My Worldbuilding Secrets

Building a fictional world that's vibrant and intriguing is extremely important, no matter the genre, so this past week at Corsets, Cutlasses, and Candlesticks, Katherine Longshore (Gilt, Tarnish) and I shared our tips and tools for creating vivid, believable settings.

Here are the links to our posts:

Building a Believable Story World by Katherine Longshore

The Art of Worldbuilding by Cat Winters

If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments sections.

A Preview of the Dystopian/Apocalyptic Side of My Historical Novel

Level Two author Lenore Appelhans interviewed me at her website, Presenting Lenore, as part of her Dystopian August feature.

I'm sure you might be wondering why an author of a historical ghost tale was interviewed for a dystopian celebration. Instead of answering here, I'll send you over to the interview, where you'll learn about the dark, strange year of 1918, the setting for In the Shadow of Blackbirds:

http://presentinglenore.blogspot.de/2012/08/author-interview-cat-winters-previews.html

The Editorial Letter Stage... and How I Immersed Myself in the WWI Era While Revising

On March 23, 2012, my brilliant editor, Maggie Lehrman of Amulet Books/Abrams, sent me a seven-page letter detailing her suggestions for In the Shadow of Blackbirds. I was on vacation at the time, which was probably for the best. I tend to want to jump directly into revisions once I receive them, but a long car ride between northern Washington and Portland, Oregon, helped me process the changes and let ideas marinate.

Fast forward to May 8, 2012. My manuscript and I came to an agreement that we had spent enough time together during the past six-plus weeks. I was starting to fuss over minor word choices, which will be tackled during the next stage of revisions anyway. My major changes to characters, plot, and setting were done, and it was time to see what Maggie thought of the revisions. I sent her the book that afternoon.

I don't know yet what she thinks, but I can say I survived the editorial letter stage! It certainly wasn't the first major edit for this book, but it was the first time I revised the manuscript knowing the novel will actually be heading into the world for others to experience and judge. I honestly had a blast digging further into my characters' lives and expanding my fictional world, and I can't wait to share the book.

Here are some of the ways I immersed myself in my 1918 setting while I worked:

1. I Devoured WWI-Inspired Entertainment.
Just ask my husband, the nighttime TV viewing in my household turned a little WWI-centric during the past weeks. We started watching Season One of the 1920s-set HBO series Boardwalk Empire on DVD, and I was thrilled to discover that WWI veterans play key roles in the plot. Young gangster Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) turns to the dark side after fighting in the trenches of France, and lost soul Richard Harrow (John Huston) suffers severe facial injuries that cause him to come home from war wearing a chilling mask. I loved the plot points involving these two damaged anti-heroes.

Also on TV during my revisions: the BBC adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong. More life in the trenches for my husband and me.

 2. I Read Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider."

Not only did I pull out all my WWI nonfiction books during my edits, but I checked out a copy of Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" from my local library. During my research of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, Porter's name always came up as a famous sufferer of the deadly, life-altering illness that gripped the world in the fall of that year. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is an emotional, fictionalized account of Porter's experiences during the flu and the war, and I'm so glad I finally read her haunting passages.

3. I Repeatedly Listened to a 1960s Folk Song.
What? 1960s? Yes, I fast-forwarded several decades past my characters' time period for musical inspiration. In January of this year, I shared my In the Shadow of Blackbirds playlist over at The Lucky 13s, and one of the songs I discussed was Donovan's "Catch the Wind" from 1965. The lyrics perfectly epitomize my two main characters' struggle to be together while enduring the darkness of a troubled world. Each day after I'd drop off my kids at school before diving back into revisions, I'd play "Catch the Wind" in my car to get into the right mindset for deepening my characters' emotional connection.

Here's a taste of the song:



I also researched additional images from 1918 that I hadn't yet explored, but I'm not going to share any of those. Yet. In the Shadow of Blackbirds is slated to include early-twentieth-century photographs and artwork, so you'll just have to wait until the book debuts before seeing my pictorial inspiration.

On May 30 I'll offer tips for revising a novel over at The Lucky 13s.

How Food Can Convey a Character's Mood and Setting

If you're a writer and you've never thought too hard about what your characters eat, perhaps it's time for you to pull up a chair at your protagonist's dinner table. A character's food tells a wealth of information about who she is: the region of the world in which she lives, her time period, her financial status, her personal tastes, her health, her cultural background.

Moreover, how she eats can convey her mood and situation. Imagine a starving little boy in a war-torn world eating one of the tomatoes pictured in the photo above. How would his actions and attitude toward the food differ from those of a confident villain taking a bite in the comfort of his lair? What if a woman in a white wedding dress were approaching the drippy scarlet food? Or an explorer from the ancient frozen tundra who's never seen a tomato before in his life?

In reality, the tomatoes in the photograph were sitting in a bowl on my kitchen table, and my math teacher husband will more than likely be the one chomping into them. If you're writing a scene about a man hurriedly devouring his lunch in a teacher's lounge, the tomatoes will turn into something entirely different than the meal of a starving little boy or a confident villain.

This week at The Lucky 13s, our theme is "Dinner with our characters: What's on the menu in our books?" I'm offering a sneak peek at my protagonist's 1918 life by asking you to have a seat with her in her kitchen. As you'll learn from what's NOT on the menu, life wasn't easy in the fall of that particular year, and what you cooked back then could have saved your very life.

Here's my Lucky 13s post:

http://thelucky13s.blogspot.com/2012/02/whats-on-my-main-characters-menu-and.html

Speaking of food and writing, at the end of this week, I'm running a workshop for fifth to eighth graders at a career fair. If you're one of my students signed up for my sessions, keep this post in mind. We'll be using food to learn about sensory writing, and we'll explore different characters' approaches to a piece of seemingly ordinary piece of fruit. Don't come hungry. You may find your stomach growling.

My Novel's Time Period Is Showing Up in Movies and on TV...Tonight!

It's one thing to study a time period's look (i.e., the clothing, the hairstyles, the home furnishings, the lack of indoor plumbing!) by poring over pictures in books and reading about all the minute details. But to see your historical era of choice portrayed in a movie or on a TV series is especially satisfying. Observing the way a particular style of skirt moves when a woman walks or the way her complicated hair arrangement stays in place can be extremely helpful in imagining life for your historical character.

I happen to have chosen an era that occurred after the invention of movies, so I have the advantage of seeing people from 1918 in action. For example, here's a 50-second glimpse at women involved in the YWCA during WWI:



The film is a really short peek at 1918, but like I said, I can see a woman's hairstyle from all angles in this clip, and I can watch the way a female walks in WWI-era clothing.

Furthermore, I currently have the opportunity to watch two different WWI-set dramas made in modern times, both at my local theater and on my TV tonight: War Horse and Downton Abbey. The number of movies set during WWII is staggering, but it's usually really hard to find modern-made tales involving the first world war.

I saw War Horse last week (and sobbed like crazy), and tonight I'll be curling up on my couch, switching on PBS, and traveling to WWI-era Europe, paying attention to everything from the rumble of automobile engines to the way everyone's hats fit on their heads.

Sprucing Up the Place with Photos

Balboa Park, San Diego (Photo © Cat Winters)

In my last post I teased readers with a distorted photo of a San Diego landmark that plays a role in my novel. The building is part of the city's beautiful, historic Balboa Park, but that's all I'm going to say about that particular setting for now. How the locale relates to In the Shadow of Blackbirds will need to remain top secret.

I decided to build upon that last post and add a few more of my San Diego photos to the sidebar to spruce up the site. I've aged the pictures to try to make them appear to be straight from my novel, and I'm hoping they do the job of making the website a little more visually interesting. I'll be adding many more goodies once I can reveal more info about the plot, but for now I'll leave you with three aged photos that could have come from one of my characters' personal collections.

Winter Greetings from Winters

My mascot, Winifred, enjoying the holidays.

I'll be taking a break from blogging and the computer in general over the weekend. I hope the holidays find everyone happy, safe, and healthy.

Below is a virtual holiday greeting I created last year. I distorted one of my photographs of a San Diego landmark that appears in In the Shadow of Blackbirds to give the picture a supernatural feel. If you're familiar with that particular region of California, see if you can guess where it is.