by Toni L.P. Kelner
One of my family's favorite outings is a trip to Plaster Fun Time, a place that supplies plaster statues and plaques, paints, brushes, and space to combine them all without messing up my house. When the work is done, the spray it with a quick-dry finish so we can take our pieces home. Our house already holds more than a few of these plasters, ranging from Halloween and Christmas decorations to Pokemon and a bookworm. But as Steve, our daughters Maggie and Valerie, our friend Chelsea, and I painted today, it occurred to me that there some good lessons for writers at Plaster Fun Time.
Okay, I find good lessons for writers all over the place. There are two reasons for this. One, I am a writer and I'm terribly self-centered. Two, obviously my subconscious thinks I need all the writing lessons I can get. But I digress from the lessons.
Lesson 1: No two writers will ever write the same story, even if they start with the same idea.
Look at these three dragons.
Obviously they started out with the same plaster, but Steve painted his black and gold; Chelsea used blue and gold,with gold stripes on the back; and Valerie went with purple and violet. Three dragons--three visions.
Of course, I did know this from my experiences editing anthologies. My co-editor Femme Charlaine and I give our contributors two things to work with--vampires and birthdays, werewolves at Christmas, supernatural beings on vacation, supernatural beings remodeling their homes--and stand back to see what happens. In four anthologies, we've never had to ask somebody to make a change because their story was too close to another one.
This is why I'm somewhat impatient when I meet a writer who is worried about telling me his or her idea. It wouldn't matter if I wrote a book or story with the exact same idea. The two works would be completely different.
Lesson 2: Writers sometimes see things that nobody else does.
One of the plasters offered for sale was a chubby Easter bunny, and when Maggie picked it up, I was expecting her to head for the pastels. Instead, she produced the figure below.
In case you don't recognize him, this is a pretty darned faithful reproduction of Oswald the Rabbit, a character Walt Disney and Ub Iworks created while working at Universal Studios.
Universal owned the little critter, so they had to abandon Oswald at Universal Studios when Disney went to start his own studio with Mickey Mouse.
Oswald and returned to public fame now, thanks to his appearance in the video game Epic Mickey. Maggie loves the game, and has become a fan of Oswald. So when she saw that bunny, she saw Oswald.
In the same way, when I was trying to write a short story about a courtroom, instead of coming up with a lawyer or judge, my first thought was pirates, because I'm a fan of pirates. Well, I'm a fan of pirate movies, that is. So I wrote "Skull and Cross-Examinations," and then a second story about pirate legal matters. To me, it was obvious. To most people? Not so much.
Lesson 3: Writers sometimes repeat themselves without meaning to.
While Maggie was painting her rabbit, I found one of my own. It seemed to me that this bunny had an evil look in his eyes, so I didn't go with a cute little Easter bunny--instead I painted something a bit more malevolent.
Pretty original, huh? A vampiric Easter bunny. Nobody ever painted anything like this before.
Except me. Here's a plaster I painted on a previous Plaster Fun Time expedition, several years ago.
That's right. A vampiric bunny. Okay, the color scheme is a bit different, and this one has a friendlier expression, but is that really going to matter when he's chowing down on your blood?
The fact is, it's easy to fall into a rut. When you start out writing cozy mysteries, you tend to stick with it. If you're start out writing noir, that's the way you automatically start to write. In my case, I started out writing the Laura Fleming mysteries with a Southern accent. When I started to write the "Where are they now?" series, it was a chore to switch accents to something appropriate for a Massachusetts native. And currently I'm trying to figure out how the main character in my new series will sound.
I'm pretty sure she won't be a vampiric bunny.
Lesson 4: Editing is good.
That newer vampire bunny of mine? He originally had a purple nose, and it was much bigger. The problem was that he just didn't look particularly scary with a big purple nose. So I had to cover over the purple nose with white--the Plaster Fun Time equivalent of an eraser--and then repaint the meaner version above.
How does this apply to my writing? Well, the Lesson 4 heading was originally, "Editing is a much-needed and valuable part of the writing process, and any writer would do well to keep that in the forefront of his or her mind."
Lesson 5: You have to know when to stop.
Yes, I did seriously consider ending this post with that--as implied in Lesson 4--but I thought just a little explanation would be good. As I was nearing the end of evil bunny painting today, I started wondering how to paint his evil little claws. Red from clawing somebody? Purple, to match his tail? Some other color. It was Steve who said, "Well, you could do something, but I don't think it would really add to him." And he was right.
The same is true when I'm on the last drafts of a manuscript. There comes a point when I change words--"ran" to "rushed", for instance--and in the next edit, I change them back--"rushed" back to "ran." That's when I know I'm no longer really adding any value, and it's time to let it be.
And that's why I'm ending this post here.
Oh, the "let it be" moment! Brilliant. Brilliant.
Posted by: Hank Phillippi Ryan | March 28, 2011 at 01:19 PM
Great post, Toni. Love the vampire bunnies...are you sure you're not going to go with them for a new series?
Posted by: Dana | March 29, 2011 at 12:40 PM