Trying Too Hard or Not Trying Hard Enough

In a comment to Domey's post yesterday, McKenzie McCann talked about how much she dislikes it when seemingly every story element is symbolic. A coffee pot, as McKenzie said, is never just a coffee pot. I answered something like, "I'd rather an author tried too hard than didn't try hard enough." That was yesterday.

Today I am not so sure. Since writing my reply to McKenzie, I have read the first chapter of Paula McLain's The Paris Wife and the first couple of chapters of Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings. I'm going to read the Bernieres book and I might read the McLain book, but both of these novels begin with a lot lot lot of the author displaying their research. The Paris Wife is a fictional first-person account of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage as told by the wife, Hadley Richardson. The first chapter is essentially an essay about Hemingway. His eyes, his hair, his dancing, his every nickname, etc etc etc and I just wanted to shake Ms McLain by the collar and tell her "I get it; this is about Ernest Hemingway." The trouble is, the scene was allegedly about Hadley Richardson dancing for the first time with Hemingway at a party, and there was almost no Hadley Richardson in there. It was all McLain's researched details about Hemingway. Ms McLain is trying too hard.

Birds Without Wings is a tragic love story set in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, as it is becoming Turkey. Nationalism, racism, the Gallipoli campaign during WW I and love all intertwine in the novel, all with tragic consequences. Sounds nifty. Except, the first few thousand words are all set dressing. It's nice to know that an imam is one who leads prayers and that a hodji is someone who's been on the haj and that people in Turkey spoke Turkish but wrote using Greek script and that Christian and Muslim traditions were mashed up in rural areas, but after a while I just wanted to meet some characters and see some action. I'm in a history lesson right now. Mr de Bernieres is trying too hard.

This reminds me of when Mighty Reader read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Every time Princess Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya ("Kitty") comes into the story, Tolstoy must describe the beauty of Kitty's clothing and person. Mighty Reader was more than once heard to exclaim, "Okay, Leo, we get it. Kitty's pretty and dresses well. Is that all you've got to say about her?" I said to Mighty Reader, "Well, the book is like 6,000 pages long. Don't you need to be reminded about the characters?" Mighty Reader looked at me like I'd grown soft in the head.

This is something I wonder about in my own books, which so far have tended to be set in the historical past. How much do I tell my reader about the setting? Where do you draw the line between giving enough explanation so that the story makes sense and the story just being a textbook? I'm not one of those people who read historical fiction in order to learn about the past. I just like a good story told well. I also don't think that writers owe any fidelity to the past and I've read enough interviews with writers of historical fiction to be aware that they'll serve the story at the expense of the facts and I'm fine with that. So I don't need to hear how the horsemen of Mongolia were more fierce than were the horsemen of Kurdistan or whatever, especially when that's just filler in the middle of a paragraph. At some point, the story gets lost for me and I'm just wading through the writer's notes.

This is not an argument against detail, though. Proust goes into minutia for half a million words but that's just the way his mind works in the pursuit of his themes. He's not trying to show you how well he's observed his hotel suite or the shoes worn at the artistocratic parties he attends. His work is about the details and it's pretty fine stuff.

Anyway, I realize that this is all very much down to personal taste and individual reading history, but I don't think that's any reason not to discuss it. How much do you want/need to be told about setting/history (real or made up by the author) before you're willing to lose yourself in a story? What are your minimum requirements? How close to the beginning of the story do you want this stuff to appear? (Last night I was talking about backstory with Mighty Reader, re my current novel. She asked if I was going to give my MC's Big Personal Question in the first chapter or so. "What?" I said. "And leave nothing for Act Two?")

Slow Down

No matter how much thought and care I put into my craft, I keep finding more aspects of writing to master. That's good because it means I have lots of opportunities to become a better writer, but bad because, well, it's just annoying to discover that I'm not doing something as well as I could.

Right now I'm considering the way I use detail and pacing in narrative. This weekend I read Joan Silber's excellent little book, The Art of Time In Fiction. It doesn't directly address my particular issues, but after reading Silber's thoughts on fictional time and the organization thereof, I was able to better see the writerly problem I'm solving.

I tend to write almost exclusively in scenes, with few or no transitional or summary passages to connect the scenes. My narratives are very active, and the speed at which the scenes take place is pretty constant. Once in a while I will pause or hesitate, and the narrative will go into slow-motion--as it were--and focus on details. Some of this slow-motion narration is written during the first draft, but a lot of it comes out of revisions. I have a habit of reading through my drafts and indiscriminately asking myself "what more can/should I say about this?" If I can think of a way to expand a thought, I'll do it, usually by pouring details into a scene, expanding the thoughts of a character, describing something, and so on. Lingering, I think, is really what I'm doing. Imagine yourself walking down a city street, keeping a steady pace, looking at the shop windows. Once in a while something will catch your eye and you'll slow down and take a better look, or even stop on the sidewalk to stare. That's sort of what it's like to slow down in a scene and focus on details.

Anyway, my method has generally been to slow down and expand the bits of narrative that caught my eye and imagination as I went along in revisions. I really enjoy this and often come up with little moments that amuse and please me no end. And that's all great, but I haven't been using this tool with the sort of deliberateness I should have been. In other words, what I ought to do is look at my scenes and ask myself which moments/images/emotions in them are most important and in need of the reader's greater attention, and then slow down to expand those bits of the narrative. I've been adding details and increased focus more or less as it suits me, with no real method in mind. This strikes me (and my taskmaster Virgo mind) as sloppy, as poor craft. So my intention--if I can stick to it--is to watch out for the moments that require more attention and then give those narrative moments the attention they need.

It's possible that, writing by feel or instinct the way I've been doing, I've actually accomplished just what I need to accomplish, but I have doubts. It's also possible that I can't have fabulous and amusing or pleasing ideas to work into the narrative on demand. But this is the problem I've chosen to work on right now, so we'll see how it goes. Slowing down with intention, with an eye to the needs of the story and not simply as it strikes me.

So that's my craft issue as I embark on a new first draft. There are all the usual issues of voice and story, but now I'm also asking myself to concentrate on the line-by-line structure of scenes, which is not something I'm used to doing.

I'm also still trying to find a working title for the detective book. Right now I'm calling it "the detective book" but that doesn't really pop, you know?

See What No One Else Sees

If you're a subscriber to our mailing list, you might have read my review of Haruki Murakami's After Dark. This book is short and relatively light, but it taught me the importance of seeing things that other people don't normally see.

After Dark takes place in the middle of the night, during hours where much of the people in the Japanese city where the story takes place are asleep and unaware. Murakami creates an entire "invisible" world here that seems to be right under our noses. Like the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia or the telephone booths in The Matrix, these magical places seem thrilling because they are at once so close at hand and yet so alien.

The same thing can be said for countless things that go on around us every day. What do our pets do when we're not home? What sort of negotiations happen behind the scenes at a museum? As writers, we have the exciting opportunity to uncover those things that no one else has paid any attention to.

This idea has really opened up a lot of story ideas for me. One sad topic that I had to confront back in 2007 was the death of my dogs, a brother and sister pair that were part of my life for over fifteen years. On the surface, this event probably doesn't sound that unique. A lot of people lose their loved ones and family members. But, when I reached an emotional place where I could actually write about it, I focused on the details of the death that people didn't ask about or pay attention to. It wasn't enough for me to write about the fact that they were dead, but I wanted to and needed to explore the events leading up to their death and the actual details of what happened when the deaths occurred. This led to my story "I'm Waiting For My Dogs To Die," which for me personally is one of the most emotional pieces I've ever written.

This concept of seeing things that no one else sees has become a really important component of my writing. In honor of my grandmother's death, I wrote a short story called "The Wild Grass." It's a piece that means a lot to me, but it was one that I had written BEFORE my grandmother's passing. When her death actually did come and I learned the details of it, my picture of the death was far less romantic than what I had created in "The Wild Grass." Because I felt that the real details were important and something that needed to be written down, I included them in another story of mine, Bread. It's strange to me now, because "The Wild Grass" is more obviously about my grandmother, but it is in this other story where I feel like the real unseen details emerged.

Some of the greatest authors have created masterpieces from observing something common in a very different way. Virginia Woolf delves so deeply into the mind of her characters during a fairly mundane day in To The Lighthouse. Leo Tolstoy follows a dying man to the smallest detail in The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. In Cinders, our very own Michelle created a whole story simply by asking what happened to a character after she reached her "happily ever after."

Often books and stories become popular because they transport us to an exotic location that we aren't familiar with. I think what's important to remember is that these strange places can be as close as our kitchen sink if we look at it with the proper mindset and the proper eye.

So, have you uncovered something before that other people don't seem to pay attention to?

Significant Details and Set Dressing

One of the little twitches I have when I'm revising a novel is that I will mercilessly go through and cut out everything that's not essential to the story. Part of this is just to clean up after my first draft. I like to throw odd things in that strike my fancy while drafting ("maybe the two big guys are actually twins, and I can do something with the idea of twins later on!" or "maybe Fredrik has one leg shorter than the other, and I can do something with that later on!") and see if they develop, and sometimes they become gorgeous symbols and set pieces and sometimes they're just rubbish I need to clear off the page later.

What this means is that at some point during my revisions process, I have a fairly tight narrative with no extraneous material in it. Which is a good thing, to a point. There is a danger--always realized in my case, I think--that all of the cool details that make the fictional world a rich experience for the reader are removed, because the number and type of buttons on someone's gloves is not a significant detail so I have cut it out, just as I have cut out the discussion of the tightness of the wood grain on the arm of a chair, and other things. Which leaves me with a sort of empty world, where characters are floating a bit in a vacuum. I don't know why I do this every time, but I do.

I am forced then to go back into the novel for another round of revisions, putting in all the details of the fictional world that I've removed. I pause to note that it's never quite so extreme as I'm making it here; possibly I only cut out about half of the details of setting and place and appearance that I put in during the first draft, but it seems like a lot to me. Anyway, I am currently in this stage of revisions with my novel Killing Hamlet, and I have always sort of disliked this stage of the process. I have felt that, in a way, I am betraying my own rules about a proper narrative by larding up my prose with stuff that the story can live without. But I also want my story to have the flavor of the time and place, without the level of detail found in novels of the historical fiction genre, where things can be--in my opinion--a bit excessive, reading like a catalogue or an encyclopedia.

Last night I was weaving in little bits of trivia about 16th-century beliefs regarding the planets in our solar system, just a sentence or two here and there through the novel (the protagonist is an astronomer/astrologer), and it occurred to me that I was not choking up my story with unnecessary detail so much as I was going around the house I'd built and furnished and putting flower arrangements and objets d'art in the rooms. Mighty Reader makes sure we have fresh flowers year round, and I have no complaints about how pretty this makes our house, and were the flowers to go away, I'd miss them awfully much. So I have decided that this is what I'm doing with my book, and that it's a good thing, as long as I don't pile in so many bouquets that you can no longer see my characters.

Anyway, and I stipulate in advance that "it's all in the execution," but what are your thoughts about details that are only in the story as set dressing, as props? I have railed against them in the past on this very blog, but I'm older and more mellow and, frankly, a bit tired today. But how much is enough, or too much, and when in the writing process do you put them in, and how much do you remove? Et cetera.

Where's Your Naked?

A term I use a lot when I critique other writing is sincere. "This sounds sincere to me," I'll say. Or, the alternative, "This doesn't sound very sincere." I'll admit that it's not the best word to use. Much of fiction is created, and probably all of fiction has at least a few details that aren't actually true. And, even though I've tried to stop using such a vague word in my comments to other writers, I feel that the need for it comes up time and again.

Because, don't you think you can tell when a fiction writer is describing a real event?

A writing teacher once told me a quote that I think about often. She said, "Fiction is the mask that allows you to stand naked in front of your audience." Or something like that. (And, of course I forget who the quote originally came from). But, it's an idea that I have relied on often. I am willing to be more honest with my thoughts and emotions as long as I'm allowed to call what I write fiction.

At the same time, readers read to be entertained. I've been working on my first adventure book, and already I can feel myself caught up in the events of this extremely fictional story. I started it a couple of days ago, and in the first thirty pages, literally all of it came from my imagination. Then, at around page 31, I found an opportunity to rely on my real life experiences. A couple was preparing to do something very difficult, and one was losing faith in the other. Even though the first part of the book had action and drama and magic, I found myself getting truly excited--perhaps in a different way--about this little domestic squabble. This was my naked. This was the real emotion that was peeking through all of the stuff I was creating.

I think when we read, whether we are aware of it or not, something in our brain is always looking for the sincerity in the fiction. The naked. The facts. However you want to call it. For a story to be properly memorable, I think it needs to be the perfect balance of imagination and reality. To filter out the real emotion, the heavy stuff, is to tell a story that won't stay with the reader. To ramble on only about the things that really happened is likely to bore a reader.

So, what do you do with the naked parts of your story? Do you reveal them? Hide them? Consider them unworthy? How do you balance the fun details you are creating with the parts of the story that are actually real?

A Man's Got To Know His Limitations

Earlier this week, Davin posted about the idea of experts versus novices, and how they view processes and fields of learning in different ways. It got me thinking about how one indicator that we are learning our craft is when we can recognize things we don't do well. If we can see our own limits, that means we have a big enough picture of what writing is to know how well our skills fit within that picture. As we write more and grow as writers, these limits get farther out and the things we need to work on become more subtle and personal. Thinking about showing and not telling, for example, maybe becomes thinking about how summarizing a scene will impact the imagery we're using and how that will affect the long-term shape of the narrative. The concept of dialogue will evolve from ideas about breaking it up with beats and tags into ideas about, maybe, the weight of individual words and the rhythm of the exchanges and how that works with the rhythm of the book's voice.

Anyway, I am sure that every established writer, no matter how many books she has published, is aware of things she'd like to do better. Even the ones who tell you otherwise and repeat a mantra of "don't get it right; get it written." I'm not talking about perfectionism here (though it's one of my many annoying traits as a writer) so much as I'm talking about awareness of not quite getting what we want down onto the page and seeing that we ought to work harder at what we can't quite do satisfactorily.

For example, I have a tendency to sort of hedge my bets when writing. I will sometimes refuse to commit to a specific meaning in a story, by which I mean that I can't decide exactly how someone feels about a situation, so that character will talk about it in vague terms. You know they feel something but I won't tell you what it is because I don't want to decide. Decisions are hard work, and have implications for the remainder of the story, so I'll write passages that could have more than one meaning--not to be clever, but because I just don't know. I wish I'd knock that off.

I also think that I don't pay as much attention to setting and detail as I should. Mostly that's because I am more interested in character than in details, or maybe I'm just telling myself that because writing setting and detail is a weak spot. In my current book, I am forcing myself to slow down and focus more on the physical details of the fictional world, and I don't like it because I don't do it well, but my hope is that when I've finished the first draft of the WIP, I'll have trained myself to do this kind of writing better. That which does not kill me makes me stronger, and all of that.

So I'm wondering, are you aware of the current limits of your craft? Are you consciously working on them? What's the most recent breakthrough you've had in your writing?

More importantly: It's Friday! This weekend cannot come too soon.

Character-driven Narration

Last Friday I was a cheerleader, but today I'm going to be a pedant and talk about craft again. That doesn't mean I'm not still High On Life and not still thinking that We Writers Are Superheroes. Because I am and we are. Just saying. Onward, though.

One of the things agents and editors go on about is "voice." Voice is mostly an undefined term, and possibly people mean a great many things when they use that word (I pause to think of Inigo Montoya in "The Princess Bride"). But I think that "voice" is mostly just the way the narration of the story works. How are we telling the story, as one person (the writer) to another (the reader)? Are we casual, formal, revealing, secretive, speaking like our reader or speaking like a stranger? What speech habits does our narration have? That's "voice," as far as I can tell: the style of narration, whether through a character in the story or directly from the author. So let's talk a little about narration, and how it ties to voice.

One thing about narration that we have to be aware of is that all of it should reflect the emotional tone of the story. You'll no doubt have descriptive passages, talking to the reader about places, things or characters in the book, and in these passages it's easy to withdraw into our authorial space and distance ourselves from the emotional lives of whichever characters are placed into the locales or action we're describing.

For example, suppose you have a character walking down a street in a big city. You describe the street as Stella (our character) goes along:

The buildings lining the avenue were modern steel-and-glass skyscrapers, reflecting each other over Stella's head, each side of the street seeing itself across the avenue. Workers in 15th-floor offices looked out and saw themselves mirrored sixty feet away, not really ever seeing the building opposite...

And stuff. Weak, I know, but it's early. Anyway, this passage reveals my own fascination with modern architecture and the phenomenon of curtain-walled glass buildings reflecting the facades of buildings across the street, but it's got nothing to do with Stella. As a narrator, I've withdrawn from the story and am just handing out some facts and observations that don't involve Stella, down there on the street between the shiny skyscrapers.

In character-driven narration, which is what this post alleges to discuss, these sorts of passages are written from a distinct point-of-view that come from the dominant voice of the novel. If the whole book is written in a distant, emotionless style like the above passage, then the above passage fits with the voice of the book. Which is fine, if we're writing a textbook. But if the voice of the book is not distant and emotionless (and let's hope it's not), your descriptive passages shouldn't be, either. When you withdraw emotionally from your readers, they return the favor and either start skipping ahead or start looking for something else to read.

So, you should tie your narration to character. What does the landscape have to do with the characters within it? Tell us that. Don't tell us your authorial impressions of objects, places or persons. Tell us what they have to do with your characters, what they have to do with the emotional lives of those characters. Have your characters drive the narration.

The street scene, driven by character:

Stella walked down the avenue. She looked up at the modern steel-and-glass skyscrapers around her, noticing how the buildings on each side of the street were mirrored in the glass of the buildings opposite them. If I worked in a 15th-floor office, Stella thought, I'd see myself when I looked out my window and maybe never really see the building on the other side...

We get the same physical details, but now they have meaning to Stella. We have put our character into the narration and are letting her drive the narration.

Remember that your POV character doesn't exist merely to give her perspective on the action and the conflict. Your POV character gives perspective on the entirety of the narrative. When you come across passages that seem cold or distant, don't let the first question you ask about them be "what's wrong with this sentence?" Ask yourself first if the passages are about your characters. The prose itself might be fine, or better than fine. What might be missing is an emotional connection between the prose and the reader: a character driving the prose.

I'll try to come up with some better examples, possibly from real books.

If My Life Were a Novel

Olivia Williams in Miss Austen Regrets - an excellent film about the later part of Jane Austen's life. I always like to think if she chose a book she could step into and live, it would have been Persuasion.


If My Life Were A Novel:

1. I could charge through to find out if I end up happy,

2. and then I could write up an outline and fix all the things that never made any sense

3. I could spend pages and pages on one delicious moment in time focusing on one or two details that send shivers down my spine

4. I could go back and change my words

5. I could make mistakes and know they'll probably be redeemed later

6. I could get feedback on every. single. word. event. moment

7. I could know what the other people in my life really think of me

8. I could relive the best moments over and over, and tweak them to make them even better

9. I could cut out all the boring crap where nothing happens, like cleaning the kitchen and laundry

10. I could have flashbacks where every detail is crystal clear and has something to do with an event that's just about to change my life,

11. and then I'd get rid of the flashback because they almost never work when I write them

12. Everybody would be amazed by my layers of expertly woven symbolism and metaphors

13. I could sum up my life in one really important blurb that makes me sound like the best thing you'd ever want to read,

14. and you could read me over and over again and keep me on your shelf

15. I would never die, even when my life ended

Who in their right mind wouldn't want to write a novel? But I think one of the most important things to remember when we put that pen to paper, or our fingers to the keys, is that novels are usually not meant to portray real life. They. Are. Fiction. Even if it's a memoir or an autobiography, we don't include the boring details that have nothing to do with the point. There must always be a point. Every scene, every line, every word needs to move the plot and characters forward. If it's something experimental or postmodern, there still needs to be a point, even if nothing happens or moves forward.

I try to remember these things as I'm writing and revising. My readers don't care what the room looks like unless it matters. They don't care what a character looks like unless it matters. No matter how important it may seem to you, or how vivid it is in your mind, please don't put it in unless it accomplishes something productive.

I've talked about this before on several occasions, but even for me, even when I hear it over and over, I still throw meaningless things into my work. It's probably why I can usually cut my 102-thousand-word novel down to 70-thousand. Stupid details are okay for me with a first draft, but after that, they've got to go. If I only I could do that in real life.


Question For the Day: If you could live your life like a novel, what would be the best part for you?


~MDA (aka Glam)

Telling Details Versus Meaningless Trivia

We all struggle to build realistic, compelling worlds for our readers. We want readers to experience our stories as real life, or an amazing magical simulacrum of real life, anyway. We wish to give our readers a picture of our characters and the places through which they move, and the only way to do that is by describing our characters and settings.

There is a wide range of opinion about how detailed your descriptions should be to accomplish this feat. I'm going to try staying out of that discussion today. What I'd like to ramble about for a while instead is the kind of detail we write into our stories. The worth of those details to our readers, if you will.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "trivia" as trifles, things of little consequence. The OED gives several definitions of "detail," but here's what I consider the most pertinent one: A minute or subordinate part of a building, sculpture, or painting, as distinct from the larger portions or the general conception. I'm going to expand that definition to include people, landscapes, objects or whatever is visible in a scene.

Detail versus trivia

I think that when we lard a scene over with descriptions of every visible object, and list inventorially the contents of every room or the costume of every character and try to "paint a picture," we are usually just giving a lot of trivia to the reader. Which is to say, if you present your reader with a list of fifty household goods or another list of twenty articles of clothing, can you really expect her to remember all of that stuff? Maybe, if the descriptions you give your readers are telling. To resort to the OED again, "telling" is effective, forcible, striking. Your descriptive details must mean something in the context of the story to be memorable, to be useful to the reader.

How do you know the difference? I think that if you can cut a detail and you lose no information about character, theme or story, you've just cut meaningless trivia. On the other hand, if your description points to something beyond itself, it has meaning to the reader.

Imagine a scene between two men. One of them is immaculately dressed in an expensive tailored suit, and the other is wearing older, off-the-rack clothes that are getting a bit tired and threadbare. You can describe the well-dressed fellow from his $100 haircut down to his $400 shoes, and then describe the other fellow in a similar fashion, from his grown-out Supercuts down to his scuffed Payless oxfords. That's a lot of description, and taking that kind of time in your narrative will bring your story to a full stop.

What you can do instead is to show one or two telling details of their clothes. Man One offers to shake hands with Man Two. Man Two notices the fine cut of Man One's suit, then looks down and sees that he's missing a button from the cuff of his own suit coat and pulls his hand away, putting it behind his back in embarrassment. Or something like. The reader has seen Man One's confidence and better dress, as well as Man Two's relative place in society and how he feels about it. Four birds with one stone, as it were.

Another example would be the dinner party in "Little Women." We get just enough about the dresses the girls are wearing to know that, while they are the March's finest dresses, they are also not so fine as the girls could wish. And the bit about Jo's gloves is brilliantly done and reinforces both Jo's and Meg's characters.

One other real problem with long, detailed descriptions is that, once you've dumped all the details on your reader, you can't usually invoke those details later on and impart more meaning to them farther along in your story. The details haven't stood out (weren't telling) when first mentioned, so the opportunity to have them be effective and possibly symbolic has been lost. Be sparing with your descriptions and parcel them out as required, but no more.

So you might take a few minutes and look around your scenes and ask yourself what matters in the way of description. Ask yourself what single detail of character or setting would deepen the meaning of the scene, and which details are merely trivia and set dressing. A few well-placed and thoughtful details are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words.

When Less Becomes More

photo by Philippe Morin

Focus. Focus. Focus.

I've learned a lot about focus lately. In fact, I'm so serious about focus that I threw out the latest draft of my novel and completely started over. I'm on page 50, a point in the story that I didn't reach in my previous draft until page 170. Focus.

Plot and Character Focus
Your reader is only going to see the picture you paint. If you describe a character’s shirt, does it have something to do with the story or the character? Or did you describe the shirt because it makes a pretty image in your head - and you wanted to show the reader? Relevant details are essential. Extraneous details pull things out of focus. The same goes for scenes and characters.

One of the things I like to do is shave down my story to its barest essentials. Break down every chapter, scene, and character into one short sentence. For example:

Chapter 1 (the trip from the train station) - Margaret sees the poverty of the town she is being forced to live in, and it frightens her.

John (secondary character) - The character who influences Margaret’s decision not to leave the town.

I’ve done this with my current draft, and ended up combining two characters into one character (they served the same purpose), deleted one character from the picture altogether (he’s still in the story, but we never see him), and cut about 20 scenes from the book (they were extraneous - their purpose was better told in two scenes)

Sentence-Level Focus
I’ll be bold here and say that every. single. word. counts.

Like the details I discussed above, if you narrow your focus onto every sentence and ask what it adds to the story, you’ll see what I mean. In my draft, I’m doing this as I write - editing as I go. I’ll write a sentence, ask myself what it adds to the forward action, to the development of the character, to the picture as a whole. If it feels weak and out of focus, I either rewrite it or cut it. (Be sure to read Davin's excellent post from yesterday about building important details into your sentences.)

Mostly, however, I’ve found that extraneous phrases are the culprit of weak sentences. For instance:

He shifted the truck in reverse and pulled out of the parking lot. A narrow, rutted road led behind the boathouse, past the inn, and to the other side of the lake.

I changed it to:

He backed out of the parking lot and followed the narrow, rutted road to the other side of the lake.

This is a necessary sentence to the scene. The reader needs to know that the character drove to the other side of the lake. Now, I could simply say: He drove to the other side of the lake - but that’s not my style. Don’t confuse style or voice with fluff.

Question Of The Day: Do you find yourself focusing on the wrong things in your story? How do you fix this problem?

~MDA (aka Glam)

Details That Imply The Bigger World

"What d'you mean, 'Leave it'?"

That's a line from the movie Gosford Park, and it's the first line spoken by one of the upstairs characters. I have the habit of letting a movie like this play in the background over and over again while I write, and so, in this case, I've probably watched Gosford Park hundreds of times. Whenever I heard this line, I thought I had missed something someone said before it. After all, doesn't it feel like we've jumped into the middle of a conversation?

What I realized was that this line was, indeed, the first line of the scene, but it implied the bigger world. It suggested that someone else had told the speaker to "leave" something, whatever that something was.

Details have the power to make the world bigger without actually describing the bigger world. This line of dialog implied that there had been a conversation before it. We can assume that the normal, "Hi. How are you?" has taken place, but that the director, Robert Altman, decided it wasn't worth his time or ours to have to watch it.

When we're writing, we can do the same thing. As we describe an object or scene, we can use the details of that description to create the bigger world that exists around what readers are actually seeing.

He walked in wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

This line describes someone and their clothing, but with only a few more words, we can give this character a lot more history.

He walked in wearing mud-covered jeans and a torn T-shirt.

With this, we know that the person who came in has been alive long before we've heard about him. Maybe he's just been beat up. Made he's just a rough-and-tumble type of guy. Either way, our experience is now of something larger than what it was before. Our story takes on a grander scale.

We can come up with other examples like this, and they don't always have to imply that time has passed.

The light through the stained glass windows made the apple look blue.

Technically, here, I'm describing an apple, but I've also used the same sentence to imply a church or something like a church.

When I am writing a scene, I try to enlarge my imagination and see the bigger picture before I crop it down. If a character is entering the room, think about where they have come from and what they were doing there. If you're describing an object, think about where it is located and how that location affects it. Our world is larger than what we are able to write down, but with a few well-placed details, we can still capture some of that vastness.

Fight Scenes and Sex Scenes: It All Goes Back To The Details

Some of the most exciting scenes in a book, any book, occur when characters surrender their normal rules of civility and act on a more primal level. Some of these scenes are so memorable for me that I can write an autobiography based on when I encountered them. I was in my dorm room bed at UC Davis when I read about Shingo Ogata lusting over his daughter-in-law, Kikuko. I was in a Brazilian hotel room, surrounded by muddy geologists inside and prostitutes outside when I read about Rabbit Angstrom coming home to encounter his wife and son after having left them for several weeks. And, I was in a refrigerated room of the UCLA biochemistry building, purifying an enzyme, when I read the scene in The Road where the father and son open a hatch in the floor of a house and go into a basement only to discover...

Action scenes that reveal the most about individual human nature are some of the hardest things to write about. How often have we been tempted to skip over their details when we include them in our stories?

They looked longingly into each other's eyes. The next day, Tina felt embarrassed by how she had behaved in bed.

or

Peter inflated his chest and asked Hugh to step outside with him. The fight lasted all of two minutes and then Peter was lying on the ground.

In a way, skipping over the details seems justified. We writers don't want to get our fingers dirty. We don't want to expose our readers to any sort of discomfort. Or, as people have mentioned in comments on this blog, we don't want to bore our readers with the nitty gritty details. But, at least for me, one of the best reasons to read is that I am allowed to witness some of the most private fantasies and some of the most desperate times for characters. Whether literary or not, I appreciate when an author makes the effort to imagine important action scenes in such detail that they (and I) are able to experience these scenes vividly and entirely.

I have a fight scene in my novel. A teenager is tied up and forced to confront a fighting rooster. My first attempts to write this scene involved me summarizing some of the graphic details. My excuse was that I didn't want my story to suddenly fall into an action genre. But, the real reason was that I didn't want to take the massive amount of time and energy that was required to really think out every twist and turn of the scene until I knew exactly what happened. Eventually, though, I did it. I wrote it out detail by detail, action after action. I was not trying to make my details serve more than one purpose. I was not trying to include symbols or character revelations beyond what was revealed by the fight. If anything, this scene is one of the more "shallow" description scenes I have, only because my sole intention was to see as much of what happened as I could, and I didn't worry about being boring.

When I read it out to my writer's group, my friend Norm said something like, "I feel like I'm reading a real book." It was a very new experience for me. For the first time I realized that emotion and depth were not the only things worth sharing. Action can reveal the most powerful elements of human nature, and they deserve to be written thoroughly and precisely, often with a lot of detail.

Revise Boring Descriptions

This post is in response to Lady Glamis's request for ways to avoid detail dumps in your writing. Detail dumps are those long descriptions that tend to intimidate or bore or infuriate most readers. (The comments in the last few posts definitely agree with this conclusion.)

In a detail dump, a reader feels like they are being stalled or overloaded with unimportant information. They want to skip ahead to the action or movement in the story. Sometimes they DO skip ahead. So, what can we do to make sure that we give out information in an interesting way?

I'm turning back to a lesson I learned from the wonderful writer, Mary Yukari Waters. She was also the one who got me to rethink the show-don't-tell rule. Keep in mind that this tip applies more to getting readers than to getting in touch with your own personal preferences. This is a tool for how you can improve your chances of connecting with strangers (such as agents) as they read through your manuscript. In other words, this may not be important to you.

Mary didn't directly address detail dumps, but she provided a tool to avoid what she called "skim-worthy prose." When writing prose, we have the goal of giving out information along with moving the story along. To keep the prose interesting for as many readers as possible, a writer must make sure the prose is doing as many different things as possible. The more things the prose is doing, the more likely a reader will like one of those things. It's statistics.

Here's a boring description:

Janet went out to the balcony. She wore an oversized cotton sweater and a pair of blue jogging shorts. She had on a wedding ring with a small diamond in it. She looked out at the lawn around the estate. It was sprawling with rows of squared hedges and rose gardens and water fountains. It led up to some low grassy hills. Between the hills, there was a view of the edge of a lake, the ripples in the water shimmered in the sunlight.

This isn't too long, but I think we get the sense that the details aren't providing us with much information about any sort of story or conflict. All we get here is a view of this woman, Janet, and where she is standing. To get more information and to feel like the story is moving, readers want action and insight into Janet's situation: her actions, her mood, her history, her thoughts. So, we can add all of this throughout the paragraph to give:

For the last time, Janet went out to the balcony. Although she usual wore delicate cashmere sweaters, today she had on an oversized cotton sweater and a pair of blue jogging shorts -- she didn't want anyone in the neighborhood to recognize her. She still had on her wedding ring, with the small diamond in it, but not for long. She slipped it off her finger and dropped it over the marble handrail. It landed with a tiny thud into the dirt below. She looked out at the lawn around the estate. It was sprawling with rows of squared hedges and rose gardens and water fountains. She once loved all of this, but now she hated it. She crossed her arms. She shut her eyes before she could see more. She knew that the lawn led up to some low grassy hills, and between the hills there was a view of the edge of a lake. The lake was the only thing she would miss. Not the house, not her husband, just the lake.

This second paragraph has all of the information that the first paragraph does, but it goes beyond that to keep the story moving and to reveal where Janet is on her journey. In the first paragraph, we got a bunch of details that didn't point to anything. In the second, the details give insight to what she likes and doesn't like. It tells us about her past and predicts what her future has in store. And, in the second paragraph, I have added some action, that of her taking off her wedding ring and dropping it down below. She has made a tangible move and we know that it was an important one.

So, how does this increase our chances of getting people to like the second paragraph over the first? Well, if the reader likes action, there is more action than there was before. If the reader likes psychology, there is more psychology than there was before. If the reader wants history, there is more history than there was before. AND, if the reader likes description, the description is still there. While the first paragraph only did one thing, the second paragraph does multiple different things. So, statistically, you are more likely to catch a reader's interest.

It's true that some people prefer simplicity. In my stories, I tend to choose really simple language and not much detail. The thing I risk is that I have to hope that the readers I'm targetting prefer the limited range I give them. It's like going to a restaurant with a fixed menu versus going to a grocery store where you can buy whatever you want. The restaurant might prepare a better version of cassoulet, but if you don't want cassoulet, the grocery store is the better bet.

Take a look at published books and short stories. Find a dense paragraph that has description in it. More than likely, you'll find that this description is interspersed with other details and action and flashback, etc. Most published writers have mastered the art of having their descriptive paragraphs serve multiple functions.

Mary had a simple way to evaluate your own writing. Read each paragraph and count on your fingers how many things it is doing. For her, if a paragraph is only doing one or two things, she revises it.

Physical Character Descriptions Revisited

I'm trying hard not to use the word "orgasmic," but yesterday's comments were exciting. I was up late thinking about this new idea that physical description is not only less important, but even unwanted by some readers. Thanks for all the great comments and ideas Rick, Lady Glamis, beth, Justus, scott, Crimogenic, Robyn, Anette, Reason Reanimator!

To quickly repeat my original point. I was saying that I think most readers have a certain average person in mind when they read a story with no physical character details. This isn't necessarily a problem, but I think it's good to be aware of it whether you want to change that image or not. Justus and Scott, you mentioned that some of your favorite characters are only minimally described. That struck me as very interesting. I'd love to hear who those characters are. Scott, you mentioned some favorite stories. Those are some of my favorites too. Do they also contain your favorite characters? I went through my list: Mahlke from Cat and Mouse, Brod from Everything Is Illuminated, Anna Karenina from a book I promised myself not to mention this week. All of them are very visual for me, described with a set of key descriptions. Yes, as many people brought up, detail overload is never the goal.

I think it's time to launch our first official Literary Lab Experiment.

Experiment #1

Question: Do physical descriptions help or hinder the ability of a person to interact with the story?

Background: Some comments from yesterday's post suggested that physical descriptions can get in the way of the movement, depth, action of the story, and that details make it harder for the reader to interact with the story. I think we all agree that physical descriptions should be relevant. The more important issue is whether or not leaving out details allows the reader to engage more with the story by being able to add their own information and by being able to avoid getting bored. I'll try to present both sides of the case so that each writer can make up his or her own mind. And, I'm currently undecided, so this will be good for me.

Materials and Methods: Rick Daley posed some great Why's and How's to the scene about the suicidal man and the woman watching. I'll use his suggestions to flesh out the all important action and motivation of the scene. I'll use one of Robyn's details too. Then, I'll write the scene again and add physical descriptions of the characters.

Results:

First, the no physical description version.

A man stood stiff and determined on the window ledge of a three story building. It was early in the morning, and there weren't any cars in the road below. He thought of his Ponzi scheme that had just been discovered the night before, the panicked calls that came into his office phone, his cell phone, his home phone. He had only answered one of them, a call from a father of four. That was all it took for him to decide to end his life. He shuffled his feet closer to the edge. His hands fell away from the brick wall behind him so that he teetered unsteadily. He had been calm before, but at that dizzying height his breathing grew unsteady. As if seeking one last vision to die on, he noticed a woman walking down the street in his direction. He thought of all the women he had flirted with in those blue-lit, gin-smelling clubs he frequented, how that lifestyle was gone for him now. At first the woman did not notice him. Her stride was casual, carefree. Then, she stopped and looked up. It seemed to take a moment for her body to react to what he knew she saw. Her form tensed. She shouted, "Don't do it!" to which the man replied, "It's too late," before dropping. His eyes stayed open. In the three seconds of freefall, he watched the ground. Each time he blinked, he got a snapshot of the gray mass of the asphalt speeding toward him, and each snapshot was a closer view of what he had done and who he truly was.


Second, the version with the physical descriptions.

A man stood stiff and determined on the window ledge of a three story building. He was twenty-something, trim, scruffy but handsome -- he looked like a man who could go places. It was early in the morning, and there weren't any cars in the road below. He thought of his Ponzi scheme that had just been discovered the night before, the panicked calls that came into his office phone, his cell phone, his home phone. He had only answered one of them, his voice unusually timid as he listened to a panicked father of four. That was all it took for him to decide to end his life. He shuffled his feet closer to the edge. His hands fell away from the brick wall behind him so that he teetered unsteadily. He had been calm before, but at that dizzying height his breathing grew unsteady. His face -- the clear eyes that had never encountered defeat before -- suddenly widened with shock. As if seeking one last vision to die on, he noticed a woman walking down the street in his direction. He thought of all the perfect women he had flirted with in those blue-lit, gin-smelling clubs he frequented, how that lifestyle was gone for him now. At first the woman did not notice him. Her stride was casual, carefree. She looked more wholesome than the women in the clubs. Even from this distance he saw that her face was warm, loving. She looked like someone who could make a good wife someday. She stopped and looked up. It seemed to take a moment for her body to react to what he knew she saw. Her form tensed. She shouted, "Don't do it!" to which the man replied, "It's too late," before dropping. His eyes stayed open. In the three seconds of freefall, he watched the ground. Each time he blinked, he got a snapshot of the gray mass of the asphalt speeding toward him, and each snapshot was a closer view of what he had done and who he truly was.

Conclusion: ???

UN- Purple Prose, A Contemporary Example

Yesterday, I described how details can be used to reveal character along with other components of a story using a passage from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Today, I'm looking at a more modern piece of literature to show that details can also be used to flesh out a setting while also performing literary acrobatics to entertain the reader. This is a passage from Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, a book that was so emotional for me, that at one point, I closed it after reading a scene because I wanted to stay frozen in the moment for as long as I could.

Here's the first paragraph of the second chapter from this wonderful book:

It was March 18, 1791, when Trachim B's double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River. The young W twins were the first to see the curious flotsam rising to the surface: wandering snakes of white string, a crushed velvet glove with outstretched fingers, barren spools, schmootzy pince-nez, rasp- and boysenberries, feces, frillwork, the shards of a shattered atomizer, the bleeding red-ink script of a resolution: I will...I will...

On one hand, this is just a list of details. But, if you read it out loud, you'll hear some beautiful alliteration (wandering snakes of white string; feces, frillwork) and also some beautiful awkward alliteration (schmootzy pince-nez), and I always laugh at the ridiculousness of the phrase rasp- and boysenberries. Foer is able to be at once funny and graceful, a skill that ends up working even more beautifully in later emotional scenes of this book.

Just a few paragraphs later, there are more descriptions of these items drifting up out of the water when one of the W twins, Chana, goes into the water to explore:

She picked up the hands of a baby doll, and those of a grandfather clock. Umbrella ribs. A skeleton key. The articles rose on the crowns of bubbles that burst when they reached the surface. The slightly young and less cautious twin raked her fingers through the water and each time came up with something new: a yellow-pinwheel, a muddy hand mirror, the petals of some sunken forget-me-not, silt and cracked black pepper, a packet of seeds…

Foer is able to unify some disparate objects by emphasizing their human-ness (the hands of the clock and the ribs of the umbrella, the skeleton key, the crowns of bubbles) and there's that almost too clever phrase "silt and cracked black pepper."

The bottom line when writing anything is that you want to be interesting. The problem with purple prose is that, most of the time, people find it boring. But, by making your details serve more than one role in the story, whether it reveals personality, social class, poetic artistry, or anything else, you'll keep the reader engaged because they will be constantly interacting with your book, focused on picking up all of the nuances you have put into it.

UN- Purple Prose, A Classic Example

Last week, Lady Glamis (who I've decided is also incredibly nice, and whose books I'd like to read) posted a valuable lesson on Purple Prose. When we write, we should avoid adding flowery details that don't serve any function other than giving details. One way to fix the problem of purple prose is to cut the extraneous information during revision. But, there are great examples when details, LOTS of them, don't end up sounding purple. This happens when the author makes use of the details not only to create a scene, but also to help reveal character, culture, status, and other aspects of the story. In this post, I'm looking at a classic example to show how the best details serve multiple functions. Keep in mind that I usually get criticized for not having enough details, so the fact that this works for me means that there is something in the description that is holding my attention. This is a passage from one of my favorite books -- sorry, but I'm Old School-- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy:

Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball had cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she walked into the ballroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as easily and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the minute details of her attire had not cost her or her family a moment's attention, as though she had been born in that tulle dress and lace, with her hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on top of it…

It was one of Kitty's best days. Her dress was not uncomfortable anywhere; her lace berthe did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were not crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, hollowed-out heels did not pinch, but gladdened her feet; and the thick rolls of fair chignon kept up on her head as if they were her own hair. All the three buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet of her locket nestled with special softness round her neck. That velvet was delicious; at home, looking at her neck in the looking-glass, Kitty had felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might be a doubt, but the velvet was delicious. Kitty smiled here too, at the ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms gave Kitty a sense of chill marble, a feeling she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not keep from smiling from the consciousness of her own attractiveness.

What I find amazing about this section is that I get completely overloaded with details but the writing still works for me. We know basically everything there is to know about Kitty's outfit as she is entering a ball. But, we also know a lot more. We know that Kitty has put a lot of time into this very eleborate gown. We know that she has a certain charm -- she knows how to wear this gown. She knows how to carry herself. She's probably been to balls like this dozens of times before, always elaborately dressed and trying to look her best. But, this is not a typical day. Because, we know, though her glamour may have come at the cost of her comfort in previous balls, today, everything is perfect. Her rosettes are not crushed or torn. Her slippers do not pinch. Tonight is a charmed night, and Tolstoy is able to really give us a feeling for just how perfect this night is by describing everything from her feet up to her hair, not missing a thing, to ensure us that, indeed, everything is perfect in its totality. And, then he goes on to describe even more details, this time dipping into the realm of things that most people probably wouldn't even consider. The gloves do not conceal the lines of her hands. The velvet is speaking! Her bare arms not only look like marble, but like chill marble. This is a girl that really cares about her appearance and the impression that she is going to make. (My belt rarely matches my shoes, on the other hand.) This entrance to the ball is something very important to Kitty's life. And, through the descriptions, we get a sense of who Kitty is: a young woman, just breaking into the social world. Her mind is not distracted by thoughts of peace and war, money, death. No. All she cares about at this moment is making a grand entrance. And, in that, we understand who she is at this moment in her life, completely, before she is forced to grow up.

So, while details can be boring, they can also be used to great effect when they reveal more than what is obvious. Tomorrow, I'll break down a more contemporary passage that I like, in the hopes of showing even more ways that details can be made interesting.