Save the date for this awesome web radio event hosted by NWP on October 20. I’ll be a guest on the show! Details:
One way we’re celebrating the National Day on Writing is by talking with writers about writing. Join us for a conversation with our friends and NDOW collaborators: from the New York Times, Katherine Schulten, editor of the Learning Networkand a NYC Writing Project fellow, andTimes education reporter Fernanda Santos; and from Figment, the teen writing site, Dana Goodyear, Figment co-founder and staff writer for the New Yorker. Also joining us will be novelist and writing project teacher Ashley Hope Perez.
Join in to help celebrate National Day on Writing. Because we all do it–even nuns and priests!
Want to know why I write? Check out my responses to the NWP’s questions. Share why you write on Twitter: #whyiwrite.
What does a movie about a sleazy lawyer have to do with plotting a novel?
Last night the husband and I watched The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey (from Longview, Texas, where I went to high school). I tend to enjoy thrillers until about 2/3 into the film, at which point I can usually see with 98% accuracy where things are going. The Lincoln Lawyer, however, kept me guessing until the last five minutes. That’s because–like all good plotting–the twists in the story grew authentically out of character tendencies.
I’m not big on genre fiction, but there’s something to be learned from it, especially in terms of how to up the stakes for characters. A good book for these kinds of lessons is Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, and The Lincoln Lawyer perfectly illustrates several of the plotting suggestions, including:
Make the opposition stronger than the Lead to up the stakes.
Ask, what is the worst trouble my character can get into in this scene? How can I ratchet up the stakes?
Ask, what is the worst thing that can happen to my character from the inside? How can things get more wrenching for my Lead? Is there someone the Lead cares about who can get caught up in the trouble? Can a secret from the past come back?
This is a movie that would be worth diagramming to see how plot and character dovetail. Maybe the plotting’s so good because it’s based on the novel by the same name by Michael Connelly.
I know, isn’t it gorgeous? And when you read The Knife and the Butterfly in February of 2012, you’ll see just how perfectly the cover fits the novel. Knife… or butterfly? It’s all in how you look at things.
Here’s the copy from the jacket:
Azael Arevalo wishes he could remember how the fight ended. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. He can picture the bats, the bricks, the chains. A knife. But he can’t remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars. Azael knows jails, and something isn’t right about this lockup. No phone call. No lawyer. No news about his brother or his homies. The only thing they make him do is watch some white girl in some cell. Watch her and try to remember.
Lexi Allen would love to forget the fight, would love for it to disappear back into the Xanax fog it came from. And her mother and her lawyer hope she chooses not to remember too much about the brawl—at least when it’s time to testify. Lexi knows that there’s more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. She’s connected to him, and he needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected.
Read an excerpt of The Knife and the Butterfly here. If you are a teacher, librarian, bookstore employee, book blogger, or otherwise credentialed, email meto find out about getting an e-galley. Or create a netgalley.com account and request accessfrom my publisher.
Mad props to the Carolrhoda Lab editorial and design team (and especially my editor, Andrew). Yup, they’re rockstars.
There we are, under the Eiffel Tower. We haven’t been up it because it’s too expensive for us right now.
Random surprises about life in Paris (all somewhat related to water):
(1) The brand new French washing machine in our apartment takes (literally) hours to wash a very small load of laundry. The load I do every night takes 2 hours, 36 minutes according to the timer on the front of the washer. And we use cloth diapers with Liam, which means lots of washing (2 washes per load of diapers). This slowness seems to have to do with high efficiency, but wash water seems minor compared to surprise #2. (BUT: we’re blessed to have a washer at all as one load at the laundromat costs 8!! Euros.)
(2) There’s always water running in the streets of Paris. I’m talking about a lot of water. Gushing. I still haven’t figured out why this is; it can’t possibly all be run-off from the street-cleaning guys’ hoses. When I lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for a summer, the sewers were always overflowing, so there was a lot of water running through the street, too. But the Paris street rivers have no smell, so I’m guessing (hoping?) it’s not that.
(3) It’s distressingly acceptable for males to pee in the street, subway station, park, etcetera. I don’t have anything against folks relieving themselves, but I do object to (a) the smell and (b) what this means for my small son who is still very much in the habit of licking things like park benches and trees. Please, can we all make water in the water closet? Those handy, self-cleaning public toilets all about?
(4) Breaking from the theme of mild displeasure and bewilderment… I had know idea how taken I’d be with the Eiffel Tower. I don’t know what I expected, but it was huge. Not just on top, but from underneath. The view of us in the photo is from beneath the tower, and it was kind of like being inside the world’s largest pointy hat. Definitely my favorite of the few “touristy” things we’ve seen.
Many things about life in Paris are not surprises: the wine, bread, and chocolate are delicious; there are heaps of red tape for doing just about anything; it’s a complicated, lovely place with its problems, like anywhere.
We’re finding our way, though. And loving the adventure.
My brother sent me this photo of a fortune he got at a local restaurant. I think it’s the most useful fortune I’ve ever seen–our Chinese buffet doesn’t offer us anything near as handy in its fortunes– usually I get something like:
You are often impatient. Be more patient.
Or:
People find you considerate; you conceal your flaws well.
Can I please sign up for these super-insightful fortune cookies? I’m taping it up on my wall, I think, because I like this a lot. Especially that bit about humanity. I’m not 100% sold on brevity; sometimes longer is better. But it’s not a bad rule of thumb. I’ve translated it in my mind to “as short as possible unless there’s a good reason for it to be otherwise.”
People talk a lot about voice in writing. Voice is that hard-to-describe quality in a piece of writing that is at once internally consistent and capable of generating surprises. It’s not the same as character or personality; it’s a kind of outgrowth of these, maybe the traces they leave on the common material all speakers of a language share. When I talk about what “sounds right” for a character, what I’m really concerned with is how the words they’re using feel together, if they generate the right web of connotations and connections.
I think of good dialogue and good narration as acts of ventriloquism. I speak through the voice that’s right for the job.
One of the things I like best about school visits is seeing kids’ reactions to me. Usually, I’m not what they expect. It’s like they think Marisa is going to walk through the door. This is fine by me—it means that they’re engaging imaginatively with my words to the point where they’ve forgotten that the author isn’t the character. This reaction has been even stronger from people who’ve read a bit from The Knife and the Butterfly. May I please have a dollar for every time I’ve been asked, “You wrote this?”
See what you think of a handful of voices, one from What Can’t Wait and two from The Knife and the Butterfly (out in February of 2012).
Here’s Marisa from What Can’t Wait:
Across the room there’s a girl about my age with her family. They stick out because they’re white in the sea of brown. Whatever their emergency is, I can just tell by how the girl slides her phone open, grins, and starts texting that it’s not exactly hitting her in the gut. Who knows, maybe her brother-in-law just got himself smashed up on the job, too. But her parents are there, the dad in a business suit, the mom in a pretty gray dress, all hushed voices and serious looks. Now the girl is up out of her seat, and her mom gives her a hug and hands her a wad of bills. She slips the money into her jeans pocket, pulls her T-shirt down over her flat tummy, and strolls out of the waiting room. Just like that, so easy.
And here’s Azael from The Knife and the Butterfly:
After Pops got picked up, me and Eddie laid low for a week. When we heard that the CPS people weren’t coming by to look for us anymore, we headed back to the Bel-Lindo.
The Bel-Lindo was bad parents and crackheads, dog shit and dirt for lawns, and pissed-off fools everywhere, but it was still home. There were things I liked, too. Like Jorge Ledesma’s grandma praying the rosary out on the balcony to beat the heat in summer. Or the soccer games with the little guys on the dirt courtyards between buildings. And nowhere else in Houston you could find Mrs. Guzman selling calling cards and Coronas and spicy-as-fuck cheetos right out of her living room window.
Here’s Lexi, also from The Knife and the Butterfly:
Then my mom came into my room talking about responsibility. Blah, blah, blah.
I don’t care if she wants to talk about this shit, but she has to be ready to feel it where it hurts. Like when I remind her that she’s the one who got fired off of three jobs for coming in drunk. She starts to cry, and her mascara globs up in the wrinkles around her eyes. God, she’s pathetic.
I show no mercy, just go in for the kill. I tell her that the mistakes started with her. We’d both be better off if she’d just gotten an abortion. Had me vacuumed out. But she didn’t. So I tell her to stop trying to ruin my life now. Then I grab Theo’s leash and he comes running. A second later we’re out the door and out of her reach.
Read the opening chapter of What Can’t Wait here. Click here for the first bit of The Knife and the Butterfly.
Welcome to our Paris kitchen! It’s not large, but it is lovely. Since arriving, we’ve been preparing many (mostly simple) meals in our little space with ingredients from the produce market and grocery stores nearby. My recent favorites: crêpes and a strawberry summer cake, both from the Smitten Kitchen blog.
You can see the last of the strawberry summer cake in the picture above–it’s on the left near the big ole jug of water. As for the crêpes, I have always assumed they must be nearly impossible since I struggle to flip a pancake and they’re a dazillion times thinner, but the crêpe batter turns out to be much more elastic. So it isn’t that hard to turn them over without tearing them.
By the way, you can trust Smitten Kitchen to spare you from bewilderment (the kind that can descend into My Drunk Kitchen hilarity and mayhem). Plenty of gorgeous photos and those real step-by-step instructions for real people that tell you how to arrange your cooking process so that it doesn’t take a freaking lifetime.
The National Writing Project (which revolutionized my teaching and writing life) invited me to participate in their events for the national day on writing, October 20. Yay!
So cruise over here and read my responses to the six questions the NWP is asking writers from all walks of life. You can also submit your own responses on the NWP website.
Save the date for this awesome web radio event hosted by NWP on October 20. I’ll be a guest on the show! A few more details:
One way we’re celebrating the National Day on Writing is by talking with writers about writing. Join us for a conversation with our friends and NDOW collaborators: from the New York Times, Katherine Schulten, editor of the Learning Networkand a NYC Writing Project fellow, andTimes education reporter Fernanda Santos; and from Figment, the teen writing site, Dana Goodyear, Figment co-founder and staff writer for the New Yorker. Also joining us will be novelist and writing project teacher Ashley Hope Perez.
Join in to help celebrate National Day on Writing. Because we all do it–even nuns and priests!
After my recent blog post on losing a day in Paris, someone innocently inquired as to how I managed to *accidentally* make 10 gallons of soup. This is also for Sarah, who wanted to know about the tiny chickens.
It’s like this, Adam: you say to yourself, we are so poor, we have to make the most of every rotisserie chicken we buy. Hence, make soup with the bones.
Only… you don’t count on gobbling up those (relatively) tiny chickens three times a week.
Then, lurking in your fridge, you have a giant bucket of chicken stock you’ve cooked with all those little clucker carcasses. You put it on the stove.
Then you think, with all this stock, I better add a lot of noodles and veggies. And then you keep having to get out more pots to hold it all. It’s madness, really.
Does anybody have ideas for what else I can make with chicken stock? Because I think my boys are going to go on strike if I do this again.
P.S. Not that I’m complaining about the tiny French chickens. That’s probably how chickens are supposed to be. The ones I was used to buying in the US probably had bigger breasts than Barbie; I bet those poor chicks couldn’t even stand up. Not cool.
P.P.S. When you buy your eggs in French, the package tells you how they were raised. Not just “en plein aire” for the ones that got to live outside, but also “en cage” on the ones from “traditional” farms. So you really are confronted with what your purchase means.
