The Alfred Owle Experience

Time for a little cross-blog promotion! Many of you know that I have been making jewelry and selling it on eBay and Etsy. I have a blog called Jewelry by Scotti. One of my latest pieces of homemade jewelry is the Alfred Owl Necklace (at left).

What does this have to do with writing? Prepare to be amazed (or bored or troubled).

"Alfred Owl" is a name that came from a distant time in my youth. My father took my brother and me to a professional baseball game in St. Louis. It was an exciting experience for us (we were fairly young, maybe ages 10 and 13?) We actually got to see Willie Mays play.

Anyway, all during the game, we kept hearing a vendor shout what sounded to us like: "Get your Alfred Owl buttons right here!" We kept looking at each other. Alfred Owl buttons? What's that? It became a joke between us. We never did find out what the vendor was really saying. There was no baseball player or anyone named Alfred Owl.

As a teenager, I wrote a long, very strange poem called "The Alfred Owle Experience." I am sharing it below. In those days, I just loved to play with words and plunk them down in the midst of things without worrying about how much sense they made together.

Many of my poems contained a "secret message." In this case, just take the first letter of the third word in each line (before you get to "All these are The Experience"). If you read the first letter of the third word in each line from top to bottom, you will see the message.

The Alfred Owle Experience

To be tangible -- in an imaginary, theoretical existence.
To be hollow -- where once there endured the pulsation of life.
To be eternal -- and part of an expansion that wavers but never runs its course.

To be wistful -- sighing at the futility of another endeavor.
To be obdurate -- belligerent in defense of total injustice.
To be romantic -- sentimental and genial, but only at twilight.
To be destined -- and yet without comprehension of a goal.

To be impoverished -- lacking even a sympathetic glance from an itinerant breeze.
To be sagacious -- aware of all eventualities except extinction.

To be loyal -- but betrayed by the subconscious dream.
To be obscure -- yet master of every indigo, emerald, amethyst, scarlet hue of the rainbow.
To be valiant -- even before the sedulous derision of acute grief.
To be enchanted -- possessed by a laughing leprechan of cognac.

All these are The Experience. The Now. The Creation.

But who

Is Alfred Owle?

Do you see the "secret message"? If you read the first letter of the third word in each line from top to bottom, you will see: the word is love. (This was the 1960s after all.)

Written Any Good Letters Lately?

I just finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. It's a marvelous book that beautifully blends the light and humorous with the dark and sobering. It's written in the form of letters being sent back and forth between the various characters in the novel. In this way, the author gives us various points of view and perspectives as we follow the story of Juliet, a writer from London who falls in love with the island of Guernsey and its inhabitants shortly after World War II.

Reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society made me want to write a novel made up of correspondence between characters. However, although it appears deceptively simple, the letter-writing format (like the diary format) can be difficult to execute well. I remember reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis way back in my youth and thinking I'd like to use that format for something. I ended up placing letters from a character periodically throughout a novel I was working on, but never actually finished that book.

Authors can have many different reasons for choosing the format their book takes. With my children's picture books, one key choice I have to make is whether to write the text in rhyme, blank-verse poetry, or prose. My first picture book, One Wolf Howls, basically wrote itself in rhyme. It flowed very naturally from the beginning.

My second picture book -- Big Cat, Little Kitty (Sylvan Dell Publishing, spring 2011) -- started out as blank-verse poetry. Editor Donna German liked it, but said she thought it might work better written in prose. I was willing to give that a try and quickly found out that she was right. The prose version evolved from the blank-verse stanzas I had written, and both Donna and I were very pleased with the result.

I am now working on a third picture book, and it *feels* like it needs to be in prose.

So -- fellow writers -- how and when do you decide what form your book will take? Have you tried writing a fictional diary or series of letters between characters? What other forms have you tried? Stream of consciousness perhaps?

What comes most naturally for you?

Which comes first: character or story?

Most writers would agree that the first thing you have to have in order to write a story or novel is an IDEA. Something or someone appears in your mind, requesting that you write about it or him or her. Personally, I find that my ideas are usually about a story line. For example: There's a house that's rumored to be haunted. The house looks like a duplex I used to live in.

This idea spawns a number of questions such as: Does anyone live there now? If so, who? Who is supposedly haunting the house? Where (in what city, country) is the house located? Who are the neighbors? Has anyone investigated the rumors? What happened?

From there, I would probably start to hone in on a particular character from whose point of view I think I might like to write -- for example, someone who lives in the house, someone who lives nextdoor, someone who investigates paranormal activity, the ghost him/herself, the house itself.

I usually don't start with a character, but I can see how that could happen. Perhaps in your mind there's a tall, gangly boy with straw-colored hair who is running away from home. From there, you would try to discover who he is, why he's running away, where he plans to go, and so forth.

So what usually comes first for you? A character who insists on your attention or a story that wants to be told?