Breathe New Life Into Old Stories

Hmm. What to do with that old story you gave up on a few years back?  The one you nurtured and fell in love with, back when you first started taking yourself seriously as a writer?  You remember the one. Maybe it’s in the far corner of some dark drawer now, still folded inside the sad-looking SASE that ferried it back home from that small-press literary journal you submitted it to.

Well, pull it out of the drawer.  I've got something for you.  

I was perusing the blogosphere a few weeks ago, looking for some much needed inspiration, when I came across an article titled “5 Ways To Shake Up Your Writing” by Sandy Ackers, professional writer and “muse wrangler.” One of her suggestions is to take an old story and rewrite it from a brand new perspective. For instance, if your protagonist is a man, rewrite his character as a woman.  Say he’s a troubled teenager... maybe rewrite him as a troubled fifty-five year old going through a rocky midlife crisis. 

Ackers even suggests changing the story’s genre to shake things up: “Rewrite a literary passage as a pivotal scene in a mystery. Change your crime scene into a romantic segment. Get creative!”

Ackers’ blog, “Strangling My Muse,” explores “how to stay creative through easy periods of fertile inspiration" as well as "dark times, when work is overwhelming and life keeps throwing curve balls and everyone is always cranky.”  If you need a little inspiration of your own you might want to pop over and spend some time there.  Her site is full of useful articles, unique exercises, and lots of lists and links--guaranteed to keep you enthralled and writing, your creative juices bubbling steadily to the surface.

Sandy Ackers: Strangling My Muse

John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth, p. 152

Writing about Complex Emotion

It's so easy to fall back on those first-thing-that-pops-into-your-mind clichés when presenting the emotions of our characters.  What a laugh it would be to read over the early drafts of some of my old stories--loaded with pounding hearts and sweaty palms, no doubt.  Not to mention single tears rolling down flushed cheeks; clenched fists; and nervously tapping feet.  It's much more difficult--and consequently much more rewarding--to come up with fresh, new ways of depicting character emotions.

In Creating Character Emotion, the one writing book I probably revisit more often than any other, author Ann Hood talks about creating character depth through emotional complexity:

Take a look at this example from Anton Chekhov's short story "The Kiss" in which the main character, an officer named Ryabovitch, suffers all kinds of emotional turmoil when he unexpectedly finds himself invited to tea at the home of General Von Rabbek and his wife.  The man is an emotional mess.  It's not simply nervousness he feels, but also shame, envy, delight, mortification, and anxiety⎯just to name a few:

"…. At first, on going into the room and sitting down to the table, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object. The faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices -- all blended in one general impression that inspired in Ryabovitch alarm and a desire to hide his head. Like a lecturer making his first appearance before the public, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but apparently only had a dim understanding of it…. After a little while, growing accustomed to his surroundings, Ryabovitch saw clearly and began to observe. As a shy man, unused to society, what struck him first was that in which he had always been deficient -- namely, the extraordinary boldness of his new acquaintances….

Ryabovitch stood near the door among those who were not dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the sight of all take a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the consciousness that he was timid, that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers, had deeply mortified him, but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, looking at his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful." 

One way to render genuine emotion in our stories is to draw from our own life experiences.  Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, tells how she mined her own experiences as a young woman to discover just the right way to depict her character's complex emotions:

In "The Kiss" Chekhov uses concrete detail and comparison to render the shame and inadequacy that Ryabovich experiences at the party: "the faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices […] inspired alarm and the desire to hide his head."  When Ryabovich watches as another officer takes "a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on" we see the comparison and understand his feelings of mortification and envy.

Ann Hood: Creating Character Emotions
Kim Edwards: "Icebergs, Glaciers, and Arctic Dreams: Developing Characters," essay in Creating Fiction (edited by Julie Checkoway)
Anton Chekhov: "The Kiss"

He Said, She Said: Free Direct Speech

For this exercise I'm stealing a passage from John Mullan's analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated, which was part of Mullan's 2005 "Elements of Fiction" series in "The Guardian": 

Mullan's article continues (you can read the rest of it here).

Although these days, free direct speech is apparently "only proper if we are to listen to something truly incomprehensible", I'd like to try using the technique to stretch and strengthen those (my) flabby dialogue-writing muscles a bit.

· John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. Read his archived pieces and respond to them at http://books.guardian.co.uk/elements/0,,1427415,00.html