Writers in the Storm

By Sharla Rae

When writing, we have to describe all kinds of people/characters. I’d venture to say that older adults or seniors are one of the most difficult people groups to describe.

Why?

Because what you see is not always what you get. Okay, this might be true with any age group, but it’s doubly so with the older generation.  There’s a world of experience and living under their belts and their faces don’t always tell the story.

Also, yesteryear’s elderly are now a cliché when compared to the modern seniors.

My grandparents had false teeth they’d take out at night and dunk in a glass of water on their bedside tables every night.
Current grandmothers, if they have the funds, opt for veneers or dental implants that permanently screw into the jawbone.

Both of my grandmothers were old timey one-room schoolteachers who never worked outside the home once they married.
Modern grandmothers prefer to stay active and often that means working until a ripe retirement age – maybe longer.

Fashion comes and goes but my grandmothers were never seen in anything but modest, below-the-knee dresses or slacks no matter the fashion. And if you had suggested an exercise program to her, they’d claim to got plenty of exercise cleaning house. 
Modern seniors exercise more than today’s youth and have bodies fit enough to wear the latest fashion, even if they choose to go for comfort instead.

 On the list below you’ll see physical descriptions as well as actions and doings of old people. Some phrases are unflattering, some humorous, some are clichés but all serve as an idea springboard.

Terms For Growing Older -- All Clichés

 Advancing years
Autumn of life
Declining years
Long in the tooth
Old as Methuselah
Old as the hills
Old fogey
Old fossil
Older than dirt
One foot in the grave
Twilight years
Winter of life

Word And Phrase Descriptions

 A little too ripe to be job hunting
Age-spotted pate
An Anachronism – as in old fashion, something old that is out of place
Ancient bones creaked
Ankles swelled with gout
Arthritic
Banging his cane demandingly
Battered shell of his youth
Bending forward to keep his balance
Beyond the first blush of youth
Bingo night is her social life
Blue-rinsed hair topped with a pillbox hat
Bushy salt and pepper brows
Cabinet of medicine, hot water bottles and Ben Gay
Cackles of the old biddy
Calcified grin
Called the shop girls girlie
Cemented in his ways
Changes his underwear after a sneeze
Cheated the undertaker once again
Codger, geezer, graybeard,
Contrary, and snappish
Crabbed with age
Crone, witch, hag
Crotchety old man with his
Damn young whippersnapper
Dapper old chap
Doddering along the park lane
Double-dumpling figure, bent with age
Dowager Queen
Dowdy old maid
Dried up
Drooping eyelids he could barely see out of
Dunked his false teeth into a water glass
Eyes bright with age
Face lined with experience and wisdom
Face was road map to his glorious past
Faded blue eyes
Faded version of his son
Feeble-minded, forgetful
Feisty antique of a lady
Forgot where she put her dentures
Frail old woman slowly shuffled
Fuddy-duddy
Fusty and set in her ways
Getting some action, he ate his fiber today
Gnarled hands knitting
Gramps zones out once in a while
Grandma and grandpa-might used a derogatory for anyone old
Gray dandelion hair
Growing love comfortable shoes and clothes
Grumped at the noisy children
Grunted and creaked with every move
Grunts when he sits, then sighs with relief only to grunt and rise
Hair a crown of faded glory
Hair billowed cobwebs in the draft
His get-a-long got up and went
Hoary, whiskered old fellow
Humped over and leaning on her cane
In his declining years
In his dotage
Infernal loud music
Infirmities aside, she was in good shape
Jowls flapped when he talked
Laugh like crackling paper
Laugh lines bracketing twinkling eyes
Long nose hair
Looked 45 but liver spots hands gave her away
Loved the decadent indolence of retirement
Matriarch who rules the roost
Matron aunt
Ol’ fart
Old and decrepit
Old duffer is deaf
Once a rock and roller, now he rocks only the chair
Patriarch of the family
Prune juice a staple of her diet
Rheumy eyes
Rocked and rocked and stared within
Room full of crooked backs, colorless hair and time-faded eyes
Ruminating on when she was young
Sagging skin
Sat on the tenement steps and watched the world go by
Senile and helpless
She’s a classic
Shriveled by half
Skin as thin and white as parchment
Skin like used tea leaves
Skin of leather
Skin stretched over knobby bones
Smelled of Chantilly Lace and moth balls
Sparse eyebrows with a chaotic growth pattern.
Stale, moldy and far-sighted
Stooped and bent frame
Strains to hear
Stroke left her expressions scary/endearing
Tottering and unsteady
Transparent blue-veined skin
Trapped behind the walls of age
Tufts of hair grow out of his ears
Turkey neck
Wattle neck
Wise old eyes widened with a twinkle
Withered skin
Wizened and shrunken like a fading rose
Wrinkled skin costumed a youthful heart
Young mind trapped in an old body
Youth was waning

 Definitions

centenarian -- person 100 years old or older

glaucoma -- hardening of eyeball resulting in poor vision or blindness; associated with                             aging

leucoma -- disease of the eye in which the cornea becomes white and opaque

noachian -- old enough to date back to Noah

octogenarian -- person in their 80’s

preadamite -- dates back to before Adam

quinquagenarian -- person in their 50’s

septuagenarian -- person in their 70’s

sexagenarian -- person in their 60’s

Dementia -- loss of cognitive ability

Alzheimer’s disease -- type of dementia that causes problems with memory, thinking and behavior.

 Links:

Playing Dr. Frankinstein – 5 Questions To Ask Your Characters Before You Begin

Keep Characters True To Themselves

If you’ve read my list blogs before, you know I love descriptions in Poems.

Poems about old age

Humorous poems on old age

Sharla has published three historical romance novels: SONG OF THE WILLOW, LOVE AND FORTUNE, and SILVER CARESS. SONG OF THE WILLOW, her first solo effort, was nominated by “Romantic Times Magazine” for best first historical. Her current work, HOW TO FELL A TIMBERMAN is in the submission process.

When she’s not writing and researching ways to bedevil her book characters, Sharla enjoys collecting authentically costumed dolls from all over the world, traveling (to seek more dolls!), and reading tons of books. You can find Sharla here at Writers In The Storm or on Twitter at @SharlaWrites.

Please give a welcoming WITS hello to Ruthie Knox who's here celebrating the launch of her latest novel (releasing today, btw) and talking about why she chose to write about a flawed hero.

So I wrote a romance novel where the hero stutters. A lot.

Actually, this is only partially true. For the first third of the story, he barely speaks. He never speaks to the heroine. THEN he stutters a lot.

This is . . . this is not done.

In Julia Quinn’s fabulous The Duke and I, the duke is a former stutterer who occasionally stammers a teeny, tiny bit (and he’s also awesome). Edie Harris’s forthcoming The Corrupt Comte has a stuttering heroine. But in the land of contemporary romance, I believe I’m on my own. (If I’m wrong, tell me! I would love to read more romance novels with stuttering characters.)

Diving in

You know how sometimes when you’re writing, you plunge head first into something that you think will be fun without stopping to wonder if there’s a really good reason no one else has done it?

Yeah. That.

But I love these accidental immersions—at least in retrospect—because they’re such amazing opportunities to learn.

When I decided to write a stuttering hero, I knew my heroine already. Katie Clark was a character in the preceding book, fully fleshed out. I also knew who the guy was I wanted to hook her up with, but he was only the barest suggestion of a character in that earlier story. All I knew, in fact, was that he rarely talked to anyone, and he never talked to Katie. I didn’t know why.

For reasons I can’t remember, I decided that Sean Owens is a man who spent several years of his life escaping his stutter. It essentially destroyed his childhood, which he left behind—a trauma he ran from instead of dealing with it. But now he’s back in his hometown, and he just knows that if he tries to start something with Katie (his unrequited high school crush), the past will come rushing back, stutter and all.

“Real” fictional stuttering?

Is this realistic? Sort of, yes. It’s simplified, of course, because fiction simplifies. But it is the case that many people who do intensive therapy are able to stop stuttering completely. It’s also the case that a large portion of these people do, at some point, begin stuttering again, and that emotionally stressful situations can be a trigger.

Romance novels are inherently emotionally stressful. :-)

In reading about stuttering, one thing I discovered right away is that stuttering is widely variable. It doesn’t have clear and absolute causes, a standard pattern of development, or an accepted “cure.” It is, like most things human, variable, complicated, and malleable. There are some common developmental patterns, some therapies that help a lot of people, some things that make it worse. Everyone’s mileage varies.

This was tremendously liberating, on the one hand, because it meant that I could take a free hand with how I developed Sean’s stutter. But it was also kind of alarming, because it highlighted the degree to which I really wanted to be responsible in the way that I depicted Sean’s speech disfluency. It’s not a cheap thing to be manipulated at my will, after all—it’s real. People stutter. And I would hate for someone with a stutter to open the pages of this novel and find all the worst stereotypes reproduced here, or, just as bad, the struggles of their own lives repackaged and spat onto the page for cheap emotional payoff.

So, yeah. Just get everything right, Knoxie. No problem.

The balancing act

The tricky thing, for me, was not the technical details — which sounds make him stutter; how to represent repeated, prolonged, or blocked sounds on the page — but in the balancing of authenticity and story, research and romance. I wanted to write a book about a man and a woman falling in love.

My hero, Sean, has emotional baggage. He has deep vulnerabilities. And in a very real way, his stutter is bound to these vulnerabilities. It reminds him of a past he doesn’t want to deal with. The act of stuttering triggers feelings of helplessness and exposure that he loathes.

BUT — and this is such a big but — the stutter is not the problem. His feelings about stuttering are the problem, and really only the surface layer of the problem, at that. As the story digs deeper, it becomes obvious that Sean’s feelings about stuttering are tied into the same emotional vulnerabilities many of us carry out of childhood: those complicated emotional legacies of conditional love, feelings of inadequacy, and misdirected ambition that haunt our adult lives.

Which is to say, I wrote a hero with an on-again, off-again speech disfluency, but I didn’t write a hero who is only “hot” when he’s speaking fluently.

I wrote a hero who stutters when he is under emotional strain, but who also stutters, pretty much always, on the hard “c” sound that begins his heroine’s first and last name: “K-k-k-katie C-c-c-clark—a stutterer’s worst nightmare,” as Sean puts it.

I wrote a hero who, like all of us, is weak when he is weak and strong when he is strong. And he stutters. But his stutter is not a weakness.

Happily ever after

When you construct an arc for a character who stutters, but whose stutter is not the basis of internal conflict, the question arises: What does his happily ever after look like?

This is a bit of a spoiler, but at the end of this novel, when quizzed about why he wants to be with the heroine, Sean says “She makes me stutter.”

I’ll admit, I did write this line in part to flip convention on its head. No magical healing! Yay!

But I also wanted to convey the peace Sean has found by the story’s end with the sound of his own voice. I wanted to show him beginning his journey to reconcile past with present. And, finally, I wanted to get across his acceptance that the woman he loves is a partner for him not because she is perfect already, or because he is—far from it—but because she brings out his imperfections and forces him to grapple with them.

I like to think this is what all of us search for in a partner—someone who loves and accepts who we are now, but who also encourages us to grow into the best people we might become.

Have you ever written a flawed character? Why did you decide on that flaw?

About Ruthie

USA Today bestselling author Ruthie Knox writes contemporary romance that’s sexy, witty, and angsty—sometimes all three at once. After training to be a British historian, she became an academic editor instead. Then she got really deeply into knitting, as one does, followed by motherhood and romance novel writing. Her debut novel, Ride with Me, is probably the only existing cross-country bicycling love story. She followed it up with About Last Night, a London-set romance whose hero has the unlikely name of Neville, and then Room at the Inn, a Christmas novella—both of which were finalists for the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award. Her four-book series about the Clark family of Camelot, Ohio, has won accolades for its fresh, funny portrayal of small-town Midwestern life. Ruthie moonlights as a mother, Tweets incessantly, and bakes a mean focaccia. She’d love to hear from you, so visit her website at www.ruthieknox.com and drop her a line.

WITS is pleased to welcome back Sharla Lovelace! And psst, she's doing a giveaway. :-)

Hi!  Thanks to Orly and the other peeps at WITS for having me!

I was asked to talk about novellas today, and I’m excited about that.  Novellas have become the new in-trend, short little bursts of story that can be wonderful all alone, or fill gaps between novels, or attach themselves to a series.  Possibilities are endless.  My first shot at writing a novella was back in October, with JUST ONE DAY.

When my agent suggested it, I honestly was already thinking about it.  I had friends who were diving in the novella pool, and I thought it would be really cool and a quick way to get some new material out there.  I thought it would be easy.  Hey, a third the length of a novel—piece of cake, yes? 

No.

Novellas are tricky little creatures.  It’s taking what you see in your head as a full story, and putting that in a compression chamber, hoping it doesn’t get the bends.  *sorry, that’s my former scuba-diving life talking*

But it is challenging, at least for me.  Plots have to be lent to a quicker resolution, relationships have to develop faster, but yet at the same time that needs to make sense.  You can’t just chop things off or rush a plot, there needs to be a reason for the short timeframe.  When I was thinking of how to approach it, I thought of my friend Roni Loren’s novella.  She writes erotica, and her novella Still Into You had the tagline:  Three days, no rings…

See?  Three days.  There’s a reason for the timeframe to be short.  Everything had to move to be resolved in three days.  That helped me think about things I could do, story ideas I could come up with that would have a reason to be short.  And I ended up with a story about a woman who’s been given 24 hours to give an answer…yes or no.  And JUST ONE DAY was born.

Now, back there I mentioned that I wanted to get some new material out there, and this was the primary push on why I went the novella direction.

Mine is a standalone, but like I said, these are great little tools for connecting to a series … maybe taking off with a minor character and having a little fun with them.  Or, like in my case, to fill in a time gap between novels.

My first book came out in April, and my second was slotted for November, so to give readers something AND generate some buzz for the upcoming book, my agent and I self published the novella a month before that release.

Traditional publishers pull these into their contracts as well, but mine didn’t happen to have that, and while my agent and I talked about trying to attach it to a traditional house, the timing was off.  Even with a short work that will only be pubbed digitally, a traditional house is likely to take six months with it.  While you get the marketability of the house, we needed it faster.

I was lucky, in that my agent is also involved in an e-pub venture with all the online e-tailer connections and all the marketing and editing capabilities of a publisher.  So she and I pubbed this one ourselves in a matter of weeks instead of months.  In addition to that, she was able to score me a slot in Nook First.

This was a good thing.  :-)

I wasn’t sure about that at first.  I thought that excluding a whole market (Kindle) for 3-4 weeks, would hurt my sales, but in reality it worked to my advantage in a major way.  The exposure and push of Nook First pushed this little e-book novella to #3 on the Barnes & Noble E-book Bestseller list.

Can you say “eeeeeeeek”???  For a time (a short time) I was sandwiched between two of the 50 Shades books, and there for a whole three hours I was one above J.K. Rowling’s adult book.  Did I take screen shots to save for proof and posterity?  You bet I did!!

It didn’t last of course.  LOL.  Once I was off the Nook First roster, it slowly dropped under all these bestselling authors who actually stay there for the long haul, but that’s okay.  I can say I was there.

And regardless of where it landed, it served as an “in-between” between my print novels, giving my readers something to chew on, that also had teasers of both my novels in the back.  I’d recommend this to anyone.  These novellas are jewels!  You can use them how and where and when you like, doing the most important type of promo you can ever possibly do: putting something new in front of your readers.  Whether it’s in between novels, filling up a dry spell between contracts, or having something generating sales while you are out on submission.

Have any questions?  Please throw them out there, I’d love to help.

And as my thank you for coming by and commenting today, I’ll pick a random commenter tonight to win a download of my novella JUST ONE DAY.  Enjoy!

About Sharla

Sharla Lovelace is the National Bestselling Author of THE REASON IS YOU, BEFORE AND EVER SINCE, and the e-novella  JUST ONE DAY.  Being a Texas girl through and through, she’s proud to say she lives in Southeast Texas with her family, an old lady dog, and an aviary full of cockatiels.

Sharla is available by Skype for book club meetings and chats, and loves connecting with her readers! See her website www.sharlalovelace.com  for book discussion questions, events, and to sign up for her monthly newsletter.

You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.