Yay School!

So my sixth grader came home today with a list of “Character Traits” given out by her teacher to help with fiction writing.  The full page was arranged in alphabetical order, starting with able and ending with young, all sorts of goodies in between, like alert, ambitious, industrious, innocent, hopeless, humorous and so on and so forth.  What a handy  thing, I thought, for creating incidental characters and such.

Instantly, I made a copy for myself, because I thought it was the coolest thing ever.  I love lists.  Particularly those that dissect the human spirit.

Back in college, my pal Doug Elkins once showed me a longer, more complicated list of traits he’d gotten as part of an acting improve class, organized by categories, like Introvert and Manipulator.  Hot stuff.

Here I am, well over twenty years into my writing career, and still looking at things that might, to to others, seem basic.  Reminded me of a panel I once sat on with a group of terribly famous and smart comic book writers, Chris Claremont, J. M. DeMatteis, Tom DeFalco and the like.

The question came up, “Are there any “how-to” books you’d suggest for aspiring writers?”  The gist of the responses was, “No, of course not, you can’t really get a magical skill like writing out of a book.  It’s about soul and trial and error.  Finding out who you are and what you want to write…”  Yadda-yadda.

I wanted to disagree at the time, but was feeling a bit out of my league.  Fact is, though, like that list of  traits, I think any book on writing can be a handy, helpful thing, even if the book isn’t any good, or totally wrong. 

Stephen King for instance, has written a few pieces on writing, and he’ll occasionally throw in rules like, “never use adverbs when describing character dialogue” and such.  I got the idea, the dialogue should stand on it’s own, but the “never” part always bugged me, so I like to (slyly) sneak ‘em in whenever I think they’re appropriate.

Thing is, even the rules/books I’ve disagreed with are useful, because they made me think about writing, they opened up a dialogue about what works and doesn’t, and whenever I’ve engaged in that dialogue in an honest way, my writing’s always improved.

So in that sense, the lists, the books, the rules, are all useful, provided they’re part of a process and not an end unto themselves.  Consistency is the hobgoblin of small  minds.

And yeah, writing is a magical, soul-searching thing, like any art, and we all have our muses, but I’ve found that a close examination of the pieces of that castle in the sky make it easier to invoke the spirit that brings it to life.  If that makes sense.

Btw – I wrote my previous post in MS Word, then cut and pasted it in LiveWriter.  I was totally shocked to see that tons of punctuation, from apostrophe’s to quotes and semi-colons, disappeared in the process.  Make it look like I wrote it in an emotional flurry rather than my usual cool, deliberate style.  :)  Anyway, will write directly in LW from now on, so my typos are my own.  Pax.