A select group of Editors Guild members took turns writing a column for
"NW Ink," the quarterly newsletter of the Pacific Northwest Writers
Association (www.pnwa.org), for several years. We've archived those articles
below.
Improving
and “Individuating” Speech
- or -
Fun with Dialogue
Irene Wanner (iwanner{at}myuw[dot]net)
January 2006
Writing dialogue may seem intimidating, but adding a few basics to your tool
kit, trying them in rough drafts, and fine tuning them in revisions can easily
improve speech that sounds awkward or unsuited to its speaker.
First, become an attentive listener. When
you hear credible dialogue in a TV show or a movie, a book on tape, or a play,
note each character’s line lengths (often short), word choice (frequently
simple), and how often the speakers exchange remarks (usually rapidly). By
contrast, if what you hear is clumsy or unrealistic, identify why. Are lines too
long? Is vocabulary inappropriate? Do people explain too much? Are their
comments relevant?
A general approach is to adopt traits that sound believable
- short lines; simple diction; conversation, not lectures - but if you
have a character who is a long-winded, pompous motormouth, ponderous dialogue
would be perfect. So, in revision, in addition to developing characters through
action (body language is revealing) and description, gradually tailor how each
person expresses him/herself. Crafting unique dialogue to characterize every
individual is called “individuating”
speech, and it’s a natural, no-pressure part of refining who’s who.
Your characters’ styles of expression - authoritative, halting, silent
- show personality - assured, uncertain, shy. Children won’t have the
sophisticated vocabulary of a rocket scientist, so select - or revise later -
fitting words. A little girl won’t say, “Where’s my damned bunny?”
unless she’s been listening to a road crew. And your road crew guy she
overhears cursing probably won’t say, “Fudge!” when he drops a rock on his
foot unless his mom raised him with that euphemism for another f word.
A second exercise to hone your ear for dialogue could be analyzing
conversations at home or at work, noting what’s shortened and omitted. Or
eavesdrop on a stranger’s cell phone conversation. From hearing only one
person, you’ll have little trouble filling in the blanks.
The same goes for readers: Their inner ears “hear” omissions and
expand compressions, so you can shorten long, grammatically correct but wordy,
complete sentences (unless your speaker is lecturing formally or telling a
story). You can omit articles (a, an, the), use fragments and slang and clichés
(you know what I mean?), prefer contractions (people do not speak as
mechanically as robots), include interjections (rats!), waffling (um...well, er),
opinions, interruptions, lies, but avoid dialect and foreign languages unless
you’re confident in your “ear,” and have good reasons to use non-standard
English.
Along with listening attentively, pay attention when you read. If the
dialogue pleases you, determine why. Often, it’s basic vocabulary, not lofty
metaphors, and has a quick pace. Frequently, words and speech tags (s/he said)
that show emotion directly (“Shut up!” she shouted), work better than
weak phrases that tell readers what to think (“Please stop being so noisy,”
she said loudly). In fact, whenever you see an adverb, ask yourself: would
another verb say what I mean without the explanation (“dawdled,” for
example, instead of “walked slowly”)?
Identify some dialogue experts - fiction by Robert Stone, say, or plays
by David Mamet - and study their scenes, that is, the parts where characters
speak and interact directly as opposed to prose narrative, which provides
background who what when where why. Note line lengths, fragments, omissions,
digressions, humor - then adopt techniques you admire.
Since narrative’s primary role is to provide background, beware of
misplacing information into your dialogue, or you may end up with, “Good lord,
Captain! Here we are orbiting the third planet from a sun that’s about to go
super nova and our engines just failed!” Where has this skipper been? Asleep?
If your characters should know these details, provide them in the narrative;
however, if your characters are hearing something new - “I’m sorry, Albert.
It’s cancer.” - then “explication” in dialogue is fine.
What is a scene’s job? Like a small story, it brings characters
together - often with a conflict - and by the end of the conversation, something
has changed. A scene works when it moves the story forward. If you write a scene
that lacks an outcome, however small, ask if the scene is necessary or
unfinished, then cut or expand as necessary.
When you have only two people in a conversation, you don’t need to
identify who’s talking every time the speaker changes.
Omit speech tags whenever possible, and prefer quiet ones (said, told,
asked) to shrill verbs (barked, blurted, shrieked), which sound like comic book
writing.
The more speakers in a scene, the harder
it is for readers to keep track. In Elements of Style, Strunk and White
suggest a helpful approach: new speaker, new paragraph. If you follow their
recommendation, readers “learn” quickly that a new paragraph signals a
different person is talking, which means sometimes you can delete speech tags,
replacing them in the same paragraph (same paragraph = same speaker) with body
language, which shows more. For instance - “Go away,” Frank said. He
threw a rock at the dog. - could be revised to: “Go away!” Frank threw a
rock at the dog.
There’s no magic proportion of narrative to dialogue. A few stories are
entirely narrative. Even fewer are entirely dialogue. You’ll find it good to
“dramatize” important or emotional events, particularly a piece’s climax,
because readers enjoy seeing how characters behave and
hearing what they say. A bland paraphrase - There was a big fight. They
yelled a lot. Alice won. - is unsatisfying.
The mnemonic “dramatize, don’t summarize” is a variation of
“show, don’t tell.” Telling is efficient; it gets the job done. First
drafts often rely on telling - you need to discover what happened, so you
narrate a summary - but in revision, as you deepen the complexity of the main
characters and sharpen their conflict, you’ll probably put words in people’s
mouths. Now these actors move and speak - and in scenes, you show (not tell)
their deeds and words.
One great thing about writing dialogue is that unless you’re on
deadline, you can revise until each word is perfect. Relax. Let characters’
personalities, as they develop, be revealed by how they express themselves. The
rude boss is tactless - do let your people say mean things and make mistakes;
readers love seeing characters get themselves out of the messes they make - the
science teacher uses big words, and the shy child remains silent. Revisions help
you improve and “individuate” characters’ speech - a big word for having
fun with dialogue.
#
Exploding Similes and Double Negatives
Waverly Fitzgerald (wavefitz{at}aol[dot]com)
November 2005
Writers love language. It's one of the reason we become writers. And words give us such power. We can dapple a lake with silver or skip decades in a single phrase ("Twenty years later…). But sometimes we don't recognize the power we exercise in our choice of words.
One of the flaws I often see in the work of beginning writers comes from a lack of appreciation for this power. I call this "the exploding simile" because a client once described his character reacting to a piece of unpleasant news with a line similar to this: "She felt like a grenade had exploded in her stomach." He meant to convey that jolt which accompanies shock, perhaps a visceral tug in the region of the stomach, but I got a vivid picture, thanks to his words, of someone's stomach exploding and the bits of innards flying in all directions. Not what the writer intended.
I understand the impulse. Writers are always stretching to find the unique metaphor. We want to avoid clichés and, no doubt, we were rewarded as young writers by our teachers when we came up with a telling comparison. But when a metaphor is too grandiose it curdles the story rather than sweetening it. Any time the metaphor is more noticeable than the feeling or action its meant to describe then I believe the writer has erred.
Of course, this depends on what sort of writing you are doing. The closer to poetry (for instance, the lyric essay), the more permission you have to make your metaphors gorgeous. But in a straightforward essay, memoir or novel, I prefer that comparisons be less showy.
If you read the line "She shivered like a spaniel does when it shakes water from its
fur,"
don't you see a dog shaking rather than a woman? When you do use a metaphor, make sure it enhances the tone or theme of your pieces. For instance, if this woman had just been pulled out of a lake, you might write: "Shivers rippled through her body," thus capturing in a verb the quality of water moving in the lake.
Another problem with language is more subtle: the double negative. Generally it weakens your descriptions by pointing to what you don't want the reader to notice rather than what you do. It's a bit like telling someone not to think about a purple elephant. For instance, what happens when you read this passage:
He stepped out of the door. The street wasn't empty. The windows weren't dark. The sky was no longer blue.
I don't know about you but I see an empty street, dark windows and a blue sky. The effort to reverse all of those statements requires too much effort.
Occasionally you can use the double negative to powerful effect. For instance:
He didn't want to think about the soft contours of her breasts under her t-shirt. He didn't want to notice the way her hair curled against the jawbone he liked to trace with his thumb. He didn't want to respond to the quiver in her voice.
In this passage it's clear that the character is aware of all these details and the language merely points to the futility of his efforts to ignore them.
Make sure your words are adding to the power of your writing rather than distracting from your message.
#
Editors Guild member Waverly Fitzgerald (waverly{at}waverlyfitzgerald.com) teaches writing in Seattle for Richard Hugo House, the UW Experimental College, and the UW Women's Center. For more information about her classes, visit her web site:
www.waverlyfitzgerald.com
Imagery: 1. Figures of speech.
Similes. Metaphors. 2. More generally, all descriptions that prompt the reader
to visualize characters in their setting. These visualizations, in turn, set off
imaginative analogies that extend the implications of the story beyond its
literal limits.
--R. V. Cassill, glossary entry in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction,
6th ed.
Writing is like drawing or painting; you create images, but with words. Often,
artists start with a pencil sketch, then add color, detail, and changes later.
For writers, a first draft is a rough sketch. For example: The meadow was
pretty.
There’s a setting - the meadow - and we learn one thing: it’s pleasant. But
is moonlight glistening on snow during a clear, January night? Does a V of geese
fly over prairie grass ringed by golden, autumn aspen? Is it summer, perhaps,
the ground a solid purple mat of wild iris?
“The meadow was pretty” is vague. Worse, the line tells readers what to
think. It’s a judgment, so the imagery succeeds little better than a sketch.
It’s a beginning, however, and with simple revisions, easy to strengthen by
showing instead of telling.
One obvious choice is to add colors.
Another effective method is to include sensory details. First draft - the
writer’s “sketch” - invariably invokes what we see. But imagine being in
that meadow; use all your senses. Is it night or day, cold or hot? Does wind
rush through the trees or a stream splash at your feet? Can you smell flowers or
earth? If you lie beside that stream, can you taste a blade of grass, hear birds
sing, feel warm, water-smoothed stone beneath your back?
Step into your image - or, for characters, slip into their skins - then weigh
which words best evoke place or person. Feel free to cut, add, move, or change
details, crafting imagery in a series of small revisions that gradually sharpens
the focus. (No pressure to be brilliant immediately!) Instead, rework each word
until every sentence says what you mean. If you select vivid not vague detail,
readers will decide for themselves the meadow is pretty.
“Vivid not vague” is a useful mnemonic. Name those yellow trees aspen, those
summer flowers iris. In other words, commit to specifics. Exact details give
your images authority, and readers will trust the information unless/until they
catch you making mistakes. Be sure your choices are, in fact, accurate: put no
exotic purple orchids in your meadow, please, unless it’s on a tropical
island!
Sometimes accuracy means conducting research (library, Web, acquaintances). My
favorite method is just doing it: go to a meadow, write down - learn and specify
- what’s actually there. Keep a writer’s “sketchbook.” Over the years,
you’ll accumulate priceless information, reflecting your - hence, your
characters’ - interests.
For instance, in the Sierras once, I did my best to draw some black butterflies.
The chief difficulty was that my models kept flying away. But I eventually got
enough detail to look them up later, and found they were Adelpha bredowii,
California Sisters. If I set a story there, my character(s) would probably know
that common butterfly well. Or if I wrote an essay or travel article, this
specific detail would lend authority.
Also remember variety. You needn’t show absolutely everything. Telling
(narrative) provides information quickly, efficiently, in summary. Combine
showing and telling. How do you decide what imagery needs strengthening? Rule of
thumb: the more important a person, place, thing, or event, the more you’ll
show.
If your writing process is one of discovery - writing by the seat of your pants,
author/poet Raymond Carver said - the journey familiarizes you with what’s
important. Be patient. Get a draft, then expand focal items, delete anything
irrelevant or distracting (even if you spent a long time on it), spread details
out so they’re not an unpalatable pile, and change anything weak or incorrect.
And what about poetic imagery? Metaphor, simile, alliteration, onomatopoeia?
Yes, use care, and let your language dance. For a marvelous primer/review of
literary devices, see Frances Mayes’s The Discovery of Poetry, which
de-mystifies poetics in straightforward style using excellent examples.
Strengthening your imagery with colors, senses, specifics, variety, and poetics,
you may find the vague meadow we began with could become as vivid as poet/author
James Galvin’s in his book, The Meadow:
Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out
in the middle of the meadow’s widest field, everything has its own green:
cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage,
the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around, with
that boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen
to the sky’s blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun.
Elsewhere on the mountain, most of the green stays locked in pines, the prairie
is scorched yellow. But Lyle’s meadow is a hemorrhage of green, and a
green clockwork of waterways and grasses, held up to the sky in its ring of
ridges, held up for the sky to listen, too.
The granite boulder is only there to hold it down.
#
Irene Wanner, a member of the Northwest Independent Editors Guild, teaches at
Richard Hugo House, Field’s End, and the UW Women’s Center. A reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times, she was also a participant in Jack Straw Productions
2004 Writers Program; her project essay, “Birding at the Office,” was
recorded for and aired on KUOW. She will present one of the many writing
workshops offered at the Haystack Summer Program in the Arts (Cannon Beach,
Oregon) this July.
Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Long, Brown, Cylindrical Smoking Tube
Kim Runciman (gwyneth{at}drizzle[dot]com)
February 2005
Elegant variation is the term Fowler, author of the usage
bible Modern English Usage, applied to the tendency of “second-rate
writers” and “young writers” to make elaborate efforts to avoid repeating
words.
Most of us want to avoid repeating the same words in prose for fear of it
sounding ... well, repetitive. Rather than repeat a pronoun or name, writers
often resort to descriptive phrases such as “the beautiful blonde spy” or
“the cop” or “the dark-haired man,” or any number of epithets. (The word
epithets is not limited only to insult words, though that’s the second
definition in the dictionary. It’s a term used to characterize a person or
thing, such as rosy-fingered in rosy-fingered dawn, or the Great in
Catherine the Great. It’s also a term used as a descriptive substitute for the
name or title of a person, such as The Great Emancipator for Abraham
Lincoln.) People think that by identifying a person by their title, physical
characteristics, or position relative to another character (“the younger
daughter told her silver-haired father”), they can avoid an unpleasant
repetition of names or pronouns.
The problem with this is twofold: Most readers don’t notice the repetition,
because words on a page are perceived differently in our minds as we read than
they do when we hear them in speech; and when people use epithets to avoid
looking like they’re overusing names or pronouns, they actually call more
attention to those extreme (and often ridiculous) efforts. It frequently becomes
less about the story than about the intrusive voice of the writer rapping its
knuckles on the reader’s forehead, saying, Hey! Look at all the cool
synonyms and epithets I just came up with!
Epithets do not enhance a reader’s enjoyment of a story, nor do they signal
sophisticated writing. Many readers are thrown out of the story, because
epithets require effort to follow and are often contrived, silly, or stupid. (A
favorite of mine referred to an FBI agent as “the blood-stained redhead.”)
True elegance in writing is not just about beautiful or poetic use of language;
it also means making it easy for the reader. When you rely on epithets, you’re
actually asking the reader to work harder than they may want to.
Save epithets for the times when they really count: conveying character or
describing someone in detail. By all means use a descriptive word if it fits the
situation, and if it doesn’t detract from the story or point of view (“The
princess had captured his heart, and he was now enslaved to her, body and
soul.” “Tom desperately wanted the annoying contractor out of his
house.”). But it becomes a burden on the reader if you use epithets
consistently merely to avoid repeating a name or a pronoun.
Elegant variation isn’t limited to avoiding name and pronoun repetition; it
also involves avoiding redundancies of any common noun, verb, or phrase, often
because the writer is searching for something elaborate and dazzling.
Unfortunately, many creative writing instruction courses encourage beginners to
write this way. I well remember the “describe your environment as if you were
an alien who had landed on earth” or “describe your home, without repeating
any words or descriptions” exercises. (This is where the phrase “oblong
yellow fruit syndrome” comes from—the exercise that avoids using the word banana.)
This kind of thing can only lead to trouble, if you ask me: It often goes hand
in hand with overuse of the thesaurus. Unless they’re skilled with vocabulary
and descriptive writing, many people go overboard with synonyms, and may even
choose the wrong word, making themselves look foolish. Be cautious with
thesauruses—if the word is unfamiliar, look up the meaning, and don’t use a
thesaurus just because you’re worried about repetition. If characters are
constantly gazing into chocolate orbs or running fingers through raven tresses,
you’re sailing into dangerous waters.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with repeating a word or phrase when it’s
necessary. If you can write around it, do so, especially if you can eliminate
repeating elements altogether. Many writers waste an inordinate amount of space
describing more “geography” than they need to. If you find yourself writing
elaborate descriptions of movement, settings, and activity, telling the reader
“he did this and then went there, and put that there,” take a moment to ask
yourself: Did I do this to make my writing sing? Did I do it to add atmosphere,
and to develop the character and her viewpoint? If you’re doing it only to
prevent repeating a word or phrase, avoid the variation—your readers will
appreciate the effort, especially because they will already be a few steps ahead
of you, waiting for you to catch up.
In real life, settings and objects
carry strong meanings. No room, no
set of car keys is neutral or random. Compare
your own living room with that of your great aunt or your best friend.
The chair, the rug, the photo speaks –– even if obliquely ––
about who that person is. If you’ve ever had occasion to deal with a
person’s effects after death, you know how powerfully these trinkets and
packets of letters and ironed cotton handkerchiefs reek of a particular life.
And so it is with fictional characters. Their rooms stand for their
lives, their objects hold their history.
Compare two characters, portrayed
through their respective suppers. The first is the ex-convict Socrates, the
protagonist in Walter Mosely’s Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned:
He boiled potatoes and eggs in a saucepan on his
single hotplate and then cut them together in the pot with two knives, adding
mustard and sweet pickle relish. After the meal he had two shots of whiskey
and one Camel cigarette.
Now here, in After the Stroke, is the writer May Sarton partaking of her
supper:
The table looked beautiful with a white cloth strewn with violets––the
pattern is violets––two deep red roses in the center with the silver
candlesticks and tall white candles. The
tenderloin roast about which I felt terribly anxious turned out perfectly. We
had a great Haut-Medoc Bordeaux Lee had brought, and for dessert, vanilla ice
cream with crème de menthe and macadamia cake ….
Though one supper is fiction, the
other fact, the techniques of detailing the suppers are the same.
Far from serving as meaningless description or as decoration, the objects
–– the single hotplate, the silver candlesticks –– work as stand-ins for
the characters themselves. Socrates with his hotplate is no corporate lawyer.
May Sarton with her silver candlesticks is no ex-con cooking on a
hotplate. We can take our own work
to the next level by giving our characters objects that represent their sorry
past or their essentially European aesthetic or whatever is at the heart of who
they are.
Settings work to intensify the
emotion of the story, and settings characterize. Here is an alley, seen through
the eyes of the above-mentioned Socrates:
The sun was coming up. The alley
was almost pretty with the trash and broken asphalt covered in half light.
Discarded wine bottles shone like murky emeralds in the sludge.
The alley holds a feeling of quiet
tranquility. It also holds the
character of Socrates. The alley is
beautiful not because trash is beautiful but because Socrates is a man who,
despite his hard life, can see the beauty in things.
A person’s rooms suggest or even
express their life. Here is the essayist V. S. Pritchard writing about the
novelist Forrest Reid, who lived in Dublin.
I found him living alone
on the top floor of a shabby house in a noisy and dirty factory district. His room was bare and poor, and only packed shelves of books, carefully
bound in white paper covers to protect them from smoke and smuts, suggested the
bibliophile and the scholar. A pile
of novels for review stood on his table, alongside his papers and pencils, and
the remains of a cold leg of mutton which, I imagine, had to last the week, and
during our talks he would sit near to a miserable little fire, shyly drawing
intricate patterns with a poker in the soot on the back of the fireplace (Lasting
Impressions).
Pritchard uses the setting
–– the miserable fire, the smoke and smuts, the bare room –– to
carry the hard life of this creative genius. To put this another way, Pritchard
perceives how Reid’s room stands for Reid’s life. Note that this passage
occurs in a book review (here again, fictional and nonfictional techniques
overlap).
Settings can do double or triple
duty to deepen a story. Look at how Faulkner opens “Dry September,” a story
about a lynching:
Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of
sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass––the rumor,
the story, whatever it was.
The bloody –– not rosy, not
soft or hazy –– twilight foreshadows and intensifies the terror of what is
to come.
Settings and
objects are interrelated, since objects occur in settings.
It is useful to speak of them in the same breath.
They resonate metaphorically: Socrates’ rudimentary room and his
hotplate stand for themselves but they also stand for Socrates’ circumstances,
his history, his occupation. Isaac
Babel, knowing the meaningfulness of objects, used to pay women to show him the entire contents of
their pocketbooks.
The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas writes extensively on objects as
expressions of self. In Being a Character he suggests that we evoke
“self experiences” by choosing objects. So for example, you might pick up a softball mitt on one occasion, a
sonnet on another. A different
person will pick up a flat of petunias or a pistol. We choose not only an activity but also the self we want to inhabit in
carrying out the activity. What
objects does our protagonist pick up? Do
these objects tend to change as our protagonist changes?
Objects carry both history and desire. Feng Shui is greatly concerned
with objects, and Feng Shui coach Karen Rauch Carter writes in Move Your
Stuff, Change Your Life that again and again she encounters
relationship-seeking single women whose walls are covered with images of
solitary, single women. She advises
replacing these with images of couples and coupling. The idea is to portray not the reality but the intention and the desire.
We writers might concern ourselves with what our protagonists put on
their walls. Does this taxidermied
moose-head represent who the character is or does it represent what the
character wishes to be?
Did I mention that settings and objects carry strong meanings? A room can
stand for a character’s mood –– it can look dreary or the dust can dance.
Objects carry cultural meanings as well as personal meanings less readily
apparent. If you walked into my house you might see on the mantelpiece a carved
African bowl. It was carved in
Liberia
in the mid-1960s. Considered at length it may raise cultural and historical
questions and suggest a lot of history. For me personally it is also a relic of
my late sister, who brought it back from the Peace Corps long ago. Does your
character possess a relic of lost love or a memento of a distant place?
We writers could do worse than to observe settings and objects ––
deeply and at length –– and use them to enrich every page.
Detail and Narrative Pace
Irene Wanner (iwanner{at}myuw[dot]net)
June 2004
“A
work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry
its justification in every line....”
--Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus
In
prose, details create the illusion of reality. But the more the detail, the
slower the narrative pace. Pace, the speed with which stories (and their
readers) progress, is flexible. Pace is also a matter of personal style. While
Amy Tan and Louise Erdrich write rich, leisurely narratives, Ernest Hemingway
and Raymond Carver preferred clean, spare language. No matter what your style,
the rule of thumb is that the more important a person, place, thing or event,
the more detail it deserves.
Quantity
of detail, then, is significant. Equally important is the quality of detail;
each should be relevant, resonant, and accurate. Relevance keeps ideas and
language interesting and direct. Resonance means choosing details that function
well on a literal level, and which may also become symbolic. And accurate
because factual errors, inconsistencies, contradictions or confusions destroy
the delicate realism created by black type on white paper. Anything disrupting a
reader’s attention or trust undermines narrative authority.
So
while pace is flexible, authority must be absolute. You may have to do research,
such as reading, asking people who know the topic for help, searching the Web,
etc. I consulted maps often for a travel article about Oregon, but would take similar care crafting details for fiction. In an interview,
Ursula Le Guin once noted that “if you throw in an orange sun and eight blue
moons,” you have to consider that imaginary world’s tides and shadows.
Further, in “Writing Short Stories,” Flannery O’Connor states, “I would
even go so far as to say that the person writing a fantasy has to be even more
strictly attentive to detail....” The greater a story’s “strain on
credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be.”
Even
if research took a lot of time and effort, keep only those details necessary to
do the job elegantly. Avoid dragging a story to a standstill with unimportant
information. Also, a page of solid type is visually daunting, so pay attention
to “white space.” The more white space, the faster the pace.
In
first draft, “freewrite.” Lock up your internal editor, accepting whatever
occurs to you. Particularly if you discover what you’re writing about as you
write, freewriting lets you save subconscious gifts or seemingly random thoughts
that later might make marvelous sense once you discern their relevance. In
subsequent drafts, as you begin to know your characters, understand their
conflict, see where they live, and how they behave, you can tailor the details
for a perfect fit. Rewriting is your best ally. Don’t worry if early versions
are vague; rewrite, and enjoy making key items vivid.
Often,
revising means cutting. Obvious choices are anything redundant or irrelevant.
Sometimes, however, you’ll want more detail. For example, at a story’s
climax, a scene - dialogue and inter/action - proves more powerful than summary.
If your first draft provides only narrative, expand it into a scene. Another
crucial spot is the beginning, which may wander until you identify the conflict.
The opposite can occur at endings. You’re so happy to recognize them, you rush
like horses to a barn at feeding time. Frequently, then, beginnings need
cutting, while endings need expansion.
Revising
may mean breaking up piles of detail - what Ursula Le Guin likens to gravy lumps
in her writing guide, Steering the Craft - culling the unnecessary and
smoothing the remainder into smaller doses throughout a piece.
In The
Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton makes an analogy between “administering
a fortune” and writing. Imagine each word costs a dollar. You’d want to
spend your money wisely. One good investment might be adding complexity to
stereotypical characters. It might mean replacing descriptions that tell (she
was old) to images that show (she removed her teeth). Bland imagery can become
evocative with inclusion of colors and sensory details (not just sight).
Specifics (oaks instead of trees) strengthen focus. And resonance can be
attained by “layering” in a detail once, twice, three times, so readers
“learn” its significance, making their own connections. Body language (he
screamed) shows more effectively more than telling with a weak verb and adverb
(he said loudly). Small changes can make big improvements.
Whenever
you read, analyze your likes and dislikes. You can learn techniques to emulate
or avoid. Then freewrite, rewrite, and rewrite again until your details are
neither too many nor too few, but just right.
Irene Wanner, a member of
the Northwest Independent Editors Guild, teaches fiction writing at Richard Hugo
House, Field’s End, and
Western
Washington
University
. On editorial staff of The Seattle Review, she also reviews books for The
San Francisco Chronicle and Orion. A recent natural history essay,
“Looking for Snowies,” appeared in Bird Watcher’s Digest. She is a
member of Jack Straw Productions’ 2004 Writers Program.
The Writing Process: Choose Your Metaphor
[dot]March
2004
Metaphors
permeate the lives of writers, but often we fail to notice how they shape our
experience. Look at the way you are approaching your current work, and if it's
not working for you, shift your metaphor.
One of the most common metaphors for the creative process is the growing embryo.
The writing sprouts from a seed of an idea, which develops complexity and even
personality. This suggests that every piece has a natural progression, one that
can be influenced by external forces but that also has its own inherent mature
form.
Another
common metaphor is writing as construction. Plot outlines, character sketches,
and blocks of research are like the frame of a house, which the writer gradually
fills in with words and detail and theme. This metaphor suggests more
manipulation on the part of the writer, who can strip back to the scaffolding
and start over. It also implies a certain level of technical skill, gained from
both study and practice.
Of course, many
other metaphors describe the creative process—for instance, E. L. Doctorow's
famous quote "Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only
see as far as your headlights, but you can make the entire journey that
way." Writing
this way, the writer has a dimly perceived destination (usually someplace
unfamiliar) and a direction, but otherwise the experience is much like a road
trip, with the writer enjoying the landscape the same way the reader will.
Sometimes
I feel that the story I’m writing already exists in an alternate reality, like
the world of dreams. How else to explain the way characters suddenly blurt out
new information or act in ways I didn't intend? In this metaphor, the characters
have lives of their own that go on without me, and I only come to record
them—although I sense, as if in a physics experiment, that my participation
changes the results.
Revising
your work invites different metaphors. I found the process of revising my novel
much more laborious than I expected, akin to a thorough house-cleaning: You've
got items stacked everywhere but nothing's where it's supposed to be because
something else is there and you wonder if you can ever get it back together but
you know you can't stop because otherwise it will just get worse.
This
metaphor reassured me that the chaos in my revision might be a sign that things
were about to turn around. In fact, I did manage to find a perfect place for
most of my favorite, but inappropriately placed, bits and characters. Those
pieces that didn't fit, I put in a computer file called "unused."
As
I approached the end of that first revision, the metaphor shifted again, to the
process of whipping cream. Although it seemed that nothing was changing,
gradually—imperceptibly at first—my novel began to feel “thicker."
Ultimately, I reached a point where I felt the whole novel cohered.
That
was only the first rewrite, however. After getting feedback from various
readers, I started revising again. This final revision, focusing on the sentence
level, felt more like combing through a tangled mass of hair. I combed through
all the snarls in the first chapter, easing out the snags, removing extra words
that clung like burrs. The next day I started over. The places I'd already
combed were fairly smooth, but when I hit the rougher sections I had to slow
down and untangle new snarls.
Of
course it's a good idea to let a piece of writing sit for a while before a final
edit, to give you more "distance"—another metaphor. In his book on
writing, Stephen King advises: "How long you let your book rest—sort of
like bread dough between kneadings—is entirely up to you, but I think it
should be a minimum of six weeks." I like thinking of my work as a piece of
bread that will ultimately feed and nourish my readers.
When
your work is finally done and you send it away, many say it feels like sending
children to college (a return to the embryo metaphor). It's similar in that you
have given up responsibility and probably can't influence the course of their
development much longer, but you will hear from them occasionally, and people
will judge you based on their behavior.
No
matter what part of the writing process you are in, choose your metaphor
carefully. Let it be one that offers you a vision of the end result you desire
and engages your imagination along the way.
Editors
Guild member Waverly Fitzgerald (wavefitz{at}aol[dot]com)
teaches writing in Seattle for Richard Hugo House, the UW Experimental College,
and the UW Women's Center. Her detective novel is currently "away at
college" in New York City. An editor and writing coach, she likes to work as a developmental editor with
writers working on novels, memoirs, and nonfiction book proposals.
