Karen Sandler

Category: The Writing Life

  • #ArmchairBEA Intro

    I’m a latecomer to ArmchairBEA, so I have some catching up to do. I would have loved to attend BEA this year because I love NYC. Yes, very corny and cliche, but for me ’tis true.

    I was lucky enough to attend one BEA when it was in Los Angeles. It’s a short flight for me from Northern California and since my mom-in-law lives in L.A., I got to stay with her. The convention floor was pretty overwhelming, even though I only attended one day. I did get to sign one of my romance novels, which was fun. It’s always great to meet readers.

    Now I’m writing YA rather than romance (TANKBORN, my dystopian YA, is due out in Sept. 2011). Since I’m so into reading YA now, it would have been fabulous to check out all the new books and scoop up some freebies from the convention floor. To meet the authors and check out all the publishers. But since I can’t be there at BEA NYC this year, ArmchairBEA is the next best thing.

  • Where in the World Do My Characters Live?

    First, full disclosure—I am the polar opposite of a pantser (that is, a writer who just sits down and starts writing with no preparation).  As a former software engineer, I plan out my books to the nth degree before I ever sit down to write page one.  I complete a detailed synopsis and fill a file with copious notes before starting chapter one.

    But even before creation of the synopsis comes my favorite part of the process—extensive character sketches.  I like to know everything about my characters from where they went to school to what their favorite color is, from who their parents were to key turning points in their lives.

    Most of my character sketches deal with the characters’ pasts, what made them who they are today.   But there’s one important element that pertains to the here and now—where my characters currently live.  If much of the plot revolves around their home and home town, I need as concrete as possible an image of what that happy (or not so happy) home looks like.

    After I choose the locale (town/city/part of the country) for my character’s abode, I decide what kind of place they live in–an opulent estate, a one bedroom apartment, a ranch out in the tulies. I then turn to a handy Internet resource—real estate websites.  Sites such as www.realtor.com and www.realestate.com allow me to search their database of listings by location, price, number of bedrooms, acreage, etc.  Most of the listings have at least one photo of the home for sale, some have multiple pictures, interior and exterior.  Some even include video “tours,” animated views of the home in question.

    For instance in one of my romance novels, HIS MIRACLE BABY, the hero is a wealthy man who lives on a large estate in Granite Bay, CA.  The estate had to include a guest house where the heroine would be living while she acted as surrogate for his implanted embryo.  On the Realtor.com webpage, I searched for homes with 5+ bedrooms with a price above $2 million (hey, I said he was rich).  I found a lovely farm style house on four acres with a small “granny flat” on the property.

    I copied the photos from the listing and pasted them into a Word document for later reference.  Then, when I needed to describe the grounds or the living room, I had the pictures at my fingertips.  I also printed the original listing with all the details about the home, further ammunition for my descriptive passages.

    Once I have a specific address, I can use a mapping program such as Google Maps to calculate driving distances to various locations mentioned in the story.  For instance, when the heroine feels sharp pains halfway through her pregnancy and fears she may be going into labor far too early, I want to know the hospital is only ten miles away, but a twenty minute drive from the hero’s home.  In another of my romance backlist, HER MIRACLE MAN, it’s an important factor in the story that the hero’s isolated mountain retreat is at least an hour away from the sheriff’s station in Lake Tahoe, a route he’s loathe to drive with a storm raging outside.

    I’m not a slave to reality when I choose a home for my characters.  I adapt the actual house to what works best for the story.  If I need a small room upstairs to serve as the nursery, I put it there in my fictional home.  But the information gleaned from the real estate websites gives me a framework with which to start and some good visual images to act as a launch pad for my creativity.

  • Foreshadowing vs. Telegraphing

    Earlier today, while working on my WIP (work in progress for you non-writers out there), I got to thinking about the difference between foreshadowing and telegraphing. Although they’re both writing devices in which an author sets up something that will be fulfilled later, foreshadowing is a much more subtle use of this device. Telegraphing, to me, is more like the writer jumping up and down and pointing to the Important Thing to be sure the reader sees it.

    What started me thinking about foreshadowing was when I wrote the following paragraph:

    Adja sat placidly enough wedged between Austin and Noah. If she got it into her head to take off while we were joined, I wasn’t sure if we’d notice. The doors were locked again. Hopefully that would be enough to stop her.

    Without going into the plot of my WIP, suffice it to say it would be very bad if the character, Adja, left while the other characters were otherwise occupied. The reader already knows that at this point in the book. But these two sentences:

    If she got it into her head to take off while we were joined, I wasn’t sure if we’d notice. The doors were locked again. Hopefully that would be enough to stop her

    are me announcing to the reader that Adja is going to leave and dire things will ensue. Totally on the nose, subtext free. No subtlety at all. This, to me, is telegraphing, not foreshadowing. Which left me with two choices.

    1) Leave it as is, but Adja stays. The reader will be relieved (although faintly disappointed). Then wham, I hit the reader with something far more terrible that’s a consequence of Adja staying.

    2) Adja does leave, but delete the second and third sentence.

    When I wrote that paragraph, I hadn’t planned whether Adja would leave or stay, so I left it there and continued on. But as I continued to write the scene, I realized that Adja should leave. So I went with option (2). I rewrote it this way:

    We all piled into the Caddy, me behind the wheel, Tariq next to me, Lisette by the window. Emily, Austin and Noah sat in the back seat, the boys flanking Adja. She sat placidly enough wedged between them.

    It’s kind of “housekeeping” paragraph that describes where the characters are all arranged in the car. A little mundane, but it reminds the reader that Adja is in the car with the other characters.

    But this mention of Adja also foreshadows. By now the reader knows the other characters won’t be able to keep track of Adja while they’re “joining.” When reminded of Adja, the reader will start worrying that she might leave and the other characters won’t notice until it’s too late. Foreshadowing gets me to the same goal–setting up Adja’s departure–as telegraphing would. But the more subtle foreshadowing accomplishes a more important goal–it raises the reader’s anxiety level, which will hopefully keep her turning pages.

    Of course, this is a first draft, so it’s hard to say if the paragraph will survive unedited. But even if it doesn’t, it was a very nice aha moment for me. Often, the lighter (and more subtle) the hand, the more compelling the result.

  • Gender Bias in Children’s Books?

    There’s been some discussion on Twitter (and I imagine elsewhere) about a recently released study revealing gender inequality in children’s literature. The study looked at nearly 6000 children’s books published from 1900 to 2000. They discovered that even in children’s books featuring animals, a significant majority of the central characters are male. At most a third of the books contain female characters at all while 100% include male characters. Take a look at the article for more statistics.

    Assuming there’s no funny business in the counting of characters’ genders, it seems indisputable that there are more male characters than female in children’s literature. Where I think the study gets mushy is in the conclusions the authors say that the data led them to. For instance, they point out that mothers and children read gender into even gender neutral animal characters. The article mentions “research on reader interpretations” to support readers’ gender assignment of gender-neutral characters, but nothing is cited. So I do wonder about that.

    The other issue that raised a red flag for me was the conclusion drawn by the authors as to the impact of this gender inequality in children’s books. They state that this will lead to a presumption that “women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys” and that it amounts to the “symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery.” That second statement in particular sounds like an overly dramatic leap too far to me. In any case, I’d like to see other studies that support their contention.

    I’m no scientist (although I like to write about them). I didn’t do the study, haven’t read it in its entirety. I know often what appears in a short article such as the one I’ve linked to includes material taken out of context and the issues I have with the conclusions may be explored in greater depth in the original study.

    And although I can’t speak for every little girl out there, I can speak for myself. As a kid in the ’60s and ’70s, I probably read some very gender biased books. Did I feel that women had a less important role in society as a consequence? Did I feel symbolically annihilated? Hell, no.

    If I read a book that featured a boy as the main character, that omitted female characters entirely even, I don’t know that I ever even noticed. I became that main character anyway, lived his adventure, imagined myself as him. I was Tom Sawyer, not Becky Thatcher. I was Black Beauty, not poor doomed Ginger.

    Later, in my late teens when I started noticing women’s minuscule roles in books (mainly science fiction by that point), I was irritated and ticked off that the author either omitted or limited their female characters. I certainly wasn’t traumatized by it. It’s one reason I have almost entirely stopped reading adult SF written by men. Because the women authors know how to create worlds with as many interesting powerful women as men.

    I know there are certainly girls/women out there who felt different than I did growing up. Who read those male-dominated books and felt smaller. But I bet there are others like me who don’t give a damn if the author wrote the character as male. They see themselves in that story, doing all those fun and exciting things that boy/male character is doing. They’re strong girls, they’re smart girls, they’re adventurous girls. And if the character doesn’t look like them, they will damn well just re-write the story so they do.

  • The Popular Girls (a confession)

    I was most decidedly not one of the popular girls in high school. I was nerdy before anyone knew what a nerd was, and before being a nerd became a kind of popular of its own. I was smart but socially so inept, I never gave even the nice popular kids a chance to be my friend.

    My yearbook photo from Hawthorne High School

    Cosmetics completely baffled me so I went without. It took my mom whispering in my ear, “Go put on some deodorant,” to save me from stinking (I showered, and washed my hair, once a week).  I even went to school one day with only one leg shaved. It was my first try at shaving, but I ran out of time and had to run for the bus before I could shave the other.

    No surprise my favorite people at school were teachers. There was my English teacher, Mrs. Luckensmeyer, who loved my writing and Mrs. Mark who called me a genius. The geometry teacher who was thrilled by my A’s and the very patient algebra teacher who nudged me along when quadratic equations seemed impossible to understand.

    Most of the popular girls just ignored me (although as I mentioned above, I didn’t give them much opportunity to get to know me). Some of them were plain mean, relishing in their hurtful words, spoken loud enough for everyone to hear. I sometimes wonder what happened to those girls. I hope they found a little compassion in their lives.

    Me (on the left) and my sister, Linda, all decked out for a Creedence Clearwater Revival concert at the fabulous Forum in Inglewood, CA

    Here’s where the confession comes in–because of a few mean girls, I have this judgement still lodged in my heart that casts a negative light on all popular girls. I don’t trust them. I’m suspicious of their success. It can carry over into my writing career when I resent authors who are bigger names than me.

    Very unfair of me, I know. I try to tell that to the teenager still inside me, but her feelings are still hurt. Which is crazy, considering how many years ago all those slights happened. And there were plenty of wonderful times in high school, too. Why focus on the negative?

    So mea culpa to all the popular girls (and boys) I might have judged. If you happen to stumble across this blog and remember me (I was Karen Stier then), let me know how you’re doing now, whether you were one of the popular kids or amongst the not-so-popular. In fact, I’d love to hear from anyone, both those in high school now and those for whom high school is a distant memory. Were you the popular kid? One of the not-so-popular? How was it then? How is it now? Let me know.