Here’s a second question that helps us understand how readers and writers connect. Last week we looked at the connecting power of humor and laughter (“if you tickle us, do we not laugh?”). Now it’s time to share a little pain.
Richie’s wife, Noelle, was the one who began asking a series of questions about the Colts and their no-huddle offense, and while Richie was patiently explaining to her how it works, and why Peyton Manning was dancing around before the play and shouting things and gesturing to his teammates like crazy, that’s when I got this brilliant idea that writers can have their own no-huddle approach to writing. At least I think it might be brilliant, although I haven’t told anyone about it. Until now.
Apart from the everyday world that I walk around in, there’s another world I enter when I’m writing a new story. It’s like a dream world because it has elements of my everyday world, but transformed somewhere in my mind into something strange and new. Just how strange varies from story to story.
In this dreamlike world, I quite willingly suspend my disbelief, and trust that most readers will be willing to do the same. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner guy, was the one who came up with “willing suspension of disbelief” as a necessity in the dream world of storytelling. In return for entertainment—a good story—the reader agrees to accept some fantastic elements in the story.
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Islands Linked by Ocean (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2009) is a showcase for the short story magic of Lisa Linn Kanae. Lisa is also the author of Sista Tongue (Tinfish, 2001), about which Susan Schultz wrote, “It combines the history of pidgin English in Hawaii with memoir with story telling.”
Islands Linked by Ocean is all about story telling, and Lisa tells a great story. I asked Lisa to share some of her thoughts about this new collection.
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So here’s a situation for you …
Imagine you’re writing a novel and it’s starting out all right. You’ve written only the first three chapters, so you’re not bogged down in the middle yet. You have a character you call Charley Meyers narrating the story first person and he’s easy.
But … and it’s a very large but … there’s this other supporting character, a 19-year-old rodeo queen wannabe with big blonde hair and a bigger personality, and she’s just about bursting to take over the story. Do you stop her? Leave her on the sidelines in most of the chapters?
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Because my new novel Chasing Cowboys is written in first person (narrated by a 40-something Reno cowboy and a 19-year-old Reno rodeo queen wannabe), I started thinking about why I love first person narration.
I’m trying to remember the first time I wrote in first person point of view. There’s a flickering memory of an assignment in fourth grade, writing about an imaginary trip across Texas.
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Someone took a look at my new book, Chasing Cowboys (Aloha Romance Writers, 2009), and asked me an inviting question, “What was it like writing this?” Good question. Let me answer it this way.
As the storyteller in this novel, I had the big job of rounding up my two-legged characters and driving them down the trail. Naturally they kept running off in all directions. New critters joined the trail drive and I had to keep an eye on them.
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