Moving quite flagrantly out of my weight class, I can't help but mention the biblical text where Jesus turns to his disciple Peter and announces, "I tell you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church" (Mat. 16:18). In Greek, the name "Peter" also means "stone," so this was a bit of wordplay: "You are Rocky, and upon this rock I will build my church." (The Bible is full of such puns, most of them sadly lost in translation.) This quotation can be read multiple ways: Peter was rock-solid loyal and Jesus viewed him as the foundation of the church, which in fact he came to be—note that the seat of Catholicism is St. Peter's in Rome. Or Peter could have simply been a big guy, or thick-headed—other New Testament passages hint as much...
All of this I learned from fifteen minutes of Internet research as I attempted to determine if the French words for "Peter" and "stone" evolved from this original Bible passage. While I still don't have an answer to that question, I've learned a lot of religious history. For the record, my Pierre Stein name is completely nondenominational.
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Bonus Material: Author Commentary
Structure and Format >
Opening Scene>
Title and Cover>
Challenges of Magic>
Trudy's Sight >
The Globe d'Or>
Cuthbert of Montagne>
Styles of Address>
Feminine Nouns >
Ladies-in-Waiting>
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Empire of Lax>
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Author Commentary: The Structure and Format of Wisdom's Kiss >
Want to write good books? Start by writing bad screenplays.
That's been my experience, anyway, and—based on this sample of one—it's a pretty useful route to publishing. Before I tried my hand at fiction, I spent eight years studying screenwriting and learned—well, I learned everything I now know. I learned about dialogue, character development, pacing, description, plot, theme ... However awful my screenplays ended up, I absorbed an enormous amount of information about how to make a story good, because a movie, first and foremost, is a story, and it needs to be really good because someone's spending millions of dollars to make it. (This, by the way, does not mean that the final product ends up good; many movies are terrible. But the point is that they're not terrible on purpose.)
"Three-act structure" is a bit of screenwriting jargon that for me has paid off in aces and spades. Basically it means that the first quarter ("first act") of a movie/story introduces the characters. The middle two quarters ("second act") features escalating conflict culminating in a "low point," easily identified as that depressing spot when you want to quit watching. In the last quarter ("third act") everything resolves and the hero emerges emotionally and/ or physically victorious.
There: you just saved yourself eight years of screenwriting classes.
Every time I start a new book, even before I start formally outlining the story, I pull out my screenwriting notes to review how to link the character's internal and external conflicts, how to pace the first act, et cetera, et cetera. I do this partially from superstition: given that it's worked five times, I don't want to mess with success. And it works as a writing exercise to get me thinking, rather like my other favorite exercise of imagining a scene without any dialogue and then with dialogue alone ... These processes open a lot of mental doors. But I also do it because the three-act structure really does work, and my stories are stronger for it.
When I outline a story, I translate the three acts into four columns, each representing one quarter of the book. Sometimes this four-column format makes it all the way to the final product: Princess Ben has four parts; Front and Center has sixteen chapters (16—4 x 4). Wisdom's Kiss has four parts, too. (Part I includes the Introduction.) Part III, entitled "All is Lost!" is particularly notable—those are the exact words I wrote on my original outline to remind myself that this is the low point. But it's also the point of storytelling generally, a perfect summation of our craft: create conflict; then resolve it. All is lost ... but not really.
The Wisdom's Kiss format, as I discuss in my commentary on Tips, Trudy, Dizzy, Ben, Felis, The Imperial Encyclopedia of Lax, and heavens knows where else, came about because I wanted a story told from three points of view. Almost immediately I realized that three points of view wouldn't be enough, that the story had facts and incidents and experiences that three voices alone couldn't manage. It's akin to a football game told only from the perspective of the place kicker; adding the stories of a coach and a ref and a fan would add immeasurably to our understanding. I could have pulled back and told the whole story in third person, the way a football game is told in a newspaper, but I would then lose the intimacy and emotional intensity of those personal perspectives, and lose as well the suspense. If a narrator doesn't know what's going to happen next, then the reader doesn't know either. Or the reader might know a little bit from another narrator, or know the wrong thing. That mystery feeds the dramatic tension. Dramatic tension is the gold ring. Dramatic tension is what we're aiming for.
Thus the eight perspectives of Wisdom's Kiss, and all the headaches and challenges and nuance that eight perspectives entailed. The story needed them, but to be honest I needed them too. I enjoyed Wisdom's Kiss more than anything I've ever created, a satisfaction marred only rarely by the fear that no one, in the whole future of the world, would want to read it. But it was immensely, hilariously satisfying to write Dizzy's diary without commas, to make sure that only Trudy got to use the word "horrid," to puzzle out what Tips could spell and what he couldn't, and to decide whether the three entries that constitute Wilhelmina's encyclopedia biography should conclude with ellipses. The glossary was equally satisfying, though I'm surprised at how those marvelous words often came across as stuffy; writing zippy dictionary definitions is a lot harder than I'd thought. But please, please don't let that dissuade you from putting to use your own e-book dictionary. The English language is an extraordinary achievement; think of Wisdom's Kiss as a present to us.
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Author Commentary: The Opening of Wisdom's Kiss
Wisdom's Kiss began with Trudy's roadside vision of approaching menace. This is to say that Wisdom's Kiss began not only with this inspiration, but for a good many drafts with as the actual opening of the book.
As an opener, it has a lot going for it. >The scene introduces the reader to Trudy and her devotion to Tips; it demonstrates the power and mystery of her clairvoyance; it even shows her passion for family as she tries to protect a hen and chicks—to be sure, a singularly ungrateful hen. I also loved that "muttered fowl curses" line; anyone who's ever worked with chickens knows that warning croon.
But, sweet as it was, the scene didn't light me on fire. It didn't suck me in as the opener of a book should. (Note the first line of The Titan's Curse, book three of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series: "The Friday before winter break, my mom packed me an overnight bag and a few deadly weapons and took me to a new boarding school." Now that's an opener.)
Whenever I thought about this new Wisdom's Kiss book I was supposed to be writing, I'd get especially enthusiastic about Tips's diving scene. Felis's description of Tips leaping off that great mossy waterwheel and arcing into the dark water of the pond ... It gave me goose bumps. Still does. When I sent my publisher a proposal for Wisdom's Kiss and needed to include a writing sample, I included that scene —not, you notice, the scene of Trudy and the chickens. Plus there was that whole wonderful Felis overlay, his ridiculous memoir title and vainglorious vocabulary and preening self-regard ... This was a character I wanted to know more about, find out what this boastful little maestro intended to do with such a talented lad. Not to mention that the scene (her lookout for Tips's brother, her knowledge of that eavesdropping-free conversation) also hinted at Trudy's c
lairvoyance!
But. But the pluses of Felis's memoir were also its drawbacks. For every reader drawn into this succulent prose, another would be irrevocably alienated by the vocabulary. Why toss readers (as it were) into the deep end of the pool? Wouldn't it be smarter (from a marketing standpoint, yes, but also as a storyteller) to draw the reader in gently? To start in the shallow end, with floaties?
Everyone agreed that this was a problem. It wasn't—unlike some other battles I can recall, to my shame—other people telling me it didn't work and me refusing to listen. I saw it too; I just didn't know how to fix it. I also wanted a softer opening, but without sacrificing that juicy Felis extravagance.
So, thinking cap jammed tightly on skull, I ruminated away ... and thus remembered a scene I'd envisioned very early in the outlining process, well before I touched pen to paper. (Okay, before I put fingers to keyboard.) While pondering Trudy's sight, I'd tried to figure out when it first happened, and came up with the idea of a small child inadvertently discovering a villain. It was a great character-development exercise, but as far as the book went, it didn't really work; it would mean beginning the story a decade earlier and then having to contrive one of those "ten years later, our heroes..." type solutions. I hate those. For me, the tighter the chronology, the better. If I could write a book that takes place over twenty-four or even two hours, I'd be thrilled. Tight = taut; stretched = saggy.
Now faced with this crisis, however, I returned to that saggy notion. Everyone who read Wisdom's Kiss loved Trudy and agreed she was the central character; it made absolute sense to begin the story with her. The memoir prose of A Life Unforeseen was far more digestible than Felis's excess. Not to mention—Oh, how I love serendipity!—that introducing Trudy and Tips as children could thus make the dive scene far more dramatic; readers would already know and empathize with this twosome.
I then spun off these two entries—Trudy's childhood plus Felis's dive story—into a separate, formal introduction and explained the six-year gap in chronology by titling Part I—creatively enough— "Six Years Later." Such is authorial flexibility. Plus the introduction's title cracks me up—I always imagine Dizzy being the one who composed it.
More on the structure of Wisdom's Kiss
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Author Commentary: Title and Cover >
Some books have titles that leap from one's brow as Athena, fully formed, leapt from the brow of Zeus. Dairy Queen and Princess Ben both fall in this category. I thought them up like this: poof! Everyone agreed that they were wonderful or at least tolerable. No one ever looked back.
Then there are the titles that lurk like blind, eyeless cave fish in the unlit pits of one's subconscious, refusing ever to reveal themselves. Into this latter category falls Wisdom's Kiss. I was most moved, while watching the movie Julie & Julia, by the scene in which Julia Child and her editor struggle for hours on end to come up with a title for Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Good gracious, I know that pain.
The original title of Wisdom's Kiss was "Fortitude, Wisdom and Tips," which from the get-go I knew was bad, not least because its abbreviation is far too close to one of those naughty modern acronyms. "WORKING TITLE!" I wrote on the cover, just to clarify that even the author knew it stunk. Then we started spitballing. Make any amalgam of Wisdom, Tips, Trudy, Fortitude, Cat, Magic, Air, Farina, Froglock, Misadventure and/or Adventure, Passion, Love, Gold, Whiskers—you'll come up with at least one of our suggested titles. I can't remember exactly what Julia Child/Meryl Streep says in Julie & Julia when they finally settle on Mastering the Art of French Cooking; something akin to "I'm too tired to think! Why not?" That's how I felt when we finally combined "wisdom" and "kiss": why not. (And then we had to go through the whole bloody process again with the subtitle. I'm still bummed that "oysters" didn't make it: A Thrilling and Romantic Adventure, Incorporating Magic, Oysters, Villainy, and a Cat —isn't that fun? But there wasn't room on the page, or something.)
My feelings about the Wisdom's Kiss title have since blossomed from acceptance into heartfelt affection, though I confess that in my private notes I refer to it as WisK, mentally pronounced as "whisk." I haven't said this aloud—yet—but I will soon, and will then be regarded with justifiable disbelief. Possibly horror. To be honest, I have never viewed myself as the kind of author who writes titles featuring the word "Kiss"—kissing is a relatively minor element in my fiction—but live and learn.
Once we settled on this title, I had to go back and weave in subtle references to the phrase "Wisdom's kiss," a job I enjoyed enormously. The deleted stuff is better still.
Like a book's title, the cover art requires synthesizing a complex, multicharacter narrative into a package that will appeal to the broadest selection of readers while also conveying its most important themes and emphasizing its originality and nuance.
Good luck with that one.
But Houghton Mifflin—hands together, everyone—pulled it off. That picture of ball gown + hair + cat (there's a girl in there too, somewhere, but really it's all about the dress) blows me away. When I showed it to my sister, she gasped: "This is every picture you ever drew as a kid!" Which, oddly, I had not realized ... Although on some level I must have because I did, you know, write the story that inspired the art. I will take credit for the cat. In an earlier, different cover version I pushed hard for a cat, feeling that it would enhance the cover's humor and quirkiness. Doubtless the designer thought of it independent of my suggestion, but I'm still content to look at that sable beauty and think, "You're mine, dude. You're all mine."
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Author Commentary: The Challenges of Magic >
If I had magical powers, I would use them all the time. Not for profit or crime or fame, but definitely enough that other people would notice. And why not? Who in their right mind wouldn't want to fly if flying were available, or shoot fire from their fingertips, or turn annoying cellphone-blabbing drivers into frogs?
Such a gift, however, presents two serious problems—by which I mean two serious authorship problems; we won't get into traffic safety.
First is the conundrum of fitting sorcery within the cultural parameters of human society. Magic is—by definition—supernatural. Its practice would attract relentless attention. Why bother with a story about a young witch who wants a boyfriend; when the news about her witch-ness breaks, boyfriends will be the least of her problems. In real life, the very existence of magic would overwhelm all other characters and conflict, and negate any other story an author might be trying to tell.
The most common solution to this dilemma can be seen in books such as Harry Potter and The Lightning Thief, where magic practitioners are required by law or some other force to keep their magic secret. Show off and you'll end up nailed by the Ministry of Magic. Or an author can create an impediment that restrains the hero's activity: in Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness, practicing magic shortens your life. Show off and you'll die at twenty. Conversely, make the magic socially dangerous: show off and you'll find yourself slaughtered by a mob. All these parameters put a damper (to say the least) on magical expression, thus focusing the fantasy novel on other, hopefully more interesting plot lines.
The second, related magic challenge is this: a hero, by definition, needs to be weak. We want underdogs to root for, flawed individuals (like us) who persevere anyway. Even Superman has kryptonite; that's the whole point. But magic is not weak. Magic, even harmless "I can fly" magic, is the polar opposite of weak. So how are readers supposed to empathize with someone who possesses abilities and gifts we can only dream of—dream of resentfully?
Well, start by making the hero flawed in other ways. Harry Potter is stubborn, frustrated, doubtful. Or give the hero a nemesis—hello, Voldemort—who's even more powerful, which makes our hero thus weak and sympathetic.
I encountered both these magical conundrums while writing Wisdom's Kiss. In order to keep the magic secret, thus giving the reader (and me) more interesting issu
es, I present witchcraft as universally loathed within Lax—a perspective reinforced by Felis and Wilhelmina. This public peril is further cemented by Ben and Dizzy's private vows—they've witnessed, so painfully, how dangerous it can be. >When Ben finally does practice magic, she does so reluctantly and fearfully. Even Dizzy recognizes the danger of their situation. >Their joint hesitance encourages our rapport.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, take a minute to picture the obverse. Imagine Dizzy and Ben strolling into Phraugheloch Palace shooting off fire and casting spells. It would ... it would suck. The only possible way to continue that story would be by making Wilhelmina an even more powerful sorceress who they must outwit and destroy in order to survive. Which—I must confess—has a lot of dramatic potential, and now I'm kind of bummed that I didn't think of it two years ago. But I didn't. Instead I had to figure out a way to somehow make these two witches seem oppressed, ergo sympathetic, while at the same time concealing their magic so it didn't engulf the story. And that's how Wisdom's Kiss ended up the way it did.
All this said, magic—once it is finally put to use—is one heck of a writing solution. Don't know how to get a character from point A to point B? How to finagle an escape? Win a battle or a heart? Magic, my dear reader; magic. Just be careful, because with magic as with salt, a little goes a long long way.
The Globe d'Or presents magical challenges of its own, as does Trudy.
Ben's earlier brushes with magic's dangers >