Learning from Writing Contests - Description

I’m one of those weird people who like to judge writing contests. For some reason it thrills me to find a diamond amongst the entries, and there are some contest entrants who not only get a high score from me, but get comments like “send this manuscript to a publisher NOW,” with lots of exclamation marks. I love those. Then there are the not-so-exciting ones, the ones that have promise if some work’s put into them. Then there are the ones…well, the ones I’m staring at and wondering what the hell is going on, because I can’t make heads or tails of them. Luckily the latter are rare, because then I have to try to find some diplomatic way of saying, “this is SO not going to work. Ever.” I hate to squash anyone’s hopes, and the truth is it’s possible for someone to work hard enough so that they go from dreadful to delightful.

Mostly what I get are the middling ones that need a bit of oomph, some craft improvement, such as sticking to a character’s point of view (POV), or starting at a different point in the story. Those are easy fixes. The harder ones are when the character doesn’t act sensibly, such as going out into treacherous terrain when she’s been told not to by wiser and more experienced heads. There has to be some major, major justification for acting in such a risky manner to convince me. Otherwise, I end up thinking that character is TSTL (i.e., Too Stupid to Live).

What’s interesting is that with every contest I judge, a craft problem stands out prominently amongst the entries. It’s good for me: when I identify what it is, figuring out how to fix them hones my own writing.

This time, it’s description. The group of entries—with the exception of one or two--I recently judged had some problems with that aspect of craft. A couple didn’t have enough to place me securely in the writer’s story world (my own problem, when I’m writing a hurried first draft), a few had some strange ones (a hero with multi-colored, multi-faceted eyes, for example. And he was not a Jeff Goldblum look-alike in a fly costume), and then there were some that were way over the top and placed in the story willy-nilly.

In my humble opinion, there is such a thing as judicious description. We’re told in writing workshops to use all five senses when describing something, but people seem to think this means using Every Sense Every Single Time. As a reader, I don’t want sensory overload. I want concrete imagery. I want the description to mean something to the characters, reflect an emotion, or reveal something about the character and his/her POV. I want the description to be essential to the scene, and do more than just describe.

I think the key is to understand that description resides in the character. It is almost always from the character’s viewpoint that his or her environment is described. Most of us view our world with emotional or mental filters, from a framework of prejudice. I use that word purposely: we rarely think outside our box of conservative or liberal, rural or urban, northeasterner or southwesterner. We view the world from our life’s context, and we react to that world in the way we do because of that context. The same is so with our characters.

As a result, when a character is feeling depressed but has a naturally practical and optimistic nature, she has a certain response to her environment. If it’s sunny outside, the description—from her viewpoint—would be something like this:

Sarah awoke early in the morning and resented the bright sunlight that streamed into her bedroom. Pulling the bedcovers over her head, she tried to block out the light so that she could wallow in her gloom from the night before. It was useless. The bed had a soft sheet and a thin cotton blanket fit for hot August nights; instead of looking at a grey dim mattress and thinking grey dim thoughts, the pretty golden glow on the white sheets made her think of spring daffodils.

Pushing aside the bed covers, she sighed, and could not help a wry smile at her own actions. There was no sense in hiding under bedsheets from the world; it was stuffy and confining under there. The sunbeams pouring through the windows into her pastel-painted bedroom conspired to banish all thoughts of last night’s failure, and lured her into imagining a day of exploration instead.

Note that not once do I state that she’s depressed. Instead, I say she’s resentful of the sunshine, wants to block out the light, and was intending to think dim grey thoughts. All of that contrasts with what’s in her environment: a sunny August morning. Because she’s naturally optimistic, the light makes her think of spring daffodils, which is not a depressing image. And because she’s practical, she’s realistic about the fact that it’s stuffy under bedclothes and therefore not a useful place to be.

The description integrates with who Sarah is. She reacts to her environment according to her nature and the way she’s taught to be. At the same time, I’ve let the reader know what her room looks like filtered through Sarah’s attitudes and character. I didn’t use all five senses in the description, just two: sight and touch. To have put in more would have bogged down the narrative, and even made it more emotional than I wanted it to be (I wanted the mood to be fairly light). I also used metaphors and personification: sunbeams are inanimate objects and don’t have motivation, so can’t conspire. However, it’s a legitimate literary device that makes the description interact with the character.

This achieves more than just describing a place. It also shows characterization, mood, and pushes forward the scene because the character not just perceives her environment, but acts on it, and is changed by it.

Characters, like ourselves, are not separate from their environment. They are in it, part of it, and react to it in some way. I think what might help is to take some time, go somewhere, and take note of what you see, hear, feel, etc. around you. Don’t judge it, take it in and see what emotions come up, what thoughts are evoked, what mood you’re in and how it influences the way you feel about your environment. Try it, and see what comes out in your writing.

--Karen H.

A God Thing

I should know better than to gripe to God, because sooner or later, I’ll get the spiritual two-by-four upside the head. (Although I’m sure I’ll probably continue to gripe, because it’s rather satisfying to gripe to someone who doesn’t get tired of me whining or tell me to cheer up when I don’t feel like cheering up.) So Saturday I was griping because I’d gone out and bought the t-shirts for our church’s little music festival, and few of them were bought, and I had all these doggone shirts left. What am I going to do with all these shirts? I don’t know yet, but I’m sure I’ll find out. These things work themselves out one way or another, I've found. I need to remember that.

The thing I forgot was that the music festival was never about the shirts, and in fact it probably wasn’t even about getting an ecumenical group of musicians out to play great music and have fun on a sunny August day, though all of us thought that was the main purpose of it. Our slogan this year was “Jesus is alive in Federal Way,” which we thought was about singing and playing hymns from the heart and soul with a rock beat.

Not quite. It was actually all about getting people where they needed to be, so that their needs could be met. Which of course is a God-thing, as we at our United Methodist Church would say. It often means the Spirit takes what you've got and does something unexpected with it, but something useful and good.

It’s been my observation that God-things happen all the time, and while most people call them “coincidences” or “serendipity” or even “magic,” they happen a lot at our church, more than I think should be possible. Someone will come into the church office worried because his refrigerator is broken, and then a minute later someone else comes in wanting to get rid of their old but still good refrigerator fast because they just bought a new one. Or the time we needed a sound board operator for our church band for a few weeks. A complete stranger came up to our music director at a non-church party the next evening, and asked if he knew anyone who needed a sound board operator—for EXACTLY the length of time we needed one. Or we needed some plywood to build something, and it just so happens someone comes by the church and wonders if they could offload some plywood. And so on. Happens so often we just shrug our shoulders and say, “it’s a God thing.”

We foolishly thought our church-back-yard music festival was about the music. What it really was about was the person from our neighborhood who heard the music, wandered in, saw our pastor (who no doubt looked approachable because of the balloon animal he was wearing on his head), and ended up finding emotional relief and comfort after talking with him. And it was about one of our own who was anxious about going from a company job to owning her own business after having to deal with the trauma of a family member's severe illness, but found peace when she connected with a stranger (an angel unawares?) who told her she had blessings and abundance surrounding her in what she was going to pursue. And more, probably in ways I haven't heard yet.

I really do have to have faith that even though I may not understand and know the effects of my actions, that they do have an effect. Heaven knows I've been shown this over and over again, even when I've been in despair. There was a time when I despaired of writing romance novels--people call them trash, after all, and what good is trash? It hurt badly sometimes when I would sit down and write something I loved, and then look at it later only to think, there are people out there who think what I do is trash, no matter how much I love it, no matter how much I put all my intellect and heart and soul into it.

I went to a group autographing once a few years ago, feeling that despair. There, a woman asked me to sign a copy of my book for her sister, who had cancer. She said that reading books like mine kept her sister from feeling the pain and the sickness of the disease and the treatments, and gave her hope. I realized then that my vocation of writing romance novels was not about me, or what others think, but was all about that woman, and people like her. People who need hope, who need respite from their very real, very hard, daily lives. It is the privileged who can afford to make judgments on whether a work of creativity is worthy of artistic note. Those who must deal with dread reality only know what keeps them sane and alive. If my books help them do that, then I am more than satisfied. I wish I could thank that woman who came to the autographing. She helped give me a new perspective that is now a deep river of calm underneath the ups and downs of my life.

I have to think that people finding comfort and joy, and the affirmation to follow their bliss and their creativity, are worth more than a bunch of leftover t-shirts. It's closer to what “Jesus is Alive in Federal Way” is about than our very mundane thoughts on musical expression.

So I’m not going to gripe about those t-shirts. At best it means they and I were part of an event that got people connected to what they deeply needed, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. At worst, it’ll mean we'll give away the shirts, and there will be a lot of homeless folk who will be wearing some nice, clean t-shirts. I really can’t lose, when I think of it that way. ☺

--Karen H

Tired!

        Whew. Got done with the Praisefest music festival thingy at my church, which my hubby pulled me into. The music festival was his idea, so of course this meant that I had to take part, whether or not I knew anything about music festivals and how to run them.

        I was in charge of publicity, and since of course this is only the second time our church has put on this summer music fest, and since there were no instructions, I had to figure out things as I went. Such as, gee, it takes a while for a printing company to print up t-shirts, and they need electronic files with color separation. Of course, I know nothing about color separation. Or how many t-shirts to order, because, gosh, nobody really remembers how many were ordered and how many sold the last time, or in what sizes. So, I took a wild guess.

        Never a good thing.

        I ended up with far too many, and so have all these nifty t-shirts on hand. I hope I can sell them at church between services. Please God.

        And speaking of God, since this whole shebang was to glorify God and all, I think He should have taken some responsibility for getting people to buy the t-shirts. I mean, seriously, you’d think He’d give a nudge to the faithful: “look, nifty t-shirts, glorifing Me. Go buy them and save that poor suffering woman over there in the sun from going into serious debt. You’d be doing a Good Work.”

        I dunno, either God was not nudging hard enough or maybe the faithful weren’t being faithful enough to hear.

        Yeah, yeah, I sound grumpy. Most of it, I realize, is feeling some major empty nest syndrome. The Alien Child went off to Washington State University in Pullman early this year--two weeks early so that he could help work on the renovation of his fraternity house. Normally, the boy would be playing some down-and-dirty blues, gospel, and rock electric guitar along with the youth band and the adult band. But this year...well, I don’t think I’m boasting when I say the bands sounded a bit thin without his guitar. He’s got very good at playing, and can improvise around pretty much anything.

        And then there’s the fact that he was really really nice this summer. During the summer of his senior year in high school, there were times he was downright nasty and irritable. Difficult to be around. It wasn’t too hard to let him go to college with a sigh of relief, despite the empty nest twinges. But this summer, he returned even more Alien than ever. Kept his room reasonably clean without protest, did his chores without being told, cleaned the bathroom, cleaned the kitchen, worked hard at his summer job without complaint, and was cheerful and upbeat pretty much the whole time. I tried to get in a few nags, but it was useless; the boy either had finished the work before I told him to do it, or he was working on it as I geared up for a good spate of nagging.

        (sigh) Well, it may well be that he’ll be snagged by one of the campus pastors for their band during the school year. The Pullman United Methodist minister had heard the Alien Child play at the Annual Conference and was at once seized by what I can only characterize as an unholy avaricious spirit and has recruited the boy to play at the Pullman church’s and youth outreach band. My fear is that the Alien Child will wish to spend his summers playing with the band at Pullman, rather than come home.

        But no, I won’t think about that. And I will try not to become what I am sure he sees as Stalker Mom, the kind of Mom that sends e-mails every day, and obsesses over why he isn’t e-mailing back, worrying that maybe he’s been run over by a truck, or even abducted by the aliens who allowed him to grow up under my care. After all, it is wholly possible that those interesting markings in the acres of Palouse wheatfields around Pullman, WA could be, might be, probably are, alien crop circles. Both the hubby and the Child said they were tracks made by wheat harvesters, but they are obviously without imagination, or more likely, were trying to assuage my fears by hiding the facts. It’s clear to me that any one of the grain silos or barns along the way to WSU could be hiding an alien spaceship, ready to take my dear Alien Child away forever....

        Ahem. Anyway. Empty nest. Yes indeedy. Got it bad. And it isn’t helped by the fact that I’m tired from all the activity today. So, off to bed, and I’m sure I’ll be more coherent and reasonable in the morning.

--Karen H.