How characters emerge: the mystery of composite selves

Photo by Gabor from Hungary / morguefile.com

Characters can be found in all sorts of places--among our families, friends, acquaintances, even strangers on the train. Yet we never borrow traits without tinging them with our own interpretation of those we observe and mixing in bits and pieces of our own imagination.

In other words, every character, even those you base on real people, have some of you in them.

I'll give you an example. The poem below I'd written as a sort of tribute to some of the ordinary yet extraordinary boys whose friendship I'd cherished in childhood.

Gilbert

My friend Gilbert
had the kind of face
you see on milk cartons
on rainy Thursday mornings
that puddle in your brain
without a grain of sense
or purpose but dripdrip drip.

Gil played games
that brought down bullies
to no-longer-larger-than-life lugs
we could look in the eye
and not cringe.

Gil's games
made emperors of roaches
and elf queens of
bucktoothed, freckled girls
who are good at math
and can't sing.

Gil thought thoughts
that entered me like garlic
and permeated blood
and lungs and skin,
reeking and lusty of life,
lingering in the pores
for days.

Laurel Garver, Muddy-Fingered Midnights p. 8. 

This fictional friend's name is, of course, an homage to Gilbert Blythe from L.M. Montgomery's Green Gables books.

Some of the details are bits and pieces of Duane, who lived next to the awesome graveyard and let me be Bionic Wonder Woman to his Bionic Batman. And also Billy, who was willing to be Pa from Little House on the Prairie. And finally Brad, who agreed that the monkeybars was totally a spaceship, and storing gobs of maple seeds for our fort's winter food supply was a dire necessity. These boys were kinder than average--and willing to give anyone a shot at joining the imaginative game of the moment.

But to be honest, I was usually the one who came up with most of the ideas when we played. You might say Gilbert is the kid I wish I'd been--imaginative, sure, but also the kind of leader who brings people together by drawing out their best selves gently and naturally.

When you build a hero or a villain, you will (mostly unconsciously) add pieces of yourself to the mix--what you admire and aspire to, what you find most loathsome, and at times even parts of yourself you most want to heal or change. This is the aspect of writing that some consider therapeutic or even mystical.

What aspects of yourself have you been surprised to discover coming out in your characters?

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N: Not Quite Away

by Laurel Garver

Photo credit: o0o0xmods0o0o at morguefile.com

Yesterday
all my troubles seemed so far
across the street my best friend
or close enough stepped on her
gerbil squish
She was walking it on a leash
like a dog pretty dumb I think
probably she forgot everything else and
burst into Tomorrow
I love ya tomorrow you’re
only a day
around the block
the Bartelli boys who like to stick
crawly things into people’s lunches
bought the gerbil guts for 50¢ &
2 red rubber balls & a swirly
marble all stuffed into
her hand too late for me
to yell cooties she smiled toothy
and wiped scritch scratch
her bloody shoe in the grass.

Muddy-Fingered Midnights, p. 20.

I wrote the initial draft of this piece for a poetry class in graduate school. As you might guess, I was experimenting on a number of fronts here: interpolating song lyrics, breathless stream-of-consciousness style, tone/subject dissonance and finally, voice. You could say my choice was somewhat in reaction to the mop-pushing megalomaniac in my poetry class who loved to use allusions to the Gilgamesh epic, among other pretensions. Being around him made me want to write real, to get past all the grad school trying-to-sound-important BS. What could be less important-sounding than some silly kid story?

I worked from of a true childhood tale a high school friend had shared about one of her neighbors who thought it would be fun to walk her hamster on a leash, then inadvertently killed it. I vaguely recall that money had been exchanged to use the rodent remains for some ghoulish purpose.

My initial inclination for telling this had been to take a knowing tone, looking on this scenario with adult eyes. But it felt entirely wrong. I realized that if I was going to be true to this story, I needed to enter into the child world—seeing the neighbor girl as the kid I imagined she was, impulsive and apt to burst into song. I mined memories for details, like what the truly evil kids did for fun. Instead of 30 pieces of silver, the beloved pet is sold off for kid treasures—the sorts of things I admired from my parents' desk drawers or my siblings' closet floors. By using onomatopoetic words, I tried make the gore concrete but not sensationalized.

The title, by the way, refers to the lyric snippets that in the original, both included the word "away." But in this context, when we're small, our world shrinks. Troubles are across the street. Tomorrow is just around the block. Not quite away.

If you've always wanted to try poetry, but don't know where to start, dip into your well of memories, and not just the shiny-happy ones. It's in the sandbox we discover some of the startling truths about life.

What lines or images strike you? How might you experiment with stream-of-consciousness or tone/subject dissonance?

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I: Independence

by Laurel Garver (that's me)

photo by Edumigue for morguefile.com

Under a smooth moon
we watch fireworks
heave purple fluff
and spray a thousand blossoms
that petal-dance
down summer shadows
to where we cuddle,
flame-drunk, bliss blistered,
sighing, OH!
at the frantic pull
to soar away,
to be all light.

From Muddy-fingered Midnights, 2013. p. 44.

I composed this piece using magnetic poetry sets, and the image that got the whole thing going was "fireworks." I spread my collection of magnetic words across a tabletop and picked out any and every word that might connect to how fireworks look, sound, and feel either literally or metaphorically. I also thought about contexts in which one experiences fireworks and the emotion of those contexts.

Once I had a big stack of words, I got down to composing. Fluff needed a color modifier, and purple had a repeating vowel sound. Blister and flame bring to mind the fire of fireworks;  I wanted both burning terms to resonate with the romantic context, so I paired them with modifiers that give them a passionate twist. Many of my first choices weren't used; many of the strongest images needed to be contextualized, which meant digging for more words that would resonate with them.

What are your favorite tools for brainstorming and developing ideas? Have you ever played with magnetic poetry kits? 


Like this poem? Enter to win my collection!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Muddy-Fingered Midnights

by Laurel Garver

Giveaway ends April 17, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

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Verse averse? Why you should try poetry

I'm over at Tyrean Martinson's blog today, explaining why fiction writers should include poetry reading in their craft-building self-education, in a post titled "Why read poetry?".

Poets have plenty to teach you about how to use words powerfully, how to employ sound and rhythm to undergird the action and emotion in your work, and how to conquer wordiness. You might be surprised to know that even genre-based magazines--romance, fantasty, SciFi, horror--often publish poems. So if form scares you off, perhaps content will make the prospect a bit more enticing.

I hope to speak more specifically about some of these things in an ongoing series "Stolen from Poets." My first post, on using vowel power to ramp up emotion, is HERE.

Are you verse averse? How might you overcome it?

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Thankful

April is drawing to a close, and as I look back on the month, I'm thankful for so many things.

~My wonderful hosts for my mini-tour of Muddy-Fingered Midnights.

~National Poetry Month, making it cool to love and write poetry. 

~My critique group, who helped me get unstuck with the WIP.

~My friends who let me badger them with medical questions. (Why in-person research rocks).

~The Irish dance hard shoes given to my daughter for free. Riverdance, here we come!

~My new editing client. Excited to edit poetry! Woot!

~The cool series idea Stina gave me: "Stolen from Poets," in which I explain how to use poetic techniques in fiction. Stay tuned for more!

~The A-Z challenge making my blog slacking acceptable. Congrats to those who persevered with it!

What are you thankful for today?

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How to save your life

I'm the featured guest today on "Artist Unleashed" series over at Jessica Bell's blog The Alliterative Allomorph, talking about how to preserve your life experiences patchwork-style. You might be too young to write a memoir, but your life experiences are worth capturing now, before they lose their keen freshness. I suggest why and how in my post "Save Your Life: a Patchwork Approach."

If you ever get writer's block, this post is for you. If you think poetry is impossible to write, this post is for you, too.

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Stories that sing

If you write fiction and have ever been tempted to try your hand at poetry, or you're simply curious about the diverse kinds of poetry out there, check out my guest post for fiction-in-verse author Caroline Starr Rose, "Stories that Sing: Poems with a Plot." It's part of Caroline's excellent National Poetry Month series serving up a daily dose of poetic treats.

In the post, I share a bit about the history of narrative poetry, explain how I crafted some of my own poems, and offer advice on giving this genre a go yourself.

Tales of heroes and epic love find a voice by the fire. (morguefile.com) 

If you've done any writing at all, you have raw material for poems. Fiction drafts, journal entries, childhood stories you've jotted down, the spooky tales your uncle told around the campfire--all are excellent sources for narrative poems.

What's holding you back? How might the image of campfire stories help you take the plunge?

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Fear is your friend

What? you might think. How could fear be a friend?

As part of Jennifer R. Hubbard's guest series on facing fear, I suggest a whole new paradigm for how writers might approach and think about fear. Stop on by to learn more at my guest post "Writing through Fear."

You might be surprised to learn that it's through writing poetry that I learned this lesson. Poetry often has the reputation of being trite, dainty contemplations of flower petals and sunsets; the best poems are so much more.

How has writing shifted your perspectives?

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National Poetry Month, sprained ankles and Eminem

Eminem owes a literary debt to this guy?

I'm the featured guest today over at Anne Gallagher's blog, where she interviews me about all things poetry. Stop on by HERE to discover who my favorite poets are, what it means to "think like a poet," how writing can be like having a sprained ankle, and how Eminem fits into the history of poetic expression (I guarantee you'll be surprised). I also suggest how we might make poetry as trendy as knitting and vegan diets.

Can you name the guy in this photo? He's best known for the poem "Howl," which begins with the line "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...".

Do you have any unusual or surprising literary influences?

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On tap for April

Easter arrived with a flurry of activity. Between a press deadline at work, my daughter's nine-day spring break (still in progress), choir rehearsals, and many details that go along with moving a congregation into a new church building (like making new liturgical hangings and cleaning/organizing nursery supplies), we're feeling a bit stretched thin. A nap might be in order today.

How was your Easter?

A few things I'm looking forward to this month:

April Fool's Day hoaxes and jokeses, precious. As a perpetually late-adopter of tech, this tickled my funny bone:



April is National Poetry Month, so it's prime season for me to get out and about in the blogosphere to talk poetry (and Muddy-Fingered Midnights). Here's my schedule so far:

April 4 -- My self-pubbing journey with Michelle Davidson Argyle
April 8 -- Tips for beginner poets with Connie Keller
April 12 -- Interview with Anne Gallagher
April 17 -- Writing through fears with Jennifer R. Hubbard
April 18 -- "Stories that Sing -- Poems with a Plot" with Caroline Starr Rose
April 24 -- All Things Strange and Beautiful with Jessica Bell

For many bloggers, April is the A-Z Challenge. Many creative themes happening this year! As part of the fun, my novel Never Gone will be featured on Michael DiGesu's blog for letter N. I also enjoy popping around reading the entries, even if I'm not able to maintain the blog-a-day schedule.

Would you like a guest post for National Poetry Month? I have some dates available in late April. Are you doing the A-Z? What's your theme? 

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The beauty of the weird

I'm over at Crystal Collier's blog today, talking about how I got started writing poetry and my attraction to the offbeat and the "beauty of the weird." Please stop on by and say hello!

 In celebration of my new release, I'm also hosting a giveaway of a digital copy of Muddy-Fingered Midnights. The contest ends April 1 (no fooling), just in time for National Poetry Month. Use the widget below to enter:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Muddy-Fingered Midnights

The happy day has arrived! It's release day for my first-ever poetry collection.

Muddy-Fingered Midnights
poems from the bright days 
and dark nights of the soul


This thirty-poem collection is an eclectic mix of light and dark, playful and spiritual, lyric and narrative free verse. In an intricate dance of sound play, it explores how our perceptions shape our interactions with the world. Here child heroes emerge on playgrounds and in chicken coops, teens grapple with grief and taste first love, adults waver between isolation and engaged connection. It is a book about creative life, our capacity to wound and heal, and the unlikely places we find love, beauty, and grace. 

“In Muddy-Fingered Midnights, Garver seamlessly integrates unpredictable rhyme and alliteration to undergird the themes and strange beauty of these poems. The collection explores moments of cowardice and melting purity, ‘my only fruit / a cool ooze / that bubbles up / on blistering days,’  yet holds strongly onto faith as much as ‘Yankee girl grit.’ Even in dark times that are ‘glassy with misery,’ there’s a hidden reflection in the pane: hope.” 
—Jessica Bell, co-founder of Vine Leaves Literary Journal and author of Fabric, semi-finalist, Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards 2012: Best Poetry.

The title comes from the final piece in the collection, "A Writer's Parable," which explores fear in the creative process, using imagery from the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 (the one where the cowardly servant buries his piece of gold in the ground rather than take a risk and invest it like his faithful co-workers do).

The collection includes a number of all-new pieces, plus previously published favorites that appeared in international literary journals. About 2/3 of the poems are general topics, a 1/3 have spiritual themes. I love using sound-play, but don't use traditional forms. Within free verse, rhythms emerge organically and rhyming is nearly always inside lines rather than at the ends.

Here are a few sample pieces:
Affliction, about the writing life
Storm Shelter, rom-dram fiction-in-verse
Not Quite Away, experimental narrative poem

Fun and soulful, dark and bright, Muddy-Fingered Midnights has a little something for everyone in small, bite-sized pieces.

Add it on Goodreads

The digital book is just $1.99. 
Find it here: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords

Or get the paperback for $6.50 from CreateSpace, Amazon

Can you help me spread the word? Simply use the share links below. Thanks!! 

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Interviews & articles

Welcome! 

This page is a compilation of all my guest appearances around the Internet. Learn more about my fiction, poetry and writing tips.

Contact
To request an interview, guest post, or a copy of my work for review, e-mail me at
laurels (dot) leaves (at) gmail (dot) com

Never Gone 

Articles

Exploring father-daughter relationships: Why Dads Matter

From high rises to cathedrals--setting a story in NYC and rural England: How I develop setting

Writing realistic romance: Repulsion, Attraction, Connection: Romance is more than "hotness"

Writing a character for whom faith is a natural part of life: The truth about...writing faith

How I use poetic techniques in my fiction to make it more musical: Make your stories sing

How I wrote Never Gone: inspirations and themes--Grief, ghosts and God

Advice on writing bereaved characters: Grief faces, not phases

Advice on developing distinct character voices: Elements of Voice

Learning to embrace a messy creative process: The two-faced life of a writing editor

Laurel's favorite book from childhood: Stories of our youth: empathy and transformation

On writing stories when you're mature enough to do them justice: Let It Simmer

Why community matters in Never Gone, and for me as a writer: The importance of community and support

Tips and tricks learned while creating the book trailer for Never Gone: Eleven book trailer tips

Interviews

Edgy and clean? Writing across genre divides
"KA: You call Never Gone’s genre 'YA edgy inspirational.' What does that mean?
LG: It means Christian in outlook, but with mature, challenging situations. 'Edgy' here is not what mainstream publishers mean by the term — they’re generally talking content and language that would earn an R rating if it were a film. My story is 'edgy' compared to other books in the Christian book market."
More here: interview with Karen Akins

Why I wrote Never Gone: tackling the question of "where is God when we suffer?"
"I wanted to explore how loss and grief are handled well – and poorly – in Christianity. People of faith can at times have an unhealthy stoicism about death.... But when someone isn’t given space to fully grieve, the emotions will come out sideways and be far more damaging."
More here: interview with Carmen Ferrerio Esteban

In loving memory: How autobiographical is Never Gone?
"I also knew if I tried to write directly about my experience [losing a parent], I’d have trouble keeping the emotional distance I needed to really shape the story and not err toward clinical detachment or maudlin sentiment. In that way, fiction can be more truth-revealing than 'true' stories."
More here: interview with Angela Felsted

Why ghosts and God?
"The idea of a parental presence lingering to help a child fascinated me, especially when it’s unclear why it’s happening (is it supernatural or psychological?)."
More here: interview with Mary Aalgaard

Teen grief and "third culture kids"
"Dani struggles with expressing her deepest feelings, suppressing and self-managing more than the typical American teen might.... Losing her British father requires Dani to reassess how she fits in the world, and how to reconcile with her American half."
More here: interview with Margo Berendsen

Let Setting Emerge From Character
"I wanted the time that Dani spent in her late father’s hometown to challenge her strong identification with him. The setting had to be a big contrast from her very American, very urban home, so her dad is not only foreign, but rural."
More here: interview with Melissa Sarno

Style, roadblocks and growing as a writer
"I strive to use language in a way that’s musical like a movie soundtrack, undergirding the emotion and action. In tender moments, expansive and flowing; in tense moments, terse and staccato. Beautiful doesn’t have to mean slow paced."
More here: interview with Kayla Black

Teen experiences 
"Like the busy teens I know in real life, Dani juggles many things that compete for her time: school work, extracirriculars, friendships, romance, family, and her own spiritual health. But most of all, she faces a moment when she has to grasp her own faith rather than lean on her devout dad’s faith--a moment every teen raised in a Christian home will face at some point."
More here: interview with Tessa Emily Hall

Writing life, projects and favorite resources
"Talk to real people when researching any aspect of your story. It not only gains you insider perspective, but also can stimulate your thinking and help generate stronger plots and characters far more than static library and Internet research can."
More here: interview at New Zeland blog YAlicious

Inspirations and comparison titles
"BK:Which books are your book’s 'cousin' (Similar set-up or style)?
LG: The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen, The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, and Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr."
More here: interview with Brandi Kosiner

Reviews

"I couldn't put this one down": a review

"The perfect fall-into-winter book": a review

"Journey across the world and into the depths of her soul": a review

"A story of redemption, of hope in the face of intense sorrow, and of great personal growth, Never Gone is a touching read." review from A Word's Worth

"Laurel Garver approached the hard issues of grief, doubt, and fear with an honesty I have never read.... Even with the tough subjects in this novel it is a very hopeful book.  I recommend this novel to young adults and not so young adult readers." review from A Novel Review

"This book is full of twists and turns, of love and forgiveness, and of faith and clarity. This story is beautiful and inspirational and can reassure someone in pain that things will get better....a great read." review from O.D Book Reviews

"I found it to be a very well written story about how a fifteen year old feels the loss of her father, written with a very realistic feel.... The author weaves a serious story, but instead of it feeling sad, it was a story of new beginnings, friendships, faith and family." review from WV Stitcher

More to come!

Muddy-Fingered Midnights

Interview with Crystal Collier
featurette and e-book giveaway with Deniz Bevan
"Skills + soul = my publishing journey"; guest post for Michelle Davidson Argyle
"Make words your playground"; guest post for Connie Keller
Interview with Anne Gallagher
"Writing through Fear"; guest post for Jennifer R. Hubbard
"Stories that sing: poems with a plot": guest post for Caroline Starr Rose
"Save Your Life, a patchwork approach": guest post for Jessica Bell
"Why read poetry?" guest post for Tyrean Martinson

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Cover reveal

My poetry collection, Muddy-Fingered Midnights, is getting ever closer to ready. Here's my cover design, which was all kinds of fun (and hair-pulling hard) to design. Let's just say my Photoshop skills have grown in leaps and bounds.

Coming in mid-March!

Have you tried to acquire any new skills lately? What was your experience?

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An exciting announcement

Photo: earl53 from morguefile.com

I've been hard at work putting together my first-ever poetry collection. It includes select pieces from my undergrad days up through the present, both previously published poems and a number of brand new pieces. It's an eclectic mix of lyrical, narrative, spiritual, humorous, experimental, and fiction-in-verse. I'm excited to share it with you all.

The collection is called Muddy-Fingered Midnights. The title comes from a line in my poem "A Writer's Parable," published in 2011 in the British journal Rubber Lemon (page 4).

To give you a little taste, I thought I'd share this short "ars poetica" piece (poem about the nature of poetry or the writing process) composed for the collection.


Affliction

In the decade between
dawn and alarm sound,
a new story swells
like a sprained ankle.
It pains you to wakefulness.
Dough-rising, volume-doubling,
pressing ever outward,
it stretches the sorry sock
that deigns to contain it.
Huge and purple it emerges,
in every sense an enormity.
The only medicine for it
is bloodletting, bard-style:
pen, paper, patient play.

© Laurel W. Garver, 2013

The collection will be available in mid-March. I'll be doing a cover reveal next week! Stay tuned.

National Poetry Month is coming up in April, and I'd love to visit some blogs to talk poetry. Let me know in the comments if you're willing to host a guest post, interview and/or giveaway.

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