Craft in a paragraph (ten)

A novel takes a while to write. This one [A Wizard of Earthsea] went pretty quickly and easily, though I didn’t have a plot outlined out when I started, but I knew what the story was. I knew who my Sparrowhawk was, and in a general way I knew where he was going—where he had to go, not only to learn to be a wizard, but to learn to be Ged. Then, as I wrote his story, what he did and said, where he went and the people he met, showed me and told me what he had to do and where he had to go next.

Ursala K. LeGuin

Interesting language 9

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Learning from Johnson

I’m enjoying At the Mouth of the River of Bees, one of Kij Johnson’s short story collections. I plan to go looking for more of her work. Consider this sentence from her story “26 monkeys, also the abyss”:

These are some ways Aimee’s life might’ve come apart:

After this sentence is a short list of three or four events which, it is clear, did not happen to Aimee. This list of things that did not happen is a kind of narrative negative space but not on the level of the page. It’s not an empty or unoccupied area around paragraphs, at the ends or beginnings of them, or a gap between sets of them. It’s an empty narrative space because it is an explicit list of things that did not occur in the character’s life. But telling readers what is not there kind of implies what is. It’s characterization by what has not happened to a character. What hasn’t happened also suggests the kind of person Aimee is. I’ll probably try this technique by suggesting what could have happened to a character, but didn’t.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Johnson’s novel The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.

How do you get through?

It’s a nice big fat philosophical question . . . how do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it’s not a compelling idea. It’s predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody’s attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.

–Toni Morrison

Learning from Mandanna

Consider the last two paragraphs of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna:

She, Mika Moon, would not be the witch who transformed the world, but she was making it a little better, day by day. She had once believed witches would never have friendship, community, and each other, but here they were. She had once believed she would never have a family, but here they were, too. She, who had once believed she would never leave a mark on anybody, knew now that the marks she had left were unerasable, as much a part of forever as the sea.

And, really, who could ask for more than that?

Endings are tricky. No one strategy will fit all of them, but this ending works really well. The techniques behind it include a summary of the book in this paragraph (the scenes that make up the book are excellent in themselves as well), anaphora, and epistrophe. The length and variety of the sentences keep the anaphora interesting: “She . . . ,” “She had once . . . ,” “She had once . . . ,” and “She . . . knew now . . .” The same is true of the epistrophe: “but here they were” and “but here they were, too.” Prose writers worry about repetition, but these strategies succeeded in creating emphasis and emotions as the book ends (at least for me). Consider trying them.

Craft in a paragraph (nine)

I like to mess around with my stories. I’d rather tinker with a story after writing it, and then tinker some more, changing this, changing that, than have to write the story in the first place. That initial writing just seems to me the hard place I have to get to in order to go on and have fun with the story. Rewriting for me is not a chore–it’s something I like to do. I think by nature I’m more deliberate and careful than I am spontaneous, and maybe that explains something. . . . Maybe I revise because it gradually takes me into the heart of what the story is about. I have to keep trying to see if I can find that out.

–Raymond Carver

Craft in a metaphor (eight)

Here is a quotation collage from Peter Ho Davies’s The Art of Revision:

[I]t might help to modify our terms and to consider our initial sense of a story as a hypothesis, and what we know about it as provisional—theory, in essence…. [A] draft might be seen as an experiment designed to test that hypothesis…. Fiction indeed might be understood as a kind of thought experiment. What is a lie in search of the truth, after all–Picasso’s definition of art—if not a form of provisional knowledge?… New hypotheses can be tested with each draft—what if I cut this? what if I expand that? what if I shifted the time frame? or the point of view?… Without a flawed hypothesis, we can’t find our way to a true one.

Learning from Moore

Here are two paragraphs from Liz Moore’s God of the Woods:

She saw everything. She sat on the edge of the stage that overlooked the community room, watching her campers in all of their triumphs and failures, the ones having genuine fun, the ones pretending to have it.

If she believed in a God, it was in one who functioned something like Louise in this moment: rooting for her charges from afar, mourning alongside them when they were rejected, celebrating every small victory that came their way. She noticed the lonely ones, the ones at the edge of the crowd; she felt in her heart a sort of wild affection for them, wanted to go to them, to stand next to them and pull them tightly to her side; and yet she also knew that to intervene in this way would disrupt something sacred that—at twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old—they were learning about themselves and the world. And this, too, was how she thought of God.

Consider characterization by thoughts about the divine. Characters might not believe at all or might not believe as aggressively and fervently as the most devout evangelists or believe to various changing degrees. What characters consider divine (their money, spouse, time with their phone or family, God) reveals them to readers as well. Does what characters consider divine put them at odds with some of the other characters around them? Does it make them a member of a community or organization? How do they feel about that membership? How do people important to them feel about it? If you’re writing literary realism, is there a faith tradition you want to mention specifically? If you’re writing fantasy, do you need to invent a pantheon? How might meeting aliens change your characters ideas about all of this? What other life events might strengthen or weaken a character’s resolve, whatever their position?

Moore’s paragraphs above quickly show readers Louise’s view of the world, other characters in it, the setting, and a bit about her view of herself. That kind of quick characterization is valuable for writers.

Learning from Rundell

What part of a character enters the room first? What is a reader’s very first impression? Consider this sentence from Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures: “His eyebrows were so bushy they would, Christopher thought, enter a room several seconds before the rest of him.” A single sentence characterizes the point-of-view character (Christopher) and the character they are meeting.

Sometimes, the first part of a character to enter a room is their reputation (see Voldemort and everything that is said and is not said about him). In contrast, consider Darth Vader’s arrival in Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. Visually, Vader is very different than the environment around him. The music suggests a reputation, possibly, but his actions after he arrives show viewers who he is.

Consider the value of being premeditated about this; you might decide whether a character has a reputation that precedes them (and what the presentation of the reputation might reveal about the character who makes it) or if a character’s actions almost as soon as they arrive reveal them.

Submitting

The latest version of the query hook for THE WILLOWBREAKERS:

Raising a strange child you’re not sure is yours. Suffocating under swarms of ghosts. Being forgotten in a family of strangers. Beating back wolves with an inherited sword. Each of the Willowbreaker children and their mother have battles to fight to keep themselves and each other safe and fed. Through negotiating with their evil stepfather, fighting monsters in strange dimensions, combating the dead, and confronting a spectral king’s dangerous daughter, they fight to stay a family. Maybe.

I’ve also changed the title to GUARDIAN, GHOST, MOON, MOTHER.