Shifts in Emotional Equilibrium

In Helen Frost's new verse novel, Hidden, only Wren and Darra, two teenage girls in the same bunk at camp, know they share a secret.

It was Darra’s father who stole a car with eight year-old Wren hidden in the back six years earlier. Wren survived by staying out of sight until she could find a way to escape.

The only person who knew Wren was hidden in the garage where the car was parked, and who brought her food and water to help her endure the nightmare, was Darra.

Until this summer, neither girl has ever seen the other, except for the images of Wren that Darra watched on the TV news at the time. But that changes when the girls, both fourteen now, discover that they are bunk mates sharing nearby beds at the same summer camp.

Each girl tells the story from her own perspective, with Frost crafting two distinct poetic forms for each girl’s voice.

To capture Wren’s inner world, beginning with Wren’s story at the time of the car hijack, Frost relies on free verse. “The placement of the words on the page,” Frost says, “is something like musical notation.”

For Darra’s voice, Frost creates an entirely different poetic form, adding hidden messages for the reader to decode at the end of the long lines to shed a bit more light on Darra’s story.

These shifts in voice and perspective give the reader an insider's view into each girl’s emotional state from moment to moment so that the reader is made immediately aware of the slightest shift in emotional equilibrium.

These subtle shifts in emotional equilibrium are at the heart of the story, and as the plot unfolds the reader is able to see clearly how each girl’s emotional state propels the story forward.

Here’s an example of how Wren’s shift in emotional balance propels the story forward at the start:

I was a happy little girl wearing a pink dress,
Sitting in our gold minivan,
Dancing with my doll, Kamara.

These are the story’s opening lines, and they reveal a girl who remembers herself in a different time-frame, a different emotional state. Happiness existed, and then, because of what happened, she lost it.

And the question, from the very first line of this story, is established in the reader’s mind: will Wren find happiness again, or, if not happiness, will she find a way to come to peace with the event that turned her life upside-down?

And here’s an example of a shift in emotional balance propelling the story forward from Darra’s perspective:

For six years, I’ve tried to figure out what happened. Dad swears he
didn’t know Wren was in the garage, and Mom
claims she didn’t either. Which one of them has
lied to me for almost half my life? Someone had to let her out. I didn’t
think it was Mom, and I couldn’t get Dad to admit
it was him–so I stopped asking.

Doubt and uncertainty have haunted Darra since the incident, and she still doesn’t know the truth of what happened that day. She is living with the “lie” that she believes one of her parents told her.

Again, Frost has planted the seed of a question in the reader’s mind: will Darra find a way to resolve her uncertainty, her doubts? Will she, like Wren, ever find a way to come to peace with what happened?

Again and again, you hear writers say that you need to find the emotional core of your story’s main characters. Why? Because it’s this search for emotional resolution--this deep need to find emotional equilibrium--that compels your characters to keep searching and your reader to keep reading.

Hidden progresses from Wren’s fear and anger to compassion and understanding, and from Darra’s uncertainty and doubts to trust and friendship.

It’s a masterful example of how an author can construct a story out of the emotional needs and desires of her characters.

For more information about Frost’s Hidden, visit:http://www.helenfrost.net/item.php?postid=30

And for more information on emotional resolution in fiction, visit:
http://www.freewebs.com/alabamaworley/Emotional%20Filter%20Exercise.htm
http://www.tameri.com/write/plotnstory.html
http://www.trutor.net/struc.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_2095687_use-resolution-writing.html
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/creative1/shortstory/
http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/emotion/

Highly Polished Diamonds

Each of Helen Frost’s poems in Diamond Willow–a coming-of-age story about a young half-Athabascan girl whose inexperience sledding dogs nearly costs one of the dogs his life–glitters like a highly polished diamond.

It’s not just the words that sparkle and shine with such radiance, it’s that Frost has arranged each poem on the page to resemble a diamond–the same diamond pattern that appears in the wood of a diamond willow, so called because of the shapes that are hidden beneath the bark.

Frost says in the introduction that she got the idea for Willow’s story from a lamp made from diamond willow that she remembers as a child and from a diamond willow walking stick that she received as a gift and which hung in her study as she thought about the story and wrote the poems

“Diamond willow grows in northern climates,” writes Frost. “It has rough gray bark, often crusted with gray-green lichen. Removing the bark and sanding and polishing the stick reveals reddish-brown diamonds, each with a small dark center.”

By including at the center of each poem a “hidden” message in darker ink, Frost replicates those small, dark centers within the diamonds and adds another dimension to each poem.

The result is quite stunning.

Not only does the reader move through the story in the voice of Willow, the young narrator, but the reader is able to grasp her emotions hidden beneath the surface and which are revealed (much like the small dark centers are revealed after polishing diamond wood) in the darker print at the center of the poems.

What’s truly stunning about these poems–even more than their delicate architecture–are the voices that emerge from them.

In addition to Willow’s voice, Frost offers readers the voices of her mother and father, her grandparents, her best friend, and, amazingly, the voices of ancestors now inhabiting the creatures (dogs, foxes, spruce hens, mice, lynx) who help guide Willow and protect her as she searches for a way out of a potentially life-threatening dilemma.

It’s risky for a writer to rely on such techniques. Some readers might feel the diamond-shaped poems with the dark centers are mere gimmicks.

But in this case, Willow’s story is so strong, the emotional undercurrents so compelling, that the technique used here, rather than interfere with the storytelling, actually draws the reader into the story and takes the reader to a deeper level inside the main character.

The diamond images echo throughout the story and don’t feel imposed on the poems. Rather, they seem to emerge naturally out of Willow’s relationship to the natural beauty surrounding her.

Maybe that’s the key to the question that’s tugging at the back of my mind and which some readers voiced in their reviews of the book: when is it appropriate to use unusual techniques like this?

My sense is that if the technique helps deepen the reader’s understanding of the character and her world without feeling artificial, then it’s ok to use.

If not– if it feels like an added layer that the author has imposed on the story, a distraction–then it’s best to forgo the technique and tell the story in the traditional way.

If you’ve read Diamond Willow, or any other book that relies on an unusual device to tell a story, let us know your thoughts when you get a chance.

For further discussion of Diamond Willow, visit:
http://sarahmillerbooks.blogspot.com/2008/10/diamond-willow-by-helen-frost.html
http://www.semicolonblog.com/?p=2778
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/news/archives/2009/mar1.html
http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-review-diamond-willow.html

And to read more about Helen Frost, visit her website: http://www.helenfrost.net/