Jon’s blog

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

In honour of Labour Day welcome to Writing 401, Practice. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. Technique and theory are all well and good, but without practice they are nothing. Nothing. If a man knows everything there is to know about grammar and style, if he knows how to weave a perfect story or depict a character so real it breaks your heart, if he understands how to construct a world that will capture your imagination—if he can do all this but never actually puts pen to paper, he is not a writer. On the other hand take a hormone-ridden teenager who has no conception of style, who doesn’t think of writing as an art because it doesn’t involve paint, and who hacks his way through Sonic the Hedgehog or Snape / Spock fan-fiction. This kid is a writer. Why? Because he writes. It doesn’t matter if his stories are graceless and perverse. It doesn’t matter if his grammar is abominable, if his characters are dimensionless or borrowed. He writes. He qualifies. The following are a set of practices that may help you qualify too.

1. Balance, II

   Write a story twice. In the first version, use short simple sentences, no more words than necessary, no semicolons and generally minimal punctuation, and present no overt themes. In the second version, write as extravagantly as you please—but do it well: it’s not the same as writing poorly—and narrate whatever digressions and themes arise. Set both versions aside for a while and later rewrite a single version from memory, with whatever balance of style comes naturally.

2. Show vs. Tell, IV

   As in the previous section, write a story twice. In the first version, expose your characters’ thoughts, motives, revelations, everything. Write it from an intimate perspective, a real internal monologue, probably but not necessarily first person. In the second version, expose nothing. Give only the external view of events. Leave every conclusion unspoken so that the reader must come to her own. Set both versions aside for a while and later rewrite a single version from memory, with whatever balance of showing and telling comes naturally.

3. Read

   The first practice in writing is reading. It’s also the only practice in this course which does not involve your own writing. Read, read, read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read works in the genres you like to write. Read works in genres you’d never write. Read famous authors, read obscure authors. Read authors you adore, read authors you despise. Read gold, read shit.

   The artistic process begins with imitation. First we copy the masters, either directly or in flattering mimicry. Then comes assimilation. This is when we incorporate several influences and begin to introduce themes and turns of our own devising. Finally we reach the stage of innovation. Our influences are so numerous and finely enmeshed with our own invention and tastes that our product is unique, never before seen, not yet imagined.

   Although it may seem like reading is more important in the initial stages of this process, it is in fact equally important at all stages. It is always important. If you are a writer then reading is your fuel.

   By reading we learn what’s been done before us, what territories have been explored, what twists utilized, what standbys and clichés established. We also learn what territories remain, and which are just begging for a new expedition. More than once I learned by reading that an idea I had was not only already done but already tired and passé. Let’s say for example I were to write a vampire story. (God forbid.) Lo and behold it’s been done before. That doesn’t mean I can’t still write it, but it does mean I don’t have to waste narrative time explaining certain common knowledge points of the mythos. Vampires drink blood, burn in sunlight, etc. It also means I may choose to spin or even reinvent other points. Maybe my vampires suffer from liver disease. Maybe my vampires thirst for feces instead of blood. Maybe my vampires sparkle.

   Would you trust a skinny cook? A stupid teacher? An unscarred stuntman? Read, read, read.

4. Critique

   In addition to reading what’s published, read what’s unpublished. Join a workshop in your city or an online writer’s group. If you can’t find one you like, start one. Find your peers and read their work. Let them read yours. Learn both to enjoy the writing of your peers and to weigh its merits as art. Tell them what you think. This part works, that part doesn’t, this drew me in, that bored me, this character I loved, that one I didn’t believe for a second, this plotline is overused, that device is brilliant.

   As you learn to critique in greater depth and detail, as you become more articulate in expressing the principles of good writing as you understand them, the better you’ll approach your own work with a critical eye. You’ll plot it out better in the beginning and so face fewer blocks when you draft. You’ll have a clearer sense of your characters and their purpose, both as imaginary people and as devices component in your story. You’ll recognize and control how the events and descriptions in your story convey moods and themes to the reader.

   Odds are you’ll find a lot of peer review is useless praise, and most of what’s left is undue insult. Odds are you’ll give this kind of critique to others until you find your balance. That’s just how odds work. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

   As a critic, keep reading and reviewing and improving at both. Learn to adapt your suggestions for writers of varied temperament and skill level.

   As a recipient of critique, thick up your skin. The tone of a critique or of criticism is irrelevant. Your work has no emotion inherent in it that leaps off the page and possesses the reader. It only evokes. If a critic shows emotion, it’s because your work has evoked it, or because the critic came with it to the table. When you accept a critique, first trim away everything except the points made. Then trim the points you don’t find true or helpful. (Do this only after careful reflection, and don’t let your own bias interfere with valid observations.) Use what’s left to improve your work as you see fit. Resist the urge to critique the critic. No ifs ands or buts. Just say thanks.

5. Mix It Up

   In general we aim to write good stories well. Whenever someone tells me they feel blocked I suggest writing a bad story, or trying to write a story poorly. Naturally the artistic instinct takes over and gets the person writing well despite their so-called block. Works every time.

   I’d also suggest this in general, though. Write a bad story poorly. Write a bad story well. Write a good story poorly. It’s important to know the difference. In art the best way of knowing is doing, and contrast is an excellent teacher, if a blunt one.

6. Back To Basics

   Another useful exercise is to write a story using only essential words: nouns, verbs, pronouns and conjunctions. In other words, write a story no adjectives or adverbs. Or, take a story you’ve already written and strip it of adjectives and adverbs.

   Read it through. Plain, isn’t it? But functional. It gets the job done. Nothing gets in its way. It’s a Spartan.

   Now, with this new perspective on the story and what it’s really about, build it back up. Insert adjectives that genuinely enhance the meaning, that actually tell the reader something she doesn’t know. Insert whatever adverbs, if any, the sentences genuinely need in order to function.

7. Give In To The Dark Side

   Write a story in the dark. It can be the first draft of a story you haven’t outlined at all, or the second draft of a story you’re not sure how to revise, or the Nth draft of a story you’ve rewritten over and over again. By in the dark I don’t mean in pitch black, but in just enough light to write by but not enough light to read by.

   This exercise is, to use the vernacular, throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. You won’t have a chance to edit as you go. You’ll forget all but the gist of the story while you’re still writing it. You’ll have no outline, no character sketches, no dictionary or thesaurus. It’s just you and the story.

   For extra credit in Balance, I and Show vs. Tell, IV, write the final unified versions of the stories in the dark.

8. Read Aloud

   In Dialogue, II we discussed the writer as an actor responsible for portraying the whole cast. To help in dialogue and the sound of narrative in general try reading your stories aloud. Learn to hear what you’re writing. It’s one thing to keep in mind a caveat against run-on sentences, and another entirely to feel yourself run out of breath as you’re writing one.

9. Queryize, Synopsisify

   A query is a brief letter from an author to an agent meant to hook the latter’s interest in a novel. A synopsis as you may know is a point-by-point summary of a novel. Both are gruelling to write. So why should novelists have all the fun? Query and synopsis writing are skills every writer should have. They stand to improve your drafting and especially your outlining in ways you can’t imagine.

   A typical query letter provides an agent with the prospective novel’s title, word count, and genre. It also includes a teaser summary of two or three paragraphs. The first paragraph should answer these questions, each in not many more than twenty words:

   • What is the main character’s name?
   • What problem or choice does the main character face?
   • Who wants to foil the main character’s plan and why?

   The subsequent paragraphs indicate how this setup unfolds. They don’t give away the ending, although they may hint at it. Instead they convey the tension of the story. A query is bait.

   A synopsis on the other hand is factual, journalistic. It tells an agent or editor exactly what takes place in the story, who is who, who does what, why they do it, where, how and when.

   Where a query is difficult to write because it’s so short, a synopsis is difficult to write because it’s so resistant to style. It’s hard to convey any tension when the story is laid out on the table like a dissected lab animal. It is exactly because they’re hard to write that you should learn to write them.

   A synopsis is just an outline written after-the-fact. If you can write an outline, you can write a synopsis. Conversely, if you can write a synopsis, your powers of outlining will multiply. If you get blocked in a draft all you have to do is step back and work on the synopsis. Its clear, factual points will remind you where the story’s going, what needs to happen, what theme you’ve forgotten to explore and which as a result has left the last scene without a bridge to the next.

   A query is just a taut, streamlined version of the blurb you give your friends when they ask what your book is about. It’s a sales pitch. It condenses the most important aspects of the story and delivers them in rich, punchy sentences. Knowing how to boil your story down to its bare essentials will help you keep track of those essentials yourself. It’s easy when drafting to get carried away with subplots, intricately described locales, conceptual explorations. If you get lost like this all you have to do is step back and work on the query. It’ll bring you face to face with the story’s beating heart.

   For extra credit, write taglines for your stories too. A tagline is a single sentence—or a few sentences cleverly punctuated but still about as long as one—whose job is to convey the barest elements of the story and to hook the interest of a potential reader. For example, a tagline for Romeo & Juliet might go something like: Two households, one love. Shit just got real.

10. Write, Motherfucker

    Don’t find the time, make the time. Don’t think about it, do it. Just sit down and start. There’s a little voice in your head right now that’s saying you could stop reading this and go write instead. Listen to it.

    Now that you’re back from writing—or you already wrote for the day, or you’re a coward and didn’t write like you should have, or you’re a casual reader and not a writer at all—consider the basic math of the writing equation. If you write for a half hour each weekday, that’s ten hours a month, a hundred and twenty hours per year. Let’s say you write an average of five hundred words in those half hour sessions. That’s ten thousand words per month. That’s a hundred and twenty thousand words per year.

    To give you some perspective, most authorities draw the minimum novel length at fifty thousand words. The average novel length is probably between seventy and one hundred thousand words. Over the hundred thousand word mark you’ll find fat fantasy books and Ayn Rand. Heart of Darkness clocks in under forty thousand words. The Trial is about eighty thousand. Moby Dick runs two hundred and eleven thousand. War & Peace, while not the longest novel ever published, weighs in at nearly six hundred thousand words.

    That means writing even so little as a half hour a day, five hundred words, not including weekends, you’re drafting and revising a novel per year.

    Stephen King says the first million words are practice. For a guy with such formulaic stories and lukewarm prose he sure knows a hell of a lot about the theory and the profession of writing. I trust his estimate. Put in eight or nine years at this 120,000 words per year rate and you’re bound to be writing decently, if not well, if not incredibly.

    Don’t find the time, make the time. Most people spend a half hour a day on the can. A half hour laying awake before they fall asleep. A half hour channel surfing even though nothing good is on. A half hour shuffling around the house picking things up and putting them back down. If you’ve got a half hour to waste on this shit, you’ve got a half hour to write. If you’ve got a half hour you can probably bulk up to an hour in a couple months once writing is engrained in your routine. If you can write a thousand words per day you’re laughing. That’s time in a year for a novel, a dayjob, a family, even a vacation, without even breaking a sweat.

    Write, motherfucker.

~J

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

Welcome to Writing 301, Theory. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. This is the writing you do when you’re not actually writing. That is to say, when you’re not drafting. It pertains in part to style, in part to your attitude and general approach to the craft. These are strengths you will accumulate over time. By practice and reflection, mostly, but also by study. When you draft you’re putting theory to the test. Then you alter the theory according to how pleased you are with the results, and try again. In this way theory empowers technique, and technique proves and refines theory.

1. Balance, I

   The idea of balance is so broad and already-implicit in these courses that I hesitate to address it openly. Nevertheless it bears addressing. So far we’ve examined a number of elements of style. In order to write well we must not only master each element, but master their use in concert.

   At one end of the prose spectrum we have the Hemingway type, exclusive and ascetic. At the other end we have the Faulkner type, involved and prolix. Both were excellent writers. Both styles valid. I happen to believe not all writers fall between. Those who have found their voice do. Those who have not found their voice fall somewhere outside that spectrum. Or below it. Or they just plain fall.

   I nearly put quotation marks around found their voice. It is a tremendous cliché in discussing writing, and tremendously vague. But as all clichés it has a legitimate root. It’s an airy-fairy way of saying establish your style. Decide your balance. Each of us has a natural instinct to communicate. Writing is not a natural act, even if storytelling is. When we write and reflect, write and reflect, we’re just as much developing a skill as uncovering that innate storytelling instinct and learning to apply it in artifice.

   How heavily do your stories rely on dialogue? Are your best transitions made with description, introspection, flat out scene breaks? How much exposition is too much? How many dots do you prefer to connect for the reader? How remotely or intimately do you like to reveal the setting, be it fictitious or well-known?

   The more you refine your style or find your voice, the more comfortable you’ll be writing. Readers are like children. They can sense that shit. When you labour in the dark the reader has no light to guide her. She hits the wall. The wall is you. On the other hand, when you hit your stride, she’s carried along light as a feather in your slipstream. When she gets to The End she’ll have a smoke and hit the book store looking for the sequel.

2. Punctuation, II

   To carry over from the last section, experiment with punctuation until you find a style for yourself. I gripe about misused semicolons but at least they tend to be misused consistently. I’ve quit reading a lot of books because the author seemed to have no sense of definite function when placing his marks. In one sentence he’d use a semicolon to join independent clauses, in the next sentence a dash. One side note he’d escape with parentheses, the next with commas. Not to mention those sentences rendered labyrinthine by a gamut of marks all thrown in together at cross-purposes.

   If you’ve read this far then you know I favour simple, artful prose, in which punctuation is the tiger’s whiskers rather than its stripes. Whether or not I pull it off well is open to debate. In any case your taste may differ. You might adore constructing sentences like puzzles to be solved before the next may be read. You might despise punctuation and compose so as to use as few marks as possible. You might be anywhere in between. So experiment, refine. Be conscious of your use. Be consistent.

3. Show vs. Tell, III

   This is not so much a further exploration of the subject. I’m satisfied with the coverage in 201. Rather, I’d like to share an analogy which may shed additional light on the subject.

   Every work of art that I consider great has the same effect as a Rorschach test. The artwork imitates shapes and colours found in nature. On a canvas or in a book these natural elements are loosed from their moorings in the world, loosed from context. Isolation opens them to interpretation. A rabbit we see in a field on our way home from work is just a rabbit in a field. A rabbit on a canvas may represent something. A rabbit in a David Lynch movie, I get chills just thinking of everything it might convey. How he might use the thing out of its natural context to invoke some reaction in the deep angles our hearts. In the Rorschach test we see these vague, familiar shapes and we tend to assign meaning to them. Did I say we tend to? Hell, we practically line up to assign meaning. Is it because we’re so uncomfortable with the lack of context that we invent order to impose on the chaos? Are we just curious by nature, problem-solvers, seeking patterns or signs? Is it that there is no shape we have not seen, that everything looks like something else no matter how disfigured?

   I haven’t got a damned clue. Maybe that’s why I’m still so enamoured of the mystery. Maybe the pattern I’m looking for is the pattern of looking itself. Even that I can’t be sure of, and so much the better. If I knew for certain, then there’d be no surprise left in experiencing new art. No revelation.

   The beauty and cosmic terror of the Rorschach test, as Alan Moore so masterfully explored it, is that no matter what we see, no matter why we see it, we can never, ever be 100% certain it’s there.

4. Economy, III

   As with Show vs. Tell this isn’t so much an expansion on the previous Economy sections as another way of looking at the subject.

   The line that’s had the most influence on my approach to economy in writing comes from Jeff Smith’s comic series Bone. The hero is chased to a cave by some rat creatures. A dragon peeks out and says ‘Boo,’ which scares them off. The hero rebukes the dragon for not being able to do something cool or mystical. The dragon belches fire all over the hero and says, ‘Never play an ace when a two will do.’

   The poker analogy extends itself perfectly. Most of the time we’re writing number cards, occasionally face cards, every now and then an ace. If the deck were all aces the game would be no fun. Ace-high hands are exciting and pay off big, but the hands between are your real bread and butter, and you don’t need aces to win big. Four twos is better than 99% (plus some fraction I haven’t got patience for) of other possible hands.

   One sign of amateur writing is zeal. In my experience, it’s especially common in the work of creative writing students. There’s an urge to put a new spin on everything. Why play a two when you can play an ace? Aces, aces, everywhere. It’s tired. It’s boring. Pace yourself. Keep in mind adages like ‘gilding the lily’ and ‘reinventing the wheel.’

   In my teens I fell into a lead guitar position in a band long before I had enough experience even to call myself a rhythm player. Rather than pace myself, I tried to compensate for inexperience with activity. I noodled my way through every song, deathly afraid I wasn’t playing interestingly enough. Ignorant of the other components and players of the song. Forgetting everything I knew about enjoying music as a listener myself. In hindsight of course I recognize the mistake. Nevertheless it taught me a valuable lesson. The structure of a story is similar to the structure of a song. There are verses of newly covered ground. There are choruses where themes are revisited. There are transitions and breaks where those themes evolve. There are solos. My, how there are solos.

   Eric Clapton kicks off a lot of songs with a little lick, a little riff, then he backs right off into rhythm for the verses. One of the most renown and soulful rock n’ roll guitarists alive and still most of what he plays is plain old rhythm. Plain old deuces and threes. He tosses down a face card every now and then as an accent. When it’s time for aces, he’s already played the other cards and built his way up and he lays them aces on the table like they were hammers and there’s nothing you can do to stop him.

   So if you’re tempted to spice up your story with clever phrasings and your own slant on grammatical clichés, okay, that’s fine and dandy, just be discerning about it. Don’t exhaust half your vocabulary in description of some unimportant character. Don’t try to coin new figures of speech just to tell us the waiter poured some coffee. Save the innovation for the big scenes, the main characters, the crucial actions, the thematic vistas. The reader will absorb the import of those moments that much more for the simultaneous amping up of both events and syntax. As with the formula discussed in Narrative Math, this is a congruence of content and style that will lend grace and power to your writing.

   Never play an ace when a two will do.

5. Listen

   The most important piece of advice I have in the arena of theory is to listen. Listen. Trust your gut. It doesn’t matter what you believe—whether art comes from inspiration internal or external, from God, from spirits, from nature, or from no inspiration at all but all creativity is simply laying bricks and a finished work is no more than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t alter the measurable facts of writing. Before you sit down to write, the story is not apparent in the world. After you stand up from writing, the story is physically evident on paper or on a computer screen. Before you act there is nothing. Once you’ve acted there is something. That something comes from somewhere. I don’t give that somewhere a name. You may.

   The one belief I have is that it’s best to leave belief at the door when you enter the writing space. Leave yourself, leave your self. As a species we have a tendency to think we know what’s best. It is a chronic, epidemic, unaccountably destructive tendency. Our biology gifts us with fine instincts. Feel a spider on your arm and you’ll flinch to get it away. Sit in a dark room and you’ll bristle when someone approaches. Other instincts are more overt, like hunger and tiredness. Bill Cosby said intellectuals are people who go to school to study what other people do naturally. It is the intellect that gets in the way of instinct. When my body tells me I’m thirsty I often think, ‘I’m busy, I’ll get a glass of water in a minute.’ An hour later I wonder why the hell I’m so thirsty.

   I’m not listening.

   In writing, whenever I reach a point where I’m trying to reason my way out of a corner, I have to pause and sit back. Maybe I’ve hit a knot in the plotline, reached a scene in a chapter which I just can’t resolve. In any case once I sit back and take stock of the dilemma it’s obvious I can’t reason my way out because I’m the one who reasoned my way in there in the first place.

   Somewhere, out there or in here, the story already has a shape (in fact or potential), and the story knows its shape, and the story is telling itself but its voice is quiet. Much quieter than my loudmouth brain.

   So I quit the Chaplin routine, trying to pick up my hat and kicking it out of reach with each step. I shelve that unresolved scene. I put aside that knotty plot outline. I put down the pen. I listen. What comes next varies but only in the incidentals. First I retrace the story or scene thus far, point by point. At certain points alternate events suggest themselves. I think about those alternates. I imagine what might happen. My inner monologue handles these as questions. What if this happened instead? What if he said that instead? What if this character were a woman instead of a man? I hesitate to say I imagine the replies, because that’s too active a phrasing. I imagine the questions and one or more answers suggest themselves. Alternates play out in my imagination. I let one run its course, first come first serve. I might make notes during or wait until afterward. Then I let the next in line play out.

   When alternates stop suggesting themselves, I compare notes. I’m still listening. I think about each alternate in the context of the whole story. It is often immediately clear which is the way the story should unfold. This, I assume, is because I’ve been lucky enough to detach from my brain and let my instinct, my gut, do the thinking. But the gut doesn’t think, it knows. The gut is your connection to the story. The story knows itself. It tells itself. Listen and you’ll hear it. Well, when I listen I hear it, anyway. I hope it works for you too but I don’t make promises. Listen anyway. Trust your gut.

   In those cases where the proper course is not immediately clear, I might try cobbling my notes together into hybrid alternates. Or I might sleep on it. Or I’ll run it by a peer. Eventually, every knot I’ve run up against has come undone.

6. Audience

   Speaking of trust, it’s important to trust your reader. Our expectations of the reader are often inaccurate, unfair, condescending, wildly varied. This is easy and, I think, natural, because the potential audience for our work is anyone.

   If it helps, imagine a target audience. As in every industry, publishing has target markets. I don’t recommend going quite so commercial a route as writing to a demographic, only to a general typical reader. Of x sensibilities, y degree of education, z number of pets, whatever your criteria. Too demographic and I think you’ll limit the work too much before you’ve written it. No consideration whatsoever to audience and it’s easy to lose your anchor and spiral into impenetrable expectations.

   Now, that said, I aspire to this general reader rule and its contrary partner, summed up in a line delivered by Joni Mitchell in an interview: ‘I didn’t really think about audience.’

   I see a clear line between the art and the business of writing. The art is what we do out of love, because we’re bursting with it. Trapped on a desert island with nothing but a lonely death to wait for we’d still do it because that’s what we’re made to do. But, of course, we’re also cells of a civilization. We have bills to pay. We make the art for ourselves but we also want to share it. Our art has value. It is natural to ply our trade and be paid for our products or services.

   As much as I can, I try not to let these halves of the process mingle. This is where the general reader + no audience team comes into play. I know what kind of books I like. I know what kind of reader I am. Naturally, I write to myself. After feedback from peer reviewers years ago I realized that was a very narrow approach. Especially because I already know how all the dots connect. I had no idea how the picture looked from the outside, I didn’t consider an outside view at all.

   Now at the outset I consider an audience. I model the imaginary reader not on myself but on some fictitious alternate me, someone with similar taste but who has no back stage pass to the story. I determine how much I want to reveal to him and how hard I want him to work for the rest. I decide which dots to connect. Then, when I start writing, I forget about him. I’ve set up the obstacle course, now it’s time to run it. It’s inevitable that I stumble, that I knock down some hurdles. So what? That’s no reason to stop. I’ve put that audience out of mind and it stays that way until the draft is finished and it’s time to revise. Then, with the input of peer reviewers, I evaluate the dots and connections and refine them. I don’t cede much ground. I’m not a fan of compromise in style. I do, however, strive to make my abstractions as clear as possible. I might want the reader to work, but I want it to be enjoyable work. I don’t want her to suffer. I want her to be satisfied when she’s finished, having sunk her teeth into the story and savoured it, digested it, gained some nourishment from it.

7. ‘Write What You Know’

   Sound advice, right? No one writes about aliens because no one’s seen them. No one writes about murder who hasn’t committed one. No one writes epic battle scenes who hasn’t led armies against an ancient evil risen again to threaten our feudal way of life and that of our estranged buddies the elves and the dwarves. No one writes a girl who is a boy.

   The real value of this adage requires a grain of salt. I may sound like a teenaged poet, but what we all know is feelings. The range of human emotion is, with precious and hideous few exceptions, exactly the same for each of us. Every person on the planet is capable of love, fear, goodwill, greed, et cetera et cetera. Our job as writers is to know this range. To become intimate with it. To learn to depict and inflict these feelings with no more than words.

   I don’t need to kill a guy to have felt the sort of anger or frustration that could lead a person to kill. I don’t need to have driven tanks and Aston Martins in her majesty’s secret service to have felt a thrill. What I do need is to convey these feelings accurately and plausibly. I need to compose my narratives in such a way that the reader feels these things as authentically as I do, and in the same manner: by summoning them from his own experience. Whereas inauthentic writing seeks to lodge foreign objects in the reader’s eye. The inauthentic writer cries, ‘See this, feel this!’

   Of course I can write about aliens, because I’ve felt alienation, fear, isolation, a whole horde of feelings I can access in the reader. Ridley Scott tore that shit up because he had the tools and talent to invoke our memories of nyctophobia, claustrophobia, xenophobia. To insinuate them even if we’ve never experienced those fears explicitly. He and Ms. Weaver made those feelings so urgent and palpable that we couldn’t help but feel them too. Our disbelief froze in its tracks. Not because killer aliens from outer space are plausible, but because the characters with whom we connected were plausible.

   Naturally this doesn’t mean you have a free ticket to make shit up. Do the minimal research required to render your settings and events and so on plausible. Even the most realistic characters won’t save your story if it’s set in a Camelot which features flushing toilets and whose peasants are happy-go-lucky intellectuals. Write what you know, yes. If you don’t know something don’t avoid writing it but engage in learning it.

8. ‘Kill Your Darlings’

   A man who taught me a great deal of practical skill and practical knowledge once told me, ‘You know what the old man says: ya gotta be ruthless.’ I wish you could hear him. The emphasis on ruthless. The nasal impersonation of his father, a turnip farmer, passing on the wisdom of his father before him.

   This applies mostly to revision, when we bridge the gap between art-for-ourselves and art-for-sale. When we stroll back through the rows we spent so long planting and tending, and tear up all but the best, most suitable, most plausible fruits of that labour. It can be painful. But it is one of those pains that can be cathartic, if we allow it to be. It purifies the work. Not every idea cut is necessarily a waste. Not every character killed, subplot axed, description junked, chapter halved. Some just aren’t ripe. Others are pumpkins whose seeds are meant for a different field. Be ruthless in dividing the useful from the useless, but salvage what you can from the useless pile and set it aside. It may prove useful one day.

   Ruthless. From reuthe, ‘pity, compassion.’ To be ruthless is not to be cruel. It is only to be impersonal, to set aside pity. If I had a child and that child were, say, bitten by a zombie, it would be my duty as a father to set aside pity and shoot the child to save it from misery. Not for my good but for his. In writing and revision, although I don’t like equating artworks to children, it is our duty to do what’s best for the story. We must set aside our own desires—or better yet, conform our desires to those of the story—and put those unripe phrases, scenes, characters, and chapters out of their misery. We gotta be ruthless.

9. A Few Reminders

   Remember the senses and how they can be used to convey ideas and themes, how they can be used to touch the reader in. Even the most idea-heavy work has a stronger impact when the reader is drawn into the physical world of the story, rather than left to orbit it in a vacuum. It’s easy in this day of 3D block-busting CGI-out-the-yin-yang movies to forget that there are senses besides the visual, besides the THX-bombarded aural. In a book, sometimes a simple flaky bite of ground pepper can hook a reader’s imagination more swiftly and completely than ten sprawling cityscapes or thirty flaming sunsets.

   Remember also the basics of journalistic writing. Who, what, where, when, how or why. This will help keep you grounded. It will help you from straying too far off track, especially into introspection or conceptual exposition. Unless you’re Sartre, in which case who am I to argue? In which case who am I at all?

~J

I’ll let these speak for themselves. Except to tell you that band with the ape is Five Alarm Funk, who put on a good show and are worth checking out. All instrumental, the sort of brass-heavy funk you’d have watched car chases to in the seventies, saved from porno cheesiness by the grace of ska.

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~J

U of J Creative Writing Course List:

Orientation
101, Basic Technique
201, Advanced Technique
301, Theory
401, Practice

Welcome to Writing 201, Advanced Technique. TENES NVNC TENEBERIS. If 101 is black and white then 201 is shades of grey. The basics are your line, your shape. Advanced Technique is the shading that will, more than anything else, define your style. These are not rules so much as considerations. How to approach, rather than how to execute.

1. Dialogue, Part II.

   What is dialogue if it’s not plausible? It’s nothing. That’s 101 level stuff. Dialogue enters the realm of 201 because it has more dimension and function than rendering characters plausible in the reader’s estimation.

   First, it may be used to create variety in the structure of a story. It is one of a group of narrative techniques sometimes referred to as modes. Other modes being action, description, exposition, introspection, summarization, recollection, transition. Aside from the events of a story, the manner of its telling and the balance of these modes determine how good it is. (By good I mean loosely that it is well constructed, entertaining, capable of holding the reader’s attention and suspending his disbelief.) A story with too much exposition is boring. A story with too much dialogue lacks decisive motion. Et cetera.

   Second, dialogue is just as capable as narrative exposition of informing the reader. The most common note of critique I make when reading novels is, “That could have been dialogue.” This is true of amateur and professional fiction alike. Most often the author has broken up his dialogue with exposition, but occasionally the interloper is introspection or summarization. In each case it’s usually more natural, more consistent, and less likely to cause hiccups, simply to convey the info in the dialogue itself. Naturally the info must be arranged to suit the character’s delivery. It might end up incomplete, ambiguous, not entirely true. But you get the bonus of further establishing your characters by showing the reader how they treat the information.

   If the info is so crucial to the story that you can’t afford to have it misinterpreted, I’d recommend saving any relevant summarization until after the dialogue has run its course. Or, at least, until an appropriate lull occurs in the rhythm of the dialogue.

   Robert De Niro said of acting, “It’s important to indicate. People don’t try to show their feelings, they try to hide them.” This advice transposes perfectly to writing. A writer is an actor responsible for portraying the whole cast. This doesn’t mean you have to be an accomplished actor, of course. It only means you’d do well to understand the principles of a convincing performance.

   Have faith in your dialogue. Let your characters speak for themselves.

2. Show vs. Tell, Part II.

   De Niro’s advice carries over from characterization into the general level of exposition and explanation in a story. I mentioned connecting the dots. That’s a handy metaphor for explaining the advanced concepts of Show vs. Tell. To show is to give the reader dots. To tell is to connect them.

   Too much showing and not enough telling results in a story that is difficult to penetrate. The reader may draw her own conclusions about the significance, the characters and even the events of the story, but she’s not as likely to feel a connection to them. Too much telling and not enough showing results in a story that reads like a report. Its events, characters, themes and significance are all laid plainly on the table — but it’s even more rigid than that, as if only a photo of these things is laid on the table. There’s no room for the reader to interpret or to draw her own conclusions.

   Everyone’s heard the saying, “Easier said than done.” Keep this in mind when you’re writing. In most cases the easy way out is to say plainly, This character is shy, works at a bakery, and can’t carry a tune. If it’s a tertiary character and it’d be a digression to convey these qualities by showing them in a scene, then go ahead, tell it instead. If it’s your main character, though, and these qualities figure significantly in the plot, then take the time to establish them by showing the character in his natural habitat, as it were. It’s a story, not a speed date or a job interview. Let your readers get to know your characters as they would real people.

   In description, showing is the purest parts of the description, the most journalistic — the who, what, where, when of a thing. Anything that is apparent.

   He was tall and red, had dark hair, a crooked grin and a pointy tail.

   Telling is anything that can be interpreted, or that is difficult to measure.

   He was evil, intelligent, ancient.

   Notice that even in the first example we can safely assume the qualities in the second example without them being told. Tall and red, crooked smile plus tail. Most of us will have pictured something like a devil. Since it’s such a common symbol, it’s natural for us to assume he’s evil. But evil is highly subjective. We might not assume he’s intelligent. That’s a quality open to broad interpretation. Even once the character is introduced, he can still be scrutinized for interpretable qualities. You may introduce him as intelligent, but later narrate him perpetrating unintelligent acts. Ancient might tell us he’s old, but it doesn’t tell us whether or not it shows. Especially not in the context we assume given the similarity of the described character to the devil. Everyone knows the devil is supposed to be ancient but he doesn’t necessarily look it. That renders the quality moot as a descriptor.

   Better than tell us a character is like this or that, just show the character doing things which indicate those qualities. If we see this be-tailed red guy causing pain and suffering, insinuating himself into the highest echelons of society and gumming up the works, relating first-hand stories of the dawn of time, then we’ll connect all those dots on our own. In the worst case, when the author’s treasure is the reader’s trash, there aren’t any hiccups because you haven’t labelled anything treasure for the reader to dispute.

   Extend this to other nouns — the places and things you describe. Must you say, It was an eerie scene? Show us instead a disused Victorian manor on a precipice under moonlight with bats flying around and howling wind, odds are we’ll catch on that it’s eerie.

   This may lead to variation in how your readers perceive the meanings and themes of your work, but that’s part of the fun in reading. Interpreting. We view everything through the lens of our experience and beliefs anyway, there’s only so much you can do as an author to ensure each reader unearths uniform themes in your work.

3. Economy, Part II.

   In the commerce of fiction words are not the sole currency. There are scenes, settings, characters, action, themes, and so on. Look on each of these with an economic eye.

   That tertiary character who shows up in a late chapter and just hangs around, is he worth keeping? Does the plot hinge on a decision he makes? Is he the foil for revealing an important characteristic of the protagonist? Does he provide a moment of levity to counterbalance the previous heavy scene? If he doesn’t serve a clear purpose, cut him. Likewise, if there’s a clear purpose that needs to be served, find a natural way to fill the role. (By natural I mean let the solution arise from within the story, rather than inserting an arbitrary solution, deus ex machina.)

   You may have heard of the rule called Chekhov’s Gun. To paraphrase Chekhov: if there’s a gun on the mantle in act one, it had better come into play in act two or three. Chekhov I think meant it in a fairly literal sense, but I and more contemporary literary theory take it in a broader sense. The gun doesn’t have to be fired. Instead it may symbolize a character’s past or internal state, or it may punctuate the story’s theme of violence or colonial oppression or whatever the case may be. But if you include a conspicuous element, it had better be there for a reason.

   As for themes, it’s tempting, especially in first novels, to explore as many themes as possible. To convey a number of messages. To share with the reader every epiphany you’ve experienced thus far in life.

   Resist.

   The more themes you explore, the less potent each theme becomes. Naturally any story will touch on multiple subjects, depict a variety of relationships, convey an array of messages both intended and not. These are ingredients whose proportion and combination determine the overall flavour of the piece. Also, if you want a writing career that lasts beyond the first few stories, you’ll want to save up those experiences and mete them out. Don’t spend it all in one place.

4. Description, Part II.

   A description is capable of being more than the sum of its parts. Even the description of a simple object can communicate a great deal to the reader — tone, theme, texture. For example:

   He crossed the street into his old neighbourhood. The houses sat shoulder to shoulder, windows open to the spring air.

   He crossed the street into his old neighbourhood. The houses crowded along the street, windows like eyes vacant of whatever soul once lay behind them.

   Both examples depict the exact same scene, but in a completely different tone. They set a mood without ever saying what the mood is. Especially in a story which shows more than it tells of its characters, moody description can establish pathos and give the reader a view to those characters’ perceptions.

5. Openings & Closings.

   I’m a big fan of strong, simple openings. Nine out of ten books I pick up in the bookshop I put right back down because the openings fail to interest me in the slightest. It’s not always for the same reason, though. One opens with Elmore Leonard’s hated rundown of the weather. Another opens with a conversation in medias res — a boring conversation at that, or one which dully sets up the plot or dumps a heap of back-story in the reader’s lap. The list of weak openings goes on.

   A strong opening can be descriptive, expository, dialogue, whatever you decide is best for the story. Its strength isn’t dependent on mode. Its strength depends, rather, on simplicity and relevance.

   A simple opening functions in prose as a thesis statement functions in an essay. It is brief enough to establish a place, a person or a concept central to the plot. It does not begin a circuitous path which arrives several paragraphs later at the introduction of a central figure. It also does not wind or digress, hiding the direction and tone of the story rather than establishing it. That’s what I mean by relevance. The opening should give a clear sense of the story’s essence. Whether it’s clear in a literal, symbolical or emotional sense is up to you.

   As for closings, I’m a big fan of punch. I like to finish a story and have to sit back for a minute to steady myself from an impact likewise literal, symbolic or emotional. I like a closing that leaves me not with the need for points to be clarified, but with guesses as to what the story’s ambiguities might mean. A strong closing makes you want to read the story again. A strong opening you’ll understand twice as well once you’ve reached the end.

   This isn’t just creative advice, it’s business advice. Literary agents read hundreds of manuscripts per month, some per week. You’ve got about five pages, tops, to make an impression.

6. Perspective.

   Briefly, when deciding between first or third person, present or past tense — or, you brave soul, second person or future tense — consider the effect each has on the narrative. First person is intimate, directly involved. Third person is remote even when its exposition gets intimate. Present tense creates a sense of urgency and heightens the tension of events as they occur. Past tense is stable, perhaps more convincing because it indicates that events have already taken place and are not invented.

   There are a number of nuances comprehended by the available perspectives. Is the narrator limited or omniscient? Is the narrator reliable? I’ll leave you to learn the differences on your own, since I have no strong opinions on their use.

   The only other note I have on perspective comes from John Gardner. He made a point in his manual on fiction that it’s often unnecessary to explain, in description, that a character is witnessing said description. He saw that this had happened, She heard footsteps, They noticed Christ floating down in some clouds, etc. If you establish that the character is present, anything you then describe the reader will assume the character has observed. If the character misses a detail you are free to tell us he missed it. A lot of he saw / she heard kind of stuff is hiccup territory. It only reminds the reader that he’s not involved, he’s only reading about fictional people engaged in fictional enterprises.

7. Narrative Math.

   Last but certainly not least of these advanced techniques is narrative math. I hew to a formula of narrative time : narrative importance. Anything I describe, expose, summarize, etc., I try to do so in proportion to its importance to the story.

   If a character makes only a brief appearance, I’ll only, if at all, describe her briefly. The progress of the story doesn’t hinge on the colour of her eyes. If the majority of a story takes place in a single city or building, I’ll describe the place in appropriate detail, summarize its history at appropriate length. (If it’s a real place — say, Paris — I’ll probably favour trivia which bears on the story or sets the mood, rather than go on about La Tour Eiffel, Notre Dame, or other shit everybody knows about already.) If an event in the past contributes greatly to later events in the story, I’ll indulge in a recollection, a.k.a. flashback. If the same event isn’t consequential I’ll instead relegate it to an appropriately brief mention in dialogue or whatever mode suits it best. If an action is characteristic of the protagonist, if it demonstrates her thought process or establishes a definite quality of her person, I’ll take appropriate pains to narrate it.

   This ties in to economy. If buddy has a smoke, I’m not going to waste time explaining the minute steps involved. There’s nothing new there for many readers. (Read: for anyone older than four or five.) Why go on about how He drew the cigarette out of the packet, tapped it on the desk, pinched it between his lips, flipped open his Zippo and cupped the flame to the end of the cigarette? In rare cases you can use this kind of detail to set the mood, to create tension by drawing out a scene when we know there’s some serious action on the way. Mostly, though, no one cares. Just smoke the damned thing and get on with the story.

That’s the story of my life: get on with the story.

~J

A short recess from classes this week at U of J, to celebrate another photo-op jackpot. This weekend Vancouver celebrated Car-Free Day. Oddly enough traffic wasn’t as restricted as it was for the Italian Festival, but there were just as many hilarious kids and BC types out to enjoy the party.

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As much fun as it was, and as many photos I got that I’m tremendously happy with, I’d trade my kingdom to be in Toronto right now to shoot the G20 ruckus. I’m not close enough to the action or the news to comment on the issues behind said ruckus. I’ve got friends in the city and they’re safe and sound, some even getting out themselves to photograph the protests. I’d be interested to know the statistics re. the historical efficacy of protests as vehicles for change. That sounds like a course I could take. Is it?

~J