KN: On your website Roy has a top-five baseball list and Sturgis has a top-ten music list. Did you make other contrasting lists in order to get to know your characters?
KS: I make a lot of those lists mentally, even if I don't write them down. I feel like, at least with major characters like Roy and Sturgis, authors should be able to answer the kinds of questions they'd be able to answer about their friends: what do they read or watch on TV, what kind of music do they like, what do they want to be when they grow up, and who are their heroes? But I only include those interests if they stand out or are a big part of a character's personality. Sturgis's music and books are a way for him to get to know his dad better, so they're important. Roy's taste in music isn't important so I don't mention it, but at I do know that about Roy -- he's OK with whatever's on the radio, unless it's jazz. But one thing about kids is that their tastes are always changing and they're always discovering new things. So as a writer, I have to keep that in mind. For example, Roy likes reading non-fiction better than fiction, but he tries reading something different in Mudville.
KN: I have to ask. Have you really cooked and eaten the dishes on Mr. McGuire’s favorite recipe pages? If so, have you served them to anyone else?
KS: Ha. Funny you should ask! My wife celebrated the week Mudville came out by planning a whole week of menus around Mr. McGuire's experiments. We had spinach surprise and spam manicotti and chili dog pie [ http://mudmambas.wordpress.com/2009/02/22/as-seen-in-the-novels-chili-dog-pie/.] Chili dog pie is actually really good, although it's not that healthy. What's scary is that I made those recipes up for the book, but was able to find every one online when I put the website extras together. They were all real things people had done.
KN: Before the story starts, you quote Roy Hobbs from The Natural, “A father makes all the difference.” Did you make Roy’s mother be uninvolved so you could focus on Roy’s relationship with his father?
KS: Yes, that's exactly what it was. It was a book about fathers and sons and brothers, so I decided to downplay the mothers of both of the main characters in Mudville. Women (and girls) are also only a minor presence in Mamba Point, which is mainly about brothers and masculine friendships. I'm making up for it with my third novel, which is in progress. There are several important female characters of different generations (and different species!) that the hero gets to know, and they're all important to him without filling a role as his mother or his girlfriend. It's of the things that I feel really good about as I slog through the nth draft. I'm confident that boys will connect with those characters and find them appealing.
KN: Mudville is a pleasure to read. Could you please talk about what you did to make sure Roy’s voice is consistent and strong throughout the novel?
KS: Thanks for the compliment! Roy's voice is a synthesis of my voice and one of the great narrators in baseball fiction, Henry Wiggen. He's the narrator and hero of The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly and two other novels by Mark Harris [http://mudmambas.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/in-memory-of-mark-harris/]. Wiggen is unpretentious and often funny, but those books are gorgeously written. Harris himself was taking a lot of cues from Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe stories. Anyway, that's how I found Roy's voice... the plot is like a W. P. Kinsella book, but I really owe a lot more to Mark Harris, and I said so in the acknowledgments.
KN: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
KS: Well, I already worked in one plug but let me work in another. I have a new book coming out this summer. It's not a baseball book, or even a sports book, but I hope people who liked Mudville will like this one, too. It's called Mamba Point, and it's about an American kid living in Monrovia, Liberia (that's in West Africa) who befriends a black mamba, one of the deadliest snakes in the world. A lot of the book is based on personal experience, because I moved to Liberia myself when I was thirteen. My dad worked at the U.S. Embassy, just like Linus's dad does in the book. I never befriended a mamba, but I did see a couple.
KN: Thanks so much for the interview.
KS: Thanks for the invitation. I really like your blog; the educational tie-ins are creative.
KN: Thanks for the compliment.
Showing posts with label chacterization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chacterization. Show all posts
Monday, May 31, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Interview With Unnameables Author, Ellen Booraem
KN: On your website, http://www.ellenbooraem.com/evolution.html, you have a fantastic description of Medford and Goatman’s development from paintings into characters. However, there are many other outstanding characters in The Unnameables. What did you do to bring each character alive?
EB: When I’m starting a book, I have a form I fill out for important characters, asking questions about their hopes and fears, even what they have in their pockets.
When characters first appear in a rough draft, I let them speak and act for themselves, doing whatever is required of them to move the plot along. When I’m ready to delve deeper—later in the rough draft and certainly during the revisions—I open a new document for each important character and write a brief life story, including his or her fears and goals, and often a journal entry in that character’s voice. When I was writing THE UNNAMEABLES, I did this at least once for Earnest, Boyce, Essence, Twig, Clarity, Arvid, and Deemer—and repeatedly for Medford, Prudy, and the Goatman.
I had a separate document telling me what everyone looked like. For a few characters, I had other documents tracking their mood changes throughout the book—especially important for Earnest, Prudy, and Twig, whose intentions and activities were hidden until the end.
KN: What a fantastic answer! I'll have to use those techniques to strengthen my characters. Why did you choose to have the island stuck in the colonial period versus another historical era?
EB: As a purely practical matter, I needed the original settlers to take over a distant, empty island and then be ignored or forgotten long enough to figure out their needs and obsessions on their own. That wouldn’t have happened as easily with a later settlement, especially after transportation became easier and faster.
In my head (not stated in the book), the original settlers were disaffected members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They’d be adventuresome by nature—having uprooted themselves once to sail from England to Massachusetts, it wouldn’t faze them to do it again. It made sense to me that they would have tired of the religious and social restrictions in Massachusetts, and would have tried to find a place where they could live according to their utopian ideals. And of course they ended up creating a society that was even more restrictive than the one they’d left.
I drafted a sequel that offered an explanation of why the Islanders continued to be left alone to the modern day. That draft is pretty much dead now because of changes in the first book, but I hope to revive parts of it someday so I don’t want to give much away. If you look at the map in THE UNNAMEABLES, though, you can see that the shoals around Island make it inhospitable to the casual visitor.
KN: In addition to the tremendous amount of historical research to inform your language style in the book, what else did you do to make sure the character’s voices were consistent throughout the book?
EB: Every morning before I started to write, I would read a chapter of one of Jane Austen’s books, which were written in the early 1800s. That set me up for the narrator’s voice and the way Islanders talked when they weren’t using Book Talk. Before writing dialogue in Book Talk, I’d dip into Samuel Pepys’s diary, written in the mid-1600s, and maybe the King James Bible or some plays from the mid- to late 1600s.
To make sure I had individual characters’ voices right, I would occasionally break away and read the journal entries I’d written for them, or maybe write a line or two more in a journal. After a while, though, I had each character so firmly fixed in my mind that their voices came naturally to me.
These were great questions, a lot of fun to answer. Thanks so much for asking them!
KN: Thank you for answering them.
EB: When I’m starting a book, I have a form I fill out for important characters, asking questions about their hopes and fears, even what they have in their pockets.
When characters first appear in a rough draft, I let them speak and act for themselves, doing whatever is required of them to move the plot along. When I’m ready to delve deeper—later in the rough draft and certainly during the revisions—I open a new document for each important character and write a brief life story, including his or her fears and goals, and often a journal entry in that character’s voice. When I was writing THE UNNAMEABLES, I did this at least once for Earnest, Boyce, Essence, Twig, Clarity, Arvid, and Deemer—and repeatedly for Medford, Prudy, and the Goatman.
I had a separate document telling me what everyone looked like. For a few characters, I had other documents tracking their mood changes throughout the book—especially important for Earnest, Prudy, and Twig, whose intentions and activities were hidden until the end.
KN: What a fantastic answer! I'll have to use those techniques to strengthen my characters. Why did you choose to have the island stuck in the colonial period versus another historical era?
EB: As a purely practical matter, I needed the original settlers to take over a distant, empty island and then be ignored or forgotten long enough to figure out their needs and obsessions on their own. That wouldn’t have happened as easily with a later settlement, especially after transportation became easier and faster.
In my head (not stated in the book), the original settlers were disaffected members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They’d be adventuresome by nature—having uprooted themselves once to sail from England to Massachusetts, it wouldn’t faze them to do it again. It made sense to me that they would have tired of the religious and social restrictions in Massachusetts, and would have tried to find a place where they could live according to their utopian ideals. And of course they ended up creating a society that was even more restrictive than the one they’d left.
I drafted a sequel that offered an explanation of why the Islanders continued to be left alone to the modern day. That draft is pretty much dead now because of changes in the first book, but I hope to revive parts of it someday so I don’t want to give much away. If you look at the map in THE UNNAMEABLES, though, you can see that the shoals around Island make it inhospitable to the casual visitor.
KN: In addition to the tremendous amount of historical research to inform your language style in the book, what else did you do to make sure the character’s voices were consistent throughout the book?
EB: Every morning before I started to write, I would read a chapter of one of Jane Austen’s books, which were written in the early 1800s. That set me up for the narrator’s voice and the way Islanders talked when they weren’t using Book Talk. Before writing dialogue in Book Talk, I’d dip into Samuel Pepys’s diary, written in the mid-1600s, and maybe the King James Bible or some plays from the mid- to late 1600s.
To make sure I had individual characters’ voices right, I would occasionally break away and read the journal entries I’d written for them, or maybe write a line or two more in a journal. After a while, though, I had each character so firmly fixed in my mind that their voices came naturally to me.
These were great questions, a lot of fun to answer. Thanks so much for asking them!
KN: Thank you for answering them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
