Don’t know about you, but for the past couple of weeks I’ve been watching the Olympics.

And as I listened to the athletes who’ve won a medal talk to the press, I’ve been struck by a commonality in their comments. Along with the rewards that have come from the sacrifices, these people have made in their life, they universally thanked family, friends, and even sponsors for their support in helping them achieve their excellence and their dreams.

This got me thinking about support groups. The informal collection of family and friends that we can count on to offer us encouragement and consolation, strength and a handy shoulder to lean on among other things.

Not everyone is blessed with an ideal support system, but the comments of these athletes have taught me the importance of having a network.

The group of people—however diverse—who are in your corner is crucial when life hands out hard lessons. Along with the triumphs, the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver will also be remembered for two unexpected tragedies.

The first occurred just hours before the Games officially got underway, when the young Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed during a training run at Whistler.

Then, on Sunday January 21^st, Therese Rochette, the mother of Joannie Rochette, the Canadian medal hopeful in Women’s Figure Skating died suddenly of a heart attack after flying to Vancouver to watch her daughter compete.

Despite her personal grief, Joannie skated. She won a bronze medal and the admiration of a nation—and indeed the world for her courageous effort.

The Olympics is now over and life goes on—another lesson learned.

Please join me over at Danger Zone Authors today where I’m Defining Suspense

using in the television shows Stargate Universe and Glee.  

I confess! I confess! I’m a pack rat.

But every so often I look around my life and realize all that “stuff” I’m keeping is weighing me down.

With the Chinese New Year looming—on February 14^th we move into the Year of the

Tiger—I decided it was time to dig out my KISS Guide to Feng Shui and look for a remedy.

Even with the book, I’m no expert. But several years ago now I took a wonderful course (Feng Shui for Writers) from Bella Andre on this Chinese art of placement for my office. Feng Shui is all about change and using a Bagua map—(ba means eight, gua means area) of the eight separate areas corresponding to some part of my life around a central square—Bella discussed using the principles of Bagua to put our intentions to work.

Take a quick check yourself. Stand at the door of your office and mentally block out your room into a nine-square grid. Moving from left to right the far wall (and mine has a large window) consists of Wealth, Fame and Reputation and Relationships. The center section includes Health/Family, Foundation, and Creativity. Finally, the areas near the door include Wisdom, Career and Helpful People.

Upon studying the Bagua map, I immediately discovered that my entire office was NOT Feng Shui.

In Feng Shui the things we have around us anchor us. Thus “stuff” that still anchors us to our past, rather than our “now” or our plans and expectations for the future, keeps us in that past. De-cluttering one’s space is an important tenet of Feng Shui. The five elements (one of the building blocks of Feng Shui)—water, wood, fire, earth, and metal—continually interact with each other in four main cycles—production, destruction, reduction, and masking.

I called in “the mover” (guess who?) and totally rearranged the furniture and pictures around my room. In the process I also took a look at what I had in my office. Several bags of garbage and a couple of recycle bins later, I’d realigned my ch’i—energy.

When I next stepped into my office, I felt the change. That week I got the email that I’d sold another book!

So this past week, in addition to my writing, I’ve been spending an hour a day down in the basement digging through my past and, for the most part, throwing it out. The recycle bin is now packed with paper. “Stuff” I once thought was important but now realize, “how important can it be if I’ve stacked it in a cupboard or shoved it in a box and haven’t looked at it for years?”

It’s been a liberating experience.

Those university papers (and I won’t even mention how old they are!) represent an important part of my life. I loved my time in the hallowed halls of academia. But I’ve had a lot of other life experiences since then that have been equally memorable. And as I sat thumbing through those papers, I realized I have definitely moved on from the needs that compelled me to keep them as an attachment to that time in my life.

Happy New Year—and here’s to a realignment of the energy behind your life!

Promotion doesn’t start once a book is published. Or even when you have a release date.

Promotion—one of the 4P’s of Marketing—can be defined as the communication between buyer and seller.

For writers, then, Promotion needs to start the moment you begin to turn that germ of an idea into a story. Why? Quite simply, unless you can clearly and concisely communicate your story idea to an agent or editor, you aren’t going to sell it.

Interested in quantifying your plot and qualifying your characters? Join me the first week of February over at Passionate Ink for an intensive look at Power Promotion.

Speaking of promotion—fellow Canadian Tracey Tressa has started a nifty little website full of writing resources called Creative-Writing-Help.com.

Drop in to check out my Author Interview.

Happy New Year Everyone! I’m working on some exciting new articles for this coming year, but today, here’s a reprint of a popular article I wrote a few years ago:

Opening Scene: Will: “… In my opinion all men are islands. And what’s more, now is the time to be one. This is an island age.”

Closing Scene: Will: “Every man is an island. I stand by that. But, clearly, some men are part of island chains. Below the surface of the ocean they’re actually connected.”

Anyone who has seen the film, About a Boy (2002), will recognize how these two statements chart Will’s growth of character from the first scene alone in his home to the final scene in the same home surrounded by people who have now become an integral part of his life.

But, what drives Will (Hugh Grant) to abandon his lone island existence and form an attachment to an island chain?

In one sense Will answers this question himself when he says at the beginning of the movie, “the sad fact is that, like any island dweller, from time to time I had to visit the mainland.”

Will’s interaction with people during these forays to the ‘mainland’ result, as human experience does, in knowledge. We learn, as the characters in our books do, about ourselves and each other, and these experiences shape future action.

Experiential Learning views learning as a process “whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.” (Kolb, p.38) This process, divided into four major learning styles, is cyclical in nature and displays different strengths, which “resembles the natural learning progression-from the Why? to the What? the How? and then finally the If?” (Teaching & Learning Styles, p. 40) Although each quadrant in the model describes a learning style, proponents of experiential learning tout the “sequence of learning [the] model encompasses.” (McCarthy, 47) In other words, although we may prefer one style over the others, all of us gain knowledge by moving “through this progression [of] four major ingredients.” (McCarthy, p. 47)

Check out the Experiential Learning Model: The North/South axis describes how we perceive while the East/West axis describes how we process information. (McCarthy)(Kolb)

Concrete Experience: Emphasizes sensing/feeling to thinking; involved, often in a personal way, in experiences, good at relating to others.

Reflective Observation: Emphasizes watching, understanding and reflection versus practical application and action; impartial observation to understand meaning of ideas.

Abstract Conceptualization: Emphasizes thinking to feeling; focus on logic, concepts and theories, good at systematic planning.

Active Experimentation: Emphasizes doing and practical application versus observing; seeks to actively change situation and influence people, good at accomplishing tasks.

                                                                                                            (Kolb, p. 68-69)

By applying this sequential model of learning to Will in About a Boy, we can chart his growth of character.

First, like novels, where introspection serves to give the reader insider information on a character’s thoughts and feelings, About a Boy uses voice overs by Will and another main character, Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), to achieve the same effect. These voice overs replicate the reflection/observation ingredient necessary to track each character’s movement through the learning process.

For example, it is during Will’s blind date, a concrete experience, with Angie that he tells us in voice over his realization that single moms could form a new and untapped source of ‘no-strings-attached’ dates. However, before Will can put his observation into practical application, he needs to find a source of single mothers. His brief abstract conceptualization stage results in the discovery of SPAT, Single Parents Alone Together, which he joins under false pretenses, inventing a two-year-old son of his own.

However, on his first foray into active experimentation, a date with single mom Suzie, her child and a friend’s son, Marcus, his visions of a pleasant afternoon are brought to an abrupt end when they find Marcus’s mother, Fiona (Toni Collette), unconscious after a suicide attempt.

This concrete experience doesn’t significantly change Will’s view of his life, only his interest in the single mom scene: “The thing is, a person’s life is like a TV show. I was the star of the Will Show and The Will Show was not an ensemble drama. … If Marcus’s mom couldn’t manage her own show, if her ratings were falling, it was sad, but that was her problem. Ultimately, the whole single mom plot-line was a bit complicated for me.”

Marcus, however, has other ideas: “Suddenly I realized, two people isn’t enough. You need a backup.”  Not surprisingly,  Marcus chooses Will as his preferred backup person, despite Will’s insistence that: “I didn’t mean anything, about anything, to anyone. And I knew that guaranteed me a long, depression free life.” Will’s apathy about life in general works against him as Marcus keeps battering him with concrete experience after concrete experience during his visits to Will’s home.

It isn’t until Fiona confronts Will in a restaurant over her son’s clandestine visits to Will’s house in the afternoons, that Will comes face to face with the fact that his life has changed.

Will: “But I’m on my own. It’s just me. I’m not putting myself first because there’s nobody else.”

Fiona: “Yes, yes there is. There’s Marcus. You’re involved now. He keeps coming around your bloody house. … You can’t just shut him out. You can’t shut life out. No man is an island.”

In other words, without his realizing it, the ‘mainland’ has attached itself to Will. As a result, Will is thrust into another active experiment, Christmas with Fiona and Marcus, during which he is forced to reflect that: “…I had a strange feeling I was enjoying myself. I’d never really enjoyed Christmas before. … But, Christmas at Marcus’s, well, I’m ashamed to say it gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.”

So, has Will really learned anything from this cycle of experience?

On New Year’s Eve he meets another single mother, Rachel(Rachel Weisz). He quickly realizes: “… she was interesting and smart and attractive and for about five minutes I had her convinced that I was too.” Faced with the gut instinct that because: “… I didn’t do anything … in about thirty seconds she would know and she’d be gone like a shot,” Will takes advantage of her misconception and pretends that Marcus is his son. This time, however, his abstract conception of the situation is vastly different from his previous concrete experience: “… I was in fantasy land again, but this it time was different. SPAT was for fun. This was serious. I acted in self-defense.”

On the surface it appears that Will’s experiences haven’t resulted in much new knowledge. When push came to shove, Will reverted to his old learning style-inventing a child to date a woman. But this time two aspects of the situation, which Will hadn’t factored in to his ‘fall-back strategy’, have changed. First, Marcus, who is now interested in a girl at school, exerts moral pressure on Will to ‘come clean’. Marcus’s honest view of what he wants out of a relationship, and Will’s own admission about the seriousness of his interest in Rachel lead Will to the following, rather startling, abstract conclusion: “Yes, I wanted to touch Rachel. But at this moment, if I had the choice, I’d settle for the less and the more that Marcus wanted.”

Foraging ahead into another round of active experimentation, Will tells Rachel the truth with, not surprisingly, disastrous results. At this point, Will’s spin around the learning cycle stalls, so much so that he’s incapable of offering any help or guidance to Marcus who is worried about his mother. As Will tells Marcus: “This isn’t my problem. I’m not your uncle, I’m not your big brother, and I think we’ve established pretty firmly that I’m not your father either, am I?”

This stall is critical to writers because, whether we like it or not, we exist in a world filled with experiential stimuli, but at the same time, we resist change. Especially intimate, personal change that requires us to interact (process and perceive) the world differently. And those who don’t learn are doomed to repeat an endless, futile cycle.

This dichotomy of human nature is the real ‘black moment’ in our character’s journey

through their story. It epitomizes the internal struggle of our characters, the forked road, the

defining choice our characters must make about themselves and how they will deal with the

world around them.

In Will’s case the choice is deceptively simple. Remain an island, or forge an underwater chain with the mainland. Fortunately, Will is capable of change. He has learned something, though, as is often the case, not quite what he expected to learn. As Will reflects: “… there was only one thing that meant something to me. Marcus. … and Fiona was the only thing that meant something to him and she was about to fall off the edge.”

Because we, as fellow human beings, so readily understand this dichotomy, Will’s risk in going out to help Marcus, and the risks our characters take, become our risks. We identify with them, we fear the potential failure, and exalt in the personal triumph that comes with forging a new personal world concept.

Applying the Experiential Learning Cycle to About a Boy, is not an exact science. It is an exercise designed to understand the experiential cycle by which we, and our characters, function within the world around us and learn new behavior. It is a method by which we can, more accurately, chart character growth. We can illustrate the slide back to comfortable learning styles and the challenges that come with changing perceptions.

References:

Kolb, David A. Experiential Learning. Prentice Hall, 1984.

McCarthy, Bernice. The 4Mat System. Excel, 1980.

Huff, Patricia et. al. Teaching and Learning Styles. OSSTF, 1986.

© Robin E. Matheson

[First Published in romantics, the monthly newsletter of the Toronto Romance Writers, Volume 17, Issue 5, May 2003.]

Wishing everyone a healthy and happy holiday—I’ll be back blogging in 2010.

Join me over at Danger Zone Authors today where I debate which movie version of the Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol to watch this year.

Before those of you who read my last post about handling Rejection wonder…today is all about the opposite.

It’s been a bumpy journey, but I’m pleased to announce that story #3 in the Heartbreak Anonymous series about second chances at love has been picked up by Ellora’s Cave.

Getting It All features Celeste—the kid sister of Zach Richards, one of the two hunky heroes from Gay Paris. In a modern take on Cinderella, I send Celeste off to a high school reunion Gala and into the arms of her nemesis.

Stay tuned for more news in the New Year.

I was reminded of the ways and wisdom of handling rejection in a recent episode of one of my favorite TV shows—Being Erica.

The show follows the life of Erica Strange (Erin Karpluk) who, with the help of her unusual therapist Dr. Tom (Michael Riley), relives regrets from her past to help her move forward in the present. In the present, Erica works as a junior editor for River Rock Publishing and in Episode 11 (Season 2) title, “What Comes Up Must Come Down,” the launch of Erica’s latest title The None receives terrible reviews. One thing leads to another and Erica is fired!

As Erica learns the value of setbacks, different people in her life offer insights—

Julianne, her boss: “IF the book sells, no one’s going to remember the reviews.” And, “Don’t dwell…cry in the bathroom and move on.”

Seth Newman (an author who’s just had his manuscript rejected by one of Erica’s colleagues): “By number 9 you almost stop thinking about it.”

Ethan, her live-in boyfriend: “The best thing you can do is just get right back into the game.”

Mr. Galvin, the CEO of River Rock Publishing (when Erica, now reliving a past regret comes to him with a book): “Be what you are. …Write what you know. That’s the best advice that I can give you.”

Erica’s mother: “When you hit a bump, you pick yourself up and you keep going.”

In the end, Erica’s reflections on her experiences sum it up nicely: “All those hard years, all that struggle to find my way. It made me different. It made me better.”

As another year draws to an end, here’s to the struggle, the being different, and being better for it!

“If self is all I ever thought of, I’d be where he was—gone.”

                                                Tom Wingfield, The Glass Menagerie

A writer presents a story through a protagonist’s perceptual filter—a point-of-view. A deeper understanding of that character’s core belief system offers insight into masks she might “wear” to protect her self-image—clues to the emotional reactions that character would have when her core beliefs are challenged.

But just because a writer chooses to tell her story through the point-of-view of a particular character, doesn’t mean she is restricted by that character’s limitations. Like real people, characters often reveal things about themselves that they may not intend or be aware of, but that the reader is able to discern.

How does a writer do this?—by drawing on Self Concept Theory, which includes the Looking Glass Self discussed in Part 3 as one of the 4 interacting components, explains how a character forms ideas and feelings about herself using both personal and societal “norms” as criteria.

The 4 interacting components of Self Concept are:

Real Self = the “objective” or “actual” self. This Real Self may be something far more complex than the “face” shown to the world because it includes aspects of an individual that are not known to people around her or even to herself.

Self Image = the “subjective” self. In other words, how we see ourselves.

Ideal Self = the “fantasy” self. How we wish we were or what we aspire to be.

Looking Glass Self = the “social” self. How we think other people see us. Of course, we aren’t always aware of what other people really think of us!

The following scene from The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, in which Tom informs his mother Amanda that they are to have a gentleman caller, is an excellent example of the complexity of Self-Concept Theory. In Williams’s play, the ideal of Amanda’s past, with her 17 gentleman callers of Amanda’s past is juxtaposed with the reality of her daughter Laura’s potential gentleman caller—Jim.

© Robin Matheson