I've been meaning to post something on revision for a long, long time, and now that I'm in the throes of it myself (revising the first draft of a short story that's taking way too long!), I thought I'd share some nuggets of wisdom from the masters:
Today's Revision Nugget: Yearning
I've blogged about this one before, but it's so important to every story, so critical, that I wanted to bring it to your attention again, this time in the context of revision. Seems important to get this one thing right --really right-- before the rest of the story can fall into place the way it should:
Here's Robert Olen Butler (From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction):
REVISION TASK #1: Find the moment in your story or novel "in which
the deepest yearning of your main character shines forth," surround it with sensual, authenticating detail, and make it sing! Force the reader to respond "in a deep, visceral way to that first epiphany."
Go.
Showing posts with label Robert Olen Butler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Olen Butler. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Revision
Friday, July 15, 2011
Beginning Writers
Lazy me...
Because I haven't had time to post anything new since the beginning of May (!!) I thought I'd offer up this earlier post from January 2010 concerning some of the common mistakes beginning writers tend to make. Let me know if you've come across any others to add to this list...
A few years ago when I first started writing fiction -- and collecting all those books on the art, the craft, and the joy of writing it -- there was one thing I wanted to avoid more than anything else: making mistakes that only a beginning writer would make. As I read all those writing books a familiar phrase kept popping up over and over again: Beginning writers tend to… (just try googling that string -- it's literally everywhere) followed by a warning that concerned the dreaded something or other that only beginning writers tend to do… Panic set in so I decided to start a list.
This week I thought I'd share with you some of the things that beginning writers supposedly tend to do. The exercise, naturally, is to read over your work-in-progress and make sure you haven't done any of the naughty things on this list:
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Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners. [John Gardner]
Beginning writers tend to worry too much about overdoing it. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a student's work and asked for more detail about this or that – a place, a person – only to be told, "I didn't want to overdo it." Novice writers, just getting their chops, need to worry more about saying enough. [Chris Lombardi, GWW]
Beginning writers tend to use insufficient detail and abstraction where what is needed is concrete detail. [John Gardner]
Beginning writers tend to skimp on the elements of setting and time, probably out of dreary memories of long descriptions they have read… But when atmosphere is well created, we do not experience it as description; we simply experience it. [Janet Burroway]
Beginning writers use this formulaic sentence all too often: "__________ filled the air."The blank can be fear, panic, the scent of cheese, the blare of a marching band. It's part of a larger tendency of description without detail. It's telling and not showing: "…gradually the aroma of coffee filled the air." Nothing fills the air. Do not, under any circumstances, use the "______ filled the air" sentence structure. [John Dufresne]
Beginning writers tend to forget about the "dynamics of desire" when they create fictional characters. They forget about that epiphany which needs to come "very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth." [Robert Olen Butler]
Beginning writers tend to create passive central characters. Boy meets girl. Boy wants girl – good so far. Boy sits by phone waiting for girl to call – not so good anymore. You cannot write a successful story about a passive central character. And you wouldn't want to read one. [John Dufresne]
Beginning writers often try to write novels with a relatively passive protagonist who wants little or has largely given up wanting. I have met more than one writer who says that his character doesn't want anything -- he just wants to "live his life." That always brings to mind something Kurt Vonnegut said: "When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." [Sol Stein & Kurt Vonnegut]
Beginning writers have a reticence to use the simple expression: she cried. Instead, we're pummeled with dubious and unnecessary euphemisms: Hot tears leaked from her eyes. Hot tears sprang to her eyes, trickled down her cheeks. Quick tears sprang to her eyes. A single tear ran down her cheek. Big tears, heavy as hail, poured down her cheek. Better: She cried. And there's no need to say She began to cry. You don't ever have to write the phrase She began anything. She either cried or she didn't. [John Dufresne]
Beginning writers tend to present a main character with a slew of characteristics, when one that is just right would do the job much more efficiently. [Sol Stein]
Beginning writers often have trouble motivating their character's actions. Unfortunately one mention on page sixty-eight isn't going to do it. This is one of fiction's major challenges: making readers understand a character's motives when those motives are not simple. The way you create such understanding is through patterns of incidents. No one occurrence will be enough. [Nancy Kress]
Beginning writers often pad their stories with unnecessary scenes. Study your scene list, trying to eliminate scenes or combine scenes. I've frequently been startled by how much a story can be sharpened by concentrating its events and emotions into the bare minimum of scenes. [Nancy Kress]
Beginning writers tend to use unnecessary flashbacks. While flashback can be a useful way to provide background to character or the history of events – the information that screenwriters call backstory – it isn't the only way. Rather, dialogue, brief summary, a reference, or detail can often tell us all we need to know. [Janet Burroway]
Beginning writers tend to lose sight of their own scenes, letting them drift into flashbacks like Arctic explorers into snowstorms, never to be seen or heard from again. [Peter Selgin, GWW]
Beginning writers tend to unravel the thread of the story instead of keeping it taut like the gut strings of a tennis racket. (Sol Stein).
Beginning writers tend to give far too much background, then compound this mistake by putting the background where it shouldn't go. (Evan Marshall)
Beginning writers tend to shift viewpoint when it is both unnecessary and disturbing. In establishing the story's point of view, you make your own rules, but having made them, you must stick to them. Apart from the use of significant detail, there is no more important skill for a writer of fiction to grasp than this, the control of point of view. [Janet Burroway]
Beginning writers often avoid running straight at an image; that is, the needless filtering of an image through some observing consciousness. Vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen. [John Gardner] *More on "filtering" in the coming weeks…
Beginning writers tend to write dialogue that is too clear, believe it or not. When characters talk too precisely and respond exactly to what has been said, then the words are probably being put in their mouths by the writer. [John Dufresne]
Beginning writers think they know what a character needs to say, and so they don't listen to the characters. They don't want the character screwing up the plot they took so long to devise. And so the character isn't credible. [John Dufresne]
Beginning writers tend to have all of their characters talk the same – usually the way the writer does. (Russell Rowland)
Beginning writers often forget the importance of letting their raw voice lead the story. They start with the voice of the story, often some other writer's story, and hope it will yield powerful, original material. [Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall]
Beginning writers often [begin their stories] with strong feelings and ideas without having found the images to embody them. Don't begin with an idea, begin with people, preferably people in action. [Ursula Le Guin & John Dufresne]
Beginning writers sometimes say, "Well, I didn't want to tell what happened to the characters. I wanted to leave the book ambiguous and open-ended. I want readers to decide for themselves what happened." This is usually a response to a criticism that the story feels as if it "just stopped." Unfortunately, the "let-the-readers-decide-for-themselves" stance is usually a failed defense. Readers don't want to decide what happened to the characters. They want you to decide, on the dual grounds that you're the writer and that they've just read four hundred pages of your prose anticipating this very information you're now withholding. [Nancy Kress]
Beginning writers tend to want to dodge the drafting process and write the story immediately. [John Dufresne]
The novice writer sets unrealistic goals for what he may not acknowledge to be, but is in fact, the first draft. He undermines his effort by holding unrealistic expectations of his imaginative and organizing powers. And so he becomes discouraged when the people in his head are unrecognizable on the page. The beginning writer who has read a great deal is even more susceptible to this kind of dejection. [John Dufresne]
On Doing Writing Exercises (something beginning writers do well :-)
When the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]
When the beginning writer works with some sharply defined problem in technique, focusing on that alone, he produces such good work that he surprises himself. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]
Writing an exercise, the [novice] writer is in the ideal artistic state, both serious and not serious. He wants the exercise to be wonderful, so that his classmates will applaud, but he is not in the dark psychological set of the ambitious young novelist struggling to write down his existence as it is, with the ghost of the young James Joyce standing horribly at his back.[John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]
~
The following books are available to purchase online:
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:
What is it that your character yearns for at the deepest level of his being?
Robert Olen Butler: From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction
Ryan Boudinot: "Cardiology" at FiveChapters.com
Joyce Carol Oates: "The Lost Brother" in "Zoetrope All-Story", Spring 2005
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