Ezzo" hit to those googling him. Just to be clear - I'm all for schedules and discipline and structure if that's what works for your family - Ezzo is in a class all by himself in that regard. I don't know how any man has the gall to take from Christ suffering and dying on the cross, an imperative from God that a mother not pick up a crying infant.

OK, difficult subject out of the way - onto writing...

I want to talk a little bit about the mysticism of writing. I listen to a lot of podcasts on writing and read lots of blogs and books, and I have an English degree... so it's safe to say I've heard many, many hours of instruction and discussion on the subject. While getting my English degree, I found it very difficult to write creatively. I think in part I was absorbing a lot of information and was in a "take it in" mode rather than an output mode. But also, I know that I struggled with thinking that if my prose didn't sound like Faulker/Austen/Bronte/ as it left my pen, I might as well give up. I'd never heard the adage "first drafts are allowed to suck" or "write first, edit later". I just thought that what I was writing would never endure to be taught in a classroom years from now.

Maybe because of that, I bristle when I hear authors talk about the magic on the page, or how the characters speak to them and run away with the book - things that can't be analzyed or quantified or taught in any way. It makes writing into an exclusive club that you can't gain access to unless you experience "it", whatever that is.

Pshaw!!!

I loved reading Janet Evanovich say that her characters are *her characters* and do exactly what she tells them to! I do think that I finally understand what authors mean by their characters doing something different than they had planned, however. Here's what I think - it's like raquetball. Have you ever heard a writing/raquetball analogy? I didn't think so!

So, in raquetball, you have the laws of physics governing the ball's movement. You hit the ball at a particular angle with a particular force, and the ball has no choice but to bounce off the wall in a particular way. If that's not the way you want the ball to go, then you hit it at a different angle or with a different force, but you don't get to change the laws of physics.

I think it's the same thing with characters. You set them up with certain traits, strengths, weaknesses and drives (their laws of physics). Then you introduce stimuli, events, plot points into their world (the serve) and they will react to these events according to the laws you set up. Now, as a writer, you can rewrite and change these laws if you don't like them. You can make your heroine stronger or weaker, or your hero a little more devious or more moral - but once you've established who they are, then their reactions need to make sense within that framework. So I think characters run away with the book when an author sets up that framework, and then introduces the plot points, and discovers that for a character to stay true to who you created them to be, they have to react in a way you hadn't planned. But of course you can change that if you want to by changing the character - or just go with the new direction.

But it isn't a big, amorphic mystery. It's writing. It's a skill. We can all do it. Just sit down with a pen, or a keyboard, and have at it!