Leslie's Writing Exercises

A Holiday Treat

2012-01-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

Check out these treats from The GuardianUK:

Literary Christmas Crackers:
To celebrate the holidays the Guardian is "parcelling up two short stories every day-- one to read, and one to listen to, featuring authors such as Colm Toibin, Margaret Drabble, Julian Barnes, Jennifer Egan & more..."

Really good stuff. Check it out here.

Voice

2011-11-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

Pulitzer prizewinner, Junot Díaz, has a piece out today in the Huffington Post talking about his approach to creating strong narrative voices for his characters. Good stuff!

Beginning Writers

2011-07-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

Lazy me...

Because I haven't had time to post anything new since the beginning of May (!!) I thought I'd offer up this earlier post from January 2010 concerning some of the common mistakes beginning writers tend to make. Let me know if you've come across any others to add to this list...

A few years ago when I first started writing fiction -- and collecting all those books on the art, the craft, and the joy of writing it -- there was one thing I wanted to avoid more than anything else: making mistakes that only a beginning writer would make. As I read all those writing books a familiar phrase kept popping up over and over again: Beginning writers tend to… (just try googling that string -- it's literally everywhere) followed by a warning that concerned the dreaded something or other that only beginning writers tend to do… Panic set in so I decided to start a list.

This week I thought I'd share with you some of the things that beginning writers supposedly tend to do. The exercise, naturally, is to read over your work-in-progress and make sure you haven't done any of the naughty things on this list:

The Single Most Common Mistake:

Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners. [John Gardner]

On Description:

Beginning writers tend to worry too much about overdoing it. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a student's work and asked for more detail about this or that – a place, a person – only to be told, "I didn't want to overdo it." Novice writers, just getting their chops, need to worry more about saying enough. [Chris Lombardi, GWW]

Beginning writers tend to use insufficient detail and abstraction where what is needed is concrete detail. [John Gardner]

Beginning writers tend to skimp on the elements of setting and time, probably out of dreary memories of long descriptions they have read… But when atmosphere is well created, we do not experience it as description; we simply experience it. [Janet Burroway]

Beginning writers use this formulaic sentence all too often: "__________ filled the air."The blank can be fear, panic, the scent of cheese, the blare of a marching band. It's part of a larger tendency of description without detail. It's telling and not showing: "…gradually the aroma of coffee filled the air." Nothing fills the air. Do not, under any circumstances, use the "______ filled the air" sentence structure. [John Dufresne]

On Character:

Beginning writers tend to forget about the "dynamics of desire" when they create fictional characters. They forget about that epiphany which needs to come "very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth." [Robert Olen Butler]

Beginning writers tend to create passive central characters. Boy meets girl. Boy wants girl – good so far. Boy sits by phone waiting for girl to call – not so good anymore. You cannot write a successful story about a passive central character. And you wouldn't want to read one. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers often try to write novels with a relatively passive protagonist who wants little or has largely given up wanting. I have met more than one writer who says that his character doesn't want anything -- he just wants to "live his life." That always brings to mind something Kurt Vonnegut said: "When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." [Sol Stein & Kurt Vonnegut]

Beginning writers have a reticence to use the simple expression: she cried. Instead, we're pummeled with dubious and unnecessary euphemisms: Hot tears leaked from her eyes. Hot tears sprang to her eyes, trickled down her cheeks. Quick tears sprang to her eyes. A single tear ran down her cheek. Big tears, heavy as hail, poured down her cheek. Better: She cried. And there's no need to say She began to cry. You don't ever have to write the phrase She began anything. She either cried or she didn't. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers tend to present a main character with a slew of characteristics, when one that is just right would do the job much more efficiently. [Sol Stein]

Beginning writers often have trouble motivating their character's actions. Unfortunately one mention on page sixty-eight isn't going to do it. This is one of fiction's major challenges: making readers understand a character's motives when those motives are not simple. The way you create such understanding is through patterns of incidents. No one occurrence will be enough. [Nancy Kress]

On Structure:

Beginning writers often pad their stories with unnecessary scenes. Study your scene list, trying to eliminate scenes or combine scenes. I've frequently been startled by how much a story can be sharpened by concentrating its events and emotions into the bare minimum of scenes. [Nancy Kress]

Beginning writers tend to use unnecessary flashbacks. While flashback can be a useful way to provide background to character or the history of events – the information that screenwriters call backstory – it isn't the only way. Rather, dialogue, brief summary, a reference, or detail can often tell us all we need to know. [Janet Burroway]

Beginning writers tend to lose sight of their own scenes, letting them drift into flashbacks like Arctic explorers into snowstorms, never to be seen or heard from again. [Peter Selgin, GWW]

Beginning writers tend to unravel the thread of the story instead of keeping it taut like the gut strings of a tennis racket. (Sol Stein).

Beginning writers tend to give far too much background, then compound this mistake by putting the background where it shouldn't go. (Evan Marshall)

On POV:

Beginning writers tend to shift viewpoint when it is both unnecessary and disturbing. In establishing the story's point of view, you make your own rules, but having made them, you must stick to them. Apart from the use of significant detail, there is no more important skill for a writer of fiction to grasp than this, the control of point of view. [Janet Burroway]

Beginning writers often avoid running straight at an image; that is, the needless filtering of an image through some observing consciousness. Vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen. [John Gardner] *More on "filtering" in the coming weeks…

On Dialogue:

Beginning writers tend to write dialogue that is too clear, believe it or not. When characters talk too precisely and respond exactly to what has been said, then the words are probably being put in their mouths by the writer. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers think they know what a character needs to say, and so they don't listen to the characters. They don't want the character screwing up the plot they took so long to devise. And so the character isn't credible. [John Dufresne]

Beginning writers tend to have all of their characters talk the same – usually the way the writer does. (Russell Rowland)

On Voice:

Beginning writers often forget the importance of letting their raw voice lead the story. They start with the voice of the story, often some other writer's story, and hope it will yield powerful, original material. [Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall]

On Beginnings:

Beginning writers often [begin their stories] with strong feelings and ideas without having found the images to embody them. Don't begin with an idea, begin with people, preferably people in action. [Ursula Le Guin & John Dufresne]

On Endings:

Beginning writers sometimes say, "Well, I didn't want to tell what happened to the characters. I wanted to leave the book ambiguous and open-ended. I want readers to decide for themselves what happened." This is usually a response to a criticism that the story feels as if it "just stopped." Unfortunately, the "let-the-readers-decide-for-themselves" stance is usually a failed defense. Readers don't want to decide what happened to the characters. They want you to decide, on the dual grounds that you're the writer and that they've just read four hundred pages of your prose anticipating this very information you're now withholding. [Nancy Kress]

On First Drafts:

Beginning writers tend to want to dodge the drafting process and write the story immediately. [John Dufresne]

The novice writer sets unrealistic goals for what he may not acknowledge to be, but is in fact, the first draft. He undermines his effort by holding unrealistic expectations of his imaginative and organizing powers. And so he becomes discouraged when the people in his head are unrecognizable on the page. The beginning writer who has read a great deal is even more susceptible to this kind of dejection. [John Dufresne]

On Doing Writing Exercises (something beginning writers do well :-)

When the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]

When the beginning writer works with some sharply defined problem in technique, focusing on that alone, he produces such good work that he surprises himself. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]

Writing an exercise, the [novice] writer is in the ideal artistic state, both serious and not serious. He wants the exercise to be wonderful, so that his classmates will applaud, but he is not in the dark psychological set of the ambitious young novelist struggling to write down his existence as it is, with the ghost of the young James Joyce standing horribly at his back.[John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]

The following books are available to purchase online:

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

John Dufresne, The Lie That Tells A Truth

Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing, The Elements of Craft

Nancy Kress, Beginnings, Middles & Ends

Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall, Finding Your Writer's Voice

Evan Marshall, The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing

Sol Stein, Stein on Writing

Russell Rowland, Gotham Writer's Workshop

Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream

Peter Selgin & Chris Lombardi, Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide

May is Short Story Month!

2011-05-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

This is a special time of year for literature buffs thanks to Dan Wickett over at the Emerging Writers Network who declared May "Short Story Month" a few years back. If you google "Short Story Month" you'll find journalists and bloggers of all stripes devoting the entire month to celebration of the short story. To see what all the fuss is about you might check out the Emerging Writers Network where it all began. Or visit Matt Bell's Blog where you'll find links to many other participating sites-- some discussing the craft itself; others posting, critiquing, and reviewing both classic and contemporary short stories. Some folks are posting a short story online every day in May while others are planning to celebrate by writing stories themselves -- one for every day of the month -- yes, thirty-one first drafts in thirty-one days!

While I love the idea of writing a short story a day, I'm just not sure I could hack that. Seems an impossible task for someone who writes as slowly as I do. Instead, I plan to celebrate by reading a short story a day (much easier!) and working on the second draft of a story I've already written.

Later this week I'm hoping to post an exercise specifically tailored to the short story, but for now...

I must get my hands on a copy of The Turning by Booker Prize nominee Tim Winton -- I hear his linked stories are "painful, raw, and eloquent." In other words... just my cup of tea!

Leslie

The Art of Description: Architecture

2011-04-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

Ah! I just discovered a new writing book that I want to share with you! Love, love, love this one! Actually, it’s not really new—it’s been quietly hiding in my bookcase these last few years, sandwiched between equally wonderful, but louder books like Sol Stein’s How to Grow a Novel and The Art of Fiction by Gardner. It wasn’t until I literally hit a wall in my writing (I needed just the right word to describe the siding on a certain building) that I even remembered buying the book.

The Describer’s Dictionary by David Grambs is not intended to replace your thesaurus or dictionary but as the author says, it's “for anybody needing quick access to just the right vocabulary for conveying in words some sort of picture. “

The book is divided into categories ranging from “Things” (shapes, patterns and edges; surfaces and textures; light and color, etc.) to “People” (skin and complexion; mouths, lips, and teeth; noses, ears, and jaws; voices; looks and tacit expressions, etc.) Other broad categories include: Buildings and Dwellings; Earth and Sky; and Animals.

What I really love about this book is that Grambs doesn’t just give us lists of words, but actual excerpts from literature, in which the technical terminology augments lovely, descriptive prose. These excerpts from the masters correspond to each separate category. In the “Buildings and Dwellings” section alone Grambs offers seventy-one (!!) different examples from literature. Here are just a few:

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away.

From To Kill a Mockingbird, by HARPER LEE

It sat on a shelf between our lane and the creek, a little higher than the rest of the bottomland, Its board-and-batten sides and its shake roof were weathered silvery as an old rock. To me it has an underwater look—that barnacled silveriness, the way three big live oaks twisted like seaweed above the roof, the still, stained, sunken light.

WALLACE STEGNER, All the Little Live Things

The architects of the Knox Building had wasted no time in trying to make it look taller than its twenty stories, with the result that it looked shorter. They hadn’t bothered trying to make it handsome, either, and so it was ugly: slab-sided and flat-topped, with a narrow pea-green cornice that jutted like the lip of a driven stake.

RICHARD YATES, Revolutionary Road

Built of butter-yellow sandstone blocks hand-hewn in quarries five hundred miles eastward, the house had two stories and was constructed on austerely Georgian lines, with large, many-paned windows and a wide, iron-pillared veranda running all the way around its bottom story.

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH, The Thornbirds

Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a background. There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.

JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

DAVID GRAMBS: The Describer’s Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations

HARPER LEE: To Kill a Mockingbird

WALLACE STEGNER: All the Little Live Things

RICHARD YATES: Revolutionary Road

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH: The Thornbirds

JOSEPH CONRAD: Heart of Darkness

The Cover Design of Your Next Novel

2011-03-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

Check this out:
Where the Cover of Your Favorite Novel Comes From
From “The Atlantic” online magazine. By Charlotte Strick, art director of Faber & Faber, Inc. and of the paperback line at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is also the art editor and designer of The Paris Review.

Rough Terrain

2011-02-21T23:05:00.000-08:00

Attention struggling, would-be novelists!
Click to listen to a few choice words of wisdom from JCO.
I expect to replay this clip many times over in the coming difficult months...

Leslie

Click here to watch the program in its entirety.

Writing a Party Scene/ Creating a Crowd

2011-02-19T18:16:00.000-08:00

Your character might be driving a carful of kids and dogs to the annual family clam dig, or he might be wandering through Munich's town square at Oktoberfest—either way, the challenge for the writer is the same in both instances: how to introduce multiple people in the same scene. Most novels (and many short stories) probably have at least one scene in which the main character is but one of many. There's almost always a group get-together of some kind or another—a family meal, a party scene, a dash through a crowded airport?

This morning I began working on a scene from my novel in which a group of five guys shows up unexpectedly at my protagonist's front door. Only one of the five are important to my story (and to my protagonist) but the fact that that this visitor arrives with an entourage is significant. My first attempts at writing this scene were not very successful. When I focused on introducing the significant visitor first, the other four almost disappeared entirely. On the other hand when I attempted to keep the other four characters in view, the focus veered clumsily away from the conflict between my two main characters.

With a little research I discovered the answer to my dilemma in Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, A Guide To Narrative Craft:

“Sometimes it’s necessary to introduce several or many people in the same scene, and this needn’t present a problem, because the principle is pretty much the same in every case, and is the same as in film: pan, then close-up. In other words, give us a sense of the larger scene first, then a few details to characterize individuals.... We will believe more thoroughly in large numbers of people if you offer example images for us...."

"If you begin by concentrating two long on one character only, we will tend to see that person as being alone."

Pan, then close-up. Pan the five guys who show up at my protagonist’s front door, then focus the camera on the two who matter most. Sounds pretty simple.

But what if I want to write a large dinner party into my story? How do I juggle all those guests, their comings and goings, their different groupings, and snippets of conversation?

According to Burroway the same technique is used for both: pan first, then zoom in for the close up. But if the scene goes on for several pages or an entire chapter how do we keep the crowd from disappearing after that initial "pan"? In that case a single pan at the beginning of the scene will not be enough to keep the reader aware of (and believing in) the crowd we've created around our main characters. We will need to zoom in and out more than just the one time at the beginning of the scene. In The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, the reader follows protagonist Nick Guest as he arrives at a very large party:

Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came out through the French windows there were two or three small groups already laughing and glowing. You could tell that everyone had been on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light. Gerald was talking to a somehow familiar man and his blonde-helmeted wife; Nick knew from his smiles and guffaws that he was being recklessly agreeable. None of his particular friends was here yet, and Toby was still upstairs with Sophie, interminably getting dressed. He took a flute of champagne from a dark-eyed young waiter, and strolled off into the knee-high maze of the parterre. ...The curlicue of the path brought him round to a view of the house again, but the waiter had moved off, and instead he saw Paul Tompkins ambling towards him.

Later, when the guests are seated for dinner, we drop into the middle of a conversation between Nick and the two people sitting beside him, then pan out briefly to get a glimpse/feel of the room as a whole, before finally returning to the close-up conversation between the three:

"So what's he like?" said Russell. "Her old man. What's he into?" He glanced at Catherine, across the table, before his eyes drifted back down the room to Gerald, who was smiling at the blonde woman beside him but had the fine glaze of preoccupation of someone about to make a speech. They were in the great hall, at a dozen tables. It was the end of dinner, and there was a mood of noisy expectancy.

"Wine," said Nick, who was drunk and fluent, but still wary of Russell's encouraging tone. He twirled his glass on the rucked tablecloth. "Wine. His wife…um…"

"Power," said Catherine sharply.

"Power…" Nick nodded it into the list. "Wensleydale cheese he's also very keen on. Oh, and the music of Richard Strauss--that particularly."

Throughout the scene the author reminds us again and again that Nick and his friends are not alone in a bubble but part a crowd seated at “a dozen tables.” He accomplishes this by having Nick pan the room every now and then giving us the opportunity to glimpse other guests at distant tables, and to interpret their gestures and hear snippets of their conversations. We hear the group laughter and even catch a peek of the servants watching from the gallery above. In between these occasional faraway glimpses we return to focus up-close on Nick’s thoughts, his immediate surroundings, and his conversations with those beside him:

Nick pushed his chair back to get a clearer view of Gerald, and also of Toby, who had colored up and was looking round with a tight grin of apprehension… Nick grinned back at him, and wanted to help him, but was powerless, of course. He was blushing himself with the anxiety and forced eagerness of awaiting a speech by a friend….

Through the generous laughter Nick caught Toby's eye again, and held it for two or three long seconds, giving him perhaps a transfusion of reassurance. Toby himself would be too nervous to listen to his father's speech properly, and was laughing in imitation of the others, not at the jokes themselves…. Nick surveyed the room, and was reminded of a college hall, with Gerald and the more influential guests elected to the high table. Up in the arcade of the gallery one or two servants were listening impassively, waiting only for the next stage of the evening. There was a gigantic electrolier, ten feet high, with upward-curling gilt branches opening into cloudy glass lilies of light. Catherine had refused to sit under it, which was why their whole table had apparently been demoted to this corner of the room. If it did fall, Nick realized, it would crush Wani Ouradi. He began to feel a little anxious about it himself….

Nick glanced round, in a little shrug of amusement, and saw that the waiter from Madeira, was standing in the doorway behind him, following the proceedings with a vacant stare… He saw that Catherine was stuffing things into her bag and flashing irritable looks at Russell, who mouthed, "What?" at her, and was getting irritable in his turn. "So, Toby," Gerald said, raising his voice and slowing his words, "we congratulate you, we bless you, we love you: happy birthday! Will you--all--please raise your glasses: to Toby!"

"Toby!" the overlapping burble went up, followed by a sudden release of tension in cheers and whistles and applause--applause for Toby, not for the speaker, the heightened, unreal acclaim of a special occasion, amongst which Nick lifted his champagne glass with tears in his eyes, and kept on sipping from it to hide his emotion. But Catherine had jumped her little gilt chair back from the table and hurried out, past the waiter, who followed her for a second, to see if he could help. Then Nick and Russell stared at each other, but Toby was getting to his feet, and Nick was damned if he was chasing after her this time, he really did love Toby, more than anyone in this high magnificent room, and he was going to be with him as he spoke.

Wow, I really butchered Hollinghurst’s beautiful prose in that excerpt. Didn’t mean to take a machete to it, but the scene goes on for some time and I wanted to give you just a gist of what he accomplishes there. I’m sure you have your own favorite party scenes by authors you love. Francine Prose, author of Reading Like A Writer has a few of her own: the ballroom scene in Anna Karenina; “the wild party that winds through so many pages of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions;” and her favorite ( I think) is the party scene found in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”

Janet Burroway: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft
Francine Prose: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

Happy 2011: First Draft: The Year of Writing Dangerously

2011-01-05T09:30:00.000-08:00

* UPDATE (1/28/11): Just finished a draft of chapter two :-) Onward!

Now that the holidays are over, or almost over (the Christmas tree still needs to come down and the ornaments put away) I have an overwhelming urge to write again. How about you? Are you feeling it too? All of a sudden I'm feeling very strong, very brave. I suppose the start of a new year does that to people. In the New Year we give ourselves permission to set aside old fears and strike out in uncharted directions, boldly and unwaveringly, with not so much as a glance behind at the year that was. That's how the New Year starts out anyway, but in recent years, by the end of that first week in January, the old fears return, sneaking up on me like they always do to yank me off course -- back to my old course, that dreaded path of debilitating self-doubt. Have I confessed to you my terror of writing a first draft?

“The first draft is definitely the hardest,” says author, Joyce Carol Oates, “like hacking one's way through a thick jungle with something like a butter knife.”

Evidently, I’m not the only one who fears the first draft. Author Will Allison, interviewed for “Writers Ask" (a Glimmer Train publication), describes the humbling experience:

“The most difficult part for me is getting a first draft down on paper. I’m not being modest in saying that my first drafts are total garbage. It’s especially hard with a novel—hard to write poorly for so many pages and still think of oneself as doing something worthwhile. I’ve gotten to the point where I tell myself that I’m not even writing, I’m just ‘sketching,’ dumping raw material on the page. That helps take the pressure off. In the end, it’s really just a big leap of faith, believing that it will all eventually amount to something.”

My fear of the first draft has not been completely paralyzing, thank goodness. I've somehow managed to write complete drafts of a fair number of short stories and a sizable chunk (about 3/4) of a 300-page novel, but those "rough" drafts have come at an excruciatingly slow pace. By now I should have completed five novels!

So what is it about writing a first draft that so terrifies some of us? Favorite mentor and author, John Dufresne, answers that question in The Lie That Tells The Truth:

“Writing a first draft isn't easy. It takes perseverance to write a story, it takes that and more to write a first draft. It takes faith and grit, boldness and resilience. It takes poise and good fortune.... You must have the courage to allow yourself to fail. The first draft is where the beginning writer most often finds himself stuck, discouraged, doomed. ”

Faith, grit, boldness! You won't abandon me this time. Not this year. This year things will be different!

The first step to recovery is understanding one's weaknesses. Here, Dufresne describes the troubled novice (me!) to a tee, and how it is we manage to foul things up for ourselves:

“ [The novice writer] makes mistakes. He sets unrealistic goals for what he may not acknowledge to be, but is in fact, the first draft. He undermines his effort by holding unrealistic expectations of his imaginative and organizing powers." [me!] "And so he becomes discouraged when the people in his head are unrecognizable on the page, when the intense emotion he felt in real life is unrealized in what he writes." [me!] "The beginning writer who has read a great deal is even more susceptible to this kind of dejection. She knows that the García Márquez story she just read did not flounder the way hers seems to. She loses confidence and hope, becomes intimidated by the magnitude of the problem that is the nascent story, is humbled by her vaulting ambition. [me, me, me!] "What had seemed like an exciting and noble undertaking now seems foolish and impossible. What she doesn't understand is that García Márquez wrote five hundred pages to get those seventeen. ”

So what advice does Dufresne have for us novices? Those who struggle like me to get that first draft out of our head and onto the page? It's not perseverance and hope I lack, of that I'm certain. I've been working on this novel for almost five years now and I'm still excited about it, still determined to see it through to completion.

“Do not write beyond what the first draft is meant to accomplish. Do not demand or expect a finished manuscript in one draft. (Any writer who tells you he wrote his story in a draft is a liar or a loafer.) The worst thing you can do in writing a first draft is to let your critical self (the boss) sit down at the writing table with your creative self. The critic will always stifle the writer within. And you aught not to be worried about your style or the music of the prose or your word choice-- you make the best word choice you can for now, knowing it'll get better later. Don't even worry about the flow of the plot. You're trying to settle into this new community you've moved to, trying to get to know the people who live there. ”

“If you're having trouble, that means you're thinking. You're being logical, critical. You can freewrite on any emotion, on any character, on any place. If you're stuck, write your character's name on the top of a blank page and freewrite for five, ten, or however many minutes you need to prime the pump. ”

To minimize "first draft" anxiety, Joyce Carol Oates has taken to writing her drafts in long hand using scrap paper. "It's a wonderful way to write, very casual,’ she says. "You don't feel that it's anything too important or too significant.” ["Albany Magazine Stories," Spring 1995, University of Albany]

Perhaps my favorite bit of Dufresne "first draft" advice is the little exercise that follows this post, which can be applied to trouble spots in the second draft as well-- not to mention the third, tenth and fifteenth. I've also listed two others, one from prolific novelist and short-story writer, Joyce Carol Oates; the other from Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, Gregory Martin. Have fun and good luck!

After this post I'll be taking a vacation from blogging in order to freewrite the first three chapters of my old novel (drastically changed story!) I hope you'll join me in this endeavor and write your own first draft of a novel (or like me, the first draft of a drastically changed novel). It would be comforting to know there are others out there struggling to accomplish the same thing.

Hope to see you back here soon!

Leslie

~
Will Allison: interviewed for “Writers Ask" (a Glimmer Train publication)
John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth
Gregory Martin: Gregory Martin: Associate Professor of English, UNM: http://www.unm.edu/~gmartin/
Joyce Carol Oates: interviewed for Albany Magazine Stories, University at Albany, Spring 1995

Write A Novel With Me?

2010-12-08T14:10:00.000-08:00

Well, now that my short story is written I'd like to move on to something else for a while, something bigger and more unwieldy that my little 5,000-word short story. Don't get me wrong-- the short story still needs lots of work, but 2011 is fast approaching and I have a burning desire to finish my novel now. I started writing it four years ago but in-between all the roller-coaster ups and downs, the short bouts of writing, and the many, many false starts, I'd like to finally finish the thing. In fact, I've never felt the urge this strongly before. I think I might actually finish it this time!

Well, we'll see about that, won't we? Obviously it's going to take a chunk of time to write a novel. So much time that I might have to blog even less frequently than I do already. The story has changed dramatically over the last four years and what was initially a simple tale of lost love and second chances has expanded into something much more complicated and (hopefully) compelling. So my plan is to take the next twelve months to rewrite the novel and then rewrite it again. Because the story has changed so much, the first rewrite will be almost like a first draft: swift and childlike. The goal will be simple: to get the new version down on paper. In the second draft I'll focus more on specific problem areas of the story and different elements of craft. Again, I'll be turning to some of my favorite authors and writing mentors for examples, advice, and an occasional kick-in-the-pants along the way, and I'll be sharing everything I learn with you here, in a series of posts on this blog.

The one stipulation I've made for myself is this: I'm only allowed to post something new when I finish writing three chapters. That could take a week, or it could take a month. No chapters, no blogging! We'll see how that goes.

Do you have a novel you'd like to finish? Or a novel you'd like to start? I'd love it if you would join me in this mammoth writing endeavor. Let's do this thing together, shall we? How about this: we write one chapter a week for as many weeks as it takes us to finish. Then we'll come back here and sort it all out like we did for the short story. What say you to that?

For the first exercise, there are so many directions, so many different aspects of craft we could choose to explore. An exercise on beginnings would seem an obvious starting place. (Maybe we'll tackle that next, just before we launch into chapter one of our novels (coming soon!)). In the meantime there's a book I've been wanting to share with you, the book being one of the main reasons I'm so excited about finishing my novel now: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose-- "A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them." USA Today calls it "A love letter to the pleasures of reading," but to my mind it's a a love letter to the pleasures of writing. The back cover copy reads: "Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured." I wouldn't be surprised if this book gives you the desire to make your own work endure as theirs has-- as well as the tools and insights to make that happen. That's something to shoot for, anyway.

In the first chapter Prose talks about "close reading"-- how she learned to write from reading the works of the masters:

"I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer [has] made. And though it's impossible to recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also text books, private lessons in the art of fiction."

• • •

"I've always thought that a close-reading course should at least be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop. Though it also doles out praise, the workshop most often focuses on what a writer has done wrong, what needs to be fixed, cut, or augmented. Whereas reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly.

"Occasionally, while I was teaching a reading course and simultaneously working on a novel, and when I had reached an impasse in my own work, I began to notice that whatever story I taught that week somehow helped me get past the obstacle that had been in my way. Once, for example, I was struggling with a party scene and happened to be teaching James Joyce's "The Dead," which taught me something bout how to orchestrate the voices of the party guests into a chorus from which the principal players step forward, in turn to take their solos."

I encourage you to read this wonderful book. Then come back in a week or so for our first exercise in writing (and rewriting) our unwieldy novels...

Leslie

~
Francine Prose: Reading Like a Writer

Part VIII: PLOT: John Barth and his Incremental Perturbations

2010-11-16T11:55:00.000-08:00

***This post is the last in a series of eight exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers. Click here for Part I ***

You’re probably scratching your head right now wondering why on earth I saved “plot” for last, and you’re probably right to wonder about that. Maybe back in August (when we began the work of turning the first drafts of our short stories into unforgettable masterpieces) we should have begun our revisions by studying plot before we talked about all those other things-- like dialogue, structure, setting, and emotion, or how to engage readers using authenticating detail.

Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing fiction, it’s that no matter how hopeless or unwieldy the task may seem, it’s never too late to fix a troublesome passage—or even an entire manuscript, if that's what's required. If we’ve taken the time to introduce our characters and delineate their myriad flaws, fears, and emotions, and to fill their little mouths with crackling, subtextual dialogue… And we’ve gone through all the effort to create vivid, dynamic descriptions of the settings they inhabit, why would we not invest the time necessary to tell our story in the most compelling way we can—no matter how many revisions it takes—until we’re satisfied that the story on paper is as good or better than the one that originally took shape in our heads?

“Though character is the emotional core of great fiction, and though action with no meaning beyond its own brute existence can have no lasting appeal, plot is—or must sooner or later become—the focus of every good writer’s plan.” Wise words from the late John Gardner, novelist and creative writing teacher, and our mentor for this series of short story exercises.

So what is plot, exactly? And how can we apply it to the draft of a story we’ve already written (and in fact have already been revising for the last three months)? First, a definition of plot from a few of my favorite mentors:

From The Lie That Tells A Truth by John Dufresne: “An idea is not a story. A first draft is not a story. A moral is not a story. A character is not a story. A theme is not a story. A plot—now, that’s a story! So where do I get me one? you might ask. At your writing desk. Because plots don’t exist. They can’t be shopped for or ordered on-line. They are coaxed into being. They develop. They grow in the course of the writing. A plot begins to form as soon as you begin to ask yourself the appropriate narrative questions: What does my central character want? What is preventing her from getting it? What does she do about the various obstacles in her way? What are the results of what she does? What climax does this all lead to? Does she get what she wants in the end? Plot, then, is the element of fiction that shapes the many other elements—character, theme, point of view, language, and so on—into a story. It’s the organizing principle of narration, let’s say. […] Plot is the force that holds the universe of your story together.”

From Fiction Writer’s Workshop by Josip Novakovich: “If you don’t write from an outline, once you have finished a story, you still should be able to see its outline, the way after a touchdown it’s easy to draw a chart of what happened in the play. Something must happen, and in the end, we must know why it has happened. Plot is partly what you discover in the writing of a story, not what you “insert.” You raise questions and seek answers, connect your sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into novels. This thread of investigation may be a thin one, but you must have it to give yourself and your readers something to look for.”

From Brandi Reissenweber in her lecture on “Plot & Structure”: “Structure and plot are the architecture of storytelling. The façade of a building may be beautiful, brilliant, breathtaking even, but it can only be that way if it is standing, right? That’s where these foundational elements come in. All other aspects of fiction—characterization, description, what distinguishes your voice from others,—hang on the basic structure and plot of the story.”

John Barth, noted novelist, short story writer, and witty professor of creative writing, writes that “Dramatic effect, not linear chronology, is the regnant principle in the selection and arrangement of a story’s action,” that “a story’s order of narration need not be the strict chronological order of the events narrated.”

However we decide to arrange the “action” in our stories, that action traditionally includes the six ingredients below. [Bracketed explanations are capsulated passages from “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not,” an essay by John Barth. To learn more, and to understand his "systems analysis" theory on the workings of plot, read Barth's classic (and humorous!) essay in Creating Fiction]:

1. Status Quo: [the less-than-stable “Ground Situation.” An overtly or latently voltaged state of affairs preexisting the story’s present time; one that tends to regulate itself toward equilibrium but is essentially less than stable (otherwise there would be no story). The Montagues and Capulets have been hassling each other in Verona for a long time before the story begins: a taunt here, a street scuffle there, but nothing the two families can’t quite absorb. No ground situation, no story, however arresting the action to come, for it is its effect upon the ground situation that gives the story’s action meaning.]

2. The Inciting Incident: [A present-time turn of events that precipitates a story out of the ground situation… “And then one day,” as the narrative formula puts it, the dramatic vehicle rolls into town: Young Romeo Montague falls for young Juliet Capulet, and vice versa.]

Note: David Harris Ebenbach of Gotham Writers Workshop says it’s the responsibility of the writer to begin the story at the point of change (the inciting incident), when “something’s happening that stands out.” Take Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” for example. Carver didn’t begin his masterpiece “a few weeks earlier, when nobody was coming to visit. [He began with] the day that’s the focus of the whole piece.” In order to “drop the reader right into the middle of the action” and almost simultaneously provide him with the necessary information to set up the ground situation (exposition), you’ll have to work hard to strike just the right balance.

3. Complications (escalating conflict): [Incremental perturbations of the ground situation; the successive complications of the conflict. (The star-crossed lovers declare their love, but…) In the story’s middle these “perturbations” follow not only upon one another but from one another, each paving the way for the next (as the story’s middle performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and strategically delaying our approach thereto)]

4. Climax: [A comparatively sudden and consequential effect triggered by comparatively small incrementations, like an avalanche, or the click of the thermostat—whether or not it involves the fall of the mighty from the height of fortune to the depths of misery. Even in the most delicate of epiphanic stories, the little insight vouchsafed to the protagonist (or perhaps only to the reader), the little epiphany that epiphs, does so in a comparative flash—and, for all its apparent slightness, is of magnitudinous consequence]

5. Denouement: The consequence of the complications and climax. [measured by the net difference it effects in the ground situation. If nothing of consequence about the ground situation has been altered, no story has been told…. The equilibrium of a story’s denouement is not that of its opening: The surviving Capulets and Montagues are sadder but perhaps at least temporarily wiser in the “glooming peace this morning with it brings.” It is an equilibrium complexified, qualitatively changed even where things may appear to all hands (except the reader/spectator) to be back to normal. Otherwise, what we have attended may have its incidental merits, but, for better or worse (usually worse), it’s not a story].

6. Wrap-up [the little coda, closing fillip, or dolly-back shot often appended to the denouement like a jazz drummer’s “roll-off” at the end of a number, and usually suggestive of what the story’s completed action portends for the principal characters].

John Barth: “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not,” from the text Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway

John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Josip Novakovich: Fiction Writer’s Workshop

Brandi Reissenweber: Instructor, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and author of the "Ask the Writer" column for "The Writer" magazine. Be sure to check out "Letterpress," her wonderful blog on the craft of fiction.

David Harris Ebenbach: The chapter "Plot: A Question of Focus" in Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction, The Practical Guide (also contains the full version of "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver)

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

November: 30 Days of Writing Bliss

2010-10-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm supposed to be posting the final exercise in my series of short story writing exercises today, and I was just sitting down to do that when a friend e-mailed with an important reminder: It's October 27th, which means NaNoWriMo begins in just 5 days!

I posted about this a year ago, so instead of wasting time writing about it all over again I'll just copy, paste, and tweak my post from last year, and that way while you're checking it out to see what all the November fuss is about, I'll slip away to finish up Part VIII of the short story posts. Meet you back here in just a few days...

From October 2009:

I can't believe it's here again so soon! If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) -- 30 caffeine-filled days of writing pleasure and frenzy in which participants write 1,667 words per day with the goal of completing a 50,000-word "shitty" first draft by midnight on November 30th. Are you up for that? Are you ready to go??

There are so many ways to tackle this thing:

l If you're a planner like me, you might prepare a detailed map either outlining or making lots of notes about every chapter and every scene, with a character chart delineating each character's growth and change throughout the entire novel -- a master plan so to speak, so you'll know where you're going and how you plan to get there. My advice is to print out your plan and pin it to the wall next to your laptop. That way you'll have it to refer to whenever you get stuck, which if you're like me will happen quite often.

l If you're like some of my successful NaNo friends, you begin on November 1st with nothing but the seed of an idea germinating in the soft tissue of your brain. The idea here is to sit yourself down in front of your computer and imagine a character or two, listen to what they tell you, and hope that their words trickle down from your brain to your fingertips. If you're lucky, you'll end the month like my friends have, with something unwieldy, surprising, and magnificent -- a rough first draft to take you through the rest of the year and possibly beyond. That's when you'll apply structure and plot to shape the story into something compelling and meaningful.

Flannery O'Connor liked to work that way. She once said: "If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't have to know before you begin. In fact, it may be better if you don't know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories."

l Of course you can always use a combination of these two methods. Ansen Dibell, author of Plot, calls this writing method "Outlining from Inside":

"Stories -- especially live, convincing stories -- will change under your hands. That's the reason I've never been persuaded of the usefulness of outlines. By other writers' experience and my own, I judge that you generally won't know how a story's going to go until you get close to the place where something is just about to happen. It will take its own shape and tell you how it wants to go, if you listen and watch attentively for the ways it's telling you.

"My advice is that you should always know what your next set-piece is going to be." [Dibell defines a set-piece as "a big scene the reader can see coming and can look forward to awhile, either in fear or in hope, before it's reached."] "You should be laying the groundwork for it right up to the time it happens. You should start that groundwork either from the story's beginning, or lay down the first seeds back before the previous set-piece, to mature and bloom later."

"When you've written your set-piece, you should be looking ahead to the end, to see if you can see its shape any more clearly from this vantage point than you could before. And if you can, make adjustments to make this scene lead more clearly, more precisely, toward the last cliff, with fewer possible turnings-away, so that the story, crisis by crisis, narrows down to a point that seems inevitable when it comes.

"I call it outlining from inside. Blocking out the story, one set-piece at a time, from inside it, taking due account of what it seems so far to be trying to become. That much outlining, I believe, every writer needs if his story is not to appear a funhouse, a random series of events sprung on the reader for no particular reason, gone too fast to have impact, leading from nothing to nothing. You need some kind of an outline, some idea of where you're going and how, if you're going to keep your story out of the funhouse which, in fiction, is no fun at all. Look ahead at least to your next major scene and get ready for it. Then deliver."

l Another method I've heard about (but never tried myself) is the "Snowflake Method" developed by Randy Ingermanson, physicist and author, in which you begin by writing a one-sentence summary of your novel in 15 words or less. You turn this little snow-crystal into a snowflake (and finally, a snowball) by rolling it through the snow-fields of your mind where hopefully it picks up more and more ice-crystals during each pass. By November 30th at midnight you should have a massive and intricate snowball full of well-developed characters, detailed settings, and compelling dialogue. It goes something like this:

1. Write the summary sentence of your story in 15 words or less.

2. Expand this sentence into a 5-sentence paragraph: one sentence for the story setup, one sentence for each of three "disasters" that take place during your novel, ideally each disaster worse for the protagonist than the last. The last sentence tells the ending.

3. Expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a paragraph of it's own, fleshing out some of the disasters in your summary paragraph above.

4. Expand the one-page plot synopsis into a 4-page synopsis… etc., etc., etc.

You get the picture. Actually, it's much more detailed than that, and may be just what you need to organize your thoughts and turn them into a well-oiled page-turner. You can get all the background information, and Randy Ingermanson's "Ten Steps of Design" at AdvancedFictionWriting.

Anyone who's ever NaNo'd successfully will tell you that every writer has a slightly different method of reaching that 50,000-word goal by the end of November. All I can tell you is what worked for me.

Here's just the thing to help get you started. It's a great little exercise from John Dufresne's wonderfully encouraging book on writing fiction, The Lie That Tells A Truth. (Might be a good one to read in preparation for November 1st…) The exercise below will not only get you thinking about the beginning of your novel, but will come in handy whenever you're ready to begin that next big scene.

If you haven't already signed up for National Novel Writing Month, I urge you to do it now, before it's too late. You'll have the time of your life and you'll end up with a writing project to take you through 2011 and beyond :-)

Good luck!

An exercise from John Dufresne to get you started:

John Dufresne is professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami, and author of The Lie That Tells A Truth, a Guide to Writing Fiction. He has also authored four novels, and at least two short story collections that I know of.

Part VII: The Art of Delay--Creating Tension and Reader Anticipation

2010-10-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

***This post is the seventh in a series of eight exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers. Click here for Part I ***

Back in January I posted a piece on the importance of tension in writing fiction, but the topic is worth revisiting I think, especially now that we're in the process of reworking our short story "masterpieces." So, what are people referring to when they talk about tension in storytelling? I like this definition offered by the late Rust Hills, long-time fiction editor for Esquire magazine, and author of Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular:

That “something” which is “going to happen” usually involves conflict of some kind, and the foreshadowing of that conflict is a key element in creating tension that works. “Conflict is the heartbeat of all writing,” says Lajos Egri, author of The Art of Dramatic Writing. “No conflict ever existed without first foreshadowing itself. Conflict is that titanic atomic energy whereby one explosion creates a chain of explosions”:

Says Hills, “As with every other discussion of method, of course, there has to be an amount of competence and care on the writer’s part, or the effect won’t be caused by the method.”

Our mentor, the late John Gardner, agrees:

So for every piece of delayed information we'll need to do three things: a) foreshadow the event so that the reader will anticipate its eventual coming; b), resolve or reveal the event or information at some point later in the story; and c) keep the tension taut throughout the story leading up to it, writing with such care, such rich language and startling accuracy of perception, that the reader can’t wait to skip ahead to the end, but is kept from doing so only by his own unwillingness to leave the gorgeous passages leading up to it.

Simple, right?

Rust Hills: Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Lajos Egri: The Art of Dramatic Writing

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Part VI: Authenticating Detail and Description

2010-09-26T20:03:00.000-07:00

***This post is the sixth in a series of eight weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers. Click here for Part I ***

“Vivid detail is the life blood of fiction…” – John Gardner

I am so behind on my revisions for this story! This most recent pass-through (the one with a focus on dialogue and subtext) took much longer to complete than I expected. Even though my story has just five or six partially dramatized scenes --and even fewer passages of dialogue--it took quite some time to hone that dialogue down to only the most meaningful and significant lines. Now it’s time to move on to the next revision pass: authenticating detail and description.

So what does our mentor, the late John Gardner, have to say about detail?

The details in this brief passage from Colm Tóibín’s short story “The Use of Reason” capture only a tiny aspect of who this mother is, but the few, carefully chosen words and details suggest so much more beneath the surface:

“Good authenticating details set a trap that captures a small piece, a tiny aspect, of what’s being described in a way that allows the reader to come to understand what’s being described for himself,” says Dave Koch, author of one of the clearest explanations I’ve read on the subject of authenticating detail. “[Readers] of literary fiction want to be able to figure things out for themselves; they want to do work. When a story allows you to do this sort of work—to come to your own decision, to come to your own conclusions—you participate in that story. And that sense of feeling like you participated, like your opinions and interpretations matter, is a big part of the pleasure you take from reading literary fiction.” Koch gives us five steps to follow to help make our readers feel like they know just enough about a character or place (or whatever it is you’re trying to describe). To get the whole scoop including some good examples, read the rest of Dave’s article here, on the Gotham Writers’ Workshop site. The five steps:

Make the decision to capture whatever it is you’re trying to describe. Set a trap.

Identify details you don’t need for this capturing. Ordinary details are your enemy.

Look to unusual details to capture the big picture. Unusual details let readers do work.

Lie, cheat, and steal. Do whatever you have to. You don’t necessarily capture the truth by being truthful.

Trust the reader. Don’t explain something after you’ve captured it. “Over-explaining takes all the power away from [the] authenticating detail. Avoid that by letting the reader figure things out for himself.”

Author, Monica Wood, interviewed for The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks (a wonderful resource for both inspiration and technique) talks about the importance of picking just the right detail when describing something-- a place or character, for instance:

I’m excited to discover that in addition to her novels and short stories Monica has written a number of books on the craft of writing, one of which is Description, a book in the popular “Elements of Fiction Writing” series. I’m looking forward to checking that one out.

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Dave Koch: "Authenticating Detail" Gotham Writers' Workshop (article first appeared in "The Writer" magazine)

Monica Wood: interviewed for The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks

Colm Tóibín: "The Use of Reason" in the collection Mothers and Sons

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Part V: Dialogue That Crackles

2010-09-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

***This post is the fifth in a series of eight. Through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers. Click here for Part I ***

Yikes. By now I should be posting Part VI (or even VII!) of my series of short story exercises, but I’m just getting to Part V. I may need to extend my self-imposed deadline another week or so. That’s okay. The important thing is not that the story gets finished by a certain date, but that however long it takes-- through diligence, determination, and pure pleasure--the story grows and matures into the best story it can be.

One way to accomplish this is to make sure our characters’ interactions radiate heat through conflict, tension, and misunderstanding. Allison Amend, author of the chapter on dialogue in Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide tells us, “more often than not dialogue is a key part of [that] interaction.” You’ve no doubt heard me sing the praises of this book a time or two in this blog... Well, Amend’s chapter, “Dialogue: Talking It Up” is one of the best I’ve read on the subject and is but one more reason to get your hands on a copy now.

Dialogue is a function of character, as screenwriting guru Syd Field reminds us. Not only does dialogue need to move the story forward but it should also establish relationships, reveal the conflicts of the story and its characters, reveal the characters’ emotional states, and comment on the action: “Your first attempts will probably be stilted, clichéd, fragmented, and strained,” writes Field. “Writing dialogue is like learning to swim; you’re going to flounder around, but the more you do it, the easier it gets.”

Unlike a novel, a short story doesn’t allow time enough to dramatize every single event or to write out every line of dialogue in every conversation that our characters engage in over the course of the story’s telling, so we’ll need to choose thoughtfully. Last week we made a list of significant, turning-point incidents that will take place in our stories. This week let’s work on dramatizing them through dialogue.

As Allison Amend tells us, not every conversation needs to be dramatized in direct, line-by-line dialogue. Sometimes all we need to reveal is a gist of the conversation and we can accomplish that through summary alone (via indirect dialogue) or with a combination of both summary and scene. By way of example she offers us this passage from Tobias Wolff’s short story “Smokers” in which the author uses a mix of both direct and indirect dialogue, sparing the reader “a monotonous conversation, but [giving us] the most important information… in a most economical fashion”:

Writes Amend: “Here we get the gist of the conversation, but then, on an especially significant line, we get the actual quote.” She continues, “So, in addition to asking yourself if a moment should be dialogued or not, you can also ask yourself if direct or indirect dialogue is the best choice for that particular moment.”

Study Amend’s chapter on dialogue to learn lots more: dialogue conventions, the illusion of reality, subtext, dialect, stage direction in dialogue, character and dialogue, bad dialogue... You won’t be disappointed.

One more word on dialogue that I’m sure you’ve already heard over and over but is worth keeping in mind as we begin to craft those passages of dialogue in our stories: Subtext. John Gardner, our mentor for this series of exercises, reminds us to “make our dialogue crackle with feelings not directly expressed. Remember that in dialogue, as a general rule, every pause must somehow be shown, either by narration (for example, “she paused”) or by some gesture or other break that shows the pause. And remember that gesture is a part of all real dialogue. Sometimes, for instance, we look away instead of answering.”

Interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson for The Glimmer Train Guide To Writing Fiction: Building Blocks, author Amy Bloom talks about “writing below the surface”:

Finally, an important note on subtext from Allison Amend:

Allison Amend: “Dialogue: Talking it Up” Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide

Syd Field: Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Amy Bloom: interviewed in The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Interim Exercise: Using Place

2010-09-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

While you're waiting for Part V, check out this intriguing exercise I came across on author Meg Waite Clayton's blog about writers. The exercise is actually a writing prompt designed to jump-start a personal essay, but wouldn't it work beautifully to help discover (and show) a character's secret motivation? Check it out :-)

Oh, and be sure to check out Meg's website with her very cool, interactive writing desk here.

Part IV: Shape Your Story

2010-09-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

***This post is the fourth in a series of eight. From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers. Click here for Part I ***

Last week we worked on how to convince the reader that there's a good possibility our protagonists might change their ways by the end of our stories--even if they don’t end up changing at all. If nothing else we’ve at least shown that they’re capable of change, thereby keeping the reader in suspense until the end of the story. And for those of us whose protagonists do change, we’ve come up with a list of incidents designed to convince our readers that the character’s change is not only plausible but, in hindsight, inevitable. Surprising, but inevitable… that’s the key.

I don’t know about you, but when I came up with my list of incidents it became apparent that many of them will need to be shown in flashback (or flash-forward), or another way entirely, but in any instance they’ll likely throw my story events out of chronological order. So figuring out the best way, the smoothest way, to sequence and transition those events will be crucial.

When American author Lan Samantha Chang wanted to tell stories based on the lives of her parents and the era in which they grew up in China she realized that, though set in the present, she would need to move backward in time to find the heart of the story, to uncover “the mystery of the past.” In her excellent essay, “Time and Order: The Art of Sequencing,” Chang (currently director of the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) writes that “Every story shapes a pattern in time, and its writer must find that shape…. Manipulating sequence can greatly increase a writer’s range, her flexibility and her authority. A leap backward can dazzle the reader and develop his understanding of the characters. A complex story may move back and forth in time, creating a spellbinding pattern. A subtle, chronological telling can draw the reader smoothly into the author’s world, holding him rapt with an awareness of its possibilities.”

Though certainly not as popular in today’s stories as the flashback, much can be gained from the flash-forward, by taking the reader briefly forward in time. Says Chang: “[The flash-forward] can provide us with a startling and revealing vision of the characters’ futures as their present conflicts unfold, helping us understand the present story in a larger context.”

In the first pages of his novel, Giovanni’s Room, author James Baldwin propels the reader forward to the events of a morning that has yet to take place. We learn that the protagonist’s lover is to be guillotined that day and that the protagonist blames himself for what has brought the two of them to this awful place in their lives. The opening, a flash-forward, sets the mood for the novel, and we feel that sense of destiny and significance as we watch, through flashback, the characters meet and fall in love. The opening of Giovanni's Room:

In another piece by James Baldwin, the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator (an algebra teacher) wants his younger brother Sonny, a musician and a recovering drug addict, to have a normal, “safe” life, away from his old friends and his nightclub music, the jazz that Sonny loves. The author employs a series of significant flashbacks, some dramatized, some expository, to show the narrator’s change over time. The transition that thrusts the reader into the past begins at an awkward (for the narrator) family dinner with his wife and Sonny, (their parents are long dead) and hinges on the narrator’s thoughts, his desire to keep his brother “safe”:

Suddenly, without even realizing it, we find ourselves transported back to the narrator’s young adulthood in Harlem, to the early relationships with his parents, his brother, and others, until eventually we come full circle and return to the present, moving on from there. Each stop along this seamless journey through the past is a significant one. Each event the author chooses to show us not only propels the story forward, but peels back the layers in those early relationships revealing the narrator’s failed attempts at understanding and helping his troubled brother. Through these past incidents Baldwin convinces us that the narrator’s change when it comes is not only plausible, but genuine.

With any sudden shift in time, be it forward or backward, the key of course is to do it without jarring the reader out of the fictional dream you’ve worked so hard to create. Sol Stein (editor, creative writing instructor, and author of nine novels) says “The reason flashbacks create a problem for readers is that they break the reading experience. The reader is intent on what happens next. Flashbacks, unless expertly handled, pull the reader out of the story to tell him what happened earlier. If the reader is conscious of moving back in time, especially if what happened in the past is told rather than shown, the engrossed reader is reluctant to be pulled out of his reverie to receive information. If we are enthralled, we don’t want to be interrupted. Therefore, the art of writing flashbacks is to avoid interrupting the reader’s experience. I’ll show you how it’s done.” … which indeed he goes on to do in Stein on Writing, his fabulous book on craft. Stein gives great practical advice in all areas of craft, with an entire chapter devoted to flashbacks and how and when to use them. Stein’s books differ from many other books on writing in that his focus is always and foremost on the experience of the reader.

Lan Samantha Chang: "Time and Order: The Art of Sequencing,"from Creating Fiction (edited by Julie Checkoway)

Sol Stein: Stein on Writing
James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin: "Sonny's Blues" from his collection of short stories titled Going To Meet The Man

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Write a Story, Part III: Character Motivation & Change

2010-08-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

***This post is the third in a series of eight. From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers. Click here for Part I ***

Now that we’ve set the mood of our stories and grounded them in time and place, let’s focus on our main characters for a bit. What motivates your character to behave the way she does? What does she want at the beginning of the story, and how does that desire change by the end? Does your character at least begin to undergo a change by the end of the story?

Of course, not all protagonists change during the course of a story, but according to Brandi Reissenweber of Gotham Writers’ Workshop, they should at least “possess the ability to change, and the reader should see this potential. Change is particularly important for a story’s main character. Just as the desire of a main character drives the story, the character’s change is often the story’s culmination…. If you don’t create the potential for change, the character will feel predictable and the reader will quickly lose interest.”

Showing character change (and the potential for change) is not simple. Nancy Kress, author of Beginnings, Middles & Ends, devotes twelve pages to character motivation and change, and tells us how to pull it all off in her chapter “Under Development: Your Characters at Midstory.” The first thing we need to do, she says, is to convince the reader that a character is capable of change by “showing him doing it” either through flashback or small parts of scenes that “can foreshadow your character’s ability to become whatever you eventually have him become” (for example: maybe the reader sees through flashback that your character has changed his mind once before). In a short story (as opposed to a novel) you obviously won’t have much time (words?) to accomplish all of that.

Once you’ve shown that a character is capable of change, the next step is to show the character actually changing, and to convince the reader that the change is genuine. This, according to Kress, is accomplished through a pattern of incidents that the character is forced to live through. As Kress says, “…one mention [of your character changing] on page sixty-eight isn’t going to do it.”

Josip Novakovich, author of Writing Fiction: Step by Step says, “When you introduce a character, imagine what her motive is. Setting several characters in motion, with conflicting motives, may give you enough momentum for the whole story. You need not worry about plot as much as about getting several characters together with strong motives at cross-purposes. Let the motives in conflict work until a climax, a showdown, occurs, and from there a conclusion will flow.”

Nancy Kress: Beginnings, Middles & Ends

Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction: Step by Step

Brandi Reissenweber: Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction, the Practical Guide, "Character: Casting Shadows"

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Write a Story, Part II: Setting & Emotion

2010-08-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

***This post is the second in a series of eight. From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers. Click here for Part I ***

There’s a famous writing exercise you’ve probably heard of, an exercise in technique that the late John Gardner developed to explore links between character emotion and setting. There are four parts to it. Here’s one of them:

“Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just bee killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.”

I’d like to tweak this exercise to help me develop the setting in my own story. It would be easy to write only one side of this exercise. The happy lover’s point of view, for instance, if that’s an emotion that works for your story. But it’s helpful, I think, to write the contrasting POV as well, to write both extremes in order to really understand the setting's "dramatic potential". In my story my POV character, Victoria, arrives with her family at a Christmas tree farm in the country, the setting where most of my story will take place. She’s irritable and on edge, angry with her husband for ruining a day that is supposed to be joyful, playful, and fun. I think it will help me develop the setting and character if I explore how different her interpretation of the tree farm would be were she to be happy instead, and thinking about how much she can't wait to make love to Tom as soon as the tree is up and decorated.

The Christmas tree farm is an important part of my story--almost as important as one of my main characters (if not, the story might as well take place somewhere else). So instead of just describing the tree farm as if it were a photo or a painting, I want to use Gardner’s exercise to set the mood of the story, to anchor the reader in time and place, to move the story forward, and most importantly, to reveal something about Victoria’s character and the whole family dynamic.

As Janet Burroway writes: “Our relation to place, time, and weather, like our relation to clothes and other objects, is charged with emotion more or less subtle, more or less profound. It is filled with judgment mellow or harsh. And it alters according to what happens to us…. Imagine experiencing a thunderstorm when in the throes of a new love: the rain might seem to glitter, the lightning to sizzle, the thunder to rumble with anticipation. The downpour would refresh and exhilarate, nourishing the newly budding violets. Then imagine how the very same storm would feel in the midst of a lousy romantic breakup: the raindrops would be thick and cold, almost greasy; the lightning would slash at the clouds; the thunder would growl. Torrents of rain would beat the delicate tulips to the ground.”

Take a look at this passage from Louis L’Amour’s novel, Hondo (used as an example of “how to weave character, landscape, and action” in Writing Fiction Step by Step by Josip Novakovich):

Novakovich writes: “L’Amour creates suspense while giving us the setting from the perspective of his protagonist; the setting not only helps us get into the story, it also helps us experience the character’s mood (tension, vigilance)…. if L’Amour simply described how the southwestern landscape looks every summer, he’d create no suspense. His fiction would be reduced to a travelogue.” (Novakovich).

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction Step by Step
Janet Burroway: Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Write a Short Story with John Gardner (and me): Part I

2010-08-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

8/11/2010: I’m about to finish the rough draft of my latest short story. The estimated time of completion is nine-thirty this evening, but only if I stop blogging now and get back to writing.

I have a plan for this story and here’s what I’m aiming to do: I want to take this “shitty first draft” and turn it into a finished masterpiece by September 30th. A nearly impossible task (especially the “masterpiece” part), but certainly something to strive for, don’t you think? John Gardner thinks I should. He thinks I can come close, too, in places, if I really work at it and concentrate on each individual unit: “When the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional.”

Obviously, then, I'm going to need some help. I can’t accomplish this goal without some very good instruction and guidance. For that I’ll turn to some of my favorite writing teachers, and to authors whose stories and novels I’ve admired, whose writing constantly surprises and astonishes. Not that I want to copy their style, but I do like to study how they accomplish what they do in just a few short sentences or paragraphs. For instance, how does the author make me feel such sympathy for her despicable villain? When the description of a particular setting makes me feel as though I know the place as intimately as I am my own town, I wonder how the author accomplished that. And here's a good one: how is it possible for an author to smoothly transition from the present to the past, and back again, fifteen times in one short piece of fiction without my even noticing?

The late John Gardner, writing instructor, author, and mentor to the likes of Raymond Carver (who wrote what is considered by some to be the most nearly perfect short story ever written: “Cathedral”) believed that with practice, and sharply focused concentration, we can surprise ourselves with the great work we produce. The focused concentration comes in the form of writing exercises limited to one particular element of technique at a time. We can use the rough drafts of our own stories to practice, perfect, and apply these techniques, and thereby write our “masterpieces.”

I can see already in my rough draft many of the different structural units that will need to be developed there. My plan is to concentrate on each one individually and work my way through the story as Gardner suggests, “working unit by unit, always keeping in mind what the plan of [the] story requires [me] to do but refusing to be hurried to more important things (Aunt Nadia’s hysteria when the gun goes off)….”

So here’s the plan: you finish the rough draft of your story and I’ll finish mine (yikes, it’s after one o'clock already!) Then meet me back here this weekend for our first exercise. September 30th is only seven weeks away and we have so much yet to accomplish!

Happy writing…
Leslie

Click here for Part II: Write a Short Story: Setting & Emotion

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (click here for an interesting story about John Gardner, by Jeff Widmer)

Raymond Carver: "Cathedral" (You can purchase "Cathedral" as part of many, many short story anthologies, but I suggest getting it here, where not only is the complete text printed at the back of the book, but where you'll also have the benefit of experiencing "Cathedral" as a teaching tool, the story analyzed by the experts at Gotham Writers' Workshop)

Write A Short Story:

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Breathe New Life Into Old Stories

2010-07-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

Hmm. What to do with that old story you gave up on a few years back? The one you nurtured and fell in love with, back when you first started taking yourself seriously as a writer? You remember the one. Maybe it’s in the far corner of some dark drawer now, still folded inside the sad-looking SASE that ferried it back home from that small-press literary journal you submitted it to.

Well, pull it out of the drawer. I've got something for you.

I was perusing the blogosphere a few weeks ago, looking for some much needed inspiration, when I came across an article titled “5 Ways To Shake Up Your Writing” by Sandy Ackers, professional writer and “muse wrangler.” One of her suggestions is to take an old story and rewrite it from a brand new perspective. For instance, if your protagonist is a man, rewrite his character as a woman. Say he’s a troubled teenager... maybe rewrite him as a troubled fifty-five year old going through a rocky midlife crisis.

Ackers even suggests changing the story’s genre to shake things up: “Rewrite a literary passage as a pivotal scene in a mystery. Change your crime scene into a romantic segment. Get creative!”

Ackers’ blog, “Strangling My Muse,” explores “how to stay creative through easy periods of fertile inspiration" as well as "dark times, when work is overwhelming and life keeps throwing curve balls and everyone is always cranky.” If you need a little inspiration of your own you might want to pop over and spend some time there. Her site is full of useful articles, unique exercises, and lots of lists and links--guaranteed to keep you enthralled and writing, your creative juices bubbling steadily to the surface.

Sandy Ackers: Strangling My Muse

John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth, p. 152

Writing about Complex Emotion

2010-07-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

It's so easy to fall back on those first-thing-that-pops-into-your-mind clichés when presenting the emotions of our characters. What a laugh it would be to read over the early drafts of some of my old stories--loaded with pounding hearts and sweaty palms, no doubt. Not to mention single tears rolling down flushed cheeks; clenched fists; and nervously tapping feet. It's much more difficult--and consequently much more rewarding--to come up with fresh, new ways of depicting character emotions.

In Creating Character Emotion, the one writing book I probably revisit more often than any other, author Ann Hood talks about creating character depth through emotional complexity:

Take a look at this example from Anton Chekhov's short story "The Kiss" in which the main character, an officer named Ryabovitch, suffers all kinds of emotional turmoil when he unexpectedly finds himself invited to tea at the home of General Von Rabbek and his wife. The man is an emotional mess. It's not simply nervousness he feels, but also shame, envy, delight, mortification, and anxiety⎯just to name a few:

"…. At first, on going into the room and sitting down to the table, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object. The faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices -- all blended in one general impression that inspired in Ryabovitch alarm and a desire to hide his head. Like a lecturer making his first appearance before the public, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but apparently only had a dim understanding of it…. After a little while, growing accustomed to his surroundings, Ryabovitch saw clearly and began to observe. As a shy man, unused to society, what struck him first was that in which he had always been deficient -- namely, the extraordinary boldness of his new acquaintances….

Ryabovitch stood near the door among those who were not dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the sight of all take a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the consciousness that he was timid, that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers, had deeply mortified him, but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, looking at his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful."

One way to render genuine emotion in our stories is to draw from our own life experiences. Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, tells how she mined her own experiences as a young woman to discover just the right way to depict her character's complex emotions:

In "The Kiss" Chekhov uses concrete detail and comparison to render the shame and inadequacy that Ryabovich experiences at the party: "the faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices […] inspired alarm and the desire to hide his head." When Ryabovich watches as another officer takes "a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on" we see the comparison and understand his feelings of mortification and envy.

Ann Hood: Creating Character Emotions
Kim Edwards: "Icebergs, Glaciers, and Arctic Dreams: Developing Characters," essay in Creating Fiction (edited by Julie Checkoway)
Anton Chekhov: "The Kiss"

He Said, She Said: Free Direct Speech

2010-07-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

For this exercise I'm stealing a passage from John Mullan's analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated, which was part of Mullan's 2005 "Elements of Fiction" series in "The Guardian":

Mullan's article continues (you can read the rest of it here).

Although these days, free direct speech is apparently "only proper if we are to listen to something truly incomprehensible", I'd like to try using the technique to stretch and strengthen those (my) flabby dialogue-writing muscles a bit.

· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. Read his archived pieces and respond to them at http://books.guardian.co.uk/elements/0,,1427415,00.html

Take Your Character to the Movies...

2010-06-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

Last month, as part of his long-running "Ten of the Best: Highlights From the World of Literature" series in The Guardian, John Mullan gave us "Ten of the Best Visits to the Cinema in Literature." The movie-going characters in these scenes come to life in novels by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to name just three. Also on the list is the 2004 Man Booker Prize-winner The Line of Beauty by British novelist Alan Hollinghurst, one of my own personal favorites.

So what makes these scenes so great? And why couldn't one of our own movie-going protagonists make it onto a list like this someday?

When you read through Mullan's ten-of-the-best list below you'll notice that the scenes have more in common than just the fact that they're set inside a movie theater. The characters in these scenes act in unique and unpredictable ways, surprising the reader with their thoughts and reactions to what they see on the screen. The characters discover things about themselves or society based on the films they see or the audience reactions to them. The writing styles vary widely but in every passage the language sings in its own way, some crisp and others lush, but most rich in specificity and sensual detail. Following are John Mullan's "ten of the best" and his description of each:

John Mullan: "Ten of the Best Visits to the Cinema in Literature" guardian.co.uk, May 15, 2010

Surprise Platter

2010-06-06T23:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun one. I love to apply this exercise to a slow passage in my fiction, one that's necessary to the plot, of course, but one that lacks texture or is a bit too predictable. It works especially well for quiet moments, love scenes, and scenes with lots of dialogue.

In fiction, surprises are not limited to plot twists, revelations, and tricky surprise endings. In The Joy of Writing Sex -- A Guide for Fiction Writers (an absolute must-read if your story is going to include a sex scene) author Elizabeth Benedict says that, "Good writing offers all kinds of surprises and pleasures--of scene, plot, character, and language--and good writing about sex does, too."

Benedict lists five categories of "ordinary surprises good writers spring on us, often so subtly we aren't aware of it, in order to give depth and texture to their sex scenes…" These include surprises of action, speech, distraction, insight, and language. Surprises like these are essential to all good writing and we should consider including them to improve not only our sex scenes but every other type of scene as well. Booker Prize-winning author, Peter Carey, in reviewing The Joy of Writing Sex wrote: "Read it because it will teach you everything you need to know about writing good fiction, whether your characters are having sex or having breakfast." I agree one-hundred percent!

Below is brief description of each of those categories of surprise, but you should read The Joy of Writing Sex to get the whole scoop--including excerpts and advice from some of today's most celebrated authors--and in particular, how surprises like these can add depth and texture to a sex or love scene.

l Surprise of Action: in which something unexpected happens. An action doesn't need to be huge or dramatic to be surprising. It can be something as monumental as a stranger storming into the room brandishing an automatic weapon, or an action as subtle as an ill-timed cough.

l Surprise of Speech: in which characters speak during the scene, and what they say is surprising or unexpected. "As with all good dialogue, dialogue in [a sex scene] should be there for a reason integral to the characters and the story. We should learn something about the characters or their circumstances from what they say to each other in bed." [Elizabeth Benedict]

l Surprise of Distraction: in which a character is distracted by another character, or by a sound, a smell, a memory, a poison oak rash--anything that takes the character's attention away from what he is supposed to be concentrating on in the scene.

l Surprise of Insight: the character realizes something she didn't before. Perhaps she intuits the true nature of the situation. Something clicks in her brain and suddenly the pieces of a puzzle fall into place. Perhaps she makes an observation and her thoughts interrupt the action in the scene.

l Surprise of Language: in which the writer surprises the reader with "original language and metaphor that demand our attention, words that are particularly eloquent at doing what our words are meant to do: move the reader to feel what the character feels at that moment, whether it is arousal, excitement, melancholy, fear, or revulsion." [Elizabeth Benedict]

These are only a handful of the many kinds of surprises writers use when creating memorable moments in their fiction. As Benedict says, you will certainly encounter others in your own reading and writing.

The exercise this week is based on something Benedict refers to in her book as a "Surprise Platter," a scene that contains several different surprises in one scene. To illustrate this, she gives us a scene from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint in which the teenage protagonist, determined to lose his virginity, visits a prostitute along with a group of his friends--a scene in which almost every line "serves up something unexpected, and the stakes keep rising higher and higher." [Roth's passage is found on p. 68 of Benedict's book]

I've had so much fun applying this "Surprise Platter" technique to my own writing, including both "breakfast" scenes and sex scenes; scenes-in-progress; and scenes going through their eighth, ninth, and tenth revisions. In almost every instance the results have triggered further insights into the characters and their stories. Because of the added moments of surprise, a scene will often take off in a totally new direction--something that can be especially helpful when you find yourself in the sagging middle of a fizzling rough first draft.

This is an exercise I came up with based on Elizabeth Benedict's five categories of surprise:

Elizabeth Benedict: The Joy of Writing Sex, A Guide for Fiction Writers Click here to listen to an interview with Elizabeth Benedict on ABC Radio Australia, talking about sex in literature.

Sound

2010-05-24T12:12:00.000-07:00

For me "sound" has always been the most difficult of the five senses to describe. It's easy to write: a truck rumbled past, or the neighbor's dog barked; she heard a scream; his voice was higher than usual; the sound of silence filled the air. A little of that is fine I suppose, but when we allow ourselves to become lazy and rely solely on the fill-in-the-blank technique, it seems to me we miss an opportunity to engage the reader by drawing him into our fictional dream.

This week, while approaching my story from a new and hopefully more illustrative angle, I've begun to pay closer attention to some of the more creative ways writers describe sound. Here are a few of my favorites:

A scream:
There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them. [Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep]

Silence:
Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audible sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern that decorated the wallpaper. [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"]

Background noise:
Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly." [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"]

Footsteps:
"You and Francis are on the hiding side," a tall girl said, and then the light was gone, and the carpet wavered under his feet with the sibilance of footfalls, like small cold draughts, creeping away into corners. [Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"]

Rain:
It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. [James Joyce: "Araby"]

A woman and her granddaughter hide under a dock and listen to the sounds of the men who are searching for them:
They crouched there then, the two of them, submerged to the shoulders, feet unsteady on the slimed lake bed. They listened. The sky went from rose to ocher to violet in the cracks over their heads. The motorcycles had stopped now. In the silence there was the glissando of locusts, the dry crunch of boots on the flinty beach, their low man-talk drifting as they prowled back and forth. One of them struck a match… The wind carried their voices into the pines…. The carp, roused by the troubling of the waters, came nosing around the dock, guzzling and snorting…. The bike cranked. The other ratcheted, ratcheted, then coughed, caught, roared. They circled, cut deep ruts, slung gravel, and went. Their roaring died away and away. Crickets resumed and a near frog bic-bic-bicked. [Mary Hood: "How Far She Went"]

Sounds of a neighboring homestead:
From the Workman's valley came the sounds of industry at all hours of the day: the buzz of chain saws, the crashing of timber, the splitting of wood, the jingle-trace rattling of mules in chains pulling stumps and stoneboats…. the next day the sounds resumed: the clangings and bangings, the shouts and orders and complaints, the buzzings and grindings, the hammerings and sawings, backfires and outbursts. [Rick Bass: "The Lives of Rocks"]

John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"

Rick Bass: "The Lives of Rocks" in Zoetrope All-Story, Spring 2005

Mary Hood: "How Far She Went"

James Joyce: "Araby"

Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep

Yearning

2010-05-16T01:32:00.001-07:00

The story I've been drafting for the last two months has finally reached a conclusion, thank goodness, but now it's time to start over and figure out where it went so terribly wrong. About three-quarters of the way in, the story fizzled out. It was missing a key ingredient -- you guessed it: yearning. And without "yearning" the story literally had nowhere to go.

In neglecting to give my main character a strong desire line, I did what many beginning writers do (and some published authors as well). According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, yearning is as essential to the art of fiction "as color is to painting and movement is to dance and sound is to music." He writes:

Butler gives us four wonderful literary examples from the works of Janet Burroway, Tom Piazza, Margaret Atwood, and James Joyce, in which the authors depict yearning through "beautiful moment-to-moment sensual details." He goes into great detail about each example, discussing line by line the ways in which the authors build coherence among the details, and how each main character's dynamic yearning begins to manifest itself in his or her particular story. I encourage everyone to get a copy of Butler's book and study that chapter in particular.

Below are examples (not Butler's) of yearning from two very different short stories. The first is from Ryan Boudinot's short story "Cardiology." The protagonist is a boy who lives in a town "where nobody had their own heart. They shared one gigantic heart located in a former water purification plant near the center of town." The young man's yearning is very clearly stated -- to leave town and walk freely -- but not until after we get the a detail-packed description of what it is he'd be leaving behind. The moment-by-moment sensual detail in this piece is probably not what one would describe as "beautiful," but the writing is masterful and the detail makes Magnus's yearning shine forth -- vivid and clear. This passage comes just four paragraphs into the story:

In this example from Joyce Carol Oates' story "The Lost Brother" the character's yearning, that "first epiphany" comes in the very first paragraph:

So, armed with this new insight it's back to the drawing board for me -- back to the place where Sarah (my protagonist) drew her first breath as a character in my short story. Hopefully this time her yearning will shine forth for both of us.

What is it that your character yearns for at the deepest level of his being?

Robert Olen Butler: From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

Ryan Boudinot: "Cardiology" at FiveChapters.com

Joyce Carol Oates: "The Lost Brother" in "Zoetrope All-Story", Spring 2005

Will you publish my short stories?

2010-05-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

A cartoon from Tom Gauld, Scottish cartoonist and illustrator:

More of Tom's work can be found
at Indiebound and Amazon
and on his website: www.tomgauld.com

The Cut and the Beat: Martin, Mamet, & Dufresne

2010-05-02T21:04:00.000-07:00

I can't seem to complete a first draft like I used to. Lately it's all hair-twisting and frittering and staring despairingly out the window, wondering if it's probable that I've just wasted the last five years of my life. It didn't used to be this way. Writing a story used to be fun and gratifying. It was easy to fill a fifty-page spiral-bound notebook in less than a week. Now it takes months, or longer. So what happened to make the process so painful?

It seems I've been trying to "craft" my first drafts instead of simply writing them -- as "freely and rapidly as possible," as John Steinbeck would say. I expect too much from this rough first pass. I expect that the story will arrive on the page fully formed, just as it appeared in my head, and anything less seems like a failure. But there's simply too much to think about when trying to make good fiction: there's characterization and point-of-view to consider; plot, structure, narrative, style, and voice. You've got your beginnings, middles, and ends to come up with; inciting incidents, and doorways of no return; revelations, crises, climax, and resolutions. Just to name a few.

Learning to write fiction is a lot like learning to swing a golf club. There's a staggering number of fundamentals to remember: feet shoulder width apart; back straight but slightly bent (from the hip socket, mind you, and don't slouch!), watch your grip pressure--you don't want it too strong, but not too weak either; keep your knees flexed, but only slightly, and your head down (or is it up?) as you address the ball. And then you've got your backswing, impact, and follow-through to worry about. My god, how does anyone manage to swing the club at all, let alone with any degree of accuracy?

The other day, when I was frittering away my morning online (I was supposed to be writing the first draft of my new short story) I came across this quote from Gregory Martin, Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, and it made me want to hunker down and finish that draft I've been working on for the past month:

I found something else I liked on the professor's website--something that really got me thinking. It was this excerpt from David Mamet's book On Directing Film:

I like the idea of the story as a series of disordering events and the characters' attempts to restore order; the juxtaposition of shots that make up a scene; the scenes that make up a story. Obviously Mamet is talking about screenwriting here, and not necessarily the first draft. But if my goal is to get a quick sketch of the story on paper (so I'll have something to revise later on) this might just be the thing. The spine on which to hang all those subtle, profound complexities Professor Martin alluded to above--if I finally finish this first draft and get around to that more nuanced second one.

So, let's get writing...
I'll leave you with a few inspiring words from John Dufresne, my favorite wise and wily administrator of tough love: "The best way to succeed as a novelist is to write the novel today and every day. Don't put it off. All right, then. Do what I tell you, and no one gets hurt. Pick up the pen... nice and easy... don't try anything foolish. Now write. There you go!"

John Dufresne: Is Life Like This? A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months

David Mamet: On Directing Film

Gregory Martin: Associate Professor of English, UNM: http://www.unm.edu/~gmartin/

Surprise Ending

2010-04-02T15:08:00.001-07:00

Not all of us love a surprise party, but most of us probably enjoy a well-crafted and unexpected turn of events in the stories we read (be they fiction or nonfiction) just when we thought we had the whole thing figured out. I'm not talking about those playful-but-clever O. Henry kind of endings, but endings that feel organic and right--satisfying on every level. How do writers come up with those great endings? I wish I knew. I wish there was a simple formula for that -- or even a complicated one.

Needing a break from my novel and the slow, seemingly never-ending progress I've been making on my third rewrite, I thought I'd tackle something new for a while -- a project I could start and finish in a month or two -- a short story, maybe, just a few thousand words. A piece of cake, or so I thought.

It wasn't difficult to come up with a premise right away. A week later I even had what I thought was a pretty decent rough draft of the first two-thirds of the story. So far so good, but as always, the final third of the story had my brain tied up in knots. How do I find that perfect surprise ending, the kind of ending that resonates and sends the reader back to the beginning to see how in the heck I pulled it all off? An ending that's totally unexpected, but feels in retrospect like the story was working up to that final moment all along...?

To pull off a surprise like that, we need to really know and understand our characters, especially those who'll be surprising us with their unexpected and seemingly unpredictable actions. We need to know who they are and what they're capable of. What motivates them to behave the way they do? Have they shown through past action that they are capable of such behavior? What are their secret and not-so-secret yearnings and fears?

In Writing Fiction Step by Step author Josip Novakovich suggests that in order to avoid the sense of "foregone conclusion" when creating and defining our characters we should look beyond simple "character traits" that tend to pigeonhole our protagonists and other characters into behaving in predictable ways:

When we do what Novakovich suggests above, we need to make sure that we've prepared the reader ahead of time. We don't want to spoil the reader's surprise, but we want the ending -- and the character's unexpected behavior -- to ultimately make sense.

Brandi Reissenweber, author of the “Ask the Writer” column for The Writer magazine (and my all-time favorite online writing instructor at Gotham Writers Workshop) explains in the following three snippets (from one of her many in-depth lectures on craft) the importance of carefully setting things up so that when the surprise comes it doesn't feel forced:

My favorite bit of advice on "endings" and "surprise" comes from author and English professor John Dufresne in his enthusiastic and inspiring book on craft, The Lie That Tells A Truth. It comes from his chapter on plot titled "The Queen Died of Grief." I find myself returning to this passage every time I approach the ending of a new story, and I imagine that you will, too:

Below the exercise I've listed a few of my favorite short stories with surprise endings that work really well. I'd love to hear about some of your own favorites. The more we read stories with good surprise endings, the closer we'll get to actually pulling one off ourselves. Oh, and hey -- if, during your travels and studies, you happen to come across a simple formula for generating the perfect surprise ending, be sure to let me know, would you?

Maass notes that in his workshops, "nearly three-quarters of participants find that they prefer the approach to the scene that this exercise yields. Why is that? First choices in writing a scene often are the easiest: the ones that make sense and feel safest. But safe choices make a scene predictable. Reversing motives shakes up a scene. It makes its course less expected, yet no less logical since the action still comes from your character's true, deep motives."

Seems to me that you could use this same exercise for the "endings" of stories as well. Or the endings of novels. Or the endings of chapters in novels. What is it your character yearns for? Make a complete list of his reasons for wanting it. Come up with several new and surprising "endings" based on each of the motivations on your list and write a brief summary of each. Do any of these new endings surprise you more than others? If so, find places earlier in the story to show that your character is capable of such an unexpected action. Can you convince the reader through your character's past experiences that his surprising action later in the story is not only plausible, but right?

A few of my favorite short stories available to read online:

"Neversink" by David Benioff

"Twin Study" by Stacey Richter

"The Wig" by Brady Udall (transcript from "This American Life", NPR) -- my favorite flash fiction piece (only 372 words!)

Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction Step By Step

Donald Maass: Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth

Brandi Reissenweber: writing instructor for Gotham Writers Workshop and author of the "Ask the Writer" online column for "The Writer" magazine

Why Writing Exercises?

2010-03-15T14:48:00.001-07:00

Some writers dislike them. Others despise them. Some find them boring and a waste of already too-limited writing time. Others see them as too restrictive, taking the writer far away from where he really wants to be: home with his own settings and characters; his own conflicts; his own carefully woven plots and subplots.

Believe me, I hear you. I don't want to leave home either. That's why I choose exercises that work for almost any project-in-progress, be it short story, novel, or memoir. You'll be surprised how easily almost every exercise here can be tweaked to work for your particular story and characters.

What I really love about writing exercises is how they take me out of that dreaded state of mind in which everything is expected to come out perfect on the first pass, or as John Gardner would describe it: that dark psychological mindset with the ghost of the young James Joyce standing horribly at your back. I hate that mindset. I love how exercises loosen me up and get me to examine problematic passages from a whole new perspective. I love to steal delicious passages from the novels and authors I admire and try to do something similar in my own scenes. Josip Novakovich, author of the wonderful Writing Fiction Step by Step says:

I have yet to apply an exercise to a passage in my own fiction that failed to improve it exponentially. After focusing for some time on one particular element of craft, the passage is always richer for the time spent; more textured, more nuanced; better in every way. I encourage you to research this phenomenon for yourself. As John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction:

Now who wouldn't want to strive for that?

Josip Novakovich, Writing Fiction Step by Step

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

Movement through Space

2010-03-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

Here's an exercise almost everyone can use: How to give the reader a sense of movement through space and time as your characters travel from one destination to another. In The Folding Star, by Alan Hollinghurst, two friends leave the city in a convertible to drive to a beach house several hours away. As they leave the city and head for the coast you can almost feel the wind in your hair and the city disappearing in the rearview mirror behind you:

I panicked again under the huge sweep of sky that opened up. The city was suddenly behind us; I looked back, and above the warehouses and estates the cluster of extravagant towers rose into view again; they became the city; then they dwindled and were blurred in haze. We were leaving fast, the engine was shouting, the wind tore over the windshield and whipped the hair about on top of my head. I wanted to be back where we'd come from…

There was a certain brown obscurity in the sky ahead, like rain falling out to sea. Matt was wearing bottle-green dark glasses and frowned as he drove. A few miles later it lifted and dissolved; and the further we went the more radiant and old-masterly the air became, so that the whole mad, worrying escapade began already to feel out of time, steeped in a dream-ether of its own.

In Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, the main character describes a carpool ride to school in seventh grade:

I'm looking out the window [of the station wagon] while Mrs. Drexel's cigarette uncoils a rope of smoke. We head into the heart of Grosse Pointe. We pass long, gated driveways, the kind that always fill my family with wonder and awe… We rumble past privet hedges and under topiary arches to arrive at secluded lakefront homes where girls wait with satchels, standing very straight. They wear the same uniform I do, but somehow it looks different on them, neater, more stylish. Occasionally there is also a well-coifed mother in the picture, clipping a rose from the garden.

And again, a couple of months later:

The car is full of girls. Mrs. Drexel is lighting another cigarette. She's pulling up to the curb and getting ready to lay a curse on us. Shaking her head at the view -- of the hilly, green campus, the lake in the distance -- she says, "Youse girls better enjoy it now. Best time of life is when you're young." (At twelve, I hated her for saying that. I couldn't imagine a worse thing to tell a kid…"

I love how those authors show us more than just movement through a particular setting. They give us their characters' emotional reactions to the experience as well.

Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex

Telling Detail & First Impressions

2010-02-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

I was re-reading one of my favorite Hollinghurst novels recently, hoping to somehow absorb through osmosis his exquisite way with language -- ah, those gorgeous sentences! His character descriptions in particular are lovely little works of art: lush, accurate, and insightful; and as Anton Chekhov would most likely say, "rendered with immediate and telling detail." Even his walk-on characters come alive on the page with just a quick, simple stroke of his brush.

In average stories minor characters and walk-ons are often easy-to-forget cardboard placeholders given little attention by their authors. In better stories authors turn simple character snapshots into living, breathing personalities, usually by adding one or two carefully chosen "telling" details (think of them as significant, revealing, or defining details—not to be confused with "show, don't tell") as in these examples from several award-winning authors and literary giants:

= She was fifteen and she had a quick nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors, or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. [Joyce Carol Oates]

= His eyes were pinpoints of trouble, his mouth a flat line of pain, his shoulders so strong and high that he appeared to have no neck at all. He entered the room as if he'd just been asked to ascend a throne and, after an initial reluctance, now meant to show just how decisive he could be. [Edmund White]

= [He was] very good company but somehow remote, the sort of person it is hopeless to fall for, as I quite did at first, with his hooting laugh and witty sentimental conversation. [Alan Hollinghurst]

= There was something very strange in him; there was a light in his eyes as though of intense feeling--perhaps there were even thought and intelligence, but at the same time there was a gleam of something like madness. [Fyodor Dostoevsky]

= There was a hint of spring in her sloe-green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk. [Toni Morrison]

= [He] was geeky, nerdy. His body was a stalk supporting the tulip of his brain. As he walked to the car, his head was often tilted back, alert to phenomena in the trees. [Jeffrey Eugenides]

= He was easily over six feet tall but appeared to regret it. [Edmund White]

= Doa Vicenta, a woman with a dull brain, who when she was not sleeping, was complaining of everything, especially the noise… [Miguel De Unamuno]

= He had on the grey suiting of a business man, but with unusual tucks and vents, which seemed to hint at his role in the arts. [Alan Hollinghurst]

= She had a radish-white, almost raw-looking body and a tiny head made big by puffed-up hair. He never saw her out of her old torn kimono. [Edmund White]

= A priest. A young priest, black-suited, with a black felt hat, one hand stiffly in his jacket pocket, thumb hooked outside, the other holding a black breviary, finger keeping the page. So tall, his head had a stoop. Wire-framed spectacles saddled his nose. Oddly, ever so, foreign-looking. [Jamie O'Neill]

= She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across the ideas they didn't want to put into words. [Joyce Carol Oates]

= He was quite spotty, although probably about my age, and wore hopeless clothes--shapeless jeans, fluorescent trainers and complicated musician's knitwear; but he was beautiful, with his dirty blond hair and chestnut eyes. [Alan Hollinghurst]

= Connie saw with shock that he wasn't a kid either--he had a fair, hairless face, cheeks reddened slightly as if the veins grew too close to the surface of his skin, the face of a forty-year-old baby. [Joyce Carol Oates]

= His ungloved hands, as big and white as boiled hams, hung down at his side. He was wearing a velvet-collared Chesterfield which he'd thrown open as if to breathe more easily, or to cool off, though it was a cold night. [Edmund White]

= He had fair brown hair, with a lock that fell onto his forehead. His sideburns gave him a fierce, embarrassed look… [Joyce Carol Oates]

In Writing Fiction, The Practical Guide (from Gotham Writers' Workshop) Chris Lombardi defines what Chekhov means when he refers to telling detail:

A telling detail does what it says: it tells the essence of what it's describing. Telling details are the scotch tape holding up Susie's hemline in the back, the tiny piece of ice that never seemed to melt in the bottom of Mom's martini, the street sign on the corner that still says, to this day, SCHOOL CROSSING, though the school is long gone. A telling detail can speak volumes in a very short amount of time. They help you achieve a golden mean--enough description to paint the picture, but not so much as to weigh it down.

Brandi Reissenweber, author of the "Ask the Writer" column in "The Writer" magazine, cautions not to use too many details when one or two precisely-chosen details will accomplish the task:

Many writers will pile on details in an effort to capture a character, setting, or moment. This is certainly useful in early drafts, as writers don't often hit on the best details right away. Over describing can be a great way to find telling detail. It's important to go back and pare out what isn't necessary so that the good stuff doesn’t get lost in the clutter.

Miguel De Unamuno, The Marquis of Lumbria

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty and The Folding Star

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Jamie O'Neill, At Swim, Two Boys

Edmund White, Hotel de Dream

Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

Chris Lombardi, "Description: To Picture in Words" from Gotham Writers' Workshop, Writing Fiction, The Practical Guide

Brandi Reissenweber, "Ask the Writer"