I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

Here is the link to this article.

A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe,” Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) wrote to his boyhood friend, rallying his own resilience as he began losing his hearing. A year later, shortly after completing his Second Symphony, he sent his brothers a stunning letter about the joy of suffering overcome, in which he resolved:

Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?

That year, he began — though he did not yet know it, as we never do — the long gestation of what would become not only his greatest creative and spiritual triumph, not only a turning point in the history of music that revolutionized the symphony and planted the seed of the pop song, but an eternal masterwork of the supreme human art: making meaning out of chaos, beauty out of sorrow.

Across the epochs, “Ode to Joy” rises vast and eternal, transcending all of spacetime and at the same time compacting it into something so intimate, so immediate, that nothing seems to exist outside this singularity of all-pervading possibility. Inside its total drama, a total tranquility; inside its revolt, an oasis of refuge. The story of its making is as vitalizing as the masterpiece itself — or, rather, its story is the very reason for its vitality.

As a teenager, while auditing Kant’s lectures at the University of Bonn, Beethoven had fallen under the spell of transcendental idealism and the ideas of the Enlightenment — ideas permeating the poetry of Friedrich Schiller. A volume of it became the young Beethoven’s most cherished book and so began the dream of setting it to music. (There is singular magic in a timeless poem set to music.)

One particular poem especially entranced him: Written when Beethoven was fifteen and the electric spirit of revolution saturated Europe’s atmosphere, Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” was at heart an ode to freedom — a blazing manifesto for the Enlightenment ethos that if freedom, justice, and human happiness are placed at the center of life and made its primary devotion, politically and personally, then peace and kindness would envelop humankind as an inevitable consequence. A “kiss for the whole world,” Schiller had written, and the teenage Beethoven longed to be lips of the possible.

This Elysian dream ended not even a decade later as the Reign of Terror dropped the blade of the guillotine upon Marie Antoinette, then upon ten thousand other heads and the dreams they carried. Schiller died considering his “Ode to Joy” a failure — an idealist’s fantasy unmoored from reality, a work of art that might have been of service perhaps for him, perhaps for a handful of others, “but not for the world.”

The young Beethoven was among those few it touched, and this was enough, more than enough — he took Schiller’s bright beam of possibility and magnified it through the lens of his own genius to illuminate all of humanity for all of time. Epochs later, in the savage century of the World Wars and the Holocaust, Rebecca West — another uncommon visionary, who understood that “art is not a plaything, but a necessity” — would contemplate how those rare few help the rest of humanity endure, observing that “if during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe.”

While Schiller’s poem was ripening in Beethoven’s imagination, the decade-long Napoleonic Wars stripped and bludgeoned Europe. When Napoleon’s armies invaded and occupied Vienna — where Beethoven had moved at twenty-one to study with his great musical hero, Haydn — most of the wealthy fled to the country. He took refuge with his brother, sister-in-law, and young nephew in the city. Thirty-nine and almost entirely deaf, Beethoven found himself “suffering misery in a most concentrated form” — misery that “affected both body and soul” so profoundly that he produced “very little coherent work.” From inside the vortex of uncertainty and suffering, he wrote:

The existence I had built up only a short time ago rests on shaky foundations. What a destructive, disorderly life I see and hear around me: nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery in every form.

That spring, Haydn’s death only deepened his despair at life. The next six years were an unremitting heartache. His love went unreturned. He grew estranged from one of his brothers, who married a woman Beethoven disliked. His other brother died. He entered an endless legal combat over guardianship of his young nephew. He spent a year bedridden with a mysterious illness he called “an inflammatory fever,” riddled with skull-splitting headaches. His hearing almost completely deteriorated. He grew repulsed by the trendy mysticism of new musical developments, which made no room for the raw human emotion that was to him both the truest material and truest product of art.

Somehow, he kept composing, the act itself becoming the fulcrum by which Beethoven lifted himself out of the black hole to perch on the event horizon of a new period of great creative fertility. While Blake — his twin in the tragic genius of outsiderdom — was painting the music of the heavens, Beethoven was grounding a possible heaven onto a disillusioned earth with music.

And then he ended up in jail.

One autumn day in 1822, the fifty-two-year-old composer put on his moth-eaten coat and set out for what he intended as a short morning walk in the city, his mind a tempest of ideas. Walking had always been his primary laboratory for creative problem-solving, so the morning stroll unspooled into a long half-conscious walk along the Danube. In a classic manifestation of the self-forgetting that marks the intense creative state now known as “flow,” Beethoven lost track of time, of distance, of the demands of his own body.

He walked and walked, hatless and absorbed, not realizing how famished and fatigued he was growing, until the afternoon found him wandering disheveled and disoriented in a river basin far into the countryside. There, he was arrested by local police for “behaving in a suspicious manner,” taken to jail as “a tramp” with no identity papers, and mocked for claiming that he was the great Beethoven — by then a national icon, with a corpus of celebrated concertos and sonatas to his name, and eight whole symphonies.

The tramp raged and raged, until eventually, close to midnight, the police dispatched a nervous officer to wake up a local musical director, who Beethoven demanded could identify him. Instant recognition. Righteous rage. Apologies. Immediate release. More rage. More apologies. Beethoven spent the night at his liberator’s house. In the morning, the town’s apologetic mayor collected him and drove him back to Vienna in the mayoral carriage.

What had so distracted Beethoven from space and time and self was that, twenty-seven years after falling under the spell of Schiller’s poem, he was at last ferocious with ideas for bringing it to life in music. He had been thinking about it incessantly for months. “Ode to Joy” would become the crowning achievement of his crowning achievement — the choral finale of his ninth and final symphony. It would distill the transcendent torment of his creative life: how to integrate rage and redemption, the solace of poetry with the drama of music; how to channel his own poetic fury as a force of beauty, of vitality, of meaning; how to turn the human darkness he had witnessed and suffered into something incandescent, something superhuman.One of Arthur Rackham’s rare 1917 illustrations for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. (Available as a print.)

It had to be in a symphony, although he had not composed one in a decade and no composer — not Bach, not Mozart, not his hero Haydn — had ever woven words into a symphony before. It had to be the crowning choral finale of the symphony, although he had not written much choral music before. But the light of the idea beamed bright and irrefutable as spring. This was no time for old laurels, no time for catering to proven populisms — this was the time for creation. A decade earlier, Beethoven had written back to a young girl aspiring to become a great pianist, offering his advice on the central urgency of the creative calling:

The true artist is not proud… Though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

So often, in advising others, we are advising ourselves — the most innocent, vulnerable, and visionary parts of us, those parts from which the spontaneity and daring central to creative work spring. I wonder whether Beethoven remembered his own advice to Emilie as he faced the blank page that spring in 1822 when the first radiant contours of his “Ode to Joy” filled his mind and his footfall.

By summer, he was actively seeking out commissions to live on as he labored. He managed to procure a meager £50 from London’s Harmony Society, but that was enough subsistence and assurance to get to work. For more than a year, he labored unremittingly, stumbling over creative challenge after creative challenge — the price of making anything unexampled. His greatest puzzle was how to introduce the words into the final movement and how to choose the voices that would best carry them.

Meanwhile, word was spreading in Vienna that its most beloved composer was working on something wildly ambitious — his first symphony in a decade, and no ordinary symphony. But just as theater managers began vying for the premiere, Beethoven stunned everyone with the announcement that it was going to premiere in Berlin. He gave no reason. Viennese musicians took it as an affront — did he think they were too traditional to appreciate something so bold? He had been born in Germany, yes, but he had become himself in Austria. Surely, he owed the seedbed of his creative blossoming some measure of faith.

At the harsh peak of winter, Karoline Unger — the nineteen-year-old contralto Beethoven had already chosen to voice the deepest feeling-tones of his “Ode to Joy” — exhorted him to premiere his masterwork in Vienna. Writing in his Conversation Books — the notebooks through which the deaf composer communicated with the hearing world — she told him he had “too little self-confidence” in the Viennese public’s reception of his masterwork, urged him to go forward with the concert, then exclaimed: “O Obstinacy!”

Within a month, thirty of his most esteemed Austrian admirers — musicians and poets, composers and chamberlains — had co-written and signed an impassioned open letter to Beethoven, laced with patriotism and flattery, telling him that while his “name and creations belong to all contemporaneous humanity and every country which opens a susceptible bosom to art,” it is his artistic duty to complete the Austrian triad of Mozart and Haydn; imploring him not to entrust “the appreciation for the pure and eternally beautiful” to unworthy “foreign power” and to establish instead “a new sovereignty of the True and the Beautiful” in Vienna. The letter was hand-delivered to him by a court secretary who tutored the royal family.

Not even the most stubborn and single-minded artist is impervious to the sway of adulation. “It’s very beautiful, it makes me very happy!” The Viennese concert was on.

But Beethoven bent under the weight of his own expectations in a crippling combination of micro-managing and indecision. Eager to control every littlest detail to perfection, he committed to one theater, then changed his mind and committed to another, then it all became too much to bear — he cancelled the concert altogether.

After a monthlong tailspin, the finitude of time — concert season was almost over — pinned him to the still point of decision. He uncancelled the concert and, once again confounding everyone, signed with one of the underbidding imperial court theaters he had at first rejected.

The date was set for early May. He hand-picked the four soloists who would anchor the choir and assembled an orchestra dwarfing all convention: two dozen violins, two dozen wind instruments, a dozen cellos and basses, ten violas, and all that percussion.

It was to be not only a performance, not only a premiere, but something more — the emblem of a credo, musical and humanistic. The reception of the symphony would make or break the reception of the ideals behind it. Against this backdrop, it is slightly less shocking — but only slightly — that, in an astonishing final bid for total control of his creation, Beethoven demanded that he conduct the symphony himself.

Everyone knew he was deaf. Now they feared he was demented.

The theater, having won the coveted premiere, reluctantly conceded, fearing Beethoven might change his mind again if his demand went unmet, but persuaded him to have the original conductor onstage with him, with every assurance that he would only be there for backup. The conductor, meanwhile, instructed the choir and orchestra to follow only his motions and “pay no attention whatever to Beethoven’s beating of the time.” The best assurance even one of Beethoven’s closest friends — who later became his biographer — could muster was that the theater would be too dim for anyone to notice that Beethoven was conducting in his old green frock and not in the fashionable black coat a conductor was supposed to wear.

After two catastrophic rehearsals — the only two the enormous ensemble could manage in the brief time before the performance — the soloists railed that their parts were simply impossible to sing. Karoline Unger called him a “tyrant over all the vocal organs.” One of the two male soloists quit altogether and had to be replaced by a member of the choir who had memorized the part.

Somehow, the show went on.

On the early evening of May 7, 1824, the Viennese crowded into the concert hall — but they were not the usual patrons. Looking up to the royal box, Beethoven was crushed to see it empty. He had journeyed to the palace to personally invite the Emperor and Empress but, like most of the aristocracy, they had vanished into their country estate as soon as spring broke the harsh Austrian winter. He was going to be playing for the people. But it was the people, after all, that Schiller had yearned to vitalize with his poem.

Beethoven walked onto the grand stage, faced the orchestra, and raised his arms. Despite the natural imperfections of a performance built on such tensions, something shifted as soon as the music — exalted, sublime, total — rose above the individual lives and their individual strife, subsuming every body and every soul in a single harmonious transcendence.

After the final chord of “Ode to Joy” resounded, the gasping silence broke into a scream of applause. People leapt to their feet, waving their handkerchiefs and chanting his name. Beethoven, still facing the orchestra and still waving his arms to the delayed internal time of music only he could hear, noticed none of it, until Karoline Unger stood up, took his arm, and gently turned him around.

With the birth of photography still fifteen years of trial and triumph away, it is only in the mind’s eye that one can picture the cascade of confusion, disbelief, and elation that must have washed over Beethoven’s face in that sublime moment when his guiding sun seemed suddenly so proximate, almost blinding with triumph.

As soon as he faced the audience, the entire human mass erupted with not one, not two, not three, but four volcanic bursts of applause, until the Police Commissioner managed to yell “Silence!” over the fifth. These were still revolutionary times, after all, and art that roused so fierce a response in the human soul — even if that response was exultant joy — was dangerous art. Here, in the unassailable message of “Ode to Joy,” was a clarion call to humanity to discard all the false gods that had fueled a century of unremitting wars and millennia of inequality — the divisions of nation and rank, the oppressions of dogma and tradition — and band together in universal sympathy and solidarity.

The sound of Beethoven’s call resounded long after its creator was gone. Whitman celebrated it as the profoundest expression of nature and human nature. Helen Keller “heard” it with her hand pressed against the radio speaker and suddenly understood the meaning of music. Chilean protesters sang it as they took down the Pinochet dictatorship. Japanese musicians performed it after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Chinese students blasted it in Tiananmen Square. Leonard Bernstein, patron saint of music as an instrument of humanism, conducted a group of musicians who had lived on both sides of the Berlin Wall in a Christmas Day concert commemorating the twentieth anniversary of its fall. Ukrainian composer Victoria Poleva reimagined it for an international concert commemorating the fiftieth anniversary. A decade later, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine performed her reimagining not long before a twenty-first century tyrant with a Napoleonic complex and a soul deaf to the music of life bludgeoned the small country with his lust for power.

But this, I suspect, was Beethoven’s stubborn, sacred point — the reason he never gave up on Schiller’s dream, even as he lived through nightmares: this unassailable insistence that although the Napoleons and Putins of the world will rise to power again and again over the centuries, they will also fall, because there is something in us more powerful as long as we continue placing freedom, justice, and universal happiness at the center of our commitment to life, even as we live through nightmares. Two centuries after Beethoven, Zadie Smith affirmed this elemental reality in her own life-honed conviction that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”

In the winter of my thirteenth year, two centuries after Beethoven’s day and a few fragile years after the fall of Bulgaria’s communist dictatorship, I stood in the holiday-bedazzled National Symphony Hall alongside a dozen classmates from the Sofia Mathematics Gymnasium, our choir about to perform Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” recently adopted as the anthem of Europe by the European Union, of which the newly liberated Bulgaria longed to be a part.

We sang the lyrics in Bulgarian, but “joy” has no direct translation. “Felicity” might come the closest, or “mirth” — those wing-clipped cousins of joy, bearing the same bright feeling-tone, but lacking its elation, its all-pervading exhale — a diminishment reflecting the spirit of a people just emerging from five centuries of Ottoman occupation closely followed by a half-century Communist dictatorship.

And yet we stood there in our best clothes, in the spring of life, singing together, our teenage minds abloom with quadratic equations and a lust for life, our teenage bodies reverberating with the redemptive dream of a visionary who had died epochs before any of our lives was but a glimmer in a great-great-grandparent’s eye, our teenage spirits longing to kiss the whole world with possibility.

Today, “Ode to Joy” — a recording by the Berlin Philharmonic from the year I was born — streams into my wireless headphones as I cross the Brooklyn Bridge on my bicycle, riding into a life undreamt in that teenage girl’s wildest dreams, into a world unimaginable to Beethoven, a world where suffering remains our constant companion but life is infinitely more possible for infinitely more people, and more kinds of people, than even the farthest seer of 1822 could have envisioned.

I ride into the spring night, singing. This, in the end, might be the truest translation of “joy” — this ecstatic fusion of presence and possibility.

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I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

Here is the link to this article.

March 20, 2018 by ANGELA ACKERMAN

While readers love to see larger-than-life characters with passion, take-charge attitudes, and heaps of boldness and daring, not every protagonist wears an extrovert skin. In fact, looking at real-life demographics for a second, I think there’s a lot more people on the quieter side than not. Some of us are introverted, others, on the shy side. People can also be deep thinkers or natural observers. And of course many struggle with doubt and insecurity, and extroverted or not, it’s enough to keep them from actively choosing the spotlight.

Whatever the reason is, it is worth remembering that if we’re to mirror the real world in our fiction, those loud, brash characters are the exception, not the rule. Besides, if all our story cast members have big, BIG personalities it will create a tug-of-war for the reader’s attention, and the story can suffer as a result. We need quieter characters, too…especially because quiet DOESN’T mean boring.

The trick with quieter characters is finding a way for them to stand out. If you have a shy woman or a calm and careful man, each will be naturally more reserved with their actions and choices. They likely think before they act, look both ways before crossing the street, that sort of thing. They may be predictable, and if we aren’t careful, they might become forgettable. This is death if your quieter character happens to be the protagonist, so let’s look at three ways to make sure they command the stage.

Use Contrast

Contrast is a great way to bring the spotlight back to your quiet character. Pair them against a flashy cast, like a friend who is bold yet arrogant, or a parent who is feisty and reckless. A teacher who abrasive and opportunistic, or an erratic, superstitious boss. When the people around your quiet hero are creating a lot of drama, then your protagonist can become an interesting and insightful counterweight.

To make this work, ensure that something about them (a trait, a talent, an interest or hobby, knowledge they have, or something else) is special and connected to the current problem or what’s at stake. For example, imagine half a dozen superficial, attention-jockeying teens on a school hiking trip who become separated from the larger group. Between blaming each other for getting lost and hysterics about starving or being mauled by a bear, no one in this group is capable of solving the problem at hand. But imagine that one of the kids assigned to this group is our protagonist, a logical thinker who spends his time Geo-caching for fun. Who is suddenly going to be the focus as he’s the best suited to navigating everyone back to the campsite?

Offer Readers Something Unexpected

People can be meek and mild, but in books, a too-quiet introvert will quickly bore the reader. Imagine a schoolgirl, her perfectly combed hair, her steps careful as she watches for cracks on the sidewalk. You can see her, can’t you, clutching books to her chest, unassuming, polite, so different from the hormonal teen freak show going on around her. She does her homework. Raises her hand enough to stay off the teacher’s radar. Her schoolmates don’t know her name and find her utterly forgettable…and readers will too if we leave her in this Plain Jane purgatory.

Yet, if we give her something unexpected, the very details that made her fade will bring her to life. Maybe we give her a secret, or allude to a desire of hers that is so much bigger than her blah exterior.

We could also reveal something about her that will make a reader’s breath catch.

What if those books she clutches are holding something in place…an injured bird found on the way to school? But she’s not holding it there to protect it. Instead, each twitch, jerk, and flutter floods her body with exhilaration, so much so that she squeezes harder, smothering away its cries as claws dig through her sweater, until finally, all movement stops.

Her carefully controlled demeanor takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

Create Reader Empathy Using Deep POV

When characters don’t have noticeably extroverted traits and behaviors, they don’t usually express themselves outwardly to the same degree as those that do. However, one thing every introvert has is big, deep thoughts. They might not be showing their emotion as actively as other characters do but you can bet they are thinking, reflecting, and FEELING.

Pulling the reader inside your quiet protagonist is a great way to show their raw emotions as a scene plays out. Deep POV means instead of watching everything from a distance, readers see through the eyes of the protagonist and experience the visceral quality of their emotions. (This in turn lends more weight to any outward expressions because their body language is layered with the context of their thoughts.)

Deep POV means what a character sees and senses becomes a shared emotional experience for the reader. And in heightened emotional moments, they often find themselves remembering their own life experiences when they themselves felt something similar to what the character is feeling. These echoes mean that deep POV is a powerful tool for creating closeness and that all-important empathy bond. Click here to download our One Stop for Writers checklist on Deep POV.

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

Here is the link to this article.

Love, laundry, and the miraculous in the mundane.

BY MARIA POPOVA

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless meditation on living with presence. “Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s,” Seneca exhorted two millennia earlier as he offered the Stoic balance sheet for time spent, saved, and wasted, reminding us that “nothing is ours, except time.”

Time is all we have because time is what we are — which is why the undoing of time, of time’s promise of itself, is the undoing of our very selves.

In the dismorrowed undoing of 2020 — as Zadie Smith was calibrating the limitations of Stoic philosophy in a world suddenly time-warped by a global quarantine, suddenly sobered to the perennial uncertainty of the future — loss beyond the collective heartache besieged the miniature world of my sunny-spirited, largehearted friend and Caldecott-winning children’s book maker Sophie Blackall. She coped the way all artists cope, complained the way all makers complain: by making something of beauty and substance, something that begins as a quickening of self-salvation in one’s own heart and ripples out to touch, to salve, maybe even to save others — which might be both the broadest and the most precise definition of art.

One morning under the hot shower, Sophie began making a mental list of things to look forward to — a lovely gesture of taking tomorrow’s outstretched hand in that handshake of trust and resolve we call optimism.

As the list grew and she began drawing each item on it, she noticed how many were things that needn’t wait for some uncertain future — unfussy gladnesses readily available in the now, any now. A century after Hermann Hesse extolled “the little joys” as the most important habit for fully present living, Sophie’s list became not an emblem of expectancy but an invitation to presence — not a deferral of life but a celebration of it, of the myriad marvels that come alive as soon as we become just a little more attentive, a little more appreciative, a little more animated by our own elemental nature as “atoms with consciousness” and “matter with curiosity.”

Sophie began sharing the illustrated meditations on her Instagram (which is itself a rare island of unremitting delight and generosity amid the stream of hollow selfing we call social media) — each part record of personal gladness, part creative prompt. Delight begets delight — people began sending her their responses to these prompts: unbidden kindnesses done for neighbors, unexpected hobbies taken up, and oh so many sweet strange faces drawn on eggs.

A slipstream of tomorrows hence, her list became Things to Look Forward to: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day (public library) — a felicitous catalogue partway between Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom and poet Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, every page of it radiant with the warmth and wonder that make life worth living and mark everything Sophie makes.

You can relish a rainbow and a cup of tea, sunrise and a flock of birds, a cemetery walk and a friend’s newborn, the first blush of wildflowers in a patch of dirt and the looping rapture of an old favorite song. You can’t tidy up the White House, but you can tidy up that neglected messy corner of your home; you can’t mend a world, but you can mend the hole in the polka-dot pocket of your favorite coat. They are not the same thing, but they are part of the same thing, which is all there is — life living itself through us, moment by moment, one broken beautiful thing at a time.

Sophie writes in the preface:

I have always been a cheerful sort of person, able to find the silver lining in just about any cloud, but 2020 was a son-of-a-cumulonimbus. There was the pandemic, of course, which knocked us all sideways. Like most people, I tried to remain hopeful, counting my blessings, grateful to be alive when so many were dying. But also like most people, I was full of anxiety and fear and grief and uncertainty. My partner, Ed, and I worried about bills, fretted about my aging parents, and missed our kids, who were living away from home. Deciding to downsize, we moved out of the apartment we had happily rented for ten years with our blended family, the longest either of us had ever lived anywhere. We canceled our wedding, because we knew we couldn’t get married without our loved ones. Then in the fall, Nick, the dear, queer father of my children, died in an accident on the other side of the world. The thunderclouds really closed in then, and for a while I struggled to find any rays of hope. I almost lost sight of beauty and wonder and delight.

With an eye to the dangerous seductions of nostalgia — that longing not for a bygone time but for the bygone selves and certitudes that time contained — she adds:

I have often found myself romanticizing the Before Times, when we could travel the world and hug our friends and shake hands with strangers, but I have come to the conclusion that it’s better to look forward: to gather the things we’ve learned and use our patience and perseverance and courage and empathy to care for each other and to work toward a better future for all people. To look forward to things like long-term environmental protection and racial justice; equal rights and an inclusive society; free health care and equitable education; an end to poverty, hunger, and war. But we can also look forward to everyday things that will buoy our spirits and make us laugh and help us feel alive and that will bring others comfort and hope.

Tucked between the quiet joys of painting on pebbles and rereading a favorite passage from a favorite book and enfolding a loved one in a simple hug is the unfailing consolation of the cosmic perspective and its simplest, most enchanting guise, which the visionary Margaret Fuller reverenced, a century and a half earlier amid a world torn by revolutions and economic collapse, as “that best fact, the Moon.”

In the twenty-first entry, devoted to the full Moon, Sophie writes:

Wherever we are in the world, we see the same moon. It’s the same moon earliest humans would have seen, waxing and waning, rising and setting. Depending on where we were thousands of years ago, we would look to a full moon to mark time, to tell us when to plant corn, when to lay the rice to dry, and when to expect the ducks back. Now we look to the moon and marvel that men have traveled there in unlikely contraptions and actually set foot on its surface. It is our stepping-stone to the vast universe, and looking at a full moon can make us feel very small and very young. But it can also remind us to make the most of our time here on earth, to pop corn and throw rice and watch for ducks.

What makes the book so wondrous is that each seemingly mundane thing on the list shimmers with an aspect of the miraculous, each fragment of the personal opens into the universal, each playful wink at life grows wide-eyed with poignancy.

In the thirtieth entry, titled “Clean Laundry” and illustrated with a stack of neatly folded grey T-shirts, Sophie writes:

I tend to put off washing clothes until the last possible day, when I’m reduced to leggings with holes and the mustard top that inspires people to ask if I’m feeling OK, but clean laundry means a whole closet of possibilities. I can dress like a nineteenth-century French farmer or an Edwardian ghost or a deckhand on a whaler off Nantucket. Actually, those are pretty much my three options, but there are many subtle variations.

My clothes are pre-owned, unruly, and difficult to fold, but my partner wears a uniform. Not the kind with epaulets or creased slacks or his name embroidered on his chest, but a deliberate, self-selected uniform. Ed is a playwright and a teacher, and he heeds the advice of Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Once a year, he purchases six gray T-shirts and a dozen pairs of black socks and multiples of carefully chosen, unremarkable shirts and pants. On laundry day, his neatly folded piles of clean clothes are so dear and familiar they put a lump in my throat.

Pulsating through the book, through the list, through the life is the one thing that saves us all: love — the love of partners and of friends, of children and of flowers, of books and music and list-making and this whole improbable living world. Indeed, the entire book is one extended love letter to life itself, composed of the miniature, infinite loves that animate any given life.

In entry №37, titled “Falling in Love,” Sophie writes:

I met my husband, Nick, when I was twenty-one, and we moved in together before the year was out. We got married when I was twenty-five, and I had my first child at twenty-six. But I didn’t fall in love, not properly, until I was thirty-six. And it wasn’t with my husband. It wasn’t that Nick and I didn’t love each other. We did. We were best friends. He could play “My Funny Valentine” on his teeth and make anything out of nothing: a 1930s-style playhouse, a shirt out of a vintage tablecloth, Halloween costumes that made the news. He had a blinding temper, but he was as funny as he was angry, so I laughed at least as much as I cried. When we met, he thought he was 5 percent gay. It turned out he was 5 percent straight. But that was enough to make two excellent children, and we thought we were happy.

Days with young children can pass by in a blur of drop-offs and pickups, bath time and bedtime, Hot Wheels and carrot sticks and Shrinky Dinks. If you’re in love with your partner I can imagine finding moments to notice each other, managing, even through the blur, to see one another clearly. But if you’re not sure, then you can become kind of blurry yourself.

Later, when I met Ed, the man I would fall in love with, I was still a bit blurry, but I saw him in distinct detail. I noticed everything: his beautiful profile, his generous ears, his kind eyes. The way he shoved his T-shirt sleeve up on his handsome shoulder as he talked. His heartbreakingly neat handwriting. The way he was always reading, even when he was walking down the street, underlining without breaking stride. The way he carried everything in a stack: book, extra book, notebook, pen, phone, as though he’d never heard of bags. The way he followed a recipe and put all the ingredients in little bowls. The way his tongue stuck out when he chopped onions or dribbled a basketball or tied a child’d shoe. The way he made all the babies laugh. The way he made me laugh. The way he made my hands tremble.

And I noticed the way he noticed me too. He saw me more clearly than anyone had, ever before.

And bit by bit, I realized that I’d previously had no idea, no idea on earth, what it was to be in love and to be loved in return. Those were heady days. Fourteen years later, they still are. The point is, of course, that you can look forward to falling in love with the love of your life, day after day. If you haven’t found love yet, or found it and lost it, then it can find you, perhaps when you least expect it.

Complement Things to Look Forward to, to which neither screen nor synthesis do service, with Sophie’s splendid animation of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge Without Music” — a sort of mirror-image counterpart to this elemental awareness that our time, finite and savage with creative force, is all we have — then revisit her illustrated celebration of our shared world.

Illustrations courtesy of Sophie Blackall

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

Here is the link to this article.

by Kobo Writing Life | Mar 17, 2017 | The Craft of Writing, Tips | 9 comments

by Chris Mandeville

The other day I was talking to another writer about the young adult time travel story I’m writing. Her first question was, “Do you have the book English Through the Ages?” I didn’t, but at her encouragement I got one immediately. The minute I opened the book it was my favorite writing tool, and I knew I had to tell you about it. Then I got to thinking about all the great writing tools on my bookshelves (both physical and digital), and I thought you might enjoy hearing about those, too. So today I’m sharing with you my favorite books that help me write books, beginning with my newest, English Through the Ages by William Brohaugh.

If you write contemporary or speculative fiction, you might not have a need for English Through the Ages. But if you want to know which came first, the chicken or the egg, stick around because this book has the answer and I’m going to share it. Plus I’ll tell you about other cool tools you might be interested in.

English Through the Ages is a hefty tome that’s kind of like a historical dictionary. It begins with Old English words that were in use in 1150, and then adds words decade by decade as they came into use through 1990. The words in each section are divided into categories like “Technology,” “Fashion,” and “Everyday Life” for easy reference. Plus a full third of the book is an alphabetical index so you can quickly find a particular word you’re curious about.

I use the book in a number of ways to make sure the language I’m using in my story is appropriate to the time period. The chapters I’m writing now take place in the U.S. in the early 1900s. I have one of the characters saying the word “quibble,” but I wasn’t certain if that word was in use then, so I looked it up in the index. Turns out the word has been in use—with the same meaning—since the 1650s, so I’m set! I can use the word with confidence.

Another way I use the book is to browse the decade following the one I’m writing about—these words should NOT be used in my story because they weren’t in common use yet. Example: the word “brassiere” wasn’t commonly used until 1915, and “bra” not until 1935. This could be important to a modern-day girl who finds herself in 1900 (my protagonist), so I did some further research and learned that bras themselves were in use in 1900 but just not called bras. Fascinating and useful, too—it gave me an idea for a scene where my character’s modern bra threatens to give her away as someone who doesn’t belong there…err, then. (Time travel is hard!)

Note that English Through the Ages is out of print and there is no e-book version available. However there are plenty of used copies floating around. Check your local library, used bookstore, or online bookseller. You’re sure to find a copy, and inexpensively to boot. (“To boot” has been in use since 1150.)

Another writing book that’s recently become one of my favorites is Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need  by Blake Snyder. I’m not a screenwriter, but after one look at this resource I understood why so many novelists swear by it: the information is awesome (a word that’s been in wide use in this context since the 1980s) and easily applicable to novel writing. For me, the gem in this book is Snyder’s “beat sheet” – a 15-point list of the critical elements that comprise a story’s structure. Not only does the book tell you what elements to include in what order, it specifies where in the story they should occur for maximum impact. When I used the beat sheet to lay out the plot of my current work-in-progress, I discovered a couple of “holes” I needed to fill, plus some areas where I might want to tighten the timing between plot points. As a bonus, if I get stuck while writing the story, I can simply refer to my beat sheet to get back on track. I’ve found this method of story planning to be so helpful, I expect to use it on every novel I write from here on out.

Before I discovered Save the Cat, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey was my constant companion when story planning and plotting. This book takes the groundbreaking work of Joseph Campbell’s “the hero’s journey” and puts it into an accessible, digestible form for writers. Like Blake Snyder, Vogler’s roots are in film, and he draws on his experiences working on The Lion King and Star Wars to provide examples that are both illuminating and relatable. Also like Snyder, Vogler lays out story elements in clear terms, providing guidelines and milestones for great storytelling. I still refer to this book and the “hero’s journey” when story planning (“plan” was a latecomer to the English party, not appearing until the mid- to late-1900s), and I find The Writer’s Journey to be particularly helpful when I’m determining exactly where I should begin my hero’s journey.

For a summary of the hero’s journey you can go back to my very first post for Kobo Writing Life here.

My reference shelf holds a number of books I consult when creating characters. My favorite for building a protagonist is The Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes by Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever, Sue Viders. Archetypes (in use since 1545) provide powerful templates from which to craft characters, and Heroes and Heroines serves them up on a platter for writers’ use. For building villains (in use to mean “antagonist” since 1830), my go-to reference is Bullies, Bastards And Bitches: How To Write The Bad Guys Of Fiction by Jessica Morrell.  This book covers all kinds of bad guys—not just bullies, bastards, and bitches but anti-heroes, monsters, and sociopaths, too. It’s a must-have for any writer who wants to graduate from mustache-twirling one-note villains to multi-dimensional antagonists who torment your other characters deliciously and believably.

I recently celebrated a milestone birthday, and as a gift to myself I bought a book I’d been hearing about frequently from other novelists: The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman. Thesauri (or thesauruses—equally acceptable) have been around a long time. In fact, the word “thesaurus” entered the lexicon in about 1600. But this thesaurus is different. The Emotion Thesaurus doesn’t provide synonyms for emotions, but rather gives writers an abundance of sources to draw from when s/he wants to depict or describe an emotion. Each entry includes lists of physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, and cues that indicate different aspects of that emotion. To indicate dread, for instance, it offers options like giving my character a hunched posture and a drooping head (physical signal), a sluggish heartbeat (internal sensation), and/or an inability to see a positive outcome (mental response). If I want to show cues of suppressed dread, I can have her attempt to escape her problems using distractions, like TV or music. Or to indicate acute or long-term dread, I can have her jump at sudden sounds or seek any excuse to avoid what is to come. For further exploration of this emotion, it’s suggested that acute dread may escalate to anguish or terror, both of which have their own entries in the thesaurus. This book is def (1985) a serious (1985) writing tool, and that’s no spin (1985).

If I had to pick just one writing book that has helped me the most in my career, hands-down (in use since 1870) it would be GMC: Goal, Motivation, & Conflict by Debra Dixon. This book is an all-purpose tool—it works on character, plot, conflict, you-name-it—which is why I refer to it as the “Swiss Army knife of writing tools” in this previous blog that discusses GMC. Once I discovered this powerful tool, it was like the clouds parted and a ray of insight shone down upon my writing. Before I was introduced to Dixon’s book I’d never thought much about what my characters wanted or why they wanted it; this book showed me how to look at my characters in that light, as well as how to create conflict by putting formidable obstacles in my characters’ way. It allowed me understand my protagonists better, build stronger villains, raise the stakes, and increase tension. In short, I’m a better novelist because of this book.

Photo by Stephen W, courtesy of Creative Commons

Okay, here’s what you’ve been waiting for:

Chicken came first. Or at least the word did. According to English Through the Ages, historical records indicate that “chicken” entered in Old English sometime before the year 950. “Egg” doesn’t appear until the early 1300s.

Now you know.

Whatever it is you need to know, remember that books can be our best tools for writing books. I’ve told you my faves (in use since the 1940s). What are yours?

Chris Mandeville writes science fiction and fantasy, as well as nonfiction for writers. Her books include Seeds: a post-apocalyptic adventure and 52 Ways to Get Unstuck: Exercises to Break Through Writer’s Block.

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

Here is the link to this article.

September 22, 2020 by Guest Poster

Have you ever been flipping through a magazine and found an excerpt from a book, maybe one you’d never read? And did reading that short passage make you want to read more, prompting you to go looking for the book? This is why a lot of authors and publicists publish book excerpts: to generate interest in their story. Erik Klass from Submitit is here to discuss why this might be a good idea for you, too.

A few years ago I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Signature of All Things” in the journal One Story, and was blown away. When the eponymous book came out a short time later, I bought it. For readers like me, who skipped Eat, Pray, Love, getting a taste of Gilbert’s fiction was important. We can understand why the author (and probably her publishers) went to the trouble of getting an excerpt published.

But a more important reason to excerpt a novel, I believe, is that, with a few publishing credits in the quiver, an (otherwise) unpublished writer might have an easier time finding an agent and eventually a publisher for his or her first novel. It is a great separator, a free pass to the top of a (towering) pile of queries. 

But, you say, your novel is structured with care. It is complete. It adheres to a particular emotional arc. It is the sum of its parts—or, correction, is greater than these parts. A completed puzzle. But a chapter, no mirror or fractal of its larger whole, may not have an arc of any kind. 

And I rejoin: If a novel is a love affair, a short story is a one-night stand. It’s quick. Sometimes a little dirty. Strangers remain strangers. In many of my favorite short stories, very little actually happens. Not much time passes (it may stand still). They are all mood and indigo. A thought. A gesture. A crack in a bathroom mirror opens up a violence. The silhouette of a child’s kite against a setting sun brings back a memory. Let’s go into the woods and follow a stream and spot a deer beneath a blood-red sky. There can be great profundity in the small. 

I’m currently working on a novel about a man wandering the streets of Łódź, Poland, contemplating the loss of love. In one chapter, about halfway through, the narrator sits in a small square in the city and remembers an afternoon at his ex-lover’s apartment. A moment in time echoing a moment in time. That’s it. No real narrative arc—maybe this is another word for plot—no arc at all. And yet, there are colors and sounds and smells. There’s that inescapable feeling of loss. The haunting fleetingness of memory. I’d like to believe it will work as a publishable excerpt. 

Yes, short stories are often subtle. This, I think, is good news for your excerpt. You don’t need to connect all the dots. I recommend you don’t. Hint. Sprinkle breadcrumbs. Those gaps? Leave them. Have you ever stood close to a painting—let us say, Van Gogh’s Roses (1890)—and studied just one small section—perhaps a single white fallen petal in the canvas’s bottom corner, painted, it seems, with the tip of a finger? It is easy to miss, white against nearly white. It is a beautiful thing. This may be your excerpt.

But not all chapters are ready to reveal themselves, to throw off their novel (in both senses) clothes. An excerpt may require some work. 

Let’s say your excerpt requires a little background. Try this: summarize your novel (up to the chapter) in a sentence or two. It’s a surprisingly easy—and startlingly effective—way to start a story. I just came up with this: My wife would be meeting her lover at 4 in the afternoon (Ulysses).

I think I’d keep reading.

And endings: Unlike most novels, your excerpt doesn’t need tidy resolution. In fact many short stories leave things vague. But you probably need a hint of resolution. Perhaps there is a catalyst, a spark, and we’re left to imagine the oncoming conflagration. (This might be how you’re ending your chapters already. It’s what we do, we novelists.) But if you need to tie things up ever so slightly, tie away. 

The chapter I mentioned above ends with my narrator eventually rising from where he sits in the little Polish square and continuing his journey through the city. No resolution. (It’s a sad chapter.) But I didn’t want to end this excerpt like this. So in the last couple paragraphs I created a new character (yes: deus ex machina), a girl with long legs and violet-blue eyes. Not a word is spoken, but there’s that hint. It’s enough.

What I’m trying to say is that we may change our chapters. They are malleable, these precious things of ours. They are made not of stone, but of clay. We may even tear them, sometimes to shreds. For this novel—this interminable novel of mine—I wrote a chapter about eight Polish poets preparing for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous visit to Warsaw in May 1927. I get into their minds, explore their loves. With just a bit of work, I was able to pull short excerpts from this chapter and submit these new “flash” stories to a handful of journals; all but a few were accepted. (Here’s one, if you have half an interest.)   

Most chapters, I believe, hold this potential. Consider it an exercise. Free of the pulling weight, the magnificent magnitude, of the rest of your novel, you may enter into your story’s story, use the tip of your finest brush (or finger), and paint anew.

Finally, there’s a whole art to submitting your—I must call it now—story. There’s much to submitting, but I’ll leave you with one piece of advice: read. There are literally hundreds of journals (I have over 400 on my list), and they vary widely. Many writers use Duotrope to search for journals—it’s a great place to start. (And if you want to make it really easy, I run a company that can help.) Read these things. It is pleasant homework.

I hope the above inspires you to submit excerpts from your novel. And I wish you success.

Erik Harper Klass is the founder of a full-service submissions company called Submitit. He has published stories in a variety of journals, including New England Review, Summerset Review, Maryland Literary Review, and Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and he has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. He writes in Los Angeles, CA.

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

Here is the link to this article.

by David Safford | 23 Comments

One of the greatest challenges of writing better stories is knowing exactly which scenes to write. The best scenes focus on the core elements of conflict — which means before you can write amazing scenes, you have to find the central conflict in a story.

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You may have a great story idea in your head. But the specifics of it — which moments to capture — are unclear. The result is often writer’s block, or a story that feels “off,” meaning it isn’t focused on the right stuff.

That’s where Conflict Mapping can make your writing even better!

Strong scenes come from strong plans. And visualizing the types of conflict between your characters is a great way to do just that.

When Conflict in a Story Is Unclear

Conflict is essential to a strong story.

To give zest to your plot and move it forward, you need to integrate a type of conflict in every scene.

This can be seen as a moral conflict that sparks an internal struggle, or a force of external conflicts that threaten a character in a physical or  other way.

Rarely does a story’s conflict magically appear in our minds. That’s because inspiration frequently comes from other sources: beauty, music, or situations. Rarely are we inspired by a focused sequence of events built around pursuing a goal (which is what a story is), because this tends to happen too quickly to note.

So when we sit down to write, we’re really just translating the image or idea we had into a word-picture.

Except those aren’t major conflicts.

I experienced this in 2012 when I decided to write a murder mystery about a family in New Orleans. My wife and I even went on vacation there, staying just outside the French Quarter.

And while we saw a lot of beautiful things, heard some amazing music, and came up with many interesting situations, strong story conflict did not come to us as we sweated our way through the city.

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The beauty, music, and situations that inspire you to write are wonderful—but these alone are not the core conflicts of your story.

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How can we translate inspiration and ideas into clear conflict in a story?

Simple: Start by drawing two circles.

Conflict Map: Drawing a Relationship

To begin your Conflict Map, draw two empty circles. Then, connect them with arcing arrows, like this:

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Now, decide which two people are in a relationship in your story. You don’t need names. Just people. Mom and daughter? Boyfriend and girlfriend? Owner and dog? You decide. Just put something in there.

The point is that you are intentionally developing multiple characters in a a story, which gives you an opportunity to create conflict between people, particularly between one character and your protagonist.

Once you’ve done this, on the arrow extending from a character’s bubble, write what they want from the other character. It can be physical (preferable) or non-physical (okay — but add something physical to go with it, like “affection = hug”).

Then, consider what the other character might want from the first. Write it on their arrow.

As you do this, consider traits that might be essential to each character. Jot them in the circles. This is the time to create without any fear or reservations.

And to keep it fear-free, do it in pencil so you can erase and alter to your heart’s delight!

Create 4 Relationships

According to Robert McKee, there are four character types that nearly every protagonist has a relationship with in most stories. Whenever I’m building a new story in a new world, I find this to be a fantastic starting place, and it’s what I did as I built the world of my New Orleans play.

The four character types to fill first, as you plan, are:

1. Friend: What one might want from a friend? What does the exchange of goals look like in friendship?
2. Authority: How does this relationship create benevolent and/or negative energy?
3. Love: How does the protagonist think of, and possibly plan to, pursue their love interest?
4. Enemy: Who opposes the protagonist? Is it direct opposition (contradicting the protagonist’s goal), or competitive (pursing the same or a similar goal)?

Once you’ve established what the protagonist wants from each of these characters, draw arrows connecting the characters to each other. What might the Authority want from the Friend? The Friend from the Love? And so on.

Not only does this give you more characters to work with, but it plants the seeds for plenty of conflict that will blossom into strong scenes. When characters are engaged in authentic relationships, the conflict between them occurs more naturally. It doesn’t feel unclear, nor does it come out of nowhere.

So plan out two (or more) characters who want things from one another that cannot easily be given.

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When you have characters in conflict, you have the makings of a strong story.

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You can see my protagonist, Isabel’s, relationship with two of these characters below: the Friend (her adopted brother) and her Authority (her mother, Natasha). Note that I hadn’t figured out Andre’s goal, yet. This truly is a way to discover your protagonist’s “world!”

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Add Goals and Go

When I was done with my Conflict Map, it was so big that my play couldn’t possibly contain all the characters and relationships. So I cut five of them!

Yet the map was invaluable for planning the relationships and conflict I would need to make the story work. It gave me the seeds of great, dramatic scenes.

And the result was a fun, thrilling play that surprised everyone with its authentic conflict.

There is one thing I didn’t do, though, that I highly recommend you do: Add action verbs to each character’s goal. There’s a big difference between an Enemy who chooses to “annihilate” to get their goal, versus one who “humiliates.”

My protagonist, a bride-to-be, chose to “soothe” her overbearing mother in order to get her goal of “genuine love and approval. The play would have been much different if she chose to blame, lie, or ignore. Verbs matter, and they can help you as you craft these crucial scenes.

You can check out a large view of my final map here. It’s a mess—four pieces of paper taped together and scanned into the computer in three batches.

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Every Story Needs Conflict

Conflict is crucial in a plot and between characters and other forces, like the environment, that challenge the protagonist.

To help you come up with conflict, turn to your planning process. Remember, this is supposed to be messy, not a perfect, finished product. A well-executed plan can lead to a wonderful final product.

Whether or not the main conflict in your scene is internal conflict or minor characters blocking your protagonist and their pursuit of their scene goals, or other external obstacles standing in their way, engaging conflicts will advance a plot and keep your readers engaged.

To plan and implement conflict into your story, give Character Mapping a try. And watch as your story get stronger right away!

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

Here is the link to this article.

By Angela Ackerman, @AngelaAckerman

Part of the How They Do It Series

JH: It’s a special treat today! Angela Ackerman takes the podium to share thoughts on the emotional wound and how it benefits our characters–and our stories.

Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of the bestselling book, The Emotion Thesaurus, as well as five others (including The Emotional Wound Thesaurus). Her books are available in six languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site Writers Helping Writers, as well as One Stop for Writers, an powerful online library built to help writers elevate their storytelling.

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Take it away Angela…

In fiction, a single piece of information usually drives the action, whether writers realize it or not: the protagonist’s emotional wound. Wounds are painful events that lurk in your character’s backstory, and in some way they changed how he or she views the world and themselves…in a very unhealthy way.

A wound might be a single event (like a terrible car accident or the death of a child), repeated episodes (such as domestic violence or a string of toxic relationships) or an ongoing detrimental situation (perhaps living in poverty, or suffering neglect at the hands of addicted parents).

Regardless of it’s shape,this shattering event leaves behind fear, pain, and destruction in its wake. Your character will adopt biases, negative attitudes, personality flaws, and other dysfunctional behaviors as emotional shielding to prevent more hurtful events from happening. While this shielding does help create a “buffer” around the character, it comes at a cost: fracturing his relationships, preventing self-growth, sabotaging his ability to achieve meaningful goals, and ensuring fear is ever-present in his life, steering his actions and choices. This is a recipe for unhappiness and unfulfillment…unless it can be reversed. If this sounds like character arc territory, you are correct. The character must learn to let go of the past and move forward differently if he is to achieve his story goal.

Because wounds are invasive, shaking even the strongest character’s foundation, choosing the right one is no small (or easy) task. While some authors prefer to let a protagonist’s fears and wounds emerge as they write, spending time up front to dig around in his or her backstory can save countless hours of revision.

There are a variety of ways to unearth what particular past event (and the fear it generates) is steering your character’s actions within the story. Here are a few areas to brainstorm which may help lead you straight to that painful past wound.

Past Influencers

It’s unfortunately true that those closest to us are in a position to inflict the most pain. In this way, the people our characters interacted with prior to the start of the story are often tied to their wounding events. Caregivers top the list, with their maltreatment birthing deep fears, generating irrational beliefs or biases, creating a legacy of abuse, or even causing unintentional parental failings to be passed through the generations.

For example, imagine a girl who helplessly watched her four-year-old sibling choke and die. She, in turn, could become a controlling mother, her fear causing her to hover over her own child to keep him safe. She may choose his friends and make most of his decisions for him because she believes she knows what’s best. And her son, growing up in this tightly monitored environment, will likely have lower self-esteem because he doesn’t trust his ability to make good decisions. Place this young man into your story as the main character and you have someone who struggles to be independent, obsesses about what others think, is hypersensitive to criticism, and avoids responsibility because he thinks he’ll screw up.

The ability to inflict pain is not just reserved for family, so think about people who left a negative mark on your character, perhaps restricting her growth, sabotaging her self-worth, inflicting a humiliation, or undermining her self-confidence. Mentors, past lovers, ex-friends, and people in positions of power may have imparted negative life lessons. Try asking this question: Whom from your character’s past would she never want to run into again and why?

Unpleasant Memories

Wounds hide within negative past experiences, such as a particular time of hardship, an event that cannot be forgotten, or a moment your character wishes she could utterly erase. Don’t be afraid to interview her about difficult situations she’s endured. Every person’s past is littered with mistakes, failures, disappointments, feelings of inferiority, and fear, so try your best to learn about these painful memories.

Personality Flaws

For some, personality is the first thing to emerge when brainstorming a new character. Maybe she has an amazing sense of humor, loves to learn, and is the most unmaterialistic person you might meet. But along with these qualities, she’s incredibly temperamental, going from hot to cold in a flash and taking offense when none was meant. Do some digging to uncover the why behind this flaw. What causes that reactiveness and hypersensitivity? Why is she so quick to see enemies where none exist? Identifying the situations that lead to this knee-jerk response will help you spot the emotions the character doesn’t want to feel, which will help you brainstorm the wounds that could be the cause of her emotional armor.

Fears

Fear is something most people are reluctant to experience, because while it can push us to strive harder for what we want, it also comes with a host of uncomfortable emotions. Clearly, your character will have a deep fear sitting at the heart of the defining wound that must be faced, but other fears and worries can also be markers of a wounding event. If you realize that your protagonist is afraid of water, why is this? If her heart rate picks up when her sister calls, delve into that response for more information. Fears don’t manifest by themselves, so search for their underlying reasons.

Secrets

One thing experience teaches us is that everyone keeps secrets. It’s second nature to hide the things that embarrass us, cause shame and guilt, or leave us feeling exposed and vulnerable. Ask yourself what your character is hiding. What information does she guard closely and would never want others to discover? This most likely touches on a shard of emotional trauma that she wishes to keep buried in the past.

Insecurities

Self-doubt is, to some degree, a problem for everyone. Worrying about not measuring up, making a mistake that impacts others, and disappointing loved ones can eat away at our self-worth. If your character is insecure about fitting in and being accepted, why is that? In which situations is she reluctant to make decisions or take risks? Thinking about her doubts and worries will create a starting point for brainstorming the negative experiences and influencers who left her feeling this way.

If you need more ideas on how to root around in your character’s history to find the defining wound, leaf through your Emotional Wound Thesaurus book, or browse the huge list of emotional wounds at our website, One Stop for Writers.

About The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma

Readers connect to characters with depth, ones who have experienced life’s ups and downs. To deliver key players that are both realistic and compelling, writers must know them intimately—not only who they are in the present story, but also what made them that way. Of all the formative experiences in a character’s past, none are more destructive than emotional wounds. The aftershocks of trauma can change who they are, alter what they believe, and sabotage their ability to achieve meaningful goals, all of which will affect the trajectory of your story.

Identifying the backstory wound is crucial to understanding how it will shape your character’s behavior, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus can help. Inside, you’ll find:

• A database of traumatic situations common to the human experience
• An in-depth study on a wound’s impact, including the fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviors that can arise from different painful events
• An extensive analysis of character arc and how the wound and any resulting unmet needs fit into it
• Techniques on how to show the past experience to readers in a way that is both engaging and revelatory while avoiding the pitfalls of info dumps and telling
• A showcase of popular characters and how their traumatic experiences reshaped them, leading to very specific story goals
• A Backstory Wound Profile tool that will enable you to document your characters’ negative past experiences and the aftereffects

Root your characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome it. With its easy-to-read format and over 100 entries packed with information, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a crash course in psychology for creating characters that feel incredibly real to readers.

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

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There are two definitions of story beat. Both of them refer to a change.

One use of the term beat refers to the subtle change in the dynamic of a relationship that a line of dialogue brings about in a scene. There are usually several beats within a scene, each a marker for pushing the scene forwards dramatically.

The other meaning of the word beat in storytelling applies to changes in the plot brought about by scenes. A plot is a succession of events linked causally, a narrative chain of cause and effect. One event effects a change, determining what happens in subsequent scenes. Writers might arrange these events on a board or “beat sheet” during the planning phase. 

One of the most popular exponents of planning a plot according to beats was Blake Snyder. In his how-to book Save The Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need, he presents fifteen scenes a Hollywood movie requires, starting with the Opening Image and ending with the Final Image. During story development, these scenes are arranged on a board containing exactly 40 index cards divided into four segments. The other 25 scenes connect the fifteen important ones.

While the emphasis in Save The Cat! is on commercial or popular storytelling á la Hollywood blockbusters, there are many aspects of Snyder’s approach that encourage the author to think about the audience’ emotional reaction to scenes. The Save The Cat moment of the title, for example, is a key scene placed early in narratives in which heroes do something selfless, such as rescuing a feline, thus establishing a core of goodness in their character so that the audience cares about them and will root for them when they later face dangers.

To read more of Beemgee’s writing craft articles click here

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

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One way to think about plot is as a “push-pull between protagonist and antagonist.” Although the protagonist is the character who frames and, indeed, decides the story’s structure, the role of the antagonist in story structure is equally important.

Last week, I shared an overview of the antagonist’s role in the first five major structural beats within a story. I originally intended it to be one post, but it turned out to be nearly twice as long as usual, so I split it in two. Today, we’ll be rounding out the subject by examining the role of the antagonist in the second half of a story’s structure—the Second Pinch Point through the Resolution.

Once again, it is important to remember the distinction between the antagonistic force that impacts storyform in a general sense and the antagonist who is a specific character representing this force within the story.

1. The antagonistic force will function in fixed (and therefore relatively universal) ways within story structure, in order to evoke the most resonant responses from the protagonist.

2. The antagonist, as a human character, however, will be much more dynamic and even unpredictable within the story. What I’ve shared in this series is focused more on the antagonistic force’s impact upon the structure, and is therefore very general. Within your specific story, the antagonist as a character may function in ways much more nuanced than what is presented here.

The Antagonist’s Role in the Second Half of a Story’s Structure

6. The Role of the Antagonist in the Second Pinch Point

For the protagonist, the Second Pinch Point mirrors the First Pinch Point in emphasizing the stakes and the potential threat of the antagonist. Specifically, it will foreshadow the “Low Moment” of the Third Plot Point to follow. Whatever the antagonist threatens here will be significantly endangered or destroyed later in the Third Plot Point. However, the very threat itself is what prompts the protagonist into the (possibly hubristic) gambit of the False Victory that precedes the Low Moment.

For the antagonist, the Second Pinch Point also mirrors the First Pinch Point in representing a moment of significant aggression (to whatever degree) against the protagonist. Here, the antagonist flexes his muscles, acting from his place of strength after the Midpoint. His strength is real, but because he has not gained any new insights (either practically or thematically), his ability to adapt to the forward momentum of the plot is beginning to stall out. In short, the protagonist is evolving faster than the antagonist—and this will be the deciding factor in the end.

Antagonist’s Role in the Second Pinch Point: The antagonist will initiate the events of the Second Pinch Point based on his advancements at the Midpoint. From his perspective, what he enacts here may seem like the beginning of the endgame. He may push back at the protagonist in the belief that one more shove will be enough to topple his foe and remove the protagonist as an obstacle. However, he will likely overestimate his own position and underestimate the protagonist’s. As a result, he may not even fully realize that the effort he expends here does not have its desired effect. The protagonist may seem to retreat, but unbeknownst to the antagonist, this retreat is only so the protagonist can gather her forces for what the protagonist deems as the beginning of the endgame.

7. The Role of the Antagonist in the Third Plot Point

At the Third Plot Point, everything changes for both characters. The protagonist initiates this major beat with a calculated pushback against the antagonist (or, alternatively, toward the protagonist’s own plot goal). In many ways, the protagonist’s gambit will succeed. She will use what she has learned in the previous beats to overcome the obstacles that once stymied her. She may well strike a significant and damaging blow against the antagonist. But because of her own ongoing and incomplete inner conflict between Lie and Truth, she will also pay a huge price for this attack. For the protagonist, the two sides of the Third Plot Point can be termed False Victory and Low Moment.

For the antagonist, this beat is similarly complicated. On the one hand, the protagonist just hit him where it hurts. Prior to this, the antagonist believed himself in a good position from which to triumph. Now, his weaknesses and blind spots have been exposed. But on the other hand, as we’ve already seen, this was a Pyrrhic victory for the protagonist—meaning the antagonist may still be able to win, if only by default. Both parties will retreat to lick their wounds. From here on, a final confrontation is not only necessary but inevitable. Their next meeting will decide who will reach their ultimate plot goals and who will not.

The Role of the Antagonist in the Third Plot Point: The antagonist will be consolidating his own resources and preparing for a major pushback against the protagonist as well. He may receive the protagonist’s efforts with some sort of ambush, which turns the tables on the protagonist at the last minute. The antagonist will not be defeated here and may even gain some significant ground in the overall conflict. However, for the antagonist too, the Third Plot Point will usually represent a comparatively desperate moment. Time is running out; both parties will recognize that the conflict will soon have to be decided. Although the antagonist may well still hold at least a slight advantage over the protagonist, the playing field will have leveled some since the beginning of the conflict. Even if the antagonist’s goal is within reach, he is still likely to be feeling the tremendous pressure of the stakes.

8. The Role of the Antagonist in the Climax

The Climax properly begins halfway through the Third Act and will ramp up to varying degrees until the Climactic Moment at the end of the entire story. This turning point is what moves the protagonist and antagonist out of their respective reactions to the Third Plot Point and into their final confrontation.

This confrontation may be directly between these two characters and may even be the entire point of the story. One character will defeat the other. This defeat is either the goal of the story or the single remaining obstacle to enabling the goal.

However, the “confrontation” may also be indirect or even incidental. It’s possible the protagonist’s final pursuit of her goal may not require that she directly move against or overcome the antagonist; rather, just in doing whatever she must to triumph in her own goal, she may incidentally defeat the antagonistic force. The latter is particularly likely in stories that focus on inner or relational conflict.

The Antagonist’s Role in the Climax: At this point in the story, it is more important than ever to keep in mind that the antagonist is a character with personal desires and goals of his own. Although his primary goal at this point may indeed be to destroy the protagonist, he must still be pursuing that end for a reason—and now that the conflict has reached its final deciding stroke, that reason will be more important to the antagonist than ever. What he has been working toward throughout the story is about to be decided in a definitive way. Even if the stakes seemed higher for the protagonist throughout most of the story, now the playing field has been leveled. The antagonist has every bit as much at stake as does the protagonist.

9. The Role of the Antagonist in the Climactic Moment

The Climactic Moment ends the Climax—and the plot conflict. It is the moment that decides who “wins” and who “loses.” In a positive story, the winner is almost always the protagonist. However, the concept of “defeating” the antagonistic force should be understood in the context of the obstacles having been removed from between the protagonist and her ultimate plot goal. This is what brings the conflict to an end. (Thus, it is not so much that there is no conflict without an antagonist, but more so that there is no antagonist without the need for conflict.)

In a story in which the predominate aspect of the antagonistic force is found within the protagonist, the external antagonist’s ultimate positioning within the finale will not be as important. For instance, returning to last week’s example of a story about competitors, the protagonist’s victory may be moral than literal. Even if it is a literal victory within the competition, the emphasis will be less on the protagonist’s having overcome at the antagonist’s expense and more on the protagonist’s own inner transformation into strength.

In fact, in some stories the conflict will end with the protagonist and antagonist resolving their differences and perhaps even mutually claiming the plot goal.

The Antagonist’s Role in the Climactic Moment: The Climactic Moment functions similarly for both characters. It is the beat in which the conflict ends. The relationship of both protagonist and antagonist to their plot goals will be definitively decided, via their actions, in some way. There will be no forward progression toward this particular goal any longer.

10. The Role of the Antagonist in the Resolution

The Resolution is the beat after the Climactic Moment. In most stories, it will be given at least a scene, maybe more. In other stories, it is literally nothing more than a beat. It is the closing note in the story, the “fade out.” Functionally, it exists to provide closure to the cause and effect of the entire story and the Climactic Moment in particular. It shows the reactions of the protagonist and antagonist to what just happened.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

The Antagonist’s Role in the Resolution: In many stories, the antagonist will not be present for the Resolution. Either he will have been functionally eliminated from the story world (killed off, banished, etc.), or he will have become irrelevant to the protagonist now that he is no longer an obstacle. In other stories, particularly those in which the antagonist is an important relationship character, the Resolution may offer a conciliation between the characters. This may range from a full-on partnership agreement between them to merely a shaking of hands and a nod of respect before they go their separate ways. It is also possible that one party (probably the protagonist if she’s following Positive-Change Arc) may be willing to reconcile but the other is not and simply walks away, effectively banishing himself.

***

Too often, we synonymize “antagonist” with “bad guy.” From a structural perspective, the antagonist is merely a force opposing the protagonist’s forward progress and therefore prompting the protagonist’s growth. Understood in this way, the role of the antagonist in structure can be strengthened to create a more rounded and convincing story at every beat.

Related Posts:

• The Role of the Antagonist in Story Structure, Pt. 1

I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.

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Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more.

BY MARIA POPOVA

Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient — and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life.

Perhaps because the life of a garden is also a vivid reminder that anything of beauty and radiance takes time, takes care, takes devotion to seed and sprout and bloom, gardens have long been living cathedrals for the creative spirit.

Here, drawn from a lifetime of marginalia on great writers’ and artists’ letters and diaries, essays and novels, is a florilegium of my favorite exultations in the rewards and nourishments of gardens.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

In the spring of 1939, looking back on her life, Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) recounted her earliest memory — red and purple anemones printed on her mother’s black dress — and her most vivid childhood memory, also of a flower, in the garden by the large white house on the Celtic Sea coast where she grew up:

I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later.

And indeed it was — a lifetime later, she rooted her epiphany about what it means to be an artist in the metaphor inside the memory. And then, in the last autumn of her life, she wrote in her diary:

All writers are unhappy. The picture of the world in books is thus too dark. The wordless are the happy: women in cottage gardens.

This was less a lament than a life-tested truth, for Woolf had found the most reliable salve for her own battle with the darkness in a cottage garden.

At the end of WWI, as the Spanish Flu pandemic was sweeping the world, Virginia and Leonard Woolf knew they had to leave London — their landlord had given them notice a year earlier. They went to the country, went to an auction, and purchased, for £700, Monk House — a sixteenth-century clapboard cottage without running water or electricity, but with a splendid acre of living land. Its story and its centrality to Woolf’s life and art comes alive in Virginia Woolf’s Garden (public library) by Caroline Zoob, who lived at Monk House and tended to its lush grounds for a decade.

At first, Virginia Woolf approached gardening the way one approaches any new creative endeavor: with passionate curiosity and quavery confidence. She wanted to grow her own food, but was unsure what would thrive or how to tend to it; she wanted flowers, but was unsure what would bloom or how to start the seeds, so she planted some in soap boxes filled with soil, then wrote to a friend asking if this was the way. Within a couple of years, much thanks to Leonard’s increasingly ardent devotion to the garden, she was eating pears for breakfast and reporting that “every flower that grows booms here.”

At the peak of her first spring at Monk House, having worked in the garden past sunset on the unusually chilly last day of May, Virginia exulted in her diary:

The first pure joy of the garden… weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.

Over the next few years, the garden became her great joy and solace; for Leonard, it became a life’s work and his great creative achievement. Just before the December holidays of 1925, during that most contemplative of seasons, she wrote in her diary:

I’ve had two very happy times in my life — childhood… and now. Now I have all I want. My garden — my dog.

For nine years at Monk House, she had been using the unheated garden toolshed as a writing studio. In 1928, the surprising success of Orlando — the art she made of her love for Vita Sackville-West, which Vita’s son later called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” — rendered Virginia and Leonard solvent for the first time in their shared life. Now, with a half-disbelieving eye to a proper room of her own, she exulted in finally having “money to build it, money to furnish it.”

And build it she did, overlooking the garden, which she came to regard as nothing less than “a miracle.” She gazed out at the “vast white lilies, and such a blaze of dahlias” that, even on cold grey English days, “one feels lit up.”

After a particularly debilitating spell of her lifelong depression began lifting, she found her “defiance of death in the garden,” declaring in the diary: “I will signalise my return to life — that is writing — by beginning a new book.”

But it seems to me that it was only after a guided tour of Shakespeare’s house one May day in her early fifties that Virginia Woolf, in recognizing the role of the garden in his creative life, fully allowed herself to recognize its role in her own.

Marveling at the mulberry tree outside Shakespeare’s window and the “cushions of blue, yellow, white flowers in the garden,” she wrote in her diary:

All the flowers were out in Shakespeare’s garden. “That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest,” said the man… I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat and walked; but you won’t find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down… To think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind.

I find it not coincidental that Shakespeare haunts the conclusion of her exquisite reflection on the childhood memory of the flower-bed that revealed to her the meaning of art and the meaning of life, inspiring her most direct formulation of a personal philosophy:

It is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

EMILY DICKINSON

“If we love Flowers, are we not ‘born again’ every Day,” Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) wrote to a friend just before her springtime death at fifty-five. When her coffin was carried across the field of buttercups to the nearby cemetery, as she had requested, most of the townspeople awaiting it knew the enigmatic woman with the auburn hair as a gardener rather than a poet. Her first formal act of composition as a girl had been not a poem but an herbarium, and only four of her nearly two thousand surviving poems had been published in her lifetime, all sidewise to her overt consent. Susan — the great love of Emily’s life, to whom she had written her electric love letters and dedicated most of her poems — listed her “Love of flowers” as the foremost attribute of the poet who often signed herself as “Daisy.”

But make no mistake — the garden was the true laboratory for Emily Dickinson’s art, and in that art flowers figured as her richest symbolic language. She might have written her poems on the seventeen and a half square inches of her cherrywood writing desk upstairs in the sunlit bedroom facing West, but all creative work comes abloom first in the mind — the rest is mere transcription — and her mind was most sunlit among her flowers. It was there, too, that she beamed her penetrating intellect at the invisible interleaving of the universe and came to see, a year before Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology, how every single flower is a microcosm of complex ecological relationships between numerous organisms and their environment.

Emily Dickinson captured this understanding in a spare, stunning 1865 poem, in which the flower emerges not as the pretty object of admiration to which the conventions of Victorian poetry had confined it but as a ravishing system of aliveness — a silent symphony of interconnected resilience, which the flower-loving one-woman orchestra Joan As Police Woman set to song for the opening installment in the animated season of The Universe in Verse, with art by Ohara Hale based on Emily Dickinson’s herbarium and lettering by Debbie Millman based on Emily Dickinson’s handwriting:

BLOOM
by Emily Dickinson

Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance
Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian —
To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm —
Obtain its right of Dew —
Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind —
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day —
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility —

DEBBIE MILLMAN

A century after Virginia and Leonard Woolf started their Monk House garden amid the Spanish Flu pandemic, Debbie Millman — my longtime former partner and now darling friend — and her wife Roxane undertook a kindred act of resistance to despair as the deadliest pandemic of our own century was furling humanity into fetal position. Watching their small garden grow into a blooming emblem of aliveness, Debbie composed an illustrated love letter to its unexpected gifts, to the way it bridged the seasonal and the cosmic, the transient and the eternal, to its blooming, buzzing affirmation of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetic-existential observation that “wherever life can grow… it will sprout out, and do the best it can.”

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F864172597&show_artwork=true&maxheight=1000&maxwidth=680

ROSS GAY

In The Book of Delights (public library), poet and gardener Ross Gay records his splendid yearlong experiment in willful gladness, conducted between his forty-second birthday and his forty-third, amid a world so readily given — and not without reason — to despair.

Looking back on the record of his experiment, he observes:

Patterns and themes and concerns show up… My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.

The garden indeed proves to be his readiest source of daily delight — a living reminder that spontaneity, unpredictability, and the occasional gladsome interruption of our habitual consciousness are essential components of delight. In an early-August entry titled “Inefficiency,” he writes:

I don’t know if it’s the time I’ve spent in the garden (spent an interesting word), which is somehow an exercise in supreme attentiveness — staring into the oregano blooms wending through the lowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves of the rhubarb — and also an exercise in supreme inattention, or distraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say, or intense fleeting attentions — did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.

This wildly delightful tone, fusing the miraculous and the mischievous, carries the book:

When people say they have a black thumb, meaning they can’t grow anything, I say yeah, me too, then talk about the abundant garden these black thumbs are growing.

Inevitably, Gay — like every gardener — arrives at the spiritual aspect of this earthliest and earthiest of the arts:

A lily was the first flower I planted in my garden, and I pray to it daily in the four to six weeks that it offers up its pinkish speckling by getting on my knees and pushing my face in, which, yes, is also a kind of kissing, as I tend to pucker my lips and close my eyes, and if you get close enough you’d probably hear some minute slurping between us, and for some reason I wish to deploy the verb drowning, which, in addition to being a cliché, implies a particular kind of death, and I will follow the current of that verb to suggest that the flower kissing, the moving so close to another living and breathing thing’s breath, which in this case is that of the lily I planted six years ago, will in fact kill you with delight, will annihilate you with delight, will end the life you had previously led before kneeling here and breathing the breathing thing’s breath, and the lily will resurrect you, too, your lips and nose lit with gold dust, your face and fingers smelling faintly all day of where they’ve been, amen.

DIANE ACKERMAN

It is hardly a surprise that Universe in Verse staple Diane Ackerman — poet laureate of the cosmos and the orchard, self-baptized “Earth ecstatic” — should devote an entire book to the ecstasies of kneeling at the brown altar of lowercase earth. In her 2002 gem Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden (public library), she writes:

I plan my garden as I wish I could plan my life, with islands of surprise, color, and scent. A seductive aspect of gardening is how many rituals it requires… By definition, the gardener’s errands can never be finished, and its time-keeping reminds us of an order older and one more complete than our own. For the worldwide regiment of gardeners, reveille sounds in spring, and rom then on it’s full parade march, pomp and circumstance, and ritualized tending until winter. But even then there’s much to admire and learn about in the garden.

Considering the existential universals that pulsate beneath the particulars of any category of creative expression, she adds:

Gardeners have unique preferences, which tend to reflect dramas in their personal lives, but they all share a love of natural beauty and a passion to create order, however briefly, from chaos. The garden becomes a frame or their vision of life… Nurturing, decisive, interfering, cajoling, gardeners are extreme optimists who trust the ways of nature and believe passionately in the idea of improvement. As the gnarled, twisted branches of apple trees have taught them, beauty can spring in the most unlikely places. Patience, hard work, and a clever plan usually lead to success: private worlds of color, scent, and astonishing beauty. Small wonder a gardener plans her garden as she wishes she could plan her life.

ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

The preeminent bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer has devoted her life and her lyrical prose to contemplating our relationship with the rest of nature. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (public library), she bridges her scientific training with her Native heritage to explore “the equations of reciprocity and responsibility, the whys and wherefores of building sustainable relationships with ecosystems” — questions rendered most intimate and alive in the garden.

In a splendid antidote to the four-century delusion of dualism Descartes cast upon us, Kimmerer writes:

A garden is a way that the land says, “I love you.” … Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking.

Half a century after the protagonist of Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia exclaimed while lying on his back in his grandmother’s garden that to find happiness is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” Kimmerer reflects:

It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.

I was hunting among the spiraling vines that envelop my teepees of pole beans, lifting the dark-green leaves to find handfuls of pods, long and green, firm and furred with tender fuzz. I snapped them off where they hung in slender twosomes, bit into one, and tasted nothing but August, distilled into pure, crisp beaniness… By the time I finished searching through just one trellis, my basket was full. To go and empty it in the kitchen, I stepped between heavy squash vines and around tomato plants fallen under the weight of their fruit. They sprawled at the feet of the sunflowers, whose heads bowed with the weight of maturing seeds.

As she ambles past the potato patch her daughters had left off harvesting that morning, Kimmerer considers the parallels between parenting and gardening in what it means to care for, to steward, to love — whether the particular piece of nature that is every child and every living thing, or the totality of nature. Drawing on the ways she shows her daughters love — making them maple syrup in March, bringing them wild strawberries in June, watching the meteor showers together in August — she finds a mirror-image in the way nature loves us:

How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.

Maybe it was the smell of ripe tomatoes, or the oriole singing, or that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon and the beans hanging thick around me. It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud, startling the chickadees who were picking at the sunflowers, raining black and white hulls on the ground. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do.

I am reminded here of how the English language, unlike my native Bulgarian, pays homage to this parallel between parenting and planting in its lexicon: nursery is the word for both the place where we nurture our young as they start their lives and the place where we start our gardens. Kimmerer captures this parent-like responsibility to the life of the land, to the mutuality of care:

In a garden, food arises from partnership. If I don’t pick rocks and pull weeds, I’m not fulfilling my end of the bargain. I can do these things with my handy opposable thumb and capacity to use tools, to shovel manure. But I can no more create a tomato or embroider a trellis in beans than I can turn lead into gold. That is the plants’ responsibility and their gift: animating the inanimate. Now there is a gift.

People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate — once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.

MICHAEL POLLAN

In The Botany of Desire (public library) — the modern classic that gave us the radical roots of the flying-witch legend and the story of how a virus created the most prized flower of the Renaissance — Michael Pollan considers the enchantment of gardening as a sort of devotional practice: a worshipful remembrance of our creaturely belonging.

In a passage evocative of Denise Levertov’s poetic indictment that “we call it ‘Nature’; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be ‘Nature’ too,” he writes:

The garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena — at once as common as any room and as special as a church — where we can go not just to witness but to enact in a ritual way our abiding ties to the natural world. Abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. But in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols. So we eat from the vegetable patch, and, if we’re paying attention, we’re recalled to our dependence on the sun and the rain and the everyday leaf-by-leaf alchemy we call photosynthesis. Likewise, the poultice of comfrey leaves that lifts a wasp’s sting from our skin returns us to a quasi-magic world of healing plants from which modern medicine would cast us out.

Half a century after Rachel Carson observed that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” because our own origins are of the earth, he adds:

Such sacraments are so benign that few of us have any trouble embracing them, even if they do sound a faintly pagan note. I’d guess that’s because we’re generally willing to be reminded that our bodies, at least, remain linked in such ways to the world of plants and animals, to nature’s cycles.

REBECCA SOLNIT

“If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it,” Rebecca Solnit writes in Orwell’s Roses (public library) — the unsynthesizably wonderful story of the rose garden the thirty-three-year-old George Orwell planted at the small sixteenth-century cottage his suffragist aunt had secured for him as he contemplated enlisting in the Spanish Civil War.

Solnit observes that the garden, paradoxically, both feeds and counterbalances the art that is both her life’s work and Orwell’s:

A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.

[…]

To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.

In this place of paradoxes and pleasing tensions — control and chaos, transience and durability, planning and surprise — none is more pleasing than the garden’s dual reminder that we are insignificant particles in vast a cosmos of process and phenomena, and we are potent seeds of change, our littlest actions rippling out into the evolutionary unfolding of the whole. Solnit captures this with her signature pointed poetics:

To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.

DEREK JARMAN

In 1989, shortly after his HIV diagnosis and his father’s death, the English artist, filmmaker, and LGBT rights activist Derek Jarman (January 31, 1942–February 19, 1994) left the bustling pretensions of London for a simple life on the shingled shores of Kent. He took up residence in a former Victorian fisherman’s hut between an old lighthouse and a nuclear power plant on the headland of Dungeness, a newly designated a conservation area. He named it Prospect Cottage, painted the front room a translucent Naples yellow, replaced the ramshackle door with blue velvet curtains, and set about making a garden around the gnarled century-old pear tree rising from the carpet of violets as the larks living in the shingles sang high above him in the grey-blue English sky.

At low tide, he collected some handsome sea-rounded flints washed up after a storm, staked them upright in the garden “like dragon teeth,” and encircled each with twelve small beach pebbles. These rudimentary sundials became his flower beds, into which he planted a wondrous miniature wilderness of species not even half of which I, a growing gardener, have encountered — saxifrage, calendula, rue, camomile, shirley poppy, santolina, nasturtium, dianthus, purple iris, hare-bell, and his favorite: sea kale. (A gorgeous plant new to me, which I immediately researched, procured, and planted in my Brooklyn garden.)

As the seasons turned and his flowers rose and the AIDS plague felled his friends one by one, Jarman mourned loss after loss, then grounded himself again and again in the irrepressible life of soil and sprout and bud and bloom. The garden, which his Victorian ancestors saw as a source of moral lessons, became his sanctuary of “extraordinary peacefulness” amid the deepest existential perturbations of death, his canvas for creation amid all the destruction. On the windblown shore, living with a deadly disease while his friends — his kind, our kind — are dying of it in a world too indifferent to human suffering, gardening became his act of resistance as he set out to build an alternative garden of Eden:

Before I finish I intend to celebrate our corner of Paradise, the part of the garden the Lord forgot to mention.

The record of this healing creative adventure became Jarman’s Modern Nature (public library) — part memoir and part memorial, a reckoning and a redemption, a homecoming to his first great love: gardening. What emerges from the short near-daily entries is a kind of hybrid between Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, Rilke’s Book of Hours, and Thoreau’s philosophical nature journals.

On the last day of February, after planting lavender in a circle of stones he collected from the beach under the clear blue sky, he writes:

Apart from the nagging past — film, sex and London — I have never been happier than last week. I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Plated lavender and clumps of red hot poker.

In the first week of March, Jarman arrives at what may be the greatest reward of gardening:

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.

Read more of Jarman’s gardening journals here.

OLIVIA LAING

Derek Jarman is one of the animating spirits of Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (public library) by Olivia Laing — that marvelous tessellated meditation on art, activism, and our search for meaning, drawing on the lives of artists whose vision has changed the way we see the world, ourselves, and each other.

In the essay on Jarman, titled “Paradise,” she twines the questions of whether gardening is a form of art and whether art is a form of resistance — a necessary tool for building the Garden of Eden we imagine a flourishing society to be:

Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere.

[…]

Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.

Read more here.

OLIVER SACKS

A century and a half after Walt Whitman extolled the healing powers of nature after his paralytic stroke, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) gave empirical substantiation to these unparalleled powers.

In a lovely short essay titled “Why We Need Gardens,” found in the posthumous collection Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales (public library), he writes:

As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

Having lived and worked in New York City for half a century — a city “sometimes made bearable… only by its gardens” — Sacks recounts witnessing nature’s tonic effects on his neurologically impaired patients: A man with Tourette’s syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, who can’t recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed. Sacks reflects:

I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication… The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

BRONSON ALCOTT

“I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy,” Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary just after she turned eleven, a quarter century before Little Women bloomed from that uncommon mind — a mind whose pleasures and powers were nurtured by the profound love of nature her father wove into the philosophical and scientific education he gave his four daughters.

The progressive philosopher, abolitionist, education reformer, and women’s rights advocate Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799–March 4, 1888) developed his ideas about human flourishing and social harmony by observing and reflecting on the processes, phenomena, and pleasures of the natural world — something he shared with the Transcendentalists of his generation, and particularly with his best friend: the naturalistic transcendence-shaman Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1856, while living next door to the visionary Elizabeth Peabody in Boston — the seedbed of Transcendentalism, a term Peabody herself had coined — Alcott borrowed and devoured Emerson’s copy of a book sent to him by an obscure young Brooklyn poet as a token of gratitude for having inspired it: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published months earlier.

Whitman’s unexampled verse — so free from the Puritanical conventions of poetry, so lush with a love of life, so unabashedly reverent of nature as the only divinity — stirred a deep resonance with Bronson’s own worldview and inspired him to try his hand at the portable poetics of nature: gardening. Right there in the middle of bustling Boston, where his young country was just beginning to find its intellectual and artistic voice, Alcott set up his humble urban garden. One May morning — a century and a half before bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplated gardening and the secret of happiness, before Olivia Laing wrote of gardening as an act of resistance, before neurologist Oliver Sacks drew on forty years of medical practice to attest to the healing power of gardens — the fifty-six-year-old Alcott planted some peas, corn, cucumbers, and melons, then wrote in his journal:

Human life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife and children, a friend or two of either sex, conversation, neighbours, and a task life-long given from within — these are contentment and a great estate. On these gifts follow all others, all graces dance attendance, all beauties, beatitudes, mortals can desire and know.

By mid-summer, Alcott had discovered in his garden not only a creaturely gladness but a portal into the deepest existential contentment — something akin to the creative intoxication that he, like all artists, found in his literary calling:

My garden has been my pleasure, and a daily recreation since the spring opened for planting… Every plant one tends he falls in love with, and gets the glad response for all his attentions and pains. Books, persons even, are for the time set aside — studies and the pen. — Only persons of perennial genius attract or recreate as the plants, and of books we may say the same, as of the magic of solitude.

JAMAICA KINCAID

A chief gladness of gardening comes from its dual nature, from how it salves our longing for making order out of chaos but also frustrates it. There is elemental satisfaction in the reminder that we can never fully control nature — that, in fact, any sense of control is a childish fantasy, for we ourselves are children of nature, made by the selfsame forces and phenomena we play at bridling.

That is what the writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid celebrates in My Garden (Book) (public library) — a fractal delight I discovered via Ross Gay, who devotes to it a midsummer entry in his yearlong journal of daily delights. (All delight is fractal.)

Writing in the first year of the twenty-first century, in a passage evocative of the poetic physicist Richard Feynman’s insistence that “nature has the greatest imagination of all,” Kincaid reflects:

How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary.

What to do? becomes the recurring incantation of the garden’s imagination. Puzzled by why her Wisteria floribunda is blooming out of season and reason, in late July rather than in May, Kincaid wonders:

What to do with the wisteria? should I let it go, blooming and blooming, each new bud looking authoritative but also not quite right at all, as if on a dare, a surprise even to itself, looking as if its out-of-seasonness was a modest, tentative query?

[…]

My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only series of doubts upon series of doubts.

This, of course, is the definition of the scientific method — the vector of revelation as a series of doubts and tentative queries continually tested against reality. But there is also a spiritual dimension to Kincaid’s questioning refrain, to the longing for an answer from an external entity with higher powers of omniscience — this, of course, is the definition of religion. In her gasping wonderment, she arrives at something beyond reason and beyond belief — the single animating force beneath all science and all spirituality:

What to do? Whom should I ask what to do? Is there a person to whom I could ask such a question and would that person have an answer that would make sense to me in a rational way (in the way even I have come to accept things as rational), and would that person be able to make the rational way imbued with awe and not so much with the practical; I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living.