Writers in the Storm

By Ellen Buikema

The road to writing is rocky. What motivates people to write their stories and endure the long journey required to send those book-babies out into the world?

Many people have a book in them to write. Thoughts traverse the mind, nudging to get written. Sometimes those words find their way to paper or screen. Other times the desire to write is a fleeting whim that goes nowhere.

I recently discussed my love of bicycles and realized how my desire to ride fueled an important character trait of mine. It was the very trait that fires my need to tell a story.

My Own Writing Journey (aka the Value of Stubbornness)

When I was about eight years old, I asked for a bicycle—a plain old or new two-wheeler. I didn’t care what it looked like or whether or not it had a bell or basket. I just wanted the freedom to get out and about.

My request received a weird answer. “Sorry, Elle. If I buy you a bike and God forbid you get hurt, I’d never forgive myself.” (Apparently, if someone else bought the bike then any injuries didn’t matter.)

A few months later a much older cousin donated his two-wheeler to me.

I beheld the behemoth with a mixture of joy and fear. The heavy, twenty-eight-inch rust-brown and tan Schwinn was way too big for my tiny self. I had to learn to ride standing up because when I sat on the seat, even when it was at the lowest possible setting, my feet dangled far above the pedals.

After many scraped knees and elbows, I finally learned to balance on my super-sized bike and rode happily up and down our street.

Then came the horrible news. If I wanted to ride, I had to keep my bike in the basement and push it up the steps to use it. I begged to keep it outside. “No. We’re too close to Harlem Avenue. Someone will steal it and you’ll have nothing to ride.”

The Nightmare Basement

Our basement was the setting for many of my childhood nightmares. Dark, dreary, and DARK, it was a creature unto itself.

But I really, really wanted to ride this bicycle. My previously untested stubbornness kicked in.

Since the adults weren’t being helpful, I would help myself. I never weighed the bike but I’m fairly certain that I only outweighed the Schwinn by fifteen or so pounds. In order to lift the bike up the first few stairs, I had to use momentum. Then, through a combination of pushing, slipping backward, and pushing some more, I finally extricated my beloved bike from the basement of horrors and wheeled it out into the light.

Those hours of freedom riding that bike justified every scrape and sniffle.

What does this have to do with writing?

That stubborn want is how I feel about writing. Getting that story out of my mind and into the hearts of others is worth every emotional scrape - and sometimes very real tears. My heavy glaze of pure stubbornness has been a tremendous help in my writing.

Why do you write?

This answer is different for everyone, but here are the most common Top Three motivations:

Creativity

Some writers love the writing process, enjoying the work involved in perfecting their poetry or prose. For them, it may be the writing journey that matters more than the end.

Winning

Beating the competition, gathering prizes, standing out from the crowd, and high sales ratings can be highly motivating.

Impact On Others

Great satisfaction may be gained from inspiring others through writing. It’s a way to leave your mark on the world.

What can hold us back from writing?

This is the dark side of the writing life - those internal fears and voices in our head that hold us back. Here are the three most common demons:

Perfectionism

If it isn’t perfect, I can’t let it go.

Write. Revise. Write. Revise. This can become a cycle that won’t end because the writing "isn’t good enough." This has happened to me with writing and painting. I wrecked a lovely head of hair (done in oils) because I kept playing with it. Thankfully, oils are very forgiving. So is the writing page.

Being Overly critical

If my world-building isn’t as good as J.R.R. Tolkien, why bother?

Setting sky-high goals is self-defeating. Great world-building doesn’t happen in a few days, or a few years. Mr. Tolkien worked on The Hobbit for at least six years, and thought about it a good deal before setting pen to paper.

Impatience

I have to get this book out there as soon as possible.

A fantastic book cover will get you part of the way there but it’s what’s inside the covers that counts. Editing your own work is important, and so is getting other eyes on your work. Multiple revisions are normal and to be expected. Fine editing makes the difference between good and great.

Here is a link to 52 quotes to help you stay motivated and keep writing. I'll leave you with my favorite ones.

"You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."
―Maya Angelou

"You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen, or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life."
―Joanne Harris

Why do YOU write? What motivates you? Is there something that occurred in your life that you see as a turning point in your writing journey? We hope you can share it with us down in the comments!

About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents, Parenting: A Work in Progress, and The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon, a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are: The Hobo Code (YA historical fiction) and Crystal Memories (YA fantasy).

Find her at http://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

by Sudha Balagopal

As a writer straddling continents, I am fascinated by authors who inject foreign words and phrases into their English fiction. I believe these international words and expressions help lend credibility to a story. They embellish the narrative, bring authenticity and help transport the reader.

Some writers explain the meanings of non-English words, either in-text or in a glossary. At times foreign expressions are used sparingly, at other times more generously. Some authors repeat phrases for consistency, or as a matter of style. Regardless of their methods, when expressions from another language are used in description or in dialogue, they leap out at me.

Examples of Foreign Expressions in Fiction

Take the case of the inimitable Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s enduring Belgian detective. When I was in high school, he taught me French expressions like mon ami and mon cher. Athough I had no knowledge of French, uttering the words made me feel clever and witty.

Agatha Christie expertly used foreign expressions in creating Hercule Poirot. The detective is often overlooked and dismissed because he is non-English, and she used his manner of speaking as a tool to develop his persona.

---

‘Mon cher, am I tonight the fortune-teller who reads the palm and tells the character?’

‘You could do it better than most,’ I rejoined.

‘It is a very pretty faith that you have in me, Hastings. It touches me. Do you not know, my friend, that each one of us is a dark mystery, a maze of conflicting passions and desires and attitudes? Mais oui, c’est vrai. One makes one’s little judgments – but nine times out of ten one is wrong.’

-- Agatha Christie, Lord Edgware Dies (Hercule Poirot, Series #9)

Appropriate dialogue is a powerful instrument to lend fiction the flavor of a culture or a place to your story. Using the right words makes dialogue sing. Look at how E. M. Forster makes use of Indian words in his book A Passage to India.

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The first, who was in evening dress, glanced at the Indian and turned instinctively away.

“Mrs Lesley, it is a tonga,” she cried.

“Ours?” enquired the second, also seeing Aziz and doing likewise.

“Take the gifts the gods provide, anyhow,” she screeched, and both jumped in. “O Tonga wallah, club, club. Why doesn’t the fool go?”

“Go, I will pay you tomorrow,” said Aziz to the driver, and as they went off, he called courteously, “You are most welcome, ladies.” They did not reply, being full of their own affairs.

-- E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (Chapter 11)

We may gather from the dialogue that a tonga is a vehicle, a tonga wallah is one who drives the vehicle. A subtle power play also reveals itself here. The last name reveals that the ladies are English, and Aziz is not.

All this is inferred from a short piece of dialogue!

Not everyone espouses the use of words from another language when writing fiction in English. In his article, Say ‘Non’ to Phrasebook Foreign Language in Fiction, Daniel Kalder writes:

“Either you render the language in English, or you render it in French. And if your readers are English speakers, then, I dunno, you should probably render it in English. Chucking in a few phrases of first-year French adds nothing in terms of meaning and is just daft.”

Granted, Agatha Christie was not Belgian and E. M. Forster was not Indian. But what if the author writing in English is reflecting a part of their own heritage, representing who they are as a people and as a culture?

Nayomi Munaweera’s novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, is set in Sri Lanka. She uses terms contextually, a natural exclamation here, a term there, which means the reader connects with the cultural milieu even as the story advances.

The two Tamil words she uses in the lines below lend authenticity and adornment to the dialogue.

---

Nishan must watch his friends being sent to squat at the back of the schoolroom, arms crossed to grasp opposite ears. As they walk home together, these boys say, “Aiyo, she has two eyes in the back of her head.” And only filial devotion keeps him from replying,” Machang, you should see her at home.”

(Part One, Chapter 1)

Foreign expressions are used in descriptive text as well. Take Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who uses Igbo words in her narrative. She brings Nigeria to us, her skill making the prose come refreshingly alive.

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The goats wandered a lot around the yard, they wandered in, too, while we cousins bathed, scrubbing with ogbo that my grandmother made from sun-dried coconut husks, scooping water from a meal bucket. We bathed near the vegetable garden, in the space enclosed with zinc left over from the last house refurbishing. Mama Nnukwu would shoo the goats away from the vines of ugu and beans that crept up those zinc walls, clucking, clapping her hands.

-- Recaptured Spirits, Notre Dame Review, Number 18, 2004

The reader doesn’t need to know exactly what ogbo is, or ugu. We comprehend the scene. The author has sprinkled just two Igbo words into the paragraph to make it shine.

Junot Diaz takes it a step forward, knitting dialogue and text and sprinkling his Spanish into it. He mixes the ingredients as if tossing a salad, the sweet and the sour, the crunchy and tangy, the veggies and the berries. His scenes come alive, because of the use of his Spanish terms. The reader is instantly drawn into the vividness of his narrative.

---

You had to be careful with her because she had a habit of sitting down without even checking if there was anything remotely chairlike underneath her, and twice already she’d missed the couch and busted her ass—the last time hollering Dios mío, qué me has hecho?—and I had to drag myself out of the basement to help her to her feet. These viejas were my mother’s only friends—even our relatives had gotten scarce after year two—and when they were over was the only time Mami seemed somewhat like her old self. Loved to tell her stupid campo jokes. Wouldn’t serve them coffee until she was sure each tácita contained the exact same amount. And when one of the Four was fooling herself she let her know it with a simple extended Bueeeeennnnoooo.

--The Pura Principle, New Yorker, Mar 22, 2010

Final Thoughts

Foreign expressions are connectors. But more than that, they enrich us. Through them, the English language elevates itself, becoming a vehicle to understand other people and cultures—helping us accept differences and celebrate similarities.

To authors who incorporate them, I say: may you continue to do so.

Do you like it when authors sprinkle foreign words into their English narratives (assuming they do it sparingly and well)? Who have you seen do this the most successfully? Please share them with us down in the comments!

About Sudha

Sudha Balagopal's recent short fiction appears in Fractured Lit, Monkeybicycle, Smokelong Quarterly, and Splonk among other journals. Her novella-in-flash, Things I Can't Tell Amma, is forthcoming from Ad Hoc Fiction in July of 2021. She is the author of a novel,  A New Dawn, and two short story collections. Her work is listed in the Wigleaf Top 50, 2021 and is published in Best Microfiction 2021.

More at www.sudhabalagopal.com

Top Photo by Capturing the human heart. on Unsplash

by Angela Ackerman

I think we can all agree that characters are the heart of a novel. We build worlds around our story’s cast, spend dozens of hours plundering their psyche to understand needs, motivations, and beliefs, and even envision complete backstories. Then, of course, we go on to produce tens of thousands of words about their vulnerabilities and strengths as they rise, fall, and rise again on the path to their goal. We also revise, dedicating yet more hours to ensure readers understand and care about our characters as much as do.

Yes, it’s fair to say we work hard to make sure our characters live and breathe on the page. But here’s the irony…in all that effort, many of us overlook or underutilize another important area of character description: their physical appearance.

It’s true, a character’s features and physicality can be hard to convey. We may not have a strong mental picture of them ourselves, or if we do, how to sum it all up economically. After all, at the start of the story when we need to provide details on a character’s appearance, we’re also juggling everything else we must show like the action, setting, circumstances, plus the character’s motivation, underlying problem, emotion, and so on.

So we find ourselves asking, does the character’s looks really matter? Isn’t it what’s inside that counts?

Yes…and no.

Obviously, we want to start a story with action, pulling readers in by showing what a character is doing and why. But including some physical description is also necessary, too. Without it, readers may fail to create a mental image and struggle to connect with the character.

Avoiding physical description and leaving it up to the reader will also create a minefield for the writer because if they mention a physical detail (like a character’s pink hair) later on in the story and it clashes with the image the reader has created on their own, well, it breaks the storytelling spell. Worse, the reader loses confidence in the author’s skills and may be unable to fully suspend disbelief from that point on.

The Goldilocks Approach

We all remember that break-and-enter deviant, Goldilocks, right? Well, to take a page from her book, just like avoiding porridge too hot or too cold, we want to avoid both descriptive sparseness and information overload. Dumps of description of any kind hurt the pace and cause readers to skim, so we should make it our goal to offer enough to point readers in the right direction and then drip in more as needed. The rest they can fill in themselves.

Even more important than quantity is the quality, however. If we choose the right details, we open a gateway to great characterization and hook readers at the same time.

Choose Details that Do More

To avoid disrupting the pace it can be tempting to just give a quick overview of a character’s general features and move on, but unless the character is unimportant to the story, this wastes a valuable opportunity to show-not-tell. Whenever description is needed, we want to think about how to ‘spend’ our word currency in the best way possible. Even with physical description, we want to choose details that will push the story forward, reveal characterization, and show readers what’s hidden.

Try using your character’s appearance to allude to...

Personality. Is your heroine the type to wear bright yellow to a funeral? Does your groom show up to his wedding in a tux t-shirt and flip-flops? Is it a toss-up between which is tighter – the pearls strangling Aunt Edna’s wattle or her disapproving glare as a neighbor’s children run amok? Written with purpose, details about your character’s clothes can say much about their personality and attitude, priming readers to see them in the exact light you want them to.

Occupations and interests. Does your protagonist have the perma-stained grease hands of a mechanic or the meticulously clean ones of a model or physician? Is there a smudge of paint above one eyebrow or a clod of potter’s clay in his hair? Small details can hint at what a character does for a living and the passions they may have.

Perceptions and self-perceptions. Does the hero fixate on his beard so much he carries a comb and smoothing gel with him everywhere he goes? Does his socially oblivious sidekick have a habit of scratching his leg with too-long toenails at the beach, grossing everyone out? Does your heroine ask friends what they plan to wear before choosing herself or does she throw on whatever is clean? The time and attention a character gives to their appearance can show how comfortable they are in their own skin and whether they care about the opinions of others.

Health. Is your character disconcertingly underweight, does she have a bluish tinge to her lips, or is she always hiding her hands so others don’t see the tremors? Does she carry an inhaler or epi pen? A well-placed detail about her appearance can hint at an underlying condition, hereditary health issue, or lay the ground for an unfortunate diagnosis that will upend the character’s life.

Hidden lineage. Does your character have a unique eye color, rare skin condition, or sun sensitivity? A physical peculiarity can help you set the stage to reveal your character is the long-lost descendant of a royal family, lead them to finding their birth parent, or shock them with the discovery that they belong to a race of magic users believed to have died out long ago.

Pedigree, station, education, and wealth. Rather than a hidden lineage, your character’s appearance can show-not-tell their importance within society. Wearing colors only a sect of assassins is sanctioned to use, the quality of their garments or adornments, observing the latest fashion, or showing a character’s bearing, posture, and manners can allude to their upbringing, economic status, or caste.

Secrets. Whether it’s a dried blood drop on the face of their watch, a strange tattoo behind their ear, or the fact they are carrying a concealed weapon at a bridal shower, details that are mysterious or out of place show readers there’s more to a character than meets the eye.

Backstory Wounds. Does your character have an odd bite mark on one shoulder, a chemical burn scar, a missing finger, or they walk with a limp? You can be sure that if it’s important enough to describe, readers will be intrigued about what happened that led to that peculiarity and want to read on to find out. 

Talents and Skills. Does your villainess have throwing knives strapped to her sleeves, chest, and back? Or does your hacker protagonist always carry a backpack full of electronic gadgets and a laptop? If a character’s skills require certain supplies, tech, weapons, or tools, it’s likely they will keep them on hand, a neon sign to readers that they have a special talent.

Emotional mindset and comfort zone. Body language, mannerisms, posture, and the buffer of space the character keeps around them (or not) will all help readers understand what a character may be feeling and how comfortable they are in a location. A character who feels utterly uncomfortable may be pulling at their clothes, sweating, and choosing dark corners over conversation. A character standing tense and watchful, ready to grab the knife at his hip is clearly expecting danger. Someone who loves to be the center of attention will be doing exactly that, confidently working the crowd, smiling and telling jokes, making people feel welcome and basking in the attention.

Motivation. A character who tests the release button on his poison ring before heading out to shake hands with his enemy makes it clear what his goal is, just as a grieving widow will by practicing tearing up in the mirror so she’s ready for her police interview to go over where she was when her husband was mugged and killed. Mission-oriented people dress, behave, and act in alignment with their goal, so describing them in the moment will focus the reader’s attention right where you want it to go.

This is by no means a complete list, but it hopefully gets the idea ball rolling. So, the next time you need to describe a character’s physical features, use it to reveal something extra that activates a reader’s need-to-know mindset, hooking them to read on.

Do you find it easy to write physical description, or is it a bit of a struggle? Let me know in the comments!

About Angela

Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of the bestselling book, The Emotion Thesaurus and its many sequels. Her books are available in eight languages, are sourced by US universities, recommended by agents and editors, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, and psychologists around the world. To date, this book collection has sold over half a million copies.

Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site Writers Helping Writers, as well as One Stop for Writers, a portal to game-changing tools and resources that enable writers to craft powerful fiction. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Top Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash