Open and empty
heart with a full measure of
empathy and love.
Top of young tree broken by human hand just leaves are budding out.
Touch Nature’s beauty;
even the hand that twists the
tree free of its growth.
[Editor’s note: I believe it was the late Rodney Dangerfield who had a comedy routine based on “I don’t get no respect.” The lack of respect could come from anybody, anywhere, including his wife. Below is a playwright Rodney could empathize with. He writes to Dear Abby, and she responds. I have known one or two other writers in the same situation. Maybe you, do, too.]
Sometimes respect is hard to come by for a writer, or a comic. Just ask Rodney Dangerfield.
I have won this prize four times – more than any other writer in the history of the contest. But is my family impressed? Not at all! My wife told me she thinks I write everything the same way and have simply repeated myself four times.
I am up in years. It’s unlikely I will ever again win this prize. So how do I respond to such indifference? What do you do when you feel you have accomplished something important and the response is, “so what else is new?”
–Looking for Validation in Florida
DEAR LOOKING FOR VALIDATION: My hat’s off to you. That you have won this prize more than any other writer in the history of the contest is a notable achievement. Attend the production, take your well-earned bow in the spotlight, and accept that the less you look to your wife for validation, the happier your life will be.
888888
It wasn’t fair. Not only did he have a nickname he didn’t like – Kibbey – but he was also sleeping in the stable with the horses. Horse and hay, flatulence and flies, though it seemed odd that there were so many flies at night. He wondered if a fly got zapped by lightning, would it be resurrected.
Even the popcorn they delivered to him was stale and a little soggy from the humidity it picked up from the air. He had a bag of his own, but it had started raining again, so he couldn’t pop it outside. He looked around to see if the blacksmith’s workshop was part of the stables or nearby.
There was not a blacksmith’s forge, so he was on his own to create a fire.
He understood that the Kidd was the hero, having shot the pistol out of the floor-faced man’s hand. He knew that kibitzers were not easily or fully accepted into society. They were witnesses and scribes, and they reported to an authority most didn’t know about or understand. He certainly wasn’t sure why he had been selected. His family were not kibitzers. Nor any of his friends. And when they came in the middle of the night and told him he was selected, they did not give him a chance to say goodbye to his wife and two sons. Only a short note, quickly scribbled. It read: I’ve been selected. Don’t wait up.
He wasn’t sure how long ago that was, what his wife was like now, if his sons even remembered him.
The Kibitzer piled some hay in one area of mostly dirt. It was turning cold. He’d need the fire for more than popcorn.
Popcorn was his only solace. Bags of it turned up at the oddest times in the oddest places. He took it as a sign he was doing a good job.
He kept a book of matches dry and buried deep in a saddle bag. They were hard to get and he usually sparked a fire with a piece of flint and a piece of steel he carried; but they were both wet from rain. He was also too tired to try.
He added a piece of dried horse manure to the hay pile.
He found the matches, walked back to the pile of straw and dried other things and selected one from the box.
It was then somebody, head draped in a hood, stepped into the stable and tossed a torch on a larger pile of hay nearby. As the man left, he said, “Don’t wait up.”
At least that’s what the Kibitzer thought he said. The words were muffled by the hood. The words stunned him. By the time the Kibitzer recovered, the fire had spread to other parts of the stable, and the culprit was gone, and the Kibitzer was trapped.
(To be continued.)
Filed under humor, kibitzer, kidd, science fiction, story, storytelling, western, word play, words, writing
“Frank, what are we?”
“We’re pumpkins, Ike.”
“But if we’re pumpkins, how come we’re white?”
Frank (left) and Ike (right) discuss life as a pumpkin.
“Halloween came and went, and when Christmas came along, they decorated us up as snowmen. Or at least the heads of them.”
“Oh, nice, Frank.”
“If you say so.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ike, just wait and see.”
#
Ike tells Frank they're changing.
“Frank, are you still there?”
“Yes, Ike.”
“We’re changing. I feel it on the inside.”
“If you say so.”
#
“Frank, look at you.”
“I can’t see myself, Ike. I can’t even see you now.”
“Frank, I’m scared.”
“I know.”
Ike becoming undone.
“Frank, what are we?”
“We’re friends.”
“I mean, what are we? What are we becoming?”
“We’re pumpkins, Ike. We’ve been pumpkins. We are pumpkins. We will always be pumpkins.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“That’s good to know, Frank. Good to know.”
“Good bye, Ike.”
“Frank, don’t leave me.”
“Frank … Frank ….”
Frank undone.
Filed under Found story, pumpkins, story, storytelling, words, writing
[Editor’s note: the essay below is taken from an e-mail newsletter sent out by the writer Bruce Hale. you can find his web site at: http://www.brucehalewritingtips.com/. You can also sign up for his e-newsletter at that site. Each electronic newsletter comes with other information, including a writing joke.]
By Bruce Hale
So you’ve finished that first draft and let your story marinate in its own juices for a while, and now it’s time for revision. Only question is: where to start?
With a picture book, that’s not too terribly daunting. But with a longer novel, you’d be well served to devise a strategy before plunging into those narrative hickets that can swallow the unwary writer. I suspect everyone has his or her own favored approach to revision. Here’s the one I’ve found most useful…
1. FIRST READ
First time through, the hardest thing is to *just* read your story and take notes. No line edits, no grammar corrections, no paragraph revisions — just reading. But if you want to be able to see the whole forest, instead of the individual trees, this approach is vital.
By all means, take copious notes. “Tighten the opening on page 43;” “wonky sentence on page 12, first paragraph;” “fix the plot logic in Chapter 18.” These are all helpful. And they prepare the way for…
2. FIRST REVISION
Once you’ve waded through your story and taken copious notes, congratulate yourself. It’s not as bad as you thought, right? (We hope.) With this optimistic thought, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and plunge into wholehearted revision.
The first time through, work on larger issues: plot holes, character inconsistencies, gaps in story logic, slow scenes that need to be trimmed, and so forth. You can always do the fine polishing later.
Revise sequentially if you can, rather than skipping around. For any sections that require you to write new material, use the same method you would in a first draft: write it fast and sloppy. After all, you can always fix it in the NEXT revision.
3. READ-ALOUD REVISION
Taking the time to read your work aloud may seem redundant at this point, but it’s necessary. You won’t believe how many errors you’ll catch. Homonyms, awkward phrasing, missing words, echoes (unintentionally repeated words) — all these will pop out at you like Halloween skeletons at a haunted house.
This is the revision where you can really focus on the sound and rhythm of your writing. Listen for those areas that sound clunky and don’t really roll off the tongue — that’s your cue to break out the belt sander and make things smooooth.
4. DIALOG REVISION
Once the story is as good as you can make it, and you’ve read aloud to catch hidden glitches, it’s time to turn the microscope on your dialog. First, make sure each character speaks differently. Have them use different idioms, word choice and catch phrases — otherwise, they’ll all sound like each other (or like you).
Top-notch authors like Elmore Leonard vary their character dialog so deftly, they don’t even need attributions (he said/she said). It’s that clear who’s speaking. In real life, we all have our own ways of putting things. So just make sure your fictional characters possess that same distinction.
5. FINAL CHECK
Before I send my story off to agent or editor, I usually try to let it sit for a week or so, then do one last read-through, to make sure all my changes fit, and to smooth out any remaining rough edges. This is an ideal time to search for words you overuse. (And we *all* overuse certain pet words.)
For example, I know that I tend to drop in “just” and “only” too often, and I tend to have too many characters shrugging and nodding. A quick search for these words shows me where I’ve overdone it, and a quick fix guards against too much sameness in the manuscript.
And that’s about all I can bear to write on the subject of revision right now. I think you know why. Yes — time to get back to revising my latest story.
Filed under advice column, Bruce Hale, revising, words, writer, writing, writing tip
Rules are like a pathway and can be helpful.
Your protagonist needs to be taking action, not just reacting to the events of the story / novel / film / play. Of course, there is always one major exception to this. That is at the very beginning. At that point, the protagonist is usually reacting to what is referred to as the inciting incident. For example, think of the first Star Wars movie. Luke Skywalker is “stuck” on his uncle’s farm in an out-of-the-way part of the galaxy. He longs for something else, but feels like he will never get it. Then storm troopers arrive, ransack the farm, kill his uncle and aunt, and as it puts it: “There is nothing for me here now.” So, to borrow from another story about a young boy: he lights out for the territories. So, at the start of your story, it is usually the antagonist that takes the first action, to which the protagonist reacts, and then begins action to restore the balance upset by the antagonist.
It usually works better if you show how a character feels about another one rather than telling. If boy loves his dog, how does he show it? By feeding the dog, playing with it, letting it sleep with him (especially if his parents object), or in spite of having allergies which the dog dander might aggravate.
Every scene has three senses.
Give your main characters distinguishing physical characteristics, or some sort of distinguishing characteristics. Certainly, hair color is a very easy characteristic, and can help you, the author, tell your characters apart, regardless of their sex.
Readers want to at the very least empathize with your protagonist and her situation and the easiest way to do this is to make her likeable. That doesn’t meant she should be perfect. Perfection won’t help your character.
There are other ways to make your protagonist empathetic. One, make her the best at whatever she does. Two, put her in extreme peril early on in the story. This could be mental or physical, though physical might be easier to show. Three, make her the underdog. Almost everybody has a soft spot for the underdog, even a smart alecky one. Four, use humor. Nothing like humor to break the ice and break the barrier between protagonist and reader.
It is not, as it is sometimes referred to: “As you know, Fred” exchanging of information. It is not one chemist telling another chemist something they should both already know about chemical reactions.
It is also not rambling speech that goes nowhere, or tails off, or full of the “ahs” and “ohs” and other verbal ticks we all have.
Dialogue is not as easy as it sounds.
No real-life conversation would work verbatim in a story. Dialogue is “heighten” speech. It gives the impression of everyday speech, but with “half the fat” so to say.
Also, the best dialogue is often not about what the dialogue is about. Or, to quote Bob McKee, from his writing book Story: “If the scene is about what the scene is about, then the scene is dead.” In short, dialogue is often as much about what is NOT said as what is said.
All of the above is part of what makes dialogue tough to master.
This can be overdone, both in the number of times used and as a way to sneak in adverbs and adjectives. Example: “Hey,” Bob said, waving his hand to get her attention. He straightened his tie as his date approached. This lets the reader know that Bob might be a little nervous, that this could be his first date with the woman. What you don’t want to do is go: “Hey,” Bob said, waving his hand excitedly to get her attention. He straightened his tie nervously as she approached.
Speech ties to speech acts is also the simple matter of if there is an action that follows somebody speaking, the action is that of the person speaking. Example: “Hey,” Bob said. She waved her hand to get his attention. Unless Bob is short for Bobbie is short for Roberta and “Bob” is how she is usually referred to and the reader knows this, the above is one person speaking followed by another person doing an action.
Within a paragraph, stick to one character’s point of view. If you need to switch points of view, start a new paragraph.
Each scene or chapter has its own small arc to it. A chapter might have several small arcs to them. Within that arc, there is movement: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. That movement is generally from a negatively charge beginning to a positively charged ending, or from a positive beginning to a negative ending.
Example, if in scene A, your protagonist is trying to get to a friend’s house, the end of that scene will be when he gets there or doesn’t. But along the way, he shouldn’t stop to buy a Mother’s Day card for his mother, a sweet role for his breakfast, stop and read the newspaper (whatever that is), or anything else that interrupts the flow. Certainly, the protagonist can run into obstacles, but the obstacles should be in importance to the scene and story. For example, if the protagonist getting to his friends house is a minor part of the story, it should not be weighed down with major obstacles. The only possible exception to this is if you are writing a humorous story, the obstacles can be out of proportion, but they should still be weighed against the overall flow of the story. After all, a humorous story with one scene that is much more funny than the rest of the story will only make the rest of the story seem flat.
If a character has a characteristic on page one, she should still have that characteristic on page 10 and throughout the story.
Know the rules, but also know when to bend or even break them. God won’t smite you and sometimes it’s necessary. But it should not be the first thing you try and like seasoning in a soup often works best when done in small amounts. A little salt can go a long.
Writing books to consider:
Stein on Writing by Sol Stein
Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass
Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee.
Some novels by Glenn Meade:
The Second Messiah: a Thriller
Snow Wolf
Resurrection Day
Web of Deceit
The Devil’s Disciple.
Young writer at work.
Some novels by the web log editor:
Not one. Not yet, anyway. Working on it.
Disclaimer: any errors are mine. Somebody has to own them.
Filed under Glenn Meade, Knoxville Writers' Guild, writer, writing, writing tip
[Editor’s note: the essay below is taken from an e-mail newsletter sent out by the writer Bruce Hale. you can find his web site at: http://www.brucehalewritingtips.com/. You can also sign up for his e-newsletter at that site. Each electronic newsletter comes with other information, including a writing joke.]
How many times have you heard that the first page of your story is the most important? Too many, I’d say.
Not that a compelling opening isn’t vital — it is. But with all that focus on crafting a killer beginning, it’s easy to forget about making an awesome ending. Endings may not get as much attention in how-to books as openings, but they are just as hard to do right.
One thing to bear in mind: An effective ending needn’t necessarily be happy, but it must be SATISFYING. In other words, whether or not your hero gets what he wants, the reader must get what *she* wants.
While you’re working on your ending’s SQ (Satisfaction Quotient), here are some key points to keep in mind.
SQ CHECKLIST:
– Has the asked question been answered?
No matter how unstated or simple it may be, every book has a theme. As part of that, the story poses an implicit (sometimes explicit) question that must be answered by the end of the book.
Whether it’s “Can a girl and a vampire find happiness and true love?” or “Will Samantha ever get her big red wagon?” that question has been brewing in the reader’s mind throughout your story. Be sure your ending has conclusively answered it.
– Have all subplots been resolved?
Before you respond with the inevitable, “Duh, of course!” be sure all elements of your story have a true sense of closure. If any
subplots or characters are left hanging, your readers won’t be fully satisfied.
Readers need to know not only that the hero’s main problem has been resolved, but that the supporting characters and villain are taken care of, too. Maybe that’s why so many concluding chapters are stuffed full of, “Dr. Evil was caught at the border, and Hannah? Why she married that cute jockey.” No need to be that blatant, but do be that comprehensive.
– Have you given the reader something expected?
A satisfying ending must fulfill the reader’s expectation. If you’re writing a mystery, the expectation is that the murderer will be brought to justice. If a romance, that the protagonist will find true love. Mess with these expectations at your peril, but also consider…
– Have you given the reader something surprising?
The best endings leave you with an “I knew that would happen, but not like THAT” feeling. A pat, expected ending feels boring, a letdown, even if it delivers on a reader’s expectations. So it’s essential to unearth some kind of surprise in the WAY the story resolves.
I just read an adult mystery where the detective was haunted by an almost supernaturally evil man he’d first met as a child. You expect that man to be defeated by the detective, but instead he was struck by lightning and died in a Biblical wrath-of-God way that was surprising and satisfying — and right for the book. I got the ending I wanted, but not in the way I’d expected it.
– Have you echoed the opening?
This isn’t necessary, but it is a nice-to-have. If you can echo some image or scene from the beginning, but have it take on a different meaning, that’s the icing on the cake. You’ll notice many movies use this technique.
In SAVE THE CAT, his excellent book on story and screenwriting, Blake Snyder says: “The final image of a movie is the opposite of the opening image. It is your proof that chance has occurred and that it’s real.” For example, in the movie Miss Congeniality, the opening image is tomboy Sandra Bullock, surrounded by boys, but not fully fitting in. The final image is of her surrounded by women and fitting in as herself.
And if you can come up with that kind of ending… your SQ will go through the roof, and readers will thank you!
Filed under Bruce Hale, endings, writer, writing, writing tip
By Pico Iyer, Special to the Los Angeles Times
January 8, 2012
“Your sentences are so long,” said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn’t want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn’t have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment.
When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn’t get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV. Facts were what we needed most. And if you watched the world closely enough, I believed (and still do), you could begin to see what it would do next, just as you can with a sibling or a friend; Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie aren’t mystics, but they can tell us what the world is going to do tomorrow because they follow it so attentively.
Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).
“There was a little stoop of humility,” Alan Hollinghurst writes in a sentence I’ve chosen almost at random from his recent novel “The Stranger’s Child,” “as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted.” You may notice — though you don’t have to — that “humility” has rather quickly elided into “affectation,” and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence, and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things.
Many a reader will have no time for this; William Gass or Sir Thomas Browne may seem long-winded, the equivalent of driving from L.A. to San Francisco by way of Death Valley, Tijuana and the Sierras. And a highly skilled writer, a Hemingway or James Salter, can get plenty of shading and suggestion into even the shortest and straightest of sentences. But too often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude. The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity’s greatest adornment).
If we continue along this road, whole areas of feeling and cognition and experience will be lost to us. We will not be able to read one another very well if we can’t read Proust’s labyrinthine sentences, admitting us to those half-lighted realms where memory blurs into imagination, and we hide from the person we care for or punish the thing that we love. And how can we feel the layers, the sprawl, the many-sidedness of Istanbul in all its crowding amplitude without the 700-word sentence, transcribing its features, that Orhan Pamuk offered in tribute to his lifelong love?
To pick up a book is, ideally, to enter a world of intimacy and continuity; the best volumes usher us into a larger universe, a more spacious state of mind akin to the one I feel when hearing Bach (or Sigur Rós) or watching a Terrence Malick film. I cherish Thomas Pynchon’s prose (in “Mason & Dixon,” say), not just because it’s beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and the predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn’t dared to contemplate. I can’t get enough of Philip Roth because the energy and the complication of his sentences, at his best, pull me into a furious debate in which I see a mind alive, self-questioning, wildly controlled in its engagement with the world. His is a prose that banishes all simplicities while never letting go of passion.
Not every fashioner of many-comma’d sentences works for every one of us — I happen to find Henry James unreadable, his fussily unfolding clauses less a reflection of his noticing everything than of his inability to make up his mind or bring anything to closure: a kind of mental stutter. But the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can’t get your mind, or most of your words, around.
When I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville — and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do — I feel as if I’m stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world. It’s as if I’ve been rescued, for a moment, from the jostle and rush of the 405 Freeway and led back to something inside me that has room for certainty and doubt at once.
Watch Dillard light up and rise up and ease down as she finds, near the end of her 1974 book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” “a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down.”
I love books; I read and write them for the same reason I love to talk with a friend for 10 hours, not 10 minutes (let alone, as is the case with the average Web page, 10 seconds). The longer our talk goes, ideally, the less I feel pushed and bullied into the unbreathing boxes of black and white, Republican or Democrat, us or them. The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas or nays.
There’ll always be a place for the short sentence, and no one could thrill more than I to the eerie incantations of DeLillo, building up menace with each reiterated note, or the compressed wisdom of a Wilde; it’s the elegant conciseness of their phrases that allow us to carry around the ideas of an Emerson (or Lao Tzu) as if they were commandments or proverbs of universal application.
But we’ve got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.
The long sentence opens the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut. Though the sentence I sent my copy editor was as short as possible. No.
Iyer is the author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head,” published this month.
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
Filed under long sentence, sentence, writer, writing, writing tip
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