Freewrite of the Week: Party Lines and Party Fouls

Everyday eavesdropping, ca. 1957

by Jacqueline Fauni

Still looking for a story gold mine? Try a crazy convention from a golden era!

In PILLOW TALK, arguably the best of the Hudson/Day movies, Rock and Doris demonstrated the hilarity that can ensue from an arrangement we’d probably find peculiar today, but was actually a commonplace reality in the 50s. The arrangement I’m referring to, of course, is that of the party line.

Back in the day, telephone subscribers in different households would share a line, and were consequently subjected to the pitfalls that came with sharing that line. If one co-subscriber wanted to make a call, she would have to pray that the other wasn’t tying up the line with one of his many flavors of the week. And if one co-subscriber was on the phone, the other could very easily pick up the phone and listen in on (and even participate in) their co-subscriber’s conversation. Imagine the infinite possibilities -- the frustration, the intrigue, the calamity, the comedy, the party fouls -- that resulted from such a simple device!

The prompt: Write a scene in which two of your characters have to share a party line.

Let the eavesdropping, gossip, and other delightful shenanigans commence!

Announcing the Winners of The Writers Junction First Page Contest!

We read so many amazing entries, and are very excited to present the winners of our First Page Contest!

To view the winners, please visit our contest website, 

http://tinyurl.com/junctionpage

and click on the "Winners" tab.

Special thanks to Scrivener, and to our guest judges:

Jillian Lauren, author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel Pretty

Michael Miner, screenwriter of the original ROBOCOP

A hearty congratulations to our winners, and many thanks to all who entered our very first writing contest!

Cheers,

The Junction

Filling “The Casual Vacancy”: A Harry Potter Generation Reader Anticipates J.K. Rowling’s New Novel for Adults

by Jacqueline Fauni

For those of us chomping at the bit as we near the highly anticipated release of J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, Ian Parker’s profile of Rowling in The New Yorker may provide some desperately needed fodder until the novel hits bookstores on September 27th. Parker writes at length about the trials and triumphs Rowling faced before and after the conception of the boy wizard on that fateful train ride from Manchester to London in 1990, and intersperses an account of her life with tidbits about her upcoming novel--the premise of which, incidentally, also came to her while in transit (except on a plane).

The Casual Vacancy has been advertised as a black comedy about a small, seemingly idyllic English town called Pagford that erupts into war over who gets to fill the empty seat left by a recently and unexpectedly deceased councilman named Barry Fairbrother. Though the premise is obviously very different from that of the Harry Potter series, Rowling acknowledges a “through-line” in the themes of “mortality, morality... the two things that [she] obsess[es] about.” Parker notes that Barry holds “the same virtues, in his world, that Harry had in his: tolerance, constancy, a willingness to act.” Perhaps, then, as we witness the corruption in Pagford's local election, we may be reminded of Harry’s conflict with the wavering and blinded-by-politics Ministry of Magic.

Parker also notes that many of the key characters in The Casual Vacancy are in their mid-teens, and that “the novel seems most comfortable when it’s with them.” The teenagers in Pagford, however, deal with much more explicit and intensely dark issues than Harry Potter and his classmates did at Hogwarts, including heroin addiction, sexuality, and abuse. Gone are the vague references to Ron Weasley’s unmentionably rude hand gestures and utterances of oaths--those are apparently replaced in The Casual Vacancy by more graphic images and phrases, such as “a used condom glistening in the grass” and “with an ache in his heart and his balls.” Those key distinctions aside, perhaps it’s not too surprising that the coming-of-age-amidst-war dynamic figures prominently in Rowling’s new novel, as the plight of the angst-ridden teen is one that Rowling speaks to most compellingly as well as personally, having struggled through particularly unhappy teen years after her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

One point in Parker’s profile that especially resonated with me was Rowling’s recollection of a girl she met in a shop who told her, “You were my childhood.” As a bookworm whose middle-grade through young adult years were mostly shaped by the Harry Potter books, I grew up right alongside Harry and his friends, and learned important lessons about love, friendship, and courage along with them. After I read the very last page of The Deathly Hallows, I felt a void I’m sure was felt by my fellow Potter fans worldwide--a void that cannot be fed by anything like the series we had just finished, because there can be nothing that compares to the wonder and the once-in-a-lifetime experience that they were. And even though The Casual Vacancy is written by the very same, wonderful woman who gave us the Potter series, it is probably a misguided hope to expect it to fill “the casual vacancy” left by the end of the Harry Potter books.

Rowling’s new story promises to be a wildly different animal--which is not necessarily a bad thing, or a reason to readily dismiss it. I will always treasure (and revisit, time and again) the magic of Harry Potter's world, and do acknowledge and appreciate the remarkably mature elements in his story, but I am curious about this story Rowling has to tell exclusively to adults, especially now that I am an adult. While I’m sure J.K. Rowling did not time the release of her books to fit my timeline of personal development, it is a happy coincidence that it has turned out so, and I look forward to the continuation of that coincidence and to the opportunity presented by this new chapter in her life as an author, and perhaps a new chapter in my life as a reader.

And I will try my best to follow along without making (too many) Harry Potter comparisons.

Freewrite of the Week: Missed Connections

by Jacqueline Fauni

Ever read through the missed connections on Craigslist? It’s fascinating to read the (sometimes very creepy) messages that people are compelled to release into the interwebs after a random encounter with that special stranger at the supermarket/coffee shop/intersection/[insert typical or extremely bizarre place to meet somebody here]. It can be especially fascinating to writers because lots of questions abound that can inspire how you answer similar questions regarding your own stories -- who are these people (characters), what did they say to each other (dialogue), what happens next (plot), why should we care (theme)? When you’re feeling blocked, the missed connections section can be a gold mine for hours of procrastination story ideas.

Missed connections function as a central element in several movies -- Serendipity, August Rush, Sleepless in Seattle, and Before Sunrise (ditto Before Sunset, and perhaps Before Midnight), to name a few. An Affair to Remember is a classic example (and, in my humble opinion, the most romantic of all time), and is in fact the film that inspired this writing exercise! Take a page from the book (or screenplay) of those films’ screenwriters and see how your characters would interact in a missed connection story.

The prompt: If your protagonist wrote a missed connection to a special stranger, what would it say?

*Bonus exercises: Write the scenes in which (1) your protagonist first encounters that special stranger, and (2) they reunite (or not) (or freeze in anguish because all they could say was, “hello”).

Have fun, and happy writing!

Writers Blogging about Writers Talking about Writing #2

John McPhee

 

This guy, more commonly referred to as John McPhee, published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, in 1965, but The Paris Review didn't get around to interviewing him until 2010. Slackers (feel free to follow this characterization to all extremes of extrapolation).  Nevertheless, they did - fortunately - interview him and the whole thing went quite well. 

Among other things, McPhee discusses his history with The New Yorker, recurrent friendships with blind men, and a 60,000 word manuscript he read over the phone. Most significantly- a least for the sake of writers needing to blog about writers talking about writing - McPhee discusses the structure in his writing. Here he speaks specifically about working on Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), which covers confrontations between environmentalist David Brower and his ideological opposition:

...I read the notes and then I read them again... looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I’m looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code—it’s like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I’ll write UNY or something in the margin...[Encounters with the Archdruid] had thirty-six components. What I ended up with was thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with a code word...I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table.

McPhee then explains:

After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn’t ride the rapid. Why doesn’t he ride the rapid? His answer to Floyd Dominy is, “Because I’m chicken.” That’s a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. “Because I’m chicken”? This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t have to say. It’s told by the structure. It’s all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table.

What McPhee describes here is a fundamental creative process that, most of the time, isn't given much deliberate thought: the arrangement of somethings and nothings. This is largely intuitive and, admittedly, the sheer vastness of somethings and nothings that comprise even a couple of sentences means it's easier this way. The same goes for art (the arrangement of positive and negative space) and music (the arrangement of sounds and silences). The 'nothings' in writing, the absences of details and the gaps in time, serve not only to frame the 'somethings' but to generate meaning that, as McPhee says, "[is] all crackling along between those two things." The Japanese even have a word for this crackling - Ma. Ma is not exactly negative space, or the interval between two things. Rather, it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these things.

At the levels of sentences and paragraphs, we cannot be expected to attend to every something and nothing; however, on larger scales, it becomes more feasible to carefully and deliberately organize for powerful effect.

So, do as McPhee does. Try to draw out the ma in your work.

If you would like to read the interview in its entirety, just click here.

The Hook #5: An Analysis of a Favorite First Line

In what may or may not be our final post in anticipation of the close of our First Page Contest, we offer up to you a few words mined from the opening page of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

Chabon is known for sentences like these, a dog pile of clauses and colorful prose sorted in something long and textured and clean. These opening lines push us back a step at a time from the now-ish to Chabon's mysti-historical, 1930s Brooklyn. Chabon establishes a sense of distance, one that not only reinforces the fundamental structure of a novel of such scope, but that will also be iterated in the lives of the titular characters. He brings us to the beginning, when the escape artists still believed the audience was only one being fooled. 

Josef Kavalier, having escaped from Prague, arrives in New York City circa 1939, a refugee staying with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy  Klayman. Between Sammy's ambition and Joe's talent as an illustrator, the two create The Escapist, a wildly popular comic book featuring the exploits of an anti-fascist amalgam of Houdini, Captain America, and The Scarlett Pimpernel, among others. The story that follows spans nearly fifteen years, as the duo's success is met without proper recompense or recognition; as Sammy struggles with his sexual identity and Joe attempts to help his family flee Nazi-occupied Prague; as loves are built, broken, and puzzled back together. In a book of escapes, literal and metaphorical, spectacular and disastrous, Chabon promises, from the first sentence, something big and enthralling, something that we will be able to disappear into for a while.

The Hook #4: An Analysis of a Favorite Dedication

 by Jacqueline Fauni

We’re switching things up for today’s “Hook” post with Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner. The author’s first line,

“Here, I practice, and you practice,” 

is enough of a gold mine on its own, and I could easily go into raptures over how perfectly its parallelism and simplicity set the tone for Vaclav and Lena’s granted, intimate, just-us-two-in-the-world relationship. But for me, the real hook happened a little before I even read the first line--in the author’s dedication. In fact, I have never been so hooked by any first line I’ve ever read as I was by this:

Gavin, my partner in crime, my lovely assistant, 

my comrade, and the very best husband a girl could have, 

you are still my rising sun. 

You fill my life with wonder and joy and 

possibility every day. 

You were always on every page of this book, 

and now you’re part of the big, wild, gorgeous universe, too. 

I know you’re having fun out there, I can feel it. 

I love you.

Before we even get into the story, we are immediately swept away by Tanner’s unabashedly romantic, refreshingly earnest style, and are filled with the sense that we are about to witness something wonderful and profound. The graceful diction, lyrical movement, and overwhelming tenderness in Tanner’s dedication to her husband--who passed on after a six-year fight against cancer--pervade the light and whimsical, yet dark and intense love story that is Vaclav & Lena.

Vaclav & Lena is the story of two young Russian immigrants who met in an ESL class in Brooklyn at age six and have been incredibly close, destined-to-be-together-forever friends ever since. They go to Vaclav’s house every day after school and practice for their big magic show at Coney Island, proclaiming themselves to be Vaclav the Magnificent and his assistant, the Lovely Lena. Life for Vaclav and Lena seems as magical and pitch-perfect as their act, and Lena is drawn from her empty, unhappy home into the open arms of Vaclav’s warm, loud, and loving family. But everything changes the day Lena doesn’t show up for school and disappears from Vaclav’s life. His love endures, despite the probability that he’ll never see her again--but time, fate, and unyielding faith work their magic to prove how deeply connected Vaclav and Lena are, together and apart.

This sense of destiny, juxtaposed with whimsicality and a natural flow, carries over from Tanner’s dedication to small, poignant moments between Vaclav and Lena, like the first scene where Vaclav is practicing his introduction:

“Ladies and gentlemans, I give you, I present to you, I warn you in advance of his arrival, so that you may close your eyes or put your hands on your face if you are afraid, Vaclav the Magnificent, Boy-Magician.”

“Eh,” Lena says in a grumbly voice.

“Lena, what we are having here is perfect introduction to the act. It is long and perfect and made of only the best and longest thesaurus words,” says Vaclav.

Vaclav’s bright, garrulous personality is delightfully contrasted with Lena’s quiet brevity, and it is this effortless establishment of their voices and dynamic that lets us in to their own little world, and compels us to really care about them and invest ourselves in their fate.

* Moral of the day: Don’t skip over the dedication! You might miss a real gem. *