Tag: writing

Learning from Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin has a lot to teach. Here is a paragraph from late in A Wizard of Earthsea.

They passed between Kornay and Gosk in foul weather, seeing neither isle in the fog and rain, and knowing they had passed them only on the next day when they saw ahead of them an isle of pinnacled cliffs above which sea-gulls wheeled in huge flocks whose mewing clamor could be heard from far over the sea. Vetch said, “That will be Astowell, from the look of it. Lastland. East and south of it the charts are empty.”

This is a paragraph of description. The paragraph before it sums up a conversation between Ged and Vetch. Summary and description are interesting when reading Le Guin. For example, in addition to summary, the paragraph I’m not quoting here builds the world of the story by describing magic and mentioning historical figures in that world and sharing their wisdom. One character watches another and reacts in ways that characterizes both. The last sentence is a portent of things to come. All of the sentences, in other words, are working in multiple ways, doing more than one thing.

The paragraph of description I have quoted above describes the fictional world and uses sensory language to do so. Sensory language is far more interesting to most readers than abstract language. Sensory language reminds us of how we experience the actual world so it can help connect us to a fictional one. Readers can draw or dream or film the passage between the islands and sailing past Lastland. That landmark is important enough to the characters that they speak of it and their speaking of it helps make it important to readers. The order of the sentences in the paragraph is not random or haphazard. It ends with “empty,” with the characters leaving not only civilization behind but any safety besides their boat. Like the paragraph before it, this one ends with a portent that increases the danger the characters face. The paragraphs are escalating tension in the story, as George Saunders suggests.

The sentences and the paragraphs do more than one thing. They characterize as they world build as they escalate as they engage reader’s senses as they provide portents/foreshadowing as they summarize. It’s excellent.

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.

Current events

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

from Ted Chiang’s Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

Opening (and continuing) with desire

Two quotations from “Silent Movie” by Charles Baxter in his collection A Relative Stranger:

She was tired of men’s voices, of their volume and implacability. She had the idea that she would spend the day not listening to any of them. She would just shut them off. She would try to spend the day inside images, instead. She wasn’t sure it was possible.

 

“Loretta,” she asked, back at the florist’s, “how do I get rid of this guy?”

“Darling,” Loretta shouted, “first ignore him and then just move out.”

What she wanted was a vacation from words spoken by voices below middle C.

The first quotation starts the story; the second is taken from about the middle of the story. In both, the character’s desire is articulated directly, very directly in the second. A plan is also implied, as is the question of how well it can be followed.

Characters with desires that readers are aware of and can relate to are often characters that readers find engaging and interesting. The central question of the story becomes whether or not the character will satisfy his or her desire. This question and the character’s reaction to dangers that would prevent satisfaction can create drama in the way Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, for example, outlines. The directness of the articulation of desire and the character’s own awareness of that desire also characterize effectively.

So, where and how will readers of the fiction you are currently working on become aware of the main character’s desire? What dangers to the satisfaction of that desire are there in your story? Obviously, these dangers don’t have to be dangers to physical well-being or health to be dangerous. And what a character desires doesn’t have to be exotic, shouldn’t be, really, to interest readers.