Consider Tracking While You Edit

July 10, 2013 0 Revision & Editing Tips , , , , Permalink 0
 

Making TracksIn my last post, I briefly mentioned how beginnings and endings often know each other in fiction.

This lends itself for me to introduce a writing technique I’d like to discuss today: tracking.

By repeatedly addressing familiar objects, sounds, themes, and threads, a writer can effectively string together a body of work as one complete and coherent piece.

I often talk about this in my classes at Fullerton College because it can apply to essay writing, too. Like writing a thirty-page essay, writing a thirty-page story carries with it its own challenges.

One of them is establishing coherence from the beginning of the essay/story to its end. We want our readers to recognize that they are reading the same essay on page five as they are on page twenty five.

For example, I want you to think of one of your favorite songs on the radio. Though the verses may change, the meter and choruses in these songs hold everything together.

Stories are no different, whether the story is a short one or a longer one. The difference is what the writer allows us to track.

I often use Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” to talk about tracking. In this story, Johnson lets us track a hunting knife and his use of danger/humor, among other things. (He has this technique of presenting dangerous situations and ratcheting them up until we have no choice but to laugh!) If you haven’t read this story before, The New Yorker has posted a podcast of Tobias Wolff (another one of my favorite writers) reading “Emergency.” I’ve also embedded it below for your listening pleasure. (Thanks, George LidstoneWheeler!) If you’d like a complete copy of the story, it can be found in Johnson’s short story collection, Jesus’ Son: Stories.

https://soundcloud.com/george-lidstonewheeler/tobias-wolff-reads-denis

For this week, I would like you to think about how you use tracking in your stories, and please feel free to send me a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time, write your heart out!

 

Photo credit: jenny downing / Foter.com / CC BY

The Opening to Alice Munro’s ‘Thanks for the Ride’

July 3, 2013 0 General Advice , , , , Permalink 0
 

Pop's CafeIf you ever want to get better at anything skill-related, like writing, it’s always a good idea to study the greats that have come before you. Without question, I would categorize Alice Munro as one of these greats.

This week, I thought we’d take a look at the first four paragraphs of one of her short stories, “Thanks for the Ride,” to see what we could learn from it and steal for ourselves as writers.

(In case you would like to finish reading the entire story, “Thanks for the Ride” comes from Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories. The collection includes fifteen stories, some of which come from as early in her writing career as 1968.)

The story begins:

My cousin George and I were sitting in a restaurant called Pop’s Cafe, in a little town close to the Lake. It was getting dark in there, and they had not turned the lights on, but you could still read the signs plastered against the mirror between the fly-speckled and slightly yellow cutouts of strawberry sundaes and tomato sandwiches.

In this first paragraph, Munro sets up characters and place. The last sentence gives us an inkling of tone, time, and place.

‘Don’t ask for information,’ George read. ‘If we knew anything we wouldn’t be here’ and ‘If you’ve got nothing to do, you picked a hell of a good place to do it in.’ George always read everything out loud–posters, billboards, Burma-Shave signs, ‘Mission Creek. Population 1700. Gateway to the Bruce. We love our children.’

Munro continues establishing character and place in this paragraph with sharp specifics.

I was wondering whose sense of humor provided us with the signs. I thought it would be the man behind the cash register. Pop? Chewing on a match, looking out at the street, not watching for anything except for somebody to trip over a crack in the sidewalk or have a blowout or make a fool of himself in some way that Pop, rooted behind the cash register, huge and cynical and incurious, was never likely to do. Maybe not even that; maybe just by walking up and down, driving up and down, going places, the rest of the world proved its absurdity. You see that judgment on the faces of people looking out of windows, sitting on front steps in some little towns; so deeply, deeply uncaring they are, as if they had sources of disillusionment which they would keep, with some satisfaction, in the dark.

Munro uses three lists in this paragraph to introduce an ironic, cynical, mocking narrator. Also, Munro establishes lines of tension here.

There was only the one waitress, a pudgy girl who leaned over the counter and scraped at the polish on her fingernails. When she had flaked most of the polish off of her thumbnail she put the thumb against her teeth and rubbed the nail back and forth absorbedly. We asked her what her name was and she didn’t answer. Two or three minutes later the thumb came out of her mouth and she said, inspecting it: ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

This waitress personifies place in this paragraph. One of my past writing mentors, John Keeble, a very kind and wise man, often said beginnings and endings know each other.

By now, we can predict to some extent that the story will be about care. “Thanks for the Ride” is also an elegant, graceful example of introducing your narrator later on in the story.

 

However, let me just clarify that the kind of analysis we’ve done is not the kind of work that you should do while drafting. It would destroy any chance of entering a “creative trance” or “the zone.” This is the kind of thing that should only be done later on, during final stages of working on a manuscript.

It’s my hope that, as writers, if we love a particular story or book, we should slow down and study it to understand why we actually love that particular story or book. We can learn a lot from it!

Until next week, write your heart out.

 

Photo credit: orngejuglr / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

The Nature and Aim of Fiction

June 26, 2013 0 Books on Writing , , , Permalink 0
 

Cool Bumper StickerLike the driver of the car to the left, I love reading Flannery O’Connor’s work! Her short story collections, Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find, are among the finest I have ever read. If you love short stories and you haven’t read either of these collections, you owe it to yourself to pick these up right now!

This week, I have an excerpt from her classic essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” (You can find it in full in her book, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, a posthumous collection of previously unpublished essays and lectures.)

 

In this essay, O’Connor discusses the art of “story-writing,” and by “story-writing” she means to include novels, novellas, short stories, short shorts–anything “in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative.” However, like authors mentioned in my previous posts, O’Connor is concerned with writing from the senses. She says,

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

O’Connor later examines a particular sentence from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

Flaubert [shows] us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, ‘She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.’

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument ‘whose strings buzzed,’ and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

The best prose–regardless if it takes the form of a novel, novella, short story, or short short–originates from the senses, rather than from abstraction. If you found this post helpful, or if you have any ideas for what I should post in the future, please leave me a comment below.

Until next week, settle into your creative trance and write your heart out!

 

Photo credit: texturl / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Don’t Tell Your Characters’ Feelings

June 19, 2013 2comments Rules for Writing , , , , Permalink 0
 

What we did at work today (Rawwrrrr!)

 

The subject of rules for fiction writing makes me nervous. I hesitate to offer advice that seems a little too prescriptive. Rules can be broken, after all. And some of my favorite writers do just that in their work. However, one of my readers requested rules to make her a better fiction writer, so here we go.

Beginning writing courses will inevitably discuss the topic of “showing vs. telling” (“Showing” is an active technique–engaging the senses, whereas “telling” is much more passive.). The beginning writer will probably “tell” at times in a story when she/he shouldn’t.

We should resist “telling” our readers how our characters feel. Avoid peppering your prose with lines like “I loved my brother.” Instead, we should “show” readers this love through scenes. The development of the scenes should set up the feeling.

For example, let’s look at a critical moment from J.D. Salinger’s masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye:

[My brother Allie’s] dead now. He got leukemia when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie never did, and he had red hair. I’ll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence–there was this fence that went all around the course–and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That’s the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them. I really don’t. I slept in garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie.

 

In the above excerpt, Salinger’s narrator, Holden, never “tells” us that he loves his brother. If he did, this would alter our entire understanding of Holden. Instead, we are “shown” this love in Salinger’s prose, and it’s more than just love that gets passed on to readers.

We also feel Holden’s pain and anger throughout this passage, while at the same time, learning more of his character and personality. To him, Allie had represented all that was good in his family.

I don’t want you to leave this post merely believing that too much “telling” results in poor writing. Some things should be told in the interest of time and page space.

Good writing will have a healthy mixture of both.

(However, avoid “telling” your readers about your characters’ feelings.)

Thanks for reading! Until next week, write your heart out.

 

Photo credit: @superamit / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

Steve Almond’s Rules for Writing Fiction

June 12, 2013 0 Rules for Writing , , , , Permalink 0
 

My Life in Heavy MetalSteve Almond is the author of several books, including three short story collections. My favorite of these is to the left: My Life in Heavy Metal.

As provided on the back of its cover, The Boston Globe notes, “Almond writes graphically, vividly, and with unflinching detail about relationships, mostly between men and women, in and out of bed. At times it’s the hum of conquest in the air that drives a story, but at least as often it’s something more complicated: the potential for love, for salvation, the possibility of possibility.”

I met Almond years ago at the Festival of Books at UCLA, where he spoke as part of a panel, and afterward, he mingled with his fans and autographed books.

 

I praised him for his work in My Life in Heavy Metal, and he was very humble and gracious.

When I handed him two of his story collections to sign, he didn’t hurry me along (like some writers do). He asked me which of his stories I liked best. And I told him “Valentino,” which seemed to surprise him. He asked me if I wrote, and I told him I tried. He opened one of them and wrote:

Ryan–

My rules:

  1. Love your characters at all times.
  2. Slow down where it hurts.
  3. Don’t give up.

Hell Yes,

Steve Almond

I thought I’d share his three rules with you today in hopes that you might find them as useful as I have:

1. “Love your characters at all times.”

If you don’t love your characters, it will be much more difficult for your readers to love them, too. It’s noticeable when writing characters we’ve judged and dislike, especially if they are our viewpoint characters. Their complexity will be stunted. Their rationale will read as shallow. And the writing falls flat. Besides, if we have time to judge a character, we are not in “the zone.” We are not in the “creative trance.” People are never completely good or completely evil. It is our job as writers to present fully realized, tragic, and flawed individuals on paper. Allow them to be vulnerable. We act as conduits to our characters’ dreams and fears and emotional baggage. Even antagonists have redemptive qualities.

2. “Slow down where it hurts.”

To slow down where it hurts is to “never avert one’s eyes” (to borrow from Akira Kurosawa, the famous director). It can be difficult for us to slow down painful scenes. If you’re like me, our tendency is to want to blow past these uncomfortable moments, to get out of them. But if we can’t slow down the images, sounds, and feelings of our characters, opportunities will be missed–the power of a scene utterly diluted. At best, our scene will read as complete B.S. When creating art, this is unforgivable. Readers need to experience what our characters see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel. This doesn’t mean that we are contradicting the first rule at all here. We still always need to love our characters.

3. Finally, Almond wrote, “Don’t give up.”

The life of a working writer in this day and age is difficult, to say the least. For every Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer, there are millions of struggling writers working odd jobs just to pay the bills. We battle rejection. We battle illegitimacy. We battle a culture of immediate gratification and consumerism. The writing life is hard. But we must not give up. Talent is overrated. It is paramount to establish a routine and to sustain the drive and focus to keep it!

 

I hope you found this week’s post helpful. Please drop me a line below in the comments to let me know what you think. Do you have any writing rules that you live by? If so, please share.

And above all else, write your heart out!

 

P.S. Here’s a short clip of Steve Almond talking about how he became a writer:

 

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