Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 7.3 - Voice as Stain

A quick recap before we dig into the meat of this week’s blog: in the last two week I’ve explained that different authors have different voices that allow us to recognize them, that some genre voices are overdone and that new writers need to learn their own voice and use it to distinguish their writing; this week I’m giving some pointers on separating your narrative voice from the voices of the characters you write.

Do you know how to write an asshole? There are lots of ways to go about it. You can make them do horrible things. You can make them lie to the characters around them. You can give your readers another character’s opinion and explain that the asshole is an asshole. But there are problems with all of these approaches – if you want a character to be an asshole with a heart of gold you can’t exactly write them into performing dastardly deeds. If you use another character to tell your audience that the character is an asshole your audience may be disinclined to believe that character, or they may feel like they’re being led too much. If your character lies frequently it’s easy to see them as an asshole but hard to see them as anything else. So once you’ve run through your options you’re kind of stuck: this character (we’ll call him Dick Jones for convenience) isn’t a bad guy, he’s just kind of a prick – someone who is hard to get along with but who is honest and good at what he does. Pretty much your only choice is to make him sound like an asshole: you have to learn to write in an asshole’s voice.

When you’ve pegged down your own voice it can be hard to sink into a character’s voice. Some new writers are a little ham-handed with it – they’ll write Dick like Draco Malfoy (always sneering and insulting people) and Dick will become very one-dimensional. Some new writers will have so carefully cultivated their wise, authorial voice that they’ll be incapable of writing something that blatantly dickish, and Dick will come across as just a normal guy. The trick is to fall somewhere in between these two extremes: Don’t make Dick cruel, don’t make Dick wise – write Dick like you when you’re pissed off at someone. If you’re angry with a co-worker for, let’s say, moving the schedule around so that you have to work fewer hours, you wouldn’t call them a motherfucking waste of space to their face (at least not in front of your boss), but you probably wouldn’t just accept the situation and work your shifts with him peacefully. You’d snark at him. You’d be sarcastic. You’d talk to him less and maybe ignore his requests for help more. You’d probably tell an embarrassing story about him to another co-worker and laugh (somewhat nastily) before going back to work. That’s how you write a Dick – like you, if you were an asshole. That’s how you write anything, really – drawing on your own experience to fill in the blanks of the work you’re crafting.

You can’t rely on yourself for all of the kinds of characters you’re hopefully going to write. You don’t want to use yourself as a basis for someone committing genocide, for example, but you can probably write a happy, depressed, cold, stupid, clever, bubbly, loyal, prickly, or loving character pretty well because you’ve experienced what it is like to feel prickly, depressed, stupid, and loving before. You are a broad-minded, well-rounded human being who has experienced a wide spectrum of human emotions and you’ve lived through situations where you felt like you were the victim, the attacker, the mourner, the lover, the hero, the coward, or the bastard.

You have a lot to draw on when it comes to writing different emotions and emotional states but, for once, I’m going to tell you that you can’t think like a writer. Writers want to control everything, they want to shape every interaction to perfection and make all of their creations shine in the best light possible. To write well in character voices you’re going to have to think like an actor.

Let’s set up a scenario as an exercise. Pretend you’re an actor getting ready for an audition. Pretend that your character is (in this situation we’ll call her Sally, a 17-year-old cheerleader) the part that you’re auditioning for. The director wants you to play the character like “x”. “X” can be anything.

“Alright, Sally,” the director calls out “you’ve just gotten the news that your estranged mother died. You’re talking to your boyfriend about it – you’ve got a one-minute monologue. Go.”

Now say that monologue. Out loud. Right now.

Did you do it? You didn’t. Maybe one or two of you did. But for those of you who didn’t, why not? You know what 17-year-olds sound like. You know what grieving people sound like. You know what confused people sound like. You know what angry people sound like. You know what girls sound like when they’re talking to their boyfriends. You know what Sally sounds like, and more importantly you know what Sally sounds like to YOU. So go – say the monologue.

I’m pretty sure you still didn’t.

Which is too bad – if you say something out loud you know what sounds right. You also know what sounds very, very wrong.

Actors have a couple of advantages over writers (not many, and access to a steady paycheck is not something either group has as an advantage, but at least writers are taken somewhat seriously.) Actors aren’t afraid of talking to themselves. Actors aren’t afraid of lying. Actors don’t give two shits if anyone thinks they’re a genius or if no one remembers them a hundred years from now. But most importantly actors are expected to be many people – it’s the only skill they’re actually expected to demonstrate (other than table service) on a day-to-day basis. Writers are supposed to be writers – they worry that they might do something that doesn’t seem appropriate for a writer, like laughing in public or occasionally experiencing daylight. This crosses over into a writer’s writing and makes the problem of writing character voices all the more difficult because if you’re afraid of being something other than yourself you’ll have a very hard time sounding like someone else, even if it’s just for a few minutes. So pretend you’re an actor. Get into character. Out loud. Speak the lines you think your character should say so that you can hear how they would sound to someone else. You may feel like your character’s lines are cringe-worthy because you would never say them as yourself, but that doesn’t matter when you’re acting – you’re Sally the cheerleader right now so no one would think it odd for you to sob “I hadn’t s-seen her for years bu-buh-but she was st-sti-still mu-muh-my Mommy!” in front of poor, concerned, stupid, imaginary Tommy the quarterback.

So be an actor – you’ll write better for it – but be the director too. When you start to sound too much like yourself, let the director side of your brain yell “Cut! What is this shit? I thought you were supposed to be in character,” then let your actor-side of the brain sooth its ego and get back into character. And when you get tired of the Hollywood in your head take a step back and re-read what’s come of this acting exercise – hopefully you’ll impress yourself because hopefully getting into character will make your characters have their own voices, distinct from your voice as an author but compatible with the story you’re writing.

And if all else fails there’s the old writer’s standby to help – research. Read the books you love and examine how the author builds her voice in contrast to how she builds character voices. Read books that you think are terrible and see what the authors are doing wrong. If you’re trying to build a character with traits and a history outside of your experience read books about that kind of character in history (for example, read about Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute if you want to write about crazy dictators or read about Hitler if you’re writing about a genocidal maniac.) Reading is never worthless when you’re trying to perfect your writing, as long as you’re reading the right way – with a critical eye and an understanding of what makes works work.

See you next week, then. I’ll be back with one or two brief entries about dialogue (with a possible pit-stop for monologue) and after that we’re moving into the complicated world of tone.

Have fun, and say the fucking monologue already.

Cheers,

     - Alli

Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 7.2 - Voice as Stain

When you hear your professor speaking does it remind you of your father? When you hear your friend speaking do you think of a cousin? When your boss talks to you does it sound like your mom? Probably not – each of the people you know has unique cadences to their speech and a distinct diction that makes them sound unlike most of the other people you know. You have a unique pattern of speech yourself, one which those listening to you can hear and identify you by.

Writers, however, must be able to command a number of different patterns of speech that they can use realistically for their writing. The rhythm of a poet’s poem is different from the rhythm that same poet would use writing an in-class essay; the diction an essayist uses when speaking to his brother is probably very different than the word choices he would make in his writing.

All of us have different voices for different occasions. You don’t speak to a child the same way you speak to a police officer, and you don’t speak to a bartender the same way you speak to your boyfriend. You also have different written voices. You may sound different when you’re writing a poem than you do when you’re writing an essay, and different when you’re writing an essay than when you’re writing a short story. But regardless of what you’re writing you should still sound like you.

Professors often notice (and complain) that students don’t have a voice of their own in their essays. The reason that students abandon their own voice is because they’re striving to sound academic in their writing – they think that there is a single proper tone that they can strike that will instantly make their papers more academic, just as many students believe a five-paragraph structure is required for academic writing – both suppositions are incorrect and both lead to bland, uniform student work.

Similarly many writers strive for a poetic tone in their poetry and fiction, imagining that if they are able to use properly poetic words and sultry enough phrasing that their work will instantly be more artistic – you frequently hear people describing this kind of language as “flowery” and in my mind that’s not a compliment: remember that flowers are a plant’s genitals – I don’t want a bunch of flora-dongs assaulting me either physically or mentally.

Good writing is, always has been, and always will be about good content. Content is the core of good writing and everything else is, to an extent, window-dressing. But it’s up to a writer to decide whether their content is dressed up tastefully or trashily, and much of what makes a piece “trashy” is what makes it trite or cliché. Writers who are afraid to insert their own voice into their writing frequently fall back on “safe” voices – the kinds of voices that have been used in the genre forever – in other words they use cliché and lessen the value of their writing by making it into something that a reader has heard a million times before and is sick of before getting past the first few lines.

Here’s an example from my own writing: I’m currently creating a character called Dr. Denkmann. She is a psychologist in her late thirties. Here are four genre examples of I one could introduce this character if I was aiming for a certain voice.

“The doctor stood before her dark window, watching the rain pound the pavement below. She had curves that wouldn’t quit, legs that went ’til Tuseday, and a look on her face that said trouble was heading my way.”

“A delicate, russet curl had escaped from Dr. Denkmann’s tight bun. It caught the soft light from the window as she looked up at me, gently adding a dusky hue to the blush rising on her cheeks and casting intricate shadows on her slowly heaving breast.”

“The doctor turned sharply away from the window and brought up a new screen on her desk. The smooth, rigid planes of her face relayed to me that bad news was on its way and the glint in her eyes, like cold, distant stars, only confirmed that my day was about to get a lot worse.”

“Alicia pressed her hand to the window and turned her face to me with a trembling lip. I had only just realized that I loved her and I waited, nervous, for her to confirm the worst – cancer, killing our love when it was young enough to be precious and old enough to have completely changed me from an asshole bad boy into a gentle, caring man.”

So were you able to pick up on the tried, true, tired voice in each of those? (I’ll give you the last one – it was the tone of a Nicholas Sparks novel, Sparks being the only living author to have pioneered a voice in his writing alone that is simultaneously addictive to women and repulsive to anyone who doesn’t like reading sappy books about mended men and women with horrible diseases.) Even if you didn’t manage to pin down the voice without more hints, you’ll be able to get it for sure when I ask which of these is romance? Or which of these is Noir? Or Science Fiction? Now it’s obvious. Painfully and depressingly obvious. Why is it obvious? All of these descriptions have the same core elements: the doctor, the window, and an indication that the doctor is upset. Now try to pin down the genre in the description that I actually wrote:

“Dr. Denkmann moved with a jarring, forest animal grace. Her wide hips and narrow shoulders were a startling contrast to her slender legs, capped with narrow black heels that clacked like a deer’s hooves when she walked. I caught her silhouetted against the window’s dim gray light, her absurd frame supported on a dancer’s legs, before she turned and sat, staring at me with a frown so slight that it was almost obscured by her glasses.”

Can you find a clear genre in that? What if I told you that Dr. Denkmann was a character in a horror story? Or a psychological thriller? Or a science fiction, noir, or romance novel? Would it fit with your common conception of any of those things? Probably not, and that is why most genre novels are derided by literature classes – they are genres that so infect the stories within them that most authors lose their voice to the genre. And fuck that bullshit – you can put any voice you want into any kind of writing you want. Dr. Denkmann is a side character in a psychological thriller, by the way, but I hate writing in tingly, questioning voices – nervousness isn’t conducive to character building – so I try to keep my writing MY writing and genre expectations can die in a fire for all I care.

So how do you assert your voice in your writing, whatever it may be? Well, first you have to know what your voice is. I like adding humor and vulgarity to almost everything I write. I know that because I’ve written a lot of shitty, flowery poetry. Flowery isn’t my thing. I had to practice a lot to know what kind of voice sounds right for me when I’m writing. I wrote a lot of stodgy, academic-sounding essays before I figured out that you can work a clever turn of phrase, a dash of hyperbole, and occasional obscenity into an academic paper and still have it turn out well. I’ve tried (you wouldn’t believe how I’ve tried) to write simpering, simmering romances just so I could have something to try to sell to a publisher but I always get twenty pages in and feel like my brain has turned into a milk shake. You assert your voice by writing, writing a lot, and messing up a lot before you figure out what works for you. And once you’ve found it you do your damndest to never write in someone else’s voice again.

Figure out metaphors that are amusing to you, adjectives that you like and aren’t tired of hearing. Here’s an exercise: in 100 words or fewer describe a bathroom. Describe it in every genre that you can think of. Then give yourself a thousand words and set a scene in that bathroom, and use those thousand words describing it the way you want to. Do it over and over and over until you are happy with the result. Then look at the result and really examine it – what makes you happy about it? What sounds like you? Hand your scene to a friend (or a professor – someone who can actually be critical of you but who knows you pretty well) and ask them if it sounds like you. Then the next day try the same exercise with an animal instead of a bathroom. The next day try a car. The next day try a person. When you’ve worked on it long enough (and it does actually take a lot of work) you’ll have found the elements in your writing that add up to your unique voice. Befriend these elements. Cultivate them. Cuddle them and bring them flowers. Then use them as much as possible to distinguish your writing from the writing around you.

Sorry if that’s massively unhelpful, and sorry if you thought there was going to be a quick fix. There’s never a quick fix when it comes to writing well – you should know that by now.

That’s all for now, Folks. I’ve allowed myself to ramble a little too much, but I’ll be back next week with advice on creating voices for your characters. After that I think we’re moving on to dialogue, or perhaps tone. Tell me which of the two you would prefer in the comments and that’s what our next subject will be.

Thanks for reading, and stay Tasteful,

Cheers,

     - Alli

Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 7 - Voice as Stain

Many writers don't know literary voice from their asshole. They write plots and poems just trying to get from Point A to Point B without thinking about how their work sounds inbetween inception and completion. This is reqlly quite sad because the authors through history who have been loved (and perhaps more importantly, remembered) have strong, complex, delicate literary voices. Scroll down the page. Look at what Jack has written this week, find Leena’s most recent post, check out Nick and Slick's musings, read Rainamoinen’s writings. Can you hear them? Can you hear the author here? It doesn't matter if you know these people: if you read three of any of their blogs you will start to hear a voice coming through - you'll begin to know who they are by what they say and how they say it. Jack sounds businesslike to me when he's writing a blog (please note that Jack is a man who will open our meetings by saying "Alright Motherfuckers, what are we doing today?"), but he sounds resignedly whimsical in his poems; someone who is tired of wonder but wonders nonetheless. Leena has a delightful wit, almost as sharp as the sadness frequently found in her writing – she is more consistent in different styles than Jack is, maintaining a very precise diction that balances artfully on the edge of juvenile joy and cutting maturity. Nick writes in questions, even when he writes in statements, asking with his poetry and prose “What is this world we’re in? Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it large and lovely? Aren’t you happy to see it?” – Nick’s writing is full of gentle cheer, warming his readers with its comfort and peace. Slick is a card – hard and churlish and jutting in direct, entendre riddled phrases and sly thrusts of jest. He writes like he wants you to think he fucks: each piece is a fun and sometimes-sloppy romp, to the point but never forgetting that reading is for pleasure. Rainamoinen is a budding rhetorician; he guides his readers neatly to the edge of a tall, stark cliff and happily drops them off, letting them land precisely where he intended. There is a charming contempt in his voice – he writes simply and elegantly, as if it doesn’t matter to him whether you read his work or not, but he’s well aware that you read it anyway. And if you’ve been reading this Writing Toolkit series for any length of time you’ve probably noticed that my voice is somewhat schizophrenic – to quote my own poetry (as any good schizophrenic should) “I’m a casual cynic who prays for optimists, but it’s hard for me to be one when I’m talking with my fists.” I want joy and wonder and sadness and comfort in my writing (humor too, if I can get it,) but I also want to make my point brutally, unmissably obvious (sometimes in the bitchiest way imaginable.) Now think of the Big Names – the writers we all know. How do you know you’re hearing Shakespeare? How can you identify Dickens at a glance? What is it about Emily Dickinson that shrieks out of her poems and declares “I AM EMILY!”? Some of it is style – Dickinson poems are pretty easy to visually identify and if you’re looking at Early Modern English iambic pentameter there’s very little chance that you’re reading anyone BUT Shakespeare. Dickens can be spotted by density alone. But what we read in the authors we love is voice – Shakespeare’s lazy attitude about proper word usage and correct grammar created a unique sound that caught the ears of audiences, creating mnemonics for concepts that other authors had explored but never defined. Dickens’ intense descriptions reshaped the way that novels were written. Dickinson’s disregard for accepted forms and heavy use of atypical rhyme sticks, disjointed, in our minds and helps us remember that it can matter when a bird comes down the path. It is the voice in an author’s writing that speaks to us – that’s why it’s called VOICE. We hear authors in our heads and so novels and poems become conversations, we know these writers as friends because we hear their warmth and sorrow and joy and love in the way they speak to us. Voice is the most important part of a writer’s repertoire because it is what makes an impression on readers. So write like you mean it, write like every paragraph and stanza is a speech, or wedding vows, or a eulogy, because everything you write IS a speech, wedding vows, and eulogy to your subject, your readers, and yourself. Good writing becomes permanent eventually, great writing is immediately indelible. I’ll be back in two weeks with more on voice and how to assert your voice in writing. After that we’ll be back with character voice and separating what your characters say from what you mean. Speak well, Cheers, - Alli

Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 6.2 – Bits and Characters, the Tool for the Job

Last weekend I was talking to my friend Gene when he made an interesting observation. “By and large,” he said, “Stephen King movies suck – they shouldn’t suck, because they’ve usually got a great story, but I think the problem is that he writes people so well; actors in a two hour movie just can’t live up to the people he makes in a seven hundred page book.”

I agree with Gene’s assessment of the situation (it should be clear by now that my appreciation of Stephen King novels borders on obsessive) for two reasons: one, because King is the king of characterization, and two, because people who decide to make King novels into movies generally wouldn’t know what characterization was if it bit them in the face.

Characterization is, as the word should imply, turning something into a character or adding character to something. This is important because if you don’t work at characterizing your characters nobody gives a shit about them.

There are four categories typically used to define characters: flat, round, static, and dynamic. A flat character is one who is two-dimensional, has little to distinguish him, and who has little depth. A round character is one who is interesting and complicated, who has strengths and weaknesses; she isn’t “just” anything – she’s bright but antisocial, friendly but with an evil streak, cruel but loves her family – she has depth. A static character is one who doesn’t change or develop; she is the same character at the end of the story as she was at the beginning, with no highs or lows and very little learned from her experience. A dynamic character is one who changes (for good or bad) and who learns from the experiences he has in the course of the story.

Characters may be flat and static (the dullest and most remedial part of this spectrum – think Bella Swan from Twilight), round and static (interesting but infrequent, Daniel Day Louis character from There Will be Blood is an example of this, as is John McClain from Die Hard), flat and dynamic (most representations of Tarzan and Superman fit this – the generic action hero/cowboy character who is essentially faceless but who makes an important change at some point), or round and dynamic (generally these are the most fun characters to read or watch – Huckleberry Finn is round and dynamic, as are Dexter from the TV series Dexter, Darth Vader, Elizabeth Bennet, and Bilbo Baggins).

The Harry Potter series has good examples in almost every one of these groupings. Harry himself is round and dynamic: he’s not just a perfect, flat little hero – he can be a whiny little bitch, he lies an awful lot, gets into loads of trouble and makes a few huge mistakes – and he’s dynamic in that he learns from his mistakes, is capable of seeing the bad in himself as well as the good, and is capable of changing roles (to the point that he accepts that he may be more of a sacrifice than he is a hero). Draco is round but static: he’s deliciously nasty and lets everybody know it, he struggles with the task of killing Dumbledore, he loves his family even though he is a spoiled brat, and is scared of Voldemort even though he’s supposed to be a death eater – but for all of that he doesn’t really change or grow in the novels; in the end (even in the epilogue) he’s just a sneering aristocrat who doesn’t like Harry – the same thing he’s been all along. Sirius is a pretty good example but not perfect fit for flat and dynamic: we’re told that he used to be a Marauder and that he was really cool when he was a student, but that’s about all that there is to his character except that we see the transformation he takes from ravening criminal to warm (but childish) guardian. Voldemort is, sadly, both flat and static, which makes him a substantially less interesting villain than he could be; he is and always has been evil (even the childhood scenes Rowling tosses in suggest that he tormented other children simply because he could), there’s no depth to him, he never experiences internal conflict, and he fails to interact meaningfully with any character around him – he’s just a monolithic Bad Guy who you never have a chance to identify with as you read the books.

This is not to say that all of the characters in everything you write need to be round and dynamic – you shouldn’t spend as much time characterizing your main character’s distant cousin who shows up for on scene as you should spend on your character – but it’s good to give some depth to most of the characters who show up on your pages. Dickens was brilliant at this – his characterization was sometimes as simple as coming up with a name that perfectly described a character, for instance the anti-change Barnacle family in Little Dorrit, Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times, who drowns in a well, or Sir Dedlock, a staunch and stupid conservative aristocrat in the legal novel Bleak House.

Where your characters fall in the spectrum of flat/round and static/dynamic is up to you, but you need to be aware of what you’re trying to create – if you’re looking to make a really compelling antagonist you’re going to be better off with a round character than a flat one because that will provide a challenging foil for your protagonist. Do you want to write a goofy, fun story, something along the lines of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Then static versus dynamic doesn’t matter as much in a main character, but it might be important to have dynamic elements to a supporting character – Ferris doesn’t change in the movie because he’s supposed to be perfect, but Cameron gets to stand up for himself at the end and Jeanne turns into less of a bitch – these supporting character transformations make the main character look better than if Ferris had undergone some profound change because he’s supposed to be a silly, flawless, inspiring hero.

Plotting your story before you start will help you make your decisions about what kinds of characters you want, but we’re not at plotting yet so we’re going to just assume you’ve got something of a story planned already.

Okay, so let’s say you know that you want a round, dynamic female protagonist with a flat, static boyfriend, a round, static female friend, a round, static evil stepfather, and a round, dynamic potential love interest. That’s fantastic. How do you make that happen?

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again – writers can’t be cloistered. You have to go out into the world. Think about the characteristics of people you like and admire. Your mom is stubborn but gentle, your brother is loyal, your father is kind, your friends are funny, your professors are intelligent, your TAs are zealous – no matter who you’re thinking of you can find something admirable about that person. Now describe it. How would you explain to your friends that your brother is loyal? What things has he done in the past that express his loyalty. Did he protect you from a bully once? Did he stick with a friend through an addiction? Does he get angry when someone makes fun of his friends? What makes it obvious that your brother is loyal? Now think of another admirable person – your zealous TA for this example. Your TA shows up early every damn day. She’s talked about the courseload she’s taking in addition to teaching your class. You heard her talk about the job she works on the side, and about the really long commute she has to get to school then back to work every day. But in spite of that you can tell she really loves teaching biology. A professor wandered in during your lab and while everyone was working she was talking to the professor about her thesis – you didn’t even realize that there was a whole community of people dedicated to studying the movement of water in plants, but this woman is one of them and she talks about stalks like they’re holy fire.

When you really think about the people you know and what you like about them (or what you hate about them) you begin to understand how characterization works. How would you describe your roomate’s sense of humor to your cousin from out of state? You’d tell a story, and you’d start that story with a little background: “you have to understand,” you’d say “Jim grew up on a farm fifty miles east of the middle of nowhere. He had more siblings than their family had cows, and…” and from there you’d tell your cousin something exceptionally funny that Jim had done, adding in some of his more common mannerisms for color, and by the time Jim came home your cousin would be itching to meet this funny guy from the farm who keeps her cousin laughing. The way you describe the people you like (or hate) to the people you want to like (or hate) them is the exact same way you need to write your characters, only more so.

The details that you don’t share person-to-person when you’re describing a friend or nemesis are the kinds of things you do need to include in your story. What does your protagonist walk like? How do they take their coffee? Where were they born? What do they think of hairstylists? (That one may sound stupid, but if you’re writing an independent female lead then telling your audience that “her hair is a usually neglected shoulder-length curtain, combed more often by fingers than a brush and mottled by several dyeings of the do-it-yourself variety to an odd, varied brown” does a lot more to characterize her than just telling them that “her hair is brown and wavy, curling softly to her shoulders.”)

So work on details, write down details, but most of all go out into the world and think about the people around you. When you see someone make an interesting gesture, try to figure out why. If the guy in class next to you has green hair then you should make up a story for how it got that way – what the first color he dyed his hair was and the progression he went through. If the teller at the bank keeps her nails short, question it in your head – does she bite them because of an anxiety disorder, or did she once scratch her eye as a little girl and learn a lesson from the pain? Look at the people around you and see what they say about themselves without saying anything – what comes off as practical in clothing versus what comes off as douchey? What do the colors that someone’s wearing suggest to you about their personality? Once you’ve thought about these things in the real world it will be much easier for you to write your characters with some character.

That’s all for this week because I’ve run long once again. I’ll be back next week with some things NOT to do to your characters, as well as some tips about making your characters speak in their own voice.

Until then, Cheers. Go write something.

- Alli

Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 6 – Bits and Characters, the Tool for the Job

Before I get started, I just want to apologize – I totally spaced on the 31st, so I’ll be posting my one complete writing exercise from last week as a comment on this blog. Sorry! Now, on to character.

We’ve all heard the phrase “a bit part” in reference to acting: a small, fairly unimportant, role. “Bit Part” was a phrase developed in the early 1900s when theatre was in the very beginning of a decline to cinema, and actors were looking for whatever roles were available on stage or celluloid. I’ve heard the term applied (quite negatively) to literature when readers are discussing characters who (a) don’t have a very big part in a novel, or (b) who seem to be stock characters even if they are a huge part of the novel.

A good example of “bit” or “stock” characters in literature are the females in Charles Dickens novels; Dickens had three (or at most four) kinds of women that he wrote: The elderly lady (who could be kind or a crone), The sweet young lady (vapid, and usually the heroine or main romantic female), and The bad woman (young or old, weak or strong, she was the same woman – some generic details thrown over the “bad” core.)



This concept is beautifully examined in the above comic by Kate Beaton (she makes absolutely wonderful comics).

Beaton does a good (if somewhat sarcastic) job of getting to the heart of the problem with character – too often the characters we read are the fantasies, rather than the creations, of their authors. Main characters, romantic interests, one-night-stand bit parts, best friends, loving mothers, kind fathers – and all of them perfect – it’s expected that the worlds we encounter in fiction will be idealized, but it is shocking how often we encounter characters who are idealized to the point of being absolute: the good guys are absolutely good, the bad guys are absolutely bad, the characters are absolutely in love or absolutely hate each other, but there is rarely any gray area to those fictional characters we no so well (and how could we not know them well? There is nothing to them to know.)

So how do you fix (or at least improve) on the problem of flat, static, stock characters, and what on earth does this have to do with Bits?

Bits, in your toolbox, are the drilling parts of drills. I’m well aware that most college English students don’t have a hell of a lot of experience with heavy machine tools, so I’m going to expand a bit here: A drill or drill press is the mechanism that drives a bit – a bit is the part of the whole that actually bores into wood, plaster or metal. There are MANY, many kinds of bits out in the whole wide world (I was forced to learn this while attempting to help my husband find bits and tools when he uses his mill), but there is almost always just ONE kind of bit for the specific job you’re working on. You wouldn’t use a glass bit to drill into wood, for example, and using a carbide steel bit to bore into drywall is some serious overkill. So good craftsmen have their bits organized by job, lined up neatly in a box or a bin, or separated out by material or length or width so that they can always find the right bit for the project they’re working on.

I suggest that, when you still don’t know exactly what you’re doing with your characters, you create bit characters who are not bit parts. Do you have a kind of woman who you see as a heroine? Build her up before you put her in a story and keep her in your bit character box. Do you foresee the need for a maiden aunt in your fiction? Create one – perhaps you can turn her into a widowed policeman in some other piece. Do think you’ll need some child characters at some point? Make a Bobby and a Susie and put them on the shelf, so that they’ll be there when you need them.

I’m aware that this is somewhat unusual (perhaps some people will call it controversial, or even bad) advice. A lot of writers think that you should avoid pulling characters off of a shelf and re-using them, and I agree that you shouldn’t re-use your bit characters without first polishing them and prepping them for your newest story. But….

New writers have a problem when they write characters: they have no idea what characters do. Newbies might have a plot, a setting, and a story all laid out with one character to push it along – but when they sit down to write they suddenly find that they don’t know how to make that one good character interact with anyone else on the page, or that they don’t know who to put on the pages around their good character.

This is why I think you should have a handy supply of trusted, worn, occasionally spit-shined characters available for ready use: as a means of testing your shiny, new, hand-crafted character. Have your bit characters interact with your main character (write this out if you want to, talk it out if you’re not afraid of looking crazy in public.) How does your main character react? How do your bit characters respond to your main character’s traits? Is he likeable? Is she smart? Is he helpful? Is she bitchy?

But spend some time making minor characters before you dig into writing a main character. Figure out what you would name a lunch lady, and how a lunch lady would talk to a lawyer. Decide what you would do if you needed to have a fire fighter in one of your stories and think about how he would make breakfast on his days off.

The brilliant thing about building up a nice cabinet of bit characters is that, in the long run, it means that you are always collecting information for your character development – the woman in line in front of you at Starbucks imparts some of her sass to your cowgirls, while the butcher at the grocery store lends some surliness to your drunks. If you’re always adding to your supply of bit characters, if you’re always giving them more depth and detail then you are always improving your ability to write all characters. Eventually you will want all of your characters to be believable – you’ll need everyone on your page to be ready to walk into the real world – but that will never happen unless you start to put together the blank outline of a character “the virgin,” “the whore,” “the sheep herder,” or “the warrior” and start filling in those blanks with the depth of the real people all around you.

So work on some bit players, give them a little bit of polish, and look at the characters you love in your books while comparing them to the characters you see around you every day. I’ll be back with you next week with a more general discussion about why character and characterization matter, and how to achieve the latter, next week.

Until then, Cheers,
- Alli

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.4 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

This is the final blog in my several-weeks-long series on narrative. I hope that, if you’re reading this, you’ve read the other blogs and have taken some time to digest them because for the first time I’m going to offer some suggestions for real practice. It’s all well and good to tell people to “avoid this” or “focus on that” or “think about that” but until you actually sit down and DO something, you’re still just masturbating; you’re thinking about writing, but you’re not actually writing. Narrative is the first subject that I’m giving “homework” for because knowing how you start, how you write best, and going out into the world to experience it all have more to do with knowing yourself than they do with knowing your craft.

Narrative is different – narrative is tangible. If you don’t have a decent understanding of narrative as it functions in a short story or a novel or a poem you’re not going to have an audience for very long because your audience will know that you don’t know what you’re doing, and worse, they’ll get bored.

The written word should not be dull. It should enflame and excite. It should stand out from the page and strike its readers with its wisdom, wit, and wonder. The written word was invented in order to facilitate the sharing of information so vital that men were willing to construct a new manner of communicating to prevent that information from being lost – and one of the earliest things humans started doing with that new medium was marking down stories and poems so that the soul of a race would not die with its elders; we write what we do to give a tongue to history, to give a voice to the past, and to grant immortality to those who understand the magic of the words “once upon a time.” The written word should be anything but dull.

If you understand this concept – that writing should give life to what is being said – then you understand the basis of narrative: tell the story but tell it RIGHT – so that everyone who hears it will remember it and want to share it with others. Good writing is a virus, one that changes everyone it touches, and one that spreads with frightening rapidity and permanence.

I’m going to step off of my soapbox and stop ranting about why the written word affects us, and I’m going to hand out a couple of exercises that will help you to write affectingly.

Tell an old story but tell it new.

Everyone has heard that there are only about ten real stories in the world and they break down into laughably simple terms: love, loss, revenge, greed, pride, rebellion and a couple more of the Big Ideas we’ve been masticating for the last handful of millennia.

I’m not going to try to tell you to write something wholly original – very few things in literature are completely original (though that’s not for lack of trying on the part of many authors) and when you’re starting out (or even when you’ve been doing this for a while) butting your head against the idea of pure, original work is just going to frustrate you. I’m certainly not going to tell you to plagiarize, though. I’m going to tell you to re-forge.

We’ve all had an assignment in some class or another where we had to rewrite something creatively. Usually this happens in elementary school classes when the teachers give kids a chance to flex their creative muscles before binding them into five-paragraph essays for the rest of their K-12 education. Usually the children are asked to rewrite something simple – a fairytale, a joke, or a simple poem. When is the last time you did this?

If it was more than six months ago, it’s been too long.

So here’s the first exercise – it’s more complicated than putting your own spin on Little Red Riding Hood or telling a lightbulb joke with stereotype “x” instead of stereotype “y” or writing a Paul Revere rap: write the story of the moon and the sun. Why are they in the sky? Why are they running away from each other? Write the story and leave out the Greeks and the Romans and the Norse and Ethiopian origin stories. Write something new about something old – write as if you were first asking the question of yourself as a child, and sharing the answer you came up with to all of your friends and detractors on the playground.

Tell a story with an imaginary friend.

This exercise works best if you’re a little crazy and have some kind of recording device handy.

Remember your imaginary friend. If you didn’t have one, imagine one – make her a good one too, if she’s your first, with purple hair and retractable eyelashes or with the best tophat you’ve ever seen, or with all of the things that you hold close and quiet to your heart and are too scared to share with real friends because these things are too wonderful and hideous to expose to an outsider’s eyes. Do you have him in your head – tall or small and frightening or lovely and there to pat your back when you almost break down, but the weight of him in your mind keeps you upright? Good. Hold your imaginary friend there, bright and clear, and trade lines in a story.

Here’s an example:
Me: Once upon a time
Chaplin: There was a basketball
Me: The basketball rolled into the middle of the street, even though there was no one to push it
Chaplin: And no wind to blow it.
Me: The basketball rolled past houses and trailers
Chaplin: It rolled through streets empty of traffic
Me: And finally came to rest in front of an ugly, squat brick building
Chaplin: The town’s junior high school
Me: It rocked before pausing, and only Jack Mason saw it.
Chaplin: Jack had stayed behind that day
Me: After the parade passed by
Chaplin: Because he didn’t like the noise – it scared him
Me: But the basketball, with its beastly show of inertia, scared him more.
Chaplin: Jack was a quiet boy, with glasses and a thin chest
Me: But he was strong in a funny way – the way that stood out to other kids
Chaplin: The way that stood up to teachers
Me: The way that made him a target whenever he made a show of that strength.
Chaplin: Jack had a secret, and the day he saw the basketball roll to a stop in the center of the silent street, he knew his secret wouldn’t stay his for much longer.

One of the best things about this exercise is that, if you get really into it (because maybe you’re really a little crazy) you don’t know where your story is going next. You just know that it’s going, and you want to keep it going. You want to keep playing your game and you want to keep it interesting for you and for your imaginary friend. And if you’re really doing it properly, extemporaneously, with no thought or plan, you’ll get pulled into your own story – you’ll probably never make it to novel length using this tool, but you’ll find an idea for a novel at some point and be able to work yourself out of the sticky places in a longer work if writer’s block starts to settle in.

Thirteen ways of looking at a trash compacter repairman.

I really wish that I could take credit for this one, but I can’t. It’s based on Roger Zelazny’s introduction to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Zelazny came up with an odd sort of phrase as a wry way of examining the versatility of Dick’s fiction. I’ve appropriated the clever beginning of his introduction as an interesting way to approach storytelling. Here’s what Zelazny has to say:

“(1) Once there was a man who repaired trash compactors because that was what he loved doing more than anything else in the world –

(2) Once there was a man who repaired trash compactors in a society short o n building materials, where properly compacted trash could be used as an architectural base –

(3) Once there was a man who hated trash compactors but repaired them for a living to keep his manic wife in tranquilisers so that he did not have to spend so much time with his mistress, who was less fun now that she had converted to the new religion –

(4) Once there was a man who in purposely misassembling the trash compactors he haded, produced a machine which –

It is no good. I can’t do it. I can play the Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Trash Compactor Repairman Game, but I canot turn it into a story at once puzzling, poignant, grotesque, philosophical, satirical, and fun. There is a very special way of doing this and the first step in its mastery involves being Philip K. Dick.” (4)

Okay, well, none of us can claim to be Philip K. Dick (unless you’re reading this and you’re the missing android version of Dick that someone made in the early eighties – which would be awesome, but if so, please go home: you’ve been scaring people for three decades now.) Putting aside the fact that you’re (likely) not Philip K. Dick, try to play the Trash Compactor Repairman Game. Play it for seven rounds the first time, instead of thirteen. Play it for three rounds. But try to play.

It’s very unlikely that you’ll write a Hugo Award winning story by playing this game (that’s okay too, Dick relied on methamphetamines and a fair dose of batshit insanity to write his stories, not whimsical storytelling exercises) but you’ll write something, and then you’ll write it differently, with more depth, and again but with better characters, and again with more feeling, and again.

This exercise isn’t an attempt to start a novel from scratch (even though that’s eventually what it can turn into) – it’s an attempt to get you to use your imagination. And it’s an attempt to get you to tell a story: not a brave story, not a hero’s story, but just the story of a Trash Compactor Repairman, and maybe one who becomes his own hero.

These exercises may sound silly, you may think they’re stupid, but they’re all getting back to one essential core goal: tell me a fucking story, and while you’re at it, make it a good one. That’s all that narrative is, that all that it should be – individuals passing through the dark places in the world before coming together into the light, with stories to tell about their adventures.

This finishes up my blogs on narrative, but I’ll be back on Saturday the 31st with an extra blog – it’s going to be based on this one. I’m going to do these exercises for homework, for practice, and to see what I can write (though I’m only going to play 5 rounds of the Trash Compactor Repairman Game because it seems that writing fewer than 500 words in a single sitting is a bit of a stretch for me) and to share it with you. I invite you to do the same, to practice, write, and share: choose one or all of these exercises and post them in the comments of my Saturday blog, and let’s use that space to workshop a little.

Thanks for reading, See you Saturday, and have fun. Write something. Play. Make up imaginary friends and visit imaginary worlds. Have adventures. And keep telling stories.

Cheers,
- Alli

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.3 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

As promised, I’m back with more on narrative, and this time I’ll actually be getting into a few specifics. Because I’m getting into specifics, this blog is about three thousand words long, and for that I have two things to say to you: I’m sorry; deal with it.

We’ve covered the fact that we all encounter narrative everywhere, and we’ve discussed that there are many forms that narrative takes, as well as many things you should and shouldn’t do to improve narrative in your writing. This week I’m here to talk about making narrative work in different written media – I’ll be covering narrative in poetry, fiction, academic and creative essays, and drama (briefly and badly – I’m not much of a dramatist.)

I decided to start with narrative in poetry because I have a lot to say about it. We at AFLM get a lot of poetry submissions, and sadly we have to reject a lot of poetry submissions. I want to give you aspiring poets an insight into one of the most common complaints we have about the poetry we reject – it goes something like this: “I liked a lot of images in this piece, and the language was good, but it just doesn’t say anything.”

I have this complaint about a lot of poetry: I’m not just complaining about the submissions we’re seeing, or the poems I hear in workshops, or the poems presented in creative writing classes – I’m bitching about the same thing on the poetry pages of The New Yorker and American Poetry and in poetry collections for the last twenty (at least) years. A prevailing attitude in poetry in the last few years has been that it doesn’t have to actually DO anything so long as it looks good doing nothing. This attitude is bullshit, and is roughly equivalent to cramming a Geo engine into a Maserati. If it’s crap, it’s crap, and no amount of chrome or styling will fix it.

I believe that poetry should always do something, say something, or reexamine something. Let’s look at one of the ballsiest poets we published, Ben Jefferson, who had the sack to submit a 9-word-poem to our magazine, and whom we published based on the sheer chutzpah of that submission. His poem “Eros and Psyche” goes like this:

“When Love gazed on Psyche
He fell into himself.”

What I like about this poem is that on the strength of allusion alone the nine words it’s made up of tell a story – Jefferson gets you to completely reexamine the whole of the Psyche myth (and hopefully the modern concept of psyche, the old concept of love, and by omission Narcissus) with a few words. Even though this poem is more clever than it is deep, it tells a complete story and asks for depth from its readers – and in nine words it does a hell of a lot more than 250 lines of purple verse that describe disconnected images to no purpose.

If you can maintain a similar effect over more than a few lines that's great. There's a reason that dear Uncle Walt is our poster boy - take a look through “Song of Myself” and experience not only a narrative, but an autobiography in poetry that reaches beyond the self and into a national consciousness. In other words, Father Graybeard was a master of narrative in poetry, so you should read more of his work - it can only help.

What makes Whitman fantastic in his use of narrative in poetry is his (mostly) delicate touch. Even though Whitman is a constant presence in “Song of Myself” he doesn’t impose himself on you with his voice, he allows you to get to know him through his vision. By way of contrast, in much of Poe’s poetry his narrative styling is too obvious to want to emulate (see "The Raven" as the most egregious offender) but Poe makes up for that by essentially creating mystery narrative right out of his ass, because he simply fucking felt like it.

Poe’s fiction is a good source to focus on for narrative because it is trying to do one very specific thing (creep you the fuck out) and it succeeds remarkably well. Poe’s characters are sometimes a little thin, his prose is frequently (brilliantly) overwrought, and his narrators are balls-out crazy, but just sane enough to hook you behind them and drag you screaming through his short fiction. Poe’s narration is personal because it’s trying to do one, excruciatingly hard thing (guarantee you have nightmares about mundane objects for the rest of your life) and that works best with a personal relation of the stories.

Twain, on the other hand, plays with his narrative style and voice a little more. Sure, you can hear the sardonic drawl of a semi-sleazy newspaperman bent on claiming all the world’s great one-liners in the background of almost every work, but go pick up The Adventures of Huckeberry Finn for a moment. Look at any passage where Huck is talking about Jim. The masterful blend of clarity and confusion in Huck’s vision of the world around Jim is the exact opposite of the narrative tone in nearly any passage about youthful misadventure that you’ll find in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Now look at something culled from Puddin’head Wilson, bonus points if it’s something about Roxy or her son, and see if you can spot the predominant attitude of the narrator (hint: while Twain manages to be sweet, salty, and sour in this story, it’s pretty clear that there are some things about which he can only be bitter.) If you’re looking for a golden boy in American Literature, you’re not looking for Twain, but if you want to see some adaptability in an author Samuel L. Clemens is certainly your man. Delicacy isn’t exactly his wellspring in most of his fiction, but he manages to be delicate with surprising adroitness when the situation calls for it. Kindness isn’t his bread and butter, but he can ditch the sarcasm to make a telling point when he needs to. I picked Twain here because he’s a pretty damn brilliant example of flexibility in narrative, and he happens to be only a century or so removed from modern readers.

If you want another, less literary, more contemporary, example of someone who can play narrative in novels like a fiddle, check out some Stephen King. In a lot of King’s books the narration follows the same pattern but in some (Gerald’s Game, The Eyes of the Dragon, Everything’s Eventual, It and most especially in The Bachman Books) King reaches into his methodology, strangles it a bit, and comes back with a way of telling a story that you’d never imagine coming from the man who wrote Christine, In a Buick 8, and the story that eventually became the awful movie Trucks, three pieces of fiction about homicidal cars.

Hold on a second. The man wrote three stories about murderous cars. And a story about murderous cell phones. Murderous rats. Murderous fog. Murderous governments. Murderous Gypsy curses. Murderous aliens. Scary-ass murderous clown-spider-alien things. Murderous alter egos. Murderous dead pets. When you really break it down, Stephen King has written the same story (“X” wants to kill you in the worst way imaginable) at least a hundred times. Really think about that. His books have topped bestseller lists for decades, he’s won the O. Henry award for short fiction, he’s written sweeping sagas and fantasy stories and the worst dreams in our collective consciousness (at least since someone put fangs and clown makeup on Tim Curry) and he’s done most of that by writing the Same. Basic. Fucking. Story. Over and over again. Never mind any disparaging comments I might have made earlier – this man has sold the same story to millions of people in dozens of books. He’s the fucking president of “People Who are Better at Long Format Narrative than Anyone You Know.”

Now that I’ve completely overawed myself by marveling at King’s immense body of narrative miracle working, I’m going to completely switch gears and go back to Twain. And I might as well totally turn the discussion in a different direction and start talking about essays. One of the best examples of narrative in critical essay writing that I’ve ever seen is Twain’s “The Literary Crimes of James Fenimore Cooper.” (If you haven’t read it I’ll give you a moment to go to Gutenberg.org, one of the best places on the internet, to download the complete Twain anthology that they have available absolutely free – it’ll only save us time in the end.) The “Literary Crimes” essay is some deliciously nasty literary criticism that also collects some of Twain’s finest opinionated vitriol on what was, essentially, the Twilight of the time. Twain’s narrative style throughout the piece is in-your-face, funny, cruel, and genuine. If you can pull this off in an essay for class then I tip my hat to you, because you’re a stupendous badass, but since I sincerely doubt that anyone reading this is as cool as Mark Twain I’ll expound a bit more on how to manage narrative in critical essays.

A lot of professors these days are lamenting the loss of the “I” in student essays. We’re trained from freshman year of high school that the worst word you can include in an essay is a self-referential personal pronoun, and so we tend to avoid it like the plague. I hate that attitude, and many professors do as well because when you use “I” well in an essay you convey greater conviction to your readers and you come across as someone who’s actually invested in your topic.

If you start an essay with “One has to wonder whether Stephanie Meyers had ever read a book before putting pen to paper,” you sound like a wishy-washy librarian. If you start an essay with “I’ve never encountered an author for whom I hold a greater loathing or more ill wishes than Ibsen,” you sound like a determined jerk (possibly a determined librarian jerk) – but you’ve hooked your reader. You hate Ibsen. You think he’s a jackass. You wish that all of his plays would dissolve into ash, and suddenly your reader wants to know why. Now, you can’t follow this up with “I hate Ibsen because I think he sodomized corgi puppies” and expect to be taken seriously by anyone, but if you follow up convicted “I” statements with numerous examples of sexism, stock characters, strained dialogue, and evidence of an utter lack of understanding of any human relationships, you’re on your way to earning some credit with your reader.

You have to be careful with narrative in academic papers – you’re trying to tell a story (i.e. the story of why Ibsen should die in a fire, the story of why Meyers is really just awful, the story of why summer vacation should be extended for at least a month, the story of Jane Austen as an early feminist) without sounding like you’re telling a story. You need to learn how to move through an academic paper in a natural way, introducing your reader to your topic (either slowly or shockingly) before supplying evidence and arguments (it helps to think of your arguments as characters – give them some personality, make them stand out, and use your evidence as setting to let them shine) and eventually reaching a conclusion that becomes inevitable as the narrative in your essay comes to a climax (inevitability is key here – surprise endings in academic essays are as ill advised as they are in romantic comedies; they’re proof of poor planning and generally a buzzkill.)

So that’s the academic side of essay writing – what about the creative side? Narrative in creative essays is perplexing. A lot of it depends on whether you’re writing about yourself or someone else, and what the purpose of the essay is. If you’re writing a creative essay about yourself then you should go to great lengths to tell your story the way you really would tell your story – seriously, record yourself telling the story, transcribe that recording and clean it up for publication. This will get you that much sought-after tinge of “authenticity” in creative nonfiction. If you’re writing about someone or something else your narrative should be shaped to showcase your subject – you are less important in this sort of essay than your subject is, but your opinion about what your subject says about the world is vital – tell the story the way you see it, but allow yourself to fade into the background (for how to do this, search me – I’m quite bad at this sort of thing – but take some cues from “Song of Myself” because, as mentioned above, Whitman was amazing at telling you how he saw the world by literally telling you about the things he saw in the world.)

Finally, I’m moving on to another topic I don’t know much about – narrative in drama. There are plenty of reasons I’m not the best source of advice on this subject, primarily the fact that I can’t stand live theatre, but I do have at least a couple of suggestions for you hopeful dramatists out there.

Drama is storytelling without the boring business of actually writing out all the crap that goes with a story. You’ve got dialogue and plot, and that’s really about it – even character is, to some extent, out of your hands and in the dubious grasp of the actors. So how do you make storytelling work if you’re not going to write, you know, an actual story?

Number one, for me, is chorus characters. I’m not talking about girls in stockings kicking dangerously high, I’m talking the about masked Greeks who used to stand on the sides of the stage and tell everyone what the hell was going on. Choruses haven’t been popular in the original sense in drama for quite some time now, but my favorite plays (read: the only plays I can really stand to read or watch) incorporate some chorus element. A fantastic example of this is Hamlet. Hamlet doesn’t run around with a bunch of dudes in sheets shouting out his plans over his shoulder – he does it himself. Hamlet’s soliloquies are his chorus – they tell you where the plot is going, why he’s thinking what he’s thinking, and they assure you (time and time again) that he’s not just batshit crazy. Want a different example? Oscar Wilde. In The Importance of Being Ernest Algy and Jack spend a lot of time vocalizing their plans, plots, motivations and ardent desires. This isn’t left up to the actors – you can’t trust the actors with this kind of stuff – Wilde wrote down all the pertinent narrative in what are, basically, superfluous speeches so that the audience could read more into the story than simply the action that was happening on stage. More examples? How about Tennessee Williams – is there any reason to provide all of the rehashings of character history unless it’s to fill in narrative gaps that are created by the lack of a narrator? Try a musical on for size – in Little Shop of Horrors the songs pick up a lot of the narrative duties, but not as much as the bloody she-bopping urchins, who step into the literal (and original) role of a chorus.

Another element that helps drama with narrative is setting – you can do this with words, like Shakespeare, Marlowe and most other Renaissance dramatists did (having your characters tell the audience that they’re on a battlefield, and how they’re shocked at the smoking ruin of war, works in building character as well as moving your story more into a story-telling realm) or you can do this with physical set changes and props (but you still need to tell people what room or forest or well they’ve walked into in order to suspend disbelief and keep your audience firmly ensconced in the story.)

I think I’ve run out of steam here, and said as much as I can reasonably (or unreasonably) expect anyone to read in a single blog. I’m going to leave off with the big question: what doesn’t work in narrative? A lot. You’ll find it, as you practice and grow in your writing. You’ll find that there are a lot of techniques that don’t work for you, and you’ll find many that do. But as you continue to write the field of “doesn’t work” will continually narrow as the field of “does work” continues to expand for you as a writer.

So long as you’re not Ibsen. Seriously. Fuck Ibsen.

Thanks for reading such a bloody long blog, and I’ll be back next week with exercises to improve your narrative technique, which should finish off my weeks-long exploration of narrative.

Until then, Cheers.

- Alli

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part Five – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

Humans are a social species, and what that really means for our society for the last 80 thousand years or so is that we’re a vocal species. We talk constantly. We frequently talk out of necessity – from a need for information, acknowledgment of instructions, informing others of danger, and so on – but conversations that we enjoy the most are centered around arguing and storytelling. These kinds of talking translate into two fields of study (with a fair amount of overlap) that we work with in English classes: rhetoric and narrative. Rhetoric is a complicated field of study with lots of rules and schools and scholarly schisms that I don’t have the degree to get into – I’ll leave that to Jack, Eric and Ryan to hash out when they feel like getting into a drawn out debate. Narrative, though, is a frustratingly diverse concept that stymies the writers of everything from novels to haiku – and that’s what I’ll be talking about here.

Think of your friend who tells great stories. Everyone has one of these friends. He’s the guy who makes his anecdote about going to the mall on Christmas Eve into a forty-five minute tale that is alternately hilarious and harrowing, enthralling throughout, endlessly amusing and worthy of reiteration for years to come. She’s the girl whose stories about high school make you choke with laughter and burn with shame, effortlessly plunging you into memories of your own high school experience. These are the friends who never lamely wind down from a monologue with “well, I guess you had to be there,” because listening to them talk convinces you that you were there. These people are blessed with an unusual (sometimes learned, sometimes native) understanding of narrative. All that narrative really means (literally, when you get down to the Latin root) is “to recount.”

So how do you make narrative work in your writing? Well, there are lots of ways - there are all kinds of different voices and perspectives and chronologies that you can get into in order to make your work work, the trick is figuring out what works for your specific piece.

One of my favorite examples of the power of narrative experimentation is Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction is a wonderfully entertaining movie, but only because of the non-linear storytelling – if you watch the whole thing chronologically (maybe leaving the Christopher Walken scene as a flashback instead of the start of the film) Pulp Fiction is actually really boring. There’s no mystery to it, everything (except for the freaks in the pawn shop) makes sense and you end up with a pretty dull day-in-the-life flick with Butch as an interloping antagonist. But because Tarantino screwed with the order you end up with an intense ball of oddities an a wide range of intriguing antiheroes whose lives touch on and affect each other as a result of divergent motivation and the unifying element of Marcellus Wallace.

Now, just because it works for Tarantino and Pulp Fiction doesn’t mean that non-linear storytelling will work for your short story (or your poem, or your essay, or even other Tarantino films – his biggest critics in the last few years have been complaining that he’s come to rely on the non-linear gimmick to tell stories that are dull even when they are chopped to pieces.)

But if your work is missing something, consider what might happen if you re-order chapters or pieces to present aspects of your characters outside of the chronology of their story. It won’t work for everything, but it will make you consider what works in the story you’ve got, and what you need to add some more polish to.

But linearity is only one tiny aspect of narrative. Voice is a bigger part, and a more complicated one. We’ve all heard about the first-person omniscient voice, third-person narrators, and a whole slew of other bullshit that is primarily discussed in high school or lower-division college English classes. In upper division classes and serious writing groups focus less on the actual “proper” names and types of voice and more on the more literal “voice” of the narrator: who is talking to the reader? Do you tell your story through a character? Is that character trustworthy? Do you tell your story through your voice? Or through an unnamed narrator who might be you? Does your audience trust you? Should they? These are the questions that really matter when you’re working on narrative.

One of the best historical examples of this is The Canterbury Tales, which is not only written by Chaucer but is also narrated by the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim, and the potential distance between Chaucer the author and the character of Chaucer the Pilgrim has been the subject of Academic debate for centuries, with good reason: Chaucer the narrating Pilgrim is untrustworthy as a narrator which casts interesting light on the stories he tells in the Tales that might otherwise be devoid of interest (especially the essentially stolen tales that feature virtually no changes from their folklore origins) and gives the whole work a wonderful recounting air – by including himself as a character Chaucer tells his audience “I was there, so listen and hear what I saw” and by making his character untrustworthy (but more trustworthy than the other narrators in the tales) he creates drama and intrigue in a very contrived frame story.

But looking back over this blog so far I see that I’ve said a lot of words without saying very much about writing, so I guess I’m going to break off now, leaving you with a condensed history and definition of narrative, and I’ll be back next Sunday with some actual advice for you about making narrative work in your writing.

Thanks for reading, sorry I’m late, and I’ll see you next week.

Cheers,
Alli