Hawthorne and the Forces of Nature

Last week I wrote a post about the uneven pacing in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Today, I want to talk about another cool component of Hawthorne's style: his use of nature to emphasize and mirror his characters' emotions.

Note: There will be spoilers from King Lear and The Scarlet Letter throughout this post.

Now, I'll admit that I had learned about this concept years before. What's even more surprising is that I remember learning about this concept years before. (Thank you Mrs. Abood from Arcadia High School!) The example she used was the storm that struck during King Lear's descent into madness. At the time, I thought it was a really odd technique, actually. I mean, I don't get any storms when I'm feeling emotional. Nature really doesn't seem to care at all about my emotional state. Why would I try and depict such a thing in my stories?

But in rereading The Scarlet Letter, I really felt like this technique had some merit. As The English Teacher said in the comments section of last week's post, this book is mostly internal. There's some fun action stuff that happens, but really the vast majority of that is offstage and takes place before the book starts. In fact, in a way, The Scarlett Letter reminded me a lot of some Virginia Woolf stories because so much of the power of the story relied on psychological explorations of the characters.

Hawthorne, however, was able to add a little more oomph to his story, and he did this by using nature. Sunlight and plant life and even the protagonist's offspring was imbued with a sort of psychic power that gave them access to each character's deepest secrets and past experiences. For me, this technique accomplished two things. First, it helped to emphasize the internal discussions in a way that made them feel more concrete. (Virginia Woolf's writing often feels as if I'm drifting in a river of thoughts that doesn't have as much of a landscape.) Second, this technique put more "action" into the story in a physical sense. Even if the characters weren't doing as much, nature was dancing around and kicking and screaming and putting on quite a show.

In the end, the technique of using nature to mirror the internal dialog has this sort of old-time feel to it that might keep me from trying the technique much myself. But I feel like I have a better understanding of why it was used in the first place now.

Conflicting conflicts?

Happy Monday, everyone!

If you haven't already heard about The Wild Grass and my giveaway for a Literary Lab Critique (and you want to), go here. Also, there's a news story about pink dolphins like the ones on the cover of my book here.

I'm a lover of epic stories and often try to create epics of my own by setting up multiple storylines with multiple characters and conflicts. In the beginning of these stories, I usually don't encounter any problems as I jump from one scene to the next, slowly developing each subplot. But, nearer to the end--like where I am now with my current WIP, Cyberlama--the different storylines have a way of suddenly hitting their climaxes at the same time, or at least close enough to each other where one tends to mute another and vice versa.

I try to downplay one in order to make another one shine, but, honestly, I've never been able to figure out exactly how to accomplish this with any sort of grace or self-satisfaction.

One solution I see is to simply have each subplot reach its climax at different times in the story. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer does this, but I found myself being a bit bored near the end of the book because some of the storylines had already played themselves out (at least in my mind). When I think about how Tolstoy handled it in Anna Karenina, I think instead of having each storyline reach a climax, he basically just stuck to one, that of the title character, making it outshine the others.

Does some sacrifice have to be made?

Maybe I'm just being greedy when I try to have all of my subplots build up to climaxes at the end. I want to have it all. But maybe the end result of such greed is just a tacky book that's dressed for too many parties on the same night. I don't know.

Do you think a book can trample on itself in an attempt to have too many conflicting conflicts? Have you dealt with this before, and, if so, what was your solution?

My Book and the "Spread The Word" Contest

Hi everyone,

I'm excited and nervous to announce that I have officially published my first collection, The Wild Grass and Other Stories, available on Amazon.

My excitement comes from the fact that this book contains my favorite and most personal short stories from my last ten years of writing. My nervousness comes mostly from my fear of the unknown. I'm not sure if anybody will care about this book. I'm not sure if anyone will want to read it. But I feel ready to do this. The time has come.

Here's the cover:



Here's a list of some things in the book that I hope you will find cool:

1. a Buddhist exorcism
2. a ghost chase
3. phallocrypts
4. first, second, and third person POV
5. the line "The days passed, one by one, like the repeated washing of a shirt."
6. pink dolphins
7. a stomach stapling brochure
8. characters with names like Kalaya and Subscription
9. a Brazilian gold mine
10. my secrets

I hope you will give my book a chance by buying and reading it. I am very grateful for anyone who does.

Thank you!

___________________________________________

As a self-publisher, my biggest worry is that the people who might be interested in this book might not know it exists. With that in mind, I'm holding a contest to get you to help me spread the word. You don't need to buy anything to help me. All you have to do is tell people about the book.

Davin's "Spread The Word" Contest

To enter the contest, tell a friend about my book and ask them to e-mail me at dmalasarn (at) gmail (dot) com with the following message pasted in the body of the e-mail:

Dear Davin Malasarn,

I heard about your collection The Wild Grass and Other Stories from (have them write YOUR name here) on sale at Amazon ( http://amzn.to/kwfpap ). I understand that this collection includes your most emotional work and will take readers to exotic locations all around the world.

Signed,
(have them write THEIR name here)

~~~~~~~~~

Your friends should insert your name in the first slot above and their name in the second slot.

Simple enough?

I'm giving away three prizes:

Top Prize is a rigorous full manuscript critique (up to ~70,000 words) by me, including two additional critiques of your first ten pages by my epic and talented co-bloggers, Scott G.F. Bailey and Michelle Davidson Argyle. This prize will be given to the person who is responsible for getting the most people to send me entries, counted by the number of times your name appears in the first name slot. You can exchange this for a $100 gift card to any location of your choice if you prefer.

Second Prize is a 50-page manuscript critique by me or a $30 gift card to a bookstore of your choice. This winner will be selected at random from among all of the people whose names appear in the first name slot.

Third Prize is a $50 gift card to a bookstore of your choice. This winner will be selected at random from among the people who e-mail me (the second name slot in the message).

The contest will run until midnight on June 30, 2011. Both people who spread the word and people who e-mail me are eligible to win prizes. Thank you to everyone who has supported me in the past and who supports me now. I also want to thank Scott, Michelle, F.P. Adriani, Marie Shield, and Troy Nethercott in general for being there for me. It means so much to me.

Don't expect only compliments

I have the reputation of being a nice guy, at least according to some people. I also have the reputation of being a quiet guy. For me, the two often go hand in hand because I tend to live by the rule "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

This is probably still good advice for the most part, but honestly I'm finding myself more bored by it than anything else. To only compliment other writers doesn't make for very lively interactions, and, sadly, I often treat book reviews I see by other writers as meaningless.

So, I've changed my stance.

I'm being more open with my opinions about other writers and agents and editors. And I have a greater respect for my peers who act the same way. There are definitely some honest reviewers out there, and I hope they know that I appreciate them.

Last week, Man Booker Judge Carmen Callil retired from the judging panel after the prize was given to writer Philip Roth. Beyond my own opinions of whether or not I think Roth is deserving of the prize, I appreciated the story being made public because 1. I'm tired of everyone always playing nice-nice, and 2. it made me think about my own opinions of what makes good or bad writing.

We shouldn't be afraid of bad reviews. When I look at book reviews, which I tend to do more often now, I find that both good and bad reviews can get me interested in a book. With bad reviews, I often want to buy a book because I'm pretty sure I'll disagree with the reviewer. Showing me a bad review written by a bad reviewer is probably the best way to get me to read a book!

And I'm pretty sure a lot of us writers are desperately seeking honest feedback. When I did my Tiger Mother reviews some time ago, I got a lot more people requesting the harsh review over the nice one. And the reviews people gave me for my own passage made me think harder about my writing. They made me a better writer (even if I was calling them names in my head).

Being honest about our opinions also gives us more credibility. I value the words of someone who I think is honest much more than someone who is always nice. I want my own words to have that sort of weight, so I'm going to be honest when I see bad writing, and I hope I'm going to be trusted when I talk about good writing.

I worry a bit about writing this post now, just a few days before I publish my collection The Wild Grass. Will this mean that everyone gives me bad reviews, and will this keep other people from buying my book? After thinking about it, though, I realize that I'm okay with whatever happens. If people are like me, the bad reviews might get them more interested in my work. For my own development, a bad review might make me a better writer.

How Sincere Is Your Writer's Face?

Happy Monday, everyone!

Today, I wanted to talk about how we present ourselves as writers. I think we've all programmed ourselves, at least to some extent, to be humble about our writing and our writing experience. I know I always think twice before I announce how proud I am about a current project I'm working on. Not only that, but I often make jokes about my writing, making my work seem silly when really I've worked hard to make it something special.

My cannibal story comes to mind. Thinking back on the last several months when I've talked about the project, I realize that almost always I've made jokes about it. In reality, though, Bread is a very personal and serious story for me, one that I did a lot of research on, one that caused a lot of nightmares for me, and one that depicts a lot of very personal intimate experiences.

Somehow, I convinced myself that no one wanted to hear about the serious side of my work. I felt the need to joke about it because I wanted to talk about it, and making jokes was my idea of harnessing my enthusiasm into something acceptable.

When I was in high school, my English teacher talked a lot about false humility. It was a recurring theme in her class. She didn't exactly say that it was good or bad to be falsely humble, but she asked us simply why we felt the need to do it.

Why do we feel the need to do it?

My answer? For one thing, I think most people feel like it's polite to be humble. We don't want to seem too into ourselves. I think maybe we also don't want people to think we're stupid. We're worried that if we suddenly say we're proud of something we do, then people will assume we think we're better than Mark Twain or someone. (Maybe we are, and maybe we're not. That's beside the point.) There's a protective aspect to being falsely humble as well. We risk less because, if anyone else puts down our work, we can claim that we already knew it was bad.

This makes me sad. I'm sad that more people don't come out to say how good their work is. I'm also sad that many writers are so frightened that they feel the need to be falsely humble. And, I wonder: does putting your work down eventually convince other people that your work should be put down? Lately, I suspect this to be the case.

I do think a lot of us sincerely suffer from lack of confidence. That's a different issue, that I also wish would go away. But, for today, I just hope that we as writers feel like it's okay to take pride in our work and to announce that pride to each other. Honestly, one of the things that makes me happiest is when I see people in the blog-o-sphere, not talking about their awards or publishing news, but talking about how happy and proud they are of their work. Those are the announcements that make me want to learn more about a writer and what they've done. If they are proud of their work, then I feel like I can see a true reflection of what they want to produce, their artist's vision, rather than something "in training".

So, are you proud of your work? Are you proud enough to announce it to the world?

(As a semi-related aside, last week on Twitter, I saw a post by an agent that went something like "Be aware than anything you say and do at a writer's conference has the potential to permanently damage your career." That really made me angry. I hope we as writers aren't so scared that we worry about every single move we make. I am happy to know that there are better agents out there, people who aren't trying to train us to be cowering wimps as this man was trying to do.)

Does an authorial voice really exist?

Yesterday, Anne Gallagher, Michelle, Scott and I tried an experiment that involved having readers try to match the writer to the writing for 4 short excerpts. (If you still want to guess, feel free to comment on the post before reading further.) The idea to do this stemmed from a discussion over at Scott's place about voice. We had several ideas running. The first was that the narrator's voice may vary with the story, but does writing also have an underlying "authorial voice" or style that a writer can't necessarily hide? Does this authorial voice always peek through? Is it limited by, say, the writer's own vocabulary, intellect, and experiences?

I was surprised to see the wide range of guesses we got. Only one person, Alex, got the right answer (woohoo!), although Scott and Michelle would have also guessed correctly. (Anne, would you have gotten it right as well?)

The correct answer is:

1. Scott
2. Anne
3. Michelle
4. Domey

Honestly, I was surprised by what a hard time everyone had on it, including myself. My own guess was wrong, as I switched Scott's and Anne's samples. I realize, then, that the elements I look at in someone's writing are not necessarily what other people, including the writers themselves, look at.

My reasoning behind my guesses will probably seem odd, as your reasoning will probably sound odd to me...although we would love it if you would describe that reasoning. For me, I easily identified Michelle as the writer of 3 because of the description "long, thin body lying limp" and the word "fluttered". I didn't need to read much further than that. Naturally, I knew which one I wrote. I had a harder time trying to decide between Anne and Scott for the first two samples, and I finally decided Scott didn't write the first one because of the use of the words "foolishly" and "foolish", a form of repetition that I personally use a lot, but one I wouldn't have guessed Scott would like. I credited it to Anne.

As I was trying to decide, I also considered things like sentence structure, as well as logic. I am more familiar with Scott's writing than Anne's, and I have seen a certain extended logical thought process in Scott's writing exemplified by lines such as "Algiers is a dangerous city, especially for men who take employment with the French oppressors". But, I detected the same kind of logic in the extended metaphor in the second paragraph of sample 2.

What this makes me realize in myself is that what I consider to be that "authorial voice" has to do with vocabulary, sentence structure, explanations of logic, and rhythms. I didn't pay much attention to subject matter, or to character. But, of course, the criteria are apparently different for everyone, given the different answers. And, so, I'm still left wondering, What makes up an authorial voice, and is there really such a thing?

Granted, this experiment had some flaws to it. The writing samples are short, and if the authorial voice has more to do with the limits of the writers ability--which I tend to think it does--then the short sample probably doesn't yet reach the boundaries of those limits. What would happen if you read multiple books by any of us? I'd bet those limits would become much more obvious.

And, how exactly did we choose our samples? I bet if any of us had wanted to, we could have picked writing samples that were more misleading and/or random. I can't speak for the others, but I'll say that for me, there was no value in that. I decided to choose two writing samples that I felt reflected polished work in its final state. Often times my early drafts are much more tainted by other writers' voices, and I hoped that these samples of mine were rid of such things...although I still see some McCarthy in my second sample. What was important to me was to show what I considered to be my best work in the hopes that people would reveal commonalities in it that I didn't necessarily see before or that people would reaffirm that the elements I consider to be mine were actually apparent. Neither one seemed to be the case.

The other complication is that voice comes on many levels. As we discussed at Scott's blog, there's always the narrative voice or the narrator's voice. This probably varies with the story. If there's also an authorial voice, the extent to which that authorial voice makes itself visible will also vary. In my own work, I personally try to hide that, aiming more for the invisible author. I would have said that in the books I've read by Scott, his authorial voice is more visible, more poetic. Michelle is more visible and poetic to me as well. I would have said Anne was less visible, based on these samples.

Do we care? Well, you tell me. If you were the one to put two samples up, would you prefer that readers could pick your work out right away or that they couldn't? I'm very much on the fence with this question. I do like the idea that I can write broadly. One of my favorite compliments is hearing someone say that they thought one of my stories was written by a woman or by someone other than who I am. At the same time, I was honestly a little disappointed that only three people assigned the 4th sample correctly to me. Those stats, in case you are interested are below:

For sample 1:
6 people correctly assigned it to Scott.
4 people assigned it to Domey.
3 people assigned it to Anne.
0 people assigned it to Michelle.

For sample 2:
5 people assigned it to Michelle.
4 people assigned it correctly to Anne.
4 people assigned it to Scott.
0 people assigned it to Domey.

For sample 3:
6 people assigned it to Domey.
4 people assigned it correctly to Michelle.
2 people assigned it to Anne.
1 person assigned it to Scott.

For sample 4:
4 people assigned it to Anne.
4 people assigned it to Michelle.
3 people assigned it correctly to Domey.
2 people assigned it to Scott.

One strong point in terms of identifying the components that make up voice might be to look at the writers who were ruled out of certain samples. No one thought Michelle wrote 1. No one thought Domey wrote 2. Obviously, there are elements there that people don't associate with these writers.

What about spread? Is there significance to there being slightly less spread in sample 1 versus sample 4? Does 1 maybe have a more prominent voice compared to 4? Is the author of 1 more visible than the author of 4?

I also wonder if factors like credibility came into play. Did people assign their favorite passage to the writer they respect the most? Their least favorite to the writer they respect the least? Did our personalities have anything to do with it? Did our past blog posts have anything to do with it? Can I possibly ask any more questions?

So, tell us your thoughts!

Analysis of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I've been meaning to talk about The Book Thief by Markus Zusak for several days now. Briefly, it tells the story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger, as she is raised by her foster parents during World War II. I don't want to review the book--there are plenty of good reviews around. Instead, I want to talk about the book from a writer's standpoint, because it made me think about effective writing and why this book "works" in some ways and not in others.

To start, though, I'll say that I didn't love this book. When I read the prologue, I was excited to continue. But, for me, as the book progressed, I felt a little cheated. I felt like there was a lot of material that was trivial, so those pages were a waste of my time. I guess I wanted the prose to be more dense.

That's not to say that I don't admire Zusak, though. He has a lot of strengths as a writer. I'm going to talk about some of what I thought were his strengths and then digress a bit into some more general views and questions.

Zusak's characters in this book were particularly strong to me. What made them effective was that they were clearly rendered and stayed true to the initial personalities established in the beginning of the book. Each character had a strong personality and had a mix of both positive and negative traits. I found, though, that they weren't particularly complicated. For the most part everyone could be quickly understood and classified as "good" or "bad" with the exception of the Mayor's wife, who was by far the most interesting character for me. Compared to other literary characters such as, I don't know, say, Anna Karenina, Zusak's characters were flat. But, I realized that these flat characters, in part because they were flat, also made them memorable. They were simple and clear, like a nursery rhyme. And I wondered if maybe the more complicated a character is, the harder they are to render in the same memorable way.

Zusak also chose an interesting setting for his story. Setting the story in World War II naturally allowed the book to inherit a lot of emotion and drama. With the devastation of war in the background, even the most ordinary events could come off as haunting. When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher tell me that our stories should be about individual people, but hung against a backdrop of something that is more universal. Zusak did exactly that when he portrayed this German family in the middle of war. But is it "cheating"? Does such a dramatic subject matter serve as a crutch that lets a writer get away with not creating as much emotion on his or her own? The emotional climaxes of this story were completely reliant on the emotional events of war. In a way, it didn't feel earned, and yet it was still effective.

I'm neutral about the structure and formatting of the book. For those who haven't read it, the book contains some short and bolded lines like headlines, along with some illustrations and comic-book type sections. For the most part, I thought they worked, but there was quite a bit of redundancy in the headlines. Often I felt as if I had read something only to have to read it again in headline form. It became too cute for me. The illustrations, however, worked, and I did appreciate that variation from the norm. As far as the structure of the story went, I thought that was clean and straight forward. Like I mentioned in the beginning, some (and I might even say many) of the scenes felt trivial. I don't skim through books, but I wanted to in several spots while I was reading this.

What I found most interesting about this book, though, has to do with my post a couple of weeks ago on the changing definition of "literary" writing and the combination of insightful prose with other elements of the story, mentioned here. While The Book Thief did not have what I would consider to be beautiful, literary prose (in the best sense of the word) it did have the other elements that I find missing in some contemporary literary work: character, plot, premise. These are important elements! I feel as if we as writers have somehow separated prose quality from all the other important parts of a story and wrongly classified them as two distinct genres or branches of fiction. The snoots care only about the beautiful prose, while the mainstream writers care about everything else.

It may seem like an obvious choice. After all, prose is only one element in a story, and apparently not always a very relevant one. But, what I find among the best prose writers is that it is in those small moments that the deepest emotions of life come forward. A good prose passage provides dozens of insights into the world instead of simply guiding a reader towards The End the way simple prose does.

Take this short excerpt from Nina Barberova's story "The Resurrection of Mozart":

The silence was so complete that when they stopped talking and returned to their own private thoughts, they could hear through the open windows the clock ticking in the large old house. The sky was green, clear and lovely, and the stars were just beginning to shine, so few and far-flung that they failed to form any definite pattern. The old trees--acacias, limes--neither breathed nor trembled, as if standing stock-still were a safeguard against something that was invisible to men but somehow immanent in the summer evening. The hosts and their guests had just finished supper; the table had not yet been cleared. Some wine-glasses were still on the table. Slowly, the green light of the darkening sky transformed the faces of the seated company which was not obscured by shadows. They were talking about war and about the omens of war. A young woman, a guest who had driven out from town with her husband and sister, restraining her brassy voice, remarked that she had seen a meteor a fortnight before.

The way I see it, all of the other elements can lead to one good story, but good prose creates dozens or even hundreds of additional good stories draped over that one good story.

The truth--or at least what I believe to be the truth--is that readers want it all. Perhaps when given the choice, some would choose plot over prose or vice versa, but the only reason they have to choose in the first place is because so few books are able to combine all the elements that make up a truly excellent book. I don't think that lets either camp off the hook. I believe we should continue to challenge ourselves to truly reach that balance.

Rearranging and Shuffling Scenes

Over the years, the elements of writing that I've had to focus on during revisions has changed. When I first started writing, clarity was a problem for me. I had to learn to see my stories from an outsider's point of view. Then, I remember a time where I had to focus on endings that felt satisfying.

Lately, much of my revision energy has been focused on rearranging the pieces in a scene and shuffling those scenes around in a story. The fact that this simple thing has occupied so much of my time is funny to me. It feels like such an easy thing, and yet I'm finding that it's having a big effect on how engaging my prose can be (in my opinion).

Today, for example, I was working on Cyberlama, and I wrote a chapter that discussed a news story in which one man murdered another man. I wrote on the topic from start to finish, including events before the murder, the actual murder, and then some people's speculations on why the murder had occurred. But, when I was done, I asked myself what would happen if I didn't get into the speculations right away. Instead, I took that chunk out of the chapter and pasted it in several pages later, after I had already written about a couple of other, unrelated topics in between.

For me, shuffling the scenes this way gives my story more tension and also makes the speculations more powerful somehow. There's more tension because the murder story doesn't quite feel complete. It's like a subtle form of a cliffhanger. There are some questions left unanswered. I think breaking up the scene also makes the scene more powerful because when the speculations are farther away from the actual murder events, they resonate more...like they resonate beyond all of the material I inserted between the murder and speculation. By bringing it back at a later time, it feels like something important that keeps re-emerging in my narrator's mind.

I find that I also rearranging things to keep similar elements closer together. I had, for example, a scene where a woman brought her violin in to play for a group of people. When I originally wrote the scene, the violin performance was broken up by the thoughts of some of the audience members. While I was revising, though, I ended up putting all of the audience members' thoughts at the end, so that the the performance was told in one continuous passage. I felt like that made the concert experience more vivid.

Has anyone else focused on moving elements around like this? Like I say, I'm not sure why it's taking up so much of my attention at the moment. But, I'm realizing that it's a powerful revision tool, one that I hadn't taken advantage of as much in the past.

Literary Fiction Is Not Literary Fiction

Last night I went to a reading of short stories from Stacey Levine's The Girl With Brown Fur. I was very impressed with the writing. Over and over again, Levine's stories caught me by surprise with unusual details and insights that made me think more deeply about life. The stories fell into what I consider to be literary writing.

I heard six stories in all, and by the time the third one started, I was still impressed with the writing, but I suddenly became aware that the stories were fairly plotless. From what I heard all of the stories did have plots, but they were thin, serving more as a carrier for the writing, which I personally still find satisfying.

But, it made me wonder. Are plot and this type of literary writing incompatible? I tried to imagine a book that had both a heavy plot and the insightful details that Levine had, and I got the impression that the two would clash somehow. As I think about it now, I wonder if maybe what makes that insight powerful is the fact that it comes from nothing. Like in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, it is the mundane aspect of the story that makes the insight powerful. Maybe Woolf ushered in this new type of fiction that is now called literary fiction--I haven't read enough to be able to know that for sure. John Updike does a similar thing in his Rabbit books. Over and over again I'm captivated by the insight of his details, the little moments. Meanwhile, the overall plots are far less interesting (though more substantial than some other books).

Then, I think about the classics. Many of those seem much more plot heavy as well as being heavy on character. I think of Moby Dick or The Iliad or Kreutzer Sonata. I would definitely call these books literary as well, but I realize all of a sudden that the qualities that make these books literary to me are not the same qualities that make The Girl With Brown Fur or Olive Kittridge or Unaccustomed Earth literary to me. Hardly any of the characters in Unaccustomed Earth are memorable to me. That's not Lahiri's focus, at least in my opinion. The skills of the classic literary writing revolved around developing so many other things besides the insightful detail.

I think what was literary yesterday is not the same style of writing as what's considered literary today. They're two different genres.

I suppose in all art there are different movements. In music and painting and sculpture and writing, new writers change the value and standards of old writing and so the transformation of literary writing can be seen as this same sort of evolution. But, somehow I think this isn't the case. I think classic literary and contemporary literary are not the same thing at all. They haven't emerged from the same branch. I'd say Scott G. F. Bailey's novels fall more into the classical literary style while what I was writing up until last year fell more into contemporary literary. (My recent stories are more plot driven and I've been missing something in them and I realize that it is this thing I talk about here.)

So...what does this mean? It's sort of a weird realization for me. I feel a bit lost. I feel like the elements I've been focusing on, this sort of platform based on insightful detail, is perhaps a completely bad direction to have gone in because it cuts off so many other possibilities of story. It's almost like contemporary literary writing is a genre that I don't feel like pursuing anymore, like maybe it's too narrow, even though I still enjoy reading it. I've been confused a bit of late because all literary writing was starting to feel similar to me. I thought maybe I was just becoming more attracted to other genres of fiction. But, I think it's actually still literary I'm after, but a different literary style than what's currently en vogue. Maybe from here I go somewhere new. Or, maybe from here I go somewhere old.

I hope it's new.

Does this make any sense at all? Am I crazy?

Don't Look Directly At The Drama Or You'll Go Blind

You know how you're not supposed to look directly at some types of eclipses because the light might damage your eyes?

I wonder if you're not supposed to write directly about some dramatic points in your story because it'll end up being a let down for the reader.

I recently finished two novellas that were more plot heavy that most of my other stories. They were fairly linear, building up to climactic moments that involved murder and the like. As I was writing up to the dramatic scene, I was feeling the excitement of the story. But, when I got to the actual scene, there was always a bit of a let down. At least for me. Like other activities, it seemed like the build up to the climax is better than the climax.

It's not a surprise that readers have expectations when they're moving through a story. If you are leading them somewhere, and building the tension, they're probably preparing themselves for some big climactic moment. But, will the actual writing ever match up with what a reader hopes to read?

My guess is no.

In my experience, rarely has anything in reality been better than the vague expectations I prepared myself for. My unopened Christmas presents are always much cooler than my opened ones. And, it has nothing to do with quality, in my experience. It has to do with expectations. If you're expecting a mouthful of chocolate, a grapefruit is going to taste funny no matter how good it is.

I thought of Light In August by William Faulkner. In that book, the climactic scene isn't told to us directly. Readers are led up close the climax, and then, POOF, we're on the other side, and hearing about the event secondhand. Faulkner's reasons for doing that always puzzled me, but as I was writing my novellas I realized that that little F-ster might have actually been on to something. (If he were alive, I'd tussle his hair.) By leaving the climax unwritten, the reader is allowed to insert his or her imaginary expectations into the gap. They're creating their own climax, or at least supplementing the climax.

I'm going back to Cyberlama after taking my little novella-cation, and I'm excited to play with this idea of the hidden or implied climax.

What do you think?

Time

These days, the world moves at such a fast pace. That's really nice in some ways. But, it also makes us forget that some things take time.

February Grace has a great post on the potential long term effects of our writing. Check it out if you haven't already.

I got some direct evidence of this on Saturday when I went to celebrate my nephew's 8th birthday party. We were playing punchball, and he casually mentioned to me that the novella I wrote for him two years ago--the novella that terrified him and got him pretty mad at me two years ago--was currently being enjoyed by his entire class, as his teacher decided to read it out loud to them. That was an amazing feeling.

Recently, too, the angry mob of us attacked a fellow frustrated and angry writer when she responded strongly to a bad review she received. Natalie Whipple wrote an excellent post responding to the responses of the response.

I'm keeping this short because apparently the A to Z thing is flooding the blog-o-sphere, so not many people will read this anyway. But, thank you to the people who do stop by, even though this posting isn't focused on the letter C. Check out the posts I linked to. And, for those of you who have been following along, the magical dryer was magical again this weekend after being quite ordinary for two weeks. Next time I do the laundry, I'm going to crawl inside. I'm pretty sure it will transport me to another dimension.

How do you slow down time in your prose?

Y'day, Scott talked about his new strategy to slow down time at critical points in his story. I got home from work, excited to slow down my own fiction, when I realized that I only had a few tricks for doing it.

Here's an excerpt from my fictional fictional story, The Cyberlama Cannibal. Spoiler alert, we're in the penultimate chapter and we are reaching the climax of the story.

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw.

(Dear Pulitzer Committee, you can reach me at dmalasarn (at) gmail (dot) com or call me at 555-Word.)

Now, let's say I wanted to slow this down. I have decided that this scene is important, and I want to make sure that's clear to my readers. What can I do?

One approach that I'm embarrassed to admit I do fairly often is what I call "the window approach." It would go something like this:

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. Outside, the sun was setting, and the fragrance of jasmine came in through the high window. The lama stopped just long enough to take in the sweetness in the air before he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

As stupid as this example is, I do think it serves to slow down the scene like I had intended. It gives CL a bit of humanity, perhaps some emotion (albeit not much) before he gets to his task.

Another approach I use, which is slightly better in my opinion, is "the stopped and looked approach".

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The cyberlama turned and looked across the way at the dingy gray walls that surrounded him. He stared at the walls for a long time. He listened to the noise in the street as a bus full of rowdy children drove by. Then, he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

Again, I think this manages to slow the scene down and assign the character a moment of contemplation, perhaps regret or some other emotion. It works, but at the same time it's limited in what it can convey. A character staring out at nothing can only give you so much information.

When I'm feeling the most energetic and the most imaginative, I'll do a sort of expansion, like looking at the scene under a confocal microscope (which is similar to other microscopes except that it's optimized for thick sample visualization):

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head. He saw the pale part in the man's hair, the goosebumps and beads of sweat that formed there. He noticed that the man was whimpering, a sound that reminded the lama of a young yak that had once fallen through the ice in a frozen pond in U-tsang. The whimpering started softly and slowed down to almost nothing. The man did not look up, but instead kept his head lowered, his forehead touching the cyberlama's feet. He fired. The man was dead. He slumped over. His departiculated brains drifted upward like a thin trail of cigarette smoke. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw. The taste of the flesh was sweet. He chewed several times until the flesh formed a mush in his mouth, and then he swallowed it down to his electronic stomach and turned on the digestive valve.

What I like about this method is that it stays focused on the matter at hand, while the other two approaches I mentioned above have more of an escapist feel to them. I'm not sure how much emotion can come through using the microscopic approach, unless one decides to do some telling or perhaps bring back some symbols that had been set up earlier. Still, it's an approach I try to do more of.

In general, these are the three ways I have of slowing down fiction. I'd be curious to see what other people do. Feel free to use the cyberlama example or one of your own...as long as it also has cyberlamas in it.

What techniques do you use to slow down time in your prose?

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?

The Hijacking Of Original Language

You've probably typed it yourself, or at least you've been on the receiving end of someone who typed it. Yes, I mean that long stretch of exclamation points. The excitement was so great, how could we expect anything less than the complete loss of restraint?

But, it's not always a perfect stretch, is it? Sometimes...sometimes we can't quite muster the strength to keep that shift button down the whole time. The exclamation points turn into lowly ones.

This can happen to you!!!!111!!!

The mistake is something that's fairly common. In fact, I'm pretty sure I made it Monday when I was chatting with Michelle (who is, by the way, co-editing an anthology to raise money for Japanese earthquake and tsunami victims). So, it wasn't too much of a shock when I saw this same supposed slip while reading a post from the hilarious and brilliant Kuzhali Manickavel.

Now, so you know, Kuzhali is one of the few living writers that I am truly, truly jealous of. Sometimes I read a piece of her writing and feel the need to wring out a wet cloth she's go good. I was, then, ever so slightly disappointed to see that she of all people had made that ! to 1 slip. Kuzhali, could you possibly have made a mistake?

Then, the realization struck me. The more I read, the more I noticed that she was consistently 1-ing her !s. She did it nearly every time she !!!!ed. In fact, it hadn't been an accident at all. Kuzhali had hijacked a common linguistic mistake and was using it to help her reach her own goals of taking over the world (or whatever it is she's trying to do). She was creating original language by observing the behavior of our society.

Maybe this sounds like I'm making a big deal about something trivial, but I really do think she has hit upon something.

We often criticize writers for sounding too writerly. I think that "writerly" quality that sometimes seems suspicious comes from that fact that we may be trying to mimmic the great writers before us. In Kuzhali's case, she's done the opposite. She's not stealing something great and pawning it off as her own. She's finding something in the scrap heap and turning it into something great. If art is an imitation of life, then this is how it should be done.

Think of the greats like Shakespeare, Dante, Joyce, and Faulkner to a lesser extent. We may be able to find the roots of their inspiration, but in the end they created language that was completely their own. How do they do that? Where did they get the building blocks from? I'd argue that it must come from some source other than the work of earlier artists.

To see how Kuzhali has done this is not a lesson to me to use more OMGs and LOLs in my prose. (OMG, Vincent just ate someone.) It serves as an example to me of how one can (and should) create new language by looking at life rather than looking at art.

The Birthday and the Empty Mind

Happy Monday, everyone! And, Happy Birthday to my friend, partner in crime, and writing colleague, Michelle!

Michelle, the more I get to know you, the more I admire you. You impress me with your writing and your limitless energy. I admire you for the work you've already done, and I'm excited about all the cool things that are happening for you in the very near future!

Everyone, please join me in wishing Lady Glam a happy happy birthday.

I spent the last four days in the desert (Joshua Tree to be exact) letting my mind empty, and it apparently worked. I haven't felt this relaxed in over a year. Among other things, I spent hours in a hammock listening to the wind and watching lizards run around.

I am indeed reminded of the importance of taking some time off. Not only does it relieve stress, but it helps you to regroup and reflect, possibly helping to re-steer your work in a good direction on the off chance that you've gone off course. So schedule some relaxation today if you haven't had a break in awhile, and remember to back up your computers first!

5,300 miles

Sendai, Japan is about 5,300 miles away from where I live in Sherman Oaks, California. I woke up grumpy this morning because I didn't get enough sleep as a result of daylight savings time. I brushed my teeth. I fixed my hair. I put on a blue shirt and fretted for a moment because it had too many wrinkles in it. For breakfast, I had a bowl of Cascadian Farm Organic Dark Chocolate Almond Granola Cereal.

At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, workers were asked to evacuate because of a cloud of smoke that appeared above them and a sudden spike in radiation levels. I complained about having to wipe the dew from my car windows before making my 40-minute commute to work. As I waited to turn onto Coldwater Canyon, the drivers in front of me were annoying. The street narrowed from two lanes to one, and I was so upset by their aggressive behavior that I merged without bothering to signal.

When I got out of the car in the crowded parking lot at UCLA, I did not find that my science building had collapsed under the weight of a giant wall of water. I did not have to scour through city blocks of debris in search of food or my possessions. I did not pass a single dead body as I crossed the street and took the five flights of stairs up to my office. I noticed that it was a windy day.

Imagine me, sitting in my chair in my fifth floor office beside several dirty windows. The pointed leaves of a liquid amber tree are rustling outside. I can hear the voices of two female students in the hall as they walk by, heading for class. Imagine me turning on my Powerbook, the quiet tone it makes. I type in some letters and check my email and my stocks. Imagine, if you can, me sorting through a crooked stack of papers while I decide what to read first as I continue drafting a report about the effects of nickel toxicity on algae.

Depending on where you are in the world, I could be as close as three feet away from you, or I could be as far away as 5,300 miles away from you. And, yet, we can sympathize with each other, we can experience each other's lives, if only we just try.

Can Confidence In Writing Be Defined?

During my writer's group meeting this weekend, someone brought up the need for confidence in writing.

He suggested--and I agree with him--that readers enjoy a story more when they perceive that the writer of the story wrote confidently.

But, how exactly does confidence come through on a written page?

That's something I've never been able to answer. In my group, it was suggested that confidence comes from clear decision-making.

This sentence might not feel confident: "The dress was an odd shade of pink, something between grapefruit and bubblegum." The writer gets close to the idea he or she is trying to express, but doesn't quite land on it.

This sentence might feel more confident: "The dress was the color of smoked salmon." Here, the decision was made. Whether or not it matches the color the writer had in mind, the reader is left with a detail that is more precise. It feels confident. (And notice that the perception of confidence by a reader doesn't have anything to do with actual confidence in a writer.)

This example is simplified, but I think there's some truth behind it. Consistently making clear decisions like this requires a lot of expertise. When we're writing as many words as we do, it's hard to keep our mind from straying off the page at least a few times. Or, even if we are focused, there might simply be certain sections of a story that we never work on long enough to see clearly. It's good to learn to recognize those sections, to see when the writing starts to get hazy. Those are the moments that might feel insecure.

In college, I once sat in on an art critique that taught me a lot about making a work feel confident. An artist had built a beautiful sculpture out of wood but had propped it up in a flimsy way using fishing line because she didn't want the support to be too distracting. What happened was that the support was more distracting because everyone was wondering if it would actually hold. The professor suggested that the artist should have instead made the support obvious and strong because that would tell the viewer that she had thought about the problem and solved it in a way that didn't need hiding. It was a subjective decision; I can imagine that some people might have preferred a more "invisible" solution. But, the idea of not needing to hide anything was something that has stuck with me for over ten years.

What do you think? Do reader perceive confidence in writing? And, if so, what is it in the words that feels confident?

Writing With Depth

I always feel silly writing about my own progress because I assume the lessons I'm learning are already common sense to everyone else. Nevertheless, I recently gained some insight into storytelling that I didn't fully understand before, so I want to celebrate it here.

Up until about a month ago, I saw a story as a progression of elements that moved from Point A to Point B. A character overcomes an obstacle. A character makes a journey. I had actions, emotions and ideas, and they all changed along the way in a linear fashion.

Take, for example, a short story I wrote called "The Wild Grass". In this piece, a woman named Kimchaa loses her husband and has to live out the rest of her life alone. The action of the story includes her aging and growing more stubborn. The emotions include her increased sadness and acceptance. The ideas include her reflections on life and what it means to grow old. I like this story of mine. I think it works. But, all of the elements move in a linear fashion, the way most of my stories do.

I'm now writing my current WIP tentatively called "Cyberlama". Without spoiling too much, this piece is also about a woman who grows old and loses the people she loves. It's slightly more extreme in that the woman here is much older than the woman in "The Wild Grass," and I think it was that extreme quality that gave me some insight.

See, it wasn't enough for me just to have my protagonist, Jacqueline, grow old and sad. She is a very curious character and is constantly trying to learn. She befriends the Dalai Lama who teaches her some things about Buddhism and the idea of reincarnation. While Kimchaa was content to wait peacefully for her death, Jacqueline is working harder, putting new ideas together. Instead of a linear progression in her thinking, there is a compounding effect, something synergistic. Her ideas--and thus the ideas in the book--add up to something greater. They go deeper.

Jacqueline reflects on aging, but thoughts of time progression get complicated by the idea of reincarnation and violence and existence and some other topics that are floating around. And, along with all of this, her emotions are getting more complex. She's not just waiting, she's having conflicts because of contradictory ideas that she's learning about. She's calculating and planning and making mistakes. While the actions are still going from Point A to Point B, the ideas and emotions go from Point A to a deeper version of Point B, which I have uncreatively called Point B'.

The key to what I'm trying to explain is that I have figured out that a writer can make a linear progression in a story, or a writer can make a more compounding progression. In other words, the steps along the way are not constantly being discarded as a new step comes along. Instead, all of the steps are adding together, becoming something messier and deeper.

Does this make any sense at all? I've been wanting to write about it, but I feel like I don't quite have the words to express myself yet. Scott told me to write about it, so blame him if this has done nothing but muddy the waters. It all reminds me of the best English teacher I ever had who would start on a topic that was very interesting and then just trail off, leaving the rest of the thought to be finished by anyone who cared enough to do so.

P.S. Buy Notes From Underground! I just got my final copies today, and they really are beautiful. Even just flipping through the pages, you can see the big variety in story structures that people employed. It's a great mix!

(Scott, was the shadow effect underneath the A and B too much?)

The Speed Of Your Read

Are you a fast or a slow reader?

I've always been slow, and I often wonder if those speed readers around me are having the same reading experience that I am. I know, for example, that not everyone "hears" a voice reading along with them the way I do. Some people read with their eyes and only have to "see" the word. (I've done this on occasion, but it's difficult. I tend not to trust what I've read until I internalize it.) I've also heard that some people can read multiple areas of a page at once.

Ignoring accuracy (because that's a whole other topic), do you think the different ways people read result in dramatic differences in their reading experience?

If you're a writer, do you think what you write is more successful for one type of reader versus another?

Don't forget our Notes From Underground Anthology is available. Check it out! You can read it as fast or as slow as you like.

The Notes From Underground Anthology is Available Now!

Grab it while it's hot! The Literary Lab's second annual publication is now out and ready for you to pick up!

We'd prefer our readers to purchase copies from the CreateSpace store. Although we don't mind at all if you prefer to go through Amazon, we do get a larger profit margin directly from the CreateSpace store, which means we get more money to donate to the Writer's Emergency Assistance Fund. Every cent of the proceeds for this anthology goes to charity.

PRINT COPIES through CreateSpace Store
$10 each 
click here

PRINT COPIES through Amazon
$10 each
click here

KINDLE COPIES through Amazon
$4.99 each
click here

We're very excited about this anthology, especially about what's inside. There are some fantastic stories we hope you'll enjoy. The list of authors and their words inside is as follows:

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Cee Martinez

Little Shark, Little Shark

Beth Overmyer

Mirror Image

Anne R. Allen

The Golden Age

No Happy Endings

Judy Croome

Whispers of Love

3 Triptych Poems

Anne Gallagher

Who Are You?

Taryn Tyler

Hellebore

B.A. McMillan

The Making of a Witch

J.B. Chicoine

Four Words

Erin Leigh Harty

Reflecting the Imperfect

Intermittent

Lisa M. Shafer

Voices From The Sidelines

Loren Eaton

The Apocalypse Closet

Jean Michelle Miernik

Notes From an Enchanted Castle

Summer Ross

Vanished Words

Nevine Sultan

The Smell of Closed Windows

Your Eyes Will Open

Candace A. Ganger

Before and After

Trade

Gone

Fumes

Yvonne Osborne

Maybe

Rachel Becker

The Truth of Her

Excerpts from Saving Throw, a young adult novel in progress

A Sedar Story

Little red riding hood undresses

Suicide at 90

Aerin Bender-Stone

TRAVELOGUE: AUSTRALIA 2002

Matt Zandstra

Competence

Simon C. Larter

The Return

And then the choir

Avoidance

R. Mac Wheeler

Hot House

C.N. Nevets

Terminal Instar

Lavanya Krishnan

Heat three spices in a pan

Susannah E. Pabot

Trees Without Trunks

**authors, if you'd like your name linked to your site, please let one of us know and we'll add it**

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Entries were put into the anthology at random. Every author was amazing to work with, and we look forward to another anthology for the year 2011. We hope all of our readers will consider picking up a copy of the Notes From Underground Anthology not only to support your fellow authors, but to get your hands on some very fine work. The book is a beautiful testament to the wonderful writers we have the privilege to interact with every day here at the Literary Lab, and we want to say thank you to each and every one of you for making The Literary Lab what it is today.

[Scott interrupts Davin's wonderful post to say: Hey, we've been waiting for this day for months and months and, yes, months! And it's finally here! This anthology is full of strong, imaginitive writing and I can't find words enough to tell you how pleased and honored I am to have been part of this fabulous party. It amazes and humbles me to think that so many talented folks hang out in our little corner of cyberspace. Thanks to everyone who entered the contest, thanks again to the amazing and infinitely patient Becca for doing All The Hard Work during the first phase of the contest, and thanks in advance to everyone who buys a copy of this wonderful collection. Also thanks (yes, I watched the Academy Awards on Sunday night; why do you ask?) to all of our brilliant readers here at the Literary Lab. Without you, it's just the three of us whining about our inability to write good Miley Cyrus short stories. Nobody wants that. Anyway, we are pleased to release this anthology into the world and pleased that you all could be here for its birth. We've made a lovely child, folks.]

Davin,
Michelle
&
Scott