I went with use it—it was time to answer Sammy’s question. Why was Mrs. Graybill such a crabby old bat?
What began as the exploration of one character’s backstory blossomed into establishing histories for all my main characters. I spent hours and hours imagining their pasts, and feeling their dilemmas and joys and pain. I figured out who Sammy’s father was. No, I didn’t know who he was when I began, and when I figured it out, I was able to understand Sammy’s mother much better. I also got beneath Officer Borsch’s thick crust, saw Grams’s past unfold, and spent some serious time inside Heather Acosta’s troubled mind.
In the process of doing this for my characters, I found myself doing the same sort of analysis of the people in my real life.
It was strange. And enlightening. Looking in real depth for possible reasons behind people’s behaviors was new to me, and doing so created an astonishing shift inside me. Where I used to be sucked into arguments or get my buttons pushed, I could now step back and look at those situations with a sense of curiosity. And instead of using the weapons I kept at the ready for the people who seemed to like to antagonize or criticize, instead of hitting back with justifications or counterattacks, I put those weapons down.
I pushed them aside.
And my new mantra became I will not take the bait. I will not fight with you.
Once again, writing was teaching me how to be a more compassionate person. We all have people who stress us out or push our buttons or are just unpleasant to be around. The easiest thing may be to avoid those people, but sometimes that’s not possible. Or, in order to see some people, we have to put up with others (the classic Thanksgiving scenario). In those cases I’ve found that figuring out why people behave the way they do really reduces the tension or the sting or just the annoyance of having to deal with them. Chances are good that they won’t change, but your reaction to them will, and that’s a crucial improvement.
So now, if I can get to the why of a person’s behavior—which I’ve found is usually rooted in feelings of insecurity or inadequacy—I can usually substitute my flash emotions (anger, irritation) with understanding, and even sympathy. When you understand what’s driving the abrasive behaviors, you can get to a place where your irritation doesn’t flare. It’s a much more pleasant state of being.
The bonus of this new approach to antagonistic or annoying people is that in cases where you just can’t conjure up sympathy—for those dyed-in-the-wool jerks—you can learn a lot from their example about how not to be.
No one wants to evolve into being a Mrs. Graybill. No ten-year-old kid says, When I grow up, I want to be a crabby old bat. So why are there so many crabby old bats out there? Usually, it’s not one big thing that shapes a person’s attitude, it’s a collection. Things happen in degrees. Disappointments accumulate. Attitudes shift. Grudges collect. And the youthful exuberance of Anything’s possible can devolve into the jaded view that life’s not fair and then you die.
Don’t become that person.
And if you find yourself around people who are like that, don’t let them blindfold you with their negative attitude and lead you down their dark dead end. Because, although they will never in a million years admit this, they welcome your defeat because it makes them feel better about their own.
Misery does indeed love company.
I would never have guessed that spending time with fictional characters could impact my real life so much. That the process would teach me that no matter how old you are, you should fight against losing your youthful exuberance with everything you’ve got. That you should instead find sympathy for the people who have replaced their dreams with bitterness, and firmly resolve not to become like them.
But that’s the magic of writing.
Of getting to know your characters.
They can guide you to your own awakenings.
Shifting the focus for a moment to story structure, with an eye here on plot.
Plot is simply what happens with and to your characters, and I’ve found there’s much value in the common plotting advice to put your protagonist up a tree…and then throw rocks at them.
If you want to bore your reader out of their mind, write about someone who is perfect or whose life is perfect. There’s no payoff, no tension, when things run too smoothly. It’s the struggle, the want, that gets us rooting for the protagonist.
So, if you create a main character (the protagonist) that readers like and make their life hard, either physically or emotionally (put them up a tree), and have them overcome a lot of obstacles (dodge a lot of rocks) in order to end up in a better place, your readers will root for them to succeed. They will care. They will want to read—and keep reading—your story.
So, okay. Writing 101. Find a tree. Load up with rocks and then…
Let those rocks fly.
At first you won’t want to. At first you’ll have the urge to protect your protagonist.
Get over it.
Do your story a favor.
Throw the rocks.
The tree I put Sammy Keyes in is the seniors-only apartment building. She’s not supposed to live there, so she has to use the fire escape to sneak in and out of the building. This provides a whole arsenal of rocks. There’s so much potential for things to go wrong.
Other rocks include nosy neighbor Mrs. Graybill, who suspects Sammy is living there and is determined to prove it (and if she does, Sammy and her grandmother will be evicted). Also, Sammy doesn’t know who her father is, and Lana Keyes—Sammy’s diva mother, who has left her behind to pursue an acting career—won’t tell her.
Rocks, rocks, and more rocks.
And the biggest rock of all?
At the beginning of Hotel Thief, Sammy is entering the seventh grade (which, in my experience, was an avalanche of rocks), and she starts the school year off by clashing with mean girl Heather Acosta.
After years of attending the School of Hard Knocks of Writing, I had my battle plan mapped out when I began writing Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief. I was locked and loaded, ready to let some rocks fly!
The first chapter—about ten pages—pounded out pretty effortlessly.
I did not start with long passages about Sammy’s situation.
I started with action.
In the opening pages, Sammy is looking out of her grandmother’s bedroom window with binoculars, giving us the lay of the land. She tells us about things she’s seen in the neighborhood and how the binoculars have saved her from feeling trapped in an old, decrepit building with old, decrepit people. And after we’re introduced to a few landmarks, she tells us about the Heavenly Hotel—the big, pink, seedy flophouse across Broadway—which is the one place her grandmother has forbidden her to look at with binoculars.
And yet she accidentally does look, and she happens to see a suspicious-looking man in the window of one of the Heavenly’s rooms. He’s wearing black gloves and he’s pawing through a woman’s purse.
She quickly concludes that this is a burglary in progress. Now, under normal circumstances she would probably call 911, but these aren’t normal circumstances. And 911 operators want to know things like who you are and where you live and what you’re doing looking into hotel windows with binoculars.
For Sammy, that’s a huge can of worms, much too dangerous to open.
She also can’t tell her grandmother. Grams would be furious that she’d been spying on people in the hotel. Even though Sammy wasn’t spying spying, she’ll never be able to explain it.
So there she is, way up a tree, way out on a limb.
Does she put the binoculars down?
Duck and hide?
No! We’ve just begun. We can’t let her out of the tree yet!
Instead, Sammy leans in.
She gets the focus tight on the binoculars.
And just as she realizes she’s seen th
e thief before…that she knows him from somewhere, but where?…he looks up and sees her looking at him.
Gasp!
I ended the chapter there.
Cliff-hanger!
Oh, yeah!
It felt like I was onto something really special, so I printed the pages and held my breath as my husband read them. I tried to act all nonchalant and occupied with other things as I secretly watched him. I wanted to see him react, wanted to hear that he felt like I did about the beginnings of this story.
He smiled at me when he was done and said, “It’s really good.”
I was immediately crushed. Everyone knows good is not good. Good is “interesting.” Good is awful.
“No, really!” he said. “It’s great!”
I studied him. He was obviously holding back. “But…?”
He hesitated, then confessed. “I thought she was going to wave at the guy.”
My breath caught.
Wave at the guy?
She had mentioned waving at people down on the street, but…at the thief?
That would be an insanely stupid thing for her to do! The thief would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had seen him, that she had been studying him. And he would know exactly where Sammy lived. Waving would be disastrous!
Which meant that it was a brilliant idea.
I added the wave, and it became a defining moment in the creation of Sammy Keyes. That simple action says so much about who she is. Instead of my describing with words that she’s impulsive and fearless and a bit of a loose cannon, a single action painted that picture.
That scene is a great example of how you should keep throwing rocks at your protagonist when they’re up a tree—even when it makes you cringe.
That wave was definitely a rock.
A big, crazy rock.
One that Sammy threw, right at herself.
Also, the easiest way for us to get to know people in real life is to see how they react in stressful situations. There is no better way to expose a person’s true colors. So use rock-throwing in your writing and let it serve a dual purpose. When you’re crafting your story, create situations where the actions of your characters further define who they are while simultaneously moving the plot forward. When Sammy waves, it conveys volumes about her, but it also makes us want to keep reading.
I mean, what’s the thief going to do now that he’s seen her?
Sammy’s impulsiveness has gotten her into big trouble. Turning the page is the only way to find out just how big, and how she’s going to get out of it.
One of the main “rocks” you will throw at your protagonist is an antagonist, who can be anything from a somewhat thorny competitor to a full-blown villain.
I do so enjoy playing with a full-blown villain—something I embraced early on.
In addition to the therapeutic need to kill off (on paper) some of the family disaster Big Bads, I also discovered the (admittedly childish) joy of getting back at a certain Little Bad from my childhood inside the pages of Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief.
The avalanche of rocks that was my middle school experience was shaken loose by a girl who saw me as an easy target. Since I had frugal parents, my back-to-school wardrobe consisted almost entirely of hand-me-downs from a neighbor girl who was three years older than I was. Every year, her mom took her shopping, and, from underwear to dresses, the girl cleared space for her new wardrobe by bagging what she no longer wanted and delivering it to me.
Because I was younger and quite scrawny, none of her clothes ever fit me, but I actually loved getting the hand-me-downs. It was better than shopping with Mom, who was impatient with the process and convinced that two outfits and a pair of shoes should be adequate for a school year. I really, really wished our public school had had uniforms. Maybe Little Bad wouldn’t have noticed me so quickly. Maybe I would have found it easier to fit in.
Looking back, I see that Little Bad was just your garden-variety bully. She had stringy blond hair and piggy eyes, but somehow she made me feel like the ugly one. She made fun of the way I dressed, the way I walked, that fact that I brown-bagged it instead of eating cafeteria food, the fact that I’d raise my hand in class with answers…you name it, she found ways to ridicule me.
And yeah, maybe my tailoring skills weren’t the best when it came to taking in the hand-me-downs, maybe the elastic in the undies was shot and I had to slyly hitch them up every few steps, maybe I was a little too exuberant with my hand-raising in class, but wow, the names.
And she didn’t stop at name-calling. She and her friend would follow me into the girls’ bathroom, enter the stall next to mine, hop onto the toilet rim, look over the divider, and heckle me as I tried to relieve myself.
And then there was the harassing me for money. She knew I didn’t carry any, yet every day she’d make a point to ask, then tease me for being “worthless.”
One day Little Bad came up to me at the lunch tables, where I was already deep into my brown bag. She had a sneer on her face, which wasn’t unusual, but this time something was different, though I couldn’t put my finger on what.
“Give me your money,” she demanded.
I sighed and shook my head. “You know I don’t have any money.”
What was different turned out to be that Little Bad was packin’ steel. She had a sewing pin on her, and in a flash, she’d drawn it like a mini-sword and was jabbing me in my derriere.
Okay. It wasn’t a sword. Or even a knife. It was just a sewing pin.
But it really, really, really hurt.
And compounding the pain was the shock of it. I mean, why? What had I done? Why was she so mean to me?
Little Bad sneered, flicked the pin on the ground, and hurried off laughing.
And me? I never forgot the way that felt.
Fast-forward to the writing of Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief. I could have placed Sammy in elementary school…but there weren’t enough rocks in my elementary school experience. Or I could have put her in high school, but again, not enough rocks. Angst, sure, but by then we’d moved to a new town, I’d joined the track team and had some good friends. I was doing okay.
So, with the tree-and-rocks thing firmly in mind, and knowing the story would seem more real if I could feel the pain of zinging rocks myself, I stuck poor Sammy in the seventh grade and I gave her someone like Little Bad—I gave her Heather Acosta.
Much of the way Heather acts in Hotel Thief is styled after the way Little Bad treated me. She makes fun of Sammy’s clothes and calls her a loser. She also asks her for money, and when Sammy tells her she doesn’t have any, Heather jabs her in the rear end with a sewing pin.
Up to that moment in the writing of the story, I was in control of my character. But after that jab, everything changed. Sammy stopped being an extension of my experiences and became herself. Because Sammy didn’t just sit there, taking the abuse. Uh-uh-uh. She got off the lunch bench, followed Heather through the tables, turned her by the shoulder, and then, bam, punched her in the nose. Blood went squirting everywhere!
It was five in the morning when I was writing this scene. It was still dark outside. I was sitting at the little desk in our bedroom, typing at the keyboard, watching the words spill from my fingertips as Sammy went absolutely rogue. My heart began pounding, ka-blam, ka-blam, my fingers were shaking, and I was suddenly popping with sweat.
Then the punch happened, and before I knew what I was doing, I leapt onto the bed and jumped up and down like a madwoman, crying, “Yeah! Yeah! Oh, yeah!”
It took a little while, but when I started coming down from the euphoria of bloodying the nose of the fictionalized version of my archenemy from seventh grade, I realized, Oh.
Oh, maaaaaaan.
Here I was, a mother. A teacher. What kind of example was I setting? I know you’re not supposed to go around punc
hing people out! You’re supposed to resolve your differences in a civilized manner.
And since there are—or should be—consequences to your actions, I wound up suspending Sammy Keyes from school her first day of seventh grade.
Clearly, Sammy is a flawed character. But after she threw that punch, I couldn’t wait to spend more time with her. With that punch she’d become my new best friend. Or, at least, the friend I wished I’d had in middle school. The one who’d have stuck up for me around Little Bad. The one whose heart’s in the right place, even if her fist sometimes winds up in the wrong place.
As the story unfolded and the page count mounted, Heather Acosta morphed away from being a fictionalized Little Bad. Little Bad could only dream of being as smart or as devious as Heather Acosta would become. But Little Bad was a good place to start. Good clay to mold.
The sweet revenge in this is not so much in the character’s comeuppance as in knowing that, in the end, karma’s gonna getcha. I never think about her anymore, but when I do school visits, kids often ask me if I know what happened to Little Bad.
I do.
She had the nerve to try to friend me on social media.
I guess she doesn’t remember her role in my middle school experience.
Whatever. What goes around comes around, and the social media picture of Little Bad’s life is pretty sad.
And my life is now pretty awesome.
The other thing I hear a lot from both kids and adults is that they had (or have) a Little Bad in their life too. I find that so…frustrating. Generation after generation, despite what we try to do to curtail bullying in schools, Little Bads abound. But here’s the good news: For us writers, they are the clay from which we can mold great villains.
So if you have (or had) a Little Bad in your life, change their name, change their hair color, and start raking them over the coals of a story. Every hero needs a villain to skewer. Have fun slow-roasting yours.
Hope in the Mail Page 5