Tag Archives: creative writing prompts

How to Write Sentences that Offer Unexpected Views

7 Jul
Natashia Deón is a Los Angeles writer who directs the Dirty Laundry Lit reading series. Her Facebook posts about her son were republished in Rockwell's Camera Phone.

Natashia Deón is a Los Angeles writer who directs the Dirty Laundry Lit reading series. Her Facebook posts about her son were republished in Rockwell’s Camera Phone.

I recently heard a discussion on a panel of writers, editors, and agents about the difference between literary and non-literary fiction. Someone said, as they always do when this question is posed, that literary fiction puts more focus on sentences, that it’s more interested in language. I agree with this statement, mostly, but it’s also vague. What does it mean to be interested in language? What do great sentences look like? The answer isn’t as clear as we’d like to think. Does language mean big words, as my freshman composition students like to think? Does it mean “poetic” language (whatever that means), as I often heard as a MFA student? Here’s another possibility: literary language is active on a sentence level. The very structure of the sentences elicits a response from the reader—not an intellectual response, though that may be the case as well, but an uncontrolled grunt or gasp. Good sentences catch our attention. Some of the most interesting sentences I’ve read lately were written by Natashia Deón. They were originally written as Facebook posts but were republished as stand-alone pieces in Rockwell’s Camera Phone, where you can read them here and here.

How the Sentences Work

Here is the first post, containing four sentences:

People will ask, “If your son uses more sign language than you know and doesn’t speak, how do you know what he wants?” This, just now, means, “Don’t go to the post office, mom, unless you leave your cell phone with me and another bowl of Cheerios. Dry. No milk.”

I’m claiming these are beautiful, interesting sentences, and perhaps you find this surprising. The language is straightforward, not lyric, and describes mundane things: sign language, post office, Cheerios. So what makes it noteworthy? The answer, in my view: The way the sentences pivot. The first sentence (“People will ask…”) asks a simple question. The second sentence answers it, and that answer is given in a direct way: “This, just now, means.” And what it means it something simple and clear: “leave your cell phone with me and another bowl of Cheerios.” But then something happens in the third and fourth sentences. The answer in the second sentence is clarified: “Dry. No milk.” Again, the language is simple and clear, but it has also moved in an unexpected direction. Remember, this information is being communicated from son to mother through sign language that only one of them knows. In other words, the first sentence has set up a problem: the speaker can’t understand the language her son speaks. But when we’re told what he’s saying, it’s incredibly specific. The incongruence between the problem and the answer isn’t clear until “Dry. No milk.” In that moment, the sentences pivot. They’ve been moving along in one direction and then, like a hinge, they swing open to offer a new view: the speaker intuits what her son wants because she loves and knows him well, not because of his literal ability to communicate. Here is another post, containing two sentences. Watch for the pivot:

There’s a tiny square of light that comes through our living room window in the morning at about 7:45 a.m. and stays for only about 5 minutes. Big Boy waits for it every day.

Again, the first sentence is clear and straightforward. So is the second sentence. But the connection is unexpected. The square of light is mundane and momentary, barely worth notice—except to the speaker’s son. The sentences are constructed and paired to highlight this unexpected connection. There is a pivot point, and the second sentence swings open.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s structure sentences around a pivot point, using the posts by Natashia Deón as a model. We’ll use two different approaches. Here’s the first:

  1. Pose a question. Make it something straightforward but not too simple, answerable with yes or no. Make it require explanation. Try beginning with “How do you…”
  2. Answer the question (Part 1). Make your answer just as straightforward as the question: “”Like this. Be specific. Imagine that you’re actually speaking to someone. If you answered them with metaphor or abstraction, they’d probably look at you funny. End the sentence with closure so that it can be read as a stand-alone answer. How do you ____? Like this: _____.
  3. Answer the question (Part 2). Add a clarifying note to the answer. This is your pivot. Add a detail that is unexpectedly specific or that shifts the answer in some way. For instance, if the answer takes place within a particular frame (day/night/in a house/in a park), use the pivot to shift the answer out of that frame. Here’s an example: “How do learn to keep your balance on a skateboard? Like this: Stand on it, every day. On the edge of your bathtub.” I don’t make any claim for these sentences’ greatness. But I hope that you can see the construction, the pivot.

Here’s a second approach:

  1. Make a statement about something that exists or happens in the world. It doesn’t really matter what the statement is about. The subject can be small (Water is dripping from the ceiling) or large (Greece is an island in Europe). It can even be vague (Love is kind).
  2. Make a second statement about the subject that contains a word or idea that isn’t implicit in the first statement. In Deón’s sentences about the light, the word wait isn’t implied by the first statement; the light is just predictably there. But when the second sentence introduces wait, we see the light in a new way, as something fleeting and worth seeing. That’s the power of the pivot. Here are two examples. Water is dripping from the ceiling. My brother won’t get out of the shower. The first sentence suggests urgency. The second sentence (and I make no claim for its artfulness) introduces the idea that someone could ignore the emergency. Greece is an island in Europe. When it’s underwater, the entire continent could go under. Again, this is not particularly artful, yet the second sentence does flip the relationships implicit in the first sentence. In the first, Greece is small, but in the second, it’s powerful. (And that is the extent of my political wisdom.) So, think about the relationships or attitudes present in the first sentence. How can you write a second sentence that introduces a contradictory or unexpected relationship or attitude?

Good luck and have fun.

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How to Structure Plot around Lack of Change

1 Jul
Christine Grimes' story, The Window, appeared in 2 Bridges Review, Vol. 4.

Christine Grimes’ story, “The Window,” appeared in 2 Bridges Review, Vol. 4.

Most stories are about change. A character goes about her business, and then an asteroid, dead body, love interest, child, or zombie shows up and everything changes. As a basic narrative structure, the change story is hard to escape. Politics revolves around game changers. At the coffee shop where I write this, KT Tunstall is singing “Suddenly I See,” which suggests that she didn’t see it before, meaning something has changed.

But what about those people who never really change? The wonderful poet Edna St. Vincent Millay once said, “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.” If this is true, and if we want to write stories about people trapped in that one damn thing over and over, then we need a new structure.

A story that demonstrates how that structure might look is Christine Grimes’ “The Window.” It was published at 2 Bridges Review, where you can read it now.

How the Story Works

The story begins in a bar, where the narrator is at a bar, celebrating a birthday:

I flirted with this beer drinking, pool playing, divorced guy, Eddie, who made eyes at me while I played darts. His shaggy brown hair hung in his eyes and when he laughed, his shoulders shook. I maneuvered over to the bar, where he asked my name, then said Gloria sounded pretty. By the end of my darts game, his buddies showed up. I went over to his table to buy him a beer and one of his friends snickered and elbowed him. Couldn’t appreciate the lovin’ a big woman can offer. Eddie just shook his head and said no thanks. I left the beer there anyway. I took a couple shots with Judy, slept on her scratchy old couch, and overslept. So this morning, I borrowed her largest pair of sweat pants and threw on my dirt shirt before driving like an idiot to get to work.

If this was a story about change, then something would happen at work to push the narrator onto a different storyline than she was previously on. And, in fact, this is what happens. Gloria works at a chip factory as a taste tester, assessing chip quality, and on this day her supervisor announces that the factory will begin hosting public tours and Gloria will be featured. In a story about change, this would be an opportunity for something new to happen. Instead, though, the story essentially repeats the structure of the opening scene over and over, with the same result: Gloria gets her hopes up or tries to make the best of a bad situation but eventually gets humiliated. This is how the story ends. So, why isn’t this boring? After all, it’s the same thing over and over. Why does it work?

The answer in how the story makes us buy into the narrator’s point of view. She keeps believing things will be different, and so do we, even at the story’s end. Three boys take the tour and watch Gloria eat chips. Two of the boys make fun of her weight and then walk away. The third boy, one with a crooked nose, doesn’t make fun of her, and we suspect that perhaps he’s different:

His face has a little smile. We make eye contact. He gets me. Maybe he’s interested, maybe impressed, maybe he likes Gornitos. I showboat a little and chew slowly, rubbing the grains against my palate and swallow. The chip’s a little stale, too oily. When I open my mouth for another taste, Crooked Nose unzips his pants and pulls out his limp dick, waving it at me. He sticks out his tongue and licks the glass before he walks out.

The story isn’t about change but, instead, about believing change can happen when it almost certainly will not. This is a key concept to remember. Plot is about confounding a reader’s expectations, not about change.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s structure a story around lack of change, using “The Window” by Christine Grimes as a model:

  1. Write a scene that sums up a character. You’re looking for a moment that makes a character (either the person involved or someone who knows him or her) say “That’s me/him/her in a nutshell.” To write the scene, try thinking about the character in terms of winner or loser. Does the character always succeed? Or not? What is a small moment when the character either gets what she wants or does not get it?
  2. Find new ways to repeat the scene. The key is to think about your character’s motivations. What does he or she want? Don’t worry about what they want most. Instead, just list all of the things they want. Either item on your list offers an opportunity for a scene in which the character will or will not get that desired thing.
  3. Create the expectation that this time is different. The character needs to believe this, of course, but so do the readers. We need to see evidence that something is about to change. Someone is going to give the character the benefit of the doubt or, conversely, not give him what he wants. If you make us believe this time is different, then we’ll be surprised when the scene goes exactly as every other scene has gone.

Good luck and have fun.

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How to Switch Gears and Increase Tension

23 Jun
Katherine Fawcett's Little Washer of Sorrows offers funny, unsettling stories that have drawn comparisons to the stories of Kelly Link.

Katherine Fawcett’s Little Washer of Sorrows offers funny, unsettling stories that have drawn comparisons to the stories of Kelly Link.

One of the easiest mistakes to make as a writer is to write the same thing over and over again. What happens is that we hit on a great idea to start a story (something spooky or funny or weird or sad), and then, when the story hits a lull, we double down on that idea to keep the story going (more spookiness, humor, weirdness, or sorrow). It’s the literary equivalent of saying, “More cowbell.” A better strategy is often to switch up what your story is doing, to step away from your great idea, and that stepping away (or switching gears, depending on your metaphor of choice) can actually increase the story’s tension.

A great example of how switching gears can heighten tension can be found in Katherine Fawcett’s story, “Dire Consequences.” It’s included in her story collection The Little Washer of Sorrows and was first published in Pique, where you can read it now (it’s the third of three stories).

How the Story Works

The story begins with a great idea: a girl doesn’t want to eat her broccoli, and her mother says, “No one’s ever died from eating broccoli.” So the girl eats it. Here is what happens next (it’s the story’s great idea):

“See?” said the mother. “I told you. That wasn’t so bad now, was it?”

The girl didn’t answer. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, went quietly to the couch, curled up under the afghan, and died.

Awesome, right? At that point, the story comes to a natural pause. The girl is dead. Now what? It’d be tempting, as the writer, to up the ante and find ways to immediately keep the weird cause of death going. But, instead, Fawcett does something different:

From that day on, the boy knew he could get anything he wanted. “If I have to do my homework, I’ll die,” he’d tell his mother, and she’d write a note to his teacher. “I’ll die if I can’t have an ice cream cone,” he’d say and she’d get him a large tiger-tiger in a waffle cone. “I will die right now if I can’t ride in that fire truck,” he’d say and she would have a chat with the fire chief and next thing you know the boy would be sitting in the passenger seat, looking out from under a red plastic fireman’s hat, grinning and waving at all his envious friends.

The story has switched gears, from cause of death to consequences of death. Before long, the story switches gears again:

But like mourning and passion, the novelty of the boy’s threats eventually wore off, and the mother could not bear how spoiled he’d become.

“Hey Mum! Mum! I’ll die unless I can have my birthday party in Disneyland,” he said one day. “With all the kids in my class. Plus a few from soccer.”

Enough was enough.

“Quit using that ‘I will die’ stuff with me,” she said. “You will not die. You’re just manipulating me.”

Neither one of them knew if this was true or not, but deep down the boy was scared that she would test it, so he gradually returned to his obedient ways, and she returned to not being such a pushover.

The story has switched gears again by moving from consequences of death to a kind of acceptance of those consequences.

The story keeps changing gears in this way until the very end. When you read to that ending, you’ll see that the story delivers the sort of payout promised by the great idea at the beginning. And you’ll also see that the story moves in a pretty direct line toward that ending—but, when reading the story, that line doesn’t feel direct. For such a short story, it has many parts and movements, each one ratcheting up the tension and emotional stakes by switching gears.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s increase tension by switching gears, using “Dire Consequences” by Katherine Fawcett as a model:

  1. Find the first pause of your story. When we’re writing, we often feel these moments as they arrive. They have a conclusive quality; we write a sentence and automatically add a space break. These are often moments where we hit writer’s block because they mean starting a new section or part of the story, and any new start means, to some extent, inventing something new rather than extending something that you’ve already created. Fawcett handles her first pause with this phrase: From that day on. It has a natural movement toward consequences or effects: the aftershocks of the big quake that starts the story. So, try starting a new section (after the pause and the space break) with this phrase. If something big happened just before the pause, how can you move forward in time and reveal the fallout from that big happening?
  2. Amplify the consequences. E. M. Forster famously wrote that “The king died and then the queen died” is a story while “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The difference between the two is a sense of consequence. Imagine if he filled in that second line: “The king died and then the queen wouldn’t leave her room and she wouldn’t eat and wouldn’t drink and wouldn’t get up to use the chamber pot and wouldn’t clean herself up or put on new clothes or swat the flies, which were considerable by the time she died of grief.” The consequences get stacked on top of one another until they become unsustainable. This is exactly what Fawcett does with the son, who demands to have things so that he won’t die. So, try repeating the basic consequence that you’ve invented. How can you break it down into specific actions that can be repeated?
  3. Change the energy level. What happens when the consequences become unsustainable? Once you’ve created an unsustainable situation, you’re going to hit another natural pause: the situation will resolve itself. Then what? Fawcett switches gears again by changing the energy level of the story from frantic to calm. The kid is freaking out, asking for stuff, and the his mom calls his bluff and they settle into a more sustainable routine, which will, of course, get broken (which will be the next opportunity to change gears). So, how can you dramatically increase or decrease the energy level of your story?

Good luck and have fun.

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How to Make High Concept Stories Unpredictable

16 Jun
Dina Guidubaldi's story collection, How Gone We Got, fits neatly on any bookshelf containing George Saunders or Karen Russell.

Dina Guidubaldi’s story collection, How Gone We Got, fits neatly on any bookshelf containing George Saunders or Karen Russell.

It sometimes seems like the fabulists are taking over the literary world: George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Manuel Gonzales, and Amelia Gray, to name a few. When we talk about these writers’ stories, we tend to focus on the fantastic: on the slightly fantastic (something’s a bit amiss or weird) and incredibly fantastic (zombies at the workplace). But I wonder if that focus is misplaced. Maybe the fantastic elements of these stories simply reflect something about the culture and world they’re written within. From a craft and critical perspective, it might be better to focus on something else: many of these stories use high-concept story plots—plots that contain elements that make them easy to summarize, like, say, Vampires in the Lemon Grove.

Here’s one more writer to add to the fabulist canon: Dina Guidubaldi. Her collection How Gone We Got is as good as anything by the writers mentioned above, and her story “What I Wouldn’t Do” offers a great lesson in how to use a high concept plot and avoid the trap of it becoming predictable. You can read the story online at Superstition Review.

How the Story Works

When I use the term high concept, I’m not referring to any particular genre. The term simply means any story whose premise can distilled to a tagline that often serves as a title: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, The Faery Handbag, Jurassic Park, or One Hundred Years of Solitude. The opposite of high concept is low concept, meaning stories that can’t be easily distilled because they’re about character or world development. They might have catchy titles (Freedom) but are still fairly difficult to summarize (Franzen’s thoughts about America); there just isn’t the same immediate recognition about what the story is about.

The problem with high concept stories is that the story may not be as interesting as its title. After the premise is introduced, the story is basically the same thing over and over again (Snakes on a Plane, Bad Teacher, Horrible Bosses). The trick, then, is finding a way to keep the conceit going in surprising ways. This means that the story may repeat itself or follow a predictable path but that it should have moments of surprise built into that path.

This is exactly what Guidubaldi does in “What I Wouldn’t Do.”

The high concept plot is stated succinctly in the story’s first line: “I wanted to love you better so I bought you a city.”

The rest of the first paragraph establishes the tone of the story:

It was small but shaped like your fingerprint, with a mansion for you in the middle of the whorl. It was hard to find, your mansion, but since I’d mapped it, troweled cement for the foundation, chopped logs for the beams, hammered and nailed and sanded until my hands fell off, lugged stones in a canvas sling with my teeth when they did, hung tapestries and draped velvet, since I did all of that, I had a pretty good idea where it was. I landscaped your rose garden and made your maze. I scissorhanded some topiaries for you in the shape of hearts and souls and kept up with their maintenance too; I was on a tight schedule and you were my hours and my half-pasts.

At this point, many readers will have a pretty good idea where this story is headed. The relationship will either grow or it will end (the basic plot lines for all love stories). As the relationship grows or falls apart, the conceit of the story (the city built for the lover) will also grow or fall apart. Once we read those details that move in either direction, we’re going to think, either consciously or not, “Aha.” Then, we may get bored; we know what will happen next. Guidubaldi follows one of these paths but what she does so well is include details that leap out of the conceit and surprise us in some way.

Here is a good example:

When the narrator’s beloved begins to chafe at all that is being built for her and around her, the narrator says this:

It’s not like you’re a prisoner here, I said. You’re free to walk out of your turret room and down the spiral staircase and through the antechamber and into the foyer and out the front door and past the rosemary and lavender bushes and into the hedge maze and down the cobblestoned circular streets and out into the world.

Personally, I think that line is really funny. I laughed out loud when I read it, and the sheer humor of it surprised me, in part because it reflects an awareness in the narrator of what he’s doing. He’s aware of the story’s high concept and its metaphoric qualities.

In another moment, the fairy-tale nature of the story’s conceit (the city build for the woman) is lowered into the grit of real life:

All bundled up, we went out into the city in a sleigh led by horses that I’d had surgically implanted to be unicorns. The one on the left had developed an abscess around the horn and it smelled bad, so I switched you seats.

And, then, a few lines later: “The horse with the inflamed horn scratched it off on a tree and your answer got lost among the resultant blood and gauze.”

Finally, the characters are allowed to sound like real people and not elements that simply arrived with the conceit like the Fisher Price farmer that comes with the plastic barn. For instance, the narrator tries to paint koi to cover up the fungus that is growing on them, and this dialogue ensues:

Jesus, you said, layering thin slices of cucumber on your eyes as if you were a salad now, too. Go order a pizza. Go back to work. Do what you need to do.

I stared at the tiny eyedropper, at the tainted fish, at my reflection in the murk. This is what I need to do, I said. The fish looked nervously skyward.

I suspect that plenty of real people, including, perhaps, the ones reading this, have spoken those lines or had those lines spoken to them. The conceit, in all of its fantastic absurdity, has been brought into the familiar realm of our real lives. As a result, the story continually makes the reader pause to laugh or cringe, and it’s those moments that make it succeed.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s add surprises to a high-concept story using “What I Wouldn’t Do” by Dina Guidubaldi as a model:

  1. Make the story and characters aware of the conceit. If a characters aren’t aware of the conceit, the reader may eventually become impatient with them. For instance, Manuel Gonzales has a story, “Life on Capra II,” about characters who are actually characters in a video game. At a certain point, one of them figures this out. If he didn’t, the story would be simply thin allegory, and we’d think, “Yeah, yeah, I get it” and thumb to the end to see how many pages are left. But when the characters gets it, too, then we wonder what will happen. So, make your characters aware of everything that you, the writer, are aware of. You can do this by simply rereading a passage that you’ve written and asking yourself, “What do I know?” Does your character know that, too? If not, how will that knowledge change how he or she feels or acts? In “What I Wouldn’t Do,” the narrator understands that the world he’s building is oppressive, and so his voice gains a kind of knowing irony.
  2. Lower the conceit into the grit of the real world. This is particularly important for sci-fi and fantasy novels. Think about the original Jurassic Park novel. These are freaking dinosaurs we’re talking about. If they escape their pens, why won’t they eat everyone in the world? The answer that Crichton invented is basic but important: the dinosaurs are on an island. (The latter movies are terrible because the dinosaurs reach the mainland and so the story becomes implausible.) Guidubaldi adds a basic biological detail to her unicorns: they get abscesses. So, take a look around your house or workplace: the places and bodies around you. Choose one or two details that you see and add them to your story, to a particular passage. What difference does it make?
  3. Bring the conceit into the realm of real human interactions. This is the same idea as the previous step, except your focusing on relationships and interactions. Take a look around you. How can you build a conversation or kind of conversation into your story. Guidubaldi does this when the narrator is making the woman feel especially claustrophobic. She says, “Go order a pizza. Go back to work. Do what you need to do.” She’s expressing her irritation in the mundane language of the real-life routine of a relationship. In other words, she’s expressing what she feels without referring to the conceit around her. So, take a look at the dialogue you’ve written. Does it refer to the conceit (zombies, dinosaurs, theme park)? If so, can you remove the reference so that the dialogue only refers to the emotions and feelings at hand?

Good luck.

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How to Write from Multiple Points of View

9 Jun
Scott Blackwood's novel See How Small "compassionately examines the fragile psyches of the individuals left behind in the haunting wake of murder," according to a New York Times review.

Scott Blackwood’s novel See How Small “compassionately examines the fragile psyches of the individuals left behind in the haunting wake of murder,” according to a New York Times review.

Anyone writing a novel with multiple points of view probably finds it easy to identify the characters to follow—you simply follow the plot lines and see who’s involved. The tricky part is figuring out how to signal the POV shifts. In his beautiful novel Plainsong, Kent Haruf made the shift at the beginning of each chapter and titled the chapters with a character’s name. The voice or tone of the chapters was basically the same, despite following different characters. This is one way to handle different POVs, but it’s not the only way.

You may want your POV sections to sound different, but it can difficult to create a different voice for each character—let’s face it, it’s hard enough to create one distinctive voice, let alone three or four. Therefore, we need to play with more than voice if we’re going to create distinctive sounding POVs.

No recent novel does as much with POV (or includes as many different perspectives) as Scott Blackwood’s novel See How Small. You can read the opening pages here.

How the Novel Works

See How Small follows a lot of different characters, and each POV sounds and feels slightly different. However, Blackwood doesn’t accomplish this by trying to mimic the character’s natural voice. Instead, he plays with different storytelling styles. For instance, the novel begins with a chapter that mixes third-person and first-person plural POVs (they and we), but what’s more important is how it focuses on some details and not others. (To understand the scene, you need to know that the novel is about the brutal killing of three girls):

Another remembered the pride she’d felt the day before, riding a horse no one in her family could ride, a horse that had thrown her older sister. He knows your true heart, her father had said. The horse’s shoulders were lathered with sweat. He had a salty, earthy smell she’d thought of as love.

The men with guns did things to us.

The chapter also contains this sentence: “It grew hot, dark, and wet like first things.”

Notice how the details are shape and focused when it comes to the characters’ memories, but the writing becomes fuzzy and impressionistic (even purposefully vague) when describing violence.

The next chapter uses a more traditional third person POV, from the perspective of a girl’s mother. Even though the writing probably feels more familiar, it does play with style:

Then, for some reason, most likely because Kate Ulrich is embellishing, revising even as she imagines it, the parking lot goes dark. Days are shorter now, Kate thinks.

The narration doesn’t rely on strict chronology but is impressionistic, like the first chapter but with a different sensibility since the character is different.

The third chapter follows Jack Dewey and lists his thoughts before a pivotal moment. The chapter is structured as a literal list, with each item focused narrowly on a particular detail:

1. Of his nylon search rope, which is five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and two hundred feet long and attached to a snap hook on his belt.

The list advances his thoughts on the rope, which gives the chapter a much more narrow focus than the others.

The fourth chapter follows a man, Hollis, who notices something important but is distracted by something else. He’s so engrossed in that thing (a boy prying loose a shell that was glued to Hollis’ car) that he’s not even aware of himself: “Around him, at the other tables, heads swivel. He suspects he’s yelled an obscenity, maybe even a threat.”

Finally, the fifth chapter follows one of the perpetrators of the crime, 17-year-old Michael. As such, he’s inherently unlikable, yet he’s described sympathetically:

“He’d asked if Michael was working on his GED and Michael lied. The older man, whose hair was thinning, laughed ruefully and said, Sure, that’s you. Overachiever.

The contradiction in how we expect to feel about a character versus how he’s describes creates tension and mystery.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s writing from multiple points of view using See How Small by Scott Blackwood as a model:

  1. Write from an impressionistic POV. It’s a cliché that any public moment or interaction will be seen and remembered differently by the different people who are present. But it may be more useful to think about what characters want or don’t want to notice—or what a character can’t help but see or not see, remember or not remember. In other words, much of what people notice is affected by their emotional states, both vague (in a good mood) and specific (mad at someone for a particular reason). Consider what emotional state your character has during the scene and how that state will affect what he or she notices or remembers.
  2. Write from a pointillist POV. Our tendency is to rely on a usual kind of camera view, taking in an entire scene at once. Try zooming the camera in. Focus on a small, particular part of a scene or on a particular thing that a character notices or thinks about. Put blinders on the narration so that it can only see one thing. What is that thing?
  3. Write from a distracted POV. In Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the splash of Icarus into the sea is only a small part of the painting. Many of the characters, like the farmer in the foreground, are looking elsewhere. You can do this with your characters (and their POV) as well. If you’ve created a significant event or interaction, the reader will expect to see it. So, defy that expectation and give your character something else to think about. If the significant event or interaction is important enough, it will butt its head into the scene eventually. Until then, what can distract the character? This is a good way to create suspense in the reader and also to develop a character.
  4. Write a sympathetic POV about an unlikable character. Again, this is about defying the reader’s expectations. If a character plays an unlikable or negative role in the novel, how can you show us the character in a sympathetic light? You might think about how the character would defend him or herself. What are some mitigating factors behind the character’s decisions? What would a character witness for your character say in a trial? Try building a chapter around those details. The opposite of this, of course, is to write an unsympathetic POV about a likable character.

Good luck and have fun.

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How to Write Riveting, Mundane Dialogue

2 Jun
Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce was an Editor's Choice at The New York Times.

Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce was an Editor’s Choice at The New York Times.

One of the drawbacks of the “raise the stakes” and “put a gun on the wall” comments in workshop is that writers begin to make every moment in a story or novel the equivalent of a gunshot. This is especially true of dialogue. It’s either needlessly mundane (“Hi,” I said. “Hey,” she replied) or it’s trying too hard to advance the plot with a forced argument. The sweet spot for dialogue has a foot in both camps: mundane and realistic and intense.

One of the best writers of dialogue that I’ve read recently is Merritt Tierce. Her novel Love Me Back is astoundingly good, and it contains dialogue that pulses with energy (to use some good book-jacket language) despite being about the most mundane topics. If you read nothing else this week, read this excerpt from Love Me Back.

How the Novel Works

The novel begins with a young woman interviewing for a job as a restaurant server. She’s immediately hired and told that she can start working immediately. Another server gives her a tour of the restaurant—he’s a Desert Storm veteran, and he immediately gives her the once over. The following excerpt is from his guided tour of the restaurant:

He takes a clear plastic cup from a stack by the soda machine and plunges it into the ice. Plastic for us, glass for them, he says. Always use the ice scoop. Georgie sees you doing this you’ll get yelled at. It’s unsanitary. Plus if you break a glass in the ice we have to burn it. Where is the ice scoop? I ask. Fuck if I know, he says. He fills his cup with Mountain Dew and takes a straw wrapped in paper from a cardboard box on the stainless-steel shelf above the soda machine. He tears the paper about an inch from the top of the straw, throwing away the long part and leaving the short part on like a cap. He stabs the straw into the cup. This is how you serve a soda, he says. Make sure it’s full. Fuckers drink it like it’s fucking crack. Put a straw in it. Leave the top on the straw so they know you didn’t put your nasty paws all over where their mouth goes. Always have extra straws in your apron because some lazy asshole in the section next to you won’t give his people straws, and when you walk by they’ll ask you for one, and if you don’t have one you gotta find dipshit or get it yourself. He takes the paper cap off the straw and flicks it into the trash. The fizzing head on the soda has settled so he tops it off and then takes a big suck. I recommend a straw for your personal consumption as well, he says. Never put your mouth on anything in a restaurant if you can help it. Shit doesn’t get clean. Ever.

In terms of plot, this scene does very little. A guy is simply talking about how to scoop ice and deliver drinks to customers—as mundane a task as there is. And yet the dialogue is charged. So, how does Tierce pull it off?

  • Use contradictory dialogue. The server gives the rules for scooping ice, but when asked where the ice scoop is, he says, “Fuck if I know.” The dialogue also contradicts his actions. Rather than scooping the ice the correct way, he scoops it out with his cup. These contradictions create tension; anytime someone breaks a rule, tension is created. It’s even better when the break is intentional.
  • Connect detail with attitude. A basic detail (He tears the paper about an inch from the top of the straw, throwing away the long part and leaving the short part on like a cap) is followed up with a comment that shows the speaker’s attitude toward that detail (This is how you serve a soda, he says. Make sure it’s full. Fuckers drink it like it’s fucking crack.) If a mundane detail is viewed as mundane, then it’s not worth mentioning in the story. But if a character feels strongly about the detail, then it’s not mundane anymore. In short, the dialogue is building the relationship between the characters and their world.
  • Mix diction and tone. Think about dialogue as a performance, which it often is, at least in moments of tension. When people perform, we tend to modulate our voice and vocabulary to get and maintain our audience’s attention. This is exactly what the server does. He uses formal diction and phrasings (I recommend a straw for your personal consumption as well) as well as less formal diction and phrasings (Shit doesn’t get clean. Ever.). Most importantly, he does this in the same breath.
  • Create ulterior motives. If you read the entire novel excerpt, you’ll see that the server is hitting on the narrator, and this sexual tension informs a lot of his actions and dialogue. As a rule, it’s a good idea to have more than one thing going on in any scene. So, in this case, the server is giving a tour of the restaurant and hitting on the narrator. The simultaneity of these actions helps give the dialogue tension.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s write riveting, mundane dialogue using Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce as a model:

  1. Give the scene simultaneity. Basically, give at least one of the characters multiple intentions for the dialogue. Think about the character’s deeper aims for a scene. There’s the surface thing the character is doing (talking to a boss, a kid, a spouse, a friend) and there’s the thing he or she is thinking about because it feels pressing (a problem, a relationship). When a character’s mind is in two places at once, the dialogue will tend to reflect this.
  2. Use contradictory language. This can be intentional or through an unintentional lapse. So, if a character’s mind is elsewhere, he could say something and, without thinking, do exactly the opposite. Or he could say something that clearly doesn’t apply to the situation. An intentional contradiction suggests that the character doesn’t care or is feeling antagonistic. So, think about what lapse your character might make or how your character might choose to willfully disregard a rule. Make the contradiction something basic.
  3. Connect detail with attitude. You’ve already set the stage for this with the contradiction. If your character makes a lapse and is called out for it, how does the character react? With embarrassment? Anger? Surprise? If the character willfully contradicts herself, how does that antagonism play out with other details?
  4. Mix diction and tone. When would the character try to speak formally (with fancy talk)? When would the character be crude or blunt? Force yourself to use both registers in a piece of dialogue. In playing with the tone, you may discover something about the character’s intentions.

Good luck and have fun.

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How to Develop a Rapport with the Reader

26 May
David James Poissant's story,

David James Poissant’s story, “Stealing Orlando,” appears in the latest edition of Newfound.

A few years ago, the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories (I think it was Alice Sebold) wrote that she chose the stories while sitting on a plane. If a story could hold her attention in that hectic environment, then it was a good one. If it couldn’t, then it wasn’t. It’s true that certain kinds of quiet stories might not be great reads for an airplane, but it’s also true that most of us make up our minds about a story by the end of the first page or two. So, how can we make our own stories grab the reader? I’ve written before about writing quick-starting opening paragraphs. But there are other ways as well.

David James Poissant uses the opening paragraphs of his story, “Stealing Orlando,” to develop a rapport with the reader. You can read it now at Newfound.

How the Story Works

The story begins with an intriguing premise: the narrator’s wife wants him to dress up like Orlando Bloom in Elizabethtown while they have sex. There are many ways to introduce such a premise, but Poissant uses a particular kind of informal language that draws the reader in. You can see it at work in the first sentence:

What happened was our marriage was falling apart, the way marriages do, and, in our falling, my wife Delia and I got real honest, because why not, because what did we have to lose?

Notice the phrases “the way marriages do” and “real honest” and “because why not”. This is how people talk in real life: we generalize, we’re ungrammatical, and we use flip phrases to to talk about things that could be embarrassing. There’s a kind of confessional tone at work, and it’s natural for the reader to lean in to listen. We’re naturally drawn to confessions.

In moments of honest confession, the speaker often tries to connect with the listener. Who wants to confess to something that is unimaginable to the other person? This is exactly what Poissant’s narrator does:

This was one of those nights where you both drink so much you feel closer than you are and safer than you are, and so you speak dangerously, say things that make it hard the next morning to meet eyes.

The phrase “one of those nights where” implies that we, the readers, understand what those nights are like.

Even the premise itself suggests a kind of intimacy between narrator and reader. Workshop teachers occasionally claim that stories should be universal, that they shouldn’t contain time-sensitive cultural references. Such references may or may not affect the story’s readers twenty years in the future, but they do make connects to its contemporary readers. What do we talk about most of the time? Movies and television. So, why not use those conversations in fiction? Here is how Poissant does exactly that:

This was a decade ago, after Orlando Bloom grew elf ears, but before the “Pirates” movies got so bad. Anyhow, it wasn’t elf Bloom Delia wanted, with his weirdo bow and creepy side braid, or swashbuckling Bloom with his muttonchops and creepy half goatee. No, Delia had a thing for Drew Baylor, the suicidal-but-clean-cut lead in what was—and pretty much remains—Cameron Crowe’s worst film. That was the Orlando she wanted.

This paragraph assumes that we understand its references: “before the ‘Pirates’ movies got so bad.” By giving the reader credit, the story draws us in.

Finally, the story actually addresses the reader directly:

And because this was a decade ago, my telling you this means I know how things turned out. As in, I could tell you, Did the marriage make it, yes or no?

But I’m not going to tell you, not yet, because where’s the fun in that?

And also because read, you lazy motherfucker, read.

Those lines may seem risky (and perhaps they will turn off some readers), but they’re built on a rapport that has been developed over the first page of the story. Many readers will want to know what happened to the marriage, and the rapport we feel with the narrator is a big reason why we’ll keep reading.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s develop a rapport with the reader, using “Stealing Orlando” by David James Poissant as a model:

  1. Use informal phrases in the first paragraph. Stories can use many different ranges of language, of course, including the very formal. However, stories also don’t have book jackets and marketing teams. Readers can’t be lured in before picking up the story, as they can with novels. So, a language that implies some connection with the reader is useful. (Novels do this, too. Read the opening page of Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao.) Try including phrases in the opening paragraph that generalize, are ungrammatical, or that cover up embarrassment or emotion. In other words, how can you add a few words to make the prose feel as if it’s sitting beside the readers, not lecturing to them.
  2. Refer to a shared understanding with the reader. You can use Poissant’s phrase as a starter: “This was one of those nights where…” This phrase can be taken in an honest direction by using an experience that truly is shared by most people. Or, you can use it to surprise the reader: “This was one of those nights where you end up shooting cats and showing up naked on your fiancé’s doorstep.” Obviously, most people have never done that, and the suggestion that we have is so ludicrous that we’re drawn in anyway.
  3. Use specific cultural references. A key to making this work is to suggest a shared knowledge. So, don’t just sprinkle in references. Instead, make judgments about those references that many people share (or, don’t share, if you’re trying to surprise the reader). Think about the narrative arc of a references. Poissant does this with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies: they were pretty good and then they weren’t. Pretty much any cultural reference that has staying power will have an arc: people won’t feel the same about it the entire time. If you refer to those changing opinions, you give the reader a chance to fill in the blanks with their own opinions, which draws them in.
  4. Address the reader directly. Again, try using Poissant’s exact phrase: “I could tell you, Did the marriage make it, yes or no.” Replace the question about the marriage with a question that is integral to the premise or plot of your story. This won’t work for every story. However, in some stories, if you develop a rapport with the reader, you can also acknowledge the artificial nature of the story itself, and that admission will actually strengthen the rapport. You’re simply admitting what the reader already knows. You’re giving the reader credit for being smart.

Good luck and have fun.

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How to Reveal the Universe through a Single Detail

19 May
Nicelle Davis latest book is the illustrated novel-in-poems, In the Circus of You.

Nicelle Davis latest book is the illustrated novel-in-poems, In the Circus of You. It includes the poem “In a Note Not Given to the Addressee.”

In Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story, “The Aleph,” a character goes into a cellar and looks at a particular part of it, a mere point, and through it he sees the entire universe. It’s a dizzying concept that makes graduate students go, “Ooh,” when they read it, but it’s also a metaphor for how writing often works, especially descriptive passages. A single detail can provide a glimpse of something much larger—the universe or a relationship or the internal self. The problem is finding that detail and, when you do, knowing how to look through it.

A great example of how quickly a single detail can expand into a world can be found in Nicelle Davis’ poem “In a Note Not Given to the Addressee,” which is part of her new novel-in-poems, In the Circus of You. You can read it now at A cappella Zoo (it’s the third poem in the excerpt).

How the Poem Works

The poem begins with this line: “There is a hole the size of your fist in our bathroom door.” This is, of course, a powerful image, and, if you imagine it as an aleph and put your eye to that hole in the door, you can quickly imagine the sort of things you might see: violence, anger, fear, and all the ways they can appear. The next line seems to set up some of those emotions: “My fault, I’m told, for pushing the hinge towards your movements.” Imagine if the poem had looked through that hole and seen the speaker of the poem, hiding in the bathroom. What do you think the poem would see? The obvious answer is a kind of keyhole snapshot of a woman. But that’s not exactly where the poem goes.

Instead of peering through the hole and seeing the speaker the way that a camera would, the poem uses the hole to see into the speaker: “I used to dream of large machines with hands pounding apart concrete so a single seed could be sown.” This is a fitting image, as it keeps with the violence of the hole. But it also moves far beyond that original image, as do the next lines, which move forward in time and also outward, giving us a glimpse of the relationship over a long period of time:

After this spectacle of effort, I’d wake with a fever of 103. You never understood how I could be sick so often.

When I teach poetry to a lecture hall full of students required to take an English course, I talk about how poems often try to move as far as they can from line to line. The thrill in reading the poem, if you feel any thrill, is in appreciating how far it can jump and still maintain some sort of coherence. In the presence of undergrads, I usually refer to this quality as something particular to poetry, but the truth is that prose writers make these leaps as well. Just read Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, or Paul Harding.

It’s the same kind of leap that Borges made with the aleph. When you peer through a descriptive detail, what you see is not simply the next logical detail but something unexpected. The surprise we feel is often what pulls us through the writing, whether it’s prose or poetry.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s make intuitive leaps in description, using “In a Note Not Given to the Addressee” by Nicelle Davis as a model:

  1. Start with a scene that contains strong emotion. Davis’ scene contains anger and fear, but these aren’t your only options. Any emotion will work. The goal is to access a moment for a character, narrator, person, or speaker when they are ready to see or look beyond what is right in front of their faces. Those moments are usually accompanied by powerful feelings. This is true in life as well: when we’re feeling love or joy or satisfaction or anger, our minds tend to leap beyond the immediate circumstances to the past or future or places that don’t exist and never will. Anxiety is a perfect example of this: It’s a feeling that pulls you out of the moment and into some possible future. So, choose some scene in which you, the writer, or the character you’re writing about are feeling charged up.
  2. Find your aleph. Of course, you may be thinking, “Sure, I’ll just find that perfect, all-seeing, all-encompassing detail. Wait, what’s that in my pocket? Oh, there it is.” Most of us can’t find that detail in one try. So, start brainstorming. If you drop yourself into the scene, what do you see? Davis choose a point of impact (literally), where the emotion has erupted into action. This is a pretty direct image (though it’s not as direct as an image of the fist punching through the door). You can choose something that directly conveys the emotion, or you can look to the side, at something that is next to the thing that directly conveys the emotion. Regardless of what you choose, try looking through it. Does the image make you want to keep writing? Or do read it and feel your energy drop. This is hardly scientific, but that’s how writing often works. Look for an image that revs up or directs your already charged emotional state.
  3. Jump past the obvious next detail. Davis could have looked through the hole in the door and seen a woman. But that would be obvious. Of course that’s what is visible through the door. The reader understands the logic of the scene and can intuit that next step. So, move beyond it. You can move chronologically (what came before the scene or what comes after). You can move from the physical to the mental/emotional/spiritual (which is what Davis does). You can zoom out (which she also does) or zoom in. You can jump sideways to a moment or image that fits in some way with the image or moment where you began. Try all of these. Some will work and some won’t. You may find that once you make one intuitive jump, you’re able to make others. The first leap gives you and your writing permission to move out of the immediate scene and toward some detail that surprises not just the reader but you as well.

Good luck and have fun.

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How to Write with Negative Capability

12 May
Joni Tevis' nonfiction collection The World Is on Fire is a collection for a future culture, with references to atomic bombs, Buddy Holly, the Alaskan wilderness, Liberace, and that old time religion.

Joni Tevis’ nonfiction collection The World Is On Fire is a collection meant for some future race, with references to atomic bombs, Buddy Holly, the Alaskan wilderness, Liberace, and that old time religion.

One of the most famous terms in literature is negative capability, coined by the poet John Keats. It’s so important that it even gets its own Wikipedia entry—not bad for a term that Keats mentioned once, and only once, and not in a poem or essay but in a letter to his brothers. So, if it’s such a big deal, then we probably ought to know what it means and how to use it or make it happen in our writing.

A recent essay that uses negative capability in a dramatic way is Joni Tevis’ “Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age (Rock City).” It is included in her new collection The World Is On Fire and was originally published in Orion, where you can read it now.

How the Essay Works

Probably no term has been more analyzed than negative capability, so let’s just start from the beginning, with Keats’ own words:

“it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

Here’s an even shorter version, as restated by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

So, the short answer to the question, “What is negative capability?” is that it’s the ability to give equal consideration to (or even believe) two contradictory ideas. So, what’s this have to do with writing great prose? Take a look at this passage from “Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age (Rock City)”:

I loved the world, believed its every inch paved with treasure, but knew it could be ripped away at any moment. Death was real; the preaching we heard every Sunday underscored that. A farm accident instantly killed my grandfather. A girl my own age, eight or nine, lost her mother one Friday night when her car was forced off a bridge. You’re no different, the preachers said, and I had to admit their logic. They’d start in on the scary parts of the Bible: Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, the moon turning red on that great and fearsome day. The Battle of Armageddon could start at any moment, the preachers would say, even now, while we’re sitting here in this big beautiful sanctuary, and are you right with God? Well, who could be? There will be a blast of wind, the rivers will turn to blood, the preachers said. Matthew 24:29, The stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. What a relief when we could all file out of the barnlike church, shaking the preacher’s hand on the way into the bright sun, past the blooming crepe myrtles and the old crabapple tree. How could we go out for fried chicken after that? How could I lie on the living room floor and read the funnies or look at the paper’s boring pictures of boring debutantes? I asked my parents about the end of the world, and they said, Try not to worry about it too much.

Tevis has set up contradictory ideas, a contradiction that is set up in the first sentence: 1) the world is beautiful and amazing, and 2) all of that beauty can be taken away. In other words, as the next sentence states, we’re all going to die. This might not seem contradictory. After all, both things are true. The world can be pretty great (though it’s not always), and everyone now living will die. Put that way, most of us will likely say, “Sure. Of course.” But what the paragraph does is make us feel the contradiction. It’s the same feeling that we often get at funerals or after hearing about some tragedy or horrible act in the world. We’re going to die, and it might be really terrible. That’s the message the preacher has, and when Tevis walks out of the church, she blinks at the light and delivers a line that I absolutely adore: “How could we go out for fried chicken after that?”

We know the passage has worked because there’s no good answer to the question. Her parents say, “Try not to worry about it too much,” which is no kind of answer. Or, it’s almost exactly the definition of negative capability, a term that is often considered a goal for good writing. In “Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age (Rock City),” Tevis suggests that believing in contradictory things is an inevitable and natural part of the human experience and that drama, the stuff of good writing, comes from a character’s inability to tie together those contradictory elements. The goal shouldn’t be, as Keats puts it, to avoid “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Instead, it should be to reach for that fact and reason and find it missing. As with all writing, you want the reader to ask, in some form, the question, “Now what?”

The Writing Exercise

Let’s create tension with negative capability, using “Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age (Rock City)” by Joni Tevis as a model:

  1. Set up the conflicting ideas. Tevis uses “life is beautiful” and “we’re all going to die.” This isn’t so different from what Stuart Dybek does in his famous story, “We Didn’t.” He pairs sex and death. If you wish, you can stick to religion: “Jesus loves me” and “sinners in the hands of an angry god.” Or, you can move toward a personal conflict with others: “I’m a good person” and “everyone hates me” or “I’m horrible” and “everyone loves me.” Or, you can create an internal conflict: “I want to do good” and “I love doing bad” or “I love my children” and “I want to be free.” The goal is to put two incompatible ideas or beliefs in the same place, at the same time. It doesn’t really matter how small or large, personal or cosmic those ideas are. The important thing is that they should resist being held together.
  2. Make the reader believe one of those ideas. Tevis does this beautifully with the sentences about deadly accidents and the quotes from the preacher. The deadly accidents give us visceral proof of the idea. How can we argue that we all die when it’s happening in front of us? The preacher creates a philosophical framework around that proof; he’s telling his congregation how to think about the proof that they witness. This two-part structure is important. If anything that happens to a character/person/narrator is worthwhile, then that person has given it significant thought and has formulated a story to tell about it or mental approach to it. How we think about something is just as important as the reason we believe it.
  3. Introduce, quickly, the other idea. This is what happens when Tevis brings us out of the church, into the beautiful world and asks how we can bear to eat fried chicken. She’s juxtaposing the beliefs. She sets beauty (sunlight and crepe myrtles) against the preacher’s version of the world, with its real proof (untimely accidents). If the juxtaposition is sharp or harsh enough, the reader will understand, on a visceral level, the impossibility of both things being true. We will question (or understand the characters when they question) how both can be true at the same time.
  4. Answer the question with negative capability. Have someone say, as Tevis’ parents did, “Try not to worry about it too much.” If you have any experience with Christianity, you may be attaching a word to this dilemma: faith. We accept, on faith, things that we cannot understand or that seem not to be possible. But faith cannot exist without a crisis of faith (otherwise, it wouldn’t be a matter of faith; it’d just be obvious). What you’re setting up is a moment where the narrator or character understands that two ideas cannot be held together, but there they are, together, and they must deal with the mental trauma of trying to make congruous this incongruous pairing. In other words, someone must say, “Don’t think about it too much,” and that mental avoidance must come to seem impossible or undesirable. When that happens, the reader will automatically want to know, “Then what?”

Good luck.

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How to Create Friction Between Character and Scene

5 May
What Burns Away, the debut novel by Melissa Falcon Field, has been called "thrilling" and "perceptive" by Tin House executive editor Michelle Wildgren.

What Burns Away, the debut novel by Melissa Falcon Field, has been called “thrilling” and “perceptive” by Tin House executive editor Michelle Wildgren.

In life, people tend to work together. At weddings, when the crazy uncle is drinking too much and telling offensive jokes, the rest of the family negotiates this behavior gently, distracting the uncle and muting him. Everyone is on the same page. If life didn’t work this way, we’d spend all of our time screaming at each other. In fiction, however, characters shouldn’t work together, at least not all of them. When a scene gathers momentum and begins to take on rules for how to act, a character needs to refuse or fail to play along. That friction between character and scene can be a great source of tension.

Melissa Falcon Field’s novel What Burns Away has this tension in spades. You can read the opening of the novel here.

How the Novel Works

The novel opens with a scene that may feel familiar to parents of young children. It’s morning, the baby is awake and screaming, and one of the parents is getting ready for work. The other is staying home. So, the scene is set:

Jonah hollered again, his breathing gone fierce: “Mama! Come!“

Such hollering tends to create a particular mood in a house, in a scene. Think about the last time you were around tired people while a child screamed. What was the mood? Frustrated? Frantic? Now, watch the book’s narrator (Jonah’s mother) look at her husband:

I eyed my husband through the open bathroom door, watching as he tapped his razor against the edge of the sink.

Already, you can see a distance open up between the sensibility of the scene (screaming child) and the response of the character “tapped his razor.” Imagine how else this description of the husband could have been written. He could have become as frantic as the child (parents often do). He could have snapped at his wife. He could have rushed out the door. Instead, he moves methodically. Now, watch how the sensibility of that tapping razor gets stretched along:

Miles kept his back to me. A new breadbasket of weight pooled at his waist, and I studied his face in the mirror. His steady surgeon’s hand took a straight edge to the beveled cleft of his chin.

All desperation and hysterics, Jonah screamed. “Please, Mama!”

Every sentence contains a key detail: Instead of turning to his wife to see if she hears the baby, Miles keeps his back to her. He has gained weight, which has pooled (note the inertia implied in that word choice) at his waist. We learn that he’s a surgeon with a steady hand. In short, his refusal to get sucked in to the household drama is an essential part of his nature and evident in his actions, his physical appearance, and his career.

Now, watch what happens next:

Miles turned to face me as I stood, a dollop of shaving cream above his lip. “Claire, go get the baby.”

That’s a cold line. He’s asserting himself and his sensibility upon the drama around him. It’s a line that you can feel like a punch in the gut.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s write a gap between scene and character using What Burns Away by Melissa Falcon Field as a model:

  1. Set the tone of the scene. Often, this is done by introducing a particular force. In What Burns Away, it’s a screaming baby. In my earlier example, it was an uncle acting inappropriately at a wedding. Both are characters who can’t be tamed, at least not easily. This week’s episode of Mad Men had a great example of this. Don’s in a meeting with a table full of creative directors, listening to a pitch about beer. The company is impressively huge, and so everyone is listening intently. But not Don. In short, walk something into the scene that cannot be ignored, that must be dealt with.
  2. Create the character who will not play along. In What Burns Away, the husband refuses to quicken his morning routine for a screaming child. In Mad Men, Don refuses to listen. At the wedding, a character could egg the uncle on, rather than tamping down his behavior. If you know what the best or necessary behavior is, think about what it would mean for a character to A) do the opposite or B) disregard the thing that cannot be ignored.
  3. Be subtle. Miles eventually tells his wife to get the baby, which is highly dramatic, but before we get to that moment, we see him resisting or ignoring in a very small way: tapping his razor. In Mad Men, Don looks out the window before he walks out of the room. Don’t jump directly to the drama. Set it up by giving the character the smallest possible physical action that reveals or embodies his or her sensibility or behavior in general. Give the character a way to not play along that no one but the reader and maybe one other character will notice.

Good luck.

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