Tag Archives: Space

Space: Richard Peck

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, , ,

Richard Peck, the man, the legend, gave a wonderful deep dive into writing for a younger audience. It’s an SCBWI DVD and if you can find a copy, I highly recommend picking it up. And investing in a DVD player.

One line jumped out at me; I even wrote it down in my commonplace book*. He said that for a younger person to go on a journey of growth, they need to leave the world of the familiar behind.

Ever wondered why so many protagonists were “friendless” or “orphans”? Once divorced from the familiar, all the comforting coping mechanisms evaporate. The ability to tap out from the struggle is gone. The only way to the end is through, and in going through all the story troubles, the character emerges as a changed person.

You don’t need to use friendless or orphan as a crutch.

Take Disney’s Princess and the Frog. Tiana has a mother, and a best friend, who has a very rich father. She even interacts with her best friend while going through her story problem. However, the bulk of her journey takes place with a stranger, and as she meets helper strangers, allowing her the space from her comfort zone to stretch and grow.

In Jumanji (the remake), once best friends, and two also-detention serving kids get transported to the world of Jumanji. Even though the boys are best friends, they have grown apart which gives them the space to reconnect and understand each other at the end of their character growth arcs.

There are plenty of options to artificially separate a protagonist from their comfort zone: send them to their estranged grandparents, move in with divorced parent who has remarried, move to new town, new school, summer camp, lost in the woods, lost in the desert, lost in general, lost with estranged friends, lost with new potential friends, amnesia (be prepared to show your work), kill a parent, kill a sibling, kill a best friend, hospitalization, long lost best friend, long lost parent, deep dark family secret that makes the familiar world newly strange.

These are a small smattering of ways to remove comfort prior to the opening of the story. There’s probably, at rough estimation, a billion more ways. Torment your character with wild abandon.

*A commonplace book is a notebook where you write down your impressions of things you’ve read or interacted with, to spark your memory later. I use mine for reflecting on business books, writing books, seminars, story ideas, travel impressions, whatever I want. There are no rules.

Space: The Joy Luck Club

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , ,

I read The Joy Luck Club for pleasure, before it was assigned for pain. I mean, technically, my English teacher assigned it as summer reading and I chose the work because I’d already read it, but there is some kind of evolution that happens to a work you have read before and now MUST read.


Amy Tan’s multi-voiced novel is similar to a mosaic novel and not much like one at all. For one thing, the framing device is much of the story, for another, I didn’t know the category existed when I was twelve. Thus, the novel exists in the same space as a favored, half-forgotten childhood memory. Condensed, dreamlike, and witnessed as a passer-by rather than a participant. That is not to say that her protagonists and supporting characters are no longer intimately familiar, just that my first reading has taken place so long ago that I can no longer tell you what exactly happens or exactly how I felt at any one point in the book. I can only look back, and, without truly understanding who I was then, think of green spaces and angry children and unrelenting parents. Somewhere in there is a great joy. I have also tangled the book I knew first with the second time I knew it, reluctantly, and the movie we also had to watch, and a couple of quizzes that I absolutely loathed.


What I meant to say was that Tan’s stories within the book occupy the same time and space as one another, though they are lived generations apart. Her flashback style feels similar to approaching someone you know but can’t remember why, and then in reaching out to shake their hand, you are struck with the memory of the first meeting and that first smile. Thus there is this smile with two layers, one buoyed with the joy of seeing someone again and one of self-congratulations of that knowing epiphany right before your hands connect.


Someone will read your story. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your future self and all your audience. When you close the book, and you exhale that story world for the final time, what space will the story inhabit in your memory? The length of a bus ride? The length of one awful revelation (Memento)? The length of a dream – within a dream – within a dream (Inception)? Or a tremendous life-changing journey to a parallel world and the universe shaking revelation that physics is actually quite fun (Diane Duane’s So You Want To Be A Wizard)*?

*I had a deep-seated, frothing hatred of science in general until this book. Just, in general. Even the word made me twitch. Full disclosure, I am now a scientist. Reading: the gateway drug.