While I’m on the subject of names…

My strengths as a writer do not include a particular talent for naming characters, let’s just establish that from the start. While I despair ever having the knack for it that—oh, anybody else—does, I do try to at least name my characters with significance.

For example, one of my characters in Songs for Piano and Voice is a nosy, tea-and-sympathy-doling, everybody’s mother figure, a la Molly Weasley from the Harry Potter series (who would also be likely to say, “NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU $%&@*!”) so I made her a red-head and named her Ginger.  Perhaps not the best example of creativity or originality, though I like to think of her as an homage.

I’m rather proud of how I named my leading lady, Laura Lovelace—though someone-who-shall-not-be-named tells me this name makes him think of Luna Lovegood and thus “Loony Laura Lovegood.” Any of you other Potterfans who’ve also read Songs think of that? (Also, I’m suddenly alarmingly aware of the number of Potter references I make…)

Back to the point…When I was conceptualizing this character, an Italian aria I sang during my brief stint as a voice major kept coming to mind. It contains the phrase “l’aura che tu respiri, alfin respiro,” which roughly translates to “the air you breathe, at last I breathe.” The name Laura was right there in the text, and it was pretty, feminine, and fit the mental image I had for the character.

There’s a story behind Laura’s last name, too.  Lovelace is a play on words: Laura is the romantic interest for a loveless man. Yeah, kinda lame, I know—but as I said, I don’t claim to be particularly good at this aspect of storytelling.

Which brings us to my male lead, John Marks, and an embarrassing confession: John is my placeholder name whenever I can’t think of a male name and want to move on with a project. In this case, I moved on with a whole novel, and by then had spent so much time with the character that I could never think of him as anything but John. He was supposed to be an ordinary thirtysomething pianist, so why not give him the most common male name in the English language?

John’s last name, Marks, was the product of a little free-writing to get the feel for how he and Laura interact. I wanted them to hit it off right from the start, when they meet at church, with a bit of banter/flirtation. Now I can’t remember the exactly thought process, but I wound up with a page of dialogue in which Laura teases John about sharing his name with John Mark, a nudist in the Bible. I kept the name, as well as the scene, because emotional nakedness had become a theme in the book.

So you see, while my characters may not be the best named in fiction, they are named with significance.

It turns out that John Marks is a more significant name than I imagined.

One night, while playing a game of Beyond Balderdash with friends, I learned that Johnny Marks was the composer behind all the songs in the old 1960s stop-motion Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, among other popular Christmas tunes.

I did not know this when I named my John, and though part of me is tempted to work this into the story somewhere; it would so be John to bemoan the fact that of all the composers, he would share a name of the one responsible for all his (and the author’s) least favorite Christmas songs. But doing that might undermine the wonderful, amusing coincidence of it all, which is one of the things I love most about being a writer.

In this profession, magic happens.  (And that’s not a Harry Potter reference.)

Since all our TV shows are on hiatus for the summer, Mr. Burt and I have been watching an episode of The West Wing every night after we get the Burt Squirt to bed.  We never watched when it originally aired, and I’m feeling rather late to the party as far as fannishness goes!  But this is not a fannish post, so I won’t wallow in self-pity that there’s no one to squee with me because OMG this show is so ten years ago!

I’m not at all surprised to like The West Wing, as I was a big fan of Aaron Sorkin’s more recent and more short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Though it’s a political drama and therefore deals with heavy, issue-driven storylines, it’s full of the same brand of fast-paced, witty, and often humorous dialogue that drew me to Studio 60.

And likeable characters.  Even if you don’t agree with the politics of the show, you can’t help but care about President Bartlet and his staff.  Why?  Because they’re people. Real, fleshed-out people.

Take, for example, this exchange between C.J. Cregg, White House Press Secretary, and Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn,  which occurs during a walk-and-talk about a press briefing in Celestial Navigation:

C.J.
I have a dentist appointment at noon.

SAM
What's wrong?

C.J.
Nothing's wrong.

SAM
C.J.?

C.J.
I'm experiencing some pain.

SAM
For how long?

C.J.
About a month now, but it'll go away by itself.

SAM
When?

C.J.
When I die, Sam. Carol, cancel the appointment.

SAM
Carol, set the briefing for two o'clock. Keep the appointment.

C.J.
Sam!

SAM
Your teeth are the best friends you got, C.J.

C.J.
They are?

SAM
You take care of them, they'll take care of you.

C.J.
When'd you start talking like this?

SAM
I'm nuts for dental hygiene.

Probably not as funny to read as it was to watch, but Mr. Burt and I howled at that last line of Sam’s, Mr. Burt commenting, “That’s so Sam.”  I agreed.  And even though it’s just a throwaway line with no bearing whatsoever on the story of that particular episode, it so cemented the character of Sam Seaborn for me that I haven’t stopped thinking about what a great example “I’m nuts for dental hygiene” is of an apparently insignificant but carefully-chosen detail bridging the gap between fictional character and fictional person.

It makes me think about my own characters and wonder whether I’ve drawn them out in such a way as to make my readers laugh out loud and say, “That is so John!”  What is John nuts for?

And I realize, as I reflect, that I need to do some more work in the quirks and foibles department.  I flirted with the idea of John being a bit of a technophobe – and yet, as my brother pointed out to me, John engages in a bit of cyber repartee that hinges on knowledge of netspeak a technophobe certainly wouldn’t have. An astute reader might laugh at the banter, but ultimately would say, “That’s not John.”

So, another item to add to the revision list – that is, whenever the Burt Squirt gives me a chance to do anything with the ideas I’ve got bouncing around in my head.  Until then, I’ll keep watching good shows like The West Wing and reading good books like the several I’ve been meaning to review, in the hope that Sam and others will continue to inspire me to be a better writer.

Recently several girlfriends and I organized a book club.  Our first read was Persuasion, which I’ve had recommended to me many times as Jane Austen’s best work.

Having now read it, I must disagree.

The story — a second chance at love for an older couple who just couldn’t make it work the first time around — may be her best.  The style?  In my opinion, not so much.

One of the qualities I like about Austen in general is how accessible her novels are to today’s readers.  Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey, for example, read easily, primarily through lots of dialogue that both tells the stories and develops the characters.  It’s the style I’d come to expect from Austen (and, I have to admit, the style of contemporary novel I prefer).

That said, the divergence from the dialogue-heavy style of Austen’s earlier work took me by surprise in Persuasion. While the prose passages are impeccably written and packed with Austen’s wit, they nonetheless exemplify telling versus showing — the ultimate writing mistake, by today’s standards.  I appreciate that the “rules” of writing have evolved over time as the way people live and read has changed, but even bearing that in mind, I found it difficult to connect with the characters of Persuasion because of it.

Much of the crucial action happens off-stage and is merely summarized  in narrative after the fact.  I suppose on one hand this stylistic choice highlights the reserve and compliance of the heroine, Anne.  On the other, not actually seeing Anne’s first encounter with Captain Wentworth undercuts the emotional impact that should be present when a woman meets her former fiance, with whom she is still in love, eight years after breaking off their engagement.  Imagine if Austen had simply recounted the Netherfield ball instead of showing Elizabeth and Darcy’s dance and their glorious UST.  You wouldn’t root for them to get together in the end, would you?  That’s how I felt reading about Anne and Wentworth.  I rooted for the idea of them, but my imagination wasn’t captured by characters I felt I knew; they remained names whose personalities eluded me.

One character in the novel I did feel I saw rather than merely heard about is Anne’s hypochondriac sister, Mary Musgrove.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she also seems to have more dialogue than any other character.  Even though she’s meant to be tiresome and obnoxious with her constant bellyaching and oblivion to her sisters-in-law’s attempts to avoid her company, she became my favorite character purely on the basis that I knew who she was amid a bunch of virtual strangers.

While I’d rank Persuasion as my least favorite Austen novel (though I have yet to read Mansfield Park), I must concede that it contains my favorite line out of all her works, Captain Wentworth’s achingly romantic “you pierce my soul.”  Guh.

I’ll also repeat that I really like the story, especially after viewing the 1995 film, which rights the wrongs of the novel because the media of film necessarily shows instead of tells. Captain Wentworth’s bitterness and inability to get over Anne are so much more clear to me as performed by Ciarán Hinds.  

On a related note, Persuasion must be one of the more difficult Austen novels to adapt, precisely because of the lack of actual dialogue in the book.  Lots of work required on the part of the screenwriter to create Austen-like dialogue.  I want to say that in the Sense and Sensibility commentary, screenwriter Emma Thompson mentioned that she considered adapting Persuasion (though I might be misremembering; she might have mentioned that a Persuasion film came out the same year as her S&S).  In any case, I’d love to see what she could do with it, as S&S is not only my favorite Austen film, but my favorite movie ever!

Austen enthusiasts and Persuasion fans, do comment and tell me why I’m wrong about this book.

Since it took me 80,000 words to have my star-crossed lovers meet, fall in love, and break up, I was figuring on it to take me anywhere from 40,000-80,000 more words to put them back together again.  (I called the king to ask for all his horses and all his men, but they were busy with this egg chap…)

However, now that I’m a few chapters into the getting-back-together phase of the story, my characters are quickly showing me that they dislike being apart every bit as much as I dislike writing them apart.  (Actually, I enjoy writing lovers’ quarrels, it’s just that it’s a lot easier to write flirtation.  But if writing novels was easy, more people would do it, and it wouldn’t be a job, would it?)   My characters still have lots of issues to work through and even more pain to deal with, but they surprised me today by doing things that indicate they want to get back together sooner rather than later.

Now, I understand that as Author, I wield phenomenal cosmic power over the characters I make up.  In the life of a fictional character, there is no concept of free will.  Yet as you write characters, a strange thing happens.  You’re not simply making up everything about them and everything they do.  They take on lives of their own.  It’s almost as if the act of writing is like chiseling away at a block of stone in which a human form already resides.  You’re not making so much as finding — finding out enough about these characters that you know what direction their stories should take even if it deviates from your original plan.

That’s why, even though I swear by planning what you’re going to write before you write it, I also swear that you have to be flexible to be a writer.   Where you might have planned for a character to retain the emotional control and distance of a Vulcan until the very end, she might tell you instead that she needs to be vulnerable.  After all, even though your characters aren’t real people, you want your characters to be like real people.  And real people aren’t (usually) Vulcans.  (Unless you’re writing, you know, Star Trek novels.  Which I’m not.  Although I am, clearly, a geek for making the reference at all.)  Real people are vulnerable.  And said character is going through a situation that would definitely leave a real person vulnerable and lowering her emotional guards.  So I think the new direction I took today was, though completely unexpected, the right one.

Speaking of real people and characters…

I don’t know if this is a common problem, but I’m never able to picture clear faces or features of characters when I’m writing or reading.   They’re just faceless blurs to me.  Yet whenever I see a film adaptation of a book I’ve read, I know whether the actor in a particular role fills in the (enormous) gaps in my imagination.  For instance, when Eric Bana was cast as Henry in the upcoming movie The Time Traveler’s Wife, I said a resounding oh yes. On the flip side, any number of actors in the Harry Potter movies make me scratch my head ask whether the casting directors read the same books as I did. (One of my many complaints about the Harry Potter film franchise, though that’s an entire blog post in itself…)

None of which is to say that I sit around thinking about who I’d like to play my leading characters if I not only get lucky enough to see my book in print, but also to have it adapted into a movie.  (Well, not very often, anyway…)  For one thing, it’s hard to cast characters who you can’t even picture yourself.  (I’ve had vague characteristics in mind for the leading lady, Laura — tall, naturally curly dark hair which she sometimes straightens, dark eyes, wide grin, toothpaste commercial teeth — but since the leading man, John, is the point of view character, I’ve managed to get by without describing him except as having thinning light brown hair.)  For another, I don’t want to base my characters off actors, lest parts of actors bleed into my characterization.  Unless, of course, that’s what I’m going for.  In this case, it’s not.

Recently I came across some reference or other to Anne Hathaway.  I hadn’t even really thought about Songs for Piano and Voiceyet that day, but immediately my thoughts went to it because it suddenly hit me that she looked exactly like the Laura I didn’t quite see in my head.  (Also, as I recalled a recent episode of SNL, she can sing, quite well, so if my book ever does become a movie…) Even more jaw-dropping was when I clicked on Anne’s IMDB profile and saw a still from one of her recent films featuring her in the arms of an actor who looked exactly like I hadn’t clearly imagined John.  (Patrick Wilson, if you’ve seen Watchmen, The Phantom of the Opera, or The Alamo.  Who also happens to be musical…Hmm…)  And again, it’s not like I need actors as reference points for my descriptions or characterizations.  I just think it’s kind of nice, after a year’s work on this book, to see more than blurs when I’m crafting scenes for John and Laura.  So now you can see them, too.

It’s strange to me how you can recognize someone you didn’t even know to look for — how the brain can supply you with only the vaguest of mental images, and yet you can feel very strongly about whether a depiction of someone or something is spot on or not.  I wonder if it’s at all connected to how you can forget the face of someone you know extremely well if you haven’t seen them in a while (sometimes a very little while, some people have told me).