Professional empathy: writing and anthropology

January 9, 2014January 28, 2014beccakinla authors, how to write, writer, writing, writing process Tags: anthropologist, anthropology, convincing, culture, empathy, folklore, folktale, kurt vonnegut, laura resau, organizations, orson scott card, point of view, POV, saul bellow, society, sociology, theory of mind, worldbuilding 3 Comments

The incomparable Zora Neale Hurston

Earlier this week, Google celebrated the 125th birthday of Zora Neale Hurston. Best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching G-d (which has one of the most suspenseful and gut-wrenching scenes I’ve ever read), Hurston was also an trained anthropologist. Much of her non-fiction work consists of the retold folktales she uncovered during interviews in the deep south during the Great Depression.

Anthropologists as writers

This got me thinking about the whole issue of writers with training in anthropology. While I never actually “practiced anthropology” professionally, I have a Master’s in Applied Anthropology and feel that the reading, classwork, and fieldwork I did during my training has had a deep and lasting influence on my writing (and teaching and pretty much everything else I do, by the way).

Hurston and I are in good company. Continue reading →

Conducting interviews to bring realism to your fiction

December 13, 2013December 22, 2013beccakinla fiction, HaModia, how to write, preparing, publishing, research, stories Tags: anecdotes, binyan, Cuban Missile Crisis, detail, Duck and Cover, fiction, history, interview, interviews, learn, magazine, past, realism, rebecca klempner, research, short story, survey, tips, writer, writing 1 Comment

Radio and television connected Americans with the facts of the ongoing crisis, and also increased their anxiety about its dangers.

You’ll find my story “Duck and Cover” in this week’s Binyan. While I lived through the tail-end of the Cold War, I’m not old enough to have survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, the setting for my story. In order to get details about how teens reacted to the situation, I conducted brief email interviews of a number of subjects who were old enough to remember the events. I asked about their feelings, how they coped with them, how they heard about the crisis, how the adults around them (both parents and teachers) reacted, and so on.

How did I use the interviews?

The responses I received were fascinating, and often contradictory, Continue reading →

Writers don’t live on desert islands

October 30, 2013beccakinla advice, authors, family, finish that novel, how to write, mother, parenting, tafkid, women, writer, writing Tags: child, completing, desert island, father, finish, ill, interruptions, kid, mother, novel, parent, role, sick, work, work from home, writing, writing from home 4 Comments

A couple weeks ago, a writer I’m friendly with asked in passing if I’d finished revising my novel. I told her that I felt like the rewrite wouldn’t happen until I moved to a desert island. Until that point, there would be distractions: carpool, laundry, cooking, deadlines on other writing projects…and more carpool.

Moving to the desert island is no escape

It kinda got me down.

My writer friend suggested that I apply for a writing retreat. Not quite a desert island, but close enough. Continue reading →

My first foray into playwriting: lessons learned about writing and directing plays for kids

September 16, 2013September 16, 2013beccakinla advice, authors, children, children's books, how to write, humor, kids, publishing, spiel, stage, stories, students, teshuva, theater, writer, writing, yom kippur Tags: actor, actors and actresses, actress, adaptation, author, Bible, big fish, child, day school, directing, jewish, Jonah, kid, library, pint size, play, playwriting, production, reader's theater, rosh hashanah and yom kippur, school, stage, story of jonah, student, Tanach, theater, theatre, whale, writing, yeshiva, yom kippur, Yonah 1 Comment

As I mentioned last week in passing, I spent a good chunk of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur preparing a play for the kids at my synagogue. The topic: the story of Jonah, which is read during the afternoon of Yom Kippur.

Yonah waiting to see if Nineveh gets destroyed. He’s kinda hoping it does. How’s that for schadenfreude?

Now, I’ve always thought this story was packed with humor. I mean, G-d singles Jonah out for a little tete-a-tete and he hops on a boat headed in the opposite direction as the mission G-d sent him on? Then he sleeps through the ginormous storm that has everyone else aboard freaking out and get swallowed by a giant fish. Come on!

And when Jonah finally makes it to Nineveh, it gets even wackier. Continue reading →

Regional dialect in the U.S. – Pardon me for my nerdiness

June 11, 2013June 11, 2013beccakinla goofy, habit, how to write Tags: adult, dialect, dialogue, discover magazine, dweeb, geek, goof, grow up, joshua katz, linguistics, nerd, science, sociology, soda vs pop, speech, statistics, write, writing 2 Comments

“I’m sorry I laughed at you for calling the ginger ale, ‘Coke.'” “That’s alright, Mabel. I’ll forgive you if you pardon me for laughing when you called the spigot a ‘spicket.'”

Like most people who read and write SF and fantasy, I have a tendency towards nerdiness. I watched Star Trek loyally (until I ditched my TV at age 24). I read graphic novels. I watched foreign films as a teen and young adult and snubbed “Forrest Gump” and “Titanic.” And my idea of a fun day out could easily involve a museum, planetarium, or library.

Yes, I sat at the table with the nerds, geeks, and dweebs in high school. At least the social consequences of nerdiness drop drastically at some point during college.

One of the things I studied in college and graduate school happens to be sociolinguistics, and the topic still fills me with geeky glee, so when Discover Magazine directed readers to Joshua Katz’s work at NC State University, I had to give it a look-see. Continue reading →

Helpful tools to plot your story

May 28, 2013June 10, 2013beccakinla advice, how to write, writer, writing Tags: classic, familiar, help, how to, invent, plot, predictable, same, similar, story, theme, tools, trope, tv tropes, write, writing Leave a comment

“Excuse me, sir. Do you happen to remember that story where that guy dies and one of his sons thinks the other did the crime, but it turns out to be the mother instead?”

I was reading a post by Noelle Sterne on Writer’s Digest today where she describes “How to Prevent Predictable Plots.” She cites Georges Polti, who listed 36 classic plots which are constantly used and reused in literature and drama. (Sterne suggests that it’s inevitable you’ll use one of these basic plots, but that you can set yourself apart and introduce unpredictability through the details.)

Intrigued, I went to a description of these “dramatic situations.” Continue reading →

Rebecca Klempner

Author page of Rebecca Klempner

how to write