The Sounding Board

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My bedtime reading for the past few nights has been Lawrence Block's Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print. I don't read a lot of writing guides, but I've always liked Block's for their humour and practical view of the craft, and it's rare that I don't find some statement that resonates strongly while reading him.

Last night the comment that struck me was tucked in his chapter about what to do when your story stalled, and among other suggestions Block wrote that it sometimes helped to talk that part of the book through with somebody.

"Not every friend will do for this process," he warned, "and you have to experiment to determine which of your acquaintances serves you best as a sounding board. Some people—well-meaning, certainly, and often creative themselves—serve only to stifle your imagination. Others prove enormously helpful, perhaps because they're capable of listening so attentively. The person you select may be an agent or an editor. It may as easily be someone unconnected with the business, someone who doesn't even read much. You can try different people to see who does you some good..."

The reason this piece of advice struck me is that I realized I do it a lot—all the time, to be honest. My mother's my sounding board.

We talk at least once a day on the phone, and whenever I'm trying to work out a kink in the plot, or decide what my characters ought to do next, I will often discover the answer by talking it through with my mother. Or to be more accurate, by talking to my mother, since she doesn't actually have to be saying anything back to me at the time of this discovery (and to be perfectly fair, when I'm talking on the phone, it's hard for anyone to get a word in edgewise to begin with).

The conversation usually goes something like this:

ME: So the characters are heading to the airport.
MOM: Oh, yes? That's nice.
ME: Unless...unless they stop and see her grandfather...
MOM: Uh-huh.
ME: Yes, they could stop and see her grandfather, and maybe he could give her something...maybe...
MOM: (Respectful pause)
ME: ...a book. Hang on now, what if she's already phoned him ahead of time, asking if he could loan her the book, and then they could stop on the way to the airport, and while they're there I could sort of bring out the complications of how they get along with each other, and then he could give her the book, and if it had maps and old photographs in it then it might come in useful to them later on.
MOM: Uh-huh.
ME: And maybe the reason he doesn't mind giving her the book is that he never really wanted it in the first place, because he doesn't want to be reminded of where he came from, and maybe it was a gift from her father...

And on and on it goes, until I've got a whole new scene I never knew that I was going to need, complete with new thematic threads and everything.

This only works, for some reason, when I'm talking to my mother. No one else provides quite the same kind of a sounding board (much to my father's dismay, since I usually phone while they're washing the dishes and he has to finish up all by himself while my mother sits off to the side saying "Uh-huh" for half an hour...)

I'm not sure why this is, or how the whole process works, in all honesty, but reading Lawrence Block's book last night started me thinking, and wondering...

Anyone else have a sounding board?

(Sorry I'm late with this post, by the way—it's been crazy at my house this week. Come back Thursday for Julie's next post).