Monday, May 24, 2010

Sound


For me "sound" has always been the most difficult of the five senses to describe.  It's easy to write: a truck rumbled past, or the neighbor's dog barked; she heard a scream; his voice was higher than usual; the sound of silence filled the air. A little of that is fine I suppose, but when we allow ourselves to become lazy and rely solely on the fill-in-the-blank technique, it seems to me we miss an opportunity to engage the reader by drawing him into our fictional dream. 
This week, while approaching my story from a new and hopefully more illustrative angle, I've begun to pay closer attention to some of the more creative ways writers describe sound. Here are a few of my favorites:

A scream:

There was no fear in the scream.  It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy.  It was a nasty sound.  It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.  [Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep]

Silence:

Hotels, late at night, are never still.  The corridors are never entirely silent. There  are countless barely audible sighs, the  rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti  seemed to  move  through a  perfect  vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern  that decorated the wallpaper. [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"] 

Background noise:

Lifting the old-fashioned black instrument to his  ear, he heard only music at first, and then a wall of sound resolving into a fragmented amalgam of conversations. Laughter. No one spoke to him over the sound of the bar, but the song in the background was "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly." [John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"] 

Footsteps:

"You and Francis are on the hiding side," a tall girl said, and then the light was gone, and the carpet wavered under his feet with the sibilance of footfalls, like small cold draughts, creeping away into corners. [Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"]

Rain:

It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. [James Joyce: "Araby"]

A woman and her granddaughter hide under a dock and listen to the sounds of the men who are searching for them:

They crouched there then, the two of them, submerged to the shoulders, feet unsteady on the slimed lake bed.  They listened.  The sky went from rose to ocher to violet in the cracks over their heads.  The motorcycles had stopped now.  In the silence there was the glissando of locusts, the dry crunch of boots on the flinty beach, their low man-talk drifting as they prowled back and forth.  One of them struck a match… The wind carried their voices into the pines…. The carp, roused by the troubling of the waters, came nosing around the dock, guzzling and snorting…. The bike cranked.  The other ratcheted, ratcheted, then coughed, caught, roared.  They circled, cut deep ruts, slung gravel, and went.  Their roaring died away and away.  Crickets resumed and a near frog bic-bic-bicked.  [Mary Hood: "How Far She Went"]

Sounds of a neighboring homestead:

From the Workman's valley came the sounds of industry at all hours of the day: the buzz of chain saws,  the crashing of timber, the splitting of wood, the jingle-trace rattling of mules in chains pulling stumps and stoneboats….  the next day the sounds resumed: the clangings and bangings, the shouts and orders and complaints, the buzzings and grindings, the hammerings and sawings, backfires and outbursts. [Rick Bass: "The Lives of Rocks"] 
John Shirley & William Gibson: "The Belonging Kind"
James Joyce: "Araby"
Graham Greene: "The End of the Party"
Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep




 

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Yearning

The story I've been drafting for the last two months has finally reached a conclusion, thank goodness, but now it's time to start over and figure out where it went so terribly wrong. About three-quarters of the way in, the story fizzled out. It was missing a key ingredient -- you guessed it:  yearning.  And without "yearning" the story literally had nowhere to go.

In neglecting to give my main character a strong desire line, I did what many beginning writers do (and some published authors as well). According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, yearning is as essential to the art of fiction "as color is to painting and movement is to dance and sound is to music."   He writes:
Butler gives us four wonderful literary examples from the works of Janet Burroway, Tom Piazza, Margaret Atwood, and James Joyce, in which the authors depict yearning through "beautiful moment-to-moment sensual details." He goes into great detail about each example, discussing line by line the ways in which the authors build coherence among the details, and how each main character's dynamic yearning begins to manifest itself in his or her particular story. I encourage everyone to get a copy of Butler's book and study that chapter in particular.


Below are examples (not Butler's) of yearning from two very different short stories.  The first is from Ryan Boudinot's short story "Cardiology." The protagonist is a boy who lives in a town "where nobody had their own heart.  They shared one gigantic heart located in a former water purification plant near the center of town."  The young man's yearning is very clearly stated -- to leave town and walk freely -- but not until after we get the a detail-packed description of what it is he'd be leaving behind. The moment-by-moment sensual detail in this piece is probably not what one would describe as "beautiful," but the writing is masterful and the detail makes Magnus's yearning shine forth -- vivid and clear. This passage comes just four paragraphs into the story:
In this example from Joyce Carol Oates' story "The Lost Brother" the character's yearning, that "first epiphany" comes in the very first paragraph:
So, armed with this new insight it's back to the drawing board for me -- back to the place where Sarah (my protagonist) drew her first breath as a character in my short story. Hopefully this time her yearning will shine forth for both of us.

What is it that your character yearns for at the deepest level of his being?

Ryan Boudinot: "Cardiology" at FiveChapters.com
Joyce Carol Oates: "The Lost Brother" in "Zoetrope All-Story", Spring 2005



Thursday, May 13, 2010

Will you publish my short stories?

A cartoon from Tom Gauld, Scottish cartoonist and illustrator:



More of Tom's work can be found
at Indiebound and Amazon 
and on his website: www.tomgauld.com











Sunday, May 2, 2010

The Cut and the Beat: Martin, Mamet, & Dufresne

I can't seem to complete a first draft like I used to. Lately it's all hair-twisting and frittering and staring despairingly out the window, wondering if it's probable that I've just wasted the last five years of my life.  It didn't used to be this way.  Writing a story used to be fun and gratifying. It was easy to fill a fifty-page spiral-bound notebook in less than a week.  Now it takes months, or longer. So what happened to make the process so painful?

It seems I've been trying to "craft" my first drafts instead of simply writing them -- as "freely and rapidly as possible," as John Steinbeck would say.  I expect too much from this rough first pass.  I expect that the story will arrive on the page fully formed, just as it appeared in my head, and anything less seems like a failure. But there's simply too much to think about when trying to make good fiction: there's characterization and point-of-view to consider; plot, structure, narrative, style, and voice. You've got your beginnings, middles, and ends to come up with; inciting incidents, and doorways of no return; revelations, crises, climax, and resolutions. Just to name a few.

Learning to write fiction is a lot like learning to swing a golf club.  There's a staggering number of fundamentals to remember: feet shoulder width apart; back straight but slightly bent (from the hip socket, mind you, and don't slouch!), watch your grip pressure--you don't want it too strong, but not too weak either; keep your knees flexed, but only slightly, and your head down (or is it up?) as you address the ball. And then you've got your backswing, impact, and follow-through to worry about. My god, how does anyone manage to swing the club at all, let alone with any degree of accuracy?

The other day, when I was frittering away my morning online (I was supposed to be writing the first draft of my new short story) I came across this quote from Gregory Martin, Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, and it made me want to hunker down and finish that draft I've been working on for the past month:
  
I found something else I liked on the professor's website--something that really got me thinking. It was this excerpt from David Mamet's book On Directing Film:
I like the idea of the story as a series of disordering events and the characters' attempts to restore order; the juxtaposition of shots that make up a scene; the scenes that make up a story. Obviously Mamet is talking about screenwriting here, and not necessarily the first draft. But if my goal is to get a quick sketch of the story on paper (so I'll have something to revise later on) this might just be the thing. The spine on which to hang all those subtle, profound complexities Professor Martin alluded to above--if I finally finish this first draft and get around to that more nuanced second one. 
So, let's get writing...
I'll leave you with a few inspiring words from John Dufresne, my favorite wise and wily administrator of tough love: "The best way to succeed as a novelist is to write the novel today and every day.  Don't put it off.  All right, then.  Do what I tell you, and no one gets hurt.  Pick up the pen... nice and easy... don't try anything foolish.  Now write.  There you go!"

~

David Mamet: On Directing Film
Gregory Martin: Associate Professor of English, UNM: http://www.unm.edu/~gmartin/