Roald Dahl: Make ‘Em Laugh, Make ‘Em Squirm, Make ‘Em Have to Hear the Story
February 7, 2011
“My main preoccupation when I am writing a story is a constant unholy terror of boring the reader” –Roald Dahl
If you don’t recognize Roald Dahl’s name, be assured you do, at least, know his work: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(Willy Wonka); Matilda; James and the Giant Peach; The BFG; Fantastic Mr. Fox…. So you’ve at least seen one of the movies, right? And maybe read all the books–as a child yourself, or with a little one curled up and chortling in your lap.
Here are some of Dahl’s best storytelling tips–in his own words:
“A story idea is liable to come flitting into the mind at any moment of the day, and if I don’t make a note of it at once, right then and there, it will be gone forever. So I must find a pencil, a pen, a crayon, a lipstick, anything that will write, and scribble a few words that will later on remind me of the idea. Then, as soon as I get the chance, I go straight to my hut and write the idea down in an old red-coloured school exercise book.
The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by. Every month they get scarcer and scarcer. Any good story must start with a strong plot that gathers momentum all the way to the end. My main preoccupation when I am writing a story is a constant unholy terror of boring the reader. Consequently, as I write my stories I always try to create situations that will cause my reader to:
!) Laugh (actual loud belly laughs)
2) Squirm
3) Become Entralled
4) Become TENSE and EXCITED and say, “Read on! Please read on! Don’t stop!
All good books have to have a mixture of extremely nasty people–which are always fun–and some nice people. In every book or story there has to be somebody you can loathe. The fouler and more filthy a person is, the more fun it is to watch him getting scrunched.”
So… what’s YOUR favorite Dahl book, and what is it about his storytelling that makes his characters so utterly unforgettable?
Chilean Novelist Isabel Allende Speaks of Writing, Passion, Justice, Suffering–and why Sophia Loren is still one of the world’s most beautiful women
January 22, 2011
“Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters; they only make good former spouses”–Isabel Allende
Here’s a video that always prompts lively conversation with my creative writing students….
You may or may not agree with everything Isabel Allende says here, but she has much to teach us about caring for the abused and forgotten–and about why her novels stay with us long after we’ve turned the last page. If you’ve never read her fiction and you enjoy gorgeously crafted, meticulously researched historicals, you might try Portrait in Sepia or Daughter of Fortune. I hope you find her talk helpful to your own efforts to tell stories of passion, truth and risk-taking….
Story and the Past: When the Fictional Story is True
February 12, 2010
Here’s the awkward truth–awkward, as so much truth is: I was nervous about the five little words my editor suggested adding to the marketing description of my first novel. Her voice was all enthusiasm over the line–but then she gets jazzed by everything, everything, I tell you, from character development to comma placement, which is why writers adore her.
“What if we added,” she wanted to know, “the words ‘Inspired By a True Story’–what do you think? Because that’s true, right? And people would love to know the story behind the story. Right?”
Well, yes. Sure. Exactly. Sort of.
Because certainly Blue Hole would never have been written without the Appalachian Mountains.
Or the brutal 1980 shootings on 9th Street in Chattanooga, or a cross-burning at the home of a Sri Lankan family in my hometown, Signal Mountain, Tennessee, or my friendship with the daughter of that family.
It wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t loved my little Southern town, and boasted to the friends around me as an adult in Boston that my mountain was home to some of the kindest people ever to draw breath.
And it never would have been written if I hadn’t also been knocked-flat horrified as an adult living in Boston to learn that my hometown had also been beloved by the assassin Byron DeLaBeckwith. After he’d been acquitted by an all-white jury twice in Mississippi for the murder of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, Ku Klux Klan member DeLaBeckwith apparently found our pretty mountaintop a safe, comfortable haven during the years I was growing up there. So all that was true.
But regarding this truth thing, I’d had fear struck into me when my brother–who is, okay, yes, at least a rough model for the protagonist’s brother Emerson–read an early draft of the novel and proudly pronounced, “Yep, I can pick out the real person behind every character.”
“What? No, see, this is fiction,” I was desperate to explain–like he might’ve gone muzzy on the definition of fiction.
True, all fiction writers draw on real life, of course. We borrow a dimple here, a balding head there, our own ugly experience of betrayal and forgiveness and deceit.
But the last thing I wanted was old friends of my brother’s and mine drawing lines from each character to an actual person–suggesting sometimes a not very flattering portrait that was never intended as a portrait at all. The characters in the novel came, perhaps, from what Jung calls the “collective unconscious,” a mish-mash of conglomeration and imagination. But in the end the characters were fictional creations, and while the story was based on historical events, it, too, was fictionalized. It wasn’t a strictly accurate rendering of events–and wasn’t supposed to be.
Still, the key words “Inspired By” convinced us all the tag was fair to use with the book.
Now here’s what’s been so intriguing to me about a fictional story rooted in Truth–that is, the truth that human beings are horrifically prone to finding others to despise in order to feel themselves superior. And that the stories of these hates are all around us, some covered up, some blazing away in full view. And that human beings also have access to improbable grace. To forgiveness. To change.
Since Blue Hole Back Home was published nearly two years ago, I regularly hear from people who’ve read the book, then give me the gift of their own stories. Sometimes these are people who grew up thousands of miles from where I did, but something in the novel triggers tales of similar hate–and reconciliation–they’ve seen and lived out. Sometimes it’s people from my own hometown telling what they remember of events that few of us talked about at the time.
One story-giver was a cameraman who’d been sent to interview me, a guy about my own age who’d grown up near where I had, but raised in a whole different part of town. Now both in our forties, one of us black and one of us white, we spun out stories together, his filling holes in what I’d known or seen or remembered–his having personally known, for example, the five African-American women described in my story as being critically injured by drunken white guys–two of them let off entirely by the jury, the third serving only a handful of months. He was the one who finished that thread of the truth for me: all five women died without one penny’s compensation.
Just this week, I received a letter from a man in a maximum security prison who grew up in a valley not far from my mountain. He’d just read Blue Hole, and wrote to tell me how he remembered much of what I described in the novel, and how his father had taken him as a boy to a Klan rally at a nearby elementary school (an elementary school! Dear God). And how he was heartbroken now by the cruelty and senseless of the racism that brewed in those days, long after the height of the Civil Rights era. His words, written from prison by a white man who committed I have no idea what kind of serious crime, spoke of gladhearted change. In our culture. In himself. A story in trade for a story.
So I’m thankful today for stories. For the way they get us offering up our own little peepholes on Life and on Meaning: our stories –some of which we rightly call fiction. But when they speak from the gut and the heart, they can also be terribly, painfully, startlingly True.
If you want to hear more of the actual events that inspired–note that key word INSPIRED–the novel Blue Hole Back Home, check out this television interview with Channel 12 in Chattanooga.
Or view the YouTube video below:
Story and Inspiration-And Especially Self-Discipline
February 12, 2010
I feel today like posting a long list of quotes that hammers away at the need for the writer to be self-disciplined? Because I need to hear them again myself. Often. I mean really often. And with a threat implied.
Why is that when any of us watch an Olympic athlete–as many of us are doing lots of these days–we’re not the least bit startled to learn that the skier or snowboarder spends an eight-hour day in training. Of course, we nod–that’s why they’re so darn good. Yet we beat up on ourselves if we can’t plop down, cold and unpracticed, and pound out a brilliant, suspenseful first draft of that novel we’ve always wanted to write?
Before I’d had a first book accepted, or even completed, back when writing was something I knew I wanted to do, something I talked a lot about but honestly didn’t do much of, someone quoted G.K.Chesterton to me. The first step in becoming a writer, Chesteron said, though I’m paraphrasing, is applying the seat of one’s pants to the seat of one’s chair.
Ouch. No mystical descriptions of inspiration or first drafts dropping like manna from heaven.
Just sitting down. Today. And tomorrow. And every day. With no guarantees how all this work will turn out in the end. With no assurance that anyone anywhere will ever want to read today’s work, or tomorrow’s.
But with gratitude, still, for the trying. Always gratitude.
On Inspiration–and What If Doesn’t Come?
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
–Jack London
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…The wait is simply too long.
–Leonard Bernstein
To draw, you must close your eyes and sing
–Pablo Picasso
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
–Emily Dickinson
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect
–G. K. Chesterton
…And On Perseverance
You keep putting one blessed word after another, just as you hear them, as they come to you.
–Anne Lamott
After ecstasy, washday
–Zen saying
If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
–Michelangelo
Blue Hole Meets YouTube
February 12, 2010
Listen to an excerpt from the first chapter of the award-winning novel Blue Hole Back Home
Story and Music–the Songs behind Blue Hole Back Home
February 7, 2010
As my musician buddies would be quick to remind me, music tells its own story–whether or not it involves lyrics. Often, we writers owe a great debt to the stories in the music we listen to during the weeks or months or years that our own stories are coming to life–or not–on the page.
In the case of Blue Hole Back Home, a coming-of-age tale of teenagers living in the still-racially and ethnically fractured South, I’d already included a good bit of music in the book by the final draft. But in the final weeks before the galley stages, my husband came home from the library with a CD of an 1960-70s compilation of Atlantic Records hits, including R&B standards like Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” That got me digging out old R&B favorites, just for fun. And, okay, also just because in the final stages of a book I become frantic for any distraction or excuse not to write. A peculiar thing happened, though: the songs began finding their way into the plot.
Below is Ben E. King singing “Stand By Me,” which figures significantly into the final chapters when The Pack is coming face to face with senseless cruelty, and what it means to stick by a friend, no matter the cost.
That same week, a friend of my son’s was staying with us for a few days and brought with him an Earth, Wind and Fire CD. I hadn’t heard them for years–or hadn’t paid attention if I had. Suddenly, though, I was finding that the story of Turtle and Emerson and Jimbo and Farsanna Moulavi and the Mangy Pack was all happening with a kind of soundtrack in the background– the most unlikely assortment of music, from James Brown’s “I Feel Good” to gritty, blues versions of “Amazing Grace.” Lots of these songs found their way into the plot.
No story that takes place in the Appalachian Mountains can spin out without the storyteller hearing a good bit of bluegrass along the way–at least in her memory. On the mountain where I grew up, people gathered on Friday nights for “Mountain Opry,” a jam session free-for-all where some of the best banjo pickers and guitars in seven states just show up and play with whoever is there–and the audience passes the hat. In the novel Blue Hole Back Home, Emerson plays a mean bluegrass guitar, but there’s also mention of banjo along the way. Here is Earl Scruggs with Wild and Crazy Guy Steve Martin on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”
And here is Martha and the Vandellas with their “Dancin’ in the Street,” which figures into the plot when The Pack is down in the city on Seventh Street, based loosely on Chattanooga’s former Ninth Street, where five African-American women were critically injured in a 1980 drive-by shooting by three white men.
One of the main characters, Jimbo, typically rides in the back of the pick up where he is teaching himself to play guitar. As they jolt down the old logging trail roads, he thrums out strange medleys of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Holy, Holy, Holy” (try finding that on YouTube). But below is another song Jimbo plays–this one with a few more posted public versions. Here is LeeAnn Rimes with a blues-inspired acapella version of “Amazing Grace.”
When Baylor University in Texas chose Blue Hole as its 2009 Common Book, my teenage daughter kindly bought and burned the songs for me that appear in the book, and I carted the CD to Waco with me to speak. Nervous as I was–okay, catatonic with fear–over having to speak to the 4,000 freshman who’d just read and were about to discuss my novel, I managed to raise one arm to hand the CD to the sound guy, who graciously popped it in as the students were arriving in the big hall.
Music is amazing. By the time Diana Ross had belted out her “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (which figures into the early chapters) and we’d moved on to “Dancin’ in the Streets,” I was forgetting to be nauseous and tongue-tied, and about two minutes away from dancing on the platform’s table with the microphone balanced on my nose.
Here is Diana Ross performing her inimitable “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1979, the year in which the novel is set.
May stories–in music and on the written page–inspire you today to offer outrageous forgiveness, to stand by a friend, and to find a good table to dance on.
Connect with Joy
