{"id":3981,"date":"2011-09-10T08:13:50","date_gmt":"2011-09-10T12:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.synchrosecrets.com\/synchrosecrets\/?p=3981"},"modified":"2011-10-27T16:31:44","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T20:31:44","slug":"magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themysticalunderground.com\/?p=3981","title":{"rendered":"Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>from Jung’s Red Book<\/p>\n

++<\/p>\n

While Rob and Megan were in Minneapolis visiting his family, Nancy Pickard<\/a> flew in for a visit from Kansas. Yes, it\u2019s like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz dropping by, except that the lions and scarecrows and tin men on this visit aren\u2019t separate beings. They are us.<\/p>\n

I met Nancy in 1985, I think it was, at the first book signing I ever did, for my first novel. She was two novels ahead of me. She and her former husband used to spend part of their winters in Fort Lauderdale, where we lived at the time, so we saw each other frequently. Over the years, we moved, Megan was born, she got divorced, and we both kept on writing. When we got together, our discussions were always bottom line \u2013 metaphysics, the hows and whys of writing, and usually, a bunch of synchronicities.\u00a0 This visit was no different.<\/p>\n

The synchros started when we went to the dog park. The only other human of our usual dog group at the park today was Colleen, who lived in Kansas for two years. Nancy knew the town, questioned Colleen about it, and Colleen talked at great length about how much fun she\u2019d had there, how great this town was after where she had lived in Michigan. As we were leaving the park, Nancy murmured, \u201cSynchronicity!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cReally? How?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat town? It\u2019s where my next novel is located.\u00a0 It\u2019s a nothing little\u00a0 town in southern Kansas and the way she described it explained exactly what I need to know for this book.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are the odds?<\/p>\n

Later that evening, we went up to a favorite coffee spot that was celebrating its first anniversary with free food. Nancy was telling me about the week she spent at Antioch College, teaching at a writers\u2019 workshop. Her focus was first paragraphs and first pages in novels and she used classics as her examples. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dickens. In each instance, the first paragraph or first page encompassed absolutes or contrasts that used words like first, last, best, worst, alive, dead\u2026well, you get the idea.<\/p>\n

And I suddenly realized that I although I had set up the absolutes\/contrasts in the novel I\u2019m working on, the third in the Esperanza series, I didn\u2019t address it in the first graph or first page. And with that realization, I suddenly knew who my protagonist should be. I suddenly knew whose story this is. This point of view thing in a novel is so critical to how the story unfolds that unless you have it right from the get go, the book won\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Think of Harry Potter. It has one perspective through all the books \u2013 Harry. We get to know the other characters, but it\u2019s his<\/em> story.<\/p>\n

The Hunger Games<\/em>, Suzanne Collins\u2019 brilliant trilogy, sticks to one perspective \u2013 that of Katniss, the female protagonist, and the stakes in this story are life or death.<\/p>\n

In The Great Gatsby<\/em>, probably F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s best novel,\u00a0 all the decadence and strangeness of the jazz age of the 1920s is captured through the eyes of Gatsby himself in the opening paragraphs.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t take my word for it. Do what Nancy and I did. Start pulling your favorite novels off the shelves. Read the first paragraph or the first page. What are the stakes? The contrasts? The absolutes? Which words are used?<\/p>\n

A novel, of course, is more than just an opening paragraph or first page. The author has to carry the idea and the characters through to the end. And the ending is just as important as the beginning.\u00a0 It\u2019s probably why author Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird) used to write his endings first.<\/p>\n

When Nancy finished her teaching at Antioch, she got a standing ovation, the first time that had ever happened in the history of this particular writers\u2019 workshop. \u201cOne of those magical moments,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Ha, I thought.\u00a0 It\u2019s because she left-brained something that all novelists should keep in mind: give the browser who picks up your book a reason to buy it. Give them magic.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from Jung’s Red Book ++ While Rob and Megan were in Minneapolis visiting his family, Nancy Pickard flew in for a visit from Kansas. 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