Tag: writing

Learning from Fowler

The first sentence of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is “Those who know me now will be surprised to learn that I was a great talker as a child.”

If you’ve been reading my posts, you expect me to argue that there is an implied question in the sentence and that readers read beyond it hoping for an answer. You’re right. What’s changed for this character so that they no longer speak as much as they used to? Is this a good thing (“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt” –Abraham Lincoln) or bad (Silence = Death)?

The sentence also explicitly suggests a change in a character, and it characterizes because this is a character who thinks about their life, time, and others, or their audience. This first sentence, in some ways, begins to address the themes of the novel, which can be read as asking about sentience and what sentience in others (especially animals) ethically requires of humanity.

Finally, all of this reminds me of one of Donald Barthelme’s expectations of sentences, that they have a “metaphysical dimension.” Barthelme offers this definition: “By ‘metaphysical dimension’ I mean a quality that turns the mind toward original questions, first principles, the deepest sort of search for meaning.” Ethical questions, especially when they involve how we treat our neighbors, evoke first principles.

How do you know when a novel is finished?

. . . [O]nce I finish a draft, I reread the book. There I find things that are wrong or that don’t work. At that point I make the necessary changes through a new draft. I read the book again. More problems and another rewrite. This process might be repeated twenty times, more. Finally, I reread a batch of changes, see problems in the work, and yet realized that I have no answers. That is when the book is finished.

–Walter Mosley, Elements of Fiction

Learning from Evanovich and Goldberg

Consider the first paragraph of The Heist by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg:

Kate O’Hara’s favorite outfit was her blue windbreaker with the letters FBI written in yellow on the back, worn over a basic black T-shirt and matching black Kevlar vest. The ensemble went well with everything, particularly when paired with jeans and accessorized with a Glock. Thirty-three-year-old Special Agent O’Hare didn’t like feeling exposed and unarmed, especially on the job. That all but ruled her out for undercover work. Fine by her. She preferred a hard-charging style of law enforcement, which was exactly what she was practicing on that 96 degree winter afternoon in Las Vegas when she marched into the St. Cosmas Medical Center in her favorite outfit with a dozen similarly dressed agents behind her.

First sentences and first paragraphs should hook readers, should give them reasons to be interested in continuing to read. This paragraph begins with the name of a character, and that character is interesting in part because the language of two distinct worlds is brought together in her: fashion and policing. Specifically, this character has a favorite outfit of police gear, an “ensemble . . . accessorized with a Glock.” The first two sentences use two characterization techniques, appearance and employment, presented using clear visual images. In the third sentence, a restated name and job title provide a transition from the previous sentence; readers are given the character’s age, and they are given access to the character’s inner life. We know already something this character does not like. The fourth and fifth sentences continue to allow access to the character’s feelings and vary sentence lengths. The change in sentence lengths provides emphasis, and the emphasis itself characterizes: “Fine by her.” Continuing attention to the character’s inner life, “she preferred,” provides a transition from the fifth sentence to the last sentence of the paragraph. That last sentence shows the character acting, another way to characterize, and acting in a specific setting. The character’s action suggests an ongoing process. If readers are hooked by nothing else, they read on to discover the results of the process. Characters and readers finish the paragraph with momentum. In other words, by the end of the first paragraph, readers know journalism’s “Five Ws”: “who” is doing “what” “where.” They can estimate “when.” To discover “why,” they read on. (The “Five Ws” have their roots in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.)  Finally, readers also know fairly specifically the genre they are reading.

Evanovich and Goldberg’s opening suggests several things we might try:

  • Using this paragraph and its sentences as a model, can you create expectations of a different genre?
  • How can your character bring together two disparate communities in a sentence or two?
  • What process begun by a main character in your first paragraph can create momentum deep into your narrative?

Similarly, Charlie Jane Anders wrote in Never Say You Can’t Survive, “I found that the more of a situation I could cram into those opening words, the greater the sense of momentum I could create, that could carry me through the rest of the story.” And also similarly, Elizabeth George in Write Away lists eight different hooks (page 70 in my edition) and many examples.

Learning from Ng

In the introduction to the Best American Short Stories 2025 annual, Celeste Ng writes about skipping reading the introductions when she’s read the anthology in the past. Even more interesting, she describes the criteria for good fiction she discovered in the process of making her selections. These criteria can be aspirational; they might be expectations we set for ourselves. Excerpts are below. I’ve added numbers and altered paragraphing.

[1] First and foremost, the story had to grab me. Sometimes this meant an unforgettable premise, or a propulsive plot, or characters so fully drawn that I felt I would know them if I met them on the street. Sometimes it was charm, or humor, or an unexpected twist. The stories that ended up in the Yes pile were ones I couldn’t get out of my head, that I kept thinking about days or even weeks after reading them.

[2] Second, the story had to feel complete…. I wanted a sense that the writer had considered the story holistically, that every choice had been made deliberately, and that all the pieces fit together, even if the… [whole] picture wasn’t fully revealed. And by the time I reached the last line, I needed to understand something more about the situation than I did at the start…

[3] Third, the language of this story had to be of the very highest caliber. If a piece didn’t have sentences that startled or surprised me, or images that took my breath away with their absolute rightness, they usually didn’t make the cut….

[4] And finally … stories had to have heft … They didn’t have to be serious or sad… But I had to feel that this story and these characters were deeply important to the author, not just a thought experiment or a whim…. I also tend to gravitate towards stories that are in conversation with big topics, whether that means our current moment or broad-reaching and eternal themes…. The very best stories engage with more than just the purely personal, and this is what turns a good story into a great story.

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.

What can we expect of sentences?

An exercise by Donald Barthelme:

Assignment: Write a sentence with some attention to the notes below.

What can we reasonably expect, or even demand, of the sentences in fiction?

The first thing I want a sentence to do is surprise me. Let me give you an example, if I can. Here is a sentence: “My great desire in life is to sleep with–that is to say, have sexual intercourse with–the New York Review of Books.” Now this sentence might reasonably be called surprising. The proposition is, we might say, an unusual one. I have written a sentence that surprises. I congratulate myself. But unfortunately, my congratulation is premature.

Because it is not enough for a sentence to be surprising. We may also reasonably ask of it that it be in some sense true–and it is not true that my greatest desire in life is to have sexual intercourse with the New York Review of Books. Let us look then for a sentence which is both surprising and in some sense true. Here is an attempt: “The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.”

Let us test the sentence. Is it surprising? Because of the fur, perhaps. If one recalls while reading the sentence a famous Surrealist object of the thirties–Merit Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup–your understanding of the sentence is perhaps enriched. But it is not necessary to know about the famous teacup to find the sentence odd, curious, surprising. Let us go on to ask if it is in any sense true.

“The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.” As dedicated relativists we know nothing is absolutely true; what we are asking is, does the sentence contain some truth? At least this much: the sentence is a demand, an “I want” statement. The speaker wishes literature to be this kind of thing–a strange object–and wants it also to break his heart. The structure of our language is such that a demand, a desire, an “I want” sentence, almost must be true, at least insofar as the speaker is concerned. I am telling you what I want. Assuming that the speaker is serious, sober, not simply putting us on, we are forced to grant his sentence a certain kind of truth.

Now, let us increase the pressure. Let us now ask for a sentence that is not only surprising and true, but also beautiful. And here I will call for help from a colleague, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Consider this sentence by Kraus: “A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.”

We test the sentence point by point. It is surprising in that it reverses the terms of the riddle/answer expectation in order to point to a truth. The truth is that the artist does not answer riddles–the riddle of the universe, for example–but proposes them. Now the philosopher Hebbel (a name you may forget as quickly as you wish, he’s inessential) says the same thing a much inferior way. “In a work of art the intellect asks questions; it does not answer them.” Why is Kraus’s way of saying the same thing so much more beautiful? Herr Hebbel speaks plainly, and plainness is a virtue. But Kraus’s sentence has paradox and elegance: in thirteen words he both announces a truth and allows us to feel the truth emotionally. I use the word “elegance” here as mathematicians do when they term the solution to a problem elegant, implying simplicity, economy, a certain kind of rightness.

There are many other ways in which a sentence can be beautiful–brutality can be as beautiful as elegance, awkwardness can be as beautiful as elegance, and so on.

So we have achieved, or rather borrowed, a sentence which is surprising, true, and beautiful, all at once. Can we now rest? No. We must ask, next, for a sentence that is at once surprising, true, beautiful, and also possessed of a metaphysical dimension.

By “metaphysical dimension” I mean a quality that turns the mind toward original questions, first principles, the deepest sort of search for meaning. “What is man?” is a metaphysical question. And for such a sentence, one reaches almost automatically for Kafka. Here is a sentence of Kafka’s: “Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.”

This sounds like three sentences but is in fact one, the parts separated by a semi-colon and colon. That it is both surprising and beautiful can, I think, be granted without argument. What we are testing for, then, is whether the sentence is true and whether is offers a metaphysical dimension. And one immediately understands that the two things are intimately related.

What we have in this beautiful sentence of Kafka’s is an appeal to the range of human experience called the religious, as well as a kind of critique of humanness. Reading the sentence one gets the feeling that before the leopards broke into the temple the ceremonies were somehow dry, artificial, routine, and that the intrusion of the leopards revived, gave new life to, the old procedures. The ceremonies must have been, like all ceremonies, the celebration of mystery; the leopards, breaking into the temple and drinking the wine, restore mystery to the mystery.

But the intrusion of the leopards, Kafka tells us, becomes itself routine. This is what gives the sentence its deepest dimension, raising the question of how men can make routine fabulous. It has ramifications in everything from the problem of sleeping with one’s spouse to the problem of torture in Chile. Kafka’s sentence is, with all of the reverberations, not a sentence but a book. But after all, only a sentence.

Here are examples, provided by Barthelme, with the exception of the last, which Chuck Wachtel added.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Areliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” James Joyce, The Dead

“There are some who eat too much and others like me who can no longer eat without spitting.” Antonin Artaud, letter to Paule Thevenin

“When on the third day, he again had to come down the ladder without having been hung, he raised his hands up in a fierce gesture and cursed the inhuman law that kept him from going to Hell.” Heinrich von Kleist, The Founding

“‘You should have killed yourself last week,’ he said the deaf man.” Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”

“In the dark, Naomi mistook a shard of broken light bulb for her contact lens.” Dick Stankridge, A Horror Story . . .

“As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van–a dresser with mirror, across which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs, sliding and swaying not aboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.” Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift