I'm Back

Now there's a concept. I've decided to write on my blog again. In fact, I'm trying to get my online "Brand" happening. Yes, it's sad but true, I'm back to marketing my self. Well, maybe it's not so sad, really, the reason I'm back to it, is I've finished my second novel. After three years of work, The Appassionata is done! (Definitely worth an exclamation mark.) So, following the advice of our brave new world, I'm now on Twitter (mollydwyer_CA) and Facebook and SmashWords and Amazon Central.

The Appassionata is set in Hugo’s Paris. Think narrow streets clogged with carriages and cafes overflowing with artists and Bohemians. The literati of Paris, names and faces we recognize for their contribution to culture. This is a time of political unrest and Revolution. Not The Revolution, but the upheaval that followed, the barricades as France fought its way to democracy.

This is the birth of Romanticism as seen through the eyes of three women:

The first, composer, Jeanne-Louise Farrenc whose music is being rediscovered. She wrote symphony music at a time when it was considered improper, impolite, impolitic, indeed impossible for women to do so.

Alexandrine Caruel was incarcerated by her husband after giving birth to the illegitimate son of one of France’s most iconic painters. Her child was taken from her. Her’s is a story of spiritual quest.

The notorious Marie-Anne Lenormand, the Sibyl of Saint Germaine. She was infamous for her ability to see the future and read cards for the likes of Robes Pierre, Josephine and Napoleon, Bonaparte. She wrote fourteen books in her lifetime and is our storyteller and weaves the novel together.

The Appassionata is epic; it explores artistic genius, and particularly the struggle of women who seek to embrace that genius within themselves.

 

I'm about to turn Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein into an electronic book. I'll be announcing the launch in the next week, and well, I'm on the prowl.

I attended the San Francisco Writers Conference this last weekend and it got me jazzed. My manuscript was a finalist in the Adult Fiction Category. I had agents and editors expressing interest... things are moving. I have two appearances coming up, at Gallery Books in Mendocino at the end of March—Sunday the 27th. It's Community Day at the bookstore, celebrating local authors. And I'll be at the Ukiah Literary Festival, at Mendocino College on April 30th.

Stay Tuned. Who knows, I might even Tweet soon. (I've already got 2—count 'em 2 followers).

Did I say I'm teaching at Mendocino College now? Critical Thinking. I enjoy it immensely. I've also, believe it or not, started working on a new (my third) novel. Something entirely different.  I'll say more about that in the near future too.

Upcoming Events & Other Good News

Good News Update: I just got hired by Mendocino College to teach in their English department. They want me to teach Critical Thinking. I'm very pleased. I also have a couple of public appearances happening in the next month and I'm continuing to teach my creative writing and critique groups. I'd like to draw them to your attention in the hopes that you can make one or another.

On Saturday, August 21st at 7pm, I'm reading with three other members of the writing group I've been part of for the past two and a half years. We call ourselves, The Usual Suspects. We're reading as part of Mendocino Stories, 7pm at the Mendocino Hotel. I'll be reading an excerpt from The Appassionata. I'm really hoping we'll have an audience, so please, if you can, come out and support us. Thanks.

Starting Tuesday, August 26th, I'm beginning a third round of Creative Writing and Critique. The groups meet either Tuesday or Thursday evening, 6-9pm and cost $50 for writing club members, $75 for the general public. The groups are open to all levels, all genres. I keep them small in order to make sure we can really spend time on each person's writing. It's been very successful thus far. The StoryStalkers are members of the critique group, and although I haven't managed to entice much blogging yet, I'm still hopeful that over time everyone in the group will begin to post thoughts and even writing on the StoryStalker blog.

On Tuesday, September 7th at 7 pm, I'll be at Book Passages in Corte Madera. I'll be speaking about Synchronicity and StoryStalking. Please spread the word and if you live in the Bay Area, please mark your calendar.  I've been invited by Left Coast Writers, a Bay Area writing community.

So. Hope to see you one place or another.
Cross-posted at Paris On My Mind

Setting the Scene

What is a scene? In short, it's that place in the narrative where something actually happens. A scene is a little story, in and of itself, with a beginning, a middle, and an end—an event that occupies time and space. A scene is sharply focused and generally held together by a single idea, a single driving force.

Scenes are those places in your narrative where your storytelling slows down and pulls in for a front row seat on some action that’s unfolding. It's the backbone of any good novel and it seems to me that without scene, it’s almost impossible to actually tell a story. Even writers like Joyce and Woolf create scenes. I write scene by scene. It’s been my instinctive way of telling a story, and until I learned to write in scenes, I couldn't figure out how to construct a novel. Good scenes are almost always built around dialogue.

According to Sandra Scofield's The Scene Book, scenes are made up of four basic elements: 1) Events or Emotions; 2) Structure (beginning, middle and end); 3) Function and 4) Pulse. Events and/or emotions seem pretty obvious. And, to be honest, I’m skeptical about getting overly involved in structure. I think in terms of beginning, middle and end, but beyond that, I find it more valuable to let a scene evolve organically. You might see a more complex structure, with beats and crescendos, in the final analysis, but I think it’s dangerous to write to it, kind of like getting stuck in a five-paragraph essay for school.

Let's focus on Scoflield's Function and Pulse. Function is the reason for a particular scene, its purpose in the narrative; what the scene accomplishes in being a scene. Pulse is its sine qua non, the "condition without which there would be nothing." Scofield calls Pulse "the vibrancy that makes the scene matter," and says it's an emotional component.

She mentions a scene from E.M. Forster’s Room With a View that I'd like to expand upon.

For those of you who don't remember this turn of the century British tale, Lucy is a prim, but curious young woman who travels from England to Italy under the watchful eye of a chaperon, only to meets George a melancholy, young Brit who generally fails to obey the unwritten rules of society. His rebellion both fascinates and repels Lucy.

Forster brings these two potential lovers together in a piazza. They barely know each other and arrive separately only to witness a knifing that kills a man. Lucy is faint and George rescues her. She dropped some photographs in the turmoil and asks George to fetch them. He insists on walking her back to the pension where they're staying. The knifing creates the logic of their encounter. Indeed, its “function” is to justify their sudden intimacy, which arises from their mutual emotional turmoil; they’ve just witnessed violence and turn to one another for familiarity and comfort. Social expectations don't matter, life does.

What happens is simple: they walk and they talk, stopping on a bridge when they reach the Arno. Right before they stop, we see George toss Lucy’s photographs into the river, and like Lucy, we're shocked. Why would he do that after she asked him to get them? Could he be such a bad guy? Lucy starts to get angry until George explains. It turns out he tossed them away because they were covered with blood.

The scene introduces George and Lucy in all their innocence and complexity. It is the beginning of their intimacy, the bonding that brings them into relationship with one another. The emotional thread weaving through the scene is what Scofield calls Pulse. Essentially, the content that defines the Purpose. In other words, the emotions that fly in the scene over the photos, over the stabbing, over being alone together without a chaperon, even the fact that they are in Italy—all this defines the scene, without it, the scene would have no reason to exist. One could say, the Pulse of the scene is in their sexual attraction, but it's only through the specific events that we see their attraction as real. Lucy and George have shared something—their attraction deepens with mutual experience.

Now, we're looking at the scene after the fact, studying it after it's been written. If we were to sit down to write it, we might think: "Okay, I need a sexy scene to bring Lucy and George together." The danger, of course, is falling into some he's-handsome-she's-beautiful generic cliché—genre romance.

Forster avoids this by taking advantage of Italy. He uses its rawness, the way it's not the genteel life of English aristocracy that Lucy and George know. Italy is disconcerting because it's foreign. The language is different, the cultural norms confusing. Forster walks Lucy into this otherness, and shows it to us through a scene—taking us right to a stabbing. We see a curious, naive girl who ran off on her own to have a taste of "quaint and charming" Italy. Boom—all of a sudden it's shocking and frightening Italy. Along comes George who doesn't quite know how to act, but he's been waiting for an opening. The stabbing gives them a reason to cut to the chase, so to speak, and get real with one another. A lot happens. They fall in love. Bottom line: Function and Pulse work together in a scene, and keeping them in mind can help you shape it clearly.

StoryStalking: Thickening the Plot

Plot: the events that move a story toward some particular effect

I’ve been preoccupied with understanding plot lately, and what I mean by that is the storytelling element of my writing. I’m convinced that writing a good novel requires two separate, albeit interrelated, skills. You have to be able to write a good sentence, but you also have to be able to spin a good yarn, to tell a story and tell it well.

There's an old axiom that says, writing "the king died and then the queen died," does not a plot make, but writing, "the king died and then the queen died of grief," does. 

Like journalism, it's the who, what, when, where and why that matters, and the how, in fact the how might be the kicker. How did the king die? How is it grief killed the queen? And do I, your reader, believe you?  If I stop and say, "Wait a minute, how can that be?" —then Houston, we have a problem.

Implausible? Impossible? Inconsistent?

From my teenager years, I wanted to write a novel. My biggest problem was I didn’t know what to write about… And then, to my shock, when I discovered something to write about, I still couldn’t figure out how to frame it, how to shape it into a good story.

So, here's the point: when a writer sees a still life, instead of studying how it looks, they're thinking about what it means: "Hmmm, snake… hmmm, apple…  hmmmm, books… how do these things fit together?" Off the top of my head, I say, let's start with Eve and idea of Eden. Let's talk about the danger of biting into that apple, of being beguiled by that snake. That's one way to make meaning out the image. And what about the books? Well, it could be religion, or could be the woman is an author...

So tell me the story about this still life. When is this? Where is this? Who smokes those pipes? Who drinks from that silver goblet? Who set the wine carafe on the table? How did it get there? And why was it left there? What happened before, during and after this meal? Was it a meal?

It sounds simplistic to say that in order to keep the plot moving forward, there has to be something core to resolve, but that is the bottom line. There has to be something that the reader and the characters can actually become involved in caring about. That's why if the king and queen simply die, we don't really care, but if the queen dies of grief, we might. We might want to know how that came to happen, what that grief is about. We smell a love story, and truth is, most stories are about finding love or staying alive—or something of that magnitude.

Still, the overarching story will fall flat unless it is refined into something much more specific. And it's trouble that will make it interesting. The love story in The Appassionata, the novel I’m writing,  is essentially over in the ordinary sense of the word early on because one of the characters involved is dead—but then it takes a turn, like Heathcliff and Kathy. This is interesting to me because a few years ago I was in a workshop where we were asked to name of the book we most wished we had written and without hesitation, I said Wuthering Heights. I guess The Appassionata is my Wuthering Heights.

One of elements that drives my story forward is the question of whether the dead man’s letter to his lover will be delivered into her hands, a rather simple thing, but surrounded in complexity.

This is the story between Géricault and Alexandra. Their affair was illicit (she was married to another man), their love insatiable and unresolved. They were forced apart. Alexandra was incarcerated by her husband, an action the Napoleonic Code allowed. Alexandra was guarded, her mail not just read, but controlled. Getting the letter to her takes stealth and will, and before it's ever delivered Géricault dies.

The letter is in the hands of composer, Louise Farrenc. She is not unsympathetic, but she doesn’t feel any particular drive to deliver the letter, either. She has fears and obligations that keep her from taking action. She doesn’t really know the lover's story, feels no particular sympathy. As the reader learns Alexandra and Géricault’s story, it becomes increasingly clear to them that the letter must be delivered. The tension builds.

The most interesting thing for me has been finding the logic of it… I started by closing down all obvious avenues for delivering the letter. Alexandra is locked up. No one connected to Géricault, indeed no one who might be sympathetic, is allowed access to her. Her husband wants to isolate her from all possible contact and knowledge of her lover, wants to make sure she knows absolutely nothing.

Plot is an architectural undertaking. If you’ve seen the film, Inception, you’ll remember that one of the pieces the dream team had to put into place was the maze that underpinned the "scenes" in the dream. (You'll also remember that Ariadne was the maze-builder. I liked that synchronicity.) The dream team then had to find their way through the maze in order to accomplish their goals. The better the maze, if I remember rightly, the more time they had. The maze wasn't apparent, it was beneath the surface. That's important.

Shaping a good plot is similar. The trick is to design a clever maze and watch your characters find their way through it. I walked in one of those garden mazes in France, built with hedges you can’t quite see over—at least if you're short like me. I was surprised by the dead ends. It looked like it would be a snap to walk it, but in fact it not only wasn't a snap, there weren't any clues, really to make it easier. It felt like luck played a role because you could make the same mistake over and over without knowing it. It seemed there was no way to judge whether you were making the same mistake a second time.

A good plot structure is the same, I think, full of tricky dead ends, places where you, the author, have to back up and try another approach. Rule of thumb: if the maze is too simple, your plot will be too. What I'm saying is that as a writer, the best possible outcome is to get baffled by you own story now and then, by how to get from Point A to Point B, because life is that way. When a good plot thickens well, it becomes an imbroglio—an intricate and perplexing state of affairs that's in need of resolution. You don't want the resolution of your story to be predictable, you want it to be intriguing.

Creating Alternative Worlds

The question came up in my critique group last night about building alternative realities, other worlds. Specifically, Orah spoke to the fact that she wants the world she’s creating in her “fairy tale” to parallel in some way the time frame we’re actually living in, so that her characters can interact with the “real” world, albeit from a distance. That’s why they have things like safety pins in their possession. We also heard a fantasy piece from Gay, set amongst ocean characters. Gay's piece seems to have accomplished that bleed-through between the “real” and the “fantasy” world Oral is asking about. Both pieces are targeted at the YA market.

So. I thought about it, and here’s a place to begin. My instinct is that it’s absolutely essential to establish the architecture of your world from the get-go. It doesn’t have to come all at once, by any means, but from the very first line you have to be focused on establishing your reader in time and space. If you're creating an alternative world, we need to see it. And if the “real world” also exists—with its safety pins and sleeping bags, then we need to be alerted to that right away too. So we can say, “Ah, here is a sister world, not completely separate from our own.”

It’s actually, a question of Point of View. POV, point of view. The big question of modern fiction. Rule of thumb: write from one POV, and one only. Lots of industry people won’t have it any other way. POV, however, is a very far-reaching and often controversial issue.

First of all, there’s the “person”  your writing in: first (I), second (you) or third (he/she). I’m going to slide over that, it’s not where my interest is focused at the moment. I’m going to talk about POV from another angle and say to you, the writer, that what I’m speaking of encompasses all three "persons." I’m going to talk about the sight (and insight) the “person” brings. I hope Gay and Orah don’t mind, but I’m going to use their work as examples, because it’s through the similarities and the differences in their writing that I can most easily make my point.

Gay has a talking jellyfish named Jeli for one of her main characters. It has washed up on the shore near Fort Bragg, California where it is rescued by a "Hu" named Memé Gay. Memé Gay helps Jeli into a tide pool and then learns from Jeli of the misfortune that has befallen her and her ocean friends. Clearly Memé Gay will become involved trying to help.

Orah’s main characters is Adi, an older woman who has magical healing powers that she's mostly stopped using. She sets out on a quest to recover her powers and meets Bart, a young boy whose parents have been abducted by a giant. The two set off together to search for Bart's parents in hopes of rescuing them. They are making their way through a forested terrain.

From the very first, there’s one marked difference: Fort Bragg, California. Fort Bragg is part of the "Hu" world, and it's also in the "real" world. Gay immediately establishes an overlap between Jeli's reality and the reality of her readers. Using geography is just one way to do it, but it's effective.

Before I go on, let me make it absolutely clear that there is no “better” or “worse” here, there’s only what one wants to accomplish as a storyteller. If you want a completely self-contained world that has no relationship to the “real” world of your reader, then you have no reason to create the connection. It’s only when you want the connection that you need to think about it. Orah told me that she wants to create connection, and asked how to establish that kind of understanding for the reader. That's what this diary is about.

The reason I’m calling it a POV issue, is because it is. POV means what we can see through the eyes of the storytelling character. Here’s the basics: If I’m telling a story through Louise Farrenc’s eyes (which I am), then when she looks out she sees Paris in 1830, I have to establish that for the reader. I have to bring the reader to Louise's Paris. I also have to account for what she feels inside and thinks—what it's like for her living in Paris in 1830. That’s her POV: everything she’s experiencing being alive. She sees other people, has attitudes and observations about them, but she can’t crawl inside of them and is never certain how they see and feel. She relies on her experience of them and perhaps some sort of sixth sense of simpatico. But even then, she’s got to validate her understanding of others. Right? She experiences everything through herself and if it's her POV, then we readers do too.

So. If Orah’s character Adi lives in a world that parallels the “real” world of 2010, then that’s what we readers have to see—how Adi sees/experiences both of these worlds. Orah doesn’t have to make a big issue out of it. She doesn’t have to point to it and say, “wow!” It simply has to be there in the same way that Paris in 1830 has to be there for Louise. Adi’s world has to include (and she undoubtedly takes it for granted) the world we call “real.” 

That’s what Gay is doing with Jelli and all of Jeli’s friends. They see the Hu world. But, (and this is important) as indicated by the fact that it’s a "Hu" world, not a human world, we see it through Jeli’s eyes, not our own. Got it? POV. We see the world through Jeli's eyes. We're not looking in, we're looking out. In Jeli’s understanding of reality Memé Gay is a Hu. In our understanding of reality Memé Gay is a human. Just that small slight of hand pushes us as readers into Jeli's perspective, into her POV.

There are many more issues here to discuss. The most important probably is about the “rules” for staying in a POV or moving into another, and how to do that successfully. It’s a topic that requires another blog entry, so I won’t go there now. Suffice to say moving the POV requires thought and skill. You have to take your reader with you. I think the best way to accomplish that is through a patterning, where the reader understands a structure that signals the change. Again, a subject for a much longer discussion, and I'll write about it at another time.

What interests me here, is the fact that the writer can get inside a POV that includes alternative "reality"… this is true whether we’re writing “fantasy” or not. In my story, Louise sees a ghost. From her POV, she sees “more” than many of the people around her. She sees the “real” world, everyone “shares," and she sees this "other" world where dead people exist and can communicate. I'm not so interested in asserting that "reality" is (exists) the way Louise experiences it; I want to say "this is the world Louise experiences." When we're inside her POV, what I have to account for, to create, is her experience of "reality." Ghosts visit her. From her viewpoint it’s “real”… I don’t need to make a big deal out of, I just need to focus on how she interacts with it and adjusts. She’s aware it’s not that way for everyone, and consequently has an attitude about it. It frightens her. That’s part of her reality too.

The point is, Point of View creates reality on the page, and if the reality is a fantasy world, the best way into it is through a character who knows that world. Let them be your guide. Create it through their eyes, and if they see our world too, then we’ll see it with them. If only a few of your characters see “our” world, then find a way, early-on to introduce us to one of the characters who sees into our world, even if it’s just a glance. That way we won't be caught off guard when it comes up in more detail. There needs to be reason why it is that way; the most successful, I think, would be a storyline in which the interplay between the worlds has purpose and value.

Cross-posted on the StoryStalker

That Golden Gate: Structuring Plot

I took a Writers Digest “webeminar” a few days ago. The visuals were terrible. One silly clip art piece up for almost the whole of the talk. The workshop itself was on structuring story. I chose the topic because it’s an area I find challenging in my own writing.

I tend toward the “episodic,” which means there’s a certain repetition and lack of forward momentum in my fiction. For some readers, Requiem bogs down in the middle. I also find the ending less than satisfying. These are things I’m working hard to avoid in my current novel. So, I welcomed the focus on plot development and structure. The instructor, James Scott Bell, had some good ideas. His primary metaphor was a suspension bridge—that's why we looked at a clip art sketch of one for most of the hour and a half he talked.

I say, think about the Golden Gate bridge: now there’s a suspension bridge worth looking at for an hour or more. Like all suspension bridge’s it’s divided into three parts. The approach, the main span, and the egress. Bell’s first point was that these three sections are predictable lengths: the approach and egress are together about the same distance as the middle.

First of all, Belle spoke of the approach. One begins a good story with a disturbance. This does not have to be a crisis, rather it's a disturbance. Bell used The Wizard of Oz as an example. In the opening, Dorothy is running away from Mrs. Gultch who threatened to take Toto. When he asked us to recall The Wizard of Oz, I imagined the disturbance to be the tornado. But the “disturbance,” is not necessarily huge. Rather it’s something that suggests the complications and complexity the main character will face.

The approach, then, develops this disturbance and basically tells the reader three things about the story:

1. It introduces the lead characters.
2. It introduces the story world and gives the reader a sense of the “rules” by which that world plays.
3. It introduces the tone of the story, letting the reader know whether they’re in for humor or suspense or savior faire.

Bell next spoke of the pylons that support the middle span. He saw these as specific moments in the plot structure, doorways, essentially, that the main character passes through in such a way that there's no turning back. I immediately thought of the opening of Herman’s Hesse’s, Demian. Demian made such an impression on me in my early twenties, that I wanted to burn the book in a ritual and ingest the ashes so as to completely absorb what I had read. Really. It was the sixties; what can I say?

In any event, its main character, Emil Sinclair, passes through just such a doorway. He lives in a bourgeois home where everything unfolds “perfectly,” as society expects. He is an adolescent when we meet him, and has always been the “perfect” son. Through a series of events that aren’t fair, a school bully convinces him to steal—the bully is extorting money in exchange for leaving Sinclair alone. Of course the situation only gets darker as the bully demands more. Sinclair can tell no one what’s happening because of his shame.

In Hesse’s story, the first theft may be the moment of no return, or perhaps the moment stretches over the broader set of actions. There is a point when Sinclair realizes what has happened to him. He sees that everything has shifted. He’s now alone, isolated by his secret and unable to resolve the crisis he’s fallen into. He feels desperate. In my mind, that is the moment he passes through the first pylon. There is no way to go back to life the way it was; he can only press on.

Another thing Bell said was that the opposition has to be stronger. Bell prefers that the opposition be personified in a character. In the case of Demian, Hesse’s bully is older, bigger, more wily and street wise, meaner, and less moral. He has all the power. It’s difficult to see how Sinclair can escape his grasp.

As the book moves into the main span, the part of the bridge that actually crosses the channel from one side to the other, Hesse introduces the character for whom the book is named, Demian. Demain is going to play the role of Sinclair’s savior, but he’s not an ordinary savior—or perhaps he is, perhaps all real saviors are demanding. Demian leads Sinclair down the path of self-discovery. He does not have any intention of delivering the boy back to the innocence of his bourgeois family life. He intends to draw Sinclair into the deeper spiritual truths of life. Hesse at the time was working with Carl Jung. The novel was a response.

Bell calls the middle “the muddle” where complications and complexities unfold, and cross-currents develop. He sums this entire span up in the idea that the character is “trying to avoid death,” whether it’s external, in some kind of Bruce-Willis-scenario, or a more subtle, inner death. Pride and Prejudice comes to mind. Lizzy’s attempt to “avoid death,” is to save herself from a meaningless marriage and find love while around her she’s being pushed to marry for practical and social reasons. Not only that, she’s choosing poorly herself, seeing her sister jilted, and feeling disillusioned about love—tempted perhaps to give up on her ideals.

Bell suggests there should be a “pet-the-dog” moment early on, a moment where the character risks something to assist another, and may get into deeper trouble because of it. I’m not sure if there is such a moment in Demian. It doesn’t stand out in my mind, what I do remember is Demian beating up the bully, basically intervening in the circumstances in a way that puts himself at risk and gives Sinclair relief. That could be considered a pet-the-dog moment; it’s simply been passed on to the another important character. In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy’s pet-the-dog moment must be found in her attempts to assist her sister, Jane, to marry Mr. Bingley. But in both cases, it’s not a tight fit, which leaves me thinking there are many ways to deepen our affection for the main character, which is what Bell says this moment is about.

As the character approaches the second pylon, the one that actually delivers us into the resolution of the story, Bell says there should be a “clue” or a “discovery” that gives the character a deeper understanding of what’s at risk, of who they are—something that will compel them into battling their way to resolution. I suspect the moment when Lizzy passes through the final pylon, is when she reads the letter from Mr. Darcy and sees that she has misjudged him. In that moment she changes, and starts to seek what we’ve wanted for her all along—Mr. Darcy. If that is the moment when she passes onto the egress, the final movement toward resolution, it reflects a new clarity, where things that used to look one way, now look another. New information, new understanding.

Bell says the moment often manifests as a set-back, when the main character has to decide anew that the battle is worth the effort. He says the transition should contain the “Hugh Factor.” He’s named this after James Bond. At the opening of every James Bond film, Hugh shows Bond some high-tech gadgets he can use to save himself. Now the time has come; he has to use those tools to survive. Bell’s point is that the tools, whatever they are, were introduced early on, at opening of the story. Otherwise, we won’t believe it when they’re suddenly there to assist our character through this final crisis.

What comes to mind here is my own life, which isn’t a story, of course. But life does present the curious capacity for synchronicity—where the “tools” one needs come from subtle and sometimes mysterious sources, and aren’t so obvious as Hugh’s meeting with James Bond. When I was about four, I started taking swimming lessons. I was so short, even the shallow end of the YMCA pool was over my head. I learned how to be in water over my head, and specifically, how to “bob,” which was falling straight down to the bottom and pushing off with one’s feet to come back to the top, blowing bubbles on the way up.

Not long after, that winter, I tried to take a short cut across the pond to catch up with my older brother and his friend who were walking too fast for me to keep up. I ran out on the ice and fell through. It was about nine feet of water. I remember going down in the murky cold, touching the bottom with my feet and pushing off like I’d learned at the Y. As I came up I blew all the air out of my lungs, pushing for the surface, just like I’d learned. I came up where I went down. My brother and his friend managed to rescue me and I’m here to tell my story. The swimming lessons—learning to bob—seems like the “Hugh Factor” at work. If it had been written into a story, it would have been as casual and arbitrary in my busy four-year-old life as it was, just one thing that happened “way over there someplace.”

Bringing a story to a satisfying end is not easy. I’m sure that’s why Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms so many times. “I had rewritten the ending thirty-nine times in manuscript," he tells us, "and now I worked it thirty times in proof, trying to get it right. I finally got it right.” Bell says there are essentially three ways to end a story:

1. The lead wins, overcoming the obstacles.
2. The lead neither wins nor loses, the outcome is ambiguous.
3. The lead loses, usually because of tragic flaw or wrong objective.

He says that what distinguishes a literary novel is usually its ambiguous ending. He uses Catcher in the Rye as an example. In the end Holden Caulfield is in a mental institution. We’ve no idea if he’s going to be okay or destroyed. Another example Bell gave is the film, Casablanca. In spite of his plan to run off with Elsa, Rick helps her escape with her husband. We don’t know whether his choice means happiness or despair for either Rick and Elsa. We’re not even sure if Rick’s choice is the sacrifice it seems to be.

The rule of thumb: the approach and the egress take up half the book, the main span takes up the other half. A thought about it all: When we approach the Golden Gate and cross it, there are a range of emotional and aesthetic experiences that carry us, depending on the weather, the time of day, the last time there was an earthquake, our mode of transportation—or whether we're feeling suicidal. Seems to me, a good novel would be the same.

Making a Critique Group Work

Here's my thoughts on how to present effective critique in a group setting. At it's best, critique is a delicate balancing act that falls somewhere between cheerleading and brain surgery.

There are several models for reading the material that's going to be critiqued. I'm going to discuss the model we're using in the critique groups I lead—the tried and true, "members show up with written material and enough copies for everyone; they read aloud." No matter the model, I find the following advice useful.

First of all, it's important to realize that everyone benefits from the critique—from receiving it, hearing what others have to say, and from giving it. Each of these roles requires a certain attitude from group members, and that's what I want to discuss.

Receiving Critique:
Once you've read your piece and turned it over to others for response, the most important thing you can do for the process is be actively receptive. Listen. Absorb. Take notes. Look for patterns. If more than one person in the group has the same observation, it's probably worth looking at even if you disagree with the feedback. They may not have "what's wrong" right, but they're probably pointing to a place in your writing that's not working as well as it might, where what you intended is not getting across for "some reason." It really is important to remain as silent as you can during this process and to discipline yourself not to defend or explain what's on the page. This is not an absolute, if someone asks a question, of course you can answer it, but do so concisely, stick to the answer, rather than using it as an opportunity to explain your text more broadly or answer something else.  Think of this behavior as a meditation, a practice, a discipline. Challenge yourself to remain in a quiet, receptive head space, mouth mostly closed.

Hearing What Others Have to Say:

In some ways this is the most difficult role. You might feel distracted or disinterested since you are not part of the immediate exchange. Someone else's observations may trigger ideas of your own, or contradict what you feel and see. Your inclination may be to jump in and object or add your two bits. It's better when you don't. Give everyone their say before jumping back in. It's best when the group goes around the circle, each person taking their turn. That's rule number one. Rule number two is that if you listen and try to see and understand the rationale for the critique someone else is providing, especially when it's not something you see or agree with, you'll learn something about how else the words work. Reading is a private experience. How we read—how we respond to what we read, what we like, what bothers us or throws us out of the story—it's all subjective. When the focus is on another person's writing, your defenses are generally down, and you can learn a lot about how writing works on the page. You'll see things you do from the perspective of a witness. "Ah, that's why I get that kind of feedback sometimes... I do something similar." Furthermore attentive listening to the group, even when you're not the center of attention is good behavior, good discipline—liking learning to play well with the other kids at kindergarten, right?

Giving Critique: 

Here we enter the realm of art. Giving good critique is a learned skill, an art. You have to care about others and about writing to do it well. The obvious rule of thumb is, how would you want someone to tell you what you have to say? This works for positive as well as negative feedback. Don't you love it when someone is excited about your writing or some part of your writing and genuinely takes the time to express their appreciation of what you've accomplished with your words? I do. I float around for quite some time after getting excited feedback about something I've written.  Even if it's just one sentence out of an otherwise unsuccessful piece, I want to know what worked. So. Plain and simple: start with what's working. Not simply because it's good manners, but because it's important we learn when and where our writing works. We need to look to the strongest places, see what we've done and learn how to do it again.

Second: Do your absolute best to try not to rewrite someone else's piece the way you would write. Every voice is unique. The last thing critique should do is undo someone's voice, unless that voice is really not working at all. Even then, there's nothing to be gained by suggesting someone write the way you do, or would, if you were handling the same material. If you want to write about it in your own way, then do so, but don't tell another person how they should do it. Instead, look for the places where you stumbled, where you didn't understand what the writer was communicating, couldn't see what they were trying to picture, or just felt something was "off." Point it out. It's actually enough to point it out. You don't have to fix it for them, only suggest that "here's a place you might want to explore. It didn't work for me because.... (I got lost, I couldn't see what was going on, etc.) You can even say, "I didn't believe your character would say that, it didn't sound like something they would say because...." and point to other places in the text that seem to support your observation.

Avoid saying "I would do it this way." There's an absolute temptation to say, "you could .... " and fill in the blank. I don't think that's wrong per se. I think it can be useful to hear suggestions. This is especially true when they're broad. For example, you might say, "what would happen if you showed us more of where we are. I'd like to see the room better."  Or the character, or the time of day, etc. That can be very useful. You're pointing to things that seem missing. Or it might be that you'd like to hear some dialogue, that the narrative seems to go on for too long without a sense of being in the moment. All this can be useful, valuable critique. The important thing is that you think about how you're framing your observations. Be specific, be thoughtful.

About That Magic

I once had someone tell me that my writing was usually magical, but the piece I'd brought in wasn't. It was very hard to respond in a practical way to that particular critique. "What should I do? Hit it with a stick?" Poof. Now it's magical too? You need to go on from there and say something like, "I think it's not working because the conversation between your characters doesn't engage me." Even that's not really enough. Instead you want to go through it line by line, saying,  "well this works, and this works, but right here—this remark by this character seems off. Would he really say that?" Perhaps the voice sounds too modern or too young or too timid... but at least now you're pointing the writer to something they can address. My first response to hearing the piece I'd written lacked my usual magic was to think I should throw the whole thing out and start over. Of course, I didn't know how to start over. So the criticism discouraged me. It left me feeling that it was all too hard, and I'd never get it right, that I might as well give up.

It's dicey business pushing another writer into discouragement. It's where you really have to examine your motives. Competition belongs outside a critique group. You have to be a team player, you have to play fair. It requires maturity, self-awareness and self-confidence. And, above all, honesty—not just about another's writing, but about yourself and with yourself. Let me repeat it: self-awareness. That's one of the reasons why everyone in a critique group should be sharing writing. What goes around, comes around. If the group starts to get mean-spirited, if people are using their words in the wrong way, then stop and talk about it. Get to the bottom of the upset or let the group go. It's got to be a safe and supportive environment to work.

Personally, nothing I've done has helped my writing more than working in a variety of critique groups. I've been in the same writing group now for over two years. It's made a huge difference in my writing. I'm very grateful for what it's given me.  I think when a group fails, it's primarily because not enough attention was given to the way the group works. Group dynamics? Important stuff. Writing groups? Worth the effort—worth learning to do them well.