In 2007, I made costumes for the Rocky Mountain Theater for Kids.  After pulling together approximately 110 costumes in 8 weeks, I realized that it’s REALLY not what I want to do any more.  Though it was fun to find out how well I’d retained the skills I learned in undergraduate school and honed in various professional costume shops, it is grueling work to crank out dalmatian after peasant after fairy costume.

Now, I am writing plays instead of costuming them, which I greatly prefer.   It’s hard to find short plays for twenty-five 4 to 7-year-olds, many of whom can’t read.  It’s really a kick in the pants to take favorite old stories and make them come alive (with the help of a herd of mini-thespians and an incredibly talented director).  My contract with the theater allows me to keep the copyrights, with the caveat that I don’t sell the plays to anyone else in the Denver/Boulder metro area.

I also adapted my book, Dragon Dilemma into a play for the  Shoestring Children’s Theater, and have written a Christmas play for the Blue Sage Center for the Arts.

All-in-all, I have to say it’s a rewarding sideline, not to mention tons of fun!

What would Harry Potter be without Hogwarts?  Just another dorky kid in a broom closet.  Right?  And don’t you just love the way the Secret Garden changes and blossoms, little-by-little, just as Mary and Collin do?   The big woods and broad prairie of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood are as crucial to her stories, and have just as much of an impact on her, as Ma and Pa and Mary.

In all these examples, the setting is more than window dressing.   It is, in essence, a character with which the people in the story interact.

A particularly good example of setting as character is The Talking Earth, by Jean Craighead George.  The main character, Billy Wind, has to come to terms with a very remarkable setting–the Florida Everglades.  As with all George’s books, the setting is described in such loving detail and is such a  key component of the plot that it truly becomes a character in its own right.

How do you make your setting come alive?  The same way you make your characters come alive.  With specific and carefully chosen details.   Wind should never simply blow.  It should howl or whisper, burn or freeze, help your protagonist’s ship sail to a safe harbor or carry her to Oz.   Is there a  tower in your story?  What kind?  Ivory or granite?  A stalwart lighthouse saving sailors’ lives or a haunted wizard’s den luring travelers to their doom?  A forest can be friendly or menacing, a seashore bleak and lonely or sun-drenched and cheerful.

Describe your setting with these kinds of telling details and you will not only ground your characters in a specific time and place but will create a setting that lives forever in your reader’s memories–as all good characters do.

So, names are important, and I’ve had a slew of names in the nearly six decades of my life, none of which really felt like mine.

1. I started out as Patricia Louise Kuhn.  My mother wanted to name me Robin, but my brothers and sister insisted I be named Patrick or Patricia because I was due on Saint Patrick’s Day.   However, I arrived three days “late.”  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard this story, always with the hilarious punchline “and she hasn’t been on time for anything since.”  Nuff said.  I was called Patty until 5th grade, at which time–there being five other Patricia’s in my class–I became Tricia.
2. A week before my nineteenth birthday, I got married and eagerly changed my last name to Sanborn, grateful that I wouldn’t ever be called “Kuner pickle” again.  I continued to answer to Tricia, however, which most people shortened to Trish.
3. Six years later, that marriage ended.  I held on to the Sanborn but dropped the Trish and started telling everyone to call me Patricia, instead.  This was the “yuppy” phase of my life, and I thought Patricia Sanborn had an upwardly mobile ring to it.
4. Ten years later, I met and married my second husband and changed my name to Patricia Sanborn McFadden.  I dropped the Louise and kept the Sanborn because I wanted to acknowledge all the phases of my life up to that point.   I also started a pre-school.  Since Patricia was too much of a mouthful for the kids, I became “Miss Pat” to them and just plain Pat to everyone else.

As you can see, my name(s) say a lot about my history and associations, but not very much about me.  They’re all just labels.  I don’t feel like a Patty, Patricia, Trish or Pat.

Okay, here comes a slightly weird part of my story.  About fifteen years ago, I was reading in bed one evening and a very pleasant, deep male voice said “Your name is Green.”   I figured I’d gone round the bend.  However, I’ve never heard any other disembodied voice, and finally decided it probably wasn’t a psychotic episode, after all.  Which meant that my name, apparently, was Green.  Great.

Except . . .Green didn’t feel any more right to me than Patricia.  Was it my last name?  Pat Green?  Ugh!  My first name?  Green McFadden.  Marginally better but still no cigar.  How about the color green in some other language?  Verde? Vert? Still no good.  I tried Pansy Green, Shamani Green and just plain Green.  I named my publishing company Green Turtle Press, to show my appreciation to the voice without actually going “Green.”  I  tried different spellings.  I began wearing nothing but green clothing.  But my heart just wasn’t into “Green” as a name; I got frustrated and dropped the whole thing for long stretches of time.

Then, last week, I told about the mysterious voice and its cryptic message at a women’s gathering I sometimes attend.  The next morning, I ran into one of the women who said, “I’ve been thinking about your story and I think you should see if there’s a Celtic word or name that sounds like “Green.”  Even though I have a lot of Scottish/Irish ancestry, am very drawn to that part of the world and took a trip to Ireland and Scotland with my daughter a couple of years ago, this possible solution to the mystery had never occurred to me.

I started googling Irish names and almost immediately ran across “Grian” (pronounced Gree-un, like Ian with a Gr in front of it), which is the Celtic word for sun and also the name of an Irish sun goddess.  As soon as I found it, I knew this was my name.  I started asking people to call me Grian.  I got the grianmcfadden dot com and started redoing my website.

Sure, there are bound to be a few complications, of course.  For one thing, all my writing up to now has been published under the name of Patricia McFadden.  But that’s not a biggie.  Lots of writers have several pen names.  And, no, I don’t plan to change my name legally.  Too much hassle.  My sister’s legal name is Carol but everyone has called her Susie all her life (which is another story), and she doesn’t have any major problems with it.  And, no, I’m not going to expect my brothers and sisters and ninety-four-year-old mother to call me Grian.  But I am doing my best to retrain my friends, all of whom seem to be taking it in stride.

What’s in a name?  Plenty, if it’s the right one.

“I’m adding a new character to the first chapter, and moving the last scene to the fourth chapter and ratcheting up my main character’s angst another notch or two and shifting the focus more solidly onto her throughout the story.”

My friend said she’d never realized what a fluid medium fiction writing is. I’ve never thought of it that way, but realized that, as usual, she’d hit the nail on the head. Writing a story is all about flow, which is probably why my little Piscean soul has such a passion for fiction writing, and particularly fiction writing for children.

Nobody goes with the flow as thoroughly and naturally as kids. They don’t care if your syntax is correct or your similes scintillating. All they care about is that you tell a good enough story to sweep them up and take them along for an exciting ride.

So, now, I tend to think of plotting in terms of river rafting, which is something I enjoyed doing once-upon-a-time. (Nowdays I get too seasick to enjoy it.) Here’s a list of “river writing” suggestions:

• Start at the right place. Begin your story when the boat goes into the water, so to speak, not the day before when the characters are packing their wet sacks.
• Vary your scenes. No river ride is fun if it’s all placid water, but it’s equally a bummer if it’s all rapids. Both rafters and readers need a chance to catch their breath every so often and go “Wow, that was really something!”
• Avoid whirlpools. Learn to recognize those points in a story where your characters are going around in frantic circles, yet the plot is not advancing.
• Get out at the right place. For both raft trips and stories, this is either when there’s obviously nothing but smooth sailing ahead or in the nick of time before a waterfall–which is an especially good place to stop if you plan to write a sequel.

So there it is, my latest take on plotting. If you follow these suggestions, your readers will thank you for a memorable ride and come back for more.

Happy rafting!

There is a weird kind of alchemy which makes characters come alive on a page. It has to do with what I think of as the “five dimensions of character.”

In geometry, the four dimensions are . . .

• breadth,
• depth,
• height and
• time.

In writing, this translates into the following:

• Physical setting–does the story take place in one location, all over the globe, in some alternate universe or “in a galaxy far, far away?” The breadth of a story is determined by the breadth of the setting.
• Personal history–Is the character old or young, part of a large family or an only child, well loved and parented or an orphan? No matter what happens in the story, if questions of personal history aren’t answered, the character has no depth and becomes a mere chess piece moving around a board.
• Relationships–Who are friends and who are foee? Why? Will these relationships stay the same or change over the course of the story? How does this impact the character? This can only be seen by gaining some height and distance from our characters. No matter what voice we choose to tell the story in, our view as the author needs to be overarching.
• Timelessness–To have a character who is both true to  her era and universal enough to be interesting to readers over time requires attention to detail and a delicate touch.  The best stories are grounded in their particular time without being too dated to appeal to an ever-evolving audience.

If you have done these four things thoroughly, you have laid a good foundation for well-rounded characters. However, it’s not enough.

WHy?  Because there is a fifth dimension that is the final key to creating a memorable character. I call it the “human dimension” which must be present, even–or maybe especially–in characters who are not, in fact, human; for example, Wilbur of Charlotte’s Web.

The most memorable characters are aware of the gains in their losses and the losses in their gains and make peace with both.  Wilbur comes to terms with Charlotte’s death by caring for her eggs.  Frodo in The Lord of the Rings saves Middle Earth but is so changed that he chooses to depart with the elves. Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden lets go of her delicious secret and the walls–both inner and outer–that keep her safe when she shares her garden with Dickon and Collin.

It is this fifth dimension–this balancing act of light and dark, advance and retreat, joy and sorrow–that gives characters soul, that elusive quality without out which they never comes fully alive for the reader.

Make sure your characters have all five dimensions–but especially the fifth–and they will be utterly unforgettable.  I promise.

Good writing!

All my life, I’ve read and loved Tasha’s books, from Pumpkin Moonshine, her first book, published in 1938, to Corgyville Christmas, her last book, published in 2002. In all, she wrote and illustrated nearly 100 books for children.

Joan Donaldson,a dear friend of mine from graduate school wrote a book that Tasha illustrated, The Real Pretend. It was a lovely surprise when Joan showed up at one of our residencies with photos of Tasha and told us stories of the visits she made to Tasha’s home in Vermont.

The thing I most appreciate about Tasha Tudor is that she lived life very much on her own terms, pretty much ignoring the 20th (not to mention the 21st) century and adopting a lifestyle similar to that lived in the 1830s.

I don’t particularly want to raise goats or light my house with beeswax candles, but I do like the idea that, like Tasha, I have the ability to craft any sort of life I want for myself no matter what is going on in the larger world.

Tasha Tudor was a person who lived life joyfully and fully. As Dickens wrote “May the same be said of us, and all of us.”

I’m finally ready to blog again after a couple of frantic weeks of packing and moving.  It seems appropriate that I’m getting back into gear on World Turtle Day.  Not only does this nicely tie into my publishing company, Green Turtle Press, and my middle-grade fantasy novel, Turtle Island, (the title of which I took from one of the Native American names for North America) but it is also a good reminder to me to keep going with my writing, no matter how slow and discouraging the process sometimes feels.

As my oldest daughter told me when she was four and first heard the story of “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the moral of Aesop’s well-known fable is “Slow and sweaty wins the race!”–a saying that has been a byword in our family ever since.  Certainly writing, itself, is time consuming.  Turtle Island took me a year-and-a-half to write, which seems to be about average for most children’s novels.  The publishing process is even longer, usually at least a couple of years between the time the manuscript is purchased and when the book is released.  Self-publishing and ebooks are faster than this, but that’s a whole different subject that we’ll get to in another blog.  Back to Turtle Day.

There are many different types of turtles – the pig nosed turtle, the green sea turtle, the alligator snapping turtle, the meso-American river turtle, the leatherback turtle (the largest species which does not have a hard shell), the red-eared slider turtle, the common musk turtle (this type had also been called the stinkpot because it releases a musky and foul odor to scare off predators), the big-headed turtle that can climb trees, and the aptly named pancake turtle.

My favorite, however, is the painted terrapin, those cute little turtles that are sold in pet stores.  A friend of mine gifted my granddaughter with two  large specimens, and the 75 gallon tank they live in, because she (my friend) had, at the time, two cats, two dogs, eight puppies, two kids and a husband as well as the turtles and wanted to downsize her menagerie.  The turtles, named Peach and Banana for their orange and yellow undersides, are surprisingly engaging and interesting critters with distinct, if reptilian, personalities.  And, unlike their slower tortoise cousins, they are surprisingly energetic.  They don’t have a lot of goals–getting to the top of the sunning rock, being the first to get to the  turtle food, chasing guppies around the tank–but they go all out after them.

So let’s all keep going toward our personal goals, writing and otherwise, either slow and sweatily or with the darting persistence of Peach and Banana–whichever the circumstances call for–as we celebrate turtles and tortoises on their special day!

I’ve braved the webdragons on my own as best I could, but it’s been a lot like someone who knows neither Italian nor sign language trying to get directions in Rome from a deaf-mute.

This time, however, I actually understand both what I’m doing on my website and why, thanks to Bethany’s patient tutelage and crystal clear explanations.  She knows her stuff and has the kind of marketing savvy that makes a website not only aesthetically pleasing but an effective marketing tool.

If you’re looking for a web designer/coach, look no further than Unique Think.