Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
Tuesdays With Story
June 30, 2011

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London

Tuesday at B&N . . .
Liam – Chapter 3 of Fog-Gotten — Andrea thought that Liam should spend more time talking about the dead person instead of seeming to brush by it in passing. Jack mentioned a few continuity problems. Liam said he’s going to fix them. Jennifer wondered if the main character was inside or outside. It was difficult for her to tell. Jack asked if we needed to read about all the calendar stuff? He thought that Liam should consider how to structure this section. Building a crescendo? Rebecca wanted the main character to be more curious about being outside.

Jennifer – Chapter 1 of Dreams of the Future — Cole said that he enjoyed the story. He liked the flashbacks, but was concerned about how often and quickly they occur. He would like to see more set in the present. Jack agreed and said that Jennifer should establish a relationship with the reader. Set the scene and establish character. Cole would like a longer scene. Jack said that throwing in the red dress doesn’t take the reader where he/she needs to be to go reminiscing. Proust reference. Bruce Catton memoir reference. Liam has concerns about the name “Mystique”. Jen liked it. Andrea was looking for support for introducing such an exotic name. There was a long group discussion about the red dress and what it meant and how much detail should be introduced up front. There was also a discussion about the tone of the piece. It had shadings of a romance novel for some people, but Jennifer insisted that it wasn’t one. Jen asked about the poem at the end and wondered why it was there.

Jack – The Golden Fleece II — Jen wanted to know if the kids would have recovered enough to speak in full sentences. Rebecca wanted to know if they should stumble more as they run. She liked the bits about how they hurt their feet. There was a group discussion about how the “energy” that Sean and Claire had was likely the result of adrenaline coursing through their bodies. Cole liked the passage about his “hands at his eyebrows, saluting the retreating sun”. Jack said to look for the Celtic myth references in the upcoming section of this chapter.

Who’s Up Next . . .
Carol, Amanda, Jack, Cole

Jen is newsletter editor for July; Happy 4th of July to all.

On the Writing Craft . . .
Articles below:
Fantasy author Emmett Spain brings us: What makes a Compelling Villain?
Advice from a master of the writing craft

Failure of Narrative Distance–When The Writer Is Too Close To The Main Character

Fantasy author Emmett Spain brings us: What makes a Compelling Villain?
From: http://www.brianrathbone.com/brian-rathbones-blog/
Having watched a copious amount of films and read a few hundred books in my 30 years on this planet, I have read/seen some absolute shockers, been compelled and terrified by the best of the worst, and endured a great deal that were more ho-hum than horrifying. And when you see that many, you start to notice some fairly obvious commonalities.
Let’s start with the scene where the villain gets introduced.
You’ve seen it before. The obligatory bad guy torturing or killing someone. The expository philosophical rant that comes before torturing or killing someone. Action movies thrive on this kind of scene in particular, and one suspects they’ll never entirely grow out of it.
For example, I saw “The Losers” recently, and watched another of these obligatory scenes. They tried to mix it up with the bad guy having an “I’m so laidback and ironic in the face of evil deeds that I’m totally cool” attitude, but sadly the performance fell flatter than a pancake dropped from a 30 storey building.
Now look at two of the villain introductions that really, really work.
Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter is slowly revealed, standing still and statuesque behind fibreglass.
The Dark Knight. The Joker wreaks murderous havoc in a bank, then slips off his mask for a massive close-up as he mutters in his twisted drawl, “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you… stranger.”
So we have two ways of setting up a villain – one with quiet poise and the other with willful chaos. Both are hugely effective. But what really makes them work?
To find out, we need to go back a step.
In both instances the villains are mentioned before we meet them, and both times there is a sense of reverence toward them, as though they are each figures of legend to be feared and revered. Lecter we are told is a very dangerous man, and before we wind our way through to his lonely little cell we hear of his atrocities, his tendencies, and the danger he represents. These words are like salt on our palettes, kindling our appetites.
Why is that?
Because there is a part of every person that is curious, that wants to solve the mysteries of life, however small or large they may be. It’s those mysteries that keep us interested, that keep us reading or watching or paying attention. Setting up a character in hushed or reverent tones makes us eager to see them for ourselves. We want to solve the mystery.
On another level, a deeper level, there is a part of us that wants to reach out and touch the darkness, to be sickened and enthralled by the possibilities that lie within that infinite void of the soul. These characters represent a safe way to explore that darkness – a morally free way we might explore the urges buried within our collective psyches.
Does the Dark Knight take the same approach as Silence of the Lambs with the Joker? Think of the great establishing line relating to the Joker’s makeup.
“Makeup?”
“Yeah, you know. To scare his enemies. War paint.”
Of course, the Joker’s legacy followed him into the film, so I can understand the argument that the character was set up long before audiences entered the cinema. But this only serves to enforce the overall point – if you set up your villain properly before we meet them, then you can have them produce a lasting impression on readers/viewers without the need for torture scenes or pompous soliloquies.
Think of your favourite villain from books. Were they set up well before you met them?
In my novel Old Haunts I took a similar tack—I built up the idea of one of the key villains before I introduced him. Threaded throughout the novel are snippets of information regarding the vampire’s previous interactions with the characters, and their fear at the idea of running into him again. With this built throughout the novel the character has a presence before we meet him… and when we do it’s as cinematic as possible:
The archway curtain fluttered once more, revealing a hunching man draped in loose hanging rags. He looked tired, greasy, unwashed. His cheeks were sharp and sunken, his eyes deep and sad-looking. Around his eyes were dark, purplish circles that offset his pale skin. His short, roughly shaven brown hair was matted with blood and dirt, as were the patches of bare flesh exposed through the rags he wore. I spotted dark clusters of bruises at his ribs, and identical pale scars at both wrists that may or may not have been self inflicted.
He looked beaten and fragile, like a wounded animal in need of shelter and care. Yet when his sad eyes spotted the trio of vampires ahead of him, I registered a reaction from them I did not expect. Fear. In their eyes, in the way they stopped moving, utterly and completely. They were afraid of him. The man’s expression had not changed, had not come over menacing or dark in any way. He just looked at them, sad eyes regarding them with a pitiful, wounded expression. I watched as most of the vamps slowly backed away, making their way off the upper tier and toward the exit. The man turned to me and lifted his head, his brows knitting together in a pleading expression.
As his back straightened with a wince of pain, my heart fell into my stomach.
Around the man’s neck was a collar of metallic silk, an alloy pliable as fabric but hard as Kevlar. It’s the alloy of choice for mystical types—or at least it is for those who can afford it. It’s most often used as a focus for binding spells, to create a barrier that is strong yet malleable, but this … I had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t latched against his neck, wasn’t held in place by any sort of fastening or catch. At either side of the collar were small, dark holes in his neck where the alloy was sewn into his skin, leaving the surrounding flesh blackened and dry. I looked up from the collar and into the man’s pleading eyes. He looked to me for relief, for safety. To be taken away from this place, from this life. He looked at me with the desperate eyes of a man who wanted to die.
I watched as the metallic collar shimmered from dark grey to bright, reflective silver, as the metallic thread sewn into his skin tightened as if pulled upon. The man winced and keened, his neck and body stiffening as he knelt to the floor. As he settled into the ground I noticed a second shimmer in the doorway, and spotted a similar piece of metallic silk strapped to the wrist of a tall, middle-aged man wearing grey suit pants, leather shoes, and a black button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. The alloy was not sewn into his skin but loosely clasped, and as he very slightly tilted his fist the shimmering stopped as if by command, and the collar at the kneeling man’s neck loosened ever so slightly.
As he stepped forward, the curtain of shadow that concealed his features peeled back up his arm, then slowly over his chest and head, revealing his face to my eyes.
The Vampire.
Sound good?

Advice from a master of the writing craft
ROY PETER CLARK, THE MAN WHO’S BEEN TEACHING GREAT WRITERS HOW TO WRITE FOR MORE THAN THREE DECADES, AIMS TO SET YOU FREE, NOT SLAP YOUR HANDS OVER A GRAMMAR MISTAKE
By Chuck Leddy From thewritermag.com

Roy Peter Clark, through his 15 books on the craft of writing and long-standing role as one of our pre-eminent writing teachers, has been helping word workers for more than three decades. He has taught multiple Pulitzer Prize winners and thousands of journalists; his influence on crafting stories reaches into almost every newsroom in the U.S.

Former Clark student Thomas French, who won a Pulitzer and became a writing teacher himself, calls Clark “the Jedi master of writing coaches.” Another Pulitzer winner, humorist Dave Barry, says, “Roy Peter Clark knows more about writing than anybody I know who is not currently dead.”

If Clark has a single message for writers, it’s his practical approach to crafting prose. He encourages writers to master the rules of grammar and English usage, but to never fear breaking them to better serve readers (it’s even acceptable to occasionally split an infinitive, as I’ve just done).

Clark’s latest writing book, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English, is a rare creature—a grammar/writing book that has earned bestseller status and critical acclaim.

His guidebook advocates an approach to grammar that doesn’t restrict writers, but rather sets them free to be more creative. Clark is not a hovering, old-school grammarian who yells “No!” Instead, he’s been shouting “Go!” to writers for 30 years.

Born in 1948 in New York City, Clark has been director of the Writing Center at The Poynter Institute since 1979. Located in St. Petersburg, Fla., the institute describes itself as “a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders. It promotes excellence and integrity in the practice of craft.” Clark, who is also the institute’s vice president, teaches on Poynter’s campus, offers writing instruction in newsrooms across the globe, and also gives online tutorials through podcasts, videos and blogs.

Clark has embraced digital technology to communicate his writing wisdom. For example, his outstanding 2006 book, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, was actually written as a blog and distributed via podcasts before Little, Brown published it between covers.

His writing expertise has led to appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show and other national television programs. The Writer caught up with Clark recently by telephone from his office.

Q: In The Glamour of Grammar, you take a “practical” approach to grammar. Does this mean writers can break “the rules”?

I’m impatient with any polarized notions of grammar. I know that there’s a decades-old struggle between “descriptivists” (who believe language is flexible) and “prescriptivists” (who believe in strict rules). My feeling is that we should take a little from both. Even “descriptivists” mostly follow “the rules” in their own work. I find this debate a false dichotomy. Instead, I like to imagine we all have a language garage where writers have a workbench and lots of different tools. Anything that helps make meaning, any language strategy that promotes communication, will have a place in this garage.

I tend to write and teach in a supportive way, so that if people are tempted to write something, they’ll feel encouraged. There’s no reason why so many people in the United States feel as if they don’t live inside the “literacy club” [people who write and read]. When I was in school, my teachers dubbed only a few students as “writers,” and these students would be encouraged to join the school newspaper or pursue a career as a writer. Now, I think about all the other students who overheard this and felt left out, feeling they couldn’t master or develop the skill of writing. No one gets good at anything without practice and encouragement.

Q: You encourage writers to ground their stories in concrete details. Why is particularity important?
The novelist Joseph Conrad writes in one of his novels’ introductions that the purpose of art is to make you see. Seeing can refer to both the visual experience of objects, but also a higher level of understanding. One of the formative experiences of my life was reading S.I. Hayakawa, who popularized “the ladder of abstraction.” Hayakawa shows that how we experience language depends on whether it’s concrete or abstract. We start with the concrete, like the ring on my finger, which is my father’s ring. It’s a physical object. But people also want to know, what does it mean that Roy wears his father’s wedding ring? Is it about reconciliation? Family loyalty? There are many possible reasons.

We often tell stories from the ground level of concrete detail, but to understand the world often requires us to move to higher levels of abstraction. The language at the bottom of the ladder gives us examples, shows us the details. Some language keeps us grounded, while some language gives us altitude. Writers need to be able to go up and down the ladder. When we see abstract language, our curiosity craves details, and you can jump down into detail. And when writers begin with details, readers assume there’s a reason behind the story, an abstract meaning.

Q: Why do you continually urge writers to strengthen their nouns and verbs, rather than relying on modifiers?

I’ve learned this myself from sources that I admire. I think of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch a century ago giving writing lessons to his students at Cambridge University in England. He’d talk about where “the muscles” are in prose style. And where the flab tends to be. You can follow that same theme through George Orwell and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. The concrete noun lets us see and the active verb helps us move. Experts on writing have always preferred strong nouns and verbs.

Even while revising my own work, I often realize how unnecessary adverbs are. I might write, “The boy’s leg was totally severed,” but then I’ll think about what severed means. It includes totally. [Adverbs, when used, should add meaning.] Think of the difference in meaning when you describe a character as “smiling happily” and “smiling sadly.” … A writer needs to decide which words in the sentence are doing the work and which ones are decorative. The decorative word often distracts attention from the stronger word that’s doing the real work.

Q: You tell writers to “write cinematically.” Explain.

I mean it’s important for writers to look at things from different perspectives. I remember working with reporter David Finkel [author of The Good Soldiers, a book that follows one battalion during the Iraq War] when he was at the St. Petersburg Times. Finkel was assigned to report on the opening of a new Hooters restaurant. He worked hard to make sure he was seeing this event from a variety of vantages. He stood outside for a while and looked into the restaurant’s window. Later, he walked across the street, seeing it as part of another landscape. Finkel also went inside, getting close enough to read the tattoos on a customer’s arm or identify the exact kind of earring a server was wearing. This sort of thing establishes a strong sense of place. This is similar to film cinematography, having different camera angles. We need to know what things look like up close or from the top of a hillside.
I always tell young writers not to view the world only from the most predictable position. If a student is covering an anti-war demonstration, he might stand in front of the stage. I always say “go around to the back of the stage, then deep into the crowd to where you can’t hear the speaker.” The world is complicated; people experience it in different ways. The enterprising writer has to recognize those differing vantage points to accurately capture the world.

Q: What are your views on structuring a story?

Decisions about the architecture of a story are critical, but you never know when they may come. … Structure tends to be discovered during the process of research or during the early drafting of a story. There are common problems that get in the way of finding the best structure for a story. Word processing, for example, often results in the first half of a story getting more attention, more revision and polishing, than the second half. I read a lot of stories where the beginning is crisp and the rest is sludge. The structure crumbles. I advise writers to think of their writing time as divided into thirds: the beginning, middle and end. I also recommend drafting the story early enough so they can [revise] and polish later.

Q: Why is having a good writing process so vital?

[I’ll] be addressing it in my next book, called Help! For Writers. All writers have common problems during the writing process, such as “I can’t find focus” or “I can’t find anything good to write about.” One student told me he always had difficulty “getting his stuff together” before beginning to write; I know what he means—sometimes I can’t write until I’ve spent a week cleaning and organizing my office. That’s where my process might start.

Think of a baseball player on a hitting streak. If things are working for him, he doesn’t want the coach telling him anything about the mechanics of hitting. He just goes with the flow. But sometimes you run into problems, and need to understand where you’re stuck. If you can isolate this, you can get to the next stage and reach your final destination. Writing is like that, too. If it’s working, keep going, but occasionally you might need to understand where you’re stuck, too. It’s very important for writers, and writing teachers, to be able to identify the various parts of the process so that writers can begin to talk about and modify their own process.

Q: In The Glamour of Grammar, you emphasize the importance of inventiveness in working with words. Why?

Think about all the creativity inherent in language. The soul of expression is originality. George Orwell said in “Politics and the English Language” that writers should not use expressions that they’re used to seeing in print, to avoid clichés, slogans and stereotypes. But to avoid them requires writers to stop and think about exactly what they’re trying to say and whether there’s an original way to say it. It might mean creating a new word or adapting an old word to fit their needs. Language is being invented constantly. Language should be fun, and all great writers play with words, play with word order, denotation, connotation, etc. If it isn’t fun on occasion, then what’s the point?

Q: What general advice would you offer writers looking to improve their craft and make a career with words?

The question makes me think of that ancient joke about the tourist visiting New York City who stops and asks a local, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” The local says, “Well, practice, practice, practice.” Some people have more or less talent, but people who want to improve have to read the kind of work they’d like to write themselves. The three magic words I stress are “read, write, talk,” and I mean talking about reading and writing. Writing is a process, a product, a habit, an art, and serves many different purposes. It’s a way of learning and remembering. I encourage all kinds of people—young, old, professional and amateur—to give it a try, to not be afraid.
________________________________________
The Roy Peter Clark File
• Clark earned a Ph.D. in medieval literature from the State University of New York-Stony Brook, where he wrote his dissertation on Chaucer.
• Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, Clark fell in love with language from listening to rock ’n’ roll: “My passion was for Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and especially, being a piano player, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Those were my language teachers,” Clark once told an interviewer from The St. Petersburg Times.
• Clark is an enthusiastic musician. After the native New Yorker moved his family to Florida, he wrote a song for his daughters called Christmas Without Snow, which he sang and then posted on YouTube. He’s also been known to play piano for his writing students before classes.
• The audio podcasts Clark created in connection with his “Writing Tools” blog (later turned into his successful Writing Tools book) have been downloaded more than 1 million times, making Clark’s podcasts one of the most popular “how-to” podcasts of all time. These are available (and downloadable) for free on iTunes.

Failure of Narrative Distance–When The Writer Is Too Close To The Main Character
By Kimberly Davis
http://kimscraftblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/failure-of-narrative-distance-when.html

My Creative Nonfiction and Advanced Fiction Craft workshops are both now up and running, and we have already run into several issues involving “failure of narrative distance.” This is a very common craft problem, and one I have certainly struggled with myself as a writer, and so I thought it would be helpful to do a post on the subject.

A failure of narrative distance tends to arise when we writers are too close to our own material. Generally there is a character in the story who is very like us, someone who is experiencing strong emotions that we ourselves have felt. And as a result, we tend to see the story from that character’s point of view, rather than dispassionately as a narrator should see it, or, more importantly, as the reader would see it.

Further, we are often so close to the situation and the emotions that we have trouble fully articulating for readers everything that is going on in the story, and so the actions of the characters tend to be inexplicable to readers. Readers see that the characters are having strong emotions or treating each other badly, and they don’t understand why. This comes off to the reader as “melodramatic”–in the sense that there are strong emotions on the page that don’t feel earned. Prominent writers have had this problem, so if you are having this trouble, don’t feel alone. To take just one example, I think Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway suffered from this.

The key to solving a failure of distance problem is to restore the proper balance in the manuscript between character and narrator, and to get the writer to step back and see the story the way the reader would see it, so that the writer tells the story as narrator, with distance and dispassion, and without endorsing the views of one or the other of the characters. Note that, with memoir and autobiography, this requires the writer to see him or herself as a character in the story.

So, how do we do this? Well, there are some tricks to try:

Change the character: One thing to try, if you are writing fiction, is to change the autobiographical character so that he or she is less like you. So, if you are short, make the character tall. If you are brunette, make the character blond. If you are female, make the character a man. Sometimes this can help you to see the character more clearly.

Switch point of view: Sometimes a change in viewpoint can help, so try switching between first person and third person. Or tell the story in retrospect, from a great temporal distance, writing as if you are much older and wiser. Often, a switch in viewpoint will reveal more of the story.

Make sure to get everything “on the page”: Often with autobiographical stories, the writer is assuming things, and simply isn’t getting basic information down on the page. You hear this in workshops. Readers will chime in with comments like, “I don’t understand why the father is so mean,” or, “If everyone was so nasty, why did Sue keep going back?” Frequently, a writer will assume too much, and will fail to reveal all of the motivations, coded language, deceptions and manipulations among the characters, leaving the reader mystified. Your job as a writer, if you are having this problem, is to wade back into your manuscript, workshop it fully, and make sure that you are getting everything down that is necessary for the reader to fully understand and appreciate what is happening.

Practice “Telling the Story”: One thing you can do is to practice “speaking” about your main character “as a character,” and telling his or her story as a narrator would–explaining the character’s motivations, fears and desires, and actions as best you can. Sometimes it helps to put this in terms of these questions: Exactly how does the character feel on this page, and why? How does this fit in with the character’s overall story? And, once you have the answers to these questions, then ask: Is all of this on the page? If you do this for each page of your manuscript I think you will find that you make a great deal of progress. Making yourself articulate, within each scene, how the character is feeling and how that relates to the larger story, forces you–as writer–out of the viewpoint of your character, and into the position of the narrator. Hopefully then you can begin to see all of your characters with the level of dispassion and clarity that is required for satisfactory narration.

I hope these thoughts help. I’d love to hear comments from other writers who have had this problem, and any tips they might have.

Words . . .
At Britian’s Ledbury Poetry Festival poets were asked what expressions have become such clichés that they’ve lost all meaning. Here’s a few responses. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/30/wordsandlanguage
“Literally” One of the great testaments to the power of metaphor, and the malleability of language, is the metaphorical use of the word “literally”. My kids do this all the time: There were “literally” a million people there, or I “literally” died I was so scared. When people use literally in this way, they mean it metaphorically, of course. It’s a worn-out word, though, because it prevents people from thinking up a fresh metaphor for whatever it is they want to describe. And that’s a shame, because the word literal is actually a beautiful and evocative metaphor in itself. It is derived from the Latin verb linire, meaning “to smear”, and was transferred to litera (letter) when authors began smearing words on parchment instead of carving them into wood or stone. The roots of linire are also visible in the word “liniment,” a salve or ointment. Thus, the literal meaning of “literal” is to smear or spread, a fitting metaphor for the way metaphor oozes over rigid linguistic borders.
“I am a very spiritual person” Exhausted on its first usage. Its vague passive-aggressive subtext implying they are a better, more moral person than you. Often uttered by the most self-centred of people, possibly while getting a lift off you and ranting against the tyranny of cars. See Kate Aldridge in the Archers for a good example.
“Amazing” On a recent visit to Bristol everyone and everything was being described as ‘amazing’ ….an English equivalent of the slightly more vacuous ‘awesome’?
“Pre-existing condition” ……… and how, exactly, is that different from an existing condition.

The Last Word . . .
“Writers are archeologists of themselves.” — Vicki Grove