There Are Places I Remember (Kill Your Darlings 6)

Hello, Writerly Friends. Happy Poetry Friday!

Did you read Writer's Almanac this week? Garrison Keillor attributed the phrase "murder your darlings" to British author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. I always suspected Quiller-Couch was a Death Eater.

A sketch of Hogwarts Castle from
the Harry Potter Lexicon. Since we can't
have the Poetry Friday Party in a fictional
castle, let's head over to Katya's place,
Write. Sketch. Repeat.

We've been talking about the revision process, how hard it is to cut characters--and even full plot-lines--from a novel-in-progress.

What about setting? Can you imagine the Harry Potter books without Hogwarts? Gone with the Wind without Tara? Peter Rabbit without Mr. McGregor's garden?

Poor Peter has lost his blue jacket.

This week, I'm giving setting the Kill Your Darlings treatment.

If you dream about a house, some say, you are visiting the mansion of your soul. It's easy to become connected to place, because places hit all of our senses. Not just the Big Five: sight, sound smell, taste, and touch. In a setting, we also have thermoception (sense of heat and cold) and equilibrioception (sense of balance, or how we perceive gravity in a place).

Read more about senses beyond the Big Five here. (P.S. This won't be new information for those of you in the Sensory Processing world.)

All these senses working together, filling my brain and body with input -- this is why I love to travel. And it's why I love to visit settings -- or use a setting I'm very familiar with -- when I'm working on a book.

Settings can, however, become literary darlings.

When I began working on my middle grade novel-in-verse, my eldest had just finished fifth grade. During that last year at elementary school, I chaperoned a field trip to Mount Vernon, George Washington's home in Northern Virginia.

Mount Vernon circa 1800.

One thing I remembered about that day: the Washington mansion was filled with tour guides, but there was no one available to answer students' questions at the slave quarters.

The quarters were a sharp contrast to the Washington
mansion, with its giant feather beds.
From Travelblog.org.

This became a plot point in my novel. I sent my fifth grade characters to Mount Vernon. Like me, they were frustrated that they couldn't learn more about the slaves who labored at the Washingtons' plantation.

In the novel, when my characters returned from Mount Vernon, they did some research and learned about the Underground Railroad Experience Trail. This is a real, docent-led hike through the woods of Sandy Spring, Maryland. Experts believe the Quaker families in the area were part of the Underground Railroad network.

Near the end of my book, Miss Hill's fifth grade class planned and took a field trip to the trail, so they could learn more about the history of slavery.

I took my friend Michelle, my kids, her kids, and some extra kids to the trail one spring morning. (The guided hike is free, but you have to make a reservation).

A conductor at the Underground Railroad Experience Trail.

What an excellent program! I let the docent know about my novel. I wrote the experience trail into my book. The poem is in the voice of Norah Hassan, an immigrant from Jerusalem. I thought it was the perfect fit between character, setting, and plot.

Freedom Seeker: The Underground Railroad Experience Trail

By Norah Hassan

On the trail, we had a conductor who helped us escape.

The whole class followed her through a forest

where signs said, To be sold and let Three Slaves.

She called us Freedom Seekers.

My family came here for a better life,

even though we were not slaves.

We did not take much.

One bag of things from home for each person.

On the trail, trackers hid, hunting for slaves.

The conductor said, “You’d rather chance

going in those woods than staying at the plantation.”

I know what it’s like to give up my bed, my neighborhood.

When the conductor said people escaped

to keep their families together, I thought of Jaddi.

He is old. My mother says once he goes home,

he will not leave Jerusalem and visit us again.

On the trail, we pretended to follow the North Star,

moss growing on trees like a compass.

I was behind Katie, hopping across the stream,

pretending to hide our scent from dogs, when she fell.

I have never seen an arm break.

I have never seen the whiteness of bone.

Ashlie said, “That’s disgusting.”

She stepped over Katie as if she were a muddy stone.

Jason, Rennie and I helped Katie to the stream bank.

T. J. called 9-1-1 on his cell phone then found Miss Hill.

I thought, Slaves did not have 9-1-1.

Jason raised his hand and asked the conductor,

“If we really were escaping slaves,

would we have to leave Katie behind?”

I know what it means to leave someone behind.

I have been a freedom seeker.

However, when I overhauled the plot of my novel this summer, I realized both Mount Vernon and the Underground Railroad Experience Trail had to go.

Can I tell you how hard it was to cut a WHOLE SETTING, especially a cool one that people should know about, and where I did a boat load of research and took pages of notes?! It felt like murder most foul, my friends.

Can you imagine Hamlet set anywhere else but Elsinore Castle?
(Said to be based on Kronborg Castle in Denmark.)

This was killing a darling in its truest sense, because including the experience trail in the book had become my personal agenda. The book had different ideas. We were only momentarily at odds with one another, but the needs of the book won. They always do.

I leave you with a cover of the Beatles "In My Life." Have you ever had to cut a setting you loved from a novel? Tell us about it!

Pimp My Setting

I know what you're thinking... what's with the classroom seating chart? Boring.

Not so! Because it's not for a real classroom.

Writers do all kinds of crazy things to kick-start the imagination. I "pimped my setting" by making a seating chart for the fictional fifth grade class in my middle-grade novel-in-verse. The chart works like a map, but it also helped me think about which characters are sitting by friends, or crushes, or kids who annoy them. I love the concept of "Girl Island" -- a table with no boys! It's borrowed from my kids' elementary school. Still trying to work it into the novel.

I just got home from our regional SCBWI weekend retreat. This year, we were in quaint Lewes, Delaware. Couldn't enjoy the beach or cute little town much because of the deluge. But rainy days (and catered meals) are great for staying in and writing.

One of the writing tricks we used was borrowed from NaNoWriMo.  NaNo regions sometimes assign challenges -- e.g. Marylanders are challenged to include crabcakes somewhere in their projects.

At the retreat, we did hourly challenges. There were flip-flop and seashell shaped gourmet chocolates for the top challenge winners (not everyone participated).

Here's how it works and what makes it good for writing: Challenge #2 was "chocolate covered pretzels."

I was going to dump the pretzels into a scene in my YA suspense novel. The protag's boyfriend brings her jelly beans (my preference at 15 years old). Easy to swap for pretzels. But when the pretzels came in, they snapped me and my beans out of habitual thinking. Chocolate covered pretzels, hmm? My character really likes yogurt-covered pretzels (this was news to me). And her boyfriend didn't know, or care enough to notice the difference.

My friend Cyndee had the pretzel confections show up in a minor character's car. They were on the floor -- been there a while. That little moment tells me something about the character. Something Cyndee didn't know before.

So -- got any writers' tricks to share? How do you pimp your setting?

Writing Exercise: The Mansion of the Soul

This Week’s Writing Exercise (Recommended for Middle School through Adult) Does your house have character? Go online to find a character building worksheet like this one: http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun98/lazy2.htm Instead of filling it out for a person, complete the questionnaire for your setting. Some questions won’t work. Others may take a little ingenuity to answer. For instance: “Grandparents” -- How long has the house been in this family? “Habits” -- Does the house creak or leak? Does it get ants every summer? All useful information as you build a realistic setting, or even as you give your fictional house some personality.