Storytelling sustains

[T]he very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. . . . So many of the things in our world tend to lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. . . . A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.

–Tobias Wolff

Asking why

Remember that a story is always trying to get at the business of human nature, to tell us that this is what it’s like to be a human being and this is how it feels. To do that we have to get below the surface. Below the action and down to the values and motivation. The important question that the story must ask is: Why? Not: What? Why does N. do what she does? One thing she does is fall in love with X. Why? How did that happen?

–John Dufresne

Planning characters

One way to characterize is for your character to make a plan. The kind of plan the character makes, the level of formality with which it is made, how the character responds when things go according to their plan, how they respond when things do not, what they do when their plan is criticized, who they share their plan with, how their setting influences their plan, how they think about and enact it, and how they revise it, all these things characterize. They also provide a plot.

The plan does not have to be to destroy or save the world. It could be to cross a room for a drink of water, but it ought to be important to your character for reasons your reader can understand.

Try drafting one.

Reading craft online

Poets & Writers has a series of online craft essays. They take just moments to read and are usually useful. Here is a representative example.

Brain Pickings has collected the advice on writing that they’ve shared over the years. This advice always has excellent authors as its sources.

Finally, Literary Hub lists short excerpts from 25 books on writing by famous authors. If nothing else, the list acts as a possible shopping list for books on the craft of writing. The excerpts can help in deciding from among all the books.

Both at once?

Students are expected to write a novella in one of the classes I teach. I’ve wanted to complete the assignments of planning, drafting, and revising along with them and thought this semester would be a good time for that. One of my own projects was being edited, so it seemed I could take a break from it for a semester. However, I’ve actually been torn the past few weeks between wanting to revise the work I’ve just had edited and starting a new novella with the class. This is, I realize, a wonderful problem to have.

I don’t usually do more than take notes on one project while working on another, but in this case I may try both at once.

Characters and information

I read Cryptonomicon probably ten years ago. An excellent novel. One I obviously still think about. It ends with a system for encoding information. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, if I remember correctly, includes in its narrative instructions for creating spy networks. What information might one of your characters teach another (and perhaps incidentally the reader)? How might that “teaching moment” characterize the teacher and the student? How informally could it happen?

On a bad day

“As Norman Mailer once put it, the main difference between an experienced and an inexperienced writer is the ability to work on a bad day.”
–Madison Smart Bell’s Narrative Design

Many quotations express this valuable idea in similar ways:

Agatha Christie’s An Autobiography: “There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.”

David Halberstam’s Everything They Had: Sports Writing: “There’s a great quote by Julius Irving that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.'”

“A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it. ”
– Alistair Cooke

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
– Colin Powell.

“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
– Conrad Hilton.

Controlling point of view

I’ve been reading Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante. It is the third of the Neapolitan Novels series. I’ve found them all compelling. The book is narrated in a distant remembering first-person. Notice how completely and naturally this narrating character moves within the inner lives of other characters/people in her life:

He wasn’t in a good mood, in fact he seemed emptied of energy, as if the practice of violence had swallowed up his craving for action. . . . Certainly he was bothered by the critical tone she had used in alluding to the morning’s expedition. He’s convinced, Lila thought, that I don’t understand why he hit Gino like that, why he wanted to beat up the guard. Good or bad, all men believe that after every one of their undertakings you have to put them on an altar as if they were St. George slaying the dragon. He considers me ungrateful, he did it to avenge me, he would like me to at least say thank you.

The quotation begins and ends one paragraph, though I haven’t quoted the paragraph in its entirety.

Context lets readers know that this paragraph begins with the narrator’s female friend interpreting a male they both know. We’re reminded that we’re inside Lila’s head by the attribution “Lila thought” which also creates an opportunity for an “I” (in “that I don’t understand why”) besides the “I” of the first-person narrator (who rarely uses the first-person pronoun, probably strategically, making room for others’ use of it). The next sentence is unattributed, but it seems likely that readers will see it as another of Lila’s thoughts. The sentence after that comes from deep within Lila’s consciousness, deep enough that it includes “me.” This sentence reveals the most about her, her perception of the guy she’s thinking about, and significantly the first-person narrator. That first-person narrator’s interpretation of her friend and their mutual friend also characterizes the narrator. It allows her to write in first-person and move deeply within another character’s inner life in compelling, but not confusing, ways.

So, to characterize, consider the following technique: a minimal, distant remembering first-person that uses an explicit attribution of feeling or thought (“Lila thought”), followed by an “I” referencing that other character (Lila), at least a sentence that can be considered more of that other character’s thoughts (the “St. George” sentence), and then a sentence deep within the other character, one that references that character explicitly, with “me,” in this case.

The way stone excites a sculptor

In an essay called “On Reading Poetry,” Kenneth Koch wrote:

Suppose you want to get an experience into words so that it is permanently there, as it would be in a painting—so that every time you read what you wrote, you reexperienced it. Suppose you want to say something so that it is right and beautiful—even though you may not understand exactly why. Or suppose words excite you—the way stone excites a sculptor—and inspire you to use them in a new way. And that for these or other reasons you like writing because of the way it makes you think or because of what it helps you to understand. These are some of the reasons poets write poetry.