Episode 113 - What Authors Can Learn from Theater with L.E. DeLano
January 4, 2022
Author L.E. DeLano talks about WHAT AUTHORS CAN LEARN FROM THEATER, including how her theater experience helped her as an introvert in both her writing craft and her publishing voyage … the exercise of “losing the dialogue and finding the beats,” including the importance of the quiet moment … the idea of “acting beyond the mask” as a way of exploring what secrets your characters are keeping … and how you can use editors and beta readers to gauge the reactions of your larger audience.
L.E. DeLano began her career as a blogger for Woman's Day Magazine and Mom's Magazine. After a foray into fan fiction, she began self-publishing romance in 2012 (under a different pen name), branched out to YA, and landed a traditional publishing deal with the novels TRAVELER and DREAMER. TRAVELER was selected as a Keystone To Reading Secondary Book Award finalist for 2018-19 and was also voted one of The 20 Most Beautiful Books in the World for 2017 by MTV UK. L.E.’s most recent work, the YA fantasy novel BLUE, was named a 2021 NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite in Young Adult Fiction. Though mostly raised in New Mexico, she now lives in Pennsylvania with two adventurous kids and two ridiculous cats.
"There are so many ways two characters physically interact with each other in a scene, and it's easy to lose that when you're mired down in the dialogue and pay attention to the words you're saying, instead of the intentions behind them." —L.E. DeLano
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is L.E. DeLano. Hey L.E., how are you doing?
[00:00:06] L.E.: I'm good, thank you for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am very pleased to have you here. So to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, L.E. DeLano began her career as a blogger for WOMEN'S DAY magazine and MOMS magazine. After a foray into fan fiction, she began self-publishing romance in 2012 under a different pen name, branched out to YA, and landed a traditional publishing deal with the novels TRAVELER and DREAMER. TRAVELER was selected as a Keystone to Reading Secondary Book Award Finalist for 2018-2019 and was also, and this is one of the coolest book awards I've ever heard of, voted one of the 20 Most Beautiful Books in the World in 2017 by MTV UK. That is pretty cool.
[00:00:45] L.E.: It was interesting, kind of came out of nowhere.
[00:00:48] Matty: Well, it's a lovely cover, and even the inside, even though it's a text-based book, not a picture book, even the way the interior is done is very lovely, so I thought that was a super fun one to read.
[00:00:59] L.E.'s most recent work, the YA fantasy novel BLUE, was named 2021 NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite in Young Adult Fiction. And we didn't plan this, but evidently, we're both in a kind of a blue mood because, as seems to happen surprisingly often, I'm wearing the same color shirt as my guest.
[00:01:16] L.E.: Well, mine says Book Nerd on it.
[00:01:19] Matty: Yes, excellent and very appropriate for the interview.
[00:01:23] L.E.: I wanted to feel bookish.
[00:01:25] Matty: Yes. And L.E. was mostly raised in New Mexico, she now lives in Pennsylvania, in fact, right practically down the road from me, which was fun to find out. She has two adventurous kids and two ridiculous cats, and she also has a Theater degree, and that is what we are going to be talking about today, which is Lessons I Learned from Theater.
[00:01:44] And so L.E., let's start out and just share with listeners, what made you decide to pursue a degree in theater?
[00:01:50] L.E.: Just a natural tendency toward the stage. When I was in high school, I did speech and drama, I was in chorus, I loved doing the spring musical every year. I was one of those theater kids, except I was an odd sort of theater kid because I was an introvert. And you'll find that probably half of the theater majors out there are introverts, but we're socialized introverts. We use those theater skills to help us when we are in crowd situations or when we do have to make a lot of social contact. But the introverts, I feel, tended to make the stronger actors, because they knew how to pull in, they knew how to take those quiet moments.
[00:02:33] And sometimes, in theater you see the big flashy, Broadway kind of people, and they're great, but they always have that I'm on sort of persona when they're on stage and the actors that really pull it off, the ones that really gut punch you, are the Meryl Streeps who can take that moment and take a beat, and one little tear goes down the cheek and you're sold. So I was more of an introvert type.
[00:02:58] And I sort of always lived in my own head, and I also journaled all through high school and wrote short stories and did a lot of playwriting, even within my own theater department. I won several playwriting awards when I was going through high school, various competitions, and so writing kind of always went hand in hand with the theater thing for me.
[00:03:21] And also, I think it was a bit of a rebellion. I was raised in an Evangelical Southern Baptist household. My parents were deeply religious, and church was the only time I got any social life other than school. And my parents never wanted me to go to college, they wanted me to get married, they wanted me to have babies, they wanted me to marry someone in the church, they wanted me to stay in town. And that's what they wanted, and I was in a small Southwestern town. I couldn't wait to shake the dust of the place off my feet and just get out of there. It was full of natural beauty, but I wanted a life. I want adventure in the great wide somewhere, you know, that's what I wanted.
[00:04:04] So I actually arranged for all my own financial aid, I filled out all the applications, I did everything I needed to do and sent myself to college. And I chose another small Southwestern town, but that was all I could afford at the time, but it was five hours from home. And it was a whole new world, I got to meet people from all over the world at this university. I actually met openly gay people for the first time in my life, which was something I never got to do before. I'd probably knew plenty of gay people, but none of them could comfortably claim that back in that time. And it was just a big eye-opening experience, and I don't regret it for a minute. You know, I love my parents, I had a good life, I'm not complaining about it, but it wasn't for me.
[00:04:49] So yeah, theater was kind of a middle finger to my parents to say, hey I'm going to go be a theater major, and it ended up being a great choice. You can talk all you want about what were your job prospects, like, I went into retail. That's what you do with a theater degree, but that degree has worked for me in so many ways.
[00:05:08] I used that line in my bio about, I have a useless theater degree, because I had plenty of people tell me that when I told them I was going to be a theater major. Well, what a useless degree, I'll never get a job with that. What are you going to do with that? Every corporate presentation I had to give, I became a corporate trainer for a while. I was in sales for a good long time, and that theater degree, man, did that help me in sales! There are still a lot of situations again, like I said, I'm an introvert where I have to be in a social setting and not appear to be an introvert. And that's when I put myself in a role and I play a role, and in the writing career, that has been invaluable, it really has.
[00:05:48] Matty: A lot of our listeners are probably also introverts. Do you have any tips for introverted writers who are going to, let's say, a conference? How can they put on a mask, put on a persona, that's going to help them be more comfortable in those kinds of situations that might not normally be comfortable for them?
[00:06:04] L.E.: Become your main character. Literally, every main character has a heart that's fierce, even though they're facing horrible odds. the best main characters are the ones who are scared to death and do it anyway, because there's a lot riding on this. And it's the same thing when you have to be out in public at a conference, at a book signing, whatever. You've got a lot riding on this. People are looking at you as your author persona, they want to know more about your book and the more closely aligned to your personality feels to your main character, the more you can pull parallels there, the more people think you know what you're writing about.
[00:06:44] If not your main character, pick a character that you just love to write and be that character, if you have to. It's again, a theater thing, but you should always be yourself, but you put parts of yourself, as a writer, into your characters. Pull those parts back out for when you've got to be on. It would be a good way to connect your readers with your characters and to also show off a little bit of the you that's in your manuscript.
[00:07:12] Matty: It would be fun to mark up conference name tags, so we'd say, Matty channeling ... and then the character that you're being, because that would be a nice conversation starter. Sometimes people said to me, oh, you know, if I go to a conference, what can I talk with people about? My first piece of advice is, if you ask anybody what they're working on now, you really don't have to worry about saying anything else for the next forty-five minutes, two hours, however long you want to let it go. But it would also be a fun conversation starter for someone to say, oh, I see your Matty, channeling Ann Kinnear, what's that all about?
[00:07:43] L.E.: Or how about, Hi, I'm whoever today.
[00:07:46] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Talk a little bit about how you applied your theater degree to character development and dialogue.
[00:07:54] L.E.: Well, I talked about this in a blog post a few years ago, and I think that's how we started out talking to each other on the subject. I had a terrific professor. For being a small university in the middle of New Mexico, I had a fabulous professor, and one of the things he used to do with us during rehearsals that I found so incredibly helpful was, he would have us lose the dialogue and find the beats. We would be running the same dialogue over and over, and we've said the same line so many ways, so many times, it's losing its charm. And he would pick one rehearsal where we would take that scene and we would act it without the dialogue. And it really forces you to pay attention to your body and what your body is doing in that moment.
[00:08:43] Yeah, I'm angry, but what's happening, is my fist clenching, is my chest tight, am I breathing fast? What is my jaw like, is there a jaw gripped? And there are so many things physically that happen to you, and so many ways two characters physically interact with each other in a scene. And it's easy to lose that when you're mired down in the dialogue and pay attention to the words you're saying, instead of the intentions behind them.
[00:09:11] So one of the things has been very helpful to me when I'm writing, my first pass through, of course that first draft is what I call the vomit draft, everything just kind of comes out. And then you start cleaning up and somewhere around draft 3, 4, 5, I'm starting to paint things. No longer does he say that with anger, now we're going to paint that anger.
[00:09:34] So I'll take that scene and I'll literally stand up, and I do a lot of voice-to-text when I'm writing. And I'll stand up with my headphones on and start acting the scene out. And I'll look at what my body's doing while I'm saying these lines that I have written. And what I think in my mind's eye, this other person is doing in reaction to me, and it all goes back to that old adage of show, don't tell. You want your reader to be able to visualize what you're doing, and the more you can paint that scene, without going overboard of course, the better it can be. So, you know, it's not enough to say, well, so-and-so said this angrily. No. So-and-so stood with his jaw tense and his hand was gripping the edge of the table as he looked at the other character who was breathing rapidly and had his arm pulled back like he was ready to hit him in the face. And now suddenly, you've got dynamic action in a scene. And that was one of the tricks I used, and I use it frequently when I'm writing.
[00:10:40] Same with just writing the dialogue, sometimes I'll put the headset on and just pace back and forth in my living room and just throw out lines here and there. And some of them are great and some of them aren't great, but that's okay, the voice-to-text grabs all of it, and I sit there and edit it later, but sometimes it's easier to talk through a scene. Yeah, my cats have been shouted at. My cats have had me pleading to them for my life. My cats have had me falling in love with them. It's all rather silly, but it works, and it's worked for me.
[00:11:13] And another thing that I talked about in my original blog post was something we did with a guest instructor once called the mask exercise. And he brought in a bunch of plain white masks that had various expressions on their faces. Some were blank and neutral, literally just eye holes and a mouth slit and nothing going on. Some had looks of horror, some were happy, some were sad, some looked angry, they had brows, whatever. And we would put these masks on, and we had just a generic scene we were acting out with these masks on.
[00:11:49] And he wanted us to, number one, act beyond the mask. So that goes back again to your body language. But beyond that, he wanted us to play this scene either realizing we had the mask in place or not realizing we had the mask in place. And he also wanted us to treat people as though we see that mask for who they really are, or we see what's truly behind that mask. And we took different turns, reacting to or reacting in spite of these masks.
[00:12:23] And it all goes back to, what secrets are your characters holding? What mask are they projecting? And do they even realize they project this mask? Do they even know this persona is what other people see? Do they deliberately project it and there's something else behind there? Do they realize so-and-so has a mask in place? How are they reacting to that? And that's another little exercise I go through sometimes when I'm having a difficult scene that just isn't clicking. I think about masks, and I think about secrets. Secrets are another great tool when you're writing. Who's got a secret, who reveals it, why do they reveal it? So that all plays into that as well.
[00:13:03] Matty: When you were doing the mask exercise, was there ever a version of that where the person who was wearing the mask didn't know what mask they were wearing?
[00:13:13] L.E.: Yes, actually we did, we shuffled masks, drew them out of a big black bag and you weren't allowed to look and see what your mask was. Because from the back, they all looked exactly the same. So, that's actually how we started the exercise was, we had no idea what masks we were wearing. So yeah, those are fun little theater tricks that have just held me in good stead as I've tried writing.
[00:13:34] Matty: I had a question about the exercise you were describing with dialogue. When you use this in your own writing, do you mainly use it once you understand something about the character and you're trying to decide how to portray their attitude or their emotion, or do you use it to figure that out?
[00:13:50] L.E.: A little bit of both, I guess. Most of the time it's a secondary pass of just painting what I've already got there, but sometimes the scene just isn't falling together, it's not clicking. There's something missing there. And usually what's missing is something dynamic or some sort of silence. Somewhere in there we need to take a beat, we need to let it settle, we need to regroup. Maybe I need to add some inner monologue. Maybe we're not sitting back and letting this resonate enough, and that's actually, you know, they always say, know your own flaws. That's one of my writer flaws, is that I don't always sit and let things settle in.
[00:14:38] I've had plenty of times where editors have come back at me with, you know, you haven't really let her think about this. I need some more internal monologue. And that's one of my setbacks is, I have a hard time with inner monologue in writing, because I'm just naturally the sort of person that doesn't like to wallow in things. I don't want to feel like I'm bothering you with my wallowing, so sometimes something momentous will happen to my character and I'm like, yeah, that was terrible, oh and next? Next? And I've had editor after editor come back to me with, wait a minute, she just lost her brother in a horrible accident, and the next page she's popping popcorn. I need to know what's going on here.
[00:15:19] Matty: I found myself in my own writing and my own work with my editor, it's very difficult for the author to see that themselves. And it's almost like acting with nobody in the audience, you know, if you're on the stage and you can see the audience's or sense the audience's reaction, it's kind of the equivalent of having a reader, an editor, a beta reader, whatever, respond to that, but finding out yourself is hard.
[00:15:40] L.E.: Exactly, acting into a vacuum, that is just a perfect, perfect analogy. You're standing on an empty stage with one spotlight and crickets are chirping in the distance. Did that resound, did that fall right? Did I say that right? And that also goes back to yes, you're right, beta readers are absolutely critical, absolutely critical.
[00:16:02] Another thing that I really like about my theater training is, you learn to pare things down when you're on the stage. It's very easy to be flowery, it's very easy to be over the top. How many parody shows have you seen with ridiculous death scenes, it takes them five minutes to die because they're rolling all over the floor and they're groaning and they're calling out all the famous last words, and it's just not tremendously effective because it's too much. And theater, when it's done correctly, and great film and great TV, like I said, it's Meryl Streep, the one tear down or cheek, it's that quiet moment.
[00:16:39] I don't know if you're a Game of Thrones fan, but there's this great character named Jorah who has been in love with one of the main heroines for the entire journey of the show. And he's pretty much been resigned to the friend zone the entire time. And he dies very heroically defending her. And she's holding him as he's literally gasping out his last breath. And you're waiting for him to open his mouth and say that one final line of, I love you, or whatever, and he opens his mouth, and he can't speak. He literally can't speak, you can see that he's not able to speak, and everything that he's wanted to say to her for seven years is in his eyes. And he takes one quick little gasp and he's done.
[00:17:27] And that moment, you know, they let it sit there. And of course the violins swelled in the background and the tears, her tears are falling on his face and, yeah, it's a great moment, but it wasn't overdone. And in theater, you learn that sometimes less can be so much more, and that's one of the things in a book that's hard to get across because you're dealing with the written word. And the truth is, if you've painted that scene well, if you've had the energy swell to the point where it needs to swell before that beat, then you can have the freedom to draw back a little and use a minimal thing. Maybe it's just, she saw his lips move and then he didn't move again. And you move on.
[00:18:13] Matty: I would imagine that there's maybe a genre or writing style equivalent that some is more like theater in the sense that it's ... I'm trying to avoid saying cinematic, because that's the opposite of what I'm trying to say, but that you're projecting to people who are at least a dozen feet away from you. They're not right in your face, like you often have in movies or TV, and so I would think there would be stylistic differences where, you know, Lord of the Rings is more like stage play in the sense that it's all a little bit bigger, but I don't know, I'm trying to think of a good example, that would be more like the equivalent of the camera's right in your face, like you just described, and you have to tone it down even more. Do you think there's genres that lend themselves to one or the other of those kinds of models?
[00:18:58] L.E.: Well, high fantasy of course is always a big Lord of the Rings production. But I think within every genre, you've got to have a mix of those big cinematic things, even if you're talking about a gritty urban drama, there's got to be that gunfire going off in the street. There's got to be that big, horrible moment when the police break down the door. And then there's got to be the quiet moment when you're sitting and having spaghetti with your best friend, and you're talking about the memory of someone else, or your remembering your grandmother or, maybe it's something small like that. So you have to have the great mix of big and small.
[00:19:37] And I think the theater training really kicks in. It's not just envisioning that big, great scene in my young adult fantasy, but I'm also looking at the moment when it's a single chair in the corner in a spotlight, and this is a quiet moment, and I need to figure out how am I going to spotlight that? Am I going to spotlight it by removing everyone else from this scene? Am I going to spotlight it by giving her a quiet corner to sit in? Am I going to have this entire raging chaos around her of the battle, and have her look down and see the dagger that belonged to her best friend and then realize there was still a hand around it, and follow that hand up?
[00:20:28] So you've got to literally think in terms of, where would the lighting be? Would the audience go quiet here? If I were doing this in a movie, where would the camera be panning? And it's also helpful when you're talking about those big thematic things, battle scenes or whatever. That's another time when I get up and I literally walk it through. I'll take the headset off and I'll sit there and walk through some of those combat scenes.
[00:20:55] And it also helps the continuity because, if I'm gripping a sword in my hand, I can't suddenly pick up the stone of destiny and then also reach out to smack my buddy on the shoulder and go, let's go, because I've got a sword and the stone. So the blocking, which is a theater term, is something you do when you figure out the action, who's going to move where, and who's not going to be in whose way, and who's picking up what, when, and where's the prop going when you put it down? And what if you need to pick that up again in two minutes and it's important, you can't put it down over here. You need to know that it's going to be over there. So yeah, you're going to hand it to so-and-so, who's going to look at it with a stupid expression on his face and go, what the heck is this thing anyway, and toss it over there.
[00:21:39] So, when you're blocking a scene in theater, you have to think of all these little details so that nobody's tripping over each other and nobody's blocking another central person when they're giving a great line, and all your props are where you need them to be when you need to get to them. So that's another thing that's important when you're writing. Otherwise your editor's going to come back and go, continuity, you've got her picking up the suitcase and she's got a kid under one arm and a blanket under the other, so we got to figure this out. That will save you a lot of time later, if you get that stuff done ahead of time.
[00:22:14] Matty: Some of the things we're talking about, I just want to point people to Episode 60, which was MASTERING ACTION SEQUENCES with Joshua Essoe, which had a lot about what you're talking about with continuity. And the other one that I wanted to just point people to, I love it when I can tie episodes together in the conversation, is Episode 48 was BUILDING GREAT PROTAGONIST AND ANTAGONIST VOICES with Jeff Elkins. And I believe it was in that episode that he said something similar to what you had said earlier, about actually acting out the character and getting to know the character by being physical about your interaction with them.
[00:22:47] L.E.: Absolutely, and another thing I do, and I know quite a few writers who do this, but when I'm writing my book, I cast all of my characters in my head. It's not just, I have a generic bad-ass heroine, I literally sit down and cast them. And it may be someone I've met or seen in real life, it could be that lady in the food court who was yelling at her husband the other day, who is this little, minor character, but she had such an irritating voice in such a way about her that she stuck with me. And JK Rowling when she wrote Dolores Umbridge, that was one of her most hated teachers from her secondary school days. And this woman made such an imprint on her that she wrote her into a book. And everybody hates Dolores Umbridge because we've all had that teacher, every one of us, you know?
[00:23:36] Matty: I really liked that too, because the idea you had mentioned, the woman at the food court with the annoying voice, I think that's something that's very easy to overlook. It would be easy to describe that character as being disheveled or like overly made up or whatever that is that you want to say, but remembering to introduce how her voice sounded, that's great.
[00:23:56] L.E.: Yeah. The way I've always said, I actually wrote this character into a book recently and she literally, I remember she was pointing her finger at her husband, but her finger was crooked, and it made me crazy. She was pointing at him like this, and it just stuck out in my mind, and I added that in, all these little details painted, color your people.
[00:24:13] And sometimes I'll have a character who's kind of a hodgepodge between two people. That's why I always hate it when people go who'd you cast in your book? Because first of all, I think that kind of ruins it for a reader. You know, if I tell you, well, that would have been, Alec Baldwin in the nineties, hot Alec Baldwin, but that would have been Pierce Brosnan in his prime. And when you're writing for YA, Pierce Brosnan is a grandfather now, so it's kind of hard to do.
[00:24:41] But sometimes it's also a combination of people. Like I'll take a character from another book series that I love. And I recently wrote a manuscript that had a character based on one of the characters in a Sarah J Maas novel. She has a character named Amren who's this 5,000-year-old almost deity from another dimension who fell into our world, and she's the wisest person in the room just because of her age, but she's also really acerbic and got this very sharp manner about her. She's like a dragon, literally living in human skin. And I just wrote a character that was half her and half Mr. Rogers, because that's what I wanted. I wanted someone who was incredibly astute and came off very sharp but was essentially terribly kind at their core. And it was kind of a nice amalgamation to make this interesting character.
[00:25:37] So I always go through and sort of cast them, and maybe that's a major motion picture star I've got in there, maybe that's somebody from my past, but it helps me stay true to that character.
[00:25:49] If I ever have another scene that's kind of muddled and still again, like I said, isn't flicking and I've done all the tricks I know to try and make it work, I've pared it down, I've killed people off, I've tried to increase the tension and it's still misfiring on some level, it's usually because I'm not authentic with my people. They're not behaving in a way that would be authentic to them. And that, again goes back to my theater training.
[00:26:15] Theater isn't about becoming someone else, it's about taking the parts of yourself that work in that character and letting yourself be vulnerable in that moment, while wearing that character's skin and living their life. But you have to pull that vulnerability from inside you. That's not something you have to pretend to be. That's something you have to pull out from a real place, or it doesn't work on the stage. And it's certainly not going to read for a camera or for an audience. And it's the same way with a book, you need to pull something real out of that character. And if you're not allowing them to be real and react in the way that they really would in this situation, then that's what's missing. You're missing the mark.
[00:27:34] Matty: Have you ever had to write a character where at least at first you thought, I really have nothing in common with this character, what can I possibly pull out of myself for that?
[00:27:43] L.E.: Many, many times. Many times. In fact, just about every bad-ass YA character, because I was nothing like that in my teen years. I like to think I would have been a brave girl grabbing a sword, but especially since I like to write fantasy, it's hard. That again is where beta readers come in handy. They're your audience, and you need that audience, you need the reaction.
[00:28:04] Yeah, I don't know how many times I was on stage in a performance you can rehearse and rehearse all you want, but when you get to performance, the audience isn't always going to laugh where you think they're going to laugh. They're not always going to cry where you think they're going to cry. They're not always going to be still and silent and on the edge of their seat in the moment where you think they're going to be. And it adjusts your whole performance. And that's part of the reason why I love live theater so much, it's a different show every night. You get a different audience every night, and I try to keep that in mind when I'm writing, because I have a different audience with every person who opens my book.
[00:28:42] Matty: It's an interesting analogy because in theater, you would infrequently have an opportunity to see an individual person in the audience reacting. I think it's normally a sense you're getting from the group as a whole. And I think a lot of writers have the tendency to react to whatever they're seeing from an individual or hearing from an individual. So if one person tells them that the scene was too long, it should be cut, then sometimes there's a tendency to want to go right there and cut the scene, as opposed to kind of stepping back and say, no, I'm looking across my whole audience, i.e. my whole pool of readers, and seeing what the general sense is I'm getting from that.
[00:29:24] L.E.: Exactly, and it's a fine line because you also have to play to the market to some degree. Like I got lambasted on my first book, and justly so I think, because my character had no female friends. Her best friend was a guy, and he was her only friend, and that was kind of the point I was trying to make, was she was an introverted girl, isolated herself to the point where she pretty much had no friends.
[00:29:50] And I did give her a best friend in the second book, who was her best buddy, but first book, no female friends, and a contentious relationship with her mother, which is something I had as well. And my reviewers, quite a few of them, came back and said, wait a minute, where are the girls in this book? Why does she not have any female friends? Why are there no good solid female friendships in this YA book? Which is something the YA market wants; they want it very much.
[00:30:20] And I was a girl growing up who had a lot of female friends early in my high school years, but by my later high school and college years, I hung with the guys more than anybody, because I was a good-looking girl, I liked the attention, and I was one of those girls who hung out with the guys. So trying to go back to the days where I really did have a lot of female friends, I mean, I still do, but they weren't like close friends. I didn't trust a lot of people. And it's a writer thing I had to get over because my market demands it, my market wants that.
[00:30:53] Matty: Is that anything that your editor mentioned at all in the course of editing the book?
[00:30:59] L.E.: Not the first book at all, not until the reviews came back and she went, oh yeah, I guess that was kind of a problem. Well, yeah, it was, it really was. And the more I read in YA, because TRAVELER was my first foray into YA. I had been writing romance for years and in mainstream adult romance, nobody really cares if she's got a female friend, they're looking at the guy and that's all they want pretty much. So I was sort of used to that thing. She might have a female friend, but there aren't going to be long conversations about my life and what I want, and all those things in a romance book in general. You'll have an occasional girls' night out or whatever, but you won't get deeply into those things like YA does. Because you're talking about younger characters who are in their late teens and still defining themselves.
[00:31:45] And when I did write the girl best friend in the second book, my editor did step in a few times and say, okay, you're not passing the test here, because these girls, whenever they do get together and talk, they need to be talking about something other than boys. And I had made the mistake of, like an adult romance, they were talking about the guy, they were talking about the guys in their life, they were talking about, will I get a guy? And these were the things they were talking about, and while there was a romance in the book, it wasn't the central storyline.
[00:32:16] And my editor had to come back at me and go, what are you doing? These girls need to talk about things other than guys, if you're going to have them have a conversation with each other. So it was a good lesson to me, and I've learned a lot since, obviously.
[00:32:30] Matty: It's interesting that you almost have to have your writer persona, as well as you're acting out the characters as you had described before, but you're wearing your YA mask as opposed to romance writer mask. It's an important perspective to bring as well.
[00:32:43] L.E.: It is, and it also goes back to being on stage, and in every stage show I've done, there's always a scene I don't like so much. For whatever reason, this scene doesn't resonate with me, I don't understand why the character did this, but I guess we have to have this scene to be able to get to the next scene. It provides valuable exposition, or it gives that other character a chance to shine, or for whatever reason the playwright put this scene in. And I'm an actor I've got to do this scene.
[00:33:14] And I think every actor has had that scene where you're supposed to be feeling X and pull the X reaction from the audience, but it's just not feeling organic. And there are some nights where you literally feel like you're phoning it in. But the audience reacts to it anyway, even though you feel like you're phoning it in, the audience loves it.
[00:33:37] And that also goes back to the book thing of playing to your market. Even though I personally don't understand the need to sit around with another gal pal and talk about my life till all hours of the night, cause I'm just not the sort of person who does that, my market want it, it's what the audience wants. So I'm going to put on my theater mask and give them what the audience wants. We're going to have this conversation and I'm going to make it stick and I'm going to make it resonate, and I'm going to use every trick in the book I get from my beta readers. I'm going to take their reactions and I'm going to see where they laughed or where they cried in places I didn't expect it. I'm going to tweak those moments, I'm going to let that line fall a little differently, I'm going to take their reaction of, that line came too quickly, and maybe lengthen the line out. Maybe have her find a different way to say it that's going to have more impact. So yeah, your beta readers again, are your audience and you need to take that audience's feedback and change your performance.
[00:34:39] Matty: One of the things that my first editor did that I loved, and I didn't realize until I had been edited by other editors that not everybody does this, but as she read, she would write little reactions, like, "ha ha" or "now I'm crying" or "I'm so bored now."
[00:34:54] L.E.: Why can't all editors do that? Oh my God, how wonderful, yeah.
[00:34:57] Matty: And I think it's sometimes just because they don't think about it, it's not that they won't, but sometimes you have to ask them ahead of time, obviously, to say, if you just have a reaction, can you just jot it down? Stick an emoji in, whatever, because that is really invaluable. Because sometimes as a writer, you don't have that sense in the actual moment that you do on the stage of, I wonder what they're thinking right now? And if your editor can help you or your beta readers or whoever you have helping you with that kind of outside perspective, it can be really helpful.
[00:35:28] L.E.: Oh, absolutely. I remember when I was writing DREAMER, which is the follow-up to TRAVELER. Second books are notoriously hard when you're writing a sequel, and we had done so much editing on TRAVELER that it became a very different book. I had originally started that book to be part one of a trilogy, and we decided to remove an entire subplot and condense it down to a duology.
[00:35:52] So the second book, I was literally pretty much starting from scratch, because I had intended for that subplot to be the beginning of the second book and take us through. So I'd literally just start over again with very minimal amounts of things carrying over from the first book. And it was just crazy trying to get through this thing.
[00:36:13] And I remember I needed to add something in. She said, I need them to connect somehow in a way that doesn't involve anything physical. I need an intimate moment between them that has nothing to do with their lips meeting, so find something. So I sat there and wrote this entire scene out, this fantastical scene, and TRAVELER's about a girl who travels through, steps through mirrors into alternate realities. And she finds alternate versions of herself in these realities. So in these other universes, she could be a dancer, she could be overweight, she could be deaf. She could be living in a land where she's wearing corsets and her family lives in a lighthouse and there's all kinds of great things going on.
[00:36:58] And I sent them to a wildlife preserve in Norway in the middle of winter and they're clutching mugs of hot cocoa and suddenly out of the forest in the distance lumber out wooly mammoths, because they haven't died off in this reality. And she gets to pet a wooly mammoth. And it's this really exciting moment, and she and he are sitting under a sky full of Northern lights going off around them, holding mugs of cocoa, and just talking about their lives. And it's just a lovely scene, I thought. And I threw it out there and thought, well, let's see if she thinks it's good or if it's too much. And she wrote back just four words: This is absolute magic.
[00:37:45] And that has stayed with me like through years of writing, just those four words. And you're right, that was a standing ovation for my scene. And it just so resonated with me, those four words. I carry them to this day. This was absolute magic. Yes, thank you.
[00:38:03] Matty: Specific to the lessons from theater, it's very, very clear how you were describing it, I was picturing it so visually in my mind and feeling the wooly mammoth and feeling mugs of hot chocolate. It was lovely, in a theatrical, you know what I mean, not overdone, but in that positive theatrical way.
[00:38:22] L.E.: I'd have the Cyclorama lit up with the Northern lights behind, sparkling stars and steaming mugs of cocoa and, oh yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:38:32] Matty: Well, that’s lovely, I can't think of a nicer note to end on than that magical scene that you described for us. So, L.E., thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more you and all your work online.
[00:38:45] L.E.: My website is LEDeLano.com. You can find my books at any major outlet. I will be attending the Pennsylvania State Library Association's convention in February. You'll see me there on the Friday of that weekend. I'll be there signing books, so if you're a librarian in the state of Pennsylvania, come and see me. And I'm available for school visits. If anyone wants to have me, I'm happy to do a virtual or in-person school visit, just reach out to me. And hopefully, you'll hear more about book, which is hopefully a witchy retelling of Cinderella, that begins with a murdered fairy godmother.
[00:39:27] Matty: Oh, that is intriguing. I won't ask, but I will be curious when I read that, who the casted character is for that. Well L.E., thank you so much, this has been so interesting.
[00:39:38] L.E.: Thank you, I've had a great time and thank you to all your listeners for tuning in.
[00:00:06] L.E.: I'm good, thank you for having me.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am very pleased to have you here. So to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, L.E. DeLano began her career as a blogger for WOMEN'S DAY magazine and MOMS magazine. After a foray into fan fiction, she began self-publishing romance in 2012 under a different pen name, branched out to YA, and landed a traditional publishing deal with the novels TRAVELER and DREAMER. TRAVELER was selected as a Keystone to Reading Secondary Book Award Finalist for 2018-2019 and was also, and this is one of the coolest book awards I've ever heard of, voted one of the 20 Most Beautiful Books in the World in 2017 by MTV UK. That is pretty cool.
[00:00:45] L.E.: It was interesting, kind of came out of nowhere.
[00:00:48] Matty: Well, it's a lovely cover, and even the inside, even though it's a text-based book, not a picture book, even the way the interior is done is very lovely, so I thought that was a super fun one to read.
[00:00:59] L.E.'s most recent work, the YA fantasy novel BLUE, was named 2021 NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite in Young Adult Fiction. And we didn't plan this, but evidently, we're both in a kind of a blue mood because, as seems to happen surprisingly often, I'm wearing the same color shirt as my guest.
[00:01:16] L.E.: Well, mine says Book Nerd on it.
[00:01:19] Matty: Yes, excellent and very appropriate for the interview.
[00:01:23] L.E.: I wanted to feel bookish.
[00:01:25] Matty: Yes. And L.E. was mostly raised in New Mexico, she now lives in Pennsylvania, in fact, right practically down the road from me, which was fun to find out. She has two adventurous kids and two ridiculous cats, and she also has a Theater degree, and that is what we are going to be talking about today, which is Lessons I Learned from Theater.
[00:01:44] And so L.E., let's start out and just share with listeners, what made you decide to pursue a degree in theater?
[00:01:50] L.E.: Just a natural tendency toward the stage. When I was in high school, I did speech and drama, I was in chorus, I loved doing the spring musical every year. I was one of those theater kids, except I was an odd sort of theater kid because I was an introvert. And you'll find that probably half of the theater majors out there are introverts, but we're socialized introverts. We use those theater skills to help us when we are in crowd situations or when we do have to make a lot of social contact. But the introverts, I feel, tended to make the stronger actors, because they knew how to pull in, they knew how to take those quiet moments.
[00:02:33] And sometimes, in theater you see the big flashy, Broadway kind of people, and they're great, but they always have that I'm on sort of persona when they're on stage and the actors that really pull it off, the ones that really gut punch you, are the Meryl Streeps who can take that moment and take a beat, and one little tear goes down the cheek and you're sold. So I was more of an introvert type.
[00:02:58] And I sort of always lived in my own head, and I also journaled all through high school and wrote short stories and did a lot of playwriting, even within my own theater department. I won several playwriting awards when I was going through high school, various competitions, and so writing kind of always went hand in hand with the theater thing for me.
[00:03:21] And also, I think it was a bit of a rebellion. I was raised in an Evangelical Southern Baptist household. My parents were deeply religious, and church was the only time I got any social life other than school. And my parents never wanted me to go to college, they wanted me to get married, they wanted me to have babies, they wanted me to marry someone in the church, they wanted me to stay in town. And that's what they wanted, and I was in a small Southwestern town. I couldn't wait to shake the dust of the place off my feet and just get out of there. It was full of natural beauty, but I wanted a life. I want adventure in the great wide somewhere, you know, that's what I wanted.
[00:04:04] So I actually arranged for all my own financial aid, I filled out all the applications, I did everything I needed to do and sent myself to college. And I chose another small Southwestern town, but that was all I could afford at the time, but it was five hours from home. And it was a whole new world, I got to meet people from all over the world at this university. I actually met openly gay people for the first time in my life, which was something I never got to do before. I'd probably knew plenty of gay people, but none of them could comfortably claim that back in that time. And it was just a big eye-opening experience, and I don't regret it for a minute. You know, I love my parents, I had a good life, I'm not complaining about it, but it wasn't for me.
[00:04:49] So yeah, theater was kind of a middle finger to my parents to say, hey I'm going to go be a theater major, and it ended up being a great choice. You can talk all you want about what were your job prospects, like, I went into retail. That's what you do with a theater degree, but that degree has worked for me in so many ways.
[00:05:08] I used that line in my bio about, I have a useless theater degree, because I had plenty of people tell me that when I told them I was going to be a theater major. Well, what a useless degree, I'll never get a job with that. What are you going to do with that? Every corporate presentation I had to give, I became a corporate trainer for a while. I was in sales for a good long time, and that theater degree, man, did that help me in sales! There are still a lot of situations again, like I said, I'm an introvert where I have to be in a social setting and not appear to be an introvert. And that's when I put myself in a role and I play a role, and in the writing career, that has been invaluable, it really has.
[00:05:48] Matty: A lot of our listeners are probably also introverts. Do you have any tips for introverted writers who are going to, let's say, a conference? How can they put on a mask, put on a persona, that's going to help them be more comfortable in those kinds of situations that might not normally be comfortable for them?
[00:06:04] L.E.: Become your main character. Literally, every main character has a heart that's fierce, even though they're facing horrible odds. the best main characters are the ones who are scared to death and do it anyway, because there's a lot riding on this. And it's the same thing when you have to be out in public at a conference, at a book signing, whatever. You've got a lot riding on this. People are looking at you as your author persona, they want to know more about your book and the more closely aligned to your personality feels to your main character, the more you can pull parallels there, the more people think you know what you're writing about.
[00:06:44] If not your main character, pick a character that you just love to write and be that character, if you have to. It's again, a theater thing, but you should always be yourself, but you put parts of yourself, as a writer, into your characters. Pull those parts back out for when you've got to be on. It would be a good way to connect your readers with your characters and to also show off a little bit of the you that's in your manuscript.
[00:07:12] Matty: It would be fun to mark up conference name tags, so we'd say, Matty channeling ... and then the character that you're being, because that would be a nice conversation starter. Sometimes people said to me, oh, you know, if I go to a conference, what can I talk with people about? My first piece of advice is, if you ask anybody what they're working on now, you really don't have to worry about saying anything else for the next forty-five minutes, two hours, however long you want to let it go. But it would also be a fun conversation starter for someone to say, oh, I see your Matty, channeling Ann Kinnear, what's that all about?
[00:07:43] L.E.: Or how about, Hi, I'm whoever today.
[00:07:46] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Talk a little bit about how you applied your theater degree to character development and dialogue.
[00:07:54] L.E.: Well, I talked about this in a blog post a few years ago, and I think that's how we started out talking to each other on the subject. I had a terrific professor. For being a small university in the middle of New Mexico, I had a fabulous professor, and one of the things he used to do with us during rehearsals that I found so incredibly helpful was, he would have us lose the dialogue and find the beats. We would be running the same dialogue over and over, and we've said the same line so many ways, so many times, it's losing its charm. And he would pick one rehearsal where we would take that scene and we would act it without the dialogue. And it really forces you to pay attention to your body and what your body is doing in that moment.
[00:08:43] Yeah, I'm angry, but what's happening, is my fist clenching, is my chest tight, am I breathing fast? What is my jaw like, is there a jaw gripped? And there are so many things physically that happen to you, and so many ways two characters physically interact with each other in a scene. And it's easy to lose that when you're mired down in the dialogue and pay attention to the words you're saying, instead of the intentions behind them.
[00:09:11] So one of the things has been very helpful to me when I'm writing, my first pass through, of course that first draft is what I call the vomit draft, everything just kind of comes out. And then you start cleaning up and somewhere around draft 3, 4, 5, I'm starting to paint things. No longer does he say that with anger, now we're going to paint that anger.
[00:09:34] So I'll take that scene and I'll literally stand up, and I do a lot of voice-to-text when I'm writing. And I'll stand up with my headphones on and start acting the scene out. And I'll look at what my body's doing while I'm saying these lines that I have written. And what I think in my mind's eye, this other person is doing in reaction to me, and it all goes back to that old adage of show, don't tell. You want your reader to be able to visualize what you're doing, and the more you can paint that scene, without going overboard of course, the better it can be. So, you know, it's not enough to say, well, so-and-so said this angrily. No. So-and-so stood with his jaw tense and his hand was gripping the edge of the table as he looked at the other character who was breathing rapidly and had his arm pulled back like he was ready to hit him in the face. And now suddenly, you've got dynamic action in a scene. And that was one of the tricks I used, and I use it frequently when I'm writing.
[00:10:40] Same with just writing the dialogue, sometimes I'll put the headset on and just pace back and forth in my living room and just throw out lines here and there. And some of them are great and some of them aren't great, but that's okay, the voice-to-text grabs all of it, and I sit there and edit it later, but sometimes it's easier to talk through a scene. Yeah, my cats have been shouted at. My cats have had me pleading to them for my life. My cats have had me falling in love with them. It's all rather silly, but it works, and it's worked for me.
[00:11:13] And another thing that I talked about in my original blog post was something we did with a guest instructor once called the mask exercise. And he brought in a bunch of plain white masks that had various expressions on their faces. Some were blank and neutral, literally just eye holes and a mouth slit and nothing going on. Some had looks of horror, some were happy, some were sad, some looked angry, they had brows, whatever. And we would put these masks on, and we had just a generic scene we were acting out with these masks on.
[00:11:49] And he wanted us to, number one, act beyond the mask. So that goes back again to your body language. But beyond that, he wanted us to play this scene either realizing we had the mask in place or not realizing we had the mask in place. And he also wanted us to treat people as though we see that mask for who they really are, or we see what's truly behind that mask. And we took different turns, reacting to or reacting in spite of these masks.
[00:12:23] And it all goes back to, what secrets are your characters holding? What mask are they projecting? And do they even realize they project this mask? Do they even know this persona is what other people see? Do they deliberately project it and there's something else behind there? Do they realize so-and-so has a mask in place? How are they reacting to that? And that's another little exercise I go through sometimes when I'm having a difficult scene that just isn't clicking. I think about masks, and I think about secrets. Secrets are another great tool when you're writing. Who's got a secret, who reveals it, why do they reveal it? So that all plays into that as well.
[00:13:03] Matty: When you were doing the mask exercise, was there ever a version of that where the person who was wearing the mask didn't know what mask they were wearing?
[00:13:13] L.E.: Yes, actually we did, we shuffled masks, drew them out of a big black bag and you weren't allowed to look and see what your mask was. Because from the back, they all looked exactly the same. So, that's actually how we started the exercise was, we had no idea what masks we were wearing. So yeah, those are fun little theater tricks that have just held me in good stead as I've tried writing.
[00:13:34] Matty: I had a question about the exercise you were describing with dialogue. When you use this in your own writing, do you mainly use it once you understand something about the character and you're trying to decide how to portray their attitude or their emotion, or do you use it to figure that out?
[00:13:50] L.E.: A little bit of both, I guess. Most of the time it's a secondary pass of just painting what I've already got there, but sometimes the scene just isn't falling together, it's not clicking. There's something missing there. And usually what's missing is something dynamic or some sort of silence. Somewhere in there we need to take a beat, we need to let it settle, we need to regroup. Maybe I need to add some inner monologue. Maybe we're not sitting back and letting this resonate enough, and that's actually, you know, they always say, know your own flaws. That's one of my writer flaws, is that I don't always sit and let things settle in.
[00:14:38] I've had plenty of times where editors have come back at me with, you know, you haven't really let her think about this. I need some more internal monologue. And that's one of my setbacks is, I have a hard time with inner monologue in writing, because I'm just naturally the sort of person that doesn't like to wallow in things. I don't want to feel like I'm bothering you with my wallowing, so sometimes something momentous will happen to my character and I'm like, yeah, that was terrible, oh and next? Next? And I've had editor after editor come back to me with, wait a minute, she just lost her brother in a horrible accident, and the next page she's popping popcorn. I need to know what's going on here.
[00:15:19] Matty: I found myself in my own writing and my own work with my editor, it's very difficult for the author to see that themselves. And it's almost like acting with nobody in the audience, you know, if you're on the stage and you can see the audience's or sense the audience's reaction, it's kind of the equivalent of having a reader, an editor, a beta reader, whatever, respond to that, but finding out yourself is hard.
[00:15:40] L.E.: Exactly, acting into a vacuum, that is just a perfect, perfect analogy. You're standing on an empty stage with one spotlight and crickets are chirping in the distance. Did that resound, did that fall right? Did I say that right? And that also goes back to yes, you're right, beta readers are absolutely critical, absolutely critical.
[00:16:02] Another thing that I really like about my theater training is, you learn to pare things down when you're on the stage. It's very easy to be flowery, it's very easy to be over the top. How many parody shows have you seen with ridiculous death scenes, it takes them five minutes to die because they're rolling all over the floor and they're groaning and they're calling out all the famous last words, and it's just not tremendously effective because it's too much. And theater, when it's done correctly, and great film and great TV, like I said, it's Meryl Streep, the one tear down or cheek, it's that quiet moment.
[00:16:39] I don't know if you're a Game of Thrones fan, but there's this great character named Jorah who has been in love with one of the main heroines for the entire journey of the show. And he's pretty much been resigned to the friend zone the entire time. And he dies very heroically defending her. And she's holding him as he's literally gasping out his last breath. And you're waiting for him to open his mouth and say that one final line of, I love you, or whatever, and he opens his mouth, and he can't speak. He literally can't speak, you can see that he's not able to speak, and everything that he's wanted to say to her for seven years is in his eyes. And he takes one quick little gasp and he's done.
[00:17:27] And that moment, you know, they let it sit there. And of course the violins swelled in the background and the tears, her tears are falling on his face and, yeah, it's a great moment, but it wasn't overdone. And in theater, you learn that sometimes less can be so much more, and that's one of the things in a book that's hard to get across because you're dealing with the written word. And the truth is, if you've painted that scene well, if you've had the energy swell to the point where it needs to swell before that beat, then you can have the freedom to draw back a little and use a minimal thing. Maybe it's just, she saw his lips move and then he didn't move again. And you move on.
[00:18:13] Matty: I would imagine that there's maybe a genre or writing style equivalent that some is more like theater in the sense that it's ... I'm trying to avoid saying cinematic, because that's the opposite of what I'm trying to say, but that you're projecting to people who are at least a dozen feet away from you. They're not right in your face, like you often have in movies or TV, and so I would think there would be stylistic differences where, you know, Lord of the Rings is more like stage play in the sense that it's all a little bit bigger, but I don't know, I'm trying to think of a good example, that would be more like the equivalent of the camera's right in your face, like you just described, and you have to tone it down even more. Do you think there's genres that lend themselves to one or the other of those kinds of models?
[00:18:58] L.E.: Well, high fantasy of course is always a big Lord of the Rings production. But I think within every genre, you've got to have a mix of those big cinematic things, even if you're talking about a gritty urban drama, there's got to be that gunfire going off in the street. There's got to be that big, horrible moment when the police break down the door. And then there's got to be the quiet moment when you're sitting and having spaghetti with your best friend, and you're talking about the memory of someone else, or your remembering your grandmother or, maybe it's something small like that. So you have to have the great mix of big and small.
[00:19:37] And I think the theater training really kicks in. It's not just envisioning that big, great scene in my young adult fantasy, but I'm also looking at the moment when it's a single chair in the corner in a spotlight, and this is a quiet moment, and I need to figure out how am I going to spotlight that? Am I going to spotlight it by removing everyone else from this scene? Am I going to spotlight it by giving her a quiet corner to sit in? Am I going to have this entire raging chaos around her of the battle, and have her look down and see the dagger that belonged to her best friend and then realize there was still a hand around it, and follow that hand up?
[00:20:28] So you've got to literally think in terms of, where would the lighting be? Would the audience go quiet here? If I were doing this in a movie, where would the camera be panning? And it's also helpful when you're talking about those big thematic things, battle scenes or whatever. That's another time when I get up and I literally walk it through. I'll take the headset off and I'll sit there and walk through some of those combat scenes.
[00:20:55] And it also helps the continuity because, if I'm gripping a sword in my hand, I can't suddenly pick up the stone of destiny and then also reach out to smack my buddy on the shoulder and go, let's go, because I've got a sword and the stone. So the blocking, which is a theater term, is something you do when you figure out the action, who's going to move where, and who's not going to be in whose way, and who's picking up what, when, and where's the prop going when you put it down? And what if you need to pick that up again in two minutes and it's important, you can't put it down over here. You need to know that it's going to be over there. So yeah, you're going to hand it to so-and-so, who's going to look at it with a stupid expression on his face and go, what the heck is this thing anyway, and toss it over there.
[00:21:39] So, when you're blocking a scene in theater, you have to think of all these little details so that nobody's tripping over each other and nobody's blocking another central person when they're giving a great line, and all your props are where you need them to be when you need to get to them. So that's another thing that's important when you're writing. Otherwise your editor's going to come back and go, continuity, you've got her picking up the suitcase and she's got a kid under one arm and a blanket under the other, so we got to figure this out. That will save you a lot of time later, if you get that stuff done ahead of time.
[00:22:14] Matty: Some of the things we're talking about, I just want to point people to Episode 60, which was MASTERING ACTION SEQUENCES with Joshua Essoe, which had a lot about what you're talking about with continuity. And the other one that I wanted to just point people to, I love it when I can tie episodes together in the conversation, is Episode 48 was BUILDING GREAT PROTAGONIST AND ANTAGONIST VOICES with Jeff Elkins. And I believe it was in that episode that he said something similar to what you had said earlier, about actually acting out the character and getting to know the character by being physical about your interaction with them.
[00:22:47] L.E.: Absolutely, and another thing I do, and I know quite a few writers who do this, but when I'm writing my book, I cast all of my characters in my head. It's not just, I have a generic bad-ass heroine, I literally sit down and cast them. And it may be someone I've met or seen in real life, it could be that lady in the food court who was yelling at her husband the other day, who is this little, minor character, but she had such an irritating voice in such a way about her that she stuck with me. And JK Rowling when she wrote Dolores Umbridge, that was one of her most hated teachers from her secondary school days. And this woman made such an imprint on her that she wrote her into a book. And everybody hates Dolores Umbridge because we've all had that teacher, every one of us, you know?
[00:23:36] Matty: I really liked that too, because the idea you had mentioned, the woman at the food court with the annoying voice, I think that's something that's very easy to overlook. It would be easy to describe that character as being disheveled or like overly made up or whatever that is that you want to say, but remembering to introduce how her voice sounded, that's great.
[00:23:56] L.E.: Yeah. The way I've always said, I actually wrote this character into a book recently and she literally, I remember she was pointing her finger at her husband, but her finger was crooked, and it made me crazy. She was pointing at him like this, and it just stuck out in my mind, and I added that in, all these little details painted, color your people.
[00:24:13] And sometimes I'll have a character who's kind of a hodgepodge between two people. That's why I always hate it when people go who'd you cast in your book? Because first of all, I think that kind of ruins it for a reader. You know, if I tell you, well, that would have been, Alec Baldwin in the nineties, hot Alec Baldwin, but that would have been Pierce Brosnan in his prime. And when you're writing for YA, Pierce Brosnan is a grandfather now, so it's kind of hard to do.
[00:24:41] But sometimes it's also a combination of people. Like I'll take a character from another book series that I love. And I recently wrote a manuscript that had a character based on one of the characters in a Sarah J Maas novel. She has a character named Amren who's this 5,000-year-old almost deity from another dimension who fell into our world, and she's the wisest person in the room just because of her age, but she's also really acerbic and got this very sharp manner about her. She's like a dragon, literally living in human skin. And I just wrote a character that was half her and half Mr. Rogers, because that's what I wanted. I wanted someone who was incredibly astute and came off very sharp but was essentially terribly kind at their core. And it was kind of a nice amalgamation to make this interesting character.
[00:25:37] So I always go through and sort of cast them, and maybe that's a major motion picture star I've got in there, maybe that's somebody from my past, but it helps me stay true to that character.
[00:25:49] If I ever have another scene that's kind of muddled and still again, like I said, isn't flicking and I've done all the tricks I know to try and make it work, I've pared it down, I've killed people off, I've tried to increase the tension and it's still misfiring on some level, it's usually because I'm not authentic with my people. They're not behaving in a way that would be authentic to them. And that, again goes back to my theater training.
[00:26:15] Theater isn't about becoming someone else, it's about taking the parts of yourself that work in that character and letting yourself be vulnerable in that moment, while wearing that character's skin and living their life. But you have to pull that vulnerability from inside you. That's not something you have to pretend to be. That's something you have to pull out from a real place, or it doesn't work on the stage. And it's certainly not going to read for a camera or for an audience. And it's the same way with a book, you need to pull something real out of that character. And if you're not allowing them to be real and react in the way that they really would in this situation, then that's what's missing. You're missing the mark.
[00:27:34] Matty: Have you ever had to write a character where at least at first you thought, I really have nothing in common with this character, what can I possibly pull out of myself for that?
[00:27:43] L.E.: Many, many times. Many times. In fact, just about every bad-ass YA character, because I was nothing like that in my teen years. I like to think I would have been a brave girl grabbing a sword, but especially since I like to write fantasy, it's hard. That again is where beta readers come in handy. They're your audience, and you need that audience, you need the reaction.
[00:28:04] Yeah, I don't know how many times I was on stage in a performance you can rehearse and rehearse all you want, but when you get to performance, the audience isn't always going to laugh where you think they're going to laugh. They're not always going to cry where you think they're going to cry. They're not always going to be still and silent and on the edge of their seat in the moment where you think they're going to be. And it adjusts your whole performance. And that's part of the reason why I love live theater so much, it's a different show every night. You get a different audience every night, and I try to keep that in mind when I'm writing, because I have a different audience with every person who opens my book.
[00:28:42] Matty: It's an interesting analogy because in theater, you would infrequently have an opportunity to see an individual person in the audience reacting. I think it's normally a sense you're getting from the group as a whole. And I think a lot of writers have the tendency to react to whatever they're seeing from an individual or hearing from an individual. So if one person tells them that the scene was too long, it should be cut, then sometimes there's a tendency to want to go right there and cut the scene, as opposed to kind of stepping back and say, no, I'm looking across my whole audience, i.e. my whole pool of readers, and seeing what the general sense is I'm getting from that.
[00:29:24] L.E.: Exactly, and it's a fine line because you also have to play to the market to some degree. Like I got lambasted on my first book, and justly so I think, because my character had no female friends. Her best friend was a guy, and he was her only friend, and that was kind of the point I was trying to make, was she was an introverted girl, isolated herself to the point where she pretty much had no friends.
[00:29:50] And I did give her a best friend in the second book, who was her best buddy, but first book, no female friends, and a contentious relationship with her mother, which is something I had as well. And my reviewers, quite a few of them, came back and said, wait a minute, where are the girls in this book? Why does she not have any female friends? Why are there no good solid female friendships in this YA book? Which is something the YA market wants; they want it very much.
[00:30:20] And I was a girl growing up who had a lot of female friends early in my high school years, but by my later high school and college years, I hung with the guys more than anybody, because I was a good-looking girl, I liked the attention, and I was one of those girls who hung out with the guys. So trying to go back to the days where I really did have a lot of female friends, I mean, I still do, but they weren't like close friends. I didn't trust a lot of people. And it's a writer thing I had to get over because my market demands it, my market wants that.
[00:30:53] Matty: Is that anything that your editor mentioned at all in the course of editing the book?
[00:30:59] L.E.: Not the first book at all, not until the reviews came back and she went, oh yeah, I guess that was kind of a problem. Well, yeah, it was, it really was. And the more I read in YA, because TRAVELER was my first foray into YA. I had been writing romance for years and in mainstream adult romance, nobody really cares if she's got a female friend, they're looking at the guy and that's all they want pretty much. So I was sort of used to that thing. She might have a female friend, but there aren't going to be long conversations about my life and what I want, and all those things in a romance book in general. You'll have an occasional girls' night out or whatever, but you won't get deeply into those things like YA does. Because you're talking about younger characters who are in their late teens and still defining themselves.
[00:31:45] And when I did write the girl best friend in the second book, my editor did step in a few times and say, okay, you're not passing the test here, because these girls, whenever they do get together and talk, they need to be talking about something other than boys. And I had made the mistake of, like an adult romance, they were talking about the guy, they were talking about the guys in their life, they were talking about, will I get a guy? And these were the things they were talking about, and while there was a romance in the book, it wasn't the central storyline.
[00:32:16] And my editor had to come back at me and go, what are you doing? These girls need to talk about things other than guys, if you're going to have them have a conversation with each other. So it was a good lesson to me, and I've learned a lot since, obviously.
[00:32:30] Matty: It's interesting that you almost have to have your writer persona, as well as you're acting out the characters as you had described before, but you're wearing your YA mask as opposed to romance writer mask. It's an important perspective to bring as well.
[00:32:43] L.E.: It is, and it also goes back to being on stage, and in every stage show I've done, there's always a scene I don't like so much. For whatever reason, this scene doesn't resonate with me, I don't understand why the character did this, but I guess we have to have this scene to be able to get to the next scene. It provides valuable exposition, or it gives that other character a chance to shine, or for whatever reason the playwright put this scene in. And I'm an actor I've got to do this scene.
[00:33:14] And I think every actor has had that scene where you're supposed to be feeling X and pull the X reaction from the audience, but it's just not feeling organic. And there are some nights where you literally feel like you're phoning it in. But the audience reacts to it anyway, even though you feel like you're phoning it in, the audience loves it.
[00:33:37] And that also goes back to the book thing of playing to your market. Even though I personally don't understand the need to sit around with another gal pal and talk about my life till all hours of the night, cause I'm just not the sort of person who does that, my market want it, it's what the audience wants. So I'm going to put on my theater mask and give them what the audience wants. We're going to have this conversation and I'm going to make it stick and I'm going to make it resonate, and I'm going to use every trick in the book I get from my beta readers. I'm going to take their reactions and I'm going to see where they laughed or where they cried in places I didn't expect it. I'm going to tweak those moments, I'm going to let that line fall a little differently, I'm going to take their reaction of, that line came too quickly, and maybe lengthen the line out. Maybe have her find a different way to say it that's going to have more impact. So yeah, your beta readers again, are your audience and you need to take that audience's feedback and change your performance.
[00:34:39] Matty: One of the things that my first editor did that I loved, and I didn't realize until I had been edited by other editors that not everybody does this, but as she read, she would write little reactions, like, "ha ha" or "now I'm crying" or "I'm so bored now."
[00:34:54] L.E.: Why can't all editors do that? Oh my God, how wonderful, yeah.
[00:34:57] Matty: And I think it's sometimes just because they don't think about it, it's not that they won't, but sometimes you have to ask them ahead of time, obviously, to say, if you just have a reaction, can you just jot it down? Stick an emoji in, whatever, because that is really invaluable. Because sometimes as a writer, you don't have that sense in the actual moment that you do on the stage of, I wonder what they're thinking right now? And if your editor can help you or your beta readers or whoever you have helping you with that kind of outside perspective, it can be really helpful.
[00:35:28] L.E.: Oh, absolutely. I remember when I was writing DREAMER, which is the follow-up to TRAVELER. Second books are notoriously hard when you're writing a sequel, and we had done so much editing on TRAVELER that it became a very different book. I had originally started that book to be part one of a trilogy, and we decided to remove an entire subplot and condense it down to a duology.
[00:35:52] So the second book, I was literally pretty much starting from scratch, because I had intended for that subplot to be the beginning of the second book and take us through. So I'd literally just start over again with very minimal amounts of things carrying over from the first book. And it was just crazy trying to get through this thing.
[00:36:13] And I remember I needed to add something in. She said, I need them to connect somehow in a way that doesn't involve anything physical. I need an intimate moment between them that has nothing to do with their lips meeting, so find something. So I sat there and wrote this entire scene out, this fantastical scene, and TRAVELER's about a girl who travels through, steps through mirrors into alternate realities. And she finds alternate versions of herself in these realities. So in these other universes, she could be a dancer, she could be overweight, she could be deaf. She could be living in a land where she's wearing corsets and her family lives in a lighthouse and there's all kinds of great things going on.
[00:36:58] And I sent them to a wildlife preserve in Norway in the middle of winter and they're clutching mugs of hot cocoa and suddenly out of the forest in the distance lumber out wooly mammoths, because they haven't died off in this reality. And she gets to pet a wooly mammoth. And it's this really exciting moment, and she and he are sitting under a sky full of Northern lights going off around them, holding mugs of cocoa, and just talking about their lives. And it's just a lovely scene, I thought. And I threw it out there and thought, well, let's see if she thinks it's good or if it's too much. And she wrote back just four words: This is absolute magic.
[00:37:45] And that has stayed with me like through years of writing, just those four words. And you're right, that was a standing ovation for my scene. And it just so resonated with me, those four words. I carry them to this day. This was absolute magic. Yes, thank you.
[00:38:03] Matty: Specific to the lessons from theater, it's very, very clear how you were describing it, I was picturing it so visually in my mind and feeling the wooly mammoth and feeling mugs of hot chocolate. It was lovely, in a theatrical, you know what I mean, not overdone, but in that positive theatrical way.
[00:38:22] L.E.: I'd have the Cyclorama lit up with the Northern lights behind, sparkling stars and steaming mugs of cocoa and, oh yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:38:32] Matty: Well, that’s lovely, I can't think of a nicer note to end on than that magical scene that you described for us. So, L.E., thank you so much. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more you and all your work online.
[00:38:45] L.E.: My website is LEDeLano.com. You can find my books at any major outlet. I will be attending the Pennsylvania State Library Association's convention in February. You'll see me there on the Friday of that weekend. I'll be there signing books, so if you're a librarian in the state of Pennsylvania, come and see me. And I'm available for school visits. If anyone wants to have me, I'm happy to do a virtual or in-person school visit, just reach out to me. And hopefully, you'll hear more about book, which is hopefully a witchy retelling of Cinderella, that begins with a murdered fairy godmother.
[00:39:27] Matty: Oh, that is intriguing. I won't ask, but I will be curious when I read that, who the casted character is for that. Well L.E., thank you so much, this has been so interesting.
[00:39:38] L.E.: Thank you, I've had a great time and thank you to all your listeners for tuning in.
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