Augusta Scattergood welcomes Celebrity Guest Blogger: LESLIE DAVIS GUCCIONE

I'm delighted my friend and writing mentor, Leslie Guccione has agreed to be a Guest Blogger today.  Here's a bit about her amazing career.

Leslie Davis Guccione has published thirty-one novels for adult, middle grade and teen readers, as well as articles on the craft of writing. Her work has been translated into eight languages.
She has been a finalist and judge for the Romance Writers of America RITA awards.
Six books for teen readers feature deaf protagonists; one, TELL ME HOW THE WIND SOUNDS, has been optioned for television. Her works for young readers have been book club and readers’ choice selections as well as classroom required reading.              

In 2000 she took a break from fiction to teach, write articles on the craft and establish WORDS @ WORK, her manuscript review service. She is currently mentor and adjunct faculty member for Seton Hill University’s masters program: Writing Popular Fiction.

Leslie's latest novel, THE CHICK PALACE, was just released as an eBook. She's here today to tell us about this newest venture, answer a few questions, and to offer a bit of advice.

What came to you first about this story? A memory? A quote? Is it based on anything that actually happened to you?

Setting came first. A small NJ lake I call “Lake Allamuchy” in the book has been part of my family for 6 generations.  I knew it would be the perfect place to explore a long lasting friendship between Johanna & Lilly, my 2 empty-nesters with divergent backgrounds. I did, indeed, go south to college as a Yankee, having never been farther than my native Delaware.

 

My writer buddy Barbara O’Connor has an abandoned tree house where she and her funny next door neighbor were meeting occasionally. 

Their husbands named it The Chick Palace. Voila. 

Alas, That was the easy part.

 I needed a plot! I had Lilly forced to share her cottage~~with the husband she has divorced twice ”Ex-ex,” and his paramour, a hot NYC graphic designer. Funny & full of potential but the draft still needed some je ne sais quoi. Then my mother died. Quite unexpectedly. Dad gave each of us children a small amount of her ashes. That was my ah ha  moment; I’d found my hook for Johanna. She can’t bring herself to scatter her mother’s ashes as she deals with family issues and stews over her new role as “Materfamilias.”

The story and plot points are complete fiction. As an aside, however, the book is sprinkled start to finish with real episodes.  To name a few:

·      My brother really did embellish my sister’s Ken & Barbie.

·      While grilling on the patio my husband inadvertently smoked a massive black snake out of the cottage roof rafters & down onto his head and shoulders.

·      Dad really blew TAPS out the window one midnight when I lingered too long in my boyfriend’s car in our driveway.

·      Cottage living?  Indeed we still share flushes.

Was there any part of it that ended up on the proverbial cutting floor? Something you fought to keep in, and lost?

Plenty got cut~~all of it my rambling yet beloved flashbacks to Johanna & Lilly in college c.30 years earlier. I teach writing the novel and should have known better. My critique partners pounced and I reluctantly agreed, c.70% had to go. They helped me see more clearly & thus keep only the flashbacks relevant to present day action. 
(A plug here for the importance of cold readers & critique partners!)

The only thing that didn’t pass my agent was the word “bling” for splintered sunlight on the lake surface. I mention this because it’s the kind of minutia all writers deal with all the time. In the end, my agent won.

What's been your experience once THE CHICK PALACE hit the market?

Joyful tears and vindication! It had been rejected on the grounds that  characters on the “far side of fifty” are too old for today’s market. I revised and added a more substantial younger-characters subplot based on graffiti & sneaky behavior of my protagonists’ kids. But in the end it was chosen by B&N because they did indeed want to target “the far side of fifty.”

 This is my 31^st book and first in this brave new techie world. My agent placed it with Barnes & Noble’s “Nook First.”  It debuted the day after Christmas. Thanks to their promotion and word of mouth, it spent 2 weeks in the top ten and even shot to #1 on the eBook best seller list. Heady stuff looking at The Chick Palace snuggled up to James Patterson, Ann Patchett, The Help, Heaven is for Real… . That translates to c.30,000 copies sold in 3 weeks.

I received a wonderful e-mail from the B&N editor telling me my sales confirm their belief that women’s fiction and mid-life women readers are a driving force in today’s market. It’s also marked as a staff favorite. (I repeat: vindication.)

After the January exclusive with B&N, it’s now at Amazon/Kindle and more widely available.

What have you done to promote it?

B&N promoted it heavily all month and I added e-mails blasts, the book cover as my Facebook profile, and daily blogs offering snippets, photos and links.

It never gets easier and the publishing sands are shifting beneath our feet as I type. From kid lit to adult fiction, you have only to follow the blogs, twitters, public events, &/or classroom visits of pros like Claire Cook or Carla Neggers; Brian Lies & Barbara O’Connor; new YA voices Kimberly Marcus or Jessica Warman to see how well-oiled promotion engines remain part of the writing life.

  

What's your fabulous writing advice for somebody just starting out? For writers with lots of experience? For someone thinking of giving up?

For those starting out I reply as a teacher of novel writing at the master level & a freelance mss consultant:

·      Read everything in the genre you write. 20 -30 titles for starters, published within the past 5 years.

·      I cannot emphasize this enough: Beware of the glorified ease of bypassing the agent/publisher/editor route and self-publishing instead. Whether eBook or hard copy, every manuscript benefits from~~demands~~cold reading and thoughtful professional critique.

·      If you go it alone, it’s worth your time and investment in a writers’ group (close by or online), writing conferences, &/or freelance manuscript consultation.

For those who’ve been in the game awhile: I share your exhaustion, elation, depression, determination. I spent the first 10 years writing to the market: 30 books for multiple houses from Harlequin to Scholastic. I’ve written as work-for-hire (a packager), a handful under other writers’ names, a few for existing teen series, five as Kate Chester for my own series HEAR NO EVIL.  My steamy romances paid the mortgage & consistently hit genre fiction bestseller lists. My single title books for kids won awards and are still used in classrooms.

Then the dry spell… .

I lost my Scholastic editor and could never sell them another story. The romance treadmill lost its charm and burned me out. I spent the next 10 years fielding rejections for my manuscripts from the heart. My pit bull agents (Denise Marcil and Katie Kotchman, who had not made a dime off of me in lo those 10 years) shook more publishing bushes than I knew were planted. We struck pay dirt last summer.

And a final bit of free, fabulous advice for inspiration I give to my students:

·      Read Andrew Scott Berg’s Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), an expansion of his Princeton thesis and a glimpse of the industry we wish still existed.

·      Rent the DVD of Cross Creek (and watch the additional interviews), the somewhat fictionalized story of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

·      Get yourself to her preserved homestead Cross Creek, FL for that matter. (Or Hemingway’s in Cuba, they tell me.)

Lilly has such a ring of truth to her. How did you, a non-Southerner, create such an honest portrayal?

Ah, “voice”.

I try to stretch myself as a writer & The Chick Palace was my first foray into first person point of view. Writing as Boston bred/New Jersey resident Johanna was easy, even if she had the tougher plot line.

As for Lilly! As a Yankee at Queens College (now Queens University of Charlotte) I was an observer. So much was new & exotic that impressions of what set “all of y’all” apart have stayed with me. As well, some of my dearest friends are southern transplants. Those TX, SC, MS buddies who write were invaluable critique partners. (I realize I paint this with a very, very broad brush). I think I ran every bit of Lilly’s dialogue past one pro or another.

Any tips on how you make setting work so well?

I have a reputation for vivid settings which I attribute to being a visual learner. My degree’s in art. I think visually; I gravitate to books with a strong sense of place and atmosphere.

I also attribute it to churning out novels while raising three children. (My protagonists have always been folks around me I could pester: pediatricians during all those visits, cranberry growers, sailors, boatyard owners, cops, firefighters…) 
I set my stories under my feet, atmosphere I know intimately:  “Lake Allamuchy,” NJ, the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts; the harbors of coastal New England; rural Chadds Ford, PA.  During our four years in Pittsburgh, I wrote my Hear No Evil series for kids (as Kate Chester) and my last romance Borrowed Baby as tributes to the city. (A fabulous place for intrigue and romance, by the way.)

Where's your absolute favorite place to write? 

I’ve had 5 residences and until 2 years ago it was always a dedicated office, first with a ten-ton IBM Selectric, then one or another PCs. I switched to a MacBook and the laptop now lets me write most anywhere, from my sunroom to, um, the bed I’m sitting in right now. (Adjusts pillows)

 Thanks, Leslie! We loved having you here. Come back soon!

Keep up with Leslie's informative and fun blogposts via  

her own blog: http://lesliedavisguccione.blogspot.com/

Even better, click on over to Barnes and Noble or Amazon and order THE CHICK PALACE. You are in for a real treat.

The VOICE

What is it anyhow?

I'm inspired today by Kerry Madden's recent livejournal post about her Bug Man. I love how she hears what he says and translates it to the page. Even in a blog.

I hear voices all the time.  In my head, reading, listening, talking—I’m surrounded by voices just like Kerry’s Alabama bug man.

But I type the V Word with great trepidation. Because I'm struggling with a voice I can't quite hear yet.

I’m speaking now of a character’s voice in fiction, how to nail it, why to bother. Everybody wants to understand it. Hardly anyone seems to be able to truly explain it. For some it comes as easily as breathing, and that may go double for anyone writing a voice we’ve heard since we first tried to talk.

The Voice Thing hit me this week when I was I shopping in a large, non-descript department store in New Jersey. (So you won’t think the good folks of my adopted state of New Jersey are all this boring, this was not Snooki’s or even Bruce’s Jersey. This was middle-of-the-state, filled-with-transplants NJ.)

Here’s a bit of that conversation:

Woman on NJ cellphone: The service was beautiful. The people were happy. The sun was too hot but we brought out folding chairs.

See, that's just so deadly dull I almost couldn't type it without "revising." I listened as long as I could to that woman in the department store. Long enough to find out she was the Preacher at that funeral. Some preachers are better at things other than speaking, I guess.

 If I'd been eavesdropping in the Memphis Airport, a Jackson Piggly Wiggly, almost any other Southern place I've been in my life, the conversation would have sounded like this:

Woman on cellphone in the South: Honey, that service was just downright beautiful. You never saw such happy people. Uncle Joe looked like he could 'bout sit up and smile right out of that white satin lining the coffin. Uh Huh. Just beautiful, I tell you. But hot? Oh, lands, it was hot. And people- so many people. Had to pull out the folding chairs from last week's Dinner on the Ground so as to have a place for everybody. Didn't want them falling out from the heat, now did we.

If we depended on hearing voices like NJ Cellphone Lady to inspire us, I don’t believe anybody would read past paragraph one. Fortunately, most writers have better sense than to listen to lady preachers in the middle of a New Jersey mall.

I once heard esteemed editor—think Harry Potter— Cheryl Klein say “Voice is like air. You can’t do without it but nobody can explain it well.” (Or something close to that--I paraphrase!). The Voice is like air part made me sit up and listen. She’s written more than I can share and spoken about it often. But if you’re interested, click here for a quick run-down of some of her thoughts on Voice in fiction.

 We Southerners might have an advantage when it comes to hearing characters. First off, we share a language filled with words that defy defining. Nobody has to lean on dialect or improperly spelled words to convey the rhythm and sound and flavor of Southern speech. In fact, I mostly hate when that happens, don’t you?

At her website at USADeepSouth.com, my writer friend Beth Jacks maintains an exhaustive list of words and phrases her readers tap into, comment on, and add to. Words long gone from contemporary speech most places. Corporosity and nary. Fixing to (wait, that one’s still in my vocabulary!). Swaney. A whole host of food items folks outside the South might not understand, including my own favorite road food: Nabs (No, that’s not somebody grabbing you.)

My own list of Southern Speak is endless, even after I’ve lived in the north most of my grown-up life. Words swirl around me like those Sunday dinner-time stories of my childhood.

When it came time for a character in my forthcoming novel for kids, set in Mississippi where I was “born and raised” to speak, and she said “Pure-D good” (try to get that one by a Yankee editor…) and doodlebugs and a lot of other things that sounded just right, I heard it so plainly her Voice just tumbled out.

I heard it because that’s all I knew growing up. But how do writers who’ve never lived in a place manage to nail the characters voices?

I asked my writer friend Kimberley Griffiths Little, whose second middle-grade novel,  set in the Louisiana Bayou country has just been published, how she did it. How she wrote so well of that place when she’s from the opposite side of the country.

  

Having an emotional core about a particular character or situation that is driving us to write that story will bring out the passion and natural voice that we possess. It’s easier to lose the self-consciousness writer within us when we are passionate about our topic… When I first visited Louisiana thirteen years ago, my heart pounded in a way it never had before. I instantly felt the power and the magic of the bayou/swamp country. I returned again and again, read everything I could get my hands on, visited every small town between Lafayette and Thibodeaux, museums, graveyards, old homes, researched at the State University, talked to folks in shops and restaurants and on the street, and ventured deep into the wilds.

I wrote with love and passion and authenticity... It took patience. But all good things do, and they are always worth it.

It’s tempting here to roll to the grand finale of this piece by saying something I hear in my head a lot. An English teacher of mine used to end almost every poem she read aloud to our class with “Truer words were never spoken.” She’d pause and look up to a ceiling glowing with fluorescent lights as if it were the Good Lord in heaven. If I ever create a character like that, I have her nailed. She’s in my head. Her short, punctuated sentences. Her eye rolls, her hand-over-ample-breasts sighs, her earrings—even her desk filled with books lined up in perfect rows. And her distinctive voice.

But I think Kimberley’s onto some true words. All good writing takes a lot of 

patience and hard work, among many other things. I imagine Kerry’s patiently turning over that Bug Man’s stories, listening to his voice in her head till he’s ready to spring forth on the page. 

 We all hear voices. With a capital V.

And for writers, that’s a good thing.

Truer words were never spoken.

  

AUGUSTA SCATTERGOOD reads and reviews books, works hard at perfecting her craft, and is eagerly anticipating the debut of her first middle-grade novel, GLORY BE, coming in January from Scholastic.

But right this minute, she's working hard at hearing voices.

Writing Like a Hummingbird

By Augusta Scattergood

The aging oscillating fan in my office has cried uncle, given up in the relentless heat. The fan no longer rotates. Like that fan, this summer I’ve spent a lot of time sitting very still.

On the day the temperature inside my house never got below 84 at my writing desk, I happened upon Nicole Seitz’s post about thinking.  

Nicole validated my quiet activity, or rather, inactivity. Sitting and thinking creatively is different from just sitting with your face in front of a fan. Different and oh-so-necessary for writers.

Sometimes, when I’m faced with deadlines, too many projects piling up on my desk, or when—like now— one big project is complete and another awaits judgment, I buy the most captivating notebook at the stationery store, find a comfortable chair, and I begin thinking and scribbling.

Then I open my favorite writing book.

Like many writers, I have an entire shelf of craft books. I refer to them when I’m stuck on a plot issue, pondering point-of-view, muddling around the middle. Sometimes.

But I mostly avoid books with “Inspiration” in the title. I’m not that great at writing prompts. I don’t enjoy books that push me hard out of my comfort zone while I'm in the thinking stage of writing.

My favorite book, THE POCKET MUSE, is different. Every time I open it, something new jumps off the page and into my notebook. Monica Wood’s book is subtitled “ideas and inspirations for writing.” Even with that subtitle, I love it. This is why.

It’s compact and solid. One terrific bookmaking job!

I often smile just holding  it.

A soothing shade of green—the only color in it or on it other than black and white—frames the outside and the inside.

More things pack the pages than you’ve never thought about. Photographs, author quotes, (fake) horoscopes, fonts- wonderful fonts!

So many good things that turn sitting into creative thinking before you can say “Where’s my iced tea?”

Today I’m thinking about hummingbirds, and not just because they are flitting and fighting over our feeder. Here’s what Monica Wood says about them:

During the first draft of anything I write…I find myself getting up and down continually, almost as if the work were too bright to look at directly. I used to consider this approach to the blank page a flaw in my character, but I have come to refer to it affectionately as the Hummingbird Method of Writing.

Hummingbirds approach flowers in much the way I approach a first draft: sip, draw back, sip draw back…

I also like hummingbirds because they hibernate. In hostile conditions they can enter a torpor, their breathing nearly indiscernible, their reactions either very slow or entirely lacking.

Another hummingbird fact writers can relate to: twenty percent of its body weight is heart.

I just love that.

I love so much of this little book.  I even love the prompts, like this one that took me right to the heart of one of my characters:

Write about the last time you got your wish.

Or this:

Imagine a coat. Imagine the pocket of that coat. Imagine what’s in the pocket.

I understand Southern writers of yore did a lot of pondering on their wide, blue-ceilinged, wrap-around porches, iced drinks in hand. As huge ceiling fans turned the hot air around, Mr. Faulkner, Miss O’Connor and their cronies cranked out a creative thought or two.

Sitting in a big chair, dipping into THE POCKET MUSE, watching my hummingbird flit—all while thinking quietly— will do just fine this summer.

Here’s a link to Monica Wood’s website, with a few of her writing prompts. And what a treat I discovered there- a second edition, in blue! 

And almost before I added the newer book to my wish list, a very thoughtful person bought it for me. 

(Note the stickie notes in my green book. I can’t bear to scribble in it, but I do put an occasional, tiny underlining or check mark.

As of now, the blue edition is pristine.)

Augusta Russel Scattergood spends her summers writing in the northeast where it’s supposed to be cooler than her home in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her first middle-grade novel, historical fiction set in 1964 Mississippi, GLORY BE, will be published in January, 2012, by Scholastic and is already available for pre-order.

Judging a Book By its Cover Info: Does a Title Sell the Book?

by Augusta Scattergood

This go-around’s topic is Advice to New Authors About How to Market a Book.

I’ll be reading these posts very carefully. That new author looking for advice would be me.

When my book comes out in one year, I’ll have memorized fellow middle-grade novelist Kerry Madden’s helpful post on the topic. (Thanks, Kerry, and I already have my bag of props ready!) And I’ll scour the internet, pick my writer friends’ brains, listen to my publisher’s publicity people—anything that helps my book get into the hand of young readers.

In the meantime, I’m working hard to make it the best written book I could possibly imagine. Many edits. Much research. But there’s one more thing I think I can do, very early on, to make my book stand out among the hundreds of debut novels hitting the shelves next year.

Although I suspect I’ll have minimal control over my book’s cover, I do have some say about the title. Right now. Since my editor didn’t love my working title—and true confessions, neither did I— we’re working on something new.

Sadly, I Stink at Titles.

I know a lot of tricks for choosing them, but I need much inspiration and lots of help from my friends. 

In fact, I’ve compiled a list of Ways to Choose Titles. The problem is, especially with kids or Young Adult books, these suggestions can become dated very fast.

But here are a few timeless, or perhaps timely, ideas for mulling over your book’s moniker. My abbreviated list:

1.     Ask a question

2.     Create a mood

3.     Combine opposites

4.     Pay attention to the sounds

5.     Tease your audience

6.     Put Google to work for you (Google movie quotes, top ten book lists, Best sellers, etc. Then play around with combinations.)

As I mull over my upcoming middle-grade novel's title, I’m thinking:

Does a preposition in the title help? Moon Over Manifest just won the Newbery Award. Can’t argue with that. 

How about using a character’s name? A dog’s name? As tricky as this title is, nobody ever forgets Because of Winn-Dixie.

I spent most of my library career at schools filled with excited readers. They traded favorite titles like the coolest silly bandz. Sometimes the exact words of a title eluded them, but if a student loved a book, she talked about it to her friends, spreading the word. And if the title was a zinger, they never forgot it, or the book. Nobody ever stumbled over Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade or Judy Blume’s Blubber. Kids loved asking for The Candymakers and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And why not? Great, appealing, kid-like titles.

Then again, one of my favorite recent books was When You Reach Me. And I cannot for the life of me be sure that’s the exact title. It just does not stick in my brain the way How to Steal a Dog does. And I’ve read When You Reach Me at least three times.

Consider poor Stieg Larsson. Ha. Not poor in the least. But also not so great at title-picking. As reported in a just-translated memoir by Kurdo Baksi, Stieg Larsson, My Friend, his working titles were the feeble The Witch Who Dreamt of a Can of Petrol and Matches and The Exploding Castle in the Air...

Ugh. Give me Girl With The Dragon Tattoo over those dogs of titles anytime.

And speaking of Dog Titles- Here’s a website that offers a different take on choosing titles.

I suspect book jacket art has more sway with purchasers, as do personal recommendations, love of the author, general chatter about a book-- not to mention glowing reviews. At least that’s my feeling about how kids (their parents and their librarians) choose books.

And, still,  I’m wondering, how much does a title influence a book’s sales? Do you gravitate toward a book because of the cover and particularly the title? What are your worst titles ever?  Your best?

Because I sure would like to nail this title thing. And I sure do stink at finding a great one.

 

Augusta Scattergood’s first middle grade novel, 
historical fiction set in 1964 Mississippi, 
will be published by Scholastic in Spring, 2012. 
It is, as yet, untitled.

Welcome Back!

 Fall always seems like a new beginning to me. It’s those years spent as a school librarian. New plan books on my immaculate desk. Books lined up, Dewey Decimal numbers in perfect order, outward facing on the very edges of the shelves. Not a missing encyclopedia, not a single computer crash, not a book returned with bubble gum attached to the last chapter.

Then the kids showed up.

To tell the truth, I liked the chaos of the kids a lot better. Oh I know, by week two, the books may have been a tad disarrayed. My prep period and lunch duty were certainly not what they seemed on those first pristine pages of the new plan book. But the kids were excited to see their friends, meet new teachers, read new books. How can you not love that?

That’s a little how I feel now. Excited to begin something new.

So it’s only appropriate that our fearless leader Kathy is greeting us at the front door, showing us off, asking her gang to introduce ourselves like eager third graders ready to please the new teacher.

Actually, I’ve been itching to re-introduce myself, patiently waiting for my classmates in this amazing Southern Authors blog to take their turns. Because this fall, if I had to write that What I Did This Summer essay thing, I’d have more to say than read a few beach books and discovered a great new Italian restaurant (though I did that, too).

If you don’t consider that prizewinning poem published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal when I was ten or my stint as editor of the Cleveland MS High School Newspaper, you might say I’m a late bloomer to the writing thing. For me, writing full time, all the time is a second career. Or a third or fourth if you count lifeguard, doctor’s office assistant, camp counselor, parent volunteer. (All fodder for a great writing life, as John Grisham said so articulately in this recent Labor Day essay: Each year from January through March I was at the State Capitol in Jackson, wasting serious time, but also listening to great storytellers. I took a lot of notes, not knowing why but feeling that, someday, those tales would come in handy.)

Yes, a few of my tales have also come in handy. Isn't that what our Past Lives are all about? Fodder for fiction? Now I write book reviews and the occasional personal essay, but my true love (no surprise!) is kids’ books. More specifically, what we in the business know as Middle Grade Fiction.

So why was this such a spectacular summer? After ten years of writing, rejections, classes, and critiques, I found an agent who loves my story as much as I do. After a few back and forth passes and a lot of help from my writing friends (Thank you, Leslie, Teddie, Sue, Melissa, Janet and Joyce), she took me on as a client. Within a week, my agent had an offer for my book. And now, the most amazing editor I could have imagined has bought my novel.

Although one of my writing buddies loves to say that ten years is about normal for an overnight success, that seems a long time to birth a book. But there’s a lesson here, one that I’ll bet every single writer on this blog understands: Keep Dreaming. Keep composing from those past lives. Surround yourselves with good books and good readers, whether you are eight years old or eighty. Imagine the most unlikely things. Write them down and work hard on revising. Because dreams, fueled with a lot of hard work, do eventually come true. 

Augusta Scattergood lives in Madison, New Jersey and St. Petersburg, Florida. Follow her blog at http://ascattergood.blogspot.com.

Her first middle grade novel is set in a town not unlike her hometown in the Mississippi Delta in 1964. But she made the whole thing up. Honest.

Who Moved My Stickie Note...

by Augusta Scattergood

When I first started writing with a serious intent to make something of it, I had a post-it note stuck on my computer. On it I’d printed four capital letters:
P L O T. Under the P, I wrote PLAN and under the L and O, I wrote LOTS and OF. The T was for TENSION. I’m not sure where I first found that acronym, but I saw it every day, every time I turned on my computer to check email or search for a recipe. Or to try to write a story.

I read it as I laboriously slogged my way through my first mid-grade novel. And while that manuscript searches for a publisher, I continue to hunt for my elusive plots.

I’ve since learned that not just fiction needs a plot. All sorts of non-fiction writing needs beginnings, middles and endings, not to mention some of that all-important tension to make its story worth listening to.

I grew up in a family of storytellers. Often the most interesting parts of their tales were the people (characters) and the places (setting). My grandmother and her Canasta partners talked about parties and church and who they’d run into at the corner grocery. My father told us about his fishing buddies on Lake Beulah and the pre-dawn coffee drinking group from the Chat ‘n Chew, a colorful bunch if there ever was one. So my head is filled with funny places and even funnier, more interesting and cleverly named people. My dancing teacher was once a Rockette. The bishop who ate Sunday dinner with us always wore Weejuns under his cassock. My great aunt Dorothy, who hailed from Boston, ate butter on her rice and might as well have spoken a foreign language.

Since I’d never been much farther than my Mississippi hometown, Memphis to the dentist, my grandmother’s house or the Gulf Coast for summer vacations, their stories were exotic and fascinating.

But the sagas told round the dinner table that had us on the edge of our seats actually had a beginning, a middle, an end. Rising tension and conflict, in addition to those fascinating, funny characters. And those are the stories I remember. Like the time my dad, who was a small-town country doctor, was called to a friend’s house out by the highway for an emergency. The emergency was that they’d found an injured fawn on their property. Since our little town had no veterinarian, he hustled on out, brought the fawn into his clinic and set her broken leg.

Certainly, that fawn story qualifies as PLOT. Lots of tension: The baby deer’s mother close by, watching carefully, the life or death nerve-wracking ride into town in the back of a pickup truck. All worthy parts that made us sit on the edge of our Sunday dinner table seats till we heard the happy ending.

My stickie note disappeared in a recent move. I was particularly fond of my neat block printing and the faded turquoise blue of the paper, not to mention its well-worn edges that showed it lived on the desk of a real writer. But even without the reminder, the phrase lingers. Stories are not just about fascinating characters and interesting places, great dialog and description. Something needs to happen. Get those characters fighting. Plan Lots of Tension.

Augusta Scattergood blogs about writing, book reviewing, and children's books over at http://ascattergood.blogspot.com. Her childhood dining room table was in Cleveland, Mississippi. She and her post-it notes now reside in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Madison, N.J.

Details, Details (or What Sno-Cones Have Taught Me About Writing)

By Augusta Scattergood

Photo credit: Scott Keeler, St. Petersburg Times


This season’s blog theme is What Writing Has Taught Me About Life. No, we don’t have to do the assignment. We can blog about anything that catches our fancy. After all, it’s not 8th grade math class. But I was always a bit of a teachers’ pet, even did the extra credit stuff. So I take these “voluntary” assignments seriously.

But not too seriously. So in honor of summer, I’ve turned my assignment around.

By the time I took to writing professionally, giving up another career to write, I had already learned a lot about life—and not from writing. So today I’m thinking instead about what life has taught me about writing.

Specifically, what eating Sno-cones teaches me about writing fiction.

Stay with me here. By studying Sno-cones carefully, I understand the importance of detail, the use of emotion, the seriousness of research, and the tricks to finding the perfect image in every word. And getting it right.

First off, is it Sno-cones or Snow Cones or Sno-balls? (Or some might make a case for Italian Ice, but if we are setting the story in the South, they would be dead wrong.)

In Mississippi, where I grew up, kids ate Sno-cones, spelled like that. And I didn’t think much about it. Then a couple from New Orleans opened a Sno-ball (spelled like that) stand a short drive from my Florida neighborhood. My transplanted Louisiana relatives were ecstatic. I was confused.

These Sno-balls looked like the summer treats of my childhood—the paper cups, squished to overflowing, that turned to soupy liquid when most of the ice is munched away. But then the proprietor of the Sno-ball stand asked if I wanted cream on top. Cream? On a Sno-cone? No, here they’re selling Sno-balls and sure, I’ll try the cream.

So right off the bat, Sno-cones have taught me the importance of research and fact checking, even in fiction. Not to mention spelling. Most of the time, you can’t fool your readers with mistaken details. Especially if the details are part of their history.

Now I’m working on a kids’ novel set in Florida, in the summer. Small-town Florida, a place where kids ride their bikes to the Sno-cone stand. Where they drip orange and purple all over their white shorts, just like my friend Eileen remembered when I asked around for Sno-cone stories.

Life— in the form of a frozen treat-- teaches me that memories are an important component of fiction.

Remembering in all five senses makes a scene come alive. The cold sticky colors dripping down an arm as we squeezed the paper cup. And white shorts, the worst thing to wear while slurping a Sno-cone. Watermelon and cherry and banana— whether the Sno-cone flavorings actually smell like the fruit they are named for, they taste that way and they evoke a scent. So I’m having my character eating a cherry Sno-cone, always my favorite.

Hot nights under the summer sky, Little League games at the park, the sound of the bell on the truck, the worry over the quarters—saved to pay for a lemon Sno-cone— that slipped through the pocket and are gone forever. Memories seep into stories and emerge as something else, another thing life has taught me about writing.

So I’m including a cold summer treat in my story, and I’ll get the details right. I’ll have to think about what to call it—a Sno-cone or a Sno-ball— but a few more trips to my new Sno-ball place, and I should have it all figured out.

Augusta Scattergood blogs about writing, book reviewing, and the occasional Southern food item over at http://ascattergood.blogspot.com. Her childhood Sno-cones were enjoyed in Cleveland, Mississippi. She now reads and writes from St. Petersburg, Florida, and Madison, N.J.