My wife takes our two dogs running almost every morning. I stay in bed because her version of running is the “all pain, no gain” variety—it involves neither a court nor a basketball. This routine didn’t affect my life until The-Morning-Which-Will-Not-Be-Named.
Skunk: 1. Dogs: 0.
Fortunately, there are writing-based insights to be gained from a pair of odoriferous mutts. Here are three lessons I’ve learned about dogs, skunks, and writing:
1) Finding writing time is like bathing a skunked dog. You can always come up with something to do that seems more pressing. There are bills to pay, emails to answer, papers to grade. You can dart and dodge and distract. But the dog still stinks. And the story still needs written. Eventually, you have to push aside your excuses and just write. You also have to bathe the stinking dog.
2) A single approach is rarely enough to solve the problem. Tomato juice. Dish soap. Baking soda. There are multiple methods for cutting the odor of a skunk-sprayed pooch. But to really deal with the problem, you’ll probably have to put more than just one of those methods to use. Similarly, when you run into a problem with your writing—a scene that drags, a middle that droops—don’t lock onto a single solution. Read your work aloud. Take a walk. Seek a critique. Step away from your computer and put pencil to paper. Take as many different approaches as needed to get your writing humming again. And maybe give the dog one more scrubbing, too.
3) Rainy days bring reminders. The odor fades. You find yourself forgetting your dog ever had a run-in with a skunk’s backside. Then it rains. Wet dog fur releases latent skunk scent in an exceptionally memorable way. And just like the rainy setting affects the potency of skunky dog fur, a story’s setting should affect the plot. The Harry Potter series wouldn’t be the same without the quirks of Hogwarts. The Hunger Games wouldn’t be the same without the districts. Setting should be more than a simple, silent backdrop. Make it matter.
And there you have it—the three writing lessons I learned from two dogs and one skunk. If you have another insight or writing tip to share, feel free to post it in the comments below. And even if you didn’t learn anything new about writing from today’s post . . . well . . . I hope you at least learned to stay away from skunks.
The Ethan I Was Before by Ali Standish – In the opening chapters of this first-person novel, the atmosphere is heavy and uncomfortable, much like the oppressive heat in Ethan’s new town of Palm Knot, Georgia. As a twelve-year-old boy terribly conflicted over the loss of his best friend, his narration has few lengthy descriptive passages. But Standish provides all the right details through environment, weather, temperature, and observations about this sleepy locale (a rusty parked truck, an untended baseball field, a cracked highway, a murky bay) that readers need in order to feel like they’ve stepped into its atmosphere.
Last Day on Mars by Kevin Emerson – This middle grade science fiction offers up opening chapters with a crisp, tense, nervy atmosphere in which the conflict increases at an alarm-inducing pace. Set in Earth Year 2213, humans living in a Martian colony must evacuate the planet and its rapidly deteriorating conditions. A prelude serves up danger and emotion before delivering a fearful and mysterious clue; here, descriptions are futuristically foreign, yet technologically familiar enough to pull readers in. The main characters resist an acknowledgement of the danger throughout the first chapter, which only serves to increase the suspense. As a solar radiation storm begins to flare, protagonists Phoebe and Liam start a quest of discovery in an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion.
A Single Stone by Meg McKinlay — This middle grade dystopian abounds with atmosphere from the first paragraph. Young protagonist Jena has a crucial job to perform for her isolated society—she is the leader of a small team of girls who must find harvests of mica inside the mountain. In the opening pages, Jena is crawling through a narrow, natural crevice with only a thin rope connecting her to the six other girls who follow her lead. In the dark, with the chilly rock of the mountain hugging her close on all sides, every movement and every touch seems amplified and intense; the reader immediately feels as if she too is crawling, squirming, wishing for a harvest spot, counting on having enough air to keep going. The dark, the mountain, even the bones Jena happens to grasp accidentally all work to establish a tangible, claustrophobic opening atmosphere—though, paradoxically, Jena seems to feel no such confinement.