From time to time I like to share books I’ve found useful in some aspect of my writing. Today I’m sharing a mix of general reference works that have proven invaluable to one or more of my novels. Maybe they will help you, too. Here we go:

Do you need a description of a specific kind of house, say a 1910 stick house in upstate New York, or a folk cabin in the Tidewater South? Get a copy of A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia and Lee McAlester. I love this book. It has a pictorial guide to various features of houses such as doors, windows, spindle work, arches, dormers. It’s arranged chronologically, making it easy to use. It’s chock full of photos of various styles of American architecture from the 17th century to the present. Highly recommended.

If you’re writing about the Colonial era, take a look at Daniel Freeman Hawke’s concise paperback Everyday Life in Early America. Beginning with a chapter called Who Came and Why They Came, Hawke paints a realistic portrait of the early settlers and their lifestyle that debunks many myths surrounding the colonial era. He includes chapters on houses, farms, health, manners and morals, celebrations, travel, church meetings and more. I don’t write about this time period, but it has been useful background reading when developing “family trees” for my 19th century characters. And it’s plain old fun to read.

I’m  not sure whether JN  Hook’s 1991 reference book called All Those Wonderful Names is still available. but if you happen to locate a copy, I think you’ll find it useful in naming your characters and towns. He writes about fads in children’s  names, and offers insights into the names of real life people such as Mary Rhoda Duck and Dorothy May Grow. Entertaining as well as useful.

Louis A Berman’s Proverb Wit and Wisdom is another entertaining read that offers unusual and interesting quotes organized  alphabetically by subject. Say you need a quote about friendship. Berman offers several pages of possibilities ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare to Ogden Nash to quotes taken from old postcards.  I use this one quite a lot.

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is a more formal and more comprehensive guide to the most important things people have said about almost everything. I use this one often, especially when I need to quote or reference British English.

Last week, speaking at a writers meeting in Houston, I recommended William Brohaugh’s English through the Ages. This book allows you to look up a word and find out when it first came into popular usage. It’s invaluable for writers of historical fiction and has saved me more than once from using an anachronistic word.

Happy writing.

One of my favorite Southern writers, Reynolds Price, published a wonderful collection of essays a few years back called Feasting the Heart.  Don’t you love that title? It conjures all kinds of beautiful experiences, from watching the sun rise over the ocean, to hearing a child’s laugh, to sitting quietly with a treasured friend, to reading words so exquisite they make you cry. As writers, we can sometimes overload on character worksheets, plotting checklists, word lists and other such things in search of writing  a story that works. I’ve  published quite a few of them here at Writers’ Caffeine.  Just as important though, is the process of feasting your heart, filling it not with checklists but with words, emotions, experiences that you can draw upon later.

Several years ago I  was a faculty member at a writers’ workshop that included the U S Poet laureate, Ted Kooser. He is a delightful man whose words, fashioned into poems that celebrate the simplest of things–a flow blue plate, a burbling tea kettle, a rainy Midwestern morning, feast my heart and fill my writer’s imagination. Here is one of my favorites, from his book of poems, Delights and Shadows. It’s called  A Box of Pastels.

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box

in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.

It was a set of pastels that years before

belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,

and all of the colors she’d used in her work lay open before me. Those hues she’d most used,

the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,

while the cool colors–violet, ultramarine–

had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.

She’d had little patience with darkness, and her heart

held only a measure of shadow. I touched

the warm  dust of those colors, her tools,

and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.

Ted Kooser

Blessings on your week, friends. Take some time to feast your heart. Your work will be better for it.

Whether you call it the climax of the story or the “obligatory scene” as Albert Zuckerman does in his book Writing the  Blockbuster Novel, it’s the biggest scene in your novel, usually takes more space than the scenes leading up to it, and has the potential to make or break your story. So it’s worth the time to make it as strong as possible. Here are a few things to consider as you write your obligatory scene.

The beginning conflict  must match the final resolution. It  must point toward this final confrontation.  If it doesn’t, you must revise one or the other.

Usually this scene includes the major characters. Your hero should be the one to act in this moment, which Christopher Vogler, in his book, The Writers Journey, calls “Resurrection”–the point at which the main character is  reborn, changed as a result of his tests and trials.  One form of this final scene is the showdown, common in Westerns. Think about the final scenes in High Noon or Stagecoach.  Can you devise a form of a showdown between your main characters?

If a duel to the death does not fit your story, then a difficult choice that tests the hero’s values or tests his faith might work.  In the movie Witness,  Harrison Ford portrays  John Book, a policeman who comes to an  Amish community to investigate a murder. In the obligatory scene, he must choose whether to shoot it out with the corrupt police official, or put down his weapon and stand with the peaceful Amish. In It happened One Night, Clark Gable’s character  must choose which woman to wed. In Sophie’s Choice, Sophie must choose which of her children will die at the hands of the Nazis.

Another possibility is to write a quiet climax in which your protagonist experiences a strong wave of emotion, a sense of peace, acceptance or understanding resulting from a reality check. Nowhere is this shown more effectively than in the obligatory scene that closes out  the movie, The Prince of Tides.  The hero, Tom, married and with three children, goes to New York to “become the memory” of his sister  Savannah who has attempted suicide. As he talks to the therapist about their shared childhood, he reveals the secret he has been carrying for all of his adult life. He and the therapist, who is also married, fall in love.  But phone calls from his young daughters and the glaring difference between his life in the South Carolina low country and the glittering life of his New York therapist convince him that his place is with  his family. In the final shot, he is driving home, across a wide bridge ( a symbol of crossing from his new life back to the old), and accepting peacefully the choice he has made, even as he whispers her name, “as praise, as  a prayer: Lowenstein, Lowenstein. ”  Great storytelling.

Your obligatory scene should be emotionally powerful. Often it includes a revelation, as described above, a new meaning for old events, or a twist that surprises the reader.Whatever you choose, this scene must tie up loose ends, resolve conflicts, and have meaning beyond the obvious.

Make a list of three or four of your favorite books or movies. What is the beginning conflict? The final resolution?  Does the author or film maker achieve the resolution through a showdown, a test of  faith or values, a quiet “reckoning” scene? Something else?  Is the main character actively engaged in the resolution? Is the scene emotionally powerful? What makes it memorable?  Finally, how can you apply these techniques to your own writing?

I am way behind on my self-imposed blogging schedule. A  few weeks ago I took a tumble down the stairs here at home. No broken bones, but plenty of sore muscles and bruises. For a couple of days, even my hair hurt.  After many phone discussions with our dog boarders, my dogs had to be taken to the vet for unnecessary flu shots (another whole story don’t  get me started). The car was due for a 7500 mile service which required half a day of babysitting at the dealership. Our CPA sent the dreaded Yearly Tax Organizer which is still hanging fire,  on the agenda to get done this weekend.  Meantime I could hear the tick-tick-tick of my internal writer’s clock counting down toward my next deadline.

You know those needle-thin actresses who show up for awards shows in  dresses that cost more than the average family sedan,  and dripping in diamonds? I do not envy them. I envy writers who can go away somewhere, unplug from life’s impediments and just write the book.  Since this luxury has eluded me for the entire 20 years I’ve been writing and  publishing I’ve had to figure out a coping strategy. Maybe it will help you, too, when life impedes your writing. Here goes:

Set a more realistic writing schedule. When I plan a new book, I write my daily word count on my calendar. Some days I don’t quite make it, some days I exceed it, and some days I never make it to my office at all.  When life intervenes…recalculate.  Sometimes this means I may need to write for an extra hour early in the morning, or in the evenings, or steal a few hours on the weekends. Sometimes it means extending my self-imposed deadline farther out than I had originally hoped.

Do less initial editing and simply put words on the page. My usual habit is to begin each day by editing the previous day’s work. When I’m trying to catch up and get back on schedule, I skip the initial editing and plow on to the next chapter.

Don’t  stop to look up a research question. As an author of historical fiction, I find that the research can consume enormous amounts of time. I try to do most of my basic research before I being the first draft, but occasionally a question arises. I’ve learned to flag it in the ms and keep going.

Delegate whatever you can. I can imagine this is where children might be useful. Since I have none, I must ask my husband to stop on the way home for a gallon of milk, to help with the vacuuming, to take charge of the dogs while I work. I ask my web designer to take care of updating my website pages and handle hosting fee renewal and such.

Whatever can’t be delegated must be postponed. This explains why I have five year old spices in my pantry. I’ve long since given up on having a Martha Stewart-worthy house. So long as those spices don’t turn poisonous, who cares, really?

Do you have a favorite coping strategy that sees you though life’s impediments?