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.

StoryStalking: Playing it Forward

  I call it Story Stalking.

As some of you know, a couple of weeks ago I complained about being stuck in my novel. Not writers block, rather an inability to see how to move the story along. I've now found an answer,  and I want to try to share my experience because I like the synchronicity it kicked up. It's a bit complicated, but I'll do my best to keep it simple. The problem started when I couldn't see how to keep moving toward the resolution of my plot—which after some difficulty, I decided involved getting a couple of my characters together on the page.

My novel is set in early 19th century Paris and I'm dealing with two women who come from very different social classes. Louise (upper left) is married and respectable and sheltered. Among other things, she's hiding her acquaintance with Juliette (right), who is an actress and a courtesan, and lives a much more Bohemian life than Louise. They originally met by accident and liked one another. Now, six years later, Louise needs Juliette's assistance.

Lousie Farrenc is a composer, and the first thing I explored was a conversation about a piece of music she was composing, Ma Tendre Musette. A musette is a bagpipe. I'd written a conversation in which, Aristide, Louise's husband, commented that he heard the pipes as a boy living in the south of France.

I've been talking about how, as writers, we leave breadcrumbs for ourselves, Hansel-&-Gretel style, as we write. And this reference to hearing bagpipes in the south of France was just such a breadcrumb. When I looked at it a second time, I remembered that Louise and Aristide had traveled together in the south of France right after they married. I decided they heard the pipes together during that journey and looked for a specific village where it could have happened.

Researching on the Internet, I found a village that advertises its old windmills as a tourist attraction. Since windmills were already mentioned in the book, I decided to use that village. So I moved from a vague idea about describing a musette for the reader, to a specific memory that belonged to Louise as she composed.

The next day I attended a piano concert at the music festival. (This is where the synchronicity kicks in.) It featured music by Franz Liszt, another character in my novel. The pianist quoted Rousseau, a philosopher who greatly influenced the times I'm writing about. "Music," Rousseau said, "gives the ear eyes" and can portray anything—even the physical world. Liszt, the pianist explained, had composed the music he was about to play to reflect the stillness of Lake Wallenstadt. I blogged about my experience in some detail at Paris on My Mind.

I came home and thought about Louise's musette. I knew she had borrowed the melody from an old folk tune and then created variations of it. Because the windmills were part of her memory, I decided she wanted to capture them somehow, in the same way Liszt tried to capture the lake. I also realized she could get word to Juliette by going through her brother, who was studying art in Rome at the French Institute there. The director of the Institute, Horace Vernet, was a painter who had been intricately involved when Louise and Juliette first met. Louise wrote her brother and asked him to have Vernet contact Juliette who was still modeling in Paris for Vernet's cohorts, including Delacroix.

It was a round about way of getting to Juliette, but Louise was being careful. She didn't want her husband to realize what she was doing, and she didn't know anyone else she could ask. One problem solved.

I still couldn't figure out how they were going to have this clandestine meeting, even when Juliette knew about it. That's when the windmill popped back up... Louise realized she could tell Aristide she wanted to go to the new café, Le Moulin de la Gallete, to be in the presence of the windmill there. Le Moulin de la Gallete is in Montemartre, which is in the northern part of Paris and part of the novel. The fortuneteller, my storyteller, had, only a couple of chapters back, told the reader about Le Moulin de la Gallete. Like Louise and Juliette, Madame Lenormand is an historical figure. She lived in Paris during the times I'm writing about and was quite famous; she'd read cards for Napoleon.

So now, not only can my characters meet; they're meeting at a locale where they might run into Madame Lenormand who may have something to tell them both that will allow the larger plot issue (the reason they're meeting) to move toward resolution. I'm not sure what's going to happen because I haven't written the scene in the moulin yet, but Madame Lenormand is the one who originally told Louise to seek Juliette's aid.

I hope I'm communicating the significance of what I'm trying to explain. Really, when I was first stuck, I had written that Madame Lenormand told Louise her maid could help her. That was the real dead end. The first change I made was to Juliette, mostly because someone in my writing group asked me what had happened to Juliette. Juliette Drouet, Victor Hugo's mistress, had been kind of a local color character—not that involved with the plot. Now, suddenly, she's relevant.

So. A couple of things: first of all, I learned the answers were in what I'd already written, and that I'd made a mistake I had to catch and change. It's kind of like getting the perspective wrong in a painting. The most important moment of undoing my problem came when I turned action over to a different character... when I realized the maid had very little to offer. Even though she had connections to the larger problem, she didn't have the connections that Juliette, as an actress, did. Secondly, I had to see how to involve this new character—in this case, get word to her. I didn't want my reader doubting the validity of how it all happened, which is where the windmills came in. They give Louise the excuse she needs to go off on a risque adventure.

The changes came from conversations, from the concert I attended, and from bits I'd already laid into the text. Executing it meant writing forward and back too—something I've begun to do more and more. All of this is based on the notion that it's better not to have all the answered figured out (outlined) up front in a novel... because it gives your unconscious more opportunity to be involved in the unfolding. Novelist Peg Kingman, who I heard speak this spring, pointed out that if she figures it all out ahead of time, generally speaking her readers see it coming and can anticipate everything before they get there. If, however, she allows the story to unfold, when her characters get stuck, the reader can't see how its going to work out. They're kept off-balance about where the story is going—a much more interesting story to read.

I call it story stalking.
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crossposted at Paris on My Mind

Getting a Character to Walk

I'm reading James Wood's wonderful book, How Fiction Works. In the section on Character, he talks about the idea of getting the characters "in" to the book, making them come alive for the reader. He talks about the fact that most of us, most of the time, lean into description as if we were describing a picture or an image in the mirror. It's frozen, just a lot of descriptors that Wood calls "static."

His point is that as hard as we try to tell the reader that the character looks this way or that, with this long list; it's no good. He gives this example of what doesn't work:

My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that gray velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood.

Here's an example of introducing the character through description that he likes:

He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.

Interesting, I think, and here's why: Wood talks about it in terms of "static" and "mobile." The first description is static. It's describing a picture, in this case, literally, but even if it weren't, it's just describing stationary elements—although I see emotion as well, and don't think of emotions as static. Nevertheless, I think what Wood is after, as I compare the two descriptions, is behavior that shows us something.

If I think about it, usually when I talk about someone, you know the "gossip" kind of talking, about a friend or stranger... I'm usually prompted by something they did that caught my attention, often with judgment attached. Right? I either like the way they act or I don't.

So, Wood is saying that to get a character established on the page, the author needs to pick up on something about the way they are that's telling, something about the way they generally behave, so the reader will get a feel for the character. Behavior, he's suggesting is more memorable than looks, especially the standard that we tend to fall back on, "limpid blue eyes," "ruggedly handsome" — that kind of thing. Actually, the example he likes combines a bit of telling physical description with a bit of behavior: red whiskers with always walking through the door first.

I've gotten good feedback about the way I brought one of my characters onto the page, and looking at it, I see that in a different way, I did something similar. It's in a conversation—what I'm referring to is the second line where Sophia describes the rider. The two speakers are outside above the street when they see him.

We had raised our third glass when a rider raced by at an awful clip.

“That’s Théodore Géricault.” Sophia always carried her mother-of-pearl opera glasses. “He rides like a man chasing death.”

Wood goes on to say that it doesn't take much to get a character "walking," just a few "brushstrokes." It makes me think that I'm often trying too hard, probably because I haven't found the strong detail that's telling. I also think it's important to keep the description unfolding for awhile, not to try to say it all at once. Again, that arises, I think, from insecurity, the nagging feeling that you haven't "said enough." The point Wood makes about the guy who "always goes though the door first," is that we surmise all sorts of things about him from that one bit of information.

He goes on to say that this capacity, to get the character walking right from the first is especially valuable with the bit players in your book. It makes sense, think about theater, if a walk-on or a one-line bit player comes on stage fully developed with attitude and behavior, we pay attention. We believe in the character.

For me, there's another whole piece to talk about here, because I think the same thing happens with the scene itself. Often writers create a static instead of a mobile scene. It's challenging to get the action moving, but the answer is similar: you have to get away from telling us how it "was" or how it "looked" and get in there with behavior—with what is actually happening. That's one of the reasons why dialogue can be powerful. It can drop us right into the action. I'll discuss this in greater detail in a future entry.

How to Launch Ariadne's Owl

This OWL is really nothing more than a suite of blogs, but it's purpose is to create an online writing community. We'll see how it goes. I've had it in mind for years, but the technology was always out of my reach, now it really isn't.

When I say, it's been on my mind for years, I have to go back to my Masters Degree, which I pursued in the 1980s at Sonoma State University. I remember sitting down in front of a computer terminal for the first time—in a lab directed toward math and science students. I was taking a self-directed course in Basic programming. Word processors and personal computers didn't exist, let alone laptops. There was no Internet, no web, no social networking, not even email—just math and science types learning to program.

The Basic interface was a bit like a word processor. To program required entering words, symbols, numbers and letters into the processor. Language. Basic is a language. It didn't take me long to realize that the computer was disinterested, that it didn't care whether I spoke Basic to it or English. It did things when I spoke Basic, returned error messages when I spoke English. But, the little space I'm typing in right now, to post this blog entry, is really not all that different than the little space I was using to type Basic into the processor, just more sophisticated.

As I remember, I was only a couple of lessons into it when I sat down one day and started a novel in which the main character communicated with extraterrestrial intelligence using the computer. I claimed it was some kind of electromagnetic device that was sophisticated enough for them to use to translate their normal means of communication into human symbols and words.... English, and that my main character (me) stumbled onto it by accident.

After that I logged dozens of hours in my self-directed course—my access to the techno-future that was exploding around me. About a year later, I had convinced Sonoma State to accept my proposal for an individual Masters in which I would study the impact of computers on the writing process. For my Master's Thesis I tried to design a nonlinear world of words, images, instructions and story. I tried to do it using Basic. I also tried to learn Cobalt, but even though I could spend the entire night in the lab, trying to make one little thing happen—without getting bored—I was never cut out to be a programmer. At some point I gave up. My vision was over my head.

A few years later some blessed soul developed Hypercard, a program that ran on Apple computers and was a simple form of what we take for granted about the web... a system by which you could highlight words and images and turn them into links. I had dropped out of my Masters program and was working as a small time graphic designer in a small time nonprofit in San Francisco. I remember someone there telling me about it at work. I opened the program and took a look around... a week later I had quit my job and gone back to my Masters program.

I finished my degree in about six months. I wrote my thesis using HyperCard to demonstrate what I was talking about, creating a nonlinear piece of fiction that was sort of like a library, footnoted with links. I had discovered a nonlinear process of digression, really, that allowed for all sorts of links and asides, suites of influence, worlds.

About seven years later, I ended up designing an English class for the Distant Ed department of a small community college that was trying to go online. The Internet was such that the World Wide Web was just one part of it... it hadn't taken over yet, hadn't "become" the Internet. I went back to programming and learned HTML, much easier to work with than Basic, and a whole lot clearer to me what I wanted to do with it... build a website. Simple. But still, I'm a writer not a programmer. I fell short again, couldn't make the language do what I was hoping, came up with something that sort of fit the image. I'd already found the poem about How to Build an Owl, was using it in my teaching, so it was an easy step to calling the thing an OWL.

I really don't think Purdue had come up with that yet, but it's so obvious that someone besides me was bound to stumble onto it. So, I think it was 1996 when I built the prototype. Then it all got lost. I went back to school and moved in a different direction and only came back around to the Internet when I published my novel and decided to build my own website. Tools had changed. It was a whole lot easier.

So there you have it.

This OWL is actually built not of HTML pages, but of blogs. Entirely simple—a suite of blogs a friend called it. At least to begin with. It does go back and forth between some HTML pages and the blogs. It's likely to grow too. Who knows—maybe before I'm done, I'll find myself in contact with extraterrestrials. That's the novel I've been trying to write since the 1970s, by the way.

For now, I'm just inviting you to visit my OWL. It's just getting started, so it's a little like inviting you to a house that hasn't been lived in yet. I'm moving in the furniture, painting walls, that kind of thing. And I'm also thinking about how to grow the thing. It does feel like a little creature of sorts, like it's a little bit alive. And, well, it also feels like my future.

Cross-posted at Paris on My Mind
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