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

I am grateful that I live in a country with no end to its beauty, even if the cost is a similar range in its humidity and frigidity. I am grateful to be employed and to enjoy the work I do and more so to co-labour with people of like attitudes and interests.

I owe props to to my immune system and sheer blind luck, to the globe so willing to be trotted, to my death-defying laptop, to quality entertainment, to natural gifts and their giver.

I’m fond of woodsmoke, uncles and aunts and cousins, ghost stories, CAO bella vanillas, chatty waitresses, roadtrip playlists, capacious memory cards, tabby cats, naps, marshmallows, crossword puzzles and the sun.

~J

~J

Man. I talk a lot about change. How global change can only result from individual change, how individual change occurs when we are authentic and fearless. I talk a lot about this here and in person and I carry these ideas into action as best I can in my personal life, but I have got nothing — nothing — on the Yes Men.

If anyone is sincere it’s these guys. If anyone is fearless. If anyone has balls of goddamn titanium-plated diamond it’s these guys.

The Yes Men are just a couple regular dudes who use cheap suits, painstaking research, and visionary wits to purport themselves as spokesmen for corporations and organizations. (More accurately, they purport to be assistants or deputies of actual spokesmen, who unfortunately had to cancel at the last moment.) They appear at trade shows, conferences, even on television, and deliver statements on behalf of these companies and organizations. The statements they make are not the usual corporate evasion, buck-passing or blame-laying, but admissions of guilt and pledges of reparation. Eventually they’re found out, and the organizations they’ve (mis)represented are left to either step up to the plate and do the right thing, the thing which has been promised and which ignites fires of surprise, gratitude and progress in peoples’ hearts, or to whine about being the victims of a cruel hoax and shouldn’t we all feel sorry for them ‘cause their wallets aren’t bursting quite enough to afford ounce one of compassion or justice.

For example, in 2004 they landed a TV interview by creating a website for a non-existent DOW Chemical ethics department, then waiting for someone to notice. Someone did. The BBC. The BBC was putting together a report on the twentieth anniversary of the catastrophe at Bhopal, India. Union Carbide owned the chemical plant that leaked, but since then DOW bought them out. DOW immediately settled Union Carbide’s debts in the US. Three years passed without any word on a settlement for the survivors and families of the dead in Bhopal. The 18,000 dead. The Yes Men agreed to appear on the BBC News special. I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it. Except that when they were ridiculed for giving false hope to the people of Bhopal what did they do? Hang their heads and say sorry? Shit no. They did what DOW wouldn’t: they went to Bhopal to find out what the people really think, really feel, and really want.

If you’re interested. No. If you’re interested or not, even extremely not, I encourage you to watch this documentary the Yes Men have made and distributed of their work. It is incredible. It is massively inspiring. The video is freely available to watch, to copy and to distribute. Get the torrent right here, or buy the DVD from their website. The video begins with an introduction explaining that the US Chamber of Commerce has demanded all copies of the video itself be collected and (I may be recalling this wrong) destroyed, as part of a lawsuit filed by the Chamber against the Yes Men. I’m delighted to do my part by spreading it.

If this kind of thing suits you to the core, you can also get involved by signing up at the Yes Lab. The Yes Men are looking to breed in a cellular, Improv Everywhere sort of way. Their mission is geared specifically toward financial corruption, so I can’t imagine it as the be-all end-all answer to the world’s problems, but damned if it won’t wake a lot of people up to the idea of change. Especially change as an individual pursuit. Hell, an individual responsibility.

Do yourself a favour and watch. Do the world a favour and get in the spirit.

~J

Now that 301 is posted I can get on with this week’s post. Long weekend. Photos of fireworks and pride parade. Might post em next week. Watched 44 Inch Chest. Delectable. Watched Avatar. Detestable. Sigourney Weaver is the new black (always) but even she couldn’t save it. The Last Smurfurai, anyone? Joke-ahontas. The end.

~J