The Wind River Outdoor Writers Conference

Amber Leberman of Wyoming Wildlife, Max Phelps of FalconGuides, Director Buck Tilton who writes wonderful outdoor books, myself, and Michael Lanza of The Big Outside.

I had the distinct pleasure and honor of presenting at the Wind River Outdoor Writers Conference this past weekend. 

You know how you never know what to expect when you go to these kinds of things?  It could be good, it could be horrible, it could be wonderful?  Well, it was beyond wonderful.  It is the yardstick against which I will measure all conferences, I have to tell you.

And I suspected as much. Buck Tilton, who organized the event with the help of his lovely wife Kathleen, is an amazing writer and the host with the most.  Anything he touches turns to writerly gold, and you just want to take him home and keep him. Our great friend David Gray helped, and I stayed with Dave and his lovely wife Chontelle (who were best man and matron of honor at our wedding years ago).

The other presenters were rock stars.  I’ll go into much more detail in the next couple of days, but I’ll introduce them here.  There is Amber Leberman, who is the editor for the pre-eminent wildlife and Wyoming magazine, Wyoming Wildlife.  There is Max Phelps, who has been in the book trenches in a number of capacities, including bookstore manager and director of marketing and sales at FalconGuides and Rowman & Littlefield.  There is Michael Lanza, who does these amazing outdoor adventures with his family and photographs and reports them on his wonderful blog The Big Outside.

Ten people attended, and I have to say I was so honored to get to know them, and I can’t wait to see how their writing flourishes in the future. Among others, there were a retired game warden, a retired banker, a retired college administrator, two wonderful PR people for NOLS (the National Outdoor Leadership School), a high school teacher, a grade school librarian, and a retired technical writer.

It took place at the Sinks Canyon Center in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains outside of Lander, Wyoming.  The blue mountains tooth up behind the center, and you think you’re in a wild animal park with all the wildlife. And the resident chickens came by to check us out.

More to come tomorrow and so on, but I have to tell you I’ll be basking in its glow for months.

Thank you, Buck, from the bottom of my heart!

'Look at This!'

(via)

I love this idea: storytelling is nothing more than a collaboration between two people, one pointing something out and the other looking.  It changes the way you think about what you include.  Setting becomes more important, and you think about pointing to the outside versus the inside. 

Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible. Imagine stopping during a hike to point out a distant church to your hiking companion: look, over there, in the gap between those trees – that patch of yellow stone? Now can you see the spire? "When you write," Pinker says, "you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing."

 And there's a lot more interesting stuff he talks about. Read the whole article here.

David Quammen's "Walking Out"

I love it when I come across an amazing new story, one that sticks with me.  Someone on Facebook linked to this great David Quammen story, "Walking Out."  It reminds me of Jack London's "To Build a Fire."  Nothing more compelling than life and death.  You should go and read the whole thing immediately, but I wanted to highlight this part.  Isn't it great how this dialog says so much about the father and son's relationship and the father and mother's relationship? Amazing stuff.

David Quammen, by Joel Sartore (via)

"We have a moose tag," his father shouted.

The boy said nothing. He refused to care what it meant, that they had a moose tag.

"I've got one picked out. A bull. I've stalked him for two weeks. Up in the Crazies. When we get to the cabin, we'll build a good roaring fire." With only the charade of a pause, he added, "Your mother." It was said like a question. The boy waited. "How is she?"

"All right, I guess." Over the jeep's howl, with the wind stealing his voice, the boy too had to shout.

"Are you friends with her?"

"I guess so."

"Is she still a beautiful lady?"

"I don't know. I guess so. I don't know that."

"You must know that. Is she starting to get wrinkled like me? Does she seem worried and sad? Or is she just still a fine beautiful lady? You must know that."

"She's still a beautiful lady, I guess."

"Did she tell you any messages for me?"

"She said … she said I should give you her love," the boy lied, impulsively and clumsily. He was at once embarrassed that he done it.

"Oh," his father said. "Thank you, David."

Creepypasta Settings

I love this post in Distractify about the 38 most haunting abandoned places on earth.  Beautiful but very creepypasta.  "They have such character," is what we say. More on this in a minute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aren't these great?!

So, "they have such character."  It got me thinking about how it is cliche to say that setting is a character in a story, but it's cliche because IT'S TRUE. 

I deliberately think of setting as another character in my stories and novels.  That allows me to think about the interactions among the other characters and the setting and how the setting influences them.  It makes me think very explicity about how I'm portraying setting and forces me to fully realize it on the page. 

Does a setting change over the course of the story?  Does it have an arc like any good character would?  Definitely, yes.  It doesn't change physically, usually, but the change is in the perceptions of the other characters, which supports the movement of the book.

I'm also thinking of any Coen brothers movie.  Setting is so rich.  I want my writing to be as rich ~ and entertaining ~ as a Coen brothers movie!

‘Bad Writing,’ a Great Video

One of the things I love about Facebook is the infinite possibilities to discover new artists.  Lo and behold, yesterday I came across husband and wife Vernon Lott and Jennifer Anderson (and sister Gina Lott) of Morris Hill Pictures, Lewiston, Idaho.  They did a fabulous video called Bad Writing, which can be viewed for free on Vimeo this month.  It features a whole host of amazing writers talking about beginning writers and their own process.  George Saunders and Margaret Atwood and a host of others have some very interesting things to say. 

Check it out! (And I’ll be looking for great things from Morris Hill in the future!)

Of Course It's a Character

Martin Johnson Heade, Lynn Meadows, Mass., c. 1871-75 (via)

It's such a cliche ~ setting is a character in a novel. You hear people say about novels they love, "I just loved the background. It was it's own character."

But it's a cliche because it is true.  I've been thinking more and more about how we do not live our lives in a vacuum.  We may live largely inside our heads and ignore things around us, but our surroundings are very much there, very much interacting with us and influencing all aspects of our lives.

So of course setting is a character.  Characters are the actors in the story, and setting surely should be one of those actors.

That's why dismissing a writer as "a regionalist" is wrong.  All fiction is regional if you're doing it right.  It should take place in a very specific time and place because it makes a difference if you're in eighteenth century France near Bordeaux or nineteenth century Africa in what would become South Africa or twentieth century America near Lake Michigan.

So, is that character hostile? Inviting?  Sensual?  Spiteful?  Comfortable? Austere?  Is it your tipsy old aunt or you cruel second-grade teacher? Flesh her out.  Let us feel-hear-smell-taste-touch her.

Moreau vs. Frankenstein

Via

Via

I just finished reading The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G.Wells.  A fascinating book on so many levels. 

H.G., the ultimate science fiction writer, was prescient in so many ways.  He predicted nuclear weapons, biological warfare, the moon landing, genetic engineering, lasers, and World War II. Course, we aren’t yet able to be invisible or travel in time.  Give it a few years.

Moreau was the book upon which H.G. made his name.  He called it “an exercise in youthful folly” and I think I read somewhere that he was surprised at the outrage it caused ~ which of course only made it more popular.

You probably know the story or have read it.  Edward Prendick’s ship goes down and he’s in a lifeboat with two other men, and right away we’re thrust into the thick of it.  In the first couple of chapters, the boat’s three inhabitants decide to draw straws to see which one gets killed for water and food. Gack! Reviews don’t often mention that part.

Then he gets picked up by a boat going to a mysterious island that has repulsive animalistic men on board. Montgomery is in charge there, but then he’s a drunkard and turns out to be the right-hand man of the evil genius Dr. Moreau, who tries to “mold” animals into men through vivisection, which of course is also ghastly torture. 

I can’t help comparing it to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.  Same themes ~ the power of science to create and destroy, an investigation into human nature ~ but very different books.  Frankenstein aims higher and achieves more, somehow.

The subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus. You might remember that Prometheus was a Titan who taught humans the arts of civilization and brought them fire.  For that, Zeus punished him by having his liver (or heart) eaten out every day by an eagle, only to have it regenerated.

So it is with Frankenstein.  He is a monster that is created by Dr. Frankenstein, and in the beginning he is good (saves a little girl’s life) but he has no love.  He tries to get the Dr to make him a mate, the Dr refuses, and the monster turns bad and murders the Dr’s family.  Like Prometheus, he does good but his maker rejects him and tortures him.

The difference between Moreau and Frankenstein is striking.  In Moreau, H.G. tries his best to shore up the difference between animal nature and man’s higher nature.  Sure, he does undercut it at the end by making humans seem nothing but animals, but he never seems to raise the animals to human level.  He has them strive but inevitably be pulled “backwards.”  My modern sensibility kept expecting some kindness ~ not just loyalty ~ from the animals, something that would turn the stereotype on its head, but we don’t get that.  The animals remain animals.

In Frankenstein, the monster is more human than the Dr.  He is capable of kindness, while the Dr is consumed with science and his own selfish needs.  The book seems to say that the monster, the animal, is more capable of human kindness than the human.

Also, in Moreau, we are firmly resting in Prendick’s point of view.  And it’s not a very likable point of view.  He’s kind of a dick, all the way around.  Self-interested, hateful, just as soon “put someone out of their misery” as anything else.  He doesn’t seem to have much compassion, and we’re stuck in his head for the whole book.

In Frankenstein, we’re in the monster’s head too, and we empathize so much.  Here’s this helpless newborn, even if he is a monster, who is thrust out into the world all on his own, and he has to learn how to feed and clothe himself, to learn language, to figure things out, and he has the disadvantage of being horribly repulsive.  And the one who should care for him the most, his maker, rejects him utterly.

It’s going to make me think a lot about craft, about how the monster is such a sympathetic protagonist, even as he eventually does horrible things, while Prendick comes across as pretty unsympathetic.  What are the craft considerations behind it?  What would have made Prendick more sympathetic and the monster less?

The Objective Narrator, or the Merged Narrator

Two-face, by Bruce Timm

A recent book deal posted on Publisher’s Marketplace (by my lovely agency):

Professor of History and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Emory University Clifton Crais's HISTORY LESSONS: A Family Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Wonders of the Brain, part memoir, part narrative science and part detective story, using the tools of his training as a historian, the author reconstructs his own personal history, and examines the neuroscience of memory and forgetting, from the ways in which experience shapes the developing brain to the mechanisms that cause the chronic childhood amnesia from which he suffers, to Dan Crissman at Overlook, by Jessica Papin at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (World English).

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

But what really struck me about this description was the narrative stance of the book.  It’s a memoir, so it’s about personal things, yet Crais also brings in his expertise and gives an “unbiased, objective” point of view.

Just to be clear.  Every book has a narrator.  It represents the storyteller’s voice in the text, but it is not the author ~ even in books with narrator’s named the same as the author.  It is a creation, a character.  In journalism and nonfiction, it’s that even-toned voice we know so well that we don’t even think of as a voice.  In third-person fiction, the narrator is sometimes very prominent, hopping from head to head and telling us what to think.  In first-person, the narrator and the protagonist are merged.*  (For a fabulous piece on narrators, read “The Author-Narrator-Character Merge: Why Many First-time Novelists Wind up with Flat, Uninteresting Protagonists” by Frederick Reiken in the AWP Writer's Chronicle, 2004-05, Volume 37, no. 4, p. 55.)

This makes me think about the many manifestations of the objective narrator. We’re used to the objective narrator in journalism and nonfiction ~ the “unbiased” voice that gives it to us straight.  It inspires confidence in its approach, and we believe what it says.

But the above deal post made me think about the objective narrator in forms of memoir and fiction.  Memoir and fiction are all about point of view, about the personal experience, and so we don’t often think of the narrator as being objective.  But often the best memoir has a narrator that is both deeply invested but also pulls out her professional or scientist hat too.  The above description is a good example.  It enriches the work if the narrator gives context as well as personal experience.

And we see the more personal tone much more in nonfiction these days ~ sort of an acknowledgement that the world is subjective.  The narrator ~ most often identified as the author ~ addresses the reader. 

Handling your narrator is very tricky.  You don’t want to overmanage, and the omniscient narrator is out of fashion, but you don’t want to have no narrator at all.  Your reader wants to feel sure that he is in good hands.  That’s where a seemingly objective narrator comes in handy.

Even though we live in an age of irony and skepticism and Everything's an Argument (a book about rhetoric), we still need a narrator.  And it helps as a writer to be very knowledgable and deliberate about our narrative choices.

It would take a book itself just to sufficiently address the subject.

*Although not totally merged. See Reiken's great essay for more detail. Sorry ~ it's not online.

World-building, or Setting as Character

I’m starting a new novel, so world-building is on my mind.

I’ve picked out images for what all my major characters look like.  I’ve imagined their ethnic origins and the histories of their families and where they’re from.  I’ve done lots of research on where it’s set ~ I’ve been there, but I need all the information I can get.  I’ve even done research on things I know implicitly but would like to be more explicit about, such as regional dialects of Wyoming.

I think some people consider world-building something only science fiction writers do.  After all, they’re creating worlds and hence naturally doing a whole lot of world-building.  You can kind of see historical fiction writers having to as well ~ the past is also another planet.  Certainly these writers do, but they’re not the only ones who need to indepthly imagine their setting and culture and characters.

The last AWP Chronicle has a great piece by a professor ("Cather's World & the Future of Narrative" by Douglas Bauer) talking about his literature class on Willa Cather and her imagining her world.  He worries that the present generation, head down to their iphones as they walk along, will not have attention nor the raw material to effectively depict setting. They won’t be able to create worlds because they don’t notice their own.  I’m a little more optimistic than this, but still.

All writers need to create worlds.  If you’re writing a romance or a literary novel or a mystery, you also need to deeply imagine your worlds.  You need to think certainly about plot ~ what happens in what order, cause and effect ~ but you also need to think about characters and their motives, the setting as an influencing character in its own right, the history of everything that contributes, what things look like, and so on.

If you don’t imagine these things, they won’t show up on the page, and your book will be like one of those minimalist plays where the background is nonexistent, props are minimal, and costumes are often outlandish.  I’m thinking of a particular Richard III adaptation where Richard sits on a bed talking on the phone while two gay lovers make out behind him.

Your world is a very strong character in your book.  It should equal all of your other characters.  It shouldn’t overwhelm everything, but it shouldn’t be nonexistent.

Think about the Harry Potter series.  Wow, what a world.  That’s because J.K. Rowling so deeply imagined it.  But also think of Mystic River by Dennis Lehane.  The setting shines through.  Many noir mysteries are this way.  Think of Westerns ~ of course the setting plays a role.  Think of Gone with the Wind, Let the Great World Spin, anything by Mark Twain (who was not writing historical fiction, of course, but contemporary fiction).  They all have love affairs with their settings.

So how does a writer so deeply imagine a place? Well, a lot of it is grunt work, asking yourself, why, why, why?  Doing a whole bunch of research.  Revising and reimagining over and over again.  The novels I’ve written I’ve done major rewrites from scratch, and each time I do the world gets deeper and richer.  Finally, I would take tips from science fiction and historical fiction writers.  (Here’s a blog summary of a great AWP panel on historical fiction.  Especially pay attention to the tips by Ron Hansen.) 

Make a conscious decision to treat your world as a character and give him or her proper due.

Excellence in Writing

Writing is a skill we can continue to hone no matter our age. The Superb Writers' Blogathon, brought to you by Grammarly grammar checker, is a web series dedicated to helping all aspiring writers achieve greatness.

I first became aware of Grammarly by their funny geeky posts on Facebook, and then they emailed to ask if I would like to participate in their Superb Writers’ Blogathon. The point is to talk about excellence in writing.  I am so on board with that!  Any time we can promote good grammar and excellent writing, I am thrilled.

When I was getting my master’s, I taught freshman composition.  I so much enjoyed it ~ meeting people with such good will and so focused on their futures and on figuring out the world.  However, they came into the classroom with such stark fear on their faces.  Someone once did a poll on what college students feared most.  Number one was nuclear war, but right after that was writing for English class.  Now that says something. 

Another thing.  Inevitably, someone would get in a jam or think they were getting away with something and would turn in a plagiarized paper.  Now I ask you: Do you think a master carpenter can tell the difference between the work of Jack Handyman and another master carpenter?  Do you think a pianist of 30 years’ experience knows the difference between the playing of a college student and someone who is her or his peer?  Can a doctor suss out the difference in effectiveness of treatment of your home remedies versus tried and true scientific method?  Well, we would certainly hope so. 

And so it was with the plagiarized papers.  Because the students couldn’t tell the difference between their own writing and the papers they plagiarized, whether it was bought from a paper mill or pulled together from sources on the net, they thought I couldn’t. 

All this to say, there are standards of excellence in writing.  Sure, there is a lot that is subjective, and once you reach a certain level, it is based more and more on personal taste, but there is a definite difference between poor, good, and great.

So what exactly is excellent writing?  Well, there are libraries full of books to tell us just that, but let me give you the three-minute version.

Clarity ~ Good writing is clear writing.  You don’t use big words to bolster your confidence or try to snow your readers.  You don’t use big words to try to make yourself sound important.  Your goal is to be as clear and straightforward as possible, using the simplest words that you can to convey your meaning.  Sometimes, though, you need to use big words, but that’s because those words fit the rhetorical situation you are in and the concepts you are trying to convey.

Precision ~ Le mot juste, or the right word.  Don’t guess when you use a word.  If you are a little hazy on its meaning, look it up.  I’ve edited seasoned professional writers who will stick a word in there that they think approximates the meaning they were searching for, but it will be all wrong.  It happens with verbs, but it also with proper names ~ in this age of the internet, you have no excuse for not looking up the exact wording or spelling of a proper name.  You don’t use a quarter inch ratchet when you need a 6 mm, and you don’t use affect when effect is the right word.

The right details ~ Along with precision comes the right details.  If your detail only does one thing in a scene, it’s not enough.  Each detail needs to do two or three or four things.  It needs to tell us about character and about setting and so much more.  Interesting and surprising and luscious details.

Muscular verbs ~ Your verbs do the work and pull the reader along.  Try to use active verbs and avoid to-be constructions when at all possible.  Related to this is to avoid passive tense as much as possible, as it leads to convolution.  This isn’t possible in all situations, as often in professional writing the doer needs to be submerged so there’s plausible deniability, but as much as possible, active verbs.

Structure ~ Having a predictable structure makes it easy for your reader to follow your thoughts.  We’ve all read those impenetrable papers.  If you’re writing nonfiction, the structure of a thesis-based essay is not a bad place to start.  The first part is a hook to draw your reader in and ends with a bald statement of your assertion or thesis.  Then the sections below each have their own assertion that supports the thesis and each paragraph has a strong topic sentence followed by rich evidence. You end where you started ~ at your thesis ~ but watch out because you’ll often argue yourself into a slightly different place.  For fiction and other forms of writing, structure is just as important. Study your writing heroes for their tricks.

Unity ~ I would tell my students, a piece of writing is like a well-designed tool ~ everything in it is there for a purpose.  Nothing is just thrown in for good measure.  That is, it’s unified.  It all has a reason, and you don’t just throw something in that you think will be interesting. If you have a sneaking suspicion that it needs to be left out, it does.

Coherence ~ I don’t mean as opposed to incoherent, the general term for confusing, but rather the technical writing term that means everything in the right order.  You should have an order in mind (chronological, theme, frame structure, whatever) and then follow through on it.  This is often a problem in technical writing where the writer doesn’t follow an overall plan. You’re teaching your reader your structure from your very first line, so it’s important to set it up and telegraph it to the reader so they know what’s coming.  And for heaven’s sake if you set it up one way, follow through.

Development ~ A few people are blessed with the ability to go on and on (and they become English majors) but everyone else tends to write short.  Things have to be adequately explained, or developed.  Topic sentences need to be supported with evidence.  The argument needs to move forward slowly and steadily.  In fiction, your readers need all the help they can get ~ don’t keep them guessing.  Of course, you may also have to trim, but err on the side of development, especially on the first draft.

Awareness of audience ~ You’re not writing to a void.  The point of writing is to communicate and so be aware of the audience or audiences you are writing for and make it as easy for them as possible.  Give them credit for intelligence, but don’t make it hard for them. Think about their vocabulary and what they know and don’t know.  In fact, every writing situation you are in, you should first ask, “Who is my audience?” and then you need to adjust your rhetorical stance to best reach them.  How do you hook them?  Are you addressing two audiences with opposing views, which is very difficult?  Perhaps you should bury your thesis toward the end and try to get people on board before you baldly state your objective.

Style ~ It’s hard to talk about style.  It is the ineffable.  But, whether fiction or nonfiction, the best way to develop your style is to start by mimicking the greats.  Try to write like your writer heroes.  If you like spare, try Hemingway.  If you like lush, try David Foster Wallace.  If you’re trying to combine storytelling and magazine style, try the wonderful Susan Orlean.  If you’re working on hard-hitting news reporting, read the major papers. Whomever. And don’t be afraid to experiment, but know that part of the learning process in anything is failure, so don’t be precious about it and throw out what doesn’t work and keep going.

Be interesting ~ One of the things freshman have a hard time getting to is that their work needs to be interesting.  Unpredictable.  Surprising.  That’s why the five-paragraph essay can be deadly because they don’t reach, they don’t surprise themselves, and the reader is left to yawn.  This is part of audience awareness too.  This is a good one for fiction writers ~ you need to follow your genre but you also need to be above all interesting, to vary the convention.  Ask yourself: has this been done millions of times before? Always, always, push yourself and your ideas.

So, how can we achieve excellent writing?  Lots and lots of lots of work.  10,000 hours, as Malcolm Gladwell says.  You need to revise everything you write.  You need to get feedback from your friends who are writers.  You need to read extensively, in your genre and grammar books and dictionaries and the OED, for heaven’s sake.  Strunk and White is your bible.  Words need to become the tools that you know inside and out, their connotations, their denotations, their matrilineal ancestry, and where they like to hang out and have a beer. 

You are a carpenter of words, my friend, and whether you are bent on a bird house or the Taj Mahal, do the work to make it the finest you can.

Relying on Your Reader

As I’m working on a short story and also thinking about yesterday’s post, I’m struck by how much the reader is responsible for making the meaning in a story. 

When constructing a story, you want every detail to matter, to contribute to the whole.  That’s why “he was five foot ten inches with hazel eyes” rarely adds to a narrative.  It’s not meaningful.  Now, if you say, “he was six foot two in his stocking feet with piercing eyes” (a la Louis L’Amour) that means something.  It means he was tall and observant, and it says a lot about where he comes from and the narrator’s voice, even if it’s become cliché.

But sometimes we make the details too closely matched while at the same time too expected.  In other words, we make them clichés.  I’m basing this current story I’m working on partly on real video footage, and I’m here to tell you the actual actions within the video are much more telling and wonderful than the received images of grief I could concoct, though I hope I would push past that to more fully imagine things.

So I guess I’m saying we should put more emphasis on the specificity and uniqueness (which shouldn’t be a word) and word choice of the detail and less on its aptness ~ because if it is too apt, it is expected.  And I’m realizing that it’s the reader who makes the connection.  Disparate details amount to something in the reader's mind. Sure, we try to craft the resulting reaction, but if we’re in there trying to lead the reader by the nose, he’ll resent it.  Let the lovely details of the world speak for themselves.

PS Pix stopped by in the comment section and pointed out this great video by Kurt Vonnegut. Thank you!!

Making You Feel, Part 2

A week or two ago, I linked to the World Press Photo winners from 1955-2011.  Those photos move us, as do Norman Rockwell paintings.  Today, I want to talk about why and how that translates into fiction.

I deliberately chose the Norman Rockwell painting above because I think it’s one most people are unfamiliar with.  Maybe we can see it a little better if it’s new.  Why does this painting ~ and all Norman Rockwell’s ~ move us so (as a generalization)?  I would suggest that it’s because 1) details, 2) composition and focus, 3) juxtaposition of small and large, 4) its very specificity points to a larger human condition.

Details.  What do we know from this painting?  This guy is a GI. We know that from the helmet and knife above and the badges to the side and the honorable discharge.  Because we know when NR was painting and because of world events, we can guess that this may be right after World War II when the GI Bill helped so many returning GIs get an education.  What he’s wearing screams college coed of that era ~ the turtleneck, the dress slacks, the shoes and the lovely detail of the socks.  Another detail ~ this isn’t a gawky kid.  He’s a grown man, filled out and experienced, yet there are details that show his awkward youth ~ the way his hair tumbles over his forehead, the shortness of his pants, the trying on of the pipe that doesn’t quite fit.  We know his name, Willie Gillis, because it’s written on his books.  We know he’s sitting in his dorm room studying.  Other details ~ the golf clubs, the edifice through the window ~ scream his aspirations.  He wants to do well.  My first impression was that the building through the window was a government building, which immediately made me think he wanted to go into politics, but actually it’s probably just a university building.  Still, the impression is there.

The composition and focus.  This, like many of NR’s paintings, lead the eye up and into the painting.  It’s darker around the outside and light toward the middle.  (Think of the Thanksgiving image of the family NR painted.  Same thing. And so many others.)  It’s framed by the window and walls.  The past is toward the outside and the future is toward the middle.    Our eyes first catch details around the outside but then are drawn inward to the face and then, inexorably, toward the light, toward the building, toward the future for this young man. We know that this young man dreams of a wonderful future, yearns, aspires.  It makes you ache for him, and I don’t think it matters if he’s white or black or any other race or ethnicity.  I think we all know what it means to yearn.

Juxtaposition of small and large.  By that I mean the everyday vs. our larger dreams.  In this image there’s the everyday details, as I mentioned above.  One person going about his day.  But there are also big things ~ life and death and hopes and disappointments ~ right there side by side. Now that I write this, I connect it with the fact that, in compelling fiction, the protagonist almost always wants something.  He or she can want nothing more than a drink of water, but if you show that, the reader is much more likely to be right there with you.

Specificity leading to the larger human condition.  This is a very specific scene with specific details.  This is one young man’s face.  He has a name.  His socks are a little worn.  He’s sitting at this window this fall.  He has a past.  All these details accrete to make a certain person in a certain situation.  But, then, gloriously, they also accrete to mean much more than the sum of their parts.  By their very specificity, they let us know so much about this man and we can identify with what he dreams for.  So many of NR’s paintings are this way ~ they show us a world of hope.

I wanted to point out that this painting does not include all the details in this guy’s life.  No.  They are very selectively chosen and placed and illustrated  to support the larger impression. Maybe this guy is from Texas or Oregon.  Do we know this?  No.  Because it doesn’t matter.  But each detail that is shown means something.

You know what I’m going to say next.  This is just like fiction.  We choose small details that mean.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, should be extraneous in a work of fiction.  (Sure, novels have more leeway than short stories.  Still, it’s all important.)  They should all be working toward a goal, an effect.  The composition ~ the sentences, the scenes, the energy ~ should all be put together to achieve the desired effect.  The “making you feel.”  These, hopefully, will then add up to the last thing ~ your specificity will point to a larger condition. 

Let’s look at the opposite for a second.  Telling us how to feel.  Generalization.  Does it work to make you feel sad to say, “She felt sad”?  Or do you get angry when it says, “She was mad”?  No.  We need the details to make us experience what the character is going through.  We don’t need to be told what to feel; we need to be shown so that it comes naturally to us.  Generalization. The best fiction is most often set in a particular place.  No accident, that.  Once again, it is the details that let us see and hear and feel. 

These craft things sound so easy.  Just write with detail.  Only it’s not, as I’m sure you know.  Which details?  In what order?  What effect am I going for?

The World Press Photo winners move us in the same way.  Their visceral nature.  The raw emotion on the subjects’ faces.  Small details vs. huge hopes ~ or dashed hopes.  The violation of violence.  Grief and loss. Now that I think about it ~ these photos are most often about loss.

Tomorrow, I’d like to talk more about making you feel as it pertains to this great documentary I watched while I was out sick: Life in a Day, which shows the world in a day, June 24, 2010.  It’s amazing. 

Film Technique in Sherlock Holmes

My husband and I went to see the new movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. (We haven’t yet seen the first one.)

I was expecting not to particularly like it, but my husband wanted to see it. He rarely wants to see a film in the theater, so when he does, I’m more than happy to go, as I’m a film addict. But the ones I like are rarely blockbuster and most often character-based.

This one was thought provoking in a number of ways, but mostly ~ for me ~ because of the superb filmmaking technique.

First of all, the actors acted incredibly close to one another. In the real world, if people are enemies or having a fight, you expect them to draw back and put distance between each other. On screen, actors always almost play close to one another, but this one seemed incredibly so. Second, the camera played very close to the actors’ faces. So not only were the actors close but the camera, we, were close to the actors. The overall affect was a feeling of claustrophobia, which was I’m sure the intended effect. It put you close to the actions and emotions but also trapped you there and made you uncomfortable. Very interesting.

I’m trying to think of the literary equivalent. Certainly psychological realism/suspense is that way. I’m thinking Edgar Allen Poe or Henry James. What would be the modern equivalent of this claustrophobic inside-the-skull dramatic positioning? Perhaps mysteries, which I don’t read a lot of. Unrealiable narrators like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, perhaps?

Another thing that was fascinating was the historical realism. The male actors were semi-unshaven, which I’m sure was a the case due to 1880s shaving and bathing technology, and the street scenes you felt would be very much like it might have been. So lovely to see. The lack of lighting and the crowding and the filth. Very lovely. It grounded what otherwise might have been what seemed like the mere attempt to turn Sherlock Holmes into a superhero. That was my suspicion going in, but it certainly didn’t come across that way.

And to be fair Holmes and Watson were the superheroes of their day. I’ve only read a little of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, but friends assure me that there is a lot of action, so it isn’t misrepresentation. So actually I’m being unfair to the whole enterprise because I haven’t read very much of the actual Sherlock Holmes stories and am relying on stereotype.

Finally, I love the way that Guy Ritchie portrayed the working of Holmes’s mind. Whenever a fight was about to occur, what is going to happen is foreshadowed in quick blur motion in black and white and blue. A very effective technique. It was similar to the technique Peter Jackson used to show Frodo’s draw to the ring in the Lord of the Rings movies. It felt dreamy but also you felt the point of view of the character strongly. And in Sherlock Holmes, it was doubly effective because then you got inside Moriarity’s head too, as he matched Holmes move for move at the end, and then ~ surprise! ~ Holmes was one step ahead.

What would be the literary equivalent? Jumping forward in time inside the characters head but with such energy of language and technique differing from the rest of the prose. It wouldn’t merely be shifting from third to first person, though that might contribute. It’s the play within the play, like "The Murder of Gonzago" in Hamlet, reflecting on the whole but also showing the content of a character’s mind. The difference in the media, though, makes prose much better at showing interiors rather than surfaces, but I thought this was a very affective technique in filmmaking. IMHO and for what it’s worth.

Oh, and Noomi Rapace (of the Danish version of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo) and Stephen Fry and Jared Harris were so delightful!

Plants vs. Zombies

Yesterday, when I picked my five-year-old twins up from after-school daycare, my son was sitting off by himself, headphones on, in front of the computer in the small side room, away from the chaos and noise of kids dancing and drawing and agreeing and disagreeing in the main room. He had found a new computer game. When he saw me, he jumped up from his chair, practically hopping up and down, and said, “This is the greatest game ever! Can we get it on our computer at home?”

It’s called Plants vs. Zombies. It really is a great game ~ I stayed up way too late last night playing it after the kids went to bed. The zombies are coming across your lawn to enter the house and eat your brains, and it’s your job to plant various plants in your back yard that defend against them. There’s a little bit of sun that rains down that you have to collect to grow your flowers, and then you plant sunflowers to gather more sun. There are peashooters and repeaters and snow peas that spit projectiles at the oncoming zombies. There are cherry bombs that turn all zombies in the vicinity to ashes. There are wall-nuts that stop the zombies’ progress. There’s a potato mine that explodes if they walk over it, but it takes some time to grow. And then with each level you advance, you get new types of plants, but you’re limited as to how many types you can choose. It turns to nighttime and you have to use various types of mushrooms. Then you’re in your backyard with a pond and you need to plant lily pads in order to plant the plants. The final line of defense is a series of lawnmowers that, if the zombies reach them, they are mowed over. But, the drawback is, once it’s gone it’s gone, and it takes out your plants too. If a zombie makes it past, it walks into your back door and “The Zombies Ate Your Brains!” Game over.

It is seriously addicting. I may have to buy the full version.

But as I was thinking about it this morning, I thought: that’s exactly what you need in a plot. You need it to be seriously addicting. How does the PvZ do it? Well, you have a protagonist (you), antagonists (zombies), and a battle with interesting and clearly defined characters on your side. The zombies too have interesting characters. There’s an athlete zombie who can bypass things and there are disco zombies who swarm. It’s progressive ~ you win (or lose) one level and get new plants and new challenges in the next level. Just like chapters. Each level is enough alike that you easily pick it up and understand it but also enough different that it’s a challenge. Chapters should progress that way ~ not aliens dropping in deus ex machina (unless you already have aliens) but also a new twist each time.

I’m telling: it’s got me thinking about my plotting.

Taking Responsibility for Your Audience

Friday’s video with Rob Kapilow is so rich and wonderful, I thought I’d pick up on another idea he highlights, and that’s about our responsibility to our audiences.

In that video at about 7:40, Rob talks about realizing that he had been playing this particular piece of piano music forever, but he had not actually heard it, and if he hadn’t really listened and heard it, how in the world could a regular audience have any hope of detecting the wonderful nuances that the composer intended? The hundreds of small inspired choices composers make go over most people’s heads. And then Rob made it his mission to educate audiences ~ and he’s so so good at it. He’s entertaining and intelligent and wonderful.

And then (at 11:40) he talks about a retreat he went on with Hallmark Greeting Cards. He quoted a communications expert who spoke at the event:

Most of us think that self-expression happens here [pointing to himself]. It’s all about our content, what we want to say, how we project our voice. But self-expression doesn’t happen here [again pointing to himself]; it happens out there [gesturing to the audience]. … Try taking responsibility for how people listen you.

For Rob, that is the issue with classical music ~ everyone is focused on the wrong side of the footlights. If people aren’t hearing those subtleties, you are expressing nothing. That’s why it became his mission to teach the subtleties of the art.

This, once again, applies so much to writing.

There are two ends of the spectrum. There are those who write strictly for the market. Sure, they may be good writers and are artful, but they do not follow their heart ~ they follow their pocketbook or the market or someone else. All valid reasons sure, but I don’t think it will be their best work. Then there are those who are doing “their art” ~ screw audiences. If anyone wants to try and suss out what the writer is saying, it’s up to the reader, and the writer won’t help out a bit. (The modernist poet Ezra Pound is first among this type of writer. Joyce is this way also. But for some reason I hold it against Pound but not Joyce. Maybe because Joyce wrote “The Dead.”) I am offended by writers who totally ignore their readers.

I’m in the middle, and I believe that it is our responsibility, like Rob says, to help your audience understand you. This takes the form of satisfying genre convention, using good technique and grammar, and “teaching your reader how to read you.” I do believe there are times where a writer is by necessity difficult ~ perhaps your trying to convey a difficult and complex concept ~ but deliberate showy obscurity is the height of selfishness, in my book.

Besides, as a writer, you need to be outwardly focused, don’t you? I mean, what’s the point of me me me all the time? Isn’t writing about connection? About being a spokesman for the world?

It is definitely our responsibility to hold up our half of the writer-reader compact, to be a kind and considerate partner in this exchange.

A Kickass Exploration of Metaphor

Over at Gotham, James Geary has this great piece on metaphor, "Metaphor and Pleasure: Experience is a comb that nature give to bald men."  I love the exploration, the sussing out of the ligamen, the exploration of metaphor's history.  A must-read for writers.  I can't wait to read I is an Other, his new book.  (Because, you know, you and I are geeks about this kind of stuff.)

Catch his TED talk here.

Anticipating Your Reader’s World

Once thing I’ve really realized in this revision of the novel is that some of the best writing anticipates how people view the world. By that, I mean, when you come into a room, often it’s the smells and the sounds that you register first. Then you see the big picture as a whole. Then you focus in on movement or on what you’re looking for or what you’re most interested in, often the people in the room.

Since this is the way that people sense the world, then that’s how best to structure a paragraph, I’ve discovered. One of the errors I was constantly making in my last version of this novel was to jump around on this order and sometimes repeating myself.

The closer you can get to mirroring the way people see the world, the less they’re aware of your story as being a construct, and the more seamlessly and insidiously ~ MWA HA ~ you can reel them in.

Questions of the Day: Any recent epiphanies on how to structure a paragraph?

Stephen Elliott’s Bravery

Stephen Elliott’s daily email from The Rumpus is fascinating and deserves a blog post all its own (sign up for it on the upper right of the home page) ~ as The Rumpus is The Bomb ~ but I wanted to expand on something Stephen said in yesterday’s email, a subject near and dear to my heart.  Here's what Stephen said:

Someone said I was brave for being so open about things and I assured them I am not brave. A week ago I was in a cafe with a friend and he said he had that insecurity. Maybe from being bullied as a child. I thought, If you've never been deeply afraid, so afraid you were shaking and irrational and the strength drained from your body so you could hardly grip a pen. If you've never felt that then how could you know cowardice? And when someone told you they were a coward how could you dispute them. Unless you were able to say, I know cowardice. Unless you were able to say, I've stammered in front of an audience, been struck across the mouth without lifting my arms to defend myself, heard someone laugh in the background.

Let me back up a step. Once, when I was a kid, one of my older sisters said, “You don’t know what it’s like to really go hungry.” It’s something that has always stuck with me. I really don’t. Sure, I’ve been on diets, but I’ve never truly been without food, and I don’t think she has either, really. The point is that I’ve never lived where there is true famine or so poorly that I didn’t have access to food. That’s something I’ll never truly know.

That has to change you, truly starving, in a way that is irreversible. You take on a terrible knowledge about the uncertainty of the world that you can't know otherwise. Your body asserts itself and, I imagine, takes over your whole being. It’s one thing if you’re a religious asthete and give up food for those reasons ~ I think denying yourself in these circumstances is a badge of courage, part of the point of it all. However, if say you’re a breastfeeding mother and you can’t get enough sustenance to produce enough milk that your baby starves. My god. That brings with it a horrible kind of knowledge about humanity and about mortality. How can you live through something like that and still believe in the good in people and in the world? It reduces someone to a certain type of emotional poverty and poverty of hope.

I like the line in the above quote, “If you've never been deeply afraid, so afraid you were shaking and irrational and the strength drained from your body so you could hardly grip a pen. If you've never felt that then how could you know cowardice?” It’s easy to be brave when you’ve never really been challenged, and it’s also really easy to pass snap surficial judgment on people, which is much more about you than it is about them. As Stephen says, you cannot know courage until you’ve been so afraid your body has rebelled. (The only comparable thing in my life has probably been my fear of flying, where I’m convinced I’m going to die.)

So, like the above quote, how can you possibly think to know hunger if you’ve never been hungry, really truly hungry?

Having said that, I’d like also to assert the power of imagination. Even if you haven’t felt these things, you can imagine them and extrapolate from your own experiences. I think there’s value in that. Because what’s the opposite? Living comfortably in your own little world and passing judgment on others? And yes I do think it takes a certain amount of courage to reach beyond your comfort zone to try to imagine what life is like for other people, sometimes a lot of courage.

Writing about experiences requires this imagination. I’ve never been a man, but I try really hard to make my male characters authentic. That’s where the power of imagination comes in. Some things I’m better at than others, as are all writers, and I’ve been told I get some things more right than others. But it’s worth the effort even in the hard things, the points of view foreign to you, to try to bridge that gap. What’s the alternative? Books about you and only you?

And if these experiences are truly your own, something you know, you’ll be even more convincing in the telling of it, and you’ll let other people know what it’s like to truly be brave, to truly be hungry.

Question of the Day: Do you allow yourself to range widely from your own experience?

Learning Through Imitation

I was at a talk given by Brad Watson a while back, and one of the things he said was that the best way to learn to write is to closely mimic the greats, to take an author you admire or feel inspired by and to try to write a story just like theirs. Use their rhythms and style and set up. Follow their paragraphing and tense and point of view. When they go to dialog, you go to dialog. Fill it with your ideas, but use their trappings.

This is what we did in the first workshop I ever took taught by the inestimable Alyson Hagy at the University of Wyoming. We tried to write like Heminway and Faulkner and Jean Toomer and others. In another online workshop (American Short Fiction, taught by the wonderful Jill Meyers), we took an actual excerpt of someone’s and changed it word by word into our own work. It was a wonderful exercise.

It’s not just an exercise for beginners. I keep going back to it. If I read something that I just love, I often will be inspired to imitate it. Or if I have a problem I’m trying to solve, I’ll often think of someone who does it well and try to infuse my work with the way they handle it. For example, right now I’m skipping around in time a lot in my work, and I think go back to Per Pettersen’s Out Stealing Horses (as I said yesterday).

It’s not the same as plagiarism. You’re not taking their words. You’re just using their work for inspiration. Some people even refuse to read great works when they’re writing because they say it influences them too much. My response to that is, I only hope that they would influence my work! Who better to be influenced by than the greats?

Questions of the Day: Have you ever done this? Has it helped?

Time in Fiction

The passage of time in fiction is a long and fascinating subject and is intimately related to other choices such as point of view, narrative distance, and many other things. I can be no means address it all, but I thought I’d ruminate on it today, specifically as it relates to the two novels I’ve written so far.

I’m kind of just thinking out loud here.

Pace is a closely related thing but not exactly the same thing. Pace is more the reader’s experience of a narrative and has more to do with rate of revelation than it does the passage of time. A fast-paced book has a lot happening, whether it’s physical or psychological, and a book with a slow pace takes lots of time to ruminate and to digress. It’s more about reader interest and how fast things “seem” to happen.

Time is not directly related to pace. You can skim through time very quickly and go vast distances as a writer and book may come across as slow. That may be because it’s boring to the reader or because not much is being revealed or because the narrative does not seem to relate to the main plot. On the other hand, you can do the Proustian thing and take 50 pages to describe someone waking up and getting out of bed, yet it may seem fascinating to some readers because the rate of revelation ~ of new developments and interesting details ~ is high.

I guess maybe pace is most closely related to how connected, how unified and coherent, all the elements of a narrative are. It’s probably other things too.

But the passage of time. Fiction writing is so amazing because you can make a moment last a lifetime or you can make a lifetime last only a moment. It’s very powerful. Two different writers can take the same concept and one will hold you rapt and the other will bore you to tears. It’s connected with how fresh and uncliched things are. Also whether you’re this person’s ideal reader ~ enough alike that you get what they are saying but not so exactly alike that what they have to say in new to you.

How you handle the passage of time can make or break you as an author. People must feel that they are in good hands. I’ve heard the assertion that fiction is nothing more or nothing less than the expression or handling of time.

Maybe I should just talk about the two novels I’ve written.

One novel, called Deep Down Things, is set in present-day Loveland, Colorado. It’s in first-person present tense with four alternating points of view, only one point of view per chapter. Within each chapter, time moves at a steady clip, but between chapters there can be jumps. No chapters overlap in time but move steadily forward one after another. The novel is in two sections with a six month gap in the break.

On a deeper level, time moves pretty quickly within the chapters. That’s because there is not much recollection or reflection or projection into the future. The characters are pretty much in the present and reacting to what’s in front of them. Partly this was because I grew up in the reserved stoic west, and like many western writers this narrative stance comes naturally to me. Also, though, these were characters who are not very self-aware nor self-reflective. Also, first person does not lend itself well to having a narrator (the voice of the author or overarching consciousness) that is detached from the point of view voice.

The other novel, called Earth’s Imagined Corners (that I’m rewriting now), is historical women’s fiction. It’s set in 1885 Iowa and Kansas. It’s third person limited point of view with two protagonists and a narrator with a strong overarching voice. The point of view may be one per chapter or may switch between the two characters within a chapter. Time in this novel moves steadily forward, no gaps in time, but there are many digressions and recollections and reflections and projections. These are not gratuitous on my part (I hope) ~ they have to be directly tied in to the plot in some way. Time also overlaps, so one character might talk about a day’s developments and then in the next chapter another character might talk about the developments of that same day but from his or her point of view. This always moves the narrative forward though. It’s not simply a rehashing of the same events.

Time is very interesting in this because I’m jumping all over. (I’m thinking about rereading Out Stealing Horses by Per Pattersen because he jumps all over in time too.) In the real time of the novel, I try to move steadily forward, but in the recollections I may just give impressions or a thumbnail or I may do a whole scene.

In both of these, I’m always trying to balance the reader’s expectations with what I need to accomplish. I believe that you need to set up expectations and follow through on things and you should try to go with as basic a structure as possible ~ straight narration as much as possible. I’m always asking myself: Will this break from the pattern I’ve established be worth it? Does it contribute to the effect I’m trying to achieve?

I guess fiction writing is all about pattern in some sense. You raise expectation and either fulfill or deny it. You have motifs that return and twist and change throughout. You have a theme that may confirm or surprise your reader in its outcome. You and your reader are in this intricate dance where you have to bring all your skills to bear to lead as best you can and hope that your partner enjoys him- or herself.

Questions of the Day: Any thoughts to add to this discussion of time?