On characters alone

The Practice of Creative Writing by Heather Sellers is an excellent introduction to Creative Writing across genres. It includes the following advice: “When you write about one person who is alone, you tend to rely on thoughts. It’s harder to create tension with a character alone on stage, lost in thought – difficult but not impossible . . . As a rule, however, a character alone with their thoughts is boring” (255). This is a good principle. One of the weaknesses in one of my projects lately is time a character spends alone, specifically while driving across much of the country. I’ve been thinking about how to revise to add tension to that journey.

At the same time, I’ve just started rereading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, the first of her MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood’s Snowman/Jimmy is very alone in a postapocalyptic cli-fi setting. Atwood’s text suggests a character who is alone can spend lots of time thinking about an interesting past that is full of other characters (these include for Snowman/Jimmy, his father, mother, father’s lover, teachers, a male friend, a female friend, at least one crush, and others). He is comfortable commenting on his own time thinking about his past (he generally doesn’t like it) and is comfortable guessing about the thoughts and feelings of people from his past. Most importantly, while much of the book takes place in Snowman/Jimmy’s past, the contrasts between his past, our near future (in which the book is set), and his present gives the narrative real tension.

I’m not sure how that set of three sources of tension could work in my project, but another strategy Atwood uses, that you’ve already probably noticed, is that her character gives himself a different name. He thinks of himself as a different person as a result of an event in the story. Before, he was Jimmy. Now, he is Snowman. Another source of tension or interest for me as a reader is discovering the details of this change. Why the change? Why Snowman?

That’s something I can use as my character drives and it might add tension or at least help characterize him. Before a big event he saw the world one way. After he sees it another. He might rename himself as a result. He’ll definitely think of himself differently in ways I can make explicit.

Are there ways Atwood’s strategies might apply to something your working on?

Learning from Katherine Heiny

“The very next day, a woman ahead of Graham in line at the deli order a Reuben sandwich with French dressing instead of Russian, and Graham recalled that his ex-wife had often order that very sandwich, and then he realized the woman was his ex-wife.”

from Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

Here are some thoughts about this graceful sentence.

The surprise in this sentence is a result of its shape, its structure. The information it presents is ordered so that readers move from “a woman ahead of Graham” and the details of a sandwich, to the memory of a woman, to the actual woman in the character’s present moment. In other words, readers move from trigger, to memory, to instance/event.

The process of recalling a memory takes place within the process of ordering a meal. The character’s mundane becomes a source of possible drama and his reaction to this event characterizes. Graham, in the sentences that follow this one, vacillates between inviting his ex-wife to eat with him and avoiding her by slipping away.

The italics provide an emphasis that perhaps characterizes but also gives readers an additional clue that while we’re within Graham’s consciousness his ex-wife is also present before him and us.

Consider building a sentence using a similar structure, one that moves from trigger to memory to surprising presence.

Fiction in the world

Visualizing a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart. . . . Happier, kinder worlds in fiction naturally lead people to band together, to try and create pockets of that experience in our world. And there’s plenty of evidence that these fan communities feed directly into political organizing.
Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders

Learning from Chekhov

“Winter, evil, dark, long, had ended so recently; spring had arrived suddenly; but neither the warmth nor the languid, transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flock flying in the fields over huge puddles that were like lakes, nor this marvelous, immeasurably deep sky, into which it seemed that one would plunge with such joy, offered anything new and interesting to Maria Vasuilyevna, who was sitting in the cart.”

“The Cart” by Anton Chekhov

I really like this sentence.

The sentence gives readers a landscape and a character and her mindset.
The semi-colons set the stage. They control broad establishing temporal shots, letting readers know about the time of year without allowing that information to be presented in a static way. We know what winters are like in this world Chekhov is building and we know how this spring has arrived. But the seasons are presented abstractly at first
For most of the rest of the sentence, a world is presented in images. Those images are built from actual, specific objects (woods, flock, fields, puddles, sky), sensory language (warmth and black, most obviously), and some metaphors.
The sentence is also structured to present a mystery. The phrase “but neither the” leads readers into the rest of the sentence wondering what the elements implied by it will be. The mystery begins to be answered with a character’s reaction to the world. The images didn’t offer “anything new and interesting to Maria.” We read on, at least partly, to see why and how there could be nothing new or interesting for her here. Chekhov presents a place that is likely to interest readers and then lets them know this character is not interested in it.
“Joy” appears in the sentence to create engaging contrast with the character’s state of mind.
Anti-climax is used strategically as the sentence ends with “sitting in the cart.” At the same time, it almost immediately reminds readers of the title of the story.

Chekhov certainly took the advice that “sentences should do more than one thing” seriously.

What might you add to these ideas about the sentence?

Nuancing “Write what you know”

I suspect a guiding principle of early drafts might be better phrased as “Write to know,” and of revision, “Revise to know more,” and of a final draft, “I’ve written what I now know.”
From The Art of Revision by Peter Ho Davies

100 x 100 II

Since my last “current projects” post, I’m at 82/100. Some of these are certainly going to be tossed, but I like others. Given teaching and other business, I feel good about what I’ve done so far. Hoping for more revision over the summer and more attention toward submitting work for publication, my biggest weakness.

Addiction

It’s the experience of writing that I’m addicted to . . . the spying into character’s lives, the living dangerously while always having reality as a safety net, the falling in love, the falling in hate. Writing lets me feel what my life hasn’t. It lets me experience what my life couldn’t.

–Peter Miller

Reading Like a Writer: T. Kingfisher

“If you have ever tried to stay afloat on a pair of magic bread slices, then you know what it’s like.”

from A Wizards Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

The equally delightful sentences before this one provide some context. Basically, the main character is trying to escape pursuers and persuades two pieces of bread to act as tiny pontoons (one for each foot) so she can cross a river.

Here are some thoughts about this sentence:

This is an excellent example of incidental, non-infodump worldbuilding. It appears organically in the text. It is not boring or long. It does not impede the narrative’s momentum. The best worldbuilding happens similarly.
An impossibility for readers is not one for characters. This creates surprise for readers out of the mundane for a character. The subtext, or the character’s assumption, is something like “You might have done this. What? No?” That assumption of the possibility of common experience–even this experience–helps create a closeness between readers and this character.
The cliche “you know what it’s like” does at least two things. The first is a surprise as readers realize that no, they can’t know what it is like. The second is an appealing gesture of good faith: What’s possible for me might be possible for you. The characterization in the gesture of good faith outweighed any distancing caused by the realization that the character and I are in different worlds. I was instead charmed by it.

Consider an mundane possibility for a character of yours that is probably impossible for readers. How might it be casually, incidentally presented in a way that indicates good faith and community?

Remember the best part

I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do–the actual act of writing–turns out to be the best part.

–Anne Lamott

Learning from William Faulkner

That title is misleading since it would be easy to teach a class on Faulkner (indeed, people do) and this it just one post. I do recommend reading his work as a Creative Writing textbook. Even a sentence is a good place to start.

From The Sound and the Fury, “His hands were jabbing at my face and he was saying something and trying to bite me, I reckon, and then they hauled him off and held him heaving and thrashing and yelling and they held his arms and he tried to kick me until they dragged him back.”

Trying to read this as a writer, here are some thoughts.

I have not written many violent physical confrontations, but this sentence seems to emphasize the visual images of a character in a specific moment rather than fight choreography. In other words, rather than a second-by-second description of who was where when, readers are within one of the character’s consciousnesses.
This sentence characterizes both the character being attacked and the one attacking. Faulkner gives us the experience through words his character would choose, through the vocabulary of a specific character: “reckon,” “thrashing,” repetition, and the alliteration of “held him heaving.” Described actions characterize the attacker, whose “hands were jabbing,” “trying to bite,” and, once they held his arms, he kicked.
The conventional wisdom in Creative Writing seems to be that events that happen quickly are best presented in many short sentence (see, for example, Heather Sellers’s excellent The Practice of Creative Writing : “. . . you use short sentences to indicate fast-paced action . . . And when you want to slow down the pace, in order to show a process that is taking place over a long period of time, use a long sentence” [203]). But, I wonder. Here is Faulkner again in short sentences:
- His hands were jabbing at my face. He was saying something. He tried to bite me, I reckon. Then they hauled him off. He heaved and thrashed and yelled. They held his arms. He tried to kick me. They dragged him back.
- Perhaps the experience of reading these short sentences and the moment being described contrast too sharply for me, but the periods jerk the fast-paced action to a stop. That Faulkner’s longer sentence doesn’t stop gives the experience of reading it and what it describes greater speed than the shorter sentences.
Since I’ve quoted Sellers above, I’ll also mention the excellent Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively by Hans Ostrom, Wendy Bishop, and Katharine Haake. More specifically, their exercise “Sentence Sounds: Exploring the ‘Conjunctive’ and ‘Disjunctive,'” on 171-173, mentions Faulkner in interesting ways.