Writers in the Storm

Kimberly Brock

There was this time when I was in college and working at a local outlet mall around the holidays so everything in my memory is a blur of gift wrap, cinnamon scented candles and rude people. But there was a Dairy Queen at the entrance to the mall and so almost daily, I ran through the drive-through for something – a burger, or a blizzard. I’d sit in the parking lot and eat and watch the traffic and try to find a Zen place before entering the fray.

There were plenty of people to watch and even though I wasn’t yet aware that this quirk in my personality that made me a serial observer would one day serve me well as a writer, I was already practicing my craft. I loved to imagine who the people were and what their lives were like, and most of the time I was absolutely certain of my deductions.

As I said, I was very young. Things and people seemed more cut and dry, black and white, good and bad, to me then. My own life experiences were fairly limited. They say to write what you know and I was filling journals with childhood memories, bad poetry, and romantic notions, but not much else. Not because I didn’t know anything else, but because I couldn’t write everything I knew. To write everything I knew meant to expose the addictions, abuses and broken places in my family and community, and I wasn’t interested in those kinds of betrayals. To write everything came at a cost that was too high.

And then I saw her. The Dairy Queen.

On the sidewalk, she sat like a squat toad under a bundle of brown clothes that obviously didn’t fit her. Her gray hair was thin and pulled hard off her face into a tight knot at the back of her head. Her face was hard and tight and dark from the sun. Her jaw was set in that strange angle of those without teeth and her eyes were slits, suspicious and mysterious and somehow threatening. I saw her in great detail because I’d pulled into the drive-through line and my car was stopped directly in front of her. I couldn’t ignore her. I couldn’t stare at her. She made me nervous and I remember checking to be sure my doors were locked, as if she might suddenly jump up and hop in my car.

My entire reaction embarrassed and shamed me, the girl with a journal full of sweet, clean little girl stories. She held a cardboard sign, you know the kind. I wish I could say that I clearly recall what it read but you can guess: Homeless. Need food. Please help.

I won’t lie to you. I wanted to look away. I felt I had no idea what to do. Except, I knew exactly what to do, but was afraid to do it. When I look back on this memory I realize that feeling visits me frequently in my writing choices and that’s a strange realization. We’re presented with choices in life and in our work and we can look away and make excuses or we can have the courage to act, to take a hard look and know something for what it is, to name it and face it. Maybe it’s not the same, altogether, but there’s some essence of dignity that comes in being honest with ourselves, with others – with our readers.

The everything that I knew – all the things I couldn’t honestly write about yet - told me that if I rolled my window down and gave the Dairy Queen a twenty dollar bill, she wouldn’t use it to put food in her belly or to take a cab to wherever she could sleep for the night. She drink it. Or worse. It would be taken from her. The everything told me to pull out of the drive through line, park my car, and speak to the Dairy Queen. And for some reason, I did. For some reason, that particular day, I was prepared to meet her. Whether she was prepared to meet me was a different story and that’s what I’m really getting to here, but let me explain.

When I reached out to take her hand and introduce myself, she looked frightened. And honestly, angry. My hand was empty and she was looking for that twenty from my wallet. But I gave her my name, instead. She did not give me hers. I didn’t mind. I’d already named her, anyway. Then I told her that if she would wait – go inside and have a seat where it was warm – I would buy her a meal, run to the grocery store to get her a few things, and be right back to call her a cab to take her to the local shelter for the night.

I will never be sure that she wanted – or needed – any of the things that I offered. She never thanked me. She never spoke to me, at all, in fact. She looked completely stunned and even more than that, annoyed. But she didn’t turn down the free cheeseburger. I paid for her meal and left her sitting in a booth while I ran to the nearest grocery store and filled two bags with cans of soup, peanut butter, nuts, crackers, tuna and a few chocolate bars, because I thought they would make her smile. The everything I knew told me that what she wanted me to come back with were alcohol and cigarettes, and chocolate would go unappreciated. But it also told me that it had been a long time since someone tried to take care of the Dairy Queen, who might not even still be waiting in that booth by the time I hurried back. And more than anything I could give her, maybe the most important thing was that I return.

Truly, I hadn’t expected to find her there. By the look on her face, she was as surprised to see me. I gave her the bags of groceries and told her a cab would arrive any minute. And I left her there.

I wish I could say that things ended with some kind of miracle. I wish I could say that it was a transformative moment in my life and that I was a better person for having met the Dairy Queen. But the truth is, I already knew her. In fact, I often wonder if I conjured her out of the everything inside myself.

I was ready to meet her that day and I meet her every day since I started to write. Through so many of the characters in my work, I hear her so clearly, all the things she didn’t say to me that day, years ago. All the everything she embodied and I was afraid to expose. I imagine what she saw when a young, well-dressed woman approached her and naively assumed her needs, then ran off to try to meet them with a few bags of groceries and a cab to nowhere. And I try to give to her what I couldn’t give that day – nor to my own dark and silenced stories – I try to give her the chance to speak. For in her silence, at the cost of a little humility, she gave me the gift of my own voice.

Where did you find your voice? We'd like to hear your story.

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About Kimberly

Kimberly Brock is the award winning author of the #1 Amazon bestseller, THE RIVER WITCH (Bell Bridge Books, 2012). A former actor and special needs educator, Kimberly is the recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year 2013 Award. A literary work reminiscent of celebrated southern author Carson McCullers, THE RIVER WITCH has been chosen by two national book clubs.

Kimberly’s writing has appeared in anthologies, blogs and magazines, including Writer Unboxed and Psychology Today. Kimberly served as the Blog Network Coordinator for She Reads, a national online book club from 2012 to 2014, actively spearheading several women’s literacy efforts. She lectures and leads workshops on the inherent power in telling our stories and is founder of  Tinderbox Writer’s Workshop. She is also owner of Kimberly Brock Pilates.

She lives in the foothills of north Atlanta with her husband and three children, where she is at work on her next novel. Visit her website at kimberlybrockbooks.com for more information and to find her blog.

Kathryn Craft

As you sat at the table counting and sharing your blessings last week, I’ll venture there was an entire subset of “blessings” that you skirted past. Because, frankly, to say them aloud would ruin everyone’s appetite. Now that your feast is digested, I’m going to suggest you seek the truth in the following statement:

We writers should be grateful for every painful event that ever challenged us.

Why would we want to be grateful for accidents, assaults, roadblocks, and acts of omission? It’s a fair question. If it were up to me, the world would never know one more case of despair that resulted in a mass shooting or suicide. We would never again have to hear the rallying cry, #metoo. We’d be able to keep everyone employed so that no one would go hungry or have to live out of their cars or suffer due to lack of healthcare.

But all of us are graduates of the school of hard knocks, and we didn’t get to design the classroom. Writers, in particular, are sensitive to the injuries we’ve sustained. They made us feel utterly powerless. Why should we feel grateful?

Because these intense pressures inspired us to arise to the hard work of writing stories that matter. We understand that such challenges served as the grit that, with additional layers of perspective, become the pearl that is our unique voice.

I’ll admit that there are certain trials that are exceedingly hard to be grateful for. But what’s the alternative? We can’t change the past. Murdering our transgressors isn’t a particularly life-affirming option. We could rail against humanity till the end of our days, but how will that give us meaningful lives, let alone one single moment of peace or joy? Rising above our torment by being grateful for the lessons it confers makes a story worth telling, whether you funnel that wisdom into fiction or memoir. The courageous determination to create a life worth living inspires readers.

Gratitude signals that we have moved beyond the outrage we once felt. Inciting outrage in our reader isn’t a bad thing—it shows that the pressures on our characters are acute—but I know from experience that outrage is not the place from which you can write your best novel. An early reader of my debut told me my character was too angry, and suggested I imbue her with some of the strength that allowed me to get beyond my first husband’s suicide. Clearly I wasn’t yet quite as healed as this reader made me out to be! But her feedback gave me a useful benchmark: I knew that my characterization of Penelope Sparrow would be complete once her actions exuded an admirable strength. In many ways, Penelope and I healed together. By freeing me from anger, gratitude allowed me to enter the perspectives of my characters in a way that resulted in a more nuanced—and ultimately more powerful—tale.

Gratitude for our life’s journey is a choice. It is not easy work. No one wants a seed of discord to be placed in her hand, and no one would blame you for casting yours onto the pavement and letting it bounce away. But if instead you planted that seed of discord in your fertile mind, let your spirit rain down upon it, and crack it open, you will watch it grow into a story whose testament to the human spirit will shine through your unique perspective. You might be writing fiction, but the hard-won truths you share will have your readers shuddering with recognition. Its impact will be profound.

Not yet ready to embrace gratitude? Maybe you have to back up a few steps, and first acknowledge that these episodes actually injured you. Then you’ll need to accept that with work, and time, you have the power to make these events into a meaningful part of your life’s journey. Acceptance allows you to let go of your anger so you can embrace the gratitude that will help you move on.

Fierce gratitude can transform your life and your writing. Try it. The world needs more people who will take on this important work.

Have you used a trial from your own life to inform something in your fiction? It may not be direct—more than my experience as a dancer, it was my miscarriages that informed my sense of Penelope Sparrow’s disappointment that her body stood out as different from others in the dance world. We won’t compare our trials—a broken fingernail can be disastrous for a hand model raising a child on her own—but let’s paint a mural of gratitude by showing how we’ve used our trials to drive our fiction.

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Kathryn Craft  is the award-winning author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy, and a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft. Her chapter “A Drop of Imitation: Learn from the Masters” was included in the writing guide Author in Progress, from Writers Digest Books. Janice Gable Bashman’s interview with her, “How Structure Supports Meaning,” originally published in the 2017 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, has been reprinted in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, both from Writer’s Digest Books.

Hannah McKinnon

Nonlinear narratives – stories where events don’t happen in chronological order – are extremely useful for tension and pacing, but can be confusing to read and are notoriously difficult to write.

Movies such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects have nonlinear structures, as did the rom-com Sliding Doors. But visual cues can more readily demonstrate the subtle time shifts a reader might otherwise miss in a novel (cue Gwyneth Paltrow’s different haircuts).

Attempting a nonlinear narrative for my first novel was ambitious, although I was no stranger to stories with that structure. Josie Lloyd & Emlyn Rees’ The Boy Next Door, Jojo Moyes’ The Girl You Left Behind or Lisa Jewell’s The House We Grew Up In are all examples of books I’d enjoyed. I was used to being shifted back and forth in time, and liked the suspense it created – unravelling the past and the present a little at a time, and in alternating chapters, always a source of excitement.

Both of my novels have nonlinear timelines. My first, Time After Time, had a simple premise; unhappy, forty-something Hayley wonders about the choices she’s made. One morning she wakes up married to her first boyfriend, Chris, whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years.

At this point the nonlinear narrative kicks in – back to the late 80s when Hayley met Chris, how their relationship started and subsequently fell apart. Then, in the alternate present, Hayley learns how her life would be had she and Chris stayed together. Hayley gets these glimpses with her other exes, too.

My second novel The Neighbors (available March 13, 2018) was more complicated because it has four viewpoint characters (and goes against point 3 below, which I ignored at my own peril!). The Neighbors is about two families, and deeply buried secrets that resurface, setting everyone on a destructive collision course. The first chapter shows an accident from 20 years ago, while the second is in the present. Over the course of the novel, and through a changing timeline, the reader discovers what each character is hiding, and what really happened all those years ago. All worth it in the end, but I’ll admit it led to many tear-your-hair-out moments as I wrote it.

If you think your story might work with a nonlinear timeline, and are unsure how to write it, here are some suggestions to help get you on your time-hopping way:

• Write your idea as a short story first

A 2,000 word story is easier to lay out in a non-chronological order than an 85,000 word novel. Start small, see how it works, and build from there.

• Make a story board with sticky notes

Grab two sets of different coloured sticky notes, use one for the past, the other for the present. Write your chapters or scenes in bullet point form, pop them on the board and start playing around with interweaving the timelines.

• Use one point of view

If you can, stick to your main protagonist’s point of view. Writing a nonlinear story from one person’s perspective will be simpler than attempting to interweave chapters with different timelines and alternate POV’s. You can always consider adding a second (or more) POV’s later.

• Write the chapters in chronological order

Or make a list of events in chronological order so you fully understand the timeline. If it’s not clear to you, it probably won’t be to your reader, either.

• Interweave the chapters

Once you’ve written the chapters (or list of events) in chronological order, physically interweave the pages to work out the best possible flow.

• Ensure the past and present storylines continue in chronological order

Have fun taking your readers back in time but think about time-hopping all over the place or you’ll risk losing them. Confused? Fair enough. This is best illustrated with two examples:

Example 1			Example 2
Chapter 1	January 2017		Chapter 1	February 2017
Chapter 2	April 1985		Chapter 2	May 1985
Chapter 3	February 2017		Chapter 3	January 2017
Chapter 4	May 1985		Chapter 4	April 1985

In Example 1 there are two storylines; one in 2017 and the other in 1985. While the chapters are interwoven present/past, the story of 2017 follows in chronological order (January, February) as does the story set in 1985 (April, May).

In Example 2 the chapters shift from 2017 to 1985. However, they also jump backwards within each year (e.g. February to January of 2017, May to April of 1985). This is difficult to pull off because you’re “double-shifting” the reader.

• Make the time shifts abundantly clear

Use a chapter heading with “XX years ago” or “Present Day” or simply the date. This will remind the reader which storyline they’re in. Add the character’s name if you have multiple points of view.

• Ask your beta-readers for feedback

Enquire how they felt about the timeline and the structure of the story. What, if anything, did they find confusing?

I’m editing my third novel, which has (*sighs with relief*) a linear narrative, and I see the attraction of structuring a manuscript this way. It’s saved me lots of head-scratching and under-my-breath muttering about the “ruddy timeline” (but not about the plot or the characters). Then again the story wouldn’t lend itself to a nonlinear narrative, so there’s little point in overcomplicating things for myself or a potential audience.

Whether you use a nonlinear narrative ultimately depends on your story. Start by asking yourself if it’ll make the novel more compelling, and if it’s a journey you think you – and your readers – will want to take. And if the answer is a resounding yes, buckle up, and enjoy the ride. Best of luck!

Have you tried time shifting? Ever wanted to?  Any tips for us? 

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 Hannah Mary was born in the UK, grew up in Switzerland and moved to Canada in 2010. After a successful career in recruitment, she quit the corporate world in favor of writing. The Neighbors is Hannah Mary’s second novel. She lives in Oakville, Ontario, with her husband and three sons, and is delighted by her twenty second commute. Connect with her on Facebook, on Twitter @HannahMMcKinnon, and on Instagram @HannahMaryMcKinnon. For more, visit her website, www.hannahmarymckinnon.com.