Karen Sandler

Author: Karen Sandler

  • Give Every Scene a Purpose

    The other day, I gave a talk to a high school class about how I did the world-building for my SF book Tankborn. This was a creative writing class, and the students were very motivated to learn more about how I wrote Tankborn and about the writing business in general.

    During the talk, I brought up an essential fact about writing fiction: that although real life is full of the trivial and mundane, there’s no room for the unimportant in fiction.

    In real life, all sorts of things can happen. You try to start your car and your battery is dead. So maybe you’re late for work and get a chewing out. Or you happen to meet a friendly stranger at the supermarket and you chat for the few minutes you wait together in line. Or when you get home from the market, you discover you got regular coffee when you meant to get decaf. Or perhaps you spend days at your father’s care home (as I did earlier this year) as he’s dying.

    Could these things happen in your fiction story? Of course they could, whether you’re writing a realistic or speculative story. But here’s the big difference. All of those events, from the mundane (chatting up a stranger) to the life-changing (the death of your father) would have to have a purpose in your story. They should not, must not be there just to fill space on the page.

    For instance, the battery going dead might mean that your main character gets to work late and discovers a police cordon around her office building. Then she sees the bodies wheeled out, including that of the mass murderer who just killed her boss and several co-workers.

    That stranger your character chats with in line could be a harried single father in desperate need of a nanny. Perhaps your main character is in desperate need of a job and she agrees to watch the father’s three unruly kids. This would lead to true love and the taming of the kids (yes, I used to write romance novels).

    That accidentally purchased coffee could have scrawled across the bottom a message that leads the main character to a factory where the employees are victims of a human trafficker. If the character had grabbed the decaf instead of the regular, she might never have seen the message.

    So think about your own story. Does every scene count for something? Are your characters finding clues, are they revealing information, are you raising the stakes for them in ways that moves the plot forward? It’s pointless to have the heroine narrowly avoid being run over by a car (as nail-biting as that might be) unless the person driving the car (or the person who hired them to drive the car) is crucial to the plot. If she slips and falls down a cliff, she’d better find a secret cave or a dead body or a treasure chest. And if she doesn’t get herself out of that fix, the person who does rescue her had better be the love interest.

    If you’re sure every scene in your manuscript does have a purpose, let me up the ante. Find a way for at least some of those scenes to do double or triple duty. Have the scene reveal not only information, but character. Have it expose a character’s weakness and also set up a crucial plot point that will be paid off later. Use that scene to not only describe the setting, but how that setting impacts your character.

    Nearly every scene can do double duty. Many can do triple duty. Your goal is to give the reader aha moments, when she or he realizes, “Oh, that’s why that was in there.”

    Because here’s the thing, here’s the reason every scene must have a purpose. It is the nature of books and stories that as a reader reads, they are accustomed to noticing what happens to the characters. They are used to tucking away unusual events and to consider them important. If you describe your character brushing her teeth every morning, but that never factors into the plot, it will irritate your reader. Brushing teeth is trivial…unless it’s not. Unless that’s how our character is poisoned. Or that’s part of her OCD routine (maybe she has to do it at a set time and for a set number of strokes each day).

    Your reader is going to notice those little details. She’s going to want her payoff later in the story. Make sure she gets it–or hit that delete key.

  • RTW – Best Book in April

    A very late entry into YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday. I’ve been out all day, some of that time spent speaking to a fantastic high school creative writing class. So much fun.

    But I’ve got to give my pitch for my fave April read–Cat Girl’s Day Off. Who doesn’t love a heroine who can speak to cats? And a kidnapped kitty who’s been painted pink? And a mystery, a sweet romantic lead, and some goofy, laugh-out-loud humor?

    Full disclosure: 1) I’m an inveterate cat lover, and 2) Kimberly Pauley is my Tu Books “sister,” that is, we’re both published by Lee and Low/Tu Books. But that’s not why I’m raving over Cat Girl’s Day Off. It was just a fantastic book. Check it out!

  • Tolerance vs. Acceptance

    The other day, I got into a discussion with someone about how students are taught tolerance in school rather than acceptance. That hit home with me and got me thinking about the difference between tolerance and acceptance.

    Of course we should be tolerant of others, right? If someone practices a different religion, has different political beliefs, is from a different country, is of a different race or ethnicity or a different sexual orientation, we should have tolerance for those differences. We have museums of tolerance which remember events such as the Holocaust, and students are taught in school to tolerate others different from them.

    Curious about the actual definition of tolerance, I dipped into my old paper version of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Tenth Edition). Here are two definitions of tolerance that I think apply:

    2a: sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own

    2b: the act of allowing something: TOLERATION

    Sympathy and indulgence seem like good qualities. But when we’re being sympathetic to those different from ourselves, it’s almost as if we are sympathizing with their wrongness. We know in many cases the person can’t help being different (they can’t change their skin color or how they might be disabled, for instance). So we sympathize with the fact that they came out wrong.

    By the same token, being indulgent of those differences seems terribly patronizing. Again, it’s as if we know in reality that the other person is wrong in believing differently, in being of a different ethnicity, of being gay or disabled. Nevertheless, we tolerate, we indulge that difference.

    What if instead we were to practice acceptance of those different from ourselves? What would that look like? Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines acceptance:

    3: the act of accepting : the fact of being accepted : APPROVAL

    Approval. What would it be like if we not only tolerated those different from us, but approved of them? What if we approved and accepted them as they are, without conditions, without any sense that different=wrong? What if that were what children were taught in school, if those museums were museums of acceptance? Somehow it makes my heart lighter just thinking about it.

    But, you might say, I don’t agree with their politics. I don’t agree with their religion. But here’s the thing. Acceptance does not equal agreement. We can accept someone’s different way of thinking or believing, but we don’t have to agree with it. We can even love them despite our disagreement. And of course we must accept physical differences because why would we not? That’s just another way of being.

    So yes, tolerance at a minimum. But acceptance, giving up that sense of wrongness in the “other,” is to me the real goal.

  • RTW – Images That Inspire

    This week’s prompt on YA Highway‘s Road Trip Wednesday is What images inspire/ represent your WIP or favorite book? This one is pretty easy because my publisher, Lee and Low, hired an artist to draw some of the creatures and flora that appear in the Tankborn series. So while I’ve been working on Awakening, book 2 of the Tankborn series, I’ve had these images swirling around in my head (bhimkay, seycat, rat-snake, and sewer toad):

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • A Girl in Shop Class

    The other day, I was listening to an interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on NPR’s Science Friday. (side note: I am madly in love with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If I wasn’t already married, I would woo Neil).

    Anyway, he got to talking about his childhood, how as a black kid he had to be an athlete in high school to fit in (he wrestled). When he told people he wanted to be an astrophysicist (which he knew from age 11), they told him oh, no, you should be an athlete. Neil said it wasn’t so much racism but the fact that that in those days (late ’60s, early ’70s, based on his age), athletics seemed to be the pathway for someone with his skin color.

    When asked what had kept him going despite society’s skepticism (although his parents did fully support his dreams) he mentioned he had/has a tremendous reserve of strength and self-motivation inside him. When he faced opposition or lack of faith from others, he would draw on his reserve to keep going. Sometimes his reserve got low, but he still kept going until he achieved his goals.

    One funny story he told was of being in shop class in junior high. All the students were to build a desk lamp. It was a simple design, with very clear instructions. But Neil didn’t want to build that desk lamp. He had a particular love of Saturn. He convinced the shop teacher to let him build a Saturn lamp. Neil glued together several blocks of wood, carved out a globe for the planet and a circular piece for the rings. He drilled a hole through the globe to run the cord through and rigged the ring to swivel so that the lamp would turn on when the ring was pressed. He still has that lamp on his desk at the Museum of Natural History. Here’s a video that includes a demonstration of his lamp. It’s at about the 1:10 mark.

    As he was talking about his shop class, he mentioned a reality at that time–that only boys were allowed to take shop. Girls were relegated to cooking and sewing classes. That brought back a memory for me.

    Somehow, when I was in junior high, I was allowed into a shop class. I was the only girl. I loved it. Our project was to design a floor plan for a house. Once we had our design, we were to use balsa wood to build walls. I created a house with a large courtyard in the middle and the rooms ringing the courtyard. I thought it would be cool to have a very private yard like that.

    I was able to draw the floor plan, and got two or three runs of balsa wood glued on. But then came the semester break. I was moved out of shop class (despite my objections) and moved into sewing/cooking class for the second semester. Although it turned out I also enjoyed cooking and sewing, the injustice of being booted out of shop class still stings.

    (Another side note: There was one boy in cooking class. I suspect he was ridiculed by his peers and looked upon with suspicion, just as I had been in shop class).

    I’m assuming that these days if a girl wants to do shop class, she can do it. I know boys take cooking class now in high school. They might still get razzed about it, but they at least have choices.

    So how about it? Anyone have an experience like mine? Or were you allowed to finish that cool project in shop class and you skipped learning how to cook and sew? Let me know in the comments.